QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES & Q-C TEST
PART 1: Introduction to the series
PART 2: The Q-C Test
C-Test
Instructions:
Fifteen Propositions
01. Gradualism
02. Independent Effects.
03. Terrestrial Isolation.
04. Gravitational Accumulations.
05. Elaborative Polymorphism.
06. Lunar Capture.
07. Perennial Geological Flux.
08. Uniformitarianism.
09. Evolution.
10. Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
11. Increasing Consciousness and Self-awareness.
12. Cultural and Institutional Invention.
13. Religious Sophistication.
14. Macrochronism.
15. Cross-validation of Time and Events.
Q-Test
Instructions:
15 Propositions
01. Quantavolution.
02. Holospherics.
03. Exoterrestrial Genesis.
04. Solaria Binaria.
05. Poly-episodic Catastrophes.
06. Lunar Explosions with Global Fracture.
07. Disturbed Geological Columns.
08.Exponential Apocalypses.
09. Species Mass Changes and Extinction.
10. Schizoid Humanization.
11. Mass Amnesia and Sublimation.
12. Cultural Hologenesis.
13. Divine Succession.
14. Microchronism.
15. Consonant Paradigmatics.
PART 3: A Comment on the Q-C Test and Its Individual Items
A ] C-TEST
B ] Instructions:
C ] ----
D ] ----
Fifteen Propositions
E ] 01. Gradualism.
F ] 02. Independent Effects.
G ] 03. Terrestrial Isolation.
H ] 04. Gravitational Accumulations.
I ] 05. Elaborative Polymorphism.
J ] 06. Lunar Capture.
K ] 07. Perennial Geological Flux.
L ] 08. Uniformitarianism.
M ] 09. Evolution.
N ] 10. Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
O ] 11. Increasing Consciousness and Self-awareness.
P ] 12. Cultural and Institutional Invention.
Q ] 13. Religious Sophistication.
R ] 14. Macrochronism.
S ] 15. Cross-validation of Time and Events.
T ] SCORE
U ] Q-TEST
Fifteen Propositions
V ] 01. Quantavolution.
W ] 02. Holospherics.
X ] 03. Exoterrestrial Genesis.
Y ] 04. Solaria Binaria.
Z ] 05. Poly-episodic Catastrophes.
AA ] 06. Lunar Explosions with Global Fracture.
BB ] 07. Disturbed Geological Columns.
CC ] 08. Exponential Apocalypses.
DD ] 09. Species Mass Changes and Extinction.
EE ] 10. Schizoid Humanization.
FF ] 11. Mass Amnesia and Sublimation.
GG ] 12. Cultural Hologenesis.
HH ] 13. Divine Succession.
II ] 14. Microchronism.
JJ ] 15. Consonant Paradigmatics.
KK ] SCORE
PART 4: PROSPECTIVE CHANGES IN THE Q-C TEST
1. Placebos:
2. Religious Dimension:
3. Additional Items:
4. Merging:
5. Validation:
6. Randomizing and Cross-sectioning the Sample:
7. Extending the number of special disciplines implicated in the results:
8. Uses:
a) Abetting theoretical studies.
b) Discovery of trends in public awareness of science.
c) Discovering relationship between creationist belief and quantavolutionary belief.
d) Q-C scores as a function of age, occupation, religion, formal schooling.
e) Discovery of trends in ideology of scientists.
f) Discovery of deficiencies and contradictions of belief brought on by specialization.
g) Enumerating the varieties of conventional and quantavolutionary thought.
h) Fostering interdisciplinary communication.
PART 5: The Scope of Quantavolution
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE
QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE
PART ONE
by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
Charles Darwin said in 1869 in the "Origin of Species" that "anyone whose disposition leads him
to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of
facts will certainly reject my theory." For a long time it seemed unwise to weigh too heavily
the anomalies. Now the time has arrived when "unexplained difficulties" have become indeed too
many for the Darwinian model of gradual incremental Evolution by natural selection to support.
It should be replaced by a theory of Quantavolution. Or, at least, it should be placed up
against a contrasting model.
Quantavolution theory maintains that the world from its beginnings, including the world of life
and humanity, has changed largely by quantum leaps, rather than by tiny increments over great
stretches of time. The over two million words of this collection of works by the author and
collaborators present the full range of ideas and phenomena that pertain to this theory. It may
be well to warn promptly against claiming any relationship to quantum field theory in physics,
although dire consequences to gravitation concepts may inhere, because of the seeming all-
sufficiency of new electromagnetic theory. Such a global change of perspective requires a search
for new evidence, a reformulation of old evidence, a reconsideration of anomalies, changes in
meanings of words and phrases, explorations of etymologies of words and concepts, and a
reexamination of assumptions, often when they are so accepted as to be trite and so trite as to
be ignored -- removed, indeed, from our very cognitive structures.
For example, there is an immense idea that persists in the literature to the effect that the
Moon was torn from the Earth; this story is told not only by scientists such as George Darwin
and George Fisher but also by myths of various cultures. Invariably, if a discussion of the
matter is allowed at all, the posited event is positioned in time billions of years ago in the
conventionally agreed upon youth of the Earth. Such an event, if it were to be treated seriously
in an encyclopedia, would invade hundreds of articles with its causes and effects, changing
practically every discipline in ways great and small. This set of works does not treat this idea
alone as the true theory; but it considers it properly so serious as to warrant consideration
under many headings.
Such theories of "quantavolution" play a part in all discussions as to the origin of the other
bodies of the solar system; one needs to explain the considerations that have led serious
scholars to ask whether and how the planets originated from the Sun or, if not, then from one or
another of themselves (such as Jupiter). Furthermore, the universal belief of ancient cultures
and legends, that the gods were born, and were members of the same family, would begin to stir
our interest.
In many cultures, there is said to have been an original chaos or world vapor and a catastrophic
event from which the father of the gods was born and from him (or her) was born the succession
of gods. Why "born" instead of having always been in existence? It is not enough to say that
these phrases are only analogies with the birth of animals in nature, or only fairy tales based
on the analogies. Why should this be? Many analogies cover realities: might this be such a case?
When one says, "Babies are born like puppies," one certainly is not denying that babies are
born. And why were all of these gods identified, if of any importance, with the planets and
other sky bodies? Most, if not all, cultures, have insisted that the planets and other sky
bodies are divinities. Does this not lend support to the hypothesis of a true succession of
birth throes in the heavens? Would this be evidence of a marvellous early philosophical
synthesis connecting the birth of the cosmos to that of the members of an earthly family? No
matter if the alarming thought should arise: the members of the solar system arose somehow from
one another in a series of catastrophes that somehow early humankind had some knowledge or
theory about.
This is the kind of reasoning that unsettles many scientists and ordinary people who are content
to rest with their ordinary perspectives on the universe; it is a "whistle-blower" on the
prevailing paradigm of the sciences and the humanities, calling back the play to the line of
scrimmage.
The catastrophes responsible for the development of the theory of quantavolution were immensely
greater than these, to be sure, but the elemental forces at work, the chemistry, the
electricity, the psychic reactions are typical and homologous. As with a host of experiences of
the past and present, the individual person must learn about catastrophes of the world --past,
present, and future -- from the testimony of the rocks, the skies, the fossils, the carvings,
the ruins, and then from recorded history and logical thought.
The theory of Quantavolution deals with the behavior of substances of the real world so far as
one can sense them. It proposes that change in nature and life occur largely as the result of
catastrophic events; the events originate in the skies, which contain forces that are
immeasurably greater than any in man or Earth and that are especially electrical. There are
numerous "catastrophists" who have contributed to Q.. It is vital to appreciate that in
Quantavolution, the word "catastrophe" loses its completely bad connotation; for what the world
is today is an effect of catastrophe or, better, of Quantavolution, whose goodness and badness
are intertwined and to be judged by the philosophy of good and bad consequences.
The underlying philosophy of Quantavolution inclines toward a phenomenological instrumentalism.
It regards a "truth" as a fitting and useful part of a system of such truths that constitute as
a whole a possible tolerable outlook upon existence. The terms pragmatism, logical positivism,
and operationism come to mind when reaching out for related perspectives. As with
catastrophists, many philosophers might be cited. Among them would be Plato, Ockham, Bruno,
Locke, Berkeley, Vico, Husserl, Freud, Dewey, Mead, Wittgenstein, and Bridgman. The day may not
be far off when a new philosopher will draw upon the applicable contributions of such thinkers
and the fast-growing body of quantavolutionary literature to produce a new philosophy of
science.
QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE
PART TWO
by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
THE Q-C TEST
[Note: this letter was attached to the first experimental copies of the Q-C Test, July 1997.]
ARE YOU CONVENTIONAL OR QUANTAVOLUTIONARY IN YOUR SCIENTIFIC OUTLOOK??
TEST YOURSELF HERE!!!
Dear Student of Cosmic Affairs:
It appears that the time may be right for a test to distinguish more or less conventional and
evolutionary scientists and scholars from what, for lack of better, can be called
quantavolutionary scientists and scholars.
I have accordingly devised a test in two parts of 15 items each, to determine the relative
position of a person in regard to these two paradigms. Your apparent interest in 'C'& 'Q'
sugests that your self-analysis would be most helpful in observing trends in science.
I would be much obliged if you would take a few minutes to circle the 30 items of the C-Q Test
and remand it to me by e-mail, or otherwise. Although it would be wonderful to obtain a number
of individualized replies to publish on http://www.grazian-archive.com
I shall withhold your identity if you say so, and merely incorporate the results in the
statistical analysis.
In either event, I would welcome your comments. I shall be improving the test and perhaps
merging the two parts with several additional "placebo" items before being done with it. Ought I
to proceed with a public discussion of the test and its cumulative findings?
Sincerely, Alfred de Grazia
Mail: Aldegrazia@ aol. com
P. O. BOX 1213,
Princeton, NJ 08542,
USA
C-TEST
To gauge agreement of individuals with the Paradigm of Conventional Science
Based on Fifteeen Primary Propositions of Conventional Science respecting natural and human
history, and the degree of adherence of an individual to them.
Instructions:
There follow fifteen statements of major theses, principles, or propositions of Conventional
Science, each one of which is preceded by a short name. Please react to each principle by
scoring it from one (1) for firm disagreement to (5) for firm agreement. Draw a circle around
the number or check your answer. Use number three (3) when you are without any belief or
knowledge or commitment one way or another regarding the statement.
Thus, for instance, a score of 15 for the test means that you disagree totally with the
principles of Conventional Science. A score of 75 means that you are in full agreement with the
principles of the version of Conventional Science expressed here. Actually, you would most
likely be termed fully Conventional only if you agreed with all fifteen of the propositions.
There is no time limit for completing the test, of course. Please answer every statement. When
finished, add up and insert your total score where indicated.
Fifteen Propositions
1. Gradualism.
The world has changed almost entirely by small-scale, incremental transactions of small or large
scope from earliest to present times.
1 2 3 4 5
2. Independent Effects.
Changes in one field of scientific observation normally are weakly discernible in other areas
and transfer into them slowly.
1 2 3 4 5
3. Terrestrial Isolation.
From earliest times, Earth has developed its physical and vital forms from internal sources of
materials and energy.
1 2 3 4 5
4. Gravitational Accumulations.
The solar system originated in gravitational condensations from a gigantic dust cloud
surrounding a young Sun.
1 2 3 4 5
5. Elaborative Polymorphism.
Great variations of all inorganic and organic forms occurred by lawful, regular processes of
nature.
1 2 3 4 5
6. Lunar Capture.
The Moon formed during the condensation of gases and dust that originated the solar system and
came within the gravitational grasp of the Earth.
1 2 3 4 5
7. Perennial Geological Flux.
In due course, the Earth's surface has been altered by the gradual limited and calculable play
of natural forces: waters, winds, pressures, and heat.
1 2 3 4 5
8. Uniformitarianism.
Inorganic and organic nature have transmuted, with minor exceptions, at low, uniform rates for
all of Earth history.
1 2 3 4 5
9. Evolution.
The present species of life have unexceptionally developed from ever earlier forms that
themselves originated by environmental adaptation in isolation and occasional successive
chemical mutations.
1 2 3 4 5
10. Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
In the course of evolution, natural selection, working at every vital level, eventuated in a
being of high intelligence, capable of deliberate, rational decisions.
1 2 3 4 5
11. Increasing Consciousness and Self-awareness.
Gradually humans developed a sense of history that let them order their lives presently and for
their future, and learned to exercise advanced faculties for pleasure.
1 2 3 4 5
12. Cultural and Institutional Invention.
Bit by bit, cultural traits were evolved in all of the various aspects of life, and could be
placed ever higher upon a ladder of complexity and utility.
1 2 3 4 5
13. Religious Sophistication.
From primitive fear and ignorance, gods were imagined, and afforded sacrifices, but eventually
higher religions, with a benign, single god and simple rites, prevailed.
1 2 3 4 5
14. Macrochronism.
The evolution of the solar system, Earth, and life forms, took up about five billion years, of
which the last several million were required to produce human beings with their advanced
societies.
1 2 3 4 5
15. Cross-validation of Time and Events.
Dozens of distinct measures and correlations have mutually supported macrochronism and, with
evolution theory, have proven the singular correctness of the historical path of science.
1 2 3 4 5
TOTAL SCORE =
AVERAGE SCORE =TOTAL/ 15=
Q-TEST
To gauge agreement of individuals with the Paradigm of Quantavolution
Based on fifteen key propositions of quantavolution, and the degree of adherence of a person to
them.
Instructions:
There follow fifteen statements of major theses, principles, or propositions of Quantavolution,
each one of which is preceded by a short name. Please react to each principle by scoring it from
one (1) for firm disagreement to (5) for firm agreement. Draw a circle around the number or
check your answer. Use number three (3) when you are without any belief or knowledge or
commitment one way or another regarding the statement.
Thus, for instance, a score of 15 for the test means that you disagree totally with the
principles of Quantavolution. A score of 75 means that you are in full agreement with the
principles of the version of Quantavolution expressed here. Actually, you would most likely be
termed a quantavolutionary even if you agreed with one or two of the propositions.
There is no time limit for completing the test, of course. Please answer every statement. When
finished, add up and insert your total score where indicated.
Fifteen Propositions
1. Quantavolution.
The world has changed mostly by large-scale and abrupt jumps or saltations or quantavolutions
from earliest to present times.
1 2 3 4 5
2. Holospherics.
Every quantavolution was holospheric such that, what became in late times human morals and
science, were affected in their every branch by its remnant evidence and its contemporary
effects.
1 2 3 4 5
3. Exoterrestrial Genesis.
The ultimate source of quantavolutions has been exoterrestrial.
1 2 3 4 5
4. Solaria Binaria.
The solar system originated and developed to this day as an often violent process of
transactions between the Sun and a solar-exploded body.
1 2 3 4 5
5. Poly-episodic Catastrophes.
Quantavolutions (usually referred to pejoratively as catastrophes) have been experienced on
sundry occasions and have been unequal in intensity.
1 2 3 4 5
6. Lunar Explosions with Global Fracture.
The explosion of Moon from Earth, and the global fracture accompanying it, produced the present
basic volume and morphology of Earth.
1 2 3 4 5
7. Disturbed Geological Columns.
Every geological column on Earth is ideosyncratically disturbed.
1 2 3 4 5
8.Exponential Apocalypses.
Every quantavolution has taken the form of an exponential catastrophic curve with a sharp ascent
and a negatively exponential descent, tailing off toward uniform change.
1 2 3 4 5
9. Species Mass Changes and Extinction.
Extant species have simultaneously on occcasion been drastically reduced in numbers and type or
extinguished while new species were being generated and old ones modified by holistic mutated
gene leadership.
1 2 3 4 5
10. Schizoid Humanization.
During a quantavolution, Homo Sapiens originated in a sudden gestalt as a schizoid species
controlling multiple selves, and preferably to be called Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis.
1 2 3 4 5
11. Mass Amnesia and Sublimation.
Primeval Homo Sapiens experienced a traumatic suppression of memory and acquired a sublimatory
psychological complex.
1 2 3 4 5
12. Cultural Hologenesis.
Homo Sapiens promptly developed a poly-faceted language and full-function culture.
1 2 3 4 5
13. Divine Succession.
Originally gods were idealized by the human mind, and their basic traits and functions proceeded
through all successive major gods and families of gods.
1 2 3 4 5
14. Microchronism.
Quantavolutions, since the solar nova that instituted the solar system, occupied brief periods
of time, while intervals between them were also brief, measureable in thousands up to a million
years.
1 2 3 4 5
15. Consonant Paradigmatics.
Despite a much greater stress upon electromagnetic forces in all natural and vital events, the
experiences (including experiments) and logic employed in constructing and proving the
quantavolution paradigm are homologous with those of the conventional paradigm of scientific
method.
1 2 3 4 5
TOTAL SCORE =
AVERAGE SCORE = TOTAL / 15 =
QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE
PART THREE
by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
A Comment on the Q-C Test and Its Individual Items.
(Original text of test has a white background. The commentary is on normal font.)
A ] C-TEST
To gauge agreement of individuals with the Paradigm of Conventional Science
Based on Fifteeen Primary Propositions of Conventional Science respecting natural and human
history, and the degree of adherence of an individual to them.
The conventional science part of the C-test assumes that a common set of attitudes toward the
method and findings of science is possessed by scientists, a correct set which, put into
practice, gives a correct view of the real world, inorganic, organic, and human. These attitudes
or beliefs are but an intuitive sample of a larger unknown number that would presumably give the
same results when administered to the same individuals. The set of attitudes reflects with
limited but fair accuracy the paradigm mentally possessed by twentieth century scientists. Since
the paradigm is most general and cosmic, all propositions about it are partial, irregular,
insufficient, and the individuals taking the test will naturally distribute themselves in
different attitudes towards them.
B ] Instructions:
There follow fifteen statements of major theses, principles, or propositions of Conventional
Science, each one of which is preceded by a short name. Please react to each principle by
scoring it from one (1) for firm disagreement to (5) for firm agreement. Draw a circle around
the number or check your answer. Use number three (3) when you are without any belief or
knowledge or commitment one way or another regarding the statement.
There are many ways of posing the attitudes as principles. One could attempt to use five
propositions as the core of the conventional scientific ideology, or ten, or twenty or fifty.
Validity and realiability might be enhanced. Often in test-construction, a large number of test
items are chosen and then the invalid and unreliable subsequently discarded, until the smallest
number that completes the universe of inquiry is left remaining. Often the salient and valid few
are doubled or trebled to be sure that the respondent understands what the inquirer wishes him/
her to understand, especially when the universe of respondents is intellectually, morally,
linguistically and otherwise diverse. In the present situation, the Q-trenders may be even more
diverse, for once the constraints of conventional scientific ideology or scientism are broken,
the escapees and refugees scatter in every direction.
Most conventional scientists will largely accept the C-test, scoring high, whereas the
quantavolutionaries will score on the C-test in varying degrees of acceptance, or so we surmise.
As the test-constructor sees it, a mark of '5' means an item is most likely true, a mark of '4'
means the item approaches broadly some truths, a mark of '3' denotes uncertainty, a maybe-yes
maybe-no position or a lack of sufficient awareness or knowledge to cast a judgement, or both of
these plus a failure to understand what is intended or what is meant by the item. This is the
infamous "don't know" category that haunts the pollsters. If the individual's position is
important, usually the test-maker provides for an extensive and intensive interview, a depth
questioning, to get the nuances of the impasse, whereupon the test-maker places the individual
respondent more to theone way or the other. An item marked '2' would be deemed to mean that the
statement is wrong-headed and contains little broad truth. A '1' is to inform the test authority
that the item is almost surely untrue. Some experts would warn against even an attempt to order
the postures and attitudes of people in this most complex region of human thought. Aside from
all the technical and straight psychological arguments of the testing discipline, a substantial
contribution to the theory of this kind of test must come from works such as those of Karl
Mannheim on the sociology of knowledge, Hans Vaihinger on the nature and logic of fictions, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein on the construction of meaningful statements.
C]
Thus, for instance, a score of 15 for the test means that you disagree totally with the
principles of Conventional Science. A score of 75 means that you are in full agreement with the
principles of the version of Conventional Science expressed here. Actually, you would most
likely be termed fully Conventional only if you agreed with all fifteen of the propositions.
Here it should be made clear that there is no real-world difference of 1 or 5 or whatever
between the five phases of each item or between one item and another, and it has already been
said that there are different bands of respondents who will settle firmly upon one reply and
disdain a number of other items. The scores also say little about the degree of indignation with
which rejection of other markings is regarded. The very sight of an item on evolution will
elicit not only a mark of 1 or 5 but with the mark a snort of resentment against opposing
markings.
D]
There is no time limit for completing the test, of course. Please answer every statement. When
finished, add up and insert your total score where indicated.
E] Fifteen Propositions: - 1. Gradualism.
The world has changed almost entirely by small-scale, incremental transactions of small or large
scope from earliest to present times.
That is:
one observes everywhere and in all things differences between time A and time B, which are
almost always minute in relation to the total shape of things but amount to the vast differences
between what was and what is, owing to the accumulation of small changes over long periods of
time.
F] 2. Independent Effects.
Changes in one field of scientific observation normally are weakly discernible in other areas
and transfer into them slowly.
That is:
what happens to one being or existence has a limited scope, affecting others little or not at
all, as an avalance will affect whatever is in its path but little more, or the death of one
species will hardly affect many species.
G] 3. Terrestrial Isolation.
From earliest times, Earth has developed its physical and vital forms from internal sources of
materials and energy.
That is:
Practically all that is present on Earth has evolved solely under the influence of combinations
of ingredients and forces that preceded it on Earth and which in turn and ultimately go back to
the earliest ages of the Earth.
H] 4. Gravitational Accumulations.
The solar system originated in gravitational condensations from a gigantic dust cloud
surrounding a young Sun.
That is:
little by little, the material that composes the planets gathered in clumps that continued to
draw in other material until most of the original outbursts from the Sun were housed in them,
while space was vacated.
I ] 5. Elaborative Polymorphism.
Great variations of all inorganic and organic forms occurred by lawful, regular processes of
nature.
That is:
many shapes and physiologies and systems of being came about as one minor change succeeded
another and elaborated differences that were originally minor into major differences.
J ] 6.. Lunar Capture.
The Moon formed during the condensation of gases and dust that originated the solar system and
came within the gravitational grasp of the Earth.
That is:
the Moon began independently to agglomerate a large mass but lost its independent motion vis-a-
vis the Sun, as it was gradually carried into the Earth's orbit by the Earth's gravitational
field but maintained an acquired new equilibrium locked at a distance to the Earth.
K] 7. Perennial Geological Flux.
In due course, the Earth's surface has been altered by the gradual limited and calculable play
of natural forces: waters, winds, pressures, and heat.
That is:
soils and rocks and aquatic channels today can be shown to have been formed by the forces that
today uniformly with the past work upon them.
L] 8. Uniformitarianism.
Inorganic and organic nature have transmuted, with minor exceptions, at low, uniform rates for
all of Earth history.
That is:
on the whole, the past has been like the present, such that the changes in earth and life forms
have averaged changes proportionate to elapsed time, each being and existence developing a
unique pace owing to infinitely small changes in rate occurring through long ages.
M] 9. Evolution.
The present species of life have unexceptionally developed from ever earlier forms that
themselves originated by environmental adaptation in isolation and occasional successive
chemical mutations.
That is:
accommodating to its environment and multiplying by successfully competing for scarce goods with
other species and individuals, a given set of individuals, brought into being as a species by a
genetic mutation or related series of mutations, reinforces its identity by separation from
otherwise similar species, consciously or accidentally caused.
N] 10. Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
In the course of evolution, natural selection, working at every vital level, eventuated in a
being of high intelligence, capable of deliberate, rational decisions.
That is:
evolving like every other life form, an animal related to the great apes and sharing much of
their genetic and behavioral constitution, mutated and survived by virtue of an ever-growing
brain that could cope ever more successfully with a variety of environments through discoveries
prompted by realistic experimental reasoning.
O] 11. Increasing Consciousness and Self-awareness.
Gradually humans developed a sense of history that let them order their lives presently and for
their future, and learned to exercise advanced faculties for pleasure.
That is:
an orderly memory, which contained readily a great many lessons obtained from experience, and
permitted self-examination as well as systematic observation, brought on an accumulation of
useful information that could be used for material progress and amusement in many forms.
P] 12. Cultural and Institutional Invention.
Bit by bit, cultural traits were evolved in all of the various aspects of life, and could be
placed ever higher upon a ladder of complexity and utility.
That is:
cumulative experience in all aspects of life was put to work in the collective memory of the
group as the basis for suggestions of improvement in technique and organization, and in the
origination of new acceptable behavior and utensils.
Q] 13. Religious Sophistication.
From primitive fear and ignorance, gods were imagined, and afforded sacrifices, but eventually
higher religions, with a benign, single god and simple rites, prevailed.
That is:
lacking command over himself , his fellows, and his environment, the early human grasped for
support at whatever seemed more powerful and possibly helpful, gods who at first imitated his
savage qualities but later on gods and finally one God who were culturally advanced in their
offerings and demands of humans, to the point of being a large factor, for most unscientific
people at least, in inspiring them to virtuous conduct.
R] 14. Macrochronism.
The evolution of the solar system, Earth, and life forms, took up about five billion years, of
which the last several million were required to produce human beings with their advanced
societies.
That is:
although only rough estimates of the age of the Earth and the several periods of its organic and
inorganic evolution can be obtained, continued progress in chronometry has moved the age of the
earth and its epochs to ever longer times, allowing thus adequate time for all of the observed
transformations to have taken place.
S] 15. Cross-validation of Time and Events.
Dozens of distinct measures and correlations have mutually supported macrochronism and, with
evolution theory, have proven the singular correctness of the historical path of science.
That is:
radioactive decay, occurring at constant rates over enormous periods of time, has been measured
in association with its environment, organic and inorganic, and these have been shown to have
ages generally much greater than geological measures alone have produced, showing the latter to
have been partly conjectural, even if vastly longer than biblical time had been. Different radio
chronometries are highly correlated when applied to the same objects, and variations have been
successfully accommodated to settle differences. With the development of dendrochronology,
dating from layered ice cores, radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence dating, and other
chemical, thermal, and historical methods, few lengthy gaps remain in the geological and
biological record that are unapproachable scientifically.
T]
TOTAL SCORE = _____
AVERAGE SCORE =TOTAL/15= ______
Note: two persons with the same average score may differ greatly in their fully described
positions. Paired comparisons are recommended, and ultimately also the comparison of individual
scores with a universe of hundreds and thousands of scores, not only as to averages but as to
matched item correlations and other parameters.
U]
Q-TEST
To gauge agreement of individuals with the Paradigm of Quantavolution
Based on fifteen key propositions of quantavolution, and the degree of adherence of a person to
them.
Instructions:
There follow fifteen statements of major theses, principles, or propositions of Quantavolution,
each one of which is preceded by a short name. Please react to each principle by scoring it from
one (1) for firm disagreement to (5) for firm agreement. Draw a circle around the number or
check your answer. Use number three (3) when you are without any belief or knowledge or
commitment one way or another regarding the statement.
Thus, for instance, a score of 15 for the test means that you disagree totally with the
principles of Quantavolution. A score of 75 means that you are in full agreement with the
principles of the version of Quantavolution expressed here. Actually, you would most likely be
termed a quantavolutionary even if you agreed with one or two of the propositions.
There is no time limit for completing the test, of course. Please answer every statement. When
finished, add up and insert your total score where indicated.
The above instructions repeat closely those for the Conventional section. Perhaps it should be
added here that unmarked items should be scored as 3 on grounds that they are the effect of
confusion or unreadiness to commit an attitude.
V] Propositions 1: Quantavolution.
The world has changed mostly by large-scale and abrupt jumps or saltations or quantavolutions
from earliest to present times.
The key words behind quantavolution (Q) are change, large-scale, and abrupt. Essentially, change
refers to a detectable difference in anything between Time 1 and Time 2 . By the world is meant
the universe and all that it may contain, including its motions and events.
By most is meant something not much less than entirely, and what is left over consists of
changes that are local and gradual. Large-scale applies to spaces and things and behaviors that
rather arbitrarily we would envision as at least the size and features of Russia or South
America or the Caribbean Sea. The change would occur abruptly, which we define as time durations
from an instant to a century in which 50% of the total physical transformation happens. Terms
used for quantavolution, "development by packets", include catastrophism, neo-catastrophism,
saltation (a jump), revolution, apocalpse and punctuated equilibrium. A salient argument against
the use of the term "catastrophism" is that it denotes a total misfortune, whereas a moment's
reflection will persuade one that a great part of the fortunate inheritance of the world comes
from the same catastrophes -- including the quantavolution or abrupt evolution of the human
being.
W] 2. Holospherics.
Every quantavolution was holospheric such that, what became in late times human morals and
science, were affected in their every branch by its remnant evidence and its contemporary
effects.
Quantavolutions were not contained to a set of rocks, a chosen people, a given language, a
particular climatic sector, etc., but within their large limits were all-encompassing. All
spheres of nature and humanity were directly affected, and their effects were transmitted to
every succeeding generation of rocks, genera, and cultures. Too, a Q employed all forces of
nature: if the Q took the form of a meteoroid, water, fire, wind, and exploded earth acted
simultaneously and in chains and mutual interactions.
X] 3. Exoterrestrial Genesis.
The ultimate source of quantavolutions has been exoterrestrial.
The Earth was itself formed from exoterrestrial elements, an obvious deduction, but the fact
leads to a realization that probably at no time in its existence has the Earth been out of touch
with the exosphere. From its beginnings, the Earth had no internal force or energy that was not
exoterrestrial in origin. Its volcanism, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods have been compelled
by exoterrestrial bodies composed of perhaps every kind of mineral and gas, and of every degree
of density.
Y] 4. Solaria Binaria.
The solar system originated and developed to this day as an often violent process of
transactions between the Sun and a solar-exploded body.
Explaining the solar system is readily accomplished by introducing a theory of binary stars,
ever more frequently observed, in which the explosion of a heavily charged sun expels a mass of
debris whose largest portion, though a small fraction of the sun, acts as an electrical pole
exchanging charge with the sun along a current of electric fire, which also serves to create a
vast electromagnetic plenum in which planets, with their own electrical properties, develop.
Conditions for the growth of life forms are often favorable and persist until the electrical
axis and the tube around it expire, whereupon the planets are "on their own," so to speak.
Although the theory of solaria binaria is unique, it can easily entertain a number of
quantavolutionary theories that have been developing in recent years that portray the solar
system undergoing a series of explosive and high energy events.
Z] 5. Poly-episodic Catastrophes.
Quantavolutions (usually referred to pejoratively as catastrophes) have been experienced on
sundry occasions and have been unequal in intensity.
Geological, astronomical, paleontological, legendary, and archaeological research has settled
upon more than one and conjectured up to a score of global catastrophes in natural history, such
that it is possible now to hypothesize a quantavolution at the end of and beginning of every
major section of the geological column and every cultural period of the brinze and iron age.
Among the greatest in effect have been, among geologists, those associated with the global
fracture system circling the world, among paleontologists, those associated with the
disappearance of the dinosaurs, and the flowering of life forms early in the Permian period, and
among ancient historians those deemed by the ancients to be connected to the conduct of the
planets and affording evidence in the wholesale destruction of ancient civilizations repeatedly.
AA] 6. Lunar Explosions with Global Fracture.
The explosion of Moon from Earth, and the global fracture accompanying it, produced the present
basic volume and morphology of Earth
Scientists divide unevenly into a majority who believe that the Moon was captured by the Earth a
billion and more years ago, and a minority who believe that the Moon separated from the Earth at
an equally early date, most of these expert grant that the event was catastrophic and
quantavolutionary. Evidence points to the Pacific Ocean Basin as the source of the crust that
was wrenched from the Earth by an electrically attractive passing body, coincidentally with a
fracture that shot around the world as the continents-to-be swung in a great gravity slide to
fill the basin. Besides the mainly crustal loss of the Moon-gathering, the fully-encrusted Earth
lost additional material as debris into farther space and swelled in volume as its charge
diminished.
BB] 7. Disturbed Geological Columns.
Every geological column on Earth is ideosyncratically disturbed.
If one were to dig anywhere in the world, one would find practically everywhere an incomplete
series of rock types and periods, with no two such drillings being alike. This claim goes
counter to the prevailing belief in conventional science that a normal deep drilling to basic
rock usually would produce mineral and fossil layers in their proper chronological order with
few or no layers or ages missing.
CC] 8.Exponential Apocalypses.
Every quantavolution has taken the form of an exponential catastrophic curve with a sharp ascent
and a negatively exponential descent, tailing off toward uniform change.
Apocalypses refer to the catastrophes pictured and popularly revered in the Christian epic of
St. John. Here it is a mnemonic nickname for quantavolutions. If charted, a Q occurs with little
warning in years, days, and other units of time, except that a repeated threat is historically
marked and watched obsessively by special priesthoods and the populace. Despite the warning, the
events themselves, of course, are precipitous; what is one day here is gone tomorrow, a
civilization, a culture, a great plain, a river, etc. After the peak period of activity,
however, the Q at first steeply declines and then ever more slowly diminishes its effects until
it establishes a mood of "it will not happen again." Thus, according to Q theory, C continental
drift theory, even though its acceptance was a concession to a Q theory, is incorrect in
believing that the continents have always been drifting very slowly, but that what is slow now
was once a continental cracking and rafting at considerable speed.
DD] 9. Species Mass Changes and Extinction.
Extant species have simultaneously on occcasion been drastically reduced in numbers and type or
extinguished while new species were being generated and old ones modified by holistic mutated
gene leadership.
The scale and intensity of Q implies the decimation of species and paleontology increasingly
locates and admits to the catastrophic ending of species. At the same time, C theory will not
admit the sudden creation of new species in the same conditions of catastrophe whereas the Q
theorists can claim that the same conditions allowed the springing forth in quick time of new
families and species. Q theory accounts for the persistence of species as well as the
destruction and creation of species to produce the puzzling array of flora and fauna of today.
EE] 10. Schizoid Humanization.
During a quantavolution, Homo Sapiens originated in a sudden gestalt as a schizoid species
controlling multiple selves, and preferably to be called Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis.
Several Q theories of the birth of man are possible. One is indicated here. A gestalt is a
sudden complex perception and cognition of a large body of mental material that has hitherto
been disassembled and unknowledgeable. In a suddenly new natural environment and atmospheric
state and in a minor genetic change from the hominid, a new being emerged with a delayed
instinctive apparatus, connected with the bilateralism of brain hemispheres and functioning,
such that a microdelay in the transmission of menal oeprations ensued, sufficient to expand the
destinations around the brain of stimuli and the awareness of doubt about the meaning of the
stimuli and a fearful need to control the multiple selves that were groping "thoughtfully" with
the disparate end-locations of the stimuli. The mentation and behavior of the new animal is
diagnosable today as a general schizophrenia, with its basic symptoms of shock, aggression,
compulsion, and displacement.
FF] 11. Mass Amnesia and Sublimation.
Primeval Homo Sapiens experienced a traumatic suppression of memory and acquired a sublimatory
psychological complex.
The instinct-delay cerebral system genetically or permanently demanded by a new environmental
constant quickly installed a memory blockage or amnesiac system to limit the flood of fears and
doubts and contradictory demands on the new person. The amnesiac system allowed, or was
compelled by overload problems to bring about, an amorphous unconscious. The unconscious
fostered a random, partially controlled, and imaginative surfacing of materials that were the
source both of aesthetic creations and hypotheses, which, when subjected to demands to restore
the more comfortable if less competent instinctive system of the hominid, also developed logic,
calculation, science, and, in a word, rationality.
GG] 12. Cultural Hologenesis.
Homo Sapiens promptly developed a poly-faceted language and full-function culture.
Speech and variegated behaviors emerged promptly and spontaneously with the poly-ego and its
talking to itself. Transfer of first epithets, imprecations, and commands to the greatest powers
known, the happenings in the sky and the responses of the earth, would impregnate catastrophe in
the language as it developed for mundane use. The same would characterize the swiftly developing
culture -- with rites, priests, magic, acoustical and electrical performances, fire-control and
cuisine, etc. This hologenetic Q-theory stands alone perhaps to contend with conventional
theories of linguistic and cultural genesis.
HH] 13. Divine Succession.
Originally gods were idealized by the human mind, and their basic traits and functions proceeded
through all successive major gods and families of gods.
Practically all religions, although some exceptional persons will claim the opposite, are in the
line of descent from the primordial religiousness. With the illusory establishment of the first
gods and of delusory devices to control them, the basic elements of religious practices from
then until now were fixed: appeasement, obsessive forms of divine communication, sacrifice,
basic artistic forms, authoritative ideologies, institutional imitations of the sky and earth-
connected divine illusions. Successive quantavolutions repeated the same types of physical
disasters and fell upon peoples that were inclined to fortify their old religions rather than to
devise new ones, but at the same time would often rename the old and condemn them to try their
fortunes with new, more powerful gods.
II] 14. Microchronism.
Quantavolutions, since the solar nova that instituted the solar system, occupied brief periods
of time, while intervals between them were also brief, measureable in thousands up to a million
years.
Some Q theorists have attempted to preserve the appearances and save a great many reputations by
staging their quantavolutions in accord with the present billions of years of "proven" earth
history. Such would be, for instance, the theory of "punctuated equilibrium," an awkward
euphemism as well as a scarcely justified faith in the swollen periods given to the past, now
approaching 5 billion years. The problem of erasing these billions is easy when it comes to
traditional geological measurements of time that employ stratigraphy, that apply uniform erosion
rates of today to the past, et al. The problem is more difficult when it comes to measurements
by radioactive decay of chemical elements, but here, too, uniformitarian assumptions can be
brought into question: electromagnetic conditions of the past, far different than those of
today, could eradicate the great stretches of time claimed by conventional scientists.
JJ] 15. Consonant Paradigmatics.
Despite a much greater stress upon electromagnetic forces in all natural and vital events, the
experiences (including experiments) and logic employed in constructing and proving the
quantavolution paradigm are homologous with those of the conventional paradigm of scientific
method.
At least one branch of Q theory questions the roots of so-called rationality, yet accepts the
newer logic and linguistics as its only tools for arriving at "truth." It accepts experiments
and the scientific method generally and it guards the method by psycho-sociological analysis of
the processes. It is not mystic nor magical nor religious nor populist. The Q paradigm
reconstructs the historical and scientific world with the historical and scientifically
defensible weapons of science.
KK]
Total Score and Average are calculated in the same way as in the Conventional section of the
Test.
QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE
PART FOUR
by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
PROSPECTIVE CHANGES IN THE Q-C TEST
1. Placebos:
Placebos would designate items in the test that indicate nothing valid or useful to know for the
purposes of the test. They function to prove a lack of unrelated differences between those who
score differently on the test. For instance, it might be useful to add several items such as
"Whether fast or slow, evolution by definition must occur in natural history." And,
"Conventional science is more a matter of etiquette of science than it is a set of accepted
theories." And, "A decline in the productivity of science, noticeable in the late twentieth
century, is attributable in part to an increase in the extent of political corruption in
advanced nations." It might occur that both C and Q respondents would score similarly on these
items, whether by scattered or concentrated agreement.
2. Religious Dimension:
Creationism; agnosticism; mysticism; atheism; personal deism; scientific deism.
Religious ideologies have been shown to play a considerable role in adhering to scientific
propositions of one kind or another. It would be possible to uncover some of these connections
either by a couple of questions accompanying the test (such as, "How would you identify yourself
in respect to the list of religious positions below: accept, reject, indifferent?" or by
including distinguishing items as propositions such as "Quantavolution fortifies logically and
evidentially religions that maintain a recent creation of the world and mankind by divine
intervention."
3. Additional Items:
Adding a number of items would help to validate existing items and at the same time lend
reliability to the test as a whole. Thus, proposing that the dinosaurs and most other species
were destroyed en masse in a brief time interval by the impact of an extra-terrestrial object,
or proposing that the continental crust of the earth has been creeping by tiny increments over
most of the global surface over all of Earth's history.
4. Merging:
The Q-C Test will be henceforth merged into a mixed set of items, such that the respondent will
be encountering items of C, Q and other significance randomly in the course of taking the test.
Merging will promote a more independent series of judgements on the part of the respondent, and
contribute to the significance of aggregated scores, in part and totality.
5. Validation:
Validating a test that seeks to elicit ideological syndromes can be most difficult, depending
upon the degree of certainty that the Thing exists in the first place and then the elusive and
unconscious ways in which people are disposed to mal-describe and conceal their ideologies.
Still, with the improvements already suggested, some approach to defining a Q and a C nuclear
ideology, and in the process a Q mind and a C mind, can find credence.
6. Randomizing and Cross-sectioning the Sample:
These ordinary problems of test development should present no unusual difficulties when
developing the Q-C test. Inasmuch as over half of the adult population cannot read well enough
nor are tutored enough to understand any considerable part of the test, either a special test
should be constructed for them or they should be passed over in favor of administering the test
only to persons who have passed three or more years of college. In the end, the test results
most useful would be the results obtained from the professional and managerial classes. Since
these are the people running the governmental, corporate, media and educational systems of the
modern state, their ideologies are a matter of practical as well as contemplative interest.
7. Extending the number of special disciplines implicated in the results:
In Part Five below will be found a list of entries planned for the Encyclopedia of
Quantavolution and Catastrophe. Every discipline will be found there, and thus a case is made
for finding Q relevant to all disciplines. It would not be too difficult to revise the test so
as to apply it more directly to each and every major discipline -- geology, anthropology,
theology, astronomy, mythology and so forth.
8. Uses:
a) Abetting theoretical studies.
In this connection, the Q-C test can suggest that a wholesale replacement of received doctrines
of science may be useful and possible.
b) Discovery of trends in public awareness of science.
Are popular notions of what is occurring in science changing? Perhaps the test will give some
indication of how and why the contents of the mass media are changing with regard to science and
scientists.
c) Discovering relationship between creationist belief and quantavolutionary belief.
Popular creationist belief is strong and seeks, spearheaded by a small group of intellectuals,
to adapt quantavolutionary research and treatises to its own needs. Creationist scientists are
inclined to dominate quantavolutionary circles, naturally, and certainly feel comfortable moving
in and out of them. Much opposition to Q work by C scientists comes from a fear that Q is merely
a front for creationism.
d) Q-C scores as a function of age, occupation, religion, formal schooling.
The sociology of science and educators would gain by the knowledge of how Q and C ideas have
been penetrating various social formations and categories. Psychological applications are
suggested: is there a radical and conservative position on C and Q that conforms to political,
intellectual, and social radicalism?
e) Discovery of trends in ideology of scientists.
At a time when it is widely believed that the vast majorityof scientists would be high-scorers
on the C-test and low-scorers on the Q-test, the distribution of the component beliefs in the
population of scientists would reveal the actual condition in this regard. Too, one may expect
to learn whether the scientific elite, the so-called establishment, has moved from the
conventional center of gravity more or less than the mass of scientists.
f) Discovery of deficiencies and contradictions of belief brought on by specialization.
Especially with longer versions of the Q-C test, it may be observed how far and near the various
special fields of the scientists stand in relation to the conventional consensus. What medical
specialty, for instance, is most radical in acceptance of Q tendencies? How do homeopathic
practitioners rate?
g) Enumerating the varieties of conventional and quantavolutionary thought.
A great many controversies characterize both the conventional and the quantavolutionary camps.
From the hi-score C camp, it appears that the conventional scientists are divided and the Q
enemy is united, whereas nothing is more obvious to the Q, and angrily regrettable, than the
splintering into tiny fragments of the Q outlook.
h) Fostering interdisciplinary communication.
Scientists and educators who have deplored the lack of sympathy and understanding between the
public and politicians on the one side and scientists on the other might regard the results of
extensive Q-C testing as indicative of the gravity of the problem, or of improvements occurring.
At the same time, tests results of different scientific groups might demonstrate that
communication among scientists is as serious a problem as it is between science as a whole and
the public. Test results among scientific cohorts might illustrate, too, the togetherness of the
scientific fraternity as a whole. Deviations fro consensus might be regarded as deviations of
thought or deficiencies in knowledge of sciences other than one's own.
QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE
PART FIVE
by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
THE SCOPE OF QUANTAVOLUTION
There follows a list of terms to be used as entries in the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and
Catastrophes. Although there is no planned correlation between this list and the contents of
the present CD-Rom of 14 volumes of Quantavolution, and although the 14 volumes have an
embedded search engine for calling up all references to any idea or person or incident that
maybe contained in the volumes, the list here may be suggestive as to subjects that might be
present and treated in the 14 volumes, and then searched for and found therein.
Scores of scientific and humanistic fields have evolved. Actually every field of knowledge has
standing behind it one or more fields of science, and therefore may be considered as a field of
applied science, as for instance, architecture or fictional romances. One way of comprehending
the extended meaning of general theory of quantavolution is to browse amidst the list of
entries that are contemplated for the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Catastrophe. These
number several thousands and another thousand will probably be added before the first edition
is finished. It will be recalled that the criteria for including an entry in the Encyclopedia
is that at least prima facie the entry directly or indirectly affects the theory of
quantavolution. Thus, the abundance of gods carried in the work would be expected if one
considers that every known god is connected directly or indirectly with global quantavolution.
Every physical law of science is involved. Most concepts of biology and genetics are relevent.
Every part of solar system astronomy enters the work, so, too, numerous stars. By small stretch
of the imagination, every scientific and humanistic discipline has many concerns to take from
and give to the quantavolutionary paradigm. To take a seemingly removed case, political
science, in both its historical and contemporary materials, must consider many aspects of
quantavolution --legends, distortions of history, movements generated by the belief in the
immediacy of catastrophe, the behavior of not only politicians but also seemingly far-removed
scientists who are consciously and unconsciously influenced by catastrophic ideas in their
belifs and by power manipulations in their collectivities. Many entries, it must be said, are
built into the Encyclopedia on a need to understand what conventional science is saying and on
a suspicion that there must be some quantavolutionary content to the thing or idea if it were
to be more extensively pursued. Excluded from the entry are thousands, and then millions, of
things and persons and events, such as are found in general encyclopedias and library catalogs.
After all, even a football player might conceivably be included as an entry on the ground that
the origin of the game lay in the most ancient religious practices wherein the ball and the
players stood for celestial gods and other divine events long remembered. Thus one stands on
the brink of declaring that all events are subject to the core events of quantavolution.
LIST OF ENTRIES
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF QUANTAVOLUTION AND CATASTROPHE
(Copyright Metron 1997)
A
==================================================================
aa
Aar Gorge
Aaron
Aaron's rod
abacus
Abell, George D.
Abell-35 nebula
aberrational Earth forces
Abery, Jill
abiogenesis
abiotic compound
ablation
aboriginal humans
aborigine
Abraham
abrupt transform
absolute zero
absorption
Abydos
abyss, oceanic
Acadian disturbance
acanthode
Acapulco Bay
acceleration
accelerator
acclimatization
accretion by comet
accumulation, precipitate
accumulator, bioenergy
achondrite
acid rain
acid-base reaction
acoustics
acquired immune deficiency syndrome (| aids|)
Acropolis
actinide elements
action at a distance
action, unit of
actor, acting
Adam & Eve
Adams, R. M. C
Adams, Walker S.
Aden, Gulf of
adhesion (bonding)
adiabatic process
Aditi
Adityas
administration
Adonis
Adrastus of Cyzicus
adrenal gland
Adriatic Coast
Adriatic Sea
Adriatica
adsorption
Aegea
Aegean region
aegis
Aeneas
Aeon
aeon, eon
aerial photography
aersol
Aeschylus
aesthetics
aether, ether
Afar Depression
affection
Afghanistan
Africa
African Rift
African Rift volcanism
African veldt
afterglow
Agassiz, Louis
agate
Agate, Nebraska
Age
age determination
Age of Discovery
Ager, Derek
aggression
agnatha
Agni
agnosticism
Agricola, Giorgius
agriculture
Agua, Guatemala
Ahaggar mountains
Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman
Ain ez Zarqa
aircraft
Airy, G. B.
Ajios Jakovos
Akhnaton
Akkad, Akkadian
Alabama
Alaca Hyk
Aland Islands
Alaska
Alaskan oriented lakes
albedo
Alberta
Albretton, Claude C.
alchemy
Alcock, Norman Z.
alcohol
alcohol, drinking of
Alcor
Aleutian arc
Alfven, Hannes
algae
algebra
Algeria
Algonquian, Algonquin Indians
alignment
Alisar, Alishar Hyk
alkali metal
alkaline rock
Alkman
All Saints Day & All Souls Day
Allah
Allchin, F. R.
Allegheny Mountains (| USA|)
Allen, F.
Allen, Richard Hinkley
allergic reaction
allocthon
allogenic sediment
alluvial fan
alphabet
alpine
Alps Mountains
Alt, David
altar
Alter, Dinsmore
altiplano
altitude
Alvarez, Luis Walter
AM Herculis
Amargorosa fault
Amarna Letters
Amarna, tell-el
amateur
Amatitlan, Guatemala
Amazon
Amazon River, basin
Amazon submarine channel
Amazonia
amber
ambivilance
Ambrasey, N. N.
ambrosia
Ameghino, Fiorentino
Amelan, Ralph
Amen, Amun
American cultures, -502 to -9| y|
American hemisphere
American sign language
Amerindians, ancient
amino acid
amino acid racemization dating
Ammizaduga tablets
Ammon, Amon
amnesia, collective
amnesia, individual
amoeba
Amojjar pass
Amos
amphibia
amphibole, amphibolite
amplitude, seasonal
Amudar'ya delta, U. S. S. R.
amulet
Amundsun, Roald
Ana, Anat( h)
Anafi Island
analog logic
analytic & linguistic philosophy
Ananta
anatexis
Anatolia
anatomy
Anaxagoras
Anaximander
ancient astronauts
ancient concensus
ancient eclipses
ancient knowledge
Andean volcanism
Anderson, J. L.
Andes Mountains
andesite
Andriessen, Poul
androgeny
Anemospilia, Crete
angel
Angel Falls, Venezuela
angiosperm
Angola
Angola
anguilliform
angular momentum
angular velocity
anhedonia
animal
nimal behavior
animal breeding
animal instinct
animism
ankh
Anluck
annelida
anniversary
annual layer
anode
anoint
anolis
anomoly
anseriformes
Antarctic dryland
Antarctic Ocean
Antarctica
Antelope County, NE
Antelope Valley, CA
Anthes, Rudolf
Anthony and Cleopatra
anthropism
anthropology
anthropomorphism
anthropophagy
anthroposphere
anti-semitism
anticline
Antillia
antiparticle
Antofagasta mudslide
Anura
anvil
anxiety
apastron
apathy
Aphek, Caanan
aphelion
Aphrodite
apis
apocalypse
apogee
Apollo and Artemis
Apollo, asteroid family
Apollo-p
Apollo-s
Apollodoris
Apollonius of Rhodes
Apophis
apotheosis
Appalachian Mountains
apparition, comet
appearence of species
Appenine Range
applied science
April
Apuane Alps
Apuseni Mountains
Aqaba, Gulf of
Aqua Hedionda Creek basins
aquatic ape
aquatic ecosystem
aqueous environment, primordial
aquifer
Arabia
Arabian dunes
Arabian Sea
arachnida
aragonite
Arak Gorges, Algeria
Aral Sea
Aramaic alphabet
Ararat, Mount, Turkey
Aratus of Soli
Araucanian Indians
arbitration
arc
arc welding
arc-second
arch
archaeoastronomy
archaeobacteria
archaeology
archaeomagnetic
archaeopteryx
archaeozoic, archean
archetype
archicortex
architecture
Arctic Ocean, floor
Arctic Region, lands
Arcturus
arcuate structure
Ardche marl fossils
arecales
Arend-Roland, comet
Ares
Argentina
argon
Ariadne
arid regions, global
Arieti
Aristotle
arithmetic
Arizona
Ark of the Covenant
ark, arch( e)
Arkansas
Armageddon
armed force
Armenia
armor
Arnol'd, V. I.
Arnold, James R.
aromatic hydrocarbon
Arp, Halton C.
art
artesian well, flowing spring
arthropoda
artificial aurora
artificial intelligence
artriodactyla
Aryabhataya( m)
Aryan
As, tell
Asakawa, Y.
Asama, Mount
Ascalon, Ashqelon
asceticisim
aschelminthes
Asgard
ash
Ashanti crater
ashera( h) tree
Asia
Asimov, Isaac
aspartic acid racemization
asphalt
Assal, Lake
Assam earthquakes
assemblage, fossil
assertion
Assyria, Assyrian
Astarte, Ashtarat
asteroid
Astour, M. C.
Astra
astral concern
astral wind
astrobleme
astrogeology
astrolabe
astrolabes, Assyrian
astrology
astron
astronaut, cosmonaut
astronomer's vision
astronomical chronometry
astronomical mapping
astronomical motif
astronomical spectroscopy
astronomical transformation
astronomical unit
astronomy, astronomical
astrophysics
asymmetry of brain hemispheres
Atchana
Atharva Veda
atheism
Athene
Athens
athletic contest
Atlantic Ocean
Atlantis
Atlantis Nigeria
Atlas
Atlas Mountains
atmosphere
atmospheric science
atom
atomic orbital
atomic period
atomic structure
atomic weight
atonement
attention
Attis
attitude
Atum (TM)
Atwater, Gordon
audiovisual aid
Aughrabies falls
augury
Augustine, Saint
Auigancan Culture
Aurora
aurora at ground level
Aurora-g
auroral form
auroral oval
auroral storm
Australasia
Australia
Australian Bight
Australian glaciation
Australian string dunes
Australopithicus
Austria
Austroafrican
authority
autumn
avalanche
Avebury
aversion, personal
awareness of self
axe, ax
Axel Heiberg Island
axial spin and tilt
axiom
axis
Axis Mundi
axis of fire, electric
Ayala, Francisco J.
Ayre's Rock
Azerbaijan
Azores
Azov, Sea of
Azovia
Aztec
B
==================================================================
Baal
Baalbek, Lebanon
Babbage, Charles
Babcock, Harold Delos
Babel, Tower of (Babilu)
Babylon, Babylonia
Babylonian exile
bacchanalia
background radiation
Bacon, Edward
bacteria
Bad-Hora
badland
Badlands of South Dakota
Baffin island
Baha Calif. cobblestones
Bahamas
Baikal lake
Bailey, Valentine A.
Baity, Elizabeth Chesley
Baja California Gulf Coast
Baker, Howard, B.
Bakersfield sand hills
Balaam text
Bali
Balkan Penninsula
ball lightning
ballgame, ballcourt
Baltic sea
Baltica
Bam Bam ampitheaters
Bamboo Annal
Bancroftt, Hubert H.
banded rock formation
Banff, Alberta
Bangladesh
Bangladesh cyclone, 1991
Bantu forge
baptism
barad
Barandiarn, JosBarchan dunes, Lima, Peru
Barendregt, Ren
Barnes, Thomas G.
Barnes, Virgil Everett
barometric light
Barong
Barranca del Cobre
barrier burst flood
barrier island
barrier reef
Barringer Meteor Crater
Barstow sand, CA
basin
Basque
Bass, Robert
Bassinger, James
Bast( et)
Batavia
Batk plateaus
Bateson, William
Batten, Alan H.
Bauer, Henry
Baume Latrone, France
bay
Bay of Fundy
Bayeux (Queen Matilda's) tapestry
be, (to)
beach
Beals Carleton S.
Bear River, Alaska
Bearsden, Scotland
Beaty, Chester B.
Beaumont, William C.
Beaver fireball
bedrock
beds of destruction
bedu mask
Beehive House (tomb)
Beersheba
Bego Monte
behavioral sciences
behaviorism
behemoth
being
Beisan
Beit Mirsim
Bel, Belos
Belgium
Belit (Ninlil)
Belize
Belize Reef
bell
Bell's paradox
Bellamy, Hans Schindler
Belorussia, Byelorussia
belt series
Beltane
Ben Hadad
Ben Nevis, Scotland
Benbulbin, Ireland
Beni Basin, Bolivia
Bennett, William Harrison
Bennu (phoenix)
Benten (Benzaiten)
Bentley, John
bentonite
Beppu thermal area
Bequerel, Henri
Beringea
Bermuda
Bermuda collision theory
Bermuda deep
Bermuda triangle
Bernal, Ignaco
Berosus (Bel-usur)
Berthelot, A.
beta () decay
Beta () Geminorium (Pollux)
Beta () Lyrae
Beta () Persei (Algol)
Beth Mirsim, Palestine
Beth She'an, Israel
Bhopal
Bible, religious interpretation
Bible, scientific study of
Bible, translations
Biblical Deluge
bicameral
Biela's comet
Bifrost
Big Bang, theory
bilateral symmetry
Billings, Montana
Bilma, erg of
Bimson, John J.
binary star
binding energy
bindu
biochemistry
bioelectricity
biogenesis
biography
biological ages
biological magnetism
biological pulsation
biological transformation
Biological tree
biology
bion
biophysics
biosphere
Biosphere 2000
bipedalism
bird
bird migration
bird navigation
Bird, W. R.
Birth-giving Male
Bishop gravel, CA
Bismark archipelago
bison, primative representation
Bittersprings Formation,
Aust= l black hole
Black Sea
black shale
Black Stone of Mecca
Black virgin
Blackett, P. M. S.
blasphemy
Blavatsky, Helena
Blegen, Carl
blood of the pharoahs
blood sacrifice
blood type
bloodstone
blue green algae
blue hole
Blue Ridge mountains
Blummer, Max
Blytt, Axel
boar
Bode's Law
bodies, orbiting
body, physical
Bog Lake, Michigan
Boghazkeui
Bohemian Massif
Bolsena, Lake
bombardment
Bonneville River and Lake
Bora Bora
bore hole
boreal
boreal opening
Borrego Valley, CA
Bosomtwe crater
Bosque de Rocas, Peru
Bosumtwi, Lake
Boulanger, N. A.
boulder
boulder field
Boulder gravel fan, Sea of Cortez
boulder train
boundary clay
boundary value
bow and arrow
Boxhole crater, Australian
boycott, of q-works
Brahma, Brahmanna
Brahmaputra River
braided stream flow
brain
Brak, tell
Brandon, S. F. G.
Brassenpouy
Brasseur de Bourbourg
Bray forest
Brazil
Breasted, James Henry
breccia, volcanic
breeding
Brent crater, Ontario
(Bubastis, Egypt
Bretz, J. H.
Breuil, Henri
brewing
Briareux
brick magnetism
Briffault, Robert
Brigit (Brigantia)
brimstone
brine
bristlecone pine
Britain
Brittany
brontosaur
bronze
Bronze Ages
bronze serpent
Brough, James
Brouwer, -. -.
Brown, E. W.
Brown, Hugh A.
Bruce, Charles E. R.
Bruno, Giordano
Bryce Canyon
Buckland, W. M.
Budge, Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis
Buffon
Bug Creek fossil
bull worship
Bullard, Edward
buoyancy
bureaucracy
Burgess shale
burial
Burma
burning bush
Bushmen
Byblos Baalat)
C
==================================================================
Cacahuamilpa caverns
Cadmus, Kadmos
Callisto-p
Calymene (trilobite)
Cambrian Period
Camp Pendelton shoreline erosion, CA
Canuto, V.
canyon, submarine
canyon, surface
capacitor
Cape Canaveral, Florida
Cape Hatteras, NC
Capella rising point
carbon
carbon cycle
carbon dioxide
carbon-14
carbonate mineral
Carboniferous Period
carbonization
carcinogenic material
Cardona, Dwardu
Carey, Warren C.
Caribbean Region
Caribou Mountains
Cadomin conglomerates
caduceus
Cajon Pass
Calaveras man
calcareous ooze
calcinology
calcite
caldera
Caledonian orogeny
calendar
Calgary silt
California
California, gulf of
Callanish
Campo del Cielo craters
Canaan, Canaanite
Canada
Canadian arctic islands
Canadian boulder broadcasts
Canadian Rocky mountains Canadian shield
Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (| CSIS|)
Canary islands
Candlemas
Cango caves
cannibalism
Canning basin
Canopus stone
canopy theory
Carli-Rubbi, Giovanni R.
Carlsbad crater
Carlson, J. B.
Carmel, Mount
carnival
Carolina Bays
Carozzi, A. V.
Carpenter, Rhys
Carquinez strait
Carsbad caverns
Carson Valley, NV
Carthage
Caspian Sea
Cassini, Jacques
cataclastic rock
cataclysm
cataforms
Catal Hayuk
catalysis
catapulted ice
catastrophe
catastrophe, mathematics
catastrophic dualism
catastrophism
catastrophist
catatonism
catechism
cathode
cattle
cattle sacrifice
Caucasoid
Caucasus Mountains
causality
cave
cave art
cave dweller
cave, bones found in
cave, ice contained in
caves, limestone
celestial nucleogenesis
celestial observation
celestial sphere
cell division
cell, biological
cellular necessity
Celsius
Celt, Celtic
cementation, natural
Cenozoic Era
Cenozoic volcanism
Central Australia
central fire
centrifugal force
Cepola fish
ceramic
cerebral cortex
cerebral hemispheres
ceremonial & ritual object
Ceres, planetoid
Cerro
Cerro Fitz Roy, Argentina
Cetus
Chad, lake
Chagar Bazar, tell
Chaldea, Chaldean
chalk cliff
Challinor, R. A.
Chandler wobble
Chandler, S. C.
Chang Dynasty, China
Chang Jiang (Yangtse River)
change in nature
change of environment
change, attributes of
change, cosmic
change, human
channel, river & stream
Channelled Scablands, WA
chaos
Chardin, Teilhard de
charge, electric
chariot
charisma
charlatan
Charon
Charriere, -. -.
chauvanism
Chela, serra de
Chellean man
chemical bond
chemical bonding
chemical compound
chemical element
chemical marker, strata
chemical reaction
chemistry
Chernoble
cherubim
chess
Chetwynd, Thomas
Cheyenne mounds, WY
Chicago Fire
chidren's songs & stories
childhood
children's rhymes
chiliasm
chimpanzee
China
Chinese choreography
Chinook wind
Chipewa indians
Chiron
chlorophyl
Christian, Christianity
christmas tree
chromosphere
chronology
chronology, historical
chronology, natural history
chronometry, techniques
Chubb crater, Quebec
church architecture
Churchill-Sempel, Ellen
cinnamon
cinnebar
circle, stone (lithic)
circular logic
circular structure
circum-Pacific pyric belt
circumcision
cither, kitharis
city planning
civilizations
cladistic
Clark, D. M.
Clark, J. D.
classification
clastic sediment
clay
Clayton, Robert, N.
Clearwater lake, crater
cleavage of Earth
climate
climate, polar
climate, temperate
climate, tropical
climatology
clothing
cloud
club, (wooden)
Clube, S. Victor
coal
coastal feature
coastal landforms
cobblestone anomaly
cocolith
code
Coe, Michael D.
coelacanth
Coelus
coesite
cognition
cognitive disorder
Cohen, I. Bernard
Cohen, J. P.
cold fusion
collective amnesia
collective behavior
collective memory
colligative property
collision, cosmic
Colorado
Colorado Plateau
Colorado River delta
Columbia (tidal) Glacier, AK
Columbia flood basalts
Columbia Icefield
Columbia Plateau
Columbia/ Frazer Valley system
column, rock
combat, ceremonial
combustion
comedy
comet
comet catastrophe
comet composition
comet encounter
Comet Halley
comet impact
comet spectrum
comet tail
comet, core of
comet, failed
comet, omen
comet, orbit decay of
cometary injecta
commensurable motion
Commoner, Barry
communication, biological & human
communication, theory of
companion star
compass
competition
compound
comprehension of quantity
comptinology
compulsion, compulsiveness
compulsive repetition
concensus
conduction, thermal
conductivity, accoustic
conductivity, electric
conference expertise
confession, religious
conflagration, universal
conflict, interpersonal
conflicting dates
conjunction, planetary
Connecticut
conscience
consciousness
conservation principle, in nature
conspiracy
Constance, Lake
constancy
constellation
contamination
continent
continent, quantavolution of
continental drift (rafting)
continental margin
continental plate
continental shelf
continental shield
continental tropism, lunagenic
contours, topographic
contraction of Earth Cantril, Hadley
control, of self & others
convection
convection, atmospheric
conventional science
Cook, Melvin A.
Cook, Mount
cooking
Copernicus, Nikolas
copper
copulation
copulation, celestial
Coral islands
coral, atol
Corban Karst region
cord
Cordillera Blanca, Peru
Cordilleran megashear
core drilling
core, deep sea
core, ice
Coriolis effect
Corliss, William
corona, solar
Corprates Canyon
corprolite
corpus callosum
correlation, stratigraphic
cosmic dust
cosmic egg
Cosmic Heretic
cosmic lightning
cosmic pillar
cosmic pressure
cosmic ray
cosmogony
cosmology
cosmos
Cosmos-s
cotton
count
countervalancy of high energy forces
countervalence
Courville, Donovan, A.
covenant
cow, sacred
Cox, Allen
Cox, Douglas
crater
rater lake, Oregon
crater ring, South Astralia
crater, impact
Craters of the Moon, Idaho
craters with central mountains
craton
creation myths & systems
creationism, biological
creationism, geological
creativity
Cresswell crags, England
Cretaceous Period
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event
Crete
Crew, Eric
crime, criminality
crinoid
crisis
Cro-Magnon man
crocodile
Croll, J.
cross
cross-bedding
crown of metal
Crozier, W. D.
crucifiction
crust, displacement of Earth's
crust, Earth's
crustal rebound
crustal spreading
crustal subsidence
crux anasta
crystal
Cuaretes, -.
cuisine
cultural change
cultural hologenesis
cultural relativity
cultural synchronism
culture
culture, dating of
Cumberland, MD
cure
Curetes
Curie temperature
Curie, unit of radiation
current, Earth
current, surface & deep sea
Cuvier, Georges
Cuyama Valley, CA
cyanide
Cyclades
cycle
cycle, historical & catastrophical
cyclic stratification
cyclolith
cyclone
Cyclops
Cypress Hills gravel accumulation
Cyprus
Cyr, Donald
D
==================================================================
Dachille, Frank
Dades gorges
dadophoroi
Daedala
Daedalus
Dagon
Dalgacanga crater
Dallol salt flats
Dan, Lebanon
dance
Daniken, Erich von
Danjon, Andre
Danu (dana, anu)
Danube River
darekh
Darius
Dark Age( s)
darkness
Darwin, Charles Robert
Darwin, Sir George Howard
Darwinian revolution
dating method
Dating the World
dating, absolute
dating, relative
datum, data
Davies, James C.
Davies, Paul
Davis, Chester
Davison, Charles
day
day length
Dayak peoples
de Geer, -.
de Leonard, Carmen C.
de Shaves, G.
Dead Sea
Dead Sea scrolls
death
Death Valley, CA
decan
decay constant
Deccan traps, India
deccan traps, India
Dechend, Hertha von
Deep Bay crater
Deep Springs valley, CA
deformation
deGrazia, Alfred
degree
deification
Deimos
deity
deity
Dekkas volcanic formation
Delaware
Deloria, Vine
Delphi
delta
deluge
dema
demagnetization
Demodocus
demon
Dendera, Zodiac of
dendochronology
Denis of Halikarnassos
density
deoxyribose nucleic acid (| dna|)
deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA)
depolarization
deposit, deposition
depression, land
depression, mental
derivation, source
desertification
dessication, planetary
detection
detonation
detritus
Deucalion Flood
deus otiosus
deuteron
deva, daeva
devadasi
devastation
Devi
devil
Devil's tower
Devonian period
deVries, -.
dew
Dewey, John
diagenic reaction
diamond
diapir, diapirism
diastrophism
diatom
Diego-Suarez bay
dielectric material
Diespiter (Jupiter)
diet
Dietz, Robert Sinclair
diffusion, cultural
diffusion, physical
Dilmun
Dingle, Herbert
dinosaur
Dionysus
Dioskouri
dioxin
dipole
Dirac sea
Dirac's equation
Dirac, Paul A. M.
disaster effects
disasterous processes
discharge of electricity
discipline
Disco Island,
discontinuity
discordant ages
disease
dismemberment
dispersal
displacement
dissociation
dissolved load
distillation
distortion
distribution
divine succession
divinity, classes of
Djamshidi, Tepe
Djerid, Chott
Dnebi
Dobzhansky, -.
Doda Fallet, Sweden
Dodds, E. R.
dog star
Dogon tribe
dolmen
dolomite
Dolomite mountains
dome mountain
domestication of animals
Dominican Republic
Donnelly, Ignatius
Doppler effect
Doran, Patrick
dormancy
double layer, electrical
double star
Dover, chalk cliffs of
dowsing
DQ Herculis
dragon
Drakensberg volcanics
drama
dramaturgy
Dravidian Culture
dream
Dreamtime
dress
drift, continental
drift, glacial
drink
drought
drug
Druid
drum
drumlin field
Dry Falls, Washington
Dubrow, -.
Dudley, H. C.
dumb-bell orbit
dune
Dunsmuir granite spires, CA
Drer, Albrecht
dust storm
duToit, -.
Dyaus
E
==================================================================
Ea (Enki)
early human
Earth axis
Earth axis change
earth charge
earth chimney, hoodoos
Earth crust
Earth dilation
Earth energy
Earth expansion
Earth figure
Earth fracture
Earth history
Earth interior
Earth magnetism
Earth Mother
Earth pole
Earth radius
Earth size
Earth surface
Earth's mantle
Earth, composition
Earth, development
Earth, interior
Earth, origin
Earth, structure
Earth-g
Earth-p
earthquake
earthquake light
earthquake prediction
East African Rift
Easter Island
Ebla
eclipse
eclipse cycle
ecliptic
ecliptic precession
ecology, ecological
ecosphere
ecstasy
Ecuador
ecumene
Edda
Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley
Eddy, John A.
Eden, Garden of
education
eel
Eglinton River Valley, NZ
ego
Egyed, -.
Egypt, Egyptian
Egyptian calendar
Egyptian Chronology
Egyptian Dark Ages
Einstein, Albert
Eiseley, Loren.
Eisley, Loren
Eisriesenwelt
El Chichon volcano
El, Elohim
Elam
Elbrus, Mount
electric
electric behavior
electric cosmos
electrical charge
electrical discharge
electrical engineering
electricity
electrification on mountain tops
electrolyte
electromagnet
electromagnetic encounter
electromagnetic energy
electromagnetic field
electromagnetic spectrum
electron
electron bond
electron-antielectron pair
electron-deficient atom
electronic microscope
electrophoresis
electrophysical effect
electrosphere
element
element, chemical
elephant
Eleusis
Elgon, Mount
Eliade, Mircea
Elijah
Ellenberger, Charles L.
Ellesmere Island
elm
embryo
Emery, G. T.
Emi Koussi
Emiliani, Cesare
emission spectrum
empirical method
Encke's Comet
encounter, cosmic
encounter, electromagnetic
endocranial cast
endocrine system
energy
energy budget, annual
energy level
energy source
energy, conservation of
Engels, -.
England
English fens
Enki
Enkomi
Enlil
Ennedi plateau
Enosh
entropy
environment
enzyme
Eocene Epoch
eolith
eon, aeon
Eosphaerra tyleri
Eoster
Etvs torsion balance
epoch
equation, conceptual
equation, mathematical
equator
equatorial bulge
equilibrium
equinox
equipartition, of energy
equipotential surface
equivalence principle
Er
era
Erebus, Mount
Ericson, David B.
Eridu (Abu)
Eros
erosion
erosional debris, missing
erratic
eruption
escape velocity
esker
espionage in science
estimate
ether, aether
ethics
Etna, Mount
Etruria, Etruscan
Etruscan alphabet
euphemism
Euphrates River
Europa-g
Europa-p
Evans, Sir Arthur John
evening star
Everest, Mount
Everglades swamp, Florida
evidence, rules of
evolution
evolved star
Ewing, Maurice
excited state
excrement, fossilized
exfoliation
exile
existential fear
Exodus, the
exosphere
exoterrestrial
exothermic expansion
exothermic process
exploding star
exploration techniques
explosion
exponential notation
exponential principle
extinction( s)
extremely low frequency energy, |elf|
eye, cosmic
Eyre, Lake
F
==================================================================
fable
facies
fact
facula
faggot
fail
Fairbanks, Alaska
fairy
faith
fall
fall of a city
fall of gas
fall of glass
fall of ice
fall of metal
fall of rock and mineral
fall of water and vapor
fall, of ash and dust
Fall, The
falling star
fallout
Fara
Faraday, Michael
Farquahar, x. x.
fatalism
Faul, Henry
fault
fault-block mountains
fauna
faunal and floral succession
fear
feast
feast of light
feedback
feldspar
Fell, B.
feminism
Fennoscandian Rise
feral humans
ferro-electricity
ferromagnetism
fertility rite
feruginous pigments
Fester, R.
festival
Festival of Light
fictional character
field of knowledge
field, physical
Fig Tree rock series
fine particle
Fingal's cave
Finland
fire
fire ritual
fireball
fired material
firemaking
Firsoff, V. A.
first born"
fish
Fisher, Osmund
fission dating
fission, atomic
fission, of large body
fissure
fjord, origin of
flagellation
flare, solar
flash burn
Flathead Valley, BC
flight
flint
flood
flood basalts
flood gravel anomaly
flood plain
flood, catastrophic
Florida
Florida sediments
flow of material
fluvial pattern
fluvial process
flux
flywheel
Foehn wind
fold morphology
Folgheraiter, Guiseppe
Folkin, A. V.
folktale
food and drink
footprint
forbidden energy state
force, chemical
force, electrical
force, fundamental
force, gravitational
force, mechanical
force, nuclear
forces of Nature
Forel, F.
forget, forgetting
formalism
formation
forminifera
formula
Forrest, Bob
Forshufvud, Ragnar
fort, ancient
fossil
fossil assemblage
fossil imprint
fossil record
fossil river
fossil string dunes
fossil, radioactivity in
fossilization
foundations; philanthropic
fourth dimension
fractional crystalization
fractional distillation
fractionation
fracture
France
Franco-Canabrian School
Frank landslide
Franklin Institute
Franklin, Benjamin
Frasnian Revolution
fraud in science
Frazer River Canyon
Frazer, James George
free will
fresh water
Freud, Sigmund
Freya, Freyja
friction
fright
frog
fuel
Fuhr, Ilse
Fujiyama, Mount
fulgurite
fundamentalism
Fundy, Bay of
funeral rite
fungi
Funkhauser
Furies
fusain
fusion
fusion, nuclear
future
G
==================================================================
Gabon
Gabriel, Archangel
Gaea, Gaia
Gaietto, Piettro
Galapagos islands
galaxy
Galilean satellites of Jupiter
Galilei, Galileo
Galileo-s
Gallant, Rene
Galton, Sir Francis
Gambutis, Maria
game
gamma ray
Gammon, Geoffrey
Ganges delta
Ganymede-p
Garden of Eden
gas
gastrobleme
Gawra, tepe
Gaza
Geb
Geiranger Fjord
geiser
Geminid progenitor comet
gender
gene
geneology
general adaptation syndrome
generation
genesis
genesis and extinction of species
genetic realization
genetics
Geneva, lake
Gentry, Robert
geocentrism
geochemistry
geographically isolated population
geography, history of
geoid
geologic column
geological age
geological ages, duration of
geology
geomagnetic
geometry
geomorphology
geophysics
Georgia, U. S. A.
geosphere
Gerard, Ralph
Germany
germination
gestalt of creation
gesture
geyser
Ghats, India
ghost, spirit
giant
Giant's causeway
giantism
Giantopethecus
Gibraltar
Gilboa
Gilgamesh
Gimbutas, Maria
Ginenthal, Charles
Ginzberg, Louis
Gisement of Micoque
Gisement of Pennon
Giyan, tepe
glacial ice, origin
glacier
gland
glass
Glass, Billy
global event
global fracture
global warming
global warming
Glomar Challenger
gnomon
gnosticism
goat
Gobi desert
god
God's Day
God's fire
god, goddess
gold
Gold, Thomas
Golden age
Golden fleece
Goldfield Summit, NV
Goldschmidt, R.
Gomorrah
Gondwana
good and evil
Goosen, Doeko
Gordion
Gordon, Cyrus
gorge
gorgon
Gosselin, Pascal Francois
Goetterdaemmerung
Gould, Stephen Jay
government
Gowans, Alan
grace
gradualism
Graf, S. M.
grammar
Grand Aarrat
Grand Canyon
Grand Coulee
Grand Karroo
Grand Teton Range
granite
granule
graphite
gravel
Graves, Robert
gravity, gravitation
Great "Nevada" basin
Great African rift valley
Great barrier reef
Great Basin
Great Bear
Great Bear Lake
Great Britain
Great flood
Great Lakes
Great Lakes Basin
Great Pyramid
Great Red spot
Great Salt lake
Great Slave Lake
great tidal flooding
Great Valley deposits
Great Western Erg
Great Year
Greater Melanesia
Greater Micronesia
Greater Polynesia
Greater Tasmania
Greece, Greek
Greek history
Greenberg, Lewis
greenhouse effect
greenhouse, atmospheric
Greenland
Greenland crater
Greenland ice cores
Gregorian calendar
Gregory, J. W.
Gribbin, John
Griffard, David
Grinnell, George
Gros Brukkaros structure
group
growth
Guatemala
guilt
Guinea
gulf
Gulf of Mexico
Gulf of Saint Lawrence
Gunn, Ross
Gunnison, Black Canyon of the
Gurr, Ted
Guthrie, W. K. C.
Guyana
Guyot
Gwarkuh, (Persian crater)
gypsum
gypsy moth
gyroscope
H
==================================================================
habit
habitability
Hadas, Moses
Hades
Hadrosaurs
hail
hairy star"
half-life
halicination
Halley's Comet
Halloway, -.
hallucination
Hama, Syria
Hamath
Hammam-Meskoutine
Hammon
hand, handedness
hand-axe
Hapgood, Charles
Har Karkom, mount
Harakhte
Harappa Culture
Harkenss, Doug
harmonic motion
harmony, of the spheres
Harper's Ferry
Harras
Harris papyrus
Harrison, E. R.
Harrison, Jane
Hartung, Jack, B
Harz mountains
Hathor
Hatteras, Cape
Hawaii, Hawaiian
Hawkes, Jaequetta
heat
heaven
Heavenly host
heavens
heavens, constancy
Hebrades
Hebrew, Hebraic
Hecate
hedonism
Heezen, Bruce C.
Heinsohn, Gunnar
Heiratic writing
heiroglyph
Hekla volcano
Helen of Troy
heliocentrism
Heliopolis
Helios
heliosphere
helium
Heller, Joseph
hematite
Hemen-g
Henbury crater field
Hephestus
Hera
Heracles
Heraclid
Heraclitus
Herakles
Herculeneum
heresy
Hermes
Hermes stone
Hermist
hero
Herodotus
Herois
Hertzler, J. R.
Hesiod
Hespherus
Hess, Harry
Hesy, tell-el-Heyrdahl,
Thor
Hibben, -.
Hienghene bay
hieroglyph
hierophany
Hieroplanes
high-place
Hills, J. G.
Himalaya
Himmalayan Orogony
Hindu
Hindu Kush
Hindu lunar catastophe
hippopotamous
Hiroshima
Hissarlik, Asia Minor
historigraphy
historism
history
Hitler, Adolf
Hittite
hoax, in science
Hoba meteorite
hog-back
Holbrook, John
holism
Holister
Holleford crater
Holmsoland Klit
holocaust
Holocene
hologenesis
hologram, brain model
holosphere
Holy Dreamtime
Holy Ghost
Holy Mountain"
homeland of mankind
homeopathy
homeostasis
Homer
Homeric Age
Homeric aristocracy
Homeric heros
Homeric language
Hominid
hominid reversion
Homo erectus
Homo sapiens
Homo sapiens schizotypicus
Homo schizo
Homo schizo reformation
homo sinemento
Homo...
homology
homosexuality
honey
Hooker, J. T.
hopeful monster"
Hopi, people
Hoerbiger, Hans
horizontal strata
hormone
horns
horse
Horseshoe falls
Horus-g
Hosea
Hoskins(-Boisen), R. G.
hot spring
Howorth, Henry
Hoyle, Sir Fred
hubris
Hudson's Bay
Hueyatlaco
Huggett, Richard
Huitzilopochtli
human engineering
human evolution
human genesis
human migration
human nature
human settlement
human survival
human variation
humanist-scientist division
humanization
Humbolt, A. von
Hume, David
humidity
humor
Hungary
hunger
hunter, hunting
hunter-gatherer
hurricane
Hutton, James
Huxley, Thomas
Hwang Ho river
hydrocarbons, in manna
hydrocarbons, in soil
hydrocarbons, on Venus
hydrogen bomb
hydrolic cataforms
hydrologic cycle
hydrous meteorite
hygene
Hyginus
Hyksos
hymm
Hyperborean
Hyperion
hypothetical construct
I
==================================================================
Iapetus
ice
Ice Age termination
Ice age( s)
ice cap
ice cave
ice core
ice dump
ice fall
ice-free corridor
iceberg
Iceland
icon
iconography
id
Idaho
idealism
identification
identity
ideology
iderot, -.
idol, idolatry
igneous rock
Iguanadon
Iliad
Illimani, Bolivia
illo tempore
illusion in scripture
illusion, spatial
illusion, temporal
Ilopango, El Salvador
image
image synthesis
imagination, tricks of
Imbolc
immortality
immunological
impact
impact (shock) metamorphism
impact erratic
impedance
Imperial Valley, CA
Inanna
inbreeding
Inca Indians
incantation
incarnation
incense
incest
incline
inclusion
India, Indian
Indian Ocean
Indiana
individuation
Indo-Chinese penninsula
Indo-European
Indo-European language
Indo-Iranian subfamily
Indonesia
Indra
induction
Indus River
Indus Valley civilization
inertia
infantacide
inferiority complex
infra-red
inheritance
initiation rites
inner language
Inntal, Tyrole
Inquisition
insanity
inscription
insect
insect, queen
inspiration
instability
instinct
instinct delay
institution
institutions, primeval
insulation, electrical
integration of ideas
integration of ideas
intelligence
intensity
interference
intermolecular force
interstellar matter
introgenesis
intrusion
invention
inversion of strata
invertebrate
invisibility
invisible matter
Io, ion torus
Io-g
ion
ionosphere
Ions, Veronica
Iowa
Ipuwer papyrus
Iran
Iraq
Ireland
iridium anomalies
iron
Iron age
iron formations
irradiance
irrational number
Irrawddy River
Isaac
Isaacson, Israel M.
Isaiah
Isbell, William
Isenberg, Aurthur
Ishim, Kazakhstan
Ishmael
Ishtar
Isis
Islam
island arcs
Isle-de-France
isostacy
isotope
isotope ratio
isotopes, table of
Israel
Issyk Kul
Itabirito, Brazil
Italy
Ithica, Ithaki
ithyphallic
ivory
Ivory Coast
Ivory Island, Siberia
Ix Chel
J
==================================================================
Jacob (Israel)
Jacot, L
jaguar
James, Peter
James, William
Janet, Pierre
Japan, geography
Japan, Japanese
Japan, mythology
Japanese language
Jashar, Book of
Jaspers, Karl
Jastrow, Robert
Java man
Java trench
Java, Island of
Jaynes, Julian
jazz
Jebel-Irhoud
Jeferson, Thomas
Jefferys, Harrold
Jehovah
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jeremiah
Jerico
Jeroboam
Jerome, Saint
Jerusalem
Jesus (Christ)
jet-rain
jet-stream, atmospheric
jewelry
jewelry, celestial
jewelry, motifs
jewelry, uses
Jewish historiography
Jewish history
Jewish legends
Jewish, calendars and festivals
Jewish, cosmic philosopy
Jewish, mysticism
Jews
Jews, early wandering
Job
Job, Book of
Johanson, Donald O.
John, Saint, the apostle
Johnson, F
Jones, J. C.
Jordan, Pascual
JOS
Joseph of Egypt
Josephus Flavius
Joshua
Joule's Law
Joule, James Prescott
journalism, scientific
Jovea, age of
Jovian
jubilee
Jubilee Pass
Judah ha-Levi
Judaic monotheism
Judaism
Judaism, catastrophes influencing
Judaism, divine entities
Judaism, earliest sources and practices
Judaism, Mosaism
Judeideh, tell
judgement of the soul, depiction
Judges, Book of
Jueneman, Frederick
Juergens, Ralph C.
juggernaut
June
Jung, Carl
jungle and tropical forests
Jupiter effect
Jupiter-g, attributes and behaviors
Jupiter-g, specific latin legends
Jupiter-g, typical effects produced by
Jupiter-g, world-wide identification
Jupiter-p, composition and appearence
Jupiter-p, external transactions
Jupiter-p, history and origins
Jupiter-p, radio-noises
Jupiter-p, satellites of
Jupiter-p, typical phenomena associated with
Jura Mountains
Jurassic Period
Justin, the historian
K
==================================================================
Ka
Kadesh
Kadmus
Kafer-Djarra, necropolis of
Kagra River
Kaibab formation
Kalambo Falls
Kalevala
Kali
Kallen, Horace
Kalopsida
Kalos, Kalotics
Kalpas
Kamchatka
kames
Kansas
Kant, Emmanuel
Kapitza
Kaplan, Lewis
kara structure
Karakoram, India
Karkom, Mount
karma
karst topography
Kas shipwreck
Kashmir
Kassite
Katewe Craters
Kazakhstan
Keen Camp summit
Keewatin
Keill, John
Keller, Gerta
Kellogg, V. L.
Kelly, Alan O.
Kelvin, Lord (Wm. Thompson)
Kennett, J. P.
Kentucky
Kentucky, Mammoth Cave
Kenya
Kepler
Kern River boulders and cobblestones
kerykeion
Kesil
Kessler Loch
Kester
kettle
Khima
Kicking Horse Pass
Kilamanjaro
Kilauea, Hawaii
Kimberlites
Kimberly mines
kinetic energy
kinetic molecular theory
king list
King shepherd
King, Clarence I.
King, Henry, C.
Kinnekulle, Sweden
Kinsborn
kinship
kitchen midden
kitharis
Klamath mountain arc
Kloosterman, Hans
Knossos
knowledge
Knudtson, J. A.
Kobuk Sand Hills, AK
Koch, R. H.
Koestler, Arthur
Kofarh, Robert E.
Kogan, Shulamith
Kohoutek, Comet
Kojiki scripture
Koko Nor, China
Kola Bore Hole
Kola Penninsula, Russia
Komarek, Edourd V. Sr.
Kondratov, Alexander
Kopal, Zdenek
Koran
Korea
kosher
kosmos
Kosmos-s
Kotelnoi island
Kotor, Gulf of
Koyukok River
Krakatoa
Kramer, Richard
Kramer, Samuel
Krishna
Kronia Group, publishers of AEON
Kronos, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies
krypton
Kugler, Francis Xavier
kuh-i-Namack
Kuhn, Thomas
Kukla, G. J.
Kumar S.
Kumara
Kurdistan
Krten, Bjoeren
Kurtz, Paul
Kuwait
Kwale islands
Kweilin karst
L
==================================================================
La Brea pit, California
La Cluna cave
La Malbaie crater, Quebec
Laacher See
Labrador
labrynth
Lachish
lady of Nordic Pantheon carbon laetoli beds
Lagrange, restricted solution
Lagrangian point
lahar
Lake Agassiz
Lake Bonneville
Lake Calgary flood
lake dwelling
Lake Humbolt
Lake Isabella, CA
Lake Missoula
Lake Pend Oreille, ice dam
Lake Wackitupe, NZ
lake, origins of
Lamark, -.
lamina
Lammas
land bridge
landform
landform, shaping of
landslide
Lane, Frank
Lang, Andrew
Langerie Haute
language
language, diffusion
Laos
LaPlace, Pierre Simon, Marquis
de
Lapland
LaPonit, P. I.
Laramie formation
Larderello hot spring
Larry, R. D.
Lascaux Caves
laser
Laskar
Lassen Peak
Lasswell, Harold D.
Late Kingdom
latent heat
lateral displacement
laterate
laurel
lava
laws, in science
lead
leader gene hypothesis
Leaky, Louis B., Mary & Richard
least interaction action
Lebanon
Leclerc, G. L.
Lederer, Wolfgang
legend
Lehmann, -.
Leibnitz, Gottfried
Leiden papyrus
Lemaire, J.
Lena river
lens
Leonardo da Vinci
Leroi-Gourhan
Les Eyzies de Tayac
LeSage, George-Louis
Letopolis
Levant/ Dead Sea Rift
Levi-Strauss, Claude
Leviathan
Leviathan cave
Lexell's Comet
Leyden jar
Liakhov island
Libby, Willard Frank
libedo
liberalism
Liberia
liberty
Libra
library
Libya, Libyan
lichen
life
life and entropy
life span
life, biotic precursors of
light
light pressure
light refraction
lightning
lignite
Lilith
limbic system
limestone
Linear B script
Lingua Adamisa
linguistic ideology
linguistics
lion
lion, rampant
Lisbon earthquake
listric fault
literature
litergy
lithic wear analysis
lithosphere
Lithuania
Little Salt spring
Littlewood, -. -.
loam
local neutral
Loch Ness
loess
logic
Loham mountain
Loma Prieta earthquake
London Geologic Society
Long, C. H.
lost tribe
Lot
Lotan
love
low elevation meteor
Lowel, Percival
Lowery, Malcolm
Lucerne, lake
Lucifer
luck
Luckenbill, D. D.
Luckerman, Marvin
Lucretius, -.
Lucy"
Lukens
luminosity
lunagenesis
lunar ...
lunar calendar
lunar fission
Luxor
Lycia, tombs of
Lycosoura
Lyell, Charles
Lyons, France
lyre
Lystrosaurus
Lyttleton, Raymond
M
==================================================================
Ma, E. M.
Maadin
Mabon
Maccoby, Hyam
MacCrea, W. H.
MacDonnel Bay, Australia
MacGowan, -.
MacGregor, J.
machine
Mackenzie river
Mackie, Evan W.
MacMillan Book Co.
MacNeish, Richard S.
macro-evolution
Macrobius
Madura, Australia
Magdalenian
Mage, Shane
Magi
magic
Magiddo
magistrate
Magna Grecia
magnetic decay
magnetic mapping
magnetic pole
magnetic reversal
magnetic tube
magnetism
magnetite
magnetization
magnetosphere
magnitude
magnolia
Mahabharata
Mahemet
main sequence star
Mainwaring, Bruce
Maiori
maize
Majdalouna, necropolis of
Malagasi
Malapina Glacier
Malay Penninsula
Maldeve Islands
Mali
Malkus, W. V. R.
Malta
Malthus, David
mammal
mammoth
Mammoth cave, Kentucky
Man (early in America)
Manavgat River
Mandelkehr, Moe
Mandraka falls
Manetho
manganese
manic depressive
Manitoba
mankind
manna
manna, medicinal properties
manna, nutritional properties
Manson structure
Manson, Lewis A.
Manu
Maori lore
map
Maran, S. P.
Maranatos, S.
Marble Canyon sand deposit, AZ
Marcanton, Pierre L.
March
Marduk
Mare Imbrium
marfa lights
Margolis, Howard
Mari
marine extinction
Mariner-s
marriage
Mars-g
Mars-p
Marshak, Alexander
marsupial
Martia, age of
Martin, P. S.
Martinatos, Spiridon
Marut
Marx, Christoph
Marx, Karl
Marxist paradigm
Maryland
mascon
mass organization
mass spectrum
mass, physical
mass, religious
mass-luminosity relation
Massif Central, France
massive dunes, Somali coast
massive ion
massive sand-deposit
mastaba
mastodon
materialism
mathematics
matter
Mauna Loa, Hawaii
Maunder minimun
Mauritania
mausoleum
Maxwell, James Clerk
May
Maya, Mayan
maypole
Mazama mountain
Mazda
Mazzuroth
MBI" people
McClintock, Barb
McKinnon, Roy
McLaren, D. J.
meaning
measure and test
Mecalli scale
Mecca
mechanics
mechanism
Mecklenberg Lake
medicine, medicinal
megalithic monument
megalomania
Megiddo
megolith
Meinesz, Venning F. A.
meiosis
Mekong river
melt
melting point
membrane, cellular
memorial generation
memory
Memphis
Mendel, Gregor
Mendeleev, D. I.
Mendocino, CA
menstruation, menstrual
mental health/ illness
mentation
Menzel, Donald
mer
Merapi, mount
Mercalli scale
Mercanton, P. L.
Mercator projection
Mercator, Gerardus
Mercuria, Mercurian Period
Mercury-g
Mercury-p
Merovingian period
Meservey, R.
mesiah, mesianism
Meso, ..., Middle...
Meso-America, Mesoamerican
mesocortex
Mesolithic period
meson
Mesopotamia, Mesapotamian
Mesopotamian chronology
Mesozoic era
Mesquite gravel, NV
Messabi Iron Range
metabolism
metal
metalurgy
metamorphic rock
metamorphosis
metaphor
metaphysics
meteor
meteor crater
Meteor Crater," AZ
meteor shower
Meteora, Greece
meteorite
meteorite, encounter with
meteorites from Mars
meteoroid
meteorology
meter, metre
methane
methodology
Methusalah
Meton
Metonic Cycle
metric system
Mexico
mica
Micah
Michael, Archangel
Michell, John
Michelsohn, Irving
Michigan
Michigan, Lake
micro-comets
microlithic technique
microrganism
microscope
microwave energy
Mid-Atlantic ridge
Middle Bronze age
Middle East
Midgard
Midsummer
Midsummer Night's Dream
migraine
migration, animal
migration, bird
migration, human
Milankovitch, M.
Milford Sound, N. Z.
Milford Sound, NZ
Milkom"
Milky Way
millennialism
Miller, Alice
Miller, Hugh
mima mound
Mimas
mimicry
mind
mineral
Minerva
mining
Minnesota
Minoa, Minoan
Miocene epoch
miracle
mirage
Mireaux, Emile
Mishrife
missing link
missing mass
Mississippi River
Mississippi, U. S. A.
Mississippi-Missouri Basin
Missoula, Lake
Missouri, U. S. A.
Mistaseni (Sask. rock)
misteltoe
Mitanni
Mithra
mitosis
mixture, chemical
mnemonic
Moazcas
model, scientific
Moen Cliffs, Denmark
Mogollon Rim river gravel, AZ
Mohenjo-daro
moho (discontinuity)
mohole
Moldavite tektites
molecule
Moloch
momentum
Monaco
Monan
monarch
money, catastrophic origin
Mongolia
monolith
monotheism
monsoon
monster
Mont Blanc, France
Montana
Montazuma Hills, CA
Monte Bolca
Montgomery Creek formation
month
Monument Valley
monumentalism
Moon
moon worship
Moon-g
Moon-p
Moore, Brian
Moorea, French Polynesia
morality
Morar Loch, Scotland
Morgan, Elaine
Morgan, Lewis H.
Morning Star
Morocco
Morris, Charles
Morris, Henry
Morrison, Philip
Moses
motion
motive
Motz, Lloyd
mound builder
Mount Saint Helens
Mount Shasta mineral deposits
Mount Shasta, CA
Mount Sinai
Mount Whitney, CA
Mount Woodson granite
mountain range
mouse
mouse, cosmic
Mousterean culture
Mozambique
Mt. Pelee
Mt. Pinatubo, Phillipines
Mu"
muck
mud
Mudies
Muir Glacier, Alaska
Muldrow Glacier, Alaska
Mullen, William (Bill)
Mller, Max
Muller, William.
multiple star system
Munk, W. H.
Murchison meteorite
murmmurings, of crowd
museum
music
music of the spheres
mutagenic agent
mutation
mutual repulsion
Mycenea, Mycenean
Myres, John
mysticism
myth interpretation
myth, mythology
mythical and celestial movement
mytho-linguistic
mythology
N
==================================================================
Nabonnasar
Nafud Desert depression
Nagasaki
names of gods
names of planets
Namibia
Nammu
Nampa image
Nanga Parbat
Nansen, F.
Naos of El Arish
Napier, William M.
naptha
narcissism
Narmada River, India
Narryer, mount
Nasca, Peru
nastic
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
natural force
natural history
natural law
natural rights
natural scientist
natural selection
naturalism
nature
Nature, periodical
Naughton
Navajo sandstone
navigation, primitive
Naxos, Greece
Nazis, Nazism
Neanderthal man
Near East
Nebo
Nebraska
Nebraska Sand Hills
Nebuchadnezzar
nebula
nebular cosmogony
Nectanebo
nectar
Needham, -.
needs, human
negative electrical charge
negative exponentialism
negro race
Nelson, John H.
Nemesis
Nemi Lake
Neo..., New...
neocortex
Neolithic age
Nepal
Neptune-g
Neptune-p
Nergal
nervous system
nest
Nestor, Palace of
Netherlands
Neugebauer, Otto
neurons
neurosis
neurotic
neutral, neutrality; electric
neutrino
neutron star
neutron transformation
Nevada
Nevadan Revolution
Neville, -.
New Brunswick, Canada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Madrid earthquake
New Mexico
New River, CA
New Scientist, periodical
New Testament
New Year's Day
New York
New Zealand
Newcomb, Simon
Newfoundland
Newgrosh, Bernard
Newham, -.
Newton, Sir Isaac
Newtonian definitions
Newtonian formulations
Ngorongoro Crater
Niagra falls
Nibelungen
Nicaragua
Nichmed
nickel
Niederberger, Chistine
Niemann, V. D.
Nieto, M. M.
Nietzsche, Friedrich W.
Niger Republic
Niger river
Nigeria
nihillism
Nile river
Nilsson, Herbert
nimbus
Nimrod
Nineveh
Ninninger, H. H.
Ninurta
Nipponia
Nippur
Nirvana
Nishapur mines
Nitovikla
nitrate
nitrite
nitrogen
nitrogen cycle
nitrogen oxides
Nix Olympia
Noah's flood
Noah, Noachian
noble savage"
node
Noga
noise pollution
noise, accoustic
noise, cosmic
noise, electrical
nonconformity, geological
Nonnos
Nordic myth
Nordic, Norse
normal
normality, abnormality
Norman, John
North America
North American Flood
North American Lacustrian Rift
North American tektite field
North Carolina
North Dakota
North Pole
North Sea
North Star
North, Robert G.
Northern Kingdom of Israel
Northwest Territories, Canada
Norway
nova
Nova Komenei
Nova Scotia
Novaya Zemlya, Siberia
novel
November
nuclear energy
nuclear missile
nuclear physics
nuclear reaction
nuclear synthesis
nucleic acid
nucleon
nucleotide
nucleus, atomic
nucleus, cell
nuclidic masses
Numa Pompilius
number
numbers, sequences and series
numen
nursery rhyme
Nut
nutrition
O
==================================================================
O'Geoghan, Brendon
O'Keefe, John A.
O. K.
Oahu, Hawaii
Oannes
oasis
Ob-Irtysh Basin
obliquity
obliquity, changes
oblisk
observatory
obsession
obsidian
Occam, William of
occultism
ocean
ocean basin
Oceana, cultures of
oceanic flood gravel
Oceanic plate subduction
oceanogrophy
ocher
October
Odessa
Odin
Odysseus
Odyssey
Oedipus
Oesel island
Oestrus
Ogden, J. G. III
Ogyges
Ohio
oil
oilfield
Okeanos
Oklahoma
Okotoks erratic
Old Crow Basin, Yukon
Old Faithful geyser
Old Man of Hoy
Old One of the Sea"
old red sandstone
Old Testament
Olgas, the
olive oil
Olivet, mount
Olmec world
Olympia
Olympic games
Olympus Mt., Mars
Olympus, Mt., Greece
Oman
omen
Ometepe Island and volcanoes
omnipotence of thought
Omo River
Omoroca
Ontario
Oort cloud of comets
Oosterhout, G. van
ooze
Oparin, A. I.
ophiolite
Ophiolites
Optimkist's Cave, U. S. S. R.
oracle
orbit
orbit transition (solar system)
Orbiter-s
order
Ordovician hammer
ore deposit
Oregon
organic geochemistry
organic illness
organic sediment
organization
orgy, orgiastic
orientation
oriented lakes
origin of life
original horizontality" concept
original man
Ormuzd
Ornstein
orogeny
Orontius Fineus
Orphic hymns
Orphic mysteries
orthogenesis
oscillator
Osiris
Osmaniye
osmium
Othus
Otto, Walter F.
Ouadi es Seboua
ought"
ought-is" problem
Ouranos
Ouroboros
outcropping
outwash
Ovendon, Michael W.
overfold
overturned strata
Ovid
Owens Valley aprons
owl
ox-bow lake
Oxnard, Charles
oxygen
oxygen isotope ratio
oxygen, transmutation of
oxygenation of the atmosphere
oyster
ozone
P
==================================================================
Pacific ring of fire
Pacific rise
Pacifica
Padagonian man
paean
pagan
Page, Denys
Paine-Gaposchkin, Celia
Pakicetus fossil
Pakistan
palaeo-anthropology
palaeo-biochemistry
palaeo-climate
palaeontology
Palenque
paleography
Paleokoutella
Paleolithic Age, Palaeolithic
paleomagnetism
paleontology
Paleozoic Era
Palestine
palladium
Pallas
Palmer
Paluxy footprints
Pamir range
Panama
pandemonium
Pangea, Pangaea
pangenesis
panic
Panku
pantheism
pantomine
papurus
parable
paradigm
Paraguay
parallax
paranatellonta
paranoia
parapsychology
Paricutin, Mexico
Paris, France
Paris-g
Parry, Alan
parthenogenesis
Parthenon
particle
particle physics
particle/ wave duality
parturition
Pascal, Blaise
Passover
Patagonia, fjords of
patriachy
Patroni, Giovanni
Patten, Donald
Patterson, Clair
paucity of evidence
Pausanias, -.
Payne-Gaposhkin, Cecilia
peace
peat
pebble
pediment
peer review
Peirce, Charles
Peking man
Pelasgians
Pelean volcano
Peleg
Peloponnesian Penninsula
Peltier, Jean
penance
pendulum
peneplain
Penniston, G. B.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvanian Period
Pensee
Pentecost
penumbra
Peoples of the sea
Pepi
peptide
percept
perception
periastron
pericentron
perigee
perihelion
period
period, geologic
period, resonant
period, sidereal
period, synodic
Periodic table
permafrost
Permean period
Permian Period
Persia, ancient
Persia, Persian
Persian Gulf
personality
personification
perspective
perturbation
Peru
Peruvian gravel anomalies
Pestigo fire
pestilence
Petrie, W. M. S.
petrifaction, petrification
petrified forest
Petrified Forest, AZ
petroglyph
petroleum
Petrona skull
Petterson, Hans
Pfeiffer, John
Pfeiffer, Robert H.
Phaeacia
Phaeton
phallic
Pharoah Ramses
phase
phenol
phenomenology
phenomenon
philanthropy
Philippine Islands
Philistine pick
philosophy
phlogiston
Phobos
Phoebe
Phoebus
Phoenicia, Phoenician
Phoenix, AZ
phonetic, phonemic
phosphate
phosphoresence
phosphorous
photochemistry
photoelectricity
photography
photometry
photon
photosphere
photosynthesis
phylogenic inheritance
physical binary system
physics
physiology
Phystos
Phythian oracle
pi
Pi-ha-kiroth
Pickering, William
pictograph
piezoelectricity
pigmentation
Pikaia
Pikering, William
Pilat dunes
pilgrim
pillar
pillar of fire"
Pillars of Hercules
Piltdown man
Piltdown, England
Pindar, -.
pingo
Pioneer-s
Piri Reis map
placebo
plague
Plagues of Egypt
plain
planaria
planarian
Planck, Max
plane, ecliptic
planet
planetarium
planetary gods
planetary motion
planetary nebula
planetary tide
planetary, transaction
planets and human directives
planets, in language
plant
plasma
plasma, cosmic
plastic flow
Plata, rio de la
plate tectonics
plateau
Plato
pleasure
Pleiades
Pleione
pleisiosaurus
Pleistocene Epoch
Pleistocene-Holocene Boundary
plenum
Plinian eruption
Pliny
Pliocene epoch
plot
Plotinus
plural environment
plural selves
Plutarch
Pluto-g, god
Pluto-p, planet
plutonic rock
plutonium
plutonium, toxicity
Pobitite Kamani
poetic meter
Poincare, Jules Henri
Point Loma erratics
poison
Polaki, Lake
Poland
Polanyi, Michael
polar icecap, shift
polarization
political control
political science
politics
politics of science
pollen
polluted sediment
pollution
Polonium
poly-ego
Polybius
polycyclic aromatic compounds (PAC)
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAH
polymerase chain reaction
polymorphism
Polynesia
polyploidism
polytheism
Pont d'Ambon
Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean
Ponway gravel
Popocatepetl
Popol Vuh Epic
popular science
population
porosity
Porphyrion
Portugal
Poseidon
positivism
Postojna Cave
potassium-argon dating
potential energy
potential, electric
pottery
poultry
Poverty Point, Louisiana
power, intellectual
power, physical
power, political
Poznansky, Arthur
pragmatics of legend
Pratt, J. H.
prayer
Pre-Cambrian Era
precession of equinoxes
precident, need for
precipitation
predestination
Predmost, Moravia
prehistory
preservation
pressure group, lobby
pressure of light
pressure, biological
pressure, environmental
pressure, physical
Prestley, Joseph
Prestwich, Joseph
prevailing wind
Priam, T.
priapic wand
Pribriam, Carl
Price, George McCready
priest
primary
primate
primeval sculpture
primevalogy
primordial soup"
principal star in binary system
priority in scientific discovery
pro-human ape
pro-selenes
pro-Selenian
probability
process
Proclus
professionalism
progress
projection
Prometheus
promised land"
proof
prophecy of doom
prophet
propoganda
protein
protoplasm
protozoa
Prouty, W. F.
Psyche
psychiatry
psychic mechanism
psychoanalysis
psychobiographical
psychological therapy
psychology
psychoneurosis, psychosis
psychosomatic genetics
psychosomatism
Ptah
Pterosaur
Ptolemy, Claudius
public policy
publishing
pulsar
pumice
punctuated equilibrium
punishment
punition
punt
Puys volcanic chain
Pylos
pyramid
Pyrannes, mountain range
Pysanky
Pythagoras
python
Q
==================================================================
q, charge on electron
q-quantavolution
Q-series
Qalaat-er-Rouss
Qraye, necropolis of
quackery
quadrant
quadrature
quantavolution
quantification
quantity
quantum
quantum relativity
quantum sedimentation
quantum-mechanics, theory of
quark
quartz
quasar
Quaternary Period
Quebec
Queen of Heaven"
Queen of Sheba
Queenstown, NZ
Quetzelquotl
Quiche Mayans
quicksand
quintessence
R
==================================================================
Ra, Re
Raabjerg mile dunes
Rabbitkettle hot springs
Rabinowitz, Eugene
race
radar
Radhakrishnah, V.
radiant genesis
radiation
radiation chemistry
radiation detector
radiation sickness
radiation storm
radiation therapy
radiation, biological effects of
radical, chemical
radient genesis
radio
radio-halo
radioactive dating, (RAD)
radioactive decay
radioactive halo
radioactive isotope
radioactive waste
radioactive, radioactivity
radioastronomy
radiochemistry
radiochronometry
radiogenic helium
radiometry
radium
radon
rafting
rafting of land masses
Raikes, Robert J.
rainbow
Rainbow Bridge, Utah
rainmaking
raised sealevel
Rakha
Ralph, Elizabeth
Rama
Ramadan
Ramapithicus
Ramayana
Ramesses II
Ramona cobbles, CA
Rampino, M. R.
Ramses II
Ramses III
Ramses VI
Rank, Otto
Raphael
Rapp, George
Ras Shamra
Ras-el-Ain
rational
rationalism
rationality
Raup, David M.
Rawanda
Rawlinson, Gerald
rayed crater
reading backwards
realism
reasonable
reasoning
recall
recency
recent time
reception system, science
Reck, H.
recombination, genetic
red colored environmental substances
Red Deer badlands
red dwarf star
Red Sea
red shift
red tide
reductionism
reef
refining, metal
refining, natural
refraction
refrigeration, natural
Rehoboam
Reich, Theodor
Reich, Willhelm
Reid, G. C.
relative density
relativity in physics
relativity, social
relief
religion
religion, reformation
religion, sociology of
REM, unit
remains, human & animal
remanence, magnetic
remission
remnant, celestial
renaissance
repetitiveness
reproduction, exponential rates
reproductive system
reptile
reservoir, natural
Reshetov, Yuri
resistance
resonance
resonance, physical
resonant ratio
respiration
retired god
reversed magnetism
reversion to hominidae
revolution, intellectual
revolution, political
revolution, scientific
revolution, social
Rezanov, I. A.
Rhaecus
Rhea
rheology
Rhine river
Rhine River valley
Rhodesia
Rhone glacier
Rhone River
rhyme
Rhys-Carpenter
rhythm
rhythm, biological
Ricci
Richat structure
ridge
Ries Crater
Rift, African
Rift, Mid Atlantic
rifting
Rig Veda
right handedness
right hemisphere
Riley, C. J.
rille
rille, lunar
Rilli, Nicola
ring of fire"
ring, planetary
ring-around-the-rosey"
Rio de Janeiro
ripple mark
ripple marking in rock
rising land
rite of passage
Rittmann, A.
ritual
river
river delta
Rivers, W. H. R.
Rix, Ziv
Roche Limit"
Rochenbach
rock
rock art
rock chimney
rock salt
Rock, Fritz
Rocky Mountain structures
Rocky Mountains
rod
Rodabaugh, David
rodent
Roheim, Geza
role-playing
Roman religion
Rome, Roman
Rommulus, Remmus
Rooser, R. G.
Rose, Lynn
Rosetta stone
Ross ice shelf
rotation
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Roussel, Rene
routine
rubble hill
Rubezahl
Ruffignac
Rugus, Carl W.
rulers
runaway" star
Runcorn, S. .K
Russell, Bertrand
Russell, D. A.
Russell, Henry Norris
Russia
Rutherford scatter
Ryan, W. B. F.
S
==================================================================
Sabbat
Sacral man
sacrament
sacred
sacrifice
sacrifice ritual
saga
Sagan, Carl
Saguenay river
Sahara
Sahara, Saharan Sea
Sahul
Saint-Hilaire, Geoffrey
Salinas Valley alluvial fan, CA
Salop, L. J.
salt
salt dome, salt plug
salt flat, salt pan
salt lake
Salt Lake crater
Salt pans, S Australia
salt, evaporation of brine
saltation
Salton Sea, California
Salzkammergut, Austria
Sammer, Jan
Samoa
Samson
San Andreas Fault
San Diego Hills, CA
San Felipe ocean flood apron
San Francisco earthquakes
San Jacinto Mountains
sanctification
sand
sand barrier
sand dune
sandstone
sandstorm
Sanhain
sanity
Santa Klaus
Santillana, Giorgio di
Santorini remnant
Sardinia
Sargasso Sea
Sargon
Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan gravels
Satan
satellite
satellite, artificial
satellite, celestial
satrap
Saturn symbol
Saturn's rings
Saturn, binary
Saturn-g
Saturn-p
Saturnalia
Saturnia, Saturnian Age
Saturnian Deluge
Saturnian nova
satyr
Saudia Arabia
Saul
Saul, John
Saussure, F de
scabland
scale-m
scale-w
Scaligar, J. J.
scanning electron microscope
scarab
Scarisora Cave
Schaeffer, Claude
Schindewolf, Otto H.
schist
schizophrenia, schizophrenic
schizotypicality
Schliemann, Heinrich
Schorr, Edward
Schramm, David
Sciaparelli
science
science fiction
Science, Organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
scientific espionage
Scotia Sea
scripture
Scrope, George Poulett
sculpture, ancient
sea feature
sea level
Sea level changes in
seafloor exploration
seafloor, spreading
seamount
season, seasonal
Second Millennium BC
secret word
secularism
sediment
sedimentary meteorite
sedimentation
sedition & science
seed
seismic discontinuity
seismic sea wave
seismism
seismology
Selene
self awareness
self control
self destructiveness
self fulfillment
self-rule
Selimiye
Selye, Hans
semantics
Semele
semiconductor
Semiotics
semite
Seneca
Senegal
Senmut
Sennacherib
sense( s)
separation of heaven & earth
serpent
Serpent mound
serpentine
Servan, lake
Set, Seth
settlement, primeval
Seuss, H. E.
Sewa
Sewalich Hills
sex
sexual selection
sexuality
Seychelles
shadow
Shakespeare
shale
Shaman
Shamash
Shamayim
Shansi Loess region
Shapley, Harlow
sheath, electric
Sheldrake, R.
Shelton, John S.
Sherman Glacier, AK
Shiaparelli, Giovanni V.
shield volcano
Shimkunas
Shinto
Ship rock
Shishak
Shiva
Shklovskii, I. S.
shock
shock metamophism
shock therapy
Shocked quartz
shoreline
sial
Siberia
Siberian craters
Sicily
Sieff, Martin
Sierra foothills sand blanket, CA
Sierra Leone
sign
sign language
Sigri, petrefied forest
Sihkism
silica, silicate
silicon
silification
silt
silver
Simiriyan, tell
simple harmonic motion, SHM
Simpson, George G.
Simpson, John, A.
simultaneous havoc
sin
Sinai
Sinanthrupus
Singer, Fred
sink
sinkhole
sinking land
Sinn
Sirius
Sisthrus
Sithylemenkat, lake
Siwalik hills
size
Sizemore, Warner
Skidi Pawnee
sky
sky mimicry
sky movement
sky-gods
Slabinsky, Victor
slavery
Slavs
sleep
Sleeping Bear dunes
slip fault
Slovensky Raj
Smart, W. M.
smelting
smite
Smith, William
Smokey Valley, NV
snake
Snake River Canyon
social imprinting
social invention
social science
socialism
Society For Interdisciplinary Studies (London), SIS
society over time
sociology
Socrates
Soda Lake, Chad
sodium chloride
Sodom
soft landing
soil
solar antapex
solar flare
Solar magnetic field
solar mansion"
Solar motion
solar power
solar prominence
solar radar
solar size
solar storm
Solar System
solar wind
Solaria Binaria
solid
Solinus
Solomon
Solomon's temple
Solon
solstice
solution, chemical
Somaliland
songs, sacred
sonic boom
Soos Springs, Czechoslovakia
soot in sediments
Sophist
Sorenson, I.
Sorokin, Pitrim
Sothic dating
Soufriere volcano
sound, catastrophic
South Africa
South America
South Carolina
South China Sea
South Dakota
South Pole
South Sea Islands
South-East Asia
Soviet Union
space exploration
space infra-charge
space medicine
space plasma
space science
space, concept of
space-charge sheath
space-time
Spain
Spangler, George W.
Spanish Sahara
Spanos
spark, electrical
Sparkling Goat"
Sparta, Spartan
specialization
species
specific charge ratio
specific gravity
spectre
spectroscopy
spectrum
spectrum class of stars
spectrum measurement
speech
speech disorders
speleothem
Spencer, Herbert
sperm
Sphinx
Spinden
spirituality
Spitzbergen
Spokane Flood
sport
spring
Spring Equinox
Sri Lanka
St. Elmo's Fire
St. Gervais, France
St. Lawrence River
stability, constancy
Stag dance
stalactite
stalagmite
Stalinism
stampede
standard atmosphere
standard geologic column
Stanley, Steven M.
star
star as pointed emblem
star dunes, W Algeria
star emblem
statics
statistics
statitc electrification
Stecchini, Livio
Steibing, Wm.
Steinhaur, Loren C.
stellar evolution
stellar population
stellar structure
Stengler, William
Steno, Nicholas Surinam
Stenson, Niels
Stephanos, Robert
stereotyping
Stetson, -.
Stevanson, ?. ?.
Still, Elmer G.
stimulus-responce
stoicism
stone
Stone Age
Stone calendar
stone circle
Stone Mountain, Georgia
Stonehenge
stones, falling
strata, statification
stratigraphy
stratographic column
stratosphere
stream channel
striation
strike
string dunes, Arabia
Stromboli, volcano
strontium
structure
structure of nature
Stube, -.
styx
subatomic particle
subduction
sublimation
submarine canyon
submarine mountain
submarine seep
subsidence
succession of gods
Sudbury, Ontario
Suess, Eduard
Sugarloaf mountain
Suhr, E. George
suicide
sulfur compound
Sullivan, Walter
sulphur
Sumer, Sumerian
Sumner, William Graham
sun worship
Sun, James
Sun, myths & dances
Sun, Sol
Sunda Arc
sundial
sunken land
sunspot
super ego
Super Saturn
Super Uranus
superconductivity
supernatural
supernova
superstition
supression, devices of
supression, techniques of
Surabhi
Surtsey, Iceland
Surveyor-s
survival
survival of the fittest"
survivor
Sutherland Falls, NZ
Sutter Buttes, Marysville, CA
Swaddle, T. W.
Swanscombe Man
swastika
Sweden
Swift-Tuttle, Comet
Switzerland
Sybil
syllogism
symbol
symbolic logic
symmetry of form
symptom
Synagogue
synapse
synchronization of history
syncline
synodos, synodic period
synthetic Q-theory
Syria
Syrian-Palastinian Rift Valley
Syro-Palestine
systemic mutation
Szasz, Thomas
T
==================================================================
T'ien
Ta-hsueh Mountains
Taal Lake & Volcano
Taannek, tell
tabernacle
Tabernacle of Moses
Table Mountain
taboo
tail
Talbott, David N.
Talbott, George
Talbott, Stephen L.
Talmud & Midrash
talos
Talyche
Tamboro Volcano
Tamil
Tammuz
Taoism
tar sand
Tarse
tarsier
taxonomy
Taylor, Thomas
Teays River
Tecate Summit
technology, development of
technology, origin
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre
Teishebaini
tektite
teleology
teleostei
telescope, optical
telescope, radio
tell
Temecula Valley
temperature
temple
Temple of Jerusalem
temple, archetecture
temple, origin
Temple, Robert
Ten Commandments
Tenerife, Canary Islands
tensile strength
Teotihuacan
tera-ampere
Terminal Cretaceous Catastrophe
Ternifine fossils
terra-cotta relief
Terrace, H. S.
terrestrial ecosystem
terrestrial methane
territory as claimed habitat
terror
Tertiary Period
Tesla, Nikola
test
test of time
test, general
test, of matter
test, philosophical
testing, mental
Tethyan Sea
Tethys belt
tetrapyrrole pigment
Teutonic religion
textual critiscism
texture & structure of rock
Tey Gawra
Tezcatlipoca
Thackrey, Ted
Thailand
Thales of Miletus
Thamud
Thanatos
Thenus
theology
theomachy
theophobia
theory
theotrophic
theotropy
Thera, Thira
therapsids
therapy
thermal energy
thermal expansion
thermal metamorphism
thermocline
thermodynamics, laws of
thermoluminescence in dating
thermonuclear reaction, fusion
thermosphere
Theseus
Thira
tholos
Thom, Rene
Thomson, Sir William
Thor
thorium series
Thoth
thought
thought disorder
thought process, thinking
Thoum, Pharaoh Thao
Three Valley Gap gravels
throne
thrust
thrusting, rock
Thule
thunderstorm
Thutmose I
Thutmose II
Thutmose III
Tiahuanaco
Tiamat-Apsu
Tibet
tidal bore
tidal flat
tidal friction
tide
Tiglath Pileser III
Tigris River
Tikal
till, glacial
tilting, axial
Timaeus
time
time of humanization
time, current measurements of
time, disclosure in rocks
time, disclosure in statigraphy
time, perception of
time, physiological clock
time, psychology of
timescale
Timna
tin
Tiryns
Titan
titanotheres
Tithonius Lacus
Titicaca, Lake
Tiubergen, Nickolaos
Tlachtli
Tlaloc
Tlazolteotl
Toba lake, Indonesia
tohu-bohu
tomb
Tompkins, Peter
tool
topography
Torah
tornado, whirlwind & waterspout
torque
torus
totem, totemism
toungues, speaking in
Tower of Babel"
town plan
toxicity, plutonium
trace element
tradition
tragedy
Trainor, Lynn
transactive matrix
Transarctic Mountains
translation
transmission of brain messages
transmutation
transmutation of chemical elements
transparency of water
trap, petroleum
trauma
tree
tree, cosmic
tree-ring dating
trenche, submarine
trepidation
Tresman, Harold
Triassic Period
Triassic-Jurassic Boundary
tribe, tribal
tribology
Trinil faunal zone
tripod cauldron
Triton
Triton, Lake
Trojan asteroids
Trojan Wars
tropics
tropism
troposphere
trough
Troy
truth
truth, in science & sociology
Tsaidan Basin
tsunami
Tsunoda, Tadanobu
Tuba, Lake
Tucson Mountains, AZ
Tula
Tunguska Explosion
turbidity current
turbulance, aquatic
turbulence, atmosphere
turbulence, lithic
Turfan Depression
Turin Papyrus
Turkey
Turkistan
Turkmenian
Turman, B. W.
turpentine
Twelve Tribes of Israel
Two Creeks Interglacial Stage
Tycho's nova
Tyndal, John
Typhon
typhoon
typology
Tyr
Tyrannosaurus
Tyrrhenia
U
==================================================================
U. S. Northeast Coast
Ubeidiya
Ugarit
Uke-mochi-no-kami
Ukko
ultramafic chemistry
ultrasonic
ultraviolet
Ulysses
Umbgrove, J. H. F.
uncertainty principle
unconformity, cartographical
unconformity, classificatory
unconformity, geological
unconscious
undersea exploration
unidentified flying objects, UFO
unified field theory
unified science
uniformitarian, uniformitarianism
universal language
Universe, development of
Universe, dynamics of
Universe, origin
Universe, structure of
unseen body
Upham, Warren
uplift
Ur
Uralian Geosyncline
Urania, age of
uranium
uranium-thorium-lead dating
Uranus Minor
Uranus-g, as god
Uranus-p, as planet
Uranus-p, satellites of
Urartu
urban revolution
Urey, Harold C.
Ursa Major constellation
utopia
Uweinat
Uxmal
V
==================================================================
vacuum
Vail, Isaac
Vajrapani
Van Allan radiation belts
van Andel, Tjeerd
van Flandern, Thomas C.
van Oosterhout, G. W.
Van, Lake
Vanderpool, Eugene, Sr.
vapor pressure
vaporization
variation, biological
Varuna
varve
varve, dating by
varve, deposits in
Vaucluse, Fontaine de
Vaughn, Raymond
Veda, Vedic
Vedism
Velikovsky, Immanuel
velocity
velocity of light
Venezuela
Venus, comet
Venus-g
Venus-g, mythology
Venus-p
Venusia, Age of
Venuturi Harbor, Tijuana River
Veracruz erratics, Mexico
Verdon Gorge, France
vermin
Vernal Equinox
Vesuvius
Vico, Giambattista
Victoria, Australia, Lake Nyanza
Victoria, Lake, Africa
Vietnam
Vijin, mexican bullcart
Vilks, -.
Villanovan
violence
virgin birth
Virgin River, NV
virus
viscosity
Vishnu, Visnu
Vissidhi-Maggia
visual agnosia
visual binary
Vita-Finzi, Claudio
Vitaliano, Dorothy
vitrified structures
Vitryas
vocalization
void
volatility
volcanic surge cloud
volcanism, explosive
volcano light
voltage
voluntarism
von Buch, Leonard
Von Fange, Eric
Vredefort Structure
Vsekhsviatskii, Sergi K.
vulcanism
W
==================================================================
Wabar craters
Waddenzee, Netherlands
Wadjak fossils
Walker Pass impact cones, CA
Wallace, Alfred Russel
Wanlesa, Harold R.
warfare
Warlow, Peter
Warner's Ranch sand hills
Warwick, James, W.
wassail
water
water depositions, UT
water transport
water, effects
water, origin of
water, World resources of
Watson, Alan
wave, in physics
wave, seismic
wave, tidal
wavelength
Wealden Series
weather
weather dynamics
weathering, rocks
Weaver, Warren
Webb, Willis L.
Weber, Max
Wegener, Alfred
weight
weights & measures
Weiner, J. S.
welding
well
welt
West Frisian Islands
West Indies
Westcott, Roger
Western cordilleras
Westfall, Richard S.
Whakarewarewa Thermal Area, NZ
whale
whammy
Wheeler, Mortimer, R. F.
Whelton, Clark
Whipple, Fred
whirl wind
whistling atmospheric
Whiston, William
White, J. P.
Whitney, J. D.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee
Whyte, Martin A.
Wickenberg flood gravel, AZ
Wickramasinghe, D. T.
Willamette Valley
Willis, B.
Wilson, Colin & A. T.
Wilson, J. Tuzo
Winchell, Alexander
wind
wind and water anomalies
wind tunnel
wine-making
Winsconsin glacial stage
Wise, D. U.
wiseman
witch
Wituratersrand system
Witwatersrand formation
Wolf of Rome"
Wolfe, Irving
Wollin, Goesta
women
Wondjina pictures
Wong, Kee Kuong
Wonguri
Wonguri ceremonies
wood, preserved
Wood, Robert Muir
Woodmoappe, John
Woodward, John
Wooley, Leonard
word
work
world government
World Order
World Tree
World, celestial archetypes
Worrad
worship
Worzel, J. Lamar
Wotan
Wreschener, Ernst
Wright, Frederick G.
writing
Wyoming
X
==================================================================
x-ray burst
x-ray source
x-ray style, in Art
xenophobia
Y
==================================================================
Yahweh
Yamato mountains
Yangtze River, Yellow River
Yayanos, Aristes
year, calendar
year, cermonies of
year, concept & calendar
Year, Great
Yellowstone National Park
YHWH
yin-yang
yoga
Yosemite National Park
Yosemite Valley
Yuba River, CA
Yucatan karst
yuga
Yugoslavia
Yukatan
Yukon Territory, Canada
Yule
Z
==================================================================
Zagros Mountains
zedec
Zeus
Ziegler, Jerry L.
ziggurat
zinc
Zinjanthropus
Zion
zodiac
zodiacal light
Zoroaster
Zysman, Milton
COSMIC HERETICS:
by Alfred de Grazia
A Personal History of Attempts
to Establish and Resist Theories of Quantavolution
and Catastrophe in the Natural and Human Sciences,
1963 to 1983.
by
Alfred de Grazia
Metron Publications
Princeton, N. J.
Notes on first printed version of this book
ISBN: 0-940268-08-6
Copyright (c) 1984 by Alfred de Grazia
All rights reserved Printed in the U. S. A. Limited first edition of 300 copies.
Address:
Metron Publications,
P. O. Box 1213,
Princeton, N. J.,
08542, U. S. A.
Cosmic Heretics was processed by the Princeton University Computing Center, using the processing
language called Script.
Photocomposition, printing, and binding were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing
Services.
The text is set in 10 and 9 point Times Roman.
The Author thanks Rick Bender, Steve Pearson, and Skip Plank for managing ably and considerately
the production of this and other works of the Quantavolution Series, and also thanks Marion
Carty for her contributions to the designs and formatting of the books.
On the cover, Isodensitometer tracing of comet Morehouse 1908 III, in J. Rahe et al., Atlas of
Cometary Forms (Washington: NASA, 1962), 63-4.
This book
is dedicated
to whoever figures in it,
whether or not
by name.
The most elementary books of science betrayed the inadequacy of old implements of thought.
Chapter after chapter closed with phrases such as one never met in older literature:
"The cause of this phenomenon is not understood;"
"science no longer ventures to explain causes;"
"the first step towards a causal explanation still remains to be taken;"
"opinions are very much divided;"
"in spite of the contradictions involved;"
"science gets on only by adopting different theories, sometimes contradictory."
Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and instead of Kant's famous
four antinomies, the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law. To
educate -- one's self to begin with -- had been the effort of one's life for sixty years; and
the difficulties of education had gone on doubling with the coal-output, until the prospect of
waiting another ten years, in order to face a seventh doubling of complexities, allured one's
imagination but slightly.
From :
The Education of Henry Adams : An Autobiography.
Privately published in 1906, in 100 copies, and sent to interested persons for comment. General
publication ensued in 1918. In 1975 republished by Berg: Dunwoody, Georgia.
COSMIC HERETICS
by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE-PAGE
FOREWORD:
IN SEARCH OF TIMES PAST
PART ONE
1. ROYAL INCEST
2. THE PRODIGAL ARCHIVE
3. CHEERS AND HISSES
4. A PROPER RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY
5. THE BRITISH CONNECTION
PART TWO
6. HOLOCAUST AND AMNESIA
7. FROM VENUS WITH LOVE
8. HOMO SCHIZO MEETS GOD
PART THREE
9. NEW FASHIONS IN CATASTROPHISM
10. ABC'S OF ASTROPHYSICS
11. CLOCKWORK
PART FOUR
12. THE THIRD WORLD OF SCIENCE
13. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
14. THE FOIBLES OF HERETICS
PART FIVE
15. THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY
16. PRECURSORS OF QUANTAVOLUTION
17. THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
EPILOGUE
COSMIC HERETICS:
by Alfred de Grazia
FOREWORD
IN SEARCH OF TIMES PAST
I did not obtain Alfred de Grazia's materials for this book without remonstrance and persiflage.
I had thought that he would be pleased to have someone writing about his activities, especially
someone like myself who could be counted upon for sympathy, and indeed intended to do so, in
several volumes, no less. Strange, for Immanuel Velikovsky had responded to me in the same way!
When I muttered something about reminiscence and the consolations of old age, he was primed for
the retort, and I learned that Leonard Woolf had written his autobiography in his eighties, in
five volumes, and Woolf was then old enough to be his father, and Bertrand Russell at the same
age in three volumes. And I had better read them.
Furthermore, said he, I have a lot to recount, think of it, a boyhood spent sniffing the stench
of the Chicago stockyards, shivering in the icy blasts off the prairies, a small critter's
glance up the skirts of the Roaring Twenties. Then the University of Chicago in the heyday of
Robert Maynard Hutchins. And more, seven campaigns of World War II, and still more, an island of
the Aegean Sea, an experimental college in the Swiss Alps, intelligent women, singular, even
beautiful, women, even beautiful men, for that matter. No, I can't let you take it away, there's
too much to say.
Let me try, I said, there'll be no conflict of interest. I'll hew to the line of the Cosmic
Heretics as they tried to break into the halls of science. It's got to be dull. It'll save you
doing the chore. I can't take in your enfants terribles or your politicking, your love affairs
or your friends who escaped your involvement in cosmic heresies. Or your poetry or attempts at
educational revolution. No Naxos, not the beautiful ideas by half. No grueling trips, failures,
pains, unless they're cosmical. No Vietnam, no University life.
Then Deg began to reproach me for taking a person's life out of its context, arguing that you
have to talk about everything to say the truth about anything, whereupon I argued that no field
of science could exist if most of everything weren't left out of the investigation of single
thing.
Well certainly, he granted, you'll have a better chance of excising the insignificant details of
life. Yes, exactly, I said, but I thought there's the problem and the genius of biography,
fixing upon the details which may be the fulcrum of a change of life, precisely the sort of
thing that is often lost in sociology and history.
Where will it start, where will it end, he wondered. I'll start, I said, at the time when you
met Immanuel Velikovsky, the beginning of 1963, and carry it down to the publication of your
Quantavolution Series, that is, the beginning of 1984. Not in chronological order of course. The
story will lurch from side to side and pitch and roll.
Using your iconoclastic word "quantavolution" will help to define the dramatis personae. If a
person's been observed by you amidst the melee provoked by the claim that nature and mankind
have been fashioned by disaster, then that person belongs to the cast of characters.
Deg told me that the cosmic heretics were many, and their number would grow with the acceptance
of the heresy. But, he warned me, if the heresy were to fail, I would be guilty of slandering
decent citizens by inclusion. In either event, he said, history will be rewritten; it always is.
To whom will you dedicate your book, he asked, which was tantamount to giving his blessing to
the project. To the Cosmic Heretics, naturally, I answered Anyhow, I have already taken care of
Velikovsky with the dedication of my first book in the field. V. died four years ago, seventeen
years after we met, and before we met had done almost all of his writing. For my own part,
previously I had done a lot in political behavior and methodology, but nothing that might be
called quantavolution. It was a sociological problem that brought us together in the first
instance -- the reception system of science I called it afterwards. Although I might have known
better, I almost immediately entered into the substantive theory of catastrophe; I couldn't
resist the challenge. And I am just about finished now. (I grinned, and so did he.) I'm
beginning to repeat myself, too, so it's not a bad time to end with your book. By the way, have
you read everything that I've ever written? Yes, of course. Just wondering, he mused, because V.
tried never to talk to a person about his works who hadn't read the pertinent volumes. It makes
sense and saved his time.
I don't feel strongly about it: my books are children who have gone off somewhere, on their own
responsibility. I don't possess them, though I ask that they not be mistreated -- the same as I
would for other people's children. Who is entirely read, anyhow, he asked of me almost angrily,
as if I had raised the subject.
I said I didn't know. Once I had met a psychologist who had read the 24 volumes of Freud's
collected works. Still, commented Deg, some of his pieces escaped the Hogarth Press. William
Yeats dedicated his autobiography "to those few people mainly personal friends who had read all
that I have written," but probably no one qualified. It's good that nobody has read everything
of anybody. It might abet the idea that where the pen stops the person vanishes. Rather,
although the powers of expression tower above life, life rampages uncontrollably below.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE
ROYAL INCEST
Alfred de Grazia was entering his forty-fourth year when he met a self-styled cosmic heretic,
Immanuel Velikovsky, who was already sixty-seven, and for the next twenty years a wide band of
life's spectrum was colored by their relationship. As with a love affair, all that happened in
the beginning presaged what would happen later, stretched out on the scale of time, themes
doubling back upon themselves, attractions and reservations never to be erased, continuing
accumulations.
The men changed, the world of science changed, too, and also the political world, yet this
latter less; for, after all, one man died and the other grew old, whereas science and politics,
those statistical behemoths of collective behavior, go on forever, compounded of many millions
of individuals whose average age hardly varies, exhibiting trends whose progress, if it could be
called such, is hardly discernible and might indeed have constituted a regression. At least so
it seemed to these two men who were trying to affect the science and politics of their time.
Velikovsky died a heretic, with scattered generally unfavorable press, while his friend de
Grazia moved on with a spirit that could be called existential, convinced as before that
politics (and he insisted upon regarding science, too, as politics and often included politics
in psychopathology) -- that politics, although probably irredeemable, was the elemental hydrogen
of human behavior, no matter how compounded into life styles.
As the winter days of 1962 became 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey, 08540 U. S. A., families and
friends gathered into clusters like the last of the leaves, so the half-consciously and driven
by eddies of customs and calendar, de Grazia saw more of his friends like Livio Catullus
Stecchini and of his brother Sebastian. He did not know Velikovsky, and if he had been asked
about him, he would have replied that he had never heard of him.
This may appear strange, considering that Deg was to be numbered, by whatever scales a social
psychologist might invent to distinguish the "informed and involved" from the "ignorant and
apathetic," as a high-scorer on information and involvement. He had enough children in the
Princeton school system, a half-dozen, to catch the sound of names from all quarters. He spent
part of each week in New York City and at Greenwich village where, of all places, the name of
Velikovsky might have been brutted about. He had since 1957 published and edited a magazine, the
American Behavioral Scientist, which pretended to cover those matters that were or should be the
concern of social scientists. He personally
scanned a hundred and fifty magazines in the social sciences and current affairs each month. He
had many students, several of them close friends. His parents and the families of two brothers
were living most of the time at Princeton.
He was not socially pretentious, nor a prideful man, not a University snob, and had had to pawn
his professional reputation several times on behalf of scholarly and political iconoclasm.
Withal, when it came down to it, he claimed that he had never heard of a man about whom a
million or more Americans could have delivered him a rancorous account. One feature that makes
mass society a horror-show is the actual anonymity of the famous. (However, the mass scatoma of
social realities may be a worse feature.)
This he confessed when Livio Stecchini, as they walked a along Nassau street on that cold day,
brought up the matter, disjointedly, as happens with men walking down the street to no end,
intellectuals with minds chock-full of oddly related and far-off affairs, old friends whose
thoughts needed no introduction nor conclusion. Knowing the two men, I imagine that their
conversation would have gone something like this:
There is a man in Princeton with good material on the scientific establishment...
Cosmogonist... They suppressed his books." "What do you mean, suppressed his books ?" "They
smeared him." "Like Reich? Like Semmelweis?" "Yes." "What does he do?" "He lives here. He
writes." "About what?" "Mythology, astronomy, the Bible, ancient catastrophes." "What does he
live on?" "His books. They are very well sold." "That's not our topic." "No. The ABS could take
up the sociological side. It's rich.
Deg was skeptical. Although his American Behavioral Scientist would stop at nothing, every
scientist had his one or two little scandals of defamation, every professor his Dean's crime,
his edgy paranoia, and you had to take his word for it. It was the same in politics, dirty
tricks everywhere and defamation as a matter of course. As for the juggernaut of science, it
rolled along smashing unconscionably the god's celebrants who crowded in upon it from all sides
with fresh ideas and reputations.
His materials are rich." Again that remark. "Really?" "I can introduce you. We can go to his
house. He lives on Hartley Avenue." "Down near the Lake." "To take a look at his stuff."
"Maybe... What's his name?" "Velikovsky." "Never heard of him.
A few days later Stecchini received a phone call from Deg. Deg had been to dinner at Sebastian's
home. There was the usual babble and movement afterwards. He circled around the front room with
its piles of papers and open bookshelves, pausing at the one where books of high mobility and
heterogeneity sunned themselves for a few days. He picked out a forcefully jacketed book,
Oedipus and Akhnaton, the author: Velikovsky. First the large photograph of the author, then the
flyleaf, then the , then the index
-- he is grasping now for the thesis: the ill-fated incestuous Oedipus was none other than the
Egyptian monotheistic pharaoh Akhnaton --more riffling of pages -- the small definite sparking
of the book browser.
"What's this?" He poked the book at Sebastian. "Any good ?" Sebastian was non-committal:
probably he had not read it. "Mind if I borrow it ?"
He began to read it that evening. It was "True Detective," connecting two eminent figures never
before joined. He finished it the next day.
How did he find the time to read it so promptly? A man who attends to a wife, a passel of kids,
a dog, a cat, a station wagon, a large house with many doors and windows to mind, fireplaces to
dampen, a busy telephone, a fat folder marked "action now", with half a dozen jobs, including a
professorship and an editorship, with a propensity to daydream, and in that American society
which tries in a hundred ways to pry into one's time and makes life tough for readers, and
needing seven hours of sleep -- how does he read a book? They say, "When you want something
done, go to a busy man." His urges are compelling.
This act of devouring the book was typical of Deg. He would seize things out of his life-stream
like a bear grabbing fish and do something with them, a compulsion to undertake and a compulsion
to complete, not unlike Velikovsky, and the tie between the two men had something to do with
V.'s recognition of this similarity, and perhaps with his growing problem of completion after
the compulsion to take on matters lingered: but both men too sometimes had to drop affairs that
needed completion or stuck to them beyond their point of pay-off, beyond hope also, so I would
not stress the trait, and I even think that it may be so common as to be undistinguished.
Velikovsky had made wide turns in his life too, architecture, medical practice, psychoanalysis,
politics, and now all this catastrophism which had something of everything.
Outwardly, they differed most apparently. Deg of medium height and compact build, V. tall and
spare, the one with a midwestern back ground and accent, the other with a heavy Russian accent,
Jewish above all. To V outrage was a simple, direct emotion; Deg had the youngness of Americans
that comes from promiscuous outrage and wide dispersal of feelings inimical to authorities.
Pablo Picasso used to tell Gertrude Stein: "They are not men; they are not women; they are
Americans." So how could Deg become outraged at the enemies of V.? Living was parceled among
sporadic outrages; indignation cropped out all over the American landscape.
While I am at it, I might say something, too, about Deg's attitude to his own writing because
this also explains how he might view V.'s troubles. It is also about Gertrude Stein: " In those
days she never asked anyone what they thought of her work, but were they interested enough to
read it. Now she says if they bring themselves to read it they will be interested."
Victim of the Rule of Three, Deg added a first phrase: at first he thought what he wrote was
interesting and everyone should be required to read it. Then, after he had passed most of his
life in Gertrude Stein's second stage, he postulated a final stage, a nirvana where what he
wrote was objectively of interest but neither he nor anyone else should be interested to read
it.
This is too early to be analyzing character, but I cannot refrain from another comparison, a
fatal difference. Whatever V. completed, he fiercely possessed; whatever Deg completed he
relinquished. This made their cash flows, you might say, very different. And their advice to
each other very different. Deg was saying to V.. "Give it away. Let it go !" and V. to Deg,
baffled; "Why didn't you hold on to that?" Moreover V. overvalued whatever he gave, and
undervalued what he received.
Halfway through the book -- before Akhnaton had espoused his own mother. Queen Ty, Deg was
committed to V., the author. A literary tour de force of the rarest kind, it succeeds in making
a single person out of two of the most famous heroes of antiquity. Nor are they of the so
numerous type of military heroes. They are the active substances of the raging intellect,
flourishing amongst squirmy snakes of psychology and religion. Should the temporal sequence be
right, then the book would be valid, that Moses preceded Akhnaton and Akhnaton came before
Oedipus. The legendary, historical, psychological and archaeological evidence marched in
brilliant composition and concordance on behalf of V.'s thesis. That Moses had come first
follows from V.'s book, Ages in Chaos, already a decade old, which was to be read and to
convince Deg in a matter of weeks. That the Oedipus legend developed after the history of
Akhnaton was established in the book itself to Deg's satisfaction, and he confirmed it once
again when it came time to write The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, years later.
By then he was convinced of V.'s theory that Greek Dark Ages were in fact several centuries that
had never existed, and then, within a couple of years, the masterful work of young Eddie Schorr
effectively closed up the gap in two articles on Mycenae, Pylos, Troy, Gordion, and other sites.
Velikovsky himself here speculated that Nikmed of Ugarit became Cadmus the founder of Thebes and
carried the Oedipus legend from the East to the North. V. 's reconstructed chronology closed the
centuries like a vise, to where Akhnaton could readily reach to Nikmed and Nikmed to Cadmus and
out of it all came the Oedipus Rex of Thebes, the fabled character who gave name to the most
popular concept of Sigmund Freud, and it was Freud who had brought on all of this work by his
psychoanalytic disciple, but had himself missed both the precession of Moses and the identity of
Oedipus as Akhnaton, although he had written directly about all three figures.
The book was the best produced of V.'s which were ordinarily drab. Oedipus and Akhnaton carried
many fine illustrations, a superior jacket, an excellent typeface, and good printing paper.
Still, it did not sell as well as any of a dozen detective novels of the day, and, vibrant and
valid, was marked by its publisher for abandonment in 1984.
Deg could be sure that practically none of his hundreds of friends and colleagues, students and
acquaintances had yet read the book or would ever do so... But then he, too, had written books
of which none but the textbooks had sold over a thousand copies. And he could recite the names
of many distinguished scholars whose books had sold less. The dream of best-selling great books
nevertheless carries on, a myth, deadly to most and profitable to a very few.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWO
THE PRODIGAL ARCHIVE
The other book, that which won Velikovsky fame, income, and scientific disgrace, was a happy
accident of publishing. It could hardly have become a best-seller on its merits; very few books
do, and this one was not easy to read or flamboyant. Worlds in Collision was reluctantly
published, deceptively publicized, and foolishly attacked. It was written in the 1940's, after
Ages in Chaos had been completed and had been circulating among publishers and collecting one
rejection after another. Evidently the later work had the better chance, because of its larger,
more explosive message.
But Worlds in Collision, too, was rejected time after time, this all during a period of high
prosperity when publishing company shares boomed on the stock market and practically anything
might be brought out. Velikovsky was desperate. One evening he walked the Upper West Side of
Manhattan with Elisheva, telling her of how he would buy a typesetting machine and they would
compose the book at home and he would sell it himself. He would have done so.
All of his publications before then -- there were not many -- had been in some sense subsidized,
the articles appearing in psychoanalytic journals, supported by small intellectual circles, the
pamphlets appearing under the shadowy imprint of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when this
was only a few dedicated utopians enjoying an impetus from Simon Velikovsky's purse. V. knew
something about publishing, as he did about many things.
V. would never have been "himself", a revered image to countless readers and a buffoon to
scientists and scholars, had he not fallen into the crazy typical pattern of a popular author.
He was able to catch the attention of John J. O'Neill, Science Editor of the New York Herald
Tribune, who was thrilled by the manuscript and wrote about it in an article of August 11, 1946.
James Putnam, an Editor of Macmillan Company, took it up, praised it among his acquaintances,
processed it through several readers, and achieved a favorable vote. A chapter of the book was
sold to the Reader's Digest and other selections to Collier's Magazine. Collier's, struggling
for circulation, took a large ad in the Herald Tribune, headlining that modern science had now
proved the Bible correct, while the Reader's Digest carried the story of the Sun's standing
still at Beth-Horon by the command of Joshua, so as to let the Israelites finish off their
enemies.
Both stories and the publicity attendant upon them played directly to a large audience of
bemused Jews and "Old Testament" Christians, including what would be called creationists and
millennialists. Then, even before its readers could discover that it was not quite what they had
expected, the wrath of scientists descended upon the book. Velikovsky's figure, until then only
that of a minor personage in psychoanalytic reading circles, was elevated to a pyre of fame and
burned to the ground. Macmillan hastily sold its rights to Doubleday publishers.
Of all this that occurred between 1950 and 1962, Deg learned upon his first meetings with V. "I
want you to read everything," he said and handed over to him two monumental manuscripts entitled
Stargazers and Gravediggers. "Everything" meant also Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos. Deg
complimented him upon the Oedipus book and wondered at the documentation piled upon the living
floor for examination.
Velikovsky wondered, too for none came to him as innocently as his new acquaintance. He was
thankful but also dismayed at this walking effect of the suppression of his books. (It hardly
occurred to him that his book might have sold under a thousand copies if it had been published
by a university press without the publicity that he himself found rather obnoxious, in which
case practically everyone might have been expected to be ignorant of it, but the ilk of Deg
might have known it).
V.'s correspondence was still heavy after a dozen years. His readers sent him every scrap of
publicity that they found and he kept it all and tried to reply, far more so than any other
author of Deg's acquaintance. A large public was out there somewhere, a heterogeneous network of
bright students, people suspicious of the scientific and academic establishments, Bible
believers in profusion.
Mrs. V. was present; she tried always to be on hand when visitors came and to Deg at least, hers
was always a welcome presence. V. kept nothing from Elisheva that he was not also keeping from
his visitors. Sheva's grand piano stood in the next room, between a desk loaded with papers and
a great cabinet stuffed with books. In the front room were couches and chairs, none too
comfortable, and a large coffee table accommodating the tea, crackers and cheese, cakes and dry
Israeli white wine that would be brought forth. There were ashtrays, too, for then many were
smokers, not V., for he had quit years before after he had suffered a stomach cancer, whose
removal had forced a lightened diet as well. Oriental rugs stretched across the floors.
The ponderous front porch let in little light, nor did the rooms have much place for an elegant
style; or perhaps they reflected an empiricist, not a philosopher. Their charm depended upon the
objects in themselves: Sheva's piano and the music resting on it, her strong marble sculptures,
several handsome and less useful books on art and archaeology that had entered lately, like
those at Sebastian's from which Deg had plucked Oedipus and Akhnaton.
From the porch, one penetrated into the sitting room through heavy gray stone walls in five
stages: first up the flagstone walk through thick bushes, then up the stairs, then through the
first heavy door into a tiny hall, then another heavy door, then an anteroom with a mail-
cluttered table and clothes-closet, and finally into the front room.
Elisheva, like her husband, had a strong character and great energy. She had large hands and a
solid body, maintained a direct and friendly stare through thick glasses, and was perhaps of his
age. She had mastered the arts of music and sculpture. Perhaps all the laborious functionalism
of its occupants gave the rooms a lack-luster belying the considerable value of their contents.
Poor cooks have dazzling automated kitchens; disemployed people have smart interiors. Much later
on, when he finally released his books to Dell Publishers for publication in paperback and
received a hundred thousand dollars, V. went into a fit of remodeling, building a garage and new
airy light-struck rooms, redistributing books and papers for greater efficiency, buying flashy
cars for himself and his grandchildren, reminding Deg of Parkinson's "Law", that, as an Empire
enters upon its finale, it builds extravagantly.
Deg had often to consider, when he taught courses on leadership and creativity, whether a
person's appearance correlated with his mind and effectiveness. The stereotype is, of course,
"Yes, it does." A great general has a martial air, a scholar looks like a parsnip, an athlete is
muscle-bound, and so on.
Deg had arrived at the all-answering concept of sociology -- the mutual interaction of physique
and role. Little Napoleon looked more imperial than tall de Gaulle, who was an obstinate dumb-
bell. But de Gaulle thought he looked like a Great Leader and worthy husband to La Belle France,
and played the part and became a great leader. (" France is a widow," Pompidou orated when De
Gaulle died.)
"The Russian Jews are the handsomest of all," Stephanie Neuman told Deg, and he, looking at her,
had of course to agree. The best explanation of the phenomenon comes in a note by V. himself,
published posthumously. The "lost Tribes of Israel" had been moved North, and passed through the
Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas into the lower Volga River Basin. There they mingled
genetically with the ever-changing population, with always at least a critical fraction
maintaining the Judaic culture-core. Deg had won a piece of the action; his wife's family, with
its cluster of Teutonic cognomens - Oppenheim, Lauterbach, Weinstein, Fleishacker, etc. - had
managed some handsome blonde alternatives in the aftermath of the Diaspora.
"But see here..." to use a common interjection of V. Velikovsky stretched his large spare frame
a full two meters, his face will all its big bones and high forehead was clean-shaven and
forceful, his large brown eyes open and direct behind his reading glasses, his movements from
his favorite low chair, up and down, across the room, were untiring and easy, not graceful but
neither awkward. His voice was sure, slow, deep, his words marvelously well-chosen, uttered in
the language that he knew least well of Russian, Hebrew, and German, while Arabic and French
came after. He couldn't match Stecchini, who had these, plus Italian, Latin, Greek and Arabic,
plus the dead languages of Babylon and Egypt, while Deg with his modest portions of French and
Italian and smattering of German, Latin, and Spanish was in a pitiable state.
V.'s English was formal, never Americanized; his dignity forbade slang or the vernacular, though
it amused him to have the vernacular explained. Deg was fond of H. L. Mencken and played loose
with the language when let off the field of science. "Sand-bag them," he remarked when V was
expostulating over the attempts of a panel of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science to get hold of his finalized paper without revealing to him their final replies to it.
"What does 'sand-bag' mean?" V asked. "It's what thugs use to hit people with from behind. Let
them have the paper; let them rewrite their papers; then withdraw your paper." Then he explained
how in some impolite poker games, if you have a good hand, you sometimes pass on it, enticing
the other players to bet on their own hands, then double their bets. That's sand-bagging, too.
V. wrote well, better than Deg, I think, although he denied it and had to make liberal use of
copy-editors. For he explained his every step carefully and was rarely abstract or harsh,
whereas Deg usually wrote condensedly, abstractly, and stridently.
Looking at V. in these first meetings in a more analytic way. Deg questioned whether a person so
physically modeled to the ideal expectation of a heroic figure could nevertheless be a genius
and not an actor, an honest victim and not a charlatan. Of what could V complain; he was famous;
his books sold by the tens of thousands; his messages had carried throughout the English-
speaking world, into several language-areas of the western world besides.
Deg flipped through the loose-leaf volumes as they talked. He could read fast and V. was
alternately suspicious and admiring of this facility. "I am a slow reader," he announced on
occasion. "Yes, but I don't have your memory," grumbled Deg. V. had a superb memory for details.
Deg gulped down batches of material, retained their forms, and excreted the details. This is
what happened when he read; the stuff was gobbled up by pre-existing forms.
Every detail of the volumes before them was remembered by V., though he could hardly have seen
most of it for some years. Every few pages contained another foolish review, comment or letter
by a scientist or historian or archaeologist. Just to be preserved and collected, side by side,
they damned themselves and each other as envious, illogical, irrelevant, ignorant, narrow, and
incompetent.
Why haven't you published this, it's great? he asked V. V. had strung together a large and
complicated story with only rare descriptions and without editorial comment; it was not
vainglorious or egotistic; the documents marched along by themselves, calling out their message
in turn. V. blew hot and cold on the idea of their publication. Mainly he feared legal action
were he to reprint letters several of which had come to him deviously. Of these Deg could not
feel sure, but he argued that persons in a public controversy in which their reputations were at
stake might publish private correspondence. A menacing letter from Professor Fred Whipple to the
Macmillan Company might be published, because it injured and defamed the author and was
associated with letters of the same type from other academicians. His publishers, Doubleday,
were unsure, said V.
In fact the volumes were not published until after his death. By then the whole Macmillan
archive of those years had been given to the New York Public Library and Warner Sizemore, who
knew the case as well as anyone alive, located them there, with all the papers that had been so
guarded for a few years. When Leroy Ellenberger reviewed them in 1983, he noted especially
Brett's account of the final interview with Velikovsky when the President of Macmillan informed
Velikovsky that Worlds in Collision could no longer be tolerated on the Macmillan list, but had
to be transferred out, and luckily Doubleday was ready to assume the risk. When asked how the
two versions of the meeting compared, Velikovsky's and Brett's, Ellenberger, who was by then
most sensitive to contradictions in the Velikovsky story, granted that substantially they
agreed, save that V had understandably portrayed himself as less shaken and more in command of
the situation than Brett had viewed him to be.
The materials that V. showed Deg were a sociologist's wishful dream. Deg decided immediately to
publish in the American Behavioral Scientist the story of science vs. scientism, as he put it.
He carried home the manuscripts and Worlds in Collision, which Velikovsky carefully autographed,
a little touch that Deg was unused to; books were books: he was never into first editions or
autographed copies, and in those days had to be reminded by his publishers that a page was
reserved for a dedication if he wished to use it.
The journalistic papers he hurried through and put aside. They would give an example here and
another there. Some readers no doubt would be astonished at the behavior of their sacred
scientists, but the case was mere basic social psychology. The scientists and their coterie of
publicists were behaving very much as might be expected in the face of disturbing theories, like
politicians, like administrators, bishops, and all other elites of organized networks.
He decided to take upon himself the most difficult task, the theoretical analysis of the system
that exuded injustice normally. The historical section would go to Stecchini and deal with
scientific precedents to V.'s catastrophism, an approach quite new to the discussions of a
decade earlier, and one which Stecchini, using the principle of contradictions, executed
beautifully, calling up Whiston, Boulanger, La Place and Kugler as unexpected witnesses on
behalf of the defendant. The straight history of the affair went to Ralph Juergens, who had been
introduced to Deg by V. as a mechanical engineer, much interested in electrical theory, who had
moved his family down from Ohio in order to be near to where V. was working; he was now a
scientific editor working in New York for McGraw Hill.
Juergens had published nothing; he knew the facts, however; he was a careful worker, Deg was
quick to note; he worked very hard; he held V.'s confidence (not easy to achieve) and won Deg's
sympathy and respect. No one else could have done the job without a year's study; even then it
would have had to be a historian of science, who would risk his career if he accepted the
challenge of the facts, or a publicist, such as Eric Larrabee, who would have produced a recital
much like Ralph's but probably too late for publication. As a matter of fact, his name came up
and V. reported that he had been under contract for years with Doubleday to do a book on the
controversy. No sooner had Deg's ABS decided to publish the story than V. got in touch with
Larrabee and prevailed upon him to sell the idea of an article to Harper's Magazine, which
Larrabee did, by virtue of an old connection there, and so wrote a piece that actually appeared
several weeks before the special issue of the ABS.
After examining the files on the case, Deg turned to reading Worlds in Collision, telling
himself that it might be wrong, harmful, mythical, distorted, and incompetent; still his
intuition was prompted by all that he had learned thus far: V. could not do a bad job on
anything. So he found the book was none of these things, and was not surprised. Then he worried
and never ceased to worry that his taking up the cause of V. came about because he thought V. to
be correct in his theories rather than because his rights were violated.
Worlds in Collision is a book in two parts, one on the Venus catastrophes, the second on the
Mars catastrophes. These conform to two sets of events that are claimed to have befallen the
world in the years around 1450 and 700 B. C., about seven hundred years apart. The planet Venus,
argued Velikovsky, began its career as a comet that probably exploded from the giant planet
Jupiter sometime, whether a few years or thousands of years before its disastrous encounters
with Earth. (V. never used B. C. preferring BCE, "Before the Common Era" or a simple negative
[as -1450], begrudging the calendar of world history to the Christians, which Deg agreed to in
principle but thought was only quibbling, given the huge contortions history has suffered.
Better he thought to settle on the year 2000 as the present, use B. P. back from this date, thus
to give us some standardization for a generation or so, or perhaps to settle upon 1919, the year
when the first association of the nations of all the world was formed, the League of Nations).
Flaming Venus passed with its huge cometary tail close by the Earth occasioning general disaster
by flood, fire, pestilence, electric shock, and fallouts of various materials, and incited a
horrendous fear that affected all areas of culture everywhere down to the present day. Mankind
lived virtually in a Venusian world for seven centuries, for other near passes occurred at 52-
year intervals, until the comet disturbed Mars, sent Mars to molest the Earth and Moon, and
brought a Martian period that endured for rather less than a century. All of this had severe and
prolonged after-affects geologically, biologically, and culturally.
V. endeavored to be exact, allowing the series of Mars incidents to occur between the years -776
and -687 on the basis of legends and historical-archaeological evidence from around the
Mediterranean and wherever else in the world it cropped up. For example, an incident of the year
-776 would be the founding of the Olympic Games, those sacred manifestations of aggressive
competitive sport that brought the Greek communities together and were said to have been founded
by Hercules, who has been identified by several scholars with the god Mars or Ares; an instance
of the year -687 would be the destruction by natural disaster of the army of the Assyrian
emperor Sennacherib while besieging Jerusalem.
Thus the bare plot. Its importance derives from the shock it gave to conventional natural
science and history, its extension of the use of legendary materials to reconstruct history, and
the excitement it caused among many people eager to escape the toils of modern science.
The most disturbing claim of Worlds in Collision was that the planet Venus as a comet approached
and devastated Earth. Several excellent writers, as I shall explain later, had claimed that
comets had devastated the Earth, and mathematical exercises on the putative effects of comets in
passages and collisions with Earth are conventionally acceptable. Not so planets, that are
believed to be fully and nicely bound to their present orbits. The sequence of thoughts occurred
to V: first, the Egyptian, accepted chronology is wrong and Moses preceded Akhnaton; next, at
the time of Exodus, there was heavy natural turbulence; third, the turbulence was incited from
the skies, and took numerous forms well recounted in legend and sacred scriptures; finally,
evidence came in rapidly from all parts of the world to support the idea that the planet Venus
was involved as prime cause. A mosaic of legends from the Near East, Greece, Italy, China, and
the Americas could be fashioned, and enough geological evidence might be assembled to tolerate
the suppositions of the legends.
V. was not as rooted in Newtonian and Darwinian prejudices as the typical Anglo-American
scholar. He could also contemplate ancient evidence without contempt. (A psychiatrist might
recall, "Ah yes, he loved and respected his father Simon who worked long for the revival of
Israel.") V. knew also that natural laws must rest upon evidence, not dogma; if evidence
contradicts the laws, the laws must change. The immensity of the topic; the difficulties in
finding and handling the data; the roundabout way in which the books were published; and many
other intervening and confusing variables concealed the essentially proper progression of V.'s
mind, which behaved in ways both psychologically understandable and logically proper. (Often,
private motives lead men scientifically astray; here, as sometimes happens, V.'s private motives
led him along the path to significant scientific theses and discoveries.)
To Deg's view, from the beginning, the ethical duty of science was clear. Confronted with V.'s
claims, the scientist should weigh the evidence, first, for the chronology, second for the
Exodus disasters, third for the exoterrestrial involvement, and finally for the identity of the
forces. In each case, there is, then, a probability, low or high, of validity. Actually the only
policy problem for science here is how much additional scientific energies should be directed at
the intriguing hypotheses. This implies the possibility of proving (disproving) them; and the
efforts required to raise the probabilities of valid answers to a respectable level.
In American politics and law, case after case had imprinted upon all concerned the notion of a
right to due process of law and to certain basic freedoms as distinct from the desirability or
correctness of a position.
There is a religious right, when forbidden by one's religion, to not salute the national flag;
there is a right to not confess to a criminal act. And so on.
Scientific behavior is not so clearly mannered. It is not governed by the coercive physical
force that gives more distinct form to the organs of the state. Also a general belief in
individualism among scientists, amounting to a kind of philosophical anarchism, makes each
scientist both judge and executor of his beliefs. Deg was enough of a philosopher and
practitioner of science to perceive a widespread belief, that a truth exists upon a subject and
that no consideration needs be given untruth or antitruth. There was, on the other hand, the
reputable principle that all scientific positions are basically hypothetical; nothing is proven
now and forever. And there was even the principle, espoused by many contemporaries, that there
are as many scientific truths as may be useful in solving a practical problem; in other words,
never mind the principle: perform the operation, and the principle, if the operation is
successful, will come trailing after.
But the vulgar and predominant belief is a belief in truth and antitruth, especially when
dealing with outsiders, and V., by this view, deserved no more than he received, there being
numbers of established truths violated by his assertions. He should have banked his receipts and
joined the outcaste company of the von Danikens.
However, according to the other views, all of which merge in this regard, nothing that V could
possibly say should deprive him of a hearing, save that he should present his views in a format
suitable for passing judgment upon them. Deg had to make up his mind whether the basic offering
was appropriate for judgment and whether a hearing was provided. Still he could not but feel
that the organization of science would fall apart if no advantage were given to the accepted
"truth," just as the state would become defenseless if everyone refused to serve in the armed
forces on constitutional grounds. What happens ordinarily, he observed often, is that the more
"obviously untrue" a proposition with its proof appear to be, the less due process of law is
used and needed in dealing with it. We have to reconcile ourselves to the "miscarriage of
justice", at least in science and probably in every area of conflict, the "Bill of Rights"
notwithstanding. If for no other reason, the burden of treating every statement with all the
respect due and owing to the best and most correct-seeming statements would be impossible for
the economy of science to bear.
In return, Deg told himself, we can ask for some minimal formatting of a case prior to
processing it through the reception system of science. This, it appeared to him, V. had done,
and much more, and some scientists had nevertheless pilloried him and ruined his chances of
obtaining scientific respectability -- not affirmative agreement, but just simple honest respect
for a remarkable job.
V. had approached the altars of science with the assiduous ritual of Aaron before the Holies of
Holies. And, when, like the drunken sons of Aaron, his books were struck by the Lord's Fire, he
was stunned. "What sacrilege have I committed?" he asked himself repeatedly. And the answer,
from all sides, if not from heaven, was "None." It is true that he had won literary fame and
supported his family meanwhile, a rare success among non-academic writers in America. So what?
Have the rich no right to complain? Who else can send the steak back to the kitchen?
The scene was familiar and the opportunity presented: the establishments of academia had
offended a man who was a fighter and had his evidence in hand. Something rare and good in the
history of science might be achieved. With the contaminants of politics and religion absent from
the mixture, and the publishers acting as catalysts, it was as clean a case of pure science in
action as one might ever hope to come upon.
The work on the special Velikovsky issue of the American Behavioral Scientist had been mostly
done when Deg addressed a letter to his Advisory Board explaining Velikovsky's position and
justifying a special issue in support of him.
March 8, 1963
To: ABS Advisory Board
Subject: Notes on several current matters
I. We plan to devote a major portion of our June issue [actually it came out in September] to a
topic called: "The Politics of Science: The Velikovsky Case." Immanuel Velikovsky, as you
probably know, is a highly controversial figure whose book Worlds in Collision incited the wrath
of a number of astronomers and geologists twelve years ago. Several other works dealt with
similar themes of prehistoric catastrophe, social upheavals, and the origins of myth. Another
book, somewhat distinct, is Oedipus and Akhnaton. I believe him to be a brilliant theorist and
am not persuaded that his criticisms of various astronomical principles are as wrong as Shapley
and others have made them out to be. The recent Venus probe has brought some surprising
information in accord with his views, for example. However, our main interest in the topic lies
in its relation to numbers 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, and 16 of the ABS program. A basic question
is the canons which science uses to appraise work that is offered. As we move into the
Velikovsky case, we observe that both the normal and the peculiar features of the criticism of
this work throw much light on the workings of the scientific establishment. Additionally the
evidence of boycott of a publisher in the case leads one into the question of the relation of
scientists to freedom of the press. The proposed would include first a history
of the Velikovsky case, a comparison of the case with various episodes in the history of science
by Stecchini, a content analysis of the reviews of Velikovsky's book, an article by Velikovsky
reciting ten important instances in which his theorizing led him to correct or at least now
respectable statements about natural events (this one to give a flavor of the substance of the
case), and an appraisal of the operations of the scientific establishment. We have abundant
material. We lack funds, as usual, for the kind of content analysis and investigation that
should be engaged in. If any of you can find a few dollars to lend to this enterprise, it will
be helpful in improving the product (especially in the reliability of coding the book reviews,
and increasing the number sampled from 100 up to 500)...
The "good will and advice" were there: as for the money, the Board knew Deg was bluffing: the
magazine would continue, one way or another.
Also, to attack frontally an array of scientists, Deg thought to assemble a special committee of
notables that would protect his flanks. He sent the manuscript of the ABS issue to his friends
Harold D. Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, and Luther Evans, all three well-known, distinguished and
innovative social scientists. He also contacted. at Velikovsky's suggestion, Salvador de
Madariaga, Moses Hadas, Horace Kallen, Harold Latham, R. H. Hillenkoetter, and Philip
Wittenberg. Madariaga and Hillenkoetter admired V. 's work: Hadas respected the learning
evidenced in it: Kallen was a grand liberal educator who had run interference for V. when V. was
trying to obtain a reading from Harlow Shapley; Latham had shepherded Worlds in Collision
through Macmillan; and Wittenberg was an expert on libel law. Deg also invited Harry H. Hess,
Chairman of the Geology Department a Princeton, who had given V. a forum, and was helpful on
several later occasions; V. counted him as a friend; Deg had met him and found him simpatico and
every inch what an Admiral in the U. S. Navy (Reserve) should be. He was a top leader in the
wartime and post-war revolution in oceanography. Hess replied by hand:
June 4, 1963, Washington. D. C.
Dear Editor de Grazia :
The manuscripts you sent me reached me at particularly bad time: Ph. D. exams, department
budget construction, a request to appear before a committee of congress and finally orders to
two weeks of active duty in the Navy starting yesterday. I have spent two days reading the
material and trying to analyze my own thoughts.
I can't urge you to publish it. Velikovsky is a friend of mine. You will reopen old wounds and
create more antagonism against him, though at the same time you will support his position and
bring out the injustices. I am not sure that this is a net gain.
Why were scientists outraged by Velikovsky's books? This is the question I have been asking
myself because I too felt a sense of outrage even though I have a kindly feeling towards him as
a friend. The reasons given by Stecchini are plausible and perhaps true with respect to some
scientists.
The real reason is something much more fundamental -- at least the reason why I rebel is, and I
am a fairly good guinea pig example of an ordinary scientist.
I haven't time to write the essay that might be written to explain the phenomenon correctly.
Velikovsky is partly to blame because of the way he handles his data. This is no excuse for most
of those who criticize him. Nor is it an excuse for the manner in which they have treated him.
Thank you for sending me the manuscripts. I wish I could do more for you than I have.
Sincerely, H. H. Hess
Deg was not surprised nor did he feel Hess's refusal at all unworthy. Hess was not the Admiral
Nelson to violate Admiralty orders and take his fleet into battle: still, as Deg remarked to me,
we already had an admiral (referring to Admiral Hillenkoetter), we certainly could have used a
geologist on the team. Years later, Deg was able to persuade Hess to join the Board of Trustees
of a foundation for studies of catastrophe.
A problem of concern to me was that, in the years following, there was no evident opposition to
V., whether as to his treatment or his ideas, carried in the ABS files and the later book, The
Velikovsky Affair, and I badgered Deg on this point repeatedly. He puts up a kind of general
defense that has some merit: "Under the circumstances, we did what we could to excite an
opposition. We had no money to conduct research. Everyone was unpaid and working at other things
for a living. The issue on V. was itself only one of ten issues to appear that year, each on
different topics. Mainly the expressions of disagreement were directed at the substance of V.'s
theories, which were, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the discussion. Juergens went farther in
explaining these and defending them than I would have gone. It was like pulling teeth to get a
scientist to enter upon the politics and sociology or even the methodology of the case. One
received simply arguments on the stability of the solar system and the unreliability of legends
and ancient history." Deg talked on, as the tape spun on its roll: I wrote Otto Neugebauer, a
hostile critic of V. and renowned expert on Babylonian astronomy, but he did not reply for a
long time, for years. In fact, I met with Harold Lasswell, who was a psychologist, political
scientist and professor of Law at Yale: he was favorable to the issue, which he read, but
concerned that the bridge he perceived as building between the natural and human scientists
might be damaged. (There was then the well-publicized thesis of C. P. Snow, physicist and
novelist, who decried the existence of these two uncommunicative worlds.) I visited Freeman
Dyson, the mathematician, who was at the institute for Advanced Studies and had been President
of the Federation of American Scientists, of which I was member, and which was agitating
against the "Cold War." Dyson was lukewarm about the matter: he had been approached by V. some
time before, and had no desire to enter the lists; furthermore he found the scenario of V.'s
work unacceptable. There was none, it seemed, on the first call for debate, and very few ever,
who were ready to defend what had happened, as there was none ready to defend V.'s substantive
views on exoterrestrially-produced disasters. Worse, there was hardly a notable scientist of the
Establishment of physics, geology, astronomy who was willing publicly to acknowledge the
legitimacy of the discussion. I approached Tom Kuhn, a neighbor, who was beginning to win fame
as a historian of science. He shied away.
I will say more. You have been presenting my analogy of this case with cases in the law and
courts. Actually, this is only one side of the coin. Just as the law and courts are utterly
inadequate to their tasks when a society is failing, so too in science the reception system is
inadequate when the institutions and politics of science are failing to begin with. That is,
unless you have a liberal, open-minded republic of science, you'll have too many cases of
injustice in the reception system. I spent some time developing the problem of the institutions
that are needed in science as in politics to back up a proper reception system, but no one of
competence has come around to discuss the subject, which is as critical today as it was then.
Criminality in science, if I may use the word, or misbehavior, is common throughout the sciences
and ultimately its origins dissolve into the background of an illiberal, non-pragmatic,
materialistically competitive, and philosophically ignorant environment where scientists are
bred. I felt that Deg's tone was becoming strident. I still doubted that he had exhausted the
possibilities of a debate, and later on I will tell of other forensic episodes. He might have
talked to Dr. Normal Newell, of the New York Natural History Museum; Ted McNulty, one of his
aides and squash-playing friends had learned that Newell had something to say; he might at least
have tried to speak to the king-pin Harlow Shapely, who was old but still feisty: he might have
approached George Brett, President of Macmillan, to corroborate that he had "dumped" V. and
explain why.
Further, Deg might well have been more rigid, and might have excluded all substantive comment of
V.'s theories, admittedly to the point of losing some of the excitement of his story. It is true
however, that copies of the issue were sent to potential opponents among natural scientists,
inviting and expecting comment. There were none. Nor did the thousands of normal readers produce
from among their number calls or letters of protest.
Nor, with one or two exceptions, did any evidence appear for decades that would affect the
statements made on the affair by the three authors. In May of 1983, Leroy Ellenberger, told me
that he had found at least one bit of evidence in the Macmillan files giving scientists reason
to attack Macmillan for advertising the book as work in science. A regular catalogue of
Macmillan books in science carried Worlds in Collision as a possible supplementary reading in
general courses. This was a trifle, to be sure, but a red cloth is no trifle to a goaded bull.
Still the annoying question once more arises: why should not the book have been advertised as a
contribution to science, even if it were ultimately to go into oblivion with most other books
that tried to make contributions to science? so again I prodded Deg on the matter and this time
got what amounted to a lecture.
Formal law has the strongest means to avoid consideration of the merits of a case in judging
whether the case properly belongs in a certain court and has been properly heard in that court.
It insists that the accused be given his day in court, with defense lawyer, an unprejudiced jury
in most cases, and a full account of the testimony against him and the right to confront his
accusers. Formal law of course often falls short of its expectations.
Formal science has roughly similar rules for judging every work coming before it. The book is
the defendant, you might say. It should be penalized, that is, dismissed, reproached, vilified,
sentenced to non-reading and non-propagation only after it has had its day in court. And, it
should come up for a parole hearing almost on demand. This too, often does not happen. Anybody
but V would have taken his lumps --I would -- and cry all the way to the bank.
When the law or science does not live up to its rules, then one appeals to a higher court or
authority that created the institution in the first place. In the matter of a book, intelligent
readers form themselves into a kind of court of consensus on the matter. That is actually what
happened in the Velikovsky Affair, but still the court refused to remand the case for trial to
the numerous special fields. The closest thing to this was the AAAS panel a decade after my book
and two decades after the events.
Now when the court or scientific establishment finds the defendant 'crazy' or 'delinquent' or
'fraudulent' or 'concealing the truth' or 'non-co-operative', but there is still evidence that
the court or science is wrong, then the higher court -- that is, those institutions sponsoring
the establishment, including the reading public, may call the lower court to order, reprimand
it, force the remand for a re-hearing, or transfer the case to another jurisdiction.
In order to face down the court or science, the higher court or critics must look as far as
necessary into the facts of the case to determine whether the defendant is indeed frivolous,
delinquent, fraudulent, concealing the truth or non-cooperative. For these purposes, some degree
of substantive worthiness of the defendant must be present to justify the intervention. This was
indeed the situation here; the content and presentation of the theories were therefore
legitimately at issue and part of the presentation of his full legal case. We therefore had to
judge the defendant in a sense on his merits and let him speak briefly on his own behalf.
Scientists are understandably annoyed by ungovernable antics and criticism, none more than us
political scientists, who must suffer the most abusive, crazy and unscientific ideas and
behavior every day in the newspapers, in legislative halls, and in political meetings, indeed
wherever politics and public opinion generate, even at the dinner-table. They still must operate
a clean shop, a decent court, which in the end serves best themselves...
He had more to say, but this is more than enough for now.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THREE
CHEERS AND HISSES
Deg found himself losing status in the eyes of his children, who had through their earlier
years seen and heard much of important personages, partly because all of them went through a
rebellious adolescence during years when he was respectful, helpful, and obviously orienting
his thoughts toward V., so that they found a weakness in their father -- his rare complaisance
-- and could, through being critical and slightly disdainful of V., get at him twice, directly
in himself and indirectly through rejection of V. It was not, as it had been put from time to
time at home, that he gave too much of his crowded time to his venerable friend. Indeed, the
children could have done well in their troubled group life at school by carrying the banner of
Velikovsky (and their father) for V. could easily be fit (no one knowing his character) into
the mold of anti-authoritarian ideas and leadership exceedingly popular among those in that
era, town, and age group.
On a summer day in 1963 Deg ushered his family of eight persons aboard the U. S. ocean liner
"Atlantic" bound for Lisbon, Naples and Genoa. The boat was a slow last effort of the
collapsing merchant marine but, he thought, just as several years earlier they had crossed the
American continent on a railroad train from California to Chicago, they ought to have the
experience of an ocean voyage. He then returned to Princeton and moved the family's possessions
and his office from Queenston Place to Linden Lane, from a large old house to a small old
house, aided by daughter Jessica's lovesick young boyfriend. His magazine was left in the
custody of Ted Gurr. Then he flew to Lisbon, joined his family on the boat, and all sailed for
Italy.
Deg made final corrections to the ABS Velikovsky issue at Marjorie Ferguson's villa in Marina
di Massa, fuming at his four boys on the beach across the street who, instead of swimming out
to sea like little Shelleys, had transferred with insouciance from the pinball machines of
Princeton to soccer machines in Italy. "Dear Ted," he wrote,
You will be pleased to note that I have incorporated most of the suggested changes... I could
not accept the idea that the political network paragraphs were irrelevant and unnecessary.(
This referred to intimations that the furious attacks against Velikovsky were prompted in part
by frustrations of Shapley and other scientists at being attacked for "red" affiliations by Joe
McCarthy and his during these years.)
I felt forced to deal with them and did all I could to make them objective. What is 'innuendo',
after all, is a question of motive. There is no innuendo here therefore. If a trace of poison
is found in a deceased's blood, do you ban its reporting on grounds that it constitutes an
innuendo? Every generalization of science implies a stereotype, to take another case. Must we
then never generalize?
Later, Norman Storer and others picked up the theme, which social psychologists might best
appreciate, most historians of science being too narrowly educated for such subtleties, or too
constrained to deal with them.
By the way, Lucca Cavazzo [an Italian supporter of the ABS] and wife had a baby. He was dining
with me just before it happened. He calls his Federico Julio, two emperors yet! [Ted had begun
his family.]
Now the special issue of September 1963 appeared and before long was reprinted. The response
was strong, but within the ABS orbit was almost entirely of social scientists and humanists.
Prompted by free copies and alerted by word of mouth, natural scientists nevertheless played
deaf and dumb, and so did those dependent upon them directly.
In the files of Deg no new voice from a natural scientist comes forth amidst the many letters
of a type to warm the cockles of an editor's heart. The scientists simply stooped low to avoid
the flying bullets and returned the silent message, "Science is truth; truth is one; who defies
the truth is no scientist; whatever happens to him he deserves." A few ducked because they had
no recourse and feared the collective or public opinion of science, perhaps retaliation. It was
a small step, which the sociologically untrained scientific mind can easily take, from
witnessing a fellow supporting the case of Velikovsky to disdaining him erroneously for
supporting his theories. Some would have been just normally lazy. Dr. Robert Jastrow, Director
of the Institute for Space Studies, wrote Deg on October 20, 1980: "I had, of course, read your
earlier very fine pieces on Velikovsky and his theories and had drawn on them in preparing my
own article." But maybe this was later.
The New York Times ignored the American Behavioral Scientist and did not review the book when
it later appeared. A brave letter came from an editor of the Christian Science Monitor (This
newspaper, you may appreciate, is one of the world's finest, and has a disproportionate
scientific audience.) "May I say," wrote G. Wiley Mitchell to Deg, on December 12, 1966, "that
I have read your book through, consider it a real contribution and am very regretful that
neither my efforts, nor those of some of my colleagues who agree with me, have been successful
in getting my paper to publish a review. The Velikovsky smearers have been effective! (Mind
you, I am not at all sure I endorse his theories in toto. But I think his method is sound and
his theories are certainly no weaker than others that gain a hearing simply because they come
with the right 'credentials. ')"
An attorney at NASA (and I must point out that he was Dan, the son of David Arons, a Gimbel
Bros. executive and an acquaintance of V.) wrote happily to his father that he had "received a
call from Dr. Newell [head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration] this morning
bright and early who told him that
.... he had read the articles in the American Behavioral Scientist which I sent him and was
'aghast at the inquisition' to which the Velikovsky books have been submitted.
He said he had noted some of the comments made back in the 50's but these articles place them
all in a pattern. He particularly noted a remark of Fred Whipple to the effect that scientists
ought to send back the postage paid postcards to publishers who use them to advertise such
books as Velikovsky's. Dr. Newell thought this was very 'vindictive' and 'uncalled-for. ' While
Velikovsky 'might be wrong' he is entitled to 'dispassionate review and criticism. ' Dr. Newell
said that he had already discussed this matter with some of the 'leading lights' at NASA
including Arnold Frutkin, Director of International Programs. He requested that he be permitted
to keep the copy he has and be provided with additional copies.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone here makes a statement on Velikovsky in the near future....
But of course, there were no actions taken. Involve NASA in such a demonstration? Impossible!
There was another case, which V. pinned his hopes upon for a time, pathetically, a President of
the grand University of Southern California, Murphy by name, who had indirectly voiced sympathy
for the Velikovsky problem and V. had barged in to suggest that he appoint a commission of
inquiry. The response: polite, and routinely cordial; but no interest, the matter being out of
bonds. No University was going to dirty its hands with the nitty-gritty of scientific
conflicts. If V. had been more of a sociologist, he could draw the appropriate parallels with
the Catholic Church at the time of Galileo, reluctantly drawn to support his enemies, a case V.
knew well -- up to a point.
There came Peter Tompkins to Princeton and Jill and Deg had him to lunch, along with their
neighbor, Thomas Kuhn. Peter had published the story of his wartime escapade in German-occupied
Rome, a feat which Deg, a few miles away at the time, thought to do but had not done, and Peter
had written The Eunuch and the Virgin, which Stecchini had shown to V. and which he had
rejected, even though Tompkins could throw light on two points of importance: the sexual
derivations from cosmic disaster (which V. had recognized) and the descent of great
bureaucratic institutions from the same obsessional terror (which Deg but not V. was attending
to). His Secrets of the Great Pyramid was ultimately to achieve fame. Tom Kuhn's book on
scientific revolutions was beginning to gather kudos for himself as a historian of science. Deg
had footnoted it in his study of the reception system, for old time's sake, since the book
hadn't come to hand until the manuscript was ready to print, and praised it in the ABS. Deg had
wondered why so little attention was paid to the materials of politics and sociology on
revolutions. When the ABS was publishing its Velikovsky Issue, Kuhn was publishing an essay on
the function of dogma in scientific research, in a book edited by A. C. Crombie; there he
argued that science is and must be dogmatic and the present balance between dogmatism and open-
mindedness appeared to be a healthy one.
Kuhn and Tompkins got into a bristling argument over parascience. They were such formidable-
looking men, especially at the moment. Deg felt embarrassed, as their host. Neither had the
energy to spare for Dr. V. Tompkins was rebuffed because of V.'s heavy anxiety over associating
with the scientific fringe, especially if sex reared its head. Tom volunteered no support, not
then, not later. The presence of the great Velikovsky archive went unnoticed by him, too. Deg
thought, well, Kuhn is in the grip of the Princetonian academia and is an historian of science,
a field of nitpickers, excepting a few like Kuhn, ignorant of the springs of human ingenuity,
clumsy handmaidens of the technical scientists.
Deg could see continually in science the ghosts of politics concealed by their shrouds. One of
his old-time acquaintances was Don Price, an epiphenomenal career man of the public service,
who launched from the pioneering Public Administration Clearing House alongside the University
of Chicago to Washington, to the headship of the John F. Kennedy Center at Harvard, to the
Presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Deg wrote him concerning
the Velikovsky affair, seeking moral support. The answer: bland, perfectly unobjectionable,
priceless.
Not having gotten his support for the report of 1963, Deg wrote Price again in 1966 asking him
to intervene to get a communication of V. into Science. He repeated the pledge and passed the
buck. Thus, on December 22, 1966, with "a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" Price
writes:
I am glad of course to have the opportunity to read it and will forward it immediately to the
Editor of Science. It is the general policy of the Officers and Board of Directors of AAAS not
to interfere with the editorial judgment of the Editor and his editorial advisers. Since I
believe that the Editor should be aware of your opinion, and that of Mr. Wigner, I am sending a
copy of your letter as well as the note itself on to Dr. Abelson, and I am sure that they will
be useful to him.
For many years, Deg had preached that science could be regarded as a branch of administration
and administration, the huge corpus of civilized routines, as the outward expression of human
habits, largely unconscious, and therefore excusably termed obsessions.
Journal, Undated, Spring 1963
Science, and all that goes by the name in discourse and actions is almost entirely a process
of administering deductions in the name of an ideology. [Actually, this is a paraphrase of what
Deg had written for the Administrative Science Quarterly a decade earlier. I am trying to
exclude from this book whatever he has printed elsewhere, as I promised him, but I am like the
oaf who quit his job grading potatoes because all the choices between big and little made his
head hurt: at times I find such distinctions imperceptible.]
On December 9, 1966, not long after the publication of the Velikovsky Affair in book form, Dr.
Douglas Shanklin delivered an address on child-bed fever at the College of Medicine, University
of Florida, applying Deg's model of the reception system to J. P. Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell
Holmes. They had independently proposed infection as the source of the often fatal puerperal
fever, and are famous therefore. But Charles White of Manchester, England, had insisted upon
absolute cleanliness in the lying-in hospital in 1773 and Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen,
Scotland, stated the theory of infection in 1795. Holmes was an illustrious poet before he
published in 1843 his theory of infection as the source of the fever that killed so many women
in the hospitals of the nineteenth century; he did not hold an academic position at the time,
but later became Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School. The
dogmatic opposition persisted until the science of bacteriology of the next generation
overwhelmed it. Holmes died at 85, highly regarded.
Semmelweis was a Hungarian Jew practicing medicine at the Maternity Department of the Vienna
General Hospital when, in 1847, he introduced the practice of washing hands with chlorinated
water before examining women in labor. Although the results were a five-fold decrease in the
mortality rate, he was attacked and forced out of his position, and took a new post in his
native Hungary. There he published a massive book on the etiology, concept, and prophylaxis of
childbed fever (1861). Four years later he cut himself during a post-mortem examination, became
infected, was mentally deranged, and died soon after, at 47 years.
Holmes' essay was well-written and without first-hand experience. Semmelweis' work was
intimidating, ponderously written and he was fully experienced. Holmes republished his own
essay a dozen years after its first publication in a medical journal, declaring: "When, by the
permission of providence, I held up to the professional public the damnable facts connected
with the conveyance of poison from one young mother's chamber to another, for doing which
humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else should ever come
to my life, I had to hear the sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe
have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins."
Semmelweis was persecuted for his heresy. Shanklin writes of Semmelweis' tragedy:
A few people acted with bold imagination and foresight, accepting the data at its face value
and effectively saving many lives... the overwhelming majority dealt either from a power base
or a dogmatic base, steeped in the irrational. The net effect for an interval was described in
the indeterminacy model. Truth was accepted here and rejected there and by gradual exchange
assimilation was finally achieved. Additional proofs with the evolution of a new technique
wrote the final chapter of the saga of Semmelweis.
It took about a century from White's obsessive insistence upon cleanliness in Manchester's
lying-in wards to consensus about a matter that should have been simple enough to grasp, if one
recalled that peasants used salt, alcohol, and herbs on wounds and they isolated persons
associated with plague by the most cruel means. That the use of hospitals for parturition
increased and that the doctors and their students increased their post-mortem dissections in
this environment escalated the puerperal fever mortality rate. These two "advances" confused
the issue, just as "advances" in agriculture, particularly in the U. S. A., have caused
devastation of the soil, water resource depletion, and new chemical diseases. In the middle of
advances, regressions are minimized or even denied scornfully. Obviously the scientific process
is largely understandable by sociological and psychological analysis.
Deg did not enjoy any illusion that there would be a direct rational line from publicizing V.'s
poor reception in the sciences to the acceptance of his views and their incorporation into
science. For one thing, he felt certain that if V.'s ideas, or anyone else's including his own,
would succeed, they had to be first disassembled, torn to shreds, and then reassembled by
thousands of people from the nearly unrecognizable shreds. Only much later might some
historians recognize the many truths and even the valid general theories in their work.
Nonetheless, the exposition of such large ideas and the controversy over them would perform the
first major task of any revolution, namely the refocusing of attention and the conditioning of
the minds of scientists and teachers to the new frame of thought. In these very days of the
1960's, the leaders of the movement for women's liberation were stressing "consciousness-
raising;" many blacks were doing the same by stressing "negritude" (as the French blacks called
it) and accusing pro-black liberal whites, "their best friends," of necessarily being racially
prejudiced; radical students caught on also to the effectiveness of "irrational," often
destructive, behavior as a way of getting the attention of the civil and educational
authorities.
Adverse publicity is a shock to the generally sheltered scientists and effectively alters their
perceptions. The demoralization of a supreme power such as the scientific establishment with
its credo and foci can occur by the exposure of weaknesses among a few leaders and heroes and
proceed with the underlying economic forces that limit rewards and positions; demoralization
then moves to the rank-and-file individuals who pay less respect, work less hard, ask more
money and benefits, and pay attention to supernatural or heretical interests. In a democracy,
the withdrawal of any substantial amount of public support for the ideas and position of any
institution, including science, results in some demoralization. A perfectly normal remark, if
publicized, can invite latent opposition to take form. When the renowned astronomer and public
scientist par excellence, Harlow Shapley, declared "If Dr. Velikovsky is right, the rest of us
are crazy," what would appear to be a humorous truism set up, when publicized, a rallying point
for all who were even slightly concerned about this or that fallacy of science; what many
scientists believed to be only an absurd contrast gave to many a premonition that, yes, all
scientists are crazy.
Although Deg believed that he had substantially accounted for the scientific behavior witnessed
in the Velikovsky case, one of the most common questions asked of him in discussions and at
lectures over the following years was "Why did the scientists make such a fuss?" It did not
seem to matter that often the people assembled had come because they already knew the answer.
There would, of course, always be on hand for analysis new cases of idiotic name-calling and
denigration of V., but the causes agitating the scientists remained essentially the same:
dogmatism (fueled by the need for respect), expressions of power (agitated by personal
ambitions and feelings of insufficient influence), indeterminacy (the frustrated wish to know,
and the denial of confusion and uncertainty) and rationalism (narrowly defined, and therefore
inadequate against ideas of quantavolution, which seem so easy to refute and dismiss but turn
out to be remarkably rich and resilient).
Exposing the mental and social operations of science produced an effect almost entirely
favorable. Some addressed Deg for bringing justice to V. Others praised him for introducing the
issue of justice into the scientific process. Some others commented upon the novelty of the
approach. Mentions of unusual courage were frequent. Social scientists recognized the phenomena
of establishment defensiveness and crowd behavior; they expressed little surprise. The letters
of surprise came from persons who had undergone a conversion experience; they professed
humiliation and disenchantment because of scientific conduct. Several urged that Deg turn his
attention to cases which they believed to be similar. Deg objected, when I thought to print
some of the encomia that his magazine (1963) and book (1966) evoked, saying that rehearing old
praise can be bittersweet, to editors as to the aged of stage and screen. To most it is a bore,
old or new. Blurbs are the medium of exchange between producer, salesman, and customer. If it
is necessary, if it's never been printed, OK, let it be brief.
So this is brief -- but it's important, because it shows that the message was intelligible, and
got through in the larger intellectual world. A comparison may be pertinent: it was widely
believed that scientists took up their pens en masse to castigate Macmillan Company when it
published Worlds in Collision. In 1983, when Leroy Ellenberger delved into the appropriate
files he found only twenty-one of such letters.
The favorable correspondence received by Deg and the ABS in 1963 and 1966 exceeded the
unfavorable mail received by Macmillan Company in what the Company regarded as a massive
assault upon its integrity and its ability to do business with scientists. The gutless behavior
of well-intentioned institutions is proverbial; Senator Joe McCarthy and a few assistants
reduced the mammoth State Department and other agencies of the Federal Government to terrorized
submission around the same time.
Some figures in the forefront of scientific method in the social sciences, then or later,
responded to the issue forcibly, a "most interesting" from Herbert Simon; "used to very good
teaching purposes" from Bernard Barber; "both fascinating... and important... a splendid
account," from Hadley Cantril; "beautifully makes the point about the psychology of
scientists... grateful" from James C. Davies, a "signal service" from Arthur S. Miller; "a
superb example of the sociology of knowledge," from Wendell Bell; "sobering and helpful," from
Renato Tagiuri; "an outstanding contribution on so vital an issue... not only the matter of
methodology but also one of political toleration and scientific craftsmanship" from Ralph M.
Goldman; "fascinating... excellent..." from Wayne A. R. Leys; "splendid... outstanding...
personal congratulations" from George A. Lundberg; and a grumpy reassessment by Stuart Chase,
"I can see your point." Sociologist George Lundberg's letter to Deg pointed to a different type
of reception system problem in science, one in which he had once been personally involved:
The question has a great many aspects. In the first place, there is the problem all editors
face in discriminating between work of a crackpot and the work of a genius. As has often been
pointed out, they are hard to distinguish, especially on the more advanced levels. A very
different problem (not involved in the Velikovsky case) faces the conscientious editor when he
gets a paper the validity of which he does not question, but which, if published, will in the
editor's opinion give aid and comfort to a group hostile to a viewpoint which the editor
personally shares, on grounds reflecting the most creditable public spirit.
Lundberg also noted, "It appears that Velikovsky's ideas have been widely circulated in spite
of the hostility of the Establishment... Is it possible that the enormous growth in
communication technology has made it practically impossible to suppress new ideas for long?"
Stuart Dodd wrote from the University of Washington:
I think you have done a magnificent job of l'affaire Velikovsky in the September ABS. The
care with which you worked up and presented the complete case in the three articles, with
excellent refereeing throughout, was a historic achievement in challenging and improving
methodology in the Behavioral Sciences. I particularly admire the way you did not go into the
controversy of the correctness of Velikovsky's theories, leaving that to the specialists
concerned. Your editorial statement of the issues involving the mores of both the physical
scientists and the social scientists as scientists in accepting and sifting new scientific work
is a skillfully done job.
On the humanities side Mose Hadas, Horace Kallen, William T. Couch, Jacques Barzun, William
Sloane and August Heckscher wrote Deg supportively. Medicine, social work, psychiatry, and law
were among the fields of applied science reporting interest and conveying congratulations.
Several ABS readers arranged meetings for Dr. V. at their campuses. Articles based on the ABS
issue originated in Italy, England, Australia, and elsewhere during the 1960's. Reviews of the
book when it appeared two years later were favorable; however, no scientific journal dealing
with the natural sciences reviewed it. Ultimately, the book was republished in England, and
translated and published by Bertelsman-Goldman in Germany.
Deg introduced the second, English Edition of the Velikovsky Affair in 1977. Brain Moore, the
librarian of Hartlepool and a cosmic heretic, reviewed the work in the Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies Review, III: 2 (1978), 38. Crediting the book "a 'classic' in its
field" with "the renaissance of scholarly interest in Velikovsky" he quoted its preface:
We dedicate this book to people who are concerned about the ways in which scientists behave
and how science develops. It deals especially with the freedoms that scientists grant or
withhold from one another. The book is also for people who are interested in new theories of
cosmogony -- the causes of the skies, the earth, and humankind as we see them. It is, finally,
a book for people who are fascinated by human conflict, in this case a struggle among some of
the most educated, elevated, and civilized characters of our times.
The area to which the ABS addressed itself was apparently much in need of attention.
Sociologist Lundberg thought "that the AAAS, not to mention individual scientists and groups,
must now prepare a detailed answer," and he added, as did others, various matters of
investigation in the reception system of science. David Wallace wrote happily, "I hope you get
sued."
The American Political Science Review, which had carried negative reviews of, or ignored, Deg's
iconoclastic or deceptively simple works in political science sprang to attention with the
Velikovsky Affair. John Orbell opined that "it represents a most significant contribution to
the sociology of science." He applauded Deg's most valuable chapter on the scientific reception
system and concluded: "Behavioral scientists might be expected this time to have been on the
side of the angels; they were, after all, nearly alone among scientists in not having some
fundamental notions challenged by Velikovsky." Stecchini wrote to Deg, then in Italy, on Oct.
2, 1963: "There has just appeared a manifesto by [Robert Maynard] Hutchins and others of his
coterie on Science, Scientists, and Politics. It says in general what the ABS has said, but it
does not give any evidence. Hutchins begins by saying that in his experience the scientists are
the most unscrupulous and power-motivated members of the academic community. The concluding
paper by Lynn White, Jr. [historian of science] declares that scientists do not understand
philosophical issues and often have philosophical prejudices."
One sponsor of this manifesto was Harrison Brown, a renowned scientist whose reviews of V.'s
books were madly mediocre, which goes to say something of the significance of works of the
Hutchins kind that do not name names, and makes recommendations that are not specific. Deg
liked and admired Hutchins, even when strongly critical of him, ever since he had attended a
seminar of that handsome, brave, relatively intellectual, self-contained, and slightly phony
cavalier, then President of the University of Chicago.
There came shortly afterwards to Deg another letter from Albert Schenkman, Publisher of
Cambridge, Mass., breaking a lance against the ABS. Ted Gurr, minding the ABS, wished to
publish it and Deg replied "Dear Ted: It is cruel of you to hound me across the Big Pond with
Mr. Schenkman's letter with a request that I reply. He is in a state of awful confusion. Print
it if you will, with or without my comments," and he suggested that Gurr put the comments
alongside the appropriate paragraphs of the letter. Gurr did not print the comments.
Philip Converse, who at this writing is President of the American Political Science
Association, on Oct. 9, 1963 congratulated Deg on "a superb document." Unlike most, he had
followed the case from its inception in the early 1950's. Unlike most, too, he directed his
thoughts to measures of policy and control.
... In accordance with the principle of open public challenge and rebuttal, why not publicly
invite those of the principals on the other side (certainly Shapley, Gaposhkin, Harrison Brown,
perhaps Abelson, etc.) who are still active to respond to this issue in an ensuing number? I
assume they would be willing actually to read the whole issue before writing rejoinders. I
trust such an invitation could be handled without devolving into a Counter-Inquisition. That
is, the profound ignorance in some coupled with the arrogance of success, has had material
consequences for the development of the behavioral sciences, and I am sure leaves many social
scientists in a counter-inquisitional frame of mind. On the other hand, it is we who purport to
understand the psychology of the inquisition, and we contend among other things that they are
unlikely to. I think it is fair game to make the basic points and make them vigorously, while a
classic case is still fresh. Yet if our claimed perspective on such matters has any merit at
all, it should both permit us and require us to handle the matter with some noblesse oblige,
out of respect for the gross differences between the two camps in comprehended information
concerning these social and psychological processes. This is true not only because of the
negative consequences of the unfettered inquisition spirit, but also because of our beliefs
that the problems are principally system-level ones, not good-guys and bad-guys, and ones
moreover that social scientists have not to date resolved operationally themselves. So a
personal vote for increased discussion and allocation of resources toward remedy, but not the
pillory or the witch hunt.
Deg at Florence was sent a copy of the New York Times of August 16, 1963 about "the first
definitive list of books assembled for the White House Library," John F. Kennedy being
President and Jacqueline, his wife, being interested in such matters as the White House decor
and French poetry. Professor James Babb, librarian of Yale University, directed the task.
"Those on the arduous project included the best brains of the Library of Congress, the editor
of the Adams and Jefferson papers, members of the White House Fine Arts Advisory Committee and
a host of distinguished scholars, librarians, publishers and experts in many fields throughout
the nation." Deg's book, Public and Republic, was on the list, his father said, and in response
to a plea from the allegedly poverty-stricken White House for donations, his father had sent in
the autographed copy Deg had given him years before.
Deg examined the list and wrote a brief essay about it. In his usual way, he managed to scold
everybody, the pretentiousness of the scheme, the great works left out, the silly books
entered, the illiteracy of Presidents, and the antiquated view of the methodology of politics
and history evidenced by the list. Most pertinent here are his remarks on the treatment of
science in this super-list:
Nor do we understand why the natural sciences are excluded. Certainly there is room for some
principal articles and books. If readability is the criterion, they are as likely to be read as
several hundred other works in the collection. Besides the originals, there should be present
at least Sarton, Conant, Whitehead, and Santillana. It is as important that the mythical
President who reads should read science as that he should read "Little Women."
This is probably another aspect of the escapism which shuns the future. The immense and fertile
American planning community is scarcely heeded. The best predictions and estimates of what can
be done in the natural sciences in the next century are absent. The best proposals for the
control of war are not available. If indeed the President were to read randomly in this
collection, we should fear for the nation.
The tools with which an active presidential mind might work are not dominant here.
The incident displays Deg as something of a misanthrope, but what meaning has this word -- a
hater of one's fellow humans or, like Le Misanthrope of Moliere's drama, an idealist and severe
critic of others? It is clear that he was the latter; he had the two tell-tale signs of this
Misanthrope: he was a harsh judge of himself, subjecting himself to daily Augustinian
interrogations of his activities, his use of time, his ideas, his conduct towards others, his
intellectual and logical rigor, and his failures. Second, he had an inflated hope for others:
for educating the uneducable, giving to the undeserving, organizing the unorganizable, loving
the unlovable, bringing peace to the world; worse, he could see good in everyone: his
opponents, madmen, silly women, gangsters, wicked politicians. Even at the moment of judging
harshly, he was sympathizing secretly. One reason why he was attracted to V. was V.'s simple
unidimensional moral quality: there were enemies and friends; the friend of your enemy is your
enemy; the enemy of your enemy is your friend; the friend of your friend is your friend. The
fourth category -- the enemy of your friend is your enemy was not so well accepted by V., or to
most others who went so far as to accept the first three propositions. So it is not all simple,
but nothing is, and all generalizations are false to a degree.
Let us move to Deg's Journal.
Princeton, April 7, 1966
I was abruptly pulled out of the relaxation of homecoming when I visited Velikovsky. He was
haranguing me about Livio's misspelling of the Pharaoh's name and I was sipping tea and
listening respectfully but comfortably and even amusedly when the telephone rang and he
answered it. I could hear him asking who it was and then "jail," and "marijuana," and "most
regrettable," and "I am in full agreement," but then "I am not the man for you. I have here
with me Professor de Grazia, Professor Alfred De Grazia," and "Let me have him speak with
you... He is better qualified to deal with this subject."
He lumbered in and explained that a gentleman on the phone wished to have a Dr. Timothy Leary
introduced. This Dr. Leary had been sentenced to thirty years in prison for possessing
marijuana. He was a psychologist... I began to recall Leary... Harvard... experiments with
LSD... and reluctantly but with some interest I picked up the receiver and received an
invitation to come to Town Hall on Tuesday (this was Monday) at 8 p. m. and introduce Dr. Leary
to the audience. The caller, Mr. Bogart, stated that under the circumstances of the sentencing,
it would be helpful if Dr. Leary were not to go 'cold' on stage but be preceded by some
supportive words. I replied that I might do so but wished to look into the matter and call him
back the same afternoon. I hung up and V. said, "You should do it, Alfred, it is a very good
and useful thing to do." I felt that I should probably do it, but did not finally decide until
I had read a little of the background of the case and an article of alarmist nature in Life
magazine regarding LSD.
Sizemore joined us at V. 's and we examined some of the long-sought-for Macmillan
correspondence on V. 's case. Miraculously, after it had appeared first that Macmillan would
never let us see what they had in their files from the days of the crisis over the publication
of Worlds in Collision, and then later they said that they had destroyed the files, Sizemore
learned that the files had actually gone with many other files over to the New York Public
Library for some future literary historian. Well, history had already begun. Sizemore requested
the materials and they were brought up for him. He was not supposed to remove them, but he did
so temporarily, reproduced them by Xerox, and returned them immediately. So now we might read
the full texts of the letters of the scientists Shapley, McLaughlin and the rest to Macmillan,
the notes of Mr. Brett of Macmillan agitating the question of whether or not to ditch V. 's
book, and related letters and papers. We were now in position to back up what some people
regarded as exaggerated statements concerning the dispute with actual quotations corroborating
our charges.
The matter of introducing Leary bothered me a bit. V. and Jill both spoke of my acceptance as
an act of courage. So did Eddie [Deg's brother] when I called him that evening for information.
So also several others in the next day or two. I feel uneasy when people say I am generous,
kind, understanding or courageous. Partly I doubt that I am any of these things. Or if I think
I am, it is upon occasions when nobody in the world notices; but then when I act normally and
naturally, it seems to me, as in the case of Dr. Leary, I am explicitly informed of my virtues.
I have long been convinced intellectually of the absolute lack of coordination between good
deeds and rewards but their lack of coincidence in practice never ceases to bother me and
unsettle me. I don't know how to put it: it seems that I do praiseworthy things in quiet,
boldly, but when a public approves my conduct, far from plunging forward even more
enthusiastically, I tend to pull up a bit and examine my conduct: am I being rash; what am I
doing that is extraordinary? I almost never find that I am fully in accord with the applause.
Eddie told me on the telephone from Washington that Leary's case had several legal
possibilities, that it was worth trying in court. He urged me to talk to Allen Ginsberg about
Leary, since he recalled Ginsberg having an interest in the matter. He then spoke with A. G., I
believe, the next morning, for G. phoned me at my office, speaking unexpectedly in a smooth,
organized way, and we arranged to meet at the Faculty Club at 3: 45 that afternoon for the
first time.
At the appointed time, having speedily dispatched a batch of phone calls, letters, papers, and
other miscellany from the piles of homecoming mail, I was at the Faculty Club and Ginsberg came
in soon thereafter. The apparition is nothing to dismiss, especially if it occurs in the
framework of the old Federal architecture and furnishings of Washington Square North. He was
more completely uncouth than I thought possible. Full grown hair and beard flying in every
direction, disheveled attire of ditch, barn, and beach. He said Peter was parking the car and
would be in, so we began to talk while we waited and after twenty minutes Peter came in with
his tam, long red braids, and grimy gym suit and tennis shoes, bringing along also his brother.
By then Allen and I had come to terms and he could introduce Peter's brother nonchalantly as
"Julius, Peter's brother. We've taken him out of the insane asylum where he's been for thirteen
years. He's become our ward." Peter said, "Sit here, Julius!" and Julius staring far far out of
this world, sat straight and mechanical on a chair and said nothing nor scarcely moved a muscle
for the hour or more that we talked thereafter.
The trio was spectacularly disgusting. Several professors and the manager poked their heads
inquiringly our way and I gave them a polite "hello!" My own feeling was of warmth and
fondness. They were completely reversed characters. All the evil in them was in their
appearance, while inwardly they revealed a beauty and kindness that was holy. They are in the
great tradition of the blessed spirits -- the hermits who live in caves and on poles, the
beggars of St. Francis, Ginsberg is an man of surpassing intelligence, aside from all else, and
Peter a kind of saintly inquirer. They are not more celibates, or even better-than-ordinary
men. They stand on the other side of Evil, having passed through it or flown over it.
I invited them to the bar downstairs for a drink, but they took me instead to their party,
where they were tardy. Present when we arrived was the hostess, Miss Beach, daughter of the
first publisher of Joyce, a Frenchman who has just translated Ferlinghetti, a Solomon who had
just been freed from nine years in a mental hospital (this must be Allen's great early friend)
and a pretty young man who looks like Edgar Allen Poe and publishes Fuck you: a Magazine of the
Arts.
I stayed for a while, then left despite their invitation to dinner, because I had to put down
some words for my Introduction. I signed into the Stanford hotel for the night, scribbled
hastily for half an hour and then walked to Town Hall (taking a cab the last couple of blocks,
since I turned E rather than W) and arrived a little late to spend time with Leary before the
address. It was as well for he was busy with the press and TV until the moment he had to
appear. He welcomed me and we went on stage to a house three-fourths filled. A young crowd, I
observed. My introduction went off well, and Leary's small strange eyes lit up warmly when I
finished and he shook my hand cordially. He rambled on nicely for over an hour under painful
white lights. They bothered me more than him but he had indicated he wished me to sit on stage
alongside the rostrum and I complied. (Now I must see what mode of exploitation there will be
of the films that were made. If I am on display I shall want to be sure of the context and
qualifications.)
Leary's message was simple and harmless. He spoke of the levels of consciousness and asserted
that the deepest was provoked by LSD. He argued that the knowledge one gained thereby was to
the good (automatically, I suppose, as the naturalist fallacy has it that all fact and truth is
good and wreaks good, no matter the context or the controls). It wasn't much. Leary has been
the patient amicus adolescensis of boys and girls seeking self-awareness and thrills of
sensation, and is adulated for this and for his troubles and for his pursuit of a vague set of
psychological and theological ideas that hover in the experiences of drug-taking.
I bid him goodnight afterwards, ate a poor solitary meal at a late diner, and slept well,
Princeton, October 6, 1966 Bad headache. Hot flashes, apparent heart palpitations after lunch.
Query: alcohol? Alcohol plus fine crop of my garden mushrooms "coprinus" for dinner last
evening? barometric pressures possibly related to hurricane Inez? something more functionally
severe? Poor mood, anyhow, Louise S --- our house guest again. A beautiful woman, so well
turned out, and 52 years old. She had a torrid affair with a young Greek and spent weeks with
him on a primitive island in the Aegean this summer.
Walked with Franny [their shepherd dog] along the streets in the balmy night air. Stopped by
Velikovsky to give him an article on "Magnetic Pressures" that describes the newest successes
in building up tremendous magnetic charges. What artifice can do, nature may have done and may
do. Hence V. 's theories about the possible role of electromagnetic charges in cosmic events
and catastrophes may be supported or considered in new light.
He insisted I stay and despite my headache, we talked for nearly two hours. He had me read his
latest correspondence and advise him on letters to Sullivan of the NYT and others. We spoke of
his archives and I repeated my thoughts about a foundation to take over his home and archives.
He is very anxious about his many remaining tasks. Fifteen they were, he said. I said "I have
fifteen not counting you as a project." He joked about the peasant pushing the old ass and
saying, in response to a remark of a by-stander: "Between us we are 100 years old."
Deg's Journal, Princeton, October 9, 1966 It is as difficult to make a little change as a big
change in politics. Or is it? I sometimes think the former and usually act upon it. But I am a
radical by temper and I resent being involved in little changes when bigger ones are needed.
I wonder: can it be that in the measurement NOT of the difficulty of change, but whether the
changes brought are big or little, that the conservatism of a society should be determined?
Deg's Journal, Princeton, October 9, 1966, 11 P. M. At 9 am Edward de G. calls and we discuss
his problems in finishing "Congressional Liaison." At 10 V. calls and tells me we should
publish his Brown University speech and the accompanying talks of his critics, together with
the Neugebauer reviews and correspondence, as a book. I agree, but he takes a half-hour to
unload his early morning thoughts upon me. I should charge the old psychoanalyst a
psychiatrist's fee (professional discount, of course). At the end he says "I feel better now.
We have this straightened out. Now I will go back to the miserable German translation of my
book." I feel compassionate. At every turn of the road, a further obstacle to communicating
one's ideas arises -- when nothing else, there will always be the damnable errors of a typist,
a translator, or an editor. Deg's Journal, Princeton, 1967 The afternoon of Sunday, December
17, Jill and I bicycled down the hill to the Velikovsky house for a tea party, with Francesca,
our German Shepherd dog, loping along nicely beside us. When we arrived she insisted upon
coming in, or rather, behaved in such a confused fashion that we finally brought her in with
us, and she finally discovered her place under the grand piano, where she had lain on prior
occasions. Present were the Ralph Juergens, Dr. Kogan, Vielikovsky's son-in-law and a Professor
and Research Scientist from Israel, with whom I had met on his previous trips to the United
States. So were the Bigelows, he from the Institute for Advanced Study and she a psychologist.
I had not met them before although Velikovsky spoke of Bigelow from time to time. He is one of
the few natural scientists who has lent sympathy to Velikovsky in recent years. A newly met
acquaintance of Velikovsky, Spelman Waxman, was in the company with his wife. He is retired now
from the Center for Antibiotics Research, that he had established at Rutgers University on the
basis of the returns from his discovery of certain antibiotics, especially streptomyocin, for
which he had received the Nobel Prize some years ago. The Waxmans had scarcely heard of
Velikovsky. I had only vaguely recollected them as well. The Juergens didn't know the others.
The Bigelows did not either, so all in all, except for Velikovsky, who has a great memory for
everybody and everything, it was a typical gathering of specialized intellectuals who had heard
little or nothing of one another despite the feeling that some of those present had that they
might have met or that they were worthy of being known to others. Jill later told me that Mrs.
Waxman seemed offended when Jill did not recognize her name, and of course Mrs. Waxman and Dr.
Waxman were probably surprised when I asked him how he spelled it later on when he was asking
me to send him a copy of "The Velikovsky Affair" which I of course felt that he should have
known about, and I am far too aware of the networks of acquaintanceship in The Great Society to
expect anybody to know me before meeting, unless they come from certain circles the existence
of which I am well aware of. Under the circumstances, it is easy to see why there is so much
trouble in gathering together a public opinion among scientists except at the most superficial
level of the top associations and those who agitate among them and in the mass media, denoted
by prizes and the like.
I learned about Kogan's work in desalinization of sea water. He is now constructing a model in
Israel that is supposed to be a great improvement over existing distillation types that require
much expensive copper alloy tubing. His method is a kind of open channel way that cuts down a
considerable proportion of cost of the installation that comes from tubing. He has also worked
in physics and astronomy. He is a large man, wall-eyed, pleasant and highly intelligent,
persuaded, I believe, of the validity of Velikovsky's general theory. We discussed the force
fields that could have been operative during the encounter of Venus and Earth about 1500 B. C.
He explained in answer to my questioning that it might be possible to set up a model to
duplicate the forces involved, but it would be a very costly affair. Natural forces are not
easy to set up in a natural state. He felt that the force of electromagnetism exerted presently
among the planetary bodies and the sun might be enormously modified because its cube principle
follows gravitational force very quickly and provides a very different relationship between the
two bodies. Hence, one cannot say that the force between Earth and Venus would be negligible at
all. Furthermore, we could venture a number of different positions, charges, currents, axial
coordinates and the like that would determine a very wide range of possible forces between
Earth and Venus during the period in question. And of course the present slow retrograde motion
of Venus does not at all indicate what might have been the position and rotation of Venus at
the time of the encounter. Unless someone comes up with a brilliant scheme, it will be
difficult to reconstruct the historical incident with details more specific than those rather
general ones provided already by Velikovsky. (However, I feel that there is some possibility
that we might be able to use a more intensive and exhaustive scrutiny of ancient documents to
discover somewhat more details about the motions of the heavenly bodies during the encounter
period.)
Dr. Waxman is an old Russian Jew of about the same age as Velikovsky, and they were able to
recall passing by one another at different points in their early wandering lives. Dr. Waxman
began to recollect his experiences in the years following his discovery of antibiotics and his
naming of the field. I asked especially, "How long would you say it was from the time you made
your discovery until the time you finally had a full research institute set up and operative
with the people you wanted?" He replied, after much clarification of the question, partly
because he, like other natural scientists, do not think in sociological process terms, that ten
years was the period from the time that he made his discovery until the pharmaceutical industry
purchased rights to use them, to the payment of royalties back to the University, to the voting
by the Trustees of a new Center for Antibiotic Research at Rutgers to be set up by Dr. Waxman,
to the construction of the building and then the hiring of a first group of deliberately
temporary people who were space occupiers to prevent other ill-housed faculty of the University
from taking over Waxman's facilities before he had a chance to bring in the permanent first-
rate men that he was seeking. Finally, at the end of ten years the cycle concluded. I commented
that this was a very short cycle of this type. It had to do with the nature of the discovery,
of the fact that a market was present, and a few unique factors, including, of course, the
shrewdness of Dr. Waxman himself throughout the total operation. A much more thorough study of
this experience would be very worthwhile from the standpoint of the history of science and the
sociology of science, as well as comparable studies of other experiences.
The tea itself was only a small part of a rather elaborate Russian type of menu that Elisheva
Velikovsky provided --sweet pickled herring, cheeses, hams, several kinds of cake, and the
company enjoyed itself at table, Franny having lodged herself below the table and under the
feet of everyone, somewhat to the embarrassment of Jill who was never really embarrassed about
this sort of thing but thought that poor Elisheva had enough to do without concerning herself
with the physical presence of a large bitch. Numerous stories were recounted.. Velikovsky told
of the legend of Solomon in which was apparently involved a bit of radium that had been picked
up somewhere and was carried in a lead box and was used from time to time for performing
miracles, and finally after generations was exhausted. I thought the story showed very well the
terrific power of Velikovsky's mind in looking at stories and seeing beyond the simple words
facts at an entirely different level. He is unquestionably a great detective.
Juergens caught me aside as we were leaving the table and the dining room to show me a long
letter he had just received from John Lear, the Science Editor of the Saturday Review. In this
letter, Lear was defending himself against Juergens' assertion in his essay on the history of
the Velikovsky controversy that Lear and Stuart McClintock of Collier's Magazine had attempted
to go beyond Velikovsky's wishes in jazzing up and popularizing Worlds in Collision, something
that we have felt contributed to the original hostility to the Velikovsky book on the part of
the scientists. Nothing in my experience would make me surprised at a popular magazine's
handling of a scientific issue. It is almost impossible, given the rules of journalism, to do
justice by science. Among many other reasons, the journals themselves are unequipped to handle
distinctions between fact statements and scandalous exaggerations. However, in this letter,
Lear again said that he had a most difficult time in working with Velikovsky; he disputes that
there was ever any intention of serializing the book itself instead of condensing it (something
that Velikovsky himself later confirmed and said that he had misremembered this fact when he
looked up his agreement), and went on at great length quoting copiously from a letter written
by McClintock to him a few months before McClintock's death last year, in which McClintock gave
the most harrowing account of an evening spent at Velikovsky's home when he and Lear and later
he alone, after Lear went out to wait for him, had tried to escape the wrath of Velikovsky and
to appease him and at the same time to try to present an article that they thought would be
printed by the magazine. In fact, McClintock accused Velikovsky at one point in his ranting and
raving of bringing out a gun from the cabinet, putting it on the table and saying "Let this
settle the matter right now." McClintock wrote, if Lear is correct in having such a letter,
that he McClintock left the place shaking and with an eruption of the ulcers that he had
thought once cured and after a year felt poorly as a result of the meeting. I laughed rather
grimly when I heard the story. Of course one would have to check the reliability of both Lear
and McClintock in respect to the incident at which Mrs. Velikovsky was supposed to be present.
But again I would not put it past Velikovsky. I could see that a man coming out of a dozen
years of every day in the stacks all day long and with his whole life work and magnificent set
of theories at stake, and with all the driving power and determination that was required for
that effort, being confronted by what had to be a shallow, glancing misrepresentation of what
he was trying to say, and considering also the enormous domineering quality of Velikovsky and
of how he wants to control every single thing that has to do with himself, he would be most
intemperate, disagreeable and could even have pulled out the pistol. Juergens wondered whether
he should show the letter to Velikovsky or Mrs. Velikovsky. I said hold it another day or two
until I could look at it more thoroughly, and then we went into further conversation with the
group, the Waxmans having departed and Jill having gone onto the subject of forming a
foundation for the study of some of the theories in which Velikovsky was interested. He would
like me to organize it. I am thinking strongly of it but I would like a much more clear
definition of our respective roles.
I arranged to see Juergens several days later and did on Thursday afternoon. Then I read
through the letter again, we joked about it some more, and I said to Juergens that I saw no
reason why it should not be shown to Velikovsky. I believed it worked out all right because the
next day Velikovsky called me on another pretext and raised the subject again just to hear my
response. He didn't mind my treating it in a jocular way. And he certainly did not express the
right amount of indignation, I thought, at the fact that I appeared to believe the story. But
he denied it and said that he had never owned a pistol since he had one many years ago in
Russia or was it Israel. He weakened my belief in the letter a little, but it would seem hard
for McClintock to make up the story completely, so specific was it. He also claimed that Lear
was not there at all during the meeting.
Juergens and I then discussed the foundation, and he agreed completely with me that prior to
the establishment of the foundation it should be determined that it would carry a full range of
objective studies of the many types of problems in numerous disciplines that we had come upon
in the course of the Velikovsky experience. Furthermore, he agreed that we should ask for the
rights to almost all of the Velikovsky archive because it is from his voluminous notes and the
total collection of commentary that we could fashion many a first-rate hypothesis for our
colleagues to research, both in the history of science and the substantive areas of concern. I
am now drafting such a letter to Velikovsky explaining the conditions under which we would have
to work. It is impossible to be in any dependent position with respect to Velikovsky and get
out any kind of regular journal, or series of publications, or systematic argument in
opposition to his theories. I could not work otherwise; I would find, as would everyone else
concerned with the foundation and its publications, that he would gobble up all of our time
whether it was necessary or not in the affairs of the foundation and we would be able to do
nothing with our lives otherwise. The pretext I referred to above that Velikovsky called me
about had to do with Professor Neugebauer. Neugebauer had apparently accused me of "dishonesty"
in some letter to Delaplaine, a science writer, because I did not print or acknowledge a letter
that he had written me (the ABS) in 1963. But I don't recall having received such a letter
until 1965, at which time, O. N., probably feeling threatened by an imminent visit of
Velikovsky to Brown University, N's own school, sent me an explanation of why he had
distributed "only one hundred" copies of his review of Velikovsky's book containing a serious
error that would make Velikovsky appear foolish or treacherous with facts.
Every month of the decades of 60's and 70's there would be an alarm raised to rally to V.'s
cause, and the volunteer firemen would rush to the scene. For persistent devotion to duty over
the whole period Warner Sizemore gets the prize. He was out of Georgia originally, became a
Presbyterian minister, studied for his doctorate at Temple University. He never completed his
dissertation, which he might have written ten times over if he had not given so much time to
Velikovsky. Sizemore was an artist as well, a modest painter who would not stretch himself to
create. He devised, too, a method of reproducing in wood a painting, whether classical or
banal, and sold his productions at fairs in shopping centers and fairgrounds.
I must not give the impression that V. would not help his supporters. When it was sage to do
so, and would not compromise himself, he would write letters; since almost always the cosmic
heretics needed letters that would recommend them to academic foes of V. and cover up their
friendliness to V., there were not many of such letters. In Sizemore's case, V. guaranteed a
mortgage on a house in Trenton, so that Sizemore and his family might settle down. They did and
found their life-paths successfully.
The interventions of Sizemore on V.'s behalf were to be numbered in the hundreds. A minister of
the many, he became a minister of the one. Hardly a week would go by without some assistance.
He gave counsel, wrote letters to the media, made phone calls, solicited support, attended
every related public assembly, taped miles of discussions and lectures, gave his own funds to
publish the magazine Kronos, kept hostilities to a minimum, and maintained a good-natured
concern through thick and thin and down the years. He became Professor of Philosophy and
Theology at Glassboro State College and persuaded the authorities to authorize a Velikovsky
Center, which began to collect items of interest and which served as a background screen for
Kronos magazine. There was little gain here except the prestige of an academic address. V.
never did consign a copy of his archive to the "Center."
Friends like Sizemore come mostly in fairy tales and epic poetry. V. took him for granted, as
indeed he took everyone for granted who did not hold some prestigious place or manage a power
center. He bequeathed Sizemore nothing -- nor anything to anyone else except his wife, and then
by descent through her to his family. It is continuously remarkable how gratitude in life,
where it exists, is typically decapitated in the performance of a last testament. It was
disgraceful, after having taken up so much time over decades talking about making his archives
available and helping others carry on his work, that V. did nothing to that effect nor did his
wife and daughters, and in fact his books and materials and funds were held more tightly than
ever after his death. I have already said that V. undervalued what he received from others and
overvalued what he gave them. Lewis Greenberg, to take another case, had for a decade edited
Kronos without compensation (unless his profligate telephoning were to be counted as such) and
could only wrench a few articles out of V. and his heiresses. Very late, Jan Sammer, the
family's assistant, helped to pry loose some pieces. As we shall see, Mankind in Amnesia is not
much as a book, but would have appeared gracefully and appropriately as articles in Kronos.
Meanwhile Kronos was weakened by its top-heavy reliance upon Velikovsky's case. When the
magazine was very young, Deg had proposed, in a fateful meeting of several cosmic heretics in a
Chinese restaurant of Philadelphia, that the magazine "go public." It should define its mission
in general terms and seek a wider audience. Greenberg, whose paranoiac outlook he was the first
to confess, felt threatened and drew back. Deg, who should have pursued his aim more gently and
privately, let it drop, and hardly had personal contact with Greenberg in the years that
followed.
But this is true, that V. would have been outraged if any of his circle, and certainly Kronos,
would have essayed to count him as only a leading figure among cosmic heretics, other than as
their raison d'etre. Those who thought such "evils" were evicted, like the Talbotts, or dropped
out, like Stecchini and Bill Mullen. Only Deg, I must say, pushed over the years for an opening
up to the world, and only once did what seemed like an awful break occur, which lasted for a
couple of days. Then the British began to skirmish, and opened up frontally with the Glasgow
revisionism; Deg began circulating his own manuscripts and coining doubly heretical terms like
"revolutionary primevalogy;" and ultimately Kronos began to carry non-Velikovskian material and
theory.
Withal Deg could note with interest how in published articles of Kronos and the British Review
and wherever else a piece might appear, the writer would be sure to interject a mention or
quotation from V. in the first paragraphs, as over the years, in American political science
journals, one felt he must refer to the latest book of the "hit parade," one year being the
year to cite V. O. Key on political parties, next year David Truman on political processes,
then Robert Dahl on democratic theory, and so on, or, in a more stable setting, the communist
scientific writers who seem hardly able to put a pen to paper without promptly keying in a
reference to Marx or Engels, no matter what the subject and "the state of the art;" and the
Chinese for a while with Mao, and so on. The issue was not "giving credit where credit is due"
but of political-social game-playing. When a man writes much, he must ultimately mention
everything from sex to the weather, and every phrase can become Biblical in its marvelous
"perceptiveness" and "prophecy."
Deg was not of course alone in detecting this in-gathering effect of fame, as I discerned in
reading the Journal of Andr‚ Gide for 4 February, 1922:
Freud. Freudianism... For the last ten years, or fifteen, I have been indulging in it without
knowing it. Many an idea of mine, taken singly and set forth or developed at length in a thick
book, would have made a great hit -- if only it were the only child of my brain. I cannot
supply the initial outlay and the upkeep for each one of them nor even for any one in
particular.
"Here is something that, I fear, will bring grist to your mill," Riviere said to me the other
day, speaking of Freud's little book on sexual development. I should say!
It would be impossible to carry in any interesting manner an account of Deg's interventions on
V.'s behalf, just as it would be to list Sizemore's multitude of favors. Instances would
include: setting up with John Bell a meeting for V. to address at New York University (Mar. 1,
1968); offering to the President of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia (Feb. 20, 1967) to
take the platform with V., if it was the presentation of "another side" that was truly wanted;
dealing with publishers (Dell, Feb 27, 1968, Simon and Schuster, et al..) to publish more of
V.'s rebuttals of the "establishment;" writing letters to the Editor of Newsweek (May 29, 1968)
and to other media directors; appearing on radio discussions; helping to arrange television
programs; addressing a "Social Order in Science Study Group" at the George Washington
University (Jan. 18, 1965), meanwhile conducting general research in the field and carrying on
another complicated life.
On occasion (rare because his obduracy was known) intimates remonstrated with Deg for spending
too much energy upon V. 's problems. His attitude was typical: give me a better cause in the
intellectual world, a more worthwhile victim; a better archive; most victims are dull, or
psychotic, or trivial... "Think of your own interests," they would say. But that only confused
Deg. He didn't feel actually that he was giving V. so much. His "own interests" were for
affection, good food, good company, sex, beauty, travel, and there seemed a good supply of all
these to be had. As for "other people's interests," he would gladly save the world and did make
a couple of literary stabs in that direction, nor was there any world movement worthwhile; he
tried to save higher education by starting a school. He jumped into the Vietnam vortex but
could do little. He took initiatives to advance his field of learning by inventing a
computerized information retrieval system. Other things as well, such as a stint to help erase
anti-semitic elements in the Catholic rite, offers to reorganize his New York University
department, etc. It was not so easy, I conclude, for him to have found a better cause. Recall
it was the "richness" of V.'s materials that attracted Deg, and allowed the science of
sociology and the history of science to progress.
Let me dip into his journal to see what was up otherwise. On March 8, 1968 is an entry that
combines food, presidential politics, Vietnam, economic development, the arts, and religion:
Lunched 1-3 pm with Rod Rockefeller at "Pireaus, My Love," rolled lamb and stuffed flounder in
a second floor saloon lined with portholes. Decided:
1) We might set up a company to study possibilities of large-scale condominium conversions of
slum properties. I'll form a committee.
2) It would be well to set up a committee of ten for Nelson R. for President among scholars and
from that I might send a larger mailing to the 15,000 political scientists of the country, and
then all the other fields.
3) IBEC would be interested in VN if United Fruit could come along and develop the economic
output of a new city. [Deg was pushing to create a new city in Vietnam.] We'll see what Julian
Turner [U. S. Army Colonel, formerly logistics chief in Vietnam] has to say next week when he
comes from Fort Lewis.
4) The fine arts corporation and antique properties holding corporation can be gotten to
whenever the means and times are right.
5) We'll try to get the National Council of Churches to do a practical and strong job of
handling its 3-year program on the social responsibilities of corporations.
I scarcely need say that none of this succeeded, but perhaps it goes to show how Greek cuisine
can help to vent hopeful dreams. Every now and then the two men would lunch together and
concoct schemes that didn't seem to go far beyond the lunch table. Deg stopped seeing Rod
without saying anything because when the big crunch descended with the school in Switzerland,
Rod gave a mere $100 to the cause. They were used to dividing their lunch bills; this Swiss
fare was too exotic for Rod to share.
The same night, he was writing a poem on the train:
How many Fridays we thanked for not being Mondays, wish we life away so. Draw back all those
weeks, dear breath, into the fresh lungs of youth and fill them with the best of life, skimmed
of complications, Humpty Dumpty splatted where he fell and tra la la la for him.
Just a dog lying in the sun Waters creeping up a beach A long walk to nowhere An enthusiastic
argument A book on the wide harmless world. No riotous shocks and jolts but sweet time, soft
time fall stilly, pass gently around our retracements drink long and cool wet and stretch these
cords from Monday to Friday. Will the little god to rest and give the big one a chance to work.
Some of the life he was leading in these years is reflected in the following letter from Naxos
to Dr. Zvi Rix of Jerusalem, dated July 19, 1976:
Dear Dr. Rix: Greetings! I hope my letter finds you well -- and not too impatient with your
friends and colleagues of the field of revolutionary primevalogy. I have settled down in Naxos
for a few weeks (until August 15), after visits in London, Amsterdam, Delft, Dusseldorf,
Dornach (the Rudolf Steiner Center), Athens, and Thera Santorini. On the 15th of August, I go
to Athens, the Dordogne (to spend two weeks around the caves and digs), Nice for the IX
International Congress of the Union of Pre-and Proto-Historical Sciences, and then probably
straight back to NYC and Princeton. I have been carrying your letter of April 2 (terrible!)
with me for months. Let me "respond" to it.
1) As I have said, you only need a) to be able to come and b) to find out whether I am here, to
come to Naxos as my guest any time.
2) If you ask him, Sizemore will probably duplicate for you a set of the Glassboro papers,
which I see are beginning to appear in Kronos.
3) Did I send you the "Jupiter and Saturn" piece? No! I have searched my folders here and,
alas, I must have given the copy I had carried with me for you to somebody in the English group
(I become generous and present-oriented under the influence of good company and whiskey). I
will send it to you when I return; it is only a brief piece with a well-phrased hypothetical
formula.
4) Did your piece not appear or is it not promised for publication in Kronos? (I have no copy
of the Birthday Symposium myself.)
5) Your "psycho-politics" was gratefully received and read by my seminar at NYU.
6) I wish it were as easy (cf. your compliment re my article on Michelson's Moonshine) to set
up our own elaborated time frame and scheme for myth analysis as it is to knock down those set
up by others.
7) The model for the new Holocene that I set up views it as an age of the "Unsettling of Heaven
and Birth of Man," the age of catastrophes, using Greco-Roman terminology: Urania, 14,000-
11,500 (BP 2000 AD); Lunia, 11,500-8000; Saturnia, 8000-5700; Jovea, 5700-4400; Mercuria 4400-
3450; Venusia, 3450-2750; Martia, 2750-1600; Solaria, 1600-0. The greatest catastrophes
occurred with the birth of the Moon from the Pacific Ocean ca 11500 for much crust was lost as
the larger element of outer planets (Uranus-Neptune, etc. possibly) passed closely and the
water canopies fell cataclysmically. The scheme appears too radical at first sight, but in
hundreds of pages of working back and forth logically and with the scraps of available
evidence, it seems to hold together. I propose it in order that we may begin to fit in all of
the scattered pieces of myth, evolution, paleontology, behavior. Whenever the exposition is
ready I shall send it to you.
7a) as for the dynamics of the birth of Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis, I have at least a
pamphlet nearing reproduction on the subject and will send you that too. I shall try to find H.
Gunkel's book; thank you. 8) I do have access to the sourcebooks that Corliss is publishing on
ancient riddles and reports. I agree with you that St. Brendan-Quetzalcoatl follows a universal
pattern; the ultimate problem is to fix the first age (Urania?) of the practice of these rites
and to show how they emerged from the brain (double-brain?) of the new homo sapiens
schizotypicalis cum geo-celestial terrors.
In the sourcebooks that you mention (Corliss') did you remark upon the vitrified Scottish
forts? I am going into this matter now. This seems to be lightning, and on a grand scale, i. e.
the protracted withdrawal or rush of charge from the Earth via the most convenient modes of
exit towards an accumulated and approaching extraterrestrial charge (opposite). Hypothesis: at
a certain point in time (Mercuria?), thousands of points of Earth were mobilized to discharge
electricity (cf. my article on Troy IIg, which might be synchronized with the vitrification
found in many places). Query: does the Tower of Babel case belong here? Did the languages of
man disperse in shocked amnesiac behavior? Do the ziggurats and pyramids evidence Vitrification
or an intent to facilitate (ex post facto) future current-flows? (Troy IIg is in pyramid-
building times.) Note Mercurial qualities? When did Hermes flourish as a god? (under overall
aegis of Zeus, perhaps). If people on an eminence feel current starting to flow, they get out
before the heavy scorching from the heavier flow occurs. Are there vitrified eminences and
walls, mid-3rd millennium, in the ruins of your area ? Perhaps, and even probably, this
phenomenon, like quakes, flood fire, whirlwinds, occurs whenever a major extra-terrestrial
approach or major planet disruption occurs.
A young Dutch geologist, Poul Andriessen, is here in Naxos drawing samples for 40K-40A tests,
that he performs himself. We've spent many hours discussing the validity of the technique.
There are serious questions that he admits, although he defends the results of his other
radiochronometries. It is all so difficult, a seemingly endless set of important problems
concerning which one must make up his mind.
But enough for now. The sea is too rough for swimming -- or at least it is not inviting, so I
shall drive my motorcycle into town and see what the tavernas are offering by way of food and
company.
With best wishes, I remain, sincerely, Alfred de Grazia
Then years later, he lies in Stylida with a broken leg (the motorcycle, of course):
June 7, 1978
Foot swollen and aching this morning. Big discussion with A. M. as to cause of this "relapse."
she saying my walking upon it caused it, I saying that it may be the normal effects of
stressing the foot in order to get the cartilage, foot bones, muscles, tendons articulating
properly. I confess, though, to a certain worry from the beginning of the case: that everything
inside was thoroughly disarranged, apart from the broken bones, and may be difficult to reorder
functionally. But, too, I took a long swim and that, plus walking, has markedly tightened the
muscles of the calf. Wouldn't the stretch pain the tendons?
Reading in Velikovsky's Peoples of the Sea to recheck whether he had separated sufficiently the
Egyptians' "Peoples of the Sea" from those "Peoples" alleged to be destructive elsewhere at the
same time, I find that he has not and I should one day pursue the idea that "Peoples" fiction
served to cover up the Martian catastrophes of the 8th and 7th century, 3-400 years before the
time of which Velikovsky writes.
But the force of his arguments makes me yearn to circularize a brief questionnaire among all
Egyptologists asking whether they have read the book and whether the hypothesis of Ramses III
being of the 4th century is at all useful or defensible. I believe that the results would be
scandalous.
Stylida evening 17 June 1978 A Swede dropped in unexpectedly. His friend is interested in
buying into my land. He stayed a few minutes and left. Ami rode into town with him and brought
back food and mail and news. Then we swam. I continued to hack my way with a hand ax down the
bluff and back up again, as I had begun the other day. It was easier, the footholes more
prominent. I slung a rope around the bush and dangled it down to steady me on the crawl up.
There were 30 pieces of mail of which 2 were for Ami, one rejecting "nicely" her second novel
(really the fourth she has written) and the other from a journalist who compares her in a
review with Anais Nin. I received a rejection of my elaborate request for a grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities; for various reasons, I don't mind this. It's already an
article or two on the "Ballroom of the Unconscious." [It is carried in The Burning of Troy.] I
wanted the money to live on and to employ Ami who knows the literature so well, supposing that
other means of subsistence don't come in.
Of the force that moves this varied activity through the years, there is more than a hint in a
note of Deg's Journal, undated but apparently of 1973, the more interesting in view of the
massive narcissism that has been ascribed to V.
Ten years ago I was induced by L. Stecchini to gaze upon the writings of I. V., catalyzed by an
accidental reading of Oedipus and Akhnaton. This led up many different paths of philosophy and
science, which I would not have had the courage or confidence to undertake, if I had not been a
victim of the magnificent arrogance of R. M. Hutchins whose New Plan and own spirit of it had
pervaded the University of Chicago with an idea that man, even in this age of specialization
and seemingly endless data banks, could and must master a survey of all knowledge to be
educated. This happened twenty-four years beforehand.
But this would not have been enough if there had not been sixteen years before a narcissistic
bending of my character in infancy and childhood, a fierce desire to keep the world in all its
forms within me (to own the world) and a fierce competitiveness toward all others to enter it
upon my own terms.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOUR
A PROPER RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY
In the summer of 1971, Deg led a party of 300 persons, with many camp followers, up the Swiss
Alps to found a college and V. came later to teach. It did not take V. long to perceive that Deg
was continually in danger of falling victim to a human landslide that Deg's own explosive force
had set into motion. When it came to V.'s turn to speak to the representative assembly, a
beautiful contrivance of Deg which, like the French revolutionary assembly of 1789, had gone
wild, V. called up Freud's Totem and Taboo and gravely admonished the respectful group of the
danger that lay in killing their father. Deg felt embarrassed while dutifully thanking V. for
his remarks, for he was a staunch republican who had always disbelieved in patriarchal
leadership systems and because many of the college crowd would be all the more delighted if they
could rid themselves of their father as well as a leader, killing two birds with one stone.
"I, an octogenarian," said V., "stride with the young of mind. There is no cult of Velikovsky:
there is only the cult of scientific and historical truth. The youths sense this, and the
rebellion against the pseudoscience taught from the cathedrals of the universities is not for
away."
V. to Princeton Graduate Forum (Oct. 18, 1972): "Nineteen years ago I called the young... to
look for new vistas, not to be afraid of calumny and name-calling. Today I repeat my call; it's
a new generation. I call you to cross the barriers between sciences... My work is not finished
... It is in your hands. It is up to you to decide if you wish to repeat what the authorities
told you or to become authorities yourselves --to grow and to be non-conformists and to take
abuse and to be exonerated some day. So be courageous and don't be afraid." If V. had been given
a son, he would have wanted him to be like the astronomer, Carl Sagan, but of course, in
agreement with his ideas. Being what he was and the times being what they were, he was probably
lucky to have no son. Rare these days is the child who adopts the father's views or even defends
him. When V. and Sagan were appearing on the same platform at a AAAS meeting in San Francisco, V
invited Sagan to his room, and there sought, if not to persuade him of his ideas, to influence
and neutralize him, perhaps in a way to hypnotize him. Sagan only redoubled his criticisms as a
result; the attempt to make a son of him back-fired. Sagan regularly lectured against Velikovsky
in his classes and published repeatedly his essay that was said to finish him off.
Still Sagan could invest himself with V.'s claims, and probably (though he would not meet with
me to talk about such matters) he was convinced that the father was well dead and gone and was
terrified at the feeling that V. now wished to be patriarch to him. Interviewed by Richard Baker
on BBC 4 (radio) "Start the Week," 30 March 1983, he was asked, along with other guests, "the
moment in your life that you've been most pleased about?" Sagan talked of the, "delightful
moments" when his predictions about planets were borne out by space vehicles on the spot.
Pressed for a "particular discovery," he replied "Well, the discovery that the surface of Venus
is extremely hot, about 380 deg-C, [Actually it is much higher] and produced by a massive
atmosphere Greenhouse Effect that keeps the heat in..." The second is a dubious theory, not at
all original with him.
That he could claim the first can most charitably be regarded as a slip of the tongue, such as
Sigmund Freud describes; inadvertent and often embarrassing utterances, they are usually
prompted by a strong suppressed desire of the speaker to make a point otherwise prohibited by
rules, morals, or truth. Sagan, one might surmise, let the claim slip out as an expression of
general megalomania, but the particular claim, out of all those he might have thought of,
strikes at V.'s well-established claim of predicting the high heat of Venus. There is here a
hint of psychological pressure working to take for his own specifically the property of the
father. V. was fixated on authority, the higher the better: he sought out acquaintances and
enemies on high levels. But he did not gather intelligent up-coming young people until late in
life; he has written a book on his conversations with Einstein, yet he would never have dreamed
of writing a book of his immensely richer conversations with Juergens about electricity and
Stecchini on ancient languages and the history of science. Why? Because they were unknown. His
idea of arrival was naive. The great ones would recognize him on the basis of his books. The
young would come along, following what their teachers say. Until late in life, he had no idea of
the striking fact of intellectual history, that most geniuses and heretics start out young.
At any given moment in time, Harvard University is likely to have a couple of pets of the
communists. It's a gimcrack impeccability. Harlow Shapely was one of these -- and, of course, a
great deal more, too much more, member and officer of dozens of scientific associations,
Director of the Lowell observatory, and more still. In poking about, Deg discovered that he had
even once invoked exoterrestrial forces to explain terrestrial phenomena.
Well, V. had thought, a man so broad in his interests and tastes would welcome a helping hand to
apply legends to astronomy. V. was anticommunist and had been so since the earliest successes of
the Russian Bolshevist movement had not gone so far as to efface anti-semitism in Russia. The
authoritarian aspects of communism, or statism in general, did not faze him. Principles of
government were foreign to him, a sharp contrast to Deg, who was continuously seeking better
designs for human institutions. To V., governments and men were bad or good. The Soviet leaders
were bad because they acted badly. Nor should persons be forgiven evil because of the pressure
of circumstances. How he would love to live quite without compromises!
The only dispute in connection with Deg's article on "The Reception System of Science" of the
ABS issue occurred over his mentioning V.'s "respect for authority." Deg told him of the
expression, "the Cabots speak only to the Lodges and the Lodges speak only to God." His response
was not to reform, but to try more of it: he writes Deg a few months later that he knows that he
is speaking like a Cabot but would Deg support him in his efforts to bring the prestigious
figure of Lord Bertrand Russell over to his side?
V. was on a collision course with himself. He practiced on Aristotle, Newton and Darwin,
numerous 19th century writers and then on current authorities, but impersonally and only with
the slightest irony, in a situation calling for broad sarcasm.
He thought of himself as an authority but did not realize that he was undermining present
authorities and that they would react as authorities invariably do, by putting him down. But,
then, he was a poor sociologist. Like many a psychoanalyst (and most scientists for that matter)
he barely realized that the field existed.
He was flabbergasted when his Worlds in Collision was attacked so vigorously and then each
succeeding book was treated the same, dismissed, or ignored. It was all the more shocking
because Worlds was a best-seller, which brought popular authority into play as well. Here both
V. and many of his followers showed themselves unwitting victims of the market place in ideas.
They did not suspect success. Deg whose life had begun early to forge a chain of successes, had
contempt for success. The concatenation of any man's successes was but a motley cluster of
medals on the breast of the generalissimo of a banana republic. V. was unhappy with the support
he received. It seemed that he would get agreement and aid from exactly those sources that he
did not himself respect while being rebuffed by those who should flock to his banner. One had to
be an anti-authoritarian to support him, but such were rarely to be found in physics, biology,
astronomy and geology. Passive anti-authoritarians, yes, often erupting in personal
eccentricity. Anthropology - but he knew little besides Freud's work on anthropology. Psychology
-- again the psychoanalytic approach, not tight empirical psychology.
So he got support from people who usually were just plain folks, intelligent (and therefore I
say rare) readers, and a great many confused believers, or at least people who V. at bottom
thought had no right to pass judgment on him. Like Moses, V spent a lot of private time
disliking his People. Like the barons of the Magna Carta, he wanted judgment by his peers,
meaning not the worthy or those not yet ennobled, but "the peers of the realm."
Perhaps Oedipus and Akhnaton should have been entitled "The Oedipus Complex Unmasked," or "The
Jews were First with God," V. enjoyed thinking about title and slogans. Deg and he would spent
some off-track moments in such half-serious play. V.'s titles were exceptionally effective:
Worlds in Collision, Ages in Chaos, Earth in Upheaval, and so were most of the titles of
sections of his works: thus in Oedipus and Akhnaton there were "The Sphinx," "The Seven-Gated
Thebes and the Hundred-Gated Thebes," "A Stranger on the Throne," "King living in Truth," "The
King's Mother and Wife," and so on.
When Deg, six years after they had met, presented him with The Torrid Love Affair of Moon and
Mars, he had to have explained to him the Hollywood Americanism of "Torrid Love Affair" and
liked the double entendre with the heat of a cosmic encounter, but then eventually preferred The
Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, which denoted, if not heat, a cosmic event and
catastrophe.
Later on, still, he could let himself like Chaos and Creation, and even Homo Schizo, but would
not let himself contemplate Moses and His Electric God, but this was part of another matter, his
taboo of Moses.
"You will damage me with this book." he declared solemnly to Deg, Since Deg made no reference to
V.'s idea of Moses in God's Fire, which V. had not seen anyhow, and since V. had damaged the
reputation of thousands of scholars "in the line of duty," he must have been gripped by an
illusion that referred to an entirely personal problem of his own in regard to Moses. What could
it have been?
Martin Sieff, a Belfast Anglo-Irish-Jewish journalist and historian --one of the cosmic heretics
-- spoke out in 1981 about the taboo: "The role of Moses is strangely muted in Worlds in
Collision. Moses is mentioned only in connection with the voice of Yahweh at the flaming bush
and the trumpet blasts of Sinai." Further, "in Ages in Chaos, one major figure who is obvious in
his absence from the same historical canvas, is that same Moses."
Again significantly, the ideas behind -- not up front -- in Oedipus and Akhnaton were
instrumental in the creation of works. V. admitted, "This study carried me into the larger field
of Egyptian history and to the concept of Ages in Chaos, a reconstruction of 1200 years of
ancient history... More than eighteen years passed from the conception of the work and the first
draft of its re-writing and preparation for the printer."
Moses was taboo to V., a subject to be turned from and skirted around, except to show that Moses
came before Akhnaton and that Freud was fearful yet adulatory of Moses. Even while railing
against Freud's problem with his father, V. may have seen himself as Moses and son of Moses,
down the line of succession that began with Joshua. "Velikovsky," said Livio to Deg, as they
walked down the street after their first meeting with him, "will be the only man who can play
Moses when they make a movie of his book." And he guffawed in his basso profondo.
We have, that is, two plots in Oedipus and Akhnaton. One is the classic scientific method and
detective work. The other is the intensely private psychic world of a man whose biological
father was a strong and beloved figure, Simon, and whose intellectual father, Freud, had
weaknesses that must be exposed, offenses against his people for wishing to abandon them for the
gentile world and for taking away and making an Egyptian of their common ancestor, Moses.
Before coming to America, V. had, in one of his few published articles, reanalyzed the dreams of
Freud that were available and concluded that Freud was torn by a desire to assimilate to the
gentile world. V. would have none of this. While Freud would make the Jews into gentiles, V
would make the gentiles into Jews.
Here I would quote Martin Sieff who is talking about V.'s article "The Dreams Freud Dreamed"
(1941).
Velikovsky was now using the psychoanalytic weapon his intellectual father had forged against
his own creator, against Freud himself... Velikovsky went further. The initial aim of his
research finally to emerge over twenty years later as Oedipus and Akhnaton, was to kill the
Freudian father dragon in its lair. Akhnaton, the first monotheist in history, stood revealed as
Oedipus. Freud's arch-saint turns out also to be his arch-sinner... Velikovsky dedicated Ages in
Chaos to his physical father, but sought to erase the name of Freud, his intellectual father,
with his Oedipus and Akhnaton.
At the same time, V. could not go to great lengths in redeeming Moses, the father, without
incurring the danger of displaying that he himself felt the strength and mission of Moses, and
that he resembled Michelangelo's "Moses" more than the other son Freud did, who went to Rome to
worship the statue. Worse yet, he, too, like Freud, would have to dispossess Moses if he wrote
about him, for how could a psychoanalyst have perceived Moses except as a hallucinator and
manipulator of crowds? And then what of Yahweh? Au revoir, Adonis.
That V. was not Moses, did not pretend to be, and even denied it by refusing the question of
"Who was Moses?" are not superfluous remarks. To many of his readers and followers he was a
Moses of modern science and history. To himself he was one who had all that Moses possessed
except the opportunity. Deg tended to agree and he had studied many men, but he was not the most
devout of followers. Aside from possessing his own conceits, he did not like Moses' theocracy,
nor his ambitions, nor his ruthlessness, nor his religious deception even if it was founded upon
self-deception.
V. differed from his secret idol by more than he himself realized and Deg liked him better for
it. If a friend, like Mel Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton University, would say to
him, as he did on the train to New York one time, I can't stand him, he's an arrogant, egomaniac
bastard, Deg would grin tolerantly and say: "I understand what you mean, but he's not all that
bad, and where do you find such minds?"
Come to think of it, this was more or less what Einstein said to an antagonist, Bernard Cohen,
when asked about Velikovsky. Referring to Worlds in Collision, he laughed and said, "It's crazy,
but it's not bad." V. could be riled up invariably by the mention of this story, and he explains
carefully in Stargazers and Gravediggers how it was wrongly told and was used to destroy his
precious relationship with Einstein, and what he conceived to be Einstein's true view and mood,
and I agree with him, and so does Deg.
In this connection, a private note that Deg made in May of 1972 may be offered for what it is
worth:
I have been present on numerous occasions when V. was under pressure to be intellectually and
politically dishonest. I would say he passed practically all of these tests with flying colors.
The rare exceptions have practically all to do with pretending to have supporters among the
authorities who did not support him so strongly. Explain. When you compare his conduct with that
of scientists who had no reason to be unscrupulous, because they were already entrenched or in
process of achieving established rank, he stands out like a rose from a manure pile.
Because his manner and figure were impressive and imperative, V. seems to have encouraged
subconsciously the awesome stupidity of attacks upon himself. Opponents became reckless out of
threat, losing their capacity to reason precisely at the moment when they were being called upon
to be reasonable. This is a behavioral pattern that I take pride in having newly discovered,
because Deg nor anyone else to my knowledge has ever mentioned it. Let me give an example:
In Ages in Chaos, V. took away five centuries that did not belong to Egyptian history, whereas
in Peoples of the Sea V. took away three centuries that did belong to Egypt, at least according
to Deg, who was siding with the "Glasgow Revisionists." One could not follow this important
development from a reading of the great newspapers or the scholarly journals. The New York Times
did carry a review of the latter work, antagonistic as expected, but quite irrelevant to the
issue. Arthur Isenberg, an Israeli writer, addressed a reproach to the Times editor, containing
inter alia a neat statistical reprimand for Thomsen's snide remark about V. 's supposed
overdoing of "the first person perpendicular."
17 July 1977
The Editor, New York Times Book Review Section The New York Times 229 West 43rd street New
York, N. Y. 10036 (U. S. A.)
To the Editor: In his reply to his critics, Dietrick Thomsen is ever more unconvincing then in
his (highly!) original review of Dr. Velikovsky's "Peoples of the Sea". He begins by
patronizingly awarding unsolicited certificates to some of those who take Velikovsky's book more
seriously than he does: They are "fine and intelligent people, and they raise cogent points"
which --alas! -- "lack of space" prevents Thomsen from refuting. Next, he concedes that "in many
points" Velikovsky "may be correct", an acknowledgment which he repeats (in spite of space
limitations) a paragraph later. But then he dilutes the concession by means of a peculiar
definition of science as a "set of mind" which, he implies, Velikovsky does not exhibit. His
major objection it seems, is to the tone of Velikovsky's book --as if scientific theories should
be judged by connoisseurs of tone and style to determine their adequacy.
Tone apart, he faults Velikovsky for overdoing the use of the pronoun "I" (the "first person
perpendicular" as Thomsen quaintly calls it.). This prompted a little research on my own part,
with the following results:
No. of Times I is used in 100 Author Short Title consecutive pages
Darwin Origin of Species 153
Hoyle Nature of the Universe 116
Einstein Relativity 60
Eddington New Pathways in Science 191
Tinbergen Herring Gull's World 161
Von Frisch Bees, Their Vision, etc. 132
Velikovsky Peoples of the Sea 8
(total "I" count for the entire book, xvi-261 page: 32)
(My counting was done hurriedly: the actual figures are likely to be somewhat larger in all
cases: Thomsen is welcome to a recount.)
A grand egotist like V. rarely lets his third person slip uncontrolled into the first person,
whatever the provocation. In fact, he slips into the third person, as V. sometimes did, talking
of himself as "Velikovsky."
Later on, Thomsen, the reviewer, defended himself in a letter to Clark Whelton. He was furious
at the impossible task set for him by the Times, and for bizarre editorial cuts.
What I have tried to express here is that somehow the figure of V made people lose their senses
and self-control; rages collected and rushed about like the winds when released from the bag of
Aeolus.
V. moved to Princeton from Upper Manhattan in 1952; Deg moved there from Stanford, California,
in 1957. Five blocks apart, it took five years to meet, a block a year, so to speak. Deg was
deeply involved in New York City and travelled sometimes to Washington. V. spent these years in
secluded study, with his wife and his daughter's family for company, his wife's musical ensemble
to listen to, several meetings with Harry H. Hess, and some conversations with Albert Einstein.
He did not attend conventions, or review other people's books; he did not join the network of
science, but then how could he? There was no science of neo-catastrophism. He might have joined
associations of ancient history, anthropology, philosophy and history of science, though; he did
not, wisely, for he was interested in a peculiar combination, unrecognizable, except in its bits
and pieces, in conventional programs of the associations. He was a special case; he would have
it no other way; he wanted to sit above all of them and receive their respect. But the ideas of
an authority and heretic may be contradictory. To be a heretic is to be opposed to established
authority. If V. could not be an authority, he would be a heretic. His true heroes were top
authorities; his professed heroes were heretics. There were three of these, he would say to Deg.
One was Diego Pirez, also known as Schlmo Molcho. A second was Giordano Bruno. A third was
Miguel Serveto (or Michael Servetus). Deg's heroes were many; he was more polytheistic, so to
speak, or even antireligious. They ranged from Jesus of Nazareth to Benjamin Franklin. They
would include in the Church-dominated Middle Ages William of Occam, for he was an empiricist,
nominalist, anti-Aristotelian libertarian who believed that words signified only real things and
events, who taught also that reason could only arrive at valid comment when talking of the real
world, not the divine, which only faith could attain (thus non-religious matters were freed from
church control). Occam's principle, Occam's Razor, prefers to cope with problem using the fewest
possible functions and terms, so therefore Deg would feel that his simple quantavolutionary
model, Solaria Binaria to begin with, and all that spewed therefrom, was in the great tradition
of the Razor.
But William was beset by the authorities, convicted of heresy, and so fled to the safety of the
Emperor's jurisdiction. His influence carried down the years, and of course all who were tinged
with his notions felt the hostility of authority, such as the Sorbonne Professor Jean Buridan
who around 1358 was drowned (not burned) and was celebrated by the allegory of "Buridan's Ass,"
that starved to death because it could not decide which of two bundles of wheat to eat; the same
Buridan, too, revived in the song of the student-brigand-poet FranHois Villon, who in turn
should have been "sanctified" as heretical hero by the student radicals of the 1960's, but was
somehow overlooked.
But Deg found heroes wherever he had gone throughout life, in India, Turkey, Italy, England,
Hawaii and so on -- never mind the war heroes who were glosses on the immense rainbow of heroes
--and heroines, because he found that heroism came more naturally and frequently to women.
Whenever one studies leadership -- the movement of events, whether political or intellectual,
one must first carefully dissever fame from achievement. He wrote about heroes in one of his
poems, contained in Passage of the Year, the poetry which he published in 1967, where he said
... I shall never
never understand
why famous names are worshipped
and writers wear their pens to nubbins on them.
When they are nothing
while the great ones bump
our elbows and disappear in the crowd.
"Wait!" "Hold on!"
I call after them
and they don't even turn around.
They are vanished, they are dust.
No cast of bronze contains them.
One of Deg's unsung heroes would have been the man whose name I forget (naturally), the English
amateur of eoliths whose protests, if harkened to rather than ridiculed, would have made the
Piltdown hoax impossible. But I would not detract one whit from V.'s heroes.
Schlmo Molcho was a Kabbalist and pseudo-messiah, a Catholic convert who reverted to Judaism.
Around 1529 he began to believe he was the Messiah, and Pope Clement VII granted him protection.
In 1531 he was denounced, tried and condemned to burn; he was saved by the Pope and another man
burned in his place. He began to counsel the Emperor Charles V but was denounced and burned at
the stake in 1532 after refusing to recant and reconvert to Christianity.
Miguel Serveto (Michael Servetus) was a true Renaissance figure who discovered the pulmonary
circulation system, was the originator of the science of comparative geography, and was a
defender of free thought and free speech. He intimated that Christ was only human, and in his
writings on Christianity preserved nothing that was merely traditional and dogmatic. Arrested in
Vienne, France, and condemned for heresy, he escaped but strangely entered Geneva, heading for
Italy, and was caught. All the Swiss protestant cantons were consulted and returned a
recommendation that he be punished for blasphemy. Calvin, however, hated him and insisted that
he be burned at the stake for heresy, for he refused to retract his dislocation of the elements
of the Trinity, his argument against the validity of infant baptism, and his denial of original
sin. He died on October 27, 1553.
Giordano Bruno began his career as Dominican philosopher but was accused of heresy. He managed
to teach at universities of several nations and wrote copiously in metaphysics, with excursions
into satire and poetry. Finally, after fifteen years of work and wandering, he came into Venice,
where he was seized, convicted of heresy, sent to Rome, and, after prolonged imprisonment,
burned at the stake in 1600. Intensely anti-dogmatic, he propounded the infinity of worlds, the
pantheism of matter, and the relativity of man's position in the universe.
V. seems to have put the cart before the horse: one did not need to be burned at the stake to be
a heretic or a hero. And a great many heretics of history escaped the fate intended for them.
Often there are ages where heretics are ignored and tolerated, as in North America and Western
Europe, when practically all forms of dissent, even against the heads of state and the forms of
government, except when expressed as deadly terrorism, escape severe physical sanctions. The
relativity of values and practices in the "advanced" democracies of today is such that almost no
definition of heresy is operative.
Notably, V.'s heretical heroes were long dead. He said once, in criticizing the magazine Pens‚e
and a foundation that were working to help him, and speaking to Milton, Rose, and Wolfe, that he
did not "wish, well, to carry the banners for all heretics." Waiting as he was for designation
to the top rank of authorities, he meant to be wary of association with any contemporary
heretic.
Deg only half listened to V.'s litany of his heroes' lives and virtues. V. would never say what
really fascinated him in the human characters of these men. His was hardly the depth analysis
that one might expect from a psychoanalyst. Indeed -- and this must seem exceedingly strange to
those who did not know him -- he almost never analyzed public figures of even those who were in
controversy with him. He accepted them, as if they were rational creatures and their justness or
unjustness was simply a matter of fact. So it was almost always Deg who was suggesting and
proposing motivations and characteristics while V. seemed to regard his opponents (and friends)
as unidimensional, almost as automatons.
In this way, and others, V.'s mind and character were Mosaic and Old Testament. He did not even
consider himself a member of the British Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, founded to
pursue work very much along his lines. Nor did he regard his tamer organ, Kronos magazine, as
part of himself. He consented to lecture at Deg's college in the Valaisan Alps of Switzerland
one summer, but he would not go and return with the chartered aircraft carrying students and
faculty, so that Deg had to authorize expensive tickets by way of Swissair. (But possibly it was
not out of snobbery or comfort, but rather that the airline was Germany's Lufthansa.)
He was absolutely unwilling to give anyone the slightest authority over himself. He never worked
for anyone; he could barely tolerate cooperating with anyone. He had a striking inability to
identify with people. He did not like to be compared with anyone alive and once exploded
publicly in cutting anger when Professor Warwick, in an attempt at a supportive speech, not only
seemed to make light of his claims to discovery, but dared to compare his own treatment as a
doctoral student by V.'s foes of the Harvard Astronomy faculty with V.'s treatment by the same
people.
This continual insistence upon treating any offensive or belittling gesture towards himself as a
major event, a casus belli, was the facade of his immense egocentrism, perhaps of the very
narcissism which, in psychoanalytic practice, he claimed, must be the first region of the
unconscious to be plumbed. Again one thinks of Moses, who looked upon all opposing thoughts and
practices as actions against Yahweh. But V. never called in God as lawgiver, witness, judge, or
executioner. He was all of these, or all of these except the last, which he left to his
supporters, and was so in the name of the rational authority of the system of science, an
abstract authority, not people so much as principles, not realistic principles, but ideal
principles. He expected nothing less than ideal justice.
The kind of offenses that were committed against him were commonplace in science, as in every
other field of human activity. But none dared tell him so for if such were proclaimed, the game
would be up and all the cosmic heretics of the Velikovsky camp would have to strike camp and
retire. Friends left him from time to time, tiring of the game. Even if one brought up an
equally nasty case, he would become suspicious that his own demand-level might be threatened.
This is certainly narcissistic behavior.
Often V. would protest that he had never behaved ad hominem towards his critics. How could they
be so personal, aggressive and vile? He said that they were incorrect, wrong, and at worst,
uniformitarian in their thinking. Hardly the invective of a mighty warrior -- which he was.
But there was many another to do this job for him, and no strong or foolish critic ever escaped
the lash of letters and articles from his supporters. This would be done at his urging or with
his blessing. They were usually appropriate, to the point, deserved -- but excessive. None could
recall an instance when V. pulled back the reins on his steeds. He usually was playing out the
reins, and slapping them; many could recall instances when V. felt that a case being made on his
behalf was not forceful enough.
But why did V. maintain personally so proper a language and bearing towards scientists and
publicists who were terming him a charlatan, a crackpot, a novice, and more? Partly, it was
strategy: to be above the battle, to be insulted without descending to their level of
retaliation. He was also restrained by his ultimate conservatism with regard to authority.
Authorities might, unfairly, unjustly, without provocation, drag him through the mire, but he
could not let himself do the same to them. He could unleash his minions to do so, however, and
they did.
This is an achievement of a great leader -- to be above the battle and yet direct it, to not
lose one's dignity in a thicket of passionate verbiage, to be excommunicated and martyred
without descending to the level of his opponents. At Lethbridge University, in the prairie of
the oil-rich province of Alberta, Canada, a conference on V.'s ideas was held in 1974 and Deg
flew in for the event. There turned up a local professor, a German named Muller, who came down
heavily upon V. in the local newspaper, and V. was outraged. He turned to his largest artillery
piece to blast Muller. He would not appear at the next meeting. "You can do it," he said to Deg
as he lay sulking in his tent like Achilles, "no one else is strong enough." So Deg departed
from the hotel room where V. and Elisheva rested, and, when the appropriate moment came, took
the floor, Muller at the rostrum, and denounced the newspaper article and impugned Muller's
general competence. Deg was not especially happy at becoming a petty hero. Muller was
unlikeable, true enough, and had the temerity to imply that V. was converting ethnic pride into
an historical reconstruction, the type of remark that Germans had been scrupulously and
correctly leaving non-Germans to make since World War II. Yet, when it appeared that Muller was
excessively disliked, and on his way to becoming a whipping-boy, Deg felt sorry for the person,
a feeling that returned a couple of years later when the same Muller was murdered by a jealous
colleague on a matter of adultery.
I doubt that Deg bothered to tell V. half the horror-stories he knew of recent academic and
publishing crimes, let alone the sixteenth century heretics. In one case -- it happened to be
his own -- Deg went off to World War II as a co-author and came back to find the book, half of
it his composition, published under a single name, this not his own. "Well I'll be damned!" he
said, when sent a copy of the book, and was soon busy with other matters, nor was his friendship
with his co-author more than temporarily bruised.
More annoying, Deg believed, was a case when his Politics for Better or Worse was published in
1973. Three young women instructors from different universities did a study of textbooks on
American politics to prove how demeaning were their authors toward women, how indifferent, how
ignorant. Then, at the last minute, Deg's book appeared on the market, was snatched up and
thrown into the bonfire in an appendix to the report that they caused to be distributed widely
at the national convention of the American Political Science Association. That is, they
flagrantly lied about, distorted, ignored or did not read the book which, had they known, he had
deliberately planned and executed as a radical exposure of the situation of women and of the
need for reforms leading to sexual equality. When he composed an indignant letter to the
culprits, weeks after the damage was done, he showed it to his learned daughters, Victoria and
Jessica. Their advice: don't get so excited, Daddy! ( How willing are children to sacrifice
their parents!) He wrote a note of gentle chiding and that was the last heard of the matter; not
one of the three responded. I wonder whether he should have introduced a thunderous denunciatory
resolution on the floor of the Convention. After all, his book might have sold tens of thousands
more of copies had it been properly contrasted with other textbooks.
V. could never understand that the crime against him was not horrendous nor uncommon. It was
remarkable in the evidence being so clear and the subject being in principle so important. It
was especially remarkable because he was his own biographer. Every slip of paper -- every insult
and complaint -- was treasured. Since he succeeded in finding a great audience, in publishing
his other works without difficulty, and in attracting to his areas of interest several dozen
excellent scholars (a most rare achievement for even the most famous and successful scientists)
he might just as well have been amused, scornful, and satisfied. Albert Einstein actually wrote
him just this, after reading an account of the insulting opposition to his work: "I would be
happy if you, too, could enjoy the whole episode from its humorous side."
That was asking too much, especially from V. For him only the respectful conversion of heads of
science would suffice. He respected authority and power: therefore only authority could
legitimately crown him. Crowds were fine, because they were pleasing in themselves but always,
too, they were used by him as a measure, such as of the pressure that his views must be exerting
on the experts and unbelievers. Crowds were not authoritative in themselves.
Deg often hinted, remonstrated, and harangued: "You must not pin your hopes on conversion of the
leaders," and would list the reasons why the leader would not budge, the "sunk costs" of their
lives, the unavailability of heavy sanctions against their retaining conventional views, etc.
and sometimes Deg would say: "Tell me if there is a single reason why an establishment leader
should side with you on any controversial point of yours. What's in it for him?" V. would rather
not answer. He realized that he could not say. "Because I am right," although that is what he
would have liked to say. This would betray narcissism.
For over thirty years, V. suffered this situation, in which he was inextricably trapped. Not in
full awareness, not as a strategy --because they could not be fully acknowledged as such -- he
adapted in several way to the implacability of the scholars.
He claimed the understanding and sympathy of the young; uncorrupted by old ideas, they would see
his ideas without prejudice or jealousy. Becoming a champion of youth did not come easily to
him, but it was an acceptable line of public argument, a stereotype of the culture. He was never
an active advocate of the young, certainly not during the critical years of student rebellions.
He diagnosed the problem of the established authorities as "collective amnesia." Again, this
argument came later. Deg does not recall V. having advanced it when in 1963 they had long
conversations on the motivations of his opponents, but the argument is prominent in Mankind in
Amnesia, posthumously published. As we shall see, the concept itself falls into doubt when it is
used without specific valid tests to label or unlabel the behavior of persons or groups.
He watched for, sought to encounter, and carefully tended any maverick from the respectable herd
of scientists. When he learned that an Australian astrophysicist, Bailey, had announced
calculations showing the sun to carry an immense electrical charge, V. corresponded with him,
and hosted him on a visit to Princeton; Bailey received acclaim from the heretic circle that he
could not receive from the scientific world. V. corresponded with and visited Claude Schaeffer
in Europe when he came to read Schaeffer's Stratigraphie Compar‚e, but, as in the case of
Bailey, there was a warmth of shared sentiments without noticeable movements of these men to the
Velikovsky camp. Trainor, Michelson, Santillana, Hadas, Kallen, M. Cook, Sagan, Einstein, Dyson,
Bigelow, Hess, Kaufman, and others were approached, responded in greater or lesser extent and
sympathy, then withdrew to their proper spheres.
Robert H. Pfeiffer, Harvard Semitic Scholar, appears to have accepted V.'s Ages in Chaos,
without carrying out substantial work that his approval might logically have entailed. There was
also in the seventies the category of scholars who were outside of academia, or young, or still
unfulfilled who had, like Deg, entered the full stream of V.'s work, men like Ransom, Milton,
Juergens, Cardona, Sieff, Greenberg, Dave Talbott, Reade, Crew, Rose, James, Lowery, and Gammon.
C. J. Ransom was, V. confided to several supporters, "for a while the only physicist who saw
something in my work and followed it."
The ideal supporter, to V.'s mind, would have been a fully accepting astronomer of renown, who
could announce the success of an indisputable test of a near-encounter of Venus and Earth 3500
years ago. Astrophysicist Robert Bass made an effective sally in the seventies. When two British
astronomers, Clube and Napier, entered wholesale upon V.'s terrain with a model of recent
cometary encounters, they hardly mentioned him. Yet they possessed foreknowledge of his work and
they could have used it legitimately as a foil, contrasting his planetary theory with their own
cometary theory, and accepting openly much of his historical and legendary reconstruction in
place of their own, which was weak. Once more we have an authority problem: though expecting a
spanking, they hoped to avoid a trouncing. They received two spankings, one conventional, the
other heretical; are two spanks less than one trounce?
Actually, when one goes to the heart of the matter, Deg was the only scholar of considerable
previous reputation who accepted most of Velikovsky's work in the natural and historical
sciences, absorbed it, and carried on with it. Most friendly or tolerant scholars of established
reputation acted like a trapeze artist who pauses for a moment on his swing to watch an
especially neat trick being executed by a tightrope walker in the next ring of the circus.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BRITISH CONNECTION
For many years Velikovsky's books had been popular in Britain but his supporters were out of
touch. Recalling the early days. Librarian Brian Moore wrote:
The popular science writers occupy an important place in the communications system which
links the scientist and the public, and they have played a major role in propagating the
unfavorable image of Velikovsky. Having been officially declared a heretic by the scientific
Inquisition, Velikovsky has been handed over to the secular arm of the scientific popularisers
for public torment. Some readers may think this an extravagant metaphor, but any objective
examination of the available evidence on the "Affair" will lead to this conclusion. My own
interest in Velikovsky stemmed in part from the hysterical scientific reaction to his ideas --
a reaction unique in this century when books proposing unorthodox ideas swarm, are ignored and
sink without a trace.
I am led once more to remark upon how vulnerable the public opponents of quantavolution,
particularly of Velikovsky, are made by their arrogant certainty. A full generation of
repetitive experiences has hardly affected their effrontery nor hence mitigated their
discomfiture.
I would point out a feature of the ridicule not elsewhere commented upon. The scientific
community will have its jokes: enough to say "Velikovsky" in a group of scientists and there
would arise that ineffable combination of good humor, snarls, titters, knowing glances, and
intellectual nudging that tie people together, like mention of a joke would other groups:
"Remember the story of Pat and Mike at the wake?" (laughter in the tavern) or "They're
reprinting the Bible in a plain wrapper for the Alabama schools," (giggles), or "Did you see
where Ronald Reagan has gotten the Nobel Peace Prize?" (laughter and snarls). There is comfort,
mutual solace, malice, subconscious fear, a bonding of spirits in possessing a few names to
which phrases and epithets can acceptably be applied.
In these times Deg visited England without knowing Brian Moore or the many others who came
together ultimately and with whom he later associated happily. He would visit old friends from
the Eighth Army of World War II like Rayburn Heycock of the BBC or of politics, like Michael
Fraser, and go about his business. In London on June 16, 1968, he is writing in his journal:
Russell Square is green in the cool of morning and the fountain may be heard to play now that
Sunday has stopped the motors. Four small boys have come out early to play a frightening game
with the taxicabs. They run out in front of them just as the signal light is about to turn
green. They put their faith in accurate timing of machines, just as their elders.
Last night I dreamed that Velikovsky died, and was much disturbed. I wept. I felt there was
terrible loss. He died suddenly, as an old man will. I confessed that I knew nothing, that I
could reconstruct nothing of his work. Just bits and pieces that meant nothing.
It must have come from my walk through the British Museum yesterday afternoon. I read so many
inscriptions, all flatly against his ideas of dates. One bore the suspicious rendering
that I have remarked before -- "Pharaoh 'A' name borne both by 'Q' in the 12th century and 'R'
of the sixth century." The same man with the centuries so wrong?
I searched for Greeks and Assyrians with horned helmets to correspond with those of the
'Peoples of the Sea' whom Velikovsky places with the fourth century Greeks and noticed several
features on statues and vases. Braids that look like horns, short plumes (?); Athena of
Pergamon with two horned projections towards the front of her helmet (baby wings out of a
crown?)
The airplane ride from N. Y. had seemed short to me. Nothing had been fully solved by departure
time -- I left several highly important matters in the hands of other -- collecting my debt
from Simulmatics, the merger of our company PIT with "3is", the contract for my American
government textbooks, the fate on the exhibition to El Arish (permission for which has been
denied by Israel), John's case at court conveniently and perhaps forever postponed and summer
itinerary awry, my contract with Simon and Schuster for both "Republic in
Crisis" and "Velikovsky and his Critics" pending -- but in all cases the formula of the
execution is assigned to someone. [Little did he know, alas, that all would proceed according
to Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will."]
The early 1970's witnessed the founding in England of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies
(SIS), conceived by a gang of four, and on a Halloween night. The first issue of their Review,
later to be attractively printed, was in mimeography and, at that, barely readable, but its
contents were of excellent quality. The founders, and those who signed up, many of them
American, settled into a flexible oligarchy. The dominant members have been, on the whole,
Brian Moore, Malcolm Lowery, Peter James, Harold Tresman, Martin Sieff, Euan McKie, Ralph
Amelan, Geoffrey Gammon, John J. Bimson, Eric Crew, Hyam Maccoby, Michael Reade, Bernard
Newgrosh, and Bernard Prescott, with possibly others, but obviously enough in number to forbid
an easy sociometric diagram of the networks of cross-influencing, not to mention the
differentiation between those who were primarily organizers and those who were intellectual
contributors. With two exceptions, they never met or heard Velikovsky in person, although his
work inspired their organization: by contrast, all of the involved Americans knew him
personally.
The Constitution of the Society adopted in 1978 declared as its principal objectives:
(a) to promote a multi-disciplinary approach to scientific and scholarly problems and in
particular to promote the active consideration by scientists, scholars, and students of
alternatives to the theory of uniformity in astronomy and earth history:
(b) to promote a better understanding of the nature of the earth, the solar system and human
history, through the combined use of historical and contemporary evidence of all kinds, and to
encourage a continuous reassessment of the validity of the basic assumptions of the discipline
concerned by testing these against evidence;
(c) to promote better co-operation between workers in specialized fields of learning in the
belief that isolated study is sterile;
(d) to foster research among scientists and scholars towards achieving these aims.
It was not at all the American condition, where years before, following only upon occasional
bulletins that supporters of V. issued in the 1960's, there came Pens‚e, a production of the
young Talbott brothers, Stephen and David, whose enthusiasm for his work crystallized into a
conversion of their small magazine on human rights into a forum on the Velikovsky Affair, at
least for ten issues. Stephen Talbott was a brilliant editor and organizer, bent upon opening
the world to quantavolutionary ideas, but also to criticism of them. After spectacular
successes, Pens‚e collapsed under a load of debt and overwork. As it was ending, it promised to
broaden its interests beyond Velikovsky and to discuss ideas irreconcilable with his.
V. would have no part of this, and several of his Eastern supporters -- with Lewis Greenberg
and Warner Sizemore leading -- issued the first number of Kronos. Kronos became editorially the
child of Lewis Greenberg, a young art historian of the faculty of Moore College of Art in
Philadelphia. He recruited a group of convinced supporters of V. who contributed articles and
evaluations, and who, being the closest to a prestigious academic group that he could put
together, he should have called "Board of Advisors," but whom he called "Staff," and he set up
grades of Senior Editors, Associate Editors, Contributing Editors, and Staff, hoping to build a
respectable latticework of authority such as is conventional among scientific journals.
Financing, production, and management fell to Warner Sizemore, who, by virtue of his faculty
status at Glassboro State College, was enabled to establish an academic connection for the
journal, a public relations device of no small value for a new review with a disreputable and
controversial perspective in science. Kronos remained essentially and in many details under
V.'s thumb until his death, performing very much the function of Imago for Freud.
This is not to say that the directors of Kronos were uncritical; in the very first issue, Zvi
Rix ventured ominously upon weak points in an article upon the origins of anti-semitism and the
Ankh. They simply had to acknowledge V.'s power, his help, his thesaurus of notes and
materials, even on occasion his financial aid, and above all --what men such as Stecchini,
Motz, Jastrow, Sagan, Hadas, Gordon, and Deg, especially, had in their own way to bow to -- his
well-nigh complete erudition and orderly mental inventory on the matters at issue.
Early in 1976, Deg appeared at the British Library Association in London to speak to the
Society; first contact between the Americans and British was made. About a hundred persons were
present and Deg talked informally but to good effect on subjects both sociological and
quantavolutionary. Questions from the floor were numerous and only a sense of decorum brought
the meeting to close. Afterwards the ringleaders adjourned to an English approximation of a
caf‚ and carried on a conversation for hours.
The high competence of the British group was manifest; if they were strongest and at "state of
the art" level in history, they evidenced also in abundance the imprecisely defined general
background in the sciences and humanities which is so necessary in facing up to questions
excited from all quarters of knowledge when exoterrestrial encounters are at issue.
I wish that I might now introduce some of the many letters that the heretics exchanged over the
years: they would display the interweaving of ideas, the reportage, the delicate personal
relations, and the ramified research and life activities that inevitably and essentially occur
in an intellectual movement. Even a single instance -- a letter from Deg to Malcolm Lowery --
may lend the flavor of it all.
Naxos, July 16, 1976
Dear Malcolm:
Thank you so much for your letter and the transcript. It was excellent work and my best
compliment is to edit it immediately and return it to you. So here it is. I probably have been
imprudent in letting everything stand, as you hoped I might. But it is fair. I think, and
fairness is one up on prudence. I have made a number of technical corrections, clarified words,
and introduced a euphemism or two. I understand that you intend to split the presentation and
leave the operation to your discretion... Your article on Kugler was most intriguing. Have you
sent Stecchini a copy? (...) The material is rich and your commentaries and presentations of
the source matter referred to by Kugler valuable. I would expect the whole, amplified even to
the extent of a complete translation, would constitute a welcome book. Perhaps one for Kronos
Press... Was the Atlantis item really August '61, as you write? I'd like to see it: perhaps you
can confirm the citation next time around. The Tuareg are a mysterious people, you know, of
undefined race and origins. The Fabrizio Mori reports, if locatable, would be more valuable...
You do bring up surprises re Velikovsky. No, I've only heard of original work he's done in
electroencephalography, that he may have been the first to propound it. What you quote is
fascinating. It does relate to the suppression of instincts, of which I make much in the
transition from hominid to man... It gives us time to think, but heightens general anxiety at
not being able to respond. My general theory of the subject is being prepared for limited
distribution prior to the long haul on publishing the book, so I shall hope to send you a copy.
Meanwhile, I would suppose you could readily do the translation yourself. Rix has a lot of
trouble with English. (I try not to distinguish 'lower' from 'higher' species. In my present
lonely spot, I am compelled to admit the many superiorities of the ants)... I haven't received
the T. L. S. review of Velikovsky Reconsidered. I've gone through Temple's work on Sirius
hurriedly. He moves into his theme backwards -- first the Africans, then the Egyptians, then
spacemen. Dr. V. in his "Chronology and Astronomy" found Sirius (Sothis) a yardstick for
measuring the Venus-cycle. The one item (well-known) of the tribal recognition of the invisible
star goes along with other ancient knowledge of the skies that was lost and recently recaptured
by telescope (cf. my brief article -- Did I leave a copy with you? -- on the rings of Saturn
and bonds of Jupiter). Better eyes, magnifying atmosphere, closer proximity, ancient
telescopes? -- we'll have to make up our minds in the light of a total well-developed theory of
Revolutionary Primevalogy... I wish that we had transcripts of the many additional hours that
we spent in discussion. Which leads me to say how much I enjoyed the whole of my visit with you
all. I'm due to fly back in haste...
So went the messages, back and forth and around. In the States, Deg worked closely now with
Earl Milton of Lethbridge, Canada on Solaria Binaria. He saw Sizemore regularly in Princeton.
He visited with Velikovsky. Most of the American network communications in these days funneled
into Greenberg, with whom Deg had only an annual telephone conversation but about whom he
received information from Sizemore. Kronos magazine sponsored two meetings at a Motel in the
Princeton area; Sizemore exhausted himself to pull them off successfully. One was before V.
died in November, 1979, the second later on, and Elisheva dropped in upon it.
Deg missed both meeting for being abroad. The second was unexciting, save for wrangling between
Greenberg and Whelton. So far as I can understand the causes, there were none of substance.
Clark Whelton spoke up in general criticism of the proceedings as lackluster and Lewis
Greenberg tore into him from the Chair with ad personam indignation which was incomprehensible
unless, as I was told, "You know Lew..." Few friendly heretics -- never mind the unfriendly
larger participation -- had no occasion over the years to receive his uncomplimentary remarks
and the consoling words from others, "You know Lew..."
Greenberg's correspondence with the British was equally a mixture of rationality, abuse, and
threats, and since he never would fly, he did not appear in England and only Peter James had a
pleasant encounter with him. But that was once. When Greenberg invited James to become of the
"Staff" of Kronos, Peter accepted. He was almost bumped from it when he wrote an early piece of
criticism of V. and V., in a fit of anger, told Sizemore and Greenberg that they had to get rid
of him or else he would withdraw his support from Kronos. Then, according to Sizemore, V.
reconsidered, recalling no doubt his own reputation as a champion of freedom of speech and
press, and called up to withdraw his demand. Nevertheless, not too long afterwards, what V. had
wished came about, when Greenberg and James quarreled and James resigned, as will be explained
later.
In the Spring of 1980 Deg reappeared in London to address the Society. By this time his agenda
was full of friends of catastrophist persuasion. The Velikovsky Affair had appeared in a
British edition in paperback with a new preface. Earl Milton was coming in from Alberta,
Canada, to speak, after which, with his wife Joan and his little son Davin, he was to join up
with Deg for a heavy workout on Solaria Binaria at the Island of Naxos on the Aegean Sea.
On Deg's list of telephone numbers in London for the occasion we find Peter James, his primary
host, informant, and contact man, a slender scintillating young and blonde man who seemed to be
everywhere and into everything in London, who lived on vegetables and beer in a collectivity,
and who had surpassed intellectually the university degree he was arranging to pick up. He
supplied Deg and Ami with an apartment, perfect in every regard save its price and lack of
telephone, of which the latter was the more serious. Hotel prices were prohibitive. Food was
expensive and as always bad, except in the oriental and European restaurants.
Luckily down the street was the Baeck Hebrew center, school and library, tended over by Hyam
Maccoby who took to reading Deg's Moses manuscript while Deg stuck heavy coins in unending
numbers into the hallway telephone. For, on the aforesaid phone list were all those he wished
he might see: Geoffrey Gammon, Malcolm Lowery, Brian Moore, Peter Warlow, Harold Tresman, John
Bimson, Martin Sieff, Eric Crew, Robert Temple, Fred Freeman, Redmond Mullin. Rayburn Heycock,
Margaret Willes, Nick Austin, and Cloe and Mike Fraser. There were thereupon added in a
confused network the names and numbers of all the people who were contacted in order to contact
others and the temporary, supplementary, changed disconnected and "try-him-at" numbers.
And on his "to-do" list for the two week were to write his paper for delivery to the Society,
to have his novel Ronald's Norm typed up and copied, to read the latest exchanges on Solaria
Binaria and discuss them with Milton, to discuss with Sphere Books the Velikovsky Affair and
his manuscripts (the same with Margaret Willes of Sidgwick and Jackson), to discuss
"Aphrodite's true identity" with James and explain the ideas of an Encyclopedia and the
possibility of a Quantavolution Institute, to open a bank account at Barclay's, to edit finally
and send Chaos and Creation to the Indian printers, to visit the headquarters of Amnesty
International, to visit the Temples in the countryside to see how their garden was growing and
where Robert's mind was in the aftermath of his book on the Sirius Mystery, to write his son
Chris in Rotterdam and send him some money, to meet Fred Freeman of Liverpool whose ideas on
independent welfare action and tax reforms were simpatico. And much more, but of course, much
was not done, bogged down in conflicts of time and logistical difficulties like the telephone
and vainly-searched-for typist.
When his plane took off from London, he entered some lines in his journal, captioned
Failures of a trip to England -- England in the Spring -- "Oh, to be in England when... "A book
yet to be published jests at my ability to concoct surprising numbers. Here are more [on time
expenditures]:
Trying to find a good place to eat 12.5%
Discussing the food and service 12.0%
Writing the talk that should have been written beforehand 23.9%
Futile Communications with Publishers 4.0%
Walks and visits: external sociability 29.0%
Management and commuting 10.5%
Eyeball-to-eyeball discussion about quantavolution 5.6%
Listen to other perform and performing 8.0%
All others 9.4%
114.9%
Adds to over 100% because of doing more than one thing at one time, e. g. "No, I think we
passed the restaurant; that was a good piece you did with O'Geoghan," or "Carter's foray into
Iran was foredoomed; why did Dayton [author of a magnificent book on ancient ceramics and
minerals] waste so much time decrying the mentality of archaeologists?" Now what more would I
have wanted to do? Talk to Bimson re opinion of natural disasters at Megiddo Dolby re ice ages
Moore re poetry Lowery re linguistics Sieff re... James re... etc. etc.
I am diverging and must return and repeat: the British and their magazine were more of a free
association and farther removed from V.'s hulking figure. Hence it would be more likely that
opposition should arise successfully there. First it happened when Euam Mackie, a proverbial
tall dour Scot, a Glasgow Museum curator and co-founder of SIS, began to place monuments that
were seemingly oriented to the present directions of the compass, such as Stonehenge, in the
period before the Venusian catastrophe of around -1450 BC when the Earth was said by the V.
scenario to have changed its axis of rotation and orbit, hence its orientations and its
calendar. Further, when Deg appeared in England in 1976 and presented his thesis of "the
Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars," he found that the English view, led by Peter James,
rejected his, and V. 's, and Robert Graves' identification of Homer's Aphrodite with Moon,
insisting that the goddess stood for the planet Venus, not Moon. James published more
criticism, and Deg was given to understand that he had been worsted -- Rix, Cardona, Gordon and
others espoused the James thesis and Deg was driven back to the stack shelves. V. said to Deg
that he had more material for the defense somewhere in his files, but he never produced it.
But then the heavy onslaught came with the long-awaited publication of Peoples of the Sea and
Ramses II and His Times. After intimating dissent for some time, the British now mobilized at a
conference in Glasgow in April, 1978, and delivered a set of papers that confirmed V.'s worst
fears. The British -- or let me say, the historical fraction of the SIS elite -- while
affirming their support of V.'s reconstruction of Egyptian (and hence total Mediterranean and
Near East) chronology until the end of the 18th Dynasty said in effect "Stop! Disposing of 500
years is enough." The rest of the Egyptian historical sequence is in respectable order: Ramses
III was not 4th century, he was also moved back to the 8 th Century. The Hittites did have
their Empire before the Chaldeans and were not a side-show or a double for them. The end result
was to cut V.'s immense loaf in half and to reassure him that "Half a loaf is better than none
at all."
One might see the pattern emerging. By 1983, when Brian Moore had been elected President and
Peter James Editor, much more emphatically than in 1978, might it be said that the "essential
purpose" of the Society was "to promote active consideration by scientist, scholars and
students, of alternatives to the theory of uniformity in astronomy and Earth history." This
could only mean the general approach of revolutionary primevalogy and quantavolution. The lines
of advance would move outward from Velikovsky but SIS would deny that it "is committed to any
specific catastrophic theory." The Review would not become involved ad hominem and in
emotionally charged wrangling but "will concentrate on the real issues at stake, as for example
the occurrence of exoterrestrial catastrophes and the reconstruction of ancient chronology."
The "SIS Review offers the broadest spectrum of opinion and the most objective approach..."
By this time, however, signs of a wider movement were also emanating from its elder, Kronos,
triennially printed in America, and the younger Catastrophism and Ancient History, a biennial
magazine founded and published by Marvin Luckerman at Los Angles, California.
There was still no broad monthly of the type of Science 83 (an AAAS publication) which Deg had
been advocating on both sides of the ocean. He would have liked to see a published magazine
"Quanta" and an Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Catastrophe, so he caused to be sent around
to hundreds of persons interested in the field a circular describing the projects as follows:
PLEASE GIVE US YOUR VALUED OPINIONS ON TWO QUESTIONS.
Project I. Quanta. A monthly magazine, large format dedicated to presenting to a wider public
all current news and developments in the sciences and the humanities related to the theory of
quantavolution: the theory that the major sources of change in the history of the world, both
in the natural sciences (all fields) and in the humanities (all fields) and including human
nature and behavior, have come from sudden, high-powered, and large-scale events.
It is an idea with a rich past, of famous writers, but, of writers whose works have long
submerged beneath the conventional tides of uniformitarian, evolutionary, and gradualist
thought. We must pull out and bring forward into contemporary review the greatest of these
ancient, medieval and early modern writings from all over the world, ranging through legend,
through religion, through literature, through science, in all their diversity and format, so
that once again they become part of our civilized heritage. Simultaneously, we must select,
from the enormous volume of indifferent but carefully prepared scientific and humanistic work
that is oblivious to the quantavolutionary idea, the remarkable findings, the nuggets, the
truths and reality that are buried there.
Finally. Quanta should publish the best of the new generation of writers who are ready to
tackle and overthrow old images of science and philosophy, the old idols of though, and to
discover in the world of nature and life, including human conduct and behavior, the validity of
the quantavolutionary vision of the world. Quanta will preach and practice objectivity.
We are presently in most disorderly state of publishing, whether of books or magazines. In this
confusion of the age, there must be a place for a modest but forthright publication, and that
is what Quanta seeks to be, that publishes for a certain critical mass of readers the facts,
theories and news about a general and liberal approach to the phenomena of geology, psychology,
astronomy, biology, and other science.
Project 2. The Encyclopedia of Quantavolution. A person who is interested in the
quantavolutionary modes of change in natural and life history is often frustrated when he
searches for information about a writer, a river, an animal, a myth, a phenomenon, a period of
time, a place, an excavation, a planet, a concept, or a philosophy; indeed, just about anything
that one looks up becomes a source of frustration. Why? Because practically every subject
treated in conventional reference books has been passed through two centuries of suppression of
the quantavolutionary, of the sudden, intense jumps that have been responsible for the largest
proportion of change in the universe.
What has been written has not been referred to and has been actively lost. Begin with the
letter "alpha", go to "Aaron", and proceed; every article has a missing slant, a missing
theory, absent evidence. But so much is left out, and so many useless things are included for
the quantavolutionary scholar, student, active reader, whatever the realm of inquiry, that
there is a pressing need for a new encyclopedia, so new indeed that one has to go back to the
Encyclopedia of Diderot in the Eighteen Century to conceive of such an innovation and advance
in the history of science and the humanities.
The present tight capital situation is not favorable to investments in publishing projects.
Orthodox foundation channels are clearly closed. Nevertheless, given that the shortage of
financial aid has not impeded thought and progress in quantavolution, the initiative and
participation of scores of competent scholars in all fields of learning can be counted on to
carry the project along. A cooperative organization, headed by an international editorial
committee, can produce alphabetically a series of fascicles that would in three years range
from A to Z. Then the total product would be bound in cloth and paper for public sale. During
the interim, individuals, libraries and institutions would subscribe to the fascicles to
provide operating capital, receiving in the end a sizable discount on the final Encyclopedia,
which would cost at present prices about $90.00.
The returns were not encouraging. It appeared that the costs of finding a sufficient market for
the magazine and encyclopedia would exceed the costs of production. That is, if a quarter of a
million dollars were to be spent in development and first publication, not counting contributed
and compensated time, at least that much money would be required to carry the message through
the dense thicket of mass book and magazine advertising. The competition among the National
Geographic magazine, Science 83, Discovery, Museum, Geo, Science Digest, the Smithsonian
Magazine, and other journals was so severe, their struggle for survival and expansion so
costly, that a small voice, no matter how sharply contrasting, would be overwhelmed. The
situation of an encyclopedia could be different. Here Deg discussed with Jeremiah Kaplan, an
acquaintance of some 35 years and Chairman of the Board of Macmillan Company, a possible
participation of Macmillan. Kaplan had put through the great International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences and was now directing the preparation of an Encyclopedia of Religion. The
question of the controversial nature of the Encyclopedia arose not directly but indirectly.
With Charley Smith, the appropriate Macmillan editor, they put together a scenario, a typical
setting for the use of the Encyclopedia.
A high school girl walks into her school library and asks the Librarian where she can find
material for a short theme on evolution. The librarian advises her to consult the Britannica
and the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution and Catastrophe. The "Ev" volume of the first is being
used by another student, so the girl studies the article on "Evolution" in the new
Encyclopedia, writes her paper, gets a failing grade from her teacher, complains, embroils the
librarian, and the librarian is told by the science teacher never to refer anyone to that book
again.
The librarians, it is concluded, want or must buy encyclopedias that provide "unbiased"
conventional articles in the name of prominent authorities; there is only one truth in science.
Deg thanks his host for the fine lunch and walks out whistling upon windy Third Avenue thinking
"Macmillan has changed since 1950. The customers now exercise precensorship." He did not, of
course, agree, and could offer other scenarios -- but what was the use?
The great one-world society was a handicap for the movement. Creative workers were spread
around the world. Far from each other, their communications were poor, and relatively
expensive, given that at least half of them had disposable incomes at the official U. S. A.
poverty boundary; few were well-to-do. Deg made Peter James an offer of a subsistence and "pie
in the sky" if he would collaborate, but James was working and studying in a combination of a
job and studies designed to extract a higher degree from the University of London. Deg talked
also to Martin Sieff, who from time to time, like most Northern Irish, wondered whether he
should move out before he was blown out by a bomb. On May 18, 1981, he was writing to Sieff at
the "Belfast Telegraph":
Dear Martin, I do regret that I cannot plot some position for you that would enable you to
carry on your valuable work in quantavolution and history, both social and natural. We have, I
believe, the phenomenon of an emergent new general paradigm for science and philosophy, and you
should be on hand as parent and midwife (the parthenogenetic simile is not amiss in ancient
age-breaking and age-making, as you know).
We need to publish many books. We need a magazine building upon the extant ones -- Quanta, I
call it. We need an Encyclopedia of Quantavolution. We need an information storage and
retrieval system that is set for quick production and dissemination of old and new materials.
When done, our progress will be rapid, and we will generate a much larger supporting group from
scientists, public, and science reporters. I cannot be blamed if I see you highly productive
and influential in this state of affairs. Your journalistic experience adds to your potential.
Besides yourself are the others and I feel strongly sympathetic, too, towards James, Lowery,
and a dozen more.
But visions without resources may be blameworthy. The great research centers are situated where
costs of living are high and life complicated -- New York, Princeton, Washington, London,
Paris, Israel, Amsterdam, the hope for large donors or, these times, a university that would
accept a new institute in its budget, much less one such as ours in spirit. I tried indeed with
the University of Maryland, New York University, and elsewhere; the answer, even when friendly,
is "Bring in your own funds." Velikovsky's resources went into a family shop, supporting
additionally Jan [Sammer] and Richard [Heinberg] for the time being, whence all products carry
the brand name "made by Velikovsky." What Elisheva is doing is wonderful. Greenberg is
hopelessly guarded in his Kronos den. None, however, can say it is the beginning and end of
quantavolution in science, history and philosophy. So what can be done? We are frustrated. My
own income is cut deliberately to the subsistence level in order to pursue my studies,
precisely at the time in life when I could be enjoying the highest earnings. But if not
Quantavolution, then Kalos, the World Order movement, would occupy me ungainfully. Only a
bonanza of some type, whose chance is perhaps one in ten, would let us set up some type of
communal operation or institute on Quantavolution. A five year lease on an appropriate property
near a good library; subsistence for perhaps eight persons, about $20,000 for materials,
expenses, and initial publications: we are approaching $100,000 a year of minimal costs.
Sources of funds: grants, donations, side earnings, correspondence courses, conferences,
publications. Should you have any ideas, I would be eager to receive them. Meanwhile I shall
brood and watch, like a demiurge, grasp at whatever creativity I can, and pounce upon any
larger opportunity...
On Dec. 21, 1981, as it seems that Sieff may be enticed onto Yankee territory, Deg writes
again:
Dear Martin: There is small occasion for cheering you on to these shores, except for my wish
that you might come and succeed and be nearby. Several major dailies have folded up recently.
The New York Daily News is on the block. There is a new market for papers and talents in
suburbia around the land, catering to shopping centers and a semi-literate public. Magazines
are plentiful, unprofitable and short-lived. The economy is in a recession, whose end I do not
see because it is shrouded in an apparently bottomless pit of world and domestic problems into
which politics refuses even to peer much less descend. Book publishing, too, is floundering in
the muck. Great talents, such as your own, are of little advantage; mediocrity, with unflagging
snuffling in all corners, would stand you better. I don't doubt that you'll get along; that
you'll be at home with your dreams, I doubt.
With all this, ought I to say, also, that the teaching field is in poor shape? The lower
schools are emptying and entering into their biggest crisis since the dawn of free schooling.
College and university budgets are all in poor shape. There are scores of applicants for every
small opening. That still does not mean that very fine candidates are being hired for the few
jobs available. Back to coda: you may find something, but you won't like it very much. May I
suggest this: If you come, come to stay; choose the spot where you want to live beyond all
other; once there take on any kind of work to make ends meet and begin the aforesaid snuffling
around; sooner or later, you'll find something better than most, which will give you a little
freedom and cash. If you don't have friends to begin with, you'll find them everywhere at about
the same level of intercourse. No matter whether Tampa or San Francisco, not any more. If we
had the kind of society we wished for, I wouldn't need to write this letter because there would
be a community of persons digging our sort of interest and you would make your way here
naturally, and there would be a place for you without saying. The University of Chicago was
that sort of area in the 1930's; almost everyone was a genius or considered himself such, and
most were broke, and most were into what they thought might be the new world.
Here in Trenton, I'm isolated in a way. I have to go long distances to see people and they to
see me. My little old house bears no resemblance to the fine and spacious house I once had in
Princeton. The Princeton libraries are only twenty-minutes drive from here, but you cannot
afford the car and gasoline, were you to crowd in with us. We'll probably be leaving for Greece
in March for several months, so there is a possibility of arranging for you to stay here while
we're gone. But I can see no advantage to this, since you'll be having to travel by train or by
car to wherever you might be needing to go to seek a position, or to get together with people.
No, it would make no sense to stay here unless I were here and then only for so long as a
couple of days for an exchange of views. Even for this, I'd try to find some friend around here
who could accommodate you comfortably while we visit together. I'll give you all the names I
can think of, with all the compliments to accompany them, anywhere in the country you may wish
to go. I'm not optimistic about this procedure, but I'll be glad to oblige. Do you remember how
costly it is to travel? And wherever you go, the way Americans live in their far-flung warrens,
you'll not be where you want to be even for the moment. The distances are an enemy, especially
for the poor. How, by the way, do you expect to get a job without a work visa? I think you have
to find an employer who will make a special request before coming. Or else, come, find a job,
return and be called back. Isn't that the way it works, unless you come as an independent
writer without a wage or salary paid you here. If I had even a little money to pay expenses, I
would invite you here to join in preparing the Encyclopedia of Quantavolution, a project that I
think would move our cause forward greatly and sooner or later pay off financially. My idea
would be to provide alphabetic fascicles every month or two until the job would be complete,
financing the venture largely from subscriptions to these (with a large discount on the
ultimate bound volumes), do it all in 2000 pages, all fields, half written by five editors (e.
g. besides myself and you, say Brian, Bimson, Milton, Lowery and other good colleagues who
might want to come aboard) and half by about 100 other contributors, taking three years in all,
appearing in three volumes in 2,000,000 words and selling at a low $89. I think Princeton would
be a good place to center it, but I wonder about Cambridge, Eng. (with occasional editorial
conferences in Naxos.) I would readily contemplate a move to Cambridge if there were a few
enthusiastic souls about and a minimal cooperation by the Cambridge Library authorities.
Couldn't we lease an old house big enough to barrack visitors for a reasonably small sum for
three years and have a go at it? The production should be done in-house on a word-processing
system that would provide print-out for the fascicles during the whole creative period and then
feed floppy discs to the automatic typesetter for the final production of the bound volumes. We
would attach a newsletter, perhaps the Newsletter of "Workshop," to the fascicles and when the
Encyclopedia comes out continue the publication of a wide-public magazine Quanta.
I was going into Manhattan today, but am glad that I changed my mind and could therefore get
this letter off to you, among other things. Holidays don't turn me on; I make my own, as often
as possible. Concluding, let me not give the impression that I have ceased to think about what
you might do and where, but give me feedback and encouragement and I'll do better next time.
Cordially yours, Alfred
Martin Sieff came like a whirlwind, and came again not much later, a short, dark counterpart of
Peter James, a comic book buff, friendly and grateful, darting brown eyes through heavy
glasses, missing nothing, spewing out accounts of college days at Oxford, the dire internal
politics of Israel, the latest bombing of his Belfast newspaper, the psychology of Velikovsky,
the girls of Long Island-Belfast-Jerusalem, the personalities of the cosmic heretics of
Britain, the confusion of the British Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (" Nothing at all
like the big way you do things here, no support..." "What do you mean? We are disaster-
stricken. Out of touch, nasty little arguments and all of that..." "Not really, I thought that
was us!" "Not so, I thought that was us!")
Martin wants to see Clark Whelton and he and Deg hear of Clark's longing for an Association
where we can all get together on a regular basis. Alas, Clark is assistant to Mayor Koch, on
24-hour alert; he is writing a novel; he is going through the trauma of kids readying for
college. How, when, with what means and who? Everyone looks blank and slightly pained. But the
outer world must have something in mind when they speak of the "underground" the "well-
organized tactics" of the catastrophists, the invariable sharp attacks greeting an offensive
remark about Velikovsky or against short chronology or for exoterrestrial eternal peace, as,
for instance the London Times Literary Supplement of 26 June 1967 murmuring about "a powerful
force in the underground of academe."
Not long afterwards, dodging about the streets of Belfast (he has spent most of his thirty
years in two civil emergencies, of Belfast and of Israel), Martin rifles a letter to Clark
Whelton at the Mayor's Office in New York, expressing fear of the collapse of the Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies journal.
Belfast, 9 August 1983 (...)
"There is only one solution that I can see -- the appointment of an Editor-in-Chief with full
authority over production, and over all SIS copy -- both Workshop and Review, able to appoint
and fire editorial staff at his discretion, responsible for deadlines, and responsible himself
directly to the SIS Chairman, creating a workable Publisher-Editor relationship. Should you
succeed in launching a U. S. version of the Society, this is the only way to get the thing
done. Government by committee is a wash out. As long as Lowery was on form it served as a
useful camouflage for him to operate under, while he actually put out a high quality product.
But once he pulled out, the wholes cumbersome system of referees and editorial committee
responsible in its turn to Council, another committee under a mini-Lowery in its turn, just
fell apart. Peter James is an outstanding scholar. But he doesn't know the meaning of the word
"deadline". Brian Moore put an immense amount of effort into the Review's production -- and had
nothing to show for it at the end of the day...
There was of course no money to pay an Editor. Sieff feared a collapse of the Society, and
could only pray that its membership would be patient with the leadership a little longer. [In a
letter to Deg later on he expresses surprise that the phoenix is arising from its ashes.]
And then horror of horrors, Martin announces re-re-revisionism of ancient Egyptian chronology:
I am becoming convinced that everything that happened in the Exodus and in the crisis of the
Ipuwer Papyrus may well have been at the end of the Old Kingdom. At this point Deg's mental
vision shutters down like a toad's eyelids. When the revolution comes, nothing is spared, and
then it feeds upon itself. No, you don't, Martin! That's too much!
Here is how Sieff declared the consensus again to Whelton: "Ages in Chaos, Vol. I still stands.
Minor corrections and improvements, yes" -- but the Hyksos are the Amalekites; El Amarna
tablets fall in the time of the prophet Elisha; Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt is the Queen of
Sheba; Thutmose III is biblical Shishak. "To which I will add the correlation -- Ramses III in
Jeroboam II's time; Merneptah kicked out by Azru = Uzziah/ Azariah; Ramses II = Late Bronze-
Iron interchange." In these words, 30 years after Ages in Chaos first appeared, Sieff is
pronouncing the validating results of thirty years' work, practically none of which was done by
anti-heretics, and which, whatever else happens, in cosmology and chronology, are sufficient to
bring the rewriting of much of ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Syrian, Anatolian, Greek, and Roman
history. But Martin is part of "whatever else happens" and so are Peter James, David Rohl, John
Bimson, and Jim Clarke who are energetically taking V. apart and putting him together again.
The old chronology is gone but there is yet no tongue-in-groove replacement.
In April 1983, Deg and Ami, after two months in France to promote her just published novel, Le
Pigeon d'Argile, go to London from Paris and he speaks on Homo Schizo, on the gestalt of
creation that in short order makes a cultured person out of hominid. This time they have the
apartment (and telephone) of Stimson, Peter James' friend, with a monster bed embracing its
room, from which everything is reachable with levers and buttons and on which all is do-able,
apparently including dining, for there is no dining space.
There is a fine celebration after the meeting, proverbial homemade English pastry playing a
nostalgic part; drink flows freely and the survivors end up at the pub nearby. Deg meets Jill
Abery so can tell her that he admires her snippets on fossil assemblages and many other mini-
reviews of the quantavolutionary literature. Again he misses John Bimson and, too, Bernard
Newgrosh, the medical doctor who edits Workshop for the SIS.
He does a fast trip to Brian Moore's Cleveland haunts and the two of them ascend the
Observatory hill in Edinburgh to spend hours with Victor Clube and William Napier who have
published their Cosmic Serpent, which Deg had read, but they have not read Chaos and Creation
so he gives them that and they give him a reprint and all are full of talk and trying for a
common ground while sniffling about a bit doggishly. Clube and Napier call their
quantavolutionary scenario "the disintegrating comet theory." They set themselves to showing
that at great intervals of time the Solar System encounters galactic clouds of cometary
material and suffers heavy destruction from collisions. Residual comets accompany the Solar
System, and their periodic visitations, on rare occasion, end in disaster. Like many others
working on catastrophism, the two Edinburgh astronomers find themselves isolated, both because
of the extremity of their ideas and because they need much material from fields like mythology
and linguistics that they cannot grasp themselves nor command expert consultants to provide for
them. The crux of the matter is that, while both groups grant catastrophes in human times, the
Scottish astronomers want to read "comets" where the Deg-V. contingent read "planets" and they
bring out reams of calculations on Encke's Halley's and more to come, while Deg is confident by
now of Solaria Binaria and cannot wait for the book, which, if not calculation-full, is
calculation-proofed, and he feels good about some tag-wrestling matches to come, where with
much better historical reconstruction and with Milton at his side, well, we shall see, he
thought happily, as they stepped out upon the Observatory site overlooking beautifully the fine
somber city with the sea beyond, and they took their jovial leave.
Deg was pondering, wasn't this setting where Comyns Beaumont placed the world of the Bible and
was Edinburgh Jerusalem, and it was all transferred to the New Palestine after the comet
struck? Nonsense, of course -- to what lengths will not subconscious ethnocentricity lead one,
but how far and how near was Beaumont to William Blake the mystic poet and painter who
envisioned Jerusalem as England, pathetic genius, lost soul amidst the steam and soot of his
century.
Time had come to leave England for New York, but two matters had to be settled. After much
thinking and talking, Deg decided he could entrust the manuscript of Solaria Binaria, which he
had been hoarding all the while, to Rosemary Burnard of the Society for composition on the IBM
type-setting machine that the Society had scraped up the funds to buy and use for its
publications. A type-font was chosen, the format designed. Within three months all would be
done and the pasted-up camera-ready copy would be sent to Milton and Deg for final correction
and printing. Not so: July stretched to January before the job was done. Shall I stop to
explain the six months delay, Deg's fortnightly fury, the sweet, bold abstracted character of
Rosemary, the trials of the intellectual underground in Britain, speaking of how things don't
get done and finally maybe do get done in the perennial bohemia of generation after generation
of the Western World intelligentsia? Of course not. I cannot allow myself a Proustian self-
indulgence in prose. If there is a page to spare, it must go to the heroic efforts of it seemed
everybody to penetrate the U. S. Immigration Service just enough to get Ami aboard a plane to
New York.
Excepting the several millions of Indians who already were on hand, the vast majority of
individuals (and I use this term significantly) who came to the shores of the New World were
driven away from their old haunts-by the Old World authorities, by famine, by failure of one
kind or another -- and half of them came within the past century. And they are coming now, in
vast numbers, such that the system of restraints has broken down, and the question now is how
to legitimize millions of persons as Americans without setting into motion a similar advent of
millions more. At work, of course, is the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service which,
you must understand, is separate and distinct from the Department of State, but shares this
with the Department of State: that they live a life out of Kafka's Castle, full of resounding
laws, rules and regulations, and of textbook principles of administration.
Now, as in Kafka's books, the people most removed from the intent of the laws are bedeviled by
them. So it is that an apolitical, well-behaved French writer, who is married to an American,
unrecognized for the troublemaker he is, can have more difficulty getting in and out of the
country than anyone of the mob of persons whom the agencies are instructed and exhorted to
screen, examine, and order into various categories. So it happened, that the aforesaid French
novelist, female, law-abiding, with a stamp on her passport letting her in but stuck with a
paper not letting her out beyond a certain time, can be prevented from coming in and must begin
at the beginning -- lines, forms, physical examinations, faceless officials, and time without
apparent end.
Here then enters Professor de Grazia, professionally, fully, skeptically, ironically,
indignantly aware of what imbecility ad infinitum bureaucracies historically display, whether
in science or in travel, yet who still imagines that a minor delay in the return of his wife,
for good reason (for the good of the U. S. A., too) will not cause much of a problem, if he
addresses the Immigration Service in London properly and in good time. One week of good time
goes by, and a second week. Ordinary communications, cables, phone calls are not enough.
Interchangeable faceless beings turn on and off. The system cannot cope with the request to
reenter; a ping-pong game is set up, with the US offices on the one side and on the other side
of the Big pond reluctantly striking the ball, after resting in-between shots.
I cannot be sure of what finally happened, except that at a certain point Deg stopped acting
like a proper ordinary citizen trying go get his wife back home and began acting like a
politician and a border-runner. Ultimately are mobilized the good offices of a U. S. Minister,
a Consul, a U. S. Senator, several U. S. lawyers, and a politically prominent British Lord,
coupled with a partially blocked presumptuous entry upon a British Airways plane with the
baggage flying solo, until somehow something cracks in the system at the New York Airport, and
the message gets through to the airline that if Anne-Marie de Grazia were to be aboard a
certain plane no objection to her coming home to America would be raised by the Inspector at
the immigration counter. Nor was there.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 2 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIX
HOLOCAUST AND AMNESIA
As his last year begins, Dr Zvi Rix is writing to Deg from Rechovot, Israel. It is January 9,
1980 and he sends New Year's greetings, and hopes that they might meet before long. "I am very
cut off at the place where I am living now. This does not only concern libraries, but other
matters too..." for the mails are slow and books arrive late in the shops. He is in touch with
Christoph Marx. They travelled together to Glasgow... "He was quite obliging... So far I have
not formed a final opinion of him."
I would nominate Zvi Rix to be the hero of this chapter, but it is up to the reader to find his
own heroes in this book. Rix was a man who Velikovsky would have liked to write Mankind in
Amnesia in his place. He was a medical man, deep into psychiatry, and a refugee from Nazi
Germany. Deg knew him only through their correspondence. Deg was glad to get a description of
him from his widow, whom he met shortly afterwards at the home of Christoph Marx near Basle.
She wrote to Deg on January 23, 1981:
Dear Prof. de Grazia, My husband died very recently; as is customary for Jews, even not
practising religious commandments, we stay at home at least a week. In this time I went through
his many letters and found also yours.
I have the impression that you were very friendly and very much appreciating his work.
Therefore I write to you that I am very thankful to you. He was a very lonely man and every
encouragement was a help to him. Here he had nobody to talk to, I myself am much too obtuse to
understand half of what he was talking about and as he was also very shy he had no contacts;
besides that, his ideas were not exactly what people here would like to hear. It is a semi-
theocratic world. Ruled by a conglomeration of Zealots (...) they call themselves socialists or
rightwingers, its all the same. Our dreams went awry.
Yours very respectfully, Melitta Rix
Rix, whose scrambled writings are being kept by Christoph Marx, was hard in pursuit of evidence
that the cometary destruction of civilizations around 3500 years ago had warped the human mind
in the Near East, inciting human destructiveness, religious excesses, and sexual deviations.
Christoph Marx was a computer expert from Basle, and an amateur of Velikovsky's work and all
that it connected with. He circulated an invitation to whomever he knew to meet in Iceland, a
typical groping, logical yet mad, of cosmic heretics for a way of expressing themselves and
their message. Logical: let us assemble in Iceland between America and Europe, a
catastrophically threatened land even now, set athwart the great catastrophic Atlantic Rider;
mad: Marx was teetering on the edge of interdiction by everyone, the British, the Americans the
Europeans, Deg included, a heretic practically excommunicated from the heretics. The conference
did not materialize. Marx tried again in 1980, this in his home city, and found a few
communicants.
The minimum consensus of all people positively involved with the work of Immanuel Velikovsky
may well be characterized as an interest in the true reconstruction of mankind's genetic
history, and thus also of geologic and, in part, cosmic history... Developing
Velikovsky's psychological inceptions, the goal -- of bringing home to collective consciousness
the realistic conception of the world, as opposed by the present mania holding sway over
cultural evolution -- would include nothing less than safeguarding mankind's life on earth,
imperiled by (1) by the acute danger of self-destruction, and (2) by not attempting to prepare
against some future chaos in the solar system. However, whether some of us are attributing such
healing powers to the recognition of true history, or whether others would simply consider it
as a value in itself, does not seem all-important: both parties will equally perform a
supporting function in repelling collective irrationality and fanaticism, the worst effects of
which are mass killings through war and murder. We know that Velikovsky comprehended his own
striving for the true picture of history in this perspective...
The consensus among cosmic heretics of which Marx spoke in his announcement did not really
exist; however, it is certain that V. 's unique and original way of searching for the roots of
anti-semitism was a revelation to many thousands of people who would otherwise have not even
considered the problem or would have lived with a few, often anti-semitic, stereotypes.
Measuring such influences is impossible, but, by any standard, V. was a great Jew who disabused
the minds of many incipient anti-semites. Deg's Journal Paris, August 19, 1968
V. keeps two secrets, or doctrines half-hidden. He has expressed himself to me so often that
the "secrets" are apparent. He would perhaps deny them. I am sure of them. He does not believe
in God. He is a Hebrew, therefore Israeli, imperialist. Both doctrines, if publicized or known,
would involve him in a whole new line of controversies, would make new enemies and unwanted new
friends.
Evidence, examples: Of 1: direct statements; writings; philosophy of psychoanalysis; his theory
of "great fear" as bringing religion; belief that Jews were even in Biblical times
polytheistic.
Of 2: works of his life -- Zionism; gift of income from his property to Israel in June 67;
written works analysis; conversations; hatred of antizionism even at cost of other values (e.
g. El-Arish incident and Brandeis professor).
After a long trip following V.'s death, Deg returned to 78 Hartley Avenue( he could never
remember the house number, but would send his letters to 34 or 85 or another number, any
number, and V. was puzzled -- What significance could forgetting it have for Deg? "You can
address me just at Naxos, Greece and I get you alright at Hartley Avenue, Princeton!" "I have
gotten letters just to 'Princeton, NJ'" -- So there you are!) to see Elisheva. The parlor was
little changed. V.'s unimpressive chair stood facing the two stiff couches and the coffee table
between. Deg thought, "Should the chair be sat in, moved, replaced, bound across with a museum
belt, what?" It struck one with incompleteness, an uncertain quaver. He would slip some books
and papers upon it. Elisheva and her assistants Jan and Richard lined up with Deg on the
couches. Like a cordial committee they sat, drank tea, and reported to each other: health,
manuscripts in progress, people seen; and they passed papers and books around.
Thus went the meetings in the years thereafter. Sheva would at some point ask: "Did you see
Marx?" and Deg would say no or yes, and she would say "How can you see him when you know how
bad I feel about him," but she was curious nevertheless, while Deg tried to evade the subject
and one time she said "I will not speak to you again if you see Marx" and Deg threw his arms
around her jovially and said, I tell you what, if you don't see Greenberg, I won't see Marx,
and she was taken aback and all laughed because she had mixed feelings on that subject too and
knew that Greenberg was not his favorite among the cosmic heretics, but setting up proscription
lists in the Roman style was pointless.
It was on one of his earlier returns from abroad, in 1977, that Deg heard about Christoph Marx.
V. spoke of a visitor, almost in religious tones, who had lifted weighty burdens from his
shoulders, and would establish his rightful fame in Central Europe. He gave Deg a copy of a
well-executed chart of his reconstructed chronology of Egypt, in color, which Marx had drawn.
"Good, good," commented Deg, who was surprised, bemused, and skeptical at the same time.
"What's happened?" he asked Sizemore and others when he met them aside. They seemed confused
and uneasy.
What happened is this. A Christoph Marx had telephoned Velikovsky to pledge his allegiance to
his ideas and to offer support. There was much he could do: he could help with the translation
of V.'s books into German, working out of his more respectable (in V.'s eyes) Switzerland; he
could launch a campaign to bring the Germans to their senses, so that they would remember the
horrible Nazi past and thus cleanse themselves of the pest of comfortable oblivion, with its
eventual compulsion to repeat the past again; he could organize study circles to confront the
establishment with Velikovsky's ideas.
On April 14, 1977, V. wrote Marx, confirming in most cordial terms an invitation to visit. For
ten days, Marx settled into Princeton. Professor Lynn Rose, who V. said at various times would
be his literary executor, came down from Buffalo for some of the discussions. Marx departed on
Mayday. V. writes him: "Dear Marx: you left on Sunday, you called from home on Monday, and
today is Friday -- and very many things did happen in those few days... Earl Milton from
Lethbridge, Canada, is with us since yesterday and leaves tomorrow morning together with Alfred
de Grazia - who just now spent with us some time - and left copies of letters he wrote to Enc[
cyclopedia] Br[ itannica] and to NY Times. Sagan sent me a new book of his inscribed with all
good wishes and a day apart arrived the tape of this year's lecture on the yearly theme --
Venus and V. -- in which he indoctrinates future astronomers in their first year with derision
toward me and my work..."
Three days later V. is writing about turning over rights to the royalties from various foreign
translations to members of his family. He says he is turning over the management of worldwide
Spanish language rights to his recently acquired agents, Scott Meredith. He says "I
reconsidered and wish to suggest the following plan: your share is one eighth (12 1/ 2%); but
you retain countries not 'gifted' an additional 7 1/ 2% for work that furthers our goals -- at
our common discretion (such will be the case with Germany),..." V. writes also to Lynn Rose on
May 11 that "I let him [Marx] have broad powers to act, and have already the first report from
him. He will take over most of the European Continent for contracting my books with publishers,
and be a rather central figure in organizing groups of interdisciplinary synthesis, and in
opposition to the Establishment." He mentions other rights to be bestowed upon individuals and
adds "Christoph Marx will be in charge of these and many other activities."
On May 16, Marx replies that he will proceed as desired. He wonders whether the gifting of
"income" rather than "rights" is not the better procedure, and suggests that the literary
estate should be kept centralized and managed efficiently. His idea is of a Velikovsky
Institute, a foundation not-for-profit, with an office in Switzerland and another in America.
V. seems to be in a manic phase. He sends off sundry "Notes to my Collaborators," a newsletter
in fact. Inter alia he mentions lending Marx his unpublished manuscripts and writes that "I
gave him wide powers to represent me in academic contacts and arrange for the publication of
translations of my books"
In August, V. visited the office of Scott-Meredith Literary Agency in New York and met the head
of their foreign rights department, Mr. Vicinanza, who "showed great eagerness to represent me
on a broader basis." An offer was made to enter the greater European market. Vicinanza
estimated that $750,000.00 could be obtained in advances worldwide for Worlds in Collision in
18 months: so V. reported to Marx, adding, "Against such figures the offers made to you appear
minuscule,..."
A month later Marx reports to V. with several offers and expresses doubts (as did V.) about the
high figures. Marx would like to sign in the name of the "Velikovsky Institute." In any event,
he would like to draw upon the expected advances to begin microfilming and indexing V.'s
archives.
Then suddenly, V. telegraphs "Please don't sign agreement with Umschau. Wait my explanatory
letter. Greetings." Something has happened. There is a flurry of letters and telegram. In a
telegram, V. says that his books are being returned by the thousands due to the book Scientists
Confront Velikovsky (by Asimov, Sagan and others) and "other adverse publicity." Marx appeals
by telegram for confidence and trust, to no avail. They also talk on the telephone. Marx is
seeking to give "rational" answers to all objections, but says "I have legally signed the
agreement as your proxy within the frame of German and Swiss law. At this point I again wish to
thank you for the powers you have entrusted to me, which I consider as a wide obligation toward
you and your family."
I suspect that around this moment, Marx had been hit by the inevitable reaction to the Grand
Vision. V., always a procrastinator in decision-making, facing opposition from his family and
the lack of enthusiasm of friends such as Rose and Sizemore, could not overcome his profound
aversion to things German, including now spending resources "to help reeducate them." Marx
might as well proceed; V. would never have returned to the Great Vision; his idea of therapy
would have to be applied by others, if at all.
Marx has signed the contract on November 22; the Umschau Verlag signs on November 29. He
reports that he is putting the money in a special account in German Marks, which are moving
upwards against the dollar. He continues to report editorial activities.
Now young Jan Sammer, who has come from Canada to live and work with the Velikovsky's, writes
to Marx. Without expressing his authorization, he relates that V. is upset with the disapproved
signing, that Doubleday Company will probably insist upon 25% of the proceeds, that V. does not
favor the Velikovsky Institute idea, that Marx has "overstepped the powers that V. granted"
him, and that he could negotiate but not sign an agreement without the author's approval. Marx
is told to stay out of affairs in Holland. Marx replies both to Jan and to V., avoiding a
confrontation.
Jan writes again repeating himself more forcibly, adding a warning to Marx not to pretend to
represent V. in speaking to any scholars. He repeats words written earlier by Marx: "Umschau in
due course will wish to have proper signatures to the contract. You would have to empower me
accordingly." How, asks V., through Jan, can you now say you had power to sign.
Marx argues at length to this point: V. had orally and even in writing granted the power to
sign. Marx speaks of a further consideration being "my understanding of how distasteful Dr.
Velikovsky would regard a duty to sign a German contract personally." (Deg remembered that V.
had considered even not permitting his books to appear in German.) Marx states that V. had told
him not to worry about any claim of Doubleday to the subsidiary rights.
Finally on March 1, 1978, Mrs. Elisheva Velikovsky writes to Marx, repeating that Marx had
himself said that further empowering authority was needed, insisting that he not present
himself anymore as V.'s agent, and condemning the idea of an Institute. Marx rebuts this, and
indicates a desire to visit Princeton to settle matters.
The visit is declined by Mrs. V. Marx inquires about V.'s health. His letters continue to carry
news of books and meetings. Jan says in the middle of a letter May 17, regarding Marx's
expenses of purchasing books, that "in any case, they would have to be paid by you from the 7
1/ 2% designated for expenses connected with your efforts to arrange for translations." More
reports. V. telegraphs for an accounting twice in the same month, the second message being
misaddressed to "Immanuel Marx." And a third cable demands the transfer of funds to America.
Marx sidesteps these and writes of his work on the Dutch contract, which he had been called
away from, and of his dislike of entitling the German translation of The Velikovsky Affair
(Deg's Book) Immanuel Velikovsky, Die Theorie der Kosmischen Katastrophen, a publisher's
presumptuousness that one might find annoying.
On August 15 goes to Marx the first letter by V. in two years. It asks the transfer of money,
and that V. be informed of all negotiations from the beginning and that no contract be signed
without written approval; if not, any authority will be revoked. Marx on August 24 refuses the
"fundamental change," acknowledges the end of the agreement is inevitable therefore, and
suggests he be allowed his 20% of receipts from books signed up and be given all German
language rights. '.... Such German monies are not going toward an enrichment of myself.... no
other people in the world need your works as urgently than the German speaking peoples. ' On
September 5, V. signs a handwritten message, witnessed by his lawyer; it "terminates our
business relationship." Further, Marx is accused of having been in California and Washington,
D. C., "but did not give a ring to Princeton."
Marx retorted that he had too many rebuffs to continue telephoning. He protests that, in V.'s
name, the Kronos magazine group was denying him permission to publish in German various of its
articles. He also received in due course damning letters from Lynn Rose and Warner Sizemore.
Rose adds a postscript calling "a deliberate misrepresentation" a letter from Marx to the Times
which asserted that "Velikovsky saw the Holocaust in terms of collective amnesia."
Matters had been sliding into the hands of Robert Pinto, Velikovsky's attorney and, with V.'s
death, attorney for his Executor, Elisheva Velikovsky. The ensuing fol-de-rol among Estate,
Publishers and Marx went on and on and is of little interest here.
So a kind of love affair ended, brutally, with injury to all concerned. Sizemore wrote to Marx
April 3, 1980 that "the last year of Dr. Velikovsky's life was almost totally taken up with the
question of how to put a stop to your activities. He rued the day he ever met you." This may be
so, but is it rightfully so, and is it all? Velikovsky was not working well for years. Further
in the last week of his life, Deg had him smartly discussing substantive topics of
quantavolution. (Marx went unmentioned.) Yes, in a way, Marx was V.'s Waterloo, his last
grandiose effort to launch himself against an opposing world. He loved Marx for the vision,
even if Sheva and Warner and Rose and Deg and all the others could not share the vision nor
needed it. Deg had not yet met Marx. On May 9, 1980 Deg is writing to Mrs. Velikovsky:
Naxos, Kyklades, Greece, 9 May 1980
Dear Sheva: When I called to say 'good-bye' before going to Greece, you had already gone to
Israel. I hope that you enjoyed your visit and are well at home now. Ami and I spent a month
here and then three weeks in Western Europe, two in London. The Society held a day of meetings
on April 26. Talks were given by Dayton, Warlow, Milton, and myself -- I spoke on "Ten
Propositions concerning the Quantavolution of around 1450 BC," or something like that. About
150 persons were present. There seems to be a continuing high interest Immanuel's work.
C. Marx came from Switzerland for the occasion. Somehow he had learned of my coming and had
written Sizemore to pass along any messages via myself. Isn't that interesting --implying that
I was in contact with him. Furthermore, he had been sending to the British group letters
presenting his case to represent Velikovsky, including even Immanuel's will, which I therefore
had occasion to read, and which fortunately is simple and clear and free of any embarrassing
detail.
After my talk, which was the last, Marx introduced himself. I exchanged a few words with him.
As you say, he is disarmingly mild and inspires immediate sympathy, to the point of affection.
I advised him first (after commenting that he should not have tried to give an essay by himself
a ride on my book of the Velikovsky Affair without consulting me, by trying to put it in
through the publisher) that he was all wrong about you and that you had been kindly disposed
towards him in the beginning and that he should write you a letter of apology. Second, I
advised him not to perpetuate a controversy that would only damage him and cause everyone great
costs, and rather to put his case up for arbitration by three persons, not including myself, to
determine what, if anything, was and is due to him for his work and achievements. He didn't
seem to care for the advice, but my last words to him were to think it all over. Probably you
have heard that he is hoping to gather a conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, soon. I have no idea
who will come.
While in London, I stayed at an apartment only a few meters away from the Jewish Synagogue and
college where Hyam Maccoby works, and we had several meetings and a lunch at the best Jewish
restaurant in London, Ruben's. He read most of my book on Moses and His Electric God and found
it plausible and interesting. He knows the sources very well. I have heard nothing from Charles
Lieber in New York, who is supposed to be finding a publisher for the book.
We shall probably be leaving Naxos for Athens and New York at the end of June and thus be
mainly in Princeton during the summer. Is Richard still with you? -- I suppose so. Please give
him our regards -- also Ruth, and Warner when you see him. I look forward, then, to seeing you
again before too long. Best wishes meanwhile.
Affectionately,
Alfred
On May 11, Marx addresses Deg, expressing pleasure at their brief meeting:
14 years ago you pointed to the Velikovsky affair and its implications, and still good
scientific form seems to require that even Velikovsky's main theses together with the principal
view whether the reconstruction gives a true picture of mankind's past cannot be considered as
fact, from which to proceed to new work. In spite of all the experiences of these 14 years a
rather naive opinion also seems to persevere, that if only one persistently kept to so-called
scientific method, in the final analysis everything will turn out just fine. For the disastrous
non-success of Velikovsky's ideas in science a Scientific Mafia is found responsible, but
science itself, the field that many Velikovskians are employed in or would like to be part of
(if just for status only), and which from its beginning has allowed the most irrational large-
scale delusions to grow (Grosswahnbildungen I call them in German), is glorified by naming our
hero one of her greatest representatives. After I've seen science destroy the more important of
these delusions, such as ancient history or some myths of physics, by its own methods, perhaps
I'll be ready to call Velikovsky a scientist: until that time, which I don't really expect to
really come true, I prefer to know Velikovsky, along with Freud, as the brilliant analyst he
was; to withdraw him and his work from the clutch of science; and thus remain free to expose
science wherever necessary or as a whole as one of the great systems of thought (after
classical philosophy and religion) shielding the collective from its memories.
He complains of "the most unfortunate job Mrs. Velikovsky is doing in ordering an about-face of
her husband's approach to the Nazi Holocaust." He thanks Deg for suggesting arbitration and
will, he says, essay a move in that direction.
On June 4, Deg replies:
Dear Mr. Marx:
Thank you for your letter. The Breasted citation and pages are welcome. I will seek the
hieroglyphics, now. Concerning your last paragraph on the 'arbitration, ' I have already
written to Mrs. V. of my suggestions to you, so certainly you may refer to them if you wish. I
am glad that I was never part of your complicated and difficult relationship with the
Velikovsky's, else I would feel responsible at least in part and therefore more sad than I am.
Any impression that the whole story has been told would be incorrect. The major issue is hardly
reflected in it. The more one considers the affair, the more one senses an underlying tension.
Would it be the pronounced incapacity of either V. or Marx to work with others? Certainly Deg's
original skepticism of the relationship was based upon his acute awareness of V. 's tendencies
to call his troops forward, only to have them halt before commitment and forever be frozen
there. V. called himself a procrastinator.
But Marx was a patient and loyal and demonstrative person. He could have gone along
indefinitely and, given the neat bind trapping both parties, the relationship, hot or frozen,
would have persisted.
The crux was the holocaust. It was deeply disturbing. The matter could be put syllogistically:
Historic catastrophes resulted in severe collective amnesia; the world's peoples, having
suppressed their memories of catastrophe, are compelled psychologically to recreate the
conditions for reliving them; thus emerge warfare, massacre, self-destruction and the
destruction of others, man-made holocausts. Whereupon one reasons: the Germans, like all
peoples, have suppressed the memories of them; like all other peoples, they are prone to
recapitulate them and do so on occasion, as during the Nazi period.
Now the process implies a therapy. To cure the penchant for human destruction, the victims of
collective amnesia (practically everyone) must be led to confront and appreciate the extent to
which their minds contain the experience of past catastrophe and hence the seeds of future
ones; once this is done, the human will realize the meaning of his conduct and control it so as
to break the endless chain of disaster. What is good for all peoples must therefore be good for
the Germans. Hence any effort to cure the Germans of their collective amnesia is to be
commended and supported.
This, in brief and with such defects as I shall point out, was Velikovsky's social philosophy,
and this everyone who paid any attention to V. knew to be his philosophy, and Marx clearly saw
this, too, and was fully persuaded of it from his reading and from his early communications
with V. He was deadly serious about it.
Long before all of this, on December 18, 1963, we find V. writing to Dr. Zvi Rix in Jerusalem:
"I found two of your ideas magnificent, the hatred of the Jews because they claim of having the
upheaval made for their benefit (the Hyksos actually profited) and the words of the Gospels
about the fiery furnaces and Hitler's accomplishing such vision and doom (by expolarizing his
own hateful traits)." Again in a letter of January 7, 1964, he calls the idea "stupendous." He
"wished that somebody else should write "The Great Fear," because he is so busy, but suggests a
cooperative book, to which he might also contribute. Nothing came of this highly unusual
disposition to engage in collaborative work.
In 1947, V. journeyed to the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, to receive an
honorary doctorate. The Conference in which he starred was devoted to the topic of collective
amnesia. His own address was subtitled "The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial
Memory and Their Later Emergence." There he commented that "the inability to accept the
catastrophic past is the source of man's aggression... Warfare has its origin in the same
terror." Leaders imitate what they perceive to be the gods in action. Nobel Peace Prizes have
been futile. Freud, V.'s predecessor, first developed the theory that each individual desires
subconsciously to repeat the catastrophe or trauma, which he believed to be the murder of the
father, the Oedipus Complex.
In place of collective amnesia from the murder of the father, V. substituted collective amnesia
from the trauma of natural disaster. His therapy, like Freud's, was to get the patient to
realize the origin of his trauma. With Freud, the aim was not to realize the primordial murder,
but to realize the oedipal complex operative in infancy. With V. it could not be this easy;
catastrophes do not occur with every generation; therefore natural and human history required
exposition in the light of catastrophism. Velikovsky accused many scientists of functional
blindness, psychic scatoma, which he would probably assign in large part to collective
functional amnesia of the anciently experienced disorders of the solar system. Thus, on
November 2, 1974, he was saying at a Philosophy of Science Conference at Notre-Dame:
Astronomers do not like interference from other sciences, and certainly not from what could be
called 'legends and old wives tales... ' The ancients tried desperately to tell us what was
going on... We wish not to know anything of this. We wish to believe we are living in a
peaceful world.
As a psychoanalyst, he was professionally unable then to accuse them of sin. They could not
help themselves. He could not denounce them even if they refused to see when the truth was
explained to them. He had simply to grant that their therapy was incomplete. The excesses of
their attacks upon the analyst were to be expected and treated by inducing self-understanding.
But he was personally involved, which is an impropriety, He became a kind of Catholic
psychiatrist, who has to tell his patients that they are sinners. Worse, since he is sinned
against, he became inevitably angry with the sinners. There was no "Forgive them, Father, for
they know not what they do." The German national case of psychic scatoma was, of course, much
more deadly than the case of the scientists.
V. writes, "You cannot put the human race on the couch." And then he looks at his own fate.
"Without preparation, without giving the patient a chance to prepare himself, you cannot slowly
release from his subconscious mind the necessary recognition of the traumatic past, and so, the
patient has experienced great paroxysms and has rebelled against my revelations." But now, by
patients, V. means specifically the scientific community that opposed his ideas, which like
humanity as a whole, rejects bringing to the surface memories of natural catastrophe.
Many of V.'s supporters agreed with these propositions, Christoph Marx certainly did, and some,
like Marx, wanted to devote themselves to its application. Not so Deg, who found both the
theory and the therapy grossly simplistic. Having spent most of his life in examining human
ideologies and devising techniques of changing, controlling, and accommodating them, Deg had
long since abandoned hope of finding a quick fix for human destructiveness.
V. hardly recognized in his psychological theory what was so obvious in his history and in the
reception of his book, that over all of history and today, the vast majority of humans and
their religions actually demands that we recognize, denominate, and respond in every sphere of
life to the occurrence of ancient catastrophes of fire flood, wind and earthquake.
Destructiveness seemed to Deg "normal," "intrinsically human," ineradicable without genetic
engineering and breeding. It could only, by known political means, be diverted, shaped, made to
play games with itself, rendered innocuous, and displaced in a hundred ways. Destructiveness
was neither more not less created by natural catastrophe than human nature in its other
behaviors, including an abstract active concern for the human race as a whole. Further there
was probably a genetic switch, prompted by catastrophe as were most mutations and primary
behaviors, that had changed a primate quickly into a human. These ideas were developing in his
mind throughout the seventies, as the theory of Homo Schizo.
When, after V.'s death, I passed along to Deg a copy of the posthumously edited work, Mankind
in Amnesia, that Jan had given to me, widely advertised as V.'s great testament, called by
himself his most important work, Deg was prepared to be disappointed. When I said "How did you
like it?" he said "Even more disappointing than I had expected it to be. Simplism is still the
hallmark of the theory. Systematic development is entirely absent. The evidence is second-hand
and commonsensical for the greater part. The recommendation for social therapy is nil."
Deg felt a deep chagrin. "The work is true only on the most general level, and therefore
unoperational and inoperative. It contains jottings and exclamations. It reads like a string of
notes. Its publication could only have been justified as 'notes and stories, ' or 'Velikovsky's
Lament. ' Dr. V.'s claim to be a 'citizen of the world' is unacceptable, unless any person's
declared wish that the world not be blown up by nuclear bombs makes the person a 'citizen of
the world'." Nor was V., in fact, for all his high qualities, ever such.
The work is too brief for its purported task. Still it wanders; it contains extraneous matter.
Too, the work had been long in the making; on July 2, 1967, V. had written Deg that he had
"decided to concentrate upon it," at the urging of his publisher. He concluded the same letter:
"Keep well, write again, and infuse yourself with impressions that will make out of you a
ringing advocate of a need to understand the racial hidden springs of hatred." No need for
exhortation: Deg had been such a resounding advocate since childhood.
In reading the new book, Deg had to reflect upon the fact that V. and he had never discussed
the work, whether because there was nothing to discuss or because V. wanted to talk of less
important matters or because Deg was uninterested in the theory beyond the basic fact, with
which he accredited V., the fact that ancient natural catastrophes have played a large role in
human and natural history. As much as he believed in the high value of introspection and of the
deep interplay of honest minds, Deg had long before meeting V. assigned only a limited
potential for good in a knowledge of true history.
"Psychological revelation" would help the world, commented Deg. "Philosophy and anthropology
well insist upon this point, but the means for such are not given by V. (see p. 207 of Mankind
and Amnesia) and therefore the statement will hardly perform the miracle. I can hardly believe
that he says psychology and sociology had nothing to say about the Jonestown (Guyana) massacre
and mass suicide, yet he does say so, whereas the dynamics of this event were crystal clear to
the ordinary social psychologist."
Where is his evidence of a 'racial inheritance' of an experienced fear, an attitude, no less.
This is a Lamarckian genetics that I cannot accept. I asked V. once, in the 1960's, for his
idea of what physiological process memories could use to ensconce themselves in the racial
soma, to which he gave no response. He didn't show me what, if anything, he was writing. I
would have been most critical. He read my Lethbridge lecture on fear and memory. I give him my
first sketch of Homo Schizo theory, but I doubt he paid any attention to it, although there I
made explicit the only dynamic by which Freud and Lamarck might be married, through
psychosomatism. Yet V., who was repelled by Jung's complaisance with the Nazis, would not admit
to being a Jungian. Moreover, his ethnocentrism is again apparent. He attributes significance
to the presence of the five-pointed star of Venus on the helmets of American, Soviet and
Chinese soldiers (only an American general officer is in fact authorized to wear the emblem),
but he does not mention the ubiquity of the Star of David in the ancient Israeli army (p. 201);
did V. or his editors delete the "Mogen David of ancient Israel or even of Israel of today"
that he had joined with the others in his Lethbridge lecture (p. 27 of Recollections of Fallen
Sky)? He indulges freely in anti-Arab statements (p. 150 et passim).
In his vagaries, he does not however mention any of his close associates; Stecchini is found in
a footnote (p. 67) also A. M. Paterson (p. 66), and the mention of Rose was a post-mortem
insertion. He mentions several correspondents; a temporary assistant, Cathy Guido; a New York
City teacher; a jail inmate; a man from Topeka, Kansas, writing on tornadoes, and a
conversation with St. Clair Drake, which meeting he placed in the Swiss Alps without
acknowledging that the two were there at Deg's invitation as part of a revolutionary experiment
in higher education aimed at diminishing destructiveness and creating a beneficent and
benevolent world order (p. 111). But the most striking omission in the rambling work is that it
sidles past the Nazi Holocaust. Of the purest, and best-documented case in history of the
working of his theory of aggression and amnesia, not a word is said! [Actually there were a
very few words alluding to the German case, and these were excised by Mrs. V. before
publication.]
And Deg wanted to go on, but I stopped him. The question of anti-semitism interested me more,
so I got him into this track. In Deg's opinion anti-semites define Jews and Jews define anti-
semitism, both in their many forms.
As to how many types of Jews there are, I know of no classification. First you have to grade
Jewishness as a subjective feeling, an intensity, say of five grades. Then these are role-
operative, transactional, that is. If I feel somewhat Jewish, this is fully or moderately or
little sensed, depending upon whether I am transacting socially and psychologically in a
setting dominated by the perspective: much, some or little of my ordinary moderate Jewish
sentiment by the objectification of Jews that the gentile setting exudes. So at any point in
time or space, I am liable to be in any one of hundreds of states of Jewishness. Moreover, my
character possesses 'X' degree of stability, but is never so stable that my sense of Jewishness
cannot be stepped up or stepped down by my hormonal balance, or some other physiological or
sensory balance, as, for instance, when depressed, I may feel more Jewish, and so, too, when
manic, but less so in between. And of course, all that I say about my type and other type of
Jews are averages of quantities.
But now you must go farther. The historical knowledge and life experiences of Jews differ
greatly, hence the symbols and references to which we respond, which are so varied. The
physical signals of Jewishness are of course symbols, too. To some Jews I "look Jewish," to
others rather so, to some not at all, and so to gentiles. There is a Jewish look, which is a
combination of a culture-look and a genetic-look. It has a set of grades of attractiveness and
repulsion, one set among Jews, another among gentiles, depending of course upon which Jewish or
gentile culture and sub-culture you are using as the standard. And with all of these
possibilities the area of Jewishness and gentile-ness and their interrelations is most complex
and varied.
This very state of complexity, in which no Jewish race, or culture, or religion, or
nationality, or historicity, can be said to aggregate more than a small fraction of those who
think themselves some kind of Jew or are regarded as a Jew, fosters anti-semitism, because
among strongly authoritarian and dogmatic characters, perhaps 10% of any population, the
tolerance of ambiguity and variation is low. Objects and people must be pigeonholed; they
cannot help themselves; that's the way they are and they are eager for any distinction that
will discriminate, any line that can be drawn, "a drop of Jewish blood" or "a Jewish
grandparent," or, on the other hand (and this is often forgotten), sometimes, a thoroughly
rigid character will accept as such any person who says "I am a Jew" and then also any person
who says "I am not a Jew," like not questioning a person who says "I am a Chicago Cubs fan." or
"I am a Dallas Cowboys fan." Since the same authoritarian or discriminating character is also
inclined to penalize ambiguities, he is at one and the same time eager to define a Jew and to
penalize the Jews for being so difficult to define.
Velikovsky, I should say, and even more so Mrs. Velikovsky, perceived the world strongly as Jew
and gentile. Mrs. V. was a fine artist, a fully acculturated Judeo-Christian as a musician and
a sculptor, but voted the straight party line, so to speak, when it came to Jewishness on most
other matters, including holidays, diet, and intimacy. The big chasm in V.'s tradition of
Jewishness was opened up by modern western science; he lacked belief in the substance of
Judaism, whatever his participation in its rites and routines and despite his refusal to
discuss religious preference with any one.
The Velikovskys were among the "most Jewish Jews" whom Deg had known, even though he had from
childhood held Jews among his closest friends and, while he had something of the heart of a
Catholic and the culture of a Protestant, he had the mind of a Jew, a twentieth century
"assimilated" midwestern American Jew, that is. That was what his wife of thirty years was too,
except that she originated in New York. He was more a Jew than an Italian, although his descent
was purely Italian, even of certain Sicilians who had been the most nationalist of Italians,
but this line had practically stopped at birth with a father who was chauvinistically
determined upon the Americanization of everyone (except musicians, it sometimes seemed).
V. couldn't comprehend this very well. He tended to stereotypes and would conspire up an ethnic
image of everyone. When once he wrote to Matthew Harris of Doubleday Publishers, upon his own
insistence, a letter advancing a book scheme of Deg, he said, "You know, of course, who
Professor Alfred de Grazia is. He is fierce fighter for causes he thinks just; thus he fought
for my cause but occasionally we disagree. I would think that born in a different place and
time he would have become a Sicilian captain roaming the seas; then Medicean Florence put an
aura around him even before he first visited the country of his ancestors..."( Dec. 28, 1968).
Perhaps so, but Deg's great dream as a boy of the prairies was "riding off into the Golden
West."
Stecchini was Italian by birth and upbringing, but that was not all of it. He had studied in
Germany for one of his several degrees and picked up another at Harvard. "Did you know that
Stecchini was of a Jewish father?" Deg asked V. one time, to observe his reaction. "No." "His
father was a prominent Italian anti-Fascist named Levi who had finally to flee the country. And
his mother was a countess." V. was surprised, and Deg was surprised at his surprise, for V. had
now known Stecchini for some years, and they had been together scores of hours.
V. was certainly able to work well with gentiles. With Freud, who was an assimilationist, there
had been concerns and crises over the role of gentiles in psychoanalytic circles; nothing could
be observed of a tension of conflict along such lines in V.'s circle, no more than there had
ever been in Deg's circles. Time after time, Deg was asked about V.'s religious beliefs by
members of an audience, but remarkably, there was no hint of antisemitism in the question, nor
did he ever perceive any among V.'s many acquaintances.
Deg surmised that Christoph Marx was a Jew for various reasons (despite his Christian name,
which was not heard in the Velikovsky household or correspondence) for V. had a tendency, in
matters familial and financial, to draw into Jewishness. Deliberately one day, when Elisheva
was remonstrating against Marx, Deg said he supposed that Immanuel thought he might have
confidence in a Jewish representative when dealing with Germans. She was astonished -- Marx
Jewish? -- not at all. Nor did Immanuel ever think so. Deg convinced her he was so, or perhaps
of Jewish and Christian parentage, and she said, "That must be it. They are the worst." And
then she telephoned Deg who had been laughing at her to say of course she didn't mean that,
meaning of course that she recalled that Deg's children were all of mixed Jewish-Christian
parentage. As it turned out, when Deg told him the story, Marx confirmed that he was not
Jewish.
When after V.'s death, Warner Sizemore (" to get money for the cause") ventured into Amway
consumer-business circles and into the formation of a "far-out" protestant church, he told Deg
how surprised he was at the manifestations of anti-semitism among folk in such circles. That's
to be expected, Deg advised, for the world of the aspiring small businessmen and
millennialists, with its rural, radical protestant, and poorer base, held large contingents of
anti-semites in America and Europe. Yet, also, this same base provided, at least among its more
educated elements, many enthusiastic readers of Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos. Since
the first Puritans, America has attracted the "true Israelites," the Christian who had been
persecuted by the Jews and Romans.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 2 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVEN
FROM VENUS WITH LOVE
When Deg was proofreading Chaos and Creation in 1981, he recalled a half-century earlier
overhearing Bob, his Scoutmaster, confide to a deacon of St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in
Chicago, "Sex rears its ugly head everywhere." The recollection was triggered because among
innumerable problems foreseen and unforeseen there occurred in remote India the castration of
Geb. As illustrated in the book (p. 125) Nut the Egyptian Sky Goddess reaches down to embrace
pronouncedly ithyphallic Geb the Earth God. But the printer's proof of the illustration that was
sent back by Popular Prakishan Pvt. Ltd. reached Deg sans phallus. I quote now Deg's admirably
restrained letter of January 29, 1981, p. 2, point 3:
I note that the phallus of the god of earth on figure 15a has been removed. This drawing is a
famous archaeological figure and should not be tampered with. Was the excision made for fear of
censorship or customs and prolonged controversy? I had no idea that there would be a problem. I
don't want to delay the books by even a day. But it takes two sexes to mate, even Sky and Earth
in mythology, so a semblance of masculinity has to be restored. I will be criticized as an
unreliable author by many people as matters stand (unless directly beneath the caption 15a on
page 125 there is printed in parentheses -- "Earth's exaggerated phallus has been removed-
reduced? - by the printer to conform to Indian government censorship regulations").
Back comes the reply of Mr. M. G. Shirali, Production Manager, dated February 2, p. 1:
Re: 'the mystery of the missing phallus' - figure 15a, page 125 - let me explain. You will
recall this drawing was traced out by our artist from the original Xeroxed sheet you had sent,
which you will remember, contained a lot of other things such as minute specks. This being
possibly photographed from a stone mural or some such thing. So while tracing out just bare out
lines, as you desired, this somehow just got lost in the maze of specks. Believe me, never for a
moment did we think of tampering with, nor was the excision made in deference to the customs,
nor for fear of censorship. Pure and simple it was an unintentional slip. Please accept my
sincere apology for the lapse on our side and also my thanks to you for pointing it out. And now
it has been 'arranged to be restored to the rightful place'!!!, as you will see when the final
proofs come to you.
The new proof returns. The phallus was restored-by half. Persisting, and because he fears that
the original has been mutilated beyond use, Deg writes on March 28,1981:
Enclosed is a copy of the famous Nut and Geb picture. It occurs to me that, without any
redrawing, a cut should be made of this as it is leaving the shading, which is from the original
papyrus, and thus the picture will not appear so prominent. I think this would indeed be an
improvement. It is, after all, only a detail in an immense work. To repeat, photograph the new
drawing exactly as it is here, and thus keep the shading in the final cut.
Indeed sex does pop out of all corners in the material of human history and is especially
illuminating in regard to catastrophic events. It remarkable how V. managed to suppress
sexuality from becoming a major theme of this circles. It would have been easy to follow a path
similar to the one of Wilhelm Reich who found in a kind of electromagnetic life force,
expressible in sexuality, the beginning of an answer to all things, including a kind of
communism for which he was evicted from the communist party in Germany.
Elsewhere, in The Burning of Troy and in related pages of the SISR, a story is told of how V.,
following Cicero, claimed the root of Venus to be the word venire, meaning 'to come', and
therefore the planet must be newly arrived, but Lowery, analyzing the words, finds them
unrelated, nor is this the first time Lowery and the tribe of linguists dashed cold water
against the heated claims of catastrophists. Christoph Marx and Deg independently found a subtle
connection that Lowery missed and I take leave to quote from a paper circulated by Marx dated
May 8, 1982:
Easy to see now how Venus from 'venire' is quite equal to Venus standing for 'love' because to
love -- if successful -- is the same as to come (as anybody past adolescence may experience).
The dream-like efficiency of the term 'ven' may easily be judged by those with the faculty of
imagination and an analytical turn of mind. To make visible the tradition of violence embedded
in the term I would only add the example of a French porno movie, in which 'to come' produces
"The End of the World" (the film title). It shows, of course, the love-making while the atomic
rockets are on their way, but only in the end we see how they were released in the first place.
Merrily, the president of the United States and the General Secretary in the Kremlin over the
Hot Line are exchanging their experiences while being serviced by their beautiful private
secretaries: the President of God's Own Country comes, and in his ecstasy hits the red button,
leaving mankind with a movie's length of final lovemaking = coming.
Etymology must begin with the study of Arno Schmidt and James Joyce who purposefully used and
analyzed etym addressing. Etymology is not at all the successful tool Lowery makes it out to be
when, e. g., he points to the reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian language: the decipherment
of the hieroglyphs was not an achievement of etymology, and whoever has read a translation, say,
of a literary text such as the Book of the Dead can not but agree that there is hardly anything
more senseless in the way of expensive books --understandable perhaps to the translator's
analyst, but certainly not the ancient author. Etymology for the present is not more than a
systematized part of established science, the mechanism for the continued repression of the
past.
Electricity has in folklore been connected with sexuality, just as has the coinage and usage of
words. Jerry Ziegler, a physicist, in the 1970's circulated his work on ancient knowledge of
electrostatics and a copy come to Deg who got in touch with Ziegler and recommended his study to
V. who ignored it, but Deg began to develop it in a number of ways. This was not uncommon; V. 's
closest associates moved in their own way; Sizemore was aware of a world of marginal sciences
that he would not discuss with V.; so Stephanos, as will be seen; so Juergens who moved toward
it, because of V., first to be near him, then to be away from him; so Bill Mullen; and the
British heretics, so devoted yet so independent of thought.
Ziegler found many associations of ancient religion with electrical practices, and persuasively
in his YHWH informs us of what interested so persistently and for so long the ancient sects in
their mountaintop ceremonies. To be near to the gods, yes, but to be near the sources of
enhanced electrical stimulation, too. The people, led by priests, went up the mountains for
ecstatic purposes where religious rites and sexual experience were joined. Electrical discharge
was supposed to enhance the sexual libido.
Significantly, when in modern times there began many experiments with electricity, following the
invention of the Leyden Jar, the scientist Sigaud tried to pass an electric shock through a
company of grounded men, a trick that others had achieved, and when the attempt failed, he
suspected that one of the company was "less than a man," a eunuch or castrato, that is; but
then, as Heilbron's history tells the story, it developed that these, too, jumped where
discharge was passed, and were electrically conductive.
But Zvi Rix, of all the cosmic heretics, went farthest into the exploration of correlations
among ancient religious practices, sexuality, and commentary disasters. Marx took over his
manuscripts from his widow, but the task of disentangling them and reformulating them into
fairly conventional prose proved to be arduous.
When he was a boy, Deg believed that sex was a simple function: a male found a female, like an
arrow shot from a bow pierces the bulls-eye of a target. For the several years that he was
confined to autoeroticism, his fantasies and exercises, occurring privately, aimed at real
female acquaintances and attractive female images in equal proportions. By increments of
experience and learning, before he was forty, he could publish the article of a friend in
Psychology at the University of Minnesota, arguing that sample surveys might be improved if they
solicited information that would place the respondent on scales of masculinity-femininity,
allowing sex to be a finer variable, capable of more meaningful correlations with other
behavioral variables like "political candidate preferences."
By the time he was sixty, though still an active heterosexual, the image of the arrow and the
bulls-eye had resolved into the image of a fragmentation bomb, striking promiscuously and
erratically in all directions. Homo Schizo, it seemed, from his beginnings and forever after,
had lost, sexually as with all drives, close instinctual guidance and gained an uncontrollable
but vast world. The modern theory is that if you don't find indications of homosexuality in a
man and lesbianism in a women, you have an unusual person who is rigid and lacking in affect.
Roger Peyrefitte, a French writer, ex-diplomat and professed homosexual, discussed and wrote
about what he regarded as the homosexuality of Jesus and his apostles. He was challenged to a
duel by a fiery Spanish psychiatrist, but refused the test. The same understandably underground
theory was shared by V., but Deg was unimpressed, not needing V.'s innuendoes, meaningful glance
and obvious reluctance to say so, but still V. had to let the cat out of the bag, like "you
know, there is much to be said in this regard about Jesus." But Deg had no doubt that the
tradition went back to the nasty cirumstancs surrounding the trial of Jesus. I'm sure they
called him everything, he said, not disagreeing but not caring at the time to plumb V.'s data
base on the question. There was little Deg could not find a place for in his mind, ranging from
Jean Genet to Don Juan, and all the ambiguous feelings, attitudes and practices in between.
The closest V. comes to offering a theory of sexuality occurs in Mankind in Amnesia. There he
asserts that neurosis is based upon narcissism, ultimately, the autistic libido that has to be
located and treated first of all (p. 162). This done, the therapist must move to the treatment
of homosexual problems and then into alleviation of the Oedipus complex. The theory is rather
directly one of Freud's many, and V. generally arrived at these several stages quickly with his
psychiatric patients. Fifteen minutes is often enough, he said to Deg, to understand what is
going on with a patient. Repeated visits and phonecalls were to be expected, of course. V. was
remarkably prudish. Over the years, he gave Deg the impression which actually was obvious at
first but scarcely believable in a psychiatrist, that he operated on the idea that "men are men"
and "women are women," a simplistic notion. He seemed not to notice that several of his most
brilliant and active supporters might have been homosexuals of one kind or another. Fight off
the homosexual urge, he seemed to be saying, and stamp out the narcissism that stands beneath
it. Laius, father of Oedipus, had introduced, according to legend, the practice of "unnatural
love" (V.'s term) in Ancient Greece (which, insists V., is at the origin of the terrible curse
upon his house).
Onetime in America and once in England, Deg was asked with a certain wonder about homosexuals in
the movement. Their participation was not surprising, he answered; no movement is a rational and
random selection from the population, no more than the establishment it stems from; homosexuals
are more active in innovative and intellectual movements; all that we know of the sources of
creativity and cultural change would be contradicted if they were not. New movements, whether
scientific, cultural, political, religious, or social do not come from the average norms and
normals of a culture.
Deg ought to have explained fully, right out of his reading of Oedipus and Akhnaton, which so
impressed him. There, on pages 48 to 50, is told the story of Amenhotep III, father of Akhnaton,
and of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and of the Greek's and Oriental's indulgence of homosexuality,
and the Hebrews' condemnation of it. In a delicate lacework of widesweeping history V. manages
the following pejoratives regarding homosexuality: "Greek love," "invert," "iniquity," "spoiled
by," "contemptible," "work their will (on Lot's guests)," "horrible retribution" (Laius'
descendant at Thebes): throughout the passage, luxury, splendor, power, idleness, extravagance,
high culture and civic freedom are dwelt upon as the ambiance of homosexual inversion. No
wonder, thinks the innocent reader, that Akhnaton was so queer. But Akhnaton is not the issue
here. Three features emerge from the passage: V. absolutely rejects homosexuality; homosexuality
is portrayed as an exotic and attractive luxury of high cultures; V. does not, here or
elsewhere, appear outwardly punitive to homosexuality.
Deg could name a half-dozen of his acquaintances, all of V. 's circle and on at least three
sides of any argument that came up --not a clique, that is -- who were homosexuals, but he never
thought of what might be the seductiveness of V. both at close hand and at a distance. For my
part, being more distant from the scene, I would guess that V. subtly presented the image which
homosexuals in those years (not the present liberationist gays) could best accommodate to: a
stern attitude exuding a luxuriant bath of guilt and a seeming tolerance, delicacy and
understanding precluding any but the most "delicious" punition, which was necessary for the
enjoyment of their homosexual feelings. (Nor to be fully aware, have we of Western culture quite
learned to enjoy heterosexuality without guilt and fear of punition.)
V. liked Nina, Deg's second wife, who was at the Swiss college on and off. Deg recalls an
especially vivid image of the two of them silhouetted in the sunshine and snow against the Alps
on the road to Haute-Nendez, talking volubly in Russian. Long after, Deg was reporting to him
that Nina had gone to Berlin to marry Peter Bockelmann -- a fine musicologist said Deg, and a
fine man. Whereupon V. began to speak of Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata," a story in which a
husband, according to V., enjoys sexuality homosexually by turning his wife over to another man.
Deg was amused at this. He had been happy that she had found so good a friend after their
separation. What were V.'s motives for the story --his liking for Nina, his dislike of Germans,
his need to carry a dubious theory into every human relation, a jealousy of Deg's philandering,
a homosexual impulse of his own? That is to say, when it came to conjecturing and examing
motives, Deg was unwilling to let others escape. Or perhaps V. just had not gotten the story
straight; the couple separated, but they were still friends: it was a plot not to be found in
V.'s manual.
One of the sillier passages in V.'s Mankind in Amnesia propounds the idea that nations have a
masculine or feminine character, Germany and France being among his examples (pp. 140-2). This
kind of social psychology is not only unproductive, but also false (like Mussolini once in anger
calling the Germans a "nation of barbarians and pederasts") and only made Deg more irritated at
V.'s pretentiously published book.
For the infant college in the Alps, Deg had invented a concept which he called, "rapport
psychology" that was intended to be a form of group encounter usable for the "Kalotic" world
order. He wrote in the Bulletin of the School:
The basic rapport group usually consists of eight to fourteen members and the leader or
facilitator. The group uses verbal and non-verbal exercises and encounters, and typically has no
set agenda. It uses the feelings and interactions of group members as the focus of attention.
This allows for maximum of freedom for personal expression, the getting in touch with feelings,
and interpersonal communication. Emphasis is on open, honest and direct interactions among
members in an atmosphere that supports the dropping of defenses and social masks characteristic
of normal academic relationships. Rapport group members come to know themselves and each other
more quickly, deeply, and fully than is possible in the usual academic situations; ordinarily, a
strong feeling of group solidarity develops. The resulting climate of openness, risk-taking,
honesty, and trust displaces feelings of defensiveness, rigidity, and mistrust. Members can
identify and alter self-defeating attitudes and behavior patterns, and explore and adopt more
innovative and constructive ones. In the end, most members can experience daily life and work
more pleasurably than before, on campus and off.
Deg was trying to connect the personal to the universal without the usual intervening madness.
Amidst the continual hubbub of hand-to-hand struggle at the new school, he could not
operationalize the theory of the Rapport Center. He left it to the attention of his brother
Edward and B. J., a group leader whom Ed had recruited from his experience at the famed center
for group therapy at Esalen, and to the students, aged 18 to 28. At one moment in a group
session, on the way to the brave new world, two men decided that they would make love to each
other and went off, after which one, a virgin in such matters, "tossed his cookies" in a rush of
shame and disgust.
The word got to Deg and to V. as well, who accosted Deg on an alpine pathway and denounced such
conduct nor, said he, will I stay on these mountains with this going on. Deg solemnly and
reassuringly listened, and told Ed "What the hell happened there anyhow?" He didn't expect much
of an answer, nor got one. The Rapport Center remained popular and undirected to the new world
order, whence I remind my readers of two axioms: few truly wish and are psychically prepared to
address themselves to the necessary new world, and "bringing life into the classroom" is a
beloved pedagogical expression with absurd possibilities.
V. stuck it out on the mountains -- actually he enjoyed his stay -- but he could not help but
slip a reminder of the incident, camouflaged, into his notes and ultimately into Mankind in
Amnesia, where, in a diatribe against both the old and the new, he says( p. 185):
The rebellion of the young was full of hope -- the millennium was about to begin. The hair was
grown long. John the Baptist was imitated in appearance, but the rebellion was against
asceticism as well as against materialism; regulations were to be violated, young and not-so-
young flocked to 'rapport-psychology' which struck out Freud and the rest of the 'schools';
orgies were practiced as curriculum in some campus classrooms as the call came for tearing down
all inhibitions.
But V. did not pursue sexual investigations of Jung or Marx, contenting himself with stressing
the obvious resentment of Jung at being regarded as a son. Bronson Feldman, a Velikovsky
acquaintance and supporter, introduced sexual analysis to back up V.'s claims, but we must
remember how chary was V. to let anyone claim to represent his several views, with every
excellent reason. Feldman, who became understandably mad and confused when dealing with Central
European anti-semitism, added little to historical reconstruction.
He did point out, for instance, that V. had misstated a famous report of Freud's swooning in the
presence of Jung and others. V. forgot to mention that not only had Jung been defending the
efforts of Akhnaton to erase his father's memory but had just been hotly accused by Freud of the
great academic crime of non-citation of authority -- namely himself, Freud -- in his writings.
Thus Freud had taken two blows from his disciple and son, Jung, and probably a third unmentioned
blow, a Christian effort (at least a suspicion thereof) to bury a Jew's contribution to
knowledge; of this suspicion we have ample evidence, and of the fact, too, whether in Jung or in
Nazism, that the contributions of Heine, Mendelssohn, Einstein and many another Jew to German
high culture were buried. And, incidentally, Deg spoke in Politics for Better or Worse of the
recent era in America, "of those highly skilled and creative people who had built the arts and
sciences, half of them Jews," for he was irritated that in whatsoever history book or
sociological work on America no such statement, even the approximation of such a statement, is
to be found. But Jews are divided in their minds and amongst themselves whether to lay claim to
their achievements or to play them down to avoid envy and resentment.
The sexual verges upon the political, and the political, I must now make the point, verges upon
the sexual. I mentioned that V. was a prude -- or was he canny, realizing that scientists and
scholars are sexually repressed and in our civilization will not respect an authority who ties
in the sexual link too closely with the processes of the intellect? I would say V. was publicly
rather priggish, and privately more so. He did not like at all Stechini's introducing Peter
Tompkins to his circle, nor did Peter visit more than once, although a war hero, a man of some
fame then ( and more to come), of great personal attractiveness, and a potentially influential
supporter: why? Because Tompkins had written on cults and practices of eunuchs and virgins and
saw in the history of the planet Venus, which he credited to V., the mad unfolding of the human
mind into sexualized institutions.
With perhaps more reason, V was exceedingly wary of a "hippy bookman" in Manhattan, Theodore
Lazar, adorative of V.'s books, who wrote a pamphlet about Venusian-derived phallicism, the
commentary image as it entered so many ways into the brain and behavior of mankind. V. was
wrought up at Robert Stephanos, a Philadelphia school system psychologist, the most faithful,
pleasant and helpful of disciples, for pushing favorably the work of the New Yorker. And, later
on, he was angry to hear that Stephanos had been flirtatiously corresponding with a Southern
devotee and, not long afterwards, in a paranoiac mood, came to suspect that Stephanos might even
be purloining papers of his. You must remove him from the Board of Trustees of the Foundation
for Studies of Modern Science, he told Deg, the President, and others.
"Politics makes strange bedfellows," but so does science when it strikes out in new directions.
Whoever wants to sleep with the partner of his choice or to sleep alone must give up creative
dreams. V. sought hard to deny his bedfellows, but they were with him from the moment his book
struck a popular chord, attracting many who were looking for bedfellows. Not so strange, he or
his fellows, I hasten to stress. Just variegated.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 2 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOMO SCHIZO MEETS GOD
Great mysteries of existence such as human nature, divinity, time and governance are
intimidating. The ordinary person is content with a few slogans about them, a kind of
catechism, and to be allowed to make off with a piece of one of them -- so small as to be
indistinguishable, therefore safe to play with for life. There are also those few persons who,
emboldened by a successful encounter with a great mystery, become drunk with the genre and go
on a rampage, knocking over distinctions and laying claim to new territory extravagantly. You
can tell the type, if by no other sign, then by the way they have of looking upon the universe
as a cabbage patch and treating great historical figures as their neighbors.
One could see it long ago in Deg, who after taking the worst and the best of the army for four
years, came back finally and managed a Chicago election where, introducing his distinguished
professor Charles E. Merriam to a mass meeting (luckily the Fifth ward had the greatest
concentration of intellectuals in the world) he said enthusiastically that he had studied with
Merriam 'like Aristotle at the feet of Plato' and then was ribbed by friends and poignantly
embarrassed, so that as you see, even now he can remember to tell me about it.
Therefore it is no surprise that thirty five years later he can be treating Charles Darwin and
everyone else familiarly, even arrogantly, "What is your opinion of Darwin?" was, of course,
the question. The tape spun; Deg picked up his notes and spoke at the machine:
Charles Darwin was an apt hero for nineteenth century biology and the public and scientific
mentalities of the nineteenth century. He came from an expanding empire, did his "field work"
young; he lived for many years quietly, gestating his ideas; he published at the right moment
for coalescing the views of the scientific and cultural world; his theory of natural selection
was simple, vague, and in line with what the secular person thought was his own idea.
Now that his ideas are wearing out, the psychiatrists, methodologists, and philosophers have
picked him to pieces. He was an uncertain person, never a fully convinced Darwinist. In the
contemporary vein, R. C. Lewontin writes that "Darwin's work is filled with ambiguities,
contradictions, and theoretical revisions." Velikovsky once pointed out that if Darwin had
followed some of his own observations while on the voyage of the Beagle he would have become a
catastrophist. He almost became a Lamarckian at one point, so fetching is it when one's own
theory is indefinite, to imagine that the soma can be changed permanently by a forceful
environment.
"Darwin was ambitious, courted success and successful men, and cared for their approval:" again
these are Lewontin's words. So too was Velikovsky. In 1858, just before Darwin published the
Origin of Species by Natural Selection, he wrote that he did not yet feel set on the truth of
any point of his theory, and was in this state of mind when Alfred Wallace wrote from far away
to tell him about his own theory of natural selection.
When he consulted his friends, their solution was to hustle him into publishing his manuscripts
along with the essay of Wallace. What else could they do? Otherwise, Wallace would have
priority. As Darwin said, "All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed ...
It seems hard on me that I should be thus compelled to lose my priority of many years
standing."
But let us be clear...
Ignoring the machine, Deg produced a statement out of his drawer of epigrams; "I used to hate
epigrams," he said, but now I collect a few, "especially my own." He read: "Priority in science
is a political claim. It is of no interest to scientific advancement that A or B captured a
strong point first, so long as it was taken. A proposition is denuded of its generator. It ends
life as it began, in anonymity." He spoke feelingly, because a continual annoyance of a
generation of the Velikovsky affair was the bickering about claims and predictions.
The lead was unfortunately provided by Princeton physicist Valentine Bargmann and Columbia
astronomer Lloyd Motz when they assigned V. a priority on the heat of Venus and the radio
noises of Jupiter (upon his instigation) and recommended reading his work for further clues as
to what to expect. Such words from an astronomer and a physicist were naughty; they excited V.
and his followers and angered other scientists, all the more because they were involved
themselves in this racket.
The ideas of 'priority', 'prediction, ' and 'claim' are more political than scientific. The
word 'claim' connotes possessiveness -- not a happy human quality. V. liked the term; the press
liked it; ambitious scientists like it. and long years of struggle have gone on is such fields
as physics and psychology to try to assure people's claims to discovery, as if all of knowledge
is of little bits, ever-diminishing bits as well, that are owned by an individual forever.
Darwin need not have worried; his location, his friends, and the ample, ambiguous, diffident
qualities of his writing, pitched at the consensus of all-who-mattered, the 'happy few' of the
day, would assure his work 'priority. '
Velikovsky's work found no such consensus. Perhaps it deserved no such consensus. Perhaps it
earned at that point precisely what it deserved, and what Darwin's work deserved -- an
audience, a hearing, a turning of minds, a refurbishing of hypotheses, some of the patient,
indulgent, reflective, detailed processing that is supposed to characterize science but does
not markedly do so.
Deg's un-darwinian Homo Schizo was present for many years and began with the conviction that
man was essentially non-rational. When Deg first joined the faculty of Stanford University in
1952, he was working on the phrasing of Lasswell's law: political man displaces private motives
onto public objects and rationalizes them in terms of the public advantage. This conception had
burst upon political science in the 1930's, joined with pragmatism and neo-machiavellism, and
overran the 2300-year-old positions of rational-legal-institutional political science.
Deg radicalized the concept. He could not see anything extraordinary about Lasswell's political
man except in the intensity of his involvement with power. Too, he was critical of the notion
of rationalization, for since boyhood he had found everybody doing nothing but rationalization.
Therefore he suspected that reason and rationalism and rationality were really processes of
rationalization. When he came in the seventies to ponder the nature of man, he could now
perceive a brain structure and personality altogether of the schizoid type. His newer concept
was of instinct-delay, blocking, and displacement of the response to a stimulus, forcing
terrible self-reflection, and in the control of response to stimulus, forcing terrible self-
reflection, and in the control of these reflections -- the polyego -- there occurred the human
character. The essential polyego assured an eternal existential fear, whose high level, being
constant, goes generally unnoticed.
Homo sapiens, whom he finally termed homo sapiens schizotypus, is most rational when he is
acting (thinking being a form of acting) pragmatically, that is, calculating and adjusting to
the consequences of his behavior while transacting with an environment, both human and natural.
Logic, and hence science, and hence most of what is ordinarily called reason, develops as a
means of most efficiently connecting an entering stimulus with an effective response. In this
sense, man seemingly farthest removed from the animal kingdom, finds his triumph in emulating
instinctive response. He aims at reducing his high level of existential few by logical,
"rational", and scientific conduct.
But as the underlaid instinctual apparatus of the animal does not guarantee it against the
multiform assaults of nature, whether represented intraspecies or in the transaction with other
species and inorganic nature and whether uniformitarian or disastrous, so too man's efforts at
reconstructing and reinforcing his less genetic, delayed instinctual apparatus, are
continuously ineffective. All the achievements of the calculating and even scientific Homo
Schizo cannot win control over the self, others, and the natural world. As in the beginning and
even in the most rationalistic technical ages, Homo Schizo continues to rely upon the
organization of his far-flung displacements for adjustment and control of himself and the
world, so that religion, culture, and the arts are, if not preponderantly his road to
"happiness," most useful and welcome companions of pragmatic scientific conduct. Alone or
together, the sciences and the arts cannot create a creature other than Homo Schizo. Even if
they could, the monsters would be limited to some portion of their own envisioned ideal that
they could agree upon, and they would promptly regret having made such a substitute for the
unrealized larger portion of their ideal.
I should not try to explain the full theory here, not when two volumes about it are available
elsewhere. However, it is appropriate to comment that Deg began his development of the model of
Homo Schizo to test the Freud-V. theory that historical traumas produced a character who simply
had memory problems but was otherwise "rational" by nature. As I said, Deg was already
prejudiced against this idea, and it was no accident that he almost immediately placed the idea
of the intelligent evolving savage into a restricted enclosure. He searched instead for the
larger meaning of catastrophe, now quantavolution, that formed a different creature to begin
with. Primordial man was now catastrophized in two senses, first genetically and second in the
sense of reinforcement through repeated catastrophic experiences.
The latter, the reinforcement process, gave Deg no trouble; there was ample evidence of a "law"
operating whereby the intensity and duration of an experience (read "catastrophe") determined
and varied directly with the amnesia and compulsive sublimated recapitulations of the
experience. Further, therapy of such a condition (control over it, that is) was exceedingly
difficult, whether of the individual or of the collectivity.
More difficult was the establishment of the genetic basis of human nature. Here Deg found his
way, first by undermining the case for gradualist darwinian and anthropological evolution, and
second by discovering uniquely human variances in current research on the structure and
operation of the central nervous system. He came to attribute humanness to a brief glitch in
the stimulus-response system, which I mentioned above. How he visualized it becomes crudely
clear in a note from his files, entitled "Making a Chimp Talk: a Suggested Research Project on
a key element of Homo Schizo."
MAKING A CHIMP TALK
Premises
1. Homo Schizo theory says that mankind became human and is human today in connection with a
millisecond delay interfering with instinctive response.
2. The delay a) diffuses (displaces) percepts, concepts, and memories widely because of lack of
immediate response, b) forces the being to sense itself, that is, at least two selves, c)
activates existential fear mechanisms because of lack of control of a) and terror from lack of
control of b).
3. To tie itself (itselves) together, the being communicates with itself and the result of this
communication is inner language, the basis for external language.
4. External or social language occurs as the being continues its inner operations by external
means, employing whatever it can, such as gestures, utterances, and other signs and signals.
5. All of 1. to 4. above occurs with little relation to the size of the brain, with some
relation to hemispheric symmetry, and with relation to other possible delaying mechanisms. A
person can be raised to behave normally in speech and behavior with 1/ 10 of the brain matter
normally encased in the cranium provided that all elements of the brain are represented by
proportional fractions.
6. A chimpanzee brain is within the human functional limits so far as size is concerned. Its
vocal apparatus and other symbolizing mechanism are adequate. It is highly sociable animal, so
"presumably would like to communicate." Chimpanzees and other non-humans can learn many
isolated symbols... "but they show no unequivocal evidence of mastering the conversational,
semantic, or syntactic organization of language." (H. S. Terrace et al. 206 Science 23 Nov.
1979,891).
Thesis: Chimpanzees do not speak because they do not undergo an internal electro-mechanical
compulsion to speak.
Corollary: Chimpanzees would speak if their instinctive brain operations were continuously and
unconsciously blocked for milliseconds. [thus supplying the compulsion] Experiment Baby
chimpanzee Abel is subjected to partial commissurectomy; insulin injections to arrive at
constant 10% higher blood level; and background human videotape television plus human handling
as of normal babies of up to 26 months of age.
Hypothesis : Abel will at the age of 26 months emit 50% (rather than 20%) of the expansive
adjacent utterances of human infants of the same age (and proportionately more than chimpanzee
'Nein' of that age -- in the Terrace et al. experiment).
Corollary hypothesis: Availability of the conditioned animal will permit application of a full
range of tests of humanism, including intelligence, self-awareness, self-images, artistry,
aggressiveness, persistency (obsession) in task performances, memory and recall, with special
attention to the generation of the several components of schizotypicality, including various
tests of insanity.
Here I think that Deg is downright ignorant regarding the possibilities of Dr. Frankenstein's
experimentation with apes. The ape is a massive system of unique organic connections and
resultant behaviors: unless you get into the gene system and perform a systemic mutation there,
you will get nowhere by monkeying (excuse the expression) with the post-natal resultant. He
proposes to cause artificially a totally ramifying system of displacements, fear, and ego split
when all the settings of the ape's organism are deadset against alteration. The animal will
simply die. That is a much more logical and simple response than to undertake the enormous
burden of behaving like a human.
Deg's archive carries many another note of different kinds --sketches, designs, critiques. They
begin as a broadly spread-out and miscellaneous aggregate, and then come together as the book
is written, but many of them are locked out in the end. Here are three of the excluded ones,
let to view:
Deg's Journal, December 20, 1968
In pregnancy, especially during the last three months, when the placenta is largest, the
placenta manufactures a large amount of blood ceruloplasmin.
1. Ceruloplasmin alleviates many cases of schizophrenia 2. Women with schizophrenia are
alleviated towards end of pregnancy
3. Relapses and initiation into schizophrenia may occur following pregnancy, i. e. post-natal
schizophrenia is common.
4. Schizophrenia is 'split personality' disease traditionally, although Hoffer and Osmond deny
this definition, saying there are not two persons, despite hallucinations and feelings of
persecution. They are in a major sense right.
5. The correspondence of high C production with the period at which a woman faces the traumatic
need to split her baby from herself makes me think that the body protects itself (or the
'mind') from the effects of this traumatic experience by exuding into the blood a specific
defense against schizophrenia.
About this time there occur also various petulant scribbles on his readings viz.:
Glancing through The Scientific American's handsome volume on Human Variations and Origins, I
see many errors behind the skillful graphics. There is Eiseley's idiotic article on Lyell, for
example. The 'distinguished' academician knows much about his man's surface and nothing about
his dynamics, nor does he understand the real conflict between uniformitarian and catastrophic
evolution. Eiseley's reputation comes from a deadhead riding the commonplace, uttering mystic
words.
Later in the book I see all manner of speculations treated as facts, simply because they come
from scientists. Man's spotty history is given a coherence by rhetoric, not data or even good
theory.
I see a picture. I read a caption. It shows an extremely tall negro and a short, chunky Eskimo.
The first's height is supposed to be an adaptation to heat, more surface per pound; the
latter's chunkiness is supposed to conserve heat. But whence the Swede? Whence the many fleshy
Africa Negroes? The Ibos, Pygmies, etc. Doesn't moisture and dryness of the air matter, etc.? I
have seen pictures of chunky short Indians of the Amazon and Orinoco tropical jungles.
The theory of evolution is full of hopeful guesses. I am working with a sample survey of
attitudes and experiences of the U. S. population right now. I am, as always, acutely impressed
by how the first relating of variables can mean nothing and always means nothing unless one is
satisfied that all the other factors are interpreted and counted. Women have the same accident
incidence as men: fine, but that's the end; afterwards all manner of crosscutting forces
changes the character of their accidents and incidence when compared in sub-groups.
The defensive scientist retorts irritably: 'But this is only popular science! We don't make
such errors in our real inside work. Nonsense. Every specialist is carried along on these so-
called popular currents, not to mention that he likes to call 'popular' anything that he
doesn't find agreeable or true. There is the beautiful image Merton and other students of
science, who are admirers of the image, employ: 'We are but pygmies, standing on the shoulders
of giants. ' We should also say, 'We are giants standing on the shoulders of pygmies, ' Or
better, 'We are monkeys, swinging carelessly along a dizzying network of vines mysteriously
placed and oriented.
' Sometime in 1970, Deg met biologist Dr. Karl Schildkraut of the Albert Einstein Medical
School through Dr. Annette Tobia. He was interested in Deg's University scheme and they talked
a couple of times about heredity. Perhaps these contacts brought about a note foreshadowing
some of his passages on evolution:
... Unless one resorts to an immense number of mutations (practically begging the question
whether uniformitarian or catastrophic), it impossible to conceive of the complex intra-
organism adjustments (changes) that must accompany an organic innovation, that is, 2n where n =
affected parts: if brain convolutes by mutation, then how many elements of the body must adapt
immediately ?
If all chromosomes and genes are linked, then there must be a chemical 'universal element, '
bringing about a total viable system change.
Note, too, the received evolutionary doctrine offers in evidence the numerous similarities of
all living cells. The same fact of universal similarity is applicable to the doctrine of
simultaneous systemic mutation, both regressive and progressive.
Deg sent an early version of the theory of Homo Schizo to Lawrence Zelic Freedman of the
Institute of Social and Behavioral Pathology at the University of Chicago at the suggestion of
Harold Lasswell. Freedman raised two issues with the theory, issues that Deg addressed in the
final work: Could man have been catastrophized other than by natural disaster and could a
catastrophe strike into the hominids en masse. Freedman wrote:
... The notion of contemporary man as a schizotypicalis is one which I find easy to accept, and
your adumbration of the contemporary social and psychological dilemmas of knowing --if not
understanding -- man, magnificently expressed... the elemental catastrophe of separation and
confrontation with hostile elements during the process of birth might be the individual
equivalent of the massive conformation with overwhelming stress which the model catastrophe
hypothesis demands.
Deg considered that human birth is not much more traumatic than anthropoid birth, hence, if it
has a greater psychic effect, that is because of a prior genetic constitution which has to be
explained. Freedman raised a second major issue: "the high probability that significant
elements in the general population would escape the pathogenic influences of the hypothesized
catastrophe."
Deg worked out of his dilemma by devising a primordial scenario in which a radiation
turbulence, causing millions of mutations, altered the physiology of a given hominid such that
full schizophrenic behavior was promptly induced in its descendent and, by virtue of the
powerful capabilities of the individual, within a thousand years produced a multitude of
operative humans spread over a large territory. Alternatively, owing to a catastrophic
turbulence, a changed atmospheric constant might have constituted in effect a genetic change by
continuously, "ever after," conditioning a new hormonal state in a pre-potentiated hominid
species, in which event, the humanization process would have been speedier. That both
processes, genetic mutation and a changed critical gaseous constant, could operate
sympathetically was also foreseen.
Deg sent the same early booklet to his friend at the University of Haifa in Israel. Professor
Ernst Wreschner, who found the Homo Schizo theory especially vulnerable in regards to its
catastrophic scenario and the short time allowed for humanization:
I accept that Pleistocene upheavals, cosmic tektonic -- a combination of fire and water --
must have been for generations of homo erectus, Acheulean man, Ante-neanderthals, Neanderthals
as well as for some Cromagnon, and whatever names archaeologists give to them, an experience of
realities that were outside their powers of coping with mentally. It is feasible that by these
very experiences mechanisms could have been developed which enabled men to survive more or less
sane during times of the twilight of the gods. But I also believe that the very principle of
natural selection could and did cope with the possible influences of catastrophes or cosmic
radiation escalations. Either in the mutational sense or in the mentally adaptive or both.
Which would mean in biological and cultural fields. (...)
The postulation that catastrophes were always global and had overall consequences is untenable,
as is the date expounded for a decisive point in human history such as 13,000 B. C. (...) The
deep dualism in the human make up developed and existed in their "animal context" becoming
mentally or psychologically pronounced when selfawareness could fathom them. But this happened
in a process of culturisation and this forced men to deal with them, even without catastrophic
catalysts. (...) And language is also not a sudden creation. Many factors worked towards it,
biological (anatomical and cultural ones). Man is by nature an experimenter, based on the
mammalian trait of curiosity. It was 400,000 years ago that he experimented with fire and
limonite to get a result which was the red color mineral hematite. Many others after him,
either independently or by diffusion, hit on the same. Many thousands of years passed between
these experiments. And those with the developed brains put the red color to symbolic use, when
other beliefs needed a carrier for associations connected with life and death. Thus with the
first burials the red color in the form of ochre appears and afterwards red color symbolism in
many forms spread and you find it ever since in variegated ideational meanings, in burial
practices, myths, rituals, legends and ceremonials.
In reply, Deg seeks to explain their basically different ways of looking at human evolution:
25 December 1977 Dear Ernst: Don't look now, but it's Christmas Day, It's cold and rainy.
Saturn has come down with his disastrous reindeer from the North pole. I am hiding out, for a
couple of hours, nursing my cold, which is true, but also releasing my soul from the desperate
festivities, which I shall rejoin soon enough, and my appetite for turkey will be sated. I
shall try to behave with the appropriate jollity. I shall try not to be ironic, and not to make
too many anti-materialistic or even learned remarks. I have become incapable of joy "on order"
though I am quite eager for joy when I am in the mood. The holidays in our current world have
become twistings and turnings of human relations in an attempt to find some traditional form
that is quite alien to the form that they assume during the rest of the year. Ah, well, for the
moment it looks as if we might have peace in the Near East this next year, owing to that
remarkable Sadat who is neither Jew nor Christian, and probably not even a member of the CIA.
Both Kronos and the Review of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (England) have asked me
to publish my Homo Sapiens Schizotyicalis and I think it will be done. I am suggesting to them
that they ask you to prepare a commentary from your letters and other thoughts, if your time
permits, thinking that you will have half done the job already. Strangely, I think you have
understood my theory very well but you have not understood the weaknesses of your own
conventional flooring quite as well. If you will permit me to say so, I would assert that time
after time you (and that means a flock of learned gentry of evolutionary persuasion) will
employ sloganized concepts and terms to bridge whatever has to be crossed. Like the word "cope"
as "the principle of natural selection could and did cope with the possible influences of
catastrophes and cosmic radiation escalations." or employ the phrase "decisively influence" in
place of "created" to deal with the change in mind. That is, you have no mechanism for the
changes that occurred, but rather words that are accepted and unquestioned. And you say that
symbolism is created by the adequate faculties of man -- then and now -- to explaining things
rationally. But why does he have to explain? Why doesn't he just let the matter go by? None
demands that he explain, except himself, and this he does because he must control himself, and
thence the gods and others. That is, the reason for human reason is not reasonable, that is,
functional in the sense you put it, but he is compelled to a certain kind of reason by his very
being that has been changed, and the change is not reasonable but is simply the kind of change
that produced the new kind of being.
I have been reading the book by Walter Fairservis, called The Threshold of Civilization, as I
have thought about your letters, and I can see him to be unconsciously evading all of my major
points. He systemically lays out the division of societies into hunting gathering,
agricultural, and civilized (using useless terms), prettying up the old evolutionary sequence.
But how much hard evidence exists that hunting came before agriculture? I think that they came
together and that later on perhaps when a society became strikingly one or the other, secondary
differences occurred. To me, it seems logical that the earliest Homo Schizo went on for a
moment of time grabbing at all the bugs, carrion, and plants he would find, but discovering
right away that by escalated sign behavior and organization he could do immeasurably better
than before. That is, the gestalt of the certain permitted breakthroughs culturally along the
whole front of life. Think of what the Renaissance in Tuscany did with a few ideas; it
penetrated every shore of culture and did it within a few years. This was the Renaissance
Gestalt.
From time to time, too, you mention long temporal periods as elapsing between events and I can
see that unless one frees himself mentally from the long-term evolutionary fame of mind, the
aggregate of events that I say happened almost simultaneously cannot by definition have
happened. So one must hypothesize the collapse of time, understand the dynamic that would then
be possible, and thereafter go back and look at time to see whether it is conceivable that we
are wrong in believing it to have been so stretched out. I realize that the odds seem
impossibly great against a short-time measuring rod. All I can say at this stage is that I have
spent some time with every method of measuring time that exists and in every case maybe found
some Achilles Heel. To give one instance, it is possible to make a case for Olduvai events to
have been contemporaneous with the destruction of the Cities of the Plain -- geophysically,
anthropologically and in legend. Not a good case, to be sure, but there has never been a study
with this hypothesis in mind. And what I have discovered is that the whole world of rocks,
skies, nature, and culture can be twisted into a short-term frame, hypothetically,
scientifically, to where a whole series of studies could without fantastic efforts give the
"yea" or "nay" to the general theories at stake...
Given so heretical an idea of man's origins and nature, we cannot expect less heresy in Deg's
religious views.
I think that Deg's troubles with religion and his carping at gods was because God is a Hero.
Deg did not like heroes, saying "Heroes are foreseeable accidents that befall a following." Let
us say that at the least he wanted a hero he should control, which is at least an ambivalence
if not a contradiction. This in turn had something to do with his early childhood, when there
was a benevolent, authoritative father and a brother older by a couple of years who was always
excelling, frustrating, lending help diffidently. Harold Lasswell in an impromptu speech at a
banquet one time, when both brothers were present, referred to 'Al' as generated out of
'sibling rivalry. ' I suppose that Deg had tried to manage Lasswell, that great god of many
social scientists, over the years and did the same with Velikovsky. There were other gods as
well, and probably he escaped being some great man's Boswell or Harry Hopkins because of his
persisting ambivalence or simple bivalence; it is not an uncommon trait, especially among
women, with whom Deg always felt at ease and in touch.
At one time he made the following note:
It should be an offense for anyone to speak in the name of gods, or to say that gods speak to
him, or to call upon gods to intervene in the world, or to treat anyone in the name of gods, or
to assign to gods human traits.
V. and Deg talked little about, and hardly searched for, religion and god. V. had no religion
and had never intended to possess one. Deg had no religion, always intended to discover one,
but seemed never fully to get down to the search; meanwhile he was forever peering into the
crevices where people kept their sacred idols and their firm or faltering notions, and he
acknowledged the value of religious discussions. V.'s indifference to religion annoyed him.
"God is an open question" was Deg's saying, and he stuck it into lectures and books and
conversation, meaning not only that God is in doubt but that God was in essence an Open
Question.
In November 1972, he makes a note to himself: "Reconcile V. 's intense jealousy of God as a
Jewish invention and V.'s expression to me of his belief in plural gods, and Yahweh as Saturn."
[ Actually V. thought Yahweh was Zeus, and Elohim was Saturn.] "I do reconcile them by saying
that V. changed too. His original belief changed even though the momentum of his original
routine drove him on. Compare him with the creationists, for example, Bass, Ransom, and others
not known except through writings (e. g. Donald Patten) who became quite good and imaginative
in scientific and humanistic work on a new secular plane." Here Deg is saying in effect that he
was sympathetic to and enjoyed the creationists, whereas V. thought that they were wasting
their time. Judaism was the tool of Zionism, so far as V. was concerned. It had little other
value but to claim additional authority for Isreal skywards as well as landwards. Martin Sieff,
studying V. from a distance, came to the same conclusions, which he expounded at an SIS
meeting:
Velikovsky's life's record clearly identifies him as a Jewish cultural nationalist, his
youthful experience in the Moscow Free University, his great work in producing the Scripta
Universitatis in Jerusalem and in Berlin, his pioneering in the settlement of Palestine in the
1920's all fit firmly into this pattern. It is likely that he was early influenced by the
Russian Jewish Zionist writer Ahad Ha'am, who died in Tel Aviv in 1925, shortly after
Velikovsky himself had moved to Palestine. It is important to note here that such a cultural
nationalist identity stood very well clear of any religious commitment. Believers may search
Velikovsky's published works in vain for any mention or acknowledgment of God. The most they
will come up with is in the Theophany section of Worlds in Collision, a carefully oblique
reference which may be taken different ways, to "the great architect of the universe" This is
what makes the pseudo-scientific attacks on Velikovsky, by people who have not troubled to read
his books, so ironic. Velikovsky himself is in no sense a fundamentalist. His tampering with
the biblical texts as they stand and his antipathy to several of the major biblical heroes, as
well as major stands of the Hebraic religion, testify to that. Did Velikovsky believe in god?
In his very revealing 1967 interview with the Yale Scientific Magazine, one of the few
occasions when Velikovsky really lets has hair down, he stayed very well clear of this issue,
stating: "people are looking for something in my works, and they cannot find it." It is
doubtful, I would speculate, that Velikovsky was an agnostic, and I very much doubt that he was
an atheist. The sense of moral destiny, or right and wrong is too strong in his books for that.
At the same time, however, just as Freud quailed before Moses, Velikovsky gives us the imagery
of Ahab and Saul quaking before the prophets of God, and his sympathies are clearly with the
sinner kings.... Velikovsky kept some orthodox Jewish practices rigorously, but insisted that
he only did so for the sake of his wife. As they enjoyed 57 years of sympathetic accord in
their marriage, this may seem somewhat spurious rationalization... as George Orwell wrote of
Tolstoy, for both men, Freud and the later figure who was so influenced by him, their attitude
towards God was rather that of two birds in a cage, suspicious of God as posing a rivalry to
their own dominance. Psychoanalysis was God, cast for Freud in the image of Oedipus, and the
devil -- reflection of his own repressed frustrations. For Velikovsky, God was in the image of
the planet god that brought purpose and terror, judgment and fire, to the peoples of the earth.
Deg recollected, when he read a copy of Sieff's speech, a remark that V. had made at
Lethbridge. He found that it had been kept through several revisions that delayed its
publication for several years. "The noises caused by the folding and twisting of strata. Noises
of the screeching Earth described also by Hesiod -- the Israelites heard in them a voice giving
ethical commands." There can be little doubt on the matter. In this work, which Milton happily
entitled "Recollections of a Fallen Sky" (V. did not like the title, but Deg ran interference
for Milton on its behalf), V. speaks from his view of all manifestations of divinity, that they
are natural, material, and that they promote delusions.
His few passages on religion in the posthumously published Stargazers and Gravediggers are
scarcely revealing. He lumps together religious and scientific dogmatists; melodramatically, he
writes "were it possible to burn my books and their author publicly, then most probably the
councils of the church and of the scientific collegium would have fought for the privilege of
taking hold of me and would have dragged me, each out of the grasp of the other, to its own
stake."
In the same work, he declares that "to my way thinking, these books of the old Testament are of
human origin: though inspired, they are not infallible and must be handled in a scientific
manner as other literary documents of great antiquity." Well, one man's 'inspiration' is
another man's delusion.
His public stance on religion is disclosed in an interview for Science and Mechanics magazine
(July 1968) :
... I answered only once when a group from prison in Illinois wrote to me that this occupies
their minds very much and they debated and would like to know how I stand. To men in such a
distressful situation, I felt that I owed an answer and I wrote to them. But generally, I keep
such things to myself because it's just the same as asking whether William Conrad Roentgen, who
discovered X-rays, believed that X-rays were created by God or not. The problem is not whether
he was a churchgoer or an atheist; this is not the question at all. The fact is that he
discovered X-rays. Now you can approach it from the philosophical viewpoint and say "this is
the creation of the Lord," and you would be perfectly right. If you are a disbeliever and claim
that X-rays are the result of a soulless Nature, you are consequently correct. But you should
not confuse historical and scientific questions with theological considerations.
There was incidentally, little of moment in the letter to the prisoners. Try as he would, Deg
could not remember anything in it. When I checked with the Velikovsky Estate to verify the
letter, Sammer and Heinberg denied its existence. They agreed that it was written in longhand
and no copy was preserved. Possibly Deg remembered V. telling him what was in it, and there
being nothing tangible, forgot what it was. We can be sure that V. did not send the prisoners
to the Bible, and one of the most persistent and risible of canards raised against V.,
especially by the humanist movement, was that he was an anti-scientific Biblical revivalist.
Many scientists picked up this idea, too. That he was often used by evangelists cannot be
disputed, but in such cases Velikovsky was not a Velikovskian.
V. could not be pinned down on God (as Deg noted in 1972 "I am certain that he does not believe
in God.") but he would use the Hebrew Lord to belay others. The most revealing passages of V.
's view came at the end of Oedipus and Akhnaton at the expense of Freud, whose book on Moses
and Monotheism he denounced; Freud, he declared, had done his people a great disservice by
taking monotheism from them as an original invention (again the idea of a "claim"), making of
Moses an Egyptian, and of Yahwism a primitive cult; Freud, he actually wrote, was neurotic. His
anger at Freud overflowed onto Akhnaton so that this magnificent free-thinking Pharaoh, who
tried to liberate a great culture from priestly and traditional thralldom, became now
psychotic, deformed, a nudist, monolatrous (not monotheistic), incestuous, homosexual
(bisexual), a pacific bungler of his country's affairs, and, if not a wife-beater, a wife-
banisher. V. harbored the thought that Moses was not a monotheist, that true monotheism did not
come to the Jews until the time of Jeremiah, whom he regarded as the first to formulate the
idea. He never expressed himself publicly, for the same reason that he had criticized Freud for
publishing Moses and Monotheism. Too many Jews would be upset, he said onetime privately to
Wolfe, Milton, and Rose. He believed that late editors of the Bible and Jewish rulers had
refashioned Moses into a monotheist, and that not until a few years before the Babylonian
Captivity did the Jews become officially and fully committed as a group to monotheism.
V.'s secret can be deciphered in Worlds in Collision, however, where, although he mentions the
facts behind his theory, he gilds them by speaking of a striving to attain monotheism from the
time of Moses onwards. Like other honest scholars, and ordinary people too, V. could not
conceal his discoveries of "truth" even though he felt morally justified in doing so, and
actually believed, with some guilt feelings, that he had succeeded. Still, his attempts at
concealment had also a political angle, for he was enabled to deny that Akhnaton was a
monotheist, and to call him an idolator of the sun, while letting stand the convenient notion
that Moses, who came before Akhnaton in his reconstructed chronology, was monotheist.
The reader will readily recognize in the Illinois prisoner incident that V. had picked up the
typical American pose to avoid trouble: keep religion out of discussion -- separation of church
and state carried to ridiculous lengths. Elisheva was telling Deg proudly of V.'s position;
evidently she, too, not only used the excuse, but was self-congratulatory about it. She was
taken aback when Deg said that it was irresponsible: how can a person write so much about
religion, realizing full well that defenseless people are being affected by what he is saying,
and then shut up like a clam when the consequences of his statements are under inquiry? This is
especially the case in a free country, where unlike in police states, one loses little by
honesty.
I agree, and it is proper to say that V. lacked original ideas about contemporary religion. He
was materialist. a Proto-marxist (rebuffed by persistent anti-semitism ), a Jewish nationalist
who had to reconcile himself to the powerful Judaic orthodoxy within the state of Israel and
within his family, an orthodox freudian believer that psychoanalysis can free the mind, a
believer in science as a realistic and rational ordering of the universe, and a shrewd evader
of religious controversy, which, if he had entered upon it, would have alienated half of his
public support.
Deg's position was quite different. He was pro-Jewish anti-Moses, even though a profound
sympathy for Moses is apparent in his book on God's Fire, and, I might add, he felt, too,
profound sympathy for Karl Marx as a mind bursting with social reality and grim wild hopes,
even while being a life-long antimarxist. He felt dreadfully sorry (remember what I said
earlier about his empathy with historical figures) for those Jews, often in the majority, who
tried to wrest human and civil rights from Moses-Aaron, Miriam, the Golden Calf worshippers,
the wanderers who heard "the call of Egypt." the Scouts, and the intercultural revelers of Beth
Peor.
Deg's idea of religion could not develop fully until he had successfully framed the problem of
historical religions and satisfied himself of the essence of human nature. You have to find
these two keys to the history of religion and man. The first key he discovered by pursuing
man's interest in things sacred back as far as possible, back to humanization or creation it
seemed. It appeared that all gods were alike, that all men were religious even when atheist,
that all religions were alike, that all religions were psychologically at least polytheistic,
and that a succession of changing gods was a reflection of catastrophic cycles of nature and
culture. All religions were basically similar: they ritualized celestial and natural phenomena
in human terms; they sacrificed, they slaughtered people; and they secured and protected them.
Their historical behavior was basically schizoid.
There were two ways of finding the divine, both almost inaccessible to Homo Schizo; one was to
open up oneself to one's innermost depths in order to know whether some part of oneself is
divine. The other was to examine the universe outside to see whether the divine must exist
there and whether it is manifesting itself. This was a futuristic theology, to be sure. It was
anti-rationalistic, that is, anti-Aristotelian. If more words need be applied, it was a
phenomenological pragmatic, existential approach.
In 1965, there occurs a mention of the idea of entropy, and Deg's view of religion may be said
to have emerged from his reaction to this "law of nature."
The world of the second law thermodynamics -- the dying world -- is the product of a dying
mind. When the mind ceases to die and begins to live, the second law of thermodynamics will be
replaced by an equally valid and scientifically acceptable law of creative evolution or
creative condensation or creative intensification of specialized activity. [This ultimately
ended in the theory of theotropy thirteen years later.]
He remembers, of course, the aura of publicity that had attended the work of Norbert Wiener and
cybernetics, and a kind of gloominess associated with the notion of entropy, merged with the
character of Wiener who, he thought, might have committed suicide in Stockholm. Not long
afterwards he came upon a book of Melvin Cook in the New York University library stacks:
published in 1966, this difficult technical work on geophysics was by all odds the most
competent and confident assault upon the premises of long-time geochronometry to be found.
Cook's model of crashing ice caps and slitting continents set up the basis for Deg's geology.
The main problem was to reconcile his own exoterrestrial first causes with Cook's Earth-based
scenario. Beside this, Cook, in a few paragraphs on negative entropy, rendered Deg sensitive to
a possible place in theology for a new process. As the time approached to write The Divine
Succession, the negativism inherent in his destruction of history was unexpectedly counteracted
by a positivism from this source.
Deg's Journal, July 10, 1979
End of my generation begins. [I cannot deduce what he means by this.] NEW PROOF OF THE
EXISTENCE OF GOD
If our model of the solar system is correct, with therefore a time 1 to 15 million years and if
the universe is large and populated as it presently seems to be, the manufacture of negative
entropic features of short duration should be occurring with much greater frequency than now
conceived (although if time is infinitely regressive then the speed of their creation is
inconsequential). However, in either case, the probability of say 1020 intelligent (negatively
entropic) worlds is very high. Now there is no reason to use mankind as the measure of the 1020
intelligent world. Whereupon I postulate an X number of worlds where the creative dynamics of
negative entropy produce beings of such intelligence and power that they may be called 'gods. '
If these are defined as 'beings with n times the intelligence and power of mankind (and they
may be aggregates as well as individuals), one of them may be considered to be of such
Intelligence as well as individuals), one of them may be considered to be of such Intelligence
and Power that it may establish control over the universal process. In that case, we have the
traditional concept of god exercised in new form of proof of omniscience and omnipotence --
that is, one who is created by the universe working towards that goal (by its essence) and who
ultimately turns around and controls the Universe. If the chances of such a One having
appeared. If the chances of such a One having appeared are low, and such a One surviving
temporally in addition to all his other powers (i. e. 'God is external') sets up a chance that
One existed but no longer does, then the Universe may still go on and on in the expectation
that sooner or later it will create its eternal, omniscient and omnipotent master, where upon
truly he universe will be intelligently (as vs. the present chaos) ordered and in which the
far-flung parts will be compelled to cooperate.
However, ideas were converging from all quarters. The theories of Homo Schizo and Divine
Succession went along together and interlocked without difficulty or even awareness.
September 9, 1972
I am going to Princeton today, expect to see Velikovsky. Have continued to probe his work
though I have a mountain of tasks before me for the Fall. Am continuously tempted to rewrite
his theories in my own language, to test them, to add to them if they test out, to explain
their importance, and to put them into a logical psychological historical framework that cannot
be ignored. I am scarcely prepared for the task, in time, resources, information, so keep
nibbling at the edges (one would hope like the Martian rats that destroyed the army of
Sennacherib, according to the Egyptians).
At this moment, am reading the scarifying Babylonian poem to Ishtar (W. in C. p. 200). I note
the line 'O furious Ishtar, summoner of armies, ' that concludes the poem. Again this works two
ways: Ishtar causes the people to wander and fight: V. says catastrophes engender migrations,
flight, armies clashing in the dark. Agreed. Many corresponding events in Greece, Near East,
etc. ca. 1500 and 8th-7th century.
But comes another reason for the armies and the clashes. When people are fearful, they
assemble. In numbers there is strength and comfort. They do not disperse as 'logic' would tell
them to. Any combat officer will tell you how difficult it is to get men to scatter for cover
when under attack; they want to huddle together, even though the collective 'good' lies in
spreading out.
The rationalization of huddling; the assembly of armies, the summoning, is that the enemy is
One, its intentions are unknown, the collective judgment of the tribe or people is needed (the
greater the roll-call the better, the more secure the judgment) and the enemy may be the
friend, who, it is desperately hoped, will be impressed by one's forces or lead one's forces
against our enemies, indeed, demand to lead them. "I am your god, your leader. Why are you not
gathered to greet me. Why do you run away; your running is suspicious. I demand that you
assemble for My Coming!" All of this is not withstanding that in some places and areas people
would in fact scatter to the caves and clefts, as the premonition of disaster came to them.(
cf. W. in C. 212-3).
Deg's Journal, Oct. 10, 1972 I showed Sebastian several pages of V. dealing with ancient China.
He was moderately impressed. I asked about Tao. Sebastian holds the unconventional belief that
the Chinese notion of 'heaven' is animated. It is a Being. I have that hook to hold on to. What
set me to thinking was this: Tao seems like a refutation of catastrophism; no bloody gods. But
in the beginning it relates the stories of heavenly conflicts. I was baffled. Tao seems so
benign, calm, apathetic. Then the thought came: but perhaps Tao became Chinese
uniformitarianism! Centuries ahead of the West. Perhaps Tao came to soothe mind and restore
calm to the heavens. Really it wasn't long after Mars-Ares-Huizilopochtli-Nergal that Plato
clamored for laws vs. disbelievers in celestial harmony. But now see: the West remained
unsettled of mind. The gods did not go away carrying catastrophic theory with them. Humanists,
historians and scientists interrupted the movement towards uniformity and celestial serenity
until the 19th century and then the latter triumphed for only a century. Is it that Judaic
Christianity carried the Bible, whose catastrophism would not be denied or effaced, right down
through the centuries in the face of all amnesiac needs in religion, society, and science? Is
this why the Western world (including the Muslim) has been so turbulent and aggressive? What is
behind Tao? Do we now have a third amnesiac development out of catastrophe: Greek pantheons,
Judaic chosen tribe and monotheism, and Tao calm reflectiveness?
Deg's Journal, New York City, 1 A. M., 24, 1973 Just awakened by a call from Jack Martin,
Baptist Missionary in Bangkok, regarding Paul. You cannot give up hope for man or woman,
knowing that, if you do, the next moment will bring you a person who will reveal that you are
wrong.
EPILOGUE TO THE SETTLING OF HEAVEN
If one has stood amidst a burning city, been shaken in an earthquake, or watched the throes of
death, or looked down yawning chasms or into the ocean depths, or heard artillery shells scream
and strike, each 'with my name written on it, '--then one can better ponder the awful
predicament of our ancestors who over thousands of years suffered disaster manifold and many
times over. They cannot be gainsaid their fears and plaints, and the qualities of their gods,
those deeply involved companions of humans who became ever more human as they took the gods
into themselves and ever more diabolic as they sought to master the games of the gods.
The gods have retired into new forms. But they still operate through the busy humans whom the
poet Rilke called 'the bees of the invisible. ' They are everywhere and scarcely as remote as
our scientific texts would have us believe. They are in astrology, in fortune-telling, in
magic. They fly to the scenes of disaster. They augment the forces of authority. They heal and
console. They scare. They make anxious. They set the rituals for many as they have done since
the age of Ouranos.
They assume their own negations: for they argue with themselves in Natural Law, in Bureaucracy,
in Dogmatic Materialism, in Reified Words, in Mummified Heroes, in Time and Worlds without end.
They let themselves be molded into One, and the One obliges his necessities by becoming Many,
Beyond all, they stand at ease waiting for Armageddon and the Day of Judgment. Then they will
don their armor and rally their hosts.
The gods have retired, yes, but it still takes rare courage to contemplate all of their
continuing manifestations and to resist the invention of their negations. There is yet nowhere
else to go. And few who would follow.
By skating along on the ice of the cerebral cortex, mathematical astrophysics or another such
exercise may sublimate the gods. Dumb bestiality may be equally functional in sublimating them.
We think that of all ways of facing them, the best is to look at them everywhere, contemplate
their every manifestation, anticipate their reappearance, but do no more. If there is any
question of human madness, it is erased when one pretends to be divine. Our human destiny is an
open question. We deny our humanity if we try to close it. We belittle ourselves if we plead
with the gods to answer it at any cost. Here we shall have to leave the matter rest.
Deg's Journal, Stylida, Naxos, July 3, 1978 The Old Testament of the Bible has been much on my
mind this summer, because of my study of Moses and the Exodus, because of several interesting
articles dealing with it by Sizemore, Greenberg, et al. that have come to hand, and because Ami
reveals herself in a new light as once a child who has remembered prodigious amounts of the
Bible from the nuns' school in Mulhouse that she attended.
I have come to look upon the Old Testament as a great mountain range that has yet to be
explored in regards to its effects upon the human mind, history, education, and anti-semitism,
politics and society in general. Just as there is no good book on the Jews -- sociological
psychological, and behavioral -- so there is none on the Bible. The early scientific
rationalists of the Enlightenment (and their socialist successors) thought that merely to
expose the Bible as a typical unscientific and superstitious document would be enough to put it
onto the shelves of dead religions, anthropology, myth. They treated it as a discrete entity
that could be taken off like a suit of clothes.
What did our homo schizo Deg do socially with his polyego while inventing it? Personal affairs
were not easy with him over much of the seventies. The daughters peeled off the family stalk
into Bryn Mawr, Smith, and the University of Chicago. The four boys broke off prematurely. They
split in every direction. Only Carl went through a university, held on at the Peabody School of
Johns Hopkins University by a devotion to music and a character too irritable to knock about
abroad. He did spend a while on Naxos, composing extemporaneously at all hours on a piano in
the middle of the OldMarket section. The others went here and there in the world: wherever the
newspapers were speaking of "endless Summer," of places where the action was, of Denver,
Bangkok, Florence, Amsterdam, Australia, Cuba, Morocco, Istanbul and San Francisco, word would
also come from them.
Jill decided upon a separation or, perhaps more accurately, redefined her relationship with Deg
around 1970 and Deg came thereafter as a visitor to Linden Lane in Princeton and then to his
mother, on which occasions he would also see Velikovsky and Sebastian and maybe Tom and Rosalyn
Frelinghuysen. The split was not abrupt or devastating; it was a drifting away that he felt
less distressing because he was immersed in tides of preoccupation. It was like a pattern that
stretched until unrecognizable, and then tore, or like the string tricks people do with their
fingers, when with a single movement of the fingers the strings slip into a new form.
Following upon his relatively flushed income of the sixties, when what he wanted to do
coincided with what agencies with money wanted him todo -- investment brokers, publishers, Bill
Baroody's American Enterprise Institute, the war establishment -- his finances fell into poor
shape during the seventies. Despite ordinary and extraordinary family expense, and his
contributions to his mother's welfare, he took leave from his University and spent all of his
savings and gave his library to the Alpine college. He gave up trying to publish his works on
world government in America and published them in Bombay, where his friend, Dr. Rashmi Mayur,
was building an Institute. Deg was insisting that a Kalotic World Order movement should come
out of Bombay or Istanbul, not the United States.
He stayed at Washington Square when in New York, became intimate friends with Nina Mavridis who
lived in his building, he taught his courses, wrote steadily, and put together the college in
Switzerland with the help of several students. Nina was generous, but could hold her
professorship at La Guardia College for only a year. They married after a time but separated
after several years of being together, and she moved to Berlin. He moved from Washington Square
Village to 110 Bleecker Street, where he spent little time. He stayed with Dick Cornuelle, he
moved into Ken Olson's loft in Little Italy, and he visited happily with Donna Welensky for a
while.
In Europe he lived in Switzerland and in Naxos. He was close to many people during the
seventies. Although a gypsy he gave the impression of being fixed somewhere and of soberly
pursuing a reasonable plan -- people knew not exactly where -- except that the where was not
where they were. One month he would be in Vietnam, then he would be staying for a week at a
little hotel in Sion where the barmaid and he became fast friends and at odd hours he would
tell her of many things and she would tell him of her Algerian mother and what the people of
Valais were like and how they regarded her. Then he would be in Naxos, buildings without the
means to build, fixing with crude tools, and writing. Friendship would be struck up with those
who came by his isolated place and people would come from town and he would go to town. Sandy
came from Australia and might even have swum from there, a blond eel, and he heard of culture
and society "Down Under," and they traveled together to America; he laughed to watch her
tapdance. Sigrid Schwartz came from the Black Forest with her little boy who carved the surface
of his marble table with a neolithic flint while Sigrid told of her mother who asked to be
carried to the grave with a jazz band playing "The Saints Come Marching Home," and so it was
done. He spent a good deal of time underwater in a diving mask and knew the bottom like his own
land, and could pluck a bit of pottery out of its rock fastenings any time and give it to a
pleased Hamburgian, Londoner, or Trondheimer.
Wherever he went in the world, he never truly wandered, but was always bent upon something to
do with study, business, politics, education, and everything else seemed to be related. He was
sometimes impatient, pressed by perceived obligations, but never at odds with himself. And
wherever he went, half of his baggage consisted of folders, full of reprints, chapters in
progress, manuscripts, proofs, correspondence and notes, never less than thirty pounds of
these, including the folders that dealt with the job he was on. Hence he was never bored, nor
even idle when he wanted to be idle, for he could hardly wait for the day to dawn in New York,
London, Tokyo, Saigon, Bangkok, Bombay, Cochin, or Paris so that he could write and read in
order to write.
Many were the occasions, though, when the needed piece of paper had been left behind or a
needed book was on a faraway shelf. Nor could he half control the crazy-quilt appearance of his
work in progress, paper of different sizes and quality made in different countries; handwriting
altered by different writing surfaces, some on vehicles in motion; writing in pencils and pens
of blue, black, red and green.
His psychological counterpart, Jean-Yves Beigbeder, would turn up or he would find Jean in
Paris or at Nevis in the West Indies, and they would celebrate life and make great plans, until
one day Jean slipped into the sea from a stalled motorboat off St. Kitts to swim ashore for
help and was lost into the night and forever. So he had many friends, good friends, he thought,
most of them going unnamed, like Carl Stover, Rashmi Mayur, Kevin Cleary and his gang who hated
their enemies more than they loved him and wounded the college, Jay Hall, Barbara Schmidt,
Christine Ressa, Peter and Annette Tobia, Charles Billings, Carl Martinson, Phil Jacob, Ken
Olson, Levi Fournier, Dick Cornuelle, Jay Hall, Savvas Camvissis, Stephanie Neuman. Even to
mention them is not fair to his wishes, for he will complain bitterly that each person means
everything to him when they are together so that he cannot stand seeing them on a list, where
they may seem like numbers of the days on the calendar of a long-gone year, deprived of all the
riches that they presented to each day.
Life carved its channel more narrowly after Anne Marie Hueber came upon the Naxos scene. They
lived in comfortable poverty, traveling irregularly and eccentrically, along the path of
Washington, New York, London Paris, Alsace, Florence, Athens, and Naxos. Great energy now went
into the Quantavolution Series, while she wrote her novels and lent him a hand.
All this I wanted to say, though briefly; creativity is always in context -- whether Marco polo
in his vast Asia or Immanuel Kant in his little garden -- and I fear not so much being
irrelevant as that I will convey neither the context nor the created substance, whether in
themselves or as they meshed together. Whatever he was up to and wherever he was, by the late
sixties, Deg, like many another but in his personal style, was radicalized. He not longer
believed in small solutions -- whether laissez-faire in economics, gradualism in politics, or
incrementalism in biological and cultural development. Pursuant to many early signs,
holospheric quantavolution took possession of him.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 3 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER NINE
NEW FASHIONS IN CATASTROPHISM
Deg's Journal, November 24, 1967
Rereading carefully V.'s Earth in Upheaval, I read the sections on the age of waterfalls this
morning and, as I poured coffee beans into the coffee grinder just now I wondered at the
marvelous parallelisms or analogies of force -- an old observation of course -- cascades great
and small, all the same --what makes them "different"? Man's size? -- which separates
everything in the world into big and small? Time is such too. Easy to see and believe the
existence of gods who pour Victoria Falls as I pour coffee beans.
Think if all the world would be reduced to the same proportion, Would we then get a marvelous
set of insights into hitherto baffling problems ? Would suddenly the rich world become dross
and dull?
Another entry, several days later :
Velikovsky came by for a few minutes, left a couple of items, and loped off saying "I have left
too much for the last mile." Too many interruptions, many of his own causing: too many
projects, too. At least he has gotten reliable Juergens to edit his "Ten Trials" for
publication [it never happened].
We talked of Livio Stecchini who is working on ancient measures and geography. His writing may
never see the light. Why? "He cannot bring things to fruition," I said. "The idea is hard,"
said V., the inception." I added "The conception." "The conception is a pleasure, the birth is
painful," said V. and he left it at that. He went to the library. He loves it and works
unceasingly and effectively there. The sky in Princeton is low and the air smells of snow.
Scholar's weather.
Velikovsky's Earth in Upheaval assembles "the testimony of stone and bone." "Wherever we
investigate the geological and paleontological records of this earth we find signs of
catastrophes and upheavals, old and recent." It gives an old-fashioned sense of the geology of
the last century, before jargon swamped its literature. The feeling is deceptive. The plain
speech was deliberate, both because little technical language was required to make his case and
because his large audience could not be embraced if jargon intervened between the writer and
reader. He also avoided exoterrestrialism, so as to show that you do not need to introduce
comets in order to prove that catastrophes had befallen earth. However, he allowed many
implications to be drawn from geological data pointing to astronomical reorientation of the
Earth. And in his conclusion, he made the point forcefully that "The earth repeatedly went
through cataclysmic events on a global scale, that the cause of these events was an
extraterrestrial agent."
He did not deal with electrical phenomena, a strange omission for one who preached an
electrified cosmos. (It entered into a supplementary paper that was printed with the book
itself.) That much material on electricity could have been considered was shown by William
Corliss, who began compiling it during the 1970's; and by V.'s friends, especially Ralph
Juergens in the 1960's then too Eric Crew in England, Milton, and Deg.
Nor did V. take a radical position on geochronometry. He refused close combat with the giant,
Time. To defeat macrochronic arguments he carried forward the order of catastrophic topics,
still valid, with new evidence from biostratigraphy. Although he advanced catastrophic evidence
into prehistorical and even historical times, he hardly advanced the theory and methodology of
time determination. He did not attack the long-time conventional view of Earth history. The
best work on short-time geology or microchronism was done by Melvin Cook. V. rejected
continental drift and his arguments against Darwinism were those well-elaborated by
creationists and scientists of "saltationist" persuasion long before.
Nonetheless, the work has solid merits; Harry H. Hess knew it well; he could find no falsehood
or factual errors in it, only a theory which he could not accept or announce ex cathedra; and
he recommended the book to his students in geology at Princeton. There was much to be learned
from it that a student could otherwise obtain from no single source. It was controversial; the
geologists dismissed not only its style but also its catastrophist ideas. V.'s scheme to make
headway among geologists by presenting a "clean" book, without assistance from legend or
astronomy, failed. Yet, today, after 27 years, his book can hardly be called controversial. It
is advanced, not avant-garde.
Still it is more complete, logical, exact, clear, and secular than any other work in geology
that considers catastrophism. The comparable next best work, privately published and quite
unknown, was completed at the same time by geologists Allan Kelly and Frank Dachille. That is:
Target Earth: The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science. Also more daring and provocative, and
also highly professional in method, is geophysicist Melvin Cook's work that I already
mentioned, Prehistory and Earth Models, published obscurely in England a decade later, which
employed purely terrestrial forces in explaining Earth's features. Both books are superior in
method to Velikovsksy's book, more complex and more original. Both books. I hardly need add,
are practically unknown and not cited among geologists and general scientists; indeed, they
were not common currency among cosmic heretics because V. neglected to admit them.
When a true believer is excommunicated or goes apostate from a charismatic cult he is, if let
go scot-free, inclined to start his own cult, and in science or art, there is every reason to
wish the apostate or excommunicant well. Robert Stephanos left V.'s circle and found a new
interest, another cosmic heretic, by then deceased.
William Comyns Beaumont is hardly known today but was a top-ranking English editor and a
brilliant catastrophist. His work turned ever more to the -- quite mad -- idea that the
Egyptian dynasties up to the 13th century B. C. ruled in South Wales and that Jerusalem was
originally located in Edinburgh; this plunged him into obscurity, even among catastrophists !
Stephanos resurrected Beaumont, located what was left of his materials, and formed a committee
to promote his work. He prepared a list of his ideas, culled from Riddle of the Earth (1925),
The Mysterious Comet (1932), and The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain (1946); he sent them to Deg
who verified the list. Beaumont, on evidence not at all execrable, positioned Atlantis on the
British platform and accepted what the Egyptian priests told Solon, that their ancestors had
been at battle with his Athenian forebears when the great Island sank amidst frightful tumult.
Here were Beaumont's more "reasonable" propositions: 1. The geology of the world's surface is
largely catastrophic. 2. The catastrophe was caused by a cometary collision. 3. All geological
formations were shifted as result. 4. Cosmic lightning played a major role. 5. Hydrocarbons
were present in cometary tails. 6. Ancient chronology was several hundred years too old. 7. The
Ancient calendars had to be revised because of the catastrophe.
8. Many species were extinguished catastrophically. 9. Religion was born in cometary worship
and tied to phallic forms because of the shape of comets.
10. Fear of cometary collisions is inherited by mankind. 11. Vermin were deposited by comets,
which also provoked plagues.
12. Deities from Egypt, Greece, Meso-America, and elsewhere were identified with planets.
13. Pyramids were both astronomical observatories and "air-raid shelters" for nobility and
kings. 14. Planet Saturn, as a comet, caused the Noachian Deluge.
15. The Atlantis date (ca 9500 B. C.) given by Plato had to be shortened.
16. Extensive legendary evidence pictures the "hairy," "bearded," "blazing star" symbolizing
comets.
17. Stonehenge, Avebury Circle and similar monuments were astronomical instruments.
18. Central American legends (and cultures) were contemporaneous with those of the Old World.
19. The intercalary "five evil days" were cursed because they coincided with a world disaster
and the ending of an age.
20. The serpent, dragon, winged-globe, caduceus, and other ancient symbols are traceable to
cometary catastrophes.
21. Religious festival are dated by cometary catastrophes. 22. Cometary conflagrations are the
origin of coal deposits. 23. The ancients had a true 360 day year. 24. The planet Venus
underwent great changes in color, diameter, figure, and orbit in the time of Ogyges.
25. Quetzalcoatl (Coculkan-Hurakan) commemorated the cometary dragon for the Meso-Americans.
One significant thesis that V. could not have gotten from Beaumont was that the disturbing
comet was Venus, although both identified Quetzalcoatl with the comet.
The list appears to be defensible by the criteria of quantavolution. But once one goes into the
books behind the list one enters a jungle of brilliant entangled foliage. Beaumont find
innumerable bewildering geographical, geological, theological, and historical analogies between
the regions of Great Britain and the Near East, particularly Palestine, such that the history
of the two can be merged into one from the time of the Golden Age of Saturn until the Emperor
Constantine (312 A. D.) of the Roman Empire. "The history of the Old Testament is the history
of Atlantis," he writes. "Constantine (" born in York") had definite motive for transferring
the arena of Jewish history and that of Christ to another region altogether." (Britain: Key to
World History) Obviously, to enter Beaumont's world is a pleasure allowed to few.
The reader may have noted that most of the theses occur in Velikovsky's, and also de Grazia's
books. It is easy enough to explain the similarities in the case of de Grazia for he drew
heavily upon Velikovsky, and cites all of his sources. It is not so easy to explain the
parallels between Velikovsky and Beaumont. Velikovsky never mentioned or cited Beaumont. Could
Velikovsky have read and forgotten Beaumont's books? His method of proof is entirely different;
practically everything -- style, format, language, method, and evidence -- is different; only
the conclusions are the same. And I should stress that when Deg came into possession of the
Beaumont materials, he found them mostly unusable for methodological and theoretical reasons;
Beaumont's stress upon Thoth, however, helped convince Deg that a catastrophic age ought to be
assigned to the god Hermes and the Planet Mercury.
Moreover, with regard to both Velikovsky and de Grazia, too many of Beaumont's conclusions are
the same as theirs to explain them as sheer coincidence. I guess that either in the 1920's or
1930's when V. was in Palestine, the books, published in England and dealing with matters of
interest to the Near East, made an appearance in the bookstores and were seen by V.
A second possibility is that during the 1940's V. met with the books at the Columbia University
Library where he spent thousands of hours in research on his own books. The Columbia University
Library possessed of Beaumont's relevant works only The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain which was
published in 1946, By this time Worlds in Collision had been written. V.'s library time during
which he achieved his major beliefs relating history and geology to exoterrestrialism had been
spent in the Columbia University Libraries.
However, a note exists in his archive, mentioning having read Beaumont's 1932 book; the note
dismisses the work. Yet V. expresses his wonder whether Beaumont had gotten his (V. 's) ideas
by telepathy. V.'s memory was prodigious. Could there have been a 'Bridie Murphy Effect? ' This
case, it will be recalled, involved a Colorado woman whose accounts of "another life" in
Ireland were substantiated by investigations of her "home family and neighborhood" in Ireland;
it developed that she had been unwittingly retailing material conveyed to her by her Irish
nurse in early childhood and duly registered in her memory.
V. had an unusual interest in mnemonic phenomena. One time Deg was visited by a nurse from
India accompanied by a high official of the Indian Foreign Ministry. She possessed a rare
factual and numerological memory. Given any long set of numbers, she could recall them and
reorder them. She could also do tricks such as supplying a person's year of birth, knowing the
day and month. When younger, she had possessed only an ordinary mind, then had global amnesia
following her mother's death, and afterwards had been led slowly by her father to relearn
everything. Despite her prodigious abilities, she was a modest person of ordinary intelligence.
V. came to meet her and a seance was held. Deg's term for the type was "idiot savant." V. did
not use the term, and he was unusually taciturn, leaving Deg wondering whether V.'s mind
possessed a similar competency.
V. one day confides in Deg that he has discovered in the course of his research certain
geographical locations where oil and gas were exuding in ancient times. It might be profitable
to explore there. They talk again and again about the information, and Deg draws up an
agreement which they both sign. If they can interest an oil company in purchasing their
knowledge, they will divide the proceeds. V. chooses a location. It turns our to be in Turkey.
Deg buys maps of oil concessions and wells for the area and finds that the spot mentioned
stands seemingly outside the boundaries of existing rights to drill, although quite surrounded
by concessions. Better Turkey than Syria, certainly, they think. However, Deg knows the
problems of Turkey, political and bureaucratic, the tangle of laws, the high cost of
concessions. All that they have to sell is a dozen words. Given away without guarantees, and
the project explodes. So Deg talks to friends, and telephones to experts. He speaks to his
friend Robin Farkas, who is Treasurer of Alexander's Department Stores and who has friends
engaged in oil speculations. The situation is ridiculous: there is no way to proceed, except by
trusting strangers; give them the information and if they can persuade the most appropriate
corporation or government agency to spend half-a-million dollars drilling, and if they strike
oil they might be counted on someday to compensate the "owner" of the magic words. V. writes
Deg, who is somewhere is the Near East, on August 12, 1968:
Dear Alfred:
Enclosed is the contract [for a book, never signed]... Ralph left on a cross-country trip...
As to oil in Italy, I shall write you separately but I would also like to know how would you
like to proceed if we come to an agreement as I hope we will...[ Is] the Italian monopoly
holding oil company entitled also to off-shore exploration and exploitation?...
And what is new concerning Turkey?... a concession there? In the matters of Cosmos and Chronos
[etc.]... I assume you have received my former letter (or letters), last to Samos.
I wish to think that you have achieved many goals during his trip as also piece of mind and
serenity that usually eludes very active minds -- though you may be an exception.
I look forward to a letter from you and shall answer speedily. With warm regards.
Yours, Immanuel
Deg is nonplussed, and heavily occupied. He cannot figure out an easy way to get in and out of
an oil arrangement. He had the same kind of difficulty once before when he wished to engage the
Xerox corporation in a system of information retrieval. There seemed to be no assured way of
handing over useful knowledge. Perhaps it would be best to publish the information for the
benefit to all those interests that might want to scramble to profit from it. Or give it to a
friendly government, or to a friendly corporate officer. Or hire someone to run around among
the oil companies and venture to the historical locations; such a person would need funds, must
be made a partner, and had to be trustworthy.
Nothing more was done, and the several indications of petroleum rest in their ancient sources.
In recent years, oil explorers have come to hire dowsers, several of whom claim to be able to
sense oil locations simply from maps. Deg asked an Exxon official whether the company might not
profitably set up or contract for an office, which for a million dollars could carefully read
every ancient document that exists to discover relevant references. After all, to dig a hole
costs half a million dollars. Deg wrote a memo about it. The idea seemed to Exxon rather odd.
(They hadn't yet heard about dowsing.) So Deg quit trying to sell information from ancient
sources.
By 1970 there are intimations that Deg would be moving into the field of geology. Typically, he
notes some striking fact and then reviews his life experience to weigh its significance. Then
he moves out in a number of forays, both intellectual and operational, some of which lead
nowhere, others foolish, still others abandoned midway, one or two coming to a conclusion. But
meanwhile, like a beaver's dam, the sticks begin to make a frame, the holes are plugged up, the
waters are stemmed and a structure manifest itself. Folders begin to collect notes and ideas.
Years may pass, during which time little that is directly relevant and purposeful happens in
the field, for he is occupied with other writing, or with education, politics, war, and
personal concerns. Still, a cluster of opinions begin to form and he is infected by the
specific ambition. He has fantasies of a message to be conveyed with fierce logic and
compelling force but is already telling himself in a small closet of the mind that he must be
respectful and persuasive. Then he foresees an opening of Time and feels inspired to create a
book. He recorders his ideas and notes in a dozen successive outline; several introductions
appear and vanish; meanwhile he writes one after another the chapters. A bad chapter is washed
out. A bulky chapter is broken into two, and a section of it is floated into a new position
somewhere else. The writing is heavy labor and becomes increasingly furious and fluent. What
ends up as The Lately Tortured Earth, written in seven months of 1982, began as a note on
strange ashes, following a reading of passages from Schliemann's report of his discovery of
"Troy."
Deg's Journal, Stylida, July 7, 1970
Early in World war II, the Germans air-bombed Rotterdam as a terrible 'object-lesson' to the
Dutch to obtain their surrender. Then late in World War II, the British and Americans bombed
Hamburg, Dresden, and other cities, using many thousands of incendiary missiles. In no case,
despite high buildings, much wood construction, and inflammable objects, did the immense fire
leave thick layers of ashes.
How do we explain, then, the heavy compressed layers of ashes that cover so many ancient
cities. I cannot go along with the many experts who casually assigning these remains to an
invasion, the loss of a battle, or accidents. They are really "playing with fire." Schliemann's
pretty little story of his discovery of "the treasure of Priam" is a case in point. He implies
that somebody carrying a large casket of good objects and other precious goods had to abandon
it suddenly during the final stage of the siege because he or they were pursued hotly. Over a
copper shield "lay a stratum of red and calcined ruins, from 4 3/ 4 to 5 1/ 4 feet thick, as
hard as stone." He nevertheless could extricate the shield and the casket of articles
associated with it by employing 'a large knife. '
He [Schliemann] writes, "It is probable that some member of the family of Priam hurriedly
packed the Treasure into the chest and carried it off without having time to pull out the key
[whose wooden handle was gone]; that when he reached the wall, however, the hand of an enemy or
the fire overtook him, and he was obliged to abandon the chest, which was immediately covered
to a height of from 5 to 6 feet with the red ashes and stones of the adjoining palace." How
remarkable that this kind of reading of the ruins has prevailed to this day! And I have noted
others from stories of the Near East, Etruria, and Meso-America.
All references to ash layers in ancient times need to be collected. The levels should be
recorded, along with the normal data on what is above, below, and the site location. Of course,
C. Schaeffer has done something like this in the Middle East and Velikovsky had added some
other reports. A special study, however, is lacking. It should also be noted that the original
layer must invariably have been much thicker than the final layer as discovered by
archaeologists. This was mentioned by Nicola Rilli in his book on Etruria; yet he persisted in
speaking of a Ligurian invasion and other mishaps, not associating the ashes with natural
catastrophes or the deluge that he believes overcame Tyrrhenian civilization. The Pompeiian,
Herculaneum, Krakatoan ashes should also be measured.
Ultimately, we should sample the ashes to determine whether their origins were local or
distant, terrestrial or celestial (this may be possible now that we are beginning to know the
geological composition of Moon's surface and perhaps soon of Venus and Mars; they must, or
course, be dissimilar; if similar, we may be stuck).
In 1973 he goes to work seriously on the case of the Trojan ashes. The literature of what he
calls paleocalcinology is nil. He prepares a memorandum and sends it to several experts, asking
them for citations and an opinion about the possible sources of the heavy calcinated debris of
the "Burnt City" of Schliemann. They give him other names, until he has a score of informants,
practically all of whom are curious and helpful insofar as they have something to offer.
Graig C. Chandler, Director of Forest Fire and Atmospheric Sciences Research for the Federal
government, wrote him a letter that might serve as a model of scientific altruism. I quote it
at length, for that reason alone, even though its contents are in themselves fascinating:
Dear Dr. Grazia:
Forgive me for taking a whole month to "reflect briefly" on your letter of February 8. The
delay is even less excusable since I have come up relatively blank on the citations you
requested. I do however have a contact who I know is quite interested, and deeply involved in
archaeological investigations of past natural fire history.
You should contact: Dr. Edwin V. Komarek, Sr. Tall Timbers Research Station Route I, Box 160
Tallahassee, Florida 32301
All the half dozen references I have been able to unearth that deal directly with prehistoric
charcoal and ash deposits stem from Ed Komarek, so you will undoubtedly get them, and more,
directly from him.
I found your manuscript fascinating. However, there are some points you should understand
before going too far with a theory that credits wood fuels, either forest stands or urban
constructions, as a source for 15 to 20 feet of ash fall.
A natural forest can easily meet or exceed the 200 ton biomass figure quoted by Kelly and
Danchille. However, in a living forest, only the material less then one-half inch or so in
diameter is ever consumed by fire, regardless of the fire's intensity. This practically never
exceeds 30 tons per acre unless the fire has been preceded by some other catastrophic event
such as massive insect kill, logging, or exceptional weather anomaly.
The "ash" residue from the complete combustion of wood ranges from 0.1 percent for white pine
to 2.2 percent for western hemlock. Actual residues from naturally occurring fire are much
higher, ranging from about 10 percent in low intensity fires down to the proximate analysis
value in firestorms. Thus, there would be less than 3 tons per acre of "ashes" produced by the
burning of the densest forest. This is an amount about 10 times as great as the fertilizer you
spread on your lawn in the spring.
There is an abundance of practical experience on distribution of ash from large forest fires.
The Peshtigo Fire of 1871 burned more than 300,000 acres completely surrounding the town of
Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Contemporary accounts mention "ashes piled nearly an inch deep in the
streets." I have been in several forest fire where newspaper accounts played up "ashes falling
like rain." In every instance with which I am personally familiar, the resulting deposit could
be measured in millimeters.
Cities, of course, have much heavier fuel loadings than do forest. But again, ash residue from
the burning of a city is measured in inches, rather than feet. The accounts from the 1906 San
Francisco earthquake and fire are good evidence on this point.
In firestorms, forest or city, there are no ashes left. Firestorm winds scour the burned area
clean.
Although it is completely out of my field, I would theorize that the only possible way in which
a deposit of wood ash many feet thick could be produced in a single event would be to
mechanically reduce the wood to rubble (earthquake), cover it with an inert material at high
temperature so that the combustion could not occur (volcanic ash fall), and reduce the wood to
charcoal and "ash" through distillation. I have never seen "red ashes of wood" in natural
fires, and the term spunds much more like a distillation residue than a combustion residue.
I hope the above discussion is helpful. Please don't hesitate to write if I can be of further
service.
Deg's exchange with Ed Komarek may also be worth quotation:
Dear Dr. Komarek:
In an endeavor to pursue a number of baffling contradictions in ancient and pre-historical
times, involving the life and death of ancient settlements and the development of various human
traits and customs, I have come upon indications of huge conflagrations involving layers of ash
deposits that to my mind could never have originated, as the archaeological community tends to
believe, from the ravages inflicted upon the settlements by conquerors with torch in hand.
Several Strata of the city of Troy (Hisarlik) in ancient Anatolia give evidence of inordinate
destruction, sometimes by earthquakes, sometimes by both. Yet there appears to be no great
volcano that might have exploded or collapsed nearby. Although perhaps none has done so, it
appears to me that a chemical examination of these beds of ashes of the different centers of
exploration in Asia Minor and the Middle East might tell us whether hand-set flames, volcanic
fall-out or some other less familiar element may have been involved.
May I ask about the nature of your studies and work in this field, and whether you could put me
on to some literature in it, and further whether you know others besides ourselves who might be
interested in it? I would be most obliged for your advice.
April 29, 1974 Dear Prof. de Grazia: I am much interested in some of the comments you make. If
the sample of the ash could be examined under an electron scanning microscope we might be able
to tell a little bit about where it came from. In fact, if you could ship me a small package of
it, I will certainly put it under an electron scanning microscope and see what I can determine.
Under separate cover I am sending you several of our publications, particularly one in
connection with particulates from forest and grassland fires. With this technique it might be
possible to pinpoint what type of ash you have found. Of course many of these early cities had
a tremendous amount of woodwork inside of them and of course, these would burn even inside of
stone buildings. We certainly should be able to tell the difference between volcanic
particulate matter and that from wood or grass.
[He goes on to describe the work he has been doing on natural fires and the origin of cereals
in Anatolia, and expresses interest in the continuation of the Trojan project.]
May 28, 1974
Dear Mr. Komarek:
Thanks for your letter of April 29 and for the many materials that arrived subsequently. I have
been having a field day with them.
The enclosed paper on "Calcination in Pre-historic and Ancient Times" carries some of the logic
that has led me to my present interest in the testing of ashes (and, I may add, mega-lightning
or Jovian lightning, which, I think, may have been almost qualitatively different and/ or
vastly more frequent and destructive at some periods than during recent times).
I wish that I had samples of ancient settlement ashes to forward to you so that the testing
might begin. But I am afraid that their collection awaits a field expedition of some
complexity. I am going to Greece and Turkey this summer, leaving June 23, and may be able to
arrange some permissions and even to scrounge some samples. I am seeking support for the
research as well, although I fear that the novelty of the approach, its threat to conventional
theories, and the fact that my qualifications for the work, whatever the distinction I may hold
in other fields, are not specific to the problem, will all handicap my efforts. Apropos of
this, may I say, in asking for help, that you will give aid and consultation in the analysis of
the obtained material?
Thank you again. Incidentally, I note that we did not miss one another by much at the
University of Chicago. I began my studies there in 1935 with $50 that my father borrowed for me
and a trumpet that sounded a lot better to people then it would now....
On Naxos, Deg had met Professor Georg Keller, geologist of the University of Freiburg, and
sought his advice as well. Keller knew Aegean geology and assured Deg that there were no
volcanos near Troy, neither now or anciently. He doubted any possible source of ash from Thera
or elsewhere. Ash falls are not uniform, even on a small island like Kos, where in one place he
found 40 cm of Thera ash while in many other cuts on the island nothing at all was visible.
Deg's Journal, June 3, 1973
Everything is understandable when it is simple and it is simple when only or two things happen
to it at given time -- and the longer the time without their changing the even more simple is
the scheme.
Thus the mechanics of the earth seem understandable when a presumed history's is said to permit
only a couple of motions and even these are under severe constraints.
However, when in fact, the real history of earth is shown to have involved large changes in not
only a couple but in many motions, then an exact explanation of what happened may be
impossible, especially so since no reliable observers reported most the events.
One reason why uniformitarianism evolved rapidly and persisted is that it created a simplistic
history, evening out things over time and subjecting them "normal" changes.
One reason why there are so many theories explaining natural history is that each man can
barely cope with possible effects of his one favorable type of motion and change.
He ruminated about oil, about tectonism, about the Thera explosion of 3,000 years ago, about
the earthquakes that long ago shook the now seemingly stable earth beneath Athens. Here he is
at New York University, noting a meeting with Professor Charmatz of the geology faculty on
Oct., 9, 1973:
Deg's Journal
Lunch with Prof. Charmatz of the Geology Department. Nina came along we ate at the Faculty
Club. I worked to minimize threat, arrogance, conviction re our subject, the question of how
ashes of ancient times are laid down and composed, in relation to Velikovsky's theories. I
needed all grace and tact to do so, for young Charmatz was ready to lecture me on my foolish
dilettantism. I could see; he was nervous and prepared to give and receive aggression. He had
hardly ordered lunch before he blurted out that V. cited sources that could only be found in
some exotic library, that one good guess did not make a theory right (he cited the surface heat
of Venus), and that V. was an astrologer. I let it all go by with sympathetic murmurs and a
soupHon of rebuttal. Then he smoothened out, and began to talk to the point.
As usual, what seems simple is difficult to bring about in experimental science. I did discover
that no sure blocks confront a set of distinctions among ash -- heaps of varying chemistry,
origins, duration, quantity. A crucial test is possible. We need an interdisciplinary team --
archaeologists, chemists, geologists, zoologists, geographer, engineer, mythographer, and maybe
even a social theorist or methodologist. Then we need to find sites around the world where
these ancient ashes lay, analyze them, and try to explain their presence in depths varying up
to an original 12 feet. Charmatz became quite involved and is willing to go along with me into
the possibility of such a project. When he loosened up, he began to release particular
information of much value. We talked also of magnetism, of what is to be found in the bottoms
of old lakes, and of petroleum. He declared that all (' not one exception, ' at my prompting)
petroleum had been found in sedimentary rocks from ancient seas. 'But not all sedimentary
strata have oil? ' No 'And if we found one non-sedimentary pocket of oil, the theory would be
blasted? ' 'Probably. ' 'Tell me: is it possible that only in sedimentary rocks where oil has
been found can oil collect? Or are there other formations that could hold oil over time? ' He
seemed puzzled by this query. I repeated it twice more, in between answers that were not
direct. I still do not know the answer, but it may be important. For if oil can only be held in
one kind of rock pouch, then it is indefensible logically to claim that the oil and the rock
are generically related. If all my pockets have holes in them except one and my money can be
kept only there, it is incorrect to reason that this pocket coined the money or witnessed its
coinage.
How helpful it is when scholars of different fields come together on a problem. That is what a
university community should be. There is so little of it, however.
P. S. He began to ponder the fact that oil would decompose everywhere; that ashes would
decompose, geology cannot tell.
Now again he is searching for anomalies in archaeological reports of ancient times, and writes
in his Journal of January 21, 1973:
I am dismayed by the material that I must digest. This morning I scanned Chronologies in Old
World Archaeology. a fat little encyclopedia edited by Robert W. Ehrich. I search for evidence
of clear breaks between cultures. The authors do not give them. They classify but do not
explain a multitude of changes in strata and objects. In a couple of instances 'sudden'
stoppages are mentioned. Done in 1965, none mentions Velikovsky, one mentions Schaeffer (he
could hardly miss him since Schaeffer appeared in 1948 and the author is specialized in
Northern Syria and Northern Mesopotamia.)
All are using R-C dating (adjusted) and grumbling about it. It is difficult to say whether the
dates given reflect a sampling of possibilities, e. g.:
If all the dates are put into a frequency table, would gaps show up and would these point to a
destruction over part or whole areas? Is this statistically inferable?
Look up possible catalogue of all R-C and P-A dates for the world and make a frequency table
from them. If there is
1) any consistency of cluster or gaps? 2) any consistency in parts of the world; i. e. axis
tilt or even another disaster would hit certain parts of the world worse than others.
Later, the whole picture could be slid into a true chronological space.
All dates seem to be later than 10,000 B. C.
Then he is in Athens and has looked up Professor G. Marinos of the University of Athens Geology
Department:
Dear Professor Marinos:
The Doxiades Organization informed me that you were supervising the analysis of the core
drillings being made at a number of sites in Athens in connection with the proposed subway
route....
I am interested in any evidences that your drillings may show of levels of calcination in the
historical and pre historical stratigraphy of the area. By calcination I mean burnt debris, ash
coverings, and earth subjected to heavy thermal stress. At the same time I would be interested
in concurrent evidence of flooding on a large scale, associated with or independent of the
burning.
Professor Marinos is happy to oblige and introduces him to the engineer who is drilling beneath
the city. The engineer takes Deg on a tour of the drilling sites, and shows him profiles of
many cores. The drilling is too crude to tell him what he wants to know: what comes up is an
already infinitely fractured Athens schist; no way of showing thin or scattered ashes. Athens
must have shaken a great deal in ancient time, he thinks, but no indications of flooding or ash
falls. Could the surface of Attica have been shaken, washed away and blown away? Possibly. The
Acropolis was originally part of a larger mass, according to Plato, and to have been well-
watered.
He sails for Naxos, whence he writes to his old friend, Richard C. Cornuelle, in Manhattan:
... I have nearly concluded that the ocean basins were created about 15,000 years ago, and
promptly filled with the waters of heaven. And I bought a beach ball, painted it white, and,
with much effort and complication, finally succeeded yesterday in drawing upon it in crayon, a
map of the all-land (Pangea) earth, the old poles, the old ice caps, and the fractures that
split and drove apart the continents by an expansion of the globe. I had hoped to sketch the
book this summer but the problems have come so hot and heavy that maybe another six months will
be needed just to outline the work so that people like you can look at it and see that I'm not
all that crazy.
There's a good little foreign crowed here this summer, writers, artists, sculptors, teachers,
drifters, even two (not one) belly dancers (American). Wish you might visit. Can give you the
absolutely isolated stone cottage away from town where you can dwell stark naked on the land
and in the sea. Or send someone you love.
I meant to go to Turkey to get a sample of Trojan ashes, but the crisis, the out-of-pocket
expenses, and other risk of the adventure made me put the trip aside and I may get a friend to
do the job in the fall or come back in the spring, hopefully with a small grant in hand, to do
it myself....
It is clear that Deg was working to explain global morphology by earth expansion. He had yet to
achieve the idea that a lunar eruption from the Earth would cause the oceanic fracturing and
rafting of continents, and explain many other mysteries at the same time.
Deg's Journal, Naxos, August 15, 1974
New war crisis. Turks are going too far. People around me disturbed. How do I proceed with my
strange far-away thoughts and study? Met with Gerhardt Rosler for two hours today, three hours
yesterday. He wants to talk politics, I geology. We talk mostly geology.
Today we figured out together the parallel faults between Paros and Naxos. May be important.
Whole strait between may have collapsed recently. Very 'recent' fault, 'fresh, ' according to
Gerhard.
Stylida is an everyday sight, by geological standards. The area is not such as to excite the
torpid theoretical tempers of geologists. If I can say something about recent changes here, it
will show that one can go anywhere in the world with the aid of catastrophic theory, properly
framed, and find 'potential support, ' at a minimum.
Gerhardt dug up a note he made on a broadcast in Germany when he was a high school student. It
said x m 3 of hydrogen per second struck the earth. Where did it go? Hydrogen is not part of
the atmosphere. Does it combine with O to drop into the ocean as H2O?
He had made some rough calculations. It is enough to account for all the oceans at 2 x 10 25
grams, we discovered, if E = 4.6 b. y. old Cf this with canopy theory. This held rings derived
aboriginally, therefore there is no need for the continuous flow.
But if hydrogen and oxygen met in a different gravitational situation -- when Earth was in
Uranus-Gigans [later designated by Deg as Super-Uranus] complex and orbit -- they could compose
the rings. Then, relieved from Uranus-Gigans, the rings fell and the stored H2O deposits with
them. Now, since then, water would be building up with them directly! Is this so? Continental
shelves -- have they been filling and dropping ?
Back in America to teach for the Fall Semester, on November 11, 1974 he telephones Dorothy
Vitaliano, who, with her husband Charles, worked as a geological team. Indiana University press
had recently published her Legends of the Earth, the aim of which was to establish
uniformitarian interpretations of both catastrophic folklore and of geological sites assertedly
catastrophic. Her book's sales were disappointing. It is not so easy to sell anti-
quantavolution books; although well-received by editors and professors, they lack an
enthusiastic audience.
As an example of her method, she presents an Arancanian Indian legend according to which in
ancestral times two serpents made the sea rise. Earthquake and volcanism were followed by a
universal flood. The survivors took refuge on a mountaintop which floated up close to the sun.
Ever thereafter, the Indians repeated their climb up the mountains, carrying bowls (to protect
their heads from the sun, they say), whenever an earth-quake occurs. There must have been
numerous similar earthquakes and tsunamis, claims Vitaliano, to perpetuate the legend and its
associated behavior.
The myth and associated actions are, in fact, rather clear examples of universal responses to a
universal flood, preceded by violent quakes and volcanism. The "Sun" was probably Saturn gone
nova (the infant Horus and Jupiter). The twin serpents were twin comets either from a second
confused catastrophe or debris from the nova. The bowls are means as protection from fall-out
of all kinds. The continual repetition of the behavior is a form of compulsion, whether it
occurs during "normal disasters" or in celebration of the anniversaries of the primordial
disaster. The concept of illud tempus (the First Great Day, so to speak) that Mircea Eliade,
the famed comparative ethnologist of the University of Chicago, employs, explains the psychic
nature of such events. Deg's Homo Schizo I transfers the concept from a solely psychic complex
to a complex based upon primeval experience.
Now, at this point in time, Deg and the Vitalianos' should have gotten together to discuss
their findings and differences. Not at all. Scientific development seems at times to proceed as
a series of missed encounters and perpetuated misunderstandings. A small problem in business --
say a sentence in an annual report -- as Deg could observe among his friends in government and
corporations, will arouse a rich system of conference telephoning, airplane rides, Xerox
fireworks, and overnight express mail. Not that the scientists need to have agreed, but they
might have erased 50% of the differences and retire, both enlightened.
Often impatient of delays, and often pushing things to conclusion --conscious of the defects in
scientific and intellectual business:
Talk about Pop and Mom grocery stores! The intelligentsia is driven to work at the lowest
support level of technology and economy. And is brainwashed besides to accept its lowly status.
There is a mythical complex of incompetence and insufficiency which are inextricably
rationalized and justified as a single process usually called creative or scientific, and
worshipped as a whole. Yet how can you be sure that they would not waste the technology if you
gave it to them. Every other occupation does, the military, the bureaucracy, the corporations,
everybody except Mom and Pop. There's the paradox: the least efficient is the most efficient,
the least costly is the most effective. We can't all be Mom and Pop, but everything else is
worse in its own way!
The Vitalianos were part of the Thera volcano study group, a combined geological-archaeological
effort at understanding the explosion that tore apart a thriving island in the Aegean. The
peculiar shape of the remaining land excited suspicions as to its history but no historical
reference to it occurs. At first, therefore, modern volcanologists assigned it an old age. Then
Spiridon Marinatos excavated cultural remains of the Bronze Ages; finally a town of Late Minoan
Age was uncovered, Akrotiri.
The geologists followed Marinatos in assigning the destruction to about 1500 B. C. and tying it
into both the Exodus and the sinking of Atlantis. Eddie Schorr, a graduate student of the
University of Cincinnati, working for Velikovsky, showed (contra-Velikovsky and all concerned)
that the event could not be of 1500 B. C., but rather must have occurred around 1100 B. C. or
later, and also that it could not be Atlantis. Deg adopted Schorr's view, even though he would
have liked to see it dated at 1500 B. C., when there was a felt need to discover universal
destruction surrounding the major Venus disaster. The others went merrily along writing books
and articles to profit from the glamorous Atlantis and Exodus connections, which I think shows
how readily 'hard' scientists will buy meretricious goods. V. was silent, though his voice,
correcting his error and endorsing Schorr, would have carried weight. Schorr should have been
granted his doctorate promptly upon the publication of this brief piece and his two articles
disposing of the Greek Dark Ages (hence 500 years of supposed time) that appeared at the same
time.
Such was not to be. Indeed, he published the articles under the pseudonym of Isaac Isaacson, so
fearful was he of being evicted from the Ph. D. program of his University. V. was disposed to
support his fear; movements are made of martyrs.
Deg could not figure out how justified was their fear, but was concerned with the self-
destructive aspects of it. V. had paranoiac tendencies which fueled even stronger and similar
suspicions on Schorr's part. Good for one another intellectually, they were bad for each other
emotionally. Schorr was highly regarded at Cincinnati. Yet he finally left the University and
retired to his family's business in Houston. His research continued privately, and he remained
in touch with several other heretics if only through letters that are extremely long,
brilliantly correct on Aegean history, and malevolently critical of practically everyone,
including his correspondents.
In one of these letters to Greenberg he attacked Deg's articles on Troy first for not crediting
him enough for his advice and counsel (in what name he should have received credit was not made
clear), secondly, for small errors that could and should have been corrected in a letter to Deg
or to the publishing magazine, Kronos. Greenberg passed the letter to Deg saying, you see, here
is what I have to deal with (for the rest of the letter was furious on other matters as well),
or perhaps he was saying, see here, I am not the worst of the Furies. Efforts were made by
Elisheva and others, following V.'s death, to consolidate Schorr's unpublished work on the Dark
Ages into V.'s lean manuscript on the subject, to no avail.
Deg offered to speak to the Cincinnati authorities on Schorr's behalf, but he was warned
against doing so; the prophecy went on to fulfill itself. I cannot say, however, that word of
the pseudonymous scholar did not leak to the Cincinnati network, for Deg told his daughter, Dr.
Catherine Vanderpool, who dwelled in association with the Athens terminus of the network, of
Eddie's predicament; and when Eddie put Deg in touch with Professor Cadogan of the University
of Cincinnati, surely he must have been tempting, or even admitting, self-disclosure.
Deg, we recall, was on the trail of Trojan ashes. One day he was working at the library of the
American school of Classical Studies in Athens, and found in one of the volumes a remarkable
sentence to the effect that samples from numerous levels of Trojan debris had been collected by
Blegen's team in the 1930's. Yes -- Jerry Sperling, a visiting scholar from Cincinnati told
him, who had worked on Troy and was at the Library at the same moment -- this showed the
thoroughness of Blegen; no, he said, I do not know what they are or where they are.
Deg had friendly access to James Caskey, head of the archaeology department at Cincinnati,
through Cathy's father-in-law, Professor Eugene Vanderpool, a friend, and highly reputed as the
"Grand Old man" of the School of Athens. Yes, the samples were in bags still, and were about to
be analyzed by a geologist, Professor Bullard. So said Caskey. And Deg spoke to Caskey of his
interest in the calcinology of the debris.
On September 18, 1974, Deg called Reuben G. Bullard who, it developed, had left the University
to join the faculty of the Cincinnati Bible Seminary. Deg found him well-disposed and even
willing to undertake the work from his new position. The sample were contained in about 400
cloth bags in the attic of McMicken Hall. Deg wrote to Caskey and meanwhile reported to his
friend Bruce Mainwaring, another cosmic heretic who also on occasion dug into his purse to help
move along a publication, "very enthusiastic about your idea for an 'ash' project... and hoping
to try to organize a program which embodies some of Eddie's ideas as well..."
Then Caskey decides the same action should be taken; he writes Deg:
3 Nov. 74
Dear Professor de Grazia,
Thank you for your letter of October 22. I am interested in the project, but must ask for a bit
of time to inform myself further. It was a shock to me to hear that Bullard is no longer at the
university. I shall be leaving Greece soon but shall be in Cincinnati only shortly before the
Christmas holidays. Therefore I'll take up the question -- as soon as possible --after the
opening of the winter quarter in January. It is important. My colleagues and I shall give it
careful and serious consideration.
With apologies for the delay and, again, thanks, I am Yours Sincerely, John L. Caskey
There is no recognition, here or otherwise, that Deg might render theoretical or operational
assistance. Deg sent a copy of his manuscript on paleocalcinology and Trojan ashes to George
Rapp, whom Dorothy Vitaliano had recommended as having had an interest in Trojan geology. Deg
now applies to the National Science Foundation and is turned down. Time passes. On May 12,
1976, Deg called George Rapp, who is at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and notes down
the substance of their discussion:
Conversation with Prof. George Rapp
Department of Geology
University of Minnesota at Duluth
1200 hrs. May 12, 1976
Has rec'd NEH and NSF grants to study the 350 sample bags from Troy. Is applying a range of
chemical analyses to all bags. Has found some pollen and wood that can be 14C analysed. No
reports yet and possibly for another year or two. (Students asst is going away for summer on
job.) He is expecting to look at the terrain himself in December. No signs of vitrification in
the samples. Visual inspection cannot often reveal ashes, but he will know whether there has
been fall-out from volcanism or local incineration from torch or accident.
I asked him about the scottish vitrified forts. He never heard of them. I described the
findings of a century ago and said that the theory called for brush or log fires set outside
the walls to harden them. He questioned the temperatures, as did I. 1000 degrees needed well
focused,[ sic] as is done in ceramic baking (with help of venting.) When I told him that the
fusing had entered a couple of feet into the crevices, he dismissed any brush fire. So one more
important detail is cleared away. The vitrified towers are definitely of unusual origin. I
asked him whether the soil of Hisarlik contained the same kind of ferruginous clay that we were
talking about and he said he did not know but would look see when he visited the site. (He had
been there before but had not noticed.) He said that the vitrification would be noticed by the
archaeologists at Troy but none mentioned it. I am not so sure they didn't. What was the
calcination if not vitrification? But the copper and lead deposits would have performed the
same lightning attractive functions as the ferruginous clay. Hislarlik is a lonely tell and
promontory, also attractive.
I told Rapp that I would rap with him come fall to see if anything new had happened. He said he
doubts if anything new will have happened. He said he doubts that he will ever have final
answers.
On June 15, 1977 Eugene Vanderpool writes to Deg:
Dear Al,
Here is Caskey's reply about the Troy samples, written from Kea. About the Thera conference
sponsored by Galaopoulos and scheduled for July, I am told by Jerry Sperling that it has been
postponed until next year. He heard this from George Rapp.
All well in Pikermi, Yours, Gene
J. L. Caskey to E. Vanderpool June 14, 1977 Work on the Troy samples is proceeding, very
thorough, under George Rapp of University of Minnesota at Duluth, progress satisfactory. I am
told. The results are to be put together in 1978, with the plan that they be submitted then as
a supplementary Monograph in the Cincinnati TROY-Series (Princeton U. Press) [actually the
results were published in 1982] Slow, but I trust worth the time and effort (and money).
If you are in touch, tell Prof. De G. I'll try to write to him one day but am not sure just
when. I haven't got the facts, and probably could not understand them if I had. Nothing
definite has been reported yet, in any case.
In 1982 the report finally appears, dedicated to Caskey who had deceased, extravagantly
published by the Princeton University Press, and offered at a price of $52.00. Deg who has been
following closely its production calls his friend Jerry Sherwood of the Press. She invites him
to sit down in their offices and go through the book. He is disappointed. There are no findings
of consequence from tests of the debris. The only organic elements of significance are from the
straw used in making bricks. There is no indication that any of Deg's hypotheses was
considered, even if to refute them.
What could be concluded from this study that occupied several years and cost a hundred thousand
dollars? Either nothing unusual had occurred beyond the man-caused or accidental burning and
earthquakes, or the proper tests were not employed, or the samples were defective to begin
with. Schliemann's burnt City remained a mystery, so far as Deg was concerned.
Only some of the samples were used. He argues that the remainder stand for future
investigation. Regardless of the sinister hypotheses of strange fall-outs or electrical-thermal
emanations from underground, there are other more conventional hypotheses that would be worth
further study. An outside team, say, such as Blumer of Woods Hole Oceanographic Center led when
he was alive, might be asked to evaluate the samples on a much wider range of tests, seeking
gases, polycyclic hydrocarbons, lightning residues, and volcanic tephra.
On the one hand this may seem to be the suggestion of a crank who is never satisfied by proofs
against his pet theory; on the other hand this may be one of those cases (so well-known in the
record of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration, for instance) where decades of one-sided
proof turn out to be bad and new theories and tests bring about retraction of the "proofs" and
significant new discoveries.
At Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Deg was visiting fire-dance expert and archaeoastronomer
Elizabeth Chesley-Baity, and paid a courtesy call to the Political Science department.
Professor Andrew Scott was cued in to Deg's quantavolution and suggested he get in touch with
his relative, John William Firor by name, who was Director of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research. An exchange of letters followed. One notes that the inquiry strikes into
two lines of study: the possibly catastrophic origins of mankind and geophysical catastrophism.
Firor's letter stuck in Deg's mind as he wrote the chapters on exoterrestrialism and the
atmosphere in Lately Tortured Earth.
June 3, 1976
Dear Dr. Firor:
As I was explaining my present studies in the origins of human nature to Andy Scott recently,
he came up with the suggestion that I address you on one type of problem which I've
encountered. In my scenario of practically instant creation of the psychocultural human from a
closely similar homo sapiens anatomy, I have had to set up models of genetic change, cultural
traumas, and atmosphere change (plus combinations). In the atmospheric context, one major
question is whether there occurred a radical change in some atmospheric constant, which then
assumed a uniformitarian guise and which is not observable presently therefore, but yet is
producing distinctively human behavior.
For instance, what are the limitations (low-high) of the gases and particles or combinations
thereof that an essentially human physical type can absorb or endure without expiring and
secondly what mental and anatomical operations would be continuously altered by the different
possible mixes?
High altitude deoxygenation, nitrogen bends, oxygen poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning, x-ray
and ultra-violet effects are some cases of relevance. I wonder whether certain gases can affect
the endocrines continuously; I postulate this because a constant heightening of endocrinal
output will result in pathological exaggerations of typical behavior.
Among the hypothetical constructs for abrupt change in atmospheric constants might be included
increase or decrease in oxygen; CO2; ambiant ionization; x-ray; solar particles; heavy
volcanism and gases over centuries. I have not mentioned changes in barometric or in atmosphere
mass weight, nor of the effects of high, heavy ice-water rings or canopies that were removed in
a series of cataclysms. The chain of causation may be complex, e. g., a life span increase
(decrease) brought on by changed gas mixture promotes longer training and group memory and
skills.
Perhaps I haven't provided enough detail even to permit considering the subject. If so, please
tell me. If this suggests to you some ideas of studies that you would care to relate to me, I
would be most grateful. I call my field revolutionary primevalogy; the atmosphere which may be
the most delicate of all ecological factors, is part of it.
8 July 1976 Dear Professor de Grazia: I have given considerable though to your June 3 letter
asking whether there has occurred any radical change in some atmospheric constant. There are
three areas that I can comment on: atmospheric composition, climate, and ultraviolet radiation.
The present notions concerning atmospheric composition do not suggest that there have been
sudden changes. Those who have thought about the history of the atmosphere take as a starting
point a gradually cooling earth which has exhaled a good deal of carbon dioxide. In this
situation, some sort of primitive plant life begins and the plants themselves begin to produce
oxygen. When the oxygen content reaches some particular level, then animal life becomes
possible and it too begins its long evolutionary chain. I am not an authority in this area, but
my reading tells me that no one has yet proposed any cataclysmic changes in composition. There
is some notion that we have reached an oxygen content which is self-regulating, that if plants
produce enough oxygen that the atmospheric content tends to increase, the likelihood of
lightning -- starting forest fires and other events would increase enough to burn up the extra
oxygen and bring it back up to its regulated level. I do not know how accepted this notion is,
but if anything, it works against what you are looking for, that is a sudden change.
There are sudden changes known in the dust content of the atmosphere as a result of major
volcanic eruptions. When the Agung Volcano erupted in the early 60s, it's well established that
the dust in the stratosphere went all over the world and stratospheric temperatures changed for
a year or two afterwards as the dust only gradually washed out. However, no ground-level
effects of this process were measured and, hence, nothing that might easily fit into impacting
a Homo sapiens anatomy.
The climate does change. The northern hemisphere warned up between 1890 and 1950 and has cooled
off since that time by a similar amount. The changes are larger in some parts of the northern
hemisphere than in others. This particular change is not particularly large and perhaps not
cataclysmic enough for what you are looking for. There are suggestions, however, in the
paleoclimate record that larger changes have occurred more rapidly. Around 500 B. C.,
evidently, in the space of a day, or a month, or a year (after this long a time, it's hard to
tell the difference) the climate of Europe cooled strikingly, clogging certain well-known
mountain passes with snow, changing the dates of which harbors were free of ice, and producing
dramatic effects on the trade arrangements, travel patterns and so forth of the time. There are
other tantalizing bits of evidence of sudden changes in climate -- a rodent in Canada found
frozen in thousands-of-year-old ice-covered terrain. Climate change and climate theory is a
very active area of study just now and I would suspect a rapid accumulation of new information
in this area in the next few years.
Finally, ultraviolet light. Recently, we have found that a sudden stream of fast particles from
the sun on one occasion struck the high atmosphere of the earth, produced nitrogen compounds
that in turn destroyed some of the ozone and suddenly admitted more ultraviolet light to the
surface than before. The effect went away fairly quickly as the ozone layer healed itself and
indeed the effect was rather small. But it suggests that if during the changing patterns of the
earth's magnetic field there occurred a moment when there was no general field of the earth,
hence, no magnetosphere to protect us from solar particles, we might have an era in which the
atmosphere would have much less ozone and, hence, the ultraviolet radiation at the surface
would be considerably larger than today. It is hard to say how rapidly such a situation might
begin. I suppose one could also not rule out the possibility of a major and sustained emission
of particles from the sun which would begin essentially instantaneously and diminish the ozone
layer for weeks or months, but we have never observed that much solar activity. Very recently
you may have seen an article in Science magazine written by a scientist here at NCAR in which
he pulled together many lines of evidence to indicate that during a 70-year period in the late
17th century, the sun seemed to be free of sun spots and the character of solar activity was
very different from anything we have known in modern times. This fact at least holds out the
possibility that sustained changes in solar activity was very different from anything we have
known in modern times. This fact at least holds out the possibility that sustained changes in
solar activity can occur and I would suppose if they can occur negatively, that is the
vanishing of sun spots of solar activity, one might have eras of higher than normal solar
activity. The carbon-14 record, which was used in the Science article as corroborating
evidence, suggests that the changes in cosmic rays producing carbon-14 and controlled by the
sun were of the same relative size of that occurring during the sun-spot-free period in the
17th century.
I hope these rather crude thoughts are some help to you in thinking about revolutionary
primevalogy.
Sincerely Yours, John W. Firor
The ancient Roman Encyclopedist Pliny mentions that the Etruscan city of Volsinium had been
destroyed long before him by a thunderbolt from the sky. None paid serious attention to the
remark, except the cosmic heretics. Deg, who had campaigned during the War in the region, would
have liked to investigate Pliny's claim, a pleasant location for a critical test of the
veracity of legend and the activity of Zeus the Thunderbolter or another god.
After he had become aquainted with an authoritative figure of Italian geology, Professor Piero
Leonardi of the University of Ferrara and the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, he wrote Leonardi
about Bolsena and received a disappointingly assured reply:
10 March 1977
... I read with interest what you said in your letter about the Lake of Bolsena and the
publications of your friend Juergens on the possible attribution of the craters and 'sinuous
rilles' of the Moon and Mars to enormous electrical discharges, but I must confess to you that
the arguments of your friend do not convince me, for a complex of considerations shared by
almost all planetologists. I am sending you separately a work of mine on the origin of the
'sinuous rilles' in which you can discern my opinion on the matter...
He voices, too, his opinion that meteoroid impacts and volcanism can account for the craters.
So far as concerns the Lake of Bolsena, one is dealing undoubtedly with a normal volcanic
structure, and I do not believe at all that its origin can be attributed to extratellurian
phenomena.
He goes on to address himself to a query of Deg concerning a nineteenth century report of human
bones and pottery found in Pliocene deposits and deposited at the Museum in Florence, and says
that the report was probably made before proper stratigraphy was carried on, thus permitting a
mixture of materials of different epochs.
Naturally Deg was not satisfied. Comyns Beaumont had written many year earlier of the erratic
nature of volcanic eruptions and suspected that meteors and volcanos transacted
electromagnetically. Stephanos found a striking instance of this reported by the noted
oceanographer Beebe on the ship "Arcturus" approaching a volcano at Albermarle Sound. In one
day, two brilliant meteors came out of the sky and shot into the crater of the volcano. Noting
that Flaugergue's Comet preceded the frightful New Madrid, Missouri, earthquake in 1811-1812,
Deg figured that a correlation between comets and meteors on the one side and volcanos and
earthquakes on the other side might well be significantly positive.
Deg is also corresponding with Professor Ernst Wreschner at this time, inquiring whether he has
news of the discoveries at Ebla. Wreschner on March 30, 1977 responds:
... On the Italian digs and tablets. There are two possibilities for the destruction of the
town, 1) A natural catastrophe, 2) A man-made one. The time: ca 2200 B. C. I do not think that
a natural catastrophe destroyed the town and left the tablets intact. The short-lived semitic
(Jewish?) Kingdom of Eber had powerful neighbors in what is now Iraq. The time is also known as
the beginning of the Hittite expansion...
Other cosmic heretics are alert to the fate of Ebla. Its destruction occurs in Deg's Mercurian
period, a highly electrical period. The nations are in turmoil; the natural forces of the Earth
-- volcanic, seismic, aquatic, atmospheric -- respond to exoterrestrial forces, attributed
often to the planet Mercury and his identities as Thoth, Hermes, et al. Deg laid down the
challenge: that no exceptions will be found to the catastrophic destruction of settlements of
this period. Concurrently, radar engineer M. M. Mandelkehr published his first study, this "An
Integrated Model for an Earthwide Event at 2300 B. C." that extended Schaeffer's Near East
investigations to demonstrate on all continents "a global catastrophe caused by an
extraterrestrial body." He worked quite alone, contentedly so, apparently; Deg and Sizemore
visited him on one occasion, inasmuch as he lived not far from Trenton. Philip Clapham made his
debut as a cosmic heretic in 1983 with two articles in Catastrophism and Ancient History on
Ebla, fitting it into the catastrophic chronology of the Near East.
One of the most promising ventures of the mid-seventies was the little magazine that Hans
Kloosterman, a Dutch geologist, put out from Rio de Janeiro. The Catastrophist Geologist went
on for two years and subsided, but not before it had brought to light materials of German and
Russian catastrophists quite unknown to the English-speaking heretics, and of a high degree of
sophistication. Noteworthy especially was Otto Schindewolf, a paleontologist who had begun his
publications in 1950. He favored the hypothesis that fluctuations in high-energy cosmic
radiation caused the periodic extermination of most species. He contributed the essential
concept of anastrophism, the positive side of catastrophism, attributing the birth as well as
the death of species to radiation disasters.
Deg heard first from Kloosterman in May of 1977 and replied to congratulate him. He absorbed
material from at least half of the contents of the journal into Lately Tortured Earth.
Kloosterman removed himself a priori from an association with Velikovsky, a step sincerely
taken which would perhaps help to bring a new line of contributors to the field; however, it
also put him out of touch with devotees of Velikovsky and actually incited antagonism to his
work. He knew that catastrophists were few, without realizing perhaps how very few. He and Deg
never met, and Deg would get snippets of news about him from Dutch heretics. The journal, which
could have matched Kronos and SISR had it continued, brought in professional geologists, an
element conspicuously absent in quantavolutionary circles.
What Deg meant by ideological features of geology and science generally was amply explained in
a note later on:
As I moved from the theory of human behavior into the study of Nature, my intellectual baggage
included the concept of a "scientific fiction" which had given me good use for many years and
which may be hypothesized when encountering phenomena that are unproven or lead too far afield
to explain, yet are needed to move ahead with an exposition.
I discovered surprisingly that most natural scientists are not skeptical about some major
guiding concepts, conceding to them the 'hardness' of reality (reality itself being a fiction
of undeniable universal utility). Several scientific fictions can be named, however, that may
be losing some of their utility and therefore should when employed should be watched for what
they are doing to one's mind and the facts being ordered.
Practical fictions of Science:
a) the Ice Ages
b) Natural Selection
c) Continental Drift
d) "In the Beginning," "primordial melt," the primitive solar system," "as the Earth was being
formed," "illud tempus."
Such a fiction includes:
a) the indexing function
b) the classifying of material
c) an explanation of phenomena
d) defense mechanism phenomena
e) license to work (freedom)
f) acceptance (reward)
g) allows one to conjecture freely
All may have in common defense mechanisms vs. catastrophism.
May be analyze with similar concepts articles in Nature before 1970 and several Sci.
encyclopedias' usages of these terms.
Cf. Hans Vaihinger Philosophy of 'As If' When no longer functional, these may and should be
reviewed to pass muster.
All the while the cosmic heretics were sure that the planets and the Moon would display
catastrophic effects along with the Earth. Planetary and satellite geology was carried on
actively in the pages of Pens‚e and subsequent media of the heretics. The high heat of Venus
was the central topic of the debate, but V. kept extending his list of claims to other planets
and the Moon.
For instance, in a letter to H. H. Hess, July 2, 1969, he wrote:
Some nine thousand years ago water was showered on Earth and Moon alike (deluge). But on the
Moon all of it dissociated, hydrogen escaping; the rocks will be found rich in oxygen,
chlorine, sulfur and iron.
Velikovsky had not then or later a fixed idea of when the Noachian Flood, which he is talking
about, occurred. Here it was 9000 B. P. Sometimes he said 4000 B. P., at other times 6000 B.
P., and it was this last date that Deg also chose when the time came to postulate a
catastrophic calendar.
Unlike V. and other heretics, Deg accepted the theory of "continental drift" that triumphed in
geology during the postwar generation. He went far beyond it, pulling the Moon from the Earth
at the beginning of the continental movements, in proposing that then the drift was a rapid
"trot," assigning the total quantavolution to a large passing sky body which he called Uranus
Minor.
24 December 1981
A Merry Christmas and Happy New year to SIS and yourself! The Editor, SISR Dear Sir.
Dr. Peter Smith's "Open Earth" (V SISR I 1980-I 30-2) is not open enough to some tastes. If, as
he rightly says, "The only certainties are that our sphere of ignorance is huge...," then he
should let some quantavolutionary theory squeeze through along with the gang of speculations
about continental drift. I do not call if "drift" but "rafting." (See Chaos and Creation, 155)
In fact, I considered calling it a "trot." Its course has followed a negative exponential curve
since its catastrophic beginning. The simplest explanation of the mosaic of jostling crustal
pieces is an initial set of heavy shocks from a passing body that wrenched away half of the
crust, cracking the remainder and sending it sliding hither and yon toward the great basin
exposed by the lost material.
For the moment, geophysicists are enchanted by the shivers of movement and the designation of
the creeping pieces as major and minor plates. I have seen the most marvelous reconstructions
of the Earth going back "half a billion" years; one is published by a University of Chicago
paleographic project under Alfred Ziegler. In my view, the original plate until a few millennia
ago was the whole earth covering the globe. What we can chart now are the millimeters of creep
of the long uniformitarian tail of the exponential curve of decline from the original
precipitous outburst of crust.
To accomplish their uniformitarian infinitesimalism, most geophysicists have taken refuge in
billions of years; thus can the curve be smoothened out. This imaginary flat curve they then
prove by elaborating geological and radiometric tests of time, the very foundations of which
were destroyed by quantavolutions. But, too, tests of time aside, if Dr. Smith would provide us
with a single study proving subduction of frozen mantle back into the molten depths -- carrying
with it light crystal material or, worse, where is all the stuff dumped along the shores? -- or
if he can supply any other type of hard proof that the continental plates move under an Earth
power that is sui generis and not originally extra-terrestrial, we should be most obliged.
On the other hand, I do not intend to support Dr. Velikovsky's view of continental drift, which
was always to my mind a non-view, "fence-straddling" (to allow an American political
expression). As he says, "My position on continental drift was (and is ) intermediary
between..." Between what -- an orange and a banana? Maybe he did not want to hurt Harry Hess'
feelings, Hess having fathered the plate theory, for Hess was one of the few establishment
leaders who treated him with a full hearing. Had Wegener's life not been cut short, he might
finally have come upon the best explanation of continental drift, for he already had unblinded
himself of major geological theses and had the basic components of continental rafting
mechanisms in mind.
I hope that Dr. Smith's youthful journal, which you advertise, will open up to articles
employing condensed time scales and depicting external forces playing upon the terrestrial
globe.
Sincerely yours, Alfred de Grazia
Deg's theory of recent lunar fission began in long fits of staring at the physiography of the
globe. He was attracted by Carey's advocacy of a considerable global expansion as the basis for
the globe-girdling fractures, but then put off by M. Cook's comments that the heat of such an
expansion would have dissolved the Earth. Still, invoking exoterrestrieal help, he worked up
first an expansion model, as is related in his letter to Cornuelle of August 1, 1974; then,
after a year of worrying that expansion great or small could not explain the actual disposition
of the continents, he decided upon an explosion-expansion model. Only Milton actively endorsed
the concept. The cosmic heretics, who could visualize Venus flying by the Earth 3500 years ago,
balked at picturing the crust of the Earth exploding into space to form the Moon a few
thousands years earlier. But Deg found that the model, proposed in Chaos and Creation, of a
binary solar system, recently disintegrating, could accommodate lunar fission along with every
major features and dynamic of the natural and biological sciences, together with the earliest
grand legendary themes of mankind.
When he finally got down to writing at length about geology in The Lately Tortured Earth, the
work came easily. It was simply a matter of taking up in turn the elements of the biosphere,
lithosphere and hydrosphere and applying to them all the material that he could gather about
exoterrestrial forces playing upon the Earth. The more he wrote, the better he felt about the
possibility of adapting conventional gradualism to quantavolution.
It seemed to him that the scientific fields were still far behind, needlessly so, even when
they were boldly led. After he had completed the book and sent it off to India for production,
he became aware that a striking conference had been held at the resort town of Snowbird, Utah
on October 19-22, 1981. Sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Lunar and
Planetary Institute, and funded liberally by several foundations and institutions, scores of
experts gathered to report upon their separately supported and conducted researches in
"Geological Implications of Impacts of Large Asteroids and Comets on the Earth." Deg was of
course unknown and uninvited; he recognized having met personally only one of the participants!
Their papers were published a year later by the Geological Society of America.
The conference would have been a practical impossibility a generation earlier. It displayed
contemporary geology doing what it could do best, technical variations on a theme: given
unmistakable traces of the occurrence of certain meteoritic falls, how might these be
distinguished and measured, what excavations could they have caused, what chemicals could have
been scattered about, what animals and planets would have died -- all of this tightly bound up
with uniformitarian experience and highly mathematicized. One searches hopelessly in the volume
for an enlarged philosophical and cosmogonical inquiry.
Many topics went unaddressed, among them the possibility that important exoterrestrial
transactions of the Earth involved pass-bys of large bodies without impacting; that planets
might have played a role in cosmic disasters; that the measures of time employed might not be
infallible; that the Earth's tortured crustal morphology might in its most general features be
an exoterrestrial effect; and that heavy fall-outs of non-exotic material such as water and
gravel might have occurred. When Deg examined the papers, he felt keenly the ambivalence and
loneliness of a front-runner in the course of thought. The elation of being far ahead was
countered by the fear of being disoriented and by the longing to be moving forward amidst a
body of kindred spirits.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 3 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TEN
ABC'S OF ASTROPHYSICS
In his journal of January 12, 1968, Deg writes of a conversation with Professor Lloyd Motz of
Columbia University, the same who had called the attention of scientists to Velikovsky's
successful predictions of Jupiter's radio noises and Venus' high heat:
Motz turned out to be a cheerful sort, full of admiration for Velikovsky, but of course
entirely convinced that the laws of gravitation and thermodynamics are much more positive proof
against Velikovsky than are some historical events of which Velikovsky may have proof positive.
(...)
Motz is going, obviously, by deduction from laws that he regards as immutable. He feels simply
that, whatever the historical evidence may be, it would be impossible for enough energy to the
generated on Jupiter to launch Venus by eruption into the heavens. He wonders whether there
might not be some third body that had appeared in space and constituted a counter force that
have drawn off or helped draw off Venus from Jupiter or whether Venus had come from somewhere
else in space. I pointed out that Velikovsky is firm at this time that Venus must have come out
of Jupiter by eruption (But not volcanic eruption -- rather from disequilibrium owing to
Saturn) and that we have no knowledge of a strange third body that may have been in space at
that time within the planetary system, else we might have heard the name given this body in the
records of the times. Still it is worth keeping an eye out for such an intruder. Motz says the
same problem besets those who think of quasars as a high-intensity explosion, an eruption from
larger bodies. Where can the energy come from, he says, and how could it gather together?
With Director of Antiquities Spiridon Marinatos in 1968, Deg met astronomer Constantinos
Chassapis who had studied the Orphic Hymns and derived certain conclusions about Greek
astronomy in the second millennium B. C. The Hymns, he asserted, had originated between -1841
and -1382, but probably in the 17th century. They showed the Greeks to understand
heliocentricity and the sphericity and rotation of the Earth, and spoke of the attraction of
the Sun as the source of orbital movement, and named the planets, the seasons, the atmosphere,
and the ether beyond. Their calendar was of twelve lunar months; they identified Saturn with
time; and they referred to a universal law that regulated the universe and stabilized the
Earth.
Stecchini, Santillana, and Von Dechend, among historians of science known to Deg, were quite
persuaded of the advanced state of the most ancient known science, so Deg was rather more
impressed by the indications of modernity in Orphism, which Chassapis was exhibiting at the
same time. If the hymns had originated so early, though, they went to prove a uniformitarian
history of the heavens. Incompetent to challenge Chassapis' readings, Deg could but question
the definitiveness of the poetic lines, which seemed indeed vague, and the technique of
retrojecting the present celestial motions unjustifiably.
The Orphic Hymns, Chassapis also maintained, evidenced an early knowledge to lenses. This, too,
rankled with Deg. He had worried over a mention of a lens-like object found in Ninevah's
earliest levels, and had discussed the general question with Stecchini. If the Bronze Age
peoples had been able to magnify the stars, meteors, planets, sun and moon, they might also
have derived proportions and distances among the planets, this making Jupiter the King and
Saturn the retired king. Too they might thus have perceived the rings of Saturn and bands of
Jupiter. They might then for religious reasons, and because humans are anxious animals, have
created a body of legends ascribing to the heavenly bodies the various adventures, including
approaches to the Earth, that the revolutionaries said were historical occurrences.
Stecchini believed that the ancients had lenses, or at least would have built concave disks of
copper alloys polished to a high reflectivity. He wavered often in his basic position about
cosmic encounters. Always quite happy to play the game of catastrophic models, he might still
be readily influenced by Santillana or another colleague to believe that other solutions might
be found in the messages sent down through the ages by the earliest voices.
Deg, on the other hand, even when he postulated ancient telescopes, could not explain away the
concordance among ancient voices; did they have telescopes everywhere? Moreover the explosive
speech of the modern skies and terrestrial crust were seeming to make a point. Not until 1980
did a space vehicle confirm the great and incessant electrical discharges of Jupiter, but then
he had for fifteen years been persuaded that the legendary electrical behavior was real, and on
a much large scale than anything that might be observed today. The same concordance on many
other matters was consistent, too, with ancient legend. If the ancients had telescopes, they
would have previewed the catastrophes but could only have modestly exaggerated them in their
mythology.
A possibility existed, he thought, that the theocratic elites, here and there, using
telescopes, would purvey to the masses distorted history, where legends survive and where are
perpetuated some happenings and forecasts; but there would be no compelling reason for widely
divergent cultures to achieve consensus on these. Why, let us ask, would the priests of the
Jupiter (Yahweh, Zeus) age, using telescopes upon calm heavens, invent catastrophic heavens of
the time of the birth of Jupiter, and of the earlier times of Saturn?
For that matter, the great telescopes of the past century have not induced uniformitarian
astronomers to alter their dogma of a calm celestial history. However, they have made an
increasing number of observers proto-catastrophists. So telescopes, even if the ancients
possessed them, could not impress catastrophes upon men who had not experienced such. If Venus
simply seemed big and beautiful enlarged 50 times, why would men go berserk, catatonic,
orgiastic at her regular, safe, distant approach? Fossil telescopes could not affect
quantavolutionary theory. They might even support the notion of cultural hologenesis that Deg
espoused.
The great Book of Venus was of course Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. In Deg's long
acquaintanceship with the book there developed practically no significant errors of astronomy
or geology, errors or omission of sources, or misreporting of legends. There is some
exaggeration and "purple prose", as in the title that suggests explosive impacts between the
planets Venus, Mars, Earth, and Moon, which he does not claim in the book itself. The style is
less timid, hesitant, than might be deemed appropriate. There are hints of arrogance as he
warns of the dire fate awaiting the theses of Darwin and Newton (less unseemly today than in
1950, however). There are no appeals to religion, only rare confusions of "ought" and "must"
with the factual "is". A certain repetitiveness occurs that may be impossible to avoid, but
which nevertheless tends to overstress and amplify some catastrophic occurrences. He avoids
scientific and pseudoscientific jargon and the coinage of terms.
I cannot here defend all of this, of which the first statement is already shocking: that "there
are practically no errors of astronomy?" How can a book that enraged many astronomers commit no
errors of astronomy? Apart from the main reasons, which are sociological and psychological,
there occur two substantive reasons: Velikovsky established his natural history by assertions
of fact; certain events either happened or did not happen and we weigh the evidence tending to
the one and the other to arrive at a judgment about planetary behavior. Second, after this is
done, Velikovsky asks how can the laws of astronomy permit such happenings. He understands the
laws. But when the behavior of the heavens does not conform to the demands of the laws, he
offers briefly some ideas as to what may improve the laws, such as the introduction of a larger
measure of electrical transactions into solar system behavior. He reasons the same in respect
to geology.
In legendary matters, he follows Euphemeris the Sicilian (fl. 300 B. C.) who established the
scientific canon that a myth is to be explained by natural causes. And when Dorothy Vitaliano
years later attacked Velikovsky while espousing euphemerism herself, she failed to realize that
she was merely reducing Velikovsky, not supplanting his method, which was the same as her own.
By the standards that Cook, Bruce, Juergens, Milton and Deg came to set for sky-body conduct,
Velikovsky was actually conservative and conciliatory to the establishment. He was heretical
but not a full-scale quantavolutionary. Deg came to feel almost perfunctory when he argued for
the middle-road quantavolutionaries like Velikovsky.
If a mini-microphone had been implanted in one of Deg's large ears, we would be entertained by
a litany of quantavolution over the years, emerging from an analysis of his stream of discourse
whenever the subject occurred, whether it would be in Greece, Manhattan, or Washington,
Princeton, London, Thailand, or India. What happens is this: most educated people are unaware
of the case for quantavolution; the subject is perennially interesting; it is impossible to
state or argue a full case; certain sloganized propositions are proven over time to have an
enlightening and convincing effect; these slogans are packaged and delivered in personal and
group conversations, with a couple left out where unnecessary or deemed inappropriate.
I have not had the advantage of an elaborate study, but I notice the frequency of these
statements, prefaced by something like: "more has happened to change the world by catastrophe
than by gradual evolution."
Religions are obsessed with primeval disasters."
"Mankind has always been fearful of the skies, such that terrible events must have happened
there."
"Venus is hellishly hot and locked to the Earth."
"Mercury now is believed to have been recently relocated."
"Cosmic disasters destroy time measurements."
"Big changes in the biosphere are connected with general catastrophes."
"Ancient legends from around the world confirm each other."
"The surfaces of Earth and its neighbors have been torn up recently."
"The world is electrified from universe to atom with potentials that can overwhelm
gravitational forces when exercised."
"You can't determine what happened in natural history by natural processes nowadays."
"Science is as non-rational as any other kind of behavior.
And other such simplicities occur more or less frequently. Whether tossed out in defense or in
exposition, the expressions collide with a variety of phrases with which the well-educated
person is equipped, such as:
Gravitation accounts for the solar system."
"All methods of chronology give very old ages."
"The solar system has been functioning as it is for billions of years."
"You can't trust legends: they say everything and nothing."
"Evolution is a fact: it look millions of years to change the horse's foot to a hoof."
"The oldest features on Earth are hundreds of millions of years old."
"No imaginable force can move the Earth without exploding it."
"Venus' thick clouds work to make it like a greenhouse."
"First came myths, then religion, then magic, then rational science."
"Any local disaster can be exaggerated to huge proportions.
After the clash of these sets of slogans is amplified somewhat, the discussion is usually
turned off or diverted. Book reviews and scientific table-talk infrequently go even as far.
Once in a while a foray in strength is launched by one or the other side. Even so, rational
discussion or exposition does not ensue, but rather an elaboration of one of these slogans with
the citation of authorities, or with dogmas more elegantly stated.
Rarely does the exposition break out of the brush into the clearing. It would not be an
exaggeration to state that in the two decades about which this book talks, no more than a dozen
public presentations have occurred in which a systematic attempt has been made by a practiced
and specialized scientist in the face of opposition to destroy and bury one or another facet of
quantavolution, such as the capacity of moving the Earth without destroying it.
If this condition appears incredible, it is because so few people understand the sociology of
scientific communication, or human discourse of any kind. Scientists can answer questions that
they pose for themselves, and spend most of their time doing so, and encourage their "stooges"
to ask these questions; but they cannot well answer questions that are asked by others, true
others, who come out of a different mentality and have different purposes in mind.
Take an example from Deg's experience in these years from a quite distant field, political
science, where in parts of three different books he proposed a single equal tax on every living
soul: that the annual budget be divided by the population to figure the tax of each one. The
shocks, reverberations, incomprehension, suspicions, reservations, indignation and flustered
unmediated ejaculations assailing the idea make it practically impossible to present or
discuss, even to the point of starting up research in the subject. Yet when he captured an
honors seminar at New York University and forced the students to expel all their preconceptions
and prejudices, and to dig up fresh facts, the single equal tax was not only understood by the
small group, but was also preferred by them, as one after another of the terms were defined,
the data researched, a sample of people interrogated, and the idea drafted into the common and
understandable form of a legislative bill.
On the proposition: "Venus is a young planet," first reactions tend to be equally obstreperous
and incredulous. The attack builds up rapidly:
The solar system is very old and stable, Venus included."
"The heat of Venus is an effect of its great cloud banks."
"A planet cannot be moved by any force without exploding."
"No force capable of moving a planet exists actively or potentially."
"Existing records reveal at least 4000 years of Venus observations."
"Bode's law of planetary spacing forbids its moving from elsewhere or being elsewhere."
"Planets cannot move from ellipses to circles, and to move they must take up elliptical orbits
for a time.
Against these, the quantavolutionary argument, as it was developed by Velikovsky and his
friends, asserts:
The arrangement of the solar system is only stable by our recent historical observations."
"Venus is an exceptional planet in its dense atmosphere and with its great heat of 900 degrees
F."
"The heat of Venus is an interior heat moving upwards to the surface and into the clouds."
"The hot planet Jupiter could have contained Venus, expelled it by fission (nova), and given it
its great heat."
"Venus rotates retrogradely, unlike the other planets."
"Venus is locked to the Earth (not to the 10 4 times larger Sun's tidal force) in two ways:
each inferior conjunction (243.16 days) finds it presenting the same hemisphere to Earth; and
its axis of rotation is perpendicular (within one degree) to the Earth's orbital plane (even
while 3 degrees off its own orbital plane)."
"The postulation of historically active electrical forces allows a planet-sized body to move
orbitally, axially, and rotationally without destruction, as an effect of the distribution of
charges throughout the solar system and of the near passage of a large body."
"Sacred and secular legends from around the world allude to the deviant behavior of Venus in
vicinity of Earth."
"The Venusian atmosphere, compared with the Earth's, contains 300 to 500 times more Argon-36, a
gas thought to have been dissipated from the planets shortly after they were formed."
"Venus practically lacks a magnetic field, it being 10 -4 of Earth's."
"Venus possesses a comet-like blowing away from the Sun that is much longer than the Earth's
relative to their respective magnetosphere radii."
"The Venusian surface is heavily featured, despite its great eroding heat and eroding wind
turbulence, but has no ocean basins."
"Fires seem to be burning on the surface of Venus, which may be caused by burning methane or
hydrocarbons."
"Chemical composition of the clouds indicates no hydrocarbons (or components) yet, but the
question is not closed." "Slight indications are present that Venus may be cooling off.
The idea of a double sun, the system of Solaria Binaria, as Deg named it, came with shocking
suddenness. It was a monster that came leaping at him even before he had a name for it, and
before he conceived of a dynamic for it. On April 28, 1963, shortly after becoming concerned
with cosmogony, his journal reads:
Discussions with Velikovsky and Livio have not cleared up the phenomenon of the similar planes
of the planets in solar revolution (maximum of 7% off) or even of why they rotate. Velikovsky
and Stecchini are not very concerned, since Velikovsky's theories hold anyway. But I wonder
whether the nebular hypothesis that has the sun throwing off the planets in an initial series
of explosions is true and ask:
Could the Sun have cast off the planets at different times, or more importantly, could the
planets be created on their common plane by the pull between the Sun and a second sun or planet
revolving around and near (a twin). Then from time to time a planet would be released from one
or the other...
While the people of his camp were arguing with conventional scientists over the origins of the
heat of Venus and the chronology of Egypt, he took the time to wander about the cosmogonical
fields and ponder what his friends might have known better than he, that is that changed
motions of large celestial bodies signified not aberrations but somewhere back in time a
basically different order.
The old order must have functioned on some basic principle, probably a simple principle. What
could it have been? He knew next to nothing about formal astronomy or palaeontology or
chemistry. What he was picking up might be scornfully and legitimately called static, a buzzing
of voices, weak signals from many directions, from alleys and haunted houses of science,
disreputable astrologies, occult references, stern and orgiastic religious cults and sects,
ancient poetry, restless cemeteries of legends, the rage for science fiction, anomalies,
contradictions overlooked and brushed aside.
Probably if he had not experienced the hubbub of politics and warfare, where all is said and
done and almost nothing is true, he would have avoided all of this, shut his eyes, clapped his
hands over his ears. Even earlier, the presumptuous liberal education at the University of
Chicago, which combined in a nettlesome but hardfast marriage with skeptical sociological
pragmatism, had irrevocably attuned him to ideological quarrels.
Perhaps, too, had he not been pummeled by contradictory and obstreperous personalities among
his friends and family, his neighborhood and his schools, he would have been quick to settle
upon a regular line of thought. And, to be sure, the din was pierced by his immoderate
ambition, which clamored louder than all else for solutions. He did not wait upon his betters.
He asked himself what he could contribute, and in line with his character it had to be "the
bigger, the better." It had to avoid competition with superior heretics, not to mention
superior conventional scholars, whenever there appeared a well-worn path --solar chemistry,
celestial mechanics, the fossil record, and so on. His head contained a large quantity of
whispers and scratches telling him what to avoid and what might be chosen. He disagreed with
most of Teilhard de Chardin's work, for instance but in reading The Appearance of Man, he
caught a fine phrase that would describe his own mental set: "On the cosmic scale (as all
modern Physics teaches us) only the fantastic has a chance of being true." Chardin followed
this course by continuing as a Catholic priest; Deg followed it more specifically.
It was strange that an old, different order of the heavens did not suggest itself much earlier.
However, going through the hundreds of titles that Earl Milton and he had compiled for the
research on Solaria Binaria, Deg could find no statement that the solar system had been
anything but a great sun which had cast off its planets in its early history. The history had
been stretched greatly over the past century, from some millions of years to several billion
years. A rotating hot ball of gases, interrupted by its own violence, perhaps, had operated as
a centrifuge. An alternative theory had predicted a passing body which by gravitational
attraction had pulled off the planets and gone its own way.
Perhaps somewhere in the literature, as there always seems to be precedents, an obscure passage
or writing would suggest that the Sun had a companion that had withered away, or, who knows,
even Jupiter may have somewhere been called such a companion. If so, it remained hidden to
contemporary discussion.
How did it happen that a few minds adventured in new directions? Let us extract some of the
ideas that seem to have influenced the turning of thought.
Legends were gaining respect. After two centuries of general neglect, the idea of Giambattista
Vico that behind legends stood a substantial truth began once more to pick up support. It is
not without significance that Giorgio Tagliacozzo, an economist and employee of the Voice of
America conceived a lush Tree of Knowledge whose fruit was of all the sciences and schools of
philosophy and brought it to Deg publication in the 1950's. Then Tagliacozzo went on a one-man
crusade to resurrect the figure of Vico and Deg became the recipient of a continuous flow of
material, which, however irrelevant to Solaria Binaria, carried a message of the validity of
ancient materials. There were others to come, the historians of science, Stecchini, de
Santillana, von Dechend, and of course V.
But, going back, too, some twenty-five years, there were the anthropologists and sociologists
whom Deg knew at Chicago, who respected the customs and ideas of so-called primitive peoples.
By his simple and radical logic, it seemed always that if these people were so smart about the
present, what they said about the past could not be more stupid than what the great religions
said. And, if the two -- the "civilized" and "primitive" -- agreed that a great god blew a
great wind over the Earth, burned it and flooded it, here might be the beginning of a
historical truth. Perhaps this was not all so easy. The anthropologists hardly went farther.
Nor did the historians of religion: Mircea Eliade went a great distance to establish the
obsession of peoples everywhere with their traumatic beginnings, and the beginnings generally
correlated; Eliade just failed to take the step, enveloped as he was in the uniformitarian song
of science, to say that these earliest peoples spoke some universal truths.
Nor was it a simple matter to detour around Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other psycho-
historians. Freud had his own basis for reality, a primeval cultural event establishing the
oedipal complex, guilt, obsession, recapitulation and, for the cosmogonies and catastrophes,
nothing but uniformitarian principles. Jung had archetypes, primeval to be sure, cosmic also,
but purely psychic in origin.
Velikovsky's was a different story. He generated a formidable sometimes caricatured obsession
out of ancient catastrophes, and, further, had attached to the beliefs-cum-faith of mankind an
original series of skies that carried two explosive bodies the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, then
later Venus that looked like a Sun in its approaches to Earth.
To my mind, there is but little doubt that if Velikovsky had been able to focus upon the
general cosmological problem of the solar system, in the last decades of his life, he would
have provided an ingenious explanation of the behavior of Saturn and Jupiter within a dynamic
system. He understood that Jupiter's behavior was akin to a "dark star" it being "cold" (i. e.
non-luminous) but with turbulent gases, and suggested that it sends out radio noises; his
unpublished talk on the subject preceded by less than a year the actual announcement of the
detection of the radio signals by Burke and Franklin (1955). In the same paper containing the
bold surmise, he had been arguing on the solar system and, just before mentioning Jupiter's
radio noises, he had used the analogy of a close binary or double star to illustrate the
presence of electromagnetic effects between stars. He had also brought forward late studies
demonstrating a correlation between the positions of the planets and electrical effect detected
upon Earth.
He had argued in Pens‚e and in conversations that Saturn must have gone nova to eject immense
waters some of which flooded the Earth during the Noachian Deluge. Then X-ray emissions were
discovered to emanate from Saturn, a possible sign of recent nova. On 4 November 1976, Milton
was asking Deg's advice about mentioning this in a Foreword to Recollections of a Fallen Sky.
"Ransom suggests that I not draw attention to this claim until Sagan et al. make some claims
about Saturn's heat, magnetosphere, and X-ray emission. The point is relevant to Velikovsky's
talks, but Ransom may be right, 'don't give them any points to avoid, let them commit
themselves first. '"
In no case, however, did Velikovsky venture the concept of the solar system having a full
binary history. In several passages here and there he broaches the idea that Jupiter and Saturn
may have encountered the solar system and wreaked havoc from a distance, and he appears to have
favored the idea that collisions between Jupiter and Saturn may have caused the Deluge and
later on made Venus erupt from Jupiter. It was difficult to try to discuss such matters with
him, and when, in his last years, Deg mentioned to him working upon a theory of Solaria Binaria
he let the subject pass like a report on the local weather.
Meanwhile, most cosmic heretics who followed Velikovsky were devising schemes by which the
major encounters among the planets occurred incidental to their clustering as satellites around
the two giant planets, a kind of independent Olympian system interacting at a great distance
from the Sun. They believed that the present solar system was occasioned by the forcible
ejection of the planets into their present positions in consequence of disruptive encounters of
Saturn and Jupiter, after which these large planets spaced out. What may exist in the way of
specific scenarios for these occurrences rests still in private files unpublished. When Deg and
then Deg and Milton came out with the model of Solaria Binaria in detail, they met with an
initial refusal within V.'s circle to consider it; it was lamented that these two had "made up
their minds;" the existence of Ouranos as a sky god was denied and other key assertions were
denigrated.
The respect and patience of Ralph Juergens towards Velikovsky assumed proverbial proportions.
Juergens devoted most of his professional life to establishing a fully electrical theory of the
solar system, including especially the explanation of solar radiance as the reflection of an
accumulation and dissipation of electric charge from the galaxies. When Deg asked Velikovsky,
more than once, whether he could accept Juergens' theory, he would reply with a definite
negative. He adhered to internal thermo-nuclear fusion as the secret of the Sun's radiation.
Because Deg respected Juergens, and then came upon Melvin Cook and then Bruce and Milton, he
was never of this opinion. And now, looking backwards, one must wonder whether Velikovsky
should have spent with Juergens the many hours that he spent instead, and writes a book about,
with Einstein.
In introducing a posthumous paper of Juergens, a "pioneer in the study of electric stars," in
1982, Milton comments that Juergens perceived the astronomical bodies as inherently charged
objects immersed in a universe which could be described as an electrified fabric.
"The Sun," writes Juergens, "is the anode end of a cathodeless discharge extending from the
perimeter of the solar system." The solar photosphere is comparable to the "tufted anode glow"
in an electric discharge tube. The Sun gathers electrons from galactic bodies and plasma, and
sends out an ion current, the solar wind, to the galaxy.
Juergens dismissed the thermonuclear explanation of the Sun's heat in favor of a galaxy-solar
electric exchange. The thermonuclear theory, recently developed, sought to explain the Sun's
properties of luminosity, temperature and stability by its essential chemical composition, mass
and size, assuming that the Sun and its behavior are effects of the conditions in galactic
space, not in its interior. So, much of his time went into seeking ways of detecting and
measuring the suspected inflow, capable of reflecting a continuous output of electrical power
amounting to 4 x 10 26 watts, or 6.5 x 10 7 watts per square meter; this, it happens, registers
0.137 watts per square centimeter at the Earth's position in space. The searched-for input must
amount to 4 x 10 26 watts as well.
Now whereas scientists have for a long time accepted the invisible source of power known as
gravitation, they have largely ignored and disdained the possibility of an invisible source
known as electrical discharge in a gas. "Electric discharge is a known and observable
phenomenon, yet we might live immersed in a cosmic discharge and know nothing its existence."
V. A. Bailey of Australia published in Nature (1961) his calculations, based on the data of
Pioneer space probes, that the Sun must possess a net negative charge with the potential of the
order of 10 19 volts. Bailey visited Princeton to meet V. and there Juergens and Deg became
acquainted with him as well.
V. was always excited by indications of unforeseen electrical forces playing about the
universe. Still he never accepted Juergens' theory, possibly, as he told Deg, because the
thermonuclear theory seemed solid to him, and it is indeed regarded as fact by physicists,
astronomers, science publicists, and of course the educated public. Since V. never read or
discussed Deg's theory of Solaria Binaria, which accepted Juergens' theory and satisfied so
many requirements of V.'s own reading of natural and astronomical history, it can be surmised
that Juergens' theory was not working for him, V., and should be tolerated because of the
usefulness of Juergen's ideas and work, whether as an ever-respectful historian of the V.
Affair or as indefatigable discoverer of electrical forces and effects on Earth, Moon. Mars,
Venus, and in planetary encounters. Long after Juergens pulled up stakes from the Princeton
area to find a new life in Flagstaff, Arizona, partly to be "his own man," V. tried to coax him
into returning to collaborate on one or another of his books.
Juergens persisted in developing his theory, while repeatedly coming to V.'s aid in the
astrophysical exchanges in which V. engaged. Never was the issue of the origins and prior shape
of the solar system introduced to systematic discussion. V. generally reacted negatively, even
harshly, when material which he objected to or deemed irrelevant sought its way into the
magazine Pens‚e. Ultimately the magazine was discontinued in part because of a disagreement
between V. and the Talbott brothers on the question of broadening the magazine's scope.
However, he behaved gently towards Juergen's material, and Juergens' ideas did receive their
initial publication in Pens‚e where Deg could study them, along with the rebuttal of them by
Princeton Physicist Martin Kruskal, to learn something about the Sun. The date was 1972.
Juergens had already moved from Hightstown, New Jersey, to Flagstaff, Arizona.
Deg was by now knocking the planets around like billiard balls, looking for the right pockets.
He came to realize in the legendary succession of Greek gods, which might be afforded backup
from divine successions in other parts of the world, a possible sequence of real cosmic events.
His basic god became Ouranos (Uranus), generally ignored by V. and the other heretics. And,
reading in the century-old esoteric papers of Isaac Vail, and elsewhere, he found an original
divine Heaven, which eventually produced a Sun-like figure which was still called by the name
of Heaven. Thence the succession, of events took shape: Ouranos-Heaven, Ouranos-Sun, Kronos
(Saturn) Sun, Zeus (Jupiter) Sun, and the antics of the Olympian family of planets -- Earth,
Ares (Mars), Hermes (Mercury), Apollo, Poseidon (Neptune), Uranus-Minor and Venus. Each and
every one of these had been a principal in catastrophes upon Earth, and victim of catastrophes
itself.
Deg thought that these might be interacting meaningfully and in a series or succession, ending
at the beginning of the present historical period, when Greek philosophy was born, which could
be regarded as the Solarian Age. From that time onwards, the Sun (and Moon) seem to have been
the dominating bodies of the sky and no intruder -- planetary, cometary, or meteoroidal --
appears to have played a major role in the sight of mankind, excepting always in the beliefs of
astrologers that carry down to us their fossil memories.
Deg speculated as follows: there were three legendary Fathers --Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus.
Hence only these three major bodies had to be accounted for as the basis of the earlier solar
system. But, since Zeus was the son of Kronos, and Kronos was the Son of Ouranos, only one body
had to be accounted for, that is, Ouranos. Now, since Ouranos was originally a thick cloud
enveloping the Earth when mankind's legends began and was the first subject of creation
legends, this canopy-sky must have been an atmosphere thicker than any in historical
experience, thicker even than those provoked by known catastrophes such as the temporary
darknesses of Exodus and other legendary or pre-historic episodes and the recent volcanic
explosion of Krakatoa. But finally Ouranos emerged and exposed himself, enveloped in clouds. To
some, he was the Cosmic Egg.
The birth of Kronos and his revolt against his father was readily pictured as successive
explosions of a super-Uranus and the establishment of the new body, Kronos. The birth of Zeus
out of Saturn was analogous. The planetary children of Zeus, of different mothers, remained
under his nudging regime until the settled skies eroded his rule and, indeed, all planetary
rulership, except in myth and astrology.
Deg imagined that electricity might do what seemed impossible for gravitation, although he
clung to both powers until Earl Milton persuaded him that all the problems could be solved
without gravitation, letting Deg cling only to the inertia which he had cherished all along as
the vital element in "gravitational" behavior. In 1976, he was in touch with Milton, who was
coaxing a key paper from V. for his book, Recollections of a Fallen Sky. He was also in
correspondence with Juergens, and he told both of them what he was up to in Chaos and Creation.
Both were sympathetic.
On April 22, 1976 he wrote to Milton a memorandum of "Alternate scenarios for the shift of
planets, including Earth, from a proposed binary system to the unitary solar system." He
conceived of the planetary system as strung out between Sun and Super-Uranus and rotating
around the common electrical axis while the axis, carrying the whole set, wheeled in revolution
around the Sun. He is becoming enthusiastic:
I am beginning to feel my oats, Earl. I can visualize as neat and elegant a model as anyone
might wish, replete with formulas. What great blooper have I made, cher colleague? Are you
still holding to your generous offer to collaborate? Is scenario II our preferred kick-off? We
are having a thunderstorm with lightning. Perhaps Jupiter knows!
Further exchanges took place: then came a week's discussions in New York in 1977, ten days
together in Washington, D. C. in early 1978, the same in Princeton in early Fall of 1978, the
months on the lonely promontory at Stylida, Naxos, by the Aegean Sea in the Spring of 1980,
where most of Solaria Binaria was written in its final from. On May 26 1980, Deg notes in his
journal 'Finished 1st draft of chaps II and III of Solaria Binaria with Earl Milton 1230 hours.
' He tells how they would discuss heatedly from early morning until early afternoon, sometimes
arguing stridently, their voices echoing over the rocks of Stylida, putting their only
competitors, the crows and seagulls, to flight. Afternoons and evenings they would write in
their separate rooms. In the early summer of 1981 they met again in Princeton and New York, and
again in late 1981, spending a strenuous ten days at Edward de Grazia's beach house at
Rehoboth, Delaware to complete a manuscript of the full work. Leroy Ellenberger, not far away,
called repeatedly but was not invited to come, for a visitor would have disrupted the
relentless pace through the manuscript. (This incident may have triggered Leroy's animosity,
who before had been deferential and complaisant.) Pages of notes and reprints lay in piles
about the large room, on the floor, the chairs, the tables. Upstairs Ami worked quietly at her
novel. Outside the low sun beat weakly upon the great beach and roaring waves. They drove to
Annapolis to visit St. John's College where Bill Mullen and Joe de Grazia were now teaching.
Deg and Ami dropped Milton off at the Washington Airport amidst a howling blizzard for his long
flight back to Alberta.
The notes and manuscripts had traversed the continent and the Atlantic Ocean several times,
punctuated by messages and phone calls, and by "Did you receive....?" letters, with chapters
and cassettes chasing the men like heat-homing missiles. By the Spring of 1982 the book was
completed and stood in line for publication.
So ambitious a work should have been created under ideal conditions, with at least a solid year
of side-by-side collaboration and next to a giant library. If they had waited for this setting,
the book would never have been written. Milton had been troubled by asthma most of his life. He
was placed under great pressure in the writing of Solaria Binaria. The discussions were heated,
the environment often strange, yet he was less troubled by poor health when they were exerting
themselves upon their creation to the point of exhaustion. Milton worked steadily over the
years to make a respected place for V. and quantavolution in Canadian thought. He was a popular
teacher and, at some risks to his career, he systematically introduced the new ideas into his
courses. Canadian higher education employs outside evaluators whose word goes far on matters of
curriculum and promotion. He was able successfully to fight off professional criticism of his
innovations in teaching and writing, and ultimately achieved an influential role as spokesman
for quantavolution.
He was a principal agent in persuading his faculty to offer an honorary doctorate to V., the
only one ever given him, and within a decade he was once more agitating at the University for
the same honor on behalf of Deg. He held meetings, journeyed to contact potential supporters,
wrote reviews, spoke on the radio, and was an organizer of the Canadian Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies. He was the principal Canadian representative in England and the
United States. Only Irving Wolfe, at the University of Montreal, and Dwardu Cardona, living in
Vancouver, approached him in effectiveness and productivity. Two papers of Milton, written at
the turn of the decade, one erasing gravitation as a necessary concept in celestial mechanics,
the second dealing with Earth-Venus close transactions, are among the classic expositions of
astronomical quantavolution.
Ralph Juergens was struck down by a heart attack in 1979, a few weeks after Stecchini expired,
and a few weeks before V. died. He was gearing up to participate in the writing of Solaria
Binaria. I doubt that the final manuscript would have been much changed if Juergens had taken
an active hand. Milton thinks not. He had gone over the general theory with him, and Juergens
had received in 1976 and 1977 Deg's skeleton of the book and chapters from Chaos and Creation.
In Juergens' home, Deg's accumulated manuscripts were used as a raised seating facility for
Milton's little son Davin, when they were visiting.
Afterwards Milton examined Juergens' rigorously organized archive of materials and manuscripts;
Solaria Binaria would have been improved, but no contradiction would have ensued, given
Juergens' outlook. Deg and Milton dedicated the work to Juergens, for his electromagnetic
theory was deeply implicated in it. To the dedication the ancient fragment 64 of Heraclitus was
appended: "Lighting steers the universe." Deg wrote a poem to his memory and sent it to his
widow. It was printed in The Burning of Troy, along with an oratorio to Stecchini and a
memorial to V. On December 8, 1980, Deg writes to Milton:
My Chaos and Creation is due for March 1 publication, already outdated in certain respects by
what you and I are doing in Solaria Binaria. It makes me uncomfortable to know this, but then
it helps to recall that Galileo had already committed worse "crimes" in science and philosophy
by the time he was brought to trial for heliocentrism. It will bring pleasure to admit errors
in Chaos and Creation if the truth is measured by what appears in Solaria Binaria.
I don't think that we need to fear competent appraisal and criticism. Apathy is a more real
problem. Physicists and astronomers are ordinarily paid to go about their work without making
waves. They are not philosophers, or even interested in philosophy. Nor are they competent in
more than their specialized areas; it doesn't pay them to be so. That is why remarks like, "It
isn't physics," or "If that's astronomy, then I'm King Tut," often carry weight. Phrases like
these are the shock troops of reaction in science. If they fail, then somebody -- hopefully
someone else -- is awaited, to bring up the heavy artillery. But then maybe the heavy artillery
is not there; maybe it is rusted from disease; or maybe there is mutiny among the cannoneers.
We shall see.
In 1979 he was beginning a friendship with geology Professor Frank Dachille at Pennsylvania
State University to whom he sent Chaos and Creation, and who engaged himself in the new
astrophysics.
Dachille wrote to Deg:
... In the earlier letter I indicated that I have browsed through your mss; since then I have
read it completely through, but not with hypercritical attention. I expect to read it again,
but I doubt this will be done before we leave for Africa. Frankly, I am quite shaken and taken
by the intensive physical processes described, generally fitting well the human recordings of
the time. However, I still feel that I would have to understand the processes analytically
before I could accept them without reservation. Shaken, too, I was by the views that the Moon
was not always up there; also Venus. So, I went back to Velikovsky, am now reading Worlds in
Collision -- really the first time. My first contact with V. was in a magazine article about
1950, when I browsed through Worlds in Collision, but was turned away by what I felt was his
cavalier treatment of I. Donnelly, and the too easy flip-flopping of planets. Kelly and I were
already working on Target: Earth -- that is, I was going over his original manuscript, started
by him about 1947 or so. I was deeply involved trying to quantify the mechanics of the
collision process, including axis change, orbit changes, figure of rotation, inertial response
of water, slippage of shells, atmosphere... My contributions were just intended as suggestions
to Kelly, but he asked me to come aboard as co-author. I think you can identify my work by the
diagrams, calculations, chemistry, white bills, dry points, epilogue. In all this time, while I
was, or we were aware of V., his work did not contribute to ours in any way. I did feel however
that his work strongly supported Kelly's historical presentation, that is, the ancient records
were, in fact, describing horrendous events touched off by what Kelly called Cosmic Collisions.
As I said before, I quantified the collisions, based on impact processes, and found that sub-
planetary, or small asteroid bodies would be necessary agents. I did not consider electric
fields between bodies at a distance. To me the very clear evidence of impacts on the moon
provided the simplest, continuous, mechanically sufficient process or mechanism -- collisions
involving objects up to 600 miles in diameter. Combining the size-frequency distribution of
collisions with the erratic records in the geologic and evolutionary columns, I found support
for the impact processes; it was not necessary to involve planetary approaches.
However, after reading your book, and going into V., I think that occasional close passages of
large (but not quite planetary) bodies will have left their marks on the Earth. So, it appears
to me now, massive collisions by the hundreds of thousands have forged the earth in its ca 4 1/
2 BY history; by the tens or hundreds close passes by generally larger bodies will also have
left their marks. As you know, Kelly has been suggesting close passes as a process operative on
the geology of Mars, perhaps even Venus. It seems that Bob Stephanos has a fly-by process.
Beaumont too. And, of course, Donnelly. It was Donnelly's work (Ragnarok, Atlantis) that got me
thinking in this area, plus my activity as an amateur astronomer.... thinking about electrical
charging of the "spheres." I do not know enough EM theory at this time to quantify the mutual
interactions of two oppositely or identically charged planetary bodies. Then there is the
problem of conservation of momentum and the scale of energies involved. The energy in the
earth's magnetic field is many, many orders of magnitude less than that of its rotation and
orbiting. How a flip-flop can be affected by magnetic or electric coupling I cannot understand
at this time.
Well, you can see that I am thinking along with you. The Cosmic Collision, in all its variants,
must be of utmost importance in the history of the earth and life. Last winter term I
introduced the subject to my students in the Geology of the Solar System. The coming winter
term I intend to intensify my presentation...
On August 3, Deg replied from Naxos:
Dear Frank,
Thanks for the excerpts and clippings. Io is full of surprises. Purely sulphur volcanoes,
someone writes now. But note the pulsing electric arc between Jupiter and Io. It compares with
my postulated arc between the Sun and its binary partner, Super-uranus.
Your work on collision-electricity interests me. Also sphere-charging, and passby-electricity.
Regarding the last, you should certainly know Ralph Juergens. Eric Crew has done some thinking,
and an article on the funneling effect in meteoroid and lighting strikes. I hope to get a
chance to read your full articles when they are available. I can give you the Juergens and Crew
stuff when I return. Juergens, you know, would say, in reply to your query as to how a million
craters could strike the moon in a few thousand years, that a great many of these are the marks
of lightning bolts, not of meteoroid falls. Further I imagine that after the major passbys, and
a couple of collisions (" Apollo") and fissions (novas) as conceived in Chaos and Creation, the
space would be jammed with a great many millions of pieces of debris. Ovenden sees the asteroid
belt as remnants of an exploded planet many times the size of Earth, not too many millions of
years ago. I call it Apollo, set it in human times, and can readily imagine the debris of
Apollo and its Destroyer. We have a big gap to close between our solar system time scales; if
you grant the conceivability of what I say in my chapter on the subject, I'd like very much to
discuss with you the seemingly impossible obstacles to it. I guess you won't see Olduvai
George; there's a fine place (the African Rift) to test the theories of chronology given the
hominid and hominid finds on various levels...
It is depressing to many to think that the planets may have once undergone displacement; it is
much more depressing to think that they may have changed motions recently. Of course we must
admit that displacements must have occurred to bring the planets into existence, and to place
them where they are now. But very few astronomers and philosophers have let the planets shift
thereafter, and practically none allowed this within the time span allotted to mankind.
Malcolm Lowery, in a letter to the London Times Literary Supplement August 27, 1976, named
several latter-day movers.
In 1960 W. H. MacCrea -- then president of the Royal Astronomical Society -- calculated that no
planet could have formed inside the orbit of Jupiter. In 1965 T. Gold concluded that the planet
Mercury could not have been in its present orbit for more than 400,000 years, as it is still
rotating with respect to the sun. J. G. Hill's 1969 model indicated that Jupiter and Saturn
were originally the outermost planets to form, and that Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were
displaced into their present orbits by planetary encounters.
Robert Bass in 1974 exposed the prevailing common misunderstanding of the mathematics
describing planetary stability, even when based upon present recorded behaviors, such that
planetary orbits could not be proven stable for more than a few centuries or millennia. W. M.
Smart, wrote Bass, "demonstrated unquestionably that the interval of assured reliability of the
La Place-Lagrange perturbation equations is at most some interval 'small' relative to 300
years; Prof. W. M. Smart's exact words are 'one or two centuries."
Bass went on to apply to astronomers the kind of pragmatic critique that impresses experts in
propaganda analysis: "... Whenever these authoritative statements about time intervals of
validity have been made, they are without exception accompanied by words like 'supposed, '
'appeared, ' 'hope, ' 'seems' 'might, ' and 'think, ' revealing clearly that the writer was
relying on his personal intuition rather than quantitative evidence."
Bass repeated his findings at a Glasgow (Scotland) conference held by the S. I. S. in April
1978, where there appeared to speak also Astronomy Professor A. E. Roy. Roy agreed with Bass,
saying that "even under Newton's law of gravitation, we have not changed by more than 1 or 2
percent over a period of more than, say, 50,000 years." This figure allows humanly witnessed
perturbations, but is not enough for the wilder of the cosmic heretics, who want to bring
changing planetary orbits within memory of myth-making man and even historical mankind.
Thus it occurred that when Melvin Cook, Ralph Juergens, Earl Milton, Eric Crew, Deg and others
-- and V. in principle -- wanted to move the planets more, and recently, they turned to
electromagnetics, and Bass once more, now in 1978, applauded their heretical stance, affirming
that "if planets approached closely, there would be electrostatic and electromagnetic
interactions not predicted on the basis of orthodox theory."
This was not enough. The solar system had to operate as a electromagnetic system, and, though
Bass produced an awareness of the sources of such theory, in Juergens and Cook, it was Milton
who, with Deg cheering from the sidelines, took the fatal leap onto the plane of non-
gravitational fully electromagnetic operation of the solar system.
In a paper circulated in 1979, called "10 -36 =0" to connote the vastly superior forces at the
disposal of electricity by contrast with gravitation, Milton wrote that the phenomenon of
gravitation implies "an interaction of slightly unequal strong electrical repulsions between
distantly separable objects (or centers) that yield a weak net attraction." Thus masses vary
when determined gravitationally insofar as they represent an electrical transaction between two
bodies of unequal negative charges. In close encounter masses undergo polarization and transact
strongly as dipolar bodies. Rapid and forceful exchange of charge then occurs which can modify
motions significantly and suddenly. Hence the absolute level of electric charge on a body is
indeterminate, as is, for example, absolute motion under relativity theory.
Deg's image of the whole solar system as consisting of bodies lined up between Super-Uranus and
Sun within a tube of gases and rotating with the gases around a discharging electrical current,
with the whole system falling apart recently into its present configuration, proved to be just
the mechanism to display a non-gravitational system, and Deg, who had never quite understood
gravitational mechanics in the first place was happy to observe his model work nicely within
the systems of permissions and restraints belonging to electromagnetic theory. He was doubly
pleased because he had been so fond of Juergens and found Milton so congenial: one should not
dismiss compatibility in scientific achievement; any scientific (or social group) manager will
be glad to elaborate the proposition: compatibility is as important as computability. An
eloquent instance of this proposition suffuses James Watson's autobiographical account of the
construction of the DNA molecule in his book, The Double Helix (1968).
V. was the Great Hostess, in the earlier time, of this whole business; he took no active part
at all in it, and the heretics dutifully thanked him at every opportunity in their writings. It
will be remembered that Juergens left the Princeton area in flight from the domineering
proximity of V. Milton was too far away to be captured intellectually, though he was
continually active in defending V.'s views. What Deg received from V. in the theory of Solaria
Binaria was nil; all he got from V. was the useful dogma that electricity had been neglected by
scientists and was an essential factor in cosmic encounters. Whether V. discussed much of
importance with Einstein will not be known until the manuscript devoted to this subject is made
available. My hunch is that Einstein retarded V.'s growth in electromagnetics just as V.
retarded the growth of some heretics in this regard.
V. made no attempt to relate his work to that of Charles E. R. Bruce of the Electrical Research
Association of England, whose seminal work of 1944 on electrical discharges in astrophysics had
been the basis for correspondence initiated by Juergens in 1965, and whose work was introduced
by Juergens in Pens‚e in 1973. Bruce was a cosmic heretic whose ideas made little or no
impression upon British astronomy. They were carried into the British quantavolutionary circle
by Eric Crew when it was organized. To this day his one hundred and more articles and notes
have not been published in assembled form. Milton caught on to Bruce in the early seventies,
Deg after his meeting with Crew in London in 1976.
Bruce observed the first identity between the velocity of propagation of a solar prominence and
an electrical discharge in 1941, when at a lecture he heard of Evershed's photograph of a solar
prominence that had reached a height of a million miles in an hour. He writes, "I thought, 'If
that isn't about 3 x 107 cm sec-1, I'll eat my hat. ' It was, as a little mental arithmetic,
confirmed on an envelope when the lights went up, established -- and I was in business as an
astrophysicist." He thereupon published privately A New Approach in Astrophysics and Cosmogony,
copies of which several cosmic heretics came ultimately to possess. Galaxies were seen by him
to be structurally determined as electrical fields. Magnetic fields spring up around cosmic
flares and bolts. In cosmic discharges, matter aggregates along the discharge channel, and in
this process of electrical breakdown "one can forget about the force of gravitation, as every
arc welder knows." This discovery Bruce attributed to Bellaschi of the American Westinghouse
Company in 1937. Jets and balls of hot gases are formed in the process. Bruce also applied the
notion of pinched-off discharges under extreme pressures to the extinction of novas. Juergens
and Milton pushed Bruce's electrical interactions between stars and atmospheres into stellar
interiors, the greatest step in obviating the need for gravitational theory.
V. lacked the capacity to give and take; he would disrupt any on-going thought processes to
call all hands to shoo the chickens out of his backyard. Those heretics, like Rose and Vaughan,
who opted to exercise their intellects in his garden, found themselves becoming over-
specialized in certain crops, interpreting Venus tablets and calculating conceivable orbits
under conventional restraints. This is only to say that such heretics became unfortunately
limited despite their eminent suitability for larger tasks; they were also diligently occupied,
as was the solaria binaria trio, in developing the larger network of heretics and playing
firemen for V.'s fires (some of which were arson).
The progress of quantavolution in the astrosphere required an electrical model. Fortunately it
could profit from a considerable advance along the whole front of electromagnetic studies which
was occurring in conventional science, as well as from the work of the heretics themselves. But
one ought not forget that the theory of quantavolution in the atmosphere was sustained too by
heavy inputs from faraway field: myth analysis, paleontology, and critical geochronology.
Deg's assurances that the fossil voices of myth and legend were speaking truths of the skies
kept the theory from flying off to join the conventional dogma that change could only happen
hundreds of millions of year ago. They also blocked the hopeful theory that comets and meteors
could take the place of the planets.
In paleontology we have this remarkable logical position, perhaps exposed for the first time by
Professor Roy in explaining why astronomers should prefer a longer rather than a shorter period
of celestial stability:
Most celestial mechanics -- orthodox and informed -- would say that we suspect (it's probably
no more than a hunch) that the solar system is stable over hundreds if not thousands of
millions of years, but we cannot prove it by the methods of celestial mechanics that are
available to us today. We have to go to geophysical, astrophysical and selenological evidence -
-and there, of course, we are again on ground which has been disputed by those who advocate the
very short time scale. The fossil record would appear to have been laid down in the rocks over
the past two thousand million years, and in those fossils we have very complicated animals. If
the orbit of the Earth had changed drastically in that time, then conditions on the orbit of
the Earth would, it seems to me, have been such that those creatures could not have existed. In
addition, one could say that, even if the orbit of the Earth had not changed in that time, but
the Sun's output of radiation had changed dramatically, then again the fossil record as we know
it could appear to be 4 1/ 2 thousand million years; similar methods appear to make the oldest
lunar samples of that order of magnitude in age. Theories of the energy output of the Sun make
it appear, from a consideration of the helium/ hydrogen ratio, that the Sun has been operating
with much the same output as it does today for something like five thousand million years. And
so on..
What Roy is saying here is that, for no other reason, a long term stability of the solar system
is acceptable because it has taken so long, according to the fossil record, to evolve life and
its peculiar, complex structures. Further the rocks are datable by radiochronometry and the Sun
is datable by its self-burnup rate. This is nice: here we have the queen of sciences, to which
the other sciences had looked for their assurance, abandoning its throne and asking for refuge
among the fossils of the rocks and the furnaces of the Sun.
Effectively, however, the quantavolutionists had spotted this cross disciplinary mutual rescue
society, and had begun to launch assaults against the positions of the other disciplines as
well. Juergens had fully disestablished the thermonuclear theory of the Sun, so far as some
heretics were concerned, and substituted (with Cook) a galactic electric-collecting model.
So far as the fossil record is concerned, Bass in 1978 accords Cook the honor of having
achieved the main victory over radiochronometry. (The old catastrophists, such as Price and V.,
had done the job on conventional stratigraphy and erosional gradualism in geology.) In a
footnote that should be a placard Bass writes:
... If I believed those long-term radioactive dates in the fossil record and elsewhere, I
probably would also believe that the Earth has not changed its position for thousands of
millions of years. However, in another book, Prehistory and Earth Models (London, Marx Parrish,
1966), Dr. Cook has had the audacity and temerity to take on the entire historical, geological
and geophysical establishments, and has reviewed in great depth and detail every radioactive
dating method, short-term and long-term. After several years making up my mind, I have come to
the conclusion that Melvin Cook is right and has established that there are enormous and
inescapable fallacies in the uranium, thorium and lead dating methods; and I don't think it can
be maintained that the surface features of the Earth have been in their present form for more
than 30,000 years.
Deg had supported Juergens in several works, and had relied heavily upon Cook in attacking the
full range of dating tests offered in support of great ages of time. I have not yet introduced
the several other contributors to the demolition of time measures. They appeared in the pages
of Pens‚e, the Creation Research Society Quarterly and the SISR for the most part. The attack
requires hundreds, not a dozen, writers, however. But still there must be a elite, leaders of
the republic of science, like Robert Bass. Everyone got a lift in spirits with his appearance
upon the scene, a stocky dark man, bespectacled, a convert to Mormonism it appeared, with a
weakness for women which, Deg reflected, was in keeping with history and not incompatible with
his experiences of Mormon friends who came out of the West to the University of Chicago in the
1930's. Bass was associated with Brigham Young University, where, paradoxically, catastrophists
were unwelcome in the sciences; a story goes that Bass forgot to sign and return his contract,
lost his tenure, and, in order to retrieve it, was asked to agree to submit to pre-censorship
of his publications, which he refused. Bass was covered with the medals of scholarships and
degrees and when he showed up, it was like a troop pinned down by continuous fire greeting a
marksman with just the right gun.
Bass took aim at the brain center of the opposition, the reliability of planetary motions, and
fired. The shot was on target. Blasted was the astrophysics of orderliness. His troops cheered.
The opposing line continued firm; hardly a surrender or desertion. It seemed that the facing
army lacked a brain center. It operated just as well by rote.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 3 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CLOCKWORK
Deg's Journal, Naxos, July 3, 1973
The animation of the night skies is both poetic and heuristic. Each meaning enhances the other
and creates a third set of meanings that are beliefs. These beliefs join the stream of myth,
color, and shape it, change its direction somewhat, make its fundamentals more difficult to
understand. Cosmopoeia is the imagined form of stars, a guide for students and navigators by sea
and land, the astrologer's subject of story, the marking of the passage of bodies and the
occasion for anniversaries of related events, be they births, deaths, or disasters. All of these
functions are important to humanity. But that they flourish should not be pretext for
diminishing or denying the occurrence and greater importance of erratic for diminishing or
denying the occurrence and greater importance of erratic and special heavenly changes.
Similarly, the world as we see it in the "normal" processes of constancy and incremental change
is a true and real world. The tides flow, the sea suddenly beats the shore, the rains wash down
soil and the winds abrade rocks. This everyday vision lulls us into somnolence about natural
forces, or when aroused, to a discrete excitement about tornados, volcanoes and earthquakes.
Like the animation of the skies, the ordinary experience of nature is a reality that is also a
screen and a censor, concealing and prohibiting the colossal, historical and potential behavior
of nature.
As it is with the skies and earth, so it is with life. The recent fixation of species, based
ultimately upon an operational definition involving interreproducibility, gives a truth that
must always have been real: gradual changes occur; species can develop in isolation, by
occasional mutation. But all the time that biology can beg, borrow, or steal is not nearly
enough to present us with the fantastically organized and behaving conglomeration of animals and
plants of 1973. The validity of received evolutionary theory must become minor, while the
heavier reality of catastrophic change and origin of species by potentiation comes forward.
It was inevitable that Deg should end up in defiance of billions of years of time. He could
hardly lie on a beach unless he was exhausted from swimming and diving. He knew and disliked the
stereotype of the American as restless and impatient, so he cultivated various devices and
appearances that would let him seem to be casual and unconcerned with waiting upon the world.
Since he was raised without the time-consuming liturgies of religion, religious routines were
not a common means for stopping his time or feeling it. Sports, smoking, drinking, eating time.
More than all of this, he played games against time. He wanted quick results in everything he
did; but the world is not constructed to provide results, much less to provide them quickly.
The same urge to quick results inclines one toward intellectualism, because so much can be
solved in the mind and the world of the imagination can be rich and malleable; fat gobs of time
can be reduced to frizzled specks, and one can leap over far spaces and epochs. However,
intellectualism is also opposed to both physiological and mental time-control in that it forces
one to be physically inactive over long stretches of time; research and writing are termite
mounds of time and a single footnote, a single bad line, can drive one to despair.
Sometimes I think that Deg was one of Alfred Adler's pure compensatory characters, who set
himself very often to do precisely what he was unfit to do because of his unfitness. If under
such circumstances he was not destroyed by the contradiction, it was because he often escaped
into the activities already noted but also into sex, travel, brief adventures, commitments to
thing extraneous. Most of all, and too important to call an escape, was his taking on two or
more large tasks at the same time, so that while to the outside world he appeared to be
proceeding carefully along one line, at a measured pace, he was in fact speeding along other
lines and then doubling back to the first line of engagement.
Paradoxically, the intellectual who is so fretful of time's arrow hastens but to sit and stare
upon dead written pages, to pitch his nervous system and organs upon his several moving digits,
gaze at the stars, watch the rats run, listen, observe, and discuss only that world that his
mind will accept for consideration -- all of this consuming such enormous amounts of time that
those who in turn observe the intellectual cannot be blamed for thinking him mad for his
dissociation and hatred of reality, his obsession, his wrestling with details, his fear and
guarding of his own thoughts, his ruthless hunting down of words and meanings, amounting in the
end to the squandering of the very object of his anxiety, time itself, time in the thousands of
hours of which every minute, he insists, counts dear, and if this lunacy is not sufficiently
oxymoronic, the time-saving time-waster can dedicate himself to time-studies.
Perhaps one-fourth of all Deg's work on quantavolution over the year dealt with time. Perhaps a
quarter of the three thousand pages that he wrote were concerned with or governed by
calculations of time. Before he had entered the field he had been possessed by problems of time
and had written but not finished what was supposed to be a lengthy philosophical and
psychological poem on the subject. By virtue of the tricks I have already alluded to, he would
escape the psychiatrist's verdict of obsession, but in fact he was obsessed and his impatient
and striving character often led to pitched battles against time; it was the most uncontrollable
element in life.
He beat time as a child by being precocious, stripping off three years of schooling, and he
became the youngest member of his graduating class at the University. But then time reacted
smartly at war and he felt the full poignant irony of "Hurry up and wait" the life of the
soldier. He nosed his jeep into many destroyed towns where clocks were stopped; hanging crazily,
sober and still, or startled faces starting from the rubble -- they were all wrong. Are all
clocks wrong? Madness about time was a disease of the poets, literati and humanists; turn to
scientists, and 99 out of 100 are perfectly satisfied that they are measuring an absolute, an
ever-so-old process; they are like the bureaucrat who is content to keep the entrepreneur
waiting, because his check comes in regularly no matter what, while for the businessman time is
money. For these scientists, there was something called the relativity of time, which was
reserved for their Sunday outings.
All of this joins in with Deg's anti-authoritarianism and republicanism (which goes back to
sibling rivalry) and gave him his ideological stance confronting time . If authorities would say
time was long, well then he would be pleased to discover time to be short, and thus more
containable and controllable. There was a contradiction here, however, but it can be explained
away. Deg had always been a darwinian, but might this not have been because Darwin was anti-
authoritarian, anti-theologian, too, while trying to be nice to the traditional believers? Deg
was exactly like this, against the scriptures as authority, against church authority as such,
but then respectful and even loving towards the many "nice" and "gentle" believers he met. How
could he join the theologians, the short-time creationists? Well, he didn't really. He found
them to be the most active critics of macrochronism. They were experienced microchronists, who
knew the history of the defeat of microchronism well because it was their history.
The problems of time came in two batches. First there was the historical batch, epitomized in
V.'s Ages in Chaos. Second, there was the geological batch, which could also be epitomized in V.
's Earth in Upheaval. Let us see what V. did with time in both regards.
V. aligned and connected Jewish and Egyptian history which had hitherto gone along on separate
tracks. The alignment settled upon the Exodus at about 1450 B. C., the Biblical date tied it
into the end of the 13th Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt with Hyksos invaders as the
Amalekite enemies of the Biblical Hebrews. He begins the splendid 18th Dynasty of Egypt at the
time of Saul and David. King Solomon he places alongside Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, and has her,
as Queen of Sheba, visiting his court. And so on.
The reconstruction attempted in his volumes on later time, as I have already indicated, fell
victim to the scholars of the "British Connection."
Dropping by 500 years the accepted chronology of Egypt after the Exodus, and holding the Exodus
at -1450 meant that all dates elsewhere, whether of the Near East, Greece, or finally Italy,
which had been set by coordination with Egyptian artefacts and occurrences, required resetting
by 500 years as well. In Greece, a gap which had been closed only by creating a barbaric "five
hundred years of the Dark Ages," was promptly nominated for elimination. A grateful rush of
scholars to profit from the new chronology did not occur; the Greek scholars were frozen to
their Positions until the Egyptologists (all 30 of them) would admit the loss of the five
centuries. Then they would follow suit. Similar scientific lags continued in the other ages
affected by V. 's reconstruction of Egyptian chronology.
When did the mistaken chronology begin? V. traced the major error to Manetho of the third
century, B. C. as reported and adopted later by scholars. Manetho was eager to prove to the
Greeks and Asians the superior antiquity of Egyptian civilization. Berosus followed suit,
exaggerating for his Assyro-Babylonian country by tens of thousands of years. Eratosthenes, soon
afterwards, took up the cudgels for his Greek compatriots and moved Greek dates backwards by
approximately the length of the "Dark Age." The motive of ethnocentrism thus played a large part
in the beginnings of modern chronology, as it did in V.'s stupendous reconstruction itself. But
it was not at all clear that the ancient chronographers following Manetho were wrong, for their
errors were covered up by a heavy burden of refinements and rationalizations up to the present
time. If V. had written nothing else in his life he would have deserved the highest accolades
for his essay on "Astronomy and Chronology."
Soon after his first attack upon Egyptian chronology was published, V. sent a copy to Etienne
Drioton, Director General of the Service for Antiquities of Egypt and received shortly one of
the most nearly prefect replies an author could wish for, and, for that reason alone, as a model
for my readers, I reprint it here. (My translation is from the French original.)
Cairo, May 29, 1952 Dear Doctor,
You were kind to have had me sent your beautiful book, Ages in Chaos, which I received this
morning, and which I have read nearly in entirely, so exciting and interesting is it. You have
certainly jostled -- and with what vigor! -- many historical tenets of ours which we regarded as
firmly established. But you do it with a total absence of prejudice and with an impartial and
complete documentation, which is most sympathetic. Your conclusions might be argued at every
step: whether they are allowed or not, they will have posed anew the problems and compelled a
fundamental discussion of them in the light of your new hypotheses. Your beautiful book will
have been, in every way, very useful to science.
I thank you warmly for having sent it to me and I pray you accept, Dear Doctor, the assurance of
my sentiments of cordial devotion.
Etienne Drioton
V. received few such letters concerning Age in Chaos. Actually, a number of archaeological
discoveries were made in the years following Ages in Chaos which tended to corroborate V. 's
reconstruction of time. One of the most important of his priorities for testing was at the town
of El-Arish, between Egypt and Israel, where he believed might be uncovered the capital of the
Hyksos, Avaris, and, if so, then there might be demonstrated the further correspondence of
Biblical and Egyptian history in revealing that the city fell to a join Egyptian-Judean army,
one led by an Egyptian Prince (Ahmose?) and the other by King Saul. This excavation has not been
accomplished.
V. paid attention closely to developments in carbondating, for here was one of the places which
he thought might give him a quick and decisive victory. He corresponded with experts, beginning
with Libby, founder of the C14 system of dating. His pathetic and persistent efforts to achieve
a dating of 18th dynasty objects were put into a manuscript called "Ash," selections from which
were published in 1974. To Libby he writes (October 7, 1953), "I also assume that if analyses of
organic objects dating from the time of Hatshepsut, Thutmose II, III, or Amenhotep II, Akhnaton
were made, the results will indicate a reduction by as much as 500 years from the conventional
figures; and over 650 years for objects of Seti or Ramses II or Merneptah." At the same time, he
suggests the dating of Pleistocene fossil beds and petroleum deposits, predicting a late date.
Libby was unhelpful, but said petroleum datings by Cl4 had shown "great antiquity."
Now V. begins a circuit of frustration. Finally a German admirer, Ilse Fuhr, who was later to
publish a fine work dealing with comets in early times, with courage and persistence obtained 25
grams of three different bits of wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen. V. was delighted and
expected the results to show -820, not the conventional -1350. In another letter he did worry
over the effects of original atmospheric contamination of the samples owing to a catastrophe.
The University of Pennsylvania laboratory performed the tests and came up on the middle, between
the conventional and heretical dating. Bruce Mainwaring had used his strong ties with the
University to help arrange the tests.
Seven years later the British Museum tested reed and palm nut kernels of Tutankhamen's tomb and
emerged with dates of about 846 and 899 B. C., both of which dates were never published and then
seemingly lost or misplaced them. Other dates of the 18th Dynasty appeared in time, not so
definite and reliable as to dismiss V.'s claims, but not such as to please him.
By this time, Deg had read Melvin Cook's article of 1970 in which, retrocalculating the Cl4 in
the atmosphere, using the rates of Libby, Cook figured that the atmosphere would have had to
have been constituted (or reconstituted) some 13,000 years ago. Deg's deduction was that a
series of catastrophes would have created the same effect. Further, Deg observed increasingly
wild fluctuations as well as a secular swing of the C14 dates from "known" dating and
bristlecone pine dates as time marched backwards, and, without straining the discrepancies
overly much, he could conclude that carbonating would be both invalid and unreliable before 3000
years ago, which ushered in the Venusian Age (in his terminology). Deg was further impressed by
the studies of John Lynde Anderson and George Spangler, which he read in 1974, not long after
their publication, that challenged the very constancy of the radiocarbon component of the
atmosphere. Thenceforth he paid small heed to earlier radiocarbon readings, whether they seemed
to support or oppose his theories. On the other hand, V. who had expected salvation in Cl4,
could not readily denounce the system afterwards, and played on occasion the game of using Cl4
dates when convenient to do so, nor did he ever renounce Cl4 in principle.
To this day, Deg has not been able to understand how V., having succeeded in restructuring the
chronology of Egypt to the end of the 18th Dynasty, could then have made further drastic changes
needlessly, displacing forwards the great Kings Ramses II and III. Deg had so much confidence in
V.'s ability and so little knowledge of later Egyptian history that he accepted the new
chronology in toto as it came to him by word of mouth, by hasty readings of manuscript pages,
and by the published volume of Peoples of the Sea when it appeared in 1977, after many years in
manuscript and printer' proofs. Very soon thereafter doubts were heard coming out of the
"British Connection," from persons whom Deg had come to respect. None of the Americans around
V., nor V. himself, had met any of the British and were inclined to put on airs or to rant
against them.
Deg did not try to follow the controversy, which was based upon close historical analysis. He
thought to wait until the dust would settle. He was made uneasy by a lurking contradiction in V.
's position. The great catastrophist seemed to be putting aside catastrophism in ordering the
centuries. In early 1972, William Mullen had written in Pens‚e that
Two assumptions from Worlds in Collision are taken as fundamental: first that no chronology
using retrograde calculation of the positions of heavenly bodies is reliable earlier than -687;
second, that the principle clue for synchronizing histories of ancient nations should be the
break caused in all of them by the catastrophic events.
The second point is at issue here. Deg agreed with Mullen. For example, he made the following
note :
It is interesting that in one of his articles Isaacson, doubtful perhaps of the strong basis for
celestial connection, ventures that V.'s reconstruction of chronology can be separated from
catastrophism. This I think not to be so. First, V. would never had revised chronology so boldly
if he had not discovered the key to chronology in two parallel accounts of the same disaster --
one in the papyrus Ipuwer at the end of the Middle Bronze Age of Egypt, the other in Exodus.
Second, the evidence of catastrophe is what explains the end of the Mycenaean civilization and
ties it directly into the Archaic Greek culture that succeeds it, both in the 8th-7th centuries,
and then ties both of these into the Biblical accounts and many other accounts of the same
disaster at the same time. In short, it is catastrophic theory that sired the revised chronology
of V. and if the genius of that reconstruction is extraordinary, it is the effect of hereditary
genius, a "fall-out" of genius from a single elemental key idea, as Juergens has written. I say
this while reminding myself that the Exodus disaster was the key, but the motive came in the
desire to reverse the order of Moses and Akhnaton: to recapture Moses and monotheism for Israel.
Not that V. cared for monotheism in itself. But since the world regarded it as an invention of
paramount importance, he was ready to fight for it.
Not until 22 December 1981, do we find Deg at the denouement of his doubts; writing to Derek
Shelley-Pearce (S. I. S.) in England, Deg says:
The Glasgow Chronology is in full swing, it appears, with John Bimson (SISR 5: 1) and Martin
Sieff (Workshop 4: 2) pushing it mightily. And the readers, no doubt, a bit giddy.(....)
I am glad to see that Claude Schaeffer's work has come into its own with Geoffrey Gammon's
article in SISR 4: 4. It is one of only several general studies of value in cultural
quantavolution. Gammon approached two points that he might have developed more fully. First, the
best benchmarks of past ages are catastrophes: cultural quantavolutions coincide with natural
quantavolutions. For a century scholars have been playing at quantavolutionary theory
unwittingly by using catastrophic age-breakers. It reminds me of how some early geologists tried
to dismiss the word "strata" because that implied discontinuities, and discontinuities implied
you know what... The other point to stress is that the end of so many settlements around -1200
(conventional dating) indicates that this date actually falls between -780 and -680, that is,
the Martian period. Gammon seems to shunt aside this evidence when, with his mind perhaps upon
Egypt, he says, regarding the destructions that ended the Late Bronze Age, "the evidence that
these may have been due to natural causes rather than the agency of man remains scanty." (p.
107)
Perhaps Velikovsky did the same, in order to progress with his idea of further shortening
Egyptian chronology; that is, he abandoned his fix on the Martian episodes. To me, the term
"Peoples of the Sea" is a euphemism for the Martian-Moon-Venus disturbances, a kind of
reductionism. Wars, movements of people, and social turmoil are expectable in natural disasters
and are a concomitant and effect of them. To show that they happened certainly does not prove
that extraterrestrial events and general catastrophes did not happen, but the contrary. Applying
the term "Peoples of the Sea" to a construction of a fourth century Ramses III is already a
warning sign of trouble ahead; one cannot move Martian events to the fourth century; one may not
give Ramses III a special "Peoples of the Sea" of his own. The Glasgow chronology may find its
clincher by research of Martian period disasters in Egypt, possibly finding the evidence around
the time of Merneptah or Ramses III (...)
He goes on to write:
As Sieff says, "By placing the 19th Dynasty so late, Velikovsky ironically obscured the cause
for these destructions which he himself had found." The reasons why he did so are also obscure.
Granted that my offhand remarks should carry little weight, surely some scholar who understood
the catastrophe-culture-history interfaces must have read and disputed this part of the
reconstruction of history. When Velikovsky was writing this book with the others still to
appear, was he by-passing his own catastrophic benchmarks to complete a descriptive history
postulated on different grounds? When the Glasgow Chronology began to surface after his relevant
book, soon two books, were in print, I heard recriminations and ducked out. I should have given
more attention to this breakup of the consensus around him, but there were too many intimations
of the "Love me, love my dog." kind, for which science has no place. I am going to have trouble
with this matter when I come to it in the course of writing "The Cosmic Heretics."
There were to be four volumes of Ages in Chaos. The first scored a large success with a group of
competent heretics. The second and third volumes, not treating of catastrophe, but of chronology
and archaeology, failed to persuade most of the heretics and their dates were soon replaced by a
new reconstruction that tied into the first volume very well.
The reviews in the orthodox media were bad, usually attacking V. for the wrong reasons. The
fourth volume was held up indefinitely by Elisheva and her daughters. Deg advised that it be
printed, even if it held a basic flaw, because V., though increasingly doubtful, intended that
it be ultimately published, and because V., though increasingly doubtful, intended that it be
ultimately published, and because V., even when he was wrong, was more instructive than most
people when right.
None, among the anti-heretics, seemed to notice that V. 's supporters, supposedly so slavish,
had quickly and thoroughly analysed and rejected two thirds of his general theory of Egyptian
chronology. Indeed the opponents would still proceed as before, talking of his cult and his
claque. There was restraint among the heretics in attacking V.'s newer books, and Kronos hardly
attended to them at all. Evidently, the heretics could also ignore books that they didn't like.
Or is this what one ought to do with books that are neither catastrophic nor correct?
For a catastrophist to limit his concerns is difficult. Once you have the planets misbehaving,
you must acknowledge that it may have been their wont in earlier times as well. V. decided that
he had better investigate the earthly effects of prior cosmic disasters; if prehistoric
catastrophes could be demonstrated to have occurred, then historical ones might become more
believable. So he wrote Earth in Upheaval. V. did not set up a timetable of catastrophes.
However, he adduced more evidence that the -1450 to -687 periods suffered grand natural
disasters, and he introduced doubts ranging backwards. He paid little attention to the
burgeoning science of radiochronometry aside from carbonating, nor did he ever exert his powers
in this area. To strengthen the case for late catastrophism, he brought forward instead the
studies of others on glacial melting rates, sudden ocean level drops, very recent alpine
orogeny, rapidly drying lakes, waterfall cutbacks, late fossil assemblages, surprisingly recent
Cl4 datings, the simultaneous devastations of civilization (using Schaeffer), excavations of
warm-weather life forms and human settlements in impossibly cold zones of today, Indian
traditions of orogeny and other quantavolutionary events, changes in magnetic orientations, and
the large-scale ash levels on ocean bottoms.
He did not know Otto Schindewolf's work, then appearing, which tied the great periods of
biosphere destruction to cosmic events and consequent radiation storms. He followed Dunbar's
Historical Geology in examples of very early disastrous effects. He advanced the idea that coal
was formed from biosphere masses propelled and dumped by huge tidal waves, without specifying
which waves and when, and used Heribert Nilsson's studies of German coals to prove his case. He
relied heavily, too, upon the early English catastrophists. He used also the work of American
creationists.
In a few lines, he expressed his feeling that the uneven lengths given to the ages were
"basically wrong;" The remark is strange, cryptic, confused. He "does not suggest either a
lengthening or a shortening of the estimated age of the earth or the universe," and then adds
irrelevantly and naively that a religious mind should not be upset by great ages. It was all
rather humanistic and old-fashioned.
Deg found that the accretion of evidence of catastrophes was much easier than the application of
a time scale to them. V. had not set himself to demolishing the new techniques of
radiochronometry, possibly because he believed them valid, possibly, too, because he felt that
he could obtain the right to his catastrophes down to Noah (6000-9000 years ago) without
contending with radiochronometry, which does not begin to operate, except for Cl4 and certain
tests still in the realm of the exotic, until 100,000 years back. Also V. had done practically
all of his writing before the issues of radiochronometry came forward, before several of his
supporters engaged in its study on their own accord, and before the creationists had worked to
discredit it.
Deg set himself two tasks. One was to set up a model of past catastrophes, hence of the ages.
The second was to classify and survey all existing techniques of measuring geological time, and
to state the grounds for believing them invalid. He had always to bear in mind that one of them
-- he ultimately included over fifty measures -- might be valid, even if grossly valid, and
thereupon would seriously damage his model of natural history and at the worst render the model
only an intriguing metaphor. He was surprised repeatedly as he went from one test to another to
discover that none existed without a flaw or a question, either of which might be fatal to its
validity or reliability.
His major teacher was a man he had not met, Melvin Cook, who went on a rampage among the
uranium-lead, potassium-argon, and other tests, pointing out inconsistencies, contradictions,
incompatibilities, and arbitrary assumptions. Cook was not an exoterrestrialist. His attacks are
almost all from the materials of geology and chemistry. His exoterrestrialism, such as it is,
comes in estimating intakes and outputs of gaseous elements from the earth's atmosphere.
Perhaps the valuable critics of radiochronometry number no more than a score. Deg could name a
half-dozen besides Cook whose work he regarded as heroic and essential to establishing and
maintaining his perilous stance. I mentioned Anderson and Spangler on Cl4. There was reliable
Juergens who showed theoretically that the electrical environment could effect enormous changes
in radiation rates, such as to annihilate time. There was N. J. G. Sykes who, in a simple test
published in the S. I. S. R., gave grounds for believing that a changing magnetic field would
augment or diminish radioactive decay rates. Then, too, there came Roy Mckinnon, also writing in
the S. I. S. R, and Thomas G. Barnes, writing in 1977 on the recent origin and decay of the
earth's magnetic field.
R. V. Gentry and his team repeatedly showed, to everyone's astonishment, that extremely short-
lived polonium halos occur in the absence of parent uranium, evidencing that the host rock was
formed very quickly. Coal was examined that seemed to have formed in days instead of millions of
years.
Deg began to treat the longer-range radioclocks as he did radiocarbon dating, an indicator at
best of relative time, and vulnerable to the kind of electro-chemical turbulence that is
inherent in natural catastrophes that begin with disorders in the sky. Essentially this freed
him to consider together all factors that could have left some indicator of time upon or around
a specimen rock or site. Since no technique appeared by itself to be a tamper-proof,
independently set, and auto-operative clock, every technique or test had to take its place in
the group of indicators of time, some of which were carried into the setting to measure its time
and others of which were inherent in the geology and circumstance of the setting. All too often,
geophysicists came to believe that there is scientific validity in what is a purely
administrative and industrial axiom --that tools and products should be standardized in as few
forms as possible -- and therefore they assumed that there must be some true superiority in a
tool like potassium 40-argon 40 radiochronometry because it can physically be applied to any
strange igneous (and now metamorphic) rock that is carried into the laboratory.
Deg came to rely, too, upon some very general ideas in concluding that the time of the world and
of the ages may have been very short. These had an air of philosophy or, worse, homespun
reasoning about them that is infuriating to technicians intercepted on their way to their
laboratories and machines. For example, Woodmorappe's painstaking survey, published in the
Creation Research Quarterly, of the successive occurrences of the earth's several eras, as
denoted by its surface rocks, shows a preponderance of discontinuities through the series of
eras. Also, the macrogeography of the Earth seems to call for a giant micro-chronic integrated
episode.
Inevitably, then, the mind was jostled to close up time radically in the period between hominid
and man in the face of evidence that the hominids were human-like, and very little time was
required to achieve a culture. Thus, microchronism lent itself to Deg's theory of Homo Schizo.
Then, upon arriving at the notion that the earth had been recently ravaged, Deg began to wonder
how the earth could have survived for very long if it had begun to suffer one after another
disaster through four billion years; this led two ways; first, to shorten time in order to admit
the fact that the earth still exists and has a biosphere even if, like the old grey mare of the
song, "she ain't what she used to be," and, second, to postulate, even then, some backward limit
in earth history to a beginning of the period of disasters, and thereupon he asked himself what
might have been the first great catastrophe to threaten the world, and what started it -- giving
him Super-Uranus, and a binary system in throes of disintegration, a baseline of perhaps 14,000
years for the first great destruction, and an initial electrical explosion arising naturally
from a pre-existing electromagnetic system.
When Milton and he sat down to discuss the system before the age of catastrophes (now compressed
into the Holocene of 14,000 years), they found no need in their binary system, with its highly
productive, enormous, magnetic tube, for more than a million years to accomplish all that was
new under the sun. Their model of the solar system probably included errors of great magnitude;
it might have major system failures; and it might even be basically wrong: both he and Milton
freely acknowledged this; but they were ready to race it against any other model in the field.
Having spent much of his life in building (not inheriting) a science, that of the study of
political behavior, Deg did not take kindly to inference or statements that he did not know what
science was all about. He replied sarcastically on occasion that indeed he did know what science
was about and it was up to no good.
When Chaos and Creation appeared, he sent a copy of it to the University of California
physicist, Walter Alvarez, in appreciation of the study his team had published, exhibiting the
existence of an iridium layer that might have fallen out from a meteoroid explosion,
contributing to the demise of the dinosaurs. He took the occasion to ask "whether you remain
convinced of the validity of radiometric dating, granted the possibility of catastrophic
radiation and heavy subterranean heating."
Alvarez replied, "In answer to your question: I consider radiometric dating to be an excellent
tool that gives reliable dates. The systematics are well understood in all except the current
frontier areas, and serious practitioners are well aware of the possible sources of problems and
how to avoid them."
From which answer, we may all take heart. In accepting kindly the book, Alvarez wrote "It helped
me appreciate clearly the difference between the basically anti-scientific, Velikovskian
approach and the way a scientist would seek to understand nature." Need I say more?
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 4 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE THIRD WORLD OF SCIENCE
For a decade from the appearance of Worlds in Collision, no quantavolutionary circle existed in
the world. V.'s correspondence with his readers was voluminous. Immanuel and Elisheva were
socially active for several years, but no scholar who could be said to be of catastrophist
persuasion was a frequent correspondent or friend. In July 1956, Claude Schaeffer, author of
the monumental comparative study of archaeological levels of destruction wrote Velikovsky his
appreciation of receiving from him a copy of Earth in Upheaval. V. had used Schaeffer's work in
preparing the book. In 1957, Immanuel and Elisheva visited with the Schaeffers for a week at
Lake Lucerne, in Switzerland. Schaeffer did not agree with any part of Velikovsky's ideas
except what Schaeffer himself had printed before V.'s work had appeared, that periods of sudden
destruction had befallen Bronze Age Civilizations.
Two decades later, Deg and Anne-Marie Hueber visited Schaeffer at his home near Paris. Deg
wanted to update Schaeffer's inventory of sites, and they had corresponded briefly on the
matter. Schaeffer had offered Deg the materials of his files about which he had written to V.
many years before. Then he had spoken of "new confirmations of the reality of these crises on a
continental scale which I have tried to analyze. I would be glad if I could write now
immediately the contemplated second edition of Stratigraphie Compar‚e in two volumes, for with
the new confirmations these Crises could no longer be questioned... so striking are proofs and
so accurate the dates established by the new discoveries..." V. had not told Deg of his
correspondence or of Schaeffer's intention of moving forward. V. had passed up a rare chance at
statistically demonstrating his theses. Nor had he exhorted others to undertake work with
Schaeffer. Deg had to suggest the idea to Schaeffer as if Schaeffer had never been aware of the
possibility. Schaeffer was ready to collaborate. It was clear to both men that V.'s
reconstructed chronology was not be at issue. Their aim was to confirm the ubiquity and
internal cohesion of Schaeffer's set of catastrophes. Deg was made aware of Schaeffer's doubts
of V. 's chronology, especially that coming after the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, doubts that were
even stronger with Madame Schaeffer, who at one moment was with the group and at the next was
out of the room tending to her visiting family. Deg conveyed his belief that the catastrophic
sequence of Schaefer could slip forward nicely, using the same intervals, to fit the scale that
he had drawn back to the neolithic age, which included V.'s fifteenth and eight century
disasters. Thus Schaeffer's sequence could serve both the conventional and the
quantavolutionary calendar.
Deg sought funds for the research from the American Geographical society, without success. [The
proposal is carried in The Burning of Troy.] He tried to reach Schaeffer in Paris in 1983.
Schaeffer had just died.
With the appearance of Stargazers and Gravediggers in 1983, a reader might see how barren was
Velikovsky's personal and scholarly life during the 1950's of the very people who were capable
of or were independently pursuing studies in quantavolution. The characters in the book are
mostly his opponents; few friends and supporters appear. The only persons of catastrophist
persuasion mentioned were Alan Kelly (but on nothing to do with his catastrophism) and Claude
Schaeffer. Alan Kelly, and Frank Dachille who was his collaborator in Target Earth (1953),
lived far apart and they worked alone.
In American biology, Goldschmidt and Simpson knew there had been quantum jumps in paleontology
and presumably their students acquired some inkling of the anomalies. In circles espousing
Biblical literalism, the work of Price and others was discussed. There must have been other
catastrophist scientists of the 1950's in America and England, but to this day Deg has not been
able to name any. The existence of perhaps half a million readers of V. 's books meant little
so far as research and writing were concerned. Some bootleg teaching of catastrophism was
occurring, especially among fundamentalist Christians. In Germany there were Schindewolf and
Nilssen in paleontology, as I noted elsewhere in these pages.
Significant differences came with the sixties. The civil engineer Ralph Juergens left his
business in the Midwest and moved to Hightstown, near Princeton, so as to be near Velikovsky
and to use the libraries of the University. Warner Sizemore, a minister and graduate student of
philosophy appeared on the scene at the same time. Stecchini, historian of science and
unemployed professor, was already there, indulged by his wife Catherine, a star teacher of
young writers at Princeton High school. While teaching at the University of Chicago in 1950,
Stecchini had signed a letter of protest to Macmillan against the treatment given Velikovsky's
book.
When Deg met V. and decided to publish his story, there was none else in sight. They thought of
Eric Larrabee, but none would be paid to write, and Larrabee was busy with unrelated affairs.
Since Deg could not do the whole job himself, Velikovsky recommended Juergens, then working for
McGraw-Hill as a scientific editor, and Deg and V. persuaded Stecchini to do an historical
portion. Thus, all the effective resources of V. amounted to three men who could and would
write about his case in depth. This was the first time any cooperative group had engaged itself
in the study of V.'s problems. It was also the first time that V. realized the values and
capacities of voluntarism in America. He was, however, cunning about the media. For instance,
as soon as the American Behavioral Scientist was in the mill, V. could persuade Larrabee to
write an article for Harper's Magazine. Larrabee was spurred into action and the article came
out two months before he ABS issue appeared.
V. was inspired and a new outlook, that of a movement, of helpers, even of collaborators,
dawned upon him. Before then he had been a lone wolf in his field of study. Now he had friends
who talked his language. Sizemore began to organize locally and to suggest that others organize
in other places clubs or study circles under the name of "Cosmos and Chronos." V. referred
often to these ghost legions. Sometimes they sprang to life to extend invitations to V. to
speak at various places, or they were used as a letterhead denomination when rebuking critics.
It was, for example, on 'Cosmos and Chronos' stationery that the Philadelphia disciple and high
school teacher of psychology, Robert Stephanos, addressed the Franklin Society in seeking to
arrange a lecture invitation to Velikovsky. When the Society reconsidered and hastily closed
its gates to V., it brought a certain public disgrace upon itself.
Inspired though he was by his association with new and competent men, V. himself could not be
organized by them; he could seek only to determine all of their activity, without becoming
controlled by them. Time and time again, spurts of organization occurred, with excellent
initial results, but thereafter the efforts would slump and expire. The most successful
organizing and activity was done out of his reach, in Canada, England, and in Oregon, He was
too immense to allow himself even to be the leader; for a leader implies followers who are
assigned responsibilities, are allowed judgment, employ initiative, and can be trusted. V.
allowed none of these. There was to be no control over this leader; he was superman, distinct
from the following, distinct even from a field of science for he refused to call it by a name,
such as catastrophism. He would deny such allegations and not even perceive the distinctions.
Nor would others, because it was unbelievable. It was nonetheless true of him. Among the types
of activists of a movement there may be distinguished: the theorist, the researcher, the
publicist, the agitator, the organizer, and the fund-raiser. A movement is oligarchic to the
degree that the functions are concentrated in a few hands; it is bureaucratic to the degree to
which the oligarchy assigns and restricts these tasks to specialists; it is democratic to the
degree to which anyone can do whatever one pleases. Pens‚e was an oligarchy, Kronos developed
beyond oligarchy into autocracy. The S. I. S. was an oligarchy with high turnover and open
access. The cosmic heretics as a total aggregate were anarchic, and formed and transformed
plastically, so that one could perceive the aforesaid stable organizations, then glimpse pairs,
trios, bands, circles, and groups in process of becoming (such as C. Marx's small Basel group
that embraced Professor Gunnar Heinsohn of the University of Bremen, and Milton Zysman's
Toronto band, and Luckerman's small Los Angeles operation). The attentive public shaped itself
over the period into ad hoc opponents and task forces (such as the AAAS panel), into members,
supportive audiences, subscribers, book buyers, gossipers, fund-donors, materials-copiers-and-
circulators --reflections indeed of the several functions, anarchically undertaken.
An instance of the highest type of voluntarism came with Alice Miller, a San Francisco
librarian, who put to herself uninvited and uncompensated the task of indexing intensively the
works of V., and V. made the necessary arrangements to publish the book. The few scholars who
obtained this work could now search to their heart's content for the fullest play and nuances
of ideas (where such fullness existed) and for contradictions and errors. The first operation
to be performed in serious criticism in as index; the memory of a reading or two rarely sets up
written material adequately for analysis. Would that every high school student who today is
being hastily introduced to a computer would be instructed in the philosophical logic
underlying the indexing of content. Deg longed for an Alice Miller for his Q Series; his
indexes were inadequate, even more than V. 's, because his work contained a larger proportion
of abstract materials, which are harder to index. He found, for instance, that searching for
"monotheism" in V. 's own indexes was useless; in Alice Miller's the idea came forth nicely,
even beyond what V. might have wished to expose.
We return to Deg's favorite pastime of counting, listing, and categorizing, and to his figures
of the numbers involved. They are impressive for they may be exponential. Despite the
casualties, the deaths, the desertions, the languishing, and the waywardness, and counting
parallel little groupings and isolated active scholars, by the end of the decade of the sixties
there were perhaps thirty true scientific catastrophists who had come up by the non-
establishment route into the field of quantavolution, and by the end of another decade, there
were fifty more creative workers in the field. Shadowing these, watching intently, and
supporting them were several hundreds of others, close in.
Shadowing the cosmic heretics, too, were a new group, union-card holders of the establishment,
who are distinguished most readily by their denial that they are or ever were sympathetic to
Velikovsky or any other quantavolutionist, or that they have ever sought or do now seek any
ties with cosmic heretics. And these were equal and greater in numbers, carrying out the
revolution by partial incorporation, the process whereby a revolutionary movements, as it
advances, meets an opposition that has already been infected by and has adopted in part the
principles of the revolution. It is at this point that most successful movements subside or are
destroyed; their heirs are their enemies.
As one can see, if workers number, say, 15 in 1 decade, 30 in another, and 80 in the next, a
doubling process may be occurring, against all predictions that might be based upon resources
available, unchanged state of the opposition, and so on. At this rate, with 150 to 200 in the
80's and 400 in the 90's taken with the activists who lend support to their views, the
quantavolution viewpoint should enter the millennium primed for a large role in scientific
thought. At the same time, it should be borne in mind, there will be attrition and desertions,
doubling, and trebling the numbers of quantavolutionists outside of (but beginning to merge
with) the establishment. But the threat of nuclear warfare to all civilization overshadows
projections of science. One is tempted, in all of this speculation, to recite Keynes' ironic
words, not about short-term economic policy but about short-sighted world politics: "In the
long term, we'll all be dead."
Be it admitted that Deg, publishing a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, had a
perfect subject and extraordinary materials in the Velikovsky affair. But why should he stick
with Velikovsky? Let Velikovsky say his piece and then be done with it. What of next month's
issue of the magazine, and the month after? The journal needed continuous attention. What of
the state of political science, and of higher education, if which he had always been so
critical? What of the state of the nation, ibid? What of his family staggering into adolescence
in the disturbed and unruly Princeton atmosphere? What of his meager fortune, skating on a thin
monthly bank balance and a home mortgage? And his friends, the women and men who had been no
more conversant with Velikovsky than he himself? And his book contracts: especially the
American Way of Government, a good textbook in need of revision, whose care would lift his
finances from year to year and carry his name around to hundreds of college communities. And
the radical book on behalf of congressional supremacy that he was writing?
What of his reputation, that, in line with the customary in academic careers, should now begin
to rise to a peak, abetted by the constant "mending of fences" and "nursing of the
constituency" ordinarily pursued among scholars in his circumstances? Or should he not now
throw in his fortunes with a political party, Democrat or Republican, it mattered not, for in
both he had "friends in high places." Close friends welcomed his participation in Barry
Goldwater's camp and in Hubert Humphrey's; this would appear strange unless one understood that
subjectively Deg was confident that he was his own man, and that he could find equal
opportunities in both camps to exercise his skills and ideals, which, to put them in several
words, were: decentralization, basic income guarantees, voluntarism, legislative rule at home,
and representative government for the world. The American party system, however, no wise shared
his bent for change.
In all of this and through it all, why did Deg continue to involve himself with Velikovsky's
problems? Did not he have enough problems of his own -- larger and more serious and worse? Did
he not have as grand and earth-shaking ideas himself? Most of all, if he was to spend a great
deal of time in promoting somebody, and it was not to be "the next President of the United
States" then why didn't he build up his own reputation?
He had had mean reviewers, scornful ones, too. His books had not sold very well, he had not yet
won any considerable prize, no Pulitzer, no National Book Award. Still he could drum up
audiences at colleges around the world. Bill Baroody wished that he might tour the country on
behalf of the reconceptualized American Enterprise Institute, addressing public issues and
garnering funds in the end. He was in mind as a political campaign manager here and there in
the nation. He was offered the job of heading the social sciences division of UNESCO in Paris
(and refused). Why should he waste his time on a political campaign in science, especially one
that had already been victorious in principle (Jastrow, Polanyi, Sagan, Motz, Neugebauer,
Kurtz, Hadas, and dozens of other personages had sooner or later pronounced themselves against
the ill treatment of Velikovsky). Did not Elisheva insist to the end that he had opened up the
final phase of Velikovsky's public appreciation? Was the establishment of the motions of Venus
so important? Or the evidence of ancient catastrophes on Earth? Or the likelihood of collective
amnesia, a common enough idea of wise men of all ages? Must the world of science sign line by
line in agreement with Velikovsky's book --the ultimate wish of a cult? No, none of this was so
important. Well, what then? Was he sexually deprived? Did he identify Velikovsky with his own
father? Many more motives offer themselves. Can one ever know? Why bother to ask, too? Yet it
is a question that was asked at scores of lectures, receptions, meeting, and in personal
discussions, a question that came out of the interest that people felt in their own motives,
out of curiosity about what might be construed as altruism or some other form of abnormal
behavior. It's Alfred's halva, Nina would say, meaning the joke about the man who loved sweet
"Turkish Delight" and would turn the conversation to it at the slightest cue.
Deg behaved as he did partly because he had enjoyed enough successes in other matters and
success bored him. Deg did not attend to promoting his academic career because he was already a
tenured professor, "heavily published" as they say, and where was there anything further to be
gained; universities and colleges seemed ready to succumb to stupidity or insane revolts, but
not to total self-evaluation and reform. They were, with governmental help, becoming ever more
bureaucratized and inane.
Besides he found self-promotion an embarrassment, all the more as he watched his acquaintances
climb the rows of ladders inclined against decrepit edifices where committees and trustees held
sway, and important research was kept in a corner like a bastard. He was not adverse to fame.
To the contrary, he expected it to be "handed to him on a silver platter," to use one of his
mother's expressions. Subjectively, he desired glory; objectively, externally, he had to scorn
it. He was having his last words on Congress and the executive force, an appeal for the
preservation of republican government that went against every major political and economic
interest in America (and that communists and socialist when in power also and even more
rampantly suppressed). He was, as I said, uninspired by the political movements of the moment,
and even more so as they developed through the sixties and seventies of the century. The
kindling problems of his family would burst into flame but he had no intention of becoming
party to a decade of adolescent rebellion of the kind that ruins the best years of many
Americans' lives. Besides, did he not have such splendid plans for going en masse to Europe for
a year to teach the children foreign languages and escape the menacing youth and drug culture
of Princeton?
But look particularly to the controversy surrounding the Velikovsky matter: was it not
exciting? The ideas at stake were of the highest order. Not only in sociology: for what
sociology is more important than the sociology of knowledge (Sozialwissenschaft) that he had
cut his eyes teeth on with Mannheim, Wirth, Shils, and Leites, and which was really the theme
underlying his first book, Public and Republic, where ideas of representation were shown to be
unconsciously operative and externally effective over hundreds of years and many different
political generations? Also there was excitement in the substance of this strange new kind of
science. Scattered about but eager to stay in touch were dozens of intelligent people
interested in one or more of the hundred fields upon which quantavolution impinged. More
exciting and elevating than yachting, the horseraces, gambling, cocktail parties, tourist
travel, religious routines, better than the eviscerated or wrongheaded politics of the times.
In the final analysis it was the unlimited firing of sky rockets in all directions that held
Deg to the course of quantavolution and bound him to his friend Velikovsky.
There was the intransigent personality of Velikovsky. Even some opponents, Robert Jastrow,
Walter Sullivan and Motz, for instance, found him fascinating. He was always there, the tallest
mountain in Princeton and anywhere else, so far as Deg could observe. A series of entries from
Deg's Journal, most of them from the year 1968, show what I mean. But first a letter from
Velikovsky to Deg, before the ABS issue of September 1963 had made its impact, to show that V.
had no intention of letting his new friend escape his camp by crossing the ocean:
August 16, 1963 Dear Professor de Grazia:
It was very good to have a letter from you in Paris. I like to hear that you may come to the
States in October. No old castles here, no ancient arenas, but you will be most certainly
engaged in some skirmishes in the tournament for which the scene is being set. Larrabee's
article produced certain effect (I assume it was mailed to you) and the foundations of the
establishment are being loosened. (...) A few papers started to comment on the issue, one or
two colleges invited me to speak before their students, much discussions going on without
reaching the printed page, and I am emerging from the "shadow of darkness." (...)
I wish I could bring to our side a few prominent scholars and scientists. I write to de
Madariaga about Lord Russell whom he knows. You may say again, 'Cabot', but visualize the
effect on the closed scientific ring of one such renegade.
I wish to think that Mrs. de Grazia and your children are enjoying their many new impressions,
and the old villa makes them feel that theirs is part of an old heritage. Turgeniev wrote
someplace that two urges live in a human soul -- a striving for far away lands and a longing
for the homeland and home. Mrs. Velikovsky joins me in wishing all of you good health and
animated months ahead.
Cordially Yours, Immanuel Velikovsky
PS The mail brings an envelope with copies of letters received by Harper's. Menzel of Harvard
Observatory writes a 17 pages letter, unfair, emotional: he exposes himself to embarrassing
statements of fact. A battle of letters started. At the present, the response runs 50% against
50%. Therefore any articulate supporter -- or opponent -- should enter the fracas, the earlier
the better. Mobilize your friends! -- I. V.
A year later, Deg was not only still in the camp, no matter where he was, but he was suffering
privately the annoyances of the camp. His journal of September 1st, 1964 from London is
relevant. He is on his way to the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, to lecture on American
politics and will from there go to Marina di Massa where his daughter Catherine will be wedded
to the best-looking boy on the beach, Dante Matelli.
Left for London at 10 AM. On way to airport penciled a crude note to Velikovsky, finally
telling him bluntly of my feelings towards him. I said, "Dear Immanuel, I am writing this on
the bus to the plane. Last night I went again over the letters and material for Rabinovitch, to
the detriment of many pressing affairs. I finally decided to send out nothing at the moment.
"You will receive the page proofs on the Margolis critique. Please make only absolutely
necessary corrections (I do not care if you offer to pay for them.) Issue is already late.
Please do not call my office or the printers. Your inability to let go of anything will be the
ruin of our friendship and of the magazine. Sincerely, Alfred".
I handed the letter to a passenger agent just before stepping aboard the PanAm Clipper. It
culminated a day of annoyance and desperation that began when I courteously called Velikovsky
to say goodbye. To those who know him well, the history of the next 24 hours was to be clear.
He wanted to rewrite letters, call lawyers, discuss imbroglios, in short, utterly and without
conscience disrupt my carefully measured out and urgent last hours before departure. And worse,
he succeeded.
This hardly matters. The friendship, the campaign, continues, and V. is still the mastermind.
When Deg goes abroad in 1966, V. has ideas of how he should spend his time in Israel and Egypt:
Feb. 14, 1966
Dear Mrs. de Grazia: Please do not send this letter to Alfred if he already left Italy. Im.
Velikovsky.
Dear Alfred:
I received your note written before leaving for airport. Should you visit Jerusalem you may
wish to give personal regards to President Zaluccan Shazar -- our friend, especially of
Elisheva, of many years. He will be glad to hear that Elsheva is active as sculptor and as a
chamber-musician (as good as ever); and Elisheva wishes him to know of the change in the
attitude of the scientific world to my book with many discoveries of the Space Age; the fact
that I am invited to speak at Yale, Princeton, Duke, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, Oberlin, Brandeis,
etc., is an indication.
I wish you good weather (pleasant driving, good new friends, and many invigorating experience).
Regards from Elisheva and my regards for Paul and John. Yours, Immanuel.
[P. S.] It would be good if at the Cairo Museum you could obtain some organic object of the
time of Ramses II or Ramses II (or of both) for radiocarbon test( better seed, mummy swathing,
leather, papyrus, linen -- and not wood, if possible) at the lab of the University of
Pennsylvania (Dr. Elizabeth Ralph.) To apply to Dr. Isnander Hanna (Director at the Lab at the
Museum). The material needs to be sent from museum to museum with all the precautions. By far
better not to mention my name.
If any difficulty, I shall try to obtain the samples by asking Dr. Ralph to write to Dr. Hanna.
Deg's Journal, January 18, 1967
Phoned Velikovsky tonight. Elisheva came on the wire too, at his request. I told them what I
was doing to institute a Foundation. He was quite subdued. He is not used to having anything
taken out of his hands. Both were happy, I could tell, at the thought of something they had
talked so much about moving so quickly to a climax.
Anti-Velikovskianism's first line of defense is the impossibility of his theories. Then, I
suppose, if proved right, it will be said that he was a simple scribe: he read an inscription
which told what happened. That position will not endure, either, for he worked in a superhuman
way to piece together the shattered mosaic.
Deg's Journal, November 15, 1967 9 P. M.
Immanuel called met at twilight to tell me Stephanos had called his attention to the Nov. 3
issue of Science magazine wherein Professor R. Eshleman of Stanford University, Electrical
Engineer and Co-Director of the Stanford Center for Radar Astronomy had raised briefly the
question whether the baffling puzzle of Venus being 'locked-in' to Earth might be answered by
the Velikovskian hypothesis of an historical collision of the two bodies. A year ago Science
refused to accept an advertisement for one of his books. "who knows, Alfred, whether the Nobel
prize, which has had a poor record very often, might not come." I said, "Immanuel, your
biography is your triumph. You do not need these foolish prizes."
Deg's Journal, 1/ 4/ 68 [Providence]
At 2: 30 I left the ribald company of Mike N., N., Jim Kane, Al Saglio, Tom Yatman, and Edwin
Safford at the Spaghetti House to visit Prof. Otto Neugebauer at Brown University. His office
is in an old red brick house next to the new Library and has an entrancing scholarly air to it,
closed into the basement, holding several tables, everything with a century old appearance that
I too should find a perfect atmosphere for quiet study and work. O. N. was somewhat suspicious
of me, as well he might be, knowing that I sponsored a special defense of Velikovsky's work.
However, like most true intellectuals, once engaged, his defenses were down and he spoke
vociferously, indignantly, said he couldn't waste time on the foolishness and trickery of V.
but proceeded to amplify at great length, his little blue eyes peering directly into mine and
his slight but determined German voice carrying effectively, even colloquially, his arguments.
He disputed hotly the idea that there had been or was any conspiracy against V., (I stated that
I too disagreed with V. on this point), and he felt that V. was employing the tools of
propaganda and sophistry against him and others. Who can deny this, too? But there seemed to be
little reason to go into the political aspects of the controversy, inasmuch as O. N. could not
know, more than V., the dynamics of this process, and I essayed questioning him upon several
critical issues concerning Babylonian tablets. He declared twice that he had "no investment" in
the words of the tablets and could take or refuse any interpretation, depending only upon its
truth. They were only a minor interest with him, not even "minor," less than minor.
He said he had not read Stecchini's interpretations of Kugler's work (and declared offhandedly
but vigorously that much had been learned since Kugler's time anyhow). He declared that the
observations in the Venusian tablets of Ammizaduga came from erroneous reportings of lunar
movements that, in turn, had been used by the Babylonians to measure the movement of Venus. An
amateur, he said, would transfer his ignorance of the ancient reports into a wrong
interpretation that it was Venus, not the Moon, that was moving erratically. He declared
emphatically that from their beginnings around 700 B. C. there were no unexplainable
irregularities. (He kept reasserting, and I had to stave off as not relevant to the argument,
which was the empirical facts re the tablets, that the whole V. thesis was mechanically
impossible, that any 10-year old schoolboy would know how the Earth would be destroyed by
anything approaching a collision with Venus, and so forth). He said further that there was
little or no reporting of any planetary behavior in a scientific way priot to about 700 B. C. (
I didn't press for the exact date) that, for instance, there was no reporting of Saturn before
400 B. C. Earlier records are largely the oracles which deal with sun, moon, and a bright star
(which could have been Venus, since it is the brightest and hence would oppose V.'s theories of
the non-existence of Venus before ca. 1500 B. C. ) He asserted further that Egyptian chronology
was perfectly established, on the basis of the Egyptian lunar calendar (based on a thirty-year
cycle) that carried back to the very earliest times. He claimed that the whole V. affair showed
the basically anti-intellectual atmosphere of the population.
I asked whether it did not show also the failing of the establishment of science to perceive
its "public problems," and offered the opinion that if he, and others such as Harrison Brown,
had dealt with V.'s work more seriously, there would have been no prolonged vicious aftermath,
to which he grudgingly acceded.
Then he added that there should not be such an accent on "going to the moon" so that billions
were being largely wasted, for which sums the whole of Mesopotamia could be dug up down to its
virgin soil. Then said he, we should have all of these problem solved. To which I agreed.
I asked whether someone should not set forth the thirty or sixty principal factual theses of V.
and find specialists on each topic to criticize V. He had mixed feelings about the idea (first
taking it personally, of course, "I don't have time for that!") holding that V.'s ideas were
too vague to discuss, that this would prove that the "conspiracy" actually did exist: that
there would be too few to undertake the job in certain areas (such as his own of Assyriology
and Babylonia); but that it might be a proper way to get to the heart of the matter. He was, on
the whole, quite negative re the general problem and hostile to V. As I was leaving, he said:
"I just received a letter from Chandrasekhar of the University of Chicago. He is the physicist.
He asks whether we shouldn't do something about the Yale Scientific Magazine issue of V. I
replied that there was no use to it."
I walked out into the winter snow-threatening afternoon and down the streets of exquisite old
structures of Providence's East Side to Mike's house, thinking of what I had learned and of the
beauties of this old part of town.
1. N [eugebauer] is convinced V. plays a tricky game: "He couldn't answer my colleague's
questions at a Brown University meeting, but said he would reply to them the next day. Then he
didn't appear."
2. He believes V. to be a foolish and wicked amateur. 3. His direct assertions concerning the
Venusian tablets should be worked into a direct encounter with V.'s words (...)
4. N appeared uncertain about Kugler, and unconvincingly dismissed him.
5. N is persuaded that V. is arguing in a great circle, using established theories as grounds
for criticizing deviations and unknowns and for proving the deviations accord with his
theories, then destroying the established framework without perceiving that his interpretation
of the deviations is itself dependent upon and sponsored by the established theories. N. did
not say so, but this kind of problem is fundamental to all theoretical change: man is dependent
for what he sees on what he has been taught to perceive, so how can be prove wrong what he has
been taught, if his new vision is wholly dependent upon being preceded by the old one ?
6. I feel the need to organize an 'Anti-Velikovsky' symposium where highly reputed scholars are
asked to address themselves to a meaningful segment of a carefully prepared set of questions
that test the whole fabric of V.'s theories. Logically V. cannot dispute this procedure. It
would, I think, cause him to be angry with me. So be it.
Deg's Journal, January 20,1968
I have been visiting with Velikovsky once or twice a week since November, and have reread Earth
in Upheaval and Ages in Chaos. Since I have been heavily occupied with the theory of activities
of the federal government, the American Government text revision, a plan for a business company
should I decide to leave the academic world, and so forth, I indicated to V. ten days ago that
I could not organize the magazine that we had always talked of publishing. Then, for some
reason, a week ago, I thought "We must start a foundation for V. and his work." I asked Richard
Kramer to initiate the papers for organization of a corporation not-for-profit in N. J...
settled on PO Box 294 and my home as the address, and decided to ask Juergens, Stecchini,
Kramer, and Herb Neuman to join me in the first Board of Directors. I called each man to invite
them aboard and received their prompt acceptances.
Deg's Journal, March 2, 1968
This morning I am resolving to withdraw myself as much as possible from Immanuel's campaign for
honors and recognition. A full eight hours went to him yesterday; it is too much, considering
what I must, do for my own work. In its way, it deserves the same kind of attention V. gives to
his and I give to his. My intellectual children may be scrawnier but I cannot turn them out to
starve in the cold. I give up lectures that, just like his, might explain my ideas and bring me
income, as for example one that I turned down today for $100 and expenses before an audience of
civil service officials in Washington. My ideas go undefended, many aspects of them go
unexpressed. I do not give them the tender, fierce, loving care that every man's respectable
notions deserve. Let's see whether I can behave by this resolve.
Deg's Journal, March 3, 1968
March is come cold and blustering. Jill and I rode our bikes to Mom's where Ed and his young
friend, Margaret C... were visiting. We arrived frozen. M. C. has just returned from 2 weeks in
Boston, under the tutelage of a Yoga guru. I say to Ed, in greeting, 'Ah, here is the "slim,
elegant Sicilian!" ', quoting Norman Mailer's autobiographical novella of the "March on the
Pentagon" that is printed in the current Harper's Magazine. [Edward organized the legal defense
of the arrested protesters.]
Jill says, of Margaret, 'Girls who have had trouble with their fathers work it off well. Girls
who have had difficulties with their mothers do not. ' She cites Jung on the point. And we
string out many examples. It is probably true, even as an unrefined statement. I ruminate: so
important, so simple are basic truths. What conceals it and them? Great truths and discoveries
are not hidden by their complexity but by jamming of our ideological cognitive, and perceptive
machinery.
Velikovsky, the other night, quoted me Butterfield's comment that the very young can understand
principles of science and nature that have baffled the greatest minds of history. I think V.,
who is in essence a philosophical realist, uses this idea in only a limited way. He means that
the young haven't had their tender minds distorted by unfact. It is more importantly to be
understood that the mind is structured in each generation to receive some truths and reject
others, or better, some half-truths. Both V. and perhaps Butterfield unjustifiably abstract the
mind from its context. It has, for instance, been pointed out by numerous defenders of
classicism, such as neo-Thomists, that we believe the ancients foolish or unperceptive of truth
because of our partial and current truth-idolatry; freed from contemporary ideology, we can
understand truth as the ancients discovered it and agree with them.
Deg's Journal, April 30, 1968 A. M., en route to NYC
Half of this past warm flowering weekend in Princeton has been spent with Velikovsky or on
matters related to him. We spent Saturday afternoon going over materials that might be suited
for the proposed book "V. and his Critics" that I am discussing with Kluger of Simon and
Schuster. We spoke also of the foundation for Studies in Modern Science, which I have
organized. He named eight major problems that are critical to his theories, and I am taking
them into consideration in the memorandum which I am preparing on the program of the
Foundation. Bob Stephanos called me on Friday night upon my return from NY to tell me that Mr.
Mainwaring of Philadelphia, an admirer of V., intended to help financially. Both V. and I had
written letters to M., who runs a family manufacturing firm and is, I hear, a person of some
intellectual stature. V. was naturally pleased. He talked on and on, I edging him back to a
subject from time to time.
Sunday evening, V seized the initiative and called Prof. Philip Hammond of Brandeis U. to ask
about his possible interest in excavating at El Arish for signs of the siege of the Hyksos
fortress by the allied armies of Saul and Thutmose, about 1050 B. C. in V.'s chronology. The
digging would be a crucial test of the V. theory of ancient history. Hammond, who had given
indications of sympathy years ago, appeared enthusiastic. He offered to go El Arish with two
assistants if we could organize the expedition.
After learning this from V., I called David Dietz to ask whether he would still be interested
in taking part in the expedition. He was. Yesterday, Monday, I asked Harry Hess of Princeton
University Geological Department to serve on the Board of Trustees of the Foundation. After
some demurral (later, V. would be mystified by his hesitation since 'Hess definitely agreed to
join. ' but I was not mystified.) Poor Hess who is one of the busiest man alive with his Space
Board, Mohole and other activities, couldn't take the leap into the cold water without
encouragement. So I purred gently, sympathetically, and finally he said with a hopeless smile
"Aw hell, OK, put me on"! (...)
Deg's Journal, May, 1968
N [ina] and I met at the Museum of Modern Art at six yesterday after discussion with Kluger, of
Simon and Schuster. A surrealist exhibition was on. Max Ernst, Nadelman, Matisse, Ram bear up
very well. Picasso rarely becomes human enough to excite me. His lines are cold and cruel. De
Chirico's colors seem shabby now. It was a brave moment and said a lot.
We drank beer and ate cheese and crackers in the garden of the Museum, which filled with grey
rosy lights as the sun set. Rodin's Balzac, seen from above, is stern and emotionally stirring.
A Picasso She-goat is my great love.
Back at Washington Square, N. prepared a light supper at her place and accompanied me to my
work. I talked to Velikovsky at length, recounting my conversation with Richard Kluger and
explaining my plans and hopes for the expedition. As usual, he was difficult to converse with
but excited more than I've ever felt him to be before. I told him that I thought we should film
the El Arish episode from beginning to end. and he was fully agreed. I wonder, or course,
continuously, whether we shall find what we are after beneath the town -- the siege evidence
and artifacts of Saul's army, the Egyptians, the Hyksos.
I hung up the phone and went to work sorting out materials to be used in my Reader on American
Government N. said "Velikovsky can never finish his work." "Nor can I!" I replied. "He has
thirteen books to go, when we last counted them. I am as badly off." She asked me what I had to
finish: "You have done so much." "Not at all," I said, impatiently. "We do not measure
ourselves by other men, but by an absolute criterion of what we might conceivably do." And then
I ticked off what I imagined I might yet do:
the publication of my collected papers of the past the American Government books another book
of poetry several novels, mostly autobiographical a philosophy of science "the new political
order"
and whatever would intervene, such as the El Arish story and the government operations study,
and who knows what else: editing the Velikovsky and His Critics book, for example (...)
I spoke to Sebastian about other matters on the telephone during the day. We are concerned
about the troubles that Eddie is having over the custody of the children in divorcing Ellen
(...)
Bus told me of a quarrel between Renzo Sereno and his wife one time over a lady, possibly a
mistress, of Renzo. "The only reason you like her is because she thinks you're great," declared
the wife. Bus and I breathed reverently over this gem for a minute of ATT long-distance time
and charges. What has come over womankind? What do they imagine to be the foundation for a
man's love and devotion, even charm, even presence? After a day of labor selecting readings for
my American Government Reader in the company of Eric Weise and John Appel, I entrained for
Princeton, snoozing aboard, and arriving happily into the fresh air of the countryside. John,
Carl, and Chris were all in excellent mood, the one fixing things on the old Cadillac, Carl
playing his Beethoven pieces, and Chris shooting baskets. Mom came to dinner, bringing some
freshly picked and cooked wild cardoons.
At nine I biked to Velikovsky's home, Francie loping alongside and for two hours, while she
stretched comfortably in the middle of his parlor, we talked and argued over who should do what
about books, magazines, and the ever-growing prospect of the expedition to El Arish. Prof.
Philip Hammond caught me by telephone soon after I arrived from N. Y. C. to reaffirm his
interest. I asked him whether he would, in addition to his usual excavation reports, accept co-
authoring of a popular book on El Arish that I was proposing to Simon and Schuster and he
accepted promptly. I like the sound of him, though we have not yet met.
V. was difficult. He holds out things and then pulls them back. He wants to do too much
himself. I try to take responsibilities off his shoulders and he fights to keep them and even
to take new ones. He wishes to discuss every small decision, to control every document. He is
elated over our plans but becomes more demanding and even a little more paranoid as events
speed up. He has a poor sense of organization and scheduling where other human beings are
involved. His own immense mental world can grab and hold everything and shake it out in
marvelous patterns, but the world of affairs has its own ruthless laws, that treat all men
equally, and that make their own patterns.
Now came time for the Foundation to form and the incorporators met to elect themselves and
additional members to the Board of Trustees, and to transact business. R. P. Kramer, L.
Stecchini, R. Juergens and Deg coopted Horace Kallen, Harry H. Hess, A. Bruce Mainwaring, John
Holbrook Jr., Robert C. Stephanos, and Warner Sizemore. The date was June 2, 1968, a day that
would not go down in history. Deg was chosen President and other preliminaries were disposed
of. Then the ill-fated excursion to El Arish, where the capital of the Hyksos supposedly lay
buried, was taken up. Everyone knew already that Mainwaring and Holbrook had put up some funds,
that a Dr. Hammond had been approached to lead the group, and a contract had been drawn up. Deg
set forth a budget, even the minimal costs of which were well beyond the pledged resources of
group. Besides the preliminary soundings at El Arish, papers on the "hydrocarbons" of Venus and
its temperature changes were to be commissioned, a publication was to be prepared, preparations
to receive and use V.'s archives were in order, a magazine was to be inaugurated, and besides
there were provisions for work on collective amnesia, dating systems, magnetic polarity,
evolutionary theory, the psychology of catastrophe, electromagnetic cosmic models, and the
reception system of science. A happy set of prospects indeed, every one of which the foundation
was to fail to inaugurate, much less carry on to any extent. The case of El Arish will suffice
as an exemplum horribilis.
In June, A. Biran of the Israeli Department of Antiquities wrote to Deg saying:
Indeed there is much interest in the archaeology and history of the area but unfortunately it
is not always possible to satisfy this curiosity. Even I with all my interest and curiosity
have not yet been either to Kadesh Barbea, Mons Cassius, or Qantara...
July found Deg in Naxos, ready to go to Israel if needed, and John Holbrook had gone to Israel
to seek permission to begin a site survey at El Arish. Deg is getting a variety of inputs from
his assistant:
July 10, 1968 ...
I spoke with Velikovsky today. He told me that Holbrook had arrived here yesterday. A copy of
all the correspondence is on its way to us. The gist of it is that Holbrook saw Biran and
Dotan, the chief archaeologist, and that the Israelis would like to see more solid support from
Americans. Biran said that FOSMOS seems a bit fly-by-night to them. Another problem is that
they don't want to grant foreigners the right to dig in occupied territory. But apparently they
have softened a little, and if they could see something more established in support of the dig,
well then... So Holbrook is going to ask somebody at Yale about it, a Professor Popo.
I read your report of the Natural Museum with interest. I will probably get to the Met sometime
this week. The figure you described on the one vase are usually interpreted as Amazons, and I
am going to compare the costumes with those of the Busiris vase, out of curiosity. I think
there is also a book on Greek arms, with should have something in it about helmets.
I am sure you are enjoying Greece -- it's so wild, beautiful, clean and clear...
Meanwhile John Holbrook is grinding his gears in Israel and is addressing a set of marvelously
detailed letters to V., a copy of which he then sent to Deg.
Holbrook writes to V. on July 10, 1968:
Now I am in a bit of a quandry. First, I have no reason to doubt Biran's word that the military
situation in the Sinai area prohibits any extended work at El Arish at this time. Second,
although I shall certainly see Dothan when he returns from the field at the end of the week, I
cannot pledge the support of the foundation to the extent of $50,000. Although we have great
hopes for it, the treasury of the foundation is still a bit empty. That being the case, I can
only explore the possibility of organizing an expedition to El Arish at some indefinite time in
the future (when military situation permits) on the most tentative basis. Much will depend upon
what I learn from Dothan. At the very least, I hope that I shall be able to get a look at the
site before I leave.
One other matter deserves mention. There is no way of telling the extent to which opposition to
your work played a role in the rejection of our proposal. There were other reasons for
rejecting it. Latter Holbrook ventures an opinion on the actual site: Quite frankly, although I
am sure that a complete archaeological survey of the Wadi El Arish and its vicinity might be
extremely useful, I am willing to bet that the first trench which is dug in the area which I
have described above, the northern quarter of town, will not be found empty or unrewarding.
Little could be done with the El Arish party, upon which V. had set the highest priority (and
did for the rest of his life and rightly so, says Deg). The failure was bad enough, but to Deg
the most disagreeable part of the episode was the way in which V. began to find grounds for
opposing Hammond after he had agreed on his competence and leadership qualities, and had
invited him to lead the operation. V. soon convinced himself, and then Holbrook, that Hammond
was pro-Arab and would be persona non grata to the Israeli authorities, until they were
actually approaching the Israeli saying in effect "We know how you must feel about Hammond, but
we are aware of this situation and are taking care of it," whereupon the Israeli, in the case
of President Shazar, said, "What are you talking about, who is Hammond?"
Deg's Journal, October 20,1968
Velikovsky and I talked for the first time in a week yesterday afternoon and again last night.
He leaves for a grand lecture tour of Texas today. We have counseled him not to go to
California to talk, a little later on, because he would become tired and he absolutely should
finish Peoples of the Sea. He continues to add new data to the work, which is slender still
though, like a stick of dynamite.
We argued over the final contract details of Velikovsky and His Critics, which I am not keen to
do anyway, given my poor financial state and other projects of greater personal importance. He
wanted us to guarantee mutually that we would not submit the final manuscript without his
approval, in effect. It is of course a perilous idea, for he hangs onto everything and cannot
suffer any criticism. I drew up an appropriate missive, but added words to the effect that we
would also be jointly responsible if Simon & Schuster publishers sought damages from us for
non-delivery of the manuscript. As I suspected, he balked, and talked of legal formalism. I
laughed and expostulated "But you want everything, complete authority and no responsibility!"
It is the same with the Foundation we are creating: he wants it to follow his every wish, but
does not think that he should be identified with it.
He then said, "All right, Alfred, we will agree just among ourselves, without a paper. You will
not submit it without my approval."
"O. K." And then we went on to argue over the student strike movement, which he fears will
undermine authority and disrupt education. "A tiny minority has no right to interfere with the
majority who want to study." I told him that minorities are the media of change in any field. I
asked whether, if the French students had not rioted in May, there ever would have been the
Faure reforms of last week, "No matter!" He would change his mind. I can always win a argument
with him on politics, by citing his own case and the history of modern Israel. On these two
great contradictions of order, stability, and authority, much of his life is built; they make
all of his defenses of authority and majorities vulnerable.
"What do you think of Onassis?" I asked to change the subject. "Who?" Onassis, and Jackie
Kennedy. "Oh! I tell you that I think it is a second assassination of Kennedy." Beautiful, I
thought, either way. His idea is the same as that of all the maudlin sentimentalists, Kennedy-
dead worshippers, the sanctimonious, the suttee-ists. My way, it is revenge for a not too great
love, followed by the maddening experience of suffering all of this cant and sick reverence.
All of these mass-media addicts were hoping she would end up with a crew-cut college sophomore
from Princeton. So she picks the ugly old Greek pirate, and I am personally pleased. The
Hollywood and Madison Avenue brainwashed crowds have their fairy tale exploded once again. I
know that people live off of these fairy tales; that is what makes valid history and rational
politics impossible for them. Perhaps I should feel sorry for the great boobery, but I am
diabolically pleased with Jackie's revenge upon them. And upon JFK too, with his harrowing
political life and difficult character and mistresses. What is there to insult in his memory, I
ask myself, and what business is it of old ladies and shopgirls to define her husband.
"Onassis, I don't know the gentleman. Probably they like each other. I wish them happiness."
Basta.
We returned to majorities and here is how he defined the Jewish majority in Palestine. "Over
history, the dead of the Jews are a majority in that country. They live in that tradition
wherever they are," Voting the dead to make a majority, like the Confederate southerners do, or
the bosses of "rotten boroughs" in the northern cities. Grussgott! What would V. say to these
majorities and so many others that are alive, as well. But Israel is the id‚e fixe; facts are
the dependent variable. Indeed, as I have known for as long as I have known him, the id‚e fixe,
the highly conventional, traditional literal interpretation of and respect for the Biblical
passages: from this conservative position spewed forth in all directions the most radical
theories.
Deg's Journal, October 25, 1968
Reflecting upon the failure of our infant foundation to launch an archaeological expedition at
El Arish last summer, I think it may be well to set down my view, which contrasts somwhat with
that of Velikovsky and Holbrook. V. was too willing to accept rumors about Prof. Philip Hammond
and placed too strong a weight upon adverse facts. V. had no right, as I told him bluntly, to
destroy Hammond's possible role as leader of the expedition on grounds that Hammond was pro-
Arab and that he had a mistress who would accompany him. Holbrook, whom I regard highly and
even warmly, with all his youthful arrogance, was too ready to accept V.'s evaluations and then
afterwards the position expressed by the Israeli authorities, to wit, that we could not afford
to support the diggings and that the political situation was dangerous. I felt that we had gone
so far in our adventure that we ought to have let Hammond himself battle with the Israeli. He
might, I think, have outfaced them and dragged in his crew and equipment over their grumpy
dispositions. I doubt that we would have uncovered anything of great significance in a few
weeks, but we would have planted our flag. We would have moved on from there.
Deg's Journal, November 2, 1968
Met with Velikovsky this afternoon. He is back from a triumphal tour of lectures in Texas. We
argued over plans for the foundation. Juergens was present. I asked him pointblank to pull out
any materials he might have that others had sent him and might be used as articles for the
proposed journal. He did so. [There was almost nothing.] I asked him also to pull together all
his address lists and to let us place a man in his house to built up a list of friends with
whom we might communicate. He agreed. I was most pleased. I borrowed V. 's manuscript on
Peoples of the Sea to read again, and left with everyone in cordial spirits. What a difficult
man but what an enormous grasp of everything, intellectually and physically!
I must set some probability theorist to work on some of V. 's proofs. They are strong as they
stand in their conventional historiographical form. But an application of mathematics would do
much more, e. g. the chances that the Greek letter on the backs of Ramses III's tiles might be
some 'flowing' or shorthand hieroglyphics.
The Foundation spent the fall of the year, following the El Arish fiasco, in some small
constructive matters and in self-destructive self-appraisals prompted by V.'s misgivings, Ralph
Juergens addressed the Board of Trustees extensively on November 13, writing inter alia:
1. ... He [Velikovsky] is concerned that funds collected, as it were, in his name, as gifts
intended to further his own researches, will be diverted to other purposes. Among such other
purposes he includes such FOSMOS projects as the Institute in Connecticut, the journal
Cosmology (...) To the doctor's way of thinking, only two projects thus far discussed would be
legitimate applications of such donated funds: a) the El Arish dig, and b) the hiring of
Princeton graduate students to carry out library and/ or laboratory research under his
direction.
2. Dr. Velikovsky is aware of our plans to launch a direct-mail campaign early in January and
he is offended at not having been consulted in the preparation of mailing pieces. (...) He
insists, at the very least, that literature sent out make absolutely clear to the reader that
he is not the power behind the foundation and that he will not be a recipient, direct or
indirect, of any funds collected by the foundation.(...)
It seems to me... that some rather fundamental misunderstandings remain to be cleared up, not
only between Dr. Velikovsky and the Board of Directors, but perhaps also among members of the
Board. In the first place, there is confusion as to the purposes of the foundation. It may be
that Dr. Velikovsky has never seen a copy of our by-laws, which seem to make the point that the
foundation is to serve as a clearinghouse for a variety of information, not all of it
necessarily related in any obvious way to Dr. Velikovsky's work. This would appear to leave us
free to tread ways not yet probed by the Doctor. And of course we thus face the danger of
becoming what Dr. Velikovsky would call a clearinghouse for cranks. But our statement of
purpose at least broadens our horizons to the extent that we cannot think of our organization
as a 'Velikovsky' foundation.
Or can we? The confusion seem rooted in the fact that we members of the Board, almost to a man,
have been brought together through our common desire to see his work get a fair hearing. Do we
really intend to operate a "Velikovsky" foundation in spite of our more abstractly stated
purpose? If so, we must accept certain consequences, e. g., foregoing a tax-exempt status and
placing absolute veto-power -- quite properly --in the hands of the Doctor. If not, I suggest
that we make haste to disillusion ourselves and Dr. Velikovsky.
On November 22, Deg writes a harsh letter to V.:
November 22, 1968
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky
78 Hartley Avenue
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
Dear Immanuel,
As you have no doubt expected, your succession of favorable and unfavorable comments concerning
the progress of the Foundation has created a crisis of morale among the Trustees. For years you
longed for just such an organization to dedicate itself to the testing and propagation of your
theories, and now that we have constructed it you are undermining it.
You trust nobody, delegate nothing, and have, partly therefore, no capacity for administration.
You also do not wish anyone to speak in your name but wish help to drift down like manna to
dispose of as you desire. Actually, we shall be trying to do both things -- administration and
help in spite of you, if you do not disrupt the process.
The Board of Trustees has unanimously pledged itself to an independent course. Whatever the
Board of Trustees believes to be useful to the advancement of science, it will seek to foster.
It cannot bargain with anybody. If it chooses to do one thing rather than another, it does so,
not out of friendship to you but out of respect for the work that you and others like you have
done.
In order to make demands of others, both inside and outside of the Foundation, I have to make
demands of you. You should cease making accusations against the Board, even if only among the
inner circle. You should cease bargaining over your Archive and the materials that you do not
intend to personally use, and let the Foundation work with a copy of them as soon as it can
arrange to do so. You should accept what we can offer you (or reject it) in good spirits,
knowing that we are doing our best in a complicated setting over which we do not have complete
control and that some times we must obtain indirectly what we cannot gain directly.
The men on the Board are your friends. If you have better ones, let them step forward and we
shall welcome them. The men on the Board are not the best scientists in the world and, if you
know better ones, we shall welcome them too. The Board has to finance the Foundation's
activities in whatever ways it deems appropriate. If you have the names of persons who, you
believe, might contribute to its work, we shall be happy to receive them. If you wish to
reserve the names of certain individuals or groups for your personal solicitations, please let
us have their names and we shall not approach them, whether in your name or in the name of the
Foundation. If you disagree with the policies of the Foundation, we would value your opinions.
But you cannot have a veto over anything that the Foundation does.
If you do not wish to relate to the Foundation in all of these ways and want to dissociate
yourself from the Foundation, I believe that you should do so, either by a personal
advertisement in a journal or by letter to all those of your acquaintances who matter. I shall
then put a resolution to the Board to the effect that the Foundation will go ahead with its
philosophy and plans. If the vote is positive, we shall go ahead with its philosophy and plans.
If the vote is positive, we shall go ahead; if not, we shall dissolve the Foundation, an action
which will disappoint me and give me immense relief at the same time. Of course, if you do not
desire to take any such measures, I would assume that you are basically pleased with our work
and will work in tandem with us.
With warm personal regards, as always, Sincerely, Alfred de Grazia
V., Deg learned from Elisheva and Ruth, was upset. Then he proceeded to put some of the blame
upon Juergens, where it most certainly did not belong.
Dear Ralph:
Yesterday morning, as you know, I received a rude letter from de Grazia with unfounded
accusations and it shocked me. Suspecting some provocation, I called you. You disclosed to me
that already on November 13 you have sent a memo to him and to the members of the Board of
FOSMOS. Next I was surprised to read the memo and its content being your interpretation of a
discussion we had at one of our meetings. I wonder why you have not checked with me on the
correct presentation of my views or at least mailed me a copy of the memo. Giving it yesterday
to me, you gave me also a covering letter. Your intent was good -- you must have suffered
observing that I am under wrong impression based on oral declarations made to me, whereas the
Board assumes a different policy; and it is good that you brought the situation into the open.
Your memo, however, is full of inexactitudes; knowing you for pedantically accurate, I wonder
at your rendition of our conversation. The only explanation I would know, is psychological:
your opposition to the idea of the Foundation --or only to the dichotomy (you use the term
'duplicity'), and that can be a subconscious urge during your writing. (...)
The sentence in your memo that obviously outraged de Grazia who repeats it is "veto power."
Nothing of the kind was spoken between us or between anybody else. There is a wide gulf between
a "veto power" and being kept in the darkness, as several instances in this letter testify.
(...) If time permits, I shall also put in writing what I exactly expect from the Foundation.
As to yourself, you know how I value you; you are also at this time the closest. To you I
always opened all my files. I wish you would be the one to organize my archive. I never
promised Alfred anything concerning the disposition of it, though we discussed its lodging at
Princeton University. Most offensive to me is his reference to my "bargaining" I never
responded to his many approaches...
Juergens then writes to Deg and passes along a never-sent but typed letter to Deg from V. with
the hand-written notation "This transcript of a letter drafted was not mailed nor typed -- it
dates from probably 1967. I. V. November 26, 1968."
Dear Alfred:
Yesterday evening when I was already preparing for sleep I had your telephone call. Elisheva
listened too. You told us of your plan to incorporate a foundation for studies in modern
science. At your last visit about a week ago you first mentioned of some step taken by a
partner of yours to charter a search along the lines pioneered in my books, thus to exploit
possibilities now neglected because of the inertia or ever opposition of scientific groups or
the entire scientific establishment to new approaches and especially those embodied in my work.
You told me yesterday of the founding committee that you intend to convoke in a few days -- two
names out of the business world, unknown to me, but also Livio and Ralph, and a few more. You
indicated that I should at some point assume honorary presidency of the new venture. A new
publication should be one of the projected activities. Organizing of my archive, another
project.
I was through with my sleep at 3 a. m. when Elisheva that did not yet fall asleep came to
discuss the project. Her thoughts and mine (crystallized by the sleep) were very similar.
The positive in your plan needs not be recapitulated by me for you. But here are the adverse
conditions.
For over a quarter century, since 1939, when I came to this country and dedicated my time to
research in ancient history, I carried the material load of existence and study and writing
with their concurrent expenses entirely by myself. This, at the end, gave me great satisfaction
since alone and a stranger in the land facing since 1950 the concerted opposition of faculties,
scientific societies, and scientific publications, I now find myself in a changing climate,
even though animosity in some circles, or among some individual is even more vitriolic than
before, but this can be recognized as defense mechanism.
Should your Foundation and money drives be instituted, the following will occur:
1. My adversaries who tried to present me as a charlatan but could not point to any unproper
action on my part, would be supplied with ammunition -- a money collection [sentence
unfinished]
2. Scientific organization like American Philosophical Society or scientific publications, like
Science of AAAS show recently some change of heart; this mimosa-like attitude would be very
sensitive to any activities [sentence unfinished]
3. Also many of my friends and followers would experience some shock if they should feel that a
monetary pursuit under whatever guise accompanies my work and I would feel embarrassed.
4. I am most averse, even afraid of being made affiliated with other, so numerous,
unorthodoxies. Through these years I am under an incessant barrage of such proposals to study
the works of others, and in some instances what is known as lunatic fringe. The Yale Scientific
issue caused a flow of letters to the editors from various individuals with appeals to have
their theories given similar handing to that given to mine. I found often in letters given
claims that the writer is in the possession [of ways] to prove me right (as if I failed in
this) or to improve my work by modifying it.
There are, no question, other worthy unorthodoxies. But I wish to continue my progress not
burdened with the defense of others, like say, the organon theory of the late W. Reich. A
foundation for studies in new [word missing] cannot close door to new ideas; I, however, cannot
and wish not to become a pope all malcontent.
5. Organizations, like foundations, from the start or after a while, institute salaries, incur
liabilities, oblige itself [sic] for grants etc., and should the organization be intimately
connected with my name, it may disband under conditions of insolvency, after a promising start,
causing an irreparable damage to my cause.
6. The small organization of Cosmos and Chronos groups is given to my close supervision and I
fell quite comfortable in separating my scholarly pursuits from the work assigned to Cosmos and
Chronos extending it to [sentence unfinished].
I know that S. Freud and to even greater extent C. Jung made use of donations, usually by their
ex-patients, to establish schools of their respective modes of psychoanalysis or for publishing
magazines. But their activities were not in the form of solicitation of funds.
In the morning after your call I drafted this letter to let you know how I feel.
Deg's Journal, November, 30 1968
Yesterday was one of those fine mornings when most things seems to go wrong, but I didn't much
mind. The mail brought a batch of documents from Ralph Juergens -- the gist of which was that
Velikovsky was deeply perturbed by my ascerbic letter to him of ten days ago. V. had promptly
asked to see Ralph's memo describing V.'s thoughts. Then V. wrote a letter indirectly answering
mine, and implying that Ralph has misstated his position, etc. V. added a newly typed version
of a letter that he said he had once written me but never mailed, full of forebodings
concerning my establishment of the foundation, together with a letter from Arens of Gimbel's of
Philadelphia, also full of doubts about the wisdom of proceeding with a foundation. All of this
was to justify V. in the face of my attack. I know V.'s pattern of responses so well now that I
could tell there was nothing new about the whole business. He writes everything down to have it
on paper for some future strategm. He warns against everything to be ready to be proven a
prophet should things go badly. He cannot let go of any power over things or people, but plays
upon every means of entrapping and embroiling them, sucking them in and pushing them off as he
feels the one way or the other in his succession of mobilizing-for-action and trust-nobody
moods.
I phoned him and visited him in the afternoon. I brought him the copy of Etruscan Tombs at
Sesto Fiorentino which Prof. Nicola Rilli had inscribed to him, and he surlily carped at every
point of Rilli's development that I brought out. 'Very risky, ' 'I don't think much of him from
what you tell me. ' 'He does not seem to be a scholar. ' 'He has very little evidence for what
he is saying. ' We finally got to the sensitive subjects of the flurry of documents. He claims
his position has never changed. I said, 'Very well, you need not have anything to do with the
Foundation, but if you wish to write articles for it or refer people to it, or receive support
from it, you are welcome. ' He agreed. (He will of course not keep his agreement, but will
intervene at every opportunity.) I offered also to turn the Foundation over to him completely
and let him designate someone to carry it on, but he refused that. I said, 'Please name those
men and foundations whom you do now wish us to approach for support. ' He would not do that. I
promised that his name would not be used in support of the Foundation, which satisfied him. I
know what he would like to see happen: the Foundation helping him in every possible way, but he
criticizing it constantly for its faults. And provided it does not demoralize others, I do not
mind. I have from my first meeting with him concluded that I should do what I thought he
basically would want and weather as best as possible the glooms, the negativism, the wounded
shouts, the suspicions, and the ingratitude.
We drank a glass of dry white wine (the Israeli wines are becoming excellent), and he showed me
a few late letters, as he usually does. With some emotion he declared that, for all I have done
for him he was going to give me sooner or later the whole history of the case -- the reception
of his ideas by science and the public. I didn't fell as grateful as I should, for I need
nothing so little as another pile of documents and a book to write, though it be the richest
such case archive in history, and I thanked him. I prepared to leave, bidding Elisheva goodbye,
and he stepped into the next room to get something. When he came out. I stepped close to him
and said 'You know, there is nothing that you can do that will drive me away. ' He said 'I will
read you a line of poetry that you wrote' and quoted "the most opposed I will most believing
be." 'Not a bad line, ' I said, smiling, and bid them goodbye again.
Deg's Journal, December 1, 1968
The Foundation Trustees met today and perused the volume of recent correspondence relating Dr.
V. to FOSMOS. They agreed that his conduct was sick. Still Juergens and Stephanos are under his
thumb. I pointed this out and questioned whether the Foundation should not slow down its
program for a year until everyone clarified their position, especially Dr. V. But we decided to
move ahead anyhow, and suffer V.'s conduct as well as possible.
The more I think of his behavior, the more indignant I become. Every kind of evidence comes out
in his letters, actions, and the experiences of others. Today he told Juergens that the
Foundation should get another box number, because he wishes to go ahead with his absurd,
presumptions, and self-glorifying Cosmos and Chronos 'Clubs' (of which, in truth, none exist).
Day before yesterday, he tried to buy my loyalty by the gift of his papers and documents on how
science received his work. 'only for you, not for the Foundation. ' A great collection, but I
wish it for others to use, not myself. He is incredibly obtuse on some matters, I try to love
him for his faults, but they are too numerous and large to embrace.
On Dec. I, the Board of Trustees met in Princeton at Deg's home, without the important presence
of Mainwaring and Holbrook. Nor were Kallen and Hess, who played no part in these proceedings
anyhow, present. Juergens carried a new letter from V, to the Board, divorcing himself from the
Foundation, which, as he asserts, he had never been married to in the first place but with
which he is hoping for good relations nevertheless.
I repeat the following from the Minutes of the Meeting:
An extensive discussion developed around the subject of the Foundation's relations with Dr.
Velikovsky. Juergens reported that Dr. Velikovsky was of the opinion that FOSMOS' aims and
activity were to deal only with such work as concerned him directly and as he might approve,
and that FOSMOS was changing its direction since its inception.
The President moved that, after examining the record, the Board resolve that the Foundation had
not deviated from its original aims, which remain unchanged and are reflected in the following
description offered by Stecchini, plus the subjects of 'Communications of Science' and 'Science
of Science':
The Foundation is concerned with conducting and aiding in the investigation of theories A. That
the geophysical and astronomical history of the planet Earth has been characterized by sudden
changes;
B. That these changes have taken place in historical times and, as such are documented by
historical records, archaeological findings, mythological traditions, religious practices, and
scriptures; and
D. That these changes have affected the human psyche and Affect contemporary social behavior.
Afterward, Deg addresses V. once more, to tell him that the Foundation agreed with him and had
always pursued the course that he now was advocating.
And then Deg receives a rather surprising letter from Stephanos who now becomes the instrument
of V. in a new way; he lists his benefactions from V. as if he were under hypnosis, and
declares:
... I must state that I find your letter to him [Velikovsky] misdirected (it should, perhaps,
have been addressed to another), and in its tone, totally unjust and unwarranted. I believe it
could be damaging to the interest we all claim to share, the acceptance of Dr. Velikovsky's
work, and capable of great personal harm to him and to his good name.
Since I was privileged to receive a copy of that letter (...) I want and do here deny its
content as my experiences allow, and respectfully request, as a member of the Board, that you
write a retraction to Dr. Velikovsky as soon as possible...
Deg replies to him:
Dear Bob: I am afraid that your letter to me of December 5 and the circumstances of its
preparation tend to confirm the contents of my letter of November 22 to Dr. Velikovsky.
It also indicates that Dr. Velikovsky should probably not have circulated a personal letter.
But thank you for your concern. I am sure that all will end well. Sincerely yours, Alfred de
Grazia
It did end well enough, except for poor Stephanos. The Foundation moved along cautiously, doing
only small projects such as disseminating materials on the Velikovsky Affair, supporting Eddie
Schorr's work on the Greek Dark Ages, and soliciting memberships. It was disturbed by a new
attitude that V. had taken toward Stephanos, hitherto his most faithful and welcome disciple.
He seemed to believe that Stephanos had encouraged persons from the lunatic fringe to become
followers of V. and was giving them inside information of V.'s activities and archives. V.
wished to dissociate himself from Stephanos and expected the Foundation to do so, too. Sizemore
stuck up for Stephanos in private conversation with Deg, who sensed no great loss should
Stephanos resign. Then he saw Sizemore's point -- Stephanos should not be sacrificed to V. --
and did nothing. Stephanos resigned anyhow. By the following Spring, Deg was withdrawing, too,
as this Journal entry of April 19 seems to indicate.
On occasion Dr. V and I have discussed a biography in dialogue form. But the three occasions on
which we went to work with a tape recorder were disappointing to me. He becomes stiff, even
more aware of his role and audience, and though I try to break through with my informal
comment, he remains fixed like a peasant before a camera.
I have not seem him in several weeks. My own problems with women and children are many and my
book Kalos cries for completion. Immanuel's magnificent self-centering is not consoling or even
rational, under the circumstance. I have ceased completely to work on FOSMOS, in part because
of the foregoing, but also because the members of the Board were not up to editing a Bulletin,
or raising funds. Bill Dix [Director of the Princeton University Libraries] told me, too, that
the Velikovsky's during V.'s illness of December, had sought to give (with tax deductions well
in mind) V.'s archive to Princeton University. Yet FOSMOS was to have been the beneficiary.
Holbrook took over active management of the Foundation, working out of his new office in
Washington. He did not succeed in developing it well, and, by general agreement, it was
dissolved several years later.
V. was doing well enough as his own majordomo as we discover when we read Deg's Journal of
October 7, 1972 in Princeton:
I borrowed Jill's bicycle and rode it to the Velikovsky's. Francie, whose memory of me hardly
dims with my long absence, loped alongside. Velikovsky was issuing directions to a University
representative on how to set up the stage for a forthcoming lecture to the Graduate School
Residence Hall Club. He spared the man no detail, prescribing publicity releases, and his
desire to have his full first name spelled out rather than I. Velikovsky (is there a wish here
to conceal the I, egoist, or the normal desire to spread out one's own name, as he said?). He
requested that all his books and even a copy of Pens‚e dedicated to his work be on sale at the
University Store beforehand; asked that two parking spaces be kept for his car and that of his
daughter; wondered, since the British Broadcasting Company would be video-taping the show,
whether the President of Princeton might not come if invited; denied a suggestion that a local
radio station broadcast the speech but insisted that provisions for a televised relay into an
adjoining hall be provided for people who could not crowd into the banquet hall. He stipulated
that some announcements reach New York and Philadelphia so that disciples might come from those
places to hear him. The young bald impresario left the Presence dizzy with details V. is many
things but he is also a master impresario. He has had to be; his overwhelming need to be
recognized for what he is can only be satisfied by mobs of admirers under instructions which,
given his detachment from the Establishment machinery, only he can provide, or by some
wonderful stroke of recognition, a great prize like the Nobel Prize, the Fermi Prize, or an
invitation from a head of state to deliver a series of lectures. I believe that he would then
retire from his promotional labors and give himself over to finishing several important books.
I thought so yesterday as I watched him masterfully, but yet exhaustingly, promoting himself
and his work, and later privately conveyed this thought to Sheva, when he had gone up to nap.
For when the door closed on the graduate club representatives, he sat back, listened to me for
a few minutes, ate an apple, and began to doze. I enjoyed the chance to talk to Sheva; she can
tell me less flamboyantly all that has happened on their trips and where all the characters of
the drama of recognition are at the moment -- Mullen and Schorr and Bucaloe and so on. I
borrowed a book and biked home to Mom. After dinner, Immanuel called to apologize for falling
away from our conversation and I assured him that I was delighted that he could sleep well and
hoped that he would always behave in exactly the same way. I had mentioned to him that I
contemplated a little book of forays into myth, science and our adventures over the past decade
of our friendship; he wondered how I could write it without his archives. I can imagine how I
might, but if he would dig into them a little, my work would be greatly improved; I did not,
however, suggest that he give me materials. I shall show him the when it is
sufficiently elaborated. Then, if he wishes, he may find some material that would help me.
Deg is living in New York City, and only visits Princeton on occasion now.
Deg's Journal, October 23, 1972
I telephoned Velikovsky at 10 PM to see how he was. He was well. We talked of the book I
intended to write. When I said that I was investigating Hermes he warned me against starting to
repeat his work of 20 years. I guess he'd like me to ask for his files and then trap me into an
endless affair. I said, don't worry: I have only in mind making several penetrations in depth,
at widespread points, to show the method that should be followed to mine the ore. He said that
he couldn't "approve" my book unless he read it. Of course. And no doubt there are some bouts
ahead. In general, he likes the idea that I will write the book.
Then I gave him some firm advice. I said "you must finish Peoples of the Sea and the Ramses II
volume promptly and publish them. You must not lecture and run around. Ten people can go around
lecturing about you but only you can finish these books. Furthermore, you must not work on the
Einstein book, or Stargazers and Gravediggers, or Ash. These can be finished by someone else.
You must write something, if only 30 pages, on your theories of what happened in the skies
before Venus in 1500 B. C." He agreed, "You are right!" He added, however, that he must write
his autobiography because nobody knows him really or how he did his work. He only let out a few
facts here and there. Alright, I responded, add that to your required list, following the ante-
Venusian article. But that's all. "You're right!" he said again, with unusual accord. And so we
left the matter, saying good-night. P. S. V. told me that Harlow Shapley had just died at a
nursing home in Colorado. After reading the extensive obituary in the New York Times, V.
concludes that Shapley, always a great self-promoter, had seen to it that the Times possessed
his own account of his life. Thus Shapley hurls his last insult to V. from the grave.
Again on November 9. Deg exhorts him:
Had long telephone conversation with Velikovsky. He was in a grim mood, I tried to cheer him
up. I also read him the list of chapter titles for my projected book. He said a few approving
things but generally he was critical, full of admonitions. careful of his own sources of
information, making no generous or even modest offer of assistance, wondering how I could have
any new idea (though he did not say this explicitly) when he had them all, and in some manner
had published them all.
I don't know how he expects ever to encourage serious efforts to follow or parallel him. He
beseeches this from the world but then denies in advance that they can either be original or
important.
I tell him to move rapidly on his theory of the pre-1500 catastrophes -- to publish at least a
synopsis of it, lest he accuse even his supporters of plagiarizing him. All I know of this work
are a few remarks of John Holbrook relating essentially the truth of the Greek theogony --
Uranus, Chronos (Saturn) Jupiter.
I am telling V. that if he doesn't do something soon here instead of parading around the
country he will become a successor instead of a predecessor of someone else, Further, his
predecessor will probably do a poor job because V. has withheld his information and assistance.
And he is concerned whether V. will be elected to greatness:
Deg's Journal, November 72
I. V. is running for election. The office he wishes to achieve is premier of 20th Century
Science. I believe that he has as good a chance as anyone up to this time of winning the
election.
However, I am not a campaign manager. And though an election in science is unfortunately like a
political election -- in that a campaign biography should be written that will show the
candidate in gorgeous lights -- I feel I must pass up the chance to win glory as a publicist.
My interest in biography is as Conant [President of Harvard University and chemist] once put
it: to find the full meaning of science through its means of creation.
Immanuel V. as I see and know him is here, and you must understand to begin with the fact that
no person can fully know another one.
Problems of health depressed V.:
Deg's Journal, December 22, 1972
Called V. He is gloomy, The doctors told him that he must go away to rest. His days are full of
calls, visits, correspondence --too much to handle; his writing lags. I invited him and
Elisheva to New York for a day of rest and walking around the museums. Maybe. I also suggested
he might go to Yucatan and see the ruins there. He doesn't "want to be carried around by the
tour buses." "Let the buses go without you. Stay at hotels. Then provide and make your own
daytime itinerary." He wondered when I would be in Princeton. I didn't know, I told him I would
think of what he should do and would call him back .
The "Apollo" Program suffers severe cutbacks;
Deg's Journal, December 23, 1972
Called Stecchini. He is feeling better after a gradual six months' recovery from an old back
injury. He said V. may be depressed by the closing down of the Apollo Moon project which,
whatever its premises and procedures, had brought forward some support of his views. The signs
of volcanic activity are still being reported, though their time of occurrence is naturally
placed conveniently far away -- 100,00 years, 500,000 years, their freshness suggesting
"recency," but recency being defined arbitrarily on the lengthy geographical scale. If 100,000,
why not 3000? No answer. No question, in fact, by anybody, save the Velikovskians. Cape
Canaveral (Kennedy) is already being dismantled. The scientific community did not rise to the
occasion, said S. "I didn't rise, either," I said. "It was a great waste of world resources."
He half agreed.
Deg worries both about V.'s health and his attitude towards a friend:
Deg's Journal, December 26, 1972
Called V. again yesterday. He is more cheerful, but says his diabetes is moderate, not light.
He is grumpy over the stricter diet he must follow. He asked me about all my children and I
recited their whereabouts and conditions of life. He asked whether he could help me. I should
have said, "Yes, let me read your pre-Venus notes and correspondence." I didn't. He wouldn't;
not now. He would ask me to show that him all of my ideas. I would do so, but he might well not
reciprocate and even though his materials must be better than mine on the whole, he might very
well absorb them and simply look the gate on me by putting me onto this or that matter
stretching on endlessly. He cannot help himself. He is authoritarian. And he finds it difficult
to think that anyone in the world but himself can supply anything but a few details nor indeed
should until he has breathed his last word. This kind of game seems bizarre between friends,
but the reason I am perhaps vulnerable to shock by its exposition. As certainly as the sun
shines (sic!) he would reject my work repeatedly, absorb all that he had not known, and accuse
me in the end of plagiarism.
V. begins to exhibit alarming symptoms:
Deg's Journal, February 10, 1973
Velikovsky Visit - V. not well at all. Extremely nervous, thin, paranoid cryptic references,
taciturn jerky movements from time to time. Is diabetic. Asked him whether 10 years of good
work might reconstruct 10,000-600 B. C. He didn't have an opinion. He said he doesn't know
whether deluge was 4000 or 9000 BCE. Deg's Journal, February 1973 Called Velikovsky at 5 P. M.
Says he is felling better, but is having troubles with "people." Has matter of importance
(ominous tone) to talk over with me. If I want to hear it, I must come to Princeton tonight. I
tell him it is difficult. Won't tomorrow night do. Maybe. "Who is it?" I ask. "Can't I help."
"You come." etc. All remote, intimations of disaster, confusion of personal and the world and
of all past with the present. I try to talk of article about Mars. 'The author believes in all
miracles except yours. ' He's not sure he read it. But uninterested really. He is involved in
his personal huge caravan of suspicions, lawsuits on his house in Israel (so Ruth tells me to
make clear his references), forebodings of catastrophes, possible suicidal impulses (my enemies
wanted their martyr; now they have it.) Nina hands me a note as she overhears me. "Do not try
to get abstract conversation. He is trying to talk about himself." But he is uncommunicative.
Finally, I leave it that I may come tonight or in the next couple of days. He is reluctant to
close but finally I end the call.
Called Ruth Sharon. Father not feeling well. Diabetes out of control. She tells me not to go to
Princeton. He will be better and there is nothing I can do. I tell her I fear he will regress
irretrievably. She cannot answer to that. She says he may even resent me later if see him in
weakness. I tell her I am more concerned with whether he will be helped now if his situation is
serious. Maybe she and her mother cannot suffice to pull him out. I ask her to call her mother
and if they want me to come to call me.
8. p. m. Ruth calls me back. She has talked to her mother but her father hung onto another
phone throughout the conversation. She says, however, that he was feeling a little better and
was thinking of driving out to purchase several articles. So I should call and give my regrets
for not coming.
8.15 I called V. Sheva came on the extension phone. I said I had not finished my proofs that
had to go to India and asked him to excuse me if I did not come this night. He assented. I said
further that I did not wish to see him before I could show him an outline of my work on pre-
history. He replied that he would have no time to read it, for he was so behind in his reading.
Sheva interrupted gracefully to say that it was short piece and I hastily agreed, saying that
it was only a page or so. He said nothing then; I uttered a few additional inanities and hung
up with the promise to see him soon. He sounded at a bit stronger of voice.
V. then recovers:
Deg's Journal, April 4, 1973
I phoned V. this morning and found him much improved since my last call before leaving the
country. Three weeks in the hospital had somehow restored him. I said, "Life without a
telephone to bother you was good for you." "No I had telephone. I took my calls."
Anyway, he is better and will drive perhaps to Youngstown, Ohio, for a speech next week. He is
working of Ramses II again. He is pleased that Carl Sagan is writing an article for Pens‚e on
Venus. He agrees that I shouldn't bother with book reviews for Pens‚e but should present a
significant paper. Maybe I shall get down to preparing one.
He is hopeful. He speaks of Particular tasks. He has even begun rearranging some files. It is a
great relief.
Bill Mullen is getting ready to move from Princeton University to a new appointment at Boston
University. He is glad to be away from V.'s moods. He writes to Deg:
August 12, 1974 ...
The summer has been curiously unproductive and jammed as far as Velikovsky is concerned. He has
spent virtually all his hours talking about what he is not accomplishing and bewailing the
magnitude of the battle against his enemies on all sides. I've contributed only bits of help
here and there, otherwise being forced to concentrate on preparation of this fall's course.
Eddie [Shorr] has been of tremendous help, spending day after day in the library going through
The People of the Sea with a fine-tooth comb. But here too the result has not been of the kind
to cheer Velikovsky up since Eddie has found many minor errors which need correction. Nothing
that shakes the reconstruction, just a lot more nitpicking work that really has to be done if
the book is to be spared the dismissals by Egyptologists on the grounds of inaccuracy which are
feared. In short, be thankful for the serenity of Naxos. Al, since little would have been
gained by being close to Princeton this particular summer (...)
But V. reorganizes his forces and this time calls upon Irving Wolfe, who graciously responds by
addressing Mullen, C. J. Ransom, Juergens, Rose, Steve Talbott and Milton:
Dear Alfred, I visited Velikovsky last week, along with Lynn Rose and Earl Milton. We discussed
several matters with him, among which were
- the number of books he's working on at once - his archives and related issues - he wants
people to submit and keep submitting articles on or arising from his work to scientific
journals, whether they will be accepted or not -- setting up a Newsletter, about which several
steps are being taken -- public recognition for advance claims and theories.
You will be familiar with most of these matters already, but I've drawn your attention to them
because I think we need to get a number of people thinking about them and coming up with
solutions because Velikovsky can use help in all these areas.
With regard to the last item above, here is an example -- the recent discovery of substantial
quantities of argon and neon on Mars seem to puzzle scientists, as an article in Science, June
21, 1975 indicates. Yet Velikovsky predicted argon and neon on Mars as far back as 1946. Key
scientists must be given the facts -- dates of original advance claims, letters, confirmations,
etc. -- and urged to write the major scientific journals. Velikovsky feels he's too busy to do
this himself each time, and so I've offered to handle it for him, telling him, telling him
that, wherever a case like this arises, he's to send the relevant document to me and I'll
compose a covering letter and send it all out to the right people.
This is where I need your help -- I want to make up a master list of key people, perhaps
divided into two or three categories, to whom such things can be sent as each occasion
arises...
Deg could imagine the huddle at 78 Hartley Avenue, planning the counterpropaganda campaign, the
"truth squads" as the Republicans and Democrats had come to call their counterpropaganda teams.
Next year, Wolfe was calling for an "alarm system" which he had worked out with Milton in
Canada. It was to be a network, highly sophisticated, with members divided into generalists and
specialists, with squad leaders who would call upon their assignees to respond to the alarm.
Wolfe had been called by V. to activate the system, as he had promised the year before, and V.
nominated as a test alarm the publication by Doubleday of Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered,
which should exercise the network to produce reviews, letters, and public discussion.
This meant helping the Talbotts who were otherwise blacklisted by V. and several of his circle.
"Regardless of what any of us feel about the Talbotts," wrote Wolfe, "I agreed because
Velikovsky asked." (Actually, I doubt that Wolfe ever felt antagonistic towards the Talbotts
himself; the plea was for others.) "He (V.) may feel that he wants to aid the success of that
book because it will affect his own case." So the Talbotts and the inner circle were
momentarily in bed together again, an event that had not occurred since the Talbotts' Pens‚e
had collapsed. The results were not remarkable, and after a time they got out of bed.
There came a lull in attempts at general organization; V. continued to turn his attention and
the minds of his several collaborating followers to the AAAS affair, a story to be told later.
It is noteworthy how much time was taken up with all the maneuvering, research, writing, and
wrangling connected with a single sitting of an AAAS panel in San Francisco, much of five years
of V.'s time and of the time of several others, the time too of Elisheva, but who counted that?
-- more hundreds of hours blanked out; there the tragedy is marked, for she was a sculptress
and musician of consequence.
She never complained, so I am reporting Deg's complaints on her behalf, unsolicited. Moses
would have been pleased with her self-sacrifice; Deg was no Mosaist. When she lay dying after a
long illness, and he had not seen her for months, he thought to write a poem for her.
Then came the infatuation of V. with Christoph Marx, and following upon Marx' return to
Switzerland, V. addressed Lynn Rose, who was perhaps feeling both grumpy about the affair and
pleased that suddenly V.'s attention was turned elsewhere. However, V. was writing in a
euphoric mood, and one could see the alarm bells ringing around the world.
The letter to Lynn Rose is dated May 11, 1977, and I summarize it. Marx was to be "a central
figure" on the European continent: Isenberg sends a paper he gave to a conference of science
editors and V. urges him to send it to the major hostile magazines --Nature, Science, New
Scientist and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, "as coming from the convention" ... A
letter from Langenbach, a supporting attorney working in the Harvard scene... A call to William
Safire of the New York Times, a self-designated "great fan" to get advice... An announcement
that Juergens has resigned his engineering job and would probably now work for him, V... A hope
to teach a course in Egyptology at Princeton University... A report of Deg's taking issue with
Lustig of the Encyclopedia Britanica Yearbook... Last minute changes to the English edition of
Ramses II... A carpenter-mason is building a room for guests and Elisheva's music... A letter
from the widow of maligned Harvard supporter, Professor Pfeiffer... Mainwaring will be sending
a complete file of all C14 communications with the British Museum and the University of
Pennsylvania museum... A conversation with Holbrook, once more in Washington... A gift of Czech
rights to Jan Sammer who helped so well with Ramses II... Some minor foreign rights also to his
early copy editor Marion Kuhn, now ailing... Reporting plans to sponsor publication of Alice
Miller's Index to his works... Detailing the distribution of 1000 free copies of Kronos to
College libraries, financed by Jerry Rosenthal... Denouncing Steve Talbott for recommending in
a pamphlet that all subscribe to The Zetetic Scholar which has recently defamed V's Urges that
the five former associate editors of the now defunct Pens‚e "should make a common statement and
try to teach the subscribers of Network (Talbott's serial pamphlet), deluded into believing
that the Network is an organ to defend and protect my work... Dr. Gowans of the University of
Victoria "comes back to the fold" after consorting with the likes of Dietrich Muller of
Lethbridge... An exchange of letters with Jacques Barzun... Reports that Peoples of the Sea
just released had already outsold Earth in Upheaval (11 printings since 1955) and Oedipus and
Akhnaton (12 printings since 1960)... He resists Doubleday's efforts at putting Peoples into a
book club as an alternate selection... Ramses II is to be delayed once more, this time by the
publishers... He is happy that his British publishers, Sidgwick and Jackson, have given full
prominence to his Peoples while somewhere in the nether pages "Patrick Moore is modestly
displayed for his '1978 Yearbook of Astronomy, ' and has to take this pecking order, he being
the author of 'Do you speak Venusian? ' presenting me as a King of Fools"... More letter
exchanges... He doesn't want Rose to be distracted from their plan to write together "The Grand
Ballroom" dealing with the AAAS affair which was already the subject of several books and many
articles... ".... The hammer of the builder sounds like a song... do you know that my real
vocation is in architecture, and the years that I visited the Library on 42nd street, I
regularly visited also the room with architectural journals, watching for a chance to compete
for a plan and construct a public building?"... "Keep well, act strong, Lynn."
V. was obviously in fine fettle. The Mastermind was back. He had a great deal going for him on
two continents now, it seemed.
The euphoria subsided. The resistance to all of his ideas continued unabated. It seems that he
could say nothing that would be right in the eyes of his opponents. His growing disenchantment
with Christoph Marx was not compensated by new faces. (New ideas were out of the question;
proofs were wanted, and defense.) He had now close to himself principally Greenberg and
Sizemore; for them Kronos was not fun and games anymore. On June 3, 1979, Sizemore writes Deg,
"This issue is going through hell -- trying to get V.'s approval on Lew's article about the
latest probes."
By now I believe that you and I Know enough of the principal characters here to venture a more
fundamental answer to the question which I dealt with unsatisfactorily at the beginning of the
chapter: why did Deg stick with V.? It appears that the two men were close to each other even
when separated and out of touch. I conclude that there was a familial relationship being
reenacted between V. and Deg. It was not father to son, but older to younger brother. In
significant ways V. was of the character of Deg's older brother Sebastian, and Deg was relating
to him as he had to his brother throughout life but especially from two years to twenty years
of age.
It was as Lasswell somehow discovered, a sibling rivalry between Deg and Sebastian, more
intensely activating for the younger than the elder. No matter what Sebastian did, he couldn't
put down his younger brother; and his younger brother, while trying to outdo him, was
absolutely fond of him and set him up as a model for others, to be surpassed only by himself,
and he was determined all the while that none was going to put down Sebastian so that there was
a strong protective impulse going incongruously upwards --material and demanding -- rather than
downwards as one might expect.
V. had two older brothers, neither of whom he saw after 1921 and with whom communication was
rare, if only because the "Iron Curtain" barred East from West and he said once to Deg,
speaking of his scientist brother, Alexander, I would not want to jeopardize his position over
there by reintroducing myself into his life.
And Sebastian and V. were of the same rawboned, tall and handsome physique, unlike Deg's more
compacted from and features, both were umbrageous, too Both felt that Deg could do anything he
set his hand to, but that he was always off on some wild goose chase when you needed him.
There were of course differences. However the song goes: "I want a girl -- just like the girl -
- who married dear old Dad," no girl is ever quite like mother: and so with siblings, no two
sibling relationships are quite a like. The major differences were two: like Deg, V. was
fantasmogenic: he day-dreamed much and often and duelled with the universe of nature and men in
his mind. Sebastian was not a dreamer. And, further, V. was there, in place, at home; for
seventeen years Deg knew where to find him at Hartley Street whose number he could never
remember, and that he would be welcomed like a brother, which, no offense intended, he could
not always count on from Sebastian.
I think that the crux of the relationship, that which proved its psychogenesis, was the fact
that Deg, unlike so many of the cosmic heretics, could be constantly critical of V. without
risk to his affection for V. Then, too, while V. would never let Deg take away his toys, nor
admit that he was equal, he would not stop him, short of outright usurpation of his position
and place, which Deg in any event would never wish to do. Indeed, one of Deg's main virtues and
weaknesses in human affairs, if it can be called that, was that he would often win a contest,
but could never administer the coup de grace, Neither V. nor Sebastian lacked this capacity
except in the case of their younger brother. Sebastian never became friendly with V. but
supported him quietly, just as he never committed himself to Deg's efforts on behalf to V. nor
to Deg's quantavolutionary ideas. He engaged himself mildly one time in their futile effort to
obtain an honorary doctorate for V. at Rutgers University. Another time, when Deg was abroad,
Sebastian perhaps prompted by his wife Lucia, thought of getting V. and Elisheva together with
the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Carl Kaysen, Ambassador George Kennan, and
their wives. Perhaps V. should be invited to join the Institute (which would in fact have been
an ideal place for him and ideally in keeping, too, with the Institute's professed aims).
Elisheva and Immanuel were irritatingly preoccupied with the menu for dinner, however, and
settled finally for a visit during the cocktail hour, which went off nicely.
Deg's communication lines generally thinned out in the years 1976 to 1983. Even his lateral
communications in quantavolution dwindled as he pressed to break through with the several large
studies underway. Here he is writing from Naxos to Professor Ernst Wreschner in Haifa on
December 21, 1976:
I am returning from three weeks in Mexico as a guest of the government. I attended the
inauguration of Jose Portillo as President, gave a paper at a special conference on the 400th
anniversary of Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Republic (author of my least favorite doctrine --
absolute sovereignty), and visited a number of Olmec, Maya and Aztec ruins and sites. It has
been a good trip and I found a considerable interest in translating my political works and even
some surprised involvement in my questions about mythology and catastrophes. I did not find the
lost tribes of Israel but perhaps learned something of pre-"Atlantean" survivals. I also had a
car wreck (I was not driving), had my wallet stolen by a large fat Indian lady with an
overpowering smell that put me to sleep on the bus alongside her, and then later on my little
camera as well -- before I could turn around, the pickpocket had dived into the marketplace
mass.) C'est la vie.
With luck, by late spring I shall have a general manuscript ready on the holocene destructions
and human development and will send you a copy. I hope that my present letter finds Ella and
yourself very well and in good spirits. I have resigned all teaching at NYU and am now free to
give my time to research and perhaps sometime to a visit to Israel, unless you meanwhile visit
here. (...)
Deg showed his materials on Homo Schizo to Harold Lasswell who approved their significance. Deg
wished he might get the famed polymath involved in seeking the origins of the human mind, even
in contemplating quantavolution, for Lasswell was as much a fantasmogene as Deg. But not long
afterwards, Harold Lasswell climbed into the bathtub of his apartment overlooking Lincoln
Center, suffered a stroke, and spent two helpless days in the tub before his apartment was
entered. His friends rallied around and attended the cheerful but addlepated great man until he
died. Deg hoped he had not been unkindly critical when they had last been sitting at Lasswell's
place, drinking whisky and looking down upon Manhattan, for he had been suddenly seized with
impatience when Harold spoke of a great new understanding overcoming the medical profession
owing (by inference ) partly to the introduction of techniques for better human relations in
complex technical situations (in which he was playing a part, as always) inasmuch as Deg felt
like raging -- not only against the system of medical care, but also against the world at large
for its frightful bungling.
When I went back in time for Lasswellian material related to quantavolution and the heretics,
the latest was from November 4, 1972, when Deg's Journal reads:
I met Harold Lasswell at the University Club 7 and after two Scotches and 'what have you been
up to' and 'what are families and friends doing, ' we taxied to Washington Square, where Nina
prepared dinner. She pulled out all the stops of her culinary organ and enthralled Harold with
poached whitefish and freshly made mayonnaise, stewed hare, spinach and egg salad, Port-Salut,
stewed pears in brandy, and a variety of wines and cognac. We talked until after midnight.
He is looking as he has for thirty years. Still grey and pink, still ranging all over the world
and talking upon every subject; the chasms of unintelligibility when he swings into Lasswellian
sentences from time to time still enchant me. It was Nina's first exposure to them and she
couldn't decode them.
He described his unexpected walk many years ago up a set of 18-inch spikes hammered into the
walls of Santa Sophia in Istanbul. He had a hangover from a night of drinking sweet Turkish
liquor and could barely save himself from nausea, vertigo and panic. How I know the feeling. He
talked too of a ride in a military plane from Paris to Vienna after World War II, where he sat
on a metal bucket seat with two other men and watched a cargo of coffins creep through their
bonds toward the freedom amidships.
We talked of economists and he expressed his pleasure that the social sciences were being
recognized for Nobel Prizes, particularly Ken Arrow and Samuelson, but his subtle manner of
speaking, which one must watch carefully, indicated he was a little hurt that he who had
achieved so much for the social sciences had not been recognized with such a prize. I agreed
with him, without mentioning the matter; what a corrupting influence the Nobel Prizes are; they
pretended to omniscience, in whose name, on what grounds; what presumptuousness.
He is now working on a Policy Sciences Center, promotes a world university, heads a Rand
Corporation Board, etc. He was delighted with my stories of the University in Switzerland and
would have gone the whole evening on the subject. His mentioning Arrow and Samuelson came when
I reflected upon the betrayal of human economics by the economists. I explained my struggle
with Scott-Foresman over publishing a chapter on economic policy and especially on a guaranteed
income. Harold says that A. & S. and others just published a statement indicating their
adherence to such in principle. I should use it to back up my attack on the subject.
I mentioned my advice to Velikovsky to publish now instead of awaiting the 'no mistake'
nirvana; H. L., who feels a certain competition, insisted that I was right, that V. wanted to
be God, that it was unscientific, that no man could expect his work to stand free of error
indefinitely, that the courage to err was the glory of a true scientist.
Lasswell spoke of a book called Chariots of the Gods by a Swiss, who apparently believed in the
depositing of inventions upon Earth by superterrestrial beings. I thought this was a modern
version of the gods of the Greeks descending at will upon earth bringing discoveries as well as
evil. I added that I am pursuing a theory that the flowering of certain early metal ages came
in consequence of the showering of metals upon earth from comets and meteorites.
Probably I should add a chapter to my book on the descent of the Metals. If the metals are
heavy, they should have sunk to the core of the Earth's molten mass, never to surface again.
Why should in theory the earth's crust contain them? For none says that the turbulence of the
crust descends to greater depth.
Before our last cognacs had been finished, we spoke of the family system, Nina presenting the
nostalgic view of the extended family, Harold asserting that the blood family has little to
offer any longer, while admitting her argument. He described his early family -- he an only
child, but with numerous relatives, now scattered from the Midwest to California and Florida,
those graveyards of American families. I had been urging him earlier to write his
Autobiography; he is silent about his past to an abnormal degree. He is noncommittal. Perhaps
he prefers to remain a Great Man of Mysterious Origins. Very well, but a good autobiography is
worth more than a large question mark.
Washington, 1979 In Memoriam HAROLD D. LASSWELL (1902-1978)
Harold! Greetings! Snifting bubbles, are you, this season, in the land of the tall drinks? Are
they pouring you doubles?
Come back to Chicago, Vienna, Nanking. Sounding like we know it all, in tones serene as your
very own, We slump in low divans and hunch over brown tables Spilling smoothly the news about
how you walked upon the Earth once.
Welcome back to Washington, New York and New Haven; your train is set to run on time. You said
straight what you saw Without hee-haws, oinks, or meows No winks, curtsies, or knotted fists No
cow-eyes, or stony gaze. Viel Blitzen, kein Donor, No "Ho-ho-ho."
Pleasant, agreeable Hero of our times, "if-then" propositions cornucopiously emitted. Two
pounds of value-sharing for all men alive. Mix one pound of deference, a dash of income, well-
being and safety added to taste, Be generous with enlightenment.
Now that you're not in it. More Seasoning is needed. some of the gusto is gone. In-put, out-go.
Hearing the world's secrets and ours nevermore, You heard them all, and those to come that we
must explicate ourselves.
Thanks for configurating the North pole under your gray hair, behind your glasses, in your
midnight coat. You gloves are too thin. Come home again, if you get the chance The New Year is
here.
So long, Saturn!
Deg's Journal, November 18, 1980
It's cold outside. I received a letter from Gilbert Davidowitz' sister telling me that my
letter to him arrived but that he had died 'of a heart attack' last July. Poor lonely mad
scholar. He was only fortyish. He must have committed suicide. Never an academic appointment.
Nothing published. Brilliant worker in the origins of languages. I immediately wrote Charles
Lee [Director of the State Archives of South Carolina, one time President of the American
Society of Archivists] who will be startled to hear from me after 38 years, explaining my
memorandum on the archives of the dying and their total loss to our culture. I feel extra sad
about Gilbert, because he was so alone and so incapacitated for everything except the history
of languages. But what a fine capacity. If he might only have known when dying how I like and
admired him. He must have known. But he needed just then to be told so.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 4 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
The asininity of the attacks by the science media and conventional scientists upon Velikovsky
was consistent with book reviewing and editorial practices generally. Sympathizers of V. had an
ample data bank from 1963 onwards from which to demonstrate that V. 's critics were brash,
dogmatic, imitative, narrow, selective, unprepared, precipitous, vulnerable, incomplete,
pretentious, possessed, unversed, unserious, unselfcritical, prejudiced, unsystematic, inexact,
unphilosophical, ideologically scatomatized, vague and irrelevant -- to say the least. Yet
withal Velikovsky was said to have been "buried" not once but repeatedly, and all of his
supporters with him.
In a field so broad, hundreds of major statements and thousands of details offered in over a
thousand published pages somehow emerged unscathed. Several scores of statements were indicted
for ambiguity or rendered more doubtful. What everyone knew ahead of time could be reasserted:
the prevailing theory of celestial mechanics would only make nonsense out of data presented. In
addition, planet Venus probably lacks massive clouds of hydrocarbon; if so, either such clouds
were never there or they burned off over time, the latter being V.'s second line of defense.
All in all, this was so small a bag that V., when it came time to write his address to the San
Francisco AAAS meeting, ended it with the words, "None of my critics can erase the
magnetosphere, nobody can stop the noises of Jupiter, nobody can cool off Venus and nobody can
change a single sentence in my books." He knew that last expression was bravado, but he felt
like sticking it in, so unsuccessful did he consider his opposition to have been. He asked
Deg's opinion: should it stay? Deg was happy for the swashbuckling septuagenarian. Besides
there was enough truth in it to let it go as the last firecracker of a speech that crackled
throughout; why not? Fling it in their teeth. And so it stands. Since effectively it says
nothing and says all, who can object to it?
I have given much thought to what kind of review might be tendered V.'s books, such that his
supporters could not assail on substantial or moral grounds but would not please them. I
consulted Professor Joseph Grace, a historian of science, and he kindly wrote a review for our
pages, holding to a 700 word limit, such as is common.
Velikovsky is a highly skilled and erudite scholar, who works comfortably in several major
fields of science and the humanities. He has a style, an attack, that is primarily humanistic.
By this I mean to exclude social science, which today has a format often resembling natural
science, complete with jargon. He writes more like Ignatius Donnelly, a predecessor of a
century ago, whose style is even more pleasurable. There can be only mild objections to such a
style, considering the undefined and exotic, even occult nature of some of the areas he must
venture into and the non-existence of a scientific language covering so broad an area. Of
course, we would lose much in clarity and orderly communication if our students were to adopt
it in all manner of writing.
Velikovsky sees prehistory and protohistory as frequented by stupendous natural catastrophes
that call into question the stability of the solar system over long time periods, and therefore
the gradualism of darwinism in biology. His evidence is limited and fragmentary, much of it
anomalies that puzzle historians both human and natural. Most of his evidence must, and does
also, serve conventional approaches, our received knowledge, although he insists upon viewing
it as catastrophic.
His most radical hypotheses, which he expresses far too confidently, propose drastic erratic
movements and changes of planets, particularly the Earth, Mars and Venus, not to mention the
lunar satellite and the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. The mechanics, even the electro-
mechanics of such allegedly historical events are, if conceivable, quite unknown and
undeveloped.
Here and there in his works one finds nuggets of valuable ore, some in history, some in legend,
some natural history. One finds these days a plenitude of studies of meteorites and comets, a
few of which he cites. One finds, too, many goods works on historical and stratigraphic
chronology, chronometry, and it takes more than innuendo to shake the solid foundations of
radiochronometry. One must be impressed, on the other hand, by Velikovsky's ability to discover
anomalies and contradictions, especially in Ancient History. He may well be on the right track
in discovering continuities between Pharaoh Akhnaton and Oedipus, and concordances between the
Biblical Amalekites and the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt, and even is stressing a baffling
absence of archeological material to fill in centuries of assigned time in Egypt, Greece, and
elsewhere.
The reader will find many entertaining and suggestive pages as well. As for his general ideas,
practically none of them can be fitted into contemporary scientific theory. The more heretical
a theory, the more hard evidence must be found to support it, and Velikovsky's ideas of an
electrically run universe, which he never develops, and his claims of planetary aberrations in
early times to which he gives a great deal of attention, are, to put it mildly, bizarre; there
exists, that is, no astrophysical theory to support them.
I would not recommend his books to anyone. Their pretensions will enrage the learned and
confound the ordinary reader. Every age has books like them. I can mention Donnelly and Mesmer
in the nineteenth century, and George M. Price and C. Beaumont in this century, but there were
many more, which are best forgotten. The genre is well known to science and historians of the
most ancient times, and one can judge the future of the books by what has happened to their
predecessors.
The fact that a great many people read such works tells us little about their value as science
or literature. No doubt, in time, such scientists as can be spared from other tasks or are
involved with his specific hypotheses will build up what would amount to a total assessment. It
is certainly too early to assert, as Prof. A. de. Grazia did after only a dozen years, that he
is one of the great cosmogonists of the century.
What can be said for this review is that it gives a general impression of what is talked about
in the books and how, and it does not challenge their right to be published, nor dismiss them
as anti-scientific, nor berate the author. When researching on the Velikovsky Affair, Deg
stimulated V. 's interest in the techniques of suppression, putting into a framework the host
of items which protruded from V.'s archives. Deg told V. of a favorite old book, Henry
Thouless' Straight and Crooked Thinking and explained how it might be applied to V. 's
experience. V. was excited by the idea and prepared a handwritten list of "70 ways of
suppressing a theory," which the two men discussed. The list that follows is largely in V.'s
words and idiom. It was not included in the published work. Each item is based upon one or more
concrete instances that can be documented and dated. Later on V. wished to engage Lynn Rose in
fleshing out and publishing the list.
Actions of Established Scientists and Cohorts Aimed at I. Velikovsky and his Book Worlds in
Collision (1950)
1. Refusal to read or examine the manuscript. 2. Charging it was not presented to specialists
before publication.
3. Refusal to help with inexpensive tests through established facilities.
4. Accusation that work was not offered for testing. 5. Assertion that work has been disproved
by tests. 6. Efforts to discourage printing. 7. Demands for censorship. 8. Engaging in
censorship. 9. Boycott of the book. 10. Boycott of all textbooks of the work's publisher. 11.
Threats of reprisal against publisher by not offering manuscripts or withdrawing books.
12. Threat against associated publishers without text books.
13. Appeals to the scientific community. 14. Efforts to influence reviewers in advance. 15.
Appeals to mobilize hostile reviewers. 16. Efforts to suppress favorable reviewers. 17. Efforts
to supplant regular reviewers with volunteer authoritative writers as reviewers.
18. Checking the allegiance of scientists and officials of scientific organizations.
19. Firing of unaligned scientists and officials. 20. Punishment of book editors and firing.
21. Demand that there be a public recantation by publishers.
22. Refusal to print author's papers about his books in scientific magazines.
23. Return of supplementary papers unceremoniously without reading.
24. Refusal to reprint answers to distortion of facts of reviews.
25. Misquotation from the book, and quotations out of context.
26. Copying of wrong figures into a quotation used in the book.
27. No correction of erroneous statements in reviews by anybody in the scientific community.
28. Use of knowingly false argument. 29. Dogmatic statements and accusations. 30. Setting up
and knocking down "strawmen." 31. Dishonest rejoinders. 32. Defamation and discrediting abuse.
33. Promotion of antagonistic critics. 34. Appeal to religious feelings. 35. Guilt by
association. 36. Treating work by association with other ridiculed or denounced books.
37. Use of fallacious statistical method to decide whether a genius or crank wrote book.
38. Writing reviews and criticisms without reading the book.
39. Copying from other reviews (even of those who had not read it themselves).
40. Innuendoes that unneeded counterarguments abound.
41. Refusal by scientific periodicals to advertise the work.
42. Warnings against readers' inability to judge work. 43. Assuring the reading (and book-
buying) public the book is dull and worthless.
44. Accusing author of using methods not actually used.
45. Denials of acts of suppression, compounding perjury.
46. Omission of credit or of footnoting the work when offering "new" theories elsewhere that
are contained in the book.
47. Refusal to give credit for discoveries confirmed ultimately in tests.
48. Refusal of information to author. 49. Refusal to engage in communication with author or
allies.
50. Suppression of news of disputes or debates won by author.
51. Deprecating value of crucial tests favoring author's theories.
52. Concocting stories that "1000 wrong predictions" were in book.
53. Defamation in letters and intimidation of potential support.
54. Use of great names (e. g. Nobel Prize winners) for defamation.
55. Whispering campaign; private letters. 56. Intimidation of students, both undergraduates and
graduates.
57. Elimination of the name of the heretic from books of reference.
58. Removal of the book from libraries. 59. Demands to place the book on the Register of
Forbidden Books.
60. Pressure on scientific supporters by bribing with better jobs to abstain.
61. Grants given to disprove the book (no grants ever given to "prove").
62. Efforts, include fabrication, to show misuse of sources by author.
63. Damaging statements put in the mouth of deceased persons of influence.
64. Heaping of accusations without substantiation in quantities making any response impossible
in the same media.
65. Insinuations of profiteering and other ignoble motives for writing the work.
66. Attempts at organizing character assassination and special meetings to dispose of the
challenge.
67. Dissemination of selected damaging reviews. 68. Offering the readers arguments from
specialized fields that they are unable to verify.
69. Generalization and complete disapproval on grounds of a single alleged error. 70.
Accusation of lack of sources by misrepresenting the term "collective amnesia."
A service to the history and science of science would occur in the expansion and testing of the
list. Deg wished that he might complete the list concerning V., then move to other cases in
science, and then to all occupations to display the universal prevalence of misdemeanor, not so
much to scandalize, nor to stop it all (an impossibility), as to expose to light the epidemic
predicament.
When asked to place them into categories (for Deg was distressed by their stringing out
aimlessly) V. divided them into: suppression of publication; punishment and rewards;
examination of the theories refused; ostracism of a nonconformist; rewriting of history and
scientific finds; control of criticism; unfair criticism; and unfair criticism continued by
unfair rejoinders. Deg in his turn divided them into logical errors, moral offenses (cheating
and dishonesty); factual errors; illegitimate demands; hyperbole; personal abuse; material
sanctions; etc. V. was especially pleased with what Deg called "the absent footnote technique"
which with disastrous effectiveness eliminates an undesired line of ancestors, such as V.
Stecchini in the 1970's pointed out that Schiaparelli was a leading astronomer but could not
get acceptance of his idea that Venus was scarcely rotating in relation to the Sun, showing an
"Earth-Lock" as it comes closest to the Earth. The "Earth-Lock" was proven a century later, but
although it supported V.'s position was not even mentioned, when, for example, the Encyclopedia
Britannica (XIX, 78) connected the phenomenon with "unsolved but very significant celestial
mechanical problems connected with the origins and early histories of the planets." Here is a
case of partial incorporation of quantavolution with the help of the "absent footnote
technique."
The tricks used against V. were all commonplace in the scientific world. Since his work was so
widely publicized and since he collected evidence so carefully, the tricks were simply more
completely displayed. The more basic causes of resistance and opposition, which spawn tricks,
have been discussed by Bernard Barber, with a wealth of example. V. was not a sociologist.
Allegations of meanness and nonrational thought exhausted his repertoire of analysis, except
for his handy notion of collective amnesia of ancient catastrophe, which, he began to think,
was the essential cause of the opposition to his theories; people, including scientists, could
not bear to admit to open discussion their own suppressed terror of the original events.
But, of course, resistance to new ideas occurs whether the new ideas are catastrophist or
uniformitarian, and with ideas that are false as well as with true ideas, which Barber has
shown in the cases of Helmholtz, Planck, and Lister, among others. As Deg has argued, the great
fear of the poly-ego in the normal schizoid human determines memory at the same time as it
demands forgetting (or resisting memory), and ancient catastrophes were materially grafted onto
this human mechanism; but the resistance to V.'s theories can be only slightly assigned to the
peculiarities of his catastrophism.
Deg prepared another list in 1978. He was making up this one out of disgust with politics: he
was gloomy over the practical impossibility of finding persons in the world who were capable of
organizing, agitating and contributing to beneficial and benevolent movements. But he saw that
the list applied also to getting support for scientific ideas and movements.
"Why Doesn't Somebody Do Something?" Noone wants to follow
Helplessness
Hopelessness
Incompetence
Hardheadedness
General Disbelief
Indifference
Too busy, no time
Can't afford to, financially
Hurts somebody
Meets opposition
Arrogant to tell someone what to do
Timidity
Fear
Fickleness
Inattention and distractedness
Leave it to the experts
The crazies you have to deal with
Hard work
Resentment against being ordered about
Ignorance of particulars
Disbelief in use of force or any form of manipulation
Hatred of those to be helped
Lack of foresight
Interested only in the moment
Can't believe a few voices might prevail
Things will work themselves out (laissez-faire)
Fear of being corrupted
Distaste for manners of other activists
Have to work with inferiors
Suspicious of potential collaborators
Fear of physical harm
Fear of failure
Fear of being responsible for effects
No wonder nothing ever gets done!
In 1978, Dr. Henry Bauer, later Dean at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, offered the first full-
dress anti-Velikovsky manuscript and the Director of the University of Kentucky Press asked Deg
to read it with reference to its possible publication. Cutbacks in funds and programming forced
the Press into giving up the manuscript or finding $5000 subsidy for its production. The
University of Illinois Press was finally to have brought the work out in late 1984. Meanwhile
one can have a review of it by way of Deg's Readers
Report of January 10, 1979:
To: University of Kentucky Press, Attn. Mr. Crouch From: Professor Alfred de Grazia Subject:
Reader's report to Henry H. Bauer. Beyond Velikovsky In my opinion, Dean Bauer's manuscript
should be published. It is the first generally adverse criticism of the work of Immanuel
Velikovsky by a single author. The author has researched practically all available public
sources. He is aware of and also adversely critical of the failings of many of the critics of
Velikovsky. The book, strangely, is a likable book, which probably reflects the author's
character more than the contents, which must prove annoying to a hundred people.
The book will be controversial. There is no avoiding this. Feelings run high on the scientific
and sociological aspects of Velikovsky's work. The most incisive criticism is bound to come
from the supporters of Velikovsky, for they are much better informed on all aspects of the
controversy than the opponents of Velikovsky. These latter are usually cut down quickly. Dean
Bauer realizes, though, that it is not easy to address the issues, and has the advantage of
four hundred pages to explain himself and balance his analysis.
Because of the scope of the book, not only Velikovsky but also a number of his supporters will
be motivated to respond. And one cannot doubt that they will have good grounds to enter the
fray Let me take myself as an example of what may very well happen with others. On p. 236 the
author mentions my "utter conviction that Velikovsky is right." Right about what? I am
favorable to his general theories, his genius, and his defense against the almost invariably
misplaced attacks upon him. Bauer might well stress his distinction between the "True
Believers" and the scholarly supporters. Among the latter, there are many differences, the
atmosphere is highly critical and, if they seem overprotective of Velikovsky, it is because the
enemy outside is so massive and aggressive. It will add greatly to the clarity of the analysis
if the author distinguishes the scholarly supporters and the lay supporters. (The word "public"
is better but unfortunately has several meanings.) The scientific opponents of Velikovsky have
also their scholarly and lay supporters. As for disputes among the scholarly supporters and
Velikovsky, contrary to Bauer's statements, there are dozens, beginning with Juergens, Hess,
and Stecchini and ending with the young writers in the current (Nov. 1978) issue of the Society
for Interdisciplinary Studies Review.
At the bottom of p. 237, Bauer shoots from the hip at both Juergens as an absurdity and myself
as a political scientist, while favoring physicist Kruskal's scornful attack upon Juergens.
This does not accord with Bauer's many comments upon dogmatic remarks and against extolling
specialized authority. Apart from whether he understands Juergen's theory, which he does not
bother to demonstrate, and whether I understand Juergen's theory as well or better than
Kruskal, he takes up a vulnerable position: what qualification, one might ask, does Bauer have
for writing a book of sociology, history, ethnology, and political analysis, not to mention
meteorology, geology, astronomy, etc.? Does he regard himself as a greater polymath than any of
us?
Then again, he contradicts my analysis of Margolis and a group of Yale reviewers, claiming that
his own count in the first instance is at odds with my own. Perhaps he should reproduce, in a
couple of pages, the Margolis article with my comments, adding his own. Such would be the
better way to damage my conclusions. The readers might then judge.
And so on. To say only of the distinguished group of scholars who passed on the ABS special
issue on the Velikovsky Affair that none was a scientist gives a completely misleading idea to
the reader. Lasswell was one of the founders of quantitative method in behavioral science.
Cantril was a distinguished psychologist and expert on systematic opinion analysis; etc. Nor
does he stress that Harry Hess, who is sometimes regarded as having been the leading geologist
of the past generation, was a thoroughly sympathetic friend of Velikovsky. Hess and I talked on
two or three occasions of Velikovsky, and Hess was as eager as I to see Velikovsky's scientific
ability respected. Hess recommended that his students at Princeton read Earth in Upheaval, for
example. These are but a few of the hundreds of points of contention in the manuscript and yet
I feel it should be published with only modest changes, because it might otherwise take years
to redo it and I am not at all sure that the public functions of the book would be greatly
assisted. Perhaps I am saying that the book as it stands invites a full rocket display and, in
the process, the public, science, and students will become better educated. I doubt that any
amount of revision will make it a definitive and conclusive answer to the rapidly developing
body of work sympathetically or willy-willy aligned to Velikovsky's books. I have four books in
process myself that are more controversial and upsetting to the established doctrines of
contemporary science than those of Dr. Velikovsky. But I have the impression that I shall not
encounter the same type of opposition as Velikovsky if only because the intellectual atmosphere
has changed so much and in part because of the Velikovsky Affair. Readers perhaps will little
note the criticism directed at myself and some others in the book, but they will be alert to a
number of points respecting Velikovsky, and I would suggest that Dean Bauer reconsider them. He
is attacking Velikovsky in 1979 partly on the basis of a pamphlet that Velikovsky published in
1946 (" Cosmos and Gravitation") and which Bauer even appreciates is not pushed by Velikovsky
himself or scarcely anyone else. True, Velikovsky hates to recant, but the pamphlet is not a
necessary prologomena to the later books. Indeed, Bauer's often insightful views about
Velikovsky's character and motives should make him wonder whether the pamphlet was not merely a
brash preliminary exercise, which vanity demanded be published as advance claims. Further it
has become fashionable now to predict the doom of the concept of gravitation, and Velikovsky's
musings were in a way the fashions worn in 1946 for anti-gravitational thought. This might be
said also regarding the model of the atom as resembling the solar system. Only lately has that
idea become discredited. Are we to dump all scholars who early in their careers exhibited what
was currently believed? Then everyone will have to walk the plank.
Bauer sometimes abuses Velikovsky, contrary to his professional aim, generally observed, of
avoiding inflammatory and ad hominem statements. It should be easy to revise such expressions
as "astonishing ignorance" (p. 159), "supreme ignorance" (p. 154), p. 161 etc. I think that he
would reap rewards if he, or an editor, were to erase fifty to a hundred non-functional
adjectives or phrases.
And, in respect to Velikovsky as a knowledgeable scientist, aside from "who is a scientist
besides the self-elect," Bauer underestimates Velikovsky totally. Let him ask Burgstahler
(chemist), Motz (astrophysicist), someone like myself who knew Hess (geology), Hadas
(linguistics), Lasswell (psychiatric psychologist), Cyrus Gordon (Near East Studies), Einstein
(physics), Juergens (electricity), et al. Every last one will or would say that Velikovsky is
not only a good scientist, but an imaginative one, and at home in a number of fields. I wonder
why Bauer did not take the step to include himself in this group by interviewing the subject of
his book. Velikovsky may be in error, but he is a scientist.
Also, I would recommend dropping the discussion of whether Velikovsky is a crank. Bauer admits
that he himself is a crank, about the Loch Ness monsters. It's unworthy of this book to waste
itself on this unscientific concept. I would, as Dean Bauer appears to believe, devote only
several necessary paragraphs to exposing the term "crank" and kicking it out of bounds.
On p. 248, I note a striking contrast between a group of pro-Velikovsky publicists and a group
of anti-Velikovsky scholars of distinction. This is a "foul blow." Either let both be
publicists or both be scholars.
So, I should conclude that off-hand abusive terms ought to be excised since they take away from
a book some of its good air of casual and pleasant inquiry. Cut back the section on cranks.
Perhaps dispense with the sections on "Cosmos and Gravitation" save for a simple statement of
its inappropriateness and its inelegant foreboding of things to come. The admirably clear piece
on gases should win Bauer an excellent contract for an elementary textbook in general science,
but may not belong here. Perhaps other paragraphs can be removed here and there at the
instigation of a generally well-educated lay reader.
The style is clear at the college level. Many, many things are said that need to be said about
both sides: about how scholars are just (simply) people; about how the general public reacts to
controversies in science as to political struggles, baseball games, etc.; and about the foibles
of Velikovsky (though perhaps not enough, regrettably, about how these foibles have had
something to do with driving him on relentlessly and with good effect). And I think that Dean
Bauer might even, in the end, bite the bullet and state that on the whole it were well that
Velikovsky's books were published, then bad that they were mishandled by the press, scientists,
and disciples, yet good that a million people began to read into history and science. Finally
take the word of the author himself (p. 366) that an astronomer's statement that "Velikovsky's
scenario was impossible on grounds of celestial mechanics was just not so." That is worth
something and will win the author a medal for courage, after all is said and done.
To avoid rumor-mongering or a delayed denunciation Deg told V.'s retainers of the existence of
the work and of his recommendation that it be published. "Why?" he was asked, meaning why
didn't he stomp it. It's not bad, he answered, you'll see, and it will keep the dialogue going,
even improving it.
Meanwhile, those who were termed by the anti-heretics "devotees," "followers," "disciples,"
"supporters," "sympathizers," and were consigned to the limbo of science as "benighted," "anti-
scientific," "occultists," "astrologers," "fanatics," and so on, unendingly -- from these who
were seriously considering his work as well as doing work of their own, came the discovery and
reporting of his errors, qualification of his statements, essays at quantification, adduction
of contrary materials, tempering, amending, and explaining. We need not go into the question,
"Whose mass of supporters is better -- yours or ours ?" We are saying precisely that the
effective scientific criticism of Velikovsky came from those who were sympathetic to his work.
It was the heretic scholars who designed alternative scenarios, in geology and astronomy, who
upset V.'s chronology beyond the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, who pointed out correctly
evidence of pro-Biblical bias, who disputed his identification of the astronomical bodies
implicated in certain legends, who pinned down the sources of numerous uncertainties, who
reduced vagueness, who found and accommodated predecessors in the esoteric and difficult
literature of catastrophism, far beyond the sporadic dark hints that "nothing new" was being
proposed.
To be blunt, if you want to know what's wrong with Velikovsky, ask his friends, as much as his
enemies; ask his admirers, as well as his detractors. You must know the literature of
quantavolution and catastrophe. It is contained by now in many books and hundreds of correctly
postured articles, many old, many new, many forthcoming. One can think no longer, if ever, that
by "not believing in Velikovsky" science will proceed on its customary paths; a growing parade
of many different kinds of quantavolutionaries is finding its own paths. The parade cannot be
dismissed by uttering an imprecation against Velikovsky.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had been established in the triumphant days of nuclear
physics following the blast at Hiroshima and was dedicated to voicing the responsibilities felt
by scientists. Like the playboy college students who excused his poor grades on grounds that
his college was anti-semitic and who persuaded his father that his nose, his curly hair, and
his name ought to be changed, whereupon, his grades remaining poor, he had to confess that 'us
Gentiles ain't very smart, ' the Bulletin did change its name for awhile and had the same old
problem so it changed it back again, but at this time, around 1964, was trying to boost its
popularity by exposing what Editor Rabinowitch regarded as scientific impostors, and his chosen
weapon, a science publicist named Margolis, settled upon Velikovsky, whence was published a
cavalier article entitled "Velikovsky Rides Again."
Deg's larger and more detailed refutation of the offensive article is reproduced in The Burning
of Troy. So here I may introduce a letter in the same vein from Eric Larrabee, a publicist and
early supporter of V., later head of the New York State Arts Council.
April 21, 1964
To the Editor:
The "Report from Washington" by Howard Margolis in your April number is a mixture of
intemperate accusations and misstatements of fact. Margolis dismisses as "hokum" the work of
Immanuel Velikovsky, which he has demonstrably read without care and judges without experience.
He claims there is "no scientific way to examine" books which abound in references to physical
fact. Their author had furnished specific scientific tests of his theory and on all of them to
date, according to Professor H. H. Hess of Princeton, he had been vindicated. Margolis brushes
off Velikovsky's successful predictions as "science fiction" and offers instead the results of
his "few hours" reading in philology and history.
He can apparently read neither French nor Hebrew. If he could read. French he would not speak
of the "actual" inscription at el-Arish in words from the outdated English translation of 1890
instead of the modern French translation of 1936, which is plainly cited in Velikovsky's
footnote. The French translation gives the name Pi-Khirote. Margolis is flatly wrong in stating
the Velikovsky "alters" the text, either here or in the case of the biblical pi-ha-hiroth (so
spelled by Velikovsky in Ages in Chaos, p. 44). If Margolis had read even the English
translation attentively he would have found "King Tum" (The French gives "le roi Toum"). This
is the text: "Voici que Geb vit sa mere qui l'aimait beaucoup. Son coeur (de Geb) ‚tait
n‚gligent aprŠs elle. La terre -- pour elle en grand affliction." It goes on to describe
"upheaval in the residence" and "such a tempest that neither the men nor the gods could see the
faces of their next." The inscription is shown to be historical by the fact that the King's
name is written with the royal cartouche.
Velikovsky's reasons for suggesting that bkhor (firstborn) in the Hebrew text might be a
misreading for bchor (chosen) are given at length (Ages in Chaos, p. 32-34) and are not
essential to his argument that Exodus and the Egyptian sources refer to the same natural
catastrophe. He uses the word "obvious" in proposing that the phrase "to smite the houses"
refers to an earthquake in view of the fact that Eusebius, St. Jerome, and the Midrashim all
confirm this interpretation. Margolis' sarcastic repetition of the word "obvious" is wholly
without justification.
Margolis accuses Velikovsky of saying that St. Augustine puts the birth of Minerva at the time
of Moses whereas Augustine "says the opposite." This would be a serious charge if true but it
is doubly untrue, both as to Augustine and Velikovsky. The relevant passage in The City of God
(Book XVIII, Chapter 8) reads that Minerva was born in the time of Ogyges and Velikovsky quotes
it (Worlds in Collision, p. 171) in those precise words. In support of the damaging assertion
that Velikovsky alters evidence Margolis alters the evidence from both sources.
Margolis cannot even read Velikovsky correctly. He says that Velikovsky "can cite no
description" of Venus growing larger in the sky despite the fact that on pages 82-83 and 164-65
of Worlds in Collision it is so described from Western (" an immense globe"), Middle Eastern ("
a stupendous prodigy in the sky") and Chinese (" rivalled the sun in brightness") sources.
The sociological interest of the Velikovsky case lies in the willingness of scientists to
dismiss the work of a serious scholar as "hokum" on the basis of slipshod, inaccurate, and
abusive criticism. Margolis had proved once again that the interest is justified.
Eric Larrabee
Deg was in an ornery mood and had threatened the Bulletin with a suit for slander. V. was all
for the idea consulted his friend, the libel expert, Philip Wittenberg. Deg also consulted
Herbert Simon and adopted Simon's view, as expressed in the letter below:
Dear Al, I have read the materials you sent me about the Velikovsky matter. (Incidentally, I
lunched with Velikovsky last week, and we are going to have him back to the campus next autumn
for a lecture.) I have a few comments to offer on the matter of strategy.
As I am sure you know, there is a doctrine in the law of libel known as "invitation to
comment." Anyone who performs publicly -- and that includes publishing a book -- invites
critical comment, and has no recourse if he gets it unless he can show actual malice. The
critic does not, in general, have to sustain the burden of proving truth. (I may have forgotten
details, but your lawyer will tell you that that is the general idea.) Two consequences follow
from this: (1) one should not publish books -- or issues of the American Behavioral Scientist
devoted to the Velikovsky Affair -- unless one has a thick skin; (2) when one is flayed by a
critic, one should almost never threaten legal action, however righteous one's feeling.
The opponents of Velikovsky are not malicious, they are indignant. Nothing about the Margolis
article seems to me libelous, however much I disagree with it. We certainly do not want to
imply that we wish to suppress his right to hold, or even publish, these opinions, however much
anguish they cause us. Hence, if I were editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, I would
politely but firmly reject your request that I "withdraw my support" from the article. He might
even point out that to an anti-Velikovskyite, some of the language in the September American
Behavioral Scientist might seem quite as offensive as Margolis' language did to you. C'est la
vie.
When you receive the refusal from the editor -- as I am sure you will -- I would advise that
you then request an opportunity to have three pages in BAS to reply to Margolis (perhaps
offering the same number of pages in ABS for a rebuttal to the September articles). There is
nothing to be lost by a public discussion of the issues, especially the issue of freedom to
publish, and nothing to be gained by defending that through threats to suppress it.
With best regards, Cordially Yours, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Administration
and Psychology
After much deliberation and testing of the winds, Rabinowitch wrote to Deg:
25 June 1964
Dear Mr. de Grazia:
In answer to your letter of May 12, I do not see why, and in what form, the Bulletin should
"withdraw its support from the article of Mr. Margolis." I do not understand what you mean by
"your contributors and advisors urging you to take action to remedy the wrong done us." The
responsibility for the contents of the articles published in the Bulletin rest (sic) with
authors of the articles. It must be obvious, of course, that the magazine cannot disclaim legal
responsibility for any defamatory statements, but I do not see in the article by Mr. Margolis
any statements of such nature with respect to yourself or to the contributors of your journal.
If all polemics over matters of scientific competence would end in court, this would be bad
indeed for the climate of free discussion in this country. In our society, the enemies of
evolution can call scientists, espousing this theory, ignoramuses, or heretics; the enemies of
fluoridation can call the medical authorities supporting it whatever like names they might
choose -- short of character assassination -- and the proponents of fluoridation can do the
same to their critics. This is as political processes should be in a democratic society.
In his article Mr. Margolis, after dealing briefly with the astrophysical difficulties of
Velikovsky's theory, expanded on the interpretation of ancient texts. From the point of view of
the Bulletin the physical and astronomical evidence is crucial, and the considerations of what
Velikovsky calls "experience of humanity," can only be subsidiary. Physical evidence is simpler
and more unambiguous; while interpretations of old texts and hieroglyphic inscriptions is an
tentative and often controversial matter.
Since Mr. Margolis brought up the paleographic evidence in his article, we must in all justice,
permit Dr. Velikovsky (or a spokesman for him) to point out the errors, if any, in his
argument. This should be done by someone with first-hand experience in the field -- either Dr.
Velikovsky himself, or even better, some independent recognized authority in Biblical history
and ancient languages. We are willing to publish such a letter in one of the forthcoming issues
(giving Mr. Margolis the opportunity of answering it, if he desires); but, we will then
terminate the discussion, since Egyptology or Old Testament studies do not represent a field of
the Bulletin's major interest.
As far as physical possibility of the events suggested by Velikovsky is concerned, I mention
the names of Menzel and Shapley because I remembered that they did analyze Velikovsky's
theories at the time of their publication. I would be glad to have any other recognized
astrophysicist or geophysicist (including the Princeton and Columbia astronomers who have
pointed out in Science the correctness of some of Dr. Velikovsky's specific predictions), to
present in the Bulletin briefly what they think of Velikovsky's theory as a whole.
I believe it is a mistake to accuse modern science of intolerance to the theories which destroy
its accustomed frame of reference and force it to revise its foundations. Einstein proposed a
revision of Newton's conceptions of time and space; for a few years, there was some resistance
of the type suggested by you, but it was silenced by Einstein's explanation of the precession
of the perigee of Mercury, and his prediction of the bending of stellar light in the
neighborhood of the sun. If the correct predications by Velikovsky, pointed out by Hess and
others, do not change the general rejection of Velikovsky's theories by scientists, it is
because changes in the laws of celestial mechanics and revisions of well-established facts of
earth history, required by Velikovsky, are quite different from the subtle, but logically
significant and convincing changes in the scientific world picture suggested by Einstein (as
well as by Mac[ sic] Planck, when he postulated the atomic structure of energy, or more
recently by Lee and Yang when they postulated a physical difference between a right and left
screw, object and mirror image). Modern science has learned to be open-minded to revolutionary
suggestion, if they are brought up with strong scientific or logical evidence. Reluctance to go
along with Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision is, in my eyes, evidence not of stubborn dogmatism
of "official" science but of the physical and logical implausibility of his theories.
Your letter and its request misinterprets the position of the Bulletin. To conclude, since Mr.
Margolis brought up paleographic evidence, fairness requires the Bulletin to give space to a
letter disputing this evidence (provided this letter is not more abusive that Mr. Margolis'
criticisms). If Dr. Velikovsky can suggest a recognized authority in astrophysics or geophysics
willing to discuss his theory as a whole in the light of recent verification of some of his
predictions, I would consider giving space in the Bulletin for a brief discussion of this kind.
It is in this spirit of scientific argumentation that the whole problem should be resolved.
Sincerely yours. Eugene Rabinowitch Editor
During the next few weeks Deg drafted a brutal reply to Margolis's article and prepared a
letter to accompany the critique. However and meanwhile, V., ever hopeful of access to and
acceptance by the authorities of physics, prevailed upon Harry Hess to submit on his behalf to
Rabinowitch an article he had prepared on his Venus theory in the light of new findings. It
would serve as a counter weight to the Margolis article, without reference to the libertarian
and legal issues involving the Bulletin.
In September Rabinowitch wrote to Hess, returning V. 's manuscript without having read it and
saying, "the Bulletin is not a magazine for scientific controversies -- except on rare
occasions (e. g. in the field of genetic radiation damage) when they are directly related to
political or other public issues... Neither is it the function of the Bulletin to provide an
outlet for scientific theories not recognized by professional authorities in the field." He
explained the Margolis article as an attempt to undo the work of "behavioral scientists" in aid
of V. whom, he said, they "championed in the most violent way."
In October, the ABS published Deg's critique of Margolis, and Deg sent it to Rabinowitch along
with the letter that he had drafted three months earlier.
November 12, 1964
Dear Mr. Rabinowitch:
Please permit me to answer frankly your letter of June 25, which asks why and in what form your
should "withdraw your support from Mr. Margolis's article about us."
The why should be apparent in the attached analysis of Mr. Margolis' writing, entitled "Notes
on 'Scientific' Reporting." This explains in detail the errors, the malice, and the legal
offenses of Mr. Margolis. Unless your can by the use of evidence and reason erase those 54
notes, your are bound scientifically, morally, and legally to "withdraw your support."
In what form should your "withdraw your support"? You should "withdraw your support" by
expressing in seven columns of space in your magazine (1) your acknowledgment of the
excessively large number of factual errors contained in Mr. Margolis' article, and (2) your
regret for the incorrect unjustified slurs upon the character and motives of Dr. Velikovsky and
the contributors and editors of THE AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, together with your hope that
your reader should join you in repairing in the course of time such damages as was caused by
this article. My present letter could now end, as might have your own at the same point.
However, you go on to make further comments that require answer.
You say that it would be "bad indeed for the climate of free discussion in this country" if
"all polemics over matters of scientific competence would end in court." I answer that "all
polemics" are not at issue, but only one polemical action. (You are of course, at liberty to
universalize its meaning.) Moreover, "the climate of free discussion" that you mention has been
clouded and cannot be logically cited as a reason for staying our of court. It is precisely to
get people out from under this cloud that the law and courts are built. The courts enable an
objective determination to be made of a matter in certain cases where free discussion is
impossible. They permit and require the calling and interrogating of witnesses under just
conditions. They prevent and remedy the abuses that you have presumably endorsed. The law of
evidence and the rule of law, Mr. Rabinowitch, are the grandparents of the scientific method.
They are not its antithesis.
You say that in our society, disbelievers in evolution can call scientists espousing evolution
ignoramuses or heretics. You say enemies of fluoridation can call medical authorities
supporting it like names and vice versa. You are defending your magazine evidently for assuming
the privilege of such name-calling as opponents of fluoridation and evolution employ. Very
well. Your reader must judge you for that.
"Character assassination", you say, is not permissible, however. The issue here is of course
just that. I call to your attention the numerous instances, well-noted in the aforesaid
memorandum on "54 ways", in which your magazine is guilty of character assassination, slander,
and libel.
Your next paragraph is logically queer, for your say that the Bulletin is largely concerned
with the astrophysics of Velikovsky and not with the humanistic evidence.( I will not tarry
with your incredible distinction between physical and humanistic evidence.) But then you go on
to admit that the Bulletin reversed itself and abandoned its chosen field in this case.
(Apparently, any and every policy can be reversed to get at Velikovsky. How true we were!) And
you say you want to get the historical evidence argued. Argued -- but not too much you state,
for you have to get back to your major interest! Like UN affairs? Like scientific freedom? You
may go back to your affairs, Mr. Rabinowitch, but not before we are done with the matter.
Now you would graciously permit Dr. Velikovsky or an "independent authority" of the classics to
answer Mr. Margolis by a letter, to be followed by a reply from Mr. Margolis, and then stop!
Two-to-one is bad enough. But how does Mr. Margolis deserve this reply? By his own expertness
as a biblical scholar, specialist in ancient languages, and classical historian? I submit that
this exchange might be equal and appropriate if I might delegate my daughter who is majoring in
archaeology at Bryn Mawr to take up your invitation to reply.
A general appraisal of Dr. Velikovsky's theories in your paper would be a good idea, as your
suggest, and I think you should find a set of scientists to make such an appraisal. I would not
go to Drs. Menzel or Shapley, whose participation in the Velikovsky case, as documented in
Harper's and The American Behavioral Scientist, has been most unbecoming Your hazy remembrance
of their posture is scarcely a firm basis for risking the reputation of your magazine and
colleagues. Besides the balance of evidence has continued to shift between 1950 and 1964. Do
read that document; your must take the time : you and your writer cannot decently continue to
ignore all the factual record of the case.
Still, all of this is not the central point, which is the behavior of scientists, and you do
well to return to it in your last two paragraphs. There you first say that modern science is
not intolerant of unorthodox theories. This is not so; even the case you cite, Einstein, was in
your own words victim of "some resistance" of the type the ABS described. But even if it were
so generally, why would you unscientifically and dogmatically refuse to recognize an "unusual"
case of resistance when it loomed before you?
How can you say that the actions taken concerning Velikovsky and his theories was tolerant?
Please state one procedure, whose value your would defend, for that reception and consideration
of new scientific material, which was followed by the leadership of science in the Velikovsky
case. Show us that he was given one key to the kingdom. I believe, as you seek to do so, you
will gradually eliminate from consideration all the decent and rational procedures that are
supposed to govern the behavior of scientists. In the end you will either be indignant or a
cynic. You will not be the Rabinowitch whose letter I am replying to.
I must end in laughter, which I hope you will forgive. For you conclude by permitting Dr.
Velikovsky to answer by letter "provided this letter is not more abusive than Mr. Margolis'
criticisms!" I am not clear whether you are here defining the outer limits of abuse, or whether
you suggest pursuing scientific truth by balancing two sets of slander.
Go back to my beginning, sir; you will find our two requests to be generous offers made in the
veritable "spirit of scientific argumentation" that you appeal to. Sincerely yours,
Alfred de Grazia
Dear Mr. de Grazia:
Thank you for your letter of November 12th. I can only add my appreciation that you published
the full Margolis article in The American Behavioral Scientist. Your readers may judge.
Sincerely, Eugene Rabinowitch Editor December 3, 1964
Dear Mr. Rabinowitch
We acknowledge your appreciation of our fairness. Does your appreciation mean that you, too,
will be fair to us and present our rebuttal before your readers?
Sincerely yours,
Alfred de Grazia
The rebuttal was not carried by the Bulletin. A great many scientists had their prejudices
reinforced at the expense of V., Deg, and the ABS. In the final analysis and many year later,
Deg's indignation seems overdone, and it is doubtful that he ever had the intention of suing,
but he was up to his typical game of driving home contradictions and pounding away at the basic
homology between legal and scientific procedure. Furthermore, while discounting his rhetoric, I
should also call attention to specific instances of the damage caused by irresponsible behavior
in scientific circles tied directly to the Bulletin article: one on the matter of fluoridation,
on an exchange between Urey and Deg, and two to be treated in chapter 15 on "The Knowledge of
Industry" involving the Sloan Foundation, Moses Hadas, and a project of Deg in economics.
July 17, 1996
Dear Professor de Grazia:
Since writing you earlier in connection with my review of "A Struggle With Titans, " I have
been reading the various documents cited in "The Velikovsky Affair."
One that particularly "struck" me was the article by Howard Margolis in the April 1964 issue of
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that your ably dissected in the October 1964 issue of the
American Behavioral Scientist.
What came as an even greater surprise, however was the article written by Margolis about
fluoridation in the June 1964 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. By failing to
take note of published reports of toxic effects from fluoridated drinking water, he constructs
a very favorable case for fluoridation and makes his opponents appear to have no scientific
grounds on which to oppose it! Since you were able to show that Margolis is not a good
philologist, I thought it might be worth pointing out that he also has not read the
fluoridation literature very thoroughly. The major documents he cited to support his view are
guilty of omission just as he is. The one that was prepared in 1955-1956 is hardly relevant to
"current" findings, while the "Select" bibliography is no more that a compilation of proponent
research, with virtually no mention of contrary results reported by others, especially in
relation to clinical findings.
I realize your interests lie primarily in the area of the "sociological" aspects of a subject
like fluoridation, but the strong scientific evidence against fluoridation has been kept so
heavily suppressed that there is a close parallel to "The Velikovsky Affair." Our own local
public library, I might add, has refused to accept or acquire a copy of "A Struggle with
Titans" on the grounds that the standard reviewing media have ignored it -- just as they are
ignoring "The Velikovsky Affair"!
Sincerely yours, Albert W. Burgstahler Professor, of Chemistry The University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas
June 2, 1964
Dr. Alfred de Grazia
The American Behavioral Scientist
80 East 11th Street
New York 3, New York
Dear Dr. de Grazia: I am sorry to see that you have gotten mixed up in the Velikovsky case.
Velikovsky was a charlatan. There is just no doubt about it at all. It is not true that
outstanding astronomers would not welcome a truly original man with constructive ideas. We
would put him on the staff of the University of California San Diego. I do think that you
should try to withdraw from this controversy as gracefully as possible and not continue it. I
assure you that every physical scientist of my acquaintance will rise to defend the Bulletin
against anything you do.
I am terribly concerned at present about the lack of control in scientific publication. Science
had always been aristocratic. Not everyone could get his ideas published in effective journals.
Articles to the scientific magazines have been carefully edited, and unless they conformed to
reasonable scientific standards they were refused. Today anyone can publish anything. In the
first place, very second-rate scientists can get jobs somewhere --with industrial companies,
government agencies, the space program, etc. They all have their private printing press in the
back room, namely a reproduction device, As a result, papers of all sorts are sent out. Also
there are new journals springing up with no decent editorial control whatever. The result is an
enormous amount of confusion. In fact, as I have stated and I now repeat, there is often so
much noise that one cannot hear the signals.
With best regards,
Very sincerely,
Harold C. Urey
Deg's Journal, June 29, 1964
... Velikovsky had palpitations last week. For several days his pulse was irregular. He has
gone into a three day period of rest and is taking a little tranquilization by drugs. He has
been traveling too much and spending too much time trying to direct strategy in his scientific
defense. A letter I received from Harold Urey depressed him greatly. Identifying as he does
with authority, V. is hurt when a Noble Prize winner for chemistry refers to him as a
charlatan. What can he be expecting? I have not been able to educate him to the sociology and
political science of science. He believes in rationalism and that other experts only by odd
mistake "because they haven't read his works," treat him so contemptuously and with hostility.
V. wrote what he thought should be my reply. (Sometimes his presumption becomes arrogant.) It
was a strange letter, full of pathos and humble remonstrance. I could not and would not use it.
It is an interesting document about V. himself. It would do him no good even if I were to use
it. Yet he was deeply perturbed when I informed him I was sending my own letter of reply. He
claimed that his was a perfect letter, which he was proud of, and felt must be sent. It was
then I learned of his palpitations. The thought occurred: the strangeness of this letter goes
with a nervous disturbance. He desperately wanted me to send his letter; he mailed it by
special delivery to New York where I was and phoned to press me about it. In a week or two,
when his illness is passed, he may be secretly pleased that I went by own way. I spoke later to
his wife. She seemed displeased with me too. She, too, will come around. She confirmed how
"hurt" he was by the Urey letter. Urey is a --------! What better could come from him. His
letter to me is a disgrace and I mean to call it that.
July 8, 1964
Dr. Harold C. Urey
School of Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
P. O. Box 109
La Jolla, California 92038
Dear Dr. Urey:
Thank you for your letter of June 2. I appreciate your concern that I may "have gotten mixed up
in the Velikovsky case." Since everyone whose attention is called to the case has gotten mixed
up in it, in one way or another, I guess that I am in good company.
Your second sentence is that "Velikovsky was a charlatan." He neither "was" nor is a charlatan.
Resort to your nearest dictionary will satisfy you on that score. If you insist that you have
not made a linguistic error, then you must give me one, just one, bit of evidence to support
your allegation. Indeed, your next sentence is "There is just no doubt about it at all." Since
you are a scientist and know the nature of proof, you must have a great many pieces of
evidence, adding up to certainty. If you cannot cite such evidence, then you must apologize to
Velikovsky, or you become yourself a charlatan and slanderer.
Your may refuse this challenge. Very well. We do not usually carry substantive discussions of
factual theory in the American Behavioral Scientist, but if you will honor us with one
significant error of fact or logical contradiction in Velikovsky's
works we will print it and let it go at that, for we are not concerned to solve the problems of
physics and astronomy, or politics and economics in our pages. I know that you will have no
trouble with this small matter; I could probably manage it myself; that Mr. Margolis could not
succeed, nor some others who tried, does not prove that the works are flawless. Then you say,
"It is not true that outstanding astronomers would not welcome a truly original man with
constructive ideas." I am afraid, Dr. Urey, that you will be hard put, in the light of the
history of science, to maintain this statement also, unless you would again resort to evasive
semantics, defining the words "truly original" and "constructive" to suit your ends. Your
saying that "we would put him on the staff of the University of California, San Diego" could be
regarded as an idle threat if it were not for the well-known anxiety of certain California
colleges to discover warm bodies wherever they may be.
You thereupon urge me to withdraw from the controversy. Actually, I had done so; but the stupid
brazenness of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' article brought to me a sharp realization that
many of your kind simply will not learn. "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny:" every error of the
scientific mind and spirit in the history of the Velikovsky case was by almost preternatural
skill recomposed into a few columns of the Bulletin. This you ask me to swallow!
The controversy will continue. You say the "every physical scientist of my acquaintance will
rise to defend the Bulletin against anything you do." Perhaps you will not have as many
acquaintances as you claim and they will not be willing to act as your troop if they, or at
least several of them, were to read the pages of the American Behavioral Scientist and compare
them with the article of the science correspondent of the Bulletin. (Isn't it interesting that
the scientists' Bulletin should have to hire a non-scientist to write about science for them?)
You have, it is clear, a rather horrifying vision of science. You gently threaten me, you
promise to bring in your gang, and then you begin to reveal the utopia that occupies your
mined. "I am terribly concerned at present about the lack of control in scientific
publication," you write; "Science has always been aristocratic. Not everyone could get his
ideas published in effective journals. Articles in the scientific magazines have been carefully
edited, and unless they conformed to reasonable scientific standards they were refused. Today
anyone can publish anything."
I, too, Dr. Urey, am concerned about scientific publication. I am not, however, concerned about
the lack of control by the scientific oligarchy, as you are, but by the lack of communications,
the haphazard and chaotic situation that is caused as much as anything by a defective
leadership in the sciences. Your kind of scientific aristocracy is precisely the reason why
your subsequent claims are laughable: if there is any villainous theme in the history of
science, it is the continuing attempt to deny a voice in the organs of science to iconoclasts,
outsiders, and just plain kleine Menschen.
You will be responsible for retarding the progress of science if you succeed in reestablishing
the old system of information controls. You should turn your attention to organizing scientific
information rather than to suppressing it.
Similarly you should be pleased that more of our working population today are scientists,
rather than coalminers or ditchdiggers. Indeed you seem to be angry with them for pretending to
perform the same operations as are practiced by you happy few. "... Very second-rate scientists
can get somewhere -- with industrial companies, government agencies, the space program, etc.
They all have their private printing press in the back room..." Einstein with his patent-office
job, Da Vinci doing his civil engineering, Freud setting up his own printing press, Darwin
idling on his patrimony -- there certainly are a great number of these second-raters, without
university chairs, not content to eat common fodder and let their intellectual ambitions expire
peacefully!
I am beginning to see your point. You would wish only first-rate scientists such as Howard
Margolis, formerly a science writer for The Washington Star and now correspondent for the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, to have freedom of scientific expression. Your idea would be to
have a kind of Empire such as Alice discovered in Wonderland where the knighthood of science is
conferred by your power elite and the Sir Margolises can be sent out to harry any peasants who
may have the temerity to poach upon the truth.
Your conditions for peace are not acceptable, Dr. Urey. Our condition is that science be open
and public, and remain so. If you wish to alter your conditions substantially we would be
pleased to hear from you again. Meanwhile, with regards to your work on tektites, I remain
Respectfully yours,
Alfred de Grazia
The special magazines given over to reporting and supporting V. 's doings have been Pens‚e,
Kronos, and the Review of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. Each of these has carried
extensive materials on the preliminaries, proceedings and aftermath of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science convention panel dealing with Velikovksy's ideas at San
Francisco in February 1974. According to astronomy Professor Ivan King of the University of
California at Berkeley, it was Carl Sagan who suggested the confrontation. It was intended that
the panel be divided into supporters and opponents of V., but over a period of months, the pro-
V. nominees were weeded out. This was suspicious, and I am inclined to cast suspicion on both
sides.
In the first place, both the establishment (for it can be called such also on these occasions
when it puts on a face) and the heretics chose a deceptive yet revealing title: "Velikovsky's
Challenge to Science." V. would never allow himself to be called a non-scientist; yet, to have
his name in the limelight, he allowed himself to be juxtaposed to science. Simultaneously, the
establishment (that is, the government ad rem in charge of the state of science), in order to
isolate the heretic, allowed the personalization of the panel, in itself an abuse of the
scientific method which addresses itself to ideas, not men. Might not a better title have been
"The Validity and Prospects of Neo-catastrophism"? Then with eight papers, four on each side,
the topics of the mechanics, the electromagnetics, the historical record, and the reception of
neo-catastrophism in science could be taken up.
Did V. want to appear without support on the stage, keeping the spotlight, whether for the hero
or the martyr, upon himself, and therefore did he not fight hard enough to ensure himself that
support? He ended up with two neutral parties, the opposition of a biased chairman, and three
convinced antagonists eager for the fray. Surely there must have been some masochistic force at
work in him, coupled with an extremely clever Machiavellism: a pro-Velikovsky paper would do
nothing for V.'s image as a great scientific loner and martyr.
If the one man who knew the Venus historical record best, Lynn Rose, had been present, he could
have devastated, on the spot and forever after, the presentation made by Huber. It would have
been ineradicable from the book that followed, entitled Scientists Confront Velikovsky. If
Juergens had been forced into the panel by V. then Mulholland would have been finished off. If
Deg had been invited, he would probably not have gone, but if he had, he might have effectively
harried Sagan and Storer, considering what these two ended up by saying. Then V. would have
been off and running.
Instead, it was a gruesome exercise at V.'s cost, then and thereafter. He behaved
magnificently, like Samson dragging down the temple of the Philistines upon himself. He won the
crowd. The press, ignoring the crowd, and incapable of reading the papers, pronounced him dead.
V. did not really go to San Francisco to have the crowd be with him. He went there to gain
scientific recognition. Or did he get mixed up and rely upon the crowd, and hope for a victory
against impossible odds while cultivating the fantasy of martyrdom ?
The establishment -- and Professors King and Goldsmith, the official sponsors, found themselves
irresistibly playing the roles of the establishment -- was quite pleased to let the panel
develop into an over-kill of V. It could not even conceal its hope when explaining the public
presentation of the symposium. King, who was the Chairman of the panel, explained privately
that he was so anxious over the responsibility of presenting V. at a scientific forum that he
had to persist in saying that the purpose of the symposium was to refute a set of ideas that
science had proven absurd. Actually he said so publicly beforehand:
What disturbs the scientists is the persistence of these views, in spite of all the efforts
that scientists have spent on educating the public. It is in this context that the AAAS
undertakes the Velikovsky symposium. Although the symposium necessarily includes a presentation
of opposing views, we do not consider this to be the primary purpose of the symposium. None us
in the scientific establishment believes that a debate about Velikovsky's views of the Star
system would be remotely justified at a serious scientific meeting.
Now I would like to quote the economist Shane Mage's booklet, Velikovsky and His Critics,
because of its elegant conciseness. Besides, he was present at the occasion, and neither Deg
nor I was there.
What took place in San Francisco was... the beginning of a real debate, even if it often seemed
to those of us in attendance like a donnybrook. Of the six invited panelists, one, Norman
Storer (Prof. of Sociology, Baruch College of CUNY) disavowed competence in any aspect of the
subject but nevertheless managed to conclude that the mistreatment of Velikovsky, though
abstractly deplorable, was also an "understandable" response of the "scientific community" to a
perceived "attack by right-wing forces in American society. Velikovsky himself presented a
short paper outlining the basis of, and some of the evidence for, his Challenge to Conventional
Views in Science, and often took the floor vehemently to rebut specific criticisms. His views
on the importance of electrical forces in celestial mechanics also received strong support from
Professor Irving Michelson (Mechanics, Illinois Institute of Technology), who described his
paper Mechanics Bears Witness as "an act of objective scholarship," intended to be neither pro
or anti-Velikovsky.
The polemic against Velikovsky was conducted by two Professors of Astronomy (Carl Sagan,
Cornell University, and J. Derral Mulholland, University of Texas) and one Professor of
Mathematical Statistics (Peter Huber, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). Almost all the
media coverage of the panel consisted of favorable citations of these three contributions,
especially Sagan's very long essay entitled An Analysis of Worlds in Collision. In the absence
of Sagan, who left before all papers had been read in order to attend a taping of "the Johnny
Carson Show," a vigorous discussion, involving audience as well as the remaining panelists,
continued for almost two hours after conclusion of the formal presentations. Both sides claimed
victory.
The logical next step was publication of the symposium proceedings, but of the panelists only
Velikovsky was willing to permit publication of an integral transcript of the speeches and the
floor discussion. Lengthy negotiations failed to arrive at a mutually agreeable format, and
ultimately the two parties decided to publish separately.
The anti-Velikovsky case was presented by Cornell University Press under the title Scientists
Confront Velikovsky (hereafter referred to as S c. V). In addition to revised versions of the
AAAS papers by Sagan, Mulholland, Huber, and Storer, this volume also includes a paper by Prof.
David Morrison (Astronomy, University of Hawaii), prepared, in its original form, for a 1974
conference sponsored by the editors of Pens‚e . There is also an introduction by Dr. Donald
Goldsmith, editor of S c. V and organizer of the AAAS panel, and a foreword by the novelist and
authority on heresiology Isaac Asimov. From the proclaimed standpoint of "scientific orthodoxy"
Asimov begins by raising the question "What does one do with a heretic?", with specific
reference to Velikovsky; goes on, with unimpeachable orthodoxy, to write that Velikovsky's
proposed physical explanation for catastrophic events recorded in the Bible is a "far less
satisfactory hypothesis" than is "the hypothesis that divine intervention caused the miracles",
and concludes that "Velikovskians" are totally impervious to any amount of "mere logic." (S c.
V, pp. 8-15) He does not, however, recommend that they be turned over to the secular arm...
The AAAS volume is presented by its sponsors as "a full scale critique" (Goldsmith, S c. V, p.
27) which, according to the review commissioned by the AAAS Journal Science, accomplishes a
definitive refutation of Velikovsky's "downright preposterous" heresy. The essays in this book
"utterly lay waste his theories." Sagan's paper "is amusing, acrid, and totally devastating...
his essay alone is sufficient to reduce the Velikovsky theory to anile fancy," and "Velikovsky
is flatly and totally disproven... As far as Velikovskianism is concerned it is dead and
buried. The final nail has been driven." (Science, v. l99, Jan. 20, 1978, pp. 288-9)
Was this appraisal accurate? Referring to the trial by press, yes. V. was further damaged in
the eyes of scientists everywhere. Speaking of substance, whether of the symposium or of the
papers, it was not true. The arguments of Sagan, Mulholland, and Morrison were mostly well-
known and those of Huber (the surprise amateur of ancient Babylonian tablets) had been long ago
considered by Stecchini and Rose. Additions and revisions allowed to the writers did little to
bolster their defenses when it came time to publish the book Scientists Confront Velikovsky. An
early analysis of the enemy dispositions appeared in Pens‚e ; then, in two issues of Kronos
(III2 and IV3), and in pieces appearing elsewhere, supporters of V., forced to waylay the
establishment speakers in the alleyways, stripped them of their arguments. The Cornell
University Press, a willing captive of circumstances, which might have published a fascinating,
meaty volume on the issues, published one poor lopsided volume, and sold paperback rights to W.
W. Norton Company. The heretics remained in the alleyways. Scarcely any reviews (except those
of the heretics) put the opposing volumes side by side and compared them judiciously, or even
savagely.
I shall not go into the several dozen points of contention here, and will take Deg's word for
it that the substance of the full arguments did more good than harm for a considerable range of
quantavolutionary hypotheses, including some precisely attributable to V.
Shane Mage, in appraising the speeches against V., uncovered in them several important
concessions that had been apparently achieved over the years. First, the book Scientists
Confront Velikovsky "disavows and repudiated the entire 'Scientific polemic' of the 1950's and
60's both implicitly and explicitly." Next, both the sponsor, Goldsmith, and Mulholland assert
that V. 's ideas and arguments are not "un" nor "anti"-scientific, whatever the press and then
the scientific community presumed to draw from the event. Furthermore, the legitimacy of cosmic
catastrophic hypotheses in science was acknowledged both by Sagan and Mulholland, but the
specific hypotheses of V. were attacked (and obviously the scientists are in confusion as to
how they can work historically and empirically with the hypotheses that they admit.)
In line with my earlier suggestion, a different and more proper title would have brought these
most important areas of agreement to the fore. If these would have been the subjects of the
panel, and if Velikovsky had been only one out of eight panel members and authors, four of whom
would have adopted positive positions and four adversary positions, then the world of science
would have been much impressed and enlightened, and the heretics might have surrendered their
weapons with honor. V. himself would have acquired many scientific allies and be better
received from then on in discussions among scientists; hundreds of hours of anxious and
resentful negotiations and dispute would have been avoided; and many fresh minds might have
been inspired to enter the newly opened field of quantavolution. The AAAS affair was a great
opportunity lost to quantavolution by V. and the establishment agents.
Deg disliked the word "heretic." I mentioned so earlier. Perhaps I should have renamed this
book. To him the word was un-American. It was one more useless nuisance for indulging V. 's
self-image. True, the dictionaries include it with its modern meaning, "one who dissents from
an accepted belief or doctrine of any kind," but in a modern democracy, he said, the occasions
for heresy are innumerable, while, without severe sanctions, the hysterical historical pitch of
the word is absent.
Whereas V. called himself a heretic both in respect to religion and to science, he chose to
stress science as the offending authority. In his day, in Western Europe and America, the idea
of heresy hardly held meaning for the larger society, although it could be effective in the
ambiance of, say, Catholicism or Presbyterianism; even here one had to lay claim to authority
heretically within the group itself.
V. was determined to be a heretic from within science but to do so one had to be a scientist in
the first place, and one of the childish games played between the scientists and V. had to do
with whether he was indeed a scientist and therefore properly within science's jurisdiction to
be adjudged heretical. Logically, we are back with Alice in Wonderland and not the least of the
skits form never-never land was the massive attack upon V. launched in the name of science and
culminating in the book, Scientists Confront Velikovsky.
Here, from the beginning, the scientists promoting the event at the AAAS meeting in San
Francisco, were befuddled. Yes, they felt, they had to defrock V., but to do so they had to
frock him and admit him to their canonical court.
But to admit him they had to claim jurisdiction over him; that is, they had to legitimize him
by allowing him to debate his ideas with them. One can perceive this strain and stress clearly
from beginning to end of the touted confrontation over a period of years. The promoters, King
et al., would say, we are not meeting to discuss V. but only to make it clear that he is not
speaking as a scientist. And then, of course, they proceed by the only modern way science
knows, to refute him as a scientist in public argument.
When the time came to publish Scientists Confront Velikovsky the establishment, operating by
queer contradiction, obtained the good services of author, Isaac Asimov, the most famous
popularizer of science and science fiction to introduce the work, admitting ipso facto that its
contents alone would not fulfill the contract put out on V.
Then what does Asimov do but fall into the pit of scholasticism by spending his precious few
pages as an instant expert on heresy. He accepts the fractured word and further mangles it. He
concocts and improperly applies a distinction between two kinds of heretics, those who commit
heresies from inside the system and those who do so from the outside. The first type can be
sometimes correct, the second never. V. was the never-correct type. Says Asimov, "Public
support or no, the exoheretic virtually never proves to be right. (How can he be right when he,
quite literally, doesn't know what he is talking about?)"
Lest he be pilloried for such bold statements, Asimov has insured himself by the most vulgar
kind of verbal trickery: he makes insiders out of outsiders if they have "reached the peak of
professional excellence" whatever that is. So naturally -- once again he says it -- "the
exoheretic... is virtually never right, and the history of science contains no great advance,
to my knowledge, initiated by an exoheretic." There is no arguing with such foolishness. The
foolishness, I must add, is compounded by self-contradiction, for is not Asimov's gun hired to
introduce this book because he has a large public that buys books? So here is Asimov, the
outsider, depending upon the public which, he says, is always wrong, to follow him in his
denunciation of heresy.
But matters become worse for Isaac Asimov. He says that the scientific establishment (calling
it the "scientific orthodoxy") is "completely helpless if the heretic is not a professional
scientist -- if he does not depend on grants or appointments, and if he places his views before
the world through some medium other than the learned journal." That is, the establishment can
withhold grants, appointments, and publication from its own heretical members, but cannot from
"exoheretics" or outsiders. That leaves the public as the only outlet for the exoheretic's
views, but Asimov says that the public is never right: "the appeal to the public is, of course,
valueless form the scientific standpoint." He does not seem to realize that he is condemning
himself and science, for he seems to approve this situation while granting that in rare
instances an inside heretic is incorrectly punished. I cannot easily believe that the two
publishers (Cornell University and W. W. Norton) and the several authors, especially not the
clever Carl Sagan -- but how can one watch out for everyone's business? -- did not read
carefully the few passages that prefaced their great act.
In the years of which we speak, Deg had a part to play in the establishment and it was not a
bad life. He turned up in Washington form time to time. He lunched with his friend "Kirk"
Kirkpatrick, Executive Director of the Political Science Association, where he was for a time a
Council Member, or at the Senate or the Cosmos Club with friends; Bill Baroody was funding some
of his writings from the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Earl Voss
and Tom Johnson there were pleasant companions; it was a smallish show, then, close to the
Republican Presidents and Conservative after his direct relations with it ceased. Deg knew a
number of Congressmen. He had access to the U. S. Office of Education when Frank Keppel of the
Harvard Graduate School of Education had gone to run it, for he had worked with Keppel at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education and had been offered appointment there. He consulted with
the Department of Defense when "winning the hearts and minds" of Vietnamese was top priority,
and went to Vietnam on a panel requested by General Westmoreland, then Commander-in-chief. He
had acquaintances who were in the top echelons of half a dozen great companies, and half a
dozen of the large foundations, others who were millionaires, UN ambassadors and bureaucrats,
New York politicians, and so on. He helped leaders like Nelson Rockefeller on occasion (without
compensation). He went as a delegate to UNESCO. He helped the Publisher of Life magazine to
help the American Jewish Committee to establish better relations with the Vatican, and was
shoved by a wily Spanish Priest for a moment into the ample arms of dear old wobbly-eared
reformer, Pope John XXIII.
The New York University President, James Hester, also from Princeton, was as friendly as he
could be to a faculty troublemaker. The departmental faculty itself was to Deg's ways of
thinking too petty, unintellectual and anarchic to launch upon large schemes, and moreover his
giant University was always in a state of imminent financial collapse. After his first year
there, he had to bring in practically all of the funding for his projects from foundations and
gifts, which is no so difficult when one is in the swim of things. His middle-level university
income from his tenured appointment was supplemented by consulting fees, honoraria, and grants.
He spent all the money that he could spare on his American Behavioral Scientist, which was felt
to have a good influence on social science research, and gave him editorial influence, whether
critical, or to help friends, or to assist students and up-and-coming scholars to get ahead.
Publishers were easy to come by. Advances were generous for textbooks, subsidies for the
others. Complimentary books flooded his library. He could stop at practically any university in
the world and be invited to lecture, dine, discuss. He traveled abroad often, always with jobs
to do, always funded at least in part by some agency (never The Agency) or foundation.
To hear him tell the story, he could have gone on and on this way with la dolce vita, spreading
his wings of influence over more and more people, things and activities. He could have dawdled
more with attractive women, driven a new car, worn new suits, written books with ex-Presidents,
etc. Why this was actually his way, his route, his fate, could have been foretold in childhood.
I doubt that he fully realized it. But perhaps enough of the reasons become evident in the
pages of this book to preserve us from going back to the "Roaring Twenties" of Chicago, Ill.,
U. S. A. There seems little reason to doubt Deg, however, when he cites his friend Ithiel de
Sola Pool's analysis of networks. By a calculus of probability, given an unstructured society,
the chances of any person knowing a person who knows another person who knows any other
particular singled-out person in the society are very high. Theoretically, given the relatively
sharply structured society everywhere, he could be introduced to anyone, even in the worldwide
society. Deg, in his old notes on Pool's manuscript, figures that he practically needs know
only his own widely differentiated acquaintances to know anybody in the top elite, and needs
but jump one more acquaintanceship to meet just about anybody else. He even made a parlor game
out of his directory, and proceeding to say who whom he knew would know this person. This
occurs because a person who knows 2000 people is in a position to know the, say, 500
acquaintances each, of these, and this million, with its 500 acquaintances each, exceeds that
population by far, but since the population is stratified, the number falls short of total
success until the chain is extended.
There are applications of network theory to the workings of science. Conventional science, we
know, is not a juggernaut, a palpable monster, a solid phalanx, a disciplined corps of
bureaucrats, a theocracy, or even an organized political party. It is --it must be, in order to
avoid its own contradiction -- a subtle, diffuse, often impenetrable, often disguised, often
unconsciously composed network of relationships.
Marxist scholars would readily comprehend this fact and would tie the whole network to the
economic production mechanisms of the capitalist system. The Chicago School of political
science would see in it promptly the manifestations of Mosca's "political formula and ruling
class" and Deg's "ideological imperative."
Discriminated against indifferently in American Society, evangelical Christians such as many
Baptists, represented in a growing movement of "Creation Science," but usually acting
individually for their nooks and crannies in the system, would also be characteristically alert
to the operation of the scientific reception system. So would the large number of individual
American and British heretics who compose a disinherited, not formally qualified, keen and
occupationally and characterologically diverse "watch and ward" network, ready to suspect the
worst of the establishment. Resembling these latter would be many a disenchanted student, not
yet amalgamated into the conventional system. All of these together, plus the simply curious,
might readily muster the kind of crowd that assembled to witness the Velikovsky panel convoked
by the program committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San
Francisco. The audience, well over one thousand persons, was by far the largest of the
Convention.
Let me now explain how it happens that the scientific network, or establishment, might in this
case, as it has often done in the history of science, be acting against its own presumed
interests and hence to repress new correct theories. How does the ruling formula of science
triumph over challenging ideas, making them heretical, and chastising their proponents?
Every field of knowledge is nowadays organized. It has therefore leaders. Some of these leaders
are parochial. Others have connections with relevant social networks and organizations of the
other fields and other segments of society. These leaders acquire fame (which already
represents the same circular system of the generation past, advancing for instance a Menzel,
who inherits for a Harlow Shapley, or a de Grazia, who inherits from a Charles Merriam.)
The mass media, though it hardly reports science, seeks out or gives access to fame. Reporters,
woefully unprepared, interview the leaders. Educational media, including widespread fund-
seeking alumni magazines, turn to their exemplaries of the famous. The occasional television,
radio, and magazine concerns about the knowledge industry result in reports that are favorable
to the same group. Foundations appoint from the same leaders to their boards of trustees and
consulting committees. So do scientific and political government agencies, although other
interests can intrude more here. The leaders, and now we are speaking of some five thousand
persons, give awards disproportionately to each other, as do generals and admirals. Government
foundations, such as the National Science Foundation, are even more susceptible to network
influence than private foundations.
In the area of book publishing, the ideas of the leaders largely determine what manuscripts
shall be published as textbooks, and on what kinds of books the university presses should spend
their small resources. Trade book publishers for the general public have almost no viable
interest in serious scientific or humanistic work. Usually what they publish in these areas is
meant to blossom quickly and die, to challenge no strong interest, and certainly not to offer
alternatives to major scientific paradigms unless they would join the ranks of somewhat
disreputable and financially insecure publishers. Thus, if Velikovsky had published with Lyle
Stuart's firm instead of the Macmillan company originally, the opposition would never have
gathered. They had to have as their target a press that would seek to avoid censure for
"conduct unbecoming a gentleman."
The scientific and professional magazines that report new knowledge are governed by boards and
editors, who are acceptable to the leaders and are watched rather carefully by them. Fading
away from the specialized periodicals are magazines of popular science, few of which are
financially secure and all of which are dependent upon the good will of the leaders. The
Scientific American, for example, would never wittingly go beyond the activities of the core
elements of a science. When a troublesome or controversial theory surfaces on its pages,
evidencing a conflict between two leader-led theories, it seeks to appease both sides by a
second article or letters of comment. Its need to seem "original" is fed by lavish
illustrations, a feature it shares with the National Geographic Magazine, the Smithsonian,
Discovery and other periodicals. By editorial tricks, all such magazines lend their materials a
glamour and adventurism that they usually do not in reality possess.
The network of leaders extends down through the public secondary and elementary schools from
the colleges by way of lesser sheikhs, supervising boards, and hoi polloi of the fields. Not
even the threat of teaching "creation science" in some state will excite overly the nabobs. The
legal and journalistic techniques of handling anti-Darwinism have long been known, and a legion
of educators moves efficiently into battle on this front with little direct participation of
the national leadership. Private secular schools -- the Lawrenceville Academies and Grotons --
would never wish their pupils to utter the wrong titles or theories in anticipation of entering
the halls of learning hallowed by the leadership. The Catholic schools are deintellectualized;
nor has the Catholic Church yet retracted its judgment against Galileo.
A word, finally, about the corporate world, where so much applied and some pure research is
done, from which, too, funds must flow increasingly into the coffers of the universities. Their
corporate images, hence their profits, depend upon the skills people come to believe (via
advertising and public relations) that they command and engross. Like university presidents,
leaders of science dip into corporate treasuries on occasion as consultants, board members, and
officers. Just as retired generals are common in the aerospace and engineering industries,
highly placed scientists, even without the need to retire, are frequently positioned in
corporate research structures. Immersed in this and in all that has gone before, a leader of
the establishment network has almost no incentive to take up a new controversial theory, much
less to originate one himself. He is himself subject to disciplinary actions, often quite
subtle, should he stray from the fold.
The network can be most simply presented as a list of institutions through which the leaders of
science operate or upon which they exert influence. The influence is continuous, is intensified
on crucial issues and, in my opinion, is generally beneficial and should be enhanced throughout
the system. Meanwhile, however, the influence needs consciousness-raising and built-in
mechanisms of reform.
LEADERS OF SCIENCE
extend their influence into:
1. Audio-Visual Media
(fame; reportage)
a. TV and radio Networks
b. Public Broadcasting
c. Documentary films
2. Popular Press
a. Scientoid Magazines
b. Science Fiction
c. Publicity (columnists)
d. Newspaper and newsmagazines, prizes, etc.
3. Book Publishing
a. Trade
b. Textbooks
c. University Press
4. Scientific Journals
5. Universities
a. Secular Schools
b. Religious Schools
6. Scientific Associations
7. Foundations (private)
8. Governments
a. Executive offices, commissions
b. Legislatures
c. Government Foundations, Prizes, etc.
9. Corporations
a. Research and consultation
b. Board of Directors
The leaders of science in the English-speaking world can be numbered from 50 to 10,000,
depending upon where you wish to draw the line of influence. They are fairly concentrated
geographically in the Northeast Megalopolis, Chicago, Washington, and the San Francisco Bay
Area, with a small English contingent, fairly closely in touch.
An extraordinary fact is that immense scattered network ultimately engaging the whole world is
composed of what in business or government would be regarded as absurdly small units. They are
like the oldtime Piggly-Wiggly small grocery store, owner-operated network, not fully
centralized, bureaucratic establishment. Furthermore, it is largely subconscious or scarcely
perceived. Nevertheless, in the end -- and merely to picture the network -- the librarian in
Juneau, Alaska, the student at the University of Tampa (Florida), the editors of the Times
Literary Supplement, CBS, PBS, NOF, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University Press, the Board of
Education of the City of Chicago, the engineers of Western Electric, the science section of the
New York Times, the editors of Science Magazine and its popular offshoot Science 84, the
National Academy of Sciences, the curators of the Museum of Natural History in New York, and
many thousands of other "nerve endings" of the science system of communications and influence
respond to cues and jiggles of power from the elite group.
Surely, it is one of the most benign elites of the world. It probably rules easier and can rule
less than almost all other elites. Its punishments are relatively light. It stupefies people
but all forms of rule stupefy their clients or subjects; here, indeed, the science elite is
more enlightening, in its double function of stupefying and enlightening, in its S/ E ratio,
than most elite or influence networks. But its exists, and it is effective. To evade or avoid
or attack the Scientific Establishment, to invade its inner sanctum and transform its Holy of
Holes, its ideological center, its paradigms, Weltanschauung, ruling formulas, or whatever one
might wish to call its heart, is the work of decades and, at least before, of centuries, and,
in the words of Lasswell, almost always involves the process of "partial incorporation," by
which is meant that before the revolution is won, the elite changes its behavior to concede the
victory and keep out the revolutionary personnel.
Thus the monarchical regimes of Europe incorporated in most cases the key ideas of the French
Revolution before the republican revolutionaries conquered them, and the capitalist regimes
went "welfare state" before the socialists could take power; so that, if the quantavolutionary
movement were to seriously threaten the ruling elite of Newtonian stabilitarian and Darwinian
gradualist uniformitarians, these would be reacting, as in fact they are acting now, to
incorporate the quantavolutionary formulas and outlook.
Meanwhile the quantavolutionary movement would be formed out of mistakes of the existing
regime, out of apostates and disaffected scientists and engineers, occult publishers, little
presses, small personal foundations, religious creations, maverick legislators, fugitive
publications sliding out of Xerox machines, and a motley public crowd of dissenting readers and
talkers. Sooner or later, according to Roberto Michel's "Iron Law of Oligarchy." the Scientific
Establishment would be modified in attitude, beliefs, practices and personnel but would still
be the oligarchy, or, let us say, "a better and more enlightened class of leaders."
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 4 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE FOIBLES OF HERETICS
For his first half-dozen years on Naxos, Deg stayed in a town apartment the Venetians had built
in the 13th Century; then he moved out to his stone house on the isolated promontory of
Stylida. In these places, much of the Quantavolution series was written. Deg's permanent
encampment at Stylida was of marbled stone and primitively equipped, not a cabin, neither a
villa. Antiques jostled useful junk on the marble tables and shelves. He pounded nails into the
walls and from them everything dangled. Empty plastic bags were stuffed behind shelves for
further use, empty bottles were hoarded. String, cord and rope in odd lengths were saved and
hung up. From this frugal perch sloping upwards, he contemplated the serene seascape before him
and the battling cats of the world beyond, not excepting the heretics.
Saving rope reminded him of Frank Knight, exemplar of the laissez-faire Chicago School of
Economics who, in his office at the University of Chicago used to store the string he too
saved. According to an eyewitness, he was mounting a train for the East one day when he called
out to his waving family, pointing, "There, get that piece of string!" His highly regarded
economics, thought Deg, were nicely encompassable by Homo Schizo theory.
Knight's colleague, the very liberal U. S. Senator Paul Douglas was dining in Manhattan,
another time with Robert Merriam, Assistant to President Eisenhower, and with Deg, and Douglas
told of a Republican Senator who had ridiculed the incessant internecine fighting among the
Democrats; "like a bunch of alley-cats" they were. Whereupon Paul had risen to add, "That may
be true, but what in the end is the result -- many more cats!" And while they were laughing,
the waiter handed the distinguished-looking elderly gentleman the bill and they had to laugh
more as the Scot, Quaker, economist, and statesman, and foe of loose spending, winced,
grumbled, and paid.
The cosmic heretics, bereft of resources, collected pieces of string to build bold systems
Coming out of nowhere, and without structure or discipline, they fought like alley-cats.
Rebuffed by the world of the press and science, they often became morose.
Deg's Journal, January 25, 1970
I spoke to Immanual on the telephone. He is feeling poorly and he intimates both a throat
ailment and sinister external moves as the source. We are all suffering vague symptoms in the
world. For months, I have felt this and the pain and scarcely know to what to attribute them?
There are thirty physical and psychical causes all intermingled and the physical uneasiness is
appropriately vague. So many millions in the world are, I think, similarly affected. It is as
if the germs of diseases were directed by a mastermind, who says to them, "Now man has learned
to be specific and special in his therapies, so you must now be as vague as possible, so that
he will not know what he is suffering from."
Deg might as well have gone on to talk of the generalized "germ" of schizotypus, which suffuses
human nature and finds a great many ways of emerging in disease, now specific, now general. It
may be no coincidence that in this decade two reciprocal kinds of slogan clashed with each
other in the mind of society, the one aimed at pandemic expressing of paranoia, the other at
fighting off paranoia, so that everyone was "unavailable" and "by appointment only," and "fill
out the form" while people were telling one another "reach out and touch someone." Highly
special acts of terrorism increased around the world as highly general public opinion surveys
showed the public to be regarding every group of leaders and every special group as
untrustworthy, including their own national and world leaders.
"The most despicable of all ways of suppression is denying to me the originality and
correctness of my predictions." So said Velikovsky at a philosophical panel at Notre Dame on
November 2, 1974. He was directing himself at the moment to Professor Michael Friedlander.
Friedlander had announced, "One of the things I'm not going to do is to attempt to defend the
foolish, and intemperate, and venomous statements that have been made by scientists over the
last 25 years." He proceeded then to incite Velikovsky's outburst (which one might also call
"foolish, intemperate, and venomous") by addressing himself to V. 's astronomical scenario of
the Venus encounter with Earth.
To be useful a prediction must be derivable logically and unambiguously from the model. If the
prediction bears only a tenuous relation to the model, then the validation of that prediction
may in fact say nothing about the model.
In rebuttal, V. pointed to the details of his own early claims: that Venus was incandescent in
historical times; that the planet had to be very hot to carry the gaseous hydrocarbon clouds
that he believed to be there; and that he had declared the first announced temperatures of 600
degrees to have been too low, and in fact they were.
What constitutes a prediction gives grounds for incessant quarreling and namecalling. Deg was
convinced that scores of his own prognostications in sociology, economics, and politics could
be culled from his own books and shown to have been realized. For instance, he had predicted at
one time that the achievement of equal population districts (" one man -- one vote"), so
stoutly advocated by the cities of America, would result in heavier political weight for the
cities' chief frustration, their own suburbs. He was not surprised nor did he put in a claim
when the prediction was fulfilled. He never got around to predicating when the world would end,
but, should it end, he could in the thereafter cite some highly probable estimates.
I did not know when Velikovsky got onto the claims and predictions "kick." I am guessing that
the famous letter by Bargmann and Motz got him going. It was the first nice thing ever said
about him in a scientific journal. The letter was V.'s idea and he provided much of the
contents. It asserted that V. had suggested radio noises were emanating from Jupiter and were
discoverable; they were discovered serendipitously by Burke and Franklin over a year later.
Further, in 1950, V. said that the surface of Venus must be very hot, and, sure enough, by 1961
the heat had been discovered by reliable instruments. Practically nothing was said of the
method employed to arrive at these advance claims. But so guilty are scientists in the matter
of "claims" and "priorities" that V. profited greatly from his cryptic and general utterances.
And, no doubt, had he been guiding NASA research, these items would have been systematically
uncovered.
The practice of advancing priorities is childish and the idea of proving a general cosmogony by
a race of claims is ludicrous. There can be no crucial test or event. Even if Venus were to
slip its moorings and drift toward Earth tomorrow, the historical scenario would not be proven.
If the cosmogony is accepted for working purposes, the prediction (or test) will have meaning;
if the cosmogony is not accepted, the prediction cannot be stated. This is shown by the
resilient way in which the great heat of Venus has been claimed as a greenhouse effect by Sagan
and others. A member of the audience at the Notre-Dame panel made the most fitting remarks:
Each side has constructed its own version of what would count as a crucial test, and has
constructed its own judgment as to how that test has been passed or failed. This is a
singularly sterile manner for resolving disputes.... As far as rational dispute is concerned,
we have to begin by saying we might be wrong.... to say what would count against us in our own
book.
It would certainly be appropriate, within every scientific work and in a discussion of it, to
confess its weakness, to argue its null-hypotheses. We are bound to do a poor job of attacking
ourselves. And, of course, disputation may overburden issues to the harm of clear presentation
of the theses. Nevertheless, Deg, in writing Chaos and Creation, was anxious enough about
excessive positive argumentation to give over a chapter to the Devil's Advocate. In one sense,
the cosmic heretics in the Velikovsky case were a conservative group, asking for law and order
in science, demanding even that the letter of the law be followed, all the more because their
substantive ideas -- erratic planets, forceful electricity in space, short geological time,
etc.-- were deemed untrue. In fact, like the typical heretical group in politics or religion,
they had logically to deny that the word "heretic" could apply to themselves; for theirs was
the truth. To those who like myself believe that science enjoys only hypothetical and useful
"truths," a scientific heresy is logically impossible. Heresy is an excrescence of authorities.
Heretics typically are intolerant of other heretics, if only to hold together their highly
vulnerable and unruly group within a miasma of ideas. We find a push-pull phenomenon occurring:
the heretics are pushed out of conventional science and attract or pull in the religious, the
occult, of ESP, "Ancient Astronauts," UFO's and astrology, the eccentric, and the revolutionary
types. All of his provides a hustle and bustle on the fringes of science. All scientists are
normally neurotic about their fringes. Only the wisest (read "self-aware and self-knowing") and
self-loving of them could understand and sympathize with what they saw going on.
Onetime, in the fall of 1976, far from the scene of action, Deg heard distant sounds of strife
and the name called out of his old friend, Professor Paul Kurtz, a pragmatist philosopher and
Editor of the Humanist magazine. Besides many pleasant hours working together, Deg remembered
how Kurtz had let him introduce a scatological remark into an article of this well-mannered
publication. He wrote Kurtz a tender of good offices, suggesting attention ought to be given to
neo-catastrophism, and sending a privately printed essay on Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis.
Kurtz replied (in confidence, for he was a careful keeper of the peace) explaining that the
fracas had generated out of a single sentence against Velikovsky in an article by Sprague de
Camp, a detested figure among Velikovsky's cult. Kurtz said that even if he had wished to do
so, he could not censor de Camp. He was startled by the vehement and even menacing letters that
he received arising first from publishing the De Camp article and then from a possibly garbled
quotation of him in the Washington Post. At the same time, Kurtz acknowledges, "The followers
of Velikovsky claim that he was unfairly treated by Shapley, etc. -- with which I fully agree,
I remember full well your justifiable concern." He was, he said, open-minded, aware of general
disbelief in V.'s theories, but not conversant with them, or with Deg's for that matter, and he
wanted to know Deg's theory of evolution: "Your thesis is most creatively provocative. My major
question is what does it do to the theory of evolution?"
Deg told V. of Kurtz's letter, V. spoke to Greenberg, and Greenberg fired off a letter to Deg,
wondering how he had come to be in touch with Kurtz, and retelling the story as he saw it:
"Kurtz may be your friend, but we are certainly not enemies." Deg could only wonder once more
at how Greenberg could turn any situation into a personal threat and from this into an
aggression.
The Humanist did publish an article by V., defending himself strongly against the then current
voices of his opponents. Possibly the pressure of anger unjustified impelled The Humanist to
give V. his say; after all, isn't the lesson of democratic politics that a group needs anger,
not justice, to make its point?
V. was lucky enough to have a few opponents who made a hobby of him. They kept an eye on the
news about him and cast enough aspersions his way to maintain his more diligent supporters in
fine fettle. In keeping with the history of ostracized movements, nearly all of the heretics
worked part-time at the job. Most were poor, although they did not reveal their poverty like
oldentimes Parisian bohemians. They were, too, mostly unreliable, partly because of their
busyness and hand-to-mouth existence, and because they were not under the lash of the dollar,
but also because they were often afflicted with intense inner struggles. I would quote
Nietzsche regarding them, "It takes a chaos within oneself to give birth to a shooting star."
"That's it, they're crazy," one might say, which is a fraudulent pretense of those who are
crazy-normals.
Astronomy professor George O. Abell of U. C. L. A. writing in the Skeptical Inquirer says that
the followers of V. " are actually following somebody who may be a bit crazy. For isn't there
something psychotic about a person who claims that he alone in a field with which he is
unfamiliar, can fathom the pure truth, while hundreds of thousands of specialists with
lifetimes of experience behind them are muddling about in the darkness? And doesn't the popular
acceptance of such a scientific-religious hero suggest a problem, or at least some kind of an
unfilled need, on the part of the follower?"
Deg's Journal, Princeton, December 27, 1978
Warner Sizemore here yesterday, 10.45-1.30, discussing many affairs.
He reported that not only Greenberg and others were angry at the SIS magazine group in England
but that Velikovsky was upset because of their caviling at points and their undermining his
theories instead of developing them.
Further V. ordered Sizemore and Greenberg to drop Peter James as Senior Editor from the
editorial board of Kronos in three months, or else he would give them no further material of
his own to print. James is associate editor for the historical content of SISR and also on the
Kronos board.
Then, says Sizemore, V. reconsidered and told them that he didn't mean what he said. Sizemore
did not guess whether this was a conclusion of principle or of expedience. (There are several
reasons for expedience: the scandal, the harm to Sizemore and Greenberg, as well as Kronos,
etc.) In the later case V. would remain guilty of the very behavior of scientist upon which his
own case of persecution is based in part. If his retraction of his order was in principle, then
the action may be partially excused because it was withdrawn.
It is not the first time that V. has come perilously close to practicing the behavior of his
enemies. He is by character domineering, and suppression of the opposition would come easily to
him under other circumstances.
V. had been called a charlatan but there was nothing to it. Deg asked himself, how could anyone
use the word? And that they used it as others use curses and obscenities. At most, on occasion
and like most men, he believed suspiciously hard in ideas that were not so firm, but none,
thought Deg, in this sense had never written a thoroughly honest book and none ever could, by
the very limits of language, for language is fundamentally a compendium of psychic tricks,
played upon oneself and others, fraudulent in a sense.
But now, I think, reflecting upon the heretics, that fraud is a remote cousin of pretension. To
lay claim to something is a human necessity. Yet whoever has any claims must be a fraud. To say
"I am alive!" is a pretense and a fraud, a boastful claim to what after all is a delusion about
nature, a question begged. We are all such frauds.
There is something else, too, another kind of subtle fraud, a fraud in the too delicate sense
of being wronged, and this V. had. One who feels that he had been defrauded is a fraud, as, for
instance, in criminology, many victims of fraud are engaged in attempted fraud to begin with,
making money out of nothing, etc.... And then, persuading others that one has been defrauded,
is also a fraud. At such persuasive tactics, V. was a master.
He could persuade by overpowering belief and documentation that he had been defrauded on a
grand scale. He could persuade the most pathetically defrauded people that he had been
defrauded more than they, and the defrauded turned their purses of energy and sympathy over to
him. For he had converted his defrauding into the collective conscience, and was collecting
retribution and returns on his defrauding because his supporters neglected their own suits in
order to pursue his suit but received no more than abstract justice.
It was as if all the gas company's customers thought they were cheated and put all their
energies into the case of one them, making the case a landmark, but the favorable decision on
behalf of the test case resulted only in the vindication and compensation of that person, while
the rest could not afford to sue, and the gas company hardly changed its practices.
Now the time had come for Deg to print Chaos and Creation. It was 1980. An outsider, innocent
of the sociology of heretical groups, would expect the publication of Chaos and Creation to be
welcomed. The field would open up further. Fresh material would offer itself for discussion.
The implications of the work of V. would be extended. New possibilities would be manifest.
There might even be some personal congratulations in order, for no one had yet produced any
considerable work in the format of a book that could be readily assimilated to most of what the
readers of Kronos were versed in and attentive to. Not at all. When the book was in page
proofs, it induced the dormant strain in relations between the directors of Kronos and Deg to
rupture into hostilities. The occasion for the hostilities came, as if often does in human
relations, whether personal or international, out of a situation promising well. Executive
Editor of Kronos Sizemore and Deg were meeting weekly out of friendship. They ate, drank,
walked and talked together for hours on end. Sizemore was enthusiastic about Deg's manuscript
of Moses, and had also been reading Chaos and Creation as the proofs arrived from India.
At the time, Deg and Aim had largely abandoned Manhattan and were living in a tiny apartment in
Princeton, writing their books, and spending as little money as possible in order to pay for
the production of Chaos and Creation in Bombay. When Warner came to visit, they would huddle
their sizable frames together amicably amidst piles of books and papers for a while, until Ami
would retreat to the second room to write upon the kitchen table between the sink and the small
bed.
The Indian production was nightmarish. A thick file of correspondence attests to the pains
engendered by cultural and physical distance. A perfect book was out of question. The work was
being set in hot type, linotype, which, unlike the word processors of today, lets new errors
creep in as rapidly as old mistakes are expunged. For weeks a strike of Indian paper mills
stopped supplies to the printer. The quality of the paper, never good, worried Deg, too. The
poor Indians were trying to conserve their old machines and paper and ink and Deg could not
tell from the proofs whether fonts were broken or the paper was refusing the bad ink, and,
worse, whether the final printing impression would be uniform on the pages. The book was loaded
with proper names of extreme diversity, with illustrations, and with hundreds of citations,
three most common sources of typographical, printing, and formatting mistakes. Deg had known
the same printers from a decade before; they had printed Kalos: What is to be done with our
World and Kalotics; he had been to their shop; he liked the several owners and workers. But it
was a different world, of different standards, and to convert it acceptably to American tastes,
while keeping costs down and work within hailing distance of the schedule, was continually
frustrating.
Warner, believing Deg would be pleased (and no doubt he would have been pleased) to see some
portion of the work printed, sent (without Deg's knowledge) a photocopy of the page proofs to
Greenberg, then in Florida, and spoke to Greenberg about the progress of the work in the course
of their frequent telephone conversations. Greenberg was enraged by errors still in the proofs,
or so the issue was presented to Deg by Warner. Deg, already upset by the defects and by the
report, asked Greenberg on the phone to be specific about the work being "full of errors." When
the letter came, the little that was added to the mistakes transmitted by telephone was rushed
off to India for correction. There were mistakes so slight as a compositor's misspelling of
Greenberg's name in a footnote crediting him with contributions to quantavolution (his name
being mistakenly mispelled by the compositor as "Queenberg," for instance, in itself sufficient
cause for paranoiac fury), and a wrong middle initial for Earl R. Milton, who received 'Earl S.
', a complimentary psychological mistake tying him to a dear old professor of Deg, Earl S.
Johnson, the same to whom The Divine Succession is dedicated.
Writes Greenberg:
After going through half of the text of Chaos and Creation, the Citations, and Bibliography, I
have decided to enclose a sampling of pages that is symptomatic of the entire work. The kind of
repair help that you need goes far beyond any gratis assistance that I could provide. I have
already spent the better part of three days reading your book and no relief appears in sight.
Typos abound, names are misspelled, publications are improperly cited and dated, many dates are
questionable and just plain wrong, not to mention glaring omissions from the published
literature. The catastrophic sequence proposed by Velikovsky has been rearranged (Mercuria
precedes Jovia) and work by people such as Warlow has been uncritically accepted, etc., etc.
He goes on to list various, mostly brief, articles, and certain contributors to Kronos that
were not in Deg's bibliography (the longest and most complete that had ever appeared on
catastrophism and Quantavolution), concluding "What you have done is downright insulting and I
find it hard to believe that it wasn't deliberate."
Deg replies on April 2 from Princeton:
You agreed to telephone me collect, later on, and to recite your list of such findings into my
tape-recorder. You knew that the need for any corrections was immediate. I kept the machine by
my telephone for six days more and now here is your letter. Several additional typographical
errors are indicated, two of which I wish I might change, along with the aforesaid. Otherwise
your letter pullulates with grotesque exaggeration, unsupported allegations, hostility, and
vanity. Dealing with paranoia makes one paranoid: could it be that you first promised and then
decided not to offer corrections of the proofs because you want to be free to slander the book?
Deg was surprised at the rapidity with which the situation deteriorated. Sizemore, father,
organizer, producer, financier, executive editor and trouble-shooter for Kronos let Deg
understand that a selection from the book would not be printed and that the book would not be
reviewed. Deg scoffed at this: how could it not be reviewed? Whose magazine was it? It would be
a mockery of the pretenses of Kronos magazine, both substantive and libertarian, to suppress
its mention. Warner unhappily suggested that the book need not be reviewed in Kronos. Deg
insisted that. Warner do something about the matter, to no avail. Their warm friendship
abruptly froze.
Many months later, the book arrives from India. A review copy was sent to Greenberg. Other
copies were sold respondents from an announcement by way of the mails. One day in April of
1982, Deg received a letter from Stephen Franklin, whom he did not know. [I find that they
exchanged letters many years before.]
Dear Dr. DeGrazia:
I wish to obtain a copy of your book Chaos and Creation. Please let me know whether I may
obtain this directly from you, & if so how much, etc. If not, where? I am enclosing a copy of a
letter I received from Kronos since I feel you may be interested in how they are handling
requests for information about your book...
Franklin was referring to a letter from Leroy Ellenberger, who had been promoted from a free-
lance gadfly on V.'s opponents to Executive Secretary of Kronos. The letter was written on
Kronos letterhead with a Glassboro State College address, and did not oblige Franklin's request
for Deg's address. The letter follows:
Dear Mr. Franklin: With respect to the book Chaos and Creation which is the subject of your
March 25th inquiry, be advised that KRONOS has chosen, after examining it, not to be associated
with its promotion or distribution. For your information, the book was published privately in
India. Its author is in charge of its commercialization.
As a reader of KRONOS, you are no doubt aware that we are not averse to presenting a critical
approach to Velikovsky and that we will entertain responsible alternative, and even opposing,
views. Given our interest in developing a Velikovsky-based catastrophist alternative to
uniformitarianism, we would be more than anxious to inform our readers of new, fruitful sources
of information. The book in question leaves too much to be desired to merit, in our opinion,
serious attention.
If your curiosity gets the better of you, so be it. CAVEAT EMPTOR.
Deg called Franklin, received authorization to use his name when raising the issue, and with
malice afterthought, sent a letter to the President of the College, reproaching him for letting
the College be a party to damaging slander through people who were pretending to connected with
the School. Official action and an apology were asked. Expectedly, there came no reply, but
Sizemore was aggrieved by the step, calling it ridiculous and a charade.
Meanwhile, Deg chose out of the "staff" of Kronos several individuals whom he knew personally.
He wrote to ask them their attitude in regard to not reviewing his work. All replied
sympathetically; still not one found the issue serious enough to deliver an ultimatum to
Kronos, not Frederick Juenemann, not Cardona, not Lynn Rose.
Rose aroused Deg's ire for postulating an enmity between Greenberg and Deg which did not exist,
and evaded the issue of Ellenberger. (Deg liked ornery characters like Greenberg more than
suave types like Rose.) He wished to hurl at Rose a statement in Kronos made by V. against
Storer of the AAAS panel: "One who maintains 'neutrality' between a gross offender and the
victim of the offense does not give an objective account of the realities; the account is
biased in favor of the offender."
Even Earl Milton who was so close a friend and collaborator did not take up a strong position.
Irving Wolfe at University of Montreal replied that Chaos and Creation should be reviewed and
said that he would tell Greenberg so. Greenberg held firm, something he was good at doing; some
of the heat was turned against Ellenberger, as if his letter had been a willful rash act, and a
decline in his fortunes began, partly accounting for his retirement to his original home base
in St. Louis. But Deg regarded Ellenberger and even Sizemore as toys of Greenberg in this
instance. Toys for what? For psychiatric play-therapy, he insisted.
Many months later, as three of the "Staff" and friends including Deg sprawled about a sunny
dock and swam in the August waters of Lake Kashagawigamog near Halliburton, Ontario, they
talked of the affair and all seemed to agree (no vote being taken) that Lew Greenberg was
acting the dog in the manger, that he acted so habitually, that Ellenberger was irresponsible,
that the book should be reviewed, that Deg should cool down his reactor, and that Kronos would
collapse if Greenberg resigned, as he frequently threatened to do. And if Kronos collapsed,
where would its 2000 readers go, and where would its score of writers go to publish their
articles? Dwardu Cordona, a writer and editor of hard opinion but essentially sweet character,
asserted he would bring up the matter with Greenberg again. Deg was noncommittal. Later on, he
did receive a letter of Cardona from Vancouver mentioning, inter alia, that he talked to
Greenberg, who was still without remorse, and even still angry.
The past could not be recaptured, despite the restoration of a distant relationship, and the
major issue remained (the refusal to review Chaos and Creation). Sizemore sent a note of
condolences when Deg's mother died and then another note apologizing for addressing the first
note to "Albert" instead of "Alfred." Deg had not noticed the mistake or, more properly, had
noticed it and thought nothing of it. Now he apprehended that the printers' errors, which
misspelled Greenberg's name in one place, etc., and the personal slips that made Earl R. into
Earl S., and so on, might be compared with changing the name of Alfred to Albert, this
involving a close friend of many years. Poor Sizemore, thought Deg, caught up in an object
lesson; I should have thrown the fit of rage he expected.
Sizemore was at this time enormously busy. He had four major occupations, beginning with his
professorship in philosophy and theology for one. Secondly, he was, as I said before, a
creative artist who had put aside his larger skills to create a singular commodity, friezes in
wood, copying in detail great (or lesser) paintings. And these he carried around to sell at
fairs on certain weekends, and while sitting by his works he read books and articles and
newspapers by the bag-load. Then he entered upon the national Amway corporation, and began to
build a network of clients and customers to purchase a wide range of consumer goods; this
entailed meeting upon meeting; much of the vast energy that had gone into advancing and
promoting Velikovsky was moving into a truly American promotional enterprise -- part crass
materialist, part ideological fervor, a hybrid of love-thy-neighbor and get-rich-quick. Deg
would not join him; he regretted the diversion of the intelligent energies that had placed
Sizemore among the top dozen of no more than a few score active promoters of quantavolution in
the world.
Yet he understood the figure of the missionary-capitalist, for he was reminded of the time he
studied the leading caucasian families of Hawaii, who had emerged from their work at Christian
conversion owning a good part of the land, commerce, and industry of the Islands. He believed,
unlike others, that Sizemore and his wife, who had never before plunged into an enterprise with
him, might well make a fortune. Max Weber, Richard Tawney, Edward Shils, Sebastian de Grazia,
Benjamin Nelson and their brethren of economic sociology would instantly recognize the puritan-
capitalist nexus in Amway and in Warner Sizemore.
Nor, meanwhile, excepting his break with Deg, did Sizemore neglect his primary responsibilities
in quantavolution. He still was the mainstay of Greenberg (and I do believe that Sizemore, were
he to strike it rich, would generously fund Kronos and set up seminars, publish books, and
promote the general development of the field); he still visited and helped Elisheva; he kept up
with the field. He aided friends in need, as he did Sigmund Kardas, first when Kardas moved his
house, and then when Kardas was nearly killed crashing into a wrong-turning trailer truck one
midnight on the highway near Bordentown.
In October, 1982, upon returning from Greece, Deg was still needling Sizemore:
Dear Warner:
I hope that all goes well with your enterprise; I trust that you have known of Kronos' decision
last winter to not review Chaos and Creation. After your long history of interest in the book
and its writing, this must have come as a surprise to you. Have you spoken to the staff about
it?
Before leaving for Greece last Spring I submitted a note to Jan Sammer as Associate Editor of
Kronos to read and forward for publication. I commented upon Velikovsky's Baalbek article.
Sammer has since reported to me that when he told Greenberg about it, Greenberg said that he
would not read it or publish it. This appears to be one more step in the recapitulation of the
unconscionable techniques which, we say, were employed in regard to Dr. V.
Also, out of the blue sky came the enclosed letter from Ellenberger. [Not carried here.] I
cannot afford the hours of rebuttal and psychiatric analysis that it calls for. What should I
do with it?
Are you, or are you not, Executive Editor, father confessor, and angel of this mad show?
Sincerely yours, Al
P. S. As you may know, we have been denied the privilege of renting Kronos' mailing list to
announce the publication of Chaos and Creation. On the other hand, I have received in the mail
on more than one occasion postcards advertising Leroy Ellenberger's Velikovsky T-shirts, beer
mugs, etc., using Kronos addresses. I fail to appreciate the philosophical principle at work
here; should you not consult with Lynn Rose and advise me on it?
The letter aroused Sizemore to stiffer opposition. He railed at Deg for trying to separate
KRONOS from its Glassboro State College letterhead, and advanced two propositions. This first
was that "factual errors" in Chaos and Creation (which apparently he had not discovered in his
intensive and enthusiastic reading of the manuscript and page proofs over a period of months)
made its mention in the pages of KRONOS impossible: "it would be difficult with such errors as
would reflect upon our integrity." Second he rejected any analogy between the treatment which
the reviewing media had meted out to Velikovsky and that which was rendered Deg by KRONOS,
adding that V. had "not once in forty years of correspondence with his opponents" resorted to
"invective or scorn." This is close to the literal truth, just as the fact that General
Eisenhower never killed an enemy soldier.
Such ruptures of relations among heretics are common. In this instance the main material effect
was to suppress attention to Deg's book for three years among a key audience for works on
quantavolution, represented by Kronos magazine. By the end of 1983 Greenberg was intimating an
interest in advertising and reviewing Deg's books. [Again he renigged.]
I have come near to demonstrating that grand principles of morals and science can equally well
be extracted from the dross of existence or flare out of imperial trumpets. The phenomenon of
"self-destruct" is ever threatening in new movements of all kinds. Yet another phenomenon here
deserves mention before passing on to other matters. It has to do with energetics, or more
simply laziness. And I am fortunate for having spoken so much of Sizemore for he exemplifies
the non-lazy, the antithesis of the phenomenon of limited energetics or laziness. The
phenomenon has also to do with the motives of the persons in fringe movements, with what they
want to get out of their belonging and in fact do get.
The cosmic heretics were fond of reciting the litany, Velikovsky in the lead, that if his new
ideas were to be admitted to scientific discussion, the textbooks of most disciplines would
have to be revised. Astronomers would have to correct their own lamentable errors, and also
they would have to study electricity, geologists astronomy, anthropologists geology, historians
mythology, and so on. At the same time, a number of cosmic heretics were solely Velikovsky
buffs: they were incompetent and unfamiliar with other quantavolutionists. Some had never had,
nor now wished to have, an education broader than that afforded by Worlds in Collision. They
derived their political, moral, and intellectual sustenance from a couple of books and a man.
They were housed in this comfortable concrete defensive pill-box from which they would
sporadically fire and venture forth on forays and to scavenge.
To this type of person, the threat of Chaos and Creation was as real as a full-scale attack
upon Worlds in Collision. To read another thick book? And more to come? A hobby would have to
become a chore. Horrid possibilities in religion, geochronology, and human development had to
be confronted. Much reading was required. A "snap-course," with its slogans, became suddenly a
curriculum.
The format and style of the new book was itself a threat; it read well, but was organized like
a text-book. The several hundred readers of its first year found even a chapter in it devoted
to negative criticism. The chapter, called "The Devil's Advocate," was written by Deg under his
dropped middle name of Joseph and an English translation of "Grazia" into "Grace" for the
cognomen. He felt that a full self-critique, carried as he went along, would have been useful
but would have doubled the size of the book. So he did his best to demolish his work in a
single chapter.
That he succeeded with some is evidenced by an editor of Athenaeum Press who, in rejecting the
manuscript, claimed to be persuaded by Professor Grace, and by a review in the newsletter of
the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, whose author wrote that much of what he had
to say was well put by Joseph Grace. Deg did not like subterfuge and had foreseen that a reader
who liked or disagreed with the chapter would soon enough catch on to the dodge. Still,
Elisheva read it and was amazed by its being there and asked Deg who the writer was. That
caused a laugh. And Leroy Ellenberger himself, even after hearing the explanation, was so
suspicious and perplexed that he wrote to Deg to confirm that the writer was not a professor at
Glassboro State College. Deg noted with interest that Leroy, who would not let the readers of
Kronos hear of the book, was reading it, presumably having wrapped it in a plain cover after
receiving the gift from Deg.
On January 17, 1982, Brian Moore is telling Deg about the difficulties the British Society is
having with its publications and asking him to come and share a platform with Dr. Don Robins
who is to speak on isotopic anomalies in radiochronometry. The Society would also like a talk
on the past ten years since Deg published The Velikovsky Affair.
Incidentally, mention of the Velikovsky Affair above reminds me of my current fracas with Lewis
Greenberg which you may like to include in your comprehensive survey of the history of
Velikovsky (when you eventually come to write it). I had received permission from Dr. Hewsen to
print in SISR his talk to the last Symposium at Princeton in which he criticized Velikovsky's
use of his sources. Lewis, of course, would not print it in Kronos as it was too critical for
his taste, but as we advertise ourselves as a forum for the Velikovsky "debate," we felt it
could be a useful contribution from an informed Velikovskian. The result was hugely ironical;
Greenberg has threatened us with legal action if we publish it as the words were actually
spoken at his Symposium. To me it seems the ultimate sin for a Velikovskian to attempt to
suppress views which he finds unpalatable, but when I put this point to Greenberg he avoids the
question and suggests we terminate the correspondence! There the matter rests for the moment.
Rather sad.
Deg notes to himself on the margin of Moore's letter. "Shall I send letter to Lew on this with
copies to Kronos board?"
He does not do so. Instead, he calls Professor Hewsen, and later replies to Moore:
I spoke to Hewsen about your fracas with Greenberg, also Sizemore. Neither H nor S is strongly
interested in the matter; H confirms the offer to you but thinks G is serious about a suit; S
would advise against such an action, which, to my mind, would be only taken up by a lawyer as
nutty as G. H. never gave away any rights to publish. And, of course, the attitude of G is
disgusting. I find G's polices and behavior frequently irrational and arbitrary, and have not
talked to him in some time. S is occupied with a new commercial venture now as well as
teaching, so sees into little. Ellenberger and G do the whole bit. I think that G would do
battle with all the 1500 Kronos subscribers and all authors and with Mrs. Velikovsky and
Shulamith Velikovsky and anyone else who would come into sight, especially all females; he is
the most handsome rhinoceros in these parts and generally exhausted from his struggles.
And Brian answers:
SIS still seems to be persona (prope) non grata with Mrs. Velikovsky. She would not allow us to
put slips in the British edn. of M in A drawing attention to the Society. We are also excluded
from the book itself though Kronos is listed. Warlow's book of course lists both organizations
(though this has not stopped Kronos from berating him in their latest issue. With colleagues
like this, who needs the Sagasimov?.) Which reminds me -- I mentioned the Hewsen Affair in my
last letter and this obviously prompted you to enquire a little into the matter. I'm afraid
this has fueled Leroy's paranoia even more. When I last wrote to him I said I was not going to
pursue the matter, but he now thinks that I "asked" you to "intervene" on our behalf and gave
me a little homily on hypocrisy to boot! Still, don't lose any sleep over this -- such
misunderstandings are endemic in our relations with Kronos. Leroy and I continue to collaborate
on other matters, so there is still a positive side to the relationship.
Greenberg and Ellenberger manage next to enrage Peter James, who has a sweet disposition but a
sharp tongue. He resigns from Kronos' editorial board with a vengeance, and later in London
tells Deg, yes, certainly, if you want to publish my letter of resignation, do so.
Dear Lewis and Leroy, In view of the present shitty relations between KRONOS and SISR I can't
see much good reason to provide Kronos with any further copy...
Permission on "Darwinian man" is withdrawn (or at least suspended).
The same applies to my BAR and Stiebing correspondence, and to the promised section on
Carchemish from my Glasgow Conference paper. Whether this material has been set in type or not,
permission is firmly withheld. I had also better tender my resignation from the KRONOS staff as
well..
Frankly I don't see why Hewsen's paper has put the wind up you lot so much. On the other hand
maybe I do. All Hewsen was saying is that we must not treat Velikovsky as a tin god, and that
we would be doing far more service to the man's genius by admitting the weak parts of his work
and sorting the wheat from the chaff. The KRONOS staff suppress his paper (yes, suppress), at
the same time protesting that they are not Velikovsky cultists. Give me one GOOD REASON why
Hewsen's comments should not have the publication that he wanted them to have, apart from the
desire of the KRONOS staff to suppress a point of view that doesn't exactly square with their
own. I am, to say the least, disgusted. I thought the name of the game was free speech and fair
discussion. The "Velikovsky movement" has been crowing for so long about the suppression of
Velikovsky's ideas. It makes me sick to see people who pontificate against Velikovsky's enemies
do the same to someone who is basically sympathetic to Velikovsky's ideas. Go to the back of
the class and join the Shapleys and the Sagans. You should both hang your heads in shame.
There was nothing untoward or irregular about Brian's letter to Hewsen. It was not going behind
Lewis' back, conniving or in any way deserving the hysterical reaction we got. Hewsen wrote the
bloody paper, a fact that seems to have been forgotten in this silly squabble, not Lewis
Greenberg or Leroy Ellenberger. Brian quite rightly wrote to Hewsen about it, and asked him to
clear things with LMG. There was no intention of "stealing" anything without KRONOS Permission.
Hewsen was asked to request KRONOS Permission. Get that straight. Nothing criminal, nothing
strange. The reaction? Sheer hysteria, and the usual childish threats of legal action. And why?
You tell me why. Ask yourselves, have a good think about your real reasons for trying to
suppress someone's thoughts...
I also find KRONOS' attitude to Peter Warlow rather weird. Why have you got it in for him?
Answer: JEALOUSY, plain and simple. If he lived in the States and was one of your immediate
clique you would be breaking your backs to help him find some answers to Slabinski, instead of
running him down all the time as you do. Along comes the guy who for the first time produces a
model and a mechanism for a Velikovskian event and publishes it in a well established physics
journal, and you lot just try and jump on him. Rose, in his comments about Senmut's ceiling,
doesn't even seem to be aware of Lowery and Reade's extensive studies, or Reade's later work on
the Ramesside star-tables. What are you going to put in place of Warlow's model, which
satisfies the mythological and geological evidence so well? Spin reversal? Crustal slipping? Go
on then. Provide us with a model that will make Stabinski happy. You know damn well that
Slabinski's calculations can't and don't take into account electro-magnetic effects. These are,
after all, part and parcel of the Velikovskian view of celestial mechanics. So way do you take
such great delight in Slabinski's calculations when they ignore them? Answer: jealousy.
I have taken a lot of stick from KRONOS staff for the criticisms I made of Ramses II and His
Time in my review. Letters from Greenberg, Rose, and others made an incredible fuss as if my
criticisms had come out of the blue, and I was told repeatedly that I was knocking Velikovsky's
view of this period without putting anything in its place. On the 19th February 1976 I wrote a
5 page letter to Velikovsky, summarising several years work, pointing out my major objections
to his equation of the Hittites and the Chaldeans, and the 19th and 26th dynasties. In February
1977 Velikovsky wrote back pretty well ignoring the points made, except to postulate an ad hoc
invention of a second Neriglissar to get around problems in the Neo-Babylonian succession. In
1978 Ramses II appeared, and the major areas of problem which I had pointed out were almost
completely ignored. The reader was left totally in the dark about key material that shows
Velikovsky's scheme for this period to be impossible. So I l felt perfectly justified in
raising this problem for the benefit of SISR readers. It would have been intellectually
dishonest not to have done so, particularly since I had raised the main points with Velikovsky
two years before... KRONOS no longer strikes me as a "magazine of inter-disciplinary
synthesis"; it is rapidly becoming a cross between a Velikovsky fan magazine and an anti-SIS
Review...
I am very sorry that it has come to this. But when KRONOS is filled over and over again with
one-sided ad hominem piffle about Gammon, MacKie and Warlow, three of the most valuable
contributors to the Velikovsky debate, and when KRONOS still continues to treat Velikovsky's
work in toto as the proverbial sacred cow, then things have gone too far. I am only interested
in having honest assessments of Velikovsky's work, to find out what is right and what is wrong.
I am not interested in a silly KRONOS vs. SISR struggle which seems to interest you far more
than the academic issues involved....
Peter James
But this is only part of the letter which I suppose might be summed up in the words of St. Paul
to the Phillipians (1: 15): "Of course, some of them preach Christ because they are jealous and
quarrelsome, but others preach him with all good will."
The explosive discourse among the heretics, we have seen, is often as vituperative as the
salvos of heretics against the outside world. It is also more personal and intensely felt.
There were times when Deg felt that Greenberg's tiny clique of Kronos was trying to make a sort
of Trotsky out of him for advocating world revolution rather than "revolution in Russia" as
Stalin would have it. He was consoled to know that the invectives and diatribes were the lot of
other heretics and conventional figures venturing into the line of fire. Nor was he without
blame; so that he could not but remind himself of the saying, "He who lives by the sword dies
by the sword." Or "he who lives by the pen is poisoned by the pen."
By contrast with the heretics, the conventional scientists were most gentle among themselves on
the subject of the heretics. It was almost unprecedented when once Robert Jastrow mentioned in
print a serious statistical misapprehension of Carl Sagan in an attack on Velikovsky; Sagan
defended himself vociferously. I do not mean to say that the conventionals are more fair or
decent; they are nicer and more polite, and must go to print under institutional barriers
against vehement expression. The heretic cries havoc and unleashes the dogs of war, and is
often too distraught to tell friend from foe.
If all of this seems trivial, that is because the word "trivial" for a dispute is defined by
contrast with horrible and bloody conflict. Or, I think, it is all trivial, even when there is
horror and bloodshed. Examine the horror and bloodshed of history. Is it not very often over
the trivial -- a sentence of Marx, an oath to the King, a remark "against the people," a
failure to salute the flag, the greasing of bullets with pork fat, these and a myriad of like
trivia -- which manage to bathe mankind in bloodshed and keep people in terror much of the
time.
One can never tell from a virulent heretical letter or a smooth conventional reasoned critique
whether, were the author possessed of the power, he would not exercise violent sanctions. The
men and women who run affairs -- in all spheres of life -- are very often like the infant whose
rages, so ludicrous, would be regarded with the gravest concern and even panic if abracadabra
suddenly the infant sprang up adult and armed.
But that is the point of keeping the peace at nearly any cost: if people are kept from
destroying themselves and each other, sooner or later they will be happy that they failed in
their wishes. They will recognize that their aims are foolish, trivial, misguided, and
mistaken, or that they would have been themselves erased, or that their enemies had agreed in
principle with them, or that they and their enemies, alone or together, might find a better
resolution of their mutual problem.
What has been shown here is that the establishment has violated most rules of logic and fair
play in literary and scientific intercourse, but, further, I have shown that the heretics, in
dealing with the outer world and among themselves, have also violated most rules of logic and
fair play in their literary and scientific intercourse.
What then can be concluded as a matter of principle? Call down a plague upon both their houses?
Go in search of honest men like Diogenes forever carrying a lantern to illuminate any rare
finds? Favor the weak against the strong, the heretic against the conventional establishment?
Continue to expose such illogical and unjust conduct wherever and whenever it appears?
Psychoanalyze, especially in the sense of self-analysis, everybody including ourselves? Reform
the scientific reception system by institutional inventions to bring about a rule a law,
emplaced as part and parcel of the rules of scientific method?
The questions answer themselves. Each implies a herculean task. Yet each implies a remedy of
value. The answer to each and all of these questions is a resounding "Yes!" All must be done,
no matter that each in itself is, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult, In Homo Schizo I
and II, Deg put forward a persuasive, if apparently pessimistic, analysis of human nature. Homo
Schizo is incurable, imperfectible, by nature. He can only be modified, constrained, trained,
and controlled within limits. But within these limits stand at the one extreme the most
horrible conduct and at the other extreme the most charming, endearing, and harmless conduct.
The main trouble in the latter case is human unreliability.
Meanwhile, work was beginning on The Cosmic Heretics and I wrote Carl Sagan in 1981 asking for
a meeting in the line of reporting first-hand something of Sagan's ideas about Velikovsky and
about himself. A reply came, dated 9 November, 1981:
9 November, 1981
Belated but very sincere thanks for your letter to Professor Sagan asking if he might meet with
you at some point while he is in New York City to discuss Immanuel Velikovsky as part of the
background for the book you plan to write about Velikovsky. Unfortunately, Dr. Sagan is now
totally immersed in science, having just returned to Cornell after an absence of more than two
years. To his regret, he will not be able to accept your invitation. If you have not yet read
it, you might wish to have a look at the chapter on Velikovsky in Dr. Sagan's book, Broca's
Brain, published in paperback by Ballantine in 1980. With kind regards, Cordially, Shirley J.
Arden Executive Assistant to Carl Sagan
I had indeed known of the aforesaid chapter, which had already appeared in at least three
different publications and which had been mauled and dissected to the point of uselessness,
Brian Moore's SISR review being perhaps the most nicely done of the valid commentaries upon the
book. Perhaps a rebirth would come with the baptism of being "totally immersed in science" that
would impel him to drive his own Cosmos TV series off the airwaves. Or to withdraw his book,
The Dragons of Eden, from circulation, of which N. J. Macintosh wrote in Nature (27 April
1978): "It is inaccurate, full of fanciful and unilluminating analogies, infuriatingly
unsystematic, and skims hither and yon over the surface of the subject, unerringly
concentrating on the superficial and misleading... profoundly unscientific."
Sagan was the latter-day Harlow Shapley for many a heretic, though Deg could never quite tell
why. Sagan had denounced Velikovsky's suppression, criticized his work publicly, and at worst
was slipshod and sophomoric. On Deg's last visit among the English heretics in 1983, and amid
some chortling, Deg was told of one Michael "Mike" Saunders, a true-believing Englishman, who
was representing interests in the never-never lands of the Gulf States sheikhdoms, and was
ringing people up with "great" schemes, one of which was to win over Sagan by setting up for
him a professorial Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Cornell University, counting upon him
to sing a new song of solar space. After Deg stopped laughing, he opined that such things had
happened before (see, e. g. the Morton Prince case, that is described in the next chapter), but
that star professors are much too clever and ornery nowadays. Like the time when a large
donation to the Psychology Department for the purpose of pursing telepathic research was
accepted by Stanford University but diverted to other uses, perhaps to construct bigger and
better mazes for running rats. Apropos, unlike rats, professor avoid any mazes built for them
and devise their own crooked ways. And some are quite principled, need I say?
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY
Deg detested the new Bobst Library building at New York University from the moment he entered
it on 16 December 1972 at 16: 00 hours for a reception to celebrate its opening. The old
central library had been in the basements of the Main Building. It was rumored that one could
draw a book from there, and he did so from time to time. But now they had obstructed the view
of Washington Square from his apartment to put up a casbah-red structure that from the outside
seemed transported from the Near East while inside there was a giant space towering to twelve
tall stories up, a roofed atrium around which wound narrow bands of shelving areas, obviously
inadequate save for a few years of collecting, and already requisitioned on its top floor for
the administrative officers of the University. The sensation was vertiginous; the building
floated with its books tucked around its waist; how could a scholar study with his ideas
precarious on the edge of exposed space?
A dance band was playing and he promptly envisioned how the design would permit its use by a
Las Vegas concessionaire to bail out the near bankrupt school: a pavilion for dancing on the
marble main floor, baths and massage parlors below, a bar on the second floor, social rooms on
the third, a bordello for men on the fourth, one for women on the fifth, one for homosexuals on
the sixth, then levels of gambling and a sky restaurant. One of the most expensive pieces of
land in Manhattan had been used to roof empty space. The spectacle was dazzling. He rarely used
the library.
When he was there he would ask himself whether it was hyper-critical of him to have such
feelings, part of his basic envy of a world that rushed along without his consent, getting
things done nevertheless; or was he simply observant of facts and aesthetics that most people,
those in power as well as their subjects, could not see or think of. This happened often, that
he would no sooner denounce something, privately or aloud, than he would reprimand himself for
thinking that he could see truth and value and contradictions thereof that groups of
intelligent people working in financial, architectural, legislative, and other task forces
could not see. He did not wish to believe only in himself; he would rather enjoy the warmth of
consensus, the applause of the crowd, but it would rarely work out so. Everything he did,
everything he got, it seemed to him, even under the conditions when he was boss, gave him not a
whole loaf, nor even half a loaf, but a thin slice. (I am not speaking of material goods, but
of the quality of the product.) The situation regarding money alone was bad enough; the
incompetency of the rich society to obtain value with its money was much worse to suffer.
Throughout his career, Deg found that it was harder to get money, the better the cause. A wage
for oneself was not difficult, a salary slightly more so, commercial money for an imaginative
project easier the quicker the turnover and the realization of profit. The trouble with your
ideas, Rodman Rockefeller said to him once while they were conspiring about the world, is that
they do not involve things that people regularly consume in large quantities, like canned food
and cement houses. Not that Rodman was spectacularly successful with his company. IBEC, which
went progressively from more romantic to less romantic, from third world to first world
projects. In those times, Deg wondered at how year after year Rod could go on administering --
ever so comfortably to be sure -- a business without breaking out more often into some of the
more imaginative enterprises and social adventures that he obviously enjoyed visualizing. Deg
blamed affable father Nelson for the suppression.
To continue on money: then longer-term money became harder, then money for a vulgar or
fashionable charity, then money for important research or an extraordinary book. Money came
hardest for a cause that one believed to be purely for the public good --unless it was a
commonly recognized public good like the Bobst Library or some other building for a respectable
university to house respectable and vulgar objects, or unless it was a concealed fraction of a
public good (the thin slice of the loaf again), like a significant sociological question
slipped into an advertising survey for dog food, or unless it was illegally obtained, wherefore
some political radicals have robbed banks and others their families, and still others lived
under miserable and dangerous conditions.
Deg made a dozen attempts in search of a teaching and study platform for catastrophe and
quantavolution. Recall this was a period when all kinds of new courses were being pressed upon
universities and colleges; standards were in general decline. Professors were wringing their
hands and burying their files for safekeeping. Yet they consistently rejected the advances
(never mind seeking the help) of quantavolutionists who had more respect for the traditional
research materials of the culture -- in classics, linguistics, foreign languages, history of
science, philosophy, etc. and whose attractiveness to students would have erected massive
barriers against the anti-intellectual and book-condemning feelings rampant in student bodies
everywhere.
A score of teaching heretics had managed to insert V.'s materials into their courses under
various pretexts and in several cases could even carry his name in the title or subtitle of a
course. The Dartmouth Experimental College at Hanover, N. H., invited V. one time for two days
of meetings with a seminar; at least six faculty members of as many different disciplines met
with the seminar before and after to discuss his books Worlds in Collision and Earth in
Upheaval.
V. was generally unhappy about the educational system, although he was displeased, too, with
the student rebellions when they occurred. A dramatic polemic against the system of higher
education finally appeared posthumously in three pages of Mankind in Amnesia (182-5). At least
this statement is available to save him from reproach for never having attacked on general
grounds (as opposed to personalized ground) the foundations of authority or their institutions.
Before converting his own social invention course to a course on quantavolution, a one-time
unauthorized change to which no official objection was made, Deg tried a frontal appeal. Here,
in 1973, he addresses an assistant dean for curriculum, after discussing the matter with Bayly
Winder, Dean and friend. He is making as few waves as possible, by placing the course in the
summer session (where "imaginative offerings" are encouraged). The proposal went to the
Committee of Deans:
October 29, 1973
Memo to: Dr. Sylvia Konigsberg
From: Professor Alfred de Grazia
Subject: A proposal for a summer Institute on Primeval Catastrophe and the Development of Human
Nature
A large and increasing public is interested in the theory that ancient astrophysical and
geophysical disasters caused profound changes in the human environment and human nature. Much
of the interest centers around the work of Immanuel Velikovsky and his school of thought.
Wherever Velikovsky appears to speak, his supporters and critics assemble by the hundreds and
even thousands. His sole talk at NYU drew hundreds of students and professors several years
ago.
I have worked for a decade on problems raised by Dr. Velikovsky since the publication of my
book, "The Velikovsky Affair." in 1963, and am presently going to press with another book on
the disasters of the Homeric Age. A heavy flow of written materials and archaeological reports
has begun and promises to be practically endless. There is a need for an academic center for
presenting and discussing the problems they present to all fields. Excellent scholars are
available to participate. I suggest that such an Institute might be held from July 1-20, 1974,
at New York University. It would occupy three hours of class time on fifteen days, would allow
students not-for-credit, undergraduate students for four credits, and graduate students for the
same ( 4-credits). The required readings would amount to 1200 pages and graduate students would
prepare a research paper. It is expected that from 80 to 200 students can register for the
Institute. Personnel for the course would include: 1. Prof. Alfred de Grazia, Supervising
Professor, Full-time;
2. Adjunct Prof. Annette Tobia, Ph. D., Einstein University in microbiology and presently
lecturer at NYU, full-time.
3. Prof. William Mullen, Ph. D., Princeton University classicist (one-third-time);
4. Prof. Livio Stecchini, Ph. D., JD, Patterson State College, historian of science (one-third-
time);
5. Mr. Ralph Juergens, Engineer and astro-physicist, Associate Editor of Pens‚e magazine, (one-
third-time);
6. Visiting Lecturers and Discussants (one day each): Professors I. Velikovsky; (general
theory); Lynn Rose, SUNY, (philosophy); Frank Dachille, Pennsylvania State Univ., (geology);
Edward Schorr, Fellow, American School of Classical studies (archaeology); and possibly an
additional person or substitute;
7. Prof. Nina Mavridis, CUNY, Political Scientist, administrative coordinator, full-time.
There would be fifteen primary one-hour lectures and 30 one-hour discussion meetings which
would break the lecture audience into small sections of 25 persons. Related lectures and
discussions would meet on the same day.
The titles of the lectures follow: Primeval Catastrophes and the Development of Human Nature
I. Time, Nature, and Human Beings
1. The Theory of Catastrophes De Grazia
2. Origins of Human Nature De Grazia
3. The Geological Record D'Achille
or Burgstahler
4. Historiography of the Solar System Stecchini
5. Correlations Of Geology and Astrophysics Juergens
6. The Synchronization of Prehistory Mullen
II. Case Studies in Disaster and Development
7. Case I: Atlantis Stechini
8. Case II: The Age of Pyramids Stechini
9. Case III: Exodus Velikovsky
10. Case IV: The Homeric Age De Grazia
III. Origins of Behavior and Institutions
11. Theology and Government De Grazia
12. Literature and the Arts De Grazia
13. Sexuality and Aggression Tobia
14. Technology Stechini
IV. Final Problems
15. Is Human Nature Governable? De Grazia Discussion leaders: Professors De Grazia, Tobia,
Stecchini, Mullen, Juergens, D' Achille, Burgstahler, Mavridis. With 100 students, nine daily
section meetings are required. If the number of students exceeds 100, we should add to the
faculty.
Readings: In addition to several paperback books that will be required the staff will prepare a
collection of readings difficult of access, and Xerox them. The basic readings will be Worlds
in Collision by I. Velikovsky, the study of Homeric catastrophe and literature by A. de Grazia,
and the collection of readings that will represent, among others, the rest of the collection of
readings that will represent, among others, the rest of the faculty. A valuable and unique
supplementary bibliography will also be provided, and, finally, a set of maps, drawings, and a
special lexicon.
Continuation of Project: We would like to begin work on the project as soon as it appears
probable that we would have 80 students, and to continue research in connection with, and to
prepare for, successive Institutes. Therefore, it is suggested that 50% of the gross receipts
from student fees (less additional faculty costs) for students in excess of 100 in number be
placed in a special project fund in the University for continuing study and development of
materials in the subject-area.
27 November 1973 TO: Professor Alfred de Grazia
FROM: R. B. Winder
The Committee of Deans discussed on Thursday, 15 November the proposal for a summer institute
on primeval catastrophes as outlined in your memorandum of 29 October addressed to Dean
Konigsberg. The consensus was that although the proposal might very well produce a large
enthusiastic audience of paying customers, it probably would not do so from degree candidates.
The Committee felt SCE might be interested in sponsoring the program, and I suggest that you
take it up with Dean Russell Smith forthwith.
I do appreciate the drive you are putting forth for funding of various sorts and am only sorry
that we felt this one would not work in the context proposed.
Nothing could be worked out in the unprestigious "School for Continuing Education." My academic
readers can practice a dry run on this proposal, or another like it as carried in The Burning
of Troy: their own committees might well respond similarly. Practically all universities in
America capture their students with "credit courses" and find "course anomalies" as distasteful
as anomalies in science.
The New School for Social Research was not so impeded, although it, too, became divided into
"non-credit" and "credit" areas. V. gave a successful series of lectures there in 1964. Clark
Whelton also taught there a non-credit course on "the Velikovsky Question" in the Fall of 1979
and significantly some students kept in touch with him afterwards, interested in keeping
informed and hoping to form an association.
Milton to de Grazia February 15, 1980:
Our department is being reviewed, and me with it. Trainor is one of the referees, the other is
hostile. Yesterday he said, Milton is not doing physics because Kronos is not include in
Physics Abstracts nor Science Citation Index. That remark deserves immortality. Hang in there,
Al, we're winning.
Milton was a popular professor at Lethbridge University and was teaching and reading
quantavolution in his general physics and astronomy classes. He was an intellectual force on
the vast Canadian Prairie, in touch with the press and radio systems. He knew the vast skies
there like a Polynesian navigator. His lifelong asthma kept him in a lifelong course in
advanced nutrition, organic chemistry, and atmospheric science. Then he read into myth and
legend, and there was no stopping him. In every picture he discovered fresh signs. Aside from
his personal qualities, he could connect with the more than ordinary number of students there
who had heard everything good about God and the Bible at home, but nothing at all, if not bad,
about these subjects in "education." Even only to hear the Bible being used as a learning tool
was exciting to them. One should recall, too, how low the estate of physics had fallen.
We find our Dean of science reporters, Walter Sullivan of the New York Times, admonishing us.
Physics is the most basic of the sciences, apart perhaps from mathematics. All phenomena, when
probed to full depth, are controlled by its laws... Yet physics is in trouble Student
enrollments in that science have plummeted... There is a public distrust of physicists that
borders on revulsion and the physicists themselves are pursuing lines of research more and more
remote from the problems of everyday life...
Sullivan's key lines were the juxtaposition of two anomalies --public paranoia and physicists'
schizoid remoteness of character, traits that do not marry well. The American Physical Society
was discussing the low state of physics, and Sullivan wrote that generally the leaders thought
that more money should be spent by the government. The British physicist and astronomer, Fred
Hoyle, wanted even greater accelerators. He also wanted scientists to participate in politics.
"You see why the world of politics is such an indescribable mess. Think of the opening of the
baseball season. Think of the ceremonial first pitch. Think of what the baseball season would
be like if that sort of pitching went on right through the summer. Then you have it -- the
present state of affairs." Presumably under Hoyle's new-age baseball, physicists would pitch
and baseball would become nothing but home-runs as the batters perfect themselves to bang away
at the invariable straight-ball coming right down the center. Or perhaps Hoyle was saying that
physicists should join the pluralist republic, as the ethnic strain of physics, helping where
they could. Deg was not sure this was "according to Hoyle," but he liked the idea.
Milton tied together the Eastern and Western Canadians, and the Canadian belt triangulated to
the Princeton-Trenton-Philadelphia area where Sizemore, Deg, and Greenberg kept shop. In the
Kronos network, besides Greenberg, Sizemore and Ellenberg, might be found Rose, Vaughan, Wolfe,
Cardona, and Jueneman. Some say that there should be added Milton, Sherrard, Westcott, Hewsen,
Ransom, Talbott and Sammer. It was a unifocal net, with Greenberg as the focus. Deg connected
with London, Holland, Paris, Basel. Greenberg, losing Peter James in London, found Bernard
Newgrosh as correspondent. Marvin Luckerman, a doctoral student at the University of California
at Los Angeles, founded a biennial magazine, Catastrophism and Ancient History; relations with
Greenberg were cool, and the British were not much impressed with his first issues, but praised
the good try. Still he rounded up a thousand readers and began to improve his journal. The
creationist groups stemming out of Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and Seattle were quantavolutionary
perforce, having been given only a few thousand years by the Bible to produce everything. Here
and there were quantavolutionaries of orthodox connections --Gould at Harvard in paleontology,
Ager of geology in England, and so on for several countries. The password that could readily
cut these out from others was their answer to the question, "Has a planet moved?"
A very small group it all was, absurdly so when compared with the network of thousands of
periodicals, scores of associations, and the mass media that served orthodox science. It makes
one wonder whether the heretics were worth considering: certainly by the usual American
standards of great-sized multiplex technology they were not.
Deg heard when young from his democratic teachers how smartly the vested interests turned to
minister to public needs, and was continually surprised when old to see how reluctant they had
become to give themselves away. As his friend Lasswell put it, when writing with Abe Kaplan
Power and Society, no ruling class gives up its goods without being forced to do so. This goes
pari passu for philanthropoids and publishers, two industries affected with a public interest.
The philosopher, artist, composer, author, administrative innovator, and physical inventor, if
he is to be creative, typically is driven to become a sneakthief, or revolutionary, or go mad,
or all three. So says Deg, who worried only about becoming a revolutionary, because then he
would have to spend his time among sneakthiefs and maddies as well.
"Of course the heretics would not get support, they did not apply for it. One must play the
game by the rules. Apply and apply and apply again." Deg knew more about this than his
heretical acquaintances by the time they had encountered one another. He had enjoyed the
fleshpots and studied what motivated the foundations, publishers and universities. He could
warn the heretics that they need hardly try -- and V. was of this opinion, too -- or, worse, in
order to succeed, they must prepare themselves to spend much of their energies in trying, and
he was insistent upon a point that few could appreciate, that only a peculiar type of
masochistic personality could apply incessantly to the point of success without losing the
vigor, freshness, profundity of his ideas and the vital energy needed to pursue them for their
own sakes.
On a few occasions, the heretics would solicit funds from individuals in small amounts to
disseminate a publication about Velikovsky, but efforts at larger funding failed. The
Foundation for Studies of Modern Science initiated a series a approaches, of which I have
already spoken; still, I shall add one more instance.
Murray Rossant, Director of the Twentieth Century Fund, was reported by someone to be attracted
to V.'s work. Because Deg and his brother, Sebastian, were already known and had been working
with the Fund in very different fields, FOSMOS sent two fresh and handsome faces to meet with
Rossant and his colleague Schwartz, Bruce Mainwaring and Coleman Morton, both enlightened
businessmen. A friendly encounter ensued, the upshot of which was that, although the Fund had
never gone into this area, the two officers were interested personally in seeking other sources
of funding, and when all was said and done, nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except that the
Fund itself gave money to Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechend for research that they
were doing on ancient and primitive myth and legend which, it was believed beforehand, would
show that mankind was clever and scientific long before it was credited with being so, but also
that there was no need to invoke catastrophism to explain the nature of mankind's early
preoccupations.
This was recounted to Deg and the others by Stechini, who was well acquainted with Santillana
and von Dechend. The product of the research, Hamlet's Mill, was welcomed by the heretics,
nevertheless, for its intimations of ancient quantavolutions, but, if the reader wishes to
understand the rampant confusion of the book, he may simply apply the hypothesis: here are two
great scatomatized experts trying to avoid mention of catastrophism.
Though they be liberal or conservative, foundations are unlikely to be creative. They think
they are able to judge creativity, of course, and especially if large, "creativity" and the
"independent sector" of society are often included in their slogans. Their size and their
bureaucracy correlate well.
But in any event," writes Deg, who had urged the Ford Foundation to apply this, his scheme,
"they are unlikely to make lists of all the people who lay creative claim to their bounty, and
dispense it equally among a random sample of them. No they put the applicants and petitioners
through the hurdles that they learned in their first course in Business and Public
Administration should be set up to employ typists and junior managers. So it happens that if
all the people who ever applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship had given the same quantity of
intense energy to a story, a painting, a song, or a study as they gave to applying, American
culture would be up a notch or two over all its length and breadth. The waste of creative
energies going into the national foundations of the sciences, arts and humanities is truly
enormous; they use up at least a tenth of the country's creativity, with their stick games
between the insiders and the outsiders. I would close them down and give their hundreds of
millions to the colleges of the country whatever their defects -- in proportion to their
budgets.
The cosmic heretics might discern that they were outlaws without going to the trouble of
applying for their identity cards. But they could not help themselves: after all, they were
educated in a way, bathed regularly, were fluent in the language, and found their interests
carried in the index of foundation provenances. So they were tempted from time to time to try
for a grant or subsidy. To my knowledge, they invariably failed. (I am not speaking of the
occasional hand-outs tendered by friends and other heretics but of the system of lending a hand
as institutionalized by the private or government foundations.)
Deg had enjoyed many experiences with foundations, small and large. The large were too
"responsible" and proper to be bold. The small were generally pets and hobby horses of their
founders.
Exceptions occurred that were interested in large social issues. A small foundation, the Relm-
Earthart group, was a pleasure to deal with. It had a tough board, and was administered by
James Kennedy and Richard Ware, both of whom bet on the man, not the institution, and did not
try to make useless work for themselves and others. (The Cornuelle brothers, Herb and Dick,
were this way, too, when they were in the foundation business. So was Bill Baroody.) Deg did a
variety of economic and political studies with their help over the years. They were not
occupied with ancient history or natural history. Since they lent you aid, they must be "good,"
I say to Deg sarcastically. Very well, he says, shall I give you some bad ones that have helped
me? Never mind, I said, I'm in enough trouble with you already. Yet the very deprivations and
constraints that help Deg in his quantavolutionary trap made him more determined and
passionate. Again Deg is writing in his notebook, perhaps to warn himself, like a politician
warns himself to refuse favors or an infantryman warns himself to keep his feet clean:
There is this in common among a gold miner, a terrorist, and a purveyor of new ideas; they
often come to exist in a new moral dimension, called immorality and outrage. Lunacy, lying,
cheating, contempt and inconsideratedness for others; misappropriation: the pandora's box of
the creator spills these out.
Deg never committed such follies -- almost never -- and blamed his frustration correctly or
incorrectly upon his own character: he inspired himself but could rarely inspire enough of the
all-important others. Society is run by networks and gangs, and you have to join a gang, stick
with it, use it and let it use you, and if ultimately you fail or perish with the gang, well,
that's the end of the trail, it's a life-term establishment. Most gangs and network fails.
Therefore skill and luck in getting into and out of the appropriate gangs is often essential to
success.
"We're working on an ABS issue about what needs to be done with the science of economics," said
Deg to his colleague, Professor Arnold Zurcher, who was also Director of the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation. The Foundation operated in this area and Deg wondered whether they would provided
support for the project in the neighborhood of $10,000. His colleague represented an approach
to political science that Deg regarded as outmoded and intent upon replacing. He was a jolly
fellow and they were friends, and he knew that Deg was carrying the weak finances of the
American Behavioral Scientist on his back. Do up the proposal, he said, I think that you have a
good chance and I'll support it. Not long afterwards, Deg received an official letter from the
Foundation rejecting the proposal. He was surprised -- the request was logical: it was for
small money and enjoyed support. His colleague was apologetic. Al, he reported, the proposal
passed from one vice-president to another, with Margolis' article from the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists about the Velikovsky affair attached, and a big "No" scribbled on the face of your
proposal. (Later on Bill Baroody of the American Enterprise Institute came up with some money
to support the issue, and economists were assembled and the issue published.)
April 22, 1964
Mr. Ralph E. Juergens
416 South Main Street
Hightstown, New jersey
Dear Mr. Juergens: I continue to be amazed that sensible persons continue to give attention to
the Velikovsky affair. I wonder if you have read the statement by Howard Margolis in the April
1964 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist.
Very sincerely yours Warren Weaver Vice President
Alfred p. Sloan Foundation.
Warren Weaver was a career philanthropist, wrote a good general survey on probability and, like
many another, was a nice man. New York University named its Computer Center after him. (For a
photo of it, in context, see Deg's Politics for Better or for Worse.)
May 4, 1964
Professor Moses Hadas
Columbia University
New York 27, New York
Dear Professor Hadas:
As long-time subscriber to Reporter magazine -- actually since it started -- I was very much
interested in your excellent review in a recent issue of "Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis."
by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai. I did draw a long, deep birth, however, when I read in the
first paragraph that "in our own time Immanuel Velikovsky, who was maligned for making myth the
basis for a cosmic hypothesis, appears to be approaching vindication." As a scientist, until
1960 a professor of chemistry at Columbia and an admiring colleague of yours in Columbia
College, I have always regretted the action of a few misguided souls who reacted 13 years ago
to "Worlds in Collision" by attacking Velikovsky's publisher -- I think it was Macmillan. The
book, in my opinion, should have been classified as science fiction but, nevertheless, it was
unrealistic, and humorless as well, to expect a publisher interested in profits, as they all
have to be, to overlook an opportunity to make a few extra bucks. The reaction to "Worlds in
Collision" and a subsequent book, the title of which I do not recall, was fairly violent but,
as I remember, reviews by Harrison Brown of Caltech and a woman astronomer with a hyphenated
name from Harvard pretty well disposed, so far as I was concerned, of Mr. Velikovsky and his
theories of cosmology. But now along comes Mr. Howard Margolis to tell us in a recent issue of
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that "Velikovsky rides again."
Perhaps you have already seen Margolis article, but if you have not, I think you may find the
attached copy of interest and perhaps amusing.
With kind regards.
Sincerely yours,
L. H. Farinholt Vice President
Sloan Foundation
To all medical psychologists: what is the vagus nerve syndrome that make a man "draw a long,
deep breath"? Re Harrison Brown and the "woman astronomer" with a hyphenated name from Harvard,
see The Velikovsky Affair, Alfred de Grazia, Editor.
6 May 1964 Mr. L. H. Farinholt
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
630 Fifth Avenue
Rockefeller Center
New York, NY 10020
Dear Mr. Farinholt,
Thank you for your kind letter and its enclosure. I can have no opinion about the validity of
Velikovsky's work; his ideas may be wholly misguided, but I know that he is not dishonest. What
bothered me was the violence of the attack upon him: if his theories were absurd, would they
not have been exposed as such in time without a campaign of vilification? One after another of
the reviews misquoted him and then attacked the misquotation. So in the Margolis piece you send
me I read "Pi-ha Hiroth which Velikovsky has altered into Pi-ha Khiroth, further enhancing his
evidence." But the two are equally acceptable transliterations of the Hebrew, and the latter is
the more scientific. For the Egyptian name, Margolis, following old books, writes, Pekharti,
but the Egyptian has no vowels, so that the correct from is P-kh-r-t, and of this Ph-khirot is
very plausible expansion. The ha in the Hebrew is merely the definite article. It is his
critic, not Velikovsky, who is uniformed and rash -- and so elsewhere also. The issue is one of
ordinary fair play.
Yours sincerely,
Moses Hadas
May 31,1966 Dr. Warren Weaver
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
630 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10020
Dear Mr. Weaver:
I have harbored for many months your critical note concerning the studies of the American
Behavioral Scientist on the reactions of scientists to Immanuel Velikovsky, thinking all the
while of an appropriate constructive response.
We have recently published an enlarged version of the same studies in book form and I have
asked the publishers to send you a copy with my compliments.
There are, of course, two issues in the Velikovsky affair --one, the conduct of scientist and
the press; two, validity and utility of his theories. The issues are separable but an
involvement in one naturally inclines one into a stance on the other. I think that you can help
many people, including myself, find their way through these issues, granted that you may have
neither the time nor the inclination to take on major responsibilities for the problems raised.
What I should like to suggest is that we get together for a day's conversation on the two
issues in the company of several other men, with the sole end of educating each other. I have
in mind persons such as Professor Donald Fleming of the Department of History and Science at
Harvard University, Thomas Kuhn, Professor of History and Science at Princeton University, and
Professor Harold D. Lasswell at the School of Law at Yale University. I believe that five would
be the right number.
I have mentioned a reunion to none of the men named, and have an idea only of Lasswell's
thinking about the subject at hand.
We might spend the morning on the question of validity (not "solving" it, but working to
understand it) and the afternoon on the question of treatment of unorthodox ideas in science.
I am quite at your disposition on the matter. Hoping to receive your opinion, I remain
Sincerely yours,
Alfred de Grazia Editor
There was no reply.
4 March 1974 Dr. Eleanor Sheldon, President
Social Science Research Council
230 Park Avenue
New Your City
Dear Dr. Sheldon:
I have become increasingly interested over the past few years in the origins of human nature,
prompted largely by a growing familiarity with some new ideas that Dr. I. Velikovsky has
introduced in the treatment of pre-historic and ancient catastrophes befalling humanity. The
field is not new, of course, and several disciplines in the social sciences and humanities
currently share it. But a lively set of controversies with a considerable potential for new
discoveries and new syntheses has begun to erupt here and there. Hence there may be occasion
for the kind of interdisciplinary research --discussion efforts that are appropriate to the
SSRC and ACLS or both.
Perhaps the eye of the cyclone moves around the question: Did homo sapiens become human and
cultured in gradual steps, as received theory would have it. Or was he compelled to think and
behave humanly by the effects of natural forces so immense that factors such as sex, commerce,
and "normal" invention must take a secondary role in explanation?
In preparing a monograph on the effects of disasters in homeric times, I have encountered and
had to deal with problems that are central, not related incidentally, to the fields of
linguistics, historical chronology, astronomy, physical and cultural anthropology, comparative
literature, archaeology (worldwide), geology, fossil paleontology, soil chemistry,
electromagnetics, astrophysics, sociology of sex, ecology, climatology, oceanography, theology,
chemical and fossil dating, psychology of infancy and of stress, epistemology, the history of
science, and political science for the origins of theocracy, bureaucratic system and collective
violence.
The problem of approaching the field is not as impossible as might appear from the listing. It
can be stated as an excellent model for cross-disciplinary investigation and theory. The
numerous sciences involved have been shocked and compressed, taken aback, you might say, and
the time may be right for a reappraisal of where they all stand in reference to the question. I
have felt continually the need for the kind of sounding board, stabilizer, consulting resources
and motivator that I once experienced via the establishment of the first Political Behavior
Research Committee of the SSRC and its subsequent operations.
Should you be of the opinion that the subject might interest the SSRC and be within its
jurisdiction, I should appreciate the chance to discuss it with you in some detail
Sincerely yours, Alfred de Grazia
April 5, 1974 Dear Professor de Grazia:
Thank you for your interesting letter of March 4, in which you suggest a possible role for the
Council in exploring human socio-cultural evolution, particularly in the light of an hypothesis
that posits discontinuous advances, following a massive challenge and response model, rather
than incremental steps.
It is true that this kind of problem is inherently cross-disciplinary, is of potentially great
interest, and needs strong guidance if it is to make progress. Also, I am aware that
Velikovsky's ideas are receiving wide attention again -- or, perhaps, at last. Nevertheless,
the topic you outline, which demands a unified approach is too enormous for the SSRC to handle,
and even if the ACLS were to be involved (obviously, I cannot speak for the ACLS) it would
still be unlikely that we could marshal the appropriate efforts. At the very least, the
physical sciences, as you point out, would have to be closely involved.
As you know, the Council is now addressing itself to more than a full intellectual and
administrative agenda, and I cannot foresee a way in which we could be helpful with this topic.
It certainly deserves attention, however, and I wish you success in your capable efforts to
bring that about.
Sincerely yours,
Eleanor Bernert Sheldon
In reflecting upon all that happened to V. and to Deg and the others, it would be unfortunate
to keep one's eyes on the immediate characters alone. For they are all symbols, too, players in
a drama, representing types of our civilization. If V. is subject of a hundred book reviews,
these reviews are signs of the times that happened to gather electrostatically like fluff
around his work.
J. B. S. Haldane, a noted biologist who also wrote on Science and Ethics, found V.'s Worlds in
Collision a degradation of both science and religion, a peculiarly enraging combination,
apparently, for a marxist and fellow-traveler, whom Deg, with a long nose for hidden political
mazes, suspected might be waving the flag (red, that is) for his American colleague, Harlow
Shapley; and when Deg, duty-bound to probe wherever necessary, intimated these sensings of
political psychology, he was scolded by certain naive and intensely tender liberal consciences,
as if political processes of leftist politics, external politics, could never enter scientific
processes. So he was amused when, in perusing an edition of Frederick Engels' Dialectics of
Nature, a work which many Soviet scientists find it de rigueur to praise highly somewhere in
their books and which contributes to biological science roughly in the same measure as Adolf
Hitler's Mein Kampf, he had to note that the adulatory introduction to Engels' book was by none
other than J. B. S. Haldane, who apparently could see contemporary marvels in the century-old
work of a communist that he could not perceive in V.'s book. Furthermore, had not Marx and
marxists been universally insistent upon the interconnection of all things with the ownership
of the means of production and therefore all things were politicized and relevant subjects for
investigation.
Indeed, Deg, in his typically optimistic manner (he would pick up a redhot stove), had
conceived of the true interests of marxist theory as residing in catastrophism, not
uniformitarianism. Why he asked himself, sometime around 1978, did Marx and Engels so strongly
endorse Darwin, fashioning the pattern for marxists to follow ever since (the heresy of Lysenko
in the 1950's being a significant incident thereto)? Perhaps, he thought, the model of
catastrophism did not give them a broad natural inclined plane for the progression of history;
it defeats man's greatest works in an instant. It pays hob with the development of the pure but
reversed Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in the historical process. It
depresses man's will and capacity to build an ultimate utopia. And Marx and Engels, despite
their rejection of the Hegelian "will" and ideal, conceived of and nurtured the most
fantastically strong human will, one that could overturn social orders and political regimes
(of course, with the aid of history). So they needed natural change to back up social change --
Engels waxing polemical on this need --but the change must not overturn catastrophically the
works of revolutionary men.
Still, Deg thought also that the problem of arousing the masses was immediate and paramount
with them, whereas, the problem of nature and history (just mentioned) was less important. Now
the masses must see themselves as the symbol or substance for a great tidal wave, storm,
explosion, and destroyer. Therefore, the imagery of catastrophe would be more effective than
the interminable gradual incremental change of Darwin and bourgeois society. And indeed there
are indications the Marx smelled an ideological rat in the theory of evolution. Furthermore, in
reading Soviet studies pertinent to quantavolution, Deg could sense a slackness in their basic
tie to Lyellism and Darwinism. In the back of Deg's mind there was an ulterior motive, to
loosen the anchor of uniformitarianism (or "actualism" as the Europeans call it) in the marxist
setting, thus to free up a flow of new quantavolutionary energy.
So Deg wanted to address himself to this problem, and he asked his daughter, Victoria, who was
a professor by now, eminent on intellectual movements of the past century, and who said, yes,
it did seem like a good idea, and she being much better attuned to the marxist mentality and
avant-garde currents in the field than he, Deg promptly submitted a proposal to the political
science and sociology section of the Natural Science Foundation. When the refusal came, he
asked for and received the critiques of the review panel. He was a little dismayed to discover
that he was illiterate and ignorant beyond his worst fears, even more so than most scholars
must be on the measuring scale that the Foundation had provided conveniently to its panel.
But when he thought that he might judge the responses to his proposal better if he knew who
were writing them, the request was refused, on grounds of "policy," and, of course, the policy
was, as is usual, good for those who were in charge of the policy and working behind the
defenses afforded by the policy. Momentarily Deg thought to investigate the law on the subject,
and to have introduced a bill for laying open such matters, as an amendment to the federal law
on freedom of information, or even to launch a lawsuit, seeking a mandamus to produce the
records. He didn't do so, of course, because, as my readers by now amply appreciate, ars lunga,
vita breve, Two years later, a postscript to the episode occurs in his journal:
January 20, 1980
A famous letter from Marx to Darwin is said to ask Darwin's permission to dedicate a volume of
Das Kapital to him. Year before last, the National Science Foundation turned down my proposal
to study the question why Marx and Engels, who perhaps should have been ideological
quantavolutionists, not evolutionists -- that is, catastrophists, not uniformitarians --would
have so warmly accepted Darwin's group. (The anti-religious connection is, of course, obvious,
but the Europeans were not so friendly to Darwin and were non-religious too). Then [1976] came
the exposure that the famous letter had not been written by Marx at all and the mistake was
traced back to its source in early communist revolutionary Russia. Marx could say once more "Je
ne suis pas marxiste" (if he ever said it). I wonder whether he would also have said
"Evolutionem non fingo." Probably he was content with two of the thrusts of Darwinism:
materialism and historical progressivism.
But enough of foundations, lest I have no energy left for treating of publishers. The lesson
that publishers learned from the Velikovsky Affair was the same as a first-term convict learns
in jail, how not to get caught a second time. The unfortunate victim of the lesson was any
author who was preparing a book in the field. Macmillan Company dumped Velikovsky's book and
Doubleday Publishers made a good deal of it over the years. All the nice people and the pundits
and the heretics believed that Macmillan, Doubleday, and other publishers would have "learned
their lesson" and a new age in publishing would dawn. Controversial books would not be
discriminated against, and so on. To Deg (I hope that I am not giving him too much credit for
saying so), this was utopian thinking, and he ought to know, being a utopian, a "realistic
utopian," he insisted, by which he meant precisely a person playing a high risk game knowingly,
because the game involved some worthy ideal. He said this to those who called his works on
world order, "Kalos" and "Kalotics," utopian.
Publishers, on the contrary, did not venture into catastrophism, nor make any money out of the
"pseudo-science" or "fringe science" of catastrophes. Ransom's Age of Velikovsky was privately
published, and when later published commercially, sold only modestly. Patten's works were
published privately and did well. Deg's Velikovsky Affair was handled by two small, high-risk
publishers and sold under 5,000 copies, and later in England sold another 10,000 copies. David
Talbott's Saturn did not repay Doubleday its large author's advance. Melvin Cook's book,
Prehistory and Earth Models, published in England, sold very quietly and modestly; it was
technically written, but an "acceptance" would have sold many copies in college courses,
technological industry, and the Scientific American's public. Hapgood's book on The Path of the
Pole sold modestly. Milton's Recollections of a Fallen Sky failed to reach the American market
from Canada.
Henry Bauer's book on the Velikovsky Affair took six years to be published and a University
Press did the job (Illinois); since Bauer found little of substantive value in V.'s work, one
need not wonder how a pro-V. work would have fared in the same circles. Dorothy Vitaliano's
anti-catastrophic book on disasters in geology (Indiana University Press) enjoyed only a small
sale. So it is not being pro - or anti-catastrophism that sells, but books on the subject are
either unsellable or the publishers will not bring them out or promote them properly.
The most successful publisher attending to quantavolution was William Corliss' Sourcebook
Project, a household concern, that culled the history of science and current reviews for worthy
material, finding thousands, reprinting hundreds, all the while maintaining a nicely neutral
position.
What was true for book-publishers held also for magazine publishers. The only magazine with a
general readership that gave sympathetic attention to quantavolution was Frontiers of Science,
edited by Elizabeth Philips. It failed after several years because it was part of a
conglomerate operation that used the bottom line to weed our unprofitable properties. The very
small journals, playing to between 300 and 1500 subscribers were fully unprofitable. Yet
without them, there would have been no means of advancing a viewpoint attractive to millions.
By the rationale of laissez-faire economists this should not have occurred; in fact it is
normal in the world of education and science. The contradiction between a society's need for
creativity and the resources allocated to creativity is stark. It is further exaggerated in the
inner organization of education and science where the more creative the work the less the
outlets for it. New journals in the sciences often form out of failures of the reception
system. Theoretical Physics was founded because some scholars could not get enough of their
material into Physical Review. Deg founded P. R. O. D (Political Research: Organization and
Design), to advance new ideas in political science and sociology; it later became the American
Behavioral Scientist, which was markedly altered in format, approach, and contents when he gave
up its editorship in 1965. One of Deg's students, Howard Smuckler, became editor of magazines
of Ancient Astronauts and ESP; from the beginning they were given newsstand circulations of
200,000 copies, with the proviso that wild nonsense be given free rein. The most fortunately
situated scholar in the country for communicating occasionally his ideas of quantavolution,
sometimes subtly, at times explicitly, was paleontology Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard
University who wrote a regular feature for the magazine Natural History, published by the New
York Museum of Natural History with a popular circulation reaching a million readers. Various
publicists such as Sprague de Camp and Theodore Gordon gave chapters over to mocking or
explaining Velikovsky, but their books were not greatly affected by these chapters. One of the
best of the publicists was Fred Warshawsky who wrote Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe.
Picking up Rene Thom's mathematical topological theory of catastrophism, presumably applicable
in any field, he applied it nonmathematically, heuristically, in discussing the many works
trending toward the quantavolutionary outlook. He undertook with V. a couple of long sessions
that curled his hair and set him straight on what to say of V.'s achievements in an article for
the Reader's Digest. Having escaped perdition, he went on to write a full book on catastrophes,
ancient and modern, which was published by the Reader's Digest Press. This company made a
distribution agreement with Harper and Row, which performed so poorly with his book that
Warshawsky complained bitterly to everyone and achieved some promotional effort. The company
then closed down, and Harper and Row stopped selling the book, returning its very large
remaining stock. Then McGraw Hill bought rights to the book for its back list, to no effect.
Over 8,000 copies were sold, but 17,000 copies were "remaindered" at a pittance. The New York
Times ignored the book. Some favorable reviewing occurred. It went out of print after only
several years. And please to note the way in which an author's "property" is kicked around.
The situation, as I surveyed it, is that not one major publisher has in print a book on
quantavolution, excepting Doubleday, Morrow, and Dell, all with Velikovsky, and excepting, too,
the New American Library with a reprint of Francis Hitching's The Neck of the Giraffe, in which
the head of the giraffe is quantavolution, the neck is the long disdainful connecting link, and
the body is conventional biology. (For those who might think otherwise, I should say that Erich
von Daniken is an "ancient astronauts" buff, not a catastrophist, except in mood. I say this
because I am often asked what I think of von Daniken and I respond that he is not a
quantavolutionary; he blithely propounds mysteries without worthwhile solutions, but he is,
alas, a cosmic heretic.
On October 31, 1982 (Halloween ) the 15 Paperback Bestsellers (trade) which were listed in the
New York Times around the U. S. A. carried six (6) titles dealing with the cat, Garfield. The
number one bestseller was "Garfield Takes the Cake," then, number 4 was "Here Comes Garfield,"
number 10 "Garfield Weighs In," number 13 "Garfield at Large," number 14 "Garfield Bigger than
Life," and number 15 "Garfield Gains Weight." If Garfield were missing, Rubik's Cube would
occupy several of its places, vying with books on diet. The NYT defines this class of paper
backs as "softcover books usually sold in bookstores and priced at average higher than mass
market."
One cannot read Deg's notes and hear him talk without deriving an apocalyptic view of the
publishing industry. "It is a doubly sick industry. It is economically sick and it is
functionally sick. By 'functionally' I mean physically, ideologically, and morally. It is
dominated by cheap nonpublishing money, coming from extravagant swashbucklers and conglomerates
of merged and paralyzed units. Ownership is alienated from editors, editors from producers,
editors from authors. It is characterized by some of the worst labor practices, witness to the
shadiest deals, and engages in the thoroughgoing degradation or writers."
This is the way he often spoke. He wouldn't say much and sometimes in a group or committee be
quiet, abstracted, even appearing bored. Then suddenly he would be seized, and as if to make up
for lost time and to persuade others that he was only speaking because what he was saying was
being torn from his lips, he would hammer out the words, scalding rather than sweetening the
atmosphere, so that when he finished, there was neither applause nor babble of dissent, but a
pause, until someone evasively spoke around him, and when that happened he didn't insist upon
his point but subsided for a good while.
Deg could recite a long list of great writers who had put out their own books, he even claimed
that most great writers did so. First of all, up until the late Eighteenth Century -- Franklin,
Voltaire, the Encyclopedists -- every writer put out his own books, unless, after burying him,
friends or relatives printed his work. In a marginal note to one of his late anatomical
sketches, Leonardo de Vinci implored his "neighbors" to see to it that his works would be
printed.
The publishing racket (Deg's word, not mine) developed sweetly out of bookstores and printing
shops where it belonged and should have stayed, but by the latter part of the nineteenth
century Balzac was excoriating the thieves and profiteers of the business in an excellent
novel, Illusions Perdues. Dickens, Dostoevski and Flaubert sweated to carry their novels first
as serials in magazines. But where are the magazines, bad as they were, today -- they carry a
single chapter, but usually the pain of editing a chapter for a magazine is damaging to both
the author and his book.
Is it names you wish? (And he would begin.) Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stendhal,
Beatrix Potter -- yes, Peter Rabbit -- James Joyce (an angel helped), Marcel Proust, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Virginia Wolfe, Andre Gide (The Immoralist issued in 300 copies), Sigmund Freud
and, if you will, Velikovsky himself published his early pamphlets. Colette was published by
her husband Willy who even stole her name as author. America's best autobiography, The
Education of Henry Adams, was put out by the author.
The myth of Thomas Wolfe is used continuously by publishers to show the unknown young writer
discovered by the great fatherly editor of a conventional publishing company and led carefully
to reveal and convey his beautiful achievements to the world of readers. Even this case is
mythical, as the editor involved, Maxwell Perkins, tried to explain in a recent edition of
Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. But the truth will never catch up with the lie until publishing
circles come upon a similar myth to serve them.
If Charles Darwin's Origins of Species sold out through a book store in 1859 it was because
writing and printing were still for gentlemanly use and the book was not deposited behind a
mass of their friends. Dammit -- nowadays you can't even sell a book to a friend! Besides there
was a prurient and agnostic public altered to the sensationalism of the book. Surely you must
know, too, that Darwin's thesis was already well-worn and agreed upon; he was selling evolution
even though he didn't use the word and the book's raison d'‚tre was the silly mechanism of
natural selection, which was nothing more than a watered-down Lamarckianism, a slogan for bird-
watchers and garden clubs. It was an easy sale.
Deg had one arrow in his quiver to fire at the now pathetically wounded publishers. They are
frauds, announced he.
They pretend to publish the books of the country. Ninety per cent of the serious writing, and I
include even novels and poetry here, is put out by government presses of several types, by
subsidized university presses, subsidized independent and university institutes, scientific
associations, and self-help amateurs like myself. Further, much of the serious writhing put out
by so-called independent publishing houses is subsidized, by insider deals, involving mutual
back-scratching, agreements to arrange publication of one's editors, promotional devices such
that no established book reviewer need fear his shit will go down the drain when there are
people who will eat it, [I am sorry, but that is what he said], by quiet subsidies, by
guarantees of sales, by tricky deals with film-makers, press agents, television companies, and
corporations, and you name it.
At this point I intended to escape Deg's diatribes by telling how he came to enter upon his
writing campaign and then to publish his own works. Lest you think that such violent opinions
as his come out of intense suffering and exploitation, let me once again remind you of Deg's
character, acquired in earliest childhood: he could be and was often indignant about a person
or an institution or a system, without being hurt by them and even while being helped. In a
way, he was rather like his children's generation and the hippies, except that he had the
forcefulness and discipline that produce alternatives; he seemed always to have ready a
proposal for another way of doing things. In this way, he was more sprung from the nineteenth
century utopians: Fourier, Brook Farm, St. Simon, Marx, Henry George, As you will see here, he
didn't expect much, he didn't suffer greatly, he didn't mind sacrificing, and he did not dance
a jig when he finished the job. I assure you once more of that great difference between Deg and
V. Deg did not see himself as a victim; V. saw himself as a victim.
Deg moved into the field of quantavolution slowly and then ever faster. This I would attribute
to his heavy involvement's between 1962 and 1966 with the American Behavioral Scientist and the
design and production of retrieval of bibliographic annotations in the behavioral sciences.
During the same time, he was writing heavily in political science, especially on the reform of
relations between Congress and the Presidency. After he turned from these in the period 1967 to
1972, he wrote Kalos : What is to be Done with Our World? Hired by Simulmatics Corporation, and
given the assimilated rank of a general with "Top Secret" access by the Department of Defense,
he spent a few weeks in and out to win over the Vietnamese people and to bolster the morale of
their own troops.) The job led him quickly into urging measures that were too radical and
diversionary for the forces, civilian and military, that were moving in an irresistible death-
dance toward the ignominious withdrawal of the United States presence in Indochina.
He was writing poetry and before flying to Vietnam in 1967 he collected his poems and put them
to press as the Passage of the Year; some of them he framed in what he called an "eccentric,"
"super-sprung" rhythm. He gave a copy of the book to Harold Lasswell who said, yes, he had
written poetry when young, at which Deg commented that poetry was more accessible to the senile
than the juvenile. He gave a copy to Velikovsky who, it appeared, had published a small book of
poems under the pseudonym of Immanuel Ram, in Russian, in 1934. V. read Deg's poems and used a
quotation from them on one occasion to persuade Deg of a point. Suddenly it seemed that mankind
was a secret crowd of poets.
He then joined with a University instructor who had not studied directly with him, and had met
in the annual Department reception, Nina Mavridis, a tough, emotional, polyglot petite blonde
smartly turned out, whom he later married. They went in search of a Greek island house, and he
bought a parcel of land on Naxos, which was then a quiet backward island, and there built the
stone cottage facing across the straits to Paros.
He turned to several of his former students, graduates, and "drop-outs" from the system, and
together they organized an experimental college, L'Universite du Nouveau-Monde, and settled in
for a hectic year upon the Alps of Valais, Switzerland. All the while, he visited Princeton,
coming and going, keeping in touch with the Velikovsky circle there and with whoever of his
immediate family happened to be home from schools and wanderings around the world.
With the University of Switzerland closed down, the United States withdrawing from Indochina,
his work on a new world order totally ignored, his family disassembled, efforts at reforms
within New York University ending only in cosmetic changes, and resettled efficiently with Nina
in an apartment of Washington Square Village, just across from one of his classrooms, and a
block from his office, Deg drove through the resulting energy gap into the field of
quantavolution. He completed two books of political science during this period, neither
requiring heavy research but both of which, Politics for Better or Worse and the "lectures to
the Chinese", Eight Bads, Eight Goods, he considered as "state of the art" philosophically, and
innovative in format and perspective. Both were "successes," he thought: neither earned much
money $18,000 in the first case, $3,500 in the second. His University teaching had never in his
career cut very deeply into his time for study and writing, partly because he did not "pal
around" with students and varnish their wasting time. Too, he avoided committee assignments
that seemed useless, and had little need for generalized social encounter. During nine months
of the year, he gave an average of twenty hours per week to straight pedagogical, work; the
rest went into his projects -- editorial, political, pedagogical, consultative -- and writing.
Wherever he had taught, including New York University, he was expected to be a "producer," to
do research and writing in return usually for a lighter teaching and committee load. He was
usually expected "to bring money into the University," which sometimes he did, and to find
funds for his research and activities, which sometimes he did. He used his time fully and
completely for these latter purposes, working year-round, seven days a week, for three to
twelve hours. (obviously, everything did not "come easy to him," as so many acquaintances
believed.) His journal slackened off, through the sixties and seventies, entries occurring only
every several days on the average and even then deprived of events recited in their fullness.
He rarely spent more than ten minutes on the day's newspapers; he watched television several
hours a week; he listened little to music and rarely played his trumpet any more, but often was
humming and whistling to himself. Except when reading a novel or a poem, he did not read in the
conventional way. Reading was an instrument of research and writing. He would pounce upon a
book or article and seek directly the point that he was addressing, which had made him pick up
the work in the first place. If it wasn't helpful, he would put the work aside. He could rarely
be trapped, for instance, by some lurid description of a disaster. At the rate of 100 pages an
hour he could tell whether there was anything useful to him in a succession of books or
articles. An issue of Science, though it might contain 100 pages, would ordinarily occupy 10
minutes, just enough time to see whether there was something of interest in it. He would
however, spend hours on a relevant two-page article in a strange field -- a paleontological
article using explicit chronometry, for instance, learning the method used, looking for the
expected illogical turn or twist, the weak point in a piece which after all had been fashioned
with extreme care, was the darling of the authors' eyes, and had been rigorously criticized by
conventional readers.
At first both current materials and ancient materials on quantavolution were not so easy to
find. Stecchini was alone as supplier of references outside of V.'s works. As the network of
scholars like Mullen, Juergens, Milton, Crew, Sizemore, Moore, Lowery, James and several dozen
others came into the field the supply of references grew exponentially. Pens‚e, Kronos, The S.
I. S. Review and Workshop and Corliss' Sourcebooks and Newsletter brought hundreds of citations
to light. I cannot do less than say that the names of the hundred authors of the articles and
notes in these magazines is the measure of 90% of the field. If screened for relevance and
translated into quantavolutionary terms, several hundred more names would be added -- not that
they would gladly accept being added -- from the conventional output of scientific books and
journals.
In a combination of disgust, impractical judgment, and worthy motive, he decided in 1977 to
resign all obligations to teach and supervise dissertations and to be at hand for the various
faculty meetings; he found the University ready to pay him a third of his salary to engage
solely in research until he would arrive at the age of 63, after which he would be considered
as fully retired. The agreement was soon followed by a considerable general inflation of the
economy, and a reduction in foundation activities, so that he was constrained to stringent
personal economy, not so evident on the surface, but oppressive in reality. He had no illusions
about the interests of foundations and government research agencies in quantavolution and in
fact received no help. He earned a little money here and there, whatever could be done rapidly
without taking his money here and there, whatever could be done rapidly without taking his mind
off of his quantavolutionary studies. He sold a piece of land on Naxos. He sold, too, a small
house he had bought for his retirement, near Brown University where he had once taught and
close friends still lived. These funds and more went into research costs -- typing, Xeroxing,
travel -- and to the occasional support of his mother and other family members. Nina, although
she finally earned her doctorate, and was a most effective teacher, could not get into and hold
onto a position in one of the college systems of the New York area. Whatever money she had, she
spent fully and equitably. This is no place to speak of her at length; she was everywhere in
those years, but when Deg comes to tell of Naxos, it will be up to him to tell of Nina. By the
middle seventies, she and Deg had split, and came finally to see one another as friends only,
there on the island where she bought and remodeled two medieval Venetian homes and lived with
her husband Peter whenever possible.
Deg's first book in the Quantavolution Series, The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars was
written in the early seventies. He had thought for several years that he should write a
textbook on what he was then calling revolutionary primevalogy, but before he had settled among
several outlines of the work and written a few passages, he reached back for a journal entry
written while staying at Pythagoreion on the Island of Samos and decided to try out the new
field with a case study.
Pythagoreion, Island of Samos, July 12, 1968
I have come across and read for the first time closely and consciously the song of Demodocus at
the house or Alcinous. How wonderfully it describes what Velikovsky said was the actual set of
cosmic events of the Seventh Century before this era, of how bright-crowned Aphrodite loved the
god of battle Mars-Ares, and how they repeatedly fucked "in the house of fire," whose master,
Hephaistos, finally entrapped them in a net and put them upon a more pious course. The passage
must be analyzed Word for Word: the parallelism is beyond coincidence; either Velikovsky wrote
the myths of the Greeks, or something like the physical events he describes historically took
place.
The story referred to is a brief lyric of a hundred lines, sung in Book VIII of the Odyssey,
the epic poem of Homer. It tells of a much longer opera ballet sung and danced for Ulysses.
Deg showed his manuscript to Juergens who was surprised at its coincidence with his own
electrical theory of the events, which was to appear ultimately as two articles in the magazine
Pens‚e. V. would not read it. Deg wished to dedicate it to him. V. said let Bill Mullen read it
and if he likes it, go ahead. Mullen did, very much. Cyrus Gordon liked it, but could not
respond to the astrophysical scenario. Further he suspected Aphrodite to be Venus, not Moon.
The English acquaintances of Deg got onto the manuscript when he submitted it to the publisher,
Sidgwick and Jackson, who had published The Velikovsky Affair in England, and he showed it to
them. They liked it, but in all conscience could not accept the identification of Aphrodite
with the Moon, for they identified her instead with Athene, Ishtar, and the morning and evening
star, Venus.
This disagreement meant that the English group was ready to dispute an important point of
Velikovsky for, in his application of the Iliad to the Martian disturbances of the seventh
century, he had found Aphrodite joining with Ares in the Trojan War to fight against Athene.
Whereupon, and for other reasons, Aphrodite was assigned to the Moon. Desertions were numerous
on this score. When James published a critique of Deg's identification of the goddess, it stood
without rebuttal, and Cardona, Rix and others were convinced of James's case.
American publishers were not turned on by the Love Affair. W. W. Norton, through Brockway, said
it was well written but not to their tastes. So it went with one publisher after another, Simon
and Schuster, Dodd and Mead, Doubleday, Random House, Harcourt Brace, Stein and Day, Princeton
University Press, Harper and Row, Atheneum, Sidgwick and Jackson, Free Press, and even the New
York University Press (unless a subsidy were paid). Deg thought he should "toot his horn"
perhaps, as his mother used to tell her boys, so he prepared a blurb about it.
He made the Love Affair sound as if it might attract the masses, but publishers were quick to
point out that the book was serious, learned, of dubious validity, and sophisticated: in a
word, forget the masses; indeed, betake yourself to a university press. But Deg knew already
the university presses were eager for wide publics, undercapitalized, dominated by editorial
committees of the more conventional members of their faculties, and slow and painstaking to a
fault. He visited Jerry Sherwood of the Princeton University Press. She returned the manuscript
in time with the expected advice. Deg stopped peddling the book. He was too busy with the
general work, Chaos and Creation, to carry on the sometimes interminable pingpong of serious
publishing.
Time after time over the next decade, he would pause in his work to recalculate the options of
his predicament. Naive friends counseled him: "Any press would be happy to consider your
books." A publisher encountered would say, cordially, "Let us see it by all means." Get it down
to 160 pages -- less. No footnotes. One only, not really new, idea. The emerging rule seemed to
be: "Never underrate the unfitness of readers, media, and publishers."
Yet it was like a drug, this pushing one into the marketplace, or like television, One
succumbed from time to time, had a bad trip, and came away cursing himself for not having
avoided the encounter. The condition of the publishing industry in America was unbelievably
bad; would that it were terminal. All that could be said of it was that it was freer than
publishing in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, or for that matter in most other countries. It was
as bad or worse than the political system of the United State in meeting its obligations, much
worse than the educational system with all its weakness.
But unhappy thoughts of this kind did not obsess Deg; they occurred often for a moment (as when
he examined the book review section of the New York Times, or looked at a publisher's list).
Long before, in the days when his work seemed ordinary, when his means of rewarding and
insulting were conspicuously in readiness, publishing his books and articles was no problem.
The society, however, was enveloped in the myth that the publishing process was a logical
affair, constrained tightly by the message between the covers. A writer's fortunes were thought
to vary with the quality of his message. So many useless and dangerous myths rule society! Like
the myth among scientists of myriad readers perusing their article in a reputable scientific
journal -- 10,000? 5000? 500? yes, 50 and feel lucky.
Now, all of this jeremiad is preliminary to announcing that at certain point in time, probably
it was in 1978, just after he began his final race against dwindling finances, Deg decided that
he would, unless intercepted by an angel, proceed to complete his work and then by one means or
another publish it himself. Somehow the money would be found, and he thought to publish it in
Bombay, where he had connections with friends and a publisher, the Popular Book Depot, which
had produced Kalos and Kalotics.
One premise he maintained firmly: he would not be finally frustrated and incapacitated by the
publishing system. Another premise was his delusionary Paternoster: that what he attempted
might be great importance to mankind. It was the best work he could set himself to -- and who
else could do it -- none whom he knew of -- and his other great object in life, a new political
order of the world, offered at this time no opportunity nor chance of success.
The decision was not easy, hardly definite in fact, because like many decisions he made, it was
long foreseen and warmed upon a little burner in a recess of the mind. It was not an optimal
solution, by any means. The myth, social binding, and conventions of publishing are so
pervasive that none of his acquaintances thought this procedure wise, prudent, or even
possible. All too poignant was his awareness that the controversial matter that he was writing
would combine with its unorthodox publication into a hard prejudice against the books. Under
such circumstances, more than a touch of megalomania is needed.
He pushed ahead imprudently, erratically, and stubbornly, or so it seemed to others, and they
were correct, but they could not see how such failings of character might add up to an
achievement. He wrote everywhere and under all conditions on all sizes and kinds of paper with
pencils and pens of any type, and now and then on typewriters, electrical, or a portable,
mechanical one. He read in several libraries, bought very few books, was sent Xerox copies of
many pieces by Sizemore, Milton, and others, corresponded, and ultimately had made notes on
some hundreds of books and articles. These were often caught on the wing, and he was often
exasperated upon completing a book to have lost a citation, forgotten the spelling of a name,
left relevant pieces now in Greece, now again in New York.
There is nothing special to recommend in his research and writing procedures except what one
cannot anyhow imitate: a wide-cast unerring eye for the salient, the strong background of
methodological -- especially epistemological -- thought and theory, a modest skill at writing,
a great skill for synthesizing material, an inborn will to let nothing stand in one's way, a
lifetime practice in doing much with little. Once in the while he got help; Donna Welensky,
whom sometimes he paid for her typing and sometimes not, whom he came to love for her energy,
efficiency, and ineffable kindness to the world, never mind her brawny blonde beauty.
The latter half of the dozen strenuous years were dominated, physically speaking, by the
presence of a quiet deep-voiced dark-haired, brown-eyed, French novelist whom he encountered
first at Naxos, where she was joyfully spending a few francs that her publisher had let her
have as a consolation for not publishing her latest book, The Paladin. With great difficulty
for her assets were almost literally on her back, she obtained a visa to come to America, and
thenceforth Deg took care of her, and she took care of him. In 1982, they married. They lived
in New York City, at Princeton, in Washington, on Naxos, and in Paris, appearing more affluent
than they were or pretended to be.
They visited her ancestral village, Habsheim, between Basel and Mulhouse, they traveled to
England, Italy, Hungary, and Canada. She loved the journeys and loved Deg and adapted quietly,
imposingly, to the net of human ties and implausible projects of Deg with a broad, engaging and
ever-ready smile. When Elisheva, sculptress forever, met her for the first time, she was
awestruck at bones that made her strong hands ache for a chisel and hammer. "How did you find
such beauty?" she asked Deg. She could be happier than anybody whom Deg had ever met, under the
poorest conditions of life -- but then, as he often said to her, and she fully agreed, we are
much better off than humanity is or has ever been or will be.
In more than a decade from 1972 to 1983 Deg gave over perhaps no more than eight months to work
outside of quantavolution. Almost all of these few months was spent consulting directly and
indirectly with the National Endowment for the Arts with Carl Stover, a friend of thirty years
standing. Given a general directive and promoted by Carl before Nancy Hanks and Livingston
Biddle, directors of the Endowment, Deg wrote a number of sketches of what might be done to
stimulate a broad range of cultural areas, but principally he committed a trenchant irony
called "1001 Question on Culture Policy" in which using the format of a book of interrogations,
he was able to say all that he wanted to say. The work was an implication that nothing
intelligent and basic was being said about public policy on the arts and humanities. Stover
even managed to obtain from the Ford Foundation a subsidy with which to send copies of the work
to most prominent leaders of the organization and direction of cultural affairs of the United
States. Copies were also distributed in Western Europe. The effects, so far as might be
perceived, and disregarding the encomia that are easily aroused by techniques of publicity,
were nil.
Otherwise the quantavolution investigation progressed and enlarged grossly. By 1975 the basic
Chaos and Creation was calving. The theory of Homo Schizo emerged and went one way,, ultimately
two ways, in two volumes, one on the origins, one on human nature today. A great fragment fell
out of Chaos and Creation and became a treatise on exoterrestrial aspects of geology, The
Lately Tortured Earth. On a sojourn in Naxos there occurred an idea for an article explaining
why the Pharaoh should have pursued the Jews in Exodus; quickly, stimulated by conversations
with Anne-Marie, it transformed into a book of exhilarating discoveries and, in the end, God's
Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus.
He had already devised a theory of how the solar system might have enacted the set of
quantavolutionary dramas which he had been uncovering and classifying. He wrote of it to Ralph
Juergens. He found agreement there, and then he achieved the support of Earl Milton, Earl opted
to come in on the enterprise of a book; Ralph became engaged, too, but hardly had Earl gone
down to Flagstaff, Arizona, to go over their preliminary notes with him, than Juergens died
suddenly, of a heart attack. Over several years, in Princeton, Washington, Manhattan, London,
and Naxos, and by telephone and correspondence, Milton and Deg worked to complete the book. Its
Index, in an unique format, which they named the Omnindex because it merged glossary,
bibliography and key words, was finished at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D. C., on February
16, 1984.
The Moon and Mars book was standing by for revision. The Burning of Troy, its title taken from
its first easy on the calcinology of Troy IIg, was organized to contain studies, reprints,
essays, and notes. The Divine Succession was taken up; its central theory, that all gods are of
the same family, was put forward; an anthropological and psychological discussion of the major
aspects of religion followed. Then, as Deg stood back, gazing anxiously and unproud into the
manuscript, there came to him the idea of adding two new proofs of the existence of gods, and
also the scheme of a catechism for whosoever might wish to contemplate a possible new religion
alongside the old.
There was left only The Cosmic Heretics, which I undertook to write. Its origins lay in Deg's
intention, growing over some years, to write an autobiography in half-a-dozen volumes. He still
nourishes the thought, cowering over the prospect of its passage through the gauntlet of fast-
gathering, spiked-leather-fisted knights of time. But perhaps I can also do this job for him.
In 1980 he sent off Chaos and Creation to India for production. Delays were many. Stephanie
Neuman lent him $3000 to defray some of its costs. He paid her back two years later. Funds came
in from the sale of the book through the mails to lists of friends and of purchasers of William
Corliss' Sourcebooks. Corliss himself sold copies. But larger sums were needed. They came from
an advance of Ben Gingold, a friendly architect who intended to purchase land in Naxos from
Deg, from cashing in 10% of the annuities that were to take care of his retirement, from yet
another property sale, and from a personal bank loan. Household economies were the rule. The
logic was simple: a small saving enabled thirty letters to be sent out, thirty letters might
elicit a couple of orders. Deg and Aim moved into a dingy little brick house on an old street
of Trenton, in a neighborhood that sociologists call by the menacing term "marginal."
Publishing in India was becoming costly. The Indian rupee which should have lost its
international value, maintained itself steadily against the dollar, letting India pay its debts
at a loss of export, but then it exported little anyhow. Nevertheless, Deg let himself in for a
third round with Indian printers, sending off in early 1982 the bulky manuscript of The Lately
Tortured Earth.
He rationalized his private publishing company in a memo to readers, but then decided not to
print it in his book. Here is a better place for it, so I am carrying it:
A Note on this Edition
The Edition is intended to bring the materials of Lately Tortured Earth to the attention of the
small number of scholars and students who are directly involved in research into quantavolution
and catastrophe. It has not undergone the ideal processing of several expert readers, critics,
and editors. It has been published for the very purpose of arousing comment and criticism.
Four major reason occur for this procedure: There are inordinate delays and difficulties in
publishing through the natural channels of the trade book and textbook publishers and
university presses. This book and others in the quantavolution series have already been in
manuscript form for some time. It may be better, therefore, to publish the work promptly in
this manner than to let more years slip by until finally some convinced entrepreneur will be
bold enough to undertake its publication.
Since the work enters upon numerous fields of sciences and humanities, expert readers would be
required, a veritable conference of critics, and, logically in each case, a possibly
unfavorable critic and a possibly favorable one. Many copies, much time, and thousand of
dollars in fees would be needed. Based upon the author's experience with the editorial services
of some prestigious publishers, the cost is too high to pay. Publishing the book on the
author's responsibly alone will enable hundreds, instead of a score, of experts and students to
weight the validity and utility of the work.
Third, authors of unusual theories and controversial types of evidence are strangers to
specialists of most relevant fields. Foundation support, university backing, and publishers'
advances are practically impossible to obtain, all of which might otherwise be used to avoid
editorial, factual and linguistic peccadillos and to comb more efficiently the library stacks
for materials on "non-fields."
Fourth, new high technology has come to publishing, but there is a shameful disparity between
the high-level technology abundantly available for the most useless kind of publications and
deeper problems of human culture and natural history, most of which necessarily occupy the
attention of only a few persons. While university presses, never an ideal solution, deteriorate
and while commercial publishers vie for scrapulous material, and while publication technology
vies for faster addressing and delivery of junk mail and selling computers for games and word
processors to enchant the bored secretary, those to whom consigned the progressive evolution of
culture are hard put to survive, assemble, and operate the tools of their trade.
We hope, in sum, that our readers will be fully critical, yet tolerant of our not so sleek
editorial packaging.
Delays loomed up in India with Lately Tortured Earth so he turned to domestic production. Once
again he had to review all of the possibilities for cheap book production in America. His
initial constraints were several. He needed a secure conventional binding, preferably cloth or
sewn. He could not publish in a large format, say 8 1/ 2 x 11 inches, because he wanted to put
the book before the reader in a familiar form. He needed a bookish type font, an even right
margin, running heads and other "luxuries" that American readers had come to expect and demand.
He wished to insert many illustrations; this would be costly if they required redrawing or
screening.
He observed the rush of new technical systems, computer memory word processing equipment,
"perfect" glue binding machines, automatic cameras, small presses of various kinds and
alternative Xeroxing machines. None of the products and suppliers with whom he treated had a
clear perception of what his needs were and he found himself lecturing them about the
greediness and unresponsiveness of industry that is set up to treat deferentially the
unconscionable matter of junk mail and the industrial wordage of the culture -- and he would
sound off sometimes on the gamut of the intellectual pariahs, the serious writers, artists, and
scientists.
From time to time he would play with the design of an ideal system of personal and small-group
publishing at a cost the humble creators of culture would afford. He put aside consideration of
systems of microform production and distribution, because the fast culture was still too slow
to accept them. He foresaw in the meanwhile a word processor with software for book-setting; a
memory capable of handling a book as a whole; software for intelligent spelling and indexing
and storing and addressing networks of acquaintances and potential customers; big readable
screen; means of composing tightly and finely; a tape that could be stored and would feed a
composer that could be slow but must print out a handsome book font and a generally useful
caption font. Then the output, automatically paginated, would be pasted up on cards, the cards
then printed in multiple copies on a reliable copying machine that could handle from one to a
hundred copies of four pages (11" x 17") at a time, after which a collating machine could fold
and merge the pages into a book that would then be placed into a thermal, glue-binding machine,
capable of handling up to a 500-page text with its covers, be they cloth or card. Next the book
would be trimmed, then, if cloth-bound, jacketed with a paper that had been produced by the
same system. The small edition, by which Deg meant from fifty to five hundred copies, would be
shelved until sold and shipped. Meanwhile the announcements would be coming out through the
same system and would be addressed by the automatic print-out of the stored customer and
complimentary lists. Small gadgets and work routines would be devised for the interfaces of the
system components. The whole publishing company would fit in a garage or basement comfortably.
It should not cost more than $20,000, including initial supplies, and a year's maintenance
contract. It should be affordable with a $2000 down payment with the balance plus interest in
extended payments over a 36-months period. Facilities for the bookmaking announcements, or its
equivalent in magazine and pamphlet production would be provided; actually a much larger output
would be possible.
The system he envisioned is quite feasible technically. Beginning in 1981, Deg could set forth
the named components and locate their suppliers to provide a complete system in the range of
$30,000, but the system would have uneconomic, inefficient, superfluous, and flawed elements.
The field was moving rapidly. At some moment, it could be brought together and a revolution in
publishing accomplished. Or rather, what would happen is that the great majority of thousands
of creative groups of the nation would cut themselves off effectively from the commercial and
university press publishers, building firmly and at a cost they might afford the printed
communication network which they needed if they were to survive. When a company called the
Who's Who of Contemporary Authors circularized him, asking the usual information and adding a
request for "words from the wise," he wrote (May 18, 1981):
SIDELIGHTS: "Two futurisms for the debased and desperate intelligentsia: A) With the decadence
and collapse of the publishing business, creative writers should discover how to publish
themselves and reach their own special audience; commercial publishing is 95% an exploitative
delusional myth. B) With the decline and collapse of the existing world system, the free
intelligentsia should cut back on writing just anything for money or prestige and begin to
assume responsibility for picturing and propagandizing a revolutionary new world order."
He never got around to seeing whether they printed it. Nothing approaching a new full mini-
publishing system was achieved by Deg with the Quantavolution Series. The name "Metron" meaning
"Measure" was revived from a personal reporting, consulting, and publishing company he had
employed mostly in the 1950's and 1960's to put out the American Behavioral Scientist, the
Universal Reference System, and books and reports. Now it was to be the name of the first
quantavolutionary publisher. The means of publication were only half-new, a melange of all
ordinary systems. Word-processing with photo-composition by large machines, Compugraphic
composition, and old hot-type linotype systems and by already old-style small offset presses.
Bindings ranged from Smyth-sewn cloth-covered board binding to new compact "perfect" thermal
binding. Deg designed all the covers and the format, under heavy constraints of format, color,
and costs.
The printing and publishing industry was in a technological and marketing revolution and it was
annihilating the old breeds of manuscript-evaluator, copy-editor, proof-readers, and designer.
All of these operation now were more expensive and provided less reliable and competent
services. Deg arranged much of the composition, printing, and binding with Rick Bender of the
Princeton University computer center and with the University's Printing Services. They became
adept at running small editions in the interstices of time that occur with a large computer and
photocompositor.
In all, the labor of his wife and himself as designers, editors, typist, clerks and managers of
production and distribution, would have cost $65,000 to purchase as services on the open
market. Direct research and overhead costs (actually paid out or otherwise absorbed) came to
about $60,000 over the whole time; direct production costs amounted to $41,500; early mailings
and advertising cost $6,000. Without any allowances for the author's time or advances against
royalties (he being the author), the total real cost amounted to $172,500. The total number of
books produced was only about 6,000, and many of these were not intended for sale. The editions
were numbered. The average real (but not cash) cost per book, then, not including any
compensation for the author, amounted to $28.80 per copy.
When I spoke to him before turning this page over to the printer (taking care not to be seen
laughing) the returns had totalled $7,500. He expected receipts to reach $30,000 in a year's
time and finish off the balance of immediate direct costs, $17,500, during the second year.
This would also exhaust the first edition copies. The main chance of compensating for the
$125,000 of other non-monetary but poignantly real costs would be to sell rights for new
editions to other publishers As for the royalties of the author, in our simulated account here,
these would have to wait until further new editions were issued, and were ticketed for archival
expenses. Apparently the avant-garde or heretical author is frustrated whether by the
publishing business or in his own efforts to reach out and communicate. Deg was continually
irritated by the ignorance of the intelligentsia concerning the engine rooms of the ships
carrying them. They are brainwashed by the language of Hollywood, in the markets of best-
sellers, and in the display quantities of ads of rich corporations. The intellectuals, with few
exceptions, inflict upon their creative brethren the oppressive standards of the rotten rich --
fame, money, connections. Dick Cornuelle and Deg enjoyed examining some of the exquisite
typography, color-drenched illustrations, and perfect printing that went into annual reports of
companies which had bought dearly Cornuelle's more than ample writing talents. No expense, no
technology, no skill was spared to convey to some thousands of barely interested shareholders
and stockbrokers how well or badly the managers had run their affairs during the year. The
annual report, no matter how expensively published, was but a trifle in their operating costs
of the year. Yet it would have covered the costs of publishing beautifully fifty creative
works.
Where are all these creative works? Is that the objection? Most of them are abortions of a
culture of intellectual and science prostitution. They do not appear because they cannot be
carried to full term. They do not appear because they expire too in their creator's archives.
And this is why Deg, as he came to the end of the Quantavolution Series and I near the end of
telling its history, began to harangue his family and intimates to set up an Institute for
Creative Archives. A billion dollars a year, he claimed, is the cultural loss to the American
nation of the death of the archives of its creative workers. This was a real loss, not
registered in the unselective National Economy's Accounting System. He wanted to do something
about it.
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PRECURSORS OF QUANTAVOLUTION
"Life is like an endless procession, long since begun, which we join as it passes by." So comes
down to us a saying of Pythagoras. V. didn't mind joining the procession but he wanted to be
seen carrying the largest idol of science. This sentiment led him to understate the height of
the people walking before him, as well of those walking alongside.
The recounting of one's precursors has in it an element of snobbery, like the genealogical
research that discovers barons but not brigands, big shots rather than bums. V. was especially
careful to admit no disgraceful ancestors and came near to the point of acknowledging no one;
pari passu he would not recognize any contemporary descendants of non-existent ancestors. This
led him into an awkward position where, on the one hand, he was extolling the observations of
ancient catastrophists of religion and natural history but disdaining the multitude of their
descendants who were equally impressed by ancient catastrophism; he lost sight of most of the
world's people when accusing mankind of a collective amnesia of ancient catastrophes, focusing
his mind upon the uniformitarian intelligentsia of modern times.
He was loath to draw sustenance from and give thanks to the long line of Christian defenders of
the historical and catastrophic accuracy of the Bible, whose works on subjects such as
evolution and geology were, for their times, as good as his own in Earth in Upheaval. He was
unfriendly to religiously committed writers who pursued parallel paths and sought to ignore
them. When Donald Patten, who had published an extensive and substantial scientific work on the
Biblical Flood in 1966, was introduced to him at a home reception in Portland around 1972, V.'s
first words were spoken angrily: "You are trying to destroy me, but you will fail in the end!"
So relates Patten and there is no reason to doubt him, especially when he adds that a while
later V. returned to him and apologized. Says Patten:
While I view Ron Hatch as both an associate and proteg‚, as we have developed our model of the
dynamics of ancient cosmic upheavals, Velikovsky viewed me as an unwanted proteg‚, not to be
encouraged. He seems to have resented the fact that I disagreed with his conclusion in part,
and he did not acknowledge or consider that I agreed with him in many ways. Often criticized as
he was (and many times unfairly), Velikovsky regarded me as yet another critic trying to
destroy his work. He was uncomfortable with my evangelical, Christian faith; I was comfortable
with his Zionist bias; many evangelical Christians support Israel strongly, and I am one of
them.
Patten was a geographer, hailing originally from Montana. In 1973, he published a second book,
"The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes," all of which events Deg found acceptable
in the history of the millennium after -1450 B. C. Deg purchased them in London in 1976 through
a member of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. In them, he found stimulus and
information. Before then, he had heard only a few derogatory remarks about the books.
Patten and his collaborators, of whom the most prominent were Ronald Hatch and Loren
Steinhauer, were fully committed to astral catastrophism and built a complete succession of
scenarios around orbital intersections of Mars and Earth, beginning with the deluge of Noah.
(At first Mars was exculpated for the Deluge but now Patten would implicate it then and there
as well.) Patten's admiration of V.'s work, which he expressed most strongly in an article of
1982, did not extend to accepting the participation of planet Venus. He presented the Deluge in
an unusual structural form; generally his work has this geometrical structure of thought. Like
Deg, he was prone to set up categories and lists. He developed also a short-term calendar of
the ages.
His brief but friendly criticisms of V. were threefold: that V. was over --influenced by Freud
and prone to accept too many evolutionary and uniformitarian doctrines, that he was
unquantitative and unsystematic in his geology, and that V. was overconcerned with his critics.
I cannot dispute Patten, because these same several views emerge from our own pages as well.
Patten's books, which he himself published, circulated widely and well over the years, and
hundreds of thousands in due course watched a 60-minute filmstrip of his ideas presented in
English and other languages. He could not be said, however, to have conformed to the ruling
formula in Christian Evangelism, which was determined by Henry M. Morris and the leaders of the
Creation Research Society, who held to an age of 10,000 years for the world, therefore
constraining creationist science greatly. Deg was next in line of constraints, with his 14,000
years for a holocene period full of quantavolutions, including lunar fission, nor could he
believe that the Judaeo-Christian God had laid down this constraint; it was miserably self-
imposed with full blame unto himself. Still he was grateful for the works tendered him by the
creationists and, unlike V., felt no need to disavow them.
V. cited with relish ancient predecessors, but when it came to citing modern scientific ones
such as Georges Cuvier, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Donnelly, Hoerbiger, and Bellamy, his lines were
niggardly, rather derogatory, and somewhat aside from the point of their predecession. When
accused in a letter to the New York Times (May 7, 1950) of having taken wholesale from Hans
Hoerbiger, an older contemporary, V. rightly answered with details of their divergences and
Hoerbiger's failings. But here, as elsewhere, V. held to a narrow view of what constituted the
procession of life and science, and precession.
V. had come upon Donnelly's Ragnarok in 1940 at the New York Public Library and was depressed
by the discovery, according to his own words. Thomas Ferte published in 1981 an account of the
numerous fore-shadowings in Donnelly's widely known work of less than a century before. But
then V. unsportingly downgraded Donnelly. I have earlier discussed the remarkable case of
Beaumont, whose claims were so similar but whose method so differed from V. 's. I mentioned
that V. noted to himself that Beaumont must have gotten his ideas from V. by telepathy (though
the reverse should be more true, if any credence were to be given telepathy).
Discovery of V.'s belief in "telepathy" amused Deg. He was reminded of Hans Kloosterman, the
catastrophist geologist leader, whom Deg had joshed for decrying V. as fanciful while himself
espousing telepathy. V. might well have agreed with Kloosterman's explanation of the uses of
telepathy to Deg, in a letter of May 5, 1976 from Rio de Janeiro:
Telepathy is not irrelevant to my main line of investigation, because:
a) Telepathy is possibly important in evolution (see p. e. "The Living Stream" of Alister
Hardy);
b) The biosphere interacts with the lithosphere. And what holds for telepathy holds even more
for dowsing, which involves rocks and ground water and ore bodies.
When Greenberg published in 1981 a posthumous note of 1948 by V. on precursors, he reacted too
strongly "to put the lie to the idiotic and petty criticism of certain people (e. g. James
Oberg) who have accused Velikovsky of failing to mention 'his antecedents' --particularly
Whiston, Donnelly, Hoerbiger, and Bellamy -- as recently as the Fall issue of The Skeptical
Inquirer, a trivial publication with debunking pretensions." Then Greenberg advanced three
other works that V. might have mentioned, provided he had come upon them, Godfrey Higgins,
Anacalypsis (1833-60), Comyns Beaumont The Mysterious Comet (1932), Harold T. Wilkins,
Mysteries of Ancient South America (1945). Neither Greenberg nor V. mentioned Nicolas-Antoine
Boulanger, a most important predecessor, as I think V. would have granted. Deg carries this
story in his journal:
Deg's Journal, November 4, 1972
I then spoke to Livio [Stecchini]. Did Velikovsky know about Boulanger when you brought his
name forward? No, he replied. When I gave him my draft paper to read, he said afterwards that
that was the one thing he learned from it, because he didn't like the paper. This was in the
spring of 1963. I asked L. where he found Boulanger. In the Princeton Library. I probably
picked up his name as an Enlightenment scientist.
I am relieved. I have been pursuing an unpleasant task. V. does not cite Boulanger, who is a
predecessor in that he ascribed a variety of religious beliefs to actual human catastrophes.
Yet V. cites an immense number of sources and combed the literature thoroughly.
I recollect V. telling me not long ago that Boulanger was a predecessor, the most important one
-- not a cause, note well, he didn't say he had read Boulanger. I wondered why he bothered to
tell me this. When one is suspicious, of course, one looks hard at any clue. No matter that I
admire V. greatly and like him as a friend; one has to chase down a suspicion that he might
pull the "silent-footnote" technique on a causal as against a merely chronological predecessor.
Another precursor of V. (and of course Deg) was Howard Baker a geologist who first mentioned
Venus as a possible intruder into Earth's space sheath, but had much to say concerning the
Moon. Again I resort to Deg's Journal:
Washington, February 19, 1979
Yesterday Ami and I spent the day at the Library of Congress to clean up the last of the
bibliography and footnotes of Chaos and Creation. It is tedious and often unrewarding. Yet I
located a copy of Howard Baker's mimeographed book of 1932, another copy of which had been
stolen from the Princeton University Library, The Atlantic Rift, and 2 articles by Marcel
Baudouin from 1916 on paleolithic astronomical symbols, especially the Pleiades. As a bonus,
there was a pamphlet from Baker's hand, of 1954.
So far as I know, only the one sentence, by Walter Sullivan in his 1975 book of Continents in
Motion, has ever been addressed to Baker's work, and that [was] a breezy reference in passing,
obviously intended to show that anybody could be a predecessor of Velikovsky. V. himself said
that he had heard of the book, probably from Sullivan, but when he searched for it, it was
gone. I must ask Sullivan some day what assistant dug it up for him. Baker's work is
professional and brilliant, he says that he was working in the field from 1909 to 1954. I shall
try to discover more about him. Apparently only 106 copies of the book were mimeographed, and
perhaps less were distributed. He argues that Pangea was an all-land Earth, that the moon was
pulled in the Mesozoic from the Pacific by a planet now missing, that prior to this, Venus may
have interacted violently with Earth, and that the ocean basins were once empty and are now
filled with waters from a late disintegration of the same planet (now probably the asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter) that had earlier caused the Earth's crust to erupt the moon.
There is, in other words, a marvelous correspondence between Baker's ideas and my own, and his
method of reasoning, his very mentality, is close to my own. He sees the same things on the
globe. And he saw all of this before the flood of information of the past 50 years from
oceanography, and when continental drift theory was held in contempt by American geologists. He
does not use legendary material but says reasonably and in measured tones that it can be
applied and may support his theories; perhaps had he set a more recent date for the eruption
and fissioning of the continents, he would have been able to use the legendary material about
which he may have known.
V. had found in legend brief evidence that the Moon was young in the sky. He published it in
1973, claiming that the Moon had been captured, a Hoerbiger idea, and showing no awareness of
the large quantity of legendary and geophysical evidence that H. S. Bellamy had brought to bear
on the capture theory in several books, especially in Moon, Myths, and Man (1936). The main
reason why V. dismissed the fission-eruption hypothesis was saying that such a catastrophe
would have been too destructive: "since human beings already peopled the Earth, it is
improbable that the moon sprang from it; there must have existed a solid lithosphere, not a
liquid earth. Thus it is more probable that the moon was captured by the earth."
On several occasions Deg would say to V. that he was pursuing affirmatively the theory that the
moon was wrenched from the earth in the time of man. V. had no interest in discussing the
question. He offered no objection. He would grunt some vague expression like "You are working
much, I see..." when Deg would say "Just look at the Pacific Basin...." and then move on the
another topic. That he didn't object seemed to Deg a kind of nihil obstat.
The mystery of the purloined book of Baker was unsolved. Deg wrote Walter Sullivan one time
asking where he had obtained the reference to Baker's work, but received no reply. Deg made a
last-minute change in his manuscript to credit Baker's work, not that he believed in credit per
se but that he was happy to find like-minded company in the Pythagorean procession of life.
The idea of "precursors," believed Deg, was about as slippery, nonsensical, and morally
disturbing as the idea of prior claims in science. In this I certainly agree with him. We know
little about how a fruitful hypothesis is achieved and developed. Merely applying words will
not help; what are the operations? And he goes on to explain:
Synonyms for "precursor" might be forerunner, pioneer, predecessor, ancestor, scout, forebears,
progenitors, inventor, creator, leader, conductor, pacesetter, guide, steersman, pointer,
mercury, bellwether, and pre-centor. Let us keep "precursor" which is an empty enough vessel to
fill with what we want. What do we want to say? The relation between writer B. at T1, to writer
V. at T2 is such that V. has heard --forgetfully heard -- did not hear of B. V. has arrived at
Proposition "M" that is 90% identical (as it operationally describes a set of defined events)
with a Proposition "N" of B. V. has arrived at Proposition "M" by employing the same method as
B., or did not employ the same method, or did not use any method, or employed a method to
arrive at Proposition "M" whereas B reveals no method for arriving at "N".
Suppose V. takes "M" from B's "N." Does he get no credit for perceiving it? Yes, some, you say.
But who gets the credit as precursor to V. who was the cause of V.'s perceiving "N" or of
reading B? His parents, teachers, colleagues; his type of mind, preparation, briefing, search
discipline? His wife for driving him to the library, for cooking food that stimulates the
imagination? The librarians over the years?
And what of the precursor of B who may have directly or indirectly provided him with "N"? We
cite Aristotle, knowing he stands for that stimulates the imagination? The librarians over the
years? And what of all the people who knew and conveyed "N" between B. at T1, and V. at T2, but
whom V. did not know about?
Would not V have thought of "M" anyway, and is not the decision to cite "B" as a precursor a
socially acceptable choice? Horse thieves are unlikely to appear in genealogies and discredited
writers are unlikely to be cited as predecessors. Whether "B" here is Boulanger or Beaumont
will make a difference. Deg can testify to this statement; he felt better, and he knew his
critics would be more accepting, if he acknowledged Boulanger and did not acknowledge Beaumont
as a precursor on one or another point. Boulanger is farther back in time, and more
conventional than Beaumont, who seized upon certain quite incredible ideas.
I have scarcely begun to discuss the ramifications, doubts, dilemmas, tricks of the mind, and
tactics of the writing scholar. We have been talking of a single skimpy proposition "M" and
"N". Suppose "M" and "N" represent averages of many propositions, then the way in which they
are combined, the theory behind their selection, and the style with which they are conveyed are
only several of the numerous conditions that may render even a close correspondence between "M"
and "N" whether single or an average of a multiple nearly meaningless.
So V. was accident-prone with precursors. It was quite unnecessary. The absurd attempt of
critics to pretend that what he said was not only false and anyhow not new could be taken
seriously only by fools. But as I have shown here time and time again he seemed to think that
knowledge came in gobs, and he had produced some gobs, and had to defend them against theft by
others.
Who were V.'s precursors, I asked Deg, the truth now, and nothing but the truth. Precursors
were many, he replied.
All the ancients were precursors. Beginning with Renaissance times, some score of major
precursors have worked. Of these, directly, V. took from Whiston, Donnelly, Bellamy, Brasseur
de Bourbourg, and perhaps innocently or amnesiacally from Beaumont and Hoerbiger. After 1962 he
probably took from many people of his circle, both directly and from their references, like
Stecchini with Boulanger and Juergens with Bruce, or Schorr on the Dark Ages and Mullen on the
Pyramid Texts, but he was writing little after 1962.
On the matter of human psychic origins, he took from Freud directly and from others probably as
currents of thought, the psychoanalysts especially. And of course, he was getting a great deal
of material from his opponents; we must never forget that. He was a sad man when the Apollo
Moon program was cut back. He used Sagan's material on the Venus greenhouse effect to dispute
the matter. But I tell you it doesn't matter -- not to science, not to the truth of what he is
saying, not to me -- only to the question of how big a hero was V. -- how many scalps on his
belt are really his own prizes.
Did V. ever use anything of Yours, I asked Deg.
Perhaps, but I couldn't say. Yes, definitely, he used me to figure out what was happening
sociologically to his interests. He soft-pedaled certain of his views on collective amnesia, on
anti-semitism, on the wrongness of others like the English heretics, on the inheritance of
acquired traits, and such kinds of matters when I was around, though this cannot be perceived
in his writings. I am not speaking of tactical advice in his self-defense, of course. All in
all, practically nothing.
And you, I asked, what did you take from him? Everything I could, Deg answered.
I got very little out of conversations, but a great deal from his writings. But I wish to make
one point clear. Although V. was my precursor, predecessor, forerunner, etc. I did not accept
V. on anything, except for a time his reconstruction of Egyptian history after, say, 800 B. C.,
and this because it seemed irrelevant to most of my interests. Not until I realized that V. was
destroying his own 8th century catastrophic history by moving kings too far into modern times
did I become worried and stop accepting that set of events.
What I mean by "accepting," he continued, is taking for granted, and not reconstructing the
same structure alongside his structure. "Accepting" is what, say, a paleontologist does who has
a fossil ape and gets it dated at 12 million years by a laboratory on potassium-argon dating
and accepts this as his date.
"Accepting" is taking a cloth made by someone else, before going on to embroider it. Everything
I took from V. I examined and took apart and put together again. I guess you could call it
"factory rebuilt." I did not deny him, underrate him, or even disagree with him seriously and
often. However, I was building a much larger, more systematic, broader, more scientoid model. I
tell you frankly, I had in mind to supersede him.
Did you succeed? Yes, Deg said. How?
Like I told you -- putting all that I could of his machine into a larger, more systematic, and
broader model. I swung the whole mass of ideas and evidence into a hypothetical model --
nothing was true; it simply could well be true. Everything is swung into position for testing;
logically, empirically, comparatively. V. worked like a detective who is looking for a culprit,
there was no crime! And if there were, who is the culprit becomes a sociological question,
always plural. And I am always suspicious of the detective, too; maybe he staged the crime!
Well, I said, dubiously, how does it happen that your writing often races along breezily and
confidently?
It's matter of style, he said, and of necessity. I am confident of what I am saying, believing
that I have put proper limits on it. There is a characterological element in it; I've always
written that way, hammering along like a thumping heart, or the old diesel motor of a caique.
There's something else, though, purely for the sake of the reader. There is a limit to how many
times you can use the word "tends to" or "may" or "on the average" or "holding all other
factors constant" in place of "is" or "does". That's one kind of problem; a writer shouldn't
carry his miasma of doubts to the extent that he is never clear; actually, every sentence you
utter distorts the reality of which it speaks.
Also, when, after having defined Yahweh and Moses and the nature of their "communications," I
may be saying "Yahweh then speaks to Moses," I hope that it is understood that this statement
of mine is subject to the prior definition of all three keywords, "Yahweh," "speaks," and
"Moses." But the total posture of my work is different. V. accomplished marvels of detection in
myth and legends. Also in history. He sets up a contradiction or confusion, then puts forward
his resolution. Yet ordinarily he is not self-conscious, about his logic, method, and
epistemology. He was a practitioner and an empiricist. By contrast, there must be hundreds of
pages on the method of myth analysis and anthropological culture analysis in my writings.
Onetime, V., in an unusually frank conversation with Wolfe, Milton, and Rose -- at the same set
of meetings in fact that produced the euphoric letter that I described in the chapter on
Holocaust and Amnesisa -- denounced the coining of words as the tactic of crackpots, and then
confessed that he had coined a word; it was "introgenesis." It meant that "everything wishes to
make everything else to its own fashion." Existence, whether animal, plant, or even celestial
and inorganic bodies, operates by this imperative, to take whatever it encounters, digest it,
and reconstitute it with oneself. Introgenesis was marked by him to become the key word in his
philosophy. It would have become my philosophical system, he said, if I had not come upon
Worlds in Collision. Everything wants to swallow up every other thing.
When this burst of philosophical confidences was conveyed to Deg, he wondered at it -- it
seemed so meaningless -- and only years later, when he heard a full statement of it, did he
appreciate that V., without realizing it, was simply coining a word (typically he credited
words with substance) which referred to his own immense narcissism, the same narcissism that he
urged all psychiatrists to fish up from their patients at the beginning of analysis.
The sole coinage of the realm was to be one's own. This wish seems to go hand in glove with the
wish for unassailable proof of the purest assay of gold in the coin. V. as he grew old appeared
to be ever more hopeful that some one critical test would occur, some grand fact, that would
prove him right. The attitude became at times an obsession in that he would disregard problems
or proof that lacked this capability. This explains why he became barely interested in myth
while hanging upon every new discovery in space. A fully professional intellectual such as he
should have known that there is a) no proof of right, b) no single right, c) little chance that
right on a single test would erase wrongs on others, but, too, sociologically, d) one's
opponents are not likely to define right in one's own terms, e) they are not inclined to come
to grips at one's strongest point (even though ideally this would seem proper), f) they will
seek to recognize someone else as the originator or predecessor of the chosen point (creating a
new issue and argument of an undefined kind). V. was not alone in this regard; he had
supporters who worked hard to establish him as champion predictor of the one right critical
test results. Still it didn't work.
It seems that all three behaviors join together in an authoritarian character: the ultra-
sensitivity to "priorities of claims" to which I referred before, the anxiety over precursors,
and the hope for the single critical test. In all of them we discover the intolerance of
ambiguity which is a strong trait of the well-researched "authoritarian character" in
psychology, and Deg alludes to the research in several of his early writings. There is, too, in
all of them, an aversion to the close proximity of others, to a trespass upon one's
possessions, a need to define exclusive boundaries.
Dislike of ambiguity is not only "authoritarian" but also "scientific" by the way, for which
the antidote is pragmatic operationism, a subject for another essay. Perhaps it is time to
venture a clearer statement. How did Deg and V. diverge from their basic narcissism, so that V.
fiercely defended his claims whereas Deg untypically and diffidently recollected his claims
after dispensing them like the money of a drunken sailor?
Both men, encouraged by their early models, commanded unusually strong energies that they used
to conquer their existential fears by creating an independent self, a self not dependent upon
others, that would take in the world and refuse to let the world include them. But then V., to
enhance his primary ego clutched, contained, and possessed his aberrant egos, his poly-ego,
whereas Deg dispersed his ploy-ego hoping and expecting dividends to return.
The result was the formation in V.'s case of an authoritarian character, in Deg's case an anti-
authoritarian character. (I trust that you will not be put off by the fact that V. had to
attack the scientific establishment and that Deg sometimes liked authoritarian causes("
universal national service") and people (such as V.) The authoritarian character led to
predispositions to monolatrous, monarchical, and presidential forms, on V.'s part, while the
anti-authoritarian character led to polytheistic and republican forms on Deg's part. On V.'s
side, the same character ran continuously the risk of enhanced paranoia; on Deg's part the risk
was hypercritical reformism.
I shall not elaborate upon the distinctions farther here, but a rough example may suggest the
effect. I selected six well-known historical figures (there is no use in comparing the two men
with the cop on the beat, their local congressmen, or others whom you have not known): Noah,
Moses, Stalin, Trotsky, Theodore Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle. I asked a couple of persons
who knew both V. and Deg to assign each famous character to one or the other, on grounds of
relative nearness. V. ended up with Moses, Stalin, and de Gaulle; Deg was assigned Noah,
Trotsky, and "Teddy" Roosevelt. I had, of course, predicted those assignments. The test works
out even better by using a scale of "nearness" from 1 to 10.
"Hypercritical" is relative to the standard of evaluation. Deg was uncomfortably aware that by
normal practice he was hypercritical, but that by logical and rationally instrumental measures
he may have been no more than properly critical. He was elated the first time he saw a sign in
a printing shop saying "If things look confused around here, that's because they are." Not only
were matters everywhere in worse shape than were admissible, but the only intelligent comment
one could make all too often had to begin at least with a negative, and he felt, which I think
was true, that he rarely failed to come up with a subsequent constructive resolution. Moreover,
the line between critical analysis and hyper-criticalness was often too indefinite to bother
with. Furthermore, was he not equally critical of himself whom he liked exceedingly well?
Now the same kind of self-justification was possible for V. Was it not true that most
conventional scholars and scientists were out to get him? Were they not making of him a target
for the release of all too many hostilities toward what he represented, an independent,
unprotected proud figure of opposition? Didn't the humanists turn him over to the scientific
crowd, and the scientific crowd kick him back among the humanist crowd, each proclaiming that
he had no place among them? So he was then, a heretic, stimulated continually along the
dimension of paranoia. And a goodly number of his supporters, several of whom were close to him
but the majority of whom were out in the public, were also exercised in their paranoid
dimension and felt better to be able to attach their paranoias like tentacles to such a strong
defensible stone.
A great difference between Deg and V. was that whereas V. took the greatest pride in being
unbending, determined and assured, Deg was continually seeking knowledge through self-
examination and the admission of sins and weaknesses. Thus it came about that V. was a kind of
Captain Dreyfuss, every inch of him the reflection of his assailants, whereas Deg was an Emile
Zola, vehemently led by the inner necessity to espouse liberty, equality, fraternity and
justice. And I have a feeling that V., had he been restored to his commission under the colors
of science, would, like Dreyfuss and his family, have begged his supporters to retire from the
scene.
When he was writing Homo Schizo, Deg came upon the essays of the psychologist Morton Prince,
edited by Nathan G. Hale, Jr., where material on multiple personality is contained. What Deg
marked in the margin of the Introduction as "terrible" are the following lines:
[Morton Prince could not] stand aloof from the Sacco-Vanzetti case [anarchists convicted of
robbery and murder and later executed], although his opinion at first flouted that of proper
Bostonians. On October 30, 1926, Prince wrote to the Boston Herald, protesting the prejudice of
the trial judge and the incompetence of the government's major witness. The judge, like most
lawyers, was lamentably ignorant of the "science of modern dynamic psychology" and had glibly
interpreted the defendant's motives in a way which discredited the impartiality of the courts.
The witness had purported to describe sixteen different details about Sacco, whom she had seen
at a distance of sixty feet, for from one and one-half to three seconds, from a car going about
fifteen to eighteen miles per hour. Only if Sacco later had been deliberately picked out for
her to identify, could she have recalled such details, Prince insisted. Her "memory" of him was
produced solely by "suggestion" and was nothing more than an "unconscious falsification." Later
Prince agreed with a committee of review, appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts and
dominated by A. Lawrence Lowell, that the conviction had been obtained after a fair trial.
Prince's protest and charge of mind had come with the authority of his appointment to a new
chair of abnormal and dynamic psychology at Harvard's College. Lowell, Harvard's president and
[an] old friend, had accepted Prince's offer of $150,000 from an anonymous donor, as well as
Prince's services as professor and director of a new psychological clinic that opened in 1927.
Prince had insisted that it be attached to the College's Department of Psychology, perhaps as
tangible fulfillment of his hope to include psychopathology within that discipline. The clinic
was to convey a knowledge of the subject, to conduct fresh research and to treat selected
patients. Prince held the chair and headed the clinic for the last two years of his life, with
Henry A. Murray as his assistant. He once remarked, "La Salpetriere is a monument to Charcot. I
want no other monument than the Psychological Clinic."
The sacrifice of principles for prestige and self is an everyday affair in science and academia
and the victims of misconduct are legion, nor do they receive the glory of execution or the
stake.
When on a snow-enveloped January morning in 1965, Deg's father died, V. projected from the
depths of his own character and experience and advised Deg that he would enter now upon a
highly creative period. The consoling remark was more revealing of V. 's paternal relationship
than of Deg's. Not since he was twelve had Deg noticed his father weighing upon him. Aside from
an oration for a junior High School convocation that he considered too important to let the boy
write by himself, and letters that were merely informative and invariably encouraging, Deg's
father committed little or nothing of his beliefs to paper. He read and worked upon reams of
music as a scholar works upon books and papers. Perhaps only a character, not a philosophy, was
needed in copying and orchestrating his musical scores -- now a soulful surge of Wagnerian
triumph, then again a sweet and lively Mozart Overture, and another time he would prepare a
Verdi chorus for brass instruments. The only expression Deg came upon when he disposed of the
music archive to the New Jersey State Prison System was this: "A rebellion is terribly hard to
repress when it is born in men's mind. How can intellectual resistance be killed?" It is not
known what occasioned the remark, neatly written on a small note pad.
The heretics, or rebels if you will, carried on with the procession. Deg is now writing Brian
Moore in Hartlepool, England:
Princeton, November 17, 1979
Dear Brian:
I regret to report to you and to your colleagues and members of the Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies the deaths, within a month of each other, of our friends and
colleagues, Livio Catullus Stecchini and Ralph B. Juergens. Besides the personal grief that
their passing has brought to us who might count them as dear friends, the loss to pioneering
scholarship and science in their demise is great.
Both men left off in the middle of important books and articles, Livio Stecchini on pyramids,
on the origin of the gospels, and on ancient measuring systems, and Ralph Juergens on the
electrical theory of the cosmos. Professor Earl Milton of Lethbridge University (Canada) has
undertaken to review Juergens' manuscripts and I Stecchini's with a mind towards their eventual
publication. Other colleagues are concerned as well.
Both men were models of honest scholars, of personal modesty, and of helpfulness to all who
asked something of them. I know that the thousands of women and men who have become related to
them through a common interest in the reconstruction of knowledge about ancient history and
nature will wish to think of them in companionship and gratitude.
We may hope that the remembrance of their achievements, like a freshly trodden path, will be
enlarged now by the usage of the young and bold.
Deg was both disturbed and amused when, in the last years of their lives, Stecchini and
Velikovsky disputed the attitude of Plato towards catastrophe, the first stressing that Plato
would have catastrophists put to death, the latter regarding Plato as the last direct heir of
the catastrophist tradition. They did not communicate for some time before Stecchini's death.
The issue is germane to political science because it reveals the conditions under which the
elitist political philosopher such as Plato will choose raison d'etat over truth.
The argument was not resolved, although to Deg it seemed clear enough that Plato was wearing
the two caps of scientist and political ruler. When he played wearing the one, he had to
recognize the catastrophe of Atlantis and other disasters, and exhibited little confidence in
the stability of the heavens. When he played the role of custodian of public morals, he
recognized, as few did afterwards, that men behave in imitation of the sky gods. When the gods
misbehave, so do men. Hence Plato would severely chastise those who rendered the gods a
disorderly mob or perceived disorder as the rule of the heavens.
On November 19, Deg writes to Brian Moore again:
Dear Brian:
Hardly had I posted my letter than the word came that Immanuel Velikovsky was dead. He died on
November 17, at 0800 hours. After a restless night, occasioned by a rapid pulse and feelings of
weakness, he arose at first light on the Sabbath and showered. He returned to his bed and
Elisheva his wife sat beside him. He murmured several indistinguishable words and took her
hand. He became quiet and she saw that he had passed away as if to sleep. He was buried in a
private ceremony the next day at a small cemetery not far from Princeton.
He was in charge of himself until the last hour, working daily on his unpublished manuscripts,
discussing proposals to film Worlds in Collision, and worrying over an article that was half-
promised to Harper's Magazine. On Monday I had an extended visit with him. We talked of my
memorials to Stecchini and Juergens and about the book on Moses that I am completing, and also
concerning a brief paper which I proposed to write for Nature magazine, setting forth six
challenging hypotheses on the worldwide catastrophe of the mid-second millennium. He urged me
to write the article "for tomorrow." I wrote it and talked with him about it on Wednesday. He
liked the phrasing of the propositions but disputed my selection of examples and said that he
would not become co-author because he had no time to do the necessary research. His powers were
fully engaged; he was concerned to advance and defend his ideas;
When I left him as darkness fell, he remained seated. He would usually walk with me to the big
door and step out for a moment to breathe the season's air. I telephoned on Thursday and he was
working. I still sense that he is palpably at work and will continue working for a long time.
Then after several years of laboring over Immanuel's archive, his widow, Elisheva, died. Deg
wrote a eulogy of her during her last hours.
Sheva
Whiffs of air, a shot of drug, a tube of soup, a white-breasted meter-maid intruding now and
then --intensive care -- to confirm her readings of your organs.
Their prognosis for you is poor you must know. You don't speak at all well, though you may
perceive, while your intakes and outputs are disordered. Your heart stands brave above it all,
like a proud cock refusing the falling night.
How I wish you might know of our plan for you: That you shall be forthwith removed herefrom,
and placed upon your porch above the greening bushes, overseen by a nervous flitting finch in
the beams, there to sit and listen while Immanuel speaks of claims and confirmations in words
so deep drawn out that in between them you plan how you will shape a bust in stone, and next
time play that passage piu adagio.
Fingering the fiddleneck and banging the chisel, just and nice your big hands were that shook
my big hands roughly. Your pot of tea is pouring interminably into our china cups and, yes,
there was something else -- cold white wine of Canaan --to fetch from the kitchen, but you said
"Wait, one moment, I want to hear this, what did you say?"
I blush to think of injustices done you, munching buttered cakes and crackers with cheese,
boasting of stalking and snaring man's mind as the very quarry was serving the hunter's
breakfast. Stroking celestial harmonies from your varnished box and chipping life into
becoming, feeding the animals, then taking up the phone protectively, "One moment, one moment,
Immanuel is on the line." But I did kiss you, did I not, and hugged you, too, whenever arose
the chance in coming or going.
Don't get up; sip your own, your own cup of tea. Why should it be yours to close the doors,
draw the blinds, bury the dead, argue the law, pay the taxes, comb the archives, fight the
battle, placate friends, watch Hector's body being dragged around the Trojan walls? Did you not
earn your porch of peace even before the 1950 War began? Sacrifices so many that never to utter
the word was your greatest sacrifice.
Your modest scoffing will not avail as we burn down the skyscraper for your pyre, each floor a
blazing bargain for your first good, next good, and thereafter. The last chord is not yours to
sound. When the guests set down their cups and leave, you are to be held close by your loved
one while your ghost rises lightly through the thick dusk air of summer.
I've told of the three heretics, heroes of V., who were burned at the stake. Do cosmic heretics
live long? Plato voluntarily denounced his own catastrophic views; he lived to 80. Whiston was
black-balled from the Royal Academy of Science and fired from Cambridge, but lived to 85.
Boulanger died in his thirties. Carli-Rubbi ended his career as an economist in good style, as
far as my inadequate sources reveal. Vico died at 76, but his friends got to fighting over
their relationship with him and left his coffin standing on the street. Bourbourg was ridiculed
at the end of his life. Ameghino was dismissed finally and posthumously honored; he believed in
Atlantis. Donnelly landed on his feet, a versatile populist-utopian, writer and lecturer, and
died at 70. Beaumont's papers were destroyed by bomb and fire; he was still writing when he
died in his eighties, and Stephanos was still peddling his manuscript when last heard of. Hans
Bellamy passed away old and with him most interest in Hans Hoerbiger's catastrophism, which
occurred from the Earth's capture of satellites. Claude Schaeffer died in his eighties full of
public honors, but not from his great work on Stratigraphie Compar‚e. Frank Dachille died
quietly aboard a PanAm airplane to Rome, on his way to a conference; he was beginning to move
back strongly into the study of catastrophism.
Of the fate of certain others, I've spoken elsewhere among these pages. The remainder are too
many to census. I don't mean to imply anything. No curse attends to the practice of heresy;
most heretics seem to live to old ages. Their ideas have been accepted. but no one does so, or
he is fooling himself if he thinks so. It is easier to found an empire -- and much more common
-- than to found a new model of scientific philosophy, and empire of thought. Christ and his
early Christians did so. The Galileo-Newton axis powers did so. John Dewey and his pragmatists
did so.
I would compare the cosmic heretics with the story of Leonard Woolf's life. His biography reads
like a brilliant, long, and useful career, on the margins of heresy, for he was always a
reformer, beginning as a Cambridge student, follower of the delightful new philosophy which
answered every question by another question: "What do you mean by that?"; proceeding to Ceylon
as so efficient a civil servant that he logically arrived at the next step, which was to de-
colonize the British Empire; then he became a novelist and a publicist, edited several
magazines including especially the Political Quarterly, set up his own publishing company, the
Hogarth Press, to put out his books and those of his wife, Virginia, and other friends; helped
to organize and bring to ultimate triumph the Labour Party; pushed for international government
through the League of Nations; supported pacifist causes and creative writers; and best of all
kept Virginia Woolf reasonably happy and at work on her novels and also kept her from
committing suicide over many years, until she managed in her sixties to end her career by
walking to her death in the sea.
Still, when Leonard came to conclude the fifth volume of his autobiography a few years ago, he
had decided that the process of life was more important than its imprint upon the world. For in
their effects upon the world, most of what he had attempted had failed. Both Ceylon and England
had grown more hideous. Peace efforts had failed. International government had failed. Justice
had failed. The Labour Party had failed. The publishing industry was much worsened. He had
studied hard for twelve years and then labored hard for sixty-four years. So he named his last
work, "The Journey Not The Arrival Matters," the reason being that one never arrives.
All these excuses and explanations of why I have performed 200,000 hours of useless work are no
doubt merely another way of confessing that the magnetic field of my own occupations produced
the usual self-deception, the belief that they wee important... in a wider context, though all
that I have tried to do politically was completely futile and ineffective and unimportant, for
me personally it was right and important that I should do it, even though at the back of my
mind I was well aware that it was ineffective and unimportant. To say this is to say that I
agree with what Montaigne, the first civilized modern man, says somewhere: "It is not the
arrival, it is the journey that matters."
Of course, if Woolf had believed this in the beginning of his life he would have undertaken
few, if any, of his numerous enterprises. It is absolutely essential to society that the young
be such fools. And that some of them remain fools forever.
At the end of the third and last volume of his autobiography, Bertrand Russell states what as a
boy he wanted to achieve in life and what he discovered in the end. He "wanted, on the one
hand, to find out whether anything can be known; and, on the other hand, to do whatever might
be possible toward creating a happier world. From an early age I thought of myself as dedicated
to great and arduous tasks." Deg had felt precisely the same. It is the narcissistic heroic
vision of oneself.
In the end Russell could appreciate that both his works on knowledge and his books on social
realities were partially achieved. But he confessed that he could not crown them with a
synthesis. He had succeeded in that many people were affected by his works and these were
acclaimed. So far, so good, but the failures rankled.
The external world had refused to cooperate with his efforts and was worse, more evil, if
anything. The internal world had failed him, too. "I set out with a more or less religious
belief in a Platonic eternal world, in which mathematics shone with a beauty like that of the
last Cantos of the Paradiso. I came to the conclusion that the eternal world is trivial, and
that mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words."
Yet Russell was a tough old optimist and "beneath all this load of failure I am still conscious
of something that I feel to be victory." The victory consists of still believing, first that a
"theoretical truth" must still exist and "that it deserves our allegiance." Second, "I may have
thought that the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to
be, but I was not wrong in thinking that it is worth while to live with a view to bringing it
nearer."
Although having some miles still to go and a passel of things to do, Deg might be compared. He
never believed in absolute Platonic truth from his first reading of Plato at 15, nor before,
nor afterwards, and, being poor at mathematics, he decided early to project the blame upon
mathematics, asserting that mathematics were a neat way of speaking and necessarily could not
be speaking some basic new truth that sprang ex machina linguae; furthermore, there would have
to be new mathematics for every important perspective upon the True, requiring therefore many
mathematics, whereas mythical and ordinary language, could by its indefiniteness suggest all of
these perspectives. In either case, language and mathematics were largely dependent functions
of thought, though they might, interacting with thought, also determine it somewhat. It can be
seen then, that Deg was a pragmatist, functionalist, and social psychologist. "The truth"
remained for him just what it was to the child, a guiding myth which, by much rationalization,
was later fashioned into a politics and then a philosophy. Truth functioned existentially, as a
hypothesis that worked better that any alternative hypothesis.
Turning to the external world, the same philosophical instrumentalism led him to believe, not
that the world would be ultimately better, although this would take longer to achieve, but
rather that the world might become either better or worse (in its concurrent configurations
with future times) and one should not expect more than that, while moving pragmatically and
existentially through the process of life.
It begins to appear to me that Deg's moods were externally fairly even, with a frequent
enthusiasm and hedonism balancing his hyper-criticality. Privately, as with many people, his
moods were more grim and irascible. His journal is not a perfectly true barometer, since he
seems to express his critical and negative feelings often and his happiness (a word he
detested) less.
Deg's Journal, 6 A. M. Sunday, Jan. 21, 1979
I derive pleasure from planning the future -- my personal future -- and thousands of pleasant
interludes of 5 minutes to hours of large plans are usually interspersed among the other life
operations and taken up euphorically as the whim or impulse seizes me. It is partly this
childish pleasure, for I have done it from earliest memory, which leads finally to the drive to
shape a world future.
It is written because I have caught myself escaping from some painstaking work on footnotes of
Unsettled Skies into penciling the best possible calendar I can hope for in the year ahead.
Connected to this impulse is the listing of "things to do." When oppressed by the many little
and large obligations, self-imposed and encountered through our hopelessly complex society, I
make a list of all that should be done in the next week, 3 or 6 months, and so on. Whereupon I
feel relaxed and confident, as if it were all done.
When Deg became anxious enough to draw up one of his lists, he unknowingly let us have a way of
guessing the ratio of concerns to total time available. Here is his list of stresses, dated
late in the quantavolutionary period; it reveals that the question of chronometry is still
plaguing him as well it might, and that the production of his book and the maintenance of a
heretical circle are pressing him too.
Deg's Journal, January 15, 1982
Especially worrisome problem (stresses)
1. Inexcusable delay of National State Bank in exchanging a German check for 19,000 DM into $.
Am broke.
2. Mom's critical illness and need for continuous surveillance.
3. Whereabouts of 1250 copies of Chaos and Creation and their bill of lading.
4. Decrepit and dirty conditions of the house on Centre Street.
5. Seemingly impossible contradiction in short-term dating of natural history and the huge
defensive effort accumulated pro long-term dating.
6. Difficulty starting car.
7. Blocked hot water pipe( frozen).
8. Bad weather -- snow, ice, cold.
9. No money.
10. Conflict over debts and title of Clearview house with Sebastian and Edward.
11. Carl's loss of job and pennilessness.
12. Bad domestic and international policies and actions of U. S. Government.
Plus normally worrisome problems e. g. abscessed tooth and dental work needed; Cathy's
miserable behavior toward me; delays in Anne-Marie's book and her preoccupation with her work;
laundry and sewing needs; growing phobia vs. long-distance driving; inability to visit or be
visited by men with the same interest, especially those expert on what occupies my writing;
lack of intellectual and social circles in the area and inability to take time, money, effort
to construct (reconstruct) same, in which I might participate (this has to do with my present
life style, and scattered domiciles -- N. Y., Princeton, Trenton, Naxos).
As a final favor to me who was much impressed by Woolf's life accounts, Deg prepared a list to
end all lists, accounting of his time over the period covered by this book. He skimmed it
across my table to me.
"I did what you asked," Deg said, "but I forgot the four hours it took me to do so. So the Q
series took 29,904 hours instead of 29,900."
I scarcely believed the figures anyway. Here they are as he gave them to me:
Time Accounting Hours (Lapsed Time: 21 years, 1963-83, total hours: 183,960) 1) 53,655 a)
Meals, visiting with family and friends (including telephoning), general correspondence, radio-
TV-newspapers; b) Housework and shopping, paying bills and taxes, personal hygiene, car
maintenance.
2) 57,487 Sleep 3) 29,900 Research, writing, production and promotion, Quantavolution Series.
4) 10,307 Other research and writing. 5) 8,936 Politicking, consulting, and business affairs.
6) 9,651 Teaching, Committee work, doctoral supervision, NYU, 12 years.
7) 2,400 National Endowment for the Arts (excepting book "1001 Questions.")
8) 4,000 New World University at Valais, Switzerland. 9) 500 Kalotic movement for World
Government (plus in Switzerland).
10) 2,000 1 year at hard labor (Naxos). 11) 900 En route somewhere (less project time achieved
en route).
12) 1,940 Spent with V. on "the Cause" a) personal: 1190 b) telephone: 750
13) 204 Spent with V. on the substance of Quantavolution (not in 3 above).
14) 400 Spent with V. on personal and general socio-political discussions.
15) 2,800 Spent with other heretics (except with Milton, included under 3 above and does not
include group time with V., see 12 above) on the "Cause": 1550 b) on the substance of Q: 1250.
184,080 Total hours accounted for 183,960 Total hours to be accounted for 365 x 24 x 21 - 120
Discrepancy 120 Add 5 days for leap years 0 Total Discrepancy "Do you have any questions?" he
said and I said yes, I do : "Why do you include 'personal hygiene' under '1b) ' instead of '1a)
'?" His answer was not nice and I see no need to convey it.
He went on to explain other matters that he believed to be beyond my comprehension. He begged
me to note that at $40 an hour (he certainly had a modest idea of his worth) he had spent
$1,200,000.00 on the Quantavolution Series. On the heretical movement as such he had spent the
equivalent of $192,000. How did you arrive at the hourly rate, I asked him. It's near to what
the University was paying me and about the average for when I operated as a consultant. You
see, he said, after you become a tenured professor you can retire on the job, and many do,
letting research and writing go by the board. However, such equivalencies don't make sense. If
I had gone into business I would have made a great deal more, or a great deal less, because I
am a speculator; smooth flows of money do not amuse me.
Earlier were mentioned gross disparities in compensation and resources between the conventional
established scholars and the heretics. Here another of Deg's computations presents a shocking
state of affairs. The typical prominent professor, at a university of the first or second grade
of excellence, may be said to receive the following emoluments:
$43,000 salary and fringe benefits
30,000 grants (directly applicable for personal support)
60,000 indirect support (government grants for projects foundation support)
40,000 Students who can be put on projects (value of their work) 20 at 2,000 (screened
applicants -- admissions, scholarships, fellowships)
15,000 use of University facilities (labs, astronomical, machinery, conveyances, University
grants)
22,000 assistants (2)
20,000 overhead
7,000 access by influence to periodicals (7 article $1,000)
20,000 consultation
2,000 personal support to attend conventions
10,000 use of institutional name (mass media, publicity, influence, public relations,
legislature)
1,000 life tenure (worth $200,000 or more)
$270,000 Real income applicable (except for personal taxes) to carrying one's prestige and
influence into the arena of scientific controversy. A total of $ 270,000 annually in emoluments
is estimated for a single professor. His tenure is certainly worth thousands per year
additionally. Nor have we considered that there must be a cash equivalent for the right to
impose upon from 10 to 1000 students a year one's viewpoints, applying sanctions to apparent
disbelievers. Because the professor is not selling soap does not mean what he does sell has no
cash equivalency. This large sum is some measure, perhaps the best that we can arrive at by
speculation, of the annual economic impact of an establishment professor upon his fields of
activity. The American public, politicians, and business leaders have only a slight awareness
of how great is the influence of professors in society. (sample surveys, however, show that the
population does rank professors in the highest echelons of respect.)
As for the time Deg had given over to the movement, it was little as you can see, no more than,
say, a chairman of the board of a closely-held company would spend on its affairs, much more
than, say, V. spent with Einstein, which V. turned into a book (yet unpublished), infinitely
more than a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, according to James Joyce, which contained all of
the wandering years of Ulysses, ten years in coming home from the Trojan Wars.
Then he said something worth repeating, that the time he spent with other heretics on the
cause, and with V., the whole 'schmeer' he called it with fine vulgarity, was essential to the
Q project. They would all have run around lost, if they hadn't been held by their crazy quilt
network. The network was essential for morale and V. was the primary reference point; the game
worked so that one had to touch base with him in some way, or utter the password, make some
symbolic gesture.
Furthermore, working with others on V.'s cause was not like work with a political party or an
evangelical sect, where you know what you want and have to believe in it, and there are few
surprises, and the question is simply how to achieve them; for V.'s cause excited continually
new issues of substantive science -- the argon concentration discovered on Mars, the
moonquakes, a radiocarbon date, the examination of King Tut's skull, the excavation of Ebla,
the finding of ash levels below the sea bottom, and in these and scores of other cases, the
heretics had to figure out their possible significance. As it developed, certain people gave
themselves over to agitation and publicity, like Robert Stephanos, who accepted answers for a
long time, while others like Mullen and Schorr were best at evaluating truth and significance,
and then there were others, like Lewis Greenberg of Kronos, who operated both as agitator and
evaluator.
Take the discovery of ash levels below the sea bottoms, a set of discoveries beginning with the
oceanographer Worzel, which V., Kloosterman, and Deg, among others, were quick to seize upon
for their catastrophic significance. What was their extent, their composition, and their age?
Did any pertinent facts remain concealed or unsought because of the conventional attitude of
the oceanographers? V.'s cause, or let us say, since Kloosterman disavowed V., the
quantavolutionary cause was to discover and prove a catastrophe, possibly exoterrestrial. Until
they understood the studies, the heretics could not use them. Until they rewrote and extended
the logic of the studies, they could not achieve the full use of them.
When the Quantavolution Series was completed, Deg could be asked what portions of this
systematic and complete model of cosmogony might he confidently expect to be useful to science,
and what might come apart soonest. I give here his answers:
That the basic principles of quantavolution would hold, he was fairly sure: the world has
changed largely by sudden, large-scale, intensely forceful events.
Also, that the solar system is a broken-down binary and functioned once within a huge sac and
plenum of dense gases.
Also, that the solar system was born electrically, changed and changes electrically, and only
emulates a "gravitational" system when there is too little change to take note of or build a
model upon.
Also, that the Earth exploded the Moon one time, and then it was that the continents began
their rafting about the globe.
That the morphology of the Earth is almost entirely due to exoterrestrial interventions,
including aftermath effects extending for long periods of time.
That biosphere evolution (and extinction) has occurred in generalized quantum leaps.
That the human is genetically and experientially poly-ego and schizoid, and rationality is a
pragmatic form of schizoid behavior.
That liturgy, language, history, and literature, are schizotypical compensations and
sublimations for fear.
That quantavolution as a heuristic model of natural and human history is useful for many
scientific and human needs involving past time, and environmental and self-controls.
That historical religion had a crude reality base. Also that Moses behaved as he is described
in God's Fire.
Deg was not sure of other parts of the model: That his radical compression of time can stand
against the fully array of opposing chronometries.
That his microchronic calendar manages to name and divide properly the actual ages of natural
and human history. That gods must exist and that as some point in time they must come to affect
the world. (But he insisted upon the axiom that what they are like and when they will operate
must stand as open questions.)
That the planets were as fully responsible for quantavolutionary events as he has made them be.
Also he was confident that on many points of detail he would be proven to be in error.
Nor did Deg feel at all certain that the quantavolutionary movement would succeed now,
although, if human civilization survived, some model much like it would occur again.
Furthermore, he thought it unlikely that quantavolution, if it succeeded in the next century in
winning over science, would recognize or acknowledge the heretics of today, but would probably,
unless otherwise decreed by a political revolution and for then largely irrelevant reasons, be
adopted as a great many bits that would form statistical trends that would quantitatively
change the existing gradualist and incremental model until it would appear that the scientific
revolution was accomplished by a great many people working independently and empirically until
driven together by the facts.
"How would you feel about that?" I asked him. "It's OK with me," he said, "I'd be so surprised
at being right, that I wouldn't think of asking more. Even though it cost me a million
dollars."
COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
Actors in the dramas of science might learn certain precepts such as:
There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to
manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would
profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who
would gain by the new ones.
So writes Machiavelli in The Prince, which was posthumously published in 1532. He was speaking
about politics but the generalization might be enlarged. Probably all who have had anything to
do with creating a new science, or trying to do so, would agree with him. Included, even, would
be those who could recognize tangible victories in their lifetimes -- Galileo, Newton, Hume,
Darwin, Pasteur, Freud, Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg.
The development of science, that is, sustains a branch of sociology: of historical psycho-
politico-anthropo-sociology. When this is applied to science, as the science of science, a
partial truth such as V.'s concept of collective fear being inherited from the trauma of
ancient catastrophes takes its place as a modest useful contribution to the science of science.
The more general truth is contained in Deg's model of the gestalt of creation where Homo Schizo
emerges out of a catastrophized ambiance as the true and normal human, who invents science as a
typically schizoid set of operations for inducing psychic control and uniting the psychic with
control of the external world.
The science of science discloses in the history of the cosmic heretics the "inadequacies" of
the American social system in dealing with the challenges of new science. There are three
extensions, unhappily, of this remark. One is that the same types of "inadequacies" are
characteristic of all areas of American science. The same kinds of "inadequacies" furthermore
characterize all other branches of the American social system -- political, religious,
economic, recreational, and educational. Third, the same kinds of "inadequacies" characterize
all ethnic or national societies --whether Western European or communist or "Third World."
I shall leave my readers to hunt by themselves for confirmation in the non-scientific areas of
American life, whether by means of Deg's other works or the works of better teachers. I abandon
them also to their own devices and explorations to discover what happens to new science in
other nations. And I do little here to arrest their attention upon non-feasance and malfeasance
in American society, other than by a few examples cited here and there, as by Burgstahler and
Barber. I am tempted into one more example, this from a letter which Deg received from the most
noted investigator of supersensory phenomena, Dr. J. B. Rhine.
The Paraspsychology Laboratory
Duke University
December 16, 1963
Dear Dr. De Grazia: It is very good to see the systematic study you have been making of the
reception of scientific developments. I am reading with great interest and satisfaction your
September number of The American Behavioral Scientist, and I hope this number will become
widely known in American science.
I have long been convinced that reception is the weakest link in the chain of scientific
development in this country, and that the situation has been progressively worsening.
I have, in connection with my own studies, been testing the S. R. S., but I became interested
in the problem as part of my study and teaching of the history of science, in partial
preparation for the work I have been doing in para-psychology. It has seemed to me that what we
are up against in the education of the individual, the growth of the university, or the
development of a culture is a perfecting of a fixed conceptual ideal which reduces the
possibility of free adaptation to new ideas. I am more heartened by seeing this problem of S.
R. S. being made the target of a special study than by anything I have seen science the problem
first appeared to my mind...
I have just finished reading a book that, more than any other I have ever read, cuts across a
large section of the struggle of ideas with the reception problem in the area of medical
psychology. It is Frank Podmore's FROM MESMER TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE, published by University
Books in New York. It is a reprinting. The book itself was published in 1909. Such books at
this and John Davies' account of phrenology in American have led me to feel more kindly toward
earlier periods with regard to their tolerance. I think I would say I am frightened about the
small chance of a true revolution occurring in a major scientific field in America today.
Western Europe I think is moving in that direction.
But this contrast is not a reflection from my own frustrations. It is true we are having plenty
of difficulties, but we are progressing, and we are winning our case, slow though the progress
is. But how many explorers die every year in the freshmen classes of our universities! Yes,
this is a subject of primary importance. My hat is off to you, Sir!
In the late 70's Deg began using the term "quantavolution." Not only the increasing number of
cosmic heretics, but also restless and probing scientists of the several large fields of
geology, astronomy, biology, and the historical sciences had been publishing new materials in
which global disasters figured, sometimes mentioning possible exoterrestrial causes, at other
times remarking on the shortening of time scales implied in the new discoveries. In
paleontology, Stephen Jay Gould, collaborating with Niles Eldredge, was promoting catastrophism
in evolution and paleontology as processes of "punctuated equilibria," thus keeping to the fore
the gradualist and incremental aspects of natural history and offending as few people as
possible.
New York University
September 26, 1980
De Grazia to the Editor, Discover Magazine (unpublished): In reporting the work of Eldredge and
Gould, among others, towards rehabilitating some of the constructive aspects of scientific
catastrophism, your author, James Gorman, was suffering understandably from verbophobia. Hardly
anyone, and for good reason, wished to advance to the study of sharp breaks and movements in
natural and cultural history under the flag of Cuvier. Not only does the term "catastrophism"
suggest a long-discredited science, but it ignores the "constructive" and "acceptable" features
of the "catastrophic" events. (Our world and ourselves were, willy-nilly, catastrophized over
time.)
"Punctuated equilibrium" (Gould's term) is admittedly awkward. "Macroevolution" is getting a
little closer. I have tried a number of designations in lectures here and abroad, and for
awhile "revolutionary primevalogy" seemed the most appropriate. I also tried "saltatory (leaps)
theory." Then I began to use "quantavolution" -- the study of large-scale change by quantum
jumps and found it the most satisfactory and reasonable. I administered a little preference
test to students and friends, and "quantavolution" came out ahead of all these other words.
Hence I suggest that we stick to "quantavolution" when we refer to intensive, large-scale,
temporally-compressed events or periods in nature.
Deg knew he was on a right track with "quantavolution" when he read in Otto Schindewolf the new
term "anastrophe" as opposed to "catastrophe" and found in it what he meant, for as Schindewolf
had stated in 1961, "faunal discontinuities, as understood by us, involve not just the dying
out of the old, but also the more or less sudden emergence of new phyla."
Later, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History hosted a conclave of biologists called by
Eldredge, an officer of the Museum, and Gould. Well-reported in Science, it did not precipitate
an organized movements, even in the single field of paleontology. A different kind of
advancement of science is occurring -- could it be the "partial incorporation of revolutions"
that I spoke of earlier? In March of 1983, M. J. Benton of Oxford University wrote in Nature
magazine on "large-scale replacements in the history of life," whereupon we must add "large-
scale replacements" to our list of euphemism.
Nearly two centuries after Cuvier, thirty-three years (one Jeffersonian generation) after
Schindewolf, 23 years after V. and even a couple of years after the laggard Deg, it is written
that "there is increasing evidence that major physical changes caused more large-scale
evolutionary changes than has competition," and that competition or natural selection "will
rarely be the sole cause, whereas it could be postulated that a catastrophic change in the
physical environment is sufficient on its own."
Warner Sizemore Richard Nixon and his henchmen were accused of covering up the Watergate
Affair, their slogan was "stonewall it"; after a while the message was "we've got to bite the
bullet."
Warner Sizemore was keen for influences from many fields and was aware of Deg's embracing the
term "quantavolution." Deg writes to him:
Naxos, January 12, 1981
Dear Warner,
After spending Christmas with the relatives congregated in Florence opportunely, Ami and I
drove off and were ferried in our Renault 4 across the Adriatic and drove again from Patras to
Athens for the New year celebrations with the relatives there. After we arrived in Naxos, a
weeklong storm closed the shipping lanes. There at the Postoffice I found the batch of material
from you. Many thanks. The experiments on imitating the rampages of nature upon dead animals
and the studies of what happens to them are long overdue, bound to be feasible, enlightening
and supportive. I read, too, the article -- effusive and popular though it was -- in Brain and
Mind, about Ilya Pirogine's work. It's impossible to tell what may be in it for us, but a
search into his books is called for. Certainly they are talking of quantavolutionary changes of
system-states. But since the mechanism is entirely abstract, i. e. non-existent so far as they
say, I presume that a mathematical model is involved, in which statistical states snap into a
new alignment by some set of convergences arising at a juncture.
Crystallization can perform this transformation under environmental stresses. Perhaps half the
plant species are instances of proportional structural explosions. New, bigger Boeings are
planned, to double the B-747 capacity with little inventiveness. Like catastrophist topological
math, there may be mostly wordage here, from our point of view.
The many new ideas that occur to me in my writings appear to emerge from flaws and oversights
of science. The philosophy that propagates the point of view that observes these opportunities
is largely the pragmatism of James Dewey, Pierce, Mead, and Whitehead, with heavy depth
psychology elements out of Freud and Lasswell, these all only being a few, and others like
Mannheim on ideological behavior (subtending from Marx) certainly are there as influences. So I
guess I'm in the recycling and recomposing business.
One has to use new images, like the hologram, of course, and devise new images. But I have not
yet felt frustrated by an absent "new kind of reality." I hope that I will applaud its
discovery, should it come -- whether signals from outer space or a kind of intra-organismic
communication that is materially effective upon all elements of the organism at once, or
whatever.
I detect in the article on Pirogine the eternal hope that a scientific breakthrough will carry
a new insistent and moral order. This sort of hope for a Second Coming always puts me on alert.
People who can't receive the right kind of vibrations any longer from Jesus, or Buddha, or
communism, yearn often for an authoritarian voice speaking out of science like the Burning
Bush. That's asking too much of the scientific enterprise. We can probably achieve a better
answered by a sober and complete understanding of what we have already learned about the world
and ourselves, call it theology, philosophy, no matter.
The universe, including its divinity, will always be an open question, and we shall go on
forever, so long as allowed, advancing, defiling, infiltrating, undermining and hovering about
the grounds of the question. If there were an answer to the question, we should have to negate
all that we think we know about ourselves, the universe, for then we would have to be something
other than what we are even in our most megalomanic states. We are already asking too much of
ourselves just in order to survive as a species. Again, it is exalting (and arrogant) to play
with answers to the question. Anyone for tennis?....
Chesley Baity was trying to extend her great bibliographic labor in paleo-astronomy by
incorporating catastrophism, working through conventional channels that she had persuaded to
accept her so long as she did not push quantavolution.
Deg, I said, I can't use your letter from Dr. Chesley Baity; she won't let me. He said why did
you ask her, dummkopf; you're talking about vital public issues; you're not titillating the
crowd with private obscenities. It's a great letter: how she's been trying to get a seminar
going on catastrophism at a school where ordinarily you're welcome to sell a course on every
other known folly. She's forever asking my advice and then sweetly adding you don't mind if I
don't mention your name. How many more years is she going to waste on this gambit?
I don't know, I said; she's afraid she'll lose the ground she's gained. A few more years and
the ground she's gained will be six feet under, he said; and if she has to go, as we all do, at
least there'll be her letter on record showing her as a heroine, a wily heretic who knows what
she's after, and who knows how she's been led up the garden path by these deans, and university
presses, and intolerant astronomers. It'll make sense out of all these years of running around
telling people I'm not a heretic, you know, but then oughtn't we consider this and that cosmic
disaster. Meanwhile they are laughing at her because she seems a befuddled southern lady, but
they wouldn't if they really knew her as I do. The trouble with her is that her husband
dominated her for so many years that she still hasn't recaptured the feisty womanhood she
inherited from her old Texas stock. I must suggest she read that biography by Sayre of Rosalind
Franklin and the British DNA caper.
Now this book of hers dealing with aspects of quantavolution; it's a good collection; good
authors. Why is she wasting her years looking for a publisher for it. She can put it out; she's
not broke. Did you tell her that, I asked. Yes, I did, and of course she said she wouldn't do
any such thing. Another victim of the publishing myth. I said give a couple of thousands to a
university press then; they'll publish it. Oh no I won't do that. Well, then, bury yourself and
your authors. The publishers will shed no tears; they'll puff with pride for having kept a bad
book off the market.
After he said this, I went and checked the list of contributors to Chesley's anthology of
Civilization and Catastrophe. Of the thirty-six approximately half have not been mentioned by
me in this book and about a fourth have escaped mention in Deg's Quantavolution Series. As you
can see, a lot of "reaching out" occurs among the heretics, each in his own style, Chesley-
Baity or, as here, Brian Moore is telling Deg of a new pair of cosmic heretics:
Hartlepool, Cleveland England
9 July 1982,
Dear Alfred:
Thanks for yours of 22 June and I'm glad to hear that the Grecian sunshine is ripening your
researches. Great pity you couldn't make our meeting, particularly as I had managed to persuade
Victor Clube to come and speak to us about his forthcoming book The Cosmic Serpent. I mentioned
the book very briefly in the last review as "a catastrophist view of earth history" but had not
then seen a copy. Having now read a review copy and met the author I consider it to be a highly
significant contribution to the catastrophic cause. Though Clube (astronomer, Royal
Observatory, Edinburgh) is conventional enough not to accept orbital changes amongst the
planets, what he does propose -- particularly as it comes from within the establishment --
should be enough to lift the level of debate considerably. To summarize briefly: most of
Clube's published work deals with the possibility of extra-terrestrial catastrophes in
geological time; the book proposes them continuing into historical times at dates very close to
those of Velikovsky. His mechanism (though we might not agree with it) is sufficiently well
supported by known astronomical data to make the critics consider the implications for
mythology/ religion/ history. He proposes that as the solar system passes through the galactic
arms it collects vast quantities of cosmic debris which in the form of comets, interact with
the solar system for thousand of years until by collision/ interaction/ integration they are
thrown out of the system altogether or turn into asteroids. His statistical calculations show
that the last series of interactions should have been dying away throughout the 3rd, 2nd and
1st millennia BC. The present Encke's comet is the remains of a giant comet which was on an
earth crossing orbit in those times and was responsible for devastation on the Earth at
periodic intervals. He has an ingenious (though I think inadequate) suggestion as to why the
agents of destruction were later remembered as Venus and Mars. He also agrees that Ipuwer/
Exodus/ end of Middle Kingdom were synchronous and that Egyptian history needs to be shortened
by 400 years! The book is defective in many respects, but for a respectable member of the
establishment who had not had the benefit of contact with our circles it is an intellectual
supernova (well, nova, anyway). Clube wanted to meet you. If you let me know precise dates for
your U. K. visit maybe we can still arrange this...
Professor Frank Dachille of Pennsylvania State University had long been a catastrophist in
geology; he also was a reader of ancient literature; he piloted airplanes and had been building
an airplane in his house at the time of his death in 1983. An acquaintanceship with Deg's work
-- they met only by phone and letter -- led him into the reassessment of his own noteworthy
work on meteoritics. A letter of July 29, 1979, shows Dachille engaging in the common
quantavolutionary tasks of extending the logic of existing science and rereading ancient
documents:
Dear Dr. de Grazia,
(...) I meant to mention in my previous letter that at the American Geophysical Union
Convention in Washington a paper detailed the possibility existing in Jupiter of nuclear
detonation. This is not new, the idea that Jupiter is in fact a mini-sun, sub-critical, having
been about for some time. However, on reviewing the presentation after having read your work
and Worlds in Collision, I can understand the probabilities of electromagnetic ejecta, and even
massive emissions from that planet, and Saturn. You might want to look for a work by P. M.
Kolor and L. E. Wharton on this subject. Both are at P. O. Box 142, Greenbelt, Md 20770.
References to Plato in Worlds in Collision have led me to an interesting finding, something you
must be quite familiar with from your extensive research. The Jowett translation is far from
that of Bury, at least with regard to the astronomical descriptions. Jowett does convey some of
the information as to sky reversals etc., but I believe his translation more modified by his
own notions. Bury was more direct.
My head still swims from my reading of the S. I. S. issue you gave me. The discussions of the
Senmut sky maps are captivating but whether from my lack of knowledge or ability, the
presentations are most difficult for me to follow. (Is it a British style of writing or is it
me?) The electricity paper by Eric Crew is good; I intend to look up his other papers.
Some months after Dachille died, Deg suggested to the State University of Pennsylvania that a
memorial meeting be held for him that would treat of subjects upon which he worked and that
interested him: meteorites, explosion dynamics, catastrophism in ancient translations, etc. The
suggestion caused surprise: Dachille was isolated among the some forty professors of
geosciences; he was alone in his heresy, which the Chairman referred to charmingly as
"extracurricular"; the Department of Astronomy seemed to be likewise uninterested; the name of
V. foreshadowed unwelcome controversy; the campus was not near any large metropolitan center
where an outside public would be attracted; besides, all the professors were remarkable people,
said the Chairman. Yes, Deg agreed, and they were dying all the time.
In reviewing the debate over quantavolution and catastrophe over 30 years (for I see no reason
to confine this statement to the twenty years of our scope here,) I am impressed by the
flaccidity and ignorance of the opponents of the heretics more than by any other single
phenomenon. Should full-fashioned quantavolution fall before the "truth," it would not be the
effect of the opposition but rather of inadvertent blows and self-examination. The opposition
has continually pressed the attack with ill-prepared Volksturm publicists parroting what
scientists say, and then with infantry of the science who could only press buttons. The proud
creative element of science, the Harrison Browns, Ureys, Neugebauers, Sagans and another score
of top-notch scientists and humanists might be court-martialed for their failures, along with
those who thought the U. S. Marines in Lebanon had such heavy firepower and such sophisticated
gear that they were impregnable to assault and then were penetrated by the simplest of
terrorist mechanisms and tactics. This was the "Vietnam Complex," too. Constantly
misunderstanding the opposition; refusing to come to the conference table; seeking allies to
help put down the guerrillas among publishers, foundations, universities; laying claim to
working for the good of all -- are these actions not patent and repetitious on the record?
The opponents of quantavolution -- by focusing upon the person of Velikovsky; trying to convert
a wide spectrum of interests on the part of hundreds of skilled, intelligent, and creative
people into a cosmic strip; raising the spurious cry of "anti-science" just like the government
raises the cry of "reds" and "enemies of democracy;" -- ended up heightening the public
misunderstanding of science, aroused suspicion against themselves, attracted and promoted the
most narrow and bigoted scientists and propagandists to the rank of spokesmen for science;
Meanwhile, the humanists and social scientists let themselves be denounced for fools, anti-
scientists, and mystics, and be accused of blocking flights to the Moon and wanting to steal
jobs from the natural scientists.
The anti-heretics have paid no attention to the scores of heretics who have been building a
case for quantavolution all these years. They have spoken of them contemptuously as a mad
following that showed up to defend V. or to attack them, failing in every case that has come to
my knowledge to read the literature of their opposition. Insofar as V. found it inconvenient to
advance his own colleagues, he played directly into the hands of the opposition that was
engaged in making of his work and mission a caricature. Allowing the issues that have emerged
in the past decades of this controversy to be centered upon a caricature of Velikovsky is a way
of continuously dampening the fires in the hope that they will die. The issues are much larger,
and are important for the advancement of science.
Quite apart from Deg's voluminous work (and even if he had never written a line) there are
available millions of words , at least thirty volumes of studies on aspects of quantavolution -
- and I say nothing of the many distinguished predecessors of V., nor of the hundreds of
studies passed as conventional science, that are gems of quantavolution. Nor have I mentioned
the mutual teaching and learning going on among hundreds and thousands of students --many of
ripened age -- that cost their government and school systems and foundations nothing, and
risked nobody's capital. Paying for itself, the movement practically registers as zero in the
absurd artifice called the Gross National Product.
Files of correspondence and numerous tapes that I hold could be used to demonstrate the level
of interaction among the heretics. As they exchange honorary degrees, the eagles of science
invariably speak of the need for "interdisciplinary cooperation," of a "melding of the two
worlds of science and the humanities." It is mostly pap. They never do it. They cannot do it.
But the people they detest and call "anti-scientists" and the "lunatic fringe" do it as a
matter of course. They do so because logically their interests and language are unspecialized,
because they have slipped their intellectual anchors, and because they must talk to whoever
happens to be passing by.
In Deg's files I find a brief article about a definition. I mention it to show a kind of
particle that floats about unintegrated into a body of science. It is by Walter Federn, an
Egyptologist, now deceased, who long ago assisted V. in his research. The piece would be almost
unretrievable to an outsider for it appears in Zeitschrift fur Aegyptische Sprache und der
Altertumskunde (33 Band 1966, 55-6). There he reproaches those who have retranslated the line
"Forsooth, the land turns round as does a potter's wheel," which is from the Ipuwer papyrus,
placed now by some scholars to the end of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus (by those who
follow V. 's chronology). Federn says they must not believe the words mean spinning normally in
the same direction, but must mean being spun back and forth, as in testing the wheel, as
clockwise then counterclockwise. So, Federn declares, the "point of comparison is the reversal
of the social order into its very opposite." A great social upheaval is pictured. Or, possibly,
I say, it means that the earth itself is gyrating: "The land reverses like a potter's wheel."
It is highly probable that it was V.'s employment of Fedren that ultimately wafted this dry
little piece to drift unintroduced and unexplained in the slow backwaters of scholarship.
The sociology of science should have field workers auditing conversations at meetings, making
tape recordings, too, although Deg, for one, would be annoyed if I spoke of hidden recordings,
of "goings-on," and would speak of invasions of privacy. But look you where the raw materials
of a developing thought-pattern are to be found. I give you an instance where the sociologist
of science should be.
Earl Milton was chairman of a symposium on planetary surfaces at McMaster University (Ontario)
on June 17, 1974, with astronomer David Morrison, electrician Ralph Juergens and astrophysicist
Derek York as speakers. Juergens assigned surface effects to recent transactions between Mars
and the Moon. After the chairman called an intermission, the tape recorder was accidentally
left spinning, and now a decade later we can eavesdrop upon several people, unknown to us, who
spent the intermission by the speaker's table. The tape is not edited. The transcript I give
here is partial. The voices are there, but they move so rapidly -- and so different are the
voices in immediate hasty conversation -- and so impromptu the means of transmission and
mechanisms employed --and so inadequate the resources here for their study that the total
episode cannot be captured; it is a soupHon of the full flavor. At issue is not a "lie" of
President Nixon, which is worth millions, and which the nation's media will pay anything to
capture, but merely a small truth that an isolated historian, me, is trying feebly to pick up.
The balance of the accidental taping only adds to the impression, you have to believe, of an
enthusiastic rapid mini-symposium, except that it ends with a new voice, obviously female,
arranging to meet one of the voices at "a quarter to eight."
First Voice....
It's an interesting idea and I don't think it has been explored adequately.... I was very
interested in this discussion.... I have done a considerable amount of research in ultra-high
current density of discharges, I hope you don't mind my saying that. I think misconceptions, at
least as they came out, imply that the conduction went through solid material... Other Voices
interrupt.
Second Voice:
No, no, no, no, you've got to get the charge...[ He begins to draw on the blackboard] you see,
if we have a surface here assuming of course that we are dealing with spherical surfaces, let's
say we have a circle here, and you are going to get a discharge from this point... Now in order
to get a discharge from this point I am going to get a small discharge, I am not going to get
any arc, I have got to bleed a lot of charge off the surface into this point and then get it
off....
Third Voice:
I think from, from... I think I can convert the high density discharge phenomena, as Mr.
Juergens describes, you initiate a discharge gradient that would allow this to be discharged
through the density of the intervening material. At this point the current density which would
occur would initiate locally and would spread out as the breakdown progressed and would
continue to build up and continue to expand in current magnitude as long as you have more
source available land the implication that this could cover the entire Moon if necessary is not
all...
Voices agreeing and protesting...
First Voice:
But don't I have a problem here as I start spreading... Second Voice:
You break that down...
Third Voice:
As long as a discharge is available, and you spread it out and the farther you move out, you
are locally vaporizing --as you dissipate energy, you are locally vaporizing solid material
which then breaks down and contributes to superconductors, I don't mean superconductive in the
terms of superconductivity...
Fourth Voice:
Sure... Third Voice:
I mean.... You are referring to ... what you get essentially is a plasma as a result of...
First voice:
That's right, current density from these discharges can go to the levels of 108 amperes per
square centimeter and can you maintain...
Second Voice: As long as there is charge available... As long as it is spreading out it could
continue, not over days, but in micro-second discharges... Don't call them sparks... The wire
was only the initial source of the plasma.
First Voice:
Yeah.
Second Voice:
During the discharge you have your anode and cathode processes of tremendous pressures on those
surfaces due to ion and electron bombardments. Your wire lies between what -- between two
pieces of metal in this cases -- was intended to be a conductor.
First Voice:
But can you do this -- explode a wire between two non-conductors.
Second Voice:
Oh, I think you definitely can. Because the metallic nature has nothing to do with it... Only
the initial discharge...
Third Voice:
Yes, that's the point... You'll have a discharge when the voltage gradient becomes at a
particular level with regard to the density of the atmosphere.
First Voice:
That's the other question... What does the atmosphere have to do with it? Juergens: You have to
trigger it with electrons dragged out by the field and once they bridge the gap, they ionize
the material...[ One notes a bit of Juergens' character, he speaks rarely and in low quiet
tones, and listens much.]
Second Voice:
If you take a little experiment they perform at the laboratory, if you take a tube here and put
on some circuitous track a vacuum tube and come around to here, where the rest of the tube
comes around to there, you put a little gap there, say a centimeter across, make the density of
the tube at a particular level, you can cause that discharge to come all the way around through
there.
First Voice:
Oh, yeah.
Third Voice:
But you will not conduct the material into the center, you will not even conduct the heat into
the material except to the manner in which you're vaporizing the surface at a tremendous rate
(from the impact), you are vaporizing the material from these discharges...
First Voice:
I agree.
Second Voice:
But the material is not blasting off everywhere at this time I am saying that at this time it
isnot blasting off. It is only to the degree to being charge carriers and to being transmitted
inside the arc but the pressure-electron and ion pressure on surface -- will prevent a massive
expulsion of matter until the discharge is terminated. After it's done, all the material will
be vaporized...
First Voice:
Now you are getting to an important point...
This goes on for a minute or two longer. The craters, rilles and mares of the Moon are
discussed as if they might have been electromagnetically created. There are quickly disputed
points and then we see a transition occurring from talking about the technology of electrical
discharges (from the small crude personal experiment with a piece of wire to catastrophic
avalanches of electricity between Moon and Mars). The voices move from the substance of science
to the behavior. Let us reproduce this transition, which is important to a science of science.
The voices begin to discuss the "great red spot" of Jupiter, in relation to a newly discovered
"red spot" on Venus... A New Voice claims the second discovery may be the umbilicus, where
Venus spun off... Others exclaim Objections... Second Voice says Jupiter, great magnetic field
would not let a body escape, nor would a body fly off the Red Spot which is not equatorial. New
Voice says that there is no reason, only presumption, why Jupiter's field and axis would not
have changed at the time of, or after the incident...
Second Voice:
But what of Venus' orbit....
New Voice:
That's different, too; Mars is responsible for it in part...
First Voice:
It may be so when we look at it from Velikovsky's perspective... The arguments against, built
on the wrong inclinations and so forth, they are held by uniformitarian but they don't explain
anything to a Velikovskyite you see...
Third Voice:
Of course, there is a built-in psychological problem. I don't know that it's uniformitarian but
it's built into our Western logic...
Voices of Agreement... New
Voice:
If that's nature, we should find out. We should overcome that reaction. We've had our
Copernicus, We've had our people who came along and said world is different from what everyone
thinks. We've had ample evidence that this has happened -- not frequently -- but every five
hundred years... And something of this.... and may be one of those times... So that's why I
say, we ought to drop our resistance to the idea so much and say, well, holy smokes, you know,
we've been confused by what we're doing uniformitarian-wise, let's jump over here and play for
a while and see what happens, and that isn't the course that's followed, and I don't understand
-- psychological resistance notwithstanding -- the unwillingness of a totally objective person
to do that. You see, that's what bothers me.
Third Voice:
I think it's understandable....
I think if you consider, if you look at scientists and engineers, they spend years and years in
universities buying their education and what you're suggesting is the education I've
acquired... is so much garbage..
First Voice:
I don't find it garbage... It's not a waste... The data stand and the objectivity of these
measurements stand. It is their interpretation of these problems....
New Voice:
You don't sacrifice your education when you change...
First Voice:
No, you don't, that's true... You don't have to throw the baby out with the bath.
All agree.
They speak of the strong psychological bent for orderliness in the scientific mind, "neat
orderly chambers," dislike of uncertainty. "It's difficult to say I'm wrong!" "It's easy to
say!" "It's very difficult to say!" "I've had so many years in graduate school. It was all
bing, bing, bing, this is it..." Then later the very ideas and outlook changed.
Second Voice:
There are a great many scientists who would never come here to speak or even to listen, they
wouldn't even discuss the questions... etc., etc.
What triggered the transition was a quickly perceived misstep or retrojecting Jupiter's
behavior in a uniformitarian way. A second transition then occurs.
First Voice:
people are belongers, I belong to this group, you examine an eccentric hypothesis, then one
gets into major trouble, your colleagues branding you a crackpot or idiot. New Voice: aren't we
suffering from the two-culture problem?
Agreements.
"Velikovsky's cardinal points were in the humanities."
Yes New Voice:
"Yes, I think so,"
New Voice:
They were absolutely unquestioning...
And then
New Voice goes on to argue the factual validity of his proposition,
leaving the discussion of the logic of science and humanities behind and also the straight
astrophysics and electromagnetics with which the talk began. The voices tend to agree in
principle: that a consensus of widespread legends is persuasive as to its basic factuality. Now
the voices thank each other and disperse, their few moments of exciting discussion ended.
I am afraid that I have lost you, my readers, amidst such a confusion of remarks, but I will
regain you if I have merely shown you how the raw materials of this intense human discourse
appear. Ultimately we reduce and clarify the process, introducing the logical order on a
printed page but losing some of the intense give and take within the human mind and among
different human minds.
Letters are not so important in scientific discourse as they once were, given the telephone,
the Xeroxing machines, the airplane, and the comfortable meeting places to be found everywhere
in colleges and hotels. They are more important among the heretics than among conventional
scholars because they are the cheapest means of communication. Their effect is multiplied too
by Xeroxing them and passing them around. But even then they are an unsatisfactory record,
because they are rendered fragmentary by intervening telephone calls and meetings. Greenberg's
and Lowery's correspondence in editing Kronos and the S. I. S. R. was heavy but would,
especially in Greenberg's case, be enormous were it to include transcripts of the phone
conversations.
Still, in letters one can follow the kind of internal argumentation that otherwise disappears.
Thus Leroy Ellenberg, reconciled with Deg despite his mean attacks upon Chaos and Creation
(mentioned earlier), began to use Deg as a postal drop, sending him letters, copies of letters
and articles, and memoranda. By 1983 Ellenberger was preparing to abandon much of
quantavolution and found now that the story of Velikovsky was not without its shady tones, and
more important, that Arctic ice cores and bristlecone pine dating technologies were directly
contradicting Holocene quantavolutions by their even pattern of annual regression into time;
further, that Gentry's studies of the surprising "instant" polonium halos of creation that came
from nowhere -- parentless -- and which threatened the theory of radiochronometry, were
probably invalid. You show a total misunderstanding of the Oxygen-18 isotope technique of
measuring time in ice varves, he assured Deg, as The Burning of Troy with its critique of ice
core studies was about to appear.
It seemed that Leroy was on the verge of taking up a macrochronist position in quantavolution,
which by 1983 was fast emerging from geophysics and paleontology and which offered
respectability to its clientele. One could thereupon dismiss all apparent human experience with
catastrophe and get rid of the historical sciences and humanities.
Deg contemplated the prospect sourly. I could, he thought, surrender michrochronism in the
event of defeat, but I would rather relabel the total construction as a heuristic exercise
machine, good for the circulation of the blood and the sharpening of the critical faculties.
There were always these honest, upsetting or encouraging, epistolary discussions going on among
the heretics, many of them --how many? -- a score at a time. Here is another one from 1978,
going into 1979. The cosmic heretic, Dwardu Cardona of Vancouver, is writing to the cosmic
heretic, Irving Wolfe of Montreal:
Dear Irving, If you don't already, you're going to hate me by the time you finish reading this.
I'm afraid that, in your cosmic interpretation of Hamlet, I do not concur with you at all.
I should qualify that last statement. I do agree that Hamlet has a cosmic connection but not
with the Martian close encounters of the 8th/ 7th centuries B. C...
The story of Hamlet is, in its skeletal form, identical to that of Horus. To my knowledge, this
is the earliest form of the myth we have so far come across. The Egyptian tale was already well
developed during the very first dynasties of Egypt. It is that old -- and older still. So is
Hamlet....
This goes on for several pages, one of several letters in the interchange going to show how
much of human history and science evolves around the figure of Saturn, the great god of the
Neolithic Age and beyond, everywhere in the world.
I will not print Wolfe's reply, equally lengthy, also giving and taking. He has published
obscurely (save to cosmic heretics) several articles on the catastrophic imagery of
Shakespeare, that when published in book form (he collected a number of rejections) will
constitute a formidable body of analysis on Shakespeare, by a new approach.
But then Cardona is also busy with historical astrophysics, and he perceives in Deg's ideas a
competitor to his own. Never mind, he has his reasons, and he writes to Earl Milton:
... The evidence of myth which points to Saturn having once occupied a position above Earth's
north polar regions is voluminous. There is not a race on Earth that has not preserved at least
one account which states as much. According to this evidence, Saturn occupied a central
position in the north celestial regions. It rotated, and rotated widely; but, other than that,
it was immovable. It did not rise, it did not set. It merely became brighter and more glorious
each night as the Sun set. This state of affairs seems to have lasted for ages. It is the one
single dictum of the ancients from which all other beliefs are derived....
But, of course, there are physical problems, and colossal ones, inherent in the tenet. And that
is where I hope you will be able to help the cause.
The problem, stated succinctly, is this: What force, and in what way, could have kept the Earth
locked beneath Saturn's south pole?...[ one of 3 pages].
And Milton replies:
... As you may know, de Grazia and I are developing a new cosmogony for the planets, one which
is consistent with extant mythologies and catastrophic historical events. If Al has spoken to
you of Solaria Binaria, then you know something of this cosmogony...
Here is an outline of our speculations about how Saturn and Earth were once locked together.
Consider a gigantic dumbbell with the sun at one end and Super Saturn (Saturn was much larger
then) at the other. The original planets, Mars, Earth, Apollo, and Mercury, were locked between
the sun and Super Saturn, very close to the latter. The new planets, Uranus and Neptune,
orbited beyond this inner group. A now distant fragment from an earlier era, the residue of
Super Uranus, was receding from the system. As we see it, the Earth did not rotate on its axis
such that the Sun was visible daily. The Earth's axis, at that time, was aimed along the Sun-
Super Saturn line. Earth's "Northern Hemisphere" faced Saturn, the "South," now devastated by
the recent tearing away of the Moon, faced the Sun...
And Cardona writes:
I'm glad to see that de Grazia and Wolfe, with whom I corresponded a while back, have not
forgotten me. At the time, de Grazia did throw a few crumbs my way concerning his developing
new cosmogony and, if I well remember, I cautioned him to be wary of certain mythological
identifications. Now I see that de Grazia's Solaria Binaria has been echoed by Tresman and
O'Gheoghan. But on all that, a little more later on.
(....) 4) De Grazia's super-Uranus needs much evidence. The Uranus of Greek myth seems to be
merely an earlier alias of Saturn. This is borne out by Assyro-Babylonian, Sumerian, and
Egyptian texts. Annu was the same as Osiris, who was the same as Saturn.
5) There seems to be no mythological evidence that the Moon was torn from the Earth. On the
contrary, I have come across evidence which points to Saturn as the parent of the Moon. The
Moon commenced its celestial career by orbiting Saturn but when Earth itself was torn from
Saturn's gravitational embrace, it managed to carry the Moon with it...
(....) When I wrote to you asking for your help, I did not know that de Grazia had already
cornered you. I do not wish to "steal" you away from him. I do believe, however, that we can
help each other. For that matter, I thank you for the information you supplied me with
concerning the Roche limit. And if it is not too much trouble, I really would appreciate it if
you could, if only for a day or so, put your own model aside and weigh the possibility of a
Saturn-Jupiter dumbbell formation with Earth locked in between.
And Milton replies, point by point, in an eight-page letter, concluding:
As with you I am not out to convert but help. To use only myth is equally as dangerous as to
use only a computer to prove Venus' orbit never intersected Earth's. We both know better...
Please keep in touch. I need more data to help you further. Should anything I see in your data
be germane to our model I will credit you and I trust you will do the same re my comments and
ideas becoming a part of your cosmogony.
And so on. Cardona has several sympathizers and is seeking to convert Milton and Deg, who in
turn are moving rapidly on their own model. Cardona, meanwhile, begins to publish his rich
Saturn materials in Kronos. Clube and Napier come forth with a cometary model, derived without
contact with any of them, in Cosmic Serpent, practically simultaneously with Chaos and
Creation.
A process is here occurring that resembles somewhat the internal competition among the
Cambridge, London and California biologists striving to produce the first and most useful model
of the structure of DNA, an event of 1953 described by Watson in The Double Helix. By 1984
there were in contention the Cardona-Talbott Saturn model, the Clube-Napier galactic cometary
model, and the De Grazia-Milton Solaria Binaria model of cosmic quantavolution. All of these
were far ahead of, or let us say distinct from the heavy empirical work beginning to appear
concerning meteoritic impacts, clay chemistry, and biological extinctions. Perhaps the tides of
particular studies will wash away most of the substance of the models. Such a fate has befallen
the model of the victorious biological team, as Stephen Jay Gould tells us:
It is a credit to the power of Watson and Crick and to the fruitfulness of good science in
general that, thirty year later, this Cartesian view of molecular genetics has been superseded,
as a second revolution transmutes our view of inheritance and development. The genome, a cell's
compendium of genetic information, is not a stationary set of beads on strings, subject to
change by substituting one bead for another. The genome is fluid and mobile, changing
constantly in quality, and replete with hierarchical systems of regulation and control...
Barbara McClintock is the godparent and instigator of this second revolution. [She published
her papers obscurely in her own laboratory newsletter, but, as Gould remarks, she has lived a
blessedly long life.]
And Gould, whom we have come to perceive as a quantavolutionist, can even discover in this
movement from the one model to the other a victory for "repaid and profound rearrangement" over
the "implication that evolution proceeds slowly and gradually." Pleased as we may be about this
aspect of the change, we are here more directly made aware of the possible short life of even
the best of scientific and cosmogonic models.
Once more I return to the point that almost nothing of the large number of writings in
scientific support of or in modification of quantavolution, particularly as conveyed in V.'s
work, has been read by any conventional scholar, including (I stress) those who claimed to have
read something by V. prior to attacking him. It is clear that one way of treating with heretics
is to go on the principle "Smite the shepherd, and the flock will be scattered." Moreover,
anti-heretics lose much of their effectiveness as soon as they discuss work by heretics other
than Velikovsky, because they depend so heavily upon a prior inoculation of the public of
science with stereotypes against his name.
In this regard, the heretics have suffered by their own behavior. If they must constantly
acclaim V. on their first page, like others do Einstein, Marx or Engels, and Freud, it's like
prefacing every encounter with a "Heil Hitler" at the worst, or at its mildest, forever
snapping salutes between the military, a practice devised to confirm a status system, limit
originality, and exclude an outer world.
It must be apparent by now that V. was not without blame. He did not want even one, much less
two or a group of martyrs burning alongside him at the stake. He was loath to adopt the ideas
or quote or put forward or support anyone who was about to be credited or discredited by a
valid contribution that was not a priori a confirming footnote to his own work. The idea of a
roundtable or true seminar was beyond him. After decades in America he became a citizen, but he
had always some of the czarism and mosaism of old Russia that would not let one kick ideas
around like soccer balls.
V.'s prominence absorbed all energies penetrating from outside in addressing him and his
claims, diverting attention from all other new work in the field, which was in any event dammed
up and had to trickle through his notoriety, whether in magazines of general circulation or in
the couple of small magazines, which themselves held back most work not directly concerned with
his affairs.
Were I to guess the quantity of useful writing appearing as deliberately directed toward
quantavolution, I would suggest a statistical figure approaching a Fibonacci series by
dodecennial periods, beginning in 1940-1951 at 1000 pages; thus, 2000 pages for 1952-63; 3000
pages for 1964-75; 5000 pages for 1976-87; 8000 pages for 1988-1999; 13,000 pages for 2000-
2011; and so on in time, granted there would be no world war or political revolution.
My aim, in quoting heretical correspondence in this chapter at some length (still not one-
hundredth of its volume), has been to give evidence of how science proceeds among heretics and
non-heretics alike. The published work (which in the case of the heretics has not been read by
the non-heretics) is only the tip of the iceberg showing. The same is true in most scientific
work. There must be a consensus of sorts between correspondents else they cannot talk: here,
with Wolfe, Cardona shares the belief that literature connects with a mainstream of mythology
extending to the birth of the human mind; with Milton, (and with Wolfe, too) Cardona shares the
premise, arrived at on both sides at the end of years of study, that the planets have moved and
changed, even in early human times
The behavior of the cosmic heretics corresponds closely to that of conventional scholars in
regard to their methods of work, and would be practically indistinguishable were it not for the
warping of the processes brought on by the heretics' poverty of resources. Back and forth, the
shaping form of new kind of science (like the old) works like a complicated weaving machine,
capable of darting up and down and sidewise to pluck its threads, strengthen its seams, and
sometimes the machine sticks and threads must be pulled out, sometimes a whole line of thread
as some major patterning element has to be rejected.
In the 1960's the American Psychological Association, through W. D. Garvey and B. C. Griffith,
conducted pioneering studies of the communication network of the field with which some 30,000
persons were connected. Of these 30,000, 2000 or less provided almost all the materials that
were being circulated as current psychology.
Work published in a psychological journal started on the average 30 to 36 months before
publication. Between 18 and 20 months before publication the work was shaped to a point where
it might be reported. Usually, between 15 and 18 months before publication, the reporting
process began. Initial communications were highly informal and occurred typically at the
writer's institution. After several months a formal report was prepared that in about 30% of
the cases came to be delivered at a national or regional meeting. Almost always the audience
was below 100, sometimes only a dozen. Copies become available at the Convention, and special
papers might be distributed now also by the author (s) through their sponsors such as a
government agency. Preprints were usually distributed, between 10 and 200. These were often
given to close-in co-workers, acquaintances elsewhere, and persons who had heard about the work
and asked for copies. The interval between submissions and publication ordinarily took 9 months
or more, but the interval would be doubled if an article were rejected. Few articles failed to
gain acceptance somewhere else. While the publishing proceeded, additional reports were being
made to groups and classes. Aside from textbooks, which amount to compulsory subsidizing by
students, practically all scientific (and scholarly), publishing is subsidized by scientists as
individuals or groups, directly or through tax money whose appropriation and spending they
manage to influence.
Exposure of the work by publication is low. The largest journal reaches 30% of the general
population of psychologists; specialized psychology journals may reach 1%. The largest journal
will expose the title to all; however, one half of the research reports will be expose the
title to all; however, one half of the research reports will be read by 1% or less of the
readership, none by more than 7%, it appears. Half the articles in the largest journals are
read by only some 200 readers. Current journal reading amounts to only about one-third of the
journal reading of one group of active psychologist studied. Some months later an article
becomes retrievable by being indexed in one of the now well-equipped services such as
Psychological Abstracts, thus helping people like Deg, who was trying to find out what work was
going on regarding "human nature," only to find nothing because the term was not indexed. The
Garvey-Griffith study offered proof of what disciplinary leaders know everywhere, that long
before the rank and file, and quite long before the public, learns of a new line of research,
the leaders know it from personal acquaintanceship, membership on foundation and government
boards, and operating at the nodes of communication where manuscripts come in and criss-cross
and where money changes hands.
The same process that occurs in psychology occurs on a greatly reduced scale in quantavolution,
among the heretical community. The scientific creationists too are loosely organized and
operate, also in a small way, like the psychologists. They and the scientific heretics engage
in mutual eavesdropping. A somewhat different process occurs among the non-heretical
quantavolutionaries, who operate on the fringes of their discipline -- psychology, biology,
astronomy, anthropology, etc., and are signaled by terms such as "macroevolution," "punctuated
equilibria," and so forth. These for the most part are anti-heretical and cling to their
disciplinary centers as much as possible. Thus Walter Alvarez, who is himself under fire for a
study showing the "iridium layer" marking an end to the dinosaurs in the rock strata is prompt
to refer to Deg's work as "anti-scientific." He cannot have read Deg's work or any other
considerable literature of the field; otherwise he must be using some narrow and antiquated
definition of science, or worse, using the term science for name-calling.
It is widely believed that all astronomers, all geologists, all physicist, all historians, and
all archaeologists have for thirty years been close-minded to the arguments continually brought
up by the cosmic heretics. This is not so. And this stereotype of the resistant and rigid
collective mind continually exacerbated feelings on both sides. (As did the opposite
stereotype, that all heretics were foolish and anti-scientific.) To illustrate my point I will
turn to Deg again, for he was always concocting hypothetical statistics. (He should have
offered a college course on the subject; it is useful for those areas, most areas, where data
is trivial or scanty, and the usual resort is to revert to the Aristotelian modes of thought.)
Deg's Notes, Princeton, 1980
The grades of opposition among the probable quarter million of scientists who have formed any
opinion on the cosmic heretics should be sorted out. And here I assign estimates in percentages
only to illustrate my view.
They may be, my guess, up to 10% off one way or the other.
a) Stereotyped rigid opponents: 19%
b) General dissenters: 35%
c) Specialized dissenters inattentive to major theories: 20%
d) Doubters but interested: 13%
e) Interested and acknowledging truthful elements: 10%
f) Persuaded of the general truth of quantavolution: 3%
g) Persuaded of the general truth and also of some special heretical truths, such as a radical
change of planetary motions, or a recent great deluge on Earth: 0.1%
If one were to correlate such figures with the prestige of the opinion aggregates in their own
fields, using concepts that I have used in studies of political leadership, we might find that
the top elite (1%) would be heavily concentrated in classes a, b, and c; the activist
productive scientists (3%) would be spread throughout; the ordinary scientists (80%) would be
skewed somewhat higher toward elite opinion but spread throughout; the inert scientists (10%)
(recalling that most scientists have hardly heard of quantavolution of Velikovsky as an issue
and are therefore not tabulated at all, and that inertness mean 'unproductive' ordinary
scientists) would be even more skewed toward elite opinion. In consequence of the biases and
the gross numbers, we would find the last two categories favoring Quantavolution populated by
only a couple of members of the top elite and a few members of the activist productive group.
It is understood, of course, that "elite" and "productivity" here may not denote "truth-
production" to any great degree: they are terms denoting network and establishment leadership.
Thus, if we were placing people, we would shuffle leadership scores like a deck of cards after
three aces in a row were drawn.
Also, "forming an opinion" does not denote extensive reading in the field of quantavolution.
Furthermore, placement of a person does not suggest his "flip-flopability." For instance, Carl
Sagan would probably score as "top elite" and full under "general dissenters," but his writing
and utterances on occasion signify a suppressed readiness to accept general quantavolution. He
would have high "flip-flopability." So would the "activist-productive" e-category geologist
Derek Ager, who, however, would not have to execute a vigorous flop, just a tilt. Melvin Cook,
a geophysicist of the same ranking, would be found in f, and would probably move restrainedly
into g. Robert Jastrow might occur as top elite in the d category of interested doubters,
perhaps even in the e category; he, too, might move up readily.
On the whole, there is much subconscious ambivalence (produced by anomalous and contradictory
material) in science, plus a goodly concentration of influentials near enough to quantavolution
theory to accomplish an easy transition. Not one of the top elite of scientists in the country
over the past thirty years has read deeply in the literature of quantavolution. That goes
without exception for Sagan, although he has been active in the Velikovsky affair.
Deg was here counting as scientists those humanists and social scientists who profess a
scientific approach to their fields. He knew of none of these of the top elite who had studied
deeply the literature. Probably no more than 1000 persons in the world have been seriously
engaged in the discovery and study of quantavolutionary literature over the past thirty years.
If Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision has been read by a million people, most of the thousand
will have read the book, but 99% of the million readers will have read little else of value
besides it.
Many a well-known figure of science has had an exoterrestrial skeleton in his closet. Plato
would deny the citizenry the right to challenge the divine and natural order of the heavens and
proposed severe penalties for such. Yet Plato has for over 2000 years afforded support to
quantavolutionists in history (the Atlantis report), astronomy (deviations of the planets) and
geology (destruction of early Attica by earthquakes), V. was annoyed when Stecchini stressed
the anti-quantavolutionist side of Plato's political writings, and urged upon them a
consistency that was not there; at least it seemed to Deg that he could not tolerate a double
standard for Plato, that what was true should nevertheless be suppressed for the good of the
social order. Here was an example of what was forbidden in principle to a psychoanalyst: V.
therefore needed to believe that the truth would free man and wished a social policy that would
acknowledge ancient traumas of catastrophe so as psychologically to free him in his behavior
today. Given V. 's authoritarian bent, a contradiction of feelings arose which was displaced
upon Stecchini's innocent and free-wheeling skepticism and attacked unreasonably. It does
appear that Plato was deliberately contradictory. He recognized a chaotic universe while
officially forbidding its recognition.
Stecchini performed a similar service with respect to Newton and Laplace, discovering in both
men the inklings of catastrophism. In Newton's case the contradiction between a stable order of
the skies of the new science and a biblical literalism ordaining catastrophic belief was
explicit, but glossed over by Newtonian science. Stecchini's exposure of the concern of Laplace
that destructive cometary visitations were possible, and of his admission that his mathematics,
which fixed the modern vision of an impeccable celestial order, simplified reality, was more
surprising.
Deg met with additional surprises and came to suspect that when the time came to throw off the
uniformitarian guise, scientists would rediscover a general exceptionalism and anomalism in
geology, paleontology, evolution, and astronomy. He relocated persons such as Pickering and
Wegener. He found that Shapely, who had become the anti-hero of the Velikovskian sociological
scenario, had posited exoterrestrial encounters one time, and so, too, Harry Hess, who had
filed amicus curiae briefs for Velikovsky, and Sagan to whose burst of fame both hypotheses of
exoterrestrial communication and rebuttals of Velikovsky contributed.
Some of such characters found a place in the geology of Deg's Lately Tortured Earth. Together
with the frankly catastrophic writers, such as Melvin Cook and Allan Kelly, they would come to
play an important substantiating role, like the dissenting minority opinions in U. S. Supreme
Court history, when the moment for revising science would occur. Then some of those who had
denounced "backward catastrophism" would become forerunners of quantavolution.
But, please note, I have scarcely touched upon the full breadth of the science of science,
which would embrace the thousands of cases occurring in the normal operations of conventional
science upon conventional offerings to science. Nor can I do so, for I must be done with the
case of the cosmic heretics very soon now.
Deg's Journal, en route Washington, October 18, 1966.
Sundry of the quantitatively directed natural scientist have told me and others that they
believe Velikovsky to be unimportant and irrelevant because of his qualitative, subjective
approach to events in astronomy, physics, and geology. For instance, the work on
electromagnetism, radioactivity, interplanetary exploration, and solar system aberrations is
learned, studied, and developed in a mathematical setting.
But for what V is saying, the movements of phenomena are so large and influential as to make
quantitative assertions about them unnecessary. What matters to us is that oceans of soil
descended from the skies, that numerous eruptions and earthquakes occurred, that gross changes
in the sky appeared. These happenings were reported. The reports are ample. Neither the
ancients nor we ourselves today would have had the tools, under the circumstances of the
events, to describe them and present them in sets of equations.
Deg's Journal, Princeton, January 18, 1968, 10 P. M. Every physical law states a proposition
that is useful to culture, with requirements that are relevant to the practical workings of the
law, and derives its "eternal truth" from that fact.
The proof, e. g. of Newton's law of inertia, is supposed to lie in the myriad applications of
it, in ballistics, industry, and transportation. But one need only think of how many enormous
discoveries and inventions occurred before Newton's law to see that the law itself does not
create the understanding of nature. It only rephrases that understanding in a slightly better
and more useful from. It is a mistake to treat each reformulation as more than a useful
temporary rendition.
Some natural laws can be made to appear ridiculously simple and indeed they may be such. A body
resists changes in its motions. "Nothing changes unless acted upon." Well, why should it?
That's the law of inertia. But the opposite of course is true -- nothing becomes what it is
without having been something else. Etc.
Deg's Journal, October 27, 1972 The revolutionary zeal to refute uniformitarianism and
evolution has not considered fully their merits. The doctrine, that solar system has been
stable for millions of years, and that biological evolution and geological changes have
occurred almost entirely through small incremental changes over billions of years, seems weak
enough, in the light of our reassessment of catastrophic evidences in every area. The recency
of catastrophe is plain.
We have had to explain why uniformitarianism triumphed but have done so only cursorily; one
does not pause to strip elaborate armor off the fallen foes until the battle is won. When we
can return to consider, we shall find that uniformitarianism has, like the Christianity its
allies so disturbed, performed functions that we are not yet ready to provide substitutes for,
indeed perhaps are not able to discover and recognize for some time.
In Praise of Uniformitarianism We have said -- Stecchini and I, at least -- that
uniformitarianism was the beautiful philosophy of the Victorian Age and of all those who wished
since ancient times to give stability to human affairs. V. has recognized this and says from
time to time, cryptically, even in Worlds in Collision, that the Great Fear remains, and is a
cause of war and strife. Uniformitarianism is the culmination of the worldwide amnesia that
followed the great catastrophes -- ( I would call the period ca 5000 B. C. to 650 B. C. as the
Epoch of Cosmic Catastrophes) [later extended to 12,000 B. C.] in its triumph,
uniformitarianism succeeded effectively to reduce to nothingness the catastrophic theories.
Great scholars like Eliade breeze over mountains of evidence of the chaos of "the beginning"
without asking whether such chaos occurred; they become a manifestation of primitive minds.
My position is this: that the effects of the Epoch persist; that Uniformitarianism was a
successful myth both psychologically and socially, and was in conformity with many scientific
discoveries. But far beyond these functions, uniformitarianism is rooted in the provision of
the grand assurance that enabled humanity to:
a) Challenge nature
b) Control nature
c) Set up the idea of History as Linear in Time, destroying the popularity of (and essential
conservatism of) cyclical theories of history
d) Spawn the idea of progress as the future of man
e) Encourage the faith in stability that promoted the exquisite and productive division of
labor in all areas (no rushing to the caves or wombs of overall theology needed)
f) Simplify religion and produce deism, god as mechanic and great designer
g) Give laws immutability
h) Promote the idea of a rational bureaucracy and rationalism generally.
Deg's Journal, New York City, November 18, 1972
Science is protected by a veil of awe and therefore is not usually thought to respond to
sociological laws. It does, however, and even to laws about the vulgar sorts of opinion and
leadership.
I notice that reforming or revolutionary scientists go back to "discarded," "forgotten"
"rejected" sources. (Cf. Velikovsky in "Cosmos without Gravitation" and Earth in Upheaval.)
The ordinary supposition is that this is part of the rational system of sciences: viz. a)
thorough coverage of sources, b) reexamination of misunderstood writings, etc. Actually the
explanation of this behavior is tr‚s ordinaire. Science has only a one-channel mind. It cannot
proceed with two theories at the same time.
This may seem ridiculous: "What? The most brilliant intellects among humanity and they cannot
hold two thoughts at the same time!"
The absurd becomes acceptable when we realize the deductive and administrative nature of
science (Cf. my "Science and Values of Administration.") An enterprise, which science is, seeks
one direction, one consistent set of rules of decision, one comfortable theory (if possible), a
hierarchy of access and command, and (like an imperial megalomaniac of any world religion) one
world-wide code (without culturally and ideologically distinct competitors)
The "old discarded writers" are therefore to be understood as you would view a rabble before it
was transformed into an army. Coming early, they did not hear the call, they could not feel the
current's strength. Their students, "seeing more clearly, feeling more keenly." rewrote their
science to fit the future history of science, that is, to describe the path to be followed.
Thus is science administered.
Newton and Darwin are celebrated for unconscious reason, more than for conscious ones or
scientific ones: to cope with increasing anxiety, and yet change from a prescientific to a
scientific age:
A) Newton performed a great theological role in the transition from geocentrism to helio-
centrism by inventing the clockwork universe, and absolute laws.
B) Darwin's great theological service was to give enormous time and minute change (i. e. to
reduce Time from quality to quantity) by inventing gradual evolution [by natural selection].
Deg's Journal New York City, January 1973
It is a formidable block to accusations vs. the reception system of science that "you do not
know anyone of great merit who has not been recognized." This is fallacious: 1) One can find
such: e. g. Boulanger. 2) Relative ratings are important. Change in rank order from 1 to 30
say, or from "best seller" to "out of print."
3) People are "infamous" and regarded as "famous" and vice-versa.
4) Famous people now have passed long periods in which they were unattended to : e. g.
Aristotle.
5) Famous people are degraded on grounds that, though they were really great, they were
superseded.
6) Who knows who is not known but great. 7) How few scientists on the list are read, and really
known, after the first dozen or so.
8) People of great merit may not be able to publish, or they may he without the experimental,
research, editorial and critical assistance to make their views plausible or digestible.
e. g. if V. had not been able to hire expert editorial assistance, writing as he did in a
language only lately and imperfectly come by, he would not have been able to publish any work
of consequence.
e. g. Deg has on occasion recommended student Abner highly and student Boggs modestly, then to
discover the Boggs got a scholarship to go on at a first class establishment university while
Abner did not go on, went instead to a less well-equipped and less influential university and
was lost sight of in the production and achievement lists.
Deg's Journal, New York City, 1974
Sidney Willhelm, who has been one of the keenest sociological observers of the Velikovsky
Affair, gave two excellent new reasons why V. should have been both accepted and rejected by
influential elements of American Society. First, he says, the American democracy has given over
to scientists its power and will to regiment ideas: "Reins remain extremely light upon the
creative person through the delegation conferred by the State; by keeping each other in line,
scientists avoid direct State censorship." (One thinks, for instance, of how remarkably well
the scientific groups have restrained the government from acting forcefully in the scientific
groups' volatile area of bioengineering and cloning.) "Thus," says Willhelm, "the forces of
resistance find a more difficult time to convince skeptics of the lack of true freedom of
inquiry by the absence of an explicit state agency charged with thought control."
Willhelm also points to the psychological compatibility of V. 's catastrophic theories with the
policies of the political elite.
"While it was the longing for peace and tranquillity which apparently nourished notions of
harmony in nature, today it is the momentum of militaristic destruction which introduces the
greater reception toward Velikovsky's controversial interpretations. Modern science owes its
growth to wars and the threats of war." The cosmic heretics, with their wars of the gods, and
clashes of the planets and comets, are setting an example, unconsciously, for the prospering of
militarism and the military-industrial complex.
V. realized these dangers, and coined the idea of' collective amnesia with the purpose of
exposing this mentality and thus controlling it, while Deg too realized the danger in the
association and went further to explicate the original dynamics of Homo Schizo, to build peace
institutions, and to devise peace therapies.
Deg's Journal, Washington, D. C., 1979
It may appear shameful that scientists should depend for a new discovery or new perspective
upon a lay body of vaguely connected individuals who are interested in an idea. Still, this is
not only historically probable; it may be also logically and sociologically necessary
deduction. The triumph of the Renaissance outlook and method in the humanities and sciences was
a politico-social-economic-ideological effect. So was the victory of uniformitarian geology
and, thereafter, biology in the nineteenth century.
Scientists and specialists, once they receive their kudos, become prideful and seek to shed
their origins, retrojecting their present behavior and methods back to their science. The story
of Albert Einstein's success, for example, is told almost always as a rational discovery, a
steady progress though appraisals and tests, to applications and finally to total acceptance.
The full story of his great lifetime success, however, bespeaks a curious figure who caught the
popular imagination and was ballyhooed by the press and newsreels under the misunderstood
concept of "relativity" until many scientists, no matter how reluctant, had to deal with his
idea. Several early opponents of "relativity" (now only a suppressed whisper is heard of this)
saw clearly that a "matinee idol" was being foisted upon them. One does not deny Einstein his
greatness in pointing out that he might not have wormed his way through the reception system of
science and almost certainly would not have received the lion's share of glory if the public
and press had not been behind him or, better, dragging him forward.
This is a subject which requires thorough exploration, and has not received such at the hands
of science or the history of science. To take up only one point for a moment, few new ideas can
penetrate the publications of science; they are pinched capillaries. If they are conveyed,
their readership is extremely limited, a few persons, unless they are well-known already, in
which event some hundreds read the work. Scientists get little reward from hard reading of
anything but items aimed toward their ongoing projects, and they are busy with other affairs.
If an idea does penetrate the minds of a very few, the very few must become a group, and must
command just enough resources (not so much as to be 'bought off') to become an inescapable
pressure against the conventional main front. Then they make a breakthrough, spread out on the
flanks, and begin to surround and capture demoralized main body elements.
The winners may not even be correct; they may inspire only one of the many fads that overcome
disciplines and the scientific outlook as a whole. If what they espouse is effectively 'true' a
surge of scientific advances occurs and, among other by-products, arouses historians to write
(and rewrite) this history. A public, consisting of persons who have time to read seriously,
like love letters, the otherwise unreal material, constitutes a heavy factor in assembling,
encouraging, calling attention to, and forcing recognition of a new viewpoint or method.
COSMIC HERETICS:
by Alfred de Grazia
-
EPILOGUE
Surely, said Deg over the telephone, there must be a better way to write personal histories. He
had just read my manuscript. If there is, said I, I don't know it.
It irritated me that he was dissatisfied, perhaps because I am dissatisfied myself. I tried. But
there is no easy way of presenting the whole truth about people's lives. The threats of self-
censorship and distortion must continuously be warded off, and, if not these, then there may
come charging in crying "foul" the police, the torts attorneys, the anti-heretics, and some of
the cosmic heretics as well.
I've used many letters of yours, I told Deg, don't you think I should have a piece of paper from
you giving me permission, but he said, no, you have them in hand rightfully and it's quite
apparent that you are carrying on a public debate in the public interest on a matter of public
concern. How can you do your job without reporting what people say, even if they don't like
being quoted? If
anything, you've been a softy; you haven't used a hundred items I've given to you about myself
and others... Wait now, I said, that's just because they would be redundant... O. K..., he
agreed, but bear in mind how important are the freedom of science and freedom of expression --
and truth, and proof of the truth: you couldn't do anything else; ideally you might have printed
the whole file and let the documents just march out with fife and drums.
I don't intend to hurt anyone, I said, and he saw I was anxious. Buck up, man, dammit, you're
doing a public service. And you've got the First Amendment to the Constitution of the U. S. of
A. for shield. Nowhere else is the letter of the law so close to the spirit of the law.
But weren't you badgering the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist with a suit for slander? Well, he
excused himself, yes, but I wanted to open up their pages to discussion, I wanted a chance to
reply, and their refusal was damaging to science. It made their scientist readers believe in a
phony history and misrepresentations; it was a nasty cover-up. You'd better go back and read
what you've said --read the chapter in The Burning of Troy on the matter, too. The conduct and
progress of science is public business and wrapping it in a cloak of privacy -- well, I won't go
on, just look at Nixon in the White House and, all that he tried to do in the guise of privacy
to make off with his papers and tapes. I didn't file suit; I tried to bulldoze them, but they
were too smart; it didn't work nor did an appeal to fair play. Now thanks to you we've had a
marriage between Miss Liberty of Expression and the scientists -- granted it's a shotgun
wedding.
You've gotten me way off the subject, I said. I called to tell you the book is ended. "La
commedia ‚ finita." All that it needs is a final word from you. Please try to make it positive.
I like happy endings.
There was a long pause; then his voice came back on the line, carefully stringing out the words:
If quantavolution is untrue, it will stand like a monument to edify all who pass on the road of
science... Everyone who seeks a new truth in science must become a party to concerns of civil
liberty... Science is half psychosociology... Of all movements, scientific movements are the
most rewarding to their adherents, win or lose, and of all these the most adventurous is cosmic
heresy... He who knows how to tell time will decide the fate of the heretics.
"O. K." said I "that's enough." "Is it?" he asked. "You have not remarked in your book that
Velikovsky wrote his works on catastrophe and quantavolution in the years 1940 to 1960, aged
forty-five to sixty-five, which was precisely my experience between 1963 and 1983 when I was of
the same age, a curious coincidence -- or a signal perhaps that my time is up." "Where are they,
Sovereign Virgin, But where are the snows of yester-year?"
To which I felt the urge to add "Yes where is the Queen Who ordered the scholar Buridan Cast in
the Seine in a sack? But where are the snows of yester-year ?"
End of Cosmic Heretics
TITLEPAGE
CHAOS AND CREATION
AN INTRODUCTION TO QUANTAVOLUTION
IN HUMAN AND NATURAL HISTORY
by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
Metron Publications
Princeton London Bombay
© 1981 by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
No reproduction in any form of this book, in whole or in part (except for brief quotation in
critical articles or review), may be made without written permission from the author.
First Edition 1981
Metron Publications
Box 1213
Princeton, N J., U.S.A. 08540
PRINTED IN INDIA
BY MANMOHAN S. BHATKAL AT POPULAR BOOK DEPOT
PRINTING DIVISION,
DR. BHADKAMKAR MARG, BOMBAY 400 007.
To Ami Hueber
I cannot without great wonder, nay more, disbelief, hear it being attributed to natural bodies
as a great honour and perfection that they are impassable, immutable, inalterable, etc.: as,
conversely, I hear it esteemed a great imperfection to be alterable, generable, mutable etc. It
is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable by reason of the many and different
alterations, mutations, generations, etc., which incessantly occur in it...I say the same
concerning the Moon, Jupiter and all the other globes of the Universe.... These men who so extol
incorruptibility, inalterability, etc., speak thus, I believe, out of the great desire they have
to live long and for fear of death....
GALILEO GALILEI
Dialogue on the Great World Systems
The real actors on the stage of the universe are very few if their adventures are many. The most
"ancient treasure" -in Aristotle’s words-that was left to us by our predecessors of the High and
Far-Off Times was the idea that the gods are really stars, and that there are no others. The
forces reside in the starry heavens, and all the stories, characters and adventures narrated by
mythology concentrate on the active powers among the stars, who are planets. A prodigious
assignment it may seem for those planets to account for all those stories and also to run the
affairs of the whole universe.
GIORGIO DI SANTILLANA HERTHA
VON DECHEND
Hamlet’s Mill
TITLEPAGE
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION: Quantavolution vs. Evolution
The Uniformitarian Resistance
Quantavolution by Catastrophe
CHAPTER ONE: Cosmic Instability
Impacts on Earth
The Cleavage of Mars: A Particular Case
CHAPTER TWO: High Energy from Space
Electrical Forces
Heavy-Body Impacts
Seismism and Volcanism
Fire and Gases
Dense Fall-Out
Hurricanes
Pandemonium and Darkness
The Battle over Time
The Quantavolutionary Column
The Exponential Principle
Revolutionary Integration of the Cosmos
CHAPTER THREE: Collapsing Tests of Time
Rapid Sedimentation
Coral Reefs
Radiodating
Radiation Turbulence
Potassium-Argon Dating
The Radio-Halo Problem
Radiocarbon (Carbon-14) Dating
Tree-Ring Time
Magnetism
The Fossil Record and Mutating Time
Cycles and Anniversaries
58 Tests in Dispute
The Dissolution of Time
Of Mammonths and Amber
Schaeffer and Velikovsky
CHAPTER FOUR: A Catastrophic Calendar
The Number of Catastrophes
Why 14,000 Years?
CHAPTER FIVE: Solaria Binaria
The Magnetic Tube and Planets
The Binary Partner
The Stacked Binary System
Decline of the Electric System
The Break-up of Super-Uranus
Planetary Behavior
Completion of the Transformation
The World of Pangea
The Sky-Watches
Early Astronomical Ideas
Summary Reflections upon the Changing World System
CHAPTER SIX: The Uranians
The Destruction of Pangea: The First Chaos
The Ice Dumps
The Creation of Man
Religious Beginnings
Paleolithic Religion
Birth of the Heavenly Host
Ejaculative Language
Ecumenical Culture
The Expansion of Homo Schizo
Old and New World Concordances
Climate Changes and Time
Puzzles of Tihuanacu
Signs of Uranian Culture
Hand, Rod, and Snake
CHAPTER SEVEN: Earth Parturition and Moon Birth
The Passage of Uranus Minor
Contributing Theories and Eruption Dynamics
Lunar Conformities to Eruption
The Global Fracture System
The Tethyan Welt
Global Expansion
The Magnetic Field
Ocean Development
Lunar Worship
Sunken Lands
Legendary Chaos and the Moon
The Moon in Meso-America
Western Europe
The Near East
A Question of Lunar Priority
Eliade’s "Lunar Perspective"
The Menstrual Cycle
The Heavenly Spinner
CHAPTER EIGHT: Saturn’s Children
The Pleiades
The Triumph of Saturn
The "Golden Age"
The Peoples of Saturnia
The Downfall of Saturn: Nova and Deluge
The Poseidon Phase
Survivors and Saturnalia
CHAPTER NINE: The Olympian Rulers
The Devil Seth
The Bonds of Saturn and Jupiter
The Lightning God
The Behavior of Planet Jupiter
End of the "Golden Age"
Monumentalism
Repeated Disasters
Gods Not Invented
Apollo
Explosion and Asteroids
Mercury
Mercury’s Geophysics
CHAPTER TEN: Venus and Mars
Career of an Androgyne
The Heat of Venus
Hundres of Identities
The Plot of the Iliad
Global Ruination and its Perpetrator
The Devi and the Mexican Ballplayer
A Longer Day
The Explosion of Thira
Martia
Carpenter’s "Soft" Catastrophism
Nergal, the "Treacherous Dealer"
Worship of Mars
The Wounds of Planet Mars
The Greek "Dark Ages"
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Devil’s Advocate
CHAPTER TWELVE: Victory of The Sun
Sun and Science
Forebodings
The Propensity to Survive
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES
The Archetype of the Chinese Dragon (Frontispiece)
1. Prominent Catastrophists since Bruno (Table)
2. The Ripping of the Surface of Mars (Map)
3. Fear of Comets and the Conquest of 1066
4. Some Shapes Taken by Recent Comets
5. Radiocarbon Dating and Ecological Stress
6. Disputed Explanations of the Tests of Time (Table)
7. A Schedule of Holocene Periods (Table)
8. A Quantavolutionary Cycle
9. Solaria Binaria during Pangea
10. Magnetic Field of the Sun
11. Humanization in Catastrophe (with Chart A)
12. Mesolithic Rayed Bodies
13. Typical Depictions of Uranus and Saturn
14. Hieroglyph of Nun, Father of the Gods
15. Mating of the Sky and Earth
16. Celestial Bison
17. The Great Ohio Serpent Mound
18. The Preferred Altitiudes of Earth’s Crust
19. The Earth Today: Cleavages, Welts, Mountain Folds and Volcanism
20. Scheme of the Land Area of Pangea and Urania
21. The Magnetic Poles of the Earth
22. Legendary Sunken Lands and Cultures of the World
23. The Mesoamerican Moon Goddess, Tlazolteotl
24. Aphrodite the Moon Goddess
25. Composition of Saturn Images
26. Saturn Devouring his Children
27. Albrecht Dürer’s "Deluge"
28. Cetus or Seth, the Devil-Dog
29. Jupiter: Lightning and Thunder
30. Disasters from Mercury to Mars (Table)
31. Variants of the Cometary Goddess
32. The Imperial Chinese Dragon Robes
33. Destruction of Bronze Age Cities
34. A Generally Accepted Time-Scale (Table)
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
FOREWORD
The scientific community of today is in part a community of myth and ideology. This has always
been, and most likely, must always be. Every body of ideas and practices must gather upon a raft
in order to float upon the ocean of "absolute reality." When a raft is leaking, construction must
begin on a new one. At that moment new designs can be introduced.
This book is designed to show that a typical scientist may hold untenable positions on five major
issues: the ordering of the solar system; the genesis of God; the fashioning of the surface of the
earth; the evolution of mankind; and the origins of culture. The chapters that are to come assert
that all of these processes may have occurred in a short interval of time in association with a
set of natural catastrophes. The world has changed by great abrupt movements. with far-ranging
effects. This story, and the theory used to organize it, are here called "quantavolution" and
"revolutionary primevalogy." They contrast with "evolutionary primevalogy."
In terms of scientific method, quantavolution is a model or image of what might have happened in
natural and human history. As such, it is one way of approaching truth in cosmogony - those remote
causes of our real world. It offers a truth that may do better than the next best truth, or it may
serve until a better truth is offered, helping to orient other searchers, even to assist in its
own replacement.
Our so-called "Age of Science" is a patchwork of different mentalities. Most people around the
world would dispute the beliefs of science on the above five issues, but do not practice a
scientific method. Most scientists of the age share fundamental beliefs on these issues, but too
often they do not practice their scientific method with regard to them; they simply carry on at
their special tasks. I subscribe to the methods of science, but yet am putting forward a challenge
to the beliefs. This sets me among a small minority of scholars, but permits me to draw support
from the traditions of a great many people, the specialized studies of many scientists, and the
sympathetic efforts of a certain few.
Many scientists pay close attention on their leading men who are building upon "realities," but
ignore their philosophers of scientific method, who warn them not to arrogate "The Truth" to
themselves. When their raft begins to leak, then, they must tolerate the effects of presumption:
mistrust, disbelief, and annoying criticism. And they may not solve some problems that they have
set their hearts upon solving. ALFRED DE GRAZIA
London May 1, 1980
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
INTRODUCTION
QUANTAVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION
Some millions of persons have lately begun to read about ancient catastrophes. In this, they
have been recapturing a habit of their ancestors who had been schooled, whatever their
religion, to believe that once upon a time, in the beginning of mankind, terrible disasters of
earth, air, fire and water engulfed the world.
As so often happens, what interests the public coincides with what interests scientists.
Impelled by an intuition that is common to both the multitude of persons and the body of
scholars, the human mind today is moving into an area "where the action is". For perhaps no
more exciting and important a set of problems is to be found anywhere in the realms of science
and scholarship.
Every discipline is implicated in the theory of ancient catastrophes - psychology, sociology,
linguistics, archaeology, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology, together with
their many subdivisions down to special and new sciences, such as plasma physics,
dendrochronology, and mega-vitamin therapy [1] . It has something to say about "the Jupiter
Effect," "the Ion Effect," and "the Bermuda Triangle," not to mention "Ancient Astronauts," and
the hominids of Olduvai Gorge. Every bite of the archaeologist's spade, every oceanographer's
deep coring of the sea bottom, every penetration of outer spaces seems capable of attracting
the attention of the catastrophist - that is, the potential quantavolutionist of natural
history and human origins.
THE UNIFORMITIARIAN RESISTANCE
The history of science took a sharp turn around 150 years ago [2] . Before then it was assumed
that life on earth had originated recently and was wracked by natural disasters. Although this
was believed largely on the "say-so" of ancient theologians and scientists, fresh evidence was
being unearthed by famous scientists such as Georges Cuvier and William Buckland.( Figure 1
gives the names and main positions of some prominent catastrophists.)
Cuvier, who is sometimes called "the father of paleontology," divided the history of the world
into four epochs, each with its own animals, each ended by great flood. In only the last of
these ages, the present epoch, were men and living mammals present, stated Cuvier [3] . He was
here mistaken; hardly had he laid down his pen, when human remains were found alongside the
bones of extinct mammoths.
By contrast, the upcoming scientists of the last century argued that the world's history was
long and evolutionary. On their side were those who were to become the treasured ancestors of
science today - Charles Lyell (1795-1875) in geology, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in biology,
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) in astronomy, and Lewis H. Morgan (1818-1881) as well as the
versatile communist, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), in sociology and anthropology.
The new group came to dominate scientific circles and scientific thought. The catastrophists
disappeared from the scientific mind save as an old enemy. The victors advanced the principle
of uniformitarianism. Their minions scorned the catastrophists.
In the words of Charles Lyell, "the ancient changes of the animate and inanimate world, of
which we find memorials in the Earth's crust, may be similar both in kind and degree to those
which are now in progress." [4] Given time, the forces of nature that we experience today
would have caused everything in life and nature that greets our senses. The tallest mountains
and the most bizarre fish would have come about gradually, over a long time and by small
increments of change.
Indeed, asserted the uniformitarians, the short span of time demanded by the catastrophists was
absurdly incapable of bringing forth the great variety of nature; a reader will sometimes
encounter, as a ludicrous target, the date proposed by Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656),
which set the creation of the world by God at 9 a. m. on October 26, 4004 B. C.
Figure 1
PROMINENT CATASTROPHISTS (QUANTAVOLUTIONISTS)
SINCE THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN SCIENCE*
. Significant publication date Requires divine action Short-term for reconstructed earth
Intrusion of extra-terrestrial forces Mankind was catastrophized
Giordano Bruno 1584 . . x x
William Whiston 1719 x x x x
Giambattista Vico 1730 . x x x
Nich.-Ant. Boulanger 1766 . x x x
Giov. R. Carli-Rubbi 1780 . x x x
Georges Cuvier 1826 . x . .
William Buckland 1824 x x . .
Ignatius Donnelly 1883 . x x .
Isaac Vail 1905 . x x .
Hans Hoerbiger 1913 . x x .
George McCr. Price 1926 x x . .
W. Comyns Beaumont 1932 . x x .
Howard B. Baker 1932 . x x .
Hans Bellamy 1936 . x x .
Claude Schaeffer 1948 . . . .
Immanuel Velikovsky/td> 1950 . x x x
A. Kellv & F. Dachille 1953 . x x .
Hugh A. Brown 1967 . x . .
Melvin Cook 1966 x x . .
Donald Patten 1966 . x x .
Charles Hapgood 1970 . x . .
* The list excludes the work of lesser-known and mostly younger quantavolutionists. I.
Velikovsky, Ralph Juergens, Livio Stecchini, Gilbert Davidowitz, and Zvi Rix have recently
died, leaving many unpublished manuscripts. A few of the scholars who are currently active are
Robert Bass, John Bimson. Dwardu Cardona, William Corliss, Eric Crew, Frank Dachille, Eva
Danelius, Ragnar Forshufvud, Brendan O'Gheoghan, Stephen Gould, Lewis Greenberg, George
Grinnell. Peter James, Julian Jaynes, Frederic Jueneman. Allan Kelly, Alexander Kondratov,
Malcolm Lowery, Christoph Marx. Earl Milton, Brian Moore, William Mullen, G. van Oosterhout,
Alan Parry, C. J. Ransom, M. G. Reade, Lynn Rose, Eddie Schorr, Martin Sieff, Warner Sizemore,
David Talbott, S. K. Vsekhsvyatskii, Robert Wescott, Irving Wolfe, and Jerry Ziegler; j'en
passe et des meilleurs. Also the Creation Research Quarterly group (Ann Arbor, Mich.); the
group of the Society for the Study of Interdisciplinary issues (England); the Kronos group
(Glassboro College, N. J.); the Lethbridge University, Canada, group (E. R. Milton). and the
Catasirophist Geology group (Rio de Janeiro, H. Kloostermann). Nor does the table include the
"Ancient Astronaut" school (Robert Temple, Erich von Däneken) or "life on other planets"
students (Carl Sagan), or contemporary "flying saucer" discussants, or "biblical literalists."
Furthermore, the list does not include many scientists. such as C. E. R. Bruce, D. Ager, H.
Urey, J. Lamar Worzel., or C. Emiliani, who use catastrophe to explain important episodes of
natural history. It may be of interest to place C. Lyell, C. Darwin, S. Freud, A. Wegener, and
A. Einstein in the chart: all would vote "No" on all questions. Yet interesting passages and
events in the lives of all of them have to do with catastrophic episodes and anomalies.
Actually, when pressed on the matter today, a uniformitarian will say that he is pursuing a
method, not assuming an absolute reality [5] . He is saying: I can explain almost everything I
see very well by assuming at the start that, whether a mountain or man, it came about
gradually, in increments, point by point. That is, he uses a uniformitarian model to frame what
be discovers.
QUANTAVOLUTION BY CATASTROPHE
By the same token, in this book, I advance a catastrophic model It, too, is a method. By using
the idea that great forces can cause great changes in a short time, I am enabled to achieve a
fairly consistent and defensible reconstruction of natural history and human history. I use new
terms in referring to this point of view. I call it "quantavolution", for in contrast to
evolution, it considers "quanta-jumps" to be the main feature of change (volution). "Primeval
quantavolution," then, would be the saltatory evolutionary science characterizing the first
ages (primeval) of nature and humanity.
From time to time, I also use the new term, "revolutionary" primevalogy, to stand for the
science of catastrophe. For the theory presented and discussed is much more powerful in its
range and effects than is conveyed by the idea of a great flood or fire. "Revolutionary" stands
in contrast to "evolutionary" and "uniformitarian"; these last words imply small changes
occurring over vast periods of time under conditions that have not basically altered over a
billion years and more. By contrast, "revolutionary" means intense, abrupt, large-scale change
(the same meaning as it has in politics). "A comet produced the last revolution of our globe,"
wrote G. R. Carli, an early scientific catastrophist, in his American Letters of 1780 [6] .
And it is the meaning that Georges Cuvier had in mind when, a halfcentury afterwards, he used
the phrase "revolutions of the globe" in his discussion of fossil paleontology.
Much that we admire and respect in this world, including our very being as humans, must
logically be thought of as the "good" side of the catastrophes of which we speak. Humanity,
art, institutions and science are products of the most ancient catastrophes. So, again, the
words "quantavolution" and "revolution" may be preferable, or at least useful to remember, in
connection with the wholly negative word "catastrophe".
Many quantavolutionists, unlike myself, may refuse to set down a base line of time. Some
quantavolutionists may set a single clock of the ages ticking at four billion years ago, and
introduce a great leap every million or hundred million years. As one of them, geologist Derek
Ager, has concluded, "the history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier,
consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror." [7] Generally, the farther
back a quantavolutionary sets his events, the more be is accepted by the scientific community;
for the idea that contemporary scientists can least tolerate is the idea that the world has
been catastrophized recently.
Nevertheless, after years of attempting to bridge the vast chasm between a quantavolution that
uses the long time-scale of astronomy and geology and that which adopts the short timescale
asserted by the unanimous traditions of humankind, I decided to try to reconcile the two scales
to the brief period demanded by the early human voices. Only then could the model of natural
and human history be integrated.
Consequently, as this book progresses, I shall be suggesting, with some reason, that human
accounts provide a baseline for the age of catastrophes at 14,000 years ago. Also, in my
opinion, the nature which offers itself to view-including the solar system, earth, and
biosphere - may have assumed its present form in a series of recent sudden leaps. The holocene
epoch, to which I allot the 14,000 years, has witnessed a connected set of catastrophes, these
can be divided into nine periods, each characterized by natural outbursts but containing
tranquil passages as well. I shall soon explain this
The original source of the saltatory changes of the earth and man has been in the skies, in
disorders among the heavenly bodies. The celestial disturbances wrecked and reconstituted the
atmosphere, rocks, and waters of the world. All combined to reorder the plant and animal
kingdoms. Finally they created and molded modern humankind. In brief, forces of extra-
terrestrial origin have recently catastrophized and transformed nature and mankind. Many ways
in which nature and life behave today are best understood as tailing-off effects of the
catastrophes of ancient times.
Notes (Introduction)
1. A. de Grazia (1975)
2. Gillispie (1951)
3. Cuvier (1831)
4. Lyell (1831-4), quoted by Albritton (1974) 857
5. Ibid., 859
6. Carli (1780) 329
7. Ager (1973) 100
CHAOS AND CREATION: FOREWORD
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE: COSMIC INSTABILITY
The once preposterous idea is now a commonplace: worlds have collided. Even the naive image of
colliding worlds two huge globes smashing, into one another is realized. The very event may be
observed daily in the great telescopes of science. Furthermore, galaxies composed of millions
of stars are in collision. Any unfortunate beings dwelling in those regions of the universe
would not consider the word "collision" to be an exaggeration.
The "discovery of the existence, almost omnipresence of a high-energy, explosive universe" is
accredited to the 1960's by the Astronomy Survey Committee of the National Academy of Sciences.
"The previously well-organized universe ... exploded into a bewildering universe of new types
of objects, large and small, with exotic new names and marvelous new natures." [1]
Some thousands of planetesimals of varied shapes and sizes, and much plain dust, orbit between
planet Mars and planet Jupiter. These nameless fragments and bits were once part of a planet -
, it is scientifically respectable now to think so. Ovenden estimated the mass of the planet to
have been ninety times that of the Earth [2] . This implies logically the belief that within
our family of planets, a monstrous direct collision once occurred. Ovenden assigns the,
explosion to an encounter with a hypothetical intruder passing through the solar system.
Even before Ovenden, scientists such as Kuiper, Bobrovnikoff, Whipple, and Tombaugh lent their
authority, too, to the idea that comets and planets collided in the asteroid belt. Whipple went
so far as to talk of collisions in that area only 4200 and -1500 years ago, in 1950, the same
year in which Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision. But Whipple immediately became a
dedicated crusader against Velikovsky [3] .
IMPACTS ON EARTH
It is also known that comets disappear into the sun, and that comets have hit planets. And that
they will continue to strike planets, and that meteoroids, that is, fragments of unknown or
eccentric paths, also strike planets, even Earth [4] . They can be, and have been, large.
At Ishim, Kazakhstan, U. S. S. R. is a meteoroid impact crater, recently demonstrated and said
to be aged 350 million years. The initial impact penetrated to a depth of 12 km and amounted to
350 km in diameter. The rebound explosion and the collapsed rim enlarged the crater to a
diameter of 700 km. The estimated kinetic energy of the event was ten billion times greater
than that of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Alaska earthquake of 1964 or the Chinese
earthquake of 1976 [5] . The fall, in a different time and place, could have obliterated
France or Germany. And from the explosion would have emerged a catastrophic typhoon that would
have towered into outer space. It would have darkened the globe with dust, caused universal
seismism, and brought worldwide floods from the concussion and from the tilting and/ or
rotational interruption of the Earth.
In the course of its encounters in space, the Earth has gained gases, rocks, metals and
minerals, possibly even some forms of life, and mechanical motions and electrical charges. It
has lost gases and rocks and life, motions and charges. It has changed greatly its surface, its
atmosphere, and its life forms in the encounters. Examples of all of these occurrences will be
found in the pages to follow. Many processes that still continue, such as the cutting back of
Niagara Falls, the adaptation of species to desert conditions, earthquakes and volcanism, not
to mention various mental processes of humans, can be interpreted as dying effects of the
encounters.
Quantavolutional thought is often said to be unable to explain the fantastic amount of energy
that must be present and converted in changing large-body motions [6] . After all, to account
for an orbital change in distance between the Sun and the Earth requires a power which, if it
were expressed as dynamite, would be sufficient, when properly placed, to blow the Earth to
smithereens.
However, such images can be unrealistic, balancing forces operate. Warlow (1978) has, exhibited
a wide range of data. and mechanisms -- legends, massive faunal destructions, abrupt salinity
changes, tektite falls, then spinning top experiments and mathematical calculations -- relating
to reversals of the Earth's magnetic field. He argues that the Earth is easily destabilized and
can even turn over repeatedly in response to external influences. If the axis of the Earth
tilts when an intruder approaches, the Earth's angular moments of rotation and revolution can
respond less radically to the strange forces; the total sphere responds and there is less
strain on its parts. Or if the Earth's rotation is interrupted, a fracture of the Earth's crust
will reduce the energy of the braking and increase the time given to it.
Every day thousands of airplanes take off and land that would disintegrate if their
acceleration or deceleration were in seconds instead of minutes; the rate of slow-down is all-
important in the difference between an explosion and a glide, whatever the ergcount.
The damping of the rotation of the Earth from a four-hour to a twenty-four hour cycle would
require the disposal of 1. 2 X 10 10 erg/ grams, or a heat equivalent to raising the
temperature of the globe 1000 ; but obviously the time factor here is ignored and is therefore
instantaneous. Half the Earth gives up some degrees of heat every night, and a slowly
decelerating Earth might do the same, night and day.
There is literally all the difference in the world between an earth slowing in a day and an
earth ceasing abruptly to rotate. Indeed, it is impossible for a sudden stop to occur. Even if
an errant great body were to collide with the Earth, days before the explosive moment the
Earth's rotation would have come to a halt, and its surface and atmosphere would be erupting in
flames and lightning.
Finally, electrical adjustments are a form of energy disposal and can change a hot transaction
into a cool one, and vice versa. Many a meteor that would scorch the atmosphere and bum itself
up, or perhaps explode in great heat, is repelled by a like charge of the upper atmosphere and
skips off into outer space.
Vast stretches of astronomical and geological time are not required by the delicacy of
organized matter. Only small amounts of time may be needed in which to accumulate and dissipate
great heat and pressures. From a molten mass, the Earth could have acquired a hard crust in a
thousand years (if radioactive internal heating is ignored) [7] . Both electricity and water
increase greatly the metamorphosis of rocks and facilitate volcanic activity [8] .
That the Moon and Mars and Mercury are devastated and biologically dead, that Venus is rotating
backwards and burning hot, that a ghost planet which should perhaps be called "Apollo" is
represented by a host of asteroids flying between Mars and Jupiter - all these give one to
suspect that the Earth has also suffered, but escaped the worst.
THE CLEAVAGE OF MARS: A PARTICULAR CASE
The planet Mars became a horror and great god to the people of 2700 years ago. Mesopotamians
might well chant:
"Shine of horror, god Nergal, prince of battle,
Thy face is glare, thy mouth is fire,
Raging flame-god, god Nergal." [9]
Nergal is god-Mars and planet-Mars. Only a god could fearlessly assault a god. And that is what
Pallas Athene, goddess of the planet Venus, did to Mars-Ares-Nergal. It is the famous scene of
the battle of the gods in Homer's Iliad [10] . Athene, with the blessing of Zeus drove her
chariot towards Ares, "the bane of mortals," and drove her spear "mightily against his nether-
most belly." A great black cloud arose from him, he "bellowed like ten thousand warriors," and
fled into the high heavens.
Planet Mars is small compared with Venus and Earth, though larger than the Moon. It has a very
thin atmosphere. In 1976, American's spacecraft landed upon it, sensing for signs of life,
finding neither proof nor disproof, but ambiguous evidence. It is wracked by wind and storms of
dust. It has changing polar caps of "dry ice". Most of all it has been bruised and battered
[11] .
The most revealing feature of Mars is its Coprates canyon complex, photographed by Mariner IX
(see Figure 2 with 1997 upgrade). The Coprates complex, as Alan Kelly has related, is a 7500
miles long line of volcanoes and canyon that are the "product of the same event, when some very
large comet or other massive intruder from space passed too close to Mars.... This intruder
literally sucked the lava from the interior of Mars to form the huge volcanoes.... As it came
closer it caused a tremendous bulge, miles high, that burst open along the top and spewed out
lava and great chunks of Martian crust, much of this material following the intruder into
space." [12] Two million cubic miles of lava disappeared into space within a few hours [13] .
Figure 2:
THE RIPPING OF THE SURFACE OF MARS.
Kelly marks the following: the 2200 miles length of the canyon proper is more that 300 miles
wide near its center and over 20,000 feet deep. The disturbed surface, however, marked by great
mountain peaks such a Nix Olympica, begins before the rupture and continues far beyond it,
giving a total length of 7500 miles, which is over half the equatorial circumference that it
follows. Nix Olympica is over 300 miles at its base and over 15 miles high. All but one of the
20 volcano-like structures on Mars are along this same line of destruction. The walls of the
canyon are slumped or subsided in a series of stair-steps. No evidence meets the eye of water
erosion, sedimentation, delta fans, or eroded stream channels cutting across the surrounding
plateaus (the expanded bulge of the gravitational attraction). Hence the canyon is not, nor was
it ever a water system, nor ever transported water. Mars or Ares was assaulted and ripped open
from space.
"ONE OR TWO CENTURIES" OF "ETERNAL ORDER"
The educated public has long held, as an article of faith, that Isaac Newton discovered the
laws of planetary movements and that Laplace (1749-1827) mathematically expressed their
practically eternal stability [14] . Yet here I have suggested that the planetary movements
are not so stable, nor have they been.
Lately astronomers have begun to reconsider the dogma of celestial stability. Ransom and Milton
have collected studies of instability in the skies [15] . In 1953, W. M. Smart, Professor of
Glasgow University, wrote in his book, Celestial Mechanics, that the maximum time-interval over
which stability calculations of the type presented by Laplace, Lagrange, and Poisson can be
trusted is 300 current solar years [16] . The words "one or two centuries" occur elsewhere as
the time limit of validity.
Moving back, in 1931, E. W. Brown that the President of the American Astronomical Society,
wrote that the mathematical statement of the stability of the mean distances, of the
eccentricities, and of the inclinations of the planets "can only be regarded as valid over a
limited interval of time of the order of
10 6 or perhaps 10 7 years at most." [17] Thus 10 million to 100 million years of stability.
Brown stated elsewhere in the same year that there were no logical or mathematical reasons to
doubt that certain of the terrestrial planets might have interchanged their mean distances from
the Sun. He felt that this interchange was unlikely, and believed the planets were probably in
their initial order, "though the relative magnitudes of some of their distances may have been
considerably changed." [18] Back again, in 1961 Arnol'd and before him, in general, Poincar in
1899, proved that Simon Newcomb's 1895 mathematics providing 100 billion years of stability
were wrong in form, but especially in not accounting for perturbing (possibly non-
gravitational, said Brown) resonances [19] .
Newcomb had been attempting to bolster Poisson, Lagrange, and Laplace (1773) in their attempts
to show that the mean planetary distance would always stay within bounds and that collisions
were nearly impossible. Laplace (1749-1827) in 1784 declared that planetary inclinations and
eccentricities must remain small [20] .
Laplace had guessed 10 million years as the duration of the present stability, a soothing
enough figure to unleash the uniformitarians to pursue time enough on Earth for sedimentation,
surface changes, and evolution of life to occur. Or so they thought. With a present Earth-age
estimate of some 5 billion years, 500 times greater than his 10 million years, there might have
been 500 world collisions in Earth history, and another may be just around the corner.
Astrophysicist Robert W. Bass has related this story much more fully elsewhere [21] . If
anything can be added to his account, it may be that Laplace, the mathematical godfather of the
stability of the heavens (with Newton as father), had himself expressed original doubts on
their stability despite his mathematical proofs. Stecchini has published Laplace's doubts [22]
.
It develops that Laplace was more sinned against than sinner, by those who made a
uniformitarian religious dogma out of his mathematics of stability. For the same Laplace had
written: "The sky itself, despite the orderliness of its movements, is not inalterable."
Further the stability of the present order "is disturbed by various causes that can be
ascertained by careful analysis, but which are impossible to frame within a calculation." [23]
Laplace warned that he had not taken comets and meteoroids into account, and encouraged the
study of history, however brief, for enlightenment on such experiences. He also wondered,
Stecchini declares, "whether heavenly bodies might not be affected by forces other than
gravitation, such as electric and magnetic forces." [24] And he even presented a cometary
collision scenario, following evidence from mechanics, geology, natural and human history. Thus
Laplace may be placed in the company of Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, William Whiston,
Nicholas Antoine Boulanger, and perhaps even Isaac Newton, when he strongly supported Whiston,
his younger colleague.
Nevertheless, Bass is correct in his account of how Laplace was used in history by scientists
who were fighting for uniformitarianism and against the need for any divine intervention in
world affairs. He has shown how the successors of Laplace expressed themselves in intuitive
language, supposedly the bane of the conventional astronomers. "Whenever these allegedly
authoritative statements about time intervals of validity [of calculations of celestial
stability] have been made, they are without exception accompanied by words like 'supposed',
'appeared', 'hope', 'seems', 'might', and 'think', revealing clearly that the writer was
relying on his personal intuition rather than quantitative evidence [25] . It is ironic that
Harlow Shapley, the famous astronomer, admonished the Macmillan company for considering a
venture into the "Black Arts" with the publication of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision [26] .
A review of cases such as that the comet Oterma III may be in order, for both the solar system
and beyond. A report on Oterma III was presented by A. V. Folcin of the U. S. S. R. in 1958.
Before 1938, this comet has an orbit lying entirely between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.
In that year, it approached near to Jupiter and then swung around so that it acquired a new
orbit entirely between Mars and Jupiter. Bass points out that "for Venus one can, with
negligible error substitute any smaller mass." [27] That is, what happened to Oterma could
also happen to Venus, to Mars, or to Mercury, for all are of the same minute order in
comparison with Jupiter.
In sum, this brief chapter has intimated several conclusions. Astronomers often have fallen
victim to the myth of the eternal order of the heavens. The mathematics of the classics writers
concerning immutable motions are vulnerable. The "guaranteed" stability of the solar system,
when recalculated in their own terms, may be uncomfortably short. Recent events such as Oterma
III encourage a review of theories of celestial order.
As Professor John A. Simpson expressed the new mood, writing while Pioneer XII was speeding
towards Jupiter: "Much of the new astrophysics is based on non-equilibrium - even explosive -
phenomena, rather than the steady state thermal phenomena which have been the primary concerns
of astrophysics in the past. It is the violence of the phenomena discovered in the astrophysics
of the past fifteen years that has changed dramatically our current view of the universe."
Changing celestial behavior excites great forces to work upon Earth. After assembling the
evidence for the quantavolution of life forms, the Russian paleontologist and geologist, L. J.
Salop concludes: "The Earth, together with the life it supports, is not a closed self-
developing system but constitutes an integral part of the cosmos." [28]
Notes (Chapter One: Cosmic Instability)
1. Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 1970's (1972).
2. Ovenden (1973).
3. Velikovsky (1955) 288-9; Juergens, 30 and de Grazia 212-3 in de Grazia et al (1966).
4. In addition to the older writers, Whiston, Boulanger, Carli, Donnelly, and Beaumont, see
Velikovsky (1950); and entries in A. Miller (1977); Ransom (1976) 73-9; Kugler (1927); Patten
(1973); Kelly and Dachille; Pensée, nos I-X; Kronos, vol. I-III; Richter; Rix (1975);
Vsekhsvyatskii (1976).
5. Dachille (1975) 51.
6. Rose and Vaughan (1974); Michelson (1974).
7. Cook (1966).
8. Kelly and Dachille, 67; Velikovsky (1950) 91-2; (1955) 133.
9. Velikovsky (1950) 261, quoting Böllenrücker, 19.
10. Iliad, Book V; here the quoted words are from the Murray translation. Loeb Classical
Library (1925), Cf. Velikovsky (1950) 245 ff.
11. Pollack (1975); Woronow (1972).
12. Kelly (1974).
13. Some of the huge duststorms of Mars may be of this material too. Cf. Vsekhsvyatskii (1967)
on loss of material by planets. The solar system envelope contains a great deal of "meteoric"
dust (Van Allen, 1975).
14. Stecchini (1966) 80 ff.
15. Ransom (1972); Milton (1975).
16. 4, 94-5, 198 discussed in Bass (1976) 39-40.
17. Ibid., 39.
18. Ibid., 37 quoting from E. W. Brown's Presidential Address; cf. p. 30.
19. Ibid., 31-5 and Bass (1974) 8-20.
20. Ibid.
21. (1974), (1976).
22. (1966) 105-9.
23. Oeuvres Completes, VII, 121, quoted Ibid., 107.
24. Stecchini (1966), 108, citing Laplace VI. 347.
25. Bass (1976).
26. Juergens (1966), 20.
27. (1974), 15.
28. (1977), 40.
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWO: HIGH ENERGY FROM SPACE
In the train of the great deluge that ended the reign of the god Saturn-Osiris, mankind
suffered from hideous monster-forces. So said the Egyptians. These were Briareux: loss of
serenity; Othus: the succession of seasons; Ephialtes: horrendous clouds; Encelade: ravaging
waters; Porphyrion: fracturing of the earth; Mimas: the downpours of water; Rhaecus: the great
wing. Horus, son of Osiris, helped his mother as much as he could to restore man to his happier
pursuits [1] . The original cause was a huge celestial body. It was an age-breaking period,
one of the two worst, but the high energy forces were always the same, in all the periods of
chaos and creation.
The first chapter offered grounds to doubt the stability of the solar system in the past. The
present chapter introduces - but only for recognition and as a prelude to extensive discussion
in later chapters and volumes - the heavy, sky - provoked forces that can cause immense changes
upon Earth in a short time. If the solar system may have been unstable and if the Earth can be
transformed by high energy forces, then all is ready for the third chapter, which radically
challenges a long-time history of the present world. Once that is done, a new short-time
calendar of the holocene epoch is in order. Thereafter, the goal will be to prove the calendar
- or if not to prove it, to establish it upon a basis worthy of intelligent discussion.
Comets have been invariably a source of terror to humanity and linked to all manner of evil
(see Figure 3). The many apparitions have been accompanied in all too many cases by the reality
of collision. Planet Earth may have endured more than a score of space encounters with large
bodies during the holocene epoch. The most recent occurred around the founding of Rome. Mars
approached on several occasions, at 15-years intervals. Venus also intruded upon the Earth's
sphere, then and before then, at least several times, on a half-century cycle. Velikovsky
(1950) depicted these latter events.
Figure 3.
FEAR OF COMETS AND THE CONQUEST OF 1066.
The Bayeaux Tapestry on the Comet of 1066. On the eve of The Battle of Hasting, a comet lit up
the sky. The crowds gaze up in awe at the comet, and a courtier tells King Harold of this
terrible omen. Below are seen the ghostly invasion ships which Harold now fears will follow.
The tapestry was produced only decades after the event.
Earlier, planet Mercury appears to have been a familiar figure of several pass-bys. Saturn,
Jupiter and other heavenly bodies give the impression of having loomed large in the sky during
their own great times. The moon has been a continuous interactor with Earth but for long has
been in stable relationship; I would only mention here that the original great body to have
encountered Earth, which I shall be calling "Uranus-Minor", may have made only a single pass at
our globe but that the Moon owes its very existence to it.
Large-body encounters bring hundreds of damaging adjustments of short and long duration, when
the effects of an initial encounter are being dissipated. It would always take some time for
the winds, waters, and land to settle down and for a new electrical balance to be struck
throughout the system. An equatorial bulge and flattening of the poles would have to occur
after a change in the Earth's geographical axis, that is, after a shift of the location of the
poles. The strains of this adjustment would carry over thousands of years. To be added to the
bill tendered by catastrophes are some minor disasters. These might be Jovian "bolts from the
blue" across immense spatial distances. Or they might be showers of gases, rock, or dust. Or
the penetration of the Earth's defenses by a small or heavy meteoroid. I shall be arguing later
on that a heavy bombardment of the Earth preceded the pass-by of Uranus Minor from which
emerged the Moon. Further, the fall-back of lunar material would have been like a rain of
meteoroids.
It is difficult in these more stable years of solar dominance, or Solaria, to imagine ancestral
conditions. People suffered from catastrophic activity in one way or another during much of the
holocene: perhaps one-third of human history, or 5000 out of the 14,000 years that I estimate
as the duration of "full human-ness". For one-third of its existence, the human being has been
in a struggle against annihilation by nature, or, more exactly, has been caught up in a battle
of annihilation among the forces of nature, a "war among the gods".
When the Earth and any large intruder approach each other, their motions are affected and
surface breakdown occurs on both bodies. The affected motions, such as angle of approach, speed
of rotation and orbital speed, may be numerous. Their magnetic fields may be altered and even
reversed. The crust or shell of the bodies, affected more directly from "above" tends to slow
down or accelerate faster than the denser and hotter mantle and core of the bodies. These
continue their speed almost unabated. Heat is generated upwards within the bodies. Explosive
exchanges of atmosphere, water, soil, and rock occur. The shells crinkle, raising hills and
mountains. One is reminded of the Revolt of the Giants in Greek myth wherein the giants piled
mountain upon mountain, "Ossa upon Pelion," in their attempt to assault the heavenly fastnesses
of the gods. Great gravitational and electrical forces are levied and act destructively
throughout upon air, earth and water.
ELECTRICAL FORCES
Entities from the size of an atom to that of a galaxy can hold electrical charges, and carry
free positive or negative charges that can move through a field under repulsion or attraction
with great energy, depending upon the distances involved. Eric Crew has recently commented that
"one of the most striking and yet most neglected aspects of electricity in astronomy is the
enormous forces which can be produced by accumulation of electron charges." [2]
The potential difference of charges that can be theoretically accumulated on even microscopic
particle is describable in millions of tons.
For instance, the number of free electrons in 1 cm 3 of copper is 5 x 10 22 , giving a charge
of 8000 coulombs. If so charged alike, two cubes of 1 cm that were one meter apart would repel
each other with a force of 79 trillion tons. (This earth-cracking force could not really occur
because the copper would fly asunder long before it could be charged to 8000 coulombs.) The
example serves to alert one to the possible electrical transactions that may occur in
astronomical space, where distances between bodies are great but the size of the bodies, too,
is great. Planets can be charged to potentials differing from their near space, with
catastrophic result should a discharge occur. Furthermore, great electrical exchanges can occur
both between bodies of opposite charges, and between bodies of similar charges of different
sums, that is, subject to a voltage gradient between them.
A nova - and we shall assert that two or more have occurred merely in the time span covered by
this book - is largely an electrical phenomenon. Surely it is part of an interacting celestial
system, but the form of the interaction occurs internally and in the near space of a body.
Stars are prone to nova, not planets, we say, but that only means that a planet is defined as a
more stable (dense) arrangement of matter. When a star novas, writes Bruce, the principal event
is the dispersion of its atmosphere leaving the nucleus practically unaffected [3] . A nova is
the catastrophic electrical neutralization of the entire charged atmosphere of a star.
A complicated natural system of sheaths surrounds bodies in space. It grades, balances, and
neutralizes charges to keep cosmic bodies in the state which we come to regard as "normal,"
that is, where time is lengthened and geological and biological processes, such as our very
existence, can occur. Ralph Juergens has described the space-sheath system in connection with
the encounters of the Earth and Mars [4] , and it will be explained below. In all the
"amazing" observations that we make about the "world," surely the continuous series of
electrical relations that extend from the universe, through the galaxy and sun and planets and
space, through the atmosphere, through the rocks, throughout our bodies down to the extreme
interior of every cell, must be among the most astonishing.
HEAVY-BODY IMPACTS
Neither Venus nor Moon nor any other large body could actually pass through the Earth's near
atmosphere without the annihilation of both bodies. At some 30,000 miles distance, a large body
such as Venus would draw up tides of the atmosphere and oceans with 35,000 times the tidal
attraction of the Moon, and hump up the rocks in places. The gravitational attraction would be
25 times that between the Sun and Earth. Something like this may have occurred not only with
regard to Venus but also during the Uranus Minor and Saturn Flood episodes, soon to be
discussed.
However, any small extra-terrestrial body, a rock meteoroid, say, of half-mile diameter, would
cause great damage in passing through our atmosphere. It would blast, burn, deafen, terrorize
and transmute materials over its line of travel, in a tube with a
radius of a hundred miles or so. A body of 100,000 tons 3 has a speed at impact anywhere from 5
to 50 miles per second, and its ambient temperatures as it passes through the air rise to 2000
degrees centigrade or more. When it strikes, a crater of several kilometers in diameter would
be excavated.
Atmospheric shock-waves, capable of blowing down Manhattan, would occur, but if that would not
suffice to destroy it, the heat would vitrify the city and the earthquake would shake it down.
The remainder would be ravaged several times over by crosscutting tsunamis.
The Siberian Tunguska body of 1908 that penetrated the atmosphere and exploded just short of
contact would have done this kind of job at St. Petersburg, the capital of Czarist Russia, if
it had continued to travel for a few hours longer. At Tunguska, it killed the biosphere for
miles around, blew down 80,000,000 trees, sent blasts of wind and earth tremors over hundreds
of squares miles, engendered a flourishing forest growth, and may have mutated and created new
plant species [5] . A new Soviet expedition departed in 1976 to investigate the locale.
Far greater in destructiveness than either the hypothetical case or the Tunguska incident was
the Phaeton (Typhon) explosion of about 1453 B. C. The mythical Phaeton was such a larger
meteoroid or was a falling portion of cometary Venus itself. Child of the Sun, he was let drive
his father's chariot, but could not control the horses and burned up much of the world. Zeus
finally dispatched him with a thunderbolt to save the rest. Many stories are told, too, of a
monster Typhon being struck down in the same time period; probably Phaeton and Typhon are
identical; they are certainly related [6] . About fifty years after the first great incursion
of the comet definitely referred to as Typhon, a second incursion came and was seen as a horse-
drawn chariot and driver in the near East [7] ; the image would correspond closely to the
Phaeton myth and the time interval would have been small enough that, together with the
destruction and confusion, the two encounters would later be treated as one. When Phaeton
(Typhon) struck the earth and penetrated the atmosphere the effects were severely destructive.
The location of the fall of Typhon is unknown. Kelly and Dachille guessed it might be at
Bermuda. The Ishim meteoroid, described in chapter I, may have been implicated, despite the
much greater assigned age.
The great pass-bys may be more important to history and more thoroughly destructive, but small
and medium-sized meteoroid impact explosions, such as the Ishim, Tunguska, and Phaeton, are
heavily damaging. Geologists Kelly and Dachille have calculated the effects of an explosion of
a 200-mile diameter "Intruder", somewhat smaller than one which they believed fell at "Bermuda"
within recent times, possibly in the Jovean or Mercurian period.
Approaching tangentially the Intruder would have scorched through 1100 miles of atmospheres at
a speed of 20+ miles per second at temperatures (~ 7500 c+) greater than the Sun's surface.
From 8 to 60 second seconds' exposure would be suffered below its path. It would occupy at an
80-mile elevation over 100 degrees of the total dome of the sky (180 ). It would theoretically
generate then and upon impact biosphere residues enough to produce all of the known coal and
oil reserve in the world.
The temperature at the moment of impact would rise to over 200,000 C.
"An actual collision would raise a column of vapor and debris that easily could measure one
thousand miles in diameter at the base, and possibly larger at the top after the fashion of the
atom bomb explosions. This column might tower something like five thousand miles above the
earth, the higher particles doomed to float out beyond the reach of gravity… This catastrophic
column would be "a gigantic chemical laboratory," arranged in levels downwards, outwards and
upwards. Its pyrolysis would continue for some time to "add to the generation of coal beds, oil
crudes, baked shales, sand-stones, firerock, hard pan, and to many specific, but generally
unexplained mineral forms. At 'zero point, ' conditions being so extreme, it is not
unreasonable to suppose that actual transformation and the very synthesis of elements would
take place." [8]
Fundamental dissociation would occur and rearrangements of protons and electrons forced into
being. Heavy metals such as uranium and thorium might be formed, with their radioactive
properties. In a breathtaking sentence, the authors ask whether we can "see in the radioactive
elements one course taken by nature to absorb and store a portion of the high energy of the
impact, with the energy escaping gradually due to an imperfect storage structure within the
nuclei of these elements." [9] Grading away from "Point Zero" would be ionic and elemental
fabricating zones and zones where more stable compounds are generated. Rock salt would descend
from intensely heated bodies of water blown from their basins, or it would form soon after the
landing and evaporation of the waters.
Shearing, folding, fracturing would occur on a large scale in an area of over a thousand miles
in diameter. Biosphere mutations at the edges of the catastrophized area would be exceedingly
numerous. They may be disregarded for the moment, my purpose here being to stress the probable
role of the "catastrophic column" or typhoon among the mega-forces that shorten the time needed
to change the world.
SEISMISM AND VOLCANISM
Chapter 7 will portray the world-wide cleavage and ramified fracture system originating in the
large-body encounter of 11,500 years ago, and the subject of earthquakes will be further
treated in a forthcoming volume. Therefore, I need not here dwell upon the seismic effects of
celestial encounters. When catastrophic seismism occurs, owing to crustal slippage, the rocks
of the Earth move not locally but over long distances. Different layers of the crust may move
at different speeds and for some miles down. The Alberta Canadian Rockies are thrusted and
folded sedimentary rock propelled from a long distance away and piled up many thousands of
feet. These sediments left behind them the basic shield rock [10] .
The number of extinct volcanoes far exceeds the number that are active. Iceland has 107 active
volcanoes, but thousand of craters, most of them definitely extinct, all young. Of its great
network of fissure volcanoes, some have erupted disastrously in recent history. Lava beds not
only line the ocean basins but are interlarded among pebble, rock, and sand beds in many parts
of the world. The lava beds laid down in the last two thousand years are as nothing compared
with those found in all the continents of the world from earlier times. These were laid down
mainly by fissure, not cone, eruptions. A large-body encounter would excite such volcanic
activity in many places.
FIRE AND GASES
When the Earth changes motion, fires break out. When meteoroids fall, fires break out. When
lightning strikes, fires erupt. When gases penetrate the atmosphere, fires explode. All of
these accompany and occur in the aftermath of large-body encounters and significant meteoric
fall-out. Persuasive accounts come down from legends of many peoples concerning the burning of
the world. One of the most astonishing groups of legends, set forth by Velikovsky and others,
treats of rains of burning oil [11] . It is difficult to put aside these reports, which are
associated with the cometary tail of Venus in the fifteenth century B. C. The falling
substances are both in flames and unburned, they have the stickiness, the flammability, the
noxiousness, the denseness of petroleum and bitumens. They could not have been lofted by
volcanoes or exploded by local pressures of oil reservoirs underground. They might be
manufactured, however, in the "chemical factory" of a meteoroid impact.
The account of the destruction of the army of Sennacherib before Jerusalem in 687 B. C.,
synchronized as it is with other disastrous events elsewhere, indicates strongly a poisonous
gassing of the multitude waiting to assault the eminences of the walled city [12] . Donnelly
lays responsibility for the immense Pestigo (Wisconsin) Fire, and the Chicago Fire upon pockets
of gas broken away from Biela's Comet that had earlier disintegrated but whose fragments and
gases were making an anniversary rendezvous with Earth [13] . Thousands of people were killed
and millions of acres burned down in three states [14] . He extends the condition and
consequences exponentially in his discussion of the great comet of Ragnarok times.
The famous case of the frozen mammoths is related to sudden atmospheric change. To freeze a
large mammal so quickly and completely that even the mouth and stomach contents contain half-
chewed and undigested plants requires quick-freeze conditions found today only in freezer-
factories processing fresh foods for indefinite cold storage [15] . So indeed the mammoths
have been preserved up to this time. Quite possibly, the cold front introducing an abrupt
climatic change penetrated first as pockets of space gas at temperatures found only in outer
space. A related possibility is a vacuum-chill incident; the congested lungs of one mammoth
implies this. The most likely time for the death of the great animals would be during the early
Jovean age, about 3500 B. C. There, both deluge and temperature conditions were extreme. The
several writers who have advocated a sudden axial tilt as the sole and sufficient cause cannot
be correct [16] .
DENSE FALL-OUT
In all large-body encounters and minor extra-terrestrial invasions there will occur fall-outs
of dense material. Dust, stones, brimstone, ash, micro-tektites, oils, and other material will
descend with or without water. All will bury or devastate the biosphere by poisoning and
asphyxiation. A geologic column will reveal some extra-terrestrial or at least catastrophic
element of fall-out of one or more of these materials. A recent study, by Woods Hole
oceanographers, of American land and shallow sea cores shows the presence in the soil of
ancient polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are carcinogenic [17] .
Extraterrestrial and explosive fall-out includes radioactive material along with the dense
material product. Some of the radioactivity will enter because the bars are let down to the
intrusion of "normal" cosmic and solar particles. Much will be "a la carte," produced by the
peculiar invading agency and the destruction of its materials in the atmosphere of the Earth.
HURRICANES
In the large-body encounters and in many derivative or minor intrusions upon Earth. there will
be hurricanes and typhoons of large diameter and immense energies. The hurricanes will be
operating at speeds upwards of 200 miles per hour and raising catastrophic columns of all kind
of material far into the stratosphere if not into outer space. They can scrape the surface --
clean down to bedrock, eradicating all trace of biosphere and human settlement. They can
transport the biosphere over long distances, and drop it or raise it into the skies. They can
even make away with rocks of 1000 or more tons; they can suck up or lay down lakes of waters
[18] .
PANDEMONIUM AND DARKNESS
With such forces in operation, the sights and noises are terrible and maddening. When the
"dormant" Krakatoa volcano exploded in 1883 (following, incidentally, by a year the passage of
the Earth through the tail of a comet), the thunderous noise was heard a thousand miles away.
The noise of the eruption of Cosaguena, Nicaragua, on January 30, 1935 was heard in Jamaica 850
miles away. The fright was so severe that in one village "300 of those who lived in a state of
concubinage were married at once." [19] Jupiter was the planet of "Thunder", Saturn was called
the "Thunderer" too; Mars was called the "god of Noise." The full consequences are reserved for
treatment in a subsequent volume, but I would mention here the knowledge that we newly possess
-- that sights and sounds can have not only far-reaching psychological effects; they can
compete with radio-activity in the production of biological, hence ecological effects [20] .
The meteorological, geological and astrophysical sciences are as yet scarcely positioned
methodologically to attend to or even discern such effects.
Comets, and to a lesser extent meteoroids, can take many shapes. Several illustrations are
given on the adjoining page from astronomical drawing and photographs. Many basic human objects
and experiences can be obviously symbolized by a comet: violence, instruments such as swords,
chariots, boats, wings, birds, cows, sexual organs, heads, hands, flowers, etc. These
apparitions are so suggestive, compelling, and terrorizing that whatever on Earth is associated
with them will never again be ordinary, and the ways in which these objects and experiences
enter culture will be pathologically or at least illogically affected (see Figure 4 on pp. 26-
27).
A final effect, when considering the consequence of large-body encounters, whether atmospheric
pass-throughs or impact explosions, is that a stygian darkness would occur. A reduction to
zero-visibility at night and near-zero visibility in daytime has most formidable psychological
and physical consequences [21] . The Jews in Exodus wandered in darkness or gloom for many
years. Their survival was only through the fall-out of manna, a sweet tasting starch, whose
deposit from the skies is reported from Greece, India, Scandinavia, and Mexico -- from all
around the world, it appears [22] .
Styx itself was the gloomy hell of the Greeks, whence stygian darkness. Götterdammerung was the
twilight of the gods of Nordic mythology, a similar cosmic darkness. After the explosion of
Krakatoa in 1883, the sunsets of the world were more sombre and beautiful for years. After the
Alaskan volcanic eruption of 1912, some 20% of the Sun's radiance was interrupted. There is
nothing at all unbelievable in the ancient's accounts of years of darkness.
Figure 4.
SOME SHAPES TAKEN BY RECENT COMETS.
From left to right: (a) Tailed Sun, (b) Widow-Witch, (c) Monster
4 (d) Flying bird
4 (e) Scorpion
4 (f) vulva
4 (g) Phallus
4( h) Quetzalcoatl Bird
"Comets are individual objects and .. a truly representative comet does not exist." (Rahe et
al., infra. vii). Hundreds of different figures can be (and have been) associated with comet in
science, legend, and journalism. See our Figs. iv, 3, 17, 31, 32. Photographs and drawing by
astronomers: a. Daniel 1907 IV M. Wolf (photo); b. Morehouse 1908 III (photo); c. Morehouse
1908 III (isodensitometer photo); d. Swift-Tuttle Aug. 29, 1862 (drawing by Secchi); e. Daniel
1907 IV M. Wolf (drawing); f. Swift-Tuttle Aug. 27, 1862 (drawing by Schmidt); g. Tebbutt July
4, 1861 II (drawing by Schmidt); h. Tebbutt July 1, 1861 (drawing by Secchi). Source: Jürgen
Rahe, B. Donn, and K. Wurms, Atlas of Cometary Forms (SP-198-NASA, Washington D. C. 1962),
pages (in order): (a) 40 Fig. 1; (b) 73 Fig 22a; (c) 63 Fig. 14; (d) 29 Fig. 47; (e) 40 Fig. 2;
(f) 25 Fig. 15; (g) 17 Fig. 9; (h) Fig 21.
Some day, when the fractures and craters of the Earth are counted and synchronized, even
approximately, the most astonishing images will be forced upon us by the calculation of times,
not once but often, when mankind had to live for extended periods -- days, months, years, a
whole generation -- deprived of light to hunt by or to see even a cloudy sky. These would be
times when the natural and human fires would be the living light, and the sky lights would be
in memory, yearning, dreams and utmost ritual pleas.
THE BATTLE OVER TIME
No doubt that in the darkness, the human being thought of time. "When will it end...?" and
course, "How long has it been going on...?" which means "When did it begin...?" The Veda
pleads: "Hide the hideous darkness, make the light which we long for." [23] Time has from its
human beginnings been subjective.
Still, human capability has stretched to the utmost to objectify time. The aim is to place the
world outside of reach of fickle minds and to ask "When did it really begin? What is its real
measure?" So that there have become two kinds of time, subjective time and objective time. And
neither is clean, pure, separate from the other.
But few question the dominating claim of science, which is this: "Never mind how suffering and
pleasure and shock affect the human mind. Outside of man, there moves a process quite out of
control of his wish or will. That is time. Now how do the two relate to each other?"
Scientific time strives to go beyond human time. When we think of a microsecond, we imagine it
or we simply calculate it mechanically. We do the same with a billion years. We take a time to
which we can relate psychologically -- a solar year -- and reduce or expand it to where we must
deal with it mechanically, without feeling it in our guts.
We do the same with energy. We feel a heat in some measure and then extend its measures to
degrees of cold and heat that are astronomical. But these extremes are also mechanical
extensions of ourselves.
In both time and energy measurements, therefore, we are working within realms of the human that
are extended into the inhuman. Both catastrophists and uniformitarians are human, feeling time
and heat; both are working with inhuman extremities.
Each looks at a range of "mountain": the one says that it was raised in years by unimaginable
forces, the other that it was raised unimaginable millions of years ago. It should be possible
to say who is correct. Although both are dealing with absolutes raised out of relatives, both
share and understand the relatives. Hence, sooner or later, one will be proven right or wrong
in terms that the other must accept.
Why, under such circumstances, cannot the quantavolutionist and evolutionist come to terms? One
reason is that they need not come to terms. A quantavolutionary can be just as good a
geologist, historian, astronomer, biologist, or philosopher as an evolutionary. One will find
fewer instructional materials, true, because practically all educational establishments are in
the hands of evolutionists. But, if persistent or clever, one will make up one's own materials
from those of the opposition. I do not see how pragmatic skills of the kind that earn a
livelihood, whether in teaching, research, or professional practice, will be affected
adversely. But I can see how such an allegation can be used as a form of invidious
discrimination against revolutionaries.
Another reason for not coming to terms is already implied. "Nature" likes ambiguity. The
historical record of nature is dim, irregular, and requires assumptions that are logically
vulnerable in interpreting it. The parties might be forced to come to terms if "nature" offered
itself as arbitrator. But time after time, it refuses to arbitrate; now a scientist will
approach with a carbon-14 test for precise dating and evolutionaries will exult: "It is all
over but the shouting!" Other scholars will claim that the test is not fair, constant, or
valid, so the controversy is only beginning. Again a scientist will appear with a "proof" (e.
g., Bode's Law) that the planets must occupy their present order and intervals, and another
scientist will step up to show that a) another formula will express a different order equally
well and b) there is no empirical theory behind the seeming order [24] . Or again, scientists
are persuaded of the fact and age of continental drift by the bands of magnetic reversal found
on the rocks of the ocean bottom, but they will be told that the magnetic bands could be much
younger (and therefore reversals more frequent) if the ocean bottom were being expanded and
paved more quickly [25] .
Nevertheless, both the quantavolutionary and evolutionary are driven to woo "Nature" for a
direct clear reply and perhaps one day someone will succeed. Meanwhile the quantavolutionary
will continually step forward to offer the unimaginable forces of ancient times -- the killers
of time, the stoppers of clocks.
Geologist Derek Ager estimates that 2000 heavily destructive tsunamis have struck the
continental coasts during the present era (Solaria) and wonders at their great cumulative
effect [26] . The convinced quantavolutionary says that the total effect of these 2000
tsunamis would have been exceeded by a single close passage of planet Mars between 766 and 687
B. C. Or by a meteoritic fall of the same time. "The terrible ones," and "the Maruts" are two
of many personalized and divine epithets given to the bursts of meteoroids and thunderbolts
from Mars that struck in many places [27] . We find Hindu prayers imploring them to "be far
from us and far the stone which you hurl." [28]
THE QUANTAVOLUTIONARY COLUMN
Wherever one stands on earth, there exists some record of history above and below. A fully
intelligent mind should be able to observe and write it. Lacking full intelligence, but also in
order to generalize, one can still construct a model. Hence we conjure a quantavolutionary
column, that by telling of present conditions, gives form to our history. In the memories of
the days of chaos and creation, in the annals of pre-Solarian mankind, and in the textbooks of
science today are described numerous floods, shocks, and explosions, of dimensions too great
for modern measure. Working as causes and effects, and as effects that become causes, they have
made of any place on earth a Quantavolutionary Column:
Any cube of one kilometer diameter circumscribed anywhere on the surface of the earth, which
reaches as high as the end of the magnetosphere hundreds of miles upwards, and as low as the
upper mantle some thirty kilometers down, will have endured within the past 14,000 years
radical changes in its absolute and relative orientations, its atmosphere, its rocks and its
biosphere, including any long-lived human cultures. The revolutionary column is thus about 500
kilometers tall but if the magnetosphere is traced to its farthest reaches, it extends about 4
million miles into space away from the solar windside of earth. The variety of radical changes
in this column has been such that every science must be affected by a new knowledge and
conception of them.
THE EXPONENTIAL PRINCIPLE
The premise that every spot on earth exists within a quantavolutionary or catastrophic column
is basic to primevalogy. A second principle is the exponential behaviour of high energy
expressions. The winds, floods, and lightning we have spoken of earlier arise with little
warning (it may be seconds or years) rise to a peak swiftly, inflict crushing blows, subside
quickly and tail off their effects over a long period of time.
The exponential principle needs stressing. Where the evolutionaries say "uniformitarian", the
quantavolutionaries say "exponential." Catastrophic events behave exponentially: they typically
arise and increase their effects with extreme rapidity and decline in their effects almost as
precipitously. Then, of course, the decline trails off and becomes near zero, where the
uniformitarian usually picks it out for extrapolating backwards in time. For example, is Mt.
Everest, in the Himalayas, the world's highest mountain, still rising? If it were undergoing
the kind of uplift measured at Cajon Pass (near Los Angeles) in relation to its surroundings,
which amounts to 0.45 feet per century, then, allowing for erosion at the rate of 2 feet for
every 3 feet of uplift, Mt. Everest would be produced in 9 million years, by Shelton's estimate
[29] . But if this 0.45 feet per century is the trailing effect of a negative exponential
curve, Mt. Everest might have evolved in only several thousand years.
Everest in 29,000 feet high; the Indian subcontinent rammed up into South Asia and in the
collision the two bodies forced up the Himalayan mountains. Let us suppose that this impact,
which is accepted widely now to explain the Himalayas, happened in the early Lunarian period of
11,000 years ago. If the collision were forceful enough to raise the land in the first year of
contact by a few hundred feet and to continue on at some diminishing rate thereafter, the
mountain would be raised to its present height in a couple of thousand years. Taking the
present rate of uplift at 0.45 feet per century and increasing it by a factor of 1.1 so that
100 years ago it would presumably be 0.495 feet/ century and 200 years ago 0.544 per century,
Everest would have been emplaced before the age ended.
Certain lunar heat spots and moonquakes, for example, may be the fossil or ghost remnants of
Aphrodite's "love affair" with Mars [30] in the late seventh century B. C. Similarly,
volcanism has been declining for a long time in comparison with its incidence in ancient times
and prehistory. Too, the measurable inching of the Arabian peninsula towards Asia is the dying
impulsion of its recent amputation from Africa: the Red Sea is the surgical scar marking the
line of severance [31] . Indeed the phenomenon of "erosion" that is basic to uniformitarian
geology is largely derivative. It is an attenuated effect of the catastrophes that carved
canyons and raised mountains. All of these statements will be clearer in the light of later
chapters.
It would appear in passages from Velikovsky and from and inspection of Schaeffer's data that
seismism was heavier throughout the Bronze Ages and Iron Age down to the Christian era.
Ambraseys has attacked the job of counting earthquakes for the past 2000 years and hesitantly
concluded that earthquakes have been uniformly experienced in the Near East over the period
[32] . It this study of 3000 quakes in generally accurate, the enormous seismism recorded by
Schaeffer for the Bronze Ages marks catastrophic periods.
Michael Chinnery and Robert G. North have analyzed the techniques used for reporting seismic
events today and warn that earthquakes, exceeding in intensity the present scales, may have
quite recently occurred although knowledge of them is lacking [33] . It is well to mark this
study, inasmuch as professionals and laymen alike are often of the opinion that the top
calibrations of the Mercalli and Richter scales represent the maximum tremors that are today
possible. In fact, there exists a dogmatic view that the Earth for a long time has not had
within it the means of exceeding these scales. D. Vitaliano [34] and her predecessors have
maintained that legends and ancient reports were exaggerated and have to be translated into
current scales of events. It is possible to reconcile the two views by opining that earthquakes
have been diminishing over time as a tailing-out effect of much greater, earlier upheavals (in
accord with the exponential principle). However, records are too few and analysis not
theoretically enough advanced to predict that intracyclical fluctuations of the curve of long-
time decline will not be of hitherto unregistered high intensity.
The exponential principle is crucial to biological quantavolution as well. Exponentialism marks
the rise and fall of species. A recent example will help to clarify the point. Muskrats abound
in America; ten millions are trapped annually. But muskrats did not exist in the vast Soviet
Union, despite a similar potential habitat, the high mobility of the animal, and its aquatic
skills. Either recent biological catastrophe is to be suspected, or else the species originated
in the past several thousand years: both hypotheses indicate quantavolution. In 1928-33,
several thousand muskrats were introduced at hundreds of points in the U. S. S. R. Within forty
years, their number was estimated at 100 millions, twice as many as exist in America [35] .
Given a niche, a species fills it quickly.
REVOLUTIONARY INTEGRATION OF THE COSMOS
Everything is connected with everything else: the most ancient people thought so, and modern
scientific philosophy agrees. The teachers of natural science to the young repeat interminably,
"Inside the atom are locked the secrets of the universe." The microscopic related to the
macroscopic, the microscope to the telescope.
Yet the mind scuttles for its own hole. It does not want to be part of the infinite
interconnected web of reality. It makes isolates of all other persons. It studies the small
apart from the large. It stretches out time endlessly so that things do not happen together.
Voices assemble and amplify themselves in politics, science, the press, the street-corner hang-
outs: "We are spared the fate of the whole. What happened once happened to others. They are not
us. What is happening elsewhere is not happening to us. We are spared. What will happen to the
future is again not us. Again we are spared." So it goes -- an endless litany to express the
feeling, as Einstein wrote ironically to Velikovsky: "Holy St. Florian, spare thee my house.
Set fire to the others." [36]
The greatest lesson of the unity and interconnection of person and person, and of person and
nature, finds its destructive and creative climax in the quantavolutionary explosion. Recall
only one recent memory, before we move into the primeval ages of mankind. What was the great
lesson of the explosion of Hiroshima? That a new age had broken upon mankind. That in the giant
column of fire carrying upwards a Japanese city was the fate of man and nature, inextricably
bound. The single act of destruction called forth the essential forces of nature and the
amazement of human beings, friends and foes alike, all over the world.
Yet this was a small force compared with those being discussed. True, there was no force in
earliest times that is unknown today. But modern man must look with sinking heart upon his
earliest experience because the forces of nature then expressed themselves in exponentially
greater measure than they do today and seemed to have as their target, as their favored
creature, and as their responsive audience, the developing human being. The earliest events
brought forward the revolutionary calendar. So it came about finally that mankind today
experiences by his own hand an imitation of the state of nature that brought about his very
existence as the deluded "wise man," homo sapiens. Standing in the Solarian Age, he can for the
first time do what only natural forces once do -- bring the curtain of catastrophe crashing
down upon the end of an epoch.
Notes (Chapter Two: High Energy from Space)
1. Boulanger (1794), V. 220 ff.
2. (1977) n 4, 24.
3. Bruce (1944).
4. Juergens (1974-5); In a general statement Piddington (1960) writes: "Magnetic fields are
almost ubiquitous and it is rapidly becoming clearer that they play a dominant role in the
evolution of the universe. It is likely that without these fields the planets would not have
formed and even galaxies or protogalaxies may never have developed from the more tenuous
primeval gas." Magnetoplasma makes up practically all of the Universe that is not of rigid or
non-conducting bodies.
5. Krinov (1966) 125-65; Glass (1969); Rich (1978).
6. Lowery, Kronos (1977); Velikovsky (1950) 143-5, 148-9, 159-60, 169, 301; Bimson (1977) 9;
Ovid, Book II; Fontenrose (1959); and cf. Index below.
7. Velikovsky (1950), 141.
8. Kelly and Dachille, 203; cf. Gallant (1964).
9. Ibid., 204.
10. Cook (1966) 183-4.
11. Velikovsky (1950) 53-8.
12. Ibid., 227-35.
13. (1833), ch. 5. Furneaux (1964) mentions cometary phenomena the year before Krakatoa
exploded.
14. Schroeder (1964) 492.
15. Patten (1960) 104-9; Cardona (1976); Velikovsky (1950) 326-9.
16. Cardona (1976) reviews the 14C dates; they extend over thousands of years, impossibly,
although they generally fall within the age I suggest.
17. Blumer and Youngblood (1975).
18. Lane (1965), "Hurricanes."
19. Furneaux (1964) 203.
20. Juenemann, 112.
21. Velikovsky (1950), 58-62,126-38 et passim; (1952) 28-9, 46-7; (1964), 175-6.
22. Reade (1977).
23. Velikovsky (1950), 285.
24. Nieto (1974) with Ransom comment, p. 7; Bass (1974) 11-12.
25. Cf. below pp. 155-59, Barnes, Milson (1977) and Cook (1966).
26. See also Coleman (1968).
27. J. Ziegler (1978); Velikovsky (1950) 282-9
28. Velikovsky (1950).
29. 416-8.
30. Cf. Homer's Odyssey, Bk. VIII, the "Song of Demodocus;" Juergens (1974-5).
31. Sullivan (1974) 214.
32. (1971) 379.
33. Chinnery and North (1975).
34. Vitaliano (1973) makes a major thesis of the reduction of legends to the commonplace.
35. Igor Akimushkin, Animal Travellers, Moscow: Mir Publ., 1970, 208-9.
36. Einstein (1955).
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THREE: COLLAPSING TESTS OF TIME
It would appear that someone has stolen the rocks of the Earth. In North America, 35 epochs,
comprised in 250 rock formations which are formed of a great many less thick and distinct
strata, have been recognized as composing the geologic column back to the "beginning of life,"
the Paleozoic of 570 million years ago [1] . [Lately a billion years.] The Pre-Cambrian before
this is thought to have consumed 2,000 or perhaps even 4,000 million years [2] .
But the formations are never present for inspection in one place. If every different stratum
that was ever labelled were heaped up in its maximum deposited thickness, the pile would tower
into the stratosphere. According to the accounts rendered of the world Geologic Column, there
should be 400,000 feet or 80 miles thick of sediments [3] . Furthermore, the heap should cover
the whole globe, unless somebody else has been digging rock from the oceans and carrying it up
the continental shelves For the ocean bottoms are scarcely sedimented [4] . And they are of a
different rock than the continents. "In the whole of geophysics there is no other law of such
clarity and certainty as... that there exist two preferred levels in the Earth's crust." [5] Or
perhaps someone has been burning sediments to make granites for the sial. The origins of
granite are mysterious [6] .
If this seems to be nonsense, the nonsense may be in the idea, not in the telling. There is no
such heap, no complete geologic column. And a geologist would be foolhardy to defend its
historical presence.
Eighty miles up is 75 miles above Mt. Everest. Eighty miles down probably everywhere on Earth,
one has passed through the plutonic rocks, is well beyond the critical Moho discontinuity, and
is deep into the molten mantle. To account for all such presumed material, one would have to be
an extreme catastrophist. For, allowing that continental land (or sial) covers only 40% of the
globe and the sediments lay on the average only 4 miles thick upon the 20 mile thick sial,
which is one-fourth of 80 miles, then 4/ 80 of 40/ 100 = two per cent. Ninety-eight per cent of
the Earth's sediments have disappeared.
There is a kind of saving argument which is, however, self-defeating. The layers added together
to reach 80 miles are of known maximum deposits, not average ones. Sheer guessing might halve
the maxima, making the total column 40, not 80, miles in height. So the 2% would become 4%.
Then 96% of the sediments are missing. Adding abyssal sediment would hardIy matter.
These crude estimates are perhaps adequate to solve the mystery of the great land robbery. Half
of the stolen sediments were never there. Great forces, operating in short periods of time,
have fluxed the crust of the Earth so thoroughly that a great many strata of false identity and
false age have been created. The other half of the sediments was stolen by "Uranus Minor" and
stashed away on the Moon: the method will be explained in Chapter 7.
RAPID SEDIMENTATION
Rates of sedimentation are usually estimated on the basis of contemporary rates. Allowances are
made for demonstrable past events but these are interpreted on gradualist lines. If the Grand
Canyon's age is calculated as an eroded river channel, its age is great. But if it is regarded
as a transverse branch of the fissure-fracture of the East Pacific followed by deluge and tidal
erosion, then it could be of holocene age [7] .
Ocean sedimentation recently examined under conventional premises (with the "help" of
potassium-argon techniques), have dated the present ocean basins at nowhere more than 200
million years, incomparably younger than by former calculations [8] . The sediments were found
to be astonishingly meager. Yet, contrary even to this new dating, the ocean sediments could be
provided readily from catastrophic sources in a thousand years after the basins formed, as
Chapter Seven will show. Furthermore, the ocean bottom, which is under enormous pressure,
contains only unconsolidated sediments, a sign of newness [9] . And if the oceans had once
been land and the land ocean, then certainly great rock formations should line the bottoms.
In addition, at the rate at which uranium is now flowing into the oceans, the oceans and their
sediments have accumulated a supply representing less than 100,000 years of flow, and when the
flow off the continents is calculated as a negative exponential curve, the age of the ocean
becomes holocene [10] . For most sediments would have been dropped or transported in the
earliest years.
Sedimentary rocks are given very great ages in part because the "normal" visible rates of
deposit are slow. But a single cometary train might lay down a "hundred million years" of till
or detritus-clay and gravel-in a day [11] . A coal deposit can be launched by a high-energy
"bulldozer" in a matter of hours, covered over the next day by clay and baked until ready; it
does not need the "millions" of years of development insisted upon by uniformitarian
sedimentary calculations [12] . Petroleum deposits are not proof of long ages, whether
terrestrial or extra-terrestrial [13] .
Geologist E. M. Larrabee studied a deposit of maximum thickness of one meter [14] . It was
laid down by the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers at Harper's Ferry (Va.) between 1861-64. Over
100 strata could be identified. Historical research suggested that two or three floods, each
lasting a few days, produced them.
In the history of geology anomalous discoveries in supposedly old sedimentary deposits are
numerous: a Roman coin ploughed up from the prairie of Illinois [15] ; a doll sucked from
under till and lava in Idaho [16] ; a fossil fish below hundreds of feet of Wyoming shale
pirouhetted among many layers of annual varves [17] ; a "4000 year-old" log ensconced in a
"billion year-old iron deposit of Labrador;" [18] a fossil 80-foot skeleton whale poised
upright amidst some "million years" of diatomaceous (organic) deposits [19] ; a fossilized set
of startled extinct "bullheads" in English lower Old Redstone marking millions of years [20] ;
a 100-foot diameter boulder nestling in a large pure clay deposit in Timor [21] ; a house-high
muck of smashed bones in Alaska [22] ; human bones and sophisticated artifacts amidst extinct
animal remains and Tertiary fauna under California lava [23] ; and so on. Each one warns:
"Stop the clock!" All together, they say, "Question all deposits as alternatively quantavolved
and evolved."
Shelton's marvelous, though uniformitarian, photographic book of geology should be quoted here.
After remarking that laminated clay deposits (varves) can permit a time estimate of each layer,
he says
"For the common sediments... we have no accurate knowledge of how long individual beds took to
accumulate or of how much time elapsed between the deposition of each... Some thick beds
accumulate in a short time, some thin ones take much longer, and in all probability the period
of nondeposition that separate most layers represent far more time than is represented by the
strata. As Charles Darwin pointed out over a hundred years ago, with far fewer facts to go on
than we have today, from the standpoint of time, the sedimentary record is very incomplete -
just an entry now and then with long pauses between." [24]
How did Darwin know the pauses were long? How long is long? Indeed Darwin's idea of "long" is
"short" according to today's scientists.
Again I quote Shelton: "Unfortunately most sediments do not contain reliable clues to how fast
they were deposited --- or to the duration of intervals between layers... Observed rated of
sedimentation range from almost immeasureably small fractions of an inch per century to many
feet per hour and make it almost impossible to estimate the average for my large deposit..."
[25]
CORAL REEFS
Among the most complex challenges to quantavolutional geologists, uniquely related to
sediments, would appear to be the coral reefs of the world, both living and fossil. An ordinary
statement of the conventional case in the following:
"Because the coral polyp's existence is tied to that of the algae, coral reefs can grow at
depths no greater than around 180 feet -- below this not enough light penetrates to permit
algae to carry on the process of photosynthesis. The brittle material we call coral is the
polyps' protective external skeleton. The tiny animals absorb calcium salts from the ocean,
allowing them to build these calcium carbonate structures around their bodies. New generations
of coral polyps attach themselves to the skeletons of dead polyps. In this way the coral reef
grow larger - layer upon layer, generation upon generation. Expanding at the rate of only few
centimeters a year, some present-day reefs have been developing for 100,000 years and more."
[26]
The author does not mention fossil coral found at considerable depths beyond 180 feet. One must
suppose a land-sinking or that the water level was rising as the coral grew; the lower coral
would die, the higher would grow faster. Suppose the water temperatures were higher; the coral
might grow faster; Suppose the amount of calcium salts in the water increased; the polyps would
flourish. The opaqueness of sea-water is not an absolute, nor, for that matter, is the radiance
at the surface. The algae supply has many variables determining it, including species
adaptations and mutations that may cause greater or lesser light requirements. Can coral polyps
feed upon bluegreen algae? Do shallow warm lava bottoms and new limestone accelerate coral
growth? All those questions can make the coral reef an "anomaly" in short-time reckoning,
reminding one of the "anomalies" that are similarly handled by uniformitarians in regard to
apparently catastrophic phenomena such as vast "river-formed plains" or the "gradual" erosion
of the Grand Canyon.
Even by conventional dating, long-term and carbondating-assisted, the seas are supposed to have
been over 100 meters lower 20,000 years ago, before the "great ice melt", and, before then, the
sea-level was abruptly higher and the coral could not have survived [27] . Hence a continuous
coral reef vertical development "for 100,000 years" would be highly improbable. Further, the
180-foot live-depth figure may be more nearly half that -- or 80 feet maximum live depth [28]
. The vertical growth rate of coral can be from 1 to 12 meters per thousand years. The lower
limit is actually zero, depending upon thermal, chemical, nutritional, wave-energy, and
pollution conditions. The highest rate, for all we know. may be limited only by the speed with
which the sea-level is rising.
Fossil coral, not heretofore mentioned whether beneath coral growth of the past eleven thousand
years, or separately discoverable, as in the Arctic Circle, or at depths of hundreds of meters
elsewhere may have originated in the swamps and shallow seas of Pangea, the wholly continental
Earth-crust that we postulate in this book. Some of the fossil coral beds may, like the
continents, have been displaced and rafted to new locations.
Much of the reasoning employed in the case of coral growth here may also be used to argue the
case of limestone caves and their stalactites. That is, subject to discussion in a forthcoming
volume, the limestone caves of the world may be taken to be largely new, a product of large-
scale electrical discharge of the Earth, water-accelerated. Arguments may be advanced farther,
to wit, that the drip-formed stalactites and stalagmites can be grown in short times under non-
uniformitarian conditions and yet be strong enough to stand against heavy seismic shock [29] .
RADIODATING
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907) estimated in 1899 that the Earth might be no older
than 24 million years if its matter were chemically inert and its heat only the primordial
remnant. Other scientists disagreed, opting for longer durations to accomplish evolutionary
processes.
How uncertain were the stratigraphic estimates of time that geologists relied upon before new
radiometric techniques came into use a generation ago is revealed in their quick surrender to
radiometry: it is common joke that the earth has aged a billion years per decade for several
decades, all owing to new tests of time by radiochronometry [30] .
Certain elements, such as potassium-40 and uranium-238, which are to be found in rocks of the
crust of the Earth, especially at or near surface levels, are radioactive. They are sometimes
called "parent elements" insofar as they decay into "daughter" elements by giving up electrons
or by other means [31] . They began their decay as soon as they were formed. One calculates
their life-span by figuring backwards from today's rate of decay as witnessed in a sample of
the element. A rock matrix presumably will contain the parent element and the daughter element
in proportion to its age, unless it had undergone some exceptional experience. The dozen or so
transformations used for dating purposes include uranium-238 decaying into lead-206, of
potassium-40 decaying into argon-40, and of rubidium-87 decaying into strontium-87 [32] .
None of these methods is useful directly for the period since 14,000 B. P. because the decay
into daughter elements is too slow to detect over the short time. However, radiodating
challenges our model of quantavolution indirectly when it produces long-term dates where short-
term dates are expected. For example if, by potassium-40 argon-40 dating, the ocean floor
appears to be 100 to 200 million years old, then it cannot have been formed between 13,000 B.
P. and 9,000 B. P. Also, when igneous rocks associated with hominid bones of the Olduvai gorge,
dated by the same technique, produce an age of about 1.75 million years, then the bones cannot
be of the holocene epoch.
Major problems occur with radiodating. One is in the setting of a rate of decay and therefore
setting a date for "time zero" within a reasonable margin of error. Regarding the "time zero"
problem, the radio "clocks" work on vast ages, from one billion to five billion years of age.
Adjustments in the so-called decay constant may move all tested rocks up and down the time
scale by many millions of years. Although such adjustment never approach a short-term position,
they cause doubts as to whether there is in fact a constant rate of decay to be discovered.
A second kind of difficulty deals with high-energy events. Radio-chemical methods of
determining pre-historic age are extensions of the uniformitarian premise that the chosen
chemical elements have remained unchanged in a closed system, save for the decay process, since
the clock started to tick. They assume that nothing would affect the parent or daughter
element, apart from the expected normal decay from one to the other; nothing could tamper with
the clock. Recent studies cast doubt upon this theory; high forces can break and enter the
clock.
The concept of "half-life" is used in radioactive decay time measurements. The half-life of an
aggregate of an element is the length of time required for half the atoms of the aggregate to
decay into the new element. The half-life of uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, calculated
backwards from presents rates of decay. Can the process of decay be so regular [33] ? Decay
is the losing of an electron from an atom that is unstable; it therefore amounts to a
transmutation. The occasion of the decay is a force. The force is another particle from another
statistical aggregate. This force is regularly and randomly applied to the "A" aggregate
causing a regular rate of loss. Each "A" atom has an equal chance of being hit in the
bombardment. Hence whatever affects the bombarding aggregate will affect the rate of decay of
"A".
And all "A's" may not be identical. Some "A's" may be "harder to hit," "resist cleavage," or
"repel the projectiles." Still, as an aggregate, "A" might respond uniformly to the force
causing is transmutation.
Radiation physicist H. C. Dudley [34] has insisted that the equations describing radioactive
decay rates were crudely derived long ago: "Bluntly, they are incorrect; but they nonetheless
appear in our latest textbooks... Studies have varied the decay characteristics of 12 other
radionuclides [besides 7Be and 90Nb] with changes in the energy state of the orbital electrons;
by pressure, temperature, electric and magnetic fields, stress in molecular layers etc.,"
citing G. T. Emery.
Dudley further asserts that in certain cases, the "decay event A is causally related to decay
event B occurring later, such that the time distributions of all decay events were no longer
truly random, as required by current theory. There appears to be a chain type reaction
operating... similar to that observed in neutron induced sustained nuclear fission," here
citing chemists J. L. Anderson and G. W. Spangler. Dudley asks for the incorporating in decay
theory of "the energy state of the entire atom [not just the nucleus] and on parameters of
interaction with an energy-rich subquantic medium."
The work of Anderson Spangler and Dudley implies this for revolutionary primevalogy: decay
rates for radioactive elements are dependent upon high-energy forces in the environment, and
may be varied little or much. Radioactive decay can be compared with chain reactions in nuclear
fission. Hence, at certain points in time, especially when the phenomenon of the catastrophic
tube occurred, time pressures (based on today's retrojections) would have been instantly and
completely disrupted.
RADIATION TURBULENCE
We are conjecturing further, here, that major disturbances in the parent-daughter relationship
may occur as a result of radiation storms and typhonic impact explosions. Lesser and more
localized in effect, and often inter-connected with radiation storms are jovian bolts,
phaetonic atmospheric penetration, titanic large body encounters, and dense material fall-outs.
These operate as follows:
Cosmic radiation consists of high-energy particles that bombard the earth sufficiently at the
present time to permit the presence in the atmosphere of atoms of all chemical elements. Both
the particles striking earth and the transmutations of particles are varied. When, according to
quantavolutionary theory, age-making and age-breaking episodes occurred, the earth passed near
to heavily radiating bodies and was also subjected to heavy radiation storms from a distance.
In fact, every change in the earth's atmosphere lessened or increased the reception of
radiation: the cloud canopies, the lowering or dropping of canopies, the rising of exploded
vapors, the destruction of biospheres and the loss or gain of atmosphere from comets, meteors
and planets.
In all of this, the parent and daughter elements involved in radio clocks have experienced a
turbulent history. No pair of elements can be granted to have remained locked in their
crystallized rock interior since the beginning of its time. There is no way of commencing the
history of potassium and argon at the bottom of the sea. The bottom formed in a turbulent
atmosphere and hydrosphere, first wet, then drowned shallowly. then deeply submerged but all
the while actively spreading. The waters that poured in came directly from the skies, through
skies via the sea and earth evaporation, and through runoffs loaded with detritus.
Under such circumstances the clocks might be deemed invalid. They were set wrongly to begin
with. They have maintained a semblance of agreement of very old ages by first of all having had
similar recent experiences within their rocks, and through laboratory fudging of tests and
samples back and forth.
Yet even "normal" experience of today's solar system presents a severe problem. Nitrogen
contained in air and in radioactive mineral undergoes a considerable transmutation of isotropic
elements. Lead undergoes the same. The cause is neutron-promoted transmutations. As a result,
the decay process of uranium into lead is paralleled by neutron-to-lead activity. When as in
certain Katanga and Canadian ore bodies, a neutron-promoted corrective factor is introduced
into the uranium-to-lead decay process, the daughter element that isowed to uranium decay is so
reduced as to produce a zero age result [35] .
This kind of problem is rendered even more difficult under solarian conditions by problems of
selecting and sampling rocks, by the fluxing and painting of the surfaces of rocks where trace
elements aggregate, and by the need to transfer (with dubious validity) the findings of a test
in one part of the lithosphere to conclusions about tests in other parts.
Problems of leaching and fluxing are severe. Rivers carry an estimated average of 6 x 10 10
grams per year of uranium down to the oceans. If the lead is left behind in the rocks this
escaping uranium is effectively turning back the clock [36] . Parents are leaving their
daughters, and the remaining parents are being charged with their existence. The amount of
uranium in the ocean, moreover, is so small (10 to the 17the power grams) as to have been
produced even under non-exponential solarian conditions within about 10 million years. With
quantavolutionary theory, the exponential rate of deposit would eradicate even this time
calculation.
Helium in the atmosphere is originated radioactively from the uranium and thorium in the
lithosphere and from cosmic rays from the galaxy and beyond. Conventional ages of the
lithosphere require that 10 20 grams of helium should have been released into the atmosphere
whereupon some of it would escape into outer space. However, the rate of escape is too slow
under solarian conditions to explain why so little helium exists in the atmosphere. Given the
amount of helium present there, it has been calculated that the age of the atmosphere must be
only 12,000 years [37] . That is, some 12,000 years ago, the atmosphere was reconstituted.
Radioactivity was discovered a century ago but time-measures of radioactivity are largely a
post-World War II development. Despite the shortness of its life, changes in the field have
been numerous and radical. Its leaders turn quickly in new directions whenever problems are
encountered, introducing new half-lives, slicing experimental rocks differently, and giving
their favor now to one, and again to another technique.
POTASSIUM-ARGON DATING
Potassium-argon dating has become highly favored recently, for reasons too byzantine to develop
here. For, the criticisms that can be addressed to uranium-lead dating hold also against 40K/
40A dating. Indeed, argon (one of the "noble gases" whose exclusiveness or slipperiness gave
them their name) is generally to be suspected of vagrancy. Also, the stability of potassium is
in question. "Potassium can be made to diverge widely form conventional abundance by
countercurrent electromigration." [38]
Argon-40 will be present in a rock if potassium-40 is present and has had time to decay. Only
igneous, and certain types of once-melted metamorphic rock, can be tested. Sediments cannot.
The half-life of 40K is so long (1.3 billion years for half the decay to occur) that almost no
argon-40 is to be found in a young rock, and therefore tests are not yet considered valid for
less than 100,000 years. Dates produced by related tests are often discordant. Material taken
from the Salt Lake Crater on Oahu, Hawaii, dated from 200 to 3,300 million years [39] ; the
Moon has been dated as older than the universe [40] ; and 200-year old lavas, that should show
zero Argon, produced enough to allow 12 and 20 million-year old dates at Kilauea, Hawaii [41]
. I shall only mention that, under such circumstances, in other cases, the problems of full and
open reporting may become serious in the field of chronometric science; as in public affairs,
there arises a temptation to dismiss, "fudge" or even conceal some of the evidence [42] .
Argon, like uranium and radioactive trace elements generally, tends to rise to the surface of
the Earth. Hence surface rocks (and these include all that have been measured) will be high in
argon content. Argon also can be infused into hot rocks from the air and kept there as the
rocks cool. This could have happened to Earth if Mars, thought now to be rich in atmospheric
argon, encountered Earth 2,700 years ago; the same Martian argon may be what is making Moon
samples, so young in some respects, so old by 40K -40A dating [43] . The U. S. Venus probe of
1978 found astonishing quantities of argon-36 and possibly argon-40 in the burning atmosphere.
Argon, being "exclusive," "slippery," and "noble," leaks. It escapes into the atmosphere; it
flows horizontally. It prefers rocks of certain types to other rocks. On the Island of Naxos,
Greece, Poul Andriessen found side by side metamorphic rocks which, in tests performed in his
Dutch laboratory, produced ages of 5 to 15 million, and of 200 million years (amphibolite
ultrabasic rock) [44] . Australian tektites have given 700,000 to 860,000 years by the 40K -
40A method in 7 to 20 thousand-year-old strata [45] .
Funkhauser and Naughton, faced by the Hawaiian incongruities, speculated that excess argon
could be held in crystal irregularities and imperfections such as grain boundaries and
dislocations in the rocks. This likely theory would appear to throw the K-A ratio upon the
mercy of petrology rather than chronology. Granted argon is more abundant in rocks nearer the
surface, a lava flow will erupt melted surface rock first, than lower rock, then still lower
rock. This may falsely date a set of lavas, although the law of superposition is correct. As
the law demands, the strata of lava on top will be younger (and hold less argon) than the
strata below (with more argon); moreover all will be very old for the reasons given above. As
matters stand, it would be a grave risk for geology to rearrange the phanerozoic scale
according to 40K -40A dating principles.
THE RADIO-HALO PROBLEM
Radio-chronometricians pass restlessly from one measure to another, despite their elaborate
equipment, which critics have alleged to be too burdensome to discount and abandon (over 100
laboratories exist today for carbondating alone). While continuously asserting the validity of
the great time intervals they have discovered - and indeed imposing this belief upon the
geologists and anthropologists - nevertheless they are engaged in a quest for improvements and
for new tests that are less vulnerable to complaint.
There are at least a dozen parent-daughter, radioactive decay tests, each with its problems of
the type already displayed in the discussion of 40K-40A tests. Discordant time readings within
and among individual tests, demonstrable leaking and leaching of elements, and proven
possibilities of elements being created under catastrophic heats and pressures are vexing
problems, even more than the problems of sampling and contamination.
If, to this time, the restlessness of chronometricians has been excused as a search for
technical perfection, that excuse has now worn out its acceptance. The reduction of the
uniformitarian ideology is permitting a clear view that elements in varied isotopic forms can
and have been engendered by natural and human forces.
The implications of various studies, writes Melvin Cook, are that "apparently all the elements
are available in cosmic radiation at very high energies as bombarding particles, and that the
synthesis of high mass atoms in large decrements of mass increase is possible. It is therefore
only necessary for our earth (or its accretion materials) to come close enough to the source of
cosmic radiation to effect a complete equilibrium distribution of atoms. At present, the earth
itself is too far away form the source of cosmic radiation (owing possibly only to the
protecting influence of its atmosphere and magnetic field) to maintain nuclear equilibrium in
respect to U, Th, K 40 , Rb 87 , and other radioactive atoms [46] .
These remarks should be taken in connection with the possibilities of catastrophic typhoons or
tubes, described in the last chapter, and fluctuations in solar activity recently discovered.
The studies of R. V. Gentry are especially threatening to radiochronometry [47] . He examined
over 100,000 radiohalos in the decade just ended. A radiohalo (or pleochroic halo) is a
spherical colored ring around a radioactive nucleus denoting the escape of an alpha-particle
and its ionizing of a surrounding zone. The ring's size is determined by the speed of escape.
When uranium (U238) decays, it does not decay immediately into lead (Pb 206) but produces seven
other isotopes en route, from thorium, radium, radon and polonium. There occur, then, with
decayed U238 eight concentric rings, of which five are distinguishable.
Gentry discovered, however, that many halo systems begin with polonium; they exhibit no uranium
or other supposedly preceding halos. And polonium 210, the longest lived of the polonium
isotopes, has a half-life of 140 days. If some of the oldest rocks of the world contain this
isotope, without a uranium-thorium predecessor, it follows that the host rocks must have been
formed in days. Promptly, then, one would have to drop a billion years from the history of the
Earth, for the original rocks are supposed to have taken a billion years to crystallize.
Parentless polonium atoms may be primordial, as are uranium-238 and thorium-232 atoms, but this
would imply that polonium halos "represent evidence only a brief period between
'nucleosynthesis' and crystallization of the host rocks." [48] Incredibly, rocks would form
immediately upon the synthesis of the elements in them. Reporting upon a telephone interview,
Stephen Talbott says that Gentry "finds compelling reasons to question the entire dating scheme
which undergirds our concept of geological time." [49]
Other studies of coalified wood from the Colorado Plateau, buried in rocks of the Jurassic-
transition, evidenced such an abundance of uranium and lack of lead that ages of at most
100,000 years had to be assigned to the coal. Then Gentry, in examining the radiohalos, had to
report that the coalification required only days, not millions of years [50] .
Sykes has shown by experiment that a magnetic field of the flux density of 0.1 tesla is enough
to increase the mean decay count of radioactive cobalt-60 and to skew the distribution of decay
incidents from the normal. The "decay constant" was increased by about 2%; correspondingly, the
half-life of cobalt-60 decreased [51] .
RADIOCARBON (CARBON-14) DATING
Cosmic rays of the galaxy strike and explode atoms of the atmosphere. These give off neutrons
that interact with nitrogen of the air to make carbon-14 or 14C. This passes into carbon
dioxide and then into plants and other living organisms through their food supply. Living
organisms also ingest carbon-12 which does not decay. When anything that has lived dies, it
ceases to ingest radioactive carbon-14, and the carbon-14 within its cells begins to decay into
nitrogen-14. Half of it might decay in 5,730 years, the other half in another 85,000 years,
according to conventional theory.
Thus, any once-living organic substance can be tested for the amount of 14C that it now
contains in relation to the amount that was originally ingested. The carbon-12 level can be
used as the base of measurement. However, not all species ingest 14C in the same amounts, so
that specific rates must be calculated for different species. More importantly, "the amount
that was originally ingested" may vary [53] .
All that has been said about the effects of high-energy forces upon the atmosphere applies to
carbon-14. How much nitrogen was in the primeval atmosphere is unknown and is presumed on
today's measure. The carbonization (burning) of the biosphere and the sudden proliferation of
flora will directly affect the rate of generation of 14C. Also, if carbon-14 was heavily
generated in the atmosphere by electrical phenomena and radio storms, in the times when Uranus,
Saturn and Jupiter were worshipped, it was ingested extensively by organisms. Matter of this
period would test as "younger" today, provided that several other "constants" remained
constant.
As disasters diminish in intensity following chaos, relatively less 14C would be created;
matter would grow "older." Several disasters involved the desiccation or saline ruination of
large areas of the world; this would cause less carbon dioxide to discharge from plants. During
short periods of burning, great amounts of non-radioactive carbon are discharged into the air
and waters, and therefore contribute to a temporary "aging" of the new life of the time that
follows. Whenever both a cosmic brilliancy and a conflagration occurred, today's tests would be
contradictory, and averages would mislead. (see Figure 5.)
Libby and Lukens have estimated a "perturbation of about 1%" occurring in the production of
radiocarbon of tree rings by lightning bolts [54] . This represents a neutron supply added to
the supply produced by cosmic rays. The estimates are based upon present-day assumptions, also
upon highly varied conditions and inexact knowledge of the extent of lightning or its effects
[55] . It does not consider lightning discharges occurring solely in the atmosphere, and
especially the mega-bolts that can be a thousand times more powerful than the average earth-
striking bolt and were recently discovered by satellites.
Aside from what is happening in the biosphere, a fixed 14C component of the atmosphere, upon
which the test is based, depends upon a constant encounter rate between cosmic particles and
nitrogen that produces 14C. Since radiation storms occurred and long-term radiation levels were
diminished and increased from time to time, intervals of the 14C scale must have been rendered
invalid, except for mere coincidence. Only in the years from about 500 B. C. TO A. D. 1900
might the amount taken in by organisms have acquired some constancy. Even so, strange
aberrations of the 14C/ 12C ratio occur, as with shellfish and coral growths.
Figure 5.
RADIOCARBON DATINGS AS INDICATORS OF ECOLOGICAL STRESS.
The left-hand scale (s) registers the standard deviation of the "true" curve from the trend
curve -- the number of years by which the radio carbon dates of each 250 year period deviate
from the average of the whole group of dates of that period. The bottom scale represents the
years before the present (taken as 1950 A. D.). As the chart shows, the dates begin to be
erratic increasingly around the time of the Martian encounters (-2687 B. P. by this book's 2000
B. P. standard). The time scale goes to -6750, and thus carries one through the Martian,
Venusian, Mercurian, and Jovean ages. However, even the erratic swings shown here do not
portray the true extent of atmosphere and ecological disturbance, because, as the text asserts,
a succession of quick changes in the atmosphere is possible, from low to high radiocarbon
intake therefore by the biosphere, and this phenomenon would cause an evening-out of still a
second and possibly much more serious form of deviation. Within a time of several years, an
organism could ingest widely varying amounts of 14 C. Hence I suggest that radiocarbon dating
may be useless before about 2500 years ago and there may have been a completely different
radiocarbon cycle, as M. Cook maintains, before the Lunarian catastrophes.
(Source: Damon et al, extended and applied [47] by G. W. Oosterhout Half-life is 5730 years.)
There are many anomalies in C14 dating, a few of which are mentioned elsewhere in this book.
Artifact dating has become quite common, with most of the apparent successes occurring on
artifacts and substances of the recent historical past. But it is precisely the problem of C14
dating that, by our theory, it is almost surely wrong in the earlier periods when the tests are
most needed.
A group of scientists recently excavated "Little Salt Spring, Florida: A Unique Underwater
Site." Among many remains they found in a lower level a tortoise carapace, which provided a
date of 13,450 190 B. P., and a wood stake used to pry open the animal, which gave a date of
12,030 200. Some 1400 years of difference. Yet this is not the only problem. The whole range
of time may be in question. For a base of a carved oak mortar was discovered and dated to 9080
B. P. and then declared to be similar in style to a piece recovered at Key Marco, 130 km to the
South, and dated at about 1200 years ago [56] .
The quantavolutionary hypothesis is disruptive of carbondating, as it has been conceived. An
adjusted curve is impossible because the revolutions of the atmosphere in precisely the most
critical millenia in primevalogy cannot be positioned and defined sufficiently well for them to
be employed in weighing the scale intervals. The 14C method will be useful for dating the past
2,400 years, when allowances are made for short-term atmospheric fluxes owing to extraordinary
cosmic, volcanic, solar, industrial, nuclear explosional, or other activity disturbing to the
atmosphere.
Mysteriously, corroboration of some of our conclusions comes from a retrogressive calculation
by Melvin Cook of the amount of 14C in the ancient atmosphere. Granted the present level of
carbon-14 and the fact that it is rising slightly, he found that all the 14C would have had to
arrive in the atmosphere within the past ten to twelve thousand years [57] . Far from being
constant, prior radio-carbon was at this point wiped out statistically and theoretically a new
atmospheric accumulation began. This would appear to be about the time of the climactic
Lunarian catastrophe. However, this calculation, as Dr. Cook might grant is more useful as a
reductio ad absurdum than as a plotting of the true history of atmospheric carbon.
TREE-RING TIME
Dendrochronology has discovered only one tree whose rings can be used to date associated events
back into periods of interest to primevalogy. Such is the hard bristlecone pine, which may
achieve 5,000 years of age by ring count. By matching fossil pine with living pine, the ages
may be traced back further; perhaps 8000 years B. P. have been claimed by matching . (if
conditions of fossilization were uniform millions of years of matching would be theoretically
possible!) It is assumed that rings have always grown on an annual basis. Not surprisingly,
quantavolutionists have adversely criticized the technique [58] .
"Annual" is a relative standard, presently derived from a revolution of the tilted globe of the
Earth around the Sun. Changes in astronomical motions can change the number of rings; if a
"year" is shortened, the rings may be increased within the normal lifetime, something that may
have caused the Methusalah phenomenon in early reported human ages of the Bible and elsewhere
[59] . Also, the rings may increase or decrease if climatic conditions introduce a doubling of
seasonal cycles within the same year-time.
The tree has to be matched with human or natural objects of known age, or used to calibrate
radiocarbon dating. But tests cannot calibrate each other without reference to a third test.
This third test is often a historical date, but such dates rarely exceed 3000 years and even
before then are hotly disputed. Furthermore, there occur in the cross-matched trees gaps of
rings that may correspond to revolutionary incidents in the arboreal environment. Electron
microscopes can find exceedingly thin rings, but cannot explain aberrations among them.
Despite all of this, if bristlecone pines could be calibrated over a span from 5000 to 8000
years, this would mean that the solar system has existed that long in a form not radically
different from its present form. Also, no important element of the atmosphere or climate
affecting rather similar biological organisms would have changed. Further no major annual
motion of the Earth respecting the Sun must have changed (orbital distance; orbital speed;
rotational speed of the Earth); or all three motions, if changed, must have added up to the
same total solar-exposure time.
MAGNETISM
When rocks are near melting, they are stamped with the direction of the magnetic pole. When
cooled, they keep this directional stamp. If reheated, they lose it and acquire whatever new
stamp is indicated by the current magnetic pole. Also, if a rock changes its position, its
magnetism will point away from the location of the magnetic pole towards which it was
originally oriented. If also it is heated in a new position, the imprint will be oriented
differently upon the rock. Paleomagnetism studies the changed magnetic orientation of rocks. It
also judges the ages of rocks, but within severe limits [60] .
Great belts of ocean basin rocks are imprinted with a polarity that is reversed from today's.
Moving away from the great hot ocean ridges, alternating belts of reversed polarity occur. It
is believed that these reversals occur at intervals, whether a few thousands or millions of
years apart. It has been shown that the belts grow older (by fossil record, by inference from
land studies, and by 40K-40A tests), as they move outwards from the ridges. It is believed that
many millions of years show up in the magnetic bands.
But magnetic reorientation depends upon the last heating of the rocks that contain the imprint
and upon their movement. If the ocean bottom is moving much faster than assumed, then the time
between reversals is shortened in proportion. And vice versa, if the reversals occur rapidly,
then the ocean bottom must be moving much faster then believed. Probably both have occurred:
the ocean bottom moved rapidly and magnetic reversals occurred repeatedly, both within a period
of several thousand years, probably between ten and thirteen thousand years ago, or so we shall
argue in a later chapter.
Magnetic reversals occur for reasons unknown. Why they should happen at long intervals of time
rather than short intervals is also unknown. Short-time intervals between reversals are
probably connected with an impulse towards or an actual change of the axial inclination (now
23 +) of the Earth. Impulses were frequent in revolutionary ages. I shall be proposing later,
with the support of legendary and geological evidence that the Earth's axis probably tipped on
various occasions, both gradually and sharply.
After each abrupt change, the globe may have rocked for a time before stabilizing. The rocking
took many years; the multiplex worldwide legends of Hamlet's Mill [61] may reflect this
perceived motion. In that case, the belts of differently imprinted rocks would represent rapid
growth of ocean basins with a rocks would represent rapid growth of ocean basins, with a slowly
wobbling axis of spin and a reversing magnetic field.
A prior period of wobbling of the axis could even produce, in a period of accumulating ice, a
succession of seeming advances and retreats (or the illusion of the "ice ages"). But also,
pluvial intervals would occur, with melting in-between. The penchant of early man and mammals
for living near ice-fields is understandable only because the Earth beyond the ice was not cold
(since the ice might come from above). However, it is too early here to take up a position on
the "ice ages," which are dealt with in the third volume of this work.
Two terms are used to discuss magnetized rock: natural remnant magnetism and thermal remnant
magnetism. Geophysicist T. Nagata of Tokyo has shown that the two are the same. Remnant
magnetism, furthermore, will occur and increase with any temperature increase above 200 C.
Magnetism decays. The exact coefficient of decay is unknown. The half-life of paleomagnetism
may be only 5,000 to 10,000 years; all magnetism, according to M. Cook, may be less than 70,000
years old [62] . (Nagata guesses 1 million years.) Therefore, paleomagnetic bars of the ocean
bottoms or land cannot well be used to measure time. Any considerable intensity must record a
young age. A priori paleomagnetic ocean bottom measurements showing millions of years of age
must be wrong. The position here taken is that any magnetism of the crust is primordial except
where the crust has suffered a melt or welled up as new crust from the interior magma.
THE FOSSIL RECORD AND MUTATING TIME
Organisms that die in a mineralizing setting may become fossils that are recognizable unless
subsequently melted or crushed. Fossils are the principal means of dating sedimentary rocks,
and, by inference, such igneous and metamorphic rocks as may be connected to them. If two
rocks, no matter where they are found, contain the same fossils, the rocks are usually from the
same period of time. The more numerous the identical species of the two fossil assemblages, the
surer their common age. When the rocks appear to be in superposition, the fossils help to
assign them a relative date. Once this is done, if afterwards the same rocks occur in isolation
or not in superposition, the fossils which they contain enable their dates to be inferred.
A fossil may be wrongly dated. The record of its period and species may be incomplete. Or the
fossil assemblage of various species may have been zoned and then have been transported to
another area and placed, say, above a younger assemblage. Or the method of dating may be
fallacious. For example, at the Schefferville (Canadian) iron mine, fossil wood specimens,
radiocarbon dated at 4,000 years and largely unchanged chemically, were found imbedded (but not
intrusively) in iron ore of pre Cambrian age (" over a billion years ago" and before trees
evolved) at depths of several hundred feet [63] .
Attempts at correlating results of radiodating with established fossil dating have not helped.
They have thrown the phanerozoic scale into disorder. Acceptance of radiodating provides
numerous anomalies in traditional fossil successions. Basic difficulties in both methods come
out of high-energy processes that devastate the atmosphere, build sediments and transport life
forms quickly.
Plant and animal species require time to adapt to environments (life niches), to proliferate
and to become extinct. So long as high-energy expressions are absent, it is reasonable to
assign long periods to these processes and long life to the species. Originally, evolutionists
were composing calendars that were under 100 million years in all. The discovery of natural
mutation introduced a dynamic of change, but a successful mutation turned out to be, in theory
at least, a most rare event. So more time was needed.
Now a billion years or more is allotted for the evolution of species. But quantavolutionary
theory permits short mutation intervals, quick and widespread extinction, the opening up of a
great many life niches for pre-existing and new species, and the possibility of less restricted
and therefore exponential growth of population. Hence all the time may not be needed to explain
evolution, even as evolution is understood by neo-Darwinians today.
CYCLES AND ANNIVERSARIES
That the world was created, destroyed, re-created and destroyed again, repeatedly, has never
been doubted by any culture anywhere or anytime, except by the modern uniformitarian culture
[64] . Five great ages are found in ancient Greece, India, Tibet, Peru and Mexico. Seven ages
are put forth in another Hindu source; in Mazda; in Hebraic sources; in the Sybilline oracles;
among the Mayas. The Hawaiians and Icelanders count nine; the Chinese reported ten ages up to
Confucius. All may be taken as valid relative to localized definitions and experiences. All may
be regarded as authentic challenges to the ages set by geochemistry and radiochronometry thus
far. There occurs, nevertheless ,an urge to straighten or blend cycles into a helix, even in
mythologies obsessed by repetitive chaos of creation.
"The final step in Aztec speculation, as indicated by their great Stone Calendar, is to assign
the four earlier world ages to the four world directions, with the satisfying result that the
present age belongs to the center of the world, the place where man likes to think of himself
existing... The terror of experiencing a derangement of the cardinal points is transmuted by
systematization into the comfort of knowing that all resulted in placing man at the center".
[65]
Very recently, however, it has become clear that the competition for chronological veracity is
going to be framed in the ancient cyclical - or, as I have termed it here, helical - mode.
Natural scientists are becoming "helicalists". Writes Umbgrove, "What creature is this that
breathes so heavily every 250 million years [66] ? He refers to the Earth and to the cycles of
"death and resurrection" that characterize so many earth processes. As we have seen,
paleontologists, ice age specialists, solar experts, diastrophists, and electromagneticists -
each in their own way - are discerning helices of the ages [67] .
Also York and Farquahar, radiometricists:
"Radiometric dates obtained on rocks from a single continent tend to cluster into definite
groups. Ages are not uniformly distributed in time."
Furthermore, the timing of the groups seems to be similar over all continents. One can guess
from their data that quantavolutions recur and affect the whole Earth [68] .
Every cycle began with a kind of creation or rebirth. There was little of regularity on earth.
Life was a continuous commotion. An obsessively fearful race projected itself into the sky.
When planet Saturn became the great god, he was king of man and destroyer of man, but also
bringer of wisdom and bountiful food. The Saturnalia began and have persisted to this day in
jubilee days that follow days of sorrow and fasting. The Jovean anniversaries took over the
Saturnalian. The Venusian and Martian came then in the spring near the vernal equinox while the
old anniversaries centered around the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere).
From full moon to full moon gave an easy method of counting in the Age of Saturn and it could
usually be observed in the often misty nights. Moon calendars, sun calendars, and planetary
calendars were often possible in the periods between changes of motion and place. A lunar month
can, and does, change its length, without requiring a major social change except to revive
terror and encourage religious ritual and related behaviors. Not until the last of the
disasters had ended, in 2687 B. P., did a stable moon or sun calendar that was correct by
present standards appear. Long afterwards and even until this day in many parts of the world,
nothing in the order of skies is taken for granted, and, for calendar anniversaries, for
festivals, and for public policy decisions, expert moon-watchers of the priesthood decide
precisely when a moon should be termed full or new. Practically all human constructions that
have survived from earliest times are temples, temple-connected, or astronomical. The
megaliths, found in many the age of surviving records, that is, the Middle Bronze (Mercurain)
and Late Bronze (Venusian) Ages, scientific observations of solar, lunar, stellar, and
planetary movements were recorded in several countries; they differ from the observations that
scientists today would make of the same movements.
The ancients numbered scientific observers among them, and states were sometimes dominated by
astronomer-theocrats. Water-clocks, that measured time by the passage of water, and sun-dials
were built; specimens have been found; they mark a time, however, which differs from the
present day.
These early observations were made by dedicated, highly-disciplined corps of observers and are
to be trusted. If they were dedicated and disciplined, it was ultimately because the skies
could not be trusted; humans, god-driven, harnessed themselves to the observation of the skies,
their pragmatic distrust reinforced by the ever-present subconscious illogic: "To watch is to
control."
58 TESTS IN DISPUTE
The quantavolutionist offers his tests of time. They usually lack tubes, needles and gauges and
require a general vision of history. The quantavolutionist looks amiably upon tests that mix
human evidence with natural evidence, joining an ancient legend or an invention with a change
in appearance of the Moon or Mars. To the evolutionist, the quantavolutionist appears fuzzy-
minded, gullible, and fanciful. But to the quantavolutionist the evolutionist seems narrow-
minded, technocratic and historically lame-brained.
The quantavolutionists say this: Consider all the great natural forces that operate today. Read
the ancient myths and accounts to discover how much greater were the expressions of these
forces in the beginning. Extrapolate the effects of these forces as known. Then state what must
have been the condition of the skies, the earth, and life in the earliest days of human
recollection. Then, if interested, go back even farther, to what might have happened before.
The evolutionist offers his tests of time. When these tests are applied, we see time as very
long and change as very slow, point-by-point, drop-by-drop.
The tests are very many. It would take an encyclopedia to discuss them properly. But on the
chart of tests (Figure 6 on pp. 60-67), I have displayed four things: the test itself, a brief
phrase on its unique quality, the main position of evolutionists in respect to its validity and
the contrasting position of the quantavolutionists.
Although it is beyond the capacity of this book to carry explanations and analyses of the
fifty-eight listed measures of time, the major objections to their evolutionary interpretation
can be set forth. I shall do so, following the categories of the chart, with apologies for the
necessary exaggerations and exclusions.
The main objection to accepting the evolutionary explanation of the prominent features of the
Earth's surface in Category I is that they are all based upon unproven constancies in the
forces working to form the surfaces. High heat and pressures, hurricane winds and tides, or
movement of the Earth's crust can form all of these features in short intervals of time. One
can move over the surface of the Earth and offer an alternative quantavolutionary explanation
of all singular features.
The main objection to the biological measures of evolutionism is again that they may all occur
through quantum jumps under high energy impulsion. Once granted that mass extinctions and
arrivals of species occur in correlation with catastrophes, then it is only necessary to point
out that "successful" mutations themselves are so rare that large numbers of mutations are
required, which implies that atmospheric catastrophes are needed. Biological and geological
quantavolutions are the basis of the ecological changes that produce the evolution of species.
The third category of radiochronometry almost entirely depends upon a constant radioactivity of
certain elements over great stretches of time. Very recent studies have shown, however, that
(a) we do not know the original state of the elements and hence the history of their
radioactivity, and (b) undecayed and decayed elements have become separated somehow, sometime,
and their ratio cannot be now regarded as a measure of time. In the case of item 8, the uranium
elements are not found in expected oceanic and atmospheric abundances for a long time record.
In the case of item 11, catastrophically produced materials such as water and natural gas are
found in an abundance under high pressures that long-term effects should have erased [69] .
Of the astronomical motions, the fourth category, it can be said that (a) proof of constancy of
motion is only available for a very short time; (b) even if the laws of motion suggested a
history of motion, they do not write the history; (c) some motions are mysterious in origin and
best explained as fossil motions from some radically different ancient motion; (d) evolutionary
science has been loath to consider the history, presence, and effects of electricity in regards
to star systems, solar systems, and the Earth (as to both its external and internal force
fields).
In the fifth category, evolutionists have wrongly, yet persistently, defied a multitude of
ancient voices even when these voices are in consensus on events and time sequences, They have
blighted the growth of the science of mythology. Moreover, they have not considered
catastrophes in the explanation of discontinuities of excavations, whether strata were
disrupted or erased entirely. As Claude Schaeffer declared in his monumental survey of Near
East excavations, "Our inquiry has often been rendered difficult by the rarity in most reports
of observations on beds of destruction.... Some reporters have regarded these beds as a
nuisance or of little interest." [70]
It should be clear, therefore, that the hints given in Figure 6 can be expanded into major
criticisms of each category of tests. In addition, several general criticisms may be directed
at off categories. One may object to the frequent unwarranted claim that the skies, air,
waters, rocks and biosphere have changed always at the same rate and under the same conditions
as we see them charging today. Inconstancy afflicts most gauges of time. The more that the
quantavolutionary hypothesis is insisted upon, the more that the past processes seem to deviate
from present ones - geological, biological, chemo-physical, astronomical or cultural. The
planet Jupiter, for example, has become more and more of an ogre since Velikovsky predicted its
radio noises in 1950, and a scientific dragnet is now out to trap all indications of its stormy
past, present, and future behavior.
A second reproof is that evolutionists have committed often the same scientific misdemeanors
that they accuse the quantavolutionists of. Possessed of two results, each based on a common or
different debatable assumption, they claim that the results, since they agree, are certainly
true. They have concealed anomalies, allowed the contamination of samples, exaggerated the
certainty of their observations, generalized from insufficient data, pleaded their premises as
proof, selected the evidence, used special cases as proof, and been thoughtless when it comes
to larger theories.
Moreover, observations are often uncertain and unreliable in the tests of time. Significantly,
progress in instrumentation many have the effect of disclosing hitherto unobserved phenomena
that tend to nullify the aim of the measurement. For example, C14 dating aimed at using a
constancy to establish dates, but it has helped greatly in discovering inconstancies. The
brilliant and thorough attempts to perfect radiocarbon dating have already given some needed
proof of the Martian and Venusian catastrophes" [71] and may paradoxically end up as a most
valuable source of information on the ravaging of the atmosphere before Solarian times.
Also, the search for pure samples to test for dates has sometimes shed more light on other
problems than upon time. Analysis of Thera( Aegean Sea) explosions ash samples has led to
studies distinguishing earlier eruptions of Ischia (Italy) and casts doubt upon various
cultural modes of dating for the Eastern Mediterranean [72] . Hydrocarbons from widespread
fires have lately been discovered in "normal" land and off-shore cores drilled in the eastern
United States [73] .
Frequently a lack of data hampers conclusions about time. Whole realms of nature are missing
from the annals of times past. Catastrophic events not only compress time but also destroy the
evidence of time. Floods, tides, and hurricanes can erase levels of the biosphere completely;
it is permissible to argue that all centers of civilization of the Saturnian age to be
described later were completely eliminated, that all "neolithic" discoveries are of survivors,
especially of peripheries of cultures - just as the Hebrews, Sumerian, East Indian, and other
legends declare. Then, too, the subsequent Bronze Ages chronology for the ancient Near East has
lately been shown to be awry, largely because catastrophic premises provoked a re-examination
of the domestic and international problems of the dynasties of Egypt [74] .
Finally, the evolutionary theory has had the services of practically all scientists and
scholars of all disciplines for 150 years. By contrast, quantavolutionary theory has survived
without media or funds and only enough scholars to make rare guerrilla forays into opposition-
held country. From lack of focused case studies, the revolutionary time-tables have been
excessively imaginative, including that which is to come in the next chapter.
It is fair to say that the five classes of time-tests of Figure 6 include practically all
techniques of telling prehistoric and ancient time. One should stress that tests on a given
site or material or problem are often multiple, as they should be, to see whether the tests
support one another. If they do, of course, the probability of validity is increased. It may
seem appropriate to annual or ignore the results of one test on particular or general grounds
such as contamination or even general theory; but it is hard to knock out several tests on the
same grounds. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind the set of general problems confronting
tests of time, the special problems inherent in each category, and the particular problems
inherent in each testing technique as indicated in the chart. In the case of several areas -
sedimentation, potassium-argon tests, radiocarbon dating, tree-ring dating, paleomagnetism and
the fossil record - my comments have been sufficiently extended to show that the debate is
generally complex and ramified in respect to all types of time-testing techniques.
I have by no means exhausted the range of criticism. For instance, I credit thermoluminesce
dating, involving its decay since the last high heat of its matrix, with "promise." Yet the
pioneers of the field are commonly frustrated: " There is a gross discordance between the TL
age and the radiocarbon age.." of sedimentary samples baked by lava from the Massif Central's
Chaine des Puys (France), the one giving 26,000 years, the other about 11,000 years [75] .
Still I can sympathize with the person who, after all is said and done, consults the
conventional time-tables and reasons as follows:
"Thousands of scientists of many fields have worked with one or more of some fifty tests. Even
if nobody is an expert in more than a couple of test areas, the scientists all lean on each
other. And all agree on the long-range thrust of the many tests. Their agreement should add up
to a certainty for either long-range evolutionism or long-range revolutionism. Short-range
revolutionism must be wrong."
In reply, I can only stress what has already been said above and elsewhere in the book:
"Every test has its problems of design, administration, reading, and interpretation. Fifty
problems do not make a solution. I could readily declare that ancient catastrophes are
absolutely proven because not 50, but 150 or 500 cultures unanimously declare that they
survived universal disaster. But more than this proof by agreement of sources is needed, in my
view."
THE DISSOLUTION OF TIME
The idea of long-range time is the bedrock of present-day intellectualism. It is ideological.
It performs a great, but fundamentally non-rational, service. By extending time to
inconceivable lengths, one makes of it, in effect, a constant, which need no longer be
accounted for in factoring the causes of ancient events. Nevertheless, every ideology or "ism"
is at best a model, at worst a blinded mule, pacing a circle endlessly.
Of the 58 tests listed, only 1 (one) does not depend upon the empirical experiential
proposition that the processes of nature have been proceeding at a constant pace with only
minor lapses.
The one exception is the principle of superposition of strata (I. 3). It is a logical
principle. It can only come into effect when natural and human material is laid down; it is
only valid when the material is not overturned or undermined by igneous or over other
intrusions.
The reluctance of "Nature" to tell her true age is perennially a frustration. In a day when
even solar time is not accurate enough for some functions and tests, and when even star-time is
introduced, the fact that some people must be wrong by hundreds of millions of years in telling
historical time cannot help but make one wonder if the minority, at least, is not mad, or
whether the whole of science is a sham. Neither is the case.
Knowing how wobbly and weak a grip the human mind has upon time it should come as no surprise
that "Nature's" time is disconcerted and disparate. Only by the greatest exertions and mutual
discipline and only at the highest peak of group organization are we able to hold a tenuous
grip upon a schedule of time; even then, the individual's psychological as well as active
deviations from the severely imposed bonds of time are very many and dominant, if one were to
be brave enough to count the undisciplined vagaries of time in relation to the ordered ones.
If this temporally disordered mind has difficulty in ordering time in relation to the ordered
ones time in its immediate contexts of group cooperation, it is not to be expected that its
farthest expeditions into space, species, and events could establish a nice clockwork.
Historians like to tell a story: God, according to Isaac Newton, had set the machinery of the
world to move like a clock, but had to intervene upon occasion to make adjustments in its
regularity, (an idea that reminds us forcibly of Plato's God at the tiller of the world ship).
Whereupon Leibnitz was prompted to remark that Newton had not only made of God a clock-maker,
but a poor one at that.
OF MAMMONTHS AND AMBER
If, as the preceding pages imply, there may be a general failure and collapse of long-term
methods of time-reckoning, a need for a radically alternative chronology arises. But where lies
the possibility of such ?
Quantavolutionism brings to bear on the problem the abilities of great forces to compress
astronomical, geological and biological time. By adding human testimony to anomalous current
scientific findings, enriching these with new evidence, especially of an electrical nature, and
integrating them within a new hypothetical structure, it can propose a new chronology of the
holocene period.
There is little chance that a single technical device. a test, will calibrate the ages. A
holistic method must prevail. A thing to be dated must be evaluated by every technique
available, in as broad a context as possible; and, even while it is being tested, it is testing
the test. For example, Carbon-14 presents us with dates between 30,000 B. P and 21,000 B. P. on
three different frozen mammoths; then, for the carbon-14 dates to be acceptable, Siberia must
have remained frozen for the duration of the period, else two of the carcasses would have
rotted [76] . But then the mammoths would have suffered three catastrophic time-points of
sudden death and sudden preservation, by asphyxiation and deep-freezing. A peculiar repetitive
kind of disaster would have to characterize this long period of time. If we believe that the
species was exterminated at once, then the carbon-14 method cannot be at all valid here. We
must still await a definitive study of this long-discussed puzzle. Its solution is important;
the utility of carbondating hangs upon it.
Another case involves the fossilized resinous exudation of dead pine forests, amber. The Greeks
cherished it for its beauty and its electrical properties; its name was "electron." At Pylos, a
Mycenaean city, whose buildings collapsed under intense heat, large stores of amber were found
[77] . The substance was in ancient times transported by well-known routes sacred to Apollo
from the coastal towns of the Baltic Sea [78] . There it was being washed ashore from vast
sunken pine forests. Recent radiocarbon dating of pollen conflicts with conventional belief,
according to which the Baltic basin was filled 70 million years ago, and places the flooding of
the Baltic Sea in the middle of the second millennium [79] , a catastrophic period that will
be described in the tenth chapter story of Venus. Presumably, only after several hundred years
was the amber fossilized, exuded, washed ashore, evaluated, and incorporated into international
trade.
Isaacson has independently established the burning of Pylos in the period of cosmic
perturbation involving the newly great god Mars, that is, the eighth and seventh centuries
[80] . Fossils themselves tend to be proof of local or general disaster. The abandonment of a
precious store of amber also indicates natural disaster, not an aftermath of a battle or
accident or ordinary earthquake. Might it not be that no one was left to dig up the treasure?
It would appear that all evidence can be put into a mutually supportive context that is much
broader and convincing than a set of dates contributed by single technique. Reasoning from the
sacred, the commercial, the behavioral elements, one has grounds for disputing the geological
theory that assigns millions of years of age to the Baltic inundation; how could amber have
been so abundant that it was still washing ashore in quantities sufficient to support a
thriving business? The origin of the mysterious amber was carried in Greek myth: the Heliades,
sisters of Phaeton, who drove uncontrollably the solar chariot and was sent crashing to Earth
by a bolt of Zeus, wept amber tears in grief for their brother [81] .
SCHAEFFER AND VELIKOVSKY
Still another type of reasoning can be shown in relation to Schaeffer's demonstration of
widespread concurrent site destructions in the second millennium B. C. [82] . Schaeffer
follows conventional Egyptian chronology and dates the periods of destruction by the
association of Egyptian artifacts with the site level artifacts under scrutiny, whether at the
site or elsewhere [83] . That is, the Egyptian chronology was regarded as absolute, just as
the radiocarbon dates were once so regarded, and still are given significant shifts and
weights. The revision of Egyptian chronology by Velikovsky, now being completed, shifts whole
centuries forward and about, and shifts the whole Greek-Near East chronology with it [84] .
For the moment, confusion reigns, and there is bitter resistance. But soon it will become clear
that innumerable historical and archaeological problems will be solved simply by switching to
the new chronology. Thus, all that Schaeffer "automatically" consigns to the end of the Middle
Bronze Age, at around 1750 B. C. I assign to the same time, but dated at about 1450 B. C. The
many destructions that he consigns to 1200-1300 B. C., I assign to 800-700 B. C., granting
special consideration to exceptional cases.
The results are remarkable. Suddenly, the vast "hiatus" between "13th century" destruction and
6th century proto-classical times becomes only a brief hiatus. It is clear that the vast
movements of "the peoples of the seas" were a fiction [85] employed by scholars to explain
the widespread natural disasters of the 8th and 7th centuries, the Mars disasters of our
calendar.
It is tempting to conclude this discussion of current problems of chronology with remarks made
lately about Lord Kelvin's three methods of arriving at the age of the Earth in the 19th
century. "All three methods employed unproved assumptions and very shaky estimates;
nevertheless, they conveniently agreed on the age of the earth." Geologists promptly adjusted
their figures to his lead and although "it was not a case of 'fudging', it still took a lot of
lively imagination for all those different scientists using different dubious methods to come
up with the same erroneous result." [86]
Since Kelvin's day, chronometricians have overlept one another in their eagerness to add time.
Even most catastrophists have been catapulted into the race. Long-term catastrophists heap
scorn upon short-time catastrophists in order to keep in the running. They may be warned,
however, that long-term catastrophism is thus asking for more and more time to do nothing. L.
J. Salop [87] has discussed the effects of a 1% increase in the solar constant which causes
an increase of ultra-violet, hard radiation by 100,000 times. There would occur one of the many
vast destructions that mark the history of the biosphere. A natural catastrophe may not require
as rare a combination of events as is believed even by non-uniformitarians. Hence, the greater
the success of the long term catastrophists in proving historical disasters, the more
implausible is it that these disasters were separated by hundreds of millions of years of time.
The catastrophist theory will itself demand a compression of geological and biological time.
Should the moment arrive when the far-flung outposts of time represented by radiochronometry
have to be pulled back, they will probably not be able to pause at chronological defenses of
the old geology; all the troops of tests would retreat to the confines of short-time
chronometry.
With this, I think enough has been said in this chapter of the tests of time to obtain
permission to try in this book and its successors a radical calendar that largely disregards
radio chronometry; that treats carbondating as exponentially erroneous as it moves backward in
time; that subjects geological stratigraphy to catastrophic premises; and that regard human
legendary reports to be correct and reliable in the large. Since all long-term measures of time
have become suspect, we can proceed by using only as much time as we need for the
accomplishment of the studied events. Whereupon 14,000 years delimits our temporal structure.
Notes (Chapter Three: Collapsing Tests of Time)
1. "Dating" (1974), V Encyclopedia Britannica, 490 ff.
2. Figure 34*
A GENERALLY ACCEPTED TIME-SCALE
Inapplicable to the present work
Age Duration
(In Million Years) Cumulative Total
From Present to Beginning
(in million years)
QUATERNARY
Recent (Holocene) . 0.015
Pleistocene 1.7 1.715
.
TERTIARY
Pliocene 13 15
Miocene (oligocene) 13 33
Eocene (paleocene) 9 42
.
CRETACEOUS 55 108
JURASSIC 27 135
TRIASSIC 23 155
PERMIAN 33 158
.
CARBONIFEROUS
Pennsylvanian 41 191
Mississippian 33 232
.
DEVONIAN 390 304
SILURIAN 22 326
ORDOVICIAN 57 383
CAMBRIAN 92 475
.
PRE-CAMBRIAN
(from crustalformation to first life) 2000 2475
*Note: This table appears at the end of the printed version of this book.
3. Shelton (1966) 304.
4. Heezing, Thorp, and Ewing, 1959.
5. Jordan, quoting (chap. III) Defaut.
6. Juergens (Fall 1977), fn. 29, p. 17.
7. Cook (1963); (1966).
8. Heezing and Hallister, 633.
9. Sullivan, 118-9.
10. Cook (1957).
11. This is Donnelly's "Age of fire and gravel" in Ragnarok (1883) cf. Beaumont (1925) 162,
176.
12. Francis (1961) Preface, 14-17, 46,625; Francis (1972); Cook (1966); Velikovsky (1955) 44-6,
119-22, 214-19; Gentry et al, 194 Science (1976) 315.
13. Velikovsky (1950) 54-8, 67-8 et passim; (1955) 218-9, 261-2; Wilson (1962).
14. Larrabee (1962).
15. Corliss (1974) Vol. MI, 104.
16. Wright (1978).
17. Walworth and Sjostrom (1977) 33-4.
18. Cook (1966); (1963) letter Nov. issue, p. 5.
19. "Don't rock the Ark," 68.
20. Miller (1841).
21. Ager, 37.
22. Hibben (1973).
23. Tuolumne (1981).
24. (1966) 70, 72.
25. Ibid., 304.
26. Winchester (1972) c217.
27. Adey (1978) 835, fig. 4.
28. Ibid., 834.
29. Williams and Herdklotz (1977).
30. The joke may be originally Knopf's 85 Sci. Monthly(1957), 225.
31. Cook (1966); York and Farquahar (1972); Wager (1964) for a history.
32. On rubidium-strontium see Wright (1972).
33. Anderson and Spangler (1974); Dudley (1972); Mackinnon (1977).
34. Unpublished paper, delivered at Imperial College (London) and U. Cambridge, November 1977.
Cf. Chem & Engineering News, April 1975., "Guest comments: Radioactivity reexamined."
35. Cook (1964) 12-22; (1966) 54-5. The Katanga ore had been dated at 600 m/ y, the Canadian
1650 m/ y.
36. Cook (1964) 3.
37. Cook (1957).
38. Robins (1978), citing Rankama.
39. MacKinnon (1977) 11 citing Funkhauser and Naughton (1968).
40. Velikovsky (1972) 19.
41. Mackinnon (1977) citing Noble and Naughton.
42. E. g. Treash (1972); Ash (1973-4); Ransom (1976) 175-8, 200.
43. Ransom (1976) 134-6; II Kronos 1, 105.
44. Personal conversation, June, 1976, Naxos.
45. Chalmers (1979).
46. (1966) 26; Juergens as quoted in Ransom (1966) 183-4.
47. S. Talbott (1977); Gentry (all); MacKinnon (1977); Juergens (1977).
48. S. Talbott (1977).
49. Gentry (1975) quoted by Talbott (1977) 6.
50. MacKinnon (1976) 15, citing et al (1976).
51. Sykes (1978).
52. Libby (1973), Table 1, p. 8. Sea shells are notably deviant; Cook (1961-2) (1966) (1970).
For discordancies, see MacKinnon (1977), fn, 39.
53. Damon (1972); Oosterhout (1976).
54. (1973), 5903.
55. Komarek (1964), (1971); "Lightning Superbolts...." (1977).
56. Clausen et al. (1979), 611.
57. Cook (1970).
58. Ransom (1976) 157-64; Sorenson (1973).
59. Rose (1974).
60. Sullivan (1974), ch. 6; Juergens (1978); Cook (1966), Hapgood (1970) 36.
61. Cf. Hamlet's Mill (Santillana & Von Dechand) where the legend is described and integrated
as an ancient view of the precession of the equinoxes and its reversal over a long time, an
idea which I find untenable. It does show what high skills are attributed to archaic man by two
renowned scholars of ancient science and legend.
62. Cook (1966) 283.
63. Cook (1966) 332-3.
64. Campbell (1949) 261-9.
65. Mullen (1974) 41.
66. (1974).
67. See e. g. Schindewolf (1963).
68. (1972) 116; fig. 9.1.
69. Cook (1966).
70. (1948), 7.
71. Cf. the Oosterhout demonstration above of the indication of radiocarbon disturbances in
these periods (p. 50, Fig. 5.).
72. Cadogan et al. (1972); Vitaliano (1969); infra, chap. X, p. 233.
73. Blumer and Youngblood (1975).
74. Velikovsky (1952) (1967) (1968).
75. Huxtable et al. (1978) 208.
76. Cardona (1976a) 82-3.
77. Graves no. 148-11, p. 222.
78. Semple, 224-7.
79. MacKinnon (1977).
80. Isaacson (1973).
81. MacKinnon (1977).
82. See Geoffrey Gammon in IV SISR (Spr. 1980), upcoming.
83. Schaeffer (1948) 19 et passim.
84. Velikovsky (1952); (1977); (1979, in press).
85. Vaihinger (1924).
86. Ransom (1976) 32, quoting 44 Am. J. Physics (May 1970) 495-6.
87. Salop (1977) 35.
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOUR: A CATASTROPHIC CALENDAR
If nature and human nature were catastrophized by events of the past 14,000 years, a calendar
of the events becomes a practical necessity. Hence we conjecture that from an original primeval
chaos to the world of A. D. 2,000, the human race and its natural environment passed through
eight phases. They are posted on the adjoining chart, Figure 7.
The set of cases is too small for statistical treatment, but, for heuristic purposes, the
typical phase may be said to have begun in general natural destruction, passed through a period
of recovery and reconstruction, and then entered upon a second catastrophic set of events.
Figure 8 depicts the catastrophic cycle, as it might be dealt with by the topological
mathematics of catastrophism. Of the first age of Pangea, no beginning is described here; nor
is any end foretold to the present age of Solaria, which began about 1,600 years ago.
This calendar takes up 14,000 years of time, and corresponds in geology to the holocene epoch.
The solar system was transformed; so were in consequence the surface of the earth, the
atmosphere, life and humanity. The transformations took the form of cycles, but the
transformations of one era were the inheritance of the next one. Hence it might be more exact
to speak of a spiral of history.
The impulses for the great changes of the world came from the skies. There the greatest forces
of the universe abide and interact. In each age, celestial bodies signalled and inaugurated
revolutions of the earth and life. Earth forces and life forces reacted. Humans, too, reacted,
although from the beginning they dreamt of controlling the skies and earth and themselves as
well. Unhappily the control was mostly managed by a set of illusions and delusions. Human
arrogance has been a reciprocal of pitiable fear.
The ages of the human earth are called, with the exception of earliest "Pangea" (all land), by
astronomical names. They are named after their apparent governor in the sky. The calendar is to
be construed hypothetically, not dogmatically. It will no doubt be often adjusted in the light
of future discoveries. Vita-Finzi, in discussing the boundary between the Pleistocene and
Holocene, praised "the one virtue of an arbitrary date, namely, its arbitrariness." [4] I, too
have this final plea in mind.
In each planetary age there were celestially provoked disasters of water, fire earth and air.
Each age except Pangea developed cultures of its own, which it passed over partly to the next
age. The gods were different while being the same. The Greek "Aphrodite" had traits of an
original moon goddess and had many alternative names in many cultures; furthermore she later
become confused with Venus, the goddess, and also the planet Venus, which had its scores of
god-names too [5] . Jupiter was himself but partly Saturn too; the Chinese "Saturn" was a
thunderer who announced time by great noises, whereas the Greek "Saturn" gave time and was
called Kronos (Chronos) and the Greek "Jupiter" was especially Zeus, the Lightning-hurler, who
was also called the Thunderer. The Calendar is but a rough path chopped through the dense
thicket of early history.
THE NUMBER OF CATASTROPHES
Plato in his Politicus paints a mythical representation of what he indeed believed to be the
historical reality: that a supreme being directly controls the movement of the world ship
through boundless space; that the master skipper retires from time to time, leaving the ship to
founder in a sea of confusion; but then he returns to the tiller from time to time in order to
save the world from complete shipwreck [6] .
What can cause one to think that there was a set catastrophes rather than a single disaster, or
perhaps two? And why would a baseline for the set be placed at about 14,000 years ago?
Figure (Table) Nr. 7
Number of / Suggested Name Years before present Years B.C. to A.D. Duration in years Number of
memorial generations** Key events
0. Pangea Before 14,000 Before 12,000 ----Land-covered globe... Canopy clouds ...Greenhouse
world... hominids.. full shallow marine and terrestrial biosphere.
I. Urania 14,000 to 11,500 12,000 to 9,500 2,500 50 Deluges form ice caps and flood... breakup
of sky canopies ...homo sapiens schizotypicalis appears... ecumenical culture... Uranus-Heaven
religion.
II. Lunaria 11,500 to 8,000 9,500 to 6,000 3,500 70 Global explosion and cleavage... Moon
eruption ...ocean basins formed and filled...displaced continents ...biosphere quasi-
extermination... peoples isolated and fully traumatized...lunar worship.
III. Saturnia 8,000 to 5,700 6,000 to 3,700 2,300 46 Biosphere multiplies...cloudy
atmosphere...settled continents..expansion of regional cultures...rich technology...Saturn
worship.
IV. Jovea 5,700 to 4,400 3,700 to 2,400 1,300 26 Noachian shelf floods and high tides...
Lightning and cleared skies ... New ice caps form...severe seasons...dry climates... eastward
move ments from "Atlantis" to Egypt and E. Mediterranean...Empires form amidst widespread
conflict... Jupiter worship.
V. Mercuria 4,400 to 3,450 2,400 to 1,450 950 19 New global tilts...Apollo and Mercury
disasters...Pyramid age...large new civilizations in Mediterranean, India, China, and
Caribbean... Olympian family worship.
VI. Venusia 3,450 to 2,775 1,450 to 775 675 13.5 Devastation of globe by protoplanet
Venus...religions and cultures reduced and remodelled... Venus worship...large petroleum fall-
out.
VII. Martia 2,775 to 1,600 775 to 400 A.D. 1,175 23.5 Mars devastates Earth, Moon, and
Venus...warlike cultures promoted...Toltecs, Myceneans and Etruscans reduced...Mars worship.
VIII. Solaria 1,600 to 0 400 to 2,000 1,600 32 Settling of present solar system...
secularization, philosophy and empirical sciences...synthetic religions.
* Present is set at A.D. 2,000 By "years" is meant present solar years. Most of the dates are
speculative estimates, as all pre-historic dates must still be.
** Fifty years = One Memorial Generation = the number of present solar years of difference
between a presumed elderly story-teller (priest) and youngest members of the group who hear the
stories [1] .This is considered a truer measure of the transmission time between generations
than the "reproductive generation" which would be in the range of 15 to 30 years. In 14,000
years [2] there have been a total of 280 memorial generations.
Figure 8.
QUANTAVOLUTIONARY PRIMEVALOGY FITTED TO THOM'S CUSP MODEL OF CATASTROPHE.
René Thom has been instrumental in developing a new area of topological mathematics to describe
catastrophes. The above model is called the "cusp" model and is suited to portray phenomena as
varied as a typical stock market cycle of "boom and bust" and the model of the historical cycle
dealt with in this book, as here portrayed. Perhaps from six to twenty or more regional or
global cycles will ultimately be found to fit this model. In the drawing, the dotted line
pursues the course of human events from one disaster to another. After the disaster the human
mind moves against the scale of solarian pragmatism, then proliferates along with the biosphere
and grows confident, and enters a period of "blissful amnesia" and sublimation with many
practical accomplishments; then there is a short period usually, when the environment is seen
to be destabilizing, and finally there is a catastrophe. Afterwards, the survivors begin the
cycle once more." [3]
Catastrophism on a long-time basis is on its way towards acceptance in paleontology. The work
of the late Professor Otto H. Schindewolf of Tubingen University is remarkable in demonstrating
widespread generic and geographic destructions of phyla at the boundaries of the pre-Cambrian
and Cambrian strata, the Permian-Triassic strata, and the Cretaceous-Tertiary strata [7] . A
Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary catastrophe is also apparent [8] , as is increasingly the
Pleistocene-Holocene disasters of the "End of the Ice Ages." [9] The 14,000 years boundary that
is a major concern of this book is, of course, the last of these - the Pleistocene-Holocene.
But as the last chapter would suggest, we shall probably have to collapse the time intervals of
earlier catastrophes, perhaps even back to the Permian-Triassic boundary, if we are to use some
of the evidence that we think belongs in the past 14,000 years.
Further classifications of the age of mankind will need reconsideration. Today scientific
conventions are given over to discussions of "Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages," "Early, Middle,
and Late Ages of Bronze," and "The Iron Age". These referents are no more sophisticated in
their general configuration than those of ancient scholars such as Hesiod and Ovid. These
ancients furthermore introduce cycles of creation and destruction within each age and sometimes
a long linear or spiral development running through the cycles reflecting "progress" or
"degeneration." [10]
Although superior in detail, there is no great scientific advantage in the optimistic, linear,
evolutionary schemes of Frazer, Morgan, Engels, Spencer and others who perceived a rational
technological sequence moving from hominid to contemporary mankind, and whose ideas are
dominant in archaeology and paleo-anthropology today. Archaeologists and historians have coined
hundreds of local designations that are poorly coordinated, even after strenuous and
painstaking field and museum studies. Like geologists, they have produced a surfeit of types in
order to make local distinctions, and in the process have hampered theoretical integration.
All of the most ancient peoples reported that the world moved through time in a series of
creations and destructions. When the Spanish explorers encountered the Aztecs of Mexico, the
Aztecs were in their Age of the Fifth Sun; the earlier "suns" had ended in catastrophe [11] .
There is no exception; there could be none, until the present age. This age -- which is termed
here the Solarian -- combines a seemingly stable solar system with a science that has made
great technological progress by following a liner or uniformitarian theory, with a general
contempt for the ideas of early men. In dividing historical time, cultural change is the most
logical concept to use. Since ages must be arranged, let them be arranged by peaks of change
that correlate with peaks of catastrophism. Since ages will be given names, let them perhaps be
named after the sequence of great gods - those anthropomorphised expressions of disaster. For
when the human race was cast down, it was by natural forces; and the forces of nature
originated in the skies; and these forces were called gods and as such invaded the mind and
history.
But if the scientific community, sensitive to its public image, wishes to stringently avoid any
hint of association with astrologers, then an Age of Mars or an Age of Venus may be
embarrassing. How to rename the ages is in itself a political and sociological problem. (There
is still a U. S. cavalry long after the cavallo has disappeared in favor of machines.)
Whereupon we may resort to Roman numerals and speak of Holocene I,
Holocene II, and so forth to Holocene VIII. Probably no two catastrophists will agree about the
timing of the ages. They will agree that "energy has killed time" Some will then say "If such
is granted, I ask no more. It is acceptable to me if millions of years are used to fill in the
gaps between catastrophes." No doubt this view prevails among the scientists who are first to
leave the fold of uniformitarianism. Of these, certain writers ascribe the catastrophes to
extraterrestrial sources, such as Urey and Ager, others to internal stresses of the Earth.
At the other extreme of catastrophism would be scientists such as Donald Patten, who holds
closely to a time schedule permitted by the Bible. Calculating back from Biblical references,
he hypothesizes the Universal Deluge of Noah (caused by a near passing astral body) at 2800 B.
C. and then musters as much scientific evidence as he can to show that this is possible and
provable. Patten also matches up other catastrophic references in the sacred scriptures to a
set of dates involving planets Mercury and Mars between the Deluge and the seventh century B.
C. Moreover, he adds a pre-Deluge, astrally caused catastrophe sometime within 100,000 years of
the Deluge, that brought coal, oil, and other products and gases into the earth, and refers to
the outer planets as their source. Most astral or extra-terrestrial catastrophists, who see the
earth as victim of intrusions from outer space, believe that at least one great catastrophe has
occurred within the memory of man. Usually, like Patton, they assign this to the Great Deluge
of Noah and place the Deluge in the Early Bronze Age. Terrestrially-confined catastrophists,
as, in his archaeological works, Claude Schaeffer, rest simply upon the evidence of widespread
destruction by fire, flood, and earthquakes during the Bronze Ages.
WHY 14,000 YEARS?
The tentative date of 14,000 years ago is chosen to form the baseline of the holocence calendar
because the criteria and evidence of later catastrophes, if accepted and carried back, seem to
devolve into a set of catastrophes with a beginning around 14,000 years ago. Many natural
disasters seem to have been concentrated around that time, some of which are lumped into a
scientific fiction called "the end of the ice-ages." True human activity began to appear in
full array at this time, too, and human cultures seem to recall this period of their birth.
The calendar began with the evidence that I. Velikovsky brought to bear upon catastrophic
events in the first and second millennia B. C. There appeared to be scientific value in
considering the planet Mars to have been directly involved in disasters upon Earth in the
period from 777 B. C. to 687 B. C. and the planet Venus to have been a direct cause of grave
natural and cultural destruction in the period between 1450 and 776 B. C.
"One who mounts the tiger cannot dismount," goes the old Chinese saying so one was compelled to
reason that 1) other great gods had existed earlier, 2) practically all types of phenomena that
had occurred during the Venusian and Martian ages had been reported of the times of those
earlier gods, 3) a fully developed human mind and culture was indicated and implicated in these
earlier times, and hence 4) a series of catastrophes had occurred. Moreover, the earth had come
so close to total destruction in these episodes that the list of earlier episodes could not be
indefinitely long. It had to return to a baseline of a time of systematic stability. Therefore,
if Uranus by its many names seemed to be the end of the line of gods in all religions, the
system from which Uranus had originated had to be stable. this stable age before Urania could
be called Pangea, meaning that all the land was together then and all the world was land --
covered [12] . Then I turned my attention to the possible physics of a stable heaven that
could have preceded the sky of today. Finally a model of it seemed possible, which is described
in the next chapter.
In respect to the lives of the gods, multitudinous findings of very recent physics, nuclear
chemistry, geophysics, astrophysics, oceanographic and aerospace exploration have exposed an
unstable basis of nature that is congenial to the catastrophic view point. These could be
correlated with archaeological field work.
In the chapters to come, many revolutionary natural events can be shown to have occurred during
the periods following the Uranian and Lunarian ; but a heavy and primordial concentration of
disasters can be shown to have begun with the advent of the Uranian period around 14,000 B. C.
Vital to the establishment of the baseline and subsequent periods is chronometry. Here, as I
have shown, various fundamental weaknesses in the new highly touted radiometric dating
techniques are being exposed, just when these techniques have dispossessed the old geological
dating methods!
With respect to the beginnings of human nature the principle offered is one that most
psychiatrists are ready to accept: that human behavior is most compulsively regular on matters
that were once uncontrollably and disastrously irregular. An obvious signal of this great
obsessiveness of the non-instinctual primate called man is the sky-struck calendarizing that
seems to have preoccupied humans from the moment of their creation as such. All of these
calendars of earliest human cultures were short in years and began with creation episodes. It
is too early to assert that any revolutionary primevalogist has succeeded in organizing a
system around these perspectives. Indeed, scientific reconstruction is likely to occur first as
the failure of the established foundations of science, not as acceptance of a new system.
Conventional and uniformitarian scientists are overloading their camel until finally they will
add the straw that breaks its back.
Obviously, there is no single experiment, no body of science, no pre-existing general theory,
by which one could have proposed this schedule of events and, by so doing, could have satisfied
the demands of any single science, much less any established religion. A combination of new
methodological perspectives engendered the schedule.
In all of this work, one is trying to construct a new model of science on the inconsistencies
and irregularities of the old. To pragmatists and instrumentalists, it is not only heartening
but also easy to accept William James' often quoted remarks to the effects that from the
anomalies of an old science spring the theory of a new science. "And when the science is
renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what
were supposed to be the rules." [13]
Notes (Chapter Four: A Catastrophic Calendar)
1. Temple (1976) adduces evidence of the Dogons carrying "hard" astronomical facts for
thousands of years. Similarly, East Africans have distinct knowledge of iron-making techniques
that stratigraphy appears to prove go back to the early solarian (present era) or before.
2. C. Wells (1964); Miller (1970); physiological generation was half the present "western" time
down to modern times but most statistical studies of burial grounds show "old people" at the
extreme of the distribution.
3. For discussion of Thom's theory, see Thom (1977), Steen (1974) and Kolata (1977).
4. (1973) 47.
5. See also below, p. 178.
6. 272: 3, 273: 1.
7. Schindewolf (1963); Salop (1977); Lantzy et al. (1977); D. H. Clark et al.( 1977);
Golonetsky, et al. (1977); Newell (1962) (1967); Hatfield (1970). Schindewolf counters the
general argument that gaps in the fossil record conceal the fact of uniformitarian changes;
"the lowest percentage of gap in the strata in the whole of the history of the Earth would
occur precisely on the boundary between the Permian and the Triassic." (p. 20) Thus one of the
very earliest of uniformitarian and evolutionary as against quantavolutionary, defenses,
proposed by Darwin himself, collapses. Cf. Velikovsky (1955), 237-9.
8. Salop (1977) 30-1; Ericson et al. (1963).
9. Velikovsky (1955); Eiseley (1943) (1946); Flint( 1971).
10. Cf. Eliade (1963) 113 and ch. IX.
11. Mullen (1974) 41; Velikovsky (1950) 34 quoting von Humboldt et al.
12. Continental drift theorists, stemming from Seuss and Wegener, employ the term "Pangaea" to
mean the continental crust, when it was intact and surrounded by the existing oceans. Cf.
Sullivan.
13. William James (1896) 301.
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIVE: SOLARIA BINARIA
Searching backward for ever older memories of disasters brings one to a point where Uranus is
father of the gods and corresponds to a huge heavenly body. But what kind of body is it that is
close-in, luminous, draped by clouds after a period of imperceptibility, but nevertheless, from
its first perception, a second glowing sun ?
Contemplation of this problem leads to a conjecture: the solar system might have been a binary
system, which early humans could actually have experienced. "This is the heyday of the
cataclysmic binary," declares Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin [1] .
Among the earliest products of the human mind are certain legends, statements, and symbols that
may be interpreted to support the theory that a binary system occupied the sky. Most important
among these is the reported occurrence of a second "sun" that can be distinguished from the
present sun, a bright star, a nova, or the moon.
As late as five thousand years ago, in Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew and other cosmogonies there
is presented a heavenly body in the "North" that is luminescent by day and radiant by night
[2] . The body is accorded divine status, and is called by dozens and perhaps hundreds of names
around the world. Were it to be granted that the binary system could carry into the time of
observant mankind, then much proto-history that would otherwise seem to be nonsense will appear
to be probable.
The discoverable properties of star systems offer a number of indications that the solar system
can be modelled as a binary system. Existing knowledge of the solar system can be regrouped
around the concepts necessary to a binary model [3] . If in 14,000 B. P. our solar system was
multiple, it would be in the company of perhaps half of the star systems of the universe [4] .
Instead of one sun there would have been two or more suns orbiting each other. Of the nearest
twelve star-systems four are multiple, three of these are binary, and three of them have dark
companions that possess masses of 1% or less of the mass of the sun [5] . In this book, I am
not only postulating such a binary system as our own, but also am suggesting that it persisted
down to about 14,000 years ago.
Alpha Centauri A, a three-star system which, at 4.3 light years' distance, is our nearest
neighbor, has nearly the same absolute magnitude as the Sun, 4.8 as against 4.86 for sun. It is
in all ways, also, an ordinary medium-sized star system. Binary components frequently have
similar separations to the planet-Sun distances within the solar system.
"Has the Sun a Companion Star?" asked E. R. Harrison (1977). He wonders whether a slight
acceleration of the solar system detected by pulsar observations may be due to an orbiting
binary partner. "The companion star is presumably either a faint white or red dwarf in closed
orbit around the Sun, or a gas-accreting nearby neutron star or black hole in open orbit." [6]
Harrison adduces Oort to say that a cloud of comets extends a distance of about 10 5 A. U. and
this, he maintains, could envelop the Sun and its companion star.
Besides the Sun, there would have been a body that can be called Super-Uranus [7] . The
postulated system is here referred to as Solaria Binaria. Between the Sun and Super-Uranus
there would have to be a connection, a great axis of fire, an electrical current discharging
its powerful pulses across the axis of the binary. Figure 9 shows this and other features of
the system. An excessive charge on the Sun would occasion the current or arc.
THE MAGNETIC TUBE AND PLANETS
Around this gigantic axial current, a magnetic field would be induced. This field was composed
of ionized gases and contained a number of the chemical elements in atomic and molecular form,
including especially water in its three forms. The field rotated around the central axis.
Within the outer envelope of the rotating gases were a set of planets, including the Earth.
They had budded and grown there in the atmosphere of the tube.
Binaries can have planets [8] . Several binaries show exchange of significant clouds of
ionized gases between the stellar components. These carry both charge and matter. In Solaria
Binaria, hydrocarbons may well have been plentiful in the gases that passed from the Sun to
Super-Uranus.
Nearby binaries contain dwarf companions, a situation similar to Super-Uranus in relation to
the Sun. Such dwarf companions have sometimes been seen to flare up, that is, to briefly
resemble a small nova [9] . This seems to have happened both to Super-Uranus around 11,500
years ago and later to Super-Saturn around 6000 years ago, when it separated from Jupiter to
retire farther into space.
The inner planets rotated around the central "axis of fire" along with the gases of the tube,
in a motion that remains today as their rotation around their individual axes. The outer
planets were all contained in Super-Uranus. Earth, Mercury, and Mars perhaps retain this fossil
motion, whereas the rotations of the outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus --
are new rotations, as is the retrograde motion of Venus.
Figure 9 pictures Solaria Binaria as a "stacked" system where the planets spin like balls in
the gaseous medium that revolves around the central axis between the two binary bodies. The
axis itself wheeled around the Sun, on what will become the "plane of the ecliptic." On the
other hand, the Sun was losing, and finally lost almost entirely, its tendency to orbit around
its binary. Rather, it undulated "as if" it were trying to perform such a motion [10] , and
this motion is probably what Harrison, as indicated above, refers to.
The observed binaries of our galaxy are engaged in heavy discharge of gases among the members
[11] . This type of gaseous exchange is presumed here to have constituted the magnetic tube
between Sun and Super-Uranus. Since gaseous exchanges must be electrified and have direction,
it may be presumed that a current was discharging between the two binary bodies. This current
would be radiant and may even be the mysterious "central fire" referred to by the ancients and
specifically by Plato in his dialogue, Timaeus [12] . But, also, the rim of the magnetic tube
would alight with cooler, slower gases, admitting a luminescence to the contents of the tube
including the planets.
Figure 9 has Earth nearest the Sun and the other planets in positions unlike their present
ones. The Earth itself is considered to have moved least, and of having been closely passed by
other planets in recent history. The total distance between the binary bodies must have been
much less in those days. This is suggested not only because observed distance between present
binaries vary greatly and can be quite small but also because the ancients appear to have had a
knowledge of the planets and to havesuffered from interactions among them that indicate a close
ingrouping. The planets would have moved outwards because of changes in the Sun as an
accumulator and discharger of electricity.
THE BINARY PARTNER
Like the Sun Super-Uranus was a charged gas cloud with a high density but volatile core. It
might have contained about 4% of the mass of Solaria Binaria. It was not unlike the planet
Jupiter of today, save that it was radiant and may have carried much more water in its high
clouds. Indeed, on occasion, Jupiter has been termed a defunct or vestigial binary. Super-
Uranus could not be seen by the hominids of Earth, or by whatever aware beings may have existed
on its other planets if they had merely human vision. Its vast cloudy environment and the
intervening atmosphere of the tube disguised its appearance.
In Solaria Binaria the Sun had 96% of the total mass and more of the angular momentum than does
the presents Sun, mainly because it was rotating or, better, undulating around its partner. The
remainder of the mass, 4% in Super-Uranus, accounted for most of the orbital movement within
the system. The period of the binary was perhaps months long. (The earliest known calendars in
Egypt and Meso-America were of 260 days.) [13] Both the Sun and Super-Uranus exhibited rotation
around their axis. In the case of the Sun, the rotation was gradually reduced by intense
gaseous discharges and matter flowing from the star's equator. On Super-Uranus, the rotation
was increased as the electrified particle stream impinged upon its surface, whipping it like a
top. These particles arrived with great energy because they were continuously accelerated as
they flowed from the sun to Super-Uranus, whose potential was less negative than that on the
Sun.
Figure 9.
THE ORIGINAL STACKED BINARY SYSTEM (SOLARIA BINARIA)
(Click on the picture to view an enlarged version.
Caution: Image files are large.)
The average separation between binary components is 20 astronomical units [14] (20 times the
distance between the Earth and Sun today). However in some binaries, the partners are much
further apart, in other much closer together. The division of the total mass among the
components shows little pattern. "A mass ratio of about 1 to 20 could occur about 5% of the
time, and under such circumstances a solar system might form." [15]
The periods that binaries take to rotate about each other extend from the order of a day or
less to upwards of thousand years. The period varies inversely with the net interaction between
the two bodies. Thus, if the attraction diminishes, the period increases.
The planet Jupiter has a composition resembling that of a star much smaller than the Sun. It
had more star-like traits in the past, when it was at least twice as massive. From the
radiation it emits, Jupiter is thought to have a subsurface temperature somewhere between
12,000 and 50,000 C. Its chemistry resembles more the gaseous Sun than the inner planets, or
even its own satellites; it consists largely of hydrogen in various states, and holds some
water [16] . Furthermore, the chemistry of planet Saturn resembles Jupiter, lending support to
the theory that these two planets were once one. In Proclus, citing the Parmenides of Plato,
occurs a statement that Jupiter separated himself from Saturn; interpreted physically, this
suggests a fission." [17] There exists, in fact, much literature on the interaction between
Jupiter and Saturn, not only in Greek thought but also in other works of Near and Middle East
cosmogony [18] .
The high density of the inner planets suggests that they have had different careers than
Jupiter and the outer planets. Venus is an exception to be discussed later, but the others
probably existed long before Solaria Binaria began to disintegrate around 14,000 B. P. They
each could have supported many forms of life. The chemical elements were fully represented on
all of them, because the axial current of the binary circulated along the center of the gaseous
tube, literally an electrico-chemical factory. All of the planets would have had similar
climates.
Radioactive elements existed in great quantities, but under the electrical and magnetic
conditions of the great tube atmosphere, their rates of decay into other elements were high
[19] . This rapid decay, which diminished with the general de-electrification of Solaria
Binaria, may account for the great ages obtained in tests of radioactive minerals today; their
"decay constants" have continually and drastically slowed down.
Without recourse to the ancients, contemporary astronomers have come to the question, as D.
McNally of the London University Observatory put it, "Are the Jovian Planets 'Failed' Stars?"
"If they can be classified in this way." writes Eric Crew, " this means that any deductions
about Jupiter are likely to apply to the other gaseous type planets, Saturn, Uranus, and
Neptune. An event in one of these may also be linked to events in others, so the problem of
cosmic catastrophes is that much simpler." [20]
THE STACKED BINARY SYSTEM
Up to the moment, catastrophists and uniformitarians have conducted their debate on the premise
that the planes have always orbited close to the plane of the ecliptic. Whenever catastrophists
have invoked planetary or cometary deviations to explain titanic encounters, they have assumed
them to occur on or about the imaginary line that defines the orbit of the planet Earth about
the Sun. Thus, Venus is said to have been launched into an elliptical comet-like orbit moving
in or near the plane of the ecliptic when it created havoc amongst the inner planets [21] . All
the collisional mishaps that might have occurred to other bodies -- the meteoroid impacts upon
Mars, Mercury, Moon, and Venue, the creation of asteroids from Apollo -- were also supposedly
events of a single plane.
A new developmental theory is offered here. It is compatible with quantavolutionary theory and
solves simply many important problems, so that I do not hesitate to advance it now. This
possibility describes how a binary system reduces to a solar system in the time of humankind.
In its primal form it was a stacked binary system where the planets ringed and revolved around
the axial electric current that ran between the Sun and Super-Uranus. The magnetic forces
circulated around this same axis. The axis is in its present form the plane of the ecliptic.
The present planetary rotations are derived from their primeval motions around the old
electrical axis. If today the planets are slightly off the axis, and stray slightly around
their average position, these are probably ghost motions of their much larger historical
rotational orbits.
The planetary orbits that ringed the great axis of fire descended to their centers on the axis
that once linked the Sun and Super-Uranus. Thus the electrical system was transformed into what
appears to us as an inertial system. I say "inertial" because explanations of motions within
the solar system of today are described almost entirely as inertia (with electrical forces
admixed as circumstances demand them). The laws of gravitation describe the existing motions as
if they had come down unchanged from a uniformitarian past. Not "cosmos without gravitation,"
as Velikovsky once put it [22] , but gravitational laws without gravitation. The axial
rotation orbits of the Pangean planets were proportional to their size and to the intensity of
the local electromagnetic current density within the axial tube connecting the binary
components. The current would everywhere be uniform. The local current density could vary. The
farther from the Sun and hence the farther up the tube, the smaller the diameter of planetary
rotation. The planets were enveloped in the outer gases of the magnetic tube, which also were
their primordial atmospheres. Heat came from the gaseous clouds in which they were enveloped,
and indirectly from the axis of fire, as well as from the great binary bodies.
The primeval human observers could see the incandescent light produced by the central current.
The more dense gases near the axis glowed like a huge interrupting neon arc. The perimeter
gases of the magnetic tube were probably also radiant. People could not see the Sun or its
binary partner through the clouds. The axis of each planet was aligned parallel to the
electrical axis; thus the equators all faced the binary axis. The axes of the Sun and Super-
Uranus were perpendicular to the electrical axis; as cathode and anode they exchanged
electrical current between the closest points on their equators.
DECLINE OF THE ELECTRICAL SYSTEM
The source of the electricity of the system was, and is, cosmic, principally galactic, which,
using a mechanism described by Juergens [23] , would have charges built up in the corona of
the Sun being continuously discharged along the tube to Super-Uranus, which was less negatively
charged. The magnetic current whirling around the electrical current was directed oppositely.
The planets within the gaseous tube shared its potential which, like Super-Uranus, was lower
than that of the Sun.
The charge on the Sun had "always" been diminishing, owing to a steadily decreasing input
current from the millions of other discharging bodies within the galaxy. Little by little, over
a long time, its ability to radiate along the line of current thus diminished. Today the
magnetic field of the Sun, carried as the "solar wind" into billions of miles of space,
stretching even beyond the planet Pluto, is a greatly diffused relic of the great Pangean
binary axis current. It presently covers a wide band that strikes into space far above and
below the plane on which the planets orbit, and may even be circumglobal; in any event, the
band is wide enough to have at one time encompassed the axially rotating planets [24] .( see
Figure 10.)
The solar flares that are so important a part of solar behavior, and planetary behavior as
well, occur largely between the surface and the corona of the Sun. They develop new sunspots
within hours, are immensely energetic, and often penetrate the corona into over 500,000
kilometers of space. The radiation and particles they emit affect the Earth's atmosphere and
possibly its motions. Gribbin and Plagemann significantly titled an article in 1973
"Discontinuous Change in Earth's spin rate following great solar storm of August 1972." Often a
surge of gas accompanies a flare. Often a single flare, and many occur, has enough energy to
provide theoretically a million years of electric power for the whole Earth.
"The physical causes of flares are still unknown, though it is believed that the energy
released by a flare.. must come from the intense magnetic or electric fields associated with
the solar active region." [25] Bruce describes the Sun as sending out arc discharges
continually from its photosphere [26] . The arcs fall back, in my understanding, and become
the glow discharge of the chromosphere, because there is no longer an anode binary and a great
enough voltage gradient to project the arc through interplanetary space. The solar behavior
recited here may be sufficient to understand how I have come to construe the present solar
system as a fossil binary, viewing the electricity and gases of the solar flares as "attempts"
to reestablish the ancient current, transporting the radiation and elements that the original
current carried.
Figure 10.
MAGNETIC FIELD OF THE SUN
Finally the motions of Super-Uranus were affected as the charge it was receiving declined. As
the central current lessened, the power within the magnetic tube, which depended upon the
strength of the current, also began to lessen; the planets began to convert their axial
rotation into self-centered rotation. They moved toward the diminishing "central fire." That
is, their angular momentum about the central axis was converted into an angular momentum based
about their planetary rotational axes.
The planetary atmospheres cleared partly because of a general lessening of density of the
magnetic gases and because of deluges of water from vapors once more evenly distributed within
the magnetic tube. Individual planetary atmospheres became separate. From Earth, Super-Uranus
began to be seen in the North and the Sun in the South. Super-Uranus, much nearer to Earth,
would, if at some 20 million kilometers distance, appear as a colorful live body twice the size
of the sun or moon today.
THE BREAK-UP OF SUPER-URANUS
Super-Uranus had been rotating rapidly, whipped by the charged central current like a spinning
top. Now it began to slow its rotation and break apart. Great electrical disturbances resulted;
meteoroids penetrated the gaseous region of the binarian axis even as they exploded into
farther space. The planets moved away from the Sun even as they were receiving more direct
radiant energy from it.
Uranus Minor, a fragment produced as the larger body exploded, arched through the solar system
along the plane of the ecliptic. This initiated the first of the set of catastrophes that
dominated the recent post-Pangean history of Earth, the Lunarian disaster (about 11,500 B. P.).
Uranus-Minor passed the Sun, lunged farther into space, then returned to the system, no longer
aligned with the other planets on the axis of the binary, but orbiting along the plane now
defined by the present solar system.
Super-Uranus (or "Super-Saturn" it should now be called) continued to fragment as it slowed
further. In the next great catastrophe (6000 B. P.), it blew off its charged surface shell and
fissioned. It became a nova. Vsekhsviatskii, Director of the Kiev Observatory, has described
such an event, ascribing it to a time of 100,000 to 500,000 years ago and claiming that some 10
25 grams of material, much of it ice, was erupted into space, bombarding the planets and
exciting secondary volcanism everywhere [27] . It is probably significant, that, as Shklovskii
and Sagan wrote: "It now seems very possible that all novae occur in close binary systems."
[28] When novae occur luminosity increases and the expelled mass is about 10 -4 to 10 -5 of
the mass of our Sun. Saturn has .02859% of the mass of the Sun [29] . The expelled minor
portion of what was Super-Saturn retreated into farther space, where eventually it became the
present planet Saturn [30] . The Earth was deluged with water. The major part of post-
explosion Super-Saturn became Jupiter. It maintained its position at the end of the axial
current of Solaria Binaria.
The new planet Jupiter's rotation was erratic; its temperature cooled; its charging wind was
drastically reduced. Yet it was still the most electrified of the planetary bodies. Jupiter
attempted to reestablish its electrical line to the Sun. Sometimes discharges from the Sun and
Jupiter would actually make contact across the vast spaces, but the lessened potential made the
intervening gas a poor conductor. Only upon occasion did the discharge resume; when it did it
wrought destruction upon the Earth, which was closing its orbit around the diminished
electrical axis. Earthlings viewed these discharges with consternation.
PLANETARY BEHAVIOR
The Planets reacted to the drop in electrical power in the gaseous magnetic tube by moving
inward towards the present plane of the solar system ecliptic. Their axial rotational speed
changed into self-rotational motion. The hemisphere of the Earth that faced towards the
disintegrating binary was increasingly illuminated as the gas clouds disappeared.
When the time came for the Earth and other dense planets to transform their minor orbits into
individual rotations, they changed the tilts of their axes. The circum-current orbit of the
equator described the circular motion of its minor orbit; thence the Earth's poles were
perpendicular to this orbit.
But, as the Earth moved in upon the dying central current, its equator slowly shifted to the
solar ecliptic. Its poles also shifted until they became nearly perpendicular to this plane, as
did the poles of the other planets. Since the guiding reins of the central current were
exceedingly loose now, individual axial tilts became possible, and did occur on occasion; a
strict rule of perpendicularity could not be enforced.
The change from Solaria Binaria would be eased by electrical transitions, which are smoother
than mechanical ones and by the quantitatively transforming binary atmosphere; hence the Earth
would have been protected against sudden wrenching changes of motion and abrupt temperature
changes of an utterly destructive kind.
The clearing skies brought the other planets and the binary bodies into view; they became the
cynosure of the human eye in its infant self-consciousness [31] . The binary side was the
boreal region, the north; there man saw first super-Uranus, then later Saturn; each in his turn
ruled the world. The greatest drama of human history was observable; the birth, struggles and
deaths of the gods, From the skies came fires, stones, waters, and also winds.
Why all the planets, having once lost their original circular orbit around the Sun-Super Uranus
axis and having moved back and forth on the solar ecliptic plane, should then have reassumed
almost circular orbits around the Sun in a plane now perpendicular to the "old" axial orbits is
explainable [32] . Circular orbits, taken alone, are a mystery that conventional astrophysics
has not yet considered. Even an original circularity was unexplainable under Newtonian laws of
gravitational motions. My answer is speculative but all that has been said here necessitates
it. The answer is dictated by electrical behavior which dominated the solar binary.
Gravitational forces can maintain stable elliptical orbits because of the interaction between
orbital inertia and centripetal attraction. In a closed system electrical forces cannot.
Charged bodies in an electrical field will give up to, or take from, the field whatever charges
they need for electrical equilibrium, changing all motions necessary in the process.
Gravitational fields are conservative. An electrical field does not yield a conservative field.
All of the movements depicted here represent the change from a highly charged electrical system
to a low-charged largely inertial system. Electricity is still vital to the system and not only
because it produces heat for the Earth. If the galactic electrical sources were denied the Sun,
it would collapse upon itself, as would the low density planets. Neutralized, bodies of the
system would continue to orbit but purely by inertial attraction, not much different from that
which we now observe but without excess radiation and interplanetary plasma. Then the solar
system would be truly a fossil system.
In all of these hypothetical adjustments, the Earth maintained "miraculously" smooth phasing in
the transition from Solaria Binaria to the solar system (but, of course, every unpredetermined
survival is a miracle). People on Earth would actually have observed all that the ancients
claim to have observed and left us as myth. Earth and all other planets would have suffered
damage in varying degrees at the times claimed in our analysis.
COMPLETION OF THE TRANSFORMATION
As long ago as 1952, Otto Struve described a fast-moving series of events occurring in the
Pleides star-cluster, particularly, Pleione. With unconscious irony, the article was called,
"Pleione -- A Story of Cosmic Evolution." [33] By 1905, this star had been observed to lose
mass, by minor fissions perhaps. It maintained a very fast rotation, 100 times the rotational
speed of the Sun. Then in 1938, Pleione acquired a ring. In 1952, gaseous atoms began to flow
with increasing spread outward from the photosphere and reversing layer. They filled an
envelope, developed a shell, and then the whole of it disappeared into outer space. The ring
had disappeared.
Struve conjectured that the observed sequence was common, and that massive material is lost in
space thereby. The process is less violent than novae, Wolf-Rayet stars, P Cygni and SS Cygni
stars. Payne-Gaposchkin's comments on the nova cycle make clear that although there can be
discerned phases of the Pre-outburst, outburst, and decline to "normality," every nova is
different. "Novae... cycles (if any) must be reckoned in centuries [34] . Even in the outburst
phase, novae have observably varying behaviors. In the present transform model of Solaria
Binaria, we are allowing more time; we discern several novas, and we grant the near total
disappearance of the huge atmospheric tube that was the birthplace of the planets and
biosphere. Only the Earth's atmosphere, the interplanetary plasma, and some vestigial planetary
atmosphere remain.
There is some coherence between this scenario of events and the writings of Bruce, Velikovsky,
Rose, Vaughn, Juergens, Milton, Crew, T. Gold, Eddington, Vsekhsviatskii, Ovenden, Bass, and
other modern writers, not all of whom are catastrophists, much less supportive of a short-time
scale. It is not of incidental significance that astronomers (for instance, Sagan, Isaacman,
and Dole) [35] have calculated and published, seemingly without reason or because "the
exercise is thought to be suggestive", sets of profiles for "alternative planetary systems."
They line up and distribute groups of planets in altered masses and positions along the plane
of the ecliptic, and exercise they are compelled to perform despite no conscious theoretical
justification for engaging hours of large-computer time to make the simulations. I would say
that their results suggest that the order of planets, their masses and their evolutions vary
greatly; there are many simulations to be performed, guided by an appropriate theory. One such
theory is the system advanced here: that of a largely electrical binary system, transforming
(under the eyes of humanity) into a largely inertial-electrical system and redistributing
bodies, motions, gases and charges as it evolves.
THE WORLD OF PANGEA
Life on planet Earth flourished in the binary system. The circumference of the globe was less
then. The ocean basins were absent. Mountains were absent as well.
The globe was luminescent but not brightly lit, for the Sun was not visible as such. The skies
were always cloudy, and the clouds dropped fresh water, usually in condensations. Occasional
rains replenished shallow seas, swamps, and ponds. Hundreds of miles above, a canopy of waters
diffused the celestial light. This canopy sky became part of the traits of the great god
"Heaven" or "Uranus" to the first true humans, as will be detailed in the next chapter. The
Moon was absent from the sky. The climate was equable and warm.
The atmosphere contained oxygen and supported a nitrogen cycle. Most of the species of today
existed. So did dinosaurs and nimble hominids. Ecological development proceeded according to
uniformitarian principles of a competition for survival. But the extinction of a species was a
rare event. So, too, was the birth of a species. As a condition gradually changed, so changed a
ratio between and among species; a biological equilibrium was maintained, without abrupt
interruption.
The crust of Pangea was sial, heavy in silicon and aluminum elements, as is the crust today.
Its depth was uniform; at about 30 kilometers it developed, but very gradually, into heavier
silicate magnesium mixtures (sima). Great sedimentation had occurred. It amounts now to 5x10 8
km 3 or 1.3x10 24 gm., [27] but twice as much was on the original crust of Pangea. All the
recent vulcanism, seismism, and crustal churning has added little to the sial, for the magma
below is not provided with the materials for its manufacture.
There is no evidence that the oceans have destroyed and buried continental material, or could
have, since the sial and its sediments are lighter than the sima of the ocean floor. In
Rittmann's work on volcanoes, we find the following words: "Since the subcrustal magma is not
capable of providing sial by differentiation, we must conclude that little has been added to
the sial since the beginning of geological history." [36]
If this mass of land had been accompanied from the early assigned ages by the oceans and ocean
basins, it would not have eroded into the sea, for the sea normally pushes back erosion [37] .
An exception is the mouths of rivers, but river deltas explain only a small fraction of the
vast continental shelves and slopes. The fossil marine beds that are found upon the land today,
even high up in the Himalayas, are once-flooded land-beds or they are Pangean shallow water
formations. They are the relics of deluges, tides and certain risings visited upon the world by
post-Pangean catastrophes. There are few fossil marine beds laying conformably upon plutonic or
basaltic sima. The ocean basins did not have to exist to explain them today. Both the uniform
and equable climate and level topography of Pangea were the results of a uniform equable
atmosphere and a stable solar electrical system. Both ended suddenly.
THE SKY-WATCHERS
That the solar system was originally (in Pangea) a Solaria Binaria seems to be evidenced by the
most ancient memories of humanity. First came the high clouds, a canopy system. Then came the
"planets", actually first the dark sun primary, Super Uranus, with several nearby bodies. Then
appeared the true Sun and the Moon, at roughly the same period. Finally came the stars and
constellations, as the skies largely cleared.
Earliest homo sapiens or "intelligent human" was a sky-watcher but not a star-watcher. The
stars were a later revelation. He watched first the rupture of the canopy, then the heaving off
and break-up of the dark, enormous Super-Uranus, then the nearby occasionally lit up Saturn-
Jupiter, then the Sun and Moon, then the fiery all-conquering Jupiter and thereafter the stars
and the progress of the constellations. The stars developed as creations of the planets and
became their creatures, minions, stopping places, and mnemonic markers.
If the skies had been always as they are now, the Sun and Moon would be portrayed early and
alone, they would have been the chief gods, and they would have been benignly worshipped, if
worshipped at all. The Moon, inasmuch as its birth was attendant upon disaster and its presence
was obvious, was more significantly worshipped than the Sun. Over time, its worship became less
schizophrenic and paranoid, less brutal, than planetary worship. Still, since its origins were
more startling and its apparition more varied, it has been a more powerful and disturbing
divinity than the Sun.
The Sun grew upon the scene gradually. It was wreathed in gas clouds at first. The clouds let
it through more and more distinctly. For a long time it could not be seen in the "Northern"
hemisphere that pointed its pole at Super-Uranus.
Helios, the Greek sun god, was treated familiarly, sometimes almost with contempt. Generally he
was respected, well-liked, and rarely gave offense. If the more terrible gods effaced him or
displaced him, he resumed his unceasing round as soon as he could or after a period of
persuasion by the gods. Unlike the planetary gods, who shone fearfully at night upon many
occasions, he shone only by day. He never visibly exploded. He did not throw fits ; he did not
frighten people to death. For these reasons, one must doubt the theory that the catastrophes of
Earth were owing to solar inconstancies that worked upon an otherwise orderly planetary system.
If the stars would have appeared as they now appear in the clear night skies, then earliest
calendars would have been sidereal. No primitive time-reckoners used the rising of a star to
measure a day and a year. Yet it is easiest of all to calculate under today's bright skies.
Some scholars have sought star calendars. The Egyptians, for example, were supposed to have a
Sirius calendar; more likely, Velikovsky argues well, this was a Venus calendar. The Egyptians
give the earliest indications of understanding sidereal time, but they first used a lunar, then
a Venus, and then much afterwards a purely solar calendar.
The reasons for a calendar were originally to watch for bad happenings in the sky and celebrate
their non-occurrence or their anniversaries as good-evil ambivalent events. Only later and
secondarily were calendars applied to pragmatic ends as, for example, saying when to plant
seeds or collect tribute.
Since the stars appeared dimly and with apparent irregularity, at first and until the Age of
Jovea, there was no chance of developing a map of the heavens. The constellations were unknown
until about 5000 B. P. Nor, therefore, could the sidereal movements be plotted against time.
When, on occasion, observers exclaimed at the movements of the stars, the movements that they
referred to were movements of the Earth on which they stood. The ancient late Saturnian
analogies in legends of the rocking mill, the rocking churn, the ashwood rotating firestick,
referred not to the precession of the ecliptic but to the wobbling to and fro of the polar axis
over a short period of years upwards to a century or more, following a catastrophe.
When later the Great Pyramid of Ghiza was built (ca. 4500 B. P.), the regular movements of the
stars on the celestial plane were known but not necessarily the 26,000 year precession of the
equinoxes. Saturn, as god of the North, had been dethroned. The earliest navigation might
follow coastal lines, and then the newly emplaced Moon would permit guidance. The stars were
later used for geometry and navigation. But they were not worshipped. The Great Pyramid itself
was oriented toward an apparently stable star that then marked the boreal opening, by this time
correctly regarded as the North Pole. The North Pole, that is, was operationally defined as the
earthly point corresponding to the celestial point marked by the stationary star.
Any boreal star might serve that did not move, and this would mark the celestial North Pole and
correspond to the geographical North Pole at that moment in time. Then a structure oriented to
it would change its geographical "true-north" orientation only if the ground on which it stood
moved. However, the Earth could (and did) shift afterward; and the Earth might even turn
completely reversing "north" and "south"; still the geographical North would remain the same.
The Great Pyramid points, within several minutes of error, to the present geographical north
pole [38] . Hence, the only possible changes of the ground on which it stands would occur (a)
by an improbable sliding from one position at one time and a sliding back into about the same
position later, (b) by any amount of longitudinal movement - that is, east and/ or west (which
would preserve the north polar orientation), and (c) by the aforesaid several minutes of
deviation observable presently in the orientation of the Pyramid, which, if it happened all at
one time, would have been a considerable disaster from interrupted rotation and earthquake, or
as an earthquake settling the lithosphere after a past catastrophe. Subsumed under the last
clause is the possibility that the Earth's shape was not yet accommodated to the approximately
1500-year-old tilt of its axis which would have required an emergence at the old poles and new
equatorial region and a flattening at the new poles. However, as stated above, the chances
would always be good that, if the Earth's axis tilted, some star would show up to be the "North
Star" so far as the orientation of the Great Pyramid was concerned.
EARLY ASTRONOMICAL IDEAS
Evidences of even earlier orientations of the first geometricians to geographical north are
important indicators of a boreal hole in the cloud canopy, which centered invariably upon
(unless it was somewhat magnetically affected by the magnetic pole) the geographical north
pole. Thus, even without stars, the skies encouraged a science of geometry, surveying, and
navigation to achieve some development before the skies could be mapped.
None of this could happen before mankind had become aware, and employed symbols. The theory of
Plato's Timaeus affords significant evidence of the thought processes that might have been
employed by early human astronomers. It demonstrates the proper role to be assigned to the
development of primeval mankind.
As the planets became visible and their effects forcefully experienced, their behavior was
studied. It was observed that the planets, gods, that is, visited among the stars. According to
the Pythagorean and Platonic theory, each human soul dwelt embodied upon a planet. If a good
person, his soul would find its star. Each human should had such a star. If bad, he was
reincarnated in a woman's form and successively "lower" forms until he arrived among mere
turbulent elements. But, by regaining control of the turbulence through the exercise of
rational faculties, he might return to his star.
Depending upon its navigational scheme, each planetary boat had its own ports of call among the
stars. The stars and constellations became known by the spectacular events that occurred when
one or another planet was visiting them. The planets, too, and therefore the gods, were tied in
story and myth to the stars. Thus planet Mars, the "Fox star" Era (Alcor), the third deluge,
the Pleiades, Ursa Major, Achilles, and the Fall of Troy are all intermingled in Greek and Near
Eastern mythology. "There are, indeed, too many traditions connecting Ursa and the Pleiades,
with this or that kind of catastrophe to be overlooked." [39]
Having ordered the heavens and settled the fate of man in relation to the heavens, so goes the
platonic myth, the Demiurge retired and "the time machine was switched on." This would have
been Super-Uranus (Ouranos, the god of Heaven) in the first age of splendid light. Then, as
Taylor interprets the Timaeus, "the subdivision of the circle of the Other into seven, to
correspond to the planetary orbits, is a fresh and subsequent procedure on the part of the
Demiurge." [40] This would be the beginnings of individual planetary motions, observable by
mankind, and would occur in the age of Saturn.
Hundreds of stories of the travels of gods and heroes, although they appear to take place on
Earth, "actually" take place among the stars and represent planetary movements, uniform and
erratic. Von Dechend learned this lesson after spending a year among 10,000 pages of Polynesian
myths [41] . The bloodiest and most terrible stories deal with planetary gods when the planets
are misbehaving, acting even more erratically than usual. Myth and legend are almost always
anchored in earlier world ages, if not in the dawn of mankind [42] . The contents are
elaborated, obscured, even deliberately edited, but their forms and force come from the
aboriginal events that they sought to report. The Odyssey of Homer, for example, is sung as a
story of heroic travels after the Trojan Wars on an East-West Mediterranean axis. I would place
its immediate events at around 695 to 675 B. C., its framework in the two centuries preceding.
A second underlying framework, however, may go back to earlier north-south travels from
Scandinavia to Nigeria, when the morphology of the area was much different, that is, across low
"Alps" and along a "Saharan Sea." [43] The Arcadians, most ancient among the Greeks who had
maintained a political community, "pro-Selenians" who had existed before the Moon, came from
the areas of the present day Po Valley and Switzerland and may have pursued this axis of
commerce.
But I have identified Odysseus as an alter ego of Athena, the great goddess, who is also
identified with the planet Venus, as will be seen. So he is a celestial traveler too. The
routes are employed by real cultures, but at the same moment they correspond to celestial
travels of gods among stars. The "cosmic" ancient paths of England and other countries, that do
not take short and easy routes, are probably celestially influenced, as well as electromagnetic
[44] .
SUMMARY REFLECTIONS UPON THE CHANGING WORLD SYSTEM
Over some ten thousand years the heavy-body motions of Solaria Binaria transformed into those
of the present solar system. The composition of interplanetary space also changed. The process
was begun as the breakdown of an electrical system that then took on the additional features of
a gravitational disruption. Many life-forms may have existed on other planets. But except for
the possible continued existence of viral and bacterial forms elsewhere, only on Earth was a
rich biosphere preserved and transformed.
The "exceptional" unexplained features of the present solar system support a stacked binary
system theory - the differently oriented "fossil" axes of planets: rotational differences;
binary behaviors of Jupiter; certain qualities common to the group of inner planets and others
common to the group of outer planets; the presence of an electrical character of the solar
system today which is only partially governing but could have been fully governing; certain
"librations" and eccentricities of planetary motions; the futile efforts of solar flares to
establish an interplanetary arc-current, except for the solar wind which behaves like an
interplanetary gas and reaches to farthest interplanetary space; the varying orbital and
rotational speeds of the planets; the very existence of the plane of the ecliptic which
resembles a dead wire; the small deviations from the dead wire plane; the fact that the planets
do not orbit in conjunction .
Comets seem to be of recent origin; so do the bodies of the meteoroid and asteroid belts; so
indeed do Mercury, Venus, and Saturn and by extension perhaps all planets - features which are
acceptable under the postulated model.
Ancient beliefs and observations are compatible with the postulated natural history - ancient
knowledge of the physical traits of the planets; legends of the behavior of the gods;
confirmation of ancient astrology and of Stoic. Platonic, and other philosophical beliefs.
Certain contemporary theories are also compatible: on the sources of and the ravaging of
atmospheres; the variety of elements found on the planets; the heating and cooling of the
planets; and the order of the inner planets.
Reasons are found both for resemblances and differences between the sun and the outer planets
in their chemical composition, behavior, and temperatures. They may be rotating as turned-off
dynamos in part.
Causes of the revolutionary mass extinction and creation of species of flora and fauna become
clearer.
The history of the solar system appears to be thenceforth more in line with the gross
electrical and explosive behavior of the stars, galaxy, and universe. Concepts of gravity can
describe a stable system but what disestablishes a system introduces electrical dynamics.
One can cope with the evidence that more than one comet, or planet, such as Venus was involved
in disruptive behavior. The binary, theory explains why all bodies would have to move. Even the
sun would have lost its undulating movement almost entirely following the dispersal of the
focused binary mass.
There is no ancient comment or legend that describes the solar system a it is; there are many
statements as to what it was; the binary system theory is a better reconstruction of the system
as it was anciently discussed.
The presence of a heavy atmosphere - the magnetized gas tube - up to the end of the Jovian
period is seen to have provided an electrified environment for many major events.
The planets moved out into space, increasing their orbital diameters gradually, as they moved
nearer to the central current (now "the ecliptic," which is a motion in space) and were blown
by it towards the Jupiter node. But the movements were spacing out in both directions. The
ultimate spacing may not be incomprehensible; the intervals may follow "Bode's Law," or a type
of the same, as the result of the expulsion of the outer planets into farther space. Bruce in
1944 asserted that when formed by fission in a nova, the separation of binary stars increases
gradually [45] . The process of spacing out had begun with the original supernova of the sun,
which has produced the binary system in the first place.
The idea that the planets were much more highly charged before than they are today receives
support, as do the phenomena (and disasters) that occurred when they were losing their charges
to other bodies and to inner and outer space.
The break-up of "Apollo" is more explainable under the present theory than before. Ovenden's
proposal that a planet of 90 earth masses existed in the present asteroidal belt until some 16
million years ago invoked only a completely conjectural intruder as the cause of its explosion.
More of Apollo's fate is described below in Chapter Nine, as is the behavior of Jupiter.
Jupiter still gives signs of instability in its surface features, clouds, temperatures,
satellites and motions. This is in conformity with the binary theory.
Electrical "machines" operate less explosively during phase shifts than mechanical "machines".
This may help to explain the transition from one system to another without total explosion
except in an outright collision. The "Principle of Least Inter-action Action." recently
introduced by Bass and Ovenden to explain planetary spacing movements, has much more the
connotations of electrical dynamics than gravitational dynamics in it. (The "principle" is
merely definitive, not analytic; it holds that solar system bodies tend to position themselves
so as to minimize possibilities of collision.)
Solaria binaria as an electromotive system resembles strikingly the human inventions of
electrical motors based upon electrical principles [46] . Perhaps the solar system today can
also be represented - as an electrified inertial system. Little in existing theory of the solar
system and its history stands against a new binary theory. The latest discoveries about solar
system behavior, as related in the final chapter of this book, seem, indeed to invite a radical
change in conception.
Notes (Chapter Five: Solaria Binaria)
1. (1977) 669.
2. D. Talbott (1977); Gibson (1977); D. Cardona (1977); Tresman and O'Gheoghan (1977).
3. The history of the solar system before 14,000 B. P., but including as well as a thorough
development of these pages, is being prepared by Earl R. Milton and the present author.
4. Batten (1973); "Binaries" Ency. Brit. (1969) 586-95; Jordan (1971) Appendix; Temple, 225;
Ransom (1972) 16 ff; Shklovskii and Sagan, 149-50; Scientific American, "The Solar System" a
number by now greatly exceeded.
5. Shklovskii and Sagan, 150.
6. Harrison, 325.
7. Super-Uranus is named for Ouranos (Greek) and Uranus (Latin) father of the gods, and not for
Uranus, the present-day planet, accidentally named so (and discovered to have rings in 1977),
but the planet Uranus is deemed here to have originated out of Super-Uranus, like the other
major outer planets.
8. "Binaries" (1974) Ency. Brit.
9. Liller, 352. This report of the important discoveries concerning the dark primary in
relation to AM Herculis (a white dwarf) pictures the gaseous exchange between stars in a way to
add plausibility to the model of solaria binaria which I had drawn the year before.
10. Shklovskii and Sagan, 150 and Figure II-6 on the wavy, undulation orbiting of binary
components. The Sun's complex sections rotate variously and there seems to be no way of
determining whether any parts of these movements are eccentric, anomalous motions of the
gravitational-electrical barycenter. Gribbin and Plageman (1974) write (p. 130): "The orbital
motions of the planets, in addition to generating tides on the Sun, also move this star in an
irregular special orbit about the center of gravity of the entire solar system. This movement
has a distance of twice the solar radius; it generates centrifugal or coriolis forces that may
disturb convection within the Sun itself."
11. Bruce (1975).
12. Timaeus and cf. L. Rose, in article to be published in Kronos 1980, on Philolaos.
13. Coe (1975) 14-5.
14. Kuiper, quoted Shklovskii and Sagan, 155. But Encyclopedia Britannica "Binaries," (1971)
595e gives 10 A. U. as the average separation.
15. 595e.
16. But see Juergens (1976); "The bulk chemistries of both Jupiter and Venus are now unknown."
(15) Its mass could contain a rocky core of some 40 earth-masses or else would have to achieve
a metallic hydrogen state in large part.
17. Proclus (1953).
18. See de Santillana and von Dechend, seriatim. The great astronomer-astrologists divided the
major epochs of history into 800 year periods, based upon conjunctions of "fiery triplicity" of
Saturn and Jupiter (399-400).
19. Sykes (1978).
20. Crew (1976), I S. I. S. R., letter, 24-5.
21. Rose and Vaughan (1972).
22. Velikovsky (1946).
23. (1972).
24. NASA, News release 1977, based on data radioed from Pioneer XI. As predicted by Velikovsky
in 1946 and verified by Pioneer XI in 1977, the magnetic field of the Sun extends beyond Pluto.
25. Ency. Brit. v. 17, 807.
26. (1944) 6.
27. (1962) (1967).
28. 149.
29. Ibid. Bruce (1944) 9.
30. Shklovskii and Sagan discuss "runaway stars" that are cast into space with a "slingshot
effect" when their primary body supernovas (157-8). Our theory here calls for several such
"effects" over several thousand years. Anthropologically and mythically, this would be the
likely source of the fundamental psychological and theological "deus otiosus effect," the
retired indifferent god.
31. Isaac Vail (1840-1972), at the end of the 19th century, drew the most brilliant picture of
the clearing heavens and their effects upon man. His citations are unfortunately incomplete
because his original manuscript was destroyed in a fire.
32. Sherrerd (1972); Williams (1971).
33. Struve (1952).
34. (1977) 672.
35. Sagan (1975) 11.
36. 265; 206.
37. Donnelly (1883, 1971) 78-9.
38. Walter Sullivan, "Study of Pyramid hints on Earth" New York Times (February 28, 1974);
Tompkins (1976).
39. Santillana and von Dechend, 386.
40. T. Taylor, ed. and trans., The Timaeus of Plato in re 36-d-6 of Timaeus.
41. Santillana and von Dechend, X.
42. Eliade (1954).
43. Research hypothesis recounted to the author by Livio Stecchini.
44. Michell (1969); Underwood (1969).
45. (1944) 13, presenting data from Russell, Dugan and Stewart, II Astronomy (1938) 703-4.
46. The electromagnetic theories of Juergens, Bruce and Crew appear to be consistent with the
model of Solaria Binaria, and are to be preferred to the usual history of the solar system as a
gravitational model. ;
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIX: THE URANIANS
The Hindu history of Super-Uranus can be told now, the Greek history later.
In the beginning, there was Vritra, a covering and restraint upon the Earth, and later on
Vritra had as allies the Vritryas, who were demons of heavenly turbulence.
Heaven, who was Varuna, lived with Earth in a common house. Varuna was an enemy of Vritra, his
heavenly antagonistic principle.
Varuna and Earth gave birth to Indra. At first Indra could not be seen. He was concealed. He
was fed soma until he grew so great that he finally blew heaven and earth apart forever,
filling the atmosphere with his brilliant self.
Indra, with thunderbolting Danavas, and the Adityas of Varuna, defeated the Vritryas.
"When the fight was over it became apparent what the Adityas and the Danavas had been
quarreling about. For out of the shattered mountains, or out of a cave, or variantly out of
Vritra's belly, emerged the cosmic Waters, motherly females who liked to escape confinement.
They came out now like lowing cattle, flowing over the body of their former restrainer and lord
Vritra, to acknowledge Indra as their new lord. And astonishingly, the Waters were pregnant,
and their embryo was the Sun." [1]
All took their place; "the systematization and regulation was known as rita (rite), which means
etymologically 'set in motion' and has the idea in the Rig Veda of cosmic truth or order." The
profound meaning of the word "rite" is suddenly apparent here; religious rite is aimed at
rehearsing and repeating the original cosmic order so as to support and control it by physical
means. I understand Varuna as the original benign and intimate heaven of Earth. The Vritryas
are the dragon-like monsters of the falling skies. The Earth's surface is destroyed in the
first struggle of the gods. But Indra appears between Heaven and Earth, the first sun, in an
increasingly visible atmospheric space. Waters fall abundantly, running off the new wrinkles of
the Earth. The sun arose out of southern waters. Creation was next, but humans were already
created, else they would not be watching the chaos.
Now we compare this Hindu myth with an analogous but distinct Hindu myth. The world was dark
and asleep until the great Demiurge appeared and scattered the shades of darkness. He then laid
the seed that became the golden egg, which, when hatched, gave forth himself, Brahma. It is the
same creation.
The metaphorical history of the Cosmic Egg [2] is not a different or unique event. In a close
parallel to the Hindu cosmogony, the Greek heard one version of creation in Hesiod and another
version in the Orphic rites. Other cultures also had two versions of creation, one of which was
the Cosmic Egg. The Dogons of the Upper Niger region put twin creators within the Egg.
Before the Cosmic Egg, a universal chaos is pictured. Translucent mixtures of light and
darkness are sensed in the sky; Heaven is close to Earth, if not identical with it, as an
eggshell encloses its egg. The human mind sees itself as within the Egg, which is cracked open.
The Demiurge who has hatched himself is Super-Uranus who presides over the now opening
universe.
THE DESTRUCTION OF PANGEA
According to the scenario of the last chapters, Solaria Binaria would be transforming at a
rapid rate, some fourteen thousand years ago, with grave consequences to the proto-humans of
Earth. The cause would have been a reduction in the particles and electrical charging that the
Sun had been obtaining from its galaxy, whose expansion was proceeding then as now. The Sun's
activity diminished, and with it decreased the Sun's gaseous engagement with its less luminous
binary star, Super-Uranus. The ratio of electrical motions to inertial motions working upon
Super-Uranus declined. Its rotation was disturbed. Its orbital velocity diminished. It became
unstable and began to fission. At least two novas occurred, one to produce Saturn, the second
to bring about Jupiter. Fragments constituting of today's Uranus, Neptune and Planet "X"
(should it exist) were ballooned out into farther space. By retiring they might remain intact
as gaseous cold planets, whereas, if close-in to the Sun , they would have collapsed. In
retiring, they disturbed the dense inner planets.
On Earth, the first period of these events is called Urania. It would perhaps occupy on the
scale of present time the years 14,000 to 11,500 B. P. The geography of the Earth then is
diagrammed in Figure 20 and its eventual patterning forms the matter for the accompanying
table.
There would commence a bombardment of Earth material discharged from Super-Uranus. A regime of
Super-energy displays would occur, occasioned by slight interruptions of Earth motions. Hot
spots and explosions would develop beneath the land in place; small ranges of mountains and
hills would be folded or thrust over other land, creating minor basins and many stream
channels. Erratic gaseous discharges would penetrate the atmosphere and extinguish life forms
in increasing numbers of localities. Great fires would be set in a world that scarcely knew
fire before.
We are just at the beginning of a worldwide hunt for signs of meteoroid falls, whether small or
large bodies. The amount of cosmic dust on the Earth is now known to be huge. The separation of
cosmic fall-out material from volcanic material in the sedimentation of the Earth is a large
task that chemical geology is now assuming. V. D. Niemann of the U. S. S. R. has calculated,
from present fall-out rates, that the globe must have acquired enormous deposits of cosmic
particles since Creataceous times so that its diameter has increased by a factor of 2.6 and
gravitational intensity of the Earth increased in proportion [3] .
Again, the seductive idea of constancy must be contradicted; under Solaria Binaria, the Earth
would have grown at a much faster rate, then the rate would radically diminish to its present
state when it is still considerable. However, the cosmic dust is only one type of fall-out and
belts of debris around the world may turn out to be largely deposited from catastrophic fall-
outs. According to B. Y. Levin. "The hydrocarbons in cometary heads must have played a part in
forming petroleum and in the origin of life." [4] Meteoritic material falls in complex
patterns, even in the same shower, In one Russian shower, a 343.8 kg stone struck with
incomparably greater force and effect than a 440.4 kg stone [5] . A stream of giant meteoroids
would probably not set up a linear spaced pattern of impacts with proportionate depths and in
circumstances to permit easy discovery and survey.
After one calculation, based upon meteorite flux data and relations between meteorite mass and
size of crater, it was concluded that the number of craters discovered is far below
expectations. Though only 50 to 100 are known, 130,000 "should" exist from the past years. "The
gross discrepancy" must be accounted for both " by erosion and by the masking effect of younger
sediments and metamorphism of older terranes." [6] Or, one might add, by the admission of many
new candidates to the club, such as Hudson Bay, the Bermuda deeps and Carolina bays, just as
the great Ishim crater was recently described. Or that great crustal thrusts, floods, and other
revolutionary events masked the craters. Or that (a) meteoroids in Pangean time were few, (b)
then they were very many in the holocene, and (c) they are now much fewer.
By our theory, therefore, Urania witnessed the first chaos of the proto-human environment. As
Super-Uranus prepared to fission and to retire, the magnetic tube weakened and the secondary
orbits of the dense planets were reduced in diameter around the principal axis of the system.
The Earth lost charge, and close-in sky vapors began to condense and fall. Also, holes were
chopped in the adamantine heaven - by the creator God, Panku, says the Chinese legend. These
would be extensive meteor bombardments, many of them of ice. Great lightning discharges struck
between canopies, clouds and land surfaces, with sporadic deluges. The sky waters descended,
gathered into clouds, and cooled the near-in atmosphere. The land waters overflowed. Heavy
winds blew for the first time.
THE ICE DUMPS
Where were the immense ice caps of the ice ages during this time? It will be recalled that
geology is fixated on the gradual advance and decline of ice caps and many glaciers over a
period of a million years. The present ice cap is usually regarded as a retreat phase of the
ice that descended into the United States and Europe and regressed only some 10,000 to 20,000
years ago. However, today, one encounters fairly often the belief that the last ice age ended
rapidly with destructive floods and the extermination of some species.
In a succeeding volume, I discuss the larger questions of the ice. Here two possibilities are
viewed favorably. One is that the ice caps only recently appeared - during Uranian times when
the heat of Super-Uranus and the binary electrical axis began to dwindle - but that before the
Earth could be covered with ice, Super-Uranus novaed and the Lunarian catastrophe to be
discussed soon, dumped most of the ice into the new oceanic basins.
As a second theory, the ice was dumped, not formed on the Earth, as a phase of the
disintegration of Super-Uranus. It was distributed erratically in the neighborhood of the poles
and on the new mountains, whence most of it descended into the hot new ocean basins, directly
or from the land.
The latter speculation permits the discovery of unexpected ice-free locations. For example,
Vilks and Mudies have analyzed a sedimentary core raised off the Labrador coast. In an area
that has always been believed to be part of the heavy ice cover of the pleistocene, "an ice-
free ocean may have occurred as early as 22,000 years before the present." Hitherto, reports
"imply that the Labrador Sea was locked in year-round polar ice." Furthermore, "the pollen
spectrum indicates the continuous regional presence of terrestrial vegetation during this
time." Sedge, shrub and tundra were growing densely nearby [7] .
The C14 dating may, of course, be basically faulty. But then the whole theory of the ice ages
needs to be reviewed. Or else, the 22,000 years should be collapsed to a post-Saturnian age
after 6000 B. P.
Alternatively one wonders whether the ice cap may have been a scattered set of accumulations
from sky drops and brief frigid episodes. This would allow a reconciliation to some degree with
those who, like Donnelly, argue that the ice ages are a myth and their "remains" are comet-
deposited gravel in fact, and also with those scholars such as Cook and Hapgood who envisioned
large caps, global tilt, and an avalanche of the ice perhaps ten thousand years ago.
THE CREATION OF MAN
(see Figure 11 and accompanying chart)
Amidst the developing chaos, the hominids were being replaced by the human race. A growing
population was being reduced even as the species itself realized its human qualities.
Atmospheric conditions and the surface environment were unfavorable to survival. Inconstancies
and radical changes in the air accompanied explosive seismism. Most species were greatly
reduced in numbers.
The evolution of man, which Johanson, White, the Leakeys, and others have contended to occupy
four million years, saw little change until it was quantavoluted by disaster [8] . The human
species began the period as a stupid hominid but speedily acquired a human nature. The hominid
of Pangea entered the first age of gods, the age of Urania, with a pananimistic brain. Given a
merely excellent primate capability of categorizing types of reality, it could not do more than
regard all the world as more or less alive, judged in relation to its own locomotive and
sensory scale. It could feel well or ill, coddle and train its young, heap up protective
barriers, judge and even bury its dead, and go through a variety of obsessive and non-
instrumental self-appeasing and other-appeasing action, which, if viewed from the perspective
of self-aware man, might appear to be spiritual, but, if seen from the zoological standpoint,
would be construed in the framework of such animal behaviors as bee dances burying bones
chasing one's tail, hallucinatory dreams, or biting oneself in frustration.
The human sprang from changed radionics of the atmosphere invading its physiology and from the
effects of intense prolonged terror. A split personality was born, essentially a self-
awareness. The new humans depended upon delusory projections for survival against grave
anxieties. A grasp upon memory and feeling for time erupted with self-awareness. The sign and
symbol spread. Systematic recollection developed. Memoria is daughter of Uranus and mother of
the muses, including history, who is Cleo: so writes Hesiod. Group history, and therefore
collective futures, commenced. Invention, creativity, planning and institutions then grew. All
of this frenzied human development and activity occurred in the sight of the great god
proclaimed Uranus. The Urbild, as the Germans call the primordial image, was Uranus, the origin
of the very word.
Figure 11.
HUMANIZATION IN CATASTROPHE.
A. Hominid under Catastrophe
B. Catastrophized Human
CHART A.
THE GESTALT OF CREATION AND ITS AFTERMATH
PRE-CREATION MIND ORGANIZATION OF THE WORLD IN HOMINID FORM
A.
Low-powered environmental forces are operative.
B.
Hominid is un-self-conscious and has fully-functioning instinctual reactions.
C.
Individual concentrates its life energies upon physical well-being and sociability.
D.
Individual possesses simple tools, makes signs, and co-operates with others.
E.
Perception, cognition and affection are governed strictly by a single coordinated instinctual
being. Only rarely and temporarily are they "distorted". No animal (hominid) no matter how
bizarre or self-destructive its behavior (induced by disease, chemicals, or trainers) ever
thinks to itself: "I can't believe what I am doing!"
F.
Assume a population of bands, a reign of natural terror (massive traumas), and distraught
faunal populations.
(Problem now set is: How does a human become created and survive successfully out of this pre-
creation setting?)
FIRST PHASE: GESTALT OF CREATION
A.
In a quick circular reaction the following occurs: High-powered environmental forces are
unleashed in sky and earth. All senses are bombarded and radionic storms change the atmosphere
and invade organisms. Physical well-being and sociability are practically destroyed.
B.
Instincts are generally blocked in a frozen terror and/ or by microseconds delay in
neurological transmissions along brain hemispheres.
C.
Schism of the self occurs in one or a few hominids. Effective but persistent efforts "to unite
the soul". Proto-decisions are required for self-control. D. Memories are intense. Memories are
also suppressed in the struggle for self-control (ego versus alter-ago). Selective recall and
forgetting spring into being.
E.
The alter-ego is used to displace terror onto other people and the threatening natural forces.
(That is, the primordial being does not know whether he is "talking to himself" or "talking to
others.")
F.
The ego begins to communicate with itself by displacement and projection, and having begun the
process, extends it to all subjects of displacement.
SECOND PHASE: REORGANIZATION OF THE WORLD IN SCHIZOTYPICAL FORM
A.
High-powered forces continue and impress senses with destruction, chaos, and imminent return.
B.
Perception, cognition, and affection are pliable (less instinctive) and are generated under
conditions that mix up all kinds of phenomena of the triple-fear and triple control system of
the person (fear of self, fear of others, fear of gods-nature).
C.
Principle imprints on p, c, a (above) are blocking (amnesia, catatonism); compulsive
repetitiveness; and orgiasm (destructiveness, wild expressionism). These imprints of the new
world order of the schizoid mind operate within the individual, between and among individuals,
and between individuals-groups and divine or natural forces.
THIRD PHASE: THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULTURE
A.
Persons and groups, so as to control fears of self, others, and the object-world (animated),
B.
And to obtain subsistence, affection and the reduction of tensions.
C.
Organize their perceptions, cognitions, affects, and energies,
D.
Through the mechanisms of memory (amnesia and recall), displacements (associations and
ultimately sublimations), compulsive repetition (rites, rituals, rules and routines), orgiasm
(aggression and nihilism), and communication (by behavior, signs and symbols),
E.
To work upon materials and resources of selves, others and the object world,
F.
To set up all behavior patterns ranging from informal to rigid, including the (1) regime of
language, (2) religious rites and structures, (3) compulsive modes of coping with subsistence,
sex, and conflict, all of which bear the stamp of the aforesaid needs, fears, and mechanisms,
but assume variegated culture-forms depending upon the "mix" of history, no matter how brief
the history,
G.
And exclude or punish, "unaware," "sinful," or "sick" persons or groups who, in relation to a
particular culture mix are deviant (i. e., have too much or too little of the key ingredients),
H.
Which deviants (e. g., "schizophrenics") must fashion "mixes" of mechanisms and displacements,
such that the number is great but represents and resembles in every case the peculiarity of the
culture where it emerges.
The theology of creation everywhere holds that man was created suddenly, as he is, without
previous existence. Quantavolution would also maintain that man was created suddenly, as he is,
without previous existence as a human, but with a previous existence as a hominid, similar to
this present physiognomy in so many respects as to be indistinguishable except for one thing.
That thing is what theologians and the human race has always called a soul. But to my thinking,
that soul is the inward turning of the new psychology upon itself -- self-awareness. And the
link to divinity was historically inescapable. As the soul, or the split person looking at
himself or herself, was born, it observed itself as born and in the company of a great active
sun that was the most spectacular feature of the whole world. That form became the principle
god and creator of the new human. Now here is the enduring connection between the religious
world and the factual world and it explains why quantavolution in all of its previous
manifestations cannot be so far from traditional religion as evolution and uniformiarianism
have always been.
RELIGIOUS BEGINNINGS
All new human nature came forth within a framework of time-based, terror-obsessed, and symbol-
stressing behavior. Religion occurred in the human mind as the essential mediator among sky
events, Earth events and human events. But if religion was the mediator, the gods were the
arbitrators and major actors.
The first manifestations of theism must satisfy the following criteria: self-awareness,
deliberateness, collective memory, future-control, symbolic connectiveness with the religious
object. These are closely implicated in the gestalt of creation that was described above.
The manifestations must then reflect and operate upon the condition of creation, namely,
uncontrollability and rapidly intensely changing environment, and the ensuing terror brought on
by the numerous expressions of high energy forces.
In addition, since great environment changes occurred in different patterns, irregularly
staggered, and over successive time-periods, the manifestations of theism must follow suit and
display these identifiable events by correlated theistic events. We begin the correlations in
this book, but the task is beyond our present capacities.
Finally, the manifestations, according to the theory of affective results already elaborated,
must, in the religious context, as in all others result in striking developments of catatonic,
obsessive, ambivalent, aversive, anhedonic, sublimatory, and orgiastic behavior - that is, a
delusive schizophrenic psychology of the universe. All of this forms the subject of a volume to
come.
PALEOLITHIC RELIGION
It is a conventional belief, quite disproven by Marshack, that "whereas Paleolithic art
provides abundant evidence of primitive man's concern both with his own kind and with the
animals which constituted his main source of food, there is apparently a complete absence of
interest in the physical environment – no representations are found of the heavenly bodies, the
sun, moon or stars." [9] Of course the uniformitarian, evolutionist model of thought would
prefer to believe this, but in fact the leap to humanity was for the hominid a leap directly to
gods.
Marcel Baudouin, in two articles of sixty years ago, joined the paintings and the artifacts of
the upper paleolithic caves of France into a convincing demonstration of the "astralism" of
their creators. We cannot expect linguistic explicitness in modern terms. As Leroi-Gourhan
reminds us, "How would a visitor from another planet distinguish between the Christian lamb
pierced by a sword and the bison struck by a lance?... Prehistory is a kind of clay-headed
colossus. ever more intangible as one goes up from the ground to the brain." [10] Direct sky
imitations -- showing a radiant solar image - are available (see figure 12) from periods that
immediately succeed the paleolithic, or perhaps are different cultures of the same time.
All the requirements of a religion can be supplied by the earliest humans. Age by age, from
Urania to Solaria, the picture emerged, changed in details, and moved into the next great
scene. In the middle Saturnian "Golden Age," the later Martian age, and the Solarian age, a
considerable world peace occurred, leading to the simultaneous development of humanitarian
religion and free, creative and skeptical cultures of considerable extent and duration.
Figure 12.
RAYED HEAVENLY BODIES.
Definitive periodic light appeared in the age of Saturn. Circles are rare in early art. These
from the Mesolithic (or Possibly Neolithic) caves of Spain (Source: Marshack, 343-4) are among
the earliest that may depict a heavenly body.
The heavens had become alive. Beyond the blankets of water that had driven mankind from its
vegetable swamps onto the highlands and into the caves, could be dimly perceived the giant body
which was menacing the human being. The monster was alternately splendidly colourful and
turbulently dark. It would rest ominously and then tear out chunks of its own body and cast
them far and wide, some of them into the bowels of the Earth. It would hide itself and then
descend like a great blanket upon the trembling Earth whose sounds of dismay and protest would
become deafening.
Santillana and von Dechend wonder what to make of "the baffling Mesopotamian texts dealing with
gods cutting off each other's necks and tearing out each other's eyes." [11] But these sane
authorities would agree with all other historians of religion that wars of the gods and self-
mutilation by the gods are part of every primordial cosmogony. Our preferred solution is that
the high energy expressions of the world in those earliest human days wrote the first scenarios
of religion.
Brandon writes [12] : "It is surprising... that the earliest recorded cosmogonies seem more
concerned with accounting for the origin of the world than for that of mankind or of the
animals." To me this is a necessity, not a surprise. The origins of the quantavoluted world
were inextricable from human origins.
BIRTH OF THE HEAVENLY HOST
The effects of the breakup of Super-Uranus were felt throughout the globe, but the
representations of the events themselves were watched best through the polar openings [13] .
The primal scenes of the gods came then from the lands of the Hyperboreans, dwellers of the
extreme north. However, the northern direction spoken of refers only to the geographical north,
based upon the axis of spin of the Earth. The plane of the ecliptic in early primeval times was
drawn between the solar equator and Super-Uranian equator; the poles of the planets-to-be were
stretched along the same line. The view through the Boreal Opening revealed, in the north, the
bodies of the Super-Uranian complex. At first Super-Uranus appeared casting his cloak of heaven
partly aside to reveal himself. And around him were the satellites and stars.
His throne was the aura of northern lights and was imitated by earthlings down to the present
day; it was also the sacred altar upon which sacrifices were forever to be offered. The altar
stood also for the arch, for a four-columned portico holding up the heaven, and for a number of
other ideas. The heavenly host of the Boreal Hole gave humans their holy city, Jerusalem, and
started utopian planning on earth.
Visibility was sufficiently good in the early days to understand that the grotesque occurrences
surrounding the throne of Ouranos were connected with the breaking of holes in the solid
ceiling of the earth and the crashing explosion and burial of giants and gods upon the Earth.
Divine men and women came from these bodies, many the ancestors of the surviving humans. So it
seemed. In Greek legend, the children of Ouranos who were known as the Cyclops were probably
named after the eye-holes that began to pierce the canopy, letting in the far Sky and each was
of monstrous proportions because the holes were often the scene of large intrusions of
meteoroids upon Earth. The connection of men and gods could be attested to by the observable
physical facts of the sky as dealt with by symbolic projection. It was a psychological
mechanism of which much is to be said later on.
The fervent wish for order brought forth the goddess Themis eldest child of Ouranos. Themis
warned her sire of his approaching end, and he responded by bringing down the canopies to
smother Mother Earth and by burying their children in the bowels of the Earth. Themis lived
long enough to become the reluctant bride of the master of law and order, Zeus, marrying the
order of the canopied age to the order of the bright skies.
Urged to revolt by his mother, Gaea, Kronos, last son of Ouranos, seized upon a flint sickle of
jagged edge, resembling too the fingered arch of the enlarging boreal opening, and rallied his
siblings to dethrone the father. The horrendous revolt splattered the blood of Ouranos around
the world. The pillars of heavens toppled, the skies fell, and out of the prolonged explosions
that filled the skies for centuries with water and dust, and through the vapory atmosphere that
still encircled the globe, appeared Kronos (Saturn in ever-increasing sharpness of detail.) To
the end, Saturn remained a god of the northern regions and was supposed always to dwell there
in retirement, among the frozen seas that marked the new Jovean ice age. It had been his
father's place before him.
EJACULATIVE LANGUAGE
To the monster, Ouranos, who seemed to cover all the air above with its body and capes,
humanity responded with terrible words seared into memory: names, imprecations, ejaculations,
commands. The earliest names must have been the same among the first humans [14] . Ten
thousand years later the names varied. The being later on was T'ien (heaven), to the Chinese,
an active Heaven, "the Accomplisher." He was Coelus or the Concealer, and, later, also was
Uranus, (heaven), to the Latins. In Graeco-Roman myth, he is pictured with a great spreading
cape of clouds, as in Figure 13. The ancient Hebrews called him Shamayim (" heaven" or "the
there waters") and Elohim. To the Scandinavians, he was Bor; to the Sumerians, Nammu; to the
Hindus, Varuna (" the surrounder," "the concealer," the watery and fiery god of day); to the
Egyptians, Nun, the primordial watery chaos of the sky (see Figure 14). And so on to other
ancient peoples [15] .
Carli writes [16] : "Uranus is the same as Uren a name that, divided into the two elements of
Ur and En, reminds us of the word man and sky. Actually Ur-en signifies Celestial-man: that is
the sense of these two celtic words. That is then how Saturn becomes son of Heaven. But Uran or
Uruan has almost the same meaning in America and Ethiopia." That is Saturn may mean "son of
Uranus," in accord with the legend.
Figure 13.
TYPICAL DEPICTIONS OF URANUS AND SATURN.
Plato gives to Ouranos the names Kosmos (the "World") and Olymos, and says that this god gave
mankind numbers. Ouranos turns about his stars, displaying his jewelry. He is the eighth god
"who moves in the opposite direction to all those [the sun, the moon, and the five planets],
but not carrying the others with him, as it might seem to men who know little of these
matters." [17]
How would Super-Uranus have given mankind numbers? First of all, because humanity was created
by him and spoke language owing to him. Coeval with words, or at least with drawings, may have
been numbering. But I think it may especially be true because the skies opened up directly
because of him. With the opening of the skies and the direction of North fixed, and the four
pillars of the world defined, the purposeful orientation of humans began. By number, Plato
probably means the science of numbers. Stecchini, reflecting upon his studies of ancient
measures, commented that "the first problem of man was to organize the space around him." [18]
Surveying began; settlements imitated "the heavenly throne and city of Super-Uranus." Paths
were drawn on the Earth that traversed routes combining subterranean emanations with heavenly
routes of the gods, giants, heroes, and animals [19] .
The first god was the living sky and the bodies wrapped in and emerging from it in the
perception of newly created humans. Every people had its shining heaven and regent of Solaria
Binaria, a combination of rim of the magnetic tube, the central axis of fire, the unseen Sun,
and the activated Super-Uranus. As Figure 15 suggests, the myth of the mating of sky and earth
excited concrete images in Egyptian tombs and on Magdalenian bones. In the Greek myths of the
creation following chaos, Hyperion (" Lights") existed before Helios (" Sun"). Both the Sun and
Moon are grandchildren of Ouranos and children of Hyperion and Thea [20] . Also, in genesis,
light came before the sun and stars. In the Pyramid texts, the earliest extant mythological
account, the moon is not prominent in the already then old cosmogony. The texts originate in
the Mercurian period (Thoth is the Egyptian god) probably between 4480-4137 B. P. So we think
that the Moon was present but cannot be identified.
Figure 14.
HIEROGLYPH OF NUN:
THE EGYPTIAN FIRST GOD, THE 'ANCIENT ONE, '
'THE FATHER OF THE GODS'.
Figure 15
THE MATING OF THE SKY AND EARTH
Figure 15a.
The embrace of the Sky and Earth -- Nut and Geb. A widespread and long-lasting myth holds that
originally heaven and earth were close lovers and ultimately were separated for various reasons
that can be related to the end of an age and catastrophism. Earth is often feminine as in
Hesiod's Greek Theogony, but here in the Egyptian version of about 3000 years age (Tamenill
Papyrus) is masculine figures (b) and (c) are attributed to the hunters of what is today
southwestern France and too some 20,000 and 17,000 years ago. Heaven is perhaps represented by
bulls, a common legendary reference. The images are close, exciting the question whether they
are closer in time than is believed. In any case, the preoccupation of early thought with the
mating of sky and earth is seen here in art, as elsewhere frequently in legend.
Figure 15b.
Bison and Birdman Composition, Lascaux Cave, Southwest France. A Bison with a spear on or in it
hovers about a prostrate semi-human, both with erect phallus; a bird on stick; possibly a
broken lance. A Rhinoceros to the left has six dots behind it.
Figure 15c.
Engraved Reindeer Bone of Bull and Pregnant Female, Langerie Basse, Southwest France.
The hind quarters and phallus of a bull hover over a naked pregnant women facing up. Rendering
is by Piette, pictured in Marshack. Dated conventionally to Middle Magdelenian (14000 B. P.?).
Marshack asks: "Does this composition depict a myth of the pregnant goddess in relation to a
horned animal which may be a sky symbol. (p. 320)
Chaos itself was everywhere an undifferentiated order preceding the cracking of the heavens and
the first self-awareness of humans, at which point "chaos" as it is known today, a world of
horrifying disorder, began and was stamped upon the mind of man, its first perceiver on the
occasion of its first perceptibility. The Exponential Principle was applied to man.
ECUMENICAL CULTURE
Celestial religion began as intense preoccupation with the behavior of the gods and as the
imitation of that behavior as the new humans saw and understood it. Spoken language began
immediately in the band and spread quickly by breeding of the human genetic type and imitation
of these by close genetic relatives.
"As we follow the clues - stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures - a
huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold
where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it. This is a true
edifice...." So do de Santillana and von Dechend generalize the archaic ecumene [21] .
There appear now to be a great idea of anthropology and its contradiction. The most ancient
humans shared a world view which was too particular to be independently contrived in many
places. We watch the first true humans spreading around the world rapidly. Now it is possible
for the concept of diffusion to explain the archaic consensus; the original diffusionists were
also the first humans. Otherwise we should have to resort like the evolutionists to some theory
of independent invention of ideas and practices among humans who had been separated for
hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Or else we should have to say, with some
Jungians, that our rather specific images are genetically transmitted. Furthermore, we would
assert that the similar celestial occurrences of later on are seen quasi-universally and
interpreted on the basis of the original ecumene.
THE EXPANSION OF HOMO SCHIZO
Before the age of Urania ended, and despite frequent disasters, the original band had expanded
into several millions of individuals. Crude pictographic symbols, capable of naming the objects
of the world, were widespread. Sculpture and painting united the gods to humans. Like the gods,
the humans were terrible and restless. They moved aggressively about the globe, like
evangelists, offering an instrumental memory, symbols, discipline, tools and explanations to
all creatures whom they encountered, and death or slavery to all that were incapable of
receiving tutelage from the newly created ones.
King were designated. (The Pharaoh is born in Nun, says the Pyramid text [22] . Why, we ask,
in heaven and not, like Athene, from the brow of Zeus?) Thousands of settlements were founded.
Polos (the boreal hole or axis of the cosmos), polus (the end of the Earth) and polis (a city),
unite the concept of an original heavenly regime located at the polar opening, the original
Heliopolis (" the City of the Sun" to later sublimated Solarians, actually the "City of Super-
Uranus") [23] . Rocks and trees were hewn into structures and tools. Animals were trapped and
herded. Clothing was fashioned of skins, vines and fibers. Medicine was practiced. All of these
processes were connected with religion. The distinction between ritual and pragmatic procedure
was rarely made; all that was "useful" or "functional" was made part of religion and indeed, so
far as the human was aware of, had never been anything else but religious.
The question arises whether the homo sapiens schizotypicalis of Urania quickly invented
agriculture or whether our theory must follow the conventional progression of hunting and
gathering, domestication of animals, and then after many thousands of years, agriculture.
Unequivocally, compelled both by the logic of our quantavolutionary model and by the crescendo
of new studies of early farming, we would assert the concurrency of hunting, gathering, and
agriculture with the first human times.
Let us take only one very recent study for example. Christine Niederberger, basing her
conclusions upon deep excavations in the basin of Mexico, on which Mexico City is presently
situated, argues that agricultural development was part of the sedentary life of humanity in
the highlands as early as or even earlier than it emerged in the coastal area of Mexico [24] .
I would say that the contest is a pseudo-competition: humans quickly civilized and
agriculturalized both highland and lowland. We have simply been unable yet to unscramble the
succession of catastrophes that affected now one, now the other locale. As everywhere else in
the world, the Mexican excavations are plagued by the hiatuses that occur at intervals,
denoting catastrophes, an inadmissible theory to most contemporary anthropologists and
archaeologists. One day, like the Nile of Egypt, the central high basin of Mexico may become a
centerpiece for pursuing the fate of Holocene humanity.
Even though much of all that is known today became known to these first people, creativity was
fearfully and fanatically tied to controls, not liberties. The burst of invention came because
it was an age when so many ideas were new - written upon the tabula rasa of human experience -
rather than being changes from a settled routine or rite.
Almost nothing of the worldwide and prolific activity of earliest Uranian humankind is to be
found, or if found, conclusively identified as of this Uranian ecumenical culture. Rather, one
is impelled to accept its existence out of a deductive logic - that the human race had to be
originally a single band, which created an inventory of myths, inventions, objects, and
practices that were shared by people of subsequently different cultures.
OLD AND NEW WORLD CONCORDANCES
We begin then with a single species homo sapiens schizotypicalis, who is a melange of hominidal
races and who develops a single ecumenical culture. It follows that this species found its way
to the wide reaches of Pangea, and that the "Old World" and the "New World" as well as Oceania
had once their Uranian humans and will, with luck and hard work, exhibit them as fossils.
Because of the Lunarian and perhaps subsequent catastrophes, descendants in straight line may
not be present everywhere. Still, it is now easier to believe that the people of the Americas
are far older, in direct or in intermediate descent, than the 12,000 years that have been
conventionally allotted to them. Numerous older dates are now assigned; one authority,
MacNeish, would allow 100,000 years to mankind in America [25] . Stone tools dated at 100,00
years were discovered in Western Australia lately [26] .
By the quantavolutionary calendar, humans everywhere show indications of having participated in
the earliest Uranian culture. We need not argue dates, but only cultures. Furthermore, no
matter how complete a catastrophe, every subsequent period of our calendar can encompass both
people and interacting cultures everywhere in the world.
Regarding the similarities observed between American mythology and classical and Hebrew myth,
Max Fauconnet writes: "Does this mean that Humanity was once upon a time reduced to a little
group of individuals who later spread over the earth, bringing with them their legends which
they altered through the centuries in accordance with new climates and new habits? Or, as seems
more probable, are all these legends a confused account of great events on a planetary scale
which were beheld in terror simultaneously by the men scattered everywhere over the world?"
[27] Thus - in the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology!
There would appear to be proof already of a shared culture between old worlds and new, even of
cultural divergence from a possible common ecumenical culture. There is a variety of materials
indicating prehistoric contact between Asia and America, little of it suggesting the
conventional theory that humans arrived in the Western Hemisphere by the Bering Straits
passage. For example, C. J. Riley has edited numerous essays dealing with Man Across the Sea,
purportedly the latest wisdom on long-distance cultural diffusion to and from the Americas. In
it, I. Sorenson presents a long list of probably diffused common or related general and
technical traits. Relying also upon Hewes and Kroeber, he counts about 200 features of an "Old
World eikoumene" (ecumenical culture of Euro-Asia). He thinks that one in eight is found in
Mesoamerica, and that another 20 or so may be added when further investigated. This amounts to
about 18%. Sorenson challenges advocates of independent evolution of cultures to prove that an
item is independently evolved in two places at once, rather than, as has been the practice, of
assuming independent origin, quoting Kroeber that "there is thus as much evidence needed for an
assumption of independent origins as of connection: the burden of proof is equal." [28]
Our revolutionary model requires not only the confirmation of its thesis of world-wide
ecumenical culture but also the placement of the inventory of culture within the framework of
the revolutionary calendar. We speculate that there was first the worldwide Uranian culture on
the Pangean all-land Earth, followed by almost total destruction from crustal eruption and
cleavage Granted beginnings of cultural differentiation in Urania, the Lunarian catastrophes
would have drastically reduced and altered the ecumenical elements and promoted rapid, isolated
cultural development of the major world geographical regions. Then, in Saturnia, contacts would
have been resumed and, then again, chaos, reductionism, and new isolated development in the
subsequent period. Then in Mercurian, Venusian, Martian and Solarian times contacts and new
types of consensus appear again. The task of segregating and assigning diffused items is not
impossible, but requires something like the revolutionary calendar of common world-wide
experience to begin with.
CLIMATE CHANGES AND TIME
Some of the problems of assigning cultural event to the Uranian period are attributable to the
complexity and confusion of paleo-climatic studies. For example, our quantavolutuionary model
of human development calls for a worldwide human race and culture existing prior to "the ice
ages" and also (it should be stressed) prior to the widespread desert conditions found in many
parts of the world where ice-age theory has said that ice was absent (the Siberian tundra, the
Sahara, Australian. and Western American arid zones, the Gobi Desert, etc.). It becomes
difficult then to handle statements by anthropologists such as Michael Coe when he writes that
"men continued to live throughout the most dessicated zones of North America. Species after
species of large game animal perished not long after its [the dessication's] onset - mastodon,
mammoth horse, camel, giant bison, ground sloth, deer, wolf, etc. - but the Indian survived."
[29] Or the statements of numerous experts to the effect that the Magdalenian hunters of the
Late Paleolithic Age flourished next to the ice caps and glaciers but then were driven out by a
betterment of climate, from which their food supply, the large cold-weather animals, fled.
Climatic change, for better or worse, it seems, can drive out men and animals. Actually, it may
be better to try to allocate these self-same persisting Indians and disappearing Europeans to
post-catastrophic periods, as survivors of Uranian and Lunarian disasters, most likely the
latter, inasmuch as they were already racially and culturally differentiated. At least in the
European case, the presence and disappearance of great ice fields is claimed which would
require, according to our theory, that the Late Paleolithic survivor-cultures of the caves were
Lunarian, because they disappeared with the ice caps. Apparently , the chronology of the so-
called Upper Paleolithic may be in serious disarray.
The Upper Paleolithic is put at 35,000 B. P. to 10,000 B. P. by Marshack [30] . Variant
estimates are common. There are problems of overlapping, too. Neolithic-Mesolithic caves are
dated at 19,000 B. P. in Greece [31] . We might well gather Upper-Paleolithic periods between
the post-human Uranian and the final Lunarian periods, that is, from about 13,000( B. P) to
about 9,500. That would place the Neanderthal Mousterian, and Upper Paleolithic, homo sapiens -
with stone and bone kits of 26, 63 and 93 tools (by Francois Bordes' count) [32] - close to
each other in time and space. But perhaps they are really so close.
Henri Breuil, who brought to light much of paleolithic art, exclaimed at the correspondence of
celestial Mesopotamian human-headed "bulls" with the bisons of the Southwestern European caves
[33] . (See Figure 16.) He argued that they were deemed anthropomorphic because they were in
fact bison-faced, not bullfaced. The bison does look human. "The identity between the
'celestial bull' and the bison is certain." [34] He believed, also, that the source of
inspiration for the Chaldeans was a memory of the bison, or perhaps a contemporary experience
with surviving types of the animal. In any event, the anthropomorphic trend in representing the
bison occurred in both areas: the human-faced buffalo had celestial relevance perhaps less
apparently in the West, where I have noted only two possibly celestial manifestations apart
from the anthropomorphism that is generally to be viewed.
Granted a correspondence of animals, anthropomorphism, and celestialism, we are faced with a
question that Breuil did not address: could the similarities have originated some ten thousand
years apart in time and thousands of kilometers apart in space? Perhaps, but one may also
entertain the hypothesis that the two cultures were much closer in time and space. In this
connection, it needs be recalled that the Magdalenian Upper-Paleolithic cavepainters of the
West have now been shown to have counterparts as far distant as the Caucasus, Azov, Central
Asia, Siberia and Bashkir [35] . If there is a connection, and not a ten-thousand year re-
invention, Upper-Paleolithic cultures would be not Lunarian, but post-Saturnian, probably. They
would be survivors of the Atlantis and other shelf flooding, according to the theory to be
advanced in the coming chapter on Saturn.
Figure 16
CELESTIAL BISON
The Bison as Real, as Human, and as Divine
(Source: H. Breuil, 1909, 250-4.)
The renowned Abbe Breuil, speliolgist and anthropologist brought together in 1909 the bison of
the Franco-Spanish cave drawings and of archaic and ancient Chaldeans. As the drawings of the
Figure demonstrate the Chaldeans knew the bison (a) and depicted it anthropomorphically as "the
heavenly bull." (b. c.). The "Upper Paleolithic" hunters appear to have done the same;
perfectly capable of painting bisons, as attested by hundreds of examples, they too drew the
bison anthropomorphically and, probably, sacredly and celestially (d, e and f). Once more the
questions of chronological confusion arises; a gap of eight thousand years or so seems too
great to bridge two sets of similar experiences and ideas.
PUZZLES OF TIAHUANACU
It is barely possible that Tiahuanacu, high in the Bolivian-Peruvian Andes, south of Lake
Titicaca, is the only known Uranian site that can be called a "central site" as against
"survivor sites". Poznansky says that the first period of Tiahuanacu began with "troglodytes"
and flourished with large buildings of sandstone adorned with, among other features, many
ordered sculptured heads, and snakes. Idols with folded arms, reminiscent of the Cycladic
Aegean idols, are found (the dates seem impossibly divergent) [36] . The climate then was
rainy and equatorial.
The period ended, it appears, in "great tectonic movements" which "in some way or another
changed the physical aspect of the continent. These alterations on the Altiplano were perhaps
the repercussion of great cataclysms and evolutions which were taking place in other locations.
Moreover, the latter were perhaps the cause of the migration to the Altiplano of many tribes of
the Arawaks from the East, terrified and fleeing from the places where these phenomena were
being produced in all their vigor." [37] Bellamy writes that the first period ended in deluges
of salt waters, showing either that the land sank or that the sea rose and that in either event
the city must have been at sea level [38] .
But what sea? If Uranian there would have been floods from the many disturbances of motion and
atmosphere, probably salt-floods, but no great sea basin. If Lunarian, the city would have been
raised high and no doubt could have been flooded before the event by the tsunamis of the earth
cleavage and lunar eruption, or after the event by continued sky deluges; but then the city is
unlikely to have been built during the terrible years of Lunaria. So a third possibility occurs
of its having been flooded in the end of Saturnian times and raised up then or during later
catastrophes (as during the Venusian interruption). However there were four more periods and
then came the Incas, according to Poznansky. Probably all of them ended catastrophically.
Conventional dating of Tiahuanacu is actually as late as the present era. Poznansky, who was
the most important figure in Tiahuanacu studies, accepted an astronomically retrocalculated
dating of 15,000 B. C. for the younger, "classical" period and a much earlier date for the
first period. Bellamy, on the basis of his studies of the astonishingly detailed Calendar and
Idol of Tiahuanacu assigned 27,000 years to the two and to the Classical period [39] . Bellamy
was pursuing the career of a postulated prelunar Satellite and believed the satellite to have
collapsed shortly thereafter, with a world-wide catastrophe, and then that after a period
without satellite, the Earth captured the Moon about 11,500 to 13,500 years ago this being
originally the theory of Hoerbiger (and again world-wide catastrophe occurred upon capture.)
The Hoerbiger-Bellamy work is important and masterly, even if quite disbelieved by other
scientists. Yet, for reasons that would require another set of chapters to explain, I would
seek to collapse the two events (the pre-lunar satellite and moon itself) into the encounters
between the Earth and Uranus Minor, with the Moon erupting (not captured) in consequence. Then
low-lying Tiahuanacu I would be Uranian; classical Tiahuanacu II (in the high Andes) would be
late Lunarian with obsessive studies and calendarizing of a changing and much different moon
cycle than the present cycle. The flooding of Tiahuanacu I would have occurred as it slipped
into waters at the edge of the sink from which the Moon had erupted, whereupon it would have
been lifted from the deeps by the westward shoving of the South American crustal plate. The
desolate site would have been occupied by Lunarian survivors and rebuilt.
SIGNS OF URANIAN CULTURE
From the age of Urania, other signs of human nature that remain today are scarce
representations of whole human cultures. Anthropology, supported by psychology, would rebut any
attempt to establish a lone trait here, another one there, and so forth, granted that a kind of
evolutionism thinks of culture growth like teeth, now one molar appearing, and then another,
and so on. Burials containing worked implements as in Shamrikar Caves; cemeteries (as in
Palestine); sign-painting of ritual significance, as in the bison and hand drawings of the
Dordogne Caves; sacrifices and cannibalism - as in the bearskull hoards of Neanderthals and
perhaps even the human bone remnants of the Peking man - these are representations of larger
clusters of culture traits.
The painstaking labours of Andre Leroi-Gourhan in 66 decorated caves and rock shelters (a large
majority of all such sites in Europe) [40] disclosed 2,188 animal figures. Of these 610 were
horses, 510 bison, and 205 mammoths. About a dozen of other animals plus 9 monsters constituted
the balance. In the central compositions of the caves, 92% of the bovidae (total N= 137), 91%
of the bison and 86% of the horses were to be found. Few other animals were to be found with
them.
Only a few shapes were drawn - the phallus, vulva, naked females, and the human hand - but
these in large numbers. The female signs were concentrated in the central composition or in
lateral cavities. Male animals and male symbols appeared at the entrance and back of the caves.
Both sexes appeared in the central display. The human hand is profusely displayed at entrances
and in the central composition.
Perhaps the cave art can be explained. The cave stands for the world and womb. It is definitely
not earthbound. The animals could be hallucinated from the clouded skies: as in heaven, so on
earth, and in the caves. The female bias, both human and animal, of central groupings, binds
heaven and earth to procreation. The vaults, below which are found most central compositions,
are suggestive of the vault of heaven and the spaciousness of the womb. The caves then were
religious and probably for the purpose of communion and initiation. The animals are totemized
and preserved in picture; they can be preserved and viewed in a guarded manner; they can be
implicated in ritual activities, such as puberty rites.
The common straight line probably stood for the male generative organ and also the pillars that
supported or reached towards heavens; the triangle, drawn usually with convex sides, stood for
the female vulva, or mons veneris, and also for the polar opening that began to occur in the
cloud canopies, and appeared to be creating many objects of importance. The obese female
statuettes, occurring outside the caves almost entirely, symbolized fertility and Mother Earth
pregnant with all living things. The animal and male figures were realistic and ordinary enough
to raise a question not of reference but of ability and intent.
The will and ability to draw anything is human; therefore these signs and symbols succeeded the
creative gestalt. They require drawing tools, of course. Also, fire was fully tamed. (Fire was
hominidal, and some primates play with fire. But use of deep caves must be reliable,
conveniently managed, and systematic.)
The basic signs are worldwide, and suggest an early Uranian period when mankind was one, before
the geographical cleavage of the world into parts. They come before others because of their
pragmatic importance; destroyed, the secluded place in which they are found indicate a sacred
sponsorship. Heterosexuality and fertility were holy self-discoveries; their symbolic
representation was a giant step into abstraction and language.
HAND, ROD AND SNAKE
The hand for instance, is of primary pragmatic importance and therefore a suitable candidate
for religious projection and incorporation, when, as happened, it was frequently modeled in the
primeval sky at the Boreal opening; there fingers of vapors, colorfully illuminated, would
often have appeared, obscuring partially the face of Super-Uranus [41] . The numerous ancient
oral legends of the northernmost mountains provide representations similar to those of the hand
as were similar suggestions afforded by the Boreal hole. The hand was the hand of God;
concurrently the increasingly frequent flights of meteors and comets trailing fingers behind
nuclear palms, stressed the symbol as a curse, a demand for solemn attention, and a way of
power. Thousands of years later, the boreal and meteoritic hand was carried atop the standards
of the Roman legions, along with a rounded bronze object standing for the dome of heaven (the
boreal opening) whence can be traced the dome of architecture; humans observed, then invented.
Some Australians, reported an English traveller of the 1880's, detached and preserved with
sacred care the hands of their chiefs or ancestors. Then, "at the sight of an Aurora Australis,
all the Kurnai in the camp began to swing one of these dried hands towards the portent,
shouting out, 'send it away! send it away! do not let it burn us up! '" [42] Still, today, the
out-thrust hand is a vulgar insult and curse upon a person in Greece.
Z. Rix exposes much of the complexity of the rod as a symbol: "The sceptre, in its wider sense
the rod, can be traced to a number, perhaps to all deities. In his commentary to 'The Star from
Jacob, ' B. Gemser shows why the Hebrew word for rod in Num 24: 17 should actually be read
'comet. '" The sceptre is given to both heavenly and earthly rulers. Horus is called "Lord of
the Rod." "Yahweh will send forth the sceptre of thy strength out of Zion" (Ps. 110: 2). Moloch
and Typhon signify Lords and have sceptres too. Prehistoric stone age cultures have rods,
"batons." carved with animals and occasionally with phallic shapes or as snakes, ultimately
achieving the storied fame of the brazen serpent's rod of Moses [43] .
Snakes appear everywhere in early human symbolism [44] . Like the rod, the cometary analogy -
the writhing form slithering through the sky - is too obvious to be missed. The earliest
Chinese Dragon was serpentlike but with feet. Until recently it was taught in Christian schools
that the serpent of the Garden of Eden lost its feet when condemned by the Lord to crawl on its
belly. Snakes accompany the carved idols of the first Period of Tiahuanacu [45] . In South
Africa Bushman drawings carry snakes without precise heads or tails. But at Baume Latrone
(France) is found a single giant serpent 9'9" long with small elephants and mammoths around it
[46] . In prehistoric Ohio, a long serpent was sculpted in raised dirt; its jaws open wide to
embrace a ball, just as the Chinese dragon was anciently pictured. (See Fig 17). Snakes are
prominent in the symbolism of all of the great gods. The axis of fire and a multitude of sky
apparitions set up the image.
In forthcoming volumes of this work, I shall again stress the quantavolutionary view of
heavenly events. Such events are not creations of the human mind making analogies from ordinary
human animal existence, such as sexuality, building, working.
They are independent events imagined to resemble known activities. They are named at the same
time as activities are being named. They operate upon these activities to constrain and develop
them culturally (humanly); yet simultaneously the heavenly events are portrayed and understood
by human minds that can work only from ordinary experiences.
Figure 17:
THE GREAT OHIO SERPENT MOUND.
Source: Corliss MGM-005, M2-46 from S. D. Peet,( 1890) 12 Amer.
Antiquarian 211-28. Mound located in Adams Co., O.
It cannot be assumed that the great universal myth of Cosmic Parturition of Heaven and Earth
derives from the projection of the universal human experience of parturition; they are coeval.
The conventional scientific attitude commits a serious error by rigidly viewing the primordial
religious experience as a human invention; it would be more correct and historical to say that
invention is a creation by the primordial religious experience. Before self-consciousness,
neither the primate experience nor the heavenly experience could properly be said to exist;
both require the self-observing mind.
Notes (Chapter Six: The Uranians)
1. W. N. Brown, 284.
2. Cardona (1978) 37, 42; cf. generally Cardona, pp. 34-54; Long (1963); Campbell (1949) 276,
282-3.
3. 68 Soviet Astronomy.
4. (1968) 178.
5. Giant Meteorites, p. 310.
6. 12 Ency, Brit. (1969) 49.
7. Vilks (1978) 1181, 1183.
8. Johanson and White (1979).
9. Brandon, 14.
10. (1976) 2.
11. Santillana and von Dechend, 303.
12. Brandon, p. 14.
13. Vail (1972); Talbott (1977A, 1977B); Cardona (1977).
14. Cohane (1969).
15. Vail (1972); Talbott (1977A, 1977B).
16. Carli (1788), 234.
17. Plato, Epinomis, 101, 83.
18. Conversation with author, April 1977.
19. Michell.
20. Vail (1977).
21. Santillana and von Dechend, 8.
22. Mullen (1973), Brandon, 8.
23. Vail, 58.
24. Niederberger (1979) 140.
25. Kennedy (1975); Greenberg (1973-4); and cf. Corliss, Compiler, Ancient Man (1978) 661-8.
26. "Man's Arrival...." (1978).
27. Fauconnet (19680 423-48.
28. J. Sorenson, 391 in Riley (1971); cf. Murdoch (1968).
29. Coe (1975) 43.
30. Marshack p. 109; on Breuil's dating see p. 69.
31. Jacobsen (1976).
32. Marshack, 77.
33. Breuil (1909).
34. Ibid., 251.
35. Bader. 30-1.
36. Poznansky (1945) II, figs. 87a, 86, 87,88.
37. Ibid., I51-2.
38. (1943) 51-2.
39. Bellamy and Allen (1959). ch. 10. Libby, in line with most Americanists, finds (1973) that
"in twenty years, the firm radiocarbon dates for human occupation have never exceeded 12,000
years" in America. But Greenberg (1973-4) reports Yukon C14 dates of 70,000 and 25,000 to
35,000 in New York and in California.
40. (1976) 93 ff.
41. Vail, "Celestial Record" 33.
42. Goblet D'Aviella, 27 quoting J. Anthrop. Insti. London (1883-4) 189.
43. Z. Rix (1974).
44. Goblet D'Aviella, 39-43.
45. Poznansky II fig. 87a.
46. Shelley-Pearce citing R.& D. Morris, Men and Snakes (1965) 10, 14 and 15. ;
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVEN: EARTH PARTURITION AND MOON BIRTH
The Uranian age closed in a crescendo of destruction. The ancient orphic rites of Greece
commemorated their remote Uranian origins when they began with the chanting of the myth of the
cracking of the cosmic egg. That the world was an egg that had to be broken to begin the human
experience is a myth found in all quarters of the globe. We have reported this in the preceding
chapter [1] . Heaven burst to produce the great god Ouranos and the turbulent sky. Then
Ouranos was dismembered by his son, Saturn, in league with Gaea, his spouse and Earth.
Aphrodite Urania, the Moon, was then born, Daughter of Ouranos, she was a product of his
dismembered genitalia fallen upon Earth [2] . Moon is worshipped after her father retired,
disgruntled and bitter at the revolt of his children and from his injuries. The Moon would have
revolved around Mother Earth (Ge or Gaia), who finally controlled her. The age of the Moon was
an almost unmitigated disaster.
THE PASSAGE OF URANUS MINOR
In the 12th millennium B. P., a major element of the disintegrating Super-Uranus may have
fissioned from the larger complex. We can call it "Uranus Minor" and it might have been
actually the planet "Uranus" (or Neptune) of today's sky. It passed closely by the Earth, in
the shape of a great ball trailing an enormous tail, which it ultimately lost, moving across
the ancient axis of Solaria Binaria. It excited an accumulation of opposite electrical charge
on the near pole of the Earth and the Earth's axis tilted to present the pole to the intruder.
The tilt would permit the Earth to suffer the least interruption of rotation.
The sudden movement loosened slightly masses of the Earth's outer shell, and unleashed floods.
Great lightning bolts were exchanged between the two bodies. Fire-fragments of the intruder
struck the area now called the West Central Pacific, excavating craters of thousands of square
kilometers down to the levels of dense hot mantle some 30 kilometers deep [3] .
The gravitational and electrical interaction between Earth and the Uranus intruder became more
intense. Abetted by the peripheral loosening and cracking occurring in all directions from the
path of the encounter, as much as half of the Earth's continental material exploded into the
sky down to the same depth, that is, some 30 kilometers.
The material thus blown and sucked high into the sky passed through the low and high cloud
layers in pursuit of the rapidly retreating intruder. The greater part of it was unable to
continue the pursuit and relapsed into an orbit around the globe [4] . For a time it rode
around the Earth like a comet; the sky seemed alive with the streaming bodies. Within a few
years, they assumed the globular form of the Moon.
CONTRIBUTING THEORIES AND ERUPTION DYNAMICS
That the Moon erupted from the Earth is not a new idea, but one that received a momentary
scientific appreciation in the nineteenth century. Observing the mysterious vastness off the
Pacific Basin and calculating from mechanical physics, George Darwin (1879) ventured the theory
and was supported by Osmond Fisher and others [5] . Howard B. Baker distributed in 1932
mimeographed copies of a treatise arguing the case. Lately, several scientists have joined in
espousing the notion. In all cases except Baker, the time set for the event has been "near the
beginning" -- safely removed from the evolution of the biosphere. The "beginning" has moved
farther back by a factor of twenty or more, and the Moon is alleged to be four billion years
old. However, as will be explained, there is no compelling reason why one cannot argue the
contrary: that the Moon is a recent evacuee from the Pacific region, whose basin would
otherwise have long ago been invaded by the moving continents. To my limited knowledge, after
Fisher, Baker alone realized the connection between the eruption of the Moon and continental
drift [6] .
Early theory proposed an instability of the Earth as the cause of the fission. A passing body
was not considered. Today, when aberrant bodies in space are taken more seriously -- and even
the possibility of terrestrial rocks and water being splashed upon the Moon by a cometary
impact has been posited by geologist Harold Urey [7] -- the first mechanism to look for is a
space intruder.
The stripped-down area is today occupied in part by the land that pushed into it. Conventional
continental drift theory only lends confusion. But D. V. Wise writes, "Many positions of
drifting or accreting continents eliminate any a priori condition to find the scar of
separation on our present Earth, although if a 'navel' must be located, the Pacific basin is as
good a spot as any." [8]
The west coast ranges of Northern America have some formation similar to the east Chinese coast
[9] . This would point to a more southerly explosion. The great Nazca Ridge and seamounts off
of South America traverse the East Pacific Rise into the Tuamotu and Taburi Islands, an
immensely long transverse fracturing and outbursting of magma. This feature would have followed
the eruption of the lunar material. The tens of thousands of seamounts following the Great
Pacific Rise are indicative of a crust that had been suddenly greatly thinned.
The crust would not have been removed so deeply where land masses exist today. They would have
sunk as they passed over the chasm, or they would have probably been noticed by now; but no
considerable area of the true ocean bottom is of sial material. Possibly the material of the
Moon could have been assembled from explosions occurring in numerous weak spots, with many
catastrophic typhoons carrying matter into space.
S. K. Vsekhsviatskii, Director of the Kiev Observatory (U. S. S. R.). has written that "the
moment of inertia of the earth's crust is about 200 times less than that of the planet as a
whole." [10] Thus crustal matter is relatively displaceable. He believes that volcanic
eruption could eject matter whose moment of force would exceed the moment of inertia. "The
amount of matter lost by the proto-earth turns out to be of the order of its present mass.
These losses should have occurred not only through direct ejection of fragments of the crust in
explosions and of ash and gas during volcanic eruptions, but also through dissipation of the
atmosphere into space, which occurred, apparently more often than was thought during five
billion years of earth history." [11] He calls his theory "cosmic volcanism". [12] I would
categorize his theory as "long-term endogenous eruptive catastrophism." Because of the speedy
rate at which comets and planetesimals dissolve into dust, Vsekhsviatskii maintains that these
material bodies now moving in space were not long ago erupted (though not so recently as argued
here). He does not think that cosmic large-body encounters are even required for the eruption
of a planet from a moribund star such as Jupiter, or for the discharge of materials into space
from a planet.
Escape velocity from Earth for today's space-vehicles is 11.2 km/ sec. This is required by the
gravitational attraction of the Earth and does not take account of electrical or atmospheric
drag (or push) on the object "taking off" Depending upon its charge, size and distance, Uranus
Minor might exert an attraction upon Earth, reducing this present escape velocity.
The rotation of the Earth's denser core and mantle would be less retarded by the encounter and
would slip past, beneath the surface crust, abetting its disintegration, "weakening its
moorings." A high thermal zone would be created between the inner Earth and its crust, which
would also help to peel it off.
Many factors, quite incalculable as specifics, would determine the motions and masses of the
encounter between Earth and Uranus minor. For example, if Uranus Minor had ten times the mass
of the Earth and passed it at 100,00 kilometers distance, the vertical tidal displacement at
the closest surface would be of the order of 5 kilometers. Not only would the Earth's motion be
changed, but a large part of its crust would be stripped off in a set of gigantic swirling
typhoons. This is calculated on gravitational laws. If to gravitational attraction were added
an electrical potential difference, or attraction, which must have been present, the
displacement and loss of crustal material would be enormously greater. The Earth would pause,
to let its surface be plucked all the more neatly.
The Earth's atmosphere would have been lost if it were as limited as it is today. But at that
time it was continuous with the gases of the magnetic tube that stretched from Sun to Super-
Uranus. Replacement of atmosphere was immediate. Indeed the Moon was formed in an atmosphere
much more voluminous that its present one, which may be remnant [13] . However, typhoons would
have been innumerable, intensely hot, and radiative. They would have carried away much of the
heat from the explosions of the crust, helping some of the biosphere to survive.
The double explosion, inwards and outwards, would have excavated the basin of the Pacific and
destroyed other portions of the Earth's crust, even placing explosive strains on the opposite
side of the globe, now the Middle Atlantic. Furthermore, the strains that these blows imposed
upon the Earth's continental crust were reinforced by a worldwide deep friction as the Earth's
rotation was interrupted and the globe was wrenched into a new axial position. The mantle and
core heated up and expanded. At a boundary between the continental sial and the upper mantle,
now known as the Moho Discontinuity, the Earth's shell began to slide over the mantle. The wide
expanse of molten Pacific basin, bereft of continental crust, offered little resistance to
other crustal movements and to fracture.
A long history of the Earth before the Uranian period requires that a uniform crustal layer of
silicate-aluminum rocks (sial) taking the form of granite (or an ancestral source of granite),
be deposited all over the globe [14] . Today this sial is found over only 40% of the surface,
the balance being ocean bottoms of silicate-magnesium chemistry (sima), typified in an igneous
basalt (see Figure 18). The Moon contains 1/ 80 of the Earth's volume, representing the mixture
of continental sial and upper mantle magma that was wrenched from the Pacific basin during the
encounter with "Uranus Minor". "A uniform layer rather less than 41 miles thick taken off the
oceanic areas would be sufficient," wrote Osmond Fisher (1882), "to make the moon." The
territory stripped from Earth exceeded the volume of the Moon; much of the surplus plastered
the passing body, and the remainder fell back upon Earth as stone and dust.
The hot material erupted in a stream that ceased when the head of the stream had reached
roughly a half-million kilometers into space. The intruder had moved off far to exert the pull
required to break up the rocks and to discharge its remaining electrical potential.
Figure 18. PREFERRED ALTITUDES OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE.
Figure on the left: The Height and Depth of the Earth's surface (Following Jordan and Defant).
Figure on the right: Frequency distribution of altitudes (Following Jordan, Wegener and
Bucher).
The Moon material, largely molten but beginning to cool, was reshaped hydrostatically
(reinforced electrically) into a sphere. It was drawn securely into orbit as the Earth's
rotation sped up. Moon's inclination away from the equatorial orbit is under standable as an
effect of the direction in which Uranus Minor disappeared into far space. At first the Moon
mass rotated. Then its face was fixed toward the Earth as it revolved.
Alfred Wegener, the geophysicist who produced the continental drift theory in the 1920's
touched briefly upon the missing sial of the Earth's structure, saying that "the outermost
layer, re-presented by the continental blocks, does not cover the whole Earth's surface, or it
may be truer to say that it no longer does so." [15] Wegener noted how clearly split and
conformable are the Atlantic Ocean's east and west rims, but how the western rim of the Pacific
Basin was broken up.
He wonders whether "the Pacific Basin should be considered as the remains of the detachment of
the moon, following [George] Darwin's idea, for this process would involve the loss of a
portion of the sial crust of the earth." [16] Daring theorist as he was, Wegener might have
come to the idea of Moon escaping, followed by continental rafting, if he had not believed,
erroneously, that the continental sial floats on the oceanic sima and could skate upon it. The
sial is deeply embedded in the crust. When it moves, it must be because the sima is molten or
missing. Or, as the present prevailing theory believes, and in a coming volume I shall refute
this, that the sima approaches a continental block and dives beneath it.
All the forces necessary to erupt the Moon would be supplied by the tidal attraction of a
great-body near-encounter; by an electrical difference of perhaps 10 18 volts between the
Intruder and the Earth; and by an interrupted rotation of the Earth. Assisting the explosion
would be the jack-hammer shocks of the preceding heavy meteoroid collisions. Promptly upon
lunar material eruption would follow an immense semi-globular gradiant introducing
gravitational slide. The continental crust would flow down the lips of the concavity.
LUNAR CONFORMITIES TO ERUPTION
The chemical composition of the Moon associates it with the inner planets. However, its surface
is a melt to a considerable depth, if not entirely. It lacks the granite cover of the Earth.
Moreover, analysis of samples returned by the Apollo expeditions and of the Moon's specific
gravity reveal a general composition resembling the crust and upper mantle of the Earth [17] .
A core of metal is probably absent.
"How does one get a 65-kilometer-thick crust that is 50 to 85 percent plagioclase without
melting most of the moon? And if melting occurred, how could the moon's interior be relatively
cool today (800 to 1000 degrees C.)?
Latham speculates that half the moon would have to be melted (down to about 1000 kilometers) in
order for this light stuff to flow up as slag. Gast thinks that the Moon would have to be
melted down only to a depth of 200 kilometers, if the composition were homogenous but
moderately high in concentrations of aluminum and calcium (about 10 percent).... Wood [Proper
name] would have the outer portion of the moon melt from the heat of rapid accretion [18] .
Here we are suggesting that the moon must be heterogeneously composed, like a stew of chunks
and sauce. Further, subsequent to its overall melting, it has been subjected to additional
destruction. It has been pelted with meteors, and exploded and ripped by numerous electrical
charges. I assign all of this destruction to later encounters of the newly created moon.
The Moon's turbulent history is evidenced in a list of effects recently discovered. These can
be catalogued here [19] . An asterisk (*) denotes items that perhaps originated with the
original creation of the Moon; in certain cases, there is a reinforcement of an original
condition by later catastrophes.
1.* The Moon's surface is one-sixteenth of the surface of the Earth. Its "crust" is igneous
anorthosite to a great depth [20] . This crystallization of plagioclase feldspar of 50 to 100
km depth throughout, exhibiting a seismic boundary at about 60 km, where a basaltic lunar
"sima" may occur, would be derived from the Earth's crust. The Moon crust is ten to twenty
times the crust of the Earth in thickness accounting for nearly half of the Earth's crust.
2.* Gases are escaping from orifices of the Moon [21] .
3. Hundreds of radioactive "hot spots" exist on the Moon [22] .
4. Fluorescence occurs, indicating radioactivity in the rocks [23] and debris.
5. A large part of the soil of tiny glass spherules formed from evaporated, and condensed and
fallen, rocks [24] .
6. Traces of hydrocarbons of foreign origin (Venus?) were found in samples of Lunar soil
returned to Earth. Carbide rocks were also found [25] .
7.* Rocks revealed a remnant magnetism that could not have been implanted upon cold rocks or by
the Moon's present weak magnetic field, but was provided by an external body when the Moon was
hot [26] .
8. Argon and neon of external origin is abundant on the surface rocks, indicating contacts with
external bodies recently [27] .
9.* Moonquakes, evidencing unadjusted layers and heat in the interior, are frequent [28] .
10.* The crystalline rocks of the surface when cracked open appear extremely fresh to the
practiced eye of geologists [29] ; a recent metamorphosis is suggested.
11. There is a general glaze over all surface features [30] indicating exposure to a recent
immense radiation flare.
12. Heat flows outward from the subsurface, showing subsurface recent disturbances [31] .
13. Thermo-luminescence tests showed anomalies on close sub-surface rocks resulting from
thermal disturbances during the last 10,000 years [32] .
14. The greatest crater, Aristarchus, and many others, are still warm [33] .
15. Aristarchus and many other craters, and the rilles or trenches that run towards and end
beneath craters, may have been caused by cosmic lightning [34] .
16. Radon-222 is emanating from Aristarchus. It is the daughter element of radium 226. It has a
half life of 1620 years. The radium 226 was probably created by cosmic lightning bolts [35] .
17. A range of anomalous colorful low mountains appears to have been welded onto the Moon as
debris from an external body (Mars) [36] .
18.* The Moon's atmosphere is exceedingly thin but is building up [37] , and therefore must
have been wiped out recently or began recently at zero pressure.
19.* Samples of lunar solids are "depleted in all substances which boil below about 1300 C, as
well as lead, which melts but does not boil below this temperature [38] ." "When the lunar
rocks are compared with terrestrial rocks or with meteorites, they are found to be
systematically depleted in the more volatile chemical elements." [39]
20.* The rock, breccia and soil samples exhibit a striking structural adsorption of rare gases
that implies a great energetic exchange upon the Moon's surface [40] .
21.* Apart from direct evidence of the Moon's body forming from the Earth's crust, any theory
of Moon capture must explain how this low density planet happens to "specialize" in non-basic
rock.
22.* Anorthosite of the Moon's crust may be formed in only 1000 years [41] . Small particles
could accrete into a moon in 1000 years [42] .
23.* Tektites, possibly from the Moon, have isotopic composition much like Earth materials
[43] .
24.* The side of the Moon facing Earth is more basaltic (sima) while the dark side is more
sialic. This may indicate that the Moon assembled itself under the tidal influence of the
Earth, and that the order of escape was preserved.
25.* The energy disposal problem is easier to solve with an eruption theory involving a large
3rd body encounter than with a capture theory, where the internal forces of the Earth would
have to do all the work and take all the heat [44] .
26.* The catastrophic tube (typhoon) mechanism disposes of heat into farther space. The single
volcano Krakatoa billowed four cubic miles of rock and ash into the stratosphere, some of it
shooting 40 to 50 miles high. With a third body, and in the presence of an electrical
attraction and an atmosphere that is moving away rather than obstructing escape, escape
velocity (11.2 km/ s) could be readily achieved by such material. And, it is important to
emphasize, the amount of the material, which is thousands of times the amount sent up by
Krakatoa, is not especially relevant; the intensity of the field's attraction affects a single
particle no less because it is affecting vast numbers of particles. Moreover, if the lower more
dense layers of the globe are retarded either more or less than the crust, the crust will be
slung off.
27.* The Moon's "anomalous" inclination in respect to the ecliptic shows the influence of a
third body. Theoretically the Moon should be lined up directly between the Earth and Sun, in a
position that is modified only by the presumed effects of the Earth's rotation upon the Moon.
28.* The radiogenic helium (He 4 ) of the Moon's rocks that would have appeared in long ages is
missing, implying youth or thermal destruction, or both [45] .
29.* A comparison of the number of objects observed colliding with or passing close to the
Earth with the number of lunar craters of a given diameter indicates that there are 400 times
as many craters in the lunar maria as one would expect [46] . If the Moon is 11,500 years
young, this indicates how it has served as an electrical collecting and discharging battery for
the Earth and one reason why the Earth has not been utterly devastated recently.
30.* "The moon and the earth were formed in the same general region of the solar system. This
conclusion is based on the isotopic composition of oxygen in the lunar samples, which is
indistinguishable from the composition of terrestrial oxygen." [47] Moreover both cases are
distinguishable from meteoritic matter examined from elsewhere in the solar system.
31.* None of the material of the Moon is of primordial planetary material "by any stretch of
the imagination." [48]
32.* An early fission of Moon from Earth would have left the two-part system with much greater
angular momentum than it possesses. (This is directed at many who believe in an early fission,
without an external body encounter.) [49]
33.* There is no known mechanism for converting a lunar trajectory to its present orbit if it
had come close to the Earth from a faraway origin [50] .
34.* The magnetic dipole at the "center" of the Earth is actually 436 kilometers off-center,
displaced toward the Pacific Basin. All of these are geophysical and astronomical arguments for
Moon eruption, a recent eruption besides, and for more recent disturbances. The list of
legendary arguments is to be presented at the end of the chapter, in the light of further
geological evidence.
THE GLOBAL FRACTURE SYSTEM
(See Figures 19 and 20)
Heezen and Hollister, in their late work in oceanography, begin by quoting a passage from the
Roman Seneca, which, though myth, has an even more modern meaning that they can have guessed :
"An age shall come with late years when Ocean shall loosen the chains of things, and the earth
be laid open in vastness, and Tethys shall bear new worlds...."
Tethys was the legendary original sea of Pangea, girdling the globe. As soon as the Moon
material was pulled into space, the globe fractured. A cleavage shot forward northwards and
southwards from the center of the then north pole. The fracture started straight but owing to
the complex of motions and forces operating simultaneously, it assumed a final form much
different from a model fracture of an unmoving globe. The fracture moved rapidly; there is no
essential difference between cracking a crystal ball and an immense globe; theory apart, the
cuts are fresh, report the oceanographers of the fracture [51] .
Figure 19.
THE EARTH TODAY :
CLEAVAGES, WELTS, MOUNTAIN FOLDS AND VOLCANISM.
This map is merely suggestive. Submarine continental shelves are treated here as "land." Many
details that indicate recent quantavolutions of the Earth are omitted. Only a globe can
represent accurately and vividly the features-fractures, mountain ranges, volcanos, sea mounts,
continental shelves, and torques of the crust-that are conceptualized in the text. Volcanos
(and earthquakes) by the hundreds follow fracture lines. Sea mounts reach up from the oceanic
abyss by the tens of thousands. The Arctic Sea stands mostly on continental shelves. The Ridges
marking the major fractures are cut transversely by thousands of smaller fractures, varying
greatly in length, all together supporting the idea of sudden explosive cracking and expansion
and repeated torques of the surface. The Trans-Asian Ridge refers to a cut that swings North of
India, through Lake Baikal and along the Lena River into the Arctic Sea where it connects with
the Atlantic Ridge. Antarctica was split away from the unexploded land masses and moved towards
the exploded area, as was Australasia; Eastwards, the Americas were likewise thrust (or
attracted) towards the raw new basin. For superior comprehension of the totally integrated
process of global surface quantavolution this chapter might be read with a Replogle "World
Ocean" globe or similar map globe at hand for reference.
Figure 20.
SCHEME OF THE LAND AREA OF PANGEA AND URANIA.
Area sizes are rough and include continental shelves. The outer boundary of the figure outlines
the estimated devastated crust and expanded surface of the globe. There is little reason to
believe that the fracture system occurred along the lines that it follows today, except in its
most general configuration. The original configuration probably followed the model of a globe
that is struck, exploded, and cracked. Many types of "wild" movements would develop immediately
from internal sources even while the Earth's external force field was changing.
The Table below gives the approximate distribution of Sial land among present-day continents,
during Pangea. The total ocean surface, less the continental shelves, measures approximately
361 million km 2 . of this 200 had once been sial. The total Pangean globe surface is estimated
at 400 million km 2 . The expansion allowed for is 110 km 2 . The surface of the globe
increased by 20%. The total volume of the globe is 1083 x 10 9 km 3 .
THE LAND SURFACE OF PANGEA USING PRESENT LAND FORM NAMES
(approximately, in million km 2 .)
Land form Surface Stacking Shelves Total area
Asia 45 5 6 56
N. America 24 3 5 32
Africa 30 2 2 34
S. America 18 3 4 25
Antarctica 14 1 3 18
Europe 10 3 4 17
Austrocean 9 2 7 18
TOTAL 150 19 31 200
Destroyed continental sutfaces 200
New Ocean Basin Expansion 110
Total 510
*Note on Table: Continental Slopes are not considered continental, but as flow material
subsequent to break-apart. However, where continental shelves are poorly defined, continental
slope contributions to true Pangean land mass are estimated and included. The fracture cut down
between the land that now became separated into the Americas on the one side and Euro-Africa on
the other. Within hours, it neared the "south" pole and promptly forked east and west. Today's
map only makes it seem that the rupture circled around Antarctica; it must have cut straight on
through Antarctica-Australia, after which the whole "South Pacific" started to move North,
pulling or being pushed by the ridge chasm which was then followed by Antarctica which was
being carried "south" by the southwest movement of the Americas.
The eastwards rupture divided into another double fork, of which one prong moved between
Australasia and Antarctica, pushing Australia eastward, and the other between India and Africa,
pushing India northwards. Land bridges remained between Australia and India, but New Zealand
became an island surrounded by oceanic deeps. All of the Asian mass was rapidly moving east
toward the vast hollows that had been created in the crust. The move of Australia was
paralleled by this move of the northern lands. The western Indian Ocean basin was bulldozed by
the Indian subcontinent as it moved north, leaving behind its giant tracks on the ocean floor.
The westward rupture also split into two. One fork joined the southern cleavage proceeding from
below Australia. The other moved north above the east flank of the great pit left by the Moon.
As soon as it rejoined the north polar cleavage, completing its globe-girdling tour, it was
partially overrun by the North American continent which was being pushed southwestward by the
expanding Atlantic cleavage and pulled by the gravity incline of the Moon pit.
THE TETHYAN WELT
Meantime, while the north-south and south-north fractures had raced around the Americas, a
perpendicular or transverse fracture had occurred as they passed the old equatorial area of the
globe. This area, with its old rotational bulge was straining backwards in the Northern
hemisphere and forwards (eastward) in the Southern hemisphere. Its fracture, relieving the
strain, moved readily eastwards, along the longitudinal Mediterranean on the east. It is marked
by a welt, more than a cut; the welt takes the form of volcanoes, mountains, deeps and
fractures.
From the Mediterranean this Tethyan welt crossed over the new north-east fork of the Indian
fracture at the Aegean area and Red Sea -- Dead Sea axis; it carried through the middle of the
Near East and then through the southern borders of the Asian continent. There it was to be
over-ridden by the Indian subcontinent moving northwards. But it continued and appears in what
was becoming the South Seas Islands. It crosses the Pacific and enters the Caribbean through
Central America, finally completing its world circuit at the Atlantic Ridge.
Especially in the new Pacific Basin, tens of thousands of molten fingers stretched up toward
the continental debris that was escaping into space and then dropped back as blisters upon the
ocean basins. These froze into the seamounts, monument to the creation of the ocean.
Lava poured forth from the world-circling fracture system, from volcanic fissures along the
main ridges, and from a multitude of transverse fissures all along the main lines. The
continents moved rapidly from the Atlantic ridge, and the new oceanic surface was paved by lava
flows as the land retreated. Ashes rained down heavily; today drills probing the edges of the
Northwest Atlantic continental slope penetrate "a succession of ash layers" before striking the
basaltic lava of the true ocean bottom [52] .
In the Pacific the major fractures appear less profound. Great rises, rather than abrupt
ridges, occurred because the surface land shell had already been exploded. It was soft and
deeply dug already. The major fracture system there was over-ridden by the North American
continent and erupted its lavas underground or on the land through many volcanoes and fissures.
Westwards it merged with the teeming seamounts, sending long transverse fractures out over the
molten pit of the Moon.
GLOBAL EXPANSION
Expansion of the globe occurred as a result of rotational slowdown [53] . Also, throughout the
flayed regions where contact was made with interior deep magma directly, some expansion of the
globe took place. Loss of electrical charge may also have decreased the density of the Earth.
Indeed, the volume of the Earth may be much greater without the Moon than it was before the
Moon erupted. Expansion occurred especially where the sphericity of the globe needed to be
preserved, that is, in the southern oceans where the lines of fracture girdle the globe
latitudinally before moving northwards again. It occurred too, at the new equator and at the
old poles, in response to the new direction of spin. Contraction and conservation of form, on
the other hand, took place at the new poles, the old equator, and where the extensive thrusts
and folds raised up mountains [54] .
Thus were the principal features of modern world geography established: the distinct
continents, the ocean basins, great oceanic ridges; mountains raised high in the westernmost
Americas by the bull-dozing ice and undermass moving on the magma and against the inertial
magma and core: Alpine Europe pushed up by Africa moving over the Tethyan welt and then back
again; Northern India colliding into Asia; and uncounted thousands of seamounts.
If the Earth had not ruptured, it would have exploded, and life would have terminated. The
cleavage permitted movement in the shell; the sial rode atop the sima and all of this to a
depth of 5 to 10 kilometers (the Moho Discontinuity) rafted to new places carrying the
surviving biosphere [55] .
The rafting is almost entirely completed now but the Mohorovicic Discontinuity marks throughout
the world the level at which the crust exploded and the crust slipped. Osmond Fisher, in the
1880's, can be credited with combining the ideas of the eruption of the Moon from the Pacific
Basin with the prompt cleavage of the Americas from Euro-Africa and their rafting by great new
convection currents set up by the moon explosion [56] . George Darwin had originated the first
idea and placed the event at only 50 million years ago.
THE MAGNETIC FIELD
A recent standard textbook reports that "we know disturbingly little about the interior of our
planet... The understanding of planetary magnetism is another source of frustration for our
understanding of even the Earth's main field is very poor. In fact, about all that is in
reasonably good shape is the description of the field: its origin is still uncertain." [57]
Robert Haymes, the author, then gives the basic facts and illustrates them by a figure (adapted
here as Figure 21). The small object in the center of the Earth is an approximation of a bar
magnet to represent the source of the field. Actually this dipole is "offset 436 kilometers
from the center of the Earth, displaced towards the Pacific Ocean. It is tilted with respect to
the Earth's rotation axis by approximately 11 ... The dipole axis intersects the surface of the
Earth at points far distant from the north and south poles. These intersection points are
called the north and south 'geomagnetic poles. ' The north geomagnetic pole is located in
Greenland at 81.0 N, 84.7 W, in the geographic system of coordinates. The corresponding south
geomagnetic polo lies in Antarctica, at 75.0 S, 120.4 E."
Figure 21. THE EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD.
"The eccentric-dipole model of the earth's magnetic field (schematic view). The equivalent
dipole is -436 km distant from the center of the planet and is closest to the surface in the
hemisphere that contains the Pacific. Hence at a given altitude the field is stronger over the
Pacific than it is over the Atlantic. The geomagnetic axis is tilted 11.5 with respect to the
earth's rotational axis (the N-S line in the figure)." (Haymes, 1971, p. 215).
Haymes proceeds to discuss the "dip poles." "The offset of the equivalent dipole from the
planetary center results in geomagnetic field lines that are not vertical where the dipole axis
intersects the surface of the earth. Thus the field lines are inclined about 3.9 to the
vertical at the geomagnetic poles.
"The places where the field lines are vertical are known as the 'dip poles. ' These locations
are controlled both by the offset and by the substances of the crust.
"Some observers believe the dip poles are located near 82.4 N. 137.3 W (Labrador), and at
67.9 S, 130.6 E (Antarctica)... It is ironic that the dip coordinates -- which should not be
particularly representative of anything fundamental -- seem to be a better coordinate system
for discussion of the cosmic radiation than does the geomagnetic system of coordinates."
That is, cosmic rays correlate with dip pole coordinates rather than with either the magnetic
or rotational poles.
The theory of Solaria Binaria, presented in chapter five, and the theory of its breakdown and
the subsequent lunar eruption and earth cleavage as presented here, taken with the critique of
magnetic time tests in chapter three, altogether suggest several points that may order the
quite confused data of the Earth's magnetic field.
1. The offset of some 436 km of the magnetic center from the geographical center of the Earth
would be the consequence of the enormous pull on the heavy old center of the Earth of Uranus
Minor that ripped off the crust of the Pacific hemisphere.
2. The magnetic field of the Earth is fixed as it was when the Earth was part of the magnetic
tube and oriented to its rotation around the electrical are axis of that tube.
3. The magnetic state of the mass of the Earth, which is remanent and not caused by any
contemporary rotation of the globe, describes the fossil position of the elements of the mass
in relation to each other.
4. The expansion of the Earth, which occurred with the electrical and chemical heating of the
globe at the time of the lunar eruption and global cleavage, may be indicated by the southern
bias of the north magnetic pole and the northern bias of the south magnetic pole. The Pacific
area swelled more than the globe as a whole but there was a total expansion extending even to
the northern and southern extremities.
5. The lava that welled up in countless places around the globe lost its remanent magnetic
orientation by heating, and thereupon was imprinted with the old magnetic field that it had
just thrown off but in a different orientation. It cooled and moved away from its eruption
coordinates to let s new mass well up and take on the same coordinates respecting the magnetic
poles.
6. Siderally oriented tilting of the Earth's axis, without change of rotation, cannot cause a
change in orientation of the magnetic field of the Earth.
7. The magnetic poles are near to and seemingly related to the north and south rotational poles
largely because the latest change in the rotational axis, probably at the time of the passage
of Uranus Minor, placed the poles near them.
8. The unpredictable and mysterious instability of the magnetic poles is produced by the
isostatic adjustments occurring throughout the globe as a result of the various body cosmic
encounters of the past 14,000 years.
OCEAN DEVELOPMENT
Earth's crust was half erupted into space upon the intrusion of Uranus Minor without Earth's
losing its atmosphere; for the atmosphere of Earth was almost identical with and part of the
much greater atmosphere consisting of the gases of the magnetic tube. New atmosphere flowed in
readily to replace all that was drawn off or destroyed with the crustal material. Moon's
atmosphere was barely allowed to form and was almost entirely lost in later destructive
encounters.
New waters poured off the continents and from the skies into the new basins. Possibly a last
great deluge of water came from Uranus Minor as it passed; in 1977, five rings were discovered
around the planet Uranus. Like the rings of Saturn they may contain ice. By feeding the
fissures and volcanoes, the waters sped up greatly the spread of the oceanic depressions. The
world was hot, steaming, and often flooded or on fire. The atmosphere was laden with combustion
products and had exchanged components with Uranus Minor. Within a century sizeable basins had
been basalted to receive the vast new waters that mingled with the old.
The rate of development of the ocean basins was negatively exponential. Within the 3,500 years
(11,500 to 8,000 B. P.) of the age of Lunaria (the Moon eruption and Earth cleavage), the full
basins were formed and paved. And, as it happened, the waters descended from the skies and
poured off the land to partly fill them. At the end of the period, the cataclysms had ceased
but the skies were still heavily clouded; the continents were shifting but at an almost
negligible rate. The shores were at the edges of today's continental slopes.
It is for another volume to say how the world was nearly destroyed and finally saved by the
first Uranian deluges and then the creation of the ocean basins to carry them. If the swamps of
Pangea and the depression of Tethys were to become the waters of today and the basins filled,
approximately 82/ 100 of a cubic kilometer of water per second would have had to fall for 1725
years. This is about the rate of annual rainfall in Vancouver, Canada, where some 200 inches
per year occur. The time period would be divided into four periods of accumulation : the
Pangean vapor condensation into swamps and ponds, the early Uranian canopy collapses, the
passage of Uranus Minor at the time of the Lunar eruption, which not only brought new waters
but also removed some water, and finally the great Noachian deluge of the end of the Saturnian
age.
LUNAR WORSHIP
In Lunarian times, vast regions of the Earth disappeared and all others were devastated. Animal
and plant species would have been threatened with extinction. The human species was no
exception ; from millions, it probably decreased to a few groups, existing far from one
another, small family bands accompanied by individual survivors of foreign groups. The
collective memories of the groups recalled the vanished age of Urania and the civilizations
that had been blasted from the Earth, drowned, or shaken to death by earthquakes at the
approach of the Uranian planet. The memories were painful and unbelievable to the
psychologically and physically depressed survivors. They were therefore distorted, suppressed,
and selectively elaborated.
The Moon was watched with fear and trembling the less so as it became regular in its behavior.
Its routine and successive phases were marked down and the logic of a calendar moving through
time was founded. Coincidentally, the Moon settled into a periodicity that came close to the
periodic menstruation of women. (But it may be, as will be discussed soon, that the menstrual
cycle was psychosomatically adjusted to the lunar cycle.) The period of menstruation was lent
importance as a result. Witchcraft flourished around the feminine mystique. Of course, the
consequences were much more manifold. Few, it any, aspects of life were freed to develop
without religious connections to what was experienced with the coming of the Moon and with
lunar behavior.
The ecumenical Uranian culture remained the substraturm of Lunarian culture. However, many
Lunarian cultures developed in isolation. Languages revived apart. Probably here now arose the
great differences among the major linguistic groups. So also institutions, arts, and crafts.
Diffusion was at a minimum. Lunar religion everywhere was based upon Uranian religion. A sun
calendar may not have developed anywhere, because the sun was still diffused as "Hyperion", not
"Helios" and was relatively remote as a threat. Its regular (or at least slowly changing
behavior) permitted it a minor role in influencing human minds and practices. The Moon was
related to imprinted fears, more variable, closer to the Earth, and for all these reasons,
terribly fascinating. As the lunar cycle became regular, the remaining portion of Super-Uranus,
known to us as (super) Saturn, was reestablished as the (new) chief of gods. Already in the age
of Lunaria, he was recognized and worshipped in the place of Uranus. But the Moon's chief place
in immediate religion was abundantly evidenced.
When, by Homer's time, in the aftermath of Martian destruction, the Moon was stereotyped for
its lightness of character, it could be said, as did Vico with marvelous intuition, that the
fables "were received by Homer in this corrupt and distorted form." [58]
SUNKEN LANDS
Sunken lands are universal in legend. There is also some geophysical evidence for them. Were an
explanation not afforded of the eruption of land into space, and, later on, of the deluging of
the continental shelves and slopes, there would be little possibility of explaining the
legends, because the true ocean bottoms are uniformly of igneous basaltic Sima. Sial cannot be
sought in the Sima, either; the two have different origins and do not mix.
The widespread evidence of marine life on the land, found at all altitudes, does not prove, as
many catastrophists and uniformitarians believe, that the land was once below the sea, and
below the sea lies other land. They have not caught up with the new oceanography. The marine
beds on the land are the residue of floods, tides, fall-outs from typhoons, and dried-up
shallow seas.
The reports of sunken lands are important pieces in the great puzzle of the history of the
Earth if only because they indicate where the continents were fractured, exploded, and drowned.
It is likely that most land-sinking occurred in two great phases: the Lunarian and the
Saturnian.
Figure 22
LEGENDARY SUNKEN LANDS AND CULTURES OF THE WORLD.
The map here presented as Figure 22 calls to mind the main legendary catastrophes. Apparently,
if all the legendary claims were accepted, the concept of an all-land Pangean and Uranian world
would become practically an established fact.
The map highlights another point : peoples from all around the world and all types of culture
are obsessed with the idea that masses of neighboring land were deluged or overrun by water and
sank forever into the depths. As John Locke said of the "fire of hell" and Vico of the
"thunderbolts of Jove," an idea so universal and persistent must refer to an intense experience
suffered in the past.
The map is extremely schematic, as is the evidence. It merely indicates areas and names them.
The size of an area conveys little or no meaning, especially considering that almost the whole
globe was land-covered before the floodings and explosions. The location of the center of each
culture, too, is almost never agreed upon. As Bellamy once wrote: "So the German ethnologist
Frobenius sought Atlantis in Nigeria; the Anglo-Spanish archaeologist Whishaw placed it in
Andalusia; the German Schulten found it at Tartessos at the mouth of the Guadalquivir; the
Germans Borchardt and Herrmann, and the French Count de Prorok, suggested North Africa; Colonel
Fawcett looked for Atlantean vestiges in the Amazon Valley; and Central America and the West
Indies have also been mooted". [59]
The map does not include vast civilizations thought to have been destroyed by water action
(deluges, tides) on land as for instance the Gobi (Desert) Sea Civilization, or the Sahara
(Desert) Sea Civilization (both indicated on the map). Nor does it include hundreds of known
sites, representing thousands of unknown sites, overrun by water either in localized or general
catastrophic action, as for example Lake Issyk Kul (Kirghiz SSR., Lake Polaki (Poland),
Mecklenburg Lake (East Germany) Lake Sevan (Armenian SSR), Lake Amatitlan (Guatemala), the Gulf
of Taranto (Italy), St. Gervais (France), Tyre (Phoenicia). Chersonesus (Crete), Volga Basin
(Russian SSR). and Bab el-Mandeb (Gulf of Aden).
The map exaggerates the polar seas. Hence, on the scale of the map, Beringia should be perhaps
extended throughout the shallow arctic seas, thus coloring practically the whole width of the
map to the extreme North.
All continental shelf lands were overwhelmed by water around 6,000 years ago, as the next
chapter will argue. Only a few of these areas are listed among the famed legendary places on
the map. However, a glance at the chart following Figure 20 will show how extensive the shelves
are and therefore how enormous the deluges of the period.
Many details not given here are provided in Kondratov's Riddles of Three Oceans. For instance,
he writes: "The majority of experts agree that dry land once existed in the Easter Island area.
It may have been a large land mass or most probably a group of islands that later sank. [or
both in successive phases.] But when did they sink? The same experts say this happened very
long ago, before human times or, at the very latest, at the end of the last Ice Age, between
10,000 and 12,000 years ago." [60]
LEGENDARY CHAOS AND THE MOON
The Fish-Man, Oannes -- goes the legend -- came ashore among the first and savage people of
Babylonia, and he taught them the human arts. He also told them the history of the world from
its beginnings.
"There was a time in which there was nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein
resided most hideous things..." [61] (Another translation of the same passage says: "In the
early days, before the Earth was yet made, a number of terrible beasts were the masters of the
heavens.") [62]
"The person, who was supposed to have presided over them, was a woman named Omoroca; which in
the Chaldean language is Thalatth; which the Greeks express as Thalassa, the sea; but according
to the true computation, it is equivalent to Selene, the Moon. All things being in this
situation, Belus came, and cut the woman asunder : and out of half of her he formed the earth,
and of the other half the heavens; and at the same time destroyed the animals in the abyss...
This Belus, whom men call Dis, divided the darkness, and separated the Heavens from the Earth,
and reduced the universe to order. But the animals so lately created not being able to bear the
prevalence of light, died." [63] (Belus then causes new animals and men to be formed from the
blood of the godhead and the soil of the earth, and these could bear the light.) [64] "Belus
also formed the stars, and the sun, and the moon, together with the five planets." Then a long
time passed until the deluge (almost surely the flood of Noah) was announced by the god,
Kronos, to the King Xisuthrus (also Sisithrus) [65] .
In this account of chaos and creation, we note that the heavens were overcast and loaded with
waters. We note, too, the association of the monster queen with the undifferentiated chaos,
then with the sea and the moon. Further, she later is divided into heaven and earth amidst the
general destruction of the monstrous species. The god Belus acts the part of a manifested
Super-Uranus or of the Super-Saturn that succeeded the destruction of Uranus, and thus
corresponds to the Elohim (Saturn-Kronos) of Genesis. Nor may one overlook the possible
significance of the other name of Belus, "Dis," for it resembles "deus" (god) in Latin.
In the beginning, says the Bible, "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon
the face of the deep; and the Spirit (or wind) of God was moving over the face of the waters."
[66] And then Elohim made the light and he separated the heavenly waters from the earthly
waters. The Firmament of Heaven was between the two regions of water. Then the earthly waters
were collected so that dry land might appear. Plant life then flourished. Whereupon, lights
appeared in the Heaven and time-reckoning began. In a passage following shortly, Genesis says
that after heaven and earth separated, and before any plants lived, the earth was watered by a
mist from the ground and in this setting men was "formed of dust from the ground." "Whence he
was placed in the Garden of Eden, which was watered by rivers." [67]
We suspect that a watchful ex-hominid, newly possessed of a sense of time, was near to the
events of the great days. Elohim may be here interpreted psychologically as a projection of
man, the Watcher, already human, already reading himself into the gods, and the gods' "traits"
and actions into himself. The watcher could not be impressed by the Sun, which was below, that
is, South of the Earth by our model of Solaria Binaria. This Elohim, or Heaven, must be Super-
Uranus-and-Saturn. Nor was he impressed by a Moon, for the Moon did not exist. As many
commentators have noted, the Bible seems to say so. Many other indications also support the
scenario.
We wonder whether this is the Lunarian period of chaos. From India comes a similar image, here
described by van Buitenen: "After the ultimate conflagration, the Fire of Doomsday, the
Ekpyrosis, which Markandeya like another Manu survives, the rain and floods come and render
earth one vast ocean, and desolately he roams the vast desolation -- a Manu without the need
for an ark, but in search of his fish. He finds if in form of a child sitting in a banyan tree
-- a tree to which the fish piloted Manu? -- the tree whose branches are roots. Inside the
child Markandeya explores the worlds in all their variety, and these 'worlds' are of course
nothing but their own seeds." [68]
Distinguishing between accounts of the Lunarian catastrophes and those of Saturn, several
thousand year later, is difficult. The legendary accounts usually confused the chaos and
creation of the primeval period with the later accounts; although holding to the cyclical ages
of disaster, the mind tended to squeeze or reorder universal primeval happenings together as
time went on. But note that in neither of the Genesis creation passages is there a human
intelligence when it begins; it is created. By Noah's time man was fully intelligent and had a
history.
In both passages Saturn is the great natural god. He is in the first place the Super-Saturn who
presides over the age of Lunaria when the Moon and Earths cleavage occurs. He is also the god,
the planet, that fissioned in a nova and retired in favor of Jupiter-Zeus-Jehovah.
But long before the deluge of Noah, in the age of Peleg, the earth was divided. So says the
Bible. Patten regards this to be referring to the great earth cleavage [69] . In Justin the
Historian, one finds another intriguing reference, a hypothesis, "whether the world, which is
now divided into parts, was formerly one." [70]
Among the people living around the strait of Bad el-Mandeb, that runs between the Red Sea and
the Indian Ocean, it is believed that the strait gets its name, which means the "gate of
tears," in memory of the immense number of people who died in the Earth convulsion that
separated Africa and Asia and created the Red Sea [71] .
Hesiod, in his Genealogy of the Gods, recites that Ocean (Okeanos) was the son of Ouranos
(Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) Okeanos came down to Earth. But meanwhile Ouranos had thrown all of
his sons down into the nether regions and had begun to suffocate his wife, Gaea, the Earth-
Goddess. The presence of the father of all the gods became intolerable.
Across the world, American Indians tell this story which sounds like the catastrophe of 11,500
B. P.:
"Monan, without beginning or end, author of all that is, seeing the ingratitude of men, and
their contempt for him who had made them thus joyous, withdrew from them, and sent upon them
tata, the divine fire, which burned all that was on the surface of the earth. He swept about
the fire in such a way that in places he raised mountains, and in others dug valleys. Of all
men, one alone, Irin Mage, was saved, whom Monan carried into the heavens. He, seeing all
things destroyed, spoke thus to Monan: 'Wilt thou also destroy the heavens and their garniture?
Alas! Henceforth where will be our home? Why should I live, since there is none other of my
kind? ' Then Monan was so filled with pity that he poured a deluging rain on the earth, which
quenched the fire, and flowed on all sides, forming the ocean, which we call the parana, the
great waters." [72]
The people of the Pelew Islands in the Pacific say that their ancestors lived in a great land.
Divine heroes who were strangers appeared among them but only one woman gave them hospitality.
They told her that a great flood would take place when the full moon first appeared in the
heavens. And it happened so, and she alone was saved, on a raft [73] .
THE MOON IN MESO-AMERICA
The Popol Vuh, the "Bible" of the Quiche, an ancient and still flourishing people found now in
Guatemala claims that their ancestors arrived in Central America from the East when the full
moon first appeared [74] .
Throughout Meso-America, said Spinden in 1917, there is an archaic culture. It reaches down to
the Andes. Coe believes that the end of the Ice Ages brought desiccation and extirpation of
many species "but the Indians survived." [75] I would speculate that much of this "archaic
culture" belongs to the reconstruction period following Lunaria, that is, the Saturnian period,
and ascribe the dessication to the Jovean-Venusian period.
Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg's 19th century studies [76] , undeniably great, yet
catastrophist, and therefore ridiculed by his very admirers, led him to two sets of disasters;
however he decided later that both must be joined. The first, he said, was a sinking of a great
crescent of land stretching from Central America to the Canary Islands; seven major islands
remained above water. Yucatan itself sank, and then later arose. This was the origin of the
Atlantis legend, he thought. It took place 6000 to 7000 years ago.
Later Bourbourg discovered the famous Troano Codex of the Mayans, and deciphered it with some
success. He thought that the Codex told of the catastrophe of Atlantis, and placed the time now
at 9973 B. C (11,973 B. P.), using Mayan time reckoning.
If the two times and two events are kept distinct, they would correspond with the great
Lunarian disaster (9500 B. C.) and the Saturnian continental-shelf flooding of around 4000 B.
C.
Bourbourg stressed an important point : the earliest religions in Meso-America, he said, were
Lunarian. Lunar myths were the sources of all later rites and symbols. Bancroft in the Native
Races of America repeats Bourbourg's theory [77] .
It seems proper to repeat that despite the recent surge of interest in it, Meso-American
mythology is almost untouched by comparison with the great labors that have gone into Near
Eastern and Classical European study over many centuries.
The Chibchas and Mozcas of the high eastern plateau of Columbia report that they were once
uncouth savages and were visited by Bochica, a foreign teacher with a golden staff who taught
them the arts. His beautiful but wicked wife Chia once flew into a rage and caused the whole
plateau and Earth to be flooded. Few beings survived. Bochica banished Chia from the Earth and
made her into the Moon. Then he opened gorges in the mountains to let the floods out [78] .
Humboldt reported 150 years ago a tribe of Guiana (S. A.) that claimed to be proselenian [79] .
Bellamy, who so carefully studied the Moon myths, claims that the Peruvians and other Americans
drew the Moon as a tiny disc, never in its sickle forms, and attached to it the evil, feared
sign of the puma. Bellamy believes the Moon was captured, not erupted, about 11,500 B. C. His
search found few capture myths (and less eruption myths, such as I have cited above); this he
attributes to the great cultural devastation caused by the tides pulled up in the encounter
[80] .
It appears that the Moon was the earliest object of adoration among the people who founded
Tiahuanacu. Poznansky writes: "With regard to the worship of the Moon, we are familiar with
many devices which demonstrate its great importance, its greater transcendence and
generalization than in the case of the worship of the sun, at least during the primitive period
of Tiahuanacu. For every ten ceramics, more or less, which through their signs depict the
worship of the Moon, we find only one or two connected with that of the sun...." [81]
The Moon, we have said, was very important to the Mayans. Anthropologist Michael Coe describes
the Mesoamerican view of the Moon in a startling parallel to Robert Graves' (and the general)
rendition of its worship in archaic Greece.
"As a female, the lunar orb was for the Mesoamericans the very embodiment of the fair sex. The
young, waxing moon was seen as a beautiful woman, forming part of a complex of youthful
goddesses associated with sexual love.... As the Moon waned and gradually slipped back towards
the eastern horizon, she became an old and somewhat malevolent deity, with snakes in her hair
or on her skirt, or with spindles placed in her headdress as an indication of her role as a
patroness of weaving... Again, she apparently formed part of a larger complex of aged goddesses
and merged in many ways with some of these. particularly with the female half of the dual
Creator God." [82] Later, Coe remarks that "the Moon was felt to exert a powerful influence on
terrestrial events." [83]
WESTERN EUROPE
Across the (present) Atlantic, the ancient people of Britain nurtured a legend of the clefting
of Earth [84] . And the Edda of the Icelanders tell the story of the primeval giant Ymir, who
was formed of ice and water and waged war against all the other races. But the gods Odin, Vili,
and Ve overcame him and flung his body into the vast chasm called Ginnungagap, which he had
caused to form. From his blood were created the sea and the waters, from his flesh the Earth,
from his bones the mountains, from his skull the sky, from his brain the clouds, from his
eyebrows Midgarth for the race of men [85] .
Alexander Marshack has taken infinite pains to study human signs of the late stone age hunters
of Southern France, Spain, and elsewhere. He seems to have discovered a practice of marking off
lunar cycles on bones and stones [86] . This would coincide with the model of a Lunarian
culture. during the period of recovery following upon the birth of the Moon.
If Marshack sees in the upper Paleolithic markings the beginning of an astronomy of the Moon,
then the Magdalenians (and others) lived later than other ancient peoples who, not only in the
Americas and Asia, but also in Europe, claimed that they flourished before the coming of the
Moon. According to Aristotle, and after him to Apollonius of Rhodes, human societies antedated
the Moon; they lived when "not all the orbs were yet in heaven." The Arcadians were said to
have been in a reduced state, living upon acorns, before the Moon appeared, and later they
boasted to the Greeks of this [87] .
THE NEAR EAST
The Phrygians of Asia Minor also considered themselves proselenians [88] , So did the Mayans
of Mesoamerica and the Indians of the Columbian highlands.
"The Assyrians referred to the time of the Moon god as to the oldest period in the memory of
the people: before other planetary gods came to dominate the world ages, the Moon was the
Supreme Deity. Such references are found in the inscriptions of Sargon II (about -720): 'Since
the far-off days of the Moon-god's time (era). '" [89]
"An ancient name of the Moon was Aa, A, or Ai, which recalls the Egyptian A‚ h or Ah. The
Sumerian moon was Aku, 'the measurer'...." The origin of the Zodiac is attributed to the "Akkad
country, probably in almost prehistoric times." This is Griffard quoting Mackenzie and
Hinckley-Allen [90] , And might not the Arcadians of the Peloponnesus be of the same root, for
their very founding king was named Pro-Selenius, "Before the Moon"?
I would question, too, whether Abram, later Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch, who was a famous
astronomer of Ur, special seat for the worship of the moon-god, combined in his name elements
of the Moon, "A," and Mercury' s "ram," living in the third millennium in Mercurian times [91]
.
Griffard claims that the zodiac, so important in astronomy, navigation and astrology today, was
originally a measure of distances using the Moon, and "possibly long antedated the general
constellations or even the solar zodiac." [92] Stecchini, too, argues that navigation by the
Moon is simple, as the ingenious American businessman, Nathaniel Bowditch, showed at the time
of the American Revolution with his book of The American Practical Navigator [93] .
The stars and the sun are not needed to navigate, once given the Moon; latitude and longitude
can be calculated. Earliest man could have commonsense means, too, of making up a calendar.
Babylon, which like perhaps all other early cities, was planned on the scheme of heaven,
dedicated many of its pyramidal towers to the moon god [94] . They constitute attempts at
warding off a threatening heaven and controlling the gods.
Briffault stresses the important place among the Semitic people that was held by the Moon, in
the image of the serpent [95] . And now we wonder whether the serpent of the Garden of Eden
represented the moon in the period when Jupiter-Jehovah was taking command of the skies. In
Mesoamerica, too, the moon-god was associated with serpents, as the remarks of Coe have already
disclosed. Hecate, a Greek moon-god form, had tresses of snakes, too.
For the strange figure of "Lilith" in Hebrew mythology, one must go to the cabalistic writings
of the Zohar (13th century) and other sources. Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She was
called "the Night Monster." She left Adam because of incompatibility and three angels tried in
vain to force her return.
I interpret the story as beginning with Adam (who is "Earth") and who is human as is Lilith.
She deserted Earth to become the night-monsterish moon, trailing destructive long tresses of
snakes. Finally Adam, wanting a woman, was given an earth being Eve by Elohim, this being now
the Age of Saturn. (And later came the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the beginning of
Jovea.)
A QUESTION OF LUNAR PRIORITY
Perhaps a case can be made, therefore, from legend as from geophysics, of the recent appearance
of the Moon, following its eruption and the catastrophic cleavage of the Earth. We have noted a
fervent universal worship of, and sacrifices for, the Moon in earliest times. We have
associated early pragmatic functions such as calendarizing and navigation with observations of
the Moon.
Something should be said of the fertility functions as well. It is not enough, of course, to
point to prevalent "primitive" tribes who unite the phases of the Moon with lore, probably some
of it scientifically verifiable, on hunting, planting, and harvesting. Nor even to deduce that,
given the phases of the Moon, we are bound to discover ancient lore and associated rites of the
same kind that originated with observing the phases of the Moon, such as are implied in the
references above to Coe on Mesoamerica and Graves on archaic Greece.
Our problem, much more difficult, is to consider whether true humans existed before the Moon
appeared and thereupon attached its phases to human behavior. Even so, the problem is not
properly circumscribed for it is conceivable that the hominids might observe and follow moon
phases without reflecting upon them just as the Canadian goose instinctively heads South upon
certain signs of winter. If it can be shown that humans at some earlier period were religious
but "non-lunar" then it will be arguable that a) the Moon did not exist, b) that when it
appeared it was an object of terrified worship, its behavior would be reconciled with human
behavior in order to exercise control over it. Legends already cited go to support this
argument.
Also, the undeniable primacy of Uranian Heaven worship, and the proofs of an ecumenical Uranian
civilization allude to a pro-selenian religion; the frequent assertion of anthropologists --
especially the older ones like Morgan and Frazer -- that an animistic, magical phase of
religion preceded the celestial (which we deny) helps, in a backhanded way, to support a
proselenian religion, celestial but not recognizably so full of symbols which seem terrestrial
but may be celestial, though not lunar.
We might take up another example to aid discussion of the problem. Among the Melanesians of
Arnhem's Land (Australia), a cycle of sacred chants and dances commemorates the behavior of the
Moon and the dugong (sea cow) [96] . In the beginning, the Moon lived along the swampy shore
but found the leeches insufferable. She persuaded the dugong that they should take to the sky.
The dugong argued that they would have to die in so doing, but the Moon insisted that she would
only drop her bones temporarily and then grow new ones (presumably the phases of the Moon). The
presence of the sea-cow in this mythical song and dance cycle points, however, to a possible
Venusian origin (around 3400 B. P); the elements indicating a terrestrial origin of the Moon
off the edge of Australia (not necessarily the present waters of Australia) may be an archaic
element juxtaposed with an explanation of the Moon's phases, and with later contacts between
the Moon and the planet Venus (the sea cow, the lotus flower, and the evening star-all are
joined together in the chants). Even so, the juxtaposition points to a confusion of history,
not of reality: that is, both the Moon and the Evening Star were born in the early memorial
generations of the tribe.
ELIADE'S "LUNAR PERSPECTIVE"
M. Eliade analyzes brilliantly the Moon-cycle complex found all over the world. His
interpretation and presentation are totally uniformitarian, reversing cause and effect part of
the time and ascribing power to the Moon that it could never have gained by is present smooth
behavior. The passage comes from The Myth of the Eternal Return, a most useful work [97] .
In the "lunar perspective," the death of the individual and the periodic death of humanity are
necessary, even as the three days of darkness preceding the "rebirth" of the moon are
necessary. The death of the individual and the death of humanity are alike necessary for their
regeneration. Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it exists as such and endures,
necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the
formless if only for an instant; it must be restored to the primordial unity from which it
issued; in other words, it must return to "chaos" (on the cosmic plane), to "orgy" (on the
social plane). to "darkness" (for seed), to "water" (baptism on the human plane, Atlantis on
the plane of history, and so on).
We may note that what predominates all these cosmico-mythological lunar conceptions is the
cyclical recurrence of what has been before, in a word, eternal return. Here we again find the
motif of the repetition of an archetypal gesture, projected upon all planes -- cosmic,
biological, historical, human. But we also discover the cyclical structure of time, which is
regenerated at each new "birth" on whatever plane.. Everything begins over again at its
commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is
irreversible and no transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is even possible to say
that nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same
primordial archetypes; this repetition, by actualizing the mythical moment when the archetypal
gesture was revealed, constantly maintains the world in the same auroral instant of the
beginnings."
These passages must be read in a special way. The Lunarian behavior that Eliade describes is,
in my estimate, the recapitulation by peoples of the second catastrophe of the holocene age.
After all, the phases of the Moon do not demand "chaos." "orgy," darkness," and "water;"
catastrophe in which the Moon played a role does demand them. Every great god is the
centerpiece of a catastrophic cycle; the moon is one of them. The correlation of human behavior
with natural Moon behavior should be interpreted as mankind trying to think like the god, act
like the god, and re-enact the cycle of birth, destruction, and resurrection of the god. Each
great god has its own peculiarities. That the Moon's later behavior exhibited the three phases
in its continuous natural cycle only stressed in the human mind the truth of the universal
proposition of the cycles of the gods and of the human ages.
But the scientists of today should not confuse this coincidence of the Moon's recapitulating
the eternal cycle with the original behavior of the Moon that prompted its dreadful worship --
its birth from the Earth, its flaming, cometary passages around the globe, and its settling
into place with routine motions, that lent hopes of a stable world order. The subsequent
"victimization" of the Moon by greater gods -- Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Mars -- is also
the story of a declining reverence for the Moon among power-worshipping mankind. The very
weakness of the Moon as a god in late times (say after 1500 B. C.), despite its prominence in
the sky and its impressive cycle of birth, maturity, senescence, death, and again resurrection,
suggests that, in the post-Lunarian epoch, new and harsh gods made their weight felt, which,
even when they aged into deus otiosus, still commanded the Moon and Earth. In the historical
mind and cultures of mankind exists the full set of transferred representations of the natural
behaviors and traits of the gods.
THE MENSTRUAL CYCLE
Another case in which quantavolutionary logic argues against the evolutionary logic deals with
the menstrual cycle of women. The facts are well-known; everywhere menstruation has been the
center of taboos, often involving excruciating practices (locking up menstruating women, for
instance) and penalties (killing a woman who lets herself be seen in certain places during
menstruation). Again, this could seem a grossly exaggerated social response to a "normal animal
function." But we note, and many cultures make the connection explicit, that the menstrual
cycle is ordinarily quite close to the lunar monthly cycle. The situations is one that
psychologically cries out for identification and transfer of affect : from the once terrible
and feared moon to the feared and terrible woman. Lederer rightly includes menstrual customs as
a key element in the concatenation of behavior that add up to a universal "Fear of Women." [98]
Quantavolutionary theory supplies hypotheses here. If the Moon erupts into a disaster that
destroys and terrorizes the peoples of Earth, and then afterwards settles into a routine that
"points its finger" directly at the universal behavior of women, then that behavior becomes
sacred, threatening, and certainly the object of social controls -- just as one would wish to
control the Moon, and indeed as part of the extended efforts at controlling the Moon.
Nor should we overlook another and even more frightening possibility, that the original Uranian
civilized and humanized women, confronted with a god who is assuming a certain periodicity of
behavior, would obsessively demand of themselves the emulation of the god's behavior and
thereupon, by psychosomatic means, fashion their menstrual cycle to conform to the period of
the Moon. Then women would, by this demonstration of a control quite beyond the capacities of
men, achieve a relation to the god that would be a constant threat to the males. These, in
turn, would "reward by punishment," that is, surround menstruation with taboos and penalties
that grant only bitter fruits to female victory.
The consequences extend to parturition; birthing is already part of Uranian religion, the
parting of the sky and earth. But now in the Lunarian period, birth is also the breaking of the
cosmic cycle of lunar menstruation; the cycle ceases upon pregnancy. Fertility then becomes
more sacred because (and the male is the agent) it, too, controls the cosmic process.
THE HEAVENLY SPINNER
The Moon, or at least the Goddess of the Moon, is a spinner. This trait may possess
significance. A spinner, to ancient civilization, denotes a raw material to be spun, a distaff
to gather it conveniently, and a spindle around which to wind the threads that are drawn out of
the material. In Egypt, Tayet, Goddess of Spinning, was a daughter of the great early Sun Re,
(probably Super-Uranus) and a daughter of Nut, probbably a moon-goddess, as well as
representing the sky.
Figure 23 shows the Mesoamerican goddess Tlazolteotl as Moon Goddess, "with spindles placed in
her headdress as an indication of her role as patroness of weaving...." [99] Figure 24 shows
the Moon in full view behind the Moon Goddess (Aphrodite) with Ares and Eros. Suhr, who pursued
the subject with great intensity, writes that "the heavenly Aphrodite... was frequently
portrayed as a spinner reaching out into the surrounding air to fleecy clouds to serve as raw
material." [100] Her other hand was carried in a position to gather the threads. In earlier
times, she was represented with the necessary equipment; later the equipment was dispensed with
[101] , and the marvellously graceful posture remained, a "classic pose." She would be bare to
the waist and barefooted to avoid collecting threads and lint.
Figure 23.
THE MESOAMERICAN MOON GODDESS TLAZOLTEOTL.
Talzolteotl, the Moon Goddess with Spindles in Her Hair. Source: Codex Boriga, 55; Coe, 16.
Among the designs often associated with the very many paintings and sculptures of the Moon
Goddess were whirls, whorls, and spirals. Sometimes she carried a mirror as a symbol of the
reflections of the Moon; it substituted for the spindle. On her head she wore at times a cap
resembling a cone and distaff of raw wool. The headgear is called the "polos," a word we have
come to identify with the Boreal pole, of Uranian origins, site of the first heavenly city that
inspired all subsequent architecture.
The cone is manifested throughout Mesopotamian and Greek cultures [102] . It is the shadow
cast by the Moon on the Earth, with a circumference of 50 miles. It is, Suhr surmises, the
origin of the mythical Unicorn, which is found in ancient China and Mesopotamia.
Figure 24.
APHRODITE THE MOON GODDESS
(After Suhr, fig. 47, following Verrall and Harrison).
In examining another specimen of moon-art, Suhr observes "an eastern divinity... one of those
composite deities we recognize as an oriental precursor of the Ouranian Aphrodite; the
attributes, a mirror in one hand and what is most likely a distaff in the other, support this
assumption... Whether she is Kybele or the Dea Syria, she wears a veil over a conical headdress
surmounted by the crescent of the Moon.. A Hittite relief shows up a similar divinity with the
same attributer." [103]
"In the Vedic hymns Rakha, the full moon, is supposed to make beautiful garments for night and
morning, with a needle which can never be broken. She weaves together the roseate hues of
morning and the soft mellow tint of evening." [104]
In appraising his findings, Suhr concludes that the Moon is a spinning goddess because she may
be seen to gather clouds (upon her distaff) and drop (threadlike) rains upon the Earth. She is
connected with fertility and love, after all, which appears to be logical. The
quantavolutionary logic, however, modifies this explanation.
If the Moon is born from the Earth, amidst chaos, in a splatter of "blood and genitals" from
the earliest war of the gods, and then must pull itself into a ball, the "clouds" would become
the primordial "raw stuff" of the spinner. If the Moon rotated in its earliest times, while
gathering itself together, it spins like the distaff gathering wool and ejecting thread. If the
Earth is being deluged by cosmic waters and at the same time by waters raised up in great heat
and falling back upon the Earth, then the Moon, amidst it all, is the spinner dropping threads,
but what impressive gathering of wool, and revolving of distaff and what threads they were!
Impressive enough to cause the mind to inaugurate a useful invention.
Again, and as usual, we see the "rational" process reversed; the invention and practice of
spinning and weaving do not excite the mind to create the god. The "god" excites the mind to
create the invention and the practice. Later on, the mind becomes subdued; it pushes into its
subconscious recesses the first causes, makes effects out of causes, and ends up with a
tolerable mental imagery that conforms to nature as one wishes it were.
When this later stage arrives, a confusion of names and identities sets in as well, so that
Aphrodite becomes Venus in men's minds, for example, or Zeus becomes Saturn, or Saturn becomes
the Sun, and so on. More of this later. The present chapter is done. On evidence from
geophysics, mythology, and psychology, the Moon is deemed to be a recently exploded fraction of
the Earth, to be newly emplaced, and to have been worshipped heavily and in accord with its
original history. Still to be related are later experiences of the Earth's satellite, of when
it was flooded by Saturn, cratered by the bolts of Jupiter and Mercury, and pelted, shocked,
and melted by Venus and Mars.
Notes (Chapter Seven: Earth Parturition and Moon Birth)
1. See also Long (1974) 240-1.
2. I follow here Suhr's (1969) identification of "foam-born" Aphrodite with moon.
3. See Kelly (1963) on a cometary train striking and excavating the Pacific Basin, 1-8, 76-99
espec. 89.
4. The astronomer Lyttleton once said, regarding the origin of the Moon, "that a distant third
body, such as the Sun, might play a major role in rounding out an eccentric orbit in a
surprisingly short period of time." Juergens (1974B) 39.
5. Marsden and Cameron (1966).
6. I came upon a copy of Baker's work (1932, 1954) in the Library of Congress as I was checking
some last citations for this book. The year before (1978) I had noticed a passing reference to
Baker in Sullivan (1974); Sullivan mentioned only Baker's idea that an intruder, possibly
Venus, had encountered Earth. The Princeton Libraries listed the 1932 book but when I searched
for it, I discovered that it had been lost or otherwise removed from the geology library
stacks. I asked Velikovsky whether he knew of it and he told me that he, too, had sought it out
but found it missing. Some years ago, someone at the University of Southern Illinois at
Carbondale had made a microfilm of the copy that belongs to the Library of Congress. Baker is
completely unknown in geology, a case of unheard genius.
7. (1965); Vsekhsvyatskii (1976) 53.
8. In Marsden and Cameron (1966) 216.
9. Wilson (1968) 316.
10. Vsekhsvyatskii (1976).
11. Ibid., 11.
12. Ibid., 13.
13. Cook (1972).
14. M. Cook (1966) 120 ff., relying upon Alex du Toit's early defense of continental drift and
ice cap depression as originating the Atlantic rupture, and upon the Farraud and Gadja
Wisconsin Ice Cap studies and the Heiskanen and Vening-Meinisz Fennoscandian studies, reports
that both the shape of the depression (now-rebounding) and its rate of rebound and less than
10,000 years ago (our 11,500 B. P.) The present theory does not posit "ice caps" prior to the
Saturnian Age finale. Therefore, it calls upon other mechanisms, especially a cosmic lightning
exchange. Had there been ice dumps in the first Uranian, proto-human period, Pacific Basin
lunagenesis would also be facilitated.
15. Wegener (1924) 21, 202-5.
16. Ibid., 205.
17. D. W. Wise in Marsden and Cameron (1966) 216.
18. Driscoll.
19. Cf. Ransom (1976) 142-54.
20. Driscoll; Ruzic, 51; Wood, 72-3.
21. Cook (1972).
22. Ransom (1976), 153-4.
23. Velikovsky (1972) 20.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 19.
26. Ransom (1976) 143-4; Treash (1972).
27. Ransom (1976) 146-7.
28. Ferté (1972) 13.
29. Velikovsky (1972) 19.
30. Ibid., 19.
31. Ransom (1976) 145-6; Ferte (1972).
32. Velikovsky (19720 21.
33. Juergens (1974D, 1974E).
34. Ibid.,
35. Juergens (1974C).
36. Personal communication, Juergens, 1970.
37. Cook (1972).
38. Cook (1972).
39. Wood, 69.
40. Cook (1972).
41. This is reasoned from Cook (1966) 3 who estimates Earth's crust might solidify in 1000
years.
42. Wood, 71.
43. O'Keefe (1966) 224 Cf. O'Keefe, Tektites (1963) on their widespread distribution on Earth.
44. Cf. Bellamy (1936) 35 ff., where the damage to Earth from a Moon capture is estimated.
45. Cook (1972) 18-9.
46. Baldwin 277-8 in Marsden and Cameron (1966).
47. Wood, 69.
48. Ibid., 71.
49. Ibid., 70.
50. Ibid.
51. Cook writes (1966) 152; "There is evidence for the hexagonal structures characteristic of
shock fracture, but this evidence is by no means perfect." He is not postulating the moon
eruption, and hence would perhaps find his fracture model more evident if he took it into
account. Soviet geologists have conceived of the Earth as a 12 and 20 latticed crystal grid,
suggesting a correlation between the fracture model and the world cleavage system (Bird, 36
ff).
52. Sullivan (1974) 147.
53. Cook (1966) 103-12; Carey (1958).
54. Cook (1966) 268 ff.
55. Jordan's figure 32 (p. 86) and graph picture the multiple discontinuities of seismic waves
below the Earth's surface at 413, 984, 2898. 492 and 5121 km. besides the Moho. They all served
historically the same function of allowing the globe to maintain its bodily integrity under
distortion and interruption.
56. Besides Fisher see Ma (1955). Harry Hess, says Sullivan (131), believed that the Moho
"simply marks a change in molecular structure caused, perhaps, by high temperature at that
level, either currently or at some time in the past."
57. Haymes (1971).
58. Vico IV 808; cf. 258., iv 814; 401, 408, 221, 708.
59. Bellamy (1948).
60. Kondratov, 77.
61. Temple (1976) 250-1.
62. Bellamy (1936) 167.
63. Temple (1976) 251.
64. Ibid. Note the quantavolutionary mass species extinction and new creation here.
65. Ibid., 252.
66. Genesis, 1: 2.
67. Ibid., 2: 4, 10.
68. (1975), 12.
69. Patten (1966) 188.
70. BK. II, ch. I, p. 12. Trogus, a Gallic Roman active around 5 A. D., was probably his
source.
71. Bellamy (1948) 158-9.
72. Donnelly (1883), 175 quoting Brinton.
73. Bellamy (1936) 271.
74. Ibid., 187; cf. Mullen (1974), 39-44.
75. Coe (1975) 43.
76. Brasseur (1869), Brunhouse (1973) describes the role of Brasseur.
77. Bancroft (1874) V, 112.
78. Bellamy (1936) 269.
79. Wilkins (1956) 87.
80. (1936) 273.
81. Poznansky, II 151.
82. Coe (1975) 14-5, Cf. in India, "The Venus Aphroditus of the western mythologists, and
emblematic of the lunisolar year. She is the daughter of Durga, and the Proserpine of the West;
and considered as time, she is the same with her mother. Metaphorically, she may sometimes
represent the moon." (Bentley 27).
83. Ibid., 17.
84. Donnelly (1883) 155.
85. Bellamy (1936) 178-9.
86. Marshack (1972).
87. Patterson (1973).
88. Carli (1788) 308.
89. Velikovsky (1973).
90. Griffard, (1977) 33.
91. Cf. Westropp and Wake (1875) 53, and Gobler.
92. Griffard 46.
93. Personal communication, April, 1977.
94. Bellamy (1936).
95. Briffault (1927) III 106 ff.
96. Berndt (1948).
97. Eliade (1954) 88-890.
98. Lederer (1968).
99. Coe (1975) 14-5.
100. Suhr (1969) 160-2.
101. J. J. Bernoulli, Aphrodite (Leipzig 1873, p. 80) "states that in the case of Aphrodite,
all cosmic attributes that were implastisch must have disappeared from statues at an early
date." (Suhr, 173).
102. Ibid., 51.
103. Suhr, 19.
104. Occidens (1888) A1-14.
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER EIGHT: SATURN'S CHILDREN
The year 1977 marked the beginning of quantavolutionary publications about Saturn. Three
articles appeared, written by David Talbott, by Dwardu Cardona, and jointly by Harold Tresman
and B. O'Gheoghan. A few months later, Velikovsky, who had inspired the studies in each case,
without participating in them released a fragment of his manuscripts on Saturn [1] .
"Two stars erupted from the planet Saturn and caused the Deluge." So states the Talmud, in
Velikovsky's translation [2] . This is one of the several principal conclusions reached by the
other writers. Saturn was a second sun, shining by day and night upon Earth. The record of the
star is preserved in the legends of every ancient people. It was the dominating star of its age
and most of the basic mythology of the world is traceable to its varying aspects, behavior, and
fate. After leaving its infinitely complex imprint upon Earth and mankind, Saturn exploded in a
nova or collision; a deluge fell upon the Earth; and Jupiter became king of the heavenly hosts.
From David Talbott we summarize more of the abundant material. For the ancients
"it was Saturn who introduced the day... what the Babylonians called Saturn's 'coming forth in
splendor' signified the beginning of the archaic 'day. ' Saturn dominated the night and
competed with the sunlight during the day.
Mythical records are unanimous in saying that Saturn, during his reign, stood in the north....
The Egyptian Ra, Osiris, Horus... the Mesopotamian Ninurta, Enki, Anu, Shamash... the Hebrew,
or Ugaritic El... the Hindu Brahma, Vishnu, Varuna, Surya... the Chinese Huang-ti or Shang-
ti... the Greek Kronos -- all appear as stationary suns... They are described as fixed at the
polar summit... Ra comes forth and diminishes em hetep, which means 'while standing in one
place. ' He comes forth and diminishes at the center, which is also the summit -- the celestial
Pole." [3] Saturn was also the Babylonian Entil.
The points of difference among the several authors and between them and the theses of this book
will be subjected in time to elaborate criticism, but the developing consensus amounts to a
serious challenge to conventional opinion in the full range of historical and natural sciences.
Whether Saturn achieved stardom and kingship by the route delineated in this book or by means
of some other cosmogony, we see, in the age of Saturnia, a divine figure of exquisite
symbolism. Talbott presents the configuration of Saturn and analyzes its details as they are
supplied by comparative mythology and archaeoastronomy. The configuration is presented in
Figure 25. I have placed beneath each item of Talbott's Saturnian imagery a sloganized
identification of it. The reader, already alerted to what is to come by what has been said in
earlier chapters, can promptly grasp the significance of the parts and the whole and move
confidently thereafter through the main body of this chapter.
The parts of the symbols are used in many ways in all areas of the world. The whole depicts at
one time a winged angel, another time a long-robed priest-god, and other symbols as well. Not
surprisingly, the Christmas Tree, crowned by a star, traces its descent into the remote past.
Figure 25f is taken directly from an Assyrian plaque [4] . It illustrates the full form,
containing several of the elements "a" to "e", that represents a real-life imitation of Saturn,
the god of the second and dominating sun in the period following the emplacement of the Moon
and creation of the oceans. Two half-human, half-bullish figures uphold the Saturn image.
The drawing 25g shows an ancient Mayan figure from Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico, and is called a
"solar symbol" which it is, but a symbol of the second sun Saturn [5] . Figure "h" is the full
composite drawn by Talbott. Figure "i" is a Dogon item of today; Temple has described the
astronomy of this remarkable African tribe. Earlier, I expressed an eclectic view of
independent invention, diffusion, and common experience, in pre-history.
Figure 25
COMPOSITION OF SATURN IMAGES
(shown below a to i) .
gg h i g. Solar Symbol at Uxmal. (Publications of the Bureau of Ethnography vol. ii., pl. 57,
no. 5) from Goblet, p. 226.
h. A composite of Saturn imagery (drawn by D. Talbott). In terms of Solaria Binaria, the view
is up the Magnetic Tube from Earth
i. Pendant called "The Female Sun." *From Fisher H. Mesmith, Jr., (1979) "Dogon Bronzes," XII
African Arts, No. 2, (Feb.) 23.
These similarities are products of forceful similar experiences, depicting the experiences on
the basis of originally derived ecumenical techniques and older experiences; yet, some element
of diffusion may also be present, particularly since, in the "golden age of Saturn", great
stretches of now sunken continental land were still above the sea, peoples were closer, and the
seas were more navigable.
THE PLEIADES
The same analysis may be applied to the Pleiades constellation. Many places around the world
mark the beginning of November as the Day of the Dead; it is All Saints Day; Halloween; All
Souls Day; etc. The time is associated with the Pleiades for reasons not clearly understood yet
[6] . The coincidences of time, mood, ceremony, and stellar assignation is so great as to
exclude independent invention except in particulars and to insist upon a common experience of
explicit quality. Only this may be said on behalf of diffusion: if the event "X" that threw the
whole world into mourning in regard to the Pleiades occurred before the Moon eruption, then
diffusion may be accepted. But if the event occurred in the time of Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury or
Venus, then diffusion, like independent invention, must be reduced to particulars, and common
experience and common observation must be the cause of the coincidences.
Cardona produces evidence to show that Saturn (Khima) is connected with the Pleiades [7] . For
one thing their names are often confused, as in the King James and other versions of the Bible
where Khima is translated as 'Pleiades' instead of as 'Saturn. ' The Pleiades are connected
with the Flood of Noah (Saturn) in many places. Further, two stars from (Super) Saturn caused
the deluge. As Ginzberg reports the legend, "the upper water rushed through the space left when
god removed two stars out of the constellation Pleiades [Saturn]." [8] The stars, says
Cardona, were better called comets; the Earth was deluged when it passed through their tails.
(Super) Saturn was in the North polar region prior to its explosion. The Pleiades were
presumably behind Saturn. After the Deluge, Saturn had been moved and the Pleiades were
observed in his place.
Now we recite the Osiris-Saturn legend in Egypt. The great and beloved god, Osiris, is drowned
by the devil god, Seth, who then cuts his body to pieces and scatters its fragments. The
Pleiades, we surmise, are the fragments and worshipped on the day of Saturn's death. The
discrepancy between early November and late December, when Saturn is celebrated and the
Saturnalia are held, indicates that the length of the year shifted once again after the deluge,
perhaps from 260 to 320 days or so. At least one of the Pleiades has since lost much of its
brightness, for many peoples, who can today observe only six stars, cite its true number of
seven stars.
From the very beginnings in Urania, mankind was impressed by the great eye that appeared in the
"northern" opening of the sky. In Talbott's drawings (Figure 25) we see it. In the course of
the day, the eye is often lidded with the crescent of the Sun's reflection (the inverted sky-
boat). The image also changes into the face of the Heavenly Cow, horned by the crescent. Rudolf
Anthes writes :
The concept of the Eye of the highest god was mentioned in the story of the heavenly cow. The
Eye occurs either as the Eye of Horus or the Eye of Re, though not exclusively : we encountered
the Eye of Atum before. The characteristic of the Eye appears to be that its removal from the
highest god means disturbance, while its return means pacification and the restitution of
order." [9]
The great battle when Seth plucked out the Eye of Horus (Jupiter) was one such occasion. The
Eye prevailed until the end of Jovean times; it is still found in many occult philosophies and
on the face of the American dollar.
THE TRIUMPH OF SATURN
Saturn replaced Uranus as binary sun and god some twelve thousand years ago. More correctly, it
would be "Super-Saturn", for the birth of Jupiter from Saturn had not yet occurred. The
transition from the one god to the other occurred as one more in the series of disasters, the
climax of which to Solaria Binaria was the fissioning of the darker binary, Super-Uranus, while
the climax to earthlings was the pass-by of the exploded body and the eruption of the Moon. The
behavior of the Moon was foremost in human attention for many centuries.
Expectedly, the ancients appear to have been sometimes unclear about the succession of events.
They were clear in having Saturn descend directly from the heaven-god, not the Moon, and
especially from a father, Uranus. They were often confused, however, about the exact form of
transmission from Uranus, so that increasingly we find them according the work of creation to
Saturn, rather than Uranus. The student today must depend upon scraps of evidence. The
distinction between Super-Uranus and Saturn was more apparent to the earliest peoples than to
us toady, or even than to the Greeks, many memorial generations later.
The Hebrew Genesis credits the work of creation to Elohim or Saturn, but a close reading of its
first lines may reveal that the work-week of Elohim traverses the times of Urania and Lunaria.
It may be premised that every creation mythology will ultimately afford a predecessor to
Saturn. And, "in each case, the successor to the original deity was a Saturn-like god." [10]
The beginning of Saturn's kingdom was fashioned by the Greeks into a story of celestial revolt
[11] . Mother Earth aroused the giants born of Ouranos and herself. These united behind her
son, Kronos, who in the struggle castrated his father. The giants or Titans ascended from the
bowels of the Earth into heaven. Ouranos was exiled into farther space, possibly in reality
constituting planet Uranus or Neptune, leaving the Earth bloody and battered by his passage.
It seemed logical by analogy: He who had overburdened and oppressed Mother Earth, who had
buried her children under the Earth, lost his virile member. The perennial connections among
astronomy, geology, sex and religion were reinforced (not only in Greek myth but everywhere)
[12] . Humans developing from hominids very much like themselves, employed the most obvious and
personally salient analogies. The mountain of sexualized religious myths rose like a new
volcano.
Saturn the god was identified by the Romans with the planet Saturn. As sun and king of gods,
Saturn's names were many. Besides those listed by D. Talbott above (p. 179), one might mention
as Saturnian Elohim (Hebrews), Odin (norse), Baal (Near East), and Tiamat-Apsu (Assyrian). Many
identities are lost or undiscovered; several were once used for Uranus (as Varuna) or are given
to later gods (as Baal became Venus). Also god heroes and gods act interchangeably, as Manu and
Vishnu (Hindu) [13] . His home is supposed to be in the north where he presided on his throne.
An early Egyptian account in the age of Mercury says that "when [Pharaoh] Pepi standeth upon
the north of heaven with Ra, he becometh lord of the universe, like unto the king of the gods."
[14] Pepi is also called brother of the Moon. A Chaldean oracle called him the companion of
Helios, the Titanic Sun [15] . M. Jastrow (1898) states: "... at all events, the fact that
Saturn was also called the 'sun' is vouched for, both by explanatory notes attached to the
astrological connotations, and by notices in classical writings to that effect." [16] Many
peoples of the Age of Saturn could see the planet there; it was huge and becoming more
continuously distinct as the boreal heavens cleared of the Uranian canopies and the Lunarian
debris. Saturn was the first irradiator of light, wrote Westropp and Wake [17] , but we
recognize Super-Uranus in this capacity and Saturn, the son of Uranus, as continuing where he
left off.
THE "GOLDEN AGE"
The costly mechanics of the Lunarian period had purchased a reprieve to life upon Earth. The
land surface of the Earth included the continental shelves and slopes, for the oceans were
lower. The Sun shone feebly from the South. Its Saturnine binary, darkly brooding upon its
children, dominated the northern sky, reflecting the Sun with some of its brightness and
clarity that the Moon, daughter of Uranus, possessed. The Earth was almost never in full
darkness. The climate of Saturnia was even and damp, a tropical greenhouse. The clouds still
were much heavier than the skies of today.
Language became well-developed and replete with celestial references. Drawing and picture
symbols occur. Memories of Uranus were historicized. Memories of the lunar catastrophes were
suppressed, but persisted in lunar myth and rites. Literature and music of a liturgical kind
developed. "Religious" history was the pretext for music and art. The Romans regarded the most
ancient Latin verses as Saturnian music, barbaric, chanted by fauns and augurs
The jagged flint sickle with which Saturn was said to have castrated his father became the
inspiration and symbol of the useful tools of a golden age of agriculture. It also became the
harp or lyre of music, when strung. Women and men, indeed all people, worked in general
equality. Rulers merged sacred and sacred ideas. They were something like totem animals, not
all-powerful, not gods, but steeped in the divine and used as scapegoats and advocates before
the gods.
Government by God-kings of the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Chinese type evolved later. First a
kind of sacred republican rule prevailed. Then the sacred ruler became the God-King. The
transition may have been "natural", as aggressive people enslaved others and their kings
expanded royal power generally on the basis of their especial powers over slaves. Since the
desire to control others, as well as to control the gods, was so strong, there would be no
psychological resistance to absolutism in government. There appear to have been no Saturnian
monolithic civilizations; Tiahuanacu and Atlantis did not seem to have the kind of state that
dynastic Egypt and Sumeria developed in the next age of Jove. Perhaps Saturn was peaceful, the
Moon calm now, and mankind generally restrained in behavior.
Civilizations, now separated by oceanic waters, entered upon a golden age, supposedly under the
benevolent rule of Saturn. The altars addressed his northern polar throne. Saturn is "the
generator," "the devourer," and the "vital vortex." [18] His are the virtues of rusticity.
Peace was believed to have characterized his reign. Something of the old aggressiveness seems
to have absented itself from the human breast. Thousands of years later, the Romans deposited
the ensigns of the legions in the temple of Saturnia when at peace. Many place names are of
Saturn or his qualities. Latium of the Latins, for instance, was supposedly named for his place
of exile, when he hid (latuit). Life appeared generally easy to humanity during the "golden
age" of Saturn, with universal warmth, moist conditions, an absence of marked seasons, low
atmospheric turbulence, and a suffused golden color from the translucent remaining canopies.
Still religion flourished, and with it the practice of human sacrifices to Saturn. Long into
the Roman Empire, despite legal suppression, the sacrifices were continued. Baal and Moloch
were names for Saturn that endured in the Hebrew world until they came to stand for evil gods.
The Phoenicians joined him to Baal and pictured him as a lion whose head was crowned by rays, a
solar (binary?) image [19] . Animal representations --among them the snake, bear, lion, and
bull continued to assist in worship.
In the endless process of transferring gods and names, the names of Saturn descended to Jupiter
and then to Venus, who were also called Baal and Moloch. However, the confusion among the
ancients has been compounded by the lack of data and by the ideological prejudice of Solarian
scholars who, regarding the gods as divinely named anthologies of fiction, were in no condition
to distinguish the true identity of the gods to whom sacrifices were made.
THE PEOPLES OF SATURNIA
The multiple kingdoms of Atlantis that Plato described may have been of the political and
social order of Saturnia. Atlantis was a set of kingdoms of related cultures [20] . It was
perhaps Celtic and in close touch with the Tethyan-Mediterranean culture. Its survivors may
have been the Stonehenge and megalithic builders of Western Europe. They remained under the
influence of the Minoans, Phoenicians, and Mycenaeans.
Atlantis can be best defined by a line enclosing all of the European northwestern continental
platform from the Bay of Biscay to Scandinavia on the north, from the western banks of Ireland
into Denmark and France. It is difficult to decide whether the Pillars of Hercules that led to
the several kingdoms were at Gibraltar, or whether the "Pillars" referred to the innumerable
megalithic dolmens that later lined the shores in honor of Hercules, perhaps even in
conjunction with a precursor to the English Channel [21] .
Saturn taught mankind the arts, possibly after the Lunarian catastrophes. Metals were
occasionally worked where they had fallen or erupted; stone and wood construction were fully
elaborated. The science of geometry governed temples, roadways, and navigation. The great seas
of Lunaria could be crossed for the first time and international commerce flourished. Carli
insisted that before the Deluge of Saturn, the inhabitants of the globe might pass readily
between Africa, Europe, and America. Maps were probably drawn [22] , considering that the so-
called "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings" which came to light recently show Antarctic shores as
they are today beneath the ice; the area has not been free of ice since the colder climates of
Jovea arrived around 6000 years ago.
The differentiation of races is a result of ancient catastrophes. The races of hominids had
been several in Pangea [23] . The race of mankind sui generis, was agglomerative in Urania.
Its near extinction of Lunarian times produced many new breeds in isolated spots of the globe.
Saturnia was a time of the multiplication of humans. Still the propagation was not uniform.
Rather, isolated pockets of older strain remained, while three fairly distinct races flourished
and dominated the world.
The three constituted the three major modern races. The areas of the Tethyan welt that runs
around the world east and west included the original Caucasian peoples who can be called the
Atlanteans and the Tethyans. Even today some evidences of their original occupation of the
Tethyan belt are noted in the Caribbean belt and Polynesia. Nor is Northwest Europe devoid of
hints of the Atlanteans. Further, the American Indians of the East Southeast were perhaps
originally Tethyans [24] . The Sines were split into Asians and American. The Africans were
divided into those who remained in North and Central South America and in Africa and those who
were transported long distances upon the moving Indian subcontinent and into Australasia [25]
.
Neanderthal, other "modern" types, and a number of hominid branches were wiped out as breeding
groups by ecological disasters and by the new humans who were aggressively schizoid. In each of
these three races, the surviving strains that rapidly bred were partly related to some common
Uranian ancestors. Although they developed many special features they were still possessed of
the basic schizoid humanness that incorporated the methods of survival in its madness.
The population of Saturnia was large. It developed religious, political, artistic, and
linguistic forms that were to persevere through the ages until the breakthroughs of
enlightenment and science in the 6th century B. C. (2,600 B. P.) in China, India, the Near East
and Mediterranean; that is, until the end of the Martian terror [26] . The archaic
Mesoamerican cultures that Spinden and Coe believe to have stretched from southwestern U. S. A.
to the Andes, a full neolithic culture, was Saturnian, and probably at bottom Uranian.
THE DOWNFALL OF SATURN : NOVA AND DELUGE
Saturnia ended in disaster. Super-Saturn, the remnant binary of the Sun, underwent the same
fate as Super-Uranus. It progressively engorged material from space it could ill digest. Its
rotation was interrupted by the meals of "his children," as the Greek myth would have it;
Figure 26 is an artistic rendering of the myth. Only Zeus (Jupiter) escaped, by the wiles of
his mother and nurses (the Kuretes). Atum, the Egyptian Saturn, means "the One who has been
completed by absorbing others." [27] Finally, near the year 6000 B. P., Saturn appeared to be
in a frightful fit of rage; it brilliantly exploded much of its shell of gas and waters into
space, and fissioned. It was a nova, still marked today by its emission of x-rays.
The Earth suffered a deluge of water and salt [28] . In addition to the Saturnian salt waters,
the high clouds that blanketed the Earth most of the time were brought down in the ensuing
destruction of the world. The "beloved" and "melancholy" old god of time was assaulted, as the
Greek myth goes, by his wife in league with Zeus, his son (Jupiter). When he became visible
again to human survivors, he was in farther space, bound up forever in his rings. The bonds
were known to the ancients who thought them meant to restrain the old god and penalize him in a
way for the crime of infant cannibalism [29] . So his last pictures, memorialized commonly in
graphic media of classical times, was of a king receiving a wrapped stone in lieu of the infant
Zeus. (See Figure 13.) The legerdemain that was to be his undoing, according to Greek legend
again, was a fate that was foreseen and foresworn by his own father, Ouranos, when Ouranos was
exiled into far space.
While the astronomical drama was interpreted and reworked in these terms by some of its human
observers, the peoples of Saturnia were practically obliterated. An electrical storm of cosmic
dimensions ensued as Jupiter and Saturn separated. Lightning discharges were exchanged even
among Jupiter and the planets. The axis of the Earth tilted sharply and quickly. Anaxagoras,
the ancient Greek scientist, says that the Earth's pole tilted at the time of the flood [30] .
The north pole, instead of pointing towards Saturn, now was nearly perpendicular to the plane
of the ecliptic. The seasons became severe because of the loss of cloud cover and far
atmosphere. Ice collected in the polar regions. Earthquakes shook the globe. In the Hebrew
story, Adam and Eve, representing all people, were driven from the Garden of Eden by Yahweh,
who made them feel intense guilt and shame. They felt their nudity physically, too, and needed
warm clothing.
Figure 26.
SATURN DEVOURING HIS CHILDREN.
Not only did a new cold climate come upon Earth. Also, waters of Saturn were blown back along
the solar axis, making dense the atmosphere of the thinning magnetic tube. But the great axis
of fire, the electrical current of Pangea, was practically gone and the tube could not generate
the magnetic field to support a universal atmosphere. The cataclysms began again. A great
deluge of Noah (Near East), of Manu (India), and of many names elsewhere swamped the Earth. The
waters fell upon continents and oceans. They fell as snow and ice at the polar regions. They
ran off the continents into the sea.
The great heights reached by the floods according to many ancient myths suggest that tidal
forces were operating, as well as deluges. The necessary cause of the tides may have been a
large, electrically charged body passing near to the Earth. This could have been Saturn itself
as it whirled from Jupiter in a great ellipse before retiring into farther space of its present
solar orbit. Certainly in such a case, mountains too would have been further elevated. The
tides would have also occurred if the Earth's axis shifted suddenly, with a consequent
whirlpool of the Earth's waters and a rebounding of the flattened polar rocks.
Hence the high peaks upon which heroes around the world were stranded were probably revealed as
the waters receded, but might also have been somewhat raised up at the time. The survivors,
such as Noah and his family and animals, and Manu and his wise men, would have found little
left of their own cultures. Survivors from the northern belts of the Earth would have migrated
towards the center afterwards. They would have suffered devastation by cross-tides, deluges,
and the ravaging of the atmosphere by wind, electricity, and fall-out of cosmic debris and
particles.
The species were again decimated and their populations drastically reduced. The survivors,
animal and human, fled together to the caves and highlands. The green world became browner and
drier. People had to labor; they survived "by the sweat of their brows."
Numerous continental area, shelves and slopes, that had escaped aquatic burial before were now
drowned, never to rise again. Great earthquakes accompanied the floods, following upon the
primeval but still continuing imbalances and the crustal shock of tilting, the movements of
waters, the lithospheric adjustment to the old and new equatorial bulges, and the electrical
interruption of the Earth's rotation.
Atlantis sank in a day of furious trembling and flood, it was told. Portions of the sialic
continents that had remained above the oceans were deluged, not only at Atlantis but throughout
the world. Total destruction came upon the large part of the Earth's population which was
living on the continental margins. For these suddenly became the vast continental slopes and
shelves of the oceans.
The ocean basins had not been deliberately designed for water, much less a quota of waters.
They were the cups paved with basalt, volcanically transformed, placed where the crust had been
removed and between the separating continents. That waters filled them from the beginning was a
geological coincidence. That waters now overflowed them was an equally understandable lack of
congruence.
THE POSEIDON PHASE
Okeanos, the child of Ouranos, was the founder of the ocean: he had begun his descent from
heaven in Uranian times. The first phase of the Jovean Age and last great flood of waters from
the skies might be called the Poseidon Phase. In Greek myth Poseidon, son of Kronos and brother
of Zeus, remained in Heaven after his father retired, but later made an accord with Zeus to
descend and rule the seas. The same great god was a ruler of Atlantis and was ambitious to rule
the whole Earth as well. He was "greedy of earthly kingdoms," [31] and famed for encroaching
upon the Earth, as he did during the Atlantean collapse and flood.
F. Guirand provides additional helpful suggestions regarding Poseidon :
Poseidon was a very ancient Pelasgian deity, older even than Zeus. His province, later confined
to the waters, was in primitive times much wider.... The name Poseidon seems to derive from the
root meaning 'to be master'.... It is not impossible that this primitive Poseidon, this
sovereign 'master, ' had once been a celestial god, as his attribute, the trident -- probably a
symbol for the thunderbolt -- seems to indicate. Though supplanted by Zeus, Poseidon continued
to exercise his empire over the entire Earth... [32]
At Sparta he was called "the creator." It is possible, then, that Poseidon was mistaken for
Jupiter or may have been for a time a visible distinct element in the break-up of Super-Saturn
appearing between the time of the nova of Saturn and the great Deluge.
SURVIVORS AND SATURNALIA
Many neolithic sites uncovered in the Eurasian and African region are Saturnian. It was not an
age of great temples. A stone age culture, quite decentralized, had existed in the land of
Egypt before the first Egyptian dynasties were founded. There, little direct succession can be
shown between Saturnia and Jovea. There is a great cultural leap and the physical type of the
people changed [33] . The direct ancestors of the Egyptians were probably survivors from
Tethyan northwestern Africa, or Indo-Africa.
Mullen surmises that the unification of Egypt "might have followed fairly directly after the
deluge" from a study of the first king lists. "Most of the gods preceding Menes as divine kings
are associated with the Osiris deluge legend. The fact that every king from Menes on identified
himself with Horus, the planet Jupiter" suggests a new order under the auspices of a new
planet.
Before the "Bronze Ages," so called, of Jovea, many surface contours from the Atlantic Ocean to
Iran had been altered. The Saturnian centers were often not preferred as sites for the new
Bronze Age centers. Most Bronze Age sites of Eurasia are marked by six catastrophes [34] . But
to find sites below them is rare. One is led to believe that either an entirely new foundation
was laid where none had existed before, or else an original settlement had been completely
erased in the transition from Saturn to Jupiter.
That the new age of Jupiter was more physically and politically repressive is strongly
indicated by the Saturnalia. Persisting to the present day, in one form or another (" the
influence of the Saturnalia upon the celebrations of Christmas and the New Year has been
direct") [35] the Saturnalian revivals reveal what must have been a long-extant view of life
and even social practices. In the Saturnalia, which occupied seven days in Rome, beginning on
December 17, the times of chaos and breaking up of an age are repeated ritualistically. Once a
year they removed the bonds of linen that wrapped up the god in the ancient Tarquinian temple,
only to replace them afterwards [36] .
But not only Rome, also in Mesoamerica, the Near East, Europe, and China Saturnalias are
discovered [37] . They are days of equality; hierarchy is abolished, slaves are served by
kings and masters. Saturn was believed to have dwelt among men. In some ways, Jesus of Nazareth
was a Saturnian figure and feared and hated as such; early Christians, too, were suspected by
the Roman authorities of conducting year-around Saturnalia. In the medieval "Feast of Fools"
the Catholic hierarchy found itself often of two minds, caught up in the Saturnalian spirit and
reproving it as pagan and anti-establishmentarian. The destructive-creative orgy was a complex
of revolt against the gods succeeding Saturn, a psychologically terrified and disorderly
recapitulation of chaos, and an expression of nostalgia for a better life once achieved, long-
enjoyed, and irretrievably lost.
Notes (Chapter Eight: Saturn's Children)
1. (1978A).
2. ibid. 23; tractate Brakhot, Fol. 59.
3. Gibson (1977); Talbott (1977).
4. Larousse Ency. of Mythology.
5. Goblet (1956) 226.
6. Halliburton (1881).
7. Cardona (1978b).
8. Ginzberg (1909) I, 162.
9. Anthes (1961), 58-9.
10. Tresman and O'Geoghan (1977) 36.
11. Hesiod (1950).
12. Westropp and Wake 82, 84-6; Rix (1975), 58 ff.
13. The fish who pulls Manu (the East Indian Noah or Ut-Napishtim) to safety from the flood is
"in the end but the incarnation of Vishnu." (Van Buitenen, 12).
14. Pepi is of the 6th Dynasty (ca 4,200 B. P.) of the Old Kingdom. The kings join the gods.
Here the god is Ra or Re, who is regarded as developing stronger in Egyptian history as time
goes on and is identified with the Sun. I maintain that, like many other gods around the world
who are finally called sun gods, he was another god, to wit, Saturn, King of the North and King
of gods.
15. Hild 1084.
16. (1898), 223, n. 58 quoted by Tresman and O'Geoghan (1977) 40, fn 66.
17. Westropp and Wake 64.
18. Hild 1088.
19. Ibid., 1084.
20. Cf. Timaeus and Critias, and Bellamy (1948).
21. Beaumont (1925).
22. Hapgood (1966).
23. Whitehouse (1975) 13-33 describes the world distribution of hominids, without partaking of
the theory being developed here and later on.
24. Fox (1976).
25. Kondratov (1975) has the most suggestive materials for the kind of speculative
reconstruction continued here.
26. "Enlightenment" (seeming) follows Mars. Since this was the last catastrophe it had a modern
air about its ideas and culture.
27. Mullen (1973) 13.
28. Tresman and O'Geoghan (1977) 38-9, citing Martin Sieff's research.
29. A. de Grazia (1977).
30. Beaumont (1932) 228.
31. Graves (1955) ch. 16.
32. Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, 133.
33. Mullen (1973) 12, quoting D. E. Derry.
34. Schaeffer (1948).
35. "Saturn", VIII Encyclopedia Britannica 916.
36. Hild 1087, citing Macrobius.
37. Santillana and von Dechend 222.
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER NINE: THE OLYMPIAN RULERS
"When Jupiter was first born, he defeated Saturn and the Sun by his brilliance," reports the
Taitiriya Brahmanna [1] .
Declares Jupiter-Marduk in a Babylonian epic poem: "When I stood up from my seat and let the
flood break in, then the judgement of Earth and Heaven went out of joint.... The gods, which
trembled, the stars of heaven-their position changed, and I did not bring them back." [2]
The Age of Saturnia ended in the Biblical Deluge. The Age of Jovea (5700 to 4400 B. P.) began.
The planets Saturn, Neptune [3] , Uranus [4] , and perhaps a "Planet 'X' " (suspected to exist
but not yet discovered) [5] had receded. They were retired gods; mythologists have applied
this concept of deus otiosus to Saturn and Uranus. Mankind might have seen all of them recede
into the farther reaches of the developing solar system.
Jupiter was the new central body of the sky, shining alternately or together with the Sun,
while still looming large to Earth. Even in the time of Biblical Abraham, Jupiter was said to
make the night-time bright [6] . It was the name of the planet and of the new reigning god who
ordained a new phase of celestial stability. Impressionable mankind, eternally grateful for
favors tendered by its cruel gods. exalted Jupiter as the god of law and order. To him was
attributed a strict righteousness that not only bound up his father Saturn, but bound up
himself so that he would obey his own laws. The ancients unmistakably perceived the rings of
Saturn and the bands of Jupiter, and gave this explanation of the phenomena.
Figure 27 .
ALBRECHT DURER'S "DELUGE" (1525).
Dürer painted this picture following a nightmare. A most remarkable feature is the cyclone-like
form of the cataclysm. The waters are bursting like giant pellets upon the Earth. not in sheets
of rain. This physical mechanism is plausibly the way in which waters might be hurled through
space, that is, like stone meteoroids, and it may be the only mechanism for supplying the great
flood volume in a short period of time. How Durer got this dream is a matter of considerable
scientific interest -- was it a Jungian archetype, a Velikovskian buried memory, a product of
the Renaissance-connected genius of Durer? In 1515, Durer drew the first star map.
Jupiter is a god-name that the Romans took from their Etruscan neighbors. "Jove" was an
exclamatory form of Jupiter, whence we take Jovea here to denote the period. Zeus was the Greek
equivalent. He was Marduk of Babylon; Shiva of the Hindus; Mazda of the Persians; Thor or Donar
of the Teutonic peoples; Amon and Horus of the Egyptians; Zeden and also Yahweh (Jehovah) of
the Hebrews. Pausanias gives 47 appellations of Zeus. A most common appellation has to do with
his lightning-hurling. Shiva carries the lightning fork; so do Zeus and Jupiter.
Sometimes names and traits of Saturn were kept and transferred to the new god. Thus the Great
Fish (Saturnian) symbol is associated with Shiva in proto-India. Baal is interchangeably Saturn
and Jupiter in Babylon; Odin among the Teutons seems to be Zeus and yet Hermes and even Saturn
(who is perhaps better Bor son of Buri, "son" of Ymir); then, too, Ishtar of Mesopotamia is to
become the child of Jupiter, planet Venus, and even the Moon.
The names of the gods are innumerable, and often overlap. Varro, the Roman scholar, counted
30,000 god-names used in Greece alone, according to Vico. Some of this confusion is in the
nature of the events themselves; Saturn emerged from Super-Uranus and in turn bore Jupiter,
which may have given birth to Venus, so that there were initial periods of doubt when the
planets carried their "father's" names. Confusion has also characterized the minds and desires
of theologians and scientists who came afterwards, down to our own day.
THE DEVIL SETH
There appears now with Horus, the hawk-figured Jupiter of Egypt, another divine figure. He is
the enemy of Horus and even replaced him briefly in the Second Dynasty, probably as the result
of a calamity. He is called Set or Seth. He has a peculiar dog-like appearance that, with his
other traits, makes him comet-like. The Romans called a sea-monster whale "cetus", and a cetus
appears upon some carved stones of prehistoric Scotland that represent catastrophes [7] . (See
the Golspie stone of Figure 28.) The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology [8] carries this
description of Seth : "Set is represented as having the features of a fantastic beast with a
thin, curved snout, straight, square-cut ears, and a stiff, forked tail.
Figure 28
CETUS OR SETH, THE DEVIL-DOG.
The Golspie Stone of prehistoric Scotland. The arrow indicates the Cetus beast, the "Devil-Dog"
Seth. (Source : Spalding Club). For a complete analysis see Beaumont (1949), 79.
This creature cannot with certainty be identified as of a species live or extinct, and is
commonly called the 'Typhonian Animal. ' Sometimes Set is depicted as a man with the head of
this strange quadruped." To the Greeks this must be Typhon, hence Phaeton; thus Seth also later
ties into Venusian events. Perhaps the constellation and Latin word came long after the sky-
seas monster called Setesh (Egp.) and Seth.
But what was Seth before he was Typhon? He was the leader of a band of conspirators who
murdered Osiris. Later, or alternately, in Egypt, he dismembered Osiris. Later, or alternately,
he fought with Horus, and was plunged into hell. Later he was adjudged fit only for hell by
Hermes-Thoth who was called upon to hear the case of Seth vs Horus, and to hell Seth returned.
It is likely that Seth is ultimately the Christian devil conceived originally in the Saturnian
disaster.
Now again, in Greece, Jupiter destroyed the rule of Kronos and imprisoned him. Jupiter did not
wear his new crown easily. For his new order of the world was attacked in earthshaking revolts,
first by the Titans, who were Saturnians, and then by the Giants, who were ferocious humanoid
dragons. Then later, Typhon came to threaten his rule and was sent crashing to Earth. In all of
these battles Jupiter's thunderbolts racked the universe. The Earth was violently convulsed.
Seth, then, must somehow supply in Egyptian myth and in the sky the material for the four great
battles of Zeus or Jupiter. We therefore make Seth an alter ego for Zeus in the revolt against
Saturn in Egyptian legends: he does the dirty work against the old god, whereas Zeus in Greek
legend had to do the job personally. Second, Seth in Egypt dismembers Osiris-Saturn; Zeus and
his cohorts destroy and scatter the Titans. Astronomically this was a sequence perhaps
preceding the great Deluge of Saturn, when enormous electrical and material storms invaded the
magnetic tube. The debris of Saturn's fission could be considered either as Saturn's
dismemberment or as a clearing of rebellious Saturnians from the skies. Again Seth is taking
the onus for Horus' action, while Zeus is doing his own job.
The next phase, perhaps upon the occasion of the destruction of planet "Apollo" and the major
displacement of Mercury, sees, in Egypt, Seth and Horus battling, and in Greece, a revolt of
the giants against the Olympians led by Zeus. This set of events, then, would occur over a
thousand years later than the death of Osiris and would mark the appearance of Mercury, Hermes,
or Thoth as a new great god -- that is, a god who is threatening the Earth with destruction.
The last battle against Typhon will be described below on the occasion of the Venusian
catastrophes. There Seth is Typhon.
THE BONDS OF SATURN AND JUPITER
The primeval clouds that had gathered around the pulsing electric axis between Sun and Super-
Uranus had furnished atmosphere to the magnetic tube in which the planets grew and moved. The
flow and the magnetic field diminished, but the skies were not fully open until Jovean times.
Remnant gases from the tubes, when not at last dissipated into space, were distributed as
atmospheres among the planets.
Not until the nineteenth century were the rings of planet Saturn and the bands of planet
Jupiter clearly defined. In both cases, the clouds extend for thousands of kilometers above the
planets and are not to be confused with the low-lying clouds that form and dissolve over Earth.
The banded clouds of the great planets Jupiter and Saturn are immense, global, and composed of
hydrogen, ice, and debris. They remain in indefinite suspension, moving downward into the
surface atmosphere, or exploded into space under cataclysmic circumstances.
Man's knowledge of clouds in primeval times was considerable and based upon observation. Not
only were the Earth's cloud canopy and modern clouds known, but also those of the mantle of
clouds (figure 13). The Greek theogony as set forth by Hesiod reported that the great god
Saturn-Chronos had swallowed all his children but Zeus, and the infant Zeus was substituted for
by a stone, which significantly, was swaddled in cloth (clouds). Saturn, deceived, swallowed
the stone. The grown Zeus caused him to disgorge his brothers. They dethroned Saturn, bound him
up and consigned him to outer space. Then Zeus became "Lord of the Bright Skies" (ca. 5700 B.
P.).
Proclus (ca. 410-485 A. D.) in his commentaries on Plato indirectly gives further details of
the events in the guise of philosophy. Jupiter, the god of law and order most powerful and
supreme intellect and Demiurge, confronts his father, Saturn, also an all-perfect intellect and
places his intellect under bonds to control its activity according to Jupiter's new ordering
principles. Then, because he is logical and just, he binds himself so that he will be subject
to his own laws as well. "In placing bonds about his father, he at the same time binds
himself." [9] Proclus repeatedly refers to the "bonds" and the "bonding" of the two gods, and
explicitly mentions the "Saturnian sections and bonds." We must take note how philosophy, like
myth, has proceeded as a sublimation of catastrophic memory. It is fairly certain, then, that
the cloud bands and belts of Jupiter were well-known in the earliest times.
THE LIGHTNING GOD
The mythical aegis of Zeus, which was occasionally lent to Pallas Athene (planet Venus), and
which is depicted in art and sung of in poetry, was known to be the clouds of Zeus from which
lightning came [11] . The lightning, say some scholars, is represented by the eyes of the
Gorgon's head on the aegis, but more likely these are the eyes of god, two of them seen when
Super-Saturn fissioned. Or perhaps this may be the double-eyed magnetosphere of Jupiter, more
dense with particles then, and illuminated. The Gorgon (Phaeton, Lucifer, etc.) was carried by
Zeus to symbolize what he had destroyed and what was destructive in himself.
Zeus was everywhere the god of the bright skies, and of lightning. His Jovian bolts are
pictured in many places (see figures 29). "Jove hurls his bolts and fells the giants, and every
gentile nation had its Jove," wrote Vico [12] . They are gigantic, not at all to be relegated
to normal atmospheric phenomena of today. They helped to dispatch Saturn to far places; they
struck the erratic monster, Typhon, that threatened Earth 2400 years later; they cleansed the
Earth's atmosphere of much of its mists at the beginning of the Jovean period; they lit up the
skies often as they played about the magnetic tube; they reached out to destroy mountain ranges
upon Earth on occasion. Late in his divine career, Jupiter was watched with great care at the
New Year of the Vernal Equinox [13] .
THE BEHAVIOR OF PLANET JUPITER
All that was historically reported of Jupiter is directly or obliquely consistent with the
present cosmogony, as are numerous discoveries concerning Jupiter made in recent years. Actions
and traits ascribed to Jupiter earlier plus new types of behavior listed here and those to be
treated confirm it as the ultimate heir of Super-Uranus.
The heat of Jupiter's interior is greater than that of the photosphere of the Sun. Jupiter
rotates in nine hours 55 minutes. The composition of Jupiter is of a star. Its outermost layer
of atmosphere consists of hydrogen and helium gas with a lacing of ammonia and water-ice
clouds. Below is a seething "surface" of liquid hydrogen, then hydrogen compressed into
metallic hydrogen, and centrally there may exist a core of rock or iron. [14]
Jupiter emits continuously streams of charged particles that penetrate deeply into space. Radio
emissions of trapped charged particles of the magnetic field of Jupiter are akin to those
launched through space by the stars and received by radio astronomers on Earth. Jupiter's
signal emerges at 50 million kilowatts. Super-hurricanes and Jovian lightning discharges, found
to reach even its satellite Io, are common [15] .
The Great Red Spot in Jupiter's cover may be the great depression still preserved by cyclonic
action, whence sprang cometary Venus, or another large body, perhaps of giants in the rebellion
described above. The Spot is a surface as well as cloud phenomenon. The radio noises have been
audited for a few years but the Red Spot has been observed for centuries. During this longer
period, on a number of occasions, the Spot has made dramatic moves [16] . Hence, the rotation
of Jupiter has repeatedly suffered marked interruptions even though the force required to
change the angular momentum of such a rotating body is far beyond the force imagined to be able
to originate in a stable system.
Figure 29
JUPITER: LIGHTNING AND THUNDER.
a. Greek Zeus-Jupiter, hurling a lightning-bolt Juergens suggests that this "unreal" bolt may
be all too real, a plasmoid of electricity of immense power, well beyond the bi-dental fork
that represents Jovean lightning in the typical artistic sublimation.
b. Zin-Chin, a Chinese Jupiter-God, the Thundermaker, hawk-like [10] . The Egyptian Horus was
also hawk-like.
The generally turbulent nature of Jupiter shows it to be not only a dark star, but one that may
recently have undergone a nova experience. The radio activity marks still dispersing charged
gases that would have been exploded and trapped in the nova of 6000 B. P. that it shared with
Saturn. The dissolution of Solaria Binaria may be completed now, with the assistance of the
novas of Super-Uranus and Super-Saturn. If "membership in a certain type of close-binary system
is a necessary condition for a star to become a nova," [17] then a third nova may be beyond
the capacity of Jupiter.
END OF THE "GOLDEN AGE"
The Roman poet, Ovid, was probably telling true history when he wrote :
After Saturn was driven to the shadowy land of death, and the world was under Jove, the Age of
Silver came in... Jove made the springtime shorter, added winter, summer, and autumn, the
seasons as we know them... icicles hung down in the winter. And men built houses for
themselves... and the oxen struggled, groaning and laboring under the heavy yoke [18] .
The Earth's biosphere took on its modern form in Jovea. The seasonal cycle existed with
relation to the Sun. The seasons were more severe because the heavy warming and insulating
gases of the binary were practically gone. Pastoralism flourished in consequence of the
diminution of wild life after the dessication of the land, and helped, also, to supplement a
reduced vegetarian product. Komarek remarks upon the succession of forests by grasses in
Midwestern America following an orogenic or other climate-transforming event [19] .
It is possible, following Ovid again, that during the Saturnian period, before Jovea, humans
were not typically carnivores. The eating of animals is then depicted or recounted in the
Jovean setting until modern times in the context of sacrifice. The hunters of the "Upper
Paleolithic" long regarded their prey as holy. Either, then, the Lunarians were, unlike
Saturnians, carnivores but maintaining a holy relationship with their prey, or else the Upper-
Paleolithic hunters" were actually of the Age of Jovea and therefore survivors of the Saturnian
floods.
MONUMENTALISM
The electrical phenomena, the terrors of the end of the Golden Age, the harsher life, and
possibly the de-ionization (especially the denegativizing) of the new atmosphere stimulated
human aggressiveness. The organized forms of law and order were also enhanced, rules being the
reciprocal of lawlessness and resistance to law. As the internal structure of tribes was
strengthened, the aggressiveness was turned towards the construction of kingdoms and empires.
About the same time as the Unification of Egypt may be placed the founding or resettlement from
practically disappeared antecedents of Dilmun on the Persian Gulf, the Indus Valley proto-
Indian towns, Tepe Yahya in Iran, the Olmec culture of Meso-America Sumer, and Minoan Crete.
These represent discoveries of social systems which certainly existed throughout the habitable
world. The physical presence of Saturnian cultures, like the Uranian, had been practically
obliterated.
Huge stone and brick structures were erected in Middle Americas, Mesopotamia Egypt and
elsewhere. These coupled a rapidly redeveloped service of astronomy to the frantic needs of
absolute rulers and priesthoods for protection against deluges and for electrical roadways to
heaven. Tunnels, mazes, megaliths, ziggurats, and pyramids were built. The time was after 5700
B. P.( 3700 B. C.). Copper was dug, and bronze and brass were made of it, with the help of tin
and lead.
Euan MacKie's work on megalithic cultures places this immense human effort, that is today
exhibited in ruins throughout Europe and the Western Mediterranean, between Jovean and Venusian
times [20] . He accepts Euro-Near East communication, but reserves judgment as to whether the
West European culture is indigenous or derived. My position is that the megalithic cultures of
Spain, France, Ireland, England and Scandinavia are survivors of the larger realms of Atlantis.
Painstaking attempts to demonstrate that Stonehenge and other megalithic formations are
accurate astronomical indicators by retrocalculations of the present order of the skies have
not succeeded. Few doubt that they are sky-oriented, part of the human obsession with the
celestial order which is one of our basic principles in this work. In careful analysis of the
constructions of Ballochroy and Kintraw in Scotland, by way of the work of MacKie, A. Thom, and
others, Dwardu Cardona has disproved the theory that these sites represent celestial conditions
unchanged since before 687 B. C.; that is, they cannot be used to contradict quantavolutionary
earth movement as late as 2700 years ago.
REPEATED DISASTERS
Humans worked even while the heavens remained unsettled. The species was repeopling the Earth
from a few thousands of survivors to many millions. Mankind was recovering from the Saturnian
floods, restoring agriculture where the land had not been devastated by salted water, or dried
by the lack of rain and by the brilliant Sun. Menes, the first king of Egypt, found a land of
marshes, drained them, and built dikes along the Nile. In the Pyramid texts and related
histories, Professor W. Mullen has uncovered evidence of repeated disasters. Herodotus quotes
Egyptian priests to the effect that the sun had changed its course four times since Egypt
possessed its first king [21] . Notably, these Egyptians came with a distinct language,
culture, and a new race or races, perhaps one from the West to the Delta and a second from the
South to Upper Egypt, the time being early Jovea. By 3200, dynastic Egypt had begun, with a
Deluge myth underlying it [22] .
Nearly all of the royal monuments of the First Dynasty were obliterated by fire [23] .
Calamities are associated with the Second Dynasty, too. Though the Third Dynasty, builders of
Pyramids, appears to have been stable, a great catastrophe "brought down the whole Old
Kingdom." [24] The "Old Bronze Age" was succeeded by the "Middle Bronze Age" which we
associate with the Age of Mercury.
Typical of the mysteries encountered when one attempts to reconstruct the disasters of Jovea is
a buried pyramid, described by Zakaria Goneim [25] . It is placed early at 3000 B. C. but not
finished. Its builders were supposedly fickle: they "often changed their plans during
construction." Both alignment and level were altered. A large wall of it was buried very
shortly after being constructed. Clear, crude drawings and marks of the workers are left on its
white limestone. Goneim offers no conclusion; to us the circumstances appear to have involved a
rampant planet, a belief in the efficacy of pyramids against catastrophes and continual
geophysical upsets, during which construction could not be carried out. Probably the pyramid
belongs at the end of Jovean times.
One may conjecture that the pyramid-building epoch began in the period of transition from
Jupiter to Mercury, which probably lasted for centuries. The Great Pyramid of Ghiza (ca. 2100
B. C. and 4th Dynasty) presents a superlative stability. It is oriented only 4 minutes of a
degree west of geographical North. Its interior shows signs of enormous stresses. It was
probably shifted in a great earthquake [26] .
GODS NOT INVENTED
The Jovean Binary establishment continued to deteriorate. The deterioration is treated in Greek
legend as the story of the Olympian family of Zeus. We make of this, and of similar family
histories in Mesopotamia. Egypt, Meso-America, the Teutonic regions and elsewhere, a history of
the solar system marked by the transgressions of major gods -- Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and
Mars. The Olympians were nouveaux arrivés, a group who appeared after the Saturnian family had
been displaced, and before these the Uranians.
The Jovean gods were in some cases new sky objects; in other cases they exchanged names and
identities with older gods, partly out of amnesia, partly out of the changed motions and
obscured vision of the time of transition. No new sky god has been "invented" in any part of
the world since the Martian age, and Mars was part of the Jovean assemblage of Greco-Roman
culture. Nor did the Teutonic peoples invent new gods, try as they might, after the "Ragnarok"
or "Gotterdammerung." Nor did a new sky god come out of India, China, or America.
Whence one concludes that "real gods" cannot be "invented" by the human mind as a pastime, or
as a cold decision. Further, the abstract God of the Jews and of Christians and Muslim, and the
abstract Heaven of the Chinese, are gods of philosophy. Insofar as a tangible presence is given
to them, that presence becomes manifest in the behavior, appearances, visitations, rituals and
iconography of the ancient sky gods and their heavenly hosts.
APOLLO
The most abstract of the ancient great gods might appear to be Apollo [27] . He was regarded
anciently, too, as the most mysterious. Pausanias listed 58 different appellations for Apollo,
compared with 67 for Zeus. Apollo is Boreal Apollo, who came from the northernmost lands of the
Hyperboreans, hence, existed in late Urania and through Saturnia, when the Boreal opening in
its half-closed later period was the cynosure of human eyes. The routes of the Baltic amber
shores were dotted with shrines of Apollo. Delos, the Aegean Island, where stood the great
classical religious center, was devoted to him; also Delphi, greatest prophetic center, for
Apollo was the god of prophecy. He was Phoebus Apollo, a shining god, without phases. He was
not originally connected with farmers and shepherds, but was a master of animals and the hunt,
as was his twin sister Artemis (Diana). He was a healer of sickness, and sender of plagues. He
was not a war god. He was wise, as befitted a prophet. He was youthful and a god of youth. He
was god of gatherings, assemblies, colonies, and politics. Through his sister and younger
brother, Hermes, he was related to the mining of silver; most silver mines of ancient Attica
were called by their names. He was god of music. He bore a distant gaze, a kind of vague Mona
Lisa expression; he showered arrows from afar. His name suggests an old Greek verb meaning "to
repel or set aside" and an ancient form of a verb meaning "to destroy." And, finally, Miller
feels that Apollo was not his earliest name.
Apollo in Egypt may have been Ammon (Amon, Amen) who is hard to distinguish from Horus-Jupiter
and Thoth-Mercury, not to mention the conventional attempts to tie him to the Sun (" a solar
deity"). Perhaps Ammon and Apollo both mean "not" (a) "visibly present" (pollomon). Perhaps
Mercury and Apollo were close together, with Apollo much the larger.
EXPLOSION AND ASTEROIDS
To accord with revolutionary theory, Apollo was once important, and then disappeared. He was
more probably a planet, I would guess, than a satellite of Uranus, or Saturn, or finally
Jupiter, his father. He shone in the Boreal North to human observers, and was helpful in the
hunt of day and night. His size and speed as he orbited between Earth and the larger planets
may have made him seem young. Perhaps his orbit between Earth and the binary complex carried
him across the stringed lines of colored clouds framed by the boreal arch. whereupon the
invention of the harp or lyre was attributed to him [29] . Both he and his brother, Hermes,
also god of music, were visible to the human eye. (Both were pictured as small suns, as Kerenyi
writes.) [30] Among the stretched strings of the heavenly lyre, they moved, plucking the
harmonies of the spheres.
The fate of planet Apollo was catastrophic. "Shining Apollo" was perhaps the most brilliant
member of the Olympian family. Early in the Mercurian period, Apollo either collided with a
Saturnian fragment, or was struck by Jovean thunderbolts, and exploded. It was probably behind
the Sun at that time and human observers could not report the event. Much of the debris of
Apollo may still be orbiting the sun as the asteroidal belt between Jupiter and Mars. Other
debris struck Earth, appearing to be and behaving as vast showers arrows and missiles, clouds
of fumes that healed or plagued living things, and chunks of precious metal.
The material of Apollo is still moving eccentrically and dropping upon Earth. The theory of an
exploded planet of the meteoroid belt between Jupiter and Mars was mentioned in Chapter One.
"Without such an explosion the fragments would scarcely have been able to deviate from the
orbit of the protoplanet." [31] Meteoritic material that has been analyzed shows elements in
excess of their proportions on Earth [32] , leading to the surmise that elements have formed
at different times in the history of the solar system. Hydrocarbons have been detected on
meteorites and durable primitive forms of life are being watched for. Though sometimes
advanced, the latter claims are never accepted.
The gift of prophecy is closely tied to the gift of disappearance, movement beyond sight into
the realms of the mysterious unsighted future. Apollo was like the grin of the Cheshire cat in
Alice in Wonderland; the cat vanished but the grin remained fixed in mid-air. The enigmatic
smiles of some sculptures of Apollo are recalled.
MERCURY
Escaping the fate of Apollo, Mercury fled the neighborhood of Jupiter. We conjecture that it
was driven or exploded from its near-in position. After following an erratic career, it settled
in its present position near the Sun. Greek myth suggests that it passed close by its "older
brother," planet Apollo, much the larger, seizing some of its abundant clouds and electrical
charge. The incident is related in the Greek myth of Hermes' theft of the flocks of Apollo;
this he did soon after he was born. Hermes was herald and guide to mankind, patron of thieves,
gamblers, merchants, and wayfarers. He was the messenger of the Olympian gods, a reckless and
careless fellow. He was Thoth, a great, perhaps dominating God of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.
"When Horus resigned earthly power Thoth succeeded him to the throne." [33] He guarded the
Moon and played games with it. He was a great god of Western Europe where Beaumont, in studies
of English and Scottish pre-history, ascribes to him disasters and obsessive worship. The Vedic
Hindu Pushan is amazingly close to the Greek Hermes in traits [34] .
In Meso-America, he was Xolotl, drawn like a big-eared dog or opossum of human body, who
assisted in the deadly ball-games when Venus played against the "Sun." [35] De Leonard tells
us so, but I am uncertain and think that this creature may be none other than the cetus-figure
or Seth, whom we have earlier described. For Rock has identified the Meso-American god
Tezcatlipoca with Mercury and Wotan [36] . Tezcatlipoca is the god of wanderers, of travelling
merchants. His cult places are at crossroads. He carries a rod. He is the inventor of ornate
speech and knows how to read dead languages. He is god of song and dance, god of magic and
witches. He is a god who moves easily into the underworld, and his followers can find
themselves in the dark. He is a medical expert who helps women in the throes of childbirth.
Perhaps he was called "lucky Mercury" because he avoided the fate of Apollo, but more so
because the Earth was lucky to have avoided colliding with him. The small planet came close to
Earth, on occasion, and treated the globe to electrical shocks that unsettled the minds of
people. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel seems to be saying so. The Greek Hermes puts
people to sleep and awakens them; he is an arch-deceiver. wizard, patron of magic. Table 30
attempts to arrange some notable events to help in general orientation. Everywhere, writes
Schaeffer of the early Middle Bronze Age, the newcomers were few, weak, and very different.
Archaeological excavations give some support to the theory of Mercury's destructive career. The
Table that follows names some of the incidents in which the planet seems to have been involved,
as well as catastrophes of the succeeding two periods.
Figure (table) 30
SOME DISASTERS FROM MERCURY TO MARS (tentatively placed)
Periods and Dates Equivalent in Catastrophic Events( y)
Reconstructed Conventional
Chronology Chronology( x)
MERCURIA
. .
2400 (2400-2300) Universal destruction[ s],
including collapse of Old Kingdom
in Egypt [w] and Old Minoan Age
in Crete [ma]
2300 . Techuacan [Cave 30]
2200 . Akkadians Fall [fr]
Yu begins Hsin Dynasty in China [f]
Tepe Yahya (Iran) [k]
Fall of Ebla (Syria) [e]
2100 (2100) Great destructions
2000 . Proto-Indian Trouble [r]
Neo-Sumerian Period Ends [rf]
1900 . Revolt of the Giants [o]
Tower of Babel [st]
Abraham's Battle [p]
Earthquakes [ot]
Sodom and Gomorrah [p]
1800 . Jacob (OT) p
1700 . Job (OT) p
1600 . .
1500 . Joseph Famine (OT) ps
VENUSIA (1750-1650) .
1450 . Exodus (OT) ps
1400 . Great Destruction [sv]
Indus Valley Ruin [ro]
1300 . .
1200 . .
1100 (1450) Great destruction [s]
1000 (1365) Great destruction Thira-Santorini Explodes
900 . .
800 (1250-1225) Great destruction[ s]
MARTIA . Mars Destructions [v] Mycenaean Destruction [l]
700 . .
Note to the table: (x) The six conventional dates are the central points of Schaeffer's
catastrophic periods for the Near and Middle East, (1948) 563-5. (y) The footnotes refer to the
following sources; many dozens of additional sources exist and, of these, many are cited in
Schaeffer and Velikovsky, and elsewhere in the present work. (S) Schaeffer, 563-5 Summary.
(Many sites). (M) MacNeish 29-37, (Ro) Rowland, 11-2. (G) Goodrich, 3rd (1963) p. 5. (V)
Velikovsky, 1950 (Many sites) (F) Fitzgerald, 14. (Fr) Frank-Fort, 47-54. (LK) Lamberg-
Karlovsky, 102-11. (R) Rawlinson, 19-21. (P) Patten, 252,255, et passim. (MA) Matz, 73,239,
(OT) Old Testament. (PS) Parker and Sieff. (I) Isaacson. (O) Ovid. (W) Bell (1971). (E) "Ebla"
Maccoby (1977), (ST) Strickling.
Goblet d'Aviella points out that both Thoth and Hermes have the ram as a sacred animals; both
were personified by steles, hermata or bethels; both carried the caduceus; both had human
figures with wings. Both were guides to the Underworld, teachers, and scribes. Pausanias claims
"Par-Ammon is the surname of Hermes," which is not irreconcilable with Ammon as Apollo, "par"
meaning "Father".
The caduceus or Kerykeion is the famous wand of Mercury (and the emblem of the modern medical
profession). It resembles the Hindu trisula, which in turn "bears a singular resemblance to the
sign of the planet Mercury...." [37] . Furthermore the caduceus "produced fire and would slay,"
says Goblet [38] . It is too similar to the serpent-entwined magical staff of Moses for the
staff to have been independently contrived by him. In the turbulent electrical atmosphere of
the times, wands could be made to produce glowing and crackling discharges with fair
reliability. Thus would priests be tied to the gods [39] .
It may also be notable that the Hebrew word for "planet" and "luck" mazal, are the same [40]
and may refer to Hermes. Beaumont asserts that Thoth is also "Ham" of the Old Testament and
Baal (Lord) Hammon of the Carthaginians; further, that the name Abram is from Ram and Ramah was
the ancient Hebrew capital city. The King of Tyr was Hiram, or "High Ram." [41] The Ram is
associated with Fricka, Frigga, Frye, who is Venus (Venerdi in Italian is Friday in English)
and who is said to be the wife of Odin (Wotan) who is the Teutonic Mercury or Hermes.
It is Beaumont's theory, which deserves credence, that the pillars of Hercules refer to the
large number of stone columns (dolmens) that line the coasts of Southern Britain and
Northwestern France leading into the English Channel [42] . However, not Hercules, but Hermes
is the god commemorated so strikingly there that the passage was known to the ancients.
(Hercules is most clearly identified with the planet Mars.) [43] Beaumont relies partly upon
Goblet d'Aviella who relies upon Tacitus [44] . What does Tacitus say? He says that the sacred
stone columns found frequently in the region of the lower Rhine are called Pillars of Hercules,
but adds that Hercules is given credit for many things that do not belong to him. Could the
columns have been erected to Hermes and a thousand years or more later accredited to Hercules-
Mars? A comparative study of the stones would answer the question; we know the myriad Hermes
stones that marked the roads of Greece.
Otto concludes his study of Hermes by telling us not to think that all his later qualities were
inconsistent with his earlier ones. "If a single trait actually did come to the fore later than
others, it still retains the same basic meaning which has found a new expression". Then naively
he says, "Whatever may have been thought of Hermes in primitive times, a splendor out of the
depths must once have so struck the eye that it perceived a world in the god and the god in the
whole world." [45] We already have pointed out that Hermes was viewed as a sun.
MERCURY'S GEOPHYSICS
The planet Mercury possesses today some features that are less puzzling when viewed in the
perspective of quantavolutionary primevalogy. It is a little-known planet and the recent
discoveries concerning it are sometimes reported with exclamations of surprise. It is more
dense than the Earth; probably it has a huge core of iron. It has no atmosphere. It is covered
with a thin dust of silicate, like the Moon. Like the Moon, too, it reflects sunlight and radar
pulses, and emits infra-red radiation.
Mercury rotates on its axis thrice while circling the sun twice. This very slow spin is
attributed to the sun's tidal or gravitational pull. Why this "spin-orbit coupling" in a 3 to 2
ratio has not become a firm lock in the "several billions of years" of revolution is unknown.
The Moon, after all, is locked into the Earth, showing always the same face to us. Even were I
mistaken in assigning only a couple of thousands of years for the Moon to acquire its earth-
lock, and were to accept instead the several billions of years attributed to the satellite's
origin, the Moon-to-Earth tidal ratio is not as great as the Mercury-to-Sun tidal ratio. Hence
Mercury should be in firm lock. So, for that matter, should be the Earth and possibly Mars.
(Venus is retrograde in its rotation and, if anything, locked into or resonant with Earth, so
this, too, is an anomaly of excess.) [46]
Already disquieting hypotheses are being voiced about how long ago Mercury may have been
emplaced; figures in the hundreds of thousands of years are heard. If Mercury, then Venus, pari
passu; and then, logically, Earth and Mars must be even more recently emplaced; but of course,
the quantavolutionary theory does not rely exclusively upon the conventional theory of what
causes rotational and orbital speed. Forces usually uncalculated affect all planetary motions.
Mercury's orbit is not a true circle, but is eccentric [47] . This, too, is surprising,
considering the supposed ages during which, free from the influence of other planets to all
purpose, it might be expected to have developed the elegant Platonic and Galilean form.
The axis of Mercury is perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. If the planet has moved, as
is claimed here, from one extreme of the binary axis (now the plane of the ecliptic) to the
other, this condition is not readily deducible. One may conjecture that so long as there was
focussed solar wind heavy enough to constitute some type of electrical axis, a planet
descending upon the axis would present its electrically compatible equator to the arc or, in
any case, wind and spin with the driving wind.
Mercury has magnetic field, stronger than that of Mars and the Moon. This may be largely a
remnant of its magnetization, when it was a body immersed in the powerful magnetic tube. An
authority declares, on this phenomenon, "That Mercury has a bipole magnetic field aligned with
its spin axis very similar to the Earth's field although weaker, is to me particularly
unexpected." [48] Conventional theory once posited a dynamo action, whereby a metallic core,
rapidly moving, produced a magnetic field, such as with Earth. Venus has a larger and hotter
core, and has no magnetic field, and no rotation to speak of. "Perhaps," he says, "the
Mercurian magnetic field arises from causes still unimagined." [49]
The surface of Mercury appears as revolutionary theory would expect. It is devastated. It has
large plains but is heavily cratered. There are long escarpments or "wrinkles" everywhere. A
single basin, scene of a horrendous blast, is 1400 kilometers across. This Caloris Basin is
apparently filled with smooth debris like the Imbrian Basin of the Moon. There appears to have
been little or no change owing to vulcanism or tectonism, or even atmospheric evolution within
the large craters following their creation.
There is no noticeable distinction between the types of craters found on Moon and Mars and
those of Mercury. Again this is a surprising finding, considering how differently placed the
three bodies are in relation to the Sun and to the asteroidal belt. A single bombardment -- why
it should be "single" is difficult to understand even from a uniformitarian viewpoint-is
postulated to have devastated the planet [50] .
Again Bruce C. Murray may be quoted, as representing so frankly the puzzles confronting solar
system evolutionists : "The bombardment could have originated... with a single object perturbed
to pass near the earth or Venus from an initial orbit beyond Jupiter, Tidal disruptions on the
earth or Venus might then conceivably have created a shower of bombarding objects that would
have been rapidly swept up through collisions with the four minor planets." [51] Indeed, this
theory might well have been employed in claiming that the Moon was caused to erupt from the
Earth by a passing body from beyond Jupiter that spread Earth and other planetary debris
throughout the system.
It is appropriate that, some passages later on, the same author should remark : "The debate now
developing over the early history of the inner solar system is reminiscent of an earlier debate
between the uniformitarians and catastrophists over the causes of the earth's geological
features. There the uniformitarians won." [52]
Notes (Chapter Nine: The Olympian Rulers)
1. 5-1,1 nakshatra pushya is the word for sun and /or Saturn; Santillana and von Dechend (1969)
434.
2. Gossman (1956) quoted in Santillana and von Dechend (1969) 325.
3. Neptune is a modern, artificial name, not the Greek god Poseidon or Roman god Neptunus. One
may guess that it had been fissioned from Super-Uranus or was one of the two stars that erupted
from Super-Saturn. It is conceivable that the planet may have been the god Poseidon and is
therefore well-named.
4. The rings of Uranus, discovered in 1977, indicate recent geophysical and astronomical
activity, since rings descend in fairly short periods of time, as may now be occurring with
Saturn's rings.
5. "Planet X," Ency. Britannica (1969).
6. Ginzburg (1909) I, 232. Patten sets this incident at about 1900 B. C.
7. Beaumont (1949) 79-81.
8. Lar. Ency. Mytho. 20.
9. Proclus, quoted in A. de Grazia (1977). Cardona (1978B) has made it clear that Saturn, like
Jupiter, was a god who binds. Proclus is pursuing one version of the myth.
10. Figure from W. Simpson (1896), The Buddhist Praying Wheel, Macmillan, fig. 41.
11. Hopkins (1965).
12. 30.
13. Ibid., 430-1.
14. Juergens (1976).
15. Time mag. (Sept. 16, 1974) 56.
16. Finney (1964).
17. Kraft, quoted by Payne-Gaposchkin (1977) 669.
18. Metamorphoses, I, lines 112-24.
19. Komarek (1965) 172.
20. MacKie (1977); cf Müller (1970); Bord (1976); W. L. Cook, ed. (1977); Trento (1978).
21. 11-142 cited in Mullen (1973) 12.
22. Mullen (1973) 12.
23. Ibid., 13 citing W. B. Emery 71-3.
24. Ibid., 13 cf. Schaeffer (1948).
25. (1956).
26. Pawley and Abrahamsen (1973); Velikovsky (1973A).
27. Robert D. Miller (1939).
28. Ziegler, 197.
29. Vail (1972) 48-9.
30. (1976) 86.
31. Rittmann 285.
32. Kerr (1978) 203; Crew (1977A) 26; Birgham (1881).
33. Larousse Ency. Mytho. 27.
34. Otto 120-1.
35. De Leonard 271.
36. Röck, 1085-6.
37. Goblet 229 et passim.
38. Ibid., 230.
39. Ziegler (1977).
40. Rose (1974) 35.
41. Beaumont (1949) 72-3.
42. Ibid.
43. Eratosthenes: "Third is the star of Mars, which others have called the star of Hercules."
44. Goblet 106; Tacitus XXIV.
45. Otto 124.
46. Ransom (1976) 117.
47. Murray (1975) 40.
48. Ibid., 46.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 45-6.
52. Ibid., 47. ;
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TEN: VENUS AND MARS
From the brow of Zeus, sang the Greeks, sprang Pallas Athene --fully armed and with a shout
[1] . She was cometary Venus --fiery-faced, owl-eyed, helmeted and horned, with a long gown and
hair trailing behind.
Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia the Akkadians were also chanting hymns to Venus, going here by the
name of Inanna: [2]
By night she sends out light like the Moon does.
At noonday sends out light like the Sun does.
The mistress of Evening whose largeness is until the limit
of Heaven...
The Holy light that fills the Heavens.
Inanna who shines as far as the Sun.
These words, along with the symbols of Inanna (Figure 31) part the curtains upon "a lady who
needs no introduction to you," as a master of ceremonies would say.
Many scholars deny that it could happen; yet no astral event of the ancients was so well
reported as the career of the glowing and devastating comet and proto-planet Venus [3] . For
nearly a thousand years it raged through the heavens periodically, encountering first Earth,
then Mars; then Jupiter; then Mars again. It periodically -- every half century -- threatened
the Earth and sometimes repeated, less harshly, its first devastation of the planet. The age of
Venusia lasted from about 1450 to 700 B. C. endured, that is, until the comet Venus lost its
cometary appendages and became a hot, young planet circling the Sun for all the world like an
ordinary planet is supposed to behave.
Figure 31.
VARIANTS OF THE COMETARY GODDESS INANNA.
Twelve Principal Variants of the Cometary Goddess Inanna Symbol,
Source: Falkenstein, Archiasche Texte aus Uruk, cf. Rose (1977).
CAREER OF AN ANDROGYNE
The year around 3450 B. P. was the most devastating since the fall of Saturn; 1453 B. C. may be
the exact year by present retrospective reckoning; the superb work of Velikovsky guides us in
this as it does elsewhere in these pages [4] . It was a year when the plagues struck Egypt, as
the Bible recounts, and the exodus of some Hebrew and Egyptian survivors occurred. Every city
in the world must have been shaken and damaged. Tidal floods swept over every coastal culture.
Volcanoes erupted. The Earth was scorched by lightning, covered with dust, ashes, gravel,
obnoxious and noxious gases, struck repeatedly by slow-speed meteorites, and showered with
hydrocarbons, some of it burning. The gamut of sounds was dinned into human ears, at deafening
amplitudes.
The encounter lasted for weeks because of the temporary roughly parallel course of the two
bodies and because of the enormous train of the cometary Venus. It began with a worldwide
plague of red dust. The experience became increasingly excruciating as the Earth moved deeper
through the millions of miles of comet tail. At the height of the disturbances, the
incandescent head of the comet penetrated the smoking skies of the globe in all of its ruddy
immensity. The Earth's axis shifted in a gravitational-electrical field. Less most of its
train, proto-Venus moved on. Now it could not be seem, nor could any other sky object. For some
years, the globe was swaddled in smoke. The biosphere hardly survived. Animals often lived upon
manna from heaven [5] . Plants withered in the thin light.
When the skies reopened to human vision, they presented for contemplation a re-enactment of the
encounter. Half a century had passed. The comet returned like a huge blazing chariot driven by
a man or angel [6] , raining missiles and spreading terror upon the Earth. Again and again,
until the seventh century B. C. Earth was menaced. The most strenuous inventions and
applications of magic and religion did not avail against the horrendous god.
Other behaviors of cometary Venus can be recited briefly: The comet was a god of many
characters -- female, male, and androgynous [7] . Thus, in the Mexican ballgame, to be
described below, the Venus is male but nevertheless gives birth. Venus appeared on occasion
larger than the Moon and fiercely bright.
She caused the Earth to alter it ponderous movements. She brought the Sun on at least two
occasions to an apparent standstill.
She wore horns and trailed long tresses which, in her male form, were more evidently a phallus.
She destroyed countries and people, rendering the land barren, clogged the air and soil with
red dust, darkened the day, excited pandemonium and brought general starvation.
She sent berserk tribes upon the warpath. She aroused a great religious fervor and claimed
sacrificial victims, in great numbers.
Her tresses (phallus) were cut off in a passage near Earth and a frenzy of sexual deviance
seized many people. (Cults of the virgin and eunuchs.) [8] She sent great tsunamis over the
coastal land, tipped over lakes like mere bowls of soup.
She is "geologically quite young and was seismically active until recently..." [9] and its
surface may be burning.
G. Talbott (1978) has proven "in a fully quantitative manner that a massive, molten body --
quantitatively a mass equivalent to Venus and having the Venus surface area, and molten at
between 1500 K and 2000 K -- will transfer heat internally by flowing magma, and will radiate
its heat in such a way that in exactly 3500 years its temperature is expected to be exactly
750 K, which by measurement it is."
She generated many millions of tons of burning pitch and petroleum that fell along a broad
swath of the Earth that turned in her path [10] . Countries grow rich today from the oil rains
that ruined ancient "Arabia felix."
And when she crossed orbits with the planet Mars, a mighty battle of the gods ensued which
their human champions emulated.
She stimulated new cycles of fear and new prodigies of careful astronomical observations to
warn of her coming.
Nor did her effects cease, for the Earth and Moon are scarred by flood, fire, quakes, and
biosphere disruption that she caused, and she left psychological and cultural marks that could
not be erased.
THE HEAT OF VENUS
The great heat of Venus is predictable from its recent origin and subsequent collisions and
encounters. The theory that its miles-deep clouds set up a "greenhouse effect" on its surface,
heating it to over 600 Celsius, will not stand examination; little of the Sun's heat (perhaps
2%) reaches the surface, and the planet rotates upon its axis so slowly that an exceedingly
cold mass would prevail on the night side for long periods of time; yet the heat is uniform
throughout [11] .
No matter how many books and articles may be written on the subject of the heat of planet
Venus, disdaining Velikovsky, the fact remains that he had before 1950 read nearly everything
that ancient and modern sources said about the planet and decided --indeed, was compelled to
decide -- that it was hot, whereas, try as they may, those who have chosen to make an
historical issue of the heat of Venus, have been hard-pressed to find any chain of opinions in
modern scientific circles which affirmed that Venus was warm. Nor is if far from the truth to
claim that the great heat of Venus has been the leading light pointing to the many surprises
that the exploration of the solar system has since displayed.
The myth of Phaeton is famous: the inexperienced youth, who was let to drive the chariot of the
sun across the skies, was burning up the Earth until Zeus, implored to help, dispatched him
into the sea with a thunderbolt. Dwardu Cardona puts the case succinctly, citing the originals
: "That the myth of Phaeton describes a shifting of heavenly bodies, we know from Plato. That
Phaeton was comet or a "blazing star", we know from Cicero. That this "blazing star" became a
planet, we know from Hesiod. And that this planet was the planet Venus, we know from both
Nonnos and Solinus." [12]
Venus was not the first body to appear before astonished humans as a comet. Any body that
intrudes upon an atmosphere may look like a comet. It can acquire horns as it brushes through
the air, and trail turbulent gases behind it. This was especially yrue before the age of Jovea,
for then the magnetic tube of Solaria Binaria was dense. Today, the gross eccentricity of
motion of a comet heightens its electrical activity and brings a variety of visual forms even
in "near-empty" space Planet Venus even now displays to astronomers a fan-like tail sunwards
and a "comet-like tail" swept by solar winds into space [13] .
HUNDREDS OF IDENTITIES
Cometary-Venus and proto-planet Venus was in other guises Pan, Phosphorus, Hesperus, Dionysius,
Hephaestus. It was Moloch (the evil god) [14] and the inspirer of the lord-shepherds (moloch-
shepherds) or Hyksos who invaded and conquered Egypt as that great nation collapsed and the
Hebrews crossed into their "Promised Land." It was Lucifer, who sank finally to the low estate
of the morning star. It was Molochset or Seth, the Devil God, and Seth (or Set), who is also
Typhon, granting that Seth was a name of older gods, too. Typhon was the name of the first
Hyksos king of Egypt; either he took the name of the portion of Venus that fell to Earth, or
his name was given to it, since by its help he won Egypt [15] . Typhon was king of the red
country, the country pulverized by the red train of the Comet. The red was believed by the
brunette peoples to have cursed the frequently semitic red heads and marked them as of the evil
god [16] .
Typhon was Phaeton; Typhon was the monster struck down by Zeus in a great battle; but some saw
Zeus and Typhon while others saw the comet head battling the grip of its monster-like tail.
Typhon is the archetype of the typhoon.
The Iroquois Indians told a story much like Phaeton and Typhon: Long ago, an immense Serpent
bearing horns (encorné) devastated Lake Ontario. The Sun and the Moon witnessed the extinction
of the Indians, swallows up one after another by the monster. In the end not a canoe was left
on the water, not a lodge on the lake shores. But one day the beast ventured too near the falls
(Niagara). The Thunder god slew it with a bolt and left its body floating on the water like a
chain of rocky spurs. [17]
When the Romans came to name the planet of the morning and evening star, they called it Venus,
for reasons little known, since on the one hand Venus is thought to have been a minor Italian
goddess and, on the other hand, Cicero was probably wrong in saying the name came from the word
venire (to come) [18] . For that matter the Greeks, after calling the planet Hesperos (evening
star) and Phosphoros (morning star), came to call it Aphrodite. But in one of its first known
usages, Plato says that the name Aphrodite came from "a Syrian lawgiver," a male, when he
ascribes it to planet Venus [19] . Whence Aphrodite, goddess of love and of the Moon, became
goddess of love, and the planet Venus.
THE PLOT OF THE ILIAD
In my view Aphrodite became the planet Venus to the Greeks only after the reality of the
catastrophic period was dissipated into a euphoric amnesiac sublimation. In Homer's epics,
Aphrodite wears the golden girdle of the full Moon. She provokes the Trojan wars by bribing
Paris with possession of beautiful Helen (Selene, the Moon). Paris, identifiable as Ares, or
Mars, returns to Troy, where he is pursued by the furious Danaens (Greeks), devotees of Pallas
Athene, who seek, then, in effect, to recover the moon (Helen). Aphrodite and Ares, gods and
lovers, side with the Trojans, but ultimately, the Athene faction wins and recaptures Helen
[20] .
The last Trojan war belongs probably in the early 7th century (-687?), as the crises of Mars
drew to a close. Aphrodite is still the Moon, reckless, wanton, "weak", (because capturable and
preyed upon in the eyes of man), "feminine." Her identity will become more foggy, until, with
confusing effects upon art history, science, astrology, and mythological understanding, she
will be identified with the planet Venus.
Cometary Venus, Pallas Athene was strikingly different from Apollo and Mercury. Her relations
with her father, Zeus, were more richly distinctive than those of any other god. Her mastery of
the age was unchallenged. If she was not ruler of the gods, she was certainly their field
marshal. Only Athene might wear the aegis of Zeus. She was mistress of the arts and sciences as
well.
At the risk of descending into mere cataloguing, we may return to the myriad identities of this
singular goddess and god. We have not yet toured the world for its names, nor can we do so very
well until anthropologists have caught up with the historians and humanists in descriptions.
Every language, every culture and sub-culture carries one and more names for Venus. Cometary
Venus was Minerva of the Latins, it was Hathor (Egypt), but also Isis; it was Fricka, Freyia or
Frigga, wife of Odin-Mercury among the Teutons; Durga-Devi and Kali in India; Quetzalcoatl in
Meso-America; Ishtar and Inanna in Babylonia (Hebrew "Esther" and Greek "Aster"); Mazzaroth,
Noga, Michael, Lucifer, and Baal of the Hebrews; and Uzza of Arabia. The star that aroused and
rained down plagues of vermin upon Egypt just before the Hebrew Exodus: was the "dog-fly"
(Pallas Athene) to her enemies in Homer's Iliad, and the "wasp-star" of the Meso-Americans
[21] .
On the cave-walls of Australia, the ancestors of the stone age tribes of today drew figures
that appear to describe Venus [22] . One depicts an owl-like creature with hands, feet,
feathers, owl-tail, owl-eyes, and owl-head. It is painted in ocher. (It is doubtful that there
were owls in pre-colonial Australia.)
Figure 32.
THE IMPERIAL CHINESE DRAGON ROBES.
The Kang Hsi emperor (1662-1722) wearing the traditional dragon robes,
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1942.)
Another painting shows a serpent-woman between whose hands is arched what is probably a
lightning-bolt. And still another reveals a person called "Thunderman" who holds a lightning
bolt in his hands.
In China, the classical "Lucky Dragon," which was carried in the most beautiful and ornate
fashion on the robes of the Emperor (see Figure 32) has been traced back to around 3500 B. P.,
to a very unlucky period of Chinese history [23] . The original image was probably of a
serpent exploding in lightning and swallowing a great globe, as Cardona's painting in the
Frontispiece depicts.
Thus there are many parallels, from many cultures, marking the worldwide shift of attention to
the behavior of a new and distinctive god in the sky. More than poetic fantasy, or a casual
shift of allegiance from one regularly orbiting stone of outer space to another, is needed as a
reason for the immense historical obsession with the sky-god and planet Venus. The more
insistent and persistent a legendary theme, the more forceful is the reality behind the theme.
GLOBAL RUINATION AND ITS PERPETRATOR
In 1948, Claude Schaeffer published his comprehensive review of the field studies of Ancient
Near and Middle East civilizations. He concluded that all had been concurrently destroyed by
earthquake or other cause on several occasions. The many cities shown on the map of Figure 33
suffered destruction by natural causes, twice or more in the Jovean, Mercurian, Venusian and
Martian periods. He goes far towards demonstrating that the conventional divisions of the
Bronze ages are in fact divisions by catastrophe. No existing settlement escaped.
Rockenbach, a careful collector of ancient materials, published in 1602 a work fixing a great
cometary disaster at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, giving the date as 1493
B. C. He alludes to witnesses of the phenomenon as far as India [24] . In 1950, Velikovsky tied
in the proto-Indian disasters of around 3500 B. P. to the Venusian catastrophe of Exodus times
[25] . Archaeology has produced more evidence since then and the question of the mode of
physical destruction has been discussed. Raikes (with the present author dissenting) has argued
that great natural dams holding back the Indus River waters upstream collapsed and flooded the
many Indus towns [26] ; thus was proto-Indian civilization fatally wounded. I would reject the
argument because, first, the destruction was exceedingly widespread, from one end of India to
another, and, secondly, in any event, because huge river channel diversions or floods are owing
to seismism, and the origins of such seismism must be searched for in an interruption of earth
motions, in "cosmic excitement." A third objection to the "burst dam" explanation is the
contemporary occurrence of catastrophe far beyond the Indus and even the Indian subcontinent.
Robert McC. Adams has recently written: "It is now apparent that there was a major westwards
shift of the Euphrates system of channels as a whole during Kassite times." [27] This would
probably be the middle of the second millennium B. C. He alludes to a long "dark age" of vastly
reduced population and to hundreds of abandoned settlements, newly located.
Figure 33.
TOWN SITES REPEATEDLY DESTROYED DURING BRONZE AGE.
Kondratov reporting upon Soviet archaeological studies, writes : "In the middle of the second
millennium B. C. the ancient cities of Southern Turkmenia declined and were abandoned by the
inhabitants. The South Turkmenia civilization perished at about the same time as the proto-
Indian, and the reasons are still unknown." [28]
China did not escape. "We discover between the chronology and the stratigraphy of the sites of
the second millennium of China and those of Western Asia a very close parallelism." [29] There
appears to have been a hiatus of centuries between the legendary Hia dynasty and the historic
Chang dynasty. In the West, this was the Exodus period.
The Baltic Sea may have formed now then. Its remarkably fresh waters, fed salt only through
narrow currents from the North Sea, would be post-Saturnian. Its depth is mostly less than 100
meters, practically all less than 200. It may have originated from an ice melt in the Venus
encounters of the second millennium B. C., with an axial tilt of the Earth southwards, a
heating of the atmosphere, and earth movements. Then pollen radiocarbon datings of this period
might be explained. The pine forests would be drowned and give up fossil resin for amber, as
recounted above, pages 72-3. [30]
Southeast Europe and Near Asia were probably devastated at the same time as the Baltic Basin
was flooded. At from 20 to 70 centimeters depth, large areas of the Black Sea bottom "consist
entirely of cellular fragments and organic remains, well preserved and showing remarkable
detail when examined with the electron microscope." Metallic stains are heavy in the 20 to 70
cm levels [31] . Dates of 3500 years ago were indicated.
The "Old World,." then appears to have been beset by the celestial encounters of Earth and
Venus throughout its length and breadth. The contemporary archaeology of the Americas is only
in its beginnings. Ecuador is the current nominee for the Mother culture, and is carried back
to 5000 B. P. (Jovea) according to Donald Collier of the University of Chicago. The best-known
ancient sites excavated, those of the Olmec civilization of South-Eastern Mexico, do bear the
tell-tale marks of fire, ashes and abrupt cessation of activities around 1500 B. C. [32] . In
the same area, at the Temple of Monte Negro, heavy combustion is reported for the Martian
period (a 649 B. C. average date) "over which nothing was subsequently built." [33] The
Americas from Alaska to Bolivia have suffered greatly from pre-historic catastrophes; this much
is admitted. The problem is to arrive at acceptable dates for the physical ruins that will
match the abundant legendary material.
In the "Old World," Geography, archaeology and legend are receiving some coordination. In
India, the wreckage of culture can be correlated with the stories of a rampant Venus. Isenberg,
for example, has recently added a remarkable piece to the emerging structure. He does so by
analyzing the myth of the goddess Devi.
THE DEVI AND THE MEXICAN BALLPLAYER
The birth and behavior of Devi is made understandable in the perspective of Venus. She was born
from an exploding conflagration of all the great god-lights of the sky and from each of them
received her form and equipment. Mounted upon a lion, she went forth [34] . She
"gave out a loud roar with a defying laugh again and again. By her unending exceedingly great
terrible roar the entire sky was filled, and there was a great reverberation. All the worlds
shook. The seas trembled. The earth quaked and all the mountains rocked." [35]
The Devi
"indented the earth struck by her foot, her crown struck the sky : the sound of her bowstring
terrified the whole subterranean world. She grasped all the space of the regions by her one
thousand arms; fierce war was raged between the Devi and the enemies of the devas." [36]
Many details might be added. The Venus encounter is also mythically portrayed in the "New
World," The ball court sculptured panels of Vijin, Mexico, are a most clear and significant
depiction of the career of proto-planet Venus. Carmen Cook de Leonard offers a detailed
description and analysis of them which carries us within easy reach of the central theory of
Venusia. The earliest Meso-American towns thus far uncovered give us ruined ball-courts.
The characters are identified as the ballplaying contestants --Venus (as a male sinner and the
feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl) and the Sun -- plus a body that may be 'Mars' or the "Night
Sun," the Moon and Mercury. The Moon is pictured as a skeleton, hanging partly immersed in
water. Mercury appears as "a human figure with a mask of a big-eared dog or maybe an opossum,
probably representing the god Xolotl who might also be a symbol of the planet Mercury whose
revolution around the Sun is probably twice depicted (88 days). He is also leader of the dead
to the other world." [37] (Seth?, see p. 210)
The ballgame moves as follows : 1. 'Venus' sits on a serpent-mouthed throne, denouncing sin and
readying to move down to Earth. The Moon as goddess of love and Mercury stand besides the
second central figure of the Sun.
2. 'Venus' is tempted by a bird-musician, and, though "male," is giving birth to a sky monster,
product of his sin.
3. The Sun and 'Venus' have played the game and 'Venus' has lost after having enjoyed 236
nights of debauchery. Venus offers Sun a knife with which to kill him and 'Mercury' prepares to
lead the dead.
4. The Sun is sacrificing 'Venus' whose spirit oozes out penitentially. (This is the fate meted
out to the defeated human ballplayers as well.)
Thus this late representation of a 3500-years old scene parallels the Phaeton and the Jupiter-
Typhon legends. 'Venus' is sexually well intentioned, goes to Earth, is tempted into sinning,
gives birth to a monster, and is sacrificed.
The Venus-worship and preoccupation go back to the earliest civilization presently known in
Meso-America (and it may be that by Venusian times the American population had been reduced to
a survival culture). In the light of our earlier chapters, the existence of cultures in Meso-
America that flourished long before Venusia cannot be doubted. The legends all go back before
then. So do the calendars. The Mayan calendars begins with the year October 4, 5373 B. P. or
August 13, 5113 B. P. according to recent calculations. This would indicate a Jovean base, and
before then comes the story of Atlantis and eastern connections.
In Meso-America between 1500-1200 B. C., writes, there was a diffusion of the religious idea of
the jaguar. Also "the baby face and hollow figures are actually, related to the jaguar. It is
amazing that this animal could have been so important in the Valley of Mexico or in the
highlands in general, where it was not found in the natural state." [38]
In Olmec period III (600-100), continues Bernal, a jaguar mask carries tears, "a clear
suggestion of the water god" and a forked tongue, also characteristic of later water gods and
obviously a feature of the serpent..... The forked tongue of the serpent. associated with
jaguar elements is typical to some classic gods. Both elements form a sort of dragon very
characteristic of Meso-American art and religion." [39] A kind of dragon has a body made up of
volutes. The volutes are said not to be an "Olmec element." "Volutes. The volutes may have been
the origin of the plumed serpent, which is not an Olmec element either." [40]
In other words, the jaguar may be merged into the origin of the plumed serpent or Quetzalcoatl,
both representing the planet Venus. Venus was also called by Meso-Americans "the star that
smokes," although it does not smoke.
A LONGER DAY
Between 1528 and 1371 B. C., the Hindus plotted their Lunar Mansions [41] . With these
marching across the sky, the calendar could be redone and the major actors tracked in the sky.
I take this to mean, not as the English astronomer Bentley said in his classic work of 1825 on
Indian astronomy, a first-time invention, but a clearing of the fulginaceous chaos of the skies
following the worst of the cometary-Venus encounters. The Moon could be well observed again,
the various mansions discerned, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter "born again."
Not until later is Saturn mentioned and he was said to be born later --revealed later, I would
guess [42] .
Bentley argues, too, that the Kali Yuga, the longtime cycle of Venus, could not have been
recorded before 1425 B. C., "which was only the dawn of astronomy in India." [43] On this
point, he engages in vituperous debate with his critics, who claimed that Hindu astronomy goes
back to around 3000 B. C. He aims to show by retroactive calculations that the older dates
would be impossible. The debate is a forerunner (partly in reverse) of the attacks upon
Velikovsky by historians and astronomers, 1950-1979, who insisted both that Venus was known to
be an orderly planet before the fifteenth century and at the same time that the Babylonians
lacked the ability to make correct observations of Venus before 747 B. C. [44] Again, in my
opinion, Bentley is proving that the skies were disorganized by the Venusian incursions, yet he
was led by uniformitarian presumptions to believe that Hindu astronomers were incompetent
before that time.
All over the world, a Venus calendar came into being with the incursions of the goddess. This
could only mean that the Earth's motions were sufficiently altered to institute a new order of
the years and months. Confirming Velikovsky's circumnavigation of cultures on the calendric
changes, the recent writings of Prof. Coe are most emphatic regarding Meso-America. "Perhaps
most important of all in their cosmological thinking was the calendar itself. At its heart was
the sacred 260-day count, the origin of which was obscure." Again, "... Since it was associated
with the color direction concept, with the gods, and with the affairs of men, this ritual count
was the most significant mental construct in Meso-America." [45] This year was broken down
into thirteen twenty-day intervals.
Not the Venus year, this year of 260-days, but the "Jupiter-year," or perhaps a later "Mercury-
year." The year was 260 days during some period before the time of Venus. Then came a change to
the 360 day year everywhere. This was the Venus year.
Writes Coe, "At each appearance with the dawn sun at 584-day intervals, the Venus regent threw
his spear at a victim symbolizing an aspect of Meso-American daily life: at a water goddess,
signifying impending drought...; at a jaguar throne, symbol of the rulers; at various deities;
at the jaguar warriors, i. e. the soldiery; and at the Maize god, indicating starvation...."
Coe stresses the "basically malevolent character of this great heavenly body." [46] He insists
that "Venus was enormously important in Meso-American religion and mythology. A large body of
myth relates to the apotheosis of Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan, the Feathered-Serpent, as the Morning
Star."
A god who produces a new calendar had moved the world; Jupiter and Venus were accordingly so
celebrated everywhere. The Venus case is summed up: "All over the world we find that there was
at some time the same calendar of 360 days, and that at some later date, about the seventh
century before the present era, five days were added at the end of the year, as 'days over the
year, ' or 'days of nothing. ' [47] Often they were considered days of ill-omen and danger.
These were the work of Mars probably. (An Egyptian myth tells of Mercury-Thoth winning five
days from the Moon in a dice game, thus lengthening the lunar year.) Again, Velikovsky
introduces extensive proof that the priests, rulers and astronomers were busily engaged in
reckoning new calendars in the century following the Mars incursions, that is, after 687 B. C.
[48]
In Meso-America, to the 360 day year was added a "five days without name," a so-called "vague
year." This 365-day year was then matched with the 260-day sacred year to produce a calendar
round of 51 vague years (note the probable relation to the recurring visits of Venus as
developed by Velikovsky in treating of the Jews' Jubilee Year).[ [49] The resulting span of
time of 11,960 days was marvelous to them, for it conjoined the calendars and arrived at 405
Lunations or months of 29.53 days. Calendar upsets mark Mayan records, ca -2840 and -1558. [50]
With Meso-American legends fresh in mind, a brief aside may be forgiven. The Near East and Iran
are no longer the sole major world areas for the study of ancient religion, history, and
science. Rapid progress has been made in the illumination of several great early cultures: the
proto-Indian and Hindu, the Chinese, the Northwest European, the Saharan, the Indo-Chinese, and
the Meso-American. Discoveries flash out from all of them at an increasing rate; for example,
preliminary revelations by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, in 1977, immediately placed
in Indo-China a significant "Bronze Age" civilization that appears to predate any known Near-
East development.
Because of its present geographical separation, Meso-America assumes first-ranking importance.
Scholars are agreed in locating a basic civilization, then a widespread later Olmec culture, a
Mayan, and a number of derivatives up to the Toltec-Aztec. All except the first, for which
symbolic and literary materials are presently lacking, are emphatically catastrophic in
outlook. It has been estimated that as many as 200,000 persons per year were being sacrificed
as late as A. D. 1500 on the altars of the Aztec Empire before a god resembling Mars, and in
order to keep the Sun from stopping its regular rounds.
THE EXPLOSION OF THIRA
It may have been during one of the later incursions of Venus that the island of Thira-Santorini
exploded. This now arc-shaped island of the southern Aegean Sea harbored a well-developed
Bronze Age civilization of the type of Late Minoan I. Late Minoan I is correlated by common
artifacts with the New Kingdom and New Bronze Age in Egypt. This would be then long after the
Exodus of around 1500 B. C., which date closed down the Middle Kingdom and the Middle Bronze
Age everywhere. Hence, as Issacson has pointed out [51] , under the reconstructed chronology
of Velikovsky, the event would have befallen about 1000 B. C., and so I have noted it on page
211.
Our sources say that German (H. Reck et al) and Greek (Marinatos) scholars established in the
1930's that the Thira explosion created havoc throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. Velikovsky
tied the explosion into the Exodus. Upon a suggestion of a German scholar [52] Marinatos
visited Velikovsky. Both agreed that the explosion occurred at the end of the Middle Bronze
Age. But Velikovsky's -1500 meant to Marinatos perhaps about -1750; both tied the Exodus to the
event. Velikovsky subtracted a zero from Plato's account of Atlantic making out 900 years
instead of 9000 years before Solon for the Thira disaster [53] . Mairnatos followed suit. So
did all the archeologists and geologists who pursued the popular study of Thira as the true
Atlantis. But they and Velikovsky were using a different absolute age for the date -1500
Radiocarbon dating gave a variety of reading from the 18th to the 10th century [54] , letting
everyone rest with the mid-millennium date. Only Isaacson, then, has pointed irrefutably to the
circumstances, to wit. Velikovsky must move up to about 1000 B. C. or give up his immense
chronological reconstruction. And the rest of the group concerned must follow suit or depend
heavily on the conventional chronology of Egypt and Minoan Crete. Thira was only a minor
disaster in comparison with the Atlantis catastrophe; the sinking of Atlantic took place in
North-western European seas; and the Thira explosion is properly placed as a Venus-induced
event of the tenth century.
If it were part of what Patten calls the Greater Davidic Catastrophe of 972 B. C., some part of
the population of united Israel would have died, mostly by cosmic fall-out, called the
"pestilence" of the Lord, and by meteoroids, and earthquakes [55] . If it were the lesser
Davidic catastrophe of perhaps 1025 B. C., again in Patten's scheme, celestial specters,
darkness, earthquakes, and meteoroids were occurring inland [56] . A third Patten scenario is
possible, this around 1080 B. C. called the Samuelic Catastrophe [57] . Here severe
earthquakes, great thunder and fierce cosmic lightning took place in the midst of a war between
Jews and Philistines. A great stone, probably a fallen meteoroid, was set up by Samuel to
commemorate the victory.
If the 50 or 52-year cycle, suggested by Velikovsky as denoting the passages of Venus by Earth,
is accepted, then the likely years for an encounter between Venus and Earth would be 973, which
could have synchronized with the Thira disaster. But Patten's dates are not exact; he too
relies upon a cycle, a 54-year cycle of cosmic danger to help him provide a date. Since Israel
was inland, tsunamis were not featured in the Bible. Therefore the correlation with Thira is
difficult.
Cook's revision of the carbon 14 dating formula may be introduced as a final expert witness. He
made allowances for the build-up of 14C in the atmosphere and advanced a non-equilibrium
calculation which "reduces the computed age.. by amounts increasing in time from about 20% in
1000 years, 30% in 4000 years and finally telescoping all very long ages to 12,500 years or
less." [58] Accordingly reduced by about 30%, the mean of Thira 14C dates would approximate
1050 B. C. This would appear then to be an acceptable date.
We conclude that Near East indications lend support to the probability of a Thira-type
explosion, with cosmic relatedness, around 1050 B. C.
Yet the Thira disaster was only a minor feature of 700 years' rule by the "goddess of love."
Few writers have sought to trace out the effects of Venusia to this day. Prof. Wolfe has found
them in Shakespeare [59] . Profs. Greenberg and Sizemore have found them in the traditions and
practices of Judaism and Christianity [60] ; the instructed student can find them indeed
everywhere. To this day, the social institutions, religious practices, symbolism, literature,
music, sexual practices, and expectations of humanity -- not to mention the very ground beneath
our feet -- reflect the centuries under sway of the great comet.
MARTIA
In a passage that is perilously close to the truth, E. Richardson writes of the ancient
Etruscans of present day Tuscany :
The last quarter of the eighth and the first half of the seventh centuries were evidently
lively times in the Near East... Farther West, in Central Italy, the Oriental style broke like
a tidal wave over the simple, if competent, civilization of the Villanovans. Here, it was not a
question of occasional Villanovan traders or mercenaries coming home with new goods in a new
style, not even a question of Greek traders sailing west.. but there must have been an actual
shift of population from the old world of the East to the relatively uncluttered new world of
the West. Almost any of the events we have chronicled above, or something we have yet to
discover might have caused such a shift during those turbulent seventy-five years [61] .
The "something we have yet to discover" was shared by East and West, a state of affairs
sometimes unbeknown to the uprooted ones -- the "something" that Rilli found mysterious in the
ashes piled upon Etruscan settlements, and the ancient encyclopedist Pliny had reported as a
bolt of Jupiter destroying the rich city of Volsinium -- was the work of cosmic forces [62] .
Vesuvius exploded in the eighth century and Etna in the seventh century B. C. The Sicani fled
Eastern Sicily because of seismism and volcanism. Italy was rent by fissure seismism connecting
with volcanoes along its entire length. The number of rivers reported to have disappeared was
far beyond the record of later solarian times. (Semple cites some of the cases.) Many
Phoenician and Greek colonies were founded in the western Mediterranean, especially in Sicily,
during the Martian period. It is possible, too, that the Etruscans settled in Italy not long
before the Romans, carrying a highly developed culture from Asia Minor where, traditionally,
they had been forced out by a great famine. Their blood type is similar to the Urartu people of
Lake Van; their mostly undeciphered language is found upon Lemnos, favorite island of
Hephaistos, and is related to the Hittite; and they are distinguishable from their Villanovan
predecessors in culture and separated from them by a layer of catastrophic debris [63] . The
Etruscans were especial worshippers of Jupiter and lightning par excellence, to the point where
they could be mistaken for Yahwah-sect descendants of Noah [64] .
Planet Mars, already long known to mankind as a moving star, was precipitated onto its
disastrous course lasting nearly a century (-776 B. C. to -687 B. C.) when proto-planet Venus
spiralled near to it [65] . Spectacular celestial events were observed from Earth. The
unsettled body invaded the orbit of Earth, and repeatedly, roughly at fifteen years intervals,
it approached Earth closely, causing new disasters.
The highly developed Etruscan and rude Latin civilizations were devastated. Although Rome was
born amidst the turmoil (753 B. C.?), it gloried in the planetary god that bore the name Mars.
Mycenaean civilization in Greece was largely destroyed through the same agency, there called
Ares, God of War and embodiment of sheer destruction. Herakles seem to have represented the
planet as well and classicists will recall that the Heraclids were identified with the Dorian
invasion of Greece [66] .
CARPENTER'S "SOFT" CATASTROPHISM
In his study of Discontinuities in Greek Civilization, Carpenter helps one across the dizzying
chasm between evolutionary and quantavolutionary though. The Dorians were the Heraclids who
were "professed linear descendents of tribal followers of the legendary hero-god Herakles..."
[67]
They came upon a destroyed civilization, "the greatest still unsolved problem in Mediterranean
history. [68] … The calendar time is 1200 B. C." [In fact, it is not, It is around 700 B. C.]
"and Mediterranean man has begun to suffer the most severe cultural recession which history
records or archaeology can determine. Great kingdoms have collapsed without apparent adequate
reason; and the eastern sea shores are overrun by fugitives seeking to force their way into
lands less smitten by disaster. In Greece the well-fortified Mycenaean palaces are burned and
abandoned; but none seems to know who burned them."
[And more and worse, but Carpenter has an answer] "famine... And by famine I do not mean an
occasional failure of several consecutive harvests, but such an enduring and disastrous
destruction of the annual yield as only a drastic climatic change could have occasioned."
He then proves famine, which is usually part of a catastrophe, we have noted. The Edomite
bedouin were even then migrating into Egypt "to avoid famine," says Bimson [69] . A change in
the prevailing winds is given as a cause : African wet winds changed to African dry winds. But
what changes prevailing winds? And around the world? We recognize today a growing belief of
meteorologists that great changes in climate originate in the celestial sphere. One Greek
civilization was destroyed and another took its place. Climatic change was part of the action,
and the transition period probably lasted one century -- 776 to around 650 B. C. -- not five
centuries. Carpenter believed in the Dark Ages.
NERGAL, THE "TREACHEROUS DEALER"
Mesopotamia suffered greatly, too; in the typical collective madness, delusion, and
psychological projection that gave birth to all astral gods, the Babylonians elevated and
celebrated Nergal. Nergal was Era who was Ares who was Mars. The insane human devastator of the
Middle East, King Nebuchadnezzar, called himself by its name: "I am Nergal. I destroy, I burn,
I demolish, leaving nothing behind me." [70]
Again the gods in heaven carry on their wars through their human agents. It was Ares versus
Athene again, Mars against Venus, in his march into Palestine. "From the philological,
theological, and historical data, there is no question that, in both name and substance,
Jerusalem was indeed the 'City of Venus. ' The reign of the 'Queen of Heaven' was an uneasy
one, however, and did not go unchallenged. In the end, the Venus Star yielded to a resuscitated
Yahwism and relinquished its hierarchical position, but only after centuries of protracted
politico-religious struggle and not until Jerusalem itself lay trampled and ruined beneath the
Chaldean war-machine of Nebuchadnezzar." [71]
The Jews commemorated the new active agency in the cosmos by the appellation Kesil Maadin, and
Gabriel, and typically rendered these as inspired by their single divinity [72] . So in the
days of Uzziah there was a grand commotion (-747 B. C.) and also when Ahaz was buried in -717
B. C. On the same day the sun dial changed about 10 (ca 40 minutes). According to Velikovsky,
the Earth's axis shifted and twilight was hastened. This story, writes Velikovsky, "is related
also in the records and told in the traditions of many peoples. It appears that a heavenly body
passed very close to the Earth, moving, as it seem, in the same direction as the Earth on its
nocturnal side." [73]
The prophet Isaiah preached about 701 B. C. It was he who said (22: 13), in the midst of the
Martian terrors, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die." "According to Isaiah XXI.
8, the heavens were most anxiously scanned at the conjunction times, by day and by night, for
the 'grievous vision' of a 'treacherous dealer' and 'destructive spoiler' (Isa XXI. 2)
According to Jer. I. 13f, the dreaded phenomenon looked somewhat like a 'seething pot', and
when it appeared in the heavens 'an evil broke forth out of the north upon all the inhabitants
of the land." These calamities happened periodically. Thus (Jer. L1,146) 'in one year, and
after that in another year, and then there was always violence in the land, and ruler fought
against ruler. '" [74] In -687 B. C., the restless Earth wobbled on its axis, electrical
exchanges occurred, and the army of Sennacherib was destroyed by a great blast of gas.
WORSHIP OF MARS
Mars appeared as lean, wolfish, foolhardy, hot, fiery, and ardent among widely dispersed
people. Mars had many names, newly coined, around the world. It was called the "wolf-star" by
the Chinese, Scandinavians, and others [75] . The Mars-obsessed Romans believed that a wolf
bitch had suckled the foundling twins, Romulus and Remus, who esablished Rome. Mars was the
"sword-star" to the Scythians, and the Romans made their new short swords integral to the
equipment and maneuvers of the invincible legion. It was Marut and Rama to the Hindus, and
Huitzilopochtli, high god of the Aztecs. In dispersed parts of the world occur myths that the
Moon is chased by dogs or wolves and, upon eclipses, they desperately beat drums and raise a
tumult to frighten off the devourer of the Moon. [76]
The Aztec Huitzilopochtli appears to have held also the names Tetzahuitl and Tezcatlipoca.
Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent god, "wise and sympathetic," was "vanquished in the struggle
with his contrary and enemy, Tezcatlipoco, the god who carried on his forehead a smoking
mirror, who spread discord and transformed mankind into monkeys, just as Quetzalcoatl changed
them into birds."
"Expelled from his city, he took the road to Yucatan, announcing, however, that he would return
to his homeland. Arriving at the shore of the sea, he erected a pyre and offered himself to the
flames. A few days later he reappeared transformed into the planet Venus." Thus goes the
principal Mexican story pertaining to planet Mars and planet Venus in celestial combat [77] .
The Romans worshipped their first ruler, Romulus, for having joined his father, Mars, in heaven
on the occasion of a cyclonic outburst. That the Romans had a longer history somewhere, perhaps
indeed at Troy, is indicated by their adoration of the whole Olympic family, and the
impregnation of their institutions by them. For instance, the Roman consuls served for a
Venusian-length year.
Greeks who survived the disorders of sky and planet chanted of the battle of the gods, in the
language of Homer. Among the principal figures who engaged in conflict at Troy under the aegis
of Zeus were Athena-Odysseus-Venus, Ares-Paris-Mars, and Aphrodite-Helen-Moon. Troy was only
one of the many cities destroyed in this period, nor was this the first destruction of that
city over the millennia. The Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares, and sacrificed dogs as
well, in nocturnal offerings, to his alter ego, Enyalius.
As happened in climactic celestial events of earlier times, the Martian period brought a change
of calendars around the world [78] . Nabonassar, an obscure king of Babylon, gave his name to a
new era of the calendar in the year 747 B. C. The first Olympic Games marked a reassembly of
Greeks and may have occurred in 776 B. C. The founder of the games was reputedly none other
than Hercules, alter ago of planet Mars. Romulus, says Ovid, brought the Romans a calendar of
10 months which made the year just the length of a woman's pregnancy, that is, 280 days [79] .
But shortly thereafter, about 715 B. C., two months were added. Bentley, reporting on India,
connects the end of the war of gods and giant there with the war of the gods in the Iliad of
Homer and with the Era of Nabonassar [80] .
Two Dutch scientists have reviewed the radiocarbon, tree ring, and varve studies of this period
and conclude that the statistics point to a considerable lengthening of the solar year, from
perhaps 280 to 365 days, around 780 B. C. [81] This is the century, too, when Seuss'
carbondating research suggested shifts in the magnetic poles and abrupt changes of climate
[82] .
Carli, the early scientific catastrophist (1780), believes (I think mistakenly) that Italy was
covered by swamps for millennia after the flood of Ogyges (approx. 4000 B. C. in his
estimation). He quotes a report by Denis of Halicarnassos that Oenotrus, son of Lycaon, having
gone to settle in Italy with a colony, found the country deserted and uncultivated and was
obliged to search for habitation on the mountains [83] . Great swamps persisted in the north
until the time of Hannibal. Taken together with the desolate situation of the South and Sicily
in the early period of Greek colonialization, with the evidence of the destruction of the high
Etruscan civilization and the coming of the Romans, this would seem to be the aftermath of the
war of the gods.
The Spartans were among the most disciplined and dedicated warriors of the classical world, but
whenever the earth trembled they would scuttle for home. Said Ellen Churchill Semple, "If
earthquakes would break the nerve and nullify the life-long training of Spartan troops, there
must have been abundant reason." [84] She sets forth the exceptional seismicity of Laconia and
much of the known world then, but in true uniformitarian fashion, never ventures that natural
disasters were worse then, or had been unbelievably worse a couple of centuries earlier, when
all the settlements of the Mycenaeans were wiped out, and the Spartans, as Dorian survivors and
sons of Herakles, took over the area.
THE WOUNDS OF PLANET MARS
Like Venus and the Moon, Mars shows the severe effects of its recent space encounters. The
geological evidence for large-body encounters with Mars in a recent time can be summed up in
nine points : 1. Argon, an important ingredient of Mars' atmosphere, is also found in
unexpectedly large amounts in the clouds of Venus and in the Moon's surface rocks [85] .
2. The surface of Mars is rent by canyons and craters of prodigious size. exhibiting both
gravitational and electrical disruption [86] .
3. The polar caps of Mars are composed of solid carbon dioxide (CO2) and possibly ice [87] .
This must be a very recent freeze, following acquisition of CO2 from Venus.
4. Sets of laminated spherical caps lay near the polar areas. These are meltings of the
surface. They are irregularly laminated, one upon another [88] . They occurred perhaps when
the polar axes heated up from interplanetary encounters with Earth or Venus, involving
electrical discharges. The near side of the Moon and the surface of Mercury evidence the same
type of molten-looking splotches.
5. The present poles of Mars are far off the laminated electric melts of the old poles (or the
old magnetic poles when Mars rotated within the magnetic tube). This would indicate an axial
tilt.
6. Hot spots, perhaps of volcanism, surface contortion and radioactivity may exist. These are
signs of recent externally produced disturbances [89] .
7. No erosion has occurred on the many great cracks, rilles and canyons of the surface. These
are electrical in origin, therefore, and not products of turbulent water (although E. J. Opik
thinks that they may be radiating lines of craters exploded from external agents.) [90]
8. A complex of a canyon, Coprates, exists that is 2000 miles long, up to 300 miles wide, and
over 4 miles deep. As described, in Chapter One, it is a product of a single instant
unzippering of the surface by a passing body, possibly Venus.
9. The crater Nix Olympica is 300 miles wide and has a 100-mile-high peak. It is not volcanic
but the result of an electrical-gravitational explosion [91] . The historical evidence may
also be summarized : Hebrew, Roman, Mexican, Greek, Hindu, Babylonian and other nations and
tribes report heavy natural disturbances throughout the period 776 to 687 B. C. All of the
high-energy forces of catastrophism were involved.
Mars (Ares) is then newly worshipped everywhere, with great intensity. The god is identified
with the planet in many places.
The behavior of the god corresponds to that of the planet. For example, in the Iliad which I
have elsewhere assigned, not alone, to the turn of the Seventh Century [92] , Pallas Athene
(Venus) "cast her spear mightily against his nethermost belly" upon which "the brazen Ares
bellowed loud as nine thousand or ten thousand warriors cry in battle, when they join in the
strife of the Wargod." [93] This may conceivably have been the occasion for the tearing open
of the Coprates canyon on Mars.
Hamon, in Hebrew, means "noise" and is a name for Gabriel (Mars). "Assyrians of the host of
Sennacherib, before they died, were permitted by Gabriel to hear 'the song of the celestials, '
which can be interpreted as the sound caused by a close approach of the planet." The god Hemen
elsewhere in the Near East, is the god of Noise [94] .
THE GREEK "DARK AGES"
With the affixing of the Mycenaeans to the events of the Eighth and Seventh centuries, a major
question arises concerning the "Greek Dark Ages" that are supposed to have occupied the years
between the Thirteenth and Seventh centuries, between the fall of the Mycenaean cities and the
advent of the archaic Greeks. An answer to this question will conclude this chapter.
I. Isaacson, an associate of Veilkovsky, has driven nails into the coffin of the Greek "Dark
Ages" that Velikovsky designed [95] . Velovsky's own work on the subject awaits publication.
He has shown how Mycenaean civilization moved directly into the archaic and classical Greek
culture without much lapse of time. The centuries hitherto assigned to the Dark Ages are
fictions aimed at accommodating an incorrectly dated Egyptian chronology to a Greek chronology
that is only correctly figured after the seventh century. Mycenaean ruins and art, as with the
remains of all of the Near East civilizations, have been tied to the Egyptian dating, which,
for reasons exposed fully by Velikovsky with contributions by independent scholars such as
Courville and Dayton, is made out to be far too old.
It is noteworthy that the collapse of Mycenaean civilization around the Aegean Sea has been
believed to correspond in time to the "Invasions of the Sea Peoples" throughout the Near East,
that is, the 13th century B. C. In fact, both the Mycenaean collapse and the Near East
ruination are events of the same period. It is not the 13th century but the 8th and 7th
centuries. The cause is not "the Sea Peoples," who did not exist as such, but the raging sky-
god Mars, and his antagonist, Venus.
Once the reconceptualization of the events and time is accomplished, the reconstruction of the
separate pieces of near East history, including its mysteries, becomes routine. Thus when the
newest edition of the Cambridge Ancient History publishes tablets inscribed on the doomsday of
Pylos, the city of old King Nestor on the western Peloponnesus, it reports that a tablet,
apparently the last, written in haste, "immediately before the destruction which baked them and
rendered them durable." details how troops were sent to watch the sea [96] . Again, far to the
East, the last documents of Boghazköi and Ugarit, reported by M. C. Astour and J. T. Hooker,
appear to describe defense preparations, after which there is nothing but destruction and ruins
to await the modern excavator [97] .
The revision in these cases, and in many excavation reports, is simple : for "invaders" or
"people of the sea," read Mars-Ares-Nergal etc. For defense preparations, read universal
portents, alerts, rescue parties, mobilization, sacrifices, propitiations, exodus. A people in
readiness for cosmic catastrophe behave, at least in the prejudiced eyes of an archaeologist,
like people organized to defend themselves against foreign enemies.
Claude Schaeffer, famed excavator of Ugarit and practically the sole systematic and clear-
sighted surveyor of Bronze Age reports in the archaeological profession, published as early as
1948 his findings. Absolute and complete, they showed the set of disasters as I have labeled
them in Figure 33. In 1968, Prof. Schaeffer was impelled to point out to his still
uncomprehending colleagues that no trace of "sea peoples" were to be found in certain cities
[98] . Yet, in 1948, he had been required, by the authoritatively accepted chronologists of
Egypt, to mark a limit to the latest excavations of many sites of the Near East at about 1200,
labelling them as destruction by "Peoples of the Sea."
In 1977, Velikovsky published Peoples of the Sea. But here the iconoclast was undertaking one
task and that alone -- of showing that Ramses III, and certain successors were of the time of
the Persian conquests, that is, of the fourth century B. C. instead of the conventionally dated
thirteenth century. An absolute and authoritative chronology was off by 800 years!
In 1977, Velikovsky published Ramses II, whereupon a large chunk of the pseudo-historical
plastering covering the "Dark Ages" -- that connected with the "Hittite" Empire -- cracked. The
Hittites evidently were Chaldeans, and their time was of the beginning of Martia. The Greek
"Dark Ages" plaster, too, will soon fall in another volume of evidence. Meanwhile, should the
scholar wish to premeditate the reconstructed history, a number of cracks in the plaster can be
discovered simply by reviewing old "discredited" studies. In Krickenhaus' work on Tyrens, for
example, fire destroys the Mycenaean palace and a new temple of Greek style is promptly built
over it [99] . No five centuries of "Dark Ages" in between!
What Velikovsky did not delve into were the many other "Peoples of the Sea" cases. These, as
stated above, fell not into the thirteenth century, not into the fourth century, but into the
eighth and seventh century Martian catastrophes. That is why, on Schaeffer's early studies, it
can be observed that following this period of disasters, settlements were either absent or, if
present, of proto-classic or even classic type.
Extensive systematically presented documentation is available in Schaeffer's work. Below one
meter of Troy's soil, all remains are prehistoric except a "few Roman sherds fallen from
above." [100] Below begins Troy VII B prehistorically with ruins caused by "Peoples of the
Sea," dated at about 1150 B. C. Archaeological science has taught its students for generations
that the site of Troy, which Mireaux said was a source of violent contention for many centuries
because of its position to command the commerce between Asia and Europe passing through the
Dardanelles [101] , was abandoned. Even a catastrophist becomes a uniformitarian in the face
of such long-term desolations : it cannot be.
Yet we find the same disconsolate conclusions reached at the many other sites [102] : Ras
Shamra, nothing after -1200; Byblos, final destruction -1200; Chagar Bazar, nothing from -1350
onwards; Hama, Mycenaean at -1300 and nothing thereafter; Beit Mirsim, Jericho, Beisan,
Megiddo, Tell el Hesy, Tarse -- all finished by the "Peoples of the Sea," ca -1200; Alaca
Huyuk; first level of culture begins at -1300; Alishar Huyak, -1150; Cyprus, Iron Age at -1150,
then nothing; Tepe Giyan, last level ends at -1200; Talyche, Agha-Evlar, etc. in Persia, end at
-1150; the Caucasus sites, no beginning after -1200; Luristan, nothing after Recent Bronze set
at -1450. No man-made catastrophe then could be so bad as all this. The uniformitarian
chronologists, unwittingly leagued with the mistaken Egyptian chronologues, have produced a
500-year artificial extension of catastrophe throughout the Old World.
The New or Late Bronze Age did not end because of some new use of metal, or the advent of some
enlightened monarch, or the desire of some people to intrude upon another people's habitat. It
marked a new celestial stage. A cosmic catastrophe destroyed cultures to the extent that the
newly created cultures were distinctive. The world moved into the so-called age of Mars, during
which the fortunes of the Earth and human race followed a path of exponentially declining
destruction, violence and madness. Finally, that which is here called the Solarian age begins.
We mentioned the cyclical theory of history in Chapter 3 and said we were helicalists. Egyptian
priests told Herodotus that this was our Fifth Sun after four destructions of the celestial
order. The Aztecs told the Spanish priests the same. The Hindu Bhagavata Purana puts us in the
fifth age also. But the Buddhist Visuddhi-Magga allows seven destructions. Rabbinical
authorities claimed six reconstructions, placing us in the seventh.
Many cyclic systems exist [103] . Why do they never (perhaps) exceed ten; why are they never
one or even two? Or even three, the favorite categorial fixation of scholarship since Plato?
Tentatively, for convenience, we place ourselves today in the eighth destructive period of the
Holocene epoch and seventh age of humanity, following six great quantavolutions.
Notes (Chapter Ten: Venus and Mars)
1. "Hymn to Athena" in Homeric Poems of Hesiod volume. On Athena/ Venus identification with the
Hindu Devi see Isenberg (1976). The dynamic problems of such an explosion have been mentioned
above, see Index, "Encounters."
2. Rose (1977) 110-1.
3. In addition to Velikovsky (1950), (1972a), (1973-4a) on the Venus question, cf. A. de
Grazia, Ralph Juergens and Livio Stecchini (1966); ten special issues of Pensée magazine, Vols.
II-IV; the Review of the Society for the Study of Interdisciplinary Issues (England) 1976-
present; Kronos (1977); Ransom (1976); E. Milton (1978); and Asimov et al. (1977). All contain
mainly material pertinent to the controversy over the natural history of Venus.
Velikovsky has produced a volume of evidence on the destructive career and nature of Venus.
Less known subsequent articles and books discussing his work have added the equivalent; there
have been hundreds of articles and books since 1950 that inadvertently lend support to his
thesis; my purpose here is not to recite all of this work, but rather to sharpen the issues by
the employment of selected studies, and to produce a theory to integrate them.
4. Velikovsky makes a critical synchronization of the Biblical Exodus with the Egyptian papyrus
Ipuwer (1950) (1952); John Van Seters and W. F. Albright lend independent support: also
agreeing are Sieff et al. (1977) and Greenberg (1975): contra cf. Bell.
5. Meade (1977); Kuong.
6. This Biblical image, cited by Velikovsky, reminds one of the Phaeton image, discussed below.
7. Rix (1977).
8. Tompkins (1971).
9. M. Y. Maror of Soviet Acad. Sci., quoted in 109 Sci. News, June 19, 1976, 388.
10. To be discussed in a later Volume of this series, but cf. Velikovsky (1950).
11. Sieff et al. (1979) 787; Greenberg (1977).
12. Cardona (1975) 37.
13. Wallis (1972); Baum (1978); Ransom (1976) 76 citing Bridges et al.
14. Rix (1975)
15. Bimson (1977).
16. Rix (1974).
17. Barbeau 118.
18. Lowery.
19. Epinomis 2.99-101.
20. These matters have been developed in an unpublished manuscript of the present author, The
Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (1972). Aphrodite, the goddess, was assigned to the
Moon by Velikovsky and Suhr. James (1976, 1976a) has attacked this identification.
21. Velikovsky (1950) chap 6.
22. The owl is Athene-Minerva's symbol, probably a forcible vision of the comet.
23. Sutherland (1973-4), 50.
24. Bimson (1977).
25. (1950); Kondratov (1974).
26. Raikes (1965) (1967) (1976); Possehl (1967); A de Grazia (1977).
27. Adams (1975), Adam's discoveries drastically amend the old positions (Encyclopedia
Britannica; vol. 18, p. 404, 1969, "Tiger-Euphrates River-System") He acknowledges conflicts
between geological and archaeological evidence regarding the delta but claims no historical
record of changes upriver.
28. Kondratov (1974).
29. Schaeffer (1948) 604.
30. MacKinnon (1976).
31. "Black Sea..." (1970).
32. Coe (1967).
33. Bernals (1969) 152.
34. Cf. Stecchini 143 quoting the Sybilline Oracles : The Morning Star fought the battle having
climbed on the shoulders of Leo."
35. Isenberg 90 quoting from The Devi-Mahatmya (tr. S. Jagadisvarananda) [Madras, 1953], 25-
178.
36. Ibid., 90-1.
37. (1975), 271.
38. Bernal (1969) 108.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Bentley (1825).
42. Ibid. 2, 3-5.
43. Ibid. xiv.
44. See Stecchini in de Grazia et. al. (1966) and Rose (1977).
45. (1975) 9,10.
46. 19-20.
47. Velikovsky (1950).
48. Ibid., 341.
49. Ibid., Bernal (1969) 103-4 mentions the 52-years cycle of the Mesoamericans.
50. Nancy K. Owen, 92.
51. J. Isaacson (1975).
52. Velikovsky (1955) 191.
53. (1950) 147.
54. Mowles (1973); Acta (1969); Isaacson (1975); Weinstein (1978).
55. Patten (1973) 161-2.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Cook (1961-2).
59. (1975-6) (1978).
60. (1978).
61. (1964) 45.
62. Rilli (1964); Pliny ii 53; Velikovsky (1950) 273; Patten 18-9, 92; Piero Leonardi,
geologist at the University of Ferrara and Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, writes in a personal
letter to the author of October 3, 1977, however: "Regarding the Lake of Bolsena, one is
dealing undoubtedly with a normal volcanic structure, and I do not believe at all that its
origins can be attributed to extraterrestrial phenomena."
63. Wainwright on blood types; Cambridge Ancient History II (1973) 161 on Lemnos; Fell on the
Hittite connection; Rilli on the ashes of Prato.
64. Rilli develops this theory and attaches the Saturnian Deluge to the flooding of the
Tyhrennian sea area, original center of the Villanovans.
65. Velikovsky (1950) Part II, ch. III et passim.
66. Carpenter (1966) 47-57.
67. Ibid., 47.
68. Ibid., 18.
69. Bimson (1978) 59.
70. Cf. Mullen (1973) 11.
71. Greenberg and Sizemore (1978) 74.
72. Velikovsky (1978), (1950) 292. Kesil means "fool" in Hebrew.
73. Ibid., 216.
74. Bellamy (1948) 124-5.
75. Santillana and von Dechend (1969) 324.
76. Occidens (1888).
77. Formenti (1969) xxii.
78. Velikovsky (1950) ch. 8.
79. Van Oosterhout and van der Lek (1972) quoting Ovid, Fasti. 1 5, 5-7, 8-30.
80. Bentley (1825) 49.
81. Van Oosterhout and van der Lek (1972).
82. Ibid; see above Fig.
83. Carli (1780) 307.
84. Semple's ancient geography suits nicely the ruling formulas of the old geology (cf. G.
Grinnell, in Milton, 1978).
85. Ransom (1976) 134-6, 146-7; on Venus, Wash Post, Dec. 11, 1976, A6 quoting Donahue, Mc
Elory, NASA Pioneer probes.
86. Juergens (1974d, 1974c); Kelly (1974).
87. Pollack (1975) 82-3.
88. Ibid., and 90.
89. Ransom (1976) 132-3.
90. Opik; Juergens (147d, 197e).
91. Ibid., Kelly (1974).
92. In an unpublished mss, "The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars" (1972).
93. Iliad V.
94. Vikentiev (1930); Velikovsky (1950) 292.
95. Isaacson (Eddie Schorr), (1973, 1974).
96. (1973) Vol. II, Part I, p. 611.
97. James (1977).
98. Schaeffer (1968) 607-8.
99. 1, 31-40; Velikovsky (1974) 6,45.
100. Schaeffer (1948) xxxii.
101. Mireaux (1948).
102. Synoptic Table IX.
103. Cf. Velikovsky (1950) 29-35.
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE
1 January 1980
Dear Professor de Grazia:
I have now read your manuscript, "Chaos and Creation," in its entirety and have a number of
criticisms to offer. You asked me to comment upon the work as a "uniformitarian," which I
suppose you can call me, but naturally I feel that I am judging the material on grounds of
science and scholarship, rather than upon the basis of what is non-uniformitarian. As a matter
of fact, I should say that I have found some points of agreement with your work, and, if I do
not mention them here, it is because you specifically asked me for negative, not positive,
criticism. So I am, as you requested, acting only as the devil's advocate.
Granted as you imply in the Foreword that you have at least one scientific or ethnological
(conventional) authority supporting every significant point that you make (I haven't checked it
throughout the book), this does not mean that your theory holds together. No more than the
blind men could describe the real elephant when each could only feel a part of him. Your theory
or model of quantavolutionary primevalogy has to make a real world, one in which people can
believe and experts can work with.
As you painfully-well perceive, the most vulnerable side of your book has to do with the
absolute chronology of events. I remain quite unpersuaded that the holocene period is as
catastrophic and as crowded as you make it out to be. One can take 14,000 years ago as its
beginning (many dates have been roughly of this order), but you are claiming to include in the
period, explicitly or implicitly, the whole Paleolithic (which now means the Quaternary plus
upper Tertiary) in respect to humans, the Triassic (-200 my) with respect to the Spreading of
the ocean basins and laying of the ocean bottoms, the carboniferous (-300 my) with regard to
coal and oil deposits, the Cambrian ( -500 my) insofar as Grand Canyon is included, and the
Precambrian ( -600 to -2500 + my), when it comes to atmospheric changes, the coming of the
Moon, the newness of gases, uranium flux and so on. In fact, you go about placing whatever you
think appropriate whenever in time your theory requires that it must have happened. About the
only law of time that you seem to obey is the principle of superposition. which is only a
relative ordering of times and which you appear to think can permit anything to occur in the
absolute measure of time.
Surely you must be aware that even if all the conventional dates of all the events that you
compress are incorrect by many millions of years, they will still not fall within your few
thousand years. It would be a miraculous coincidence if half-a-dozen radioactive tests of time
were all wrong, totally wrong. It is hard to conceive how hundreds of geologists and
geophysicists working upon these tests have not to any degree acquired your suspicions, and you
must admit that you have not yourself performed any of the tests, which require extensive
laboratory facilities.
Even if all radioactive tests were wrong you would have to grant the unanimity of opinion in
respect to the older methods which you have listed in the first category of your tests-of-time
chart, (Chapter 3). They, too, are the word of a horde of geologists. Nowhere will you find
them hesitating in putting most of your "holocene events" much further into the past. Granted
that some tectonic, depositional, and climatic events are saltations of normal rates of
activity, these form only a small fractions of all events that have occurred and all changes
that have shaped the present surface of the globe. One anomaly or exception does not undo a
rule or make a new rule; how do you know, or how does your reader know, the ratio of exceptions
to the normal cases?
You make much of your revolutionary column; it is merely the geological column extended into
the atmosphere. You will have as much difficulty proving a recent catastrophe in every column
on Earth as geologists have in finding a real geological column with all ages represented by
it. Geologists may not be able to prove that a certain discontinuity is a product of
depositional slowdown, or slowly changing material of erosion, but you cannot prove it to be a
product of disastrously speeded up or cut-off erosion, or quick change in the material mix of
erosion.
Fifty or more fields of science and learning say that they need lots of time to explain all the
changes that have occurred in the behavior of whatever they may be studying -- genetics, birth
of planets, development of human intelligence, culture, a rock system, a river valley, an ocean
floor, a change of climate, and so on. You take away their time and give them explosives.
You're smashing the clock. It won't work. Even if it could work it would take a couple of
centuries for the large body of scientists and the public to feel comfortable with your
paradigm.
I would like to point out to you what you would have to give up if your short time-scale were
proven wrong:
(1) Your homo schizo would be looking for a new niche in time farther back and opponents would
be encouraged to go back to work on their evolutionary ladders.
(2) The surface of the Earth, the atmosphere, the solar system -- would have a new lease on
life (backwards life, of course). Here again, the evolutionary idea, or at the least a long-
term catastrophism, would take over.
(3) Many of the anomalies that you have elevated to the dignity of data will be degraded to
anomalies again.
(4) Most disastrous of all, the large body of legendary evidence would have to be discarded,
since the memorial generations of the human mind can go back fourteen thousand years, but they
cannot go back a hundred thousand or a million or remember events that happened before homo
sapiens existed ten or a hundred million years ago.
What would remain then -- if the attacks upon your timescale were to succeed -- would be the
general sequences and interplay of forces; a method of explaining orogeny, sea bottoms the moon
emplacement, the extermination and birth of species, etc. A theory of the time-stretched solar-
system as an evolution from a binary would remain hence the movements of planets, the
disintegration of Super-Uranus in nova phases, the heavy atmospheric envelope of the binary
system, etc. But all of this can probably be successfully attacked too.
You coin too many words. Take your calendar of ages, now wouldn't it be better to call Urania
"The Stone Age" which it is; and Lunaria "the Hunting Age"? And then Saturnia, "the Golden
Age;" Jovea, Mercuria, and Venusia, "the Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Late Bronze Ages,"
and Martia "the Iron Age," and perhaps Solaria, "the Machine Age," going back, perhaps, to the
first clocks and mining equipment of the European middle ages. The god names are too romantic
and animistic. As for the general term "revolutionary primevalogy." well, no one will buy that.
"Quantavolution" sounds a little better. I think that you are stuck with "catastrophism" even
though you say that the great disasters gave us all our "goods" as well as "bads" and made us
what we are.
Of course, it all starts with your Solaria Binaria electrical system. What can I say about
that? The scenario you provide is simply unbelievable within the narrow time span that you have
set for yourself. You say that the "straw that broke the camel's back" came about 14,000 years
ago and the electrical current pulsing between Sun and Super-Uranus diminished so much that the
latter big body began to fission and the small planets and magnetic tube began to spiral in
towards the central axis or arc of fire. Why should it happen so fast considering that it was
running for -- what? -- a billion or 5 billion years before?
As for Juergens' theory that the Sun is a dispatcher of charge obtained from galactic sources,
you must know that he and you are about the only people who believe it (I hadn't ever heard of
it before you used it). Here, as in so many places in the book, I felt that you were asking for
more than any reader could give, that is, acceptance, or at least consideration, of a general
theory that was quite unacceptable to prevailing science in every single chapter. You should
perhaps concentrate on just one chapter and do a whole book on it alone.
This is how I feel about the Moon chapter, too. The topic is large and your theory about it far
too big for the few pages given it. Again you are proceeding with clues that are ambiguous and
faint. I cannot say that they are erroneous. It is simply that I expect, when more data comes
in, that the Moon's material will prove to be distinctly different from all possible Earth
material: I expect, too, that you'll just have too much of a problem explaining away the
continental-type rock found in several places in the Pacific Basin where the Moon would have
erupted from.
Frankly I find it hard to imagine so much of the crust skimming into space. I won't demand
calculations at this point; I know that George Darwin and others have claimed such a Moon
eruption, but not so impossibly recent. The calculations of the force required to pull away the
crust, the amount of interrupted Earth rotation, and the paths of the Intruder and the pursuing
crustal matter would be anyone's guess; you'd probably be able to ward off attacks on these
accounts. But the heat and gases released would annihilate the atmosphere (your dodge here of
the Earth's atmosphere being part of the great binary tube atmosphere is just too neat).
Aren't you just like Höerbiger-Bellamy, whom you criticize for having fetched earth satellites
out of thin air and then put them through all the gyrations and crashes necessary to account
for all of the peculiarities of earth history and morphology? You move the planets at will in a
shorter period than these men do. The "gods" fly hither and yon at your bidding. Of course you
can then explain all that is asked about nature and mankind.
Even if, as seems possible, several catastrophes caused by external encounters have devastated
the globe, it is more likely that one or more comets, coursing thru the solar system, have
inflicted the damage and terrorized the human mind, than it is that the planets, each in turn,
have done this work. This theory would allow you to keep the planets in their present location
into the indeterminate long past. It would let you give up your attempt to destroy what is
generally considered to be the necessary long-term dating and evolutionary process. Further,
all the religious practices and beliefs associated with planets (accepting your evidence of
this as sufficient) would naturally result from their being the regularly observed bodies that
are most similar to comets. And, further, comets, upon passing thru the solar system, would
affect and "inflame" observably planets other then Earth and would appear also to come from the
planets. The increasing evidence of the possibility of our Sun to create catastrophe -- some of
which you bring out in your last chapter --leads me to think that all of your quantavolutions
could have been caused by the Sun in one or another of its aberrances. I realize that you have
bricked up the door to the sunlight by showing the sun to be a weak god and the planets as
great gods. Still, my position is that time is long and these disasters far away in time;
therefore, it is impossible to consider these human memories as authentic. Probably the planets
stand for some small special phenomena of recent years. Then the sun could carry the burden of
the very great primeval disasters of millions and billions of years ago.
Your general theory of a recent Solaria Binaria and of planetary deviations, can be rendered
useless, not to say wrong, if the ancients had simply observed that the planets are moving
stars, not fixed stars, that when the comet was also unfixed and wandering, and that when the
comet approached from the region of a planet, it became automatically a herald emissary,
representative of that planet and the planet would then be given various names and traits
characteristic of the cometary behavior and its effects upon Earth.
Admittedly it is difficult to explain the origins of gods. But I would rather believe that if
Uranus were the first god everywhere, it was because some fascinating phenomena in the skies
made him an appealing idea and the idea had other uses, as e. g. a father substitute, and was
spread by traders, warriors and other ways of cultural diffusion. I think that man had enough
fears within him to use the suggestion of a god fearfully without the "god" in reality behaving
catastrophically.
Here and in many other places you could have "settled for half a loaf;" man can work himself
into a froth with very little help from celestial rage-makers; just watch a poor farmer shake
his fist at the sky when there has been no rain!
Again on the matter of accepting "half a loaf," most scientists might today accept your
description of the universe, the skies and even the solar system as more unsettled, explosive,
threatening and damaging than is generally believed. But why go to extremes? There could have
been solar disturbances so extensive as to cause Venus to behave strangely -- as if alive --at
one time, perhaps even light up if its rotation were slowed down. Jupiter might have exploded
some brilliant gases under solar influence, too. It's quite believable from your evidence,
also, that the Earth may have suffered a disaster from a comet tail on some occasion, and from
a large meteoroid falling in the area of the Near East on another occasion.
You should stop at that; it is too early yet for the quantavolutionary model. Be content with
bringing out the anomalies and the incidents, in all fields of knowledge, and let the pattern,
if there is such, emerge with time and study. Look at Vitaliano's book, for example. She
explains various cases of disaster one by one as a result, finds nothing remotely resembling a
Deluge, world fire, instant cleavage of the Earth, or any of that.
How do you know what to select as truth and what to disregard as fantasy or social lies? If all
of mythology including all ancient religious documents amount to, say, a hundred thousand
pages, whereas your selections come to a few thousand lines, I cannot believe such selectivity
is possibly valid; no matter that you are personally skilled, you just do not have any reliable
method to work with. I am sure that your sampling is biased. There are no good rules for
analyzing myth. Your approach is psychiatric, I would say, but with this great difference, that
you go beyond Freud and Jung and the others in assigning a reality to the final objects
inspiring myths and legends. I took down a copy of Robert Graves' Greek Myths from my shelf and
find nowhere in its mass of confusing details even a hint of the kind of reconstruction you
have made of Greek myth.
You do more to establish the early cloud canopy of Urania by myth than you do by
hydroengineering. Canopy theory is far more complex. Practically any way you handle it, you
will have immense bodies of water falling upon Earth with a destructive heat of impact. In
effect it would be a gigantic meteoroid shower or at least the physically oppressive effects of
an endlessly descending vapor cloud.
You regard Aphrodite as representing the Moon, at least in her earlier phase. You can see here
how tricky is the game of associating gods with celestial bodies, because you quote Plato to
the effect that the planet Venus is to be called Aphrodite. Even I know that the love affair of
Aphrodite and Ares is always translated as the love affair of Venus and Mars. Why do you feel
that you must have Aphrodite as the Moon? Anyhow --I don't see how it would affect your case
one way or the other to give in to the general opinion, although you would have to surrender
your astonishing interpretation of the Iliad as describing a war of the followers of Venus to
recapture the Moon from her abductor, Mars.
You don't agree fully with any catastrophist, not even Velikovsky, and yet don't explain why.
Perhaps it's simply a problem of limited pages. But there are some tricky cases. In all the
gymnastics that you have the Earth perform, you don't have it reversing its rotation or turning
upside down. Yet you must know that Velikovsky and others have quoted Herodotus quoting
Egyptian priests that "the Sun, it rose in the West," and they have displayed the Senmut
ceiling of late Empire days which shows the sky upside down. Now why shouldn't you accept this
remarkable evidence? Why don't you discuss it? Velikovsky gives many additional examples and
details in chapter five of Worlds in Collision. It is a crucial case for catastrophism.
In chapter after chapter you attempt to show that new gods follow old ones because new or
different heavenly bodies dominate the skies. You also grant that no great new body has
disturbed the skies since Mars did so in 687 B. C. Nevertheless, we have had new gods and new
religions since then; Jesus. Mahomet, maybe even Buddha, and an infinite number of minor gods
have arisen here and there in the world.
Furthermore you attribute the destruction of civilization to catastrophes, but the Roman the
Mexican, the Inca, the Byzantine, the American, the Tibetan, and the East European capitalist
civilizations have been destroyed in the Age of Solaria. It is man who changes gods and
civilization, without the need for help from the skies. Nor do I believe that ancient, terror-
driven catastrophized man is any better at slaughtering his kind and ruining the environment
than twentieth century, westernized man.
Another effect of your revolutionary model is to my way of thought undesirable. I don't wish to
censor you on grounds that by destroying the stability of the skies you will destroy the
stability of the social order. That point of view in no longer respectable, although Plato and
many others, and even unconsciously, many present-day scientists would feel so, although they
would not express the feeling.
But certainly your model will reduce the close relation between mathematics and celestial
mechanics to a shadow exercise. I don't regard it as an accident that Laplace's theory of tides
is still taught, even when it will not predict tides. Or that Newton's mechanics govern physics
and astronomy. The variables and hypotheticals of your natural history are so many that even
the virtuosity of such astrophysicists as Bass and others whom you cite will be strained to
beyond the breaking point. We shall be left with a suppositious sequence of events.
Scientists generally believe that the progress of a science moves in step with its mathematical
formulation. In the sense of this belief, you are setting the sciences back hundreds of years
by taking away the empirical foundation of their mathematics. Maybe this all can be recouped;
if not, natural history will become a toy for everybody's amusement.
It should not be difficult to demonstrate that your model will not work. Quantavolution, at
least as you have stated it, is forthright in its challenges. These can be directly met and
overcome. First we shall, in some part of the globe, discover a non-quantavolutionary
geological column, that is, a pillar of earth and air that has not undergone catastrophic
change in the past. Then we shall discover a human settlement older than 687 B. C. that has not
suffered natural disaster in its history. We should also be able to produce fairly soon at
least one test of time that can tell time for at least 30,000 years without being based upon
uniformitarian premises. Also, some ethnologists or linguists or mythologists should be able to
prove that none of your gods are clearly defined and therefore we do not really know whether
they have had 'careers' such as you have given them.
Certainly, nobody who reads this book should become a quantavolutionist in consequence. There
are too many unanswered questions in it, even if one were to accept its general theory (which I
do not do). It would require a much larger volume, prolonged public discussion, and many new
special studies before one could take the unlikely step of siding with its views.
As a model of contrariness, the book may have value. I can see many a sullen student in
introductory science and history courses discovering an anti-establishment enthusiasm -- which
is a step forward in learning. I can also picture some instructors in the sciences and
humanities using it as an imperialistic weapon to expand their subject-matter. The work is too
technical for the general public, I would guess, which is just as well.
I fear that I must use a trick to conclude my comments. That is to leave you with the innuendo
that additional counterarguments exist that I have not put forward. If I had more time I would
take up point by point the questionable assertions in each chapter. I am confident that for
every one of them, "uniformitarianism" or "evolutionism", or whatever you wish to call the
prevailing model of thought to which I belong, will have an alternative explanation that does
as well or better. But it's your book and welcome to it.
Sincerely yours,
Joseph Grace
Professor
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWELVE: VICTORY OF THE SUN
Albert Einstein once remarked. "What is inconceivable about the Universe is that it should be
at all conceivable." We have spoken of things beyond immediate belief. They seem to be
miracles. But miracles are everywhere, in a true sense. Before it happens, your next sight --
whatever you next see when you lift your eyes -- is a miracle. Its every detail could never
have been predicted.
Still, surprisingly, after you see it, a full report can demonstrate that the view was no
miracle: it was ordinary. That is why old ladies and little boys may enjoy sitting by their
windows: every few moments will bring a miracle; afterwards, every miracle can be told. If it
were a miracle, it couldn't be told.
So we say that miracles never happen; yet they happen all the time, As Bertrand Russell said,
the next license plate number that you see is a miracle. The probability that you would have
observed this very number is one in millions.
You may rest assured then: we are asking you to believe in miracles even as we ask you to
disbelieve in them. What we say may have happened, is not at all a miracle if it did happen.
And whether it happened is to be judged by evidence -- miracle or no miracle.
Cosmogony changes. Unfamiliar models become intelligible. It is anachronistic for a scientist
to deny the ancient occurrence of cosmic catastrophes and biological revolutions, to accept
geological and radiological chronometry as unquestionably valid, to believe that the succession
of historical gods is without historical meaning, and to deny human beings any role as
witnesses of epochal happenings in the history of the Earth.
Charts are drawn today that show peaks of sunspots occurring when Jupiter and Saturn are in
position to exercise their maximal tidal draw upon the Sun. We can wonder whether this is but a
feeble grasping to reestablish the great electrical are that once shot out from the Sun to its
binary partner [1] .
It is conceivable and defensible that the suns were two, that Earth and the planets have
changed their motions radically, that the atmosphere of Earth is but a ghost of an enormous
electromagnetic gas tube, and that the Moon was torn from the crust of the Earth in recent
memory.
The high energy forces that play upon the world collapse the time-scales of natural history and
simultaneously withdraw the intellectual need for long draughts of time to explain the world.
High energy forces make out of natural history a set of exponential curves resembling very old
human theories that universal history runs in cycles. The set of curves represent, of course,
the approach, climax and recession of revolutionizing events.
It is possible that, chained together through time, the curves exhibit a spiralling or helical
history; that is, natural history may have a direction, rather than simply repeating itself. By
direction is meant that the periods of the history, besides their obvious unique and eccentric
qualities, may be stages of a process with an end. What is left now, as an inheritance, of a
cosmic system, of the air, of the land, and of mind, may be all that we shall have to work with
for a long time to come.
Humankind has not tested its inheritance fully, yet. It does not know yet what it is capable of
becoming. So we are learning to dance upon the hot coals of history, daring that the coals will
not flare up before the dance is learned.
SUN AND SCIENCE
In the creation period of human nature, the dominant role of the Sun was largely unrealized by
mankind. Over half the period was completed before the Sun was fully visible. All of the great
gods were of the Super-Uranus complex. The regularity of the Sun once it appeared in the skies,
worked against its becoming a great god.
After the major physical changes had been wrought in the skies, when the visible planets moved
reliably on remote cycles, and when others that had been gods had disappeared from sight, the
Sun came to be a symbol of eternal security and was credited with the more stable and
beneficent traits of the gods. "Old Sol" called up the affection of "Santa Claus."
Then, from time to time, out of the welter of submerged memories and habits of mind, a penchant
for mundane explanation emerged. By the year 600 B. C. (2600 B. P.), secular and scientific
cosmogonies were appearing, certainly in the natural philosophy of the Greeks, probably in Asia
Minor as well.
Not until another thousand years had passed, however, did any movement on a culture-wide scale
offer to smooth out the cycles of ancient history, center a science as well as the fate of the
Earth upon the Sun, and proceed to disentangle the knotted forms of the human mind and social
practices. This has been the modern science of Solaria.
Plutarch, in full Roman imperial days, was writing on "Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers."
[2] At about A. D. 400 we may commence Solaria. As Velikovsky writes, "With Macrobius in the
fourth Christian century, there begins a tendency to see in many gods of Egyptian and Greek
antiquity the personification of the sun. Macrobius compared Osiris to the sun and Isis to the
moon, disregarding the opinion of earlier authors. He also interpreted Jupiter as the sun."
More generally, "not only Ra, Amon, Marduk, Phaeton, and even Zeus, but also king-heroes, like
Oedipus, became solar symbols." [3] Many more ancients were translated erroneously into sun-
gods (Pharaohs, for example) or solar symbols (Odysseus, for instance). Apollo was especially
favored as the sun because he had no ready planetary position and yet was a bright, shining
god.
"Collective amnesia" about the old planetary gods was almost total [4] . In fact the Earth and
skies had been settling down for centuries. "In those last days of classical paganism," writes
Jaquetta Hawkes, "the Sun God shone like a pharos for ships at sea, guiding them on their way
or lighting them into a harbor where all conflicting ideas could anchor together in a kind of
harmony and mental agreement." The West had become monotheistic in the sense of Solarianism
before it was converted to Christ.
The mentality and behavior that was possible and promised by the Age of Solaria did not replace
more than a fraction of the human nature created by 12,500 years of intermittent chaos and
disaster, Indeed, the world view of Solaria cannot hope, even if granted an ultimate full
success, to master the facts and fate of the Cosmos. The human experience of catastrophes is
too long to be exorcized by sunbeams.
FOREBODINGS
The Sun itself is not as constant as one had been led to believe. The recent discoveries of the
role that sunspots play in the Earth's weather, climate, and, possibly, its seismic movements,
have been capped by the discovery that the Sun is at the least capable of withholding sunspots
for most of a century.
John A. Eddy, an astronomer from the National Center for Atmospheric Research's High Altitude
Observatory, upon reporting about the historical facts of the Sun's quiescence, remarked,
"we've shattered the principle of uniformitarianism for the Sun." [5] Afterwards, George B.
Field, Director of the Center for Astrophysics at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and
the Harvard College Observatory commented to the audience, "Maybe we've heard a turning point
in the history of science."
The period of quiescence, called the "Maunder Minimum," was discovered from a search of records
by E. W. Maunder, an English 19th century astronomer. The Sun was not exhibiting sunspots
between A. D. 1645 and 1715; the sun's corona shrank greatly. Europe suffered extreme cold and
famine. The Thames froze over several times [6] . Perhaps the Earth accelerated; a debate is
occurring on the thesis that the Earth decelerates in response to great sun flares [7] .
Already, carbon 14 and bristlecone pine variations during this period have been verified.
Moreover, three studies promptly appeared, based on notes of astronomers in the period 1611 to
1644. They concluded that there had been a dramatic acceleration of the Sun's rotation in these
years leading up to the period of sunspot minimum [8] . The speed-up was particularly marked
in the regions within some 15 of the Solar Equator.
"Until recently the character of solar differential rotation has been assumed to be constant.
But in the period 1642 to 1644, "the equatorial velocity of the sun was faster by 3 to 5 per
cent and the differential rotation [between the equator and high latitudes] was enhanced by a
factor of 3." [9]
The variability of the Sun's various behaviors must now be taken for granted. A few years ago
Carl Sagan and Andrew T. Young in studying a group of solar-type stars in the cluster of
Praesepe, at about equal distances from our Sun, found that the individual stars were not
uniformly bright. Their varied light would indicate periodicity, inconstancy, and fit the new
evidence from the now-known history of our Sun. In the case of our Sun, further, another low
sunspot period was discovered and a high sunspot period, in the same past one thousand years.
In 1978, two prominent astronomers in England, Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, accused
scientific research authorities of discriminating against their work in exobiology, which had
postulated that plagues and diseases are derived from the debris of space, particularly the
biophile environment of comet tails. There, germs are nurtured, and fall upon Earth with the
dust and debris from time to time [10] .
It is noteworthy, in this connection, that popular traditions around the world associate comets
with sundry grave human disorders -- pestilence and war among them. In A Journal of the Plague
Year of 1665, Daniel Defoe reported that "a blazing star or comet appeared for several months
before the Plague." The renowned Bayeux tapestry (see Figure 3) presents a scene of despair in
England and the premonition of King Harold that his realm will be invaded and be overthrown by
the Normans in 1066. Above the scene hangs the comet, Halley's comet to the best of our
knowledge.
The last six sunspot peaks have coincided with flu epidemics. [11] Birgham, a century ago,
reported the discovery of organic remains in fallen meteoroids; actually Hahn and Weinland,
German scientists who did the research, claimed the presence of sponges, corals, and crinoids
in the stone [12] . About the same time, the American politician and writer, Ignatius
Donnelly, guessed that such widely dispersed events as the great Chicago fire, the Pestigo
Forest fire, and the immense volcanic explosion of Krakatoa may have been caused by an
encounter with the tail of Biela's comet [13] .
I hardly need speak of the occasional comets and meteors whose impact alone, should they strike
Earth, can cause local devastation with worldwide effect. On August 10,1972, a meteor of
perhaps 4000 tons and forty feet across, skipped through the atmosphere of the Mountain Sates
of America and was by chance closely observed. Luigi Jacchia, an astrophysicist, who glimpsed
by accident the passage, afterwards estimated its explosive force at four Hiroshima-type bombs
[14] . The Tunguska explosion of 1908, in a remote area of Siberia, belongs to this category,
and its effects were described earlier; reindeer became scabrous; unusual radioactivity is
present still; the foreign matter is microscopic if it exists at all; some 80,000,000 trees
were blown down; and some mutagenesis seems to have occurred [15] . The blast might have
destroyed any city on Earth.
Jupiter is restless, too. Its Red Spot, a baleful eye of huge dimensions, was first reported by
Cassini three centuries ago, in 1666 [16] . Its behavior has little changed. The Red Spot, by
a satisfactory theory, that of R. Hide, is deemed to be a stagnant atmospheric column hovering
over a very large, topographical feature of the planet's solid mantle. Some students have
guessed it might be the place from which cometary Venus was wrenched some thousands of years
ago.
The question suggests itself : if one Red Spot, why not more? Is Jupiter capable of further
fissioning? Momentary decelerations have been noted. Vsekhsviatskii claims Jupiter as a source
of comets [17] . Others see Jupiter, when in near conjunction with other bodies and Earth, as
forming a mechanism that can trigger disastrous earthquakes in California and elsewhere [18] .
In 1944, Bruce, unaware of the great heat of Jupiter, which was then considered a "cold body,"
mentioned that "Kothari and Anluck have recently concluded that the largest possible cold body
will have a size comparable to that of Jupiter." The implication here is that Jupiter should
perhaps have been hot, a binary star, and in fact, as we have seen, it is hot, and it probably
was a binary. But there is a further implication. If Jupiter is cooling, as it must be, then at
some point, on some day, it must also become too cold to hold together. Then it will fission,
or nova.
The unmanned spaceship Voyager I crossed the bow of the magnetosphere of Jupiter at a distance
of 3.8 million miles (6 million Km). Photographic close-ups gave new evidence of the immense
turbulence of the shut-down binary. The satellites of Jupiter were shown to be variously
formed. Io, among them, might be extremely young or continuously melted, for it was seen to be
relatively unblemished. Also discovered in early 1979 was a band of charged particles, glowing
in ultraviolet radiation, which circled the equatorial region of Jupiter, perhaps akin to the
rings of Saturn [19] . The explosion of such an outwardly poised mass into interplanetary
space would not be a difficult job for the restless giant. The consequent radiation storm on
Earth might be terribly effective.
All in all, two thousand years into the Solarian Age, and despite all the attempts during that
time by philosophers, theologians, and scientists to discover an eternal orderliness in the
skies, it is not given to us to believe that the heavens have settled down forever. In a
strictly logical sense, we must however agree with the founder of uniformitarian thought, James
Hutton, he who influenced Lyell and thus Charles Darwin. Writing in 1795, he declared:
"In examining things present we have data from which to reason with regard to what has been;
and from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to
happen hereafter." [20]
In their simple and elegant abstraction, his words are no more than both quantavolutionist and
evolutionist require. For in newly "examining things present we have data" of particles and
waves, turbulent heavens, mobile rocks and ocean basins, and electromagnetic-gravitational
forces pervading all things. We must freshly "reason with regard to what has been." Thereupon
"we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen hereafter," although it be
far less data than we recently believed that we possessed, far more bewildering data, and far
too little data for painting serenely a picture of the hereafter.
THE PROPENSITY TO SURVIVE
Like all the world, mankind, creature of the heavens, has not settled down. What he has learned
of controlling himself has been compensated for by what he has learned of destruction. It is
deeply feared that a volley of nuclear missiles will destroy the human race.
For those who are detached observers of the cosmic scene, quantavolutionary history offers a
half-promise: nuclear bombs probably cannot exterminate this hardy species. In ancient times,
universal deluges have driven people to the heights to survive. Sheets of fire have not reached
survivors in their miles-deep caves. Tides have swept over mountains but passed over caves on
the opposite slopes. The fall-out of deadly radiation had missed deep pockets of still air;
also, there are humans suspected of possessing a partial immunity to radiation.
The burn-up of atmospheric oxygen has not consumed the exhalations of all crevices nor
suffocated all swamps. The human race rafted upon the continents to new habitats, and rode the
folding and thrusting rocks. Some of us were somewhere else, too, when half the crust of the
Earth exploded into space.
The trump card that the human race has always played against catastrophic forces is its
exponential reproducibility. This it still possesses. One may be a staunch supporter of the
control of population -- believing with reason that overpopulation is itself a kind of
catastrophe -- and, too, one may dread, with all reason again, a nuclear war. It is
nevertheless of some consolation to consider that the reproducibility of the species amounts to
an ultimate mechanism of escape from extinction in chaos and war.
A woman of fifteen can reproduce. Thereupon, the arithmetic of survival is simple : a surviving
couple can generate a population of billions in a thousand years, under conservative
theoretical assumptions. So effective is this challenge of life to the principle of entropy
that one must credit somewhere in the dim past an evolutionary saltation that was based upon
the presumption of catastrophes.
Furthermore, the individual human being is capable, in extremis, of excelling a giant
programmed computer in its sensing for the possibilities of survival and can exploit any
promising niche in the new world. Then and there, the human survivor will re-invent the words
of Yahweh: [21]
Here I am creating new heavens and a new earth; and the former things will not be called to
mind, neither will they come up into the heart.
Notes (Chapter Twelve: Victory of The Sun)
1. Alter (1929) A2-191.
2. IV 56.
3. (1950) 301.
4. Ibid., 298-300; A. de Grazia (1978).
5. John A. Eddy, quoted in Frazier (1976). See Eddy (1976) (1977) et al (1977).
6. Mulcaster (1977).
7. 104 Science News (1973), 136.
8. Herr (1978).
9. 824.
10. Times (1978).
11. Hope-Simpson (1978).
12. Birgham (1881); cf. Ransom (1976) 114-5. Given the conditions of Solaria Binaria with its
enduring magnetic tube and huge atmosphere, life must be presumed to have existed on other
planets, such as "Apollo" and Mars.
13. (1883) 408-23.
14. New York Times, July 4, 1974, p. 8.
15. Rich (1978).
16. Chapman (1968).
17. (1967).
18. Gribbin and Plagemann (1974).
19. New York Times, March 1, 1979, B20.
20. (1795) 19.
21. Isaiah 65: 17.
CHAOS AND CREATION by Alfred de Grazia
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Bibliography contains all works cited in the text or notes and a number of additional works deemed
relevant. All journal citations may be clear except perhaps S. I. S. R. which refers to the Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies Review (11 Adcott Road, Acklam, Middlesbrough, Cleveland TS5 7ER, England). A full
general annotated bibliography of quantavolution is in process under the direction of Professor Earl S.
Milton, Lethbridge University, Alberta, Canada, and the present author.
Acta (1969), First International Scientific Congress on the Volcano of Thera. Athens, Greece. Adams, Robert
McC. (1975), "From Sites to Patterns," 68 Univ. of Chicago Magazine, Winter, 19-20.
Adey, Walter H. (1978), "Coral Reef Morphogenesis: A Multidimensional Model," 202 Science No. 4370 (November
24), 831-7.
Ager, Derek V. (1973), The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, John Wiley, New York.
The Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 (1970), U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C.
Albright, W. F. (1946), Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 2nd ed., Baltimore.
----(1965), 179 Bulletin American Schools of Oriental Research, 41-2.
Albritton, Claude C. (1974), "Uniformitarianism," 18 Encyclopedia Brittanica, 857-9.
----(1975), Philosophy of Geohistory, 1785-1970, Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, Stroudsburg, Pa. Alfven,
Hannes (1971), "Plasma Physics, Space Research, and the Origin of the Solar System," 172 Science (June 4),
991-4.
Allchin, F. R. (1956), "The Stone Alignments of Southern Hyderabad," 56 Man, 150: 133-59.
Alter, Dinsmore (1929), "A Critical Test of the Planetary Hypothesis of Sun Spots," 57 Monthly Weather
Review (April), 143-6. (Repr. in Corliss, A2, 190-5.)
Allen, Clabon W. (1963), Astrophysical Quantities, Oxford U. Press, 3rd ed.
Allen, Richard H. (1899), Star Names, their Lore and Meaning, Dover Publications, New York, repr. 1963.
Aller, Lawrence H. (1974), "Star," 17 Encyclopedia Britannica, 584-604.
Ambraseys, N. N. (1971), "The Value of Historical Periods of Earthquakes," 232 Nature (Aug. 6), 375-9.
"An Ancient Roman Coin Found in Illinois," (anon.) (1882), 46 Scientific American (June 17), 382.
Anderson, John Lynde & George W. Spangler (1974), "Radiometric Dating: Is the 'Decay Constant' Constant?" 4
Pens‚e, No. 4, 31-33.
Areng, Victor (1971), Ionizing Radiation and Life, C. V. Mosby Co, Saint Louis.
"Argon in Mars' Atmosphere," (1975), 49 Sky and Telescope (May), 291.
"Ash" (1978), IV Kronos (Winter), 101-4. "Ash" (1973-4), IV Pens‚e (Winter), 5-19. Aspden, Harold (1977),
"Galactic Domains, Geographic Fluctuations, and Geometric Reversals," 2 Catas. Geo. 2, 42-7. Hymns of the
Atharva-Veda, transl. Maurice Bloomfield (1969), Greenwood Press. New York.
Atkinson, R. J. C. (1960), Stonehenge, Pelican Books, London. Asimov, Isaac, et al. (1977), Scientists
Confront Velikovsky, Cornell U. Press, Ithaca, N. Y.
Aveni, Anthony F. & Robert Linsley (1972), "Mount J, Monte Alban: Possible Astronomical Orientation," 37
American Antiquity, 529-31.
---- H. Hartung & B. Buckingham 91978), "The Pecked Cross Symbol in Ancient Mesoamerica," 202 Science
(October 20), 267-79.
Avery, T. E. (1975), Natural Resources Measurements, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Babcock, William H. (1922), Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study in Medieval Geography, American
Geographic Society, New York.
Bader, Otto N. (1965), La Caverne Kapovaia: Peinture Paleolithique, Moscow.
Bailey, James R. A. (1973), The God-Kings and the Titans, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
Bailey, James R. A. (1973), the God-Kings and the Titans, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
Bailey, V. A. (1960), "Existence of Net Electric Charges on Stars," 186 Nature (May 14), 508-10.
Baity, Elizabeth Chesley (1973), "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Thus Far," 14 Current Anthropology No.
4 (October), 389-449.
Baker, G. (1960), "The Present State of Knowledge of the 'Age-on-Earth' and the 'Age-of-Formation' of
Australites," Nature (January 30). Baker, Howard B. (1932), The Atlantic Rift and Its Meaning, mimeograph,
Detroit.
---- (1954), The Earth Participates in the Evolution of the Solar System, Detroit Acad. Nat Sci.
Ball, Robert S. (1906), The Cause of an Ice Age (3rd ed.), K. Paul, London.
Bancroft, Hubert H. (1874-76), Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, D. Appleton and Co., N.
Y.
Barbeau, Marius (1967), "The Old-World Dragon in America." in Sol Tax, ed., Indian Tribes of Aborginal
America, Cooper Square Publ., New York.
Bargmann, Valentine & Lloyd Motz (1962), "On the Recent Discoveries Concerning Jupiter and Venus," 138
Science (December 21), 1350-2.
Barnes, Thomas (1977), "Recent Origin and Decay of the Earth's Magnetic Field," II S. I. S. R. No. 2,
(December), 42-6.
---- (1978), "A Response to Dr. Milsom," II S. I. S. R. No. 4 (Spring), 110-1.
Bass, Robert W. (1974), "Did Worlds Collide?" 4 Pens‚e No. 3 (Summer), 8-20.
---- (1974), "Proofs of the Stability of the Solar System," 4 Pens‚e No. 3 (Summer), 21-26.
---- (1975), "Can Worlds Collide?" 1 Kronos No. 3 (Fall), 59-72.
Bathurst, G. B. (1964), "The Earliest Recorded Tornado," 19 Weather, 202-4.
Batten, Alan H., ed. (1973a), "Extended Atmosphere and Circumstellar Matter in Spectroscopic Binary
Systems," I. A. U. Symposium No. 51 (May). ---- (1973b), Binary and Multiple Star Systems, Pergamon, Oxford.
Baudouin, Marcel (1916), "La Prehistoire des Etoiles au Paleolothique. Les Pleiades a l'Epoque Aurignacienne
et le Culte Stello-Solaire Typique au Solutr‚en," ser. VI Bull. et Memoires de la Societ‚ d'Anthropologie de
Paris, Tome VII, 25-103, 274-317.
Baum, Richard (1978), "The Maedler Phenomenon," 27 Strolling Astronomer, 118-9.
Beaumont, William C. (under pseudonym of Appian Way) 1925, The Riddle of the Earth, Chapman & Hall, London.
---- (1945), The Mysterious Comet, Rider & Co., London. ---- (1949), Britain, the Key to World History,
Rider & Co., London.
Bell, Barbara (1971), "The Dark Ages in Ancient History: Part I, Egypt," 75 American Journal of Archaeology,
1-26.
Bellamy, H. S. (1936), Moons, Myths and Man, Faber & Faber, London.
---- (1943), Built before the Flood, Faber & Faber, London. ---- (1948), The Atlantis Myth, Faber & Faber,
London. ---- (1951), A Life History of our Earth, Faber & Faber, London. Bellamy, H. S. & P. Allan (1956),
The Calendar of Tiahuanaco. Faber & Faber, London.
Bender, Barbara (1975), Farming in Prehistory, John Baker, London.
Benedict, R. (1935), Zuni Mythology, Contributions to Anthropology No. 21, Columbia University, New York.
Bentley, John (1825), A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy, from the Earliest Dawn of that Science in
India to the Present Time (Part I & Part II), Smith, Elder & Co., London.
Bernal, Ignacio (1969), Olmec World, tr. D. Heyden and F. Horcasitas, U. of California, Berkeley.
Berndt, Ronald M. (1948), "A Wonguri-Mandzikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone," XIX Oceania (September), 16-50.
Berry, William B. N. (1968), Growth of a Prehistoric Time Scale, Freeman, San Francisco.
Bibby, Geoffrey (1969), Looking for Dilmun, New American Library, Mentor Books, New York.
Bidez, Joseph (1945), Eos: ou Platon et l'Orient, M. Hayes, Brussels.
Bimson, John J. (1977), "Rockenbach's 'De Cometis, ' and the Identity of Typhon," I S. I. S. R. No. 4
(Spring), 9-10.
---- (1978), "An Eighth Century Date for Merenptah," III S. I. S. R. 2 (Autumn), 57-9.
Birgham, Francis (1881) "The Discovery of Organic Remains in Meteoric Stones," 20 Popular Science, 83-7;
repr. in Corliss AI-AMB001, 25-8.
"Black Sea Issue: From Meter to Centimeter to Micron and Finally to Angstr"m Units," (1970), XV Oceanus No.
4 (July) (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).
Blinkenberg, Christian S. (1911), The Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore, The University Press,
Cambridge.
Bloch, R. (1962) Gli Etruschi, II Saggitore, Milan. Blumer, M. & W. W. Youngblood (1975), "Polycyclic
Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Soils and Recent Sediments," Science (April 4), 53. Bord, Janet (1976), Mazes and
Labyrinths of the World, Latimer New Dimensions, London.
Borst, Lyle B. (1969), "Megalithic plan Underlying Canterbury Cathedral," 163 Science (Feb. 7), discussion
with Frank K. E. Barmore, 166 Science (Now. 2, 1969), 772-4.
Bostick, Winston H. (1957)," 197 Scientific American (October), 87-94.
Boulanger, Nicolas-Antoine (1765), "Deluge," in L'Encyclop‚die, D. Diderot, ed., Briasson, Paris, 1751-65.
---- (1766), L'Antiquit‚ Devoil‚e par ses Usages ou Examen Critique des Principales Opinions, Ceremonies et
Institutions Religieuses et Politiques des Differents Peuples de la Terre, 4
Vols, Amsterdam. Brandon, S. G. F. (1963), Creation Legends of the Near East, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
Brasseur de Bourbourg, Charles-Etienne (1857-59), Histoire des Nations Civilis‚es du Mexique et de
l'Amerique Centrale, A. Bertrand, Paris.
---- (1864), S'il Existe des Sources de l'Histoire Primitive du Mexique dans les Monuments Egyptiens, etc.
(Extrait du Volume, Institute Relations des Choses de Yucatan, de Diego
Maisonneuve, Paris. ---- (1868), Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique, maisonneuve, Paris. ---- (1869-70),
Manuscript Troano, Etude sur le systeme graphique et la langue des Mayas, Imprimerie Implide, Paris.
Bray, J. R. (1974), "Volcanism and Glaciation during the Past 40 Millennia," 252 Nature (December 20-7),
679-80.
Bretz, J. H. (1969), "The Lake Missoula Floods and the Channeled Scabland," 77 J. Geology, 503-43.
Breuil Henri (1909), "Le Bison et le Taureau Celeste Chald‚en," XIII Reveue Archeologique, series IV, March-
April, 250-4. Briffault, Robert (1927), The Mothers, A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions,
3 vols, Hamilton, New York.
Brooks, Charles Ernest Pelham (1949), Climate Through the Ages, McGraw Hill, New York.
Brown, E. W. (1931), "The Age of the Earth from Astronomical Data," Bull. National Res. Council, No. 8
(June), 460-6.
Brown, Hugh A. (1967), Cataclysms of the Earth, Twayne Pub., Inc., New York.
Brown, John Macmillan (1924), The Riddle of the Pacific, Small, Maynard & Co., Boston.
Brown, W. Norman "Mythology of India," in Samuel N. Kramer, ed. (1961), Mythologies of the Ancient World,
Doubleday Anchor, New York.
Bruce, C. E. R. (1944), A New Approach in Astrophysics and Cosmogony, Unwin Brothers, London.
---- (1966), "Lightning Currents," 12 Electronics and Power (June), 200.
---- (1968), Successful Predictions of the Electrical Discharges Theory of Cosmic Atmospheric Phenomena and
Universal Evolution, The Electrical Research Association, Leatherhead Surrey, England.
---- (1975), "The Role of Electrical Discharges in Astrophysical Phenomena," 95 The Observatory No. 1008
(October), 204-10.
Brunhouse, Robert L. (1973), In Search of the Maya, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Bruno, Giordano, (D. W. West, ed. 1950), His Life and Thoughts.
Bumstead, A. P. (1943), "Sunspots and Lightning Fires," 43 Forestry Rev., 134-44. Burgstahler, Albert W. &
Ernest E. Angino (1967), "Venus --Young or Old?" XLI Yale Scientific Magazine No. 7 (April), 18.
---- (1973-74), "The Nature of the Cytherean Atmosphere," 4 Pens‚e No. 1 (Winter), 24-30.
---- (1973-74), "A Concluding Note," 4 Pens‚e No. 1 (Winter), 37.
Burkert, Walter (1972), Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E. L. Miner, Harvard University
Press.
Burtt, E. A. (1954), The Metaphysical foundations of Modern Science, rev. ed., Doubleday, Garden City, New
York.
Butzer, K. W. (1971), Environment and Archaeology: an Ecological Approach to Prehistory, Aldine Press,
Chicago.
Cadogan, Gerald, with the collaboration of R. K. Harrison & G. E. Strong (1972), "Volcanic Glass Shards in
Late Minoan I Crete," 46 Antiquity, 310-3.
Cambridge Ancient History (1973), Cambridge, Eng., University Press, vol. II.
Campbell, Joseph (1949), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Cardona, Dwardu (1973-74), "The Pyramids and Earth's Axis," letter, 4 Pens‚e No. 1, 66-7.
---- (1975), "Tektites and China's Dragon," I Kronos No. 2, 35-47.
---- (1976), "The Problem of the Frozen Mammoths," I Kronos No. 4, 77.
---- (1976a), "On the Origin of Tektites," II Kronos No. 1, 38-44.
---- (1977), "The Sun of Night," III Kronos (Fall), 31-37. ---- (1978a), "Let There be Light," III Kronos
(Spring), 34-54. ---- (1978b), "The Mystery of the Pleiades," III Kronos (Summer), 24-44.
---- 1979), "The Stones of Ballochry" and "The Cairns of Kintraw," IV Kronos, No. 3 (Spring), 23-55.
Carey, W. (1958), The Tectonic Approach to Continental Drift, Symposium on Continental Drift, University of
Tasmania.
Carli, Giovanni-Rinaldo (also Carli-Rubbi) (1788), Lettres Americaines, 2 Vol., Buisson, Paris.
Carpenter, Rhys (1966), Discontinuity in Greek Civilization, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.
Chamanlal, Bhikku (also Chaman Lal) (1966), Hindu America. Chalmers, R. O., et al. (1979), "Australian
Microtektites...," 90, Geol. Soc. Amer. Bull., 508-12.
Cicero, M. T. (1933), De Natura Deorum, H. Rackham transl., G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.
Chinnery, Michael A. & Robert G. North (1975), "The Frequency of Very Large Earthquakes," 190 Science (19
December), 1197-8.
Chapman, Clark R. (1968), "The Discovery of Jupiter's Red Spot," 35 Sky and Telescope No. 5, 276-8.
Clark, D. H., W. H. McCrea & F. R. Stephenson (1977), "Frequency of Nearby Supernovae and Climatic and
Biological Catastrophe," 265 Nature, 318-9.
Clark, G. W. (1977), "X-Ray Stars in Globular Clusters," 237 Scientific American No. 4 (October), 42-54.
Clausen, C. J. et al. (1979), "Little Salt Spring, Florida: A Unique Underwater Site," 203 Science (16
Feb.), 609-14.
Cobine, J. D. (1958), Gaseous Conductors -- Theory and Engineering Applications, Dover Press, New York.
Coe, Michael D., R. A. Diehl & M. Stuiver (1967), "Olmec Civilization, Veracruz, Mexico: Dating of the San
Lorenzo Phase," 155 Science, 1399-1401.
---- (1975), "Native Astronomy in Mesoamerica," in Anthony F. Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian
America, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas.
Cohane, John Philip (1967), The Key, Crown Publishers, New York.
Coleman, P. J. (1967), "Tsunamis as Geological Agents," 15 Journal Geol. Soc. Australia, 267-73.
Colman, William (1964), Georges Cuvier, Zoologist, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Cook, Arthur B. (1964), Zeus, a Study in Ancient Religion, Biblo & Tannen, New York.
Cook, Melvin A. (1957), "Where is the Earth's Radiogenic Helium," 179 Nature (January 26), 213.
---- (1961-62), "The Radio-Carbon Method," 39 Utah Academy Sci. Arts Letters Proceedings, 115-5.
---- (1963), "Evidence for Recent Rupture of Continental Crust," 40 Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and
Letters, Part I, 74-77.
---- (1964), "Continental Drift: Is Old Mother Earth just a Youngster?" The Utah Alumnus (September), 10-12.
(Critiques and Debate, Nov., 1963; Oct., 1964; Nov., 1964).
---- (1964a), Uranium-Thorium-Lead 'Time Clocks', University of Utah, Depart, of Metallurgy, Salt Lake City,
Utah.
---- (1966), Prehistory and Earth Models, Max Parrish, London. ---- (1970), "Carbon 14 and the Age of the
Atmosphere," Creation Research Society Quarterly (June). ---- (1972), "Rare Gas Adsorption on Solids of the
Lunar Regolith," 38 Journal of Colloid and Interface Science No. 1 (January), 12-18.
Corliss, William R., compiler (1974-X), Sourcebook Project, Glen Arm, Maryland, 9 Vols.
Courville, Donovan A. (1975), "Limitation of Astronomical Dating Methods," 1 Kronos No. 2, 49-72.
Cox A. & R. R. Doell (1956), "Paleomagnetic Evidence Relevant to a Change in the Earth's Radius," 189
Nature, 45.
Crew, E. W. (1974), "Lightning in Astronomy," 252 Nature No. 5483 (December 13), 539-42.
Crew, Eric (1976-7), "Electricity in Astronomy," in four parts, Soc. Interdiscip. Studies Rev. Vol. I, No.
1, 2, 3; Vol. II, No. 1.
---- (1977), "Stability of Solid Cores in Gaseous Planets," III Kronos (Fall), 18-26.
Cuvier, George (1831), Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, and the Changes Thereby
Produced in the Animal Kingdom, Carey and Lea, Philadelphia.
Dachille, Frank (1962), "Interactions of The Earth with very Large Meteorites," 24 Bull. S. Carolina Acad.
Sci., 1-19.
---- (1963), "Axis Changes in the Earth from Large Meteorite Collisions," 198 Nature (April 13), 176.
---- (1977), "Meteorites-Little and Big," 46 Earth and Mineral Sciences, No. 7 (April), 42-52.
Daly, R. A. (1923), "The Earth's Crust and its Stability: Decrease of the Earth's Rotational Velocity and
its Geological Effects," V Amer. J. of Sci. (May), 349-77.
Damon, P. E., A. Long, E. I. Wallick in W. G. Mook, et al. (1976), Proceedings 8 International Conf. RC
Dating (Wellington, N. Z., October 1972), mimeo, University of Delft, G. W. van Oosterhout, Neth. D"niken,
Erich von (1971), Chariots of the Gods, trans., Bantam Books, New York.
---- (1973), The Gold of the Gods, Putnam, N. Y. Danjon, Andr‚ (1960), "On the Change in the Rate of
Rotation of the Earth Occurring During the Month of July 1959." 250 Comptes Rendus des Seances de l'Academie
des Sciences (February 22), 1399-1402.
----(1962), "On the Continued Variations of the Rotation of the Earth," Series 8, 254 Comptes Rendus des
Seances de l'Academie des Sciences (April 2), 2479-82.
---- (1962b), "The Rotation of the Earth and the Quiet Sun," Series 8, 254 Comptes Rendus des Seances de
l'Academie des Sciences (April 25), 3058-61.
Darwin, Charles (1845), Journal of Researches, D. Appleton, New York.
Darwin, George H. (1879), "On the precession of a Viscous Spheroid and on the Remote History of the Earth,"
II Phil. Trans. of Royal Soc., London, 447-538.
de Grazia, Alfred (1975), "The Coming Cosmic Debate in the Sciences & Humanities," From Past to Prophesy:
Velikovsky's Challenge to Conventional Beliefs, Proceedings of the Symposium held at the Saidye Bronfman
Centre (January 10-12), Nahum Ravel, ed., Montreal, Quebec. ---- (1976), "Paleo-Calcinology: Destruction by
Fire in Pre-Historic and Ancient Times," I Kronos (April), 25-36; II Kronos (August), 63-71.
---- (1976a), The Palaetiology of Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis, Xerox edition, Quiddity Books, Princeton, N.
J.
---- (1976b), "Catastrophic Finale of the Middle Bronze Age," Proceedings IX International Prehist. and
Protohis. Cong., Nice, France, Sept. 1976. ---- (1977), "Ancient Knowledge of Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's
Rings," 2 Kronos (February), 64-9.
---- (1978), "Palaetiology of Memory" in Recollection of a Fallen Sky, Earl Milton, ed., Lethbridge
University Press, Lethbridge, Canada, Symposium 1974.
de Grazia, Alfred, Ralph Juergens & Livio C. Stecchini (1966), The Velikovsky Affair, New York University
Books, New York, 2nd ed. (1967) Lyle Stuart. (Second ed., Sphere Books, London, 1978). de Leonard, Carmen
Cook (1975), "A New Astronomical Interpretation of the Four Ballcourt Panels at Tajin, Mexico," in A. F.
Aveni (ed.), Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, U. of Texas, Austin, 263-83.
Deluc, J. A. (1831), Letters on the Physical History of the Earth, C. J. G. & F. Rivington, London.
de Santillana, Georgio and Hertha von Dechend (1969), Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time,
Gambit, Boston.
The Devi-Mahatmya (trans. by S. Jagadisvarananda, 1953), Madras India. De Young, Don B. (1966-67), "The
Precision of Nuclear Decay Rates," 13 Creation Res. Q., 38.
Donnelly, Ignatius (1883), Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, D. Appleton & Co., New York.
"Don't Rock the Ark," n. a. (1977), III Kronos (Fall), 68-71. Dorsey, G. A. (1904), Traditions of the Skidi
Pawnee, Houghton Mifflin & Co., Boston, New York.
Douglas, Mary (1970), Natural Symbols, Explorations in Cosmology, Pantheon, New York. Doumanis, George A. &
William E. Long (1962), "The Ancient Life of the Antarctic," 207 Scientific American No. 3 (September).
Doumas, Christos (1974), "The Minoan Eruption of the Santorini Volcano," XLVIII Antiquity, 110-115.
Driscoll, E. (1972), "Bonanza from the Highlands," Science News (July 1), 12-3.
Dudley, H. C. (1972), "Letter on Internuclear Exchanges produced by Neutrino Sea," 5 Nuovo Cimento, 231.
Duran, Diego (1971), Book of the Gods and Rites of the Ancient Calendar, Transl., ed. and annot. by Fernando
Horcasitas and Doris Heyden, U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Duxbury, T. C. & J. Veverka (1978), "Deimos Enocounter by Viking," 201 Science (September 1), 812-14.
"Ebla, the Plain Dealer," (1978), II S. I. S. R. No 4 (spring) (unsigned note.)
Eddy, John A. (1976), "The Maunder Minimum," 192 Science (June 18), 1189-1202.
---- (1977), "The Case of the Missing Sunspots," 236 Scientific American (May), 80-92.
---- P. A. Gilman & D. E. Trotter (1977), "Anomalous Solar Rotation in the Early 17th Century," 198 Science
(November 25), 824-29.
Eggleton, Peter, S. Mitten & J. Whelan, eds. (1976), Structure and Evolution of Close Binary Systems, I. A.
U. Symposium No. 17, Reidel, Boston.
Egyed, L. (1956), "Determination of Changes in the Dimensions of the Earth from Palaeogeographical Data,"
178 Nature (September), 534. See Also: (1965), 190 Nature, 109. Ehrich, Robert W. Ed. (1965), Chronologies
in Old World Archaeology, 4th impression 1971, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.
Eicher, Don L. (1974), "Geological Time Scale," Encyc. Britannica, 1065-70.
Einstein, Albert (1955), Letter to I. Velikovsky, of March 17. repr. in 2 Pens‚e 2, 39.
Eiseley, Loren (1943), "Archaeological Observations on the Problem of Post-Glacial Extinction," 8 American
Antiquity (January), 209-17, 291-5.
---- (1946), "The Fire-Drive and the Extinction of the Terminal Pleistocene Fauna." 48 New Series American
Anthropologist (January-March), 54-9.
Eisler, R. (1910), Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, C. H. Beck, Mnchen
Eliade, Mircea (1949), Trans. By Trask (1954), The Myth of the Eternal Return, Princeton U. Press,
Princeton, N. J.
---- (1963), Myth and Reality, Harper & Row, New York. ---- (1964), Trait‚ d'Histoire des Religions, Payot,
Paris. ---- (1974), Gods, Goddesses, and Myths of Creation, Harper & Row, New York.
Emery, W. B. (1961), Archaic Egypt, Baltimore, Penguin Books.
Eratosthenes, (C. Robert ed., 1878), Catasterismorum Reliquiae. Ericson, David B. et al. (1963),
"Extinctions and Evolutionary Changes in Macrofossils Clearly Define the Abrupt Onset of the Pleistocene,"
139 Science No. 3556 (February 22).
Everhart, Edgar (1969), "Close Encounter of Comets and Planets'" 74 Astronomical Journal (June). 735-50.
Ewing, M & W. Donn (1958), "A Theory of the Ice Ages," 123 Science, 1061-6.
Fairbridge, Rhodes W. 1974, "Holocene Epoch," 8 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 998-1007.
Fauconnet, Max (1968), " Mythology of the Two Americas," New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, Hamlyn
London.
Fell, Barry (1977), "Etruscan," V (Occasional papers) No. 100, Harvard Univ., Cambridge, Mass.
Ferte, Thomas (1972), "A Record of Success," II Pens‚e No. 2 (May), 11-15.
Finney, John W. (1964), "Slowing of Jupiter's Rotation Reported by Radio Astronomer," New York Times (April
27).
Fisher, Osmond (1881), Physics of the Earth's Crust, London. ---- (1882), "On the Physical Cause of the
Ocean Basins," Nature (Jan. 12), 234-4.
Fitzgerald. C. P. (1965), China: A Short Cultural History, New York.
Flammarion (1880), Astronomie Populaire, C. Marpon et. E. Flammarion, Paris (repr. 1955).
Flint, R. F. (1971), Glacial and Quanternary Geology, Wiley, New York.
Fontenrose, Joseph (1959), Python, A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins, U. of California Press,
Berkeley.
Fox, Hugh (1979), Gods of the Cataclysm, Harper and Row, New York.
Francis, Wilfrid (1961), Coal: Its Formation and Composition, Arnold, London.
---- (1972), "Velikovsky on the Origin of Coal," 2 Pens‚e (Fall), 19-21. Frankfort H. et al. (1946), The
Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago.
---- (1954), The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlessex.
Frazer, James G. (1919), Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, Mac Millan and Co., London.
---- (1968), Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies, Dawsons, London.
Frazier, Kendrick 91976), "When the Sun went strangely Quiet," Science News (March 6).
Frickenhaus, August H. (1912), Tiryns, vol. I Athens. Funkhauser, John g. & J. J. Naughton (1968),
"Radiogenic Helium and Argon in Ultramafic Inclusion from Hawaii," 73 Journal of Geophysical Research, 14
(July 15), 4601-7.
Furneaux, Rupert (1964), Krakatoa, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.
Galanopoulos, Angelos & Edward Bacon (1969), Atlantis: The Truth behind the Legend, Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
Indianapolis & New York.
Galilei, Galileo (ed. by Giorgio de Santillana, 1953), Dialogue on the Great World System, U. of Chicago
Press, Chicago.
Gallant, Ren‚ L. C. (1963), "Meteorite Impacts, Lunar Maria, Lopoliths, and Ocean Basins," 197 Nature
(January 5), 38-9.
---- (1964), Bombarded Earth, An Essay on the Geological and Biological Effects of Huge Meteorite Impacts,
John Baker, London.
Gardiner, A. H. (1909), Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage from a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden (Papyrus Ipuwer).
Gaster, Theodor H. (1965), Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, Harper & Row, New York, repr.
(1969);( 1975), Harper Torchbooks.
Gentry, R. V., W. H. Christie, D. H. Smith, J. F. Emery, S. A. Reynolds, R. Walker, S. S. Cristy, P. A.
Gentry (1976), "Radiohalos in Coalified Wood: New Evidence Relating to the Time of Uranium Introduction and
Coalification," 194 Science (October 15), 315-18.
Gibson, John (1977), "Saturn's Age," pre-publication interview with author David N. Talbott, Research
Communication Network (October 15), Portland, Oregon.
Gillispie, C. C. (1959, 1951), Genesis and Geology, A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural
Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850, Harper, New York.
Gilvarry, John J. (1961), "How the Sky drove the Land from the Bottom of the Sea," Saturday Review (November
4), 53-8; with critique and defense, op. cit. (1962) (April 7), 40-5.
Gimbutas, Marija (1974), The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: Myths, Legends and Cult Images, U. of
California Press.
Ginzberg, Louis (1909-1939), The Legends of the Jews, trans. by H. Szold, The Jewish Publication Society of
America, Philadelphia.
Glass, Billy (1967), "Microtektites in Deep-sea Sediments," 214 Nature (April 22), 372-4.
Glass, Billy & B. C. Heezen (1967), "Tektites and Geomagnetic Reversals," 214 Nature, (April 22), 372.
---- (1969), "Silicate Spherules from Tunguska Impact Area: Electron Microprobe Analysis," 164 Science (May
2), 547-9.
Count Goblet d'Aviella (1956), The Migration of Symbols, New York U. Books, New York, repr. Goff, Beatrice
L. (1963), Symbols of Prehistoric Mesopotamia, Yale U. Press, New Haven.
Gold, T. (1955), "Instability of the Earth's Axis of Rotation," 175 Nature (March 26), 526-9.
---- (1958), "Irregularities in the Earth's Rotation -- Part I," 17 Sky and Telescope (March), 216-8; "Part
II," (April), 284-6.
Golonetsky, S. F., V. V. Stepanok & E. M. Kolesnikov (1977), "Signs of Cosmochemical Anomaly in the Area of
the 1908 Tunguska Catastrophe," 11 Geoktrimiya, 1635-45.
Goneim, Zakaria (1956), The Buried Pyramid. Gordon, Cyrus H. (1971), Before Columbus -- Links between the
Old World and Ancient America, Crown Publishers, New York.
---- (1974), Riddles in History, Crown Publishers, New York. G"ssmann, P. F. (1955), Das Era-Epos,
Augustinus-Verlaz, Wrzburg, Germ.
Graves, Robert (1955), The Greek Myths, Vol. 1 & 2 Penguin, Baltimore; repr. 1959.
Gray, L. H. ed. (1964), The Mythology of all Races, Cooper Square Publishers, New York.
Greenberg, Lewis M. (1973), "The Papyrus Ipuwer," III Pens‚e (Winter), 36-7.
---- (1973-4), "W. F. Libby, C14, and the Americas," VI Pens‚e (Winter), 60-1.
---- (1973-4a), "Atlantis," VI Pens‚e (Winter), 51-4. ---- (1975), "A Concordance of Disaster," I Kronos
(Summer), 16-22.
---- (1977), "The Venus Greenhouse Theory Debunked," III Kronos (Winter), 132-4. Greenberg, Lewis M. &
Warner B. Sizemore (1978). "Jerusalem--City of Venus," III Kronos No. 3 (Spring), 56-90.
Gribbin, J. & S. Plagemann (1973), "Discontinuous Change in Earth's Spin Rate Following Great Solar Storm of
August 1972," 243 Nature (May 4), 26-7.
---- (1974), The Jupiter Effect: The Planets as Triggers of Devastating Earthquakes, Vintage Books, New
York.
Griffiths, J. G. (1956), "Archaeology and Hesiod's Five Ages," XVII J. Hist. Ideas No. 1 (January), 109-19.
Grove, David C. (1970), The Olmec Paintings of Oxtotitlan Cave, Guerrero, Mexico, Harvard U. Studies in Pre-
Columbian Art and Archaeology, No. 6.
Guerrier, E. (1976), "Le Forgeron venu du Ciel," 17 Kadath, 30-6.
Guirand, F. (1968), "Greek Mythology," Larousse World Mythology, 85-198, Putnam.
Gundel, (1894-1941), "Kometen," in Pauly-Wissowa, XI Real Encyclop"die (also "Planeten.")
Gunkel, H. (1895 & 1921), Sch"pfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit, Eine Religionsgeschichtliche
Untersuchung ber Gen. I und Ap. Joh. 12, Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, G"ttingen.
Goodrich, Luther C. 1957), A Short History of the Chinese People, Allen & Unwin, London.
Haliburton, R. G. (1881), "Primitive Traditions as to the Pleiades," 25 Nature (December), 100-101; repr. in
W. R. Corliss, Compiler, 91974), Strange Artifacts, M-1, MLW-003, Glen Arm, Md.
Hamilton, Edwin L. (1953), "Upper Cretaceous, Tertiary, and Recent Planktonic Foraminifera from the Mid-
Pacific Flat-Topped Sea Mounts," 27 J. of Paleontology, 207-37. Hampton, John (1955), N. A. Boulanger et la
Science de son Temps, Librairie E. Droz, Geneve.
Hapgood, C. H. (1966), Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Chilton Books, Philadelphia.
---- (1970), The Path of the Pole, Chilton Books, Philadelphia. Harris, T. M. (1958), "Forest Fire in the
Mesozoic," 46 J. Ecology No. 2, 447-453.
Harrison, E. R. (1977), "Has the Sun a Companion Star?" 270 Nature (November 24), 324-6.
Hartmann, William K. (1975), "The Smaller Bodies of the Solar System," 233 Scientific American No. 3
(September), 142-59.
Harwit, M. (1968), "Spontaneously Split Comets," 151 Astrophysical Journal (February), 789-90.
Hatfield, G. B. & M. J. Camp (1970), "Mass Extinction Correlated with Periodic Galactic Events," 81 Bull.
Geol. Soc. Amer., No. 3, 911-14.
Hawkes, Jacquetta (1973), Atlas of Ancient Archaeology, McGraw Hill, New York.
Hawkes, J. & Leonard Wooley (1965), History of Mankind: Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, Vol.
I, Harper & Row, New York.
Hawkins, Gerald (1969), Ancient Lines in the Peruvian Desert, National Geographic Society, New York.
Haymes, Robert C. 91971), Introduction to Space Science, John Wiley and Sons, New York.
Heezen, B. C., Marie Thorp & M. Ewing (1959), Floors of the Ocean, Geological Society of America, New York.
Heezen, B. & C. Hollister (1964), Face of the Deep: Physiography of the Indian Ocean, Geological Soc. of
Amer., New York. Heide, Fritz (1964), Meteorites, Edward Anders & Eugene Du-Fresne, transl. U. of Chicago
Press, Chicago; (1969), 3rd impression; trans. from (1957), Kleine Meteoritenkunde, Springer Verlag, Berlin.
Heninger, S. K. Jr. (1960), A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, Duke U. press, Durham, N. Ca.
Hentig, Hans von (1968), Ueber den Zusammenhang von Kosmischen, Biologischen und Sozialen Krisen, Ernst
Klett Verlag, Stuttgart.
Herr, Richard B. (1978), "Solar Rotation Determined from Thomas Harriot's Sunspot Observations of 1611 to
1613," 202 Science (December 8), 1079-81.
Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, H. G. Evelyn-White, trans. (1936), "Eastern Anatolia and
Velikovsky's Chronological Revisions I," 1 Kronos No. 3, 20-30.
Hibben, F. C. (1953), Treasure in the Dust: Archaeology in the New World, Cleaver-Hume Press, London.
---- (1968), The Lost Americans, T. Y. Crowell, New York. Hild, J. A. 91919), "Saturnus," IV-2 Dict. Antiq.
Grecque et Rom., 1083-90.
Walter Hirschberg (1928-29), "Die Plejaden in Afrika und ihre Beziehungen zum Bodenban," 60-1 Zeitscrift fr
Ethnologie.
Hitching, Francis (1977), Earth Magic, Morrow, New York. Hoch, Roy (1969), God in Greek Philosophy,
Princeton U. Press, Princeton. N. J.
H"rbiger, Hans (1925), Glazial-Kosmogonie, R. Voigtlander, Leipzig.
Holbrook, John 91973), "The Revised Chronology," 3 Pens‚e No. 2 (Spring-Summer), centerfold. Homer, Richmond
Lattimore trans. (1951), The Iliad, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago; (1961) Phoenix ed.; (1967) 19th
impression.
---- A. T. Murray (1919), trans., The Odyssey, 2 vol. Putnam's Sons, New York.
---- E. V. Rieu (1955), trans. The Odyssey, Penguin Books, Baltimore.
Honeyman, James R. (1976), "Sinking Continents," 13 Creation Res. Q., 58.
Hooker, Dolph Earl (1958), Those Astonishing Ice Ages, Exposition Press, New York.
Hooqkaas, Reijer (1970), "Catastrophism in Geology, Its Scientific Character in Relation to Actualism and
Uniformitarianism," 33 Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschaften Letterkunde, No. 7, 271-316; repr.
in Albritton (1975), 310-56.
Hope-Simpson, R. E. (1978), "Sunspots and Flu: a Correlation," 275 Nature 86.
Hopkins, Clark (1965), "The Canopy of Heaven and the Aegis of Zeus," Bucknell Review (March 29), 1-16.
Hoyle, Fred (1951), The Nature of the Universe, Harper, New York.
Hoyle, Fred & N. C. Wickramasinghe (1977), "Identification of the 2, 200A Interstellar Absorption Feature",
270 Nature (November 24), 323-324.
---- (1977), "Does Epidemic Disease Come From Space," New Scientist, Nov. 11.
Humboldt, A. von (1814), Engl. transl., Researches concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient
Inhabitants of America, Vol. II, Longman, etc. Hurt, Rees, Orme & Broung J. Murray & H. Colburn, London.
Huxtable, J., M. J. Aitken & Bonhommet (1978), "Thermoluminescence Dating of Sediment Bedded by Lava Flows
of the Chaine des Puys," 275 Nature (September 21), 207-9.
"How the Ice Age Began," unidentified author (1975), 105 Time (Canadian Edition) No. 52 (March).
Inglis, D. R., "The Shifting of the Earth's Axis of Rotation," 29 Review of Modern Physics, 9-19.
Isaacson, Israel M. (1973), "Carbon 14 Dates and Velikovsky's Revision of Ancient History: Samples from
Pylos and Gordion," 3 Pens‚e No. 2 (Spring-Summer), 26-32.
---- (1974), "Applying the Revised Chronology," 4 Pens‚e No. 4 (Fall), 5-20.
---- (1975), "some Preliminary Remarks about Thera and Atlantis," 1 Kronos No. 2, 93-99.
Isenberg, Artur (1976), "Devi and Venus," 2 Kronos No. 1, 89. Jacobsen, Thomas W. (1976), "17,000 Years of
Greek Prehistory," 234 Scientific Amer., 76-87.
Jaki, Stanley L. (1978), Planets and Planetarians: A History of Theories of the Origin of Planetary Systems,
Halsted-Wiley, New York.
James, E. O. (1961), Seasonal Feasts and Festivals, Barnes & Noble, New York.
James Hutton (1795), Theory of the Earth, 2 vols. London. James, Peter (1976), "Aphrodite -- The Moon or
Venus?" I S. I. S. R., No. 1, 2-7.
---- (1976), "Aphrodite," Letters, I S. I. S. R., No. 3. ---- (1977), "Peoples of the Sea?" II S. I. S. R.,
No. 1, 4-6. ---- (1979), "Metallurgy and Chronology," III S. I. S. R., No. 4, 81-3.
James, Williams (1896), The Will to Believe, Longmans Green, London, 1937 ed.
Jastrow, M. (1898), Religion of Babylon and Assyria. Jaynes, Julian (1977), The Origin of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston.
Jeans, J. H. (1928), Astronomy and Cosmology, Cambridge, Eng.
Johanson, D. C. and T. D. White (1979), "A Systematic Assessment of Early African Hominids," 203 Science
4378 (26 Jan.) 321-30.
Jordan, Pascual (1971), The Expanding Earth, Trans. from German (1966), Die Expansion der Erde, F. Vieweg,
Braunschmeig.
Joseph, P. (1972), The Dravidian Problem in the South Indian Culture Complex, Orient Longman, Ltd., New
Delhi.
The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. Whiston, 91895 ed.), J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia.
Jueneman, Frederic B. (1973), "Letter on Mutagenic Acoustics," I Pens‚e , No. 4, 112.
---- (1973), "A Most Exciting Planet," 15 Industrial Research (July), 11.
Juergens, Ralph (1972), "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," 2 Pens‚e No. 3
(Fall), 6-12.
---- (1973-74), "Juergens Replies," letter, 4 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter), 62-64.
---- (1974), "Electricity Absent from Sagan's Astrophysics," 4 Pens‚e, No. 2 (Spring), 38-43. ---- (1974b),
"Electrical Discharges and the Transmutation of Elements," 4 Pens‚e , No. 3 (Summer), 45-6.
---- (1974a), "Of the Moon and Mars, Part 1," 4 Pens‚e, No. 4 (Fall), 21-30. (1974-75), "Part 2," 4 Pens‚e,
No. 5 (Winter), 27-39.
---- (1976), "The 'Bulk chemistries' of Venus and Jupiter," II Kronos, No. 1 (Summer), 11-15.
---- (1976b), "Velikovsky and the Heat of Venus," I Kronos (Winter), 86-92.
---- (1977), "Radiohalos and Earth History," III Kronos (Fall), 3-17.
---- (1978), "Geogullibility and Geomagnetic Reversals," III Kronos (Summer), 52-63.
Justin (3rd century A. D.), The History. Kaiser, T. R. (1955), "The Incident Flux of Meteors and the Total
Meteoric Ionization," Pergamon, London.
Kelly, Allen (1963), Continental Drift: Is It a Cometary Impact Phenomenon ?, Carlsbad, Calif., rev. ed.
1966.
---- (1974), The Gravitational Disruption of Mars: Speculation, Theory or Fact? (privately printed)
Carlsbad, Calif.
Kelley, Allan & Frank Dachille (1953), Target: Earth, the Role of large Meteors in Earth Science, Carlsbad,
Calif.
Kennedy, G. E. (1975), "Early Man in the New World." 255 Nature, 274-5.
Kennett, J. P. & N. D. Watkins (1970), "Geomagnetic Polarity Change, Volcanic Maxima and Faunal Extinction
in the South Pacific," 227 Nature (August 29), 930-4.
Kerenyi, Karl (1976), Hermes, Guide of Souls, Spring, Zurich. Kerr, Richard A. (1978), "Isotopic Anomalies
in Meteorites: Complications Multiply," 202 Science (October 1973), 203-4.
Kofahl, Robert E. 91976-7), "Could the Flood Waters Have Come from a Canopy or extraterrestrial Source?" 13
Creation Res. Q., 202.
Komarek, E. V., Sr. (1965), "Fire Ecology -- Grasslands and Man," Proceedings, 4th Annual Tall Timber Fire
Ecology Conference (March 18-19), 169-220.
Kolata, Gina Bari (1977), "Catastrophe Theory: The Emperor Has No Clothes," 996 Science (April 15), 287.
Kondratov, Alexander (1974), The Riddles of Three Oceans, Progress Publishers, Moscow, U. S. S. R.
Kopal, Z. (1959), Close Binary Systems, Wiley, New York. Kramer, Samuel Noah, ed., (1961), Mythologies of
the Ancient World, Anchor, Doubleday, Garden City.
Krinov, E. L. (1966), Giant Meteorites, Pergamon Press, Oxford. London, Edinburgh, New York.
Kronos, Editors (1977), Velikovsky and Establishment Science, Kronos Press, Glassboro, N. J.
---- (1978) IV "Scientists Confront Scientists who Confront Velikovsky," 2: 2-79.
Kroeber, Alfred L. (1952), The Nature of Culture, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Kruskal, Martin, Ralph Juergens, C. E. R. Bruce, Eric W. Crew, "On Cosmic Electricity, Supplement," III
Pens‚e, No. 3 (Fall), 42-50.
Kugler, Franz Xavier (1927), Sybillinischer Sternkampf und Pha‰ton in Naturgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung,
Munster.
Kuong, Wong Lee (1973), "The Synthesis of manna," III Pens‚e( Winter), 45-6. Kuper, Charles G. & Asher
Peres, eds. (1971), Relativity and Gravitation, Gordon and Breach, New York.
Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. & M. (1971), "An Early City in Iran," Scientific American (June), 102-11.
Lane, Frank W. (1965), The Elements Rage, Chilton Co. Publ., Philadelphia and New York.
Langdon, Stephen H. (1923), Enuma Elish, The Babylonian Epic of Creation, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
---- (1935), Babylonian Menologies and the Semitic Calendars, Oxford U. Press, Milford.
Laning-Emperaire, A. (1962), La Signification de l'Art Paleolithique, Paris.
Lantzy, R. J., M. F. Dacey & F. T. Mackenzie (1977), "Catastrophe Theory: Application to the Permian Mass
Extinction," 5-12 Geology, 724-8.
Larrabee, E. M. (1962), "Ephemeral Water Action Preserved in Closely Dated Deposit," 32 Sedimentary Petrol,
608-9.
Lasaga, A. C. & H. D. Holland (1974), "Primordial Oil Slick," 174 Science (October 10), 53-5.
Laville, Henri (1978), Climatologie et Chronologie du Pal‚olithique en Perigord, Laboratoire de
Plaentologie, U. de Provence, France.
Lederer, Wolfgang (1968), The Fear of Women, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York.
Legget, Robert R. ed. (1976), Glacial Till: An Interdisciplinary Study, Royal Society of Canada.
Leglay, Marcel (1966). Saturne Africain, Boccard, Paris. Leighton, Robert G. (1970), "The Surface of Mars,"
222 Scientific American (May), 27-40. Leroi-Gourhan, Andre (1957), Originalit‚ Biologique de l'Homme, Paris.
---- (1965), Le Geste et la Parole, Albin Michel, Paris. ---- (1976), Les Religions de la Pr‚histoire, 3rd
ed., Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
Lessing, G. (1888), Laokoon, trans. by E. C. Beasley; G. Bell and Sons, London.
Levin, B. Y. (1968), "The Interaction of Astronomy, Geophysics and Geology in the Study of the Earth," in
The Interaction of Sciences in the Study of the Earth, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 165-180.
Lewis. Gilbert N. (1934), "The Genesis of the Elements," 46 The Physical Review (November 15), 897-901.
Libby, W. F. (1973), "The Radiocarbon Dating Method." 3 Pens‚e No. 2 (Spring-Summer), 7-12.
Libby, L. M. & H. R. Lukens (1973), "Production of Radiocarbon in Tree Rings by Lightning Bolts," 78 J.
Geophysical Res., No. 26 (September 10), 5902-3.
The Lichtenberg Reader (1959), Beacon Press, Boston, (Georg C. Lichtenberg).
"Lightning Superbolts Seen from Space," (1977), New Scientist (October 20), 150.
Liller, William (1977), "The Story of AM Herculis," Sky and Telescope (May), 350-4.
Lockyer, J. N. (1965), Dawn of Astronomy, M. I. T. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Long, Charles H. (1963), Alpha: The Myths of Creation, G. Braziller, New York. ---- (1974), "Myths and
Doctrines of Creation," 5 Encyclopedia Britannica, 240-1.
Lowery, Malcolm (1977), "Father Kugler's Falling Star," II Kronos, No. 4 (Summer), 3-28.
---- (1977), "Some Notes on Senmut's Ceiling," II S. I. S. R., No. 1 (Autumn), 7-10.
---- (1977-78), "Dating the 'Admonitions': Advance Report," II S. I. S. R., No. 3, 54-7.
---- (1978), "The Sybil and Dr. Stecchini," III S. I. S. R., No. 2 (Autumn), 32-4.
de Luc, M. (1790), 10th letter to La Metherie, "On the History of the Earth, from the time when that planet
was penetrated by light, until the appearance of the Sun..." 37 Journal de Physique, Part 2, 332.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. by R. C. Trevelyan, The University Press, Cambridge (Eng.) (1937).
Lyell, Charles (1831), Principles of Geology, Vol. I.; (1832), Vol. II.; (1833), Vol. III., Murray, London.
Ma, Ting Ying H. (1943), "Alteration of Sedimentary Facies on the Ocean Bottom and Shortness of the Period
of Diastrophism after a Sudden Total Displacement of the Solid Earth Shell," II Oceanographica Sinica, Fasc.
1 (September), the Author, Yungom, Fukien, China.
---- (1955), Research on the Past Climate: Vol. VI. The Sudden Total Displacement of the Outer Solid Earth
Shell by Slidings, Relative to the Fixed Rotating Core of the Earth, World Book Co., Ltd., 99 Chung King
Road, 1st Section, Taipei, Taiwan,
China. Maccoby, Hyam (1971), "Ebla," a note, I, S. I. S. R. (Spring), 3. McCall, G. J. H., ed., (1977),
Meteorite Craters, Wiley, New York McCrea, W., D. H. Clark, F. R. Stephenson (1977), "On possible cosmic
event of last several thousand years bombarding Earth by cosmic radiation," 265 Nature, 318.
McDonnel, J. A. M., ed., (1978), Cosmic Dust, Wiley-Interscience, New York.
MacKie, Euan W. (1974), "Megalithic Astronomy and Catastrophism," 4 Pens‚e No. 5 (Winter), 5-20.
---- (1977), Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain. ---- (1977-78), "Radiocarbon Dates for the
Eighteenth Dynasty," II S. I. S. R., No. 2-3, 95-6.
MacKinnon, Roy (1976), "Cenomanian Sync.," I S. I. S. R., No. 2 (Spring).
---- (1977), "The Inexact Science of Radiometric Dating," I S. I. S. R. (Summer), 8-19.
Mac Neish, Richard S. (1964), "The Origins of New World Civilization," 11 Scientific American (November),
29-37.
Macrobius, (P. V. Davies trans., 1969), Saturnalia, Columbia U. Press,
Mainwaring, A. Bruce (1973), "Final Report, Foundation for Studies of Modern Science Radiocarbon Project,"
Project conducted by the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology of the Museum of the University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.
Malin, S. C. R. and I. Saunders (1973), 245 Nature 25. Manuel, Frank E. (1963), Isaac Newton: Historian,
Harvard U. Press, Cambridge.
Marcanton, Paul L. (1907), "La Methode de Folghereiter et son role en Geophysique," 112 Archives des
Sciences Physiques et Naturelles, 467-82. Maringer, Johannes (1960), The Gods of Prehistoric Man, trans. by
Mary Ilford, Weidensfeld and Nicholson, London; Knopf, New York.
Marov, M. Y. (1976), in 109 Science News (June 19), 388, Venus surface light. Cf. II Kronos, No. 1, 104-5.
Marsden, Brian G. (1967), "One Hundred Periodic Comets," Science, 10 March, 1207-13.
Marsden, B. G. & A. G. W. Cameron (1966), The Earth-Moon System, Plenum, New York.
Marshack, Alexander (1972), The Roots of Civilization. The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol
And Notation, Weldenfeld and Nicolson, London; McGraw Hill, New York.
Marshall, Sir John (1931), Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, 3 vols., London.
"Martian Poles Shift, Say Polar Drift Theorists," (1973), 43 Science Digest (June), 74-5.
Martin, P. S. & H. E. Wright, eds. (1968), International Association for Quaternary Research, Pleistocene
Extinctions, The Search for a Cause, Yale U. Press, New Haven.
Martineau, LaVan (1973), The Rocks Begin to Speak, KC Publ., Las Vegas, Nev.
Mavor, J. W. Jr. (1969), Voyage to Atlantis, Putnam's Sons, New York.
Mead, G. R. S. (1906), Thrice Greatest Hermes, J. M. Watknis, London.
Meggers, Betty J. (1975), "The Transpacific Origin of Meso American Civilization: A Preliminary Review of
the Evidence and Theoretical Implication," 77 Amer. Anthro., 1-27.
Mellaart, James (1967), Catal Huyuk, a Neolithic Town in Anatolia, McGraw Hill. New York. Menard, Henry, W.
(1961), "The East Pacific Rise: Convection Currents in the Mantle Bay Account for this Bulge on the Ocean
Floor," 205 Scientific American, No. 6 (December), 52-61.
Mercer, S. A. B. (1952), The Pyramid Texts, Longmans, Green, New York.
Mergell, M. et al. (1978)," A City Plagued by Noise..." Environment Report (November 27), I. National League
of Cities, Washington, D. C.
Michell, John (1969), The View Over Atlantis, Ballantine Books, New York.
Michelson, Irving (1974), "Mechanics Bears Witness," 4 Pens‚e, NO. 2, 15-22.
---- (1974), "Tide's Tortured Theory, ' 30 Science and Public Affairs No. 3 (March), 31-4.
Miller, Molly (1970), The Sicilian Colony Dates: Studies in Chronography I, State U. of New York Press,
Albany N. Y.
Miller, Robert D. (1939), The Origin and Original Nature of Apollo, Ph. D. Dissertation. U. Of Pennsylvania.
Philadelphia.
Milsom, John (1977), "A Commentary on Barnes' Magnetic Decay. ' II S. I. S. R., No, 2 (December), 46.
Milton, Earl (1975), The Planets Bear Witness, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Lethbridge, Canada.
---- ed. (1978), Recollections of a Fallen Sky. Lethbridge U. Press, Lethbridge, Canada.
Mireaux, Emile (1948), Les Poems Homeriques et l'Histoire Grecque, 2 Vols. Albin Michel,, Paris.
Mishra, D. P. (1971), Studies in the Proto-History of India. W. H. Patwardhan, Orient Longman, New Delhi.
Misner, Charles W., K. S. Thorne & J. A. Wheeler (1973), Gravitation, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco. Mowles,
Thomas (1973), "Radiocarbon Dating and Velikovskian Catastrophism," III Pens‚e (Spring-Summer), 19-25.
Mulcaster, Geoff (1977), Letter on the "Maunder Minimum," II S. I. S. R., (December), 31-2.
Mullen, William (1973), "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts," 3 Pens‚e, No. 1 (Winter), 10-17.
---- (1974). "The Mesoamerican Record," 4 Pens‚e, No. 4 (Fall), 34-44.
Mller, Rolf (1970), Der Himmel ber dem Menschen der Steinzeit, Astronomie and Mathematik in den Bauten der
Megalith-kulturen, Springer, Berlin.
Munch, Peter A. (1926), Norse Mythology, Am-Scand. F., New York.
Munk, W. H. & G. J. F. Mac Donald (1960), The Rotation of the Earth, Cambridge U. Press, Cambridge.
Murdock, George P. (1968), "The Common Denominator of Cultures" in S. C. Washburn & P. C. Jay, eds.
Perspectives on Human Evolution, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York.
Murray, Bruce C. (1975), "Mercury," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September). 58-69.
National Academy of Sciences, Astronomy Survey Committee, Astronomy and Astrophysics for The 1970's,
Washington, 1972.
Newell, N. D. (1956), "Catastrophism and the Fossil Record," 10 Evolution, 97-101.
--- (1967), "Revolutions in the History of Life," Geol. Soc. Amer., Special paper No. 98, 63-91.
News Report, excerpts (1972), "Cosmic Violence," National Academy of Sciences. National Research Council,
National Academy of Engineering (June-July). In 2 Pens‚e, No. 3, 39. Newton, Robert R. (1970), Ancient
Astronomical Observations and the Acceleration of the Earth and Moon, John Hopkins Press. Baltimore.
Niederberger, Christine (1979)," Early Sedentary Economy in the Basin of Mexico," 203 Science, 4376 (January
12), 138.
Nieto, M. M. (1974), "The Titius-Bode Law and the Evolution of the Solar System," 4 Pens‚e, No. 3 (Summer),
5-7.
Nilsson, Martin P. (1920), Primitive Time-Reckoning, Oxford U. Press, London.
Niniger, Harvey H. (1953), A Comet Strikes the Earth, Palm Desert Press, Palm Desert, Calif.
---- Out of the Sky, (1959), Dover Publ., New York. Ninkovich, P. & B. C. Heezen (1965), "Santorini Tephra"
in Submarine Geology And Geophysics, W. F. Whittard & R. Bradshaw, eds. Butterworth, London, 413-52.
Ninkovitch D. & W. L. Donn (1977), "Explosive Cenozoic volcanism and Climatic Implications," 196 Science
(January 10), 1231-4.
Opruchev, V. A. (1959), "Fossil Cemeteries," trans. from Russian, Fundamentals of Geology, Moscow, 321-6.
Occidens, Stella (1888), "Moon Lore and Eclipse Superstition," 11 Knowledge (January 2), 51-2; repr. in
Corliss, Compiler, Strange Universe, Vol. AI-13-14, Source Book Project, Glen Arm, Md.
O'Gheoghan, Brendan (1978), "Cosmic Imagery from the Time of Joseph, ' S. I. S. Newsletter, No. 2 (July), 8-
9.
O'Keefe, John A. (1966), "The Origin of the Moon and the Core of the Earth" in B. G. Marsden & A. G. W.
Cameron, The Earth-Moon System. Plenum, New York, 224-33. ---- (1973), "After Apollo: Fission Origin of the
Moon," 29 Science and Public Affairs, (November), 26-29.
---- (1978), "The Tektite Problem," 239 Scientific American, (August), 116.
Olson, E. A. (1974), "Dating, Relative and Absolute," 5 Ency. Britannica, 496-13.
Olsson, Ingrid V., ed. (1970), Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology, Wiley & Sons, New York.
Oosterhout, Gerard W. van, & Wouter van der Lek (1972), "Radiocarbon Dates of Samples of Known Age Suggest
that the Length of the Solar Year Did Change," unpublished. xerox, 18 pp. (August).
Opik, E. J. (1966), "The Martian Surface," 153 Science, 3733 (July 15), 255-65.
Otto, Walter (1954), The Homeric Gods, M. Hadas, trans., Pantheon, New York.
Ovenden, M. W. (1972), "Bode's Law and the Missing Planet, ' 239 Nature, 508-9.
Ovid, Rolfe Humphries, trans. (1971). Metamorphoses. U. of Indiana Press, Bloomington & London.
Owen, Nancy K., "The Dresden Codex and Velikovsky's Catastrophe Dates," III S. I. S. R. 3 (Spring, 1979),
88-93.
Oxnard, Charles E. (1975), Uniqueness and Diversity in Human Evolution, U. of Chicago, Chicago.
Oyama, V. I. et al. (1979), "Venus Lower Atmospheric Composition," 203 Science, (23 Feb.), 802-5.
---- (1970), "Could Paleomagnetism Be Wrong?," 227 Nature, (August 22), 776. Parker, David & Martin Sieff
(1975), "Joseph and the Pyramids," letter and reply. I Newsletter of the Interdisciplinary Study Group, No.
2 (September), 18-19.
Parker, L. N. (1975), "The Sun," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September), 42-57.
Paterson, A. M. (1973), "Giordano Bruno's View of the Earth without a Moon," III Pens‚e (Winter), 25-6.
Patten, Donald W. (1966). The Biblical Flood And the Ice Epoch: A Study in Scientific History, Pacific
Meridian Publ. Co., Seattle.
Patten, Donald W., Ronald R. Hatch & Loren C. Steinhauer (1973), The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other
Catastrophes, Pacific Meridian Publ., Seattle.
Pauly-Wissowa (1894-1919), Real-Encyclop"die der Klassischen Alterumswissenschaft, J. B. Metzlen, Stuttgart.
Pawley, G. S. & N. Abrahamsen (1973), "Orientation of the Pyramids," 181 Science, (July 6), 7-8.
---- (1973), "Do the Pyramids Show Continental Drift?" 179 Science, (March 2), 892-3.
Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia (1977), "Fifty Years of Novae," 82 Astronomical J., No. 9, 665-73.
Pearce, Joseph Chilton (1971), The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Julian Press, New York; (1973), Pocket Books,
New York.
Pearl, R. M. (1976), "World of Lakes: Meteorite Lakes," 31 Earth Science, (March 1978), 75-6.
Pens‚e (Magazine), ed. (1976), Velikovsky Reconsidered, Doubleday, New York.
Petterson, H. (1960), "Cosmic Spherules and Meteoric Dust," 202 Scientific American, 123-32. "The
Phanerozoic Time Scale," (1964), Q. J. Geol. Soc., London, whole issue.
Piddington, J. H. (1969), Cosmic Electrodynamics, Wiley, New York.
Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. trans. F. M. Cornford (1937), Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York
The Epinomis of Plato, J. Harward, trans. with intro. and notes (1928), Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Pluche, Noel-Antoine (1740), Histoire due Ciel O— l'on Recherche l'Origine de l'Idolatrie et les Meprises de
la Philosophie sur la Formation, et sur les Influences des Corps
Celestes, Veuve Estienne, Paris, Trans. J. B. De Freval as The History of the Heavens, Osborn, London.
Plutarch, trans. (1818), Miscellanies and Essays, Little Brown, Boston.
Pollack, James B. (1975), "Mars," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September), 106-117-129.
Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley
from the translation of Adrian Recinos (1950), U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Posnansky, Arthur (1945), Tiahuanaco, the Cradle of American Man, J. J. Augustin, New York, (1958), 2nd ed.
Possehl, Gregory L. (1967), "The Mohenjo-daro Floods: A Reply," 60 Amer. Anthrop., No. 1, 32-40.
Price, George M. (1934), The New Geology. Pritchard, J. B. (1955), Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2nd ed.,
Princeton.
Proclus Parmenides nec non Procli Commentarium in Parmenidem, eds., R. Klibansky and C. Labowsky, London,
1953. Raikes, R. L. (1965), "The Mohenjo-daro Floods," 39 Antiquity, 196-203.
---- (1968), "Kalibangan: Death from Natural Causes," 42 Antiquity, 268-91.
---- (1976), "The Ecological Role of Extreme but Predictable Climate Events on Prehistory..." Ninth
International Congress of Pre-Historical and Proto-Historical Sciences (Nice, France), 15 pp mimeo.
Ransom, C. J. (1972), "How Stable is the Solar System?" II Pens‚e, (May), 16-7, 35.
---- (1976), The Age of Velikovsky, Kronos Press, Glassboro, N. J.
Rawlinson, H. G. (1965), India: A Short Cultural History, New York.
Reade, M. G. (1977), "Manna as a Confection," I S. I. S. R., No. 2, 9-13, 25.
---- (1977), "Senmut and Phaeton," II S. I. S. R. No. I (Autumn), 10-18.
Rich, Vera (1978), "The 70-year-old Mystery of Siberia's Big Bang," 274 Nature, 207.
Richardson, Emeline (1964), The Etruscans: Their Art and Civilization, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Richter, N. B. (1963), The Nature of Comets, Methuen & Co., London.
Riley, Carroll J., J. Charles Keller, Campbell W. Pennington & Robert L. Rands (1971), Man Across the Sea:
Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts. U. of Texas Press, Austin & London.
Rilli, Nicola (1964), Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino, Tipografia Giuntina, Firenze. Rittmann, A. (1962),
Volcanoes and Their Activity, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Rix, Z. (1974), "King-Shepherds or Moloch Shepherds? ' unpubl. manus. II p.
---- (1975), "The Great Terror," I Kronos, No. I (Spring), 51-64. ---- (1977), "Note on the Androgyne
Comet," I S. I. S. R., 5, 17-19.
Robins, Don (1978), "Isotopic Anomalies in Chronometric Science," II S. I. S. R., (Spring), 108-10.
Rock, Fritz, "Die G"tter der 7 Planeten in Alten Mexico und die Frage eines Alten Zusammenhanges
Toltekischer Building mit einem Altweletlichen Kultursystem," Anthropos.
Rose, Lynn (1972), "Could Mars have been an Inner Planet?" with a note by Lynn Rose and Raymond Vaughan, 2
Pens‚e, No. 2 (May), 42-3.
---- (1973), Babylonian Observations of Venus," 3 Pens‚e No. 1 (Winter), 18-22.
---- (1974), "The Length of the Year," 4 Pens‚e. No. 3 (Summer), 35-7.
---- (1977), "Just Plainly Wrong: A Critique of Peter Huber," III Kronos, NO. 2 (Winter), 102-12; IV Kronos
(1978), 2: 33-69.
Rose, Lynn & R. C. Vaughan (1974), Velikovsky and the Sequence of Planetary Orbits," 4 Pens‚e, No. 3, 27.
Rowland, B. (1953), The Art and Architecture of India, Penguin Books, London, Baltimore.
Runcorn, S. Keith, Leona Marshall Libby, and Willard F. Libby, (1977), "Primeval Melting of the Moon," 270
Nature, (22 Dec.), 676-81.
Ruzic, Neil P. (1973), "The Case for Returning to the Moon," Industrial Research (July), 48-54. Sagan, Carl
(1975), "The Solar System," in The Solar System, W. H. Freemann, San Francisco, 3-11.
Salop, L. J. (1977), "Glaciations, Biologic Crises and Supernovae," 2 Catastrophist Geology, No. 2
(December), 22-41.
Sanford, Fernando (1931), Terrestrial Electricity, Stanford U. Press, Milford, Oxford, U. Press. London.
Santillana, Giorgio de, & Hertha von Dechend (1969), Hamlet's Mill: An Essay On Myth and the Frame of Time,
Gambit Inc., Boston.
Sarvajna, D. K. (1970), "Orbits Of Charged Bodies," 6 Astrophysics and Space Science, 258-62.
Schaeffer, Claude F. A. (1948), Stratigraphie Compar‚e et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidentale, Oxford U.
Press, London.
---- (1968), Ugaritica V, Imprimerie Nationale, Paris. Schaeffer, O. A., ed. (1969), Potassium-Argon Dating,
Springer-Verlag, Berlin, New York.
Schindewolf, Otto H. (1963), "Neocatastrophism?" 114 Zeitschrift Deutsche Geol. Ges., No. 2, 430-45; trans.
in 2 Catastrophist Geol. No. 2 (December, 1977), 9-21.
Schultz, Gwen (1974), Ice Age Lost, Doubleday Anchor, New York.
Semple, Ellen C. (1932), The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History,
Constable, London.
Shafer, R. (1954), Ethnography of Ancient India, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden.
Shapiro, Irwin I. (1967), "Resonance Rotation of Venus," 157 Science (July 28), 423-5. Shelly-Pearce, Derek
P. (1978), "The Catastrophic Substructure of the Samson and Delilah Myth," S. I. S. Newsletter No. 2 (July),
9-11.
Sherrerd, Chris (1972), "Venus' Circular Orbit," 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May), 43.
Shklovskii, I. S. & Carl Sagan (1966), Intelligent Life in the Universe, Dell, New York
Sieff, Alvin, et al. (1979), "Structure of the Atmosphere of Venus up to 110 Kilometers," 203 Science (23
Feb.), 787-90.
Sieveking, Gale, "The Migration of the Megaliths," in Edward Bacon (1963), Vanished Civilizations, McGraw
Hill Book Co., London.
Siever, Raymond (1975). "The Earth." 233 Scientific American, No. 3, 82-91
Simpson, John A. (1973), "Journey to Jupiter," 66 U. of Chicago Magazine, November-December, 6-11.
Simpson, G. G. (1953) Life of The Past, Yale U. Press, ---- (1970), "Uniformitarianism, An Inquiry into
Principle, Theory, and Method in Geohistory and Biohistory," 43-96 in M. K. Hecht and W. C. Steere, Essays
in Evolution and Genetics in Honor of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York.
Slosman, Albert (1976), Le Grand Cataclysme, Laffont, Paris. Smart, W. M. (1953), Celestial Mechanics, John
Wiley and Sons. New York.
Sorensen, Herbert C. (1973), "The Age of Bristlecone Pine." 3 Pens‚e, No. 2 (Spring-Summer), 15-18.
---- (1976-77), "Bristlecone Pines and Tree-Ring Dating: A Critique," 13 Creation Res., 5. Spanuth, Jurgen
(1956), Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled, Citadel, New York.
Spence, Louis (1975), Atlantis Discovered, Causeway Books, New York.
Staudacher, Willibald (1968), Die Trennung von Himmel and Erde, Wissenschaftliche Buchegesellschaft
Darmstadt.
Steen, Lynn Arthur (1974), "Mathematicians Hail New Theory", 106 Science News, No. 11 (September 14).
Strickling, J. E. (1980), "The Tower of Babel," 16 Creation Res. S. Q., March, 22-3.
Struve, Otto (1952), "Pleione -- A Story of Cosmic Evolution," Sky and Telescope, (August), 243-5, 254.
Stuart, John (1856-67), Sculptured Stones of Scotland, The Spalding Club, Aberdeen.
Stuiver, Minze (1978). "Carbon-14 Dating: A Comparison of Beta and Ion Counting." 202 Science, (24
November), 881-3.
Suarez, Max (1976), An Evaluation of the Astronomical Theory of the Ice Ages, Princeton U. Press Princeton.
Sues, H. E. (1970), "The Three Causes of the Secular C14 Fluctuations, Their Amplitudes and Time Constants,"
in Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology, Proceedings, 12th Nobel Symposium at Uppsala Univ. 1969,
Univ. 1969, Ingrid V. Olsson ed., Almquist and Wiksell,
Stockholm. Sugden, David (1976), Glaciers and Landscapes, E. Arnold, London.
Suhr, George (1969), The Spinning Aphrodite, Helios Books, New York.
Sullivan, Walter (1974) Continents in Motion, McGraw Hill, New York. Sutherland, Carter (1973-74), "China's
Dragon," 4 Pens‚e, No. 1 (Winter), 47-50.
Sykes, N. J. G. (1978), "An Investigation of Isotope Decay Constancy," III S. I. S. R., No. 2 (Autumn), 43-
5.
Tacitus (tr. 1885), De Germania, George Stuart, ed., Eldredge & Brother, Philadelphia.
Talbott, David N. (1977), "Saturn: Universal Monarch and Dying God," Report, Research Communications
Network, Portland, Oregon.
Talbott, George R. (1978)," The Cabots, the Lowells and the Temperature of Venus." IV Kronos, 2: 2-25.
Talbott, Stephen (1977), "Mystery of the Radiohalos," Res. Communications Network (February 10), Portland,
Oregon, 3-6.
Taylor, Thomas (1819), "On the Coincidence between the Belts of the Planet Jupiter and the Fabulous Bonds of
Jupiter the Demiurgus," XX Classical Journal, No. 40. 324-26.
Temple, Robert K. G. (1976), The Sirius Mystery, Sidgwick and Jackson, London.
Thom, Alexander (1967), Megalithic Sites in Britain, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Thom, Ren‚ (1968), "Topological Models in Biology," Topology, No. 2.
---- (1977), "Catastrophe Theory," 270 Nature, 658, and (1977) 270, letters, 381-4.
Thomas, P., et al. (1978), "Origin of the Grooves on Phobos," 273 Nature, 282-4.
Thompson, J. (1970), Maya History and Religion, U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
---- (1977), Rise and Fall of the Mayan Civilization, U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Thompson, Win J. III
(1976-77), "Catastrophic Origins for Asteroids and Rings of Saturn," 13 Creation Res. C., 82.
"Times Higher Education Supplement," (1978), The Times of London (April 14); Scientists Protest denial of
research on plague origins in space.
Tompkins, Peter (1971), Secrets of the Great Pyramid, with Appendix by L. C. Stecchini, Harper and Row, New
York.
Treash, Robert (1972), "Magnetic Remanence in Lunar Rocks: A Candid Look at Scientific Misbehavior," II
Pens‚e, 21-3.
Trento, S. M. (1978) The Search for Lost America: The Mysteries of the Stone Ruins, Contemporary Books,
Chicago.
Tresman, Harold & B. O'Gheoghan (1977), "The Primordial Light," II S. I. S. R. No. 2 (December), 35-40.
"The Tunguska Meteorite," (1967), 172 USSR Academy of Science Reports No. 4-5.
"Tuolumne Table Mountain -- Human Remains Under Lava Flow," (1891), anon., 44 Nature, No. 438 (September 3);
repr. in Corliss, Compiler, A Source Book Project, Strange Artifacts MES-006, Glen Arm (Md.)
Turekian, K. ed., (1971), The Late Cenozoic Glacial Ages, Yale U. Press, New Haven.
Uman, M. A. (1969), Lightning, McGraw Hill, New York Umgrove J. H. F. (1947), The Pulse of the Earth,
Nijhoff, The Hague.
Underwood, Guy (1969), The Pattern of the Past, Abacus ed. 1972. London.
Urey, Harold (1965), "Meteorites and the Moon," 147 Science (March 12), 1262-5. ---- (1973), "Cometary
Collisions and Geological Periods," letter, 242 Nature, (March 2) 32-3.
Vaihinger, Hans (1924), The Philosophy of "As If", Harcourt Brace & Co. Inc., New York.
Vail, Isaac N. (1972), Selected Works, Annular Publications, Santa Barbara, Calif.
Valentine, James W. (1974), "Temporal Bias in Extinctions Among Taxonomic Categories," Journal of
Paleontology (May), 549.
Van Allen, James A. (1976), "Interplanetary Particles and Field," 233 Scientific American, No. 3
(September), 160-73.
Van Buitenen, J. A. B. (1975), "Manu, Ut-Napischtim, and Noah," U. of Chicago Magazine, Winter, 10-3.
Van Deventer, T. R. (1977), "Holocene Woodlands in the Southwestern Deserts," 198 Science, 182-92.
Van de Kamp, Peter (1961), "Double Stars," 73 Publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, No.
435 (December), 239-409.
Van Seters, John (1964), 50 J. Egyptian Archeology, 13-23. Velikovsky, Immanuel (1945), "Theses for the
Reconstruction of Ancient History," Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana, New York.
---- (1946), "Cosmos Without Gravitation," Scripta Academica Hierosolymitana, New York.
---- (1950), Worlds in Collision, MacMillan (April), Doubleday (June) New York.
---- (1950), "Hoerbiger's Theory," New York Times, Sect. IV, p. 8, col. 6 (June 25).
---- (1951), "Answer to Professor Stewart," 200 Harper's Magazine (June), 63-6. ---- (1952), Ages in Chaos:
A Reconstruction of Ancient History from the Exodus to King Akhnaton, Doubleday, New York.
---- (1955), Earth in Upheaval, Doubleday, New York. ---- (1960), Oedipus and Akhnaton: Myth and History,
Doubleday, New York.
---- (1967), "Venus -- A Youthful Planet," XLI Yale Scientific Magazine, No. 7 (April), 8-11. Lloyd Motz,
"Velikovsky -- A Rebuttal," Immanuel Velikovsky, "A Rejoinder to Motz".
---- (1972), "When was the Lunar Surface Last Molten?" 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May), 19-20.
---- (1972a), "On Decoding Hawkins' 'Stonehenge Decoded, '" 2 Pens‚e, No. 2, 24-28.
---- (1973), "Astronomy and Chronology," 3 Pens‚e, No. 2 (Springs-Summer), 38-40.
---- (1973a), "Metallurgy and Chronology." 3 Pens‚e, No. 3 (Fall), 5-9.
---- (1973b), "Eclipses in Ancient Times." 3 Pens‚e, No. 3 (Fall), 20-1.
---- (1973c), "The Orientation of the Pyramids," 3 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter), 17.
---- (1973d) "Earth without a Moon," 3 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter), 25-6.
---- (1973e), "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," 3 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter), 31-2.
---- (1973-74), "Tiryns," 4 Pens‚e , No. 1 (Winter). 45-6. ---- (1973-74a), "Venus' Atmosphere," 4 Pens‚e ,
No. 4 (Winter), 31-6. ---- (1974), "My Challenge to Coventional Science," 4 Pens‚e , No. 2 (Spring), 10-4.
---- (1974-75), "The Scandal of Enkomi," 4 Pens‚e No. 5 21-23.
---- (1977), Peoples of the Sea, Doubleday, New York. ---- (1978), "Khima and Kesil," III Kronos, (Summer),
19-23. ---- (1978a), Ramses II, Doubleday, New York . Venturi, Franco (1947), L'Antiquit Svelata e l'Idea
Del Progress in N. A. Boulanger, 1722-1759, La Terza, Bari, Italy.
Vermeule, Emily (1967), "The Promise of Thera : A Bronze Age Pompeii." CCXX The Atlantic Monthly,
(December). 83-4, 89-94.
Vico, Giovanni Battista (1961), The New Science, trans. T. G. Bergin and Max H. Fish, (1937) Scienza Nuova;
A. Miliani, Padova (Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y.)
Viemeister, Peter E, (1961), The Lightning Book, Doubleday, New York.
Vikentiev, V. (1930), "The God 'Hemen, '" Recueill de Travaux Faculte des Letters, Universite Egyptienne,
Cairo.
Vilks, Gustavs & Peta J. Mudie (1978), "Early Deglaciation of the Labrador Shelf," 202 Science, (December
15), 1181-3.
Visher, S. S. (1925), "Tropical Cyclones and The Dispersal of Life from Island to Island in the Pacific,"
Smithsonian Institution Report, Washington, D. C.
Vita-Finzi, Claudio (1969), The Mediterranean Valleys: Geological Changes in Historical Times, The
University Press, Cambridge.
---- (1973), Recent Earth History, John Wiley & Sons, Halsted Press Division, New York. Vitaliano, Dorothy
B. (1969), "Plinian Eruptions, Earthquakes, and Santorin. A Review," Acta of Firest International Scientific
Congress on the Volcano of Thera.
---- (1973), Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins, Indiana U. Press, Bloomington & London.
Vitaliano, C. & D. (1974), "Volcanic Tephra on Crete," 78 Amer. J. of Archaeology, No. 1 (January), 19-24.
Vsekhsviatskii, S. K. (1962), "Comets, Small Bodies, and Problems of the Solar System," 74 Publications of
the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 106-15.
---- (1967), "New Evidence for the Eruptive Origin of Comets and Meteoric Matter," AJ Soviet Astronomy, No.
11 (November-December), 473-84; trans. from 44 Astronomicheskii Zhurnal, (May-June), 595-609.
---- (1976), "The Origin and Evolution of the Comets and other Small Bodies in the Solar System," II Kronos,
(November), 46-54.
Wainwright, G. A. (1959), "The Teresh, the Etruscans and Asia Minor," 9 Anatolian Studies, 197.
Wallis Max K. (1972), "Comet-like Interaction of Venus with the Solar wind," 3 Cosmic Electrodynamics,
(April), 45-59.
Warlow, P. (1978), "Geomagnetic Reversals," II J. of Physics, 2107-30.
Watson, David L. (1938), Scientists are Human, Kegan Paul, London.
Weber, Joseph (1969), "Evidence for Discovery of Gravitational Radiation," 22 Physical Review Letters, No.
24. (June 16), 1320-1324.
Webre, A. L. & P. H. Hess (1976), The Age of Cataclysm, G. Putnam's Sons New York. Wegener, Alfred (1924),
The Origins of Continents and Oceans, trans. from 3rd German ed. by J. G. A. Skerl, Methuen, London.
Weinstein, G. A. & H. N. Michael, "Radiocarbon dates from Akrotiri, Thera," 20 Archaeometry (1978) 203-9.
Wells, Dr. Calvin (1964), Bones, Bodies and Diseases, Praeger, New York
West, R. G. (1977), Pleistocene Geology and Biology, Longmans, New York.
Westropp, Hodder & C. Staniland Wake (1875), Ancient Symbol Worship : Influence of the Phallic Idea in the
Religions of Antiquity, J. W. Bouton, New York.
Whiston, William (1717), Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed, London.
---- (1722) New Theory of the Earth, Tooke 3rd ed., London. White, J. P. & J. F. O'Connell (1979),
"Australian Prehistory, 203 Science, (January 5), 21-8.
Whitehead, Alfred N. (1925), Science and the Modern World, New York.
Whitehouse David & Ruth (1975), Archaeological Atlas of the World, Freeman, San Francisco.
Wilkins, Harold T. (1956), Mysteries of Ancient South America, Citadel Press, Secaucus, N. J.
Williams, Emmett L. and R. J. Herdklotz (1977), "Solution and Deposition of Calcium Carbonate in a
Laboratory Situation II," 13 Creation Res. Soc. Q., (March), 192-9.
Williams, I. P. (1971), "Planetary Formation from Charged Bodies," 12 Astrophysics and Space Science, 165-
71.
Wilson, A. T. (1962), "Origin of Petroleum and the Composition of the Lunar Maria," Nature (October 6), 11-
13. Wilson, Clifford (1972), Crash Go the Chariots, Lancer, New York.
Wilson, J. Tuzo (1968), "Static or Mobil Earth: The Current Scientific Revolution," 112 Amer. Philos. Soc.,
No. 5 (October 17), 309-20.
Winchester, James H. (1972), "Safe Havens for Sea Life," in Marvels and Mysteries of the World Around Us,
Reader's Digest Assn., Pleasantvile, New York.
Wissler, C. and H. J. Spinder (1916), "The Pawnee Human Sacrifice to the Morningstar," 16 Amer. Museum J.,
49-56.
Wolfe, Irving (1975-76), "The Catastrophic Substructure of Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra'," I Kronos.
No. 3, 31-45; I No. 4 37-54.
---- (1978), "' Worlds in Collision' and the Prince of Denmark." II S. I. S. R. (Spring), 104-8.
Wolfe, John H. (1975), "Jupiter," 233 Scientific American, No. 3 (September), 130-141.
Wood, John A. (1975). "The Moon," in The Solar System, Freeman, San Francisco, 69-77.
Woronow, Alexander (1972), "Origin of the Martian Chaotic Terrains," 178 Science, (November 10), 649-50.
Wright, G. Frederick (1889), "The Idaho Find," 11 Amer. Antiquarian 379-81; repr. in Corliss, W. R.
Compiler, Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts (1978), Source Book
Projects, 458-60, Glen. Arm., Md. Wright, Robert C. (1972) "Effects of Volatility on Rubidium --Strontium
Dating," 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May), 20.
York, Derek (1972), "Lunar Rocks and Velikovsky's Claims," 2 Pens‚e, No. 2 (May) 18-19.
York, D. and R. M. Farquahar (1972), The Earth's Age an Geochronology, Pergamon Press, Oxford. Young, A. T.
(1973), "Are the Clouds of Venus Sulfuric Acid?" 18 Icarus, 564-82.
Young, Andrew & Louise (1975), "Venus," 233 Scientific American No. 3 (September), 70-81.
Zahan, Dominique (1958), "Etudes sur la Cosmologie des Dogons du Soudan Francais," 80 Notes Africaines, 108-
11.
Zammit, Sir T. (1930), "The Prehistoric Remains of the Maltese Islands," IV Antiquity, 55-9.
Zenner, F. E. (1959) The Pleistocene Period: Its Climate, Chronology and Faunal Successions, Hutchinson
Scientific and Technical London.
Zeuner, Friedrich E. (1946), Dating the Past, London. Zeylik, B. S. & E. Y. Scytmuratova, (1974), "Giant
Impact Structure in Central Kazakhstan and its Magma and Ore-Controlling Significance," Dok. Akad. Nauk,
SSSR, 218: 1, 167-70.
Ziegler, Jerry (1977), YHWH, Star Publishers, Morton, Illinois. ---- (1978), Indra Girt by Maruts, unpubl.
Manuscript. Zimmer, Heinrich (1946), "Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization," ed. by Joseph
Campbell, Bollingen Foundation, Washington D. C.
End of Chaos and Creation
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH
by Alfred de Grazia
EXOTERRESTRIAL FORCES
AND QUANTAVOLUTIONS IN THE EARTH SCIENCES
by
Alfred de Grazia
METRON PUBLICATIONS
PRINCETON, NJ, 08542,USA
Notes on the printed version of this book
Copyright (c) 1983 by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
No reproduction in any form of this book, in whole or in part
(except for brief quotation in critical articles or reviews),
may be made without written permission from the author.
First Edition 1983
Metron Publications
Box 1213
Princeton, N.J., U.S.A. 08542
Note:
The word 'exo-terrestrial' is used in preference to 'extraterrestrial.' It is more exact
etymologically, less romantic and sensational, and easier to pronounce.
The design on the jacket is one of several drawings by Leonardo da Vinci of the
"Deluge." He portrays the cataclysm as a terrific downbursting of water and whirlwinds.
"Nihil difficile naturae est, utique ubi in finem sui properat."
* Seneca
De Quaestiones Naturae
* "Nothing is difficult for nature.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH
TITLEPAGE
Foreword
1.Quantavolutions
PART I: ATMOSPHERICS
2.The Gaseous Complex
3.Hurricanes and Cyclones
4.Magnetism and Axial Tilts
5.Electricity
6.Cosmic and Terrestrial Lightning
7.Fire and Ash
PART II: EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS
8.Falling Dust and Stone
9.Gases, Poisons and Foods
10.Metals, Salt and Oil
11.Encounter and Collisions
PART III: HYDROLOGY
12.Water
13.Deluges
14.Floods and Tides
15.Ice Fields of the Earth
PART IV: CRUSTAL TURBULENCE
16.Earthquakes
17.Volcanism
18.Sinking and Rising Lands
19.Expansion and Contraction
PART V: RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS
20.Thrusting and Orogeny
21.Ocean Basins
22.Fractures and Cleavages
23.Canyons and Channels
24.Continental Tropism and Rafting
25.Sediments
PART VI: BIOSPHERICS
26.Fossil Deposits
27.Genesis and Extinction
28.Pandemonium
29.Spectres
PART VII: DIMENSIONS OF QUANTAVOLUTION
30.Intensity, Scope and Suddenness
31.The Recency of the Surface
Epilogue
Two Charts of Time
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE
QUANTAVOLUTIONS
Clarence King was the first Director of the United States Geological Survey. He was
liberally educated at Yale University and spent years in field work thereafter.
According to the historian Bancroft, he "had acquired a reputation and a position second
to no scientist in America." When he returned to lecture at the Sheffield Scientific
School of Yale in 1877, he argued against the prevailing opinions in geology and
evolution, insisting on the basis of his experiences and visions as a surveyor that the
Earth had been lately devastated. The belief in catastrophism, he said, in surprising
pre-Jungian language, was a true grasp of what had happened to the World. "Catastrophism
is therefore the survival of a terrible impression burned in upon the very substance of
human memory." [1]
Because catastrophism is a word that excites emotion and connotes only destruction, the
present work and the series to which it belongs prefers the more general idea implied in
the word quantavolution. The concept allows a more peaceful invasion of the realms of
gradualism, uniformitarianism, evolution, and anthropology.
I do not mean this book to be violent and bloodcurdling. We have far too much of such
stimulus today on television, in movies and in other books and magazines. I even go so
far as to say that the Earth system has been settling down -this without conclusive
evidence. But facts must be faced. The Earth has been severely traumatized in the memory
of mankind. In words that I have used before, any place on earth can be viewed as a
Quantavolutionary Column:
Any tube of one kilometer diameter circumscribed anywhere on the surface of the Earth,
which reaches as high as the end of the magnetosphere hundreds of miles upwards, and as
low as the upper mantle some thirty kilometers down, will have endured within the past
14,000 years radical changes in its absolute and relative orientations, its atmosphere,
its rocks and its biosphere, including any long-lived human cultures.
Several principles characterize the theories of quantavolution: Every major feature of
the Earth's surface is an effect of quantavolution; hence every feature figured in
evolutionary theory is translated more realistically into quantavolutionary theory.
The dominant shape of the most determining events in natural history is a logarithmic or
exponential curve where, from a pre-existing state, sharp change occurs, followed by a
steep exponential decline in the effect. After a time the curve of the effect flattens
out, and an illusion may arise that the processes under scrutiny have always been as
they are now.
The several descriptive spheres of natural activity: atmosphere, lithosphere,
hydrosphere and biosphere, transact regularly, but most emphatically and completely
under catastrophic impulsion.
Partly because of the greater force of inanimate being and partly because its own basic
nature is identical with the inanimate, the biosphere is as subject to quantavolutionary
experience and interpretation as the physical spheres.
The theory of quantavolution depends upon the evidence that catastrophes really
happened, for it is upon such abrupt, large-scale natural events that the quick leaping
changes of quantavolution in the holosphere depend. By the same token, a
quantavolutionary theory must show either that large spans of assigned time in natural
history are fictitious, or, if they occurred, little of the natural world changed during
their passage. Every chapter of our book is dedicated to these tasks, but several
general comments may be offered in advance.
If our minds were still strapped to the ideological framework of the seventeenth
century, there would be less of a problem in these regards. For we should normally
believe that great floods, fires and earthquakes had happened in ancient times, and
operated on such a vast scale that many "miracles" were associated with them. By
miracles, I mean such phenomena as the falling of edible material, manna or ambrosia,
from the sky, and the specters of enormous brilliant comets to which the Earth around us
responded like a giant animal coming alive.
No mental gymnastics would be required to see in the Earth's behavior an abundance of
evidence of at least the one great Flood of Noah in which the whole world was deluged
and inundated. Indeed, we should see so many marks of catastrophe that we would have to
invent several such floods and conflagrations, and comets to explain the complex piling
up of ruin upon ruin, fossil upon fossil, and their bizarre collection and combinations.
Practically every extensive ancient document and legend known to us from around the
world would repeat the same kind of catastrophic history and lend support to the
testimony of our eyes and the voice of religious and social authorities.
We might have been granted different, or additional, heroes of science, too: the brave
Spanish priests who rescued from certain destruction the iconography and writings of the
original inhabitants of the Americas; astronomers like William Whiston who perceived an
exoterrestrial cause for the Noachian deluge; anthropologists like Nicholas-Antoine
Boulanger who recognized the symptoms of catastrophic fear in the history of religion;
paleontologists such as Cuvier who discovered the layerings of catastrophe;
anthropological-biological explorers like Humboldt who accorded respect to aboriginal
accounts. Charles Lyell and his supporters thereupon might have had less success in
dominating natural history --even allowing that they were riding on the crest of English
world power, political power always being consciously or unconsciously imperialistic in
the dissemination of ideas.
Admittedly there is a world history of science to be written from the standpoint of the
sociology of knowledge as a first step in the opening-up of thought upon quantavolution.
We must nevertheless still provide in the here and now the evidence of catastrophes
called for earlier. Fortunately and yet unfortunately, the here and now is prejudicial
to quantavolution. Fortunate it is that mankind up to the time of the atom bomb has had
a respite from cosmic catastrophes for over two thousand years. However, the respite has
permitted a thoroughgoing sublimation of memories of general disaster even in religion,
all of which are rooted in proto-historic disaster, not excluding the Judaeo-Christian-
Islamic faiths. The greatest secret of religion today is the ostensible fact, too
obvious for continuous attention, that religion is originally founded upon the
terrifying behaviors of its founding gods. Jesus and Mahomet originate in the Books of
Moses, in the frightful times of Exodus when Yahweh became God of the Jews. The history
of religion as the history of catastrophes is also to be written.
Once more we return to the quantavolutionary evidence in the here and now. If science,
politics, and religion are using the relatively peaceful natural world of today to cover
up ancient catastrophes, how are the catastrophes to be uncovered? So far as research
goes, one must read between the lines of natural science and politico-religious
arguments, picking up here and there bits of knowledge and threats of argument.
Ultimately, these can amount to many thousands of pieces and a strong line of argument.
The mills of conventional science, originally churning out milk and honey, are beginning
to grind stones and salt, as in the ancient Scandinavian myth of the end of the world.
This trend is faster than generally believed. I would guess that the leading scientific
magazines such as Nature, Science, and Sky and Telescope have carried since 1945 an ever
increasing number of quantavolution-oriented articles, minute proportion to the total,
to be sure. But this number has been increasing exponentially in the past several years
and by the year 1993, I would expect that fully a quarter of all publications in natural
history will treat of quantavolutions.
Going farther, in geology and geophysics a number of scientists are deliberately
hypothesizing catastrophes at the boundaries of several geological ages and adducing old
and new evidence, especially by chemical examination of sediments, to prove that they
occurred. The space programs of U. S. A. and U. S. S. R. have naively reported ancient
catastrophes and on-going explosiveness wherever their vehicles have gone -Venus, Moon,
Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. Astrophysicists and astronomers are edging into
catastrophic explanations of the surfaces of the inner planets and the asteroidal belt
between Mars and Jupiter. Whereas in Charles Darwin's youth many scientists disbelieved
in meteors striking the Earth, today certain scientists are advancing serious proposals
for a space project aimed at exploding meteoroids that might appear to be on collision
courses with the Earth. Where once the evolution of coal beds was supposed to have
occupied million of years in the ample time depots of natural history, today at least
one authoritative textbook adopts great fires and floods as the most possible
explanation of the origin of coal [2] . Biology is moving swiftly, but biology (and in
the case of man -anthropology) as the history of life moves much more slowly, moves even
in reverse motion, sucking up ever greater draughts of time.
Still, Walter Sullivan, dean of science reporters, could declare in the New York Times
in December 1981 that serious challenges to the conventional tempo and mode of evolution
were arising; they came out of proof concerning links between catastrophe and
extinction/ genesis of species, out of the capacities of genetic engineering for
modeling new life forms, and from the growing tendency to interpret the rarity of so-
called missing links or transitional types as the non-existence of said types,
introducing therefore the alternative presumption that macroevolution (quantavolution)
introduced distinctly new forms suddenly. What Lyell wrote a hundred and fifty years
ago, "that no causes whatever have changed the earth except those that still do so under
the eyes of man," can be easily updated: today man's eyes are wider; they can see more
and can see into themselves.
The surface of the Earth that appears before our mind's eye is largely a crystallized
image, a set of snapshots of a whole too large to be embraced by a single thought -
valleys, plains, deserts, seas, mountains, clouds, jungles, islands, cities and more -
ten, twenty, thirty, until the mind tires and says 'enough' and that is our Earth image.
And, if we were quickly to call out words that we associate with each snapshot, we
should probably begin with a couple of descriptive terms like, 'tall' or 'dry' or
'water' or 'trees', but then somewhere in the early words of each list there would
perhaps be words like 'slow', 'long', 'evolving', 'the same', and 'old' that hint at
'long, slow processes in Nature. ' Without conscious awareness, we perceive and recite
the ideology of the prevailing science. Yet only when we imagine the cities of the Earth
are we describing a surface feature that is surely known to be very recent, because
these are manmade.
We mostly come from western countries whose dominating perspective on the Earth and its
history has been shaped by the victorious currents of scientific thought of the past two
centuries. Other peoples, and our own peoples in other times, and many of our own
peoples who do not participate in this phase of our culture, would not exhibit the same
responses. As they imagine the Earth's scenery, they would think in terms of 'creation'
and often use the very word. This would mean to them an animate god, the creative force.
And when they say 'long ago' they mean 'very lately' in geological terms, and the same
if they were to say 'in the beginning. '
Between the gradualists and the creationists are those whose outlook is
quantavolutionary, thinking that the Earth here and now presenting itself is both
natural and young. To them this Earth is a setting recently arranged by disasters.
Quantavolution has had a foot in both camps. Insofar as it claims the methods of science
and the empirical positivism of science, it is in the evolutionist camp. Insofar as it
adheres to facts and theories resembling the earliest stories of the great and small
religions, it is in the creationists camp.
The combination of ideas has never been given a full trial. When, in the early
nineteenth century, a few quantavolutionists were active, they were known as
catastrophists, or revolutionists, or saltationists. They were soon identified with the
enemy by the uniformitarian and gradual evolutionists and crushed in the same battles
that saw the defeat of the creationists. Let us identify ourselves as quantavolutionist
and, confronting the Earth's features, ask "How and when did what make what?" For
instance, "In the 1980's exploding and erupting magma rising under high pressure
fashioned the top of Mt. St. Helens as it appears today. "This is not much of an answer
but it suffices to introduce the complicated subject of this volcano.
If "what is made" has to be thought of as the whole surface of the Earth, large
categories are needed. So we adopt several arenas or spheres of activity, and place this
volcano under volcanoes in general, and volcanoes in general are part of the
lithosphere, inasmuch as what remains on the spot is now frozen into rock. Much of what
emerged from the Earth rose as ashes, and gases, as electric discharges, too, and water,
in a veritable cyclone.
For some purposes, then, Mt. St Helens could find a place under a second category, the
atmosphere, which was much affected locally by the eruption. The clouds of water vapor
ultimately fell upon the ground and the seas and circulated widely in the hydrosphere,
another principle arena for geophysical activity. Except for a few insects and plants,
the close-in biosphere was wiped out by the disaster. Some biosphere specimens of homo
sapiens cleverly moved to a safe distance and observed the events; a few persons were
killed. So in the instance, forces typical of the lithosphere changed a feature of the
lithosphere and affected the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere to a noticeable
extent.
There are not so many different crustal forms of the Earth that they cannot be
encompassed by the mind and by this book. The splendid and fascinating variety of nature
is in its details. We hope to treat the major features in a general way: volcanoes,
rifts, mountain ranges, ocean basins, etc. in the lithosphere; gases and electric
charges etc., in the atmosphere, but too, exoterrestrial intrusions by meteoroids,
electricity, gases and dust; further, the waters acting in the oceans, floods, tides,
rocks and rivers; and the biosphere of the plant and animal kingdoms. These spheres are
the general answer to the question: where does change on Earth occur? The features or
forms are the "what is made." As to "what makes them," we have to settle upon a
classification of forces or energies. Here we prefer a pragmatic approximation which is
close to the phenomena as experienced, so most of the terms are straight from the
newspapers: the volcano, though a feature, becomes also a force. Meteoroids as well, and
others, too. Most of the chapter titles convey an impression both of cause and effect.
Atmospherics are the workings of and in the atmosphere; hydrospherics of and in the
hydrosphere; and so on.
Had it seemed more useful, a highly abstract nomination of forces might have been
attempted; electromagnetic, inertial, 'weak' force, and the whole Earth described as
built from the working of forces beginning at the level of particle physics. Something
like this procedure is followed in an accompanying book (Solaria Binaria). But as
matters stand, here we have already enough abstraction for our needs and perhaps even
too much for the tastes of the reader.
The forceful phenomena that landscape the Earth and impress mankind go by a score of
names. Some surprising consequences attend even the seemingly ephemeral noises and
sights that attend natural operations; they are, to be sure, powerless effects in one
sense, but in another sense, as we shall see, they are forces in their own right. The
"music of the spheres" and "the wheels within wheels" are but ancient inherited words
fossilizing for us ancient phenomena of sound and sight. They help make man what he is
and this can be regarded as a criterion of a natural force; thus, what concerns us about
the atmosphere is partly that the air we breathe and the food we eat are governed by
atmospheric processes. Such are the homocentric beginnings of ideology, that which
inspires our curiosity about nature in the first place.
Otherwise, the categories of forces are commonplace enough and group themselves fairly
readily in the several spheres of natural operations. We name them as winds, hurricanes,
cyclones, lightning and other electrical flows; as meteoroids and fallouts of all kinds,
terrestrial and exoterrestrial in origin, including especially radiation. We call up as
forces too, the downpours of rain or cataclysms, the floods, tides, tsunamis, accretions
of ice, the ocean currents and chemical 'baths. ' And of the land we speak of
continental drift or rafting, of seismism, volcanism, the folding and thrusting of
mountains, erosion both fast and slow, the rising and sinking of land, the electrical
processes in the land as well as air. And, so far as concerns the biosphere, we are
interested in the mutational forces that speciate life forms and the human work that can
often transform the landscape and affect the atmosphere and oceans.
We may become most general in our language and conceive of a holosphere, all spheres
transacting among themselves. As in the case of Mt. St. Helens, effects of a natural
force are likely to be experienced in all spheres, immediately or with the passage of
time. An earth tremor will divert a stream, gather and discharge electricity, send the
animals fleeing in all directions, and set humans to praying. Seismism is neatly
numbered by intensity nowadays, and it is easy to test the holospheric principle by
observing effects in all spheres produced in association with a Richter scale 1 and,
say, 9, but allowing that this reading of 9 may have, in times before measurement and,
more, before conscious memory, reached hypothetical reading of 12 or 20. What would the
Richter-scale reading have been when the Indian sub-continent split off East Africa? Or
when the fabled island continent of Atlantis "sank in a day of furious trembling,"
according to Plato?
Now a criticism can be launched against quantavolutionism. India split from Africa, not
in a day, but by an exceedingly numerous series of a centimeters a year, as Arabia is
pulling away from Africa today -so it is argued. This might be measurable on the
ordinary reaches of the scale. So the event, as grand as it appears on maps, was not a
catastrophe; besides, the argument goes, it happened a hundred million years ago.
This kind of argument is bound to brew trouble. The "when" problem occurs in conjunction
with the "how" problem. The "when and how" are answered together. First, an up-strain
from below works gradually along a weak line of rock and slowly insinuates a crack which
lengthens and widens until India is separated from Africa and, impelled by mantle-
located forces of the same type, is slowly pushed towards Asia. Millions of years were
consumed in accomplishing the clear break, many millions more in rafting to Asia. In
such circumstances, the hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere would be hardly affected;
even the lithosphere would not be severely disturbed; there are always a few crumbs
falling when a slice is cut from a cake and slid across the table. All to the tune of
numbers 1 to 9 on the Richter scale.
Adversely, a catastrophe is asserted. India's separation from Africa was part of a
worldwide fracturing of the globe. It happened quickly, with a hard blow impacting
somewhere. Within hours, India was cut off and moving rapidly through watery wastes
lately occupied by other lands that, too, were dispersed and moving eastwards. Not only
was the event consummated suddenly, but it happened lately -thousands, not many millions
of years in the past. So goes the quantavolutionary argument. We shall join the argument
again and again in the chapters to come.
A classic case of holospherics is the much-studied and well-discussed theory of world-
disaster befalling about the year 1450 B. C. at the instigation of a great comet. Here I
shall repeat only the hypotheses, as I have stated them elsewhere, suggesting that the
reader may resort to my Chaos and Creation and God's Fire: Moses and the Management of
Exodus for a fuller account, or to the famed book of Velikovsky called Worlds in
Collision and the debates surrounding it [3] . In regard to that fateful year, and
throughout the world, the quantavolutionary hypotheses may be stated as follows:
(a) No geophysical feature or process that manifested a sensible form then, and which is
capable of exhibiting the effects of discontinuous stress when examined by current
geophysical techniques, will fail to show that such stress occurred.
(b) No record of astronomical events available for the period around that year will
present astral, planetary, or solar movements as unchanged or uniformly changing from
before to after the year.
(c) No retroactive calculation or index (such as of carbon 14 levels) or historical
reference will fail to show atmospheric turbulence and atmospherically implicated
irregularities.
(d) No survey of biological history around this year can deny highly unusual animal and
human behavior and widespread destruction in the plant and animal kingdom, including
agriculture.
(e) No graphic, legendary, or archaeological account will produce a human settlement in
the world that escaped heavy destruction from natural causes.
(f) No religious temple that was constructed anywhere beforehand and rebuilt thereafter
shows the same astronomical orientation before and after.
(g) No god passed through this year without change of status, rites, family relations,
and serious personal incident, and, correspondingly, all religions changed.
(h) No culture complex can be shown to have avoided, with or without detectable hiatus,
significant changes in institutions, rulership, and artifacts.
(i) No institution, behavioral pattern, and natural setting existing today, if its
history is complete, will fail to recall the effects of the events of these times.
In brief, no sphere of existence escaped intense experiences and transactions with other
spheres in the quantavolution of the times. All quantavolutions imply heavy holospheric
events. For periods before human race had quantavoluted (the subject of my work, Homo
Schizo I), anthropological spheres of existence would, of course, be excluded.
It will be appreciated that, under evolutionary theory, holospherics tend to be less
stressed. When large effects are reduced by time to minute causes, the side-effects are
proportionately and even exponentially reduced. The more intense and sudden the event,
the more spheres will be transacting. The larger the scale of an event, too, the more
spheres will enter the action.
Suppose the Earth's rotational speed were to be slowed. This is a mighty event and takes
a mighty force; Earth's rotational energy is calculated at 10 36 ergs. Yet it has been
observed (by Danton) to happen recently, if only for a millisecond. No account of effect
has yet been rendered; perhaps the effects were immeasurably small, or perhaps the
reaction of scientists were too slow. If large solar flares caused the retardation, as
seems to have been the case, worse flares or other causes might produce a larger
rotational lapse, perhaps a second of time would be lost; perhaps then a minute; why not
an hour? -Hypotheticals are cheap. The effects of lengthening the slowdown would be
heavy. Every sphere of Earth, every force, would be activated in using up the energy
surrendered by Earth in the deceleration. One would have holospherics on a grand scale.
Ordinary language, the most archaic religious language, and scientific language could
each provide the description required.
Now the quantavolutionist reverses the logic as well. We say, "the more affected the
holosphere, the greater the force to be sought." The effects are proportional to the
original force. When the effects exceed (or are theoretically calculated as having
exceeded) a certain intensity, we must even go beyond the Earth into cosmic forces
drastically simplifying. Only in the supra-terrestrial arena, the planetary and galactic
systems, are to be found forces large enough to do the Earth what appears to have been
done. Only cosmically can truly great holospheric transactions be generated.
One can realize, then, the importance of the "when" and "how long." To say "speedy
reactions" is to invite ultimately the cosmos in to explain our terrestrial phenomena.
To say "slow reactions" is to keep the Earth within its cocoon in space, traveling
evenly and safely. If the Alps tower above Europe, some force must have pushed then up.
If the Alps are to arise suddenly, then something besides earthly forces are behind the
event. We move into the cosmic realm. If the Alps are to arise over a great many
millennia, then the force might be generated in energy measures conceivable from some
mysterious, but still earthly, internal force.
Notes (Chapter One: Quantavolutions)
1. Scientific American, Supplement N 80, 14 July 1877, 1276.
2. Wilfrid Francis, Coal, Its Formation and Composition, 2nd ed., London: Arnold, 1961,
625,
3. (a) Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publications, 198 1; (b) ibid.: 1982; New York:
Macmillan, 1950; and see the files of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review
hereafter SISR, Kronos, and PensÚe magazine, passim.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWO
THE GASEOUS COMPLEX
The atmosphere of Earth is so delicate that most sudden and violent transactions in
space or on Earth transform its constituents and their behavior. Considering what is to
come in this book by way of demonstrating terrestrial catastrophes, one may wonder how
it happens that life has survived five thousand, much less five billion years. The very
fragility of the aura around us bespeaks the recency of the atmosphere as we know it.
For example, in-coming cosmic particles collide with atoms of the atmosphere, giving off
neutrons that interact with nitrogen to make carbon 14. Then C14 couples with oxygen to
form carbon dioxide, and is often ingested by plants and passed along to animals through
the plants. When any plant or animal (living from plants) dies, it ceases to acquire C14
and the C14, which is radiogenic, decays at a constant rate into nitrogen. In the short
term, the process is fairly regular. The ratio, in a specimen, of C14 to C12, a non-
decaying type of carbon, can be used to date its decease. But lightning, smoke, dust,
explosions, vapors and cosmic particle flux can alter the density of C14 in the
atmosphere, hence in organic material.
Soviet investigators found C14 deviations in connection with galactic supernovas of the
years 1054 and 1700 [1] . Judging by the C14/ C12 ratio in annual tree rings in or
about the year 1908, when the Exoterrestrial Tunguska body exploded with heavy local
effect in Siberia, 1% less of the C14 was available in that year by comparison with the
year before and after [2] . In another case, during a period called the Maunder
Minimum, 1645 to 1715, when the Sun exhibited no sunspots and the Earth was gripped by a
"Little Ice Age," the C14 found in tree rings of the period averaged 20% more than
before and after [3] . Grave events disturbed the atmosphere on other occasions. Between
3200 and 3700 B. C. and in the eighth and fifteenth centuries B. C. the quantity of C14
in the air fluctuated heavily [4] .
A theoretical calculation by Cook that retrogressively computed the presence of C14 in
the atmosphere, basing itself on a presently observed slight built-up of the gas,
concluded that today's volume of C14 would have had to originate from a zero point
13,000 years ago. Why the rate would decrease to zero around that date has been
interpreted as an indication of an extremely short Earth history; we here regard the
hypothetical absence of C14 around that time as owing to several factors, most
importantly (a) the presence of a plenum of gases incomparably more impenetrable by
cosmic radiation that the present atmosphere, (b) a stronger geomagnetic shielding
produced by a stronger geomagnetic field than exists today, and (c) exoterrestrially
produced turbulence in the Earth's gaseous complex [5] . The inference here would be
that major events before that time might have reconstituted the atmosphere, at which
time C14 would have begun to accumulate.
Obviously C14's history indicates that other atmospheric components would not have
escaped turbulent experiences. Carbon dioxide in the air fluctuates with industrial and
domestic combustion. The amount in the air is increasing (it is some .03% of the
atmospheric mass) and concern is expressed that the Earth's climate may change so as put
much of the biosphere in jeopardy [6] . So also it has been surmised by students of the
ozone (O3) constituent of the upper atmosphere that its destruction as a particle shield
by aerosol discharges on Earth would engender high risks of biosphere damage [7] . All
of this may happen within the next century or two.
Very similar types of blue-green algae live under the skins of rocks in the frigid
Antartic desert and in the heat of the Sahara [8] . Abyssal organisms live beyond the
reach of light. The limits of humans and their predecessors are much more narrow,
whether we speak of oxygen or a dozen other basic requirements. (Later we shall examine
the claim that simple organisms can traverse and inhabit space-conveyed meteoritic
vehicles even "on their own.") Humans have been known to acclimatize themselves to high
altitudes with low oxygen and low barometric pressure [9] . But beyond 20,000 feet, the
human dies. Pure oxygen is, of course, a poison and an explosive.
There is little certainty about the history of the atmosphere, even during human times
[10] . The primeval air must have contained some molecular oxygen (O2) for the lung-
breathers. Not too much lest the air catch fire. Legends do report "world-burnings,"
that Donnelly and Velikovsky, for instance, attribute to hydrogen gas pockets of
exoterrestrial origin. Nitrogen might not be needed but the air must then also have held
much other gas; for terrestrial life forms are constructed to deal with outside
pressures. The diaphragm and chest muscles are made to operate as a bellows sucking the
oxygenated air into the lungs and exhaling it with carbon dioxide. A pressure gradient
must be accommodated between the external air and the internal metabolism. Yet if the
air had been too dense, creatures such as humans would be too burdened by it to move
about.
Considerable leeway is permitted for the amounts of inhalable oxygen, the mixes of gases
inhaled (barring poisonous gases such as carbon monoxide), the atmospheric density
(pressure) and degree of vaporization, the kinds and amounts of radiation such as
ultraviolet rays, temperature (from 40 to 100 Fahrenheit as a milieu), and luminosity of
the environment. Dew will suffice in place of other freshwater sources. Edible plants or
animals, including one's own species in extremis, must be available, and these, of
course, are atmosphere-dependent too. The present human cannot survive in the highest
mountain altitudes or underwater without artifices.
Given the prolific potential of human reproduction, the atmosphere might have been
severely ravaged and changed without destroying utterly the species. The human body is
built upon and functions with the basic elements of nature. It is catastrophised and by
the very fact catastrophe-proofed to some degree. Its incubating young are deeply
encased and easily transportable. What it cannot cope with internally it seeks to escape
by rapid mobility and exponential rates of reproduction. The atmosphere presently
consists of a changing mix of gases and vapors that moves from surface levels upwards to
where the magnetosphere ends at any moment of measurement. What is beyond may be called
outer space, where space plasmas, solar winds, cosmic particles, and meteoritic material
play about in some disorder.
The atmosphere itself is a model of disorder. It is continuously moving and
reorganizing. Everyday its pressure goes up and down. About 99% of its mass blankets the
globe at under 19 miles of altitude. This consists of the gases, molecular nitrogen(
78%), molecular oxygen (21%) argon (1%) and carbon dioxide (. 03%). Water vapors rarely
reach 1% of the total: normally, half of the globe is covered by clouds, which form,
reform, and discharge their vapors almost entirely within six miles of the surface.
Below the clouds hang most of the "pollutants" of industry, consumption, war, and
transportation. But some of this may rise so high as to threaten the layer of ozone, a
poisonous triple-atom oxygen molecule (O3), which, so long as it stays out of the animal
system, performs a vital function in stopping solar ultraviolet rays from reaching the
animals.
As one moves up the atmospheric column from ground-zero one passes successively through
"belts." These are statistical entities, not the usually discontinuous strata of the
lithosphere. The sixty-mile homosphere is divided into troposphere, stratosphere, and
mesosphere. Then occurs a heterosphere, and, at around 300 miles, an exosphere. The
homosphere is a molecular region where nitrogen and oxygen are the principal actors; but
at bottom are cloud and pollutant behaviors and at the top occur some vigorous
radiation, dissociation of molecules, formation of hydrogen compounds, and ionization.
In the heterosphere, atomic oxygen, helium and hydrogen are the abundant elements. Some
of the helium and hydrogen is on its way into farther space, but is replaced, it is
believed, to produce an equilibrium. However, Melvin Cook, a quantavolutionary
geophysicist, has asked, "Where is the Earth's Radiogenic Helium?" [11] . Cosmic-ray
sources are alleged to generate helium at 3x10 9 g/ year. The same amount is estimated
to be generated from the uranium and thorium in rocks of the lithosphere. With an Earth
age of 5x10 9 years, about 10 20 grams of helium should have passed into the atmosphere
by now. The atmosphere contains 3.5x10 15 grams of helium-4; if a steady state, it must
have passed out through the exosphere the equivalent of the aforesaid 10 20 grams.
However helium-4 does not concentrate in the upper atmosphere significantly and "at the
escape temperature of 1500 K at the base of exosphere, the rate of escape of helium-4
would be only about 600 g/ year, or only about 10 -7 as great as the replenishment rate
from the lithosphere." Only by raising temperatures at the base of the exosphere by
thousands of degrees could the helium be allowed to escape in sufficient quantities to
permit equilibrium. This can be conceived as possible only by means of a number of
immense solar storms that would wreak havoc on Earth or, worse, by large-body encounters
wrecking the atmosphere. Cook suggests that the helium-4 is still increasing; the
atmosphere is not in equilibrium; and if retrocalculated, a recent beginning or
reconstruction of the atmosphere must be confronted.
Geophysicists and meteorologists nevertheless retain the concept of the atmosphere as a
whole being in equilibrium. This is probably not so, even in the short run of a thousand
years. The idea is difficult as commonsense, considering that all the way from sea level
into outer space the atmospheric column is in continuous flux. It is agitated and fed
from the bowels of the Earth with heat, vapor, etc. and bombarded topside by elemental
particles of all kinds. Motion is continuous, too, up and down the column and then
horizontally with winds produced by thermal changes, such as the seasons produce, and
rotational effect that, for instance, disturb the atmosphere via surface irregularities
such as mountains and basins.
Indeed, equilibrium of the atmosphere is probably more of a hope than a fact. What makes
the hope into a "fact" is, not surprisingly, the uniformitarian conviction that today's
actors and roles are unchanged from eons ago. Given hundred of million of years when
animals and plants have been surviving, then the mix of vapors, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon
dioxide, argon, ozone, and radiation must have been what they are today. And that spells
equilibrium.
The belief becomes so strong that meteorologists, possessed of the "fact" of atmospheric
equilibrium, can even take their turns at guarding the portals of uniformitarianism,
assuring other scientists that meteorology, too, proves the long-enduring stability of
present-day conditions. At the same time, ironically, meteorologists are leaders in the
campaign to save the world from the atmospheric ravages produced by a few years of
industrialism, atom bombs, and aerosol discharges.
A quantavolutionist may share heartily the meteorologists' fear of the poisoning of our
present atmosphere. The quantavolutionist would at the same time point out the extreme
improbability of the atmosphere's having been preserved intact-free from radical changes
and poisons over long periods of time. Unless, of course, there were, before the present
atmospheric system came about, some ancestral system that in its nature involved a true
long-term equilibrium.
It is generally admitted that the sources of nitrogen and oxygen of the air are
uncertain and disputed. Further, the sources of water and salt are unknown. Too, all of
the minor gases of the atmosphere are of mysterious origin: neon, helium, methane,
krypton, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, and xenon. And some has mysteriously "disappeared;"
neon "should be" far more abundant, for example.
Oxygen is supposed to have been exhaled from plants, permitting thus the beginnings of
animal life. Orthodoxy puts this "happening" at over a billion years ago. Perhaps the
only "hard" evidence for the event is the discovery of a non-oxidized core of uranium
and sulphur in Kenya, the presumption being that there was little or no molecular oxygen
with which the elements could react when the rock was formed. Yet by this kind of
reckoning, it is hard, too, to explain fossils of 3.1 billion-year-old bacteria [12] .
It has long been permissible to speculate that the components of the air came from the
"primordial melt," a fiction of science performing very much the same role as the
fiction of "the end of the Ice Ages." One may as well speculate that they came from
space, since practically every element has been identified within the magnetosphere of
Earth.
There are indications that the Earth may have evolved in a binary system such as I have
described in Chaos and Creation and, with Earl R. Milton, in Solaria Binaria. An
electrical axis, carrying an arc or current between the Sun and its small and less
radiant binary partner, would be a more durable and gently changing source of radiation
and chemical energies than the direct glare of the sun today. A magnetic gaseous tube
rotating around the axis would provide a full complement of chemical elements, again in
a highly stable medium that so minor a product as aerosol sprays could not disrupt. It
would be making large quantities of all the substances whose manufacture in the small
atmospheric and petrological economy of "Spaceship Earth" has been hard to explain.
Atmospheric pressures, too, would be stable. Winds would be largely absent, illumination
fairly constant.
It should be permissible to speculate that the magnetic gas tube stretching between the
binary's two principals was the source of the Earth's atmosphere. Most of the binary
tube gases would have escaped into space with the decline and disappearance of the axial
current. The Earth then may be surviving upon the fragment of the gases that its
electric-gravitational field retained. The atmosphere now may be only a remanent halo.
The variety and abundance of the atmospheric gases are what would be expected according
to the gas tube model. A long-time continuity of the atmosphere and biosphere would have
been possible; life could have begun long ages ago (or recently) and enjoyed the same
relationships it now enjoys with oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and salts. The fragile
ozone layer was entirely missing, without ill effects, because the Sun and galaxy were
not striking directly upon the Earth. Indeed, there would be little need for a
stratified, local Earth atmosphere. The Earth could change position along the central
axis without losing its atmospheric and thermal equilibrium. In the early declining
period of the axial current, the pollutant of meteoroid or large-body contacts could be
dissipated into the gas tube environment, and important losses replaced from the same
source. Even the effects of an eruption of the Moon from the Pacific Basin would be
cushioned by the binary atmosphere.
The postulated magnetic tube would be randomly composed. Its gases would be arranged
with the lighter elements nearer the axial current, heavier elements in the middle;
simple compounds would occur toward the boundary of the tube, where the planets were
rotating. The heavy-bodied planets would accrete their special atmospheres within the
tube, even while rotating magnetically around the axial current. But the difference
between the terrestrial atmosphere and the tube atmosphere would be far less than
between the Earth's atmosphere and its heterosphere or outer space today.
It is understandable, under these postulates, how the Earth's atmosphere, so fragile,
might have existed for a considerable period of time. Given the evidences of
catastrophes on Earth, I do not see how the atmosphere could have survived without large
external atmospheric background. Still the Earth was lucky to escape the fate of Mars,
Mercury and possibly other inner planets, whose atmospheres were almost entirely
stripped; Venus, with an infernally hot and turbulent atmosphere, was an exception, but
a recent arrival from Jupiter. All of this is possible, and dealt with in Chaos and
Creation and Solaria Binaria. Scientific opinion has slowly liberalized in respect to
new models. By 1972 a scientist might write offhandedly in Nature magazine that "major
reorganizations of the solar system are no longer regarded as ridiculous." [13]
Recently, dendrochronologists, historians, meteorologists, radiocarbon dating
specialists, and astronomers combined in a most unusual enterprise. They delivered a
blow to the theory of the constant Sun. John A. Eddy of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research conveyed the message: "We've shattered the Principle of
Uniformitarianism for the Sun." [14] He presented evidence mentioned earlier, showing
that for 70 years between 1645 and 1715 A. D. sunspots were almost entirely absent. It
proved to be a period of bitter prolonged winters, when Londoners walked across an iced-
over Thames River, when the Northern Lights hardly displayed themselves, and when the
11-year sun-spot cycle was absent. Lapses of the same kind were uncovered in other
historical periods.
Other conditions may be expected to vary with sunspots -solar flares, ozone density,
radiation diminution, precipitation, magnetic fields, atmospheric turbulence, famines
and perhaps even human energy and inventiveness. No doubt the last will be among the
most difficult to prove. No simple search of the annals of culture will reveal a closely
related trend.
Stretching the uniformitarian thesis, more severe storms may be conjectured for pre-
historic times, in an attempt to keep the planetary bodies in place, eliminate cometary
encounters and still explain catastrophes upon Earth. Thus Harlow Shapley, who led some
scientists in an attack upon Velikovsky's catastrophism in 1950, himself had in 1935
proposed a solar nova as the explosive generator of space X-rays.
Hurricanes, volcanism, interrupted rotation, ozone destruction, ice ages, geomagnetic
field reversals, biological extinctions and even explosions of cometary and
meteorological material on Earth can be rationalized up to a point as effects of solar
misbehavior. Such a theory is possible, but it would be like hiring a thief to catch a
thief. For the Sun would then become sole factor in quantavolutions, in the effort to
exclude other bodies from trespassing upon Earth. As we shall see, there is too much
evidence of other operative factors to assign the whole job of quantavolutions to the
Sun, even though, as a matter of fact, the Sun is the original sire of quantavolution in
the solar system, according to the model of Solaria Binaria, mentioned above, which
begins history with a nova of the Sun.
According to the quantavolutionary theory here presented, solar behavior has exhibited
only effects of a moderate kind since its gradual emergence as a distinct bright image
some thousands of years ago. Before then, the Sun was hidden or a bright prominence in
the cloudy firmament. Its indirect influence was of course always paramount. But should
the counter-thesis be proposed that the Sun was responsible directly for earthly
catastrophes, it would have to be said that its "uniformitarianism," though spotty, was
nevertheless much greater than that of the planetary family descended from the Sun's
binary partner, which I have called Super-Uranus after the Greco-Roman first Heavenly
Father.
The sunspots may be a trailing-off effect of the exhaustion of the electrical current
and magnetic tube. That is, they may be fairly regular attempts of electricity to jump
the gap between the Sun and its binary. In such a case, the sunspots should become less
intense and more sporadic with the passage of time, like the plasmoids and bolts of
Jupiter.
Climate is the typical behavior of the atmosphere over any geological column during a
longish time. Every island, they say in the Caribbean and Aegean Seas, has its own
climate; "mini-climate" would be precise. More expansively, we can talk of a regional
climate or a global climate. Too, we shall soon have a "cosmic climate," since evidence
is fast accumulating of solar-planetary transactions on a continuing climatic basis.
Earthquakes, volcanism, winds, precipitation, magnetic fields, temperatures, electric
currents and the biosphere transact in climatic affairs.
One does not get this sense of a welter and complex of factors in going far back by
conventional chronology. Rather one has the sense that climates have swirled around in
multiform changes in the Quaternary period but then somehow climates withdraw into the
background while we are presented a broad succession of ages in the tens of millions of
years each, when life changed very slowly and conditions of biological survival and
adaptation must have been constant over long periods of time. One is privileged to view
charts in which paleontological developments occur at the slowest imaginable pace, with
only a dozen or so boundary lines where, certainly, it is given that climates changed
and new names are provided -Devonian, Carboniferous, and so on. Did climates, with all
the factors that engender them, stand still for these long periods in rigid constancy?
This would be unbelievable. If in between the major boundaries of epochs, climates
changed as they have in the brief recent past of the Quaternary, then the
paleontological and geological record is far too short, or contains very little
information. In sum, either the world has changed and the recent past speeds up wildly
in comparison with the remote past, or else the remote past is still quite unknown
despite its diligent study over two centuries by numerous disciplines and thousands of
scholars.
Hence climatology lends us a great doubt when we imagine it fitting to the long past
ages, and many doubts when we try to use it for the turbulent recent times. A great many
works on pre-history try to associate events with climatic changes. Considering that
geologists have failed to establish confidence in climatic boundaries and periods, the
pre-historian's failure is predictable.
For instance, classicist Rhys-Carpenter has endeavored to explain as a climatic
worsening over generations the end of the Mycenean (Greek) civilization and the
subsequent so-called "Dark Ages" (an invented period of several hundred years to evade
evidence of catastrophes in the eighth and seventh centuries B. C. and to accommodate
Greek to Egyptian chronology, the later itself wrong by centuries) [15] . Cities were
abandoned in the face of desiccation; new hot, dry prevailing winds made impossible the
carrying on of their culture.
To believe him, however, one must have a reason why the flowering of Greek culture
occurred under the same climatic conditions later on. One must also discount the many
evidences of natural destruction by fire and earthquake of the Mycenean centers [16] .
One must cling to a spurious Egyptian chronology, which gives 500 years to Greek and
Mediterranean history that, since nothing happened, are not needed [17] . Further,
catastrophic changes in winds and precipitation have a cause; that cause can only be
celestial changes, whether by introduction of new Earth motions and land forms, or by
solar-system particle-outputs. If the Alaskan musk contains the swept-in plant and
animal life of large areas and the species it contains are modern, then one should
suspect that sooner or later, as Hibben has opined, humans, even clothed and deep-
frozen, should turn up by accident or deliberate excavation. Already, several pre-" Ice
Age" settlements have been uncovered within the arctic circle by Americans and Russians.
Rodents and mammoths froze quickly while eating warm-weather plants. How abrupt was the
climatic change that killed them is unreported, if known. The polar regions were
recently near-tropical in climate and ecology [18] .
The bafflement of archaeologists over climate is understandable. They follow the
evolutionists. But the attic of climatic evolutionism is stuffed with junk. When a
modish dress does not suit the facts, an old-fashioned one is tried on.
For example, the heat of the Earth has been described in numerous ways over the past two
hundred years; hence, without ostracism, one may propose that the Earth has an enormous
internal heat or is cool -whichever advances one's theory of climates. Too, the ages of
the Earth and its geological periods have been estimated with tens and hundreds of
millions of years of variance and leeway, so that evidence of climatic shift can often
be placed in time wherever it will fit the theory at hand. And the melting of the ice
sheets can proceed rapidly or slowly, as needed for a particular job of explanation.
Uniformitarians employ typically six mechanics of climatic change :
(a) a cooling of the Earth's interior over eons of time. (Since this should have ended
long ago, with the Earth's interior stabilized, a radioactivity of deep rocks is now
believed to be an incessant source of heat from below.)
(b) a crawling up and crawling back of ice owing to pronounced cyclical solar activity
(which has lately received some support by the aforementioned "Maunder Minimum" and
sunspot studies.) (c) a reorientation of prevailing winds due to a manmade or artificial
desiccation of lands, or to ice movements or Earth cooling (as above.)
(d) the "inches-per-century" drift of the continents from cold to hot places or vice-
versa.
(e) heavy multiple volcanism, called upon to supply the heat for the vaporizing of
waters that then proceed northward and drop upon the polar areas as snow and ice.
(f) changes in solar activity, whereby a period of diminished or augmented sunspots will
produce cold weather or stormy weather.
That all of these are explanations inadequate to explain even holocene climatic change
is evident in the controversies and the contradictions continually appearing. Geologist
Vita-Finzi practically abandons his search for climatic benchmarks in his authoritative
work on the holocene. Lacking the engine of a general theory and a time-table to run it
on, freightcars may be switched around at will. In one place he is driven to remark: "On
the assumption that every yodel in the Alps had its echo on the coast, pebble bands are
equated with glacial episodes, truant beds are eroded away, and the uplift of mountains
is delayed to justify the absence of glacial features." [19] He prays that the
radiochronometrists will rescue the situation. But I have already concluded in my
analysis of tests of time, published in Chaos and Creation, that a rescue must come from
elsewhere.
Perhaps a quantavolutionary scheme may do better. It is not written in some law that
enough time must be allowed to let humans get away, bag and baggage, from the changing
air. Every catastrophe which they underwent would demand a climatic response as one of
its effects. Hence there may have been a score of global shifts in climate within a
14,000 year holocene period.
Certainly the boundaries of the ages would point to climatic change. The onslaughts of
the early holocene mark a paramount boundary. There came destruction of a worldwide
greenhouse regime and the beginnings of mountain ranges, huge deserts, stripped shield
rock, high plateaus, oceans and their currents, and biosphere revolution.
This Pleistocene-Holocene boundary climax is euphemistically carried in the logbook of
the sciences as "the end of the Ice Ages". I treat it as the Lunarian climax in Chaos
and Creation, because of its apparent connection with the advent of the Moon. Hundreds
of titles from many fields are dedicated to it. In oceanography, Emiliani extracts from
Gulf of Mexico bottom cores the information that a fresh water avalanche descended upon
the basin some 11,500 years ago and he wonders whether this was from a cataclysm such as
sank the legendary continent of Atlantis. Tree pollen changed abruptly in the Great
Lakes region about 10,000 years ago, according to J. G. Ogden III. "The only mechanism
sufficient to produce a change of the kind described here would therefore appear to be a
rapid and dramatic change in temperature and/ or precipitation." [20]
Oceanographers Broeoker, Ewing, and Heezing gather ocean-bed "Evidence for an Abrupt
Change in Climate Close to 11,000 Years Ago." [21] Vita-Finzi reports that a group of
geosols, or weathering profiles, ended their development about 12,000 years ago; the
date is proposed as the holocene beginning for the U. S. A. [22] . From Israel, paleo-
zoologist Joseph Heller writes of the faunal remains of a Kebaran Site on Mount Carmel
[23] :
What then was the cause of the post-Natufian size crash? (9000-10,000 B. C.) The fact
that the crash occurred in certain carnivores and rodents simultaneously suggests that
it was not causally related to phases in the evolution of human cultures. Rather this
simultaneous dwarfing favors climatic interpretation. Drastic climatic changes occurred
in various parts of the world towards the end of the Pleistocene about 12,000 years ago.
In tropical Africa, India, South America and Australia, conditions that were extremely
arid before 12,500 B. P. suddenly gave way to increase in humidity.
It is generally accepted by pre-historians of Europe that the end of the Pleistocene Ice
Ages brought disaster to human races and cultures. The finding is surprising,
considering that the warmer the climate, the more abundant the biosphere should be. But
if catastrophes were involved, the reduction and retardation would be understandable,
indeed demanded.
Ruins of cultures are found in many a harsh climate of the world, in deserts, on high
plateaus, amidst perma-frost, and in steaming jungles. (Let us exclude, under the seas,
which, after all, involved a climatic change, one which we shall discuss later on.)
When archaeologists and pre-historians cannot explain the death of a culture by enemy
invasion, plague, or economic decline, they are prone to seek out a change of climate.
But what they seek out is a uniformitarian or gradual change of prevailing winds,
rainfall, and temperature. Centuries, if not millennia, are invoked to pursue the death
agonies of a culture.
The quantavolutionist tackles the same problem with a markedly different concept,
catastrophic climatic change. With the images in mind of an aboriginal greenhouse world
afforded by many sources, he sees in every desert a likely disaster, every tall plateau
another one, under frozen arctic shores still another.
For the quantavolutionist, too, the mechanisms of explanation are available, they are
high-energy forces as provoked possibly by changes in the Earth's motion, a change of
its orbital path around the Sun, a shift of its angle of inclination to the plane of the
ecliptic (axial tilt), and a movement of its crustal shell (continental displacement).
They include, further, a bombardment or discharge of particles, including cosmic
electricity, affecting the atmosphere and magnetosphere that stretches even now beyond
the Moon. And deluges of salt, oil and other dense material that spoils the land.
With all of this, it would seem that the quantavolutionist would necessarily bungle more
than the uniformitarian in describing the natural history of climatic change. He is
using, it seems, many more variables, and the more the variables, the more complicated
the solution of a problem. However, the quantavolutionist has two sources of
encouragement, he can see how futile are the explanations of the conventional
climatologists of the natural history of climate. And the evidence appears to fall into
the line of this theory with surprising ease.
The uniformitarians, in attempting to explain climate by reducing chances of natural
catastrophes to a near-zero constant, become bogged down in a morass of special
climates; every way they turn they discover new and different climates. They cannot cope
with the possibility that in the sudden prelude and aftermath of disaster, short-term
climates by the hundreds are created around the world; deserts are deluged, jungles are
desiccated, lands are flooded, lands rise, winds change sharply, soils are turned over,
the biosphere is transformed; if late in time, cultures terminate, or spring up, or
react eccentrically. Nor can they allow that, if several global catastrophes may have
occurred in four billion years, several might have occurred in ten thousand year, each
transforming atmosphere and climate.
A Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution team reported in the Scientific American of March
1982 a set of discoveries which threatens the prevailing theory that oceanic waters are
regionally stable, that regional bottoms reflect this aquatic stability, and that world
climates can be determined by fossil and chemical balances of the bottom content. Eddies
of the great oceanic currents such as the Gulf Stream occasionally break off from these
gigantic oceanic flows and set up columnar rings of water that can reach 300 kilometers
in diameter, even in this relatively placid age, and endure for 18 months or more. The
ring-waters differ significantly in salinity, oxygen content, and temperature from their
surroundings. Biological assemblages follow suit. Sedimentation rates are also a
function of current velocity. Under such conditions, given several thousand, let alone
several hundred million, years false climates can be expected to be inferred practically
everywhere. Misleading strata will be exceedingly numerous. Once more, we must warn
against the many theoretical structures of climate, hydrology, chronology and
paleontology that interlock in varying degrees of poorness of fit. These findings by the
Woods Hole scientists may effectively administer the coup de grace to the whole lot of
them.
But we must not be carried away with the holistic interplay of factors before we have
explained them. We may content ourselves at this point with three tentative, even
sceptical, remarks. The atmosphere is not stable and has not been for long in its
present state of equilibrium. When subjected to quantavolutionary hypotheses, the
history of the atmosphere becomes full of mystery and potentiality. The study of
climates has been vigorously pursued, but perhaps with the wrong conceptual instruments.
Climates, the benchmarks of atmospheric history, seem to us to disintegrate under
analysis into ephemeral signals of catastrophic events.
Notes (Chapter Two: The Gaseous Complex)
1. B. K. Konstantinov and G. E. Kocharov, "Astrophysical Phenomena and Radiocarbon," 10
Sov. Physics 11 (May, 1966), 1043-4.
2. C. Cowan, C. R. Atluri, and W. F. Libby, 206 Nature (1965), 861.
3. Science News, March 6, 1976; Astronomy (March 1979), 58; J. A. Eddy, P. A. Gilman,
and D. E. Trotter, "Solar Rotation During the Maunder Minimum," 46 Solar Physics (1976),
3-14.
4. A. F. M. de Jong, W. G. Mook and B. Becher, "Confirmation of the Suess Wriggles:
3200-3700 B. C." 2180 Nature #5717 (July 5,1979) 48-9; I. U. Olsson, ed. "Radiocarbon
Variations and Absolute Chronology," (12th Nobel Symposium, 1969; Alqvist and Wiksell,
Stockholm and New York: Wiley, 1970) esp, H. E. Suess; Alfred de Grazia, Chaos and
Creation, 48-52.
5. Melvin Cook, "Carbon 14 and the Age of the Atmosphere," Creation Res. Soc. Q., June
1970. Reuven Ramaty (U. C. L. A., Calif) has studied extensively geomagnetic effects.
6. Gilbert N. Plass "Carbon Dioxide and Climate," Sci. Amer. (July 1959), 3.
7. S. W. Tromp, Biometeorology (Philadelphia: Heyden, 1980), 12, 16-17, 19.
8. George W. Gray, "Life at High Altitudes," 193, Sci. American (Dec. 1955), 58;
"Respiration and Respiratory Systems," Ency. Britannica (1974), 763.
9. E. I. Friedmann and R. Ocampo, "Endolithic Blue-Green Algae in the Dry Valleys"
(Antarctica), 193 Sci. (24 Sep. 1976), 1247.
10. L. V. Berkner and L. C. Marshall, "A History of Major Atmospheric Components," 63
Proc Nat'l Acad Sci 6( 1965) 1215; John A. Eddy, "The Sun Since the Bronze Age," Int.
Sym. on Solar-Terres, Phy., June, 17, 1976; J. S. Sawyer, ed., Proceedings Intl Sym on
World Climate: 8000 to B. C. (London: Royal Meterological Soc., 1966; Donald W. Patten,
The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch (Seattle: Pacific, Meridian, 1966), Chapter. 9.
11. 179 Nature (26 Jan. 1957) 213.
12. I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (New York: Dell,
1966), 223-4.
13. A. G. W. Cameron, 240 Nature (1 Dec. 1972), 229
14. Supra, fn. 3.
15. Rhys Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge: Harvard U., 1966)
16. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, Stratigraphie CornparÚ... (London: Oxford, 1948).
17. I. M. Isaacson (pseud.), "Applying the Revised Chronology." 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall). 5.
18. This has been known since O. Heer in the 1860's. See Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval
(New York: Doubleday, 1955), 44 et seq. Cf. H. H. Lamb, "The Earth's Changing Climate,"
180-5 in Encycl. Britannica Yrbk, 1975; Frank Hibben, Treasure in the Dust (195 1).
19. Claudio Vita-Finzi, Recent Earth History (New York: Wiley-Halstead, 1973), 106-7.
20. See below, Chapter 31
21. 258 Amer. J. Sci.. 429.
22. Op. cit., 42-3.
23. The Faunal Remains of Iraq es Zihhan, a Kebaran Site on Mt. Carmel; cf. Livingstone,
1975 "Late Quaternary Change in Africa," Ann. Rev. Ecology and Systematics 6: 249-81;
Williams, M. 1975 "Late Pleistocene Tropical Aridity Synchronous in Both Hemispheres,"
253 Nature 617-18; Hamen, Wunstra, and Zagwin "The Floral Record of the Late Cenozoic of
Europe," in Turekian, K, ed. The Late Cenozoic Glacial Ages (Yale U. Press); Farraud,
"The Floral Record," Ibid
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THREE
HURRICANES AND CYCLONES
An explosion of Mt. St. Helens recently blew down thousands of trees. An exoterrestrial
explosion at Tunguska in 1908 blew down million of trees. The Fens of East Anglia
contain millions of felled trees. Here the trees were knocked down facing northeast and
were buried. They were sheared off a meter above the ground and their stumps remain
rooted. Many were tall and thick trees. No volcano is to be located as the source of the
blast. What kind of a wind was this?
Winds find a minor place in textbooks on earth features. They erode rock by polishing
and pitting it, by making grooves, by shaping and faceting. They make various alcoves
and niches in rock walls. They also form sand dunes in deserts, and blow the sand and
silt of stream beds hither and yon. A sandsheet in Libya, over a meter thick, rests on
bedrock over many thousands of square kilometers and is supposed to have been laid down
by winds of the desert. There are others like it around the world. Such aeolian activity
is allotted millions of years to help shape the landscape; the number of millions, one
or a hundred, is calculated from estimated past climatic conditions working against
various constraints, such as whether landforms exist nearby to provide the material of
erosion.
Tornados, cyclones and hurricanes now and then wreak havoc upon soil and settlements.
Part of the climatic complex of this age, these storms are localized -the "tornado belt"
of the south-central United States, the Japan and China Seas, and so on. Of course,
bearing in mind the "many changes of climate over the ages," most places on earth would
have suffered such storms in turn. When they occur, part of the biosphere is blown away
with some of the natural landscaping. Paleo-anthropology and archaeology debate the
relative contributions of the Orient and the Eur-African world to the earliest American
cultures, for example, without proper attention to the possibilities afforded travelers
by changing winds that come with changing climates, now pushing things one way and then
again another way. So that even when the possibilities of cataclysmic changes in early
human times are ignored, changing climates would carry culture both East and West [1] .
Tornado effects are discoverable in some places where sedimentary beds are interrupted
by poorly sorted mixtures of rock which evidence by their shape, fragmentation, and
positions a sudden displacement and replacement. Ager calls these storm deposits
"tempestite," after a word that he ascribes to Gilbert Kelling, when he observes them,
for instance, on the heights of the Atlas Mountain of Morocco [2] . Similar deposits
have been identified in a few other places. Missouri, Virginia, the English Channel, the
Paris Basin, in rocks of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic. Carozzi and Gerber consider that
"such an early generation of cherts in carbonates is more common than generally
assumed." [3]
We cannot figure how often such high energy local events have occurred, until the world
is better surveyed with this idea in mind. But one can "think big". With a thousand
tornados a year (300 in the U. S. A.) tearing up two thousand square kilometers of
sediments and breaking down surface features, an area equal to the total land surface of
the world (240 million square kilometers) would be superficially pulverized in about
120,000 years. If a conventional age of 3.6 million years is accorded the Earth's crust,
the whole of it would have been scoured, not once, but 30,000 times by cyclonic action.
In the short term, not all land would be affected equally, but in the long-term, given
changing climates and drifting continents, an assumption of randomized strikes could be
tolerated. Where then are the scars of 30,000 tornados in every geological column? Or
even in any single one anywhere?
From this we might conclude that we have a great deal of field research to do in
geological history so as to obtain a realistic estimate of the number of events. This is
also the situation, we may as well say, in respect of meteoroid falls, volcanism, and
other high-energy events to be discussed. The quantavolutionary approach to history
comes naked as a neonate, without systematic hypotheses, data, or applicable
mathematics.
If few such effects are discoverable, it may be because catastrophes acting on a large
scale have obliterated almost all localized indications of damage. For instance, if
great earthquakes have shattered rock strata, lesser violence to the rock would be
hardly visible. The schist dropping deep below the city of Athens is infinitely
fractured. Is this tempestite, thermotite, seismotite, hydrotite, turbotite, or what? If
the wind god, Aeolus, blew at once all around the world, many sediments would be
displaced, losing their local cyclone scars in the process and letting no new strikes
penetrate deep into the new strata.
But perhaps the Earth's surface has spent 99.9% of its time in a peaceful state with a
quiet atmosphere. Such quiescence contradicts uniformitarianism as much as it does
catastrophism; that is, I have used above the present "quiet" state to reconstruct the
past, as Hutton and Lyell recommended. Yet even so, estimates resulting therefrom would
be much more impressive than present conventional history gives one to understand.
A final possibility is that the sedimentary rocks of the Earth are much too young to
have experienced all that is supposed to have happened. That is, if the Earth were
100,000 years old, much of its surface would perhaps not have been scarred by tornados
(or meteoroids).
Ancient legends speak of a large role for winds. The sacred book of Buddhism, the
Visuddhi-Maggia, says that when world collide the winds "turn the ground upside down.
Large areas crack and are thrown upwards. The winds pulverize the ground and it
disappears into space, never to return. Thus ends a cycle of the ages." [4] It is the
extreme catastrophic typhoon.
The ancient Meso-Americans said that the former world was brought to an end by the great
wind god, Huracan. Probably the origin of the word "hurricane" is here. Huracan is also
a manifestation of the great god Quetzalcoatl, who is also identified with the god and
planet Venus [5] . Huracan, the Heart of Heaven, fathered a large number of people, who
he then destroyed in the darkness of a storm amidst black rain that fell day and night.
So records the Quiche book of Popul Vuh. Then animal gods mangled the bodies [6] .
"Air" is rarely missing in the legendary and early scientific classifications such as
"earth, air, fire and water." The idea of world destruction by wind is, of course, quite
disregarded by modern scholars. One hears the term "marine transgressions" but not "wind
transgressions." It is surprising how few pages have been devoted to the winds by
catastrophists, too. Again, perhaps the effects of hurricanes and typhoons are quickly
concealed by other forces operating. Or the effects may be interpreted as tidal wave
deposits.
The splintered bones of some fossil assemblages would indicate aerial rather than water
transport. Although he does not follow through, F. Hibben provides a rare passage
dealing with the immense deposits of bones that he witnesses. "Throughout the Alaskan
mucks, too, there is evidence of atmospheric disturbances of unparalleled violence." [7]
The Cumberland Cavern catastrophic life dump shows no evidence of water transport [8] .
Probably as many collections of animals and vegetation have been gathered and flung in
heaps by winds as by water. In seeking the origins of some coal deposits, catastrophic
winds are a prime suspect, along with rock and water thrusts.
What can create deposits can remove them. Heavy winds, operating tidally or
cyclonically, can blow away pre-existing structures. Contemplating the early ages of
human settlement, one may wonder at the frequent absence of primordial sites. Here, as
everywhere in the mythicized realms of science, there is a vision that is perhaps false,
of excavating sites layer upon layer until arrival at bed rock, and thereupon
pronouncing the last ruins to be the first settlement. But the god Huracan is able
quickly to erase settlements down to bed rock one and more times. The typical absence of
human vestiges before the neolithic age is usually taken to signify that human
settlement began with the neolithic. There is small reason to believe this to be the
case. In fact, there is a hint of aeolian morphology in the near absence of paleolithic
remains except in caves and abris in the Dordogne of France and elsewhere.
The power of winds to push, pull and lift is great. The Hiroshima nuclear fission-bomb
explosion is assigned an energy of 7.9x10 18 ergs. The measured energy release of a one-
megaton fusion bomb explosion is in the range of 10 22 ergs. This is about the same
energy as exploded in the Berringer meteoroid crater in Arizona. "In one day a large
hurricane releases as much energy as a 13,000 megaton nuclear bomb. Some hurricanes take
a week to reach such intensity, others mature in a day or so. And during the time
another may be at full blast a thousand miles away." [9] Some hurricanes last three
weeks and travel 1,000 miles. (One can bear in mind the immediate transport of resilient
living species around the world by such means.)
An ordinary Kansas tornado will approximate 4x10 18 ergs of kinetic energy. Its power in
kilowatts is 10 18 , "which is in excess of the capacity of all the generating stations
in the United States." (ca 1959) [10] . The wind velocity at the center of its funnel
theoretically may achieve 2000 miles per hour. By the Fujita scale, an F-5 wind, indexed
at combined forward and rotating speeds of 261-318 mph causes "incredible damage."
Electrical activity is so vigorous that Peltier's words of 1840 can be used as a model
for an electrical cyclone theory. "Everything proves that the tornado is nothing else
than a conductor formed of the clouds which serves as a passage for a continual
discharge of electricity from above." [11] Observers have been inside of this "enormous
vacuum tube, somewhat similar to a geissler, neon or fluorescent light tube, conducting
very low density electric current whenever there is a sufficient accumulation of
electricity in the clouds to make the jump to Earth." [12] Typhon, the cosmic spectral
dragon felled by a thunderbolt from Jupiter, was anciently described by Apollodorus as
"rushing at heaven" with hissing and screams, spouting a great jet fire from his mouth.
This same Typhon is probably the origin of the word "typhoon." [13] Cyclones and water
spouts (water-bearing cyclones) often appear in groups. An outbreak of 148 tornados was
registered in the United States and Canada on April 3,1974. Sometimes associated with a
tornado are a number of downbursts of high-velocity winds that blow down whatever they
strike, whether groves or houses or aircraft. Ted Fujita of the University of Chicago
compares the downbursts with giant garden hoses aimed downwards upon circles kilometers
in diameters; often they end their work in two minutes.
What might cause a vast number of cyclonic events to appear? A meteoroid bombardment, an
interruption of the Earth's motion, a tilt of the Earth's geographic axis, magnetic
axis, or sidereal axis: these would do, and also a large meteoroid impact, and a large
body passing nearby, the latter, however, being tied almost inevitably to other changes
in Earth's motions. Too, a deluge of waters might form into many ribbons, mushrooms, or
funnels in descending. The winds and other effects of a heavy meteoroid impact would be
simulated if a large number of nuclear missiles were trained upon a single spot and
exploded at the same moment.
The atmospheric turbulence accompanying such impacts must include more than a blasting
power. Its heat can provide the circulating system for a natural instantaneous chemical
factory. The turbulence generates disturbing sounds and sends them over long distances
and brings intolerable changes in barometric pressures. Volcanic explosions produce
similar effects: whether a crater is a volcanic or meteoric effect is often contested,
and both produce tornado and hurricane effects.
During the Krakatoa volcanic explosion of 1883, winds stripped all the surrounding area
of its lush vegetation before burning it [14] . People heard noises of anchors being
hauled up and dropped, of thunder and beating drums: the winds carried the explosions
across the Indian Ocean where they were heard as distant cannonading. The barometer on a
ship nearby jumped up and down an inch at a time. The air was sucked up so that people
could not breathe. The gases were sulfurous, choking and blinding. The sun was obscured,
and slightly so around the world for years. In the pitchblack day, a Dutchman groped for
a knife to despatch his family.
So cyclones darken abruptly the sky, and bring ear-bursting and chest-bursting drops in
barometric pressure. They explode houses by creating vacuums into which the inside air
must burst. They lift boulders and cows, carrying them off, and they dig up the earth.
There is a hint in cyclonic action of what may have happened to some of the mammoths and
other large-animals that were exterminated a few thousand years ago: suffocation;
lifting and dropping; followed by quick freezing; thence to be discovered in the same
position today.
Winds act faster than water and have the same exponential effect upon the bodies which
they may encounter as their speed increases. Wind pressure, that is, increases as the
square of wind velocity, up to the velocity of sound at least. A 500 km/ hr wind exerts
25 (not 5) times the pressure of a 100 km/ hr wind; gravel then begins to behave like
fusillades of bullets. Kelly and Dachille calculated that the winds created by a large
meteoroid impact will move laterally and vertically with the speed of sound [15] .
Their effect has to be measured, too, in terms of the amount of debris that they
transport. A single such blast, moving horizontally, can strip its area of passage bare
down to bed rock, or below, especially if it is loaded with detritus, and may continue
its major effects for a thousand kilometers. Only a mountain can stand against it and
it, too, will be defaced; an instant ablation corresponding to millions of years of
ordinary aeolian erosion will occur. Rivers would be wiped out and set up elsewhere.
Valleys would be filled with debris. Great vegetable and animal dumps would be
established in many places.
Waterspouts have been known to hoist and drop far away the water and biosphere of large
ponds; since these events happen under meteorological conditions ordinary to our age,
they must be hundreds of times less powerful than the waterspouts (and land spouts) that
would arise from large-body impact explosion or related events involving catastrophic
energies [16] . The turbulent atmosphere of the planet Venus rotates in six days as
contrasted with the 243 days that the body of the planet takes to rotate. Its normal
wind velocities of 10 to 100 meters per second are comparable to those of the jet stream
that races through the upper atmosphere of the Earth [17] . The surface heat of Venus
is of course in the hundreds of degrees Celsius. The mechanism has not been solved.
Several effects of a perpetual firestorm might be considered, granted that free oxygen
is absent. One is reminded of the firestorms that were engendered in the Chicago fire,
the Tokyo earthquake, the Pestigo forest fire, the firebombing of Dresden, and the
atomic bomb-burst over Hiroshima. Large areas can become like giant tornados; perhaps a
planet can suffer the same fate.
Winds can operate like tides. Thus, if the Earth's rotation is altered, the atmosphere
will be subjected to the same influences that cause the alteration and will in effect
act turbulently, that is, out of phase with the lithosphere. They will sweep over the
globe like a tide of water. The atmosphere, if electromagnetically affected by a
conjunction of planets and Sun, will help to disturb the lithosphere and engender
seismism.
Differential atmospheric pressures define the existence of a wind; two clouds of gas,
essentially isolated but lacking an effective "bag" to contain their isolation,
interact. Electric potentials are established. Electrical forces thereupon flow
throughout the transacting systems laterally and vertically. It is perhaps axiomatic
that where there is wind there is an electric current and discharges. And where there is
an electric current there is bound to be a magnetic field. And, lacking a better
container, an electric current is contained by its magnetic field.
More than one observer has confirmed the testimony of a man who was caught in the open
as a tornado passed above him by a few meters. He was beneath a tunnel whose walls were
composed of whirling clouds, in the manner of a magnetic field as this is pictured in
drawings of a textbook. He looked up into the tunnel for at least half a mile; brilliant
lightning flashes illuminated the tube. Where he crouched, the air seemed calm; the
gases stank suffocatingly; screams and hisses could be heard. The tornado, having deftly
raised itself to pass over him just as gently dropped down upon his neighbor's house,
exploding it and its objects [18] . This small tornado may function very much on the
same principles as the cyclonic effect of a large meteoroid explosion, and again like
the great tube of gases that envelops a binary star system, such as I outlined for the
solar system in Chaos and Creation and discussed at length with Earl R. Milton in
Solaria Binaria.
In the Uweinat section of the Great Sand Sea of Southwestern Egypt, a number of possible
meteoric impact sites have been reported. One, positively identified, is of 4 km
diameter; another is of 14 km diameter. Many extinct volcanos are also evident in this
desolate area of sand and sand dunes, which was occupied by humans until at least the
neolithic period [18A]. A great climatic change must then have occurred lately.
The region is part of the Sahara Desert, which is also marked here and there by human
traces. The Gobi Desert, greatest in Asia, bears human relics as well. So do the Mexican
and U. S. deserts, and the Peruvian. The great deserts of the world are recent, it
appears.
The astroblemes and volcanism of Uweinat may have been associated with the events ending
civilization and creating deserts. The wind-blown dunes are long, wide, and tall; yet
the same winds have not erased the meteoric or volcanic craters, even though these are
often not so deep as the dunes are high; not enough time may have passed. Aeolian dunes,
astroblemes, volcanos, climatic switching, and culture extinction together can entertain
an hypothesis of holospheric quantavolution, pending the establishment of a chronology
that would prove the hypothesis or temporally sunder apart the events.
The largest deposits accorded to winds are not those of the Lybian peneplain mentioned
earlier, nor those of Egypt, but the huge areas of the Earth covered by loess. The term
itself was invented for glacier deposits of the Rhine and Danube valleys and elsewhere
in Europe. It found itself connected with the "drift", the glacial pebbled clay of North
America, where vast stretches of the buff and porous earth, compacted but frangible to
the fingers, were found distributed. Here transportation by ice sheets and rivers
forming from their melts was imagined. Then, west of Peking, an area larger than France
exposed its loess to geological inquiry.
Loess can occur at high elevations as well as on great plains. It breaks down into
excellent thick soil in China and its cliffs degrade into natural terraces [19] . Old
roads cut through it, sometimes passing through the Chinese countryside thirty meters
below the houses and farms on the loess above. In Indiana, the highest lands and ridges
in particular have the thickest yellow clay (called drift or loess) and it is free of
sand and gravel [20] . The loess is not stratified, nor does it contain marine fossils,
and land fossils of shells and mammals are only occasionally found in it.
Sedimentation from lakes and rivers seems to be an impossible explanation. Adequate
sources of glaciers and ice are often absent, as for example near the loess that occurs
inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The favored theory of loess formation stands upon the
transporting power of winds that would carry the material from distant high places or
deserts, operating over long periods of time. But where are the loess heaps on the
fringes of great deserts? There are none. And why should stratification and cross-
bedding not then have occurred? Nor can the chemical composition of loess be assigned to
the mountains of its supposed origins. And the loess grains are not rounded by wind or
water but are angular, as if exploded, and are settled in vertical lines through which
rain readily percolates.
Ignatius Donnelly, in Ragnarok (1882), was already ascribing till, drift and loess to
fall-out from a great comet, going so far as to deny the very existence of past ice
ages, to which most scientists then and still today ascribe these materials. He read
many distinct legendary sources and intercepted many sedimentary strata as stories of
great winds that picked up the detritus of Earth, whirling it around wildly and
depositing it in "intercalated beds." [21] Donnelly's denial of the ice ages in favor
of exoterrestrial deposits by comet does not appear so outrageous today. As we shall
see, ice age theory has been used (and abused) to the point of exhaustion of the subject
and of the geologists working in the field; it has been made responsible for many
geological forms and events that might more readily be assigned to other forces.
Velikovsky, in a note of the 1940's, before he had himself been subjected to ridicule,
commented that Donnelly had been called "the Prince of Cranks" for his books on several
difficult and controversial subjects [22] . Donnelly was in fact a superior writer and
lecturer, an intense student with a sensuous affinity for the palpability of the ground,
a political and social hero, and a precursor in fundamental ways of later writers such
as Velikovsky.
Fifty years after Donnelly, Penniston was advocating the thesis of an exoterrestrial
origin for loess [23] . Citing Shapley (later a violent critic of Velikovsky) and Belot
for having proposed a solar nova as the cause of the ice ages, he reasoned upon this as
a possible source of the material, which, experiencing high temperatures for a period of
time, had its silicates metamorphosed in part to quartz, thus arriving at the loess.
That stony meteorites have differed in composition from loess has stood against his
theory. The source of meteorites has probably been mainly from the asteroid belt in
contemporary times, however, and cannot be well compared with either the solar or the
cometary origins hypothesized. Not unnaturally, geologists faced with a choice of wind
or exoterrestrial fall, would prefer the wind. Wherever possible, as in middle America,
they introduce " glacial sluiceways." Yet we would prefer to discuss the matter once
again when it comes time to ask what can and does fall to Earth from outer space.
Let us rest content here if we have but established several points: The force of wind
rises with the square of its velocity, with correspondingly large effects upon the
landscape. Hurricanes must be associated with every abrupt and intensive geological
event. Cyclones convey major electrical and fire phenomena. In large-scale catastrophic
events, a great many typhoons could originate to accommodate changed atmospheric and
lithospheric motions or multiple meteoroidal instrusions. Finally, if the sediments of
the world do not reflect adequately cyclonic effects, the reason may rest in their
continuous erasure by more forceful events which themselves require identification.
Furthermore, assigned geological times may be too long; maybe not enough events have
happened to flesh out the skeletal ages.
Notes (Chapter Three: Hurricanes and Cyclones)
1. Cf. C. L. Riley et al, Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts
(Austin, Tex.: U. of Texas, 1971) 302 et passim.
2. Derek W. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (New York: Wiley-Halsted,
1973), 39.
3. A. V. Carozzi and M. S. Gerber, "Late Paleozoic Tornados and Synsedimentary
Brecciation of Chert Nodules."
4. Warren, Buddhism in Translation, p. 328 quoted by Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision 70.
5. William Mullen, "The Mesoamerican Record," 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall), 34-44.
6. Popul Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya (Norman, Okla.: U. of Okla.
Press, 1950), 90.
7. Op. cit.
8. I. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 60.
9. Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1965), 6.
10. Ibid., 45.
11. 38 Amer. J. Sci. and Arts (1840) 73, cf. William Corliss, compiler, Strange
Phenomena (Glen Arm, Md.: Corliss), GLD052-G2-105.
12. Ibid., G2-104-5.
13. Velikovsky, World in Collision, 68-70.
14. Rupert Furneaux, Krakatoa (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), 34.
15. Allan O Kelly and Frank Dachille, Target: Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth
Science (Carlsbad, Calif.: Box 335, 1953), 203, 66 et passim.
16. Ibid., 202; Hans Oersted, 1 Amer. J. Sci. 37 (1839) 250-67, quoted in Corliss, op.
cit., G2-233.
17. Andrew and Louise Young, "Venus," 233 Sci. Amer. (Sept. 1975), 73.
18. Alonzo A. Justice, 50 Monthly Weather Review (May 1930) 205-6, quoted in Corliss,
op. cit., G2-105-7.
18A. Faraouk El-Baz, 213 Science (24 July 1981) 439-40.
19. Frederick W. Williams, "Loess Deposits of Northern China," 22 Popular Sci. Mon.
(1882) 243-8, quoted in W. Corliss, compiler, Strange Planet (Glen Arm, Md. 21057:
Sourcebook Project, 1978), ESL001-E2-161.
20. J. T. Campbell, 23 Amer. Naturalist (1889) 785-92, quoted in Corliss, ESL004-E2-167.
21. I. Donnelly, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (New York: Appleton, 1883), 53.
22. "Precursors," 7 Kronos 1 (1981), 53.
23. J. B. Penniston, 39 Pop. Astro. (1931) 429-30 and 51 Pop. Astro. (1943), 170-2,
quoted in Corliss, ESL-003-E2-165.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOUR
MAGNETISM AND AXIAL TILTS
The Earth has two axes of concern here, its axis of rotation between the geographical
north and south poles, and the warped axis of its magnetic field lying between the
north magnetic pole and the south magnetic pole. It is easier to imagine the axis of
rotation; the imaginary equator divides the globe into two equal halves and this
equator marks a circle around the spinning globe which, every 24 hours, completes a
turn.
The magnetic poles are distant by some hundreds of kilometers from their corresponding
geographic poles. They are denoted by the behavior of a compass needle which assumes a
vertical position when at or near the magnetic pole; the nearly global distance that
lies between the north and south magnetic poles witnesses a continuously changing dip
of the compass needle which reverses itself as it passes approximately half the globe
and again turns to the vertical (in reverse) as it approaches the opposite pole. The
magnetic poles are in perpetual motion, seemingly traversing a kind of oval figure. In
the north, the pole is just south of King Chirstian Island (1980, 77 19 N; 101 49W) and
is moving north by 24.4 km per year and west by 5.4 km per year [1] .
Apart from a certain usefulness in navigation, its extreme weakness may let one think
such magnetism to be quite unimportant. But it indicates the presence of several
important processes of the atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere and cosmosphere. An
entertaining book might be written concerning the effects on life of the loss of the
magnetic field. How will wild geese navigate? Will there be less heart attacks or more?
Cox says that the removal of the dipole magnetic field will reduce the total shielding
of the biosphere from cosmic rays by 10 to 12%, no more than is involved in a person's
moving from the equator to Alaska. Waddington is of the same opinion "unless it is
assumed that these periods are associated with greatly increased particle radiation
from some external source." [2] This last point stresses the atmosphere-exosphere
relationship, and may serve later on to solve some reversal perplexities.
In 1989, NASA's Magnetic Field Satellite confirmed that the field, already weak, is
decreasing in strength. The trend indicates a zero strength in about 1200 years [3] .
Relying upon studies begun in 1830 by Gauss, Barnes made the same prediction earlier
[4] . Theorists are divided, some saying that the field hits zero, then reverses, and
then returns to zero, and so on over great periods of time. A few, the present author
among them, say that the field is a once and for all thing: it began at higher
intensity, endured for a long time, then began to diminish, meanwhile from time to time
reversing its direction.
Assuming a continuously increased strength reading backwards in time, however, implies
an enormous intensity eons ago; there is a hint here, to our way of thinking, that the
field was created and sustained at a constant level, and then abruptly was cut off from
its source, and began to decline. Barnes declares, too, that "This magnetic decay
phenomenon could not have been going on for more than a few thousand years, as the
magnetic field would have been implausibly large for a relatively neutral body such as
the earth." [5]
The magnetic field constitutes a magnetosphere which is much larger than the Earth
itself; [6] it can be imagined as a kind of giant electric globe enclosing the Earth
which is perceptible even as one descends into the deepest rocks and which may only end
in some kind of an electric current which may be running through the core of the Earth
at about the geographical spinning equator, very roughly perpendicular to the
geophysical poles.
It is important, too, to appreciate that these two features, the magnetic electric
current and the geographical spinning equator may be largely independent of one
another. That is, one can conceive of the magnetic and geographical systems operating
even at right angles to one another. We have discovered no natural law that says the
two equators and sets of poles must be close together.
This implies, however, that the two sets of poles are not stable, that their present
positions are a historical accident. But, then, to think so introduces worrisome
possibilities: that the axis of spin of the Earth may be changed, too. Both of these
possibilities have increasingly occupied the minds and studies of scholars and
explorers. Have there indeed been occasion on which the globe has tilted,
geographically and magnetically? The answer today is yes, that the axis of spin has
shifted and also the magnetic axis has shifted.
But before we consider these two probabilities, it is well to mention yet a third
change in the Earth's behavior that would possibly occur without magnetic or geographic
shift. Suppose that the Earth simply tilted in space.
On this phenomenon, Peter Warlow reports that both Needham and Dodwell found
oscillatory change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, on the basis of ancient
astronomical records. Dodwell concluded that three factors were operative in the
movement, the linear drift conventionally ascribed, a decaying oscillation with a
period of 1200 years, and a logarithmic-sine decay. Dodwell saw in the exponential
decay (quantavolutionary exponentialism that I mentioned earlier and in Chaos and
Creation) a drastic occurrence some 4500 years ago [7] .
Could the Earth have even turned over completely without interrupting (interrupting
very little) its spin or its magnetic field? The geographic poles would be reversed,
and along with them the magnetic field. The Earth could not perform such a movement
without an external assist, whether from an upsetting explosion of gases from the Sun
or from the attraction or repulsion of a large passing body.
According to Warlow, who has however been challenged by Slabinski, the transaction
could be relatively delicate; it would amount to the drawing of a force along the
Earth's path that would cause it to tip over while containing its spin, in the manner
of a tippe-top, a toy that is weighed on top and set to spinning on the board; the top
turns completely over continuing to spin all the while in the same direction, North
becomes South and East becomes West [8] . The motion performed is technically a fast
precession.
A moment's reflection will rid us of any notion that the action would be harmless. The
atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere would be agitated and produce effects that by
any measures would have to be called quantavolutionary. For instance, it appears most
likely that the widespread sudden destruction throughout the northern regions of the
mammoths and other large mammals occurred in conjunction with a tilt of the Earth's
axis in the presence of the exoterrestrial entity causing the tilt. We can say this
because a sudden deep vacuum freeze, asphyxiation, thrusting of masses of gravel and
bones, and permanent cold ever thereafter, such that the animals are sometimes found
still fleshed-out and diagnosed in certain cases as heart-failures or with blood-
clotted lungs, must indicate a holospheric event comprising an atmospheric and aquatic
withdrawal, the descent of an extreme coldness, and upon the passing of the body,
returning tides of water and wind to accomplish quick burial under muck, ice and
tundra.
Yet, according to Warlow's theory, the tilt, which might have been complete to 180 and
would change East to West and North to South, would require only thousandths of the
energy to be disposed of if, by contrast, the Earth were largely cease or reverse its
rotation. If such were to happen, it would be most unlikely that the two bodies, Earth
and the intruder, would achieve just the mode of encounter and passage that would avoid
direct electrical and material exchanges or that would bring about a full 180
reversal; the Earth, unlike the tippe-top, could cease its tilt at any angle not
excluding a full 360 circle with its intruder acting momentarily as its binary, and
performing a "loop-the-loop."
Should the intruder collide with the Earth, the Earth might tilt, also, and the damage
to it would be much greater. Dachille estimates that a body 320 km in diameter,
impacting tangentially at a velocity of 12 km/ sec would produce an axis shift of a
mere 0 32' [9] . Many forms of energy disposal are available, it appears, besides
reorientation of the global axis. One is led to suspect that non-colliding encounters
involving heavy electrical differentials might more effectively produce axis tilting
than would collisions.
Lest the idea be considered quite fanciful, it should be recalled that several ancient
sources refer seriously to a reversal of directions. Herodotus and Plato cite Egyptian
sources of occasions when the Sun changed directions and arose in the West instead of
the East. A ceiling in the tomb of Senmut of Egypt also pictures a reversed sky tableau
such as would occur were the Earth turned upside down. In fifteen spectacular pages
[10] Velikovsky searches out and orders rationally other indications in legends and
writing of a reversal of directions that could only come with the Earth turning upside
down. The contexts scarcely permit the alternative, a cessation and reversal of the
Earth's rotation.
Thomas Gold once remarked that, if the Earth were a perfect sphere, an insect alighting
upon it might turn it over. In revising Warlow's calculations, Slabinski assumes that
the Earth has to be turned over in a single pass-by at two Earth's radii distance in a
parabolic approach trajectory. He emerges with a requirement for a body with the mass
of 62 Suns. Even if the crust of the Earth is shoved around independently of the
underlaying layers, a body of the mass of 68 Jupiters is needed [11] . We expect that
such an action will be totally catastrophic." Furthermore, "any appeal to
electromagnetic forces that does not give a quantitative analysis of how such forces
produce the required torque is equivalent to saying..." a miracle occurs."
Ellenberger, although a stout Velikovsky supporter, agrees: "Since motions occur along
the path of least resistance, the possibility that a spin reversal has occurred would
appear to be greatly reduced and that interpretation of Senmut's ceiling (and other
evidence cited) may be in need of a raison d'etre other than evidencing a spin
reversal. If a spin reversal is a viable alternative, where are there discussions and
quantifications of its mechanism?" [12] Yet Velikovsky, arguing the case for axis
displacement, had earlier discussed a calculation by Weizacker demonstrating that an
Earth transaction with a strong magnetic field would affect its axial inclination much
more readily than its rotation [13] .
Presently, the evidence for sidereal tilts is considerable, for geographic tilts also
some, for upside down tilts little, for stop-and-reverse rotation very little. There is
no way in which astronomical assurances can be lent to geologists on this account.
Conversely, there is enough doubt on all scores to let geologists be open to the
possibility of several catastrophically effective maneuvers of "Spaceship Earth". A
moment's consideration of Slabinski's calculation leads to the suspicion that he may be
employing a rate in his formulas that soars to wild heights and casts doubts prima
facie on his procedures: if it would take the gravitational force for 62 Suns to turn
the Earth around at a distance of less than 15,000 km, how does a single Sun lock the
Earth into fixed orbit at 150 million kilometers? Also, evidence of a geographical
shift of the poles is abundant; if this is not to be denied, then we should have to
supply the force to do the job; if not 62 Suns, then how many Suns at 15,000 km
distance are needed?
The possible occurrence of reversals in proto-historical times may suggest additional
reversals in pre-human ages. However, Milton and I have presented in Solaria Binaria
(Chap. 8) a theory according to which the Earth was in grip of a huge external magnetic
field of the solar binary system until perhaps eight thousand years ago; during almost
all of geological time, it could not reverse its field. In fact, it is argued that this
same magnetic field and its reciprocal electrical current are the present geomagnetic
field and current within the Earth, which have been steadily undergoing decay since the
grip of the external magnetic field was released. This theory permits us here to
explain the principal geological problems connected with terrestrial magnetism.
We would have to assert that the numerous alleged reversals of the Earth's magnetic
field in geological history simply did not occur. Obviously there is no evidence to be
obtained one way or another by atmospheric testing of the field; any number of
reversals (or none at all) might have occurred without leaving discernible evidence.
The geophysicist, however, can search for evidence of the magnetic field in rocks [14]
. Igneous rocks have often been imprinted with magnetism when in a molten state; hence
they hold myriads of tiny compasses, pointed towards the magnetic pole. If for one set
of rocks the compasses point north and for another adjoining set they point south, it
is conceivable that the magnetic field had reversed itself on an occasion between the
melting and hardening of the first set of rocks and the melting and hardening of the
second set.
Magnetic mapping of rocks is almost entirely of this century but has burgeoned swiftly
and, some say, chaotically. Persuaded that they can tell the ages of rocks by
radiometry, explorers have used time as a reliable indicator of the change in the
magnetic field of the Earth. Since the rocks of the world have exhibited a bewildering
variety of magnetic directions, many "dated" strata of differing magnetic direction
have been assigned to the different magnetic periods, usually forced into a
preconceived mold of "normal" and "reversed" magnetic field.
Depending upon the angle of declination, not only have such fields been noted, but they
have been asserted to pertain to shifting magnetic poles. Some students have supported
the idea that hundreds of field reversals have taken place in the several billions of
years allotted to the Earth's history. One catalogue reports 433 paleomagnetic poles
for 3 to 4 billion years of Pre-Cambrian time, an average of one new pole per 7 to 9
million years [15] . Since the Cretaceous, says Heirtzler, 171 reversals of the
magnetic field have been identified [16] . Others have perceived certain intervals of
time to elapse between reversals, 700,000 years, fifteen million years, and so on;
several studies claim that the farther back in time one goes, the longer the period
between reversals.
Some observe much more frequent reversals; they can claim that a reversal occurred 2600
years ago, 3500 years ago, a dozen times during the Pleistocene, and so on. If, they
say, we cannot perceive so high a frequency in times more ancient, it is because the
reversal is not accompanied by a general melting of rocks and therefore cannot be
detected, or it is too faint to be recognized because of disturbances or contamination
of the strata. Magnetic reversals may be concealed because sedimentation is too slow to
capture its duration, when samples are not closely spaced in time and the reversals are
brief, when turbulence and contamination affect samples, when the sediments are dumped
or shifted, and when biological activity is high at the level being searched for
magnetism [17] . Still indications are strong in favor of heavy magnetic disturbances
in the mid-first and mid-second millennia B. C., with ceramic, clay, rock,
biostratigraphic, legendary, and historical contributions.
As early as 1907, P. L. Marcanton, using Folgheraiter's method, demonstrated magnetic
reversal and intensity changes by studies of the magnetic inclinations imprinted upon
Bavarian and Etruscan vases of the period 600-800 B. C., a period that in Chaos and
Creation I called "Martia." [18] In 1981, K. Games reported upon a similar
investigation of Egyptian pottery over a 3000 year period, concluding: "Clearly, the
geomagnetic field in Egypt has varied rapidly and by large amounts. The greatest rate
of change, which occurred around the maximum at about 1400 B. C. was about 140
manoteslas/ year... and lasted about 300 years either side of the maximum [19] . He
did not study directional changes of the field; further, his date of 1400 B. C. is more
likely to have fallen in the 8th century, since he was using an unreconstructed
chronology which is backwards by 500 years.
One important off-shoot of this enthusiastic age of magnetic pole discovery is the
belief that the discovery of a new magnetic pole means that a new geographic pole has
been discovered. If so, and if what is being discovered are true magnetic reversals,
the Earth would have suffered thousands of devastations. A shift in a true geographic
pole (as opposed to a purely celestial or sidereal tilt) must involve a shift in the
axis of rotation, the worst kind of disaster. Apparently some geologists are runaway
catastrophists as long as they can run on free time long past. Munk's title, "Polar
Wandering: A Marathon of Errors," [20] deserves sober thought.
The significance of this chaos of findings also lies in the association of magnetic
reversals with atmospheric, biospheric and lithospheric turbulence. The magnetic field
or magnetosphere, even though it is remarkably weak in the farthest stretches of the
atmosphere, nevertheless blocks and deflects a host of incoming particles. It acts thus
like the ozone layer and atmosphere in general, as a protective shield. If it is
removed, or temporarily "shut off" because it is shifting, or overwhelmed or shunted
aside by great blasts of gases and charged particles, species extinctions may occur.
Kennett and Watkins claim, on the basis of deep-sea drilling, that volcanism was at a
peak in coincidence with changing geomagnetic polarity [21] . Wollin, Ericson and Ryan
have noted by faunal and oxygen indicators at various sedimentary levels that cool
climates may be associated with high magnetic intensity [22] . These may be short-term
indicators, since at least by the Solaria Binaria theory, magnetic intensity was stable
and high until recently and has since been declining.
A sampling of Siluro-Devonian sedimentary sections from the Arctic Archipelago of
Canada reveals a common magnetic reversal. The magnetic inclinations suggest a low
equatorial latitude. The rocks were apparently laid down under equatorial conditions,
and they magnetized rapidly. Unfortunately, if the globe's axis rotation has since
tilted or the continents have shifted or a plenum of clouds then covered the globe, the
findings of such studies must be discounted; all three probably occurred. That is, the
Devonian has long been thought to have been a warm world; the arctic rocks, whether
drifted by conventional modern theory or by quantavolutionary theory, would give false
paleomagnetic readings, and the geographical poles may well have shifted as late as the
end of the ice ages.
Also, field reversal is an indicator that worse things may be happening. An incoming
giant meteoroid may dislocate the magnetic field in the course of destroying life and
blasting rock. Whatever it lays down or heats to melting point will be stamped with a
deviant magnetic imprint as it cools, provided the field has not sprung back into its
original figure.
The complex picture is liable to so many contradictions and misinterpretations that one
is tempted to discard it completely. If the magnetic field is due to an original source
of electrical current deep in the Earth, can such a current be so fickle, breaking down
and resetting itself in a new pattern time after time, so as to mark new orientation
upon the rocks and atmosphere above? Runcorn has written that microsecond daily changes
in Earth's rotation (one report gives 1 second slowdown every 600,000 years) may cause
variations in the shape and intensity of the current; he adds that sudden changes in
rotation would produce radial changes in the currents [23] . Michelson argues that the
energy required to interchange the Earth's magnetic poles is about that of a moderately
strong geomagnetic storm resulting from an intense solar eruption [24] .
Meteors have pronounced magnetic effects. Studies to this end by Jenkins, Gilmor,
Campbell and Green are summarized by Corliss, and Dachille has also insisted upon the
phenomenon [25] . Passing cometary trains exhibit strong electrical disturbances and
can cause the same in transacting bodies as in the space plasma. A large meteoroid,
whether impacting or passing close by, will disorder the Earth's electromagnetic field.
Also, were the Earth to change its orbital position, it would behave like a comet, with
a flaring electric tail representing electrical transactions with the unaccustomed
medium of passage.
The most enthusiastic students of terrestrial magnetic changes are the exponents and
developers of continental drift. Prof. Billy Glass once told the author that what
convinced him of continental drift was paleomagnetic measurements. These generally are
held to correlate positively bands of rock, moving away from the central Atlantic
ridge, with time; the older rocks are farther from the ridge. Not only do the magnetic
measurements depend upon geochronometry but also upon uniformitarianism, because it is
assumed that the lava flood extending from the ridge has been of the same volume-to-
time ratio for many millions of years. More on this last point will be brought forward
later.
To conclude these pages on magnetic and geographical tilts, we can state our position:
the geographical figure of the rotating Earth can tilt or reverse north and south, with
moderate applied exoterrestrial force and with large holospheric damage. It has done
so. The magnetic figure of the Earth will tilt or reverse in general accord with a
change of geographical figure, but can also tilt or reverse independently depending
upon a large electrical exchange between the Earth and a massive agglomeration in
space. It has done so repeatedly. The damage is much less. Both types of change -of
geographical and magnetic axes -could not have occurred, by the theory of Solaria
Binaria, until the binary system was collapsing, which has been placed in time by the
present author and again by Milton and myself at less than 14,000 years ago. There
remains a more devastating change, whereby the Earth not only tilts but also emplaces
its poles upon a new geographical location. The physical force needed to accomplish
such a change is many times greater than that required for the tilt alone, because the
rotation of the Earth is both interrupted and altered in orientation. It is known that
the Sun changes differentially the rotational speed of its several sections and some
sharp movements may occur in connection with solar storms [26] .
Too, on Earth, an interrupted rotation is likely to be ramified latitudinally and
stratified internally. T. Gold has given attention to such problems; in one place he
has demonstrated that the polar positions will change owing to crustal movements and
distortions [27] . In another place, too, he insists upon the alteration of the
Earth's shape that must accompany a displacement of the geographical poles [28] . He
points to the evidence of paleomagnetism as indicating numerous different polar
locations over geological time, evidence that we must largely discount.
But hard geophysical evidence, as presented by Hapgood, Velikovsky and Cook, for
instance, supports belief in a recent ice-age finale that shifted the north
geographical pole from a position presently denominated by Baffin Island, 20 south of
its present location. There is a measurable spring-back occurring all the way from
Scandinavia to the Hudson Bay area, a rising area that may be due to a new rotating
figure of the Earth, involving a new equator, and possibly to collapse and sudden
removal of a burden of ice that had been weighing down the region. (Inasmuch as the
great global cleavage passes through the center of this region, one has to introduce
the probability of a forcing apart and expansion of the area between the two rising
elements of continental rock.)
Surely, if the Moon were to have erupted from the Pacific Basin, the Earth's shape
would have been altered, the crust would have been half removed, and the conditions
Gold sets for a shift of geographical poles would be satisfied. A great force moving
southwestwards would have tilted the globe, removed the crust, cleaved the globe, set
the continental fragments into motion, slowed the speed of rotation, and established a
new figure of spin, with a new equator and new geographical poles.
This occasion may have been the one and only time that the Earth changed its true axis
of spin, as opposed to a number of other occasions in which the geographical and
magnetic axes tilted. All the historical and legendary allusions to the world "turning
like a potter's wheel," to celestial dizziness, to changing constellations, suns
standing still, and so on may relate only to tippe-top behavior of the globe. Moderate
changes in time, that is, of orbital and rotational motion, are not excluded, involving
deceleration of the Earth's rotation, whether momentary (the Gibeon phenomenon) [29] ,
or permanent. Claims of heavy deceleration, even so, are suspect; with a tilt, the sun
may be visually retarded but the Earth's rotation very little affected.
The full range of possibilities in tilts has not been completed yet. Two additional
ideas remain to be presented. The first concerns crustal slippage. The Earth's shell or
crust, contributing about 1% to the Earth's radius, lends about one-thirtieth to the
moment of inertia of the whole Earth. Apparently, then, if the shell can slip without
an identical movement of the mantle and core, the energy required to change celestial
and geographical orientations on the shell would be less than that required for a total
reversal or retardation of Earth motions.
There are signs that this stratified slippage has occurred in the overwhelming evidence
of crustal destruction around the globe as, for example, in the outpourings of lava
found everywhere. Even so, the energy required for total shell slippage (following the
attraction of a passing body) is formidably high, and where it would be applied is
crucial, so that this idea appears, initially at least, to be as totally destructive as
any other means of moving the Earth about.
However, if this crustal slippage were to occur at the moment when over half the crust
was being blasted into space, then obviously the problems of slipping and venting would
be greatly lessened, especially with the assistance of fracturing, rifting, and
expansion. These topics cannot well be delved into here, and are reserved for treatment
in later chapters.
Archaeology affords support to the proposition that the Earth has changed position
relative to the Sun and the planets in recent antiquity. In connection with the human
drive to build settlements according to the prevailing cosmological observations and
beliefs, the compass orientation of the constructions presents highly important issues
in regard to changes in the Earth and the sky. That the earliest humans felt compelled
to address their dwellings and public places to astronomical occurrences is generally
granted. No one has yet found an ancient settlement capable of taking some shape that
is not sky-oriented.
The mind of today's scientist turns first to the Sun, then the routines of the current
Sun -the rising and setting, the solstices and equinoxes -to answer all problems of
ancient civilizations. When the ruins do not confirm to these directions, then Polaris,
the current fixed star of the north, is assumed to guide the primeval builders. One
preplexed writer suggested that the Mesoamerican Olmecs aligned their structures with
the Big Dipper. When neither the north-south axis nor the solar behavior nor a
constellation fits the orientation, then it is that the ancients could not tell
directions well, or that the matter in any case was not important to the builders.
What is absent from such reasoning? First, there is a failure to appreciate that the
desire to orient to the skies was an obsession, a compulsion, an inescapable tradition,
a sacred obligation, a proud duty. Second, the ancients, as far back as we can discover
their humanity, could calculate readily and exactly the course of heavenly bodies and
orient themselves thereto. Many examples of this are presented in G. de Santillana and
H. von Dechend's book, Hamlet's Mill [30] , indeed this is the book's theme.
Third, not only the Sun, the North Star and the constellations, but also and especially
the Moon and the planets were often objects of sacred (which is to say, all-important)
architecture. This point has been stressed in numerous works on many cultures. The
ancient pyramids of several countries, the design of Greek temples, the Hebrew
Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon -these and all other ancient masterpieces were
like wedding rings uniting Earth and Heaven.
Fourth, when the heavenly bodies deviated from their customary paths or when the Earth
shifted its position with respect to them, then the plans of temples, buildings, and
settlements were shifted to conform to the new order of the skies. That is, celestial
and mundane catastrophes of the past can explain many deviations from present "true"
orientations.
Controversy naturally is engendered by any claim that the planets and Earth have
shifted their axes in million of years, if not billions. Still, every oriented edifice
or monument built since about 2600 years ago (after the last of the catastrophic
shifts, as argued by Velikovsky) [31] seem to have remained fixed in relation to the
present skies, while those built before then appear to have moved.
Certain claims of "fixed" structures warrant study. The most famous is the Great
Pyramid in Egypt. Recently, the Stonehenge megalithic "astronomical observatory" has
also been widely discussed. The age of the Great Pyramid of Ghiza is in question. It
has been ascribed to around 3200 B. C. and to other times. But no one suggests that it
was built after 687 B. C. or for that matter after 1450 B. C. that is, after the end of
the Middle Bronze Age. The West face of the Great Pyramid, which Stecchini believes was
drawn first and is the basic face, is oriented 2'30" west of true north [32] .
This slight discrepancy, claims Stecchini, may be attributed to the precession of the
equinoxes, which occurred from the time at which the plans were drawn to the
commencement of work. He thinks that the Egyptians knew of the precession and
deliberately allowed this discrepancy. I doubt this thesis, also, which is based partly
upon the work of de Santillana and von Dechend, and ascribe the deviation from true
north as an increment of continental drift and other seismic movement of the area.
A more important question concerns whether the almost perfect north-south orientation
means that no tilt or change of poles has occurred since the Great Pyramid was
constructed. The following possibilities ensue :
1. The Pyramid was imperfectly oriented to true north.
2. The Pyramid was perfectly oriented to true north but the continuing drift of the
African land mass or at least northeastern Africa has amounted to minute disorientation
since the Pyramid was built [33] .
3. The Pyramid was oriented to a pre-existing true north, marked by another star. The
axis of the earth shifted celestially. But an abundance of stars can be used to mark
true north; Polaris is the most recent star and naturally the Pyramid points to it.
4. The Pyramid was oriented to a pre-existing true north, which coincided with the
present true north. The Earth's axis tilted on one or more occasions and then tilted
back to its former position when it was built.
5. The Pyramid was oriented to the north-south. Subsequently, the rotation of the Earth
changed direction, meaning that a new geographical (not celestial) true north was set
up, but the rotation was either changed by 180 and therefore south became north, or
alternatively, accompanying or subsequent land mass thrusts coincidentally brought the
area around Cairo to rest pointing at the true and original north-south axis.
Of these five possibilities, the third appears most acceptable within the framework of
this book. It would permit a number of axial tilts but only a minimum land-mass
movement affecting Egypt since the Pyramid was constructed. This seems to be in accord
with the theories advanced in Chaos and Creation that catastrophes subsequent to the
great Pyramids construction did not cause major crustal slippage or a changed axis of
rotation even though they caused heavy electrical, flooding, hurricane, and volcanic
events. Earlier catastrophes involved the major changes in the geographical existence
and location of the Earth's land masses.
At least so far as the Egyptian area is concerned, Velikovsky's descriptions in the
Venusian case (ca 1450 B. C.) especially may be exaggerated; any implication that the
geographical masses moved, or the Earth's axis of rotation changed, would have to be
discounted. His evidence that the Pyramid shows signs of great seismic stress should be
recalled, however. The most resistant material ever sculpted and fitted by mankind was
affected visibly by earthshocks that must have been beyond the present limits of the
Richter seismic scale.
The huge stones placed in circles and lines at Stonehenge, England, can be proven to be
only generally oriented to observe solar solstices of the present age. Otherwise they
display actual rearrangements of stones, done with immense labor, which can best be
accounted for by an axial tilt, that is, by catastrophe.
Here, as at other magnetic settings, the earth scientist needs to take into account
human motives, asking oneself: is it likely that the stupendous collective labor
required to build these great structures, admittedly astronomical, would have been
mobilized if the Earth (and hence the skies) were not exhibiting strange and terrifying
changes of motion? Was the human urge to control the sources of his terror implicated?
Attempts have been made at dating Stonehenge by C14 on organic objects found in
association with it. MacKie is of the opinion that the dates of Stonehenge and other
megalithic astronomical sighting locations would not permit one to claim reorientations
of the Sun after 1500 B. C [34] . Hence, in Joshua's time or on later occasions,
reports of the Sun altering its route would have to be considered false.
Still, Stonehenge, like the Pyramid, is a catastrophized artifact in the first place,
and bears also the marks of catastrophic changes in its settings. The C14 dates are not
abundant and consistent, nor generally reliable within the span of centuries.
The Mesoamerican sites magnify the uncertainty. There are many of them. All are thought
to have been set up after 1500 B. C. Macgowan, (1945), and now we quote Anthony Aveni
extensively [35] ,
... seems to have been the first person to suggest that the plans of a large number of
Mesoamerican cities exhibited an east of north axiality. Among those sites which
evidenced some orderly arrangement, he observed that the orientations fell into three
groups: true north, about 7 east of north, and about 17 east of north; he noted that
few sites were oriented west of north. In the 17 group were Teotihuacan, Cholula,
Tenayuca, Mexican period buildings at Chichen Itza, Tula, and the pyramid adjacent to
the Zocalo in Mexico City. A number of sites of the Peten District seemed to belong to
the 7 group. Macgowan suggested that a historical pattern might emerge in the sense
that early structures such as Cuilcuilco possessed a nearly true north axiality while
the 17 east of north orientation showed up in the later buildings.
Aveni found by transit that fifty of the fifty-six sites surveyed align east of north;
the 17 orientations seems to be prevalent in the valley of Mexico.
Yet Carlson, working on centers carbon-dated between 1000-1400 B. C. says that "Olmec
culture is well-characterized by ceremonial centers, which are generally 7 to 12 west
of north..." [36] . This would suggest that tilts of different ages are represented in
the two regions, or that the Olmecs, who invented the magnetic compass, may have
oriented their buildings to a magnetic north. Almost all of them deviate from true
north orientation.
According to sacred scripture, the four gods who were born of the creator gods govern
the four cardinal points of the Earth's compass, and struggle with each other. It would
appear from the chart that, while north-south was the way human construction should be
engineered, by present direction lines, frequent changes have occurred.
A few years ago, Mesoamerican civilization was considered recent and crude. Today the
view has changed and the same respect is given the early Mesoamerican as is accorded to
other world civilizations.
In 1976, a lodestone compass was claimed for the Olmec civilization at 1000 B. C. or
earlier, before the earliest demonstrable Chinese compass. In this case, it cannot be
argued that the Mesoamerican were incapable of planning their settlements and public
buildings with accurate reference to north or any other cardinal point. In a letter
describing a study trip to Central America, Patrick Julig writes: [37] .
... I observed changes in the orientation of the foundations of Mayan buildings between
the Archaic and Classical periods. Sometimes there were changes within the same
building by as much as 10 in later additions to the structure such as in the Palace at
Palanque. This could possibly be a way to date the structures, or at least the
foundations, as being pre-687 B. C.
One must tentatively conclude that at least Middle America suffered serious crustal
slippages. Or, axial tilts occurred frequently and the Mesoamericans were employing a
method of determining true north (the Earth's axis of rotation) by a means not
dependent upon a star. And, if this technique existed, the alternative presents itself
that the object defining true north itself moved on occasion.
A second study by Aveni leads us also to believe that astronomical settings have
altered in proto-historical times. He and his associates traced and surveyed the
orientations of "The Peaked Cross Symbol in Ancient Mesoamerica" in many places [38] .
These peaked crosses are not monuments of the highest level, but remind us in some ways
of the frequent crude religious sculptures that are to be found at crossways in many
places on Earth, dating up even to the present day. The cross represents the
application of the Sacred Year to the four quarters of the world, the cardinal
directions, the highly significant merging of time and space that the ancient
Mesoamericans achieved.
Teothihuacan was probably the religious center of ancient Mesoamerica, like Rome of
medieval Europe. The fundamental Teotihuacan grid as excavated is oriented 15.5 east
of north. Of the some 30 symbols that the Aveni group have assembled from elsewhere in
Mexico, the orientations of 19 are given. Of the 19, nine are oriented with in 2 of
the Teothihuacan grid. Of the nine, all except one (carved on an outcrop) are on a
floor. Of the remaining ten with known orientations, all range between 35 42 and
80 24'; all are incised upon outcrops except one that is on a broken flat stone whose
"axis points toward Teothihuacan"( TEP3), and another (TUI) that is "pecked on
horizontal floor of lava field." Most of these are considered as pointing towards the
summer solstice sunrise, which is rather insulting to the intelligence of the humblest
pecker. Are we to believe that they could not find the point of farthest advance of the
Sun? And why should outcrops be carved east and floors to the north?
It would appear that either (a) the carvers were inexact amateurs with biases towards
the east, or (b) the larger part of Mexico shifted its axis by 15.5 to the west of
north in response to seismism and/ or a tilt of the Earth's axis in reference to the
solar and sidereal system, or a geographical transfer of poles implying a changed axis
of rotation, or (c) the axis of Teothihuacan shifted at an early time eastwards from
true north and its new position was assigned sacred and ritual meaning, a Holy North to
be imitated, just as the 260-day Sacred Year was tenaciously preserved, without a
celestial referrent, until modern times, alongside the 360 and 365-day calenders. In
the case of (b) and (c), the extreme eastern orientations of the peckings might have
been memorial, without special orientation, to Teotihuacan's gods upon the occasion of
faulting, fracture and exposure of new rocks. The geology and the relative dating of
the peckings are important in considering these alternatives. Especially, the
hypothesis can be entertained of a deliberate attempt to follow a fault line
(especially if an electrical current were running) in the outcroppings. (If the
Etruscan priests took possession of and catologued all aspects of a spot struck by
lightning, similar obsessions may be expected among the equally obsessional
Mesoamericans.)
So long as north-oriented axes were to Holy North, they would be consistent. But east-
oriented axes, if there is no "Holy East", would wander with tilt of the Earth's pole,
that is perhaps from 30 to 80 , whether in the wake of the Teotihuacan shift or upon
some later occasion. The association of the peaked cross symbols with outcroppings must
have some significance. If a desperate speculation may be permitted, new outcroppings
might have become thereby "holy" too, just as fallen meteoroids have become holy, and
perhaps the outcrop orientations might be attempts at affixing the eastern risings of
that vagabond planet, Venus.
A research of deviating Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Mycenean, Greek and other structural
orientations may suggest dates for the construction of earliest Teotihuacan-a subject
of some controversy -as well as point to causes of the phenomena of the peaked crosses.
Finally, one may observe that the Teotihuacan orientation 15.5 to the east of north
could have indicated a transfer of the geographical north pole of the Earth by that
amount at some point of time. This shift is not far from the degree of shift in the
north pole from a location at Baffin Island to its present location northwest. A number
of students believe such shift to have occurred at the "End of the Ice Ages."
Notes (Chapter Four: Magnetism and Axial Tilts)
1. Paul H. Serson, "Tracking the North Magnetic Pole," Geos (Winter, 1980)
2. II S. I. S. R. 2( 1978), 45.
3. "Magsat down: Magnetic Field Declining", 117 Sci. News (1980), 407.
4. Thomas G. Barnes, 8 Creation Res. Soc. Q. 1( 1971) 24-9; 9 C. R. S. Q. 4 (1973) 322-
30; 18 C. R. S. Q. (June 1981) 39-41; II. Soc. for Interdisciplinry Stud. R. 2 (1978)
42-5, 4( 1978), 110-11.
5. Allan Cox, "Geomagnetic Reversals," 163 Sci. (17 Jan. 1969) 237-45; C. J.
Waddington, Sci., 17 Nov. 1967; Cf. J. Eberhart, "Of Life and Death and Magnetism,"
Sci. News (Mar. 27, 1976), 9.
6. R. Juergens, "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," 2
PensÚe 3 (Fall, 1972), 6-12.
7. Geoffrey Gammon, "Focus: Catastrophism Old and New," V SISR 2 (1980-81), 34.
8. Peter Warlow, The Reversing Earth (London: Dent, 1981).
9. 198 Nature (13 April 1963), 176.
10. Worlds in Collision, 105-20. See also, A. W. Perrins, (tr., 3 S. I. S Workshop 1
(July 1980) 27-8, on the reversed burials of Pharaohs, the inscription of Horemheb's
tomb that the Sun rises in the West, and Rameses II at Abu Simbel facing East rather
than the orthodox western way to where, with his false beard, he should be oriented.
11. VII Kronos (Winter 1982), 86-94, 92.
12. V. J. Slabinski, "A dynamical objection to the inversion of the Earth on its spin
axis," 14 J. Physics A. (1981) 2503-7.
13. "Straka: Science or Anti-Science," I PensÚe (Fall 1972), 16.
14. S. Matsushita and W. H. Campbell, eds. Physics of Geomagnetic Phenomena (New York:
Academic Press, 1967).
15. P. L. Lapointe et al., "What happened to the High-Latitude Paleomagnetic Poles,"
273 Nature (22 June 1978), 655.
16. J. R. Heirtzler, "Seafloor Spreading," 219 Sci. Amer. (1968), 60-70.
17. Thomas McCreery, "Krupp and Velikovsky," VI Kronos 3 (1981), 44-5.
18. 112 Archives des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles (1907), 467-82.
19. New Scientist (11 June 1981); cf. Brian Moore, note in V S. I. S. Rev. 2( 1980-1),
38, and 4 S. I. S. Workshop 2 p. 17.
20. W. H. Munk, 177 Nature 4508 (24 Mar. 1956).
21. J. P. Kennett and M. D. Watkins, "Geomagnetic Polarity Change, Volcanic Maxima and
Faunal Extinction in the South Pacific," 227 Nature (29 Aug. 1970), 930-4.
22. G. Wollin, D. B. Ericson and W. B. F. Ryan, "Variations in Magnetic Intensity and
Climatic Changes," 232 Nature (20 Aug. 1971), 549-50.
22a. P. Lapointe and P. Dankers, "L'arctique Canadien sous un climat equatorial?" Geos
(Summer, 1982), 12-6.
23. S. K. Runcorn, "The Earth's Magnetism," 193 Sci. Amer. (Sept. 1955). 152.
24. Irving Michelson, "Mechanics Bear Witness," 4 PensÚe (Spring 1974), 15-21.
25. A. W. Jenkins, et al., 65 J. Geophys. Res. (May 1960), 1617-19, and in Corliss,
compiler, op. cit., GMM-001 to 4 in G2.
26. "Solar Rotation," 202 Science (8 Dec. 1978), 1079.
27. "Irregularities in the Earth's Rotation," in two parts, 17 Sky and Telescope,
(March 1958) 216-8 and (April 1958), 284-6.
28. "Instability of the Earth's Axis of Rotation," 175 Nature (26 Mar. 1955), 526-9.
29. J. Gribbin and S. Plagemann, "Discontinuous Change in Earth's Spin Rate Following
Great Solar Storm of August 1972," 243 Nature (4 May, 1973), 26-7; AndrÚ Danjon,
Comptes Rendus des SÚances de l'AcadÚmie des Sciences, series B, 250: 1399 (22 Feb.
1960), 254: 2479-82 (2 Apr. 1962), 254: 3058-61 (25 Apr. 1963).
30. Boston: Gambit, 1969.
31. See Velikovsky, "The Orientation of the Pyramids," 3 PensÚe 3 (fall), 20-1.
32. L. C. Stecchini, Appendix to Peter Tompkins: Secrets of the Great Pyramid (New
York: Harper and Row, 1971), 380.
33. Cf. G. S. Pawley and N. Abrahamson, 179 Science (2 Mar. 1973), 892.
34. Euan W. Mackie, "Megalithic Astronomy and Catastrophism," 4 PensÚe 5 (Winter), 5-
20; "Megalithic Astronomy: Neolithic Stone Circles," I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring 1976), 2-
4.
35. Anthony Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America (Austin, Texas: U. of
Texas Press, 1975).
36. John B. Carlson, "Lodestone Compass: Chinese or Olmec Primacy?" 189 Science (5
Sept. 1975), 753-60.
37. To William Mullen, 1974 n. d. Julig studied the famous Nazca earth lines of Peru
and concluded that they might represent lines of meteoritic falls from which the
(sacred) burnt stones were removed.
38. A. Aveni. H. Hartung and B. Buckingham, 202 Science (20 Oct. 1978), 286-79.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIVE
ELECTRICITY
Tertullian, an early Christian apologist, came to the attention of a contemporary
physicist delving into the occult, and he, J. Ziegler, has supplied us with this
quotation which can introduce this chapter and the next:
The philosophers know the distinction between common and mysterious fire. The First that
serves man's use is one thing. The fire that ministers to the judgement of God is
another, whether flashing the thunderbolts from the heaven or rushing up from the earth
through the mountain tops. For it does not consume what it burns, but, even while it
spends it, repairs the loss. So the mountains remain, ever burning; and he who is
touched by fire from heaven is safe -no fire shall turn him to ashes.
Lightning expresses only a small fraction of electrical processes. Electricity is
everywhere. It presents itself in the smallest particle and, some of us believe,
commands the behavior of every remote galaxy of stars. It is part and parcel of every
natural transaction. Perhaps it is the hunger of protons for electrons that initiates
all natural behavior, whatever the scale or intensity.
Earth scientists have been reluctant to admit electricity to their domain. There is a
confined interest in "hard" lightning, taken over by metereologists now, and geophysics
must trespass upon nuclear physics in connection with chemical bonding and
radioactivity. Historically, earth scientists have led the parade of debunkers when
meteoroids were reported to fall or when lightning took unusual forms. Of course, when
geologists stood upon mountain tops and St. Elmo's fire flowed from their beards and
hammers, they could not well deny this "god's fire" of the ancients [1] . But one
searches in vain for a treatise on St. Elmo's fire, one of the oldest and most
fascinating phenomena continuously reported.
In fact, there exists no treatise on the full range of electrical behaviors related to
geology. This universal presence of electricity in geological events does not excite
systematic attention, no more than it has in astronomical events up to the present. If
one seeks a rational explanation for this neglect, it may lie in the unreadiness of the
lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere to display their electrical history, letting
the electrical be considered transient and superficial.
If one seeks non-rational explanations of an ideological or psychiatric sort for such
avoidance, it may be in the quixotic or miraculous appearances of electrical phenomena.
Bordering upon the religious and the occult, these set up psychological resistances
among "hard" scientists. As we shall see, even the famous subject of lightning, which
can hardly be ignored, is little understood. The latest literature on lightning is still
at the state of trying to survey its extent and intensity, and not even its forms are
classified.
The ancient Etruscans thought that they could discern eleven different types. So wrote
Pliny, but a modern Etruscan expert, Rilli, says that they recognized thirty kinds of
lightning [2] . Ancient sources that refer to fire often are speaking of electricity,
"god's fire." Applying the modern meaning of "fire" as combustion and conflagration, one
cannot comprehend their outlook. To early theologians and philosophers," fire" meant a
set of qualities exhibited by the "aether", loosely translated as "air", and when "air"
was considered a basic element of existence, electrical phenomena were deemed to be
integral with it.
The large importance given to electrical phenomena in ancient times, drives us to
believe that their manifestations were much more in evidence. Furthermore, although
there are a few indications that the Egyptians may have employed wire on occasion to
transmit electricity, unquestionably they were preoccupied with electrostatics, the
exploitation of the generous and ready electrical potentials of the ground atmosphere.
This I have discussed in my study of Moses.
Lately, the ionization of the atmosphere has come to be studied. Even the ground beneath
our feet has come to be conceived as a conveyor of waves of numerous types, ranging from
the gross seismic tremors that topple whole cities to the delicate motions of the wire
in the hands of dowsers in search of underground water [3] . Ions are electrified
particles; they affect the growth, fibres and nervous system of plants, animals, and
humans in ways mostly unknown [4] . Many students think that an abundance of negative
ions in the atmosphere produces a sense of well-being, but that "excessive" positive
ions provoke depression, irritability, and illness.
The Earth's surface contains a charge; it too is unknown in extent and effects [5] .
The charge is called negative originally because it is of the kind that comes from
rubbed resin, and conventionally because it comes from the ground. On a clear day an
electric potential of about 100 volts per meter of height occurs. The charge of Earth
tends to persist in the absence of exoterrestrial intrusions, employing the lower
atmosphere as an insulator. The charge in our opinion, will have varied greatly over the
human past. Then its variation, as well as its constancy, must have had significant
effects upon human behavior and ecology.
The Earth may have presumed once to have been in the grip of a constant heavy charge,
for reasons that will unfold below and are also treated in Solaria Binaria. It began to
lose this charge, both gradually and in series of catastrophic discharges. Today, solar
flares excite large surges in the flow of charge from upper atmosphere to ground. Too,
thunderstorms may be principally a method of balancing the atmosphere-lithosphere
equation by releasing ground electricity [6] .
There persist certain phenomena that may reflect this decline of charge. All over the
world there are pathways that were worked out mysteriously (part instinctively and part
deliberately) by ancient men and that are followed today. Michell has sought out the
English paths especially. He shows that they are often not the shortest way between two
points [7] . Rather they have seemingly pursued geodetic "power lines" which thereupon
developed as religious routine, ritually followed. As with many customs, people follow
behavior that originally had a perceived and sound meaning.
Waterlines have been explored successfully by following the cues provided by traditional
water-dowsers. It may well be that underground water moves along paths which are
electrically distinctive. In other cases, it may emulate the course of lightning that
once travelled along root networks and also fractures formed by lightning. Seismic
fractures also are important conduits of water.
Lightning has been used as a kind of naturally-provided instrument for studying the
electrical nature of the ground. Aside from numerous ancient observations along these
lines, a few modern studies exist [8] to indicate that soils of high conductivity (e.
g. marshes) are lightning-prone; that ironstone outcrops attract lightning; that strata
discontinuties attract lightning. So do underground springs; so do areas of high
negative ion concentrations. Masts, lightning conductors, and buried metal pipes invite
strokes.
Experiments by Stekolnikov showed that soils attracted sparks depending upon their
conductivity. Certain trees are stroke-prone, the oak, for example. The variety of
effects is scarcely understood -the fancy dendritic patterns sometimes displayed
underground, the killing of flocks of sheep, the escape unimpaired of a girl enveloped
in lightning flames, the subsequent death of a man seemingly unaffected at the moment of
stroke, and so on.
In 1977 an American physicist, J. Ziegler, published a study of the knowledge and uses
of electrostatics among the ancient Hebrews and other peoples of the Near East and
Greece [9] . His thesis, elaborated shortly thereafter by the present author in a book
on the period of Moses, maintained that these ancient peoples possessed devices for
inducing and displaying electrical effects in their religious practices. The most
spectacular of the devices was Moses' Ark of the Convenant, which G. C. Lichtenberg, a
German Electrician of the 18th Century, termed a form of Leyden jar.
The Leyden jar is called an electric capacitor. A metal rod based upon a metal lining
within an insulating (e. g. wood) vessel will store a charge from the air. When the
outside of the vessel is also lined with metal that is in touch with the ground, an
opposite charge is induced. The potential between the two poles may accumulate to a
level at which a spark will jump the gap between them. The frequency, brilliance, and
power of the spark or arc (Ark = box = Aron in old Hebrew) depend upon the size of the
gap and the voltage differential that is generated.
The condition of the atmosphere and ground are critical factors. The higher the box and
the wetter its grounding contact, the greater the electrical effects. That is, the
effectiveness and potency of the devices depends upon local conditions that can to some
degree be manipulated. Aside from this, the general electrical state of the Earth and
atmosphere (including exoterrestrial influences affecting these bodies) determines the
overall effect.
In an atmosphere where electrical and dust turbulence were prevalent, as in times of
Exodus and other periods that I have identified elsewhere, and the Earth was discharging
at an effectively higher level than it is today, the incitement of electric displays
without motors, pumps, and wires was easy: large potential differences continuously
presented themselves for exploitation. Electrical effects became essential to political
and religious roles and were subjects of jealous contention within and between
governments. A full social analysis is presented in my treatise on Moses; what may be
stressed here is that the existence and activity of such devices evidences that the
Earth was then in a state of heightened electrical activity relative to modern times.
With the settling of the skies, the intensity of electric phenomena diminished. The
divine spark manifested itself less and less; the arks were carried more and more up to
the mountain temples (e. g. both the Temple of Solomon and the Temple of Jeroboam). The
angels, demons, and mountain gods manifested themselves in electrical demonstrations on
high with the aid of crosses, trees, and poles [10] . These, too, could not be
maintained. Empedocles, when discussing the four elements, fire, earth, air and water,
says that fire has ceased to "travel", and no lower forms of fire remain [11] .
Plutarch wrote at the end of the pagan age an essay on why the highly placed Delphic
oracle had lost its influence; he gave the vaguest of references indicating a failure of
electric current, but the question itself is significant [12] . By late classical
times, the knowledge of arks and of the exploitation of "god's fire" was largely
defunct.
Yahweh became "invisible", who before, declares the Bible, could be seen in flaming
display upon the Ark of Moses. So later philosophers gave new meanings to words:
realities became metaphors and abstractions; thus, the "word" and "presence" of the
divine became thoughts, rather than the noises and signs of electrical divinity. The
profuse electrical references in the Bible, in ancient Near East documents and Greek
Mythology, in the Hindu Vedas -all were reduced to metaphors, generalized into ordinary
meanings ('fire' becomes 'conflagration'), and metaphysical abstractions (the
commandment to worship no other God nor image is interpreted philosophically rather than
realistically). The obelisks whose points once lit up as the eyes of the hidden god Amon
(Amen) came to be variously interpreted as giant sundials, emblems of royal power,
phallic symbols, or sign boards for vainglorious inscriptions. As Ziegler suggests, the
Greek word "obelisk" itself might have meant "ob-el-ish," or "serpent-light-fire."
Von Fange recounts a century-old report on a Babylonian ziggurat, which may have been
the Tower of Babel. The structure can be placed several centuries earlier than Moses but
also in a highly electrical epoch.
It appeared that fire struck the tower and split it down to the very foundation. In
different parts of the ruins immense brown and black masses of brickwork had changed
into a vitrified state. At a distance the ruins looked like edifices torn apart at their
foundations. Evidently the fiercest kind of fire created the havoc. The most curious of
the fragments found several misshapen masses of brickwork, black, subjected to some kind
of heat, and completely molten.
The whole ruin has the appearance of a burnt mountain. On one side, beneath the crowning
masonry, lay huge fragments torn from the pile itself. The calcined and vitreous surface
of the brick had fused into rock-like masses. It is difficult to explain the cause of
the vitrification of the upper building. Great boulders were vitrified, and brickwork
had been fused by fire [13] .
Here possibly was cosmic fire. Another effect deserves mention. A major electrical
discharge in which a number of humans are stimulated, as in a town on an eminence, may
proceed slowly and without killing. It leaks rather than blasts. It might affect
people's minds. Today, a fearful side-effect of electroshock therapy, which is used to
treat persons suffering from depression, is amnesia; whole sections of the person's
store of memories will be erased.
The Tower of Babel was probably erected at a time when electrical perturbations were
attributed, if my analysis in Chaos and Creation is correct, to movements of the planet
Mercury [14] . The arrogance of the builders in attempting to reach the sky was
punished, recites the Bible, but in a peculiar way. They who spoke the same language
when they began their work were caused to "babel" in many tongues. The Earth shook long
beforehand; the tower partly sank into the ground, so say Jewish legends; but also much
of the tower was destroyed by fire from the sky. The work had to be abandoned and
afterwards the nations spoke different languages.
I offer a scenario for consideration. The Tower of Babel was being built in terror and
hope of appeasing sky-bodies, possibly Jupiter-Marduk or Mercury. Conscripts or slaves
of many countries made up a work force of 50,000 men. They put together a rough lingua
franca from the language of the area to communicate on the job. The approach of a large
body (there were actually many adoring and frightened references to planet Mercury
around this time) occasioned the build-up of charge and then a flowing discharge through
the structure, creating a confusion in administrative orders and a linguistic amnesia
especially in the lingua franca. No longer could people understand each other. And then
the whole edifice was stuck by immense cosmic bolts, partly fractured, and exploded.
"Slow lightning" is the geologically and biologically effective discharge of terrestrial
electricity. A "slow lightning flood" may be conceivable, too. The curious vitrified
forts of Scotland may be a case in point [15] . They remind us of the Ziggurat of
Babylon. Their stone and mortar are fused solidly with the clifftops to which they
adhere.
The forts are much in need of study. The early interpretations of them as cattle pens is
uncomplimentary to a people that lived in hovels that experienced no such fusion. The
idea of brush being heaped outside the precipitous walls, and then burning them with an
intense heat, would require a mobile ceramics oven and vent.
We would argue that the lightning here was not "bolt-thin" and "lightning-quick" but
poured upwards over seconds, diffusing through its medium, ferruginously-mortared stone.
There would have been an approaching unequally charged great body or gas cloud that had
pierced the electrically balanced plasma and drawn away or brushed aside the magnetic
space sheath of Earth. The Earth below would have collected on its highest surfaces a
charge to meet the incoming charge. This would begin to flow upwards. Heavy leader
strokes descending would have collapsed the roofs of houses. A tube of ionized dust
would arise and descend, make contact from both ends and set up a fierce heat that would
scorch its "vessels." A final flash, and then the body would pass or the cloud
dissipate, and a rain of dust and vapors would fall back upon the ground, calcinating
it.
It is probable that many thousands of burnt eminences exist around the world whose tops
have seen the fusion of rocks, perhaps even Troy IIg, the "Burnt City" so-called [16] .
The famous site, whether or not it was the real Troy, is on an eminence. While not high,
the city would have had many small reservoirs of water, whereas the ground outside might
already have been dried out. In Troy IIg a sulphurous color suffuses all outdoor spaces
and passageways of the town. A deposit of lead and copper melted and flowed around the
town. (It is possible that this melt had been scavanged after Schliemann reported it in
the 1880's and the discoloration was all that was discoverable when the Blegen
expedition re-excavated the site in the 1930's).
No human hand could have or would have set such a fire. The heat was fierce. The ash was
far too abundant for a deliberate fire from local materials, and carried a red color. In
places it was like calcinated rock, a meter or more in depth, perhaps like the vitrified
Scottish forts. No one would have wanted to destroy precious metals (not so mention even
more precious metal left in abundance in the scorched houses and the Treasure of Priam,
found on a Wall). Noteworthy is the absence of human and animal skeletal material in the
ruins. Either they turned to dust from the heat, or the electrical build-up was sensed,
as it is by animals before earthquakes for example, and they fled from the hill onto the
plain where the sensations were absent.
Perhaps a heavily charged cosmic body was approaching or was near the Earth with an
opposite charge or inducing one to collect on Earth; this would cause numerous
discharges. Every eminence, one might imagine, would offer an exit for lightning,
especially if it held the slightest metallic component, and were not surrounded by damp
lowlands. Buildings are not needed.
If settlements seem to have been affected by slow lightning flood, unsettled eminence
should often have endured the same experience. I have explored as a candidate a conical
hill of Stylida, Naxos, Greece (Alt. 152m) [17] . The top is a hard silicate with bits
of ferruginous rock in the eroded (burst?) rubble. It nests among loose, hardly
consolidated rocks that have fast fallen away from the columnar core. This phenomenon is
usually seen as an ancient metamorphosis. Somehow the temperature of water-laden deep
limestones and granites mounted and caused them to nearly melt and to rise. Limestone is
a common environment of silicification. Silification is abundant around igneous
metamorphism. In a hot and fast reaction, siliceous fluid is introduced hydrothermally
and replaces the host rock, such as limestone, into which it intrudes.
Such is the case where an electric charge is seeking an exit from far below. With or
without water, a hot electric discharge current can assemble and proceed quickly up the
core of a hill, heating and silicifying as it move. On top of the hill, it forms a cap
just as caps will form on the sparking end of a discharging rod. The charge, that is,
uses the plastically flowing rock as a conductor and then builds a deposit from which it
may discharge more easily.
The taller the mountain, the less time and chance for the siliceous fluid to reach and
cap its peak. At the same time, electricity of this type may even build mountains.
Juergens has suggested that mounds may have been formed on the planet Mars by the same
process. An electrical process may also be involved in the vigorously erupting mountains
of Io, satellite of Jupiter. These are casting material to heights of several hundred
kilometers from caldera-like structures. Unless Io is newly emplaced, all water or
carbon dioxide would have long ago been exhausted as propellent media. Spectroscopy
evidences no water on Io, moreover. Sulfur would be too heavy to gain the speed of
eruption required for such lofty explosions.
Therefore, Thomas Gold turns to the electric current of 5x10 6 amperes that cyclones
upwards from the Jovian surface arguing that it is "largely conducted through the body
of Io [18] . The current contracts along a narrow tube of passage which is kept hot and
therefore more conductive. As it emerges into cold space, the current encounters
conductive resistance and, hence, forms heat spots of several thousands of degrees
kelvin. "Most current spots are likely to be volcanic calderas, either provided by
tectonic events within Io or generated by the current heating itself." The electric
volcanism is steadied by the "accurately repeating" electric arc from Jupiter. So now we
find here a model for processes that may once have occurred on Earth as well, supposing
a sufficiently intense terrestrial discharge were occurring at a weak spot for even a
few days.
The "slow lightning" may shape not only eminences but also subterranean cavities. Von
Fange writes that "The same phenomenon has been observed in the mounds and barrows of
the British Isles. Some have at one time been filled with an intense heat. Their walls
are melted and their contents fused. The stones of the innermost cell of a long barrow
near Maughold on the Isle of Man have been fused together like the mysterious vitrified
towers of Scotland and elsewhere." [19] Many Egyptian tombs and the interiors of
pyramids are scarred by intense heat. Caliche (CaCO3) adhering to bones and rock
undersides in a California burial cairn provide radiometric dates of 19,000 to 21,000
years, whereas archaeological estimates of the many such cairns give 5,000 B. P. or less
[20] .
The famed caves of Aquitaine (France) [21] whose primeval users carved and sculpted
images upon the walls, may surprise the naive visitor. One expects to find a general
similarity of the interiors. Not at all. Each interior is unique. Some are serpentine,
others like grand ballrooms; some have magnificent silicate columns and startling
naturally formed shapes; others are plain and dull, save for the signs of human
occupancy. All are of limestone; all are elevated, if only slightly, above the flat
river and stream valleys around.
Why are they so different? Caves are said to be formed by the percolation of water
through weak stone, cracked stone, or interstices of layers of stone. The filtering
drops become trickles, and then streams. The cavity is enlarged. The river deviates or
dries up and the interior is prepared for occupancy. Time elapsed may be "millions of
years."
However, Worrad reports that limestone caves can be rapidly formed by water -"that in
one year a cave of 3ft. x 6ft. cross section x 120ft. long would be formed per square
mile of the surface," and opines that the Deluge [not to mention other floods] provided
huge amounts of water for limestone solution and cave foundation [22] . Dripstone would
be formed rapidly, too. A National Geographic Magazine photograph (1953) carried a
picture of a bat "entombed" inside a stalagmite, which, therefore, could not have formed
at the "0.001 inch per annum or so rates " usually assumed [23] . In Brixham caves
(Devonshire), the bones of fossil mammals, of the types drawn in the Caves of Dordogne,
are stuck in the ceiling -so writes a correspondent, U. E. Ramage, to this author -as
well as in the sides and floor. In as much as these species' extinctions were quite
recent, this shows that it may not take long to hollow out a cave. Furthermore, the
small cave is "prettily ornamented with concrete growths." [24] So we would appear to
have a very recent catastrophic bone assemblage of animals, then or soon extincted as
species, followed by a geologically instant cave-making, and prompt furbishing with
stalagmites and stalagtites.
Although water may quickly hollow out caves, the role of electricity is not to be
ignored. Electric fields, as Asakawa has demonstrated experimentally, enhances heat
transfer in nearby gases ( up to 1.5 times); liquids (up to 2.0 times) and solids (up to
1.6 times), depending upon the positioning of electrodes and the strength of the applied
fields [25] . Perhaps caves are ancient hotspots, electrical calderas, where creation
time is shortened by the blasting impatience of electrical arc currents.
Notes (Chapter Five: Electricity)
1. Cf. 44 abstracts of such experiences in Wm. Corliss, Sourcebook GLD-001 to 044, GI-81
to 110.
2. Pliny, Natural History, Rockham tr. (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1967), II. LIII; N.
Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Florence: Giuntina, 1964).
3. Guy Underwood, The Pattern of the Past (London: Abacus, 1972) Treats dowsing,
electricity, geodetic lines, and cultural associations all together.
4. Fred Soyka and Alan Edmonds, The Ion Effect (Toronto: Seal Books, 1978); S. W. Tromp,
op. cit., 112-5.
5. Fernando Sanford, Terrestrial Electricity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U. Press,
1931), Chapter 4.
6. "Solar Activity and Terrestrial Thunderstorms," 81 New Scientists (1979), 256.
7. A View Over Atlantis, (1969).
8. See the survey of unusual ground effects by B. L. Goodlet, J. Inst. of Elec. Eng. 81
(1937), 1-26.
9. Jerry Ziegler (pseud. Zeromiah II), YHWH, Princeton: Metron Publns., 1977.
10. Ibid., 53ff.
11. Hock, God in Greek Philosophy, 99, cited in Ziegler.
12. "Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers," IV, 56. See Ziegler, Chapter 19.
13. Erich A. von Fange, "Strange Fire on the Earth," 12 Creat. Res. Soc. Q. (Dec. 1975),
132.
14. Op. cit., 210 ff.
15. James Anderson, 5 Archaelogia (1777), 241-66; ibid., (1980), 87-99. and see the
materials reprinted in W. R. Corliss, Strange Artifacts (Glen Arm, Md.: Sourcebook
Project, 1974) vols. M-1, M-2, under "Forts."
16. A. de Grazia, "Paleo-Calcinology: Destruction by Fire in Pre-Historic and Ancient
Times." I Kronos (April 1975), 25-36; II Kronos (August, 1975), 63-71.
17. The author thanks geologists Dr. Gerd Roesler and Dr. Poul Andriessen, who aided me
notwithstanding their scepticism.
18. "Electrical Origin of the Outbursts of Io," 206 Sci (30 Nov. 1979), 107 1-3. On
sulphur as the medium, cf. Guy J. Consolmagno, "Sulfur Volcanos on Io," 205 Sci (27 July
1979), 396-7.
19. Op. cit., 132.
20. P. J. Wilke, "Cairn Burials of the California Deserts," 43 Amer. Antiquity (1978),
444-8.
21. Inter alia cf. J. P. Rigaud and B. Vanderneersch, eds., Sud-Ouest (Aquitaine et
Charente): Livret-Guide de 1' Excursion A4, IX CongrÚs U. I. S. P. R. Paris, 1976.
22. Worrad, Creat. Sci. Res. Q. 197; see also letters by D. Cardona and B. Raymond in 3
PensÚe (Winter, 1973), 48-50; and E. L. Williams and R. J. Herdklotz "Solution and
Deposition of Calcium Carbonate in a Laboratory Situation," 13 Creat. Res. Sci. Q.
(March 1977), 192-9.
23. Ltr. of Felix Fernando, III PensÚe (1973), 50, citing Nat. Geog. (Oct. 1953).
24. 8 Sept. 1967 from Ceylon; Villey Aellen And P. Strinati, Guide des Grottes d'Europe
(Paris: Delachaux, 1975), 130.
25. Y. Asakawa, "Promotion and retardation of heat transfer by electric fields," 261
Nature (20 May 1976), 220-1.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIX
COSMIC AND TERRESTRIAL LIGHTNING
A powerful, highly developed and mysterious people of ancient Italy, the Etruscans,
believed in the strictest set of relationships between the small Earth and the great and
divine Universe [1] . They planned their cities astronomically, as did all early
peoples, but, more specifically, worshiped lightning and gave "the thunderbolting god"
Jupiter to the Romans. They founded a College of Lightning Arts (ars fulminum) at Visul.
When a bolt of lightning struck, the ground became at that instant hallowed; no one
might disturb it until priests made a site inspection and had concluded which of thirty
types of lightning it was and what should be done about it [2] .
They dug wells to receive lightning and marked the wells with the bidental symbol of
Jupiter (Zeus), a two-pronged spear. Zeus has been variously portrayed as the hurler of
cosmic lightning, with a two or three-pronged spear, and even hurling a bolt whose shape
was not forked lightning but like an American football, a plasmoid perhaps, a kind of
lightning bomb [3] .
All mountains were sacred to thunderbolting Jupiter. Seneca, the Roman stoic and
dramatist, has him dissolving mountain ranges with his bolts [4] . The Bible says the
same of Yahweh, all this and more.
Psalm 97 gives us :
"His lightnings lighten the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like
wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth."
The Babylonians speak so of Marduk, the Indians of Shiva, the Persians of Mazda. Other
gods played with lightning and fire -Hephaistos, Apollo, Hermes, etc. but Jupiter was
the overwhelming lightning god. Giambattista Vico believed that lightning was less on
Earth in the damp age of Saturn, before Jupiter, because of deluges. It is noteworthy
that satellite maps of terrestrial lightning published this year (1981) by Orville and
Vonnegut show a dearth of discharges upon oceanic surfaces [5] . Satellites have also
shown that a realm of lightning bolts a thousand times more powerful than the ordinary
terrestrial bolts dominates the upper atmosphere [6] .
The Etruscans said that their great city of Volsinium, by what is now Lago Bolsena, was
destroyed by a thunderbolt of Mars. They believed that a portent or an inducement to the
awful act came from rituals performed by their King [7] . This was about the time that
Rome was founded, likely by near descendants of fugitives from grave disasters in the
Near East [8] . The famous Seven Hills of Rome themselves may be a set of extinct
volcanos, according to an early French geologist. Since few scientists believe in cosmic
thunderbolts, this report of Lake Bolsena has never been thoroughly investigated. The
Italian anthropologist-geologist Leonardi assured me that the lake basin is a typical
extinct volcano. Velikovsky accepted the lightning thesis [9] . Geographer Donald
Patten calls it a meteoric crater-lake because it lacks a volcano talus, is oval shaped,
7x9 miles, and is bottomed by lava and ash [10] . Until an intensive investigation is
made, Leonardi's expertness must weigh heavily in our judgement.
J. E. Strickling has guided the author to a passage in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews(
I, 240) where, it is said, " the day whereon God visited him (Abraham) was exceedingly
hot, for He had bored a hole in hell, so that its heat might reach as far as the
earth..." Was this hole dug by a meteoroid impact, a lightning stroke (downwards or
upwards), or a volcanic outburst? That it would have been a sudden occurrence, and that
other studies indicate probably exoterrestrial (hence volcanic) disturbances in
Abraham's time and that Abraham's God was a God of lightning are bits of fact to
consider with the larger mosaic being pieced together here.
Archaeologist Nicola Rilli dug in one location at Prato (near Florence) and found three
distinct heavy ash layers defining three distinct periods of prehistory [11] . He found
a small silo grain, intact but carbonized, a fact that he ascribed to a great fire that
had been suffocated. Lightning fires may have played a role in the burnings.
Recent astrophysical opinion regards Jupiter as a hot hyper-active planet that exchanges
bolts with its satellite Io over a distance of 50,000 miles. The bolts are frequent
enough to be an arc or current. Strangely, Pliny described great thunderbolts as the
"fire of the three upper planets," not to be confused with terrestrial lightning [12] .
Today lightning could not discharge over the great distance between Jupiter and Earth,
not unless Jupiter were to explode, a great cloud of gases that would drift between the
planets and provide a conductor for the electric spark. Something akin to discharge can
affect the Earth and Sun, though, when the great planet is in conjunction with Earth and
Sun, as Gribben and Plageman have propounded [13] .
However, according to the theory of Solaria Binaria which we have advanced in another
book, the two bodies were once nearer, there were remnants of a gaseous envelope between
Sun and Jupiter, and there were sporadic efforts to push through discharges along the
defunct axis of an electrical current that had once connected the bodies. Since Earth
was descending upon this axis, which became the ecliptic plane it may have experienced
the reported Jovian bolts. These would still be discharging from time to time, seeking
to make contact with the Sun and being short-circuited by Earth and probably other
intervening bodies.
It may be surmised, too, that, upon the nova and fission of Super-Saturn (Saturn-
Jupiter), not only would water and debris be discharged into interplanetary space, but
also gases that would temporarily afford Jupiter its chance to earn its reputation as
the discharger of interplanetary thunderbolts. Not until the arc flashes had quite
disappeared, the gaseous medium had been quite dissipated, and the Earth drifted out of
its binary-locked, conjunctive orbit with Jupiter would the cosmic lightning cease to
threaten the Earth with a bolt from the blue.
Replacing the binary current and magnetic gas tube were two contemporary phenomena: the
solar winds and the space plasma. The solar winds are not a current, but are unfocussed
particle flows and blasts. They diffuse into space rather than concentrate upon the
planets. Earth receives only a very small fraction of the solar radiance.
The space plasma that surrounds the planets is composed of dissociated ionized atoms
that generally do not assemble in electrical charges [14] . It protects the Earth and
other planets from inducing and suffering repeated cosmic discharges. And it prevents
leakage of the remaining charge of Earth, which may indeed be building up.
However, the space sheath or magnetosphere of the Earth cannot suffice as a buffer when
large or fast erratic bodies approach. In the Venusian catastrophe, cosmic lightning
played a heavy role. Cometary Venus, according to Velikovsky's reconstruction,
encountered the Earth in the spring of 1453 B. C. and followed roughly its orbit for
some days. The comet with its millions of miles of tail appeared and reappeared as the
Earth continued with interruptions its rotation. On the second approach, after six days
had passed, a gigantic column towered into the sky, a pillar of smoke by day and of fire
by night, as Exodus 14: 19 describes it.
This stage was accompanied by violent and incessant discharges between the atmosphere of
the tail and the terrestrial atmosphere. When the tidal waves rose to their highest
point, and the seas were torn apart, a tremendous spark flew between the earth and the
globe of the comet, which instantly pushed down the miles-high billows. Meanwhile, the
tail of the comet and its head, having become entangled with each other by their close
contact with the earth, exchanged violent discharges of electricity. It looked like a
battle between the brilliant globe and the dark column of smoke. In the exchange of
electrical potentials, the tail and the head were attracted one to the other and
repelled one from the other. From the serpentlike tail extensions grew, and it lost the
form of a column. It looked now like a furious animal with legs and with many heads. The
discharges tore the column to pieces, a process that was accompanied by a rain of
meteorites upon the earth. It appeared as though the monster were defeated by the
brilliant globe and buried in the sea, or wherever the meteorites fell. The gases of the
tail subsequently enveloped the earth." [15]
I would depart from the scenario mainly to suggest that the column of smoke seen
everywhere was probably a mixture of the comet's tail and the "catastrophic column" (as
Kelly and Dachille picture it). The main contact between Earth and Venus occurred at
this point were the main discharge left Earth carrying upwards surface material and
building then and there a "great chemical factory" of Venusian and Earth raw materials
[16] .
Legends from around the world describe this engagement. It is the battle between Marduk
and the dragon Tiamat, between Isis and Seth, between Vishnu and the serpent (or Krishna
and serpent), between Ormuzd and Ahriman, between the Lord and Rahab and, the most
widely known of all, between Zeus and Typhon.
Velikovsky proceeds, after citing these legends, to place the comet Typhon in the mid-
second millennium B. C., at the time of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Bimson has
established the pharaoh of Egypt just then as the first Hyksos King by the name of
Typhon [17] . Typhon is related to Typhon (South Seas), Toufan (Arabs), and is another
version of the legend of Phaeton. Legends, myths sacred scriptures, and ancient
historians have been mobilized to support the theory of the encounter. That Venus also
suffered is logical; it still faces Earth "respectfully" in "resonance", upon its near
passage [18] .
Electrical phenomena akin to lightning are associated with volcanism, earthquakes, and
meteoritic phenomena, including atmospheric pass-through and impact explosions. They may
also be an independent "instrument of the gods," as strong or stronger than gravitation
in their effects when two dense bodies approach one another closely. Further, cosmic
electricity may traverse a whole star system or planetary system.
C. E. R. Bruce of the British Electrical Association for many years sought recognition
of the place of electricity and lightning in the creation and destruction of whole
galaxies of the universe [19] . He described lightning discharges of 6x10 11 miles in
width and ten times as long generating temperatures of 5x10 8 degrees Celsius and
lasting for 10 6 years or more. The discharges occur amidst accumulations of cosmic
dust.
Bruce's colleague, Eric Crew, who shares his views, has given more attention to cosmic
lightning within the solar system and particularly in encounters involving earth. How he
handles electrical problems of large-body encounters can be exemplified in the following
passages:
If a charged body B (such as a large comet) approaches a planet A which has an
atmosphere, opposite charges are induced and the atmosphere will be pulled out towards
B. This increases the voltage gradient between B and the extended atmosphere very
rapidly and violent discharges may take place even though the two bodies are separated
by a considerable distance. The effect is intensified if both A and B have atmospheres,
and even more so if they have opposite charges.
The effect... is to cause jet of compressed material to form and for the substance to be
ejected on to the negatively charged body, or the induced negative charge.
Charges induced in the solid surface of A as B approaches will cause a ground current to
flow and the resistance of its path will cause the induced charge to lag behind the line
joining A and B. The electrical force will produce a turning moment on A and B and the
resultant motion will depend on the direction of the force in relation to the axis of
rotation of A and B. The displacement may be increased if B has a crust floating on a
molten interior, as the moment of inertia of this would be much smaller than that of a
completely rigid sphere, even if the possible tilting of the axis is ignored [20] .
That is, in the case of the several large body encounters of the Earth, which we think
may have occurred, strong lightning exchanges took place, atmospheres exchanged in
varying proportions, debris flew into space, powerful ground currents of electricity
followed the point of closest contact, and these currents assisted inertial forces to
push crustal sections of the Earth over its plastic mantle.
Ralph Juergens' theories of cosmic electricity have been close to the historical events
proposed by quantavolutionary theorists. Intimately acquainted with the experiences and
ideas of Velikovsky, he worked for many years upon the basic astro-physical problems
posed by the Venus-Mars-Earth scenario, specializing in the application of electrical
theory.
His primary theory deals with the source of solar energy [21] . It is in one sense non-
catastrophic. It is also quite new and unaccepted; yet, as he says "the modern
astrophysical concept that ascribes the Sun's energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in
the solar interior is contradicated by nearly every observable aspect of the Sun."
Whereas the conventional theory is that the Sun derives its energy from a hydrogen-
fusion nuclear reaction continuing over millions of years, Juergen's theory is that the
Sun's surface bears a negative heavy electrical charge, which it has gathered mostly
from galactic winds and from a great many bodies brighter than the Sun, and which
discharges itself upon the solar system bodies. The solar radiance that strikes Earth
and causes heat is as nothing compared with the galactic radiance that strikes the Sun.
The Sun's bloated atmosphere is the anode; its highest levels are of the highest
temperatures, which go down, rather than up, as the surface of the giant gas bag of the
Sun is approached. Hence, elaborate attempts to catch neutrinos from the Sun's "solar
furnaces" as they traverse the Earth must fail; if no nuclear fusion, then no neutrinos.
The Sun's radiance, varying only slightly as its total charge varies, penetrates the
electrically neutral plasma of interplanetary space, passes through the positively
charged outer magnetosphere, enters a neutral zone and then a negatively charged inner
zone, and finally strikes the Earth's atmosphere with warming and radioactive effects.
(Jupiter does not "need" the Sun's heat; it radiates several times as much energy as it
receives from the Sun.) A great proportion of all the craters and many fissures of the
Moon and Mars, and, though less visible, of the Earth, are explained by Juergens as the
effects of cosmic lightning, occurring during the holocene period that we are studying.
The "plasmoids" which I referred to earlier are a type of lightning conducted to Earth
as "pieces of plasma." These balanced "things" of positive ions and electrons retain
their identity and appear as luminous objects of missile-like proportions. They would
cause impact craters or above-ground explosions that leave little trace. A second type
of primeval lightning, like that known best to us, would give clear evidence of electric
scarring, whether as a crater or as a jagged crack in the ground.
The jagged cracks of clefts are called rilles and are found by the thousands on the
Moon. The principal candidate for the most recent creation of rilles is the planet Mars,
which, following Velikovsky's reconstruction of events, would have happened in the
period 776-687 B. C. Electrons has to be torn from the lunar crust in numbers sufficient
to trigger an interplanetary discharge. The Moon becomes the cathode, Mars the anode. As
the charge mobilizes quickly on the Moon, it probes along lines of weakness and explodes
the surface in traveling to its discharge point. It blasts a crater as it exits into
space.
Again Juergen's theory is exceptional. More favored as agents are running water (now
gone), erosion by dust winds, an explosion of underground gases, and the collapse of
lava tubes through which liquid lava had passed. That these alternatives to the agency
of eruption of a breakdown channel raise severe problem is documented by Juergen's table
presented below. It may be seen that the lightning channel eruption, not entirely
unknown even today on Earth, provides a better explanation of rille characteristics.
Competence of Various Theories to Explains Sinuous Rilles of the Moon
Proposed Rille-Origin Theory Rille Characteristic
Erosion by Ash-Gas Cloud Formation by Gaseous Outburst Formation by Gaseous
Outburst Formation Lave-T Collapse Eruption of Breakdown Channel
1. Width greater at higher end C C O B A
2. Channel sinuous A C O C A
3. Irregular crater at upper end B B O B A
4. Ends of rille at different elevations A A O A A
5. Outwash deposits lacking at lower end C-X B A C-X A
6. "Bridges" lacking along channel A A O B-C A
7. On-channel cratering frequent O O A O A
8. Channel may traverse high ground X X B X B
9. Channel may stray from dip of surface C-X C-X B C-X B
10. Channel may follow crest of ridge X X A B A
11. Channel may expose numerous strata B B A C-X A-B
12. Surface strata upturned at rille margins X X A X A
13. Clustering of rilles C C B-C B-C A-B
14. Young rilles may cross older rilles C-X C-X A-O C-X B
15. Secondary rilles in rille bottoms Erosion by Running Water B C C C
B
Symbols :
A. Predictable on basis of theory,
B. Permissible in terms of theory,
C. Permissible, but difficult to explain,
O. Apparently irrelevant in terms of theory X.
Evidence precludes theory. Probably the main focus of the electrical battle between Moon
and its assailant is the huge crater Aristarchus. It expresses its recency by a bare
uncratered floor, by giving off light and by being intensely radioactive. The greatest
concentration of lunar rilles is also located at and near Aristarchus. The light bolt
was estimated by Juergens at 2x10 21 joules of energy, "a few million times as energetic
as ordinary lightning."
The likely partner in catastrophe, Mars shares gases with the Moon.
As things stand, the situation is this: Lunar finds are rich in argon, neon, other rare
gases, and carbon dioxide None of these gases is known to be present in the solar wind,
nor is elemental carbon a known constituent of that medium... Precisely those gases
known to be present in the atmosphere of Mars -the great bulk of which has been
mysteriously "stolen" away in the not-too-distant past -are also found tenaciously held
in superficial crystalline layer of the Moon's outermost blanketing materials. This
would be a most incredible coincidence if the interplanetary discharges described by
Velikovsky never took place [22] .
We are only in the early stages of fulminology. Edward Komarek has discovered that the
effects of modern lightning are extensive. When a tree is struck, surrounding trees and
vegetation are affected by structural, biological, and chemical changes for a long time
to come. Lightning also may fuse the Earth around. Fused sand tubes caused by lightning
and called "fulgurites" are common around the world. "In one sand-dune patch of 5,000
acres at Witsands, on the southeastern border of the Kalahari Desert, Lewis estimated
that there were not less than 2,000 fulgurites. Since lightning is at the present time
very infrequent in this area, some of the tubes must have been formed thousands years
ago [23] . The fulgurites often followed bush and plant roots. Perhaps they occurred
simultaneously and were one of the causes of the desert. That all deserts, whatever
their origin, may be indeed new is a question worth considering. Lightning may descend
in showers. Lightning may instantly fossilize trees; a high tension wire did so too in
Alberta, Canada, E. R. Milton reports. Lightning alters C14 content in trees, hence
their "age" for dating purposes [24] . Recently various theories have been offered to
explain the mysterious kimberlite tubes of South Africa and similar tubes in Utah. The
former are like fulgurites and are found near the great diamond fields. Probably the
same electrical flows that dug the kimberlites produced the diamonds. Whether this
should be called "slow lightning," and discussed in the preceding chapter, or should be
discussed here is perhaps immaterial at this stage of research. The Moses Rock dike of
Utah is about 4 miles long at the surface, in the shape of a hook, and about 1000 feet
wide. It was forced up from possibly 200 kilometers below the surface.
Komarek has come to believe that "lightning is ecologically fully as important as such
better known factors as temperature, rainfall, soils etc [25] . He does not estimate
past incidences. If present lightning effects must be exponentially retrojected into the
past, the world would have been significantly remolded therefrom.
Juergen's theory of Moon and Mars belongs to Earth as well. The Earth must have lunar
rilles in large numbers. An unknown but considerable number of craters, "river" valleys,
fractures and ravines must owe their origin not to ice, water, volcanos, or meteoroids,
but to cosmic lightning. In the absence of well-directed field work, not only are their
indications misinterpreted, but usually their very existence remains a surmise. The
present level of electrical activity on Earth does not excite research except in
imaginative minds, like Ralph Juergens, Nicola Tesla and Frank Dachille.
It is well for geologists to consider meanwhile the promise of such theories. Take, for
example, the consequences of the concept that the Earth's global electric potential has
not been uniform throughout its history, an idea that I repeat in this book several
times; consider its consequences for another insistent idea of these pages, that
geological time may be grossly exaggerated.
Juergens argues that the Earth's surface potential is highly negative and low [26] .
Suppose that it is lowered further. Rampant radioactivity would occur. The half-life of
every radioactive atom would be drastically reduced. Radiochronometric time would be
largely erased. In the opposite case, if Earth's potential became higher and less
negative, polonium, for instance, which has a short life as evidenced in the geological
record by the halos it inscribes upon rock, would acquire a much longer half-life and so
would other radioactive isotopes.
Nikola Tesla's work is acclaimed for its genius. But some of it was unfortunately cut
short by a lack of funds and his growing madness. It went largely unreported and,
especially because it was so astonishing, it was and is difficult to describe and
appraise. Around the turn of the century, after his dramatic successes in designing and
building alternating current electric motors in the East, Tesla went West to Colorado
Springs and built an extraordinary electrical apparatus [28] . He set up a 200 foot
tall mast with a metal ball on top nested in a 10 foot diameter coil. At a diameter of
80 feet he provided a second surrounding coil. These were affixed to banks of
condensers. A 300 volt line from a nearby power plant supplied initial impetus to the
oscillator. The magnetic field created by the current in the large coil set up an
alternating current in the central coil. Over 150,000 times per second, a charge was
sent through the Earth and back up and out into the atmosphere, discharging as bolts of
lightning.
Tesla thought that such a machine oscillating through the Earth might be tapped at a
number of place through local receivers to supply energy for local consumption. It would
be a wireless electrical power distribution system. This naive and astounding project
has not to my knowledge been seriously considered by geophysicists and electrical
engineers in these years of energy crisis. Nor, for that matter, has the idea of
Juergens, that "once the curtains of thermo-nuclear theory are drawn aside, electrical
engineers will quickly discover that the controlled-fusion reaction they have been
seeking in vain for a quarter of a century have actually been within their grasp for at
least twice that long - that a relatively small throughput of electrical energy will
release the pent-up power of matter on a scale far beyond the most fanciful prediction
of the late 1940's."
Notes (Chapter Six: Terrestrial and Cosmic Lightning)
1. Nicola Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina, 1964),
92.
2. Ibid., 94-5.
3. Ralph Juergens, "Of the Moon and Mars," 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974) 21-30; 4 PensÚe 5
(Winter 1975), 27-39; A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, 203 for illustration. On ball
lightning see A. Wittmann, 232 Nature (27 Aug. 1971), 625.
4. In Thyestes, a drama remarkable for its catastrophic images.
5. R. Orville and B. Vonnegut, "Patterns of Thunderbolts," 92 New Scientist (1981), 102.
6. New Scientist (20 Oct. 1977), 150.
7. G. P. Pliny, II Natural History (trans. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1967) II: LIV.
The translation of Rackham is questionable, if only because he has no idea that the
Etruscans and early Romans, like the Hebrews and Greeks of the age, were using
electrostatic machines to produce divine image and oracles.
8. A. de Grazia, critique of Enea Nel Lazio (Rome: Palombi, 1981) on the Virgil
Bimillennial Celebration, in The Burning of Troy (in press).
9. Worlds in Collision, 273.
10. Donald W. Patten, R. R. Hatch and L. C. Steinhauer, The Long Day of Joshua and Six
Other Catastrophes (Seattle: Pacific Meridian Pub. Co., 1973), 18-9.
11. Op. cit., 88-91.
12. Patten et al., 92.
13. The Jupiter Effect: The Planets as Triggers of Devastating Earthquakes (New York:
Vintage Books, 1974).
14. Juergens, "Moon and Mars," loc cit., 37 et passim.
15. Worlds in Collision, 77-8.
16. Target Earth, 189ff.
17. "Rockenbach's 'De Cometis' and the Identity of Typhon," I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring
1977), 9-10.
18. C. G. Ransom, The Age of Velikovsky (Fort Worth, Texas: LAR Co., 1976), 117
interprets several studies.
19. His basic work is A New Approach to Astrophysics and Cosmogony, (London: Unwin
Bros., 1974); cf letter of Dec. 1958 in 4 Electronics and Power, 669-70, "Cosmic
Electric Discharges."
20. "Electricity in Astronomy," S. I. S. R. (1976-7) I: 1,2,3, II: 1.
21. 2 PensÚe (1972) 3 (Fall), 6-12.
22. Juergens, "Moon and Mars," loc. cit., Winter 1974-5, 33.
23. "The Natural History of Lightning," Proc. Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conf. (9-10 Apr.
1964), 150.
24. L. M. Libby and H. R. Lukens, "Production of Radiocarbon in Tree Rings by Lightning
Bolts," 78 J. Geophy. Res. 26 (10 Sept. 1973), 5902-3.
25. Op. cit., 171.
25A. 98 Sci News (11 July 1970), 33 on the work of T. R. McGetchin; I. D. MacGregor,
"First Kimberlite Conference," Rep. S. A. F. Geol. (Mar. 1974), 151-2.
26. "Radiohalos and Earth History," III Kronos I (Fall, 1977), 3-17.
27. J. J. O'Neill, Chapter 2.
28. 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974), 30.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVEN
FIRE AND ASH
"A 'universal conflagration' (if possible) would certainly not last long enough to
leave any sort of recognizable stratigraphical record, whereas a few centuries or
millennia of occasional heath or forest fires, during a particularly dry spell, would
probably do so without requiring any special mechanism." [1]
Even to speak of a universal conflagration gives a geologist cause to blush, as Derek
Ager, the author of these lines, remarks in another context. Without the "special
mechanism", forest fires, started by lightning, and volcanos, started by hot spots in
the deep crust or mantle, must do the full job of whatever we see as signs of burning
on Earth and whatever the ancient voices are fearfully asserting. If this were all, and
it certainly is not all, we would still have to ask about lightning and hot spots;
neither is a simple autodynamic mechanism, as we have seen already in the case of
lightning and will see in regards to hot spots.
The legendary and early historical record is replete with assertions that global
burning has occurred. Writing apparently about historical experiences, Seneca, the
Roman stoic philosopher, gives a common ancient view of the holocaust:
And when the time is come when the world destroys itself to be renewed, then (Earth,
seas and life) will destroy themselves by their own strength. Stars will fall upon
stars. And when all material things are in flames, everything which now shines
according to a planned distribution will rise up into a single fire [2] .
Of course, Seneca does not declare that a stratigraphical record will be thereafter
available; the Earth is "renewed," which implies that few marks would have been left
upon the rocks and no bed of ashes would have formed and persisted. Where are the ashes
of single or multiple events, for that matter? Sometimes they are present, sometimes
not. In certain parts of the world, extensive beds of ashes of possibly local type can
be found. They are thin. We can find the ashes of Troy, on several levels of
destruction, but can the ashes of the countryside around be found? If not found, does
that means that Troy alone was burned, or that ruined Troy alone preserves its ashes?
Paleocalcinology -such a science hardly exists -will help us someday to measure the
words of Ager and Seneca.
The "ordinary" fire mechanism of volcanos and forest fires sometimes incite rains, but
these are hardly conspicuous. On the other hand, the legendary coupling of fire and
water is so flagrant as to pass notice, except when a progressive rabbi, for example,
finds it easy to explain to his children why the heavens are of fire and water; ish-
vamayin (fire and water) make up shamyin (heaven) because the ancients thought of
sunlight as fire, and the rains, of course, come from the sky [3] .
G. R. Carli, writing in 1780, was already asserting that "the idea of a deluge of fire
and a deluge of water was present among all peoples... This idea of fire and water...
seems to recall tradition of an event of which the memory has endured. It is certainly
odd that the indications manifested by a seaflood should have suggested the idea of a
deluge of fire [4] . Carli cites Clement of Alexandria for the observations that
Stenelas, father of the king of the Ligurians, lived at the time of the fire of Phaeton
and the flood of Deucalion. So fire and flood occurred together. Reasoning from effect
to cause, Carli then assigns the coal deposits of the world to burning and water acting
in quick succession, a theory now coming into prominence again. He argues that only a
comet could burn up the world, drop vast amounts of water, and bring great tides at the
same time. Probably this line of argument will stand up: a large body encountering
Earth, even if it were not dropping water or ice, would bring both conflagration and
flood. Whether it crashed or not, the effects would still be similar. Donnelly produces
an abundance of legendary accounts of the world in flames: from Druid mythology,
Hesiod's Greek account, the Eddas of Scandinavia, Ovid's Roman account of Phaeton, the
meso-American Toltecs' Codex Chimalpopoca, the Persians' Zend-Avesta, the Hindus' myth
of Ravana and Sita, and the legends of the Tupi, Aztecs, Tacullies, Ute, Peruvian,
Yurucares, Mbocobi, Botocudos, Ojibway, Wayandot, and Dog-Rib Indians, that is from one
end of the Americas to the other, and across both continents. He quotes the Gothic Surt
of the flaming sword, "He shall give up the universe a prey to the flames," and also
the Algonquins, whose god "will stamp his foot upon the ground, and flames will burst
forth to consume the habitable land." [5]
Job of the Bible hears from a retainer that "the fire of God is fallen from heaven and
hath burned up the sheep [to the number of 7000], and the servants, and consumed them,
and I only am escaped alone to tell thee." (In our days cases of a score or more
animals being electrocuted by a lightning bolt are recorded.) There begins then the
woes of the stubbornly patient Job against frightful divine tests. It is only one of
many references to naturally caused combustion in the Bible. The story of Job may be
exceedingly old; there Elohim (Heavenly One) is addressed; it happened in full
Neolithic times, perhaps at the ending of the age of predominantly Saturn worship [6]
.
Later in reference to fire is the "flaming sword", east of the Garden of Eden, "which
turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life." This was after the "Fall from
Grace." [7] The image of a sword in the sky may refer to the Great Central Fire of
early Greek Philosophy and, as we elaborate in Solaria Binaria, to a then intermittent
arc between Jupiter and the Sun. (We treat the image in detail in Solaria Binaria.) The
seasons begin; it must be now the period of the gods Jupiter-Jehovah, the Jovean Age I
have elsewhere termed it. In a later incident, the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah
are destroyed by a fall of fire and brimstone and swallowed up. Then, as earlier
described, the Tower of Babel succumbed to fire in part. During and after the Exodus,
repeated references to the heavenly fire are encountered. It comes in all its forms;
lightning, gas blasts, burning naphtha falls. These are elaborately treated by
Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision and by the present author in God's Fire: Moses and
the Management of Exodus. In all, von Fange quotes 37 different passages from the Bible
referring to, or prophesying, destructive fire from heaven [8] . Both Donnelly and
Velikovsky claim the myth of Phaeton -the one writer for a Great Comet of an earlier
age, the other for the events of the mid-second millennium, where we too have decided
to place it. The Latin author, Ovid, is the principal source of Phaeton. The Babylonian
cuneiform expert, Kugler has explained Ovid's as a true history of a comet [9] .
Phaeton is the inexperienced son of Phoebus who demands to be let to drive the chariot
of the Sun one day. He prevails, but loses control of the steeds and burns up sky and
earth. The constellations are disturbed. The flames turn whole nations into ashes. The
ground bursts asunder, the rivers dry up. Smoke billows bring darkness to the world.
The ocean shrinks. Ashes cover the Earth.
Mother Earth trembles and sinks below here usual place. She pleads with Jupiter. "If
the sea, if the earth, if the palace of heaven, perish, we are then jumbled into the
old chaos again. Save it from the flames, if aught still survives, and preserve the
universe." Jupiter responds by demolishing Phaeton and the chariot; Phaeton, his yellow
hair streaming in flames, is hurled to the earth like a falling star.
The Sun, Father of Phaeton, mourns as in an eclipse. The earth was lit only by its own
flames. He would not resume his daily journey until all the gods supplicated with him.
The days appeared once more, and Jupiter restored order and life to the heavens and
earth.
No one disputes the fact that the earth has been badly burned. Provided, of course,
that the statement is properly qualified. The ocean basins are of melted rock; they are
fashioned almost entirely of basaltic lava. Ocean abyssal sediments are thin and loose,
and composed of organic and dust fall-out for the most part, including some products of
combustion. Of the continents, part of the surface that is exposed to view is igneous,
a product of old or new melting. Another portion is metamorphic, a word meaning rock
transformed mostly by heat and pressure, both old and new; this emerges from both
sedimentary and igneous rocks. (It is significant that whereas observers are compelled
by the sight of volcanism to say that some lava beds are new, they are reluctant to
name any metamorphosis of rock that has taken place very recently.) Igneous rock, if
not witnessed as it forms, is also invariably given old dates.
A Phoenician vase of around 1500 B. C. was found embedded in the copious lavas of the
Jezreel Valley of Palestine, where volcanism had supposedly ended in prehistoric times
[10] . At Nampa, Idaho, in 1889, a well-worked human image carved of pumice stone was
found amidst coarse sand of an old lake bed beneath 300 feet of alluvium, lava and clay
[11] . The lava had been and still is classified as late tertiary or quaternary, a
million or more years before mankind is supposed to have arrived in America. The Nampa
image, now lost, is disregarded; given the strong testimony concerning it, one may
wonder how much of natural and human history would be erased under the same strict
rules of appraisal.
Granites are the continental structure: nearly all come from an ancient cooling of
molten rock. They rest below the recent igneous rock, metamorphic rock and sedimentary
rock on all continents. We have direct information downwards only on a couple of miles
of crust; it is considered that granites carry on down to a basalt not unlike that of
the ocean bottoms. When and how the granites formed is unclear; their chemistry is
distinctive.
A final part of the continents is covered by sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock is
formed from transports of materials by wind, water, and ice. Donnelly argued that much
of the clay, gravel, and till that composes it descended from a cometary train recently
in " the age of fire and gravel," rather than from other rock being ground up and
spread around by moving ice. From the standpoint of human primevalogy, the uppermost
layers of rock and debris are highly important. These are usually termed
unconsolidated, or loosely consolidated, or aggregated, or conglomerate. High energy
expressions of "earth, air, fire and water" will produce large quantities of this
material and their origins, dating, and relation to the biosphere are hard to discern.
Everywhere one is likely to find soil, a catch-all work for any layer from the thinnest
film up to a few meters in which life forms take hold or dwell. Fossil soils often rest
between layers of the several types of rock.
Besides the soil, too, exist metals, soda ash, peat, various ashes, coal, oil, natural
gas, salt, and other deposits. Some of these are thermal products. Billions of tons of
glassy microtektites are strewn over the globe; whatever their origin, they may have
fallen in as hot rain on land and sea. Layers of ash are found over vast stretches of
the oceans bottoms, perhaps everywhere, since the searches have just begun. Ash is
fairly distinguishable; it is more difficult to detect whether the much more profuse
sedimentary clays are not themselves in part the products of combustion, carried over
and dropped upon the sea or drained off the continents onto the slopes and shelves.
On the land, too, ashes mix readily with soils and detritus to form clays. It is not
impossible to detect calcination in soils and clays, but the subject has attracted few
geo-chemists. Soils and young marine sediments of northeastern and offshore America
reveal, under chemical analysis, evidence of a fiery origin in that they contain
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [12] . These are carcinogenic and mutagenic. It is
possible that their incidence is world-wide. If so, it would indicate that the whole
world suffered one or more fall-outs of burning or burnt material. The burning could
have been caused by super-terrestrial impact explosions or gases. Or the products of
atmospheric fire (burning naphthas and brimstone or sulphur, as the Bible would have
it) descended. Or both might have happened. The authors of the report cited here
considered the effects to have been possibly produced by giant forest fires and air
transport, and unfortunately, did not consider exoterrestrial origins of the widespread
combustion products, or for that matter, of the fire that consumed the biosphere. T. M.
Harris [13] , in describing "Forest Fire in the Mesozoic," found much fusain in many
layers at many places, including the deltas of Greenland and Yorkshire. The admission
that cosmic lightning and cosmic fire were prevalent at quantavolutionary points is
avoided by placing layers of time between layers of ashes.
We cannot readily separate ash from human, at least not without chemical tests of a
degree of sophistication hitherto undeveloped because of the theory of gradual
accumulation of soils over long eons. Commenting upon Ager's search for ash, Hans
Kloosterman speaks of a "black horizon" of soil "that seems to have been covered with
sediments immediately after its formation," this in Derek Ager's work; and despite
Ager's retreat into what Kloosterman calls "crypto-uniformitarianism," the latter
defends the idea that there might be identified only" one enormous forest fire, which
is moreover correlatable from Southern England to the Great Lakes of North America.
Doesn't that sound somewhat like a universal conflagration? [14]
Kloosterman goes on to discuss the "dark bank" he witnessed in Brazil. Despite
deliberate tropical burnings that are regular and go back hundreds of years, "no
charcoal-rich layer is formed anywhere; the ash is incorporated into the human layer or
washed away."
Whereupon, this author adds evidence by Wendorf, Said, and Schild that in Egypt, at
claimed dates around 10,550 B. C. a burnt layer appears over a large region of the
Upper Nile Valley, which the investigators guess to have been caused by brush fires,
but which to de Grazia seemed to have been associated with holospheric catastrophe and
world-wide conflagration and/ or incredibly heavy ash fall-out.
J. Lamar Worzel of Lamont Geological Observatory (Columbia University) published
important findings in 1969, entitling them "Extensive Deep Sea Sub-Bottom Reflections
Identified as White Ash." [15] The analyzed deep sea cores came from the east-central
Pacific, from Mexico to Peru, an area of a million and a quarter square kilometers. The
piston-corer was not long enough to probe the nature of echoes, possibly representing
other ash layers, obtained from below 78 feet.
The layer of ash measured differently in the various drilled cores but ranged from 5 to
30 cm of thickness. "Since the layer is fairly near the surface and is not discolored
and contains nothing but the glassy ash material, it must have been laid down fairly
quickly." At depths of 1000 to 3000 fathoms, the ash was under great pressure, also the
original atmospheric and hydrospheric conditions might have dissipated and
disintegrated some of the initial deluge.
The fall was so heavy and quick, "that it may be difficult to ascribe it to the
Andes... Perhaps sub-bottom echoes from other areas can also be correlated with this
white ash layer. If so, it may be necessary to attribute the layer to a world-wide
volcanism or perhaps to the fiery end of bodies of cosmic origin."
In a critique of "The Significance of the Worzel Deep Sea Ash," Maurice Ewing, Bruce C.
Heezen and David Ericson, also of Lamont Geological Observatory, advanced reasons why
the white ash layers might be found elsewhere: citing the sounding of the vessels
Albatross, Galathea, and Verna from different part of the world, they conjectured that
the same sub-bottom echoes and possible ash layers existed over much of the globe [16]
. Sedimentary mixing would often subdue or annul the echoes.
The ash deposits observed by Kuenen and Need and Bramlette and Bradley were mixed
through a column of sediments several times the thickness of the original ash bed. In
addition to this mechanical mixing, solution may vastly alter the sediment before
permanent burial is accomplished. Devitrification and alternation, proceeding at rates
dependent on the environment, may transform an ash bed into products whose origin is
not readily recognized.
"Extensive ash layers are now recognized in continental areas throughout the geological
record," they point out, citing C. S. Ross. They declare too that "ash of similar
composition has been logged in boreholes in many of the dry lakes of the western United
States." (These dry lakes are all very young, post-glacial.) As mentioned, Wengret and
others showed extensive ashes and calcination in the Nile Valley to which they assigned
fairly recent ages; one can only wonder, for similar reports simply are not registered
generally, how many cuts and profiles around the world reveal such calcination and why,
as has been observed, the older rock-strata show almost no calcination -except that
metamorphics, granites, igneous rocks, and perhaps limestones themselves are sign of
heavy thermal activity.
Until very recently, geologists, like archaeologists, have been incurious about thin
beds of ashes. An alerted surveyor, Heladio Agudelo, wrote this author (Oct. 4, 1977)
saying, "In my work... while helping build a new street I noticed a black line in the
gravel formation." It was a "one inch thick black line in otherwise homogeneous
alluvial(?) formation." Within several weeks it became invisible due to erosion "but it
will take no bigger a tool that a hand shovel to expose it again. This is in
Londonderry, N. H., no more than an hour's drive from Boston Airport." Thin beds of
ashes represent enormous fire, the effects of ordinary forest and construction fires
disappear quickly.
The Ewing group, quoted above, comments that "Murray and Renard identified volcanic
particles in practically all of the Challenger surficial samples of deep sea deposits,
demonstrating that volcanic detritus is an important component of modern deep sea
deposits throughout the world. They suggested that the abyssal clays are largely the
result of alternation of volcanic ash." Later on, the authors themselves conclude: "It
is necessary to study the alterations of fine pyroclastics in the sea and to set up
criteria for recognition of the alteration products formed under the full range of
environmental conditions." (I proposed such procedures for heavy combustion products in
many archaeological levels, exemplified in the "Burnt City" of Troy IIg). The Worzel
ash consists of colorless shards of volcanic glass without sorting by particle size.
"In all important respects it is similar to material which has been classified as
volcanic ash in the deep-sea deposits of the world." Analysis of the surrounding
sediment in the Worzel cores indicates that the bottom waters "must have contained some
oxygen" and that the sediments "probably represent no more than 100,000 years and
conceivably far less." Whatever the date, mankind was very much present and concerned.
Certainly years of darkness, disease, distress and terror occurred around the world
with this deluge.
"The ash is entirely unlike material described as meteoritic dust. Only the wide
geographic extent of this layer suggests any source other than volcanic eruptions. "To
this proposition, with which Worzel might differ, given his quoted remarks, one might
take exception. "Meteoritic dust" is too imprecise a term to use in argument,
considering that we may have to consider lunar material and the 50 to 150 million mile
tails of comets. If, as the authors grant, there is a need to examine and re-examine
numerous types of sediment, there is also a need to distinguish, if at all possible,
"cosmic dust" from "terrestrial dust". If world-wide volcanism can only originate from
an externally interrupted motion of the Earth, or from a titanic large-body encounter,
then "terrestrial dust" is also an effect of exoterrestrialism.
Heezen and Hollister write that the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 "produced an
insignificant sprinkling of ash" by comparison with six great eruptions of the past
"million" years that blanketed thickly the ridge and basin of the Java Trench. "Indeed
how great must have been the earlier eruptions if the greatest known to man was too
small to produce significant record. Powerful eruptions in the Japanese, Kurile, and
Aleutian arcs have produced so much ash that these airborne volcanic products dominate
the scenery of the Northwest Pacific in a belt almost 1000 km wide [17] . (We note
again that human were already present during these great ash storms and presumably
coining legends.) Heezen added elsewhere the Mediterranean Sea bottom as a depository
of several heavy ash layers.
Walter Sullivan describes " a succession of ash layers" encountered on the edge of the
continental slope before striking the lava basalt of the true ocean bottom. Might this
not indicate that the continental slope was laid down subaerially, collected its
sedimentary and ash layers and was then inundated by the ocean? Drilling in the
Atlantic "has begun to paint a picture of the awesome events that accompanied the birth
of that ocean [18] .
To all of the ash layers referred to, and much more exist, one must accredit
exponential ash storming that has dropped to relatively tiny amounts during historical
times. Max Blumer led the discovering and detailing of paleochemicals in soils. His
group found polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon from pyrolysis in many places and wondered
at the great conflagration of ancient times.
Blumer even suggested that these carcinogens and mutagens played a role in the mutation
of species [19] , Beadle has explained the origins of a peculiar ancient Mexican corn
as a case of thermal polyploidy, genetic gigantism brought on by subjection to
environmental heat, a feat he duplicated in the laboratory [20] . Gigantism, and
possibly dwarfism, and associated polyploidy in plants and animals have, then, as a
possible contributing cause, heat stress.
The work of Edward Komarek Sr. on fire and lightning stresses the role of these agents
in prehistoric as well as modern times. He regards many species of plants and animals
as fire-prone, including mankind. They have become adapted at some time in the past to
naturally caused fires and are inclined to make the best of it. Komarek has been active
in instituting controlled forest fires to imitate natural fires which strengthen
growth, rather than weakening it as is popularly believed; the observed quick recovery
from fire is one more indication that the great conflagration can occur without
citation in the geological record.
Fires in prehistory may have been much more extensive than they are today and their
part in animal adaptations may have been considerable. He quotes Harris on "Forest Fire
in the Mesozoic," where the author describes vast fusain deposits, identifies them as
fossil charcoal, and says "the objection usually used against accepting fusain as
charcoal produced by fire is that there is too much of it and in too many layers. It
would make the past a 'nightmare. '" Fusain is intimately associated with coal beds and
thus reinforces the Carli and Velikovsky thesis, seconded by Francis and Cook, that
coal is what remains of a bulldozed burning biosphere, buried deeply and tamped down
promptly by successive waves of other material.
Animal fossils are sometimes found amidst ashes. "Ancient Ashfall Entombed Prehistoric
Animals," heads an article by M. H. Voorhies [21] where a Middle Miocene prodigious
ashfall over hundreds of square miles snuffed out over 200 species at one waterhole
alone. When geologist Louis Lartel was excavating Cro-Magnon man (fragments of 15
individuals) near Les Eyzies-de-Tayec (Dordogne, France) in 1868, he uncovered five
archaeological layers that had been covered by ash. The Upper Paleolithic was an age of
ashes too. The glacial ice, where such great sheets existed, must have been covered
with ash, if today ice drilling reveals no heavy ash fallouts it must mean that the
caps are exceedingly young.
Erich von Fange has come upon many a recent report of burnt sites. He mentions towns
whose calcinated ruins resemble strikingly what one can read of Troy IIg, "The Burnt
City," when reexamining the extensive records of its excavation. His cases come not
only from the Near East but also from Western Europe and Britain, Central Africa, the
Gobi Desert of Central Asia, the Mohave Desert of the American Southwest, India, Cusco
(Peru), and Cete Cidades (Piaui, Brazil). The "Cities of the Plain," including Sodom
and Gomorrah, flourished in an area that became a scene of utter devastation to this
day, over four thousand years later. All that grew in this Dead Sea Rift area, all who
lived there, all that was built there, were wiped out by falls of fiery debris and an
upheaval of the earth; asphalt, salt and sulphur are abundantly displayed now. The
prophet Isaiah (2: 10,2: 19) has people rushing into holes and caves when the Lord in
his majesty "ariseth to shake terribly the Earth." The lowland Indians of Peru put pots
on their heads and run for the hills when the earth quakes. So do Kamchatka Siberians.
Against softly reasonable explanations of such behavior stand grimly reasonable ones,
that in times past, earthquakes and fall-out and heavy tides came together.
Boiling seas have been observed near subterranean volcanos. That large stretches might
boil is arguable. Velikovsky adduced legendary accounts around 1450 B. C. Thus, quoting
the Zend-Avesta, "The sea boiled, all the shores of the ocean boiled, all the middle of
it boiled," when heated by the star Tistrya (Venus) [22] . Carl Sagan claimed a total
boil-off if the Earth abruptly stopped rotating [23] , but a slowdown would bring
limited surficial boiling.
Perhaps the oldest radiocarbon dates of a burnt city come from Dilmun (modern Dahrein)
at the North end of the Persian Gulf [24] . There the lowest level is calcinated. It is
located below a thick wall. The burning occurs over the whole area of settlement. The
debris contains burnt bitumen and "black masses," producing radiocarbon dates of 19,000
to 36,000 B. P. (in my opinion, valueless). There are "strange" sand "fill" intrusions
at this level that carry various artifacts and bits of copper. Below the calcination
occurs a meter of sand with shards, and below that, bedrock.
The ruined mysterious city of Tiahuanacu, 18000 feet high in the southern Andes
mountains, is believed to have once rested upon the shores of the ocean, now hundreds
of kilometers distant. It seems to have had port installations and to have been
connected with Lake Titicaca, to the north, which contains living species of oceanic
type. Tiahuanacu stands on strange ground. The climate is dry, the foliage is scanty,
the weather is cold, the neighboring people wretchedly poor and few in number. The top
soil of the plateau is a two-foot dry deposit, now soft stone. Below it stands the
lignite of charred tropical plants. Next come a layer of ash deposited amidst rainfall,
and then appears an alluvial deposit. All can be considered short-term deposits of the
lowlands. Combustion obviously played a large part in the happenings. In such a place,
one would normally expect merely a scanty soil, windwept, on rocky ground.
Poznansky, the major investigator, detected three cultures and three natural
destructions [25] . He allows Tiahuanacu a very old age, calling it the oldest known
city in the world. Bellamy believed it to be a city that dwelt beneath a terrible sky,
with first a satellite that closed into Earth and crashed later, and then a newly
captured moon circling above [26] .
I argue elsewhere for a single event, that the Moon erupted from the Pacific Basin to
occasion the destruction of Tiahuanacu; at the same time it was elevated, but not to
its present height. Another elevation might have followed in the second millennium B.
C. whereupon the city was left in ashes and ruins. That is, an early Tiahuanacu might
have flourished before the new-born Moon. Peruvian legend has it that before the Sun
and Moon were made, Viracocha, the White One, rose from the depths of Lake Titicaca and
presided over the erection of the cities on its islands and Western shores.
The conventional view classifies Tiahuanacu as pre-Inca and places it therefore in the
present era. It was never an important Inca site and its resemblances to Inca culture
are no more than its resemblances to the earliest Ecuadorian or Mexican cultures or to
the Easter Island complex for that matter. Its astronomical observations carved upon
stone gates were magnificent [27] , the Incas were underdeveloped by contrast.
Tiahuanacu may then be the oldest of fire-devastated ruins.
Examples of the latest possible world conflagration can be found in Greece. These would
be in the -776 to 687 B. C. period, by Velikovsky's chronology, which I accept; owing
to a major shift in time reckoning, most of the great destructions in these areas that
has been assigned to around 1200 B. C. is now scaled down to the eighth and seventh
centuries. The new great destructive sky god was Mars in many forms [28] . It was now
that King Nebuchadnezzar ravaged the Near East believing himself to be the
personification of the planet-god Mars-Nergal: " I am Nergal. I destroy, I burn, I
demolish, leaving nothing behind me." (He was, of course, not nearly so effective as
his model, and was ultimately killed).
The same age began with the downfall of the Mycenean culture. The evidence of the
destruction of Mycenean culture by fire has been available for a long time, but put
aside for lack of a cause. A. H. Frickenhaus, a German excavating long ago at Tiryns,
described how he had located a burnt Mycenean palace with a new Greek-style temple
built right over it [29] . At Pylos, not far away and of the same period, fire was
manifest everywhere, burnt rooms, burnt oil, fused metallic implements, scorched pots.
In his analysis of the Pylos event and others, Isaacson has substantially proven the
correctness of the revised dating [30] . Apparently, the Mycenean (Greek) Age changed
into the archaic Greek period amidst general conflagration. But so did age upon age
before, both geologic and cultural.
I have not mentioned thus far the catastrophes that ended the Old Bronze Age around
2300 B. C. According to Schaeffer: "There is not the slightest doubt that the
conflagration of Troy IIg corresponds to the catastrophe that made an end to the
habitations of the Old Bronze Age of Alaca Huyuk, of Alisar, of Tarsus of Tepe Hissar,
and to the catastrophe that burned ancient Ugarit in Syria, the city of Byblos that
flourished under the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the contemporaneous cities Palestine, and
that was amongst the causes that terminated the Old Kingdom of Egypt." Egyptian Old
Kingdom tombs are generally marked by signs of conflagration, Emery has discovered
[31] . A great many places elsewhere must have become heaps of ashes as well.
At Anemospilia, Crete, a small north-watching hillside temple was excavated [32] . Of
four skeletons unearthed, one was identified as a priest, a second as a youth of 18 who
had just been sacrificed. (" The only remains of Minoans heretofore unearthed had been
recovered from tombs.") He had been trussed and laid upon the altar. The sacrificial
knife lay on his bones. The priest sprawled in an agonized posture nearby, intimating
death by sudden collapse of the stone structure. The other persons were perhaps
attendants and killed simultaneously. Earthquake was presumed. The youth, an analysis
of his bones revealed, had died just before the disaster, half his body had been
drained of blood, the upper-most half. Then a fire had swept the premises before the
bottom half was drained.
The fire is attributed to tipped oil lamps, but, following the logic employed in my
study of Trojan fires, I would suspect an external source, possibly drifting flammable
gas pockets, for an ordinary fire would consume the bones, in the unlikely event it
could start up in the first place. Perhaps it was not fire, but a scorching blast, that
preceded or succeeded a seismic shock. Why, also, were there only three persons in the
temple? Were all other people in hiding while the heroic priest and his staff went to
offer the sacrifice? Why did not the people return to dig out the bodies and restore
the temple? Burial was a holy obligation; an unburied priest would be a holy horror. A
presumption of total desolation and death over a considerable area arises.
John Bimson, describing the recently famous Ebla excavation in Svria, finds that the
proto-Syrian culture datable sometime after 2300 B. C. by Schaeffer's scheme was
destroyed by seismism and fire [33] . As I stated on several occasions, this finding
was predictable, for all known settlements of the time were similarly struck. It would
fit among the Mercurian disasters described in Chaos and Creation.
The specific origins of burning are usually in doubt. Catastrophic combustion is a
product of earthquake-caused fire, of fissure and cone volcanism, of lightning, of
phaetonic atmospheric penetration, of typhonic impact explosion, of fall-outs of
combustible materials that are ignited in flight, including gases and naphtha.
Donnelly, a century ago, speculated convincingly upon the fall-outs of gas clouds from
the tails of comets. His Age of Fire and Gravel, the culminating devastation of all
human time, was pictured as a burning of great patches of the world from carbureted
hydrogen. Some kind of exoterrestrial gases are often to be suspected in great
prehistoric and ancient fires. A combination of gases and lightning, if the gases are
not too concentrated, will bring masses and sheets of flame, rather than explosions. I
have read few convincing reports of gas and fire explosion -the Pestigo Forest Fire and
the Tunguska blast, both modern, being the type of event to look for, nor have I read a
report of excavation revealing an exploded city, unless some of the settlements that
seem to have been wreaked simultaneously by fire and earthquake do not in fact involve
earthquakes. Probably a strict investigation would discover any such explosion
affecting human settlements, but the geologic causes would have to depend for evidence
upon legends. A gas explosion and flash fire would leave practically no traces within a
few years of occurrence.
Volcanos are more obvious sources of fire. Many a volcano has claimed its Pompeii and
Herculanum. It has worked its way with mud and lava flows, ashes lofted nearby and
afar, and noxious gases. It may be fissure or cone, extinct or live. One of the oldest
pyramids, that of Quiquilco in America, stands almost buried in lava. It is probably as
old as the oldest pyramids of Egypt.
When a great may volcanos erupt simultaneously, the effects upon settlements are more
than proportionate to the effects of a single eruption. Inasmuch as layers of ashes
have been discovered over millions of square kilometers of the ocean bottoms, it has to
be granted that the same ashes fell upon the land and the biosphere, and upon human
settlements, if such existed.
Ashes are apparent to an alerted observer when they lie in belts and heaps. But
material dissolution occurs, the destruction and effacement may involve additional
forces that remove the ash, incorporate it, or dissolve it. Ash may be washed away by
tides, blown away by hurricanes, or subjected to these forces gradually. It may turn to
clay, impervious to all but the most exacting chemical analysis and electron-scanning
microscopy. The tephra of Thera-Santorini, falling from the plinian explosion of 3000
B. P. (a less likely date is 3500 B. P.) is found in heaps, but also in miocroscopic
form amidst debris that may or may not have been of the same occurrence, in widely
separated locations. In Thera itself, one bluff is composed of pumice, the next one,
higher, contains none. In Kos( Greece) at one place, 40cm of Thera ash is visible; at
many other outcroppings of subsoil in Kos, no ash is visible. So in Crete, so also
Anafi. Common clay is abundant on land and on sea bottoms. It contains not only the
material of slow erosion and ice age drift but of sudden exponential erosion and ice
cap avalanche, of volcanic ashes, and of meteoritic and other exoterrestrial fall-out.
To conclude these pages of fire and ashes, we may assert once again that the gradual
processes of today were preceded very recently by quantavolutionary processes. More and
greater fires burned more widely in the world than during the past two thousand years.
More blankets of ashes were laid down. More settlements were ruined. That the fires and
ashes may often have had ultimate exoterrestrial causes is probable. Until the basic
issue of geological chronology is settled, we are not prepared to affirm that the 85%
of the exposed Earth's crust which is of igneous rock is all nearly as young as the ash
levels, but the possibility is real. From the standpoint of theoretical mechanics, the
Earth's ash layers and all the components of soil and clay originally containing ash
may have been the fall-out of global volcanism which produced the igneous rock. But we
have yet not covered enough ground in our tour of the Earth's features to determine the
matter. And perhaps in the end, we shall still be uncertain.
Notes (Chapter Seven: Fire and Ash)
1. letter, 2 Catastrophist Geologist, 1( June. 1977), 13.
2. "Consolatio ad Marciam"
3. L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, p. 7: 15, 76; cf. H.
Tresman and B. O'Geoghan," The Primordial Light," II S. I. S. R. 2 (Dec. 1977), 40, fn.
102.
4. II Lettres Americanes (Paris: Buisson, 1788), 309.
5. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (New York: Appleton, 1883) p. 428.
6. Martin Sieff, "Cosmology of Job" I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring 1977), 17-21, 32.
7. Genesis 4: 24.
8. Op. cit., 136-7.
9. L. C. Stecchini in A. de Grazia et al., The Velikovsky Affair, 2nd ed. (London:
Sphere, 1978), 120ff.
10. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 197-8.
11. See W. R. Corliss, ed., Ancient Man (Glen Arm, Md: Sourcebook Project, 1978), 457-
60, from G. F. Wright, 11 Am. Antiq. (1889), 379-81.
12. Blumer and W. W. Youngblood, "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydracarbons in Soils and Recent
Sediments," Science (4 Apr. 1975), 53.
13. 46 J. Ecology 2 (1958), 447-53.
14. 2 Catas. Geol. (1977), 14.
15. 43 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (15 Mar. 1959), 349-55.
16. 45 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 351-61.
17. B. Heezen and C. Hollister, Face of the Deep, 476-8.
18. Walter Sullivan, Continents in Motion, (N. Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 147-8.
19. 234 Sci. Amer. 3 (1976), 45.
20. Cf. New Scientist (12 Nov. 1981), 433.
21. Nat. Geogr. Mag. (Jan. 1981), 66.
22. In Asimov et al., Scientists Confront Velikovsky, (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1977);
but see Shulamit Kogan, ltr. Physics Today (Sept. 1980), 97-8, repr. VI Kronos 3
(1981), 34-41.
23. Worlds in Collision, 92
24. G. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun (N. Y.: Mentor, 1969), 167-9.
25. Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanaco, The Cradle of American Man, (N. Y.: Augustin, 1958).
26. A Life History of Our Earth (London: Faber and Faber, 1951); Built Before the Flood
(London: Faber and Faber, 1947), especially on Tiahuanacuo.
27. Cf. H. S. Bellamy and P. Allan, The Calendar of Tiahuanaco (1959) and The Great
Idol of Tiahuanaco, both published by Faber and Faber, London.
28. Worlds in Collision, Part II; Chaos and Creation, 235-46.
29. August H. Frickenhaus, I. Tiryns (Athens, 1972).
30. In 3 PensÚe 2 (Spring-Summer, 1973), 26-32 and 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974), 5-20. See
also my study: The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (1983).
31. Arhaic Egypt (Penguin Books, 1961), 71-3, 92, 97.
32. Y. Sakellarakis et al., "Drama of Death in a Minoan Temple," 159 Natl. Geog. (Feb.
1981), 208-23.
33. "Ebla Reconsidered," V. S. I. S. R. 2 (1980-1), 37-9; Matthias, Ebla: An Empire
Rediscovered (London: Hodder, 1980).
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER EIGHT
FALLING DUST AND STONE
When Alexander the Great asked some Celtic leaders in 325 B. C. what they most feared,
expecting them to reply Alexander himself, they said it was that the skies might fall.
Somewhere along the line of history, this story lost Alexander but became attached to
the Celtic Gauls; the schoolbooks universally read by French children until lately
began by telling them that their earliest ancestors were the Gauls whose eyes were
blue, who feared nothing but that the heavens would fall on their heads, and whose huts
had holes in their roofs to let out the smoke. Were the Gauls known for nothing else?
The naive, simplistic image lets the children be amused. But the insistence with which
this particular canard is purveyed says something about the fear of falling skies,
which absurdly seems to grip even the savants in their obsession with foisting it upon
their perceived ancestors and their descendents.
In the most ancient legends it is common to find references to more than comets and
deluges of water. Deluges from the sky consist also of dust, loess, stones, glass, tar,
oil, salt, gold, iron, ashes, carbohydrates -all of them sometimes hot and sometimes
aflame. They are invariably tied to catastrophes.
Donnelly collected some of the stories:
We read in the Ute legends... that when the magical arrow of Ta-wats struck the sungod
full in the face, the sun was shivered into a thousand fragments, which fell to the
earth, causing a general conflagration." [1]
[One is cautioned to read "sun" with reservations; foreigners who pass along legends
are likely to make the word "sun" out of any brilliant great body in the sky. That the
Sun is only one of such historically manifested bodies is the thesis of a number of
studies.]
Further :
It is a belief in many races that the stone axes and celts (chisala) fell from the
heavens. In Japan, the stone arrow-heads are rained from heaven by the flying spirits,
who shoot them. Similar beliefs are found in Brittany, in Madagascar, Ireland, Brazil,
China, the Shetlands, Scotland, Portugal etc. [2] (And the Greek Apollo is famed for
discharging clouds of arrows and plagues from afar).
Also from the Aztec prayer to Tezcatlipoca :
Hast thou verily determined... that the peopled place become a wooded hill and a
wilderness of stones?.. Is there to be no mercy nor pity for us until the arrows of thy
fury are spent? Thine arrows and stones have sorely hurt this poor people [3] .
And, of course, the Bible (Deuteronomy xxviii)
The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust; from heaven shall it come
down upon thee, until thou be destroyed..."
Thus, in Deuteronomy; but more too in Joshua x:
And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to
Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and
they died: There were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of
Israel slew with the sword.
This, it may be recalled, was the day when the Sun "stood still", a swing-back of
cometary Venus, according to Velikovsky, 52 years after Exodus, and at the least he
shows that this hail was not ice but of stone [4] . The student of geology today is
realizing that what falls from the sky is not only nickel, iron or stone fragments.
There is a continuity of materials. P. M. Millman writes:
... physical theory, applied to the observed heights, velocities, deceleration, and
luminosities, indicates that in most cases the mean densities of the meteoroids may be
below that of water and that they have a fragile structure with a tendency to crumble
and fragment. A small fraction, probably 1 or 2 percent, consists of denser, compact
particles corresponding more closely to meteorites. These latter are either nickel-
iron, with densities about eight times that of water, or heavy stone, with densities
between three and four times that of water [5] .
Where does all the dust and stone rest today? It may be, as Donnelly said it, the main
constituent of the so-called glacial till and in heaps called mistakenly glacial
moraines. It may be in much of the clay of the Earth, in red loams of many countries,
in abyssal clay of varied red and blue hue. The geologist Johan Kloosterman tells a
story from Brazil :
Early this year, Professor Doeko Goosen in Enschede, Holland, told me that there was
something odd about the iron content of the early-Holocene coversands of the
Netherlands. These sands are thought to have been formed through a combined fluvial and
aeolian activity. But in many of their soils, the amount of iron is much too high for
such an origin. Moreover, the present loss of iron by seepage water, observable along
many ditches, demonstrates that the original iron content must have been higher still.
Weathering of minerals (loss of Silica and relative accumulation of iron) does not
satisfactorily explain this anomaly. Could the iron have come from above, as a sort of
ferruginous loess?
A few months later in Mato Grosso, Goosen's remark led me to look more closely at
laterites profiles. I noticed an inch-thick layer of hard laterite between two layers
of unconsolidated gravel; its undersurface was smooth: it had obviously been formed
prior to the deposition of the top gravel. I traced the layer for several kilometers,
and later found it in places tens and even hundreds of kilometers away, on different
deomorphological levels. The only possible explanation for these observations seemed
aeolic precipitation on a barren, moist surface [6] .
Doeko Goosen has gone well beyond the ordinary unsatisfying explanations of soil
formations commonly employed." Not so long ago soils were considered to form in
materials derived by weathering of the underlying rock. Over several decades there has
been a growing recognition that much of the mantle of soil is allochtonous." [7] But
where does it come from? Few are the regions where soil can be shown to have aggregated
as humus from the vegetation above. The large areas of Europe and Asia covered with
loess are now considered all or in part by Russian scientists as non-aeolian. This is
conveyed forcefully to their minds by the presence in the loess of numbers of angular
stones. Promptly we are recalled to the pages of Donnelly's old book where he insists
on the exoterrestrial origin of the angular stone typical of "glacial till" and of
loess.
Now Goosen advances the argument with respect to the soils that sit atop the loess. He
claims that humus does not form except in waterlogged area, presently and historically
unlike the Kazakhstan (U. S. S. R.) area he discusses. Furthermore, the "Chernozems,"
the aforesaid soil, is rich in hydrocarbons. Presumably, some of it was combusted, too.
The incident of its formation was most likely a cometary encounter.
Goosen goes farther, in what approaches in fact a general theory of soils formation.
Slickensides (common in cracked vertisols and related to mass movements of ash and
clay), and latosols, along with much other soil with a high iron content are assigned
catastrophic origins, with tides and floods in the first case, and heavy hematite
exoterrestrial fall-out in the second as the mechanism.
"Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." From dust to dust, goes the pathetic
saying about man's fate. "To dust" we know from experience. "From dust" -what does
geology say? Nothing, of course. Does mythology have something to say? Yes. One of the
most popular creation legends has man being made from clay, Hebrew Genesis, for
example. The Greek Promethean creation, for another. Moreover, the "Cree Indians
believe that the flesh of those who perished in the waters of the Deluge were changed
into red pipe-clay. Similar myths or echoes of myths are found in the tales of almost
every nation. "So reports Bellamy [8] "We are all made from common clay," say
egalitarians.
Why clay? Because, according to ordinary surmise, clay is malleable; early people would
made images of clay and, projecting their desire for omnipotence onto the gods, would
imagine that the gods could fashion real people from clay. Is this adequate reason? Is
there additional reason to believe so?
Bellamy also asserts that the enormous and unfamiliar loess deposits, which must have
formed such a striking feature of the new Earth, were regarded by the survivors as the
dissolved bodies of their unfortunate brothers and sisters [9] . It is noteworthy that
loam deposits do surround the remains of Peking man at Choukoutien and human tools of
the Lower Paleolithic in Europe and Tadzhik (U. S. S. R.) The loess is a fine
undifferentiated loam of brownish or reddish color that makes eerie standing images by
its vertical pipe structure when eroded. The logical divine action, in magical theory,
is to create people from the same material, especially if its origin is celestial.
To conclude our reasoning, the myth and the magical reasoning press a hypothesis upon
the geologist. The origin of loess may be in an immense fall-out of dust from a comet
or an explosion of Earth material into the highest atmosphere whence most of it fell
back to form loess and clay covering many hills and valleys to this day. Since humans
seem to recall such an event, the time might not be far off.
Donald Cyr, a California amateur and devotee of the Canopy Theory of Isaac Vail, has
studied loess. He has a story to tell too.
"Loess is mixture of silica and clay, with particle size ranging from 0.1 mm down to
0.005mm . Where loess in unoxidized, it has a greyish color, but may also be yellow,
orange, or brown because of presence of ferric oxides. Deposits of loess occur in North
America, Europe, Russia, Siberia, China, and also in Argentina and New Zealand...."
[10]
The State of Kansas is estimated to be overlain by more than 50,000 cubic miles of
loess. There is little glacial outwash in Kansas, Cyr writes, and he does not see how
glaciers had the power to grind down sufficient rock within the Pleistocene age,
wherein it is placed, to supply the loess. He estimates the worldwide deposits at 7,000
cubic miles per degree of longtitude per hemisphere. And he suggests that the ocean
"blue" mud may be part of it.
A few more words are owing on the origins of the drift or till, before letting the
abused author Donnelly stand in his solitary majesty. Many accounts of stone falls are
acceptable; Corliss has compiled and introduced some of them. Velikovsky has analyzed
several cases, while rejecting Donnelly as to the cometary origins of the drift. For
instance, he points to 28 fields of blackened, sharp-edged and broken stones (harras)
in Arabia in strewn fields of many thousands of square miles; they are not igneous;
they are referred to in ancient Arabic and Hebrew literature; they originate from the
sky in early historical times [11] .
Till is a stiff clay full of stones varying in size up to boulders; conventional
science says it was produced by abrasion and carried along by the ice sheet as it moved
over the land. So Geikie said in 1863, and the definition is still useful. Donnelly
pointed out that this till, which he called drift, is not in all places where the ice
was said to be and exists in other areas where no ice was supposed to have been. Till
is common "over much of the most important mineral producing terrain of the northern
hemisphere. Till occurs ubiquitously in Canada and Scandinavia and is present as well
over significant areas of the United States, U. S. S. R. and United Kingdom." [12]
But why, argued Donnelly, was there a "driftless region" is Wisconsin, Iowa, and
Minnesota [13] . And why is very little found in Siberia; there exist " the great
river-deposits, with their mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now
obtains in those high latitudes, still lying undisturbed at the surface." So wrote
James Geikie [14] . And why are "glacial" pebbles and a "terminal moraine" found on
hills and in valleys of the Southern Appalachians, and where the ice was not supposed
to have reached in Eastern Kentucky [15] . Why do glaciers today not produce true
ancient-type till, that is, striated stones, drift clay, mountain-top till, and how
could glaciers form sheets over 30% of the Earth's surface a million years ago, not to
mention pushing boulders up thousands of feet in elevation [16] .
Crossed trains of drift occur, and are rationalized into successive advances and
retreats of ice under different climate and morphological conditions. The till is not
fossiliferous. Where drift and till have been found in Australia, India, and deep beds
of older rock in Scotland, they were attributed to more ancient ice ages, thus scholars
might conveniently dispose of all material appearing to be till. It is not difficult in
historical geology to use time freely to make place for anomalies and to create events,
even the greatest types of events, such as ice ages.
Using the ordinary theories of glacial geology, even though he is an exoterrestrial
catastrophist, the Soviet geologist Salop has pointed out "that the Precambrian
glaciations occurred under very unfavorable physical-geographical conditions. The
glacial deposits are interbedded between strata indicating a hot climate, such as red-
beds, dolomites, phytolite-bearing limestones (at present only found in warm, usually
mineralized waters along the seashore or in tropical lagoons and hot springs),
evaporites, kaolinitic sandstones and bauxite." This association of tillites with
formation of warm and hot climates is typical of the Paleozoic Ice Ages too [17] .
But Salop also demonstrates that nine ice-age pre-cambrian "intervals vary from 40 to
125 (or 180) MY and no evident periodicity can be observed." He then associates
"biologic revolutions with the epochs of excessive climatic cooling usually resulting
in glaciation." Tillites are taken as the signal of an ice age; whatever the climate
above and below the till, whether cold or hot, the till is supposed to designate cold.
Some association may be found among tillite beds and a) low sea-water temperatures as
measured in the differing gas and mineral concentrations of stratified sea-shells, and
b) "coeval strata" that "attest to the influence of a cold, almost glacial climate."
All correlations are subject to variations and even to possible basic flaws in
radiometric dating. The association is loose enough to permit the argument that
tillites may not be associated with cold climates, hence the tillites are not deposits
of ice sheets and glacier, and, further, that tillites may be exoterrestrial deposits
occurring in both hot and cold climatic period, wreaking quick destruction upon the
biosphere.
Cyr and Sun point out that tektites are chemically similar to loess. This would suggest
a possible exoterrestrial origin for loess and a coincidence of the two substances.
Tektites are jets of fused silica. They range from microscopic size to large chunks.
They are strewn around the world in enormous fields. They are found in the waters and
soils of Central Europe, West Africa, Australia, Indochina, Thailand, the East Indies,
the Philippines, Japan, China, and the Caribbean [18] . Heezen and Hollister estimated
an Indian Ocean deposit of a billion tons that they think occurred upon a reversal of
the Earth's magnetic field 700,000 years ago.
Billy Glass and R. N. Baker of the University of Delaware, with D. Storzer and G. A.
Wagner of the Max Planck Institute of Heidelberg, studied intensively the Caribbean-
North American strewnfield [19] . They estimated the total tektite field at 10 17
grams of material, dated stratigraphically at Middle Upper Eocene. Some 6000 such glass
microspherules were found in the sediment of one thin core at a depth of some 250
centimeters below the Caribbean Sea Bottom. The falls apparently came either at
different times, or from different phases or portions of a gigantic single incident,
because there are chemical differences among the tektites coming from different
strewnfields of the world.
The writers claim different times, for they hold few reservations about their dating
techniques. If from different times, a Moon origin is suggested, for there could have
been large meteoroid explosions upon the Moon that would have splashed debris onto the
Earth. Or, since the tektites are of a material akin to the Earth's crust, they might
have been a fall-back from large explosive impact encounters with Earth.
Glass and Heezen differentiated three forms of tektites found in the Far East. One was
melted twice, one melted once, and a third little melted. They deduce a massive cosmic
body breaking up upon atmosphere entry into two or several pieces. Of these, one would
explode in the upper atmosphere, another closer to the ground and a third close to the
ground [20] .
Faul says "it is an established fact that tektites fell from the sky," but show too
little cosmic-ray interaction to have spent much time in the sky [21] . Although he
allows a possible lunar origin for some tektites, he shows that some tektite fields are
too concentrated spatially to have been flung from the Moon and that, in Germany and
the lvory Coast, a similar composition can be ventured for large astroblemes and nearby
tektite fields.
No writer has considered the possibility of an origin from the fission of the Moon and
Earth. If the present author's theory of lunar fission were postulated, then the
composition, distribution and occurrence of the specified forms of tektites would be
consonant with the event.
I think that legendary streams of cosmic arrows shot by the gods upon hapless but
offensive mankind might refer to the glassier kinds of fall-out. Tektites resemble
somewhat obsidian, a popular igneous stone for fabricating arrowheads. Tektites may
fall like showers of needles, or arrows, or as arrowheads in size, weight and hardness.
The same tektites are called "Dragon Pearls" in China. Carter Sutherland in 1973 traced
dragon art in China back to its apparent origins around 1500 B. C [22] . That
reinforcements of the horrendous (but sometimes beneficent "Lucky Dragon") image have
been supplied by various comets through the ages was documented by Dwardu Cardona
(1975) [23] .
Invariably the Chinese dragon is chasing a "chuh," or globe, or sphere, and "chuh" also
means "pearl". "Huoh chuh" is "fiery sphere" and "fire pearl." Moreover the Chinese
also call the tektite "huoh chuh". Indians, Javanese, and Tibetans also call the
tektite "fire pearl". Long before modern science became interested in tektites, the
ancient Chinese (the T'ang Annals) knew that these 'fire pearls' originated in space."
They were esteemed by priests and emperors.
The tektites fell from the sky [24] . Aerodynamic ablation experiments with tektite
glass have simulated their shaping upon entry and passage through the atmosphere. They
are found in recent sediments and on the surface. The tektites were not long in space,
they display no cosmic-ray interaction. They are easily eroded [25] but still exist
in abundance and cannot be found in fossilized beds, another sign of youth. But other
tektites have received old ages, 20 to 45 M/ Y, as reported by Barnes [26] . Many are
around the million-year mark (Heezen Glass, Chaprian) [27] . and ages of 5000 years
were found by George Baker and Edmund Gill [28] . Gentner's dating by fission-track
suggests a million years or less for certain groups, much longer times were assigned to
others.
The tektite falls have been associated by Billy Glass and others with magnetic
reversals and faunal changes [29] . A syllogism emerges: a heavy-body impact explodes
tektites high into the sky; it causes reversal of the Earth's magnetic field; as the
EMF hits zero point, cosmic particles, ordinarily deflected, pour down and cause
mutations and extinction. Contrasting with this theory are opinions such as
Lyttletons's that tektites fell from a passing comet train. However, Urey and Spencer
argue that they reflect a splash from a cometary or meteoroid impact on the Earth.
Moreover E. A. King: "the answer is now clear: tektites are produced from
extraterrestrial rocks melted by hypervelocity impacts of large, extraterrestrial
objects." [30]
Erratic bits of an exploded planet from the Mars-Jupiter interregion often fall to
Earth. Some of them may also be surviving, uncaptured, terrestrial material. The
tektite fields on Earth could also be fall-back from the lunar eruption. Rittmann
writes : "The chondrites (of meteoric falls) correspond genetically to the terrestrial
sima, and the tektites to the protosialic upper crust of the primeval earth." [31]
James Sun proposes that half a million years ago, a snowball comet laden with flammable
gases approached Earth from the Northwest [32] . It shattered by gravitational force,
and part crashed while part continued on. Loess was thus laid down, and in some place
melted by impact into glass. Loess has a chemical composition very much like the
tektites, as I have mentioned above. Aerial explosions created innumerable small glass
blobs that fell to Earth.
The investigators generally agree that tektites are earth-like and moon-like in
composition. Probably, the loess and tektites arrived within the same time span after
passing into the upper atmosphere following their explosion from the Earth. Either a
passing large body exploded the Earth's crust to make them or a meteoroid impact did
the job.
John O'Keefe links the North American strewn field of tektite and microtektite falls
with the terminal Eocene (Tertiary) event, when radical climatic change can be
perceived in floral abundances and radiolaria were devastated [33] . His theory calls
for the tektites to assume, before final descent, a ring-like structure around the
Earth. The ring might have lasted a million years and cast a blighting shadow over the
biosphere.
It is apparent here, once more, that earth scientists are becoming ever more daring in
their suggestions of mechanisms to satisfy the resultant state of geological facts.
Just under a century ago, Issac Vail received short shrift from academicians for
proposing a Saturnian ring canopy system for the globe and arguing that it was known to
early civilized man and fell apart before his very eyes [34] .
Reporting systems on natural phenomena have gradually become more complete, regular,
and valid. Nevertheless, the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1819 issued an
enchanting list of "meteoric stones, masses of iron, and showers of dust, red snow, and
other substances, which have fallen from the heavens, from the earliest period down to
1819." [35] Among the exotic items were: a great fall of black dust at Constantinople
on November 5-6, 472 B. C. accompanied by burning heavens; a kind of red matter like
coagulated blood in the middle of the 9th century; a burning body that fell into Lake
Van, Armenia, turning the waters red and cleaving the Earth in several places (1110 A.
D.); gelatinous matter in India with a globe of fire; and a mixture of red rain and
snow whose dust contained silica, aluminum, lime, iron, carbon and loess and was
coincidental with a shower of meteoritic stone over central and southern Italy in 1813.
Red rains, often associated with meteors, were common. William Corliss, in his
compilations, has educed much additional literature on peculiar fall-outs. Peter James
[36] , Donnelly, Velikovsky and others have demonstrated the frequent occurrence of red
falls in proto-history.
Much meteoritic dust falling upon the Earth is invisible and immeasurable. Meteoritic
falls have been estimated at 4000 tons per year by Saukov [37] . Hughes (1976) arrives
at a figure of 16,000 tons per year. Schmidt gives an average for all of geological
time at 8x10 11 tons per year, very much larger and based upon an exponentially
leveling off of initially vast drops of material [38] . At the last rate, with a
geological age of 5x10 9 years, one would have a total of 40x10 20 tons dust dropped on
Earth from space. This is not far from the total mass of the Earth, 6x10 21 tons. But
if Pettersson is correct, the rate of accretion of cosmic dust may be about 10,000 tons
per day [39] .
Micrometeorite dust has been estimated by Fred Singer [40] to fall at a median rate of
1250 tons per day or 456,250 tons per year (the rate may actually be 10 times more or
less, he estimates). The calculation is from the detection of aluminum 26 abundance
ratio in Pacific Ocean bottom cores. This is 4.5x10 11 grams per year today, but
Schmidt's estimate is only 400 tons per year today.
If any exponentialism is part of Singer's scheme and it should be, a fairly
considerable portion of the Earth's crust should be composed of gathered-in planetary
dust, achieved in a fairly short time. If, for example, we had a measure showing this
figure to have been 10 20 grams per year in 500 B. C. and 10 25 in 2500 B. C., the
subsequently plotted curve would give us the mass of all of the continental crust
except for the basic granite within a few thousand years. We do not have such figures,
but if we consider the obsession of ancient voices with days and years of darkness and
ascribe half of this to fall-out of dust, the required substantial deposits would be
quickly forthcoming.
Between 1956 and 1964, W. D. Crozier collected exoterrestrial black magnetic spherules
from atmospheric fall-out at two New Mexico stations, of a type noted around the world
and in sedimentary rocks of great ages. These were accreting at an average annual rate
of 1.04x10 11 grams for spherules in the diameter range of 5 to 6. David Hughes
considers the interplanetary dust to originate with comets and arrives at a figure of
16,000 tons per year of all sizes.
Hans Petterson, reporting upon the oceanographic expedition of the Albatross, disclosed
a high nickel content in the Pacific Clays. Since basalt, the bottom material contains
little nickel and meteoritic dust, meteoritic showers hundreds of times greater than
presently observed were required to explain the abundance. The nickel abundance is also
5.5 times that in continental igneous rock; hence an exoterrestrial source is invoked
[41] . Assuming the average of nickel in meteoritic dust to be 2%, he arrives at the
aforesaid figure of 10,000 tons of dust per day, 3,650,000 tons per year (3.6x 10 6 ),
hence, especially if any kind of exponentialism is introduced as we go back in time, we
should have the sediments of the ocean receive their quota of nickel laid down in a few
thousand years.
McSween and Stolper, in their study of basaltic meteorites, which were definitely not
of earthly or lunar origin, abstracted a type of shergottite meteorite. This material
they assign originally, not to comets, or asteroids, but to the planet Mars, which has
many extinct structures and surface rocks with a known resemblance to the shergottite
[42] .
The electrician, Eric Crew, has analyzed confirmed reports of ice and stone falls
associated with lightning; many such were collected by Charles Fort (1874-1832) who
wrote once, "we shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded... a
procession of the damned." [43] . Crew ascribes both pick-up and fall-out phenomena
sometimes to high-speed jet occurring in and about air-to-ground fast electrical
discharges [44] . Dust storms and volcanism greatly augment the fusion of particles.
There may be posited that in large meteoroidal and cometary encounters, the Earth will
be subject to considerable material exchanges by the electrical discharge channels
occurring between Earth and the intruder.
The "White Cliffs of Dover" and other immense chalk beds elsewhere are a mixture of
tiny spheres, a formless chemical mass, and organic debris, which contains some
marvelously unattrited marine skeletons. How were they formed? Conventional science
pleads continuing longtime deposits, but the stratification and water-current markings
attesting to such are missing, nor can the preserved shapes admit to this mechanism
[45] . A great updraft and precipitation is suggested, or else a dust-laden electric
discharge penetrating the waters, followed by an upheaval or expansion of the bottom
terrain.
A study by L. and W. Alvarez, Asaro and Michel describes a fall-out of dust 1000 times
that of Krakatoa from a meteoroid crash, which, they claim, darkened the Earth for
years [46] . The crash was deduced from the presence in Italian, Danish, and New
Zealand limestones of the fossil break between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods of
iridium, 30,160 and 20 times its normal background level in terrestrial rocks but
characteristic of meteoroids. Spain and Holland were added by Ganapathy to the
locations bearing the tell-tale chemical signals. Fish-clay analyses by Kyle and others
in Denmark agreed with the limestone findings. A number of additional rare elements
were also in long supply, 5 to 100 times their normal abundances.
The correlation of a fossil index set with a distinctive chemical element marks an
important advance in geological investigation. A sure layer is now presumed to exist
worldwide; even were it not to signal an age boundary, it would permit a tightening of
identifications of relative and absolute dates of strata and species. We know that we
are dealing with a uniform world-wide event, something that is only hoped for when
correlating fossils and rocks. We know that the event is limited in time.
We know further that if the event is not denoted in the strata, the reason is not that
the event did not occur. That is, some stratum capable of containing the iridium (or
other element) must at the stipulated time have existed everywhere. Where not found,
conditions for its prompt removal must have existed, or later removal must have
occurred. Alternatively, the fall-out was erratic and initially directed only to
certain spots by the presumably catastrophic winds and tides of the moment. Despite all
this, with a dozen such exoterrestrial chemical markers, historical geology and
paleontology would undergo a quantavolution.
What conclusions can be drawn from the material of this Chapter? At the least, a
considerable part of the Earth's crust is exoterrestrial and has fallen as dust and
stone not long ago. There is reason to accept in general terms the multitude of legends
speaking of heavy falls. Even the most bizarre material has descended during historical
times and every indication points to an exponential increase in the quantity and
perhaps the variety of matter with the regression of time from the present. All the
seas and continents contains heavy deposit of suspected exoterrestrial origin.
Yet there is also some indication that the time of heavy falls may have been
concentrated in a catastrophe or set of catastrophic climates. The "ice ages," for
instance, may have been a period of combined ice and stone deluges from outer space,
explaining thereby a number of inconsistencies in the terrestrial pure theory of a
central focus and outspreading therefrom. The absence of fall-out stratigraphic
formations in older rock formations bespeaks a primeval peace.
A question arises as to what constitutes outer space or exoterrestrialism for dust and
stone falls. Under certain conditions of large meteoroid or cometary impact, and heavy
multiple volcanism, exploded material can achieve extreme heights and even be lost into
space. Such would be the case, for instance, were the Moon to have been exploded from
the Pacific Basin. In such a case, a prolonged fall-out period of a great many years,
perhaps centuries, might result. Pebbles, dust, loess, tektites and other types of
matter might separately collect in orbit and shower down homogeneously, while
simultaneously, volcanism would pave large stretches of the globe.
Once more, we find the gradual fall rates of the present and the more credible
exponentially higher fall rates of the recent past so productive of mass and volume for
the Earth's crust that a young age for the Earth or a very young age for the
catastrophized Earth suggests itself. Whatever the properties of fully exoterrestrial
falls to explosion and fall-back, the fall-out even will wreak havoc: darkness,
lightning, winds, possible interruption of Earth motions, and biosphere destruction,
plus excitation of seismism and volcanism; holospheric transactionism, that is.
Notes (Chapter Eight: Falling Dust and Stone)
1. Op. cit., 258.
2. Ibid., 258-9.
3. Ibid., 186-90.
4. Worlds in Collision, 42-3, 51-3.
5. "Meteor," 12 Ency. Brit. (1974), 36.
6. I Catas. Geol. (1976).
7. Unpubl. mss., 1980, Soil Dept., ICT, Entschede, Netherlands.
8. H. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 241, 243.
9. Ibid.
10. D. A. Cyr, Annular Space Dust (Thousand Oaks, Calif. Annular Publs., 1968).
11. Earth in Upheaval, 96.
12. W. W. Shilts, "Glacial Till and Mineral Exploration," in R. F. Legget, ed., Glacial
Till (Ottawa, Royal Soc. Can., 1976), 205; Also Dreimanis, Ibid., II, 14-5, 42.
13. Op cit., 28-31.
14. ibid., 121-2.
15. John Bryson, 4 Am. Geol. (1889), 125-6; W. R. Jillson, 60 Science (1 Aug. 1924),
101-2.
16. Chester A. Davis, 19 New World Antiquity (Mar-Apr. 1972), 27-43; Donnelly, op.
cit., passim.
17. L. J. Salop, "Glaciations, Biologic Crises, and Supernovae," 2 Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec.
1977), 24-5.
18. John A. O'Keefe, "The Terminal Eocene Event..." 285 Nature (1980), 309-11; Heezen
and Hollister, op. cit., 254; O'Keefe, ed., Tektites, (U. of C. Press, 1963) and
Tektites and Their Origin (N. Y., 1976).
19. B. P. Glass et al., "North American Microtektites from the Caribbean Sea" 19 Earth
and Plan Sci. Ltrs (1973), 184-92 (N. Holland).
20. 217 Sci. Amer. (1967), 35-6.
21. 152 Science (3 June 1966), 1341-5.
22. C. Sutherland, "China's Dragon," 4 PensÚe 1 (Winter 1973-4), 47-50.
23. "Tektites and China's Dragon," I Kronos 2 (Summer 1945), 35-42.
24. 152 Science , loc. cit.
25. G. Baker, "Origin of Tektites," 185 Nature (30 Jan. 1960), 291-4.
26. Gill, 75 J. Geophys. Res. (1970), 966-1002 finds ages of only 4830 to 14600 years.
B. glass et al. find end of Eocene deposits, 10 Lun. Plan. S. (1979) 434-6.
27. B. Heezen, B. Glass, op. cit., and 112 Science News (1977) 408 on Ivory Coast
tektites.
28. Op. cit.
29. John Lear, Sat. Rev. (6 May 1967), 57.
30. E. A. King, 65 Amer. Sci. (1977), 212-18.
31. Rittmann, Volcanoes and Their Activity (New York: Wiley, 1962), 284-5.
32. James M. S. Sun, 56 Trans. Am. Geophys. U. (1975), 389.
33. 285 Nature (1980), 309-11.
34. Selected Works (Santa Barbara, Ca: Annular Pubns, 1972).
35. Edinburgh Philos. J. (1819), 221-35.
36. I. Catas. Geol. (Dec. 1976), 5.
37. In D. I. Shcherbakov, ed., The Interaction of the Science s in the Study of the
Earth (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1968).
38. R. A. Schmidt, "Extraterrestrial Dust as a Source of Atmospheric Argon," 151
Science (14 Jan. 1966), 223.
39. "Cosmic Spherules and Meteoric Dust," 202 Sci. Amer. (Feb. 1960), 123-32.
40. S. Fred Singer, "Zodiacal Dust and Deep Sea Sediments," 156 Science (26 May 1967),
1080-3.
41. "Exploring the Ocean Floor," 183 Sci. Amer. (Aug 1950), 42-4.
42. Sci. Amer. (June 1980), 44-53.
43. Book of the Damned, repr. (London: Abacus, 1974). See also the compilations of W.
Corliss (Glen Arm, Md., 21057, Sourcebook Project).
44. "Electricity in Astronomy," I S. I. S. R. 1-4 (1976-7), esp. # 4.
45. W. A. Tarr, "Is the Chalk a Chemical Deposit," 62 Geol. Mag. (1952), 252.
46. Luis Alvarez et al., "Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary
extinction," 208 Science (6 June 1980), 1095-1108.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER NINE
GASES, POISONS AND FOOD
That "all things come from heaven" may be untrue, yet even in these last peaceful
centuries the quantity and variety of things reported to have fallen upon Earth is
astonishing. For two hundred years, scientific establishments sought to resist the flow
of accounts, making out those who appeared with such claims to be culturally retarded
and childish, clowns, cranks and religious fanatics. Now the door is open to claims,
and some scientists are tripping over each other's footnotes in their eagerness to go
to through it. Since most chemical elements and compounds can be either found beyond
the Earth or conjectured to have once formed from the thermal and electrical conditions
that occur exoterrestrially, scenarios of past events to explain present processes are
becoming as common, prolonged, and disastrous as the "soap operas" of radio and
television.
Contemporary man is motivated to come to grips with the sky by economics, politics,
militarism, and the need to survive. Poisonous hydrocarbon, radiation, aerosols, carbon
dioxide, acid pollution, radio microwaves, ion disturbances, acoustical turbulence,
supersonic stresses in flight, and civil and military thrusts into outer space amount
to a major challenge to human modes of existence. To cope with such developments, ever
more scientific knowledge is required and this in turn leads to discoveries of
processes occurring in outer space that influence the Earth, and thereupon present new
problems and possibilities -solar energy, weather control, incursions of hitherto
unrecognized chemicals and particles, and even, say some, life forms contributing to
evolution and diseases. A modern pragmatic preoccupation with the skies, it would
appear, is now being laid on top of the age-old preoccupation with the forces and gods
believed to dominate the celestial sphere.
The gases that we discuss are mainly effective in the biosphere. We address not only
their chemical qualities but their behavior in mixtures and their propulsion by winds.
The poisons we discuss are cell destroying chemicals. The food consists of the rare
occasion of the descent of digestible cell-building chemical compounds. Hydrocarbons
are considered here as poisons; petroleum deposits are dealt with in a chapter to come.
Radiation is treated as a poison, though it may be a creator at times. Electricity, as
was said earlier, is everywhere and can go onstage with a number of the processes
involving gaseous behavior.
Comets and meteoroids, like volcanos, can emit gases. Explorer and scientist Humboldt
thought it probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with our atmosphere
in the years 1819 and 1823. When, on March 24,1933 a fireball of six miles diameter
sped across the American South, it trailed a tail one mile wide that carried a thousand
cubic miles of dust. The people who were beneath its passage smelled a peculiar
sulphurous odor for hours and for several days suffered from throat irritation [1] .
If the intruder is admitted, one may grant the occurrence of gases. An actual impact is
not necessary.
Can a gas cloud descend through the atmosphere without exploding or burning? It would
have to be charged oppositely to the Earth's surface and buffered during descend by a
plasma. Even under normal conditions, the positions of light and heavy gases are
sometimes reversed in the disorderly atmosphere. The Great Chicago Fire, and forest
fires which burned out millions of acres of land in Wisconsin, Michigan, Western
America and Canada broke out on the same day in the fall of 1871. E. K. Komarek speaks
of a peculiar fire weather and cites this case; Donnelly claimed that all were due to
gas drifts from the tail of Biella's Comet which had not been seen on its expected
three previous visits but was glimpsed without its tail in 1872, a year later, at which
time a spectacular meteoritic display occurred [2] . Donnelly offered a number of
testimonials that the fires referred to leaped incessantly from different locations
above the houses and forests and behaved as electricity in some ways (fusing without
burning) and as a gas in others (asphyxiating people away from the blaze).
A few years later another comet neared Earth and the Earth passed through its tail. The
comet broke up on September 9, 1882. Krakatoa exploded on August 26, 1883, after months
of eruption. A great many people were burned, smothered in the choking gases, and
nearly blinded. We should recall how the Krakatoa ash is negligible in the sea today
when compared with the layers described in earlier pages. Mass asphyxiation would be a
logical deduction from the conditions cited.
Just as research has shown sunspot gaps to be connected with climatic disaster, and has
correlated planetary-solar conjuctions with earthquakes, it may establish that cometary
passbys have occasioned violent volcanism -all of this during the uniformitarian
Solarian period. All the more may have happened, then, during ancient periods of
catastrophes.
Cosmic dust can be struck by particles from the Sun or stars and emit gases. David
Tilles explains only 20% of the argon 36 and 38 on Earth as an effect of the solar wind
upon space dust and debris. The balance he believes to be derived from an unquiet sun
of long ages ago acting upon then larger dust clouds surrounding the Earth [3] .
However, argon has been unexpectedly detected in the thin atmosphere of Mars, and if
Mars has been recently in gaseous exchange with Earth, as Velikovsky wrote in 1950, it
would have given argon to the Earth or taken it away [4] .
Gibson and Moore, investigating subsoil samples from the Moon, found so many
differences in volatile elements between North Ray Crater and other sampled locations
that they concluded it to be the site of a cometary impact. They agree with Kopal that
"the total amount of gas which can be acquired by the Moon in a catastrophic encounter
with a comet is far from negligible." [5] The Earth is a bigger target for comets than
the Moon. We would expect the Earth, then, to have also picked up many elements from
foreign sources. Traces of gases and hydrocarbons were found some distance from the
crater. Gases emitted by an impacting body would probably cause significant surface
phenomena on Earth as well.
In the year 687 B. C., at a time when natural phenomena, attributed to Mars, were
verging upon the catastrophic in many places on Earth, the great army of the Assyrian
king Sennacherib was destroyed as it was preparing to assault Jerusalem. "The angel of
the Lord" is credited with the deliverance from the enemy by the Bible. The angel is
identified as the Archangel Gabriel. He is connected with divine fire, with the
founding of Rome, with the planet Mars. It was "a consuming blast" that rabbinical
sources say burnt the souls of the Assyrians but not their bodies.
An analysis is contained in Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (230-41) in several fine
passages. The grotesque incident was coincidental with several other documentable
events around the world, and with a probable interruption in the Earth's movement. As
happens when a mega-force is operating, one force incites another: the destruction
might have been occasioned by gas and "celestial fire" acting together.
A charged gas would have descended, possibly lured by the concentration of metal
weaponry and myriad campfires. The gas cloud would have sent an electrical leader to
the camp grounds and the subsequent exchange of potentials would have killed the
Assyrian host. Sennacherib the king escaped, he was probably camped high and far from
the multitude of soldiers. Even in modern times of untroubled skies, verified reports
of flocks and herds being annihilated by a lightning blast occur.
The destructive meteoroid in this case would have been a plasmoid, preserving its
integrity as it passed through space and the atmosphere by the repulsion of its
surroundings, but driven down to Earth's surface by decrease in the repulsion, until
ultimately a "soft explosion extinguished the oxygen available to human and replaced it
by methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide or these together.
We turn next to the famous case of the mammoths, not waiting for the chapter on
extinction [6] . One almost should say the "deathless" case, for it has endured the
whole battle between catastrophists and uniformitarians, two hundred years -except that
now it may even become the case of the "deathless" mammoth, for a late news report
tells us that certain Russian experimenters are seeking to unfreeze and clone a mammoth
cell with an existing elephant to give birth to a live mammoth. Were the original
mammoths gassed into extinction? Instant death, fractured limbs, destroyed sometimes in
herds and sometimes alone, discovered on hills (not in river channels), some found with
their skins and innards intact, several found with food in their stomachs, even their
mouths, often associated with an incongruous assembly of other species, they lived and
died where they were found, several still standing, one with a rooted tree buried with
it. The mammoth and almost all other large animals of the same period were extincted
between 5,000 and 30,000 years ago over the face of the globe. The extinctions occurred
from over practically the whole arctic area and down to the southern part of the United
States, Europe and Middle Asia, where their close relatives, the mastodon, now-extinct
elephants, and modern elephants browsed. It is strange that no human skeletons have yet
been found, since we have their drawings of the mammoth.
Obviously if the date of each specimen were to be taken seriously, we would have, as
one writer argued, a series of local catastrophes. All over the world, he might have
added. Nor were the frozen elephants found encased in ice, but rather in a muck of
pebbles and clay, which is the same kind of muck that is widespread over hundreds of
thousand of square kilometers in the frozen arctic regions and contains the mangled
remains of millions of animals and plants. It is hard to dispute claims of a sudden,
widespread, simultaneous, and single catastrophe.
The assigned dates are hardly defensible. In the preliminaries of such a catastrophe,
valid carbondating would be extincted along with the large animals. The supplemental
dating is provided by the complicated ice age series, of which more later, but which,
we can say, is something of a muck itself. With the unreliable dating shunted aside, a
global scenario can be provided, an extravaganza, to be sure, but one is driven to it
by the facts.
One may speculate that a large body passed by the Earth perhaps 6,000 years ago. It
drew up tides of water and air below its path by hundreds of meters. It drew along and
up, then, water and atmosphere from the extreme northern and southern latitudes. It
tilted the globe at the same time. Most animals were asphyxiated during the hours of
the withdrawal of air. Simultaneously they were deep-frozen by temperatures reaching in
directly from outer space in the range of -150 F.
The intruding body departed. The columns of air and water collapsed, and rushed up to
the north and south. The winds and tides collected most of the dead animals, tore up
the ground, and finally deposited the remains in a muck that sometimes reaches to 1,000
feet of depth, even to 4,000 feet in one that the Soviets have excavated. Much of the
air never returned; the supply from the larger envelope around Earth was depleted and
the immediate atmosphere was thinned. As the legends say, it was now the bitter, cold
age of the "God of the Bright Skies", Jupiter. The mammoths, dry frozen in a vacuum,
rested in their packages of muck until the present day.
After relating so dramatic a story, it would be excessive to speak of the dinosaurs and
other mass extinctions, and these shall be saved until the appropriate chapter. Other
issues remain to be discussed here relating to gases and poisons.
One has to do with human experiences with atmospheric pressure, not only in moments
such as asphyxiated the great mammals, but time and time again in primeval history.
Sudden electrical events, not encounters alone, must have raised and lowered the air
pressures under which humans lived. At times, mankind must have endured miserable
headaches. Anthropologist Kennedy once referred briefly to "certain ritual practices
like trepanation (which also developed obsessive proportion in Late Neolithic and
Beaker time in Western Europe)." The practice extended in North Africa from the Canary
Islands through the Berber lands at least as far as Egypt. It was performed in
Mesoamerica as well. George Sarton writes in his history of science of prehistoric
skulls that have come down to us with evidences of trepanation (trephination) performed
upon them in life. The trepan is a saw for cutting holes in or removing pieces from the
skull. It is a dangerous operation, hardly on a plane with piercing the nostrils to
hold decorative devices. (But why are these devices so near the sinuses, too?) Extreme
headaches and fury can thus be relieved. Trepanning, we surmise, was an indication that
some considerable part of the population could not cope with a periodical fluctuation
or definite change in atmospheric pressure.
A second issue has to do with ozone. Having discovered that aerosol devices and
supersonic transports might destroy the ozone layer, several scholars have ventured to
say that such events have occurred in the past. Ozone, or atomic oxygen, exists in a
thin layer in the upper atmosphere, where it blocks solar and cosmic particles from
penetrating to the Earth's surface, here to cause innumerable mutations and cancers.
Ozone, too, is a poison in itself.
Associating ozone layer destruction with the periods of a reversal in the Earth's
magnetic field and these with the extinction of a number of species, discoverable in
ocean bottom drilling, Reid, Isaksen, Holzer and Cruzen theorize " that current concern
about possibly anthropogenic destruction of stratospheric ozone may be well-founded
since it is possible that major depletions occurring in the distant past have had
profound effect on the development of life as we know it." [7] Anticipating again what
is to be developed later, we can give credence to the theory, but would add that the
destruction of the ozone layer will have occurred during any catastrophe involving
turbulence in the stratosphere, especially with the passage of a large body.
Furthermore, the authors say, "the harmful effects accompanying polarity reversal,
whatever they may be, form only one component of the total environmental stress on a
given species." Beland and Russell point out that solar flares of extreme power, of a
kind never observed and perhaps occurring once in 200,000 years by probability theory,
would have to coincide with the reversal of GMF in order to account for a large number
of species extinctions [8] .
The Sun might well have become agitated by changing movements of large bodies within
its field and add a heavy dose of radiation to what might be occurring on Earth in
reaction to an intruding body or bombardment of meteoroids. Ozone problems would have
to take their place among many disturbing chemical and radiation changes. As Waddington
pointed out in 1967, particle radiation increases inversely with magnetic shielding
[9] .
Presently one speaks of background radiation, or low-level radiation, and a pressing
problem of the future is how to keep radiation at the same low level at least.
Sternglass finds even now indications of birth defects, infant mortality, and old-age
respiratory problems traceable to low level radiations [10] . Evidently both long-term
increases of level and single bombardments can cause damage to most people. Latest
medical reports (1983) are more ominous.
Prehistoric cases can exchange ideas with future cases. J. W. Gofman has predicted that
"a nuclear-based (U. S.) economy with 99.9% perfection in plutonium containment could
mean a 25% annual increase in total death rate from this source alone," amounting to
over 25 million extra cases of lung cancer over 50 years [11] . One must evaluate
prehistoric indications of abnormal radiation and high-energy explosions in this light.
Vera Rich, reviewing knowledge of the Tunguska (Siberia) meteor of 1908, brings forward
evidence of scabrous infection of the local reindeer in that year, a great acceleration
of tree ring growth beginning then, and an increase in the radioactivity of surrounding
trees [12] . Another report has it that certain plants mutated as well. The event was
exoterrestrial in origin and probably is of the category of "gas-bag" explosions, since
scarcely a ton of exogenous particles has been recoverable from the immense scene of
destruction.
Perhaps the body entered the Earth's atmosphere with great speed, electrically
attracted as well as driven by inertial differences, and thoroughly ablated until it
became a gas projectile without a casing, that exploded before striking. Or perhaps it
was a "Sennacherib plasmoid" from its inception. Generally speaking, the radiation
effect of a single meteor or cometary train passing through the atmosphere would be
heavier than many hydrogen bombs (unless these latter are deliberately "dirtied" by
cobalt or other chemicals) because of its great heat, its compression of the ambiant
air, its wide path of fall-out, and deep and large explosive cratering. During the
disasters of Exodus, several documents give indications of radiation effects. The
widespread "leprosy" effect may denote radiation disease, as I have explained in my
study of Moses. Eating fallen quail killed many persons, reports Jewish legend. The
manna, too, had to be eaten under supervision; to argue that it was" holy" and thus had
to be treated ritualistically is a modern sociological notion overlooking that it might
have become "holy" for several reasons, one being that priests, the savants, were
called upon to distinguish the edible from the poisonous manna. The Egyptian Ipuwer
papyrus conveys the impression that women became barren and that people lost their
hair. The cattle herds died of scabrous diseases. The most substantial theory of Exodus
times regards them as part of a much larger, a global, event, involving the close
passage of a comet, so that radiation effects are logically to be expected.
Recent studies have discovered high levels of radiation in fossil flora and fauna,
going back far in conventionally dated geological time. Kloosterman writes of "
anomalous high radioactivity" in a fish from the same Old Red Sandstore beds in which
the Pterichtyades occur, "fishes often invoked by catastrophists..." and quotes Hugh
Miller (1841) on a quiet but potent agency of destruction erasing "innumerable
existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles at once, and yet the medium in
which they had lived left undisturbed in its operations." [13] We mention the case
again when discussing extinction; electric shock probably accompanied the poison, and
was succeeded immediately by great tides of slurried water. In 1975, Bramlette
described deep fossil beds a plankton in the sea bottom that he tied to cosmic
radiation storms [14] .
Radiology is a new field of knowledge, whose development is producing a new attitude
toward what can be transformed, in biology, geophysics, meteorology, and geology.
Oparin some time ago began to call upon it to explain the long chain of chemo-
biological events leading up to The Origin of Life. He wrote of inorganic meteoric
material suffering far-reaching transformation from inter-stellar radiation before
arriving upon the Earth, of transmutations, for instance of iron and nickel into
aluminum and silieni and of these into magnesium, sodium, and helium.
An instance of how rapidly old problems can be tendered new solutions by seemingly
remote scientific developments occurs in the case of perhaps the most famous of fall-
outs , that of manna, ambrosia to the Greeks, soma to the Hindus, and other names to
other peoples. The insistent claim of the ancients takes on enhanced validity in the
context of operations of modern technology.
The bits of suggestive evidence come from all quarters. We begin with a famous 1945
experiment of S. L. Miller (in consultation with H. Urey) and ask Bernard Newgrosh to
describe it for us:
On the suggestion of H. C. Urey he took a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane and
ammonia (which were then thought to be the constituents of Earth's primordial
atmosphere but which are now known to be the constituents of cometary matter), boiled
the water and ran an electrical discharge through it continuously for a week. The end
products were an assortment of organic compounds, including some sugars, cyanides and
small quantities of amino-acids. It was the latter which evoked the most interest and
sparked off a whole new avenue of research into "the creation of life on Earth." Miller
had boiled his liquid only to prevent the growth of (and therefore contamination by)
micro-organisms. Later experiments used far less energy, and it transpired that the
shorter and smaller the amount of heat used, the greater the yield of amino-acids
obtained since these are denatured by heat. Other workers tried different mixtures of
gases including, in some cases, oxygen and hydrogen sulphide. As long as the mixture
was basically reducing in nature, the organic compounds and aminoacids were produced
[15] .
M. G. Reade and Wong Kee Kuong have more recently discoursed theoretically upon methods
by which carbohydrates, such as the manna which fed the ancient survivors of the Exodus
disaster, could be produced with the aid of cosmic lightning [16] . Formaldehyde (a
compound of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) is a partially combusted gas, of which "there
will be no shortage.. in a burning fiery cloud, almost whatever its origin." In
mixtures of free oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, this is the only product. It
has to be synthesized into sugar in an alkaline environment (already done) which is not
poisonous and can be converted into starch, rolled into "coriander seed" sizes and
dropped at dawn. So goes the argument of Reade, himself a confectioner and engineer.
The necessary procedures and formulas are presently at the threshold of laboratory
chemistry, he asserts.
On the processes required to produce edible carbohydrates in the form described by the
ancient sources, all are present in the environmental setting described by the same
sources, although without making the scientific connection that present knowledge
affords. The analysis of Reade is especially literal in matching edible product and the
natural "chemical apparatus" within the Bible.
In a yet unpublished manuscript on the Vedas of India, Ziegler brings forward many
ancient statements about dust and gases pervading the skies, including the fact that
the dust was falling and carrying the dew of heavenly waters (soma) with it.
In Hindu rite, the soma-devi are celebrants of sacrifices using soma. As a libation to
Agni, soma is now superseded in India by ghi. Now the deva is a goddess practically
identical with Venus, and the devi are her cohort. Venus, east and west, is worshiped
at times in the form of a cow, the sacred cow of India, for instance. Ghi is clarified
butter. The "golden calf" of the Hebrews in Exodus is the equivalent Baal-Venus image.
These few (from a great many) observations are made solely to point out and complete
the coincidence of a great celestial presence (a cometary body), a turbulent atmosphere
full of dust and lightning, the availability of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen,
methane, formaldehyde, and water in large amounts, the presence too of many enormous
laboratory vessels from which would fall not one but several products, and, of course,
the desperate survivors who would eat anything (regardless of its nutritional value)
and reverence the imagined donor.
At the same time as the Hebrews, Hindus, Mexicans, Greeks and others were munching
manna, they were vitally concerned with a certain redness in their environment. The
most astonishing and fearful color had fallen out of the skies and penetrated the
surface. Again we take leave to quote copiously from Newgrosh:
Dr. Velikovsky has produced numerous citations from ancient sources to show how falls
of a blood-like substance occurred when a "new" comet (later to become the planet
Venus) came into catastrophic contact with the Earth: the Manuscript Quiche of the
Maya, the so-called Papyrus Ipuwer from Egypt and the Book of Exodus all record the
fact that the water in the rivers was turned into "blood". In addition to these
examples, Dr. Velikovsky refers to the Greek myth of Zeus and Typhon, the Finnish epic
Kalevala and the lore of the Altai Tartars. However, a more exhaustive survey of such
legends would include the Sumerian myth of Inanna (a Venus goddess) who filled the
wells of Sumer with "blood", the Egyptians story of the goddess Hathor (also Venus)
whose visits to Earth were associated with the covering of the land with a blood-like
"beer", and the Norse legends of the "raining of blood" associated with the Valkyries.
These myths are widespread and all tell the same story. There can be little doubt that
something looking like blood fell from Venus during its close contacts with Earth.
What was its nature? Dr Velikovsky noted that it was a soluble pigment: "In sea, lake
and river this pigment gave a bloody coloring to the water. These particles of
ferruginous or other soluble pigment caused the world to turn red." Moreover, the
accounts of Exodus 7: 24 and of Ipuwer lamentations agree that this bloody colored
water was unpleasant and maybe poisonous. It is recorded of the Nile that "the river
stank" (Exodus 7: 21). There was disease among the cattle which, Dr. Velikovsky
claimed, was due to dust of an irritant nature.
Another writer, Peter James, asks whether legends of red falls from periods before
3,500 years ago might not refer to geological occurrences that deposited red sands or
ferratites around the world [17] .
In Greek myth the Sky-god Ouranos, the first ruler of the universe, was castrated by
his son Kronos and his blood fell to the Earth, impregnating it with a number of
dreadful deities. To turn to Roman literature, we have a very graphic description of
fall of blood in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" in his account of the fall of the Giants. "The
terrible bodies of the giants lay crushed beneath their own massive structures, and the
Earth was drenched and soaked with the blood of her sons." Egyptian myth tells a tale
of the Sungod Re similar to the Greek myth of Ouranos -it was said that Re mutilated
himself and that new deities sprang from his blood as it fell. In another Egyptian
myth, Re decides to punish mankind by sending down the Goddess Hathor/ Sekhmet. She
performs her task enthusiastically, gorging herself in the blood of men, but Re does
not want Man utterly destroyed, and he has to devise a stratagem to stop here in her
path of destruction. He mixes red ochre with beer, and pours a vast quantity over the
Earth during the night, to a depth of three palms (about nine inches). The goddess
sates herself on this "blood", and intoxicated she returns to heaven having forgotten
her task.
Newgrosh refers back to the Miller experiment, for a crucial detail that has long gone
unnoticed.
Miller wrote: "During the run the water in the flask became noticeably pink after the
first day, and by the end of the week the solution was deep red and turbid. Most of the
turbidity was due to colloidal silica from the glass. The red color is due to organic
compounds absorbed on the silica."
To conclude, electric discharges between the intruder and Earth synthesized organic
compounds in the cometary gases, including an edible component and an inedible red
silicate that showered down to color the Earth and water a turbid red. Newgrosh adds,
"being organic compounds, they would be speedily denatured, leaving no trace -except,
that is, in the memory of mankind." Also, an iron compound of partially hydrated FeCl2
has been reported present in heavy concentration in the clouds of Venus today [18] .
Considering that a possible source of Venus is the "Great Red Spot" of Jupiter,
together with the material already mentioned, if this analysis remains valid, this is a
significant quantavolutionary indication, perhaps a better test than the hotly debated
question of hydrocarbon clouds.
On many occasions in the past several centuries, falls of gelatinous material have been
reported in connection with meteors. The literature in part has been compiled by
Corliss [19] . Luminous and therefore probably electrified while falling, the stuff is
transparent and colorless, texturally a jelly, stinks when disintegrated, and dissolves
into a few grains of residue after some hours. One may guess that the Earth's reducing
hydrogen-rich top atmosphere is carried into contact meteorically with an oxidizing
lower layer, gathering dust particles and vapor, including metallic catalysts, to form
a semi-solid type of formaldehyde glob the size of a drinking cup. These are certainly
poor imitations of manna, but a similar process is entailed.
To portray its relation in volume to a smallpox virus, a single crystal of salt would
have to be enlarged to a five-meter cube, on a ratio of one centimeter to 1 micron (10
-4 cm) for the virus to be visible [20] . There is certainly room for viruses to ride
on cosmic dust. There is not yet a definite answer to the question whether meteoroids
and comets do now carry or ever have carried organic molecules and primitive life
forms. Brigham, in 1881, following Hahn and Weinland, reported a collection of some six
hundred specimen of fossil life obtained by analysis of meteorites [21] . Their work
was discarded as imaginative to the extreme, for they were discovering corals, sponges,
and crinoids. In the thirties, Lipman and Roy debated the former's findings of rods and
ovoid cells in meteorites [22] . Recently, Claus, Nagy, and others have discovered
inherent organic compounds, carbonaceous chrondrites, in meteoritic material.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have tackled the problem vigorously over the past few years
and emerged with two relevant hypotheses: one that life forms originated in space and a
second that plagues also descend from space. Comets carry the appropriate chemicals and
can carry on the necessary varying experiments naturally, over millions of years, until
"photosynthetic bacteria, able to oxidize hydrogen sulfide anaerobically," emerged.
If a cometary impact led to the start of life, the question arises: would subsequent
arrivals of cometary material carry biological or prebiological material which might
affect terrestrial biology? The boldest answer must be yes; that is to say,
extraterrestrial biological invasions never stopped and continue today. These invasions
would take the form of new viral and bacterial infections that strike our planet at
irregular intervals, drifting down onto the surface in the form of clumps of meteoritic
material probably similar to those studied by Dr. Rajan and his colleagues [23] .
The authors propose a perpetual vigil and a screening of stratospheric contents for
microbes. If their theory is correct, one might expect veritable plagues to have had a
hand in the great extinctions of species that have marked geological history. The
causes of death would not only be mechanical -flooding, wind, hailstones etc. -and
radiation, but also should include "biological warfare" against the Earth. Actually
there is yet another dread possibility, chemical poisons, such as cyanide.
Iridium, osmium and arsenic occur in quantities hundred of times above the normal in
strata of the cretaceous-tertiary when the dinosaurs and many other species, both
terrestrial and marine, extincted. Kenneth Hsu discerns at the same time a double blow
to the biosphere in the form, first, of heavy atmospheric heating owing to a cometary
pass-through and explosion, which killed off large terrestrial animals, and cyanide
poisoning that wiped out calcacerous marine plancton [24] . The cyanide effect would be
stressed by a catastrophic rise in calcite-compensation depths in the oceans after the
cyanide was detoxified.
During these disastrous events, which may have happened on several or more occasions,
not one alone, the ground forces would be highly energized. Velikovsky found it
impossible to determine whether, in the plagues of Exodus, "the comet Venus infested
the Earth with vermin," or "the internal heat developed by the Earth and the scorching
gases of the comet were in themselves sufficient to make the vermin of the Earth
propagate at a very feverish rate." That many forms of life are comfortably buried
below ground surface is well-known. But a thermal rise, flooding, earthquake,
volcanism, and electrical discharging, will bring them out in incredible numbers. Thus
the frogs of Exodus, the locusts, and the vermin also. One need only retroject modern
reports, and raise the scale of intensity, to imagine the succession of events. In the
area of the Krakatoa explosion, the nether world of animals was stirred up even while
the gases burned, choked, blinded, and smothered people.
There is normally more in the soil than the erosion of terrestrial rocks: this has
become apparent. Equally, new elements are discoverable that convey surprise, mostly
unpleasant. The Dow Chemical company of Midland, Michigan, has been for several years
in a quarrel with local authorities and environmentalists. The latter claim that Dow
has manufactured chemicals that deposit dioxins, a carcinogen, in the soils. Dow says "
we now think dioxins have been with us since the advent of (fire). It is perhaps
uninformed to discount the company's research, that is apparently discovering dioxins
everywhere. Adding more dioxins to the ground, of course, makes matters worse.
A parallel can be cited from the research into "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons is
Soils and Recent Sediments," conducted by Blumer and Youngblood, on behalf of the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution [27] . Samples were drawn from "depositional and
chemical environments ranging from continental and coastal soils to marsh and subtidal
marine deposits, and from high to low oxidation-reduction potentials." The PAH
component is significant; PAH is carcinogenic; ancient burning may be producing some of
today's cancers; it would be well to perform statistical correlations on populations,
cancer incidences, and "background PAH" of soils. PAH are formed at elevated
temperatures by incomplete combustion.
Our interpretation would imply that carcinogenic and mutagenic hydrocarbons occurred on
the earth's surface during geological times spans. This raises the question whether
these compounds might have contributed significantly to the processes of natural
selection of mutation, and to the evolution of species.
The scientists assess the possible origins of the PAH deposits. They exclude
weathering, seepage and spills, they exclude biosynthesis; they doubt early diagenesis
in process of formation; they settle upon pyrolysis. This burning might be thought to
occur on the site, but "the consistency in the PAH distribution among our samples
suggests a predominant single mode of origin;" the sites are distant from one another.
The chemistry does not permit regarding the PAH as "urban air particulates." Forest
fires are "possible but unproven:" low temperature burning could provide the homology
among the samples and air transport of PAH carbon ash from a great central fire
somewhere might preserve the similarity. The ash layers are not noticeable, however.
The authors do not consider typhonic meteoric explosions and fall-out. This could raise
to great heights the combustion residue of large vegetal areas and drop it around the
world. Nor do they consider a cometary pass-through with a burning hydrocarbon tail
that could deliver the PAH where and how found today. The time would be recent, for the
PAH are in surficial sediments.
In sum catastrophes, especially if exoterrestrially invoked, display much chemical
creativity. Great typhonic explosions on Earth, probably exoterrestrially induced, will
behave more modestly, but similarly. Numerous gases, poisons, and foods have fallen out
in natural history, and very recently. Precarious life situations have been widely and
abruptly generated. Multiple reports of gaseous and fall-out processes in space and
atmosphere challenge the credibility of radioactivity rates that have been established
under guidelines consistent with presently observable rates.
Notes (Chapter Nine: Gases, Poisons, and Food)
1. F. W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Phila: Chilton, 1965), 179.
2. Donnelly, op. cit., 102-6.
3. David Tilles, "Atmospheric Noble Gases...," 148 Science (21 May 1965), 1085-7.
4. L. M. Greenberg, "The Martian Atmosphere," II PensÚe I (1976), 5-9.
5. 179 Science (5 Jan. 1973), 69-71.
6. W. R. Corliss has compiled and reprinted numerous extracts from the scientific
literature, Strange Planet (Glen Arm, Md.; Sourcebook Project, 1975), section EBM. An
important update and new material is contained in L. Ellenberger, et al.,
"Catastrophism and the Mammoths," VII Kronos 4 (Summer 1982), 62-96.
7. G. C. Reid et al., "Influence of ancient solar-proton events on the evolution of
life," 259 Nature (22 Jan. 1976), 177-9.
8. 263 Nature (16 Sept. 1976), 259.
9. Science (17 Nov. 1967)
10. E. J. Sternglass, Low Level Radiation (NY: Ballantine, 1972).
11. Report prepared for the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (Yachats, Oregon).
12. 274 Nature (1978), 207.
13. J. B. Kloosterman, 2 Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec. 1977), 49.
14. 187 Science (17 Jan. 1975). 4172.
15. 4 S. I. S. Workshop 1 (July 1981), 2-3.
16. Wong, Kee Kuong, "The Synthesis of Manna," 3 PensÚe (Winter 1973), 45-6; M. G.
Reade, "Manna as a Confection," I S. I. S. R. 2 (Aug. 1977), 9-13, 25.
17. I Catas. Geol. (Dec. 1976), 5.
18. G. P. Kuiper, "On the Nature of the Venus Clouds," Planetary Atmos., Intl Atmos
Union, Symposium 40 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971).
19. See W. R. Corliss, Strange Phenomena, (Glen Arm, Md., 1974), 2v.
20. Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (NY: John Day, 1957).
21. F. Brighan, 20 Pop. Sci. (1881), 83-7.
22. Work by C. B. Lipman; S. K. Roy; E. Anders et al. and R. L. Levy is extracted by W.
R. Corliss ed., in Strange Universe (Glen Arm, Md.: Sourcebook Project, 1977), 2v.
23. "Does Epidemic Disease come from Space?" New Sci. (17 Nov. 1977), 403.
24. 285 Nature (22 May 1980), 202.
25. Worlds in Collision, 192-3, 268.
26. R. Jeffrey Smith, 202 Science (15 Dec. 1978), 1166-7.
27. Science (4 Apr. 1975), 53; see also R. A. Hites, Laflamme and Farrington,
"Sedimentary Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons...," 198 Science (25 Nov. 1977), 829-31.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TEN
METALS, SALT AND OIL
Iron-working is siderurgy, a word out of ancient Greece and Rome. It translates
properly as the working of star-iron. The Greek word for anvil, on which iron was
worked, was close to the word for a meteoric stone. The Eygptians called iron "the
bones of Typhon" and "a gift from Seth," both names corresponding to bodies crashing
into the Earth, devil-monster and devil-god. Meteoritic iron was known to the early
dynasties. "The Jews called iron ore nechoshet, which literally means the 'droppings of
the (cosmic) serpent, ' a nonsensical term unless our interpretation of it is allowed."
[1] The Jews forbade the use of iron in chiseling stones for the construction of an
altar. "A similar taboo was observed in Greek and Roman cults, it was and still is
widespread." [2]
But, whereas the Egyptians held an especial taboo of iron, the Assyrians did not, and
M. Sieff has described how Egyptian power waned when it lacked iron and waxed, on
occasion, when foreign workers and allies such as the Greeks and the miners of Zimbabwe
brought in iron and worked it. The Assyrians achieved their greatest conquests at a
time of grave natural disasters (the Mars-associated events between -776 and -487) [3]
. South and north of Egypt, iron in large quantities was found and used; in Egypt it
was neither found nor used. Query: why was no distinction made between meteoritic
sacred iron and mined iron? Possible answer; because all iron was known to be
meteoritic. Much may have fallen in association with the activity of the great war god
Mars-Ares-Nergal. Adequate metallurgy was known for thousands of years before the iron
age; increased temperatures could have been devised if the will--and the material--were
present.
In conventional works of human history, iron is placed as a late discovery. The "iron
age" comes after the "bronze ages" which follow the "Stone-ages." These terms and
divisions now only perpetuate confusion in anthropology, history, philosophy, and
perhaps even in geology. Thus, a common reference, the Columbia Encyclopedia, thinks
that meteoric iron beads existed in Egypt as early as 4000 B. C. but iron smelting not
until 1900 B. C. and later [4] . Some confusion is admitted on the matter and
Velikovsky's reconstruction of Egyptian chronology has added dismay to confusion [5] .
Some even say that iron may have been used before bronze, since isolated iron artifacts
of very early dynasties have been recovered. By the end of the second millennium, iron
was in general use in Palestine and probably also to the North. A Soviet excavation has
reported a metallurgical industry between 3000 and 2000 B. C. in Medzamor [6] with
steel tweezers dated at about 1000 B. C. Several experts now assert that there was no
clear functional superiority of iron in the first centuries of its use; bronze was
adequate even for weapons.
This all would signify a concurrent use of iron, lead, tin, copper, gold and silver by
2500 B. C. in the Mediterranean and Middle East, also perhaps elsewhere in the world.
The question arises why mankind did not use metals and invent metallurgy earlier. Could
all the workable surface metals of the world have arrived from exoterrestrial sources
within a brief period of late proto-history, and so vividly that the ancients even
could assign separate periods for their arrival, as Hesiod and Ovid did when reporting
a golden age, succeeded by a silver age, and ending in an iron age? I cannot attempt a
full answer here, but would support the case for human-witnessed exoterrestrial falls.
Bellamy can again be quoted [7] : Gold, platinum, uranium, radium, mercury, bismuth,
and other heavy metals are not detected in the surface layer of the Sun, nor of any
other star. As we cannot suppose that they do not exist in those bodies they must
logically be present in their cores--and hence also in the cores of the smaller cosmic
bodies, planets. Therefore the presence of heavy metals on, or near, the surface of our
Earth points to strewing from without. Without such cosmic strewing no ores would
probably be found on, or near, the surface of our Earth at all.
In the south of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) there is a zone, about 180 miles long by
25 to 30 miles wide, which contains great deposits of ores--chiefly copper, iron, tin,
uranium, and cobalt. In Angola and Rhodesia, as well as in South Africa, there are
smaller deposits.
Indeed, many geologists are of the opinion nowadays that the great rich ore deposits at
least must have been brought into being through strictly localized, exceptional, and
briefly operative causes.
Iron, the ancients believed, was meteoritic in origin. What would they have believed if
they had seen the now exposed great iron mountains of Minnesota or Venezuela? Could
such mountains have fallen from the sky? Unquestionably. Asteroids exist in the size of
iron mines and contain as much iron. Would they not have exploded and dissipated into
dust upon landing? Some would and some not.
A not-well-understood feature of meteoroid falls is that they can accomplish soft
landings as well as hard crashes. In hard crashes, such as at Campo del Cielo
(Argentina) where a number of meteoroids fell, "large masses of meteoritic iron and
shale have been found in its vicinity." [8] Heide writes, "the 60-ton meteorite from
the Hoba farm near Grootfontain, South West Africa, the heaviest of all known
meteorites, imbedded itself in friable limestone at a depth of only 1.5 meters. The
iron meteorites of Cape York in Greenland, weighing up to 30.875 tons, lay on solid
gneiss rock, or were barely imbedded in moraine rubble, without any trace of an impact.
Here we may guess that they fell on a thick layer of ice or snow and sank to their
final location as the snow or ice melted [9] .
However, as the Mass and Velocity of the meteoroid increase, its Energy of impact
increases, according to the formula E = 1/ 2 mv 2 . The atmosphere cannot brake the
body in time. Therefore, no iron masses of over 100 tons have been deemed to be of
exoterrestrial origin; where such have actually fallen, and few doubt this, they have
been vaporized by the impact.
In the face of this formula and the visible facts of meteoritic iron, it would appear
that the large iron ore masses on Earth cannot have originated exoterrestrially. The
negation, if any, depends upon variable velocity. If the falling iron mass is
electrically charged, or gathers a charge, so as to render it less attractive to the
Earth its velocity would diminish. Theoretically, it could waft down in a soft landing
in one piece. If it crashed upon landing, it would possibly assemble itself into the
form of an iron ore deposit as deluges of water and dust would fill the interstices.
Strange objects have been found in the midst of iron ores being mined, such as wood of
recent date [10] .
Much that is meteoritic may not be discovered. On an Antarctic ice field, Japanese
explorers found over 1000 meteorites, of which only one was composed of iron [11] .
Were the field of stone, instead of ice, the stone meteorites would probably go
undetected. Obviously we could not test all the Earth's rocks for exoterrestrial
origin, especially since the tests themselves might beg the question.
Masses of iron were found lying upon a Disco Island (Greenland) shore with a great
gneiss erratic boulder and associated with the talus of a basalt cliff which itself
contained similar bits of iron. All the iron was termed meteoritic which led the
investigators to wonder, especially since the basalt fragments were found even embedded
' inside the iron of the beach, whether the meteorite shower "occurred while the basalt
was in a state of pasty eruption." [12] But, too, the range itself, though immense and
tall, might have been the rim of a great impact collision and was permeated by and
interacted with the exploding body.
Suppose all known meteoritic material in the world were assessed for its proportion of
iron. Suppose then that one calculated the proportion of iron ore to the amount of
drift, loess and homeless clay. If the two ratios were similar, the exoterrestrial
thesis would be expanded to embrace the materials of both ratios. Iron in one form or
another composes about 5% of the Earth's surface rocks; here is a thoroughly
homogenized relationship of iron to rock. This ratio turns out to be closer to the
ratio of iron to stone in meteoroids. Both ratios would be far removed, no doubt, from
the ratio of iron ore to drift and loess, which would probably be one in thousands. We
can imagine, as have several scientists, that the meteoroids fallen upon Earth are
those of a late planet explosion in the region of the belt of asteroids and therefore
we have been sampling a planet composed as the Earth is supposedly composed, with iron
and nickel core, sima mantle, and sial crust. Calculations, given this simple idea, are
complex but not enough. There is too much evidence of exoterrestrial dumping upon Earth
by other bodies, more of the nature of Jupiter and Saturn, to carry out this algebra of
ratios with confidence.
Generally, "terrestrial" iron bodies are distinguishable in composition from meteoritic
iron in that they contain either smaller amounts of nickel (about 3 per cent) or larger
amounts (about 35 per cent). The meteoroids also contain some cobalt. The distinction
is hardly foolproof. Generally, too, the meteoroids have encrustations attributable to
their experiences in space, although this is statistically discoverable and not an
absolute distinction.
Perhaps somewhere in the literature, unknown to the present writer, exists a systematic
examination of the boundaries of a very large metal body demonstrating a lack of
exoterrestrial experience. Nor is there a great iron body embedded in precambrian rock;
nor has anyone come upon intrusive pipes of iron ore that would have conveyed metal
from the core or mantle, by some combination of electrical and volcanic force.
If an alternative to an electrically-assisted soft landing were sought, one might
better conceive of a welding process; gigantic lightning strokes from iron bodies in
space lasting for a minute would cast molten iron ore down their path to where they now
rest in heaps. Again, a study of ore body boundaries is needed. Schaeffer has written
of the layers of ashes and cinder scories close in to a huge pure copper mine of Cyprus
[13] . One recent theory has the same copper distilling from a hot spot of a northern
fork of the great African rift. To this author, the exoterrestrial notion is as
convincing.
Like Bellamy, I am impressed by the fact that "there are, scattered over the Earth, a
number of ore-mountains which are evidently foreign to their surroundings. At Eisenerz,
in Austria, there is a huge mountain, consisting altogether of iron ore .... On the
island of Elba, in Sweden, in Russia, in India, and elsewhere we find more or less
considerable hills consisting of pure iron ore, mineral wonders of the world. In
Orissa, India, in the jungle near the village of Sakchi, is a hill consisting of iron
ore which is so rich that it yields almost 65 per cent of pure metal." Elsewhere he
writes that such mountains would, upon investigation, probably prove to be 'rootless. '
He describes others.
"At Gellivara in Sweden there are enormous deposits of iron ore whose special
characteristic is that they are found in floelike masses, as if they had been
'pancaked' down. At Kirunavaara and Loussavaara, in Lapland, there are similar deposits
of iron ore. The 'Kursk Anomaly' in Russia consists of a mass of iron ore estimated to
contain about a cubic mile of high-grade material. In the Ural area there is Gora-
Blagodat, the 'Blessed Mountain, 'an iron ore mountain 520 feet high, situated in a
plain. In Russia too is the Wyssokaya Gora, a deposit of rich magnetite ore, littered
over a strip 40 miles long by 9 miles wide." [14]
As with iron, so with other metals: many legends have them falling from heaven. The
Chinese sky dragon's "breath descends as a rain of water or of fire. Gold is the
congealed breath of a White Dragon, but a Purple Dragon's spittle turns into balls of
crystal; glass is regarded as solidified dragon's breath." (The tektite allusion is
plain). "The dragons of mythology are often described (among the Teutons, for example)
as guardians of hoards and givers of wealth." The dragons are wise in metallurgy [15]
.
Donnelly says the same. He describes "Beowulf, when destroyed by the midnight monster,
rejoicing to think that his people would receive a treasure, a fortune by the monster's
death." [16] Further, now Humboldt writes, the Scythians had a sacred gold which fell
burning from heaven. "The ancients had also some strange fictions of silver which fell
from heaven, and with which it had been attempted, under the Emperor Severus, to cover
bronze coins." [17] An image of a rattlesnake with a tail of gold, and descended from
heaven, was worshipped by the Inca as the god of riches. In the Bible (Job 21) it is
said of the horrendous dragon Leviathan, "he shall strew gold under him like mire." And
Chan reports that in ancient Mesoamerica "yellow was the color of gold, the teocuilatl
or excrement of the gods." [18] The dragons that are the substance of most ancient
myths and of children's fairy tales today tortured and enriched both the Earth and the
minds of men.
Cores drilled from Antarctic sediments of pleistocene age contained iridium and gold in
anomalously high proportions. "A sizeable fraction of the noble metals is contained in
vesicular, millimeter-sized poly-mineralistic grains that closely resemble ablation
debris from chondritic meteorites, and there is little doubt that the noble metals
resulted from the accretion of a large extra-terrestrial object."[18A]
About the same time as this expedition, the largest American gold strike in a century
was occurring on the Thornton-Ash ranch in Nevada. The gold was not in nuggets, but in
microscopic sizes like the Antarctic find. It is extracted by crushing and leaching its
host rock. Large tracts of land are being scooped out and many millions of tons of rock
processed to obtain the gold. In the absence of a comparative examination of the Nevada
and Antarctic discoveries, one may suspect an exoterrestrial origin of the Nevada gold
as well.
Conventionally, studies of the origins of metals and their cultural recognition do not
mention any exoterrestrial contribution to their chemistry, appearance or use. Instead,
they are looked upon as components of igneous intrusions. Speaking of gold, silver,
copper, lead and tin, Clair Patterson in his exceptionally important study of "Native
Copper, Silver, and Gold accessible to Early Metallurgists,"[18B] declares:
The primary igneous minerals of the 5 anciently used metals were generally mixed with a
large number of unwanted minerals in the vein or lode. Useful igneous minerals of the 5
different metals were not generally mixed together, however. Except for close relations
between lead and silver, deposits of the 5 metals were more unrelated than related in a
specific region (Noble 1970). The different metals were generally successively
deposited over a period of time in adjacent regions (Noble 1970). The common
characteristic which bound the deposits of all 5 metals together was the fact that they
were emanations derived from igneous intrusions in mountainous belts, sometimes
occurring together, or nearby, or not at all.
He reports that the ratio of copper to silver to gold mined from all types of deposits
in the entire world from 3800 B. C. to 1925 A. D. was 3,000 to 11 to 1, and believes
the ratio not to be far removed from their natural incidence as ores. These are largely
surficial, he says, even though he expects the same metals to be found in highly
dispersed, fine grains throughout the crust, where their bulk would be perhaps seven
million times that of the ores. "The lower the grade of ore, the more there is of it,
until finally we include the entire earth's crust in our consideration."[18C]
It is likely that the greatest masses of copper, silver, gold, tin and lead ores were
emplaced in the upper several kilometers of the earth's crust rather than throughout
the total 35 km thickness of the continents or the thicker upper mantle. Governing
agents in this vertical distribution were abrupt decreases in temperatures and
pressures near crustal surfaces. It is unlikely that there are any large deposits of
the kind we commonly recognize as ores at great depths in the crust, although there are
very large amounts of copper, silver, gold, tin, and lead dispersed down there.
It seems that ores are found in a highly confused and diversified state that does not
let one assume any neat intrusion of pure metal. Nor even is the intrusiveness
manifest; the term seems to define itself, as simply something differing from its
surroundings, not a clean belt or stratum, but as a conglomerate chemically,
physically, and morphologically.
Ore is the valued part of minerals, including metals. The modern processes used to
isolate ore are imitations of nature. Crushing is first, where the pressures and
grinding of water, wind, and rock movements are emulated. Mineral separation follows.
Minerals of different sizes are shaken through sieves. A hydrocyclone may be used to
segregate particles by their response to varying winds. Flotation is employed to
separate the crushed particles according to their density. The material may be conveyed
along jigging tables under running water so that high density, then afterwards lower
density material, settle. A magnetic wheel can collect from poured minerals the
magnetic ores and cast off the less-magnetic ores. Minerals that accept water-proofing
can float in a froth while non-proofed minerals and rock sink. Once minerals have been
chemically created, by high-energy forces, the same or a varying mix of
quantavolutional forces can segregate them.
Under these circumstances, a person of our persuasion is likely to see exoterrestrial
intruders smashed, crushed and exhibiting metal here and there; or, secondly, rims of
hardly discernible craters containing segregated elements of the Earth's rock mixed
with exoterrestrial elements that have been subjected to the immense heat and pressure
of a crash; or, thirdly, effects of massive electrical discharge plus fall-back of
exploded earth. (Regarding this last, and considering the unusual conductivity of
metals, have they been prepared for conductivity, like quartz semiconductors? Are we
dealing with homeopathy or homology?)
The distribution of metals in the world is associated somewhat with folding and
thrusting, but this may be a finder's help, not a random sample of ore distribution.
More significant is the lack of correlation of these metals with volcanism or even with
great faults. Why should metals congregate near circular features and basins,
suggestive of astroblemes?
Flint is found that has undergone controlled heat treatment, with pressure retouching
as revealed by spectroscopic experiments; this is at least Solutrean in age, 22000 B. P
by conventional dating [19] . The skill is as complex as and less enjoyable than
metalworking by heat; why then did man wait another 15,000 years to begin his work with
copper, tin, lead, gold, silver, and iron? Perhaps they were not available. Or, perhaps
the dating is too long and, soon after the flintworking, metalworking began, which is
one logic for preserving the conventional origin of metals by casting aside the
conventional chronology.
Before the ages of the metals, so-called stone age man existed. He used many different
kinds of stone, bone, wood, and grasses. He designed, cut, heated, and molded them. He
domesticated animals, grew cereals, performed anatomical operations with stone knives.
He built cities and great monuments. He painted, danced, and sang. Coal and peat were
burned. Obsidian and flint were mined; Greek myth portrays Saturn castrating his father
Uranus, using a jagged-edged sickle of flint. If any amount of terrestrial iron had
been present on the surface and outcroppings, why would it not have been employed?
Gold, silver, copper, tin and lead were mined and used.
Mankind was ready to work and even to melt and purify iron, it seems, long before it
was available. If only in order to supply the type of hypothesis that may lead usefully
to historical research on the subject, I would suggest that most metals occurred around
the period of the great Deluge and in the transition from Saturn to Jupiter worship,
about 4200 B. C., and may be connected to a cosmic explosion that I have in Chaos and
Creation assigned to a planet with the legendary traits of Apollo. It is noteworthy
that the ancient metal mines of Attica had two favorite names, Artemisiakon and
Hermaikon, both siblings of Apollo [20] .
John Saul drew circles corresponding to rounded features, possibly ancient exploded
craters, on a topographic map of a portion of Arizona. He independently marked the
location of mineral deposits on a similar map. When one overlaid the other, there
appeared a significant relationship between craters and mines, with the deposits
generally occurring on the rims of the circles. One circle was abundantly supplied with
minerals, indicating that a certain small percentage of craters, and hence their
originating body, may be heavily mineralized [21] . R. S. Diez is cited by Pauwels for
arguing the origination of the immense Sudbury (Canada) nickel mines from a meteoroidal
impact of pre-Cambrian times.
One can conjecture, then, about a possible ratio of large stone meteoroid impacts to
large mineral meteoroid impacts corresponding to the experienced ratio of small stone
to small iron-nickel meteoroid impacts. Since historical experience has been limited
(explainable by the negative exponential principle), one would hardly expect
historically the fall of the rarer metals such as gold, silver, and copper. Walter
Sullivan has presented in the New York Times of Nov. 2, 1966 a map of the world's most
productive gold field below Johannesburg, which shows a large primary "bulls-eye-
formation" rimmed by gold-bearing formations and a much larger 200-mile-diameter,
secondary, cratered, rim-like area, also bearing gold, and asks "Did a comet create a
South African gold field?" Unless the gold was alchemized on the spot, it might have
been part of the meteoroid that crashed.
Most metals, in conclusion, may originate exoterrestrially. If an alternative must be
found, it may be suggested, although hardly discussed directly here, that special
thermo-electric events might produce the metals. This would constitute electrolysis on
a huge scale, in a dense catastrophically formed atmospheric plasma, before or after
striking.
The metal, manganese, is exceptionally terrestrial in origin. Its growth out of
underseas volcanos is particularly explosive and rapid. Pure manganese is found in
cones near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Hot water and steam percolate through lava
segregating the metal and depositing it in molten pools where it cools shortly. The
French-American Mid-Ocean study, "Project Famous," found manganese geysers along the
Ridge in the 1970's.
Manganese is also found in nodules on the ocean floors. These, by contrast with the
geyser type, are supposed to have required much time to grow. Scott and his colleagues
estimated that nodules grow at rates of 1 to 10 mm/ million years. They are supported
by Ku, Burnett and Morgenstein, using both radiometric and nonradiometric techniques of
dating. But Goldberg and Arrhenius reported finding a 50-year old naval shell with a
ferromagnesium oxide coating 30 mm thick, indicating a rate of 60,000 mm/ m years
[21A]. Heezen and Hollister point out that the rate of accumulation of manganese is a
function of its concentration in water and the availability of a nucleus in the water
[21B]. Conventional gradualist theory cannot explain the "mystery" so well as
quantavolution.
Nodules abundantly litter the deep abyssal hills. They form around a particle, tephra,
a pebble, an animal tooth, a bone, or on the surfaces of volcanic or drifted rocks. The
nodules should require a very short time to form, if supplied with nucleus, warm water
and a manganese rich soup emerging from fast flowing and erupting volcanos. The
manganese adheres to any object and rafts to its ultimate destination far from its
birth place with fast-spreading lava, which also boils out manganese accumulations as
it spreads, and by swirling currents of newly forming seas around it, the same currents
that hold the nuclear objects in suspension for a time. The process 'proves itself as
turbulent and swift by the nuclei, which would otherwise sink in the abyssal muck if
there were such and by the availability of manganese only at the hot spots of the
ridge. Thus, contrary to the long-time theory of manganese formation, the very presence
of the manganese nodules goes to demonstrate how rapid was the paving of the ocean
basins, a topic to be treated later on.
Sodium chloride is of course a mineral compound, and not a metal. The salt domes of the
world, averaging 30 cubic miles each, may carry 100,000 cubic miles of salt, about
three-tenths of all the salt of the seas. Salt is not found in pre-cambrian rocks,
which are said to embrace most of the time since the Earth was created. Basalt of the
ocean bottoms contains no salt and salt could not have been precipitated from the
melting of mantle rock [22] . Granite is also deficient in salt.
The presence of salt, like the metals, in living tissues, and therefore the need of it,
does not prove its terrestrial origin. Nor should one gullibly receive the story that
since salt is in our tissues, it must be part of the ancient waters that bore the first
life, hence giving us proof of most ancient salt oceans. Life digests salt-free water,
even ocean life. If all the water of the world were to receive all the salt deposited
in domes, life as we know it might become precarious--except insofar as we constructed
desalification factories to sustain it. The miracle is that salt has not killed life
already, like many ancient settlements had their land sown with salt by their enemies,
and thus were extinguished. Species closely resembling one another are to be found both
in oceans and freshwater lakes and rivers. Salmon live in both oceans and rivers during
their individual lifetimes. Paleontology may not be able to demonstrate the precedence
of saltwater over freshwater life forms. Too, the medium of early marine life may have
been brackish.
There is no apparent earthly source for salt. A Head Curator of Geology at the U. S.
National Museum, George P. Merrill, long ago wrote that sodium chloride (at least the
latter) must have come like meteorites from outer space and been caught up first in the
atmosphere and then dumped in the oceans. By the atmosphere is implied a canopy sky.
From the canopies, salt would descend with water deluges, which we shall be considering
later as a quite recent event. The canopy or set of rings may have been a momentary
affair or endured for centuries. The rings and body of Saturn may contain sodium
chloride or its elements; the rings contain millions of small mineral objects.
Legendary evidence exists on this account.
Once salt in solution strikes the ground it must run off into the basins that have
water, making it salty, and also contribute with its host water to new seas. If it
sinks into the ground in solution it will form a reservoir, either exposed or folded
under or trapped in a cavity. In these cases, the water will boil out as steam: or it
will percolate into underground and above-ground branches flowing to the sea. The salt
residue will then form domes.
Cook argues that the salt domes were created in the same set of events as the deep
burial of organic material of which petroleum is composed, for many salt domes act as
oil traps, keeping oil from dissipation. Avalanching ice from collapsing ice caps, and
sediments pushed by these, suddenly thrusted and folded salted waters that were
swirling around the great movements, containing them under high heat and pressure. The
trapped waters were squeezed out of insoluble sediments into their own cavity. There
they evaporated quickly, leaving salt deposits. But it is unlikely that the waters of
the Earth were so salty as to provide, via tides, the salt domes and still leave the
run-off waters with the present heavy component of salt in solution. Furthermore, as
later chapters here will argue, the bulk of the ocean waters and ice came
exoterrestrially and the salted waters mostly arrived later.
The salt may have descended both as a solid and in acqueous solution. Salt domes exist
beneath the sea floor as well as below the land. Salt domes containing oil have been
discovered beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico at 12,000 feet of depth (2000
fathoms) [23] . Great salt domes have been discovered below the Mediterranean floor as
well, giving rise to an idea that the Mediterranean once, 12 million years ago, became
a dry basin. Why salt should not then be evaporated and laid in even layers of
sediments rather than in intrusive pockets is unanswered.
In South and East Texas many cylinders of salt (with nearby anhydrite, gypsum, oil and
sulfur deposits) penetrate the Earth to depths of a thousand meters and more. Kelly and
Dachille ask "What could have caused these tremendous beds of practically pure rock
salt?" And they write: "Our inevitable answer is the same, collision-flood. We should
guess that this pan of the earth was struck by a body or bodies of sufficient size to
evaporate great quantities of ocean water, both by the Kinetic energy released by the
impact and by the great pool of molten lava that must have been formed in the crater.
This evaporation of ocean water would have left the salt provided that it was not
connected directly with the main ocean, otherwise the salt would have gone back into
solution." [24]
The Gulf of Mexico does seem to have vague characteristics of a gigantic meteoroid
impact. Since other salt domes have been also discovered beneath the gulf itself, one
may wonder whether the meteoric body itself may not have been composed largely of salt
and injected its own salt tubes into its crater basin. This would seem a more realistic
scenario than the Kelly-Dachille vision of a typhoon lifting salted waters into the
air, evaporating the waters, and having the salts precipitate in favored sequence and
locale in a pure state. The fact, as they recall it, that salt is so free from
contaminants (less than 0.4%) argues for the solid integrity of the salt from its
initial appearance on Earth.
Legends imply my theory. Saturn was the first Lord of the Mill, a grindstone round like
the revolving vault of the sky. It ground salt into the sea and was sunk in the ocean
during the great maelstrom and deluge that brought the golden age of Saturn to an end.
In Hindu myth, the gods churned the celestial ocean and the mill ground out salt into
the sea. Norse myth has the heavenly mill churning out gold, then salt, then, sunk in
the sea, sand and stones. The unhinging and failing of the Mill implies, too, a tilting
of the axis of the globe, a likely accompaniment of the cataclysm.
A South American legend supplies significant detail. "The Arawak of Guyana call the
Galaxy 'the Tapir's Way. ' This is confirmed in a tale of the Chirignano and some
groups of the Tupi-Guarani of South America." According to Cuna tradition, "the Tapir
chopped down the 'Saltwater Tree', at the roots of which is God's whirlpool, and when
the tree fell, saltwater gushed out to form the oceans of the world." [25] The Cuna
cosmology thus unites the idea of the tree-of life found in many places, including
Genesis, with a Tapir-god, Saturnian-Elohim divinity, and, as the tree of life is
destroyed (the old order ends), saltwaters deluge the Earth. (In Solaria Binaria, Earl
R. Milton and the present author identify this tree of life with the legendary and
philosophical axis of fire and this with the presence, until a nova of Saturn, of an
electric arc-current flashing between a then-larger Saturn and the Sun, and visible to
man.) In sum, various legends independently agree that the salt of the oceans came with
an aquatic cataclysm in a time when mankind was an intelligent witness.
That salt came down upon the doomed "Cities of the Plain" at a later time as well is
argued by Dwardu Cardona. Yahweh threatens his people with "sulphur and salt and
burning, so that its whole land will not be sown... like the overthrow 3f Sodom and
Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which Yahweh overthrew in his anger and in his wrath;...."
[25A]
In the same work, Milton and I propose that the Noachian Deluge occurred in cyclonic
form, with the salty waters hosing or jetting down at thousands of locations. If this
were correct, some of the characteristics of salt deposits would be explained, such as
their common cylindrical shapes and great depth below the surface of land and
seabottom. The saltwater would bore through the surface rocks under great pressure and
with enough time to penetrate deeply. The water would vaporize promptly in the ambiant
heat and what was left of it would leak through a multitude of fractures on the margins
of the deposits.
In Manchester, England, a process of making petroleum from garbage has been announced
(1982). "We can do in ten minutes what nature has taken 150 million years to do,"
asserts a proud engineer. The oil costs half the prevailing price of natural crude oil.
This price does not consider the original devastation of the biosphere that occurred
with the natural production of oil. Conventional belief interprets oil resources
according to an idyll, that organic rot was deoxidized, accumulated over long periods
of time, roasted slowly at a deep warm level in the rocks until it turned into oil,
then seeped into rock reservoirs where it was trapped to await the oil explorer of
today. There is little use in our discussing this story, inasmuch as the reader will
have ready access to it in many books. Here it is argued that oil is a catastrophic
product and the major questions concern the catastrophic mechanisms of its formation.
The "ten-minute oil" suggests that there may be no inherent guarantee that natural oil
is old. Recently discovered hydrothermal vents in the Gulf of California are producing
from sediments a petroleum that is close to commercial standards. Several C 14 dates of
oil offshore California and from the Gulf of Mexico range from 5000 to 20000 years.
Still petroleum generally is dated from two to six hundred million years; a common age
given is fifty million years. One group of scientists suspects that solar ultraviolet
polymerized the methane atmosphere of primeval Earth to form an oil slick of one to ten
meters' depth all over the globe [26] . T. Gold believes that methane, composed of
carbon and hydrogen, erupts from primeval reservoirs in the mantle; they sometimes
explode from electrostatically induced sparks [27] However, the presently continual
explosions would indicate to this writer a recent origin of the methane, probably from
biomass deep-buried by catastrophe. A. T. Wilson produced hydrocarbons out of
electrical discharges on methane and ammonia, and claimed in 1962 that the Venus
atmosphere held hydrocarbons [28] . Oro and Hart maintain a case for current
hydrocarbon production on Jupiter from methane; they manufactured hydrocarbons from
methane in their laboratory [29] . Libby has theorized that oil is raining down upon
Jupiter today [30] .
Max Blumer, a pre-eminent paleo-geochemist, lately of the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, used the conventional age estimates given above in making a calculation of
some social significance. Reminiscent of the Dow Chemical Company's claim about natural
dioxins mentioned in the previous chapter, oil shipping interests have protested that
only half the ocean's petroleum content comes from polluting practices and the other
half comes from natural leaks and seepage. In 1970, Blumer, following this logic,
estimates the amount of seepage at 5 x 10 6 tons. Quoting then high estimates of
offshore oil resources at 100,000 x 10 6 metric tons, he points out that all of this
would have leaked out in less than 20,000 years. But, taking the average age of oil as
above, 50 million years, and the claimed seepage rate, "the average offshore oil-field
would have lost to the ocean 2500 times the free flowing oil or more than 1500 times
the total oil existing in situ before commercial offshore oil production started." [31]
Obviously, in Blumer's view, and the publicity attendent upon the brief article
indicates a wide acceptance of it, the estimate of natural seepage is ridiculously
high; the polluters are responsible for the oil in the oceans. The same is true on
land. Seeps are negligible because "oil reservoirs are well sealed even on the
continents where uplifiting and erosion should have bared oil-bearing strata more
extensively than on the ocean floor." Oil leaks are frequently sealed by natural
asphalt.
The quantavolutionist can address three comments to Blumer's line of argument. First,
the age of oils in the sea may be grossly overestimated. Possibly the oil resources of
the world are under 20,000 years old; in this case, the allegations of the seepage
advocates would have to be disproven by other evidence, if at all. Second, Blumer does
not deny seepage, but wishes it reduced. But he does not estimate seepage, or else, I
guess, he would have to name a figure, such as one-tenth of the seepage claimed. In
this case, the age of the "average oil" would drop by a factor Of ten; all oil
resources would be exhausted by leakage in 200,000 years. Surely he would not insist
upon the fifty million years age and therefore be compelled to argue that true seepage
is hundreds of times less than claimed. In other words, he is walking right into the
quantavolutionary door; no significant seepage is satisfactory if conventional oil ages
are to be defended. This is especially so, given that strict uniformitarian rates are
not likely; no matter how oil is made, early seepage must have been at a faster rate
than today's seepage. Even just the transfer from factory to reservoir cannot occur
without large losses. Again the age of oil must drop. And of course if a
quantavolutionary theory of oil formation is adopted, the exponential principle come
into play: oil is made, not in ten minutes, not currently in submarine hydrothermal
factories, but in very short times nevertheless.
Two quantavolutionary theories, requiring very short times, offer themselves, one best
enunciated by Melvin Cook, the other by Velikovsky. Cook hints that a great deluge may
have precipitated the lateral break-out of the ice caps. The vast ice avalanche
bulldozed the biosphere long distances and folded it into the Earth in a heated state.
Velikovsky argues for the origin of petroleum from the tail of a great comet, which he
identified as an erratic Venus. Both offer short-term explanations, Cook placing the
production of oil around 10,000 years ago, Velikovsky around 3450 B. P.
Cook reconstructs the oil production process as follows: around the old ice cap of the
north grew a heavy biosphere. The towering ice cap, triggered by deluges, exerted
fracturing radial pressures that sent great bulldozers of ice and rock in all
directions to sweep up, ignite and bury deeply the vegetation and animal life. The
organic matter stewed under high thermal and pressure conditions. Some became coal;
some became oil and natural gas. Here is a quick "Cook's Tour" of the world's petroleum
[32] .
The most prolific oil basins of the world are those associated with the postulated
major long-thrust systems described previously, namely the Mississippi valley--Gulf of
Mexico system and the extensive and complicated overthrust systems comprising the great
oil fields surrounding the Red, Mediterranean, Caspian and Black seas and the Persian
Gulf. The southwestern USA thrust system responsible for the fragmentation in the Basin
and Range province possibly contributed to the California oil basins. Another similar
thrust system apparently generated the oil and coal provinces of Borneo, Sumatra, Java
and New Guinea. These great oil and gas regions are most likely associated with sudden
deep burial of marine and vegetal matter in (1) spoke-like radial thrusts from the ice
sheets that began with the flood and eventually triggered continental drift, (2)
continental drift itself, and (3) the Subsequent catastrophic effects of readjustment
(ocean ridge and related systems). The greatest oil fields in the world, those in Iraq,
Iran, Arabia and Kuwait, are apparently the result of all three of these mechanisms of
sudden deep burial. The Gulf of Mexico system is postulated here to represent
tremendous, sudden and deep burial thrusts contributed largely in the pre-continental
drift stage, but with great contributions from both the north and the south such as to
insure deep burial of sediments all along the coast and shelf of the Gulf of Mexico.
The west coast of North and South America represent regions showing perhaps all of the
deep burial effects: that due to welting and overthrusting in the pre-continental drift
stage being strong in this region, the welting at the front of the thrust blocks during
continental drift itself and the tremendous upheavals strongest here in the final
readjustment stage. Perhaps the great (bathylithic) uplifts associated with the earth-
circling ridge and rift system, particularly that part that cut into the continent in
the western side of the Americas, contributed mostly to the deep basin structure in
California, accounting for the youngest pools of the world.
Cook, then, must provide a force sufficient to initiate the break-out of an ice cap of
enormous size; then a thrusting and folding of crustal rock over large distances,
burying a whole biosphere of vegetal and marine life; then a cracking of the globe,
sending the continents skittering from the great Atlantic and southern ocean cleavages
in a complex pattern, with a major fracture moving through most of the world along the
old Tethyan sea belt. He concludes as follows:
The physical chemistry of oil, including its formation from marine raw materials, its
conditions for cracking, its observed composition and physical properties as a function
of depth of the reservoirs are, apparently, better accounted for by the sudden, deep
burial mechanism than by the doctrine of uniformitarianism. Oil reservoir temperatures
are too low to permit appreciable cracking during all of geologic time even assuming
existence of the best known catalytic cracking conditions. The observed changes of oil
grade with depth may be explained instead on the basis of the physical chemistry of
decomposition of green marine and vegetal raw materials in their sudden burial at
various depths in the oil basins [33] .
But Velikovsky's theory of petroleum Origins introduces a frightful deluge of oil. He
cites references in legends and scriptures to the fall of naphtha, sometimes blazing,
and of brimstone, often rendered otherwise as a rain of hail. The Abkasian, a people
famous for their long life-spans, convey a story about a fall-out of cotton, which
caught fire and burned the Earth; perhaps it was "cotton-candy" mixed with hydrocarbon
[34] . The ancient bible of Mesoamerica, the Popul Vuh, tells of the fate of the people
of that age:
And so they were killed;
They were overwhelmed.
There came a great rain of glue
Down from the sky. [35]
The "glue" is still found in the land of the Olmecs. William Mullen comments on the
work of the pioneer excavators: radio-carbon samples are contaminated by asphalt. "Much
of the Early Tres Zapotes level was sealed with volcanic ash. Coe reports that lumps of
asphalt were found everywhere at the San Lorenzo excavation." [36] I consulted with an
expert on the area. As expected, he said that the area practically floats on oil. I
visited the area. He spoke truth. But the question is: Which came first, the culture or
the oil? Here, as throughout the world, the ancient voices give precedence to the
people.
Velikovsky's concept can be summarized to a degree in his own words [37] :
The tails of comets are composed mainly of carbon and hydrogen gases. Lacking oxygen,
they do not burn in flight, but the inflammable gases, passing through an atmosphere
containing oxygen, will be set on fire. If carbon and hydrogen gases, or vapor of a
composition of these two elements, enter the atmosphere in huge masses, a part of them
will burn, binding all the oxygen available at the moment; the rest will escape
combustion, but in swift transition will become liquid. Falling on the ground, the
substance, if liquid, would sink into the pores of the sand and into clefts between the
rocks; falling on water, it would remain floating if the fire in the air is
extinguished before new supplies of oxygen arrive from other regions...
The descent of a sticky fluid which came earthward and blazed with heavy smoke is
recalled in the oral and written traditions of the inhabitants of both hemispheres...
All the countries whose traditions of fire-rain 1 have cited actually have deposits of
oil: Mexico, the East Indies, Siberia, Iraq, and Egypt ....
The rain of fire-water contributed to the earth's supply of petroleum; rock oil in the
ground appears to be, partly at least, "star oil" brought down at the close of world
ages, notably the age that came to its end in the middle of the second millennium
before the present era....
In the centuries that followed, petroleum was worshipped, burned in holy places; it was
also used for domestic purposes. Then many ages passed when it was out of use. Only in
the middle of the last century did man begin to exploit this oil, partly contributed by
the comet of the time of the Exodus.
Definite legendary, archaeological, and geological evidence of a holospheric
catastrophe in Mesopotamia was provided by J. V. K. Wilson for a period tightly
connected with Inanna (identifiable as Venus) [38] . Large-scale mesolithic rock
displacements are displayed, and accounts of rains of oil, the poisoning of the land,
and falling sheets of fire are described in the ancient documents. Lion-headed pillars
are associated symbolically with mushroom-shaped clouds (our typhonic cyclones) in the
legend and architecture of the times.
The Soviet geologist Levin asserts that the hydrocarbons in cometary heads must have
played a part in forming petroleum and in the origin of life." [39] Velikovsky wrote
once: "Actually, if we can believe numerous testimonies bequeathed to us by ancient
sources, the ancients had already what we intend some day to obtain from Venus--samples
of its dust, ash, atmosphere, and rocks." He believed firmly that "Venus must be rich
in petroleum gases," which, because of the planet's great surface heat, "will circulate
in gaseous form."
Fred Hoyle, in Frontiers of Astronomy (1955), argued for less heat and therefore oceans
of oil on Venus. The historical and geological evidence led Velikovsky to argue that
Venus was hot and cooling measurably, that it was comparatively flat, with a dense
atmosphere, an anomalous axial rotation, and the aforesaid hydrocarbon gases. The other
predictions having been generally fulfilled, it seemed for a moment that hydrocarbon
gases had also been detected; if so, the theory of the historical encounter and the
dropping of Venusian oil on Earth would be strengthened.
However, the NASA scientists involved in an early statement favorable to hydrocarbons
withdrew their support, and a controversy ensued, to no final end. The clouds of Venus
appear definitely to be mainly of carbon dioxide. Whether this is compatible with an
existing component of hydrocarbon or can have resulted from chemical transformations
that resulted in the disappearance of hydrocarbons is disputable. Furthermore, organic
compounds seem to be present, and also indications of iron and sulfur, possible sources
of pigment for the red fall-out phenomenon mentioned earlier.
Blumer, in a path-breaking article on organic paleochemistry, pauses to reflect that
"man has long been curious about the origin of these materials," coals and oil. "On
occasion, early speculations approached the truth in a colorful way; thus, the Triassic
Tyrolian oil shales, which are rich in vertebrate fossils as well as in chlorophyll and
haemin derivatives, were thought to have resulted from an impregnation of the local
rock with the blood of a slain dragon." [40]
Perhaps he should have reflected longer. The dragon, in many a myth, has poured its red
blood, metals, dust., and oil upon the Earth, and the dragon is often identified with
destructive sky bodies, comets, no less. That silicates and oil should descend and
emplace themselves in oil shales should hardly cause surprise; we have seen that the
color of red-brown to blue-black oxidized heme, blood red, is often reported in myth as
falling in dust or in the gore of a slain dragon. The shale could be formed quickly,
baked by a moderate heat.
How could the organic matter be injected into shales and oil from above? As related
earlier, the presence therein and a fall-out of a biomass from a comet is not at all
impossible. Furthermore, the distinction between living and non-living structures is
not clear in the hydrocarbons of oil. "Trieb's isolation of pigments related to
chlorophyll and haemin marks the origin of organic geochemistry... The fossil
prophyrins of ancient sediments and of petroleum are chemical fossils; just as the more
commonly known morphological fossils, they represent surviving evidence of ancient life
processes that had achieved an increased structural order on the macroscopic and on the
molecular level and inorganic as well as in organic structures."
It seems Blumer is claiming the unprovable, that in their beginnings these
morphologically unrecognizable organic chemicals were in living organisms. Yet he
declares, "in organic geochemistry, the distinction between chemical fossils and
artifacts has not always been sharp." And he says, after defining geochemistry as
ultimately based upon the molecular remains of ancient life, that thousands of changes
occur: "chemical fossils are far more abundant than their better known morphological
analogues. Contrasted with 90,000 (some say 110,000) species of fossil animals known
presently, are millions of fossil chemical derivatives." Then, further:
Research on the constitution of crude oil and of oil shales has revealed severely
altered biochemicals and numerous structures which occur neither in living organisms
nor in recent sediments... Also crude oil and sediments contain polymers (asphaltenos,
kerogen) of a type not found in living organisms.
For pages, Blumer struggles to trace the complex descent of petroleum hydrocarbons from
living organisms while insisting upon the intrusion of many non-organic chemical
processes, only to admit that "we are virtually ignorant of the reaction mechanisms
and. reaction rates." He proceeds to establish that depth, deposition rate and
temperature control the chemical chaos during the critical moments of oil formation.
Still, "we remain uncertain of the extent, the rates and the mechanisms of geochemical
reactions and of the composition and role of the sedimentary polymers."
We shall certainly not be contradicting him, if we conclude that the chemical
transformations producing oil are as likely to occur in space as below ground, probably
more likely, if we wished to argue the point. Further, we do not see how it can be
asserted either that organic biomass capable of forming oil does not exist in
exoterrestrial bodies or, if it does not, that its absence precludes space gases
constituting or contributing to the constitution of the oils that are present on Earth.
Most metals, salt, and oil, we conclude, are more likely than not to have originated
exoterrestrially or in exoterrestrially precipitated transactions at the Earth's
surface.
Notes (Chapter Ten: Metals, Salt and Oil)
1. Bellamy, op. cit., 84.
2. Velikovsky, Ramses II and His Time (N. Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 221-47.
3. "The Road to Iron: 8th and 7th Century Metallurgy and The Decline of Egyptian
Power," (In press: Catas. and Anc. Hist. M.)
4. R. Maddin, J. D. Muhly and T. S. Wheeler set a date between 1100 and 900 B. C. .,
"How the Iron Age Began" 237 Sci. Amer. (Oct. 1977), 112.
5. See fn 2, p. 5.
6. L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, Eternal Man (Herts, Eng.: Mayflower, 1972), 58, 160; and
also their Morning of the Magicians for many suggestions of prehistoric discoveries.
7. Op. cit., 197-8.
8. Fritz Heide, Meteorites (Chicago: U. Of Chicago, 1969), 44.
9. Ibid., 16.
10. Melvin A. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models (London: Max Parrish, 1966).
11. 52 Sky and Telescope (1976) 429 citing a report by Walter Sullivan, NYT.
12. 2 Sci. Am. Supp. (1876), 510.
13. Stratigraphie ComparÚe... (London: Oxford, 1945). 580.
14. A Life History of Our Earth (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 196.
15. Bellamy, Moon... 87, 89.
16. Op. cit., 16.
17. Cosmos, I, 115. 18. R. P. Chan, A Guide to Mexican Archaeology (Mexico City:
Minutiae Mexicanae, 1971), 75, 78.
18A. F. T. Kyte et al., Nature (30 July 1981), 417-20.
18B. 36 Amer. Antiquity 3 (July 1971), 286-321, 288, cf. 294.
18C. Ibid., 291.
19. 276 Nature (14 Dec. 1978), 7013-4.
20. Advice of Prof. Merle Langdon, then of Am. School Class, Studies; Athens.
"Artemisiakon" was a favorite name, the "kon" ending meaning "under the protection of,"
"owned by" or "discovered by."
21. 271 Nature (26 Jan 1978), 347.
21A. P. A. Smith, 265 Nature (1977), 582-3 reporting Scott et al., I Geophys Res. Ltrs
(1974) 355 and Golberg and Arrhenius, 13 Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta (1958) 153; Corliss,
op. cit. ESS-005 doc.
21B. Op cit., 424, 440.
22. Cook, op. cit., 87.
23. Oscar Wilhelm, Geol. Soc. Am. Bull (March 1972).
24. Allan Kelley and F. Dachille, Target Earth, 211; cf. 205.
25. G. den Santillana and H. von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969), 247,
cf. 146-7.
25A. Deuteronomy 29: 22 (Watchtower Edition); Cardona "Jupiter--God of Abraham (Part
III)," VII Kronos (Fall 1982), 66. Fire evidence is copious in the settlements
excavated at the sites.
26. A. C. Lasaga and H. D. Holland, "Primordial Oil Slick," 174 Science (10 Oct. 1974),
53-5.
27. See K. S. Lewis, 78 New Sci. (1978), 277 and Walter Sullivan in NYT (24 Dec. 1977),
1.
28. A. T. Wilson, "Synthesis of Macromolecules." 188 Nature (17 Dec. 1960), 1007-8.
29. J. Oro and J. Han, "High Temperature Synthesis of Aromatic Hydrocarbons from
Methane," 153 Science (16 Sept. 1966), 1393-5. Cf. J. Oro, "Comets and the Formation of
Biochemical Compounds on the Primitive Earth," 191 Nature (29 Apr. 1961), 389-90.
30. C. J. Ransom, The Age of Velikovsky (Glassboro, N. J.: Kronos, 1976), 80-2.
31. "Submarine Seeps," 176 Science (16 June 1972), 1257-8.
32. Op. cit., 241 ff.
33. Cracking is the process of breaking up large molecules of heavy hydrocarbons into
smaller ones of lighter type, accomplished by heat, pressure, and catalysts.
34. Sula Benet, Abkasian (NY: Doubleday)
35. Popul Vuh: The Sacred Book of the ancient Quick Maya (Norman; U. of Ok., 1950
trans.).
36. Ibid.
37. Worlds in Collision, 53ff.
38. The Rebel Lands: An Investigation into the Origins of Early Mesopotamian Mythology
(Cambridge, Eng.: Faculty of Oriental Studies, 1979), reviewed in IV S. I. S. R. 2(
1981), 64.
39. B. Y. Levin, "The Interaction of Astronomy, Geophysics and Geology in the Study of
the Earth," in The Interaction of Sciences in the Study of the Earth (Moscow: Progress
Publ., 1968), 178.
40. "Chemical Fossils: Trends in Organic Geochemistry," Contrib. 2898 of Woods Hole
(Mass.) Oceanographic Institution, n. d., 592. See also W. W. Youngblood and Blumer,
"Alkanes and Alkenes in Marine Benthic Algae," 21 Marine Biol. (1973), 163-72.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ENCOUNTERS AND COLLISIONS
"Even heaven, despite the orderliness of its movements, is not inalterable." So wrote
Laplace [1] , who has been freely used to attest to the security of the celestial
order. Nothing in his unparalleled mathematical and physical achievements kept him from
soberly portraying the effects of collisions of the Earth with comets, and expressing
the view that these had occurred and would probably again occur. He warned of movements
that he could not take into account in his calculations, and mentioned the forces of
electricity and magnetism whose effects were then unnoticeable. The gravitational
balance of the solar system, he proved, however, was near perfect, an empirical
demonstration that became a shibboleth to astronomy and thence to progressive mankind.
The present trend to accommodate ancient cometary and meteoroid encounters in the earth
sciences and biology cannot but bring about a revolution in thought. A large body
impacting on Earth is the most versatile mechanism of quantavolution: so everyone will
admit. Its effects begin upon approach, increase upon passage through the atmosphere,
reach a climax in its explosion, and continue to spread from the point of impact until
the whole world and all its spheres are affected. Too, the effects may continue for many
years in an active form and then go on in the 'genetics' of the holosphere.
During a period, which Nininger has well described, when scientific dogma forbade the
serious discussion of exoterrestrial interference in the affairs of Earth, when even
light meteoritic falls were ignored, students were denied the use of this marvelous
theoretical construct in explaining what lay before their eyes. Finally a scientific
commission was dispatched from Paris in 1802 to the countryside to investigate a
reported fall. It returned with evidence of several thousand meteorites. So "America was
discovered." Still in 1933, a Smithsonian Institution report by L. J. Spencer could
declare, "the problem of meteorite craters is quite a new one." Only several were
listed, and of these only the Barringer crater of Arizona and the Wabar Craters in
Arabia had been well described, both lately.
Yet, to continue the litany of this book, it appears now that enough meteoroids and
comets have struck the Earth to deface it throughout. Moon, Mercury and Mars evidence
telescopically tens of thousands of large astroblemes. Dachille (1962), projecting the
Moon's apparent experience onto Earth, estimated a round million of heavy impacts here
[2] . He assumes five billion years of uniform falls and applies weathering rates for
the continental masses from wind, tide and vegetative erosion, ending up with somewhat
over a thousand craters that are potentially identifiable.
Of this thousand, 750 are below water and ice; of the remaining 250, "in the last few
years a staccato tally of meteorite scar finds or recognitions has raised the total to
42-50 at this writing." He offered an independent survival rate calculated by Krynine
that would be in the neighborhood of 10,000.
He pointed also to new diagnostic methods, such as the discovery of coesite, a silica
mineral that forms under high pressures in the laboratory and has been found in craters
suspected of exoterrestrial origin. Meanwhile the space shuttle Columbia has
photographed beneath the sands covering the eastern Sahara to reveal fractures, dried-up
rivers, and probable paleolithic settlements. The U. S. Geological Survey confirmed the
radar penetrations. Craters can be discerned as well, and they will probably be promptly
mapped over the globe. Many bodily and electric encounters of Earth with exoterrestrial
bodies will one day be counted, measured, plotted for concentrations, and assigned to
temporal episodes.
The difference between a meteoroid and a comet may be an artifact of biased experience.
Lately no comet has fallen to Earth. Perhaps, too, most or all comets come from a
special source today; Jupiter has been suggested. Perhaps the meteoroids come from the
asteroid belt; such is generally believed. The major distinction may come from their
manner of flight; with highly elliptical and often eccentric orbits, comets must forever
change their appearance in transacting with their electrical and material environment;
the asteroids are generally in regular orbit. Too, we know the size of many asteroids,
but not of comets.
Once, to ridicule Velikovsky, a renowned astronomer claimed that comets were filmy and
insubstantial bodies. A more acceptable theory of Whipple of the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Laboratory (he was by no means a supporter of Velikovsky) sees comets
typically as bodies of ice and other frozen gases cementing together rock and dust. It
may be of significance to note the presence of water in recently examined meteorites,
from studies by Hughes, Ashworth and Hutchison [3] ; if water, then a watery planet
once upon a time: so the reasoning goes.
Gravitational anomalies on the Moon and Mars have been interpreted to signify dense mass
concentrations, hence "mascons." They are associated with large circular basins,
therefore probably with meteoroid impacts [4] . The Earth has not yet registered
mascons. Because of its heavier atmosphere, more intense magnetosphere, and greater
electrical charge, it may be that the Earth has means of ablating and retarding the
velocity of meteoroid falls. On the other hand, gravitational anomalies have begun to be
detected in circular areas of the Earth and shortly we may expect mascons in the Earth's
morphology as well.
With the aforesaid "soft frills," one can expect the Earth to exhibit hills and
mountains, as of iron ore and erratic isolated hills, which are then surficial mascons.
Concerning the "abrupt" extinction of Cretaceous life forms, Smit and Hertogen, like
Alvarez and his associates, see in a general distribution of two trace elements, iridium
and osmium, at this stratum of the phanerozoic record a proof of meteoroid impact [5] .
Soil and rock everywhere, it would seem, are in need of chemical tests in search of
exoterrestrial influences during their deposition.
A decade after his estimates were published, Dachille would report that the number of
identified craters had risen to "60 well-documented craters, 25 very likely candidates,
and another 20 hopefuls." [6] The greatest of these are the Ishim, Kazakhstan, USSR,
(7000 km diam.), the Nastapoka Island arc of Hudson Bay (440 km diam.) and the Gulf of
Saint Lawrence opening onto the Atlantic Ocean [7] . The Ishim crater is estimated as
initially of 350 kilometers in diameter, 12 kilometers in depth. "The subsequent rebound
of the central region and the collapse of the surrounding area enlarged the crater to
700 kilometers in diameter, making it larger than the average lunar mare. The area of
this impact structure is a little greater than the combined areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio,
New York and Maryland. The kinetic energy of the collision can be shown to have been at
least one billion times as great as the energy in any one of the largest earthquakes of
recent history." [8] And these quakes, of course, much exceed the greatest hydrogen
bomb blasts in energy output.
In a work of 1953, Dachille, together with Alan Kelly, offered the circular Bermuda Deep
as an astrobleme. By all odds the largest candidate for craterdom so far, this feature
might be held responsible for Bermuda Island, as its typical central peak. The hundreds
of Carolina Bays were conjectured as the splash-down sites of successive meteors in the
same train or later on. The Appalachian mountains would become the westward-thrusted,
outer rim displacement from the crater. Significantly, in 1982, claims were voiced that
a Northeast to Southwest belt of the Appalachians was once an offshore island chain
rammed into America in the course of continental drift and, after the growth of the
Eastern plain, the two continents split once more to create the Atlantic. More
persuasive to this writer is the Kelly-Dachille view that would let the mountains be the
Bermuda crater rim, let the plain be the crater debris and sediments and let the
Atlantic cleavage be abetted by the Bermuda impact.
The authors of the Bermuda theory proceed to discuss the dozen high-energy expressions
that must necessarily accompany so stunning an impact--global hurricanes, eruption of
hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of lava, darkening of the globe for years,
deluges of water and debris, destruction of most of the Earth's biosphere--terrestrial
and marine--poisoning of the atmosphere and fall-outs of many kinds of material, a giant
set of electrical typhoons centered at and around the impact and moving radially
outwards, earthquakes and volcanism in many places including the antipodes, and vast
tidal waves sweeping across America, the Caribbean, and the oceans to the north, east,
and south. Large tracts of land would be sunk and others elevated. Minerals would be
formed, elements transmuted, species extincted and new forms created in the radiation
storms. They assigned an axis tilt of 30 to the blow, shifting the north pole from
near Akpatok Island, in the Hudson Strait, to its present location.
The diameter of the Bermuda crater appears to vary between 2200 and 2500 kilometers as
its limits are drawn, the western being more marked than the eastern, which disappear
into the oceanic abyssal bottom. The western arc extends from the Grand Banks of
Newfoundland down around the East Coast of America to Puerto Rico. The diameter of the
original comet or meteoroid is estimated at 400 to 700 kilometers, greater than the
possible Hudson Bay crater (440 km). The relative speed before impact of the meteoroid
with Earth is given at about 100 km/ second, with an approach from the northeast. The
collision would involve an energy approximately equal to that of the Earth's rotation
(1.2 x 10 37 ergs) and would readily provoke an interruption of the rotation, an axial
tilt, a slippage of the crust above the mantle, and an immediate orogeny around the ruin
of the blast crater.
The scenario includes many details that need not be repeated here. For instance, the
hypothetical Bermuda intruder would theoretically account for all the coal, gas and oil
of Appalachia and the North American continental shelves by instant burning in passage,
deep burial and dampening upon impact folding, and tidal land thrusts and water
flooding. Even cutting back its diameter to 280 km, the intruder upon impact
would raise a column of vapor and debris that easily could measure one thousand miles in
diameter at the base, and possibly larger at the top after the fashion of the atom bomb
explosions. This column might tower something like five thousand miles above the earth,
the higher particles doomed to float out beyond the reach of gravity for all time... the
energy of the collision we have pictured is so great, that but 2 to 3 per cent of the
total would be required to evaporate completely the meteorite and its equal in weight of
the earth's crust. Therefore the column above the collision area may take on the
function of a fractionating column for these mineral vapors, refining minerals to
varying extent [9] .
Streams of speciated minerals, metals, rocks and salts would pour down to form deposits.
Large areas would be melted and magnetized by electromagnetic fields arriving from
intense brief currents of electricity formed of the electron and ion plasma. In all of
this, it should be noted that the colliding intruder partly or largely provides for its
own concealment, by cross-winds, cross-tides, rain, volcanism, debris fall-out, and
differential diastrophic effects, some of them called forward from remote areas.
Moving about the global map, Kelly and Dachille could suggest numerous candidates for
their meteoroid inventory. Wherever an arc appears on a coastline--they noted five large
ones off the west coast of North America, two off of West Africa, two off of Brazil and
Argentina, plus the great island arcs of the north and east Pacific Ocean--a crater is
implied. Norman elsewhere suggests "that any large-scale crustal feature which exhibits
an arcuate outline is deserving of special scrutiny--for example, the curve of the Coast
of China, the curved mountainous coast of eastern Australia, and the magnificent sweep
of the Himalayas bordering northern India. Smaller-scale versions exist bordering the
southern parts of the Caspian and Black Seas, and eastern Korea. We must also think of
examining concave arcuate coasts such as the Gulf of Mexico or the Great Australian
Bight." [10] In 1981, Fred Whipple suggested Iceland as the site of the giant meteor
impact which, striking the volcanically active ocean ridge, initiated the finale of the
Cretaceous period, its dinosaurs, and its marine life [11] . A year later, Sky and
Telescope [12] reported the discovery of a double ring of magnetic anomalies of 60 and
180 kilometer diameters, in Yucatan. The anomalous magnetized rocks are about 1100 feet
deep and assigned to Late Cretaceous which makes it, too, a candidate for extincting
dinosaurs and decimating the biosphere. But other candidates can be named, for instance
an astrobleme feature beneath the disturbed ice of Wilkes Land, Antarctica, to which
Weihaupt ascribes hypothetically the origin of the tektite strewn fields of Australia,
calling the collision of "Recent geologic time." [13]
I might, too, suggest the Pacific Basin as a possible impact site, though here the size
of the feature is so great as to imply the total destruction of the globe, and I have,
for this reason and many others, elsewhere defined this area as the escape basin of the
Moon, following G. Darwin, Osmond, and other writers. Notable in this case is the set of
great transform fractures, pictured by Norman [14] which point from south, east and
north like arrows to an "impact" or "escape" point in the central Pacific Basin. The
current theory of scientists concerning the asteroid belt orbiting the Sun between Mars
and Jupiter is that here is the debris of a great body exploded by collision with
another body some millions of years ago. One may reason that if this could happen in
asteroidal space, it could also happen to Earth's space. There has obviously been a
limit to the size and mass of all that has struck Earth.
Satellite photography has in the past few years introduced a new instrument for crater
detection, whether volcanic or meteoric, as in the Bichat structure of Mauritania. Some
photographic reconstructions delineate what appear to be many crater outlines. Soon, it
appears, the number of defined crater outlines will soar into the hundreds, and perhaps
thousands.
Given the new interest in meteoritics, the identification of meteoritic fields may also
proceed apace. As long ago as 1889, a list of 14 small fields was published, all of the
nineteenth century and ranging from 3 to 16 miles long. The Arabian barrad fields,
Donnelly's drift stones, and the tektite fields, already discussed, are much larger and
older phenomena. The Atacama Desert also evidences a large meteoritic field, still
unmapped, with many siderites and rich silver mines at its center. Meteoritic material
on Earth is evidenced therefore by dust, stones, and craters, with all ranges of size
from visually undetectable clay elements to basins so large as to be hitherto visually
unimagined.
The answers to our persistent questions about the extent and recency of
quantavolutionary phenomena at the Earth's surface are now beginning to take shape. The
Earth must have suffered as much meteoritic bombardment as its planetary neighbors and
satellite. On several occasions--at Hudson's Bay, the circular bulge of the West Africa
Coast, Ishim, Bermuda, St. Lawrence Bay, Argentina, Australia, Antarctica, and others,
all inadequately discerned until now--global catastrophes could have occurred with
large-body impact encounters. On other occasions, as we. discussed earlier, meteoritic
showers and bombardments also may have been globally catastrophic. Harold Urey writing
in 1973, conjectures a comet of 10 18 grams and an impact velocity of 45 km/ sec to end
the Cretaceous and begin the radically different geological period of the Tertiary [15]
; his scenario of effects upon Earth is substantially that provided here and in the much
more detailed analysis of Kelly and Dachille for so large a body. (The reader is asked
to recall that scientists have only lately granted comets this possibility of large
masses and Earth collisions. The recent work by S. V. M. Clube and W. M. Napier,
entitled The Cosmic Serpent (1982), essaying a connection between solar-system galactic
spiral encounters and recurrent paleontological catastrophes, via cometary and
meteoritic crashes, is perhaps the first treatise to be published by professional
astronomers. The independently pursued work of the astronomer Earl R. Milton, much of it
in press as Solaria Binaria, with the present author, is comparable. Clube and Napier
wrote unaware of the astronomical theory of Chaos and Creation and similarly, I did not
obtain a copy of their book until the present work was at the printers.)
But would any or many of the larger impacts be recent, within the past score of
millennia? This is probable. The methods by which heavy meteoritic and cometary impacts
on Earth are timed begin with averaging on uniformitarian assumptions. Thus Dachille
arrived at his 1967 numbers by averaging the expected number of major impacts over a
five billion year age for the Earth and Moon; then, again using uniformitarian premises,
he reached for some broad guidelines. 'Weathering rates estimated for continental masses
and great mountains are about 80 meters per million years, and for land masses in
tropical regions 225 meters per million years. Circular ridges of less than 750 meters
relief could be broken down in 5 million years, to be unrecognizable..." [16] Thus he
arrives finally at his low figure for discoverable craters.
But when, with Kelly, he came earlier to describe the Bermuda event, he could
contemplate this global catastrophe of maximum intensity as having occurred at the time
of the Chaldeans and Hebrews, about 3500 years ago. In the Bermuda case the two
scientists follow quantavolutionary logic and can explain the new face of the globe in
terms of seconds, minutes, weeks, years. They do not need or use much time. Not only
that, but they indeed destroy time by the few-second incoming passage of the body
through the atmosphere and the gigantic explosion that transforms a considerable portion
of the atmosphere and rocks of the world. How many radioactive clocks, depending upon
stable rocks and atmosphere, were disrupted?
Here the uniformitarian suffers the same embarrassment as the catastrophist. Just as he
jests at the catastrophist, "You say that evidences of catastrophe are unavailable
because they are destroyed," now the catastroptfist jeers at him, "you say that you
cannot find meteoroid craters because they were eroded." Perhaps there never were a
million craters or more. If undeniably showers of ice, water, dust, stones and heavy
bodies have struck the Earth, cannot a deluge of dust, stones and heavy bodies have done
the same? It is prima facie reasonable that the changes wrought, upon Earth have been
the work of a few thousand years. And it is an open question whether the changes are
recent or ancient. Perhaps the bombardment of Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Earth is
all recent history.
C. Simon (1982) reports on the topography of giant circular ripples moving out from a
point west of Hudson Bay as indicated by gravity anomaly data [17] . Scientists
involved conjecture that a 60-90 km meteoroid impacted, digging a great crater and
wrinkling the surface for thousands of kilometers around. All is covered over but the
density variations remain, below the surface, to provide the circular patterning.
That such an event would be electromagnetic as well is certain. Lacking surveys, we are
left to surmise. Electromagnetic effects must' be especially important in meteoroid
impacts. Dachille has described electromagnetic fields produced by impacts of high-
velocity explosives in military tests, and has projected the Em fields to meteoroid
masses of 10 12 , l0 16 , 10 20 grams at 40 km/ sec. "Magnetic fields more intense than
those of the most powerful electromagnets extant would be imposed upon matter many
hundreds of kilometers from the point of impact." [18]
Once again, we must pose the dilemma that is to be a theme of our book: either the Earth
must be so thoroughly tortured electromagnetically that the search for magnetic maps to
represent the Earth's magnetic fields is futile; or the Earth's surface was so lately
magnetized, whether for the first or last time, that collisions and encounters and all
other remagnetizing influences have not had time to deface it.
A generation ago, in the Physical Review for Aug. 15, 1948, Carl Bauer theorized that
the asteroid belt contains remnants of the explosion of a planet less than 60 million
years ago. He calculated the age from the quantity of helium in examined meteorites,
assuming its origin from radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Ovenden also later on
retrojected an exploding planet as the ancestor of asteroids. Von Flandern added comets
to meteoroids: "Comets originated in a breakup event in the inner solar system about 5 x
10 6 years ago. In all probability it was the event which gave rise to the asteroid belt
and which produced most of the meteors visible today." [19]
In the course of his study, he alludes to "the lack of any definite finds of 'fossil'
meteorites or meteorite craters," citing Cassidy; moreover, he reports that "Stair
mentions that neither tektites nor other meteorites have been found in any of the
ancient geologic formations, which also suggests that most surviving meteorites are
relatively quite young, in contradiction to their estimates by the usual dating
methods... The need for a revision of the standard dating methods is certainly suggested
by these new results."
An astrobleme, large or small, disappears quickly under conditions of rain, tides,
current, wind, fall-out, seismism, volcanism, biosphere invasion, and recurrent
disasters governing its location. Still, what, if not astroblemes, are the multitudinous
faint circles that John Saul has located on published maps, publicly available?
The Earth's surface exhibits faint circular patterns which have not been described
before. These circles are characterized by near perfection of outline. by the presence
of topographic highs (rims) along parts of their circumferences, by their generally
large scale (diameters of from under 7 km up to approximately 700 km in the areas
examined), and by their definition in various geological environments, in many rock
types, and in rocks of all ages. Many of the circles are intermittent in places along
their rims but about 55% of the approximately 1,170 definite circles observed to date
can be visually traced around an entire 360 of arc. The circles are further
characterized by the presence of fracturing and brecciation along parts of their rims
and by the extraordinary control they place on regional geology in general and on ore
mineralization in particular [20] .
Saul has only begun such surveying, and has found circles in the Western United States,
northernmost Mexico, the Appalachians, Alaska, the Yukon, Madagascar, and Corsica. The
circles occur more frequently in mountains rather than plains, indicating that mountains
may often have been formed by such upheavals and that the scars are too deeply buried by
overdrift to be observable straightaway on the plains.
Perhaps, he says, these circles are more shadows of astroblemes than the original
craters themselves; they would be like old scars on human skin, which often are
distorted and shift away from the original wound. Kellaway and Durrance, it turns out,
had some time earlier discovered such circles too, and called them cycloliths [21] .
They called attention to cycloliths in Great Britain and Mauritania (the Richat
structure), and stress that they can be responsible for river development and drainage
patterns. Rivers would channel along the rims, giving them a negative enhancement, and
would make gulleys in the fractures associated with the cratering.
The cycloliths are granted great ages mainly because of their faintness. Yet their
existence contradicts the interpretation of the rocks below them; if two intersecting or
adjoining circles of similar states of preservation overlay rock exposures, say, a
hundred million years apart, then, either the rocks or the circles are of the same age,
and the rocks give no indication of the age of the cycloliths; worse yet would be the
finding that the circles straddle rocks "older" than themselves. This is all matter for
investigation.
Yet if time were short, could the Earth have suffered so many blows? In any event, large
cycloliths must number in the scores of thousands, unless the Earth, like the Moon, has
a preferred side for suffering bombardment. Small cycloliths must then approach the
millions. Nor are we speaking of fossil craters, contained in stratified sediments, none
of which appear to have yet been discerned. It is one thing to say, as do the writers
above, that the bombardment occurred upon a newly formed Earth crust, as on the Moon,
four billion years ago, for then all the time given is free to give. But could they have
been made by impacts in a recent period of, say, six thousand years? Then if two million
landings ensued, they would average several hundred a year, like one clean hydrogen bomb
per million square kilometers. Deluges of water might settle much of the dust. Still the
prospect is awesome. Soft landings, ice falls, cosmic lightning blast--these might cause
the Earth less agony. It is too soon to say.
Velikovsky, in Worlds in Collision, did not treat of collisions, strictly speaking,
between Earth and its principal antagonists in space, Venus and Mars. The bodies
approached one another at times between about 1450 and 687 B. C.; they exchanged
electrical charges; dusts, stones, and gases fell upon Earth. Earth passed through the
tail of Venus, which was behaving as a comet. The earth paused in its rotation on
encounter. Here Carl Sagan in criticizing Velikovsky had to agree; the biosphere would
not go swirling off the globe into space by centrifugal force, as others had argued.
Actually the danger of explosions into space would rather come from electro-
gravitational interactions [22] .
A portion of such a cometary Venus or of its tail probably did, however, crash into the
terrestrial globe. This was called Typhon by many writers and in legends. Typhon was
both the name of a conquering king of Egypt, following the disasters that brought the
Middle Kingdom to an end, and the name of a monster who threatened the world at the same
time. We can let Donnelly tell the story [23] ; he does it well:
Born of Night a monster appears, a serpent, huge, terrible, speckled, flesh-devouring.
With her is another comet, Typhon; they beget the Chimaera, that breathes resistless
fire, fierce, huge, swift. And Typhon, associated with both these, is the most dreadful
monster of all, born of Hell and sensual sin, a serpent, a fierce dragon, many-headed,
with dusky tongues and fire gleaming; sending forth dreadful and appalling noises, while
mountains and fields rock with earthquakes; chaos has come; the earth, the sea boils;
there is unceasing tumult and contention, and in the midst the monster, wounded and
broken up, falls upon the earth; the earth groans under his weight, and there he blazes
and burns for a time in the mountain fastnesses and desert places, melting the earth
with boundless vapor and glaring fire.
We will find legend after legend about this Typhon; he runs through the mythologies of
different nations. And as to his size and his terrible power, they all agree. He was no
earth-creature. He moved in the air; he reached the skies...
According to Pindar the head of Typhon reached to the stars, his eyes darted fire, his
hands extended from the East to the West, terrible serpents were twined about the middle
of his body, and one hundred snakes took the place of fingers on his hands. Between him
and the gods there was a dreadful war. Jupiter finally killed him with a flash of
lightning, and buried him under Mount Etna.
And there, smoking and burning, his great throes and writhings, we are told, still shake
the earth, and threaten mankind:
"And with pale lips men say, To-morrow, perchance to-day Encelidas may arise!"
Typhon, also spelled Typhaeon, is evidently another version of Phaeton (and probably of
Python who was a monster killed by Apollo). The Phaeton myth, most famous 'of all, is
treated by Plato self-consciously as a myth in form but standing for true natural
history. Phaeton is reluctantly lent the chariot of his father the Sun for a day. He
cannot control its powerful steeds and burns sky and Earth in his wild plungings.
Finally he is felled by a Jovian thunderbolt, cast dead into the river Eridanus, and the
nearly destroyed Earth recovers. The sad and angry Sun emerges once more.
Parallel legends are found in other cultures; the best resume occurs again in Donnelly's
Ragnarok. The paramount student of ancient astronomy of his day, F. X. Kugler, dissected
the myth of Phaeton to assess its validity and concluded that a comet struck the Earth
in the north Aegean region in the second millennium B. C. The event is probable. If it
is tied into all the other evidence, in legend, history, and geology, of the same time,
the event becomes more probable--and of more dire consequences. It is best if we avoid
repetitious listing of disastrous effects; suffice to say that every criterion of a
major exoterrestrial impact is satisfied, except the location of the point of impact.
Still the story is not to be ended neatly. At one and the same time, so it appears, a
great body passed close by the earth (call it proto-Venus) and a large body collided
with Earth. The disasters afflicting the world in those days were effects of both
events. Until the crater or aerial explosion point of flaming yellow-haired Phaeton can
be found and its size and traits used to evaluate the occurrence, the effects of the
principal body's pass-by cannot be calculated. Inasmuch as the effects have been
extensive and continuing, not only geophysically but socially, the research seems
worthwhile.
Because it is our favored theory that the Moon erupted from the Earth, we give less
attention to the idea that we discarded some years ago, namely that the Pacific Basin
originated in a meteoroidal impact. We do ascribe many impacts prior to the episode,
based upon legendary indications (see Chaos and Creation) and contributing to the
loosening of the crust. It is noteworthy that E. R. Harrison "proposed that the Pacific
Basin was the seat of an immense explosion in the primitive Earth" and suggested a
planetesimal of about 100 km radius [24] . The rim of the Pacific has a number of
characteristics of an astrobleme rim, on a gigantic scale.
Our preference for the lunar fission is based upon evidence elsewhere in this work, and
in the Quantavolution Series; it has to do mainly with the nature and behavior of the
Moon, with legendary evidence, with the recency of the event as attested to by today's
oceanography, and by the electrical effects of a two-body pass-by that would execute
more efficiently, even while dampening, the effects evidenced in the Pacific Basin and
throughout the global cleavage and rifting system.
By now the reader may be wondering how the Moon and more could have been erupted in one
set of events, how so much of what we see on the surface could have dropped from above,
and how thousands of craters, many quite large, could be dug into the Earth, all within
a period of time which, it is increasingly apparent. I believe to have occupied only ten
to twelve thousand years, in the Holocene period, no less. Are there not too many
disasters to let the biosphere survive? Further, how do these relate in time? Finally,
does the author accept all of the suspected astroblemes of the world without question?
To the last question, the author has to apologize for a general ignorance. The Bermuda
astrobleme may be an illusion, for example. The thousands of faint circles or cycloliths
may be how the Earth swells and expands. As to how the growing inventory of astroblemes
may be placed in time, the author refers to a hypothetical calendar, carried here below
and in Chaos and Creation. The ladder of associations between time and events will be
better and better constructed as the calendar is investigated. To the first question, on
the inconceivably large scope of the disastrous falls and their bisopheric effects, the
author again pleads the general ignorance. On one issue, he feels confident, namely,
that a small meteoroid such as the Alvarez team has sought and believed sufficient to
destroy the dinosaurs and much else around the world--a meteoroid of a few kilometers
diameter--would barely interrupt the reproduction cycle of the species; but it did not
occur alone.
Certainly I did not begin my studies with so prodigious an armory of missiles in mind.
It happened that more and more effects called for causes. It happened, too, that more
and more literature has been becoming available that indicates exoterrestrial
intervention in earthly processes. Meanwhile, I increasingly strapped myself into a
short-time harness, which is explained astrophysically in Solaria Binaria,
anthropologically in Chaos and Creation and Homo Schizo I, and to some extent in the
chapters gone by here and in those to come. My model demands a short-time for many
exoterrestrial transactions to occur. If either the amount of time or the number of
encounters is to be substantially changed, my model will crack up, and the value of my
work must then rest on its assembly and description of exoterrestrial effects in the
different areas of geology, astrophysics and anthropology. An exception would occur if
it will be shown, as we have said in Solaria Binaria, that the formative period of the
Earth, under a million years ago, brought down showers of material whose marks are
faintly observable everywhere still. However, I am in no sense foreseeing a crack-up and
ask the indulgent reader to continue to ride along with the model.
Notes (Chapter Eleven: Encounters and Collisions)
1. (1749-1827) Oeuvres ComplÚtes (Paris: 1884) VII 121; and see VI 234-5, 478; VII cxx
ff.
2. Frank Dachille, "Interactions of Earth with Very Large Meteorities," 24 Bull. S. Ca.
Acad. Sci (1962), 1-19; see also "Axis Changes in the Earth from Large Meteorite
Collisions," 198 Nature (13 Apr. 1963), 176.
3. "Meteorites-Little and Big..." 46 Earth and Mineral Sci. 7( 1977), 49-52.
4. C. S. Beals, Ian Halliday, and J. Tuzo Wilson, Theories of the Origin of Hudson Bay
(Ottawa: Dept. of Energy, Mines, ResoHad trouble resolving dest near word action type
is Launch urces, 1968).
5. Dachille (1977) 51; 5 Astronomy (Feb. 1977), 60.
6. D. W. Hughes, 256 Nature (28 Aug. 1975), 679, referring to studies of Ashworth and
Hutchinson on hydrous meteoritic minerals.
7. O'Leary, Campbell and Sagan, "Lunar and Planetary Mass Concentrations," 165 Science
(15 Aug. 1969), 651-7.
8. J. Smit and J. Hertogen, "An Extraterrestrial Event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary
Boundary," 285 Nature (1980) 198-200.
9. Op. cit., 203-4.
10. John Normain et al. "Astrons--The Earth's Oldest Scars?" New Sci. (24 Mar. 1977),
689-92.
11. New Sci. (19 Mar. 1981), 740.
12. 63: 249 (1982).
13. 81 J. Geophy. Res. (1976), 5651-63.
14. ( 1977) 692, fig. 5.
15. " Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods," 242 Nature (2 Mar. 1973), 32-3; cf.
R. A. Lyttleton, 245 Nature (21 Sep. 1973), 144-5 for comment.
16. Op. cit., 2.
17. " Deep Crust Hints at Meteoritic Impact," 121 Sci. New (1982), 96.
18. " Electromagnetic Effects of Collisions at Meteoritical Velocities," 13 Meteoritics
(Dec. 1978), 430-3.
19. " A Former Asteroidal Planet as The Origin of Comets," 36 Icarus (1978), 51-74, 71.
20. John M. Saul, "Circular Structures of Large Scale and Great Age on the Earth's
Surface," 271 Nature 26 Jan. 1978), 345 ff.
21. Supra, 75, ltr Geoffrey A. Kellaway and Eric M. Durrance with Saul reply 273 Nature
(4 May 1978), 75.
22. Asimov et al., loc cit. and S. Kogan, op. cit.
23. Op. cit., 140.
24. 188 Nature (24 Dec. 1960), 1064-7.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part III: Hydrology
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWELVE
WATER
With both waters and elaborate forms of life, Earth is unlike other planets. The belief
that this situation has persisted for billions of years may be considered someday as
bizarre as the belief that the earth is flat.
The world's oceans contain 1.4 X 10 18 tons of salted water. Its surface fresh waters -
streams, rivers, lakes -come to 5.1 X 10 14 tons, 50,000 times less, a drop in the
bucket. The ice of the continents amounts to a menacing 2.3 X 10 16 tons. And water
vapors constitute 0 to 7% of the atmosphere up to 50 miles high, enough to lay a cloud
cover over half the globe at any given time. And there are groundwaters, more voluminous
than those of the surface. The fresh waters amount in all to three percent of all
waters, and three-fourths of the fresh waters are bound up in ice.
The omnipresence of water in large amounts in all life forms grant it a large role in
biological and atmospheric activities. Its employment and bulk make its lithospheric
transactions important shapers of the Earth's surface. Where do the ocean waters come
from? Since she sees the streams and puddles after a rain, a child reasons that all
water comes from the sky, that is, unless a geologist gets to her quickly to tell her
that the oceans have always been here from the time the Earth was formed, or almost as
long. An eccentric geologist might say that, over the ages, hydrogen atoms descend from
the Sun and space upon Earth, unite with oxygen in the atmosphere and then over billions
of years drop to form the waters of the oceans.
The conventional myth -by which I intend no slight -is set forth by E. Bullard [1] who
assumes "the obvious things.... one of them is the constancy of the total volume of
water through the ages." Water is "obviously" in "equilibrium," but "the mechanisms of
the equilibrium are unknown."
Thus "it looks as if the water must have been tied up in compounds, perhaps hydrated
silicates, until the earth had formed and the neon had escaped." (This last is needed to
explain why neon, so abundant in the Sun and stars, is so rare on Earth.) "Water must
then have been released as a liquid sometime during the first billion years of the
earth's history, for which we have no geological record." Bullard follows this with
further apologies for the myth but says that the past decades have revolutionized
oceanography and have "unlocked the history of the oceans."
The door may be unlocked, but few have entered. The billions of years of equilibrium can
no longer be accepted: new theory has the ocean floors being scraped and relaid by the
continental plates at least over the past two hundred million years or less; no longer
can the myth hold that the most ancient sediments must rest on the ocean floors, hence
no evidence is thereby offered of what the waters may have been like.
Surely there has been water so long as life has existed, but not necessarily salted
water nor much water. One may assume little water to begin with and little for long
after. Swamps and shallow seas are best for evolution and quantavolution of species;
thick atmospheric soup might be even better, at least in the beginning. Even now, life
seems to reject the oceanic abyss. This is a sign of youth, for the abyss is not without
nutrients, and forms of life exist that require little or no sunlight.
The oceans do not carry all the uranium that they should possess after long eons of
riverine deposits. Their salt is excessive and its sources are not organic. One
calculation emerges with only 2.6% of the present chlorine of the oceans as conceivably
of continental origins.
The sea bottoms seem never to have been compressed and folded, so this indirect evidence
of the age of the water is lacking. Sediments are thin, and mostly accorded under 80
million years of existence. That is only one-fiftieth of the conventional age of the
world oceans. Have there been fifty world-girdling oceans?
If the ocean basins were filled late in time, deluges from the skies have to be assumed.
There is no other source, nor any more apt source, than the waterlogged comets and great
planets. One is compelled to seek water there, and bring it here. Hence the need to
invoke explosions of water from Saturn et al., and passing cometary encounters.
Once the theory of a deluge( s) is given, the search for the source of the water is by
no means ended. The Earth's water may have been injected, boiled off the imagined
primodial melt, stayed up in the skies, and then fallen when a crust had formed and
cooled below 212 . This may have happened, but then again it may not have. It would seem
that if vapors rose high, they would stay there and rotate with the Earth, descending
only when terrestrial electrical conditions permitted or were "seeded" by exoterrestrial
fall out (which is also an electrical phenomenon).
Professional courtesy grants geologists not only their huge oceans but also the basins
to hold the waters. "God" must have made the basins to hold the water, and even if gods
are dispensed with, the basins must stay. So just as some communists stuff their
religion into the mummies of Lenin and Mao, some geologists stuff their religion into
the "nature" that wisely provided ocean basins to hold the great waters.
The waters are too great for the basins to contain; they cover much of the "true"
continents. The fact that the basins occur and the waters occur does not mean that they
were made for each other. Nor have they corresponded. Yet the presence of the basins is
essential to the preservation of the greater part of the continents. If all the earth's
present crust were a uniform level, the waters would cover the globe to a depth of a
kilometer and more.
There is not enough water in the earth's granite or basalts to fill the oceans. Granite,
the rock that underlies the continental sediments, is notably lacking in porosity.
Porosity is the ratio of void space to the bulk volume of a rock, and therefore a
measure of the water or gas contained in the rock at the time of its emergence from a
molten state. Its porosity ranges from 0.3 to 1.5%. That granite could not be generated
from the deeper basalts of the mantle is argued by Y. N. Lyustikh, a soviet
geophysicist; four times the present water mass of the earth would be needed for the
job. [2] Nor can the process by imagined.
The crystalline, glassy, volcanic basalt, which lines the ocean floors, can have a
porosity of anywhere from 1% to 30%. Generally the porosity declines with the depth of
the sea, a phenomenon attributable to pressures more lately applied than to original
pressures, since this rock was often melted and extruded in unfilled basins that is, at
less depth that it is presently discovered. Rocks of the same chemical constitution that
differ in porosity will have had different histories in at least one significant regard:
the rock of lower porosity had larger infusions of water and/ or vapors during its last
melting and reforming. An expansion of the earth could be facilitated by the
incorporation of water and vapors in heated rock. Water could recycle itself time and
time again: it would flood a hot chasm, be incorporated in the rock, be extruded,
expelled, and again enter a hot chasm.
Water exists exoterrestrially. Only in 1970 were the first observations of comets in the
ultraviolet spectral region made. Cometary atmospheres (comas), in which dust and minor
molecular components had been hitherto alone observable, now revealed indicators of a
large component of water, "confirming the Whipple hypothesis of comets being 'dirty' ice
conglomerates." [3] By 1980, other comets had disclosed similar compositions.
The outer planets contain great amounts of water. The rings of Saturn contain about 377
billion km 3 of non-conglomerated swarms of ice particles, by one reckoning. It has been
dropping rings in the past. Saturn is 95 times the size of Earth; if Earth carried the
same amount of ring ice relative to its size, it would have had 4 billion km 3 of ice
particles to fill the ocean basins. The ocean basins contain 1.37 billion km 3 of water.
True the density of Saturn's rings is much less than Earth's waters; still, the
necessary relation of sky waters to ocean waters can be premised, especially if Saturn
were to have shed most of its waters in times past. Moreover, Saturn is only one of many
waterbearers in space. Jupiter and the other planets carry water, like Saturn and
numberless comets.
Ancient wise men of Palestine, Mexico and India are known to have attributed the
deluging of the earth to planet Saturn. Thus, the Hebrew Talmud reads in one place.
"When the Holy One decided to bring the Deluge on the Earth, He took two stars from
Khima and (hurling them against the Earth) brought the Deluge on the Earth." [4]
Velikovsky identified Khima as Saturn. In Mexican documents, where ages of the world are
called "suns," "the first world age, at the end of which the earth was destroyed by a
universal deluge, and presided over by Ce-acatl, or Saturn" [5] The ancient Persians
reported the star Tistar appearing in three manifestations to the accompaniment each of
a different deluge of rain of ten days' durations. [6]
Long before modern astronomy, Saturn was perceived to have rings and to be watery, never
Venus, Mercury, or Mars. How the ancient would associate Saturn with water is a mystery
unless the planet had been observed at a distance much closer than it appears to the eye
today and seen to blow off some of its rings or gases that ultimately arrived to deluge
the Earth. Since Saturn under various names was the ruling god in human cultures at the
time of Noah's Flood, the associations begin to appear reasonable. However, the
Saturnian deluge followed the Golden age of Saturn, and oceans existed at least to some
depth in Saturnian times. They were navigable by Saturnian age peoples.
It can be hypothesized that Saturn contributed some of the vast bulk of ocean waters.
Where did the earlier waters come from? If Saturn did not supply the primordial and
secondary earth waters, the deluge theory has to seek evidence of earlier acquisition of
water. We can begin with a postulation providing for some water that the Earth inherited
from the plenum of gases in which it thrived over most of its history. Then three major
sources are indicated, this inheritance from the gaseous plenum enveloping Solaria
Binaria -the Sun and its partner -in a long period of binary transaction; second,
deluges when the legendary Uranus (Ouranos) complex broke up; and third, upon the
disruption of Saturn. Let us say, for hypothetical purposes, the three investments of
the Earth with water came in one-sixth, three-sixths, and two-sixths of the total.
The ocean waters are geologically young. Granted waters are difficult to date, Melvin
Cook has shown that the oceans contain under 100,000 years' accumulation of uranium,
even granted a uniformitarian riverine run-off curve (which, of course, would mean much
less time on the quantavolutionary exponential curve). [7]
That the basins which hold the water are young, which is yet to be shown, holds
significance for the youth of the waters as well. Few evolutionists and
quantavolutionists regress in time to a completely water-covered Earth, although the
first passage of Biblical Genesis might be construed so: for Elohim separated the chaos
by a firmament dividing the waters below from the waters above, and assembled the land
out of the waters below. And the primeval legend of the Earth being fished out of the
waters is found in the farthest removed cultures of the globe. Also among the first
impression and memories of mankind was the image of the vast cloudy universe recurrently
pouring water and debris down upon the hapless Earth.
A more correct interpretation is that early man was caught in an increasingly turbulent
cloudy world. The next chapter, on Deluges, carries this matter forward. But meanwhile
let us interject a commentary on the origins of the fresh waters of the Earth.
Most if not all of the lakes of the world can be thought of as slowly diminishing
stagnant floods -the salt lakes like the Great Salt Lake (Utah) and the Dead sea, and
the freshwater lakes such as the Great Lakes (USA), and the thousands of Canadian and
American "glacial lakes." That these latter are in most cases being fed by rains and
streams as fast as they evaporate or drain does not obviate the fact of their origins.
They were created under flood conditions. If this is so, it is likely that ground waters
and swampland are also behaving as flood waters, that is, everywhere draining at the
levels of the ocean basins. The Caspian Sea has been shrinking rapidly over the past 150
years, not alone because of human diversions, and becoming more saline. According to the
idea that this sea may be a remnant of a recent and westwards dumping of the contents of
the vast Gobi Sea, now Desert, carried on over thousands of kilometers, ending in the
Mediterranean, the desiccation is to be expected. But, too, the local freshwater
replenishment of the Caspian may be inadequate, and may always have been since its
quantavolutionary creation.
So, too, can the ocean basins be regarded as flood drains, again to make a logical
point, which is otherwise an absurd stretching of language. It can be looked at in this
way: the basins of the oceans existed before they contained water; some water flowed or
dropped into them, "flooding" them. More craters were added, more 'flooding' took place.
Finally they were even 'over-flooded, ' that is, land not properly abyssal but belonging
to continental sial was flooded up to present shorelines.
Whether or not the flooding is continuing is debated in hydrological circles, along with
the questionable trend of land elevation, and is, of course, related to trends of
climate as well. If the hypothesis here is correct and the freshwater (and saline)
bodies are late aspects of world tidal and flood movements, and if swamp and groundwater
levels are also aspects of the same, then the biosphere worldwide is faced with a
growing shortage of water. In the foreseeable future, life on earth will come to depend
upon the systematic utilization of freshwater trapped in ice, upon irrigation from
reservoirs, upon converting freshwater bodies into reservoirs, upon worldwide controls
over the augmentation and distribution of atmospheric waters, and upon conversion of
salt waters to fresh water. Mankind may confront, not only the effects of its ravaging
of water supplies everywhere by overuse, by populations pressure, and by promoting off-
flow of continental water supplies -but also a more grave problem, the hitherto
unsuspected natural trend of the continental crust to lose its water holdings, because
"they never belonged there in the first place."
A great many dry lake basins exist around the world. Some are large, as Lake Bonneville,
whose remnant is Great Salt Lake, and the Caspian Sea basin, containing today's shrunken
lake, still the largest in the world. Some freshwater lakes, such as Titicaca (Andes)
and Tanganyika, contain adapted or primordial oceanic animals like the seahorse and
jelly fish. Perhaps a million watered and dry lakes exist.
By origin, basins may have been created by natural dams accreted gradually or thrown up
abruptly by avalanche, by calderas of extinct volcanos, by meteoroid craters, by faults
and rifts (as lake Baikal and the Dead Sea), and by the bulldozing done by ice and rock
thrusts. The original water may have been groundwater seepage, rainwater, deluges, ice
melt, or tides.
With six forms of basin and six archtypes of water, the combinations and permutations
are numerous. And we have no global survey of lakes with which to compose a frequency
distribution. The only exclusively non-quantavolutionary basin form is the damming by
gradual accretion. Four types of water contents (excluding rainwater) might be
quantavolutionary; three types (excluding deluges and tides) might be non-
quantavolutionary.
No lake is geologically old: this is an impressive datum. It says something about the
lately tortured Earth. An undisturbed or slowly changing surface should include a
proportionately great number of lakes aged in the millions and tens of millions of
years. To object that lakes become filled with sediments must imply that such fossil
lakes should exist by tens of thousands in the stratified rocks of the world. They do
not. Some seemingly ancient lake beds are evident. These should be placed in the
frequency distribution.
The results, even by raw conjecture, would be disappointing. The fossil lakes would be
all too few. For, if we multiply the present million lakes, say, of an average age of
10,000 years as a guess, and take the last billion years of the earth "history" as
providing similar lakes, we get 100,000 periods, and one hundred billion lakes. With
climates changing (and Flint, for one, along with many other geologists had to invent a
turbulent rain belt to fill his pluvial lakes), and with continents drifting about, and
lands rising and sinking, why should not lakes have visited every place at some point in
geological time, and be found in all (or say 10% to 100%) of the geological columns
dutifully examined. I fear that reductio ad absurdum will once more assail conventional
geological theory.
Freshwater springs exist in many places, emerging above their "natural " level, often
quietly but sometimes with explosive vigor. The subterranean liquids and gases -water,
oils, natural gas, and even compressed air -appear frequently to be pocketed under
pressure. Calculations by M. Cook and others allow only a few thousand years for their
escape, at most. Their burial must have occurred in some form of thrusting and folding,
that is, is no longer occurring; we have accounts of many springs that have died, few
that are new. This last fact would arbitrate against conventional theory that
underground volatile pockets are fed from descending rock strata and then forced up
above their local level at some interstices among the rocks, unless, of course, it is
granted that the fresh waters generally are draining away, for the reasons given above.
Once more we turn to oceanography for help. The U. S. Atlantic Ocean shelf was drilled
in 1976 at water depths of less than 300 meters and penetrated to depths of from 20 to
300 meters, at 19 widely separated sites. "One of the most significant discoveries... is
that fresh ground water occurs beneath much of the Atlantic continental self." [8]
These fresh and sometimes brackish waters occupy large lenses in rock strata that are
Cretaceous or younger.
The investigators considered whether these expanses of fresh water below the ocean salt
waters were remnants that had been trapped in shelf sediments when the Pleistocene ice
ages lowered the ocean waters, or were submarine discharges from mainland aquifers.
Generally the first solution was preferred, although indications of submarine intrusions
were discovered at southerly sites. The investigators did not suggest a third
hypothesis, which we offer here, that indeed the freshwater lenses are fossils, but not
from a period of withdrawal of waters to make ice. Rather they are both remnants and
submarine channels of the age before deluges filled to over flowing the basaltic ocean
basins. Fresh waters were trapped in the continental rocks as they made way toward the
abyss and are probably trapped in the debris of the continental slope as well. They are
extensions of normal aquifers, a circulation and storage system that is being broken
into and polluted. We speculate( as do the investigators) that these waters have been
suboceanic for only a few thousand years, and will not be with us for long.
Notes (Chapter Twelve: Water)
1. "The Origins of the Oceans," in The Oceans (San Francisco: Freeman,), 16-25.
2. B. Y. Levin, op. cit., 168.
3. M. K. Wallis, "Cometary Science," 286 Nature (17 July 1980), 207.
4. III Kronos 4 (1978), 19.
5. Velikovsky, V Kronos 1 (1979), 5.
6. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man, loc. cit., 124.
7. Prehistory and Earth Models, loc. cit. 8. J. C. Hathaway et al., 206 Science 4418 (2
Nov. 1979), 515-27, 523.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part III: Hydrology
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DELUGES
We resort again to the skies for cataclysms. A dense canopy of primordial clouds, lately
dropping, has long been a tempting theory. Jordan, who wrote a book generally upon earth
expansion, assembled data and authorities in support of the idea that in the Devonian
and Carboniferous age there was "a world-wide uniformity of climatic conditions from the
furthest south to the furthest north." [1] A cloud cover of a thickness of perhaps ten
kilometers was deemed possible, leading to the warmth and precipitation that grew
rapidly the huge forests of the carboniferous period where, he pointed out, the trees
carried no seasonal rings. R Potonie is cited on the evidence for low light intensity in
those times.
Jordan favored Dirac's hypothesis of a declining gravitational constant. This would
permit a larger solar constant in earlier times, which would have brought on the vapor
cloud canopy. At some point the gravitational grip relaxed and the rings and clouds
descended. Jordan was not concerned with the speed of drop or the basins required to
collect the waters or with the recency of the translation from sky to Earth. However,
the sky-drops may not have been so long ago. Rich and specific traditions of great
celestial waters and deluging of the whole earth convey a strong presumption of truth.
Prehistoric floods are believed in by many peoples who have suffered in historical times
floods of only trivial consequences. Not even psychoanalytic theory, which is the most
penetrating critic of delusions, can locate a psychic source of the flood complex; the
waters of the sac in which we all swam in embryo are believed to have been a soothing,
not devastating, medium.
Scholars have repeatedly analyzed much of the surface of deposits of the Earth and
reported them to be the result of universal deluges; just as often they have been
rebutted by scientists who see in their studies the hand of religious authority. The
greater the controversy, the less immediate the conviction that my few paragraphs here
can convey. Nevertheless, I will state that an unbiased scientist must today admit that
the action of heavy, large-scale floods produced by vertical and lateral rushes of water
can, in a holistic context, account for numerous deposits and land forms around the
world. A presumptive and perhaps invalid stretching of time can only stagger the events
so as to deny them simultaneity and hence grand scope. Or, in keeping with legends, the
events can be concentrated, but the intervals of quiescence then may be stretched out
greatly. Or, finally, both the events and the interims may be condensed in time, a view
preferred here.
The sources of huge flood waters are limited. They may occur from the sudden collapse of
an ice cap such as that of the Pleistocene, which covered, it is said, 30% of the
Earth's surface. They can be exoterrestrial -from a comet or exploding body of the
planetary system. They can descend from a onetime far-flung vaporous canopy. They can be
mobilized as tides from an interruption of the Earth's motion, a tilt of the Earth's
axis, or a drag induced by a giant passing body. They can, also as tides, be generated
from a heavy meteoroid impact on the ocean, directly and also indirectly as in all cases
above, from the winds, rock shifts and seismism accompanying them.
Deluges and tides both cause flooding. Some distinctions are necessary, though, for the
next chapter continues this one with the story of great tides that swept the Earth.
"Deluges fell." We should preserve the strict meaning of deluge, as a cataclysm, a "down
fall." That is, a deluge is defined as an immense rain or fall of matter from the sky. A
flood tide is a body of water in motion. A flood is a raising of water levels from rain
or tide or both. In this chapter, only the vertical flood, the true cataclysmic deluge,
is considered; in the following chapters, lateral floods and tides are treated.
Diderot's Encyclopedia (1751-1765) carried an article on "The Deluge" written by a young
French engineer and soldier, Nicholas-Antoine Boulanger. Going beyond Newton's disciple,
Whiston, who had explained the Deluge by a comet, he then wrote the first scientific
work uniting the four factors; comet, flood, terror, and the origin of religion. G. R.
Carli followed in a few years with additional world-wide legends and geological evidence
of catastrophe. The ancient reports of universal catastrophe, both men reasoned, bore
the stamp of truth.
In the century that followed, the natural and psychological sciences separated
themselves from history and legend. The Biblical Deluge, for example, was steadily
diminished and even dismissed as a fairy tale. It became a local flood along the
Euphrates River, an account which the Hebrews picked up and patched into their holy
scriptures. The influential geologist Seuss opined that "the traditions of other peoples
do not in the least justify the assertion that the flood extended beyond the lower
course of the Euphrates. More recently, the great floods that moved over the Indus River
centers of India in the second millennium B. C. have been explained by Raikes as the
effects of the bursting of natural mud dams. Such floods, goes the conventional belief,
typified in the work of D. Vitaliano, occurred elsewhere from time to time and were
exaggerated out of local pride.
Anyone who has experienced heavy rain and flood is keenly aware of the damage and the
fright that come with the prolonged precipitation combined with the rising and swirling
waters. Individuals and towns do not forget them easily. But no culture makes of any
such weather event a centerpiece of their history as human beings. No matter how
disastrous (as for example, was the Yangtse flood that killed an estimated million
people in 1887), unless a flood practically obliterates a culture, or is accompanied by
compelling foreign "divine" phenomena, it does not mark indelibly the social memory.
Donald Patten lists sixty-eight deluge traditions on six continents. He might have named
many more. For instance, twenty-five of them come from the Americas; but Marie and
Richard Andress, folklorist and geographer respectively, found forty-six in the New
World, almost twice as many accounts. But Bellamy estimated 500 deluge myths coming from
250 peoples or tribes. The probability is high that every culture can recite the story
of a universal flood which practically nobody survived. [2] The deluge is frequently
pictured, too, in ancient and modern art. A. Durer and Leonardo da Vinci painted their
images of it, both making it a kind of typhoon. And indeed, in the ancient Chaldean
story of the flood of Xisuthros the node of the Deluge is spoken of as a waterspout that
"swelled up to heaven "and struck fear into the gods; the god Ea pleaded that any and
all disaster be visited upon men, but nothing so terrible as "the waterspout of the
Deluge." [3]
In every ancient legend of great waters descending from the sky, a few survivors live to
tell the tale. At any rate, so it seemed to the survivors. But given any tiny sum of
survivors in various parts of the world, one has the basis for survival of the human
race. Even a single couple procreating successfully can set off a population explosion
within a few generations. The mathematics of reproduction are such that some eight
billions might theoretically come forth in a thousand years. That is over twice the
present population of our crowded world of today.
While catastrophic forces work on exponential curves, so do populations of all living
forms. Indeed, unwilling as they may be to accept such a defense, one of the best
arguments for Darwinian adaptation is the capacity of all living things to increase from
a pair to billions in a numbers of years. There would be no need for exponential
population growth under uniformitarian conditions. But population explosions themselves
are an indirect proof of catastrophes.
Since the time of Boulanger, quantavolutionary thought has arrived at a number of
additional conclusions about the "Deluge." These are at odds with conventional science,
yet have been using more and more the findings of conventional science.
Boulanger and others have talked of "the" Deluge as if there were only one, whether
unique in occurrence or unique in size. Most of the ancients spoke of periodic flood
catastrophes. The Greeks spoke of three great floods, Deucalion, Ogyges, and Dardanus.
The first two have been tied to great floods of Exodus times, the mid-second millennium
B. C. [4] According to Philochorus (3rd c. B. C.), "deluge-swept Attica remained
without a king for 189 [or 190] years " in the wake of the Ogygian Flood. [5] Sextus
Julius Africanus said that "all the former population of Attica was killed in the
Ogygian deluge and the country remained uninhabited for 270 years." [6]
The Flood of Dardanus was probably of the 8th century B. C. The story of Atlantis may be
contemporary with the Saturnian flood. We note that the Atlantic Ocean was called the
Sea of Kronos. Atlantis would then have sunk in the flooding of the continental shelves
by the Noachian Deluge. In a prescient line, Bellamy thinks: "Genesis I is a dragon myth
without a dragon, a deluge myth without a deluge." [7] This would be the initial
deluges of the first, Uranian period of Chaos. The Greek myths of Ouranos and Okeanos
were concerned with universal deluges of the earliest catastrophes, involving the
breakup of the Super-Uranus partner of the Sun.
Diluvians are of several minds. My view is that the deluges were numerous, with two
great peaks. This view has at least the advantage of including all known and suspected
deluges in human memory. As pointed out earlier, various high energy expressions such as
typhoons and volcanic explosions invariably pick up and drop huge amounts of water and
are at least localized deluges.
The first peak, the Uranian, consisted of a series of drops of sky-held waters,
occurring from the beginning of the holocene period when set at 14,000 B. C. and
continued for several thousand years through the lunar fission. Deluges of stone and
dust (or mud) occurred simultaneously. The second peak may be placed at the end of the
age of Saturn and can be identified as the flood of Noah (sometimes calculated at 4000
B. C.). Dense material fall-outs of catastrophic extent occurred at the time of the
heavy-body encounters with Venus and Mars, in the second and first millennia B. C. These
were exoterrestrial. In these cases, described in Chaos and Creation, as well as on a
number of other occasions, universal and local conflagrations and explosions caused
damaging fall-outs of material that was raised from the Earth. The gravest such
occurrences would have been the fall-back of some of the material that was erupting to
form the Moon, around 11,500 B. C. Huge falls of insects, fish, frogs, etc. would have
certainly constituted terrifying spectacles over less extensive areas, and were
sometimes the cause of plagues.
Issac Vail, an American naturalist, in 1874 proposed that the Deluge of Noah occurred
"as a philosophical necessity, arising from a world-condition that no longer obtains
.... A vast cloud-canopy of primitive earth-vapors, such as now envelop the planets
Jupiter and Saturn, lingered as a revolving deluge-source, in the skies of antediluvian
man --a source of primeval rains, snow and hail, competent to produce all the floods,
and all the Glacial Epochs the earth ever saw, and that this last fall of those
primordial waters deepened the oceans many fathoms." [8] Vail was a polymath whose
analyses of myth were superb. Unfortunately, a fire consumed his principal manuscripts
and he was compelled to rewrite them from memory, and then only in part, omitting many
citations of sources.
Vail calculated the fatal flaw of the conventional theory of the ice ages; the
incapacity of the Earth internally to generate enough heat to lift the waters and convey
them to where they would form ice. And, had a mechanism to lift such masses been
employed by exoterrestrial sources (although noone considered this possibility), then
the poles as well as the Equator would be consumed by heat. The only alternative, Vail
thought, was a pre-existing high set of Saturnian rings which descended into Jovian
cloud bands and then fell upon the Earth as snow and ice in the polar regions, to which
they were deflected by the Earth's magnetosphere.
Vail thought that the vast changes recorded in ocean and terrestrial life proved that a
canopy had existed and had from time to time dropped part of its contents upon the
earth. He pointed to pre-existing tropical conditions uncovered throughout the globe as
proof of a "greenhouse" climate in which the clouds diffused the sun's heat and
maintained even temperatures everywhere.
Vail did not introduce heavy-body encounters into his model of heaven and earth. Yet
there is yet another possible source of a deluge, terrible beyond all others. If a
passing body were attractive enough to disrupt, dislodge, and explosively pull into the
sky portions of the earth's surface, it would also extract water and ice directly from
the earth. The portion of the water that did not follow the intruding body into far
space beyond the earth's grasp would fall back upon the world as a deluge or circle the
earth with the moon and ultimately, if disturbed, fall.
Vail was not specific as to why the canopies would ever fall. He appealed to a "natural"
and "divine" order or process happening over long ages, without external intervention.
If the rings had moved with the Earth like the Moon does, they would hold their orbits
similarly. Their fall would be at best exceedingly slow and the climatic ages that they
would produce on earth exceedingly long, too long for any catastrophic theory. However,
a collapse would be rapid under certain conditions. The globe or canopy might change its
motions and/ or electrical charges. Both would occur with large-body encounters and
dense-material fall-outs and radionic storms. A great meteoritic explosion, a phaetonic
atmospheric pass-through, and a bombardment of particles would singly or in combination,
and in proportion to their volume, precipitate deluges upon Earth.
Now we see a complex of possible events: that "heavenly waters" (canopies) might have
existed, that they might have fallen, and that explosions might have produced them and/
or brought them down along with exploded waters. The mechanisms are described more
precisely in Solaria Binaria.
We continue Vail's account: the most ancient of East Indian gods was Varuna, whose name
means the "surrounder" or "concealer." He is the regent for the Sun. The root syllable
"var" means water, hence "he who covers the heavens with his water canopy." Ouranos is
the Greek equivalent: this Heaven-god, ancient Hesiod's Theogony tells us, came from far
away to embrace "Mother Earth," Gaea, and "lay close about her on all sides around." The
most archaic deity of the Latins was Coelus, ruler of heaven (Coelum), who like all the
other heaven-gods, was ultimately banished. The Kojiki, holy scriptures of Japan,
maintains that the gods, in the earliest days, brought the heavens and earth very close
together. Two light-gods then ruled the world from their "f1oating bridge of heaven."
Later, heaven "began to retire and eventually passed utterly away."
In the Hebrew Genesis, the Elohim (the Most High) created the Heavens and the Earth. The
Heavens were a "firmament" placed "in the midst of the waters." The "there-waters"
(Shimayim or Heaven) existed with lights but not with the sun and moon, for they are not
mentioned in the opening passage of Genesis. The Assyrians said also that the sun, moon
and stars came into view only when the monster foes of order were dislodged. When the
Scandinavian heaven, Asgard, died with the gods, during Ragnarok, "the Sun and his
legions came riding through the gap in shining array."
The name "Yahweh" came later when the skies were opened, just as names of the leading
gods changed in all cultures, with the coming of a new age. In Greek terms, Kronos
(Saturn) became Zeus (Jupiter). When Kronos was removed by Zeus, Zeus removed also his
own younger brother Poseidon from Heaven and sent him to rule the terrestrial waters.
But note that Okeanos (the Ocean) had, as a rebellious Titan, already been expelled from
Heaven before Poseidon left it.
So the Great Deep of the earliest religions was a watery sky. The final waters of the
Great Deep were broken up at the time of the Noachian (or Poseidon) Flood. But there was
"a long, long time when floods were the order of the day."
If I may refashion the theory of Vail, in the light of what I have written elsewhere, I
should suggest that (a) self-conscious myth-making mankind was born beneath a high
canopy of rings and clouds, without a visible Sun; (b) deluges began and a visible
Uranian Sun and the present Sun appeared; (c) the Uranian Sun went nova, the Earth bore
forth the Moon and cleaved, while undergoing further deluges that partially filled the
newly formed ocean basins; (d) the heavenly clouds remained to some extent thereafter
(during the Golden Age of Saturn when the world lived tropically); and then (e) the
second great Deluge came, which was the Noachian deluge.
Jewish legends of the earliest period of man go beyond the Bible in defining a cosmic
catastrophe prior to Noah's Deluge. It may be called the Enosh Catastrophe, for it
happened during the time of Adam's grandson, Enosh. Since I have designated the full
self-awareness of modern man (in Homo Schizo I and I1) as part of the early catastrophic
scenario of a binary nova of Super-Uranus, and suggested that this was accompanied by
great flooding, and that the Moon eruption and Earth cleavage (Chaos and Creation) also
brought down to Earth great deluges to fill the ocean basins, perhaps Enosh belonged to
one of these eras. The second is preferred if only because in legend and scripture Adam
(mankind) was self-aware and active, and had been evicted into a hard world from the
Garden of Eden, which represents a catastrophe of a universal globe-tilting kind.
The legends say that mankind's attention was riveted upon celestial events; idolatry
(implying deviant sky-body worship) and gods (the same, but lawful) were active and
importuned. The terrestrial effects were said to be threefold: the sea transgressed its
bounds and a third of the Earth was flooded; "There arose mountains, valleys, and rocky
ground, whereas prior to that everything had been smooth and even...; man's stature was
shortened." [9] Ignoring the last, which is for another book, we are left to conjecture
original or successive (Uranian) deluges possibly in conjunction with the eruption of
the Moon and the cleavages of the globe, at which time great orogeny occurred and much
of the land was thrusted and folded. O'Gheoghan points out that two deluges were
attributed by Phoenician sources to the planet El (Saturn, possibly our lunar Super-
Uranian and Super-Saturn novas) [10] .
The Greeks had a god who was a son of Ouranos. His name was Okeanos and his behavior was
consonant with our theory. Okeanos, writes Giorgio Santellana and Hertha von Dechand,
dwelt originally in heaven [11] . He was the rivers of heaven who flowed down from the
sky to earth. He was the "beloved end of the earth, ruler of the pale" and his name,
too, is derived etymologically from "heaven." Jane Harrison also found that "Okeanos is
much more than Ocean and of other birth." [12] He was the "daimon of the upper air," of
the stratosphere, of the binary system's atmospheric plenum in our interpretation.
According to Homer, the universe took the form of an egg that was girded about by
Okeanos, the Generator. And Socrates in Theathetus says, "When Homer sings of the wonder
of 'Ocean whence sprang the Gods and Mother Tethys' does not mean that all things are
the offspring of flux and motion." [13] "Mother Tethys" is the ancient sea that in my
opinion preceded the earthly oceans, and was the central body of water of Pangea, as the
wholly land-covered Earth may be called. A whole subsequent paragraph of Santillana and
von Dechend bears quotation:
The authority of Berger can reconstruct the image. The attributes of Okeanos in the
literature are "deep-flowing," "flowing-back-on-itself," "untiring," "placidly flowing,"
"without billows." These images, remarks Berger, suggest silence, regularity, depth,
stillness, rotation--what belongs really to the starry heaven. Later the name was
transferred to another more earthbound concept: the actual sea which was supposed to
surround the land on all sides. But the explicit distinction, often repeated, from the
"main" shows that this was never the original idea. If Okeanos is a "silver-swirling"
river with many branches which obviously never were on sea or land, then the main is not
the sea either, pontos or thalassa, it has to be the Waters Above. The Okeanos of myth
preserves these imposing characters of remoteness and silence. He was the one who could
remain by himself when Zeus commanded attendance in Olympus by all the gods. It was he
who sent his daughters to lament over the chained outcast Prometheus, and offered his
powerful mediation on his behalf. He is the Father of Rivers; he dimly appears in
tradition, indeed, as the original god of heaven in the past. He stands in an Orphic
hymn as "beloved end of the earth, ruler of the pole," and in that famous ancient
lexicon, the Etymologicum magnum, his name is seen to derive from "heaven."
Boreal means "northern." It also means "bore," a "hole". Both of these prehistoric
meanings refer to the first human sense of direction. As the clouds that surrounded man
's early cultures began to break up and descend as deluges, the first openings of the
sky were in the north (to those living above the Equator). Uranus, in the late Roman
Empire, was still pictured as a god cloaked in clouds.
The Hyperboreans were people who lived farthest north. Their legends said that the great
light (commonly, but mistakenly translated as Helios) arose and also set but once a
year. So time-cycles were possible in the brilliant peak of illumination.
Most legendary clues seem compatible with the model being tested here--of an early
cloud-covered greenhouse world, now broken through and deluged by water, fire, and
rocks; of clouds lowering upon a smothering Mother Earth; of the beginnings of reliable
changing lights and planetary figures in the Boreal hole; of a rapid development of
thought and culture; of the retreat of Ouranos (Uranus) and the appearance of Kronos
(Saturn).
But then also the land of Pangea was being flooded and the ice was piling up in the
polar regions. Life forms retreated steadily southwards. Then came a Lunarjan
catastrophe, the worst, followed by the full mild, misty "golden age" of Saturn
(Kronos). Again, disaster, with the Noachian Deluge and the coming of electrical Yahweh
(Zeus-Jupiter) to the force [14] .
Afterwards, sunshine, dryness, lightning, thunder and the present rain-making cycle
governed the atmosphere. Vail put it one way: "All through the Ouranian and Kronian
ages, the thunderer [Jove] was silent." I would say that these former ages were fully
catastrophic in their beginnings and end, and cosmic lightning and pandemonium were
present, but that a fairly clear and dry world was the scene for the working out of
Jupiter's divine character.
The first fall-out of sky-waters must have been limited--one sixth of today's total, we
guess--because, as we argue later on, they descended upon a world largely without basins
to receive them. The world would have drowned without the basins. Nor did the second
fall come at one time but over a period of centuries prior to and after the forming of
the basins. Even then, if the waters had not fallen partly as ice upon the caps, where
it did not melt, then too the world would have been swamped.
The deluges would not amount to much rain if they were spread out over thousands of
years. This, of course, was not the case, but is worth calculating. We assume that the
original Tethyan Sea, shallow but globe-gidling, held one-sixth of the 1,347 million
cubic kilometers of water contained in the present oceans. Further, we assumed that two-
sixths of the present oceans came down in subsequent deluges of Noah and thereafter. Ice
caps (now I/ 200 of the total waters) are ignored, so, too, possible expansion of the
Earth during the period, and also the rain cycle that would be occurring all the while.
We allow ourselves 6000 years to bring down new waters equal to half the oceans today,
that is, 673.5 million km 3 . The annual average quota becomes 112,250 km 3 /y, which
turns out to be only 22 cm 3 /cm 2 /y, when it is averaged over the Earth's surface.
This is much less than the average rainfall around the world today, which can rise well
above 200 cm3 in a number of localities such as the State of Washington or Hongkong.
Evaporation and precipitation would add to the figure. Further, most important, most of
the deluging might occur in years, not millennia, and then we should have to resort to a
dynamism unlike ordinary rain, and resembling more ropes, hoses, and cyclones of water
at many locations.
The ancient Scandinavians called snow the "pus of the gods." Something is to be said
about snow and ice deluges soon. In many places, however, the waters of the deluges and
floods or tides were heated. Rains came down in gobs the size of a man's head and were
at times boiling hot, according to the Zend-Avesta of Persia. Josippon bin-Gorion
repeats a Jewish myth: "The fountains of the deep broke up first. Then came the flood
from above. Then fire fell also, and rain, boiling hot." [15] Bellamy writes that "quite
a number of peoples report not only a Great Flood, but specifically a flood of hot
water." American Indians of the West claimed that the waters of the Great Flood were
warm. The Voguls of Finland said a great fire raged over the world first and was
followed by a deluge of hot water. Then the hot waters raged across the land. Fire mixed
with the water--even their rafts caught fire, they said. Amerindians of Brazil said that
the Sun was a cauldron of boiling waters that tipped over.
Saturn was the chief sun in ancient legend, it should be borne in mind; several recent
studies have established this identification (see Chaos and Creation). Saturn, successor
to Uranus, was both an early sun, a bright binary partner of the Sun, and flared
magnificently when it went nova just before its deluge waters struck the Earth.
Moreover, while lightning would unquestionably have played about the deluge scene, the
fires and heat connected with the deluge and flood waters would be associated with the
debris of the nova and the heavy volcanism which, as one Jewish commentator wrote,
sprang up on all sides [16] .
The Feast of Lights (Hannukah) and the Christmas Light festivals, as well as the Hindu,
Roman and other Saturnalia derive from the brilliant seven-day display of Saturn in
nova, before the deluge struck. Frazer give us a Jewish folktale to conclude our
instances of sky-associations for the Flood of Noah:
Now the Deluge was caused by the male waters from the sky meeting the female waters
which issued forth from the ground. The holes in the sky by which the upper waters
escaped were made by God when he removed stars out of the constellation of the Pleiades;
and in order to stop this torrent of rain, God had afterwards to bung up the two holes
with a couple of stars borrowed from the constellation of the Bear. That is why the Bear
runs after the Pleiades to this day; she wants her children back, but she will never get
them till after the Last Day [17] .
In Solaria Binaria, which is the heavily astronomical work of the Quantavolution series.
Milton and I formulate the dynamics of the deluges. 1 mentioned earlier that the form
which the deluges of Uranian and Saturnian times took was probably cyclonic, with the
waters jetting down, as fountains or as liquid meteoritic fails. This would be a
necessary assumption for biosphere survival and for disposing of the huge quantities of
water involved. At the same time, we must speculate upon the lithospheric effects of the
thousands of jets or spouts. Where are the visible effects today?
Perhaps the myriad rings faintly visible on satellite photographs of the Earth's surface
(as reported in earlier pages) represent cyclonic craters formed by the jets and soon
filled by aquatic tides and earth flows. When I first began to study the incidence of
meteoroid impacts, I was pleased at each new discovery. But as the number of indicated
craters grew larger and larger, 1 began to wonder how the Earth could have been so
completely bombarded yet its biosphere could have survived. Cosmic lightning bolts and
plasmoid lightning balls supply part of the answer. A liquid bombardment might also be
an answer. We shall have to await a more extensive survey of the surface halos of the
Earth.
Notes (Chapter Thirteen: Deluges)
1. Pascual Jordan, The Expanding Earth (1971) (orig. German ed. 1966).
2. The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, op. cit., 164-6, 52. Bellamy: Moon, Myths and
Man, op. cit., 120.
3. Kelly and Dachille, op. cit., 241.
4. By Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, 148-52.
5. H. S. Bellamy, The Atlantis Myth (London: Fabar and Fabar, 1948), 145.
6. Ibid.
7. Moon, Myths and Man, op. cit., 178.
8. "The Misread Record," p. 1. Most of the specific allusions in these next paragraphs
are form Vail's Selected Works, loc. cit.
9. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: 1909), V. 152, note 55. Quoted by B.
O'Gheoghan, "Notes on a Possible Pre-Deluge Catastrophe," III S. I. S. Rev. 2( Aut.
1978), 36.
10. Op. cit., and see H. Tresman and B. O'Gheoghan, "The primordial Light?" II S. I. S.
Rev. (1977), 35ff.
11. Op. cit., 190-1.
12. Ibid., 189.
13. Ibid.
14. The author's Moses examines the electrical associations of Yahweh.
15. Bellamy, M. M. M., op cit., 124-5.
16. Velikovsky in V Kronos 1 (1979), 9.
17. Folklore in the Old Testament (1981), I, 143-4.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part III: Hydrology
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FLOODS AND TIDES
Paleontology is based largely upon the classification and ordering in sequence of
marine fossils. Cuvier, one of its founders, claimed as the best evidence of universal
floods, that land animals were always found in association with marine fossils.
Terrestrial strata were laid upon marine strata which were superimposed upon
terrestrial strata. In 1796, he named three ages and three catastrophes, evidenced by
three quite different 'aggregates of species. Man appeared following the last of these,
he believed. Today, many fossil deposits consisting solely of land animals can be
pointed out, but the presence of marine fossils in all regions of the world and at all
altitudes provides an unending source of doubt. The Earth has had to be made mobile,
with sliding land masses and sinkings and rising, to explain this fact, and with great
stretches of time to accomplish what several very general tides, directed by
exoterrestrial bodies, might in theory accomplish in short order.
Strictly speaking, floods are waters 'seeking their own level. ' 'Gravity flow' is
implied, whether a high cresting river is over-flowing a town's streets or waters from
all Sides are rushing down into a huge basin from which the Moon has been wrenched to
form an ocean. Phenomena often called 'floods' might be more carefully denominated
deluges, tides, and tsunamis. Remaining as floods would be barrier-bursting avalanching
floods, the aforesaid floods from the rising and sinking of land (elsewhere treated),
the varieties of rain-fed waterdownslides, the rising of waters below the ground from
higher waters of distant sources and. more obviously, the melting of ice.
Tides. on the other hand, are moving waters led by other moving forces. We are not
concerned here with ordinary lunar tides, of whose perplexities I. Michelson writes,
"We are to this day unable to decide whether high tides occur when the Moon is in the
meridian or whether the exact opposite, low tide, is more nearly correct." [1] The
implications in this state of affairs, that electrical fields are operative, etc., are
not germane here.
The palaetiology of flooding is no less complex than the lunar tides. Possessed of
records of the Nile, Thames, Mississippi and other river flows, one can make
predictions of some value concerning their behavior in the near future. Given a case
where long-term records are not available, it is easy to make errors both about past
and future behavior. For instance, the Pecos River in Texas flooded severely in 1954.
older techniques of paleohydrology had assigned a frequency of recurrence probability
in the millions of years; newer techniques reduced the recurrence interval to about
2000 years [2] . Such cases should be borne in mind when considering the probable
dates of prehistoric floods: are we viewing a 10 million-year effect or a 2000 year
one? Are we dealing with a rapid series or very gradual pulses?
More important to geomorphology are the tides of the great tsunamis and the tides of an
Earth that is losing its balance by some external intervention. On several occasions,
the Earth has had not only its waters diverted up and around, but also its very crust,
this too constituting a tidal movement of land.
A comet with a nucleus as large as the Earth would from 50,000 miles' distance pull up
ocean waters to a height of several miles at its focus. An exact calculation requires
many assumptions; approximations of such encounters have been figured by persons as
eminent as the mathematician Laplace. Hoerbiger and Bellamy more recently have
calculated the tides engendered by a capture of moon-sized satellites. If one is
pondering the escape of a Moon-sized mass from the Pacific Basin, a larger body, closer
approach, greater mass, and favorable electrical conditions (greater attraction) must
be conjectured. Atmosphere, water, the crustal rocks, and the upper mantle must
participate in the tidal action--indeed the tidal force would extend through the whole
globe, and the concept of tide becomes as strained as the globe itself under the
postulated circumstances.
Should such an event have occurred, and it does seem the most plausible method of
providing the Earth with its satellite, the tidal pull would have dragged the surface
waters everywhere towards the node of escape. Thereupon, as the intruding body moved
on, the tidal force would relax and the tidal waters would rush back in great rings
around the globe, reverberating for large but diminishing distances until they should
accommodate to the new complex of Earth motions and the tortured terrain.
However, our model here and in Chaos and Creation calls for a small portion of the
Earth's present waters having been available for the tides caused by lunar evacuation.
Less waters would yet have been available for the tides that would otherwise reach
miles into the sky. Nor, for that matter, were the mountains elevated to their present
heights, but rather were only then forming under catastrophic diastrophism.
The Saturnian or Noachian Flood some thousands of years later than the postulated lunar
tide also would have had major traits of a tidal disaster. Patten estimates aquatic
tides of 5,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level and extensive tides of magma beneath the
crust. This "breaking up of the fountains of the deep," he says, might account for
99.9% of the flood waters of the Great Flood of Noah, leaving only 0.1% as deluge
waters from the skies. His schedule of events follows Davidson, Stibbs and Kevan and is
useful [3] . During forty days the rains fell. For another 110 days flood (tidal)
waters continued to rise. Next, 74 days were occupied in the "going and decreasing."
Not until another 40 days passed did Noah send out a raven. Then 21 days were taken to
send out three successive doves. A further 86 days occurred before the total experience
ended. Thus 371 days passed.
If the Bible is historically accurate, even only generally so, a tidal catastrophe is
depicted in which rains played a minor role. Even granting that all the overrunning of
the land and climbing of mountains was accomplished by tides, there remains in mind a
question respecting the origin of the oceanic waters. The continental slopes and
shelves were permanently inundated at some point in time, and this seems the most
reasonable time for the job. The quantity of water required and mode of deluging are
difficult to conceive. E. R. Milton and I finally settled upon introducing waters
sufficient to cover the slopes and shelves at this time, despite the enormous bulk
required to raise ocean levels by thousands of feet. We reasoned that, if all of this
water were not introduced here, we could not find legendary substantiation for it
elsewhere.
Having the waters descend was more difficult. As Kofahl has clearly shown, so heavy a
deluge in the short period of forty days might practically wipe out the surface of the
Earth [4] . So, as already indicated, we relied upon a few bits of evidence to
consider and adopt the typhoon mechanism, having the waters streaming down in thick
columns dispersed around much of the globe. This would have the advantage of letting
much of the Earth go relatively unscathed. An average of one typhoon for every 100
square miles on the globe's surface would provide all the new water needed to cover the
continental slopes and shelves. Preceding and successive deluges would make less severe
the requirement. So would, of course, an increase in the 40 days and nights of rain
that the Bible allows for the Deluge. A reason for acknowledging the many days of
rising and falling tides is that, subsequent to exploding its waters upon the Earth, a
major portion of the fissioned Super-Saturn may have pursued a path paralleling the
Earth's for some time before overtaking and passing the Earth. This or another major
portion finally receded into a position beyond Jupiter, and probably even retained its
identity as the retired god, god of the underworld, the god placed in bonds by the new
king of the gods, Zeus-Jupiter-Marduk-Yahweb.
Early students of Siberian geography, working without an ice-age theory, observed from
geomorphology and fossil conglomerates that in the far north a gigantic tidal wave had
recently been propagated. North-south tides of this size strongly suggest an axial
imbalance of the Earth. Water in the bottom of a rowboat splashes towards someone
climbing up from the side, and splashes then back and forth, as he gets on or drops
off. The enormous fossil aggregations that, with a sand admixture, compose whole
offshore islands, testify also to tidal action proceeding northwards and then
withdrawing [5] .
A change in the speed of rotation of the globe, for which an exoterrestrial large-body
encounter must be presumed, necessarily entails large tides. Some writers, including
ourselves, have surmised a shift from 360 to 365 days a year around the eighth century
B. C. Putting aside the more plausible cause of orbital recession, and laying the
burden of such a shift upon a speed-up of rotation, with shorter and more days, the sea
level would be theoretically raised by 118 m at the Equator and dropped by 227 m at the
poles. So calculates V. J. Slabinski, assuming a water-covered Earth and implying
instant time [5A]. The "historical belt" around the world in the Mediterranean, Near
East, India, China, and Mesoamerica would have noted "moderate" drops or rises of 35 m
or less.
If an axial tilt occurred at the same time, counterrailing and aggravating motions
would have occurred. Presumably, too, the "solid crust" would soon warp and flow to
erase much of the change. Some orbital change, as stated above, probably would alter
the calculations, too. The several factors at work highlight the problems of
conceptualizing and calculating the effects of encounters, but heavy tidal movements
must be assumed.
The legends of tides number in the hundreds, but they are usually hard to allocate to
periods of time, particularly in this incipient phase of the science of
quantavolutions. When the Biblical Book of Exodus says, "The waters were a wall unto
them on their right hand, and on their left," tidal behavior is suggested at the
critical point of the Venusian comet, about 1450 B. C. by Biblical-derived dating. And
the Psalms are chanting of the same event when "He made the waters to stand as a
heap..." And the Midrashim comment likewise, "The waters were piled up to a height of
sixteen hundred miles, and they could be seen by all the nations of the earth." (Though
here we are bothered by the height and wonder whether, with the tides, there was a
cyclonic tube reaching into the far heavens, the famous column of smoke by day and fire
by night, that guided the Hebrews in Exodus). Also, in China, if the time of Emperor
Yahou belongs anywhere, it belongs around the time of Exodus; and there the waters
"over-topped the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods." [6]
But when the Lapps recite how the angry god Jubmel raged against the wicked, and,
"foaming, dashing, rising sky-high came the sea-wall, crushing all things," we are not
sure that this is the time of Exodus or earlier or a combination of later and earlier
events. So it goes around the world. The tides are there: immense, overpowering
everything, wrecking the surface, launched by the gods, accompanied by fire and wind;
still each legend has to be examined carefully before assigning it to a given
catastrophe.
The Jubmel legend ends up as sophisticated language, as good a poetry as ever written
perhaps, but it is not the language of the time of the event. Even the Biblical
language is not the Exodus language. All the accounts are much later than the events.
So the quality of the language does not date the legend. I think one may accept,
however, that the tides were overwhelming at Exodus-time.
They were also present at other catastrophic intervals, and particularly in the
Lunarian Age. The Noachian-Saturnian Flood was a deluge and tidal flood. The Popul Vuh
of the Meso-Americans speaks of the god Hurracan as the driver of disastrous winds and
tides, but sounds as if it were reminiscing about events of the early primordial
period, our Lunarian episode.
The peculiar image of the walls of water parting gives pause, too. It is not only
Biblical but, for example, Inca; near Yucatan, twelve roads of escape were opened
through the sea to let pass certain peoples from the East. Can tides behave to create
passages? The answer must be "yes." Not only is there a typical shore withdrawal before
a tsunami; the tsunami can occur in a series. Further, the immense expressions of
energy in tides, as in winds and earthquake, sometimes act to spare the most
incongruous as well as precious things. Cows have been picked up by cyclones and set
down miles away without injury.
When Krakatoa exploded, the people of Batavia a few miles away braced for a gigantic
tidal wave that never came. Yet the wave wiped out other villages not far away and
raced across the oceans to frighten Indians and Africans. There are parts of the Aegean
islands that were scarcely mounted by the towering wall of water that set out with
hurricane speed from Thera-Santorini around 1000 B. C. Tides rip, cross, translate, and
in other ways convey their force. During the flood of Manu (Saturnian flood, probably
about 4000 B. C.) hurricanes and turbulence surrounded the boat of the Indian Noah.
The skies are full of motion and the mover's body is itself moving. The atmospheric is
raging with currents of wind and electricity. The Earth itself is moving. The celestial
actors in the scene are imposing or withdrawing forces. Hence, exoterrestrially induced
tides will not behave so simply as tides operate with the regular passage of the Moon
or of a single earthquake. They will draw startling geometric figures. No one would
have been more amazed than the Jews themselves, to have survived the double-walled
water passage into Sinai. They lost, according to legend, the vast majority of their
people to the waves that swallowed the Pharaoh's warriors. It is logical that few might
reach the "Promised Land."
The "great spark" that Velikovsky says struck the walls of water and caused them to
collapse upon the hapless pursued and pursuers is attributed by him to a discharge of
cosmic lightning between Earth and Cometary Venus, releasing the attraction between the
two bodies. It is well to note in this connection that an American Pima Indian myth
paints a similar scene [7] .
There were 3 warnings from an eagle of great flood.
Suddenly a terrible roar paralysed men with fear. A green water-mountain rose over the
plain. For a very short time it seemed to stand upright like a wall -then it was split
by a vivid flash of lightning, and plunged forward like a ravenous beast. Only one man
escaped, keeping afloat by clinging to a large lump of rubber or pitch.
The flood of Noah is an example of both deluge and tide. If it were purely a deluge,
how would the Ark end up on a tall mountain of Anatolia? (How would the boat of Manu,
the Hindu Noah, end up in the high Himalayas, for that matter?) Even the heaviest
deluge could not over-fill the ocean basins and cause the waters to ascend the highest
mountains. The waters would run off, carrying any barges downstream, or else the world
would be permanently drowned.
Alternatively, the mountains would have appeared in the course of the deluge (because
the continents were on the move) and afford anchorage and survival. Or else the deluge
was accompanied by tidal rises of the waters of the Earth owing to the electro-
gravitational attraction of close-in celestial bodies. Or else all three events
happened more or less simultaneously: the deluge fell; the lands moved and rose; and a
tidal force (the same that was causing the deluge to fall and the lands to move and
rise) drew the waters up to the heights of whatever mountains pre-existed or were
appearing.
The Bible contains many specifics, almost as if it were, as Patten says, an eye-witness
account. His is probably the best all-around analysis relating to the Flood. He
establishes it securely as a tidal flood, "a universal, global Flood, and that it was
caused by the interacting gravities of two astronomical bodies of planetary dimensions
-the Earth and the astral visitor. Since the Earth possesses two fields, one
gravitational and the other magnetic, there were two kinds of celestial conflicts with
the intruder." [8]
The question of "how few" were the survivors need not detain whether scores or
thousands -but they certainly were widely scattered about the world. The following
quotation from the ancient Nicolaus of Damascus seems reasonable [9] :
There is a great mountain in Armenia, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many
who fled at the time of the Deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark
came on shore upon the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were for a great
while observed: this might be the man about whom Moses the legislator of the Jews
wrote...
The steady increasing and decreasing of waters is a tidal as well as a deluge
phenomenon. The ten-month duration assigned the flood seems more to indicate a long-
range tidal attraction of a celestial body; a flood, even if universal, would not take
so long to recede as the 74 explicit and 90 additional implicit days before the full
grounding of the Ark.
The archaeological history of the deluge has been controversial. It has been reviewed
by M. E. L. Mallowan and H. J. Lenzen, among others, and Robert Raikes has supplied a
critique of the theories [10] . What is generally discoverable in the Middle East is a
seeming succession of water-destroyed levels in many excavations dated in the period
2600 to 3500 B. C. Raikes accepts these datings. I cannot, for I am compelled by many
other considerations in this book and others to assign the Biblical Flood to a time 500
to 1400 years earlier. That humans were civilized before the Flood is undoubted.
Whether there exist excavations from this period among the Middle East excavations has
to be determined by examining one site after another.
Judging by the way the tide advanced and retreated, there would not have been a total
dredging and destruction of already buried antediluvian sites but probably a complete
extirpation of diluvian settlements. There should therefore be a rupture and hiatus
between ante-diluvian and post-diluvian cultures. Probably the distinction ordinarily
made between Paleolithic and Neolithic ages directs itself unwittingly at this
catastrophic break.
Hence the Great Archaeological Debate over the Deluge of Noah has probably not been
treating of the Deluge at all, but has been trying to force lesser floods of later eras
upon the legendary accounts of the great Saturnian floodtime. Nor was Velikovsky of a
precise opinion in these matters. It is in the hiatuses between Paleolithic and
Neolithic that one must search for evidence of the Noachian-Saturnian-Gilgamish-Manu
world flood.
Tides may be aquatic, but readily transport denser bodies. The velocity of water is as
significant as its volume for carriage. Moving currents carry to the sixth power of
their velocity. If a stream of volume "X" were to move at 2 km/ h it would carry 64
times the load it could carry if it moved at 1 km/ h. Tidal transport is scarcely less
powerful.
Tides can stretch for great lengths and in all directions. Those who like to imagine
that the Exodus tide was limited ignore the evidence that the Red Sea was in motion.
Moreover, they overlook the fact that unidimensional tides are practically restricted
to hurricanes. A splash, a large-body pass-by, an explosion or a deluge summons a 360
degree tidal effect.
The speed of tides is swift unless remote bodies are their cause, as with the daily
tides of the Moon. The appearance of the tidal effect during the Exodus, long after the
first plague signaled the approaching comet, indicates a remote and approaching body.
The Navajo say that on the occasion of the world flood (which cannot be precisely
named) the animals had been running from east to west for days before they saw a semi-
circle of water moving, like a mountain range, towards them from the east. By the next
day the waters were upon them and only those who had reached the nearby mountain-tops
survived. The tidal flood was preceded by a bright light in the east, an indication
that an incandescent body was in the sky [11] . Again the speed was relatively slow
compared with the tidal waves from hurricanes, explosions, earthquakes, and falling
bodies.
The amplitude of tidal waves will vary greatly. Historical explosions have raised waves
of 85 meters, as in the Krakatoan case. Earthquakes, as in Alaska, have done as much
too. The Thera volcanic tsunami of circa 1000 B. C., is thought to have raised higher
tidal waves than Krakatoa. As we have said, an exoterrestrial body may raise tides
kilometers high. Adding to the rain-flood from a deluge would be the flash-flood, the
destruction wrought by fast-draining rain waters. Ancient times witnessed flash floods
of great scope and intensity under deluge conditions. Heavy deluge waters filled the
rivers and ocean canyons of the world; they poured off the mountains in the Deluge of
Noah, and legendary heroes from Columbia, China and elsewhere earned their glory from
engineering the escape of the floods.
A non-tidal moving flood is caused by the bursting of barriers: a natural dam blocks
and collects water and then collapses. Some of the behavior and landscaping to be
expected of great tides and floods are exemplified in the Channeled Scablands (Wash.,
U. S. A). They are 15,000 square miles of effects of a barrier burst flood; they were
not made by a tide, not directly at least. Some 100,000 miles of this section of North
America are thickly covered with lava, in places more than 10,000 feet thick, which can
be ascribed to the immense volcanism incurred when the American continent traveled
westwards over the global fracture of the East Pacific area. This might have been
around 11,500 years ago, not the 10 to 30 million years conventionally given to the set
of events. The whole area was then covered with silt and loess.
The Scablands are a water sculpture of this lava surface. Expert opinion asserts that a
barrier of ice corked a mountain pass and caused a Glacial Lake Missoula to form. The
Lake was half the volume of present-day Lake Michigan, but pitched high above sea
level. The lake, it is thought, was of short duration and finally overflowed. The water
cut through the ice cork. (The immediate cause may have been Earth movements.) "Within
a very short time -perhaps no more than a day or two -the ice dam was destroyed and the
contents of the lake were released." [12] So reads a tourist bulletin on the area. A
maximum speed of 45 miles per hour has been assigned to the resulting flood, and a
maximum rate of flow ten times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world today.
A luxuriant biosphere was wiped out, including large mammals, camels, bison, antelope,
and, to my thinking, humans. I add "humans" partly because a doll was found in clay
below 150 feet of lava, not far east of the same lava field, at Nampa, Idaho.
The flood plucked and transported huge blocks of basalt. It flayed the basalt of its
skin of loess. It dug channels in the basalt more than 200 feet in depth, and one of 8
miles in width. It made instant falls and plunge pools and eroded them backwards
quickly. When the waters slowed they began to dump debris, some 500 square miles of it,
to a depth of over 125 feet. The flood crest lasted a day or so, the main flood 2 to 3
weeks. Today, a satellite photo taken from 569 miles up shows the ramified and
interlacing channelways of the flood cutting through the loess into the basalt, and
then generally the unvegetated region around them.
The barrier-burst flood theory originated with Professor J. H. Bretz of the University
of Chicago and was not accepted for many years because it was catastrophic. [13] In
fact, the theory can be pressed further in the direction of radical catastrophism.
First there are the reaffirmations of certain catastrophic doctrines. Energy kills
time. Buttes, ravines, and river channels can be carved from dense rock in days. A
biosphere can be destroyed down to bedrock in a single rush. Broad river channels are
sculpted immediately through deep soil and loose rock. Giant gravel ripples are laid
down; hills are fashioned; long steep slopes are fashioned Ó la minute. Heavy stones
are sown far and wide, the famous "eccentrics." Basalt is stripped to form monumental
columns.
A catastrophist still may not rest content with the analysis. Why, he can ask, is the
volcanic base of the region timed so long ago and why is the volcanism supposed to have
required intervals of thousands or millions of years to be laid down deeply? What water
did in a month could be equaled and surpassed by lava in a few years.
It is thought that glacial Lake Missoula formed 18 to 20 thousand years ago. Also it is
said that several smaller lakes had formed in the same way and been discharged in the
same manner. That is, the glacial ice lobe plugged the escape gap and pulled the plug
several times. The previous logic holds here too: ice can form slowly or fast; climates
change slowly or fast; plugs must be pulled in tempo with these fluctuations.
Moreover, plugs can be placed or pulled tectonically, perhaps without the use of ice;
the Earth shakes and gaps are blocked; another shake and the blockage bursts. More
generally, suppose that the lava-paving occurred in the first phase of "Lunaria"
(11,500 to 10,500 B. P.), after the Moon explosion, global fracture and the mountain-
building thrusts and folds from the north. The high canopies are still descending and
drenching the northern areas. The waters drain down the old raised glacial valleys and
new ravines. The tectonic scenario of Lake Missoula goes into effect.
The area through which the flood raged is tipped to the southwest and the waters of the
flood drained that way. The land is supposed to have tilted after the lava beds were
laid. The tilting actually might have been responsible for the uncorking of Lake
Missoula. Such extraordinary seismism would have been heavily felt in the Lake area.
Nor may the heavy loess coverings of the basalt give more than brief pause. Credited to
wind-blown erosion material, it is not clear where such heavy dust would have
originated or what climate brought such strong winds to transport it. Wherever it came
from should contain the "mother lode"; where is it? This deep frosting was laid down by
exoterrestrial sources, a cometary train, some would say. Others may claim that the
loess or silt is a deposit from the inutterably greater thrust and fold phase of the
ice cap avalanche and crustal movement, with contributions of ashes from biospheric and
volcanic fire. By the time the scablands were etched upon the surface, the fires had
been banked and the Earth was settling down.
The Scablands, we recall, are supposed to have registered several floods in succession
from the same general source, glacial waters. I collapsed these somewhat and placed the
Uranian-Lunarian deluge-avalanche-uplift period earlier. The Saturnian deluge and tidal
flood would have come later, and contributed to a huge rise of waters drawn by a
passing comet, which moved from place to place, drawn upwards and penetrating barriers
and then withdrew as the attractive force was withdrawn. I have not attempted to say
whether the Venusian episodes drowned and scoured the Scablands; when one thinks of the
shrinking times allotted to ice ages, Lake Lakontan, Niagara Falls, and a great many
"post-glacial" lakes, one should not be surprised if the Scablands Flood was a much
later event and that my guess is too old.
Across the world from the Scablands are Mesopotamia and India, whose peoples claim
great floods as part of their historical experiences. These floods -were they
originally from deluges or tides? Comparisons with the Scablands may be useful. In all
cases, the tradition claims several great floods. Just as the Greeks had at least three
floods, the Indians seem to have had their flood of Manu and the flood of the Gariga
region, both described in the Puranas.
Both were disastrous, and we need not doubt that, as with the Scablands, other floods
occurred from time to time. A similar series seems to have happened in Mesopotamia,
where for centuries controversy over the number and extent of floods has raged.
However a hydraulic engineer and scholar, Robert Raikes, has given close attention to
the literature of archaeology and to the topography of the reported events; Raikes
favors a non-catastrophic approach which, to his annoyance, has been deemed by many
others to be a catastrophic approach. So he is in somewhat the same seesawing position
as Bretz of Scablands fame.
Let us take up the Indian case first. Here, on the one side, are the true
catastrophists, religious or scientific, who say that the Indus civilization was
wrecked by the mid-second millennium Venusian events -mostly earth movements and tidal
floods. In full opposition, the uniformitarian extremist would be one scholar
(Fairservis) who deems the Indus culture to have declined because of economic
extravagance and poor ecological practices, until finally the Aryans of the northern
plateau could swoop down upon the remains [14] .
The area under discussion is of great size. The influence and interconnections of the
Indus and probably pre-Indus culture were most extensive -at least from today's Iran on
the north to China on the east, to Arabia and Africa in the west and south to the
islands of the South Seas.
Raikes finds in the Indus River Valley evidence of repeated flooding and of attempts to
build against the flooding, until finally about 1500 the Valley was abandoned. He finds
reprehensible "a general tendency to ascribe the abandonment of prehistoric sites to
climate changes" without quantification of the degree of change beyond normal
variations; also quite wrong is "the over-simplification which is to ascribe
abandonments of sites to regional, or even world-wide periods of tectonic
catastrophes." [15]
"Many archaeologists believe that at Mohenjodaro an extreme flood event or a series of
them account for the great depth of silt/ clay which has buried 11 or 12 meters depth
of occupation levels under the present flood plain." Raikes traces the cause of
flooding to "a combination of tectonically caused damming of a part of the Indus south
of Mohenjodaro coupled with the division of Indus flows between the Nara channel and
that of the Indus proper." Behind the tectonism may have been a rising seacoast,
together with "extensive mud extrusions (including mud volcanoes) still active..."
"Both the flood deposits and the evidence of rebuilding occur at a great many different
levels." Thought Raikes, perhaps the people built, were flooded, rebuilt, and so on,
always keeping just above the new water levels. But why did the act not go on
indefinitely, so that when the river finally settled itself the people might be still
around and flourishing? They either abandoned the culture or they were destroyed. One
can imagine that silt (loess, clay) can be laid down by comet trains. Also from far off
multiple volcanism and cyclones. Or the tectonism, that Raikes tries to contain, was
far more extensive. The seacoast and mountains were rising rapidly. Dams were
tectonically built and burst as at the Scablands. The elapsed time from damming to
filling to flood "would have been very short," in Raikes own words.
Raikes suggests similar events at Chanhu-daro. He refers to "other uplift episodes," in
the same article. And in another to "a general, if less marked," raising of the Indus
flood-plain to the south, at Sehwan. He believes that "there has been no climatic trend
toward either wetter or dryer conditions since Harappan times," so again turns to a
stress upon tectonism [16] .
Many sites, particularly in the Baluchistan region, north of Mohenjodaro, show signs of
a destruction by burning. Harappen centers were not flooded. Abandonment was sudden in
these and other places after which they stood empty for centuries. Yet "one fails to
see any evidence of the hill raiders who supposedly brought Harappa to its knees."
B. B. Lal turned his attention to the phenomenon of a wide scattering of copper pieces
and Ocher Color Ware in the present Delhi area of India. They are found over a huge
area of 60,000 km 2 [17] . At Bahabrabad, for example, the pottery and copper objects
had been strewn in a level six meters below ground, and had been covered by sand,
pebbles and earth. The hypothesis was a veritable "deluge." Tectonism is blamed, with
or without a deluge, possibly through the mud dam mechanism or river diversion.
The Indian flood area, whether once devastated or several times over, includes the
famous fossil beds of the Siwalik hills. These are foothills of the Himalayas, north of
Delhi. They are crammed with hordes of specimens of a great many species. Many of them
appear for the first time in these beds and are extinguished in them, so far as
paleontologists know.
In the Geology of India, D. N. Wadia writes [18] , "This sudden bursting on the stage
of such a varied population of herbivores, carnivores, rodents and of primates, the
highest order of mammals, must be regarded as a most remarkable instance of rapid
evolution of species." Tortoises of over six meters, two dozen species of elephant,
pigs, oxen, and apes are scattered about. There are signs of earthquake, folding of the
land, perhaps folding and deep burial of animals.
Similar deposits are found 1300 miles away in Burma, cut away to view in the valley of
the Irawaddy River. Two great zones of fossils are separated by 4000 feet of sand.
Petrified trees pervade the fossils in the thousands. Writes Velikovsky: "Animals met
death and extinction by the elementary forces of nature, which also uprooted forests
and from Kashmir to Indo-China threw sand over species and genera in mountains
thousands of feet high." [19]
Other instances may be added to extend the area involved in disaster much further,
probably to the limits of proto-Indian civilization, and indeed throughout the world.
The dates are hinging upon 1500 B. C. in many instances. Therefore, it would seem
reasonable to place Raikes' work on the revolutionary shelf; try as he may to limit it,
his evidence and own conjectures press in the direction of general catastrophe.
What emerges from Raikes' complex analysis is that in the Old and Middle Bronze Age -
and particularly at the age-break between Middle and Late Bronze -there is proof of
various terrific floods to which all known settlements succumbed. Raikes inclines,
after considering six possibilities, towards a land subsidance on a large scale
complementing a land rise to the east.
He does not mention the backup of river waters that would occur from Thira-type
tsunamis driving north through the Persian Gulf, although the evidence allows it. Such
tides could come from a Typhonic impact explosion, a poseidonian earthquake, or a
large-body encounter producing an axial tilt or interrupted rotation of the globe. (One
notes the level of ashes and char beneath the flood level of Shurrupak. It does not
appear to have been an incendiary blaze.) He does not consider canopy water-drops, but
insists upon retrojecting uniformly precipitation rates from modern times. Although the
evidence of the period which he is examining is disordered and prejudiced already, yet
the evidence that he must confront shows a flooding that is utterly devastating, and
unexampled in recent times. But still, he draws back from catastrophic conclusions,
loath to abandon the dogma that catastrophe could not have happened, and certainly not
an exoterrestrial one.
Since large upthrusts of the Himalayan mountains are now being dated to post-glacial
times [20] , since even mountains much higher than the Siwalik foothills contain "old"
marine fossil beds, since the Siwalik-type beds are so young even when conventionally
dated, since evidences occur of huge waves of translation moving from south to north in
India and leaving great moraines (including the Siwalik-type hills), since neolithic
stones are found in the loess of the Himalayas and since great human cultures were
flooded over and probably deluged as well, one is entitled to the quantavolutionary
hypothesis: a series of abrupt, intensive, wide-scale changes overwhelmed the Indian
subcontinent.
Frantic proliferation and extinction of species occurred, while India broke from Africa
and crashed into Asia, while tides moved over the land, ramming, ripping, rising, and
drowning, while the land raised up in a great arc into Asia, while hominids, then
humans, entered and built cultures that were then destroyed and recreated. It may be
that from this part of the world will come the easiest and fullest proofs of
revolutionary primevalogy, of a succession of geological and cultural ages coinciding
with the successive disruptions of what had been Solaria Binaria.
Dwarfing the Scablands and Indus barrier floods was the Gobi Sea flood, which may have
been connected with the complex Noachian Flood. Thomas Huxley wrote the first scenario
of the event. Bellamy refurbished the story in this century [21] . The Gobi desert,
which the Chinese call "the Sea of Sand," was once a great body of water. Numerous
settlements lined its shores. Then suddenly it was emptied in a huge barrier-type
flood. Its cultures disappeared along with a great many other settlements along the
line of the flood. The western barrier of the Gobi Sea broke between Tian Shan and
Altai mountains, and rushed through where today remain the waters of Telli-nor, Ebi-
nor, Ala-kul, Sasyk-kul and Lake Balkhash, much of it now saline and disappearing. The
great flood spread out into a "Sea of Turkestan" and then drained down into the
depression of the Aral and Caspian Seas.
It then poured out between the Ural mountains and the mountains of northern Iran,
descended west through the Manych Depression into the Valley of the Don, the Sea of
Azov, and the Black Sea. The areas of today's Romania and Bulgaria were temporarily
part of a greater Black Sea. Soon it overflowed at the straits of the Bosphorus and
pushed through the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean region. The Aegean and Eastern
Mediterranean lands were flooded.
Next the Adriatic River, possibly the legendary River of Eridanus, and nowadays the
truncated Po River, was turned into an Adriatic Sea. The Ionian Sea overflowed and the
land bridges between Italy and Africa were covered with water. The shelves of the
region of Tyrrhenia were submerged, the survivors driven to the high places of the
Italian peninsula and islands, and contact was ultimately made with Gibraltar.
The Sahara basin may have been filled with water upon this occasion, to have become the
ancient sea of Triton. It was this Tritonian Sea that figured in the mythical birth of
Goddess Pallas Athena (the planet Venus) and I think that it was around 3500 B. P.,
therefore, when the Tritonian Sea broke out and threw itself into the Atlantic Basin.
Ancient Saharan ruins and the art of the Ahaggar mountain caves amply testify to the
ancient cultures there between 4000-1500 B. C.
The elapsed time for the 4000-mile journey from China may have been months or years.
The drainage of the several temporary basins established en route from East Asia to the
Atlantic Ocean occupied centuries. Barrier-burst floods and tides must have been
numerous, we conclude, because of the mountain-building, severe faulting, deluging, and
other movements and outbursts that were occurring. Both actions would have been quite
unexpected and erratic. They would have devastated the biosphere. Evidence of both
effects comes sometimes from jumbled deposits of animal bones and wood. These locations
consist of different species, that were killed suddenly (not by men), by the hundreds
or thousands, and were transported to the location, by tides of water but in some cases
also by hurricane and cyclonic action. In the Yukon Valley of Alaska, bulldozers
scraping for gold have removed bones by the ton and drills have picked up bones
hundreds of meters below ground. Such evidence exists around the world, and much more
will be said on the subject in Chapter 26.
The number of fossil deposits will probably be extended to many hundreds of cases in
the future. Still, most deposits would have been destroyed at the moment of
catastrophe. Fires would have burned others. Impenetrable ice covers many bone piles. A
succession of revolutionary actions would have blown to bits, dissipated, ground up,
converted to fuels, washed into the sea, and deeply buried many others. The scenes at
bone deposits are impressive: they are worldwide; they are found at low and high
altitudes. Strange bedmates are discovered: ostriches and foxes; mammoths and lions;
peacocks and horses; elephants and sharks.
Anthropologist Frank Hibben surveyed the bone mucks of Alaska and heard of similar
deposits in nearby Siberia. The Arctic Ocean is in fact rimmed by the bones of many
millions of animals. Hibben weighed the possibilities: hunters' overkill, ice flows,
natural death, volcanic ash burials (ashes are abundant in the muck), volcanic gases?
The mystery seemed to him unsolvable. He wrote of it in 1947; he revised his work in
1967 [22] . There is no indication that he had heard meanwhile about Velikovsky,
Hapgood, Patten, or Cook who were offering solutions to the mystery in terms of
Cuvier's century-old expression -"revolutions of the globe." Derek Ager, with a mind
and eye for the catastrophic occurrence, remarks that "tsunami, ' or 'tidal waves' as
they were for long misnamed, have an immense effect on shorelines, both in erosion and
in the shifting of great quantities of sediment." [23] But what parcel of land in the
world has never experienced a tsunami?
"It is generally accepted that tsunamis are usually triggered by earthquakes or violent
volcanic explosions. It is also possible that they can be produced by the slumping of
large masses of sediment in water..." Or by meteoroid splashes, we might add, or
hurricanes and cyclones. "Though infrequent, there are certainly enough of them for
geological purposes. From historical records it can be deduced that there have been
more than two hundred notable tsunamis in the last two thousand years; this would allow
us more than 100,000 in a million years."
Then move the continents a little here and there, raise and lower shorelines, change
climates a few times, and add ten, fifty, a hundred million years. We have millions of
great tsunamis to work with. Obviously the whole surface of the Earth will have been
worked over a number of times by ordinary, uniformitarian waves. Thereupon add all the
other high-energy forms: deluges, exoterrestrial impacts, volcanism, and so on: it is a
wonder that the crust of the Earth is not a homogenous finely ground mixture of all
past life and surfacing rocks. Now add great catastrophes elaborated in this book and
the homogenous mixture should be guaranteed.
That is, stratigraphy is hardly understandable by following uniformitarian principles,
if we acknowledge what scientists have all along been discovering, but more recently
have become acutely aware of. Even if, as Ager writes, "the changes do not take place
gradually but as sporadic bursts, as a series of minor catastrophes," the strata of the
Earth do not make sense.
Those who believe in major catastrophes interrupting huge serene tracts of time may be
wrong, because they must add to the effects of the great disasters the effects of a
multitude of minor ones called for during great stretches of "peaceful" time. The
result would be a homogenized crust. The effects of the forces that have operated are
such as to suggest for the Earth a short and recently catastrophic history. The Earth's
surface still retains its forms and fossils because its tortures have been clustered
and have occurred following a short total Earth history.
Notes (Chapter Fourteen: Floods and Tides)
1. PensÚe (1974), 71.
2. 215 Science (Jan. 22), 4531.
3. Op. cit., 65, 61.
4. R. E. Kofahl, "Could the Flood Waters Have Come from a Canopy or Extraterrestrial
Source?" 13 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (March, 1977), 202-6.
5. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 7-9, 38-9.
5A. C. L. Ellenberger, ltr., VIII Kronos (1982), 94-5.
6. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 70-6.
7. Bellamy, M. M. M., op. cit., 257.
8. Op. cit.
9. Book 96 (lost) quoted by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, by Whiston, and by
Patten, op. cit., 61.
10. R. L. Raikes, Unpubl. paper, "Ecological Role of Extreme but Predictable Climate
Events on Prehistory with some examples, for comparison, of Unpredictable Events and
Their Consequences;" "The Physical Evidence of Noah's Flood," 28 I Rag part I, 52-63.
12. The Channelled Scablands of Eastern Washington (U. S. Govt. Printing Office, Wash.
D. C., 1974).
13. J. H. Bretz, "The Lake Missoula Floods and the Channelled Scabland," 77 J. Geol..
(1969), 503-43. The original work was published in 1923.
14. See Gil. Possehl, "The Mohenjo-daro Flood," 69 Am. Anthrop. I (1967), 32-40,
opposing views such as Raikes, 66 Amer. Anthrop. (1964), 284-9 and see below, fn 16.
15. Op. cit., fn 10 (unpubl. paper).
16. " The Mohenjo-Daro Floods," 39 Antiquity (1965), 196-203, 203.
17. " A Deluge? Which Deluge?" 70 Amer. Anthrop. 5( 1968), 857-63.
18. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 79.
19. Ibid., 21.
20. Ibid., 74-8.
21. Bellamy, M. M. M., op. cit., 308-16.
22. The Lost Americans (NY: Crowell, 1968).
23. Op. cit., 45.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part III: Hydrology
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ICE FIELDS OF THE EARTH
The earliest humans had to contend with growing ice caps and glacial fields, or at least
some force that created their effects. Did the Great Ice Ages really happen? For a
century the confident answer of science has been "yes." The idea is fetching; so much
ice surrounds the north and south poles now that it seems reasonable that once there was
even more, and probably once there was less, or none at all. At peak time, an estimated
30% of the Earth's land surface was covered by ice, three times the area occupied by ice
today; this was as late as 11,000 years ago, or so it is believed.
When Emiliani discovered evidence that the Gulf of Mexico was for a time freshwater, he
posited a rapid end to the Ice Ages and a flooding which may have drowned the mythical
Atlantis culture, since the time (ca. 11,600 B. P.) conforms to Plato's date of the
disaster. The surmise engendered sharp criticisms, allowing even historians to get into
the act [1] .
It seems that everyone believes that the ice cameth and each has an individual scenario,
which is not complete unless it contains quotas of confusion and contradictions. If one
wishes to spend a lifetime solving a puzzle while wrapped in an enigma, a career in
paleoglaciology is recommended. One can scarcely blame an amateur from enjoying and even
tolerating Donnelly's old idea that the ice ages never existed. Next best, one can call
down the ice (or most of it) from outer space, as we do here. And so does Patten. Third
best would be the Milankovich theory which depends upon cosmic perturbations in Earth-
Sun transactions, but lets Earth manufacture the ice. John and K. P. Imbrie have updated
and defended the theory, which, highly complicated in itself, is also confounded by the
uncertainties of paleoclimatic studies [2] .
Hard evidence that a set of ice ages occurred falls into several categories, as follows:
Certain northern lands near the present ice are rising, as if a large load had been
lifted from them. They seem to form arcs with Baffin Bay as an old geographical pole and
center of an ice cap. (The western rising arc is separated from the eastern arc, as if
they had been pulled apart.) An issue occurs if one asserts that the rising would ensue
from a shifting of the Earth's axis and North Pole, regardless of the presence of ice.
Far to the South of the present Arctic ice, and far to the north of the present
Antarctic ice, the rocks and soils show peculiar qualities. Huge areas of rock are
scoured and scratched as if some gigantic force has scraped over them, now advancing and
then again retreating. Immense fields of stones (or drift) have been pushed and shoved
into place, as if by moving ice. An issue occurs if one asserts that tides and
exoterrestrial stone fall-outs had produced the fields.
Glaciers, formed on mountaintops around the world, take their origin usually in a U-
shaped nook of a mountain. Their ice forms and slowly slides downwards through valleys,
carrying drift and ending in melting waters. They abrade and pluck the drift as they go
along. They are broad, and they terminate in broad curls, from which streams form and
run off. Many "extinct" glacier forms exist, indicating that once there may have been
much more cold and ice. That is, unless these "fossil" glaciers were pointed towards the
sun in a global Earth tilt, and melted, or once were a part of a large crustal lateral
avalanche that thrust whole areas away from the polar regions. Or unless exoterrestrial
ice were dumped upon higher places and melted away from lower places.
Heat is required in large amounts to raise water for the snow falls over glaciers as
well as polar regions. Some say the heat required would be too great for the biosphere
to tolerate unless the snow gathered by very slow increments; there is evidence that
"glacial ages" came and went rapidly. Further flora and fauna of the glacial age seas
are arctic types; then where were the sufficient warm seas whose waters would evaporate
and stream polewards as clouds? If cold water and snow fell from high cloud canopies, it
could persist at higher altitudes and latitudes and accumulate and flow.
In many settings, such as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, large plains end on the downslope
with a number of ponds and layer upon layer of sands, gravel, and clay. In it are
scratched stones and finely ground glacial flour. It seems that an ice sheet had once
moved downwards on all sides from a northerly direction, acting like a glacier on a
grand scale.
Humps, low ridges, occasional erratics (rocks foreign to where they are found), and
kettle pools (some dry) are scattered along the hypothetical front of the glacial sheet
and might well have been produced by the forward march and retreat of the flood of ice.
Futhermore, an ice sheet that moved down into North America all across the continent
blocked all northward flowing rivers; it created many lakes, some extinct like Lake
Agassiz, others extant like the Great Lakes. The ice sheet forced a southward fanning
out of many rivers, away from the ice front, to carry the melt waters. Once again, much,
if not all, of the work assigned to ice could have been performed by winds, tides,
exoterrestrial fall-outs of pebbles, dust and ice, extreme precipitation, and axial
tilts of the globe.
I have not mentioned climatic changes: a very cold climate, as evidenced by the kinds of
fossil flora and fauna discovered in old beds, indicates that a great deal of ice might
have been nearby. Nor have I ventured to say when the ice ages happened and how many of
them there might have been.
Full justice cannot be done here to the case for the ice ages. The conventional
literature does so. But because some of the ice age reasoning falls victim readily to
catastrophic claims, it may be time to advance the cause of quantavolution. Here three
different positions are held: one is that the Ice Ages did not occur. The second says
that they did exist but were sudden events, beginning and ending in disaster. A third
admits their slow development but claims that they ended in catastrophe.
Ignatius Donnelly is the best older critic of the very idea of ice ages. (Douglas Cox
has recently presented strong persistent objections to the reality of the ice ages.) [3]
In Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, Donnelly asserts first of all that there is no
evidence of the ice ages in the cold Siberian wastelands and parts of Alaska that
stretch up to the present Arctic ice. This is true enough. But, most catastrophists
believe that a sudden tilt of the Earth occurred in the last ice age and hence these
areas had not been so cold before then.
However, Donnelly proceeds. He argues that the debris of the called ice age -the pebble
fields, erratic stones, and vast clay and till deposits -are not caused by the movements
of ice at all. Rather they are the stuff of which the long tail of a comet is in part
composed and it was a comet that devastated the earth in the early memory of mankind.
Little was known of comets and comet tails in his days. Until the past few years,
scientists generally doubted that such substantial material was being transported around
the heavens. Indeed, Velikovsky came in for much ridicule when he wrote in the nineteen
fifties, in much greater detail and with stronger evidence, of the substantiality of
comets. (He did not adopt Donnelly's anti-theory of the ice ages, however.)
Today the immense material potentiality of comets is scarcely doubted. Ice and gases,
and otherwise terrestrial minerals found in meteoroids, are now accorded comets. Yet
Donnelly's theory has not been seriously criticized; we forget that geology once got
along without the ice ages, and that the inventor of the ice age theory, Louis Agassiz,
was a catastrophist. The immense drift and till deposits could have come from
exoterrestrial sources.
Although the analogies between glacial behavior and ice sheet behavior are numerous and
strong, it is possible that the ice did not exist and that the dead glacial moraines are
merely evidences of a cold climatic episode or episodes, not direct proof that they were
related to a larger ice age sheet that blanketed millions of square miles to a depth of
a kilometer and more.
Moreover, since the poles are flattened a bit from the spin of the Earth, would not the
old polar areas of a perhaps faster spinning Earth be still relaxing into a spherical
form? This would give a false impression of heavy ice caps having been removed. Further
the weight of the Wisconsin ice cap would have been 3.10 23 grams and 10 33 ergs of heat
would have been required to melt it. The melting would have taken at least 30,000 years,
yet there is near to a consensus even among uniformitarian geologists that the ice cap
disappeared rapidly, catastrophically. And the arctic land rising, mentioned earlier,
appears to have begun only 10,000 years ago.
Why I do not accept Donnelly's theory despite its brilliance has to do with the
correlative evidence going far off the straightforward discussion of ice ages. Some of
the reasoning emerges when the theory of Melvin Cook is explained. Cook writing in the
nineteen sixties, accepts the evidence for huge ice caps at both poles. Further he seeks
no exoterrestrial power. His theory is nonetheless the most perfect of catastrophic
models yet advanced. Ignoring the beginnings of the ice ages, but pursuing their end,
his story commences with the great ice caps.
These, he says, by their enormous and accumulating weight, bore down upon the crust so
heavily as finally to cause a rupture of the rim of the crater. The ice caps avalanched.
They scraped the earth as they moved. They acted as gigantic bulldozers that caused
mountain ranges to be thrust forward and buckled and folded upwards. Giant floods from
the rapid melts swept the earth.
The globe fractured and caused the continents to spread apart rapidly. The Atlantic
Ocean and the Arctic Ocean were opened up. In the end the surface of the earth was
greatly changed. A great many land and life forms, together with cultural centers, were
destroyed in the process. As the huge ice blocks descended, they turned over the
biosphere and folded it to create coal and oil deposits in a geological "instant."
Waters that were buried deeply are still rising under pressure. Yet the end came
quickly, occupying a few years, not millions of years.
The legends are definite but seemingly too rich. The northern peoples talk of terrible
ice falls and winters, far beyond historical experience, and perhaps long before history
as we gauge it. In Old Norse, the language of the Edda epics, snow is called eitr-ornir,
"white pus of the dragon." Martin Sieff writes: "Saturn is the solar system's 'treasury
of snow'... The Greeks associated the planet Saturn (Kronos) with snow and hail, which
were thought to be the planet-god's weapons; Nonnos told of the "shining victory of Zeus
at war and the hailstorm-snowstorm conflict of Kronos..." [4]
Could the ice have fallen from the skies? Examination of glaciers shows that there is a
gradation of consistency, from fresh fallen snow to dense ice, the dense ice being
older. No question but that, if snows fell heavily they would promptly turn into ice.
Further, the greater the falls, the swifter the glaciers would move and the longer and
greater their moraines.
Moreover, why should the ice ages occur in extremely distant as well as recent ages; how
do they come and go in stages, and concentrate most recently in a million years of the
recent Pleistocene epoch (which is the typical allotted time)? The Sun is invoked.
Whereas, on the one hand, the Sun is credited with great stability, on the other hand it
is presumed to have stoked its furnaces from time to time, causing the ice to form. But
back again. If the Sun cools, the equator cools; if the equator cools, waters evaporate
more slowly; there is less to be carried north and to drop in the form of snow.
Continental drift has been argued as the cause of ice ages: "The ultimate cause of
glaciation is thus seen to be movement of continents into appropriate latitudes... And
much of the fossil evidence upon which the time-honored concept of Tertiary 'cooling'
has been founded could be nothing more than a reflection of drifting of what are now the
northern-hemisphere land masses and ocean floors toward the pole and hence into cooler
climes." [5] Another theory holds that a huge number of tropical volcanos erupted at
once, which threw vast amounts of water into the air, which, because the upper
atmosphere was darkened, caused less sunlight to bombard and warm the Earth, which
finally caused the vapors to fall at the poles in the form of snow and ice [6] . Also,
Hibbin attests to many burials of pleistocene animals in ashes that fell after the ice
ages [7] . It should be borne in mind, however, that extensive simultaneous volcanism,
as well as the ice ages, points to exoterrestrial forces impinging on Earth.
The solution must be catastrophic, it appears, but must take a special form, which
elsewhere we have called Solaria Binaria. If it is consolation to the reader,
explanations of "the ice ages" have generally been bizarre and fantastic. Nothing less
may be expected of our theory here, unless, of course, the reader is conversant ahead of
time with our work. It is not unreasonable, we argue, to postulate a primordial age, as
recent as 14,000 years ago, when no ice caps existed. The Earth would have been
generally comfortable. It would be also enveloped in the gaseous atmosphere of the
binary magnetic tube. This Uranian heaven blocked direct sunlight, but afforded an
equable climate to the Earth.
The binary tube atmosphere would itself have been maintained by the same electrical and
inertial forces that kept the Earth in rotation and orbit. Then the solar system as a
whole was disturbed by the failure of one of its parts. The part that failed was the
counter-solar or Super-Uranian node of the binary solar system. When the electrical
current between the Sun and Super-Uranus diminished, the magnetic field around the
current diminished. All the bodies that circled around the current ceased orbiting
around the axis between Super-Uranus and the Sun and descended radially to the plane of
the ecliptic. They began to find new individual orbital paths around the Sun. They moved
out towards larger orbits.
The atmosphere, a remnant, specially attached to the Earth, of the old plenum
atmosphere, drew more closely about the Earth. "Heaven came down to embrace Earth," to
paraphrase the Greek myth. The clouds were pierced by material erupted from the
disintegrating Super-Uranus and blown down the magnetic tube between the binary
partners. Some of it precipitated upon the surface of the Earth. The Earth could not
melt much of the ice, most of which fell at the electrically least-guarded poles. The
now direct sunlight helped the friction of the fall to vaporize and precipitate some of
the ice as rain. Flooding began at the edges of the forming ice caps. The time
postulated for these events began about 14,000 years ago.
Within a few centuries the threat to life on Earth became extreme. Great ice blocks
covered the extremities and local regions of the globe and threatened ultimately to make
contact, erasing practically all life.. At the same time flooding spread throughout the
world.
If one-third of the globe was covered by ice at the time of maximum advance, according
to conventional theory, ice was piled three miles deep at the poles; there was twelve
million cubic miles of ice. For a hundred years catastrophists and disbelievers in the
ice ages have pointed out that an incredible power (heat and winds) was required to
evaporate equatorial water, lift it, and transport it to the polar areas. The world
would have burned up at the equator while freezing deeply at the poles. The idea
supplies its own contradiction; yet it is the accepted theory, that molecule by molecule
the water evaporated, drop by drop it condensed in vapor clouds, ton by ton it fell -
all off and on for a million years and more. Then the mechanism was turned off, rather
suddenly; much of the ice melted and the oceans rose by several hundred feet several
thousand years ago.
Direct exoterrestrial deposition of snow to form the caps follows from the heat
requirements to evaporate, lift, transport and condense as snow the contents of the ice
caps. The surface heat requirements might have stressed the biosphere life tolerances.
Further, in order to raise the required mass of water, the clouds transporting water
from tropical to arctic regions would become so dense that heat from the Sun of today
would cease to penetrate to the surface with sufficient energy to continue the lifting
task. The latent heat of aqueous vapor at the tropics is 1000 F. A pound of water
vaporized at the Equator has absorbed 1000 times the quantity of heat that would raise a
pound of water in temperature by one degree Fahrenheit.
An exoterrestrial catastrophic solution is called for, from beginning to end. The time
to erupt the Moon arrived with a passing great fragment of Super-Uranus. The Earth's
crust burst. Lava had to flow in endless streams. Great volumes of sky-borne ice must
have fallen and participated in the bursting mechanics. Cook has figured the needed
forces, but we should add an initial impetus from the eruption and blow-off of the
Pacific crust. A fracture shot to the old north pole and down the Atlantic, thence
around the world. The ice avalanched. It fed the boiling sea bottoms to help them settle
and expand. Much was then evaporated and precipitated again by the conventional method,
but under catastrophic conditions. Finally the new world surface shaped up and
stabilized. The precipitous curve of disaster dropped exponentially to the slight level
of activity where it could be mistaken for a linear uniformitarianism.
It was thus that the worst and best accident happened. The earth cleaved, lost most of
its continental crust, and the ocean basins began to form. This greatest of all
catastrophes removed the ice and permitted life to survive; it became the greatest of
all blessings. A date of 11,500 B. P. may be ascribed to the event.
The ice caps, as Cook has so well calculated the scene, collapsed and avalanched upon
all sides, moving into the great chasms of boiling lava directly or through floods that
rushed over the land and plunged down into the new oceanic chasms, carrying debris to
form slopes. Hundreds of deep canyons were grooved into the land and slopes around the
world, where they remain today, "fossils" from the time of ice age collapse and of the
filling of the ocean basins. The ice caves were formed -solid ice from the ice ages
sandwiched in between layers of once boiling lava flows, still intact, though hollowed
out somewhat, now refrigerating food and supplying age-old spring waters [8] .
Geologists have counted and recounted the number of ice ages and of interstadials, the
periods between stages. John Gribben, in a recent work on Forecasts, Famines and
Freezes, counts ten ice ages, of which one lasted only for a century or less. Paying no
attention in their "petrofabric analyses" to our impression that fossil "glacial and
stream deposits" could just as well come from comet-tail or meteoritic splashing,
geologists saw breaks of climate in the interruptions of moraines, where now a swelling
and then a shrinking may appear. In the soil found squeezed between strata of glacial
debris, there is also the suggestion of successive ice ages. Even the Arctic Ocean is
said to have been free of ice in Pliocene and Pleistocene times, on the basis of
calcareous nanno-fossil deposits below the present ice [9] . And another study, of the
Labrador shelf area, based on fossilized sediment cores, argues for an ice-free sea
extending back 21,000 years from the present [10] .
Over a mile deep in the Greenland ice field around Dye 3 radar station, Greenland, ice
cores are being drilled, extracted and analyzed [11] . From its rock base upwards, the
ice is expected to afford 100,000 years of Earth history and the beginning of at least
the local ice age (cf other estimates of 1 to 3 million years and our own of 14,000
years). Oxygen ratios in sampled slices of the drilled ice are calculated to determine
climatic trends and time scales. The units are "annual" ice varves. As depths increase,
the distinctions blur. Dust ratios are used as indicators of heavy volcanic events in
the world.
The stratification challenges any quantavolutionary attempt, as here, to explain the ice
accumulation as a brief episode. Obviously the ice under examination did not fall as
blocks, at least not most of it, or, if it did so fall in the region, the blocks
splattered and connected up or flowed afterwards under weight, internal pressure and
heat, picking up atmospheric exposure and dust.
Heavy snowfalls, whirled about by heavy winds, would, however, establish the great depth
in short order, in dozens or several thousands of years, with present snowfall adding
steadily to the basic conserved precipitation. It is noted that at an estimated 10,000
years, the "ice age" deposits of tiny crystals end and the large ice crystals of the
present era begin. For those who are disturbed by only 100,000 years for the Greenland
ice cap, because of ice age theories of a million years, there is the consolation that
the ice beneath relentlessly squeezes out to form icebergs that search out more southern
climes.
Interpretations that seek a long drawn-out succession of uniform deposits may be an
illusion of sorts. The evidence rather may indicate the erratic character of the ice
falls, both in intensity and distribution over the Earth's surface. It may also indicate
a wobbling of the axis of the Earth as its electrical fields changed and its motions
within the solar system altered. Whether the globe changed geographical axis once, with
such gradualness that it scarcely wobbled, or whether it changed once quickly and
wobbled several times before settling down in its new position, or whether the
geographical axis changed several times in several hundreds or thousands of years, an
illusion of several ice ages and subdivisions thereof might be fostered.
Faced with the problem of explaining the chalk cliffs of Etretat (France) across from
Dover, which are laminated, French geologists have tried to establish a correlation
between the laminations and the oscillations of the axis of the Earth. The oscillations
occur some 23,000 to 41,000 years apart, the sedimentary layers are individually
accorded 20,000 to 40,000 years. Voila, as the Earth rocks, the sea level and the
biological activity of the sea rise and fall, as evidenced in the layers. "But how
explain that such feeble orbital variations should be capable of engendering such
important changes? The problem," wrote a group of French editors led by Serge Berg, "is
far from being clarified." Surely so; however, not only chalk sediments but also ice
layers could be deposited in a short time if the wobblings of the axis were greater and
more frequent, as is demanded in quantavolutionary theory. Strata of all kinds can be
laid down quickly, including strata that reflect and measure falling snow and ice.
Furthermore, as we have pointed out, unfossilized till deposits, possibly themselves
exoterrestrial, are used to denote recent and ancient ice ages. ".... The Huronian
super-group in the south of the Canadian Shield presents this evidence most
unambiguously. Three tillite levels are reported from that region .... corresponding to
three glacial periods separated by epochs of warm or even hot climatic regimes which
lasted some tens of millions of years." [12]
So, too, around the world, on every continent (whence geologists have deduced shifting
sidereal poles); thus "two principal tillites are dated isotopically at 870-820 MY and
at about 680 MY." These statements, by a pronounced quantavolutionist, L. J. Salop,
evidence the overall grip of conventional scientific theory on the scientific mind, for
it would be only consistent of Salop to query the origin of the tillites and then the
conventional view of many ancient and modern ice ages. The correlation of tillites with
ice ages is deceptive of time and causation. Why not repeated switches of a comet tail?
A late report, in the newsletter of Science and Technology (54: 2, 1982), describes an
area of the Huqf Desert of Oman where tillites on striated bedrock -taken as glaciation
-seem to be associated with oil reservoirs, and the complex is pronounced Early Permian
(-158 my), when coal is supposed to have formed as well from tropical vegetation. We see
no contradiction in ice striking hot tropics, provided the ice comes from the skies, and
provided that along with the ice one brings down stony till to gust along, scratching
the rocks. Here, however, one may dispense with the glaciation, which is predicated upon
the till; ice may or may not have fallen. One may also tie in the oil deposits with the
exoterrestrial source of the till, a comet. One may, moreover, hold in abeyance the
dates assigned to the events; the time may have been only thousands of years ago.
The ice ages, then, may be a product not of a million or more years, but of several
thousand years, from 14,000 B. P. to about 9000 B. P. At this latter time, there began a
settled and milder age, with a subdued binary, an equable climate under still cloudy
skies and two suns, the Sun and Saturn. This would be the renowned Golden Age of Saturn,
of which so many legends speak, an age following the revolt that dethroned the god
Uranus, the age before another great catastrophe, when the gods warred again and Jupiter
removed his father, Saturn. There occurred huge inundations, brighter skies, and the
present ice caps developed, shaped around the present geographical poles. The Antarctic
cap is largely contained on a land mass with an ice flow over its boundaries and into
the sea. The Arctic Sea was almost entirely a swamped continent, despite the rifts
through it, and received its ice directly upon this land in the transition from Saturn
to Jupiter. The extreme conditions of Earth fracture and ice avalanching encountered in
the critical period beginning at 11,500 B. P. would have destroyed all ice. Evidences of
mild climate and an abundant biosphere are present in both polar areas, some of this
presumably from the Saturnian interlude, most from pre-lunar times.
Thus far, no human vestiges have been discovered where once the Uranian ice cap lay. The
turbulent moving ice would have erased all such evidence down to a considerable depth of
rock, even in the absence of land thrusts, flood, wind and fire. Certainly humans
retreated to warmer climates in the face of the icy tempests. Still, primates, proto-
humans and homo sapiens lived among the animals whose remains have been found under ice
and permafrost. Whether a long-term date (like two million years) or a short-term date
such as I suggest here is adopted, these species existed before the ice and they may one
day provide new fossil discoveries.
There is an old map, called the Piri Reis map, that shows perhaps the coastline of the
Antarctic continent as it would have appeared in the interim between the settling down
from the great ice cap collapse and crustal shifts of Lunaria and the new ice caps of
Jovea that remain today. That would be during the "Golden Age" of Saturn. The Piri Reis
map is the subject of a book by Charles Hapgood, who also provided a singular theory of
ice cap avalanche with a mechanism different than Cook's. (Einstein thought Hapgood's
idea that the ice cap would have shoved the continental crust on a wedge principle to be
mechanically acceptable [13] .)
I incline to the view that the map, which was drawn up from various old sources a few
years after Columbus anchored off Santo Domingo, plots the shores of Antarctica well
because, during the Saturnian period, a mild cloudy climate prevailed, the southern
oceans and shores were free of ice, and navigation was well developed. Probably human
settlements then existed in Antarctica as they did in many places in the far north that
are now encased in ice or permafrosted.
We speculate that the "ice ages" did happen, first in Uranian, then in Jovian times.
Much of the Earth was frozen. The ice was mainly exoterrestrial. Vsekhsviatskii writes
of Saturn that "observation of its rings over the past 300 years have shown that during
this time the middle line has moved 0.17 of its original distance closer to the surface
of the planet. Therefore, one may suppose that in a matter of some 1800 years a large
part of the material in Ring B will fall onto the surface." [14] We are here back to
visualizing Vail's canopy drops, from primeval sources, or as a way-station. But a
Saturnian explosion, not a falling of Saturn's rings, deluged the Earth with ice.
Saturn's rings today may be fall-back debris of the same incident, still falling back.
The ice came down with falls of gravel and tillites. The great Ice Age extended from
about 14,000 to 11,500 B. P. During this time the Earth was wobbling, the atmosphere
turbulent and the deposits of ice were eccentric. Life would have been exterminated by
the spread of ice and flooding if the greatest of all catastrophes had not cleaved the
Earth and formed the ocean basins. Then ice and waters avalanched or fell into the
basins as these grew in size, filling them ultimately over their brims.
The present ice age began in proto-historical times. Saturn's explosion drenched Earth
with water and ice and the terrestrial axis tilted as a result of the explosive force.
The age of "Jupiter of the Bright Skies," as the Greeks significantly denominated him,
began; the skies were clearer and the climate colder because of the tilt; the high
canopy was almost quite gone leaving merely the present upper atmospheric levels and
magnetosphere of Earth. Ice began to gather around the northern and southern poles,
drifting over the cultures of the age of Saturn [15] .
Notes (Chapter Fifteen: Ice Fields of the Earth)
1. 189 Science (1975) 1083; 193 Science (1976), 1268-71.
2. Ice Ages (Short Hills, N. J.: Enslow, 1979); cf. Ian Cornwall, Ice Ages (NY:
Humanities Press, 1970); Bj÷rn KurtÚn, The Ice Age (NY: Putnam, 1972); Clifford
Embleton, Glacial Geomorphology (NY: Wiley, 1975); Salop, op. cit. introduces cosmic
disturbance as causes of glaciation, too, as does Pattern, op. cit.
3. 13 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (June 1976), 25-34.
4. S. I. S. Workshop (Mar, 1978), 4.
5. C. B. Beaty, "The Causes of Glaciation," 66 Amer. Sci. 4( July 1978), 452-9, 458.
6. J. R. Bray, "Volcanism and Glaciation During the Past 40 Millennia," 252 Nature (20
Dec. 1974), 679-80.
7. The Lost Americans, 163.
8. Patten, op. cit., 120-4.
9. T. R. Worsley and Yvonne Herman, 210 Science (17 Oct. 1980), 323-5.
10. G. Vilks and Peta J. Mudie, 202 Science (15 Dec. 1978), 1181-3.
11. See Walter Sullivan, N Y Times, Aug. 9, 1981, 1, 24.
12. Salop, op. cit., 23 ff.
13. The Path of The Pole (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1970).
14. "Physical Characteristics of Comets," (Moscow, 1958), NASA-TTF-80.
15. Flavio Barbiero, Una Civiltß sotto Ghiaccio (Milan: Nord, 1974).
16. 178 Science (13 oct. 1972), 190-1.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part IV: Crustal Turbulence
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EARTHQUAKES
The ancients may have been more familiar with earthquakes than modern man:
... The earth shook and trembled... the foundations also of the hills moved and were
shaken... Then the channels of the waters were seen... and the foundations of the world
were discovered.,. The mountains skipped like rams... [The divine power] removes the
mountains... overturns them... shakes the earth out of her place.
In these and many more lines, the Hebrew Psalmists commemorated times of catastrophe.
World myth contains thousands of such songs and stories. Some can be located in time;
most cannot. But, little by little, the science of myth will move to help the science of
the Earth; and geology will move to interpret mythology. Then the ages of quantavolution
will assume a clearer shape.
The deep valleys, rifts, and canyons of the globe will soon here be assigned to the
greatest of movements. The Earth cleaved; the continents broke up and were rafted into
place. At the same time and on later occasions, many places on Earth sank into the
depths. These might all be called earthquakes, although they are global events.
A great but conventional earthquake would be described as in the following testimony of
a resident about the New Madrid, Mo., earthquakes:
The first shock came at 2. a. m., December 16, 1811, and was so severe that big houses
and chimneys were shaken down, and at half-hour intervals light shocks were felt until 7
a. m., when a rumbling like distant thunder was heard, and in about an instant the earth
began to totter and shake so that persons could neither stand nor walk. The earth was
observed to roll in waves a few feet high, with visible depressions between. By and by
these swells burst, throwing up large volumes of water, sand, and coal. Some was partly
coated with what seemed to be sulphur. When the swells burst, fissures were left running
in a northern and southern direction, and parallel for miles. Some were 5 miles long, 4
1/ 2 feet deep, and 10 feet wide. The rumbling appeared to come from the west and travel
east. Similar shocks were heard at intervals until January 7, 1812, when another shock
came as severe as the first. Then all except two families left, leaving behind them all
their property, which proved to be a total loss, as adventurers came and carried off
their goods in flat boats to Natchez and New Orleans, as well as their stock which they
could not slaughter. On February 17, there occurred another severe shock, having the
same effect as the others, and forming fissures and lakes. As the fissures varied in
size, the water, coal, and sand were thrown out to different heights of from 5 to 10
feet. Besides long and narrow fissures, there were others of an oval or circular form,
making long and deep basins some 100 yards wide, and deep enough to retain water in dry
seasons. The damaged and uptorn country embraced an area of 150 miles in circumference
[1] .
Earthquakes are most simply thought of as movements of large bodies of rock, whether of
a few tons or of the whole Earth. The rocks flow, flex or fracture. There may be two
sets of rocks that split and separated in times past, or which do so now: one moves up
and another down; or one slips alongside the other. Or one or both sets move apart or
one or both press together. Or one crawls over the other. Earthquakes may combine these
movements, so that one, or two, or all may happen at once.
The duration of the movement may be of seconds, or minutes. There may be a single
shaking or a series going on for days, and again repeated months later. (The ancients
cried to heaven over interminable tremblings, as when the Egyptians suffered them during
the days of the Hebrew Exodus.)
Electrical fields gather and play about the scene, beforehand, during, and afterwards.
The world may seem to be glowing with fire in the distance. The ground sends up thunder
and groans. It screams. It makes rattles like volleys of gunfire. Winds spring up and
blow hard. Waters are agitated; tidal waves sweep over the land; wellwaters sink; rivers
stop flowing or change their channels.
Animals often sense an earthquake in advance and show distress. Birds fly far, mammals
run off, lizards crawl out and away. People are of course terrified by the trembling,
they pray, they condemn their sins and those of other, they swear to reform, and curse
their government; they help each other or stand stupefied or behave like zombies [2] .
When the rocks move, man's world shakes and shatters.
Any force that disturbs the rocks causes the earth to quake. Pumping radioactive wastes
deep below ground caused earthquake tremors in Colorado a few years ago. A dynamite
explosion or a small meteoroid impact will cause one. Frequently earthquakes are
associated with volcanos. A map of the earthquake belts of the Earth is practically a
map of the areas of volcanism. The same forces must cause both. The primary force could
be an old one, unsettled, that is still working upon the rocks. Or it could be a new
force. But perhaps the old and the new force are identical: the new occurs now for the
first time; the old is what occurred some time ago. Is not the earth very old? Should it
not have settled down? Should not the rocks be stable? If so, then force from nowhere is
impossible.
Most of what is known empirically of the globe comes from earthquakes -earthquake shock
waves to be more precise. Hence, it is difficult to talk about how the interior of the
globe causes earthquakes, if indeed it does. Seismic waves can be made to register their
occurrence and intensity on seismographs set up to record and calibrate them. Many
thousands of earthquakes, mostly non-damaging, are thus registered around the world each
year. They shake the housing of a heavy pendulum which, itself unmoved, marks the
shaking on a graph; a reading of the graph indicates the magnitude of intensity on the
Richter scale.
The patterns of seismism around the world in recent history are easily described now.
One simply follows the Tethyan world belt, the world-girdling fracture (noting a greater
intensity where it passes beneath the land), and the island arcs off of East Asia.
Cases such as the New Madrid phenomenon mentioned above are less effected, although a
Mississippi Valley "earthquake region" has recently been described. Applying the
quantavolutionary ideas, one may point to recent "Ice Age" shifts of the Ohio and
Mississippi Rivers, which certainly denote earthquakes, and to the great load of
detritus that the lower Mississippi basin must be bearing: "Atlas Shrugs." For, in a
brief period, a large part of the North American continent surface rushed toward the
Gulf of Mexico in a slurry of ice, water, stone, vegetation, and soil. If enough
freshwater entered the gulf to freshen it, as Emiliani found, enough debris would
accompany the flood to burden the region and deform and fracture its rocks.
In a second indicative, a severe earthquake struck north of the Adriatic Sea in the
Friuli region of Italy. Shocks were felt simultaneously in the Upper Rhine Valley just
northwest of the Alps. We conjecture that a branch of the African rift crosses the
Mediterranean, runs up the Adriatic Sea, and emerges from beneath the Alps (which have
overrun it) as the Rhine River Valley, emptying its waters into the North Sea. All of
this is quite recent. The Rhine canyon cuts far out into the bottom of the North Sea,
revealing its very late sub-aerial existence. Dutch geologist Doeko Goosen claims that
the Netherlands suffered earthquakes more frequently in earlier times [2A]. The
Fourteenth Century saw the erasure of many areas and villages. The Alps, of course, make
up a heavy load upon the underlying rifted area of the crust.
The greatest known earthquake was registered variously between 8.25 and 8.9, in Chile on
May 22, 1960. On the Richter scale, each higher unit stands for a ten-fold increase in
wave amplitude, and this represents a .32-fold leap in radiated seismic energy. The
numbers move arithmetically from 0 to 8.9 but the magnitude increases exponentially; for
example, an earthquake of 8.0 is 10,000 times greater than an earthquake of 4.0 and the
energy release much greater.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake might have reached 8.3 on the Richter seismograph
scale, which registers the intensity of vibrations alone. Its equivalent in the more
descriptive Mercalli scale would be 11 (out of a possible 12). The present top of the
Mercalli scale reads: "Damage total. Waves seen on ground surfaces. Lines of sight and
level distorted. Objects thrown upward in the air."
In the Assam earthquakes of 1950 "rivers were dammed; major floods drowned the
countryside; mountains and hills split open and square miles of their surface covering
were stripped off; rain came down as mud owing to the dust-choked air; and the geography
of the region was permanently changed." [3] . It was recorded at 8.6; it is obvious that
the measuring scale is a crude indicator of real events.
There may very well have been in recent times earthquakes of great force that do not
register beyond the recorded limits of the seismographs, as conjectured by Chinnery and
North [4] . Actually what is today meant by earthquakes is an earth movement defined by
modern experience and measured by instruments calibrated to this experience. Because of
the rareness with which earthquakes of magnitude over 8.0 on the Richter scale have
occurred in the brief 75-year record of various measurements, "many investigators have
concluded from this result that earthquakes... greater than 8.6 or so do not occur..."
However, as it is likely that earthquakes of this intensity occur on the average once a
decade, it is also probable that ones of greater intensity (with a seismic moment of 10
31 dyne-cm or more as compared with the Chile 1960 earthquake of 2.5 X 10 30 dyne-cm)
can occur and may even be expected over a fifty or hundred-year period. If larger
earthquakes occur they might cause destruction far greater than hitherto experienced and
"may cause a considerable excitation of the Chandler wobble," a veritable, if slight,
shaking of the axis of the Earth.
Most earthquakes have a localized shallow focus and originate within the crust, at or
above the Moho discontinuity which may be regarded in quantavolutionary theory as the
boundary of the Earth's shell and as the line of catastrophic slippage of the crust on
several past occasions; but the Moho boundary itself was born of quantavolution, we
maintain. It is both conventional finding, and quantavolutionary theory, "that some
overall global factor, rather than conditions localized in the hypocenters themselves,
is responsible for. generating terrestrial seismicity." [5]
The source of an earthquake varies. The seismograph stations of the world draw a fix
upon a certain point that appears to be the focus of the earthquake, its epicenter
within the Earth. The mantle of the Earth is a hot dense liquid. It does not lend itself
to earthquake manufacture by simple mechanical thrusts and fractures. Are there
substances in the mantle that are escaping and causing disturbances in the overhanging
rock or crust of the continental and oceanic bottoms?
"Yes," says the up-to-date scientist. Chemical elements are decaying in the mantle and
crust. They escape upwards and set up convection currents. These currents actually
amount to so much force that, like the rising heat of a boiling soup, they can move the
surface of the soup off to the side and down. But the forces of convection required to
move ocean bottoms and continents is tremendous and many persons, including this author,
believe that they cannot be assembled [6] . Earthquakes and earth movements are
basically mechanical, and do not result from chemical or nuclear forces, as Cook has
shown.
Still, the theory is fetching. For if one examines again the map of the rifts,
earthquake zones, and volcanic regions of the world, one can see that there is an order
or pattern to them all. They cut up the globe, and the pieces can be called plates. Some
of the plates can be measured as moving very slightly; and it can be seen that lands
that are now far apart fit together as if they once were of one piece. Since no other
force can be imagined by our up-to-date scientist, the convection current force,
upwelling and moving out laterally beneath the rocks, must account for rifts, seismism,
and volcanos. But this accepted theory, it develops, may be incorrect, and we shall
return to the issue of convection currents in a later chapter on continental drift.
An ominous kind of movement has always been the "conjunction," when two or more
celestial bodies line up, especially the Sun and planets with the Earth. Earlier we
mentioned the Gribbin-Plagemann phrase, the "Jupiter Effect." [7] . They chose to plot
their scenario along the 600 mile-long San Andreas fault, part of the East Pacific Ridge
system actually. Hence, the San Francisco Bay Area and many other thickly settled
communities found themselves wondering when the "Jupiter Effect" will occur. "1982" or
thereabouts, said the writers. At this time, which is passing as this book goes to
press, Jupiter and Saturn were to line up with the Sun, Moon, and Earth and exert an
electrical gravitational tidal force upon the Earth sufficient to upset the delicate
juxtaposition of rock surfaces along the San Andreas fault. The Moon is small, and
239,000 miles away on the average. Yet it affects the waters of the world with its tidal
pull, daily and twice a month or every 14.8 days.
The same writers go a certain distance into history, where a few records are to be
found, and are able to discover devastation by earthquake close to the time of past
conjunctions, specifically in 1800-03. The timing is a bit off, the disaster by no means
a catastrophe, but the evidence points to the "Jupiter Effect" as the culprit. In a
close encounter with a large celestial body, the earthquakes would be immeasurably
worse.
Before Gribbin and Plagemann, Charles Davison examined the same celestial motions to
relate them to earthquakes. He found increases in seismism at full moon, 14.8 days, and
19 years and also found a sunspot period every eleven years: when the spots were
particularly active, rains and earthquakes increased.
Davison's periodicities may thus be added to the planetary "Jupiter Effect." They show
how sensitive are the shell and rock layers of the earth, in their fractured condition,
to impulses from the outside. They are clearly tidal, i. e. cyclical.
Davison also discovered that atmospheric pressure could be correlated with earthquakes.
Here there were two cycles: a daily one and an annual cycle. Midwinter midnight and
midsummer noontime were seismic favorites. Perhaps the atmospheric phenomenon may be
connected with the vast diffuse sky lights that occur before earthquakes, arising
probably out of a discharge of electricity.
If changes of atmospheric pressure trigger quakes because they represent a "true dead
weight" of the atmosphere above a certain shifting point of focus, then this too is a
tidal effect. If it is itself produced by electrical changes, then the direct cause must
be assigned to whatever assembles atmospheric potentials.
Sunspots have been increasingly blamed for climate and earthquakes. Recently a 70-year
gap in the sunspot record between 1645 and 1715 A. D. was rediscovered and called the
"Maunder minimum." [8] It was a time when the Northern Lights hardly appeared; when the
Sun's corona was relaxed and clear of disturbances; when C14 was increased because solar
particles were not blocking in their usual way the cosmic particles that cause the C14
in the atmosphere; when tree rings became irregular and thin; and when the climate was
called a "Little Ice Age." John Eddy, in announcing some of these findings, declared,
"We've finally broken a block that held us back - uniformitarianism. It was an
assumption we took as fact." And "We've shattered the Principle of Uniformitarianism for
the sun." As yet a negative correlation with earthquakes has not been plotted;
earthquakes should have declined in number and intensity.
The possibility also arises that some earthquakes are responses to increases in the
amount of ice contained in the polar caps. This may be true today and also of any
prehistoric ice-caps. Cook and A. Brown develop this line of thought [9] . Cook points
to a correspondence between total annual seismic energy and a seeming accumulated energy
in the growing ice of the caps. The huge vertical and radial pressures exerted on the
earth's rocks by the caps may be taken up by the elasticity of the shell, or, on the
other hand, and at least occasionally, the pressures may be alleviated by a shearing or
refracturing of rocks even quite far away from the perimeter of the ice. We stated above
that seismic origins are in global overall forces rather than in local areas of
earthquakes themselves.
However, quantavolutionary theory leads us to suspect that, not the present ice caps,
but rather the effects of the great catastrophic periods are still felt. Earthquakes are
seismic memorials to ancient disorders. The rocks of the Earth will not rest in place
until their very gradual tailing-off consequences end.
The major source of present-day earthquakes is to be sought along the lines of the
global fracture. The fractures will be discussed later on; here they must be mentioned
because of their connection with earthquakes. Taking up first the north-south Atlantic
rift and following it from the Arctic to the Antarctic, one observes intense seismism
throughout its length but largely in the middle of the Atlantic and little on both sides
of the Atlantic Basin. The fracture, like an almost healed wound, throbs, festers and
drips a little, pushing the continents left and right almost unnoticeably. Perhaps the
rocks of the Atlantic Basin are lagging or stretching behind the Pacific rocks, which
are being pushed into the basin of the lunar genesis. No theory is yet adequate to
explain the difference in intensity and frequency between the Atlantic and Pacific
seismism.
Wherever the fracture moves -into the Indian Ocean, across Asia, and laterally across
the Southern Pacific and up the East Pacific, it bears with it seismic strains that
develop as earthquakes of shallow focus. Quakes of deeper focus take place along a belt
that circles the Pacific area of erupted crust, from New Zealand north and east up to
Siberia, across the north Pacific and down the west coast of the Americas all the way to
Antarctica. It is famous as "the Ring of Fire."
A second belt of shallow and deep focus earthquakes pursues a route along the old
Tethyan equatorial region. It begins in mid-Atlantic, pushes through the Mediterranean
and the Near and Middle East, shifts to follow the Himalayans where these break upon the
Asian heartland, and swings down and across the south Asian seas. Here, where it
overlaps the "Ring of Fire," it is intensively active.
But the Tethyan belt does not appear to cross the Pacific basin. It would, of course,
have been erased if the Moon had erupted from the region. There thousands of seamounts
stretch up from the ocean bottom, and long transverse faults occur. Rather, it resumes
off of Central America where, indeed, there is a meeting of all four great earthquake
belts -the globe-girdling rift, the Pacific "Ring of Fire," the westwardly moved
Americas, and the old Tethyan belt.
Afterwards it proceeds into the Caribbean which may have been once coupled with the
Mediterranean. It ends with the outlying islands some hundreds of miles south of its
connecting link, from which I began here to trace its around-the-world movement.
Geographers have matched Spain with the West Caribbean region; it is to be expected
therefore that the Tethyan fracture of the south would tie into a transverse fracture to
the north, thus circumnavigating the globe.
Earthquakes are seismic memorials, it was said. Today there are precipitators, but not
important new causes, of seismism. The old causes that regularly occur are themselves
significant reminders of a time when the heavenly bodies were much more active. Just as
most religious holidays around the world celebrate or re-enact the terror of primeval
catastrophe and the relief of survival, the rocks of the world move from time to time in
reenactment of their ancient catastrophic motions, prodded by the ancient forces when
these are stimulated by recurrent anniversaries.
But some still say that earthquakes go back in time without an increase in frequency or
intensity. N. N. Ambraseys, a seismological engineer of the London Imperial College,
concluded, after prolonged study of Near East documents, that the 3000 large and small
earthquakes of which he found evidence in the period 1 to 1900 A. D. did not in this
period show a decline of frequency and intensity .
His evidence is piecemeal, localized, undefined in regard to intensity, and barely
usable. Only if there were enormously worse earthquakes early or late in the period
could a conclusion be drawn.
By the first century A. D. the world was already seven hundred years past the last
general catastrophe, as described elsewhere [13] , and the skies had been tranquillized.
Still, in the several hundred years before Christ, many accounts of severe seismism were
handed down. The Spartans, most doughty of warriors, were so deadly afraid of
earthquakes that if the land shook in the middle of a war, they would quit and retreat
home; this kind of terror suggests a legendary experience recent to their times [14] .
Ellen Churchill Semple, writing of ancient Mediterranean geography, admits the profuse
claims of risings, sinkings, chasms, and upheavals both in legends and in the scientific
accounts of such illustrious reporters as Aristotle and Strabo. Not to mention Seneca,
who declared that "Tyre is as regularly shaken by earthquakes as it is washed by the
waves..." But she simply puts them down as exaggerations and furthermore "they erred as
to the time element in the problem," for they did not employ the million or so years
that she gave to the geological order of the Mediterranean. (We see, though, that her
Mediterranean is only Quaternary!) Yet who can deny Pliny, the natural historian, when
he claims 57 earthquakes to have occurred in a single year at Rome in 217 B. C. [15] ?
As we move back in time, the earthquakes increase in severity. Velikovsky points out
that in the eighth and seventh centuries earthquakes were so numerous that when they
occurred they were mentioned in a bare line of the astrological tablets of Ninevah and
Babylon [16] . Nevertheless, "reports concerning earthquakes in Mesopotamia in the
eighth and seventh centuries are very numerous, and they are dated. Nothing comparable
is known in modern times." He quotes from a tablet of Babylonia, "The earth shook; a
collapsing catastrophe was all over the country; Nergal [Mars] strangles the country."
Further, "references to breaches in houses, large palaces, and small dwellings are very
numerous in the [Hebrew] prophets of the eighth century." Neglecting such sources, a
historian could claim that "the earthquake held a place in the religious conception of
the Israelites quite out of proportion to its slight and relatively rare occurrence in
Palestine." Obviously, some literalness has to be restored to the language of the Bible,
as well as to many ancient voices, if a better natural history is to be written.
A destroyed city may leave no records of its destruction; a sunken land leaves only an
outsider's report and a myth. A lifetime (19371975) of work was dedicated by S.
Marinatos before the archaeological and geological world came to realize, perhaps too
enthusiastically, what earthquakes and explosions befell the island of Thera in the
Aegean Sea some 3100 years ago [17] .
Velikovsky's research is especially thorough on the "tenth plague" of the Exodus, which
he places at about 1450 B. C. [18] "At midnight, there was not one house where there
was not one dead" in Egypt, says Exodus. All the houses were destroyed. It was the
unlucky 13th day of the month. "The thirteenth day of the month Thout (is) a very bad
day. Thou shalt not do anything on this day," according to an Egyptian myth. Why should
a single event be frozen into all behavior unless it was far more frightful than other
earthquakes, no matter how severe? "The children of princes are dashed against the
walls" and "cast out in the streets," wrote Ipuwer, an Egyptian scribe of those days;
"the prison is ruined;" again, "the residence is overturned in a minute."
It would seem that in those days the Earth shuddered and cities collapsed across the
world from Mesoamerica through the Mediterranean, the Near East, Middle East, India and
China [19] . The greatest modern earthquake becomes insignificant by comparison with the
disasters of the Exodus period. Even so, that is not the earliest period of catastrophic
earthquake known to archaeology.
Claude Schaeffer systematically combed the files of all excavations in the Near and
Middle East that were connected with the period from some 3000 to 5000 years ago. His
conclusions are sharp: all known sites suffered multiple destruction; most of the time
the destruction was by earthquake, often with fire, sometimes by unknown causes. In the
city that he himself excavated in part, Ras Shamra-Ugarit, at least eight heavy
disastrous discontinuities were discovered in the period 2400 to 1000 B. C., by his
dating.
At five points in time a general destruction of the whole Near East occurred. Small
earthquakes, that must have been very common, are of course not considered. They are
hardly detectable in excavations. After practically all of these disasters, many years
passed before a culture could renew itself or be resettled by survivors from other
areas.
Schaeffer plotted the destroyed settlements on a modern seismic map that shows areas
where earthquakes of intensities 6, 7, and 9 of the Mercalli scale are typically found.
A number of the repeatedly destroyed settlements were located in regions of lower
magnitude earthquakes. As noted earlier, this is true of Rome and Palestine, too. They
are no longer so prone to earthquakes as they were then.
The destruction was so total in many of the cases which Schaeffer studied, and had such
peculiar features -heavy combustion, for instance, and in the case of Troy II, "the
Burnt city," which I too studied, both deep calcination and yet enough time for the
population to escape -that the investigator is led to consider even exoterrestrial
hypotheses. Invading troops, volcanos known to exist, and hurricanes acting by
themselves are inadequate hypotheses. Deep ash falls might apply in some cases;
unfortunately archaeologists before World War II paid little attention to levels of
destruction; anyhow, where would the ash come from? Once again, the lack of data
frustrates theoretical reconstruction; moreover, the less severe modern experience of
earthquakes had led to simplistic and negligent judgements even on the part of groups
which spent years on site.
Were the quantavolutionary hypothesis to be increasingly applied, the contrast between
the past and present would become more marked. Systematic review of the field work of
the past two hundred years is needed, as is also a thoroughly objective analysis of
ancient legends and records. Too, technical awareness and application of new paleo-
chemical techniques are needed in further field investigations.
We can conclude that earthquakes were greater in early history and pre-history than they
are today. Further, the seismic experience of the past century is not adequate to assure
us that earthquakes a thousand times worse in their effects are no longer possible. They
then approach a new level of destruction wherein fire, flood, fall-out, avalanches,
diastrophism and other effects assume major roles. Under such conditions the seismism
itself tends to become a relatively minor feature and even to lose its name to much
greater movements of the land, sea and air. The earthquake is supremely prominent today
because the rocks replay more of the history of catastrophe than the atmosphere, the
hydrosphere and the biosphere. No people has recalled total cultural destruction by
shaking but perhaps all recollect its destruction by fire, winds and water.
There are parts of the world where the rocks, seeming so firm to the naive eye and
touch, are criss-crossed by what must have been an interminable succession of surges and
shakes. Cores of the earth under Athens were drilled lately in the planning of a new
subway; most of them pulled up cylinders of the so-called "Athens schist," a rock
formation that is a mass of small chaotic fractures. It is conceivable that millions of
years of erosion caused the cracking; it is perhaps more readily conceivable that the
schist was macerated in a period of continual trembling. Plato reports that Athens
suffered severe earthquakes in its earlier history; springs on the acropolis were
stopped and cliffs were toppled. According to Plato, the Attica of old was practically
unrecognizable by his own time, which seismically is our own time, the flattened end of
the seismic curve. [20]
Notes (Chapter Sixteen: Earthquakes)
1. The account of one Godfrey Le Sieur, in E. M. Shepperd, 13 J. Geol. (Feb. 1905), 46-
7.
2. U. S. Government Printing office, The Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 (1970).
2A. "A New Model for Level Areas," Vitgeverij Waltman: Delft, 1974.
3. Lane, op. cit., 211.
4. "The frequency of Very Large Earthquakes," 190 Science (19 Dec. 1975), 1197-8.
5. Cook, op. cit., citing Benioff (1955).
6. See Chapter 24 below.
7. See Chapter 6, fn. 13.
8. John A. Eddy, "The Maunder Minimum," 192 Science (18 June 1976), 1189-1202.
9. Hugh A. Brown, Cataclysms of the Earth (NY: Twayne, 1967).
10. P. Jordan, op. cit.
11. As is argued by Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, Chapter 8.
12. Nature (16 Aug. 1971), 375-9.
13. In Chaos and Creation (1981) and Worlds in Collision (1950).
14. E. C. Semple, The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient
History (NY: Holt, 1931), Chapter 3
15. II Natural History 86.
16. Worlds in Collision, 274-8.
17. Chaos and Creation, 233-4.
18. Ages in Chaos (NY: Doubleday, 1952) and Worlds in Collision, op. cit.
19. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, and Schaeffer, op. cit. 20. ph. Negris, Plissements
et Dislocations de l'Ecorce Terrestre en Grþce, leurs Rapports avec les PhÚnomþnes
Glaciaires et les Effondrements dans l'Ocean Atlantique (Athens, 1901).
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part IV: Crustal Turbulence
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
VOLCANISM
Five hundred volcanos of the Massif Central in France, now defunct, were erupting 12,000
years ago, or less, during the Magdalenian Upper Paleolithic culture. So maintained
Escalon de Fonton of Montpellier University. The spheres of the Earth were once so
active that humans must have been encouraged to a pan-animism, an omnidirectional
feeling which would have dominated all religion and culture if there had not appeared
some immense and forceful sky bodies that focused attention upon themselves. Mother
Earth, now a picturesque name, was devoutly and literally supplicated by the ancients
even in the millennia of the great sky gods between 13,000 and 2700 B. P. She was often
married to the greatest of the gods, and it was generally believed that her nuptial ties
explained much of the animism of the Earth. "A theory of volcanicity" must not only be
"taking into account the whole range of geodynamic processes," as Rittmann says in his
classic work on volcanos, but also the whole range of cosmodynamics.
The great movements have gone, but a restlessness remains, erupting locally; volcanos
erupt solo, almost never performing duets. The volcanos of the world adhere to the
world-girdling fracture system. The system organizes the world's volcanos. The volcanos
of the land, active and extinct, follow the great fracture lines that pass underground
as for instance in the Tethyan shear sub-system of the Caribbean-Mediterranean-Middle
East, or beneath the Pacific coastal states of America. The same is true of the volcanic
belts off the East Asian continent. The oceanic volcanos string along with most of the
fracture system. Isolated volcanos such as the Hawaiian Islands require special
explanations; if the general theory here that seamounts (guyots) are fossil short-lived
mantle taffy is correct, the isolated volcanos can have originated at the same time,
"the same, but more so." The difference may be explainable by measurements made by
Preston in 1893: "The lower half of Mauna Kea is of a very much greater density than the
upper. The former gives a value of 3.7 and the latter 2.1, the mean density of the whole
mountain being 2.9," [1] for the height above sea level. Thus, like a seamount, Mauna
Kea stretched in a taffy bubble until finally it burst and began operating as a typical
volcano.
More puzzling is the absence of clear connections between volcanism and astroblemes. Why
should not a deep shocking crater give rise to a volcano? That a meteoroid often makes a
melt of a kind is undisputed, but where is the persisting volcanism? Obviously one must
seek for deeper roots of the world's volcanos.
Volcanism takes the form of cones and fissures. It is also beneath swellings and
bubblings of surface features. Most of the igneous basaltic surface of the world,
including the ocean bottoms, was created by fissure volcanism. As occurs still in
Iceland, fissure volcanos produce lava copiously. "During recorded history more lava has
poured forth above the sea in Iceland than in all the rest of the earth's volcanic belts
combined. Yet... Iceland's volcanic belt comprises less than one-half of one per cent of
the total length of the world-encircling rift." [2] Beaumont points out that 40,000
square miles of the British Isles afford plateaus of basalt in sheets; though nowhere
are cones or vents to be found, till and clay accompany the basalt [3] . Rampant
fissure volcanism is today observable on planet Venus. "Recent first-class Pioneer
photographs of Venus show that the planet is rent with fissures, and most remarkably has
been described as 'the most volcanic planet' in the solar system." [4] By "most
remarkably" the writer implies the theory that Venus is a very young planet and has been
losing its heat of eruption from Jupiter only slowly.
When the Earth had to erupt magma on a large scale, from far down, because of a loss of
crust and an expansion of crust, fissure volcanism had to be the means. The deep ocean
ridges of today still supply lava for paving the abyssal surface; the process has
assumed a certain orderliness. On the other hand, viewing the Pacific Basin one must
conjecture that a very large surface was once removed and a deep wound was left exposed
that repaired itself in situ. The concept of cone and fissure volcanism fails, then and
there, and one must speak of sheet volcanism, creating its own hard skin.
Fissure volcanism stands for extensive catastrophic venting; if there is so little of it
today, the reason occurs in the general global settling. Cone or tube volcanos represent
a moderate 'need to erupt. ' Volcanic fields denote an interconnected set of tubes with
a number of outlets. Volcanic outlets are spaced apart in relation to the thickness of
the lithosphere; thinner rock invites closer spacing [5] .
When dormant or extinct, all of these suggest either that a local rock crisis has been
settled or that the global volcanic system has been shutting down its ramifications and
further extensions. Many hills and uplifts, whence gases and lava have never escaped,
are in the same fossil status. A major exoterrestrial encounter, the only event that can
excite general volcanism, would reinvigorate the pattern of prehistoric and present
volcanism insofar as the force vectors of the encounter prescribe, and would excite new
volcanism wherever new stresses were imposed. Ultimately, geophysics should be able to
locate as a set of overlays the total historical series of exoterrestrial encounters in
fossil and live volcanism and go so far as to discover or substantiate the detection of
their avenues of approach, their duration, and their energy.
Neat surveys of past volcanism are not to be had. Rampino, Self and Fairbridge collected
"known volcanic eruptions of large magnitude within the last 100,000 years." [6] Their
interest lay in associations between volcanism and climate, and a shaky correlation was
established, with climatic change apparently preceding eruptions, suggesting to this
author exoterrestrial issues. Presently germane, however, is the possibility that the
statistics will confirm or deny a greater incidence of volcanism in the past. No help is
forthcoming, because of the inadequacy of the data: the dating methods are perforce
questionable; the bias toward known historical instances is heavy (12 of 28 cases occur
in the past 5000 years, one twentieth of the period studied); and there is no uniformity
of occurrence over time (implying, if anything) that heavy volcanism is aroused by
global events. Because fossil volcanism is generally assigned even older dates, most
scholars do see very heavy volcanism in periods beyond 100,000 years; australopithecus,
for example, is often tramping in volcanic ash, but 'three million years ago and more. '
Some 13 ash layers have been already discovered in the Central East Pacific Ocean, none
blanketing the entire region. There is a great discrepancy in dating between the argon
radiometric and biostratigraphic methods, about half a million years within the single
million years of total assigned time. The argon technique is faulted for atmospheric
contamination and incomplete outgassing of lava containing radiogenic argon. (But is
this not an inevitable occurrence, then, in all catastrophism, where atmospheric
'pollution" is inevitable?) Even so, both methods are faulted when it appears that
preclassical Mayan artifacts are found under the 500,000 y argon-dated (or 50,000 y
biostratigraphic-dated) so-called "D" (or Worzel) layer of ash in the region.
The explosion of the island of Thera about 3000 years ago sent about 40 km 3 material
into the atmosphere. The seas were covered with pumice, some of which was driven ashore.
Marinos and Melidonis plotted the story of one such incident at the small island of
Anafi to the east of Thera. Two pumice deposits were noted. The one at Vounia is
notable.
On the base of a natural profile of soil, we observe the following sequence: lowermost
schists of the basement (bed rock), on this a bed of earth and pieces of schists of
alluvium and slope debris. On this the mentioned bed of pumice and on the pumice a
younger bed of soil and small stones of the surrounding rock with the usual cementing of
lime carbonate. The general dip of these strata is gentle (about 10 ) to the bottom of
the valley. The lower part of the pumice bed consists of broken pumice, though the upper
one consists of almost powdered pumice mixed with small pieces of pumice, irregularly
rounded, of some millimeters to a few centimeters. We cannot give any other explanation
about the formation of the above pumice bed except the transportation and deposition of
this material by the tidal tsunami wave following some terrible phase of the catastrophe
on Santorin (Thera). [7]
The height of the foaming wave increased after rushing into the funnel opening of the
narrow deep valley. It ascended, achieving 250 meters, and then retreated, leaving the
pumice. The authors do not comment on the heavy, late diastrophism evidenced: the
absence of low-lying pumice beds, the abrupt cut-off of the bed, as drawn by them and
the layering of ca 2 meters of alluvion talus atop the pumice bed. I have observed the
same deep bedding of semi-consolidated rock over pumice in Thera-Santorini itself.
Possibly there occurred subsequent explosions of rock and soil, or violent quakes that
shook down hill-tops. The investigation of cases such as Vounia and Thera where the
dating is relatively secure may enable us to reconstruct a larger and/ or later sudden
deposition of non-volcanic material. Without the historical dating here, one would be
inclined to assign very old ages (as was the case here before Marinatos discovered Late
Bronze Age artifacts in the ruins of Akrotiri) in order to account for the superposition
of heavy 'erosional' deposits and then a slow landscaping.
Today, volcanism of all kinds may be remanent. Fascinating and destructive as it may be,
it is as nothing compared with the volcanism of times past. The Soviet geologist, A. P.
Pavlov, declared in 1936: "At the present time, only a residual, negligible
manifestation of volcanic activity is observed on the earth; formerly, this activity was
perhaps the most typical and almost universal phenomenon in the life of the planet." [8]
Probably the phenomenon is correct, but the volcanism, like astroblemes, may have
happened during only several immense exoterrestrial encounters.
The greatest eruption of modern times, some say (incorrectly) of all history, was the
1883 eruption of Krakatoa. The total volume of erupted material has been estimated at 18
to 21 km 3 . "When compared with prehistoric ignimbrite-forming events ranging in volume
up to 10 3 km 3 .... the volume of the Krakatoa eruption was very modest." [9] So
declare S. Self and Rampino.
Thera's volcano (Aegean Sea) blew away most of a large, high island and its culture
three thousand years ago [10] . Ilopango (El Salvador) destroyed a cultured Mayan area
of thousands of square miles in an explosion of 1800 years ago [11] . The volcano of
Tamboro on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies emerged from the waters in 1812. Within
three years it grew the awesome height of 12000 feet, some three miles tall. Then it
exploded. Approximately 100 cubic kilometers of material shot into the atmosphere. About
100,000 people were killed, many more than died in the Anglo-American War of 1812 being
fought at the same time across the world.
Hawaii arises eleven miles from the bottom of the sea. It is the world's tallest
mountain. It appears to be stable. Yet it ends a long fracture out of Mexico and begins
an arc of seamounts that strikes Siberia. The scene of volcanism today is the pallid
termination of the scenario of quantavolution. There is nothing objectionable in present
theory; it is just not historical.
Volcanic activity serves as a mechanism to release thermal energy from the Earth's
interior. Thus, we can view the Earth as a boiler and the inactive volcano or vent as a
sealed valve. Conversion of tidal energy to thermal energy by friction is concentrated
at plate boundaries, where almost all active volcanos are found. Thus tidal energy helps
heat up the boilers and increase the pressure, while tidal stresses weaken and break the
seals. Both of these triggering effects increase during periods of increasing peak tidal
stress... Once a volcano has erupted, its susceptibility to triggering remains low for a
longer period of time and then increases rapidly following a hyperbolic or exponential
stress [12] .
Now we turn to Rittmann for additional theory:
Volcanic activity is caused by the loss of gases from magmas, a process which takes
place wherever magmas can ascend from the depths and come into regions of lower
pressure. This ascent of magma is, however, only possible if the earth's crust is
stretched and fractured through tectonic forces. The existence of volcanos is thus
closely connected genetically with orogenesis and epeirogenesis. We then attempted to
explain these genetic connexions on the principle of the causal chain of disturbed
equilibria, and so to place volcanicity in its correct position in the overall picture
of geodynamic processes. The interpretation of a wide variety of observed facts led us
to the conclusion that magmas could originate in two ways, and that we could distinguish
between primary magmas having their origin in a subcrustal zone encircling the earth,
and secondary magmas formed by the anatexis of sialic rocks within the earth's crust
[13] .
One notes here, besides the requirement of a stretching and tearing of the crust, the
origination of volcanic magma from the "subcrustal zone encircling the earth" and
anatexis, or regurgitation of surficial rock. This region occurs some 15 to 30 miles
below the land surface and about 5 miles below the oceanic bottoms. This layer
corresponds not only to the Moho discontinuity, as I have mentioned in connection with
the base of seismism, but also with the volume of "missing sial" from the ocean basins,
which roughly approximates the volume of the Moon. Volcanism, then, like seismism,
reflects the level at which, all over the globe, the still landed crust moved in
reaction to the eruption of the Moon. Whether or not the mantle on which this lunar
boundary level rides jostling is solid or liquid, in the years of its fast movement it
would have heated, liquefied, and expanded. The volcanos are probably still draining the
liquid.
Studies of volcanic eruptions arrive at correlations between the moment of major
eruption and the tidal forces exerted upon the Earth by the Sun and the Moon. Similar
correlations have been detected between tides and seismism. In this regard, volcanism
and earthquakes reveal themselves as close relatives.
G. Beccaria ( 1716-81 ) with Stokeley, Franklin and others, set the stage early for a
systematic approach to electricity in connection with earthquakes, cyclones, and
volcanos, but the promised scientific drama has never been enacted [14] . As early as
June 21, 1902, Elmer G. Still published his observations of the volcano-solar-lunar
relationship [15] :
The writer has for several years been observing this relation between the positions of
the heavenly bodies and seismic, volcanic, and electrical disturbances, and is forced to
the conclusion that the latter are caused in part by the conjunctions, oppositions,
perihelions (or perigees) and equinoxes of the moon, earth, and seven other planets,
especially when several of these occur at once.
He warned that such disturbances do not always occur at these times and that the
relative position of the heavenly bodies have to be combined with local causes to
produce volcanism and seismism. After all, he commented, if solar storms (sun spots) are
excited by perihelion with Jupiter, why would not earthquakes and sun spots be
transactive?
A second article in the same year stressed that "the influence of the Moon and planets
in causing and intensifying seismic and volcanic disturbances is not altogether tidal
action -gravitational; it is partly, or mostly, electrical, and seismic and volcanic
action is an electrical disturbance." [16]
Once more in 1902, the same author, E. Still, continued his prescient argument, now
declaring that gravitational tides of the Moon were quite inadequate as explanations of
many terrestrial disturbances. "We know [Still was seventy years ahead of the field]
that magnetic earth currents (which interfere with telegraphing), brilliant auroras,
severe thunderstorms, violent storms of many kinds, and also earthquakes and volcanic
activity accompany sun spots. All these are electrical disturbances, and the eruption of
Mount Vesuvius and numerous seismic shocks which occurred at the time of the last large
sunspots -about September 15, 1898 -were no doubt electrically caused by them." [17]
We are not surprised at these statements, in view of Chapters 4 and 5 earlier on in this
book, where electricity was allowed a broad scope among geological effects. The
electrical volcanism of Io, satellite of Jupiter, will be recalled, where ejecta speed
at 2000 miles per hour from 60 to 160 miles above the surface. A number of factors
operate holistically in terrestrial volcanism; electricity may sometimes take up center-
stage; mechanical heat and pressure are probably the chief actors in late historical
times. Yet the electric and the mechanical are always working together: no rock can be
squeezed without emitting electricity; no electric charge can pass without heating rock.
Recently, Johnston and Mauk examined the unusually complete records of Mount Stromboli
(Italy) over a 72-year period and related 33 major eruptions to the amplitude of tidal
forces operating upon the Earth [18] . A distinct pattern emerged. Some ten days after
the tidal peak is the significantly likely moment for the eruption. The eruptions
concentrate in the days between full moons.
Roosen used oxygen isotope ratios in cores of the Greenland ice cap as an indication of
mean temperatures between 1200 and 1976 A. D.
Variations in tidal stresses on the Earth caused by the Sun and Moon cause changes in
the stratospheric dust produced by volcanic activity; this in turn changes the thickness
of the stratospheric dust veil and hence the atmospheric radiation balance. At least
some significant fraction of the dust occurs at peaks of tidal stress. The tides
measured vary over long periods. There is a peak of stress at approximately 179.3 years
period. This period actually shows up in a (significant) correlation of 0.37 between the
stress periods and the temperature curve [19] .
The relevance of such studies here is that tidal stresses and volcanism correlate;
hence, great tidal stresses of the past must have excited great volcanism; conversely,
evidence of heavy past volcanism denotes heavy past tidal stresses.
In the present placid astronomical order of the world, there is scarcely a place to look
for such tidal forces. A mere 500 active volcanos occupy the world landscape, compared
with the 500 of the Massif Central of few thousand years ago. Flying high over southern
Italy, one may luckily see Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna all smoking at the same moment.
Arriving in sight of the famous seven hills of Rome, there is a grandeur of culture, not
nature. Yet Breislak in 1801 was arguing that the seven hills were debris amidst a large
volcanic caldera, and Cuvier for one approved the idea. When the oldest hominids, human
in some ways, walked the Earth at Afar (E. Africa), some ten nearby volcanos were
active.
A great many dormant volcanos exist and an enormous number of extinct volcanos. If the
belts of inactive fissures and the unnumbered thousands of seamounts are added, the
Earth has undergone periods of the most intense exoterrestrial stress. Or else, one will
have to parcel out these millions of volcanos and 'volcano equivalents' over exceedingly
long stretches of time. But if volcanism even in the stable "solarian" period of the
past 2000 years exhibits a 'grouping' tendency in response to exoterrestrial tides, then
pre-historic volcanism must have exhibited grouping, too. Once more, we force the
question: quantavolution, yes, but could it not happen at widely spaced intervals over
time?
Even with fossil and radiochronometric data that give, I think, ages too "old," the
ocean volcanos and ridges are geologically young, under 80 million years. Is there some
reason to believe that land volcanos should not be also as "young"?. Probably not,
inasmuch as most of the land volcanos are tied into the ocean ridges, into great faults,
and into the ring of fire that bounds the Pacific Basin.
If there exist extinct volcanos and fissures that belie this statement by extruding from
the surface far from the zones of present activity, these, it will turn out, are aligned
with expired branches or special fractures of the Earth's crust. That is, it is
plausible to assign all volcanos to the same geological time, and a young age; "where
are the volcanos of yesteryear?"
If the continental and oceanic plates break up and drift apart, as the prevailing theory
will have it, touring the globe every 200 million years, forming new combinations, where
are the extinct volcanos that should dot the world like pine trees? That is, so far as
volcanos are concerned, history ends recently. Presumably, before then, lands broke up
and plates travelled without their fiery boundary-markers; this is implausible.
The innumerable seamounts are a standing reproach to opponents of quantavolution. I have
mentioned their origins as pulled mantle taffy in cosmic encounters. They are an
impossibility for tectonic plate theory for there the continents move on plates, not
through them, and seamounts appear abundantly around the Moon Basin of the Pacific, with
a solitary but impressive chain of hundreds off the New England Coast [20] . If the Moon
were erupted from the now Pacific region, the seamounts could be visualized as pulled
taffy drop-backs that could not follow the Moon into space. But the Atlantic Ocean off
New England would only then have opened its abyss and "New England" would have been
retreating westwards. To explain this particular "taffy-full" we must conjecture a
prolonged explosiveness or subsequent passes of an attractive exoterrestrial body in
order to assist their generation.
Morphological comparison of Atlantic and Pacific seamounts may be of use in deciding the
sequence of events. One study of the former finds shallow water fossils, including coral
and the algae Melobesia, at 3000 meters, and suggests that somehow the seamounts
subsided that much. More in order is our hypothesis that the sea did not fill the basin
until recently; similar phenomena are discoverable in the Pacific seamount areas.
I would be loath to leave the subject of volcanism before tightening its awesome
connection with the birth of the Moon in the parturition of Earth. In 1907, William
Pickering was continuing George Darwin's effort, begun in 1879, to establish that the
Moon fissioned from the Earth's present Pacific Basin. He called it "The Volcanic
Problem." [21] He alluded to spectroscopic binaries as examples of fission in the
Universe.
He argued that when the Moon fissioned, "the Earth was in much the same condition that
we find it at present, except that it was hotter." It was supposed to be rotating in
only several hours (so as to provide the centrifugal force for whipping out the Moon).
He matched the continents at the Atlantic to show the breaking away occasioned by the
need to fill the emptied basin; he mentions "North America during its transit across the
fiery ocean, in obedience to the pull of the Moon." (Thus he preceded Wegener with the
idea of continental drift.)
Geologists generally abandoned the search for proof of Moon fission, even though they
could choose their own time and state of the Earth to accomplish the feat. Thus they
might afford a gaseous fission, or a thin crust, or a hot and molten body and they had
no care for the biosphere or atmosphere or even stratified rocks. It is surprising that
under such easy conditions for speculation, they could reject the theory. A reader of
this book will surmise that an ideological block against any immense catastrophic event
would account for the rejection of fission. Rather should the Moon come sailing in
nicely and moor itself above the Earth. The catastrophic implications of capture were
not generally pursued, except by Hoerbiger and the maverick mythologist Bellamy.
Nevertheless many establishment scholars looked benignly upon the fission theory,
allowing that the event was to have occurred eons ago. Also, of course, exoterrestrial
inducements to fission were taboo.
D. U. Wise, more rationalistically, attributes non-acceptance of the fission theory to
calculation problems. "The traditional and seemingly insurmountable obstacle to all
fission hypotheses has been the discrepancy of approximately 400% between the present
angular momentum of the earth-moon system and the values calculated as being necessary
for the last stable configuration before fission." [22] That is, an incredibly
flattened obloid would have to drop its end like ash off a cigar. After disposing of
several types of calculations, he is satisfied that "the basic problem of excessive
angular momentum in fission hypotheses may have a solution in volatilization and escape
of a silicate atmosphere generated by dissipation of lunar tidal energy in a high-
temperature early earth." [23]
The eruption of the Moon certainly extends beyond the conventional concept of volcanism,
although Vsekhsvyatskii claims that planets and comets originated in volcanic episodes,
especially involving escapes from Jupiter. Explosion is of course a fission; rocks are
transformed; gases and electricity are part of the process, and so on. Also,
exoterrestrial influences are connected with volcanism, both as to origins and to
triggering activity. These influences are provable in our own time by correlations of
volcanism with tides, electricity and seismism. They are provable for ancient times by
the patterned system of volcanism in the world and the obvious function of volcanism in
relieving stresses according to a pattern highly suggestive of transactions in outer
space. Withal there is a uniqueness to the lunar event; the dimensions of the event soar
almost beyond comparison with ordinary disaster and even all other catastrophes. But the
theory of the fission is greatly simplified if it is conceived to occur through the
passing intervention of a large body in space.
Furthermore, it is well to mention, as a postscript, that should the Moon have erupted
from the Earth and all ocean bodies are young, then the eruption must have occurred
recently. The basins are dated at under 100 million years. Thus the Moon episode, so
incredibly destructive, would have occurred with the full realization of life on Earth,
including many thousands of existing species and with most Earth rocks still present. If
those species could survive, so even could homo sapiens.
Therefore, one must accept the possibility of the Moon originating by eruption. The
evidence is that such occurred. The evidence is that it occurred recently relative to
geological convention. The evidence is that it occurred without total destruction of the
Earth's surface or its occupants. If, finally, one is to argue whether the Moon erupted
12,000 years ago as opposed to 120 million years ago, the issue may seem idiotic, but it
is imperative to dispose of it.
Notes (Chapter Seventeen: Volcanism)
1. CXLV Am. J. Sci. (1893), 256.
2. Heezen and Hollister, op. cit., 557.
3. Comyns Beaumont, The Mysterious Comet, (London: Rider, 1945), 197.
4. R. D. Mac Kinnon, 3 S. I. S. Workshop 1 (July 1980), 7.
5. P. J. Smith, 265 Nature (1977), 206; Vogt, 21 Earth Planet. Sci. Let. (1974), 235.
6. 206 Science (16 Nov. 1979), 826.
7. G. Marinos and N. Melidonis, "On the Strength of Seaquakes (Tsunamis) During the
Prehistoric Eruptions of Santorin," reprint from Acta (see fn. 10), 280.
8. Quoted in S. K. Vsekhsviaskii, "Indications of the Eruptive Evolution of Planetary
Bodies," (Kiev: unpubl. paper, ca 1973), 7.
9. "The 1883 Eruption of Krakatoa," 294 Nature (24 Dec. 1981), 699-704.
10. Acta, First Int'1 Cong on Volcano of Thera, 1969 (Athens, 1971) J. Keller, D. L.
Page, and C. and D. Vitaliano, eds.
11. N Y Times, 101 Jan. 1977, quoting Payson Sheets.
12. R. G. Roosen, "Earth Tides, Volcanos and Climatic Change," 261 Nature (24 June
1976), 680.
13. Rittmann, op. cit., 267.
14. Artifical and Natural Electricity. See Heilbron.
15. 86 Sci. Amer (21 June 1902), 433.
16. 87 Sci. Amer. (26 July 1902), 54.
17. 87 Sci. Amer. (27 Sep. 1902), 203.
18. M. J. S. Johnston and F. J. Mauk, 239 Nature (29 Sept. 1972), 266-7.
19. Op. cit. 682.
20. J. R. Heirtsler et al., 65 Amer. Sci.( 1977), 466-72.
21. "Place of Origin of the Moon: The Volcanic Problem," 15 J. Geol. (1907), 23-38.
22. "Origin of the Moon from the Earth: Some New Mechanisms and Comparisons," 74 J.
Geophys Res. (15 Nov. 1969), 6038.
23. Ibid., 6044.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part IV: Crustal Turbulence
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SINKING AND RISING LANDS
Vita-Finzi remarks that we cannot tell whether, over the past century or even now, the
shorelines are sinking or rising [1] . Furthermore, there is much greater complexity
and much less data when making such determinations for the longer past. The Earth has
demonstrated a capability for moving up and down here and there leaving scarcely a clue
as to the causes. The wisest path may be to pursue a general theory, such as the Ice
Ages or, I think, a great lunar eruption, and build hypotheses and information upon it.
The legendary voices are worth an audience. Alexander Kondratov, a Soviet linguist and
compiler of legendary and geological evidence of the sinking of lands, writes [2] :
China's oldest myths tell of a war between the god of fire and the god of water 'at the
beginning of the world. ' The mountains erupted fire, the earth quaked and the sea
attacked the land. When the fire god was defeated he decided to commit suicide and
struck his head against the highest mountain in the west. The frightful blow drove the
land into the sea in the east like the prow of a boat, while in the west it flew into
the air like a boat's stern. Since then all the rivers in China have flowed eastwards.
Kondratov inquired of geologist Yuri Reshetov concerning this myth and received the
following in reply:
Geological, geophysical, paleontological, archaeological and anthropological studies
have shown that up until at least the middle of the last Ice Age the Japanese Islands
and Indonesia were Asian peninsulas. During the second half of the Ice Age (from 40,000
to 20,000 years ago), vast areas of land subsided into the sea and were replaced by
what are the Sea of Japan and the south China Sea. The sinking was accompanied by
powerful volcanism and by earthquakes. At about the same time, that is, towards the end
of the Ice Age, the ranges of Indo-China and the mountains of Central Asia rose another
2,000 meters. Many generations of Chinese must have witnessed the gigantic geological
changes in south-east Asia. It is these events that the myths about the struggle
between the gods of fire and water evidently reflect.
This is macro-geography, indeed. It speaks of a quarter of the world. Part of the world
rose and part of it sank. The events described are probably much more recent, the
20,000 year figure reading 10,000 years in other sources.
Many Europeans still speak, as they have from the dawn of history, of a civilized
continent of Atlantis that sank in a day.
The legend of the Lost Continent of Atlantis is a hardy tale; billions of words have
been written about the few words of the legend. It is quite incorrect of F. M.
Cornford, for example, to write that "serious scholars now agree that Atlantis probably
owed its existence entirely to Plato's imagination." If Plato lied in his tale of
Atlantis, there would be little truth in him generally; for Plato repeatedly insisted
that his story be considered seriously and literally: the Atlantean culture did exist
across a water barrier to the west; it had relations with the ancestors of the
Athenians and Greeks; it did sink abruptly in an earthquake. Plato's date would place
the event at about 11,500 years ago. I attribute this date to a confusion with the
lunar catastrophe and assign it instead to the time of the Noachian Deluge, that is,
about 6000 B. P. as described in Chaos and Creation.
An ancient document, the Oera Linda manuscript, which was written in Frisian with runic
characters and whose age and authenticity is much disputed, claims a general Atlantis-
type sinking of a prosperous civilization of the Fryas between the North Sea and the
Baltic, where frost was rare and fruit trees blossomed. There came a summer of
darkness, great earthquakes, a spitting of fire from newly bursting mountains, a
general holocaust, an obliteration of rivers, and huge floods that advanced to cover
most of the land. Whole islands were newly formed by the bones of dead cows and sand
(one is reminded of the Siberian islands formed of mammoth bones). The survivors were
subjected by invading Finnish bands (just as the Hyksos invaded Egypt after the Exodus)
[3] .
The Caribbean peoples talk of an "Antilla," now sunk beneath the ocean. The Pacific
Ocean and American peoples of the Southern Hemisphere say that once a continent existed
where now stand a few islands amidst a great deep sea. The perplexing books of
Churchwarden concern this continent of "Mu." Legends of the Greeks speak of a drowned
Aegean Sea, and the ancients believed the Mediterranean Sea was recently arisen.
In the Pacific Ocean of the North, there is supposed to have been a Beringia where now
stands the Arctic Ocean on one side and on the other side the northern half of the "arc
of fire" bordering the great Ocean.
The East Indian peoples and Indian Ocean people offer legends of the sunken continent
of "Lemuria," whence came world civilization. T. Huxley and F. Engels were famous
supporters of the theory over a century ago. And the islands of the South Seas, where
Indonesia stretches out, are reputed to have been of a single piece before the waters
rose or the land sank. The Dutch geologist Bartstva claims that a landbridge connected
the Celebes and Philippines until Holocene times. In August 1982, Alan Thorne announced
the discovery of Chinese human remains in North Australia with an estimated age of at
least 10,000 years [4] . A map in Chaos and Creation outlines in the most general way
all of these mythical lands that are said to have existed in human times.
If one is to believe legend, every large expanse of ocean once had its land mass. A
form of quantavolutionary reasoning could proceed as follows: the ocean basins are new,
created in the time of man; before the time of man, there was Pangea, a globe covered
by continental crust that carried shallow freshwater seas, especially in the then
equatorial area, which area, now greatly tortured, is still recognizable in the fabled
Tethyan Sea remnants of the Mediterranean area and the "belt of fire" that girdles the
world longitudinally. The awesome depths to which the land has sunk or from which the
crust has been removed should not halt the argument. If the Andes, the Alps, and the
Himalayas can rise miles high, Lemuria and Atlantis can slump miles deep. If the sial
debris of sunken lands cannot be scooped up by dredges or pierced by the few meters of
core drills, that too is not surprising; the ocean basins were opened up and repaved
recently with basalt; where the land was not exploded away, it was covered over by lava
working furiously and fast under the catalysis of falling and flooding waters.
Where the continental fragments do not remain to be fitted obviously together, then the
intervening land was blasted away or sunk. Continental sial has been extracted on
occasion from the deep bottoms in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean; this is surprising
given the major discovery of recent oceanography that the ocean bottoms are covered
everywhere with lava. Metamorphic rocks typical of the nearby islands and Italy were
found 3000 meters below sea level in the central Tyrrhenian Sea, as reported by Heezen
[5] . Fragments of black carbonaceous sandstone were found on the Rocksall Plateau and
Orphan Knoll, between Greenland and North America [6] .
Some legends have been confirmed by geology; many might be confirmed; most are not,
because they are vague or misleading. It would be well to examine closely the myths
that have proved quite accurate to see in what mythical form they found expression and
then to proceed systematically to the translation of similar myths around the world.
The aboriginal Australians who live around MacDonnell Bay say that an angry witch once
stirred up the waters and flooded the beautiful land to make the Bay. Geologists
confirm that the land was high in the ice ages and recently sank to form the Bay. The
image of the witch should not be discounted; Velikovsky has described how European and
Chinese alike have an image of a witch riding a broomstick, which he traces to cometary
images of 3500 years ago. Indians of the area of Crater Lake recalled in their oral
history what geologists later confirmed -that a great volcanic explosion fashioned the
beautiful basin in the mountains that has since collected rainwaters.
These were not the only risings and sinkings, but they were by far the major ones.
Kondratov, for example, mentions that Bulgarian researchers have compiled a detailed
map of underwater archaeological finds, dating from the eighth to the fifth centuries
B. C., discovered along a large section of their country's Black Sea. Irish Celts were
in America in this period, according to several recent studies of history, archaeology
and linguistics; they were perhaps driven to explore and immigrate by a further sinking
of their homeland coasts.
The age of the comet-god Athena-Venus preceded these episodes of the age of the god
Mars by under a thousand years. The Gulf of Mexico may have been sunk at this time, for
the peoples of the Mexican Gulf Coast were not long afterwards lamenting the
destruction of their previous civilization by the jaguar-god (a Venus symbol) and
storm-god Hurracan, and telling of how they were taught their arts by a few people who
came from the east. Kelly and Dachille wrote that the Gulf of Mexico has the
superficial appearance of a meteoritic impact crater. In Cook's reconstruction of the
area prior to continental movements, the Spanish peninsula is fit like a socket into
the Gulf but a gap, possibly a crater gap, remains.
These several speculations treat of events of 11,500 years ago, or at the latest 7000
years ago, not of 3500 years ago -unless, of course, everyone is right: that is, the
breakup of the area occurred and "western Europe" rifted outwards; the flood of Saturn
deluged the shallow gulf areas; a fragment of the Venus tail spilled petroleum in the
area and impacted.
The Caribbean area generally is rife with myths of disaster and immigration. The
timetable is chaotic. Archaeologist Cyrus Gordon has described convincingly
Mediterranean materials that originated between Phoenecian and Roman times and that
were uncovered in spots so far apart as the Brazilian Coast and Tennesse (U. S. A.)
[7] . Sanders and Price in 1968 set up a convincing case for direct Asiatic influences
upon the New World. East Indian contacts with the Americas can be traced as well.
At maximum age, none of the materials would go back to before 1500 B. C. That leaves a
great prior gap of culture, untilled save by indistinct legend. Brasseur de Bourbourg
was one of many early European scholars who felt that, in these myths of white-skinned,
technically competent people coming from the East, there were visitors from or
survivors of a great continent of Atlantis.
Interest in East-West contacts has increased recently among scholars. That ancient
"Japanese" had cultural contacts with at least "Ecuador" is a distinct possibility.
That unusual blood types appear among villagers in settlements of the Andes is
demonstrable. Also, the ancient Meso-Americans, as judged by sculptures and drawings,
seem to be a population in which African-Negroid and Tethyan-Caucasoid (Semitic) types
were mingled with Mongolian-Sinyan-Amerindian populations.
John L. Sorenson, citing Kroeber and others, examines 200 basic, defined
culturalfeaturesof the "Old World Oikoumene." [8] What would be called the "common
heritage" of the peoples of the Near East. Of these features one in eight is found in
Meso-America definitely. He believes that another tenth would be added to the New World
list when checked out through the whole body of information; thus about 18 percent of
the Old World basic culture traits are shared with the New World. The statistical
probability that this percentage of correspondence would occur by accident is low. It
suggests land bridges of past ages.
Perhaps it was around 1500 B. C. as well when Thule vanished into the Faroe Rise. Thule
is famous in Northern European myth and is referred to in many books and accounts with
tantalizing brevity. Russian geographer N. Zhirov argues this theory, citing evidence
that Thule was near Iceland, that many islands were mentioned thereabouts, that it was
in a warm oceanic current, and its people grew grain and other crops, (We are reminded
of the Oera Linda manuscript.)
Indeed the birth of the North Sea may have come so late as 1500 B. C. The famous amber
of the North and Baltic Seas is conventionally dated at seventy million years; it comes
from submerged pine forests that are assigned that date. Recently geologists have begun
to stress the youngness of the area, prodded by archaeologists. Drowned settlements
have been found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and off the British
Isles. These are not to be confused with the sunken settlements of later time -Slavic
Vineta in the Baltic by a tidal wave of 1100 A. D., many places off the mouth of the
Rhine in 864 A. D. and so on. We are writing of the whole of these seas. "Europe was
inhabited when the North Sea did not exist, when England and Ireland were not islands
and Jutland and Scandinavia were not pennisulas but were all parts of a single land
mass." Thus writes Roy MacKinnon, who gives us a fix on these great submergences [9] .
Aristotle wrote in his book Of the Earth, "Inroads and withdrawals of the sea have
often converted dry land into sea and sea into dry land." And Strabo, the most reliable
geographer of the classical age, declared that "extensive submergence of the land, as
well as minor submergence, has been known."
Reviewing these and other ancient writers, Professor Ellen Churchill Semple wrote in
1931 that they "attributed the straits and sounds of the Mediterranean and the
formation of many islands to convulsions of nature. They found evidences of previous
land connections in the similarity of relief and rock structure on both sides of the
intervening channels, as do modern geographers, but they erred as to the time element
in the problem" That is, she would accept what they said of sinkings and risings, the
Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea connection, the Sicilian-Italian-Tunisian
bridge, and so forth, but simply dismissed any short-time reckoning for the events. She
is not alone in thinking that the ancient sense of time was palpably and prima facie
stunted.
The same authority speaks airily of the Mediterranean Sea being of Quaternary origin or
less (perhaps a million years); whereas now the Scientific American publishes maps of
the Mediterranean as it was supposed to be half a billion years ago, a discrepancy of
some 50,000 percent. Not to be outdone, Heezen and Ewing, two of the best contemporary
oceanographers, found continental land far beneath the Tyrrhenian waves, even while the
"oldest" parts of the seven seas are credited with a mere 200 million years. (Many say
less.) That is, 200 million years ago would represent the time a continent was lofted
by its convection cell currents over the oldest spot of the oceanic abyss, erasing its
sediments and boiling it.
If so, the Mediterranean could hardly resist for such vast lengths of time the passage
of land masses over it, while land rocks betook themselves into its depths. One is
attracted once more to the ancient idea of the Tethyan Sea, a shallow home for
innumerable species until the new oceans were created to house them.
Geographers have long known of this mythical Sea of Tethys of which the ancients spoke.
They appropriated the term for a Tethys Geosyncline or trough which they traced around
the Old Worlds -from Gibraltar to Indo-China. The Mediterranean Sea is regarded as
descended from it. I use the term for an equatorial belt and shallow seas
circumscribing the original Pangean globe. With the new theory of continental drift and
splitting of the Old World from the New by the Atlantic Ocean, Carey changed the
concept of the Tethyan geosyncline. "The Mediterranean shear system links up en echelon
with the Caribbean system to form part of a global sinistral shear system which I have
called the Tethyan Shear System." [10]
The lands (and shallow seas) were wrenched apart between North America/ South America
and Europe/ Africa. and Asia/ South Asia. Then Africa rotated sinistrally and Asia
dextrally. The Asian continent encountered land masses moving sinistrally from the
South, Arabia and India primarily.
So incomplete is the understanding of great movements of land that, where one
encyclopedia, the Britannica, is merely out of date, another, the Americana, assigns to
the Mediterranean a Tethys origin that runs far to the north -taking the Black Sea
route to the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Aral, and into Mongolia. In myth this is incorrect
Actually this is a third and temporary great ocean of Tethys that may be called the
Gobi Sea. It replaced the Tethys geosyncline and the remnant of old Mediterranean which
are more plausible successors to the ancient mythical Sea of Tethys. It gathered waters
in the great basin that is now the Gobi desert or "the Sea of Sand," as the Chinese
call it. Like the extinct Sahara Sea, the Gobi Sea lasted long enough to attract many
human settlements to its shores. Then it was emptied in a great flood and its cultures
disappeared, as described earlier.
Thus there were perhaps three Seas of Tethys, the latest being the Mediterranean Sea of
recorded history. The first would be the Pangean shallow sea that carried the vast
majority of marine species and supported a thriving population of plants and
terrestrial animals, including australopithecines. This area, like the rest of the
world, was severely buffeted in Uranian times but became known to the first modern
humans. They were called pro-Selenians because the Moon was absent from the sky, and
were the prototypical Tethyans of generalized Mediterranean race.
A second sea would be produced from the Lunarian catastrophes and be deepened by
transverse cleavages of the world-girdling fracture system; it is discoverable today as
the Balearic, Ionian and Eastern Mediterranean basins. It may have been a major locale
of recovery for humans and their cultures. But the recovery was far from peaceful.
Africa slammed into Europe at several points, raising the Alpine ridges and the
mountains of Anatolia, then withdrew after a short interval.
The third Sea of Tethys was formed by the flood waters of the evacuated Gobi Sea basin,
four thousand miles away. It was at first huge in expanse, then in a short while
diminished to the earliest Mediterranean Sea known to history. The Sea of Azov and the
Black Sea basins would have been filled and connected with the Caspian Sea. The
Tyrrhenian area was flooded beyond its present level and survivors occupied the high
islands of the Western Mediterranean.
Ancient history saw many more risings and sinkings of land and towns than have occurred
over the past two thousand years. Extensive research would probably be able to
distinguish the sinkings of what we have been calling sometimes the Solarian, Martian,
Venusian, and Saturnian ages. They are all part of legend, of some remaining historical
fragments and, unfortunately, of an age that knew writing and had a complex culture,
but whose achievements are inadequately identified because of the great destruction and
the unwillingness of scholars to entertain even a hypothesis of the events. The names
of the places supposedly sunk or serving as havens for survivors read like a roster of
geography and mythology. Attica; many places of the Aegean Sea; numerous places around
the Sea of Azov, a ring of towns around the Black Sea; the whole Adriatic basin (this
was probably the location of the predecessor of the Po River, the mythical deep river
of Eridanus, that used as its channel an arm of the global cleavage that forked from
the Red Sea clear up through the Rhine), the Gulf of Taranto. The Straits of Messina
and the Sicilian-African straits, the lands around Corsica and Sardinia, the coast of
ancient Etruria, the Cyrenaican coast of Libya, Jerba in Tunisia, towns of Crete, the
Gulf of St. Gervais off of Marseilles, the straits of Gibraltar, the Isthmus of Suez.
One can only guess that the Sahara Sea (Sea of Triton of myth and ancient reports) was
created during the Saturnian deluges. If so, it probably was emptied into the Atlantic
Ocean and its cultures destroyed during the cometary intrusion of about 3500 years ago.
Scholars of every science have pondered the many tantalizing indications of shared
history in the southern regions of the globe. Kondratov exclaims at one point:
The most surprising part of it is that a study of the world's earliest civilizations
reveals a whole series of riddles that can be solved only by using the hypothesis of
Lemuria, a large land mass in the Indian Ocean that was inhabited not just by lemurs
and not even by Pithecanthropi, but by human beings who had reached a high level of
civilization. (p. 131)
And later he says:
Lemuria... is connected with sciences that range from marine geology to the deciphering
of ancient scripts, and geographically, from the Indian Ocean to the Himalayan
mountains and the Buryat steppes. It may be that Australia and Australian studies are
also linked up with Lemuria.
One can conceive of the original extent of Austroafrica or Lemuria by noting that
Africa, South America, Australia, India, and Antarctica were once intimately connected.
Moreover, in the South Pacific a huge amount of shelf area exists beneath the waters
and a great amount of continental crust is missing.
The Americas were heavily reconstituted by natural disaster. It is reasonable to
presume that humans occupied these continents prior to the great catastrophes.
Conventional anthropology and archaeology would do well to drop the theory that all
Americans are descended from some few who made the passage across Bering Strait a few
thousand years ago -some say 20,000, some only 12,000. They assume that the continents
were in their present positions; only a bridge of land sank and rose. Even among
believers in the possibility of contact from the Pacific islands by sea, a recent
occupation is credited. A few think it more likely that the people of Tierra del Fuego
and other southern stretches came from "down under," that is, Tasmania or other islands
of the South Pacific. I think that it will not be long before some human remains of
Uranian or pre-catastrophic times are discovered or rediscovered.
The same will be true of Antarctica. This huge continent, nearly twice the size of
Australia, gives many indications of recent tropical climate, and produces many types
of fossil animals and plants including those associated farther north with human
occupations. Kondratov writes that "we do not know when the antarctic region became
covered with ice. Some glaciologists think that it cannot have been more than nine or
ten thousand years ago."
Two maps have appeared in recent years after four centuries of gathering dust. One is
the Piri Reis map that depicts the true un-iced coasts of Antarctica with considerable
accuracy, another, the Orontius Fineus map, that carries interior topography with
considerable accuracy. By conventional theory, mapping of a land mass of Antarctica
could not have occurred until the middle of our present Twentieth Century because of
the ice cover as well as the great difficulties in moving about without planes and snow
vehicles.
It seems likely, then, in accord with the general theory of this book as well as such
evidence, that African peoples occupied Antarctica during Pangea and Urania, and were
decimated by the Lunarian disasters, especially by electrical and atmospheric ravaging;
that they recovered somewhat during the Saturnian period, and then died out in the icy
climate that descended in the age of Jupiter. Somewhere in the interior their remains
will be found
Moving north from the frozen continent to the micro-continent of New-Zealand, largely
buried under water, and to Australia, the situation is not too different. There few
people were living before the European immigration. These few are supposed according to
conventional wisdom to have come from the northern and western islands of the Indian
Ocean some 20,000 years ago. Another theory says that this was impossible because there
was open water that could not be crossed and that there would have to be land bridges.
Presently, the geologists of the area have gotten together with the anthropologists, to
the extent of saying that the land bridges existed for the movements of people.
(Admittedly, the people of New Zealand, standing across a deep sea, would be difficult
to account for by a shallow sea land bridge.)
So the theory goes back and forth in a way to satisfy now theorists of the bridges and
then again theorists of the clever navigators. The theory which we employ is that the
land masses of New Zealand and Australia were sliced away from Antarctica by the now
quite evident earth cleavage and sent rafting along with other lands towards the
excavated crustal areas, north and east. On the rafts were Austroafrican survivors.
Australia rafted mostly to the east; India moved mostly northwards and to the east; the
Asian continent moved east and south nosing under the waters in places, and ultimately
(after the Saturnian deluge) with a large section of its underside underwater as ocean
shelf and slope. It is probable that the Indian Ocean was an excavated basin forming
part of the great Pacific basin and then was closed in upon by Asia veering southwards
and Australia going north.
India itself, it is agreed, became detached from Africa and Madagascar and rafted north
to lodge itself into Asia. Half the crust of the earth was gone and the earth was
expanding somewhat so that there was plenty of room for maneuver and titanic forces to
propel the rafts. Now to examine the human record in the southern regions. It is
becoming ever more plain that the oldest surviving large-scale culture in the world is
African, exemplified in the Tamil culture of India. For thousands of years we have
heard claims that this south Indian culture was a survival of a great sunken culture.
Ancient writers even asserted that India had been connected with Africa. Probably the
first modern man to consider the evidence of the common roots of the Dravidians of
Tamil Culture of Southern India with the natives of Australia. and then to connect this
idea with the notion of continental drift, and hence continental drift in recent times,
was the Soviet ethnographer, A. Zolotaryov. He was deeply influenced by Wegener's book
and presented his synthesis in 1931.
Before Zolotaryov, the Tamil (Dravidian) legends and the many ancient commentators had
impressed others. Thomas Huxley, the apostle of Darwinism, wrote that mankind had
originated on the now sunken continent, Lemuria. Frederick Engels, the intimate cohort
of Karl Marx, and a believer in Darwin's theory of evolution, wrote that a
"particularly highly developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical
zone -probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian
Ocean." Ernst Haeckel, German biologist, named the proto-human "pithecanthropus," and
assigned its origins to Lemuria; he said it migrated from there to India, Africa and
South-East Asia; indeed, in all three places pithecanthropus was shortly found.
The Dravidians, who are among the darkest in skin of the Indians and who had
generalized features which could be called Negroid but by the same token primordial
human features, are located principally in Southern India today. Their culture is
called the Tamil and is now reputed among scholars to be the oldest in India, predating
by far the Indo-European culture of the Aryan immigrants of the mid-second millennium
B. C., not to mention the medieval culture brought in by Muslim invaders.
The Tamil scholars look back not only to a sunken Lemuria, but to a sunken larger
continent called Gondwana. And it is this "Gondwanaland" that has given geologists the
name for their conception of a united land mass of the southern hemisphere that split
apart in the breaking up of the continents an alleged hundred million years or so ago,
long before the age assigned to the primates. (I may note here the interchangeability
in the context of this discussion of the words "sinking" and "drifting apart." One must
be prepared mentally to think of sinking whenever rifting occurs, both because a
cleavage is seen by terrified observers to be a sinking of the opposite lands and
because flooding and sinking actually occurs in most areas of rifting.)
However, the number of species whose remains have been found in separate areas where
there was once Gondwanaland (that is, around the world in the southern and tropical
regions), increases from year to year. Some are alive. Earthworms of the same species
are found in Australia, India and Ceylon. Pouched mammals or marsupials are found in
the Americas and Australia and nowhere else. (In 1982 fossil marsupials were uncovered
in Antarctica.) Old world and new world monkeys exist. So also, identical as well as
related fossil species, of horse, elephant, tiger, camel and rhinoceros. So, too, both
living and fossil plants.
From Kondratov's summaries, it appears that Soviet scientists have been most active in
tracing the ethnic movements of pre-history from the Lemurian homeland. Surprising
developments have occurred one after another, building up the case espoused by the old
Tamil scholars. In the first place, and using "Dravidian" as the term for the basic
generalized Negroid (Australoid) race, the Dravidian language has been compared with
and found to be related at some remote period to the language of Madagascar, thus
supporting floral and faunal resemblances and geophysical similarities previously
uncovered by other scientists from several nations.
Further, the Dravidian roots have been traced up through the Indian sub-continent to
the proto-Indian high civilizations of the Indus valley and indeed up and across the
whole north of India. Computer analysis of proto-Indian and a number of other writings
indicated the Dravidian affinity.
Moreover, Soviet scholars contend that the proto-Indian, hence Dravidian influences,
move up the Persian Gulf and into the very foundations of what were to become the
Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilizations. These have long been thought to be the
rock-bottom, independently developed civilizations of the old world. This earliest pre-
Sumerian culture has been termed the Ubaid. Kondratov makes clear that it is not alone
a matter of trade and other intercultural relations; for the pre-Sumerians or Ubaids
were part of the proto-Indian, hence, Dravidian complex. Place-names, language roots,
religious images, god-names, and forms of building construction are similar if not the
same.
Far to the East now is the present Khuzistan, Iran, once called Elam. The Soviet
linguist I. Dyakonov has said that "the only hypothesis supported by a few indicative
facts," in a comparison of Elamite with other writings, "is that of an Elamo-Dravidian
relationship." Further, "tribes related by language to the Elamites and the Dravidians
were scattered throughout Iran, or at any rate, throughout southern Iran, in the fourth
and third millennia B. C. and perhaps later as well." Traces of the Dravidian race have
been noted since then in various places in southern Iran.
Far to the north, recent Soviet archaeology has been uncovering a South Turkmenian
civilization of the third and second millennia B. C. Again, statuettes, symbols and
skeletal and cranial analysis point to close relationships to the Elamites, then the
Ubaids, then the proto-Indian, that is, the Dravidian, and ultimately to the sunken or
rafted continent of Lemuria-Gondwanaland.
Kondratov does not leave his discussion of the Lemurian cradleland without elaborating
two further items of significance. The origins of Egyptian high culture, following the
neolithic, have puzzled many scientists. Suddenly, upon the neolithic, a high culture
seems to have been imposed. I believe that it came from the Tethyan movement eastwards
from the Atlantis-Mediterranean centers. Kondratov suggests that a Dravidian north-west
thrust may have brought it in.
The earliest Egyptian writings are estimated at five thousand years of age. They are
not primitive; they are classical, that is, developed and complex. Perhaps Dravidian
India was the source. Indian archaeologist S. R. Rao has analyzed rock drawings of
early Egypt found along the Red Sea coast and sees in their high-prowed, high-sterned
boats portrayed there the vessels of Dravidian India. I find no contradiction, but
actually two early post-diluvian civilizations encountering each other in Egypt.
The Dravidians, or perhaps more properly, the Austroafricans or the fundamental negroid
race, did not cease their travels to the East until they reached the farthest islands.
African blacks, Dravidians, and the Melanesians that reach across the southern islands
of the Pacific to New Zealand relate to a basic African race that was not greatly
different from the Tethyan and Sinyan groups during the Uranian age. (Racial
differences develop rapidly in isolation and under conditions of inbreeding.) Now it
appears that the languages of the Dravidian and Australian peoples -both of which,
incidentally, throw the boomerang -are cognate. The Australian scholars J. C. Pritchard
and William Bleek argued the case a century ago. In 1963 Swedish linguist, N. M.
Holmer, systematized the grammatical and phonetic coincidences of the two languages.
Kondratov continues:
In the last century philologists discovered a remarkable similarity among the languages
spoken over the vast area that extends from Madagascar, near the shores of Africa, to
Easter Island in the eastern part of the Pacific. It has now been demonstrated that the
similarity is not accidental. The languages spoken on Madagascar and on Easter Island
which, along with those of the Hawaiians, Maoris and other inhabitants of Polynesia,
belong to the Polynesian group, the languages of the Micronesians, living on islands in
the North-West Pacific, those of the Melanesians, inhabiting islands in the South-West
Pacific, the languages of the Indonesian Archipelago, and those of the indigenous
population of Taiwan all come from a single root and constitute the Austraonesian ("
southern islands") family of languages.
In view of all of the foregoing, which has relied heavily upon Kondratov, it might be
reasoned that the whole southern hemisphere of the world and perhaps a very large belt
moving north above India belonged once to a great African grouping and was
catastrophized and separated during the lunar fission. Any Antarctic survivors were
removed by the new ice age. It may be that the same is true of South America, but with
flood, not ice, as the destroyer.
The scientific roots of catastrophism are more extensive than ordinarily believed.
Alfred Wallace, co-inventor of evolutionary theory with Charles Darwin, believed that a
single oceanic race had inhabited a great island in the Pacific Ocean which had then
been sunk. So did Darwin's disciple, Thomas Huxley, and Darwin probably agreed with
him. No injustice is done to Darwin by regarding his work as a great model of natural
history, or "simply a theory" as some critics like to say. He had many doubts and made
many "anomalous" observations about vast sudden catastrophes of species, of mountain
building, and, when he experienced a now-forgotten earthquake off the coast of Peru, he
was appalled by the high energy displayed, noting in his Journals that the surface of
the stricken island was changed more in a day than in a century of uniformitarian
processes.
Lesser known scientists developed more elaborate theories of the sinking of Pacific
lands: a century ago, Dumont d'Urville, naval officer and explorer, Moerenhout,
folklorist, both French; then earlier in this century, J. M. Brown, ethnographer, and
M. Menzbir, Russian zoo-geographer. Others might be also named. All brought forward
evidence of a great continent joining the Americas to Asia and of human cultures
flourishing upon it.
What kinds of evidence of this theory might be advanced? Again, as with the Indian
Ocean, the material is geographic, ethnographic, zoological, and mythological. Again
the chronological problems are perplexing. Kondratov, whose work was passed by a high-
level interdisciplinary committee of Soviet scientists, can therefore only hint at the
possible resolutions:
It used to be thought that the earth sciences possessed indisputable data. However,
oceanography and geology are both developing so rapidly today that many seemingly
settled questions are being revised. Substantial changes may soon take place in one of
the cardinal questions of geology and oceanography -the dating of events that have
changed the face of our planet.
Relating to the geographic is our general conception of the Pacific area as an exploded
basin, filled promptly with water. The famous "ring of fire" is an effect like a
fractured earth that is cauterizing the wounded edges of the continents. Repeated
catastrophes irritated and reopened the wounds. The famous arcs of islands and their
associated trenches were left in an advanced position when the Asian continent was
forced back by the Indian collision and an elastic withdrawal after the continent had
been pushed to its maximum.
Japan is rising out of the water. Eastern Siberia is also, as evidenced in a
progression of shell mounds of shellfish-eaters marching inland from the coast where
the food was taken and eaten. Is Eastern Asia still pulling back from its farthest
advance? But southeastern Asia is still subsiding. Is the continent still moving
southwards? Experts may be found to date these events anytime from the Tertiary Age to
the end of the last Ice Age. As with the ice caps and climate, the rising and sinking
of continents is difficult to measure, much more difficult to interpret in terms of
localized theory, and always hard to time.
If only people had kept off of the hundreds of Pacific Islands, geologists of long-term
persuasion might rest easily. But some surprising human developments have been going on
throughout the vast region. Related to the great Sinyan race of the Asian continent are
the Malaysians to the southwest and the Polynesians to the south and east. Farther
south and mingled with these groupings in some places are the Negroid or Australoid
types to which reference has been made earlier. Nor should one neglect the Negritos and
pygmies who are found in the middle of Negroid regions but are reputed to have dwelt
practically everywhere. "The little people" are a universal subject of folklore.
Wherever found they are designated as a very old, perhaps aboriginal, type of mankind;
they are said usually to be more clever and have a richer mythology than the peoples
around them, despite their smaller braincases.
Not only are there peoples on the Pacific Islands, but also the peoples have cultural
complexities and have exercised technologies beyond their recent capacities. Picture
writing is found on a number of islands, the kohau rongo-rongo tablets of Easter Island
and the Woleai Island script, for instance. Monumental sculpture, comparable to "Old
Bronze Age" achievements of the Middle East, existed on Easter Island, Ponape, and the
islands of the Caroline Archipelago. Brown found Easter Island sculptural forms in many
islands: Hawaii; Pitcairn; the Marquesas; Christmas; Malden; Tinian; and Ponape. There
are no two sculptures alike; hence the contacts were not recent and even originally the
peoples must have been of diverse sub-cultures.
And everywhere, including the tiniest atolls, the peoples have myths of large
populations, greater lands, of sinking lands, and of past ages of glory.
An Easter Island legend is typical. It is translated by Kondratov from Easter Island
writings brought back by Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian archaeologist-explorer:
The Youth Teea Waka said:
'Our country was once a big land, a very big land. '
Kuukuu asked him:
'Why did the country grow small? '
Teea Waka answered:
'Uwoke lowered his staff on it.
He lowered his staff at Ohiro.
The waves rose, and the land became small.
People began to call it Te Pito o te Henua. [Navel of the Universe]
Uwoke's staff broke against Mount Puku Puhipuhi."
A later arrival on the island, Chief Hotu Matua is told the story.
It is added that "When Uwoke's staff was big, the land fell into an abyss.
The chief corrects the report:
"That was not the staff of Uwoke, my friend," said chief Hotu Matua.
"That was the lightning of the god Makemake."
The parallels here to the Phaeton and Typhon myths of Greece and the Near East seem to
be beyond mythical fantasy. The comet (staff) of the god (cf. Uwoke, Yahweh, Ea, Yahou,
Hermes), the marine tidal upheaval, the near approach of the huge comet, the sinking of
the land into the abyss, the stroke of cosmic lightning that broke off the comet's
tail, and the resulting "navel of the world," a sacred place like Delos Island in the
Aegean Sea, which was called by the same term.
But now we are given pause. The Phaeton incident was of 3500 years ago, not 11,500
years. How explain the discrepancy in time between the Lunarian fragmentation of
continents and the Venusian cometary catastrophe?
The question is actually an opportunity to advance the theory. Perhaps the most
perplexing of the problems enmeshed in the multifarious evidence of grandiose Pacific
happenings is this: the debris of the Pangean continental breakup is scattered around
the Pacific as its fundamental morphology; yet reports of more recent disasters occur.
Many a geologist has dismissed offhand all evidence of recent happenings because he
knows how removed in time were the major events; meanwhile the ethnologists are fixated
upon the evidence of a human history unfolding in the midst of disaster. If the Pacific
continents sank once, how could they be there to sink again even in the past three
thousand years, even, indeed, in the nineteenth century, when reputable navigators
swore to the presence of islands near Easter Island and elsewhere that are no longer
there.
Some indications fit different periods. One may conjecture that, in the Lunarian
episode, small pieces of land survived the chaos, or disengaged from the nearest
continent and floated into the vortex. But, as for Europe, Africa, and Asia, so for
Oceania. There was no end to catastrophe. Considerable populations and cultures could
still be built up, only to be drastically reduced by subsequent lesser catastrophes.
The Earth has not yet achieved equilibrium, particularly in the regions that were most
heavily damaged. Igneous islands, such as the Hawaiian chain, must be considered as the
tallest of seamounts. Coral islands and atolls may be considered as debris of Pangean
sea bottoms and as new growth, accelerated by heat and by being adaptable to a quick
rate of bottom sinking.
Rare igneous bits of rock, such as rhyolite, are of continental origin and found on
Easter Island. The Soviet geologist, V. Belousov, maintains that a large zone off of
Western south America had once been continental sial. Moreover, the seabottom of this
southeastern sector of the Pacific rests upon a crust 20 to 30 kilometers thick; this
is characteristic of continental crust, not of oceanic crust, which is only three to
five kilometers thick.
It is possible that the area is continental sial, and even was once populated land, but
that the stripping of crust by the moon eruption brought on lateral avalanching to the
north and west and a sinking generally in this sector. Then as the world cleaved, the
rift here overran the land that was to sink. The setting contrasts with western North
America where the rift was overthrust by the continent. One may expect to find oceanic
basalt or sima beneath Easter Island, which extruded from the rift to pave over the
land. Just as in the northwestern United States, the rift extruded lava on top of the
land in wave upon wave.
Regrettably, judgment cannot yet be passed on the origins of Tiahuanaco, in the
Bolivian highlands, or upon its related areas of culture in Peru, Colombia, and
Ecuador. It may well be connected with Polynesian settlements in mid-ocean. The
Galapagos Islands, once thought to be an isolated laboratory of plant and animal
evolution, now gives up 2000 pieces of pottery and implements of human manufacture, as
well as continental species of flora and fauna.
If Tiahuanaco last rose high when the Sierra Nevadas of California did, and when the
area around Easter Island sank, then this event and a new phase of existence maybe
placed in the second millennium B. C., rejecting its present dating of around 400 A. D.
and moving backwards part of the way to Bellamy's 11,500 dating.
Soviet opinion on the American Indians, like that of most Europeans, assigns earlier
dates to their arrival in the Americas. Kondratov works on the baseline of 30,000 to
40,000 years ago, and of 25,000 years for the Indians of the U. S. A. In Kamchatka
Peninsula, sites are dated at 14,000 to 15,000 years. Red ochre, arrowheads, and beads
and pendants like American Indian wampum were unearthed there. (Perhaps the question
should be not "How so early?" but rather "Why so early?") Some 14,000 years of dealing
in the same monetary exchange appears extraordinary in view of the fleeting career of
historical monies. There are drawings in the American southwest of man and dinosaur;
also footprints of man and dinosaur are linked; it is hopeless to calm the heated
objections to these finds here; they are not impossible; then either the dinosaur
survived until very late, or Americans are extremely old. Evidence is difficult to come
by, but quantavolutionary theory may find profit in considering a humankind in America
who was primordial with humans everywhere, who was almost annihilated in the subsequent
catastrophe, who was Tethyan (Mediterranean-Atlantean), Melanesian (African) and Sinyan
(Mongolian) - all three - and who was later reinforced by way of the Aleutians and the
Bering Strait region; there is no gainsaying the supposition.
Perhaps by this time the reader has already noticed the magical phrase which
conventional science uses to deal with recent catastrophes of all kinds: "the end of
the ice ages." It is a useful way of saying what is uncertain, without admitting that
it is uncertain, or that scientists are even in agreement on when the ice ages ended.
It could be anywhere between 5000 and 25,000 years ago, with most scientists centering
upon the date that I have assigned to the Earth cleavage and Moon eruption, about
11,500 B. P. Thus, Vladimir Obruschev places "the sinking of the land in the region of
Easter Island at the time of the glacial epoch" when the ice melted and waters rose. Or
"Bering Land began to sink at the end of the last glacial period, between 10,000 and
12,000 years ago." Probably in any sample of books and articles on quaternary geology,
paleontology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, most authors will be found to use
the "end of the ice age" as a general synonym for catastrophe. From pole to pole and
all around the world "the Pleistocene ended in disaster." The reader might examine the
two contrasting hypothetical calendars that follow after the text of this book.
To claim a known sinking for a known time invites error. The help that one can get from
geologists and prehistorians is mainly inadvertent. The calendar of events and dates
could be readily improved were a quota of careful scientific attention granted to
quantavolutionary hypotheses. Even conventional geologists of the holocene period have
complained that their colleagues turn their backs on any phenomena that are recent.
Geology has traditionally opposed or ignored the interjection of legendary history and
anthropology into its concerns, especially insofar as revisions of time scales are
stated or implied. How then has geology coped with the rise and fall of land masses?
After shaking off the idea that Noah's flood had covered the world (and the Deluge
became a bogeyman to them, obliterating ancient human voices and behavior), geologists
were possessed by the need to explain why marine fossils are found in lofty and
protected enclaves of the continents. It seemed natural to resort to risings; then just
as naturally, the land beneath the sea had taken part in sinkings. Blessed with the
gift of time, they could assign to every parcel of land its turn above and below the
sea. The mechanism for the many freight elevators was unfortunately almost as
mysterious as the "Hand of the Almighty," and is to this day. Furthermore, the mystery
has in the past generation been enhanced by the discovery that most land beneath the
wave is a stranger to the subaerial land. 'Sial is sial, and sima is sima, and never
the twain shall meet. '
J. Tuzo Wilson pioneered the theory of the destruction and remaking of present ocean
floors every couple of hundred million years: so much for sunken lands; they are
stuffed down and run over by drifting tectonic plates. The rises are another matter.
The uplift of the continents is by the rise of flat domes of a variety of sizes, which
have been called shields, cratons, batholiths and smaller domes... There have been
intermittent uplifts involving the rise of land areas of the size of shields, or even
of whole continents. Uplifts are followed by erosion and flooding of continents by the
sea, each cycle requiring something like a hundred million years... Next smaller in
size are cratonic uplifts of which Southern Rhodesia affords a fine example... Much of
the shield of Southern Africa is underlain by a series of about a dozen cratons, each
roughly circular and a few hundred miles across. These cratons are uplifted more
actively than the shield as a whole... Smaller again are batholithic intrusives... Each
craton was formed of a hundred or more batholithic uplifts... Those formed during a
period of a few million years in Jurassic-Cretaceous time in the western Cordillera
exceed in area by a factor of 1,000 all those formed during the rest of the half
billion years since the close of the Precambrian eras. Once considered to have been
intruded while molten, batholiths are now widely considered to have more likely
resulted from plastic deformation with recrystallization and partial melting of piles
of pre-existing sediments. They are often approximately circular and those showing the
strongest evidence of recrystallization and igneous activity grade into uplifts of
similar size that were clearly intruded while cold and in a solid state." [11] Even
smaller uplifts are very many in number.
Wilson's statements are descriptive: the mechanism is here presumed. Too, the language
itself is non-operational and Aristotelian in undue proportion. Noteworthy in our view
is the assignment of uplift to practically all land above the sea. It is thus that the
marine sediments occur in all regions. The uplifts are circular, but not meteoritic;
they seem like aborted volcanos, whether great or small.
The total impression is of immense uplifts from pre-existing sea beds, accompanied by
smaller uplifts, then smaller, and finally quite small rises, a bloated skin with many
thousands of protruberant patches. There appears also to be a heavy concentration of
these rises in an age that concluded with worldwide biosphere extinctions, the
Cretaceous. Further, the subterranean force involved a heat whose temperatures might
begin by melting rocks and end in slight metamorphic deformation of rocks whose top
levels were in fact pushed up in a cold state.
Might this whole worldwide process have occurred mostly in a single quantavolution?
Some regions, even large parts of continents, would have been lifted hundreds or
thousands of meters higher than others. Shallow marine sediments would be raised. Many
sediments would be reworked in the heat, pressure, and churning of the uneven general
uplifts. Erosion would be heavy in such an event, from mechanical disruption, uneven
heating, electrical and gaseous outbursts, precipitated vapors, and winds. A great many
inter-lift depressions and fractures, laying the groundwork for gullies, streams, and
valleys, would develop.
The superpositioning of fossilized sediments according to age would be preserved, even
as these were raised. High in the plateaus of Africa, Tibet, and Bolivia, fossils from
shallow seas and swamps would be stretched out in their original beds. The Earth would
have a largely new surface, uneven, less neat, and confusing to the eye of the
beholder. Too, with all this swelling, could not one speak of a general expansion of
the Earth? Again, we go in search of a mechanism.
Let us turn to another admirable geologist, whose work unwittingly has helped us to
generate the theory of quantavolution. Shelion explains the modern theory of crustal
movements of the Earth -diastrophism, in a word [12] .
Most geologists look inside the earth for the ultimate driving force of diastrophism;
no known exterior forces are sufficiently versatile to account for the variety of
deformation we see... Plastic creep, perhaps in the upper part of the mantle, is the
active element, and the brittle crust on which we live is passively tiding on this very
slow flow. Of course, discernible forces arise from the rotation of the earth, from the
tides, and from gravity acting differentially on irregularities in the crust and its
surface topography, but these influences probably can do no more than modify and
locally complicate what is probably the essential mechanism of crustal deformation -
very slow plastic movements at about the level of the upper mantle.
One notices an absolute indifference to exoterrestrial forces and to their high energy
expressions of an electrical, atmospheric, aquatic, and lithic kind. Shelton proceeds:
This concept is attractive for many reasons. By postulating different directions of
flow in the upper mantle, it is possible to imagine many different kinds of stress
being imparted to the lower side of the comparatively passive crust. If the flow
involves circulation in three dimensions it must include rising currents in some areas
and sinking currents in neighboring ones hundreds or thousands of miles away, as well
as horizontal transfer from the first type to the second.
One notes the speculative terms: "attractive," "postulating," "imagine," "must
include." There can be no objection to speculation, especially in so excellent a volume
as Shelton's, but neither should geology claim to be a "hard science," fighting off
speculators.
Shelton, perhaps embarrassed by the weakness of conduction currents, suggests that the
rising heat of the deep mantle is so great as "to require the actual rise of masses of
rock from hotter regions deeper in the earth." And he concludes that "some kind of very
slow thermal convection -the rise of relatively warm columns and sinking of relatively
cool ones -is a favored hypothesis for the ultimate cause of diastrophism." Then in two
final paragraphs he reverts to basic questions, asking, too, for the essential
information needed to answer the questions. He doubts finally that the information at
hand is more than enough to tell one rock from another, and certainly not adequate
enough that "a hypothesis of thermal convection currents in the upper mantle can even
be formulated, let alone tested..."
Sometimes, when asked why he does not sufficiently quote "creation scientists" -George
McCready Price, Donald Patten, Byron C. Nelson, Alfred Rehwinkel, to name a few -the
present author answers that he has only a limited perspective, an individuated
paradigm, which cannot move too far if it is to remain intact. Moreover, he cannot
assimilate theoretically the instrumentation of some secular catastrophists such as
Hoerbiger and Beaumont, whereas he feels comfortable in the modes of thought of such as
Boulanger, Donnelly, Bellamy, Kelly, Dachille, Velikovsky, and a number of very recent
historians and catastrophists. But finally he must confess that he feels more inspired
by the contradictions displayed within the evolutionary and geological literature as it
marches in fine array through the catalogues and journals of science. It profits
science and pleases him more to tell the latter writers that he agrees with what they
are saying but that they do not realize the full meaning of what they are saying.
Notes (Chapter Eighteen: Sinking and Rising Lands)
1. Op. cit. 55, 59.
2. The Riddles of Three Oceans (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1974) 101.
3. Unpubl. miss. communicated to author by RenÚ Roussel of Ablon, France, Apr. 19,
1974; cf. discussion by J. Bimson, S. I. S. Workshop, Feb, 1979, P. M. Hughes, ibid.,
Sep. 1981, and 35-6 editor).
4. Melbourne Sun, Aug 14, 1982.
5. 229 Nature (Jan. 29, 1971), 327-9.
6. By the "Glomar Challenger," cf. 227 Nature (Aug. 22, 1970), 767-8.
7. Before Columbus (NY: Crown, 1971); Riddles in History (NY: Crown, 1974).
8. In J. C. Riley et al. Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts
(Austin, Texas: U. of T., 1971).
9. "Cenomanian Sync., "I S. I. S. Rev. 2 (Spring, 1976).
10. S. Warren Carey, The Tectonic Approach to Continental Drift (U. of Tasmania, 1958);
The Expanding Earth (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1976).
11. In Beals, et at., Theories of the Origins of Hudson Bay, op. cit., 37-40.
12. The material to follow is contained in Shelton's Geology Illustrated, 423-4.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part IV: Crustal Turbulence
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION
Mankind has been impressed by many lands sinking like Atlantis and Lemuria, and by
others, such as the Atlas, the Cascades and the Chilean Cordillera rising. The
movements, all legends insist, were sudden. And, of course, since it is the human who
speaks, the movements were recent.
L. C. Stecchini, historian of ancient measures, maintained [1] that the Babylonians,
calculating the diameter of the Earth subsequent to Egyptian measurements, arrived at a
larger figure. Some of man's early obsession with geometrical measurements of Earth and
sky were motivated by perceptions of terrific effects and of changes still then
occurring or feared.
Geologists prefer to think of lands sinking in one place while rising in another. I
doubt that ancient man would argue the point. The geologist may call the total process
isostasy, by which is meant the belief-not necessarily a fact that the mantle around the
world so acts as to stabilize the crustal surface. The mechanism of isostasy is
questionable, but, since it is only a question-begging term, it is less questionable
than the mechanisms for pushing up and pulling down the crust, which may be a non-
existent practical fiction.
What would provide an intelligible mechanism? One such possibility is the expansion of
the Earth as a whole.
When the remarkable past changes of the globe first assembled themselves in my mind, I
imagined them to have occurred solely as a result of the expansion of the Earth under
the influence of exoterrestrial forces. Then the theory of lunar eruption appeared more
convincing than a very large expansion, and finally I settled upon a combination of loss
of mass and expansion of volume.
Whatever can explode can expand. Worlds explode. Radio astronomy and even visual
observation on rare occasions, confirm this. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter
was probably a planet until recently. There are some small indications that it may have
been identified with the Greek god Phoebus Apollo, hence be so close in time.
The Earth can explode. Therefore it can expand. It is more difficult to construct a
model of expansion than a model of explosion. Both layman and expert can readily conjure
up an image of "more than enough" energy to explode any body. In so imagining, they may
skip over the crucial problem of how much it takes exactly to explode the body. An
explosion can be defined as a rapidly accelerating expansion that has achieved a
specified rate where a set of effects occurs that is called "explosion."
The conservation of angular momentum of a rotating body depends upon its retaining the
sum of its mass, its velocity and its radius. The radius is the distance from the center
of rotation to the direction of its motion along the axis of rotation. Expansion
signifies a change in radius.
The concept of radius describes a relationship of objects. It is not itself a force or
an entity. Therefore, the expression "increase in radius" must signify a changed spatial
relation between things that determine the radius. Once more, the salient question
points at electro-mechanics, determinants of mass that might act to increase the radius.
Expansion of a rotating body then must be associated with a change in velocity or mass.
In the case of the Earth during a lunar eruption, the loss of mass consists of half the
crust and most of a dense atmosphere, altogether no more than 2% of the mass of the
Earth. An interruption of rotation imposes an abrupt decline of spin velocity upon the
Earth. This then requires an increase in radius and expansion in order to maintain
angular momentum.
At the same time, the conservation of angular momentum does not occur in an isolated
system. In the present case, energy representing the angular momentum is transferable to
other external systems: the space plasma, the proto-Moon, the Sun and planets, and
cometary bodies.
A body such as Earth will expand when it is freed from an external pressure. Possession
of a dense atmosphere of the type of Venus would have limited the Earth's figure; if
removed, the Earth would have expanded. Its outer surface will even spring back, that
is, exhibit an acceleration and a counterpressure that causes it to "take off" from its
base. Irregularities found in a number of places around the globe may be fossil
expansions, if not fossils of impact explosions and massive eruptions.
There are reasons to believe such events can occur and have occurred. In anticipation of
stating them, we may suggest why land has sunk; for the two behaviors of expansion and
sinking are not independent, although they may occur at different places and
lithospheric levels. Lands have sunk by collapse into new basins, by flooding, and by
their contents disappearing in explosive clouds of debris. If the force that explodes
the land expands the Earth, then we have sinking and rising in a new formula, one which
contains its mechanism, and furthermore may be true.
The Earth was not pre-ordained to its present volume or density. No two planets have the
same size or density. Earth's mass density differs considerably from that of the inner
planets and much from that of the outer planets. So does its volume. It could once have
been denser and smaller. That its mass and volume have been constant through long ages
is 1) an ideological dogma and idÚe fixe 2) a mistaken simplism regarding the "hardness
of rock" and the innateness of volume 3) a mistaken reading of natural history 4) a
psychological denial of an undesired state 5) a practical fiction, or 6) a fact. The
first five possibilities might be demonstrated without much difficulty, but will be left
to such evidence as the reader may cull from this and related studies. If they are so,
then the sixth may be in doubt and the contrary may be considered, namely that the
Earth's volume has fluctuated or at least been subject to expansion. Such a
consideration is the purpose of this chapter.
A number of theories have given the Earth different sizes in the past. A number of means
of expansion are available. A number of reasons lead one to a probable opinion that the
Earth was once smaller and has recently expanded in volume.
Pickering long ago realized the necessity of Earth expansion. "A rising region... must
evidently be increasing its volume. This increase may occur either with or without an
increase of mass. In the latter case, the increase must be due to a rise in temperature.
It has been shown that, if a part of the Earth's crust fifty miles in thickness were to
have its temperature raised 200 F, its surface would be raised to the extent of 1,000
to 1,500 feet. The Bolivian plateau has an elevation of two and a half miles. That of
the Himalayas is about a mile higher. It is improbable that these elevations are due to
this cause." [2] He finds that an increase in mass is impossible. He then turns for an
explanation from a simple temperature rise to the possible pressure of water and steam,
and since he was unaware of the lack of water over the rock of ocean beds, and since he
presumed the Moon eruption and the catastrophic period to be very ancient, he called
upon a still watery mantle to produce the necessary thermodynamics for expansion. Even
were the age to be granted, the mechanism would be hopeless for the task. No exploding
steam engine could blow the material of the Moon basin into space.
Carey and Jordan have devoted books to the subject of Earth expansion, and were cited
earlier. Both see the process as very gradual. Carey estimates a 20% radial expansion
and uses the projected expansion as a mechanism to account for continental drift. M.
Cook, in criticism, finds Carey's theory short in energy supply, and argues that the
required release of chemical bonding of molecules would melt the Earth. Jordan,
following Dirac, claims a relaxation of the gravitational constant over time. As
gravitational attraction declines, matter expands. The application of Dirac's theory to
Earth expansion would logically follow, but Jordan is unable to provide convincing
geological evidence, even when presented with a long Earth history.
R. H. Dicke and C. H. Brans also predicted a slow drop in the force of gravity, and
Dicke estimated that Earth gained from this source 15% in volume over 3.25 billion
years. When the Atlantic basin was shown to be young, Dicke ceased to credit its
widening as support for his theory, because it apparently had grown 300 times faster
than his theoretical rate would allow [3] . Egyed's theory of Earth expansion, based
upon paleogeo-graphical data showing a modest inverse correlation between the quantity
of ocean waters and the passage of time seems vulnerable both because a uniform quantity
of water is assumed and because the time periods, though conventional, can be
challenged. Egyed cites Cox and Doell, further, in claiming an increase in the Earth's
radius of between 0.5 and 1.0 millimeters per annum [4] . This would amount to 10 6
meters in a billion years, about one-seventh of the Earth's radius.
In comparison, my estimate of the radial expansion which accompanied the fission of the
Moon is about 9%, less than one-tenth of the total radius; the estimate is the result
merely of topographical scrutiny. The expansion in volume represented is about 20%, much
less than Carey's estimate. Carey's expansion took place over many millions of years;
the process here discussed would have occurred in perhaps three thousand years. Again,
we rely upon a uniquely great exoterrestrial encounter to compress time, accomplishing
in centuries what the aforesaid scientists have allocated as the task of very many
millions of years. Any evidence at present of an expanding Earth, we would accredit to
the extended uniformitarian tail of the exponential curve of quantavolution.
Of the several attempts at demonstrating expansion, Meservy's appears most clear and
valid. He shows that "the separation and movements of the continents in the last 150
million years cannot be explained by continental drift on the surface of the present-
sized earth." [5] This he does topographically. Following the Bullard and Hurley
reconstruction of the supposed original supercontinent before its continental elements
drifted apart, he retrojects the present continental map as it must have drifted and
shows that the present arrangement could not have emerged from the reconstruction.
In order for the supercontinent of one time to fit the map of the continents of today,
the continents of today would have to come from a smaller globe. "It seems highly
improbable that the area enclosed by the perimeter [of the Pacific] was ever as large as
half the earth's present area in the last 150 million years." Furthermore, he claims
that his "argument is not very sensitive to the exact time scale or to variations in the
rate of ocean-floor spreading, as long as these were reasonably monotonic in the period
in question." That is, the solution of a smaller Earth would emerge even if time were
foreshortened and ocean-floor growth were rapid. "The most direct interpretation of the
evidence... seems to be that a large expansion of the earth's interior has taken place
in the last 150 million years. The nature of the physical process that could have led to
such an expansion is highly conjectured, but such a process cannot be excluded on the
basis of present physical knowledge."
By what means could the Earth have expanded at the time of or subsequent to the breakup
of the original super-continent? Six means can be suggested, none of them excluding all
others and in fact all six could be simultaneously operative to produce a concurrent
breakup of the continental mass and an expansion of the globe. Meservy does not consider
a sudden loss of over half the Earth's crust, as by Moon fission, but significantly the
occurrence of such a loss, concentrated within the Pacific perimeter, only serves to
strengthen his topographical demonstration.
An abruptly slowed rotation of the Earth over days of time, never to be restored, would
reduce the centripetal force of the globe and tend to expand its volume. This would be
especially prominent if the body causing the slowdown were electro-gravitationally
attractive. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald (1893) equations assert that all matter contracts in
the direction of its motion and the amount of the contraction increases with the rate of
motion. The Earth rotates with a kinetic energy of 2.6 X 10 36 ergs. If an interruption
by an external body depresses its rotation by 35% and shortly thereafter the rotation
assumes the level of a 20% reduction, an energy of some 10 36 ergs is available, along
with a large electrical, gravitational, and axial torque energy, to push the continents
and expand the volume of the Earth. This heat of rotational slowdown is sufficient in
theory to unleash 50 billion Krakatoa's. That volcanic eruption, one of the worst in
history, released about 2 x 10 25 ergs.
The conditions for expansion of the Earth were probably present, but they approached the
conditions for a complete melting of the crust of the Earth. They approached, beyond
that, the conditions for the explosion of the Earth. Nevertheless, in the end, the
sphericity of the globe was maintained, half of Pangea was preserved, and small numbers
of most flora and fauna, including homo sapiens, survived. The fall of cold water on the
continents helped to preserve their structures against heat from below while the same
waters moving into the oceans and the falling waters there catalyzed the expansion
process.
The sudden acquisition of a huge heat presented problems of storage and prompt use, if
the Earth were not to explode. The Intruder's pass-by and the forces it exercised upon
the globe would begin some days before the moment of maximum impact and continue for
several days thereafter. Thus the heat would not be applied all at once; by the time the
critical moment arrived, the Earth was committed to partial explosion and expansion. The
loosening of the Moon-making crust and the cleaving of the globe would take place
quickly; then immediately the heat would be drawn upon for the reconstruction of the
Earth.
Also, a great proportion of the heated matter would be exploded into space. The global
fracture system would help to handle the venting of enough heat and material to cool,
pave and expand the Earth's surface. Moreover, it would develop the capacity to do so
within the required time. And the density of the Earth's interior would be originally
sufficiently high to provide the material.
A decline in atmospheric pressure by the temporary and permanent removal of atmosphere,
especially a heavily vaporized one, would also contribute to an expansion of the Earth.
So too, of course, would the actual removal of crustal material of low temperature. It
is not necessary that the rising magma be less dense than the escaping crust but only
that temporarily it be in a molten state, mixing with gases and water as well, and hence
capable of freezing into a solid at a higher level or over a larger expanse of surface.
H. J. Binje said once that "the driving force of rising magma lies in change of the
nuclear structure of the magma itself." [6]
Water added to a silicate solution reduces its melting point. The lower crust and mantle
boundary might melt at as low a temperature as 500 C under water saturation. The water
itself would be provided by old surface waters and incoming deluges of rain, snow, and
ice.
The upper crust on which the biosphere and sediments rested would be shielded from the
abyssal heat by thousands of volcanic vents penetrating its surface and by the cyclonic
venting of heat into space over the immense flayed crater of the Moon. Still the thermal
pressures throughout the globe would be heavy and accompanied by rises in temperature
that would increase the expansion.
The globe would fracture throughout. Pictured as scraped of its biosphere and surficial
sediments, the globe today presents a thoroughly fractured appearance. Nowhere on Earth
is one very far from a great fissure that would have been involved in expanding the
globe. Perhaps one of the reasons for the discontinuity and absence of expected
sediments in so many places is the underlying expansion by igneous intrusions that once
occurred. Furthermore, the very 'success' of the globe-girdling fractures in producing
ocean beds of lava and pushing away the continents is that they were engaged in
expanding the volume of the Earth.
The sial continents that remained obviously were not destroyed in the process of partial
explosion and expansion. However they were penetrated at many points by expanding lava.
The sial could be lifted by less force than would be required to dissolve it. Given over
half the surface as a direct outlet, and a huge fracture network for disgorging heat and
magma, there would be less occasion to obliterate the many large areas of sial overhang.
Willis once wrote that "it is established by observations on rocks that the chemical
compounds of which they consist can adjust themselves to changes of pressure or of
temperature or of both by changes of volume as well as by alterations of form. Larger
volume would result if a mass of rock were heated and at the same time relieved of some
of the load resting upon it." [7] He even went so far as to say that erosion can cause
underlying rocks to expand their volume. Rock crystals respond to new conditions, not
even highly thermal, by reorganization of their structure. "Crystals are almost human in
that they always seek the easiest way out... Where crystals grow vertically, continents
rise." A sudden and massive change in crystallization may have occurred in many rocks.
Now we might claim that the lunar explosion may have been the chief factor in expanding
the Earth and producing the granites of the continents whose origins we had been
wondering about in an earlier chapter.
A definition of stability and even of structure is that the defined complex resists
electro-gravitational dissolution. If a complex, say of rock, is stretched in a lowered
gravitational field, that is, attracted by another field, and obtains a revised
structure, then, after release from the second field, it will tend to retain the form
temporarily assumed. This may be a factor to be considered in relation to an expanded
Earth. An analogy suggests itself: rock under conditions of the assumed encounter would
behave like oil shale when it is processed. The rock that is mined expands its volume by
20% or more [8] .
Seismic signals experimentally transmitted through the Earth produce more or less sudden
changes in velocity, indicating "boundaries" at six radial distances before reaching the
center: the Moho discontinuity, and at 400+, 950+, 2900+, 4800+, and 5100+ kilometers of
depth. There seems to be little explanation for these seismic transitions unless they
represent levels of response to an historical torque. The interruption of a rotational
motion of a mass must be perceived by the whole body. At some ratios of density to
torque, indications of a phase shift should occur. These indicators would be erased by a
huge expansion, but by the same token, will remain vivid under conditions of moderate
expansion.
In another work, I asserted briefly, and probably in error, that the Earth would lose
electrical charge in a grave encounter such as would remove the lunar material: "loss of
electrical charge may also have decreased the density of the Earth." [9] This was based
on the assumption that piezoelectricity from rock turbulence and electrostatic charges
would be lost into space to the larger intruding body; then matter hitherto bonded
electrically would be unbonded and take up more volume. However, after discussions with
E. R. Milton, I became persuaded that the intruder would have carried a heavier charge,
since it was transporting charge from the outer solar system toward the Sun; it was also
much larger than the Earth; therefore it would have deposited charge upon Earth. The
charge would then be incorporated by the Earth's molecules and cause the stretching of
their internal atomic bonding. Hence expansion. But where the charges would accumulate
is critical, whether on the continental surfaces, or diffused in the mantle, etc.
"It is not generally known that the volume of a Leyden jar is increased by charging the
jar and diminished by discharging it, wholly or partially. The crust of the earth
resembles a Leyden jar, of which the coatings are represented by the liquid core and the
enveloping atmosphere." So wrote Abbe Moreaux in 1909 [10] . He envisioned a daily
expansion and contraction of the crust. Possibly the same charging phenomenon would
effect a larger and more enduring expansion of the Earth.
The almost non-existent evidence, and the complexities of the electrical phenomena
accompanying such an encounter, make all reasoning highly speculative. It is possible
that both processes occurred, a gain and loss of charges, with the gain predominating.
Yet another set of phenomena may be connected with Earth expansion, rather than simply
the adjustment, unexplained, of coastal margins to which it is otherwise attributed.
That is the tendency of continental margins to stretch out over the ocean basins. For
instance, "as late as the beginning of the Quaternary period the land of Siberia reached
much farther north and at the end of the last glacial epoch was broken up, large areas
sinking into the sea." [11]
Elsewhere we read, "while exploring the seismic structure of the continental margin off
France, Lucien Montadert, of the Institut Francais du Petrole, noticed that the upper
part of the continental crust of margins has been fractured into a remarkable pattern of
narrow sedimentary basins bounded by listric faults, that is, faults that 'curve, '
being steep at the surface, becoming more horizontal with depth. He suggested that the
continental crust at the margin was extended at the time of rifting by up to 20 per
cent." [12] The listric faults are not found where internal basins, such as Lake
Michigan, have been examined.
We are inclined to view this oceanic marginal fault system as a possible stretching to
accommodate expansion. If the rift did not cleave cleanly, however, the stretching might
be expected. As the Earth expanded, and radial pressures pushed upwards, blocks of rock
would be broken off serially from the continental mass. The stretching might also, still
in accord with our general theory, be a result of a differential speed of rafting, with
'France' here heading eastwards faster than the bottom of the basin could be paved with
fresh lava.
When the Earth's surface is viewed from a detached intellectual perspective, it begins
to appear as a thoroughly disorganized assemblage. Instead of its presenting logical
conformities on a grand scale, its every feature becomes an anomaly. All of its real
rules seem to have come from violating the rules of the earth sciences. When such a
condition is manifest in human organizations, such as the factory, or the hospital, or
the government, that is, when what is regularly done contrasts with the way things are
supposed to be done, the usual recommendation is to change those rules that are
inapplicable to reality. Unfortunately in the present case, as in many cases of social
organizations, new rules are not easy to write and, meanwhile, the old stable mixture of
reality and pretense that has been managing the enterprise dissolves into fantasy and
disorder.
Notes (Chapter Nineteen: Expansion and Contraction)
1. In conversation with author. His yet unpublished manuscripts may cast light upon the
matter.
2. 15 J. Geol. (1907), 34.
3. W. Sullivan, Continents in Motion, 50-6.
4. "The expanding Earth," 197 Nature (16 Mar. 1963), 1059-60; see also P. S. Wesson,
"Does Gravity Change with Time?" 33 Physics Today (July 1980), 32-7.
5. "Topological Inconsistency of Continental Drift on the Present Size Earth," 166
Science (31 Oct. 1969), 609-11.
6. Quoted by Jordan, op. cit., 121.
7. B. Willis, East African Plateaus and Rift Valleys (Wash. D. C., Carnegie Inst.,
1936), no. 470; 306, 309.
8. Encyclo. Britannica yearbook, 1976, 289.
9. Chaos and Creation, 154.
10. 68 Sci. Amer. Suppl.( 24 July 1977), 3.
11. II Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec. 1977), 3.
12. Tony Watts, "Plate Tectonics," New Sci. (6 Nov. 1980), 362.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY
THRUSTING AND OROGENY
When nineteenth century geologists departed from their original simplistic
uniformitarianism, they found it useful to identify in Earth history several points of
great diastrophism (" turnabouts" in Greek) or revolution. Whence came the Laurentian,
Algonkian, Killarney, Appalachian, Laramide and Cascadian Revolutions, each marked by
profound unconformities in the rocks. Naturally a quantavolutionist will wonder why
these never evolved into a new catastrophist geology. First, there was the obstacle of
ideology, which a social psychologist can appreciate more than a natural scientist: the
social atmosphere of the times, the breakaway from religion, the need of biology to
pursue prolonged development periods, and the empirical fascination of studying the
processes going on before one's very eyes -these acted to subdue diastrophism and
revolutionism.
Long periods of slow changes were supplied until the revolutions themselves appeared as
continual skirmishes of the elemental forces. The search for internal forces capable of
sculpting the Earth's surface went so far as to conceive of the massive core of the
Earth wobbling within the globe so as to push out or pull back crustal features. Some
have thought of shrinkage, so that as the Earth aged it wrinkled (apparently not willing
to move out upon the seabeds). Nowadays radioactive decay, rising from the rock deeps
and engendering heat, has been called upon to push the continents slowly about. And this
is said to crumple the colliding edges of continents into mountains and to stretch and
reform the landscape.
A second reason why catastrophist geology could not evolve is also related to the
ideological: geologists have refused to look into the skies for the forces needed to
accomplish the revolutions that they perceived; without a mechanism, they were left with
mere names -and questions, such as ones asked by K. Krauskopf [1] ; "What are the
irresistible forces which can twist and break the strongest rocks?" "Where do the forces
originate which can raise and lower continental masses vertically? ... Why have not
forces in the crust long since reached an equilibrium? With questions like these we have
long since reached an impasse."
Since we have essayed answers to questions of vertical movements for the sake of this
chapter, we may add: "How can kilometer-high sediments be pushed over thousands of
kilometers of the surface of the Earth?" Every thrust that has occurred or might happen
can be described by the same few variables. The permutations resulting in reality may be
numerous but are still intelligible. Price details several thrusts; Cook and Velikovsky
describe a number; Burdick, Brock and Engelder have produced case studies.
It should be possible to conceptualize thrusting. Suppose a thrust as any lateral motion
of a definite mass. The mass will have an initial velocity and acceleration, a momentum
and inertia, a direction. It will have a surface to ride upon, and the interface will
have a characteristic viscosity. The mass need not be solitary, even though it is
definable; a limestone may be riding on a schist, or rock upon oil or water slurry, and
so forth; hence there will be another set of variables for each definable component in a
complex thrust.
Melvin Cook and Charles Hapgood employ prior ice caps as a mechanism of sudden
diastrophism. Accepting prior calculations and proof of the existence of towering ice
caps at the poles in recent times, they weigh the ice and decide that enough mass is
available to cause unbearable pressures laterally (Cook) and a lever effect (Hapgood).
The ice mass avalanches upon the world, perhaps in conjunction with the fracturing of
the globe. The massive thrust of the ice bulldozes the surfaces of all sediments and
biosphere in many areas; the fractured Atlantic region of Pangea, now the Americas,
moves westward and the bows of the continents rise into high mountains as they plough
through the oceanic crust. Hapgood adds a tilt to the Earth, product of the same event,
and this permits him to add another string of disasters to that of the precipitating
cause. I cannot criticize these works here. In general, to tie together the apparently
interconnected Pacific Basin and continental movements I find a need for a more
universal force.
Mountain ranges are folded. What is a fold and what is a thrust? There can be no fold
without a thrust. Nor is there any major fold that comes from two opposite thrusts at
the same time. There must be a source of the push that folds, and sometimes folds in two
or three laps. And the push must be along a surface that is the base for itself and the
fold. Conceivably an uplift might come from an expanding Earth or an attractive
electrogravitational force above the Earth. In the latter case, however, irregular
outbursts would occur, and the landscape afterwards would be volcanic or batholithic or
like the seamounts of the ocean bottoms. In the former case the surface would crack,
swell into circular rises of different sizes, cause gentle slopes, and also erupt in
volcanism. There is no need to deny the ordinary idea of a fold as coming from a push.
Enough of the high mountain ranges of the world are poised at the edges of the
continents to admit the possibility that they were pushed from behind by the moving
continental mass. Their pitch, too, suggests a seaward thrust. If the thrust was
initiated by ice blocks, they would ultimately take the form of a scow uplifted at the
stern and bow. If in movement because of a forward electrogravitational slide and an
upwelling and expanding lava flow from the rear, the bow would be much less pronounced
than the stern. If the movement were accompanied by a swelling of the magma below,
especially if the expansion were more pressing from the rear magmas, the scow would tend
to nose down and come to its ultimate halt with towering mountains and deep roots. If
the uplift were general beneath the thrusting mass, the prow and mass as a whole would
lift itself, too, and ride more easily on the magma. Like a motorboat that rides higher
as its speed increases, the continents would be elevated and move faster once in motion
over a swelling magma. Unlike the motorboat, the continental blocks as a whole would not
then sink; the supporting rock would be metamorphosized at a new density.
The emptiness of the Pacific Basin stands for an event quite capable of initiating
global diastrophism once and for all. This would require the withdrawal from the Earth
of a moon-sized body, in fact the Moon, an event that must call upon an enormous
electro-gravitational attraction, which must come from a body even larger than the Earth
that passed close enough to pull out over half the crust. And this event is described in
Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria.
Thereupon all the terrestrial processes that Melvin Cook so well portrays proceed: the
remaining crust fractures down to the mantle in an explosive network providing the
globe-girdling rift and fault system. Orogeny occurs rapidly as the cut-apart
continental blocks scramble for position. Cross-tides of water and wind race around the
world. Rock and ice are in motion as great bulldozers, thrusting here and there. The
immense number of faults, not only of the global girdles but practically everywhere,
establish the infrastructure of the valleys and rivers of the world. The true ocean
basins are created for the first time.
Under such circumstances and sequences of events, the vocabulary of science is strained.
The most extreme case of thrust would be a force gripping or pushing the crust of the
Earth like a shell so that it moves independently of the mantle and core. That such an
idea may be rooted to some degree in reality is attested by studies proposing analogous
movements in the Sun and Jupiter, and at least one suggestion that the Earth's core
rotates out of step with the crust. The contacts of the crust with the plasmas of space
and with its atmosphere may set up a continuous drag and eccentricity on the mantle,
manifested for example in seismic and volcanic responses to heavy solar storms. Natural
history may have witnessed, if not a complete and neat slippage of the crustal shell,
some diastrophic approaches thereto.
I do not know where to place the finding of F. A. Vening-Meinesz: as related to lunar
eruption, Earth expansion, rifts and fractures, landforms, or to thrusting? He studied
the major topographic features of the globe in relation to the Earth's axis of rotation.
Their pattern of shocking and shearing evidences a clockwise rotation of the crust in
relation to the core of 70 . That is, as the Earth moved east, its landforms struck out
south by east [2] . The unified nature of his finding suggests a single giant thrusting
episode sequential to the evacuation of the southern hemisphere.
The continents move; this is a form of thrust. Often it is a thrust through water and
basalt bottom; then, again, the Indian subcontinent thrusted upon Asia. Sedimentary rock
layers are scraped and dumped over the sides of the awesome abysses; here is thrusting.
Coal fields are forests bulldozed and deep buried: this is a form of thrust. Mountains
are piled upon one another, again a thrusting action. Tides and winds lay down field
upon field of debris, of vast extent; are these not thrusts, too? It is fruitless to
argue over definitions. As with earthquakes, which are moving earth, and shaking, so
with thrusting: beyond a certain intensity, the vocabulary is inadequate to the quantity
of cleavage, the quantavolutions. Then, too, earthquakes and thrusting can come to a
marriage; in a discussion of even the relatively mild seismism of our times, Frank Lane
writes that "where an earthquake is concerned there is no such thing as an unmovable
object, even mountains are moved." They are thrusted.
Yet it has been a long time since "the mountains skipped like rams," as the Biblical
Psalm goes. Although the records of solarian geology are far from complete, we suspect
that such a sight has not been seen in the past two millennia. The occasional
spectacular rock avalanches and submarine mud avalanches that are presently recorded are
not what the Psalmist had in mind. In an age that experienced earthquakes abundantly, he
was celebrating and reporting Yahweh at a peak of power, probably in the centuries that
remained vivid to him -the seventh to the fifteenth before Christ -reinforced by the
cherished accounts stretching back to the breakdown of the pangean surface.
He was speaking for the hapless ones who watched the Alps rise up from the Tethyan
geosyncline to be "shoved northwards distances of the order of 100 miles" where now are
located Italy and Switzerland. The famous "nappes" of the Alps are but smaller thrusts
laid upon great ones. The alpine massif smothered the long rift that once cut through
the "Adriatic Sea" and "Rhine River Valley." Or the American cordillera, thousands of
kilometers long, stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; there mountain uplifts
amounting to thousands of meters have occurred, it is agreed by a range of authors from
C. Darwin to I. Velikovsky, in absolutely modern times. The Sierra Nevadas of California
are a single block, a thousand kilometers long, thrust up westwards. The Himalayas rose
steeply in human times. "The highest mountains in the world are also the youngest,"
wrote Helm and Gausser [3] . But the Himalayas are also reasonably accredited to the
crumpling of the "Indian" subcontinent against Asia with the vast inertial forces
initiated in continental rafting. And probably the rising of the Tibetan and African
plateaus occurred under lateral and subterranean pressures of the same time.
One after another, explorers and writers have expressed surprise at the youthfulness of
the mountain ranges until at least and at last all that are spectacular have been moved
up in time to the age of humans. Velikovsky published a brief survey of this evidence
citing the geological works of R. A. Daly, G. M. Price, R. F. Flint, B. Willis, A. Heim
and A. Gausser, H. de Terra and T. T. Paterson, and R. Finsterwalder. He offered general
catastrophic forces as the cause operating most often in human times. Melvin Cook placed
orogenesis in a single set of great earth movements of human times. The present work
unites the recent risings, the great global faulting, and exoterrestrial forces mainly
of the lunarian age.
Cook uses huge avalanching ice blocks convincingly as the bulldozer of many thrustal
incidents in America and, in one case, in South Africa. The ice sheets push the
sedimentary strata for many kilometers, melt and flow around them, crack through them,
scatter mounds of debris in their path "like loads of loose, dry snow thrown ahead of a
fast moving snow shovel." [4] Possibly the only alternative to his mechanism would be
rapid continental movement toward the south, deceleration of the basal movement of the
crust, a swelling of the Earth beneath the rear echelons, inertial continued movement in
the same direction by weaker overlaying sedimentary strata, in some cases even
overrunning the halted forward elements. Under this scenario, one would have numerous
cases of inverted strata, older on top of younger, and hence the fossil inversions
sometimes deemed a disproof of evolution. One would also expect then the occurrence of
thrusts in regions of the world where no ice sheets were at work; in fact the Alpine
overthrusts, the Atlas mountains and other overthrusted areas were not near to
overpowering ice masses.
Thrusting played a large role in the formation of coal, lignite, and fusain deposits,
which range in depth from the surface down to over a kilometer. The distribution of
world coal deposits, Cook shows, follows in significant part the radial avalanching of
the ice caps. Coal deposits radiate from cracking and thrust points of the old ice cap
and shell-slip. "Most coal deposits are found apparently squeezed by crustal thrusts,
between the ice cap depression zones and the concentric, flow-resisting mountain
ranges." [5] Ice cap fragments moved outwards upon the biosphere with the scooping and
scraping motions of a giant earth-moving machine, depositing it, often smouldering,
often slurried with ice and sky waters, into heaps, folded and thrust them over and in-
between with thin sands, clay and gravel, and abandoned them in a state of thermal-
retaining and heat-generating compression laterally and from above. Super-hurricanes,
fast deep water tides, and typhoons can also scoop and pile up the total biosphere.
Since the deep oceans did not exist during much of the quantavolutionary crises, the
massive scoopers, scrapers, and in-folders might handle the marine life of shallow seas
identically. Coal of different grades, and in thin beds, is interlarded with layers of
ash, charcoal (fusain), clay, till, and pebble, that is, with all that goes before the
blade of the bulldozer.
Velikovsky's summary of H. Nilsson's analysis of the lignite or brown coal of Geiseltal,
Germany, is revealing. The original studies were the work of J. Weigelt and associates.
There plants from contrasting climatic regions of the world are identifiable, as are
insects, algae, fungi, reptiles, birds, and mammals, (including apes). "Plants are
represented there from almost every part of the globe." [6] The material is well
preserved: chlorophyll, colors, membranes, and nervature are in many cases apparent. The
fossilization says Nilsson, happened lighting fast -"blitzschnell;" the catastrophic
process is evident.
Nilsson explains the event by tidal waves moving in from around the world. The time is
given as early Tertiary. Velikovsky is noncommittal. To us, more likely than tidal
action would be cyclonic action: a great funnel of gases passed over a wide band of
territory collecting the biosphere, macerating it, and finally dumping it. Little heat
and pressure is needed to bake lignite. Carbon 14 would be low in coal deposits, not for
the reason commonly given, that coal is an old deposit, but because it was not in a
constant state of equilibrium and is, as Cook shows [7] , not now in equilibrium and,
when the rate of growth of carbon 14 is projected backwards, it arrives at a zero state
around 13000 years ago -subject to much turbulence, of course, but pointing to a
thoroughgoing reformation of the atmosphere around that time.
Where is the thrusting and folding of the ocean bottoms? There is very little of it,
unless, as we said, continental drifting is called thrusting. The seabeds are flat, save
for the steep oceanic ridges, the great rises, and the innumerable seamounts.
Geophysicist Edward Bullard marks the contrast: The mountains of the oceans are nothing
like the Alps or the Rockies, which are largely built from folded sediments. There is a
world-encircling mountain range -the mid-ocean ridge -on the sea bottom, but it is built
entirely of igneous rocks, of basalts that have emerged from the interior of the Earth.
Although the undersea mountains have a covering of sediments in many places, they are
not made of sediments, they are not folded and they have not been compressed [8] .
The last sentence points up an impossible predicament for conventional geophysics: a
supposed situation in which the continental crust folds and thrusts and compresses into
abundant mountains while the oceanic crust slides up and under and around without making
mountains, having once and for all and by gradual processes made its igneous ridges and
seamounts. That no continental mountains are to be found imbedded in oceanic basalts is
remarkable. Considering how recently most of the mountain ranges of the Earth have
formed, however, we surmise that the mountains came on the heels of the ocean basin
creation or thereafter. But this points to the conclusion that the world has been flat
until very lately. And this leads to the idea that quantavolutions of all kinds may have
begun only recently.
The seamounts are igneous, and usually flat-topped. They came into notice during and
since World War II. Their astonishing numbers point to a common and concurrent origin:
almost all of them must have been both extruded and pulled up in the exoterrestrial
engagement of the lunar fission period. There are no substantial currents to erode their
tops and anyhow erosion creates peaks and gradual slopes. They are not volcano fields,
connected underground by a piping system for magma flow.
Sedimentation on them is slight. Some have "surprisingly young" fossil-impregnated rocks
on their beveled tops, write Heezing and Hollister [9] . Some of the fossils are
subaerial, not marine. Could sea levels have been 400 meters and more lower than today,
ask the same authors. (Actually, subaerial fossil species have been found at 1000 m
depths.) Or could the ocean bottoms have subsided by that amount? Neither hypothesis
finds favor.
They probably stem directly from the lava pavements of the ocean floors. They probably
lifted up into a maelstrom of air and water, rather than grew up underwater like some
volcanos, even now, are observed to form. For a short period they stood amidst a rising
ocean of water. The water ceased to rise rapidly. Life took hold on some of them. After
a couple of thousand years, an immense quantity of water was poured into the ocean. The
seamounts now drowned.
The rhetoric of geology is overpowering in its stress upon time. It rolls along in the
cadences of an epic poem, stressing eons of time like the pause at the end of the lines.
But today has its poetry of the absurd, and this may drive the incessant echo for a
moment from the mind. Consider, then, the absurd: that legitimate arguments can
maintain, facing the geological world, an age of 10 9 years and an age of 10 4 years -
ten billion against 10 thousand years.
The absurd, of course, is the theory of quantavolution: time is squeezed out of
explanations of the Earth until only the minimal amount remains, like forcing the air
out of a bottle until a nearly total vacuum is reached. The analogy is not so remote:
some say that the Earth is losing its atmosphere, atom by atom, until one day, eons from
now, it will move denuded of air in the vacuum of space. The same might be done in hours
and days by the near passage of a body sufficiently large and electrically attractive to
suck up the atoms of the atmosphere.
The absurd in geology makes statements of a related type. All the igneous rock and its
formations of the Earth's crust, could be brewed by sudden heat over 1500 C and
pressures over 5000 atmospheres within a few years. Igneous rock is the greater part of
all rock. All rock that is metamorphic needs less heat and pressure to form, and the
same short time. Metamorphic rock is a small percentage of all rock. Sedimentary rock,
least common but plentiful nonetheless, by definition never boiled or overheated or
intensely pressurized, can be laid and formed as fast as material is provided, this
consisting of biosphere products, fall-out, and erosion of other sedimentary, igneous
and metamorphic rock.
Slower than all of these in forming are the biosphere products. Still, if upon the crust
of the Earth were laid the seeds of plants and the eggs of animals, and these were
enveloped in an electrified atmosphere, and souped up with nutrient minerals, a passage
of several thousand years would find the crust blanketed kilometers deep in biotic
debris. If one were intent upon preserving the evolution of species, species would
mutate to their present forms in two to thirty leaps, say, and this would provide the
varieties of today. It would, of course, require several thousand extra years. It is no
secret, actually, that the fillip of evolution has supported geology's claim to time,
rather than the contrary (except for radiochronometry); life takes longer than rocks,
and fossils can be used by the theory of evolution to push back the age of the rocks.
The absurd idea still has not gone far enough; the Earth's surface and crust are a
complicated mixture, of thin and thick pieces, of sliced and hacked out layers, and of
dense and light materials, under different pressures and temperatures. How is it to be
fashioned to bring order? Dispense promptly with the word "order". The natural order is
largely in the mind. The "order" is a wish and illusion. Pursuing the absurd, the
mixture of forms and materials of the Earth's crust are but the work of a clumsy chef,
who shakes his pot, stirs it erratically, burns the bottom and adds ingredients to his
strange tastes. Or, to assign no blame to a divinity, the same effects are achieved by
forces born within the Earth and coming from outside of it, but great forces, of the
kind that can form the materials. The force that can suddenly slow or change the world's
motion can thrust and scatter about the formed materials, and concoct others. What can
chop and grind and break the materials can inject all the heat and pressure to make them
in the first place, and again and again.
What is more, in this absurd scenario of quantavolution, processes occur simultaneously.
The chalk cliffs of Dover do not wait to form until the Anatolian chalk cliffs are made;
nor does the mutation of species await a sunny "bowr of earthly blisse." While the
Earth's crust is reforming into the Moon, a multitude of volcanos blaze, and deluges of
water and debris fall upon the world. All the rocks everywhere are in movement, under
pressure and exerting pressure; electricity exudes from every pore and catalyzes the
already hard-working floods and vapors; radiation and adaptive saltations are
differentiating many species and exterminating many more.
How does one argue against the absurd conception of natural history? One would draw
books on the Grand Canyon of Colorado from the shelves showing "two billion years of
history passing before one's eyes." But the quantavolutionary vision of the Grand Canyon
springs readily to mind: the complex can be put together in a short time in uplift and
cross-cutting floods, then cleaved, supplied with torrents, and finally quieted down to
make it attractive for tourists. Should one appeal to radiochronometry to resolve the
vision, it occurs that the radioactive isotopes might have been stopped or raced in the
catastrophic maelstrom. We recall again some of the features of the Earth's surface
previously discussed. One by one, it would appear, the morphological features of the
world succumb to quantavolutionary explanation.
"Long distance overthrusting has occurred (a) for whole continents over the ocean crust
where overthrusting has been several thousand miles (continental drift), and (b) for the
superficial Cambrian and 'younger' sediments over the continuous, strong basement rock."
(Cook) The greatest thrust and rift and the smallest rock-crack can be considered as
"faults."
"Shields [the flat barely covered rock of Canada, Scandinavia, and elsewhere] are here
interpreted as crustal rocks denuded of sediments by thrusts of their original sediments
from beneath the ice caps driven by the hydrostatic pressure and the friction of the ice
flow" (quoting Cook). "Welts" define pre-Cambrian rocks (that is, with slight signs of
life), exposed at the surface as a result of uplifts and crustal buckling.
Huge troughs such as the Mississippi Valley are the result of an immense flow of turbid
ice-laden waters and tidal flooding, so recent that spectacular anomalies such as the
great New Madrid earthquake can occur.
Countless rubble hills are dumped in place by floods and wind from rocks expanded and
broken up by earthquake. Most of the rubble orogeny has occurred in times of
quantavolution, not by evolution nor uniformly bit by bit.
Uprisings occur through collision of rock masses, undercutting, compression, heat
expansion of undercrust, and cooling of quasi-exploded material. Here would be included
the igneous mountains of the world, such as St. Helens or Vesuvius. Here also would be
earth that did not escape upon explosion and appears as mounds or hills swollen up (not
buckled). Here too would be broad plateaus caused by a heat-expanded crust that cooled
in its expanded form at great heights.
Finally, closely related to the previous item, are the submarine ridges around the world
and the myriad seamounts (guyots). The ridge mountains, the world's tallest, are igneous
productions, still bubbling and bursting along their length. The seamounts, as noted
earlier, are the taffy-like pullback, unexploded lava blisters of the lunarian
outbursts.
Quantavolutionary theory, then, holds that any hill and mountain of the Earth can be
explained by concepts such as these. All involve energies that erase millions, even
hundreds of millions of assigned years of time. Nor is it difficult, either, to imagine
a quantavolutionary definition of other features not before discussed.
Where a gorge, a rift, or a canyon is observed, we are traumatized into seeing faults,
fissures and turbulent waters rushing to shape them.
Where others see placid lakes, long ago hollowed from rock and fed from melting ice, we
see land sinks, quick filling with avalanching waters, now stranded and in all
shortlived.
Where deep surface deposits of clay, pebbles, sand, till and their associated rocks
occur, we see tidal catastrophes, cyclones, and exoterrestrial fall-out.
In lava fields are seen, not occasional flare-ups after long-prepared mantle heating,
but the rivers of boiling rock forced up and out by large earth movements and expansion.
Fan deposits are not gradual accretions at the foot of a flow, but sudden dumps by
turbulent currents, and the continental slopes are the largest of fans.
Catastrophic winds, tides, and floods form dunes and peneplains, abetted by seismism.
Basins are formed and erupted by catastrophic uplift, changed Earth motions, or
meteoroid impact explosions.
What is left to mention in the lexicon of landforms? We still have to do justice in
succeeding chapters to several major Earth features: the ocean basins; the rifts,
canyons and channels; and the sediments, including the continental slopes. Otherwise one
is driven into sub-classification. Faults, for example, can be classified into tilts,
grabens, horsts, and troughs and each of these is divided into sub-categories; these are
treated in textbooks and present no unsurmountable obstacle to quantavotutionary theory.
Each of these pertains to its parent-category û faults -and cannot supply something
which the parent lacks. Metamorphic rock is of many kinds -schists, gneiss, limestone,
marble mycorites and migmatites -and a natural history museum will present an orderly
array of them.
The world "order" occurs again. And again the order is in our minds. The several
conditions of heat and pressure and the several minerals that altogether manufactured
these rocks were a disordered composition baking inside a faulty oven. One is seduced by
the vast quantities observed of each type into imagining orderly production. A tall
mountain of sedimentary rocks appears orderly to us, but so does the simple snowflake
under a microscope.
One is impressed also by the very many material compositions and forms. But this is an
illusion arising from the many different combinations which a few conditions and
chemical elements can create; a mere eight separate states of being, described in terms
of a temperature, a pressure, and a chemical compound free to combine, can, after all,
supply some 2 8 or 256 entities to contemplate. There is order in all things and
alongside this order there is chaos in all things; that is, we can look at any event or
thing as orderly or chaotic, just as Parmenides looked at the permanence of being and
Heraclites at its eternal flux.
Where in the world is the remaining virgin land of Pangea? If one is to believe surveys
of the presence around the world of all the conventional geological ages, the answer is
"practically nowhere." Perhaps 2% of the world's land can claim a full geological
column. The ages are either a fiction, or the victims of quantavolution.
Still, even at this early stage of quantavolutionism, when few minds -and even fewer
resources -have been brought to bear on the issues, it appears that by employing only a
modest increment of time, quantavolution can move from the absurd to some respectable
level of probable validity. One can comfortably and scientifically operate given an
Earth age of a million years, with a late resurfacing of the Earth accomplished during
the past fourteen thousand years.
It might seem impossible to reconcile the 5000-times-greater time span of conventional
geological theory. Actually it is not impossible. The processes reflected in the Grand
Canyon profile could be temporarily collapsed by a factor of 5000, making every five
million years become a thousand years, without scrambling ordinary explanations. The
rules to reduce time are: increase heat; increase pressure; add motions; introduce
electric potentials; and look into the skies. Says the sage to the astronomer, writes
Friedrich Nietzsche: "As long as you still experience the stars as something 'above you'
you lack the eye of knowledge." [10]
Notes (Chapter Twenty: Thrusting And Orogeny)
1. Quoted by Kelly and Dachille, op. cit., 76.
2. Discussed in Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 125-6.
3. Ibid., 78.
4. Cook, op. cit., 188.
5. Ibid., 11.
6. Supra, 219-20. On Nilsson, further, see B. Gray, VII Kronos 4 (Summer 1982), 8-25.
7. "Continental Drift," Utah Alumnus (Sept. 1964) 12, and see discussion, ibid., Nov.
1963, Oct. and Nov. 1964.
8. "Origins of the Oceans," op. cit., 19.
9. Op. cit., 521.
10. Beyond Good and Evil, Epigram 71.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
OCEAN BASINS
The planet Venus, which has been shown to have had its share of astroblemes, lightning
activity, melting, volcanos, plateaus, mountain ranges, great valleys, and closed
depressions or basins, has a "curious dearth of great basins," whence we surmise that
Venus never underwent the trauma of Earth, which resulted in most of the Earth being
ocean basins. "The tectonic forces that have shaped the surface of Venus have raised
only 5 percent of the surface into 'continental masses' and left only 15 to 20 percent
of it as basins... " [1] Nor do we know whether these are "real" basins, that is,
distinct from the continental material as they are on Earth.
The ocean's "trackless wastes" may be a nice metaphor for the 71% of the Earth's surface
covered by water, but the ocean bottoms are marked by enough signs to revolutionize the
earth sciences and natural history. Essentially the ocean basins are three in number,
the Pacific, the Indian and the Atlantic. The Pacific Basin was the recent scene of the
most awesome event ever to have befallen the Earth since its early times, the outburst
of the Moon. The Indian Ocean appears to have been created at the same time by the
migration of continental land driven to the scene of the disaster. The Atlantic Ocean
was rather obviously originated from a great wedge that helped propel the continents
east and west so as to distribute the mass, heat, and electrical charge rather more
evenly in the expansion and filling initiated in the evacuated areas.
The only possible mechanism for the lunar outburst would involve an exoterrestrial body,
to which I have alluded on several previous occasions. The clearest description of the
event and the closest to our own theory was provided by Howard B. Baker in an obscurely
published article of 1952 [2] . He was an American geologist, who from 1909 worked on
the problem and completed a manuscript in 1932 that was never published. Both works were
discovered by the present author after the manuscript to Chaos and Creation was
completed; no changes were needed as a result, except to credit Baker for his
achievement.
Baker stipulated an eccentrically orbiting planet, "Pentheus," as the intruder, and
illustrated
how by perturbative increase of orbital eccentricity alone, without any alteration of
mean distance ... an orbit of mean distance 3 (astronomical units) might be so displaced
that perihelion would be tangent to the Earth's orbit and aphelion well into Jupiter's
danger zone, that is, greater than Jupiter's perihelion distance, which is 4.95...
The planetary disturber is conceived to have been broken up by gravitational encounter
with Jupiter, as suggested by Jeans (1934), and much of its ocean water, frozen with
sand, gravel, and other debris, continued on a cometary orbit. The Earth occasionally
met with these showers during the Pleistocene glacial epoch.
The Roche limit, as explained by Jeans (1934, p. 269), is 2.49 times the radius of the
larger of two bodies in an expanded or a contracted state as computed to make the
density the same as that of the smaller body. With equal densities, the volume and mass
are both represented by the same figure and are proportioned to the cube of the
diameter.
Thus Earth, with mass 1 and diameter 1, and a radius of about 4000 miles, would
encounter Pentheus with a mass 27 times greater, a diameter 3 times longer, and a radius
of 12,000 miles. In this case, the Roche limit would be 2.45 X 12,000 or 29,400 miles
from center.
As Pentheus progressed in its orbit it occupied a path 58,800 miles wide, within which
no body much smaller could survive. The earth is conceived to have been deeply touched
on the Pacific side by the Roche limit of the larger planet at the latter's
perihelion... with the result that the Moon was born... If Pentheus were a mass of 64,
radius 16,000 miles, its Roche limit would be of 39,200 miles.
Baker's model path calls for a two hour passby between 10 PM and 12 PM, at a perihelion
velocity of 23.5 miles per second. A bulge distending the Earth appears at l0 PM with a
tide raising power 225,425 times that of the Moon. At 11 PM the Roche limit is almost
tangential to the Earth with a power of 816,818. At midnight, the tide power is
1,170,701 times that of the Moon and the Roche limit embraces the whole outbursting
section of Earth, which then escapes into space. The Earth has lost most of its crust,
but has gained water and a fall-out of rock.
Baker does not use the electrical power that would also operate effectively to the same
end as gravitation. The distance might be several times farther given the same masses,
if the intruder had come from afar bearing an electrical potential much different from
the Earth's charge. Also the model proposed by this author is of a more gaseous and
heavily electrified body. Its detailed treatment is available in Solaria Binaria and it
ought perhaps not be discussed further in these pages, whose subject is the bottom of
the oceans.
The prevalent view of sea-floor spreading has molten material exuding from the great
oceanic ridge volcanos, pushing into place as a strip and jostling the older strips that
compose the floor to move further away from the ridges. Ocean floor chronology and drift
theory are based upon observations that from one strip to another, every several
"millions" of years, there occurs a magnetic field reversal.
However, besides the other problems, which I have recounted, one core (395 A) from the
Atlantic ridge flank shows magnetic differences in depth; the upper 170 meters is
normally magnetized, the next 310 meters is reversed: and the following 40 meters is
again normal [3] . This is an unwelcome surprise to chronometry and the theory of
convection currents.
Still, pursuant to our theory here, we should expect erratic magnetic effects to
accompany the great outpourings of lava; as soon as a batch is dumped off the ridge it
hardens with the magnetic orientation of the moment. Very soon, before it has moved
away, another batch is dumped on top of it, then another, all occurring before the whole
thickness of lava moves far enough to be free of additional burdening. If, as we think,
the ocean basins could mostly be paved in a thousand years, during which time the
Earth's field would be moving geographically and oscillating, the laminated magnetic
structure of the floor must follow.
Allen Cox points out that "if sea-floor spreading has occurred at a constant rate, the
marine magnetic profiles may be interpreted to yield a reversal time scale going back 75
million years. The apparent average duration of the polarity intervals was greater
during the time 10.6< t< 45 million years than during the past 10.6 million years, and
during the time 45< t< 75 million years the average length was still greater." [4] That
is, periods between reversals of the Earth's magnetic field occupy ever broader stripes
or bands on the ocean bottoms as we go back in time.
Cox realizes that this might be an effect of an inconstant rate but dismisses the idea.
With our larger theory that negative exponential rates followed a catastrophic opening
of the basins, we find this data supportive. The ocean basins opened fast and then ever
more slowly, giving the appearance of a magnetic field that used to reverse more slowly
than it does now.
The Arctic Ocean scarcely deserves the name [5] . The North Pole area is flatter than
the lands to the south and some miles lower than the swollen equatorial belt. If it were
not so, there would be no Arctic Ocean. By far the greatest pan of the Arctic Ocean
floor is continental shelf, less than 300 meters below sea level. There are half a dozen
abyssal plains with depths from 2700 meters to 5000 meters. The Mid-Atlantic ridge forks
northwards around Greenland and the two prongs come close together north of Greenland,
then move in parallel across the ocean bed sandwiching the North Pole abyssal plain
between them. A third "Alpha Cordillera" meanders northwest from the North Greenland
regroupment, with many seamounts. The three ridges enter the continental shelf of
northeast Siberia. They seem to disappear. But the Nansen Cordillera moves into the
continental shelf in a great "Sadko Trough" and, precisely in line with it, some 400 km
on, there begins the delta of the Lena River and a great valley, probably a rift valley.
This rift cuts down through Asia ultimately to join the Indian Ocean ridges.
Throughout the Arctic ocean bed the continental mass rises abruptly above the abyssal
plains. Sheer cliffs of over 2000 meters are the rule. Although, on the one hand, a
defender of erosionary theory would offer in explanation that the solid ice cover has
preserved the "original" morphology, it may be argued that the fractures are new,
occurred when the ice cap avalanched in Lunarian times and then were covered up during
the Saturnian-Jovian age-breaking events that included a new ice cover, the present one.
Semi-tropical, fully human cultures have been uncovered in islands only a few hundred
kilometers from the North Pole. Iceland is apparently a high element along the North
Atlantic (Reykjanes) ridge, volcanically produced.
Figure A :
Sketch of the main ridges and fractures of the Pacific Indian ocean bottom with main
trenches. Possible Trans Asian and Trans-Euro-Mediterranean rifts are added to the
drawing, which is adapted from O. G. Sorochtin, ed., Geophysics of the Ocean (in
Russian), vol. II, fig. 17. The lithosphere (crust) is everywhere shallowest beneath the
ridge lines.
Thousands of seamounts shooting up from the ocean bottoms are not drawn here.
FIGURE B (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are
large.): The Arctic Hemisphere, indicating the largely continental (rather than basaltic
ocean-type) bottom; and the North Atlantic Ridge passing by the North Pole and
proceeding towards Siberia, where possibly it becomes a land rift proceeding to the
Indian Ocean via Lake Baikal. (Pages B to F are author's sketches. In all of them, the
outlines of the full continents, including shallow shelves, are drawn.)
FIGURE C (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are
large.): The Indian Ocean Hemisphere, noting the African Rift on the extreme left, the
East Ninety Degrees Ridge, and the largely continental rock platforms that underlie the
vast Asia-Australia area.
FIGURE D (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are
large.): The American Hemisphere, noting how both the Atlantic and mid-Pacific Ridges
follow the shape of South America at great distances. A world-circling Tethyan shallow
sea belt may once have passed through Central America, the Mediterranean and the South
Seas, but can hardly be discerned because the ocean bottom growth and expansion and
crustal slippages have largely erased it.
FIGURE E (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files are
large.): The Antarctic Hemisphere, showing how ridge-fracture cut the south polar
Continent off completely from all land to the North, as by a circular saw. It would
appear that the main fractures occurred before the main continental shift, (as in the
Arctic Basin to the South), because there still is a semblance of order to their
progression around Greenland and into Asia. Furthermore, Greenland adheres in shape to
the North American continent and its neighboring western fracture does not seem to
descend as deep as the eastern one. And on its East, Greenland seems conformable to the
Scandinavian platform.
The simplest scenario for the mass movements that created the Arctic basin would call
for a fracture, a swinging down of North America with a widening of the fracture valleys
to create the abyssal plains. Northeastern North America was stretched out; Greenland
and the many Canadian islands moved more slowly. Later Asia pushed northwards at one
point in its generally southeast torque -the Yermak underseas Plateau -almost restoring
contact with North America (Greenland) but letting the great ridge system pass through.
The total true ocean area created by and in consequence of the explosions and worldwide
venting system amounts to 310 millions km 2 . Its depth averages 4 km. A floor of 1.24
billion km 3 would have been laid almost entirely in a period of about 2000 years. After
that time, the activity of basin-evolution would begin quickly to subside. The basins
would continue to evolve at a greatly reduced rate. Most of the vents would have become
inoperative. The ridges and fissures are still expanding around the globe but at a
scarcely discernible rate; like today, rarely would the oceanic surfaces be troubled by
seabottom volcanism and spreading.
A full life would have arisen in the warm oceans; the marine species of today originated
in the shallow Tethyan waters. Men began navigating the oceanic surfaces now. Whereas
ancient fossilized life-forms have been discovered on high mountains, they are absent
from the bottom of the sea. It is presumptive, if not incorrect, for geological writings
to state that the oceans have covered and uncovered the land on several lengthy
occasions. The mountains have arisen from the shallow waters of Pangea, bearing the
fossils, or the fossils have been laid down by flooding and tides, or they have been
dropped by cyclones. The abysses of the ocean contain only species whose origins in
shallower waters are patent. The oceans were born recently, and therefore hold only what
has lived in these times. Heezen and Hollister, recounting the scarce record available
of life on the ocean bottoms, conjecture that "either there was no abyss then, or the
relicts of these ancient seas have been completely destroyed. The deposits of earlier
seas are found exclusively on the continents." To us it is clear that these earlier
"seas" were the only "ancient seas" and were the shallow Tethyan seas and swamps.
The length of the oceanic fractures and their transverse fissures (transform faults)
amounts to some 300,000 linear kilometers. The funnel volcanos number in the tens of
thousands. The emission from a volcano cone can be given a value equivalent to 5
kilometers of fissure volcanism, and the number, never counted, can be set at 50,000.
Then 550,000 kilometers of venting area was available to produce on the average 2,254.5
km 3 of ocean floor per venting kilometer within 2,000 years, or an average of 1,127 km
3 per year.
In two days in 1902, the Volcano of Santa Maria in Guatamala erupted and emitted 5.5 km
3 of material. A fissure of Laki, Iceland, part of the Atlantic northeast ridge forking,
was quite active in 1783 and along a 25 km line emitted 15 km 3 of material in 4 1/ 2
months. In the tenth century an Icelandic fissure one year erupted 9 km 3 of lava alone
along a 30 km trench. It is evident that if its activity were continuous at its full
rate of eruption, the fissure of Laki would eject about 3,000 km 3 in 1000 years, 9000
km 3 in 3000 years, far more than its quota.
The figure used as a base requirement, 1.24 billion km 3 , is twice as large as
required. The underside of the ocean floor, comprising half the thickness of the floor,
appears to be not a product of lava flow but a melting and cooling of basaltic rock in
place. As the gaps widened, and the lava flowed to fill the chasm, the floor of the
chasm at first softened from the heat all around it and from the waters, and then
quickly hardened beneath the lava flows. This is but the cooled crust of the exposed
magma of the mantle. When geologists declare, as does Shelton, that "... we cannot yet
explain why magma exists where it does or seeks escape when it does," [6] they are not
considering this kind of quantavolutionary and exponential solution.
The continents can be viewed as the rims of the ocean basins. They are steep-sided
blocks, whether they plunge directly into the waters or have sea-covered shelves that
then plunge down. The continental slopes, on the other hand, are water-covered moraines
of continental debris laying on top of ocean abyssal basalt. They have a triangular
profile, making nearly a right angle where continental block meets ocean floor; the
hypotenuse is a lengthy stretch moving from the top of the shelf at an angle of 5 on
the average. The declining rate of expansion of the ocean floor contributed to the
profile of the slopes. By moving first rapidly, then ever more slowly, they heighten the
illusion that a gradual off-flow of sediments has created the sloping figure. More
likely exponentially declining rates of continental debris and seabottom spread worked
together to provide the profile. Deep river canyons extend hundreds of kilometers into
them. Elephant teeth are found far out on the slopes at great depth; probably the slopes
were laid down, occupied by terrestrial life forms, and then lately flooded. Deep
turbidity currents, if they were to transport them, would bury them or destroy them.
They lay near where the elephant died not long ago.
As told in the previous chapter, the continental slopes are free of continental
mountains, as are the true ocean bottoms. The logical implications of this fact have
evaded geology. If most great mountain ranges are new, whether by our chronological
reckoning or by that of conventional geology, why have none appeared on the continental
slopes? The answer suggests itself: the mountains rear up at the edge of the precipices
of the continents; they dump their debris into the abysses.
Immense floods and tides traversed the continents and poured off the miles-steep
continental blocks into the ocean. The canyons occur where the blocks were fractured,
and consequently where the waters poured out most heavily. The canyons, which will be
treated soon in more detail, were not submerged beneath the oceans until the ocean
basins stopped growing and their waters crept up upon the continental blocks and
shelves. The seas do not come in and kidnap the land; they beat back the detritus and
even build land. Thus the great slopes could not have formed under uniformitarian
conditions or even underwater.
Prolonged, universal run-off of deluge and catastrophic tidal water produced slopes; the
blocks were often towering water falls, dropping sheets of slurry into the abyss to form
the slopes. The coarse gravel typical of the slopes far out to sea signals the impetuous
rush and transporting power of the waters going to fill the basins. The scale would have
dwarfed even the scene pictured by K. J. Hsh for the Mediterranean Sea (our dates and
events differ, of course), "a giant bathtub, with the Straits of Gibraltar as the
faucet. Seawater roared in from the Atlantic in a gigantic waterfall." If the falls
delivered 10,000 cubic miles of seawater per year, they would have exceeded Niagara
Falls 1000 times, and filled the Mediterranean basin in 100 years. "What a spectacle it
must have been for the African ape-men, if any were lured by the thunderous roar." [7]
The Mediterranean basin requires in its complexity an analysis that we cannot afford
here. It appears to have been primordial, that is Pangean, and shallow. Then it may have
suddenly closed and as suddenly opened, dry for a few years, and then overwhelmed by
floods of water much greater than at present. [8]
The ocean basins are composed of sima, rich in silicon and magnesium elements. They are
of basalt. They are igneous, formed in red heat. They are thin. They are denser than the
continental sial. The continents probably sit upon similar material, but much deeper,
perhaps directly upon the upper mantle, save where the magma of the mantle may have
expanded and intruded upon the continental granites.
The continents and the ocean basins are distinct formations that were produced at
different times and by different mechanisms. The sial is old. The sima is new. The fact
that the shell of the ocean bottoms is only one-tenth as thick as that of the continents
in itself suggests that the ocean crust is the product of a melt, that the seas are new,
and that the continents were somehow in a position to resist complete volcanism or
explosion. The fact that ocean crust is more basic or less acid than the continental
crust indicates that it separated from the primeval melt after the granitic crust; so
says M. Cook.
The continents were produced by a cooling of the Earth's surface and by their own
erosion and debris, and in direct contact with ultra-basic material of a heavier
composition. Hence, the igneous marine floor does not cover a former continental
surface, and density probes show this to be the case. Nevertheless the floor probably
contains continental debris in small amounts. With all the sinking of lands reported in
legends, one would expect ocean-bottom drills to collect continental material here and
there. Very little appears, leading one to suspect that most sinkings have occurred on
the continental slopes or shelves.
The ocean basins are scarcely sedimented; they hold only 1% of all sedimentary
materials. Under uniform conditions, this would represent only 16 million years of
runoff deposits amounting to 10 18 tons 3 . Dissolved solids in the ocean waters compose
3.5% of their mass, far from making up the difference, nor can these solids be allocated
to detritus removed from the continents.
Often the rocks are bare along the circumglobal ridges. They are 20 meters thick or
less. The thickest ocean sediments are not on the basins proper but on the continental
shelves and slopes. Further, next to these areas where the abyss begins, sedimentation
is thicker and can reach 1000 meters in exceptional areas.
All of these oceanic sediments come either from cataclysmic off-pourings from the
flooded continents, or from fall-outs, both volcanic and exoterrestrial. Material
lagging at the end stream of the fission of the Moon might have dropped back to form
islands of continental crust in mid-ocean. The time required for such sedimentation is
calculable in a couple of thousand years or less under quantavolutionary conditions.
The character of oceanic sediments varies. It differs markedly from much continental
sediment that is rock. It is clay and ooze. The shelves carry clay; the polar regions,
the slopes, and some of the abyss carries ooze; and the deep abyss carries clay. The
polar basins also carry sand and boulders.
Carbonates are heavy on the shelves and bottom oozes, but compose only from 2 to 10% of
the clays (since they dissolve in the colder waters). Layers of distinct calcination and
ash are interlarded with the oozes and clays in many parts of the world. An unknown
proportion of additional ash has been incorporated chemically into the clay and ooze and
remains to be distinguished. Much clay is igneous in origin, a product of volcanic
tephra, volcanism, and cosmic fall-out. Much manganese has been precipitated onto rocks,
pebbles, fish teeth, and bones over many areas, and pure manganese has been found on the
bottom near the ridges.
The towering ridges that girdle the world have flanks that descend gradually. They
present almost no underseascape for many hundreds of miles. There is no thickening of
the ocean basin crust beneath the ridges, unlike the so-called isostatic thickening
beneath the mountains of the continents, much of which is probably due to blunted
thrusting. This occurs despite the fact that the ridges rise higher than the continental
Alps. Thus they are distinct in origins, as was pointed out in the last chapter. The
continental mountains were shaped by horizontal forces, with the intense, sporadic
assistance of electro-gravitational forces from outer space. The ridges were formed by
vertical forces from within the Earth, with similar assistance; unlike continental
mountains, they lack rock roots, evidencing that they were not thrusted.
An impossible predicament is presented to conventional geophysics; how can
uniformitarian forces produce this contrast? The continental crust folds and thrusts and
compresses into abundant mountains; but the oceanic crust, having made its igneous
ridges and seamounts once and for all, slides up and under and around without making
mountains, but exudes lava in discrete amounts, and shakes seismically from time to
time.
The Pacific Rise conforms generally to what one would expect from an exploded, as
contrasted with a cleaved, basin such as the Atlantic. Worthy of quotation here is a
passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica (my remarks in brackets):
Fast spreading... as is characteristic of the Pacific [because the basin was already
blasted out], produces a rise. Slow spreading... results in the formation of a ridge.
Sea-floor spreading is a symmetrical process that accretes new ocean floor equally to
both flanks of a rift; [The East Pacific basin obviously did not accrete symmetrically.]
When a former landmass splits apart, the ridge maintains a median position as the newly
created ocean basin increases in size. This phenomenon occurred in the Atlantic and
Indian Oceans, but, in contrast, the rise in the Pacific did not rift a landmass when it
was formed, and consequently there is no reason for it to be median. [Again, no land
mass.]
A slash wound upon already swollen human flesh produces a swelling along the line, but a
lower ridge than a single slash wound upon healthy flesh; so the Pacific rise is swollen
high off the middle of the ocean bottom, and has a less marked ridge from the slash
wound cutting it than the Atlantic basin has from its same slashing.
The Earth expanded as well as exploded; whatever can explode can expand: a chapter has
been given over to this subject. Although the Pacific Basin is concave, no one can
examine a relief map of the Pacific Rise, for example, and say that the volume of the
Earth remained unchanged thereby. Since this rise occurred, along with many other
bulges, then a considerable expansion might be demonstrated by survey without resorting
to theoretical physics. The globe has many slight bulges. Russian geophysicists have
recently described its shape as formed by at least two geometric networks of lattices, a
many-faceted figure [9] . So there may even be a pattern to the expansion of the global
crystal. The latticework can be viewed as expansion joints; the total pattern makes the
surface of the globe a set of convex plates rather than a perfect sphere.
Under the conditions imagined here, much of the expansion would be expressed simply in a
hurrying of the basin-paving process, accelerated by inrushing waters. The salt of the
dropping canopies would also promote magmatic melting. Molten lava takes up more volume
than solidified basalt; wherever the crust was boiling, it would expand the surface of
the globe. The tidal pulls of the Intruder, temporarily, and the new Moon, permanently,
would draw the surface of the Earth outwards; there the surface would pause, cool, and
harden.
The ridge mountain volcanos, and the ridge and transverse fault fissure volcanos, differ
from tens of thousands of sea mounts, atolls and guyots that rose tall and slumped back
upon the escape of the Moon from the Pacific Ocean Basin and smaller crustal material
elements elsewhere. Some of these became instantly created volcanos and continued
activity after the others had collapsed back. The Pacific seascape differs from the
Atlantic by its incomparably more numerous holdings of seamounts. Morphological
examination would indicate that the seamounts do not have the extensive piping systems
of continental volcanos.
As the main blow struck and the fracture opened in North America, it drove that
continent as a block southwestwards until it overrode the East Pacific Rise (fracture)
that had just appeared off what was now its west coast. Much of this western area
promptly erupted into volcanism and was covered by huge lava flows and extensive,
faulted desert plateaus and plains. The Asian and Australasian coasts and islands do not
fit into the North American continent because vast spaces opened up and the whole arc
from Alaska to Southern Asia broke away with the explosion of the Moon. A boundary ridge
is not easily visible but extends down the Pacific basin on the West from Kamchatka
Peninsula to the Campbell Plateau and ties into the Emperor Sea volcanic seamounts and
the Line Island Ridge.
The Indian Ocean bottom, unlike the Pacific and Atlantic basins, appears to have been
well-traveled. Antarctica has been shoved southward some hundreds of kilometers, and
girdled by two great ridges. A newly discovered rift pierces the Waddell Sea, probably a
transverse fault from the ridge to its north, and is lost under the great ice plateau
hundreds of kilometers inland.
Australia has been ushered eastward by a fork of the same fracture that pushed India
north and Antarctica south. Indeed, if one wishes an up-to-date definition of the
continents of the world, useful for some purposes, one may say that a continent is a
body of land surrounded by an oceanic cleavage. Even in the case of Europe and Asia,
some believe the fracture to exist, going up from the Indian Ocean through the Persian
Gulf, the Caspian Sea, the Ural mountains and into the Arctic complex earlier described.
Contemporary geological theory has also traced the path of the Indian subcontinent from
Southeast Africa to the Tibetan Plateau. "The vast Himalayan range was created when a
plate of the earth's crust carrying the landmass of India collided with the plate
carrying Asia some 45 million years ago, having travelled 5,000 kilometers nearly due
north, across the expanse now occupied by the Indian Ocean." [10] The drift itself took
much longer, since it occurred at the rate of 6 to 16 cm/ year, if one were to accept
the belts of magnetic reversals that mark the stretches of ocean bottom along the line
of march and the dates given the lava from one belt to the next.
However, cores drilled into the Indian Ocean bed not far from the observed course
produced gaps in dating of sediments by fossils of many millions of years, perhaps fifty
millions in some cases. "Why these accumulations are missing," commented the directors
of the survey, "is at present a mystery." [11] Fifty from a hundred million or so years
is a big proportion. That "there are more gaps than record" is, of course, a familiar
complaint among paleontologists on land as well as under the sea. In the other great
basins, gaps of twenty million years in the fossil record are common. With sediments so
thin, the gaps are not so important, say some -a turbidity current or two, and there you
are. (Geophysicists and paleontologists can be catastrophists Ó la minute, when it is
demanded of them.)
Still, when there is a gap in the fossil record of between 50 to 70 millions of years
ago, we are speaking of late Cretaceous times and of the disastrous end of the dinosaurs
and most marine species. A layer of unfossilized chert tiles the floor just above this
zone, "as though some catastrophic development killed off most of or much marine life."
One begins to suspect that the Cretaceous boundary may be considered as the primeval age
of the ocean beds and that all which is found in the abyss arrived there afterwards;
further, the finale of the Cretaceous may have been the end of Pangea and the outburst
of the Moon, even if both are to be dated at a few thousand years ago. Almost all of the
sea floor assigned to a date is Cretaceous or younger [12] .
We mentioned earlier that the Himalayas are agreed to have risen steeply within the last
dozen thousand years. We called to the attention of Raikes and other students of the
destruction of proto-Indian civilization that their "uplifts" were part of world-wide
catastrophe. Today, the people of the southern Himalayas are suffering from a horrendous
erosion of their soil. They are blamed for improper farming practices and
overpopulation. This may be true enough, but, considering the youngness of this region,
it is also fair to suggest that the Himalayan slopes have simply not existed long enough
to have come sliding down on their own accord.
The cruxes of the internal activity of the Earth during the lunarian period occurred at
two well-marked belts of discontinuity. One is the Moho discontinuity just below the
shell in which the oceans and continents are fixed. Here the upper mantle boundary
preserves an almost liquid character before it resumes a hotter but hardened condition
farther down. This boundary of difference would scarcely be noticeable if it had not
marked the torque and twist of the surface in the phases of shock and adjustment. For a
simple unagitated melt produces, except in purely statistical terms, an undifferentiated
transition of rocks up to the sedimentary level. The Moho boundary marks a breakdown of
viscosity on a worldwide scale.
The second crux occurred at the 2900 kilometer-deep level of the lower mantle, some 50.0
kilometers before the upper core's boundary. Suddenly the density index, that had been
moving at a fairly even rate of increase through the rocks after leaving the lighter
crustal regions, leaps from 5.42 g/ cm 3 to 9.91, a difference of 4.49 g/ cm 3 . This is
about one-third of the total value of the scale, which begins at 3.31 and ends at 13.00
at the center of the Earth. No marked changes in pressure, gravitational intensity, or
incompressibility are notable at this level. The largest secondary torque of the globe
in reaction to axial displacement and rotational torque and retardation happened here.
Lesser torques occurred at the 400, 1000, 5000 and 5100 kilometer depths where seismic
discontinuities are observed.
Several points deserve stress in reviewing what has just been said and looking ahead to
the next chapter.
An immense part of the Earth's shell is simply missing. It had nowhere to go except into
space, for it cannot be decomposed, mixed with plutonic material, or shovelled under the
sea bottoms.
A psychological fallacy pushes us to believe that the ocean basins were made by and for
the primordial waters. That the basins exist is one accident; that waters fill the
basins is another accident. The accidents added up to a "miracle" of good fortune for
mankind. Better near extinction than a totally frozen or drowned globe. At first, the
waters were below the rims of the basins; now they slop over the rims.
The East Atlantic Basin corresponds to the West Atlantic Basin. Their former juncture is
plain. The Pacific Ocean is deeper. The East Pacific Basin is sharply marked where the
southern, western and northern margins are arranged as a giant set of arcs detached from
a blasted area.
All the ocean basins are young, thin, and scarcely sedimented. Oceanographers who
recently discovered these facts were amazed; in a few years, the basins became four
billion years younger. Only potassium-argon datings, which are vulnerable to
catastrophic events, let the bottoms achieve even this young age. The basins are not 200
millions as against 4,500 million years old. They maybe only aged a dozen millennia. The
surprise is greater: not one-thirtieth as old, but one-ten-thousandth as old.
Three additional, related points are stressed in other works of the author and have only
been mentioned in this book:
Despite the almost total destruction of the biosphere by heat, explosion, suffocation,
and famine, many species survived. Marine life soon found vast new breeding grounds. So
did plants and land animals. Even before they were drowned in the later deluges, the
cooled seamounts harbored many forms of land life on their summits.
Horrified, stunned, fully human beings saw all of this happen. Wherever archaeology
finds "paleolithic" and "early neolithic" sites, it finds not slow soil coverings but
fast disaster coverings. Much legendary and physical evidence points to a newly emplaced
Moon and a worldwide catastrophe about twelve thousand years ago.
The network of fractures around the world is unitary. Mechanically it must be considered
as the effect of one and the same event. The Moho discontinuity recorded today beneath
the Earth's shell at from 5 to 50 kilometers depth may denote where the shell rafted and
where it was peeled off. The next two chapters deal explicitly with the fracture and
rift system of the world.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-one: Ocean Basins)
1. Richard A. Kerr, "Venus...," 207 Science (18 Jan. 1980), 291.
2. Baker was born in 1872. In 1932 he mimeographed The Atlantic Rift and Its Meaning in
Detroit. Fortunately a copy reached the library of Congress. The article is "The Earth
Participates in the Evolution of the Solar System," Detroit Acad. Nat. Sci., 1954
(pamphlet).
3. "Testing Vine-Matthews," Open Earth 3 (Apr. 1979), 28-9.
4. Geo Rev., 244; and see A. Cox R. R. Doell, 189 Nature( 1956), 45 which contains
summery of paleomagnetic tests; and "Geomagnetic Reversals," 163 Science (17 Jan. 1969),
237-44.
5. See National Geographic Magazine, map, "Arctic Ocean Floor" (Wash. D. C., 1976).
6. Op. cit., 69.
7. "When the Mediterranean Dried Up," Sci. Amer. (Dec. 1972), 33
8. E. Smith 28 Sea Frontiers (1982), 66-74.
9. Chris Bird, New Age J., 36-41.
10. D. P. McKenzie and J. G. Schlater, "Evolution of the Indian" Sci. Amer. (May 1973),
63.
11. Sullivan, op. cit., 172.
12. See map in Sullivan, op. cit., plate 22.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FRACTURES AND CLEAVAGES
In the past few years, the public has become well aware of the revolution in
oceanography, a major element of which was the uncovering of an immense integrated
global fracture system. It is a kind of reverse harness which works from the inside
instead of the outside to control natural behavior around the world. The question is
whether the harness emerged from deep within or whether the globe was harnessed by an
exoterrestrial force. Except in westernmost North America, in East Africa and the Near
East, through Iceland and Central Asia, through the Adriatic-Rhine River rift, and
beneath India, the fractures course below the sea, where they are rendered visible by
the ridges running alongside of them. Many years ago, De Lapparent and Howard Baker had
recognized the oceanic rifts and called them recent, while Heer had assigned the
boundaries of the Mediterranean to the era of the drift [1] .
The system is worldwide. It may be said to begin in the arctic region, moving south from
both sides of Greenland. It shoots down to the antarctic region, forks west and east,
and forks again north and east. The east fork traverses the South Pacific and rises
northwards when it strikes South America, proceeding up to and around the North Pole
where it is reconnected with the northward fork that has shot up through the Asian
continent via the Persian-Indian coast, Lake Baikal, and northern Siberia. There it
probably connects with the fork around Greenland, completing a circuitry of the globe.
Less apparent is a worldwide rupture that carries through the East-Central Pacific,
Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South Asian areas, possibly a fracture along the line of
the old Tethyan Sea equatorial belt.
The present globe does not portray the original situation. A Pangean globe would show
nothing but land and shallow seas. Today's named areas stood unbroken. The globe then
was without ocean basins. Its main body of water was the Tethyan Sea, corresponding to
the present Caribbean, Mediterranean, and trans-Pacific northern tropical region. This
was the equatorial region. The South Pole was bounded by lands now disappeared, unless
New Zealand and a few other continental areas are remnants of them. The continents of
South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica were far to the North, and part of the
Pangean land mass.
The fracture originated at the old North Pole and proceeded rapidly towards the old
South Pole, bending as the north geographical axis of the globe shifted to the northeast
and as global rotation slowed and resumed. The globe must have jerked suddenly as the
Atlantic cleavage passed through what are now the Brazilian and African humps, and then
resumed its more direct southerly course.
The polar ice cap is said by Weyer to have shifted its position by 10 to 15 degrees
along a line 60 degrees west and 120 degrees east [2] . Possibly the cap was cleaved
and the rift began running; then almost immediately the Intruder began to cut its swath
from the Pacific crust and staggered the Earth to a momentary pause, driving the rift
eastwards in Mid-Atlantic.
When the fracture reached the South Pole, losing momentum but cleaving the Earth rapidly
at the full depth of the continental crust, it veered sharply eastwards slicing through
the then polar south region until it met with the westward shifting "American"
continents, whereupon it veered northwards until it reached the northwestern fork of the
north polar fracture. It skirted the eastern rim of the great pit of the Moon material
that had been blasted up and away.
A secondary forking sent the fracture northwards shortly after the south polar fracture
occurred, slicing through "Africa/ India," then, after crossing the Tethyan fracture,
resumed in diminished depth its course across central Asia.
Meanwhile the initial point of rupture at the old North Pole sent a forking movement
northeast and northwest, isolating Greenland. Both of these fractures joined the trans-
Asiatic fracture at different points. Earlier, as the main "Atlantic" fracture
encountered the equatorial Tethyan area, it incited a trans-world secondary fracture,
that moved more rapidly east than west. The western Tethyan fracture cut through the
continental mass then occupying the Gulf of Mexico and lost itself in the inchoate
molten mass occupying the blasted crater of the fissioned Moon material. It may scarcely
be perceived to end at the West Pacific Rise (rupture). The eastern thrust moved,
however, through the "Mediterranean" and "Near East" then through a blast area which
soon was overrun by a jumble of lands moving southwards.
Finally major rifts struck out from the Tethyan fracture north and south. On the south a
Mediterranean and a Syrian fracture join the Red Sea rift and continue south across East
Africa to join the proto-Indian fork. In proportion to a number of submarine fissures,
this rift was a moderate addition to the world fracture system. Africans of the Rift
countries retain legends of great structural changes in their land. To their stories are
to be added similar Arab and Hebrew stories.
From the beginning to the end, the fracture system might have been the work of a day;
geophysicist Cook speaks in terms of hours. It conceivably inspired the "Third Day",
during which "God created the oceans" in Hebrew story. "And God said, 'Let the waters
under the heavens be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear. '" [3]
At the end of the day, the continents had been carved out, many islands had been sliced
along the Tethyan way, the antarctic region, the arctic region and the "East Pacific"
area. The continents were in motion. The Earth was girdled by chasms and ready to move
and expand. Pangea was ended. The climax of chaos had passed.
Two characteristics of the world fracture system deserve much more attention than
geophysicists have allowed them. Only Cook, to my knowledge, has frankly expressed what
is so apparent, that the total system was the work of hours; perhaps he could utter the
shocking sentences because he had won a Nobel prize for his work on explosives. That our
precious globe could be treated so abruptly and cruelly is inconceivable to most people;
it is like an innocent child coming upon the scene of an autopsy. Cook remarks that
"there is evidence for the hexagonal structures characteristic of shock fracture..."
This is no less than what many geologists have been trying to say in the "tectonic
plate" school of thought and the Russian "crystal grid structure" theory that C. Bird
has described, all hesitating to give voice to the necessary implications.
Cook goes on to add the clause, "but this evidence is by no means perfect." He may be
saying this because he does not deal with the two essential components of the epoch-
making event, the intervention of a great exoterrestrial body and the blasting of the
Moon from the Pacific Basin. These elements of the scene tend to obscure what would
otherwise appear as a more normal hammer fracture of a solid crystal globe in rotation.
The Antarctic continent (including the continental shelf of the Ross Sea) is steep-
standing in its surrounding ocean. About half of it executes a remarkable circular tour,
from 0 to 180 east. The other half presents a more jagged coastline, deeply
retracted from the imaginary circumference of the eastern arc. Opposite the uniform half
circle are the continental masses of the world. Opposite the retracted half of the
continent occurs the South Pacific Ocean, between New Zealand and South America, where
by our theory the Moon was drawn forth.
The Antarctic continent, we surmise, must have been located north and east, and its
south and west side was the limit of the exploded crust. Its north and east portion was
broken off from the neighboring continents by the forking of the Atlantic fracture, east
and west along the circular arc, and had just been isolated to its west and south by the
lunar explosions. Forced down by the fracture and up by the new abyss, it settled
centrally over the new South Pole, contained there by lava flows from all directions.
Its slopes are heavy with debris, indicating that the separation and explosion happened
when the continent was ice-free and/ or that an ice cap, if there, melted
catastrophically. The lack of fossils more recent than the Cretaceous in Antarctica
seems to pose a challenge to short-term time reckoning in quantavolutionary theory. If
the terminal Cretaceous was the time of lunar fission, however, the lack tends to
confirm the theory. Thereafter Antarctica was isolated.
The puzzling fractures of the Pacific basin north of Antarctica invite puzzling
quantavolutionary assumptions. The Nazca Ridge and its associated seamounts moving west
off northwestern South America find their mirror image in the Tuamotu Archipelago far on
the other side of the mid-Pacific Rise (Albatross Cordillera). Also the whole of the
western coast of South America conforms in shape and fit to the same cleavage. The
cleavage image is shifted southwest.
Are we seeing double? These features must have originated together. The Rise must have
pulled away from South America faster than South America, impelled from the east by the
Atlantic, moved to follow it. This is understandable if the Rise had no crust, but a
yawning basin, to its own West; meanwhile it was being pushed reactively by its own east
side lavas as these were blocked and pushed by South America.
Farther North, the Rise loses itself in the great transform fractures of what we call
the Tethyan Belt and is then overriden by the North American continent which has been
shifting southwest with the opening of the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans.
A second matter calling for attention is the form of the fracture system: the ridges
move rectolinearly with sidewise steps and with a great many perpendicular fissures.
Perhaps the successive torques to which the globe was now being subjected shifted the
main line of fracture. Every time there occurred a glitch in the crustal velocity of
rotation, the main fracture line would shift to the East. At the new equatorial belt, a
great shift to the East is observable. Several more 'glitch-points' occur before the
fracture cuts through Africa-Antarctica and then, perhaps because the slowdown of
rotation had terminated, the sidewise steps are no longer in evidence.
Nor are the transverse fissures any longer apparent. The long east-west fractures seem
independent of the main ridge. Instead, passing now for the rest of its journey through
evacuated surface, the major fracture, in its bifurcation, is accompanied by myriads
outbursts of lava mountains, the seamounts. Seamounts occur in large numbers along the
Atlantic ridge and in various evacuated regions of the basins. A close statistical
analysis may ultimately use the seamounts as indicators of torque, time of fracture,
velocity of the land masses, and other events, now quite obscure, of this period.
The striking conformity of the Mid-Pacific Ridge with the shape of South America and its
passage beneath western North America persuades us that the original continental land on
the east of the fracture is still there. But there exists no sial continent west of the
Rise, that has any kind of morphological association with it. There is no well-defined
boundary of the oceanic expansion to the west, nothing to compare with Euro-Africa on
the other side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, no well-defined boundaries such as tie South
America, Africa, and Australia to Antarctica. The "Circle of Fire," which marks an arc
of volcanism and seismism from Southern Chile to the Aleutians and down through Japan,
stops; so the Circle is not a circle and not a fitting image of the American side
either. The morphology of the basin of the Pacific would be an incredible coincidence, a
gross improbability, without our positing the disappearance of its entire crustal
covering west of the Rise.
Attempts to produce a unified time-scale for the spreading away from the ocean ridges
have not been successful. Heirtzler and his associates found that relative to the time
scale for the spread of the South Pacific, the North Pacific time scale was in error by
a factor of two. The principal technique employed has been potassium-argon
radiochronometry. Nor do the spreading patterns moving from the ridges around the world
agree on the location of the North Pole around which presumably they would evidence
rotation. Still, because of similarities in the spreading pattern of widely separated
regions, it is believed, and we think rightly, that the spreading of lava was a
universally concurrent phenomena. The similarities, where they show a discontinuous
floor-laying off of one ridge show the same off of another; such similar discontinuities
connote simultaneity.
Earlier Cook (1963) had advanced evidence for the recent rupture of the continental
crust that would probably have erased most of the perplexities just evidenced [4] .
1. The uplifts observable in Fennoscandia and Northeastern America "began at the same
time and followed essentially the same relaxation equation. This equation, derived by
Vening-Meinesz, is an exponential rise equation characteristic only of a sudden
unloading of the crust followed by a normal relaxation."
2. The maximum depression at the center of the ice cap was along the seashore where
presently stand Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and Labrador Sea.
3. Without the missing land in these northern areas, no great ice masses would have
collected: "the ice would simply have rolled off into the sea." The seas of the region
could not have existed prior to 10,000 years ago.
4. The uplift data fits into the extended fracture that thereupon moves down the
Atlantic and around the world.
5. The ice stored in the ice cap is calculated as equal to providing the water that
would fill the Arctic and Atlantic basins.
6. A "Great Arctic Magnetic Anomaly" defined by E. R. Hope from the magnetic remanence
of crustal rocks exhibits "a surface dipole magnet in the North Pole region." One
apparent pole is in Northern Baffin Island, the other offshore from Severnaya Zemlya in
Siberia. These two apparent poles appear to be at one and the same location, if the two
separated lands represented are pushed back together at the location of the former pole.
"In other words, it would only be necessary to return all the land masses in the
northern hemishpere to their original position by reversal of the process described by
Du Toit [the splitting and rafting of the Arctic crust] in order to completely remove
this magnetic anomaly."
Two sets of conditions governed the occurrence of the world-girdling fracture and the
Earth's expansion. The first condition of fracture is an unevenly applied pressure on a
shell. The shell is the Earth's surface down to a level which presently can be called
the Moho discontinuity but which in the Age of Pangea was the point when the coolness of
the Earth's surface disappeared into the mounting temperature of the crust and mantle,
caused by primordial rising heat convection from the center, by pressure from the rocks
above, by radioactive flow blocked from emission by the surface charge of the Earth, and
by the greater centrifugal force of rotating material of greater density than the
surface material.
The unevenly applied pressure consisted of ice caps rapidly formed in the thousand years
before by falling ice and icy waters; these did not need to be melted at the equator,
then raised by evaporation, then blown to the north, and then dropped again. They
contributed directly to the ice cap, and to such an extent, that shortly there formed a
tall mass of ice covering Pangea around its North and South Poles.
If the Earth had not had its magma sources opened up by fission, fracture and expansion,
it might have been frozen completely over. Great depressions were formed in the rocks,
depressions which have still not relaxed after 12,000 years. This pressure was a
mechanical potential exercised around the circumference of the ice bowls. The fact that
oceans did not exist permitted a much greater piling up of the ice caps, for a deep
water basin cannot hold the same amount of ice.
A second condition of fracture is a formation that can be split. Millions of geological
faults of the Earth attest to the potentiality of rocks for splitting and shearing. If
the body to be split is spinning, the slightest delay in spin along a line of fault will
drive the one side of the fault away from the other side. The centrifugal force in the
Earth's rotation achieves this.
The setting up of a massive horizontal circular pressure against weaker rock and the
resistance of denser and stronger rock below incline the potential event towards a split
rather than an implosion or collapse. The buildup of ice will continue until the
horizontal walls will give way through folding and thrusting. But the ice mountain does
not thrust over because it is sunken in, with the form of a cap.
The horizontal strain to the depth of the ice cap causes a continual heat at its edges.
It leaks water, but accumulates more ice than it loses. The heat augments below, too,
from the pressure of the ice upon the non-basic sedimentary rock and granites below.
These grease the cap undersurfaces.
If there were now to be a sharp blow upon the center of the cap, the cap would crack
radially. In addition the weakened crust beneath the cap would give way. The Earth's
axis of rotation would be tilted to meet the first blow; the Earth's spin would take up
a new figure with an axis towards the direction from which the blow came. The fracture
would leap out of the blow and race around the globe in the manner described above.
All of these conditions were fulfilled. The blow struck. The hammer could have been a
lightning bolt from an Intruder from the northeast. At a distance of a million
kilometers, it began to agitate the space sheath of Earth. The axis of the Earth tilted
to meet it. The bolt struck the ice cap and sent radial fractures in all directions. At
the same time electro-gravitational force was applied, with particular stress upon the
pole, wrenching the Earth by its cap against its rotational direction. Earth's
rotational velocity slowed sharply.
All lines of weakness were stressed. The Globe shuddered from the blow and fractured
deeply. The eastward rotation of the Earth sent the deep fracture rushing down the
"Atlantic" and "Pacific" sides to the other end of the spin, the South Pole. The
Intruder swooped closer and passed over the Southern Hemisphere, the "Pacific Basin,"
where it flayed the Earth of half its crust, and then passed on. The crustal debris shot
up into space in pursuit. Most of it turned aside and became the Moon. Some fell back to
Earth, now and in the succeeding years. After centuries of a ring of debris, the Moon
was fully assembled. The Earth came to see the new great light and the Sun and other
planets as well.
The globe was probably spinning east before and during its exoterrestrial encounter, and
the Intruder apparently approached from the northeast. Thus a swath of crust was removed
that began narrowly in the North, barreled out at the epicenter of the encounter in the
Pacific Basin, and continued to explode for thousands of miles until it passed into
farther space. The "crater of the Moon" was elliptic in form.
Because of its possibly being remembered and because of its continental geography, the
great Rift Valley of East Africa might be recalled for discussion. Viewed from the
south, it appears to begin where the Island of Madagascar was detached from the African
continent, proceeds north, bifurcates, resumes a unified path and leaves the continent
at the Afar Triangle, thence moving northwest below the Red Sea, bifurcating once more
to pass up the valley containing the Dead Sea into Syria (where it loses itself in the
jumble of mountains observing the burial of the old Tethyan Sea and Tethyan welt that is
moving generally west and east; the western bifurcation is questionable, but is likely
to pass across the Mediterranean, up the Adriatic, beneath the Alps, and out along the
Rhine graben that ends far to the northwest beneath the North Sea.
Arabia fits cleanly into Africa across the Red Sea. Why the Rift should turn northwest
at this point may be explained by the westward thrusting Gulf of Aden-Indian Ocean
faults, which have sent out a powerful arm in this direction, thus reinforcing each
other and cutting a neat right angle around the Arabian peninsula. The narrows where the
Gulf of Aden enters the Red Sea are called Bab-el-Mandeb, the straits of tears, after
the legendary devastation the rupture caused. The Olduvai Gorge and Afar Triangle, whose
hominid fossils have been assigned ages up to 3.5 million years, sit upon the Rift
Valley, which is kilometers wide and houses its own world beneath the towering plateaus
and mountains abutting it.
Opinions differ as to the age of the African rift. That it has been active in human
times seems evident from legends and excavations. Its origins have been set as far back
as 2.7 billion years, however, by R. B. M. McConnell, speaking most directly of the 4000
kilometer section from the Red Sea to the Zambezi River [5] . He speaks of
"transcurrent movement" between more ancient shield rocks, but also of "perennial"
reactivation. So eminent an authority as Flint accorded the Rift an origin in the late
Pleistocene, well within our ken [6] .
If India and Madagascar were dissociated from the continent some 100 million years ago,
as is currently believed, certainly the Rift would have been strongly activated then.
Also, if Africa and the Americas had separated not long before that time, then, too, the
Rift would have been agitated. The great platform that hovers above the Rift might
represent the kind of worldwide swelling expounded earlier as an accompaniment of the
general global cracking.
From the standpoint of this book, the arguments giving a long history to the Rift are
worth no more or less than the arguments for long time-scales elsewhere in the world. In
Solaria Binaria, which is primarily a work in astrophysics, the age of the Earth's rocks
is put at less than a million years; in this work, which concentrates upon the recent
reworking of the Earth's surface, we are not interested so much in the older rocks as in
their recent upheavals.
In this context, we see the swift movement eastwards of the African continent and the
lifting of its great southeastern plateau region as concurrent. The Rift had already
happened; two masses were pulled apart in the global fracturing; but reactive pressures
from the even larger fracture to the east, now below the sea, compressed the Rift and
let the dropped rocks fall only a small distance before halting, trapped as they are
today, covered with lakes, volcanic ash, and plains.
The Olduvai Gorge has been assigned 200 million years; it was then a late fault
branching off the main faulting of the Rift. If it is so old, it becomes difficult to
explain the hominid and mammal fossils protruding from its walls. They could not be
cliff-dwellers; so the Gorge must be younger than they. How young they are is in
question; the legends of heavy rift activity weigh upon our mind, and there is a variety
of evidence that the hominids may be much younger, material that is treated by this
written Homo Schizo I. The evidence extends to the Afar Triangle, a flat land-fill
actually, born of the pull-out of Arabia, where related hominids are found. It also
extends to the Palestinian portion of the Rift where Olduvai types of hominid sites are
discoverable.
The Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, we have said, seem to have been produced out of sharp
lateral faulting shifting the end section of the Carlsberg Ridge of the Indian Ocean
northward. This might indicate that the total area east of the Owen Fault Zone,
including the African Rift-Gulf of Aden-Red Sea rift occurred at the time of or only a
little later than the globe-girdling rift of which the Carlsberg Ridge forms part.
Further activities of the Rift advance into proto-historic times, particularly into the
Bible. The occasion of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, including the story
of Sodome and Gomorrah (see below, Chapter 29), treat specifically of the same rift. M.
Blanckenhorn placed the age of the Syrian section of the Rift in the early glacial
period [7] . W. Irwin retrojected the influx of magnesium salts into the Dead Sea, on
uniformitarian principles, and arrived at a 50,000 year approximation of its age.
Velikovsky gives several reasons for reducing this age drastically, and estimates both
the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley have an age of 5000 years. In all the disastrous effects
of the biblically described destruction, a sea is not mentioned; yet when the Israelites
under Moses and Joshua arrived on the spot around 3450 years ago they encountered the
Sea.
The Jordan River, argues Velikovsky, had changed the direction of its flow, too. "Prior
to the Exodus, the Jordan Valley was on a higher level than the Mediterranean Sea. With
the rupture of the tectonic structure along the river and the dropping of the Dead Sea
chasm, many brooks in Southern Palestine which had been flowing to the south must have
changed their direction and started to flow towards Palestine, emptying into the
southern shore of the Dead Sea." Legendary references indicate that heavy bursts of
lightning were involved in the production of fire, smoke, and sulphur, whether by cosmic
stream injections in which the planet Jupiter (Marduk in Babylonian, Zedek in Hebrew) is
insistently implicated, or by subterranean upheaval along the rift (by no means
excluding an exoterrestrial prime mover).
Allowing therefore that some of the major rifting of the Earth occurred as late as
several thousand years ago, we conclude this chapter. All of the great rifts of the
world are connected in time and by cause. They form a system that harnesses the world to
the recent fission of the Moon. The individual histories of the sections of the world
fracture system are insignificant by comparison with the common historical experience of
the whole. The system functioned to balance the world by redistributing the crust and by
expansion and to vent gases and heat during the process. The climactic event was
tangibly sensed by the Pangean Earth days in advance; it occupied a day in establishing
the new morphology of the Earth-Moon system; thousand of years were required for its
major effects to devolve into the processes recognizable in the world today.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-two: Fractures and Cleavages)
1. Beaumont, op. cit., 190, 197. For Baker see the preceding chapter.
2. V S. I. S. R. 2 (1980-1) Discussed by Warlow, 34-5.
3. Genesis I: 9 and fn Oxford Annotated Bible (NY 1965), 1.
4. 40 Proc. U. A. S. A. L., part I, op. cit., 74-7, also in Prehistory...
5. R. B. McConnell, 83 Geol. Soc. Amer. Bull. (Sep. 1972), 2549-72.
6. Glacial Geology, 523; Glacial and Quaternary Geology (1971).
7. Velikovsky, "Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah," VI Kronos 4 (1981) 49, and see the
accompanying note by Frederick B. Jueneman; also J. E. Strickling, "Sodom and Gomorrah,"
2 S. I. S. Workshop 4 (1979), 3-5.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHANNELS AND CANYONS
The model river channel combines the history of an earth fault, a catastrophic torrent,
and an erosional runoff bed. Most large rivers, perhaps all of them, are children of
Okeanos, whom the Greeks called "the Father of Rivers" who personified the sky waters
before the first deluges, as we said in Chapter 13, and then came down to Earth. His
children carried his waters into the new ocean beds.
Many myths appear to conjure rivers where none exist, and, of course, a great many dry
river beds of once tremendous rivers are to be found around the world. During the
Universal Flood of Deucalion, a small chasm was said to open in Athens into which the
waters emptied. According to Lucian the people of Hieropolis (near Aleppo, Syria) "say
that a great chasm opened in their country, and all the water of the flood ran away down
it." Again, myths warrant hypotheses. In the Volta River Project (West Africa), a
onetime shallow river bed was suggested by a deep river bed with a jagged bottom. Local
legends spoke of upheavals in the now quiet area, and when the water was lowered prior
to constructing a dam, several protuberances became islands, and at a depth of 35 feet
revealed carvings whose age was estimated at 3000 years [1] .
The Po River is probably an extension of the African-Rift-Red Sea-Rhine rift valley that
connects with a buried rift in the Adriatic Sea. It carried down the immense debris of
the sudden uplift of the Alps. It may be the ancient sacred river, the Eridanus, of
Greco-Roman legend, long-lost because later a sea. The Po serves in truncated form to
water and drain the Po Valley. The Rhine River picks up the graben northwest of the
Alps, and moves it far out into the North Sea; not long ago, it shared its burden with a
westward flowing river that was then naturally dammed so as to reduce the Loire River of
France to more modest proportions.
The Colorado River may be a ramification of the East Pacific Ridge, that runs up the Bay
of Lower California and strikes through the desert into the raised platforms of the
southwestern states, abetting the disintegration of the Rocky Mountain uplift; once its
tectonic work was done, it began its present work of erosion.
The great rivers of China flow in the direction they do, says a Chinese myth, because
the goddess Niu-Kwa made the waters of the great flood stream off towards the southeast;
the whole Earth had tilted and sunk into the sea there [2] . Most great rivers of the
world understandably conform to the processes set into motion by the lunarian outburst.
Many hasten along courses conveniently provided them and their tributaries by fractures,
the Rhine, the Colorado, the Susquehanna, the Indus, the Congo and others.
In decoding the natural history of river beds, geologists fighting the ghosts of
catastrophism have refrained from extremes. M. G. Wolman and 3. P. Miller in 1960
essayed an analysis of the "Magnitude and Frequency of Forces in Geomorphic
Processes."[2A] Using mainly four rivers as their cases, they conclude that "dwarf"
gradualist forces operate steadily to perform most transport of sediments, that "man-
sized" moderate forces of brimming "bankfull" waters supplement the "dwarf" work in
carving banks and valleys, and depositing sediments, thus accounting for perhaps 90% of
the changes effectuated. The rare work of "giants" make up the balance, including many
switches off channels and movements of erratic boulders.
Unfortunately they lack respectable data over time even for these "giant" events, which
they estimate at 50-year intervals; yet they call them catastrophes. Like the experts on
seismism, their extremes are historically confined to what noone doubts have been
uniformitarian times. Of course, then, they must pass over with the weakest of scenarios
the grand metamorphism and concentrate upon pygmy processes playing out recent history.
They realize that they are dealing with exponential, logarithmic processes, but excise
the peak curves. In the only concession to longer history, they murmur at one place
about "materials inherited from a period of greater stream competence which possibly
existed during glacial times." As we have noted, "the end of the ice ages" is a cover-up
fiction of all that has happened to the lately tortured Earth.
Not alone of river channels do they speak but also of beaches and winds. With regard to
beaches they introduce the commonly accepted concept of an "equilibrium profile." It is
"an average form around which rapid fluctuations occur. Waves from storms may
periodically destroy the equilibrium form, but over a period of years there is an
average equilibrium profile by which the beach may be characterized." The more
meaningful question is where does this profile come from in the first place -these
millions of profiles, we should add, unique in themselves but in distribution worldwide?
Where is the "supergiant's" place, that smashed out the profile to begin with, in the
analysis and theory. As for the effects of winds upon river and beach morphology, many
analyses, they say, "indicate that a log-normal frequency distribution of wind
velocities is a general rule." The log-normal winds, like log-normal river flows and sea
waves are what recent experience and the authors give as "log-normal"-curves that rise
scarcely enough to make their uniformitarian hearts skip a beat.
Their last paragraph is naive, but so unconsciously significant as to be worth quoting:
Perhaps the state of knowledge as well as the geomorphic effects of small and moderate
versus extreme events may be best illustrated by the following analogy. A dwarf, a man,
and a huge giant are having a wood-cutting contest. Because of the metabolic
peculiarities, individual chopping rates are roughly inverse to their size. The dwarf
works steadily and is rarely seen to rest. However, his progress is slow, for even
little trees take a long time, and there are many big ones which he cannot dent with his
axe. The man is a strong fellow and a hard worker, but he takes a day off now and then.
His vigorous and persistent labors are highly effective, but there are some trees that
defy his best efforts. The giant is tremendously strong, but he spends most of his time
sleeping. Whenever he is on the job, his actions are frequently capricious. Sometimes he
throws away his axe and dashes wildly into the woods, where he breaks the trees or pulls
them up by the roots. On the rare occasions when he encounters a tree too big for him,
he ominously mentions his family of brothers -all bigger, and stronger and sleepier.
In their last sentence, they suggest the truth as in a dream. This should be the extreme
dimension of their theory, accounting for the largest facts before their eyes. Thus the
larger catastrophic origins of the morphology under examination are excluded.
A century ago, geologist Clarence King was describing the river system of the Pacific
coastal area of the United States [3] .
A most interesting comparison of the character and rate of stream erosion may be
obtained by studying in the western Cordilleras, the river work of three distinct
periods. The geologist there finds preserved and wonderfully well exposed, first,
Pliocene Tertiary river valleys, with their boulders, gravels and sands still lying
undisturbed in the ancient beds; secondly, the system of profound caZons, from 2000 to
5000 feet deep, which score the flanks of the great mountain chains, and form such a
fascinating object of study, and not less of wonder, because the gorges were altogether
carved out since the beginning of the glacial period; thirdly the modern rivers, mere
echoes of their parent streams of the early Quaternary age. As between these three, the
Early Quaternary rivers stand out vastly the most powerful and extensive. Theà present
rivers are utterly incapable, with infinite time, to perform the work of glacial
torrents. So, too, the Pliocene streams, although of very great volume, were powerless
to wear their way down into solid rock thousands of feet, at the rapid rate of the early
Quaternary floods. Between these three systems of rivers is all the difference which
separates a modern (uniformitarian) stream and a terrible catastrophic engine, the
expression of a climate in which struggle for existence must have been something
absolutely inconceivable when considered from the water precipitations, floods,
torrents, and erosions of to-day.
Uniformitarians are fond of saying that give our present rivers time, plenty of time,
and they can perform the feats of the past. It is mere nonsense in the case of the
ca±ons of the Cordilleras. They could never have been carved by the pygmy rivers of this
climate to the end of infinite time. And, as if the sections and profiles of the ca±ons
were not enough to convince the most skeptical student, there are left hundreds of dry
river-beds, within whose broad valleys, flanked by old steep banks and eloquent with
proofs of once-powerful streams, there is not water enough to quench the thirst even of
a uniformitarian. Those extinct rivers, dead from drought, in connection with the great
ca±on system, present perfectly overwhelming evidence that the general deposition of
aerial water, the consequent floods and torrents, forming as they all do the distinct
expression of a sharply-defined cycle of climate, as compared either with the water
phenomena of the immediately preceding Pliocene age or with our own succeeding
condition, constitute an age of water catastrophe whose destructive power we only now
begin distantly to suspect.
These passages, according to the model for which we are groping, refer to the three
phases of recent quantavolution. The Pliocene river beds represent a period of
increasing disorder and deluge in the world for about two thousand years prior to the
climactic lunar fission. The awesome dead rivers of the Early Quaternary are relics of
the phase of mountain thrusting, westward movement of the American continent and the
deluges associated with it, which broke down and flushed away the elevated landscape
onto the shelves and slopes along the Pacific scarp. The rivers of the American
heartland do not exhibit so obviously the recent catastrophic forces. Still, in the late
Pleistocene, both the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers changed their courses markedly
along an east-west axis, provoked by great seismism [3A], and watched, most probably, by
awestruck humans.
Today's third phase finds "pygmy" rivers, many in new channels, watering and draining
the country. We group all three phases in the latest of holocene period of the past
14,000 years. "Nothing comparable" with the second phase river action, "ever now breaks
the geologic calm," writes King. Then, with prescience of the concept of "collective
amnesia," he adds that the idea of "catastrophism is therefore the survival of a
terrible impression burned in upon the very substance of human memory."
Some rivers possess drowned deltas of enormous proportions. The collision of India with
Asia produced, besides the Himalayas, two equally large-scale, if less visible,
phenomena in the deltaic fans of the Indus and Ganges River. These stretch into the
Indian Ocean, one to the west, the other to the east of the subcontinent, covering with
detritus ocean basin areas together as large as India itself. Like the raging torrents
of yesterday in North America, these great transporting systems are today inactive.
Although the rivers still carry two of the largest flows among all of the world's
rivers, they are, as King would say, "pygmies" compared with their ancestors, their
"fathers," or "holy fathers" at that, because all of this work that conveyed the
tumbling slurry from high places for hundreds and thousands of kilometers had to do with
mountains and plateaus just created. There stand no millions of years behind these works
of nature.
It would seem appropriate to pass from the subject of rivers to that of undersea canyons
by way of the most famous of natural monuments, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.
Grand Canyon is a monument also to deceased uniformitarian geology. It is so well-
studied and rationalized, with long-time-term reckoning, that every geologist is
expected to recite its history liturgically. Not so Cook, nor Kelly and Dachille, nor
the present writer.
Conventionally, following Woodbury, Shelton, and Redfern, we commence with an age
approaching two billion years ago. Radiochronometry supports the great ages found in the
canyon. The canyon proper is allowed an age which Derek Ager, for example, sets at ten
million years, but, pursuing a negative exponential principle, gives one million years
to the mere latest fifty feet of erosion [4] . (That is, a practically catastrophic
rate is seen to have occurred at times.)
The floor of the Grand Canyon complex is an unknown material supporting what is called
Vishnu schist, composed of mud, sand and lava. Thereupon the miles of sediments begin to
pile up, most of them now missing, and probably eroded, but today some three miles can
be accounted for: one in the bottom and main canyon itself, a second mile from the brink
of Grand Canyon to the top of Zion Canyon, and a third up the face of the higher
plateaus to the top of Bryce Canyon. Wind and water bring in the sedimentation layers.
Many in variety, several distinctive deep beds of schists, sandstone, limestone and
shale compose the great bulk of deposits. Discoverable in the series are ten major
unconformities and many minor ones, where intervening layers existed and were worn away
before being covered by new deposits.
The area was uplifted and submerged a number of times with relation to the seas around.
Some lapses in the record are so prolonged that whole mountain ranges on site could be
worn down and planed off by erosion, succeeded by new tall deposits. Fossils of algae,
primitive and later vertebrates, fishes, and footprints of amphibians are discovered in
ascending. Fossil trees, fishes and reptile tracks are found in higher Triassic rocks.
The fossil record stops at the Eocene epoch of the early Cenozoic (recent) era. In the
Cenozoic, the entire region was uplifted from near sea-level to the present elevation.
During uplift periods the Colorado River system has washed away materials and cut the
gorges. So goes the gradualist solution of the Grand Canyon scene.
The quantavolutionary view, as may be supposed, stresses high energy forces, fractures
and quick deposition. "Many of the pools and rapids in the Grand Canyon are located
where the river crosses regional and local fracture zones." [5] Cook points out that
the Canyon is narrow at Supai Village and that the gorge appears to have ruptured open
in a brittle fracture. The Grand Canyon, as was mentioned earlier, is perceived as a
branch of the earth-girdling rift system; numerous other branches of the fracture system
are observable north and south of Grand Canyon also. All of this occurred when the
continent was thrust westward over the Pacific Ocean rift and the ocean rift fractured
the continent. A number of orthogonal embayments of the Canyon are perpendicular to the
main fracture or canyon, and these have been filled with debris from the outpouring of
temporary great inland lakes known to have existed in the region.
The three miles of sediments, all heavily fractured, were products of overthrusts from
afar and of great slurries that brought in and laid down beds of fossiliferous sand and
mud. Speaking of the sediments of hundreds of feet, "if all this was a very slow process
requiring millions upon millions of years, how did it happen that the rivers carried
nothing but clay for millions of years and then suddenly changed to sand?" And "nowhere
today do we find rivers producing deposits of such uniform nature..." [6] The erosion
was generally prompted by heavy seismism. The fossils found in the beds would have
quickly disappeared if they had not been buried in sudden local and general disasters.
The radiochronometry employed is of dubious validity, or, let us say, requires a
specific set of challenges going far beyond these rudimentary paragraphs. All may agree
that in the deep non-marine but water-deposited Eocene limestones of Bryce Canyon may be
found some excellent carvings.
Grand Canyon would be a minor feature of the continental slopes of the ocean and a minor
canyon among submarine canyons. Even the Hudson River possesses one as awesome; it
proceeds underseas for hundreds of kilometers, first cutting into the continental shelf,
and then extending down the continental slope to the abyssal plain of the ocean, 4.5
kilometers below sea level. The difference is not that the one has grown sub-aerially
and the others aquatically; both types have been sub-aerial for all their active lives.
The seas encroached as the lunarian period created the sea basins, slopes, and canyons.
Grand Canyon and several other such remarkable sub-aerial features are of the ilk; a
comparison of a profile of Monterey Submarine Canyon (California) and of Grand Canyon
[7] reveals very close similarities and indicates strongly a common ancestry.
Scores of impressive submarine canyons extend the courses of rivers around the world.
The idea that they were once active as rivers was resisted for a generation. In 1936,
Francis P. Shepard could formulate the predicament, which still stands unresolved [8] :
Investigations of submarine canyons carried on for a number of years with the
cooperation of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Geological Society of America, Scripps
Institution and other organizations have revealed that these sea-floor canyons have all
the characteristics of river canyons and are distinctly different from fault valleys.
Also tests of the idea that the submarine canyons might be the product of currents have
produced negative results so that they have evidently been cut by rivers. The
significance of this sub-aerial erosion on the present sea-floor is particularly
disturbing, since the submarine canyons extend out to depths of from 2,000 to as much as
10,000 feet and are found off practically every coast of the world. Also all available
evidence favors a Pleistocene age for the canyons. Accordingly, there is the implication
that the coasts of the world were greatly elevated above their present positions during
the glacial period. That all the continental margins both off stable and unstable coasts
could have been subjected to such movements in comparatively recent times is scarcely
credible. The alternative that there have been sea-level changes connected with the
cause seems much more reasonable. Such changes are indicated not only by the submarine
canyons but also by many of the phenomena of coral reefs and by oceanographic data from
various parts of the world. The only cause of sea-level change which does not meet with
almost insurmountable objections is that of glacial control. It seems quite possible
that the continental glaciers during some of the earlier glacial epochs may have been
sufficiently thick and sufficiently extended to have allowed a lowering of 3,000 feet or
more. While such a lowering was probably insufficient to account for the deeper canyons
it is felt that it would have resulted in the development of a universal canyon system
which, connecting with much older sunken canyons in some places and modified by
subsequent sinking elsewhere, would account for the present situation.
The world would have to be a great ice mountain to provide such waters. The waters had
to come from elsewhere, and be accompanied by great tectonism. We hold rivers to be
based upon faults.
In the same year, geologists Harry H. Hess and Paul MacClintock presented a striking
solution. They saw in the canyons evidence of recency, a late Pleistocene age, of
suddenness of creation, and of worldwide simultaneity. Here are the three primary tests
of quantavolution, all passed by the submarine valleys. Then they are compelled, with
reluctance, apologies, and special consultation with H. N. Russell (who advised against
it), to advance the quantavolutionary mechanism, exoterrestrial encounter. The passages
deserve quotation [9] :
The valley-cutting conditions resulted from a sudden change in the shape of the
hydrosphere, depressing sea-level in low latitudes, raising it in high latitudes; in
other words, a change in the ellipticity of the sea surface. At present we can think of
no orthodox cause for this change... However, a speculation comes to mind; if a sudden
decrease in the rate of rotation of the earth took place, the hydrosphere would respond
by being drawn into polar latitudes. The solid body of the earth would less rapidly
adjust itself into a new spheroid in equilibrium with the slower rotation, which
adjustment, when complete, probably would restore sea level to approximately its present
position. But during the adjustment, it is postulated that there would have been time
enough to allow rivers to cut valleys on continental slopes. While of course we do not
know what could have caused the sudden change in rotation, it is conceivable that a
collision with a small extra-terrestrial body would be competent to produce the effect.
The authors then sought for evidence that the depths of the canyons would decrease from
the equator to the poles, and, second, that there would be found high marine terraces in
the northern latitudes where the shores would have been temporarily flooded. Indications
of both were deemed favorable.
The failure of theory to move along such lines is unaccountable, except in terms of the
psycho-sociology of science of which we speak in the Velikovsky Affair and The Cosmic
Heretics. Many years later one reads in a study by Landes approvingly [10] :
I claim that the finding of graded clastics and misplaced (shallow-water) faunas deep
beneath the sea is not prima facie evidence that they were carried there by turbidity
currents: that the finding of cobbles does not prove that they were transported by
submarine landslides; and that photographs of ripple marks lying at a depth of 4,500
feet do not necessarily mean that they resulted from current action operating at
depth... I likewise believe that deep-sea-floor current ripples, like the truncated
seamounts, are relics of shallower water.
At this point, Landes should be looking into the ancestral skies. Instead he suggests
that the deep ocean basins might once have been over 20,000 feet deeper. Even this idea
might lead somewhere, but, instead, the ad hoc argumentation that so often passes for
geological theory obtrudes; when in trouble, call upon isostasy, diastrophism, time,
lifting, and, as here, sinking, and thus by name-calling the problem is solved and the
matter ends; the data are not pushed to their ultimate meaning.
Landes writes: "What manner of logic allows us to accept evidence, such as marine
strata, of a sea-level far above present datum of 25,000 feet, but causes us to run from
evidence of a sea-level depression of 25,000 feet?... What is so sacrosanct about
current sea level?" The trouble here is that the logic is not good enough. One ought not
to have indulged in the notion of a sea-level 25,000 feet higher because of the marine
fossils up there, especially while he was laughing over Noah's Ark. Furthermore, the
present sea bottoms and therefore sea-levels can be depressed by another 25,000 feet,
but again no mechanism is perceived.
He, and others, should be asking the deeper questions: "What are these deluges that
humanity has been clamoring about since the dawn of history?" "Must every drop of water
bear the holy stamp, 'Made on Earth'?" "How long does it take a pre-designed fracture
trough to make a river channel, complete with fractured and non-fractured meanders? ....
What is so sacrosanct about the ocean basins having always been filled with water?" I
think that we have progressed far enough along in this book to dispose readily of the
submarine canyon problem. The canyons were instantly created great river courses that
rushed down, first, precipices, then, steep slopes, then gradual slopes, into the ocean
basins that were only partly filled with water. Drainage of the water-logged continents
and successive deluges filled the ocean basins to overflowing. As the seas encroached
upon the rivers, the rivers were also receiving far less water to give to the sea. The
underseas box-like, sluice-like channels ended their careers as turbulent rivers within
perhaps two thousand years.
They have not filled with sediments. Gross, in his Oceanography, says that submarine
canyons would soon fill up if they were not being emptied by turbidity currents. Geology
has invented some bizarre mechanisms to circumvent catastrophism and here is one of
them: turbidity currents. They have never been actually observed; they are
"intermittent;" they are caused by earthquakes; they have speeds of 20 km/ hr; they
account for anomalous continental sand and fossils found on the ocean floor. A rare
study assigns them credit for having broken a trans-Atlantic bottom cable. (Still, no
one denies seismism.) Would not such currents act as bulldozers instead of sweepers, and
fill, rather than clean out the canyons? Our quantavolutionary theory is adequate for
all that bespeaks turbidity currents, including the oceanic sands and fossils.
A question remains to perplex: if the continental blocks were meanwhile rafting over
long distances, would they not have left behind their detrital slopes? The slopes would
then be flat and spread over the abysses. A logical answer is available here, too. We
have but to recall that the continents travelled because they were both pulled and
pushed. If they had been only pulled they would have left their ocean moraines behind.
But they were standing on a kind of conveyor belt, as has been said by Harry Hess and
others, and their slopes moved right along behind them; the belt was being pushed by the
lava currents issuing from the ridges, fissures, and volcanos. Anyhow, the canyons were
working rivers after the continents ceased to move rapidly, and before new ocean waters
drowned them.
In concluding the chapter, a few words may be in order on the more puzzling problem of
the deep sea trenches. These deep, narrow and often long slits in the crust are found in
various regions but are especially prominent around the Pacific. There they gash the sea
floor off of South America, Central America, the Aleutians, Kuriles, Japan, the
Philippines, Java, and various island fronts, including a long stretch north of New
Zealand.
In a typical large trench, a depth of ten kilometers is precipitously achieved, with a
slant toward the continental rock against which it is emplaced. Its sediments are
shallow, its walls bare. Trenches were never rivers. A function for them was hard to
discover until the tectonic plate theory of continental drift went shopping for its
mechanism. Then it occurred that the ocean floor being made at the ridges had to be
disposed of somewhere else, if the world was not expanding. For lack of better, the
trenches became locations into which the sea floor plate crept upon encountering another
plate, thus disposing of itself tidily. The next chapter will handle this theory, but we
cannot leave the trenches without an explanation.
Trench walls are igneous for the most part, straight, and nearly vertical, like fault
scarps, say Heezen and Hollister about the Puerto Rican Trench. They belong to the
period of great disruption. Their oceanic sides abut continental walls that are much
taller and deeper; the connection between the two may not be binding in many or any
trenches. The continental wall is of varying chemical composition; the oceanic wall is
purer basalt of the mantle. They heat and expand, cool and contract at different rates.
The gap or trench may occur as a pull-back of the oceanic basalt or the continent, a
drop fault where nothing drops. "The crustal block which forms the floor of the Puerto
Rico Trench resembles the dropped keystone of a rising ramp, which once bridged the
transition from the thin oceanic crust to the thick foundation of the island arc." [11]
Sediments of the trenches are scanty. The same writers say: "It is a general lack of
sediment accumulation which is the most notable feature of all the deep-sea trenches.
This lack... demands a recent origin of trench topography." [12] Recent must mean
holocene or pleistocene, it appears. But now, the plate tectonicists chase in full cry
after the trenches as fulfilments of the need of convection cells and subduction of
continental and oceanic material. Are trenches barren because they appeared lately or
are they barren because they have just digested hearty meals of sial?
Notes (Chapter Twenty-three: Channels and Canyons)
1. Anon., 229 Nature (5 Feb. 1971), 371.
2. Bellamy, M. M. M., 261-2.
2a. 68 J. Geol. (1960), 54-74.
3. 11 American Naturalist (August 1877), 449-70.
3A. A. C. Johnston, "A Major Earthquake Zone on the Mississippi," 246 Sci. Amer. (Apr.
1982), 60-83.
4. Op. cit., 48.
5. R. Dolan, A. Howard and D. Trimble, "Structural Control of the Rapids and Pools of
the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon," 202 Science (10 Nov. 1978), 629-31.
6. Kelly and Dachille, op. cit., 113.
7. Ibid., 81.
8. 83 Science (May 22, 1936), 484.
9. 83 Science (1936), 332-4.
10. Reprinted in W. Corliss, compiler, Strange Planet (Glen Arm, Md: Sourcebook Project)
vol. El, Doc. ETS-002).
11. Op. cit., 490, 467-9.
12. Ibid., 483-4.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CONTINENTAL TROPISM AND RAFTING
A Texas association proclaims the slogan "Stop Continental Drift," in its attempts to
foil the trend to believe that the Earth's crust has been, and is, in motion. The crust
is thin below the ocean bottoms and thick beneath the continents. It is broken up into
a dozen major plates whose boundaries are defined by faulting, heat, and turbulence.
The plates show signs of having moved great distances over time. Most scientists have
been converted to this mobile perspective from a static one during the past generation.
"We now have a new, mobilist orthodoxy, as definite and uncompromising as the staticism
it replaced." So writes Stephen Jay Gould in Natural History Magazine [1] .
Now and then, goes the theory of continental drift -that is, every couple hundreds of
million years, the plates renew themselves. The continents do not. They may be split
asunder, or bash their fenders, but they move on and on, majestically riding upon the
same material, their own mantle magma.
They carry a two-billion-year record of life, while the ocean bottoms have deposited
their sediments periodically beneath the sea shores of continents, or beneath other
plates which they may be jostling, so that now they carry no more than the last 160
million years of sediments. The plates are pushed around, it is said, by convection
currents. These are hot rock moving up to the cooler surface areas and pushing them
aside until these bump into other plates which are being also pushed; then they are
forced to descend (or force the other plates to descend); they melt once more and
become deep mantle material.
Much of this theory is incredible, we shall argue. We accept gladly the facts that the
continents were once together and then moved long distances and still exhibit minute
motion. We accept also the facts showing the ocean bottoms to be geologically very
young. Several other facts are grist for our mill, and some minor theories are also
credible; we have mentioned several of these and will mention others. But we shall
concentrate upon the quantavolutionary theory that an exoterrestrial catastrophe
brought about the movements of the Earth's crust recently, and we begin with the most
obvious fact in topography, namely that the continents of the Earth are concentrated
opposite the oceans. "This means that 82.6 percent of the total continental area is
antipodal to oceanic area." [2]
So saying, C. G. A. Harrison goes on to describe how, on a computer, he rotated
randomly coordinates representing the continents on a sphere, in order to discover how
often the actual antipodal percentage would appear. He simplified the continental areas
into circles and fed their numbered forms into a computer which then randomly placed
them to see how much land would be antipodal to oceanic area. He repeated the random
placement 2000 times. "The median percentage of continent opposite ocean to be expected
from a random distribution of circular continents is 68.0 percent of the continental
area. The observed figure of 82.6 percent is exceeded in... 9.6 percent of all cases.
Thus from this evidence alone it would appear that there is a probability of only 0.096
that the present distribution of continents is random over the surface of the earth."
He repeated the test with triangular instead of circular simplifications of the proper
areas and the results were similar. He concluded that "there is less than 1 chance in
14 that the present antipodal distribution of continents and oceans is the result of a
random process."
This is hardly surprising. If the Arctic-Atlantic ocean were closed up, if Australia
and Antarctica were fitted to their apparent points of departure from southern South
America and Africa -that is, if the continents were rendered into a single mass as they
appear to have aggregated before the present age of "drift" began, then all of the
existing continental land would be antipodal to oceans.
The implication is strong that before the drift began, the ocean areas were in fact
land-covered. The major differences between the Pacific Basin and the other oceanic
basins, we have noted, indicate that continental material was blasted out of the former
and pushed aside from the latter. The movements of the continents since this time can
be interpreted upon the premise of a sudden removal of over half the Earth's crust in
what is mostly now southern hemispheric ocean. The land of both the eastern and western
hemispheres has traveled towards this vacated area. So have Australia and Antarctica.
The so-called plate movements have not been random, nor can they be interpreted in any
other way. The continents all exhibit "lunagenic tropism" and nothing much else. They
have moved in the particular direction of the lunar-vacated, now south-central Pacific
Basin under the special stimuli of global fracturing, electrogravity slide, earth
expansion, hydrostatic equilibration, and isostasy. We define isostasy here (and
elsewhere) as the process by which all mutually affected elements in a system,
consequent upon any change in one of them from within or without, share the effects of
the change by changing themselves in closest accord with their peculiar sites and
natures. When a change is introduced to Earth from outside, all possible responses of
the Earth's motion and masses are drawn upon to incorporate its effects and to do so in
accord with their ranked most possible behaviors. Isostasy has to have a function; in
the great post-lunar diastrophism, isostasy functions as a tropism. It moves the
continents not randomly, nor to the poles or the equator, nor to gather surviving
animals for the Ark, but to repair and redress the lunagenic basin.
Propelled by three rifts in all and with a blasted out area east of it, the exception
to lunagenic tropism would appear to be the Indian subcontinent. India moved east
faster than Africa. But since the continental world was moving generally south as well
as east, why did India move north? Relatively Eurasia was moving south, and this is
part of the suggested answer. Also India and Australia were simultaneously and together
disconnected with a large land mass from Africa and Antarctica by the Atlantic-Indian
and Mid-Indian Ocean Ridges; India was simply at the northern end of a plate and could
not pivot southwards; northward lay the old Tethyan Sea region, which was now being
compressed and closed up. India was pushed by the largest expansive fracture complex
per land unit: this "lava grease" worked upon it like the currents of a powerful river
moving a raft downstream. When it arrived at the southern shores of Asia, it
encountered the Tethyan shear with weakened rocks and islands, all of which it overran,
thrusting and folding its edge over them until the Himalayas were produced, meanwhile
elevating, with an assist from the swelling mantle, the great Iranian plateau area.
(Two surviving races, one African and the other Indo-European or Tethyan, found
themselves on opposite sides of the great mountain mass. They encountered one another
thousands of years later, when the Proto-Indian civilization was battered by natural
disaster and the Indo-Europeans came down from the Plateau.)
The low continental Pangean mass to the south and east ultimately was partly flooded by
the waters of the sky, never to reappear again. Higher elevations constituted the South
Seas islands of today. This can be called Australasia. It is a land that has the
Tethyan shear and moon basin through its northern belt, the northern trans-Asiatic rift
to its west, and the South Pacific fork moving eastwards and finally up to mark its
southern and eastern limits.
The northern extremity of Pangea was depressed originally by the ice cap and is still
rising, although at a decelerated rate. The fjords mark sheared continental mass,
sharp, clear, new; the low-lying lands that compose the great flat watery islands and
the Arctic Sea (which is mostly continental) signal the former land mass under the ice
cap load. Some of it was additionally compressed by the new ice cap formed in the Age
of Jovea.
The Antarctic Sea was opened up at the south polar forking fracture, and the Antarctic
continent, denuded of ice, was pushed southwards to center upon the new south polar
axis. It, too, received a new ice cap beginning in the later "Age of Jupiter," but, to
follow Hapgood's "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings," possibly not until exploration, after
a period of civilization, when maps of the coastline were drawn to a considerable
degree of accuracy.
Some 450 specimens were recovered at Coalsack Bluff, Central Transantarctic Mountains.
Found there were terrestrial amphibians and reptiles of lower Triassic, typical of the
same age in Africa, India and China, especially genus Lystrosaurus. These creatures had
no "long way around." "The interchange of Lower Triassic tetrapods between Africa and
Antarctica could have been only by a direct ligation of the two land masses," probably
at Southeast Africa [3] . The Labyrinthadont, the first land vertebrate to be found in
Antarctica, has also been found in Africa, South America, and Australia [4] .
Marsupials are now placed in South America, Antarctica, South Asia, and Australia.
The infinitely complex faulting of the Earth's surface rocks, aside from the major
morphological transformations, is an expected phenomenon of the multiplex pressures of
rafting land masses. Additionally, the phenomenon expresses surficially what were more
profound upward pressures during the Uranian period. The "latest" evidence supports
Alfred Wegener's view that the continents moved only once, this in the Mesozoic, and
that there were two continental masses, one to the north and the other to the south
[5] . These "findings" are expected in our theory. The Tethyan equatorial waters of
Pangea probably are the source of the belief that there were two masses. As for the
Mesozoic, 65 to 225 million years ago by conventional reckoning, this period is being
rapidly invaded by similar species from both directions, but there may have been a
period of terrestrial isolation when the Tethyan waters intervened.
If the continents split asunder or were "born separate" and moved several times, there
should be abundant evidence of the events. There is little fresh data on this score.
The most prominent basin, the Pacific, hardly gives evidence of having been traversed
by continents, though they all drift toward it. Mostly, old theories of the lifting and
dropping of land during ancient orogeny have been dusted off and varnished to claim the
several periods of movement. Fossil ice ages have been claimed, too, as proof of former
dislocations of the continents, but these have been embarrassments to ice age theory
from the earliest discovery of pertinent evidence; the presence of pebble drift and
till, and of glaciers or high mountain freezing may be referred to dense material fall-
outs such as were discussed earlier.
"In the whole of geophysics," Defant once wrote, "there is no other law of such clarity
and certainty as that there exist two preferred levels in the Earth's crust." [6]
Continents are like ships in a frozen sea. "The continents, steep-sided massive blocks
surrounded by an enormous world-encircling sea, have deep roots which project 30,000 or
40,000 meters into the earth's mantle while the ocean crust is but a thin 5000-meter-
thick film frozen over the earth's massive mantle." Thus report Heezen and Hollister.
These continental blocks, I have maintained, are splittable only by a great external
force and a responsive expansive force, while the ocean basins are easily producible by
fissure volcanism.
The post-catastrophic process is followed by a rapid relocation of the continents and
reencrustment of the globe. The continents were not "just drifting"; they "were going
somewhere." A. L. du Toit was veering toward reality when he offered in his early
(1937) book, Our Wandering Continents, the idea of a "gravity slide," the creeping of
continental masses toward rimming geosynclinal depressions. He gave at the same time
perhaps too much encouragement to the idea of thermally driven currents in the mantle.
These were, as we may establish, an accessory after the fact.
When F. Tuzo Wilson, reviving du Toit, and the spirit of Plato's ancient words for that
matter, exclaimed, "the earth, instead of appearing as an inert statue, is a living,
mobile thing. The vision is exciting. It is a major scientific revolution in our own
time...," [8] he was thinking of continental drift but could better have been speaking
for a continental trot, or rafting, or lunagenic tropism of the continents.
Continental drift theory has invented convection currents to move the Earth's plates
with whatever continental land may be aboard on long journeys over the Earth. The
convection currents cycle vertically between the mantle below and the crust above; the
currents push the plates about the surface like the uplifted trays of waiters in a
crowded cafÚ, except that waiters as they weave and duck are known to descry paths
between the bar and the tables, while noone can even guess why the convection currents
go one way or another, if indeed they exist. For example, Harrison, after proving that
a non-random process had to account for the counter-oceanic distribution of land,
mentioned large-scale convection currents in the Earth's mantle as a possible cause.
This seems to put too much directiveness into convection currents, which are already
overloaded with the task of pushing huge tectonic plates around the globe. A better
hypothesis would have been "lunagenic tropism," the tendency of the continental land to
move toward the crater of the Moon and to fabricate new crust in compensation for the
excisions. Still, the convection current hypothesis is worth considering, if only
because at the moment it is the height of fashion in geophysics.
Tall mountains, a trillion geological faults, islands, bays, and most other
morphological irregularities denote that the continents were not peaceful bystanders to
the creation of the oceans. The Earth is slightly flatter at the poles than its present
rotational velocity would explain. The difference is 1%, which is a disappearing relic
of the period of rotational deceleration. The great depressions found in the Hudson
Bay, Greenland, and North Eurasian areas, which when refitted, fit the shape of the
destroyed ice cap, are also relics of the lunarian crisis.
The trans-Atlantic coastlines, above and below the Tethyan transverse fracture area,
fit together well. The probability that the jagged and curved pieces would fit as they
do by random development is negligible. South America and Africa, North America and
Europe, have many points of topographic, lithospheric, and biospheric identity. The
blocks of the continents on both sides of the Atlantic Basin are steep and sharply
outlined at the edges of the continental shelves.
The west coast of the Americas are also steep and sharply marked. The western mountains
seem to be a unit from Alaska to Chile; this in itself must have great significance:
the nearly 180 degree belt of rock had a single, simultaneous experience; how can
geology, geography, and geophysics ignore the simple meaning of so magnificent a
display? The Andes are so continuous with the Rocky Mountains, and the Mid-Atlantic so
parallel to the two Americas, and South America so congruent with the Albatross
Cordillera that they must all have been engaged by approximately the same vector forces
during lunagenesis.
The force of lunagenesis affected profoundly the now western terrain of the Americas
even though its epicenter was probably emplaced on the old equatorial Tethyan belt and
thousands of kilometers west of Central America. The western shelves of the Americas
are of the same age as the East and West Atlantic shelves. But they poorly match the
continental shelf morphology across the Pacific Basin. If the steep shelves of the
Americas represent one side of a fracture, where is the western fracture to match? The
Americas have moved westward; they have risen greatly; they have probably climbed over
and rest upon their once opposing land as upon the fracture itself in the north. Part
of the sunken continent of Mu, to pre-empt some wag, is below California and explains
why it is so.
The East Pacific Rise pushed up and out rapidly; its transverse fractures struck out
far to the West. It met little resistance. The crust had been vaporized, and the upper
mantle was boiling, just as it was along the great fractures. To the west of the
craters was the larger land mass of Asia, to the southwest the morphological
disorganization produced by the fracture system and to the southeast that affected by
the elliptoid Moon Basin.
The new coasts of the south and west of the Basin were attracted toward the basin;
fragments separated and rafted faster than the larger mass to become the offshore
islands of South and East Asia. Oceania was born, much of it in arched array, moving
inward upon the swatch cut by the main explosions.
The wide Tethyan tropical belt of Pangea was generally trampled upon by the shifting
continents, disappearing beneath the Middle East, South Asia, and the Moon Basin. The
"Mediterranean" seas were swept north and south and the area was partially fractured
and closed as Europe moved down. The PyrÚnÚes, Alps, and possibly the Balkans were then
created by shearing forces as Africa rotated southeast beyond Europe. [9] In the
withdrawal of Africa the Mediterranean Basin opened up and waters from northeast, east,
south and finally the Atlantic filled it. Later movements may have sunk the Tyrrenian
plateau. Later, too, the Triton Sea of the Sahara was emptied leaving a great desert.
The complex Mediterranean morphology reveals deep bowls and large shelves. Hs³ has
reported investigations of its western bottom, evidencing a dry, desert terrain at one
time. The deceleration of the old globe would have promptly dispatched its waters north
and south to higher latitudes, supposing it had before been tropical. Huge submarine
canyons depict a scene of inpouring waters afterwards. The mouth of the Nile River
discloses a narrow, deep gorge cut 700 feet below the sea level of today, which may at
that have been several thousands of feet deeper, according to Chumakov. Libyan off-
shore canyons are also impressive, as reported by F. Burr and associates.
Geophysics, not having yet considered our hypothesis, has not clearly expounded the
original torque of the continents. Earlier I wrote that the Mid-Atlantic ridge veers
sharply east at the Equator and explained it as the result of the Earth's sudden
deceleration of axial rotation. To this I may now add that five major occurrences
signify the same slowdown of rotational velocity. At the same time they explain the
location of several land masses.
The first is that the larger of the two branchings of the Mid-Atlantic fracture,
arriving at about 50 South Latitude, swings in the direction of the Earth's rotation,
east, that is. The fracture is pursuing its original route and continues while the
Earth as a whole is slowing. It is following the direction of greatest stress, too,
where the greatest need to fracture exists.
Second, this bifurcation of the fracture may have happened where the old South Pole may
have been; but, more likely, the fracture had not achieved its 'objective, ' the old
South Pole, before it was forced to split into two. This giant forking might, as M.
Cook has suggested, be the normally expected effect of the decelerating explosive
fracture of a globe; it might also be an effect of the resumption of mondial rotation,
within an hour or so following the halting that may have produced the aforesaid Mid-
Atlantic transverse movement of the fracture. The split to east and west now cut off
Antarctica, which because it was in a low latitude and neither east nor west, was
rendered safe from lateral movement and became a polar continent.
But, third, the fracture, continuing, divided again. This was logical, too, one fork
continuing east, but the original torque reversing on the sphere and heading back
north. The east fork severed Australia from Antarctica and the north fork cut between
Australia and Africa.
Fourth, Australia proceeded swiftly eastward propelled by the crustal slowdown and the
attractiveness of the lunagenic basin to the east. Fifth, India, cut off from Africa,
rotated clockwise, as expected, and headed, also as expected, north by east.
Since the world-girdling fracture system will be encountered sooner or later no matter
in what direction one goes, any area enclosed by fracture boundaries can be called a
plate. Ignoring most fractures or rifts that traverse the continents, one may conclude
that some ten (Gould) or twelve (Toks÷z) such areas or plates exist. Curiously, they
are of greatly different size; the Pacific Plate, for instance, covers most of the
Pacific Basin, while the Cocos Plate encompasses a smallish region between Central
America and the East Pacific Ridge. Inasmuch as a very slight annual movement of
several centimeters seems to be occurring at the edges of most plates, and the
boundaries of most plates include some portion of the volcanically and seismically
active oceanic ridges, it would appear that the whole of the Earth's surface is somehow
in motion, and therefore, a science of "plate tectonics" must be devised to account for
the "drift" of the combined, inseparable continental-oceanic lithosphere.
That the Earth may have expanded or be expanding in volume along its fracture lines is
a theory not to be dismissed, but geologists for the most part prefer to portray
crustal, lithospheric drift (carrying the continents) as a perpetual steady-rate
movement, which disgorges molten rocks from deep in the mantle, along one and another
plate boundary, while engorging rocks at other boundaries of the plate, thus
maintaining a constant global surface area. To account for this upwelling and
subduction is no small task; "an area equal to the entire surface of the earth would be
consumed by the mantle in about 160 million years" at the presently calculated rates of
movement up and down [10] . That would be about 510 million square kilometers, of
which 310 would be true ocean basin of about 8 kilometers in depth of rock. Granted a
uniform rate of exchange and the time allowed for it (which is roughly based upon the
age of the oldest portions of the oceanic rocks ), something like 1.55 cubic kilometers
of crustal rocks has to be subducted annually.
The preferred instrument for subduction is the once altogether mysterious but
impressive submarine canyons. These line up along the coasts of western South and
Central America, also along the western Pacific Basin arc from the Aleutians down to
New Zealand, and then too stretch westward off the southern boundaries of Indonesia.
Lesser lengths can be discovered in the Caribbean, and in the extreme South Atlantic
ocean. Altogether over 10,000 kilometers of submarine canyons are notable.
The time allowed for subduction is conveniently long, so that very little work is
required at any given time and place.
To the average kilometer of these canyons is assigned the task of ingesting .00015
kilometer or 1.5 cubic meters of the Earth's surface per year. This is a modest
undertaking, but also one can call for help from the old standby, orogeny. India is
still smashing into Asia, hence the Himalayan range is piling up debris from the plate
edges. South America is being pushed away from the welling-up Mid-Atlantic Ridge and
also away from the East Pacific Ridge; perhaps it too is rising from the east while the
oceanic crust of its west is being subducted into the long western trench.
The convection cell is a natural heat machine. Hot material deep in the Earth's mantle
rises to the cooler regions of the surface, breaks through as a plume or fissure and
pushes aside the colder rock; the colder rock is moved along to a subduction zone where
it is mechanically forced downwards into the deep mantle. There it assimilates to the
hot surrounding material, and may even return to an area where it will rise once again
to repeat the process. The scheme is almost entirely theoretical, although one may, by
watching a stew pot, see a similar occurrence, the heated mixture arising from the
bottom of the pot to displace the cooler surface mixture which then sinks to the
bottom, is heated, and then rises once more.
To observe any part of the convection process, even indirectly, is difficult, but bits
of data can be made to fit. Thus, the fact that submarine canyons are coincidental with
earthquake and volcanic and mountainous zones implies a turbulent function, such as
subduction would be. One cannot deny the evidence of upwelling magma along the great
oceanic ridges; there is an output, and there is a movement away from the output.
But is there a subduction? The submarine trenches appear to be cleared for action
tomorrow, but not the scene of yesterday's action. They have scanty sediments, whereas
they ought perhaps to be full of oceanic sediments, not to mention continental sial
that would happen to be subducted. In what was the first attempt at observing an actual
subduction of sea floor, Heezen and Rawson made four dives to the floor of the Middle-
America Trench in a U. S. Navy submersible, DVS Turtle, at around 1600 meters of depth.
They observed a set of escarpments moving steplike down to the bottom floor, then an
"apron", which shortly encountered the abrupt landward wall of the trench. The apron
was bisected parallel to the wall by a "line of contemporary deformation;" this "is
interpreted as the sea floor trace of subduction." [11]
But the scene is peaceful. "We observed no features which could be attributed to
turbidite erosion or deposition." Further, "at the present time no movement is
occurring at the base of the landward wall andà probably no significant deformation has
occurred there for decades or centuries... Perhaps the most surprising observation was
that most of the steep wall is covered by smooth undisturbed ooze." The trench here is
obviously long defunct or inadequate for the task assigned it. The stepdown escarpment
into the trench seems to be a normal faulting occurrence, like much of the African
rift, denoting dropped blocks, in connection with a pull-back motion of the landwards
wall of the trench. Still, even if this were an "average" point of a trench, the
activity of subduction might be too miniscule to observe.
Several years later, the Glomar Challenger was drilling into oceanic sediments north of
Barbados at an apparent plate boundary and discovered older Miocene sediments overlying
younger Pliocene deposits. [12] The phenomenon was explained by plate tectonic theory
as a product of an underthrusting (subducting) sediment-loaded oceanic plate. As the
plate went down its older sediments were sheared off and ended up overlying its younger
sediments. All of these formed now part of a mass that culminated in sub-aerial
volcanic mountains. The volcanism would be an effect of the descending slab, which
generates heat by friction, shear stresses, and rock faulting. Channels for explosive
heat escape would be provided in the course of structural adjustments between unlike
rock masses. Earthquakes occur until the masses become thermally indistinct, never
below 700 kilometers; there the rock can no longer behave in a brittle manner [13] .
The occurrence of earthquakes up to this point is taken to indicate the correctness of
subduction convection cells, and plate tectonic theory.
Here is Toks÷z' summary of the current theory of the subduction of the lithosphere.
The lithosphere, or outer shell, of the earth is made up of about a dozen rigid plates
that move with respect to one another. New lithosphere is created at mid-ocean ridges
by the upwelling and cooling of magma from the earth's interior. Since new lithosphere
is continuously being created and the earth is not expanding to any appreciable extent,
the question arises: What happens to the 'old' lithosphere?
The answer came in the late 1960's... The old lithosphere is subducted, or pushed down,
into the earth's mantle. As the formerly rigid plate descends it slowly heats up,
and... is absorbed into the general circulation of the earth's mantle." [14]
Interestingly, "in certain areas convection currents in the asthenosphere may drive the
plates, andà in other regions the plate motions may drive the convection currents."
Lest the reader hoot at the picture of a driver driving the car but sometimes the car
driving the driver, it should be interposed that this latter possibility is a broad
hint of what may be the truth of the matter, namely, that so far as the evidence goes,
the paving and expansion that went on in the past, and their faint stirrings today,
would have to, and do, generate currents, even cyclical currents, in the mantle. How
could they not do so?
Where plates collide, to resume the theory, a trench is forced open and one or the
other plate descends the trench into the mantle, thus letting the ridge, perhaps
thousands of kilometers away, continue to churn up lava and pass it along, so
efficiently indeed that folds or thrusts are hardly to be found in the vast expanses of
the abyss nor alongside the ridges. The trenches "accumulate large deposits of
sediment, primarily from the adjacent continent." (This contradicts another view,
Heezen and Hollister's, that the trenches are scarcely sedimented.) "As the sediments
get caught between the subducting oceanic crust and either the island arc or the
continental crust they are subjected to strong deformation, shearing, heating and
metamorphism... Some of the sediments may even be dragged to great depths, where they
may eventually melt and contribute to volcanism. In this case they would return rapidly
to the surface, and the total mass of low-density crustal rocks would be preserved."
Skillful drawings enhance the text by showing some sediments being scraped off on the
opposite side and other sediment being miscilated and conveyed below. Without wishing
to burden this one article with problems universal to its genre, one cannot but allude
to additional contradictions. There should be enormous masses of plate-served detritus
on the inward side of a receiving trench. Indeed, the whole of a previous world of
sediments should be dumped in such heaps or carried down into a mantle reluctant,
because of its higher density, to receive it.
There are, of course, no such masses. The sediments by the trenches, if they exist at
all, are mostly igneous masses, which foregather there in as ordered or disordered a
condition as anywhere else. As for the metamorphosed rocks, they show no preference for
trenches and can hardly amount to the quantity under consideration, unless this is to
be the origin of new granites. The balance of new and old sediments, it appears, is
impossibly askew.
The trenches, according to the prevailing notion, have good appetites, but are slow
feeders and neat eaters. Perhaps that is why they have never been observed while at
dinner. Toks÷z refers to low and high subduction rates and draws several diagrams of
the subduction process, but offers no proof of subduction other than gravity anomalies
(whose findings, he grants, are belabored by uncertainties) and seismology. "The most
compelling evidence of the subduction of the lithosphere comes from seismology."
Seismic wave behavior in the vicinity of the trenches, where earthquakes are common,
has exhibited differences, as might be expected, showing different depths of activity
and these have not been interpreted satisfactorily. Now these seismological differences
have been assumed to be measures of different depths of the mantle's alimentary canal,
so to speak, where different stages of rock digestion are occurring. The argument is
almost totally deductive.
If the oceanic plates and basins have been completely renewed every 160 my, then they
will have been renewed about 35 times since the Earth originated. Each time these
plates would have scraped off some of their sediments upon each other. By now the
continents of the Earth should be presented in heaps of sialic rock randomly
distributed as islands around the globe. Such sediments scarcely exist. Or they are
unrecognizable as such. The sediments of the oceans are less than a kilometer deep on
the average. Call them a kilometer; double this to match the disproportion of sea to
land; and multiply this volume 35 times. The result, a column over all the land of 70
kilometers, far exceeds the present continental sediments (if the only source of these
is oceanic sediments) nor does it appear in any large sedimentary masses distinct from
the indigenous continental mass.
The present mass of sedimentary rocks is about 32,000 X 10 20 grams. It is about 5% of
the crust. From the deepest trench to the highest mountain of the Earth is about 20 km.
Some 44% of this is pre-cambrian, 56% of it of later origins. Most has been recycled
several times, but not all, else we should not possess fossils indicative of all ages.
"The whole sedimentary mass has been turned over five times." [15] The oceans are
thought to have been in a steady state throughout all of this time, picking up and
delivering sediments.
Most of this conjecture becomes nonsensical if a single fact is considered: consistent
stratification of species around the world, such that exceptions are considered
anomalies. If oceanic plates repeatedly dumped their "young" sedimentary contents at
the base of the onshore sedimentary heaps, the phanerozoic order would be reversed, as
in the Glomar discovery just reported; the older the sediment, the higher up it would
be stratified. Such not being the normal case, one is compelled to reject the theory of
subduction and perpetual plate renewal. Marine sediments are the majority of all
organic facies; they are loaded in temporal order according to the principle of
superposition. They did not arrive on the land by plate tectonics; they arrived by
tides, floods, land rising, and other quantavolutionary mechanisms. For subduction,
forceful convection cells are required. "All the fountains of the deep must be broken
up," in a parody of the unique event of the Bible, not once but continuously and
forever, over billions of years, enough to move the furniture of all the Earth's land
around the world every 160 million years, inch by inch. The path of upward and downward
movements cannot be smooth; at the least it is different beneath the thin sima than
beneath the thick sial; furthermore, some interception must occur at the two or more
levels of the mantle where striking seismic discontinuities are observed; indeed, it
should perplex the conductionists that these seismic barriers even exist, for would not
eons of convection have effectively erased what, after all, can only be levels of
chemical mineral differentiation? Seismic studies show that the Earth below the surface
is stratified; what else could seismic discontinuities mean?
The thickness of the Earth's crust, as the physicist P. Jordan once said, is a breath
of air blown upon a desk globe. The breath should be unevenly blown, for the
continental portion is 40 km and the oceanic crust is only 5 kilometers thick. This is
using the Mohorovicic Discontinuity as the boundary between crust and mantle. At this
"Moho" boundary the velocity of a seismic signal increases sharply, indicating a
density increase from 3 to 3.3, the mean for the crust being 2.8 g/ cm 3 and that for
the incomparably more massive mantle 4.5. The increase in velocity (and density) occurs
within a band of rocks of under five kilometers thickness. Below the oceanic crust, the
Discontinuity zone is less than half a kilometer thick. The Discontinuity seems to be
caused by "a difference in chemical composition between crustal rocks and the
underlying mantle rocks. " [16]
The theory of plate tectonics visualizes the conveyor belts of ocean crust moving along
between ridges and trenches just above the Moho Discontinuity. In cases where the plate
is oceanic and encounters a plate carrying continental material, whether supposedly
built up of primordial granites and sediments or of trench debris folds, the conveyor
belt (convection current) dips down, and, of course, the Moho dips too and resumes at
about 40 km below the continental rock. In all of this process, the Moho is conceived
to be independent of the tectonic process presumed to be taking place.
This is incredible. It is much more likely that the Moho Discontinuity marks the level
at which the continents marched around the world after the Moon erupted, and, below the
ocean, the level above which new crust had to be created from the uppermost magma of
the mantle with atmospheric chemical participation. A new, subaerial, low-pressure,
hydrated factory produced the oceanic crustal basalts out of upper mantle material. The
continents and ocean bottoms are probably still in motion along the Moho Discontinuity,
as they were, but much more rapidly, when the Discontinuity was born as the boundary
between crust and mantle.
There are, besides the Moho, two more major discontinuities in the mantle, one at 400
km depth and the other at 650 kin. In both cases density and chemical composition are
believed to change markedly. Inasmuch as both of these discontinuities, as well as the
Moho, pervade the globe as "shells" they must be continuously penetrated by rising,
falling, and lateral convection currents. It is perplexing to consider how the currents
could be maintained throughout Earth history without erasing the discontinuities. Since
there is evidence of the Discontinuities but not of the convection, the existence of
the convection cells must be doubted. Moreover, as with the Moho, these other
discontinuities may represent secondary and tertiary torsion levels, as the Earth, more
than once, suffered deceleration of its rotation.
The fact of the general uniformity of depth of the Moho Discontinuity around the world
is also an indication that it was formed at the same time as part of an epochal event
whose negatively exponential tailing-off was temporally brief. The fact that the
continental blocks move at a distinctively different, lower depth in the mantle has
less to do with their "greater weight" (relative to the oceanic crust) than with the
historical fact of their quite different genesis.
Quantavolutionary theory explains the occurrence of earthquakes along the global fault
system, even where no trenches are subducting. And the convection cell theory is
susceptible to challenge simply on the basis of insufficient energy, while the theory
of plate tectonics as a whole does not pass a number of tests.
Regarding the first point, earthquakes have long been associated causally with faults,
even before the oceanic ridge system was known. The submarine trench can be construed
as a magnificent type of fault, almost always near an earthquake zone. But a great many
earthquakes occur away from trenches. If they occur because material is being stuffed
into the bowels of the Earth by a plate, there is yet no evidence of it, and one may as
well maintain that the seismism denotes the relative motion of rocks, as was said
earlier. The movement is often vertical so that, relatively speaking, some rock is
often moving down, but that is not the point. It would be more in order to demonstrate
that all the earthquakes occurring landwards of the trenches (and this is mostly the
case except in the Java-Sumatra region) bring about increased elevations as the debris
is refused by the depths beyond the trenches.
Moreover, if the continents shifted and the ocean bottoms were repaved by an
exoterrestrial and hence surficial force, then the disturbance of the Earth's crust and
mantle would form a large area of surface directed as a narrowing cone into the mantle
until it reached a point below which seismism could not be energized. Such may well be
the case. The points would lie along the global fracture system and also where
meteoroidal impacts have occurred.
The fact that an overwhelming majority of earthquakes is registered on the sial of the
continents rather than upon the sima of the oceanic crust has surely to do with the
greater depth of the continents as contrasted with the oceanic crust, but it also has
to do with the greater age and rigidity, hence recent disturbance, of the plutonic land
rocks. One may surmise that the sima is "better adapted" to movement because it was
"born of movement." The very planar, uniform, featureless character of the sea bottom
evidences that it has not participated in terrestrial diastrophism, but has, like the
water itself, filled in with molten and flexible rock wherever the land has been
removed.
The heat required within the deep mantle to expel excessively heated rock up to many
thousands of linear kilometers on the surface is, of course, great; and, at the other
end of the conveyor belt, or surface convection current, the rock must be dense and
cold enough to sink, with a mechanical force assisting. Elaborate calculations have
been made to demonstrate the possibility. None are convincing. It must be in many
thousands of degrees celsius, enough to burn the bottom of the pot, if the favored
analogy of the boiling cauldron is pursued.
However, although the presence of radioactive minerals deep within the Earth is only a
postulate, rising radioactivity-produced heat is given as the source, rather than some
internal fire. Metaphysical figures are not difficult to come by, my critics will have
been observing; so I can assert the same. There must be an irregular distribution of
giant kettles and small kettles (because the surface areas of the convection process
are vastly different) and hence some zones of radioactivity must be chemically
different than others.
It is well known that volcanism gives off great heat into the atmosphere and beyond.
Why, with this naturally effective heat venting apparatus, would the cumbersome
convection cell be required? There is no limit but the universe itself to the heat
ejected sub-aerially; the bubbling stew is without a lid. Why should there be vast
surfaces (between plate boundaries) bereft of volcanic outlets while the enormous mass
of molten rock is pushed so delicately sideways as to not break the surface? Repeatedly
the convectionists and subductionists use the quantavolutionary words "collision" and
"plunge" to denote operations occurring at a scarcely observable rate out of
"collisions" between bodies which are already impacted and therefore scarcely able to
collide, though capable of jostling perhaps (wherefrom we might receive the submarine
trenches). Still we read often that plates "collide"; one plate "plunges" beneath
another.
They are in a desperate theoretical fix: their instruments tell them that they have
only about 160 million years to sweep around the globe; the energy for this must occur
by a relative heat emanating from radioactive decay. Some scholars must long for a
young Earth whose interior might still have its "primordial heat" to give away. Their
belief in stable astronomical motions of the globe and its solar system neighbors
precludes their introducing thermal and inertial forces to abet the heat emerging from
radioactivity and pressure.
To speak of flowing rocks as the convectionists do, and to a degree all must, is to
employ the word viscosity. "Viscosity is a function of the chemical composition,
temperature... and pressure..." [17] A high viscosity marks a slow flow: measured in
poises, water flows with a 0.01 poise, honey creeps with 100 poises; and the rocks of
the Fennoscandian uplift (where presumably once an ice cap and a polar region had
produced Earth-flattening) exhibit by one estimate 2.4 X 10 22 poises [18] .
Summarizing and developing several studies, Cook publishes figures of about 10 22
poises as the average viscosity of the crust and upper mantle, a viscosity of 10 13 to
l0 14 poises at the bases of continents and about l0 11 poises at a depth of 150
kilometers. A minimum viscosity or maximum fluidity would occur at about the 150 km
depth, both geochemical and seismic observations being seemingly in agreement on the
matter. But if there are no reasonably short gradients of viscosity thereafter, it is
hard to visualize a large-scale convection dynamic in operation, much less a host of a
dozen giant cells or a pattern of a thousand smaller convection cells working within
the mantle. Not unexpectedly, then, Cook and Eardley calculated that to move the
continents even in 200 million years would require forces "a billion to a trillion
times greater than those that should be generated by the postulated mantle convection
currents." [19]
Some scientific creationists, as exemplified by G. R. Morton, cannot accept continental
drift, much less rafting as here described, because by their calculations, "neither
convection cells nor any other [lateral] forces could have separated the continents
within a few thousand years, if the viscous forces were involved in that movement."
[20] The heat generated would have to be in the millions of degrees and would vaporize
the Earth. Morton concludes that "either God separated the continents outside of
natural agencies or that the Earth expanded in such a way that the viscous forces were
not involved." Creationists generally avoid naturalistic exoterrestrialism, Patten
being exceptional. So Morton does not consider the possibilities that led the present
author to the model of Solaria Binaria: heat can be exploded and fresh atmosphere
brought in from a fuller plenum rather than the thin present air of Earth. However,
Morton remarkably adds a final sentence, irrelevant to all that he has said before:
"The expansion of the earth caused by an expansion of each individual atom due to a
change in the permittivity of free space (the electric force) is a possibility which
could avoid the viscosity problem." Thus he finally grasps for "the electric force,"
which, we have seen, is a heat-saver.
We are led back to the only mechanism that can produce low viscosity and provide it
where needed, an exoterrestrial and hence surficial force suddenly applied to set the
crustal blocks containing the continents -that is, the remaining blocks -into lateral
motion. First, an explosion of surface must occur, with heavy electrical attraction and
expansion. Then what Cook writes (and he uses the northern ice cap as a self-mover,
without exoterrestrial assistance) is Ó propos: "Crustal distortions under a force
sufficient to cause continental drift should then have amounted to from hundreds to
thousands of times more than witnessed in the recent uplifts. In a catastrophic drift
process viscosity breakdown along the shear surfaces would permit relatively easy flow
compared with that of a threshold drift process." [21] Once in motion away from the
rifts, the blocks (or plates) will have provided their own "grease" for a movement
enduring several thousand years and exponentially declining to today's minute rates of
drift. Overall, the pattern of movement was lunatropic, directed at resurfacing the
Earth.
That nevertheless some collisions would ensue was to be expected, for the fractures
around the globe necessarily expanded to move crustal fragments towards one another as
well as toward the lunar basin. It is not surprising that modern studies detect
contrary motions, as, for example, South America is being pushed westwards from the
Atlantic Ridge and eastwards from the East Pacific Rise at the same time. These are not
contradictory motions, so far as the theory of lunagenic tropism is concerned.
Most geologists and geophysicists today are satisfied that the heat generated and in
part used to move the dozen plates of the world around is not so great as to make life
impossible today or for a billion and more years past. A minority, as here, is not so
sure. The issue is complex, technical, and abstract to the edge of pure speculation.
This, however, is certain: an exoterrestrial and sub-aerial force can require less
continuous heat and dissipate it more quickly; it operates with heat as more of a waste
product than the key to the movement of the crust. The greatest portion of the heat
given off to set the continents in motion would be explosive and would disappear into
cold space with the exploded crust.
The resistance to the movement of the remaining crust would be much less than if the
crust of the Earth had remained intact throughout Earth history. The continental blocks
would require much less energy to move into the large areas heretofore occupied by
continental material but now unoccupied save by an erupting and boiling mantle
material. Only several soft kilometers of depth would need to be ploughed through by
the continental blocks heading toward the lunagenic basin.
Further the quantavolutionary theory, as proposed here, would rely upon earth
expansion, largely owing to electrical discharge, as a precipitator and facilitator of
the crustal movement. Except most rarely, as with Carey, the writers on continental
drift ignore an obvious probability and even necessity, that when continents drift
around the globe and the whole Earth's surface moves -no matter how slowly -the Earth's
surface cannot remain a constant quantity, as if some secret ordinance has determined
that the globe must have retained its precise figure of today through hundreds of
millions of years, no more, no less, no matter what heats burn, what pressures invest
the rock masses, what atmosphere bears upon it, what collides, what escapes. Lately,
orogeny has come to be added to the marvels created by plate tectonics; the Alps and
Himalayas are thus explained; so too the mountains and islands that stand landwards of
some submarine trenches. The aforesaid secret ordinance must decree that extra plate is
created for every mountain rise, or else admit some expansion of the crust. But if some
expansion, why not much expansion? The material that is rising from the hot mantle must
bring with it an expansive pressure; it is less dense; but when it cools upon erupting
at the ridges does it become more dense? Not if it is like the famous stew pot or
porridge in the analogy of convection cells. What remarkable chemical properties the
magma must have: having had its backside scraped of sediment by the razor-bladed
trench, it returns to the deep mantle millions of years later and hundreds of
kilometers away and resumes its former thermo-chemical state.
Scientific advance of an important kind occurs when an acceptable interplay of theory
and fact occurs. On the issue of the movement of continents, tropism towards the
lunagenic basin was suggested as long as a century ago, by Osmond Fisher. But little
was known of the ocean basins and the time scheduled for the event was in the dim
beginnings of the Earth. W. H. Pickering of the Harvard College Observatory argued the
case in 1907, [22] and it was well publicized. Meanwhile H. Baker was evolving his
theory. "The separation of the continents by fission," wrote Pickering again in 1923,
has for 18 years "been attributed to the great convulsion that occurred at the time of
the birth of the Moon, from the side of the Earth. This explanation of the origin of
our Moon is at the present time almost universally accepted by astronomers. We see the
same phenomenon occurring in many close double stars." [23] He placed the "center of
origin" of lunagenesis off the southern tip of New Zealand.
However, Pickering held to the view that, although terrestrial lunagenesis and the
Atlantic fission must have occurred late enough so that the continents possessed their
modern forms, the time had to be early: "that a catastrophe involving the sudden
removal of three-quarters of the Earth's surface could occur without destroying all
life, both vegetal and animal, appears impossible." Therefore he disputed Alfred's
Wegener's contention that the Atlantic Basin opened up at the end of the Cretaceous
period or in the early Tertiary.
Thus an impasse occurred until the present day. Wegener's continental drift theory is
accepted but not its cause. Instead geologists cling to their terrestrial ideology and
posit convection currents. The effects of ripping some 50 kilometers in depth off of
most of the Earth's surface were conjectured to be utterly destructive of the
biosphere. Today much new geological and geophysical evidence can be adduced from an
examination of the Earth and Moon, tending to support the terrestrial origin of the
Moon and the connection between lunagenesis and continental break-up and movement.
Moreover, the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary is increasingly understood to mark the
extermination of most species. Whether this boundary happened at sixty million years or
twelve thousand years ago (which I construe to be the case) does not much matter on the
issue of biosphere survival. I have pointed out elsewhere that biosphere annihilation
was not necessarily predicated during lunagenesis. The immense typhoon that conveyed
the crust of the Earth into space would have carried away with it most of the heat
generated in the transaction, while at the antipodes of the event, downwards draughts
of the then much more voluminous atmosphere would have cooled and regassed the land.
This is only one instance of the physical arguments that can be brought into play to
establish that the biosphere would survive. To be borne in mind, also, is the prolific
regenerative capacity of all species, no matter what their method of reproduction. The
proper question to ask regarding biosphere survival is: what chance did one or more
reproductive units of each of a million species have of surviving the conditions of
lunagenesis?
To conclude, the tectonic plates are with declining force moving to restore the global
holospheric symmetry lost in lunagenesis. They are constrained and directed by the
global cleavage system. The subduction theory is demonstrably incorrect. The convection
theory, which aside from its weak force and its dependence on subduction theory,
depends upon a place to go, is impossible. Quantavolution theory, on the other hand,
copes well with continental drift theory, assimilates it, simplifies it, and gives it a
strong foundation in cosmogony.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-four: Continental Tropism and Rafting)
1. "The Continental Drift Affair," 17.
2. "Antipodal Location of Continents and Oceans," 153 Science (Sept. 9, 1966), 1246-8.
3. D. H. Elliot. E. H. Colbert. W. J. Breed, J. A. Jensen, J. S. Powell, "Triassic
Tetrapods from Antarctica: Evidence for Continental Drift," 169 Science (13 Sep. 1970),
1197-1200.
4. "Continental Drift," V Ency. Britannica (1974), 112.
5. Ibid., 108.
6. Quoted by Jordan, op. cit., and see the chart there (and in Chaos and Creation) of
the frequency distribution of altitudes of land and sea bottoms.
7. Heezen and Hollister, op. cit., 521.
8. "Static or Mobile Earth: The Current Scientific Revolution," in Gondwanaland
Revisited..., 112 Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. (Phila, 1968), 309.
9. "Mother Earth...," op. cit., 12.
10. M. Nafi Toksoz, "The Subduction of the Lithosphere," Sci. Amer. 89.
11. Bruce C. Heezen and Michael Rawson, "Visual Observations of the Sea Floor
Subduction Line in the Middle-America Trench," 196 Science (22 Apr, 1977), 423.
12. Roger N. Anderson. "Surprises from the Glomar Challenger," 293 Nature (1981), 261-
2.
13. Toks÷z, op. cit., 97.
14. Ibid., 89.
15. Fred T. Mackenzie, "Development of the Oceans," 13 Ency. Britannica (1974), 480.
16. A. E. Ringwood, "Structure and Composition of Earth," 6 Ency. Britannica (1974),
51.
17. M. A. Cook, "Viscosity-Depth Profiles...," 68 J. Geophys. Res. (June 1963), 3515.
18. G. Robert Morton, "Creationism and Continental Drift," 18 Creation Res. Sci. Q.
(1981), 42.
19. "Analysis of Crustal Deformation by Mantle Convection Currents," 1962, unpubl., cf.
Cook, "Continental Drift: Is Old Mother Earth Just a Youngster?" Utah Alumnus (Sept.
1963), 10-12; also critiques and debate, Nov. 1963, Oct. 1964, Nov. 1964.
20. "Creationism and Continental Drift," 18 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (June 1981), 43.
21. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models, op. cit., 271.
22. Am. J. Geol. (1970), 23; cf. CXV Harper's Monthly (1907), 120; Scot. Geog. Mag.
(1907), 523.
23. 61 Geol Mag. (1924), 31.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part V: Rifts, Rafts and Basins
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SEDIMENTS
We have entertained the possibility that till might have originated from the tail of a
comet or cyclonically (tempestites). Using the typical approach of an intruder with an
unwelcome hypothesis, I introduced statements of anomaly and bafflement. Thus, where is
the till of the seas? Why is the correlation between till fields and glaciated areas not
strong? If tektites can be exoterrestrial, why not till -remember that the feather and
cannonball of Galileo fall at the same speed? And so on.
Dreimanis could be quoted: "Most of North America, particularly Canada, the entire
northern part of Europe and considerable portions of other continents have been
glaciated several times during the last two million years, and covered by various
thicknesses of till and other glacigenic deposits... It sounds like a paradox, but till
appears to have become more complicated with time, in spite of detailed and extensive
investigation... " [1] And Kujansuu showed that "the flow directions of the ice sheet
in Central Lapland," as indicated by five beds of till, followed five largely different
directions [2] . And G. W. White: "In almost any excavation in the glaciated
northwestern Allegheny Plateau, a till different from the surface till will be
encountered, and in an excavation of 15 feet or more, several till sheets of different
ages are to be expected... The tills vary in texture, composition, compactness,
permeability and in joint spacing... the till sheets may be separated by a sand layer or
a silt layer of varying thickness... unweathered till may lie upon weathered till, or a
paleosol, or another unweathered till." [3] As with till, so with all sediments: none is
perfectly simple, or, if so, can be proved to be. Sand occurs as 10% or less of deep
ocean sediments. Basalt does not give up sand; sand is continental. Is this fall-out,
turbidity currents of unobserved ferocity coming off the slopes, early winds over empty
beds? Shelton ends his book on geology much as I end this chapter, musing about
hypothetical studies, "and finally, before we can do any of these things, we must be
able to tell one rock from another -which is just about where we started." [4]
About 5% of all crustal rock is composed of sediments that remain in something
approaching their state after deposition. They veneer about three-quarters of the
continental surface to thicknesses ranging from the merely visible to a dozen kilometers
in height, with the average for the globe at over two kilometers. Sediments have been
classified by priority of deposition and anywhere from ten to hundreds of major and
minor strata have been allocated positions, sometimes only after prolonged controversy,
some only among certain believers. Besides containing chemical and mineral traces and
distinguishable fossil remains, an estimated 80% of sedimentary rock are shales composed
of mud or clay, 10% are of sandstone and 10% are of limestone.
The old problem of sediments missing from the geological column became more worrisome
with the discovery that the ocean bottoms do not carry their proportionate burden of
sediments, much less the extra quantity to fill the gap in the geological column. The
continental slopes are formed of shaken down, wasted down, and blown down debris from
the shelves of the continents; but they would constitute only a small part of the
supposed accumulation. The composition of the slope deposits is unknown. Perhaps half
was carried off the shelves in the continental movements and orogeny following
lunagenesis. A fifth may have descended from the sky preceding and accompanying the
event. A tenth might have been washed in during the Noachian deluge. The small balance
may be divided between river run-off into the oceans and cosmic and volcanic fall-out.
Ager reports that "... chaotic deposits and slump topography have now been found at the
foot of many present-day continental slopes." [5] The continental shelves and the
abysses carry clay. The polar regions and half the remainder of the basins carry ooze.
Sand and boulder are confined largely to occasional polar sediments. However, sand
composes 10% of the ocean bottoms, too much for long-term sedimentation to have
occurred. Carbonates, suggesting organic detritus, are common in the shelf and ooze
sediments. Little suggests the continental rock in the oceanic sediments; it is a
different world of unconsolidated material.
Perhaps the granite that forms the massive substructure of the continents down to about
ten miles is composed of melted sediments, making the original crust out to be a thin
basalt covering where the upper mantle has cooled. The chemical composition of granite
would deny this idea, however. Nor does the location of the granites or sediments
suggest that granitization has consumed sediments. Granite is found below, and
intrusively, among sediments, not apparently where it might have been transforming them
by conveying some special electrical or thermal force.
Old sediments do not appear to be far less common than new sediments, which they would
be if they had been formed and consumed in a special earlier time on Earth. Granites can
be formed by subjecting a mixture of albite, orthoclase and quartz minerals to high
pressure (30,000 lbs/ in 2 ) and melting temperatures, and then allowing cooling. Hence
it was surmised by O. F. Tuttle that the origin of granites was in hot magma of the
mantle [6] . This idea may be the best of the three considered by him (the others being
the metamorphosis of mostly sedimentary rock through hot chemical solutions, as above,
and metamorphosis of proto-granites from ion exchanges causing crystal changes even
while in a solid state); but he does not consider, nor do others, the possibilities of
an accumulation of granite from atmospheric (plenum) deposits in an earlier state of the
solar system, or of a massive electrical discharge between Earth and external bodies, or
of a melt of an earlier crust by an exoterrestrial encounter.
In this book, granite is presumed to be the creation of a period during which the Earth
gained dust, charge, water, and heat from the gaseous tube extending between the Sun and
its binary partner. We suppose that granite is an exoterrestrial electric welding of a
crustal covering for the Earth. It lay under such sediments as have formed out of
largely 'cool' fall-out and heavy erosion.
That granite and basalt, both with the hardness of steel, can be quickly reduced to
debris is attested by the well-defined Washington scablands; there closely-spaced rushes
of water cut many channels of many meters of depth through hundreds of kilometers of
basalt plains, before dumping some of their debris in hills, and more debris into the
Pacific Ocean basin, where perhaps it was overrun by the continent. It may be added that
most of the granite once possessed by Earth was ripped off and exists in a
reconsolidated state on the Moon.
With the granite went half of the sedimentary rock as well. Still, much sedimentary rock
is found in a largely disarranged condition on Earth, in some places being miles thick,
in other places scanty or even nil. And the geological ages of the Earth, largely
founded upon the layerings of sedimentary rock of the continents, have long been suspect
simply because of the disarrangement and, indeed, chaos of the sediments. Geologists
customarily still speak of erosion as the source of all sedimentary rock [7] ,
following a process of weathering of source material, transportation, deposition, and
lithification which compacts and cements the material into a coherent rock. But to
address such rocks with the fixed idea of gradual erosion is inappropriate.
Geologists, writes Ager, generally act on the belief that "the stratigraphical column in
any one place is a long record of sedimentation with occasional gaps... But I maintain
that a far more accurate picture of the stratigraphical record is of one long gap with
only very occasional sedimentation... The gaps predominate .... the lithologies are all
diachronous and the fossils migrate into the area from elsewhere and then migrate out
again." [8] Ager does not presume to measure gaps of time, perhaps because if nothing
happens, there can be no measure of it. Therefore the gap may be long or short. Here we
prefer the brief gap to the long. Indeed, often it can be argued that no gap exists.
In a remarkable survey, Woodmorappe has denoted the presence or absence of the ten
conventional geological periods on a sample of 967 equal square areas of 406 square
kilometers of the continental lands [9] . Ideally, every square on Earth should exhibit
some rocks of all ten periods. Natural history assumes that all areas have undergone
similar weathering experiences during any given long period of time; if, as is known,
rocks of all ten periods are not found, it is because field surveys have not been
competent or complete, or because the weathered debris of given age has been transported
as such or as rock later on to somewhere outside the 406 square kilometer area (a
journey of a maximum of a dozen kilometers), or because the rock did actually form but
was eroded and carried off, or because the rock once formed was later subjected to
metamorphosis. Some credence can be given to all these explanations, but, too, it is
noteworthy that the "presence" of period rocks in Woodmorappe's study often refers to a
minor outcropping within the area and not to full coverage of the area.
The departure of reality from the myth is impressive. In no more than one per cent of
this sample of the areas of the world are all ten periods of natural history
represented. Some of these widely scattered areas are doubtfully complete (in the
Himalayas, Bolivian Andes, Indonesia, South Central Asia, and Cuba). Rarely does one
find even three of the ten geological periods in their expected consecutive order.
Moreover, "42% of earth's land surface has 3 or less geologic periods present at all;
66% has 5 or less of the 10 present; and only 14% has 8 or more geologic periods
represented..."
Individual geologic periods' coverage of the earth's land surface range from a high of
just over 51% for Cretaceous ... to a low of only 33% for Triassic. Only 21% of the
Lower Paleozoic is represented in 3 or more of its periods; the complete Upper Paleozoic
is found in 17% of the areas; the Mesozoic is complete in 16% of the areas. A complete
Paleozoic record is found in 5.7% of the areas, and a complete Upper Paleozoic plus
Mesozoic in 4.0%. Some percentage of every geologic period rests directly upon
Precambrian 'basement', especially high percentages of Ordovician (23.2%) and Devonian
(18.6%) doing so.
The data confirm the belief of those who argue, with Ager, that there are more gaps than
record. Too, the chances are painfully high that one stands upon a seriously incomplete
geological column wherever one may be on Earth.
Although the statistics will not suffice to show causation, they support the line of
thought here: the Earth's surface has been reconstituted; the reconstitution has
camouflaged the earlier surface and the earlier surface has disguised the
reconstruction. Many of the "gaps" in the record are illusions. Fossils are probably as
often the perpetrators of unconformities as the indicators of them; they must often have
gathered where "they didn't belong" in the course of catastrophes.
The strata of all periods prefer to rest directly upon their prior strata, showing a
tendency towards a time-consistency in superpositioning, as conventionally believed;
that is, each era tends to be more on its preceding era than on any other era. There is
one important exception: all have a greater chance of resting on pre-cambrian than on
the last post-cambrian eras. Except for the two periods just prior to it, a period has a
better chance of resting directly on pre-cambrian than on any other stratum; the
correlation except for two directly preceding periods must be nil. This indicates a pre-
cambrian basement preference of all strata. It also suggests a simultaneity for deposits
that have previously been assigned as successions [10] .
So what Price once called the "onion skin theory" of sedimentation is untenable, if it
is indeed still retained by many. The essential principle of sedimentation should
probably be called "quantavolution." Actually the idea has many antecedents and
precedents: this we now well understand. Specifically applied to sedimentation, it means
that the rocks of the phanerozoic era convey by their composition, strata, geography,
quantities, and geological columns a patterning that suggests intensive, large-scale
sudden and brief events, that is, a lately tortured Earth.
Derek Ager takes the position of a macrochronic quantavolutionist. "Changes, cyclic or
otherwise, within the solar system or within our galaxy, would seem to be the easy and
incontrovertible solution for everything that I have found remarkable in the
stratigraphical record." [11] The secondary mechanism, which he employs repeatedly but
without criticism of its fundamental origins, is plate tectonics. "The theory of plate
tectonics now provides us with a modus operandi." [12]
He sees a distinction between the exoterrestrial cause and the drifting continents as
cause; thus, "we come to one of the great anomalies of the stratigraphical record, with
the widespread extinctions of the Frasnian/ Fammenian junction" of the Devonian. There
is no evident explanation to be found in drifting continents or colliding plates. It
seems that here, at least, we must appeal to an exoterrestrial cause. He has several
additional preferred temporal locations for exoterrestrial interventions in geology.
He can use plate tectonics to discover and discuss numerous "periodic" and "episodic"
catastrophes around the world. This enables him to be macrochronic: "the history of any
one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom
and short periods of terror."
He offers a wide range of examples, from numerous eras, of the worldwide distribution of
various rock-types and fossils; this leads us to the supposition not only of a Pangea in
which sediments and life forms might readily become worldwide but also, and perhaps more
important, of species that never reached their potential limits, suggesting forceful
interruptions of their spreading. Further, it implies worldwide equal conditions for
even very special kinds of sedimentation and rocks to form.
He illustrates the bizarre differences in depth of the deposits of the same age in
separate regions both near and distant, pointing out, for example, the one foot of
Jurassic sediment in Sicily in contrast to the 15,000 feet of one Jurassic zone's
sediment in Oregon [13] . Since they do not form on mountains, sediments, which can
fill basins to a depth of up to 20,000 meters, would have been below sea level if the
oceans existed when they grew.
He alludes to numerous wide differences in rates of sedimentation: a 38-foot fossil tree
stands amidst the late Carboniferous Coal Measures of Lancaster; but for the flow of
sediments from rivers into the seas he quotes Holmes' measure of only one centimeter per
millennium. He estimates the Grand Canyon at under 10 million years; the gorge, that is,
provides a case of rapid erosion. "The periodic catastrophic event may have more effect
than vast periods of gradual evolution:" this he calls "the phenomenon of quantum
sedimentation." [14]
As there are more gaps than record, it is also true that there are more rapid deposits
than slow ones, and the two facts may be connected in quantavolution. Rapid rates are
easy to discover; Vita-Finzi cites a mid-Atlantic rate of clay deposit that increased
suddenly from 0.22 to 0.82 grams/ centimeter 2 /year about 11,000 years ago
(conventional dating), along with a drop in total carbonate deposition from 2.80 to 1.34
g/ cm 2 /y [15] . Nearly a 400% increase over an immense area; was it a type of Worzel
ash fall-out? Or another case of rapid sedimentation?
At Nampa, Idaho, a well-carved human image in soft stone was recovered at 300 feet depth
during well-boring [16] . The drill had penetrated 60 feet of alluvium, 15-20 feet of
lava, and 200 feet of quicksand beds and clay, coming upon the sculpture in coarse sand,
just below which was vegetable soil, followed by sandstone. One recognizes here a
probable catastrophic sequence; the statue's presence, if admitted, wreaks havoc upon
anthropology or geology or both.
Doeko Goosen has developed a wealth of related material, yet unpublished [17] :
Two of my students collected undisturbed samples of a transition zone between a soil of
less than 1 m thick and the underlying shale. My hunch was that the soil had not
developed from the shale, and minerological analysis proved me right. Within cracks of
the shale multi-layer cutans were found. Traditionally such is explained by the one-
layer per season theory, but when I looked through the microscope I saw oddities not
compatible with that theory. [An expert on micromorphology confirmed his conclusions.]
The phenomenon must have been caused by very strong tectonic vibrations, causing
cracking of the slate and a sudden influx of clay and lime. At the same time fragments
of the slate must have been projected upwards violently, passing through the soil, and
now found on the surface.
Such tectonic miscibilation must be worldwide and visible under examination according to
the quantavolution hypothesis in ground not believed to have experienced tectonism
historically. Furthermore, a probable catastrophic cause may be assignable to soil
processes that are considered ordinary and gradual. Goosen writes:
The formation of a laminated deposit via the season after season theory occurs only in
highly exceptional circumstances. Wherever flooding occurs, there is also biological
activity. The Rhine in the Netherlands each year floods pastures within the zone between
the dikes, and leaves a thin deposit of clay. In the thus accumulated soil there is
absolutely no lamination. The growing grass plus organisms like worms lead to
homogenization. Indeed, it will be difficult to find on earth an environment where the
season after season theory could be demonstrated. And then, upon seeing a laminated
sediment, the inevitable conclusion must be that it is a catastrophic sediment,
including the famous Scandinavian varves.
"Sedimentation goes on all the time, for ever moving from place to place, for ever
cannibalizing itself." [18] It accumulates also from erosion of igneous and metamorphic
rock. All sedimentary bodies, other than deep sea oozes and volcanic ash deposits, are
likely to be diachronous. They stretch and spread out from a node over a small or large
region, so that the elapsed time from the center outwards may be considerable. Two
contrasting illusions, we note, can be created if the same sediment is thinly spread
over a large area, first that the sediment is all of the same time, whereas it is not,
second that the time itself must be long because of ambiant indicators applying to some
central segment. That is, dating the indicator, one applies it to the whole, which
brings about an illusory dating of adjacent rocks, too.
Rejecting the "layer cake" and "gentle rain from heaven" images as explanations of
sedimentations, Ager introduces a rolled carpet that is gradually unrolled with time. We
can extend the analogy. A producer of carpets lays down his roll and rolls it out before
a salesman; the salesman rolls it up and carries it away to sell to buyers. Sometimes
the producer has no carpets; at other times he brings only part of his collection;
sometimes he brings in many rolls. The salesman sometimes rejects carpets and they are
not sold; sometimes he buys one, or several, or all. A pile of rugs accumulates in the
producer's showroom. Piles grow elsewhere. The salesman may even return his defective
carpets. He may decide to deal with several producers, even as the producers may deal
with different salesmen. Some buyers save carpets as a form of money; others wear them
out quickly. In critical times for the economy, heaps of unsold carpets are laid out and
accumulate, or are desperately sold in heaps; in inflationary periods, carpets become
quickly and widely distributed. These last time periods would quantavolutionize the rug
business.
When he is not imagining rugs, Ager's picture of the stratigraphical record is "of one
long gap with only occasional sedimentation." [19] But his "occasional" sometimes is
rare and sometimes frequent. I have noted this earlier in his view of tsunamis. Also now
avalanches: "the frequency of landslides is quite enough to account for a major part of
the wearing down of new mountain chains." Three cubic miles dropped in one slide at
Flims, Switzerland; 40 million cubic meters of mountains fell into Lituya Bay, Alaska,
in 1958. Still, a single earthquake of 10 or more on the Richter scale (and what was the
number of the rising of the Sierra Nevadas?) would shake a new mountain range into well-
worn shapes with garlands of debris all about below, and enough detritus to provide many
moraines; the rise of a mountain range, indeed, may be its own heaviest eroder, then and
there. The more rapid its rise, the more eroded it will be when it ceases to rise.
Ager argues convincingly the origin of deep sediments. The production of sediments is
independent of subsidence. "It is only when sedimentation and subsidence coincide that
the conditions will be right for the preservation of the vast thicknesses that
constitute the stratigraphic record." [20] Again, we encounter a falling back upon the
old notions of subsidence and uplifting. The phenomena are not mistaken; they are only
insufficiently explanatory.
Ager partly realizes this, and sets up a very busy plate welding shop operating
episodically over vast periods of time. A number of plates (and he seems to accept many
major fractures everywhere as plate boundaries) spend history in roughly their original
geographical locations, jostling heavily against one another periodically, episodically,
spasmodically. "The continental plates, rather than sailing about the earth until they
met in catastrophic collisions, separated and came together again repeatedly along the
same general lines. In other words, there were many catastrophes and certain parts of
each plate were particularly accident prone." [21] He would better have taken up the
simple concept of ocean basins being created before the oceans and filled by debris
washed down and fallen out of the catastrophic deluges.
We should not diminish one whit or alienate so expert and staunch an ally. We may, as
mildly as we can, offer a suggestion. Let us give one more turn to the screws on the
lately tortured Earth by computerizing its morphology. Suppose only one index to be
composed for a sample of, say, 5 100 sedimentary sequences chosen at random from the 510
million square kilometers of the Earth's surface (one in 100,000; this ratio and size of
sample is typical for discovering the political opinions and predicting the voting
behavior of the American population).
Call it an Index of Quantavolution "Q/ a" (actually this could be a composite of a set
of indices). It should contain and combine the number of distinguishable strata; an
index of conformity to the ideal sequence of geological ages; the number of
discontinuities that might be of diastrophic origin; the proportion of igneous and
metamorphic intrusions; the proportion of the square kilometers (as judged by a
hexagonal reading from drilling or otherwise) occupied by the central sequence of
strata; and a total of the estimate of the lowest possible elapsed time for the deposit
of each stratum to the column. Determine the usual statistical parameters of the sample,
the sums, means, modes, quartiles, standard deviations etc. of the 5100 sedimentary
sequences, and perform the obvious analysis and comparisons.
Some will say that the general information sought here is already known and taken into
account, others that it is largely unknown and impossible to achieve, and many (rightly)
that it is a caricature of a carefully drawn index. Many will comment that if the MOHOLE
could not be financed to drill into the underseas mantle at an especially flushed period
of American government finances, this project could never be funded. Many would want
"add-ons": for example, "why not get samples of all strata in every sequence while we
are at it?" We would eagerly agree. However, plausible conjectures and semi-data might
be developed for all aspects of the index by library research and questionnaires
addressed to many experts. Substitute sampling could be extensively employed.
Ultimately I would suppose refined summations to emerge such as the following: that the
number of strata increase with recency; that superposition is 90% or better, but less
than 50% of the recognized sequence is present; that 95% of the discontinuities might
conceivably indicate diastrophism; that possible intrusions occupy over 50% of 80% of
the sequences; that few sequences preserve their integrity over a square kilometer; that
80% of all sequences might conceivably have been laid down in their totality within 1000
(sic) years and that individual sequences would never exceed 10,000 years using
conceivable assumptions.
The report would be entitled, Reductio ad absurdum, Part II. Perhaps one of the more
entertaining aspects of such a study would be the objections that it is too literally
empirical, and that the "total picture" is needed to disprove it and set it aright; the
"total picture" is, however, what hitherto has given rise to the cosmogonies and science
fiction that have commonly caused distress among geologists.
It would be possible to elaborate the hypothetical findings of such a study and to
explain their heuristic and substantial utility, but not here. Thus, if the data is
rotated topographically, significant summaries of continental and regional data would be
generated. Moreover, as characterizes discussion of empirical data, no matter how crude,
the air would be cleansed of some of the purely terminological pockets and gusts that
cause turbulence and mental cloudiness. I see in such a project, also, a confrontation
of the facts and their consequences that even a most learned and iconoclastic scientist
does not consistently afford himself. He may come to realize that microchronism must be
employed as a hypothetical model if a catastrophist is ever to integrate his facts.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-five: Sediments)
1. "Tills: Their Origins and Properties," in Legget, ed., op. cit., 11.
2. "Glaciological Surveys for Ore-Prospecting Purposes in Northern Finland," in Legget,
ed., op. cit., 225.
3. "Thickness of Wisconsian Tills in Grand River and Killbuck Lobes...," in R. P.
Goldthwait, Till: A Symposium (Columbus, Ohio State Univ., 1977), 160.
4. Op. cit., 424.
5. Op. cit., 38.
6. O. F. Tuttle, "The Origin of Granite," 192 Sci Amer. (Apr. 1955), 81.
7. As for example, W. G. Ernst, Earth Materials (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall,
1969), 111.
8. Ager, 34.
9. "The Essential Nonexistence of the Evolutionary-Uniformitarian Geologic Column," 18
Creation Res. Soc. Q. (June 1981), 46-67.
10. Ibid., Table II.
11. Op. cit., 83.
12. Ibid., 100.
13. Ibid., 40.
14. Ibid., 41, 44, 50.
15. Op. cit., 73.
16. G. Frederick Wright, 11 Amer. Antiquarian (1889), 379-81.
17. From letter to author, 15 Oct. 1982, Enschede (The Netherlands).
18. Ager, 58, 52.
19. Ibid., 34.
20. Ibid., 20.
21. Ibid., 86.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part VI: Biospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
FOSSIL DEPOSITS
In coarse quartzose sandstones of stream channels of Antarctica's Transantarctic
Mountains, fossil bones of the definitive reptilian genus, Lystrosaurus, were found.
Deemed typical of Lower Triassic forms, it has been uncovered also in South Africa,
India and China. In the sandstone, mudstone and white quartz pebbles are intruded along
with the bone fragments. Logs and coal are at the same depth. Volcanic material is
above and below. Remains of between 40 and 50 specimens are among the more than 400
specimens of other species in the same deposit. Numerous fossil relations have been
shown between South America and Southern Africa, though not yet the Lystrosaurus. The
China parallel introduces properly the Pangean connection.
Pangean world distributions of many species of flora and fauna, both fossil and living,
can be traced. Living species that have no way of traversing present-day barriers are
discovered to exist on both sides of the barriers, as the tigers of Africa, India and
Siberia. Extinct species of one area are alive in another area, impassibly separated by
modern geography, as the elephants and camels of North America, probably miscegenable
with those of Africa. Specimens of the same extinct species are found in areas
separated by modern geography.
A collapsed time schedule for the creation of the ocean basins demands a reconstruction
of how aquatic species developed. Pangea was a world of small waters. Small and shallow
lakes and swamps are conducive to the generation of individual variations within
species and the prolongation of their careers. Whales and sharks travel great
distances, but do not need to do so; they can flourish in a Tethyan sea; so with every
other aquatic species. The great deeps are a last resort.
The eels from everywhere descend to breed from their rivers into the salt ocean and
there find the Sargasso Sea, the great belt of weed-bearing waters on both sides of the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They die there and their young swim for thousands of miles and
years of time to find the rivers of Europe and America. The American eels have 104 to
111 vertebrae, the European 114 or 115, and n'er the twain shall meet.
Igor Akimushkin conjectures that eels originated or dwelt in the intercontinental
fissure when it opened up an asserted 130 million years ago, not far from their fresh
waters. Then they expanded their mobility to follow the drifting continents [1] .
Fitting the case to the quantavolutionary theory, it would appear that the Sargasso Sea
is a part of the old Tethyan world-girdling shallow freshwater sea; that for breeding
the eels found the gulfweed more necessary than the saltwater noxious; that there has
been too little time to cast off the habit of traversing great distances, or of
adapting to seawater for the long adult life; and that the small differences between
American and European eels are an additional indication of a recent common ancestry.
The Sargasso Sea seems to be growing, which, since it must precede the eels, indicates
that it may not have been in existence long. In sum, eel migrations are as much a proof
of continental rafting as continental drift is proof of the reason why eels must be
astonishing long-distance travelers.
So also with aquaticized birds: if they migrate today intercontinentally, it is a
stretching of their original habits; the irregular geometry, followed by birds that fly
away from the arctic directly south and then veer at sharp angles to find their winter
grounds, and vice versa to return, may be a function of land-mass migrations; the birds
seem to be pursuing their original routes. If so, there may have been little time in
which to evolve more efficient habits.
The Pangean shallow waters life centers were mostly wiped out, but survivors could
readily adapt to the continental shelves and slopes, and the shallow and middle depths
of the new ocean basins. (Wegener once alluded to the exclusive presence of shallow-
water fossils in marine paleontology.) A typical succession pattern for the survival of
an aquatic species would be to migrate or be turbulently transported from a Pangean
center in a flooding action that settled into a temporary pond on the way across the
land and towards what was to be the ocean. By the time of arrival at the finalized
ocean shelf, where almost all aquatic species concentrate, the ocean waters bordering
the land were quiet and cooled enough to permit proliferation. The exponential
arithmetic for the growth of the population of the species at this stage would produce
numbers sufficient to choke the oceans in a thousand years.
In the oceanic abyss, few species are found, and the same species are more commonly
found on the continental shelf with few mutations. There is no exclusively abyssal
flora or fauna, nor any "living fossil ancestors." The fact, however, that species do
inhabit the abyss signifies that the abyss, were it old enough and the conventional
processes of evolution occurring, would be teeming with adapted and mutated species.
The same logic would explain the scarcity of life forms in the high mountains, in the
atmospheric bands, deep, below the land surface, and in the deserts. The
inhospitability of these environments is only relative to dubious premises.
Conventional long-time uniformitarian evolution and adaptation would have permitted all
niches to become life-niches. Recent catastrophes provide of extinct niches such as
would support a 50-foot winged dinosaur. If the oceanic salt seas carry few analogous
niches for today's species, the reason may be limits imposed by the recency of drastic
change, rather than limitations of nature.
Rocks dredged from the bevelled tops of a number of seamounts carry imbedded fossils of
current species that give 8 to 12,000 years readings on C14 dating (probably 4000 years
old, then). The abyssal floors contain many bones, remarkably preserved. Large shark
teeth of unknown species abound. Elephant teeth are found far down the continental
slopes of North America. Their preservation for more than several thousand years is
unlikely.
The mountain is a new life-niche for mankind. A swamp is preferred. The altitude of the
ruined city of Tiahuanacu is too high for the natives to reproduce themselves readily;
they used to descend to the plains for the purpose. Either they were correct or had
been living too brief a time up high to be sure. The mountains rose after the city was
flourishing. Generally, if mountains were old, they should support many more life forms
than is the case. The erect posture of humans is well-adapted to sky-watching and life
in the swampland; wading and carrying were greatly facilitated (as probably with
certain dinosaur species). The food supply of swamps is lush and the fish and game of
swamps easier to catch than the animals of the plain and mountain. It is a common error
to portray hominids as living in the African climates of today and exerting themselves
in the pursuit of large animals. Findings of bones pounded and scraped by hand-axes
relating to hominoids might only signify omnivorous scavengers.
Large attached organisms are rare on the most recent oceanic ridges. The proliferation
of such species on such ridges, that are rich in flora and fauna, is to be expected
after a brief passage of time. The intense activity of the ridges several thousand
years ago blocked their prompt development.
A distinctive southern flora, Glossopteris, found nowhere in the northern regions, is
found as a fossil in India, Australia, South Africa, South America, and Antarctica. The
case of India is doubly significant because a northern, adaptable, counterpart to
Glossopteris exists but has never been found in India which is attached to Asia. This
fact not only indicates continental rafting, but also recent continental rafting; there
has been too little time for overland diffusion to have occurred.
Identical genera of late Permian fauna are found in Northern Russia and South Africa. A
fossil dinosaur of five continents (North America, South America, South Africa, Europe,
and Asia) is known. Pangean distribution is generally confirmed. South America and
South Africa, however, do not share mammalian identity today; cats are the only common
genera. Many mammals common to both areas existed in Pangean times, before the
catastrophes. Flora and invertebrates present a different picture today: there are
numerous identities.
Evidences of paleozoic faunal commonalty between North America and Europe are common.
Many extinct Bohemian forms are replicated in extinct Texas forms, for example. During
the paleozoic and mesozoic, some identical flora were to be found in East Asia and
Western North America, and others in Eastern North America and Western Europe.
The age-breaking catastrophes, since they came from the skies, handicapped severely
large land animals. Most of the dinosaurs were wiped out at once; the larger mammals
were mostly exterminated in one brief period. Elephant remains have been found in South
America in Chile, Venezuela, and Brazil, as well as alive in Africa and India. Mastodon
remains were discovered in Ecuador and Colombia. Elephant fossil bones were found in a
Brazilian bed, or nearer to the sea than that same bed, which contained hundreds of
modern human skeletons mixed among numerous marine shells and nodules of carbonaceous
matter; these were discovered about 1827; the bed was referred to as of limestone and
of tufa (volcanic lava).
Piles of torn and mashed mammalian remains (mastodons, mammoths, bison, etc.) along
with remains of many types of contemporary flora and other fauna, are discoverable in
Alaska and Siberia. They are found in muck pits. They portray instant disaster by tidal
and atmospheric forces. Large deposits of bones are found in Baja California (Mexico)
cast up by the same kind of forces, uniting elephants and sharks in death.
Most species of large mammals suffered extinction in undeniably modern times. (In 1975
a radiocarbon dating of a mammoth find placed it at only 400 B. C.) The species that
could betake themselves to high ground or fly quickly from one place to another
survived in larger numbers. Humans were among the survivors. Maybe it will be also
shown that humans were present when the continents split apart. The implication of such
proof is that an ecumenical culture must have existed prior to the Lunarian diaspora.
The references to the catastrophic extinctions at "the end of the Pleistocene" mark the
end of the ice age, which should, according to conventional theory, have been a
blessing to most species, but was a universal disaster; life was first threatened by
advancing ice and water, and then practically destroyed by the forces that broke up the
ice and by ice break-up as well.
Many voluminous deposits of destroyed life occur in areas far beyond the tropical or
temperate climate where the same or related species exist today. Injections of space
gas at very low temperatures, associated once or several times with the tilting of the
Earth's axis, may be evidenced in well-preserved, suddenly frozen life forms found in
various places. Moreover, in every area of the globe where collective disaster is
manifested among the plant and animal species, the geology of the areas usually
confirms the biology: ooze and clay boundaries shift in the deposits of the ocean beds;
organic layers are sandwiched between inorganic; ash is generally distributed on
several levels of many marine and terrestrial sediments. Each level represents a
general disaster; some stand for world disasters. Conflagration, tides, atmospheric
violence, and other disastrous forces can probably be discovered wherever the mind is
directed. Or so it seems.
Nature lends her occasional favors of fossils in a cruel way -by disasters. Human cult
practices provide on occasion fossil cemeteries; otherwise human paleontology, too,
would be dependent on the rare, unplanned event of a Pompeii. It is a euphemism, and
misleading, to speak of "fossil cemeteries," or even of '" fossil assemblages," but,
too, "dump," 'heap," "deposit," 'collection," 'aggregate" and other words are also
questionable. Perhaps "fossil deposit" would be best, signifying many life forms
concreted with clay, pebbles, and sand.
Fossil deposits may include on the one hand mineralized or petrified remains, or on the
other hand preserved organic remains. The basic principle of fossil analysis requires
every fossil occurrence to be approached as a catastrophic event. Quick burial of a
potential fossil is essential. Then, occasionally, one or more of several chemical
processes will preserve some of the organic structure itself, or an image of it, for
posterity. R. Redfern summarizes fossilization for us, letting disaster pop out of a
fully uniformitarian ideology in an analogy of the "fossil food" in a supermarket.
Paleontologists sometimes find fossilized animals preserved in an almost complete
state: sloths in arid caves, mammoths packed in ice, and men in peat bogs. Such
effective preservation was the result of rapid reduction of moisture content or
temperature, impregnation with chemicals, exclusion of air, or of a mixture of all
four. Although we would hardly call preserved food 'fossil food' when we buy it from a
supermarket, there is really nothing new about desiccation, deep freezing, chemical
additives, vacuum packaging, and various combinations of all four [2] .
If all the remains of all that has ever lived had been preserved, might they exceed in
mass the Earth itself? Termites and many insect species are considered geologically
ancient. There is said to be a half-ton of live termites for every living human being.
Considering that entire islands and hills have been found composed of mammoth and large
mammal bones, and considering the huge fossil beds of vegetation, we can be sure that
recent catastrophes have laid down the organic soils of today and a great deal more
that has been eroded or quantavoluted since then.
What dies is thus quickly recycled biotically, unless some geological intervention
occurs. And this intervention that fossilizes is almost always connected to the cause
of death. The fossil record therefore is distorted as to populations of the species and
to a lesser degree to the kinds and numbers of species.
Not all is known about fossilization, and less is realized. Ardrey mentions that the
waters of Lake Victoria (Africa) were once fossilizing animals quickly and well because
of some unknown quality probably not now present. E. R. Milton describes his
examination of a petrified tree trunk in Alberta (Canada) [3] :
The piece... was pure clear silica inside, it was coated with a rougher opaque crust of
partially fused sand. The tree whose stump was petrified was alive five years ago!
After the tree was cut down to accommodate the right of way for a new power
transmission line, an accidental break allowed the live high-voltage wire to contact
several tree stumps still in the ground. The power was cut off within hours of the
break. All of the tree roots which contacted the broken wire were fossilized...
Obviously, electricity can metamorphose matter quickly.
One's mind reverts to earlier passages of this book where the presence of heavy
electric fields and poisonous gases are given credence; perhaps these may have helped
in the fossilizing process.
A fossil is typically an accident, a disaster, an anomaly. We should not find in
Ecuador a mixture of mastodon bones, pottery, and coal. Nor reptiles with full
stomachs, pterosaurs swallowing food, a mammoth with buttercups in his teeth, or an
ichthyosaur mother in the throes of birthing her infants. The very existence of fossils
reflects, says C. B. Hanson, "inefficiency in the natural systems for recycling organic
material." He experimented with sending mammal bones down a flume in a laboratory in
attempts to replicate natural conditions. M. Coe studied the decomposition of elephants
in a Kenyan drought, and concluded that only rapid burial would allow any chance for
fossilization [4] . There was no question here of the elephants being assembled to die
and then deeply buried away from water and doused with petrifying chemicals so as to
produce one of the fossil assemblages so commonly found in natural history. In fact,
the best case of a fossil assemblage that geology can afford from historical times is
the resort population of Pompeii and Herculanum smothered and buried by the gases and
ashes of Vesuvius in 79 A. D.
The following exchanges concerning a fossil conglomerate of prehistoric Nebraska
clarifies the issues, as perceived by uniformitarians and catastrophists [5] . We
quote the catastrophist:
"In the American Museum of Natural History (New York) there is on display in the Late
Mammals room (Room 3, 4th floor) a rectangular fragment (about 1.7x2.5 m, and 15 to 50
cm thick) of a bone breccia from a 'fossil quarry' near Agate, Sioux Co., Nebraska.
Most of the bones are from a small, two-horned rhinoceros, Dicera-theriurn, with minor
amounts from Moropus (6%), a clawed mammal related to horses, and from Dinohyus (1%), a
giant piglike mammal. Extrapolating the quantity of individuals that make up this
fragment over the total volume of the breccia layer (360 sq. m 15 to 50 cm thick), one
arrives at 8200 Diceratheria, 500 Moropi and 100 Dinohyi. This breccia is believed (by
Museum officials) to have formed in quicksand. The accompanying text reads:
The accumulation of bones is believed to have been formed in an eddy in the old river
channel at a time when the valley was not so deeply cut out as it is now, and the river
flowed at the higher level. A pool would be formed at this eddy, with quicksands at its
bottom, and many of the animals which came to drink at the pool in the dry seasons
would be trapped and buried by the quicksand. The covering of sand would serve to
protect the bones from decay and prevent them from being rolled or water-worn by the
current, or from being crushed and broken up by the trampling of animals that came to
drink. But the sand of a quicksand is always moving and shifting around (whence its
name of quick-sand), and with it the buried bones would be shifted around,
disarticulated and displaced, so that when finally buried deeper by later sediments of
the river valley they would be preserved as they are seen here, complete and almost
undamaged, yet all the bones separate and disarticulated.
"I wonder whether the inventor of this mechanism has done his best to find an
actualistic example of quicksand sucking up animals (with a lesser density than itself)
in such a selective manner. Or is this another example of a gradualistic mechanism
being preferred at all costs, even if it violates actualistic principles and physical
laws? Has the possibility of a herd suddenly buried by a landslide or a liquefied
sediment been considered? Are the properties of the overlying sediment compatible with
this hypothesis? If so, it would be interesting to investigate this possibility also
for other bone breccias, and to find out whether such breccias are more common from
certain periods of Earth history than from others."
The story and comments are those of Hans Kloosterman, Editor of the magazine,
Catastrophist Geologist.
Kloosterman's note receives a reply from Richard H. Tedford, Department of Vertebrate
Paleontology, the American Museum of Natural History:
The hypothesis you object to also bothers me. The hall displaying the block of bones is
to be revised and that will give us the opportunity to revise the captions for the
exhibits. I think the critical evidence here is the extent of disarticulation of the
remains which implies dismemberment of the carcasses and transport in a fluid and I see
nothing improbable in the ordinary hydraulic agencies in a fluviatile regime. The
concentration of remains can also be attributed to irregularities on the floor of the
channel (observed during excavation) and the development of local eddies over the
larger bones first deposited that trap further remains being swept downstream. The
catastrophic factor may be the cause of death of a large group of animals and there are
ways to assess this (unfortunately not tried with reference to the deposits in
question), but normal stream transportation and deposition seems to me to be sufficient
to explain the resulting deposit.
Richard H. Tedford
The American Museum of Natural History
Dept. of Vertebrate Paleontology
New York, USA
And, in rebuttal, Kloosterman writes the following:
If we first of all keep separate the two possibilities: death and deposition by the
same or by different causes, the disarticulation of the remains certainly suggests that
death has occurred previous to deposition, but the high bone-to-sediment ratio of the
layer and the paucity of species suggests rapid burial after death, pointing to a
connection between the causes of death and burial. Museum specimens will provide no
answer to these problems and we will have to go back to the field, and also compare the
characteristics of many different bone layers. Are layers when consisting of only a few
species always composed of herbivores? Are their sedimentological characteristics
different from other bone layers? Doesn't there exist any classification of bone
layers, or have I just been unable to find it?
The issue is attacked by a hydrologist:
The quotation from the American Museum of Natural History implies that a pool, formed
at an eddy in a river would have a quicksand bottom. There is only one way such
quicksand could form, and that is by upward movement of groundwater through the bottom
of the pool (see reference on Ink Pots springs). While this is not uncommon, there is
no evidence (e. g. sorting of the sandy matrix of the bone breccia) presented for this.
Again referring to my Ink Pots paper, it is clear that density differences between
quicksand and "trapped" animals do present a problem. The animals may have died from
exhaustion, but they would not have been "sucked in". Lacking further evidence for the
quicksand hypothesis, I think the mud flow (liquefied sediment slide) solution is more
likely.
The only way to solve this question is to collect all the evidence, including grain
size distribution throughout the deposit, and detailed description of all "foreign
matter" in the sediment.
Robert O. van Everdingen
Hydrology Research Div., Environment Canada
Calgary, Canada
Ref.:
Van Everdingen R. O., 1969: The Ink Pots--a group of karst springs in the Rocky
Mountains near Banif, Alberta. Can. J. Earth Sci. 6/ 4: 545-554.
And Kloosterman concludes the case:
The problem here is that an equally strong and pervasive uniformitarian influence
exists in sedimentology as in paleontology, with, in the interpretation of sediments,
an aversion to even such common and minor catastrophes as rapid mass movements. Even if
we are willing to consider catastrophist hypotheses, some basic data may be lacking,
and thus the "cooperation" of the two specialities may lead to a typical case of "cross
sterilisation," so common between two different disciplines or even branches of the
same discipline.
Enlightening as these comments may be, it is noteworthy that what to this author seems
to be the more likely solution of the problem is not mentioned. The animals are of
distinct species and were killed together, their bones disarticulated, and their bodies
concurrently buried, in a (probably presumed) "eddy" of a now extinct river. No
indication of water-wear or scavenging affects the bones. Probably a large cyclone was
involved; the animals were picked up, torn apart, dumped, at some distance, and buried
in a matrix of debris that was also being transported. If the conglomerate contained
more species, further study might reveal a possibility of a water tide as the prime
factor.
K. E. Chave's tumbling barrel experiments, in which shells and skeletons of marine
animals were subjected to water, chert pebbles, and sand abrasion at 30 revolutions per
minute, saw a reduction to under 4 mm grains of most of the structures within 183
hours, with perhaps 40 hours representing a half-life figure for average structures
[6] . Complementary reduction occurs biochemically and by the action of other animals.
Clearly, then, given 200 hours of rolling about, little identifiable fossil life would
remain. Supposing that the rolling were stretched out in a tide or current, about 300
kilometers of movement at one kilometer per hour would reduce practically all life
forms to grain size in a bio-mineral soup, which, when motion ceased, would be
deposited and in a matter of days form a strong deposit, partly mineral and partly
biological. The tide would be moving much faster in any disastrous scenario. The rate
of destruction would increase with the speed. Therefore, a fast tide in a few hours
over a stretch of a few kilometers would render the fossil record something readable,
if at all, by electron microscope and paleobiochemistry.
If tides had totally overrun the globe, the fossil record would be much less -all the
less because tides dig up old deposits as they move, too. On the other hand, is the
fossil record so generally rich as to imply large expanses of peaceful, tideless time
when shells could find a quiet home, preserved, until pushed into visibility, there to
encounter aeolian forces? Looking at the question in another way, where in the world
would a fossil go to rest undisturbed by currents, electricity, and chemicals for a
million years, or a hundred million, or a billion? "Hitler's Festung Europa (Fortress
Europe) has no ceiling," we used to say in 1944. Has any fossil anywhere an anti-
electro-chemical fortress, a Festung Fossilia with a ceiling? If we had available to us
a thorough paleontological survey and map of the Earth above its granites, we should be
able to answer the question of the age of the surface since its last scourings. We do
not have it.
Discovered fossil assemblages number in the hundreds, although they are not nicely
inventoried. They occur on every continent, in many countries, in high and low
latitudes, whenever land animals, plants and marine life have thrived. A large number
remain to be discovered. A list of over fifty is before me as these lines are written,
and I realize that they are almost all either late Cretaceous (reptiles) or late
Pleistocene (large mammals), and that one must take into account many times this number
for the aforesaid periods and then every "rich fossil bed" that graces the boundaries
of the total phanerozoic calendar.
An item from Chemical and Engineering News comes to mind [7] . Workers "found the
fossil skeleton of a baleen whale some 10-12 million years old in... diatomaceous earth
quarries in Lompoc, Calif. .... The whale is standing on end in the quarry and is being
exposed as the diatomite is mined... The fossil may be close to 80 feet long." A
sarcastic reader wrote in (March 21, 1977) that "Everybody knows that diatomaceous
earthbeds are built up slowly over millions of years as diatom skeletons slowly settle
out on the ocean floor. The baleen whale simply stood on its tail for I00,000 years,
its skeleton decomposing, while the diatomaceous snow covered its frame millimeter by
millimeter." That is, catastrophes affect the minute as well as the great life forms.
We do not know what proportion of fossils contributing to paleontology was derived from
conglomerates as against individual finds. As expected, no one has sorted the
assemblages into those involving collective catastrophe and those accumulated by normal
individual disasters. A committee of experts would probably find few if any of the
latter category, some of doubtful origins, and the majority to be collective disasters.
It would not take long today to conclude, for example, that the famous La Brea (Los
Angeles) tar pit and similar pits, discovered many kilometers away, portray
catastrophes. The conglomerates of smashed and disarticulated bones of discordant
species (saber-toothed tigers, peacocks, etc.), gravel, and asphalt point to a paradise
of wild life suddenly devastated and revived only as the dry, thinly populated land,
poor in fauna, of recent historical times. The time of the La Brea incident has had to
be lowered drastically; for one thing, human bones have been found there; but also, the
assemblage has been connected with other major events, such as the drying of lakes,
placed at about 3500 years ago.
On the principle of "the Great Contrary" as the ancient Chinese called it, it would
seem that the uniformitarians have received their chief input to the reconstruction of
ancient species from the catastrophes that they would deny, just as the omnipresence of
strata upon which they depend for their geology carries the heaviest implication of
repeated disturbances of the Earth's surface.
Fossil conglomerates are not partial to genera or to epochs. Many recent studies have
been based upon material dredged from marine sediments, and concern minute organisms or
creatures. These, too, usually mark boundaries ordinarily termed epochal, or climatic,
or even catastrophic, for they involve abrupt terminations of some certain composite of
species. Thus, when suddenly a thick band of coccoliths is dredged up from the bottom
of the Black Sea, aged perhaps three to five thousand years, a sudden end to a regime
becomes apparent: a deluge of strange waters, an abrupt climate change, an electric
shock transmitted throughout the body of water, or a sudden break in the food chain
occasioned by similar events [8] . We speak more of this when we come to discuss
extinctions.
At Bearsden, near Glasgow, a fossil conglomerate termed Carboniferous by age is found.
Marine and freshwater strata are interlaced; marine and non-marine life-forms are
present, not necessarily tied to their "appropriate" rock strata (land plants and
marine animals are mixed); crustacean and shark fossils (rapidly decomposable) are
found in high degree of preservation [7A]. Though often the material of coal beds,
they are not carbonized. A series of tidal thrusts is to be assumed; further,
coalification does not occur, it appears, unless an independent heated element is added
before or after dumping. The evidence is consistent with the catastrophic theory of
coal formation.
Coal deposits are fossil conglomerates of a most impressive kind, and call upon the
winds, the tides, and the giant bulldozers of ice and rock.
Quotations from botanist Heribert Nilsson are pertinent [9] :
Even if our peat-moors grew to a thickness of 2,000 meters, nothing would be similar to
the Ruhr Carbon or any other coal district... If the possibility of an autochtonous
formation of the seams is judged from the point of view of the amount of material
available, the results must be considered as highly improbable. A forest of full-grown
beeches gives material only for a seam 2 cm. It is not unusual that they are 10 meters
thick, and such a seam would require 500 full-grown beech forests. Whence this immense
material? How was it deposited all at once? Why did these masses of living organic
material escape decay, why was it not completely decomposed?"
To what degree sediments are "rock fossil assemblages" is unknown. They too, with or
without fossils, can be transported by high-energy vehicles. If a tree stands
vertically in a sediment does it not demand that its whole depth of burial should be
carried throughout its stratum wherever it leads and the whole be considered
instantaneous? Should not the vertical great whale referred to above be a measure of a
whole stratum's instantaneity? A stratum can only be as thin as its tallest fossil will
allow. A poly-strata fossil wipes out practically all the temporal pretensions of the
blankets of its bed. Ideally, it should wipe out all identical blankets everywhere.
A famous instance of ancient catastrophic fossilization was introduced by Hugh Miller
in 1841 in regard to the Old Red Sandstone [10] :
The River Bullhead, when attacked by an enemy, or immediately as it feels the hook in
its jaws, erects its two spines at nearly right angles with the plates of the head, as
if to render itself as difficult of being swallowed as possible. The attitude is one of
danger and alarm; and it is a curious fact... that in this attitude nine tenths of the
Pterichthes of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are to be found...
At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction
the Fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much
more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which
exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted,
contracted, curved, the tail in many instances is bent round to the head; the spines
stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in Fish that die in convulsions... The
record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total, so far as it extended...
By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable existences of an
area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent annihilated at once, and yet the
medium in which they had lived left undisturbed in its operations?
The depth of the fossil bed was immediately determined. Miller gives it at over 8000
feet. Hence all sandstones of this type everywhere in the world must be treated
hypothetically as quantavolutionary. This promptly casts suspicion upon all rocks in
the 360 global ambiance of the sandstones.
It seems that this episode, which fascinated the scientific public over a century ago,
is due for a reassessment in the light of current knowledge especially since a new
element is found at the well-known scene, radioactivity. "Anomalous high radioactivity
has been detected in Homosteus, a fish from the same Old Red Sandstone beds in which
Pterichthyodes occur," writes Hans Kloosterman [11] . We have mentioned similar cases
earlier. Kloosterman continues:
Latter-day uniformitarians tend to explain the radioactive anomalies by differential
absorption of radioactive elements posterior to deposition. Conceivably this will bear
out to be correct, but it could be only a partial explanation. Has any study been
undertaken to find out whether high radioactivity in fossil bones correlates with the
great faunal breaks of the Earth's history?
Radioactivity does not kill and assemble fauna quickly. It is associable with forces
that do so and it implies exoterrestrialism: cosmic lightning and electrical
discharges; freezing, gassing, and smothering fall-out, and incoming tides that have
been radiated elsewhere.
Many microchronic catastrophists, hot on the scent of fossil absurdities, believe in
the contemporary existence of species that are conventionally placed in superposition
and assigned sequential periods of existence. The number of individual anomalies -a
cold-water clam in a hot-water clam bed or a dinosaur among mammoths -is too small.
Indeed, I have read of no incontrovertible case of major consequence for the
reconstruction of time and evolution. The most sophisticated of their concepts seems to
be fossil zoning, by which, if I understand rightly, is meant the simultaneous growth
of ecological sets of a greatly different order. These sets are shuffled about as the
scene changes, under castastrophic duress. One ecology is piled upon another and a long
temporal sequence is assigned to the whole and its parts.
I can conceive how, let us say, continental tides of translation might sweep in and
deposit a life zone upon one area; also I can conceive of another wave, reverse or
oblique to the first, carrying upon the same area a second layer of fossilized
sediments, and, in the end, of the second being given incorrectly a much younger age
that the first. I cannot conceive, on the other hand, of nature being so neat, so
orderly, or so given over to long range thrusting. One bears in mind that the longer
the transport, the worse the conditions for fossilizing. Also, the chances that a tide
or bulldozer will pick up inter-zonal species are excellent and therefore will place
not only 'A' upon 'B' but 'B' upon 'A'. But such occurrences are quite rare, and almost
always distinguishable. The inconsistency would be noticeable. One cannot but feel at
times that paleontologists have a lore that is locked out of the literature and that
would emerge upon systematic questioning. Thus, what are the statistical parameters of
fossil deposits in situ: how often, for instance, are fossil beds pure and how often
apparently heterogeneous and to what degree? Are fossil deposits of ancient ages more
likely to be heterogeneous than late fossil beds? If fossils usually travel, as Ager
says, do they travel with their own age group? Does the age-pure rich fossil bed
indicate, not a long, but a short chronology, because the fossils have not had time to
be mixed or destroyed?
No part of the world is without fossil deposits. This would indicate that no part of
the world has escaped catastrophic experiences. Marine fossils are of shallow seas: the
oceans may be too young to have spawned new species, much less to cast them over the
continents.
A great many fossil deposits are assigned old ages. The horrified fish of the Old Red
Sandstone referred to earlier are Devonian and given hundreds of millions of years. The
theory of this book has been tending toward confining biosphere catastrophes to the
nearby ages and to an early period of "radiant genesis," defined in Solaria Binaria,
with a stable intervening period. Either the ancient assignments will have to be re-
timed or we shall have to give up this notion of a long period of Pangean stability
during which quantavolutions were in abeyance. (See, e. g. the time charts following
the text.)
We cannot conclude here from the study of fossil deposits that all major disturbances
have been recent. But these conglomerations lend direct and substantial support to the
quantavolutionary theory that Earth changes have been sudden, large-scale, and intense,
and that most, if not all, have been very recent.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-six: Fossil Deposits)
1. Animal Travellers, loc. cit., 126-46.
2. Corridors of Time: 1,700,000 Years of Earth at Grand Canyon (N. Y.: Times Books,
1980). Cf. G. M. Price, Evolutionary Geology and the New Catastrophism (Mountain View,
Calif: Pacific Press, 1926), 234-9.
3. V S. I. S. Rev. 1 (1980-81), 10-1.
4. Fossils in the Making
5. 2 Catas. Geol. 1 (1977), 1-2; Ibid. n 2, inside cover.
6. K. E. Chave, "Skeletal Durability and Preservation," in J. Imbrie and N. Newell,
Approaches to Paleoecology (N. Y.: Wiley, 1964), 377-82.
7. Chem. and Engin. News, Oct. 11, 1976, quoted in III Kronos (Eall 1977), 68-9.
7A. 5 S. I. S. Workship 1 (1982) 28-9 citing Nature (17 June 1982), 574.
8. Egon T. Degens and D. A. Ross, "Chronology of the Black Sea over the Last 25,000
years," in Chemical Geol. (Elsevier: Amsterdam, 1972), 4; also, with J. Mac Ilvaine,
170 Science (9 Oct. 1970), 163-5.
9. Quoted by Bennison Gray "Alternatives in Science," VII Kronos 4 (1982), 15, from
Nilssen's "Summary of the facts and leading principles concerning the non-evolutionary
phenomena in the world of biota and the theory of emication," based upon his
Synthetische Artbildung: Grundlinien einer exakten Biologie, 2 v., Lund: Gleerup,
1953).
10. The Old Red Sandstones (Edinburgh, 1941), 48.
11. Kloosterman, et al. (supra, fn 5) citing S. H. U. Bowie, D. Atkin, "An Unusually
Radioactive Fossil Fish from Thurso, Scotland," 177 Nature (1956), 487-488; W. R.
Diggle, J. Saxon, "An Unusually Radioactive Fossil Fish from Thurso, Scotland," 208
Nature (1965), 400.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part VI: Biospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
GENESIS AND EXTINCTION
Man is an exceptional creature, creative and destructive. He is a walking catastrophe
for other kinds of life. Rashmi Mayur, in agitating for a "Kalotic World Order,"
projects that mankind will extirpate most species of life within this generation in
exchange for 1.5 billion more people. J. W. Carpenter has cited estimates that 25% of
all existing species may become extinct by the year 2000 [1] ; this is not the work of
man alone perhaps, for the Earth itself may be enduring a longer-term decline stemming
from its ancient cosmic bouts. But man is failing to protect the Earth.
If our approach is believable, nature requires high-energy forces to extinguish species
and must need an equally great force to create them. The forces at the same time maybe
subtle and powerful, as with invisible radiation, or flagrant and powerful, as with the
crash of a large body into the Earth. Such is quantavolution.
It appears to be easier to discover death than new life. The literature on biological
extinctions is getting heavier all the time, but little is forthcoming on genesis. We
wonder why. Could it be a taboo against one kind of creation? Perhaps. Might it be
this, that eighteenth century economics picked up an idea that common people have
always had -and some great ones like Machiavelli and Hobbes, too -that life is a
struggle among men; there are few places at the top; one must eliminate competitors to
get one's place; survival is a power struggle. Early modern economists went along with
the notion. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) pushed the line of thought into a world-wide
view: goods are scarce, and men will compete for them; who is most effective gets the
most; human populations are checked in their growth only by nature's instruments of
famine, plague, and war. Later man was excused from the struggle, if he would develop
"moral restraint" against excessive breeding. He has not done so. But the biological
world, as young Charles Darwin saw, had no moral restraints and was operating
continuously under the pressures of the environment. Nor was there any rentier
psychology in nature: "Give me my little niche and I will give you yours." Pressure to
expand was infinite and this aggressiveness led to the most marvelous adaptations (to
other's niches) and actual physical evolutions. So went the line of thought.
The underlying amoral (but moral in its own way) view here found the idea of
catastrophism disturbing, first because a moral agent called God was customarily
employed to command the disasters and reconstitute the world afterwards, and second
because catastrophism without divine controls appeared to be quite disorderly and not
progressive, lacking the capacity to create species (Elohim promises Noah this Deluge
would be the last; nor did the survivors anywhere talk of new species, these all having
been created once before.)
Nor when Mendel appeared on the scene with proof of mutations, was it appreciated that
a mutation was a micro-disaster, perhaps tied into catastrophe somehow. It was for a
later generation of scientists and theorists, impelled by the logic of the atomic bomb,
to bridge the gap between an invisible particle and a visible awesome destruction. It
was (and is) still too early to say how catastrophe creates as well as destroys; a
third line of theory has to be developed to explain the paths of genesis, which despite
repeated extinctions, have led to new and different forms of life.
Nonetheless, biological quantavolutions appear to have a large creative element. One of
the rare early geologists to perceive this was Clarence King, and, in his attempt to
assail evolution on its firmest historical ground, he penned several passages of beauty
and importance [2] :
Greek art was fond of decorating the friezes of its sacred edifices with the spirited
form of the horse. Times change: around the new temple of evolution the proudest
ornament is that strange procession of fossil horse skeletons, among whose captivating
splint-bones and general anatomy may be descried the profiles of Huxley and Marsh.
Those two authorities, whose knowledge we may not dispute, assert that the American
genealogy of the horse is the most perfect demonstrative proof of derivative genesis
ever presented. Descent they consider proved, but the fossil jaws are utterly silent as
to what the cause of the evolution may have been.
I have studied the country from which these bones came, and am able to make this
suggestive geological commentary. Between each two successive forms of the horse there
was a catastrophe which seriously altered the climate and configuration of the whole
region in which these animals lived. Huxley and Marsh assert that the bones prove
descent. My own work proves that each new modification succeeded a catastrophe. And the
almost universality of such coincidence is to my mind warrant for the anticipation that
not very far in the future it may be seen that the evolution of environment has been
the major cause of the evolution of life; that a mere Malthusian struggle was not the
author and finisher of evolution; but that He who brought to bear that mysterious
energy we call life upon primeval matter bestowed at the same time a power of
development by change, arranging that the interaction of energy and matter which make
up the environment should, from time to time, burst in upon the current of life and
sweep it onward and upward to ever higher and better manifestations. Moments of great
catastrophe, thus translated into the language of life, become moments of creation,
when out of plastic organisms something newer and nobler is called into being.
The breaking of an age is the occasion for instant creation and instant destruction.
The quantavoluting high-energy forces concentrate upon reducing and at the same time
increasing the variety of species. Otto Schindewolf, from 1950 on, was tracking what he
called faunal discontinuities, for which task D. L. Stepanov called him the "most
important and consistent spokesman of the idea of neocatastrophism in contemporary
paleontology." In him one finds a more stringent scientific tongue than King's but the
same view. "Faunal discontinuities... involve not just the dying out of old, but also
the more or less sudden emergence of new phyla. This phenomenon can no longer be
successfully accommodated under the term catastrophe in the true meaning of the word:
it should rather be described as anastrophe." [3] (that is, 'upturn, ' not
'downturn'). It was partly for this same reason that the term quantavolution was
chosen.
Probably most species are born or die out at the disastrous junctures of natural
history whence the rocks and fossil seas, too, provide evidence of commotion.
Pietro Passerini cites estimates of 1.5 million extant species and between 3 million
and 8.5 million species as existing but still unidentified [4] .
G. G. Simpson estimated the number of existing species at two millions. and the all-
time average since the beginning of life at between 500,000 and 5 millions. He guessed
that the average species endured from 500,000 to 5 million years. He put the time since
life began at from one to two billion years. When he performed his arithmetic he
emerged with a high total estimate of all species of four billions, a medium estimate
of 341 millions and a minimal estimate of 50 millions [5] .
Sometime later, Teichert estimated the number of discoverable or fossilizable species
at ten millions, lower than Simpson by a factor of five. The vertebrates among them
were guessed at a round million. Cook used many less, accepting 1,105,000 for the
living species, and then proposed that a figure of 130,000 for fossil forms discovered
be considered a fairly complete sum of all past species. He asserts grounds for
believing that most fossilizable species have already been discovered, implying that
most or all species were created in short order and that a tenth or so have been
eliminated. If algae and worms can be traced in the sediments, what would not have been
traceable?
Schindewolf comments that "good conditions of preservation existed even for the most
delicate, soft-bodied organisms in the Precambrian;" furthermore, it is incorrect that
the rock strata of quantavolutionary times are missing or totally destroyed along with
their hypothetical fossils [6] . Cook's view accords with his microchronic view of
Earth history, which would permit one or several catastrophes and a natural dissembling
of the fossil record to tempt exaggerations of the expanses of time and the progress of
evolution.
Between Cook's one million and Simpson's two million for living species, reconciliation
is conceivable. Between his 130,000 (say 200,000), and Simpson's maximum of four
billions, there is no hope of ultimate agreement. Even Simpson's minimal figure of
fossil species, 50 millions, is 250 times larger than Cook's. Altogether we are in a
state of ignorance on what nature has afforded as candidates for extinctions. For that
matter, no one is so bold as to define absolutely a species, much less to maintain
nowadays that the conditions for speciation have always been the same. There may indeed
be one or more dubious premises in all reasoning on the subject.
We may be confident that at least all major forms of life and many manifestations of
each have been recovered from the past. In this sense, for the philosopher anyhow,
there are no important gaps in the record. Yet, evolution demands ancestors, and its
theory becomes dubious if the extinct are not sufficient in numbers to provide
ancestors. Or at least the same few ancestors would have had simultaneously to branch
in numerous directions; this is not impossible to argue; and a shortness of time would
be no handicap to the argument. For the moment, to hold in abeyance an opinion on
stasis and evolution, I shall accommodate my thinking to a million or more living
species and over a million fossil species.
For several additional issues beg introduction. With the painful realization of gaps in
the record that refuse closure, the reality of quantavolutions, and the improbability
of point-by-point evolution no matter how much time is allowed, some scientists have
spoken forthrightly for a new look at the record. They find that the path of evolution
has been irregular, that there are times to evolve and times for quiescence. (Nor is
this an artifact of time estimates.) Writes Brough, concluding an extensive review: [7]
Evolution seems to have worked in a series of more and more restricted fields with
large-scale effects steadily decreasing. Evolution at the present time is a slower and
much more restricted phenomenon than it was earlier, and seems to be concerned with
speciation in a pattern of larger systematic units which was laid down in the more or
less remote past, and seems to have been standardized for a long time.
Genesis may not work at the will of God, but it does not work uniformly either. "Given
a more or less even mutation-rate, and Natural Selection as a cause in evolution, there
is difficulty both in accounting for the early and relatively rapid phases of evolution
giving rise to major groups and also for the great decline in this phenomenon in later
geological time."
Brough holds to spontaneous mutation as the source of genesis and speciation, and
"Natural Selection merely works on these;" furthermore, "changes in organic forms have
nothing to do with external factors." So he gets into a tight corner.
There seem to have been evolutionary surges in the past when large changes of organic
form took place, and produced the larger systematic units... There is plenty of
evidence suggesting that during these evolutionary surges changes produced by mutations
were not random, but were directional; this is well seen in such groups as the mammal-
like reptiles, and in the higher bony fishes where several independent phyletic lines
undergo the same sort of changes at about the same time.
Natural Selection may have assumed more importance when this process slowed down. An
example of the evolutionary surge would be the "sudden appearance of a highly-developed
fauna in the Cambrian," after diligent search of undisturbed sandstone, shales and
limestones of the pre-Cambrian for hints of what was to come.
We speak here of simultaneous physical changes in a collectivity of species that may be
unrelated. Within a species a saltation of individual changes must be also occurring.
Hence there should suddenly occur a heavy branching out of types, some to survive, some
soon to die. But then we encounter two additional phenomena of the fossil record -a
lack of transitional types and an absence of short-lived sports.
In the case of all the thirty-two orders of mammals, Simpson tells us, the ancestral
record is very poor. "The earliest and most primitive known members of every order
already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately
continuous sequence from one to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and
the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed [8] . '
E. C. Olson, reviewing the literature lately, reports: "under the very best
circumstances... morphological and stratigraphically graded transitions between classes
and subclasses have been found. At the level of phyla and higher categories, any
information on transitions as far as the fossil record is concerned is essentially non-
existent." [9]
T. H. van Andel surmises that missing links "may have been expunged from the record."
[10] The Glomar Challenger found one-half of the assigned 125 million-year record
missing from deep cores drilled in the South Atlantic Ocean: he implies a catastrophic
removal of the layers.
Other paleontologists, specialists in other evolutionary fields, agree: as with the
rocks, so with the life forms, there are more gaps than record. In treating of this
important point, discussion has focused upon "transitional types." It can be said that
for no phylum, class, order, family, or species is there an indisputable succession of
types that is predicted under the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.
If, as Rodabaugh points out, micromutations must account for all observable variations
between species, then the number of transitional species must be exceedingly large.
"Furthermore, each species must be exceedingly viable in order to survive long enough
to give rise to some 'evolved' descendent." [11] He then proceeds mathematically to
demonstrate, with a probability approaching certainty, that transitional forms have not
in fact existed. A "transitional form" is the species of life that is both intermediate
and ancestral in relation to any two discovered fossil or living forms. "Missing link"
would be a synonym for it. Where, for instance (if birds are indeed descended from
reptiles), is the reptile who is just starting to sprout the wings of the bird? And the
ancestor of the horse is nowhere to be found. D. M. Raup and S. M. Stanley [12] are
quoted: "Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery;
commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of
transitional forms."
Until lately, the ape Ramapithecus was in favor as the possible ancestor of the
hominids. In 1982, it was reported that close study of a skull of Sivapithecus dated at
8.5 million years, and regarded as practically identical to Ramapithecus, showed
definite relationship to the orangutan and hence was deemed not to be a transitional
form to man [13] .
Nevertheless, although it is already admitted that transitional forms are absent,
Rodabaugh computes, from the number of fossil birds estimated to have been found, the
probability that a transitional form will exist. He finds the possibility so tiny as to
be absent, quoting Emil Dorel: "Events whose probability is extremely small never
occur." Rodabaugh concludes that, either the present biological world got here by
macromutations ('hopeful monsters') or by special creation.
The "hopeful monster" is the new species, containing many changes, thrown out by a
general mutation, and hopefully satisfying the conditions of survival. Rodabaugh
declares that the concept "is rejected by nearly all evolutionists." Still, it has been
reported, "within certain of the dying families [of Upper Cretaceous ammonites], an
increase in size and the presence of bizarre-looking forms may be noted. This is a
common accompaniment of extinctions of many groups." [14] It suggests catastrophe,
accompanied by radionic mutating storms that both alter and destroy species. At the end
of an "age" (defined as a "more settled" period), the species-mix and distribution of
the biosphere suffer revolutionary change. Whereupon the struggle for life niches
renews under more and more uniform conditions, which may, however, not be the uniform
conditions of the past age.
Charles Hapgood, another catastrophist, whose work has already been cited, confronts
the same problem and although admitting that the major proponent of macromutation or
"systematic mutation," Richard Goldschmidt, is opposed by the majority of writers,
believes that a sudden shift of the Earth's poles and crust could produce the requisite
shortening of the tempo of evolution. I am treading upon uncertain ground. In what has
been said of the sacred and divine elsewhere (in Chaos and Creation and The Divine
Succession, both works of the Quantavolution Series), I maintain that the historical
gods are scientifically explainable within the framework of natural causes and human
nature, but merge into a philosophy of religion that is not germane here. Hence
enlightenment on the scientific level has to come through a uniform explanation of the
fossil record or through macromutation in a catastrophic setting.
It is possible that a trillion "sports" have been disposed of by quick extinction, and
that the few fossils that come down to us represent trillions of individuals of the
standardized species. In this case, the absence of transitional "missing links" is not
so improbable as some make it out to be. That is, if during a billion years, the
average number of individuals per "long-lived" species has amounted to, say, a trillion
and the average aborted and transitional form had to "make" or "break" on no more than
one thousand specimens, then the chances of finding and recognizing such a necessarily
handicapped form in the fossil record are negligible. That is, the transitional species
would be a small population. If successful, it would spread with exponential rapidity.
If, for every significantly mutated species which survived there were 10,000 that did
not, then even 10 4 Xl0 3 would give only 10 7 . By contrast, the surviving species
averaged l0 12 specimens that might enter the hall of fame of the fossil record. The
relative chance is then 100,000 to 1. Consequently, if even a single showcase of
transitional freaks has entered into the fossil record, there is enough to satisfy
mathematical expectation.
It is more likely that a form of quantavolution operates (it is discussed in Homo
Schizo I and Solaria Binaria). The absence of transitional types, if it proves
anything, probably goes to prove that something like quantavolution must exist in
genetics; there is then no expectation of transitional types. A mutated reptile has
wings and it flies, without a long time of flight-prone ancestors.
However, transitional forms are not the most bothersome problem. Nor is it the
continual relapse into Lamarckian environmentalism that characterizes the literature of
many professed Mendelian-Darwinists. It is the nagging intuition of purposefulness that
afflicts both the religious and atheistic observers alike. The species, from the virus
up to the human, appear to be put together meaningfully. The species function in the
wierdest, meanest, most wonderful ways to exist -not to progress, adapt, change, or
intelligize, but simply to carry on an existence as best they can. Every species
appears probabilistic to the point of impossibility.
A species may be "fantastically" constructed; but it is functional. A billion cases of
an animal or plant cannot be denied. Its every trait relates to every other trait, just
as in a culture every culture trait relates to every other culture trait somehow, no
matter how "senselessly." The species is a whole, just as a culture is a whole. How can
it be that, amidst the millions of chemico-physico transactions always occurring in the
human body, a shot of adrenal hormone, prompted by a scare, is practically
simultaneously counteracted by a hormone to prevent over-reaction to the scare, as the
classical work of Cannon on homeostasis, or The Wisdom of the Body, first elaborated?
Stanley's calculations show that species of European mammals of today have on the
average survived for one to two million years by conventional calculation (middle
pliocene mollusks had a mean duration of 7 my). Very few species of short duration
(less than 0.4 my) occurred in the record. No ephemeral species appeared and
disappeared. He concludes that "much more than 50 percent of evolution occurs through
sudden events in which polymorphs and species are proliferated." [15] So here we find
no sports, no transitionals, and a suggestion of macroevolution or quantavolution or
"punctuated equilibrium." Also Stanley and Harper have noted a lack of correlation
between rate of evolution and generation time [16] .
Life forms have widely varying generation-lengths. The human, who lives relatively
long, reproduces from dozens to millions of times more slowly that most animal species.
The human, therefore, should have had less evolutionary change in his past than a great
many 'lower' and 'simpler' forms. Too, if the capacity to mutate is considered a
positive feature of a species in "natural selection," then the human and many another
'advanced' species should be regarded as handicapped in the struggle to survive and
adapt.
The biologist will probably agree with this and go in search of other advantages
afforded these handicapped species in natural selection. When his search fails, he must
grant that biology has always had an in-grained prejudice for the complex 'higher'
animals, especially man. Man, like other advanced mammals, and indeed like all
specialized as opposed to primitive, general, and simple organisms, is poorly designed
for survival.
Nevertheless this dismal picture includes a seed of hope, indeed a new hypothesis of
quantavolution. If generation rate and evolution rate do not correlate, it may be that
evolution occurs, whether in simple short-lived forms or complex long-lived forms, at
an instant time that is absolutely short and therefore, reversing the history of the
Colt revolver, "makes a big man equal to a little man."
More importantly, a long-lived form may inherit a genotype which all life forms share,
no matter their generation time. This would be the ability in a mutation to change
instructions for the largest and most complicated cell assemblage as readily as for a
single-celled animal. One result would be equalization of evolution effects; the
concomitant would be quantavolution or macroevolution, that is, the instant all-around
change when a mutation occurs.
We have already noted the conspicuous absence of flora and fauna of the ocean bottoms
and high mountains. The matter is relevant here again. The charts of extinction of
species are also charts of genesis of new species. When species are exterminated in
large numbers, new forms follow. Paleontologists question whether the new species are
alterations of the old, or descended from earlier forms that failed to appear in the
old fossil record, or evacuees from other zones of life. The first would seem logical
but we are given to believe that first the old die out and then the new appear. This is
an aspect of the problem of missing transitional forms. Yet it seems inexplicable.
Should not the dying dinosaurs and mutated mammals appear in the same strata? If heavy
radiation is killing off one form but creating another, the stratigraphic gap should be
inconsiderable, or the old and new forms should grade continuously into one another. It
should not require more than several centuries to prove the fitness of a new form and
to find it in numbers upon the next catastrophic occurrence. Perhaps this is what did
happen; however, we are used to placing a million years between any two highly visible
events in the record. Or at least one should be able to locate first a catastrophized
conglomerate of fossils and then in succeeding uncatastrophized strata the new forms
appearing as individual fossils. Else we should have to double the number of
catastrophes, one for extinction and a second for genesis.
But is it "flesh or fowl?" Or, as Velikovsky asks: "Were all dinosaurs reptiles?" [17]
Live birth among dinosaurs seems now fairly certain and not rare and there may have
been a large mingling of important features hitherto believed distinctive between
dinosaurs and mammals. Western USA rocks (Hava Supai Canyon, Colo.) produces drawings
of dinosaurs, elephants, ibex, and human figures, as well as pictographs. If this
ensemble is of the same time, a shocking reconstruction of the holocene period must
ensue, absorbing time all the way back into the Cretaceous and up into the neolithic.
But all those creatures exhibited may be pre-selenian, and were extincted, even the
particular human race of the artist, around 12,000 B. P.
Leaving this perplexing issue, we return to the problem of the ecological niches. These
should be quickly occupied upon the demise of old species. Cameroun and Benoit found
algae, fungi and bacteria thriving in volcanic lava laid down by volcanic eruption on
Deception Island in Antarctica. Elapsed time was one year [18] . Krakatoa's little
island received new life, too, within several years of being exploded and completely
burned out, not only microscopic life but amphibia, reptiles and birds.
Yet, to repeat an earlier fact, large attached organisms are rare on the most recent
oceanic ridges, according to Heezen and Hollister [19] . At 1000 to 4000 meters of
depth, the ridges should be rich in flora and fauna, of established species. This
signifies either an extremely young age for the ridge system as a whole, or for the
most recent millennia a very heavy general eruptive activity. In the end, so far as
concerns genesis, we hold to quantavolution in biology and geology. The holospheric
principle continues to be productive; the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere transact
continually with the biosphere: all are affected by high-energy forces ultimately
originating exoterrestrially. Genesis or the new in life occurs hand-in-hand with the
destruction of the old life forms. This is nothing more than Schindewolf's
"anastrophism."
No more revolutionary times than the present have struck geology and biology since the
victory of gradualism and evolution over a century ago. The most striking signals of
the change are emitted from the new studies of the extinction of species.
In 1961 Schindewolf prepared for the 113th General Assembly of the German Geological
Society a status report on neocatastrophism [20] . He claimed major faunal
discontinuities on the boundaries of the Precambrian-Cambrian, Permian-Triassic, and
the Cretaceous-Tertiary eras. "On the divide between the Precambrian and the Cambrian
there was a relatively sudden and thorough-going transformation of the animal kingdom,
in which durable hard parts were deposited for the first time." There is a partial
species overlap of short duration as the Permian moves into the Triassic as he notes in
4 groups of fauna, but he names 24 that expired and 24 that newly appeared. At the
Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, "the dinosaurs represent only one aspect of the much
wider extinction process and the profound change in the composition of the faunas..."
The larger mammals then came into being.
P. S. Martin and others trace the extinctions over most of the world [21] . D. A.
Russell draws a picture of losses of 50 out of 250 terrestrial genera, a third of
floating marine genera, half of the bottom-dwelling genera, and least of all in losses,
about a fifth of the swimming marine genera [22] . He estimates that 75% of all
species died alongside the dinosaurs, and in a period of only 1000 years, in
conjunction with magnetic field reversals instigated perhaps by blasts of supernova
radiation from a nearby star. He argues that "it is beyond the capacity of forces
within the crust of the Earth to produce global catastrophe on this time scale;"
conjectures of glaciation are inadequate, especially since no evidence is to be had of
a general temperature change. Nor does Russell grant that the Sun could expel such high
bursts of radiation. Schindewolf here denominates 16 faunal groups as exterminated, 3
as overlapping briefly, and 24 as newly arising. As young Darwin wrote in his Journals
(Jan. 9, 1834), "certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as
the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants." (How could such observations
end up in uniformitarianism?)
Schindewolf also dismisses explanations offered for these quantavolutions, none of
which he deemed valid, such as gaps in the rock and fossil record, epidemic diseases,
climatic changes, ice ages, differing depositional characteristics of species, reduced
salinity of seawater, competition and natural selection, mammals eating dinosaur eggs,
and changing sea levels.
Then he reaches into the skies. "Since faunal discontinuities are universal phenomena,
they must arise from universally active causes. This has compelled me to look for
agencies that would (1) have worldwide effects and (2) could extend to the totality of
biotopes in the sea, on dry lands, in freshwater and in the air, as well as to stocks
of most varied habitats and ways of life." [23]
His explanation lies in radiation storms:
Since 1950 I have favored the hypothesis that sharp fluctuations in the high-energy
cosmic radiation reaching the Earth should be considered among possible causes... I
proposed that, on the one hand, the direct impact-effects of ionizing radiation should
be considered, and, on the other, especially the increased generation of radioactive
isotopes, which would become incorporated in the living organic matter and the
molecular compounds of the chromosomes. Here they would unleash a twofold mutagenic
activity, through ionizing radiation, on the one hand, and by the liberation of
electrons in the decay of the isotopes on the other.
He cites theories of supernovas as the source and media for the transmission of the
anastrophic material, and credits E. A. Ivanova with "a connection between the faunal
discontinuities and the migration of radioactive elements." Schindewolf points out that
the exceptional survival rate of insects compared to other fauna may be due to the fact
that "the resistance of insects to radioactive radiation is about ten times greater
than that of human beings and other organisms."
Schindewolf's conclusions, including his exoterrestrialism, have been supported by
later studies. In a summary report of 1982 [24] , W. Sullivan added the Devonian-
Carboniferous and the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary periods. In the former some 30% of
the animal families disappeared. In the Pleistocene climax, 70% of the large mammals
extincted. In both eras, marine life suffered greatly as well. He separates the
Permian-Triassic into two extinction periods, 50 million years apart. Raup estimates
that 96% of all marine species may have died out in the late Permian. Valentine and
others before him (1974) have noted the petering out of highly innovative evolution
[25] . The origination of phyla, classes, and orders came successively to a halt;
families declined, but diversified in the Mesozoic-Cenozoic. A macrochronometrical
paleontogist would say that there has been no major innovation in life for 40 million
years (present company excepted).
Species, as we have indicated earlier, are an unknown quantity, with gross
discrepancies in estimates of their historical numbers. Species are also more
susceptible to genesis than the statistically concocted general groups with their
assigned, more basic features; this is in accord with theory, whether microevolutionary
or macroevolutionary. Probably species have been extincted and ramified on disastrous
occasions that did not affect the existence of the basic forms to which they pertain.
Mankind may be one case in point; small differences are all that can be observed
between man and ape, but as with the absence of major differences between men and
women, in the words of the French deputy: "Vive la petite difference!" In the two
volumes on Homo Schizo, the origins of the differences between hominid and homo are
discussed.
We uneasily recognize the need to consider together at the same time a new chronology,
a new theory of mutations, better data on numbers and extinctions of species, and the
observed quantavolutions of the Earth. For only by such means will we be enabled to
answer a question such as the suddenness of extinctions. Somewhere in the space between
a day and twenty million years, a line has to be drawn to distinguish catastrophe and
gradualism.
The studies and critiques of the work of Alvarez and associates on the Cretaceous-
Tertiary extinctions illustrate the point. The superseding of dinosaurs by large
mammals is known, with their accompanying less dramatic extinctions and creations. Also
now a chemical boundary is known. By one count, "Iridium-rich layers marking the end of
the Cretaceous Period have now been found at more than two dozen locations around the
world." Freshwaters and seabottoms were affected along with dry land. Iridium is much
rarer in the Earth's crust than in presumably exploded and space-affected meteorites.
Hence a cosmic event is predicated, the Alvarez group holding to a middle-sized
meteoroid explosion as the source, and a several months darkness accompanying the
explosion as the killer of the dinosaurs.
Critics argue that the dinosaurs did not extinct with the end of the Cretaceous and
took much longer to die out anyhow. Others say that the iridium is a product of heavy
deep volcanism and slow sedimentation. Another maintains that the dinosaurs died from a
drying up of their swamps. Still another claims that a mere several degrees of
temperature rise or fall would halt the incubation of reptilian eggs and in a short
time destroy the species.
After the Cretaceous comes a "nine-million-year" period of the Tertiary known as the
Eocene. Geologists (Ganapathy, W. Alvarez et al., and O'Keefe) now speak of a "terminal
Eocene event", a catastrophe marked, as in the case of the end of the Cretaceous, by
high iridium concentrations and microtektite fields. Do tectites and iridium always
occur in exoterrestrial crashes? Or does this suggest that the two events, post-
Cretaceous and post-Eocene, were one and the same, the "Eocene" and other eras having
been concocted for differing fossils and strata of the same time.
An impatience and frustration seizes a person who is imbued with the perspectives of
quantavolution and recency in biology and geology. Ordinary accounts of animals,
plants, volcanos, winds, rocks, etc. become lame and foolish. The author, riding a KLM
plane across the Atlantic in 1982, puts aside this chapter and glances through the KLM
News magazine. There a puff is given KLM for flying seven small lemon sharks from
Florida to Holland. The sharks needed "tender, loving care," "had to be massaged
constantly," "sprayed continuously," "given extra oxygen," -these being beasts "having
inhabited the oceans since some 50 million years before man made his first appearance."
How, one wonders, could the sharks have prospered through one catastrophe after
another: either the extinction would not be complete and exponential reproduction would
quickly make up the difference, or else sharks are young species and much of their
ecology must be young as well, including, say, manganese nodules that form around shark
teeth in the abyss.
There are then the meteoroids and the supernovas as sources of anastrophic radiation.
Could "cosmic" radiation come from volcanism? If deep, heavy, and worldwide, radiation
closely akin could fall out from volcanism. But such volcanism, as we explained
earlier, must look for high-energy excitation from the skies. As for the supernovas, in
Solaria Binaria Milton and I attribute heavy radiation to at least three novas -a
preliminary outburst of the Sun creating its binary, and two explosions of its binary
in subsequent millennia. We also designate several other possibilities of radiation,
that would be heavy enough to account for periods of intervening radiation, not from
novas but from impact-explosions and crustal removal in passing encounters.
Here and there now reports are issuing of excessive radiation levels in rocks and
fossils. Kloosterman was earlier quoted on the subject. Salop speaks of a primary
enrichment of uranium in dinosaur bones. Numerous similar findings have been reported
since 1956 in Brazil and Argentina. Some bones from an undated red sandstone were
radioactive. J. E. Powell summarizes these findings. Fossils from Mongolia also show
high levels of radioactivity. Kloosterman located these facts and also discovered that
almost none of the world's natural history museums have measured radioactive levels in
specimens of their collections [26] .
However, the prevalence of fossil conglomerations around the world implies brief
periods of extinction, and forces not alone of radiation, and pre-existing ecologies
quite different from those that came after the catastrophic periods.
So many rich fossil deposits occur in circumstances that reveal high-energy processes
to be at work. In Baja California, fossils were laid down over hundreds of square miles
of the desolate terrain, exposed by surface erosion. Living and extinct species mingled
in broad confusion. Flint and obsidian artifacts lay also upon the fossil sediments.
The bones of mastodons, ancestral horses, a giant tortoise, camels, bison, sharks,
whales, sea cows, and fish were plentiful. A shark species found in Mississippi turned
up here in the Pacific. Assigned times, prior to investigation on the spot, ranged from
50,000 years (in the case of the artifacts) to 60 million years. Dating aside, the
giant, confused, and rich fossil fields signal a catastrophe or a series of
catastrophes at short intervals of time, from floodwaters sweeping in from land and
sea.
S. J. Gould, who has pursued assiduously the study of extinctions, has had to go well
beyond gradualism, uniformitarianism, and natural selection. Luck or chance figures
heavily. Random macromutation can substitute for isolation, by creating two species in
the same niche without the benefits conferred by travel. Commenting on the Permian-
Triassic catastrophes, where an estimated ninety-six percent of the families of marine
organisms ceased their existence, he says:
There are few defenses against a catastrophe of such magnitude, and survivors may
simply be among the lucky 4 percent. As the Permian extinction set the basic pattern of
life's subsequent diversity (no new phyla and few classes have originated since then),
our current panoply of major designs may not represent a set of best adaptations, but
fortunate survivors.
Would the stripping of half the Earth's crust and an associated expansion and cleavage
of the Earth, together with a paving of the ocean basins, all occurring within several
thousand years and most of it very quickly in a single action complex, exterminate
entirely the biosphere? Even the most determined catastrophists have passed over so
frightful a concept. If, as has been conjectured, a meteoroid explosion of a few
kilometers' diameter would destroy the dinosaurs, the colossal event portrayed here
would annihilate all life.
To counter this universal scepticism, there is the fact that life does flourish today
despite the event, so that if the event were proved, then the scepticism would have to
vanish. However, taken as a problem in its own right, instead of an inference
determined by an external logic, we should stress certain possibilities in the event of
lunar fission.
1. The atmosphere at the time might have been enormously greater and so extending far
into space to permit a reviving reverse flow to replace the escaping atmosphere, and to
act at the same time as a great vacuum cleaner against the heavy dust clouds and heated
air.
2. Although an enormous number of species may be extincted, only several survivors of a
species may guarantee a replenishment of continental scope within centuries.
3. The possibility must be entertained that hitherto unused intra-species genetic
adaptability can permit survivors of modified form under stresses seemingly quite
destructive.
4. Holospheric catastrophes by their very complexity can block each other's effects,
allowing some life-preserving niches to survive and even fabricating niches where none
existed before.
It is no longer rare to hear scientists arguing an intervention from outer space to
push evolution along. Objections arise from extreme proposals, whether of intelligent
visitors or of lower orders. "Extraterrestrial footsteps on the sands of history," R.
E. Dickerson has remarked, "do not seem to be mandatory." [27] They would be
superfluous, for that matter, if a quantavolutionary theory has laid down the sands.
Further, as detailed in Solaria Binaria, if exoterrestrial voyagers had landed on Earth
they might well have felt at home. Until quite recently, their former planetary abode
would have provided a genetic milieu in the same vast plenum of atmospheric gases that
the Earth enjoyed. However, Mars and Mercury have lost practically all of their life-
support systems while the Earth has retained a crucial halo of air and a vast supply of
water.
In itself this can be made into an argument for a short term of life on Earth. The more
one studies the possibilities of natural disasters the more likely it appears that,
over long stretches of time, these would have been so frequent as to make a total
disaster much more likely to occur. That is, if several disasters are granted, given
the same Earth and Universe, why did not many occur and why not worse? Assigning the
Earth and its species five billion years of self-development may turn out to have been
a frustrating detour in the history of the human mind. By contrast, encapsulating the
disasters within a unified theory, quantavolution, may prove enlightening and
progressive.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-seven: Genesis and Extinction)
1. Despatch, UP Int'1,19 April 1982. He is Res. Director, Patuxent Wildlife Research
Center.
2. Op. cit.
3. Op. cit.
4. "Knowledge and Entropy," 3 Catas. Geol. (June 1978), 17-9.
5. 'How Many Species?" 6 Evolution (1952), 342; Teichert, "How many Species?" 30 J.
Paleont. (1973), 967-9
6. Op. cit., 12
7. James Brough," Time and Evolution," in Studies in Fossil Vertebrates, Atlone,
London, 1958, 38, 34, 36.
8. Tempo and Mode in Evolution, (NY: Columbia U. Press, 1944) 106; see review of his
Splendid Isolation (New Haven, Conn: Yale U. Press, 19800 by Jill Abery, S. I. S. 4
Workshop (1981), 25-332.
9. "The Problem of Missing Links: Today and Yesterday," 56 Q. R. Biol. (1981), 405-40;
cf Mark Ridley, "Evolution and Gaps in the Fossil Record," 286 Nature (31 July, 1980),
444-5.
10. Nature (3 Dec. 1981).
11. David A. Rodabaugh, "Probability and the Missing Transitional Forms," 13 Creation
Res. Soc. Q.( Sep 1976), 116-9.
12. Principles of Paleontology, 1971 (San Francisco: Freeman, 1971), 306.
13. 121 Sci. News, (Feb. 6 1982), 84.
14. V Ency. Britannica (1974), 576.
15. S. M. Stanley, "Stability of Species in Geologic Time," 192 Science (16 April,
1976), 267-8.
16. C. W. Harper, Jr., comment, 192 Science (16 Apr. 1976), 269-70.
17. II Kronos 2( 1976), 91-100.
18. NASA, news release 69/ 80, 27 May 1969.
19. Op. cit., 550-7.
20. Op. cit.
21. S. Martin, and H. E. Wright, Jr., ed., Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a
Cause (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U. Press, 1967).
22. 3 Catas. Geol. 1 (June 1978), 8; additional data in 10 Geos 3 (Summer 1981), 8.
23. Op. cit., 18-9.
24. NY Times, Jan 19, 1982, C1.
25. 48 J Paleontology (May 1974) 549-52.
26. 3 Catas. Geol. (June 1978), 4-7.
27. Letter, Sci. Amer. (Dec. 1978), 10.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part VI: Biospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
PANDEMONIUM
Polite language exclaims, "Pandemonium ensued..." In ruder language, "All hell broke
loose..." In either case all (pan-) demons (daemon-) are in action (ium). "Pan" was a
god as well as the word for "all." He was the son of Hermes (Mercury) according to one
story. He was a noisy disturber of the peace, a collector of disorderly crowds, an
orgiastic god of revelers. He was by no means a symbol of sounds alone but of general
tumult. Great noises are all-absorbing and entrancing, as the rock-music discotheques
aim to prove. Pandemonium is not only the sounds and their effects in themselves but
also the meanings that their auditors place upon them. In the end, the catastrophic
pandemonium evolves into music.
A pandemonium is how high-energy sounds to people as it bursts upon the human world. A
spectre is how high-energy is seen by people as it occurs. Smell and taste are affected
also in the processes studied by the earth sciences. A natural catastrophe, especially,
is a holistic event: every human sense, and every part of the habitat, is affected.
Pandemonium is the capital of Hell in Milton's Paradise Lost. Elsewhere, Plato
offhandedly mentions a catastrophe that he does not name and says that the survivors
came down from the mountains with their ears ringing. Hesiod, in his Theogony, speaks of
Mother Earth (Gaea) groaning under the pressures of Ouranos in primordial times. Here
are reasons for treating of sounds in earth sciences: their natural origins and their
effects on the biosphere. Observers of high energy forces without exception dwell upon
their sounds. When we learn more of them, we shall know more about the earth sciences.
There will be a place for a few acoustical geologists among volcanologists,
seismologists, meteorologists, and paleontologists. When a bad local flood occurs, as it
did at Wilkes-Barre (Pa.) in the spring of 1973, the physical processes are mediated by
television through their sights and sounds; there occur physical destruction, economic
dislocation and distress -all of them mediated through the eyes and ears. Admissions to
nearby mental hospitals went up sharply; also the use of hard drugs, and the suicide
rate.
In the great Alaska earthquake of 1964, the destruction, death, terror, sounds and
sights all together made their lasting impact on people. Psychiatric symptoms such as
depression, withdrawal, guilt feelings, and irrational blaming of people were common
reactions. The churches came alive with repenters and worshippers.
Modern cases permit us to empathize with the ancients. Exaggerate them a thousandfold
and one gains an impression of the ancient experience. We read in the log of a ship's
captain at sea near the exploding Krakatoa: "So violent are the explosions that the
eardrums of over half my crew have been shattered... I am convinced that the Day of
Judgement has come." [1] The climactic blast was heard 3000 miles away. A crazed
survivor ashore insisted that "the Arch Fiend stood everywhere, implacable, unpitying,
offering help to none, listening to no imploration."
We are told that when the volcano at Cosequina, Nicaragua, erupted on January 30, 1835,
the explosion was heard in Jamaica, 850 miles away. The blast was so terrible that at
one village "300 of those who lived in a state of concubinage were married at once."
Tornados have their own repertoire.
A tornado, like thunder, is heard many miles away. As it approaches, there is a peculiar
whistling sound that rapidly changes to an intense roar, reaching a deafening crescendo
as it strikes. The screeching of the whirling winds is then so loud that the noises
caused by the fall of wrecked buildings, the crashing of trees, and the destruction of
other objects is seldom heard. The bellowing of a million mad bulls; the roar of ten
thousand freight trains; like that of a million cannons; the buzzing of a million bees
(when the tornado is high in the air), and, more recently, the roar of jet airplanes -
these are some of the phrases used by those who have experienced a tornado [2] .
And so to meteors: Frank Lane writes of the meteoric shower of February 9, 1913 that was
first seen at Saskatchewan, Canada, and last seen off the Brazilian coast, 6000 miles
away. "As they passed southeast over Ontario they grew more brilliant and great
explosions were heard. Detonations and earth tremors were caused along the path of the
procession to distances of 20 to 70 miles on either side." In 1958, L. LaPaz wrote, "To
listen to the sound effects produced by a large meteorite fall is a unique and awe-
inspiring experience. Neither a hedge-hopping jet nor a keyholing rocket gives rise to
the sky-filling reverberations set up by a falling meteorite." [3] Neither a nuclear
blast, with its single report, one might add.
The rumbling, grinding, screaming sounds of earthquakes are well-known. Velikovsky
quotes the plaint of the Egyptian scribe of Papyrus Ipuwer at the time of Exodus:
Years of noise... There is no end to noise... Oh, that the Earth would cease from noise,
and tumult (uproar) be no more.
The ancient Greek poet Euripides speaks in Hippolytis of tidal waves near Corinth:
An angry sound, slow swelling Like god-made thunder underground A wave unearthly crested
in the sky; Till Sciron's Cape first vanished from my eye, Then sank the Isthmus hidden,
then the rock of Epidaurus. Then it broke, one shock and roar of gasping sea and spray
flung far, and shoreward swept.
In assessing what such sounds do to humans, it is well to recall that the age of
firecrackers, firearms, cannon, dynamite, and nuclear blasts is young. The first
detonation of dynamite occurred in 1881 [4] . Primeval sounds were entirely of nature,
apart from the pathetic imitations of sounds made by humans. If the paradigm of this
book is correct about Pangea, the pre-quantavolutionary, pre-human period of late times,
the world was peaceful and orderly, with overcast skies and little celestial or
terrestrial turbulence. Man's ears were not made for explosions any more than his eyes
were made to stare at the sun. A tiger's roar, an elephant's trumpeting, squeaks,
whines, growls, yells, the splashing of waters, the snapping of twigs, the slumping of
old trees -this in our theory was the pre-holocene acoustical environment.
However, and it is argued so in Chaos and Creation and Homo Schizo I, awful noise
descended upon the first humans, as they were being born. Great noise was from the first
heard as a manifestation of the gods, a theophany. When meteoroids broke through the
skies, when cataclysms began, then came a pandemonium that terrified humankind, that
drove people mad, that deafened them, and that catastrophized human nature and culture,
together with their ecology.
Stephens reports that accidents, absenteeism and other factors indicating degradation of
human performance can be correlated with infrasonic waves arriving from storms 2000
miles away [5] . Infrasonic waves cause nausea, disequilibrium, disorientation,
blurring of vision and lassitude. All of these have been described as accompanying
earthquakes, ball lightning and volcanism [6] .
Some thunderous and strange sounds accompanying the passage of meteorites are
attributable to the friction and collapsing vacuum of passage, but others have been
theorized as products of the conversion of kinetic energy into electromagnetic
radiation. Romig and Lamar have studied this problem. The high velocity of such waves
would explain why some meteoric sounds are heard during and even before the visual
sighting of meteors [7] . C. S. L. Keay has recently summarized from New South Wales
many reliable reports of a large fireball in the atmosphere, tens of kilometers high,
whose sounds reached the ears instantly with hisses, hums, swishes and crackling. [8]
Frederic Jueneman has speculated, on the basis of apparent acoustically provoked
mutations in a London bomb crater from World War II, that catastrophic acoustics may
have been an active mutator in ancient times [9] . The sensitivities of plants and
animals to sounds has been widely surveyed by P. Tompkins and C. Bird [10] .
The splendors of auroral displays vary with the behavior of the Sun and the Earth's
magnetosphere, among other factors. They stretch from 90 to 400 kilometers high, and on
occasion seem to dip down to the very plane of the viewers. They, like all other
fascinating phenomena of nature have been held responsible for the allegedly mad
legendary accounts of catastrophes. Thus the ancient Teutons might recite their sagas of
a world on fire, but uniformitarians, unimpressed, would see in these only the auroras
that the northern peoples were lucky enough to view. This is a topic for another time
and another author: spectres of colors, rays, and lurid skies were plentiful in cosmic
disasters, exceeding the auroras. Every disaster has its color scheme and geometric
figures.
It has its sounds as well, and the aurora can join other natural forces even today in
suggesting the pandemonium of catastrophe. An account by Hans Jelstrup, a Norwegian
astronomer, in 1927, exemplifies the auroral visual and auditory experience [11] :
When, with my assistant, at 19h 15m Greenwich Civil Time, I went out of the observatory
to observe the aurora, the latter seemed to be at its maximum: yellow-green and fan-
shaped, it undulated above, from zenith downwards - and at the same time both of us
noticed a very curious faint whistling sound distinctly undulatory, which seemed to
follow exactly the vibrations of the aurora.
They later proceeded to record the impulses on an instrument and found "the vertical
component was greater than 100 microvolt / meter."
Many years earlier, another Norwegian had polled persons from "all parts of the country"
about the sounds of the aurora and received "92 affirmations against 21 negations." [12]
Apparently many people provided a surprisingly large set of descriptions. They used
words and phrases like: sizzling, creaking, soft whizzing, the sound of tearing silk,
"hoy, hoy, hoy," a rustling stream, crackling, rolling din in the air, clashing, like a
flapping flag, flapping of sails, hissing of fire, the sound of a flight of birds, the
buzzing of a bee, roaring of wind, soft breeze, roaring of the sea, a distant waterfall.
What can be made of this, aside from its entertaining aspect, is that the sounds of
nature are legion; that these join the centurions of electrical sounds; and that a
record is to be had of all these sounds in these mild times of the Earth that can be
used to identify ancient and legendary metaphors of sound. So that when dragons hiss and
flaming rays dart from their nostrils, one does not simply say here is an especially
exciting auroral display, but assigns to the dragon hypothetically the electrical
qualities and sounds of the aurora or of bolides whose "sounds are described as hissing,
swishing, whirring, buzzing and crackling" when they have the "brightness of the full
moon" and reach the observer at the same time as the visual image does [13] . So, too
when in Ezekiel (XLIII, 2) it is said that the voice of the Lord "was like the sound of
many waters." Ancient records and legends are rich mines of electrical allusions from
which not only the state of electrical phenomena can be assessed but also the electrical
technology of early cultures can be surmised; this field, ignored hitherto, is being
researched by J. Ziegler.
The Books of Moses carry testimony of great celestial noise that cannot be rationalized
as ordinary thunder. And Noah, it is said in Jewish legend, was spoken to by a voice
from the sky amidst a great commotion. This followed the failing of things upon the
earth and was followed by the Deluge. The story of Job, later on, reads: "Hear ye
attentively the terror of his voice, and the sound that cometh out of his mouth." Again:
after the ends of the earth are lit up, "a noise shall roar, he shall thunder with the
voice of his majesty, and shall not be found out when his voice shall be heard." A
circum-global sound.
As the Jews passed from Egypt in the tumult of Exodus, they paused at Sinai. "I am
Yahweh," heard the people during the night at the Mountain of the Lawgiving. "And all
the people saw the roars, and the torches, and the noise of the trumpet, and the
mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood far off." Ten
blasts of the trumpet sounded out the Decalogue, legend tells us also.
Great sounds were reported from around the world: the Babylonian Gilgamish epic: "Loud
did the firmament roar, and earth with echo resounded." Hesiod's Theogony: the huge
Earth groaned when Zeus lashed Typhon with his bolts -"the earth resounded terribly, and
the wide heaven above." Velikovsky pursues the name Yahweh elsewhere: he finds Jo, Jove
(Jupiter); Yahou, Yao (Chinese emperor of the age); Ju Ju huwe, (an Indonesian
invocation to heavenly bodies): Yahou, Yo (in the Hebrew Bible); Yao, Yaotl (ancient
Mexico); Yahu (ejaculation of the Puget Sound Indians and other Amer-lndians when they
performed the ritual of raising up the fallen sky off the earth) [14] .
It is perhaps of some significance that Cohane has found Haue, a Middle-English god-
name, in the names of gods, sacred places, rivers, salutations, and objects all over the
world into the hundreds of instances. "In the landscape of the Old Testament part of the
world is still overflowing with Hawa place-names." [15] All sound alike despite
spellings such as oa.., ua.., awa.., huwa.., oua.., wa.., and so on. Provisionally, we
may entertain the idea that the sound of great natural events were incorporated in the
basic vocabulary of new-born humanity. If so, the popularity of the "awah" sound is at
least as ancient as the time of Moses (circa 1500 B. C.), and probably several thousands
of years older, and would also then be carried on down to modern times. 'Yow," "wow,"
and "ow" are everyday American slang exclamations. The divine voices were also heard
later on. A Babylonian hymn to Nergal (Mars) is of the first millennium B. C. and reads:
His word makes human beings sick,
It enfeebles them
His word - when he makes his way above -
Makes the country sick.
[16]
The motions, noise, and gases of a heavenly body of large dimensions seem to be
indicated here. The god Mars is referred to in Babylonia as the God of Noise. There is
an insistent connection of noise with the planet Mars.
The connections between heavenly sounds, sacred events, and the beginnings of music
appear to be secure. From Chernikov, in the Ukraine, Soviet scholars reported finding
mammoth bones converted into skull drums, shoulder blade kettle drums, and lower-jaw
xylophones, at an estimated date of 20,000 years. If the instruments, all of the drum
family, are correctly identified, it would mean that the settlement was fully human,
with a religion. For nowhere is there any indication of musical instruments or musical
sounds that are not connected with the heavenly host.
When the Wonguri tribe of Australia conducts today its holy dream time ceremonies, the
assemblage beat sticks together; the dancers keep rhythm; and the stories of earliest
times are recounted, of the time the Moon left their land forever and the morning star
accompanied her. Ancient Greek myth tells of the infant Zeus; he was being hidden from
his father Kronos who would swallow him; his nurses, the Curetes, drowned his cries with
drums, cymbals, and dancers.
Drumming and whistling may be the oldest emulated sounds. The bull-roarer is an ancient
and world-wide instrument, a primitive noise-maker that whips the air into a sound like
a falling body. It thunders and whistles. Perhaps whistling also developed with a pipe
or fife. The horn, whence the trumpet, might follow; it is a piercing and blasting
instrument. The arched string instrument -harp, lyre -must have joined the sacred group
quickly. All together they reproduce the music of the spheres and of the gods.
In earliest China the drums were used to communicate with heaven. The drum comes from
K'uei, a green oxlike creature who came out of the sea shining like the sun and moon and
making a noise like thunder. He was captured by Huang-ti who made him into a drumskin.
But the same K'uei is also the master of music who alone can bring harmony between the
six pipes and the seven modes. Without this harmony heaven and earth would lack their
essential music. K'uei was also master of the forge, of dance, and of regulating floods
[17] .
The sickle with which Kronos (Saturn) castrated Ouranos (Uranus) was also the harpe
(lyre) of Demeter who had taught the Titans to reap. The strings of the lyre were
ultimately five or seven, corresponding to the number of spheres counted as planets.
Vail thought that the arch of the harp and sickle came from the opening of the boreal
hole of the north when the regime of canopy skies began first to break down; the arch
was the sickle; it was also the arch of the lyre, and the strings to be plucked were the
beams of light playing down upon the earth.
Here, as in many other cases, an issue is whether the sacred image came before the
invention or the invention was made and compared with a later celestial image. As usual
I incline towards the position that the sacred example preceded the profane.
The correspondence between the number of planets and the number of strings on the lyre
is an instance in point. It is only one of many. The number of observed planets
obviously determines the number of strings on the instrument, not vice versa. An old
Chinese text says that "the calendar and the pitch pipes have such a close fit, that you
could not slip a hair between them." [18] This seems an odd expression until one
realizes that the sacred calendar is replete with a synchronous musical calendar -from
Easter music to Christmas music, for example. The pipes are pitched to heavenly sounds
and numbers; the calendar is an arrangement of heavenly events.
The Pythagorean philosophy of ancient Greek culture generated the theory of music and
the theory of numbers out of the behavior of the heavens. The "harmony of the spheres"
of which the ancients spoke was probably first the sounds of heaven of the "better"
sort, to which humans might adjust, and which, to them, presaged a tranquil stability,
and then later, inferentially, the visual reliable order of the heavenly bodies as noted
and welcomed by philosophical astronomers.
Robert Temple has been able to locate a fundamental connection between geodesy in Egypt
and Greece. The Greeks and Assyro-Babylonians had the heptatonic or seven-toned diatonic
scale of today. The Egyptians possessed a musical octave of seven degrees (that is, an
eight-tone scale, such as the West has today). The same seven degrees was the geodetic
principle followed in the topographical surveying of Egypt. For the Egyptians, 1 North
was at Behdet and 8 was at the southernmost limits, by the Great Cataract of the Nile.
Further, Temple, with suggestions by L. Stecchini, established an octave of centers for
oracles: running up the lines of latitude and musical scale at equal intervals, thus:
Barce, Triton, Paphos, Omphalos (Crete), Kythera (or Thera perhaps), Delos, Delphi and
Dodona [19] .
Robert Graves has reported an octaval version of the name of Yahweh, Jehuovao. The
sacred name can then be pronounced and chanted as a set of vowels running the gamut of a
musical scale. We are reminded of the connections between Egyptian and Hebrew culture,
when Demetrius wrote: "In Egypt the priests sing hymns to gods by uttering the seven
vowels in succession, the sound of which produces as strong a musical impression on
their hearers as if flute or lyre were used." The seven vowels were uttered in
succession as the divine unspeakable name [20] .
Musical sound, and also noise, can be broken down into pitch, rhythm, timbre and volume.
The first instruments specialized in rhythms, for instance, and had variations of pitch,
timbre and volume. The pipe or flute specialized in pitching different tones and a
whistling timbre. Using such elements in combinations, music could be built up. But it
would not have been possible without the basic psychological changes that were taking
place in people. Control of themselves and the gods was the paramount motivation behind
the people who originated music and all other aspects of culture.
The humans had a compulsion to repeat their first experiences, which were naturally
terrible; this is explained fully in my work, Homo Schizo I. The repetition of rhythms
is the repetition of the sounds of the gods at work upon the world. The orgiastic side
of music - the furious beatings, poundings, amplitudes, blasts, whirling dances and
frenzied lyrics -is an imitation of the behavior of the gods in the days of creation.
The orgiasm is the basis of the plot of song and chant; it gives the melody line, the
beginning, middle and ending.
Repetition and orgiasm shape the four elements of music, and lend form both to the
instrument and to the unique composition prescribed for it. The very design of an
instrument is intended to supply a limited span of capabilities to the musical elements.
Not only does the music itself follow patterns under strict general rules, but the
instrument is a mechanical contrivance to see that the rules are obeyed.
To all of this is added from the start the sublimation that the music affords. Tests of
endurance, involving the basic, and destructive, elements of earth, air, water, and
especially fire, sometimes are incorporated into the dance and music. Battles of the
gods, too, may be emulated. The gods are being controlled at the same time as they are
being celebrated and honored; the audience is being controlled as it celebrates and
honors the gods.
"Heavenly sounds" are a contradiction; they are actually the suppressed and sublimated
sounds from heaven that destroyed the world. In The Holy Dreamtime of the Australian
Womburi is a Holy Dreamtime of all other peoples -for all peoples have them. Sacred
myth, song, dance, and music provide an escape from horror by saying and doing all that
was said and done in those days in a way that remembers in order to forget.
Contemporary music that is avant-garde has the subconscious ambition, certainly doomed
to fail, of confronting the terrible days of catastrophe directly. It brushes aside the
sublimation, and the compulsive repetitiveness of music. It destroys expectation, and
unleashes the gods. It destroys form by atonalism and arhythmism. It randomizes the four
elements. Whatever happens in a sound-producing setting - "a happening" - is "music."
The computer is used to reduce dependency upon skills, pitch, volume, rhythms, and
timbre. It creates the mixture that is the "true reality". All this is often done
without full realization. It is nevertheless a largely honest attempt to return to the
primeval chaos in which humanity was born.
I have known geologists to taste stones and drippings, to smell in crevices, to feel the
texture of rocks, to tap a fracture and listen, and of course to hold up a specimen to
view by every angle of light. Hence it is not a radical departure from the earth
sciences if we carry our inquiry into broader realms of sound and light. Our intent is
not to create a marriage of sciences and humanities: that is good in its own right and
if it is a by-product of this interest, so much the better. Our motive is to understand
and possibly to reconstruct natural history. Whereupon it happens that, once the idea of
the constancy of natural events through long eras of time is put aside, and another
model of inquiry is advanced, we must take advantage of the treasury afforded by human
history. The dumb rocks can tell their stories in part through human lips. All the
motions that are forbidden the dead past are resumed through the sights visited upon
early human eyes. The sounds and sights of events that witnesses and their descendents
describe are clues about an Earth that is less static and more dynamic than the earth
sciences have heretofore portrayed.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-eight: Pandemonium)
1. Furneaux, Krakatoa, 188.
2. Frank Lane, The Elements Rage, loc. cit., 1958,
3. Ibid., 179.
4. IV Ency. Britannica (1974), 955.
5. R. W. B. Stephens, 7 Ultrasonic (Jan. 1969), 30-5.
6. See Corliss, op. cit., CrSD-045, GI-232 from Monthly Weather R (Feb. 1895), 57.
7. 28 Sky and Telescope (Oct. 1964), 215.
8. C. S. L. Keay, "The 1978 New South Wales Fireball," 285 Nature (1980), 464-6.
9. I PensÚe 4( 1973), 112.
10. The Secret Life of Plants (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
11. Reported in Carl St÷rner, The Polar Aurora (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 137.
12. S. Tromholt, 32 Nature (24 Sept. 1885). 499-500.
13. Daniel S. Gilmor, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (NY: Bantam, 1969)
as reported in Corliss, op. cit., C1-235, GSH-001, from M. D. Altschuler paper.
14. Examples here are from Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision.
15. J. P. Cohane, The Key (NY: Crown, 1969).
16. Velikovsky., Worlds in Collision, 263.
17. Santillana and von Dechend, op. cit., 125-8.
18. Ibid., 4.
19. Op. cit, 29. 20. Ibid., 266
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part VI: Biospherics
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SPECTRES
To recount the visual experiences of ancient humans in regard to natural phenomena would
be a work of thousands of pages of agonies, joys, and revelations. However, the reader
is probably aware of their nature through voluntary and inescapable exposure to fairy
tales and horror movies. The earth sciences will profit more from a discussion of some
relationships between natural events and the spectres that accompany them. I shall avoid
speaking of the eyes when used functionally, as, for example, to assess damage or to
organize a new life. Rather I shall concentrate upon the visual effect in itself, and
what it conveys about natural events.
Uniformitarians usually abandon their position on change when it comes to what ancient
voices convey about natural events. That is, in order to hold on to their belief in a
natural world that changes by gradual evolution rather than by quantavolution, they say
that humans have changed their "exaggeration-rate." They often deny ancient testimony,
using pseudo-anthropological arguments that early mankind was superstitious and
excitable, hence quite unreliable. What he claimed to see were in fact illusions and
delusions; what he passed on as memories were gross exaggerations. In other words,
nature behaves in the same way; man has changed.
This theory we find unacceptable, as also we do its accompanying statements, that
typically proceed like this:
Ancient people are not to be believed if they say that a large body was spotted and
approached in the sky. Or that bodies of all shapes and sizes rushed high and low
through the skies. When mountains and land are seen to rise, and at other times watched
as they sink, this must be an illusion and an exaggeration. No one could have seen a
wall of towering water. That there should have fallen sheets of flame and weird colored
waters or dense substances, including even life forms, that ice and hail should fall in
deluges and wind should sweep away forests: these again were delusions. Seeing the
landscape dissolve in an earthquake, while even the air is rendered into visible shock
waves, and seeing the Earth explode and pour out boiling magma from cracks and cones:
again illusions. Telling of the destruction of almost all that was living: people must
have been psychotic to make up and pass along stories of such events.
The quantavolutionary position is that they were probably psychotic, but partially
because of the nature of such events. Thus, to some extent, we become uniformitarian in
respect to human psychology as we become quantavolutionary in regard to nature.
An increasing number of studies of modern mankind in disaster lead us to accord greater
reliability to ancient stories. A severe trauma of terror, such as the nuclear blast at
Hiroshima, leaves the survivors quite catastrophized. What happens thereafter matters
little to the survivor. Subsequent sights are likely to fall upon a numbed and hopeless
creature. Where survivors are reduced to hopelessness, few lift their hands to help
others. The prognosis of the group is poor. Studies of the aftermath of Hiroshima have
shown this to be the case. Each succeeding horrible sight is seen by eyes becoming too
jaded to respond. We should bear in mind, too, that Hiroshima was a local event, a
minute fraction of what many a fossil agglomeration and extinct volcano chain tells us
once happened. When we see millions of trees all felled at once buried in the Fens of
England, a blast many times greater than Hiroshima has to be postulated.
After the explosion and tidal wave of Krakatoa, a survivor spoke of scenes "too horrible
to remember; incidents that reminded of the animal instinct that enables people to do
the impossible." [1] When a fireball blazed erratically across the Southern States of
the U. S. A. on March 24, 1933, people were terrified. "Ninninger (1936) says that
seasoned cattlemen, accustomed to facing the vicissitudes of life and who ordinarily
knew no such thing as fear, told him they despaired of their lives during these
'terrible moments. ' Yet they were 75 miles from the fireball's nearest approach !" [2]
If, however, people on the periphery of a disaster survive, these will be terrorized but
hopeful of themselves. Even this was noted at Hiroshima. If after days, months, years or
centuries, a disaster of the same dimensions strikes, and again some survive - some of a
new generation, too -then the memory and meaning of catastrophe is reinforced. But again
the survivors are active, self-preservative, and hopeful. They still can believe in some
surcease and control. They have meanwhile established relations with gods and nature,
the very forces of wrath. They can immediately interpret the events, and produce one or
more inventions to propitiate and control the gods and, therefore, the events.
Prophets will help them to remember and to react:
The Lord will smite you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind; and you shall
grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness... (Deuteronomy)
And they shall go into the holes of the rocks .... for fear of the Lord and for the
glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth... (Isaiah)
The great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast... l will bring distress on
men, so that they shall walk like the blind, because they have sinned against the Lord;
their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung... (Jeremiah)
I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms
.... the horses and their riders shall go down, everyone by the sword of his fellow...
(Haggai)
These are the visions of prophets and there are many more like them, posed as promises,
to be sure, but with the full assuredness that comes from past experiences. We note
marks of genuineness: going into caves during earthquakes (for the sky brings worse
terrors); the kingdoms are overthrown, then the survivors attack each other; the
survivors are stunned, maddened, functionally blinded. The preventatives are difficult,
if not impossible: that all should worship faithfully and properly, and obey divine
commandments.
Now here is a legend of the Indians of the Badlands of South Dakota. It tells of how the
Badlands came into being, laying it onto violations of the will of the Great Spirit who
had granted plenty but had decreed peace, and there was no peace. Warriors prepared for
battle:
At last all were assembled and the day had come for the advance. And now the Great
Spirit took matters into His own hands. Dark clouds hid the sun from the face of the
world. Lightning streaked across the blackness and thunder rumbled high over the hills.
From the ground flamed forth fire, and the earth shuddered and rocked. A wide gulf
opened and into it sank the mountain tribe - all their people - all that they possessed.
With them sank all life - the waving grass - the clear springs - the animals.
As suddenly as it came the storm ceased. The earth became fixed in waves as it had
rolled and shaken. There was only a barren waste on which nothing has ever grown or can
grow [3] .
After a catastrophe, the sights of doom are only partially capable of recall. They are
personalized, humanized. Then they tend to fade over time. They are sublimated in many
ways. The history seems to us strange; it is literal, detailed, yet surreal, as in the
Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I discussed the geology of the story in Chapter 22.
When the family of Lot, warned by an angel, was fleeing the doomed Cities of the Plain,
it was forbidden to look back. The Cities were utterly destroyed. Lot's wife turned to
look and was transformed into a pillar of salt. Thus did subsequent generations, perhaps
even the descendants of the family (who violated the taboo against incest to perpetuate
themselves), remember the event and tie themselves personally and visually into it.
Of salt in the Great Rift Valley of the Jordan there was plenty or perhaps just then it
came to be plenty and is plenty today. It was a convenient "memory tag", to imagine a
seen horror encased in a pillar of material produced out of the holocaust itself; then
'this is where Lot's wife was frozen with fear and died' becomes 'this is where Lot's
wife became a pillar of salt because she viewed the terrible wrath of the Lord. ' That
is, the story is tied into the event all the more closely. That there may have been
nothing left of her except a location and new salt would help, if true, to explain the
story. The others, who dared not look back, would have no way of knowing.
I am not arguing for literalism but for "spectralism" which I would define as subjective
realism: first, a sympathetic and fully possible truth has to be searched for and, then,
whatever is left over as "false" has to be explained in the vision of the subjects and
of their immediate descendant, and finally in objective psychological and
anthropological terms.
A much broader range of cases may advance the argument. There is, for example, the
dragon. Everyone knows what a dragon is. All do not know that it is a theophany, a
divine manifestation. And that the creature is closely tied to visions of events in the
sky, many times repeated.
Chamber's Encyclopedia, defunct now for many years, carried a charming passage on the
dragon:
The dragon appears in the mythical history and legendary poetry of almost every nation,
as the emblem of the destructive and anarchical principle; ... as misdirected physical
force and untamable animal passions... The dragon proceeds openly to work, running on
its feet with expanded wings, and head and tail erect, violently and ruthlessly
outraging decency and propriety, spouting fire and fury from both mouth and tail, and
wasting and devastating the whole land.
The dragon is regarded as a benevolent creature by the Chinese, however. And no people
has been so devoted to the symbol. Its iconography was as intense as that of the
crucifixion of Christ in Medieval Europe. Recently, Carl Sutherland found that the
dragon made its appearance in Chinese art around 1500 B. C. [4] This date is a well-
marked catastrophic boundary, known in radiochronometry, archaeology, geology, legend
and history. Eliminating bit by bit "all later accretions," he thinks that he has
"attained some understanding of the sight observed by the ancient Chinese: a writhing,
bright, elongated thing. It was irregular in outline; it was apparently on fire... This
thing, the dragon, seemed to be driving off the terrible flaming globe and so to be
benevolent as well as powerful." Later on it was given legs and scales. It is almost
always shown in the heavens. Flame symbols show the sky to be on fire. The globe carries
lightning and thunder symbols as well as fire symbols. (Probably the lightning generated
the moving legs of later representations.) The Chinese Emperor with a "Dragon Face," sat
on the "Dragon Throne" wearing robes of state on which dragons were displayed.
Dwardu Cardona has presented first-hand descriptions of comets that compare them with
dragons [5] . The accounts range from England to China. The comet of 449 A. D.
stretched over England from beyond Gaul to the Irish Sea, "a ball of fire, spreading
forth in the likeness of a dragon, and from the mouth of the dragon issued forth two
rays..." Thus wrote Geoffrey of Monmouth. Some comets "lash their tails" wildly.
The Chinese "Kung Kung" dragon flung himself in rage against the heavenly mountain,
turning the skies around, and tilting and flooding the world. He had a son-dragon,
"K'au-fu" who wished to keep pace with the Sun. K'au-fu tried to quench his thirst en
route by drinking up the rivers of China but succumbed finally of thirst. Cardona
identifies the myth with the Phaeton myth and episode. Phaeton, eager to drive the Sun's
chariot, did so incompetently. Legends recite that he came so close to Earth that the
rivers of Asia, Africa and Europe dried up. Strabo's Geography mentions the terror of
the Syrians and Aramaeans at the sight of Typhon, probably the same as Phaeton [6] .
That the myth of Phaeton describes a shifting of heavenly bodies, we know from Plato.
That Phaeton was a comet, or a 'blazing star, ' we know from Cicero. That this 'blazing
star' became a planet, we know from Hesiod. And that this planet was the planet Venus,
we know from both Nonnos and Solinus [7] .
Then Cardona takes up the question of the Chinese "fire pearls," or "tear drops of the
Moon." These we have discussed as the tektites, which are scattered over the Earth. He
concludes that they splashed upon Earth after great meteoroids or cosmic lightning
discharges had blasted the Moon. Possibly it was the work of the cometary Venus, for the
dragon Lung is pictured chasing a great pearl across the sky. And the fear that the Moon
will be devoured by a comet is part of some legends and modern anthropological reports.
That the ancients may have actually observed such bursts upon the Moon is argued by
astronomer Jack B. Hartung [8] . According to the Chronicles of Gervase, for June 18,
1178, at Canterbury, England, five persons witnessed with their naked eyes the explosion
of a crater. Hartung estimates it as perhaps 13 miles in diameter. In Gervase's words:
A flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals,
and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon which was below writhed, as it were, in
anxiety...
Whether this writhing was an illusion created by air waves or an actual rolling seismism
of the Moon's surface is not to be known. Bancroft once reported an Aztec legend that
the sun and moon emerged equally bright, but to the gods this was not seemly; so one god
took a rabbit by the heels and slung it in the face of the moon, dimming its luster with
a blotch whose mark is seen to this day [9] .
Great events have impacts on human behavior and human behavior can be sometimes used to
conjecture upon possible great events. One must reason back and forth, trying all the
while to avoid circular argument. A difficult case is the similar duration of the lunar
cycle (today) and the menstrual cycle of women (today). The one is 29.5 days; the second
can vary from 21 to 35 days, but concentrates upon 29 days. Gestation occupies generally
nine moon cycles. Various scholars have mentioned these 'coincidences. ' Recent studies
have shown that the Moon cycle is more closely followed when women of varying menstrual
periods are shut up in a room where they cannot be aware of moontime and suntime; they
unconsciously tend to approach the lunar revolution.
It is ordinarily believed that the Moon was on the present cycle long before the first
human evolved. Anthropologists have maintained that the coincidence ultimately
reinforced human attention upon the Moon and also provided specious grounds for marking
the peculiarity and witchcraftiness of the female sex. Menstruation is often the subject
of taboos [10] . In some places, women in menstruation must not be seen. Harsh
penalties for violations of menstrual taboos are common.
Under the quantavolutionary theory here, it would be possible to view the "ideal"
menstrual cycle as itself determined by the cycle of the Moon. Only the human female
behaves on the monthly cycle. A psychosomatic response to the greatly feared and revered
goddess and god of the Moon, newly in place and settled into a regularity, could be
achieved by disciplining a varying physiological function. People will go to any lengths
to harmonize their behavior with that of their gods. (I discuss this subject in the
volumes on Homo Schizo.) To bind a whole sex and indirectly a whole people by its
important reproductive cycle to the Moon god who passed them in daily review would
appear to be a principal invention of the human race. There was strong incentive to
devise this proof of devotion to the great god: it had ceased to bring ruin on the world
and was guarding the new peace.
"Spectralism" might propose another case for consideration. How long have nights and
days characterized earthly existence? A legend has persisted down to our times on the
high plateau of Bolivia, around the impressive ruins of Tiahuanacu, that the city
existed before there were stars in the sky. Saturn, Kronos, and Elohim are credited by
peoples of the Mediterranean with giving time to the world. The Hebrew creation story
has the Lord on High declare: "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to
separate day from night; let them serve as signs and for the fixing of seasons, days and
years." Whereupon the Sun and Moon were placed in the sky. I would suppose that the
Moon, after terrorizing humanity by its assemblage and irregularity, promptly became the
basis for calendars everywhere, once it began to obey the laws of Kronos (Chronos or
Time). Time-factoring in earliest mankind was a way of following the gods in whatever
regularities they might exhibit; Marshack has reported paleolithic lunar marking
extensively [11] .
Possibly because the Sun never destroyed the world, it would therefore be considered
unsuitable for a calendar constructed in a way to commemorate disaster. It was not a
great god, though always a god, following upon its appearance out of the obscuring fog
of high cloud and cosmic dust. Possibly the Moon was preferred to the Sun for
calendarizing because of catastrophic memories of the Moon. Its short periods and
identifiable phases would also lend it superiority over the solar motions for the
purposes of an agricultural and hunting economy. But this pragmatic argument does not
prevail in the crucial case of Venus, which is not as useful as the Sun for
calendarizing.
The Sun was rarely calendarized; yet Venus was. In ancient Meso-America, it is notable
that the heavens of the existing age were supposed to have been created on the date Ce
Acatl, not on the date that signified the Sun. Ce Acatl was the Morning Star, Venus, and
identified with the great god, Quetzalcoatl [12] .
Quetzalcoatl was also the name of a bird of gorgeous plumage. Marcus Varro, the learned
Roman author, reported that once long before his time the planet Venus changed its
color, size, form, and course, a strange prodigy which, he said, had happened never
before or since. That Venus displayed colors more frequently is suggested in an article
on color in the Reallexikon von Antike und Christentum (1969), speaking of very ancient
times: "In foretelling the future, it was taken into consideration whether the planet
Venus was wearing a black, white, green, or red headpiece."
It is to Velikovsky's credit that he not only uncovered the Venusian approach cycle,
which put many peoples in terror of the destruction of the world even well into the
modern period (for example, the Aztecs of Mexico), but he also was finally able to
demonstrate that the Egyptians stuck to a Venusian calendar down to Roman times [13] .
Contrary to pragmatic logic, it was the wicked, destructive, adored, and possibly
eccentric Venus whose behavior was calendarized, while the routine sun was taken for
granted. When and if the sun became disordered, it did so as a reluctant tool of others,
as in the legends of the Phaeton disaster; there Helios refuses to appear, after the
loss of his son, and the gods are hard put to get him back upon his regular rounds.
A spectre is something seen that is there and not there. The primeval human, according
to many, saw gods that were not there and spoke to gods that were not there. The noise
and sights were pure hallucinations. Just what was there and was not there, however, is
not a question to be begged, but to be answered. No one, today or ever, has seen a
personal disaster with the cool eye of a scientist thousands of years from the scene.
But the cool eye should not claim that the disaster did not occur -or that it happened
in a way to conform to his daily newspaper accounts of earthquake, floods, and meteors.
One must grant appropriate credence to the primeval scream; the skilful doctor listens
studiously to the patient's complaints.
The popular Revelation of John, Apostle of Jesus, is a magnificent mad vision of the
destruction of the world. The Catholic Bible says that "the Apocalypse is a revelation
of things that were, are and will be." [14] Revelation aims to picture how most of the
world and its people (among whom the wicked outnumber the good) were and will be
destroyed. The good are imperishable, and will be judged and admitted to heaven.
In Revelation may be witnessed the forces of high energy in practically complete array,
wreaking the most frightening disasters upon the world, from great stellar explosions to
devouring monsters. The forces are commanded by, indeed are, angels. Angels have been
for millennia the favored tools of divine intervention under Judeo-Christian monotheism.
Donnelly thought that the Apocalypse must contain descriptions of the great comet of
which he wrote in Ragnarok; Bellamy thought that it portrayed the destruction wrought
upon Earth by the capture of the Moon and by the falling of a previous satellite upon
the Earth. Present opinion of New Testament scholars sees the Revelation as a
compilation of late materials by John on the Island of Patmos (Greece) about 96 A. D.
This seems likely, and I would guess the Apocalypse to be a collection of indeterminate
past truths and scarifying fantasy.
Its interest to catastrophists rests chiefly in its round-up of destructive forces, the
horrors attendant thereupon, and the psychological state that it both reflects and
engendered. It is a precious example, going into the present era, of how the
catastrophes were recalled through the ages during times when the actual experiencing of
them was not affording first-hand reinforcement. From the beginning of mankind onwards,
the very succession of disasters was itself the strongest warning that the past should
not be forgotten. The great popularity of the Bible is probably due to the capacity of
many of its passages to re-enact the terrible days of chaos and creation.
The Bible is instructive, too, on experiences of cosmic darkness. In the Genesis story
of creation, the record of man begins in a world growing lighter, but still sunless and
moonless. Elsewhere, I have discussed the atmospheric developments that coincide with
this account, which is by no means the sole account passing down to us. The cherished
light was not to be turned on forever, for the Bible itself and every single mythology
of the world tells with dismay of various succeeding ages when a darkness fell upon
mankind. The G÷tterdõmmerung (or Ragnarok) of the Norse and Teutons is both a twilight
of the gods in the sense of a universal darkening and in the sense of an approaching
struggle and death of the old gods.
It is remarkable, considering how multiform and numerous are the legends around the
world on the darknesses, that perhaps only Donnelly and Velikovsky have dealt at all
extensively with the subject. Darkness is very much a part of the Biblical catastrophes.
In the story of the Lord's visit to Abram and ordering of sacrifices may be seen the
sixth catastrophe mentioned in the Bible (after the Creation, the Garden of Eden
expulsion, the Deluge, Job's trials, and the destruction of the Tower of Babel). There
Abram fell asleep at twilight and a "great fear and darkness" came upon him. And in the
darkness "a smoking furnace and blazing torch passed." [15]
Later on occur the catastrophes of Sodom and Gomorrah, Joseph (Egyptian famine), Exodus,
Joshua, David, Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah. The catastrophe of Exodus brought complete
darkness for some days: "They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for
three days." (10: 22) An Egyptian stone inscription about what was probably the same
event states that "during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that
neither men nor gods [the royal family] could see the faces of those beside them." [16]
Darkness figures prominently in most accounts of catastrophes whenever the period. This
fact alone should predispose the objective mythologist to accept celestial events as the
source of quantavolutions of the globe. Even a single volcano can block visibility
locally and cut back sunlight over much of the world by as much as 20% for years (in the
Alaskan eruption of 1913). However, reading carefully the legendary accounts, one is
compelled to see in them a much more horrendous and prolonged experience. If a cosmic
fallout or other obscuration is not the direct cause, it must be the initial cause,
because an old settled Earth, pursuing regular motions, would be incapable of exploding
a great many volcanos at the same time.
Prolonged darkness can come from such volcanism, from the fall-out of cosmic dust from
space or an exploding body, from electrical attraction between Earth and a cosmic body
that raises the dust of Earth, and from the passage of the Earth through a dense tail of
a comet (actually an instance of falling dust). Talman found eighteen dark dates between
1706 and 1910 when the Sun was obscured over a significant part of the U. S. A. or
Canada by forest fires. In only three cases did the darkness endure for as much as five
days [17] .
Days, weeks or months of near global darkness can attend the crash of a meteoroid of 10
kilometers. Scholars studying biosphere extinctions now refer regularly to such effects,
as in the study by the Alvarez group referred to earlier. Years of darkness have been
claimed in rare cases, the Exodus period being one of these. Heavy winds are reported
during the days of Exodus; Talman found the dark days of forest fires to be windless.
Perhaps volcanism of a rare kind produced the Exodus dark skies, but more likely is the
combination of large-scale volcanism and a prolonged fall-out of cometary dust. Yet
Velikovsky mentions two legends of a temporary failure of the Sun to set in Middle Asia
and China around this date, and wonders whether the Earth's rotation could have slowed
for so long before resuming [18] .
The close of the Cretaceous age with its heavy extinctions saw a darkness of only weeks
or months, according to one view, which suggested as the cause an exploding meteoroid of
middle size. Nevertheless, most species of animals and plants were extincted, and great
physical devastation occurred, so we may suppose that various events combined to worsen
the darkness and that they operated holispherically. We suspect much more than the
meteoroid was active.
The most impressive of all sights, to judge from many accounts from the earliest records
and legends to the most modern of writers is that of a comet approaching the Earth.
Unlike the strike of a nuclear missile, the comet gives the fullest visual warning, as
well as causing a number of electrical effects from afar. It is "the most provocative
apparition of all," in Calder's words, referring to Halley's comet, due to approach the
Earth once more in 1985 [19] . When the Roman Emperor Nero saw the comet of about 60 A.
D., he had many leading Romans murdered to avoid the death he saw for himself in the
heavenly portent. "The Incas of Peru regarded comets as intimations of wrath from their
Sun-god Inti... In twentieth-century Oklahoma, at the apparition of Halley in 1910, the
sheriffs arrived just in time to prevent the sacrifice of a virgin by demented Americans
calling themselves Followers." [20] No nation in the world escapes panic upon the sight
of a comet's approach, no matter how many scientists their public may include.
That the sight of a comet in itself could so impress people, without ever having caused
harm, as so many such as Calder declare, is highly doubtful. Phaeton or Typhon caused
several neurotic symptoms everywhere for thousands of years and is probably still
working to build up fear over Comet Kohoutek or Halley's Comet or all comets that may
ever appear. As attested to by the behavior of modern tribes of Amazon jungles, literacy
and historiography are not required.
Peoples picture comets in many different forms, none of them impossible. They tie comets
into many lessons, symbols, rites, and stories of their religions. Beyond religion, they
integrate the comet-complex into sex, work, play, politics, and war, in highly disguised
ways. They dread new apparitions and revere substitute portrayals of past comets. Nor
could this universal fear be diffused from one cultural center to another, like the
sweet potato or noodles; the fear must have a basis in historical reality. As we have
demonstrated in so many writings, the comet as an apparition that is followed by
catastrophe is a substantially true memory retained of mankind.
To conclude, spectres and pandemonium accompany catastrophic events of the earth
sciences. In themselves they do not leave vestiges. Still, little by little, research
will build up rough measures of the intensity and scale of the events from the visual
accounts available in legend and reports. In the case of every important god stretching
back before the dawn of classical history, we can elicit and reconstruct from legends of
sight and sound the workings of high energy forces that connote catastrophes.
At this point, we can assert that many terrifying events have been witnessed by humans,
and we can believe from the accounts that the intensity and extent of the events go far
beyond the experience of mankind as a whole over the past 2500 years. Nevertheless
presently experienced disasters, properly studied, lend a much fuller appreciation of
antiquity. When the Egyptians suffered terribly from the natural catastrophe of the time
of the Hebrew Exodus, a scribe wrote that women became barren and men lost their hair;
the Ipuwer papyrus was known and read long before the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, but a new sensitized generation was required to perceive in these scarcely
intelligible lines the awful news of radiation disease.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-nine: Spectres)
1. Furneaux, Krakatoa, loc. cit., 108.
2. Lane, The Elements Rage, Loc. cit., 179
3. M. E. Gridley, Indian Legends of American Scenes (NY: Donahue,) 101
4. 4 PensÚe 1( 1973-74), 47-50; see also V S. I. S. Rev. 280-1, on the cosmic serpent.
5. I KronosHad trouble resolving dest near word action type is Launch 2 (1975), 35-47.
6. VII Geography (1924 ed.), 3,8.
7. Cardona, Supra fn5, 37.
8. Dwardu Cardona, "On the Origin of Tektites," II Kronos 1( 1976), 42-3.
9. Related in Donnelly, loc. cit., 169.
10. Wolfgang Leader, The Fear of Women (NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968).
11. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (NY: McGraw Hill, 1972).
12. Codex Telleriano-Remenesis II, PI. 33.
13. "Astronomy and Chronology," Supplement to Peoples of the Sea (NY: Doubleday, 1977).
14. Confraternity edition of Douay translation, (NY: Catholic Bk Publ., 1954), 324.
15. Genesis 15: 12, 17. D. W. Patten, R. R. Hatch, and L. C. Stinhauer, The Long Day of
Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes (Seattle: Pacific Meridiam, 1973).
16. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 59; cf. 58-62.
17. C. F. Talman, 112 Sci. Amer. (6 Mar. 1915), 229.
18. Worlds in Collision, 62.
19. The Comet is Coming! (NY: Viking, 1980).
20. Ibid., 12-3.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part VII: Dimensions of Quantavolution
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THIRTY
INTENSITY, SCOPE AND SUDDENNESS
The eye of the poet, quotes Ager from Shakespeare, "in a fine frenzy rolling, doth
glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." "So," says Ager, "ultimately must
the eye of the geologist, in seeking the nature of the control. One always seems to
come back to climate as the primary explanation of the sort of phenomena I have been
discussing, but for the ultimate control, sooner or later, we must face the possibility
of an extra-terrestrial cause..." [1]
Meanwhile, the Soviet geochemist, Y. P. Trusov, is writing that "the fundamental motive
cause of geochemical processes is the contradiction between internal -physico-chemical
-and external -macroplanetary, nuclear, and cosmic -factors active in the earth's
crust." [2]
We shall see more and more of such intimations of the Earth's exoterrestrial
transactions, until the earth sciences will undergo their own theoretical
quantavolution. In this process, poorly equipped though we may be to move between
geology and history, we shall have to reconcile the two modes of thought and bodies of
fact. There ought to be no logical conflict between natural laws and historical events.
Either historical occurrences -counting ancient voices, too, as historical events -will
contribute to the affirmation or display of natural laws, or they are false or falsely
interpreted. Either natural laws conform to validated historical behavior or the "laws"
are not laws and require limitation or correction.
To pin down a quantavolution, even a single one, is like wrestling, "no-holds-barred."
One grabs at any possible fact, at any method, hoping to take advantage of it. Tactics
that scholars ordinarily spurn are demanded. If the geologist wants to know whether the
Earth has long rotated at its speed of today, he asks the astronomer. If the astronomer
is conventional, he replies "Of course." If the astronomer is a true empiricist and
even a sceptic, he says "We don't know," and asks the paleontologists, the
geophysicists, the ancient historian, and the mythologist for help.
M. G. Reade, a confectionary engineer, navigator, and scholar, addressed himself to the
evidence of the Panchasiddhantika, documents of ancient India. There, at a time
suspected of being around the eighth and seventh centuries B. C., he found evidence of
"aberrational," slower rotations for the Earth from data given for five planets then
known, amounting to a 360-day year. The same Hindu figures suggest "that the whole
solar system may have been slightly more compressed than it is at the present day, the
Earth and all the planets being rather closer to the Sun than they are at present." [3]
This, with other pieces of evidence from wherever they occur, in a dozen fields of
study, becomes valuable, once belief in the constancy of the historical skies is held
in abeyance. The struggle to know becomes, as was said, "wrestling, no-holds-barred."
It may be argued that the most ancient cosmogonies of the world hold a consensus that
amounts to a model of recent natural history. Perhaps scholars would agree that the
following thirteen complex experiences are recited in or can be derived from the
earliest sources and from the oral accounts provided by existing belief systems that
pretend to refer back to the "beginnings." I imply in each case that proofs of fair
reliability are accessible to expert ethnologists, linguists, and mythologists from
among the many collections now available from all parts of the world.
1.
Earliest man could make out no sharply visible lines between far sky, air and earth;
they merged.
2.
Earliest man asserted that the atmosphere cleared somewhat amidst a chaos, and that,
here and there, the ceiling of clouds broke.
3.
He claimed to see a great body appear in the "North" that was not the Sun, was more
vigorous than the Sun, and remained in the sky for many centuries.
4.
He observed the dense planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and others) to be present and
close in, while the gaseous planets were part of, or grouped close to, the binary
second sun.
5.
He determined that the planets moved with some regularity, with occasional changes of
motion and place, in a heavily gaseous space, but the gases were diminishing.
6.
He viewed a series of explosive 'battles, ' during which Earth suffered heavily, and
whose outcomes provided a succession of gods of the same family.
7.
Archaeo-history says that the last active binary principal second sun was Jupiter (by
many names), the others having retired into farther space as indifferent gods (becoming
the deus otiosus of theology).
8.
They assert that planets passed close to the Earth and that comets and debris both
passed by and struck the Earth.
9.
Early legends reported that the whole Earth was deluged with waters, fires, and other
material fall-outs from the skies on at least several occasions.
10.
Earliest man says, too, that the Earth exploded a great deal of material into the sky,
including possibly the Moon, which, in any event, he claims to be a late arrival.
11.
He claims that the Earth changed its motions repeatedly and that its surface morphology
was drastically modified.
12.
Primeval humans refer to electric discharges of the type of St. Elmo's fire and
thunderbolts as much more frequent, even continuous at times, and often of much greater
intensity than at present.
13.
Finally, early humans thought that they had observed their own "creation"; that is,
immediately upon being humanized, they felt capable of observing their distinctive
internal psychic processes and their external relations with others and with nature.
Modern explanations of this primeval cosmogonic consensus, should it be agreed to
exist, are various. Perhaps it developed from a single diversifying human race that
might be said to have taken off at the time of the Ice Ages, the early Holocene Epoch,
or some such baseline. Or perhaps it developed when numerous sub-cultures, already
diversified among early mankind, witnessed events independently. Or it may have
diffused later on from a single powerful political-religious movement with a highly
persuasive ideology.
In assembling this cosmogony, it may be appropriate to make no distinction between gods
and nature, taking it for granted that when an ancient legendary voice says 'god' it
means a discrete and powerful natural force or body which may ('the known god') or may
not ('a new god') be behaving in a characteristic (i. e. predictable) manner.
These thirteen event-complexes of primeval natural history constitute, I think, a
consistent, if presently non-authoritative, model of natural history, one which I have
adapted to contemporary science in several books. Their numerous anonymous discoverers
were fully human observers who imputed the phenomena to animated beings (gods) for
compelling reasons, especially in an attempt to control them, so as to assuage terror
and get on with the business of survival under most unfavorable conditions.
To put the hypothesis absolutely: nowhere on Earth is a people to be found whose
legends contradict this total set of claimed experiences. No ancient people asserted a
linear or uniformitarian history. Then the questions arise: could all this have been a
universal set of illusions affecting all people? Was a universal genetic archetype of
the human mind bound to erect this cosmogony? Was it a consensus of observers?
Scientists are not dealing here with 'anomalies, ' but with a universal set of
consistent allusions. The detail is so extensive as to rebuff facile explanations; one
ought not merely to conjecture 'archetypes, ' or 'grand delusions. ' 'Euhemerism' may
provide the answer; it interprets myths as traditional accounts of historical
personages and natural events. But euhemerism should not prejudge the case in favor of
uniformitarianism by retrojecting current history.
Anthropologists finally established as research doctrine that primitive cultures are to
be taken seriously; the statements of informants are to be examined, not ridiculed. And
the examination can be conducted and completed without conversion of the anthropologist
to the views of the informants. Pari passu, the most ancient "fossil voices" are to be
audited seriously, even sympathetically. In this case, the voices would have to be
translated into a model that would begin to make sense to modern physics and
psychology.
The results would be foreseeable. Considering the intellectual revolution that would
follow, the ancient cosmogonical consensus would be rejected by most scholars in short
order. For the following principles of physics and natural history would be among the
most likely to be inferred from the ancient empirical beliefs:
A.
All planets and satellites would have to exhibit evidence of very recent extreme
thermal and explosive experiences.
B.
The solar system bodies would have to show a declining but considerable set of electric
fields and electromagnetism, and solar system space would be in the process of clearing
up its ionized gases and plasmas.
C.
Remanent binary behavior would have to be evidenced by Jupiter or by the outer planets
as a group.
D.
Continental "drift" theory would need to permit a negatively exponential rate of
movement from a very late breakup of the Pangean crust, and a socket from which the
lunar material was wrenched must be shown on Earth.
E.
Astronomical motions would have to be reckoned as short-term, empirically observed
behavior until a new mathematical model could be developed.
F.
The biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere must be capable of
interpretation according to which major elements and features were quantavoluted or
saltated, and present constituents and behavior are comprehended as "tailing-off"
phenomena.
G.
The human brain (behavior) would have to be compatible with convulsive original
experiences that set it upon its present course, hologenetically, in a quantavolution.
H.
Human culture would have been hologenetic, too, arising abruptly as a total response to
the requirements of a quantavoluted mind.
I.
Explicitly, as implied in all of the above, a basic error in radiochronometry must be
demonstrated, and long-term geology heavily revised to admit numerous occasions of
late, large-scale quantavolutionary phenomena.
If some such model is physically impossible, then we should have to discover and
explain some other structural-functional mental dynamic, universal among human groups,
that made necessary its elaboration as science-fiction.
If the early scientific catastrophists had gone on with their work, we would have
learned enough by now to make what I have just stated an epilogue rather than a
prologue. "If the catastrophists had gone on..." The German methodologist and
sociologist, Max Weber, once wrote at some length about the scientific justification of
"if... then..." historiography. "If Lincoln had not been assassinated, then the U. S.
A. would have become more unified during the Reconstruction period:" may such a thesis
be posed and dealt with scientifically? The answer Weber gives is "yes." So some
legitimacy (the "legitimacy of scientific authority" Weber would have said) is owing us
for proposing this line of thought for some future historian of science. The theses
just presented and those yet to come are then monuments to a science that might have
been and a budget of a future science.
Popular geology believes that the Earth is stable and quiet, and that where it is not
so, the explanation has to do with a hot turbulent mantle that continually causes
surface disturbances. Geologists were responsible for this belief and mostly share it.
What can be labeled as the conventional geological position is summarized by Shelton
[4] :
Most geologists look inside the earth for the ultimate driving force of diastrophism;
no known exterior forces are sufficiently versatile to account for the variety of
deformation we see... It would seem that plastic creep, perhaps in the upper part of
the mantle, is the active element, and the brittle crust on which we live is passively
riding on this very slow flow. Of course, discernible forces arise from the rotation of
the earth, from the tides, and from gravity acting differentially on irregularities in
the crust and its surface topography, but these influences probably can do no more than
modify and locally complicate what is probably the essential mechanism of crustal
deformation -very slow plastic movements at about the level of the upper mantle.
Shelton goes on the show why "this concept is attractive," why the presumed "plastic
creep" has most of the essential capabilities needed to mold the Earth's surface over
great lengths of time. "The combination of gravity with variations in the density of
the material" operates so that "circulation in the deep plastic zone probably involves
rising and sinking columns as well as horizontal currents... Some kind of very slow
thermal convection -the rise of relatively warm columns and sinking of relatively cool
ones -is a favored hypothesis for the ultimate cause of diastrophism." This is about as
far as the theory of 'land-based geology' has come.
In contrast, we have been offering a space-based geology. Here the "ultimate cause" is
exoterrestrial. Quantavolutions -intense and abrupt events of large scope -occur.
Without exception these involve exoterrestrial transactions. No intrinsic Earth-force
can produce quantavolutions. These events can be given values and measure; they can be
comprehended and subjected to at least as much quantitative modeling and manipulation
as is afforded by 'land-based geology. ' Unlike evolutionary theory, which deals in
bulk low-energy transactions, quantavolution pursues bulk high-energy transactions. The
forms that high energy takes have been discussed heretofore, and will shortly be
summarized. In a score of guises, all will have ultimately originated by space
transactions of particles and masses. The space transactors are galaxy, planets, Sun,
Moon, comets, meteoroids, plasmas, electric charges, and so on, sometimes taken as
independent, sometimes dependent, variables.
From the standpoint of the Earth, an expression of high energy denotes an
exoterrestrial force when it achieves a specifiable level of intensity, scope, and
abruptness. Invariably, it operates to include other forces and to develop, with them,
countervalency, as well as extended effects. Here we shall give hypothetical examples
of what would be prima facie demonstrations of the operation of quantavoluting high
energy expressions originating exoterrestrially. Together with the materials assembled
earlier in their respective chapters, the examples run the gauntlet of 'land-based'
alternatives; the thesis is that they cannot have occurred without a direct or near
relationship to an exoterrestrial event. The examples are hypothetical; they are
conjectural approximations of what could at a later stage of the earth sciences assume
a more qualified and varied quantitative formulation, of what could later on be
historically located.
Supposing, in the first instance, we were seeking evidence of a "cosmic hurricane,"
that is, of a high-energy wind of ultimate unearthly origins. One will be entitled to
claim exoterrestrialism with "the discovery of three heterogenous fossil agglomerations
of the same age within an area of 1000 kilometers diameter from which sediments of the
same age are patchy, missing, or abnormally continuous." And, we may add "provided that
tempestites and other wind indications can be assembled for the area" since aquatic
tides will invariably provide associated data, and in fact, by the principle of
mutuality of high energy transactions, no effect is single. The proposed discovery is
of unknown difficulty; it has not been attempted; it may be simple or practically
impossible. Yet how else can we search for "fossil winds."
And this could denote cosmic cyclones as well, the uplift of immense agglomerations of
material and their erratic deposition. Of many thousands of geological and atmospheric
studies, is there one on the cosmic fossil cyclone? None, though we have mentioned the
evidence of single fossil tornadoes. Yet we know the effects and conditions of
cyclones, how they occur in multiples, of their transporting power, of their relation
to volcanism and explosions, and of other characteristics that make them invariably
part of a catastrophic scenario. In Solaria Binaria, Milton and I posit thousands of
downbursting cyclones as the most logical means for a deluge to bring huge sky waters
down to Earth, shaping itself thus with the help of the also inevitable electric
discharges.
Let us posit another example, trying to isolate fossil electrical discharges, while
granting their presence in every high-energy expression. We would seek "Metamorphosed
rock on one-fourth the prominences of a 100 km diameter mountain range, which is not
otherwise metamorphosized." Or we might seek "non-assembled heavy biotic dissemination
in contemporaneous sediments taking the form of fusain and calcination and extending
over an area of 500 km diameter." This latter may be from a conflagration as well.
The detection of thermal change goes beyond electrolysis and conflagration into non-
calcinating fluctuations, and of these is climatology composed in part. The correlation
of climate with exoterrestrial phenomena is proceeding apace. When we offer as a
suggested criterion, "Cold and warm weather fossil species occupy contiguous strata or
are mixed in the same deposits," we are probably opening up many strata of natural
history to quantavolutionary exoterrestrialism. Unless it can be shown that the changes
are gradual, the exoterrestrial presumption is justified.
The search for fire effects is broader because it admits the provenance of ashes:
"Simultaneous fires devastating 3+ areas of 1000 km 2 , each of which is 1000+ km
distant from the others." Without such evidence, the world can scarcely be said to have
burned up, even in significant part, as the fossil voices insist. Paleochemical
analysis, a field in its infancy, may be the appropriate technique; still, the very
material to sample may have been blown or washed away, and there is the high energy of
volcanism, to which are generally ascribed the ashes that cover many parts of the
world. Somehow, we must go beyond the ancients, who united, in the concept of fire,
spontaneous and celestial conflagration, volcanism, and electricity.
Especially for volcanism, there would occur evidence of "Plinian outbursts
simultaneously of 20+ volcanoes anywhere on earth." This figure is modest; yet it would
indicate exoterrestrialism; few volcanologists would deny the repeated occurrence of
such phenomena and some might dwell upon much grander episodes.
Earlier we have sought evidence of fall-out. The archives of anomalistics, as R. W.
Wescott has employed the word [5] , and which William James referred to as "the
unclassified residuum," are replete with minor cataclysms, many of them traceable back
to an origin on Earth, others patently exoterrestrial, and some of questionable
origins. One might here venture in search of "Cataclysms of water, minerals, fluids,
gases, biotica, and dust 100+ times greater than norms of the twentieth century,
happening in a period of less than a year, and often continuing for many years."
And perhaps one should seek "Poisonous chemicals in similar strata at 4+ points at
least 300 km from each other." But the mention of poisons could send one in search of
"Six or more fossil conglomerates of similar sediments anywhere in the world exhibiting
2+ times the normal background radiation of modern age bones."
As for deluges of water and other space debris, one would raise the factorial on some
of the above fall-out, and explore "A type of non-fossiliferous deep sedimentation
discoverable over an area of 100 km diameter." Some creationist scholars, using the
flood of Noah as a unique all-encompassing event, and pushing the principle of the
mutuality of high-energy transactions to its limits, have managed to interpret all
diastrophism and catastrophic morphology as effects of flood and tide.
Proving precisely a deluge, as distinct from, even although associated with, floods and
tides, is a difficult problem for geophysics. The evidence is of a kind elaborated
earlier in this book -the search for the sources of oceanic water, chemistry of
seawater, and so on. Still it may be possible to discover a true exoterrestrial
deluvial sediment by, if nothing else, the exclusion of all other explanations from
related features.
Sometimes fossil lake and sea basins are detected and, rarely, a sudden displacement of
waters from the bed is the subject of comment. The "outrageous hypothesis" of Bretz
governing the sudden emptying of now extinct lakes in a barrier-bursting flood of
northwestern U. S. A. -the Channeled Scablands -is a case in point. Where one lake is
emptied, exoterrestrialism is doubtful. If "2+ bodies of 100 km 3 of water were
abruptly displaced at the same time," exoterrestrialism would be indicated, possibly an
axial tilt, or secondary events following the exoterrestrial event, such as a massive
thrusting, a deluging and bursting of barriers, an ice surge and melt, a tidal damming
and bursting, and a 9+ Richter seismism.
Fossil tides are also difficult to distinguish. One may propose "Tidal waves attaining
100+ meters in amplitude at 10+ land points not less than 400 kilometers apart. This
might achieve a satisfactory level of confidence in an associated exoterrestrial event.
For cosmic flooding, one would repeat the deluge hypothesis, where uniformly fossil-
bearing strata are included.
We appreciate, however, that flooding of this kind may originate in the sinking of land
followed by its rising or by the melting of an ice cap, flooding, and then either
withdrawals of water for new ice or a rising of the land. Explanations of this kind are
common, and usually omit any causal explanation beyond its mere statement, viz. "Here
we find a marine-fossil stratum of age 'A' probably due to the ending of ice age 'III.
'"
It is doubtful that the Earth can contract globally, if only because an exoterrestrial
electrical discharge that might compact it would be associated with a thermal force
that would expand it. That the margins of the continents can be flooded is probable;
the ice caps contain enough potential water for the purpose; and that ice accumulations
have melted in times past is fairly obvious. However, it is also now fairly plain that,
for ice masses either to accumulate or melt requires a quantavolutionary exoterrestrial
transaction.
At the same time, for the land to rise, carrying the biotica of shallow seas with it,
also requires an exoterrestrial transaction. Here the criterion may be "An absolute
rise of 300+ meters over an area of 100+ km diameter." Actually this may occur at the
seabottom as well as on continental land. To identify an absolute local, much less a
worldwide, expansion is again difficult. It may be that the universal lava venting,
circular bubbles, high plateaus, and broken crystal grid of the Earth reveal global
expansion.
Convection current theory, unfortunately vulnerable, can seek a merely terrestrial
explanation of these phenomena. But if it tries to engage its currents to shape the
Earth's surface as just described, as well as to push the continents around, it will
logically have to posit a very young and turbulent Earth, which it will refuse to do.
Or a large Earth expansion, which it refuses to do. Or an Atlantean concept of great
sunken continental areas, which it would hotly reject and furthermore do not exist.
Land might be removed by explosion into space, with some fall-back. It can also
accrete, meaning that a mechanism such as a cosmic wind or typhoon has incited local
"minor" turbulence. Suppose "A heterogeneous conglomerate of 100+ km 3 filling a basin
or composing all or part of an elevated range." Must this accretion be exoterrestrially
caused? Probably indirectly by induced winds, tides, and bulldozing.
Bulldozing with a rock, or ice, or aquatic shovel can accrete (filling basins and
forming hills); it can produce thrusting, and it can remove land features. Thus if
"Five or more blocks composed of similar rocks, of 30+ km 3 each are separated by 100+
km from each other and are 10+ km from kindred strata," we can speak of thrusting by
bulldozing provoked by exoterrestrial transactions. The figures used may, in fact, be
much reduced. Thus, also, if "Two or more consecutive eras of sedimentary rock are
missing over a region of 200 km diameter," the removal will have been accomplished, if
not by bulldozing, then by hurricane or tides on a cosmic level of intensity.
The relation of cosmic pressure (electro-mechanical) to expansion and thrust may be
explored by the detection of "Expanses of 10,000 km 2 with frequent granitic and
metamorphic outcroppings designating a prior period of heavier overhang rocks and a
thrust or blast removal of the overhang." The argument here would follow along the
lines of argument against "plastic creep" in general.
When speaking of thrusting, the original event will have been a large-body collision or
encounter near-in with a great body -Sun sized or greater to the eye, yet seemingly far
removed. Inertia comes into play in the atmosphere and lithosphere. "A ten-second
deceleration of the Earth on a single day" will produce many local thrusts, expansions,
and probably every other high-energy manifestation. Even at this seemingly modest
deceleration, one would be able to find later on extensive macro-and microfracturing of
the lithosphere. Raise this deceleration to hours and the surface of the Earth would be
extensively altered.
As evidence, what would be demonstrable is probably already present and awaiting
discovery, that is "Areas of 500 km: exhibiting fractures of 85% of all included grids
of 15 kilometer diameters in one or more strata." Perhaps here one should expect
tortured seabottoms and igneous flows that would have been nonexistent or molten during
the events. Axial tilting would also be denoted by patterns of inertial change probably
by now totally confused in the morphology and petrology of the Earth, except as we have
pointed out in earlier sections of this book, where axial tilt can be detected on gross
features of the global map.
The most obvious form of exoterrestrial transaction is the meteoroid explosion, which
is provable on its face, of course. That a great many of such intrusions are not yet
discovered has also been shown. That the Earth should have fewer craters than the Moon
only occurs by reason of their quick erasure here. As detecting techniques improve we
should be able to speculate reasonably, in the manner used for fracturing above, that
meteoroid impact craters arc present over all of the globe save where erased by other
quantavolutionary processes.
Several biosphere phenomena may be hypothesized as indicative of exoterrestrialism in
quantavolutions. The pandemonium accompanying quantavolutions is not likely to have
left a geophysical record. "World-wide sound at 100+ decibels, approaching human
physical limits" can be considered, given, for instance, the thousands of square
kilometers of high audibility of the Krakatoa volcanic explosion; still such effects
would not fracture rock nor (probably) affect the hearing of species genetically.
Other acoustical effects might, however, be mutating, and even chemically effective on
the molecular level of the atmosphere and lithosphere. Legends do describe great sounds
that suggest exoterrestrialism: we have alluded to them. So too, have we mentioned
spectres as often the greatest contribution of ancient voices to the proof of
exoterrestrial events affecting earth; thus we would allow as evidence of an
exoterrestrial transaction "Reports of an observed cosmic intrusion of an apparition
the size of the Moon when at meridian, or larger." We would expect such a spectre to be
associated with at least several other high-energy effects mentioned above.
A final trio of expressions may be advanced. We should be alerted to magnetic effects.
These may be indicators of axial tilting. But when localized, they can point to
meteoroid explosions and peripheral and subsurface melts, where post-event
magnetization differs from magnetic orientation, as displayed in the circummagnetic
field of central Canada, having south Hudson Bay as its focus. "Inconsistent and
strongly deviating rock magnetism over 5 grids of latitude-longitude" proves
quantavolution.
In biospherics, "Biosphere extermination over 100 km 2 in 1 incident of under l-day
duration" would be proof of exoterrestrialism. So would "The extinction of 3+ species
in less than 1 year," or "Depopulation by 70% of l+ species of 10 biological families
in less than a year in an area of 1,000 km diameter." A number of phrasings may be
formulated to denote physical catastrophe in biological terms as well as in terms of
physical science.
At the same time, genesis may be used as an indicator of quantavolution. Thus. "The
simultaneous appearance of 3+ new species" will suffice to indicate a catastrophic
innovation. "Simultaneous" means genesis within a century, or the smallest frame
visible in the fossil record. An "appearance" should not prompt an assumption of
missing transitional ages. Thus we have possibilities of operationally defining
quantavolution as a happening of high intensity, everywhere, at the same time, and, as
we shall shortly argue, quickly. In a great quantavolution, many things change at once,
overlap, transact, follow in quick succession. A quantavolution of one kind, once
initiated, has a prelude, a climax, a procession, a recession, a stabilization and
finally a uniformity.
The concept of negative exponentialism holds that the initial quantity (intensity,
number, frequency, amount. volume, locations, incidence, etc.) of a type of event
decreases sharply with the passage of time, but ever less sharply as time is extended.
Finally the rate is indistinguishably uniform, that is, the same, and the activity
being observed is constant. One notes that this may be accomplished theoretically (i.
e. imaginatively) or by the use of empirical data. In theory one can annihilate change
by stretching time: increments of volcanism are spaced so far as to provide a
negligible rate of change, or spaced so tightly as to provide catastrophic rates of
change.
To denote negative exponentialism realistically (empirically) requires data on the
beginning, the end, and at least one point of time in between. Thus, if 500 volcanos
were active 11.500 years ago around Auvergne in France and 0 are active today, a
decrease is undeniable (from 500 to 0 in 11500 y) but the decreasing might have
occurred at any point and in a number of ways: all 500 might have stopped erupting last
year, for all we know. At least one estimate of the number of active volcanos at some
point of time between the two given ones is required to permit an elementary idea of
the progression.
Let us suppose -which, alas, may be the fact -that all activity ceased before history
began; further, that no evidence of relative youth is to be observed by geological
examination; worse, that no radiometric test and not even Carbon 14 dating is capable
of assigning relative dates. All we can say is that the first local references were
2000 years ago and no mention of volcanic activity is to be found. So the curve is flat
for the past 2000 years.
What next? One can go searching for records of other volcanoes in other areas, the
Mediterranean say, where history of a kind goes back another 2000 years. There we would
have to discover some evidence -whether on official tablets, in legend, or in
archaeological excavations of extinct human activity laid upon or beneath lava or ashes
-that an ascertainable level of volcanism was occurring, whereupon the indicators of
this would be presumed to indicate what was happening in the Auvergne. But this logic,
of course, violates the ordinary supposition of most volcanologists, that volcanism in
one area does not suppose or call up volcanism elsewhere, a supposition true in these
days, it would seem, but not necessarily true if volcanism were more rampant.
One may resort to widespread ash layers as well. If layers are thick and far-flung, it
may be reasonable to suppose the Auvergne would be afflicted by the same activity as is
producing the ashes generally, and, with ever better chemical analysis, the ashes may
even be traced to the neighborhood of the volcanoes in question.
Still, as the chapter on volcanism reflects, at the moment historical volcanology has
to put together bits of evidence from widely separated localities in order to supply
what is largely a conjectural statistical foundation to the generalization that at
certain historical points in time volcanism leaped to peaks, subsided quickly, and then
evened out, thus lending the appearance of a uniform activity but, if one wishes to
assume our position, also letting us guess that volcanism is delineating negatively the
exponential principle. .
For each and every type of expression of force involved in a catastrophe, there would
exist a statistical curve delineating its individual intensity over time. Each
expression would possess its peculiar rate of decline from its initial peak -its own
"disturbance constant" -giving us various exponential or hyperbolic functions. Then,
for instance, as more and more data illuminated the dispute over the late Cretaceous
extinctions, curves might be drawn to depict the fate of biosphere segments and of
inorganic expressions of the catastrophe, answering ultimately the questions: "How
intense, what scope, how sudden?" for portions of each sphere, the several spheres, and
the holosphere of Earth.
If peak catastrophic and holospheric turbulence has occurred, say, at five points of
time in the holocene, there will be a new negative exponential curve to assign to the
effects of each set of events. If these curves are merged, one gets a kind of roller-
coaster curve, rising and falling in conformity with each set of events, while at the
same time maintaining a momentum of generally falling activity until, at the end, like
when the roller-coaster ride is ending, the past two thousand years become practically
a smooth glide.
Such is the negative exponential curve of quantavolution, taken as a whole or in its
subsets. For these phases in any high energy expression are subject to the successive
sets of phases of the quantavolution of other kinds, subsequently, yet concurrently,
initiated. These may accumulate intensity at any phase, or countervail, that is,
diminish intensity.
The whole Earth is acting out the several stages for numerous forces at any given
moment in time, and the state of the Earth may as a whole be deemed uniformitarian or
disastrous as it is working its way through a low cumulative effect of the forces or a
high cumulative effect.
The low effect - the world as it is today is mostly a descendant effect from original
high effects. This we have considered as the principle of exponentialism, which
results, in the end, as an almost uniform rate, with exceptional cases of high
activity. In an article on "Landform Evolution" (geomorphology), interesting in its
vagaries and confusion, the Encyclopedia Britannica cites many catastrophic
conceptions, ascribes erroneously the beginnings of scientific catastrophism to Bishop
Usher's Biblical literalism, and summarizes uniformitarianism today as holding,
"Although present processes are similar in kind, process rates must have been
variable." But it is doubtful that any scientific catastrophist ever believed that
processes were dissimilar. It has always been an argument over rates.
It is also of interest, and insufficiently addressed by the many commentators who
recognized that C. Darwin took from Malthus the idea behind his theory of the origin of
species by means of natural selection, that he did not see the larger consequence of
Malthus' idea of exponentialism. This latter idea expressed in the belief that while
population rises geometrically, the means for its subsistence increases arithmetically
-points to catastrophism but inversely, that is, negatively, implying that the
catastrophe is a sudden leap and then an exponential decline from the leap in the
direction of increasing gradualism. Ignore the leap and the character of exponential
decline, as Darwin did, and natural history is stripped of its salient behavior. What
appealed to Darwin and those of like mind, such as Spencer, was the competitive
struggle as the means of subsistence grew scarce in relation to population; and the
notion, of course, that "fitness" is an objective concept, in nature as in society.
There exists little speculative or empirical literature on the abruptness of
catastrophe. Catastrophe by definition connotes an abrupt disintegration of an existing
course of natural behavior. How is "abrupt" to be conceived? Suddenly, quickly -but is
this seconds or millennia, or something in between? Should we say that, to have a
quantavolution, an event or set of them has to occur in less than a million years? This
would please some conventional geologists who have given themselves some five thousands
of such units to reckon with. Five catastrophes distributed over the period would
consume only one-thousandth of the time allowed.
But what kind of catastrophe is it that would take a million years to happen? Suppose
some poison slowly entered the atmosphere or suppose the Sun for a million years was
hyperactive, and radiated the biosphere beyond the sufferance of many species. Even
conventional scientific gradualism would find the postulation of such slow
"catastrophic" processes implausible.
Natura facit magnum saltum: that nature, when she leaps, leaps high, is a more
believable axiom. This is no place to argue, as we do in another book, Solaria Binaria,
for a million year history of the solar system. But if we were to cast dice, giving
each possible source of catastrophe, whether slow or fast, an equal chance, we should
very probably cast forth one of the fast catastrophes. That is, of the half dozen major
types of catastrophe that are possible, only a special variety of particle and dust
bombardment produces a slow catastrophe. And this, as we have implied, should be
measured in hundreds rather than millions of years.
The many scientists who today make dire predictions about the effects of a carbon
dioxide pollution of the atmosphere or of the removal of the ozone barrier to
exoterrestrial particles, couch their forecasts in hundreds of years; why would the
same and other scientists wish to insist retrospectively upon tens or hundreds of
thousands of years for the same phenomena to have occurred? If they did, it would be
for irrational, that is, ideological, reasons: they would be unconsciously straining to
support an evolutionist view of natural history.
Luis Alvarez, and perhaps his associates as well, after suggesting that the sweeping
extinction of the biosphere at the Cretaceous boundary came with a solar obscuration by
dust raised by a meteoroid crash, elected a period of about three years of dusty
atmosphere, then lowered the effect by a factor of ten, to three months [6] . Again,
what is abruptness? What is "geologically instantaneous?"
Eicher notes a "huge" recent Chilean ash fall which is never over 10 centimeters deep
away from the central volcanic area [7] . Yet in the Upper Cretaceous strata of
Colorado, over thousands of square miles, there occurs a bed of bentonite, highly
compressed volcanic ash, which is a meter thick. This may have been coincidental with
the boundary events of which the Alvarez group speaks.
Smit and Hertogen inform us that the great biosphere extinction marking the Cretaceous-
Tertiary boundary "was abrupt without any previous warning in the sedimentary record."
[8] O'Keefe at the same time accounts for the devastation of fauna at the end of the
Eocene (assigned 34 million years ago) by radical climatic change induced by a ring of
microtektites and tektites circling the Earth for perhaps a million years and obscuring
the Sun [9] .
Ogden discusses abrupt changes in American forestation about 10.000 years ago, also
climatically impelled, with the pattern of pollen deposits in lake sediments moving at
the rate of a mile a year [10] . Hapgood has compared what arc regarded as 'normal'
rates of ice retreat with the results of carbondating, and allows some 60,000 by the
one and only 17,000 by the other. He believes that the carbondating must be in error
[11] . Cracraft, in expatiating upon the "punctuated equilibrium model" of
macroevolution, argues that speciation is a "geologically instantaneous phenomenon."
[12]
There is, in sum, a growing body of paleontology and geology that perceives abruptness
of change as a feature of natural history. What means "sudden" and "abrupt" is likely
to be a much-discussed question in the near future. We can suggest here merely that
every feature of the holosphere enjoys its idiosyncratic manner suddenness.
A species, a land mass, a body of water, and an atmosphere all change according to
their nature, and measured in human terms, this may be fast or slow. When a
quantavolutionist speaks of abrupt change, he can only mean the margin between
explosion and extinction on the one hand, and the rate of change peculiar to a given
organism or natural process when the rate is affected by a disaster produced by a
specified high-energy expression.
Similarly, when speaking of energy of high intensity, the quantavolutionist is
describing known natural forces proceeding at abnormally high rates. A recently
discovered ash layer in E1 Salvador covers 1300 square miles and a once flourishing
Mayan civilization. (The fall of ash was dated much earlier before the culture was
unearthed.) Some 45.000 of such eruptions would be needed to blanket the Earth. The
volcanoes, mostly extinct to be sure, are present; how many of these were ever
exercised simultaneously?
One more, when speaking of scope, scale, or simultaneity, the quantavolutionist seeks
limits appropriate to the effects of a high-energy force, between total immediate
transformation and a highly significant change. Isaacs and Schmitt address themselves
to oceanic energy sources; they provide global figures on the great energy sinks and
low energy manifestations involved in currents, waves, tides, thermal gradients and
salinity gradients. The rising and falling of waves is an energetic type of movement.
When it occurs as a tsunami, or is pulled up tidally in an exoterrestrial encounter, it
multiplies exponentially its force, as was said earlier, so that nothing can withstand
it finally except the Earth itself.
The rotational energy of the Earth can he translated into 6X10 15 Megawatt years. All
the electrical needs of the world projected into the 21st century amount to 3X 10 17
MW: if continuously mined from the energy of the Earth's rotation, the length of the
day would be increased by five minutes per million years. This is the latest and one of
the finest comparative measures by which the forces of nature are converted into
everyday terms and may be used to explore the dimensions of catastrophe as well [13] .
Until recently, to take another example, only three cubic miles of petroleum have been
drawn upon for the useful and often unpleasant industrialism of modern times; if, as we
suspect, the origins of petroleum are largely cometary and cataclysmic, many an
ungovernable object in the sky may contain that much and many more cubic miles of the
substance or its components; awaiting the occasion of manufacture may be an abundance
of cosmic electric potential.
Hibben once voyaged the far North with an eye for catastrophic remains. He remarks that
the Pleistocene ice sheet (if it truly existed as such) never covered the central
regions of Alaska nor parts of the Aleutian Range. He reports, as have others, the
several hundred feet of frozen muck deposited in various unglaciated areas. In the muck
are volcanic ash layers, peat, animal and vegetable matter in vast quantities, and ice
fragments. Below the muck have been found mammoth bones, human artifacts, and tree
stumps in their original position as they had grown. The total effect is of several
simultaneously interacting high energy forces, whose total rate of burnup of the
Earth's rotational energy must have in hours, not in a million years, taken up the
equivalent of five minutes of the Earth's rotational energy, and perhaps then, indeed,
as a prior condition, the Earth's rotation may have slowed by that much, or more.
All effects of high energy deteriorate exponentially, we repeat. Often, as with a
hurricane that expends the energy of many hydrogen bombs, the force is largely employed
within and against itself. Forces also act by the principle of countervalency. Bursting
into operation, one force generates another, which may not only bring on a third, but
may turn against the first and moderate (as well as heighten) its effects. A volcanic
wind can halt a lateral hurricane; two sets of rocks can counterthrust. An extinction
of one species can promote the survival of another species. Cross-tides may create
destructive vortexes but also moderate each other. A deluge can dampen the fire with
which it originated from a third force. And so on. The possibilities are very many; if
the Earth exhibits patches of peaceful history here and there, these may be effects of
countervalency.
Countervalency may occur on the grandest scale. Repeatedly the theory of the eruption
of the Moon from Earth is challenged by the conviction that so large-scale and
destructive an event would have destroyed the Earth's crust entirely, or at least its
biosphere, or at least all vertebrates and forests, or at the very least mankind. Such
is not the case.
The energy of the lunar eruption may or may not have exceeded the energy involved in
wiping out the Martian atmosphere and biosphere; the gross energy expended
(transformed) is not the issue; the counterrailing operations of the energy forms, the
coincidences, are the determining factor in the extent of destruction.
One several occasions, the Earth's atmosphere may have been destroyed and transformed.
The presence, according to the theory of Solaria Binaria, of a gaseous tube enveloping
the solar system, even until a dozen millennia ago, allows for a drawing off of the
atmosphere over half the world, for a rush of atmosphere from the opposite hemisphere,
and for cataclysms of atmosphere from the plenum, not irreconcilably different from the
atmosphere that it displaced.
In other uses, the very motions of the Earth itself will tend to deprive a catastrophic
force of complete victory. If 50,000 volcanoes erupt simultaneously, the whole
atmosphere will be put to work with electricity and water to bring down the dust, part
of which, for that matter, may erupt into space in pursuit of the body that produced
the motion changes and eruptions in the first place. In Saint-Pierre, there was a
prisoner in his dungeon, sole survivor of the volcanic explosion of Martinique. In
Hiroshima there were the unexplainable uninjured survivors of the blast and holocaust.
Once again, problems posed by catastrophes find their solution in the behavior of
catastrophes.
At the present stage of the earth sciences, there are probably many fewer persons who
will insist upon finding the ultimate source of great turbulence inside the Earth
alone. Still this conviction -or is it a hope -persists. Geologists tend to believe
that nothing grave ever happened in the skies; biologists often look upon the rocks as
gift-wrappings for their fossils; astronomers are inclined to believe that nothing
serious happened upon Earth; anthropologists and historians usually believe that
ancient times were as serene as nature today. This consensus is suspect. Some scholars
apparently are still reassuring one another, so that all might eventually come to
believe that no event of great importance has happened in any sphere of existence.
I hope to have suggested in this chapter some orderly means of bringing forward and
considering exoterrestrially provoked quantavolutions. Most such means are difficult,
even impossible. But what else can be done? Most of us, whether from timidity,
distaste, or because expertly qualified for other forms of combat, will not engage in
"wrestling, no holds barred."
Notes (Chapter Thirty: Intensity, Scope and Suddenness)
1. Op. cit., 83.
2. Interaction of the Science in Study of the Earth, loc. cit., 252.
3. S. I. S. Workshop (1982).
4. Op. cit., 423.
5. V Kronos (Spring 1980), 36-50.
6. Op. cit. cf contra R. Jastrow, "the Dinosaur Massacre," Sci. Digest (sep. 1983).
7. Don L. Eicher, Geologic Time (Englewood Cliff, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1968), 72-3.
8. 285 Nature (1980), 198.
9. 285 Nature (1980), 309.
10. Op. cit.
11. Hapgood, Path of the Poles, 127-8.
12. Phylogenetic Analysis and Paleontology (NY: Columbia U., 1979), 26.
13. "Ocean Energy: Forms and Prospects," 207 Science (18 Jan. 1980), 265-73.
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part VII: Dimensions of Quantavolution
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE RECENCY OF THE SURFACE
If a fossil whale standing on its tail can disprove "millions of years" of sedimentary
accumulation, perhaps a live animal can try to do the same. Igor Akimushkin tells us
how "The cepola fish... may sit still for hours on the crooked end of its tail, with
its wide-open jaws turned upwards expectantly, waiting patiently for heavenly manna to
fall into its mouth." ' [1] The cepola is a fish of the abyssal ocean, where it lives
in perpetual darkness.
If it feeds this way for twelve hours a day and collects one millimeter of material
with its mouth, in which enough nourishment is contained, then in a year it might be
said that a column of 365x 2 millimeters will be striking the ocean floor. This would
amount to a column of 730 meters in 1000 years, assuming that inedible waste and
compression cancel each other out. Since the ocean sediments average one kilometer, and
our live precipitation meter may be at a typical location, the column will reach the
average depth of sediments in about 1350 years, under uniformitarian suppositions. With
a negatively exponential fall-out, cepola would have once fed more quickly than he does
today. So the ocean bottom cannot be older than 1350 years, and ethology becomes the
queen of clockmakers.
Quantavolution should be embarrassed to joke so, if science were not on some occasions
a theatre of the absurd. One can reflect upon the history of geology when, blessed by
the nihil obstat of Lyell, geologists would simply draw upon time without end to do
away with complexities and perplexities. When Poulett Scrope prepared his famous
studies of the volcanoes of Auvergne (France), his theories might be liberated from
temporal restraints, such that a recent commentator on his work, Rudwick, could refer
to "unlimited drafts upon antiquity" as his necessary and useful tool [2] .
Continuing until today, the time scales have been even more expanded, much more, so
that many a geologist has felt free to mount his facts into any frame of time that can
hold them; the duration itself would scarcely be accosted for proof. Owing to recent
discoveries such as the youngness of the ocean bottoms, and to late criticism of
biostratigraphy, the license to capture time has become more restricted. But
radiochronometry, newly developed, reigns supreme over time and is dizzied by success.
Conventional chronology today gives about 15,000 years to the Holocene and latest
period, and about two million years to the Pleistocene. Then some 35 my go to the
Tertiary, with its Pliocene, Miocene and Eocene; 55 my to the Cretaceous; 27 my to the
Jurassic; 23 the Triassic; 33 the Permian; 74 the Carboniferous; 72 the Devonian; 22
the Silurian; 57 the Ordovician; 92 the Cambrian; and some 2000 million years (or much
more) to the Precambrian era.
By this point, the reader is well-aware of our scandalous departures from the
conventional text. We have been arguing, in the whole of our Quantavolutionary Series
(and see page 497 below), that all of the preceding ages probably have occurred within
a million years, and especially that major elements of the Holocene, Pleistocene,
Tertiary, Cretaceous and Carboniferous have occurred within the time usually allotted
to the Holocene, namely some 15,000 years or less. The great disparity has occurred, we
maintain, owing to the displacement of time by catastrophe. And to denote these
catastrophic intervals, we have used certain disruptive episodes that we have tied into
astronomical events, bringing a sequence of periods that we begin with the Pangean, and
then go on the Uranian, Lunarian, Saturnian, Jovean, Mercurian, Venusian, and Martian,
each marked by catastrophe, until the present or Solarian period to which only some
1600 years are allotted.
Many salient events are disallowed to quantavolution theory by conventional science not
because they take too long to happen, not because they did not happen, but because they
happened very long ago. Notable among such cases are the fission of the Moon from the
Earth, the transportation of hydrocarbons by comets, the prolonged great heat of Venus,
the desolation of Mercury and Mars, and other impliedly catastrophic occurrences, whose
number is surprisingly large -even determining -when plucked out of the pages, for
example, of the special account of the solar system contained in the Scientific
American for September, 1975.
Some fifty-nine techniques of determining prehistoric duration and fixing distant
events were summarized by the present author (1981) and deemed faulty in one or more
regards. This, even when taken together with the sources to which it refers, does not
constitute definitive disproof of the validity of long-time chronometry. However, it
does permit us to entertain a short-term model of solar system history. The evidence of
Solaria Binaria is such that all previously existing tests offering macrochronic
conclusions are either modified to suit our model, or declared invalid.
With regard to geological and biological tests that assert long duration of processes,
evidence is accumulating rapidly that quantavolutionary transformations are physically
possible. Independent of historical argumentation, geological and biological time are
collapsible in theory and in the laboratory. Astronomers figure time in light-years
over vast distances, but this is a convenience, not a measure of history. Empirical
tests are, however, also theory-dependent, as, for example, the "thermonuclear" Sun
whose dynamics are invisible, and the potassium-argon radioactive decay tests performed
upon moon soil that presume a three-billion-years-old Moon, or the radiocarbon test
that believes in a practically constant atmosphere.
Every discipline advancing long-time claims would today be in a defensive posture were
it not for the heavy investment, both intellectual and material, in radiochronometry,
which is believed to be paying rich dividends. The bedrock defense of radiochronometry
is that radiodecay rates of known elements are regular and inalterable by any
conceivable environmental force. Lately, this view has been challenged.
Once the quantavolutionary hypothesis is substituted for the evolutionary hypothesis of
uniform and gradual changes based upon the change rates of recent centuries, the
majority of tests simply is nullified. The reason is that the constituents of time-
measurement are nature-dependent -the time-makers are, like undisciplined and free
workers, able to speed up or slow down and hence cannot be counted upon for an
indefinitely long series of regular movements or changes.
If there are 59 different measures of time, say, each one will have to know enough
about a certain changing phenomenon of nature to guarantee that it has given off a set
of signs or signals throughout a specified period, that these signals composed
intervals translatable into current understanding such as solar years or millennia or
some usable sequential juxtaposition, and these signals that were once given off can be
reliably reproduced, observed, or inferred when recently or currently the signals were
registered and/ or interpreted.
Considering the prevalence of scientific opinion on the side of a universe, solar
system, Earth biosphere, and hominoidal presence, each of long duration -say, of 6
gigayears, 5 gigayears, 3 gigayears, and five million years -the challenge which short-
time chronologists present to the time-keepers of science should be easily disposed of:
these need only provide one incontrovertible proof of long duration where short
duration is claimed. Should it be demanded that the short-time advocate offer his
proofs first, one may plead that the long-time chronometrician is rich in experimental
resources, hence noblesse oblige.
The stakes in radiochronometry are very high: all of the natural sciences have a stake
in the game, plus ancient history, pre-history, anthropology, archaeology, indeed all
of the humanities and, in the end, philosophy, theology, cosmology.
At Valsequillo (Mexico) human occupation is evidenced by sophisticated stone tools but
the horizons occupied have been dated by the fission-track method on volcanic material
and by uranium dating of a camel's pelvis at 250,000 years of age [3] . At least one
of the team believes the age to be "essentially impossible."
North of the border, at the Calico site, California, early humans occupied premises and
employed several categories of tools. Uranium-thorium tests yielded a date of
200,000"20,000 years for the artifacts [4] . Meanwhile, in Israel, at the 'Ubeidiya
site, previously dated to 700,000 years, fossil mammals were redated to a human site
containing Acheulian artifacts at two million years, "500,000 years older than any
record of Early Acheulian artefacts or Homo Erectus in Africa." [5]
These claims support my attack in Homo Schizo I upon the hominid chronology asserted in
such studies as those of R. Leakey and Johanson in East Africa. That is, all datings of
hominids and early man are far too old, and the so-called hominids were probably human.
They also support the thesis of Chaos and Creation that assigns an ecumenical culture,
worldwide, to Pangea, prior to the breakup of the continents.
In the realm of legend, challenges to radiochronometry emerge as well. The following
abstract from Catastrophist Geology may be quoted in its entirety [6] :
Lake Bosumtwi (diameter 8 km) in Ghana is by geologists generally interpreted as the
impact scar of an extraterrestrial body, and the Ivory Coast tektite field has been
correlated with it on chemical and geochronological grounds. The Dogons, who live 800
km away in Mali, preserve an ancient tradition attributing the Lake to the fall of a
fiery metallic mass of unusual dimensions. This legend is also an integral part of the
cosmogony of many other West African peoples, such as Mandingoes and Bambaras. Many
priests make a pilgrimage to the Lake or to the nearby town of Kumassi, and also many
blacksmiths visit the Lake before initiation to their sacred profession. Glass from the
impact rim around the Lake has been radiometrically dated at 1.3 to 1.6 million years,
a period when Africa was inhabited by Australopithecines.
The moment is opportune for some scholar to compile such victories of oral traditions.
No less than eight hypotheses of this book are combined in and supported by this single
story. And who dates the Australopithecines and how? The problem is global.
Every proposition that supports exoterrestrial influence on Earth threatens
radiochronometry. Radiochronometry has meanwhile thrown biostratigraphical chronometry
into disrepute. Vita-Finzi, for example, places his hopes for quaternary geochronology
on radiochronometry [7] . Richer in his turn writes:
Radiochronometric dating thus laid to rest once and for all the idea that rocks can be
dated, even in a gross way, by their lithology or by the extent of their deformation
and metamorphism. Radiometric dating also revealed that Precambrian time was far
greater than anyone previously imagined." [8]
(Precambrian time is accorded 80% of all rock time and Precambrian rock by one estimate
surface over 17% of the Earth.) Fossil-time is heavily theory-dependent. Alter the
assumed speed of evolution and one alters fossil-time, and the dating of its associated
sediments. Evolution-time, once we dismiss the pretensions of natural selection
(adaptation and survival of the fittest), and microevolution (neo-darwinism) and
introduce quantavolution, can be calibrated on practically any time-scale, allowing
only a perceptible succession and superposition of species.
The boundary times between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods are increasingly
recognized to have been catastrophic. From tall mountains to the deep abyss, notable
turbulence occurs. Asteroids or comets have been called forth to explain the phenomena,
which are holospheric. One study [9] concentrated upon a single core drilled at 4805
meters of ocean depth off Africa into a fan of a submarine canyon cut into the Walvis
Ridge; at about 205 meters below the bottom the C/ T boundary was ascertained and its
materials analyzed. Numerous anomalous chemical conditions were discovered, leading the
20 authors to support conclusions, some suggested elsewhere, that the state of carbon
dioxide, oxygen, iridium, platinum, cyanide, osmium, arsenic, calcium carbonates,
terrestrial ejecta dust, and exoterrestrial dust indicated and/ or caused general
decimation of marine invertebrata, and, by extension, as suggested elsewhere,
insufferable conditions for flora and fauna of the continents, with magnetic
disturbances, a rise in temperature of 8 degrees centigrade, flash-heating of the
atmosphere at the explosive moment, difficulty in photogenesis, and starvation. The
mixing of C/ T fossils above the boundary for two meters led to an unresolved question
as to whether bioturbation or a prolonged extinction process was proceeding after the
extincting event. There was only a film of sedimentary clay to work with at the
boundary. Above lies core material ending with lower Eocene fossilized ooze at the
surface: thus, most of the Cenozoic or recent period is unrepresented. Basalt is first
struck at 280 m subbottom depth, below which it alternates to 340 meters with
volcanoclastics, clay and sand. Above the latest basalt occur the same, with fossils at
intervals intermingled with a sandstone marl, and, toward the present, chalks, cherts,
limestones, and ooze. A layer of ash is found at -200 meters just above the C/ T
boundary transition and another at -60 meters.
There is an obvious sequence from older to newer nannofossils, but there is also a
gnawing doubt as to the length of time which the total deposition, even in its
presumably truncated form, actually required. If, for instance, in the 280 meters of
postbasalt deposits, some 7 meters consist of ashes, which must fall rapidly, then
ashes amount to about one-fortieth of the column, but they must have dropped in a
matter of days.
If, too, the submarine fan was laid down turbulently from its parental canyon, and, all
the while, heavy volcanic fall-out was occurring, one might conjecture again in terms
of days, or months, or years, but hardly in millions of years. The sudden cessation of
deposition at the Lower Eocene of 50 million years ago suggests a bottom of prolonged
stillness, but then what comes before as here must suggest a brief turbulence. The
sequence of fossils could extinct and proliferate in centuries or millennia, or, less
likely, occur by instant turbulent crossbedding from different sources.
The authors and others are looking for a medium-sized astrobleme that would have been
the disastrous Intruder of the C/ T boundary; a 25 km/ diameter crater at Kamensk (S.
Russia) is alluded to. By our theory the Earth may have suffered numerous meteoroid
explosions at this time. In earlier pages, the exponential rate of astrobleme
discoveries was noted. There is no chance of finding a solitary culprit. Cretaceous
craters will be numerous, and if time is compressed, distinction among the ages of most
astroblemes may be vitiated. All of this is ominous. If geology and geophysics are so
ready to sell out biostratigraphical chronology, on which natural history has depended
almost entirely from the beginning of its modern phase 150 years ago, then those
disciplines, if not bankrupt, are poor. One cannot be blamed for addressing them with
alternatives.
Moreover, one must consider whether radiochronometry would ever had developed if
geochronology had not already felt the need to posit macrochronism. The presuppositions
of radiochronometry are such that it would have had hard going against a microchronism.
Basic among these uncertainties of radiochronometry are, first, the setting of zero
time for the start-up of radioactive decay of the measuring elements such as 238-
uranium, second, the need to assume a constant intake of exoterrestrially produced
elements during a long Earth history, and third, the belief that electric charges
within the crust and their magnetic fields are either constant or do not affect rates
of radioactive decay of the elements whose decay is used as a measuring rod.
As Cook has argued, the early state of the Earth is hardly empirically known or
deducible. Yet radiochronometry must proceed as if it were, and, furthermore, somehow,
whatever is found now as the result of decay was not present in the beginning but finds
its only source in the decay process [10] .
There is a basic weakness of all radioactive decay methods of chronometry that is too
frequently ignored. All these methods must assume a given composition of species at
zero time. For example, in the original 'lead method' it was assumed that the total
'chemical' lead was zero in uranium-thorium minerals at their time of origin. In later
lead 'isotope' methods the decay isotopes were assumed to be absent in the original
sample. Later work showed that such assumptions were very doubtful if, indeed, not
untenable. Any such method would seem on its surface to be invalidated as soon as one
obtains evidence regarding an appreciable abundance of decay products at zero time
unless some means were available to determine the zero time concentration of the
radioactive decay products. Unfortunately, one may only guess these concentrations, and
the age results thus obtained can be no better than this guess. The apparent
hopelessness of this situation is exemplified by relative lead isotope abundance data
presented in extensive tables by Faul and Kulp (Landsberg, 1955).
Cook proceeds to the second problem, that of cosmically produced nuclear transformation
of the isotopes being used to measure time.
A few years ago radioactive decay processes were the only natural ones known. Perhaps
all of the nuclear reactions previously described as 'artificial' as well as many
others involving energies quite outside the range of artificial transmutations actually
occur probably at appreciable rates in the earth. Puppi and Dallaporta (Landsberg,
1955) showed that the average star (cosmic ray-promoted nuclear explosion) rate is
about 2/ cm 2 /s or 10 19 /s in the atmosphere alone. George (Landsberg, 1955) gave
star count data which would suggest possibly about another 10 25 inside the earth.
Moreover spontaneous uranium fission alone should produce 10 26 stars/ year inside the
lithosphere. Since a particles emitted from radioactive elements have enough energy to
penetrate the coulomb barrier in nuclei of atomic number Z up to at least 20, perhaps
upwards of 10 -4 of these particles (geometrical cross-section about 0.02 barns) should
produce secondary nuclear transmutations. If this is the case, natural decay processes
should effect at least 10 29 - 10 30 secondary transmutations in the earth's crust each
year.
This would be enough to disjoint the radio clocks. Jean Perrin, as noted by Baranov
[11] , has gone farther than Cook to argue that radioactive decay is not spontaneous,
but is caused by ultrahard radiation coming in from exoterrestrial sources. That is why
"natural" radioactivity is concentrated within the crust of the Earth.
We have stressed that exoterrestrial bombardments of the Earth by particles from nova
explosions and other sources of hard radiation have been repeatedly experienced by the
crustal rocks of the Earth. The present state of the Earth must be receiving a small
fraction of its historical radiation. Yet scientists who have provided some of the
chemical proof of these catastrophes have been, inconsistently, strong advocates of
timing their own disproofs of cosmic particle equilibrium by the very radioactive
levels being simultaneously disproved. Like the proverbial military headquarters, they
issue bulletins that "the situation is developing well; our troops are withdrawing on
all fronts."
A similar problem is to be seen in the separation of electricity from radioactivity.
Ignoring the electrical state (or, better, the electrical history) of the Earth may
foreclose alternative life-experiences of radioactive materials. But we have intimated
earlier that the Earth has had heavy periodic electrical transactions with
exoterrestrial bodies and plasmas. Further, the Earth has had electric potentials
differing from its potential today.
Sykes placed a standard radioactive cobalt-60 specimen between the poles of a magnet
with an estimated flux-density of 0.1 Tesla, positioned a gamma radiation detector in
proximity, and took readings of the emissions when the magnet was on and when it was
off. The "decay constant," which is supposed to be invariable if it is to be used to
clock geological time, speeded up about 2% when the magnetic field was applied. He
concluded that "the thesis of decay constancy under all environmental conditions cannot
be maintained." [12]
These experimental results move in the direction theorized by Juergens and
experimentally indicated by Anderson and Spangler [13] . The half-life of radioactive
isotopes appears vulnerable to external electromagnetic influences. Since the strength
of the Earth's magnetic field has been diminishing, along with that of magnetized
rocks, the radio clocks within the rocks will have been slowing down. Further, it is
not alone a matter of a long-term trend. In any quantavolution, strong electromagnetic
forces are likely to be applied to crustal rocks causing sharp increases in the speed
of passage of "radio-time."
Furthermore "electric discharges of cosmic proportions should be capable of creating
new elements; even atmospheric lightning is credited with producing radionuclides, and
all artificial element-creation starting with the first fusion reaction ever achieved
in the laboratory -producing technetium from molybdenum, in 1937 -has involved
harnessing the forces of the electric discharge." So writes Juergens [14] . Tesla, his
biographers recall, once began experiments to make of the whole Earth an accumulator of
induced atmospheric charge; in 1982 an immense electrical current was traced from its
North Pacific origins through the Strait of Georgia behind Vancouver Island past Tacoma
(Wash.), into Oregon, paralleling a fault line [15] .
"What role," Juergens goes on to say, in passages cited briefly in our chapter on
lightning, "might environmental electrification play in setting the rules for nuclear
stability, radioactive-decay rates, and energies of particle-emissions in decay
processes?" The ambiant electrical stress would be different, whether continuously or
for short periods of time. "It would seem to follow that decay rates for radionuclides
might well differ radically from today's norms. Polonium isotopes now exhibiting very
little stability [referring to Gentry's experiments] might then acquire -briefly, but
long enough, half-lives in keeping with the evidence of the Earth's crustal rocks."
Gentry had shown the existence of short-lived polonium without evidence of association
with uranium-decay, whereas polonium has been considered an essential link in the chain
of decay that ends in 206 lead. Critics of Gentry objected that his findings would
cause "apparently insuperable geological problems."
Juergens proceeds farther. Following experiments by Gamow in wave mechanics, he
describes the nucleus as having a well-potential or '" potential-well" out of which
alpha particles must climb to "decay," mustering sufficient energy to escape. He
regards the Earth's electric charge as a principal "well-builder." "The Earth appears
to be strongly charged with negative electricity, so that its surface potential is low,
which is to say, highly negative."
Suppose, then, that Earth potential is suddenly lowered by just 1 million volts -this,
in all likelihood, is an almost negligibly small fraction of the planet's 'normal'
negative electric potential. Alpha particles could, so to speak, climb out of the well
readily. "Any abrupt lowering of Earth potential by a mere million volts could be
expected to produce rampant radioactivity, with consequent lethal or at least strongly
mutational effects on all forms of life."
Even presently, under quiet cosmic conditions, the possibility of electrical
intervention in radioactivity is not to be ignored. Radioactive radon is released from
rocks in earthquakes [16] . This is revealed by a sudden decrease, followed by a sharp
increase, in the radon content of the water table just prior to an earthquake. The
mechanism is obscure, but it can be conjectured that the electrical fields being
generated in the area of the faulting play a role in the phenomenon. When these occur
under conditions of a largely quiet exosphere (though we bear solar-storms correlations
with seismism in mind) piezoelectricity is to be suggested, as rock is being
recrystallized under pressure and heat.
What happens to cause a radon deficiency in the subsurface rock may be happening to
other radioactive elements as well, including uranium and potassium isotopes. If so,
such rocks may be incapacitated to serve as radiometric clocks, supposing, for example,
that potassium 40 is under the same stress. It will either leak out of the rocks, or
decay rapidly into the more stable form of Argon 40. If it leaks, and Argon 40 remains,
the rock will become promptly "older" in K/ A testing. If the Argon 40 leaks
disproportionately from the rock, the rocks will become "younger." More likely, the
ratio of the two will change and establish itself in a false gradation within the local
geological column that will, upon testing, confirm relative age differences with
perhaps little more chronological information than is supplied by simple
superpositioning of the strata. But what is "local" is probably large-scale, inasmuch
as rocks everywhere have been involved in seismic disturbances.
A treatise or symposium negatively critical of the macrochronal pretensions of
radiochronometry would be welcome and is overdue. The objections raised here cannot be
sustained without much more elaborate treatment. Nor can we more than mention the
problems of radiocarbon dating, so important to holocene and pleistocene geology with
which we deal heavily in these pages. As I have written elsewhere, the fragility of
this index of time is such as to make it less useful beyond 2500 years ago [17] .
As with every radiochronometric process, various fluxes of cosmic and terrestrial
electricity, large fluctuations of the gaseous and radiation intake of the atmosphere,
and biospheric conflagrations all contribute to radiocarbon disequilibrium. Given, for
instance, that a solar magnetic storm of the 1950's was observed to add 1% to Carbon 14
of the atmosphere, hence the intake of the biosphere, the probably much heavier solar
storms associated with several kinds of atmospheric turbulence of antiquity might
seriously affect dating, which, indeed the studies of H. E. Seuss have proven [18] .
We bear in mind, too, the calculations of Cook, which, retrojecting the small but
perceptible increase in Carbon 14 in the atmosphere under uniformitarian conditions
today, come out with a figure of zero-carbon in the air some 13,000 year ago. [19]
Like every radiochronometric process, with its half-life calculations, radiocarbon
decay is figured at a declining exponential rate. The mathematics of exponentialism
subjects the process to time collapse; exponential rates in chronology are an
unreliable ally of uniformitarian rates in biostratigraphical measures of time and of
macrochronism generally. In the clamor of debate over the significance of the
multitudinous mammoth (and antelope, rhinoceros, and other) fossils of recent times,
the long spread of Carbon 14 dates assigned to the finds has attracted attention, but
their meaning for carbondating has been ignored. If frozen mammoth finds are dated from
44,000 years ago at one extreme to 2500 years ago at the other extreme, an impossible
pattern of climatic changes has to be developed, all allowing some of the cadavers to
persist unthawed during the whole period, while letting others cadavers give all signs
of eating warm-weather plants just before death [20] . The Carbon 14 dates must be
invalid. The same dates, if collapsed and rendered simultaneous, then support an abrupt
event, as opposed to an event occupying many thousands of years. The same reasoning
would apply to other Carbon 14 problems of the end of the ice ages. Here then, one
would refer back to the last chapter and its stress upon the abruptness of biological
and geological change.
Is there then nothing whose history when retraced on an exponential rate of development
must still have been of long duration? Most likely to limit the microchronic concept of
quantavolution are certain biological phenomena. Thus, if a living bristlecone pine
tree shows annual growth rings now, and if these go back in time for hundreds of years
on the same tree, and these live trees are positioned above a locality of fossil trees,
which exhibit the same many rings, and in turn connect with the rings of other trees
obviously buried continuously below them, a lengthy period of time begins to develop
which, founded upon the need for the species to have evolved beforehand, would begin to
push time back by thousands, if not many thousands, of years. Proof of such
retrogression is not quite satisfactory yet.
With an enthusiasm born of religious convictions and impelled by many years of
frustration at playing the other fellow's game, a group of creationist geologists,
without spending much time at the task, can readily explain the history of the world's
landforms in terms that allow only a few thousand years. That they can do so
constitutes in itself a formidable challenge to conventional geology. Still, even
granted that they can do so, are they correct?
If they pursued the line of thought that I follow in my books, they might first dispose
of the missing half of the Earth's crust by removing it, in a major incident, from the
Pacific Ocean hemisphere. They can place the removed crust on the Moon and in planetary
space. Then the minor oceans of the world open up to let the continents raft into their
present position. Practically all of the ocean bottoms are of recent lava.
Next, they tackle the waters, which descend largely from the heavens, and from boiling
metamorphosizing basalt foundations. Next they fashion the rivers from the world's
infinite cracks and faults, big rivers from big faults. The mountains are folded and
thrust up forward and aft of rafting continents. Huge tides create deserts and fill
some lakes. Precipitation fills others. The ice comes from precipitation in darkness,
and from exoterrestrial falls.
The sedimentary rocks are ground up from the turbulence of winds, tides, and the
friction of moving land masses. Their fossils, when they occur, denote rapid
deposition. Volcanoes spurt up along the forward edges of movement in vast numbers and
volcanic fissures vent even more than cones. All of the sea and some of the land is
lava-covered, an igneous composition. Another large part of the land and ocean shelves
is of the original basalt base of the earlier all-land system and is called shield rock
or Precambrian exposures. The biosphere that has been destroyed by drowning, burning,
burial, poisoning, and freezing exhibits itself largely in a few assemblages, as
fossils, coal, fusain, and some types of oil. The metals coming from earlier explosions
among the planets fall in dust or globules, mixing with the turbulence as deposits.
Repeated falls of dust, terrestrial and exoterrestrial, mingle with the slowing floods
to give the Earth its patina of soils in favored places. Here, and also at one time in
the drowned slopes of debris off the shores of continents and around submerged volcanic
heights, most of the surviving and adapting biosphere found its home.
Who needs more time than several thousand years to explain all this, they may well say?
I would say that we need at least a little more time for all of this work, another ten
thousand years perhaps. Even then, we would need an additional longer period for the
creation of the solar system, the planets, the Earth, and the land and biosphere that
were worked upon in the scenario just presented. In an accompanying volume, Solaria
Binaria, a million years is given. (See page 497.)
Only a small fraction of the operations and product of the earth sciences and biology
depends directly upon the chronologies that have been developed in natural history.
Determining whether the dinosaurs were exterminated five thousand or fifty million
years ago may have little to do with deciding whether the mammals had reptilian
ancestors. King Kong may still be alive in some jungle for all the difference it would
make to primate zoology. The protozoans are alive and studied without reference to the
discovery of similar Precambrian species.
Even the science of radiology is independent of its use to measure time; geophysicist
Melvin Cook, following upon his trenchant criticism of radiochronometry, is prompt to
praise other uses of radiation physics in geology. Similarly Dudley attacked vigorously
the idea of stability of radioactive decay measures even though he was a professor of
radiation physics in medicine and quite aware of the value of radiation science [21] .
When asked to comment on tests by Anderson indicating the non-random and unreliable
decay of C14, "scientists said that it could be possible to accelerate or control the
release of energy from decaying nuclei... This could lead to..." [22] It's an ill wind
indeed, that blows no good.
When a group of scientists and philosophers, perhaps the most notable of them being
Albert Einstein, radically criticized the notion of time, the progress of physics is
said to have been assisted. Even when time is conceived to run backwards in certain
physical, chemical and astronomical theories, the idea is treated as possibly a
positive contribution to the solution of perplexing issues.
Nor does the radical alteration of other hard-shelled concepts throw the sciences into
unhealthy turmoil. For some time now, the gravitational constant has been assailed as
an inconstant, possibly diminishing on the Earth and in the cosmos, following the work
of Dirac, Dicke, and others. In an accompanying volume, Earl Milton and the present
author, in a history of the solar system, seek to dispense with the concept of
gravitation entirely, save for the notion of inertia. At the same time, we seek to work
with the concept of a single charge in electricity, endeavoring to solve cosmogonical
problems without the two-century-old idea of positive and negative charges.
Why, then, does it matter at all when, in looking upon a mountain or dealing with a
human being, one person says he is looking at a historical creation of a great many
millions of years while another person says he is observing the creations of a few
thousand years? Each sees beauty in the sight, let us grant; each understands the
morphology; each commands techniques for mastering problems that arise in connection
with the mountain and the human. Indeed, each may exclaim, "What wonders hath God
wrought!" -God taking much time to the first observer, little time to the other.
But, now the second person adds that he believes in the validity of certain scriptures
that purport to convey the word of God, among which are some sentences that describe
how God made the world, including a time-schedule of the construction. The first person
has no interest in these same scriptures except as possible scientific testimony, and
as such he finds them almost totally incorrect, and says so. Now an issue is joined.
But note that the issue concerns time only incidentally. The issue is whether a body of
writings can be the words of God; many other parts of the scriptures are at issue which
do not concern time at all, such as, for example, a statement forbidding the eating of
pork and shellfish.
The issue of sacred authority is beyond the method of the present work (and is treated
in my book, The Divine Succession) unless, as a consequence of this book, either the
one or the other person derives support from it, which he can then use in proving that
the alleged words of God do or do not conform to a historical reality, proved by other
means.
However, it is deemed permissible to employ the scriptures in a secular sense here, as
a source of facts, allegations, and hypotheses about natural history; in so doing, we
submit the scriptures to the same respectful treatment we give to all the rare ancient
documents treating in their own way of scientific subject-matter, such as Hesiod's
Greek Theogony and the Hindus' Rig-Vedas.
Therefore, questions of the elapsed time for accomplishing the present surface of the
Earth have to be answered with a set of intellectual instruments called the scientific
method, which are presumed useful to all persons engaged in seeking such answers. The
primary tools are the empirical proposition, the testing of this by factual evidence,
and some control of reality under the government of the propositions -that is,
hypothesis, proof, and application (prediction being one form of such).
This is all elementary, but leads us to ask about time. If the duration of historical
time is unimportant and inconsequential in most of the work of the earth sciences, why
should it be important in natural history? If it can be shown that natural forces could
have provided all of natural history through the agency of hundreds of millions of
years, why trouble oneself with showing that they could provide the same in a few
thousand years?
There are two answers, not identical even though usually correlated: one set of
solutions may be more consonant with reality; further, one set may be more useful. A
satisfactory explanation of those answers (apart from the problem itself) would require
a volume of philosophy on the true and the useful. We might, for instance, find
ourselves concluding that the short and long chronologies are both equally true, but
the short answer is useful for people who wish to correlate perfectly their natural
philosophy about the empirical world with their beliefs in the words of their sacred
scriptures.
Alternatively, we might discover that the long-term view is really true and we might as
well accept the reality principle as our guide, instead of the sacred doctrine. Since
this is a fairly weak view (why hold to reality if it doesn't make pay-offs?), it is
often strengthened by a historical, acquired fear of negative experiences in treating
with persons holding to the scriptural text. Taken together with various sociological
forces -such as professionalism and bureaucracy -truth per se and historical fear can
generate a strong sense of the utility of the truth. The stage is then set for an
enduring struggle between creationists and gradualists.
Here we end up in a distinctly different position. We wish no quarrel with anyone; yet,
in a sense, we have to quarrel with everybody. We say that, properly understood,
natural forces can have created the present world in a vastly compressed span of time.
Too, they may have done so. In arguing that they may have done so, we probably lend a
hand to creationists; we do so, too, by according respect to ancient holy writ, as we
find this source of evidence shabbily treated in both scientific and humanistic
circles.
On the other hand, we see no divine miracles in a nature operating by quantavolutions
over a short time. Nor do our time schedules and calendar of events correlate fully
with the sacred ones that we know. Nor, finally, unless I underestimate my work, do our
explanations facilitate the introduction of an animate divine intelligence into natural
history.
Indeed, "creation science," as is called the systematic effort to validate the natural
history of the Bible, may be self-defeating. It lets a holy statement, which might
better be believed as a different kind of truth-telling and saving instrument, enter
into competition in the contests of science, where the rules, the umpires, and the
rewards are greatly different. I say this while expressing appreciation of the
distinctive contributions that creationists have continuously made to the earth
sciences, and realizing that, were it not for their religious zeal, their scientific
interests alone would not have given birth to their hypotheses and research.
Supposing that a respectable case has been made for its actuality, what utility does
mini-temporal natural history possess? It displaces time as dictator of events.
Although it does not abolish historical time, it allows natural forces to play flexibly
with time in history.
It lends historical stimulus to inventive ideas that would be hopeless if time were by
its very slackness a limiting factor. We see this kind of idea now seeking realization
in such fields as elemental physics and genetic engineering. Third, it permits the
amalgamation of the earliest records of mankind into the natural sciences, makes man a
creature and creator of nature in a holistic sense, helps understand the human story
and uses that story to help explain nature.
Here arises the theory of which Velikovsky was the leading exponent, that the morale
and behavior of the human race would be improved if humans would appreciate their
catastrophic history. Once recalled and realized, the catastrophic record would keep
mankind alerted to its compulsion to repeat its past. The racial death-wish could
better be kept under control, especially now that racial suicide is facilitated by
nuclear armaments.
Since there exists a high correlation between millennialist attitudes (the expectation
that world-destruction is imminent) and support for catastrophist scientific theories,
I doubt that a therapy for the unconscious compulsion to destroy the world is to be
found so easily. "If one is going to go to heaven, the sooner the better." More
complicated solutions will be addressed in another work concerning religion. It is
conceivable that quantavolution offers possibilities of a new effective synthesis of
religion and science, which existing creationism and evolutionism cannot afford.
Beyond such utilities rest the several advantages that a microchronic model provides in
association with the other elements of the theory of quantavolution: such as the
negative exponential principle, the holistic principle, and the transactions of
exoterrestrial and terrestrial forces. For example, moon-eruption theory (G. Darwin,
Fisher, Pickering et al.) was first posited as occurring in early stages of the Earth's
formation by macrochronic reckoning.
When Wegener advanced his continental drift theory, he was impelled by paleontology to
place the rifting continents in the Cretaceous period. An opportunity to join lunar
outbursting and continental drift was lost because of vast differences in timing the
two events. Both theories, moon-eruption and continental drift, were placed in abeyance
for many years.
Then, when Wegener's theory was revived, an elaborate mechanism of tectonic plates
moving by convection currents was devised (Hess et al.). Again an opportunity was lost.
But microchronism, together with its allied quantavolutionary principles, brings all
three events together: paleontological ecumenicalism, the moon-eruption, and
continental cleavage and rafting.
For propagandistic purposes, one might take advantage of the credibility that attends
long time scales: granting quantavolution, may I not still allow a few millions of
years for the resurfacing of the Earth, or only a million, or even a hundred thousand?
Or use the Pleistocene, that period of "ice ages" which can be stretched from 100,000
to 2,000,000 and has as many climates and ice advances as we have fingers and toes,
thus to avoid a furor of reproaches? Why do I crowd the Holocene so?
I reject this admittedly tempting idea for one large reason alone. As is demonstrable
fully in my books on Chaos and Creation and the rise of Homo Schizo, I find evidence in
the earliest behavior and beliefs of mankind that I cannot dismiss, which attests to
human experience with every form and scale of quantavolution. At this point in the
study of quantavolution, I would lengthen the time scales only if some incontrovertible
proof of a relevant far-distant event were offered, or if it were to be discovered that
the earliest humans whom we know about were survivors of earlier advanced civilizations
whose true long natural historiography was handed down in garbled form. Neither seems
likely.
Notes (Chapter Thirty-one: The Recency of the Surface)
1. Animal Travellers, loc. cit., 87.
2. M. J. S. Rudwick, "Poulet Scrope on the Volcanos of Auvergne: Lyellian Time and
Political Economy," VII Brit. J. Hist. Sci. 3: 27 (Nov. 1974), 205-42.
3. Virginia Steen-McIntyre et al., "Geologic Evidence for age of Deposits at Hueyatlaco
Archaeological Site, Valsequillo, Mexico," 16 Quaternary Res. (1982), 1-17.
4. Ruth D. Simpson, "Updating Early Man, Calico Site, California," 20 Anthro. J. Canada
2 (1982), 8.
5. C. A. Repenning and O. Fejfar," Evidence for Earlier Date of 'Ubeidiya, Israel,
Hominid Site," 299 Nature (1982), 344.
6. E. Guerrier, "Le Forgeron Venu du Ciel," 17 Kadath (1976), 30-6.
7. Op. cit.
8. Op. cit., 65.
9. K. J. Hau et al., "Mass Mortality and Its Environmental and Evolutionary
Consequences," 216 Science (16 April 1982), 249-56. (20 authors, now at 13 different
institution, 2 funding organization, sponsoring center, and a number of readers were
involved.)
10. Prehistory and Earth Models, loc. cit., 24.
11. In Interaction of sciences in the Study of the Earth, loc. cit., 221-2.
12. N. J. G. Sykes, "A Simple Investigation of the Thesis of Isotope Decay Constancy,"
III S. I. S Rev. (Aut. 1978), 43-5, 45; cf Don Robins, "Isotopic Anomalies in
Chronometry Science," II S. I. S. Rev. 4 (1978), 108-10.
13. 77 J. Phys. Chem. (1973), 3114.
14. III Kronos (all, 1977), 3-17, 11.
15. J. R. Booker and G. Heusel performed the work; see "Nature's Hidden Power Line," 90
Sci. Dig. (Oct. 1982), 18.
16. Hiroshi Wakita et al., "Radon Anomaly..." 207 Science (22 Feb. 1980), 882-3.
17. A. de Grazia, Chaos and creation, loc. cit., 51, and Chapter 3 generally.
18. 4 Radiocarbon Geophysics 3( 1980), 113-7, 117.
19. "The Radio Carbon Method," 39 Utah Acad. Sci. Arts Letters, Proc. (1961-2). 11-5.
20. Cardona, I Kronos (Winter 1976) ' 77-85; Ellenberger, op. cit.
21. See Chem. and Engin. News, Apr. 7, 1975, "Comment."
22. Interview NY Times (30 Mar. 1971), Following presentation of paper, see IX PensÚe 4
(Fall, 1974).
THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH
by Alfred de Grazia
EPILOGUE
This book will conclude without a chapter given over to the explosion of the Moon from Earth. In Chaos
and Creation and Solaria Binaria lunagenesis is treated more directly, whereas here we have mentioned
at many points its relevance to geological processes. Lunagenesis was the paramount holospheric event.
No major geological process can be understood without a theory of the origins of the Pacific Basin. The
reader can, if so minded, judge the plausibility and the consistency of the theory by tracing it with
the help of the Index.
Geology has not been able fully to confront lunar fission because of its notions of time. Nearly all
studies favoring the idea have placed the event in the most remote eras, because to place it later
would require the reconstruction of later natural history, including that of the biosphere,
Furthermore, recent explorations of the ocean bottoms have revealed their astonishing "youth." This
finding has been thought to disprove even the earliest fission of the Moon, since lunar fission theory
without the Pacific Basin as its point of departure would be unappealing.
But the new evidence piles up in favor of lunar fission from Earth. The physical calculations of mass
fit are plausible; the Moon fits its hole. The Indo-Pacific Basin is there; the ocean bottoms are all
freshly paved. The land has been cleaved into great and small chunks and directed at the source of the
eruption. The cleavages have occurred at a negative exponential rate down to the very present. The only
force capable of such large interlocked effects would be the passby of a gigantic exoterrestrial body
interacting electrogravitationally with the Earth. Such evidence is resisted because it is felt that
the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere would be totally destroyed. This is not a
challenge to be met by theory alone. If the facts occur to demonstrate the prior existence of a totally
encrusted and thriving world surface and, then, after an epic quantavolution, continuation of the same
processes, greatly altered, lunar fission has to be believed.
Yet theoretical logic -call it speculation -has a large role to play, not the least in calculating
whether the biosphere would survive. A review of all that has been written on this subject allows an
affirmative. The extinction of a species is difficult; the extinction of tens of thousands of species
is more difficult; the extinction of nearly all species requires the total explosion of the globe.
Exponential reproduction over a few years can hide the most drastic reductions of population by fire,
flood, thrusting, explosion, fall-out, radiation, de-oxygenating, and de-photosynthesizing conditions.
The very excesses of blast may harbor the secret of survival. Cyclonic action fashions its own
boundaries. The cyclonic form is applicable to water, heat, dust, debris, electrical charge, radiation
-to all that in a spread-out form would tend to exterminate life. An atmosphere permitting survival, by
the theory of solaria binaria, would have been present in a huge plenum or sac surrounding the planets;
in addition, atmospheric gases in close encounters can be exchanged, possibly even created under
extreme conditions out of water and other compounds.
Surely survival would not be guaranteed. It might even be considered miraculous. Yet there is enough
plausibility in survival so that extinction should not be assumed; what is perhaps the most useful and
credible theory to explain the tortured Earth should not be passed over. If the Moon was assembled out
of a blasted Earth in a highly developed and recent epoch, then the origins and behavior of continental
drift are explained, world geography and physiography are explained, the oceans are explained, and the
present state and distribution of the biosphere are explained.
It is astonishing and dismaying to consider the huge differences in time allowances between
evolutionary and revolutionary morphology. The Grand Canyon has been a showpiece of geology as well as
American tourism. Its accepted history is in the range of one to two billion years for the walls and 10
millions and more for the gorge. M. Cook's explanation calls for only I0,000 years to develop the whole
complex. The whole world is implicated in such discrepancies, for the types of geological structures of
the Earth are limited to a couple of dozens and they are nowhere unique.
Does it not wreck the earth sciences to propose a cut in time by a factor of 200,000? One might as well
ask whether it wrecks economics to suffer both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. A quantavolutionary earth
scientist can earn a professional livelihood as well as an evolutionary one, so long as his employer is
unprejudiced. Further, radical criticism cannot but help any field, if it is properly conducted.
Conventional science funds should be tithed to promote tests of the quantavolutionary model.
But beyond these considerations goes the nature of the field. Geology operates upon a few basic
concepts, among them superposition, erosion, heat and pressure. And these are commonsense to begin
with. When one rock rests upon another, it is younger, unless some force has intervened; erosion is the
effects of wind and water upon landscape; heat and pressure can transform and transmute a substance.
Catastrophists do not deny these ideas; in fact, they invented them. Geology also has a large
dictionary of names that are given to things large and small, representing infinite combinations of
substances, heat, pressure, erosion, and position. The genius of geology is to bring order to this
immense variety and to use this knowledge to practical ends like making cement and finding oil. To all
of which the quantavolutionist says "amen."
Neither geology, nor any other science in its historical aspect, has to fear the idea of collapsed
time, but can derive theoretical benefits from it. Let us speak for a moment of chemical evolution.
Should it be as well termed quantavolution? I have here above (Page 119) spoken of the Miller-Urey
experiments on the initiation of primitive life processes, and have generally considered the possible
derivation of earthly existence from exoterrestrial and atmospheric sources. In Solaria Binaria we go
farther into the matter, elaborating the life-creating and sustaining plenum of primeval Earth.
In 1983 C. Ponnamperuna reported the discovery of all five of the so-called "precursors of life" in the
Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia in 1959 [1] . The compounds are adenine, guanine, cytosine,
thymine, and uracil, which are key molecules in DNA and RNA. He subsequently created all five bases "in
one fell swoop" by subjecting a mixture of methane, nitrogen, and water to electrical discharges. This,
he said, evidenced that chemical evolution could have been accomplished in a single pool of liquid (or
dense atmosphere?) in primitive times. The process might have occurred exoterrestrially as well as on
Earth, commented Melvin Calvin who had also studied chemical evolution and won a Nobel prize.
"In one fell swoop:" what, if anything, is this expression but a way of saying collapsing time and
quantavolution? Nor can one arrogate to man alone the ability to compress time. Nature may be blind,
but she is infinitely large, powerful, and busy.
Therefore, collapsing time may boggle the mind but does not destroy geology. Collapsing time introduces
the need for high energy forces than can do in weeks what erosion can do in millions of years. The
forces -wind, water, heat, pressure -are already present; it is a question of their organization and
intensity. The more intense the forces, the more they depart from our experiences, and resemble the
catastrophic recitals of the earliest humans.
Also, the more intense the forces, the more likely that they originate exoterrestrially. There appear
to be no means whereby the scientific ideology pervading the earth sciences for the past century and a
half can continue legitimately to ignore exoterrestrial causes and exoterrestrial effects in explaining
our lately tortured Earth.
Notes (Epilogue)
1. P. M. Boffey, in the New York Times, 30 Aug. 1983.
TWO CHARTS OF TIME
1. An Unconventional Time Scale
See Table 6 in Solaria Binaria
2. A Conventional Time-Scale such as is found in numerous works.
Period & Epoch Years before Present (m/ y) Duration (m/ y) Biosphere Prominences
Quaternary (Holocene) 15,000 yrs. 15,000 yrs. see text below*
Quaternary (Pleistocene) 2 2
Tertiary (Pliocene) 15 13
Tertiary (Miocene) 28 13
Tertiary (Eocene) 37 9
Cretaceous 92 55
Jurassic 119 27
Triassic 142 23
Permian 175 33
Carboniferous 249 74
Devonian 321 72
Silurian 343 22
Ordovician 400 57
Cambrian 492 92
Precambrian 2492 2000
* In the Q mankind caps the prominent insect, mammal, fish, bird and angiosperm plants,
presences, which meet the Cretaceous that, with the J, T, and P down into
the Carboniferous. abounds in reptiles (dinosaurs), fish both bony and shark-like,
brachiopods and ammonites, with conifers abundant. Then we move into ages rich in
amphibians, shark-like fish, insects, tetracorals, and productids. The Ordovician
and Cambrian favour nautiloids, graptolites, trilobites, and lingulella, while the
Precambrian reveals bacteria and algae.
============ End of The Lately Tortured Earth ============
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
Origins and History of the Solar System
by
Alfred de Grazia
and
Earl R. Milton
Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey
Notes on the printed version of this book:
Copyright 1984
Alfred de Grazia
and
Earl R. Milton
ISBN : 0940268-04-3
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S.A.
Limited first Edition
Address
Metron Publications.
P.O. Box 1213
Princeton,
N.J. 08542,
U.S.A.
The Authors express their thanks to
Rosemary Burnard
for designing and composing their book in type,
and to
Malcolm Lowery
for his editorial counsel.
To the memory of
RALPH JUERGENS
ta de panta oicizei ceraunoz*
* Lightning steers the universe
Heraclitus, ca. 2500 BP,
Fragment 64
SOLARIA BINARIA:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SOLARIA BINARIA
Origins and History of the Solar System
by Alfred de Grazia
and
Earl R. Milton
TITLE-PAGE
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
01: The Solar System as a Binary
02: The Solar System as Electrical
03: The Sun's Galactic Journey and Absolute Time
04: Super Uranus and the Primitive Planets
05: The Sac and Its Plenum
06: The Electrical Axis and Its Gaseous Radiation
07: The Magnetic Tube and the Planetary Orbits
08: The Earth's Physical and Magnetic History
09: Radiant Genesis
PART TWO: DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
10: Instability of Super Uranus
11: Astroblemes of the Earth
12: Quantavolution of the Biosphere: Homo sapiens
13: Nova of Super Uranus and Ejection of Moon
14: The Golden Age and Nova of Super Saturn
15: The Jupiter Order
16: Venus and Mars
17: Time, Electricity, and Quantavolution
PART THREE: TECHNICAL NOTES
NOTE A: On Method
NOTE B: On Cosmic Electrical Charges
NOTE C: On Gravitating Electrified Bodies
NOTE D: On Binary Star Systems
NOTE E: Solaria Binaria in Relation to Chaos and Creation
GLOSSARY
BIBILIOGRAPHY
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLES
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IN TEXT
GUIDE TO METRIC UNITS
LIST OF FIGURES
CHAPTER ONE
1. Dumb-bell Motion of Solaria Binaria
CHAPTER TWO
2. The Sun's Connection to the Galaxy
CHAPTER THREE
3. Stars around the Sun's Antapex
4. Nearby Stars in the Solar Wake
5. The Solar Antapex
CHAPTER FOUR
6. Electron Flow from Surrounding Space into a Star-cavity
7. The Birth of Solaria Binaria
8. Material Flow Coupling the Sun, Super Uranus and the Electrified Plenum
9. Flow of Material Between the Sun and Super Uranus under the Influence of a Self-
generated Magnetic Field.
10. Magnetic Toroidal Field Produced by Solar Wind Current Sheet
11. Magnetic Field Surrounding Several Flowing Ions
CHAPTER SIX
12. The Planet Saturn in Ancient Indian Art
CHAPTER SEVEN
13. Magnetic Field Associated with an Electrical Flow
14. Decreasing Magnetic Field Strengths Surrounding Central Current at Increasing
Distances
15. Motion of Drifting Charged Particle in a Magnetic Field
16. Braking Radiation Emitted by a Spiraling Electron
17. Primitive Planets in Orbit about the Electric Arc
CHAPTER EIGHT
18. The Earth in the Magnetic Tube
19. The Earth Magnet
20. Magnetic Transactions within the Earth
CHAPTER TEN
21. Transaction between Solaria Binaria and the Cosmos: Dense Plenum Phase
22. Solaria Binaria as the Plenum Thins and the Stars Separate
CHAPTER ELEVEN
23. Explosive Eruption from Super Uranus
24. Possible Astroblemes in Arizona
25. Meteoroid Trajectories
CHAPTER TWELVE
26. Radioactivity of Fossilized Remains
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
27. The Surviving Land from the Age of Urania
28. The Encounter of Uranus Minor with the Earth
29. The Fractured Surface of the Earth
30. Fragmentation of Super Uranus
31. Fission of the Earth-Moon Pair
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
32. The Chinese Craftsman God and his Paredra
33. The Churning of the Sea
34. The Golspie Stone
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
35. Apparent Motion of the Charged Sun about the Earth
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
36. The Electric Field between Mars and the Moon
NOTE C
37. Potential Energy Curve for the Collision of Two Atoms
38. Electric Forces Between Celestial Bodies
NOTE D
39. Binary Orbits of Short Period
LIST OF TABLES
CHAPTER THREE
1. Stars Behind the Sun (to 25000 Years Ago)
2. Stars Behind the Sun (25000 to 75000 Years Ago)
3. Stars Behind the Sun (over 75000 Years Past)
CHAPTER EIGHT
4. Calculated Undisturbed Decay of the Earth's Magnetization
CHAPTER ELEVEN
5. Modes of Meteorite Encounters
CHAPTER TWELVE
6. Ages of Solaria Binaria
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IN TEXT
BP before the present
cf. compare
E evolutionary (model)
EM electromagnetic
f.(ff.) following page(s)
fn. footnote
Gm, Gy gigameter, gigayear (= aeon)
ibid. in the same place
ISEE International Sun Earth Explorer (a space craft)
K Kelvin
km/s kilometers per second
ly light year
mks meter-kilogram second (units)
My megayear or million years
NMP, NRP North magnetic (rotational) pole
o. Omnindex (used in the printed version of this book. This electronic version has
the same information presented as Glossary, and Bibiliography)
op. cit. in the work cited
Q quantavolutionary (model)
q.v. refer to
SB Solaria Binaria (model)
SMP, SRP South magnetic (rotational) pole
GUIDE TO METRIC UNITS
Distances are measured in meters
Multiples of the meter, by thousands and thousands, have special names designated by
a prefix, such as micrometer and gigameter.
Other metric units use the same prefixes for their multiples, like microvolts,
gigaergs, etc.
Prefix Decimal Notation Useful to Measure
nano 0.000 000 001 atoms
micro 0.000 001 cells
milli 0.001 type size
- 1.0 people
kilo 1000.0 driving distances
mega 1000 000.0 satellite diameters
giga 1000 000 000.0 star diameters
tera 1000 000 000 000.0 planet orbits
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
INTRODUCTION
Since 1924, when the theory of the expanding Universe was first expounded, the
phenomena of astronomy have been viewed increasingly as intensely energetic. The
notion of an explosive Universe has been abetted by the identification of novas, the
discovery of the immense energy trapped in the internal structure of the atom, and
the detecting of radio noises from vast reaches of space signaling events so extreme
as the imploding of whole galaxies. What began as a whisper in scientific circles of
the late nineteenth century has become, in late years, a shout. Yet, for reasons
that can only be called ideological, that is, reflecting a constrained cognitive
structure in the face of contradictory perceptions, scientific workers on the whole
have not heard the "shout".
At the same time as the space and nuclear sciences have had to confront a new set of
facts, the near reaches of space have been surveyed and the body of the Earth
searched more thoroughly. The results confirm that the wars of the Universe have
been disastrously enacted upon battlefields within the Solar System. Without
exception, the planetary material that has been closely inspected exhibits the
effects of extreme forces unleashed upon it. Mars, Moon, Venus, Mercury - all are
heavily scared, Jupiter and Saturn are in the throes of internal warfare. An
asteroidal belt that may be called "Apollo" represents a planet that exploded. Nor
can we exclude from the common experience this scared Earth.
Consistent with the panorama of catastrophes, and additionally supplying a new
dynamic form in cosmogony, there has been developed a body of knowledge and
speculation surrounding the phenomena of stellar binary systems. The first binary
star orbit was computed in 1822, but not until the past few years has sufficient
information become available to speak about binaries systematically. Since the first
discovery, a large proportion of observed stars have come to be suspected as
multiple star systems.
Moreover many cosmogonists speculate that the Solar System itself was once a binary
system, or at least is now a kind of fossil binary system, with Jupiter exhibiting
star-like traits. It may be pointed out, for instance, that the distance between the
principal bodies of the Solar System is comparable with the distances between the
separate components in many binary systems.
Hence it becomes logical that a cosmogony of the Solar System should be modeled
after the theory that it was, and is, a binary system, a Solaria Binaria, accepting
and applying for the purpose of the model what is known and thought about the
observed stellar binaries elsewhere.
The explosive or catastrophic Universe poses basic problems to chronology. The span
of astronomical time has been increasing dramatically even in the face of time-
collapsing explosive events that reduce drastically the constraints upon time as a
factor in change. Great stellar bodies exhibit rotations and motions that accomplish
in hours phenomena that would on a gradual timescale be accorded millions or
billions of years. It appears that one has to work with a paradox: even as one
studies a Universe that changes over billions of years, one studies local events
where changes are measured in microseconds. Consequence, which is the last hope of
causality, is often strained in the straddling of time.
When the Solar System comes to be viewed in the light of newly discovered universal
transactions, the idea necessarily arises that it has developed under time-
collapsing conditions. Time measures - radiometric, geological and biological - that
have been painstakingly manufactured to give billions of years of longevity to the
system - must submit to a review of their credibility.
The need to generate a new chronometry is enhanced by current reassessments of
legends and knowledge that ancient and prehistoric human beings possessed. The
authors would not have ventured upon this reconstruction of the recent history of
the Solar System were it not for the fossilized voices whose shouts about their
catastrophic early world and sky sound louder even today than the shout heard in
contemporary science about the exploding Universe. Those anthropologists,
archaeologists, and scholars of ancient humanity who believe that these shouts must
have been mere whispers confront the same impasse ideologically as those scholars
who overlook the larger meanings of explosive cosmogony today. What the ancients
said, and did not say, about the world are to be taken into account. Both their
concepts of time and their visions of events deserve consideration.
This consideration and the others advanced before direct this monograph towards
resolving the cosmogony of the Solar System into a model of a Solaria Binaria, the
last stages of whose quick and violent quantavolution have been witnessed by human
eyes. The model stands as plaintiff, confronting the model of uniformitarian
evolution as adversary. Although a note on method is appended to the present work,
it may be well to stress in the beginning that a prerequisite of scientificity is
the ability to suspend judgment on a case being tried. This is especially painful
when one is expert on the matter at issue. Even so, a scientist who cannot suspend
judgment must be deemed as incompetent as the judge who cannot suspend judgment
while hearing a case in a court of law.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER ONE
THE SOLAR SYSTEM AS A BINARY
Contrary to the hypothesis that the Solar System was born as and has evolved as a
single star system, it is here claimed that the Solar System was and is a binary
system. The binary system was formed when the primitive Sun fissioned. Several
planets were generated in the neck of the fissioning pair and co-revolved about the
Sun synchronously with the companion (see Figure 1).
The remaining planets were generated, one or more at a time, in several episodes, as
the companion became unstable because of a changing galactic environment which we
will discuss in Chapter Three.
Figure 1. Dumb-bell Motion of Solaria Binaria
The binary system rotates like a lopsided dumb-bell as it moves through galactic
space. The Sun orbits about the planets and the companion as they also orbit about
the Sun. To be precise, all bodies in the system orbit about its center of motion
with the same period.
Jupiter can be taken to be the remnant binary partner [1] . This =>
quantavolutionary [2] conception of a rapidly developed solar binary system is
consonant with observations of nearby star systems. To seventeen light-years, or
about one hundred million times the Earth-Sun distance of 150 => gigameters, there
are forty-five star systems consisting of sixty stars and seven dark => unseen
bodies. Among these are many => physical binary systems.
Sixty-one percent of the sixty nearest stars are components of a double or triple
star system. Inasmuch as we cannot judge the organization of distant star systems,
this statistic may or may not characterize the starry Universe. Even within our
sample of sixty nearby stars, the star density and the binary frequency drop with
increasing distance (van de Kamp 1971, p109), a suspicious fact.
Nothing that we know of the Sun is exclusively a property of a single star system or
would be surprising if found in a => double star system.
On the average the => principals in a physical binary system are separated by
approximately 18 => astronomical units. At one extreme, separations of up to twelve
thousand astronomical units are deduced; at the other, the stars orbit one another
with their surfaces in contact (see Technical note D).
We see Solaria Binaria as a double star system evolving from the close extreme to a
system showing increasing separation of the principals with time.
The typical => visual binary system that has been analyzed contains principals whose
separations, periods, total masses, and orbital shapes are not markedly different
form the Sun coupled with any one of the major planets of the present Solar system
(Note D). The present Solar System differs from other visual binaries only when the
=> luminosity and mass rations of the principals are considered. The observed
features of visual binary systems are not an inconsistent final state for a physical
binary system evolving in the manner that will be proposed here for Solaria Binaria.
The present mass ratio between the Sun and its planets would seem inconsistent with
observed binary systems were it not for the fact that these latter are all visually
observed and do not exclude the potential presence of binaries where the minor
principal is undetectable presently by any observation. Further, as we shall show in
Chapter Four the brightness of the Sun and its companion( s) was markedly different
in the binary phase than in the present system.
The currently accepted cosmogony of the Sun and the planets is dominated by concepts
of gravitation, great stretches of time, and the stability of stellar and Solar
System motions. In this cosmogony one looks backward and forward in time, confident
that the world has been and will be found in place under known conditions. One
assumes the order of things in accord with a three-hundred-year-old theory backed up
by centuries of systematic observations. Occasionally, but nowadays with increasing
frequency, new scientific discoveries are "surprising" or anomalous, within the
frame of the cosmogony. For instance, devastation has been wide-spread both on the
Earth and on the other planets whose surface details are visible. Because theories
had not predicted such instability, these disruptive events are insistently termed
episodic and localized, and relegated to remote times. As will be shown, the
prevailing cosmogony of science cannot cope with increasing numbers of surprising
and anomalous observations. Sooner or later an alternative cosmogonical theory is
invited. The mutating evidence suggests that a cosmogony can be constructed which
does not require a long time to evolve our habitable world, within which major
readjustments of the planetary orbits and environments are possible, and which
redefines the set of forces that bring about change (see Technical Note C)
We began with the theory that the Solar System originated as a binary star system
and has evolved to the present as such. In the course of elaborating this theory, we
shall have to develop and use new tools of analysis - a general concept of
electricity (see Technical Note B); new ways of viewing the origins of the
atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere; an unusual form of legendary and historical
inquiry (see Technical Note A); and revised measures of time for the process.
Accepting the notion that the Solar System may be presently at the end of a long
binary trail leads to a theory that the Sun is electrical. This fundamental idea is
the topic of the next chapter.
Notes on Chapter 1
1. We acknowledge the conceivability of a recent theory that a large remote planet
or a dim distant companion of the Sun seems to be disturbing the planetary system
(van de Kamp, 1961, 1971; Brady; Harrison, 1977) and might be a remnant binary
partner in addition to Jupiter.
2. See ahead to glossary.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER TWO
THE SOLAR SYSTEM AS ELECTRICAL
The Sun, as star, radiates energy into the space surrounding it. Stars can be
conceived to have originated from electrical cavities in the structure of space.
Space, to our mind, is an infinite electrical medium. It is electrical in that it is
everywhere occupied by a charge, which, when it moves, assumes the character of
electrons, that is, "negative" charge (see Note B). The movement energizes and
carries material into the cavities which become and are the stars.
Such electrical cavities or stars are observed in the millions, and inferred in the
billions, in a fairly random distribution about the Sun. They form a lagoon of stars
that is called the Galaxy, through which the Sun moves in a manner, and with
consequences, to be described in the next chapter. Materially, a star is an
agglomeration of all that has accompanied the inflow of electrical charges from
surrounding space. The cosmic dust which astronomers see throughout the galaxies is
matter yet to be forced into stellar cavities, or matter that has been expelled
after a star dies. This dust is detected in greatest amounts in the vicinity of the
most highly active stars [3] .
Once in the cavity, the material cannot readily escape; it acquires increasing
density because of electro-chemical binding and electrical accumulation. A cavity or
star is increasingly charged but during its lifetime it cannot be more charged than
the medium around it [4] . The Sun is highly charged, as some scientists have
lately concluded (Bailey, 1960).
The life history of any new star may normally proceed as its cavity acquires first
matter, and then charges continuously until its charge density reaches equilibrium
with the surrounding medium, which is to say that the cavity has then been filled.
Thereupon the star releases or mixes its material with the medium until it no longer
possesses distinction as a body. This "normal" procedure is conditional upon the
star's transacting with the space around it in a uniform manner. The majority of
stars seem to transact quietly with their surrounding space, whether they are small
red stars, or giant red stars. They end their existences as they lived, quietly,
passing their accumulated material into the medium of space, eventually becoming
indistinguishable from the medium itself.
However, the fact that the star is in motion within the galactic medium poses an
occasional problem. It may journey into regions of the Galaxy which present it with
greater or lesser electrical differences than it has been used to. Then
quantavolution occurs. The star becomes one of the types to which astronomers pay
the most attention - the variable stars, the highly luminous stars, the binary
stars, the exploding stars.
It was in one such adventure in space that the original Super Sun lost its steady
state, fissioned, and became Solaria Binaria. The system then consisted of a number
of bodies, acting first as small "suns" with a primary partner, as is to be related
in Chapter Four.
In recent times, according to the central theme of this book, this Solaria Binaria
encountered a galactic region whose characteristics rendered the lesser stellar
partner of the system unstable. In a series of quick changes the binary was
transformed into today's Solar System.
Bruce (1944, p9) sees the process of stellar evolution as a cyclic build up of an
electrically charged atmosphere above the star. As we see it, galactic potentials
will determine the nature of the "surface" presented to the outside observer. As the
star journeys through galactic space, its surface nature changes in response to
differences in galactic potential. A change in the local galactic environment can
lead to an instability which results in catastrophic electrical redistribution of
the whole stellar atmosphere and sometimes of material found well beneath the star's
surface layers [5] . In short, the star becomes a nova.
In his cosmogony Bruce argues that binary stars form by division of an original
stellar nucleus. When the star becomes a nova, the returning nova discharge,
transacting electrically with the normal outward flow of => stellar wind off the
star, induces the outbursting star to rotate. A possible reverse jet blast from the
explosion might also cause the rotation to occur. Stars then, should have maximum
rotation during the nova outburst. Fission of the star into a binary would then
logically happen most frequently by rotational fission (Kopal, 1938, p657)
immediately after a nova outburst. Close-binary pairs should be found among the
post-nova stars (Clark et al., 1975, p674-6; Cowley et al., 1975, p413).
The Solar System is probably the descendant of a Super Sun, a body containing at
least eleven percent more material than the existing Sun, which became electrically
unstable and underwent a nova explosion.
When the Super Sun erupted as a nova it divided into a close binary pair, whose
primary became our present Sun; and its companion was a body about ten percent the
size of the Sun (see Lyttleton, 1953, pp137ff) [6] , henceforth to be called Super
Uranus, Enveloping the binary was a cloud of solar material constituting at least
one percent of the Sun's material. Also created in the fission were the seeds which
grew into the so-called "inner or terrestrial planets", probably Mars, the Earth,
Mercury, and one that will be called Apollo. Apollo's fate is discussed in Chapter
Fifteen.
Turning our attention to the Sun itself, we observe an opaque layer called the
photosphere. This layer is regarded ordinarily as the Sun's surface. Above the
photosphere lies the transparent solar atmosphere, which is difficult to observe.
First comes the => chromosphere and then the corona. Perhaps the key to star
behavior is the distinction between the photosphere and chromosphere. Each is
examined and known by means of spectroscopy, that is by observing and measuring its
spectrum of => radiation.
The spectrum of the photosphere shows radiation produced when the atoms, => ions,
and electrons of the photosphere collide, and therefore the spectrum reflects the
state of atomic collisions there. The light is emitted during the collisions. It
appears that the photosphere is a region of => plasma and atoms where the motion of
the material is chaotic, randomized. Collisions occur after short journeys, after
short mean free paths of electrical accumulation. The electrical field is small. A
high kinetic energy of collision is registered in the temperature of several
thousands of degrees. Energy is transmitted with some, but not great, amounts of
conversion of energy into internal atomic structures (excitation).
By contrast, the spectrum of the chromosphere represents the release of the internal
energy of excited atoms and ions. Light is emitted not so much at the moment of
collision among atoms, but it is cast off by rapidly accelerating atoms moving to
and from collisions, that is, between rather than during collisions. The
chromosphere is a region of directed, vertically moving electrons descending into
the photosphere, and atoms and ions escaping into the corona and the => solar wind.
The mean free path is long, not short. The electrical field is large, not small as
in the photosphere.
The photosphere, thus, is a region where the transmission of energy is observed. The
chromosphere is a region where the => transmutation of energy is what is observed.
The temperature "measurements" of the two regions are not helpful in understanding
the dynamics, because in one case, temperature is "low" where short paths lead to
frequent collisions, and in the other, temperature is high because of infrequent
long-path collisions. What is important is the contribution of each region to the
electrical system of the Sun.
The photosphere glows brightly with a silver color (Menzel, 1959, p24). Blemishing
this visible face of the Sun are dark, slightly cooler regions called sunspots, the
average spot lasts less than a day (Abell, 1975, p527). Viewed by telescope, the
whole photosphere, except where sunspots obscure it, shows a granular appearance.
These => granules are bright patches, hot tufts of gas that live for only a few
minutes (Juergens, 1979b, p36).
The photosphere and the behavior of the solar atmosphere which lies above it can
best be explained using a model based upon electrical processes. Bruce (1944, p6),
and later Juergens (1972, pp9ff) and Crew (1974, p539) have shown that photosphere
granules have the properties of a large number of parallel electrical arcs. Further,
Juergens maintains that highly energetic electrons are transmitted from the Galaxy
down through the solar atmosphere to the photosphere. As in the Earth's atmosphere,
the gas density and pressure in the solar atmosphere decrease with height above the
photosphere. Where the atmospheric pressure falls to a value equal to one percent of
the atmospheric pressure measured at the Earth's surface, collisions between gas
atoms can no longer dominate the exchange of energy between the atoms. Instead it is
the electrical processes that govern the energy exchanges in the solar gas. We see
this transition as the hot chromosphere. The bladed or spiculed structure of the
chromosphere consists of jets of gas moving upwards at about 30 kilometers per
second. These spicules rise some 5000 to 20 000 kilometers above the photosphere
(Abell, 1975, pp531ff) [7] .
Instabilities in the arc discharges lead to a build-up of charged regions in the
solar atmosphere. These eventually produce electrical breakdown; sudden discharges
occur, causing bright => faculae [8] and the temporary extinction of some
photosphere arcs. The result is a sunspot (Bruce, 1944, p6).
The upper atmosphere of the Sun is the apparently intensely hot corona [9] . The
gas atoms of the corona have been stripped of several electrons [10] by collisions
with in flowing energetic cosmic electrons. The removed electrons are drawn towards
the Sun so other ions can flow outwards into the corona allowing the coronal ions to
recede into the solar wind. The spectrum of the lower corona shows the atoms
stripped of several electrons emitting light between collisions, and the emission
from the energetic electrons during collision.
The corona seems to be constantly ejecting its contents into space as the solar
wind. The fraction of the solar output represented by the solar wind is about one-
millionth. Haymes states that the whole corona is lost and replaced in about one day
[11] .
Some of this material flows past the Earth's orbit as a cloud of energetic protons
and helium nuclei, accompanied by electrons, known as the solar wind. In every
second 100 million solar ions arrive above each square centimeter of the Earth's
atmosphere.
The more luminous the star, the faster its stellar wind carries away mass, and, in
general, the more rapidly the gases flow away from the star. Stellar wind flows of
10 -10 to 10 -5 . Sun masses per year have been inferred with measured velocities
from 550 to 3800 kilometers per second respectively (Lamers et al., Table 1, p328).
Sudden explosive eruptions, called flares, occur above the solar surface. Energy in
the form of light, atoms, and ions, is accelerated away from the Sun. The energy in
a single flare could supply the Earth's population with electrical power for
millions of years. A large flare releases in an instant about one-fortieth of the
continuous solar output.
Flares start near sunspots, with associated faculae, and develop over hours. They
move as if driven by an electrical potential difference between the Sun's surface
and the higher atmosphere (Zirin, pp479ff, Obayashi, pp224ff). Once accelerated, the
flare gases escape the Sun and modify the solar wind significantly. The cause of
flares is baffling to conventional theories, which underplay electrical forces in
cosmic processes. Most flare models involve some kind of magnetic driver to blow the
gases from the Sun with great force (Babcock, p420, p422-4). The presence of
magnetism implies an electric source. As we shall show in Chapter Six, the Sun once
had an electrical connection to its companion, within which energy was released that
created and sustained life within the binary system. Today's flares represent an
undirected remnant of the inter-companion arc of yesteryear.
The solar wind consists of coronal gases which have been boiled away from the hot
solar atmospheric discharges. It conducts the Sun's electrical transaction with the
Galaxy. It is the Sun's connection to the Galaxy. The electron-deficient atoms
(ions), by escaping from the Solar System, increase the negative charge on the Sun.
This brings the Sun towards => galactic neutral and thus, in time, would end the
Sun's life as star.
It follows that in the past, when the Sun was less negatively charged, more current
flowed from the Sun to the Galaxy. Thus the present flow of solar wind is less than
the flow in ages past when the Sun was more out of equilibrium than it is now. The
Solar wind varies with the ongoing "evolution" and "quantavolution" of the Sun.
In the past the solar wind flow was very complex because we believe that the Sun was
a binary star and its companion, Super Uranus, was not in electrical equilibrium
with it. The system eventually approached => internal neutrality because a large
solar wind, electrically driven, flowed directly between the two principals.
In this connection we may explain the origin of the heavier elements in the Solar
System. They were not built up from primordial hydrogen and helium, which show up so
prominently in spectroscopic observation, but rather represents an accumulation in a
period measurable in thousands of years of the fragments of heavy materials
scattered initially near the Sun, near its binary partner, and along the electrified
axis between the two (see ahead to Figure 7).
The theory that heavier elements are sparse in the interior of the Sun is probably
incorrect. Spectroscopy cannot penetrate to beyond the photosphere; therefore it
must show only a cloud of hydrogen admixed with metal and molecular vapors (Ross and
Aller, Table 1, p1226) at low density [12] .
The mass of the Sun is calculated as a function of the orbital motion of the
planets. Probably here, too, a methodological error is occurring that serves to
produce the illusion of a light mass. Thus the model of the composition of the Sun
depends upon the assumed structure of the solar interior and then the Sun's mass is
probably incorrectly known.
Both incorrect theories - regarding the elements and mass - contribute to the major
error of conventional Solar System theory, which is that the Sun is powered by
thermonuclear processes, specifically the fusion of hydrogen atoms, in its interior.
Regarding the processes which power the Sun, most astronomers believe that there is
an energy source deep in the solar interior obscured from view behind the opaque
photosphere. If this belief is correct then the interior of the Sun must be hotter
than the photosphere. Knowledge of the conditions within the Sun is inferred as the
consequence of the physical forces assumed to be governing the stability of the Sun
(Smith and Jacobs, pp223ff). It is usually inferred that near the center of the Sun
the gas is sufficiently hot and dense enough to bring about => nuclear fusion on a
large scale.
A thermonuclear Sun is an attractive theory since the Sun seems to be composed
mainly of hydrogen. By compressing itself into a nuclear-powered core the Sun might
radiate energy long enough to accommodate the gradual evolutionary processes
believed necessary for the biological and geological developments that have occurred
on the Earth.
However, thermonuclear fusion processes must dispose of large numbers of =>
neutrinos, and a vastly insufficient number of neutrinos have been detected on Earth
in experiments specifically designed to capture the normally elusive solar neutrinos
(Parker, p31). Before the nuclear Sun theory was presented, several mechanisms were
proposed to explain the Sun's output of radiant energy [13] . All of these led to a
radiant lifetime that was too short to satisfy the excessive time needs of the
evolutionists.
Fatal, furthermore, to all theories of an internally powered Sun is the minimal
temperature of the photosphere. How can the "surface" of the Sun remain cool when it
is blanketed by hotter regions below and above whose temperatures reach millions of
degrees (Parker, p28)? The usual answer is that the Sun's atmosphere is heated by
turbulence within the Sun's outermost interior layers below the photosphere (Wright,
p123). Somehow this process which, overleaping the photosphere, heats the Sun's
atmosphere is supposedly divorced from the flow of radiant energy from the Sun's
interior. Since such separation of processes is unknown elsewhere this explanation
is unacceptable [14] .
Lastly, the observed turbulence (the granules) on the photosphere and its opacity
are not compatible with the properties of hot gas of solar composition and condition
(Juergens, 1979b, pp33ff). Since Bruce has shown the Sun outside the photosphere
behaves like an electrical discharge, the theory, originally by Juergens, that the
origin of the Sun's energy is external and electrical, is accepted here.
Consistent with the electrical phenomena of the Sun's atmosphere, we propose an
external source of solar power. The Sun's light and heat output arises from the
energy released by a flow of highly energetic electrons arriving from the Galaxy
[15] . This electron current is enhanced by the flow of energetic solar wind protons
away from the Sun [16] . The detected plasma a density near the Earth's orbit is 2
to 10 ions per cubic centimeter [17] . The ions flow outwards. Near Jupiter's orbit
the Pioneer spacecraft measured no increase in the velocity of the solar ions over
their velocity measured near the Earth [18] .
Figure 2. The Sun's Connection to the Galaxy
Outward-flowing solar wind ions carry an electric current between the negatively
charged Sun and the more negatively charged galactic space that surrounds it. The
solar wind flows through a "transactive matrix" (see Technical Note B) of solar
electrons, which permeate the interplanetary space but do not flow through it as do
the ions. Inward-flowing galactic electrons, travelling at velocities close to the
speed of light, carry energy from the Galaxy to the solar "surface" where it is
released and radiated as light and other electromagnetic waves, which constitute the
solar luminosity.
At the edge of the Solar System, escaping protons, accelerated to high energy by the
drop in electrical potential between the Sun and the Galaxy, become galactic =>
cosmic rays and flow in all directions towards other stars. The protons expelled by
other stars arrive in the Solar System as cosmic rays [19] . For energies above 100
GeV about six cosmic rays impinge upon each square meter of the Earth every second,
but these few energetic particles carry inwards about one-twentieth of the energy
flowing outwards with the solar wind at 1 AU.
That electron-deficient cosmic ray atoms continuously flow to Earth enhances the
probability that the Earth is electrically charged. Juergens (1972) has argued that
both the Earth and the Sun can have an excess (negative) charge.
At energies below 100 GeV the Sun somehow modulates the number of cosmic rays
arriving in the inner Solar System (van Allen, p133). This presumably represents the
maximum driving potential between the Sun and galactic space, with which it is
transacting electrically. Cosmic rays with energy greatly in excess of 100 GeV would
not be impeded meaningfully by the Sun's opposing driving potential.
Where the solar wind ends is yet to be determined. It was once believed the wind
stopped inside Jupiter's orbit, later near Pluto, but today the wind is deemed to
flow well beyond Pluto (Haymes, p237).
Somewhere the "galactic wind" meets the solar wind; there a boundary exists where
the flow of incoming cosmic ray protons balances the out flowing solar wind protons.
This is the edge of the Sun's discharge region, the limit of the Solar System.
To conclude, a star is born when an electric cavity forms in the charged medium of
space, and matter rushes along with the charged space to fill the cavity. Then,
after the cavity fills, the star dissipates into charged space, spilling out its
matter simultaneously. No tombstone marks its demise; no derelicts travel forever
through space. Indeed, existence is an attempt to achieve nothingness. Pockets of
lesser negativity become existence by seeking to accumulate enough electric charge
to emulate universal space, at which time they are capable of disappearing into
nothingness.
Notes on Chapter 2:
3. To be considered is whether this may result from the dust in near stars being
more observable.
4. The consequences of the temporary overcharging are described later when we
consider stellar novae (Chapter Thirteen).
5. See Bruce (1966b) for a discussion which compares a lightning discharges to the
light curve for Nova Herculis 1934. Bruce (1944) mentions a discharge of the order
of 10 20 coulombs in the nova outburst. We see this atmospheric discharge as an
electrical readjustment required after the star has responded to its changed
environment.
6. Lyttleton (1938) has argued that rotational fission cannot result in the
formation of a stable binary system, but his arguments are probably invalid if the
bodies at fission are highly charged ( and of the same sign) but in different
amounts (Note C). In this instance, immediate electrical transaction between the
stars may allow non-collisional orbits to be stable, where they otherwise would not.
Later criticism and support are well summarized by Batten (1973b). The arguments
they're about the stability of binary orbits over long times are in question because
of the work of Bass. Likewise, the claim that fission cannot occur because stellar
cores cannot remain uncoupled from stellar envelopes once rotational distortion
becomes appreciable is also in question if the process producing the rotation begins
in the envelope rather than in the core.
7. Juergens (1979b) believes the spicule is a fountain pumping electrons from the
solar surface high into the corona. If he is correct, the upward motions detected
spectroscopically in the spicules are produced by atoms bombarded by the electron
flow. The electrons supplied by the spicules are necessary to allow ions to travel
away from the solar surface.( See also Milton, 1979.)
8. A facula (Lat : "torch") is a bright region seen best near the limb of the Sun
where the underlying photosphere appears less bright.
9. The temperature deduced from the spectrum is millions => Kelvin.
10. Specifically, atoms heavier than helium which have lost several electrons are
detected. In the corona, hydrogen and helium are present too, but cannot be detected
since they have lost all of their electrons.
11. Replacement of the corona in one day produces a loss of about 10 -10 . Sun's
mass each year. Haymes' estimate for the loss of solar corona is much higher than
the loss expected using measurements of the solar wind flux. One such solar wind
measurement cited by Marti et al. would produce a corona loss which is 1/ 10000 the
value in Haymes.
12. Compared with the Earth's atmosphere, which at the surface has 1390 times the
number of atoms per cubic centimeter as does the Sun's atmosphere at the
photosphere.
13. Thus, the Sun, primordially hot, gives out heat as it cools; such a Sun has a
life of thousands of years. Then Mayer, in 1848, supposed that the Sun is heated by
infalling meteorites. If they did the Sun would gain mass, affecting the size of
planetary orbits. For his part, von Helmholtz, in 1854, showed that the Sun could
radiate for tens of millions of years if it were contracting slowly. The reader is
referred to the following sources for interesting and readable accounts of these
mechanisms: Newcombe, Russell et al., 1927; Rudeaux and de Vaucouleurs.
14. Parker argues that a man (with a body temperature of 37ø => Celsius) can rub two
sticks together to ignite them (producing a fire at several hundred degrees
Celsius). He adds that there is no limit to the temperature which can be obtained by
so rubbing the sticks. What he fails to recognize is that if the sticks are
continuously rubbed together generating heat by friction, they will conduct heat
from the region of the friction. This heat will eventually reach the stick-holder's
hands. Even if the stick-holder wears asbestos gloves, the wood, which is slowly
becoming hotter, will eventually catch fire. On the Sun the photosphere must
likewise heat up, unless it is somehow cooled by the warmer regions surrounding it.
Such cooling is not spontaneous in nature.
15. The Sun's energy output is 4x10 26 watts. If the arriving electrons have the
minimum energy for cosmic rays not modulated by the Sun (see below, p. 18), which is
about 100 gigaelectron volts (100 GeV), the in flowing current density at the Sun's
photosphere would be 6.5x10 -4 amperes per square meter. This value is a maximum;
higher-energy electrons arriving lead to lower values for the electron current
density.
16. The flow of the solar wind particles is consistent with a potential barrier
located at infinity (Lemaire and Scherer). Moving through the potential, the protons
gain energy; as they flow away from the Sun and past the Earth's orbit the protons
double their velocity, increasing from 150 kilometers per second in the corona to
320 kilometers per second at the Earth. The electrons' behavior is consistent with
electrons being repelled by the distant Galaxy but also being repelled by a nearby
Sun carrying an excess negative electrical charge, as was postulated much earlier by
Bailey (1960).
17. Zirlin remarks that spacecraft measurements of the solar wind plasma refer to
protons, "but considerations of electrical neutrality require that the number of
electrons per cubic centimeter equal the number of protons (although the velocities
need not necessarily be the same)". Exact => electric neutrality cannot be assumed
if the Sun is electrically powered from the outside, and thus we do not know the
electron density in the solar wind unless it is measured.
18. At the rate of solar wind flow, a sphere 100 AU in radius could be filled with
plasma to 5 protons per cubic centimeter in about 10 000 years. However, moving at
300 km/ s, a proton would travel about ten light years in this time, about 6300
times 100 AU. The material flow would be about 10 17 tons (1/ 35 000 of an Earth).
19. Conventionally, no origin other than "galactic" or "extragalactic" is ascribed
to arriving cosmic rays not certainly identified with the Sun (Watson). The paucity
of electrons in the cosmic ray flux is unconvincingly explained except by the notion
of a star as an electron-deficient cavity in space.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER THREE
THE SUN'S GALACTIC JOURNEY AND ABSOLUTE TIME
Conventionally viewed, the formation of a solar-type star and planets from a cloud
of gases and cosmic dust takes on the order of several hundreds of millions of
years. After accretion, an Earth-like planet supposedly takes another one or two
thousand million years (1-2 gigayears or => aeons) to develop a stable lithosphere,
which when formed allows the much slower evolution of a viable biosphere from the
materials and energy available at the planetary surface (Oparin). To us, these
processes seem too slow and rely too much upon random occurrences to be viable.
However, the processes forming stars and planets and leading to living things may
proceed much more rapidly. Our cosmogony employs electrical cavities, charges and
forces to accomplish change. These produce changes which are much more powerful and
are highly selective.
Electrical force, as measurable by the repulsion between two electrons, compares
with the apparent gravitational attraction of
the same two electrons in the ratio of 10 36 to 1 [20] . Conventional models of
cosmic processes employ almost exclusively the trivially weak force termed gravity
to produce and govern the Universe.
Electricity is a greater sculptor of change because it operates more variably within
a given cosmic setting. A simple lightning bolt can cause extensive surface damage,
liberating megajoules of energy within a few meters of surviving observers. Only
thousandths of a second are involved in the event. Yet, too, an undisturbed
geological surface may be the setting for a large number of biological mutations
provoked by a radiation storm of cosmic origin.
What "gravity" is supposed to accomplish in aeons, electricity could quickly
accomplish before the eyes of the earthly observer. Driven by the powerful
motivator, electricity, quantavolution becomes not only possible - but also
essential. Furthermore an understanding of electricity's role provides a powerful
new and unified explanation of most observable phenomena.
If the evidence cited in Chapter One has permitted us to proceed, viewing the
developing Solar System as Solaria Binaria, and similarly, if in Chapter Two we end
up viewing stars, and in particular, the Sun as an electric phenomenon, then we can
hope to inquire about the time scale over which the Solar Binary developed. To be
more specific, may we have a stellar binary which develops over a short interval
through some of the most significant phases of the history of the Solar System ?
To tackle the problem of chronology we shall, as we have done before, look to the
skies for the crucial clues. We must, in so doing, introduce a seemingly radical
conception, one which we feel can be defended with the evidence to follow. We
assert, in line with the past chapter, that stars take their properties less from
the material which they contain and more from the electrical difference between the
cavity, which creates the star, and the surrounding medium of electrified space (see
=> space infra-charge).
Translated into more common astronomical language, the luminosity of the star
depends upon its galactic environment rather than upon the amount of material which
it contains (see behind and to Technical Note B, fn. 116). The conventional notion
that the more luminous the star, the more massive it is, was induced by Eddington
from the analysis of a small sample of binary stars. As we interpret the same data,
the more luminous the star, the more it transacts with its companion, and so the
companion completes its orbit more rapidly (see Technical Note D). Unfortunately
Eddington's Mass-Luminosity relationship is well established in astronomical
formalism, so that today stars are assigned masses as soon as their luminosities are
estimated.
There is a problem inherent in Eddington's method of massing the binaries. He calls
upon "gravitational force" and nothing else to bring about motion within the binary
system. The problem is compounded when luminosities are introduced as a way to
measure mass in non-binary systems. Luminosity can only be known where the distance
to the star can be measured. Star distances are computed using the annual parallax
produced by viewing the displacement, as the Earth orbits the Sun, of any nearby
star against the background of very distant stars. The parallax measurement involves
measuring minute angle at the apex of an isosceles triangle whose base is the
diameter of the Earth's orbit about the Sun [21] . Parallax angles are very small;
the closest star, Alpha Centauri, is only displaced through 1.52 => arc seconds over
the year. This parallax, the largest, was not measured until 1839 (Baker, R. H.,
p317) Parallaxes are difficult to measure and they cannot be determined for stars
farther from Earth than 652 => light-years. Such a small distance encompasses only
one thousandth of the sphere of stars under close observation by astronomers. Thus
the majority of reported star distances and luminosities are derived by theory
rather than measurement. Of the twenty first-magnitude stars (the apparently
brightest stars in the sky) only five are closer than 26 light years, the next five
take us to 84 light-years; the next seven to 217 light years; and the last five to
the measurement limit. In this sample are six supergiant stars; the parallax of one
of these stars is only an estimate, two of the others are at the extreme limit, the
last three are between 171 and 192 light-years distant. None of the most luminous
supergiant stars are in this sample; thus all luminosities given for such stars are
estimates ! Even where parallax is measured, the measurement is rarely precise;
uncertainties of 25% and larger are common, leading to luminosities which are most
likely erroneous in the order of at least 56% (about half a magnitude unit). Near
the measuring limit the possible deviations grow immensely, often exceeding
considerably the number measured.
The famous => Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, the Rosetta Stone of modern astronomy,
plots stellar luminosities against surface temperatures, determined from the star's
spectrum. Since the spectrum is often difficult to classify, placement of the star
on the diagram is not always easy (Baker, R. H., p342). To circumvent that
difficulty astronomers now rely upon color indices in place of spectrum classes
[22] . Such measurements are even more strongly theory dependent than the former in
terms of their applicability to stellar emissions (see Wyse, p49), but they are more
quantitatively formulated and therefore they lead to an unjustified sense of
satisfaction with the computed result of the stellar condition. For our purposes
they offer no help.
What we would say about the classification of stars is the following. In going from
stars whose surface temperature appears to be high, to those which appear cooler,
there is a gradation of the lines present in the stellar spectra. The hotter stars
show absorption produced by helium atoms. As we look at progressively cooler stars
the helium lines decline and abruptly hydrogen lines appear, increase in intensity,
and slowly decline. As the hydrogen declines, the lines of the metals and metal ions
increase in intensity through the solar type stars; they dominate in stars slightly
cooler than the Sun, only to be surpassed in the coolest stars by band spectra
produced by various simple molecules, notably hydrides and oxides. In some of the
coolest stars compounds of carbon are prominent. Although astronomers may continue
to seek a more precise classification for stars, we are content to employ the
traditional spectral types for the present study.
Besides the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that is used to classify the stars,
astronomers have also divided the stars into populations according to their location
within the Galaxy.
Some striking results were obtained:
1. The most luminous and apparently hottest stars are found within gaseous clouds
containing much cosmic dust. These stars are confined in clumps to a thin plate that
forms the equator of the Galaxy. Similar stars define the highly visible spiral arms
seen in other galaxies.
2. Bright, cooler stars like Sirius are located near the equator of the Galaxy but
are not confined to the galactic arms.
3. The disc of the Galaxy is populated with moderately hot stars (with 5000 to 8000
K surface temperatures); these stars resemble the Sun and populate the arms, the
spaces between the arms, and make up part of the stars that occupy the central core
of the Galaxy. These disc stars are the most numerous group of stars observed.
4. The disc of the Galaxy is enveloped in an ovoid shell of red giant stars whose
spectra show fewer metals than stars of comparable type in the disc population. That
these stars are mostly giant stars is usually explained by claiming that the smaller
stars in the population are not likely seen because of distance from the Earth. It
is possible that the latter are absent. Most of what is known about these stars is
from the study of giant stars within star clusters and intrinsically varying giant
stars, where the star's luminosity varies in some characteristic way over an
interval of days to months.
5. The Galaxy itself is embedded in a halo of cooler stars. Most of what is known of
the galactic halo is deduced from a study of a few nearby small stars and 120
globular star clusters which surround the core of the Galaxy. One of these globular
clusters, Messier 13 in the constellation of Hercules, has been described as a
"celestial chrysanthemum" (Baker, R. H., p451). The number of stars in this cluster
cannot be counted; but estimates around 500 000 are made. Averaging this number of
stars over the volume of the cluster (not precisely known) it would seem as if the
stars are about two light-years apart, much closer than the stars near the Sun. Some
small halo stars are observed passing through the disc stars in the Sun's vicinity.
Barnard's star is an example.
In summary:
-- the most interactive stars and gas clouds form clumps which are the galactic arms
-- around the arms is a disc of less interactive stars -- enveloping the disc are
variously shaped ovoids and halos alleged to be progressively more "metal deficient"
stars.
It has been proposed that the stars of the different populations of the Galaxy
follow orbits about the galactic core which are characteristic of the population.
Supposedly the arm stars have the most circular orbits; the disc stars follow
slightly elliptical paths. Some are deemed to move inclined slightly to the galactic
plane, like the asteroid orbits of the Solar System. The halo stars move in strongly
elliptical orbits with random inclinations to the galactic arms, like the comet
orbits of the Solar System. As they pass through the Sun's locality the halo stars
betray their presence by large annual displacements compared to the disc stars.
All of the stars in the Galaxy are in motion. Since there is no standard of rest all
we can detect is the motion of one star relative to another. Two streams of stars
are observed moving past the Sun parallel to the Milky Way (the arms of the Galaxy).
The two streams move oppositely at a relative speed of 40 km/ s, the outer stream
moving towards Orion, the inner one to Scutum. These motions apparently reflect
differences in the motion of consecutive galactic arm segments in the Galaxy. The
stars in the Sun's "arm" we assume move with the Sun at 275 km/ s [23] towards the
constellation of Lyra near Cygnus, which is a motion away from the stars of Puppis.
Looking only at the net motion of stars close to the Sun we detect the drift of the
Sun within its arm of the Galaxy. This analysis reveals a motion of 20 km/ s towards
the constellation of Hercules (away from the constellation of Canis Major)( Mihalas
and Routly, p103).
Neither of the Sun's motions is precise but they should suffice for our purpose. The
Sun's motion within its arm carries it four astronomical units per year. It takes
nearly 22 500 years for the Sun to drift one light-year from its present position.
But, when the galactic revolution motion is considered, the Sun is moving up to
fourteen times as fast. In the extreme only 1107 years are required to displace the
Sun one light-year, so in ten thousand years the Sun moves nine light-years, and in
one million years it travels about 904 light years.
If our hypothesis is correct and the stars derive their properties from the space in
which they are embedded, then a look at the stars presently in the Sun's wake will
tell us how the Sun appeared in ages past. Unfortunately the path of the Sun over
the last million years, within which we believe Solaria Binaria developed and
collapsed, is not wholly within measured space. Luminosity assumptions need to be
made during the first two -thirds of the binary's lifetime.
The Sun's total motion now is directed away from a point within the constellation of
Right Carina (the solar antapex at 8.4 hours Right Ascension and declination -62§
[24] .
This antapex was determined by Str"mberg using the radial velocities of globular
star-clusters (Menzel et al.). In his sample, the Sun's drift and the Galaxy's
revolution combine to produce a net motion of 286 km/ s away from the antapex.
For star systems close to the Sun, adjacent stars are about 10.3 light-years apart,
each thus occupying a sphere containing 578 cubic light years of space (Allen, 1963,
p237). Given such a low star density, a rather large volume must be examined around
and along the Sun's wake to ensure that some stars are included. We have
constructed, therefore, a cylinder thirteen and one-quarter light years in radius
about the Sun's path. Moving for ten thousand years through this cylinder the Sun
will "encounter" about 5000 cubic light-years of space. In such a volume there would
reside about nine stars or star systems at the average local star density. Over the
sixty-five light year swath through space covered by the Gliese Star Catalogue there
are only fifteen star systems. It appears that along the Sun's path, the actual star
density is only twenty seven percent of that expected. The Sun entered the region
included within the Gliese catalogue about 74000 years ago. Within that volume, our
analytical sample of stars is reasonably complete . Beyond it, many of the stars
located along the cylinder do not have published parallaxes and so they cannot be
located in time; they cannot be used in the analysis.
The region of space which includes those stars which now occupy the space once
passed through by the Sun on its galactic voyage is represented on a star map by a
cone centered on the solar antapex [25] .
The base of the cone in the present includes stars over one half of the sky. As time
progresses backwards the frustum of the cone projected upon the sky diminishes in
area (Figure 3). The frustum of the cone 3 500 years ago is a circle 76§ in radius,
encompassing stars from Orion's belt across the South Celestial Pole to the
Scorpion's tail. Moving back twenty thousand years shortens the radius to 36§,
thereby including the region from the feet of the Greater Dog to the Centaur's right
foot. The area has only a 13.5§ radius sixty thousand years ago; it shrinks to less
than a 3§ circle after three hundred thousand years.
Through recent time the Sun's trail is very close to a straight line projected
towards the antapex. It is shown in Figure 4 and the stars included are listed in
Table 1.
The stars occupying the space inhabited by the Sun through the current era (the
Period of Solaria) [26] and during the time of the Late Quantavolutions, to be
discussed in part Two of this book, are in this sample. Here, we find the nearest
star system, the Alpha Centauri triple. The largest star is very similar to the Sun
(Dole, p112).
Figure 3. Stars Around the Sun's Antapex
The Sun's path traced backwards through the stars of the Galaxy passes through a
cylinder of space whose axis stretches from the center of the Sun through the point
on the celestial sphere with coordinates 8.4 hours of right ascension and -62§ of
declination. The edge of this cylinder, chosen to have a radius of 13.25 light
years, is represented for different eras by the series of circles converging onto
the solar antapex. Its first companion is 23.5 astronomical units away moving along
an elliptical orbit (Menzel et al., p467). This star is slightly cooler and fainter
than the Sun. The second companion is located almost two degrees away in the sky. It
is over 550 times more distant than the separation of the closer pair. Frequent
eruptions superpose bright emission lines on its otherwise faint class M spectrum.
It is a flare star; its flaring might be associated with some intermittent
transaction with the pair of distant companions. Unfortunately the a-Centauri triple
is the only occupant within the space transited by the Sun during the series of
quantavolutions preceding the historical period. It gives us no clue to an
understanding of that space besides learning that solar-type stars can exist there.
Figure 4. Nearby Stars in the Solar Wake
The sun's path through the space now occupied by the stars listed in Table 1. This
space represents the region traversed by the Sun while it quantavoluted from Solaria
Binaria into the Solar System we see today.
TABLE 1
STARS BEHIND THE SUN (to 25 000 Years Ago)
Identification of Star Distance from Sun (in ly) Years in the Sun's wake (see Fig
3-2)
Alpha Centauri: Triple Star, main sequence components, dwarf "G", "K", and "M"
stars; mission lines in the type "M" spectrum 4.3 4 860
Gliese 191: MO main sequence dwarf star 13.0 14 750
Gliese 440: White dwarf start (class A) 16.1 18 200
Gliese 293: White dwarf start (class t-g) 19.2 21 700
Limiting magnitude of sample + 18
The three remaining stars are all low-transaction objects. This space we would
suspect to hold a lower electric charge density than the space closer to the
present. The closest of these three faint stars is located within the zone we
believe was occupied by the Sun in the time before the eruptions began which
eventually broke up Solaria Binaria. That instability of the recent past may well
have been created as the Sun passed between the lower and higher regions of the
transaction represented by these six nearby stars. The likelihood is that the Sun,
late in the Period of Pangean Stability (Table 6), was less luminous than it is
today.
TABLE 2
STARS BEHIND THE SUN (from 25 000 to 75 000 Years Ago)
Time (BP) Star Name Type
27 300 Gliese 257 M4 +
33 500 Gliese 341 M0
36 400 Alpha Mensae G6
47 600 Gliese 269A K2, Binary
53 500* Gliese 333 M3
53 500 Gliese 375 M5 +
54 300* Gliese 391 F3, Subgiant
64 700 Gliese 294A F8, Triple
68 300 Gliese 298 M
73 800 Alpha Chamaeleonis F5
Limiting magnitude + 18
* These stars are 25 ly apart, the Sun passes through space at their respective
distances at the beginning and end of a 760 year interval.
Extending the Sun's line farther into the past to the limit of the Gliese catalogue
(table 2) we find no stars as luminous as the present Sun until we go back 54 000
years. Then along the path are positioned three stars that exceed the Sun in
luminosity. The closest, an F3 subgiant, is five times more luminous; the second,
the primary star in a triple system, is only 1.44 times brighter. Its two companions
are very faint. The last of the three brighter stars exceeds the Sun's output eight-
fold.
At the 75 000 year limit to Table 2 we reach the edge of the reasonably complete
star sample. So far there are no conflicts with our theory. Stars of different
spectral classes are well separated in space. In fact the cooler and hotter stars
seem to be sorted: the class M stars tend to lie above the Sun's route while the
class F and G stars are below it [27] .
If our calculated course is correct, the Sun's past behavior, as mirrored in the
listed stars' present behavior, would show significant variation in luminosity over
the tens of thousands of years represented here. Noteworthy, there are no highly
luminous stars thus far along the Sun's trace.
Beyond 65 light-years, the magnitude limit of the available star catalogues
containing measured parallaxes limits severely the completeness of the star sample.
We can list no stars that are intrinsically fainter than today's Sun (Table 3). The
catalogue from which the sample was taken covers only stars whose visual magnitude
exceeds 6.25 (Becvar) whereas the Gliese catalogue includes known nearby stars above
magnitude 18. Almost all of these stars show some distinguishing characteristic. The
majority are binary, another has nebulous spectrum lines. These stars are positioned
about the solar antapex in Figure 5. All could reflect plausible conditions for the
early stages of Solaria Binaria's Period of Pangean Stability, and possibly also for
the earlier Period of Radiant Genesis which followed the binary's creation.
At the limit of our proposed time (about one million years before present) using the
Atlas of the Selected Areas (Vehrenberg) we count about 39 stars brighter than
magnitude 12.5 in a target zone 40 by 40 arc-minutes adjacent to the Sun's antapex.
Unfortunately no distances are given for the stars in this atlas.
Figure 5. The Solar Antapex
Map showing the brightest stars surrounding the solar antapex (see Table 3). The
circles represent the described cylinder of space around the Sun at the ages shown.
The successive radii are centered upon a slowly displacing point representing the
solar antapex. The displacement, seen at this map-scale, occurs because the Sun
rapidly orbits about the center of the Galaxy as it slowly moves through the arms of
the Galaxy; its path therefore is a curved rather than a straight line.
TABLE 3
STARS BEHIND THE SUN (over 75 000 years Past)
Time (BP) (in Thousands of years) Distance (in ly) Star Name Spectral Type
124 112 b Volatis K1
134 121 C Carinae A2, binary
139 125 GC 12253 F0, nebulous lines
258 233 GC 11867 G8, binary (M=+ 1)
301 326 e Carinae K0, B; Spectroscopic binary
Limiting magnitude + 6.5 The sample ends at the edge of measured space.
Since our calculated solar target shows no stars the deficiency of the present
measurable sample is confirmed. Nevertheless we see that the last listed star, 300
000 years BP along the Sun's run, is a spectroscopic binary whose class B primary is
orbited by a class K secondary; a system not unlike our view of the early Solaria
Binaria.
In our analysis more distant stars cannot be located in time along the Sun's path.
Yet we can place, although uncertainly, several bright blue supergiant stars at
locations surrounding the antapex in all directions and at distances corresponding
to times between one-half and three million years ago. Several of the stars are
components in binary star systems. Within or on the periphery of this highly
transactive region of space, the original Super Sun may have parturitioned to give
birth to Solaria Binaria. Although proof is hardly forthcoming from this analysis,
at least evidence disproving the hypothesis is absent. We are encouraged to retain
the idea that the behavior of star systems depends, if only in part, upon the
celestial charge level of the space through which they pass. It seems as if this
electric charge is contained not only by material residing in the space (stars,
atoms, and electrons) but also, in part, as a charge embedded in the space itself,
what we shall call a space infra-charge. Literally, the space infra-charge means
that a vacuum (empty space) contains normally unavailable electric charges (here
electrons) which generate the structure of that space and affect the behavior and
properties of all matter occupying the space.
Notes on Chapter 3
20. Incidentally, the Universe, conventionally asserted to be held together by
gravity, is said to be 10 26 meters in radius; the atom, admittedly bound by
electricity, has a radius of 10 -10 meters. These radii are curiously in the ratio
of 10 36 to 1.
21. In practice, the parallax is half of the annual angular displacement of the
star, and the base of the triangle, now rightangled, is one astronomical unit.
22. The color index is determined by measuring the brightness of the star through
two or more colored filters and comparing the intensities obtained with calculated
laboratory profiles of intensity versus wave-lengths for various temperatures.
23. We choose this value from a list of several, spread between 167 ñ 30 km/ s and
300 ñ 25 km/ s, the values obtained using different samples of celestial objects
(Mihalas and Routly). The choice can never be free of theoretical bias, nor of
indeterminate bulk velocities possessed by the sample objects. Here, the choice is a
compromise between accepted values for the galactic rotation (Menzel et al.) and the
higher value derived from measurements within the Local Group of Galaxies (Mihalas
and Routly).
24. Negative declinations indicate co-ordinates south of the celestial equator.
25. Because of galactic rotation the cone is bent slightly. Over one million years
the path bends eastwards by a shade less than one degree , corresponding to a
sideward displacement of 15 light years.
26. See ahead to Table 6 ( p. 124) for a summary of the periods during Solaria
Binaria's lifetime.
27. Given a small error in the solar motion (which is uncertain because the Sun's
drift velocity, especially in the direction of the Galaxy's rotation, is variously
reported with a twenty percent range), It path could be veering somewhat, either
upwards or downwards relative to the path we have calculated. If so in this period
the Sun might have become significantly brighter, or alternatively, remained much
fainter than at present.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER FOUR
SUPER URANUS AND THE PRIMITIVE PLANETS
About one million years ago, our Sun, then a Super Sun, underwent a nova eruption
because of a sudden or unendurable change in electrical conditions. Solaria Binaria
was instantly born. The Sun fissioned and in a huge blossoming cloud there would
have been found a diminished Sun. Within a concentration of gases from the old sun
would occur an admixture of chunks of the old Sun's interior material (nucleus),
including a body that became the binary partner, which we here call Super Uranus.
Between the new Sun and Super Uranus lingered other fragments of the fission and
great quantities of the material that were to be absorbed into the planets. This
impressive electrical quantavolution occurred in a matter of hours. The separation
of the two bodies increased rapidly.
In electrical and chemical terms, we begin to detail this quantavolution. The normal
flow of electricity between a star (the cavity) and the surrounding space is inward
as is shown in Figure 6. The original Super Sun was such a star transacting quietly
with the electron-rich space around it. The Super Sun became unstable, as outlined
in Chapter Three, when its galactic journey carried it into a less electron-rich
region [28] . Here, the enrichment presumably was rapid and of great magnitude,
producing a quantavolution. The resulting nova, which is an explosion of electrons
that forces (requires) a material accompaniment, created Solaria Binaria. The Sun
for a short time was relatively too electron-rich. In an explosive expansion the
binary was born, not just from the solar atmosphere but also from the refractory
materials normally hidden within its interior.
Figure 6. Electron Flow from Surrounding Space into a Star-cavity
The Sun and the other stars represent electron deficient regions within the Galaxy.
These regions, cavities as we call them, transact with the space around them gaining
electrons during the lifetime of their central stars. When they become filled the
stars they contain cease to exist.
The first state of Solaria Binaria is shown in Figure 7 below. The nova explosion
had propelled what temporarily was excess charge away from the Sun. This of course
would be illusory, for the Sun, by its continued existence, remained a region of
relative electron deficiency. Thus, the initial dismemberment of the original Super
Sun quickly halted: the expansion of the => plenum of material, now surrounding the
Sun, ceased both because of the Sun's need for electrons and because the charged
surrounding medium continued moving because the charged surrounding medium continued
moving in upon the cavity. The boundary of the plenum shown above is actually a
quantitative concept to denote the region where the outward pressure created by the
charged Solaria Binaria is equal to the inward pressure normally produced by the
Sun's galactic cosmic transaction.
At birth the electrical state of Solaria Binaria was radially layered. The system
can best be described in terms of the local charge density of both the material and
of the space into which the material was ejected in the eruption. The highest
relative charge density existed at the perimeter of the plenum. Inwards this density
decreased. The fragments ejected from the Sun, the debris forming the planets and
Super Uranus, had progressively higher charge densities than the Sun, which had the
least charge density in the system.
The Sun seeks its lost charge. The easiest way to get that charge is to launch into
the plenum electron-deficient atoms (ions). The proximity of super Uranus distorted
greatly what otherwise would have been a radial flow of ions (as in the original
transaction between the Super Sun and the Galaxy). A strong electrical connection
coupled the Sun and Super Uranus; a lesser connection joined the Sun to the plenum,
as shown in Figure 8 (see Technical Note E). This connection involved an inward flow
of charge through the plenum. The charge flowed inwards either by direct transport
of electrons or by indirect electron transport accomplished through the outward flow
of electron deficient atoms (ions) (see Technical Note B).
Figure 7. The Birth of Solaria Binaria
At its birth Solaria Binaria was embedded at the center of a plenum filling a sac of
electron deficient matter. Electron flow into the sac from the Galaxy was augmented
by electron redistribution within the plenum and among the components of the binary
system.
The strongest electrical transaction occurred between the principals; accompanying
this electrical flow, and highly influenced by it, was the transfer of material from
one of the principals to the other. Elsewhere, close binary systems exist where the
flow is form the companion to the primary (Cowley et al., 1977, p471); more common
is the flow from the primary to the companion (Mitton, p85, p100). The amount of
flow and its direction would depend upon the distance between and the => specific
charge ratio on the principals. We favor the flow of ions and gas from the Sun to
Super Uranus. Since we often cannot resolve the principals into separate stars,
designation of one as the primary and the other as companion is somewhat arbitrary.
The choice usually is dictated by theory.
Figure 8. Material Flow Coupling the Sun, Super Uranus, and the Electrified Plenum.
The creation of the Sun's companion, Super Uranus, greatly distorted the electrical
flow between the electron deficient Sun and the Galaxy. The Sun's daughter, Super
Uranus, like its parent, was short of electrons compared to galactic space outside
the sac. The electrical flow coupling both the two stars and the stars with the
Galaxy caused and directed a significant material exchange between the pair of
stars.
Ionized gas atoms would be induced to flow between the principals. This flow of
countermoving electrons and electron-deficient atoms would constitute a strong
electrical current. As a consequence an intense magnetic field would be generated
surrounding the current. This magnetic field would pinch the flowing ions producing
a relatively narrow electrical flow channel (Zirin, p481). Collisions between
neutral and electrified atoms would transfer the influence of the magnetic field
(which affects only the electron-deficient atoms directly) to all of the gas between
the principals; the result is a magnetic bottle (see Arp, pp213-5).
Figure 9. Flow of Material Between the Sun and Super Uranus
under the Influence of a Self-generated Magnetic Field
Electrically charged material flowing between the Sun and Super Uranus generated a
strong magnetic field about the axis between the two stars. The effect of the
magnetic field was to squeeze all material flow into a thin tube joining the stars.
So constrained, the charged matter flow constituted a potent electric discharge, the
arc, through the gases and matter of the plenum.
From the solar wind protons moving past the Earth, Juergens (1977c, p28) has
calculated the current flowing away from the Sun in a sheet localized close to the
ecliptic plane. If this same ion current was once flowing through the electrical
channel, then the magnetic field generated was several thousand gauss in strength.
Such a field would adequately constrain most of the gases producing a gaseous column
or axis between the two stars. Material has been found along the interstellar axis
in several binary systems (Batten, 1973a, p5).
The absence of an appreciable interplanetary magnetic field despite the magnitude of
the electric current represented by today's solar wind is understandable in terms of
a planar current sheet model.
Figure 10 Magnetic Toroidal Field Produced by Solar Wind Current Sheet
Assuming that the solar wind is concentrated about the plane of the orbiting
planets, the outward flow of ions from the Sun would represent a sheet of electric
current. A significant magnetic field, curved upon itself to form a doughnut (a
torus), would be generated by the existence of the solar current sheet. This
toroidal magnetic field should be found in the space above and below the space
occupied by the solar wind.
As shown in Figure 10, the solar wind sheet produces opposed toroidal (doughnut-
shaped) magnetic regions above and below the planetary plane of motion. In the
region between the toroids the magnetic fields generated by the radially diverging
ions act so as to cancel out one another as in Figure 11. The vector sum of the
magnetic intensity cancels between the parallel flowing ions but survives on their
perimeter, leaving the postulated toroidal field. So, the regions above and below
the Sun could be strongly magnetic, while interplanetary space so far explored lies
outside of the toroidal field region, and has been shown to be almost devoid of
magnetism. The existence of the magnetic toroid above and below the Sun may be
responsible for the planarity of today's planetary region and the enhancement of the
solar wind flow in that plane.
The Sun's rotation began consequent to the nova discharge creating Super Uranus,
Super Uranus thereafter wheeled about the Sun in close orbit. The magnetic field
produced by their electrical transaction was instrumental in locking the rotation of
the Sun to the motion of Super Uranus about the Sun. Strongly coupled together the
pair rotated looking like an ever expanding but otherwise rigid dumb-bell. The gases
and the planets as they formed remained trapped along the gaseous electrified axis
between the principals.
Figure 11. Magnetic Field Surrounding Several Flowing Ions
(Click on the figure to view an enlarged version.
Each moving ion (or electron) comprises a unit of electrical current. It generates a
magnetic field which appears in the plane perpendicular to its motion. When
electrical charges flow radially, as does the ion wind from the Sun, only a tiny
magnetic field is apparent in the region between the flowing ions because the
magnetic effect of each ion is cancelled by that of its neighbors. A significant
magnetic indication of the electrical flow is found only along the perimeter of the
current sheet produced by the radial flow of the ions.
Plavec notes that the companion, if less massive than the Sun, can always be
expected to rotate in synchronism with orbital motion. He states, also, that for all
binary systems synchronism of rotation and revolution seem to occur for orbital
periods shorter than ten days. For longer periods the synchronism falls except as
postulated above.
Batten (1967, p36) notes that some semi-detached binary systems, particularly the
Algol group, have primaries which rotate appreciably faster than would be expected
for orbital synchronism [29] . We see these systems as a later stage of evolution
of the binary. Solaria Binaria did not detach in this way until after the Saturnian
period (see ahead, Chapter Fourteen).
The evolution of Solaria Binaria was such that the two principals were slowly driven
apart, in part by the momentum of the flow of mass from one to the other and in part
from increased repulsion caused by the growing level of electric charge in the whole
system by the accumulation of galactic electrons. All the while the angular momentum
(spin) within the system was being transferred from the primary to its companion. At
fission the Sun could have had over 80 percent of the angular momentum. The evolved
binary (today's Solar System) left less than one percent of the angular momentum in
the Sun. If matter was transferred mechanically from the heavier Sun to the lighter
orbiting Super Uranus, the spin of the binary would decrease, but if the transferred
matter is electrically driven, acceleration would be expected to accompany the
transfer, thereby potentially increasing the spin of the binary. Even if no increase
in spin occurs and even with a slight slowdown of spin, angular momentum is slowly
lost by the Sun and gained by its companion and the primitive planets as the
electric transfer continues.
The pulling apart of the principals was reflected in an increase in the binary's
period of revolution. That is, Solaria Binaria wheeled more slowly about its center.
There is a significant relation between the period of revolution of binaries and the
observed "surface temperature" of the primary star. Certain stars called => early-
type by astronomers tend to have companions with shorter periods (Russell et al.,
1927, pp703ff).
In its earlier stages, Solaria Binaria would have looked to a distant observer as a
close binary with an unseen companion. We imply that the Sun was an early-type star
but not in the usual sense of the term star. Within the => sac, where the two stars
and the Earth were located, the energy flow may always have been similar to what we
observe now. However the outer parts of the sac were transacting intensively with
the cosmos and thus were radiating so as to appear markedly hotter. The perimeter of
Solaria Binaria, then, would have appeared to radiate as an early-type star and not
like the Sun does now (see ahead to Figure 21). Its period of light variation,
radiation emitted, and flow of mass would have attracted the attention of
astronomers elsewhere to Solaria Binaria.
Some curious "age disparities" exist between principals of binary systems. In the
Sirius star system, a young => main sequence star is orbited by a less massive old
white dwarf star (see Kopal, 1938). The B-emission stars (hot, very rapidly rotating
main sequence stars surrounded by a shell of gas) are often spectroscopic binaries
whose companions orbit in about ten days. The companion is usually invisible and
believed to be a highly => evolved star relative to the primary (Maraschi et al.).
The highly evolved component admittedly often has so little mass that a nuclear
synthetic evolution (see => nucleosynthesis) could no have aged it so rapidly
(Kraft).
Both the age disparities and the size anomalies disappear if electrical evolution is
considered. It is noteworthy that many of the interesting close-binary systems
involve an unseen companion. The primaries in these systems range from very hot-type
O-stars to very-cool-type M-stars. The sizes and masses within these star systems
are inferred conventionally from the theory of evolution for the thermonuclear star
(see => thermonuclear fusion). We do not agree with such an interpretation of this
evidence.
We will not pursue the stages of early evolution of Solaria Binaria here (for that,
see Part Two). The first aware men saw the skies in the => Age of Urania about
thirteen thousand current years before the present (de Grazia, 1981). There were no
humans capable of comprehending Solaria Binaria before it began to break up at the
end of an Earth age that we shall be calling Pangea.
Super Uranus was first revealed to humans as a luminous object about twice the size
of the Sun we observe today. The Earth was then located about two-thirds of the
distance from the Sun to Super Uranus, because it was still electromagnetically
bound to the axis between the stars. The objects found within the inner regions of
galaxies seemingly orbit in this way - and probably for the same reason.
With such a configuration the Sun, if visible, would have been seen from the Earth's
southern hemisphere only and would appear 2.5 times larger than Super Uranus, which
in its turn was visible only from the northern hemisphere. The hemispheres referred
to here are not those inscribed on the Earth - globes of today. They refer to the
ancient references to the sky gods and their places. The Earth moved with its
"north" locked towards Super Uranus (see ahead to Figure 18). No other major gaseous
planet was in existence at this time. As the solid-wheel binary evolved, the Sun
eventually was separated from Super Uranus by 105 gigameters (about 0.7 astronomical
units). Before the next great quantavolution the primitive planets Mars, Earth,
Apollo, and Mercury ended up between the two principals in the region between 61 and
96 gigameters from the Sun. At such separation this would this would bring the
planets Mars and Mercury closer to Earth by factors of four and six respectively.
Even so these planets would produce visible discs which were only about one twenty-
seventh the size of today's Moon. If they could be seen (which we doubt) they would
still be observed almost as points of light in the sky [30] .
The planets were originally debris from the Super Sun nova. They traveled out in the
trail of Super Uranus, held in the electric and gaseous flow. They settled into
their original positions rather than moving on because they were electrically less
negative than Super Uranus. They distributed themselves in their magnetic cage along
the axis in accord with the principle of maximum mutual repulsion (elsewhere known
as "the principle of least interaction action"; see Ovenden, 1974).
Several cosmogonies involve processes occurring within a binary star system. Gunn
proposes that planets arise from the break-up of a rotationally unstable star, the
same process by which he accounts for the formation of a binary star system from a
single star. Lyttleton (1936, p559) visualizes a process by which planets form
during an encounter of a star with two other stars; for such an encounter between
three stars to be likely the stars must formerly be members of a bound system of
stars, a triple star system. Bruce (1944, p13), like Gunn, sees the process of
planet formation as a special case of fission of one star into a binary.
From the beginning Solaria Binaria was enveloped in a cloud of solar material (gases
and solids). As the binary evolved this sac became extended along the lengthening
axis from Sun to Super Uranus. Compressed by the magnetic field generated by the
flowing electrified gases, a stable gaseous tube surrounded the planets; indeed
these gases pervaded the entire planetary region, enveloping all of the planets in a
single sac of gases. Within this dense gaseous sac, the contents of which the
ancients called the aether [31] , and we will call the plenum, the planets could
receive biologically necessary temperatures from the axial electrical discharge
connecting the Sun with Super Uranus (de Grazia, 1981). If today's aircraft had
existed then, they might have flown regularly among the planets.
The approximate size of the gaseous tube within which the Earth and the other
planets moved was at most the diameter of the Sun, and at the least a significant
fraction of the diameter of Super Uranus. This tube confined the plenum which
allowed life to develop and thrive on all of the planets of Solaria Binaria.
Notes on Chapter 4
28. The effect would be to make the star's surface suddenly quite electron-rich.
Under such conditions the => cosmic pressure cannot hold the star's material
together. The result is an explosive expansion. We cannot dismiss the possibility
that a galactic electron storm suddenly enveloped the Super Sun, charging its
surface to instability.
29. In cases of anomalous primary rotation, the anomaly is generally detected
because the spectrum lines of the primary star are unusually bright. This line
broadening could be, as well, evidence of electrical fields within the star's
atmosphere (Stark effect).
30. The resolution of the eye is at best 20 arc-seconds; for night vision resolution
is much worse than this (Greenberg, L. H.).
31. See Aristotle (Astronomy), where he argues that the outermost regions consist of
an elementary kind of matter which is distinct from the other elementary substances
(earth, air, fire and water). Also, in Meteorology, he notes that Anaxagoras thought
that the upper regions were burning hot. Anaxagoras called the substance which
prevails in those parts Aether. Aristotle adds that the ancients assumed that the
aether is an eternal substance whose motion never ceases. It is like nothing else we
know. There was controversy among the ancients as to whether the term aether (GK.
aither) is derived from aeithein, " to run always", or from aethein, "to burn".
Aristotle favors the former (Gershenson and Greenberg), although Anaxagoras and
modern etymologists prefer the latter.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SAC AND ITS PLENUM
The original Super Sun, prior to its nova, was accumulating electrons from the
Galaxy consistent with the demands of the environment through which it was passing.
As we have explained earlier, the Super Sun became too electro-negative and expelled
material violently into its surrounding space. This material could not escape; its
expulsion was opposed both by the post-nova Sun and by the Galaxy. It thus formed
and filled a sac surrounding the newly created Solaria Binaria.
In the sac was the whole system of Solaria Binaria; the Sun, Super Uranus, the
primitive planets, and the plenum (of gases and solids) of solar origin that
nurtured the planets.
As the binary widens, the sac becomes conical in shape, narrowing from the size of
the Sun at one end to about the size of Super Uranus at the other. A system of
similar appearance has been postulated for the binary AM Herculis (Liller, p352).
Wickramasinghe and Bessell describe gas flow patterns in X-ray-emitting binary
systems. There, one may note a similarity in the shape of their pattern of maximum
obscuration to the cone of gases proposed in this work.
Viewed from the outside the ancient plenum would have been opaque to light. Not so
with the gas of the Earth's atmosphere today, which is eight kilometers thick if the
atmosphere is considered as a column of gas of constant density [32] . This
atmospheric layer is of trivial thickness compared to the radius of the Earth, yet
its importance to the environment is unquestionable. Even this negligible
atmospheric layer removes 18.4 per cent of the incoming sunlight, mostly by
diverting it from its original direction of travel.
Some of this scattered light returns to space, but most of it is redirected several
times to produce the blue sky so familiar to us. Atmospheric scatter is enhanced
near sunset when the incoming light traverses an atmospheric column tens of times
longer than near noon. The setting Sun is notably fainter and its color redder
because of the increased scatter. If the atmospheric column were as little as 1280
kilometers thick (at the present surface air density) all of the sunlight would be
deflected from its incoming direction. Light would still be seen but only after
scattering several times; no discernible source could be identified with the light.
So it was in the days of Solaria Binaria. To be precise, if, in the last days of
Super Uranus, this body were about thirty gigameters from Earth and if Super Uranus
was then as bright per square centimeter of surface as today's Sun, it would not
have been directly visible unless the gas density in the plenum was close to that
deduced today for the Earth's atmosphere at an altitude of eighty kilometers. To see
the more distant Sun this density would have to be decreased another fourfold [33]
.
In the Age of Urania, Super Uranus was located about as far from the Sun as the
orbit of the planet Venus today. This would provide the plenum with a volume of
about 10 20 cubic kilometers. If the plenum contained as much as one per cent of the
atoms in the present Sun, the gas density would be several times that found at the
base of the Earth's atmosphere today. Neither star would be seen directly, and only
a dim diffused light could reach the planetary surfaces.
As the binary evolved, the plenum came to contain an increased electrical charge; it
expanded, leaving less and less gas in the space between the principals. Thus it
became gradually more transparent.
Astronomers see diluting plenum gases elsewhere in evolving binary systems. Batten
(1973a, p10), discussing matter flow within binary systems, favors gas densities of
the order of 10 13 particles per cubic centimeter. Warner and Nather propose a much
higher density for one system (U Geminorum-a dwarf nova system) where they postulate
a gas disc with 6 x 10 17 electrons per cubic centimeter. Unless all the gas is
ionized, the neutral gas density would be higher than the calculated electron
density. The gas densities that they mention are comparable to those necessary to
allow the early humans to discern the first celestial orbits.
In the earlier stages of Solaria Binaria the plenum was impenetrable to an outside
observer; all detected radiation came from the surface layers of the cone-shaped
sac, an area up to fifty-five times the surface of the Sun. The luminosity of the
sac would arise from the transaction between in flowing galactic electrons and the
gases on the perimeter of the sac.
The plenum, at formation, was electron-rich relative to the stars and the planetary
nuclei centered within it. These latter electron-deficient bodies promptly initiated
a transaction to obtain more electrons by expelling electron-deficient atoms into
the volume of the plenum. The charge differences within the sac were modulated with
time. In other words, the plenum was losing electrons from its perimeter to its
center. In response, the size of the sac collapsed under cosmic pressure. In time
this charge-redistribution might have diminished the volume of the sac by as much as
tenfold, compressing the cone of gases into a cylinder or column of smaller
diameter.
Running along the axis between the Sun and Super Uranus was an electrical discharge
joining the two principals. Moving with this electrical flow was matter from the Sun
that was bound for Super Uranus. Some of this matter would be intercepted by and
incorporated into the primitive planets.
Induced by the electrical flow a magnetic field was generated which encircled the
axis and radially pinched the gases. The pinch effect is self-limiting in that the
more the current, the more the pinch. An infinite current in theory pinches the
current carriers into an infinitesimal volume, extinguishing it (Blevin, 1964a,
p214). Material would be extruded at both ends of the pinched flow by the pressure
induced in the pinch.
This circular magnetic field, a magnetic tube, would induce randomly moving ions of
the plenum to circulate along the field direction. The circulating motion of the
ions eventually would be transferred by collision to the neutral gases. The result
would be that in the outer regions flow would be dominated by revolution around the
circumference of the tube. Everything here would eventually revolve uniformly. The
innermost regions of the column were dominated by flow along the axis. Considerable
transaction occurred at the junction of these two separately moving regions of the
column, the central and the peripheral.
Some luminosity would arise from the transaction of electrons and ions deep within
the magnetic tube. The ions electrically accelerated towards Super Uranus were
neutralized at some point along their trajectory. At neutralization X-rays were
produced. Some of the ions would be neutralized upon collision within the magnetic
tube, most upon reaching Super Uranus; but, because of the pinch phenomenon noted
above, some ions would be extruded and neutralized near the perimeter of the sac
behind Super Uranus. Despite the high gas density in the original plenum, X-ray
emission would be observable from the outside. That such is the case elsewhere is
indicated by Brennan.
As the plenum diluted with time (in a manner to be discussed in Chapter Eleven) the
outside observer would see deeper and deeper into the system, and eventually all of
the X-ray emission would come from the interface between the magnetic tube and the
surface of Super Uranus. As in other binary systems, a partial eclipse of the main
X-ray source would then be seen as the dumb-bell revolved (see Tananbaum and
Hutchings for data on other binaries).
Matsuoka notes a positive correlation between X-ray and optical emission in
binaries. Radio-emitting regions surround many binary systems (Wickramasinghe and
Bessell). Spangler and his colleagues claim that radio emission from binary stars is
noted for stars that are over-luminous. The radio emission is generated by electrons
transacting with the magnetic field associated with the inter-star axis. That this
emission is enhanced when a stronger transaction occurs between the stars causing
the over-luminosity is understandable, using our model.
At the perimeter of the plenum, optical effects would show to an outside observer an
apparent absorption shell associated with the hidden binary within. Like many of the
close-binary systems, the stars of Solaria Binaria would not be resolvable in a
distant telescope, but the binary nature of the system could be known because
observable differences would be produced as the dumb-bell revolved.
Gas-containing binary systems as described here, and elsewhere (Batten, 1973b,
pp157ff, pp176ff), represent the stake of Solaria Binaria at various epochs, and
especially in its last days. As the binary system collapsed, the plenum thinned,
allowing direct observation of light produced by sources inside the sac. The gas
disc, theoretically implied to surround the stars of other binaries, is waning in
the late translucent plenum. The gas streams detected flowing between certain binary
components are present in Solaria Binaria along what we call the electrical arc. The
gas clouds, whose absorption spectrum leads us to believe that they envelop entire
binary systems, correspond to the perimeter of the early opaque plenum. As Solaria
Binaria evolved, each of the classes of circumstellar matter noted by astronomers
became observable in their turn.
Inferable from the above is the degree of visibility from the Earth's surface, or
from any point of the planetary belt within the plenum. Overall there is a
translucence. Objects near at hand might be distinguished, certainly after the half-
way mark in the million-year history of Solaria Binaria was past. Sky bodies were
indistinguishable from Earth.
With passing time, the level of light would increase. In the beginning, the light is
scattered and the sky is a dim white. As the plenum thinned electrically, the sky
bodies would emerge as diffuse reddish patches. During this process, the sky would
brighten and become more blue. Thus, as they emerge, Super Uranus and the Sun
brighten and whiten while the sky becomes darker and bluer.
At a time related to the changes soon to be discussed, around fourteen thousand
years ago, the Earth is suddenly peopled by humans, and one may investigate whether
any memories remain of the plenum. There seem to be several legendary themes that
correlate with our deductions about visibility.
Seemingly, aboriginal legends describe the heavens as hard, heavy, marble-like and
luminous. Earliest humans were seeing a vault, a dome [34] . Probably in
retrospect, to the heaven was ascribed the human qualities of a robe or covering,
and, by extension, part of an anthropomorphic god. Thus, the Romans saw Coelus, the
Chinese T'ien, the Hindus Varuna, and the Greeks Ouranos. Vail (1905/ 1972) presents
ample evidence that day and night were uncertain and that the heavens were
continuously translucent. When Hindu myth says that "the World was dark and asleep
until the Great => Demiurge appeared", we construe the word "dark" as non-bright
relative to the sunlit sky that came later. Heaven and Earth were close together,
were spouses, according to Greek and other legends. The global climate of the Earth
in the plenum was wet; all is born from the insemination of the fecund Earth by the
Sky, said some legends. There was so much moisture in the plenum that, although the
ocean basins were not yet structured, the first proto-humans might confuse the
waters of the firmament above with the earth-waters. In some legendary beginnings, a
supreme deity had dispatched a diver to bring out Earth from the great primordial
waters of chaos (Long, 1963).
The earliest condition was referred to as a chaos, not in the present sense of
turbulent clouds, disorder, and disaster, but in the sense of lacking precise
indicators of order, such as a cycle that would let time be measured. T'ien is the
Chinese Heaven, universally present chaos without form. The gods who later give men
time, such as Kronos, are specifically celebrated therefore (Plato).
Sky bodies were invisible. Legends of creation do not begin with a bright sky filled
with beings, but speak of a time before this. When the first sky-body observations
are reported, they are of falling bodies. The earliest fixed heavenly body in legend
is not the Sun, the Moon, the planets, nor the stars, but Super Uranus, as will be
described later on.
Nor was the radiant perimeter of the sac visible. It lay far beyond discernment as
such, and was in any case practically indistinguishable from its luminescence. The
electrical arc would have been visible directly only in its decaying days, being
likewise sheathed from sight by the dense atmosphere of the tube. That the arc or
axis appeared along with the sky bodies before its radiance expired is to be
determined in the next chapter, where its composition and operation are discussed.
Notes on Chapter 5
32. The actual atmosphere does not have a constant density throughout its volume. If
condensed to constant density it would become an 8-km column of gas at the
atmospheric density found presently at the bottom of the atmosphere.
33. The retention of a more dense, thin atmospheric skin surrounding the Earth (and
the other planets) would not affect the visibility of the binary components more
adversely than does the Earth's atmosphere today.
34. Vail (1905) collected ancient expressions from diverse cultures testifying to
perceptions of the heavens as "the Shining Whole", "the Brilliant All", the
"firmament", "the vault", "Heaven the Concealer". Heaven was the Deity who came down
crushingly on Earth, and the heavens are said to "roll away" and to open to
discharge the Heavenly Hosts; great rivers are said to flow out of Heaven. In other
places we read of the gods chopping and piercing holes in the celestial ceiling, of
a Boreal Hole that is an "Island of Stars", a "star opening", "Mimer's Well". Heaven
was perceived to become ever more impalpable and tenuous with time, so that not only
the memory of it but also its names, adjectives and metaphors lost their strength of
meaning.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER SIX
THE ELECTRICAL AXIS AND ITS GASEOUS RADIATION
The binary electrical system was distinguished by an electrical flow between the
principals. This was a highly energetic discharge which generated chemical, and
probably nuclear, transformations among the gaseous constituents of the plenum. It
provided the heat and energy for life to emerge.
The gaseous plenum initially seems to have contained an excess of hydrogen. The
combination of electrical arc with hydrogen-rich gases favored the quick production
of organic molecules and of biological systems (Miller and Urey) within the plenum.
An electrical current flowing along the axis of the binary of the order of 10 14
amperes (100 => teraamperes) would produce sufficient magnetic field intensity to
constrain the plenum gases up to 64 000 kilometers from the axis (see ahead to
Chapter Seven). Electrical breakdown can occur in dense gases where the electric
field intensity is of the order of 25 kilovolts per centimeter (Schr"der, p90). The
longer the electrical column the greater the potential difference required between
the principals in order for breakdown to occur. Once breakdown occurs the voltage
drop at a place decreases from kilovolts per centimeter to tenths of a volt per
centimeter [35] . Along the discharge column the voltage drop varies considerably.
It is greatest near the electrodes and is very small at most points in the body of
the discharge [36] .
It is difficult to estimate the energy that would be released by a discharging arc
unless the voltage drop across the arc is known. Since we do not know this value for
Solaria Binaria, we must define the arc's parameters in terms of other criteria. One
must be preoccupied with the thermal constraints upon the Earth and its developing
biosphere.
It is known that transverse heat flow is hindered by the presence of a strong
magnetic field (Kapitza, p962). Also the gases insulated, diffused, and rendered
uniform the intermittent blasts of the arc by the time the radiation reached the
region occupied by the planets. Nevertheless, the closer the Earth to the arc, the
more energy it would have received. For some time the Earth gained its energy almost
entirely from the arc source. It is reasonable to assume that Earth's temperature
must soon have devolved below 325 K. If the Earth-to-arc distance is chosen to be
fixed at 64 000 km from the arc, the Earth is irrotational with respect to the arc,
and it absorbs all incoming energy (see ahead to Chapter Thirteen); the heat flowing
away from the binary arc cannot much exceed 2.6 X 10 14 watts per kilometer of arc.
Such an arc would dissipate at least 3.1 X 10 22 watts within the sac. Given the
constraints to radial heat flow cited above, the actual arc could have been much
more energetic than we calculate here.
Thus, the discharge should have produced a small region of hot gas centered along
the electrical axis. Surrounding the gases of the discharge was a large opaque
mantle of cool gases. Within the cooler gases were the electrically charged planets,
which had been repelled from the arc but caught up in the magnetic tube (see ahead
to Chapter Seven).
In terrestrial lightning the period of electrical build-up (leader process) compared
to the time of discharge (return stroke) is in the ratio of hundreds to one. The
recovery time before the next stroke has built up is often 800 times the duration of
the stroke. Thus it would be reasonable to conceive of the Solaria Binaria arc as
discharging about one-thousandth of the time.
A lightning-bolt leader moves about 300 kilometers per second. Thus late in the
history of Solaria Binaria it would have taken about 350 000 seconds [37] for the
leader to work its way along the 105 gigameters between the principals. The return
discharge propagates faster, taking only 2190 seconds or 36 1/ 2 minutes.
Did this arc, so necessary to life, persist even into the time of human awareness?
As Super Uranus receded from the Sun, and the planets redistributed themselves
farther apart in its wake, it is logical to assume that the intensity of the arc
declined and its flow became intermittent. Hence, at around thirteen thousand years
before the present an observer on Earth would have seen a great flickering and
coiling axis or column of fire.
Solaria's electrical binary connection differs from a terrestrial lightning stroke
of today in that it involves many concurrent (but not necessarily simultaneously
launched) arc channels. A close analogy would be the granular cells seen at the
bottom of the discharge channels between the Galaxy and the surface of today's Sun.
In this latter case the difference between the arc in Solaria Binaria and the
radially directed discharges on today's Sun is the absence of a closely spaced non-
electrically neutral companion body. This proximity, which was present in Solaria
Binaria, induced a continual series of electrical explosions to be conducted along
the electrical tube joining the closest localities of the surfaces of the two stars.
The plenum gases at this time, especially near the arc, were dense enough to be
opaque to radiation. A discharge that is opaque appears to radiate from its surface
rather than from the whole volume of gas. In consequence energy flows diffusely away
from the central discharge into the surrounding gas, some as radiant energy, some as
the flow of excited matter, some by thermal conduction (by kinetic energy exchange
in collision). Collisions will act so as to maintain an outward flow of energy
(Somerville, p42).
Usually ions and electrons diffuse radially from the column. Later they recombine
giving up the energy of ionization to the gas. Also, excited atoms, especially those
which are long-lived, flow away from the column carrying internal excitation energy
which they can release when deactivated by a collision with a non-excited atom or
molecule.
The relative importance of radiation when contrasted with conduction for
redistributing the arc's energy will depend upon the composition of the gas and the
gas pressure. Some gases, like hydrogen and helium, are not efficient radiators of
visible light. However, for all gases, high pressures make radiation more important
than conduction in the transfer of energy.
In the laboratory, electric-arc current flows are of the order of 10 amperes per
square centimeter. If such an arc were to flow between the early Sun and its close
companion, Super Uranus, it need strike only a rather small area of the latter. A
discharge column, if encompassing an area of only 10 13 square centimeters, would
produce an arc current of 100 teraamperes.
In an electric arc the gases "burn" [38] in a relatively narrow column. The higher
the gas pressure the narrower the discharge column and the more difficult it becomes
to sustain a uniform current through the discharge (Somerville, p19). Strong arc
discharges, such as lightning channels, seem to bend into a helical shape. Such
bending seems to generate a condition within the arc which can terminate the
discharge (Blevin, 1964b, p473, Somerville, p54). "Non-electrical" gradients in the
conducting electrified gases are usually offered as explanation for the curving of
the discharge channel. These "mechanical" drifts set up within electrical discharges
are probably better explained as electrical drifts, but neither explanation goes
very far at present.
Revolution of the gases around the longitudinal axis of laboratory discharge columns
tends to stabilize the discharges [39] . When they do, the rotating gases are said
to create a radial "gravitational" field (Somerville, p20). Similar vortical
stabilization is noted in rotating air; it is suggested in tornadoes where almost
continuous vortical lightning activity occurs (Chalmers, p340).
The rotating gases surrounding and driven by the magnetic tube in Solaria Binaria
would act to keep the electric discharge going when it otherwise would have gone
out. In the laboratory, high current discharges are so unstable that continuous
operation is not easily maintained. The pinch effect usually extinguishes the
discharge. With the current removed, magnetic field relaxation occurs, so that the
hot electrified gases begin to diffuse away, cooling the discharge column.
Electrical forces quickly re-establish the current, stopping the outward flow of hot
matter. So it was too in Solaria Binaria; the arc pulsed regularly responding to
some natural rhythm between the forces leading to extinction and the forces
promoting resurrection.
High gas densities favor brief, frequently recurring, pulses of arcs (Somerville
p55). Could this mechanism be the origin of the regular pulses of radiation observed
in celestial objects called => pulsars? As the gas density decreases, the arc's
pulsing frequency would decline; pulsars show a slowing of the pulse rate with time
(Hewish, p1083) [40] .
The electric arc operating in Solaria Binaria is a cosmic discharge of long
duration. Bruce, in the course of seventeen letters about Cosmic Electrical
Discharges (1958-1964), has documented examples of smaller arcs of shorter duration
and of longer arcs lasting to millions of years. We concur in his conclusion that
electric discharges on a cosmic scale explain many phenomena observed in the
astronomical realm. Bruce has convinced us that only scale differentiates lightning
discharges, observed regularly in the Earth's troposphere, from solar flares,
periodic discharges in the giant envelopes of gases surrounding certain variable
stars, and the enormous eruptions moving through the entire volumes of certain
"active" galaxies (see, 1966a).
He proposed that an electrical discharge liberating energy comparable to that
ascribed to the => quasars was capable of transforming elliptical galaxies into
spirals. It would seem that the quasar phenomenon is in fact a galaxy in
transformation. This is the grandest of the cosmic lightning discharges; in its wake
the spiral arms of the galaxy form with their "metal-rich" stars. Bruce speculated
that in the enormous temperatures generated in these discharges, nucleosynthesis
transmutes smaller atoms into larger ones. It is this latter possibility that leads
us to postulate that nuclear transformations were accomplished in the arc of Solaria
Binaria. If they were, they probably occurred most vigorously at the beginning, when
the discharge current was greatest.
Despite the many problems with laboratory experimentation in this area, some
supportive work has taken place. Using a pulsed high current arc discharge, Russian
workers produced beams of 40 kiloelectron volt => deuterons at instabilities in the
discharge (Somerville, pp55ff). This achievement is consonant with certain proposed
nucleosynthetic processes that occur in low energy flares above star surfaces
(Canal). Zirin gives a mechanism for the generation of solar flares resembling
processes which might occur within regions of a pinched electrical arc.
Even more closely related to the situation in Solaria Binaria is Joss' speculation
that X-ray burst sources result from thermonuclear flashes. X-ray burst sources are
episodic; in some, bursts are much more frequent. Many burst sources can be inactive
for weeks. X-ray sources, steady and bursters, are associated with binary star
systems. If, particularly, the burst sources are due to thermonuclear reactions in
close binary star systems, then we can be confident that these reactions occurred in
Solaria Binaria and that they were instrumental in shaping its chemical and
biological structure [41] .
Inasmuch as these thermonuclear events were part of the earlier history of the
electrical axis, no human would have observed this part of his ultimate creation.
The last chapter mentioned what the earliest true humans would have generally
perceived, but it postponed treating their special experience with the electrical
axis. A correlation of the electrical axis with early legends about a central fire
may be probative.
At one region of the Earth, the axis might be expected to appear as a kind of
rainbow of fire or "neon-tube" glow across the sky ending at Super Uranus. In
another region the arc might appear more short at the horizon and stretch to the red
star. In the opposing hemisphere, the arc might be visible alone, first, and then
might reach for and finally attain the Sun, with the axis blossoming at the Sun,
thus "creating" it, or vice versa. The flickering of the arc, when slowed down
enough to be noticeable, might resemble red coiled snakes, intertwining and crawling
brokenly towards the great red god.
The snake and dragon accompany very early gods and goddesses. "The Serpent of the
Jupiter-type myth is always seen to be a creation of the proto-Saturn god" (Tresman
and O'Gheoghan, p39), that is, Uranus. The Saturnian image with snakes from India
and the Chinese painting of the espoused deities, shown in Figure 12 and Figure 32,
are suggestive. Serpents are among the earliest symbols of art and myth. The color
red is widely used and sacred in archaic, perhaps Paleolithic Uranian times
(Wreschner). However, the abundance of such symbols is countervalenced by their
generality as referents. Lacking specific applications to phenomena, they are
unreliable indication of the electrical axis. Certain symbols associated directly
with Saturn (of the time of => Super Saturn) are also suggestive of the arc. These
include the courtly long-gowned figure of the god, the tree of life (including the
Christmas tree), the sacred mountain , and others (Talbott, D. N., ch. 8) that
convey the image of the god atop a cone-shaped or pyramidal design on top of the
World.
In Iroquois legend, at the beginning of things, the Chief of Heaven, in a fit of
jealousy towards his spouse, uproots the tree whose flowers illuminate the celestial
world. The Sun and Moon did not exist at the time. He cast his wife, "Fertile
Earth", into the hole and replaced the tree (Eliade, 1967, pp146ff).
Figure 12. The Planet Saturn in Ancient Indian Art
Brahma, the planet Saturn, encircled ring-like by serpents, testimony from an early
time of the serpent motif in cosmogony. -- reproduced courtesy of S. I. S. Review
Among the Nagdju Dayak of Borneo, the Creator couple, dwelling as birds in the tree
of life, fight and damage the tree badly. Some time after the first humans are born
of their efforts, the tree is destroyed (ibid, pp77ff).
More closely correlative with the axis in the linguistic frame of modern science is
the concept of the "Central Fire" that occupied early Greek philosophy. This has
particularly descended through the fragments attributed to Philolaos, the
Pythagorean (Dreyer, p40-3). Rose has thoroughly explored the material. Philolaos
was the first of the secretive Pythagoreans to publish a book and his treatment by
Plato leaves little doubt that he represented a considerable school of archaic
science [42] .
Some thirty-two attributes of the "Central Fire" are to be elicited from Philolaos
and Heraclitus, as presented by Rose, all of which can be accommodated to the theory
of the electrical axis of Solaria Binaria. The Central Fire was thought to have been
a layer of fire above a layer of air. It is the center of the world. It is cone-
shaped. It never sets, and has always the same location in the sky. It is "alone",
the "highest", "unmoving", "stable", the beginning of everything. The Earth orbits
around the Fire, but Earth does not rotate upon itself. Nor has the Earth any
obliquity.
The Fire is not counted among the numbered bodies of the celestial sphere. It is not
called Saturn or by any other name except that it was termed the "Mother of the
Gods". It is called the "hearth of all", the "residence" of Zeus, his "throne", his
"tower", his "fortress". It is a "divine ruler and teacher. It is the "altar", the
"bond", and the "measure" of nature. The Sun borrowed light from the Fire; the Sun
orbits around it [43] . The Moon, planets, and stars orbit the Fire.
Heraclitus reported it as "an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures
and going out by regular measures". He said that "it advances and retires" (Rose,
1979, p26) [44] . Earth turns always the same face towards the Fire. A Counter-
Earth exists, which is closer to the Earth than to the Fire, and obscures the Fire
from view [45] .
The match of Solaria Binaria's axis of "electrical fire" (as electric discharges
were called until the nineteenth century) with the attributes of the Central Fire in
Greek cosmogony is close. The mention of celestial bodies can be explained as
reflecting later observation of some traits.
Notes on Chapter 6
35. The voltage drop occurs about a microsecond (one-millionth of a second) after
breakdown (Bruce, 1955).
36. Francis discusses conditions in the positive column of a short discharge tube.
The estimate of 0.1 V/ cm given above is a simplistic linear extrapolation from the
data given for the voltage drop across an entire discharge tube. Actual values in
the discharge are difficult to measure (Juergens, 1977a). In the plasma away from
the electrodes the voltage drop is miniscule and could be one thousand times less
than the average value.
37. 4.06 present Earth days (sidereal).
38. The gases in an electric arc do not burn in the sense of combustion, rather they
are excited electrically, sometimes giving off light.
39. The Gerdien arc, where stationary gas is surrounded by a rotating flow of water,
shows very marked peripheral cooling, enabling a high axial temperature to be
attained.
40. Besides pulsing at intervals of one second or less, pulsars also show saltatory
changes, named glitches (sudden decelerations of the object astronomers presume to
be rotating). In the event that the pulsations are discharge phenomena, as we
presume here, the => saltations could result if sudden outbursts altered the gas
density irreversibly within the discharge column.
41. See behind, Chapter Two, where we argue that thermo-nuclear fusion does not
occur in the interior of the stars. Theoretical models for the interior of solar
type stars lead to the conclusion that their interiors, even if compacted, would not
be hot enough to initiate nuclear fusion (Milton, 1979). Notwith-standing any
contradictory calculation, the paucity of neutrinos emitted by the Sun must be
considered as fatal to internal nucleosynthesis in stars (Juergens, 1979a). In solar
flares and the other discharges mentioned below, temperatures significantly higher
are measured. Thus only in the cosmic discharges does nucleosynthesis occur.
42. Rose supposes that the Central Fire is Saturn, the planet, as it anciently
functioned, with which interpretation of the data we disagree, believing that the
evidence is heavily in favor of its identification with the electrical axis.
43. At a late time the Sun would appear to orbit the axis, as would Super Saturn,
when these globes would appear to rotate around the point of the axis cone striking
into them, as the Earth moved in its orbit around the axis.
44. The Fire might advance and retire optically as it flared on and off in its
decaying state.
45. This probably is a phenomenon that followed the beginning of Earth's rotation
perpendicular to the ecliptic, or refers to the era when the arc was no longer
visible (see ahead to Chapter Fifteen).
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE MAGNETIC TUBE AND THE PLANETARY ORBITS
The arc along the axis between the principals created a magnetic tube, which
surrounded the discharging gases (see Figure 13).
A magnetic field surrounded the electrical axis and extended outward to infinity
[46] . The magnetic surfaces are here represented by lines, which by their
increasing thinness indicate progressively weaker magnetic fields; see Figure 14.
The strength of the magnetic field at a given distance from the axis depends only
upon the magnitude of the electrical current flowing between the principals.
The ability of the magnetic field to constrain the motions within a gas depends upon
the presence of electrified atoms. Whenever the energy density of the magnetic field
at a given location exceeds the energy density of the gas [47] , the field can
influence the flow of the gas and thus delineates the boundary of the magnetic tube.
As noted earlier (Chapter 5) the presence of even a small fraction of an electrified
gas can be sufficient to trap the neutral gases.
The electric current is mainly ions moving from the Sun to Super Uranus. It would be
a negligible fraction of the total gas flowing between the two stars. Most of the
electrical current was confined to small channels within the region of the flowing
gas. Gas continually left the Sun and entered the plenum.
Figure 13. Magnetic Field Associated with an Electrical Flow
An electric current is always encircled by a magnetic field. By convention the
direction of the electric current is opposite to the motion of the electrons
contained in that current. For a moving electron the magnetic field is directed such
that, if the election flow follows the thumb of the left hand, the north magnetic
pole of the magnetic field created by the electron flow is orientated around the
motion in the direction of the curled left fingers.
Figure 14. Decreasing Magnetic Field Strengths Surrounding Central Current at
Increasing Distances
The magnetic field created by an electrical flow is oriented in the plane
perpendicular to the direction of the electric current. The intensity of the
magnetic field depends upon the magnitude of the current and inversely upon the
distance from the current to the place where the intensity is being monitored. The
further one is from a given current the weaker the detected magnetic intensity.
Most of this gas followed the electrical arc through the plenum (Alfv‚n, pp433-435).
At Super Uranus the flow impinged upon a small area of the facing hemisphere. It is
difficult to make direct observations of gas exchange within binary star systems,
but some have been made. Batten (1973a, p2, p5) reports a typical value of 450
kilometers per second for the velocity of flowing gas. Using his value, we estimate
that in the Age of Urania the flow may have amounted to about one-thousandth of the
number of molecules in the plenum, or one hundred-millionth of the solar material
per year.
In the region where the discharge passes, the gas would be hottest and hence of
slightly lower density than that of the surrounding region. Moving outwards, the gas
would become progressively cooler. If no other factors influenced the gas, we would
expect to find gas density increasing in successively cooler layers. However, since
the magnetic field grows weaker moving outwards, the density of gas that is
constrained also drops. Thus, the highest gas density would be found in the warm
region surrounding the discharge. Here marked chemical changes within the gases of
the plenum are expected.
Because the electric discharge took the form of a pulsating arc, electrified gases
could move radially during the relaxation cycle of the discharge. Gases of lighter
mass move more rapidly than heavier gases and thus migrate more readily. Those atoms
whose electrons could be most easily stripped off also migrated. This migration,
coupled with chemical processes, altered the mixture in the magnetic tube until the
gases now commonly found in the planetary atmospheres dominated it.
Given, a 27-teraampere current flowing late in Solaria Binaria, the magnetic tube
had the capacity to contain a gas density comparable to that of the Earth's present
atmosphere (at surface level). The full plenum, at this same time, could have
contained more than the equivalent of one hundred "Earth-masses" of gas and vapors
[48] .
In a magnetic field, electrified atoms are constrained and follow the magnetic field
direction at each location. Motions along the field are unimpeded, but motions
across the field produce forces that cause an electrified particle to revolve round
the local magnetic field line [49] . Combinations of along and across motions
produce a spiral path about a magnetic field line, as shown in Figure 15.
Figure 15. Motion of Drifting Charged Particle in a Magnetic Field
An electrically charged particle moving in a magnetic field is subjected to a force
acting perpendicular to both the direction of its motion and the direction of the
magnetic field. The result is that charged particles move freely along a magnetic
field. The motion of the charge becomes helical because the constraint forces the
particle to circle around the magnetic field while the particle translates along the
field. Electrons and ions spiral in opposite directions.
The circular magnetic field surrounding the axial electrical discharge was also
responsible for the production of much electromagnetic radiation within the plenum.
Radiation would be emitted as ions and electrons were forced to spiral around the
curved magnetic field lines of the magnetic column. This radiation process is called
Bremsstrahlung, or braking radiation [50] . It is emitted whenever charged
particles are retarded (decelerated). By radiating, the particles lose energy to the
surrounding gas. An enormous glowing gas cloud soon surrounded the arc - an =>
afterglow - like the great ion trails left by large meteors.
As they lose energy, the spiraling particles move with smaller and smaller radii
around the magnetic field line. By emitting braking radiation, motion across the
magnetic field is greatly reduced. Since motion along the magnetic field is
unaffected by the presence of the field, it eventually dominates. Thus the gases
surrounding the discharge tended to flow around the magnetic column.
The same radiation as described here is used by biologists to mutate rapidly growing
species such as Drosophila, the common fruit fly. In Solaria Binaria, radiation was
abundant precisely when needed to explain periods of great biological change.
Figure 16. Braking Radiation Emitted by a Spiraling Electron
A charged particle experiencing a force accelerates; it gains or loses energy
through the acceleration. When energy is liberated (because the accelerating
particle is losing energy) it appears as electromagnetic waves emitted in a
direction perpendicular to the charge's acceleration.
Earlier, we suggested that, in the outermost parts of the magnetic tube, material
was revolving about the electric arc. This revolution began early in Solaria Binaria
when the intercompanion current was greatest. The immense magnetism so generated was
able to magnetize all of the contained and revolving material. Once magnetized,
directed flow was assured (see Figure 13). Among this material were the electrically
accreting primitive planets, also strongly magnetized. They revolved about the arc
locked in direction by their magnetized structures.
As the binary extended, the arc weakened, in consequence of which the magnetism
around the arc declined. With diminished magnetism, more and more material could
exist in a non-magnetized state. Although this material had all been magnetized
earlier, the magnetization would begin to decay as soon as the surroundings allowed
it. The decay of magnetized Earth rocks has been documented by Nagata. There is
probably a positive correlation between the ease of magnetization of a material and
the duration of its remanence. So, as the magnetic tube weakened, the now orbiting
bodies would lose their magnetism differentially depending upon their composition.
As we will show later, Earth's decaying magnetism of today is a remnant of its stay
in the magnetic tube.
Once in orbit about the arc the gases and solids (including the planets) of the
plenum would retain their motions unless disturbed. This leads us to conclude that,
in addition to their binary "dumb-bell" orbit, the Earth and the other planets also
initially orbited in a circle about the Sun-Super Uranus arc (Figure 17).
Figure 17. Primitive Planets in Orbit About the Electric Arc
Over most of time the solar planets have orbited locked between the component stars
of a binary. Their motion about the electrical connection between the stars resulted
because the strong magnetic field generated by the electric arc kept the
electrically charged planets in orbit around the arc. In a "gravitating" system only
the Lagrangian point (labeled L1) allows a planet to co-revolve with the pair of
stars, but for orbits under the influence of electrical force co-revolution is
possible at many points along the electrified axis of the system.
Because of electric repulsion, we propose that the arcuate orbits of the primitive
planets were situated somewhere in the vicinity of what is called the => Lagrangian
point L1 for the Sun-Super Uranus binary system. Near this point co-rotation is
expected as the dumb-bell rotates. In fact, even in today's Solar System, where the
magnetic tube has collapsed, a Sun-Earth-satellite pair (ISEE 1 and 2) has been
orbited at the L 1 point between the Sun and the Earth. In today's system, all the
planets orbit with different times and the L 1 orbit is barely stable; but in
Solaria Binaria, with a strong magnetic tube in place between the principals, L 1
would be a most likely haven for planetary bodies in the binary.
Since we propose the existence of more than one primitive planet, and since each is
electrically charged, the planets would revolve about the arc staying as far from
each other as the principals would allow. This, we feel, would crowd the four
planets near the L 1 point.
The planetary orbits about the axis, like rings on a pole, would be substantially
closer than today's concentric orbits. The planets would maximize their separation,
subject to three constraints: repulsion by the principals, repulsion from the arc,
and the need to follow the magnetic lines of the tube.
In consequence each planet orbited about the axis tending to expand or contract its
orbit depending upon its charged state relative to the axis and its need to stay
away from the other planets. Their speed and direction was dictated by the flow of
magnetized material about the arc, despite their need to avoid one another. Given
that the planets as a group occupied a limited region of the tube, they positioned
themselves on their orbits so as to maintain the net maximum distance from the
summated repulsion of all of the other orbiting planets. Perhaps the simplest, and
at the same time adequate, response to the constraints would be for each planet to
take a different azimuthal position [51] on its orbit in the magnetic tube.
In the opaque plenum, and because of their different revolutional phases, no planet
could be observed from another planet. Even when the plenum was clearing, the
planets so positioned would be difficult to discern. They may not have been
perceived until the => Age of Jovea, when, freed from the tube, their dim radiance
could be isolated against a darkened sky.
The magnetic tube, unlike the arc and the sac, was not directly observable, and so
could not enter into human awareness, even in the final days of Solaria Binaria. Its
presence, nevertheless, allowed later men to see the arc. Its grasp upon the gases
amidst the revolving planets was instrumental in converting the energy moving away
from the arc into a huge visible column of "flaming, twisting" light -- again a
possible source of serpentine imagery in early symbolism.
The magnetic tube may have played a part in generating cosmic sounds. Archaic Greek
philosophers, especially the Pythagoreans, employed the phrase "music of the
spheres" to designate what has since been regarded as an unreal belief in celestial
and planetary sound. That the violent forces within the tube would have emitted
acoustical waves is unquestionable [52] . In the manner of => whistling
atmospherics, as lately studied (Hines, p816), such sound would be trapped by the
magnetic field and propagated along the magnetic tube.
In the late times of the tube, when celestial bodies could be distinguished
visually, the sound might have inspired the Pythagoreans to the invention of their
sacred musical scale, which was also related to their sacred theory of numbers -
both sound and numbers constituting theophanies. The sounds might first have been
involved in the earliest sacred music. The magnetic tube worked its wonders by an
invisible hand.
Notes on Chapter 7
46. A magnetic field only appears when relative motion exists within systems
containing electric charges (Sherrerd).
47. The energy density of a gas depends upon the density of the gas => particles and
upon their temperatures (average random motion), and upon their kinetic energy as
they flow within the electric field.
48. The "mass" of the plenum depends upon the gas composition.
49. The authors understand that magnetic field lines are only a method of
visualizing motion of charged particles being acted upon by magnetic fields and that
they are not ingredients of the theories of electromagnetic interaction, but we feel
that the use of field lines provides the reader with insight into the direction of
the magnetic field around the electrical arc and into the motion that would occur as
ions and electrons moved within the plenum.
50. Bremsstrahlung is observed from X-ray tubes, particle accelerators
(synchrotrons), atomic beta decays, "supernova remnants" and cosmic X-ray sources.
51. Azimuthal angle is, here, a measure of the planet's progress around its orbit.
Planets whose azimuthal angles differ would be said to have a revolutional phase
shift (as in Figure 17).
52. Several expert observers, working at remote locations, report sound associated
with intensive displays of the Aurora Borealis (Harang, Stomer).
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE EARTH'S PHYSICAL AND MAGNETIC HISTORY
The generally round shape of the Earth is an effect of external electric pressure to
bring it into electrical balance with the plenum. It was originally a dense
aggregate, a fragment of Super Sun trapped in the magnetic field that was generated
around the arc joining the Sun and Super Uranus. The aggregate grew rapidly in a
short time from accretions of smaller bodies and chemical elements.
The Earth's density alters from lighter material on the outside to heavier on the
inside, in proportion to the intensity of requirements of materials for charge --
lesser on the outside, greater at the center. Density and conductivity are
correlated. In an intensely electrical ambience, the deposition and transmutation of
metals such as iron and nickel at the core of the Earth are understandable.
Though knowledge of the Earth's interior is by inference, its seeming simplicity may
be a fact and, if so the result of its electrical accretion and its conductive
nature. By contrast, the superficial crust of the Earth consists of more poorly
conducting species. It has also been subjected to many geophysical incidents of a
recent kind. Therefore, its highly differentiated structure is understandable (see
ahead to Chapter Eleven). Granite, for example, is a rock formed as a global
covering at and near the surface under highly energetic conditions. It may once have
been basalt that was electrically energized by the magnetic tube to the point of
metamorphosis. Too, it may have migrated by electrophoresis and deposited by
electrolysis, as particulate, from the enshrouding plenum. It is old, then, but not
so old as the core and mantle of the Earth.
Granting that the granite cloak could not be a metamorphosis of sedimentary rock
requires admitting that the sediments can never have been very deep, not much more
than the observable sedimentary cover on the continents and ocean bottoms today! A
half-million years of violent and gradual erosion would seem to be sufficient to
provide it. If, as will be argued in Chapter Thirteen, the Earth has lost crustal
material by explosion, it has also gained some materials from the explosions of
foreign bodies (see Chapters Eleven and Fourteen); the search to explain ore, salt,
and other anomalous bodies embedded in the surface must begin with a study of their
possibly cataclysmic accretion.
The mineral structure of the Earth harbors magnetism, which is the capacity of some
of the Earth's rocks and of its total surface and ionized atmospheric gases to give
evidence of a distinctive electrical presence both now and in the past. Rock
magnetism, imprinted in ferruginous and other rocks by some past event, yields
magnetic intensities up to one microtesla [53] . At the surface the magnetic field
of the Earth's body has an intensity of sixty microteslas. In rocket and orbiting
satellite observations made in the ionosphere, high above the surface, intensities
as low as ten nanoteslas are found. This ubiquitous force is weak to the point of
impotency, yet at the same time it is highly significant in reconstructing the
Earth's history and present state.
The globe as it accreted was aligned with the magnetic field lines around the
electrical axis discharging between the Sun and Super Uranus. It was forthwith
magnetized [54] . It, too, orbited the axis, maintaining a fixed direction relative
to the magnetic field in which it moved. As depicted in Figure 18, it posted its
rotational poles at right angles to its magnetic axis [55] .
Quantavolutions eventually weakened the field of the magnetic tube leaving today
only a feeble magnetic field in the region of the ecliptic (see Figure 11). The
outflowing solar wind protons seem to leave the Sun radially. Except near the Sun
this flow seems to be focussed mainly onto a disc enveloping the ecliptic. The
outer-planetary space probe Mariner 10 has noted some depletion of solar wind at
high ecliptic latitudes (Kumar and Broadfoot).
Figure 18. The Earth in the Magnetic Tube
The magnetic field around the electric arc of Solaria Binaria made the electrically
charged Earth orbit around the arc. The magnetic intensity of the constraining field
caused the material of the Earth to become magnetized. So held in orbit the Earth's
rotational and magnetic poles were located 90 degrees apart on the Earth's surface,
the rotational axis was directed parallel to the arc, while the magnet axis was
directed along the contours of the magnetic tube.
After sufficient weakening of the magnetic tube, the Earth was released from
alignment with the field lines surrounding the electric arc; gyroscopic action,
caused by the electric current flowing through the Earth's core, then ended the
former rotation about poles displaced greatly from the magnetic axis. The Earth-
magnet sought alignment with the now dominant solar magnetic field created by the
motion of the electrically charged Super Uranus around the charged Sun. The Earth
began to rotate with the north rotational pole (geographic north) in the same place
as the "north" magnetic pole (Figure 19) [56] . Later events separated the two
poles.
Figure 19. The Earth Magnet
The surviving magnetization of the Earth's interior arises from the remnant of the
electric current induced within the Earth's material during its stay in the magnetic
tube. This decaying current is detected externally by the presence of an ever-
weakening magnetic field, which surrounds the Earth.
Presently the magnetic axis is tilted eleven degrees to the rotational axis (Haymes,
p214). The term far-magnetic field refers to this dipolar field observed from a
great distance above the Earth. The near-magnetic field has its poles in northern
Canada and on the Antarctic coast, south of Australia. Here the magnetic field is
vertical. Location of these, often called "dip poles", is difficult and somewhat
dependent upon crustal conditions rather than upon the internal magnetization
(Haymes, p217). The present dip pole in the northern hemisphere [57] drifts
westward by more than five kilometers per year (Vestine, p90). Its daily motion
carries it through an elliptical loop with amplitudes up to 130 km reported
(Serson).
Only in the recent quantavolutionary periods (the post-Saturnian : see Chapter
Fourteen) have the magnetic poles abandoned the equatorial region. Palaeomagnetic
estimates of the location of the ancient magnetic poles of the Earth's surface
register an aversion to high latitudes (Lapointe et al.).
Under earlier Solaria Binaria conditions, therefore, the surface rocks and internal
magnetism of the Earth were in line with the field forces of the magnetic tube. All
subsequent accidents to the Earth that brought magnetic disturbances, whether in the
rocks or in the poles, must be overlaid on the fundamental magnetic map imprinted
upon the globe during its youth. Furthermore, the electric generator of the Earth's
magnetic field must be the descendant, still declining, of the primeval current set
in motion by the magnetic tube. This current flows in the conductive material deep
within the Earth. There it creates, and mainly defines, the field, the lines, and
the poles of today. Its ancestor, much stronger, was present to imprint magnetizable
rocks under circumstances of changes [58] . Today, many rocks point magnetically
towards what was some pole of the past, some to the neighborhood of the present
magnetic pole, and most to nowhere in particular. Only a few of the rocks are
magnetized at all.
The magnetic poles of today are located near Thule, Greenland, and in Antarctica
(120øE, 75øS). When these poles are joined, it must be noted that their axis does
not transect the center of the Earth -- it is offset by 436 kilometers towards the
surface of the sphere, where lies the basin of the Pacific Ocean (Haymes, p214).
From this it may be inferred that, subsequent to the establishment of the magnetic
field of the Earth, a quantavolution scooped out the Pacific basin and deformed the
Earth (see Chapter Thirteen).
The present global field, which we have said is descendant from the Earth's stay in
the magnetic tube, is complex in that later events have acted either to induce new
electric currents (located superficially within the core) or to perturb parts of the
main current flow. The result are the disturbing currents, shown in Figure 20, the
imprint of more recent quantavolutions of the world order when Earth suffered
electrical encounters on a large scale (de Grazia, 1981, 1983a; Juergens, 1974,
1974/ 5; Velikovsky, 1950, pp85ff), including meteoroid impacts (Dachille, 1978) and
encounters.
Figure 20. Magnetic Transactions Within the Earth.
The drift of the Earth's magnetic dip poles across the continental surfaces
indicates the complex nature of the causal current through the material making up
the Earth's bulk. It is likely that the major current (drawn thickly) was induced
during the Earth's stay in the magnetic tube. However, lesser currents (drawn thinly
and located closer to the planet's surface) were individually induced in each of the
interplanetary encounters of the Late Quantavolutionary period. Each of these lesser
currents must transact with the main current, and likely also with one another,
resulting in a complicated precession of the total magnetic field around the figure
axis, which is directed perpendicularly to the plane of the major internal current
(see inset). The net motion is the observed drift of the magnetic dip poles.
Not only can surface anomalies be explained by celestial intrusion, but so can the
wander of the dip poles, a vector sum of the complex wobbling. If large electrically
charged bodies passed close to the Earth's surface they could especially disturb the
electric current in the core as noted above. These lesser currents, once created,
would interact with the existing magnetic domain of the Earth (see insert, Figure
20).
Malkus concludes that precession of the Earth's rotational axis produces torques
upon the Earth's fluid interior. He sees these torques as generating the internal
dynamo that is conventionally called up to create the Earth's magnetism. Here we
adduce his results only in evidence of magnetic wobble arising from torques.
The Earth's magnetic field has been weakening over the 150 years of measurement of
it strength (Cox, p237). This implies a decay of the current within the Earth's
core. Such a decay could be the main source of heat flowing from the Earth's
interior. At the observed rate of magnetic decline, it would take on the order of
six hundred years to heat the core one (degree) kelvin. Even granting a much
stronger field ten millennia ago we do not believe that the Earth's core is fluid.
The observed surface magnetism and seismic profiles of the Earth's interior are
consonant with a solid conductive body containing an excess of free electrons. Given
that the Earth's field is weakening, it is logical to believe that rock magnetism is
decaying at least as rapidly (see behind, Chapter Seven). Neither would still be
present if magnetization had not occurred very recently.
The magnetic testimony of the lithosphere is largely fossil, in that the present
interior current of the Earth passes its magnetic force into the atmosphere without
the capacity for imprinting anything except molten rock. That is, if some rocks
carry a complex magnetism, it must be measured and read as a much more intricate
registry than the present magnetic field could generate.
As indicated earlier, the strength of the Earth's magnetic field is over fifty times
that of the strongest rock magnetism. Presumptively, in the magnetic tube the
Earth's overall magnetization would have been only a fraction of that of its
environment. Notwithstanding its genesis the time measure of the current within the
Earth's core is to be adjudged by the surface magnetic field and not by the rocks.
Rocks containing => magnetite, of igneous origin, are imprinted by the Earth's field
when they freeze. Other rocks containing similar minerals can be made magnetic if
subjected by lightning to piezostress (Hertzler and Phillips or to magnetic shock
(Dachille, 1978). Magnetization by any, or all, of these modes can occur when large
charged cosmic bodies encounter the Earth.
Magnetic surveys disclose magnetic axes in all directions (Mil-som, Vestine, p94).
Typically, the survey instruments are set to read as "north" and "the reversed
north". That is, the preconceived theory calls for a magnetization in the direction
of the (wandering) north magnetic pole, and, in recent years, evidence that the
poles may be on occasion reversed, "north" thereupon reading "south". The theory is
vitiated by lack of consistency in the readings. To revive the theory, extinct poles
in off-north directions are postulated as the determinants of deviant readings, even
though this practice begs the question by using two variables to prove each other.
Juergens (1978) has criticized the interpretation of published evidence of
geomagnetic orientations and reversals (see also Cox, p244).
The Earth's magnetic field has never been reversed. It is securely implanted in the
Earth. Should the earth have tilted or turned upside down (Warlow), our model
requires that its magnetic field would have turned with it, acquiring perhaps some
minor dislocation or a tangential minor current as an offshoot.
Once the magnetization has stopped, the magnet decays. What is the duration of the
Earth's magnetic field and its rock magnetism? Until recently both were considered
permanent or assigned exceedingly long durations. Now it is recognized that
magnetized objects lose their magnetism over intervals that are impressively short,
Cook (1966, p282), using data given by Nagata, estimates the total decay time at
under 70 millennia. By our theory, the magnetic tube would have held sway over the
Earth's magnetic field and any lithospheric imprinting up to its weakening and
collapse some 6000 years ago. If the tube were weakening, the Earth's field should
have decayed with it. After the tube collapsed, the Earth's magnetism began to
function independently. Its continued loss in strength has been noticed.
Barnes summarizes measurements made of the Earth's magnetic moment and magnetic
field intensity from the determination by Gauss in 1835 until the middle of the
decade past. These data show that the magnetic moment is decaying with a half-life
of about 1400 years.
He notes that the energy in the Earth's magnetic field can produce, by self-
induction, an electric current in the conductive core of the Earth. This current
loses energy to the core in the form of heat, producing the observed decay of the
external magnetic field. At present, by his computations, the core current required
is 6.16 gigaamperes with a power loss of 813 => megawatts. If the Earth's field had
been decaying undisturbed for more than a few thousand years, magnetization would
have been present whose decay should have melted the Earth [59] . Recent onset of
the presently noted decay seems in order.
From the Earth's magnetic moment and using Barnes' estimate of the present internal
current, we arrive at a "radius" for the Earth magnet of two megameters (about one -
third of the globe's size). Since the magnetic intensity at the surface is a
dilution of the internal magnet, discussion should be focussed on the latter. Our
estimates yield a magnetic intensity close to ten times the surface value at the
source. The decay of this magnet over the past few millennia is of interest, for,
adapting the decay calculated by Barnes, we obtain the data in Table 4.
If no quantavolutions had occurred, the above extrapolations would predict that
seven millennia ago, the Earth's magnetization was thirty-two times it present
strength. In the same era, then, the heating of the core should have been 32
squared, or 1 024 times the 1970 value. Under this enhanced decay, the core would be
heated by one degree in 226 days. This heavy heating could warm the iron in the core
above its Curie temperature in five centuries were it to continue undiminished.
Since several celestially-induced saltations punctuate this interval, it is unlikely
that the magnetic decay can be extrapolated meaningfully back through the interval.
Even if it could, the Earth core would still remain safely cool since the liberated
heat is not all retained in the core; it flows outward towards the surface; and on
its way it encounters over thirty times the volume of material of its region of
genesis. The surrounding mantle material requires up to twice the energy per
kilogram to heat as it does the metal-rich core. Thus the heat is easily dissipated
providing the Earth-magnet is not allowed to grow further into the past and, indeed,
this it need not do, for during its stay in the magnetic tube the current did not
decay and its energy output was benignly dissipated.
TABLE 4
CALCULATED UNDISTURBED DECAY OF THE EARTH'S MAGNETIZATION
(using Barnes' Decay Model)
. Date Magnetic Field Intensity
. (Astronomical years) (in => milliteslas)
. at surface within core
+ 1970 0.062 0.61
+ 570 0.124 1.22
- 830 0.248 2.44
- 2230 0.496 4.87
- 3630 0.992 9.74
- 5030 1.98 19.5
- 6430 3.97 39.0
Reckoning in astronomical years. AD years are designated with a+, BC years are
lessened numerically by one year and have a - preceding them.
(e. g.: 1 BC = 0.; 3 BC = -2)
Electricity probably played an important role in cooling the Earth's interior in the
days of great magnetization. Evidence abounds that, under electrified conditions,
heat flow and heat dissipation patterns are altered over those noted in the absence
of electrical flow (see Asakawa). Earth currents persist to this day; we have no
reason to believe that they were less strong in the past. Their role in shaping and
maintaining a habitable globe cannot be overemphasized.
We do not know the maximum magnetization during Earth's stay in the tube, nor its
level when the tube collapsed, releasing the field to free decay. The level of
magnetism induced in a magnetizable material depends upon the purity of the
material, the temperature, and the strength of the inducing field. The Earth's core
is unlikely to be a pure magnetic alloy, hence its magnetization in the tube would
not have to reflect more than a small fraction of the full strength of the inducing
field. On leaving the tube the core need not have been magnetized to any level that
would pose a problem in thermal dissipation, whatever the model employed for the
heat flow that began as the magnet waned [60] .
Given a half-life for magnetic decay of the order of 1 400 years, it is reasonable
to conclude that all existing magnetization of surface rocks must be very recent. A
rock magnetized to one microtesla (about the strongest value noted) would decay to
the limit of detectability (one nanotesla) in ten half-lives. If rock magnetism
decays at least as rapidly as does the Earth's field, fourteen thousand years would
erase all magnetic imprints from the rocks! Not only must the rock magnetism be very
recent, but also most of it has probably resulted from electro-thermal events of
cosmic origin.
The presence of magnetism throughout the Earth's domain cannot be denied, despite
difficulties in explaining its generation and variation when using models which
maintain that the Earth is not an electrically charged body. Those who have studied
the electrical currents associated with the body of the Earth and the higher
atmosphere above the Earth, and those who have studied the electrical flow from the
atmosphere to the ground and its variation, might well have concluded that the Earth
is most easily understood as an electrically charged body. That they have not so
concluded is significant. From the earliest modern experiments in electricity the
evidence of an electric Earth has loomed closely under the printed pages of
explanations. Many investigators perceived the answer but were discouraged by their
inability to offer proof of their suspicions (for example, Sanford, p105, pp72ff).
Our assertion that the Earth is a body that carries a net surplus of electrons is
paramount in understanding its properties [61] .
In the beginning the Earth was far from electrical equilibrium with the plenum of
the young Solaria Binaria. Consequently the accumulating Earth material transacted
strongly with its surroundings. The Earth probably glowed visibly as it formed and
for a time thereafter.
At an early date this visible Earth-glow was extinguished and the Earth became the
dark planetary body that it is today. An electrical current of 1800 amperes still
flows from space to the Earth. This continuing electrical transaction partially
decreases the Earth's charge by 3.5 X 10 29 electrons per year. This altered charge
represents a flux that is ten times that ascribed to the Earth-magnet in the core.
The Earth-air current density is 3.5 microamperes per square kilometer of surface.
There is evidence of a possible electric connection between the Earth and the Sun;
this circuit drives, in part, the Earth's weather cycles (Webb, Cole).
The energy liberated by the Earth-current is in addition to that from the influx of
sunlight. Its power has yet to be determined and its significance is mainly
unexplored. Nevertheless several phenomena are recorded indicating the Earth's
electrical state. An electrical gradient exists, increasing the electrical potential
maximally near the ground by a few hundred volts per meter of upward displacement
(Chalmers). Higher, the gradient declines, producing a maximum potential difference
of 300 000 volts between the ground and the atmosphere at an altitude of twenty
kilometers. The direction of this gradient is consistent with the notion of a
negatively charged Earth in a slightly less negative environment [62] . So the =>
troposphere forms an electrical sheath joining the ionospheric plasma to the charged
Earth.
Above, in the => ionosphere, strong electrical flows are documented with maximum
currents of the order of 90 000 amperes. These flows occur in a plasmasphere
analogous in form but not in behavior to the Sun's photosphere.
Farther up, another electrical sheath, a => double layer, exists which joins the
plasmasphere below to the solar wind above. This sheath, at the so-called
magnetopause, has produced phenomena that have defied explanation (Kelley) because
electric neutrality is demanded of the Earth. The double layered sheath, like the
chromosphere-corona of the Sun, is the gatekeeper for the systems. It admits and
accelerates incoming electrons, while it repels or retards incoming ions. From the
Earth-side it prevents electrons from escaping and facilitates the outflow of ions.
On occasion, solar outbursts flood the double layer, diminishing its effectiveness
(Hartline) and suddenly altering for a time the Earth's charge level. This produces
a saltation in the length of the day, that elsewhere has been called a "glitch"
(Danjon; Challinor; Gribbin and Plagemann, 1973). In the weeks that follow, the
Earth regains its charge balance and the rotation corrects itself. Rotational
saltations are explainable in terms of a charge exchange between the Earth and the
surrounding interplanetary plasma.
Inasmuch as in the past the Earth was farther from equilibrium with its surroundings
than it is now, electrical readjustment was more spectacular than the small
electrical transaction noted today. As the Earth came into balance it would appear
to an Earth bound observer that the Earth's electrical charge was decreasing with
time, whereas in fact the opposite is more correct. The Earth is gaining charge
continuously. In line with the electrical explanation for rotational saltations, the
deceleration of the Earth's rotation is explicable as a charge increase with time.
We maintain that its continuous charging and the interruptions determine the Earth's
very geophysical integrity thereto. There are links between volcanism and climatic
change, and tidal phenomena are linked with both of the former and with seismicity
(Roosen et al.). It is suspected that an extraterrestrial trigger is responsible for
these correspondences (Rampino et al., p828, Johnston and Mauk, pp266-7). That
trigger is intimately related to variable rates of charge accumulation by the Earth.
These variations have been in the past responsible for drastic quantavolution of the
Earth's surface.
There is mounting evidence that even the biosphere is shaped in consonance with the
Earth's electric and magnetic state. Discussion of this subject need not be further
postponed.
Notes on Chapter 8
53. The unit of magnetic field intensity is the tesla. Such an intensity is very
strong, comparable to the largest magnetic intensity noted in the cosmos. One tesla
represents one hundred million magnetic lines of force passing through each square
meter of the magnetized surface. The nanotesla is one-billionth (USA) as strong and
represents the weakest detectable magnetic intensity.
54. As were all planets then in the tube, meteorites are generally found to be
magnetized (Levy). The cases of other bodies will be treated later.
55. This rotation would have the same period as the Earth's revolutional motion
about the electrical axis. The poles of rotation would lie parallel to the arc.
56. This is the south pole of the internal magnet. It attracts the north pole of a
compass.
57. The north dip pole is located between Bathhurst Island and Prince of Wales
Island in the Canadian Arctic (260ø E, 74ø N). Its motion is complex but reasonably
well documented since 1950 (Dawson and Dalgetty) with some data over the past
millennium (Yukutake).
58. It is known that molten rock will be imprinted if it solidifies, and then cools
to its => Curie temperature in the presence of a magnetic field.
59. On similar grounds, cosmogonists have rejected the possibility that the Earth's
core contains its share of the radioactive elements posited as the Earth's cosmic
allotment.
60. The Earth's rotational spin-loss, ascribed to tidal friction, liberates forty-
two million times the energy presently lost by the magnetic field. The Earth has not
boiled from the tides (compare with Darwin, 1879).
61. We remind the reader that this electron surplus is relative to the Earth's
material itself: relative to the cosmos the Earth is an electron-deficient body,
while relative to its immediate surroundings the Earth is close to, but not quite at
electrical equilibrium, as we shall note below.
62. Such an arrangement of charges is seen elsewhere; it may be a means of shielding
the Earth's electron complement from a voracious Sun (see Technical Note B).
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART ONE:
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BINARY SYSTEM
CHAPTER NINE
RADIANT GENESIS
The physical history of Solaria Binaria may be divided into three major periods
according to the intensity of quantavolution occurring: a primary period of violent
changes and rapid development, extending perhaps to a quarter of a million years; a
secondary period of relative balance among the elements within the system, extending
almost to the present; and a shorter tertiary period of system breakdown, when Super
Uranus, the planets, the sac and plenum, and the electrical arc with its magnetic
tube underwent abrupt transformations.
A biosphere was generated during the primary period and produced its main forms.
That is, there was first a time of radiant genesis, a proto-zoic stage, followed by
a time of the escalation of basic biological types, a palaeo-zoic stage. Then occurs
a meso-zoic period of formal and ambient stability, which coincides with the
secondary period of relative balance in physical history. These are the subjects of
the present chapter. The Cenozoic, which we redefine as a period of explosive
quantavolution, corresponding to the period of system breakdown, is the subject of
Chapter Twelve; there the origins of human nature will be discussed (see also Table
6).
The prevailing theory among scientists conjectures that a sequence of chance
chemical combinations occurring over time produces the "self-replicating molecule"
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). For the moment we pursue this idea of chance chemical
combinations.
In Solaria Binaria, the sac is the vat of chemical evolution. Its gases are
hydrogen-rich but contain, by inheritance from the body of Super Sun, all simple
ingredients found in life forms. The energy sources which catalyze the process are
ultraviolet radiation, electric discharges (lightning bolts), and ionizing particles
(from cosmic rays or radioactivity). Using a variety of gaseous mixtures, energy
sources and temperatures, experimenters have been successful in producing a
multitude of prebiotic compounds in short times [63] . The ultimate step, the
creation of life, has not been reproduced in the laboratory ! Presently,
experimenters are searching vigorously for some means of reproducing the
"reproducer" -- DNA -- in the laboratory.
The composition of the plenum gases varied significantly over time, though for a
long time the gas density remained fairly constant. Once Solaria Binaria came into
existence, electrical forces produced => electrophoresis among the electrified atoms
throughout the system; in electrified gas mixtures the components apportion
themselves within the mixture in relation to their ionization potentials. "The
component with the lowest ionization potential becomes more concentrated at the =>
cathode, that with highest ionization potential at the => anode " (Francis,
pp195ff). The rate at which separation of the constituents occurs depends upon the
=> mobility of the ions. The mobility of an ion is of the order of one to ten
centimeters per second for each volt per centimeter of electrical field (at standard
atmospheric temperature and pressure -- S. T. P.). At constant temperature the
product of ion mobility and pressure is approximately constant (Papoular, p94).
The least => massive ions are the most mobile and so they will migrate soonest ; the
heavier ions will take longer to separate. In Solaria Binaria only a partial
separation was effected, but this was sufficient to contribute to the anomalously
low abundance of lithium, beryllium and boron noted in the solar spectrum (Ross and
Aller).
The effect of the discharge was to reapportion the plenum gas mixture, changing the
local percentage of hydrogen relative to the heavier atoms. This would effect
greater efficiency in producing organic compounds in certain regions within the
plenum (Dayhoff et al., p1462).
After the nova (see behind to Chapter Four) the plenum occupied a large volume; it
was honeycombed with variously electrified domains producing a state of great
electrical dis-equilibrium. Held together by pervasive cosmic electrical pressure,
the gases of the plenum assumed the smallest volume consistent with their charge
density. In reaction to the nova, electric flow within the plenum worked to equalize
charge densities within the sac, while maintaining an outward radial gradient of
increasing charge density in concession to the external demand from the continuing
cosmic transaction.
The result was an initial implosion of the sac, as charges were redistributed,
superposed upon a much slower expansion of both the sac and the rest of the system
as galactic charge accumulated. Consequently, over most of their history, the Earth
and the other primitive planets were immersed in a dense plenum of gases which was
opaque to radiation; this gas was at least as dense as the present atmosphere at the
Earth's surface.
The nutritive soup from which living forms emerged was not wholly the primitive
vapors of Earth (conventionally the oceans and atmosphere) but the total surface of
the planets and the volume of the sac. Appropriate temperatures were available in
most of this volume within thousands of years of the nova of Super Sun. Various
organisms can survive temperatures well above the Earth's present temperature. Fish,
fly larvae, and aquatic metazoans survive in hot springs where temperatures approach
320 K (Dicke, 1964, pp119ff; Wickstrom and Castenholz). Live bacteria have been
discovered in an oil well where temperatures approached the boiling point of water
(Dicke, 1964). Thus it is argued that the Earth could have had a much warmer climate
in ages past when life arose. Urey concludes that temperatures have been below 425 K
since the Earth's crust separated (Miller and Urey). Fox (1960, p203, p206, 1970),
maintains that certain chemical processes preceding the genesis of life were
accomplished by heat. He now considers the debate over past temperatures irrelevant
since the critical processes can occur at temperatures well below 425 K.
If we consider only that portion of the plenum which enveloped the planetary region
(a cylinder 35 gigameters long by 100 megameters diameter) we have a reactor volume
which is sixty million times the combined volume of the Earth's atmosphere and
oceans, in which life otherwise is believed to have been generated. The energy
source for the plenum was the electric arc. The early arc may have liberated about
10 23 watts to the plenum, compared with 3 X 10 13 watts received as ultraviolet
radiation by the Earth's atmosphere [64] , or with 3 X 10 11 watts received as
lightning discharges (see Chalmers for data).
If Solaria's plenum at the edge of the central flow zone is compared with the outer
surface of the Earth's atmosphere with regard to energy density, Solaria's plenum
will have had an advantage by a factor of 500 000.
At the other extreme, if the energy is spread throughout the entire volume of both
reactors, the advantage in energy density still is with Solaria fifty-fold.
If the time taken to generate life in an energized primitive environment depends
primarily upon the rate at which the primitive gases can be excited to produce
chemical changes, then life ought to have been generated within the plenum after a
time somewhere between two thousand and two hundred million years! [65]
Should the initial photolysis not be the rate-controlling step, then the immense
volume factor greatly favors a more rapid biosynthesis in the plenum than supposedly
occurred in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans aeons ago. Furthermore, a highly
electric environment may speed up generation time, and therefore the
intergenerational opportunities for mutation. As we see it, the plenum was an ideal
reactor in which living systems could be synthesized and sustained [66] .
Evidence that the generative environment was highly magnetic can be inferred from
the sensitivity of many living organisms to magnetism. Both animal and plant life
respond to strong magnetic fields (above 100 milliteslas), showing modified growth
or behavior (Kolin, pp40ff). Magnetic fields more closely approximating the Earth's
field today have also been used to stimulate organisms. In some instances the
magnetic field seemingly applied directional clues (Barnwell and Brown, p275, p277,
Pittman).
Where steady magnetism, regardless of strength, seems to be beneficial (Hays),
magnetic variability seems to induce pathological effects, even in modern humans;
coronary arrest correlates strongly with extended intervals of disturbed magnetism
(Malin), psychiatric hospital admissions correlate less strongly (Friedman et al.).
Sudden biological extinction has been linked to periods of magnetic confusion in the
paleontological record (Whyte, p681). Such periods, in our view, would be more
likely produced by cosmic large body encounters that would inject magnetic
disturbances along with other disastrous effects upon the biosphere.
To summarize, in regard to the time available for the origin and development of
species, the Solaria (SB) model is 2000 times less "effective" than the Evolutionary
(E) model. With respect to the volume of the life-generating region, the SB model is
six million times more effective. Considering the energy density, SB is five hundred
thousand times more effective following the establishment of the binary arc.
Actually, before its establishment, the nova phase, lasting for months, would have
organized the Solaria Binaria system to the equivalent stage of two billion years (2
aeons) of conventionally ascribed Earth history. Hence the SB model, assessing
energy density, would well exceed by a millionfold the E model. Since mutagens work
upon mutable forms, and branching of species is an exponential concept, the
effectiveness of Solaria Binaria in quantavoluting life is multiplied again by the
volume of the life-generating region. So, even on a short time schedule, Solaria
Binaria appears to be millions of times more capable of producing the species of
today.
Still, even this might not be enough to originate and develop the species. The first
stages of life are of such low probability, and the alter stages of higher but still
low probability, that a "guiding factor in life development " must yet be sought.
For example, an average protein is formed of a chain of about one hundred amino
acids. To quote a creationist: "If all the stars in the Universe had ten earths, and
if all of the earths had oceans of 'amino-acid soup', and if all the amino-acids
linked up (randomly) in chains 100 acids long every second for the entire history of
the Universe, even then the chance occurrence of a given very simple protein [10 -
130 ] would be inconceivably remote" (Stengler, p16) [67] . And the building of a
protein is only one of many complex arrangements adding up to life as we know it
[68] .
The model of Solaria Binaria might only serve to supersede conventional theory of
the evolutionary process, and not to discount it and provide an alternative positive
theory, were it not for its electrical features. Life begins by microscopically
mimicking its gigantic progenitor, the sac. It has no choice. Every atom, in
endeavoring to hold its electrons or gain others, seeks to surround itself with the
smallest and densest complete electrical perimeter possible. This is usually an
octet of electrons. Whenever necessary, atoms aggregate into molecules where a
compromise sharing of electrons will lead to a higher density electrical perimeter
[69] . From here the molecules proceed to more complicated systems that ultimately
come alive.
The concept of life therefore is an extension of the concept of the "cavity" with
which our book began. Life is a way of gaining, hoarding, and begrudgingly doling
out electricity. In countless numbers organic molecules determinedly build
themselves micro-sacs of chemicals in reaction to electric gradients, capture raw
materials, manufacture compounds within the sacs, fire themselves with ever
accumulating electric charge, until, incapable of continuing this process without
bursting their sacs, they force out unused parts. Usually these are excreta. In
critical cases, they are replications of themselves -- if not exactly so, then in
fundamentally similar ways. No cell divides itself in mirror like fashion,
uniformly, in the beginning. But every deviant is a candidate for the first exact
mitosis.
The step from excreta to exact reproduction is critical. The sac of organic
electrical activity is not "intelligent" except by human prejudices, ex post facto.
But the sac can most efficiently -- effectively and reliably -- excrete if it
separates its ingredients on the binary principle of "one for you and one for me".
Least change, least imbalance, and therefore longer life ensure if the sac polarizes
uniformly prior to excretion, setting half of its contents opposite the other half
and splitting itself down the middle, closing the gap at the instant of its
division. Excretion becomes reproduction.
Sacs that thus form cells which divide offer more chances of survival and conquest
of space by numbers than sacs that either hold their accretions until they burst or
bifurcate inequitably from an electrical standpoint, thereupon having to internally
reorganize their electrical accommodation upon every mitosis. One notes the terrific
speed with which life can develop and reproduce under rules of uniform mitosis.
Within a few thousand years the plenum might be filled with such cells. Indeed,
perhaps large areas were filled with them.
One is not permitted logically to adjudge life as superior to rocks, which have
their own form of durability. The biosphere today is a tiny fraction of the rock
masses and space of the Universe. As an offshoot of universal change it has a
special interest and importance in the perspective of the human mind. Life has a
special mode of material extension which, after all, could fill the Universe
promptly under proper conditions, and this is a constant challenge to the entropic
concept of the Universe [70] .
Life's arrangement of electrical signals is perhaps its chief embedded
characteristic. "Electrical potentials occur in all cells studies thus far, although
their biological importance is recognized in only a few cases" (" Cell and Cell
Division", Ency. Brit., 1974, Macro. vol. 3, p. 1050). The surface of cells is
negatively charged. The cell membranes are 6 to 10 nanometers thick and are highly
resistant electrically (from 1,000 to 10,000 ohm/ cm 2 ). They produce voltage
gradients which drive the biological functions (as noted ahead) and produce a cell
interior that is more highly negatively charged than the surface layer of the cell.
That cells are so electrically arranged is understandable when one considers charged
cells in a charged universe. In metaphorical language, the overall picture of the
cell, and the image of the primordial cell, then, is one in which a peculiar
combination of chemical compounds survives by erecting an electrical screen to admit
nutrients and to repel destructive invaders, then organize its internal components
to sustain itself and to resist random escape from the community.
Several varieties of cell growth and transformation are observable. The "main" type
of self-duplication ensues as a permissible, organized, collective escape, or
excretion, providing for the maintenance of a complete defense system. Cell division
would operate by an electrical signal system. The members are an electric grid (as
in a vacuum tube), and acts as a gatekeeper among the elements in and surrounding
the cell and during mitosis.
Cells make macro-molecules, including genetic molecules, which do not exist
elsewhere in nature and are not allowed exit through the cell membrane. Inasmuch as
macro-molecules are concentrators of electricity, this synthesis permits the cell to
sustain longer than otherwise would be possible its quest for additional electrical
charge. The cell thus builds a higher concentration of charge than is available
elsewhere in the plenum mixture. This process is the essence of metabolism.
Metabolism concentrates electricity in the macro-molecules, thus depleting of its
nutrients the medium trapped in the cell. (The analogies of cell as sac and of
nutritive medium as plenum are close and possible homologous.) The cell responds by
excretion of water, ions and gases (by-products) and ingestion of electron-rich
nutrients.
Strain is imposed upon the cell membrane, for it must both contain the increased
material and at the same time defend the cell against penetration by electron-
deficient atoms and molecules. The membrane signals the cell nucleus concerning an
imminent site of charge deficiency and leaking. Then the genetic macro-molecules of
the cell, which are the only ones capable of dividing themselves more or less
equally, and have been so doing since their last episode of cell division, respond
to the signal of impending disaster by completing their synthesis, and by lining up
on the two sides of a perimeter membrane that is being electrically trenched through
the nucleus at the future site of fission. Actually, the division line-up is
provoked by an electric polarization of opposed centrioles, each representing a
focus of peak negative charge on the edge of the nucleus.
Midway between the two centrioles, the newly forming perimeter constitutes an
electron-poor trench. Following the genetic molecules, the other materials of the
cell are drawn electrically to flow in equal amounts to either side of the
perimeter-to-be, pursuing the two centrioles. By contrast the cellular material that
is to constitute the cell wall itself flows into the trench from both sides. Thus,
without breeching its old perimeter membrane, the cell has doubled its surface and
has divided. Electrical forces move the two new cells apart. Never are two cell
membrane in contact even in a densely packed tissue. Some 15-20 nanometers of
intercellular space, filled with a sugary fluid, separate them.
From the self-reproducing cell to the hominid of a few thousand years ago requires
passing by many landmarks in the organization of life.
Close to the solar nova and birth of Solaria Binaria at the beginning of the Period
of Radiant Genesis, one may position groups of critical developments: the provision
from solar debris of chemicals and transmutations in the plenum; and prebiotic
organic molecules (amino acids, sugars, nitrogen bases, plus other compounds).
Cell membranes, left-handed symmetry of organic macro-molecules [71] , proto-
enzymes, porphyrins and => nucleotides --these developments would readily follow.
The cell probably took in the latter three constituents after proto-proteins had
been formed independently in the plenum. Some cells, instead of dying, began to
engage in mitosis, whereupon self-duplication, as described here, would soon follow.
Large cells would ingest small cells, or form around them, performing two types of
action: digestion, the beginning of animal behavior [72] , with the breakdown of
the electrical defenses of the smaller cells, and in other cases the formation of
cell colonies using the membrane of the host cell as a super-membrane or skin of the
smaller internal cell or cells. Large cell colonies would float in the magnetic tube
and, later on, settle upon solid bodies.
From the development of the cell, the mode of basic change in life forms ever
thereafter can be surmised. Time after time it happens that some portion of the
excreta of the organism is retained within the sac of the colony and supplied with
the coded electrical signals that connect with the master genetic material so that
its descendant in the next generation can draw upon its experience and existence.
The developing special organ excretes within the organism and returns signals to
make demands, denote satiety and share directiveness in the behavior of the full
organism.
For example, the eye is always close to the mouth. The photo-receptive organ that
perceives food chances is close to the sac opening that can employ opportunities for
ingestion. The organism as a whole is, as it always has been, ready and eager to
accept charge-bearing contributors which allow it to increase its density. (It
rejects cations for this reason). It permits and then becomes dependent upon the
vision, with the genetic material duly recording and perforce returning in the form
of instructions the interrelated, combined signals of the eye-mouth.
The genes do not "know" that they are building an eye to go with the mouth;
nevertheless, they do so with despatch, as they eagerly accept extensions of all
such special organs in the Period of Radiant Genesis; for the environment has a
plenitude of electron-rich chemicals, a state of affairs that does not persist
beyond the first half-million years of Solaria Binaria. In more modern times, the
cell (and hence the organism as a whole) is more hard-pressed to find energy-rich
molecules and in the very stress to obtain nutrients it has bureaucratized itself so
to speak, and is hence even less equipped to obtain them. In the modern electrified
environment, vital processes take much longer.
The plenum of Solaria Binaria was the creator, cradle, and mutagen of life. The
broad sculptures of plants and animals were completed during the first half of its
existence. If fossils represent the basic variety of life, the phyla and the orders
came into being then. No new general forms have originated in recent times (Brough).
Despite great waves of extinction, slightly over one million living species are
named today. The fossil record should show millions of ancestral species to provide
the present number, but in fact shows only about one hundred thousand species. This
contrast has excited comment: why were large changes peculiar to early existence;
why were small changes more common in recent times (ibid.)?
Set up in this manner, the questions seem to accept answers from Solaria Binaria
theory. The plenum promoted creation initially, as would be expected, promoted it
less when the binary was stabilized, and became quite destructive and conservative
as it exponentially decayed and collapsed. The agents of these change may be
identified. The first period provided an immense number of prototypes and access to
abundant nutrients, so testing their viability (Ayala). The second period provided a
stable environment of abundant nutrients but an end to the easy method of forming
combinations. Further, the more distinctive and specialized the species, the less
likely its electrical transformation would eventuate in new designs of life.
In the final period, environmental disasters extinguished many species, but also
promoted very many, already genetically deviant individuals to the status of
families, genera and species.
To acknowledge that a great many of these lesser, less creative designs have emerged
in the later history of Solaria Binaria requires a theory of genetic realization.
The genetic material can carry far more instructions for the construction and
behavior of any organism than are required at any given time (Ayala). Under lower
(but higher than present) solar system quantavolutionary conditions, suppressed
instructions can be triggered. It is conceivable that every living species carries
in its genetic code instructions for metamorphosis (monsterism). Cosmic rays,
nuclear explosions, radiation fall-out meteoroids, electromagnetic typhoons,
encounters of Earth with large bodies (comet, meteoroid), viral epidemics, and
"silent" significant changes in electrical discharges within Solaria Binaria and the
Solar System may be the means of suddenly extinguishing some genetic instructions
and releasing others, quantavoluting a species into a similar but substantially
modified species that is altered anatomically, physiologically and behaviorally.
Success has not attended the search for transitional forms that bridge the "gap" of
development from one species to another under conventional Darwinian theory. It may
be maintained that transitional forms, such as reptiles with half developed wings or
hominids that spoke but poorly, never existed (Rodabaugh, p119). All orders of
mammals appear with their "basic ordinal characters" (Simpson, 1944, p106). Many of
the plant species, it is believed, are replicas of other species (=> polyploids),
differing almost entirely in size alone, with the physiology and behavior
appropriate to giantism and dwarfism [73] . That the horse, a favorite instance of
evolution since Lyell, has evolved its peculiar configuration by means other than
genetic realization seems unlikely. The millions of years authorized to complete
this series of changes (among others) are unnecessary and probably even insufficient
unless supported by a theory of genetic realization, a position that has forced its
way into contemporary evolutionary thought to evade the constraints of ever greater
stretches of time and of evolution by random mutation under uniform Solar system
conditions.
The problems of explanation that remain are historical and technical, inasmuch as a
common electrical process is followed in all biological changes. The applications of
the process -- to change marine animals into amphibians, reptilian types into
mammals, one animal into another with all the anatomical, physiological and
behavioral changes involved -- occur according to a simple set of principles. Nor
are these adaptation, nor survival of the fittest, nor random successful
experimentation with mutations, all of which are minor aspects of quantavolutionary
change. Rather, electrical claims are provoked by opportunities, encounters and
transactions, and organize themselves into genetic storage and release.
Evidence from the surface of the smaller remaining planets shows total devastation
and almost total loss of atmosphere. On Mars, where some atmosphere remains, no
biological residues survived (Horowitz, p55). The Martian surface was found to be so
deficient in organic material that a mechanism for their removal is being sought.
The inner Solar System is now sterile, excepting Earth's biosphere, which thrives.
A final short period follows the period of evolution; it is an epoch of explosive
quantavolution that comes down to the present. It witnesses catastrophes of life
forms, quantavolution through genetic realization, and the rise of Homo sapiens. On
the physical side, it carries the record of the destruction of Solaria Binaria and
the advent of the Solar System. Though short, this period contains the full human
experience. Its story forms the second part of this book.
Notes on Chapter 9
63. The work of Stanley L. Miller and Cyril Ponnamperuma stands out.
64. Miller and Urey cite this value for radiation capable of modifying the primitive
gas. The more complex molecules produced after the initial photolysis are more
easily excited and are affected by lower energy radiation, which is present in
greater amount.
65. Presuming that the same processes took one gigayear in the primitive environment
of Earth, as is postulated by currently accepted theories.
66. Recently a series of papers in Nature and elsewhere, also the book Lifecloud,
authored by Hoyle, Wickramasinghe, N. C. and others, has considered the possibility
of life, now on Earth, having originated from simple molecules, which populate the
cold interstellar gas clouds.
67. Insertions ours, taken elsewhere from Stengler's paper.
68. The variety of propagating forms in the plenum probably extended beyond the
mainstream of life. Groups of biological polymers separate spontaneously into
coacervatives, small droplets of diameters to 500 micrometers. Where they can
metabolize, coacervatives are stable, and can grow and divide. These active droplets
are regarded as analogues, not ancestors, of cells (Dickerson).
69. Molecules often assume distorted shapes to achieve this compromise. If a
spherical arrangement is possible, it is preferred to all others.
70. The Universe is supposedly increasing its entropy with time, that is to say, the
parts of the Universe become even more disordered. Living systems represent
increased order because of their internal organization.
71. The origin of one-handed symmetry was probably in the magnetic field (see
Edwards et al.). Committed to spiralling into right-handed helices, the DNA molecule
and all of the molecules with which it transacts profit from the design, for they
thus attain denser molecular packing, producing greater electric stability. The
tightest-packed helix is the alpha right-handed (screw) helix - here each turn of
the coil incorporates 3.6 to 3.7 amino-acid units. This form of the helix has no
open spaces in the center; further, all amino-acid structures are exposed on the
surface of the helix (Mazur and Harrow).
72. We see certain bacterial and plant behavior in photosynthesis as a concurrent
development, supplementing an animal diet with the capturing of a chlorophyll
(pigment) molecule, precursor of the protein, which was useful in the internal
manufacture of foodstuff.
73. One-quarter of the flowering plants may be polyploid species. Some vertebrates
are polyploids as well (Tinkle).
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART TWO:
DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
CHAPTER TEN
INSTABILITY OF SUPER URANUS
The first part of our narrative was given over largely to the origin and progress of
Solaria Binaria up to the beginnings of a fatal instability. Almost from the
beginning life burgeoned and flourished in the plenum, and subsequently on Earth and
other planets. Celestial objects were not then visible from the Earth because the
plenum was too dense to let light pass directly from the binary stars to the
planets. Hence mankind originated its physical being almost entirely in a world
where murky grey skies softened the light through a misty air. His psychic being and
intelligence, by contrast, were formed in most important regards during the
degeneration of the binary system.
As best we can locate this turning-point of humanity, it happened during the pre-
nova instabilities of Super Uranus. Already mentioned is evidence that early humans
had intimations of a primordial plenum and an electrical fire. More extensive
evidence correlates human observers with the expectable, inferable, behavior of
Solaria Binaria as it would begin to collapse. The first human observations have to
do with a solid heaven that began to separate from Earth and fell apart.
A number of peoples claim that the primeval chaos was present before the creation.
It was a plenum - dark (compared with what followed), uniform, dense, and housed a
Demiurge who had not yet acted and a world of things and beings that were
potentially activatable. The Ngadin Dayak, a people of Borneo, insist that "at the
beginning, the cosmic totality was undivided in the mouth of the coiled water-
snake", possibly referring both to the togetherness of the chaos and the
omnipresence of the electrical axis mundi. In the Hindu Vedas, Dyaus-Pitr (Dyava),
"Father Sky", can be identified with the age of first man and an unbroken plenum. He
married Prthivi, Earth. The world was dark and asleep, "says" Manu (a Hindu Noah)
until the Great Demiurge "appeared to scatter the shades of darkness".
Coelus, or "Heaven", was the most ancient Latin god of the sky. His name means
"covering". Ouranos was "Heaven" and the first god of Greek legend; this Heaven was
at first a calm and settled person, married to Mother Earth, Gaea. The Chinese
legend pictures Heaven as T'ien, at first a marble-like ceiling, unbroken. According
to the Iroquois of north Eastern America, the Chief of Heaven was persuaded into
marriage by "Fertile Earth" (Awenhai) and impregnated her by his breathing. The
Hebrew Book of Genesis, a creative compilation, probably by Moses, of earlier
legends, describes in its opening verses the Demiurge brooding over the combined
celestial and earthly universe; "The Earth was a formless void, there was darkness
over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water." as the editors of the
Jerusalem Bible comment, most of these images are intended to describe how being may
be created from Nothing.
All religions, says Eliade (1954, p4) go back to the earliest times, illud tempus ("
That Time") when the world was born and the initial creative happenings occurred in
all aspects of existence. Ever thereafter, the practices and rules of the religion
are obsessed with repeating the events of those days. It is obvious that all peoples
look upon this epoch, illud tempus, as a highly volatile quantavolutionary period,
full of stresses and inventions. There is no uniformitarian or mild illud tempus.
In many places, a theory of the Cosmic Egg is used in connection with the earliest
god, who is Heaven; it explains how God and the World were born. Thus the Hindus
asserted that a seed was laid and became the Golden Egg. The Cosmic Egg is often
said to have existed from an age before it revealed itself. We construe from this
that the earliest humans are present on Earth as the troubles of Solaria Binaria
heighten and that they were newly human for a short time before Super Uranus, that
is, the Cosmic Egg, appeared.
Other widespread types of creation legends are usually conformable to the Cosmic Egg
myth or do not contradict it (Long. 1963), and often occur within the legendary
corpus of the same culture; as examples, in the Greek legends of Hesiod and the
Cosmic Egg myths of Orphism, in China with two variant stories about P'an Ku, or
with the Dogon of the southern Sahara, who put creative twins within the Cosmic Egg.
Some type of creative urge is antecedent to the Egg. usually a supreme sky deity.
The Egg can take related forms: a shell, a seed etc. Fuliginous powers that break
out of the Earth to assume living forms are a type of creation widely believed;
usually an external force inseminates or provokes the Earth, as in the Egyptian
image of Nut and Geb, Heaven copulating with Earth. Finally, parents representing
Sky and Earth are experienced as separating, allowing life to flourish. Earth
divers, yet another type of creator, are deities who often are commanded by a
supreme deity to plunge beneath the primordial waters of chaos and emerge with
Earth, which becomes the site of life. This cosmic image can be a metaphor of the
same events in the breaking of the Cosmic Egg and the separation of the Sky and the
Earth.
We assume that primordial observations gave rise to all of these legends. As part of
the continuing emergence of life and intelligence from the chaos befalling Solaria
Binaria, the Cosmic Egg myth is imagery for the vision of the first great "sun",
Super Uranus, as it emerges from the Heavenly gloom. It emerges shortly after human
self-awareness, and in a time of troubles for mankind. This Uranian Age was, both in
legend and in our astronomical theory, a time of disturbances.
As is typical of evolving binary systems, the principals, here Sun and Super Uranus,
move apart with time. During the phase when a strong electrical current flowed
between the two stars the components remained relatively close together, while the
whole system charged negatively in transaction with the galaxy (Figure 21). This
charging drives the Sun and Super Uranus apart so that the current flowing between
them weakens and from time to time falters; the two become more isolated
electrically within the ever-diluting gases of the plenum. The importance of the
electrical axis of the binary diminishes. The universality of binary recession can
be documented by Russell's 1927 data, where star class is correlated with binary
period. Only Bruce (1944, p13) has connected binary age with separation of the
components.
Figure 21. Transaction Between Solaria Binaria and the Cosmos : Dense Plenum Phase.
Originally Solaria Binaria transacted with the Cosmos as a unit. Electrons flowed
from the Galaxy into the sac of the binary, liberating energy to the gases along the
perimeter of the plenum. Charges so delivered to the binary as a whole were
subsequently redistributed among the parts of the enveloped binary, producing
secondary energy releases as they impinged upon some particular component (star or
planet) within the dense plenum.
While the two bodies, the Sun and Super Uranus, were transacting vigorously, they
were quite luminous, though not sufficiently bright to be perceived as celestial
bodies. As the arc between them began to falter, they and the arc remained luminous,
but the latter less so than before.
Though the central arc was sputtering, the surrounding gases in the magnetic tube
sustained an afterglow and so were not always extinguished between discharges. But,
as the arc decayed further, the discharges became less frequent, so that eventually
even a long afterglow could not maintain continuous luminosity throughout the
magnetic tube. At times the sky briefly darkened. This was the first light and
darkness experienced by humans, who may then have deduced the concept of contraries,
good-bad, yin-yang, or light-darkness, the basis for religious dualism and human
thinking processes.
Relative time may have been invented in the period of Super Uranian instability. If
the arc pulsed regularly, the earliest humans would have responded to it, first
subliminally and later consciously. Possibly, when the glow of the arc darkened and
lightened perceptibly and in rhythm, a notion of periodicity would be imparted to
humans they would have a clock. The experience of the first abrupt darkness would be
terrible, the unexpected gloom of even a minute, provoking fears of a shutdown of
light. If the pulsing were regular, but interruptions occurred, terror would ensure
with the interruptions. Frenzies of fear attending eclipses, historically and
recently (Corliss), may be traceable to primordial experiences with a degenerating
axis. The birth of Super Uranus, emerging from the plenum sky, would be both
terrifying and reassuring. Graeco-Roman mythology pictures the god Uranus as gloomy
and enshrouded (de Grazia, 1981). New measures of time and space might be
calculated, a reliable presence was granted humans, and even the ultimate terror of
a turn-off of electrical axis activity could be tolerable if Super Uranus remained
visible.
It is possible that through this period the electric discharge was converting from
one emitting light to a non-optical, or dark, discharge. Thus the absence of light
is not a synonym for the absence of electric flow, only a change in the gases'
reaction to the flow. Nevertheless, pauses in the glow were becoming longer with
time and the flow more erratic in its intensity.
Whereas before, the two stars transacted internally to produce the arc, while the
opaque plenum transacted at its perimeter with the Cosmos, now each star transacted
separately with the galaxy through the thinning plenum. This new galactic connection
could occur because the plenum density had fallen as it expanded both bodies were
still far from electric equilibrium with their galactic environment (Figure 22).
Thereupon, Solaria Binaria would be observed to be a semi-detached binary star
system (Note D) from the vantage point of another star system. Not surprisingly, the
gas density detected in such binaries is at a level of that plenum density that
would suffice to let the principals be seen from the Earth's presumed location
during that era [74] .
Figure 22. Solaria Binaria as the Plenum Thins and the stars Separate.
Late in the development of Solaria Binaria the gases of the plenum had been thinned
to such an extent that the transaction between the Cosmos and the binary ceased to
liberate the major part of its energy at the binary's perimeter. Thereafter the
cosmic transaction deposited energy individually at the two stars. The inter-star
transaction (the electric arc) continued for some time after each of the stars
attained a separate connection with the Galaxy. An important feature in semi-
detached binaries is the flow of material from one of the principals to the other.
Usually as flows directly between the principals, however, in some cases the flow is
deflected or is directed around the recipient star (Batten, 1973a, p8). Gas
expanding from the star is seen in some systems.
Wyse showed that emission lines are often observed in close-binary systems. Emission
by hydrogen, helium and singly ionized calcium is common. Mass transfers amounting
to 10 -8 to 10 -5 Sun per year have been proposed in such systems (Koch, p90). In
some cases, lengthening of the period of the binary has been ascribed to mass loss
from the system (Nather and Warner). In our view the flow of mass contributes
towards separating the two stars; nevertheless most of the separation occurs because
of the electric charging of both stars through transaction with the Cosmos. We also
see no way for gas to escape except as stellar wind.
In certain close-binary systems, like nova AO535+ 26 in Taurus (Coe et al.), intense
X-ray emission is noted as gas flows onto one of the stars (Wickramasinghe and
Bessell). The discovery that most galactic X-ray sources represent close-binary
systems and that in some cases a flow of ionized gases occurs between the principals
in the presence of (inferred) [75] magnetic fields is an important finding
(Kraft); we concur. The presence of electrical potential difference between the two
stars makes X-ray emission understandable. Detection of cosmic X-ray sources implies
that electric, not magnetic, behavior, is being observed. We infer that Solaria
Binaria was an X-ray emitting binary at this stage. Enough of these X-rays were
penetrating to the planets to cause quantavolutions in the biosphere before the eyes
of humans, possibly contributing to the age-old beliefs of humans in metamorphosis
of living things.
Various scholars have maintained that all peoples have possessed religious beliefs
from their earliest origins, that these beliefs centered upon a single "Heavenly
Father" as a type of monotheism, and that this father God became indistinct after
the first ages, was lost, was forgotten, and/ or was indifferent. This is true of
Dyaus in India, of Ouranos in Greece, of Coelus in Latium, and of the "Great
Fathers" of the Australian Arandas, for example (Eliade, 1967, pp20ff). This
Ouranos-type is first the sky and then the materialization of the sky into a sun-
like body, whence it disappears and is replaced by a son, a Saturn (Tresman and
O'Gheoghan, p36).
The Maori of New Zealand have the Demiurge moving form inactivity to increasing
activity. And this is a universal subsequent theme. The skies break up. They fall,
Humans, are much disturbed. Their world changes. The heavenly god moves heavily and
destructively. The god becomes various gods, families of gods, and demons. Creation
is under way, rarely in one phase, but continuously, over a long time -- thousands
of years, we think -- before arriving at what is recognizably the modern Solar
System.
Hesiod's version of the Greek creation myth has Ouranos or Heaven squeezing down
upon Mother Earth, oppressing her until she cries out in agony. We interpret this
suffocation of Gaea as an increasingly disturbed atmosphere, with many extinctions
and quantavolutions in the biosphere. The mechanism usually termed "natural
selection" operates rapidly, under extreme environmental pressures. The "fittest"
which survive are often accidents of isolation, or species that can draw upon
luckily beneficial reverse or recessed genetic capabilities, as well as groups with
now to be proven superiority in food-finding and breeding under difficult
conditions.
Ouranos goes increasingly mad, taking up his children and hurling them beneath the
Earth, Gaea in desperation urges her brood to revolt against the Father. We
interpret his sons plunging to Earth as a bombardment by heavy meteorites, released
into the plenum by the "unsettled" Super Uranus and encountering the Earth.
To the pre-nova turbulence of gases and bombardment, a duration of 1000 years may be
assigned before the human creation (which will be related in Chapter Twelve). is
connected with the turbulence; subsequently another 2000 years is assigned before
the climactic nova of Super Uranus.
In China, P'an Ku, a creator god, began pounding on T'ien, breaking large chunks off
with his hammer and chisel until the skies showed through. The Dayak of Borneo,
report that two mountains arose and clashed, with the first features of earth and
sky emerging into existence from their explosive contest. The mountains are revealed
as two creator gods, Mahatala and his parahedra, Putir, who then continue to create.
Turning to Hindu sources, Dyaus is replaced by a struggle of two types of heavenly
powers, one good and the other evil, one led by Varuna, the other by Vitra. The good
powers were termed Adityas; the bad dragon-like demons were called the Vitras.
Removed from the protective blanket of the plenum, which heretofore had isolated
Super Uranus from the Cosmos, this sun-like body became directly subject to
variations in the electrical environment through which it was travelling (Chapter
Three); a new variability of the surrounding plenum's electrification was produced
by the sputtering arc.
At this stage, Solaria Binaria was transmogrified and might have resembled the
cataclysmic variable stars, a group of close binaries. Here the primary is sub-
luminous and its companion is often a dwarf red star. The diminished luminosity of
the stars begins as the components readjust from internal transaction to galactic
transaction. We think that, in transition, Solaria Binaria, now a low luminosity
system, entered an eruptive phase.
That Super Uranus was the erupter in these first noted celestial events, and not the
Sun, is confirmed by the evidence that the ancients did not regard the Sun as a
powerful sky god. As de Grazia has noted elsewhere (1981, p258), "the regularity of
the Sun, once it appeared in the skies, worked against its becoming a great God".
In ancient writings the planet gods sometimes altered the motion of the Sun and the
stars, but never the converse. Occasionally, as part of a catastrophe, the Sun would
go on strike, bringing up darkness. Velikovsky (1950, pp300ff) thinks that Macrobius
in the fourth century may have been mainly responsible for the erroneous
personification of many sky gods as the Sun. We can say that at least he represented
a trend of ideas, which Jacquetta Hawkes has confirmed (de Grazia, 1981, p259).
Closer to our time, Max Muller's extensive work on primordial religions has
imprinted this error in the minds of most scholars.
The outer layers of Super Uranus and its => space-charge sheath were the first
places to react to instability. At intervals, a shell of material expanded
explosively away from Super Uranus. To the outside observer this small star had
become a nova of low intensity. Weak outbursts are not uncommon in under-luminous
close-binary systems.
Some close binaries contain dwarf-nova stars, for example, SS Cygni. It is possible,
sometimes, to see a hot spot where gas flows from one of the principals onto the
atmosphere of the other (Cowley et al., 1977, p471; Hesser et al.). Dwarf novae also
exhibit flickering, which usually disappears if one component eclipses the other.
The flickering, which is especially intense in the case of Z Chamaeleontis, is
attributed to the hot spot (Mitton, pp84ff).
On the other hand this flickering may be a variation of the current onto the
photosphere of the stars as the system adjusts its mode of transaction from that in
Figure 21 to the one shown in Figure 22 [76] .
Many stellar binaries involve components which have perplexed astronomers, because,
according to the criteria of classification, one star is very old while its
companion is quite young (see Kopal, 1959). Usually these pairs are closely orbiting
as we propose was Solaria Binaria. Such pairs, with discrepant evolutionary ages,
are thought to be systems in which one component has passed through the nova stage,
some indeed being recurrent novae. Krzeminski believes that in U Geminorum the
irregular flow of matter from the red companion triggers recurrent nova eruptions on
the white primary (see also Aller, p603). The primary star in such systems is
usually classified as a white dwarf star (Glasby, p61). A cycle amplitude
relationship has been established linking the intensity of the recurrent nova flare-
ups to the time between recurrences (Kukarin and Parenago). the larger the flare-up,
the longer the recovery. For the largest flare-ups, recovery time exceeds the period
of observation; here periodicity is implied rather than established. The regular
recurrence may be a discharge effect. The transaction between the star( s) and the
Galaxy may slow down periodically due to space-charge fouling of the discharge
channel. The discharge then diminishes, which allows the interfering space-charge to
dissipate. A new breakdown can now occur, leading to another flare-up.
Alternatively, it may be that, at this time, Solaria Binaria moved into a region of
the galaxy in which the cosmic electrical pressure was diminished (see behind,
Chapters Three and Four). The binary, and especially Super Uranus, as the smaller,
highly electrified part, could teeter on the verge of serious internal instability.
This condition, which may have persisted over about three thousand years, would have
proved disastrous for Super Uranus and eventually altered for all time life on
nearby planets, including the Earth. Milton (1979, p74) has postulated that the Sun
today remains stable relative to the cosmos surrounding it on a moment-to-moment
basis; small solar inconsistencies have been noted over the historic period (Eddy et
al., pp8-9; Clark et al. 1979). Even the ultimate instability, the nova eruption, is
not forbidden.
Super Uranus can have erupted many times. The shock of its recurrent explosions
propagated through the plenum, damaging the planets nestled within it and
electrically thinning it further. Not all of the ejecta was gaseous. Fragments
circulated within the system for a time, encountering explosively other bodies
differently charged. Some fragments fell back upon Super Uranus, which was
diminishing in brightness and may be also in size because of its outbursts.
The rude disturbance of the hitherto peaceful atmosphere of the Earth was noted
fearfully by the rapidly developing human culture that was spreading throughout the
World. Men perceived the heavens to be alive and exercising a control over earthly
affairs. Heaven both inflamed and frustrated man's desire ... which seized him in
the course of his very creation -- to control himself and his environment.
Notes on Chapter 10
74. About 1.6 x 10 -6 kilograms of gas per cubic meter, or 10 atoms per cubic
centimeter.
75. Reservation ours. Conveniently, such fields are not generally detectable (Batten
1973a)
76. Juergens (1977d) notes that similar current variations exist in the solar
photosphere.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART TWO:
DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ASTROBLEMES OF THE EARTH
The first experience of Super Uranian instability on Earth would be a quick
succession of light and darkening and a relatively more pronounced illumination from
the South (Sun) and the electrical arc. The dark would come from the expulsion of
dust and debris down the sac towards the Sun (see Figure 23). Pandemonium would be
let loose and frightful specters abound as fragments would rip through the plenum
and encounter Earth.
Instability of Super Uranus periodically expelled from that body a halo of debris
whose nature depended upon the intensity of the particular outburst. It is
conceivable that the process could persist over several millennia with frequent
small eruptions occurring at intervals similar to an active volcano or to a
recurrent nova (Chapter Ten). Mild outbursts might only cause ejection of
superficial material gases and fine solids. Violent ejections could send massive
chunks of solid material away from the star. Because the binary is nestled in the
cavity, the ejecta does not escape the system. However, its fate is dependent upon
its electrical state and the direction of ejection.
In its outbursts Super Uranus mimicked, but with diminished intensity, the nova
eruption which the Super Sun underwent early one million years earlier. Electrical
instability between the skin of Super Uranus and its interior, probably produced by
the transition between one mode of transaction and another (Chapter ten), led to
explosive ejection, in all directions, of layers of the star. Much of it was
captured by and funneled down the magnetic tube. Its penetration towards the Sun was
governed by its inertia and charge (see Note C). This material, possessing greater
charge density than other parts of the binary system, caused havoc as the pieces
(atoms to irruptives) encountered the plenum gases and the planetary bodies.
The electrical, meteoritic, and gaseous disorders attendant upon the initial
instability of Super Uranus are largely deduced from the dynamic model of the
collapse of Solaria Binaria. Direct proof of the falls associated with system
derangements extending over a period of perhaps three thousand years is lacking. In
an extreme case it may be postulated that most of the damage of an extraterrestrial
meteoritic character belongs to this period, as opposed to damage inflicted by
planetary size bodies to be discussed later.
Figure 23. Explosive Eruption from Super Uranus.
At the period when the galactic transaction to Solaria Binaria was shifting from the
gases of the outer plenum to the gases closely about the two stars, electrical
instability developed within Super Uranus. This instability caused Super Uranus to
shed explosively material and gases from its body. Much of the ejecta became trapped
in and funneled down the magnetic tube, bombarding the planetary components of
Solaria Binaria.
Probably impacts were rare during the period of stability following the first
accretional stage of the Earth. Evidence for this in rocks and depressions would
have been metamorphosed, granitized or erased under sedimentary aggregation and
erosion.
We suggest that most extraterrestrial deformations of the Earth's surface would then
have occurred at the end of the stable period, that is, from fourteen thousand years
before the present onwards, during the period of Super Uranus instability. The lunar
episode, to be discussed in Chapter Thirteen, would have provided most of the
remaining meteoritic features, or astroblemes. Here the material itself would have
been mostly a fallback and possibly identifiable as Earth-crustal material by
physical and chemical techniques if its nature would not be later modified to
conform to Earth. Subsequent disastrous showers of meteoroids, as we shall explain,
would have been experienced in Apollo and Venusian times, that is, around 5000 and
3500 years ago.
Lately the term "astrobleme", meaning "star-wound" in Greek, has come into
scientific use along with the renewed interest in things coming out of space.
Generally it refers to detectable craters dug, supposedly, by meteorite falls. Here,
our discussion of astrobleme includes a whole class of effects of extraterrestrial
transaction with the Earth's surface; "meteoritic" craters and mounds, irruptives
(collisional intrusions that may turn out to be soft-landed meteorites);
"meteoritic" craters and mounds, irruptives (collisional intrusions that may turn
out to be soft-landed meteorites); meteoritic dust; => barads and field cobbles;
till (consolidated clay and pebbles); metals ash; waters; ice; vaporites (fall-back
of exploded and extremely heated meteoritic and terrestrial material); fulgerites
(fused soils of lightning origin, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial); and
biospheric transformation. Controversy and a paucity of identified materials makes
this list hypothetical; certainly it is not complete, because extra terrestrial
collisions, small or large, must convey many lost effects. Before long, for example,
it will be difficult to detect, even guided by a precise hypothesis, the eighty
million trees blasted down in the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908, probably by a
meteoritic air-burst; the animals and few persons killed in this obscure wilderness
disaster have long disappeared into dust. Mutated flora has been reported from the
spot; such plants would have merged into the plethora of ordinary species if there
were not a search party alerted to their possible quantavolution.
Distinguishing among astroblemes of the various episodes 14,000 to 11,000; 11,000 to
10,000; circa 5,000; and circa 3,500 BP; and all others, even though perhaps a minor
concern, is probably impossible because of the heterogeneous nature of the Earth's
crustal material and the similar processes occurring in each case of a strike.
Legends and history will afford some assistance and could afford more were these now
to be reviewed in search of incidents. For some time Australian Caucasians
disbelieved the reports of Australian Aborigines that McConnell Bay had suddenly
appeared where before there was no water. Late studies have changed the date of
origin of the feature from millions of years BP to a few thousands (Kondratov).
Meteorites were often incorporated into places of worship, as sacred relics of the
vitiation of, or a message from, a god. The Temple of Artemis/ Diana at Ephesus in
Asia Minor contained a meteorite (Acts 19-35); the image of Diana was reputed to
have been sent by the god Jupiter. Velikovsky (1950, p289) cites other examples. The
best-known surviving meteoritic object of worship is the Black Stone (30 centimeters
in diameter) now encased in silver and embedded into a corner of the Kaaba (Ka'bah)
in Mecca (Abdul-Rauf, pp584ff). A local legend attributes the stone to he Archangel
Gabriel who is associated with Venus (Velikovsky, 1950, p291), Moslems believe that
the stone is the only extant piece of Abraham and Ishmael's House of God (Abdul-
Rauf).
The geophysics of crater identification is in its infancy; the very idea of the
Earth having suffered extraterrestrial encounters has been resisted until lately
(Ninniger), Craters from smaller than seven kilometers to seven hundred times that
diameter are discernable under various geological formations at widely separated
locations in continental North America and elsewhere (Saul). Ancient meteorite
craters may be the source of many circular features of the Earth, but few of such
topographical formations have been given more than a superficial look (Norman et
al., p692) Figure 24 shows an area of broken terrain in Arizona from which Saul's
analysis revealed a set of overlapping and eroded astroblemes as shown drawn over
the map. Notably, metal and mineral deposits are distributed among these
astroblemes, lending support to our suggestion elsewhere in this book that most if
not all useful minerals and metals are deposited and produced by quantavolutionary
processes.
Beals and Halliday outline criteria used to identify meteorite crater remnants after
erosion, and possibly glaciation, have attacked the exposed circular or oval
structure. Critical is the presence of a lens-shaped layer of broken rock under the
crater. This is often extremely difficult to reach by drilling. They note that
fragments of the meteorite usually are absent; this they attribute to removal by
glaciation. However, we maintain that no fragment need have fallen to produce such a
crater. A crater produced by the shock from an explosion resembles one produced by
material impacting at high energy, both exhibiting phase transitions that produce
high density crystals from the resident minerals. Glasses produced by heat also are
common in both settings. Craters satisfying Beals and Halliday's criteria result
when great electrical discharges reach the surface (Juergens, 1974; 1974/ 75).
Figure 24. Possible Astroblemes in Arizona.
A section of an official relief map showing a portion of Arizona at a scale of 1: 2
000 000. The rectangle encloses the land between 110§ and 112§ West longitude and
33§ and 35§ North latitude. The city of Phoenix is located on the west margin of the
enclosed area about one quarter of the distance from the bottom to the top corner of
the map. The circles representing the remnant astroblemes have been drawn over the
map: they are based upon the analysis of Saul. Extensive mineral deposits have been
discovered at sites on the rims of these features.
Vsekhsviatskii, speaking about the origin of the Moon's craters, notes that "the
magnificent achievements of the Apollo astronauts... leave no doubt that most of the
processes affecting the surfaces of the planets were determined by endogenous
forces." He favors eruptive genesis, because of the basaltic nature of the ejecta
surrounding the Moon's craters. In our opinion, he is incorrect in attributing these
eruptions to processes originating within the Moon (and the planets), but is correct
in his observation that only local material is present. The same is true for Earth
craters. Only rarely do large meteoroids contact the Earth, because of electrical
repulsion between the charged Earth and the invader (Figure 25) [77] . Some
overcome the repulsion and go on to impact (trajectory 3); others do not and deflect
back into space. Many meteoroids become unstable and discharge electrically
(trajectory 4); the discharge can explode into the Earth's surface, producing a
"meteorite" crater, or it can produce an atmospheric shock wave which devastates the
surface features. More commonly, a bolide is produced that discharges harmlessly
well above the surface; only audible shock - waves reach the surface (trajectory 2).
Then dusty d‚bris or a few small rocky fragments, splintered off the meteoroid, may
reach the ground (Milton, 1982). Most meteoroids "burn up" at high altitude
(trajectory 1), the smallest of which are noted to decelerate as if repelled by the
Earth [78] .
Hughes (1979) commented that certain meteor swarms observed within the Earth's
magnetosphere behaved as if they were electrically charged. This conclusion is
consistent with the surprising finding that the rate of encounter between Earth and
fainter meteors correlates negatively with increased solar and geomagnetic activity
(Lindblad). Other charged particles encountering the Earth from directions away from
the Sun's show a similar inverse correlation with solar activity, which lends
support to the concept of charged meteoroids.
Motion of ejecta, like the motion of the principals, would have been dependent upon
the relative charge densities of the transacting pieces. Under stable conditions,
the gases and material within the magnetic tube were close to being in electrical
equilibrium with the flow along the electric arc. Thus material encountering the
Earth should normally have a charge density approximating that of the Earth and
would be repelled in encounter. Penetration into the Earth's electric domain (a
space much larger than the body of the planet) would be determined by the
combination of mechanical inertia and electric attraction/ repulsion (see Table 5).
Most meteoroids would reverse their trajectories and fling them away into the
plenum; alternatively the electric transaction between the meteoroid and its
surroundings would consume the encountering body before it could be repelled.
Figure 25. Meteoroid Trajectories.
Objects from space that penetrate the Earth's electrosphere and enter its atmosphere
transact strongly as they approach the Earth. For bodies larger than a grain of sand
a visible trail, a meteor, is produced during the passage through the atmosphere
(1). Frequently a meteor will explode harmlessly high in the atmosphere, to produce
a bolide (2). A very small fraction of incident meteoroids overcome the electrical
repulsion by the Earth and impact with the ground: these are the meteorites both
ancient and modern, the majority of which are small and thus can become equilibrated
with the Earth's electrical state during their short falls. The largest meteoric
pieces can impact explosively (3) or discharge to the ground, damaging the terrain
indirectly( 4).
This transaction arises because particles of different sizes possessing the same
charge density have different electric potentials at their surfaces (see also note
C); thus they must transact if in proximity. The larger body has the higher
potential and gains charge from the smaller. This heats the meteoroid and may
vaporize it. If the potential difference is great enough, lightning-like currents
may be induced between the meteoroid and surrounding charges, explosively
stabilizing the charge levels; such discharge would be expected only for large
meteoroids.
TABLE 5
MODES OF METEOROID ENCOUNTERS
Inertia
Charge Low Moderate High
======================================================================================================
Repulsion "Faint meteors" Evasive skip Air explosion
Neutral Drift down Small intrusion Rafted irruptive
Slight attraction Ballistic meteor Fireball Bolide
Strong attraction Soft fall Hard fall Explosion crater
In the disruptive environment, when the binary began to be electrically unstable,
large amounts of meteoritic material could encroach upon the Earth's domain,
arriving in an electrically inflamed condition (at very different charge density).
Some of this material would be strongly attracted towards Earth and could blast
explosively into its surface. Even when a near miss occurred, the passage could
alter the Earth's protective electrical sheath (as solar wind outbursts, produced by
solar flares, do today), great thunderbolts would be generated, and again produce
explosions at the surface.
When a tremendous bombardment, or large-body encounter, would occur, most of the
matter could not overcome the electrical repulsion of the Earth; but vast sporadic
falls from above could dot the Earth's surface. Remnants are found buried under the
fallout from later catastrophes (Velikovsky, 1955, p55, pp96-9, pp104ff).
Repeated impacts (material and electrical) would disturb the Earth in its orbit
within the magnetic tube. The globe would wobble, the magnetic axis would constantly
seek realignment, only to be subjected to another disruption as another megalith
fell (Dachille, 1963) or a gigantic thunderbolt struck. The assault would crack the
crust in many places (Norman et al., p691), cause local uplifting, and alter the
electric current in the outermost region of the Earth's conductive core.
Meteoritic fallout would range from microscopic nodules, similar to those found in
the seabeds of later eras, to colossal intrusions of rock and/ or metal. The Sudbury
irruptive in Canada is an example. It is an elliptical ring sixty kilometers by
twenty-seven, enclosing an asymmetric basin up to three kilometers thick. Along its
boundary are large quantities of broken native and irruptive rock. This intrusion is
judged to be younger than the rock surrounding it (Douglas, 1970).
The existence of ore mountains (isolated metallic deposits of mountainous size) like
Marampa in Sierra Leone is also evidence of celestial fallout (Bellamy, 1951, p196).
But the Sudbury basin and Mount Marampa are far from being the only examples of
celestial intrusion: these are found on every continent, and certainly more
astroblemes will be discovered.
Whereas the larger irruptives devastated local features upon which they fell,
smaller pieces merely bombarded the surface without exploding, like artillery duds.
People can survive intensive explosive barrages, as did most defending soldiers and
civilians on Iwo Jima and at the Abbey of Monte Casino during World War II; pre-
historic populations were no less survival-prone. Much of the smaller debris simply
dented the surface and lay there exposed as testimony of a perplexing celestial
activity.
When a material impact occurs, electric fields are produced, causing electric
charges to flow (generating an intense magnetic field). Dachille (1979) asks:
What mechanisms account for the changes in crater forms from the simple bowl to
the awesome mare?
And then he replies:
It should be noted that the microcraters observed on crystal faces or glass beads
in lunar samples do not differ significantly from the Arizona crater or its lunar
equivalents; the impact energies involved span at least twenty orders of magnitude.
However, on progressing from bowl through the terraced -, peaked -, and melted-floor
craters to the maria, the total energy difference amounts only to six [more] orders
of magnitude [79] . This marked change in behavior can be related quantitatively to
the reaction of the EM fields with the magnetic and dielectric properties of the
target as a function of the duration of EM pulse and the passage of the much slower
shock wave pulse; in the upper range of energies the EM processes overwhelm the
mechanical ones and thus determine the physical, chemical and petrological character
of the resultant craters.
Spotting the Earth's surface are tektite fields. The large Australasian tektite
field covers over five million square kilometers. From this field over 20 000
specimens have been examined.
Tektites are glassy spheres, of refractory materials, erosion due to air-friction
melting as they fell through the atmosphere having depleted them of their less-
durable components [80] . Tektites have rained down upon the Earth episodically
since late Mesozoic times (presumably the Cretaceous), according to Baker (1960,
p293).
Chemical studies show that tektites resemble both terrestrial sediment and lunar
soil, but significant differences distinguish them from both. To explain their
deficiency in volatile material, the tektites must fall to Earth at velocities
sufficient for friction-induced melting and scouring to cause chemical changes to
their incipiently silicic composition; heating to 1475 K would produce sufficient
such ablation (O'Keefe, 1978). Accordingly, O'Keefe has conjectured that the
tektites were fired at the Earth by a hydrogen-powered lunar volcano. Equally, they
could be products of the electric arc, or ejecta from the breakup of Super Uranus;
more likely they were generated in cosmic thunderbolt strikes to Earth which
occurred at intervals while Solaria Binaria disintegrated.
Tektites have been unearthed along with the fossil bones of Java man. Likely their
falls were witnessed by prehistoric and ancient man and the spheres treasured as
sacred. The experience would be remembered. In China, they were known as "fire-
pearls"; and it is a "fire-pearl" that is pursued, in traditional representations,
by the dragon, associated by Cardona (1976, pp42ff) with the memories of comets,
possibly proto-Venus of circa 3,450 BP. Most of the meteoritic debris encountered by
the Earth today is in the form of microscopic dust. Estimates vary a millionfold,
but the Earth sweeps up a minimum of one tonne of dust per day (Singer, 1967). Daily
falls of 44 times this amount are considered to be realistic (Hughes, 1976). A nine-
year annual average gave 1.04 x 10 11 grams (285 tons daily) in New Mexico sampling
(Crozier, 603) [81] . In two years the annual fall averaged 685 tons daily.
Depending upon the influx and upon the timescale, the amount of meteoritic sediment
can be calculated. Some scientists consider that a considerable fraction of earthy
sediments (what amounts to about 3 x 10 18 tons) are estimated to be meteoritic in
origin (Niemann).
Most of this extraterrestrial dust must have fallen during outbursts in Solaria; at
the present rate of influx, even allowing hundreds of millions of years since the
Cretaceous, only one-million of the required meteoritic dust would drop: hence the
estimate gap above. We conjecture, to conclude this set of guesses, that the Earth,
from its primordial seed, could accrete from the plenum its present volume, less its
sediments, in a millennium; its sediments could have been laid down in some
generations of late binary times by extraterrestrial and turbulent surface events.
The observation in the infrared that some nova outbursts produce a significant
silicate dust shell (Ney) leads us to suspect that the eruption of Super Uranus
deluged the Earth with "meteoritic till", vast intrusions of dusty d‚bris. In a
short outburst the d‚bris, which in some geologists' minds must have taken millions
of years to sift down, might be plunked down upon the lithosphere. Donnelly (1883/
1970) argues that vast fields of till scattered over the world are cometary fallout
and not the remains of ice ages. It is more likely that both ice and till were of
superterrestrial origin.
The first pre-nova eruption of Super Uranus probably rained down megaliths, rocks,
glass, gravel and sand, but ice and water also fell from the sky in great amounts.
The Earth was inundated with water condensed electrically from the plenum. Typhoons
formed in explosions and towered into the plenum (de Grazia, 1981). They might
occasionally be seen - roaring, stumbling pillars of smoke, water, electrical
discharges and debris: veritable automotive disasters. New winds blew the waters
across the face of the land. Since there is no compelling reason to suppose that
great basins existed on Earth such as collect today's oceans, the flooding was
severe. Some of the water drained into the craters blasted by meteorites and by
electric bolts. Other waters slipped into the numerous fractures that appeared and
into ponds fashioned by local thrusts and folds of the sediments.
An annual rainfall of two-and-a-half meters (not uncommon in coastal areas today)
would dump over one million cubic kilometers of water onto the Earth's surface. This
amounts to about 10 18 tons of water, or about 1/ 3850 of the present oceans.
Cherrapunji (India) receives 11 meters of rain in 159 days, which extrapolated (at
the mean daily intensity) would yield 26 meters of rainfall annually. Hurricanes
deposit rainfall at over seven times the rate at Cherrapunji; globally, such
hurricanes could fill the ocean basins in five decades!
By current standards, a Deluge would constitute a more extensive rainfall than this.
But for a biosphere used to Pangean conditions, where rain had been supplied by
mists, the new kind of heavy rainfall would be traumatic.
The blast of material moving down the magnetic tube from Super Uranus created shock
waves in the plenum. Where rarefaction occurred, water vapor froze, producing ice.
Some of this ice fell onto the Earth. Within a short time ice sheets formed and grew
all over the globe. Those were not polar ice caps. The ice caves of the
intermountain plateau of the Pacific North-west region comprise millions of tonnes
of ice (Patten), sandwiched between layers of lava. They are a surviving example of
ice which fell from the sky. Clumps of ice avoided the numerous hot spots and lower
altitudes of the world. As the ice continued to fall, electrical processes funneled
most of it towards the magnetic poles, where large ice caps accumulated - this was
the first ice to accumulate in what today we consider high latitudes. These polar
caps grew and joined onto the sporadic patches, spreading rapidly towards the
magnetic equator. The ice would probably have covered the globe and exterminated the
biosphere had Super Uranus not erupted again.
Notes on Chapter 11
77. The first documented meteoroid repulsion was made in August, 1972 (Jacchia).
78. These faint meteors decelerate at rates up to one hundred times greater than
that expected for a solid body penetrating the Earth's upper atmosphere (the
ballistic meteors).
79. Bracketed word is ours.
80. The tektites seem to have encountered the atmosphere (with present properties)
moving at ten kilometers per second along shallow trajectories (Faul).
81. Spherules used in the counting measured 5 to 60 micrometers in diameter. ;
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART TWO:
DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
CHAPTER TWELVE
QUANTAVOLUTION OF THE BIOSPHERE: HOMO SAPIENS
Subjected to the effects of an unstable star, Earth's biosphere quantavoluted by
extinction and genetic realization into the present form. To be emphasized here are
the recent wave of genetic realization and the advent of Homo sapiens as an observer
of the history of Solaria Binaria in its last stage.
Radiometric chronology and geochronometry based upon gradual stratification are
incongruent with the model of Solaria Binaria. The fossil record, which is the
guarantor of traditional geochronometry for the phanerozoic era, is generally
acknowledged to be fragmentary, disjointed, and anomalistic (Ager, ch. 3). It is
beyond the scope of this book to attempt a reorganization in detail of the
geological and palaeontological record, and we have had to content ourselves with
using conventional labels in a preliminary sketch of the route which such a
reorganization would take. Table 6 exhibits in its first part what we would regard
as the several significant major divisions of binarian history, leading into a more
refined division, also contained therein, of the final very recent quantavolutionary
times.
The Carboniferous appears in our view to have been a brief and thoroughly
catastrophic set of episodes that bulldozed, burned, blasted, and buried masses of
marsh and shallow water life forms in certain places, giving the illusion today that
the whole (small) world of that day was a swamp. It should properly be assigned to
the period of Super Uranus instability, a period of great extinction, rather than to
a 65 million-year period preceding the Permian Period, where, significantly,
boundaries are admitted to be rare.
TABLE 6 : AGES OF SOLARIA BINARIA
Suggested Names of periods Years Before Present* Duration in Present Solar years
Description of period
A. Super Solaria ? to ~ 1,000,000 - Electric cavity... galactic region depleted
of electrons... space-material compressed into star... star transacts launching ion
wind into space thereby increasing its electron density.
B. Radiant Genesis 1,000,000 to 750,000 250,000 Star erupts into binary at
unstable epoch... strong inter-component electrical transaction... electric flow
catalyses cell production... self replicating mitosis... biologic diversification of
species and habitat.
C. Pangean Stability 750,000 to 14,000 736,000 Binary components separating... arc
operating... biosphere thrives in plenum and planetary environments... biological
creativeness declines.
D. Late Quanatavolution 14,000 to 1,600 12,400 Arcintermittent... plenum thins...
binary becomes unstable... planets isolated, devastated and relocated as binary
translates into Solar System.
I. Urania 14,000 to 11,500 2,500 Deluges form icecaps and floods... breakup of
sky canopies... Homo sapiens schizo-typicus appears... ecumenical culture... Uranus
Heaven religion.
II. Lunaria 11,500 to 8,000 3,500 Global explosion and cleavage... Moon eruption
... ocean basins formed and filled... displaced continents... biosphere
quasiextermination... people isolated and fully traumatized... lunar worship.
III. Saturnia 8,000 to 5,700 2,300 Biosphere multiplies... cloudy atmosphere...
no ice caps... settled continents... expansion of regional cultures.. rich
technology... Saturn worship.
IV. Jovea 5,700 to 4,400 1,300 Noachian shelf floods and high tides... lightning
and cleared skies... new icecaps form... more severe seasons... dryclimates...
eastward movements from "Atlantis" to Egypt and Mediterranean ... empires form
amidst widespread conflict... Jupiter worship.
V. Mercuria 4,400 to 3,450 950 Separation of magnetic and geographic poles...
axial tilt enhanced... pyramid age... large new civilizations in Mediterranean,
China and Caribbean... Olympian family worship.
VI. Venusia 3,450 to 2,775 675 Devastation of globe by protoplanet Venus...
religions and cultures reduced and remodelled... Venus worship... large petroleum
fall-out.
VII. Martia 2,775 to 1,600 1,175 Mars Earth Moon and Venus transact
destructively... war-like cultures promoted... Toltecs, Myceneans and Etruscans
reduced... Mars worship.
E. Solaria 1,600 to 0** 1,600 Settling of present Solar System... secularization,
philosophy and empirical sciences ... synthetic religions.
*2000 AD = O BP.
** Solaria is defined to begin with victory of Christianity in the Roman World,
eclipse of the pagan gods and their appropriation by solar imagery.
Most of the earlier Silurian, Devonian and Permian periods would fall into our
middle category of Solaria Binaria stability.
Even earlier periods of the controversial scale are assigned to our period of
radiant genesis. The scarcity of fossils in early Cambrian rocks indicates their
formation and turbulent experiences in the early radiant period.
Originally, geologists and paleontologists hoped to trace natural history backwards
through the rocks and establish a long chain of rock-related fossils on the
principle of super-position, the first and perhaps only quite defensible concept of
natural history. Such hopes were dashed early, but the ideological stimulus behind
them was so strong as to obscure the fairly obvious origins of rock and fossil
discontinuities.
Discontinuities (unconformities is generally synonymous) imply quantavolutions,
whether treating of rocks or fossils. No continuous column of rocks or fossils
exists. All => fossil assemblages that incorporate flora and fauna of diverse life
niches, as a flying animal and a fish, or a hippopotamus and a reindeer, are
evidence of quantavolution. Logically, and for other reasons, the rocks that contain
them have been quantavoluted at the same time.
Traditional geochronometry, already in a crisis of self-doubt, compromised with the
new science of radio-chronometry, allowing itself within this century to move from a
forty million-year to a 4.5 aeon Earth history. This thousand-fold increase was
accepted on the assurance that radioisotope fractions can be used as a clock, if the
initial balance of the isotopes is known. Such is not the case, as even the eruption
of Mt. St. Helens showed in 1980 (Rawls). Besides the trenchant negative criticism
of radio-chronometry (Cook, 1966, pp23ff), the modes of genesis and agglomeration of
the Earth invoked in the present study supplant the kinds of elemental mixes
presumed by nebular models of Earth genesis. Recently more direct attention has been
accorded the waves of extinction that typify the fossil record (Valentine, Raup),
and the theory of extraterrestrial causes of extinction has entered the house of
science from its stable as a Grenzwissenschaft (fringe science), Massive intrusions
of solar protons have been postulated as the cause of the extinctions and
accompanying mutations (Reid et al., p179). In the period after the Mesozoic, the
collision of cosmic bodies with the Earth has been proposed as an alternative
explanation for the extinctions (Urey; Alvarez. et at.) [82] .
Known living species number upwards of one million; estimates of living but
unidentified species may reach to eight and one-half million (Passerini). The number
of different species since the beginning of life was estimated at five hundred
million by Simpson (1952). Fossilizable species were estimated at ten million by
Teichert, of which nearly half would be marine (Passerini), but only some one
hundred and twenty thousand fossil types have been identified. Thus, one in fifty
species would be fossilizable, and one in a hundred of these, or 1 in 5 000 of all
pre-existing species, would now be known. It may be argued nevertheless, as has Cook
(1966), that the fossil record is relatively complete, and that the fossils already
discovered form the vast majority of pre-existing species.
Clearly, the definition of species, both as to those living and those extinct, must
greatly affect the numbers. Further, in biological development speciation is much
less important than major changes, as indicated in definitions of phyla, classes,
orders, and families, but especially in definition of the stages of development of
the living cell. Major natural change has probably ceased. Much speciation will
probably come under human control, even as existing species will continue on their
course of extinction. The history of Solaria Binaria would not promise the species a
reprieve; this, if granted at all, must come from the laboratory. Humans are a part
of the problem, being themselves in a posture of self-extinction; hence, the
laboratory work may begin with the laboratory workers.
The biosphere, when Solaria Binaria began to degenerate into the Solar System, was
at a stage roughly equivalent to that which has been denominated in paleontology as
the Triassic. All major life forms of today and most of their families and species
were identifiable, but many species were absent, including the human. Conventional
reckoning has already moved Homo sapiens, defined as an ancestral hominid working
with tools and building shelters, back by between five and ten million years into
the Cenozoic. Under such circumstances, he would encounter extinct reptiles,
mammals, fish and birds, and travel between continents over broad land bridges now
inundated. It is not expected that the human age will ever reach back to the
Triassic, but it may be that the Triassic will reach up to the human.
This may happen by assuming - with whatever adjustments may be required in the
interpretation of the sporadic fossil record - that almost all present families and
species, if not existent prior to the Period of Quantavolution, realized themselves
in this period; most at the beginning of it, 14000 to 10000 years ago, some even
later. It may be that the now well identified Permo-Triassic extinction was the
period of Super Uranian novas (14000 to 10000 BP).
Figure 26. Radioactivity of Fossilized Remains.
Evidence from several widely separated investigators indicates that fossil remains
from the Upper Cretaceous are highly radioactive. Reptile bones containing as much
as 0.11% U3O8 have been found in Brazil. Fossils ascribed to earlier eras show much
less radioactive content than remains dated at the Cretaceous - Tertiary boundary.
- Figure after Kloosterman
At this biological discontinuity Raup calculates a loss of 13.5% of the classes,
16.8% of the orders, and 52.0% of the families of well-skeletonized marine
vertebrates and invertebrate animals, and of 64.8% of the invertebrate genera. He
reasons that 96.0% of the species of echinoids were extinguished then, too. Basing
his estimate upon a standing species diversity of between 45 000 and 240 000 in the
Permian, he concludes that the marine biosphere would have been left with between
1800 and 9 600 species, from which the present species come. We call to mind that
earlier we proposed a desiccating climate for the epoch when the plenum declines;
the extinctions noted may be related to this phenomenon. The later extraterrestrial
discharges of water collected into deep pools rather than in shallow marshes, once
the ocean basins were sculpted. The end of the Triassic sees further mass
extinctions. So does the cretaceous, which concludes with the disappearance of the
dinosaurs and other groups.
In the Cenozoic, "speciation was rampant, as a multitude of niches was invaded in
the replacement of extinct reptiles" (Stanley). An average species of late Cenozoic
mammal survived one to two million years without transitional forms. With this
average, it seems impossible to account for changes from primitive forms to bats and
whales, in twelve million years of the early Cenozoic. So reports the same author,
who notes that "much more than fifty percent of evolution occurs through sudden
events in which => polymorphs and species are proliferated". In the American West,
drawings of dinosaurs have been found, presumably by the hand of ancient Indians
(Hubbard). The existence, on the banks of the Puluxy River in Texas, of human
footprints (not detectably different from the footprints of a modern human) in
sandstone alongside dinosaur tracks makes the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs
hard to dispute. At the end of the Pleistocene, conventionally tied to the last Ice
Age and dated ten to fifteen thousand years ago, another wave of extinctions struck
the biosphere (Martin and Wright).
In view of these mass extinctions, any lingering hope that an evolutionary record
can be completely displayed and then proven must be abandoned. So must the similar
hope of proving an evolution of the lithosphere using fossils. No continuous
stratification either of fossils or of rocks exists. Under these conditions, where
discontinuities and unconformities mark the geological fossil record (Ager, ch. 4),
quantavolution becomes the ruling concept. Fossil and rock discontinuities are to
geological age boundaries what ruined settlements are to Bronze Age boundaries.
Originally established to show transitions or anomalistic happenings, they end up as
benchmarks of disasters. Further, the omnipresence of fossil assemblages as the
basis for paleontological studies of succession is a sword of Damocles over the head
of evolutionist. Fossils, themselves, are creatures of personal or, usually, of
collective catastrophe. No new life forms are attributable to the interval of the
Pleistocene extinctions. It may be that few new forms are associated with any
extinction of the third and last period of Solaria Binaria.
Apart from ideological hopes, two processes may have served to give the impression
of new species and families evolving at or between extinction events. One is the
bias of the fossil record, which rewards large numbers and calcium-bearing
superstructures with a badge of existence. We believe, rather, that almost all
modern species have survived from the Period of Radiant Genesis, either in their
present form or in a form carrying in its germ plasm the present form and
intervening forms awaiting realization [83] . Under catastrophic conditions
immediate mutation and adaptation are possible among some individuals. Thus in a
sense they both perpetuate and generate a species, Hence, non-populous species can
have persisted all along and appeared in the record when their populations expanded
under the "right" conditions. Further, these species and other species already part
of the old (Devonian) record have quantavoluted into "new" species under the same
catastrophic, mutative, and adaptive circumstances.
The difference between the certainly catastrophic age of radiant genesis and the
catastrophic recent record of explosive quantavolution clearly rests in the
extremely powerful and rich environment of the first period and its vast domain of
the plenum. The period of collapse of Solaria Binaria was incomparably poorer in
genetic capabilities; to extinguish, yes; to capacitate, also yes; to create, no.
The many millions of mutations and environmental changes occasioned by the
instability and destruction of the system were paltry by comparison with the
possibilities of the first period.
Therefore, when one approaches the subject of the genesis of Homo sapiens, one need
not expect grand changes of a bio-physiological type; these do not exist. With
protein "chains" as the basis of comparison, humans and chimpanzees "share more than
99% of their genetic material" (Washburn, p203). A comparison of the earliest
fossils of hominids with the similar parts of modern humans does not demand an
acknowledgment that the two are of distinct species; and judging from remains alone,
the hominid may have equal or greater capabilities than the modern human. For
example, the brain case of hominids, which may contain 500 cc. is not so small
theoretically as to preclude intellectual competition with a modern human brain.
Though larger by far on the average, modern mankind does offer braincases that,
while intellectually competent, are akin to the hominid's in relative size. This is
quite apart from the presently unresolvable issues of the intensity of convolution
of the brain and the percent age of brain tissue ordinarily utilized [84] .
The view here conforms to the theory of genetic realization. It may be maintained
that hominid is as old as the end of the period of radiant genesis; further it may
be maintained that hominid had a genetic potential for becoming the modern human. A
large change is not necessary to differentiate the human from the hominid.
It would appear futile to search for differences in traits that recently socio-
biologists have already discovered in other primates or animals: sociability; group
obligations; signaling; using sticks, building houses and nests; organizing
expeditions; intricate social bonds; and so forth.
It may be equally futile to seek after biological differences; manual dexterity;
bipedalism; brain size; omnivorous dentition; and so on.
Perhaps the most rewarding area of research would be in the mechanisms that govern
traits most peculiar to humans (although least likely to be determinable from fossil
remains). Most peculiar to Homo sapiens from his earliest appearance has been a
"non-trait", his generally defective instinctive structure. Active fear and self-
awareness resulting from it generated his symbolic and ideological behavior. These
are logically connected, as has been shown in detail elsewhere (de Grazia, 1983b,
1983c). Their mention here helps to explain how it happened that we have human
testimony to use in constructing a natural history of Solaria Binaria and the extent
to which such testimony may be reliable and valid.
The simplest change would be a general constraint upon instinct. Instinct is a non-
learned activity and response, unfettered by self-awareness. Homo sapiens is the
least instinctive of all animals, hence the least predictive and most responsive to
internalized planning. Very many, perhaps all, human actions and physiological
processes can be internally constrained or modified unconsciously (psychosomatism)
or consciously. The extraordinary achievements of Homo sapiens, it is argued, are
entirely due to the operations of an instinctual incapacity upon an otherwise normal
primate constitution. This instinctual incapacity is closely connected with and may
have given rise to the generalized anxiety or fear characteristic of humans,
especially "intelligent" humans. Human fear, resting on top of animal fear, was
originally fear of oneself, fear of the inability to act and react instinctively
under conditions of the mental division of the self into several differently aware
parts.
The transformation of hominid to human with respect to instinct delay, which leads
to self-awareness, which then promptly adduces symbolism, ideology and recall, is
most likely to have been accomplished by contradictory pressures - one to diminish
instinctive response and the other to increase response. Together they produce
continuing anxiety and a number of mechanisms to cope with it.
Some of the pressure to diminish instinctive response may be attributed to an
increase in electrical resistance between the two hemispheres of the brain,
distributed throughout the corpus callosum, the large membrane occurring between the
two hemispheres. This membrane would increase its resistance to the passage of
messages between the right and the left brains, which are in fact electrified and
responsive to changes in the external and internal environments.
An environmental de-electrification would seem to occur as the Earth's interior
increased its supply of electrons (relative to its cosmic surroundings) simply by
the steady accumulation of charge. In a changed environment, the repetitive
correlating signals that constitute a large part of the exchange between the two
hemispheres of the brain would encounter increased environmentally induced
resistance; so they would bunch up and interfere with one another. That is, fewer
transmission lines would be available to the same number of messages.
The brain originated in a world of lower electrical levels and greater electrical
differences. There may be a functional problem today in a world where electrical
levels are higher and electrical differences much diminished [85] . The brain was
possibly originally more stable, that is, instinctive, perpetuating the less anxious
hominid.
The messages between the brain hemispheres propagate relatively slowly, by direct
current through chemo-electrical diffusion, so to reflect a slightly diminished
electrical constant, enough to furthermore "encourage" crowding of signals and a
more frequent de-synchronization. The effect would be both delay and confusion -
delay in microseconds in assessing a neural trigger for an information or command
bit, and confusion in overburdening the channels with combined but incompletely co-
ordinated messages.
Signals that must "wait" and may get out of phase would necessitate momentary
verification of otherwise instinctual responses, a delayed reaction, and even
conflict and aborted decisions. This is enough to set up the unique pattern of human
behavior in an otherwise pedestrian mammal.
Thereupon two paramount qualities of the human mind would result; the need to think
before acting, and the analogizing of experiences and events, leading to synthetic
combinations of all types. In addition, we admit the possibility of a change in the
functioning of hormonal glands, such as the adrenal cortex. A continuously higher
level of secretion and induced stress - a new constant - might have been provoked by
the disasters of the time of humanization and / or by a new, stronger and persisting
electro-chemical stimulation. The brain would be permanently stressed towards
anxiety and action. Taken with the decline in the correlation of the hemispheres,
this contradictory stress would further humanize the person with the evermore-
poignant auto-instructions to "look before you leap" and that "he who hesitates is
lost."
Promptly there would emerge a conception of the self, a continuous fear of loss of
self control developing out of the need to compromise with oneself, an aggression
against those who provoke difficult decisions or restrictions of the self-conflict
or who "cause one to have to think", and the need to talk to oneself (one's other
self), which leads quickly to talking to others to engage them into talking to one's
self-which leads in turn to talking to "the most important people in the world": the
anthropomorphized gods. The self would project its hopes and fears to the external
world, but especially and exactly to those features of the external world from which
the most impressive experiences emanate - the heavens.
Thereupon the human mind is structured and in place. The devising of culture was
practically instant. Words, operations and thoughts establish social contact on a
level unknown to "hominids", and a "social contract" comes into being. Society helps
people to talk to themselves; people talk to themselves through other people.
The social process, the instant culture, is not only formed of the present. It
accrues memories. It recalls. It is obsessed with its own creation simply because it
is so unbelievable and dramatic (traumatic). Since this scenario was enacted only
260 => memorial generations ago (de Grazia, 1981), the transmission of some valid
and reliable information in decipherable form need not be surprising.
Humanization and culture seem to have appeared in the initial phases of Solaria
Binaria's collapse, around thirteen thousand years ago, allowing for a thousand
years of environmental instability to finally "get through" to the hominid, as
described. The fact that all races share the human mentality indicates that they
share a single ancestral line; no one has discovered a feral tribe or a live
hominid. Still, because of the quasi-environmental character of the "mutation",
several lines might have originated independently from individuals or groups
hoarding the genetic substructure of the newly expressed trait. Whatever the case,
the fact that many, perhaps all, peoples possessed an ecumenical "creation culture"
would point to a worldwide takeover by a single culture within a thousand years.
The earliest human stories reveal something both of the character of the storyteller
and of the events about which he speaks. Creation legends (and many creation legends
remain unclassified as such) recall a time far before the time of their recounting.
As a consequence of the need to control himself and his environment, the human
promptly invented history, that is, a purposive and selective recollection of all
that had happened to his group since he stood as a human upon the Earth (Eliade,
1954; de Grazia, 1981,1983b). Invariably the history began with a celestial
disruption of an even -- tenored, hardly conscious existence, or with gods preparing
to destroy the primeval world in order to reconstruct a new world suited to mankind.
The catastrophic natural frame in which the hominid quantavoluted matched the terror
that seized him as he humanized. It is the oxymoronic quality of this fact that has
led most experts to question the ability of a catastrophized mind to report anything
but catastrophes; they view catastrophic reports of natural history as the fictions
of a savage mind - a catastrophized mind (which it is, rather than savage) prone to
elevating personal problems into gross slanders of calmly evolving nature.
This position cannot be maintained in the context of the massive sublimation
exemplified in legend, myth, fables and rites. If primeval man were "spinning yarns"
in contradiction or exaggeration of actual happenings, he would probably tell
stories with peaceful plots and happy endings. He would not incorporate gods, or
even believe in them. Instead, he builds the totality of his culture on a tragic
plane; sacrifice, suffering and punishment are its principal themes. The leading
actors in his tragedy on these themes are always gods of the heavens.
Of all four possibilities, then, that refer to the experience of primeval man -
catastrophized mind transacting with calmly evolving nature; calm mind transacting
with calm nature; calm mind transacting with catastrophic nature; and catastrophized
mind transacting with catastrophic nature - it is this last that appears to be
closest to the truth. Catastrophically originated, Homo sapiens built upon his
irrepressibly fearful and scarcely controllable mind. With this mind, he observed
and recalled with obsessed determination the time of his creation, and all
subsequent landmarks of history that reminded him of the circumstances of his
creation.
Notes on Chapter 12
82. Such collisions would, as we have shown, cause magnetically confused sediments
to be laid down, at the times of bombardment. Sudden biological extinction has been
linked to periods of magnetic confusion in the paleological record (Whyte).
83. This may be recognized as related to the concepts of "paedomorphosis" and
"clandestine evolution" ( see Ency. Brit., 1974, Macro, 19).
84. Modern humans can function broadly and intelligently on half a cerebrum, one
hemisphere.
85. This may account for some of the three-fold growth of the brain by comparison
with fossil hominid.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART TWO:
DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOVA OF SUPER URANUS AND EJECTION OF THE MOON
Ancient Mesopotamian accounts of gods tearing off each other's heads and limbs are
not "baffling" (de Santillana and von Dechend, p303) in the context of early human
existence. But these and similar stories in the Teutonic, Greek, Roman, Hindu,
Iranian, Mexican, Egyptian, and archaic (" primitive") religions are baffling in
regard to their positioning in time. Given an empirically established calendar, a
general review of the early literature may assign a period to them. Tentatively, we
assign these earliest theomachies to the period of Super Uranian instability and the
climactic nova of Super Uranus that drastically changed the face of the Earth.
According to Hindu accounts (Brown, pp281-9), while Adityas and Vitras fought in
that troubled first phase of the skies, Heaven and Earth, living together in a
common house, bore Indra. At first concealed, he fed upon soma until he attained
enormous size, whereupon he blew Heaven and Earth apart forever, filling the
atmosphere by himself and exploding the Vitras in the process by thunderbolts. From
the exploded belly of Vitra came the cosmic waters, acknowledging Indra (Super
Uranus) as their new lord. Out of the waters came also the Sun. Varuna (Heaven as
Super Uranus) presided, as order and truth emerged from primordial chaos.
This narrative is but one culture's account of mankind's witnessing of the explosion
of a celestial body. An alternative, from the Vedic period, has a Cosmic Egg (here
Super Uranus) floating for a thousand years in the primordial waters (our plenum)
until it burst (as a nova) to reveal the Lord of the Universe, Purusha. It may be
that Purusha is yet another phase of the troubled Super Uranus.
From the navel of Purusha sprang a lotus bright as a thousand suns (possibly the
electric arc), whence came Brahma, who acquired Purusha's powers as Lord of the
Universe (and whom we shall identify below as Super Saturn) (Cardona, 1978a, p43).
The cracking of the Cosmic Egg may represent the sight of a fissioning Super Uranus
in human memory.
The Hebrew Book of Genesis begins with a primordial light that did not have the
company of the celestial bodies until "the fourth day". This may have been
"lightness" or "a light". The deity may have been Super Uranus, who first gave
"lightness" and then "a light" of himself. Some (e. g. Cardona, ibid.) place the
deity here already into the Saturnian period, justifiably asserting the parallel
names and qualities of Elohim and Saturn. We speculate that either Genesis begins
after the Super Uranian nova, with Super Saturn, or that in the great expanse of
time, Elohim in his Uranian role was merged into Elohim in his Saturnian role.
Generalizing on this problem, Tresman and O'Gheoghan comment that "where there is
descent (from father to son) it is obvious, otherwise the transition between the
original deity and the later Saturn god is not too marked."
"The Sumerian ideogram for 'star', 'god', and 'heaven' (An) is one and the same, a
simple eight-pointed star shape W . This strongly suggests that they believed that
the original "heaven" was a body that later became a star. It also strongly
indicates that the first deity was this star-heaven god. (Tresman and O'Gheoghan,
quoting Kramer, 1963 and Peter James, p36) The Egyptians defined Atum as "the
incomplete one who became complete", says Lowery (ibid. fn., citing the Coffin
Texts); we may surmise this as Heaven becoming a star; Atum was depicted by the
Egyptians as a setting sun (Ions, p40).
"There is every indication that this original deity was at one time the only visible
planetary body of the heavens. From the Hindu sources we have; 'In the beginning
Prajaparti existed alone'. The Egyptian records tell that Atum 'was alone in the
primeval watery abyss'. The deities An/ Anu (Sumeric) and Ouranos (Greek) were both
lone planetary deities, although their names translate literally as 'heaven'. In
each case the successor to the original deity was a Saturn-type god." (Tresman and
O'Gheoghan, p36) In the Edda epic of Scandinavia, "The Spirit brooding over the
dark, abysmal water calls order out of chaos, and once having given the impulse to
all creation, the First Cause returns and remains for evermore in statu abscondito!"
(Blavatska, citing Mallet and the Edda epic, pp160ff)
The star, in its pre-nova state, was apparent from the time of its emergence from
out of the gloom into the now activated heavens. The interval from 14 000 to 11 000
years ago may be designated as the Age of Urania. The skies were falling upon the
transformed primate schizoid, Homo sapiens. Children's fables like that of "Chicken
Little", who led the barnyard animals in a search for an Authority to do something
about the falling skies, are ancient and widespread and are not to be neglected as
reflections of the ancient traumas imprinted upon the collective memory and
sublimated into the first fictional literature alongside the sacred religious myths
(de Grazia, 1978, 1984a).
When the heavens were broken open, as by P'an Ku, the Chinese creator god, Super
Uranus appeared in the north, immense and egg-shaped, probably resembling a giant
eye, too, atop the sky. At first the white of albumen, it became yolkred, and
radiated heat. It was probably the primordial light of the beginning lines of the
Hebrew Genesis; as noted above, the present celestial bodies appeared only on the
fourth day of creation.
To the south, less luminous because it was much more distant, was the Sun. There
were now three sources of heat, the magnetic tube (powered by the arc), the Sun, and
most prominent of all, Super Uranus, Depending upon the earthly observer's location,
either Super Uranus or the Sun could be discerned through the thinning gases. In
general, northern observers glimpsed Super Uranus, southerners saw the dimmer but
larger Sun [86] .
During its period of instability Super Uranus erupted regularly. The body of the
star contained electric charges distributed internally to be in balance with the
charge on the surface, which was transacting with the Sun and/ or the Galaxy. The
Sun via the arc had been robbing Super Uranus of electrons for almost one million
years, a process that kept the surface of Super Uranus relatively drained of charge.
Super Uranus' charge-deficient surface could be altered in one of two of two ways: a
sudden influx of Galactic charge, or a short-lived disruption of the arc. Both would
"overcharge" the Uranian surface. The reaction would be to further concentrate the
charges within Super Uranus. When the surface charge again became reduced (which
would happen if the arc suddenly reconnected, allowing a burst of ions onto Super
Uranus) the interior of super Uranus, now overly packed with charge, would respond
by outbursting charged matter into space.
This outburst would not normally escape from the domain of the star which generated
it; most of it would in time be reabsorbed into the star, returning the "released"
charge. Charged debris falling back could help induce conditions for another
electric compression and outburst. And so the star erupted cyclically.
The cycle of erupting away highly charged material and subsequently re-absorbing it
follows directly the notion of a plenum of charged gases around the binary system
itself and secondarily around each charged body of the binary.
The extent of each plenum is determined by the charge on the body it surrounds and
by the charge in the plenum gases. When an eruption occurs the plenum gases increase
in charge and expand their sac. Electric fields are set up which cause charges to
flow, thereby decreasing the surrounding charge relative to that within the central
body. The plenum then begins to collapse, pieces within the sac discharge and also
fall back. In the Age of Urania each body might be said to possess an autonomous sac
and plenum, immersed in the now diluted plenum of the whole system.
The plenum of Solaria had by this time become so tenuous that the individual bodies
had established around themselves electro-spheres - regions of charges, gases and,
from time to time, solid matter. These spheres, or regional environments, were to
their central bodies what the plenum had been to the system, in that they defined
the limit of the body's influence upon nearby matter and charges. Vestiges of the
electrospheres are found today in the electric sheaths surrounding the Sun and the
various planets; the transition occurred mostly in the time of Jupiter (see ahead to
Chapter Fifteen and Note B, fn. 117).
The resorption of erupted pieces occurs so long as they do not exceed a certain
critical size. Judging by today's Solar System, this would seem to be about 22
kilometers in diameter or a volume of about 6 000 cubic kilometers. Pieces that
could not be resorbed could become satellites of their parent body - as had Super
Uranus and the primitive planets - but in Solaria they could be transferred from the
realm of one body to another whenever the two electrical plena involved were
contiguous. In these special circumstances escape was possible; the smaller sacs
could leak gases and pieces into adjoining sacs. This is how Super Uranus bombarded
the planets. Its outbursts electrically charged the Earth's sac and filled it with
debris of diverse sizes.
The cooling of the Earth, noted during the Uranian Period, could be accomplished by
several means. As the plenum cleared, more and more of the arc's energy was
transmitted directly to the Earth without involving the plenum gases as
intermediary. Thus => albedo became more important in the energy transfer. Where
earlier the heated plenum kept the Earth warm, now the light conveyed energy
directly to the Earth. If the cloudy Earth reflected 52% of the radiation from the
arc the Earth would cool to 270 K from its former warmer temperature (see behind,
Chapter Six). Alternatively, if the Earth accepted more than half of the light but
the arc cooled, the temperature would also drop [87] .
In its climactic explosion, Super Uranus ejected a large chunk of its material down
the magnetic tube towards the Sun. This element, to be termed Uranus Minor, was
preceded and accompanied by gaseous blasts and water. Badly out of electrical
equilibrium, both because of the electrical cataclysm which ravished Super Uranus
and because the ejects now followed orbits taking them into regions of greatly
different space - charge, a vast, brightly glowing space-charge sheath surrounded
Uranus Minor as it hurtled towards the Earth (see Juergens, 1972, p12, for a
discussion of these sheaths).
At the time of the eruption the Earth is revolving around the arc, moving counter-
clockwise (viewed from Super Uranus). The globe is oriented with Africa (the old
north) facing the explosion; the magnetic poles lie on the rotational equator,
Greenland leading and Antarctica following.
At this time the Earth had a continental crust everywhere. The continents that
survive today were bunched around Africa, then located at the north rotational pole.
In Figure 27 the land areas of the world today are drawn schematically as they
related in Pangean (all-Earth) times. They accord with the geophysical and
paleontological findings of the continental-drift school of thought [88] . Uranus
Minor, moving from Super Uranus towards the Sun, encounters the outside edge of the
Earth (the Pacific side) in passing (see Figure 28).
An intense transaction occurs between the two. Electrical polarization distorts the
shape of both bodies and their sacs, and the Earth's magnetic axis wrenches out of
line, which causes the world to shudder. The sudden movement loosens part of the
lithosphere; torrents of water (or ice) flow (or slide) across the surface. Fiery
blasts strike the area which is now the West Central Pacific Ocean, opening massive
craters, some deep enough to release mantle material previously thirty kilometers
below the surface.
At perigee the transaction between Earth and Uranus Minor reaches a maximum. The
crust on the side closest to the intruder cracks and fragments. Explosively, as much
as half of the Earth's continental material rises into the sky, leaving exposed much
of the upper mantle. This extraction initiates the reshaping of the lithosphere to
produce the structure we study today. Whereas before this event the entire Earth was
topped by a thick granite layer, basalt was now exposed. In its brief encounter with
the Earth, which we estimate to have lasted many hours, Uranus Minor peeled a deep
swath of crust (and some upper mantle material) from the Central Pacific and to
lesser depth from the great seamount area west of the Americas.
Figure 27. The Surviving Land from the Age of Urania
Prior to the eruption of Super Uranus, which hurled the large fragment Uranus Minor
down the magnetic tube past the Earth, our planet was covered by a complete shell of
granitic crust. Much of that crustal layer was lost when the Earth encountered
Uranus Minor. That crust which remains was once clustered around the ancient North
rotational pole, which then always faced towards Super Uranus. It was ruptured and
rifted by the close passage of Uranus Minor.
Figure 28( a) The Encounter of Uranus Minor with the Earth
Figure 28( b)
The Earth was in orbit around the electric arc at the time when Uranus Minor passed
close by it. Then the Earth's surface was irrotational with respect to the arc so
that one point on the crust (magnetic south) was always leading on the orbit (see
above) and the point on the opposite side (magnetic north) was always trailing (see
over page). Though the crustal arrangement of that time placed the lands
differently, the lands on the present globe, which did not take up their present
positions until after the catastrophe described here, would be oriented as indicated
on figures 28( a) and (b) relative to the arc and the Sun Uranus Minor met the Earth
on the trailing side and departed on the leading side (compare with Figure 18),
tearing away crust and creating the Moon Basin where shown.
The Earth wobbled eccentrically as mechanical, electric and magnetic forces acted
upon it. Surrounding the wounded surface was a rampart of devastated granites.
Within it were thousands of seamounts, unable quite to explode into the sky, and now
frozen like pulled taffy. At its center was an abyssal plain where the surface of
the Earth's mantle appeared scoured of its covering; it was then, and is now, the
deepest basin of the Earth's surface. The blow-off was so great that it pulled the
great central magnet of the Earth 436 kilometers towards it, making the shortest
circle line of the Earth's magnetic field of today pass through the Society Islands.
The Earth's center of gravity was pitched five kilometers towards the great Pacific
depression (Baker, 1954, p5).
In this one brief event, the entire original Southern Hemisphere of the Earth's
crust, was electrically ejected into the sky. The unbonding of the crustal granite
and mantle from the subsurface magma involved a large transfer of energy. If the
inter-body transaction is translated into thermal terms, the heat would have been
perhaps impossible for the Earth to support without vaporizing the biosphere and the
globe itself. About 10 32 joules are theoretically required to peel off the surface
layer of the Earth entirely. Here, over half the crust was ejected, but the balance
was loosened and set into motion.
However, the transaction consisted of a trade of material for electric charge.
Uranus Minor, much more heavily charged, deposited charge upon the Earth. The new
electrical energy was incorporated by the molecules of the Earth. Their internal
(atomic) bonds were stretched. A very large amount of energy was required by the
chemical bonds and supplied athermally [89] by a huge column or front of lightning
bolts blasting a swath into the sky during the pass-by. That heating which occurred
was concentrated at the interface of crust and mantle and at the bottom of the moon
basin. In adjusting its figure following the ejection the remaining land mass
fractured and the Earth expanded by about twenty per cent (de Grazia, 1981; see also
Meservey, p611). This represented a radial expansion of nine per cent and a
corresponding atomic expansion throughout much of the Earth.
The remainder of the continental mass that had covered the Earth fractured into the
complex ocean-ridge and land-rift system viewed today (see Figure 29). The separated
blocks were electrically repelled [90] and squeezed apart. They rafted speedily
towards the Moon basin. Lava welled up from below the fissures and widened them.
Thousands of new volcanoes were instantly activated.
The constellation of fractures exhibited in the world map of Figure 29 probably
occurred within a day's time (de Grazia, 1981; Manson, ch. 4). Tectonic plate theory
today relegates the fractures to a remote unspecified era, with ocean basins always
present. It invokes various mechanisms to accomplish over great stretches of time
complex slow movements of a number of plates carrying continental crust. The theory
is not only unnecessary; it is mistaken on the most obvious criteria. Melvin Cook
(1966, p189), from the perspective of his research on explosives, points out readily
the unified and simultaneous features of the global fracture system, finding in them
what is ordinarily to be perceived in an explosive impact upon a globe. Possibly,
certain minor fractures branched out or lengthened in the following months or years.
Some fractures were not fully consummated, such as the African-Near East rift and
the trans-Asian rift. Others have been covered in part by subsequent torques of the
crust, as in the case of the San Andreas fault, which was buried in the "westward"
movement of North America, or the Red Sea-Adriatic-Rhine Valley rift, which was
partially overridden by the Alps. It will be noted, too, how the Atlantic Ocean
crack probably shot out from an Arctic base, traveled swiftly but against
resistance, and then branched off to circumnavigate the south Pacific area, sending
four continents on their separate journeys: South America, Africa, Australia and
Antarctica.
A deluge of water fell from Uranus Minor as it passed. These waters more than
replaced the water carried away with the lost crust, fell into the hot fissures and
onto the volcanoes blasted into existence at the passage. There the waters exploded,
expediting further cracking of the continents. The world, which shortly before had
been heading for an icy end, now become hot and steamy and threatened by falling
water and rock.
A cubic kilometer of Earth's atmosphere at present contains ten thousand tons of
water. If the Uranian deluges were precipitated by electrical activity of the
Earth's electrosphere (see ahead to Note B), only 540 tons of water per cubic
kilometer would be required in order to achieve the oceanic levels that we estimate
occurred in the Uranian Lunar periods. In the course of a millennium an annual
rainfall of 1.2 meters depth would have descended upon the Earth's surface, a
rainfall that a substantial section of the world's people enjoy today. This would be
adequate to fill the basins up to the continental slopes, about half of the present
ocean volume. Most of the rest of rainfall belongs to the story of Saturn (Chapter
Fourteen).
Figure 29. The Fractured Surface of the Earth
Key to the map:
Following the removal of the Moon from the bulk of the Earth by the action of the
passing Uranus Minor, the surviving broken continental crust of the Earth shattered
and rapidly scattered, taking up new positions around the crater surrounding the
Moon Basin in what is today the Pacific Ocean deep. The troughs, ridges and faults
of the current crust were sculptured as the Moon was torn from the Earth and as the
Earth recoiled and recovered from that devastating encounter with Uranus Minor. The
volcanic and mountainous rim around the Pacific Ocean was created in this same
catastrophe. The most prominent astroblemes were also products of the Age of Urania,
but not all of them were blasts accompanying the ejection of the Moon.
Areas were set on fire. Elsewhere, newly created basins were being paved with
basalt. As floods descended from the high land, they were vaporized on the hot lava.
The water recirculated. Torrents of rain fell upon cooler land, producing another
flood, which, descending, was once more vaporized, and assembled to launch yet
another torrent. The sky remained cloudy while the oceans formed.
With extra charge on the globe, the Earth's volume increased. The continental blocks
fractured and sometimes folded as they conformed to the underlying shape of the
Earth's body, and occasionally as they underwent collision. Thus the geography of
the modern world was established: separated continents, ocean basins, global
fractures and ridges, mountainous ramparts around the Pacific Basin and a global-
circling welt (the old rotational equator), which forms the other great mountain
chain of this planet.
The => Mohorovicic discontinuity, which is found beneath the crust throughout the
world, marks the level at which the ancient crust was served from the underlying
solid. The continents continue to float, moving today ever so slowly, but only
eleven and one-half thousand years ago that motion was initiated in hours and
rapidly completed. Three thousand years later the continents were almost at rest and
located close to where they are now found. They came to a halt because an electrical
equilibrium had been established among them, at both their prows and their sterns
(see Harrison, 1966). The ocean basins by them held water roughly to the base of the
continental shelves. Many seamounts (and present oceanic islands) were exposed and
acquired biospheres in time. But another deluge, the Saturnian (or Noachian), was to
come.
The sculpting of the ocean basins occupied a millennium. During all of this time,
waters continued to descend onto Earth from the sky in rains and occasional small
deluges. Both old and new waters traversed the continental masses in the gorges of
the major fractures, converting them into rivers that poured over the continental
shelves and into the abysses, forming slopes, too, from the large amounts of
detritus that they transported. The slopes were largely formed from broad-sheeted
run-offs from the continental blocks.
Within the basin, the heavy heat from continuous mantle extrusions evaporated the
waters, forming dense clouds that filled and rose above the abysses into the
atmosphere above the continental blocks. The early continents, until eroded, were
large buttes surrounded by the new paved basins located five thousand meters below
the surviving land masses.
There are indications that the drop of five kilometers into the abyss from the
continental shelves was known to the ancients. Ouranos, the Greek Super Uranus, cast
his rebellious sons into Tartarus, "a gloomy place in the Underworld, which lies as
far distant from the Earth as the Earth does from the sky; it would take a falling
anvil nine days to reach its bottom" (Graves, Hesiod a). One notes the gloom (the
dense clouds below the habitable plateaux), the position (below the human world),
the precipitousness (the metaphor of an unimpeded falling object). Ancient sailors
spoke of falling off the edge of the world (a fear also present in the modern
child). The concept of hell, which John Locke said was so persistent that it must
have represented some human experience, may have arisen from the era of the great
chasms; hell is straight down, is burning, is fulminating, is sulphurous. There was,
too, a world of the antipodes that could not be reached, possibly across the abyss
(Dreyer, pages: 7, 37, 213, 220).
At higher altitudes on the plateaux and where the edges of the abysses were remote,
snow fell and glaciers formed. Such appears to be the only scheme by which the heat
needed to raise the waters can be supplied, while an area that can support ice caps
may exist to receive the waters. The old ice-falls had been melted in the lunar
eruption; the new ice persisted until the basins were filled up to the continental
margins, and the ocean cooled; then, in the "Golden Age of Saturn", the ice melted
into the ample basins. Not until the Super Saturn nova was there another "Ice Age".
The disposition of the atmosphere is a crucial problem for our model. The atmosphere
would have been sucked up under a gravitational model, and unquestionably much
atmosphere, and also water, was lost in the eruption into space. However, the
electrosphere was already operative, as indicated earlier, and was ionizing as well
as electrically repulsing, and hence returning, the gases that sought to leave the
Earth.
The reduction in atmospheric pressure was short-term but unquestionably fatal in a
great many instances. Even at the antipode of the catastrophe, the air would have
rushed towards the scene of the disaster. Some help would have been derived from
counter-winds electrically repelled and driven to the antipode. The electrosphere,
containing a mixture similar to, but richer than that of the weakened plenum, would
have originated downdraughts at the antipode. Assuming that the pre-Lunarian
atmosphere was three times the present density at sea level and taking as the short-
term extreme the habitat of people in the High Andes today, the atmospheric pressure
might have been reduced to one-sixth for a short time (see Gray, pp63ff, White,
p763). This would not eradicate life.
The departing Uranus Minor is deflected slightly from its path by the Earth. It then
crosses the binary axis so as to approach the Sun on the forward side (orbiting
directly). Its passage by the Sun causes an electrical transaction which increases
Uranus Minor's negative electric charge and ejects it into an orbit beyond the
surviving binary pair. It now becomes the planet we know as Uranus, or possibly the
planet Neptune (see ahead to Chapter Fourteen, p. 165, fn. 94).
The granite and mantle material removed in the passage of Uranus Minor past the
Earth is strewn along an arc between the retreating intruder and the gashed Earth,
there mingling with ejects from Super Uranus and travelling with Uranus Minor. A
portion of this debris escapes with Uranus Minor, but most of it, amounting to about
one-fiftieth of the Earth's volume, is left behind in the space near Earth. For a
time some of it fell back upon the Earth as stone and dust. The rest, partly molten,
was assembled by electrical pressure into a rapidly cooling globule. The form of
fission of a body in such a manner was foreseen by G. Darwin and Fisher; later Baker
(1954, p20) constructed a simple instrument depicting the process: his drawing of
the critical stage of the fission is reproduced in Figure 31.
Figure 30. Fragmentation of Super Uranus
In schematic form the relocation of Uranus Minor is shown after its explosive
ejection from the solar companion, which to that moment had been Super Uranus but
then had become the smaller Super Saturn. The released fragment, Uranus Minor, first
traveled sunwards along the magnetic tube, where it passed close by the Earth (E),
tearing crust away and forming the Moon in the process. Thereafter, the still
electron-rich Uranus Minor moved into the vicinity of the Sun (S) before escaping
into the outer regions of the system beyond the orbit of the new companion (O),
where it is likely located today as one or the other of the two most distant major
planets.
Figure 31. Fission of the Earth-Moon Pair
This simple diagram illustrates the minuteness of the Moon compared to the Earth's
bulk, despite its having removed half of the Earth's crust when it departed.
A new sky god/ goddess, the Moon, is born, child of Mother Earth, Aphrodite-Urania.
She is worshipped after her father retires from Earth's view.
Eventually the Moon orbited the electrical axis, repelled by its excessive charge to
a greater distance from the axis than the Earth. From its removal as a piece of the
Earth to the present, the Moon can never have been free of the Earth - if it had
escaped it would now be an inner planet of the Sun, on an independent orbit and far
from the Earth. This leads us to conclude that so long as the Earth remained in the
magnetic tube, the Moon remained close by. It orbited then, as it does now, with the
Earth. Though considerably closer to Earth than today, seen only in a daylight sky,
the Moon was not a significant object in the sky. Likely it was larger than the disc
of Super Saturn but it was incomparably fainter. It showed no phases, nor could it
eclipse any body [91] ; it probably was always oppositely positioned in the sky to
the arc and at => quadrature with both of the brighter stellar bodies.
In the period of accretion, debris and lightning would be striking the Moon from the
plane of the swath in large part. Far-flung cultures portray the goddess of the Moon
as a spinner, the first spinner (de Grazia, 1981). In ancient spinning, as in its
modern survivals, threads are held and fed from the one hand to the spindle held by
the other hand (Suhr). The spindle grows fat and round. Such myths may represent the
accretion of the Moon and its assumption of a globular shape (see Baker, 1954, p18).
The process would have endured for generations and would have been most impressive
at first, especially while the Moon was candescent. Afterwards, it may have been
visible only on occasion during electrical discharges.
Tresman and O'Gheoghan quote Midrashim to the effect that the Moon fell, was less
brilliant, "and tiny threads were loosed from her body". Also, "some of her parts
fell off".
The legendary evidence of the birth of the Moon is discussed elsewhere (Darwin p510;
Fisher; Bellamy, 1936, pp268-72, 1951, ch. 16; Baker, 1954; and de Grazia, 1981).
Physical and astronomical evidence is abundant on the manner and recency of the
Earth's parturition and the birth of the Moon. Here we cite only salient examples
from several scientific disciplines.
The Moon's overall density approximates the density of Earth's mantle material; so
it is natural that many scientists have suggested some connection between the Moon's
origin and the Earth's missing crust. The similarity between the chemical
composition of the surface rocks of the Moon and the Earth enhances the
believability of this hypothesis, especially with regard to the amount of the noble
metals - gold, platinum, nickel, etc. (O'Keefe, 1973). That the Moon rocks are more
impoverished in the volatile elements (zinc, cadmium, lead etc.) than Earth rocks
indicates that the Moon material has been subjected to more heating than has Earth
material. The Moon rocks were formed under reducing conditions: ferrous iron is
common on the Moon, while it is rare on the Earth, where oxidized ferric iron is
found (Arnold). If the Moon agglomerates electrically in a depleted plenum all of
these differences are explained. The lunar material is heated as it is wrenched off
the Earth. In space it is dispersed into an oxygen-poor dilute gas, where it
accretes electrically again, liberating heat. The forming Moon is unable to conduct
this heat away efficiently (as had the Earth, which accreted in a much denser and
more electrified plenum at an earlier time).
The Moon's internal structure testifies to the rapidity of its formation (Wood).
Despite a high surface heat flow, the Moon's interior is relatively cool today
(below 1300 K); the Moon seemingly accreted as a conglomerate, like stew chunks in
sauce (de Grazia, 1981). Its sixty-five kilometers of anorthosite crust reveals that
it was melted or, better, metamorphosed electrically, at the time of its
agglomeration. Its over three trillion craters of one meter or greater in diameter
(Short, p48) show that it underwent extremely heavy electrical blasting and debris
bombardment after its emplacement. As a result we are not surprised that some rocks
returned to Earth from the Moon show strong and fairly stable remanent magnetization
(Strangway et al.) despite the weakness of the lunar global magnetic field. If
electrical events magnetized the Moon rocks their in-situ magnetizations should be
quite disorganized, sporadic, and of varied strengths.
Several in-situ observations testify that the Moon's formation was very recent.
Lunar samples do not match modern theoretical expectations about primordial planet
composition (Wood, pp71-5). The oxygen isotope ratio in lunar samples is identical
to that in samples of terrestrial oxygen (Epstein and Taylor). The amount of Helium-
4 (a product of radioactive decay) found in the Moon's rocks is exceptionally low
(Heymann et. al.). Indicative of the Moon's youth (Cook, 1972, p18).
Cracked crystalline surface rocks show evidence of shock metamorphism and rapid
cooling (Douglas et al., 1970). The bombardment has been extensive and repeated,
while some debris is of recent origin (Quaide et al.). Using the conventional time
scale, recency means about one four-hundredth of the Moon's age; using our time
scale it means very recently (de Grazia, 1981; Baker, 1954; Velikovsky, 1969). The
thin lunar atmosphere is accumulating now; gases trapped when the Moon agglomerated
are still escaping from orifices in its surface (Cook, 1972). Periodic eruptions are
reported, notably in the craters Alphonsus and Plato, and within Schroter's Valley
(Menzel et al., p229; Wilkins and Moore, p235, p263). Moonquakes, frequent though
weak, may be taken as evidence that equilibrium has not yet been attained within the
Moon and within the Earth-Moon system (Latham). It is presently impossible, however,
to distinguish which or how much of these several phenomena are attributable to the
throes of the birth or result from more recent encounters between the Moon and other
planetary bodies and comets.
Notes on Chapter 13
86. At some latitudes both bodies were visible, either together or alternately. We
believe ancient accounts of two great lights in the sky refer to this era, or to the
later Saturnian era (before the Deluge).
87. An Earth reflecting 30% of the light and an arc reduced by 32% would also cool
the Earth to an ice-age condition. The actual mechanism by which the Earth receives
its => insolation is open to question. Hanson notes that measurements made from
space have necessitated lowering the Earth's global albedo from 45% to 29%, =
irradiance values to the surface having been raised by up to 27%.
88. It will become apparent that our theory (cf. de Grazia, 1981, 1984b) posits a
continental rapid rafting of a thousand years or so, rather than the usual 200 My
drift.
89. That such an athermal encounter is possible is attested by the survival of a
tree at Lugano, Switzerland, which did not ignite upon being struck by lightning. By
a serendipitous coincidence the whole event was photographed by a scientist
conducting research on lightning (Orville).
90. Each continent is currently located antipodally to an ocean (Harrison, 1966).
91. In support of our notion that the Moon did not orbit the Earth monthly we note
that Vertes has criticized effectively the notion that certain Upper Paleolithic
artifacts were lunar calendars.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART TWO:
DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE GOLDEN AGE AND NOVA OF SUPER SATURN
The great god, Saturn, identified by many names, of many cultures, and often
associated with the planet, which has been known in the most ancient times by that
name, is the son of a god. In the ancient Buddhist liturgy he is called Ravisuta, or
"Son of the Sun". Uranus, by his many names, does not have a father; but he is often
referred to as the father of Saturn, Uranus is killed, castrated, defeated, retired,
or dismissed, and usually it is the work of a Saturn Figure. The physical
circumstances of his end are those that may be associated with a stellar nova, as we
have described it. So, too, Saturn comes to his end in a disastrous struggle,
thousands of years later, in favor of a new planetary god, Jupiter, also called by
many names, and usually made the son of Saturn. There is reason to believe that the
ancients, when they used the metaphor father-son to refer to sky bodies, meant the
most direct and close relationship of one body to another.
Saturn came into his own as king of the gods in the period following the destruction
of Super Uranus and the ejection of the Moon. We have recited only a portion of the
mythic evidence for the period immediately following the rise of the moon god or
goddess; there is little coherent knowledge of human societies of the time.
Thousands of years were required for the reconstruction of the Earth's surface and
the recovery of a biosphere; the possibilities of monumental and record-keeping
cultures were low for many generations. Perhaps the Moon would receive the extensive
and obsessive worship of a great god, or even the great god, for some three thousand
years before Saturn came into his own as ruler of the gods. More likely, we think,
would be an earlier determination that the Moon was fixed and captive, pallid, and
earthly in origin, hence capable safely of dependent status, along with the Earth,
under Saturnian rule. Saturn would have ruled therefore either from 11 500 (or from
about 8 000) down to 5 700 years ago.
The concluding date of 5 700 BP is related to proto-historical times, the time of
the Great Deluge of Noah in the Bible and the First Dynasty of Egypt. The date is
likely to be fixed with exactness someday. A Sumerian prism, for instance, names ten
kings who ruled before the Flood, and says, "then the Flood swept over the Earth.
After the Flood swept over, kingship again descended from Heaven." Wiseman, the
editor of the prism, adds that "there is actually a line drawn across the text to
separate the postdiluvian events from those occurring before the Flood".
At this time, as the Saturnian era moved towards a close, the disc of Saturn
appeared three times larger than today's Sun. Its orbit about the Sun took about
sixty-four present days. Earth was still wheeling in orbit between the Sun and
Saturn, such that from Earth Saturn looked about four-fifths as large as the Sun. In
a time close to three present days Earth completed its circuit about the arc.
Granted an elliptical orbit similar to that for binary stars of 64-day period (note
D), Saturn and the Sun would apparently expand and diminish in size (cf. Talbott, D.
N., p181). With this movement, time-keeping would be suggestible and simple. The
Earth would also enjoy two seasons, cooler and warmer, each of more than thirty days
duration.
Brahma as Super Saturn absorbs, regurgitates and reabsorbs as the ages pass (Mullen,
p15), So does Kronos, identified here with Super Saturn. As with Super Uranus,
Kronos' instability made him less than an ideal father. In Greek myth, the great god
Kronos (Saturn) swallowed at least five of the children born to him out of his
sister-wife Rhea. She then hid her youngest, Zeus, and fed a wrapped stone to
Kronos. When Zeus matured, he led a revolt that ended in the banishment of Kronos,
after he had vomited up all his children alive. The interpretation here is that
Super Saturn was absorbing fragments that remained from the Super Uranus debacle or
ones erupted later by Super Saturn itself. Then during its instability, it exploded
back a number of them, before as a nova it fissioned into four major parts,
corresponding in the myth to Jupiter - Zeus, his brothers Hades and Poseidon, and
Saturn Minor, the distant planet of today.
That Saturn possessed satellites was known to the ancients (Tresman and O'Gheoghan,
p36). That Saturn was regarded as a Second Sun, a Night Sun, is shown by Cardona
(1977, p33) and others. That it was bright is claimed by numerous ancient texts and
authors, surveyed by Jastrow, Mullen, Greenberg and Sizemore, Velikovsky (1973,
1978a), Cardona (1977), Tresman and O'Gheoghan, and Talbott (1980). That it became
exceedingly brilliant just before the Deluge of Noah is implied in Hebrew legends
(Tresman and O'Gheoghan, quoting Ginzberg). One Hebrew source has the star "as
bright as one hundred suns". That widespread cultures held Saturn, the god,
responsible for the Deluge is made clear by several authors already cited. That
Saturn the planet was deemed responsible for the Flood is equally plain (see
especially Velikovsky, 1978a, 1979). Velikovsky appears to have been the first to
claim that Saturn became a nova, an idea that he found buried in Jewish rabbinical
commentaries on the Deluge. That Jupiter was a prime element in the nova and
subsequent events is evidenced in many of the same places; Ea, the Akkadian Saturn,
reproaches Enlil, or Jupiter, for having caused the sky-waters to fall (Mason, p77).
Trisiras, a son of Prajapati and a saintly Saturn figure, was a three headed god
with heads resembling the Sun, the Moon and the fire, which we interpret
respectively as Saturn itself, the celestial crescent and the electric arc. Indra (a
Hindu Jupiter) slew Trisiras with a thunderbolt, whereupon Trisiras' three heads
shone with brilliant energy until they were cut off, and then flocks of birds flew
out of them and his fever left his body.
The powers that acted in the Heavens were manifested to humans amidst increasing
disaster. In terror, self-abasement and pleading, man created a Uranus-Heaven
religion and hoped for cosmic tranquility. Unanimously the legends of the world
acknowledge the human to be an imperfect creation; some have him created more than
once, as for instance, the Olmecs of Mexico; they sensed faults in their
powerlessness against cosmic forces. They projected then retrojected their faults to
the behavior of the gods. These notions of imperfection were indelibly imprinted.
Perhaps never until the past two hundred years did humans believe that they and the
natural environment might be benignly controlled through human intelligence. What
may have most bothered the early humans was their inability to manage their internal
psychic systems. They were interminably made anxious and self-reflective by their
lack of self-control. From their ungovernable alter egos arise the huge variety of
traits and behaviors of the gods; they are artifacts of human conduct analogized to
objective features of the natural environment. In every aspect of nature could be
found some physiognomic and behavioral parallel with the self and with the primary
human group with which the self identified. This intrinsic, practically congenital,
confusion of the inner and outer worlds of mankind was a two way transaction that
led humans to emulate the most extreme and complex manifestations of nature, with
results upon human nature and culture that were in modern perspective often richly
"constructive", but frequently "self-destructive" as well.
When the skies opened after the lunar disaster, the new great god, Super Saturn, was
visible dimly, through the clouds, to Earth's inhabitants. They had already been
"religious" for millennia and might readily once more identify the sky objects with
human forms and actions and project their hopes and fears upon the heavenly objects
newly visible. Magic, spiritualism and animism, which have been regarded sometimes
as substitutes for, and predecessors of, celestial religion, were derivative
accompaniments of the human preoccupation with celestial behavior; they were forms
of homeopathic social medicine for the "great disease".
The first religions were in the broadest sense "monotheistic." [92] Heaven was
worshipped as the active power. As we set forth earlier, from the very beginning,
humans have tended towards a supreme god. The Chinese, with T'ien, may have been the
most persistent in abstracting a monotheistic idea from the Heavens and using it
through a succession of specifically powerful heavenly forces. The I Ching gives
this sequence: the First Principle is Heaven (T'ien) eternally present, chaos
without form; the Second Principle and First Sun, giver of time, called "The
Arouser"; the Third Principle, and Second Sun, an orderer, "The Limiter". "The
arouser" appears to have been both Super Uranus and Saturn, a merging of memories
over time also to be found in other cultures.
Figure 32. The Chinese Craftsman God and His Paredra
Fu Hsi and Nu Kua measure the "squareness of the Earth" and the "roundness of
Heaven" with their implements. The god is depicted enthroned atop a serpent-like
column arm-in-arm with his mate. It is tempting to suggest that this picture
illustrates the situation during the Age of Saturn, with the god-star perched stop
the "fiery" electric arc, which rose above the world and faded in the distance into
the golden sky.
The ancient Persians and others asserted that God created Saturn (whence Saturday)
on his sixth and last day of labor, before resting on the seventh day (whence
Sabbath = rest) (Cardona, 1978a, p34). The implication is that all things - the
separation of Heaven and Earth, the other celestial objects thus revealed, the
biosphere, the advent of the Moon, and mankind - were all accomplished before Saturn
appeared.
Various scholar identify the Biblical Elohim as Saturn (de Santillana and von
Dechend, p146; Tresman and O' Gheoghan; Cardona, 1973a; and others). More likely,
the story adopts the designation of god employed during the Saturnian Age (as for
example, it was assertedly retold by Moses in Genesis). But "Elohim" at the
beginning of Genesis is behaving like the great inactive demiurge brooding over the
Pangean chaos, who then becomes activated as Super Uranus in the troubled phase, and
creates the world, as mankind, born on the sixth day, received and perceived the
Cosmos. Whereupon a more detailed account begins, relating the Hebrew experience
with Saturn as distinct from the more general, aboriginal human experience.
When the gods changed, humans bowed to the changes. This repeated behavior over
thousands of years is a significant motif in religious history. The lamentations
over the death of Saturn were worldwide. Because Saturn "died" in what was an
historical period, although little of its civilization remains, the hysterical and
obsessive mourning shows mankind affected by, not affecting, a real tragedy.
Thousands of years after the death of the second sun and the end of his age, the
Roman government was acting to suppress infant sacrifice to Saturn. The parallels
between Saturn and Christ as a Saturnian figure are numerous: the passion of Christ
is historically and psychologically a re-enactment of the character, the unjust
death, and the resurrection of the god who had died some four thousand years earlier
as Osiris-Saturn. Frequent efforts philosophically to cover over the deep trench of
tradition connecting the two gods have failed to divert the mainstream. Such efforts
have built a distinctive existential character for Christ. The => Age of Saturn in
cultural terms was probably what is usually designated as upper Paleolithic and
Neolithic. It would be the age of Atlantis and other civilizations lost to view in
the disasters that followed.
Saturn, who was generally accredited with bringing agriculture and other useful arts
to mankind, was the first Lord of the Mill, a sky wheel grinding out material and
spilling it upon the Earth-gold, salt, sand, and stones. Before it sank in a cosmic
mael-strom, it ground salt into the sea (de Santillana and von Dechend). The
Saturnian Deluge was caused by a salt-water tree cut down by a tapir, according to
the Cuna Indians (ibid). In Hindu myth, the gods were churning the heavenly waters
and ground salt into the seas (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p39, and see Figure 33).
Salt domes are among the most common of the mineral intrusions that are scattered
over the Earth's surface. Small ones are about one cubic kilometer in extent, but
some are several hundred times this extent. The largest known salt dome is in
Calliou Island Bay, Marchland Louisiana; its size is unknown but it is estimated to
be 43 kilometers long, 20 kilometers wide
and 6 kilometers deep; if so, it contains about 10 13 tons of salt. Globally 950
large salt domes are being used for mining. In some regions these domes are
associated with petroleum and natural gas deposits. Other places have sulfur
deposits associated with the salt intrusions. Since most salt domes have been found
scattered widely from the three major salt-dome fields known today, it is not
unreasonable to think that only a small fraction of the buried salt has been
discovered. These immense deposits of salt in the ground suggest a non-marine source
of all salt. The salt in the seas can be explained in terms of salt falls from
space.
Figure 33. The Churning of the Sea
Vishnu sits atop mount Mandara accompanied by his wife Lakshmi. The mountain of the
world is being spun as the great snake Vasuki is pulled to and fro by the devas
(grasping the snake's neck, to the left) and the asuras (holding its head, to the
right). Together they churn the sea of milk, producing the liquid of immortality.
Unfortunately their churning became so violent that it threatened the Earth,
whereupon Vishnu, as the avatar of the turtle (seen here below the mountain), came
to save the world by assuming the role as its pivot. Still the world was threatened
by the heat of the churning until Indra sent the Deluge from Heaven to quench the
fire. -courtesy Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology
Whence comes "The Golden Age" of Saturn? Saturn is golden. So is the light on Earth.
The interruptions of absorbing the children were spaced out, perhaps half a dozen
marking disasters over the 2 300 years that followed the lunar period. Meanwhile
life on Earth may have been easy in most places. There was no ice age. Travel by
boat was easy, for the breezes were mild. Antarctic may have been mapped in this
age, since an ancient map showing its outline beneath the present snow has been
found and since no later age would have been able to produce it because the
coastline was invisible (Hapgood, 1966). The northernmost and southernmost regions
were quite habitable, even tropical. The continental shelves and slopes had become
livable. There was a plentitude of moisture and all-year warmth. The plenum and
electrosphere were still insulating. Further, Earth was holding its own surface
atmosphere despite the thinning of the plenum under Saturn. The plenum became
increasingly more transparent.
The arc was less brilliant and more intermittent, yet the fire was there, binding
Earth to its great god. Kronos is addressed in an Orphic Hymn as "you who hold the
indestructible bond", while his Babylonian alter ego held "the bond of heaven and
earth" (Tresman and O'Gheoghan, p36). The "central fire" is also represented,
likely, in the innumerable pillars, phalluses, bonds, pinnacles, pyramids, and one-
legged gods (Talbott, D. N., pages: 190, 368, 188). Even the jagged sickle, with
which Kronos castrated Uranus, may have symbolized the electrical axis being severed
from Super Uranus. Manu, a Hindu creator god of the Flood, stood on one leg for
thousands of years, contemplating his world design. All of these images are closely
connected with Saturn, often by name as well as by symbol. Yahweh is imagined in
Jewish legend as radiant atop Mount Zion, and Kronos-Saturn ruled Mount Olympus
before Zeus toppled him.
Super Saturn sat atop the sky, a dull red disc three times the size of the present
Sun. Because of the Earth's offset from the arc, the sub-solar position on Saturn's
face was askew 21 per cent from the center of its disc. The arc impinged upon about
five per cent of Saturn's face. Below Saturn it widened like a tree until it passed
Earth's horizon, where it was something like 15 degrees wide.
The insistent worldwide legendary connections between the Pleiades, the Deluge, and
Saturn as god and planet (Cardona, 1978b) point to the likelihood of the Deluge as
having occurred at the time when Super Saturn had masked this star group, and of the
Pleiades having emerged for the first observable time in the sky at the zenith
following the clearing of this place by the actual bodies and the debris of the
nova. The Pleiades were widely taken to be the remnants of the Deluge nova by the
myths.
The report of Seneca, about Berossus' history, to the effect that when the stars are
lined up in Capricorn, a great flood occurs, can be interpreted to mean that the
Deluge occurred at the time of year when Capricorn was astrologically dominant,
which, in the period when astrology crystallized, would have fallen near the end of
the year. But the end of the year is the end of the Age of Saturn, hence the floods
of Capricorn are associated with the Saturnian Deluge.
Also to be considered is the naming of the large sky area, "the Celestial Sea",
where the two Pisces (the zodiacal one and the southern one), Cetus (Whale),
Eridanus (Styx, the river), Capricornus, and Aquarius are the dominant
constellations. These aquatic images suggest the presence of vast celestial waters,
and their one-time general location. Celestial aquatic motifs are common, as in the
Golspie Stone discovered near the small town of that name in northern Scotland
(Figure 34).
At the moment of the nova the electric arc was interreputed long enough to free
Mars, Earth, "Apollo" and Mercury from their million-year captivity along the axis
of the binary partners. Thereupon they orbited the Sun independently for the first
time, moving along a plane close to that of the old binary. Their new, roughly co-
planar orbits, were similar to, but much more closely spaced than the orbits of
these same planets today [93] .
At the time of its nova Super Saturn broke into at least three major fragments;
these pieces, constituting the present Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, all receded from
the Sun following the fission. Jupiter, the largest surviving piece, took up a
position near the Earth's present orbit; Saturn Minor, the intermediate-sized part,
blew into space beyond Mars present orbit; Neptune receded beyond Jupiter's present
orbit after depositing much water into the Earth's electrosphere [94] . In the
nova, charge was expelled from Super Saturn into the plenum and dispersed in
surrounding space; it was as if the mass of the system had been reduced two-and-one-
half-fold; so, the planetary motions slowed considerably.
Neptune is the Latin identity of the Greek god Poseidon, brother of Jupiter, who
with another brother Hades, helped Jupiter overturn their father in the nova revolt.
Poseidon then was granted sovereignty of the seas and assumed his role on Earth.
Before him there had been Tethys, goddess of the sea on Earth, and Okeanos, god of
the celestial sea girdling Earth. By implication we conclude that Poseidon played a
role in the deluging of the Earth.
Figure 34. The Golspie Stone
An interesting collection of ancient celestial motifs. We find aquatic creatures
associated with the Flood which ended the Age of Saturn; the destroyer god, who
felled Saturn from his perch stop the column at the center of the world; the two
stars connected, representing the earlier state of the world; and the intertwined
serpents, or the electric arc, which was quenched by the Deluge.
Synchrotron radiation emitted by the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus has been
detected and cosmic ray sources have now been associated with these planets. Saturn,
like Jupiter, emits much more energy that it receives from the Sun (Milton, 1978;
Hunt and Burgess) [95] . The heat excess given off by the gaseous planets is an
indication of their electrical nature. The emission of X-rays by a stellar source is
often taken by astronomers as an indication of a very recent thermonuclear nova.
Following our theory, the X-rays emitted by stars and these gaseous planets of the
Solar System come from electrical transactions.
The effects of the deluges of Saturn are a subject beyond the scope of this book
(see Patton, pp51-64; Frazer, 1916). Judging by the civilizations reported to have
been inundated, the fall of waters must have been worldwide and extremely heavy.
Those cultures that disappeared beneath the waters (de Grazia, 1981) are presumed to
have been located at the low-lying coasts of continents on what are now the
continental shelves and slopes. The disappeared civilizations are not the only clues
to how much water was involved. The great river canyons that course down the
continental slopes to the abyss were in existence before the Deluge and were now
inundated and probably greatly eroded, as were all of the valleys on higher land.
The Great Deluge would thus top up the ocean basins of the globe, covering the
continental margins left dry after the Uranian deluges. Not only would more water
fall on the Earth than in the earlier cataclysms, but it would fall in a much
shorter period. If indeed the water came down as the Hebrew Book of Genesis reports,
in forty days and forty nights [96] , then fifty-one per cent of the Earth's water
descended in three and one-half million seconds: 411 tons per square kilometer-
second, 1.5 meters of rain each hour. The whole Deluge would have amounted to a
1.42-kilometer depth of rain upon the Earth's entire surface. Much of this water
would have to drain into the basins in order to deepen the seas by more than two
kilometers. That such a Deluge has dominated the myths and legends of the survivors
is understandable [97] .
Saturn is reputed to have lit up brilliantly and preserved its light for seven days
before the Deluge hit the Earth. This may be interpreted as a set of pre-fission
flare-ups climaxing with the nova that destroyed Saturn. If the Earth were still
only 14 Gm from Saturn, the debris expanding away at 200 km/ s would encounter Earth
in a little more than 19 hours. If the 40-days/ nights period were of present
duration, the problem of depositing so much water on the Earth would be practically
impossible. Millions of heavy cyclones would be needed, even one per 30 square
kilometers all over the Earth. If they were concentrated at the poles by the
electrosphere high above the Earth and funneled down there, the damage might be
less. But then the tremendous erosion would be visible today. We think that a longer
span of time may have been required, and "a day" was a translated memory of a longer
regular interval unknown to us, a magical cipher, or an historical error.
The problem of deluging the Earth is nearly as difficult to cope with as the recent
eruption of the Moon from the Earth. In both, almost unimaginable physical phenomena
must be conjectured. The biospheric aspect, which often comes first to mind, can be
rationalized on the equally incredible capacity of living populations to renew
themselves. Even postulating Manu and his tiny crew or Noah and his family as sole
survivors, a thousand years of exponential growth could fill the land to
overflowing. As with the deluges, one does not have to move far from the extremities
of legend to enter the realms of the possible.
The astrophysical aspect is more intimidating (see Kofahr). To launch the waters and
other debris from Saturn is readily conceivable, given the nova. To guide it and
land it requires the invention of low-probability solutions. Even if the dynamics
thus far presented can be accepted with respect to Earth, how does one explain the
absence of water on Mercury, Moon, and Mars, all of which would have been in or near
the rush of water [98] ? If they were inundated, where has the water gone? There is
almost no sign of water on them, or its having been on them in oceans. Where, too,
is the salt?
Two types of probability occur. The two planets may have burst out of the magnetic
tube ahead of the Flood churning down towards the Sun, whereas the Earth was
entrapped. Or else, the Flood can have descended the tube by a passage occupied at
the moment by the Earth alone. In this case, the Moon occupied a special position
besides, for it was a considerable distance from the Earth towards the perimeter of
the tube. In any case, the Earth would still be luckier than Mercury, or Mars, for
both of these planets have ruined surfaces and no biospheres.
Three different Jewish legendary statements refer to a diminution of the Moon in
size (Tresman and O'Gheoghan). This would occur presumably after the Deluge, when
the Moon followed the Earth out of the old magnetic tube and was repelled by Earth
into a larger, but still captive, orbit. Two legends imply that the stars multiplied
then, an expected improvement of visibility in the star-system sac. The age of
Jupiter, now upon the world, introduced mankind to the light of the stars in the
darkness of the night.
Notes on Chapter 14
92. See the works of Plato, Eliade, Lang and W. M. Schmidt, contrasting with the
popular views of Frazer, Tylor, Spencer and others.
93. See ahead, Chapter Fifteen, p. 174, for the fate of Apollo.
94. The evidence is slightly in favor of Uranus Minor being the modern planet
Uranus, and of the god Neptune-Poseidon being the modern planet called Neptune, a
marvelous coincidence, if true. Should it turn out that Hades is the modern planet
Pluto we would have to consider an unconscious mechanism at work in the naming of
these "discovered" planets.
95. The thermal state of the inner planets is much less clear. There, the radiation
balance is not sufficiently measured to allow any unequivocal statements about the
presence or absence of a thermal excess.
96. The "day" taken here is 86 164 seconds (24= sidereal hours), but would have been
different in those times.
97. The present atmosphere contains 4 x 10 13 tons of water, about 10 000 tons over
each square kilometer of Earth's surface. To hold the Deluge waters the Earth's
entire electrosphere must have been involved. Given its immense volume, each cubic
kilometer of it was still required to hold 637 tons of water and precipitate it at
the rate of 184 grams each second. An inveterate bather might measure the rains by
standing under the bathroom shower for 40 days and nights.
98. Juergens (1974, 1974/ 75) has demonstrated that the canyons and rilles observed
on the Moon and Mars and sometimes accredited to deluge and fluvial erosion cannot
be water features, but probably result from the passage of electrical discharge
currents.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART TWO:
DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE JUPITER ORDER
When Thor, the Scandinavian Jupiter, went into battle, and
would grasp the handle of his terrible weapon, the thunderbolt or electric hammer,
he was obliged to put on his iron gauntlets. He also wears a magical belt known as
the "girdle of strength", which, whenever girded about his person, greatly augments
his celestial power. He rides upon a car drawn by two rams with silver bridles, and
a wreath of stars encircles his awful brow. His chariot has a pointed iron pole, and
the spark-scattering wheels continually roll over rumbling thunderclouds. He hurls
his hammer with resistless force against the frost giants, whom he dissolves and
annihilates. When he repairs to the Urdhar-fountain, where the gods meet in conclave
to decide the destinies of humanity, he alone goes on foot, the rest of the deities
being mounted. He walks, for fear that in crossing Bifr"st [the rainbow], the many-
hued Aesir-bridge, he might set it on fire with his thundercar, at the same time
causing the Urdhar water to boil (Blavatsky).
The numerous electrical aspects of the god are here apparent; "the euhemerization of
electricity", Blavatsky calls him. Lightning is handled by a number of gods in the
history of religion, but all together these are insignificant compared with the
references accorded Homer's "Jupiter the Thunderbolter" alone. It is natural to see
in this literature an exaggeration of ordinary lightning strokes, but we have
already stressed in earlier chapters the cosmic role of lightning-like discharges.
We see in the Universe countless instances of stellar and interstellar binary
currents produced by the discharge of accumulated electrical charges. Also, at any
given time there are several million electrical discharges in the photospheric
region of the Sun, each about one or two thousand kilometers long and lasting ten
minutes (Crew), "Mega-lightning" of hitherto unappreciated voltage has been observed
by satellites in the Earth's upper atmosphere, but has not been detected yet by
ground observation (Turman).
When legend reports the electrical activity of Jupiter the god, it tells of the
electronics of the planet Jupiter. Mountains are leveled or melted, sky monsters
felled, citadels destroyed, the Earth scorched, and armies sent fleeing; all the
work of the king of gods. Every lightning stroke to Earth becomes a theophany, as in
lightning-obsessed Etruria, which gave the name Jupiter (Jove-pater) to the Romans.
The sacred manifestations consecrate the cosmic bolts that were memorialized and
discussed for thousands of years.
The planets, following the interruption of the magnetic tube, were freed. Instead of
wheeling with Jupiter, now the binary component, they orbited the Sun independently,
their motion close to the plane of the old binary - now the plane of the
reconstituted Solar System. In their free orbits the planets avoided one another and
Jupiter because of their electric charges, which produced repulsive forces when they
came into proximity. Regularly they passed through, or close to, the axis between
Jupiter and the Sun. Then Jovian thunderbolts were experienced. These could be the
now occasional visible discharges of the dying binary, catalyzed by the presence of
a charged planet in the path of the discharge; more likely they were locally
generated discharges between the planet and its electrosphere, induced by the
planet's voyage through the electrified region within the invisible arc-discharge
between Jupiter and the Sun [99] . Either way the planet was zapped by Jupiter as
it came into opposition with the Sun. From the Earth, for the first time humans
might see the other planets swinging on their journeys around the Sun.
Planet Jupiter, now viewed as Ruler of the Heavens, struggled to restore and
maintain the arc -- connection to the Sun -- for a time the arc flared with
occasional visible spurts, but mostly the electric connection was dark. It is in
this era, possibly, that the existence of a Counter-Earth was proposed, a dark body
which obscured the celestial fire (see behind to Chapter Six).
Jupiter is the most phallic of the great gods. The association of electrical
stimulation, phallicism, and thunderbolting is strongly linked to the religious
rites in vogue at the time of Jove (Ziegler, pp65-72). Phallic worship is common
among Jupiter-type deities (Tresman and O'Gheoghan). The Amun temples in Egypt are
liberally decorated with images of the ithyphallic god Min. Shiva (the Hindu
equivalent of Jupiter) emasculated himself when the realized that his creative
ability had left him. The analogy of this legend with the end of the visible
electric arc is plain.
The golden Age of Saturn contrasts both culturally and physically with the bright
harsh Age of Jupiter. We must explain brighter skies, a worsened climate, a larger
role for sporadic electrical phenomena, and certain striking astronomical movements
of Jupiter's "Olympian family",
The Earth emerged from the magnetic tube following the Saturnian Deluge (about 5,700
BP) with its rotational axis forcibly relocated.
While in the tube, it was constrained to maintain a magnetic axis along the tube's
perimeter. Freed from the tube, the magnetic axis found a new alignment in the
magnetic field induced by the apparent motion of the charged Sun about the Earth.
This magnetism, albeit weak, established a new rotational pole on the Earth close
to, if not coincident with the Earth's magnetic pole (see Lapointe et al.)
A small tilt and a relatively diffuse plenum made the variations in such sunlight as
was released very noticeable on the Earth in the altered system. Seasonal
differences in the earlier era were minimal compared to variations in climate now
existent on the Earth and during the year. We have already suggested that the first
lines of Genesis move quickly, and possibly in a confused way, from a Uranian
beginning into the Age of Saturn. Similarly, the second and different creation,
which follows a few verses later without evident attempts to reconcile the two
theories, begins in a Uranian setting, of mist without rain, and before agriculture.
Man is made out of earth and placed in the luxuriant Garden of Eden, in an innocent,
proto-human state of unabashed nudity and unselfconsciousness. Man gave names to
every creature, and was given woman out of himself. The tree of life and knowledge,
planted in the middle of the garden, and the four divided rivers of Eden, are firm
symbols of Saturn, corresponding to the electrical axis and the cross-sections of
the Saturn disc. (Talbott, D. N., pp120ff).
Figure 35. Apparent Motion of the Charged Sun about the Earth
Freed from the magnetic tube at the time of the Deluge, the rotation of the
magnetized Earth was brought into alignment with the weak magnetic field generated
by the relative motion of the electrically charged Earth-Sun pair. From the Earth
the charged Sun is seen to flow in a loop around the Earth in one year, representing
an electron current flowing counter-clockwise along the ecliptic (as seen looking
down on the North pole). Such an electron current creates a magnetic field, which
enters the Earth at its North magnetic pole. This field parallels the Earth's
magnetic field. The situation described here initially brought the Earth's magnetic
and rotational poles together. The later quantavolutions separated them again and
tilted the Earth's rotational axis to the ecliptic.
The wily serpent that tempts Eve and Adam is the alter ego of the tree. The couple,
eating the fruit of the tree upon the serpent's persuasion, become fully human, that
is, possessed of self-awareness: "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew
that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons"
(Genesis 3: 7). Thus they also work; they feel conscience already, and the wrath of
the deity for what they had already become, conscientious workers. He evicts them
into a world of shame and toil, far from the sacred tree (axis), the winged, lion-
bodied gods (of the Saturnian symbolism) and the twisting, flaming sword (the axis
again in its more visible sputtering phase). The Earth is now a drier, harsher
habitat, where they had to wear skins rather than fig leaves. It is the age of
Jupiter, and of Yahweh to come. The cosmic thunderbolts of Jupiter function in clear
skies. There is a Jupiter Pluvius (" of the rains") but this is either one of his
many powers (for he is overlord of all) or it is a reminiscence of his having played
a role in provoking the Saturnian Deluge (Mason, pp76ff). The skies are clear
because the plenum has greatly diminished in density; the heavens are transparent
and the stars are seen.
A new ice age may now have begun, centered at the rotational poles. Fossil
settlements of the extreme north have been uncovered that enjoyed a tropical flora
(see Velikovsky, 1955, pp44ff). They probably date from the Saturnian age. The new
ice will remain, advancing and withdrawing on occasions between and during
encounters with celestial bodies, up to the present time. Today we cannot yet deduce
whether the ice caps are increasing or decreasing (compare Kukla and Matthews with
Gribbin, 1976; A. Brown).
The solar year under Jupiter may have had a succession of different lengths. First
occurred the Saturnian year, to which we have assigned a 64-day duration [100] .
Then it increased to 156 days when Jupiter receded. The Mayans possessed a 260-day
sacred calendar that was central to their religious and cultural life, even while
using a more modern and exact calendar (Coe, p9). We attribute this sacred calendar
to the Jupiter-Earth synods of this era, to the time before 4 400 years ago [101] .
At the Saturnian Deluge we suspect the Earth was around 96 gigameters from the Sun.
It moved outwards constantly after that to 107 Gm before the Mercury / Apollo
episode of 4 400 BP, then to 127 Gm as a result of that encounter. In the course of
these changes, Earth's axial tilt was altered again and again [102] (see Dachille,
1963; Warlow), causing glacial retreats and advances in the extreme latitudes at
each period.
The Apollo episode is most speculative. Considering the traits of Apollo, de Grazia
(1984a) associated him with the asteroid belt. We see no reason to alter that
finding now. After 4 400 BP Jupiter orbited within the space of the "asteroid belt"
we know today.
Briefly, Apollo is a great god of the Greeks. His equivalent identities are obscure:
he may be Horus of the Egyptians (unless Amun-Jupiter and Horus are the same). He
owns no planet in late ancient times. He is a psychically remote god, and a god of
plagues and remote missiles in war. He is young and a son of Jupiter. He is wise and
was literally brilliant -- "Shining Apollo."
The envied reputation of Apollo as the shining, "brilliant Hellenic god of peace and
civilization" (see, for example, Grant, p1064) coincides with the idea that he was
destroyed. He could not become even Deus Otiosus, thereby exposing the sad human
experience, howbeit unconscious, that "the only good god is a dead god".
It is conceivable that "Apollo", a planet nearest to Jupiter, in the second
millennium of the Jovian Age, was perturbed and then destroyed by Jupiter's
thunderbolts. Apollo has solar attributes which were in late classical times
exaggerated until he was often portrayed as the Sun, a most unlikely identity. The
shining of Apollo, as of his brother, Hermes - Mercury (de Grazia, 1981) was most
likely occasioned by flare-ups in close conjunction with Jupiter, prior to the
outburst that destroyed the planet. Apollo, the god, often clashed with his father.
To some (Ovenden, 1972), the asteroids look like bits of the residue of a large
planet, long ago exploded [103] . The time of the "asteroidal explosion" is recent
(Van Flandern) even under long-time reckoning; it is very recent if placed in the
context of Greek legend. In this context, several events coincide and relate to the
larger theory of Solaria Binaria.
Apollo has a younger brother, mischievous Hermes (Mercury), who is a swift, winged
messenger of Zeus (Jupiter) and the gods, who is connected with electricity
(especially as Thoth, in Egypt), the creator of illusions (mental problems), and is
god of thieves, travelers, and healing. He, too, becomes a great god, known to many
- East Indians, Mexicans, Teutons, and others. Though Yahweh reflects Jupiter, he
also has qualities of Thoth; Moses was probably a devotee of Thoth, and acts towards
Yahweh as Hermes towards Zeus (de Grazia, 1983a).
Astronomically, Mercury would have been next to Apollo, would have acquired
atmosphere and debris from Apollo in the latter's outburst, then lost charge and
would have been displaced towards the Sun. In so doing, he would have passed by
Earth and Moon, inflicting considerable damage upon both. The lobate scarps and
shallowly scalloped cliffs that run for hundreds of kilometers across Mercury's face
suggest shrinkage of this planet after formation (Murray, p42). In contrast, Earth,
Moon and Mars seem to have expanded (ibid., p41). In electrical terms, Mercury has
lost charge while the other three bodies have gained it, consistent with the orbit
shifts proposed in this book.
If indeed "Apollo" was destroyed, it must have been by Jupiter, which absorbed much
of Apollo's material, so that a dearth of debris orbits in the space inside
Jupiter's position today. Mercury seems to have escaped the full wrath of Jupiter;
it was not destroyed, But it lost instead its superior orbit, beyond the Earth, and
was flung much closer to the Sun. Like the Moon and Mars, it bears the marks of its
devastation. Its surface is saturated with craters, strikingly similar in density of
numbers to those on the Moon and Mars (Hammond). A "discrete terminal episode of
bombardment" of catastrophic proportion has been proposed in an attempt to explain
the similar surface destruction on these three astronomical bodies (Murray, pp45ff).
Though some of these craters were caused by impacting bodies, especially during
interplanetary encounters, they were in the main the result of electrical
bombardment. The thick clusters of craters found even in heavily cratered terrains
(Oberbeck et al., p1697) bespeak genesis by electrical rather than heavy-body
impact. The crater lumps noted at the site of the lunar rays on the face of Mare
Cogitum were the earliest for which a bombardment hypothesis would no longer avail
(Lear, p43, p38). Yet, besides Juergens (1974/ 75, II. 28ff), only Pickering has
forwarded an electrical explanation for cratering.
During changes in orbit, electrical transactions on an enhanced level are induced.
Unless a body is protected by an extensive atmosphere, and today none of these are,
surface damage will result whenever electrical currents flow to or from them
(Juergens, 1974, I. 21-3). Too, if the transactions are of great intensity, even the
presence of an atmosphere will not guarantee immunity. When Mercury moved inward
past the Earth it was severely damaged, both by its change in orbit and by its
direct transaction with the bodies it passed.
Even Mercury's present orbit is a mystery. According to gravitational-tidal theory
the planet's axial rotation should long ago have been locked to give Mercury one
hemisphere in perpetual daylight, the other in darkness [104] . The discovery that
Mercury rotates three times over two orbits of the Sun has evoked remarks like "this
is amazing" (Asimov) and has led theoreticians to postulate that the planet has been
in orbit in its present position for less than six hundred thousand years (Gold,
1965). The state of astronomical and geological time-reckoning is such that six
thousand may be read in place of the longer time (de Grazia, 1981, ch. 3).
Jupiter, like his father and grandfather, became a kind of deus otiosus, already
majestic and less active in the Homeric Wars of Troy. There was no longer a close
presence; philosophy and literature might usurp the regions of near space with
abstract principles and metaphors. But among scientists, today, Jupiter has suddenly
recovered some of his legendary features. Astronomers for some time have considered
this planet to be a dark star (Newcombe). That it radiates considerably more energy
than it receives as sunlight has more recently led to speculation that it is a yet-
to-be-born star. Both views keep alive Jupiter's stellar nature long after it has
ceased to be visibly stellar.
Today the clouds above the surface of Jupiter are very cold (150 K) yet the planet
is very active electrically (Sutton, Gurnett et al.). Jupiter's "magnetosphere" is
enormous: if it were optically visible, its size, viewed from the vantage-point of
Earth's orbit, would be comparable to the disc of the full moon. The ion and
electron currents detected within this magnetosphere represent radiation levels
which would be fatal to humans (Panagakos and Waller, 1974, pp15ff). The radio
noises generated within this region are received at the Earth, as are "cosmic rays"
(mainly protons) of Jovian origin. Jupiter is, so far, the most demonstrably
electrical of the planets. Jupiter is like a miniature Solar System, with its
planet-sized Galilean satellites, its asteroid-sized satellite family and its
entourage of comets. Everywhere the electrical imprint is there, and not always just
by implication.
The three inner Galilean satellites, Io (resembling Earth's Moon in size), Europa
(about nine-tenths of the Moon's size), and Ganymede (eight percent larger than
Mercury) orbit in 1: 2: 4 resonance. When any two meet on one side of Jupiter, the
third is located oppositely behind Jupiter or at quadrature to the pair (see Peale
et al.). The resonance is seen less clearly in the motion of the fourth satellite,
Callisto (slightly smaller than Mercury).
The surface of each of these bodies is distinctive (see Smith, B. A. et al.,
pp934ff). Io, seemingly, is close to being molten. It lacks craters, but shows over
a dozen caldera-like scars, which were likened to active volcanoes when an eruption
was observed during the fly-by of the Voyager 1 spacecraft (Morabito et al.). An
electrical flux-tube through which a current of millions of amperes flows between Io
and Jupiter (Stone and Lane, p947) has been linked to Io's eruptions (Gold, 1979).
The Voyager 1 spacecraft was aimed at this flux-tube (Krimigis et al.) as it
encountered Io. It missed the tube by seven megameters in what was labeled a
navigational error; but more properly, in our opinion, the cause of the miss was an
electrical perturbation (here a repulsion of the spacecraft by the tube).
The persistent connection, by the flux-tube, between Jupiter and its satellite, Io,
is one of the last sites of cosmic thunderbolting between these two bodies has been
known for several years since the advent of the radio telescope, when strong radio
bursts which correlate with Io's position about Jupiter were detected (Dulk, p1588)
[105] . That a passing spacecraft was located advantageously to photograph the flash
of one of these discharges was happy happenstance. The glow was interpreted by some
experts as evidence of volcanism. Apparently, to think that we have witnessed
directly the fire of the gods, a cosmic discharge, would seem to be too frightening
(Juergens, 1980, p74).
Jupiter discharges only to Io today, but its repertoire and gamut may have been more
extensive not too many centuries ago. Photographs of Europa show it to have lobate
scarps resembling those on Mercury (Smith, B. A. et al.). Perhaps Jupiter zapped it,
causing it to shrink upon loss of charge. Callisto, the outermost of the four, is
one of the most cratered objects in the Solar System (ibid), likely the result of
thunderbolts striking it. Ganymede, the second closest of the four, shows a banded
surface, pocked with ancient craters, then overlaid with younger bright-rayed
craters, which stand out prominently (ibid.): distinct electrical scars resembling
the rayed craters of Earth's Moon (also seen on Mercury), which Juergens (1974/ 75,
II. 28ff) ascribes to cathode behavior when interplanetary discharges occur.
Additional description of Jupiter's electrical nature, especially as it affects the
asteroids and comets, has been afforded by Milton (1982). The present behavior of
the dark remnant of Super Uranus is, in sum, fully in keeping with the pure
electrical theory of the Solar System and the historical reconstruction of Solaria
Binaria.
Notes on Chapter 15
99. Today, when planets pass one another in orbit geomagnetic disturbances are noted
(Jacobs and Atkinson).
100. The Saturnian year has been assigned cognizant of the requirement that the
solar "mass" declined at the time of the Deluge (see Chapter Fourteen, p. 165).
101. Jupiter then orbited the Sun in 390 days while the Earth orbited in 156 days,
and so the Earth crossed the Jupiter-Sun axis every 260 days.
102. The North Rotational Pole has had possibly three earlier positions, in the
Yukon, in the Greenland Sea, and in Hudson's Bay (see Hapgood, 1970).
103. Nieto notes that such an explosion, which left d‚bris estimated at up to one-
tenth of an Earth mass from a planet whose bulk Ovenden assumes is 90 Earth masses,
would not likely have left its d‚bris exactly at the place which satisfies perfectly
the so-called Titius-Bode "law" relating the planetary distance. This law, as we see
it, is merely an expression that the planets repel one another. Nieto cites Napier
and Dodd in arguing that such an event is almost impossible to reconstruct using
gravitational, nuclear or chemical interactions, neither, apparently, having applied
electrical theory to the problem of planetary repulsion. Had they done so, it
follows that the insertion or removal of a new celestial body simply causes a
compensatory adjustment in the orbits of the others.
104. The great eccentricity of Mercury's orbit would at best have the planet
waggling, or liberating much more that the Moon does as it orbits the Earth.
105. The inner three Galilean Satellites moving in resonance, as noted above,
modulate the intensity of radio emission from Jupiter at wavelengths of the order of
a decameter (Lebo et al.). Since the commensurability is probably due to electrical
effects, the modulation is understood, using our model.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART TWO:
DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
VENUS AND MARS
It is no longer fashionable to believe that Venus and Mars are beautiful bodies,
with some congenital blemishes. Like Moon and Mercury, like Earth itself, they
shriek of more recent disasters. The major question now is " How recent is
'recent'?" We address the question to their peculiarities of motion, position,
composition, and behavior.
Myth and legend (in its deliberate attempts at science) afford voluminous material
about both planets, their transactions with each other, and their encounters with
Moon and Earth. Research of the past generation has evidenced that the planet Venus
dominated the human cosmogonical mind in the years between 3 500 and 2 000 BP and
that the planet Mars entered upon the competition to catastrophize the human mind in
the latter 800 years of this period. Venus had hundreds of names and identities,
many of them secret, sacred, and obfuscated. For example, the Hebrew word "shakris"
means the Evening Star, Morning Star, to sacrifice, to kill something, to make
sacred.
Logically, one initially seeks information about the first appearance of these
celestial bodies; when were they born? In the case of Venus, legends of the Near
East, Greece, Rome, the Teutons, the Hindus, and the Meso-Americans seem to speak of
a special time of birth of a deity with a homologous syndrome of traits (Velikovsky,
1950).
Although the name "Venus" may not originate directly from "venire" (" to come"), as
Cicero would have it (Lowery, Grant), it may well emerge even more significantly
from Venus, which Bloch translates as "blooming nature", hence, as we see it,
something new-born and rapidly expanding. The lotus and lily, two life forms
suggestive of blooming cometary images, are employed in widely separated cultures as
Venusian symbols [106] .
Clearly conformable to an astronomical operation is the birth of Greek goddess
Athene, who sprang fully armed with a shout from the brow of Zeus (Hesiod b). The
Hindu Devi is remarkably similar in the commotion that she causes when born
(Isenberg, p90). Various studies analyzed by de Grazia (1981, 1982a) set the time of
her birth near 3,450 BP, in accordance with older studies by Velikovsky (1952, pp1-
53, 98-101). The time coincides with the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt under
Moses, an event so fraught with catastrophe that it remains the substratum of the
Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions.
If Venus was erupted from Jupiter, it conceivably burst from the disturbed area of
the Great Red Spot. Although not demonstrable, this is hypothetically feasible. It
was Jupiter's greatest discharge, its last attempt to rid itself of ions and gain
electrons. It succeeded; it retired; and its offspring was unleashed into the inner
Solar System, where all massive fragments had gone hitherto.
Unlike Uranus Minor, Neptune, and possibly Pluto, Venus was of low electrical
density and fell victim to encounters with Earth, then Mars, and remained within the
inner circle of planets. Both the Earth and Mars took electrical charge from Venus,
not without extensive physical "damage" to themselves; they both moved away from the
Sun after their encounters with Venus (Ransom and Hoffee, Table 1).
Venus was not rich enough in electrons to be coveted by the Sun. By the legendary
and historical evidence, it took hundreds of years to achieve a "safe" orbit from
where it would not venture close enough to Earth to endanger it and cause electrical
damage. Until then, it may have threatened the Earth about every 52 years. During a
seven hundred year period both the Jews and the Meso-Americans observed a great
"Jubilee year" on those occasions; the inference from the holiday is that the proto-
planet, still behaving as a comet and undergoing continuous electrical transaction,
was due to arrive in the vicinity of Earth but prayerfully would design not to
destroy the world. It is significant, as one of numerous details in the Venus
mosaic, that the American Pawnee Indians until a century ago celebrated a Venus
festival on each occasion of the reappearance of Venus, sacrificing a virgin to the
star. But many another celebration of Venus could be cited.
Granted that history and legend impart an aura of youth to the planet Venus, one can
search for and find confirmation of youthfulness in the present state and observable
behavior of the planet. We cannot do more than summarize here the debate upon the
question, which has involved leading figures in Astronomy and Physics (see de Grazia
et al. 1963; Talbott et al., eds., 1976; Ransom, 1976; Goldsmith, 1977; Greenberg et
al., 1977, 1978; and many others referred to in de Grazia 1984d). We let the reader
appraise the arguments dispassionately with the caution that theory must always bow
to the demands of direct observation. We advance the following points in respect of
the anomalous nature of Venus when viewed from the standard cosmogonical model, but
implying the recency of Venus and its electrical nature in consonance with the
thesis of this work. The 925 K surface temperature measured by landed space probes
has not been explained satisfactorily (see for example. Firsoff; Velikovsky, 1978b;
Forshufvud; Greenberg, L. M., 1979; Morrison) by any theory other than recent and
continuing electrical transaction. The observation that the lowest thirteen
kilometers of the atmosphere are glowing (Panagakos and Waller, 1979, p3) and that
lightning occurs in the Venusian atmosphere (Taylor et al. ) encourage us in our
view that electrical currents flow between Venus and surrounding space. The two
localities which were photographed show evidence of recent surface devastation.
Seemingly the surface of Venus is similar to those of its neighbors even though the
latter lack atmospheres (Ksanformaliti et al.; Florensky et al.).
One of the major surprises greeting the explorers of Venus and the theorists who
welcomed their data was the demonstration of the slow retrograde rotation of the
planet. Several non-electrical explanations have been offered to explain how Venus
might have reversed its original forward rotation (Singer, 1970; Ingersoll and
Dobrovolskis; Kundt). In a two-planet encounter involving electrical polarization
(which induces aspherical shapes onto both bodies) strong "tidal forces" act and can
alter spins, or flip planets over, as Warlow shows. The five bodies of the inner
Solar System exhibit a spectrum of spins and orientation, running from fast-direct
(Mars and Earth) to slow-retrograde (Venus), with Mercury and the Moon in between,
Given a number of encounters among these five bodies over the past several
millennia, many combinations of rotational alteration must be expected: it is
probable that none of the spins are virginal.
The atmosphere of Venus presents another type of problem. Its carbon dioxide
composition is like that of Mars, unstable over a long time due to photolysis by
ultraviolet radiation. That most of it has not reacted with the exposed surface
rocks is termed "surprising" [107] , possibly Venus' atmospheric gases have
recently been modified.
The chemistry of the deep and dense Venus clouds has been inferred only by indirect
evidence despite the passage of several spacecraft through them. Above the clouds,
which seemingly insulate the planet, temperatures resemble those found at comparable
altitudes above the Earth. Insolation and heat radiation from the clouds do not
betray the hellish heat that was discovered below. Even at the base of the cloud
layer (which is twenty kilometers thick), temperature, pressures and winds remain
Earth-like (Burgess). It is the descent through the remaining forty-nine kilometers
that confounds expectations and confuses the instruments of the descending space
probes (making some of them inoperative and the data from others uninterpretable):
here Venus does not resemble any environment yet penetrated by instruments. We find
a murky and stagnant inferno under crushing pressures many times greater than those
on Earth. There, lightning occurs frequently (Taylor et al.), indicating an
electrical instability in excess of that found on Earth, and an electrical glow,
noted above, permeates to the bottom of the murk.
Even the edge of Venus' sphere of influence has produced the unexpected. Venus is
only trivially magnetic; yet its interaction with the solar wind produces 80 percent
of the effect generated by the three-thousand-times more strongly magnetized Earth
(Russell, C. T. et al., 1979). Since Mercury, whose magnetism is similarly
miniscule, also interacts strongly with the solar wind (Ness et al., p480) we are
drawn to conclude that the interface between planets and solar wind is electric,
rather than magnetic. The bow wave in front of the planet and the long tail in the
wake of the planet represent the junction of two electrospheres: the solar wind
flows on one side of the junction and the planet driven ions and electrons flow on
the other side. Electrons traversing this junction behave differently at Venus (and
Mars), for there they are slowed, rather than accelerated as happens with Earth,
Mercury and Jupiter (Simpson et al: Wolfe et al). Electron-deficient solar wind
atoms seemingly penetrate and are absorbed by Venus' upper atmosphere (and Mars'
surface). The magnitude of the effect indicates that Venus is farther from
equilibrium with its surroundings than are the other planets. This finding may be
the "Rosetta Stone," telling us why near Venus' surface the heat is infernal. Any
unequivocal evidence of disequilibrium tells us that Venus is indeed young (Van
Flandern) [108] .
Earth's history of the period around 3 500 BP, so far as it is known, provides proof
of extraterrestrial damage. In this respect, the following propositions have
garnered enough probative support to be acceptable as leading hypotheses [109] .
1. Astrosphere:
the skies were disturbed and celestial motions were reportedly irregular.
Astronomical alignments of before this age are out of line with references of the
period following. No temple can be adduced whose orientations have remained the same
through this time.
For instance, the second rupestral temple at Wadi es Seboua( s) in Upper Egypt was
originally orientated before 1 500 BC from its rear, through its portal, via a
faraway mountain saddle to the winter solstice bearing 30ø 9' 0" South of East. It
was destroyed by fire. Much later it was excavated and rebuilt. Again it was
orientated to the winter solstice, this time, however, to 35ø 49' 12" South of East
(Roussel).
Possibly a block of the Earth shifted northward or else the axis of the Earth
tilted; both are possible, and each may have contributed to the need for
realignment.
2. Atmosphere:
There were radical disturbances and some lasting changes in atmospheric electricity,
radioactivity, temperature, winds, climate, and solar radiance. The Book of Exodus
can be read as a meteorological journal - one encounters electrostatic phenomena,
gales, dense clouds, a unique darkness, falls of manna (compound manufacture in the
atmosphere), dense rains of stones, fire (often apparently electric), a mass of dead
quail (driven down by electrical storm and hurricane winds and said to be poisonous
to eat), and radioactivity (see de Grazia, 1983a).
A sharp rise in C-14 levels occurs about now (and at the time of the Mars incursions
700 years later) (see de Grazia, 1981). It is doubtful that C-14 is a valid and
reliable clock, since its formation and absorption rates are so easily altered by
changed environmental conditions, and so evidence of this nature, though favorable
to the hypothesis, must be discounted.
3. Geosphere:
Every geophysical process gives evidence of quantavolutionary stress. Widespread
earthquakes are part of the destruction of towns to be referred to below. There
occurred "a major westward shift in the Euphrates system of channels as a whole
during Kassite times" (Paterson) (of this age, we believe). A set of natural
disasters plunged the Harappan culture of India into a fatal decline now too.
4. Biosphere:
Unusual biological behavior occasioned by habitat disturbance and environmental
stress is evidenced. The behavior of animals during the Plagues of Egypt is well
known and not to be dismissed as a myth: it is typical of well-observed disaster
behavior (Galanopoulos and Bacon, p192-9; Lane). In the Black Sea, a large belt of
coccoliths at the bottom returns a 35-century-old Carbon-14 date at a level below
the sea floor [110] .
5. Ekosphere:
All human settlements suffered destruction or damage from natural causes. In one
study, we read, "In the middle of the second millennium BC the ancient cities of
Southern Turkomenia declined and were abandoned by the inhabitants. The South
Turkomenian civilization perished at about the same time as the Proto-Indian ... and
the reasons are still unknown." (Kondratov, p164) Schaeffer's survey of some 40 most
important archaeological sites in the Near East arrived at the same conclusion for
the same time [111] .
6. Historiasphere:
All contemporary accounts or chronologically assignable legends dealing with the
period mention a general natural disaster. The prime case is the Bible. The Pallas
Athene instance is also referred to. The Ipuwer papyrus has strong support now as an
eyewitness account of the catastrophe ending the Middle Bronze Age in Egypt
(Velikovsky, 1952, pp22-9; Greenberg, 1973; Sieff, 1976, p14; Bimson).
7. Anthroposphere:
Every culture-complex changed markedly. We have mentioned several major
civilizations which declined sharply or fell - Egyptian, Indian, Kassite,
Turkomenian, and others of the Near East. One might add the Minoan of Crete and the
Chinese. Social organizations, religions and modes of life were altered. A corollary
is that no god of before 3500 BP remained without change of status or serious
accident, citing the advent of Athene and the Mosaic renewal of Yahweh as examples.
8. Holosphere:
In summation of the foregoing seven propositions, we may assert that all spheres of
existence quantavoluted about 35 centuries ago. Nor does any sphere change
independently of quantavolutions in other spheres. Since all spheres are changing, a
general cause must be sought. There can be only one necessary and sufficient cause
of the set of quantavolutions, which must be a very large body encountering the
Earth. By observation and later commentaries, cometary behavior is indicated.
Nothing but a god-like comet could have produced the phenomena of 3500 years ago.
It follows, finally, that every institution, behavioral pattern and natural setting
that exists today, if its history is complete, will reveal an inheritance of effects
from the (Venus) quantavolution. The de-traumatizing of the human mind by designing
and propagating new models of natural and human history would appear to be a
necessary preliminary to peace and progress. For the later time, about twenty-six
centuries ago, the Mars case offers a similar set of propositions, although the
evidence argues for a level of destruction appreciably lower than that obtained form
he earlier Venus-Earth encounter [112] .
Around the solar year 2776 BP, human activities related to celestial disturbances
were generated respecting Mars, as well as Venus, and are notable in the Near East
and Mediterranean world (Velikovsky, 1950, p265ff). Enough subsequent benchmarks
were provided by legends and practices for Velikovsky to surmise that a large
heavenly body, apparently Mars, was threatening collision with the Earth at fifteen-
year intervals. The Mars encroachments may have been initiated by Venus, which,
pursuing an ever-shortening orbit, perhaps encountered and displaced Mars from its
earlier orbit between the Earth and the Sun (Rose, 1972).
The Romans were Mars-worshippers par excellence, and the legends, rites and early
reports that tie Mars to the history of Rome are not to be disregarded;
"archaeological and epigraphic discoveries" continue to demonstrate that "the
legendary guise of the traditional material actually masks a real foundation of
authentic events" (Bloch, 1085).
By contest with Venus, Mars seems to be an old god. Much less is made of his origins
and birth in the Mediterranean world. When he bursts upon the world scene in the
eighth century BC he is already well known. Least personable of the Olympian
deities, Ares (Mars) is portrayed as a ruthless warrior. Hercules seems to be one of
his more interesting identities. New militaristic nations, particularly the Romans,
the Assyrians, and the ancestral Aztecs, forged empires under his inspiration. The
Roman dedication to Mars is well known. He was believed to be father of Romulus,
their founder. In the old calendar they named the first month after him.
The Romans irreconcilably claimed both Aeneas, Prince of Troy, and Romulus as their
founder. Aeneas was, and is, placed in the twelfth or thirteenth century BC with the
Trojan Wars, by older scholarship. Recently the Wars have been brought into later
times, along with Homer, who sang of them (de Grazia, 1984a). This is but one step
in a reconstruction of chronology that eliminates the several centuries of a so-
called Greek Dark Age and pulls the disastrous collapse of the Mycenaean
civilization down to the eighth century as well (Isaacson). Roman legend has Romulus
and Remus (abandoned and miraculously suckled by a wolf in their infancy) [113]
founding a town called Rome, which Romulus rules until he is lofted into the air,
possibly by a cyclone, to join his father, Mars.
It seems to us reasonable that around this time, Aeneas and his band of experienced
and cultivated Trojans might have impressed themselves upon, or been welcomed by,
the local Latins of the new town, and perhaps even helped by their neighbors to the
North, the Etruscans, who themselves were of Anatolian origins.
It is an age of destruction and movement. The powerful nearby Etruscan state was
staggered by natural disasters and a decline. According to Pliny, their city of
Volsinium, where stands Lake Bolsena today, was destroyed by a thunderbolt. Both
Mount Vesuvius and Mount Etna underwent => Plinian eruptions around the same time.
Many peoples were on the march or fleeing -- possibly the Etruscan elite had not
preceded Aeneas by long. They were from the general area of Ilium (Troy). Southern
Italy and Sicily were being heavily settled by Greeks, in trouble themselves and
profiting from natural disasters that were besetting the earlier inhabitants. And at
that time the Dorians (Heraclids, sons of Hercules-Mars) were moving in upon the
hapless Myceneans.
All of these loose connections and temporal references need a thorough analysis;
indeed, we require nothing short of a total review of the most ancient history,
legends, and the records of excavations. Even then the human record, like the fossil
record, is scanty. One may hope for, but not expect, that the thousand-to-one chance
will occur, and that a tablet or papyrus describing clearly the behavior of the
planet Mars in these times will be found. The earliest Etruscan, then Roman,
calendar was of ten solar months. That the later twelve months alternated at thirty
and thirty-one days does not fit the present lunation, which is better suited to the
29-and 30-day alteration used in all surviving lunar calendars. The indication is
that Mars disrupted the month in its transaction with the Earth and/ or Moon.
The Aztec Mars was Huitzilopochtli, born of Mother Earth from a ball of humming-bird
feathers that fell from the sky. His color was blue, his totem the eagle, and his
weapon the blue snake. The interminable human sacrifices of the Aztecs were in his
name or to the Sun in his name; the Sun, "the Eagle who rises", was believed to
require the hearts of an unending stream of prisoners-of-war if he was to remain
constant in behavior. The High Priest of Huitzilopochtli was called Feathered
Serpent, priest of Our Lord; but "feathered serpent" is rendered Quetzalcoatl, who
at a much earlier time was the ruling deity of Meso-America and was identified
unfailingly as the planet Venus by many scholars.
The Assyrians of the eighth and seventh centuries, "like the Romans, those other
stepchildren of Mars, and more than the Hittites, its victims, had a lively
reverence for the planet Mars: 'Nergal, the almighty among the gods, fear, terror,
awe-inspiring splendor', wrote Essarhaddon, son of Sennacherib." Evidence of
physical destruction by fire and earthquake is abundant everywhere in these years,
and it was "beneath the exploits of Mars ... that Assyria marches to world power",
Sieff (1981) declares. Patten et al. argue that the Assyrians timed their major
offensives to coincide with cosmic approaches of Mars to profit from the physical
disorder and consternation of their enemies.
In general, the same hypotheses that we stipulated earlier for the Venus encounters
may be translated for and applied to the Mars encounters seven centuries earlier.
That is, we can adduce some evidence from around the world of deep disturbances in
the six spheres and of their interconnections in the holosphere.
Ancient astronomers and writers appear to have had no difficulty in considering (or
perhaps they were really reflecting upon) historic encounters governing the planets;
yet we can observe in their own times the strengthening of three psychological
defense mechanisms that made historical reconstruction involving quantavolution
difficult: denial and suppression of memory, religious and literary sublimation, and
abstract philosophy [114] . Modern cosmogonists, sternly trained in the principles
of uniformitarianism and gradualism under a very long whip of time, are loath even
to consider large-body departures from presently observed motions. And it is true
that the constraints on motions required by strict obedience to such physical laws
as the principle of conservation of angular momentum are formidable; immense forces
must be invoked from somewhere so as abruptly to alter the motion of bodies. Calling
upon gravitational force, as this is presently perceived in science, requires
"impossible" conditions even if an encounter seems "reasonable" to expect.
However, if the moving bodies are charged and are transacting electrically, many
"surprising" and selectively violent alterations can happen. The observations by the
ancients that passing celestial bodies appeared like the objects we, today, classify
as comets are understandable. Juergens (1972, p7) has shown how comet-like behavior
(and appearance) results when astronomical bodies move quickly from a region with
one level of electrification into a remote region differently electrified. Milton
(1980/ 81) has generalized Juergens explanation to apply it to other "non-
gravitational" celestial motions. Encke and later astronomers have noted with
surprise how cometary bodies sometimes alter their angular momentum in seemingly
sporadic episodes (Sekanina). By this point in our study of Solaria Binaria, we
should not have to digress further in order to establish the capabilities of
electrical motions.
We can go further. The Moon has undergone its tribulations whenever the Earth has
been engaged. Legends, and myths of Moon encounters with Venus and Mars, are at
least as numerous as those involving Earth alone. Documentation has been presented
elsewhere.
Juergens (1974, 1974/ 75) has analyzed reports of various disparities between
surface features of Moon and Mars, and explained them as effects of anode and
cathode behavior that would be excited in close encounters. He has suggested, for
instance, that some of the hill ranges of the Moon are so morphologically
anomalistic as to represent a job of "electric welding" done by Mars [115] . To
extract from these hills and from the canyons of Mars comparable material is
presently impracticable, even though we may conceive of chemical tests to apply to
the material thus obtained.
Juergens has gone further in the investigation of electrical encounters between Moon
and Mars. On the assumption that the ray-surrounded crater Tycho (the most prominent
feature on the Moon under high-angle lighting, that is, near Full Moon) could have
been blasted out of the lunar highland rock by an electrical
explosion liberating almost 10 17 megajoules of energy and requiring a transfer of
10 11 coulombs of charge between the Moon and Mars, Juergens sought a suitable anode
site on Mars' surface which might receive this discharge. He found a likely receptor
in the mountainous feature called South Spot (now, Arsia Mons). He writes,
this spot is an enormous pit 140 kilometers across at the crest of an impressive
17 kilometer rise from the floor of the Amazonis basin to the west.
He observes that this volcano-like structure has no known counterparts on the Earth.
Tycho also represents a lunar high point: it is some 1.2 kilometers above the
hypothetical lunar sphere. The electrical connection between this feature and the
Martian South Spot could have resembled Figure 36 just before the discharge
occurred.
Figure 36. The Electric Field between Mars and the Moon
During the close passage of Mars and the Moon, circa 27 centuries ago, devastation
was produced on the surface of both bodies, the result of interplanetary discharges
across the gap between the two bodies. Here we see the electric field lines (arrows)
and the lines of equal electric potential (variously dashed) prior to the breakdown
that produced electric discharges from the Moon (the cathode) to Mars (the anode).
The outer equipotential depicts the sheath boundary between the electrosphere of the
charged bodies and the interplanetary plasma.
-- courtesy of the estate of Ralph Juergens
Juergens' analysis might well serve as a launching platform for decades of detailed
studies, using a quantavolutionary electric and recent-time model of each planet's
topographical peculiarities.
As with Moon and Mars, so with Venus and Mars. perhaps, in the end, we shall come to
regard a famous scene of the Iliad of Homer as an eyewitness account, garbled, to be
sure: that is where the goddess Athene, archetype of planetary Venus, engages in
awful sky combat with the god Ares, who is recognized as the planet Mars.
Athene drove her chariot towards Ares, bane of mortals, and drove her spear deeply
into his belly. Thereupon arose a huge black cloud, and he bellowed like 10 000
warriors and fled into the high heavens.
Some 2700 years later, the United States of America sends Mariner 9 into space and
photographs the most prominent feature of Mars, the Coprates Canyon complex. It is a
12 megameter line of seemingly extruded mountains, enormous beyond anything on
Earth, leading into a canyon 3,600 kilometers in length, 500 km. wide, and 6,100
meters deep, ending in another string of great volcanic outbursts. Some 8.5 million
cubic kilometers of rock have disappeared. The wound stretches across half the
circumference of the planet.
Allan Kelly has offered a scenario. The total eruption
is a product of the same event, when some very large comet or other massive
intruder from space passed too close to Mars .... This intruder literally sucked the
lava from the interior of Mars to form the huge volcanoes .... As it came closer it
caused a tremendous bulge, miles high, that burst open along the top and spewed out
lava and great chunks of Martian crust; much of this material followed the intruder
into space.
There is no evidence of water erosion of the steep stairs of the canyon, no
sedimentation, delta fans or stream beds cutting the lengthy lips of the wound. The
intruder, be it Athene, Ishtar, or Venus, both repelled and implanted charge onto
the defenseless Mars. Leaders of lightning from Venus incised the masses that had
assembled in a belt of Mars along half its girth. In the ripping blast that
followed, Mars flung them upon the intruder, and, lighter but more heavily charged,
withdrew. So the aforesaid "garbling" of history lay partly in not perceiving that
Mars laid a mass upon Venus and that the greatest spear thrusts of lightning were
exchanged beneath the dense cloud that poured from Mars' wound.
Notes on Chapter 16
106. The lotus was used earlier in imagery portraying the central arc of fire
arising to Saturn, which probably lent force to the Venus symbolism on the logic
that the electric arc, thought to be lost, now reappeared, freed to roam the
heavens.
107. On Earth the sea water contains 98% of the total potential atmospheric carbon
dioxide as dissolved gas (Plass; Sundquist et. al.). The carbonate rocks of the
crust have locked away most of the potential supply of this gas.
108. Van Flandern, in a letter to C. L. Ellenberger.
109. From a paper by A. de Grazia, 1980, to the Society for Interdisciplinary
Studies in London. Published in de Grazia, 1984c.
110. But this is subject to questions concerning all C-14 dates before 500 BC
(Blumer and Youngblood).
111. Here we use the traditional Exodus date for the corresponding end of the Middle
Bronze Age rather than the date, about 150 years earlier, used by Schaeffer.
112. This is expected because Mars is smaller than Venus. When Mars "struck" the
Moon the damage was very great.
113. The wolf (cf. Fenris in Norse myth) is often a Mars symbol.
114. Aristotle (Metaphysics); de Grazia, 1977, 1978, 1981, 1983a, 1984a; Stecchini;
Velikovsky, 1982.
115. Personal communication to A. de Grazia.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART TWO:
DESTRUCTION OF THE SOLAR BINARY
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TIME, ELECTRICITY AND QUANTAVOLUTION
With the model of Solaria Binaria constructed here along the lines of short-time
electrical quantavolution, we have presented physical and cultural evidence of
several major historical happenings, as well as some lesser events that need not be
summarized here.
1.
The succession of great gods in human history coincides with a succession of ages of
destruction and renewal that may tentatively be numbered at seven. These are carried
in Table 6.
2.
Human nature originated abruptly with a complex culture in the first age of binary
instability, precipitated by electrical and hormonal changes, and displaying anxious
self-awareness and a grasping for self-control.
3.
The Moon was ejected from the ancient southern hemisphere (the modern Pacific Basin)
later in the same period in an electrical encounter with a piece of planetary debris
originating from an explosion of a star that we call Super Uranus.
4.
The planets have assumed their present order in the past few thousand years,
responding to a principle of mutual maximum repulsion.
5.
The Solar System sac and the plenum which it contains are now so enlarged, and hence
distant from us and dilute, that they have been overlooked by observers. The binary
electrical axis has been diffused into a pervasive solar wind, which permeates the
planetary plane. The once-substantial binary partner is dispersed into at least a
dozen sizeable fragments and myriad fragments of smaller debris. All of this has
happened in fourteen millennia.
6.
All major chemical and biological developments occurred in a period of a quarter of
a million years at the beginning of Solaria Binaria. The number of species peaked in
the period of Pangean Stability and has been steadily reduced by catastrophes.
7.
The planets and the Sun are accumulating electric charge and have separated greatly,
whereupon their ability to discharge (take charge) from one another is diminishing
with time. If the trend continues without sudden galactic interruption, the planets
will disappear upon attaining the higher level of charge found in the Galaxy
surrounding us.
Contemporary cosmogony may be said to lack a binary model for solar and Earth
history, and this we have attempted to provide with Solaria Binaria. We have
conveyed it by means of a short time chronology, a concept of quantavolution, and a
fully demanding theory of electric behavior.
Several major observations promoted consideration of the Solar System as a binary
development. A growing realization that our star system is embedded in a Universe
largely composed of multiple star systems led us to match known characteristics and
behaviors of these systems in their varied stages of development with our own system
as it might have been, is and might become. Evidence mounts, too, that planet
Jupiter has stellar traits, as have, less obviously, the other major planets.
Exploration of the inner planets, not excepting the Earth and Moon, reveals the
progressive destruction of their surfaces over time. Understandably , conventional
cosmogony seeks to fix the destruction in a convenient episode close to the birth of
the Solar System. However, the evidence speaks not of a day's work of a passing body
four aeons ago, but rather of the normal work expected of a binary system.
Furthermore, ancient observers and philosophers who were neither primitive nor
naive, an who were also reporting the ideas of other experts of hundreds and
thousands of years before them, affirm that the bodies of the Solar System and the
stars changed their behavior and their motions. These men were cognizant of, and
disciplined by, religious systems that were sky-obsessed, and which moved
continually between celestial behavior and mundane behavior, in supreme efforts to
let happen on Earth what happened in Heaven, and vice versa. As we have reviewed
their ideas and reports, coupled with evidence emerging from legends and
archaeological excavations, we found reason to think that they might be living in a
world that was strikingly different from our own and that was recognizably a late
phase of a stellar binary system.
The prospect before us, then, was to understand an ancient science and tradition
which had large heavenly (god-like) bodies hovering over the Earth in what today we
would classify as a synchronous orbit. If the Earth were locked between the partners
in a binary, much of what the ancients spoke of as their own experiences, or related
as the experiences of their ancestors, makes sense.
By no means were their ideas purely deductive. They recited experiences; they made
empirical statements; they claimed knowledge of a world into which the human race
was born. They discussed a set of events that should occupy, by temporal schemes in
vogue today, millions (if not billions) of years, and that treat matters such as the
acquisition and transformation of the Moon and the recession of the planets deeper
into space.
As soon as we began to draw upon ancient opinions concerning cosmic events, we had
to take a position respecting chronology. In this we were encouraged by the binary
concept itself to call time into question. Binary systems offer evidence of great
forces operating over short times to produce large effects. They illuminate
shortcuts in the creation of the raw materials for planetary, atmospheric and
biological development. As they transact, the large bodies separate and fragment
within the system, creating and destroying worlds while retaining their parts. It
may be fair to say that only a binary model can supply those scientists --admittedly
a small minority -- who are inclined to shorten natural history with an adequate
theoretical instrument.
The binary model suggests and may even require, a short-time scheme for natural
history. A short-time Solar System requires high energy and precise interventions at
levels of nature ranging from the Galaxy to the atomic nucleus. It is specifically
this sort of intervention that is evidenced time and time again in natural history.
All "absolute chronometries" become variable in a quantavolutionary world. The
rampant inflation of this century, which has expanded the time scale for the
lifetime of the Universe from 40 million to 80 billion years, may end in a
catastrophic implosion.
As if their technical difficulties were not sufficient to disable long-time
chronology (de Grazia, 1981), ancient human voices seem to testify against it. These
earliest humans unmistakably assert, among other things, that Heaven and Earth
separated, that suns appeared, that gods fought in the skies and invaded the Earth,
that the world was repeatedly built and destroyed. They are neurotically obsessed
with all celestial bodies and motions, and engage in all known extremes of behavior
in imitation and appeasement of the behavior observed in the skies.
It is not possible to claim that this is primate activity, nor hominid, nor that it
is primitive, nor finally that it is a collective psychosis of early civilizations.
Modern social psychology and psychiatry can document, and even replicate, such human
behavior today. The earliest cultures, those that are "guilty" of this behavior,
invented social organization, agriculture, manufacturing, science, and the arts. To
think that they could do all this without a firm "reality principle", as Freud has
termed it, must be in error.
The skeptic of our interpretation may be reduced to postulating that "illud tempus"
must have been exciting and stressful, but could not be so very exciting and
stressful as they would have us believe. Reasoning similarly, one could assert the
contrary: the real foundations of the ancient excitement and obsessions must have
been even worse than we are given to believe, because the ancients were used to
disasters and hence were less traumatized by them; "war is hell", but less hellish
to old soldiers than to recruits. It seems to us that both a priori views -- that
the ancients were excitable or that they were blas‚ -- may obstruct the necessary
work of delineating, bit by bit, the experiences of the ancients from the
conglomerated assemblage of fragmentary records, legends and geological and
archaeological facies, and then exposing them to analysis in the light of the
sciences today. A persistent theme of the ancient voices is quantavolution, that is,
that the world and all that is in it owe most of their changes to forceful torsions
and saltations. That quantavolution plays a role in the theory of natural and social
science has never been denied. But the role has been grotesquely reduced by ignoring
it and stressing evolution, by consigning manifestations of it whenever possible to
times beyond mind, by framing scientific principles in prejudicial terms, by
associating quantavolution with disreputable or outmoded religions and scientific
beliefs and by unconscious editing of the evidence.
To our view quantavolution affords an instrument for scientific inquiry as useful as
and perhaps superior to that allowed us by evolution. We find that the morphology of
the Earth and the patterns and compositions of the skies bespeak quantavolutions. In
biology, we see in the decline of evolutionary power over time, in the absence of
transitional types in evolutionary branching, in the waves of extinction of species,
and in the failure of evolution to provide an internal guiding dynamic, sufficient
reason to promote the concept of quantavolution.
The guiding dynamic for quantavolution, whether in biology, geology or astronomy,
may be electricity, a "strong force" that has been generally accorded a weak place
in most sciences. For several reasons, we believe that electricity is the necessary
and sufficient impulsion of cosmology. We noticed that a strong force is needed to
accomplish change, whether in biology or astrophysics. Basically, electricity is to
"gravitation" (if such exists independently of electricity) as 10 36 is to 1.
The behavior of stellar bodies, including the Sun, can be described in electrical
terms. The composition of "space" is a plenum of charges and ions, field and
currents, winds and relatively stationary matter, of orbiting bodies shifting orbits
as they transact, at times attractively but usually repulsively.
The fact that electricity is present in all matter, and an aspect of the existence
and activity of all matter, presents us with the opportunity to study all matter and
motion in an electrical perspective. Electrical attraction and repulsion seem to
operate simply and flexibly in cosmology as well as in microbiology, and can be
accommodated to the concept of inertia, the two together constituting a powerful
instrument for the analysis of nature.
Finally we would point out one more helpful attribute of electrical theory. Invoking
electricity enables us to avoid the mechanical blasting, usually required of
gravitational and explosive mechanics, that brings inordinate destruction and
thermal excess to situations where we seek quantavolutionary change with a maximum
of selectivity and minimal mechanical bursting.
Despite their ubiquity, electrical phenomena have been isolated from the rhetoric of
causality. When treated, they have been allowed as only secondary or even tertiary
effects; instead mechanical and gravitational processes of enormous magnitude are
postulated as the forces playing the primary (causal) role. Sometimes magnetism
(usually not observed directly) is seen to play an intermediary, or secondary, role
in the deduced causal train which leads to the observed effect. But our outlook has
changed. Once practically dismissed as inoperative in celestial matters,
electricity, together with electrical effects, has increasingly been recognized to
play a role in cosmic actions.
In every natural and biological process -- creation, accumulation, structure,
function, storage, dissipation -- electrical theory is at home. The smallest
observable or inferable operation of a molecule, and the largest explosion of a
nebula, can be referred to the unified language and lawful behaviors of electricity.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART THREE:
TECHNICAL NOTES
TECHNICAL NOTE A
ON METHOD
Scientific method goes far beyond such tasks as washing test tubes antiseptically or
inventing a better particle shield. It is more than a logical or mathematical
calculation. On any question of importance, as here in cosmology, it invokes a
sociology of science and a philosophy of being and change.
In the famous Piltdown Hoax, a deliberately buried modern brain case and orangutan
jaw were exhumed in 1912 and pronounced an exciting discovery in human evolution
(see Johanson and Edey, pp77-83). Most scientists, led by an authoritative English
group, assigned to the discovery an age of half a million years and Piltdown,
England, became a sanctuary of anthropology for a long generation.
Harry Morris was a bank clerk and amateur archaeologist. he collected "eoliths",
artifacts of the Neolithic period. But his finds were rejected and ridiculed. The
hoaxer of Piltdown had cast some eoliths among the relics; suddenly these were
received as paleoliths and respected as part of the Piltdown assembly. Morris wrote
letters accusing Dawson, the discoverer and a likely culprit, of fraud. To no avail.
In 1926 Edmonds published a geological map of the area of Pilt-down, which placed
the gravels of the discovery site in the upper Pleistocene of fifty thousand years
ago, one-tenth of the age assigned to the hoax material. This was not noticed until
1937 when Oakley, doing fluorine research on the Piltdown bones, discovered flagrant
discrepancies between the supposed parts of the same being. Finally, in the
nineteen-fifties, the hoax was exposed (Weiner, p19).
For us the most important lesson of this case and similar ones rests not so much in
the immorality of the hoax and cover-up, with their prolonged damaging of scientific
anthropology, but in the ever-present sociological process, which here demonstrated
how authority in science has the same kinds of effects as it does in religion and
politics - to turn attention from anomalous facts, to block inquiries, to
discriminate against outsiders, and to maintain and boost reputations.
These effects are normal to authority and countervailing to the also normal
productive effects of authority in organizing work and maintaining morale. Embedded
in the social process, scientific method is fully susceptible to fashion, also.
Fashion is a modern guise of authority - there are fashions in religion and
politics, too. it impels scientists to seize enthusiastically upon directing
hypotheses as truths that justify a monopoly of attention, making work difficult for
others concerned with conflicting hypotheses. Recently, a colleague, James
Christenson, who had worked with the 1980 Nobel-award-winning Cronin-Fitch
experiments in particle physics, reflected that they indicated nature to be biased
in favor of running forward in time. For a generation, highly touted theory had
worked upon the hypothesis that "time" was neutral to direction, contrary to human
mental expectations. He went on to say that the "big bang" theory of the origin of
the "expanding" universe should not have been implicated in these varying
experiments. "The Royal Academy made a big deal out of the cosmological stuff
because it looked like astrophysics. That's purely speculative and involves an
unstable proton." Scientific models of time and motion continually change in these
years, often with only the slightest evidence, but pretending a great deal of it.
In 1980 an interdisciplinary conference at the Field Museum in Chicago devoted
itself to examining what some members called "macroevolution" and we have called in
this book and elsewhere "quantavolution". The proceedings were not to be published,
but the thrust of the meeting was publicized as denoting the prominence, if not pre-
eminence, and even necessity, of geosphere and biosphere changes, of abrupt, large-
scale, intensive events. The new stress is interpretable as a veering towards, and a
cautious detour around, the barricaded door of scientific catastrophism with an
ultimate crashing through the gates of extra-terrestrialism.
In hundreds of cases since 1942, when a coded message was flashed from Chicago that
"the Italian Navigator has landed", scientists have uncoordinatedly begun to tap
into the paradigm that looks upon nature as quantavolutionary. In all of these
cases, we may perceive that a brilliant research technology is at work, a technical
methodology operating with a great many electro-chemico-mechanical devices, but also
that this technology inherently must depend upon the ability to ask questions and
make mental combinations that position the Universe in new ways, whether examining
nuclear particles, cell functions, organisms, or gross shapes of the landscape and
skyscape. The theory of Solaria Binaria, typical of cosmology, depends for its
success upon fashioning an appealing and effective combination of the advanced
technical methodology and the guiding questions and scientific imagery of the age.
The Scientific Reception System Like laymen in a court of law, scientists who cross
disciplinary boundaries are chagrined to discover that in another scientific
jurisdiction their "best" evidence is inadmissible. For reasons similar to those of
a court of law, and with consequences that are often acknowledged by the court
itself to be dysfunctional as well as functional, evidence must be limited to
certain kinds, pre-processed in a certain manner, and presented in a certain way. To
all else, the court is determinedly and deliberately blind.
In schools of law, realization of this large fact of the preeminence of legal
procedure can be traumatic to the naive beginning student. In schools of science,
the same pre-eminence of procedure will often cause the same shock in the student,
but is mitigated by the more confident assurance of the teaching authorities that
the process is fully rational, not mythological or conventional in any way or form.
The scientific petitioner, assuming that he has a truth which, if properly heard,
would be acknowledged, may try to win his case by several strategies. He may fashion
his evidence so as to be heard in the court - framing it as a hypothesis,
eliminating value-judgments, quantifying its procedures, obtaining expert witnesses,
publishing related material in a most reputable journal, and putting himself forward
in academic regalia.
Failing to win a subsequent judgment, the scientific petitioner may resort to a
court of different jurisdiction, another discipline - history of science, say,
rather than astronomy. Or he may appeal to a higher court, the cosmological and
philosophic jurisdictions, for instance. If these resources are denied him, or give
judgment against him, he may seek to replace the judges (as for example, Franklin
Roosevelt did with the U. S. Supreme Court), or to create a new court (as Courts of
Equity were established to give justice in cases unframable for ordinary judicial
consideration).
If rebuffed in these attempts, or if his creations fail him, he can go to "the bar
of public opinion", where by an adequate display of persuasiveness, power, and
intelligent support, he may intimidate or enlighten the judicial institutions, and
obtain in one way or another a rehearing or a favorable verdict that is masked as a
rehearing.
Finally, in a revolutionary setting, and with the justification that the system is
too rigid for reform, he can try to overturn the juridical order and replace it by a
new juridical establishment operating under new rules for the admission and hearing
of cases and evidence.
Probably most scientists who have had occasion to test the reception system of
science, and whom repeated frustration has not reduced to emotional confusion, will
recognize this order of possibilities in pursuing the truth as they see it.
They might also acknowledge that in the past half-century the reception or court
system has been elaborated ingeniously, if unconsciously, to provide a modicum of
success to everyone - so that there are more judges than petitioners, and a court
for every conceivable case and procedure. The bureaucratization of science in
academia, government and corporations promotes such a development. This tends to
trivialize the caseload of all courts, and sends up a miasma of mutual deference to
ward off critics. The resulting rigidity tends to create a revolutionary opposition
from the start, a point that has evaded most writers seeking to explain the plethora
of anti-scientific books and movements. It is not too far-fetched to compare the
situation with that in worldwide politics that has produced so much terrorism.
COSMOGONY: A GHOST FIELD?
In the present work, we have directed ourselves to the discipline, or court, of
cosmogony. This, we might think, is logical, since the work concerns ultimate causes
of the physical and biological world. Unfortunately, however, the field of cosmogony
hardly exists. Such is indicated, for example, in the latest (1974) Encyclopaedia
Britannica, where neither "cosmogony" nor "cosmology" is allowed a place between the
substantial essays on "cosmic rays" and "Costa Rica". Further, in a mere several
paragraphs of the "Macropaedia" (vol. 3, pp. 174-5) we are led to perceive these
subjects as special areas of astronomy (the "big bang" hypothesis, etc.) or of
mythology and ancient speculations about the Universe.
Now are cosmology and cosmogony offered, much less required as subjects of study in
universities; exceptions are rare and usually to be found in schools with a
religious bias. Writings on cosmogony are likely to run off the pens of elderly
astronomers, "born-again" physicists, and uncomfortable priests. A discipline
without a method is a risible contradiction in terms, but such happens to be the
situation.
Since the court of cosmogony is largely imaginary, we may expect an ad hoc panel,
drummed up from various professions, to sit in judgment on our work. For their
troubles they will find little that can be termed a cosmogonical method. Rather,
they will find in one place the methodology of spectroscopy, in another place that
of microbiology, then again that of Egyptian mythology, and now, too, that of
theology. It is not because we possess any distinction in these, or in other fields,
that we treat of them, but because of the broad and general nature of our problems
and of our desire to be as denotative and technically correct as we can be.
At the same time, as must benefit topics so large and fundamental, we avail
ourselves of the general operational logic that is accessible to every educated
person when working upon any subject whatsoever. We regret, as much as every last
reader, the paucity and unreliability of data - in astronomy and physics, we hasten
to interject, as well as in mythology and the history of science - and that
therefore frequent speculation is necessary, although controlled to be sure, up to
the final leap. By way of consolation, one of the auxiliary functions of our study
may be to bring to our readers a poignant awareness of how speculative indeed is the
basis of the sciences that are concerned with our subject matter.
Thereupon one may appreciate why we must concern ourselves with the simplest of
logical and psychological operations in a work of the highest scientific
pretensions. For example, the important idea that the Greeks and Romans named
planets to correspond to the rank order of importance of the gods is realized only
after prolonged study. Saturn, as the retired god (Deus Otiosus) of a planet, is
second only to Jupiter in size. But how could the ancients have known this without
telescopes?
And why would Saturn then be made "father" of Jupiter? Jupiter, the largest planet,
is king of the gods, wherever his name or a version thereof is employed. Then come
the children, Mars, Mercury and Venus, the others (Neptune, Uranus, the asteroids,
and Pluto) being invisible. Mercury (Hermes, Thoth) is more important, earlier and
absolutely, than Mars, even though it is smaller in the sky. This we think is
significant.
Striking, too, is the widespread ancient insistence that planet Venus, the brightest
and most conspicuous starry object to the eye, is an offspring of Jupiter; for its
size and brilliance should have identified it as the ruler of the planetary gods.
The significantly larger-sized Sun and Moon are part of most religious, but have not
received over the past several thousan years the frenzied and obsessive worship of
the others. The Earth, of course, as Mother Goddess, closely identified with the
human race, related as a being to, but was not placed in, the category of planets.
The recency of Venus is suggested; also, one may surmise that the order of the
planets and gods has been overlooked because observers, believing Venus to be a
primordial planet, would not notice this coincidence. Thus several simple facts can
lend their weight to our theory.
Another example occurs from ordinary psychology. Obsessiveness (and compulsiveness
associated with it) is a common behavior. In the history of religion (and what is
not associated with religion in earlier times?), obsessive-compulsive behavior is
the main trunk of the human mind. Furthermore, this obsessiveness pursues a direct
line of extraterrestrial concerns, such as we have incorporated into this book and
elsewhere (de Grazia, 1981, 1983b, 1983c, 1983d). Yet many scientists and experts,
in putting aside their own subjectivities so as to pursue objective, value-free
truths, put aside the subjectivities of their patients (the myth-makers and myth-
preservers ) and discuss the infinitely varied product of the mythic mind as if it
were bubbling up randomly and without reference to objective reality.
Human obsessive-compulsive behavior has causes; it differs from the compulsive
instinctive reactions of animals; yet it does not come from a mental tabula rasa. It
is both logically and psychologically proper to descend the trunk of the human mind
in search of those causes until one finds at its roots events adequate to have
brought about a heavy dedication of mind and culture to them. Insistent rites,
pronunciamentos, testimony, and affirmations demand the recognition of these events
as the peculiar causes of compulsions. We think it more plausible than man was
watching a sky model and emulating it than that, say, a hominid, who mumbled words
and killed his kind, should become casually interested in the sky and use celestial
imagery to describe his behavior.
The Humanist-Scientist Divorce In the absence of a field with its special jurists,
and of a guiding methodology, the often-decried misunderstanding between the
sciences and the humanities is sure to come to the fore. There is no barrier to the
negatively conditioned response of physicists to the humanities and of the humanists
to the claims of physics (1984d).
An historian of science, Livio Stecchini (1978, p117) has written appropriately:
Most readers of science, except for the very top layer, reveal themselves as being
naive realists without any knowledge of scientific epistemology. An expression of
this is that some of them declared that Velikovsky's earlier activity in neurology
and psychiatry disqualifies him from discussing question of cosmology. However, it
was just from an interest in neurology and psychiatry that Kant moved in his
investigation of the phenomenology of space and time, which is the foundation of
non-Euclidian geometry and Einsteinian physics....
Snow, Polanyi, Barzun, Conant and others have taken their turns at deploring the
misunderstanding. Curricula are reformed to correct it. Yet in continues unabated.
The negative conditioning separating these large groupings of savants grows out of a
tendency, in the first place, to define one's field in terms of one's special
interests, these not necessarily constituting the general interests of the field. A
common pattern of individual behavior in both groups is to proceed by an ever-
narrowing path towards the proof of a special theory; any cracking of the frame of
the theory will being a heavy cost of retracing the path and finding another or a
broader way. Hence even an extended approach within the field is not to be
countenanced. Only under optimal and rare conditions, too, does a modern discipline
possess clearly defined goals, consequently, intra-disciplinary frustrations are
common, as paths without ends are pursued, whereupon, in a typical response to
frustrations, scientists will reproach out-side fields for the faults that they dare
not denounce in their own fields.
Inasmuch as internal confusion is a rather general state of affairs in a field of
knowledge, it is ordinary for scientists, seeking an opinion upon a matter where an
outside field intrudes upon their own, to seek out authorities in the intruding
field to obtain opinions concerning the intrusion. However, the very fact that they
are challenged in their own field by someone in another field suggests that this
person is a maverick from the other, and increases the likelihood that, when they
approach the authorities in his home field, they will receive an unfavorable account
of the maverick. For instance, authorities in mythology regard legends as expressive
of a culture and of some historical value; but they exercise the same control over
legendary testimony as do their counterparts in geology and astronomy over the
evidence of these latter fields. Hence, it is not especially useful to inquire of
them concerning events that not only they themselves deem improbable, but also which
they themselves have already heard from geological and astronomical authorities to
be impossible. So the vicious circle is set up.
This happens even with "depth" psychology. Jung ends with mental archetypes, Freud
with the oedipal complex. These are myths, scientific myths to be sure insofar as
they are objective in their formulations, which advance evidence, but such myths are
as far from reality as the creation myths of the tribes of Borneo, not to mention
those of the Bible. Conversely, should archaeologists or mythologist have the
temerity to ask astronomers whether the Moon could be young or geologists whether a
great land might be inundated, they can be fairly sure of a negative answer.
We stress that on many facts and principles of cosmogony one has to be especially
careful of what authority to interrogate. All fields of scientific study employ
fictions -- abstractions, concepts, metaphors, models, and probabilities. All fields
of study have private languages, which, useful as they may be to insiders, tend to
persuade outsiders of a grasp of reality that may be quite weak.
With such conditions prevailing in the field of cosmogony, a method is proper whose
premises and goals are clear, whose terms are defined, which offers proof from the
"best" evidence available, and whose propositions fairly reflect and summate all
"good" evidence from whatsoever quarter or, lacking means to formulate all of it,
admits the exclusions and justifies them on methodological grounds.
The method may be called a "model" when the integration of hypotheses is such as to
enable the behavior of a part to be predicted from the behavior of the whole and
vice versa, "missing parts" to be deduced from described parts, and the whole to
operate as an intelligible system through time.
In sum, the procedures demanded by scientific method are clear and accessible, but
misunderstandings among the sciences are psychologically and materially indulged. In
cosmogony, the situation is grave regarding clarity and accessibility of materials,
as well as in psychological and material inducements to discord.
PHYSICS AND LEGENDS
Usually "misunderstanding" between "humanists and scientists" is especially heated
on current topics such as euthanasia, crime, nuclear disarmament, vulgarization, and
the like; yet nowhere is the malice of natural science towards the humanities so
readily vented as when legends are taken seriously. At the risk of controversy , we
must nevertheless stress some congruencies between natural science and mythology.
Initially we may compare the structures of legend and science. Any topic of legend
can be a topic of science, and vice versa. A legend is an observation or a set of
them; so is science. Legend states its observations in human language, rich in
metaphor, and carries them orally from one generation to the next and, later, in
writing; science seeks non-metaphoric, denotative and quantitative language, and
records its observations in information storage and retrieval systems, Legend seeks
to retain the functions of moral teaching (" should" and "ought" are persuasive,
while "must" is a punitive "should"); science seems to limit itself to precise
descriptions and observable relations among events. Legends refer to
anthropomorphized sources; science to abstracted forces; both refer, overtly and
covertly, to paradigms and ideologies.
Legends are trifled with and tampered with in pleasant times when amnesia overlies
historical memories and optimistic wishes can be indulged. In disaster, legends
become more important and, under heavy pressures, change significantly . Science
changes under the guidance of rules of evidence, the raising of unconscious factors
to awareness, and the forging of more and more links in causal chains. Also, science
changes by responding to heavy political pressure (Grinnell, pp131ff).
The motives behind legends are moral teachings (religious control), and the
achieving of a tolerable level of amnesia, involving fun, fantasy and aesthetics,
all of which are the more obvious forms that sublimation takes. Although these
motives occur in science as well, and science itself is a form of sublimation,
science is anxious lest they vulgarize, popularize, distort, and divert its work.
We permit ourselves here, by way of illustration, to speculate and generalize upon
an as yet undeveloped series of observations: a systematic study of the oldest
nursery rhymes will ultimately discover that every one of these "little classics" ("
Chicken Licken", "Hey, diddle, diddle", "Sing a Song of Sixpence", "Ring around the
Rosie," etc.) is based upon some historical drama or catastrophe. It will help those
scientists and humanists who tend to be snobbish, puritanical or majestic about
their material and scornful of the concerns of mythologists with "silliness and
superstitions" to reflect upon how much of natural science has come out of
amusement, as when early electrical science generated advances from shocking kisses
(Heilbron, p236). Myth, science and amusement alike play games with trivia, but the
grave cosmos is always unconsciously in mind.
Finally, neither in legend nor in science can the observer have escaped wholly the
grip of the ambiance of observations: the observer is part of the observations. The
various relativity theories, ancient and recent, make much of this fact. All in all,
legend-making and science-making are not foreign to each other but have much in
common. Each has its own good reasons for refusing marriage while maintaining
liaisons.
Recently, some scientists have named a conjunction of electro-gravitational
influences causing natural disorders on Earth the "Jupiter Effect" (see Goodsavage,
pp144-56). They seem to be able, on good evidence, to demonstrate that Jupiter is
not isolated, but has certain fearsome transactional capabilities, which may be
exercised upon occasion. An astrologer would say that he has known this all along.
Most ancients were obsessed with many "Jupiter effects". We say that these
astrological fossils go back to real Jupiter effects that were incomparably stronger
than the ones occasioning the present excitement. The ancients, seeking to control
the effects, sought to control human behavior aimed at propitiating Jupiter, "lest
you die". Our contemporaries do the same, suggesting more pragmatic (effective)
means of protecting sectors prone to earthquakes and tidal waves (Gribbin and
Plagemann, pp132-48).
We would say that the legendary sources are cognizant of grave past effects, and had
little new evidence and less control over expected effects. The astrologers
inherited confused observations of the past, which further confused them, and could
prove no new evidence because they were helpless and incompetent. Our contemporaries
possess but disbelieve ancient observations, and also some new evidence of recent
times that may have practical value and may lead to a systematic review of ancient
celestial behavior. Ancient accounts become simply another source of observations.
The Phaeton legend has been recited to young and old alike for thousands of years:
Phaeton, son of Sun, incompetently drives his father's chariot too near to and too
far from the Earth, causing great fires and frost. The correspondences between this
flight and a cometary encounter are so numerous that many scholars are convinced of
Phaeton's historicity, that is, that a comet cut a destructive swath across the
tottering globe around the middle of the second millennium before Christ. As Kugler
showed, material of scientific value is obtainable from the careful analysis of the
legendary stuff on Phaeton (and his namesakes in other myths).
There is adequate reason why the ancient "Jupiter effects" such as cosmic
thunderbolts, the Phaeton legends, the natural events reported in Exodus, the Cosmic
Egg mythology, the phenomenon of the Deus Otiosus, and the divergent "non-
astronomical" sacred calendars of the Meso-Americans, Egyptians, and others - to
mention only several proto-scientific or disguisedly scientific reports - should be
given ordinary treatment, in an integrated manner, in histories of science and
textbooks of astronomy, earth sciences, paleontology, and human behavior, including
anthropology, prehistory and ancient history. It is perhaps obvious, also, that the
ancient accounts of quantavolutionary events find all mankind in the same
situations, building related cultures, seeing them destroyed, and recreating them.
Once scientists decide to reach back to natural events and primordial human cultures
with the hypothesis of Solaria Binaria, they will discover a most inspiring
ecumenicalism for our most threatening of times.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART THREE:
TECHNICAL NOTES
TECHNICAL NOTE B
ON COSMIC ELECTRICAL CHARGES
In this work we forgo the concept of opposite charges, which has been in general use
since Benjamin Franklin established it. Thus, we revert to a position being argued
by other early electricians, who saw no need to introduce "plus" and "minus" charges
(Heilbron, pp431-38, p481). The one-charge idea suits our concept that the Universe
possesses a net electrical charge and that all star systems can be represented by
cavities which are deficient in that charge. Where the word "negative" occurs in
this work it means only the electron and does not imply the existence of an opposing
or second type of charge.
For a time we, like others before us, considered the solar charge to be of positive
sign, because of the gradual acceleration of the proton wind as it moves away from
the Sun. However, this same phenomenon can be viewed as a flow of ions towards a
surrounding region of negative electrical charge.
Insofar as solar wind electrons have, if any, only trivial anisotropy in their
motion and since detected cosmic-ray ions - which Juergens (1972) has described as
the spent wind from the most luminous stars - outnumber cosmic-ray electrons by at
least two orders of magnitude, it is logical to conclude that within the region of
the Sun most electrons are occupied with sustaining the transaction tending to
eliminate the solar cavity. These electrons are not free: they form a => transactive
matrix enveloping the Solar System.
Cells, and maybe even whole biological organisms, are surrounded by charged "skins"
or "sheaths" (Ency. Brit., 1974, Macro., vol. 3, pp. 1045 ff.) Their interiors are
even more charged than their perimeters, which indicates to us that these biological
entities are electron collectors. This, we argue, also applies to the operation of
the Sun.
Atoms may be considered in the same way. The atom has long been known to be
characterized by electric transactions forming both the inter-atomic linkages (which
create molecules of many kinds) and the inter-atomic coupling, which defines the
"electron-shells" of the atom and may even delineate the chemical elements
themselves.
The atom is modeled here as a plenum of charge enveloping a nucleus, which we regard
as a massive, dense, compact electrical cavity. Like the cell, the atom exposes to
the world a negatively charged perimeter. We therefore chose in this work to avoid
speaking of negative and positive ions (say, for example, electrons and protons)
being produced when an electron is removed from an atom. Rather we speak of
electrons and electron-deficient atoms.
This rhetoric then allows us to describe net charges on bodies that are "negative"
(as with the Galaxy, the Sun and the cell) without specifying the sign of the
charge. When we refer to ions in this work, we always mean electron-rich atom or
molecule. It is noteworthy that atoms are almost always detected and measured when
their electrons undergo some form of transition that defines the energy levels and
reactions of the atoms. Electrons seem to be the monetary currency of the Universe;
stars, cells, and atoms transact and transform to obtain them.
It seems to us that the Solar System's development from creative-nova into binary,
through the destructive nova which freed the planets and in the subsequent
rearrangement and destructive encounters, is also a story of electron exchanges on
the grandest of scales.
The elementary principle governing Solar System behavior is that planets act to
accumulate electrons from their surroundings, but in reality they are forced, by the
Sun and by their orbital motion, into that space where the electron supply is least
capable of yielding electrons to them [116] . Planets are also constrained by their
electric charges to avoid other planets to the maximum extent. In terms of
conventional gravitational models this latter behavior has been described as least-
attraction interaction; we see it simply as mutual repulsion between bodies of
similar charge density.
Further, planets maximize their capture of the locally precious electrons by
developing an electrosphere about their solid surfaces. Atmospheric layers, when
present, are within the transactive junction between the planet and its
electrosphere. The current flow across the lowest 20 kilometers of Earth's
atmosphere is evidence of such a junction. At the outer perimeter of the
electrosphere, the "magneto-pause" and "shock front" mark the transactive layer
through which the Earth attempts to absorb interplanetary electrons and to exclude
solar wind ions. The junction is not always successful: cosmic ray ions regularly
break into the Earth's domain, as do bursts of energetic ions generated by solar
flares. These ions make the Earth's task Sisyphean: it accretes electrons only to be
forced also to take in electron-deficient ions that are hungry as well for the
electrons.
An examination of the electrospheres present in the Solar System [117] reveals a
"shielding" that protects the charged planets, for they are immersed in a flow of
plasma, which must remain close to charge-neutrality. In the plasma, the local
differences between electron and ion densities is small, as it is in a metallic
conductor through which an electric current flows. Hence in some proportional
fashion the small quantity of incident electrons from the Galaxy are distributed to
all of the bodies within the cavity by way of the nearly "neutral" plasma. But, in
the main, electron accumulation is accomplished by the ejection of ions into the
interplanetary plasma from the solar and planetary electrospheres.
By launching ions towards the periphery of the cavity, where electrons are still
available, the Sun gains galactic electrons; by contributing to the ion flow the
planets gain an appropriate number too. Protons are observed flowing into the solar
wind from the electrosphere of the Earth and Jupiter. This outward flow perplexes
those analysts who assume electrically neutral planetary environments. Yet it need
not, for it can be understood as the only effective method of accumulating electrons
within an electron-poor cavity. The planet "disguises" its charge level by
surrounding itself at great distances with an increasing proportion of ions to
electrons. In this way, so to speak, the planet can defend itself in a system where
the central Sun voraciously devours any available electrons and jettisons ions onto
any reachable electron-sink. The planets, like flotsam, deal with the solar jetsam.
Thereupon, the view from each planet is through an electrical fog [118] .
The methodological problem posed in describing quantitatively an electrified cosmos
is an experimental problem common to all systems where the instrument disturbs the
measured systems. The dilemma cannot be resolved simply by recognizing that the
instrument and that which is measured are rendered indistinguishable. We can
scarcely imagine how to go about measuring the actual complex of charge-levels
existing within the planetary spheres. The problem of determining the charge on a
cosmic body resembles the long-established problem of determining how we can feel at
rest on the Earth whilst hurtling at fantastic speeds on the globe, in orbit,
through the Galaxy, and in the Universe [119] . Should electrical charge prove to
be at one and the same time the fundamental element in the Universe and
unmeasurable, then we may have to hammer one more nail into the coffin of
deterministic physics.
For the first time we are confronting processes occurring at the interactive
junctions between large bodies. The very size of the transactions permits humans to
observe them broadly, and even to fly among them. (On the microbiological cell level
the membrane problem is equally important and complex and there is hampered by
technical problems of observation.) Still, the definition of perspectives is
difficult in the cosmic sphere, and this is in turn the result of confusing the
identities of the actors and the sets. Given the electron and electron-deficient
atom as the principal actors, and the scenery of electrospheres, plena and sheaths,
the cosmic drama can begin to unfold understandably.
Notes on Technical Note B
116. Here again, as with stars (as noted earlier in Chapter Three), it is apparent
that space itself is the primary determinant of behavior. The stars, planets, and
other material in the space compete for the contents of space. These contents not
only seem to be atoms and electrons but also a spatial infra-charge, which is not
normally available to the body in the space, but whose presence governs all
transactions which can occur.
117. Conventional descriptions of the planetary exospheres describe their electrical
properties only as adjuncts to their magnetic properties hence they are there called
magnetosphere. Here we consider their magnetic properties secondary manifestations
of the fundamental electrified state (see Chapter Thirteen).
118. The screening of the planets from the Sun resembles the "view" that the valence
electron has in, say, a sodium atom; it does not "see" the full nuclear charge
because it is screened by the shells of the intervening electrons.
119. The Earth's equatorial velocity due to rotation is 0.46 km/ s, in orbit Earth
travels 30 km/ s, the Sun moves through the Galaxy at 19 km/ s and orbits the
galactic center at about 275km/ s. The galaxy itself may be traversing the universe
at speeds near 540 km/ s. Only the first two motions are known with confidence.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART THREE:
TECHNICAL NOTES
TECHNICAL NOTE C
ON GRAVITATING ELECTRIFIED BODIES
In this work we conceptualize "gravitational fields" as an effect of electrical
forces acting between charged bodies moving within a charged cosmos (Milton, 1980/
81): two bodies respond and move to maintain the greatest separation. In the co-
planar orbits of today's Solar System this electrical repulsion among the planets is
deemed by us to manifest itself in the Titius-Bode law of commensurable planet
periods (e. g. five Jupiter orbits in approximately [120] the same time as two
Saturn orbits). Until now the "law" has been an unexplainable observation.
In an electric "gravity" system a tangential inertia [121] is coupled to a radial
electrical force whose nature depends upon the electrical state of the bodies
orbiting. The electric force can vary between strongly repulsive in close encounter
to strongly attractive when electrical flow joins the two bodies (see Table 5 and
Figure 38). When the bodies are widely separated and relatively insulated, as are
the planets now, the electric transaction among them is repulsive, but is opposed by
the surrounding cosmic charge trying to fill the electron-deficient cavity, which is
the Solar System; the two repulsions nearly cancel out, leading to the illusion that
something called gravity produces a very weak attraction between the Sun and a
planet or between a planet and its satellite( s).
The fact that gravitation, the Great Mother Goddess of physics, has never been found
sensibly to exist has nurtured a mild scandal in science for three centuries. After
manipulating logically the relevant parameters (the separation of planets from the
Sun and their motions in orbit) Isaac Newton concluded that the gravitational force
acted everywhere in the same way: it was a universal force (Westfall). That his
conclusion was erroneous is becoming apparent. New gravity models incorporate the
notion that the strength of the gravitational force (relative to, say, the
electrical force) weakens with time (Dirac; Jordan; Dicke, 1957, p356; Hoyle and
Narlikar; Canuto et al., p834).
If indeed the relative strength of the gravitational force declines with time, it
means that the mechanical units customarily used to describe celestial motions
cannot be interchanged freely with the units employed in atomic physics. Also there
is evidence that the gravitational constant varies between experiments (Heyl and
Chrzanowski, p1, pp30-1; Long, 1974). The experiments can be interpreted as evidence
that the gravitational constant of proportionality is a function of the spatial
separation between the masses gravitating and, in some instances, even of the
quantity of mass involved in the "attraction" [122] . If gravity is dependent upon
time and locality, conclusions about the world based upon a universal force ruling
over cosmic motions without intrinsic dependency become erroneous.
More specifically, the mass of a body becomes a function of how its mass is
established. Its transactions become environmental rather than absolute. For
example, if sex, age and occupation explain a person's consumer behavior, but
elements of all are inextricably in all, the decision according to sex alone never
occurs but always varies as a function of the other two factors. So here masses
measured using transactions in the celestial realm need not be conformable with
those determined by transactions between atoms.
Extrapolations between the cosmic and atomic spheres become meaningless. The bizarre
quality of conclusions about recently observed cosmic processes has already spawned
the question "Do we need a revolution in Astronomy?" (Clube). All of the dilemmas
cited by Clube as confronting astronomers can be resolved in a universe where
electric forces are conceived to dominate.
For a long time chemists who concern themselves with the mechanics of collisions
between atoms (which are admittedly dominated by the forces between electric
charges) have agreed that a collision between two atoms can be treated as a sequence
of alternating attractive and repulsive actions (see Figure 37). At great distance
the atoms mildly repel one another because their perimeters are sacs of negative
charge (blurred electrons). Closer together, electron coupling produces the
possibility of bonding and the atoms attract, but further inside, beyond the
coupling range, the atoms again repel (this time very strongly). So it is with a
"gravitational field", which is then really an electrical field.
The behavior of bodies orbiting in electric transaction differs from those
experiencing the conceptually simpler, weak, attractive gravitational force caused
only by their mass content. The way in which planets move was shown by Kepler to
depend upon the magnitude of the semi-major axis of the orbit [123] . Later, when
Newton quantified the "gravitational force" into a relation containing the quantity
of matter in each body and the separation of the "gravitating" bodies, Kepler's
Harmonic Law was modified to allow celestial systems to be massed (see ahead to
Technical Note D). Figure 37. Potential Energy Curve for the Collision of Two Atoms
When two atoms collide, electrical force between them acts to alter the energy state
of the system compared to the energy which the two atoms posses when they are
greatly separated and at rest, the "zero" energy level. Usually two colliding atoms
will have more energy than this "zero level"( some positive value). Their kinetic
energy of approach determines the closeness the pair can attain in the collision.
For a specific energy (the horizontal line drawn above and intersecting with the
potential energy curve) the system of two colliding atoms has a surplus of energy
represented by the vertical distance between the curves for any chosen distance
between the atoms. Where the curves intersect they both represent the same energy;
there is no surplus. As the atoms begin to collide, the approaching pair at first do
not affect one another (from A to B), but as their electron clouds meet a slight
electrical repulsion occurs (from B to C); then electron coupling, as in a chemical
bond, produces an increasing attraction between the atoms (from C to D) until a
critical separation is attained, when electron decoupling, described elsewhere as
internuclear repulsion, begins and produces an increasing repulsion (from D to E)
that finally overcomes the inertia (motion) of the pair and causes them to rebound
(at E, where the electrical repulsion equals their inertia). The law relates three
variables: the period over which the complete orbit occurs, Ti ; the average
separation of the bodies form the Sun, ai ; and the total mass of the system of the
Sun and the
N -1 orbiting planets, S Mi, where the summation is from i = 1... N. The Harmonic
Law, expressed in mathematical terms, states that the square of the period equals
the average separation cubed divided by the mass of the system :
where the summation in S Mi, is from i = 1... N, and the subscript i refers to the
motion of the i th planet about the Sun. G is the proportionality factor applying to
gravitating systems, and was first evaluated by Henry Cavendish (Shamos).
As traditionally perceived the causal mass terms are invariant hence the other
parameters, the separation and period, must as well remain fixed. Given electrically
caused orbits, the interbody force depends upon the charge difference on the various
bodies in the system. As indicated in our text, we believe that the bodies
"gravitate" differently when great charge density differences exist within the
system than when they do not (Figure 39).
Figure 38. Electric forces Between Celestial Bodies
By analogy with the collision between two atoms, charged celestial bodies in
collision, if governed by the action of electrical force, also exhibit various
possible degrees of attraction and repulsion as they approach one another. In (a)
two bodies of like charge and like charge-density experience electrical repulsion as
they approach collision. In close encounter polarization of their atoms may
redistribute their charges in such a way that some electrical attraction will occur
during a part of their approach, but ultimately the two bodies will repel one
another and rebound from the collision. In (b) two bodies of like charge but of
unlike charge-density initially attract one another as they come together.
Polarization may enhance this attraction at closer range and the possibility is
great for an electrical discharge between the two bodies as they pass. After the
discharge( s) the colliding pair may attain the state of the bodies in (a) and the
collision proceeds to closest approach, where the like charges repel the bodies into
rebounding apart.
For example, in Solaria Binaria the Sun and Super Uranus never attained electrical
equilibrium [124] throughout the lifetime of the binary; their electrical
differences persisted, though diminishing with time. The inter-stellar arc was the
Sun's attempt to recapture lost charge [125] . It represented an attractive force
between the two stars. So long as their electrical natures remained attractive, the
inter-star flow continued. If the two had attained equilibrium, that is, had Super
Uranus charge-density declined to reach that of the Sun, the two would no longer
have attracted one another electrically; their equal charge-densities then would
have produced an electrical "neutrality" in an inertial state.
During the interval when the orbiting stars were seeking electrical equilibrium, the
mass of the binary system, as measured using its period of revolution (by Kepler's
Law) would have seemingly diminished. As the interval transaction that was
accelerating the stars in relation to one another declined, the binary would appear
to lose angular momentum. In part this "loss of energy" would be an artifact of the
measuring theory; what really was occurring would be a recession of the principals
to conserve and gain charge; but a dispersal of charge into the plenum would be
occurring as well, causing the plenum to expand and hence the calculated mass of
each transacting body to decline.
Taking another example from the Solar System, Jupiter's angular momentum (the
product of its mass, distance from the Sun, and its tangential (perpendicular)
velocity in orbit) is 2.03 x 10 43 (mks units). If it were orbiting at the Earth's
distance from the Sun but with this same angular momentum, Jupiter would move at 68
kilometers per second, two and one quarter times faster than the Earth's orbital
velocity of 30 km/ s. The Jupiter year would be a little longer than 161 Earth-days.
The Sun's "mass" required to hold Jupiter, so moving at this closer distance, would
have to be five times its present value ! If Jupiter were more closely positioned
than above, its year would be even shorter, and the Sun's mass would seem even
greater. The Story of Solaria Binaria recounts the consequences of the ongoing
enhancement of the Sun's charge resulting in the continuously growing repulsion of
the planets to regions farther from the solar surface. Analyzed in mechanical terms
this repulsion has been reported as a weakened gravitational force over time, it
could equally have been as a decline in the Sun's mass (its gravitational ability).
Orbits changing under varying electrical transaction behave differently than the
conventional view of very slowly evolving gravitational orbital elements. The
objects are drawn together or forced apart by changing radial forces. Literally, an
object like Venus, born from Jupiter in a charge-deficient condition, spirals
inward, driven radially by electrical force and increasing its tangential velocity
in sustaining its angular momentum. It is no "lucky billiard shot" that Venus
encountered all planets inferior to its initial position near Jupiter. Following an
initial diminishing spiral path generally close to the same plane as the other
planetary orbits, Venus could not avoid close (i. e., effective) encounter with each
body it passed en route to its present orbit. The events described in this book are
the recorded, recollected and inferred consequences of many planetary encounters
both before and after the excursion of Venus made famous in our time by Immanuel
Velikovsky.
Notes on Technical Note C
120. The divergence with theory may be attributable, not to "time of accommodation",
but to the complex electrical fields in which the charged planets move.
121. "Inertia" is usually defined as the quantity of motion (momentum) within a
body. It also can be considered as a measure of the difficulty in altering a body's
motion (accelerating or decelerating it). For an orbiting body the motion is
directed tangentially to the orbit while the force which changes the motion is
directed radially.
122. The implication is that very close and very distant satellites may experience
significantly different gravitational transactions with their primary; that is, the
force need not remain exactly proportional to the inverse square of their distances
as the => Newtonian formulation would have it. Since G can have somewhat different
values for different separations, then the force function becomes more complex than
Newton's Law can handle accurately. Another complexity arises if G also changes
values as the amount of mass involved is altered. Such a variation would mean that a
binary companion or a Jupiter sized mass would not orbit with a force simply
proportional to the force keeping an asteroid or a tiny meteoroid in orbit.
123. Its average separation from the Sun.
124. At equilibrium no net change occurs in a system with the passage of time. Here,
interbody electrical currents would cease to flow.
125. 3 X 10 22 coulombs might have been exchanged between them over one million
years. This represents a transfer of 2 X 10 44 electrons and a tiny fraction of the
mass which flowed between the stars through the plenum. Even with this electrical
exchange, the charges moved are negligible compared to the number in a body like the
Sun or Super Uranus. If the Sun were an electrically neutral body of mass 2 X 10 27
tons, the flow would represent an exchange of one electron per one hundred thousand
million electrons present. A stellar body carrying net charge, as these were, would
be exchanging an even smaller portion of its charge.
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART THREE:
TECHNICAL NOTES
TECHNICAL NOTE D
ON BINARY STAR SYSTEMS
In the sample of the sixty nearest stars to the Earth we include the Sun.
Accompanying seven of these stars is at least one dark unseen body. These unseen
bodies are inferred because a wobble is detected in the peculiar motion of the star
associated with the dark body (as in Figure 1). Including the unseen bodies as small
stars we find sixty-seven stars grouped into forty-five systems. There are three
triples, sixteen doubles, and twenty-six single stars. Sixty-one percent of these
objects are thus components in a double or triple star system.
There are potentially many binaries in the Galaxy. Since faint companions are
unlikely to be detected by any means, many of the binary systems which exist will
not be recognized by observers.
In general, binaries fall into groups separable only by the technique used for their
detection. Where the principals sufficiently separate they can be resolved by visual
observation through a telescope: these are the visual binaries. When the principals
are closer together spectroscopic detection is sometimes possible. For very close
pairs eclipses are sometimes seen as the stars orbit one another. In some cases
other phenomena are seen which show regular periodicity betraying the binary nature
of the system. Discovery of this type has become increasingly frequent in recent
years, greatly expanding the number of known binary systems.
Visual observation of the binary companion depends upon several factors: the
proximity of the binary system to the Earth; a sufficient separation of the
principals to allow resolution of their images by a telescope; and the occurrence of
small differences in the luminosities of the principals, otherwise the view of the
=> companion will be obscured by the light of the => primary.
Tens of thousand of binary systems can be resolved by telescope into two separate
stars. In about twelve percent of these visual binaries the orbital motion can be
measured, but only a few satisfactory orbital analyses have been completed [126] .
Where the orbit of the companion relative to the primary star can be measured, and
where the distance to the principals can be measured, the physical separation of the
pair is known. If the period of revolution of the binary is known, then, temporarily
accepting Kepler's Harmonic Law, which is based upon Universal Gravitation as the
only force binding the principals, the total mass of the binary system can be
calculated (Chapter Three). This calculation based upon Kepler's Harmonic Law is the
primary clue to the masses of all stars [127] (but see Chapter Two).
Allen (1963) tabulates the distribution of the stars against the calculated total
"mass" of the binary system. For systems equal to or greater in mass than the Sun,
only thirty-two percent of the stars are not members of double or multiple star
systems. In those star systems of lesser "mass" the percentage of single stars rises
dramatically [128] . For the mass range 0.5 to 0.25 Sun, eighty-five percent of the
stars appear single. No star below 0.1 Sun seems to have a companion (ibid). This
surely indicates that the ability to see companions near such poorly luminous stars
is limited, if not nil.
For a typical visual binary one revolution of the companion about the primary takes
a few decades. The orbits of the companions have dimensions comparable to the orbits
of the major planets in the Solar System, but their shapes are much more elliptical
than are the planetary orbits (see Figure 39). For a typical visual binary
superposed on the Solar System the => apastron (near Neptune) is three times as
distant as the => periastron (near Saturn).
The shorter the orbital period for revolution, the more circular the orbit of the
companion. Systems which revolve in less than ten days have relative orbits whose
shape resembles the orbits of the planets Mars and Saturn. Where the orbit is less
than 100 days the orbit is less elliptical than the orbit of the planet Mercury. For
orbits over 100 days distinctly elliptical orbits are noted and apastron is about
twice as distant as periastron. These orbits are more elliptical than the orbit of
the planet Pluto, where aphelion is sixty-seven per cent further than perihelion.
Figure 39. Binary Orbits of Short Period
Binary stars show a relationship between the shape of their relative orbit and their
period of revolution in that orbit. For those pairs orbiting in times from a few
days to a few weeks the orbits are found to be somewhat like the more elliptical
planetary orbits found in the solar system. Elliptical orbits are described in terms
of their difference from a circular orbit using a quantity called eccentricity.
Eccentricities for closed orbits have values between 0 (a circle) and nearly 1
(which would be a parabola). The ellipse above the graph shows how the eccentricity
is measured for a particular ellipse.
In some binary systems the separation of the components is too small to allow
resolution in a telescope. Sometimes the detection of the binary still can be made
because when the distance between the principals is small enough the stars move in
orbit with high velocities. The binary can be observed because a Doppler shift
occurs in the spectrum lines of the orbiting companion.
Spectroscopic detection favors binary systems in which the stars are highly luminous
and especially where the orbiting star is equal in brightness to, or brighter than,
the more stationary primary. The orbital periods for spectroscopically detected
binaries range from days to weeks. In such systems the orbital period is determined
from the time taken for the spectrum lines to shift through one complete cycle;
canceling the motion of the binary system itself, the spectrum of the companion
shows a velocity of approach, then no velocity, a velocity of recession, no
velocity, finally returning to a velocity of approach.
Nineteen percent of all bright stars show variable Doppler shift in their spectrum,
implying a companion (usually unseen). Of these, forty-seven percent show double
spectrum lines; the duplication arises because the motion of both of the principals
is detected, indicating that the two stars are comparable in brightness.
Lastly, some binary systems are detected because the light received from the stars
is seen to vary as the principals eclipse one another. The stars in these eclipsing
binary systems usually revolve about one another in less than one month. If indeed
these light variations are eclipses, the principals are very close together or,
alternatively, at least one, and sometimes both, of the stars have a very large
radius compared to the Sun. Orbits have been calculated for almost 100 eclipsing
binaries.
About nine percent of the spectroscopic binaries are also eclipsing binaries. To
have such a high percentage of eclipsing systems in the spectroscopic binary sample
is surely an anomaly.
Eclipsing binaries include principals with the smallest separation; the close binary
stars belong to this group. About sixty percent of eclipsing systems can be
described as detached, which means that the light curves of the eclipse produced as
one star obscures the other show that the principal bodies are roughly spherical in
shape; the Algol star system falls into this group of eclipsing star systems.
The remaining eclipsing binaries are the semi-detached star systems. Here the
surface of at least one of the principals is distorted into an ellipsoidal shape,
and forms at the extreme a teardrop-shaped body "in contact" with the other star.
The Beta Lyrae system is a semi-detached binary. Though there is no physical
distinction between all of the detached binary systems, that group transacts
differently and less strongly than the remainder of the sample, all close binaries.
These binary stars transact much more strongly because of the proximity of the two
stars. The behavior of the close binaries can be characterized by its violence, in
some examples episodic, in others sustained. Here the stars are in competition with
the locally available energy supply and for the space with its infra-charge.
Of special interest are the so-called contact binaries, systems in which one of the
stars has seemingly expanded so as to touch, or in some cases even to envelop the
companion star within its tenuous atmosphere. Some contact binary systems appear to
revolve about one another in a small fraction of one day.
Seldom do the close binaries resolve into two stars, nor do their spectra often show
duplication. They are the binary systems with the greatest internal transaction.
Many of them show gas flowing between the stars (Chapter Ten), some exhibit emission
lines, in other one of the components, usually a dwarf star, erupts regularly
(ibid). This eruptive behavior seems to be linked to the gas flow, which produces a
hot spot on the recipient star, representing a cataclysmic extreme in activity of
the type exhibited by the close binary group as a whole.
Systems containing the dwarf novae fall into a group which also resembles systems
containing old novae and W Ursae Majoris binaries (Glasby, p146). All of the
principals are underluminous. In contrast, many close binaries contain one "overly
large" principal. The Wolf-Rayet stars are found paired with a smaller overluminous
companion (Glasby, p143). Frequently, B-emission stars are members of close binary
systems (Maraschi et al.). As early as 1938 Haffner and Heckmann proposed that in
open star clusters, stars lying above the Main Sequence (overluminous stars) were
members of binary systems. It seems that a property common to close binary systems
is deviant luminosity of one or both principals. This may indicate the importance
both of the transaction between the components in such systems, and of the
competition of these stars for the contents of their surroundings. We maintain that
these transactions are electrical.
In summary, the close binary stars feature one principal which is a degenerate
object. At least one of the principals shows anomalous luminosity. Transactions
within these systems produce various degrees of violent outburst: some flicker
(Chapter Ten), all exchange material and, we believe, electric charge. These unusual
characteristics of close binary systems appear to represent a competition for space
and electrical charge; some scholars, perplexed by these same behaviors, have
proposed that unimaginable concentrations of matter have been observed and are
causing the observed violence. From the evidence presented in this book, it seems
that Solaria Binaria quantavoluted through the gambit of close binary phenomena
before its principals became detached and its binary nature became disguised. The
electrified star system, simple in concept and understandable in its development,
was the stage on which the pageant of mythology, pre-history, and written history
begins to unfold as parts of the common cosmic voyage.
NOTES ON TECCHNICAL NOTE D
126. Batten (1967) notes the great difference between the number of systems known to
exist and those which have been studied. A highly special sample has well determined
orbits, even fewer systems have known masses. Typical orbits are given in Allen.
127. We use the term massing in preference to weighing. An example of massing using
Kepler's Harmonic Law; the satellite Triton is 353 megameters form Neptune: the Moon
is 384 megameters from the Earth. If both Earth and Neptune had the same mass, the
periods of revolution for Triton and Moon about their primaries would be about the
same. They are not; the Moon takes 22.3 days to orbit while Triton orbits in 5.9
days. This leads astronomers to conclude that Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth.
Any transaction equal to 17 times the gravitational pull of one Earth mass on Triton
would suffice to cause Triton's rapid orbiting of Neptune as observed. So with the
stars: the more intensive the transaction between the principals, the more rapidly
the pair will orbit about one another.
128. In systems which show no evidence of any periodic phenomenon, the star's mass
has been inferred using theoretical considerations (see Chapter Three).
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
PART THREE:
TECHNICAL NOTES
TECHNICAL NOTE E
SOLARIA BINARIA
IN RELATION TO CHAOS AND CREATION
In 1981, one of us (Alfred de Grazia) published Chaos and Creation, which presented
the model of Solaria Binaria as part of a general theory of quantavolution. During
the last years of its writing, he discussed first with Ralph Juergens and then with
Earl Milton the idea of a book on the subject, that would establish it upon firmer
foundations and raise it to a new conceptual plane. Juergens' direct participation
had hardly begun when he died; but his encouragement and his writings were inspiring
to both of us and so we dedicate this book to him in gratitude and friendship.
While Chaos and Creation was going through the toils of publication, its author was
well aware that he had only spoken the first words on the topic of Solaria Binaria,
and that his books would need amendment as soon as a new book could be written. This
is not an unusual phenomenon in rapidly developing areas of theory and research, and
he is even pleased to constitute a case in point for the pragmatic view that science
is never a final statement of truth, and to acknowledge the technical and
theoretical superiority of the present work in regard to the model of Solaria
Binaria.
Most prominently, our collaboration in the preparation and writing of this book has
led to a purely electric theory of the Universe. Chaos and Creation still speaks of
electro-gravitational forces, although it relegates gravitation largely to inertial
phenomena and stresses the universal electrical energies that are generated and
employed in cosmic encounters.
The electrical theory of Solaria Binaria further dispenses with two-sign charges,
designating only the electron as the independent variable of electricity, and
describing relevant natural events by the extent to which they are electron-
deficient or electron-rich. We rely exclusively upon electrical charges to motivate
transactions within the cosmic realm. We present our propositions, principles and
evidence without resort to the concept of gravitation. This is the first work to
present a history and dynamics of the Solar System in an entirely electrical form.
It offers the first electrical cosmogony.
Looking specifically to Chaos and Creation, there de Grazia states how the
electrical manifestations declined because, he claimed, the Sun's charge has
"always" been diminishing as the galactic input declined. While the galactic
transaction was indeed declining and will ever continue to decline (because the
Sun's cavity is filling up) the solar charge has increased steadily. But time has
evened out the charge distribution within the cavity as well. And so intra-cavity
electrical transfers are much less frequent and are of much lower intensity today
than ever before. So de Grazia was right in that "electricity" has declined, but not
because the solar charge has diminished as he once claimed.
Later, de Grazia described how Super Uranus met its end, using electrically induced
rotation to produce mechanical rupture of the star. Here we describe the same
process in terms of an electrical instability in Super Uranus' outer layers. Both
processes eject debris into the magnetic tube; both would produce sudden fission;
but electrical instability would be more easily produced and could focus its effect
towards the Sun and the other planets, giving both the recession of the old star and
injection of the new partner into the binary position in line with the ancient
string of planetary beads lying along the electrical axis.
Again de Grazia talks about differences between electrical and gravitational
systems. There, he notes that electrical differences are quickly erased (non-
conservative behavior) while gravitational properties exist. In the strictest formal
sense, as used in Physics, both fields (electrical and gravitational) are
conservative. The strong electrical field in an excited state can relax itself
quickly (by emitting electromagnetic radiation as in the atom) while the weak
gravitational field cannot. Translated into phenomena, the overt electrical
properties of the system would be the first to disappear, supporting the illusion of
a non-conservative electrical presence as claimed in Chaos and Creation.
Finally, in Chaos and Creation, after the explosive extraction of the Moon's
material from the Earth, its phases inciting the early humans to a period of lunar
worship (circa 11 500 to 8 000 years ago). To conclude that the Moon immediately
orbited about the nearby Earth (its motion being somewhat disturbed by the Sun's
gravity as it is today) is necessary when the driving force for the orbit arises
mechanically or by some mechanical-electrical mix. But in the purely electrical
field that we employ here, the Moon can remain suspended in the Earth's sky as we
propose. The question of why humans worshipped the early Moon does not depend upon
the Moon's motion in that era: its size, its prominence, and its observed birth and
subsequent assembly before man's eyes provide sufficient motivation for worship.
The time span of Solaria Binaria, unlike that of Chaos and Creation, includes the
whole of the geological, atmospheric and biological development of the Solar System.
The authors feel that, although they may have drawn liberally upon Chaos and
Creation, they have introduced so many novel concepts and solved so many hitherto
unrecognized cosmological problems in the present writing, that this book appears as
a complete and independent treatise on cosmogony, which, whether or not Chaos and
Creation is well known to the reader, can be comprehended in its entirety, from
beginning to end. In addition, we have introduced a number of formal, stylistic,
structural, and mathematical innovations that make the present book, despite the
passage of only several years, the work of a new generation in the theory of
quantavolution.
BP before the present
cf. compare
E evolutionary (model)
EM electromagnetic
f.(ff.) following page(s)
fn. footnote
Gm, Gy gigameter, gigayear (= aeon)
ibid. in the same place
ISEE International Sun Earth Explorer (a space craft)
K Kelvin
km/s kilometers per second
ly light year
mks meter-kilogram second (units)
My megayear or million years
NMP, NRP North magnetic (rotational) pole
o. Omnindex (used in the printed version of this book. This electronic version has
the same information presented as Glossary, and Bibiliography)
op. cit. in the work cited
Q quantavolutionary (model)
q.v. refer to
SB Solaria Binaria (model)
SMP, SRP South magnetic (rotational) pole
GUIDE TO METRIC UNITS
Distances are measured in meters
Multiples of the meter, by thousands and thousands, have special names designated by
a prefix, such as micrometer and gigameter.
Other metric units use the same prefixes for their multiples, like microvolts,
gigaergs, etc.
Prefix Decimal Notation Useful to Measure
nano 0.000 000 001 atoms
micro 0.000 001 cells
milli 0.001 type size
- 1.0 people
kilo 1000.0 driving distances
mega 1000 000.0 satellite diameters
giga 1000 000 000.0 star diameters
tera 1000 000 000 000.0 planet orbits
SOLARIA BINARIA
by Alfred de Grazia and Earl R. Milton
GLOSSARY
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE BIBILIOGRAPHY AND GLOSSARY
abr. abridgment
Ap. appendix
art. article
bk. book
cf. compare
Ch. chapter
col. column
ed( s) editions( s), editor( s)
Eng. English
esp. especially
et al. and others
f., ff. and the following pages( s)
Fig. figure
fn. footnote
l. line
loc. cit in the same place
o. omnindex
orig. originally
partic. particularly
pl. plate
pt. part
priv. privately
publ. published
q. v. see
repr. reprinted
rev. revised
[sic] thus, indicating an irregularity in this items
sci. science, scientific
Su. Summer
tr. translated, translator
unpubl. unpublished
v.,vols. volume( s)
GLOSSARY
Glossary especially designed for Solaria Binaria, but look up these same words and
many other terms of the book at the front of the CD, in the suggested index list,
or simply by employing the search engine, from anywhere on the CD.
aeon
is usually an indefinitely long time, here to designate the order of the
conventional age of the planetary system, a billion (or thousand million) years.
Also equivalent to gigayear.
afterglow
in a molecular gas, is produced by a pulsed electric discharge through
pure nitrogen. The afterglow has been observed to persist to the darkness-adapted
eye for several hours (Strutt); it is strongly visible for minutes (Ruark et al.).
Other common gases produce weaker, shorter-lived afterglows.
Age of Jovea
is the period following the Deluge (about 5700 BP) to the time of
Mercury's encounter with the Earth circa 4400 years ago.
Age of Saturn brackets the period eight thousand to fifty-eight hundred years
before present.
Age of Urania
is the first age of the Quantavolutionary Period, assigned to run
from 14000 to 11000 years ago. Also called the Uranian age.
albedo
is the fraction of light reflected from a cosmic body.
anode
is an electron-deficient region in an electric discharge. It is the place
towards which electron flow occurs, and can be the source of an ion (q. v.) current
- the ions being electron-deficient atoms.
apastron
means the greatest separation of the principals (q. v.) in a binary. It is
a homologue of apogee for an Earth satellite, and aphelion for a planet. The term
apocentron is used elsewhere in place of apastron to describe the farthest point on
an orbit.
arc-second
is the smallest unit of angular measurement using the scale where the
circle is divided into 360 degrees. The degree has 60 arc-minutes. Each minute
consists of 60 arc-seconds.
astronomical unit (AU)
is the present value of the Earth-Sun distance. It is equal
to 149.6 gigametres (149.6 million kilometres).
barads
is a biblical term which can be interpreted as the fall of meteorites from
the heavens. The Seventh Plague of Egypt. Stones such as are found in great fields
on the Arabian desert. See Sieff.
cataclysm
is a sudden dense material deluge from the atmosphere altering biosphere
and/ or lithosphere. see, quantavolution
catastrophe
is a sudden large-scale, extremely harmful event; the word probably
originated from two Greek roots meaning a "falling star" but came to have assigned
to it two different roots, meaning "down-turning" and applied to the denouement of
a Greek tragedy.
cathode
in an electric discharge is the source of electrons for the conduction
process. The cathode usually will be the most electron-rich region.
Celsius (degree)
is the unit of temperature using the scale of 100 degrees between
the freezing and boiling points of water at one atmosphere, air-pressure. It was
formerly called the Centigrade degree. One Celsius degree is 9/ 5 of the Farenheit
degree still used in both the United States and Great Britain in 1982.
Central Fire
also, axis, electrical
charge (electrical), see electric charge
chromosphere
the gases of the solar chromosphere appear to be hotter than the
photospheric gases which lie below them. In the chromospheric region temperature
rises abruptly by several tens of thousands of degrees Kelvin. Similar temperature
increases have been detected across the chromosphere of other stars (Wright, p.
124). This layer of solar atmosphere can be viewed as an electric double layer
between the plasmas of the solar photosphere and the corona.
close binaries, see binaries
commensurabilities, see mutual repulsion
companion
in a binary system is a body which revolves about the major component (q.
v. principal) in the system: the orbiter; as the Earth about the much larger Sun.
corona, see solar corona
cosmic pressure
on the theory that the Universe is pervaded by a continuum of
electric charges, the notion arises that where charge-deficient cavities (stars)
exist within the Universe a pressure results driving material within the cavity
into one or more aggregations (stars, planets, etc.). The materials within these
bodies are confined by cosmic pressure.
cosmic rays
are highly energetic electron-deficient atoms (mainly protons) which
impinge equally upon the Earth from all directions. The average cosmic ray has an
energy of 7 GeV. Cosmic ray electrons exist but they are only one hundredth as
abundant as the protons (Hillas. pp. 67-9). The sky "shines" as brightly with
cosmic rays as it does with starlight (Watson). The most energetic cosmic rays have
an energy at least 100 billion times the average. Such cosmic rays are very rare.
crater, see astrobleme
Curie Temperature
(after Pierre Curie) is that temperature at which magnetic
materials undergo a sharp change in their magnetic properties. Remnant magnetism
appears in rock below this temperature and is erased if the rock is heated above
it.
Demiurge
refers to a grand original intelligence who acted to produce the real
world, as described in cosmogonies of early peoples and philosophers.
deuteron
is the nucleus of a heavy hydrogen atom. Fusion of two deuterons is one
step in the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen.
double layer (electric)
is the juxtaposition of an electric sheath containing an
excess of electrons upon an electric sheath which is electron-deficient. Such a
double layer is formed whenever two plasmas of differing electric charge densities
meet, for example, between the Sun's photosphere and its corona and between the
solar wind and the Earth's plasmasphere. The former double layer forms the solar
chromosphere, the latter the Earth's magnetosphere and bow wave.
double star
is a synonym for binary star.
early-type stars
are those which, using conventional star-evolution-theory
sequences, must be younger. Herein, using Bruce's scheme, these are the post-nova
stars. They are in our system also high transaction stars.
electric neutrality
as used in this work is a local rather than an absolute
condition. The existence of a measurable transaction between local bodies (like the
Sun and the Earth) indicate there is not neutrality within the locality. If the
galactic neutral is one too many electrons per million atoms, while in the Solar
System there is one too many electrons per ten million atoms, then a current will
tend to flow between the Sun and the Galaxy in order to make the Sun neutral.
electrophoresis
is the motion of particles (of atomic or larger size) under the
influence of an electric field. This motion implies that the particles bear an
electric charge.
eon, see aeon
epoch, see time
evolved-star
is one which does not obey Eddington's Mass-Luminosity law. Stars in
close binary systems are usually of this type, indicative in our view of an
intensive electric transaction between the principals in such binary systems.
faculae
are irregularly shaped unusually bright patches above the solar disc
generally associated with sun spots. They are active regions in the photosphere and
have their equivalent higher in the atmosphere as chromospheric plages and coronal
condensations. (Chromospheric calcium plages are sometimes called flocculi.)
force, electrical, see electrical force
fossil assemblages
are aggregates of fossils uncovered at a single location. They
often exhibit ecological unconformity.
galactic neutral, see electric neutrality
giga( metre)
The prefix giga is used to designate thousands of millions; called
billions in the United States but not in Great Britain where billion refers to one
million million (or 10 12 ). One gigametre is one million kilometres.
granule
on the solar photosphere about two and one half million granules exist at
any moment. The average granule is 1000 kilometres across; it survives from five to
ten minutes. Granules are about 100 K hotter than their surroundings. They show a
turbulent motion of about 2 kilometres per second, like a bubble in a porridge pot
(Abell, p. 526).
Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram
is a two-dimensional field of stars where
luminosity (total radiation emitted) is the ordinate (dependent variable) and color
(surface temperature) is the abscissa (determinant variable). This diagram is used
extensively in astronomy to infer properties of stars whose distance makes direct
measurement difficult or impossible. In terms of the HR diagram, evolved stars are
either overluminous or underluminous for their color, that is, they are above or
below the main sequence (q. v.) of the stars.
insolation
is the solar energy received at the Earth's surface. Only a fraction of
the insolation is absorbed, some of it reflects into space.
ion
is here an atom from which one or more electrons typically present has been
removed. see also, electron-deficient atoms.
ionosphere
is a layer of ionized atmosphere beginning at an altitude of 56 to 90
kilometers above the Earth's surface. This layer is electrically conductive. Its
altitude and density varies over the day. In theory there is no upper limit to the
ionosphere, yet detection of its upper layers is accomplished only infrequently.
irradiance
is the radiant flux incident upon a unit area of a surface. For sunlight
it is the number of watts received per square metre of the Earth's surface.
Jovean Age, see Age of Jovea
Kelvin
is the unit of temperature using the scale zeroed at absolute zero. It is
the lowest conceivable temperature. The Kelvin unit is identical to the Celsius
degree. The freezing point of water is 273.15 K( elvin).
Lagrangian point
in a three-body system the orbits can be computed if one of three
bodies is negligibly tiny - in such a case the motion of the minuscule third body
does not disturb the two primary bodies. Lagrange showed that for such a
"restricted system of three bodies" there existed several points, co-rotating with
the motion of the primary pair, where the third body could be trapped. The L1 point
is one of these points; it lies between the two primary bodies.
least interaction action (sometimes, least action interaction), see mutual repulsion
light-year
is a unit of distance. It represents approximately 10 16 metres, the
distance light travels (in theory) through a vacuum in one year (3.16 x 10 7
seconds).
luminosity
of a star depends upon the area of the star's surface (opaque radiating
layer of gases) and upon the fourth power of its surface temperature. The
luminosity of a star is a measure of its energy output, it can be known directly,
as opposed to inferred, only if the star's distance can be measured.
magnetite
is a black to brownish metallic stone with magnetic properties. The
legendary lodestone is one of the magnetites. The magnetites are formed of
octahedral crystals of mineral whose chemical structure contains the unit, XFe204 .
X may be Fe, Mg, Ni, Zn, or Mn. The first is most common; the last two are only
weakly magnetic.
main sequence stars
obey Eddington's Mass-Luminosity Law. They constitute the
majority of stars whose distance, brightness, and temperature have been measured.
massive ion
ions are divided into fast and slow. Ions with greatest inertia to the
field are said to be massive because they are harder to move; the easier they
become mobile the more lightness they are assigned. Elements of low atomic number
are most mobile.
mega( watts)
the prefix mega indicates a multiplier of one million. Hence a
megawatt is one million watts and a megametre is one million metres.
memorial generations
is the difference in years between a youngest listening child
and the oldest storytellers of a society. Here we assign this interval a value of
50 years.
milli( tesla)
the prefix milli refers to the multiplier one-thousandth. One
millitesla is thus one-thousandth of a tesla.
mobility
is the ratio of the average drift velocity (attained between collisions)
to the electric field strength (which produces the drift velocity).
Mohorovicic discontinuity
is the junction which separates the Earth's crust and
mantle. Its depth is about 10 kilometres below the ocean basin.
neutrinos, see nuclear fusion
Newtonian formulation
states that the gravitational attraction between two
celestial bodies depends upon the product of the two point masses transacting and
upon the inverse of the square of the distance separating the masses.
Expressed mathematically : [Formula...]
In metre-kilogram-seconds units (mks) the gravitational constant of proportionality
(G) relates the force in newtons to the masses in kilograms and the separation in
metres. G has the value 6.667 x 10 -11 m 3 /kg-s 2 so, : [Formula...]
nuclear fusion
is the supposed stellar process by which the nucleii of four
hydrogen atoms collide with sufficient energy to coalesce forming a single helium
nucleus having slightly less mass than the original hydrogen. The mass which is
destroyed in fusion reappears as radiant energy which slowly flows away to the
surface. In the fusion, two protons are changed into two neutrons, two anti-
electrons, and two neutrinos. The neutrons remain in the fused helium nucleus, the
anti-electrons annihilate with two electrons (liberating more radiant energy), and
the neutrinos escape the star immediately, travelling at the speed of light.
On Earth, a type of nuclear fusion has been sustained for one hundred pico-seconds.
No continuing fusion process has been produced. To remain luminous by conventional
theory the star must fuse hydrogen continuously (Rudeaux and de Vaucouleurs, pp.
316-9).
nucleosynthesis, see nuclear fusion
nucleotides
the monomeric unit which makes up the nucleic acid molecules. A
nucleotide consists of a nitrogen base, plus a sugar, and a phosphate group.
particle
is used here as a synonym for electrons, atoms and/ or electron-deficient
atoms (ions) which are in motion, such as in an electric discharge, or in a flowing
gas or plasma. So viewed, cosmic rays and stellar/ solar wind ions are particles.
periastron
means the least separation of the principals in a binary. Similarly, its
homologues are perigee and perihelion when orbiting the Earth or the Sun.
Elsewhere, the term pericentron is used to describe the closest approach between
two bodies in orbit.
physical binary system
is here defined to consist of two bodies which are mutually
dependent in respect to their orbital revolution about each other. In multiple star
systems, which also exist, more than two bodies are in revolution about a common
centre-of-motion, often designated as their baricentre.
plasma
is a gas in which the electrons are separated from the electron-deficient
atoms. The whole gas contains approximately equal numbers of electrons and ions.
plenum
the contents of the sac of Solaria Binaria and later of the Solar System;
excluding the distinctly stellar and planetary material in it.
Plinian eruption
is the most violent volcanic eruption known. It is of almost
incomprehensible violence such as the eruptions of Stronghyle (believed to have
occurred in 1500 BC), of Vesuvius (in AD 79) and of Krakatoa in 1883.
polymorphs
are organisms which during their life cycle undergo a transition
(metamorphosis) between forms. In some species several forms co-exist within one
colony at any moment.
polyploids
are species of plants (and sometimes animals) whose chromosome number
exceeds twice the basic set of chromosomes (the haploid number) found in the gamete
cell (which) produces a new organism by fertilization with an appropriate gamete
cell of the opposite gender. It is not uncommon to breed plants with double or four
times the original number of chromosomes (euploids).
primary
is the major body in a binary system, e. g. the Sun in the Solar System.
The companion( s) orbit( s) the primary. In some systems neither object can be
called primary.
principals
are the major components in a multiple or binary star system. Referring
to Solaria Binaria they would be with time, the Sun and Super Uranus, then after
Super Uranus' destruction in a climatic nova eruption, the Sun and Super Saturn.
After the Deluge the principals become the Sun and Jupiter whose transactions today
dominate motions in the surviving Solar System.
pulsars
are stars, a significant part of whose observed energy output is not
continuous but is emitted as distinct flashes or pulses of electromagnetic
radiation. Many pulsars also emit some radiation weakly and constantly, forming a
background for the more intensive pulses.
quadrature
is the angular aspect by which two celestial bodies are observed from a
third body to be ninety degrees apart in the sky. An example is the Sun and the
quarter-phased Moon as seen from the Earth.
quantavolution
is an abrupt, large-scale change caused by, and affecting one or
more spheres such as the astrophere, biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and
anthrosphere.
quasar
is a celestial object which appears "star-like" but is not explainable in
terms of the usual stellar properties. Many quasars have a visible "tail" -
supposedly a jet of material expelled from the quasar. Often quasars emit anomalous
amounts of radio waves.
radiation
is used here to denote electromagnetic waves of any wavelength. It
includes, in order of descending wavelength, radiowaves, microwaves, infra-red,
visible light, ultra-violet, X-rays, and gamma-rays.
sac
in Solaria Binaria, the container of all that can be included in Solaria
Binaria, and later on the Solar System; as distinguishable from the medium of space
external to it.
Saltation, see Quantavolution
sidereal
measured relative to the stars rather than the Sun.
space-charge sheath
is a region in which either electrons or electron-deficient
atoms predominate and through which electric currents flow. The space-charge limits
the current through the sheath. There, electric field strength is not zero.
space infra-charge
is an electrical property of space itself, not determined by the
presence of electrical charges or conductor's residing in that space. The infra-
charge is homologous with Paul Dirac's electron theory (1928) which postulated that
the vacuum was a sea-of-electrons possessing negative energies. These electrons are
not normally detectable but can be prompted into existence (that is, converted into
detectable electrons) under certain conditions. The electrons of Dirac's sea affect
the energy states of atoms in space. To quote Nobel laureate Leon Cooper (606 fn.):
"Thus the vacuum, rather than being an inert void responds to the presence of
charges or masses and modifies their behaviour".
specific charge ratio
is a method of comparing the electric charge inherent in a
celestial body with some other physical property such as its volume or the number
of atoms which it contains. The ratio would thus be expressed in coulombs per cubic
metre, coulombs per kilogram, or possibly as excess electrons per kilogram
molecular mass (kilomole).
stellar wind
is the flow of material from a star to the Galaxy. In the electric
star the stellar wind exists as one means of the star accumulating charge from the
nearly "empty" space which surrounds it. By sending electron-deficient atoms to the
Galaxy the star gains electrons relative to the material it contains. From the few
stellar winds that have been measured, it seems as if the mass loss increases as
the square root of the luminosity. In terms of the electric star model presented
here, it is tempting to think that luminosity varies as the square of the star-to-
galaxy current. There is some evidence that mass loss is enhanced when a close
companion is present (Hutchings).
tera( amperes)
the prefix tera indicates one million million times the quantity.
Tera- is thus a synonym for a multiplier of one billion in Great Britain, and one
trillion in the United States. It is, as a measure of current, one million million
amperes.
thermonuclear fusion
occurs in a gas of sufficient temperature that its atoms in
collision will fuse in significant numbers (see nuclear fusion). A thermonuclear
process is purported to provide the power radiated by the stars.
transactive matrix
is a quasi ordered plenum of electrons moving chaotically, which
forms a medium through which ions can flow, thereby transmitting an electric
currrent. The solar wind electrons form such a matrix, their existence allows the
Sun to jettison ions towards the edge of the solar cavity where electrons are
readily available.
transmutation
as used here to transmute means to change the form of, such as from
kinetic to potential energy, or to modify the structure of a molecule, crystal, or
atom.
troposphere
is the lowest layer of the Earth's atmosphere. It is characterized by
the complete mixing of the atoms and molecules of the atmospheric gases by
significant vertical winds. The temperature and pressure declines with height in
this layer.
unseen bodies
are components in a binary system which remain undetected by direct
observation but are implied by some anomalous behaviour of those bodies which are
detected.
visual binary system
is a binary system where the component stars are resolvable
into separate optical images, that is, the star images are distinguishable.
whistling atmospheric
or whistler, is an electromagnetic wave in the audible
frequency range (300 to 30 000 hertz). Its origin is in lightning discharges, and
it is propagated along the magnetic field lines (see Hines). Whistlers are today
audible only using an amplifier but in the environment of Solaria Binaria they
should have been directly audible.
SOLARIA BINARIA: BIBILIOGRAPHY
BIBILIOGRAPHY
Certain sources and their abbreviations:
Acad. sci., compt. rend. Academie des sciences, comptes rendus
Am. Beh. Sci. American Behavioral Scientist
A. Chem. Soc., J. American Chemical Society, Journal
An. Rev. As. Ap. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics
As. Soc. Pac., Publ.( Proc.) Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Publications (Proceedings)
As. & Ap. Astronomy and Astrophysics
As. J. Astronomical Journal
Ap. J. Astronomical Journal
Brit. As. Assn., J. British Astronomical Association, Journal
Can. J. Pl. Sci. Canadian Journal of Plant Science
Chem. & Eng. News Chemical and Engineering News
Creation Res. Q. Creation Research Quarterly
Dept. En. Mines & Res. Department of Energy, Mines and Resources (Canada)
Detroit Acad. Nat. Sci. Detroit Academy of Natural Sciences
Ency. Brit., Macro. (Micro.) Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Macropaedia (Micropaedia)
Ins. El. Eng. J. Institute of Electrical Engineers, Journal (now Electronics and Power)
Int. As. U., Proc. 11th Gen. Ass.: International Astronomical Union, Proceedings of the 11th General Assembly
Int. As. U., Proc. Colloq. No. 6: International Astronomical Union, Proceedings of Colloquium Number Six
J. Geomag. & Geoel. Journal of Geomagnetism and Geoelectricity
J. Geoph. Res. Journal of Geophysical Research
J. Opt. Soc. Am. Journal of the Optical Society of America
J. Phys. Journal of Physics
Nat. Bur. Std., J. Res. National Bureau of Standards, Journal of Research
NY Acad. Sci., Annals New York Academy of Sciences, Annals
Phil. Mag. Philosophical Magazine
Roy. Anthrop. Inst., J. Royal Anthropological Institute, Journal
Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. Astronomical Society (London), Philosophical Transactions
Roy. Soc. (London)., Proc. Royal Society of London, Proceedings
Roy. Soc. (New South Wales), J. & Proc.: Royal Society of New South Wales, Journal and Proceedings
S. I. S. Review (Workshop) Society for Interdisciplinary studies, Review
(Workshop)
References:
Abdul-Rauf, Muhammad (1978), "Pilgrimage to Mecca", National Geographic 154, no. 5
(Nov.), pp. 581-607; (pp. 584 f.) also, "Arabia", Ency. Brit. 2, 9th ed p. 262
Abell, George D. (1975), Exploration of the Universe, 3rd ed. (Holt, Rinehart
&Winston: New York);
Adams, J. A. S., see Heymann
Ager, Derek V. (1973), The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (Wiley: New York);
(Ch. 3); (Ch. 4)
Aggarwal, H. R., see Oberbeck
Agrawal, P. C., see Matsuoka
Hannes (1962), "Filamentary Currents and Magnetic Conditions on the Sun" in Int.
As. U., Proc. 11 th Gen. Ass. (Academic: New York), pp. 433-5; (pp. 433, 435)
Allen, C. W. Q 955, 1st ed.; 1963, 2nd ed.; 1973, 3rd ed.), Astrophysical
Quantities (Athlone: London); (1963: p. 237); (1963, 1973: no. 112); (1963: 219,
219)
Aller, Lawrence H. (1974), "Star" in Encv. Brit., Macro. 17 (Chicago), pp. 584-604;
(p. 603) see Ross
Alvarez, Luis W., et al. (1980), "Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-
Tertiary Extinction", Science 208 (6 Jun.), pp. 1095-1108;
also, Russell, Dale A., "The Mass Extinctions of the Late Mesozoic", Scientific
American 246 (Jan. 1982), pp. 58-65
Alvarez, Walter, see Alvarez, L. W.
Aristotle, On the Heavens, tr. W. K. C. Guthrie (Harvard: Cambridge, 1971); (p. 25.
270b)
-Metaphysics, tr. H. Tredennik (Harvard: Cambridge, 1975); (partic. Bk. One, pp. 3-
83)
-Meteorologica, tr. H. D. P. Lee, (Harvard: Cambridge, 1978 p. 13, 339b21)
Armstrong, T. P., see Krimigis
Arnold, James R. (1973, "The Chemist's Moon," Science and Public Affairs 29, no. 9
(Nov,), pp. 22-5
Arp. Halton C. (1975), "The Evolution of Galaxies" in New Frontiers In Astronomy,
(Freeman: San Francisco), pp. 210-21
Arvidson, R. E., see Oberbeck
Asakawa, Y. (1976), "Promotion and Retardation of Heat Transfer by Electric
Fields," Nature 261 (20 May), pp. 220-1
Asaro, Frank, see Alvarez
Atkinson, G., see Jacobs
Axford, W. I., see Krimigis
Ayala, Francisco J. (1978), "The Mechanism of Evolution" Scientific American, 23 9
(Sep.), pp. 56-9
Babcock, H. W. (1962), "The Solar Magnetic Cycle" in Int. As. U., Proc. I I th Gen.
Ass. (Academic: New York), pp. 419-25
Bachmang, Charles H., see Friedman
Bacon, Edward, see Galanopoulos
Bailey, Valentine A. (1960), "Existence of Net Electrical Charges on Stars,"
Nature, (186 (14 May), pp. 508-10; S; 16, fn. 16 also, Nature 189 (7 Jan. 1961),
pp. 43-4, 44-5; and Roy. Soc. (New South Wales) J. & Proc. 94 (1960), pp-77-86
Baker, George (1960), "Origin of Tektites" Nature 185 (30 Jan.), pp. 291-4; 120 (p.
293)
Baker, Howard B. (1954), "The Earth Participates in the Evolution of the Solar
System", Detroit Acad. Nat. Sci. (Detroit).
Baker, Robert H. (1967), Astronomy, 8 th ed. (van Nostrand: Princeton).
Barnes, A. see Wolfe
Barnes, Thomas G. (1977), "Recent Origin and Decay of the Earth's Magnetic Field,"
S. I. S. Review II, no. 2 (Dec.)
See also, Milsom
Barnwell, F. H. & Brown, Jr., F. A. (1964), "Responses of Planarians and Snails,"
in Biological Effects of Magnetic Fields, v. 1 (Plenum: New York)
Basilevsky, A. T., see Florensky
Bass, Robert W. (1974), "Proofs of the Stability of the Solar System," Pens‚e 4,
no. 3 (Su.), pp. 21-6; also, loc. cit., "Did Worlds Collide?" pp. 9-20
Batten, Alan H. (1967), "On the Interpretation of the Statistics of Double Stars,"
An. Rev. As. Ap. 5, pp. 25-44;
-(1973a), "Discussion of Observations of the Flow of Matter Within Binary Systems"
in Extended Atmospheres and Circumstellar Matter in Spectroscopic Binary Systems,
Int. As. U. Symposium no. 51 (May), pp. 1-21;
-(1973b), Binary and Multiple Systems of Stars (Pergamon: New York Toronto)
Beals, C. S. & Halliday, Ian (1967), "Terrestrial Meteorite Craters and their Lunar
Counterparts," in Int. Dict. Geogr., v. 2 (Pergamon: New York)
Becker, Robert O., see Friedman
Becvar, Antonin (1964): Atlas of the Heavens 11: Catalogue 1950.0, (Czechoslovakian
Academy of Sciences/ Sky Publishing Corp.: Praha/ Cambridge MS)
Beebe, Rita, see Smith, B. A.
Behannon. K. W. see Ness
Bellamy, Hans Schindler (1936), Moon, Myths and Man (Faber & Faber: London)
-(1951), A Life History of our Earth (Faber & Faber: London)
Bessell, M. S., see Wickramasinghe, D. T.
Bible, references are to Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday: Garden City)
Bimson, John J. (1978), "Redating the Exodus and Conquest," J. St. Old Test., Sup.
Ser., no. 5
Blavatsky, H. P. (1877), repr. (Theosophical University Press: Pasadena, Calif.,
1976) vol. I., Science, pp. 160 f., citing Mallet's Northern Antiquities
Blevin, H. A. (1964a), "Plasma in a Magnetic Field" in Discharge and Plasma
Physics, ed. S. C. Hayden (The University of New England: Armidale, NSW), pp. 471-
80
-(1964b), "Plasma Confinement" in op. cit. pp. 471-80
Bloch, R. (1962), Gli Etruschi 11 (Saggitore: Milan)
Blumer, M. & Youngblood, W. W. (1975), "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Soils
and Recent Sediments," Science 188 (4 Apr.), p. 53
Bostrom, C. O., see Krimigis
Boyce, Joseph, see Smith, B. A.
Brace, Larry H., see Taylor
Brady, Joseph L. (1972), "The Effect of a Trans-Plutonian Planet on Halley's
Comet," As. Soc. Pac., Proc. 84 (Apr.), pp. 314-22
Brazilevski, A. T., see Ksanfomaliti
Brennan, M. H. (1964), "Plasma Heating," in Discharge and Plasma Physics, ed. S. C.
Hayden (The University of New England: Armidale, NSW), pp. 481-7
Briggs, Geofrrey, see Smith, B. A.
Broadfoot, A. L., see Kumar
Brooks, J., see Hoyle (Oct. 1977)
Brough, James (1958), "Time and Evolution," in Studies on Fossil Vertebrates
(Athlone: London), pp. 16-38
Brown, F. A. Jr., see Barnwell
Brown, H. Auchincloss (1967), Cataclysms of the Earth (Twayne: New York)
Brown, W. Norman (1961), "Mythology of India," in Mythologies of the Ancient World
(Doubleday Anchor: New York)
Browning, Iben, see Roosen
Bruce, Charles E. R. (1944), A New Approach to Astrophysics and Cosmogony (Unwin
Bros: London)
-(1955), "Combination Spectra in Long-Period Variable Stars," Phil. Mag. 46 (sep.),
pp 1123-31
-(1958-1964), "Cosmic Electric Discharges," letters to Electronics and Power (Ins.
El. Eng., J.):
1. "Cosmic Electric Discharges," v. 4 (Dec. 1958)
2. "Spiral Nebulae," v. 6 (sep. 1960)
3. "Galactic Evolution and Cosmological Controversies," v. 7 (Jul. 1961)
4. "The Energy Radiated by Radio Galaxies," v. 7 (Aug. 1961)
5. "Cosmic Plasma Jets and Hyperthermal WindTunnels," v. 8 (Apr. 1962), pp. 204-5
6. "Stellar Temperatures," v. 8 (Oct. 1962), p. 459
7. "Radio Galaxies," v. 8 (Dec. 1962). p. 547
8. "The Evershed Effect," v. 9 (1963), p. 118
9. "Two Populations of Galaxies?," v. 9 (Jun. 1963), p. 259
10. "Zanstra's Theory of Planetary Nebulae," v. 9 (Jul. 1963), p. 303
11. "The Radio Haloes of Galaxies," v. 9 (Aug. 1963), pp. 356-7
12. "Discharge Generated Vortices," v. 9 (1963), p. 414
13. "Extremely Strong Cosmic Radio Sources," v. 10 (Feb. 1964), p. 56
14. "Theories of Radio Galaxies," v. 10 (Apr. 1964), pp. 93-4
15. "Galactic Evolution," v. 10, (May 1964), p. 166
16. "Solar Magnetic Fields," v. 10 (Aug. 1964), pp. 279-80
17. "Whiskers in Space?" [16 sic], v. 10 (Oct. 1964), p. 361
---(1966a), Lightning, Novae, and Quasars," Nature 209 (19 Feb.), p. 798
---(1966b), Lightning Currents," Electronics & Power 12 (Jun.), p. 200
also, Nature 211 (2 Jul. 1966), pp. 62 ff.
Burgess, Eric (1979), "Venus Questions Answered," New Scientist 81 (8 Feb.), pp.
391-3
Canal, Ramon (1974), "Nucleosynthesis of Lithium in Low-Energy Flares," Ap. J. 189
(1 May), pp. 531-3
Canuto, V., et al. (1979), "Varying G," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 188, pp. 829-37
Cardona, Dwardu (1976), "On the Origin of Tektites," Kronos 2, no. 1 (Aug.), pp.
38-44
---(1977), "The Sun of Night," Kronos 3, no. 1 (Aug.), pp. 31-8
---(1978a), "Let There Be Light," Kronos 3, no. 3 (Sp.), pp. 34-54
---(1978b), "The Mystery of the Pleiades," Kronos 3, no. 4 (May), pp. 24-44
Challinor, R. A. (1971), "Variations in the Rate of Rotation of the Earth," Science
172 (4 Jun.), pp. 1022-5 Chalmers, J. A. (1967) Atmospheric Electricity, 2nd ed.
(Pergamon: Oxford)
Clark, D. H., et al. (1975), "Is Cir X-1 a Runaway Binary?," Nature 254 (24 Apr.),
pp. 674-6
---(1979), "Differential Solar Rotation depends on Solar Activity," Nature 280 (26
Jul.), pp. 299-300
Clube, S. Victor M. (1978), "Do We Need a Revolution in Astronomy?," New Scientist
80 (26 Oct.), pp. 284-6
Coe, Michael D. (1975), "Native Astronomy in Mesoamerica" in Archaeastronomy in
Pre-Columbian America, ed. F. Aventi (University of Texas: Austin)
Coe, M. J., et al. (1975), "Hard X-ray Measurements of Nova AO535+ 26 in Taurus,"
Nature 256 (21 Aug.), pp. 630-1
Cole, K. D. (1976), "Physical Argument and hypothesis for Sun-Weather
relationships," Nature 260 (18 Mar.), pp. 229-30
Cook II, Allan F., see Smith, B. A.
Cook, Melvin Alonzo (1966), Prehistory and Earth Models (Parish: London)
---(1972), "Rare Gas Absorption on Solids of the Lunar Regolith," J. Coll. Int.
Sci. 38, no. 1 (Jan.), pp. 12-19
Cooper, Leon N. (1968), An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics
(Harper & Row: New York)
Corliss, William R. (1975), "Moon Lore and Eclipse Superstitions" in Strange
Universe (Sourcebook Proj.: Glen Arm, MD)
Cowley, Ann P., et al. (1975), "TT Arietis: An evolved, very short period binary,"
Ap. J. 195 (15 Jan.), pp. 413-21
---(1977), "The Flickering White Dwarf CD-42 o 14462: A Non-eruptive Close Binary,"
Ap. J. 214 (1 Jun.), pp. 471-7
Cox, Allan (1969), "Geomagnetic Reversals," Science 163 (17 Jan.), pp. 237-45
Crew, Eric W. (1974), "Lightning in Astronomy," Nature 252 (13 Dec.), pp. 539-42
Crozier, W. D. (1966), "Nine Years of Continuous Collection of Black Magnetic
Spherules from the Atmosphere," J. Geoph. Res. 71 (15 Jan.), pp. 603-10
Dachille, Frank (1963), "Axis Changes on the Earth from Large Meteoritic
Collisions," Nature 198 (13 Apr.), 176
---(1978), "Electromagnetic Effects of Collisions at Meteoritical Velocities:
Experimental and Theoretical Results," Meteorics 13 (Dec.), pp. 430-3
---(1979), "The Electrodynamic Aspect of Impact Cratering," unpubl., presented at
International Meteoritic Society Conference, Heidelberg
Danjon, Andr‚ (1960), Note: "Sur un changement du r‚gime de la rotation de la Terre
survenu au mois de juillet 1959," Acad. sci., compt. rend. 250 (22 Feb.), pp. 1399-
1402
Darwin, George H. (1879), "On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid and on the
Remote History of the Earth," Roy. Soc. (Lond.), Phil. Trans., pp. 447-538
also, The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System, 1898, repr. (Freeman;
San Francisco, 1962)
Davies, Merton E., see Smith, B. A.
Dawson, Edward & Dalgetty, L. C. (1967), "The March of the Compass in Canada,"
Canadian Surveyor 21, no. 5 (Dec.), pp. 380-402
Dayhoff, M. O. et al. (1964), "Thermodynamic Equilibria in Pre-Biological
Atmospheres," Science 146 (11 Dec.), pp. 1461-4;
de Grazia, Alfred (1977), "Ancient Knowledge of Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's
Rings," Kronos 2, no. 3 (Feb.), pp. 65-8
---(1978), "Palaetiology of Fear and Memory" in Recollections of a Fallen Sky, eds.
E. Milton et al. (Unileth: Lethbridge), pp. 31-44
---(1980), "The 1500 BC Catastrophe: Ten Absolutes for Testing," rev. in "Focus,"
S. I. S. Review IV, no. 4 (Sp.), pp. 74 f.
---(1981), Chaos and Creation: An Introduction to Quantavolution in Human and
Natural History (Metron: Princeton)
---(1983a), God's Fire: Moses and the Management of the Exodus (Metron: Princeton)
---(1983b), Homo Schizo I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis (Metron: Princeton)
---(1983c), Homo Schizo II: Human Nature and Behavior (Metron: Princeton)
---(1983d), Divine Succession: A Science of Gods Old and New (Metron: Princeton)
---(1984a), The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (Metron: Princeton)
---(1984b), Lately Tortured Earth: Exoterrestrial Forces and Quantavolutions in the
Earth Sciences (Metron: Princeton)
---(1984c), The Burning of Troy: Essays and Notes on Quantavolution (Metron:
Princeton)
---(1984d), Cosmic Heretics (Metron: Princeton)
---et al. (1978), The Velikovsky Affair (University: Hyde Park, NY, 1967), repr. of
art. orig. publ. Am. Beh. Sci. (Sep. 1963); rev. ed. (Sphere: London de Santillana,
Giorgio & von Dechend, Herta (1969), Hamlets Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame
of Time (Godine: Boston)
Dicke, Robert H. (1957), "Principle of Equivalence and the Weak Interactions,
"Reviews of Modern Physics 29 (Jul.), pp. 355-62
---(1964), "The Earth and Cosmology," Ap. to The Theoretical Significance of
Experimental Relativity (Gordon and Breach: New York), pp. 99-121
Dickerson, Richard E. (1978), "Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life,"
Scientific American 239 (Sep.), pp. 70-86
Dirac, Paul A. M. (1937), "The Cosmological Constants," letter to the Editor,
Nature 139 (20 Feb.), p. 323
Dole, Stephen H. (1970), Habitable Planets for Man (Elsevier: New York)
Donnelly, Ignatius (1970), Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, 1883, repr.
(University Books: New York)
Douglas, J. A. V., et al. (1970), "Minerology and Deformation in Some Lunar
Samples," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 594-7
Douglas, R. J. W. (1970), Sci. Ed., Geology and Economic Minerals of Canada (Dept.
En., Mines, & Res.: Ottawa)
Dreyer, J. L. E. (1953), A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, 1905, repr.
2 nd ed. (Dover: New York)
Dugun, Raymond Smith, see Russell, H. N. Dulk, George A. (1965), "Io-Related Radio
Emission from Jupiter," Science 148 (18 Jun.), pp. 1585-9
Eddy, J. A., et al. (1976), "Solar Rotation During the Maunder Minimum," Solar
Physics 46, pp. 3-14
Edwards, Deborah, et al. (1980), "Asymmetric Synthesis in a Confined Vortex:
Gravitational Fields Can Cause a Symmetric Synthesis," Am. Chem. Soc. J. 102 (2
Jan.), pp. 381-2
Eliade, Mircea (1954), The Myth of the Eternal Return, tr. (Princeton Univ.: New
York)
---(1967), The Quest (U. Of Chicago Press: Chicago) Encke, J. F. (1823),
"Fortgesetzte Nachrucht ber der Pons'schen Kometon," Sammlung astronomischer
Abhandlungen Beobachtungen und Nachrichten, pp. 124-40
Epstein, Samuel & Taylor, Jr., Hugh P. (1970), "O-18/ O-16, Si-30/ Si-28, D/ H, and
C-13/ C-12 Studies of Lunar Rocks and Minerals," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 533-5
Faul, Henry (1966), "Tektites are Terrestrial," Science 152 (3 Jun.), pp. 1341-5
Firsoff, V. A. (1980), "On Some Problems of Venus," Brit. As. Assn., J. 89 (1978),
pp. 38-46; repr. Kronos 5, no. 2 (Jan.), pp. 57-65
Fisher, Rev. Osmond (1882), "On the Physical Cause of the Ocean Basins," Nature 7
(12 Jan.), pp. 243-4
Florensky, K. P., et al. (1977), "Geomorphic Degradations on the Surface of Venus:
An Analysis of Venera 9 and Venera 10 Data," Science 196 (20 May), pp. 869-71
Forshufvud, Ragnar (1979), letter "On the Thermal Aspects of Venus" and "More on
the Thermal Aspects of Venus," replies: Talbott, George; Jueneman, Fredrick;
Milton, Earl; Ellenberger, Leroy; and Greenberg, Lewis; Kronos 4. no. 3 (Feb.), pp.
76-8; Kronos 5, no. 1 (Oct.), pp. 83-8
Fox, Sidney W. (1960), "How Did Life Begin?," Science 132 (22 Jul.), pp. 200-8
---and Windsor, Charles R. (1970), "Synthetis of Amino Acids by the Heating of
Formaldehyde and Ammonia," Science 170 (27 Nov.), pp. 984-5
Francis, Gordon (1956), "The Glow Discharge at Low Pressure" in Handbuch der Physik
(Band 22 Gasentlaufen II Springer Verlag: Berlin), pp. 53-208
Frazer, Sir James George (1916), "Ancient Stories of a Great Flood," Roy. Anthrop.
Inst., J. 46, pp. 231-83
---(1922), The Golden Bough (Cambridge, 1900), abr. (Macmillan: New York)
Friedman, Howard, et al. (1963), "Geomagnetic Parameters and Psychiatric Hospital
Admissions," Nature 200 (16 Nov.), pp. 626-8
Galanopoulos, A. C. & Bacon, Edward (1969), Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend
(Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis)
Gershenson, Daniel E. & Greenberg, Daniel A. (1964), Anaxagoras and the Birth of
Physics (Blaisdell: New York)
Glasby, John (1970), The Dwarf Novae (American Elsevier: New York)
Gliese, W. (1957), "Katalog der Sterne n"her als 20 Parsek fr 1950.0,"
Astronomisches Rechen-Institut Heidelberg Mitteilunger Series A, Number 8, 89 pages
Gold, Thomas (1965), as reported in the New York Times (21 Apr.), ascribed to
remarks at one of the Planetary Sessions of the American Geophysical Union meeting.
Not mentioned in the published Transactions of the 46th Annual meeting
---(1980), "Electrical Origin of the Outbursts on Io," Science 206 (30 Nov. 1979),
pp. 1071-3; repr. S. I. S. Review IV, no. 4 (Sp.), pp. 109-111 Goldsmith, Donald
(1977), ed. Scientists Confront Velikovsky (W. W. Norton: New York)
Goodeavage, Joseph F. (1978), Our Threatened Planet (Simon and Schuster: New York)
Grant, Michael (1974), "Roman Religion" in Ency. Brit. Macro 15 (Chicago)
Graves, Robert (1960), "The Castration of Uranus," Ch. 6 in The Greek Myths, v. 1,
rev. (Penguin: Harmondsworth)
Gray, George W. (1955), "Life at High Altitudes," Scientific American 193, pp. 58-
68
Greenberg, Leonard H. (1975), "Diffraction and Angular Resolution" in Physics for
Biology and Pre-Med Students (Saunders: Toronto), 4-7-1
Greenberg, Lewis M (1973), "Compendium: The Papyrus Ipuwer," Pens‚e 3, no. 1
(Winter), pp. 36-7
---(1979), "Velikovsky and Venus: A Preliminary Report on the Pioneer Probes,"
Kronos 4, no. 4 (Jun.), pp. 1-2 Reply to Forshufvud, 182 Reply to Morrison, 182
---& Sizemore, Warner B. (1975), "Saturn and Genesis," Kronos 1, no. 3 (Nov.), p.
46
---et al., eds. (1977), Velikovsky and Establishment Science (Kronos: Glassboro)
---et al., eds. (1978), "Scientists Confront Scientists Who Confront Velikovsky"
(Kronos: Glassboro)
Gribbin, John R. (1976), "Antarctica Leads the Ice Ages," New Scientist 69 (25
Mar.), pp. 695-6
---and Plagemann, Stephen H. (1973), "Discontinuous Change in Earth's Spin Rate
following Great Solar Storm of August 1972," Nature 243 (4 May), pp. 26-7
---and Plagemann, Stephen H. (1974), The Jupiter Effect (Random House; New York)
Grinnell, George (1978), Catastrophism and Uniformity: A Proble into the Origin of
the 1833 Gestalt Shift in Geology" in Recollections of a Fallen Sky: Velikovsky and
Cultural Amnesia, eds. E. Milton et al. (Unileth: Lethbridge), pp. 129-37
Gunn, Ross (1932), "On the Evolution of a Rotationally Unstable Star," Physical
Review 39 (1 Jan.), pp. 130-41 and "On the Origin of the Solar System," Physical
Review 39 (15 Jan.), pp. 311-9
Gurnett, D. A. et al. (1979), "Auroral Hiss Observed near the Io Plasma Torus,"
Nature 280 (30 Aug.), pp. 767-70
Hammond, Allen L. (1974), "Exploring the Solar System (1): An Emerging New
Perspective," Science 186 (22 Nov.), pp. 720-4
Hanson, Kirby J. (1976), "A New Estimate of Solar Irradiance at the Earth's Surface
on Zonal and Global Scales," J. Geoph. Res. 81 (20 Aug.), pp. 4435-43
Hapgood, Charles H. (1966), Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Chilton: Philadelphia)
---(1970), Path of the Pole, rev. (Chilton: Philadelphia) 174, fn. 102 (verso front
cover, Ch. 1)
Harang, Liev (1951), The Aurorae (Chapman and Hall: London) Harrington, Robert S.,
see Roosen Harrison, Christopher G. (1966), "Antipodal Location of Continents and
Oceans," Science 153 (9 Sep.), pp. 1246-8
Harrison, E. R. (1977), "Has the Sun a Companion Star?," Nature 270 (24 Nov.), pp.
324-6 Hartline, Beverly Karplus (1980), "Three Spacecraft Team Probes the
Magnetosphere," Research News in Science 207 (1 Feb.), pp. 511-3
Haymes, Robert C. (1971), Introduction to Space Science (Wiley: New York); 12, fn.
11 (p. 277)
Hays, J. D. (1971), Geological Society of America, Bulletin 83, pp. 2433-47
Heilbron, J. L. (1979), Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (University of
California: Berkeley)
Heirtzler, J. R. & Phillips, J. D. (1974), "Rock Magnetism," Ency. Brit., Macro 15
(Chicago), pp. 942-7
Hesiod, (a), Theogony, tr. & ed. Hugh Evelyn-Whyte (Harvard: Cambridge 1964) 101
(1. pp. 115, 87 ff.); 106; 148 (1. pp. 720 ff., 131)
---(b), The Homeric Hymns , tr. Hugh Evelyn-Whyte (Harvard; Cambridge 1964); 181 ("
Hymn to Pallas Athene," pp. 453-4)
Hesser, James E., see Cowley (1977)
---et al. (1976), "Sigma Orionis E as Mass-Transfer Binary System," Nature 262 (8
Jul.), pp. 116-18
Hewish, A. (1975), "Pulsars and High Density Physics," Science 188 (13 Jun.), pp.
1079-83
Heyl, Paul R. and Chrzanowski, Peter (1942), "A New Determination of the Constant
of Gravitation," Nat. Bur. Stds., J. Res. (Jul.), pp. 1-31
Heymann, D., et al. (1970), "Inert Gases in Lunar Samples," Science 167 (30 Jan.),
pp. 555-8
Hillas, A. M. (1972), Cosmic Rays (Pergamon: Oxford)
Hines, Colin O. (1974), "Ionosphere," Ency. Brit., Macro 9 (Chicago), pp. 809-16
Homer, The Iliad of Homer, tr. Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago: Chicago,
1951)
Horowitz, Norman H. (1977), "The Search for Life on Mars," Scientific American 297,
no. 5 (Nov.), pp. 52-61
Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Narliker, J. V. (1971), "On the Nature of Mass," Nature 233 (3
Sep.), pp. 41-4
---and Wickramasinghe, N. Chandra (1977), "Origin and Nature of Carbonaceous
Material in the Galaxy," Nature 270 (22-29 Dec.), pp. 701-3
---and Wickramasinghe with other authors, "Prebiotic Polymers and Infrared Spectra
of Galactic Sources," Nature 269 (20 Oct. 1977), pp. 674-6; "Identification of
Interstellar Polysaccharides and Related Hydrocarbons," Nature 271 (19 Jan. 1978),
pp. 229-31
---"Does Epidemic Disease Come From Space?," New Scientist 76 (17 Nov.), pp. 402-4
86, fn. 66 also, Life Cloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (Harper & Row: New
York, 1978)
Hubbard, S. (1927), The Doheny Scientific Expedition to the Hava Supai Canyon,
Northern Arizona, 1925
Hughes, David W. (1976), "Earth -An Interplanetary Dust Bin," New Scientist 72 (8
Jul.), pp. 64-6
---(1979), "Meteoroid Fragmentation in the Auroral Zones," Nature 280 (16 Aug.),
pp. 539-40
Hunt, Garry, see Smith, B. A.
---and Burgess, Eric (1979), "Saturn -Lord of the Rings," New Scientist 84 (13
Dec.), pp. 864-7; 165 (p. 867)
Hutchings, J. B. (1976), "Massive Binaries -Early Evolutionary Stages" in Structure
and Evolution of Close Binary Systems (Reidel: Boston), pp. 9-17 I Ching, tr. James
Legge (Bantam: Toronto 1969)
Ingersol, Andrew P., see Smith, B. A.
---and Dobrovolskis, Anthony (1978), "Venus' Rotation and Atmospheric Tides,"
Nature 275 (7 Sep.), pp. 37-8 and see Nature 277 (11 Jan.), p. 157
Ions, Veronica (1968), Egyptian Mythology (Hamlyn: London)
Isaacson, Israel (1974), "Applying the Revised Chronology," Pens‚e 4, no. 4 (Fall),
pp. 5-20
Isaksen, I. S. A., see Reid
Isenberg, Artur (1976), "Devi and Venus," Kronos 2, no. 1 (Aug.), pp. 89-103
Jacchia, Luigi G. (1974), "A Meteorite that Missed the Earth," Sky and Telescope 48
(Jul.), pp. 4-9
Jacobs, J. A. & Atkinson, G. (1967), "Planetary Modulation of Geomagnetic Activity"
in Magnetism and theCosmos (American Elsevier: New York), pp. 402-14
Jastrow, Jr., Morris (1910), "Sun and Saturn," (in English), Revue d'assyriologie
et d'arch‚ologie orientale (Paris) (Sep.), pp. 163-78
Johanson, Donald & Edey, Maitland (1981) Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (Simon
and Shuster: New York)
Johnson, Torrence V., see Smith, B. A.
Johnston, M. J. S. & Mauk, F. J. (1972), "Earth Tides and the Triggering of
Eruptions from Mt Stromboli, Italy," Nature 239 (29 Sep.), pp. 266-7
Jordan, Pascual (1938), "Zur empirischen Kosmologie," DieNaturwissenschaften 26 (1
Jul.), pp. 417-21
Also, "Formation of the Stars and Development of the Universe," tr. H. S. Green,
Nature 164 (15 Oct.), pp. 637-40
Joss, P. C. (1977), "X-ray Bursts and Neutron-star Thermonuclear Flashes," Nature
270 (24 Nov.), pp. 310-4
Juergens, Ralph E. (1972), "Plasma in Interplanetary Space; Reconciling Celestial
Mechanics with Velikovskian Catastrophism," Pens‚e 2, no. 3 (Fall), pp. 6-12
also, in Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday; Garden City, 1976), pp. 137-55
---(1974), "Of the Moon and Mars," Part One, Pens‚e 4, no. 4 (Fall), pp. 21-30;
Part Two, Pens‚e 4, no. 5 (Winter), pp. 27-39
---(1977a, 1977b), "Plasma Probes," Ap. II (pp. 26-9) of "On the Convection of
Electric Charge by the Rotating Earth," Kronos 2, no. 3 (Feb.), pp. 12-30
---(1977c), "Galactic Space Charge and Stellar Energy," S. I. S. Review I, no. 4
(Sp.), pp. 26-9
---(1977d), "The Critics and Stellar Energy -Juergens Replies," S. I. S. Review II.
no. 2 (Dec.), pp. 49-51
---(1978), "Geogullibility and Geomagnetic Reversals," Kronos 3, no. 4 (May), pp.
52-64
---(1979a), "Stellar Thermonuclear Energy: A False Trail," Kronos 4, No. 4 (Jun.),
pp. 16-25
---(1979b), "The Photosphere: Is it the Top or the Bottom of the Phenomenon We Call
the Sun?," Kronos 4, no. 4 (Jun.), pp. 28-54
---(1980), "On Morrison: Some Final Remarks -Ralph Juergens Replies," Kronos 5, no.
2 (Jan.), pp. 68-75 Kapitza, P. L. (1979), "Plasma and the Controlled Thermonuclear
Reaction," Science 207 (7 Sep.), pp. 959-64
Kelley, Michael C. (1980), book review of Solar System Plasma Physics by E. N.
Parker et al. (Elsevier: New York, 1979) in Science 207 (18 Jan.), pp. 297-8
Kelly, Allan O. (1974), The Gravitational Description of Mars, priv. publ.
(Varsbad, CA)
Kloosterman, Johan B. (1976), "Why Did the Dinosaurs Perish?," Komsomolskya Pravda
(5 Apr. 1965), repr. Catastrophist Geology 3, no. 1 (June), p. 5 (supplied courtesy
of L. I. Salop), 127, fig. 26
Koch, Robert H. (1970), "Observational Facts in Binary Mass Loss," in Mass Loss and
Evolution in Close Binaries, eds. K. Gydenterne & R. M. West, Int. As. U., Proc.
Colloq., no. 6 (Copenhagen University Observatory)
Kofahr, Robert E. (1977), "Could the Flood Waters Have Come From a Canopy of
Extraterrestrial Source?," Creation Res. Q. 13 (Mar.), pp. 202-6
Kolin, Alexander (1968), "Magnetic Fields in Biology," Physics Today 21 (Nov.), pp.
38-59
Kondratov, Alexander (1974), The Riddles of Three Oceans (Progress: Moscow)
Kopal, Zdenø k (1938), "On the Evolution of Eclipsing Binaries," Roy. As. Soc.,
Mon. Not. 98, no. 8, pp. 651-7
---(1959), Close Binary Systems (Chapman and Hall: London)
Kraft, Robert P. (1977), "Double Stars" -a book review of Structure and Evolution
of Close Binary Systems, ed. by Eggleton et al., Science 197 (29 Jul.), pp. 449-50
Krimigis, S. M. et al. (1979), "Low-Energy Charged Particle Environment at Jupiter;
A First Look," Science 204 (1 Jun.), pp. 998-1003
Krzeminski, W. (1965), "The Eclipsing Binary U Geminorum," Ap. J. 142, pp. 1051-67
Ksanfomality, Leonid Vasilevich, et al. (1977), "The New Venus," New Scientist 73
(20 Jan.), pp. 127-9
Kukarin, B. & Parenago, P. (1934), "Investigations of Nova-like Variable Stars, II.
Cycle-amplitude Relation in U Geminorum Variables," Ver"nderliche Sterne 4, no. 8
(44) (1 May), pp. 251-4
Kukla, G. J. & Matthews, R. (1972), "When Will the Present Interglacial End?,"
Science 178 (13 Oct.), pp. 190-1
Kumar, S. & Broadfoot, A. L. (1978), "Evidence from Mariner 10 of Solar Wind Flux
Depletion at High Ecliptic Latitudes," As. & Ap. 69, Letter, L 5-8
Kundt, Wolfgang (1977), "Spin and Atmospheric Tides of Venus," As. & Ap. 60, pp.
85-91
Lamers, H. J. G. L. M., et al. (1976), "Stellar Winds and Accretion in Massive X-
Ray Binaries," As. & Ap. 49, pp. 327-35
Lane, Frank W. (1968), The Elements Rage: The Extremes of Natural Violence, in two
vols., rev. (Sphere: London)
Lang, Andrew (1968), Custom and Myth, reprint of 1885 London ed. (AMS: New York)
Lanzerotti, L. J., see Krimigis Lapointe, P. L., et al. (1978), "What Happened to
the High-Latitude Palaeomagnetic Poles," Nature 273 (22 Jun.), pp. 655-7
Larson, E. D., see Strangway Latham, Gary V. (1973), "Lunar Seismology," Science
and Public Affairs 28, no. 9 (Nov.), pp. 16-21
Lear, John (1964), "What the Moon Ranger Couldn't See," Saturday Review 47 (5
Sep.), pp. 35-43
Lebo, G. R. et al. (1965), "Jupiter's Decametric Emission Correlated with the
Longitudes of the First Three Galilean Satellites," Science 148 (25 Jun.), pp.
1724-6
Lemaire, J. & Scherer, M. (1971), "Kinetic Models of the Solar Wind," J. Geoph.
Res. 76 (1 Nov.), pp. 7479-90; 16, fn. 16 (pp. 7480 f.)
Levy, E. H. (1978), "Magnetic Field in the Primitive Solar Nebula," Nature 276 (30
Nov.), p. 481
Lewis, Jr., Paul D., see Milton (1978)
Liller, William (1977), "The Story of AM Herculis," Sky and Telescope 53, no. 5
(May), pp. 351-4
Lindblad, B. A. (1979), "Meteor Radar Rates, Geomagnetic Activity and Solar Wind
Sector Structure," Nature 273 (29 Jun.), pp. 732-4
Long, C. H. (1963), Alpha: The Myths of Creation (G. Brazillier: New York)
Long, Daniel R. (1974), "Why do we believe Newtonian gravitation at laboratory
dimensions?," Physical Review, Part D 9 (15 Feb.), pp. 850-2
also, "Experimental examination of the gravitational inverse square law," Nature
260 (1 Apr. 1976), pp. 417-8
Lowery, Malcolm (1980/ 81), "What's in a Name?," S. I. S. Review V, no. 2, pp. 46-9
Lugmair, G. W., see Marti Lyttleton, Raymond A. (1936), "The Origin of the Solar
System," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 96, pp. 559-68
---(1938), "On the Origin of Binary Stars," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 98, pp. 646-50
---(1953), The Stability of Rotating Liquid Masses (Cambridge University:
Cambridge)
Malin, S. R. C. & Srivastava, B. J. (1979), "Correlation Between Heart Attacks and
Magnetic Activity," Nature 277 (22 Feb.), pp. 646-8
Malkus, W. V. R. (1968), "Precession of the Earth as the Cause of Geomagnetism,"
Science 160 (19 Apr.), pp. 259-64
Manson, Lewis A. (1978), The Birth of the Moon (Dennis-Landmann: Santa Monica)
Maraschi, L., et al. (1976), "B-Emission Stars and X-ray Sources," Nature 259 (29
Jan.), pp. 292-3
Marti, K., et al. (1970), "Solar Wind Gases, Cosmic Ray Spallation Products, and
the Irradiation History," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 548-50
Martin, P. S. & Wright, Jr., H. E., eds. (1967), Pleistocene Extinctions: The
Search for a Cause (Yale University: New Haven)
Mason, Herbert, tr. (1972), Gilgamesh (New American Library: New York)
Matsuoka, M., et al. (1974), "Further Simultaneous Hard X-ray and Optical
Observations of Sco X-1," Nature 250 (7 Jul.), pp. 38-40; 47
Mazur, Abraham & Harrow, Benjamin (1971), Textbooks of Biochemistry, 10th ed.
(Saunders: Philadelphia); 91-2, fn. 71 (pp. 71 ff., esp. 74-6)
Menzel, Donald H. (1959), Our Sun, rev. ed. (Harvard: Cambridge); 11 (p. 24)
---et al. (1970), Survey of the Universe (Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs); 24, fn.
23 (p. 659)
Meservey, R. (1969), "Topological Inconsistency of Continental Drift on the
Present-Sized Earth," Science 166 (31 Oct.), pp. 609-11
Mihalas. Dimitri & Routley, Paul McRae (1968), Galactic Astronomy (Freeman: San
Francisco)
Miller, Stanley L. & Urey, Harold C. (1959), "Organic Compound Synthesis on the
Primitive Earth," Science 130 (31 Jul.), pp. 245-51
Milsom, John (1977), "A Commentary on Barnes' Magnetic Decay," S. I. S. Review II,
no. 2 (Dec.), p. 46
Milton, Earl R. (1978), "Foreword" in Recollections of a Fallen Sky: Velikovsky and
Cultural Amnesia, eds. E. Milton et al. (Unileth: Lethbridge), pp. 11-18
---(1979), "The Not So Stable Sun," Kronos 5, no. 1 (Oct.), pp. 64-78; 11, fn 7
(pp. 70 f.); 56-7, fn 41
---(1980/ 1), "Electric Stars in a Gravity-less Electrified Cosmos," S. I. S.
Review V, no. 1 (Jan.), pp. 6-12; reply to Forshufvud; reply to Morrison
---(1982), "Comets, Rings, Satellites, and Things," unpubl. Mitton, Simon, ed.
(1977), Cambridge Ency. Astronomy (Prentice Hall: Toronto)
Morabito, L. A. et al., (1979), "Discovery of Currently Active Extraterrestrial
Volcanism," Science 204 (1 Jun.), p. 972
Morrison, David (1980), letter, "On Morrison: Some Final Remarks," replies:
Juergens, Ralph; Milton, Earl; Talbott, George, and Ellenberger, Leroy; Jueneman,
Fredrick; Greenberg, Lewis, Kronos 5, no. 2 (Jan.), pp. 66-92
Mullen, William (1973), "A Reading of the Pyramid Text," Pens‚e 3, no. 1 (Winter),
pp. 10-16
Murray, Bruce C. (1975), "Mercury" in The Solar System (Freeman: San Francisco),
pp. 37-46
Nagata, Takesi (1961), Rock Magnetism, rev. (Maruzen: Tokyo)
Napier, W. McD. & Dodd, R. J. (1973), "The Missing Planet," Nature 242 (23 Mar.),
pp. 250-1
Nather, R. Edward & Warner, B. (1969), "DQ Herculis: Synchronous Photometry,"
Science 166 (14 Nov.), 876-7
Ness, Norman F., et al. (1976), "Observations of Mercury's Magnetic Field," Icarus
28, pp. 479-88
Newcombe, Simon (1878), Popular Astronomy (Harper & Brothers: New York)
Ney, Edward P. (1977), "Star Dust," Science 195 (11 Feb.), pp. 541-6
Niemann, V. D., Soviet Astronomy 68
Nieto, M. M. (1974), "The Titius-Bode Law and the Evolution of the Solar System,"
Pens‚e 4, no. 3 (Su.), pp. 5-7
Ninniger, N. H. (1952), Out of the Sky, repr. (Dover: New York)
Norman, John, et al. (1977), "Astrons -the Earth's Oldest Scars?," New Scientist 73
(24 Mar.), pp. 689-92
Obayashi, Tatsuko (1975), "Energy Build-Up and Release Mechanisms in Solar and
Auroral Flares," Solar Physics 40, pp. 217-26
Oberbeck, V. R., et al. (1977), "Comparative Studies of Lunar, Martian, and
Mercurian Craters and Plains," J. Geoph. Res. 82 (10 Apr.), pp. 1681-97
O'Keefe, John A. (1973), "After Apollo: Fission Origin of the Moon," Science and
Public Affairs 29, no. 9 (Nov.), pp. 26-9
---(1978), "The Tektite Problem," Scientific American 239, no. 2 (Aug.), pp. 116-25
Oparin, A. I. (1953), The Origin of Life, tr. Sergius Morgulis (Dover; New York)
Orville, Richard E. (1968), "Photograph of a Close Lightning Flash," Science 162 (8
Nov.), pp. 666-7
Ovendon, Michael W. (1972), "Bode's Law and the Missing Planet," Nature 239 (27
Oct.), pp. 508-9
---et al. (1974), "On the Principle of Least Interaction Action and the Laplacian
Satellites of Jupiter and Uranus," Celestial Mechanics 8, pp. 455-71
Panagakos, Nicholas & Waller, Peter W. (1974), A New Look at Jupiter: Results from
the Pioneer 10 Mission to Jupiter," NASA News, no. 74-238, 20 pp. (10 Sep.)
---(1979), "Early Findings from Pioneer Venus," NASA News, no. 79-13, 22 pp. (5
Feb.)
Papoular, R. (1965), "Mobility" in Electrical Phenomena in Gases, Eng. ed. (Iliffe:
London), Ch. 9, pp. 92-9
Parker, E. N. (1975), "The Sun" in The Solar System (Freeman; San Francisco), pp.
27-34
Passerini, Pietro (1978), "Knowledge and Entropy," Catastrophist Geology 3, no. 1
(Jun.), pp. 16-28
Patten, Donald Wesley (1966), The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch (Pacific
Meridian: Seattle)
---(1973), The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes (Pacific Meridian:
Seattle)
Peale, S. J., et al. (1979), "Melting of Io by Tidal Dissipation," Science 203 (2
Mar.), pp. 892-4
Pearce, G. W., see Strangway Pickering, W. H. (1903), The Moon (Doubleday: New
York); 176 (p. 53)
Pittman, U. J. (1963), "Magnetism and Plant Growth: I Effect on Germination and
Early Growth of Cereal Seeds," Can. J. Pl. Sci. 43 (Oct.), pp. 513-8
Plass, Gilbert N. (1959), "Carbon Dioxide and Climate," Scientific American,
offprint no. 82 (repr. from Jul. 1959 issue), 9 pp.
Plato, The Epinomis of Plato, tr. J. Harward (Clarendon: Oxford, 1928)
Plavec, M. (1970), "Rotation in Close Binaries" in Stellar Rotation, ed. A.
Sletteback (D. Reidel: Dordrecht), pp. 133-46
Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secondus), Natural History, Book II. rev., tr. H. H. Rackham
(Harvard: Cambridge, 1967)
Plummer, L. N., see Sundquist Ponnamperuma, Cyril & Mack, Ruth (1975), "Nucleotide
Synthesis Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions," Science 148 (28 May), pp.
1221-3; 84, fn. 63
Quaide, William L., et al. (1970), "Impact Metamorphism of Lunar Surface
Materials," Science 167 (30 Jan.), pp. 671-2
Rampino, Michael R., et al. (1979), "Can Rapid Climatic Change Cause Volcanic
Eruptions?," Science 206 (16 Nov.), pp. 826-9
Ransom, C. J. (1976), The Age of Velikovsky (Kronos: Glassboro)
---& Hoffee, L. H. (1973), "The Orbits of Venus," Pens‚e 3, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 22-
5
also, in Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday: Garden City, 1976), pp. 103-9
Raup, David M. (1979), "Size of the Permo-Triassic Bottleneck and Its Revolutionary
Implications," Science 206 (12 Oct.), pp. 217-8
Rawls, Rebecca (1980), "Mt St Helens Stirs Chemical Interest," Chem. & Eng. News 58
(25 Aug.), pp. 28-9
Reid, G. C., et al. (1976), "Influence of Ancient Solar-Proton Events on the
Evolution of Life," Nature 259 (22 Jan.), pp. 177-9
Reply by Beland and Russell, Nature 263 (16 Sep. 1976), p. 259; also, Science News
116 (24 Nov. 1979), p. 356
Rodabaugh, David J. (1976), "Probability and the Missing Transitional Forms,"
Creation Research Quarterly 13 (Sep.), pp. 116-9
Roosen, Robert G., et al. (1976), "Earth Tides, Volcanos, and Climactic Change,"
Nature 261 (24 Jun.), pp. 680-2
Rose, Lynn (1972), "Could Mars Have Been an Inner Planet?," Pens‚e 2, no. 2 (May),
pp. 42-3
also, in Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday: Garden City, 1976), pp. 100-2
---(1979), "Variations on a Theme of Philolaos," Kronos 5, no. 1, pp. 12-46
Ross, John E. & Aller, Lawrence H. (1976), "The Chemical Composition of the Sun,"
Science 191 (26 Mar.), pp. 1223-9
Roussel, Ren‚ H., "The Reorientation of a Small Temple at Quai es Seboua," unpubl.
Ruark, A. E., et al. (1927), "Spectra Excited by Active Nitrogen," J. Opt. Soc. Am.
14 (Jan.), pp. 17-27
Rudeaux, Lucien & de Vaucouleurs, G. (1962), Larousse Encyclopaedia of Astronomy,
2nd ed. (Hamlyn: London), 15, fn. 13 (pp. 355 ff.)
Russell, Christopher T., see Taylor
---et al. (1979), "Pioneer Magnetometer Observations of the Venus Bow Shock,"
Nature 282 (20-27 Dec.), pp. 815-6
Russell, Henry N., et al. (1927), Astronomy Part II -Astrophysics and Stellar
Energy (Ginn: Boston)
Sanford, Fernando (1931), Terrestrial Electricity (Stanford University: Stanford),
repr. (University Microfilms: Ann Arbor, 1067)
Saul, John M. (1978), "Circular Structures of Large Scale and Great Age on the
Earth's Surface," Nature 271 (28 Jan.), pp. 345-9
also, Kellaway, G. A. and Durrance E. M., Nature 273 (4 Apr. 1978), p. 75 for a
comment extending Saul's sample Schaeffer, Claude F. A. (1948), Stratigraphie
compar‚e et chronologie de l'Asie occidentale (Oxford University: London)
Schr"der, G. A. (1964), "Breakdown in a Gas Under Extreme Conditions" in Discharge
and Plasma Physics, ed. S. C. Hayden (The University of New England: Armidale,
NSW), pp. 89-106
Sekanina, Z. (1968), "Nongravitational Forces and Comet Nuclei," Sky and Telescope
35, no. 5 (May), pp. 282-6
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Natural Questions, tr. Thomas H. Corcoran (Harvard:
Cambridge, 1971); 163 (Book III, pp. 27, 29 quoting Berosso's explanations of why
the Deluge occurred)
Serson, Paul H. (1980), "Tracking the North Magnetic Pole," Geos. (Winter), pp. 15-
17
Shamos, Morris H., ed. (1964), Great Experiments in Physics (Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston: New York)
Shaw, G., see Hoyle (Oct. 1977)
Sherrerd, Cris S. (1979), "The Electro-magnetic Circularization of Planetary
Orbits," Kronos 4, no. 4 (Jun.), pp. 55-8
Shoemaker, Eugene M., see Smith, B. A.
Short, Nicolas M. (1974), "Meteorite Craters," Ency. Brit. Macro 12 (Chicago), pp.
48-54; 153. Note one trillion equals 10 12
Sieff, Martin (1976), "In Defence of the Revised Chronology; An Answer to John
Day," S. I. S. Review I, no. 1 (Jan.), pp. 11-14
---(1977), "Planets in the Bible," S. I. S. Review I, no. 4 (Sp.), pp. 17-21, 32
also, S. I. S. Workshop 1, no. 4 (Mar. 1978)
---(1981), "Assyria and the End of the Late Bronze Age," S. I. S. Workshop 4, no. 2
(Sep.), pp. 4-8
Simpson, George Gaylord (1944), Tempo and Mode in Evolution (Columbia University:
New York)
---(1952), "How Many Species?," Evolution 6, p. 342 Simpson, J. A., et al. (1974),
"Electrons and Protons Accelerated in Mercury's Magnetic Field," Science 185 (29
May), pp. 160-6
Singer, S. Fred (1970), "How Did Venus Lose its Angular Momentum?," Science 170 (11
Dec.), pp. 1196-8
---(1967), "Zodiacal Dust and Deep Sea Sediments," Science 156 (26 May), pp. 1080-3
Smith, Bradford A., et al. (1979), "The Galilean Satellites and Jupiter: Voyager 2
Imaging Results," Science 206 (23 Nov.), pp. 927-50
Smith, E. v. P. & Jacobs, K. C. (1973), Introductory Astronomy and Astrophysics
(Saunders: Philadelphia); 14 (pp. 223 f.)
Somerville, J. M. (1959), The Electric Arc (Methuen: London) Spangler, Steven R.,
et al. (1977), "Radio Survey of Close Binary Stars," As. J. 82, no. 12 (Dec.), pp.
989-97; 47 (p. 989)
Spencer, Herbert (1899), The Principles of Sociology (Appleton: New York); 158, fn
92 (esp. Ch. 24 and 25)
Stanley, Steven M. (1976), "Stability of Species in Geologic Time," Science 192 (16
Apr.), pp. 267-8
Stecchini, Livio C. (1978), "The Inconstant Heavens" in The Velikovsky Affair, rev.
(Sphere: London), pp. 80-119; see de Grazia (1967)
Stengler, William (1978), "Life By Chance?," The Plain Truth (Aug.), pp. 13, 15-16
Stone, E. C. & Lane, A. L. (1979), "Voyager I Encounter with the Jovian System,"
Science 204 (1 Jun.), pp. 945-8
St"rmer, Carl (1955), The Polar Aurora (Clarendon: Oxford)
Strangway, et al. (1970), "Magnetic Properties of Lunar Samples," Science 167 (30.
Jan.), pp. 691-3
Strom, Robert, see Smith, B. A.
Strutt, R. J. (1911), "A Chemically Active Modification of Nitrogen Produced by the
Electric Discharge," Roy. Soc. (Lon.), Proc. A 85, pp. 219-29
Suhr, Elmer G. (1969), The Spinning Aphrodite (Helios: New York)
Sundquist, E. T., et al. (1979), "Carbon Dioxide in the Ocean Surface: The
Homogeneous Buffer Factor," Science 204 (15 Jun.), pp. 1203-5
Sutton, Christine (1979), "Voyage to the Giant Planet," Science 83 (1 Jul.), pp.
213-20
Talbott, David N. (1980), The Saturn Myth (Doubleday: Garden City)
Talbott, Stephen L., et al. (1976), Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday: Garden
City)
Tananbaum, H. D. & Hutchings, J. B. (1975), "Parameters of X-ray Binaries," NY
Acad. Sci., Annals 262 (15 Oct.), pp. 299-311
Taylor, William W. L., et al. (1979), "Evidence for Lightning on Venus," Nature 279
(14 Jun.), pp. 614-6
Teichert, Curt (1973), "How Many Species?," Journal of Paleontology 30, pp. 967-9
Tinkle, Donald W. (1974), "Species and Speciation" in Ency. Brit., Macro 17
(Chicago), pp. 449-55
Tresman, Harold & O'Gheoghan, Brendan (1977), "The Primordial Light," S. I. S.
Review II, no. 2 (Dec.), pp. 35-40
Turman, B. W. (1979), "Lightning Detection from Space," American Scientist 67 (May-
Jun.), pp. 321-9
Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett (1903), Primitive Culture (John Murray: London), repr.
under the title The Origin of Culture, Peter Smith (Gloucester MS, 1970); 108, fn.
92 (v. 2, pp. 342 f.)
Urey, Harold C. (1973), "Cometary Collisions and Geologic Periods," Nature 242 (2
Mar.), pp. 32-3
Vail, Isaac N. (1905), Selected Works, repr. (Annular Publications: Santa Barbara,
CA, 1972)
Valentine, James W. (1974), Temporal Bias in Extinction Among Taxonomic
Categories," Journal of Paleontology 48 (May), pp. 549-52
van Allen, James (1975), "Interplanetary Particles and Fields" in The Solar System
(Freeman: San Francisco), pp. 129-34
van de Kamp, Peter (1961), "Double Stars," As. Soc. Pac., Publ. 73, no. 435 (Dec.),
pp. 389-409
---(1971), "The Nearby Stars," An. Rev. As. Ap. 9, pp. 103-26
van Flandern, Thomas C. (1978), "A Former Asteroidal Planet as the Origin of
Comets," Icarus 36, pp. 51-74
Vehrenberg, Hans, Atlas of the Selected Areas (Vehrenberg Publ.: Dsseldorf)
Velikovsky, Immanuel (1950), Worlds in Collision (Doubleday: Garden City)
---(1952), Ages in Chaos: I, From the Exodus to King Akhnaton (Doubleday: Garden
City)
---(1955), Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday: Garden City)
---(1969), "Are the Moon's Scars Only 3000 Years Old?," New York Times, early ed.,
21 Jul.; repr. Pens‚e 2, no. 2 (May 1972)
---(1973), "The Pitfalls of Radiocarbon Dating," Pens‚e 3, no. 2 (Sp./ Su,), pp.
12-14, 50
---(1978a), "Khima and Kesil," Kronos 3, no. 4 (May), pp. 19-23
---(1978b), "The Weakness of the Venus Greenhouse Theory," Kronos 4, no. 2 (Oct.),
pp. 28-32
---(1979), "On Saturn and the Flood," Kronos 5, no. 1 (Oct.), pp. 3-11
---(1982), Mankind in Amnesia (Doubleday: Garden City) V‚rtes, L szl¢ (1965),
"`Lunar Calendar' from the Hungarian Upper Paleolithic," Science 149 (20 Aug.), pp.
855-6
Vestine, E. H. (1958), "Geomagnetic Field" in The Earth and its Atmosphere, ed. D.
R. Bates (Basic Books: New York), Ch. 6, pp. 88-96
Vsekhsviatskii, S. K., "Indications of the Eruptive Evolution of Planetary Bodies,"
unpubl., read at the symposium "Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar
System," McMaster University, Hamilton (18 Jun. 1974), 116
Warlow, Peter (1978), "Geomagnetic Reversals," J. Phys. A10, 11 (Oct.), pp. 2107-30
Warner, Brian & Nather, R. Edward (1971), "Observations of Rapid Blue Variables -II
U Geminorum," Roy. As. Soc., Mon. Not. 52, pp. 219-29
Washburn, Sherwood L., "The Evolution of Man," Scientific American 239, pp. 194-205
Watson, Alan (1977), "Whence Cosmic Rays?," New Scientist 73 (17 Feb.), pp. 408-10
Webb, Willis, "The Electrical Structure of the Earth," unpubl., read at the
symposium "Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System," McMaster
University, Hamilton (1974)
Weiner, J. S. (1955), The Piltdown Forgery (London: Oxford)
Westfall, Richard S. (1973), "Newton and the Fudge Factor," Science 179 (23 Feb.),
pp. 751-8
White, Fred N. (1974), "Respiration and Respiratory Systems," in Ency. Brit. Macro
15 (Chicago), pp. 751-63
Whyte, Martin A. (1977), "Turning Points in Phanerozoic History," Nature 267 (23
Jun.), pp. 679-82
Wickramasinghe, D. T. & Bessell, M. S. (1974), "Gas Streaming in 2UO900-40 and Cyg
X-1," Nature 251 (6 Sep.), pp. 25-7
Wickramasinghe, N. C., see Hoyle
Wickstrom, Conrad E. & Castenholz, Richard W. (1973), "Thermophilic Ostracod:
Aquatic Metazoan with the Highest Known Temperature Tolerance," Science 181 (14
Sep.), pp. 1063-4
Wilkins, H. P. & Moore, Patrick (1955), The Moon (Faber and Faber: London); 154
Wiseman, The Flood Reconsidered; 156 (p. 46, fn. 9)
Wolfe, J., et al. (1979), "Initial Observations of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter Solar
Wind Plasma Experiment," Science 203 (23 Feb.), pp. 750-2
Wood, John A. (1975), "The Moon" in The Solar System (Freeman: San Francisco), pp.
69-77
Wreschner, Ernst, in conversation with de Grazia, Sept. 1977 Wright, Kenneth D.,
"Observation of Stellar Spectra Related to Extended Atmospheres" in Extended
Atmospheres and Circumstellar Matter in Spectroscopic Binary Systems, ed. Alen
Batten (Int. As. U. Symposium no. 51, May
1973), pp. 117-33 Wrigley, Robert, see Quaide Wyse, Arthur B. (1934), "A Study of
the Spectra of Eclipsing Binaries," Lick Observatory Bulletin 17, no. 464, pp. 37-
52
Yukutake, T. (1967), "The Westward Drift of the Earth's Magnetic Field in Historic
Times," J. Geomag. & Geoel. 19, no. 2, pp. 103-16
Ziegler, Jerry L. (1977), YHWH Star (Morton, IL)
Zirin, Harold (1966), The Solar Atmosphere (Blaisdell: Waltham)
=======End of Solaria Binaria ======= ;
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
Metron Publications
Princeton, N.J.
Notes on the printed version of this book:
The cover is from Pablo Picasso's Girl before a mirror (in reverse), 1932, the original of
which rests with The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and a photograph of which was lent
by the Princeton University, Art Library.
The text was processed by the Princeton University Computer Center, with photo-composition
and printing by Princeton University Printing Services by xerography in a limited edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
de Grazia, Alfred,
1919-
Homo schizo I: Human and Cultural Hologenesis
Includes index
1. Anthropology.
2. Psychology.
3. Evolution.
4. Prehistory
ISBN: 0-940-268-01-9
Copyright ¸ 1983 by Alfred de Grazia
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S.A. Limited first edition.
Address:
Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213,
Princeton, N.J.,
08542,
U.S.A.
To
Sebastian
primus inter pares
HOMO SCHIZO 1
by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA
TITLE-PAGE
FOREWORD
Chapter 1: SLIPPERY LADDERS OF EVOLUTION
THE HUMAN BRAINCASE
THE SEARCH FOR A BETTER APE
LEGENDS OF CREATION
MEMORIAL GENERATIONS
NATURAL SELECTION
SEVERE LIMITS TO NATURAL SELECTION
WAVES OF EVOLUTION
Chapter 2: HOMINIDS IN HOLOGENESIS
HOMO ERECTUS
PEKING MAN
FOOTPRINTS
AMEGHINO'S ARGENTINE HOMINIDS
METHODOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES
TIME UNNEEDED FOR CULTURE
OLDUVAI GORGE
A SURPRISING COLLAPSE OF TIME
CHARDIN'S ORTHOGENETICS
DOBZHANSKY, SIMPSON AND QUANTUM EVOLUTION
Chapter 3: MECHANICS OF HUMANIZATION
ANCIENT CATASTROPHES
THE HUMANIZING FACTOR
QUANTAVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION
BRAIN SPECIALIZATION
SIGNALING HORMONES
MUTATION
INTELLIGENT MUTATION AND EVOLUTIONARY SALTATIONS
EXTERNAL PRODUCERS OF MUTATION
VIRAL MUTATION
PSYCHOSOMATIC GENETICS
AN ATMOSPHERIC TRANSFORMATION
SOCIAL IMPRINTING
THE SUMMARY MECHANICS
Chapter 4: THE GESTALT OF CREATION
THE GESTALT OF CREATION AND ITS AFTERMATH
A MIND SPLIT BY MINUTE DELAYS
FRIGHT, RECALL, AND AGGRESSION
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
THE STRUGGLE OF THE SELEVES
BECOMING TWO-LEGGED
VOLUNTARISM
DIFFUSION OF THE GESTALT
THE DOUBLE CATASTROPHE
A PRIMORDIAL SCENARIO
QUANTAVOLUTION AND HOLOGENESIS
THE NEW HUMAN BEING
Chapter 5: CULTURAL REVOLUTION
PROTO-CULTURE
LOST MILLIONS OF YEARS
TRIBES, CIVILIZATIONS, AND TIME
MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS EVERYWHERE CONTEMPORARY
ECUMENICAL CULTURE
AMERICAN CULTURAL ORIGINS
CULTURAL INTEGRATION
Chapter 6: SCHIZOID INSTITUTIONS
SPEECH AND LANGUAGE
GRAPHICS
PRIMORDIAL LANGUAGE
GROUP VS. INDIVIDUAL
PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION
MEGALITHS AND MEGALINES
ORGANIZATION AND CONTROL
REPUBLIC AND MONARCHY
AUTHORITY
COVENANT AND CONTRACT
SEXUAL RAMIFICATIONS
THE COMPULSION TO REPEAT CHAOS AND CREATION
SUBLIMATION
CANNIBALISM
VIOLENCE AND WAR
Chapter 7: PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF HISTORY
A SICK JOURNEY
HISTORISM
SCHIZOID EPISODES IN ABUNDANCE
HELL
ORDINARY MAD TIMES
NAZIS, STALINISTS, AND DEMOCRATS
RELIGION AS CUSTODIAN OF FEAR
UTOPIANISM
DARWINIAN HISTORISM
Chapter 8: THE HOPEFUL MONSTER
REAL AND PSYCHIC DISASTER
A RECENT SMALL SHARP CHANGE
THE UNREDEEMABLE APEMAN
SCHIZOTYPICALITY AND HOMO SAPIENS
HOMO SCHIZO I: FOREWORD
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
+
FOREWORD
Most scholars believe that man has progressed since his original appearance on earth.
Probably so, but it has been a strange kind of progress, not well understood, and often
showing a negative balance of the bad over the good.
Some scholars believe that man is a rational animal. In limited ways he is, but, again, it
is a strange kind of rationality, more ape-like than other traits of humans that are called
non-rational. For, to preview an argument that comes later, man is continually seeking ways
to reestablish the uninterrupted instinctive responses of his forebears, and this is the
homologue of rationality. When Descartes wrote of animals as machines, he was obviously
unaware that the precise rationality of man, which he, of all philosophers, elevated to
awesome status, was just this homologue of the machine and animal.
So constrained and confused is whatever is called human rationality, that I prefer to call
mankind by the name homo schizo, that is, homo sapiens schizotypus, rather than homo
sapiens. Humans were created and are born schizotypical, with a set of traits to be
distinguished in this book. They were from the first, and are now, more schizophrenic than
otherwise. What is called rational is a derivation out of schizotypicality. This line of
argument is also pursued in a companion volume, Homo schizo II: Human Nature and Behavior,
which deals with today's people.
Here we are concerned with the evolution of mankind, a field densely covered with
literature, but with many a sprouting mystery and contradiction that has resisted the spray
of evolutionary formulas. The field is surprisingly vulnerable to a variety of pests, if
iconoclastic views may be termed such. It invited questions. And to these I attempt answers.
By what means did hominid become man? By electrochemical means, and suddenly. Was the change
large or small? The change was substantially minute, but profound in its consequences. When
did it happen? Recently -- about one thousand reproductive generations ago, which comes to
about 260 memorial generations. What role did great natural forces play? They precipitated
and perpetuated the change. Did culture spring up with, or did it lag behind, the human
transformation? Culture sprang up with the gestalt of human creation. How many symptoms of
mental illness are innate in man? All of them. How many cultures are sick? All of them, but
the sickness is normal. Can homo schizo aspire to become homo sapiens? One can aspire to a
fiction, but cannot achieve it. Occasionally, a person, or even a group, can reach a
delicate equilibrium, which can be called reasonable, thus becoming homo sapiens
schizotypus. Anything more than that is most uncertain.
The answers are tentative, as must be many scientific propositions. They may appear far-
fetched, but rightly so, because they must be brought in from faraway fields. They would be
more firm if only a few students of anthropology, linguistics, genetics, psychology, natural
history, and early human behavior were disposed to drink deeply from their primeval fountain
of self-doubt, and thereafter to re-examine their data.
I regret not being able to credit the full literature and cannot pretend to have slighted
nobody. Especially am I concerned about the lurking work which may have quite escaped
research, the work that would have bolstered my strained defenses or, for that matter,
penetrated them, and which will emerge later, in a recapitulation of the Mendelian scenario.
I recall that Mendel's genetic work was published in 1865, in plenty of time for Darwin to
amend his view in later editions of the Origin, or so says Julian Huxley. His evolutionary
theory badly needed the evidence of mutations in biology. Others, the same Julian Huxley for
one, have made excuses for Darwin, and I hope that someone will do the same for me.
Alfred de Grazia
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE
SLIPPERY LADDERS OF EVOLUTION
Scientists tracing the origins of man face an almost impossible task. So little remains of
the beginnings that the very dirt around a suspected visit of early man is prized. They
must grasp for anything tangible, a fossil bone, a chipped stone, a coprolite. Yet here we
are, on the trail of man's most important original trait, self-awareness, an intangible
phenomenon that cannot fossilize. Few, even today, would contradict what the geneticist,
Ralph Gerard, said in 1959: I don't think any of us has the remotest idea of why subjective
awareness developed. [1]
Self-awareness is the consciousness of self. Practically every human, perhaps everyone, can
stand off and look at himself. In fact, he does so normally, does so frequently, does so
readily and at so early an age that maybe even the baby must think I am I. He is self-
conscious before he can speak. The physical boundaries of the self, fingers, toes, ears,
nose and eyes are matters of interest to the infant who teaches them to himself in a matter
of months. Fixing mental boundaries goes on endlessly. Probably he begins the study of
himself in utero, even though he must wait for his deathbed to conclude it.
Granted we cannot discover directly the appearance of self-consciousness in fossils, we may
seek its concomitants. Anything denoting symbolism is a valid clue. Apes use sounds to
convey moods, intent, and information; there is no use denying that this is symbolic
behavior. So humans have to employ double abstraction to be different: the sign and signal,
plus a reference that is not tangible, as for instance a wind, a direction, a ghost, an
absent party, a glyph on a tree or rock, a burial, a sign of yesterday, a signal for
tomorrow. But what should we do with the chimpanzee 'Congo, ' who dabbled in painting,
turning out hundreds of compositions in a style typified by bunched and fanned brush
strokes [2] ? A second valid clue to self-awareness is a tool. Sharpening a stone for use
shows a sense of the design that may be inherent in a recalcitrant object, and is a valid
indicator of human abstraction. Human-seeming animals are almost totally bereft of clubs,
spears, pounders, drums, ropes. If they may grasp a twig and poke out ants from a hole,
they cast it away when the hunt has ended. They do not improve it or look after it or
burden themselves with it for very long.
Does walking on two feet, bipedalism, mark the advent of self-awareness? A baby is self-
conscious before it can walk; but, no matter, the different traits need not appear in
perfect succession. Congenitally crippled babies become human rapidly; again, the human
setting fills the gap. That bipedalism may have preceded self-consciousness is easy to
contemplate (perhaps because it is easier to 'sell out' self-awareness than a physical
trait). But the mind balks at a four-footed self-conscious creature, even though babies are
very human while still in the crawling stage. I think that we must admit that bipedalism
may be a precursor or an invention but not a proof of self-awareness.
Fire-making is sometimes accredited as a sign of humanness. Fire may have 'always' been
used. Birds and other animals, including primates, play about natural fires and eat roasted
vegetable and animal matter consumed by the flames [3] . A natural fire may borrowed
preserved for a long time. But any group that could conserve fire was probably able to make
it by friction, especially if in the habit of striking rocks together. The humanness of
fire-use depends, then, upon how it is obtained and whether it is preserved.
THE HUMAN BRAINCASE
Ultimately we would have to play a trump card: the large brain. Can we not assign the birth
of self-awareness to the appearance of the first modern cranium. Thus, typically, a
physical anthropologist such as Le Gros Clark will arrange the fossil cranial discoveries
in order of time and size. The scale might begin with a chimpanzee of 300 to 600 cubic
centimeters of cranial capacity, proceed to an australopithecine of from about 450 to 800
cc, up through homo erectus who might achieve 1280, then through homo neanderthal with an
average higher than our own (1300-1610 cc), then back to modern man with 900 to 2300 cc --
elapsed time being set at four million years. At what point of skull size does the hominid
leave off and the human begin? It would beg the question to answer: when tool-making is
associated with the skull. John Buettner-Janusz says properly: Unfortunately too much
anthropological writing has focused on cranial volume when there is no evidence that a
critical threshold for cranial volume need be exceeded for such 'higher' activities as
tool-making and, by implication, culture. [4]
The conventional answer is that we do not know precisely, but that we can assume that the
cerebrum, evolving with the size of the cranium, became ever more clever until it conceived
of fire-making, tools, speech, and abstract non-entities. There are reasons to doubt this
scenario. We have no place in this book for Julian Huxley's exuberant declaration, that
evolution simply is not just a theory any longer; it is a fact, like the fact that the
earth goes around the sun and that the planets do all sorts of things. [5] Nor can we
follow naively the theory that as with anatomy, so with culture: culture, too, evolves, as
originally with Tylor, Spencer, and Morgan, and still now with many anthropologists [6] .
However, we agree with these latter that Boaz and his followers were excessively wrought up
to claim, as did B. Laufer, that the theory of cultural evolution is.. The most inane,
pernicious, and sterile theory in the whole realm of science. [7]
A human brain consumes 20% of the energy resources utilized by the person as a whole. At
the same time only 2 to 4% of the cerebrum is said to be activated, even at peak periods.
Obviously there might be an energy crisis if we could work our brains very hard. One may
suspect that the brain grew large without the 'intention' or 'specific purpose' of working,
much less thinking.
This seems more plausible when we consider that the bilaterality of the cerebrum is not
necessary. The human mind can function well with one hemisphere, if training and
acculturation occurs on the basis of just the single hemisphere. Acquiring a single
hemisphere would not be 'handicapping, ' as would, say, a single eye or leg. The genetic
instruction for a double cerebrum is part of the bilateral anatomy that reaches far out
among the animal orders. Once again, we have a surplus; it is not persuasive to claim that
a second hemisphere is 'good' to have upon the accidental loss of one hemisphere, and
thereupon involve 'natural selection. '
Supposing, however, a single hemisphere and a 400 cc brain --less than a third of the
average human but one-half of the fast learning brain of the one-year-old baby or of homo
erectus -- it would appear that, if this were functioning physiologically in a human way,
it would be functioning behaviorally, too, in a human way. One would have, if nothing new
were added along with size, the same mental and cultural abilities that we have at present.
One would operate humanly with less than the brain capacity of australopithecus.
Dwarves with well-proportioned bodies of 2 1/ 2 ft in height, and with brains weighing one-
third (14 ounces) of the ordinary human's brain may be sometimes stupid, but they speak
fluently. A high adult I. Q. on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test is possible with about
one-third of the total cerebrum lacking. But adaptative intelligence suffers at less than
the 30% level. So says one authority [8] . He was perhaps unaware that, at about the same
time as he was writing, a hydrocephalic Englishman, with one-tenth of the normal cerebral
volume (10%) was doing well socially and in his university studies.
Another disturbing thought occurs: the weight of brain of the australopithecus was probably
heavier, in proportion to his body size, than that of the modern human. This would support
the idea that australopithecus should have been as clever as ourselves, or conversely, we
might well be more stupid than australopithecus, if it were not for -- what? Putting aside
the unconvincing though popular view that, point-by-point, evolving man grew in brain size
and in adaptative control of the environment, an argument that is part biological and part
cultural but in both cases implausible for reasons stated elsewhere, the source of the
difference between the stupid hominid (assuming such was the case for the forebear of
australopithecus) and the clever human must rest in a specialization of the brain and/ or
in its electro-chemical state and operations. My opinion here -- and in the accompanying
volume -- is that both types of change occurred: specialization and a new electro-
chemistry. F. M. Bergounioux is persuaded that intelligence is a phenomenon with no
connection whatever with the physiological structure that supports it. So it seems, and one
can observe hovering in his unusual essay the ultimate resort to teleological creationism
such as Teilhard de Chardin developed [9] . The theory of homo sapiens schizotypus may,
however, bridge this chasm between the subtlest human behavior and the physiological
housing. Something other than brain growth was responsible for humanization.
THE SEARCH FOR A BETTER APE
A book on human origins written in the last century presents the same basic ideas as a book
lately published; there is little new of importance in the recent book. The main difference
is that about 1900, Mendelian mutations, actual changes in the germ plasma, were accepted
by many geneticists as the main factor in the alteration of species. Although it could have
been used to rehabilitate catastrophism, this discovery was used to reinforce the shaky
foundations of the dominant Darwinian evolutionism.
Whereas the old book asked only modest amounts of time for the human race to develop from
the ape, the new book asks for up to five million years. Aided and abetted by modern 'time-
telling' techniques, such as the potassium-argon test, the new book can fit many skull-
cases, jaw-bones and some extremities that have been uncovered into a long-time frame. Many
comparative studies have been made of primates and people, showing, for example, how they
walk or what relationship their blood hemoglobin contains. But no old evolutionist ever
doubted the cousinship of man and ape: go to the zoo and see for yourself.
Evolutionary theories have to venture in fine detail into what came first. For evolution is
uniformitarian, gradual, compounded bit by bit. Thus, a ladder of culture has been
assembled. First, crude stone pounders and cutters, then use of fire, then many other
developments, partly anatomical and partly cultural: cannibalism, walking upright,
righthandedness, premature parturition, improved weaponry, crinkled brains, deft digitry,
weak dentition, improved diet, signalling, thinking ahead, fortifications, speech, burial
of the dead, and so on [10] . Many disputes have arisen as to priorities among the
numerous steps forward in social evolution; no two ladders have the same rungs. If one were
to collect a shelf of all major works on human evolution since and including the work of
Charles Darwin, and took from each its 'first, ' 'truly human, ' 'necessary, ' 'all-
important' steps, and then examined the list, he would feel bemused: each author builds his
own ladder; each 'new' trait is the crucial trait that set off man from the ape. Sometimes
the rungs are anatomical, at other times cultural; they may also be geological -- events of
the rocks, ice, climates, the geomagnetic field, or of geochronometry.
An interesting ladder-scheme, unfortunately not well-developed, is offered by Walter Garre
and called The Psychotic Animal: A Psychiatrist's Study of Human Delusion [11] . He
believes that man, in evolving anatomically over millions of years, developed more and more
tools and artifacts. Man was proud of his abilities and became, indeed, increasingly
megalomaniac. He began to seek goals in the sky and on earth that he could not possibly
obtain until finally he went mad. Vanity, then, is the nemesis of man, and the therapy for
the human psychosis is to reconcile man to what is possible. Garre's ladder is amusing and
at least more logical than most; his theory is, however, very lightly constructed.
To Freud, writing in 1930, the upright posture of man was the start of his fateful
development. [12] By getting his nose off the ground and putting his genitals up front,
man exhibited himself and felt shame. Further, man could never gratify his sexual drive
fully and therefore had to seek all kinds of sublimation, all the cultural developments
that are summed up by the word sublimation. Presumably this set of events would have
preceded the events that gave him the truly human oedipal complex, the day when he and his
brothers killed the old bull father in order to possess sexually the females, and felt ever
thereafter an intensification of guilt [13] -- or, to avoid implying that Freud
contradicted himself, the great guilt as against the small shame.
In another widely read and more respected treatise, J. Bronowski stresses the development
of omnivorous eating habits before other traits, beginning with australopithecus and moving
through Neanderthal to modern man:
The consequences for the evolution of man were far- reaching. He had more time free, and
could spend it in more indirect ways, to get food from sources (such as large animals)
which could not be tackled by hungry brute force. Evidently that helped to promote (by
natural selection) the tendency of all primates to interpose an internal delay in the brain
between stimulus and response, until it developed into the full human ability to postpone
the gratification of desire [14] .
Thus Bronowski momentarily sighted the instinct-delay, but was diverted into adding a rung
to the ladder.
Dozens of carpenters and ladders are in the race. But each author has his detractors, who
say such things as: 'You cannot eat meat without cooking it, ' or 'You can cook but still
not be reflective, ' or 'Lower animals were omnivorous first. ' The most effective way yet
found to handle the disputatious crowd is to give everyone time -- one, five, even ten
million years. Then every ladder can climb to the same lofty level of modern humans who can
do everything. What I propose here may be more effective: remove the ladder and let
everyone in through the front door; they are all right, at the same time!
LEGENDS OF CREATION
'Let everyone in -- do you mean even the creationists? ' I am not so sure, but let us make
a case for the legendary accounts of human origins. It is not impossible to do so. Man has
no memory of being a hominid, much less an ape. He insists, however, that he remembers
being created. The ready conclusion -- one which has been proposed from the earliest times
-- is that mankind was humanized abruptly. This event was universally depicted in
theological language as a divine creation. Hence scientists of the past century, in ridding
themselves of religious constraints, ceased to consider whether, even without divine
intervention, humanization might have occurred in a natural quantavolution. Charles Darwin,
to begin with, did not attend, when his disciple, Thomas Huxley, wrote him in 1860 not to
be too rigid with the adage, Nature makes no leap (natura non facit saltum). Darwin
repeatedly termed the adage a canon. In the historical record from its beginnings, and in
the treasured oral records of non-literate peoples of today, mankind is portrayed as a
divinely created being. He was fashioned, by beings of a higher order. Homo schizo
apparently knew long before Aristotle that an effect had to have a sufficient cause. We may
be curious as to why they did not claim eternity, why they did not accept the idea of a
world beyond time, why they postulated a chaos followed by a creation. Nor did the earliest
cosmologists venture that humans were descended from the lower animals, as much as they may
have lived among and respected animals. Yet scholars commonly argue that clever primeval
men invented their divine makers because they were not clever enough to imagine how they
might otherwise come to exist upon the earth.
Peoples of all types of culture insist, with a unanimity that deafens modern scholars, that
they were created, not evolved [15] . The Hopi Indians say that after the world was spun
out and nicely formed and enlivened with plants and animals, twin gods made people and gave
them speech and wisdom. The Wyot Indians maintain that the first people were furry and
talked badly; a universal deluge was visited upon them, and a brother-husband and sister-
wife brought forth the good new people.
The Eskimo Creator elicited people out of a scattering of seal bones. The Quich‚ Mayans
proposed that twin gods filled the great void with water and earth; living creatures were
made, but their voices could not praise specifically their creators. Whereupon mankind was
made of clay, and the clay melted, requiring another attempt. At first, it spoke, but had
no mind. Abandoning clay, the gods resorted to wood. These wooden creatures could not walk
properly, nor did they worship their creators. They were annihilated in hurricanes and
deluges of black rain. The monkeys are their survivors. Now the gods made fine men, out of
corn, so fine that the gods had to cast a mist before their eyes to prevent their knowing
too much; and later the gods made them wives who came to them in their sleep.
The Swahili of East Africa adopted Islamic creation theory, which goes back to Judaic
theory, which has man created from clay, which is also the Christian belief. One pygmy
group of Zaire has god creating an 'Adam and Eve' and punishing them for violating his
commandment, and a second story of the god creating humans as fruit of a special tree of
life. The god of the Ngombe of Zaire let his human creations live with him in the sky. Then
he exiled a troublesome woman with her son and daughter to earth, and from these came the
human race. (But a hairy stranger also mated with the daughter and their offspring brought
evil and sorrow to the world.)
To the ancient Mexicans it seemed that the first race of men, created by one of the gods
out of ashes, was destroyed by jealous gods in a flood, and the people became fish. Other
ages intervened before the present one, the Fifth Sun. In the fourth age the people were
ape-men (tlacaozomatin). In the fifth age, a god searched the regions of the dead for the
bones of a couple of humans. These were found, ground up, and watered by blood from the
penis of Quetzalcoatl. Now man, creature of divine self-sacrifice, must sacrifice
continuously to keep the world in orderly motion.
Chinese legend has Nu-kua making people of yellow earth patties. Iranian Bundahism recites
that man and bull were fashioned of the soil, and that the seed of life, made from the
sky's light, was planted in their bodies. Various Greek nations claimed that the earth gave
birth to their ancestors; for instance, the Thebans were born from the dragon's teeth sown
by Cadmus. A Sumerian story conveys that Enki, the great god, ordered Mami, the mother
goddess, to mix clay with the blood and flesh of a lesser god killed by the other gods. So
it was done. As usual, the earth was thriving beforehand. And so it was when Elohim created
Adam and Eve, the former out of clay, the latter out of a rib of Adam. The Egyptians
believed man to be divinely fashioned of clay, too.
In Plato's dialogue, Timaeus, a didactic myth presents the faultless creator Demiurge,
using the planets, including Earth, as factory sites, making human souls out of less pure
materials than that of which the universe is made; and then he distributed them, assigning
each soul to its several star. [16]
The Skidi Pawnee of the Great Plains recited, Our people were made by the stars; when the
time comes for all things to end our people will turn into small stars and will fly to the
South Star where they belong. [17]
But clay seems to be a favored material: made of common clay. So also says Ovid, at the
beginning of this era, but he adds maybe. His Metamorphoses tells many a gruesome tale of
people turning into monsters at the will of the gods, nor can we dismiss the idea that Ovid
may have been trying to recount times of great radiation and mutation [18] .
MEMORIAL GENERATIONS
What could in fact the ancients remember, if anything? Oral traditions can survive for
exceedingly long periods, at least some thousands of years. In the case of modern isolated
tribes, and even in the case of the Hebrew and Indo-European Sumerian tradition, what
reason do we give for our confidence that these stories cannot go back to the first stories
of the first 'time-factored, ' that is, remembering or historical, mankind? Can any force
change the roots of a myth? Through how many memorial generations of man do the roots of
myth penetrate?
The statistical reports of groups exhumed from cemeteries and analyzed for age show average
ages of death below 40 until recent times, but also persons who lived to advanced ages. (In
a Bushman people numbering 248, living as marginally constrained hunter-gathers, 8% were
from 60 to 80 years old) [19] . If one memorial generation is the age difference between an
old oral historian and a young child of a tribe, it may average fifty years. Ten thousand
years gives only 200 careful sacred recitations; twenty thousand years gives 400. If all
the peoples of the world pay sacred respects to what amounts to a story of the sudden
appearance of humanity, this fact would seem to support the idea of a continuous story from
the beginning of man.
Suppose that a psychologist and anthropologist, supported generously by the U. S. National
Science Foundation and Institutes of Health, were to set up a chain of 800 story-tellers,
sixty-year olds alternating with ten-year olds, and told the first person in the chain the
Eskimo creation story. Would the 800th person repeat the essential story, granting such
changes as 'seal bones' becoming bones of another animal? Let an awesome authority warn
that the story must be retold with perfect accuracy, lest you die.
A much more sophisticated study design is possible; my purpose here is to position the
problem for intuitive comprehension. There are grounds for believing that a basic legend
can go back even 100,000 years, an age conventionally assigned to homo sapiens, if it
conveys a fundamental truth.
If the story goes back that far, or even if it does not, how does it happen that fine
legends are not spun about the evolution of man from the animals? Or of his eternal
existence? With ages of religious prejudice behind us, we must of course be contemptuous of
descent from lower animals. Yet can we believe that the earliest men had to invent gods
because they were so disgusted with their similarities to animals? Even when men lived
close to animals, endowed them with human characters, and worshiped them as totems? And,
too, the earliest stories and depictions around the world reveal, for instance, bulls and
women in sacred copulation, not to mention snakes and swans. T. Dobzhansky is therefore
probably reasoning ad hoc when he says: Infinity is a notion which most people find hard to
conceive of. Creation myths were accordingly constructed to show that man and the universe
did have a beginning. [20]
The thrust of legends, when scientifically considered, is directed at humanization as a
discrete kind of event, remembered by a mind that recalls not what happened beforehand to
itself but what happened then and ever thereafter -- a new kind of memory. And, we guess,
this was and remained a fearfully composed memory, compulsively and obsessively
recollecting itself. Somehow a barrier was suddenly thrust up between humans and animals.
Hans Bellamy alludes to the remarkable fact that the mythologist, though he knows an
immense number of creation myths, cannot point to a single one whose report starts right at
the beginning of things... Almost everywhere we find the ordering of a chaotic muddle of
pre-existing things, a formation or a reformation on an improved plan, a recreation rather
than a creation in the primary sense of the term. [21] The Earth is fashioned out of the
body of a vanquished monster, or fished out of the primordial sea, or created by the word
of a demiurge, this last a favorite of later priests, so that, for instance, the creator
gods assembled, and called Earth! and the Earth arose from the waters. As St. John said, In
the beginning was the word; the word pervaded God; the word was God. Afterwards man was
created, as earlier stated. 'Of course, ' it can be argued, 'these are typical
schizophrenic delusions, having no basis in reality. ' Very well -- although it is rather
early in the book to accept our thesis that man was born schizophrenic and has always been
schizotypical. Can we not also suggest here that man was striving in manifold ways to
recall a hologenesis of mind and culture? And that he must have been a true human at the
time of the events at issue?
It is in this connection, too, that we can address the extensive work of Mircea Eliade on
The Myth of the Eternal Return [22] . For he finds everywhere in the world, and displaced
onto all of the functions of life, such as farming and sex, a compulsion to conduct
anniversaries and rites to commemorate the first great days of human existence, insisting
that 'this is the way things were in the beginning, ' illo tempore. Eliade does not analyze
the causes of this universal human behavior; he rests with the facts, uncovered with so
much toil. Here we take what seems to be the necessary step beyond, asserting that humans
may remember their origins.
Now, if this is so, then the cultural, or 'intrinsic', memory of man must be extremely
long, or the time allocated to human origins must be far too long. Probably the moment has
not yet arrived for calling into question the estimates of the duration of human becoming.
We still have not heard the stories -- we shall not call them legend -- told by the
scientists who have worked with the rocks, the bones, and the artifacts composing the
under-ground history of mankind.
NATURAL SELECTION
Doubts about the efficacy of a ladder of evolution begin with questions about the means of
constructing the ladder, that is, the machine of natural selection. Charles Darwin titled
his influential work The Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Although his mentor, the
geologist Charles Lyell, had employed the word evolution since 1832, Darwin did not use the
term in his own book that came 27 years later. An unfolding of new traits was certainly
implied, in biology as in geology, especially since Darwin thought (rather vaguely, it
seems) that new traits emerged from within individuals as they competed for survival within
their species and with representatives of other species.
On the other hand, Darwin used the term natural selection 414 times, and selected or
selection an additional hundred times. The heavy employment of the term suggests that he
was using it not only as a referent, but also as an active substitute for real natural
operations and in place of non-existent evidence.
In general, darwinism has provided a century of confused thought about natural selection.
Looking back from today, it is difficult to understand how the idea could so have captured
the minds of scientists, granted that its public appeal was large. We should not forget
that Darwin (and Wallace, whose ideas on natural selection paralleled his own) received the
idea behind natural selection upon reading Malthus who in turn was keen on justifying the
laissez-faire notion of a struggle for survival in economic affairs. He demonstrated
persuasively that, while the means of subsistence were growing arithmetically, population
was growing by geometrical progression, with an ultimate resolution only through famine,
disease, and war. It is surprising that even the marxists, who were so suspicious of
bourgeois ideology, should have overlooked the import of this connection, when adopting the
idea of evolution by natural selection. Marx did associate Darwinism with liberal English
economics, but did not insist upon following through the consequences of his surmise.
One may allude to Darwin's inattention to Gregor Mendel's studies of plant genetics. Why on
the other hand, would he have taken the first opportunity to put down Mivart's work (1871),
which argued that evolution could only be explained as a series of saltations [23] . It
seems that Darwin was bent upon taking his inspiration from a hard-headed economic realist
rather than from other biologists, perhaps only to guard his idea of natural selection, but
perhaps also because he realized that sudden leaps in evolution would, when it came to the
journey from ape to man, open the door once more to the religious creationists. Most cases
advanced to illustrate the concept of natural selection turn out to be Lamarckian
environmentalism or question-begging. The pattern was set by Darwin himself. He was even
capable of statements that mutilations occasionally produce an inherited effect. [24] More
recently, we have Washburn and Howell declaring that it was altered selection pressures of
the new technical-social life which gave the brain its peculiar size and form. [25]
Elsewhere, Washburn has it that, In a very real sense, tools created homo sapiens. [26] So
Buettner-Janusz, claiming that culture put severe demands upon the brain, causing it to
evolve [27] .
That is, man is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, governing his own evolution in some of
its most critical aspects such as brain size and specialized brain areas, arguments that
verge beyond the Lamarckian toward several other hazy theories on the fringes of scientific
discussion -- teleological explanations, inherent Platonic forms seeking their realization,
etc. Where does all this evolutionary sap come from that now causes the mind to burgeon and
then again fashions the tool for the mind to use? But such has been a common form of
arguing around the weakness of natural selection in its stark logical definition.
More often, natural selection is proven by a kind of question-begging. Thus, a trait of a
species, one not found in a fossil relative, is given an ex post facto justification by
natural selection. A common formulation reduces to this: a species which did whatever was
done tended to survive in greater numbers. But no proof is offered. Both natural selection
and mutation theory abound with the stated or implied premise that whatever changed must
have changed because the change helped the species to survive.
A typical problem occurs with asymmetrical brain organization in the human, which
accompanies, but not necessarily in a mutually causative relation, handedness --
righthandedness in about 87% of the species. Left-handed people are more brain-bilateral,
both anatomically and functionally. Their left and right crania exhibit less asymmetry and
their speech areas are less centralized in their dominant hemisphere. There occur thereupon
the typical rationalizations of brain asymmetry and handedness: these 'help the species to
survive by promoting dexterity; ' and 'the left hemisphere, with an accomplished right
hand, can carry out its dominating wishes and calculations. '
In acute brain lesions of the dominant hemisphere, left-handed persons suffer less speech
loss than right-handed persons. If the majority of the LH (approximately 70%) have
bilateral representation of speech, this atypical organization would spare them from the
more severe and prolonged effects of a unilateral lesion that would be seen in the RH
person whose speech mechanisms are more laterally differentiated. [28] Now, if enough
clubs smashed enough skulls in the billions of fights during the ascent of man, and if
speech were important after the battles ended, and if other variables were not present,
then man should by now be left-handed and retrogressed to bilaterality.
However, apart from these particular 'if's, ' there occur scores of additional 'iffy'
variables. For instances, left-handers are considered wrongheaded by most people, and maybe
inferior, so might they not be exterminated? Also, might not left-handed clubwielders be
more surprising and effective in battle and therefore reduce the right-handers with
evolutionarily significant frequency? Or be employed by right-handers to fight and
disproportionately die, while the right-handers remained home to breed?
And might not the right-handers, being more asymmetrical, be also more schizoid, and being
more schizoid, be more paranoid, assertive and socially dominant over the left-handers; but
schizotypicality is fostered, too, by invidious cultural discrimination, so should not the
left-handers like Leonardo da Vinci more than hold their own in the evolution of the
species. So do we not have a statistical stand-off, what evolutionists might gratefully
refer to as 'an evolutionary equilibrium of 70 and 30 proportions resulting from the
operations of natural selection'? This line of thought could go on almost indefinitely,
with every question begged by the interposition of the magical term natural selection.
GRADUALISM Charles Darwin felt committed to the view that man must have arisen from lower
primate forms to his present eminence by a ladder of incremental changes. In The Descent of
Man, he conceived of a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape- like creature
to man as he now exists so that it would be impossible to fix on any definite point when
the term 'man' ought to be used. [29] (He used the terms gradations and gradual some sixty
times in the Origin of Species.)
The history of fossil anthropology has seen many attempts to prove Darwin's insensible
gradations to be the correct scenario for human development. Thus, a century later, LeGros
Clark, the authoritative physical anthropologist referred to earlier, thought it is evident
that a closely graded morphological series linked Australopithecus through homo erectus
with our own species homo sapiens. [30]
A prominent zoologist, Ernst Mayr, could in 1951 set forth a fine case for cultural
elaboration being attendant upon brain enlargement [31] . A decade later he might say the
same of all speciation, but only by leaving out careful considerations of time, of the
mathematics of permutations and combinations, of the earliest actual origin of the rich
intraspecies gene pool being called upon the allow remarkable adaptation, and by skirting
the edges of Lamarckian environmentalism even while denying it [32] .
In considering the advent of homo sapiens, alert scepticism about the language of natural
selection and mutation theory will send many a popular view crashing to the ground. There
is little in the known history of human evolution that can be called upon to show that
natural selection, adaptation, the survival of the fittest, or even 'mutation as an aid to
natural selection, ' has played any part in the present constitution of mankind. But, to
question-begging, evolutionary discourse adds a ping-pong game in which a frustrated
natural selection explanation bats the ball to mutation theory, which, frustrated in turn,
bats the ball back to natural selection. Moreover, the same scepticism may be indulged
regarding the mania for extending time backwards to great lengths. A theory of natural
selection, plus point-by-point mutation, plus an unchanging or very slowly changing natural
environment are going to require very much time to effect the multitude of alterations
distinguishing the human being from its imagined primate archetype. The ladder of evolution
has to be very long.
However, we may not use the long ladder to prove that time is long, even though time must
have been long in order to build such a ladder. Time has to be proven long by independent
criteria and tests. The scientific world has conveniently forgotten that Darwin conceived
of natural selection as having originated and developed all species of life to their
present state within a time span which, by present standards that move toward two or more
billion years, would make of him a rapid evolutionist. Relative to a small span of time,
the years allocable to the ascent of man were negligible by contemporary guesses; even then
time was short, no doubt explaining some of the exasperation of gentlemen of the day, who
could feel the hot apish breath of their ancestors on the back of their necks.
The ideology still prevails, suffusing the field of study with three hypotheses: that one
fossil form has progressed to another very gradually, that the elapsed time has been long,
and that the culture traits have budded upon the branches of anatomical changes. But also
(see Washburn, above) the brain can bud on the branches of culture; thus, tools excite
brain growth.
What are we allowed to think of the evidence if we disrobe our minds of the ideology of
darwinism for a moment? Humanoid types have been dispersed over most of the Earth.
Different types lived at the same time and even in the same places. There are no provably
transitional types. Stone tools and artificial dwellings have characterized the earliest
bipedal large-brained types. Stone tools are prima facie evidence that there was sufficient
neurological material for culture. [33] But can culture (that is, humanization) be
potentiated for three or more million years without realizing a breakthrough somewhere? Can
the measures of time be wrong? With all this, must we not begin to consider whether there
occurred some quantavolution, some saltation, as opposed to a gradual evolution? Must we
take a position on the duration of humanizing evolution in order to develop the theory of
homo schizo? Suppose that we accept a 5-million-year evolution from hominidal ancestors to
modern man. Can we then say that man has changed bit by bit over this period of time and
very gradually became the schizoid type that we know today? And, to address C. Darwin,
could we then speculate that, at some point near the end of this period, this changing
anatomy finally produced an outburst of cerebration and culture?
Also, did man lose his instinctive behavior bit by bit, with blunting and delay occurring
in one after another case, until finally he became modern? Was he, incipiently, and then
more and more, self-aware and was he more and more frightened and anxious as time went on,
until finally he achieved full self-consciousness?
If so, what brought on this gradual change? Was it a series of mutations, all leading in
the same direction ('directed evolution') or a continuous process of natural selection
breeding a creature more effective at survival? But it is not possible for mutations to
work so rapidly under present and recent natural conditions. Nor, considering how many
changes would be required and that these changes had to be transferred in a set of
successive 'chain reactions' to the species wherever its habitat, has there been time for
natural selection.
SEVERE LIMITS TO NATURAL SELECTION
And what is natural selection? We come back to the question. Darwin complains, I cannot...
understand how it is that Mr. [Alfred] Wallace maintains, that 'natural selection could
only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape. ' [34] It
may be that natural selection, if it makes sense at all, is capable only of ensuring
survival. The fittest may survive, but to be 'fittest' means only fitter than the next
individual of one's species, and being a member of a species that is reproductively fitter
than whatever species at the moment may be cutting into this reproductivity. Natural
selection is a measure of the influence, at a given moment, of a life form. It is the
interaction of life forms and their living and inorganic environment favors the genetic
descent of certain forms and the extinction of others, whether of the same or of different
species. From this, it is logical that an individual life form that is favored tends to
expand in numbers.
But if the environment at Time 'X' changes erratically or quantavolutes, then the changes
within an individual and species that have occurred up to Tx can promptly lose their merits
as factors in natural selection. What helps for survival this year may hurt survival next
year. So it is that natural selection is a more persuasive idea if one is a uniformitarian,
believing processes in nature have always been as they are now.
Persuasive it may be, but still not statistically probable. As soon as all the variables
are emplaced in the correlation matrix, the likelihood of natural selection collapses. For,
what uniformitarian evolution provides in the way of infinite chances of 'advance' must be
provided as infinite chances to 'retreat, ' hence infinite contradictions. The general
reliability of natural selection in producing an 'advance' must be close to zero.
The environment which effects species selection is so changeable even under uniformitarian
conditions that no 'line of evolution' can be credible as an effect of natural selection.
One moment a virus, the next a drought, the next an elimination of a competing species by
other causes than direct competition, then a chance mutation then a hundred other selective
forces play upon the situation of a species. And, of course, the holistic structure and
function of an organism, where thousands of interdependencies interact with each ongoing
moment, are utterly beyond the selective capacities of nature, as these are presently
construed. And, if one flees to time for protection, they are quite beyond the capabilities
of the longest time.
When a gathering was convoked at the University of Chicago in 1959 to celebrate a hundred
years of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, and after much wisdom was spoken
and the final discussions ensued, there occurred within minutes a blurting of confessions
and hopes [35] . Ernst Mayr was concerned with evolutionary outbursts along some lines
after many millions of years of stability, and wondered how so many extinctions occurred,
considering the extreme sensitivity of natural selection, doing the most incredible and
impossible things. Emerson said that he himself was of the opinion that We need much more
precise information on the evolutionary time dimension within all the biological sciences -
- behavior and development and so on, and A. J. Nicholson regretted that whereas much
attention had been given to the disappearance of unfit forms, little attention had been
given to the replacement of unfit forms.
Such research specifications have, needless to say, gone unfulfilled for another twenty
years. David Raup ventured to say that we have even fewer examples of evolutionary
transition than we had in Darwin's time, [36] and a conference held in 1981 at his
institution, the Field Museum, in Chicago, focused entirely upon the possibility of
macroevolutionary periods, without facing squarely the non-uniformitarian mechanisms that
might have produced them, such as catastrophes [37] .
I shall not argue that a busy god exists: but I would point out that hard-headed
materialists of the evolutionist camp, who are quick to cite the human stupidity which can
treasure a religious delusion for thousands of years, should not have trouble in
recognizing that they, too, have been laboring under a delusion, that of natural selection,
for 150 years. God is not the only ideological delusion making the rounds of humanity.
If modern man has taken a long time to evolve and if the changes were on the ladder, say,
of ramapithecus --australopithecus -- pithecanthropus -- homo, there should have occurred a
great many intermediate types, each with some distinctly 'progressive' concatenation of
bones and behavior. These have been claimed; they had to be claimed. But, as we shall see,
the known types are several at most. Also, it is unlikely that more than one or two
additional types will be found.
Generally, the prevailing modes of thought act to suppress this kind of observation, and
let presumptuous expressions such as that of Le Gros Clark pass without serious criticism.
As evidenced by the Piltdown Man fraud, whenever a missing link or transitional type seems
to emerge, it is eagerly seized upon [38] . In any event, should not such types have
survived, even the several known fossil hominids? Up to the present, man has not been able
to exterminate his primate relatives, and presumably the hominids would have been more
clever and elusive than the apes and monkeys. Very recently (May 2, 1981) a commentator in
the New Scientist could sloganize the controversy as 'lucky survivors' versus natural
selection. Species do not arise by any provable natural selection but only on occasion
flourish thereby or decline, and even then almost always by happenstance that has
practically nothing to do with survival of the fittest as a selective mechanism. Mutation
is the seemingly general mode of creating new species and perhaps of destroying many, but
then mutation is another matter, an electro-chemical event offering advantageous or
disadvantageous possibilities in a given environment. Many a 'hopelessly inept species'
lives on and there are many 'marvelously adapted' fossils of extinct species. Millions
fewer of extinct fossil forms are found than 'should be found, ' if one is to judge by the
number of existing species.
Exponential reproducibility is a prima facie case versus the refined general theory of
natural selection. Natural selection by any means whatsoever, except general catastrophe,
reduces to its largest component, exponential reproducibility. Clever little wings, a nose
that sniffs better, and all the thousands of alterations of species and individuals
designed as 'improvements by natural selection, ' are as nothing compared with the
formidable propensity of every species to reproduce in infinite numbers.
Seen in this light, the fact that should be astonishing, but seems to impress few, that the
simplest virus or bacterium survives as well or better than the most complex species, can
only mean that catastrophe and reproducibility determine natural selection. For the rest,
natural selection has been a fol-de-rol, diverting developmental biology from more
important business. Darwin prepared an epitaph for his main concept when, in expounding
gradualism, he predicted, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the
belief of a continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden
modification in their structure.
WAVES OF EVOLUTION
Scholars generally believe that four waves of evolution have occurred in the ascent of man.
The first was of pro-human apes, all fossils now, such as Aegyptopithecus, Dryopithecus,
and Ramapithecus, who inhabited Old World locations from 34 to 8 million years ago (so it
is said). There are, in fact, no ape fossils from anywhere after about eight million, notes
Johanson [39] . These extinct beasts were without sign of human culture despite a fairly
large brain. That they could have behaved in 'stupid' human ways or could have had
descendants, also extinct, that might have done so, is not impossible. Adrian Desmond [40]
illustrates well how modern apes are hovering upon the brink of self-awareness and of
varied deliberate activities. Such intimations of humanity, which may be enhanced by future
paleontological discoveries and modern experiments, are in line with our general theory
here, as they are with conventional evolution. The mechanics of humanization, to be
discussed in the next chapter, may have altered primate behavior in the same directions of
ego-fracture and or delayed instinct response as they did in ourselves.
The second wave was australopithecine. Estimates of their age vary up to a million years in
the case of individual finds and extend from a half-million to several million years within
the group of finds. Some 243 to 285 of these hominids are represented in fossil discoveries
in Africa and Asia. The most famous come from Olduvai Gorge near Nairobi and the Afar
Depression ( Lucy). Some were discovered earlier and others are being uncovered. The brain
of australopithecus could achieve 800 cubic centimeters, especially large in view of his
small size; his ratio of brain to body bulk was greater that of modern man, 1/ 42 as
opposed to 1/ 47 by one calculation [41] . His neck was proportionally longer too. He was
completely adapted to bipedalism [42] . He was right-handed. His physique varied from
gracile to robust; he weighed perhaps 32 to 39 kilograms, and resembled in musculature a
modern Bushman of the same area [43] .
The third wave was pithecanthropus or homo erectus, who also spread out over Africa and
Asia. He is found so close to australopithecus in certain excavations, as at Olduvai Gorge,
that he probably lived at the same time. The most famous is Peking man from China. His
brain attained 1200 cc., large also in relation to his stature. His time is guessed at
anywhere from 100,000 to millions of years (or this whole range of time). Other finds of
homo erectus are adjudged in the same range. Homer Rainey reports Johanson's estimates of 3
to 4 million years for the Afar Depression homo of 1975 an 2 to 6 million years for the R.
Leakey rift finds of 1972 and says that several manlike and other Homo species were
contemporary in very ancient times. Moreover they were toolmakers. [44] Soviet excavators
at Azhch (near Erivan) have discovered remains, tools, and incised bear skulls, dated at
450,000 years.
Then came the proto-homo sapiens, who differ little from modern homo sapiens in anatomy.
Often they are called homo erectus, with little reason save their arguable old ages. I
doubt that the earliest of these would be considered non-human if their age were unknown.
There came, too, the Neanderthal (316 specimen individuals) who was long considered sub-
human until discovered co-habitating with our kind in Palestine. He is now given homo
sapiens status, but not quite admitted to the club of homo sapiens sapiens. By then, and
even before then, modern types were flourishing, so that some 400,000 years is an arguable
age of full man in current anthropological circles.
There are three main cultural periods to attach to these four waves. All of the creatures
except the pro-human apes have worked tools, the most tangible signs of a culture. The
Paleolithic is divided unsurprisingly into Lower, Middle, and Upper, the Lower going back
to the earliest tools, which may be anywhere from 500,000 to 5m/ y old by conventional
reckoning; in geological time this would be Middle Pleistocene to Pliocene.
After describing the habitual bi-pedalism of australopithecus, Wolpoff points out that the
canine teeth of australopithecus do not differ significantly from those of homo erectus. He
then describes the tool kit of australopithecus, saying, Indeed, some of the
australopithecine industries are surprisingly advanced. The Sterkfontein and Natron
industries have been called Acheulian.[ 45]
Alberto Blanc helped rehabilitate Neanderthal man, accrediting him with ritual mutilation
of skulls going back 250,000 years, in a style close to that employed in Bronze Age Germany
and present-day mutilation practices in Borneo and Melanesia. Further, he pointed out that
homo erectus (Pecking man) was available in fragments of forty individual skulls; only one
piece was entirely missing from all forty, the base or foramen magnum, signifying probable
mutilation, and therefore a possible connection running all the way from homo erectus
through Neanderthal to modern man.
The reconstructed skull of Sinanthropus offers, therefore, an astonishing resemblance to
the mutilated skulls of the early and late Neanderthals and to the skulls mutilated for the
purpose of practicing ritual cannibalism in the Bronze Age of Germany and by the present
head-hunters from Borneo and New Guinea [46] .
It is also probable that ritual skull mutilation signifies ritual cannibalism. He mentions
the famous figure, obviously the figure of the god or genius of the hunting people, of the
Cave des Trois-FrŠres in AriŠge, with the horns of a deer, paws of a bear, eyes of an owl,
and tail of a wolf or horse. There is no reason to doubt his word that the constant
complexity of human beliefs is valid and abundantly proved, at least since the Upper
Paleolithic. [47]
F. Bordes, among others, lumps together the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, does not find
them in America, and attributes to the long period an Acheulian and a Mousterian style. But
he speaks of overlapping: Prehistory is now at a point where we have to accept the idea of
contemporaneity not only of different culture variants, but also of different cultures, and
this not only in different provinces, but also in interstratification in the same region.
[48] Acheulian and Mousterian have been noted to overlap, by Mellars and others. The
Mousterian culture is also found in connection with Aurignacian Upper Paleolithic remains.
The same type of person made both types of artifacts, or two types of people made both,
thus being equally human.
J. E. Weckler writes, it is no longer possible to maintain the idea that biface cores were
the work of homo sapiens and flake tools the product of Neanderthal; for we know that
generally in the Europe-Africa-India range the Levallois flakes and biface cores were made
by one and the same people as parts of unified cultural assemblies. [49] The Upper
Paleolithic and Mesolithic are joined, too, in America as well as in the rest of the world.
A report from Russia carries a shoe-print of an Upper Paleolithic hunter with evidence that
the type worse trousers [50] . The modern races are probably present in the Upper
Paleolithic. Australians go back now 100,000 years, according to a 1980 news report.
Further, australoid types have been found in South Africa and Ecuador. North American Amer-
Indian types have been pushed back into the Upper Paleolithic. The major Asian, Sinese or
Mongolian types are on hand, and the Caucasians are amply present in the Mediterranean and
Europe. Neanderthal probably merged with the caucasoids, rumors of extermination to the
contrary notwithstanding. If the rock drawings of the Sahara and Southwest Africa are Upper
Paleolithic, as their style might indicate, would their artists be negroid or caucasian, or
mixed assemblages of types? The answer is still unknown, but that they were religious is
undoubted.
Little time is required for human types to diffuse around the world. As if to confirm this
conjecture, a recent dispatch carries the claim of Alan Thorne of Australian National
University to have discovered fossil remains of Chinese humans in North Australia which
date to at least 10,000 years [51] . That humans, ecumenically cultured, split off in
early natural disasters, and that a land platform prevailed until about 6000 years ago
during which they might move around in the Southeast Pacific, is considered in this book
and in Chaos and Creation.
J. D. Birdsell thought Australia might have been settled within 720 years by pioneering
negritos from Timor but places the date at 32,000 years ago, which I must regard as too
long a time. He guessed that the australopithecines moved thousands of miles from South
Africa to Southeast Asia in 23,000 years. This, too, seemed swift to him and to others:
Pleistocene man when spreading into unoccupied territory could have saturated it to
carrying capacity... in amazingly short elapsed time. [52]
Yet Americanists long believed that men crossing the frozen arctic Bering Straits reached
practically to Antarctica in 12,000 years. Now man is thought to be older in the Americas.
I would maintain that man is as old in the Americas as anywhere else, but in any event his
velocity of diffusion was much greater everywhere. No hominid or homo need have more than a
few centuries to stretch around the globe. And, if hominids and homo were contemporary, and
especially if all were human, the occupation of the world by mankind need have consumed no
more than a thousand years. (I would maintain this whether the world was land-covered --
see my Chaos and Creation -- or fragmented.) Furthermore, present racial differences are
such as may have occurred in brief periods of isolation, followed by bursts of regional
expansion of new types. The mechanism of such quantavolutions in the hominid sphere, as in
the biosphere generally, is quantavolution in the natural sphere, catastrophes such as I
depicted in Chaos and Creation.
The Neolithic period brought practically everybody everywhere to the stage where most
people still are, except for some use of metal now in many parts around the world. Pottery,
farming, domestication of animals, religion and many other cultural features are present
everywhere. Yet, nowhere, strangely, is it claimed that the Neolithic is more than a few
thousand years old, six to twelve thousand being the normal estimated range.
We need not consider this Neolithic Period here. No hominid or proto-homo-sapiens emerges
during it. Also, as indicated above, nothing basically important seems to have
distinguished the Upper Paleolithic from the Mesolithic. So far as human development is
concerned, the cultural level of the Upper Paleolithic approaches that of the Neolithic
(later on, I shall offer my evidence to this point). So the temporal question is whether
homo schizo originated then, or in the Middle or Lower Paleolithic, bearing in mind that by
Lower Paleolithic we must mean Early Pleistocene, with this period in turn moving back into
what was once thought to be Pliocene, and perhaps even into the so-called Cretaceous.
The time problem is tied in with the manner of genesis. Did this human being originate in
steps or by quantavolution, that is, all at once? Did his culture originate promptly with
his physical origins, that is, hologenetically? In answering these questions, we shall be
solving the problem of time. A quantavolution of human genetics and culture implies human
hologenesis, and both imply a collapse of time scales. If timescales are deprived of
anthropological, archeological, and legendary support, they must subsist upon geology and
geochemistry. And if they cannot do so, they must be radically adjusted.
Notes (Chapter 1: Slippery Ladders of Evolution)
1. On p. 188, of Volume III, Issues in Evolution, Sol Tax and Charles Callendar, eds., of
Evolution After Darwin, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960, hereafter cited as ED.
2. D. Morris, Primate's Aesthetics, 70 Natural History (1961), 22-9.
3. E. V. Komarek, Sr., Fire and the Ecology of Man, Tall Timbers Foundation, Tallahassee
(Florida), March 1967, 151-3.
4. Origins of Man, N. Y.: Wiley, 1966.
5. III ED 265, also 107.
6. As with Marshall D. Shalins, Elman R. Service, eds., Evolution and Culture, with papers
also by D. Kaplan, T. G. Harding, and Leslie A. White, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
1960.
7. Ibid, v.
8. Ward C. Halstead, Brain and Intelligence, in L. A. Jef-fress, ed. Cerebral Mechanisms in
Behavior, N. Y.: Wiley, 1951, 251.
9. Notes on the Mentality of Primitive Man, in S. L. Washburn, ed., Social Life of Early
Man, Chicago: Aldine, 1-64, 11.
10. Cf. inter alia J. N. Spuhler, et al., The Evolution of Man's Capacity for Culture,
Detroit: Wayne U., 1959, chap. I., and S. L. Washburn and R. Moore, Ape into Man, Boston:
Little, Brown, 1973.
11. N. Y.: Human Sciences Press, 1976.
12. Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, NY: W. W. Norton, 1950, 46.
13. Totem and Taboo, 1913, trans. 1950, N. Y.: W. W. Norton, 140ff.
14. The Ascent of Man, Boston: Little, Brown, 1973, 44-5.
15. A number of the cases comes from Barbara C. Sproul, Primal Myths: Creating the World,
N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1979.
16. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill, Boston: Gambit, 1969, 306.
17. Ibid., 309.
18. Ibid., 252, 118.
19. John E. Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Man, N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1972, 391.
20. Mankind Evolving, 1962, N. Y.: Bantam, 1970, 1-2.
21. Moons, Myths and Man, London: Faber and Faber, 1936, 165.
22. Princeton University Press, 1964.
23. Ernst Mayr, The Emergence of Evolutionary Novelties, I. ED. 354ff; St. George Mivart,
Genesis of Species, London: Macmillan, 1871.
24. Descent of Man, 1871, 1883, 440, cf. 435.
25. Human Evolution and Culture, II ED 52.
26. Spuhler, op. cit., p31.
27. Op. cit., 352.
28. Paul Satz, A Test of Some Models of Hemispheric Speech Organization in the Left- and
Right- Handed, 203 Science, 16 March 1979, 1133.
29. Page 541.
30. The Antecedents of Man, Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971, 359.
31. Taxonomic Categories in Fossil Hominids, 15 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on
Quantitative Biology (1951), 109-17.
32. I. ED. 354ff.
33. Buettner-Janusz, op. cit., 349.
34. Descent of Man, 432.
35. III. ED. 141-2. Cf. Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable, N. Y.: Basic
Books, 1981; Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe, N. Y.: Mentor, 1982; T. M. Schopf,
ed., Models in Paleontology, San Francisco: Freeman, 1972.
36. Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology, quoted by L. R. Godfrey in Natural History,
June 1981, 9.
37. Roger Lewin, Evolutionary Theory Under Fire, 210 Science Nov. 1980, 883-7.
38. J. S. Weiner et al., The Piltdown Forgery, London: Oxford, 1955; Nature, 2 Nov. 1978.
39. Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1981, 363.
Washburn and Moore, op. cit. Buettner-Janusz, op. cit.; NY Times, Feb. 7, 1980 on new
Aegyptopithecus discoveries by Elwyn Simone.
40. The Ape's Reflexion, N. Y.: Dial, 1979.
41. Buettner-Janusz, 146, 350-1, et passim.
42. C. O. Lovejoy, The Locomotor Skeleton of Basal Pleistocene Hominids, IX Proceedings,
Congress, UISPP, 14 Sept. 1976, 157.
43. Alan Mann, Australopithecine Demography, Ibid. 181.
44. Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook, 1976, 260.
45. Milford H. Wolpoff, Competitive Exclusion Among Lower Pleistocene Hominids: The Single
Species Hypothesis, 6 Man 4 (1971), 606.
46. Some Evidence for the Ideologies of Early Man, in S. C. Washburn, ed., Social Life of
Early Man, 133.
47. Ibid. 121.
48. Chronology of Paleolithic Cultures in France, in Renfrew, ed., The Explanation of
Culture Change: Models in Prehistory, Pittsburgh, U. of Pitt., 1973. F. Ameghino, in
several works at the turn of the century, claimed an Acheulian culture of the Lower
Paleolithic in South America.
49. The Relationships between Neanderthal Man and Homo Sapiens, 56 Amer. Anthro. (1954)
1011.
50. Peter Kolosimo, Spaceships in Prehistory, Secaucus, N. J.: University Books, 1979,
source not cited.
51. Chinese 'First to Australia, ' Melbourne Sun, Aug. 14, 1982.
52. Some Population Problems involving Pleistocene Man, 22 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium of
Quant. Biol. 1957, 67-8.
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWO
HOMINIDS IN HOLOGENESIS
Might all types of known hominids and proto-humans have been of the species homo sapiens
(schizotypus) in physiology and culture? Might these and all modern races have appeared
during the past 14,000 years? Might man have originated hologenetically in the holocene
period, by quantavolution? Such is the line of questioning and argument to be followed
here; outrageous as it may be to conventional theory, it may be also productive.
We have already noted that australopithecus had certain human qualities. We can pick up the
analysis again. He was adequately supplied with cranial matter. Specimens exceeding the
minimal brain size known for normal humans have been discovered. His brain-body build
proportions were modern. His size was that of many millions of modern people. His dentition
was close to modern man's, far removed from the apes. He was bi-pedal and held his head
high (higher than we do, said Louis Leakey). He was social. He used tools. He built
enclosures. He was right-handed. It appears that his brain was hemispherically asymmetric,
which introduces additional human potentials. McKinley, Wolpoff says, demonstrated that
Australopithecus (gracile and robust) followed a 'human' model of short birth spacing, and
Mann showed that the rate of australopithecine development and maturation were delayed, as
in modern man, rather than accelerated, as in modern chimpanzees. (Based upon the timing of
molar eruption.) There are no signs yet of his having had speech, but no evidence to the
contrary; Louis Leakey thought he had a human palate. There have been few indications yet
of his having been religious and artistic. There are signs of his having used fire.
He was connected with homo erectus in time and with the Acheulian-Chellean culture at
Olduvai, which culture extends into the Terrafine of North Africa and is found also at
Swanscombe and Steinheim, with practically modern man. Opposing the theory that
australopithecus was human stands largely the thesis that he is anatomically too different
from modern man. To the forgoing response may be added the following: we do not know what
are the limits of variation within the single species or how the principal distinction
employed -- that interbreeding be impossible -- would apply here. It is of significance
that Johanson had persistent doubts about classifying his fossil hominid, Lucy. He argued
that she might be called homo, but relented at the prospect, then, that all
australopithecines would logically have to be regarded as of the homo line. Where would we
go to find our hominid ancestors? The search for the missing link would begin again.
While at the University of Chicago, Charles Oxnard compared fossil australopithecines with
living apes and men by fine measurements of the foot, pelvis, fingers and other bones,
transferring the measures to computer tapes for multivariate analysis [1] . Geometrically
this is the equivalent of constructing and viewing from one position a three-dimensional
model of the swarms (of points measuring similar objects) and then rotating and viewing the
model from a new position that best separates the swarms. His studies suggest that the
australopithecine bones are uniquely different from both man and the chimpanzee and
gorilla.
Applying stress analysis to the bones supports his comparisons derived from the computer
analysis in that the finger bones of man are incompetent for both knuckle-walking and
hanging-climbing, whereas those of the Olduvai australopithecines are poor for
knucklewalking, but adapted for hanging-climbing. Oxnard believes also that
australopithecus might have been better equipped to run than to stride bipedally. One
wonders when the Olduvai creature of the savannahs stopped walking on his knuckles, how he
used his hanging-climbing faculty, and why his hands were not scuppered for scooping fish
from the successive Lakes of Olduvai. Kamala, the Indian wolf-girl, went on all fours and
could not stand, until after years of coaching; her hands were described as very strong and
rough; she could run, rising on her digits. Her anatomy was normal for homo sapiens. The
races of mankind are distinguishable as skeletons, but are one species; so the hanging-
climbing hands of Olduvai man may be of minor importance if he were otherwise human.
Australopithecus may be a branch of the human line that habitually clung and climbed.
Better yet, he may have maintained an ancestral feature that was finally bred out. It may
be suggested, also, that he originated wherever homo emerged, and that the quantavolution
was so open-ended as to provide a remarkable diversity of human types in the beginning,
followed by a diffusion of these types around the world. Soon the types would double back,
and merge with, or exterminate each other.
There is much diversity among the australopithecines themselves to fuel controversy;
several attempts have been made to call new specimens by new species names. Generally,
anthropologists have wanted to join them together as a single species, if only to avoid
barren disputation and to make it easier to sum up the primordial situation in textbooks.
Charles Oxnard points out that a recent finding at East Rudolph, by Richard Leakey, of the
keystone of a foot arch (talus) has been dated as the same age as, or older than, the
Olduvai australopithecine. Yet the new find is much larger, more similar to that of modern
men, according to the multi-variate analysis of Bernard Wood. Richard Leakey found also a
skull dated from two to three million years of age with an endocranial volume of 800 cubic
centimers (the australopithecine volume being generally much less), showing an overlapping
of cranial capacities with homo erectus. Then, too, an arm bone fragment from Kanapoi,
dated at four million years, has already been shown... to be very similar to that of modern
man. In this phrase, very similar, we can read within the range of variation of modern man.
The various pieces of evidence, according to Oxnard, add up to meaning that perhaps as long
as 5,000,000 years ago (and the possibility is not lost that future finds may place this
further back in time) there may well have been creatures living that were generally similar
to homo erectus and therefore classifiable as man in a way that we must deny to any
australopithecine (whether named H. habilis, H. africanus or whatever else). That is, we
should say, erectus was even more modern in anatomy than australopithecus. But probably
present anatomical differences between the pygmies of the Congo and their tall black
neighbors are as great as between australopithecus and homo erectus; they discourse in the
same language (pygmies adapt and use neighboring languages), intermarry, have continuous
commercial dealings, and in fact are symbiotic.
HOMO ERECTUS
Now it is homo erectus who comes to mind, and we would like to know whether he, too, might
be human. If so, how did he come to be created? And when was he created? And if five
million years old, or three, or one, or one-half, or one-tenth -- to cite various estimates
-- why then should he have evolved so slowly until the Upper Paleolithic, which is
variously reckoned at from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago?
Homo erectus cannot be dismissed from the motley ranks of modern man. He had large
supraorbital ridges but so have some modern individuals and so, too, Neanderthal man, who
had a cranium larger than modern man and a culture. Home erectus had a low skull, yet
possessed the cranial capacity of the smaller skulls found among ourselves. And amongst
ourselves, cranial size has little or no relationship to average intelligence and
competence, or perhaps even to extreme intelligence.
Le Gros Clark, seeking to prove gradual evolution, wrote that by the end of the Middle
Pleistocene, the hominid skull had attained a degree of development very similar to modern
man; indeed, except for the rather strongly developed supraorbital ridges, some of the
cranial remains of this date are hardly to be distinguished from modern man. [2] His
Middle Pleistocene was about 500,000 years ago, and in cultural terms might now be termed
Lower Paleolithic, because well-developed stone age cultures dated at 250,000 years ago
have been uncovered, as in Tadshik, U. S. S. R. Bj"rn Kurten alludes to modern humans with
a brain case of 1400 cc and using fire, discovered in Hungary at Vartesz"ll"s in the 1960's
and dated at 400,000 years ago [3] . Probably homo erectus and homo sapiens were
contemporaries. Inasmuch as fire making was also assigned to Peking man, homo erectus
whether 400,000 or four million years ago, it would seem that humans have been allowed an
inordinately long time to sit around fires in a mental funk.
In 1975, field work at Koobi Fora in northern Kenya resulted in the demonstration of
contemporaneity between KNM-ER 3733, an unequivocal homo erectus cranium, and KNM-ER 406,
an obvious robust australopithecine. This was dramatic confirmation of earlier
interpretations that suggested the existence of two distinct hominid lineages in the
African early Pleistocene [4] .
In Java, homo erectus and meganthropus were living side by side in the Middle Pleistocene
[5] .
Presently, radiometric dating, particularly the Potassium-Argon test, is determining the
ages of hominids, and this test is applied ordinarily to volcanic issue. The stretching of
the time of hominids has gone on regardless of definitions of boundaries, and little
attention is given to traditional geochronology. If the volcanic ashes imbedding a bone are
adjudged to be two million years old, that is usually the end of age reckoning. So the
hominids have gone back beyond the Pleistocene well into the Pliocene.
How baffling the time element can be is suggested in an incident. A skull of homo erectus
was discovered in Kenya by Bernard Ngeneo, working under Richard Leakey. It was dated at
1.5 million years. Peking man, a prototype of homo erectus had been dated by non-
radiometric methods at 0.5 million years or less. Leakey said, this raises questions about
the true age of Peking Man. The Chinese must develop a new, different way to date their
sites for more accuracy. Upon re-examination, they'll probably find these fossils to be a
million years older than now dated. [6]
In effect, the 40K-40A dating method is giving very old and by implication good results,
and should be the sole method of plotting man's ascent! If so, some dates of hominid and
homo fossils that were estimated before radiometric methods were employed may be useless.
Or else these types lived for millions of years on Earth. As I stated earlier, modern types
are now being found aged in the millions of years, not only skulls of modern volume but
also modern bones, and now modern footprints.
PEKING MAN
Sinanthropus, the Chinese version of homo erectus, from Choukoutien [7] , probably had a
cerebral mechanism for speech. He was also righthanded as judged by cerebral asymmetry and
the way he made and used tools. His occlusal trough was the same as ours and he chewed the
same way. His two lateral upper incisors display a crown morphology quite typical for this
region in various races of modern man. The upper central incisors were longer than in the
Northern Chinese today. The lower molars were of a generalized and progressive type... one
whose slight modification in a given direction may readily produce a condition dominant in
modern hominids (The experts who say this make a comment that should be borne in mind when
comparing ancient and modern man: that the most distinctive peculiarities of modern man are
degenerative in origin.)
Sinanthropus built fires and made artifacts of quartz; layers of ashes were uncovered and
thousands of pieces of worked quartz. We will treat this matter when we discuss cultural
hologenesis, but it may be worthwhile to mention here that the Choukoutien formation must
be considered as a perfectly homogeneous and distinct stratigraphical unit. To our view,
this signals the possibility that the Choukoutien scenario was brief, not enduring for a
hundred centuries or a thousand centuries.
An archaelogical columnar section illustrates the distribution of prehistoric culture in
relation to deposits of North China, as known to Black and his collaborators half a century
ago. I have tabulated it here. Note how crowded the holocene period is in relation to the
Pleistocene and Pliocene sections, and yet how heavy its cultural development. So much time
is allotted to the earlier periods because convention so dictates, i. e., such is the
ruling paradigm of evolutionary time. But inspection of the contents of the column reveals
plainly that practically all of its material could have been deposited in weeks, years, or
centuries. The deposits are precisely of the type that occur in floods and storms: sandy
lacustrine deposits, loams, loess, and gravel. (In The Lately Tortured Earth, I examine
evidence of an extraterrestrial origin of the loess.) It is unlikely that hundreds of
thousands of years elapsed, as the report declares. This idea is especially poignant
because the Choukoutien fossils and artifacts were found in lenses of deposits that were
swept into a rock cleft, fissure, or large cave, filling it up, until, in our day, they
were come upon in the course of quarrying.
That the total setting is recent is attested to by occasional unsuspecting sentences in the
reports: the fissure contains such a wide range of fauna from Late Pliocene and Upper
Pleistocene (at least 1 myr) that it is not easy to decide to which of them it stands more
closely related, so it is placed as Lower Pleistocene.
The fossils... constitute a curious and heterogenous collection of types... Such forms as
the marmot, the camel, the antelope and the ostrich seem rather out of their due place.
Possibly they were accidental wanderers along the plain, unless we admit that the plain
itself was the steppe, then elevated considerably above the present flood plain level.
Also
Though these pioneers probably arrived with a knowledge that crude stones could be used
in a variety of useful ways, it would seem probable that the lithic industry of Choukoutien
was largely if not wholly a slow autochronous development; that the latter in any case was
indeed an extraordinarily slow one, is witnessed by the relatively insignificant advances
made in technique over the many, many centuries during which the Sinanthropus community
must have occupied the great cave of Choukoutien...
The climate was mild. Curiously enough, however, a generally effective faunal barrier seems
to have existed then just as now, between the Yangtze and Hoangho basins. Just as now! Why
not now?
There are some Mousterian (Neanderthal) cultural affinities: As a matter of fact most of
the... quartz specimens would seem to be indistinguishable from the major part of the
quartz artifacts which have been collected in some of the Mousterian caves in France. Then:
There also occur throughout the deposit vast numbers of burnt and fragmented bones.
Further, much of the deposit is of ashy and burnt clay of different colors, possibly of a
great many fires, but also possibly of wind and water transported ashes. Almost nothing but
cranial parts of Sinanthropus was found in the deposits, despite the abundance of mammalian
bones in the thousands of cubic meters of debris examined. Could the skulls alone have been
buried in the pit (a possible Mousterian practice)? Or washed in from a nearby settlement?
One can conclude that more direct evidence supports a short-time life of the cave than a
long-term history.
Yet pressure is exerted on the curators of the site of 'Peking Man' to redate it to carry
it backwards in time from 200,000 years to over a million years, so as to match East
African specimens of homo erectus, which in turn has been found in association with
australopithecus, and this extends backwards by another two million years, all based upon
the validity of potassium-argon radiodating which is suspect. It is not beyond reason that
this whole dating scheme will soon collapse and the hominids will be carried forward in
time, leap-frogging the geochronological conventions of the 1920's, to the very edge of the
holocene, a dozen thousand years ago.
FOOTPRINTS
At a site, G. Laetoli, Tanzania, the fossil imprints of three individuals, thought to be
gracile australopithecines, were discovered in a consolidated tuff of volcanic ash dated by
the K-A method at 3.6 to 3.75 million years. A stereometric camera was used to compare the
footprints of these two individuals with modern footprints. The contour patterns are
similar. The impression of the heel, ball, arch and big toe are similar. The pattern of
weight and force transference through the foot... also seem to be very similar. [8]
A lucid description of the K-A dating technique is to be found in Lucy (187-207). Johanson
and his collaborators worked hard on Lucy's K-A dating of three million years to reduce the
margin of error from 200,000 to 50,000 years. Then, on the basis of new information coming
from paleomagnetic matching of rocks here and elsewhere and matching of dated fossil pigs
found in rock strata of the same type elsewhere (biostratigraphy), they discarded the 3m/ y
date for a new older date of 3.75 m/ y. Lucy became 750,000 years older. One can scarcely
be surprised if the reader, at first awfully impressed by radiochronometric machines,
becomes now disenchanted when these are abandoned for divination from pig bones. Perhaps
Lucy is a million or two years on the younger side and was gassed with her friends in a
recent volcanic oven. And maybe the footprints at Laetoli were made by the Leakey family on
an outing, before they had their first foundation grants. But this we know cannot be, for
Mrs. Leakey would remember whether the volcano was then active.
The age of Lucy did not long stand where Johanson had placed it. In 1982 Boaz and others
made new faunal comparisons that younged her and her earlier Afar associates by half a
million years, and F. H. Brown compared volcanic tufts and likewise found Lucy much younger
than she had seemed to be; a basalt testing at 3.6 m/ y lay above a tuft of 3.2 m/ y, the
basalt test, less reliable, was superseded [9] .
Johanson could recognize his shoeprints and a cigarette package in the wadi where he had
worked two years before, for there had been no rain. Yet we surveyed the 333 site. A good
deal of sandstone had crumbled down from the overburden above. It was now scattered in
large blocks and smaller chunks over the hillside that had been so carefully screened for
fossils two years before. Two years and 3.75 million years: close to two million times that
amount of debris might have been dumped in the area since Lucy's days, even with a uniform
climate (which he claims) and no natural disasters to muck it up (but 10 volcanos were
active thereabouts in Lucy's days).
Old or young, the hominid and homo types have overlapped in time and habitat, as well as in
numerous traits. Michael H. Day writes:
It has been pointed out by a number of workers that the approximately contemporaneous
Ternifine mandibles (jawbones) of Algeria and the Peking mandibles of China show extreme
similarities; the great similarities between the Peking femurs (thighbones) and the Olduvai
Hominid 28 femur have also been noted. A reasonable explanation of this similarity is that
migratory hunting patterns had brought many groups of Homo erectus into contact and that
exogamous (marrying outside the tribal group) breeding patterns had resulted in the
widespread occurrence of certain traits. These similarities are very likely too great and
consistent to have resulted from separate evolution along parallel lines in isolation; and,
indeed, the degree of similarity seen in the available material makes it extremely unlikely
that long-term isolation was a factor in human evolution after the early middle Pleistocene
[10] .
Ashley Montagu long ago pointed out that Swanscombe man, who was quite modern, preceded
Neanderthal, and that a Swanscombe type was found at Quinzano, Italy and placed in the
Middle Paleolithic. Also before Neanderthal came Fontechevade man, with cultural remains,
and he would appear in all respects a modern type of man. [11] He alludes to Louis
Leakey's Kanam and Kanjara discoveries as modern but Middle or Lower Pleistocene.
AMEGHINO'S ARGENTINE HOMINIDS
The extensive works of Fiorentino Ameghino, the Argentine paleontologist and archaeologist,
are due a review in the light of recent oceanography, paleontology, and anthropology.
During his lifetime he was attacked and ridiculed; he lost his university position for his
ideas; nor has his fame been restored to this day. Several of his claims, apart from the
many new species of extinct animals that are accredited to him, are beginning to ring true.
He proposed, on the basis of numerous explorations and excavations, that man had existed,
with an Acheulian culture, in the Pliocene period and earlier, an age that only now is
being invaded by East African hominidal discoveries. He found human remains, tools, and
habitats associated with the giant fauna that were extirpated at the end of the
Pleistocene. He found carapaces of giant turtles, with diameters around 1.5 meters, that
could house dwellers of the plain, and inside of them, flint tools and selected bones; man,
he thought, used these carapace homes on the treeless plains to avoid the giant animals of
the age. He could not but believe that the association of man and great animals stretched
far back into the Pliocene, even into the Miocene, and possibly the Eocene.
He argued vehemently for the existence until recently of land bridges between South America
and Africa, actually in the time of man. No doubt that he would have welcomed the theory of
continental drift in vogue today, although he followed a theory with other well-known
writers, that the land between the continents had sunk, rather than split up and drifted.
His most shocking hypothesis was that mankind had originated in the pampas of southern
South America and had moved North and East across continental connections. He called the
Central Atlantic bridge the Guyana-Senegal connection. This is also the Antilles-
Mediterranean link, which Suess, Lapparent, and other geologists and paleontologists
perceived to exist in the Tertiary period [12] .
I believe, he wrote, that one can regard as susceptible to nearly rigorous proof the
following facts: 1. The American population is not a unique and homogenous race but the
product of crossings of different races. 2. One finds individuals and tribes representing
races of the Old World, but the mass of people is distinctly different... 5. Emigrations
from the Old World always found the Americas peopled by natives... 7. While Europe was
still peopled with savages, America possessed very advanced peoples living in great cities
and constructing grandiose monuments. 8. At different periods, new emigrations took place
toward the Old World... 10. The most ancient peoples of Europe, Africa and America were in
communication. 11. The communications were facilitated by land, today disappeared. 12. The
existence of this land can be demonstrated by tradition, prehistory, archaeology,
ethnology, linguistics, philology, anthropology, botany, zoology, paleontology, and
geology. 13. Up to now, science has not been able to determine in what corner of the globe
man or his precursor made his appearance for the first time.
Ameghino describes skeletal material and crania from the Canyon of Moro (North of Necochea)
[13] as of a people rather over four feet tall, long-headed, prognathic, small-brained,
small-toothed, and generally exhibiting bone-structures foreign to modern man. He called
this group of hominids Homo sinemento.
In another paper, Ameghino and his brother describe an apparently incised Protorotherium
jawbone that they discovered. This would place Patagonian man over thirty million years
ago, in the Eocene age, far earlier than the most radical of present-day datings which
range up to five million years, and then only hypothetically. Two famous anthropologists
from the United States visited the site, Ales Hrdlicka and Bailey Willis; neither accepted
Ameghino's early datings of man or even the presence of a hominid in the Western
Hemisphere, much less the four races of hominid that Ameghino claimed to have discovered.
Since the present author has not studied the problem extensively or at first hand, and
indeed the materials for such a study may no longer exist for specialists to investigate,
one can only remain in a state of mystification, hoping that the search for primordial
humans in South America will be vigorously pursued.
METHODOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES
Oxnard's statistical, computer-assisted techniques of comparative anatomy might well be
applied to test new hypotheses. They are especially adapted for logical operations in which
time should be squeezed out. Pearl computed coefficients of variations in the human
species, along seventy dimensions. G. Simpson deemed the results to show a not unusual
variability in comparison with other mammal species [14] . The data, he thought, indicated
that man was changing rapidly. If modern man is so variable in physical structure, it can
be assumed that fossil men (hominids included) will also be at least as internally deviant,
and in fact they are, even if the australopithecines and homo erectus are examined
separately.
But now let us group Neanderthals and proto-modern types with modern man, and
australopithecus with homo erectus. The number of parameters of difference within the two
groupings will probably remain the same - the aforesaid seventy perhaps. The variations or
values within each grouping will increase. What are the two sets of coefficients of
variations? What are their means and extremes? Are all of these indices equal within the
two groups?
Then plot the ancient aggregate against the modern aggregate on every parameter, and on the
means and extremes. Calculate all the differences and principal sets of differences and
express them statistically. Test then the following hypotheses: a) The internal differences
of the ancient group are of the same mean and range values as those of the modern group. b)
The differences between all individual values and sets of values of the ancient and modern
groups are not significantly greater than the internal differences found in each of the two
groups.
Both hypotheses are deemed to be supported if the differences trend toward their
confirmation. If the hypotheses are largely confirmed, elapsed time between ancient and
modern man must be presumed to approach zero time.
The conclusions thus derived are subject to attack from 1) Independent measures of time by
geochronology and any evidence of an independent archaeological kind such as aberrational
cultural developments, as well as by 2) Independent knowledge from evolutionary genetics,
from evolution by other means such as natural selection, and from paleontology concerning
the length of time that the traits under examination require to reach their extreme
parameters. If neither kind of independent control is valid and reliable, beyond the limits
to which the aforesaid tests of the hypotheses are valid or reliable, then the hypotheses
may be maintained: The groupings of ancient and modern man are internally homogeneous;
elapsed time between ancient and modern man must be very short. Since little of this
proposed work has been performed, however, the value of the hypotheses must be temporarily
judged on the basis of such logic and evidence as are otherwise presented in this chapter
and book.
TIME UNNEEDED FOR CULTURE
Oxnard is impressed by the uses to which a long history of mankind might be put:
knowing as we do the enormously greater speed of psycho-social evolution as compared with
the slow rate of biological evolution, then a larger absolute time span of, say, 5,000,000
years, may allow an even greater amount of relative evolutionary time for the evolution of
the behavioral, cultural and intellectual qualities that stamp man as unique from any
animal [15] .
But whoever said so much time was needed for cultural evolution? We shall soon be arguing
that culture was practically instantaneous.
Some old evolutionists gave 50,000 years as the age of modern man. They were thinking in
physical, not cultural, terms. That splendid hoax, Piltdown man, was expertly placed at
500,000 years and then a few years later just as expertly placed 50,000; finally, of
course, he achieved the surreal, a timeless mockery of scientoid pretense. By the newest
estimates, mankind would have had one hundred times as long as these 50,000 years to rise
from some non-human level to its present state.
To insist that very old fossils of modern physical type must have had a culture provides a
sword that cuts both ways against time. The physical as well as the mental traits of the
homo species, if deemed to imply each other, might be dated very recently. Homo sapiens
might be born within hailing distance of 14,000 B. P., a basepoint that I have developed in
Chaos and Creation for the Holocene age.
To allow quantavolution in a short time, one must agree that some part of evolution might
be systemic, that is, permit a set of crucial human changes to occur together in the same
moment and perhaps by the same instant mutation. The issue has been hotly argued. A
plurality of biologist are point-by-point evolutionists; very few are saltationists,
quantavolutionists or systemists; many are puzzled over the great variety of points to be
covered over time, no matter how long, and yet unready to accept successful monsters as the
answer.
There is no way of soothing the bafflement and frustration concerning measures of time. I
have mentioned traditional geochronology and potassium-argon radiochronometry as the
bulwarks of long time reckoning. Probably I must say more of them here inasmuch as they are
accepted with little question by some of the foremost paleoanthropologists.
Traditional geochronology needs to be considered mainly because it offers a fall-back
position, should radiochronometry be deemed invalid. The major drawback of geochronology in
regard to fossil man is that time is measured by evolution; the time scale follows the
fossil record of the sequence from lower to higher forms.
The defensive positions of a century ago are irreparably in disrepair, however. At that
time the age of the Earth itself was being argued in the highest scientific circles in the
neighborhood of thirty to ninety million years, which would on today's hominid reckoning
give perhaps one-tenth of all earth-time for the development of man [16] . But then man
was still hovering in the five figure bracket of 20,000 to 90,000 years. Certainly, were it
not for radioactive dating methods, evolutionary theory would be at an impasse for lack of
time for mutation and for natural selection to transform the biosphere.
Like question-begging is the plague of natural selection, circular reasoning is the plague
of traditional geochronology. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks
more accurately... circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales. [17] There
are neither transition fossils in any number to mark the important fossil stages, nor
complete fossil columns showing the evolutionary sequence; nor is evolution a hard set of
facts. Yet index fossils with a doctrinaire chronology are imposed on the rocks and the
rocks assigned dates. Then rocks of comparable type, though lacking fossils, are dated
accordingly, and many of the strata and formations surrounding them, too.
Velikovsky has ingeniously displayed, using Blanckenhorn's study of the Syrian-Palestinian
rift valley, through which pass the Jordan River and Dead Sea, that the old geochronology,
before radiochronometry, could properly formulate for it a history of a few thousand years,
rather than many millions of years [18] . He further used proto-historical evidence, that
of Biblical sources, to strengthen the theory of short duration for the rifting of the
area. The older methods of geochronology are often too flexible to engender confidence.
We must bring time into a new order. So long as it is the tool of the old vision of a
point-by-point development of humanity, time will stretch out of bounds. The Holocene-
Pleistocene boundary is not fixed upon an event, unless it be an end of the ice ages. But
the ice ages are still going on, and it is doubtful that they played much of a role in the
humanization and diffusion of man, except for imposing sometimes rather obvious limits upon
settlement. The Pleistocene-Pliocene boundary was set by the International Geological
Congress of 1950 on the basis of late Cenozoic stratigraphy in Italy, more precisely on the
entrance of northern marine invertebrates into the Mediterranean. This boundary, too, is
scarcely useful, and should be ignored in reckoning the origins of man in time. The
Pleistocene record is always discontinuous and fragmentary, especially in glaciated areas.
The task of scholars would have been incomparably easier if some stratigraphic section
covering the entire Pleistocene were available, showing, for instance a complete sequence
of alternating tills and soils. Unfortunately, such a section seems to be available nowhere
in the glaciated areas. [19]
We note, too, how geological time-reckoning expands as we go back in history. The Upper
Paleolithic artistic period was dated back 30,000 years by French scholars and geologists,
working on remains in caves and rock shelters. Estimates of sedimentation rates of deposits
into which artifacts were sandwiched, gave such duration. But the dating of the Upper
Paleolithic artists is more a working consensus that an absolutely tested fix. Pergrony and
Caslis give us an age of 4500 years ago for metals, a Neolithic lasting 5000 years before
then, a Mesolithic of 2500 years, an Upper Paleolithic of 30,000 years, a Middle
Paleolithic of 80,000 years and Lower Paleolithic of from 800,000 to 1,500,000 years [20]
. As we have pointed out, this last figure is now verging upon five million years.
The Upper Paleolithic period falls between the claimed periods of competence of radiocarbon
dating and potassium-argon dating. The most careful work on this period is therefore
dependent on sedimentary dating in large part, and this cannot get around the possibilities
of periods of flood and torrents, laying down blanket after blanket of clay and gravel to
create illusions, in today's peaceful landscape, of the passage of much time. This is no
new problem. For instance, when Alfred Wallace was writing his studies of the distribution
of animal life in the nineteenth century, he had to confess to the great difficulty of
judging sedimentary deposits [21] . In repeated discussions at the Dordogne cave and
shelter sites with French scientists who have excavated and are responsible for them, I
have been unable to accept their meticulous reconstructions as valid.
In the end, they rely nowadays upon carbondating, which although it often upsets their
expectations, at least keeps them in the Paleolithic period rather than moving them into
more recent times. That radiocarbondating which is based upon measuring a ratio involving
the diminishing amount of carbon-14 isotopes discoverable in organic remains, can be
erratic, owing to atmospheric, species, and soil transformations, has already been the
subject of investigation. Recently, changes in the Earth's geomagnetic field have been
added to the several conditions that alter radiocarbon dating. Unfortunately, the
usefulness of radiocarbon dating decreases exponentially as we move into the periods of the
neolithic and beyond, when the need for a dating instrument becomes increasingly acute
[22] .
Geologists bought evolutionary time to preserve themselves from alternative catastrophic
hypotheses. Whereupon the biologists and anthropologists, together with the geologists,
were persuaded of radiochronometry by geo-physicists. The Potassium-Argon test claims
validity over a time span of a billion years and more, beginning at 100,000 years or less
before the present. Its favorite rock for testing is erupted volcanic material, ashes and
lava. It establishes a constant rate of decay of the isotope potassium-40 into the isotope
argon-40 (40K to 40A). Then it measures the amount of 40K and 40A in a rock sample and, by
the proportion of the two, determines the 'age' of the rock, hence of fossils embedded in
the rock. A high proportion of Argon-40 signifies an old age.
Unfortunately for its validity, and despite the brilliant technical theory and achievements
represented in its applications, the 40K ug 40A test suffers from a defect common to
radioactive elements in nature. The elements migrate. In consequence, the proportions
change, giving illusory ages. Rocks can both acquire and lose both elements or either
alone.
Moreover, one cannot rely upon a temporal sequence that appears nicely to show older strata
succeeded by younger strata as a proof that the sequence occurred smoothly and without
disturbance. For the whole sequence may have been laid down in short order during a
turbulent period that is accompanied by high argon deposition, or the eruptive sequence of
a volcanic source can lay down deposits, first heavier, then lighter, in Argon-40, owing to
a tendency of such trace materials to migrate from heavier to lighter rock. It may not be
necessary to disbelieve absolutely in the validity of 40K ug 40A dating to maintain a
quantavolutionary opinion of the process of humanization. However, it is more difficult to
explain certain critical fossil data and the mechanics of humanization while adhering to a
long time perspective. Vast stretches of non-eventful time have to be accepted between the
occasions of significant changes, such as bipedalism, large brain, tools, and language; or
else the finest, minutes, multitudinous ladder rungs or steps are forced upon one, leaving
one again in baffling contradictions and a need to search for a meaning behind evolution
such that every bit of change requires every subsequent bit of change, connecting
intelligence with depilation, and so, on, thus accounting for the confusion of ladder-rung-
labelling, with now one trait, then another being given priority.
OLDUVAI GORGE
Homo erectus bones and artifacts, which may even be australopithecine, have lately been
discovered in the Syrian-Palestinian rift valley that we have already claimed to be of
recent origin. In a letter of October 15, 1981, Professor Ernst Wreschner of the Department
of Anthropology, University of Haifa, wrote me that at Ubeidiya, together with an industry
of pebble tools, spheroids and primitive handaxes they found a skull fragment and a tooth.
Not enough to say Australopithecus or Homo erectus. I tend towards the latter. Supposed
time: ca 800,000 years. Because of the similarity with Olduvai 3 it became designated:
Israel-Olduvai. The Ubeidiya site, the time of its occupation ca 800,000 years ago and till
about 250,000 ago, was a lake-side camp, before the tectonic tilting. The living floor is
now tilted ca 43 degrees. (Dating was by 40K-40A of underlying and intermediate basalt
(lava) layers, thus similar to E. African practice generally.)
But, now this tool-strewn Ubeidiya hominid site of Israel has been reevaluated with respect
to homo erectus in Africa and moved from 700,000 years ago to 2 million years or more,
placing it alongside or possibly older than any early Acheulian finds of Africa [23] .
Here we evaluate fossil mammals from Ubeidiya, which are stratigraphically and directly
associated with Early Acheulian artefacts, and find no substantial reason for considering
the locality younger than 2 Myr, and possibly as much as 500,000 yr older than any record
of Early Acheulian artefacts or Homo erectus in Africa.
In this book, I am suggesting that the Rift finds generally should be deemed
contemporaneous, so that the new placement is welcome in one sense. However I also suggest
reconsidering both homo erectus and australopithecus as quite young, that is, moving the
Acheulian to the beginning of the Holocene period. In other books (The Lately Tortured
Earth and Chaos and Creation) I ask, too, that geological dating methods be revised so as
to allow the drastic younging of the strata in which all hominids and homo erectus are
found. These discoveries bear ominously upon the famous centerpiece of current paleo-
anthropology, the Olduvai Gorge. The narrow floor and steep sides of Olduvai Gorge in
Tanzania are a typical element of the East fork of the Great African Rift, which cuts from
at least South-eastern Africa to the Red Sea. The problem of Olduvai man and culture is
part of a complex world wide geological history that I have outlined in Chaos and Creation.
I appreciate that I cannot here reproduce these materials, nor bring to bear more extensive
materials analyzing the particular setting and criticizing the methods of radiochronometry
employed.
I can only state the nature of the problem and alert the reader to the ultimate surprises
that may be awaiting historical anthropology in this setting. To do so, I quote here from
an exchange of letters with Dr. Melvin A. Cook, a geophysicist, recipient of a special
Nobel prize for his studies of explosives, and author of Prehistory and Earth Models.
(1966). On March 10, 1976, I wrote Dr. Cook the following:
... Presently I am perusing the three volumes of reports by the Leakeys and others on the
Olduvai Gorge. Here I think is a main intellectual battle front, and one that calls
especially for your attention. Here the conventional paleontologists, geologists,
radiochronometricians, and evolutionists are lined up in force. All the discoveries are
squarely upon the Great African Rift, the bottom of the deposits is an igneous basalt, and
from then on up for 300 feet are layer upon layer of tuff, clay, marl, Bonneville-like type
'sediments' and scanty soilroot elements, with earliest fragments of australopithecus and
pithecanthropus interlarded at 'living' sites, and with abundant mammalian and lake fauna
including very large and modern species both extant and extinct. Hominid and faunal
transitions are indistinct from bottom to top, similarly the abundant scattered artifacts.
The discoveries are eroding off the walls of the rift and are also found by digging back
from the walls. The whole is dated after some controversy from 2 million years at the
bottom to about 300 thousand at the top, using K40-A40. Everyone is proud of this showcase
of many disciplines.
On the other hand, I cannot but perceive a quite different solution, that is, the
initiation of a heavy cone and fissure volcanism, the uplifting of the great plateau, a
watered depression, successive floodings and lava flows and fallouts of ash and dense
material from the many nearby centers of volcanism, repeated incursions of hominid and
faunal species, and finally the rifting as a forking from the world global fracture.
Several cultures, from Asia to Kenya, 'remember' the upheaval of the rift, Hebrews, Arabs,
and Blacks...
If you would look at the excavation profiles in Vol. III, you will note an average of about
30 levels, most or all of which are probably turbulence deposits.
In his reply, dated May 5, 1976, Dr. Cook said, inter alia:
Interestingly enough, just a day before your letter of April 29 arrived, my son Krehl
returned from Kenya and a visit to the Olduvai Gorge and Great African Rift valleys with a
large group of geographers and geologists. He gave me his vivid first-hand impressions of
the geology of this region and the occurrences of fossils. It coincided very well indeed
with your descriptions. After his extensive study of the region of the Olduvai Gorge and
the surrounding area, he said he is completely convinced that it should be understood in
terms of a catastrophic continental drift with great global overthrusts and subsequent
catastrophic read-justments that have really been the facts that have shaped the region...
The global extent of the great rifts, their obvious relationship one to another, the sort
of chaotic geology found in and around the rifts throughout the world - not merely those in
Kenya, and the excessive fragmentation of fossil skulls and bones (human and animal) in
these regions are the sorts of information that to us prove that the great rifts were
created all at once, i. e., catastrophically...
Your reconstruction of the situation in the Great African Rift and Olduvai Gorge is very
plausible...
One must handle K-A dating, consistent with all the facts dealing with it, by simply
dismissing it as unscientific and completely unreliable, indeed absurd. They simply don't
publish the sort of facts they know about that would kill K-A dating once and for all if
they are known. For example, I have heard that year-old volcanism in Hawaii can yield K-A
'ages' of several million years...
As I pointed out in PEM [Prehistory and Earth Models], the A 40 found in igneous rock is
largely nonradiogenic contamination. Leakage of rare gases from the crust is too great to
permit any reliable dating. Moreover, leakage can both deplete and enrich. For example,
leakage of A 40 along such vast outscrapings as occur in the Great African Rift can
concentrate A 40 inventory of the earth even if the earth were five billion years old...
Should the hypothesis of the recency of Olduvai history become adopted, the theory of homo
schizo would be strengthened. Should it not be acceptable, mysteries, contradictions,
anomalies and confusion would persist, such as the astonishing million-year retardation of
human implement development that I stress in these pages and that Sonia Cole, among others,
refers to [24] . In such a case, the theory of homo schizo would need to retreat to a
position asserting that the true human was born recently out of catastrophic events which
allowed a further climactic mutation and/ or chemico-physiological transformation. We would
have to abandon australopithecus and homo erectus throughout the Old World, with all of
their humanlike traits, to live out very long existences sub-humanly.
A SURPRISING COLLAPSE OF TIME
But nothing stands in the way of objectively and empirically explaining the whole set of
fossil hominids that rift excavations extending from Syria to Southeast Africa have
produced as a short-term occurrence under catastrophic conditions. The same is true of
Peking Man (see Index) and of all other hominid and protohuman finds, except perhaps
certain 'anomalies' (to borrow the excuse of the opposition). The Olduvai Gorge hominids
and homo can be readily brought into the Holocene period.
Consider how rapidly man changes, physiologically and culturally, under present-day
observation and from our earliest direct knowledge, which is Upper Paleolithic and
Neolithic. To thereupon add five million years (or 100,000 'memorial' fifty-year
generations) of mental and cultural evolution to a substantially completed anatomical
structure would reduce to absurdity the uniformitarian theory of the evolution of modern
mankind. Or else man would have evolved, and been destroyed, time and time again, never
being extinguished. (But of course this would be another form of universal catastrophic
theory).
So much time is not needed, if man is evolving on a consistent anatomical base. More time
is now defeating to evolutionary theory; the evolutionists do not yet appreciate that they
have crawled out farther and farther on a limb which may suddenly and soon break off at the
trunk. For instance, could humans and hominids have lived for millions of years without
having reached the Americas, where elephants, camels, horses and other mammals abounded?
Would they have waited until 100,000 years ago to descend upon Australia?
Nor can evolutionists cease to stretch time and beat retreat to shortened time. If the time
is drastically shortened for paleoan-thropology, the radio-dating techniques collapse. Then
all which depends upon the techniques -- prehistory, paleontology, geophysics, geology,
climatology, etc. -- will come under revolutionary assault.
Against the background of this stupendous reversal in prospect, other conclusions about
fossil man pale. The australopithecines existed alongside homo erectus and other types of
man, as well as many kinds of ape. The vanished hominids were destroyed by or adapted to a
dominant strain of the human race, in conjunction with natural catastrophes. We shall
consistently maintain that homo sapiens schizotypus (catastrophized homo sapiens) reduced
his live, physiologically compatible brethren, whether australopithecus, or homo erectus,
or homo sapiens, to subjection, or he exterminated them.
CHARDIN'S ORTHOGENETICS
By now it should be clear that we are heading implacably toward a theory of biological
quantavolution, an eventful scene in natural history, where a hominid walked upon the stage
and a human walked off. This hovers upon creationism, in the theological sense. But it is
not such. Nor do we need to employ here orthogenesis such as Teilhard de Chardin calls
upon, a divine or even natural penchant of the soma of a species to transmute into a phylum
crowned by a mysterious noos [25] . It is not that we want to, or can, or must take away
from humankind all the glories that we claim for it. But this matter is not germane, and
there has always been an abundance of literature exclaiming upon the incomparable and
marvelous capabilities of homo sapiens sapiens. We say that humanization is a brief
episode, accomplished by a set of minor alterations, and followed by a mighty effect.
De Chardin was close to such significant events of fossil anthropology as the fraud of
Piltdown Man and the excavation of the caves of Choukoutien in China that gave up the
skulls of Peking man (sinanthropus); he was a Jesuit and a social philosopher, playing a
role rather like that of Loren Eisely in America. He accepted uniformitarianism but yet
conceived of teleology in evolution. He thought that the Peking skulls, that were found
throughout the whole fifty meters' depth of a filled fissure of breccia, ashes, and clay,
along with many extinct animals, were of thinking humans. He saw evidences, as did others,
of fire-making and deliberately chipped stones. The time of occupation was estimated, by
himself and others, at between 100,000 and over one million years. Two fatal observations,
that are conveniently evaded in most discussions of Peking man these days, are that the
assembled material may have been catastrophically collected and impacted in a short time
and that the skulls may have originated elsewhere.
Peking man, later identified with a widespread group of hominids of the homo erectus
designation, was part of the trajectory of a humanity moving persistently towards ever
higher states of individual and affective consciousness. [26] However, it seemed to him
that this hominid group died out in the Middle Pleistocene, then estimated at some 200,000
years ago, as did the more primitive but possibly also pebble-chipping australopithecines,
which have also been found over half the Old World.
De Chardin found himself trapped between microevolution, point-by-point changes, which he
nevertheless calls quantum jumps at one place [27] no matter how small they may be, and
macroevolution, a large quantum leap. But he could not imagine the form of the leap except
that it might be a simple chromosomatic mutation and that the gap between the human and the
australopithecine has not necessarily been greater, in size, than that ordinarily observed
or stimulated, beneath our eyes, in animal or vegetable populations at present living. In
the case of man, we seem to have an example of mega-evolution governed by chromosomatic
play of a perfectly normal type. Yet the germplasm is orthogenetically prepared for the
great leap of hominization and cerebration.
This is ex post facto reasoning of a dubious kind, made necessary because Chardin feels he
must have a marvelous (teleological) cause. Ultimately he would then argue for noos or
spiritual intelligence, and soul, detouring around all that is known about the brainwork
and central nervous system, not to mention the behavior of humankind.
DOBZHANSKY, SIMPSON AND QUANTUM EVOLUTION
Theodosius Dobzhansky picks up the problem of the quick leap, too, in two sentences of his
masterful treatise on Mankind Evolving. But he perceives the leap as involving many quick
successive changes. Quantum evolution, emergence of novel adaptative design, may involve
breaks in the evolutionary continuity when the differences between the ancestors and the
descendents increase so rapidly that they are perceived as differences in kind. [28] He
passes on to other matters, missing the chance, as does Teilhard de Chardin, of launching
into a quite new paradigm.
After discussing, as if they were successive, a set of evolutionary are at least behavioral
changes in prehominids, he raises the question
as to whether upright stance, tools, monogamous family, change in food habits, or
relaxation [sic] of male aggressiveness came first. Obviously we cannot answer with
certainty, but it is most likely that these changes went together, with mutual
reinforcement. What we are dealing with is the emergence of a whole new evolutionary
pattern, a transition to a novel way of life which is human rather than animal. This is an
example of an infrequent type of evolutionary change, which Simpson (1944, 1953) has called
'quantum evolution. ' Evolutionary alternatives in general, and especially those in quantum
evolution, are unlikely to involve changes of one trait at a time. The whole genotype and
the whole phenotype are reconstructed to reach a new adaptative balance [29] .
This passage is remarkable in that, whereas Dobzhansky's work as a whole epitomizes the
conventional uniformitarian and long-term evolutionary approach to the origins of human
nature, here he is practically giving away the show to quantavolution. Any being that can
perform all of these operations can and must perform all other human operations; man is
born.
At one place he says that pre-man separated from apes no less than 11 million years ago
[30] . He places the proto-homo sapiens at perhaps a quarter of a million years ago.
Presumably long periods of evolutional impetus occurred, or thousands of other changes took
place before the sudden transformation. Then why is the great leap needed?
So it was Simpson who had originally muddied the still waters of uniformitarianism. What
had he said? Reluctantly, with a step backward for every step forward, Simpson applied the
term quantum evolution to the relatively rapid shift of a biotic population in
disequilibrium to an equilibrium distinctly unlike an ancestral condition [31] . However,
the genetic processes involved do not permit making the step with a single leap. Agreeing
with earlier work of Dobzhansky [32] , the accumulation of small mutations is not only
adequate to permit rapid evolution, such as involved in quantum evolution, but also the
best substantiated mechanism for this.
The small mutations of a rapid type he accounts for by the availability of unoccupied
ecological niches and the break-up of sub-groupings of a species into isolated pockets, so
that one, which is preadapted, can change swiftly to exploit the niche, while the other
groups often die out. Thus, some horses grow big, strong teeth while browsing, without
needing them, but then, before the big toothed horses, isolated and with browsing overdone,
could become extinct, the new form begins to use the teeth to graze rough grasses, then
expands to fill the new niche. Simpson grants that his examples were not on large changes
that bring in families, sub-orders, and orders, but thought that a process like this could
cause the large changes.
Indeed it was because of the continuous puzzle of large-scale extinction followed by fully
developed new species, mega-evolution, that he felt the need for a new concept. The hot
breath of quantavolution was on his neck, but never could be let himself turn and face the
concept. Nor could Dobzhansky or Chardin. They resorted to equivocation, denial and
evasion.
When, later on, reports accumulated, that characterized the boundary-periods between
extinctions and new species as times of natural catastrophes, Simpson resisted attempts to
take up and enlarge his idea. He says in one place, Since the groups involved in the major,
more or less revolutionary episodes are highly varied in structure, physiology, and
ecology, it seems unlikely that the intensified factors are the same for all of them. [33]
And then, farther along, he writes, The real point is simply that a modified, relatively
mild and gradualistic form of revolutionism is in accord with our present knowledge of
biohistory, but that neocatastrophism is not. He likes 'neorevolutionism'. Perhaps this was
because the notion of catastrophe, when fully realized as in the theory of quantavolution,
affects seriously the theories of evolution, natural selection, and long-time natural
history.
We can allude to a final example, one from primate history, based on a chart which can be
found in Buettner-Janusz's Origins of Man [34] . The families of primates have clearly
boundaried histories, with little overlapping from one age to another. Six out of seven
boundaries are sharply defined by extinctions. Of course, the families may have
quantavoluted at these points, rater than extinguished. If so, so much the better for our
theory.
Where the boundaries of the geological ages are not clear --such being actually the case --
the primate families themselves delineate by their careers the period boundaries, without
the help of other fossils and rock strata. We note also that most of the living taxa have
fossil relatives who became apparently extinct (or did they hide themselves somewhere?)
eons ago. Quantavolution is manifested throughout the ages, but perhaps the ages are not so
far gone either, and quantavolutions have been frequent.
Under the circumstances, a close look at the mechanisms that might produce humanization is
justified. Time, period boundaries, evolution, culture, geological strata and types of
humanoids -- all have begun to whirl about in our minds and we begin to wonder when the
skies, too, will begin to whirl, and wish that we might have a theory -- even if
quantavolutionary --to stabilize the scene.
Notes (Chapter 2: Hominids in Hologenesis)
1. Uniqueness and Diversity in Human Evolution, Chicago: U. of C. Press, 1976, 169 et
passim.
2. Op. cit., 608.
3. R. S. David, et al., Early Man in Soviet Central Asia, Sci. Amer., 130-7; Bj"rn Kurten,
p. 113
4. D. C. Johanson and T. D. White, A Systematic Assessment of Early African Hominids, 203
Science (26 Jan. 1979), 326.
5. R. Sartonon, The Javanese Pleistocene Hominids, Proceedings, IX Congress UISPP, 14 Sept.
1976, 462, using fluorine tests.
6. New York Times, March 9, 1976, 14, news conference.
7. Davidson Black, Teilhard de Chardin, C. C. Young, W. C. Pei and Wong Wen Hao, Fossil Man
in China, Series A, Noll, Geological Memoirs, Geological Survey of China, Peiping, May
1933, repr., AMS press, New York, 1973.
8. M. H. Day and E. H. Wickens, Laetoli-Pliocene Hominid footprints and bipedalism, 286
Nature (24 July 1980) 386-7; R. L. Hay and Mary D. Leakey, The Fossil Footprints of
Laetoli, Sci. Am., Jan. 1982, 50-7; and on Lucy's new age.
9. See Boaz in 300 Nature (1982) 633, Brown, ibid., 631.
10. Guide to Fossil Man, 1956.
11. Time, Morphology, and Neoteny in the Evolution of Man, 57 Amer. Anthrop. (1955), 15ff.
12. L'homme pr‚historique dans la Plata, and L'ƒge des formations s‚dimentaires tertiares
de l' Argentine en relation avec l' antiquit‚ de l'homme, in Obras Completas 24 vols.,
(Buenos Aires 1912-36), vol 2.
13. Descubrimento de dos esqueletos humanos fosiles en la Pompeano inferior del Moro, op.
cit.
14. The Major Features of Evolution, N. Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1953, 78.
15. Op. cit., p. 122.
16. E. G. J. Joly measured the runoff of sodium into the oceans to get An Estimate of the
Geological Age of the Earth, of 89 million years. Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report,
1898-9, 247-88. Melvin Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models, London: Parrish, 1966 criticizes
a number of such techniques. Also A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, Princeton: Metron
Publications, 1981, ch. III.
17. J. E. O'Rourke, Pragmatism versus Materialism in Stratigraphy, 276 Am. J. Sci. (Jan.
1976), 51; H. M. Morris, Circular Reasoning in Evolutionary Geology, Institute for Creation
Research, no 48, June 1977, iv.
18. The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, VI Kronos 4, 1981,
19. C. Emiliani, Dating Human Evolution, in ii ED. 59.
20. Notions de Prehistoire, Perigeaux, 1975, 11
21. Geographical Distribution of Animals, N. Y.: Harper, 1876, I, ch 1.
22. M. Barbetti and K. Flude, Geomagnetic Variation during the late Pleistocene period and
changes in the radiocarbon time scale, 279 Nature (17 May 1979), 202-5. See Chaos and
Creation, ch. 3.
23. C. A. Repenning and O. Fejfar, 299 Nature (1982), 344.
24. The Prehistory of East Africa, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, 130.
25. The Appearance of Man, N. Y. Harper and Row, 1956; The Future of Man, ibid, 1964.
26. Appearance, 123.
27. Ibid., 136-7.
28. Op. cit., 213.
29. Ibid., 209-10.
30. Ibid., 183.
31. G. G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution, N. Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1944, 206ff.
32. Biological Adaptation, 55 Sci. Mon. (1972), 391-402.
33. In Albritton, ed., Essays in Evolution and Genetics, 291.
34. Op. cit., Figs 7.1, 7.2, pp101-2.
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THREE
MECHANICS OF HUMANIZATION
If time were collapsed into a short span, cultural traces now deemed hominidal would appear
human. Since footprints and bones that are deviously connected with the artifacts are also
now considered close to modern man's, we may suspect that homo erectus and
australopithecus, if not human themselves, of having had some human cousin living up North,
say. This homo schizo would send his relatives fleeing east and south from the common
ancestral home, which might be at the junction of Europe and Africa. After consolidating
his position -- mainly defining his proto-mind and proto-organization -- he would reach out
to contact them.
Then he would extirpate or interbreed with them, and come to dominate the homo line and
promptly diffuse to the geographical limits of the world. Only the docile and miscegenable
would be spared. Even today, several strains of homo schizo are in danger of extermination
-- the pygmies, negritos, numerous Amazonian tribes as well as other Amer-Indians, and the
Eskimos, for example.
If homo erectus and australopithecus were human, which we deem likely, then we should look
for a hominid (X) as our ancestor. This 'X' might be much like man or a surprisingly
different type. Granted that the probability is low, because he still has to appear
alongside the fossil australopithecines, even modern man -- to all physical appearances --
might be his own ancestor. But, too, 'X' might be an unseemly anthropoid. Eugenics cannot
say how great a change of type can occur under special conditions nor whether certain
species are more capable of quantavolution than others. We note how often in the fossil
record, some species change while others remain the same. And we have already been startled
into the realization that the change from hominid to human may have been anatomically
slight. Since we have little evidence to suggest who 'X' might be, we might leave the
search for him in more knowledgeable hands, and assign ourselves the task of determining
theoretically how such a hominid could become human.
We have already ruled out most of the traits that scholars have joined to the ladder of
evolution -- skeletal, muscular, sensory, alimentary, sexual and lingualpharyngal mutations
-- as the crux of humanization. We have ruled out as well the growth of the cranium. We
should also rule out the piling up of reinforced primate experience in a growing storage-
box brain that would eventually begin to expel human products.
One need only contrast the races of mankind to see how little difference so many changes do
make in psychology and behavior. With skin color from black to pink, hairiness from hirsute
to hairless bodies, height from the very tall Watusi to the neighboring Pygmy, nose from
flat to hooked, head from broad to long, cranial capacity from 830 to 2000* cc.,
differences of dentition, of blood groups, and so on, homo schizo has nevertheless come to
possess a similar array of psychological qualities whatever his outward appearances.
We should look most closely for signs of self-awareness, of a split ego, for from this, we
believe, and only from this, would come the flood of fear, the insatiable demand for self-
control, and the outward movement of this need to control, taking the form of showers of
displacements that would be transformable into human conduct. Symbolism would be the
necessary external manifestation of the inward symbolizing needed to tie together the ego
that had been split asunder. We would expect our newly quantavoluted person to behave
recognizably as an imaginary Hominid 'X', close to the chimpanzee, in that his basic needs
would be the same. Much of his behavior, too, might appear instinctive.
What would become quickly a critical difference would be an unending stream of delayed and
unrecognizable stimuli in great numbers. He could be interpreted as an animal trying in
amazing ways to consummate a new kind of stimulus-response, where the responses were
delayed, as much as he might try to speed them up. He would be an action-delayed, hence
decision-craving creature.
Whatever its cause, the character of the mutation may have been quite simple, confounding
high-flown speculations that have adorned debate about human nature over the centuries. It
may have been what Dobzhansky called a polygene mutation, carried over into many
chromosomes, providing a slight quantitative, not 'qualitative' change, but yet a change
with great effects. A systemic delay of microseconds in overall signal transmission in the
brain might act as a suppressant of instinctual response, set up an echo of the self, and
excite perennial hyperendocrinalism. The gestalt of creation (treated in the next chapter)
would promptly take effect.
Besides mutation, it is conceivable that an environmental constant may have changed,
provoking a human response that must continue as long as the constant remains unchanged.
Further the human mind may have quantavoluted culturally because of experiences so intense
and memorable that a new kind of creature emerged from them. We must look into these
possibilities more closely. But before we do so, I ought to stress the importance of
natural catastrophes as a background and source of quantavolutions in biology.
ANCIENT CATASTROPHES
Legends everywhere carry stories of great numbers of people reduced to a few survivors.
They are obsessive tales, repeated continuously over thousands of years. Psychiatrists will
readily deem them to be founded upon strong memories, a possibility that most historical
scholars are loath to admit. The English prehistorian Childe says that the population of
England in paleolithic times numbered only in the hundreds, during neolithic times in some
thousands. Were then all the people of England mustered to drag the neolithic megaliths of
Stonehenge into position, and then reassembled in Ireland and Brittany for the same tasks?
Mircea Eliade, whose research on myths worldwide is justly renowned, is most impressed by
the obsession of all peoples with the earliest times of creation, by the permeation of the
totality of their cultures with the same obsession that great and terrible events occurred;
yet he has not ventured to say that anything at all happened then. Are the legends mere
fantasies of primeval poets, primordial Dante's, whose plots no later poet could ever
improve upon?
Dobzhansky, of whom we have spoken, takes one sentence in a large book on human evolution
to dismiss obsessions of creation as a 'natural' reluctance of people to conceive of
infinity. Are peoples, (using his own perspective) supposed to recall their lives as apes?
He and many others arrogate to an illuminated modern mind the right to conjecture and
endorse ideologically the concept that humans long were few and became many with extreme
gradualness. For all the other people who have ever lived, and who claim by a kind of
culturally transmitted history that their ancestors arose in large numbers and were wiped
out in cycles of catastrophes and revival, no place is to be reserved in science.
The Holocene period itself embraces many more fundamental natural events than were once
accredited to it, as the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica points out. A start
has been made in assigning quantavolutions to it, but the major allocations cannot occur
until chronological methods are criticized and reformed. Even though their character as
ages is not yet defined, the occurrences of catastrophes of continental, if not global,
scope may have occurred in half a dozen sections of the Holocene period -- approximately
2700, 3400, 4400, 5700, 11500, and 14000 years ago. I have attempted to order and designate
these epochs in the book, Chaos and Creation, Chapter Four. Intervening catastrophes of
less global scope were common. Plato, Boulanger, Carli-Rubbi, Cuvier, Velikovsky,
Schaeffer, Hapgood, Kugler, Schindewolf, M. Cook, Kondratov, Patten, Bass, Juergens, and
other scholars of times past and present have exposed the revolutionary character of
natural events in such ages.
For the moment, and so that argument may proceed along its main line, the extent of
catastrophism of the past fourteen thousand years can be barely sketched. It would help
conceptually to regard all expressions of natural forces of a destructive character
witnessed by modern humanity as but the flattened tails of negatively exponential curves of
catastrophism. These natural forces of the past worked through explosions of the legendary
elements of earth, air, fire and water.
Catastrophic action and effects were manifested over the whole globe. Their intensity was
such that the potential destructive force of deviations in the motions of celestial bodies
must be introduced into the equation. Legends (oral history, amnesiac fragments, and
sublimated tales) assert abundantly the priority of heavenly forces as destroyers of the
world on successive occasions. The locations of large meteoritic explosions are discovered
in increasing numbers. Increasingly, geologists such as Ager slip from the grasp of earth-
bound uniformitarianism, and astrophysicists such as John A. Simpson conceive of their
realm as explosive and disorderly.
It can be asserted and defended that in the past fourteen thousand years, a disorder befell
the solar system that terrorized and transmutated the sensible biosphere, changed the
atmosphere, cleaved and ravaged the crust of the earth, altered drastically the sky and
surface waters and destroyed or severely damaged every civilization up to the seventh
century before the present era. During these fourteen thousand years, it can be argued,
human groups spent one-third of their time in an environment of natural and social chaos
and suffered intense physical and mental stress. Again I refer to the book, Chaos and
Creation.
Continents were fractured; mountain ranges rose; crustal material was exploded into space;
cataclysms of water, ashes, oils, gases, and fire rained from the skies; ice ages came
quickly and avalanched, not melted, into oblivion. Oceans were created; seas were drained;
floods raged in every direction up to the very mouths of highly placed caves; climate
altered in a day and the atmosphere was deprived, enriched, and poisoned on numerous
occasions.
No single mile of the surface of the world can be bored for its actual stratigraphic column
without discovering it to be at some points a catastrophic column. No matter what part of
the destruction can be assigned to the ages before man, some part of it has to be
attributed to the ages of man. Settlements and civilizations everywhere, from the Arctic
Sea to the Tropics, from Spitzbergen to Tiahuanacu, are now, upon exhumation, shown to have
been the victims of such events [1] . Beginning with the larger part of its surface that
is below the oceans, the earth is a scene of global disaster, punctuated by habitable
oases. Scientists have known so all along but, in good conscience, have refused obsessively
to reveal the fact. Whether one observes the ash and debris of hundreds of ancient
settlements which, as C. Schaeffer has said, are studiously ignored or whether one reports
on the ashes of primeval human sites, where, comments H. T. Lewis critically, ash lenses in
places like Shanidar are offhandedly treated as ash middens or hearths, the 'conspiracy of
silence' governs the authorities. The Sahara, the Great Salt Lake (Bonneville) area, the
Gobi desert, the arctic tundra, the sub-glacial Arctic and Antarctic regions, East Africa,
Southwest Africa, and so on to many smaller locales are signs that what happened to Mars
almost happened to Earth. Practically all species that became extinct, and whose careers
might be followed by fossil evidence, became extinct suddenly, as for example, some three-
quarters of all large animals at the end of the Pleistocene, fully within the time of man's
cultural flowering.
It appears, therefore, that every hypothesis trying to explain the means of humanization
must be developed within the historical bounds of natural catastrophe.
THE HUMANIZING FACTOR
The closest that we can come to distinguishing a key factor in humanization is an instinct-
delay system operating in the brain but serviced by the body's electrical and hormonal
system. This could be called the humanizing factor. In baseball language, the animal in us
has been forced to touch base several times before completing the circuit and scoring, and
so the human ball game is on. A close investigation of instinct-delay (see Homo schizo II)
emerged with the theory that it is an effect of the specialization of the brain, with
consequent transmission delays in coordination of the total brain and organism, and that
there is an overcrowding of consciousness because of a spillover of repeatedly insistent
messages taking alternative routes for delivery or ending up in functional cul de sac.
I shall try to formulate the process of instinct delay here in a manner that will assist in
seeking the mechanism of humanization. Instinct-delay (D) is a function or ratio of the
product of the mass of the brain tissue requiring service (M), and the specialization
thereof (S), to the product of access facilities (the number of receptors or docks and the
number of routes pursued by messages) (A), the input of electro-chemical signals (E), and
the velocity of the work of transmission (V). That is, D = f( MS/ AEV). When all other
variables are held constant:
1. If the mass of the brain increases, instinct-delay (D) will usually increase.
2. If specialization of the brain increases, D will usually increase.
3. If the number of message docks and the number of routes to them increase, D will usually
decrease.
4. If the input of electro-chemical signals increases, D will usually decrease.
5. If the signals move faster, with less impedence, D will usually decrease.
However, the variables are not entirely independent, although we do not know the extend of
their interdependence. Thus, an increase in brain tissue may not bring a proportional
increase in docks and routes available to supply the tissue. Nor will the larger brain
necessarily be supplied by an increased input of hormones, which come from several places,
or electrical charges, to transport messages. Nor do we know whether the electric and
chemical signals will carry on with their former speed or will move less rapidly, unless
some other factor increases their speed (which may, for example, be an electromagnetic
change in the state of the environment).
That is, we cannot identify precisely the agents, nor the cause of their behavior. All that
we can feel confident of, at this point, is that there are here the rudiments of an
explanation for instinct-delay, hence self-awareness, hence humanization. We believe, too,
that such a system is capable of empirical verification and modification. Further, it seems
to answer a need in science for a concept that will go along with most of what is known of
human development and human nature, and will not lead us astray as we seek to understand
how mutation and other mechanisms could have occurred. Finally the concept will pay a large
profit when it correlates with the mental and cultural behavior of the human during and
after humanization.
QUANTAVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION
We return to the contention that mentation and culture have developed by small increments
over millions of years. We find in it a subtle ideological attempt at cutting change into
such fine bits that it will simply blow away and nothing will be left to explain. Let us
address it nonetheless.
The human is compelled to behave humanly in both mind and culture. Once granted that self-
awareness was a quantavolution rather than very slow evolution, mentation and culture must
originate at once. So one should ask whether self-awareness came at once.
Self-awareness is a trait that varies quantitatively among humans; some people are
apparently unselfconscious, until closely observed -- then time, space, gods, rituals,
discipline, and anxiety appear, until it is obvious that their 'unawareness of self' is a
catatonic suppression. In any human group, we invariably discover a capacity to be taught
self-awareness among practically everyone. Even the hominids among us, if there are such,
know how to 'put on a good act. '
But let us speak of the past. Could the self-awareness of the human species as a whole,
regardless of whether homo schizo ultimately emerged, and granting that he did, be a matter
of slow accretion, slightly self-aware four million years ago, more so three million years
ago, even more so two million years ago, practically modern a half million years ago,
modern 30,000 years ago? Whereupon, would not developments that require less self-awareness
take less time, and inventions demanding more self-awareness take more time? The use of the
right hand, for instance, might long precede the invention of tools for the right hand, and
then another long period would be allowed for language and even this divided into words for
sensible things, and later words for abstractions, then drawings, then domestication of
animals, and so on. All of this is not impossible. It is widely believed that some hundreds
of physical and cultural changes were laid upon Hominid 'X' gradually over millions of
years, and that the flowering of culture occurred among Upper Paleolithic man and then
again in neolithic times, and then again in the iron age, and once more in the recent
centuries of science -- these flowerings being expected as accumulative, branching effects.
However, the external environment and the internal tensions of homo schizo, the ones who
were fully self-aware, would immediately have stressed the whole community to maximize
self-awareness. The drive is socially contagious, and irresistible. It comes from the fear
of itself and the need to control itself. It is not dealt out by a third party. It is
excited by itself. Therefore it cannot emerge piecemeal. It must emerge for all it is worth
as soon as it exists. A homo schizo in a group of Hominid 'X' would dominate or die.
But might the self-aware have been precisely those who gradually became such? No. Unless a
guiding hand to physical evolution were present, we cannot expect this trait to have
emerged in ever-increasing quantities by successive mentations, like a turning of the
screw, each turn producing a higher level of self-awareness with a consequent output of new
ideas, fabrication, and social inventions. Indeed, evolutionists teach us to avoid such
pathetic notions. Who advocates such a guiding hand? The psychosomatic Lamarckians
probably, and I may sympathize with them. But why should a beast will for himself a small
increment of self-awareness, and then another and another, especially when the
psychological effects of self-awareness are not at all comfortable, not even tolerable, so
that, if man had the ability to choose, he would, like a volunteer soldier caught in a
battle, renounce his original enlistment gladly. Neurotics are notoriously fond of dumb
animals.
Conventional evolutionary theory does not provide for an intelligence that would direct
mutations toward every-increasing self-consciousness. Isolation and inbreeding among a
slightly more schizoid band would be counted upon to produce a type that would, given the
chance, venture forth and shove aside less able hominids, or, later on, humans. But this
cannot go on for long, unless there is a mutated element present in the germ plasm allowing
ultimately the full exercise of self-awareness.
Here is an area where evolutionary thought is especially self-contradictory and,
consequently, slippery and evasive. It can only get from one small change to the next but
cannot get from the beginning to the end; it can explain some intra-species changes, like
horse-breeding and the Beltsville turkey, but it cannot explain a major development. No
known mechanism directs a long string of slight modifications in the germ plasm. Even if we
were to concede that the jump from hominid to human were only apparently large but was
biologically small, human genesis would admittedly be a hologenetic occurrence; when it
occurred, hominid life changed drastically; it speciated.
BRAIN SPECIALIZATION
Nor can humanization wait upon a slowly evolving culture, no more than the bee was
anatomically created and then evolved the basic elements of its social system over millions
of years. Even though he does not draw the consequences -- hologenesis -- we can agree with
Robin Fox when he writes: The nature of order is part of the order of nature. It is not
that man is as culture does but that culture does as man is. [2]
Recent researches into the differing behaviors prompted by the separate hemispheres of the
brain can also be considered. Hominid 'X' may or may not have had a large brain before he
was humanized, that is, before he became schizotypical. The fibrous conjunction (corpus
callosum) bridging the left and right hemispheres of the brain may be playing an effective
role in conditioning humans for schizotypical behavior, even if it is not indeed the
physical location of the genetic factor that so many are searching for.
In his treatise on The Ghost in the Machine [3] , Arthur Koestler has placed the origins
of human 'mis-behavior' in a malfunctioning relation of the limbic system to the cerebral
region. The basic reptilian and mammalian control and response systems are located below
and behind the cerebrum, which is grossly 'over-developed' in man. The rational and
constructive inclinations of the uniquely human cerebrum, he thinks, may be frustrated all
too often by the more instinctive, unconscious, and irrational animal systems. Human
behavior, as a result, is prone to contradictions, rage and aggressiveness,
destructiveness, and madness.
Even while admitting that a specialization is occurring here in the human central nervous
system that can bring about schizoid behavior from a lack of perfect coordination, we must
say that the problem is incorrectly stated and may explain why Koestler did not arrive at
the focal center of human nature. The problem is not one of 'mis-behavior' but simply of
behavior, both 'bad' and 'good, ' 'normal' and 'abnormal. ' Pari passu, there is no
'malfunctioning, ' but only 'functioning. ' We do not turn off a spigot marked 'rational'
and turn on the spigot labeled 'irrational. '
Once we brush aside this specious and decrepit Aristotelianism and scholasticism,
Koestler's work becomes valuable. For now it becomes possible to seek a mechanism of
delayed instinct between the automatic and cognitive specialization of the brain, which, in
conjunction with other sources of delayed, diffused, and over-loaded responses, may explain
the self-awareness, existential fear, and profuse displacements of the human being.
The bilateral structure of the brain, providing two hemispheres, had been fashioned long
before the advent of humans, probably one some quantavolutionary occasion between two ages.
A division of functions between the hemispheres may have come only with the origination of
mankind. The skullcase tends to warp to conform to the concentration of functions in the
brain; and external asymmetry conforms to the internal asymmetry. Such asymmetry, implying
human specialization, may characterize most or all hominids. Ornstein asserts that
hemispheric specialization (asymmetry, that is) appears to be unique to humans [4] .
Handedness in favor of the right hand, and language, are dominated by the left hemisphere.
Asymmetry in the language region is, for instance, discoverable on the skull of Arago XXII
coming from Tautavel, France. This specimen is classified as homo erectus and assigned an
age of 450,000 years by uranium-thorium and electron-spin-resonance tests. (Source: Mus‚e
de l'Homme, Paris.)
Besides governing right hand and body movements and language, the left hemisphere is
specialized in analysis and mathematical functions. It is also assertive and, in observed
behavior and experiments, tends to dominate decision-making. The right hemisphere of the
cerebrum initiates and supports activities of the left side of the body, and pursues non-
verbal and holistic forms of thought and appraisals of experience. It is described as
artistic and analogical in its ways of processing the external world for internal
consumption and action. Thomas Parry has surmised that a relation exists between ancient
catastrophism and a take-over of internal and external behavioral leadership by the right
hemisphere of the brain on the occasion of traumatic experiences [5] .
Each hemisphere alone can convey to the whole person the possibility of physical and mental
survival. Each is in constant touch with the other through the medium of the corpus
callosum which carries millions of connecting links between them. The severance of this
membrane has permitted direct observation of the individuality of the two hemispheres. It
leaves a still normal person with two separate minds, that is, with two separate spheres of
consciousness.
If the key to humanization is a general delay of instinctive response with a consequent
choice-factor introduced into a wide range of behavioral decisions, then a possible source
of the delay lies in the corpus callosum and/ or any drug that can inhibit the full and
complete communication or near-identity of action of the two hemispheres. If, for example,
fatigue and exhilaration both produce schizoid symptoms, some quantitative measure of
interaction between the cerebral hemispheres may define the normal schizotypical state of
the hemispheric relationship; the norm itself would be genetically and/ or socially induced
on a continuing basis, providing typical human behavior. The recent association of high or
uncompensated adrenalin secretion with schizophrenic symptoms suggests offering this drug
as a candidate for a humanizing auxiliary.
One is inclined to distrust so simple a solution to so fundamental a problem, even after
posting the usual warning signs: that the process is more complicated than it appears; that
we know next to nothing about the circulation of adrenalin and other drugs with which it
interacts in process; and that historical proofs of such an evolution are probably
impossible. One might as well suppose, while offering the same type of warnings, that an
electrical change has brought about human behavior. If the Earth has gained charge in
recent millennia, the human body may be operating in a hyper-electrical mode relative to
the environment in which it evolved. This would be the case with the biosphere generally;
insects, birds, and mammals are all sensitive to electromagnetic fields and changes in
them. The hominid might then become the 'nervous human' who turns upon the not-quite-
quantavoluted hominids and trains them to be human, meanwhile through adaptations and
interbreeding creating a new race, whose, members are quantitatively distributed about the
genetic norm of the 'nervous human. '
As with every significant element in the quantavolutionary theory of homo sapiens
schizotypus, the hypothesis of the physiological source of humanization is put forward to
orient thought and method. The theory as a whole serves to show where we can go when
deprived of the assumptions of a uniformitarian external force-field of evolution and of
the free, long expanses of evolutionary time.
SIGNALING HORMONES
A logical candidate for mutation and environmental transformation in the chaotic period is
the endocrinal system. It is an anciently derived collection of glands, separate from but
connected with the brain, the nervous system, blood pressure, metabolism, growth, sex,
fear, and stress. It discharges numerous hormones that stimulate and regulate these
systems. Its main components are the pituitary gland, the pancreas, and the adrenal cortex
and medulla. Lionel Tiger places phyletically prescribed environmental boundaries around
sociogenic processes, treating mainly of endocrinology [6] . The bio-social movement may
help quantavolution much, because of the intense scrutiny it gives to the logically
necessary biological and social interface where the great change of humanization had to
occur.
The endocrinal system, especially the adrenal cortex, is stimulated by stress and
establishes counter-stresses in the organism. For example, rats bred in the laboratory have
smaller adrenal glands and less resistance to stress, fatigue, and disease than wild rats.
Their thyroid glands are less active and their sex glands develop earlier and permit
greater fertility. They have smaller brains, are tamer, and are more tractable.
In humans, similar differences occur between people who are stressed by the environment and
those who are not. New Yorkers usually have enlarged adrenal medullas, compared with the
American population at large. Paranoid and obsessive traits, involving distortions of
reality, are commonly observed among persons who suffer from an excess of adrenalin either
as a result of great fear and anxiety or in consequence of inadequate suppressive and
discharging chemicals and mechanisms.
Schizophrenia involves at least some separation of the 'primary' self from a second self,
which includes part of the self and engages in profuse identifications with the outer
world. Frequently observed in mind-workers, it evidences heavy pituitary stimulation of the
brain as well as insulin and adrenalin 'excesses. ' The brain often becomes ungovernable
owing to endocrinal disturbances. Notable, too, is the association of fear, aggressiveness,
and sexuality in variations of the endocrinal system. It is then reasonable to suppose, for
instance, that sexuality is determined more by the stresses of the quantavolutionary period
than by the aboriginal oedipal complex or simple sexual drives.
Other modes of mutation or transformation also point to the importance of the endocrinal
system in developing humanness. Solar radiation stimulates the adrenal system, both
directly and indirectly. Hence, abruptly changed levels of solar and other types of
extraterrestrial radiation may have prompted humanizing behavior. The types of social
imprinting imposed upon the first generations of mankind and all generations since then
were, so far as we can tell, the same; delusory, symbolic, obsessional, and aggressive;
these are typical products of endocrinal excesses.
Finally, the obsessive will to mutate, to change one's corebeing down to the egg and sperm
themselves, has been proposed by Freud as an evolutionary example of the omnipotence of
thought; so strong a will would be more probably and capably generated in individuals who
are endocrinally excited. More than by growth of the brain, therefore, the accelerated
development and passover of hominid to human in a quantavolutionary period may be owed to
the endocrinal system.
The hypophysis or pituitary gland excretes hormones that can arrest growth and cause
dwarfism by reduced excretion, or giantism by increased excretion. An increase also
probably increases the rate of insulin secretion by the pancreas. Growth hormone directly
enhances transport of at least some and perhaps all amino acids through the cell membrane
to the interior of the cells. [7] It also depresses glucose utilization by the cell. The
growth hormone is secreted continually from birth to death.
If the hormone reduces or perhaps delays growth, and at the same time can deprive the cell,
including the brain cells, of nutrient amino-acids, and can also diminish insulin output,
can it then contribute to the delay and dispersion of signals through the brain? It is
conceivable; experiments can be designed to test the hypothesis.
Man is supposed to be fetalized as compared with the apes since in the adult man the size
of the head and the relative proportions of its parts resemble those in juvenile apes
rather than those in adult apes. Bolk speculated that fetalization may have been caused by
changes in the hormonal balance in the body, especially by a decrease in the production of
the anterior pituitary hormone [8] .
Dubrow has correlated growth and size of humans and many other life forms with changes in
the intensity of the earth's magnetic field. We may wonder then whether an endocrinal
change produced by a change in the GMF might stimulate pituitaryism and expand
australopithecus to modern human proportions.
Since the left brain hemisphere is asymmetric with the right hemisphere, being larger
occipitally, and this area is close to the calculating and speech centers, then a growth of
the total cranium implies an important proportionate growth of this area and its special
functions. That it may be more than proportionate is indicated by Dubrow's finding that the
length of the skull geographically varies inversely with the intensity of the GMF [9] .
Thus humanization would accelerate. The quantavolution that split man's mind and freed it
to displace copiously upon the world may thus have been influenced by a declining GMF. This
'freedom' would then take the form of the multiple selves, or poly-ego.
I have noted on occasion that drugs which are used to treat diabetes of the pituitary
variety, and are intended to reduce blood glucose concentration, occasion paranoid
suspiciousness as a side effect. But this and these other workings of the endocrines are
puzzles within riddles: as F. Dunbar said, There are no disorders of single endocrine
glands. [10]
MUTATION
Let me consider now mutation, asking the ethologist and expert upon instinct, Tinbergen, to
describe the situation:
Present day theories of evolution consider mutations in the widest sense as the basis of
all heritable change. The variability due to mutational change may show directiveness of
various types, adaptive as well as non-adaptive. Adaptiveness is brought about by
selection. Speciation, or the divergent evolution of populations originally belonging to
one species, starts with geographical expansion of the species' range to such a degree that
two or more populations of one species become reproductively isolated. The various
populations thus isolated are usually slightly different in genetical make-up right from
the beginning. This difference, together with the environmental differences leading to
different selection pressure, account for divergent evolution of the populations which
ultimately results, via the formation of geographical races, in the origin of new species,
genera, and even families. Whether this 'micro-evolutionary' process is at the bottom of
all evolutionary divergence, even of those often called macro-evolutionary, is a matter of
disagreement. It is certain, however, that the causes of evolution can only be studied in
micro-evolutionary processes [11] .
A gene is a large molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) wound on a double helix, along
which are strung in fixed order some simple chemical structures called nucleotides. Only 4
types of nucleotides are ordinarily found in one and all chromosomes but their varied
arrangements establish by code the behavior to be followed by any given gene. Hence each of
the supposed 50,000 genes that carry the full hereditary code of instructions has its
unique code that determines its unique job.
A gene mutates, that is, changes its code and hence its 'building plan' by a disarrangement
or loss or destruction of one or more nucleotides of the helix. This accident occurs when a
foreign chemical or particle or charge or wave or organism enters the chromosome and its
gene, with especial effects when the gene is in the process of duplicating itself. Once the
gene is altered, it transmits new instructions and whatever aspect of the organism is under
its command will accordingly change. Mutations may also affect the organization of genes
within the chromosome, rearranging them or even rearranging chromosomes.
It can be estimated (following calculations by Wallace and Dobzhansky) that in the case of
man, the number of 'spontaneous' ('natural, ' 'background') mutations that would occur for
a world population of four billion people in 350 generations amounting to 10,000 years
would be only around two hundred (200). Since practically all mutations are 'cosmetic, '
harmful, or lethal changes, it is embarrassing to place one's faith in mutation (at least
as here construed) as the factor bringing about speciation from hominid to man. Indeed,
Wallace and Dobzhansky, after presenting the negative and positive effects conclude that
mutation is something to be avoided. More-over, Lack of genetic variability for further
evolution of the human species is something we need not worry about. [12] . Like the last
man to squeeze aboard a crowded bus, they don't want the driver to stop anymore to pick up
someone else.
Here, however, we are concerned with the point of origin of the bus: presumably the change
from hominid to man must be applauded. Somewhere along the way this genetic event occurred.
But we can understand the plight of uniformitarian evolutionists. How many mutations are
represented in the differences between hominid and homo schizo -- one, ten, fifty, one
hundred, one thousand? Geneticists cannot say, because, excepting a very few cases, they do
not know yet what genes control what changes to what degree. (Anthropologists, such as
Washburn and Moore, in their book From Ape to Man, can brave the statistical jungle to
extrapolate, but fail.) If we retrocalculate the figures given above, we would have, say, a
single viable mutation per ten million years. For, if the humanizing population is set at
four millions instead of four billions over whatever time period is involved, a generous
estimate by conventional reckoning, then we multiply the time required for 200 mutations
one thousand times, giving 10,000,000 years. If one in 200 mutations is viable, then we get
a viable mutation every ten million years. But the difference between viability and the
ape-to-man difference is still to be bridged. Would then 500 viable mutations be required
in order to bet upon the critical change occurring? If so, this would appear to require
five billion years. Fortunately, we can dispense with further arithmetic, since authorities
have pronounced this to be the age of the Earth itself.
To explain the creation of man by mutation under a uniformitarian theory is thus
impossible. To call in natural selection, as is usually done, does not help. For natural
selection, unless it is sheerly ad hoc or post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, must have
some genetic possibility to work with. It must depend upon mutation to begin with. One
cannot assume that homo sapiens resides in 'Hominid X' like a homunculus, awaiting only
isolation and inbreeding, or a shift in moisture-carrying winds, or a new supply of
protein-rich alligator meat to give the creature sustenance.
If we are to use mutation theory at all, we must associate it with radionic turbulence of
the most violent kind, extended over many centuries. And it is even more plausible if, to
such catastrophic mutators, we add a permanent change in some atmospheric constants. And,
then, too, we must continue to belabor mutation theory, for there is some deep mystery in
it --a kind of genie in the bottle, something of Lamarck's environmentalism, of Freudian
psychosomatism, perhaps even of the monads with miniature universes within them, which is
to say, something of a Great Intelligence. At this point in time, then, we still need
mutation theory and catastrophe theory, with an open door to whatever other theory comes
bearing fruit. We receive a hint that the merger of gene theory of mutation into macro-
evolution or quantavolution is possible with recent studies showing that much DNA (like
much brain tissue) is surplus, seemingly unnecessary [13] . Is this material that is in
readiness for recombination? Is it potentiated for organizing a general response in the
event of a mutation that would otherwise be too specialized to survive in the species?
Some important areas of agreement exist concerning mutations. Genetic mutation is a change
in the formation-instruction code contained in the DNA component of one or more genes of
the sperm or egg. Of the estimated 50,000 genes, a mere 210 have been assigned loci in
specific chromosomes [14] . The gene map is practically useless, then, in plotting the
route of humanization.
New genetic instructions are carried into the fecundation of the egg, thenceforth into the
embryo, the newborn, and the adult. This happens provided that survival is possible under
the changed rules of growth. Mutation of non-genetic material whether adult or embryonic,
affects only the individual and is not reproducible. Many chemicals and particles can bring
mutation in this sense; but they affect individuals, not species, through cancers and
abnormalities.
George Gaylord Simpson laid down a few years ago several principles that are pertinent to
humanization.
It is now known that mutations, broadly speaking, an ultimate basis of variation, are
discontinuous... The somatic effects of mutations vary from great to barely perceptible, or
quite likely, to unperceptible by usual methods of observation... Despite the fact that a
mutation is a discrete, discontinuous event at the cellular, chromosome, or gene level, its
effects are modified by interactions in the whole genetic system of an individual (oddly
enough, there is no generally accepted term for that important concept). They [mutations]
are also modified by varying environmental factors. The results are that for many
mutations, the somatic effects in different individuals vary in an essentially continuous
manner. Even an expression that is marked modification in some individuals may be only the
extreme of what is a gradual sequence in the population.. [15]
The whole genetic system falls into line with the mutation, so to speak. This is certainly
a hologenetic effect; one wonders why no generally accepted term for that important concept
exists. A great many features of the organism (hence species) are systematically
calibrated. Still, individuals of the species, already unique, alter in unique ways as a
result of the mutation. Whether the human 'big brain' evolved in one or several steps, the
process was individualized so that, for instance, one person could have only half of the
cranial matter of another person; further there are ethnic and sex differences in cranial
size.
Simpson hesitantly comments on the likelihood of quantavolution of species:
The instantaneous origin of a new species by a single genetic event can occur but is
unusual. It is practically confined to cases of increase in individual chromosome numbers
happening to produce a system both viable and capable of reproduction but not capable of
backbreeding into the parental population. In usual... cases distinct evolutionary change
involves the increase or decrease of proportions of genetic factors in whole populations,
and this is a gradual process occurring in successions of generations. The prevailing
modern theories of evolution are essentially, although not dogmatically, gradualistic [16]
.
No new species has been proven to form, through mutation, breeding, or otherwise, in human
history. First mutations occur rarely; perhaps one in 25,000 spermatozoa or eggs possesses
a gene that has been mutated. Still, with a large population over a long period of time the
number of mutations will be high. Since women carry their eggs from birth, some 200 of
them, an egg mutated on one occasion may be represented in a birth as much as forty years
later; male sperm is wasted and renewed, millions per ejaculation, so that a mutated sperm
has very little chance of being partner to a conception.
The chances for a successful mutation are so slight, and the process typically visualized
by biologists for evolution of a species is so long, that many scholars have offered
calculations showing the high improbability of the origin and development of species by
mutation. Yet other theories have not been acceptable, except for the enlargement of the
mutation-referral, or calibration process that Simpson spoke of above. Natural selection
has to work only with the gene pool already available to a species and is questionable on
the grounds already stated in the preceding chapters. MAJOR FEATURES OF EVOLUTION G. G.
Simpson declares that Mutation rate can rarely be an effectively determining factor in rate
or direction of evolutionary change; this is also the conclusion of Muller..., leading
student of mutation rates. [17] Mutation offers plenty of possible changes but natural
selection is more important: once more we face the frustrations of evolutionary ping-pong
between mutation and natural selection.
An effort was made by the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, in 1940 to provide a new material
basis for evolution [18] . He said that his lectures at Yale ought to have been called the
genetical and developmental potentialities of the organism which nature may use as
materials with which to accomplish evolution. Evolution and natural selection, including
the survival of the fittest, were accepted by him as facts. But, he said, selection and
adaptation required necessary hereditary variations to work with.
So he strove to discover evidences of macro-evolution. He showed how hereditary
differences, that might have fateful consequences in appearance and behavior among species,
might be attributable to certain mutations. He conceived the idea that hopeful monsters
would be frequently generated, from among which some rare type might accomplish an
evolutionary saltation. Although he could not demonstrate such directly, he conceived that
novel patterning of chromosomes might instantly achieve the same effect as an accumulation
of mutations, producing a new chemical system that would substantially alter an organism's
appearance and behavior. So he could speak of systemic mutation as a complete change of the
primary pattern or reaction system into a new system.
He might have added the term hopeful scientist, to describe himself and others who were
products of the hopeful monster, homo schizo. The phrase: To illustrate the presence and
wisdom of God in the natural and moral world meant to the naturalist, he declared, the
demonstration of law and order in his chosen field. This view is a common amnesiac
sublimation of the characters of the gods Yahweh, Shiva, Zeus, and Jupiter, spreaders of
chaos and lightning-like destroyers of the order of Mother Earth and Mother Nature. Perhaps
if he had investigated the character of his gods, he might have truly found the means by
which nature accomplished changes -- by catastrophes multiplying infinitely the mutating
forces and adaptative opportunities of the world. He then would agree even more with
another authority whom he supports, O. H. Schindewolf, the German paleontologist, who not
only surmised macroevolution but adjudged the causes to be catastrophic and
extraterrestrial, in a set of studies published between 1936 and 1963.
The earliest men were in fact hopeful monsters who had to believe that the gods were
responsible for their sorrows, as well as their welfare, but sublimated many of the
sorrows. Perhaps this is why Mircea Eliade, the hopeful scientist, must wonder why the
first Greek god Ouranos was believed to have bred so many hateful monsters, his own
children, whom he cast down and buried in the bowels of the Earth; Eliade may be avoiding
his own ambivalence in not answering the question that perhaps he of all scholars is best
equipped to answer.
Coming closer to the key to quantavolution and macroevolution are scientists such as
Dubrow, who credits sharp changes in the geomagnetic field with mass mutations leading to
sudden increases in populations and systemic mutations leading to new species and genera
[19] .
INTELLIGENT MUTATION AND EVOLUTIONARY SALTATIONS
That genes instruct organisms via chemo-electric code is well-known. That genes mutate
occasionally has long been known. The mutation as an electro-chemical event with functional
consequences is also appreciated. Puzzles remain: how, if at all, do mutating genes provide
the non-random set of instructions needed to accommodate the rest of the organism to the
new structure/ function of the changed part? The problem is made all the more poignant by
the observation that nearly all mutations are relatively meaningless and mostly trivial;
yet a given species is integrated functionally, and differs significantly from another
species. No gift of time, no matter how generous, nor even the bonanza of radiant
catastrophes, can displace our feeling that mutations may generate hopeful monsters, some
of which survive.
A new metaphor is therefore suggested. We assume that the mutation is a changed chemical
message sent by one gene to all other genes as well as to all other genes as well as to the
operations which itself commands. Every gene (hence chromosome) receives, upon mutation,
not only a capability to provide a new instruction but also a capability for leadership.
Every gene, like Napoleon's soldiers, carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack. When it
mutates, all other genes become dedicated followers. The gene, as befits the ideal field
marshal, conveys to them instructions concerning the behavior newly expected of them. They
do their limited best to conform to the new order.
The gene that gives the limbs of my cat a surprising six digits orders all other genes to
whom the change is relevant to provide the necessary services. Muscles, brain, blood
vessels, and many other structures and functions swing into line. The cat survives and
breeds its kind.
The instructions given out by the other genes that control the cat's features are contained
in their programs, for apparently they have not been mutated. We see at least two levels or
types of changed instructions passed from a leader gene to all other genes: a) a new
proportionality of structure and function which provide 'normal' individuation within
limits of an ongoing species, and b) ad hoc accommodations in the presence of hitherto
inexperienced demands. The ad hoc accommodations may be presumed to be quantitative or
extreme deviations of the individuation code. Both types of change will persist so long as
the mutated gene gives off the same signal, practically forever. The mutation may be
deleterious, or harmful, if the pre-existing capabilities are not flexible enough to
provide holistic means of survival; on the other hand, the ad hoc instructions may be
accommodated, and the organism survives.
Is it conceivable that the genes carry design accommodations for every successful
macromutation? If so, where do they originate? Suppose that, in the beginning of life
forms, each gene is possessed of designs that can cope with every form from an amoebae to a
whale (this is, of course, not a new idea). Given a certain chemical stimulus, it will
produce its part of the structure and function of any species known up to the present and
many more. There is no logical reason why an individual
gene capability of a bacterium of 2 2000 combinations cannot foreshadow all life forms that
have developed. The gene's speciated repertoire of designs presumably has limits. Indeed,
such limits are commonly defined in the course of reciting the similarities among all
living forms. They are further defined in the course of classifying phyla, orders, and
families. Then, should a changing gene stretch the fhrerprinzip too far, asking, for
example, that feathers be provided for a whale, the followers, the other genes, cannot find
the requisite function among their repertoire of attainable specifications, and the animal
will usually die.
But suppose that my cat bears kittens with flipper-like limbs. The mutated gene passes its
changed chemical messages to its cohorts and the necessary changes are made, well within
limits, except that the little beasts cannot walk very well. They might swim and, if
introduced to a body of water, do so. The cohorts work hard now to accommodate: eye muscles
tighten; muscles bulge at the flipper joints; oil gathers heavily at the skin pores; the
body becomes rotund for insulation and floating; the taste buds are alerted to watery
savors; the lungs expand for searching and diving underwater; and so on.
The young cats are not equally flexible and they lack parental instruction, but perhaps one
or two survive and go ashore, mainly to procreate and give birth, cautious and suspicious
of land forms, abandoning their unmutated kittens and carrying their mutants back into the
water. Since my cat is a mixture of Siamese, Persian and Mediterranean alley-cat, its
kittens and their kittens will afford numerous possibilities for immediate natural
selection. They will compete adequately with beaver, muskrats, otters, duck-billed
platypus, seals, and sea-lions, and will supply prey for the few large carnivores of the
sea and food for smaller marine animals with their carcasses. They may live and hunt in
gangs. If my cat had given birth to all of this in secret, I would be surprised by a new
order of beasts when, a few years later, I would be swimming. Should, in the course of
events, a member of the new species be mutated, a new gene would probably become the
leader. Now gigantism is the order of the day, from among the dead-born emerge two double-
sized kittens, which grow to quadruple-sized adulthood. A new instruction would have been
dispatched to all its genes, which would have been received and interpreted on the basis of
previously existing instructions, not for Cat but Cat I.
The process of fixing the next species, Cat II, would be analogous to the earlier one. Cat
II genes would be centered around the Cat plus Cat I chemical norm. Their limits of
deviation presumably would remain those of Cat plus Cat I. That is, they had inherited Cat
I's new instruction. The new chemical instruction would build upon it; it would only order
research of the repertoire to its limits to abide the new order. So, in swimming around a
decade later, I might receive an even greater surprise.
Examining the gene structure of Cat II progeny, one would find all of the instructions
implanted in the primordial form of life, Amoebae I (or even, in fact, its predecessors,
that were locked into it), together with every mutation (or new command) ever imparted to
Cat II ancestors. Missing would be only the changed genetic capabilities afforded species
that have branched off of its line since the beginning of life. The whale would be denied
feathers. In this sense, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Under such conditions, the
number of successful mutations from the primordial form might have been far fewer than is
generally believed, perhaps less than a hundred for the generally of species, and under a
dozen for the particular species.
Consequently, mutations can be conceived to cause very little or very great changes in the
structure and functions of a species. Further, mutations are considered statistical, that
is, indeterminate increments contained in a limited number of commands. They are, of
course, not models of the form-to-be. Their intelligence consists in their primordial
ability to induce coordinated shifts of behavior in non-mutated genes.
By implication, important changes occur by saltations, as quantavolutions. In environments
that provide mutational possibilities, radically different forms can emerge quickly,
propagate abundantly, and branch quickly again. Long-time durations are of little
importance; whether they occur or not is immaterial.
The theory here is so simple that it may be merely a metaphor. It need not be justified by
elaborate mathematical calculations. It preserves most of the general observations of
Lamarck, C. Darwin, St. Hilaire, Mendel, Dobzhansky, Watson and many another geneticist, it
can cope with paleontology and genetic engineering without strain. It suggests, among other
things, that, in principle but against great odds, preexisting ancestral species can be
recreated, and that the creation of future major life forms is within sight, perhaps at the
level of probability of controlled nuclear fusion.
EXTERNAL PRODUCERS OF MUTATION
The prevailing evolutionary theory, The Modern Synthesis, has looked to point mutation
within structural genes as causing individual variability, which is ultimately carried into
a population where it comes to be a dominant trait. A species change is thought to occur by
gradual accumulation of small differences. Isolation and small numbers promote the change.
Subsequently, the new species diffuses. Long time intervals are admittedly required.
Transitional forms, which should be abundant among fossils, are rarely discoverable, and
never incontrovertibly accepted a such. The fossil record appears to be a representation of
quantavolutions, not incrementalism. It is suppressed, however, by an ideology of
uniformitarian evolution.
Even when the Modern Synthesis is attacked, as it was recently in a conference of
geneticists and paleontologists, the challengers, advocates of 'macroevolution' or
'punctuated equilibrium, ' (our 'quantavolution') appear to stay within the boxing ring
outlined by an assumed speciation: 'what happens in speciation? ', not 'what causes
speciation? ' A rapid speciation, even to the challengers, is one taking place over, say,
50,000 years, but that is an instant compared with the 5 or 10 million years that most
species exist. [20] Even so, it would be far longer than necessary to change Hominid 'X'
into homo sapiens schizotypus, if the modifications which I suggested above were sufficient
to make the main differences between the two species. Once the viable combination is
struck, the speciation occurs instantly.
Furthermore, with normally prevailing rates of mutation, speciation is unlikely under
either the Modern Synthesis or the 'punctuated equilibrium' theory. It is striking that the
aforesaid conference did not take up the question of the possible role of cosmic or space
environmental change. Writing in 1980, a group of scientists claimed that a major
extraterrestrial impact on Earth ended the Cretaceous 'reptilian' period and inaugurated
the Tertiary mammalian period at which time, quoting D. A. Russell, no terrestrial
vertebrate heavier than about 25 kg is known to have survived, and the food chain was
completely disrupted for many years by other biosphere extinctions and reductions. Further,
there have been five such extinctions since the end of the Precambrian, bringing us back to
the beginning of life [21] .
Schindewolf, Salop, and a number of other scholars, whether in the close fields of
genetics, geology and paleontology, or in the general field of catastrophism, have brought
forward volumes of material to support the likelihood of mutation-causing disasters.
Probably the 'earth-bound' specialists are waiting for a green light from the astronomical
establishment. Meanwhile pressure mounts from the earthlings and the general
catastrophists. Nature magazine, for example, carried in one issue (May 22, 1980, Vol. 285)
three articles on catastrophes at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.
Not only mutations, but all other factors in speed-up of genetic change are provided by
natural catastrophes -- isolation, adaptation, and extinction of competing species. Thus we
hear Simpson say that The chance of fixation of a favorable mutation may be considerably
larger by accident of sampling in a small population than by selection in a large
population... [22] Catastrophes therefore simulate in quick time the supposed effects of
natural selection. If man has been humanized within the past 100,000 years, or even within
the past million years, actually at any age boundary, even granting the dubious long-time
reckoning, he probably was humanized by catastrophe. Here the quantavolutionary model
diverges from the evolutionary model most emphatically. In order to enhance the chances of
a viable speciation by mutation, a heavy bombardment of particles is required such as has
not been experienced in history; a radiation storm is called for. Such storms must have
existed on numerous occasions in recent prehistory, if the evidence assembled in my Chaos
and Creation is accepted. They ionized thoroughly the environment by interrupting,
deflecting, and reversing the electromagnetic field of the Earth, by mega-lightning
electrical discharges upon the near encounter of bodies in space, upon the occurrence of
great potential differences between space and Earth, and by removing cloud canopies and
transforming the gaseous composition of the atmosphere. Meteoric pass-throughs collisions
would have occurred. The Sun would be stimulated to hyper-activity. The electrical and
atomic state of every organism and rock would be altered.
The radiating effect of one meteor or comet of small size gliding through the atmosphere is
heavier than that of a large cluster of hydrogen bombs because of its great heat, well over
2000* C, over a long trajectory, the wide distribution of fall-out, and its possible final
explosion at a great speed of many kilometers per second. A single such passage, of which
there would have been many, should produce millions of mutations in the biosphere
generally. A large explosion creates a catastrophic tube from the upper mantle into outer
space, in and around which many millions of combinations of electrical, chemical, physical,
material, thermal, and pressure events take place. Paleontologist D. J. McLaren had events
such as these in mind when, in a presidential address to his colleagues, he reviewed the
evidence of the wholesale extinction of species. After describing the effects of a large-
body collision, he remarked: This will do. [23] Yet, it is not only extinction that
occurs, but also speciation.
As soon as they will grant the occurrence of extraterrestrially caused disaster,
paleontologists will arrive at a public agreement in favor of quantavolution. Essentially
this would include first that the species have been created and exterminated in waves. The
waves will probably be fixed chronologically at the passages between the conventionally
named periods -- such as between the Pliocene and Pleistocene. Thirdly, they will probably
settle upon radiation storms (or, for stretched-out changing, new atmospheric constants) as
the principal force bringing in the great changes. They may well decide that these
radiation storms are connected with cosmic explosions and encounters. Finally, they may,
with greatest reluctance, turn to a shorter time-scale for measuring the succession of
events in natural history. For radiation storms and geological disasters not only mutate
and exterminate species; they also invalidate methods of dating that assume a constant
chemical and geophysical environment.
The time of man and protoman now includes a Holocene that impinges upon the Pleistocene
that is moving back in turn into the old Pliocene. I have already noted that
anthropologists believe that they are finding modern types of homo in early Pleistocene
(once Pliocene) times. Whether the advent of homo sapiens should be set in these times or
in the early Holocene depends largely upon whether one adopts a long-time or short-time
chronology. The change from hominid to homo was not anatomically or physiologically
spectacular. Australopithecine and sinanthropus, if they lived alongside each other,
probably lived in the time of proto-modern man as well.
Ericson declares our thesis in the title to his study, Extinctions and Evolutionary Changes
in Microfossils Clearly Define the Abrupt Onset of the Pleistocene. [24] Now I report what
Salop writes:
At the end of the Pliocene, some 3 M Y ago, is the last great revolutionary limit-line in
the history of life. The first ancestors of Man appeared and an essentially new epoch
started, the Anthropogene or Psychozoic. All other changes in the organic world, however
important, seem of minor significance in comparison with that event. The animal kingdom of
today originated, broadly speaking, also at that time, not counting the extinction of large
animals in the second half of the Pleistocene thought to be largely caused by the activity
of Man [25] .
This last explanation, involving man, is not acceptable; all species were under extinction
stress in both Pleistocene and Holocene, including man. Moreover Salop limits the causes
unduly. He comments, Growth of the solar constant by one percent results in an
insignificant rise of temperature of the troposphere, but the UV radiation multiplies
100,000 times. The ozone shield would capture most of this if it were as strong as today.
Recent planetary, cometary, and meteoroid catastrophes, which are more probable but are not
discussed here by Salop, would engender infinitely greater radiation storms [26] .
Most large mammal species were wiped out in the late Pleistocene, 70% by one estimate, in
ways that would imply worldwide atmospheric revolution, as with the mammoth. The
quantavolution of hominid into homo sapiens could have occurred on one of numerous
occasions. Given the lesser resistance of the mammals and man to radiation effects, and
granted findings such as Ericson's and Salop's, there is further reason to hypothesize the
mutation and drastic adaptation of humans.
If the proto-men (the Hominid 'X') of this era were spread over at least the Afro-Asian
world, some estimates, no matter that they must be highly speculative, are in order. The
creatures must have been numerous. In a world of ten million hominids (30 per 100 square
miles) and during a thousand years of one or more ionizing forces, whether continuous or
intermittent, five million females would be subjected to radiation. Their eggs would be
present and available for mutation for a life-span, say, of forty years. Assuming that
females averaged a pregnancy once every two years, that their life spans averaged twenty
years of child-bearing, and that a radiation storm environment persisted in which one of
twelve fertilized eggs had been mutated, then some 1.85 billion mutated births would occur
in the one millennium. Mutated sperms might raise the number to three billions.
Of these three billions, from 300 to 3 millions might be beneficial or inconsequential,
guaranteeing at the least an average chance of physiological survival beyond infancy. One
must not neglect the chance that two mutants would interbreed, making possible combinations
of genes, or a new total configuration. If systemic mutation were admitted to be possible,
then too the chances of an emergent human would be increased [27] . The numerous high
energy forces would have had enormous effect upon the ecology and mankind. Not only would
they cause destruction on a grand scale; they would affect the mind of future generations
in many ways -- genetically, by imprinting, by social indoctrination through story, a
custom and institutions. The beginnings of mankind had to be associated with fearful
happenings, as Nietzsche, Freud, T. Reik, I. Velikovsky, and of course all sacred
historians have declared. Much was forgotten and distorted.
No one has detailed particular disasters and their human effects as well as Velikovsky.
Still, it is not alone, as Velikovsky puts it, that mankind has never recovered from the
terrors of catastrophe: homo sapiens schizotypus did not in fact exist before the terrible
times. Mankind was born out of catastrophe and achieved his delusionary schizoid human
nature out of catastrophes; and he can never be anything but the kind of creature that went
through those special overwhelming experiences. Humanity was created during a natural reign
of terror.
VIRAL MUTATION
Quite recently, the role of viruses in genetic change has come to be recognized. Viral
storms might accompany the large-scale penetration of the atmosphere by exploded material
from extraterrestrial events. Various ancient myths report such occurrences. Apollo was the
Greek god of plagues and arrows; he was a sky god and not the sun, as later writers
supposed. Recently, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have, in their book Life Cloud, proposed that
early life forms were deposited on Earth by cometary fall-out. In Disease From Space (1979)
they also claim space dust as the carrier of plagues to Earth. Their proposed
investigations went unsupported by the grants authorities [28] . The search for viruses in
meteorites and Martian soil samples in proceeding.
Deeply buried viruses might also be exposed and some of them mutated by large-scale earth
upheavals. Large explosions can create drifting material that will disseminate both
crystallized and already activated viruses in similar fall-outs, and with similar genetic
results. Hope-Simpson in 1978 reported that the last six peaks of sunspots coincided with
pandemic influenza, possibly from increased cosmic radiation which mutated existing
viruses, enabling them to evade human immunities [29] . Not to be ignored, therefore, is
the chain reaction of a virus, a viral mutation, and a human mutated by a virus. Again, the
likelihood of successful mutation is small but the participating organisms are exceedingly
numerous.
We bear in mind the theory, advanced elsewhere in my studies, that several solar system
bodies disintegrated during the past 14,000 years. One or more were probably carrying life
forms. Viruses might persist for some years, possibly thousands, prior to their extinction,
in a permanently hostile environment, and hence, while scarcely detectable today in
meteorites or direct planetary sampling, would have been aboard their exploded vehicles in
ancient strikes against the Earth.
PSYCHOSOMATIC GENETICS
Still another means for achieving humanization, and also mutational, would be the
psychosomatic conversion of genes. For a time, the idea fascinated Freud and Ferenczi. They
were influenced by Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. On
October 5, 1917 Freud wrote to Karl Abraham to this effect, saying, Its essential content
is that the omnipotence of thoughts was once a reality. When Abraham responded that he had
not heard of the idea, Freud wrote that it would complete the theory of psychoanalysis by
providing a theory of change through an entoplastic adaptation of one's own body.
Our intention is to place Lamarck entirely on our basis and to show that this 'need' which
creates and transforms organs is nothing other than the power of unconscious ideas over the
body, of which we see relics in Hysteria: in short, the 'omnipotence of thoughts. ' Purpose
and usefulness would then be explained psychoanalytically; it would be the completion of
pychoanalysis. Two great principles of change or progress would emerge: one through one's
own body, and a later (heteroplastic) one through transmuting the outer world [30] .
Even before it was realized how minute was the probability of successful genetic mutation,
Freud, like many another thoughtful person, like the theologians, like even Alfred Wallace
and Lyell (until his old age), could not accept the piecemeal elaboration of homo sapiens
according to the uniformitarian Darwinian model. With scientific catastrophism in disrepute
and obloquy, they could not imagine an appropriate environmental stimulus to change.
The theory is not beyond discussion. Presumably the hominid bearer of sperms or eggs would
be so drastically affected by environmental turbulence that it would will a chemical
mutation upon them. Practically every tissue and organ of the body has been shown to be
capable of physical change, usually deleterious, when an obsessed person focuses intense
and prolonged attention upon the soma. The genetic material cannot logically be exempted
from the obsessive influence; both point and systemic mutation could then occur.
The ability, conscious and/ or unconscious, to engender fully intense and prolonged neuro-
chemical and/ or electrical energy, and to focus it upon a given tissue or organ, is given
to few persons in these times. It might more frequently emerge when the environment is
heavily agitated and the collectivity reflects this agitation and inspires a response among
its members. That is, the alteration of the race by willing a genetic change might have
occurred in the creative years of mankind. This would be a true mutation, inasmuch as a
chemical intervention or electrical impulse affecting the genes is postulated.
The psychosomatic model has a low probability. Although the terrorized hominid woman may
have had the most intense desire, conscious and unconscious, to change her offsprings, how
could she have known how to target the eggs in her womb? Can terror act as a chemical
bullet directed at the eggs? We have noted that Teilhard de Chardin and the 'school' of
directed evolution also have found it necessary to premise an inherent motivation towards
progressive biological change, to go along with transmutation. Psychosomatism unconsciously
targets an organ. Physical stress and psychic stress both can affect the heart, for
instance. And our culture tells us: 'Don't give your dear father a heart attack by your
evil conduct. ' Further, there is a lore of affecting the unborn child. And witch-doctors
may sometimes pretend to know how to affect one's enemies with psychic heart attacks and
psychic damage to unborn children. Psychosomatism, we can affirm, performs the seeming
miraculous. But we prefer to believe here that psychosomatism is the cultural product of
the already humanized homo schizo. It is an irresistible path that the fear arising out of
the split-ego and instinct-delay points out to the human being. In one report, which
unfortunately I have lost, the women of a tribal group are apparently capable of
controlling their own fertilization by 'willpower; ' this is, if true, a possible effect on
the germ plasm or on the fluids or musculature of the reproductive organs.
Freud, and Jung, also believed in phylogenetically inherited material but could never
describe precisely its brainwork. The evidence is that certain common symbols are not
learned, nor 'classical' phobias, nor the oedipal complex, nor some other symbols and
practices. The human inherits not only predispositions, but even subject-matter and memory
traces. Homo schizo has a natural cultural output: so goes the contention. But we can
postpone this matter until a later chapter.
Freud and his associates could not come to close grips with psychosomatic humanization; the
chemistry, biology and neurology were not available, then. They may not be now. Freud's
reconstruction of the origin of conscience suffers from such basic flaws that one marvels
at even the limited acceptance granted it. He should have worked instead upon his
psychosomatic theory of mutation. He declares that, in an early family of homo sapiens, the
sons, sexually covetous of their mother and other females, killed their father and ate him;
ever since this significant incident occurred, a sense of guilt for the action has been
transmitted through the mnemonic generations.
Inasmuch as ordinary observations of primates and other mammals reveal the dispossession of
the aging and weakening bull males in families and hordes, with regard to a full range of
values, including the sexual, it is presumptuous to build a specifically human trait upon
the assumed killing and deduce therefrom some of the most important qualities of human
behavior such as guilt, conscience, totem and taboo, religion, and civilization. Unless, of
course, we are dealing with an animal already so advanced in the preparation of conscience,
that the concoction of new provocation would hardly be necessary. It is much more likely
that the ascription of morality to events such as the reformation of sexual power in a
group is attributable to a higher morality -- the instinct-delay fear --that gives in the
process of its sublimation and rationalization direction to all aspects of life.
AN ATMOSPHERIC TRANSFORMATION
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844) advanced two important ideas. One was that of saltation,
the leap from one species to another: the first bird hatched from the egg of a reptile; the
second was that atmospheric changes and other environmental changes bring about speciation,
particularly those respiratory fluids, which sharply and strongly modify animal forms [31]
. His treatment was cursory and unconvincing.
But today it is more apparent that atmospheric reactions are an important factor in
behavior. They might be an alternative or a supplement to genetic mutation in transforming
mankind. In this case, Hominids 'X' are presumed to have an already existing genetic
capability of becoming human. They are genetically preadapted to quantavolution. This
genetic capability is not exercised in the hominid condition because the atmosphere
contains a 'hominid mixture, ' not a 'human' standard. The oxygen may have been more or
less ionized than it is today, for example. The atmosphere may now be heavier (or lighter)
in solar or cosmic rays, certain gases, and other chemical elements affecting biological
behavior. Might some of these conditions alter human conduct?
The evidence is strong that some or all humans would be affected. Prevalence of unusual
gases and metals in the workplace affect workers with psychiatric symptoms, even though
they spend only a few hours their daily. One can surmise from this fact that an enduring
day-around condition would bring about shortly a different norm of human mentation and
behavior.
In such cases, the changed constant would affect proto-humans in a number of places around
the world and humanization would be a worldwide phenomenon of the age. Although I feel that
such changed constants have affected human history, I doubt that they alone could have
accounted for the emergence of homo schizo. Therefore, I follow generally the model of a
single-shot mutation in humanization. Some cultural science support for this position will
be cited in the chapters to come, diffusion of basic culture from a single point of origin,
for instance.
D. W. Patten has offered, as a geologist and creationist, several hypotheses on atmospheric
acquisitions from outer planets, especially affecting the ozone and the nitrogen content of
the air, which would then alter the chemistry of growth and longevity. He halts at this
point [32] . Temporary or permanent alterations in the gaseous and ion composition of the
air could potentiate an already existing physiology, especially via the endocrinal glands
and hormonal system. Both the solar and cosmic 'constants' were inconstant during much of
the primeval period of humankind; even lately, though respecting smaller deviations, the
inconstancy of the solar and galactic winds has come under study.
External events can introduce continuous and to some extent permanent changes (operating as
a new constant), if the events and the conditions they bring about persist. So long as
heavy noise, air pollution, rapid movement, and other high-stress life conditions of New
Yorkers are constant, New Yorkers will tend to have swollen adrenals. Or, so long as the
proportion of oxygen in the air of the High Andes is relatively low, the people there will
have unusually developed lungs. A connection of the endocrinal system with megavitamin
therapy has registered effects upon schizophrenia through facilitating the physiological
discharge of adrenalin.
A diminished oxygen supply or incompatibility of oxygen type in the atmosphere may
introduce schizoid symptoms to some part of the population. The brain needs oxygen not only
to survive but to energize neuro-transmissions throughout its domain. In schizophrenics the
oxygen level in the brain is sharply lower than normal. Further, frontal lobe brain
activity is low. Thought dissociation may be produced by oxygen deficiency in the frontal
lobe.
A radiation storm; a material fall-out; a sweep-out or in-take of atmosphere in
transactions with extraterrestrial bodies; intense electrical storms; and the dropping of
canopies (opening of skies) can drastically reform the atmosphere. They might change
atmospheric constants abruptly or over a period of time. The new atmosphere forces upon the
hominids a new 'norm' of response. The new norm is, at least among some individuals, within
the range of genetic capability. The adaptible survivors behave according to the new norm,
which is to say that they now behave as humans.
The reconstructed atmospheric constant may affect most importantly the fetal environment of
the humans-to-be. This happens when the new chemicals in the air find their way into the
hormonal food supply of the fetus. And/ or the new constant presents its demands for
changed physiology and behavior upon the infant after birth. Man, and all life, lives off a
radiation diet that is generally unperceived. Even today, delicate scientific instruments
are required to detect radiation, and the symptomology of radiation poisoning is not very
clear, or where clear does not readily name its precise cause.
The atmosphere of chaos was a mutator. The sun of the later Solarian Age may not have been.
Nevertheless, the finally settled atmosphere has played a role in humanization. Legends
around the world speak of a primordial cloudy sky. The opening of the skies would increase
radioactive influences from perhaps still nearby and hot planetary bodies, and also and
especially from the sun.
Exposure to helio-radiation (including ultra-violet rays) generally increases physical
resistance, relieves arthritic and muscular pain, lends a feeling of well-being, stimulates
ergosterol and hence Vitamin D production, counteracts rickets and respiratory disease, and
kills bacteria and fungi of the skin. It promotes the healing of wounds and athletic
performance; it increases the rate of basal metabolism. All of these occur at the price of
occasional skin cancers, and possibly of still unknown deep changes [33] . Although they
would contribute to a higher general level of health and activity, they would not create
the human. Larger events are required.
The Earth's geomagnetic field has come under intense study in the past few years, because
evidence now available points to reversals in the past. Whether the field has reversed
quickly and often, as quantavolutionists believe, or gradually and rarely, as evolutionists
think, a reversal of the North Magnetic Pole introduces as interval during which cosmic
rays can descend upon the Earth unhindered and bring about mutations in great numbers. Some
studies have indicated a coincidence of reversals with waves of biosphere extinction. B.
Heezen, pioneer oceanographer (for it is on the rocks of the ocean bottom that magnetism
can be most readily traced), has speculated that the last reversals was before the time of
man. However, the time of man has been pushed back well beyond this period in conventional
theory, and in quantavolutionary theory the times of the last several reversals are well
within the human span, one having occurred in the eight century B. C. according to an
examination of the orientation of iron particles in pottery of that age [34] . Yet another
reversal is said to have occurred around four to six thousand years ago in connection with
large biosphere and natural destruction [35] .
Furthermore, the geomagnetic field (GMF) is declining slowly. I have already introduced the
work of Dubrow on the subject. If the decline has been exponential from some past peak, as
I believe and will be discussing with Earl R. Milton in a forthcoming book, then the
hominid was subjected to a sharply different paleomagnetic field. So we must ask ourselves
whether the relaxed grip of the electromagnetic field disorganized the hominid brain and in
effect created homo schizo. For he would be presented with an intellectual freedom in the
form of a bewildering number of options for action instead of the more closed system of
stimulus-response accorded Hominid 'X. ' The 'constant' is still changing, but slowly,
today. Still the frequency of heart attacks has been convincingly associated with
internationally collected measurements of geomagnetic activity as registered by
magnetometers.
It may be possible, too, that many animals, including especially the primates, acquired a
loosened behavioral potential at the same time, in the same way. Relieved of the heavier
GMF, the minute electrical charges that operate the central nervous system may have stepped
up their activity, relatively speaking, and, crowding the access points, delayed
instinctive reactions and promoted displacements. An electric shock, administered
experimentally or therapeutically (at this supposed new level of the human mind), provokes
mental activity (mania), hallucinations, and amnesia, while reducing depression and
anxiety. ECS [Electroconvulsive shock] leaves a permanent change in brain excitability.
That a marked change in the Earth's electrical field would have affected the human brain is
not difficult to accept. We have mentioned that much testimony on a primordial canopy of
clouds exists, at the time of the first god Uranus (known by many names.) [36] The sky
cover was probably removed in the time of human creation. The results would include a new
and constant heavy bombardment of the biosphere with cosmic and solar particles. What
legends frequently describe as the primordial chaos could have been a combination of actual
celestial turbulence, ground bombardment, and mass biosphere mutations and extinctions,
associated with the shock of being transmuted from hominid to homo. The Hebrew Genesis is
by no means unique in referring to this concatenation of events.
Nor does this conclude speculation about the possibilities of the ancient skies. If large
bodies transacted in close encounter or collision with Earth, as is argued elsewhere in the
Quantavolution Series, large electrical charges would be exchanged between the bodies. The
Earth could either lose or gain immense charges, sufficient to affect deeply the human
nervous system. Then the proto-human must cope either with an enhanced or lesser charge on
the Earth's surface or in the atmosphere, either as a sudden terminator event or as a new
constant or both.
At this point of the discussion, the multiplicity of possibilities begins to bewilder and I
would, if I could, sing the praises of Occam's razor. Would the hominid mind split and
develop instinct-delay and the poly-ego from any one or all of these possibilities? Or
would man becomes stupefied, more hominidal, instead of electrified, confused, and
energized? Reasoning ex post facto, which is to say, begging the question, I shall have to
say that since he became the latter, whatever happened, even combinations of opposites,
worked to the same end of instinct-delay and poly-ego problems.
SOCIAL IMPRINTING
In Seneca's ancient tragic drama, Thyestes, the chorus chants of the shocking fiery passage
of Phaeton in his solar chariot, when each and every constellation deviated:
This is the fear, the fear that knocks at the heart That the whole world is now to fall in
the ruin Which Fate foretells; that Chaos will come again To bury the world of gods and
men; that Nature A second time will wipe out all the lands That cover the earth and the
seas that lie around them And all the stars that scatter their bright lights Across the
universe [37] .
A fifth means of transforming hominid into human nature might be by the social imprinting
of shock upon the individual. The hominids again afford the basic genetic capability and a
pre-adapted habitat. In this case, however, natural disasters inflict shocks upon the
hominid beyond its 'normal' tolerances of stimulation. The shocks in themselves are the
grossly exaggerated homologues of the shocks of 'normal' existence.
They take the form of a celestial scene inhabited by new symbolic references and other
mind-openers; of terrorizing high-energy expressions including spectres and pandemonium; of
crushing and effacing effects that are prolonged and of high intensity; of the ranging of
the natural elements.
The shocks are so traumatic that the victims adopt response behaviors that become patterned
as the essence of human nature. The traumatized catastrophical survivors retain the
memories, but distort and use them in ways that are typically human. Most importantly, they
devise in the very process of their own creation the social means of perpetuating their own
changed mentalities and behavior. Human nature is then and thereby guaranteed by a
collectivity of humans formed into a group or society. The memorial generations transmit
and adapt new traumatic and 'normal' tribulations to the fixated human nature.
In explaining the development of the human mind in relation to the catastrophes of Venus
and Mars in the period 1453 to 687 B. C. Velikovsky pushes beyond Nietzsche, Freud, Jung,
and Eliade with the concepts of collective amnesia and aggression [38] . Mankind is
destructively aggressive as a result of suppressing its memories of natural disasters. The
inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of man's aggression... Freud did
not come to understand the true nature of the Great Trauma -- born in the Theogony or
battle of the planetary gods with our Earth, brought more than once to the brink of
destruction -- which was the fate of Mercury, Mars, and Moon. Freud died in exile from his
home, when a crazed worshiper of Wotan was preparing another G"tterd"mmerung. [39]
The view which I am setting forth embraces this criticism of Freud and the concepts of
collective amnesia or repression concerning catastrophes. Also, aggression is to be
correlated with this suppression, and the techniques of aggression are in a direct sense
analogized unconsciously and consciously to events witnessed in the sky. Nevertheless I
perceive social imprinting as at best an auxiliary source of human nature, an intensifier,
which itself needs to be intensified from time to time by fresh natural (or man-made)
catastrophe.
The Middle Bronze age civilizations, 3500 years ago, whose trials Velikovsky describes so
vividly, were pre-adapted to catastrophes; their societies behaved in ways already learned,
and with institutions inherited from prior disasters. Ultimately, though, with the earliest
disasters, a physiological change had to take precedence. Even in the genetic humanization
of man, catastrophe was an on-looker, carrier, and psychological and cultural reinforcer of
gene-fracturing elements.
John V. Myers and Warner B. Sizemore declare that the disintegration of objective reality
during cosmic catastrophe could produce subjective states similar to those of
schizophrenia, and that the disintegration of subjective reality in the schizophrenic is
accompanied by visions of cosmic catastrophe. [40] I argue that the reality recognized by
the first human was catastrophic and his mind was as well. There was never -- and here I
think we diverge from a common view of Velikovsky and a great many others, including
conventional long-term evolutionists -- a clean minded, rational evolved human whose mind
was 'blown' by catastrophic experiences: the recurrent disasters proved to homo schizo that
his vision of the world was correct!
THE SUMMARY MECHANICS
It is perhaps apparent to the reader by now that I prefer, as a 'holding position, ' a
complicated mix of several means of humanization, altogether happening within a very short
period of time. The mutation of an individual hominid is given prominence generally in the
scenarios to come. But it is not difficult to switch from the one to the other, or to
stress a combination. The changed atmospheric constant as the mode of humanization has the
value of inherent continuity, and is as efficient as genetic mutation in explaining
generational inheritance; also it permits humanization to occur simultaneously among many
hominids at the same time, in the same month or a few years. We might begin a search for
humanizing mechanisms that are present in the modern atmosphere but would not have been
present in an atmosphere in which hominids could thrive.
The branches of the human race have changed in some respects, mostly cosmetically, since
the cosmic beginnings of homo schizo. But the basic ways of behaving as human were
determined in the midst of great crises: the interruption of the Earth's motions, the loss
of electrical charge, the dropping of the immense cloud canopies in deluges, and the first
openings of the sky. An allotment of a thousand years would have been sufficient for these
tremendous experiences to bring about humanization.
Even while mutations were abundantly occurring among all species, a single group of
hominids, largely potentiated as humans beforehand, in distress and in terror, would find
amongst themselves individuals of flexible, if erratic, genetic constitution, who were
capable of expanded symbolic behavior and signaling various interpretations of the new
giant forces of the environment.
The same group would become capable of managing its newly installed communication system,
and then lend its cooperative forces to the evolving interpretation of the universe, the
aboriginal cosmology. The group would be driven to adopt the new system even before all of
its members shared the mutant genes. In the endeavor to ease their pains and anticipate the
sharing of the inheritable traits, it is possible that non-mutants actually mutated
themselves by will power, adding a consistent but different emotional mechanism to the
hereditary pool of the human-dominated group. Whereas the first mutants would operate by
genetic instructions, the second kind of mutants would work out genetically a mode of
hyper-excitation of the endocrinal system. This would lend the group an element of
obsessive emotionality as soon as genetic miscegenation began.
The social imprinting of shock would come about not by itself alone but in the course of
executing symbolic references of the first mutant type, in accepting the obsessive drive of
the second mutant type, and in the development of followership among the erstwhile normal
band, consisting of sophisticated crowd behavior already possessed by hominids.
All elements would be caught up in the atmospheric reformation. The mutations were
consistent with it; they were in fact created by it and responsive to it so that, in a
fundamental way, the correspondence of the new world with the new being was assured.
Although it did not eradicate the old 'normal beings, ' the radicalized atmosphere punished
them and preferred those who responded readily to the new constants.
Notes (Chapter 3: Mechanics of Humanization)
1. This column is discussed in the author's Chaos and Creation and The Lately Tortured
Earth and see I. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, Doubleday, 1955; Harold T. Wilkins,
Mysteries of Ancient South America, Secaucus, N. J., Univ. Press, 1956; Claude Schaeffer,
Stratigraphie Compar‚e, London: Oxford U. Press, 1948.
2. Biosocial Anthropology, London: Malaby, 1975, 7.
3. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
4. Robert E. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness, San Francisco: Freeman 1972, 63.
5. The New Science of Immanuel Velikovsky, I Kronos 1, 1975, 6-7.
6. Somatic Factors and Social Behavior, in R. Fox, ed., op. cit., 115; E. J. W. Barrington,
et al., Hormones and Evolution, N. Y.: Academic Press, 2 vols., 1979.
7. A. C. Guyton, Medical Physiology, 3rd ed., Philadelphia: Saunders, 1966, 1040.
8. Dobzhansky, op. cit., 205; L. Bolk, Das Problem der Menschenwerdung, Jena: Fischer,
1926.
9. A. P. Dubrow, The Geomagnetic Field and Life, N. Y.: Plenum, 1978. Ibid., 84.
10. Emotions and Bodily changes, N. Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1935, 4th ed., 1954.
11. N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct, Oxford U. Press, 1969, 5th printing, 195.
12. Radiation, Genes, and Man, N. Y.: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1959, 43.
13. Discussed in B. Silcock, The New Clues that Challenge Darwin, Sunday Times of London,
Aug. 3, 1981, 13.
14. V. A. Mckusick and Frank A. Ruddle, The Status of the Gene Map of the Human
Chromosomes, 196 Science (22 April 1977), 390-405.
15. Op. cit,; The Major Features of Evolution, N. Y.: Columbia U. Press, 1953.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. The Material Basis of Evolution, New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1940, 3.
19. Op. cit., 99.
20. Lewin, op. cit., 883.
21. Luis W. Alvarez, W. Alvarez, Frank Asaro, Helen V. Michel, Extraterrestrial Cause for
the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction, 208 Science 4448 (6 June 1980), 1095-1108. 1107;
Russell, Episodes 1979 No 4, 1979, 21. Cf. Otto H. Schindewolf, Neocatastrophism? (trans.
V. Axel Firsoff), 2 Catastrophist Geology 2 (Dec. 1977), 9-21.
22. Op. cit.
23. Quoted in Robert Bass, Did Worlds Collide? 4 Pensee (Fall, 1974) 8.
24. David B. Ericson, 139 Science 3356, Feb. 22, 1963.
25. L. G. Salop, Glaciations, Biologic Crisis and Supernovae, 2 Catastrophist Geology 2
(December 1977) 22-41; cf, Martin, P. S. and H. E. Wright eds., Pleistocene Extinctions,
1968.
26. See A. De Grazia and E. R. Milton, Solaria Binaria, Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publ.,
1983, for discussion.
27. I am using the kind of reasoning about genetic change over time employed by Simpson
(1953), 109-10, on the horse. He estimates 300 effective new steps were needed over 15m/ y
with a mutation rate of .000 001 and no systemic mutations, or macromutations, which, he
says, are unknown. See also J. B. S. Haldane's approach, Natural Selection, 101-49, in P.
R. Bell, ed., Darwin's Biological Work: Some Aspects Reconsidered, Cambridge (Eng.) U.
Press, 1959. See also Wallace and Dobzhansky, op. cit.
28. London Times, Lit. Supp. April 14, 1978. Life Cloud (N. Y.: Harper an Row, 1978).
29. R. E. Hope-Simpson, Sunspots and Flu; A Correlation, 275 Nature (1978), 86. H. Hoaglund
discusses Some Biochemical Considerations of Time, in J. T. Fraser, ed., The Voices of
Time, (N. Y.: Braziller, 1966), including oxygen consumption and slowing of time, and deep
freezing and time slowdown of virus (325-9).
30. Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, N. Y.: Basic Books, III, 312, 341.
31. Influence du monde ambiant pour modifier les formes animales, Mem. de l' Acad. des
Sciences, XII 91833) 63, quoted in H. F. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, N. Y.:
Scribner's, 1894, 199.
32. The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, Seattle: Pacific Meridian, 1966.
33. S. H. Licht, ed., Therapeutic Electricity and Ultraviolet Radiation, E. Licht, New
Haven, 1967.
34. Velikovsky describes this work of Mercanton and Folgheraiter in Earth in Upheaval, N.
Y.: Doubleday, 1955, 146-7.
35. Dubrow, op. cit. 84.
36. Isaac Vail, Selected Works, Annular Publications, Santa Barbara, Calif., reprinted
1972.
37. In Four Tragedies and Octavia, E. F. Wartling, trans., Baltimore: Penguin, 1966, 81.
38. Cultural Amnesia in Earl R. Milton, ed. Recollections of a Fallen Sky, Princeton:
Metron, 1978, 21-30, 26-7; Mankind in Amnesia, New York: Doubleday, 1982.
39. William Mullen, Schizophrenia and the Fear of World Destruction, I Kronos (Spring,
1975), 70.
40. I Kronos (1975) 70.
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOUR
THE GESTALT OF CREATION
The human creation happened all at once with a crackling and bursting of the hominidal dam.
It was a gestalt, a configuration of nearly simultaneous and transacting developments
emerging from a central change.
A plausible scenario of the birth of mankind might be reconstructed. Let us attempt it.
There follows now a charting of the total process of humanization, to be followed by its
discussion.
THE GESTALT OF CREATION AND ITS AFTERMATH
(The Hologenesis of Homo schizo)
A. Low-powered environmental forces operate, in a uniformitarian way.
B. Hominid is not self-conscious. It has fully functioning instinctual reactions. It has an
ape-like cranium, is bipedal, four feet tall, semi-human in appearance, and hairy.
C. Individual concentrates its life energies upon physical well-being and sociability.
D. Perception, cognition and affection are governed by a single coordinated instinctual
being. Only rarely and temporarily are they distorted; no matter how bizarre or self-
destructive its behavior (induced by disease or fright or chemicals) it does not ask What
am I doing?
Postulate now a set of terrorizing natural disasters and distraught faunal populations.
Problem now posed is: How could a human be created and survive?
A. High-powered environmental forces are unleashed in sky and earth. All senses are
bombarded. Radionic storms change the atmosphere and invade organisms. Physical well-being
and sociability are everywhere damaged and threatened. A reign of natural terror.
B. Instinctive behavior is generally frustrated by terror and strange stimuli. Microsecond
delays in central nervous system and especially in brain transmissions occur.
C. Schism of consciousness occurs in one or a few hominids with cranial enlargements.
Proto-decisions are required for self-control. The ego begins as coordinating center for
the fragments of the old conscious self; it is actually a poly-ego.
D. Memories are intense. Memories are also suppressed in the struggle for self-control (ego
versus alter-egos). Selective recall and forgetting spring into being.
E. The alter-egos displace terror onto other people and the threatening natural forces. The
primordial being does not know whether he is talking to himself or talking to others. Self-
punishment and self-mutilation are found to be ineffective but persist in efforts to unite
the soul.
F. The ego begins to communicate with its selves by displacement and projection, and having
begun the process, extends it to all subjects of displacement. Symbolism as internal
language begins. Bilateral asymmetry (righthandedness) is stressed to help centralize
dominance in the left-brain hemisphere.
A second phase now occurs, organizing the world schizotypically.
A. High-powered forces continue to impress senses with destruction, chaos, and threats of
return. The poly-ego is fraught with ambivalence toward the forces, hence, by retrojection,
also among its alter-egos.
B. Perception, cognition, and affection are pliable (less instinctive and internally
distorted thought-disorders) and mix up all kinds of phenomena of the triple-fear (fear of
self, fear of others, fear of gods-nature) and triple control system of the person.
C. Principal imprints upon perception of nature and affection are blocking (amnesia,
catatonism); compulsive repetitiveness; and orgiasm (destructiveness, wild expressionism).
These imprints of the new world order of the schizoid mind operate within the individual,
between and among individuals, and between groups and divine (natural) forces.
Without time lapse, a third phase fashions the culture.
A. Persons and groups, so as to control fears of self, others, and the object-world
(animated),
B. and to obtain subsistence, affection and the reduction of inner tensions,
C. organize their perceptions, cognitions, affects, and energies,
D. through the mechanisms of memory (amnesia and recall), displacements (associations and
ultimately sublimations), compulsive repetition (rites, rituals, habits, rules and
routines), orgiasm (aggression and nihilism), and communication (by behavior, signs and
symbols), E. work upon materials and resources of selves, others and the object world,
F. set up all behavior patterns ranging from informal to rigid, including the (1) regime of
language, (2) religious rites and structures, (3) compulsory modes of coping with
subsistence, sex, and conflict, all of which bear the stamp of the aforesaid needs, fears,
and mechanisms but assume variegated culture-forms depending upon the mix of history, no
matter how brief the history,
G. and then exclude or punish unaware, sinful, or sick persons or groups who, in relation
to a particular culture-mix are deviant (i. e., have too much or too little of the key
ingredients),
H. whereupon said deviants (e. g., officially labeled schizophrenics) must fashion mixes of
mechanisms and displacements, which, though great in number, represent and resemble in
every case the peculiarity of the culture wherein they emerge.
A MIND SPLIT BY MINUTE DELAYS
The gestalt brought forth the prototype human instantly (which explains our use of the
world creation). Whether by mutation or by trauma, the central event was a splitting of the
mind in an essentially schizophrenic reaction. The split mind recognized its other self.
That is, it was forced into a basic, irreversible delusion that it had to deal with an
inner person. Self-awareness began. It was an awful feeling.
A permanent blockage (or suppression) was laid down before all instinctual behavior,
creating a constant anxiety. The anxious animal could no longer act with instinctive ease
although it could act more intelligently and with greater versatility.
Now we have the answer to the questions: Why is human instinct so blunted in comparison
with primates? How does it happen that all animal instincts in humans are within reach of
psychosomatism? Instinct is the hair-trigger, set to go off without time for decision-
making. Many critical human instincts are reachable by will and can be controlled; indeed
they must be. They are set as slow triggers. This happened during the gestalt of creation.
Generalized delays of milliseconds in response time between the limbic and cortical systems
and between the left and right brain hemispheres, experienced as environmental, electrical,
and chemical impulses, introduce conflicts between the systems and the hemispheres. The
delays occur not once, but repeatedly and continuously, because the external forces are not
withdrawn immediately. The delays add up to a general depression of instinctive responses,
which is sensed by the hominid as both crippling and frightful. Even with microseconds of
delay, the organism senses piercing inner contradictions that call for proto-decisions by
itself vs. itself.
A host of proto-decisions fill the behavioral response-space left by the depression of
instincts. But there is little experience to help understand, control, and guide the mass
of proto-decisions. This new anarchy requires organization, but from what sources and how?
A pure anguish, it might be suggested, should drive the hominid back into the archaic
limbic system whence no self-awareness would ever emerge. But this cannot occur because the
stimuli for the new order of mind have blocked the regression and thrown the bewilderment
into the cortical arena.
It is too late to regret the passing of the animal. Either one or another of a pair of
cortical referents will triumph by making a decision. Still, the several egos cannot
contest indefinitely in a battle of all against all, else, like the warriors who sprang up
from the teeth of the dragon that Cadmus slew, they will kill each other. The organism, to
survive with its one stomach and conjoined limbs, must act as a whole.
The resolution comes from moving forward, not backwards. The organism widens the gap rather
than closes it. What began as a set of millisecond delays becomes an alter ego. The alter
ego grows though performance, habit and training into a weltanschauung (a world view). The
world order emerges, reconstructed by the human mind in a schizoid form. Drinking and
eating, bowel movements, fear-flight-fight, copulation and many other behaviors are animal
as well as human, but the human way of performing these operations encases them in
schizotypicality. All the behavior that is authentically and ineradicably human is
schizotypical.
Impulsiveness begins to become a vice, not a virtue, for the human. The organism comes to
realize that at any moment it has the capacity to ask itself questions. As frightful as the
experience is, the new human cannot resist the asking. The boundary of the brain
hemispheres is the main locus for the sensing of the gap. The left hemisphere, losing
slightly its near perfect coordination with the right hemisphere, accomplishes reflection.
The reflection is fearful, but effective.
FRIGHT, RECALL, AND AGGRESSION
Fright was all-pervading, both for what was happening inside the person and what happening
outside. Because of the terror and the split, a recollective memory leaped into being and
with it instant amnesia. Recollective memory was a form of control, occasioned by the delay
of instinct. Hominids might remember, but not recall. The voluntariness of recall summoned
up the mechanism of the repression of recall.
Meanwhile, the new creature began to talk to himself. (He was, it should be borne in mind,
a child without human antecedents). As soon as he questioned his own behavior, he became
superior to all hominids around him. He would think, I should do this, meaning we should,
and the all-important act of will was born. Will is the spearhead of the drive to control
oneself and the world. Now it was necessary to turn this weapon of will into a weapon of
control. For the flood of terror demanded relief. A rapidly growing stream of symbols
crossed the bridges between the two selves and flowed out to attach the symbols to the
outer world and especially that part of the outer world that was threatening destruction,
the turbulent skies and the effects they were producing on Earth.
Great fear was never to be eliminated from the human. It dominated his mind and set limits
upon all of his behavior. It was the fear of his own schizoid character and fear of the
outside world (and the gods). Of all unpleasantness, being two people is perhaps the most
continuously unpleasant. Out of such fear comes the desire to control and somehow stabilize
the situation, preferably by merging dissimilar selves into the original unity. Assuming
some success in achieving stability, any increase in internal or external fears will excite
the fear of loss of self-control.
In all of this a large role for human aggressiveness is prepared, for the world must be
controlled if anxiety is to be relieved. Or one must delude oneself into believing that it
is controlled and that one can take part in the control system to insure that it will work.
It was a formidable assignment. Still, for a madman nothing is impossible, as we shall see.
When the sensitive brute could not endure the intensity and scale of internal and external
disasters that confronted him, he explored, besides flight and fight, other means of
control to cope with reality. And immediately upon seeking control he found it in the new
exigencies of his constitution: in the ability to recall and forget, to perceive his
individuality and duality, in flights of fancy and in the symbolization of his lines of
communication within himself and between himself and the outer world.
When finally given respite from panic, these mechanisms could be used pragmatically, with
brilliant and instant success, to organize and invent for all aspects of life. The human
had become unconquerable, and lusted for conquest.
Ordinary animal fears, with which hominid was not unusually beset, given his many
abilities, were inadequate to move him into a new phase of development. With its
uncontrolled and widespread displacement, the great fear, however, threatened all existence
and, by inference, every life-value of the organism --procreation (sex), health, food,
sense of control and adaptability, and affectional ties of the primal horde. Hence, the
changed character of the mutant human affected all life-values and thereupon all the new
institutions that came to be.
The very fact that the changed hominid could reflect upon itself meant that it was not
itself, but split self. So to primordial fear was added existential fear, the fear of one's
own self-awareness, the distress of standing off from oneself, the basic schizophrenia of
humankind, largely delusory from the standpoint of physiology since the same organs served
the plural selves, but of course the schizophrenia was itself physiologically founded.
The origins of human nature were connected with the fearing components of hominid nature,
and the subsequent history of human nature, as a result, has been mostly unhappy. The
misery is generic, and therefore persists even when the rude clutch of disaster is
released, as it was for periods of time, early and lately. The structure of the readily
mutable mammal, the hominid, was such that a benevolent mutation, if conceivable, might
have been utterly destructive. Generally, nature adds in evolution; it complicates; the
easiest thing to capacitate in man was his brain; so he got a multiple head.
What happened to me? was the first question. Then came the gestalt of creation: it was
composed of awareness, symbolizing, and projection. The proto-human strove to recollect
himself amidst the turmoil of his kind and of nature. To exist and survive he had to
discover himself amidst the disruptions of memory. His subconscious now existed in a way
that it had not before, as a well of confusion, that overflowed with images that did not
belong to the present, that offered uncoordinated seemingly unrelated elements that were
taken care of by unmechanistic ways unfamiliar to animals. Before he could say I am, or I
think, therefore I am, he had to come to terms with a new subconscious that distorted all
perceptions of himself and others. His character was born of delusion.
The broken mind of the beast sought to restore itself, but could only do so under new
terms. Restoration of the previous state was destructive to the organism. A consciousness
had to be organized to seek materials to guide the organism in its disorganized condition.
It had to pull what it required from the forgotten, which was not really forgotten, but
which would no longer normally emerge in a flow of instinctive, directed, utilizable
unconscious information that characterized the hominid. The tortures and triumphs of memory
then began. The accommodation of an awareness to an uncontrollable but recognized history
began. The conscious and the willful assembled together upon this small island in a sea of
suppression.
Dominating the transition from a brutish to a human character was the psychological
mechanism of projection which sprang from the creative gestalt. Projection is the
imputation to another perceived existence or being of one's own motives and wishes. Once
projection is achieved, and a world of transactions, real and imaginary, is set up.
As his own self divided through self-awareness, man's gaze was fascinated by the sky. As he
questioned himself, he questioned the intangible and uncontrollable world of the skies and
all its mundane effects. The fact that the heavenly forces were abstract and impersonal
became a matter of concern much later for a few generations of philosophers. Primeval man
did not own a neuter gender. Everything in the world was alive. He did not have to acquire
an illusion permitting him to reify or anthropomorphize. For he never had made and had now
no reason to make a distinction between the living and the inorganic. Projection to objects
as living things was immediate. The gods came into being. What traits the gods came then to
possess were the actual traits of a god as witnessed, the traits (later on) of remembered
gods, the feelings and traits of mankind in chaos and birth, and such traits of life forms
on earth as mankind perceived and found to be analogous to his own and those of the gods.
What he saw in the sky confirmed and strengthened his projections and let them be
retrojected into his own traits even more strongly. Each time this happened, there was a
self-fulfilling prophecy, a growing obsessiveness, an enhanced belief that one was being
threatened by sinister forces (paranoia).
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Self-consciousness, the poly-ego, was a village built upon piles driven into the sands of
permanent existential anxiety. It was and is a patterned and integrated architecture
accommodating to the neural blockages that deter instinctive solutions. The neural
blockages are stabilized by socially elaborated mechanisms that take certain forms such as
rituals, theology, and logic. Further, self-awareness involved the use of symbols, first to
institute an inner communication system, and then to introduce transactions with others and
the outer world so as to keep the far-flung egos fully operative. Once achieved and begun,
physiochemically constituted and socially founded, self-consciousness is revived post-
natally in each generation.
The human poly-ego was both individual and social. Those possessed of it sensed themselves
unique, and at the same time identical with their groups. It produced an anarchism at one
extreme and a regimented discipline at the other that go far beyond the capabilities of the
mammals. Herein lies the eternal cooperation and conflict between the individual and the
group, which is the subject of so much philosophy, sociology and political science.
Self-consciousness in humans is not only awareness, as in a wakeful animal, but it is
awareness of the (other) self or selves as entities. Further, the self looks at itself and
at other people and objects with the same dynamic. Thus, in terms of psychopathology, the
self -- the poly-selves -- is a form of delusional thought in the schizophrenic category of
the split self. This usage may have developed as a convenience for considering therapy; but
in actuality the poly-ego is the only human self to exist and is a system of normal and
sane delusions. Since self-consciousness did not exist until the catastrophes began, the
fundamental breakdown occurred only once, this in the days of creation. Repeatedly, in
subsequent catastrophes, the mind might drift from its first moorings, but, with the help
of culture, it would arrive at another anchorage in a new set of self-conscious delusions.
An ancient set of events is incorporated in the story of Adam (man) and Eve (woman); after
having eaten of the tree of knowledge, they became shameful in their own eyes, shameful for
their nakedness. From a blissful lull of unthreatened self-consciousness they passed, under
the harsh command of their god, into a renewal of their self-awareness. In the millennia
before the new disaster struck them, they had apparently developed a religious and symbolic
world of a humanistic kind. This was the Garden of Eden, a Golden Age to other cultures,
where apparently threats to the poly-ego, now stabilized, were few. Analogously,
Giambattista Vico comments that it was the thunderbolting electricity of Jupiter that
produced the first Muse, who defined knowledge of good and evil, a power only later called
divination, [1] which then, much later, is regarded as a kind of superstition.
In the age of Yahweh, perhaps millennia afterwards, new catatstrophes of Exodus and the
wilderness occurred, and the Hebrew Deuteronomy declared, (28.27-9), The Lord will smite
you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind; and you shall grope at noonday, as
the blind grope in darkness. Thus whole groups of people might lose their ordinary minds,
but never their human minds. Typically, the blows bludgeoned the self-aware mind into
extreme pathological states (in human terms), but afterwards the mode of recovery was
always the same. The mechanisms of the human conscious proved to be functional not only in
obtaining relief from anxiety, but also at the same time in providing the goods of life.
The proto-typical madness was superior for coping. So the mechanisms of the conscious found
themselves to be generally released from their total service to emergency needs of
disastrous times. They came to be used pragmatically for many other purposes, including the
development of the useful arts and crafts and for social organization. Ultimately there
occurred an everyday dissociation of the emergency and pragmatic functions of the self-
aware ego.
The emergency functions, that are similar in effects to the superego, are more particularly
the primordial functions, ordinarily engrossed by theology. When a new disaster occurred,
when the polyego system again was deeply disturbed and dissolving, the old self displaced
the new pragmatic self and recapitulated the mechanisms of defense as they were employed in
the days of creation. In times of great stress and fright, it is the primordial human self
that takes command, not the unconscious nor the beast. A human organism will fall into a
catatonic coma or die before releasing the self-consciousness it received upon creation. It
will temporalize, symbolize, and control, up to the brink of eternity. Oblivion marks the
surrender or death of self-awareness.
The problems typical of the human species are in the regression of the ego-mechanisms to
their primeval but human state, and not in the resurgent total triumph of the hominid. The
unconscious, when reviewed, is seen to be the reservoir of hominid instincts and the
suppressed or forgotten materials of experience. However, it is commanded and transformed
by the primeval ego, even though physiologically coordinated with the aboriginal
instinctive animal.
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
Whence might come such lines as these of Baudelaire?
In those times when Nature in her bursting vigor Bore of herself each day such monstrous
children I would have loved to live with a younger giantess As at the feet of a queen, a
voluptuous cat [2] .
The corridors of art and culture everywhere echo with the cries and gasps of remote
recollections.
R. G. Hoskins, in his essays on schizophrenia, writes how patients describe their mental
illness:
Very commonly it is as if the conscious self had descended to some lower region where it is
no longer in control... The eyes are opened so that one seems to see back to the beginning
of creation. One seems to have lived perhaps in many previous existences.
Mnemosyne (Memoria), according to a Greek legend, was the daughter of Ouranos but she bore
the muses of the arts and sciences from Zeus, grandson of Ouranos and a much younger god.
Thus Greek cosmogony assigned memory as an immediate effect of creation. Memory would have
begun in the self-awareness of the gestalt of creation. Heavy terror worked to forge memory
and forgetting. Out of the material of all things, it hammered the deepest memories.
There was too much that was too bad to remember easily, and it was forgotten [3] . Also
too much was forgotten for even the unconscious sectors of the mind to bear. Recall may be
regarded as the most obvious and 'rational' function of the memory mechanism,
mnemotechnology; it operates, however, only if the recollection does not destabilize the
poly-ego. The 'forgotten, ' that is, the memories that tend to destabilize the ego's
confederational balance, provide essential subject-matter and forms to sublimate activity.
They force their way into remembrance via the routes of theology, myth, literature, the
practical arts and sciences, and social behavior.
The pride of man in a memory that is superior to that of the beasts is inordinate. Memory
is a weak, self-imposed tool for displaying material to the conscious in a light that
poorly reveals its sources. The special human memory, like everything else uniquely human,
is a device that the beast may not need. But the human must have it. He does not go around
picking his fundamental qualities like pretty spring flowers in a meadow.
Accompanying the primary amnesia of events themselves, is a secondary amnesia that is
associated with the forgetting of events. The amnesia of man came from the primal terrors
and set up the mechanism of denial, which first insists that nothing was forgotten, and
then persists in denying all sorts of traumatic memories, until we find him today the
congenital liar, lying both consciously and unconsciously.
Man does not remember his experiences as Hominid 'X, ' because the hominid had a
conditioned reflex system that typically registered reaction, not selection; they were too
boring and useless to recall; they were not layered by meanings, symbolized or
acculturated; they were not history.
Further, the shock of humanization was also a shock of de-hominization. Forgetting that we
were once hominids is part of the amnesia of the trauma of creation. The autonomous system
of selective (though usually only apparently so) memory began with the creation condition
which we chose to remember and the sublimation of the larger part of the events. All
cultures have creation stories. Before creation, man was clay or animal or part-god. The
gods, they tell us -- and what gods are not crazy -- give us our special schizoid minds.
The memories were in the brain, memories of all except the most trivial and fleeting of
events. They were diffused around the brain but could not be called up indiscriminately.
The call had to come from one of the poly-selves and then would be subject to a veto from
another self or from the central government of the selves. An endless complex track or
network became probably an index of symbols, an inner language. When this language was
developed as a political process, in communications with others, it formed an outer or
public symbolism or language. But this is only a small fraction of the inner language that
connects memories. In the public language that ultimately developed were contained clusters
of words that grew into creation stories, which purport to describe the days of creation of
the world and of humanity. We expect the stories to be heavily veiled accounts of a true
history, much like dreams that are internally distorted and censored but nevertheless lend
themselves to scientific interpretation up to a degree. We see in the need for creator gods
a determination to tell the truth in some way, to assert that the human was distinctly
born.
Also stories were told of the environment before and during creation. In the new public
language, the legends agree that there was a chaos, a formless, mindless order of the
world, going nowhere until the divine intervention. We see two types of important 'fact' in
this chaos. First, there is a reality, an Earth with a dense translucent encircling high
firmament clouds. Second, the human is not there but is about to appear. Man appears as the
canopy breaks and the gods appear.
Beyond this core of agreement, which I have not fully described here, the stories diverge.
Running them together is like reciting a stream of dreams, all apparently referring to a
single theme. This earliest extant public language is just what we would expect it to be,
and what dreams are like, too, and what the world often appears like to persons suffering
from mental illness. They hold a truth which can be deciphered.
The modern schizotype or schizophrene may get up from bed late because it takes hours to
sort out his dreams from his reality. Primordial homo schizo must have had the same
problem, and, if it were not for the fact that primates waste a lot of time anyhow, the new
human might have been victimized for this trait. But, on the 'positive' side, he acquired
many new displacements (by analogy) from his dreams, a great many wish-fulfillments that
encouraged his ambitions to control the world, and a number of incredible (to us)
believable orders (to himself) to sally forth and conquer the world.
To dream is to sleep, and, as the poet says, to sleep is to dream. Tinbergen says more
about sleep in humans:
Another innate displacement activity in man seems to be sleep. In low intensities, in the
form of yawning, it is of common occurrence in mild conflict situations. Just as in some
birds (avocet, oystercatcher, and other waders) actual sleep is an outlet in situations
where the aggressive instinct and the instinct of escape are simultaneously aroused.
Reliable and trained observers, among them Professor P. Palmgren of Helsingfors, have told
me that in situations of extreme tensions at the front, just before an actual attack,
infantrymen may be overcome by a nearly insurmountable inclination to go to sleep.
I can attest to this, having sleepily observed sleepers under the circumstances. I note,
too, that the Spartan warriors at Thermopylae, having sent home their allies and decided to
die in the approaching overwhelming assaults of the Persians, spent their time dreamily,
mutually combing their long tresses, much to the surprise of Persian scouts. Tinbergen
adds, then, that
Sleep, as is known from Hess's experiment, is a true instinctive act, depending on
stimulation of a centre in the hypothalamus. It is also in line with other instinctive acts
in that it is the goal of a special kind of appetitive behavior.
The human is sleepier, or at least sleeps much more deeply and determinedly, than animals
except when these hibernate. Sleep, dreams, hibernation, self-hypnosis in crisis
expectancy, drifting hazes of schizophrenic displacement, catatonic cultures, sleeping
culture pockets, and retreat from the dreaded or impossible; there is here an interrelated
complex that helps to index some of the catatonic control operations essential to homo
schizo.
THE STRUGGLE OF THE SELEVES
The ancestor of homo schizo carried a bilateralized brain; two generalized and equally
functioning hemispheres operated with a minimum of conflict. The cerebrum of Hominid 'X'
was large, perhaps too large already to escape conflict arising out of intra-brain and
central nervous system dyscoordination. Homo schizo inherited a larger brain, with
immediate problems of electro-chemical and nutritional supply, and of neuro-transmission
speeds. In homo schizo the brain conflict evades the earlier physiological compensation by
moving out in all directions. So it gets less rest, is more continuously restless, awake
and asleep. Rest often takes the form of diversion. As already pictured, specialization
within the brain was sharply increased, and right-handedness developed. A general feeling
of fear, inadequacy, and weakness was instituted that demanded obsessive attempts at self-
control, which extended outwards as attempts to control the environment.
The mind of the hominid was shattered. The quantitative leap was great enough to be termed
a quantavolution, a qualitative change. One of the sometimes enviable and endearing traits
of higher mammals is their consistency of behavior. But we are often so bored with this
quality that we search for the smallest indications of character in horses, dogs, and apes.
After a night in town a drunk can mount a donkey and be carried asleep over the mountains
to home; the animal is 'given his head. ' Many species, we note admiringly, have 'minds of
their own. ' Actually, they do not; it is easy to trace the instinctive sources of the
behavior. They do not perform many behaviors where doubt and decision are present. We can
assume that the hominid was not plagued by indecision nor driven by strong needs to control
himself and the world.
The human mind that eventuates is a troubled regime. The ego is a would-be dictator whose
position is shaky. He can be toppled at any time when his foreign possessions - the outer
world - revolt and attack him, and his inner subordinates have sufficient autonomy to join
the foreign alliance or to launch a rebellion on their own initiative. Hence we say that
the hominid mind broke down in quantavolution and the human ego, basing itself on the large
'lower-level' elements of the central nervous system, grew out of the chaos of the higher
level elements. The ego, then, was never hominidal and never absolute. It came into
existence as a suzerain and would-be dictator, and can be toppled or changed as its
components grant or withhold loyalty. A great step of the suzereign ego is to consolidate
its control by seizing and managing the right hand. In a typical neglect of transactional
philosophy, it is conceived that righthandedness is logical inasmuch as the right side of
the body is controlled by the dominant left brain hemisphere. May it not be more logical to
conceive of the right hand as being developed by the left brain in order to strengthen the
dominance of the left brain? Right-handedness is genetically predisposed, but only because
the left cerebral hemisphere is genetically dominant. The left brain commissioned the right
hand to be commanding officer in order to bolster its shaky regime.
Similarly, a struggle of the selves took place outside the mind, in the environment, in
outer space. In this arena, we see the stars and planets, the comets, the clouds, the moon
and sun. Homo schizo first saw these objects in a way that no hominid could see them. He
was, we recall, striving to establish a dictator-ego, preferably to carry himself back to
his golden age of instinctive bliss. The situation was, however, chaotic, and other selves
were offering themselves as candidates for authority, or worse, were practicing anarchists.
Here is where symbolism might play a major role as a ally of the dictator ego. If
everything was to be called by name, and the code for the names were locked in the code
counting and sorting computer of the brain, then whoever held the computer key was the
master of the brain and body. So language was seized upon and developed by the left brain.
With symbols and a strong right hand, a viable regime could be and was established.
Too, there were no limits to the symbolism. As fast as fear erupted and displaced itself,
even to far space, the symbols could pursue it and control it. To name an object is to rule
it. Always the principal ego was to be an uncertain despot, yet to be a magnificent one, on
whose infinite territory not the sun, not even the stars, ever set. The substance of all of
these operations may have taken time to occur and be realized by the self-aware human. But
the implications of them were already present upon the gestalt of creation.
BECOMING TWO-LEGGED
Humans probably became totally committed to stand and walk on two legs upon genesis. They
were shifting their anatomy to conform to the global reconstitution of their mentation.
Students have now shown that australopithecus was bipedal, and feel confident that homo
erectus was as well. Hominid 'X', the common ancestral form of them and the human, can be
imagined as preadapted to the point where he might, if he would, be bipedal. Like
handedness, as soon as the ego-struggle occurred, bipedalism was pressed into service by
the dominating left brain.
The human stance is unique, but the anatomy of standing is only presumed to be unique. We
remind ourselves that the Indian feral child, Kamala, was totally adapted to quadruped
motion to the age of perhaps eight years, and several years of training were required to
get her to stand and walk voluntarily. Her muscles, tendons, hands, feet, knees, and
probably her total body posture were quadrupedal. She walked on her tough palms with a full
heel-to-toe motion.
A number of physiological and anatomical changes accompany bipedalism, but perhaps all are
ex post facto, such as the stretching of lungs and swelling of blood vessels to the head.
Most likely, bipedalism is an adaptation for which an intense determination is required.
There are no commonsense reasons for it. Kamala was comfortable on all fours and could run
well. The human infant, of course, crawls for a year and more before being able to stand up
and toddle. Only for sophisticated human activities is bipedalism superior, which presumes
that humanism came first. Primates and other mammals are physically and socially more
intimate than humans, even including the great cats within their own families; they might
be called more 'tangiphile. '
Bipedalism had some motive in the schizoid complex, in which aversiveness to others and
ambivalence are prominent. Standing erect is a gesture of retreat and removal from others,
which individuates beings. It is also a threatening and offensive posture, including the
conspicuous chest-thumping that fiction-writers overrate in gorillas. It goes along with
(deliberately) smelling less, and with offering less in the way of hindquarters and front-
features to nuzzle and smell. It encourages genital privacy because the hand and upper
torso can exercise protective movements. The first homo schizo, one may conclude, would
voluntarily seize upon bipedalism, if it were not an already confirmed behavior.
Bipedalism, therefore, matched the character of homo schizo and he is determined to master
it. But what was this determination or voluntariness or will? Man was supposed to possess a
will; philosophers and hoi polloi have thought so for thousands of years. Recently,
however, the will has been removed by the philosophers of determinism, although retained by
the masses. Did events occur during the gestalt of creation to give humans a will, yet
permit it to be taken away under later rational analysis?
VOLUNTARISM
The 'will' in hominid, we postulate, must be a 'want, ' typical of animals, therefore an
instinct - basically a will to feed, fornicate, flee or fight. In the disaster of creation,
the new human achieved a new primary 'want, ' to control himself and the world, to rid
himself of fright. All of hominid's will - the aforesaid 'Four F's' - is subordinated,
rendered secondary, to the primary will to control.
Since the will to control is conveyed to a bewildering variety of human displacements and
identifications, it acquires a new complex aesthetics that deludes humans as to its nature.
People (philosophers and theologians among them) came to think that they were dealing with
a qualitatively distinct mechanism, whereas it was a highly diffused aspect of all human
activity, capable of exponentially more fixations than the simple 'Four F's' of the beast.
Some acts of obsession and compulsion came to be called 'will, ' when they pertained to
objectives of positive or negative value. These, however, if we ignore value preferences
and their large variety, can be reduced to the great gestalt of instinct-delay, split self,
existential fear, and consequent promiscuous and obsessive need to control.
The world is as will, then, just as Hegel said. It is a delusional creation of man's poly-
ego confederation playing with its kaleidoscope. This game, with its dexterity and
intensity, put all other animals to shame. And individual men came to be distinguished
infinitely, in their applications of will, by the way their particular minds shook their
kaleidoscopes. So that one man's iron will was to win a battle, another's to win a certain
mate, another's to gather money, another's to die, another's to conquer will itself by
willing nothingness. Much of this diversity probably occurred promptly after the time of
the primeval gestalt. Its diversity elaborated into virtuosity, which doubtlessly played a
part in intimidating all surrounding conscious animal forms, including our erstwhile
hominid cousins.
DIFFUSION OF THE GESTALT
The hypothesis pursued here is that the gestalt of creation happened to one or two
hominids, and diffused as a new dominant gene system. Were this proven untrue, we should
proceed to a hypothesis of changed atmospheric constants. If this should be proven
incorrect, we should retreat to a theory of psychosomatism, that combines psychosomatism,
the 'omnipotence of thought, ' and potentiation of everpresent lines of development of
essential living matter. If this idea should be overthrown, we would put up a last-ditch
defense with a purely cultural theory of catastrophic fright overturning the hominid mind.
All of these are conceived to have been quantavolutionary changes, occurring quickly and
hologenetically, from the one Hominid 'X' species to the present homo sapiens schizotypus.
Further, it is likely that elements of all of three entered into the actual rise of homo
schizo and his further development up to the gates of history. The theory of mutation-by-
mutation, adaptation, rung-by-rung, millions-of-years' evolution that is generally held
today seems to be mistaken and useless. In the quantavolution of homo schizo, what happened
to the Hominid 'X' ancestors, and to diverging strains such as homo erectus and
Neanderthal? Many mutated, sickened, and died under the catastrophic conditions that were
required to generate the new dominant gene system of mankind. Furthermore, the character of
the new species was such as to intimidate the hominids and drive them into marginal living
niches. Inasmuch as interbreeding was common, the human population would contain for some
centuries or millennia hominid members and human members with hominid genes.
The sharp differences between the two types of creatures would encourage eugenics as a
matter of course. There are many examples, in social and historical practice, of obligatory
or authorized infanticide and of celibacy enforced upon special groups, tribes, serfs or
slaves. Holy wars have been many. The hominids, then, insofar as they were not eliminated
by segregation and extirpation, could have been subjected to absolute interdiction by the
rules of birth and social nurture.
In a quantavolution by atmospheric change, the scenario of the gestalt would have been
replicated in many hominidal settings. A number of humans would have promptly appeared. The
transition from hominid to homo would nevertheless proceed under the conditions just
stated. Might the mutations required for humanization have occurred in several hominidal
settings, and thereupon and later be fed into the human gene pool via miscegenation? We
would then witness, for example, a fire-making band joining a speaking band, from which
speaking fire-makers would be born. But the theory of homo schizo requires that his traits
should fall out from a central trait change, which we have pinpointed as the splitting of
the self. The single genetic incident is fully explanatory, and it cannot admit of any but
minor exceptions to the hologenesis of traits.
THE DOUBLE CATASTROPHE
The necessity of natural catastrophe has been recognized, if a critical mutation of species
is to be experienced. In other works and in earlier pages, I have presented the theory and
evidence for such catastrophes. Strictly speaking, this external catastrophism is distinct
from the internal catastrophism of creation. Man is a catastrophized animal: both external
catastrophes and the internal catastrophe of his genesis have awarded him this title.
Confusion between the two types of catastrophe can occur, as it did in some earlier
passages that I have published. For, not only is there the outer chaos and the inner chaos
but there is also the overlapping of the natural catastrophes with the earliest experience
of homo schizo. He speaks the language of catastrophe out of experience.
Critics of quantavolutionary theory can turn this around and say that homo schizo, being
what I have said him to be, naturally imagines all kinds of natural catastrophes to have
occurred to which he was witness; that is, he would normally have hallucinated world-
destroying catastrophes; that is, he would normally have hallucinated world-destroying
catastrophes. For instance, Fenichel alludes in his Psychoanalysis to the manic's desire to
control the world and Sebastian de Grazia in his Political Community to the ever-present
ideology of the destruction and reconstruction of the world. Can I not keep the skies swept
clean and in order, leaving catastrophes to occur solely in the mind?
To this, I would respond that homo schizo's stories of great disasters are too well
supported, and too well detailed, to be either imaginary or highly exaggerated tales. It
might be expected, too, that people who were genetically frightened, to appease their
fears, would tell stories of a golden age and a gradual progressivism of mankind, which
they do; these are partly there, but by their temporary historical framing they lend
support to the disaster stories, so that both types of recollections must be accorded
historicity, and thereupon further analyzed.
Because the terrors were sensible manifestations of high-energy forces, delusion and
reality were forever commingled in the new species. The range of thought and sense material
was great, including as it did the practically infinite combinations of sense data of the
high-energy events and the immediately and infinitely symbolized associations of the events
with the self and group. Not only are the earliest records loaded with catastrophic events
and languages, but so also are Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies.
The great variety of detail in man's innumerable culture traits is an expectable and
understandable resultant of all the psychological and real events attending the creation.
For every controlled and uncontrolled construction that the mind emplaces upon events and
objects, there are real events to fit into it. De Santillana and H. von Dechend explicitly
commend a large, though unmeasurable, quantity of historicity in Ovid's work on
metamorphoses. The palaetiology of the concept of metamorphosis may rest upon an abundance
of mutated and damaged organisms accompanying atmospheric and radionic disasters. To hear
it told, life was never dull illo tempore.
A portion of all religious expression and practice relates to such quantavolutions, among
other things. These spectra horribilem then serve as religious lessons, teaching groups and
individuals of the punishing power of the gods. The same events serve to connect the
celestial with the mundane, inasmuch as sky images and stars are connected with the mostly
terrible changes. The lack of control over mutants raises the level of terror. Therefore,
what appear to non-quantavolutionists to be unconnected, inconsistent, and unexplainable
varieties of the production of human minds here and there throughout the world, acquire
under quantavolutionary theory a simple logic within a single framework of explanation.
A PRIMORDIAL SCENARIO
Ideally, the general scenario of the hologenesis of homo schizo would provide a highly
specific scenario such as the following:
A pregnant twenty-one year old female of the species homo erectus frater (that is, Hominid
'X') is a member of a band of thirteen that gains its livelihood by gathering nuts, berries
and herbs, and hunting small animals and choice insects in a swamp habitat. It eats roasted
products of wild fires, even spreading them to harvest a territory. It has no tools, not
even reusable clubs. An aggressive older male leads the group, which has hegemony over some
fifty square miles of territory. The group straggles about. The large mammals hardly
disturb them, for they put on a brave front, screeching, gesticulating, baring their small
teeth, and dodging adeptly. They are tree and rock climbers, and swamp floppers. They are,
in effect, too much of a nuisance to bother with and not tasty to eat.
But as the camera zooms in upon an abri, laying off a swamp, one female, 'Ma, ' is dropping
an infant. For a long time, which no memory exists to appreciate, the skies have been
falling; the waters are rising; fires are frequent; volcanoes are bursting asunder; and the
animals, as always now, are agitated. They do not know it, but the fall-out of radiation is
heavy. Many die without seeming cause. Many infants are born dead. Many dead animals of the
water, sky and air are discoverable and eatable, though some may be radiated and chemically
toxic. So living is easy, but stresses are heavy.
Ma bears forth two monsters, identical twin males, glabrous, their heads noticeably larger,
their movements and cries unprecedented in volume and queer. Ma and others nurture them and
they survive.
They are the bane of the band. They seem never to grow and their demands are insistent and
unending. Crowed by them, the band cannot kill or abandon them, but as if by order of a
superior, give them what they ask for, so far as possible. They are tough and wiry but not
a match at first for the other young of the band, who begin to breed before these are
mature. Still they have a strange power and dominate most of the band, exhibiting an
aggressive acquisitiveness. Their command of screeches and gestures is far superior to
everyone else's.
They behave in unexpected ways. They will carry fire farther, preserve clubs, go out of
their way to spy on game, remember the nature and sources of comestibles, pack, store and
carry provisions, and use their resources aggressively to dominate the whole group
including the present leader. They hurl pebbles at friend and foe alike. As if they can see
how they appear, they stand on their hind legs and howl needlessly, with their right arms
shaking a club, apparently with intent, at the sky, at holes in the ground, and against the
winds. They do not forget, and discriminate savagely among the group, for one thing raising
Ma to a status higher than that of anyone else, male or female, rewarding her for favors
long past.
The time of reproduction comes, tardily. The siblings, who have fought off together the
approaches of others, mate with their mother and every female about, and other monsters
come forth, bawling. Nothing is too good for the several mutant brats that issue, and their
pressure for variegated responses is such that the band actually loses hominid members, by
premature death and fighting. But in the next dozen years, the band grows by ten monsters,
several of them out of hominids by the male mutants, and includes only six servile
hominids, who are treated like retarded children.
The mutants prattle incessantly among themselves, gather and hunt successfully, carry flags
or branches that intimidate even large animals, not to mention other hominids, give Ma a
decent and jealous burial, then dig up her skull and set it nicely in a niche of an abri
that has become their headquarters, surrounding the whole with rocks and letting only the
docile enter. When the group goes off on long journeys, the young, the sick and the old are
left at the abri, comforted by Ma's skull and continuous fire. They spend their time
attracting living things to their garbage pit and dispatching them; they chant, they make
rope, break stone, and whittle lances.
There is little more to be witnessed. As we take our leave, we are satisfied that a human
culture, up to the standards of the twentieth century in most respects, will manifest
itself in a scenario of fifty years into the future.
The mutants -- call them homo schizo -- ill number three hundred, living among a dozen
bands, ruling these and drawing the remaining hominids for services, and tribute, possibly
cannibalizing them when convenient. The infectious family will have seeded the most
attractive of the females and spread out for a thousand square miles around.
Some hominids who are docile, or children of the mutants, remain; their germ plasm will
soon carry schizoid genes and they are themselves trained to resemble the homo schizo types
in behavior. The others flee or are killed for resisting progress in some sphere of life.
Unlucky the hominid band that broke away with no mutant.
Large animals can now be trapped and killed. No natural enemies exist, except
microorganisms, to threaten survival. There is, however, the enemy within, for homo schizo,
when seized by the will, attacks his own kind. Several bands are to be found hundreds of
miles away, led by people who have fled or been driven from the homeland.
Only the gods above who animate the violent forces of nature are respected and communicated
with by declamations, exclamations, obeisance, gifts, chants, and dancing. This
polymorphously perverse people, their instincts unleashed, are driven to try whatever comes
to mind; they are capable of stressing themselves inordinately and setting up and breaking
down habits continually.
If the reader is interested in comparing scenarios, he may refer back to the evolutionary
ladder scenario set forward earlier or to one of the quantum speciation school of thought,
in Steven Stanley's New Evolutionary Timetable (157-8).
QUANTAVOLUTION AND HOLOGENESIS
The human probably was born from Hominid 'X' in a brief incident that, for reasons given
elsewhere, might be placed at 13,000 years ago, perhaps even a millennium or two later, but
also perhaps within a 300,000 years period earlier. It would be well to fix the Holocene
boundary at the point where the humans appeared. The aggregate of data on australopithecus
and homo erectus promotes them to adjunct humans, also descended form Hominid 'X. ' Hence,
in the preceding chapter, they were projected up the ladder of time.
John Pfeiffer, in some unusual passages, tells of how competent are the economics and how
full the minds of the people of today, the Bushmen and the aboriginal Australians, deemed
the simplest of humans, though living in an environment incomparably more difficult than
what it once was [4] . He reports on their high mobility, the thousands of square
kilometers over which they regularly range. He tells us too, of the charming dream of Louis
Leakey, of a kind of dynamuseum, as I once termed such, where visitors would, each week, be
transported into a different stage of human development, living as an early
australopithecine one week, and the next week according to another way of life. Week by
week it goes -- as if time could be collapsed and we might develop so quickly, which is
true enough to be suggestive.
The homeland of mankind cannot yet be ascertained, even though we agree with Washburn and
Moore that man was born only once, at one time, in one place [5] . We speculate that out
of Hominid 'X', whose behavior and appearance were distinctly different from those of the
hominids, proto-humans, and modern humans of whom we know at present, there came a
macroevoluted or quantavoluted type who intermingled with and dominated these families in
short order. In Chaos and Creation I drew a schematic diagram of the continents of the
Earth as they were once gathered together in an all-land world. In this Pangea there occurs
a location which can only be imagined today because of the ocean's opening up and the
continents separating. The Caribbean region and the entrance to the Mediterranean dividing
Europe and Africa were probably a single landed area with shallow seas, the legendary and
geological Tethyan Sea.
This kind of area can be regarded as a possible original home of mankind, and I shall
sketch here an idea of it. Basic to the argument is that Hominid 'X' existed in numbers
everywhere and became human before the globe cracked, before the continents moved to their
present positions, and that all of these events happened between 14,000 and 11,000 years
ago. The defense of this time scale is carried in Chaos and Creation, The Lately Tortured
Earth, and Solaria Binaria.
Our choice of location may be preferable to the African rift, a treasury of early finds
because it has been exposed by geological erosion. Our guess may also be preferable to the
speculation of Thomas Huxley (accepted by the polymath co-founder of communism, Frederick
Engels) that mankind originated in a now sunken area called Lemuria, a presumed tropical
zone of the West Indian Ocean alluded to in Indian and African legend; this idea does not
account so well for northwestern man. The location is more likely, too, than the high
Iranian plateau, which more plausibly provided a refuge for disaster survivors and only
much later a mobilization area for the later descent of Indo-Europeans towards the west and
south.
A race 'Atlanticus' may be represented in the proto-Mediterranean type and the aboriginal
Europeans, North Africans, and seemingly Caucasoid traces of types reported in earliest
American depictions and myths. The homeland is postulated at a point not too far from the
focus of Atlantean legends. It follows educated guesses by early anthropologists such as
Frobenius, who thought that man moved first from West to East and then back in later times.
Nor does it contradict the evidence of relative movements and superposition of fossil data
in the fossil and cultural discoveries of the past fifty years.
The Americas are usually considered to have been barren of human life until Holocene times,
or until late in human development. I think it more likely that existing incidental
evidence of man's presence in the Americas will ultimately be augmented to the point of
acceptance. At present we have hundreds of items such as inter-racial picture albums
(Wuthenau's Unexpected Faces), an incredible upper left second molar associated with
pliohippus and other Pliocene animals, in Nebraska (evaluated between pithecanthropus and
Neanderthal), and Hooton's claim of finding negroid skulls among pre-Columbian inhabitants
of Mexico.
With a compacting of time, what appear to be long gaps in human development will disappear
as illusions. It is probably no more implausible than other theories, that
australopithecus, evolving with its Hominid 'X' form, and neo-humans moved through the then
tip of South America, also down throughout Africa, thence through then-joined India,
Madagascar, Antarctica, Australia, and eastwards, also, through what is now the Near East,
Arabia and the South Asian islands.
Neanderthal's mixed hominidal-human group would have moved eastwards following the shores
of the Tethyan belt through Turkey, Iran and China. Homo erectus, in combined human-
hominidal form, would have struck North and South to the farthest extremities of Greenland
and South America, and in a wide sweep westwards through Africa into the now South Asian
Islands and farther north to China and beyond.
Beyond here means, by the Pangean theory, all the land, into which elements of all races
found their way, which was exploded and blasted away in the greatest of catastrophes, that
which saw the material constituting the Moon pulled out largely from what is now the
Pacific Ocean Basin. Once again, the reader is referred to the statement of this theory in
the aforesaid volumes.
I have mentioned earlier the controversial works of Ameghino that claimed an extremely old
date for the fossils of men of the Pampas. Nor can the halt always lead the blind; a
radiometric dating by the uranium-thorium method gave an age of 81,000 years for a human
tool made of mammoth bone. It is from Old Crow Basin in the Yukon, and was reported by
Richard Morlan of the Ottawa National Museum of Man. In California and Mexico, claims of
around a quarter of a million years of age have been made for two sites of human operations
[6] . Artifacts at the Calico site (California) were assigned by uranium-thorium tests an
age of 200,000 * 20,000 years. Similar dates were assigned by both fission-track dating of
volcanic material and uranium dating of a camel pelvis to the Hueyatlaco (Vasequillo,
Mexico) site containing sophisticated stone tools, by a second group of scientists [7] .
Once again radiometric dating is thrown open to question, but also the persistent, and I
believe incorrect, theory that humans came to the Americas at a very late date following
the humanization of the Old World.
THE NEW HUMAN BEING
Upon a probable mutation, which has been described, the hominid was subjected to a general
instinct-delay that left only lower-level and instinctive operations largely untouched (but
not unreachable). The instinct-delay can be termed depersonalization, which was the first
feeling of homo schizo, to be promptly succeeded by a splitting of the mind into multiple
entities that ultimately became a typical human poly-ego. The depersonalization aroused the
new creature to a high level of fear, a general anxiety, an existential fear, integral to
its being, ineradicable. The response to the fear was a grasping for control of the selves
to reestablish the former hominid consciousness and its instinctive nature. This was also
permanent. The human was marked by a mania for control.
The control-mania could not stop with the selves, because the selves did not stay with the
body. In the struggles among the personae, the whole world was embroiled; a splatter of
displacements occurred. Streams of affect or identifications were ejected, with attachments
ensuing, minimally at the level of attention. Attention extended to habit and to obsession
and to a sensing of property, all being mental strategies to fix upon objects to control,
thence relief of anxiety. The 'return on the investments' in real or sensed or illusory
affect consummates the transactions, no matter whether with people, objects, or spirits;
the transactions could be termed, also, projections and retrojections.
The outcomes of this unceasing and uniquely human transactional process are numerous. They
can be grouped into:
a. Perception and attention with typical overlappings into perception disorders,
hallucinations and illusions.
b. Thought, logic and analogy, moving into rationalizations, delusions and thought
disorders.
c. Selective, recallable memory, often employing amnesia for fear-reduction. d. Emotional
ambivalence respecting all persons and things, a mild anhedonia and general negativism,
anxiety-freighted, as distinguished from the hedonic animal.
e. Aversion or the non-acceptance of apparent prima facie resolutions of human
relationships, including paranoia with its fearful denial of retrojected affect and the
substitution of alternative hypotheses of threat.
f. Psychosomatism, the stressing of the body to achieve higher control levels, often with
healing and destructive effects.
g. Guilt and punishment, ranging among all persons, objects and spirits to discipline and
erase fear.
h. Discipline and work as an outcome of attention, habit, and obsession.
i. Drug addiction for anxiety-therapy and orgiasm. j. Anxiety, which continually presents
problems for solution, and, when overabundant and impractical, engenders neuroses,
neurasthenia, epilepsy, and depression.
k. Internal speech, the coding of information bits and sets, in time and space, for quick
retrieval by association or for computation, including speech disorders when pieces of code
are compulsively expelled as speech.
l. Language, public speech, to signal and control the outside world, real and delusional,
using internal code elements that others agree upon.
m. Sublimation, the elaboration of symbolic activity in a low-anxiety area of
displacements.
n. Basal activities closely paralleling earlier primate behavior, such as eating,
sexuality, mother-love, aggression, and fear-flight resulting from immediate threats,
except that these activities are continuously subject to uniquely human interventions.
In the outpouring of his new nature, the proto-human thus exhibited new methods of handling
large portions of the range of animal behavior. He could think about, talk about, and do
something about a world of problems of which his ancestors were unaware. He would give a
new aspect to all the ordinary activities of the earlier hominid. However, if eternal
'angst' be considered as a cost, the new person paid heavily for his virtuosity.
Notes (Chapter 4: The Gestalt of Creation)
1. The New Science, 82.
2. La G‚ante, in Baudelaire, Scarte, ed., Baltimore: Penguin, 1961, 25.
3. A. De Grazia, Palaeoetiology of Fear and Memory, in Milton, op. cit., 31-46.
4. Op. cit., 210.
5. From Ape to Man; cf H. H. Wilder, Pedigree of the Human Race, N. Y.: Holt, 1927, 156-7;
E. A. Hooton, Apes, Men, and Morons, London, 1938, 185.
6. Ruth D. Simpson, 20 Anthropological J. Canada 2( 1982), 8.
7. Virginia Steen-McIntyre et al., 16 Quarternary Res. (1981), 1.
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIVE
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
In dreaming, the human brain works fast, conjuring plots and actions that would be not only
physically impossible but also temporally prolonged. Persons who have narrowly escaped an
abrupt death sometimes exclaim, My whole life passed before me in an instant. Many creative
artists and inventors, whether in the physical or social field, refer to their
visualization or conceptualization of a total product in a moment of intuition.
Such occurrences point toward a theory of cultural hologenesis: if human, then holistic
thought; if holistic thought, then holistic behavior; if holistic behavior, then collective
instant culture, or at least a culture that develops as rapidly as the acting out of dream
and thought sequences can be managed.
A culture -- a group mode of mentation and behavior -- arose promptly with homo schizo.
Just as man became psychologically holistic upon his origination, so did he become
culturally holistic. Human culture was global from its beginnings. Culture was schizoid and
remains so.
The expansion of homo schizo geographically and culturally proceeded rapidly. Three hundred
people, the number achieved in the first fifty years by the scenario of the last chapter,
could, under optimal conditions, reach into the billions within a thousand years. Some
millions probably did breed. His spatial movements, again if under minimal constraints,
could carry him in ever-widening circles to the farthest points of the globe. Like
population, spatial occupation probably did proceed exponentially.
For reasons given in my study of Chaos and Creation, it is unlikely that the point from
which he was launched upon the conquest of Earth and its denizens is presently meaningful;
the continents and the aquatic basins have shifted. His point of origin may be set at
present-day zero degrees latitude, zero degrees longitude, without contravening any mass of
evidence to the contrary. Neither the Iranian Plateau nor the rift valleys of Africa are
any longer candidates for the spot. The mouth of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean Sea,
if these were joined instead of being separated by the Atlantic Ocean, would be a likely
homeland, but to argue the issue farther than we have done in the last chapter would lead
far afield.
PROTO-CULTURE
The question is, how could homo schizo, granted his rapid increase in numbers and
territory, accomplish the acculturation of which we speak? We know something of his
psychology. How would this originate a culture?
What we have to demonstrate is that within a century or two, the major structures of
culture would be necessarily, recognizably, and irreversibly present wherever the human
race was found. These would be implicit in any one of many things that must derive from
self-awareness: speech, tools, voluntary organization, religious symbolism, new
constructions, movable property, fire tactics, time-factoring.
The first culture was a set of wild moves in all directions guided by displaced instincts
and an intense need to stabilize the psychic world. It was like the output of a newly
designed computer that had to be newly programmed to process data that had to be freshly
gathered in order to satisfy the new program.
Usually the search for culture begins with a search for tools, because tools can be hard
and enduring, and because they exhibit a deliberate human effort to command materials to
effect a purpose. We should acknowledge first, though, the inevitable and greatly
convenient built-in tool kit of a human. The first human was a tool-user whose body was his
portable tool-kit. The hands of the ape are not put to many of their human uses. The human
made tools of his fingers, hands, arms, feet, back and shoulder muscles, tongue, spittle,
voice-box --indeed of all his senses and organs that he could command. Even today in a
highly technical society where there is 'a tool for every purpose, ' the built-in tool-kit
is continuously in use in ways far exceeding the imagination and capabilities of the
primates. One can indeed conceive of a culture without artifacts. But in reality man must
go on to make other tools. He has no choice.
Like man's anatomical tools, his mechanical tools are projections of nature and analogies
to it. They exhibit a sense of the future and represent the obsessiveness of humans. The
tool is pragmatically rational if, in addition, it is functional (efficient) and conserves
resources. A tool, then, is a socially transferable physical object believed by its user to
confer a larger control over the world than he could otherwise achieve. A mechanical tool
is a type of social tool, also, and there is some merit to defining a social tool as an
organization of other people believed to add to the user's control of the world.
Who ports a club, supports a culture. He remembers to carry it, and foresees a use for it;
so he has memory and foresight. The club is a versatile tool against living things and
obstructions; it extends the arm and gives leverage. It has to be produced; a skill is
involved, so we have homo faber. It is one's own, so we have a property right. It is a
coercive threat; it is a sign of fight more than flight, so it communicates a sign of power
and authority. As the batons of upper-paleolithic man evidence, the club converts readily
to a work of art, employing symbolism of lines, geometry, living things, and carved
depictions of the phallus. The club reaches into the sky to connect with shooting stars and
comets, as in the snake-entwined rods of Hermes and Moses.
Thus the simplest tool, the club, represents the major areas of human interest: skill,
subsistence, economics power, safety, authority, sexuality, religion, and aesthetics. It is
required, however, that it be carried. If we knew when the club was first carried, we would
have a sound basis for fixing the gestalt of creation in time. Alas there is no earliest
club; wood rots quicker than bone; we have only the aforesaid early bone batons. We have
practically nothing belonging to the earliest man, nor ropes, skins, bamboo constructions,
and so on; all subtle evidence is gone, leaving chipped stones and stone mounds.
Our statements, such as these about the club, must be highly speculative, anchored mainly
by a theory of human origins and nature, and by retrojections of tribal practices today.
Tool kits of different cultures might be counted. Leroi-Gourhan has estimated the oldest
cultures, the Acheulian, to have possessed 26 stone tools, the Mousterian Neanderthals to
have 63, and the succeeding modern type to have 93. These kits do not include all of the
tools by any means - not skins, vines, ropes, gut, shells, bamboo, leaves, clubs, wood
levers, wood slides, bones, hair, fur, paints, glues and so forth. E. H. Man's survey of
the isolated and simple-living Andaman Islander a century ago revealed no more tools of the
stone type but more made of the material that would have been destroyed by time and nature.
Such tools might raise the given numbers by a factor of five, giving 130, 315 and 465
which, averaging (for who can say what determined the ratio in each case), gives some 300
tools in earliest known human cultures. Then add the tool chest in the human body. We can
take it for granted that the earliest human who used any tools, used many.
With such material uncovered from, or imputed to, paleolithic man, a world of intellectual,
emotional, ritualistic and mundane variety can be contemplated. An engraved ox rib from
Pech de l'Az‚ was called Acheulian and dated at 300,000 years by F. Bordes, and in 1982
Pietro Gaietto published in Genoa a treatise on pre-historic sculpture [1] . There he
moves the earliest artistic works of mankind a million and a half years back to the pebble
culture of australopithecus and homo erectus. He argues that the earliest busts and menhirs
are as decipherable as the earliest utensils, and exposes abundant evidence of artistic
mentation in material of a type hitherto disregarded and cast aside by paleoanthropologist.
Appearing first in what may be artificial modifications of naturally suggestive stones,
they develop successively in pre-Neanderthal, Neanderthal, and homo sapiens excavations.
Working independently, L. G. Freeman and R. G. Klein, University of Chicago
anthropologists, announced a year later the discovery at El Juyo (Spain) of a sanctuary
containing a probable altar, weapons, house-hold tools, animal relics, and a stone
sculpture. The sanctuary was dated at 14,000 B. P. and the bust depicted a two-faced
creature, half smiling man and half cat. It resembles a number of Gaietto's sculptures.
Gaietto's controversial findings conform to my theory here, lending more evidence 1) of the
humanness of the hominids, 2) of cultural hologenesis, 3) of a persisting interest,
amounting to an obsession, in two-headed and two-faced persons, that may denote wonderment
over the self-awareness of homo schizo, 4) of concurrent cultural and physio-psychological
human genesis, and 5), although he does not question the conventional long-term chronology,
of the cultural homogeneity of paleolithic beings and therefore of a short elapsed time
since humans quantavoluted.
Even though he believes in darwinian gradualism in human development, Andre Leroi-Gourhan
can say of his study on prehistoric religions that
Man, from his formation up to our times, began and developed reflection, that is, the
ability to translate the material reality around him by means of symbols... There is no
good reason to deny to paleolithic man a preoccupation with mystery, if only because their
intelligence, of the same nature if not of the same degree of homo sapiens, implies the
same reaction in the face of the abnormal, the unexplained. Here, facts exist, many of
them, which show that from his first moments, homo sapiens (or his immediate predecessor)
behaves like modern man. The indicators involve not only religion, but also techniques,
habitations, art, self-adornment; they create, by contrast with that which precedes, an
intellectual ambiance in which we recognize ourselves at first glance [2] .
He is saying that modern man has been basically unchanged from his beginnings. But the
beginnings for him go back millions of years and we assert that the evidence of a long
period is almost entirely wanting.
S. A. Semonov, in his work of 1973 on Prehistoric Technology, attempted an analysis of the
stages of technological development followed by mankind. He perceived seven tendencies,
which he believed to have followed one another over a long time. First a manufacturing
process was invented to reduce the angle of edges on stone. Then smoother blades were
evolved to reduce friction. Next, the mechanical power of tools was increased by elevating
the amount of force that could be applied to the instrument. Steps were then taken to
increase the rapidity with which the tool can be exercised while working it. Specialization
was afterwards introduced to evade the limitations of a general tool and accomplish better
the foregoing processes. Later, the physical-chemical properties of the instruments were
enhanced by using fire, sunlight, and water to alter the properties of rope, wood, and
bone. Thereupon, abrasives and saws were invented to increase friction, and the pestle and
mortar were employed to pound materials.
We note that the principles of force, involving portage (pushing and pulling), the lever,
elasticity of matter, gravitation, and chemical combustion, were incorporated in the
processes. Too, wind, sun, and fire were used directly to play upon the materials and
convert them. Animals, furthermore, were induced to dig, carry, and turn devices, much
later on, it is thought, and animals too were exploited, as with bird-eggs and bees honey.
Yet there is no rigid requirement that these inventions should follow one another in all
cases, or, if they did, that they should not have followed one another quickly. It is the
counting of time that lends an evolutionary atmosphere to the proceedings. A more rapid
counting, on quantavolutionary theory, would accomplish the same developments in several
hundred years. Much depends upon intensity of motive and self-awareness, once the time
element is laid aside. The concept of the gestalt of creation, we have argued, supplies
such strong motivation and awareness. We go further and claim that in his first years on
Earth, homo schizo must have achieved much in the way of tools and culture. It is safe to
say that, if at all human, that is, if self-aware, hence finding many objects and animals
of interest and striking for control of the world, homo schizo would in short order arrive
at a complete culture-kit.
I have already shown that, to paraphrase Bonaparte's remark about bayonets, a self-
conscious person can do anything with a club plus sit on it.
Also, you can digest any organic material that you can find and eat, raw or processed.
Processing includes to stew, heat, bake in ashes or sun, salt, soak, pound, powderize, and
pre-masticate.
You cannot gather plants without noticing that they grow from seeds, and that seeds and
bulbs are edible, and that time after time your favorite location will renew itself.
You cannot chase animals without catching their young, then raising them until they are
ready and needed for food. (Modern women have been noticed to nurse suckling pigs, until
these can eat other food.)
You cannot have a garbage pile without observing that rodents, birds, and tasty insects
feed and breed there.
You cannot handle fire without preserving it, using it for roasting, and being
'spiritualized' by it.
In skinning an animal before eating it, which can be done with one's hands, though a sharp
rock is better, you cannot help but sit on the skin or use it as a muff or blanket or haft.
You can frighten and inspire responses by hooting and whistling, and whipping branches in
the air, and if you frighten other beings and they you, can readily try to impress
inspirited locales, like caves and sky, where you imagine there must be live things, to
keep them from frightening you. You cannot gather eggs without finding young birds whose
wings you can break and which can be kept in a loosely covered hole until grown.
You can get agreement with others by recalling and using sounds in common, and can convey
known sounds from one person to another from one day to the next or one place to another --
a message.
You can model your indecisive behavior on your remaining instinctive behavior and animal
behavior, unknowingly setting up the paradigm of logical and pragmatic thought about causes
and effects.
Should not these necessary immediate implications of proto-human brainwork be incorporated
into appraisals of earliest man? No evidence contradicts the statements; why, then, should
a creature be put to climbing the rungs of a ladder for four million years or forty
thousand years, for that matter?
Probably the ideology of classical anthropology was at fault. In order to discover proto-
man, the amateurs ventured forth among the most savage tribes. The most savage would be the
poorest in property (the heyday of the bourgeoisie was then) and the simplest (rococo art
permeated the Victorian age). So the students referred to the peoples who were hunters and
gatherers.
Instead of penetrating into and evaluating the mentation of these peoples, explorers and
reporters placed them into the category of primeval man, who had to be one step above the
apes and who had just climbed down from the trees. Probably there was in this theory, such
as it was, an element of ethnocentrism. The British geologist Ager has noted that the
nomenclature and systems of rocks in the world have had a suspiciously prominent presence
in the centers of the old British imperial posts and routes. The British invented and
dominated much of early anthropology, too. A joke as hoary as Queen Victoria went, One
Englishman a hunter, two a dress-up dinner, three a club. The most-savage nomadic hunter-
gatherer (the women gathered) was a wish-fulfillment; Tarzan, son of an English nobleman,
was back among the apes.
To the contrary, proto-human had very soon a culture that was as schizoid as he was and
held the essentials of most subsequent discoveries and institutions. He invented as he
moved through the world, and the news about, and practice of, culture moved with him.
Settled and mobile communities existed, tied into the ecumenical culture, kept posted by
eccentric wanderers and by group encounters.
LOST MILLIONS OF YEARS
By extensive comparisons of primates and mammals, Robert Martin has positively related
basic and active metabolic rates to body size, then again body surface with brain size [3]
. Brain size and body size are also positively related. Man's enormous brain is partly
accomplished in embryo and partly post-natally. The big spurt after birth, when coupled
with the very small human litter, typically one infant at a time, leads Martin to believe
that this relative human abnormality depended for survival in the process of natural
selection upon the persistence of a stable natural environment and ecology. In our terms,
this would imply a denial of the need for a high reproduction rate as insurance against
catastrophe.
The human reproduction rate, however, is compatible with catastrophic conditions; it is
still exponentially high. Furthermore, only because it is working humanly and not because
it is large, it is a pragmatic or rational insurance against catastrophic obstacles to
survival. Therefore we would discount the meanings that have been offered of his
correlations; there must be some significance to them, but not the one for which we are
searching.
The catastrophized human mind is itself proof against catastrophe. The human, it appears to
us, must have grown a larger body and brain, and heightened its metabolism, and lengthened
its training period because it was already human. Stated simply and crudely, the human
wanted to overcome its disadvantages and extend its controls, and did so -- genetically by
breeding, psychologically by practices and ideals; it invented the gods and imitated them.
Population growth rates present no obstacle to a quick diffusion of mankind. They are an
exponential phenomenon. An amusing calculation recently gave to Charlemagne's fifteen
children of the ninth century some 255 billion contemporary descendants, a hundred times
the world's population today. (Obviously heavy intermarriage occurred continuously since
his day, especially inside France.) Then, the genealogist said, Attila the Hun several
centuries earlier made his presence felt in what became the kingdom of the Franks, and
Charlemagne had to be descended in some part from Attila, by statistical calculation. Which
would permit finally every modern Frenchman to claim descent from Attila. For that matter,
many of us may descend from a fecund cousin of Lucy, the australopithecine who perished in
the ash wastes of Afar.
Anyone in the world can play a similar game. Populations, human groups included, repeatedly
expanded and contracted like an accordion, in the passage of centuries. Today we are
impressed by expansion. The people of India number over 700 millions, twice the population
of 35 years ago, and pressing hard upon the means of subsistence. Yet they are projected to
double in the next 32 years to 1,400 millions. A quantavolution, whether deliberate or
disastrous, is foreseeable.
Man should have reached a comfortable Neolithic level of culture within a thousand years of
humanization, and stayed there unless general catastrophe intervened. The Neolithic is
universally acknowledge to have been an across-the-board human culture with all basic
practices, institutions and techniques invented and in use; it was certainly in being
everywhere 8000 years ago. Could man have been fully potentiated and activated by mutation
-- i. e. physiologically complete as a human -- but not have behaved so as to develop his
mind and culture except very slowly and incrementally? If so, then what was retarding him,
keeping him for periods of first millions, then thousands of years, from making progress
towards the new stone age?
Might it have been perpetual dietary deficiencies? But the diet of the hunter-gatherer is
excellent.
Might it have been perpetual warfare? But war has incited invention and cultural diffusion
throughout history. Moreover, war may not have been continuous.
Neo-malthusianism and birth-control among the race as a whole or among the intelligent
would be implausible.
Might it have been the difficulty of first inventions, as opposed to secondary ones? The
lever, the spring, the knife, the bucket, the garment, the overhang, animal training, the
advent of springtime seeding? Are these inventions which would be taking trillions of man-
hours?
Continuous plagues of types known and unknown today? A generally stupefying plague is
unknown.
Might it have been a world catastrophe (climatic, fall-out, solar black-out?) These would
endure only briefly.
Were there recurrent global amnesias from a stupefying and dizzying electrical condition of
the Earth? This is conceivable.
Might it have been frequent devastating natural disasters? Like war, disaster teaches.
Was there a catatonic fear of change -- a frozen taboo against change? Changes are
eventually forced, and taboos do not block all avenues of development.
Might life have been simply too easy, hence dolce far niente? Life (see all above) is never
that sweet; and recall his eternal angst. Were men too few or isolated? Not knowing about
each other? Contra-indicated.
Perhaps they could not organize a division of labor? But the potentially useless would have
a desperate motive to make themselves useful, to avoid being discarded.
Whatever the reason, the primitivity of many tribes today shows that men do not progress
except for reasons which we do not understand. But they succumb to new temptations right
away -- horse, ax, gun, tobacco, sugar. Further, as we argue, primitivity may not only be a
mistaken idea; it may in any case be an actual short-time, youthful phenomenon. If
primitives act young ( the childish peoples some early anthropologists called them
condescendingly) it may be because they are young, and so are we all.
I cannot completely dispose of all of these objections here. Merely to phrase them,
however, disposes of many. The very nature of homo schizo as a restless, anxious, control-
seeking creature answers them. The most troublesome problem, it seems, is a possible
variant of the events that produced homo schizo: if a subsequent new constant of a gaseous
or electrical character were to be introduced into the atmosphere, mankind might be numbed
or frustrated mentally for a hundred or a million years, a prolonged Tower of Babel effect,
one might call it. By a worldwide alteration of electrical fields, the human mind would be
incapacitated for consistent and routine solutions of problems; it would be amnesiac; it
would be fibrillating excessively and continuously. Or, conversely, the mind would be
deprived of the hormones and gases required for all except quasi-catatonic operations;
mankind would be a sleep-walker for millions of years.
Evidence has been already presented to show that these lost ages have not occurred; they
never existed. Hence, this possibility must be preserved only to defend the theory of homo
schizo in the event that long-term time reckoning turns out to be correct. I shall
continue, therefore, my analysis, tending to show that human culture has not been slow in
developing, but, to the contrary, rapid.
Scholars have sometimes wondered at the long ages of mental stagnation. Thus, J. Hawkes
remarks, That a tradition could continue with only slight changes of essential style over a
period of between twenty and thirty thousand years, which is what our present chronology
suggests, seems today almost incredible. [4] If this scene of the Upper Paleolithic is
incredible, what then of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, of
changelessness going before?
Thus Sol Tax comments upon the universality of the material characterizing the East, on one
hand, and Africa, Europe and India, on the other, and how their artifacts span four-fifths
of the quaternary period with practically no change, and a socio-cultural reconstruction of
the Sinanthropus cultural material would be mathematically the same as that made for the
Australopithecines. He concludes that Certainly, the stability of attainment and the lack
of change cannot ever be taken as characteristic behavior of Homo sapiens as we know him,
and we must look closer to home for our first representative of Man. [5]
In effect, he is saying: deny man exists, as long as he is not developing for long
stretches of time. Instead, Tax should be challenging the time-clocks. His position seems
all the more uncomfortable inasmuch as he has acted as a leader in bringing the public to
realize that primitivity is a pejorative term and unjust to the mentality and culture of
'primitive' peoples.
TRIBES, CIVILIZATIONS, AND TIME
I prefer the term 'tribal' to the world 'primitive': it is less misleading. Tribal cultures
are not young; they are as old as the oldest modern culture. All cultures are equally old,
so far as one can tell. The tribal culture holds a stronger illusion of special gods and
heroes; it claims common ancestry; it speaks a special language; most of its transactions
are inside the tribe; and it has not been accommodated to a greater society. These
conditions are disappearing; few tribal cultures are left outside the great society.
Until recently, many tribes were 'resting' in the stone age. This is a mechanical and
psychological judgement, not an ethical one. As Jules Henry and others have explained,
their psychic unity is complete [6] . When a culture achieves some tolerable mastery of
its individual and collective minds, there is little incentive to change unless it is
ravaged by nature or conquest. A scarcity or profusion of artifacts is no proper criterion
of the humanness or human development of a culture. Until this century, a village with its
farmers on some Greek islands would possess few artifacts, and its church would be scarcely
more than a shaman's hut in Central Africa. If the Greek and African villages were compared
with the Shandridar village of ancient Iraq or an early community in the Basin of Mexico or
classical Tiahuanacu one could not argue conclusively that the later were more evolved than
the earlier, and one would find perhaps similar difficulty in appraising their outlook and
mentation.
The great civilizations began to appear about seven thousand years ago with commerce and
conquest. There have been perhaps fifty of them. They take about three hundred years to
gestate and last for a millenium before handing themselves over to another civilization as
with the Incas, and/ or dissolving, as happened with the Roman Empire. During this time,
and counting the component cultures from which they were amalgamated, there may have
existed about 20,000 cultures in all.
It is difficult to 'put a tribal culture back together again' once it has been absorbed
into civilization. Sometimes a tribal culture will remember having been ruled distantly but
not tightly or absorbingly. It shows almost no signs of having been included in a bygone
civilization. Therefore it must have existed by itself since the beginning of human time,
or since it split off from a tribal aggregate at some time in the past to form a related
unit. The fission would have occurred because of natural catastrophe, flight from a growing
civilization, internal disputes, or overpopulation and emigration. It is unfortunate that
all of these statements must be conjectural. Yet their thrust is unmistakable. There has
not been enough time since the beginning of human culture for all tribes to have
experienced participation in a major civilization -- except for the ecumenical proto-
culture to which all peoples must originally have belonged. In this case, the demography of
cultures would imply recent human origins and support the theory of cultural hologenesis of
homo schizo.
Elsewhere I have defined a 'memorial generation' as a unit of fifty years that would span
the age of the oldest story-teller and the youngest attentive listener of a group. It is
about three times the length of a reproductive generation. Some current estimates, using
long-time reckoning, have human culture appearing, bit by bit, of course, for from 50,000
to 5 million years. Here we estimate that one thousand years (20 MG) is enough; and 260
memorial generations (MG), 13,000 years, is enough for the history of mankind. Fifty
thousand years give 1000 MG's, and 5 million years allow for 100,000 MG's. Unless the human
mind developed finely, bit by bit, with one tiny innovation following another, the human
could not consume so much time so unprofitably. And what was directing this incrementally
minuscule evolution? And if it burst into quantavolution in the Upper Paleolithic, what
caused that event to occur?
If it were not for the accepted methods of reckoning time, scientists would probably have
to agree that a hologenesis of both man and culture is logical and recent. To hallucinate
further, if Solon of Athens had called on a panel of experts from Babylonia, Iran, China,
India and Mexico, as well as from Greece and Egypt, in the sixth century B. C., all would
have told him that man's history was short, at least since the last great catastrophe. But
belief is firm in the tests that report long times for the early fossils and relics of man
and life generally, and claim a long, slow ascent.
A century ago, when time reckoning was governed by our type of speculation, by the fossil
record, and by the apparent ages of sedimentary rock strata, time measures were easier to
assail. Today, radiochronometry lengthens human time and fixes it by elaborate chemical
tests, the most critical of which are the radiocarbon dating and potassium-argon (K-A)
dating to which I have made reference above.
Both tests are striving for validation in the crucial middle times between 10,000 and
100,000 years ago. It is expected and hoped that they will close this gap. Meanwhile the K-
A test can be used to support very old ages for what appear to be human remains with
artifacts; and the 14C test is keeping the Upper paleolithic age far enough back to support
impressions of a very gradual human cultural development. I have given elsewhere my reasons
for disputing the validity of 14C beyond 2700 years, for regarding the K-A test as quite
unreliable, and for questioning most other chronometry. (Chaos and Creation, chap. III)
Here, I do not treat fully these tests, because the theory of human and cultural
hologenesis is independent of the time-tests frame. Hologenesis could have occurred 13,000;
50,000; 200,000; 1.5 million or 5 million years ago, except that in all of these cases, an
incredible amount of human history is missing. Perhaps we should hope to find it, cheered
on by the late reports from micro-paleontology that have added a billion years to the two
billion year age of life on Earth (but brought the age of life and the age of the Earth
itself uncomfortably close to one another).
For those dates that are beyond 50,000 years, one might postulate a limited jump in human
and cultural evolution, leaving a final large jump for the Holocene boundary. That is, some
hominid, perhaps not even a human ancestor, could have chipped a stone, with nothing else
on his mind. Given my analysis of the club-wielder, I would not know how to explain this
activity. It would not be modern man, but a different species. I find this solution easier
to tolerate than a gap of millions of years between a true man, a chipped stone, and the
Upper Paleolithic-Holocene periods.
MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS EVERYWHERE CONTEMPORARY
Not only did primeval man quickly achieve a world-wide protoculture, but the next age, so
far as we can tell about ages, reveals increasingly a panorama of cultures of equal status
around the world. To distinguish this age from proto-culture, let us refer to it as neo-
culture and think of it as merging the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic
developments.
Legend usually does so, and in a way so do the most ancient texts. Man is created, he is
savage but human, he is given gifts of all arts and crafts, he lives in a golden age. He is
destroyed, and a new age follows. If a new panel of experts were called, this time by name,
say High Priest Aaron, Akhnaton of Egypt, Solon, Hesiod, Plato of Greece, and Ovid of Rome,
they would probably agree to this and add much illuminating detail.
If the French scholars of the years of nationalistic jealousy were not intent upon showing
the great age of advanced culture in France, they might have assigned the cave are of the
Dordogne to the time of pre-dynastic Egypt, 6500 years ago. The hot breath of tourists
damaged the Lascaux paintings in a few years; before then, neither the ancient users nor
the dozen thousand years of quiet cold damp were sufficient for their destruction. Nor the
great climate changes that drove off the cave people and the large animals. Of their style
in general, Leroi-Gourhan writes, The nature of the paintings does not seem to have varied
from -30,000 to -9,000 years before our epoch and stays the same in Asturias as on the Don
River. [7]
Some 21,000 years of the same genre of painting. And by now he would have to say -- from
England to Siberia. The older genealogy hardly justifies the assigning of ancient ages; it
all was suspended by the thread of thriving ethnocentrism, until geophysics advanced a
radio-carbon test for charcoal and bone.
From A. F. Spiess' Reindeer and Caribou Hunters (1979), we are permitted the notion that
protohistorical North American hunters and paleolithic hunters of Southwestern France (Abri
Pataud) had similar relationships with their prey, despite the numerous different cultures
in each setting and within the settings, over a passage of up to 35,000 years. The social
adaptation of humans to animals suggest common behaviors persisting universally (relative
to the ecology) over long time spans.
The mode of life of the 'hunters' of the Upper Paleolithic, which has now been extended
beyond France as far as Siberia and through the Sahara possibly down to Southwest Africa,
and very lately to England, may not have been the exclusive life of the times. The caves
themselves were not for living. As far as one can tell, they were modelled on the cloudy
vaults of heaven and the mysterious depths of the womb. The passages and chambers were
artistically organized for stages of religio-clan initiation. The bison was the central
totem animal.
Living, for the hunters, was outdoors, or in temporary huts, or under abris which could
shelter them against the elements. They must have been connected with settlements, else
where would the women and children and animals have stayed. One cannot examine their
artwork without grasping that at the very least they would be living in the style of the
North American Indians before 1600 A. D. Repeated devastations and heavy sedimentation and
sinkings have obliterated practically all traces of their villages and gardens, and perhaps
major civilizations as well.
Generally the domestication of animals has been placed in the period 7-9000 years ago [8]
. A claim is now advanced for domestication near Nairobi in East Africa at 15,000 years
ago. In Patagonia, whose natives are looked upon as exceedingly 'primitive', men long ago
captured, confined, fed, killed, and ate the giant ground sloth, now extinct, the
extinction perhaps occurring when 70% of the great pleistocene mammal species disappeared
[9] . This will certainly confuse the picture.
Meanwhile agriculture seems to be moving backwards in time reckoning. C. Niederberger finds
Mexican sedentary economies with a mixed agricultural-gathering-hunting base around 8,000
years ago. Artifactual and non-artifactual evidence from the lacustrine shores of the
Chalco Basin already suggest the existence of fully sedentary human communities in this
region from at least the sixth millennium B. C. [10]
San Pablo (Ecuador) corn kernels embedded along with associated corn designs on pottery in
deep cultural remains show a heavy agricultural population between 200 to 4000 B. C. (using
14C tests with bristlecone pine correction). These high flood plain sites are called
generally the Valdivia culture. They are definitely not of Japanese culture type, as may be
some other early discoveries of the same region. Agriculture was known throughout the world
in Neolithic, and perhaps much earlier times. One may ask whether agriculture, which is not
an easily diffusable set of inventions, was not practiced in embryo during the first
ecumenical culture of homo schizo. Southeast Asia and Asia Minor are emerging with
concurrent early dates. We can quote Henry T. Lewis:
A search for the various stimuli to domestication should not involve looking for those
factors which led man to discover agriculture; rather it should involve learning about
those factors that made agriculture a necessary alternative in human adaptations, first as
a complement to hunting and gathering, and later as a substitute for it [11] .
In pre-European California, hunting and gathering competed successfully with agriculture
[12] , for example. And, again, Lewis writes: Domestication would have begun not as a
'revolution' but, rather, as an attempt to extend and stabilize the existing subsistence
strategy.
Here he is saying what I earlier implied, widespread natural disasters may have driven
humans into agriculture, away from the more convenient and satisfying life of the hunter-
gatherer, 'just as the Bible says. '
As for today, the same group of anthropologists agree that it is merely a matter of time
before all the cultural systems of the world will be different variations, depending upon
divergent historical experiences, of a single culture type. [13] This exemplifies their
law of cultural dominance. But it also casts doubt on any great antiquity for culture,
hence for man.
Baker comments on the situation concerning prehistoric botanical domestication an
diffusion, saying Why is it that the ancestors of domesticated plants are now so rare (or
even extinct)? It is hard to see how domestication of cucurbita (squashes) would make life
any more difficult for the wild species. [14] Might it be that man under catastrophic
circumstances takes care of his plant seeds while the wild seeds are destroyed? Might man
also preempt the best areas for growing the plant, thus handicapping the wild sort? And
might not the wild plants have come from an isolated botanical niche whence they were
transported around the world by men? All three arguments, especially the last, appear to be
valid. They would point to an early, rather than late, date for agriculture.
It is not impossible, then, that much of the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic were
merged, and throughout the world, too. As for the Mesolithic, this usually maligned
cultural epoch is now receiving accolades for its own achievements. Nevertheless, it still
hardly has boundaries to distinguish it as a period, and rather is sandwiched in between
the two other periods to fill the greedy stomach of time.
To support the foregoing hypothesis, it is well to stress again that many tools bridge gaps
of thousands and even 'millions' of years between different epochs, leaving one to wonder
at the marvelous resiliency of the stone age peoples who otherwise appear to reject
invention. So that, for instance, Neanderthals executed works of art [15] . They also
garlanded their dead with flowers in Northern Iraq [16] , implying an interest in
horticulture, as well as religion. Neanderthal Mousterian styles of stone-working are found
in Magdalenian deposits.
And a single Greek cave assigns one chipped stone from Upper Paleolithic to early
Neolithic, an adjoining stone from Early Neolithic to Late Neolithic and another from
Middle Neolithic to final Neolithic; Magdalenians use Mousterian tools, etc [17] . And,
once again, MacNeish, working at Teotihuacan sites, assigns one type of uniface flaked
stone implement at 10,000 years of age and finds that it continues to 6300 years ago. Just
before this last time, another type of implement picks up and carries on until 800 years
ago. Nine thousand years are spanned by two implements [18] .
ECUMENICAL CULTURE
There was in the beginning one human race, one language, one culture. The contrasting
hypotheses seem to be losing vigor. That many cultures around the world originated
independently implies that men scattered around the world and only then started up cultures
from a delayed time-fuse in their brains.
Despite the tenacity with which this idea grips many people, it would appear absurd, unless
one believed at the same time that humanization occurred immediately in consequence of an
atmospheric change that affected the brain with some uniformity everywhere, an idea that I
have not seen expressed except in these pages, and here is included as a partial and
fluctuating cause of humanization.
Since we cannot agree precisely when humans originated, for certainly most will accept
Charles Darwin's series of insensible gradations in preference to my theory of holocene
hologenesis, how can we fix a point for the beginning of culture? As I construe the
conventional argument, it must assert that the ever-extending ladder of evolution contains
many rungs, some of which are physical gradations and other cultural. When a physical rung
-- say a straightening of the spine -- occurs, the lucky straight-backed clan is different
from all other men until its trait overcomes their curved spines; but, meanwhile, some
curved-back clan invents a bull-roarer, which gives an impressive sound, and this artifact
begins diffusing among the curved-backs and the straight-backs, helping both to survive in
competition with men of either type, as with animals. Hence, at any given moment in this
long period of human evolution up to the present, one would encounter a dizzying number of
intersecting circles of diffusing physical and cultural traits. Too, it is a competition of
all against all. The number would be perpetually large, and uniquely combined at any point
in demographic space. So the mills of evolution by natural selection and mutation would
have to be working very finely, very rapidly, and continually.
Inasmuch as this theory, perhaps exaggeratedly put here, dominates scholarly thought, all
coincidences of cultural traits following humanization must occur by means of independent
invention, or by adoption (that is, by diffusion from one or the other source or a common
third source). Hence argument always centers around these two ideas and they have been
flailing at each other in their boxing ring since the beginning of the uniformitarian
orthodoxy a century and more ago. The additional contestants that I would sponsor here, out
of a sense of sportsmanship, namely common origination in cultural hologenesis and common
experience of general catastrophe, are barred from the ring.
It is easy to see why this prejudice should occur. With a very long evolution time, it is
presumptuous, if not absurd, to believe that any culture trait possessing particular
recognizable form could be part of a primordial culture. That is, such a namable and
tangible trait cannot be very old. The idea behind the trait may be very old and
represented in some now extinct forms and cultures as well as in present-day cultures.
For instance, the taboo against incest extending to first cousins is found here and there.
These cannot be primordial but must be independent inventions, according to long-term
evolution; they would be offshoots of a very ancient taboo against incest that may have
conquered all cultures in some form by diffusion or independent invention at some time in
the murky history of man. Freud's speculation that this taboo may have occurred everywhere
by diffusion as part of a guilt reaction, also diffused, originating from the murder of the
leader of a single primal horde, seems too close in time and has not been accepted by the
orthodox anthropologist. The prejudice against the arising of cultural traits out of
similar experiences with a common catastrophe is also easy to explain. Such catastrophes
have until recently been certified by astronomers and geologists not to have happened, or
to have happened so long ago that they cannot have affected whatever it is that interests
anthropologists or archeologists or prehistorians; hence no further consideration is
required.
The literature of prehistory is otherwise rich in the assumed effects of climate,
topography, and habitat upon cultures, deriving similar cultural and even physical traits
from the similar experiences of men. Thus comets terrify all cultures. But this is
explained as normal fear of unusual sights in the sky. The deluge is attested to by
practically all cultures. But this is explained as exaggerated accounts of flooding and
high tides. On the other hand the people of the north are blond because they need to absorb
sun while the people of the topics are dark because they need to reject the overabundant
sun. (It seems not to matter that the Eskimos and Lapps are dark, or that the great
tropical forest scarcely illuminate the dark people in them.)
With all of this, there has until now been little chance of emerging from the source
materials with even the beginnings of a division of culture traits as we conceive of them:
elements that are assignable to times of common catastrophic experiences; independent
inventions that came about owing to cultural peculiarities of given peoples with some
parallels to be drawn from the independent inventions of other peoples; and innovations
originating among one people and diffusing to others, whether in the wanderings after
natural disasters and war, or in variously motivated migrations.
For instance, fire, which had been known to, and used by, hominids and other animals, would
have been reinvented by mankind. Fire was born when heaven and earth separated, says a
Mongolian marital prayer. Fire -- in its modern sense of something to be used
multifariously, made and remade -- was invented because the created human was terrorized by
new intensities of fire, because the projected gods used fire in the skies and on earth,
and because the new mind could remember its use and foresee its future utility. Credit for
the invention was ascribed to a god and sometimes also to a god-hero who, partly man and
partly god, could arrogate credit without displeasing the gods.
The earliest town plans were built according to a celestial model, and the planners were
astronomer-architects. The conditions for planning were, again, an aware and awed human
group, a sky religion, a skill in retrojecting and rationalizing a celestial scene, and
then a science of measurement and construction. The orientation of the towns (Greek: polis)
and temples followed first the North-South line of the Boreal Hole, a northern-most sky
opening which happened in cloud-canopy times to represent the north geographical pole (from
polis.) In less cloudy and in bright times, measurements that were derived from the old
monuments and improved by stargazing, permitted the practice to continue. The Egyptian and
Mexican city and pyramid orientations were North-South. In protohistory, East-West
orientations became prominent because the sky-path of Venus was East-West, and finally the
Sun's regularities provided the lines of true orientation for planners.
Macgowan's study of fifty early Mesoamerican towns shows modes at 70* East of North and 17*
East of North, but several pitch from 1* to 21* West of North. The earliest are truest to
the North [19] . La Venta was dated by Hutch (1971) at around 1000 B. C. and is oriented
8* West of North. The changing orientations suggest that tilts in the axis of the Earth
occurred from time to time; ancient man was never whimsical about orienting his towns.
A recognizably scientific astronomy is being sought farther and farther back in time. B. A.
Frolov argues that an intellectual curiosity possessed early humans everywhere. The Russian
counterparts of the Stonehenge monuments are at Lake Onega, and both are sky-directed
religio-astronomical instruments [20] . The Pleiades are called the Seven Sisters by
aborigines of Australia, North America, Siberia, and other ancient cultures. Petroglyphs
that appear to refer to astronomical constants and phenomena are found all over the world;
it may be mainly the prejudice on behalf of the 'evolutionary ladder' that forbids the
assignment of many such carvings to the earliest age of humanity; in some of such cases the
glyphs are found among the earliest ruins of a people or are the only remains discernible.
That is, the hologenesis of mentation and culture derives support from the increasingly
early assignment of scientific works.
Two thousand years after humanization, a large number of humans possessed self-awareness,
religion and rites, planned towns, armed forces, a full range of stone and soft material
tools, special occupations, domesticated animals and plants, and complex language. They
entertained a range of aspirations that followed their time sense into visions of improved
life; they created the rudiments of the highest ideals of later times: freedom from fear
through knowledge, individual autonomy, conquest of the environment, storage against future
hunger, and social cooperation. But the high energy forces of the gods permeated history,
life, and expectations. Destructions were frequent, and catastrophes, such as they already
dreaded, were to recur.
During the Saturnian 'Golden Age, ' which was a single Neo Age, composed of the Upper
Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic, a wide circulation of traits occurred. Still a
great many isolated groups, whose ancestors had survived the earlier catastrophes,
continued to live apart. They became in many cases the so-called 'primitive tribes' of
historical times, philosophically and technically undeveloped relative to newly organizing
large central cultures. Later catastrophes added to the number of isolated units of
culture.
Humans who are tribal in organization possess an essentially primordial culture. Among them
are found well-developed languages in bewildering variety; they share not only linguistic
principles but verbal roots with the great languages of the world; their attitudes toward
language and symbols are proto-historical. Totemism is common; so also complex systems of
taboo. Their religious astralism varies in extent and complexity. In comparison with
scientized cultures, the succession of gods is less well described in legend, though the
sky god (Uranus) is found everywhere.
Customs such as head and body deformation, and the couvade, that has the father imitating
the pains of child-bearing, are similar in widely separated areas, suggesting an original
universal community. Elaborated stone tools, advanced symbolic designs, ceramics, an
attention to the North-South axis in monuments, the practices of circumcision, cannibalism,
human sacrifice, flood legends, medical remedies, and a great many other practices and
beliefs point back to humanization in the creative period, followed by devastation and
isolation thereafter.
The primeval kit of humankind, the set of ideas and devices that the proto-humans gained by
the gestalt of creation, seems less sophisticated than it really was. The voluntariness and
self-consciousness infusing the cultural complex set it apart from mammalian products and
organization.
Deliberate convocations and collecting of individuals into assemblies for planning,
ordering, worship, and celebrating, accompanied by speech, symbolic gestures, markings, and
rituals, also constituted part of the original cultural consensus --these in communications
and organization. Planting, hunting, gathering, tool devising, storing -- all operated from
the collectivity extended through memorial generations -- such were the practical
activities.
Joseph Campbell puts our position here well:
It has actually been from one great, variously inflected and developed literate world-
heritage that all of the philosophies, theologies, mysticisms, and sciences now in conflict
in our lives derive. These are in origin one: one also in their heritage of symbols;
different, however, in their histories, interpretations and applications, emphases and
local aims [21] .
AMERICAN CULTURAL ORIGINS
Alexander von Wuthenau, in his book on Unexpected Faces in Ancient America, 1500 B. C.-A.
D. 1500 [22] scans the literature on Asiatic, African, Egyptian, Semitic, and European
presences in cultures and races of Central America and presents his remarkable album of
stone and ceramic countenances of the stated peoples. Despite conventional theory, there
seems but little question that the Central Americans were a mixture of human types long
before Columbus arrived.
But further, the American race had its own primeval forms. In Chaos and Creation, as in the
present book, I argue that homo sapiens schizotypus was present in the Americas from his
very first period, and despite repeated general catastrophes held on there in niches of
survival, and was repeatedly reinforced across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, with
artifacts and cultural practices to remind us of these occasions.
Although this thesis is not central to the present book -- because the theory of homo
schizo can be argued on whichever grounds conventional theory chooses -- it has important
consequences for early American studies. As I foresee the emergent issue, it is not rampant
diffusionism versus carriage across the Bering Straits, but rather how much of the
similarity among races and cultures came from the ecumenical period of homo schizo and how
much was transmitted via long distances thereafter.
The case for diffusionism is building up. Some of the material advanced before World War II
regarding Asia-to-America diffusion is summarized in Lord Raglan's How Came Civilization?
(Chap. XVII). He placed the world ecumenical culture of the first civilization in the
region of the Persian Gulf. More recently Betty Ebers has marshaled the evidence for
Japanese to Olmec (Mesoamrica) diffusion, by sea [23] .
In another case, an authority on early Mesoamerica, Michael Coe (31) reports the
coincidence from Needham's studies (1959, 407) that the Maya astronomers and those of the
Han Chinese worked with an eclipse calendar of 11,960 days. [24] The coincidence cannot be
an accident, especially when one considers that the Mayans seem to have used 'solar
mansions, ' like the Chinese, rather than a zodiac, to mark the progression of
constellations, and, further, indicated constellations, in the manner of Han China, by
circles connected with straight lines, which was not seen in Europe until 1785.
Acceptance and progress of pre-Columbianism are blocked mainly by uncertainties over the
timing of intercontinental transactions. For example, Posnanski and Bellamy go beyond
15,000 years in reconciling Tiahuanacan (Bolivian) remain with Pacific Island and
Mediterranean-Caribbean traits [25] . The Atlanteans range from 11,000 to 3,500 years ago.
The Asianists for some time held to 12,000 by land and nothing by sea; then neo-Asianists
ascribed East Indian and Japanese contacts to materials of Mexico, Ecuador, and other
parts. These ranged well back into fabled times of sunken Pacific continents, but they also
surged forward into the end of the classical period; even Alexander the Great's lost fleet
found a new role in a culturally fecundating voyage through the southern oceans to the
western shores of the Americas.
Meanwhile, evidence of Phoenician, Egyptian, West African, Jewish, Roman, Celtic, and
Viking contacts ranged from New England to Middle Eastern America in the North and down to
Brazil in the South. Indications of a European or Eur-African presence in the centuries
just before Columbus are not wanting [26] . The idea that the Americas were a virgin to the
Old World before Columbus deflowered them is an anti-historical myth.
That there were many contacts seems clear. One has only to read Ameghino's survey of pre-
Columbian encounters of the two regions, written a century ago as I mentioned earlier, to
comprehend that, while he may have been naive, the contemporary scholar has been
unreasonably skeptical. Moreover, much evidence has seen the light since his time. As to
the troublesome question concerning when these contacts took place, here we propose that
the Americas have been in touch with the rest of the world throughout the history of
mankind, except in the periods of great natural turbulence, with the contacts swelling in
numbers whenever a few hundred years of technical development and cultural organization
would occur. Whenever a catastrophe happened, which cut off peoples by splitting
continental blocks, lifting mountains, creating great rivers, or interposing new climates
between them, the isolated cultures developed very rapidly, requiring only a few centuries
to exhibit different cultures, languages, and ways of life.
Let the editor of a recent collection of studies on trans-oceanic contacts summarize the
situation for us:
Clearly, the present status of our knowledge of American archeology does not allow us to
attribute the origins of New World civilization to diffusion from the Old World with
assurance. Equally, however, it does not demonstrate the independent origin of New World
high culture. Just as the zero occurrence of artifacts originating in the Old World and
found in America may be taken as a strong argument against the diffusionist explanation, so
the early occurrence of a complex of Old World-like traits -- often very sophisticated --
in early levels of nuclear American civilization casts a strong reflection against the
independent origins hypothesis [27] .
This points to a very early heartland culture; then came divergence and sporadic exchanges.
I would suggest, concerning said passage and the same anthology of studies, that we should
be looking for several periods of transference of traits; in Chaos and Creation I suggest
six of them. Artifacts and usages can then be assigned by ages and the outcomes tested (for
their logic and verisimilitude). Basic social forms, early ceramics, boat design, the
lodestone compass, the pyramid, Semitic, Celtic and Roman relics, and many other kinds of
evidence exist with which to clarify the periods of intercourse.
To summarize, an hypothesis of ecumenical world culture in the earliest times, attaining
quickly the neolithic level, is supportable. Inventions require heavy motive power, both in
the phase of mental gestation and of social adoption. The motive power must operate within
and among individuals. Basic inventions came in rush following the gestalt of creation.
They flowed from the psychology of the new human species, originally a small group. They
were tied immediately to astral gods and figures and to animals as well; this
identification lent memorial power to the inventions and authority to the thrust of their
diffusion.
Acting in the name of their gods and totems gave authority to the imposition of practices.
The same aggressiveness that ultimately eliminated the hominids also foisted upon them the
basic inventions. Those who grasped the meanings of the human culture, or at least could
practice it, survived. The aggressors possessed ideology, skills, and zeal. No species
could stand against them.
In this manner an ecumenical or universal culture was quickly created and diffused among a
variety of human racial types. Potentiated genes were diffused and came to the fore quickly
in adapting to a changing world. Culture traits were imposed under the most stringent
conditions. It was the greatest age of evangelism in the history of mankind. Within a
thousand years of increasing natural terror, most basic skills would have been adapted from
nature, developed, put into a framework of ideas and imprinted upon society.
CULTURAL INTEGRATION
The Dogon people of the Upper Niger region of Africa have come to public attention recently
[28] . Marcel Griaule's exposition of their secret lore has been presented by his
collaborator, Germaine Dieterlen [29] . The Dogons have a rich astronomy. They know that
the star system, Sirius, contains a bright star and also a dark, dwarf star, although it
cannot be seen by the naked eye. Robert Temple studied exhaustively the sources of this
knowledge and ventured the idea that astronauts from Sirius may have once have visited
Earth and imparted this knowledge. Or else the dark star may have once exploded in a super-
nova and was remembered. A third possibility is a one-time proximity of Sirius, which would
imply a vastly accelerated expansive movement of the galaxy. Or a telescope. I incline
towards the super-nova view.
The Dogon were probably survivors, with the ancient Egyptians, of the vast 'Triton'
(Sahara) civilization that was destroyed about 6,000 years ago. In isolation, they have
kept their knowledge accurately, obsessively, secretly. It took Griaule 16 years to hear
the lore from them.
The Dogon culture shows clearly the fundamental law of cultural anthropology: All aspects
of a culture are interconnected:
The smallest everyday object may reveal a conscious reflection of a complex cosmogony...
Thus for instance African techniques, so poor in appearance, like those of agriculture,
weaving and smithing, have a rich, hidden content of significance... The sacrifice of a
humble chicken, when accompanied by the necessary and effective ritual gestures, recalls in
the thinking of those who have experienced it an understanding... of the origins and
functioning of the universe [30] .
And we can quote the social theorist Cassirer also:
If a man first directed his eyes to the heavens, it was not to satisfy a merely
intellectual curiosity. What man really sought in the heavens was his own reflection and
the order of his human universe. He felt that his world was bound by innumerable visible
and invisible ties to the general order of the universe -- and he tried to penetrate into
this mysterious connection [31] .
All the pieces of human culture resemble or hook on to each other. Social and body
symbolism are international, for example, as Mary Douglas has shown [32] , also cosmogony
and sex, diet and religion, and so on. Exceptions come from intrusions and novelties: these
are rejected; but if lent power, persistence, and utility they will work themselves into
the cousinship of culture traits. The discovery that this is so belongs to modern
anthropology, to field workers such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Clyde Kluckhohn
[33] . The discovery is in the air and an alert historian of science shares it. Thus
Santillana writes : As we follow the clues --stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse,
music, structures --a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is
inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time
assigned to it. [34]
Many studies pursue the First Law of Anthropology. Yet few ask why it should be. Why is a
culture -- Womburi, French Canadian, Hopi, Greek, or English -- integrated?
Because the human likes to be consistent. But why does he seek this consistency ?
Because the human mind has to explain itself. Why so? Because all things are connected to
the stars via the cosmos! But in an industrial culture, millions of chickens are dispatched
automatically without obvious connection to anything but the market for chickens.
Actually, all three theories hint at the best explanation. The human must be consistent in
connecting all things, because, in the times following creation, culture burst forth
spontaneously in all of its manifestations; all the objects of the world were not only to
be seen, but also to be reflected upon, that is, to become objects of thought. Cultural
consistency came before its rationalization. And each culture is of course culture-bound,
viewing the world in its own way.
Since the days of creation must be obsessively remembered and repeated, as we shall see,
they continue to force upon man their original togetherness. They supply the motive force
for performing the greatest and the smallest tasks of society.
Then, too, since the burst of revelation and discovery was tied into the outbursts of the
gods, all that is thought about becomes tied to the gods. Whereupon the human must realize
this fact, confess it, and lend it importance, or else he will be guilty of blasphemy,
ingratitude, and neglect of the gods. Hence he must excuse himself and his actions. Such is
the explanation offered here of the First Law of Anthropology.
Every culture is integrated and coordinated within itself; this we know from the
comparative study of existing cultures. All culture arose hologenetically, and diffused
with the original homo schizo. But, in any event, they could not be radically different,
because human nature sets limits on what a culture can do. We can hardly conceive of what
might be different about cultures, because they are part of our very nature. Louis Wirth
used to lecture that men differ in every way that it is possible to differ. If they do not
differ otherwise, that is because it is impossible to do so. If it were possible, we would
not know it. Further, there is no practice in any culture that lacks a homolog in every
other culture.
The pattern and limits of culture began with and must follow the schizotypical nature of
individual humans as they transact among themselves and with the world. Therefore, we can
expect to trace the syndrome of schizotypicality through any given culture and all cultures
taken together.
The recent insistence of some sociologists and ethologists upon the predetermination of
human behavior does no more than make sense of the view that humans are culturally
determined. Nature and nurture are inextricably bonded. One misleading view, which has
flourished in many forms, is that culture is a thick varnish laid upon a brute to contain
and rule him. To the contrary, humans are born to rule themselves and must spend their
lives in trying to do so. They cannot ignore the problem of control. They must try promptly
every conceivable means of doing so, whether this means reaching into their own nerves and
muscles for the purpose or stretching outwards into the environment and then reimposing
controls via a group and its culture.
Modern empiricists are often repelled by the mythologist who says that the ancients
connected all with all. They cannot pursue the line of thought that connects everything --
lines, crosses, comets, sceptres, circles, megaliths, and seemingly everything else -- with
a phallic symbol, for example. Or an eye with a comet, lightning bolt, an electric arc, a
giant, a mountain, and so son. Anthropologists should make such connections as a matter of
course; it is surprising when they do not.
There are two main reasons for granting that the earliest humans possessed a holoculture
and thought in terms of it. One is the evidence itself, so voluminous that a thick book
could be prepared of all the demonstrable, deliberate connections of the membrum virilis in
tools, arts, stories, beliefs, and rites. But if the evidence is not overwhelmingly
convincing, the quantavolutionary theory of early man should be. For the original humans --
and even the unconscious among the humans today -- thought in holistic terms. It is one of
the lessons of logic, dutifully repeated in its textbooks, that 'analogy is not proof. '
But to the first homo sapiens schizotypus, and to humans of all times, analogy must be
proof. The most marvelous sense of power, intellectually and behaviorally, comes from the
association of the tiniest events and observations with the nature and conduct of the great
universe.
Here the anthropologists, the mythologists, the pre-historians do agree. All things are
tied together: a sacred universal bond exists among all things. One may imagine that
millions of hours went into both fantastic and carefully considered leaps in order to form
all sights, sounds, and experiences into a meaningful whole.
The ability and need to see all in all is fundamental to the newly created human. The
scientifically and technically useful ability to concentrate upon only a single special
aspect of a thing derives from the obsessive compulsion to repeat.
The two needs spring quickly from the urge to control. Fearfully and paranoically, the
humans saw in everything the thing that would threaten (or, ambivalently, save) them.
Fearfully and obsessively, humans had to rehearse and redo what they had experienced,
keeping everything the same and in order.
Notes (Chapter 5: Cultural Revolution)
1. A. Marshack, Amer Sci, March, 1976 and Curr Anthro (1976) 278; Gaietto, Prescultura e
Scultura Preistorica, E. R. G. A.: Genova.
2. Les Religions de la Pr‚histoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1967, 6, 7, 146-7.
3. Roger Lewin, How did Humans Evolve Big Brains? 216 Science (May 1982) 840-1.
4. I Prehistory, Part I, 280, New York: Mentor, 1965.
5. Primitive Man vs. Homo Sapiens, in A. Montagu, The Concept of the Primitive, N. Y.: Free
Press, 1968.
6. The Term 'Primitive' in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, in Montagu, op. cit., 89.
7. Op. cit., 85.
8. R. Protoch and R. Berger, 179 Science (19 Jan. 1973).
9. C. M. Nelson, N. Y. Times, Aug. 27, 1980; A Smith Woodward, 15 Natural Sci (1899) 351-4.
10. 203 Science (12 Jan. 1979), 140; R. S. MacNeish, The Origins of New World Civilization,
211 Sci. Amer. (Nov. 1964), 29-37.
11. The Role of Fire,.. 7 Man 2, 1972, 217.
12. Sahlins et al., op. cit., 77-88; cf. MacNeish, supra fn 7, p. 36, where, despite rich
variety of domesticated foods, only 10% of food supply came from them (ca. 5000 B. C.).
13. Sahlins et al., op. cit., 92.
14. In Riley, Ed., Man Across the Sea, op. cit., 441.
15. Walter Matthes, IPEX; Jahrbuch fr pr"historische and ethnographische Kunst, 1963.
16. Ralph S. Solecki, Shanidar IV, A Neanderthal Flower Burial in Northern Iraq, 190
Science (28 Nov. 1975), 880-1.
17. T. W. Jacobsen, 17,000 years of Greek Prehistory, 234 Sci. Amer. (1976) 19, 80.
18. Op. cit., 64.
19. In A. F. Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, Austin: U. of Texas
Press, 1975.
20. On Astronomy in The Stone Age, 22 Current Anthrop (1981) 585; cf A. C. Haddon, 10
Natural Sci (1897) 33-6.
21. The Mythic Image, Princeton U. Press, 1975.
22. N. Y.: Crown, 1975.
23. Yes, by Land, and No, by Sea, Amer. Anthrop.
24. Michael Coe, in Aveni, op. cit., 31.
25. Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanaco, The Cradle of American man, N. Y.: Augustin, 1958; H. S.
Bellamy, Built Before the Flood, London: Faber, and Faber, 1943.
26. Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus, N. Y.: Crown, 1971 and Riddles in History. N. Y.: Crown,
1974.
27. Riley, op. cit., 457.
28. Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1976.
29. Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Le Renard Pƒle, Musee de l'Homme: Paris, 1965.
30. Ibid.
31. Essay on Man, New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1944, 48.
32. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, N. Y.: Pantheon, 1970.
33. Cf. Kluckhohn. Mirror for Man, N. Y.: McGraw Hill, 1954.
34. Op. cit.
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIX
SCHIZOID INSTITUTIONS
Totem and taboo organize and report 'right' and 'wrong' for the people of a culture. They
control one's selves by setting up a bank of animated displacements, publicly symbolized,
and preventing one's selves from disturbing the assemblage. It would seem to be a normal
way for homo schizo to behave. It does not matter that the terms are reserved for 'savages;
' civilized cultures can and do employ the totem and taboo. Most of this chapter, once it
moves from the opening theme, plays upon their variations.
Totems and taboos are convenient ways of repeating and organizing obsessions. They are
group elaborations of the schizophrenia of original humans. Both are found in all cultures
and in varying degrees of weight. In large-scale cultures they are part of religion and
bureaucracy.
Taboos are sacred prohibitions, whether received directly or indirectly from divine
authority. The 'Ten Commandments' include taboos. The name of Yahweh was taboo. At one time
it might be pronounced only once a year. Violation of taboos is commonly supposed to have
fatal results. Yahweh frequently concludes his injunctions with the phrase ... lest you
die.
The totem, more strictly, is a symbolic identification of a human group with an animal or
plant, which represents a divine force. Because animals (the owl, for instance) and plants
(the sacred oak) were tangible, near at hand, and well-known, they could readily be fitted
into the scheme of delusions; a communication system, largely imaginary, is set up between
the life-form and its human patron.
In joining with a totem, a human group acquired a talisman and group representative. The
totem life-form operated in the sky and on earth to the presumed over-all benefit of its
sponsors. Once the sun (earth) rotated too fast; the great rabbit, said some American
Indians of the Great Plains, lassoed the sun and halted it, not releasing it until it
promised to go slower (perhaps the rabbit was a cometary image.) But a totem also imposed
limitations upon behavior by means of taboos, rites, and penalties.
Totemism came to be a set of specialized practices with regard to a species or even a
particular animal or plant. It arose with the help of certain celestial behaviors that were
for various reasons interpreted as animate behaviors within the celestial environments. The
important illusory behaviors of the animation in the sky are carried down to Earth and
cemented by analogy to the organism's earthly behavior. Thenceforth a set of attitudes to
the life manifestations are produced that give birth to totemestic practices. As the human
draws apart from the 'lower forms of life, ' the totem and the taboo dissolve into
sublimations.
A totem provides a complete schizotypical system: the injection of divinity into an animal
denotes a cognitive disorder, a hallucination, a misplaced metaphor. The exclusiveness of
the totem and its group towards other totem groups in its associated taboos reflects the
schizoid aversiveness to others; the worshiping and cannibal sacrifice (sometimes) of the
totem animal emerges from ambivalence; the numerous rituals and rules connected with the
totem convey compulsive obsessiveness; and the secret and enduring aspects of the totem
group's practices, going back to the totemic primal incident, display catatonism.
Enrico Garzilli writes of Faulkner, Joyce, Pirandello, and Gide in their searches for the
real self, notable names, to be sure, pursuing at the pinnacles of literature the
primordial search for oneself within the polyego [1] . He explains that the word is the
self; becoming human is to become a word. Hence the importance of such ancient expressions
as begin the Gospel of John: In the beginning was Word; and Word suffused God; and God was
Word. (My rendering.) We sense here the power and control exercised in the first naming of
something and agreeing upon it with others. We should understand, too, here, that Word is
Logos or the enlightened life of mind.
SPEECH AND LANGUAGE
C. Levi-Strauss is of the opinion that language was born all at once, thus supporting our
position of hologenesis. He goes on to say that whatever the moment and the circumstances
of its appearing in the range of animal life, language has necessarily appeared all at
once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually. After a transformation the study of
which has no relevance in the field of social sciences, but only in biology or psychology,
a change has taken place, from a stage where nothing had meaning to a stage where
everything had. [2]
This is a surprising use of the word relevance. Once we have understood what was happening
biologically and psychologically, we comprehend what was happening socially. A
quantavolution introducing language must concurrently involve a grasping for logic, for
control over memory, and for the social consensus on meanings from which culture sprouts.
We have already spoken of what was happening biologically and psychologically: the
hominid's brain was beset by delays in instinctive reactions, building special sub-centers,
and displacing throughout himself and the world outside. The internal code of language was
springing up and erupting here and there into public language.
According the Edward Sapir, too, language was formally complete from the beginning and
existed from the beginning of man. H. Kalmus claims an explosive origin of speech, too, but
then limits the speed to hundreds of generations, [3] a retreat to appease the millions of
years of mankind awaiting fulfillment. Speech did not occur word by word, grammatical form
by grammatical form, over millions of yeas of humanization. It probably sprang up in a
mixture of counting, signs, and ejaculations. Counting has been connected (through Lord
Raglan's How Came Civilization?) by Seidenberg [4] with rituals, which fits the model of
homo schizo well. Counting was invented in a civilized center, in elaboration of the
creation ritual, as a means of calling participants in ritual onto the ritual scene, once
and only once and then diffused. Seidenberg explains that all people had religious
numberings and taboos on certain kinds of counting. It is frequently imagined to be theft
when one's name is counted. Today, a homologous paranoia underlies the hostility of many
persons to the computer, which seems to steal one's name, carry one's number, and
manipulate these and hence oneself.
A person is only created when named or announced and the creative word may have been the
creative number. Marshack would seem to be moving along a similar path, with stress upon
arithmetic and calendarizing (the catastrophized need to watch the skies for regularities
that are hoped for, and irregularities that one must prepare for) [5] . He is also
locating ever earlier symbolic forms.
Some anthropologists are proving that the chimpanzee can learn to understand words and
sentences. The point of exhaustion is reached after several dozen of them are learned. If
the chimpanzee has not learned to speak in its supposed eight or more million years of
existence or whatever its age as a species, it is unlikely to begin now. On the other hand,
if the chimpanzee had just recently been mutated, the effort might be worthwhile.
The human seems better equipped to move his tongue than the chimpanzee, but it is not the
primate's tongue that prevents speech. Basic English, a shortened selection of words for
communicating in English, does well with 750 words from a possible quarter of a million.
(Its problem lies in the constructions; the format or program of a language would be
critical to a world tongue, and cannot be simply imperialistic.) A number of gods have as
many names as would be needed to constitute a language, hundreds for every major god.
Many vertebrates and insects could manage 500 distinct sound-combinations; 9 distinct
sounds might be permuted about 2 9 or 512 ways. Since words have several meanings,
depending upon their context, a great many more than 512 'words' are possible. When these
thousands of words are combined, many thousands of messages are possible, enough to make a
lexicographer out of a sparrow.
In order to speak, an animal has to be intelligent. This means that it must possess a sense
of being an individual, a will to words, the things to refer them to, a capacity for time
and recall, and an obsession for reiteration.
There is no speech center in the human brain; a large cortical area controls speech and is
placed in either the left hemisphere (for the right-handed) or the right. This would
suggest not only that speech is recent and non-organic in structure, but also that the will
to speak is an inner necessity connected with instinctual blockage between the left and
right hemispheres, and slowdowns in message transmission in other newly grown parts of the
brain.
Man did not get so clever that he began to talk. He was originally so frightened that he
began to ejaculate names, and to call them out obsessively, then to use them on like
occasion (to compare, in effect), to admonish, to pray, and command. To his surprise, he
could find others who might understand, at first perhaps only a twin, then their offspring.
Nouns came first, wrote G. Vico, one of the earliest modern etymologists. And he definitely
connected the earliest speech with the worship of the gods.
Following the ejaculative phase, which may have occupied only a few years, language
probably entered upon a liturgical phase. Heavily depending upon exclamation, it moved to
detailing situations and meanings. It undertook to express what had happened (to call the
roll of disasters, so to speak), to exorcize the causes of the events, and to cover them
up, making sounds of appeasement or evasion.
Much public or formal language, like liturgy, has been formal and compulsory from the
beginning. It is still so, obviously in mega-societies but also in tribal societies.
Maurice Bloch speaks of the deliberate and enforced impoverishment of language in
traditional oratory. The language acts to control the speaker [6] . He cannot go beyond
prescribed forms of speaking. Hence public speech is understandable only in the context of
ritual, as Malinowski said, not by virtue solely of knowing its lexical units. The rhetoric
cannot become revolutionary.
GRAPHICS
Speech came promptly, but writing was not developed well until civilizations had poetry,
art, religions, and social systems. A possible reason for this may also be supportive of
our theory of language. It is logical that as speech is to the mouth and ear, writing is to
the hand and eye. No one doubts that earliest man (or latest hominid) was as digitally
adept as he was orally proficient. However, gestures, grimaces, and context could let the
eye help the speaking process along.
But the hand and eye could not, like symbols, accomplish internal symbolizing or speech,
which is probably what was occurring in the new creature to help him coordinate his several
selves and their displacements in the outer world. That is, public speech was the
extrusions of inner speech, like the small portion of the iceberg that floats above water.
Some people with complex languages do not write even today. Art of course takes the place
of writing in respect to many messages from one's ancestors. A totem pole can take the
place of much written history, depending upon the kind of history wanted. There is a clue
here: a large society and an official class need explicit messages and records.
Until these criteria come into play, art can successfully block writing, somewhat as
television blocks literacy. Art can say so much that, by comparison, the breaking down of
pictures and symbols into writing may appear to be a meaningless and barren enterprise.
Further, it may seem to be sacrilegious to openly admit that words are interchangeable
tools. Hence writing was originally a holy profession, as in the Egyptian bureaucratic
empire. It was carried over into government: the needs of a centralized administration were
a far greater impetus to the development of writing, among the Sumerians (cuneiform) as in
Crete, than intellectual and spiritual needs, [7] Earliest tablets speak mostly of rations
and personnel in the palaces.
But, in maritime cultures, such as the Phoenician, the pragmatic value of messages finally
broke the sacred grip. Words (orally spoken) had departed so far from their origins and
symbols from art, that they might be used casually in practical affairs. The alphabet was
invented out of numbers, phonetics, and calendars by people who were on the move, as in
boats [8] .
The invention of writing was an effective grasping for control of memory, behavior, and
pragmatics. It delivered also a severe blow to the imagination; it caused massive
disenchantment. It placed credit for works effectively upon the culture. No longer could
one be taught by the gods, through subtle or at least mysterious parental and social
transmission or from the depths of one's being, from inner springs. Besides memorization,
one had exactness, repetition, a third party, an objectivity, a beginning of coolness and
remoteness.
PRIMORDIAL LANGUAGE
Man spoke one tongue to begin with. As he diffused from his proto-patria, his speech had
reason both to change and to remain the same. If there can be found a basic set of sounds
and words that is common to all of mankind today, then one would have an original language,
a proof of cultural hologenesis, and an indication of the recency of human origin. Searches
for the first language have been modestly rewarding, enough so to justify a greater
expenditure of time and resources, especially for computerized manipulation of data. R.
Fester has proposed that there is an original vocabulary of six archetypes common to all of
humanity which still today comprises the basic of every language and which at the same time
provides a clearly recognizable link between all languages. The root-words of 'Pangean, '
as we might call the tongue, would be BA, KALL, TAL, OS, ACQ, and TAG. From the moment when
the genus homo left the family of lower animals, and thanks to his upright stance, both
hands and senses could serve him more freely than before, the vox humana shared his further
evolution to the Man of today. [9] We should, of course, disregard the makeshift ladder
that Fester has thrown up here to arrive at human voicing. The words are prominent today in
geography: Indo-European, Mongolian, Phoenician, African and Ancient American geography was
decidedly using the same original words.
Fester claims to have discovered that in many languages, the syllable BA pertains to human
relations and subsistence; KALL appears connected with the idea of concavity and the
females womb; TAL refers to clefts, to the ground, to females; OS to thresholds; ACQ to
water; and TAG to height, gods, erect humans. To Malcolm Lowery, who has kindly supplied me
with his translated materials, the progression by which the words related by Fester to the
roots are said to drift in space and among cultures is not intelligible.
J. P. Cohane also proposed a set of root words, independently and without awareness of
Fester's book [10] . These key words, he believes, were strongly religious in their
original associations. Like Fester, he finds his examples to be most copious in geography.
His words are also six in number, although others of equal importance seem to be present in
his narrative. They are Oc (or Og) as in Okeanos, Kronos, Moloch, and an ancient Irish god,
Oc; Hawwah, as in Aloha, Yahweh, acqua, earth; mana; ash/ az; tema, as in Thames, Tiamat,
Athena; and Eber/ abar, as in Berber, Hibernia, Calabria, Abruzzi, Hebrew, Ares, Mars.
Scholars of linguistics seem disinclined to undertake the risky task of reconstructing the
prototype language. Whorf spoke of the story of man's linguistic development -- of the long
evolution of thousands of very different systems of discerning, selecting, organizing, and
operating with relationships. Of the early stages of this evolutionary process, we know
nothing. [11] We can, he said, only survey the results of this evolution as they exist
today. Still, Whorf was an early enthusiast for trying to trace the original ecumenical
speech. Generally, the linguistic establishment has beaten back the numerous efforts to
demonstrate speech affinities, regarding them as prima facie absurd. Such connections would
be Gaelic with Algonkin, Chiapenec with Hebrew, Othomi with Chinese, Choctow with Ural-
Altaic, these being Amerindian connections. The diffusionists have fared better in
proposing Old World connections: Hamites with Semites; Sumerians with Magyars; Late Minoan
with Greek; Egyptian with Hurrian; Etruscan with Lemnian; Berber with Basque, etc. Justus
Greenberg says that the 750 indigenous languages of Africa were originally four families,
and these were originally one, and possibly related to Hamitic, says Gilbert Davidowitz.
Encouraged by the theory of hologenesis of culture, I would conclude that the search for
the ultimate ecumenical Pangean language will not be in vain.
GROUP VS. INDIVIDUAL
Humans of the proto-age had immediately the problem of constituting themselves deliberately
into a group. The psychology of the hominid band was gone. In its place was the fearful,
distracted, individuated -- even multividuated -- person. He must belong, yet not belong,
at the same time. The favorite topic of political philosophers and economists -- the
individual against society -- took shape.
The bond between individual and collective psychology is tight. It is both genetic and
adaptive. It is fully determined. It is unbreakable. Evidence of these statements gushes
from history and anthropology on the one side and from many psychological schools on the
other. Just as the brain can reach to the toe to express itself physiologically, it can
reach to the stars to express itself psychologically. Where it happens to reach is a
cultural affair.
Just as the human is a coordinated poly-ego, so a culture, and for that matter any group,
is a mega-poly-ego, that typically selects a dominating ego-pattern as its design for he
behavior of its members. A special concept of organization is required to grasp that
organized behavior that is an extension of patterned mind-behaviors. The genesis of
external organization is in the mind( s) of individuals and their groups.
One way of expressing the holism of personal human conduct is that private motives are
displaced onto public objects. Thus, a person suffering inferiority and weakness in
personal life finds superiority and strength in political activism; Harold Lasswell,
following Alfred Adler, has expounded and documented this thesis [12] .
I do not limit our theory to this view or language. All men, given their brainwork
problems, must feel weak. All men seek power according to their own private and cultural
prescription. The distinction between private (individual) and public (social, cultural) is
most usefully applied during special investigations in politics and law. The human bonding
is without innate distinction. The human acts in a merged internal and external context. A
fond pat on the hand can stop a pain in the toe; a political victory can let a man digest a
thick steak, as I once observed in a study of Huey Kingfish Long of Louisiana.
There is no end to the process of 'private-public' interaction from conception to death.
That means also private-cultural. The individual and the group march along, side by side,
from the dawn of mankind. Both society and the individual are schizoid in origins,
structure, and functions. Their behavior and forms are not always congruent; the
symptomology is varied. Then it is that deviance (medical schizophrenia) is defined. The
individuals seek to evade the society or change its laws; the society seeks to make the
individuals conform; else it treats them for mental illness or jails them on account of
their menacing or destructive conduct.
The process will go on as long as human nature retains the form which it assumed in the
days of creation. There are perhaps some non-schizoid culturally created humans, who have
evaded hybridization with the schizoid, the fate of most hominids. Even if there were none
at all, the idea of their existence should be retained for heuristic and theoretical
purposes. They would be well-trained primates, although not discernible as such. The
schizoids, and especially certain schizophrenes, are religiously and politically dominant.
With their obsessions, suspicious hyperawareness, penchant for symbolism, and their
megalomania they control the world. That is, they try to control it; but the world is, by
their own definition, uncontrollable. Homo sapiens schizotypus defines 'control, ' and is
insatiably anxious for control.
Human action moved back and forth along an axis of tension between the individual and the
collective or social. Self-awareness was an inescapably individualist phenomenon. Never
after creation could the sense of the self be exterminated. Never thereafter, then, could
the collectivity perpetually and wholly dominate the individual soul. Incessant, forcible,
and imaginative attempts to do so over all of history were foredoomed to fail and still
are. The split self, a source of the greatest terror, could not permit its unification by
the collectivity, even though the collective achieved its great resilient strength from its
guarantees to the individual that it would assuage, diminish and even cure the terror of
the split. There was no returning to the mammal.
So loyalty began, built upon intrinsic disobedience. And so began authority. The story of
Job, in the Bible, represents the individual trying with all of his might to subject
himself to the will of Yahweh. Dreadful catastrophe, initiated by Yahweh, abetted by the
Devil and by hostile humans, crushes his life-values: his loved ones, his possessions, his
power, his respect, and his health. An exception stands for the sixth value, knowledge,
that is not removed but is the focus of the divine assault upon Job. If only he could be
mentally broken into a numbness, stupefied, then he could be defeated. He would not then
respond to God.
The very failure of this last form of degradation of self is both a triumph and a negation
of Yahweh. That is, all must stop short of the ultimate disaster, which would effectively
wipe out creation. On the other hand, once stopped short of self-effacement, the campaign
of Yahweh and the Devil is lost and the human being is restored. Job is left the victor on
the scene of battle. All of his values and achievements are indeed restored. The story of
Job is told as a lesson in humility; actually, it is a lesson in human arrogance: the will
to control God.
Job's story might be set at the end (ca 4000 B. C.) of the age of Elohim-Saturn. It is
before the flood of Noah. By then, human ideation was as complete as it was to be until the
Greek skeptics, unless some civilization, of which no trace remains, had operated with a
secular ideology. Technology had arrived at a level hardly exceeded until 350 years ago. At
Catal Hjk, in present-day Turkey (6,000 B. C. ?), orderliness and planning prevail
everywhere; in the size of brick, the standard plan of houses and shrines, the heights of
panels, doorways, hearths and ovens and to a great extent in the size of rooms. [13]
During the age following Saturn, which may be called the age of Jupiter (Zeus, Horus,
Yahweh, Marduk), the list of secondary institutions and inventions becomes long. Large
scale organization or centralization developed. Millions of people were aggregated and
ruled by agents and delegations of authority. Kingship; priestly, military, and official
classes; record-keeping; and extensive physical properties were common. Increased
domestication, breeding, and herding of varied animal species reflected a projection of
human organization into the animal kingdom. Large-scale agriculture is also to be viewed in
the context of an administrative organization of plants and human caretakers.
PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION
Basically, given the domineering schizoid prototype, social behavior (including language,
religion, governance, art, etc.) contains varying elements of obsessiveness, catatonism,
orgiasm and sublimation. The fears of the self, of the gods, and of loss of control lead to
the eternally 'shell-shocked' behavior of returning to the original traumas and repeating
them, both to punish oneself and to avoid punishment by others. Deviation is tabooed,
except as it finds expression in momentary orgiasm and sublimation.
The only way in which language and all other inventions of customs can be developed and
organized happens to be schizotypical: undeviating insistence upon repetition, the
compulsion to repeat, the slavish adherence to memory and tradition, liturgies. Bleuler
reports patients who will play the same musical trill or chord a thousand times and, like
the esteemed citizen of the regimenting modern state, Bleuler's patient, obsessed with
command automism, will mechanically obey any outside order, will imitate others slavishly,
will repeat everything he hears, and, despite a lack of feelings, do all of these things
impulsively or as if compelled.
This is an effective human response to a loss of instinct and the great need for new forms
of control over the self and others. Organization, even as we see it today in great
bureaucracies, highly rationalized, is a catatonic gripping for a non-changing world: 'If I
remain perfectly still, I will escape observation, I will not be punished, and the world
itself will stand still in emulation of me. ' Members of a Judaic sect freeze in whatever
activity they may be engaged when the Sabbath falls and do not move until the Sabbath ends.
In its conception and supposed functioning, a typical modern bureaucracy is a marvel of
deductive science [14] . It is hierarchy of power and control from top to bottom, with a
division of tasks from broader to more narrow scope, down to the individual worker. It is
regarded as a highly rational way of accomplishing large collective tasks. Yet this
administrative grandeur is only the recognizable descendant of the first efforts of homo
schizo to organize work, something he did half-aware but naturally. For the principle has
been the same from then to now: an obsession upon a displaced target (god, a village plan,
a hunt, agriculture) and an effusion of severe discipline, compulsively exercised and
rationalized. Man has had to work in this way. The awareness of the principle, its
statement in science and law, and deductionism as scientific method all trail after its
spontaneous generation. In early organizations, the compulsion to reiterate was applied to
external control and organization as it had originally been employed for self-control and
the ordering of smaller groups. Authority was supplemented by deductive principle.
Deductionism is the idea that from a general prescription may be derived specific
prescriptions. That is, a statement, that all must be put in strict order, is followed by
an enforcement system to ensure that no exceptions to or deviations from the order occur in
individual cases.
Deduction is consistent with the association of different kinds of displacements and the
compulsion to reiterate. It permits free play to authority to expand its scope of activity
and its human domain. It leads to all avenues of life. It externalizes the subjective, by
providing security, letting the inner self relax, and divesting the self from its
preoccupations with itselves into 'objective' external occupations. It relieves the smaller
social organizations of their involuted and intricate rites and rules, moving them out upon
the larger stage of a kingdom.
Constructions of many types became possible. Monuments, settlements, populations, armies,
and record-keeping all grew in size. A bureaucratic (usually theocratic) state might be
discerned, successful in its aggrandizement of human activities, and containing within its
larger order the orgiastic practices of religion and warfare, the sublimatory development
of the arts and crafts, and the negativism and retardation always imminent in human
populations.
Bureaucratic states might collapse from natural disaster, or from competing states, or even
from long-term demoralization. Deductionism is rigid and restrictive. It puts constraints
upon ambitions, social differences, and new experiences (orgiastically impelled). It is
prey to apathy.
Nonetheless such social forms as the bureaucratic kingdom must be called a civilization.
The surrounding and preceding forms might also be called civilizations. When, then, did
civilizations begin? Civilization is premised as some condition beyond humanization. The
human could not elect civilization; he was driven to it by his fundamental character; what
was needed was a respite from catastrophe and a space of a few centuries.
Civilization marked no qualitative change in the human character. It is an enduring, well-
grounded way of life for a large number of persons containing elaborated and sublimated
second-order effects of humanization. If more severe strictures are put upon the term, no
significant benefit in logic or theory accrues. Writing is civilized, but provokes no great
change in human character or ideation. Deducing commandments from a generalized authority
is not exclusively a civilized practice. Peacefulness is not exclusively a trait of
civilization. If it were not for the catatonic motif that freezes many cultures at a first-
order stage or in a 'fallen' stage, the word 'civilization' could be logically applied to
all human organization.
The catatonic response to disaster may be presumed to account for a number of 'primitive'
or 'retrograde' peoples and subgroups of larger populations, such that the elaboration
which is the hallmark of civilization does not proceed. This catatonism is negative and
refuses change. It fights the battle for world control within the person and the small clan
or tribe. Its overburden of constraints, rejections, and taboos miniaturizes and
trivializes. The externalized, exo-tribal culture is actually abandoned and condemned,
leaving the members of the group motionless, aghast, face to face with awful eternal
threat.
MEGALITHS AND MEGALINES
People built megaliths around the world, probably beginning six thousand years ago. A
megalith is a worked or cut stone that weighs, say, over 10 tons, which alone or in
conjunction with other stones mediates religious sentiments among the group and with the
gods. The stones stand for ancestors, gods, holy circles, sacrificial altars, astronomical
pointers, centers of convocation, and tombs. The efforts required to erect them demonstrate
both strenuous collaborative discipline and fervid emotions. They are large to demonstrate
the peak of divine fealty of which the group is capable and to stand firm against the
elemental rages of nature.
That they are often isolated from their quarries or sources, have been reconstructed again
and again, have been abandoned by or remain from a disappeared culture, and are fallen,
split, and cracked indicate that the fears of their builders were well-founded. The
builders were dispersed or annihilated. When recently the megaliths were rediscovered and
studied, they were considered mistakenly to reflect a peak level of technology of their
builders. Actually, many of them may represent the work of marginal surviving elements from
civilizations that peaked at higher technical levels but whose centers were eradicated.
The Olmecs of the Mexican lowlands used basalt quarried from eighty miles to the North to
build their monumental sculptures. Single stela and single heads weigh from forty to fifty
tons. The scale of the operation required dwarfs that of Stonehenge and speaks for an
authority of great power at La Venta, backed by potent sanctions. [15]
Gerald S. Hawkins examined the famous Nazca ground tattoo of lines for stars, planets, sun
and moon alignments and found none. The line complex was not built to point to the sun,
moon, stars, or planets. Astronomically speaking, the system is random. [16] But, if the
Nazca lines are very old, we could expect them to be nonsensical by current retro-reckoning
in astronomy, for there is evidence that the Earth has tilted during human times. Thaddeus
M. Cowan, a psychologist and archaeoastronomer, writes that Old World proto-astronomers
... were primarily concerned with significant solar and lunar events as they appeared on
the horizon.... Indian lore suggests a variety of ways the stars can be regarded
(individual stars, groups of individual stars, patterns). Similarly, the mounds might be
seen as following the same course (conicals, chains, effigies). [17]
That is, to the Amerindian, the mounds and stonework were templates of the constellations
and sky events, therefore measured large (though subjectively) and mostly not even fully
visible from the ground and to the workers. Probably this is behind the Nazca drawings too,
with their spectacular drawings of dragons and a large bird.
Since the megaliths were all constructed before the Earth and sun had achieved their
present orientations, none of them preserve their original orientations. At best they point
roughly towards some anniversary position of the sun, moon or stars, such as the spring
equinox. They were not the best instruments, either, of their times and culture. Whatever
the orientation and cyclical repetition that they counted and measured, a simpler, more
manageable, and finer measure was within the builders' capabilities.
The megaliths were religious. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was built to celebrate a
concatenation of heroic and historic deeds, not to be simply a convenient traffic divider.
It was oriented to the sunset of the victorious December 2nd Battle of Austerlitz, also
Napoleon Bonaparte's Coronation Day. So too the megaliths were erected, not to count months
or praise the dead, but to commemorate the past, to celebrate survivorship, and to control
destiny.
ORGANIZATION AND CONTROL
The first task of the split-self was to recollect itself and gain control of itself and
others. How it did so became the paradigm of governance ever thereafter. The workable
mechanism incorporated the overflowing stored fear, the gods associated with its origins
and still operative in the sky and on earth, and the four patterns of behavior, all of
which could be brought to bear upon the problem of self-control and the control of others,
lending the person a tolerable balance of mind and behavior while identifying with and yet
subverting the gods and accomplishing the pragmatic functions of existence in a much more
developed and technical way.
All of this appears rational and fully intentional only in retrospect. Most of it occurred
as the reaction and response of a new species of being to continued applications of great
internal and external stress. The bearers of the new human culture were not all members of
the new humanity. Whatever the combinations of mutation and potentiation, schizotypical
leaders were present from the beginning, who, in order to adapt themselves to the new life,
had to seek the adaptation of the others. They possessed all the tools of leadership that
have ever since been possessed, namely symbols, ideology, force and goods, in the same
order of importance, all tied together in the drive to control and organize the environment
according to a teleological, if delusional, form.
The predominance of the delusional, aggressive, symbolist character in governance began
then and continued ever after. Human food production, and the useful arts and crafts could
not move forward without qualities of leadership removed from the actual specialization of
tasks, no matter how important and vital they seemed in themselves. Control and power in
the self and in the group were their preconditions. Therefore priests were the governors,
and hunters, planters, and workers the governed. In a later elaboration, god-kings assured
the society a personalized succession from the gods under covenants and constitutions;
these the priests contrived to tie human governance to the order and disorder of the skies.
The universal presence of generalized, rather than specialized, leadership is knotted to
the principle of the total cohesion of culture, earlier described. Since the culture is
holistic, so must the culture's leadership be holistic.
REPUBLIC AND MONARCHY
The basic political institutions are but two, the republic and the monarchy. All human
organization resolves into a combination of these. The republican is of hominid origin and
was the logical first form of human organization. The monarchies originate from the
catastrophes following creation and the relentless evolution of homo sapiens schizotypus.
By the time of the first extant historical records, ca. 5200 B. P., past ages and past god-
kings had reigned and retired. Now there came, in what is conventionally regarded as the
first dynasty of Egypt, a consolidation and a worship of the sky-god Horus (Jupiter) and
the Pharaoh as divine king. But this unifier of Egypt built his rule upon a congeries of
small kingdoms each with its own divinities and cosmogonies. It is said that in the control
of the Nile waters (perhaps after the Saturnian flood) lay the appeal for the unification
of Egypt. More important as a cause was the aggressive force unleashed in the aftermath of
disaster. Just as the divinity of a king is proven by his internal absolute power, and that
proof is rendered necessary by a natural (divine) destruction of the previous power of the
prior dynasty and rule, so is his divinity proven by his ability to master foreign
societies, in emulation of the universal omnipotence of the king in the sky. The Pharaoh
incarnated Horus.
The sequence of rulership tended to proceed from disaster to survivorship to monarchy to
republic and then through the same sequence repeatedly, over cycles of varying duration,
until the cycle became a self-fulfilling prophecy, or Plato's tyranny, aristocracy,
democracy and so back to tyranny, aristocracy, democracy and so back to tyranny, a law of
politics. This could be rationalized, without the recollection of primeval catastrophe, as
'the way man's mind worked' and 'how societies changed. ' Even to this day, the cycle tends
to occur. The chaos that typically ends democracy is laid to libertinism, rather than to
the subconscious primordial feelings excited by a rule of liberty.
AUTHORITY
The end of democracy, that is, comes not from what happens but from an increasing feeling
that 'man is getting away with too much, ' and that the gods will respond by devastating
man. So a tyrant arises, plays god, restores order, and people hope that their expiation
and sacrifices of their liberties will be punishment enough. Usually the occasion for the
crisis of the regime and the revolution of the government is something resembling a
catastrophe: a natural disaster such as a drought, a hurricane, crop failure, economic
depression, or a crushing defeat by a hostile army. The function of authority is to support
the structure of the human mind that was erected upon the dire events that brought the
human mind into being. Authority is the formula that encompasses the three control-needs --
the control of the self, which is paramount; the control of the gods; and the control of
the environment, including other people.
The world may be believed to consist of an objective reality but that objective reality is
a product of an uncertain mind. The objectiveness of reality consists of a mind that
perceives itself and therefore perceives the need to define reality, plus an agreement of
many minds that reality is as it is. Both come from the shared structure and discipline of
the newly create humans.
But the mind is uncertain of this absolute reality and human society is an endless struggle
to set up and maintain this reality against the indecisiveness of human instinct and the
discrepancies of perspective, both genetically and experientially caused.
The bonding consists of a) the projection and identification of the mind with all of these
together, b) the obsession (repetition compulsion) as a glue of the binding, c) the
deductive principle as the method of moving through time and space and dealing with all
three components while moving, d) the lesser principles of catatonism, orgiasm, and
pragmatics that are intrinsically incapable of ungluing the binding formula of authority,
unless and until the mind is destroyed. That is, not only was chaos the primeval cloud-
world, formless and kaleidoscopic, but also chaos was his non-recollectable existence to
which he could not return, and feared, and therefore would not wish to go back to.
COVENANT AND CONTRACT
Men have always cherished the hope that the gods would cease to torment them. One of the
most brilliant inventions to bring this about was the 'covenant' of the lord. The gods
would promise to perform certain tasks and refrain from harming people provided that the
people would worship them properly and behave in certain ways as well. In the Bible, Elohim
and Yahweh introduce at least seven covenants. One is with Adam and Eve, another with Noah,
others with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and David. Several of these followed upon natural
disasters. A new constitution, so to speak, was handed down from the throne.
But note how the route from catastrophe to theocracy to monarchy to individualism is
pursued. First there is chaos: no promises are binding. Friedrich Nietzsche, predecessor to
Freud in the discovery of the 'unconscious, ' writes in the Genealogy of Morals that the
human was originally simply a fickle animal. Somehow the creature had to be severely
chastised in order to give it a memory. For the keeping of promises was the basic condition
of humanization and civilization. Surprisingly, Nietzsche does not take the leap to
catastrophism, inasmuch as he thought that some immense event must have happened to cause
mankind to acquire a memory. He says that he cannot think of anything more severe than the
punishment that would be dealt out to persons who did not keep a bargain in early tribal
commerce.
Tribal commercial promises, like many another cultural trait, are traced by the
quantavolutionist to the by-product, the fall-out, from the great reality of chaos and
creations: 'You made us; you have destroyed us; do not do so again; we must believe you
will not; we have this specific assurance from you, your self-binding covenant; promises
must be kept (we hope) and therefore we shall kill any among us who violate your covenant;
further we will punish anyone who violates any promise that he makes, and go to war over
broken promises; so all contracts shall be sacred in your name. ' Thus I would imagine the
genesis of contracts.
Then as egalitarianism progressed, the laws came to regard a great many contracts as made
between equals, rather than handed down as in the beginning. So the sanctity of contracts,
which the American courts for a long time expounded with holy fervor, goes back to the
times of reaction and destruction, to fear, and to the magical coupling of the sacred and
the profane so as to reinforce the sacred. The pragmatic element of the contract is of
course great; there is no gainsaying Nietzsche there; but the catastrophized essence is
there too.
As in other areas, the catastrophized behavior works itself out in a highly sublimated and
indirect form. The 'rationality' of the 'contract law' is on the one side. The famed
penchant of Jews for 'arguing with El, ' 'legalism, ' and 'bargaining' derived in part from
their catastrophized anxiety over whether a new covenant would be pending and what the
words of the last covenant really meant.
On the other side, the aboriginal idea runs rampant. The Zealots of the first century after
Christ are a case in point. They believed a terrible calamity would soon overcome the world
and wipe out all but a few good Jews. Then a new covenant would have to be confirmed by
Yahweh. St. Paul extended the time, and modified this idea into a belief in the Judgement
Day. But the early 'millennialist' sects are imitated from time to time today.
And a close homology is afforded by the 'Cargo Cult' sects of the Pacific Islands; there,
property and promises are dispensed with, in a fatal pause or age-breaking, during which a
people awaits the coming of a great ship or (now) airplane carrying the goods of life
promised by a sacred ancestor.
We noted how the Greeks handled the problem of promises. Their gods were full of not-so-
valid promises, possibly because they were so full of obligations and interconnections.
Whence their gods were deemed fickle, not at all like Yahweh. But, recalling the passages
of Proclus on the bonds of Jupiter and rings of Saturn, one notes the covenant there [18]
: Jupiter is the paramount god of law and order in the universe. He binds himself as well
as others to obey his own laws. So the Greeks were not so far off the mode of humanity.
SEXUAL RAMIFICATIONS
Not much in the way of pragmatic life routines is exclusively male. G. P. Murdock surveyed
the part played by women and men in the economic and household activities of 224 societies.
[19] . Only the pursuit of sea mammals and major hunting were never exclusively the task of
women. But neither were they anywhere usually done by women. Nor were they ever a function
shared by the two sexes. Females like the goddess Diana of the Hunt were exceptional. I
attribute this not to the muscular ineptitude of women, but rather to unconscious male
sexual jealousy of large beasts, and a general lesser aggressiveness in the less schizoid
female, as I have explained in my accompanying volume on human nature today.
It is impossible for the human, given both the catastrophic and the physiological structure
of the mind, to divorce his major concerns, to segregate them intellectually, mythically,
verbally. One must impart congruity and cohesion to any important experience. He will put
all experience into context, through unconscious processing by way of the catastrophized
memory or through partially conscious analogizing and philosophizing. Important natural
events will be related to sex, food, tools, violence, and death. Each will have, in its
symbolization and in his mind, something of every other. Human sexuality is exponentially
more complex that primate sexuality and reflects, with all other life-values, the
circumstances of creation and the aftermath.
Truly and simply, events of the primeval period were seen to resemble hominid organs and
practices. Making sense of the sky events and their effects, with their super-potency,
called upon the new mechanisms of the mind to an ever-increasing extent, a shocking extent,
until finally sexual behavior, like all other behavior, came to be a secondary derivative
from imputed sky practices.
The origin of sexuality thus was attributed to the sky gods. Hence much that could relieve
disaster-anxiety, the true primal fear, was forced into human sexual behavior. From that
time onwards, sex was no longer the indigenous and instinctive product of the mammalian
species but was the example and instruction of the gods. From the very beginning of
humanity, sexual practices, like all other life and culture, were integrated and deduced
from the behavior of the divine.
Therefore, those practices which in the light of humanitarian science appear to be savage
or brutal were in fact instrumentally rational and functional for the new creature. Self-
consciously, he and she did not care for what was natural to animals, but wanted what was
possibly divine.
All manner of sexual practices and linkages of sex to other life areas came to be invented
and institutionalized. In the earliest dynasties of Egypt, four-directional compass points
are indicated by phalluses. Single and double-phalluses are carved as heads of batons,
possibly for pointing during ceremonies and for other magical purposes; these are found in
the French Upper Paleolithic sites. They are also found drawn on cave walls. Both the
paleolithic Cromagnons and the Egyptians draw a picture of heaven overarching earth: the
first as a bull over a female, the second as a sister over a brother (see Chaos and
Creation, figure 15). The drawings are so close in spirit that they may carry Cro-Magnon
man down to the Old Kingdom of Egypt. A parallel occurs in Minoan Crete where Dedalus
fashions a metal cow to house King Minos' wife so that she can cope with a white bull that
has attracted her. These are to be interpreted not as the exaltation of sexualism as a
human drive but to the divine imposition upon sex of the rule of heaven, nature, and gods.
The concept of sexual perversion dwindles when confronted by the complexity of sexuality.
The Princess Palatine, wife of the brother of Louis XIV of France, in one of her frank
letters describes her homosexual husband's attempts abed to fecundate her by masturbating
first with holy medals of the Virgin. (The scandal of the deed and of the letter itself,
which was omitted in a celebrated edition published in 1981 -- and this is scandalous, too
[20] , -- invites comparison, say, with the public holocausts of sinners of the same
culture in church squares before the 'god of peace and forgiveness, ' as described and
surveyed in contemporary publications.) The sacred and the profane, the obligation and the
evasion, merge like wrestlers, like the symbol of the Yin and Yang. Still, public madness
defines private sanity.
It is from the interpretation of divine behavior that cults of virgins and eunuchs
originated and were perpetuated throughout the world. Peter Tompkins thinks that the loss
of its tail by a comet identified with Venus may have originated these cults and
perpetuated them practically to our day [21] . It was through the fear of the sky gods
that punishment was ingrained in individual and collective behavior too, and that extremes
of both impotency and furious rape came to be responses to every major and minor expression
of the high energy forces.
Violence unleashed is everywhere given a sexual form and rests with the human psyche
thereafter. Sex is a screen for, and release of, the primordial fear built up by
catastrophic genesis and experience. No culture has escaped the process from the beginning
of human time. The more obvious violent aggression associated with human sexuality is paced
by sublimated sexuality. The catatonic response to disaster reflects itself in sexual
frigidity and impotence, with their hundreds of individual and collective manifestations.
Catastrophized obsessiveness is reflected in the frequent fixation upon the pornographic.
Unlike primates, humans have developed a prolonged coitus and frequent coitus, again as
types of compulsive-obsessive behavior. Human females secured a perpetual weak rut, after
an instinct blockage arose against the imperative primate rut period.
Once locked into quantavolutionary theory, sexology can initiate new theories for sexual
problems or deviations. The cultural relativity of sexual practices can be explained even
while the universality of the catastrophe-sexuality nexus is admitted. For example,
Saturnian and Bacchanalian orgies are deviant sexual as well as economic, organizational,
religious, and physical (anti-hygienic) outbursts. They introduce and celebrate the end of
the world in infinite series. Once reinforced and lent new meanings by the sky gods, human
sexuality entered upon the social scene vigorously. The simple dashed line at varying
angles ( | ) is most common in cave art; it is generally adjudged to be a phallic symbol
and certainly develops in that direction. The female vulva is also common (¥). The ankh
(see below) symbol of (comet) planet Venus is common and may even be found in the New World
as a diffused or independently invented symbol. It has been a religious symbol in Egypt and
in Christian areas for millennia. It is frequently used as a genital symbol, bisexual or
androgynous, and may be related to the Greek 'phi' (f) a fire sound, that was used as a
sexual symbol by itself.
ankh:
A variety of architectural forms have been given sexual as well as heavenly associations.
The pyramid (D), the megalith and obelisk (shown below), the tomb in several forms, and the
Greek temple (shown below) are suggested as primeval sexual symbols carried into the
highest civilizations. (The Temple resembles a triangular female symbol resting upon male
pillars. Naked and unashamed 'lingam' and 'yoni, ' monumentally constructed, are found in
India and elsewhere.
Obelisk:
Greek temple: Thus may be explained the most incomprehensible of interconnections: the
religio-politico-sexual. Creation events were seen to resemble actual sex organs and
practices. This happens by the basic delusion that gives objective realism to signs and
symbols. The superpotency of sky events and disastrous high energy forces might be
controlled, it appeared, by controlling their close cousin-referents in society --
sexualism. The rituals, sacrifices, elaborations, and sublimations then begin.
THE COMPULSION TO REPEAT CHAOS AND CREATION
Among the Navaho Indians, women sit on their legs, and men sit crosslegged. Why? They say
that in the beginning Changing Woman and Monster Slayer sat in these positions [22] .
Manu, the Noah of India, was delegated by the gods to be the recreator of all creatures
after the great flood. In a desire for offspring he practiced worship and austerity. He
practiced severe and great self-mortification..., while he stood on one foot with his arms
raised. With bent head and eyes unblinking he performed awesome austerities for 10,000
years. [23]
We must do as the gods did in the beginning, says an ancient Hindu text. But not only the
Hindus believe and act so. Every known religion does the same, whether it is the belief
system of a great civilization or of an isolated small tribe.
And not only is it the religions that aim to repeat the behavior of the gods in the
beginning. All social forms of activity are saturated with the emanations of this
principle. In Timor, when the young rice sprouts, a specialist on agricultural myths is
brought in to spend the night in the fields reciting the myths about the origins of
cultivated rice [24] . Every activity seeks to follow its earliest principle.
The bearing and baptism of children, marriage, the rites of adolescence, and death --
sexual relations, family relations, work relations, -- governments, companies, armies,
athletic teams: no activity can escape its beginnings.
Ballgames are played all over the world. They are just games, people say, and they may even
say that so-and-so invented the game of baseball or whatever the ballgame is called. Not
so. Every invention is in a continuity. Every game goes back to primeval religion. Every
game is a game originally of the gods. The human players of athletic and parlor games are
exhilarated by their unconscious replaying of divine roles in catastrophe and so are their
spectators.
Thus the Olmecs of ancient central America played a ball-game and had courts built with
religious carvings and paintings all around where the game was watched [25] . This was
about 1500 B. C., and is attested to in recent excavations of their ruins. Their myths are
clear as to what they were doing. They were imitating the games of the gods as they saw
them in the sky, bloody disastrous games in which the losers, though they be gods, were
killed. And so the Olmecs played their games with human skulls in the beginning, and the
players who lost were killed and skulls became the balls for the next games. To shrink from
these ancient practices, and take refuge rather in a supposed calm rationality of the
sciences may be comforting, but is self-deceiving.
No one can escape the conduct of the gods in the beginnings. Not even the secular mind of
the scientist. For even while asserting his distrust of the supernatural and legendary, the
scientist uses a language, a numbering system, and forms of organization derived from the
celebration of what the gods did in the beginning. Science is built upon the nature of homo
schizo; it does not come from outer space. The bulk of science comes from heightened self-
awareness, the wide span of human displacements, the causal connective mimicking of
instinctive stimulus and response, obsessive attention, suspiciousness, associations
retrieved by naming, and imitating with arithmetic addition the sequential processing in
the consciousness' (dominant ego's) control of attention. Scientists constitute a corps of
disciplined self-controllers engaged in these schizoid practices. Furthermore, like a snail
moves with its shell, the scientist carries his shell of culture as he goes about his work.
An Einstein will trust that nature does not play dice, a scientific fiction that perhaps is
not as reality-based as the cosmic fiction of early man, who went back to the beginnings,
when the gods were playing ball. In India the game of dice may have begun, say Santillana
and Dechend, with the gods, who go around like... casts of dice. [26] Indeed nature plays
dice. The Hindus also played a game called 'planetary battles. ' 'Nature, ' of which
Einstein speaks, is an idealization of Zeus, who maintained law and order, despite his
rapscallion son, the planet-god Hermes (Mercury) who was always traveling about and
bringing luck to dice-throwers.
What causes this compulsion to connect all activity to its origins in the primordial
conduct of the gods? A compulsion to repeat an event, say the psychiatrists, of whom Freud
may have been the most eloquent and original, is caused by the traumatic nature of the
event to those who experience it. What, then, was so shocking about the events of the
beginning? And how can we be traumatized today by events so ancient that they slip off the
pages of recorded history?
Now again, unanimously, the fossil voices of the dimmest past speak; the events were the
awful behavior of the gods when they created mankind. They tore apart the elements of
nature to fashion this new creature. They drenched the world; they fired it; they tore up
the earth; and they stormed the atmosphere. The human creature was made from the elements
in a time of great stress. He was born to great fear and abject servility to his makers. He
was born with a compulsion to repeat his birth throes. The birth of every infant, as in the
theory of Otto Rank, is the primal trauma of the person; the birth of mankind is the
primeval trauma of humanity.
SUBLIMATION
I explain in an accompanying volume my doubt that the word 'sublimation' is scientifically
useful. It refers always to a displacement; hence what is said about the one is to be said
about the other. Therefore, while I retain the word in these passages, the word
'displacement' can be read into them equally well.
The gestalt of creation inaugurated for the new person a kind of incessant civil and
foreign conflict, one in which his resources were over-extended internally and externally.
He could not keep himself in order without ordering the world outside, a generally
impossible task but one to which he was now biologically committed. But, as it happened,
his most effective ally was his external enemy, society and culture, including gods. These
are all non-existent delusions, and hallucinations when they 'command' one, but
nevertheless interpose true ordering principles of conduct into the behavior of the
inveterate warrior. In effect they tell him that he must 'sublimate, ' and teach him how to
do so.
Sublimated behavior is commonly understood as an unconscious substitute in socially
accepted form for impulsive behavior that would be condemned. The substitution appeases the
unconscious while it performs its overt function. Primevally, sublimation begins in the
overt function. Primevally, sublimation begins in the distraught circumstances of self-
awareness, as amnesia and recollective memory begin.
When the anxious species is born and asks of itself an impossible measure of control, it
begins by reacting against the memory of its harsh experience, which is soon submerged
('forgotten'). The memory is still active and sets up a ghost pain against the recurrence
of the experience. Consequently, the memory lends itself in translated and disguised form
to unrecognized expressions. It is carried back to the surface of the thought and activity,
where it is enacted and reenacted in disguise. It is used in a solemn rite, or played with
as a toy, a game, or a comedy. Thus, as was described, ball games became sacred, dramatic
events, which reproduced the battles among the celestial hosts, with skulls as balls, and
beheading as the price of defeat. As in heaven, so on earth. Control is established; the
memory functions in a displaced setting, exuding the energies of the response that it
demands but cannot perform frankly.
Only a theory that human nature is schizotypical can explain the vast and ramified
character of sublimation. Students of language, myth and art, in their diligent search for
principles, have discovered that myriad delusive and distorting guises can surround any
event. Yet sublimation occurs not only in linguistic and artistic life-areas, but also in
all areas of technology.
The original traumas and mental distortions of humans required all things in the objective
world to be processed through the schizoid world and there given some of their meaning and
forms. Beautiful church liturgies, children's fairy tales, methods of combat, designs of
tools, and systems of philosophy abound in examples.
Freud once wrote in Totem and Taboo that the neuroses on the one hand display striking and
far-reaching resemblances with the great social productions of art, religion and
philosophy, but on the other hand they have the appearances of being the caricatures of
them. One might venture the statement that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic
creation, the obsessional neurosis a caricature of a philosophic system.
In all three cases, the reverse is more accurate. The nomenclature is irrelevant. For
instance, hysteria is regarded here by Freud as a poor artistic creation, whereas actually
the art is a sublimation of hysteria. All three highly regarded sublimations are founded
upon the primordial madness that says in its first gestalt: fear, remember, control; and,
when external controls move against one, sublimate!
In the eight century B. C., Hesiod wrote a combined philosophy, theology, and poem,
containing what may be elements of a correct cosmogony. Gods and muses and humans transact
in a highly metaphorical and figurative drama. Between the reality and his mythology lay an
enormous collective pain, felt by a people who had not better way of confronting the
terrors of existence and the traumas of their history. It is so, too, when a schizophrenic
patient gives a fully pseudo-mythical account of an event that contains within it an
accurate report that he is too pained to tell about 'as it really happened. ' There is a
sad irony here that the more he succeeds to sublimate, the worse the diagnosis of his
illness. But is he not a 'pathological liar'? He is that, too, except that his lies are
embellished in a fashion close to what society will accept as myth or as a work of art.
When Gustav Mahler composed the Song of the Earth, he was a neurotic who was contemplating
suicide, but meanwhile he was also communicating to his audience, the society, a message in
a modified 'modernized' language that they would grasp on the brink of their own madness.
His song, his neurosis, his suicidal intents -- these were all himself trying to cope with
his depersonalization; but the audience would say, 'somewhat mad, but sublime. '
Shakespeare has joined together the transacting elements in a few lines of A Midsummer
Night's Dream:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name...
What we would conclude here is that sublimation is but whatever is socially acceptable, now
or later, in homo schizo's methods of handling his displacements. Everyone, not artist and
scientist and humanitarian alone, sublimates at work and play, in love and indignation, in
common speech, yes, in dreams asleep and awake. One must sublimate, and always has
sublimated since the earliest generations when a modus vivendi had to be established among
the schizo clan.
CANNIBALISM
A common textbook example of sublimation was provided us by William James, who suggested
that sporting contests functioned as substitutes for warfare. A weaker surrogate is
afforded the spectators, and perhaps even weaker is that tendered to the masses who watch
the sports on television. The problem of warfare is much more complex of course [27] . The
infantryman usually hates war. Why should he need a substitute? Whereupon we begin a
painstaking unraveling of the web of war, attacking the knots of displacement; projection;
paranoia; aggression; tradition; authority; habitude; greed; loot; rapine; prestige;
exhilaration; gambling; remote and indifferent pilots, missiles, and generals; racism;
economic competition; self-destructiveness; the armageddon-complex; and so on until all the
knots are untied and not much is outside of war except a few rules of the Geneva Convention
which beg us not to kill prisoners, and certainly not to eat them, as now and then has been
the case. Achilles wanted to eat his slain enemy Hector and Hector's mother, well, she
wanted to chew Achilles' liver [28] .
Cannibalism has also had to be sublimated, rendered by frontal cultural attack into a taboo
in most cultures, a nauseating abomination, but then also built into the most symbolic and
elaborate rites, as in the Eucharist of the Christian Catholic religion.
The suppression of cannibalism must be one of the most successful and important
sublimations that mankind has ever achieved. Cannibalism is not unnatural to humankind or
else it would not seem so repulsive and dreadful. Further, it would not be so commonly
discoverable in sublimated form among religions in the world. The major question is, in
fact, not whether, but how we came to be numbered among the rare species who have eaten
their own kind.
The theory of homo schizo here offers three reasons. The first is that a creature that can
fear and hate itself, and can transfer this ambivalence to others and gods, can sternly
rationalize the eating of others, which symbolically includes itself and the divine.
Second, the practice, which has psychic and religious justification, has had upon many
occasions a pragmatic or calculated effect; people who would otherwise starve upon the
occasion of near extinction from natural disasters, including famine, flood, and radionic
plagues, would eat whatever came to hand. Third, relations for some time with others of
one's band and tribe would include a stratification between homo sapiens and hominids. A
logic of divine ritual sacrifice, made urgent by protein starvation, could be confirmed by
primeval considerations of eugenics, population control, animal husbandry, and invidious
racism. Cannibalism was restrained and sublimated very early because it was self-
threatening; one was ingesting other egos of an uncontrolled kind except under rare stable
ego conditions. As with psychogenic mushrooms, you have to be a bit crazy to eat them and
you become distinctly crazy afterwards.
Anthropologists have long suspected earliest humanoids of cannibalism. From Ethiopia
(Valley of the Awash River), the Bodo hominid skull has, upon reexamination, been adjudged
a victim of ritual defacement and scalping at least, with a probability that it had been
treated anthropophagously [29] . These operations which use tools, are human, whether
perpetrated by Bodo man or by related hominidal or human types.
Nowhere to our knowledge was cannibalism more widely practiced than in the Aztec empire
prior to the Spanish conquest. The Aztecs placed war and its corollary, sacrifice, at the
very center of their universe... the one and eternal order. [30] Tens of thousands of
prisoners were taken, nourished, sacrificed, and eaten every year.
Gert Heilbrunn calls cannibalism The Basic Fear, and writes that the infant is born
cannibalistic and projects its impulses upon the environment as his persecutor.
Phylogenetic and human ancestral reflections in conjunction with psychoanalytic data point
to the ever-existing threat of passive cannibalistic incorporation as the basic danger felt
by the new organism [31] . He finds cannibalism widely spread among historical human groups
and sublimated very often in modern groups.
Let us now turn to anthropophagism in its most sublimated form. We begin with the warning
of St. Paul (Epistle to the Corinthians, XI, 29): The Christian who enters upon communion
without comprehension eats and drinks his own damnation. For the Christian is partaking of
Christ. The text of the Gospel of John recites the startling words of Jesus, which shocked
even his disciples, and this text is repeated by the priest at the moment of Consecration
in the Mass:
Most truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood,
you have no life in yourselves. He that feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has
everlasting life, and I shall resurrect him at the last day; for my flesh is true food, and
my blood is true drink. He that feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood remains in union with
me, and I in union with him.( 6: 53-6)
Henri Fesquet explains what occurs in the Eucharist:
The communion, is it cannibalism? To judge by its intent it is undeniably so. It proceeds
through a murder, a sacrifice, through manducation, and through the classic symbolism:
uniting a person with another whom one loves, and appropriating his qualities. To eat God
is to make oneself divine. But the sacrament is more than cannibalism. It surpasses and
sublimates it. It is disconnected materially from the cruelty of the killing, granted that,
without Golgotha [the mount of crucifixion], there could be no Eucharist, which directs the
separation of the flesh and the blood. Besides, the raw material of the Eucharist, the
bread and wine -- two products of the earth -- gives it a cosmic dimension, actually a
pantheistic one. The vegetable kingdom, among other things, precedes the animal kingdom
and, in a sense, engenders it; by means of the Eucharist, the cycle of creation begins once
more. That the presence of Christ is total ( real in the bread and the wine as Catholic
theology maintains) gives to the incarnation an exquisite prolongation and deprives the
embodiment, the cannibal effect, of all its cruel character. Here, the violence of love is
made silent, decent. The consecrated hosts and cups of wine, these there will always be,
everywhere and for everyone. It is the superior gesture of tenderness. The mean which Jesus
conveyed to his friends achieves a universal character. It is the virtue of Christianity,
which traversed the grounds of the religion that came before it, to have adopted the better
of them, to have purified their rites and broken down the barriers of races and nations
[32] .
The Eucharist might be compared with an entry in the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci where
he wanders from his point, which is to do honor to virtuous persons. They
deserve statues from us, images and honors; but remember that their images are not to be
eaten by you, as is done in some parts of India, where, when the images have according to
them performed some miracle, the priests cut them in pieces, being of wood, and give them
to all the people of the country, not without payment; and each one grates his portion very
fine, and puts it upon the first food he eats; and thus believes that by faith he has eaten
his saint who then preserves him from all perils [33] .
Collective violence need not proceed across territorial boundaries. The killing and eating
of members of one's own group, particularly of those somewhat different, physiognomyically
and mentally, and without foresight to arm and attack first, could occupy a normal place in
the career of the homo schizo band.
We recall that the deceased and digested are often relatives, at the least of very similar
kind, although, for that matter, there would be a general animism operating by displacement
and projection to make many mammals one's relatives and even totems. The general animism
would only serve to make the killing and eating of one's own kind less remarkable.
At what point would the practice cease and guilt be felt? For cannibalism, soon; for war,
never. As evident hominids diminished in number, homo schizo would find himself battling
with and dealing with his speaking and aggressive kind almost entirely. Identifications
would become closer and closer until one was eating oneself. This should stop most
cannibalism. Further the years of easy human hunting would be over; other animals were
easier to kill; improved weaponry played a part in this switch of practices.
Now then the cannibal victim can be identified with oneself (seeking esteem) and one's gods
(requiring sacrifice). The outcome would appear to be sacred cannibalism, reserved more and
more for ceremonial occasions and anniversaries. Thereafter any promiscuity in eating human
flesh would become tantamount to a crime against the gods and spirits; a taboo would be
born.
Prisoners were first sacrificed and eaten, then simply sacrificed. Ultimately animals were
sacrificed and eaten; this practice would be less thrilling but more reliable, since, for
other reasons, prisoners of the right kind were not always available. Like infant
sacrifice, prisoner sacrifice is more disturbing when other means of controlling the gods
are less threatening to poly-ego stability (I must stress that this poly-ego stability is
not an absolute, objective state; rather it is a cultural balance uniquely fashioned with
the individuating traits of the person.)
VIOLENCE AND WAR
Meanwhile collective violence continued unabated, enhanced indeed by social growth.
Primates do not wage war. Female primates do not even kill game. Baboons fight, and one
band will live apart from another, trespass upon another's territory, and engage in a melee
when challenged; instances of a baboon being severely injured or killed in such warfare are
rare. Strange individuals are usually chased away by a band's 'citizenry, ' but on occasion
adopted.
They do not foresee war, plan war, reenact or celebrate the anniversaries of war, or train
for war. The hominids behaved like primates. Warfare is peculiarly human and naturally
emerges from the schizoid traits of self-awareness, memory, group-shared symbols,
projection, and the limitless search for the impossible goal of control over the self,
gods, others and the environment, staked by endless fear. Aware of oneself, and fearful of
it, the person recalls the creators in subservience, propitiation and terror. As the
creators do, so does he. The wars of the gods have always been in his mind as models of
behavior. Even Christians carry along a war of god and the devil, descendents of Horus and
Seth in Egypt, Jupiter and Lucifer (Phaeton) in Greece and Rome, Tezcatlipoca representing
both in Aztec Mexico, according to Brundage [34] .
If culture appeared promptly upon humanization, then warfare and other forms of collective
violence may have roots in the same process. I say 'may' rather than 'must' because warfare
and other human practices might be considered most important as effects, yet maintain no
essential connection with the dynamics of human nature. If such were to be the case, we
should rejoice, inasmuch as collective violence might then be more readily extirpated from
culture.
It is pointless as well as impossible to survey here the voluminous literature on human
conflict from several major scientific fields [35] . Suffice to say that no culture,
anywhere, is surprised at collective violence, whether internal or external, and, to that
degree, a natural quality is indicated for it. However, nowhere does the practice of
collective violence bring on, except in individual cases, the physical revulsion that
cannibalism often excites when it is experienced or reported. Taboos against taking up
arms, for 'just' cause of course, are rare.
Ethologists, naming K. Lorenz, Arbrey, and Bj"rn Krten as instances, often claim that man
was originally a cannibal warrior. Ir"n"us Eibl-Elbesfeldt finds warfare in prehistoric
societies and in hunting and gathering cultures today [36] . Krten's theory, that man was
originally two or more kinds of primate of generalized brain and instincts who struggled
with each other, gives us a lead to pursue. An early human band, composed of homo schizo or
dominated by the type, would be in continuous contact with unaffected hominid bands. The
culture gap between the two species would be wider than their appearances might suggest.
Even though cultural assimilation had to recommend itself to homo schizo, and he tried in
the earliest times to accommodate hominids in his 'table of organization, ' there would
occur internal rebelliousness and flight. The neighboring hominid bands would have no means
of understanding nor wish to learn that they might become docile enough to appease homo
schizo, and find a place in his expanding territory. Thereupon, they would become targets
of aggression by homo schizo, who would kill some, break up the band, and acquire the more
docile as slaves who would join his 'breeding farm. '
Successful violence encourages more violence. So the practice of war would be common and
energetic. Relative to other sources of labor, sex, breeding, and control, bands composed
entirely of hominids or almost so would be most lucrative. And as we said above, they were
an excellent source of food. Peking man, homo erectus, along with other types of man, have
presented some fossil evidence of cannibalism. The food would be both hunted and farmed.
If the human felt at ease with himself, whether or not he controlled the world, it is
doubtful that he would so persistently engage in the most risky of enterprises --
collective violence. Enough has been said in this work and elsewhere to stress that the
problem of 'feeling at ease with oneself' is no matter of a decent meal and a good night's
sleep, but it is the greatest and most persistent human predicament. Contributing to its
recalcitrance to therapy is its embodiment in the central nervous system, where to suffer
and inflict suffering is tolerable and even appeasing and the urge to control extends
beyond sight, beyond the grave, into the skies.
C. G. Jung would make of this the eternal celebration of a destructive archetype,
developing out of the eternally split condition of the soul. The archetype is that which is
believed always, everywhere, and by everybody, and if it is not recognized consciously,
then it appears from behind in its wrathful form, as the dark son of chaos, the evil-doer,
as Anti-christ instead of Savior -- a fact which is all too clearly demonstrated by
contemporary history [37] . Moreover, the natural storms amidst which hominid was mutated
into man and which occurred throughout his earlier history added to his fright and stressed
his already biologically catastrophized nature. In every disaster some people run about
proclaiming the work of the Evil-doer --The Evil One, one Alaskan 1965 earthquake survivor
called him. All institutions and cultural practices are permeated by natural catastrophes.
Their effects upon mankind would be fully apparent in history and psychology were it not
that mankind already displayed and carries similar effects in his nature -- 'white on
white, ' disaster upon disaster.
Notes (Chapter 6: Schizoid Institutions)
1. Circles without Center: Paths to the Discovery and Creation of Self in Modern
Literature, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U. Press, 1972.
2. Introduction to M. Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires,
1968.
3. In Frank Smith and G. A. Miller, eds., The Genesis of Language, Cambridge, Mass., MIT
Press, 1966, 282-8.
4. The Ritual Origin of Counting, 2 Arch. for Hist. of Exact Sci. 1, Berlin: Springer
Verlag, 1962, 1-40.
5. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization, The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First
Art Symbol and Notation, N. Y.: McGraw Hill, 1972.
6. Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, London: Academic Press, 1975; cf.
Charles Morris, Signs, Language, and Behavior, N. Y.: Prentice Hall, 1946.
7. M. I. Finley, Early Greece, London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.
8. Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus, 103ff.
9. Sprache der Eiszeit: Die Archetypen der Vox Humana, Berlin: Herbig, 1962, 31, 6.
10. Cohane, The Key, N. Y.: Crown, 1969, is directly comparably with Fester.
11. B. L. Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge Mass: M. I. T. Press, 1956, 84.
12. Power and Personality, N. Y.: W. W. Norton, 1948.
13. W. A. Fairservis, Jr., The Threshold of Civilization, N. Y.: Scribner's 1975, 143.
14. A. de Grazia, The Science and Values of Administration Admin. Sci. Q. (Dec. 1960) 363-
98; (March 1961) 558-83.
15. Michael Coe, Mesoamerican Astronomy, in Aveni ed., op. cit., 89.
16. Gerald S. Hawkins, Astroarchaeology: The Unwritten Evidence, ' in Aveni, ed., op. cit.,
89.
17. Effigy Mounds and Stellar Representation: A Comparison of Old World and New World
Alignment Schemes, in Aveni, ed. cit 218-35, 222-3.
18. A. de Grazia, Ancient Knowledge of Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings, II Kronos 3
(1977), 65-70.
19. Comparative Data on the Division of labor by Sex, 15 Soc. Forces (1937), 551-3.
20. See L'Express, Paris, Nov. 1981.
21. The Virgin and the Eunuch, N. Y. Bramhall house, 1962; Zvi Rix, Notes on the
Androgynous Comet, I Rev. Society for Interdiscip. Studies (Summer, 1977), 17-9.
22. Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1954.
23. Manu, Ur-Napischtim, and Noah, U. of Chicago Mag. (Winter 1975), 10ff.
24. Eliade, op. cit.
25. Carmen Cook de Leonard, A New Astronomical Interpretation of the four Ballcourt Panels
at Tajin, Mexico, in Aveni, ed., op. cit., 263-83.
26. Op. cit.
27. Cf. Quincy Wright, The Study of War, Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1965.
28. Eli Sagan, The Lust to Annihilate: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Ancient Greek
Culture, N. Y.: Psychohistory Press, 1980.
29. Based upon paper and discussions at the American Anthropological Association
Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, August 15, 1982, led by Donald Johanson and Timothy White,
with supporting statements by Louis Binford, Glenn Conroy and Clifford Jolly.
30. Burr C. Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World, Austin: U. of Texas press,
1979, 217.
31. 3 Jour. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. (1955), 44-450, 464.
32. Henry Fesquet, Anthropophagie, sacrifices humains et immortalit‚, Le Monde, June 21-2
1981, l, 17.
33. Quoted in K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci, London: Hogarth, 1962, 262.
34. Op. cit., chap 4.
35. Q. Wright, op. cit. W. D. Hamilton, in Fox, op. cit., 133ff.
36. The Biology of Peace and War, 1975, trans. N. Y.: Viking, 1979.
37. A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, in Psychology and Religion: West and East, II
Collected Works, New York: Pantheon, 1968, 117.
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVEN
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF HISTORY
The death-scream of Lady Macbeth is heard off-stage and Macbeth, told of her end,
generalizes the human tragedy:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last
syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty
death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and
frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (Act V, scene 5)
Whereupon he sallies forth to battle; death is the therapy: il se fait tuer or, as
Americans express it, 'he gets himself killed, ' Life is a tale told by an idiot, the many
idiots who live and then those who tell of it, and such is history. These famous lines of
Shakespeare seem to be in context here.
Starting with its creation, mankind moved through time on a spiral path around its schizoid
core. On numerous occasions catastrophes changed the arc of the spiral, sending humanity
closer to the core in mentation and behavior. Whenever the natural environment seemed to
settle down, it appeared that he might invent ways of reaching beyond his limitations, and
his historical spiral moved away from the core. But simultaneously, as if magnetized by the
core, he would be pulled inwards to it. Thus it has happened that the record of some five
thousand years of proto-history and history has found mankind reenacting time and time
again, without the urgency of catastrophes, his primordial behavior. His spiral path has
had an inertia such that he could neither escape his core self, nor the fossil thrusts of
the disastrous times that he had suffered. When a social change occurs, when the earth
trembles, when a comet files by, his mind is unduly disturbed, that is, agitated beyond his
normal schizoid behavior into activity reminiscent of the similar but much greater
catastrophes of his earlier days on Earth. It is not necessary, either, to search only in
the wreckage of recent disasters of relatively large social scope for an outburst of
symptoms of schizophrenia. Even in mild episodes, whether collective or individual, the
symptoms exaggerate, become full-blown. The recurrence of such symptoms, great or minor, in
modern times, are not to be thought of as evidence of the weakness of the quantavolutionary
model of homo schizo, but, on the contrary, are indications of its strength.
Let us examine a few types of historical behavior to clarify the 'psychopathology' of
history as the story of homo schizo. When we do so, we can agree that Arthur Koestler, man
of much political experience as well as a profound human analyst, was hitting close to the
truth as he was writing: When one contemplates the streak of madness running through human
history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of
some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. [1]
A SICK JOURNEY
Generally, history-telling is a guided use of symbols to integrate disordered minds by
reiterating obsessions about how the idols of the tellers have controlled the world on
their behalf. So history-telling can be a form of dance, chant, prophecy, folklore, legend,
prayer, catechism, rite, epic poem, parable, fiction, literature, fantasy, sacred relics,
drawings, sculptures, physical constructions, or historiography in its narrow sense. In the
total accounts of humanity, historiography, which looms large in the minds of such as read
this book, is a small part of history, with only a fractional impact upon the total effects
of history-telling.
It is a history-telling when people engage in sacred drama or dancing, as all drama and
dancing were during most of the world's history. Nor does comedy or jazz dancing or even
computer music escape its sacred roots, although these are sublimations of sublimations
beyond facile recognition. Sacred dramas have occupied more human time in history than the
whole of all secular theatrical activity since its beginning. It is common to find
'madness' in Shakespeare and Samuel Becket, but a sense of direct connection with primeval
origins does not come readily. Let us use the materials so auspiciously gathered by Perry
to stress the interconnections of dance forms, schizophrenia, and the origins of mankind.
Persons going through psychotic episodes frequently say that they are taking part in some
dramatic performance that has been already written and prepared beforehand.. nothing about
them feels arbitrary or 'made-up, ' but rather they seem to follow well-established
configurations. [2] They are linked actors in ritual dramas found around the world --
Egypt, India, China, early Central and South America, the Norse area, Ireland, Iran and
other Indo-European regions.
The inner journey of the psychotic topically repeats the following form, in the words of
Perry:
1. Establishing a world center as the locus.
2. Undergoing death.
3. Return to the beginnings of time and creation.
4. Cosmic conflict as a clash of opposites.
5. Threat of the reversal of opposites.
6. Apotheosis as king or messianic hero.
7. Sacred marriage as a union of opposites.
8. New birth as a reconciliation of opposites.
9. New society of the prophetic vision.
10. Quadrated world forms.
Carrying this framework into the ritual drama of Ancient Egypt, we encounter the
replication of raising of the center of the city as did the creator god. Next there occurs
the drama of the murder of the god Osiris, and of ensuing chaos, until his son Horus
assumes world power, and is embodied in the Egyptian monarch. The king goes back to the
beginning of creation and is baptized, purified, and prepared for the future. The devil god
Seth, represented by an animal, seeks to usurp the monarch; mock battles are fought with
warrior actors. A suspenseful period is said to follow, a chaos, while the issue of ruling
the universe is unsettled. The king is crowned ruler of the world, successor to Horus.
Various festivals are held; effigies of the gods cohabit. Osiris is reborn through his
mother, the Sky. A new harmonious order of the world is proclaimed, reestablishing the
primal order and justice. Throughout, the world is represented by a four-cornered, four-
pillared structure, the four cardinal directions. The king takes possession of them all.
Although a jumble of celebrations and their related dramas develop in Egypt, as elsewhere,
and do so in the varying forms that personal psychoses take, the general paths of the
rituals remain clear and it is likewise strikingly evident that the great society is
celebrating a thoroughly schizoid cycle, year after year, endlessly.
The melange of ritual dramas adds up to history, as it is known and relived by the elite
and masses of all times and places. History as it is taught in the schools, schizoid though
it may be, is but a pallid imitation of this more fundamental and archtypical history-
telling. The Exodus story, true in most respects - as indeed the drama contains essential
historicity for all peoples -is recited and replayed in Judaic ritual celebrations. The
Roman Catholic mass, basing itself upon the life of the Christ, is also a ritual drama.
Joseph Campbell composes a worldwide plot for the tales of heroes, which belongs in the
category of ritual dramas [3] .
What happens to the educated and scientific people, the millions of unbelievers, 'back-
sliders, ' the communist throngs of half the world that denies the ritual drama in its
traditional forms - do they successfully cast off the schizotypical behavior implicated in
the ceremonial dramas? More likely, they find substitute outlets. They pursue speculation
on the origins of the universe (the catastrophic 'Big Bang'), on the evolution of life over
billions of years, on the climactic but prolonged rise of mankind, on blind but progressive
nature and on its control by reason. In a recent television film, Cosmos, viewed by
millions and loudly touted by the intelligentsia, Carl Sagan, an astronomer, chants a
prolonged liturgy on the evolution of life forms from molecule to man, with the help of
canonical background music and sleight-of-hand cartoons.
Bits and pieces of the ritual drama (which was not a one-act performance anyhow) are
parceled out to holidays, parades, 'Hollywood westerns, ' speeches, diet-fads, paranoid
political causes, mass spectator sports and so on. Admittedly the sundered great god Osiris
is rarely discovered and put together again. Living a new history, as contrasted with
reenacting faithfully history, is difficult. But for those who cannot stand the secularized
way of life, there is then mental therapy: 'Maybe you should see a psychiatrist, ' or
There's an article you should read in yesterday's newspaper.
HISTORISM
History-telling today is typically viewed as the events of the past, incompletely or
completely related depending upon the number of volumes given over to it, sorted by periods
like the Renaissance, names like Julius Caesar, topics like architecture, events like the
Battles of Verdun, or demonstrations of principles like Marxism. Behind all of this is the
historian: Alexander is Great, said his faithful biographer, because I wrote about him.
What do historians write? If what history tells us is true, then homo schizo is the hero of
all times and places. If what history says is false, then history is the workings of the
minds of homo schizo on past events. Should someone protest that history is both true and
false -- and indeed it is -- then homo schizo must be both subject and author, and then in
a way all history is the autobiography of this species.
Historism is a production of histories about history. In its various guises, it is evoked
in order to train the people of a culture how to avoid and handle anxieties. It is
typically addressed to some part of society in preference to the rest because there are
usually several identities striving for recognition of themselves and no history can or
wants to work for all of them. Ordinarily it is the rulers who have most need of history
and can command it most readily and can support it. It appears no less than right that the
'heads' command the 'heads. ' It is clear that historism is a branch of culture, a culture
complex, and little more. The two have the same motive, to help homo schizo behave in a
controlled manner.
The major focus of historism is in a fundamental sense upon itself, that is, upon the power
needs that brought it into being. What are the main problems here? Historism must show how
first came chaos, then the creation of the forces that work for the benefit of its sponsors
and clients. So historism must deal with the creation, with the gods who are its gods, who
have chosen its clients. Then it moves to the rulers, its rulers and how they worked for
its clients until, usually, the rulers went bad. It unites fate and destiny with the
clients, but if the gods are not active enough, and if fate and destiny are not adequate,
then it adjoins some lawful principle, like evolution by natural selection, like progress,
like the triumph of the working class, or like the ideal of the nation-state.
Creation, gods, and rulers or principles -- these are the major subjects of history, the
events of history, even written history, much more oral history. Now then historism fattens
itself into great tomes, as in epics, encyclopedias and monographs, to concentrate upon the
settings or conditions of different times to make certain that all clientele will have a
locale and moment with which more easily to identify.
Then historism concentrates upon conflicts, and as in peek-a-boo with a baby, which Otto
Rank sees as a basic play for relieving the fear of a separation from the guardians, the
conflicts go to show how time after time the ego's stability is threatened by accident or
malefactors, only to be restored by benign and usually anthropomorphised agents. In the end
the topics of history, the main topics, not the endless sublimations of topics, serve to
concentrate attention and relief where it most matters, at the most threatened points: why
we are here in the first place, who we are, what has been done to keep us reassured -- even
by the most devious means -- and how we may expect to preserve our being into the future.
Historism, then, in all of its forms, is therapy on a grand scale for homo schizo. It
operates like a giant brain. It helps a selected main ego to dominate the other egos. It
occupies itself with the displacements that are current and molds them into more meaningful
buttresses of the self, so at one time it concerns itself with gods and then at another
time with heroes and rulers, then with food supplies, with money, with ships, whatever the
focus of the attention of its clients.
It aids the memory to forget and recall. It says to the Jews of 3400 years ago, 'Remember
your bondage in Egypt, ' and to the Jews of 1981 'Remember the Nazi holocausts. ' And the
Romans said 'Remember Carthage' and the Americans said 'Remember Pearl Harbor. ' One may
wonder that these are disasters. But the disasters are still the route to victories; the
end has not come. Meanwhile they give goals, ergo identity, to the clients of historism.
The Germans of 1980 do not proclaim 'Remember World War II! ' with much enthusiasm; they
are seeking a new dominant ego.
If the disaster is final, it is suppressed. The American Indians and Blacks, for a long
time, wanted no history and knew hardly any. It was ego-destroying. If, by some
concatenation of events, it is revived, then its more tolerable parts are recalled. The
unbelievable catastrophe that Elohim brought upon the world in the great flood is so
honeyed for the surviving clientele, for the Noahs, that it can be read by tender-hearted
little children without qualms. Historism supplies the proper amount of amnesia.
In addition it distorts or even denies the events. Even sincere efforts of German policy
since World War II have not prevented massive amnesia of the death camps, and, for more
complex reasons, German democratic leaders have had to tolerate deliberate efforts to show
that the Nazi holocausts were unknown to most Germans and also greatly exaggerated. All the
perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten of murder the hands of Lady Macbeth, the poet wrote,
and so guilt goes underground and historism is often nothing but sublimations of crimes
perceived and committed. It becomes part of the devil within one, the uncontrollable alter
ego and helps homo schizo to remain himself, eternally divided, and therefore adds to the
continual flow of anxiety, maintaining the level that guarantees the genetic predisposition
to remain an unstable self.
If it is true, as psychoanalysts say, that one has to be psycho-analyzed before he can
practice psychiatric therapy, then it must be equally true that all historians should be
psychoanalyzed. But if this were so, then history would be a dull compendium of who knows
what; or it might not even exist, for of what use is remembering if it does not tender
oneself a psychic strength? Conceivable, but impossible: if it were done, all poetry and
history and literature and music would be lost; it would be irrelevant, dead, unpracticed.
Or perhaps the psychoanalyzed historians will be told by their therapists what their age-
old mission is: not truth, but therapy.
But homo schizo is quite incapable of this, although he toys with the idea as we play with
it here. Historism gives him control, relief from fear, a more manageable ego, comfortable
obsessions, paranoia and aversiveness, cognitive disorders quite believable, grounds for
ambivalence, negativism; and above all it affords him sublimations. Verily, history is too
important to entrust to truth.
SCHIZOID EPISODES IN ABUNDANCE
The human never acts according to a single factor in his complex, but in terms of the
complex itself. Whence history as a whole can be viewed as a prolonged struggle against
anxiety, as Norman Brown, for example, asserts [4] . Action according to a single mode, e.
g., 'obsessive compulsion, ' without involvement in identity questions, displacements,
fear-level, or sublimation, does not occur. Rather, the history of a set of actions, of a
character, or of an institution involves all modes in different proportions and with
intricately woven and sometimes imperceptible patterns.
Technical and scientific histories, say defenders of objective historism, are exceptions to
the flow of schizoid control processes through accounts of the past. Firstly, as has become
accepted by historians of science, in principle if not in practice, such specialized
history has the full range of homo schizo behaviors in its substance. The writing itself,
far removed from a chant about the first days of creation, is a subterfuge, proclaimed so
openly and therefore deemed innocent. The sublimation of factual technical narrative, even
in its suspiciously professed narrowness, is intended to follow an obsessive rhythm,
letting all the faculties of homo schizo sleep and dream while the brain beats to a narrow
band of 'truth. '
Chess is a highly intellectual game. Computers can play it close to the master's level.
Below is a story that may not be in the history books of chess, it being counter to be
rationale of the game.
An extraordinary everyday-life example of a paranoid reaction illustrating shame-
humiliation mechanisms took place at the Spassky-Fisher chess-match of 1972 held in Iceland
for the world championship. By the 17th game, Spassky, the Soviet world champion, was
facing the loss of the match by three points, 9 1/ 2 to 6 1/ 2, with 12 points needed to
win. In this symbolic warfare between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the
United States, a humiliating defeat was impending for the Soviets, who had held the world
championship for the previous 24 years and for 41 of the last 45 years. Soviet chess was
about to lose esteem in the eyes of millions.
Trying to account for Spassky's unusual slackening of concentration and display of
impulsiveness, the Soviets issued a public statement claiming that non-chess means of
influence (electronic devices and chemical substances) might be involved. They requested an
expert examination of the playing halls and its contents.
A 24-hours guard was placed around the hall. The chairs of the players were examined for
poisons and x-rayed. (These were richly upholstered Eames chairs sent from New York.)
Icelandic scientists dismantled the lighting canopy over the stage, but found only two dead
flies. (Strangely, no one suggested further examination of these well-known bugs.) Nothing
was found.
At the end of the match, which Fisher won 12 1/ 2 to 8 1/ 2, Spassky, who during play
sometimes peered suspiciously up at the lighting, said, I still feel there was something in
the hall that affected me... I am really convinced there was some curious thing in it. [5]
Whence, for that matter, come the highly elaborated practices of medical therapy?
In the second millennium B. C., the Chinese word for medicine still was composed of two
parts, cure and divination. W. Tseng reports that the concepts of Yin-Yang opposites, of
the five elements, and of the microcosmos-macrocosmos bond dominated the corpus medicus
[6] .
Care and feeding of the young were perhaps the earliest therapies. Care of the self has
been noted among some mammals. The licking of wounds is common; they may even be bathed.
Care of other adults of the group is found in warning signals, grooming, and food-sharing.
This, if it were not reflexive or conditioned, but voluntary, would require the multiple
identification process of homo schizo. Worship of gods implies care and attention to the
projected demands and needs of the controllers upon whom one's sense of self-control
depends.
The first medical therapies, it may be conjectured, were reiterative rites and
celebrations, such as dramatization of big dreams, orgiastic feasting, cannibalism, self-
mutilation, mud baths if it was believed that we were fashioned from the primordial ooze;
blind staring of catatonia; emitting sounds evocative of pandemonia; and hypnosis.
Recapitulation of collective trauma, of natural disasters and defeats, was foisted upon the
group as a mode of therapeutic control. All of these are found today in highly altered
forms as mental and physical healing.
Then might proceed the infinitely varied and slightly less 'mad' corpus of homeopathic
medicine. Displacements occur by gestalts far removed spatially from resembling gestalts in
the brain. The essential methodology is still reiterative, but one large step removed to
the imitative by means of extended analogies -- exploring the overlapping discs of the
neuron nets for discovery of what new connections make one feel better. In the homeopathic
mood a therapist might readily move into the finest sublimations, recognizable as to their
origins only with difficulty.
Eating the lotus flower is far removed imaginatively and practically from sacred castration
as a way of controlling the god of a comet or a planet like Venus, which is associated
sometimes with the lotus and with castration and clitoridectomy. The effects on a wound or
on an aberrant mind are achieved, whatever they may be, at the same time as the cooperation
(control) of the god is achieved.
Ultimately the development of a set of plants, usable in a variety of complaints, is
recognized, accepted and even experimentally enlarged. All this now occurs beneath the
sublimatory umbrella of suppressed, 'forgotten, ' religious approval; thus, the god of
Venus may rarely be evoked or cited. A corpus of medical therapy exists and can even grow
pragmatically by means of the observation of qualities, doses, and effects. Homo schizo has
no objection in principle to actual cure, so long as the cures are by-products of or do not
interfere with self-control.
For lack of space, the interminable parallels (really homologs) between schizophrenia and
archaic human behavior cannot be drawn out. The invitation is always there, however, to
scrutinize, or even simply to screen, the contents, for example, of Mircea Eliade's several
books on primitive myth and behavior. There, the qualities of homo schizo exude from the
time of creation (illud tempus) and pattern themselves so as ultimately to reproduce the
insane-sane human of today. Whence one may venture among the deeds of the archaic heroes
as, for example, in Campbell's accounts, following the gods-driven succession of
compulsions, rites, sacrifices, penances, orgies, and aggressions, interlaced with an
infantile cute cunning that manifests the earliest pragmatic behavior.
Exemplary in studies of individuals or heroes would be Ulysses or Odysseus [7] whose
pragmatic cunning was world-famous, so exceptional was it. He is otherwise a typical
survivor of catastrophe; in this case some true disasters of the 8th and 7th century, now
well documented, are intended, including the Trojan wars, as well as an echoing of more
ancient disaster. Odysseus is an alter ego of the Goddess Athena, a thoroughly dangerous,
irresponsible and exploitative psychopath, who never dares to look at himself, an
accomplished scoundrel. Ulysses goes into the underworld; he has visions and hallucinations
-- he is rather paranoid, not only aversive to other people, but pursued by the hostile
Poseidon, god of the sea; his reasoning processes are often disordered, when they are not
tricky; he is possessed by signs; eternally anxious; homicidal.
Even so, Ulysses was a human with 10,000 years of 'progress' behind him and his story is
told by the 'divine' or at least 'highly sublimated' Homer. His life has been faithfully
taught to schoolboys by many generations of teachers, mostly 'normal' and oblivious of this
simple and easy interpretation of his character and deeds.
Not even James Joyce saw Ulysses in such a light when he wrote his masterpiece by that
name; for his hero Bloom is a different kind of schizoid, a wandering Jew whose multiple
roles were the products of the changes of scene within the city of Dublin and among its
people (there being at least two ways of dissociating and cultivating egos -- internal
movement and external).
The weirdness of the linguistics of free associations found in the novel of Joyce creates a
radical contrast to the language of Homer. Homer had to convey a crazy message to the
ordinary man, and his language was ordinary; but the leaps and irrelevancies -- the great
metaphoric stretching -- of his style can be seen as chanted liturgy, divine schizoid
language, whereas the style of Joyce was ultra-modern schizoid, the liturgy of the
individualistic priest of the twentieth century.
When the Greeks and Turks mobilized in a crisis over the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the
author watched young men parading around an island town singing of marching into
'Constantinople' (the Greek name before the city was renamed Istanbul). When he ventured to
remark to several by-standers, acquaintances, that with perhaps a quarter of a million
deaths Constantinople could be won, they looked at him as if he were a psychopath, or
worse, a Turkish sympathizer. When a contract was let by an office of the U. S. Government
in the 1950's to prepare a hypothetical scenario on how to make an unfavorable peace or a
surrender in the event of defeat, a public uproar forced its immediate cancellation and
apologies from high officials for this insult to hubris. But, then, vox populi, vox dei.
Theodor Reik tells of how ordinary people, adults and children, and of how prehistoric man,
the Biblical Job and Adam, and the Greek heroes were affected by hubris, an excessive idea
of their competence, a presumptuousness, a belief in the power of their own wishes to
transform reality. Prehistoric man must have had an even higher degree of over-estimation
of his thoughts and fantasies than modern man [8] . Such would be called delusions of
grandeur if met with in the psychiatric clinic. But, says Reik properly, all men have some
of it.
J. Jaynes has developed much material on the hallucinatory behavior of the ancient heroes
of the Bible, the Homeric epics, and early empires of the Near East. Johnson has done the
same, in a less analytic manner, and the present author has concentrated especially upon
the psychology of Moses and the Exodus [9] . To Jaynes, the whole of these ancient
cultures, perhaps from the dawn of mankind and certainly for the millennia before the
eighth century B. C., were bicamerally schizophrenic, the one brain hemisphere cut off
functionally from the other, until a loss of faith in dealings with the gods provoked
seizures of self-awareness and the beginnings of a complex inner mentation, culminating in
the Greek classical age.
Jaynes has identified the greater part of recorded history as a partial recovery of mankind
from an early, catastrophically-provoked schizophrenia, and has settled upon the brain-
hemisphere split as the locus for the schizoid mental phenomena that we are discussing. In
his view, iconoclastic and solitary in contemporary philosophical and psychological
discussion, the human mind was behaving 'properly' in what may be recognized as 'the Golden
Age of Saturn; ' but then it was sent, even literally, upon the warpath by natural
disasters. In our view, the origin of self-consciousness was not in the breakdown of the
bicameral mind but in its creation.
Were Jaynes to specify the several disasters, and to allow the original schizophrenia to
occur with the very birth of homo sapiens, a remarkable congruence of our theories would
result. It is strange -- ought I say schizoid? -- that in the years he was working on his
book he was, to judge both by its inadequacies and by its references, completely out of
touch with the vigorous, and even noisy, circle of catastrophists who were working in
Princeton Borough, a few hundred yards away, with Immanuel Velikovsky, who was a noted
psychiatrist as well as the principal figure in the neo-catastrophist revival.
HELL
The 17th century philosopher John Locke and the 18th century historian-engineer, N. A.
Boulanger, both secular investigators, believed that mankind could not have invented the
idea of hell unless hell had been an actual experience. These are interesting prologues to
C. Jung's concept of archetypes of the mind, where much that governs the unconscious today
has been with the human species from its beginnings. Velikovsky and the present author,
among others, have presented voluminous evidence for such actual hells, brought on by
natural disasters.
Nevertheless, one must consider the possibility that present and historical experiences of
hell are part of the self-induced and socially induced mentation of schizophrenics. Most
psychologists believe it probable (perhaps without considering actual prototypical
experiences) that the idea of hell is manufactured and processed within the mind. There can
be no question that large-scale disasters of burning, earthquakes, explosions, and fall-
outs are hellish, and the comment of survivors even of highly localized disasters is
frequently 'It was like hell itself. ' How did they know so?
Hell may have been sometimes anciently outside of us and affixed its impressions upon us,
or it may have been both outside and inside of us since the beginnings. Hercules, the Greek
god-hero, who was at least as old as the archaic age, feigned madness. The god Dionysus
drove people into collective madness and orgies. Madness has always been akin to divine
behavior, and the gods were the producers of hell upon earth. Hercules was identified with
planet Mars, Dionysus with planet Venus.
E. R. Dodds, in his brilliant study, The Greeks and the Irrational [ 10] demonstrates
clearly that only very few Greeks of even the classical period, and Socrates and Plato were
not among them, thought that man was anything else but irrational and likely to be
possessed. Socrates' own treasured second 'voice' is the most famous of hallucinatory
companions. Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, he said, the madness must
be of the divine type, produced by a divinely wrought change in our customary social norms.
[11] Truth was certainly an ideal, but one to be obtained principally by what we should
call today 'occult' processes, involving omens, prophets, oracles, voices, mysteries,
ritual, and myth.
Metaphorical or analogical reasoning was paramount, which today we should regard as
suggestive but not probative. Deductive reasoning was in the ascendancy, which is
essentially 'pulling rabbits from a hat. ' The peculiar kind of empirical induction
employed by science en masse today was in its infancy with geographers, such as Anaxagoras,
and a few others, usually later, such as Archimedes and Thucydides. In all these regards,
the intelligentsia was ahead of, but not much ahead of the masses. Socrates was convicted
by only a small majority of his fellow citizens, nor was he a very good witness on his own
behalf. So we need not venture into 'less-advanced' societies for homo schizo, nor into
'primitive tribes. ' He is the hero of historiography.
ORDINARY MAD TIMES
That schizotypicality is the everyday state of historical times seems to be a verifiable
proposition. It is unfortunate that in the study of societies, as in the study of
individuals, schizotypical and schizophrenic behavior are regarded as departures from a
norm, a norm that we can never find. A person is either schizo-typical or nothing. Edward
Foulks was hot on the trail when recently he wrote, Schizophrenia is found world-wide
because it has a functional basis in human groups and, until recently, may have provided
certain evolutionary advantages, [12] going on to say that when a society has become
stratified and retrograde, schizoid prophets or politicians arise to break down the culture
and introduce changes.
They rise and fall -- like Jim Jones' American sect that committed mass suicide in Guyana.
They are endless in number, in all cultures. The point of distinction is not sanity-
insanity but appropriate-inappropriate behavior, or well-adapted-ill-adapted. For every
schizoid prophet who is successful, a hundred are crucified.
But that is only a first point. Second, societies have many ways of behaving
schizophrenically, ranging from the incorporation of a population in regular wars or
killings (the Roman circuses, the Aztec human sacrifices) to the maintenance of a catatonic
bureaucracy that employs and stupefies an active population (the thirteenth Dynasty of
Egypt, the Confucian mandarins of China, the Soviet agricultural system, the U. S.
Department of State). We cannot yet predict if and when a 'stratified and retrograde'
society will be busted by schizophrenes. In any event, it is not a question of schizophrene
against normal, but of tigers seizing each other's tail, as the children's story goes, and
chasing each other so furiously that they collapse finally in a mess of butterfat.
C. Jung speaks of the sudden disintegration of the personality and the divestment of the
ego-complex of its habitual supremacy, [13] that marks the onset of some acute
schizophrenias. It is like experiencing an earthquake, explosions, pistol-shots in the
head. These disturbances appear in projection as earthquakes, cosmic catastrophes, as the
fall of the stars, the splitting of the sun, the falling asunder of the moon, the
transformation of people into corpses, the freezing of the universe, and so on.
In 1957, Jung is again conveying the experiencing of schizophrenia, this time of latent
schizophrenics, who he guesses must outnumber manifest cases by 10 to one [14] .
The latent schizophrenic must always reckon with the possibility that his very foundations
will give way somewhere, that an irretrievable disintegration will set in, that his ideas
and concepts will lose their cohesion and their connection with other spheres of
association and the environment. As a result, he feels threatened by an uncontrollable
chaos of chance happenings. He stands on treacherous ground, and very often he knows it.
The dangerousness of his situation shows itself in terrifying dreams of cosmic
catastrophes, of the end of the world and such things, or the ground he stands on begins to
heave, the walls bend and bulge, the solid earth turns to water, a storm carries him up
into the air, all his relatives are dead...
In the absence of a scientific tradition of quantavolution and catastrophism, Jung, like
most other observers, assumes that the individual is displacing his fears upon the
religious stories, fairy-tales, and cinema accounts of disaster throughout his life. Of one
fact we feel confident: the human mind, whether normal or abnormal, both by past experience
and in imagination, has been full of disaster from its creation. Like the main stem of the
nervous system, history and historism reaches from past to present. In many schizoid mind
stands a Hesiod or a Moses, ready to tell us how it happened illo tempore, and to transform
events into myths, an improvisational and immense creativity deemed a severe form of
insanity.
The facts add up to an important bulwark of our thesis, Schizophrenia produces many
collective dreams, as well as dreams of personal life. Also, the condition yields an
immense harvest of collective symbols. [15] Some of the collective dreams resemble the Big
Dreams found in both mobile and unmoving cultures, of the kind that were reportable to the
Areopagus of Athens and the Senate of Rome. We compare these with the output of historism
and conclude that in the past, now, and in the future, historism, consciously and
unconsciously, is reporting reliably upon the true state of the human mind which is forever
being recovered, recycled, reenacted, both personally and collectively, wherever and
whenever surrounding circumstances are analogous. Mircea Eliade correctly reports the
universal dedication of tribal peoples to the first days of their existence. The continuity
of their cultures depends upon celebrating in all major aspects of their culture the
anniversaries of their birth from chaos and their reception of culture. It takes little
comparative analysis to apply fitly the schizophrenic syndrome of mankind to their reliving
of the first day. This is their history.
More difficult to propose and accept is our thesis here, that history, as we have known it,
since 'the dawn of civilization' is also the return to illo tempore by homo schizo in
search of his origins. That is, the ceremonial return to illo tempore is no more real than
the true course of man's history which itself is a form of Freud's compulsive return to the
original trauma.
When World War II ended, a psychiatrist, G. B. Chisholm, like many others, was wishing for
an end to all the products of insanity such as war. He saw it in a basic psychological
distortion that he found in all civilizations. This was a force which discourages seeing
facts, prevents intelligence, teaches mental dissociation and disregard of evidence,
produces inferiority, guilt, and fear, makes controlling other people emotionally
necessary, encourages prejudice and the inability to understand others. [16] He grasps the
symptoms, but persists in superficial meliorism, ascribing the psychopathology of history
to bad social policies.
Until psychiatrists, like many sociologists and statesmen, view war as neither inherent in
nor an aberration of civilization, but as one way of handling primordial and civilized
man's mental and life problems, it is not likely that the war problem can be structured
even for preliminary analysis. Earliest mankind probably killed his kind and related kinds
promiscuously and in this sense practiced war. Pericot has written that on the various
series of pre-neolithic paintings in the Spanish Caves, only one depicts human combat [17]
. But we have already argued the prevalence of early violence, and Egyptian murals deal
heavily with war.
NAZIS, STALINISTS, AND DEMOCRATS
Often in history, the schizoid becomes schizophrenic, and we see a full clinical disease
possessing the collectivity. One of the sharpest episodes of recent memory was the passage
of the German nation from a strong self-aware kaiserdom whose schizoid traits were 'lawful'
(according to the rules of international misbehavior), underground, and sublimated; to a
weak dissociating-ego situation, following a traumatic war, under the Weimar Republic; to
the overt schizophrenic state of Nazism; and to a post-World War II republican regime whose
therapy was punishment, including self-punition, and an identity with the superpowers of
the Age.
The early studies of H. D. Lasswell and F. Schuman on Hitlerism of the 1930's [18] have
been supplemented by many more recent works; they employed the method of matching the
criteria of clinical madness with the speeches and writings of Nazis, the characters of the
leaders, their actions and public policies, and the response to these of German public
opinion. Their conclusions are typified by this sentence from Lasswell's study: The
conscience for which [Hitler] stands is full of obsessional doubts, repetitive affirmation,
resounding negations, and stern compulsions. Identification, displacement and projection,
obsession, repetition, negativism, aversion and compulsions nest in this one sentence, most
of what composes human nature in fact.
We note, concerning the effective Hitler appeals, the logic of metaphor, the profligate use
of analogies, the 'reasoning by right brain, ' his 'effeminate intuition, ' his artistic
background, and we raise a question for those who feel that the 'left brain digital logic'
is somehow more at fault for violence than the 'humanist' right brain of the poet and
musician.
We are reminded of a case of Bleuler. A catatonic notified the court that his illness had
been diagnosed as paranoia and the apparitions as hallucinations. 'Be that as it may, ' the
patient asserted, 'there are still sufficient reasons to proceed against the gang. ' [19]
Then we have Hitler personally conducting the massacre of his own men, many of them loyal,
in the infamous purge of June 30, 1934, asserting to the German people thereafter that,
granted these men may have been innocent, they still deserved to be killed because (as far
as one can disentangle his words) they were guilty of making him suspicious and this was
the same as threatening to destroy Germany. These alleged conspirators, agitators and
destroyers were poisoners of the wellsprings of German public opinion, a metaphor suitable
also for arousing deep feminine sexual fears of impurity and impregnation, and of anti-
semitism, whose folklore had utilized the same allegation against the Jews since time
immemorial.
To stress the metaphorical logic, we recite, too, Mein Kampf, where Hitler had written, All
great movements are movements of the people, are volcanic eruptions of human passions and
spiritual sensations, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Misery or by the torch of the
word thrown into the masses, and are not the lemonade outpourings of aestheticizing
literati and drawing-room heroes. [20]
To generalize about history cannot be scientific, and, if scientific, cannot assemble its
volumes of proof, and, if it can, it will certainly be misinterpreted. Can we agree that
all history is not Nazi? Of course, but how much of history is such is a matter to report
as well. If the Nazis had not deliberately put to death millions of Jews and other human
beings, a German history of fifty years would not be studied as a case of collective
madness. Yet it would still have been history as a recital of schizotypicality.
The Stalinists of the U. S. S. R. and its satellites largely evaded the stigma of madness;
they committed millions of murders, assigning as pretexts collective mutiny as with the
Kulaks and Cossacks, or military necessity as with the massacre of the Polish officer corps
at the Katyn Forest, or of conspiracy against the worker's state as in the 1930's treason
trials and purges that brought death to many thousands and filled the deadly concentration
camps of Siberia.
Rigidity frequently takes the form of logic and principle as a feature of German character;
it is a quality that will not compromise with politics or with 'how other people feel. '
This heavy schizoid trait is better camouflaged by acceptable doctrines in other nations.
The Russian behavior was, for instance, generally believed to be more human, partly because
of the humanistic ideology and underdog connotations of marxism. When Marshal Petain, later
to be condemned as a traitor, became the hero of France in World War I, it was because he
took the sternest measures to insure that a million or more Frenchmen should be killed or
wounded in the Battles of Verdun. The German military leaders were equally distinguished at
Verdun. The American and British destruction of enemy cities in World War II were justified
as combination of retaliation and military necessity. The list of such behaviors is
exceedingly long and falls back to the dawn of history -- to the glee of pharaohs
inscribing on their temples and tomb walls what armies of men they slew, what slaves they
took, what towns they destroyed, what loot they carried home; it retires also to the Vedas
of India; to the epics of Homer; to the Books of Moses and Joshua.
Yet it would be a cheap trick to let the case for homo schizo in history rest upon war and
civil violence. We should appreciate that man is at war only half the time. Perhaps no more
than a fifth of all deaths since humanity began have been from violence, directly or
indirectly. The shadow of war and violence is always over mankind, of course, and this
shadow uses the visions and rhetoric of insanity; and the history that is told is largely
the stories of war, written by the greatest number of historians, and coursing through the
historical senses of people en masse.
We can proceed beyond warfare to larger realms; not a trick, but as real as can be, is the
claim that collective behavior can have the same psychological adjectives applied to it as
individual behavior. One needs to be careful. There is no brain, heart, liver, or limbs or
phallus, etc. of society except as metaphor. As the American marine general argued, when
told that his national policy was to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, Grab them
by the balls, and their hearts and minds will come along with them.
But if one holds to a quantitative mode of thought and discourse, one can say: there are 2,
3, 5, 10 out of 11 persons employing the same mechanisms, and even extend this to such
aggregates as the French governing group, or even the French people, or a typical French
practice, or a change in German attitude meaning over x% changed, etc. This empirical and
quantitative mode of thought must be emphasized, lest, on the one hand, strange and
confusing metaphors be employed and trusted -- like the heart of the nation -- or, on the
other hand, lest it be regarded as unscientific to speak, for example, of a collectivity of
persons being traumatized by a catastrophe.
What happens to a 'group' happens to the individuals composing x% of the group, or it does
not happen to the group at all. When we say 'a group is schizoid, ' we mean that the traits
of human nature are all operative in varying forms among the group members in subjective,
interpersonal and external transactions. When we say that this group becomes Nazi, we mean
that its ruling element and a significant portion if its members are acquiring a
preponderance of Nazi attitudes and exhibiting Nazi behaviors. We can also say that a group
depersonalizes, as Germany did following World War I, developing, as S. De Grazia has
described it, an acute anomie, not being able to find itself or an appropriate image of
itself [21] . The United States appears to have gone into such a state with the first
generations to follow World War II. We await a masterly treatise along these lines, but
meanwhile are diverted daily by episodes such as one momentarily in the news as these lines
are written, of a fourteen year old boy who raped and murdered his girl friend and who
exhibited her unburied corpse from day to day to a dozen acquaintances, none of whom called
the police. This is acute anomic behavior.
However, any historic (i. e. past) behavior, whether selected randomly or chosen as an
extreme test of the proposition, will exhibit the full range of schizotypicality, because
that is the only way that people could ever behave, as they can only behave now. Some
extraordinary incidents are chosen for their atypicality, and these compose most
historiography and 'news. ' Schoolchildren read that Abraham Lincoln walked miles to repay
a few pennies to a lady who had been given the wrong change in his store. Psychiatrists
such as Clarke have dwelt upon this incident, in analyzing Lincoln's character.
But let us say that Lincoln gave his next customer the proper change. Isn't this a simple
transaction, a bargain, a sale? What would be psychopathological about this ordinary
transaction? Of course, firstly it is assumed history and not taught -- why? Because it
lacked significance, significance meaning something sinister and obviously schizoid,
whether positively moral or evil. Or because it would make dull reading, which is proof
once removed of the same. The total setting, the total action frame of historiography is
human and schizoid.
Deviancy, terror, violence, and pornography must constitute most of all that has emerged as
literature, art, and history. A great many routine actions bear the stamp of rationality
simply because they are conducted in an accepted cultural structure. A machine-gunner, who
kills twenty men whom he has never met, is simply making small change: there is nothing
psychopathological about him. There stands a fine monument to the Machine Gunners of World
War I alongside Hyde Park, in London; the inscription on it reads from the Bible, Saul slew
his thousands, and David his ten thousands. (I Kings 18: 8)
Let me clarify by means of another case. In Psychopathology and Politics (1930) Lasswell
speaks of the man who hates his father and tries to kill the king, and accords to such
behavior a formula: that the political man (terrorist) displaces private motives (father
hatred) onto public objects (king) and rationalizes it in terms of the public advantage
(tyrannicide or republicanism). This sounds pathological, abnormal, and rare, but a few
moments of analysis will reveal that everyone engages in precisely the same mental
operations and activities in everyday life. That is, one aggregates 'private' and 'public'
objects by displacements, and acts, in one way or another, similarly (so far as concerns
his motivation) with regard to both types of objects.
RELIGION AS CUSTODIAN OF FEAR
What else has man done other than prepare for and engage in conflicts and war? He has
practiced religion as much or more of the time, and it would be well if one might present a
concise statistical inventory of all that has gone on in the name of religion. Without such
a summary resource, and not wishing to recapitulate the extensive exposes by eighteenth and
nineteenth century writers such as Voltaire, Boulanger, Feuerbach and Frazer, and
especially because a more systematic analysis of religion is intended in a later volume of
this series, our remarks here must be brief and linked closely to our theory.
I have elsewhere cited the ancient realization, expressed in the saying of Lucretius,
Statius, and others that First of all the gods created fear, and First of all fear created
the gods. Fear is in all life but especially in mankind. Man, upon his first full
appearance, created his gods to be responsible for his fear; moreover, they were created
for the major purpose of controlling his fear. If this be so, it should not surprise anyone
that, since the first days of human history, religion has been the principal custodian of
all the major aspects of fear. And that the general fear is incorporated in the routines of
life and any particular fears that arise are invariably fitted to religious fear before
they are released for testing in more pragmatic areas of life. Divine action has been the
first hypothesis for explaining every event.
Continuity is perceived as pursuance of divine behavior and teachings; change is seen as a
violation of or an instruction of the divine. The divine is the creator and the mediator of
all things, the intervening variable between cause and consequence that is too often denied
or left out by those ancients with hubris and those moderns with science.
Human behavior is continuity: will not most readers agree that religion suffuses all that
is long-enduring, routinely undertaken, and traditional? And change is always a rebellion
against some aspect of some religion usually in the name of another aspect of the religion
or of another religion. That marxism, a non-religious doctrine of social science, is
practised without a heaven and invisible god is apparent wherever it prevails, and often it
rests on top of a population retaining its traditional religious affinities.
The Chinese have for millennia been fond of what we have called ritual counting; and when
the youth of China was given a carte blanche by Mao Ze Dong in 1967 to tear down
traditional institutions, including the covert religious practices of Confucianism, they
were told to destroy 'the four olds, ' old thought, old culture, old customs, and old
habits. The terrible aftermath was referred to popularly as The Revenge of T'ien, the
ancient living Heaven.
That religion is everywhere schizotypical is not difficult to prove, if a hypothetico-
empirical science is assumed, i. e. a science based upon the tenuousness of propositions
and the rules of material evidence, for this arrives speedily at Thomas Hobbes' assertion
The fear of things invisible is the Natural seed of Religion. That it is abundantly
schizophrenic in the usual definition of disease, making of its practitioners either
outright schizophrenes or followers of the same, also emerges from a simple and fair
reading of the religious record in history. Delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and
anhedonia are at the core of every great religion and tribal sect. It is ironic in the
extreme for devotees of religion to explain the madman, i. e., the assertedly
schizophrenic, as one who has fallen away from religion and is therefore accursed.
Atheism abandons celestialism and anthropomorphism, but cannot, all hopes to the contrary
notwithstanding, divorce itself from schizotypicality. Elsewhere, I have ventured to say
that real celestial activity was the original sponsor of religion; and it has always been a
reinforcer of traditional religiosity, as people view the skies once again as part of their
religion. Catastrophes are breeders of typical religiosity. The seeds of many memorial
generations lie dormant, awaiting the occasion of disaster to sprout.
But in the interim of calm skies, a few people become atheist and claim a capacity to think
for themselves, to think in hypothetico-empirical terms, and to act pragmatically. Modern
western culture is even dominated to some extent by atheistic thought. Still there is no
question of a basic change in humanity occurring. The same mechanisms and processes of
perception, cognition, decision and action occur, only without an area of displacements
hitherto filled with the Heavenly Hosts.
An atheistic bookkeeper in a soviet machine factory, bred of three generations of urban
atheists, fills his mind with identification with the dead Lenin and heroes of the
communist movement: he projects his wishes into the leaders of the Soviet Union, ascribes
to his boss and American imperialism feelings of hostility toward him that he feels toward
them, finds solace in work and in alcohol, is scrupulous and neat to a fault, nurtures a
constant cold in the head, plays psychological games with his family and neighbors, and so
on. He is a good man, they say of him and he will be buried in the earth of Mother Russia
without benefit of clergy. All of which is to say that this man is of the ilk of the friar
of a Byzantine monastery that once stood next to his cemetery.
Celestialism, sky-religion, which has marked the history of worship, was a contributing
factor to the creation of homo schizo and primordially paramount in the filling of his mind
with displacements and ideas, but man does not require a continuous experience of sky
activity, nor a conscious belief in its historical or present actuality, to be either
mundanely religious or atheist. However, in no case can he cast off the schizotypicality
that accompanies celestial religion by becoming either mundane or atheist. Cambia il
maestro di cappella, ma la musica ‚ sempre quella! -- the choirmaster may be changed, but
the music is always the same.
UTOPIANISM
A final escape is solicited, not historical, but utopian. Imagine a group living communally
in houses of a settlements that they have built. There they grow food and animals and eat
them, and fashion tools to make necessities such as clothing and furnishings. They cure
disease empirically and save only enough for a rainy day. They love their children and old
people and live in peace with their neighbors. They profess no religion.
Now perhaps this community has never existed. But, if it did, would not its people be
called truly homo sapiens sapiens?
No. These people are apparently schizotypical. The very conception of them and the
conception they have of themselves -- the utopia -- is schizoid. The utopia begs all
questions of its creation and leaves us with dogmas of conduct and consequence. How they
positioned themselves for the utopia is unknown. Like all utopias it is an exercise in the
omnipotence of thought: to think of something is to create it.
Yet, passing over the absurdity, examine the activities of the community. All require
severe consensus. How shall decisions be made, by what system of voting? What plan will be
devised that is not descended from he prehistoric pillars of heaven, north-south
orientation, the planetary circuitry of the walls of ancient Babylonia, the star of Saturn?
What shall the diet -- that pandora's box of phobias and compulsions -- consist of? What is
to be traded for the tools, or will we be here in an autarchic stone age village? What
identifications are to exist between commune and neighbors? What language will be employed
to deal with them: are they vous or tu? Will the diseases be all organic, to avoid problems
of definition, and will psychosomatic illness be denied or absent? Can this last denial
work, considering the rigorous training imparted to the children, who must, despite this
heavy discipline, love themselves, their old people, and their neighbors. Much must be set
ahead and back in time, too, for to love the old means to respect the olden times that the
old like to talk about. Planning is everywhere: the crops to be harvested, the goods to be
made, the curricula of teachings: the saving (how much?) for the rainy day (when will it
next rain?). Practically all psychologists (except perhaps one such as B. F. Skinner who
has written of such a place that he calls Walden II) will see in this mythical community a
highly integrated and coordinated set of schizotypical human behaviors. They will foresee
in it a propensity to totalitarianism and religious revival, once a disastrous threat
appears from 'the friendly neighbors, ' or 'benign nature, ' or 'traveling in foreign
places. ' The community is ahistorical, an impossibility. It is founded upon a non-existent
kind of human nature. Should it succeed in any other sense, it will succeed as a grand
delusion.
DARWINIAN HISTORISM
It may not be long before there is a general realization that the foundations of Charles
Darwin's idea of the origin of species (1844) and the descent of man (1871) were
intellectually weak, and that the success of Darwinism was, like that of Alexander the
Great and Isaac Newton and Napoleon Bonaparte and Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and Albert
Einstein, first of all a success of the opinion thunderstorms of the times.
To repeat a theme of the first chapter of this book, Charles Darwin argued often on a post
hoc ergo propter hoc basis: where organic variation existed, it must have been preceded by
something less advantageous, and what brought about the change would be called natural
selection. Natural selection was more than a name to him; it was a reality, even a dogma.
Influenced explicitly by Lyell who saw long, uniformitarian processes of change in the
rocks of the earth, and inspired by Malthus who saw famine, war and disease as always ready
to cut down a surplus population to viable proportions, Darwin could examine one form of
instinctive behavior after another in animals and purport to find in their variations
consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings, --
namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. [22]
This was the principle of survival of the fittest, wrote H. Spencer, in an approving vein.
A mutual approbation society grew up among economists and biologists. Its cold, dogmatic
line of thought provided the largest, deepest source of aggressive laissez-faire
competitiveness. To its influence, many commentators have ascribed the breakdown of the
human mind in the last century-meaning the open exposure of the schizophrenia of human
nature in cultures. That is, many sociologists, anthropologists, literary critics, and
philosophers agree: the historism of Darwin did not settle the minds of homo schizo. He
hastened the break-up of the selves system of his age.
Thus can we say that Darwin, as an historian, for that he certainly was, would have been
unconsciously seeking, according to our own theory, to provide his clients with the means
of controlling their ever-anxious schizoid minds. The argument is surprisingly simple, and
even well-known. The minds of his clientele, the cognoscenti and literati, and the radical
and socialist revolutionaries like Engels, were already in a distraught condition; for they
were rejecting mosaism in religion and feudalism in politics. They were desperately
agitated and impatient.
Darwinism provided a new swarm of displacements, a set of obsessive problems, an outlook
for aggression against well-defined authorities, even a stable primate-mind that could view
remorselessly the gradually changing social scene of nature. Darwin himself probably saw
his mission, and, if his personal despair is significant, realized he had failed to
accomplish it.
Despite all that has been written about him and the history of biology, much more could be
said than this study can comfortably bear. I can only try to oblige Darwin's requirement,
expressed in a letter to Thomas Huxley: It would take a great deal more evidence to make me
admit that forms have often changed per saltum. [23] I would probably suggest, too, a
good psychiatrist. The dreadful but quiet war of organic beings going on (in) the peaceful
woods and smiling fields, as he put the struggle for survival, was going on in this
abnormally intellectual specimen of homo schizo as well.
I think that, personally and as a typical man of his times, he could bear the infinite
trench warfare of his theory more than the bombastic war of catastrophism, implied in the
euphemistic word saltum, the leap. Catastrophism was the world of the Old Testament and of
his father's and wife's character. He was the invalid fighting the point-by-point, day-by-
day war all of his life.
On the eve of the publication of The Origin of Species, he wrote his cousin that I have
been extra bad of late, with the old severe vomiting rather often and much distressing
swimming of the head. My abstract [of the manuscript on which the book was based] is the
cause, I believe, of the main part of the ills to which my flesh is heir to... [24]
Although he had conquered conscious mental revulsion against his theories, he could not
suppress the psychosomatic revolt. He was a gentle man, people agree, but with a compulsion
to speak out rebelliously and aggressively in displaced intellectual forms. His world of
nature was his world of struggling selves within.
I also wish that I might do a proper analysis of evolutionary theory in biology and
anthropology, especially as it concerns man. Instead, I can only guarantee it to be still a
happy hunting ground for the logician who is biologically trained. It abounds in evasions,
question-begging, circular arguments, ex post facto 'discoveries, ' post hoc ergo propter
hoc reasoning, proof by selective example, hysteron proteron, and doctrinaire assertions.
This is all aside from the paucity of evidence on important issues, the failure to
recognize important issues, and the entanglement in trivial research.
The final nemesis is the ever-present, ever-available two-way switch between the genetic
pool and natural selection. Natural selection can never fail as the means of evolution
because it will always presumptively find among the genes of any species whatever precise
gene, unknown of course, is needed to explain a given step in evolution. With this
suppositious entity, any hole in the hulk of natural selection can be plugged. This is gene
'Q, ' the potential quirk that conveniently enters the gene pool prior to whenever the time
arrives for it to be called forth, potentiality into actuality.
If these allegations are deemed too severe, I may at least hope that biologists,
psychologists, and anthropologists will realize in them a suggestion of the need for an
explicit union of social, psychological, and biological theory. Also, in the course of
writing this volume, it became clear to me that I was presenting neo-darwinists with a
strong and original argument for their case, even while establishing my own case. This has
occurred by locating and simplifying the instinct-delay mechanism as the force of
transition from primate to man. It is a factor that is to a high degree quantitative and
therefore could be considered capable of sustaining many minute changes by mutation and
adaptation over long periods of time. I hope that this bonus will compensate my critics for
reading what otherwise may have appeared to be an offensive attack upon the true facts of
evolution and culture theory.
Notes (Chapter 7: Psychopathology of History)
1. The Ghost in the Machine, N. Y.: Macmillan, 1968, 266.
2. Perry, Roots of Renewal in Myth and Madness, 80.
3. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949, 88.
4. Life Against Death, N. Y.: Vintage, 1959.
5. K. M. Colby, Clinical Implications of a Simulation Model of Paranoid Processes, 33 Arch.
Gen. Psychiatry (July, 1976), 854-7, 855-6.
6. Wen-Shing Tseng, The Development of Psychiatric Concepts in Traditional Chinese
Medicine, 29 Arch. Gen. Psychiatry (October, 1973), 569.
7. A. de Grazia, The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, publ. in xerox, 1968;
Princeton: Metron publ., 1983.
8. Myth and Guilt, New York: Braziller, 1957.
9. Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness...., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1976; A. de
Grazia, God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus, Princeton: Metron Publ., 1983.
10. Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1968.
11. Phaedrus 244-a, quoted in Dodds, op. cit., 64.
12. Unpubl. xerox mss, 1976, kindly supplied by the author.
13. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, (1939), Princeton U. Press, 1960, 162.
14. Ibid., 180-1.
15. C. Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Diseases, Princeton U. Press, 1957, 165.
16. The Reestablishment of Perceptive Society. IX Psychiatry (1946).
17. In S. L. Washburn, ed., Social Life of Early Man, London: Methuen, 1961.
18. Lasswell, Psychology of Hitlerism, in The Analysis of Political behavior, New York;
Oxford U. Press, 1947. Frederick Schuman, The Nazi Dictatorship, New York: Knopf, 1935.
19. Eugen Bleuler, Dementia, Praecox, or the Group of Schizophrenia, 1911, J. Zinkin, tr.,
N. Y.: Int'l U. Press, 1950, 128.
20. From Houston Peterson, ed., Great Speeches, N. Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1965, 757, 759.
21. The Political Community, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1948.
22. Origin of Species, 1859, ed. 1936, 208.
23. Life and Letters, II (1860) 274.
24. Ralph Colp, To be an Invalid: The Life of Charles Darwin, Chicago: U of C. Press,
(1977).
HOMO SCHIZO I:
Human and Cultural Hologenesis
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE HOPEFUL MONSTER
My story of the hopeful monster is nearing an end. Given the physique of an ape and a
troublesome miniature computer, he has harried the whole Earth, scuffed about on the Moon,
and can sing Aida. I see no signs of the angelic in his origins and history, only in his
delusions and pretensions -- but what can one expect from a schizoid?
Nor have I discovered substantial grounds for any theory of the origins of human nature
except that of homo schizo. Aside from special issues and errors of fact, none of which, it
may be hoped, are fatal, four major criticisms can be aimed at the theory. These can be
stated as follows: first, that the catastrophes of the human creation scenario did not
occur; second, that humanization was not a hologenesis but a process occurring point-by-
point; third, that the human species appeared much earlier than 13,000 or even 50,000 years
ago; and, fourth, that mankind is not genetically schizotypical.
Any one of these criticisms can be offered by itself, while with-holding the others.
Moreover, all four of them can be advanced together. At the same time, I can be correct in
any of these four regards and also in all four of them, to wit, the catastrophes, the
hologenesis, the recency of humanization, and the schizotypicality of human nature.
REAL AND PSYCHIC DISASTER
On the issue of catastrophism, I should repeat the thesis. There are three kinds of
disastrous intervention in the process of humanization: First, catastrophes are invoked as
requirements for mutations, biosphere destruction, and atmospheric transformation, without
which the human species -- and many others -- would be most unlikely to evolve. I have
sketched the evidence and the character of such disasters and shown how they would enter
into the quantavolution of mankind.
Second, the metaphor of catastrophism is applicable to the hominid mind as it was destroyed
and the human mind composed. In this sense, the human came about as a schizophrenic
psychological disaster. To sharpen the point, one can imagine that a team of scientists,
knowing much more than we do now, and expert with drugs and surgical instruments and
experimental environments, might convert a hominid mind into a human one. The team could
then announce, metaphorically, We have today fashioned a fearful, power-seeking, disaster-
prone maniac interested in everything in the world.
The third form in which catastrophe intervenes is once more in the non-metaphorical mode.
Natural catastrophes occurred after humanization on a grand scale and at intervals of time.
These provoked and reinforced the catastrophic character of the human mind, entering, with
'unfortunate' compatibility, upon the interior and transpersonal melee of individual and
collective psychology.
It would be unwise to place the burden of proving the true natural catastrophes entirely
upon this one book. At the least I may refer to my books of the Quantavolution Series for
more theory and evidence and then to the classics and rapidly growing literature of
quantavolution, as cited in those books.
The human mind -- an itself that perceives itself as a disaster emergency -- is sandwiched
between natural catastrophes that preceded it and natural catastrophes that succeeded it. We
are not surprised, given the catastrophic interfaces, that the human is often an unreliable
observer. Still, although the world is ultimately to the mind a coded set of illusions, and
although this mind must always possess a great many delusions about these illusions, there
does exist a sense of reality, a pragmatic mechanism simulating the animal's instinct to
respond to a stimulus. The pragmatic mechanism permits humans to distinguish between more or
less delusionism. Legend, myth, history, and thought can be reality-tested for their degree
of 'excess delusionism. ' The mind of homo schizo, in sensing the outer world, can build a
battery of tests to discriminate more disastrous from less disastrous conditions.
A RECENT SMALL SHARP CHANGE
Whatever one's ultimate judgement on the issue of catastrophism, a second criticism may be
leveled against the general theory of homo schizo, namely, that humanization was a point-by-
point process, not a hologenesis. In this regard, one can review the psychological theory of
this book and of its companion volume, going beyond the evidence, which is thus far scarce,
concerning both quantavolutionary and evolutionary theories. Our theory here says: the
critical change in the pre-human creature was probably small, a significant depression of
instinct-response speed, but the effects were an avalanche, pouring into all aspects of
behavior, internal and external, and prompting an immediate culture.
Our position, disregarding the evidence momentarily, is logical and theoretical; it is well
illustrated in the scenario of the simple club-carrying creature: he has to be a fully human
person. No matter by what door one enters into human behavior, one enters upon the domicile
of the human being. The central nervous system, mentation, and culture are holistic -- all
must be related to all.
Whereupon a third criticism is ventured, that the human species is known to be very old,
even though human behavior and culture are not demonstrable until the Upper Paleolithic age.
This criticism usually is brought in to support the second criticism, but is logically
independent: one may have rapid-fire point-by-point evolution occurring in a short time. The
question here is how long ago did humanization occur. My position is that the time scales
are grossly distorted, that 'three-million-year-old-hominid bones' are perhaps no more than
thirteen thousand years old. I have indicated signs of weakness in the tests of time upon
which so much faith is placed.
Either we are dealing with a hominid who is humanly incapacitated, or we must drastically
shorten the time scales. A human who is distinguishable three to five million years ago, who
then disappears for three million years, and who then emerges with a culture, is a
contradiction in terms; he was not human. But could he have become clandestinely a human
only 100,000 or 200,000 years ago? If one has to speculate in this fashion, then the debate
will become a free-for-all, no holds barred.
THE UNREDEEMABLE APEMAN
The fourth and last major objection to the theory of homo schizo is this: however he came
about, man was born a rational animal, in whom signs of schizotypicality are abnormal, even
if frequent. If someone will argue along this line in the face of the abundant evidence and
citations advanced in this book, not to mention its companion volume, then that person is
ready to accept the implantation of a soul by intelligent beings from outer space, or by a
god of his choice, as the critical step in human genesis.
Ironically, the ethologists are on the proper track: man in his 'rational' nature is most
like an ape, seeking the simplest solutions and fastest decisions that a brokendown instinct
apparatus will allow. As Blaise Pascal said, long ago, There is no man who differs more from
another than he does from himself at another time. It is in one's erratic attitudes or
values, in one's conflicts, and in one's unsatiable curiosity that a person is most human.
No other animal species is so ineluctably schizotypical. The so-called irrational element of
people is therefore their authentically 'normal' constitution.
Surprisingly little systematic scientific theory of the genesis of human nature exists. We
know rather well, in this age, what constitutes a general scientific theory, and if theories
of human origins are scarce and defective it may be because their empirical foundations are
absent. In such circumstances, we can offer the theory of homo schizo with greater
confidence, realizing that it is not just 'another theory. ' Let us repeat then the theory,
in summary form:
Given the conditions that must have attended human creation, human nature must have been of
necessity schizoid. Furthermore, judging from what is known of his early behavior, culture,
and history, he was in fact schizoid.
As to the first point -- what 'must' have created a schizoid human in the process of nature
-- we allude to the constitution of the primate, from which man derives so many mental and
physical attributes. The fascination that crowds humans into the monkey house of the zoo
reflects the intuitive recognition of similar species. An unending stream of detailed
studies just reinforces the resemblances of physiology, anatomy, and behavior. But
reflectiveness, symbolism and reasoning on widely displaced subjects are missing.
The forces that generate species by mutation are constrained by the necessity to work on
what is already potential, in order for the species to survive in a physical, as well as
environmental sense. Mutations are not purely random, not quite blind, but strike the target
like poor archers, off center. In the case of humanization, the key mutation produced
directly or indirectly a fatal indecisiveness, whose first outward evidence would be a
crazy, that is, misbehaving, hominid. The preconditions for mutation included natural
particle or viral storms of sufficient scope, intensity, and duration to cause a great many
mutations.
To fix by conventional chronology a certain date for the birth of mankind is risky and might
mislead; the compression that we force upon the usual timetables reduces millions of years
to mere hundreds. The boundary line between some pair of ages that run from the Cretaceous
to the Holocene (a sixty-million year interval in conventional geochronology) might have
witnessed the first humans. On such occasions the skies changed, the atmosphere was
turbulent, the Earth was deluged, the lithosphere was refashioned, and great numbers of
species were extincted. Thereupon might the human, whether by mutation or radical
adaptation, have originated.
In themselves, the changes from hominid to human may have been anatomically negligible. Even
the swollen cerebrum is scarcely distinctive. Hence what happens inside the brain is all-
important, for that is what translates into uniquely human mentation and behavior. We have
argued that what happened had to happen at once, in a hologenesis of mind and culture. We
have demonstrated that little time was needed to permit the speciation of man and that
probably little time was actually available, the current geochronometry notwithstanding.
Further, the speciated man was genetically predisposed to culture. Culture was inevitably
and promptly determined by the human quantavolution. Recognition of this process has been
blocked by the same evolutionary and uniformitarian ideology that insists upon point-by-
point speciation; point-by-point cultural evolution is impossible. Culture is species
specific behavior of homo schizo. He finds culture as he finds a water hole or a mate. And
this culture is a monstrosity of nature, whose very existence proves that man is the only
species that dwells outside of itself, out of its mind.
SCHIZOTYPICALITY AND HOMO SAPIENS
The primate ancestry, the turbulence of the environment during the birth throes of the
species, and the basic human culture all point toward a creature who is perennially
distressed from having to invent his own mind. He had now to behave in the pattern of what
is today called schizophrenia.
He was depersonalized. He constructed a multiple personality and operated under a
confederational ego. He was fearful and anxious continuously and without sufficient cause.
He has remembered a terrible past which, inconsistently, he has forgotten and displaced.
He had an unceasing and unbounded need for control of himself and pursued all semblances,
fakes, illusions and self-deceptions that seemed to give such control. He displaced madly.
He has always thought by displaced association and projection. He animated nature. He sought
the eternal. He had immediately to establish the trappings and rituals of culture. He
suffered religious delusions and made and unmade gods, under the illusion that these gods
were busily making and unmaking him. He killed and ate his kind.
He was obsessive and compulsive. He has consistently disliked himself and others, and has
been characterized by aversiveness to people and ambivalence. His ambivalence extended to
himself, to others, to the gods, to all of nature. He has loved and destroyed all of these.
Nor has he been happy. Anhedonia, the 'joy' of suffering, has always been a major human
trait, though often so deeply buried in his culture that he can go about 'happily' denying
its presence. He has been typically paranoiac; never could he manage to build more than a
narrow crust of trust, even though paranoia unleashed the most self-destructive kinds of
behavior.
He symbolized internally and then extruded portions of his code for external communication.
The symbolist process expanded enormously to take in the whole of his world and of nature.
Everything perceived and conceived received its code name. The linguistic process was done
not once and for all, but repeatedly, thousands of times, in thousands of cultures and at
different periods of the culture. He made fetishes of signs, words, and symbols.
He has always envisioned a future, but the future squeezed in and out like an accordion,
from the next beat to forever, dragging along a ragged melody, out of time with everyday
behavior and history, and changing its tune from one moment to the next. He could add and
subtract, which from time to time amounted to marvelous intricacies of mathematics and
logic, yet these formed always a limited, not powerful, element of his character. He
designed and valued decision in many forms as the substitute for the instinctive behavior
that he lost and would dearly love to relocate. Great mythologies and sciences of decision
emerged. He ventured into totally 'unproductive' fantastic and philosophic contemplation.
For dreaming so much while asleep and awake, he is uniquely distinguished among all
creatures. In the beginning, as ever, he became mythographer and historian, the schizoid
recorder of his own schizotypicality.
To conclude, we have found no symptom of mental illness, or schizophrenia as that is broadly
construed, which has not been an important and 'normal' part of human nature from its
inception. We find, also, that there has been no large general and persistent pattern of
human thought and behavior that cannot be subsumed under the symptomology of schizophrenia.
The name, homo sapiens, and especially homo sapiens sapiens, given to him, is a misnomer and
he should more accurately be called homo sapiens schizotypus. Indeed, there may turn out to
be, by tests refined beyond those that are presently validated, a mixture of human natures,
including hominidal forms that cannot survive or regenerate as humans without instant heavy
administrations of culture, and then several others, one or more of whom was responsible for
the invention of culture and the great changes of history. Possibly there may be, among the
latter, some genetical structure that is so fully cerebral and ego-controlled that it can be
called sapiens sapiens.
It is, after all, mainly a convention that bids us call all people by the same species name.
There is no natural law that demands that all people be of the same species in that they
apparently can interbreed. Even at that, some humans can interbreed only under high risk
circumstances, at some risk to themselves and their progeny, owing to genetic differences.
We may also suspect that the stress on species intra-reproducibility may be an offshoot of
the peculiar sex-sublimated English nineteenth century environment, in which Darwin and his
friends were heavily immersed and in which animal breeding was of large interest, as Darwin
himself evidenced, and in which 'good breeding' and genealogies within human groups took on
a sacred aura. By contrast, many peoples of the world, including Greeks and Hindus, have
claimed that the human soul could migrate, in all or in part, hither and yon in the animal
kingdom, transcending zygotic barriers.
Genetic differences among individuals become minor or major by definition, by public policy,
by fiat, one may say. While ordinary people, societies, scientists and the intelligentsia
have their eyes upon certain visible differences of culture, upon skin color, stature, and
certain other differences, not apparent but tangible, such as blood groupings, other more
basic behavioral and mental differences may stand unattended. These latter may appear to be
so important, when ultimately perceived, that they will erase not only the traditional
insistence that all people are of one species but also the thesis of this book that all
people are to be presumed schizoid. More likely to occur would be the uncovering of genetic
differences that are too minor to suggest drastic eugenics.
The worst possible occurrence, which would at the same time be the best possible, would be
the discovery of a trulyhomo sapiens sapiens among the population in 'pure' or 'diluted'
form. Even to be able to recognize scientifically such a type would be difficult if not
impossible, since we should have to recognize something that we are not, to lift ourselves
by our own bootstraps, so to speak.
If it were recognizable, presumably it would be a person whose self-awareness is infinite
but at the command of a calm will of a solid genetic ego. It would be a person who can
displace without anxiety, but who also has a will to displace infinitely. This person would
make and unmake habits with only instrumental motives in mind, could believe in causes
without bias and prejudice, could emotionalize warmly without commitment to irrelevant
choices, utilize large portions of his or her cerebrum for calculations according to a
presently unknown logic, control his nervous system and physiology at will (that is, by
perfect psychosomatism), be prudent but fearless -- in short do many things naturally that
we have here come to believe cannot be done without contradicting nature. Such would be an
'ideal' species, as we would megalomaniacally describe one, without reference to the reality
of homo schizo. We construct this ideal, in fact, with as little appreciation of its
possibilities and likely genetic mechanisms as we imagine the 'intelligent beings from outer
space, ' with only the vaguest ideas of how such beings might be anatomically and
behaviorally designed. There is, I would conclude, only a rare chance that such a species
exists among us and, if it did, could be found, and, if found, could be eugenically
engineered and maneuvered into commanding position in the development of a real homo sapiens
sapiens.
Most probably we are confined to homo schizo in ourselves and in society. Our tactics, and
to some unknown degree our eugenic policies, must be to trick ourselves and others into
certain ways of behavior whose consequences we desire and accept. These tricks can carry us
a certain distance towards utopia.
In addition, as we discover the right tricks (I realize that I should be calling them
applied social science or humanistics), we can be alert to discover certain quantitative
genetic differences that reliably distinguish those human schizoid constitutions that prefer
our tricks -- our solutions -- and are docile respecting them. These can be genetically
assisted.
So a cultural and genetic kit-bag may eventuate that will give us a new typical homo schizo,
ideal in these senses rather than in the unrealizable megalomaniac conception that was
hypothetically formulated above, which, incidentally, resembles the far-flung schizotypical
visions of man that are commonly voiced by philosophers and politicians.
End of HOMO SCHIZO I
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
Metron Publications
Princeton, N.J.
Notes on the printed version of this book:
The cover is from Pablo Picasso's Girl before a mirror (in reverse), 1932, the original
of which rests with The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and a photograph of which
was lent by the Princeton University, Art Library.
The text was processed by the Princeton University Computer Center, with photo-
composition and printing by Princeton University Printing Services by xerography in a
limited edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
de Grazia, Alfred,
1919-
HOMO SCHIZO II: Human Nature and Behavior
Includes index
1. Psychology.
2. Medicine.
3. Human Behaviour
ISBN: 0-940-268-01-9
Copyright ¸ 1983 by Alfred de Grazia
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S.A. Limited first edition.
Address:
Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213,
Princeton, N.J.,
08542,
U.S.A.
To
Harold Dwight Lasswell
(1902 - 1978)
Almus frater magnus idearum
HOMO SCHIZO II
by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA
TITLE-PAGE
FOREWORD
Chapter 1: THE NORMALLY INSANE
CULTURED MAMMALS
SAMPLING FOR THE NORMAL
THE IDEAL PERSON
SELF-AWARENESS
CATEGORIES OF MADNESS
THE HUMAN DISEASE
SYMPTOMS OF MENTAL ILLNESS
RECONCILING THE NORMAL AND ABNORMAL
SCHIZOPHRENIC AND SCHIZOTYPICAL
THERAPIES
GENETICS: ARE THERE HOMINIDS AMONG US?
Chapter 2: THE SEARCH FOR LOST INSTINCT
INSTINCT-DELAY
SELF-FEAR AND SELF-CONTROL
THE SENSE OF "I AM"
EXISTENTIAL FEAR
INSTINCT IN MAN AND ANIMAL
POLY-EGO VERSUS INSTINCT
"YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN"
Chapter 3: BRAINWORK
THE ANIMAL BASEMENT
THE LOCATION OF INSTINCT DELAY
HANDEDNESS
ORDER AND DISUNITY
MEMORY AND REPETITION
PSYCHOSOMATISM
Chapter 4: DISPLACEMENT AND OBSESSION
DISPLACEMENT
PROJECTION AND PEDAGOGY
TIME AND REMEMBERING
OBSESSIONS, COMPULSIONS, HABITS
Chapter 5: COPING WITH FEAR
OMNIPRESENT FEAR
PHYSIOLOGY OF FEAR
GUILT AND PUNISHMENT
AVERSION AND PARANOIA
AMBIVALENCE
ANHEDONICS
CATATONICS
ORGIES AND HOLOCAUSTS
SUBLIMATION OF FEAR
Chapter 6: SYMBOLS AND SPEECH
SILENT SYMBOLISM
ANATOMY
NEUROLOGY OF SPEECH
THE STRUCTURE OF SPEAKING
VOX PUBLICA
CULTURAL DISCIPLINE AND SPEECH DIVERGENCE
INNER LANGUAGE
IDEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE
Chapter 7: THE GOOD, THE TRUE, AND THE BEAUTIFUL
THE MUDDLE OF MENTATION
THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT
SECRET WORDS AND PANRELATIONISM
RATIONALIZATION
THE DISSOLUTION OF LOGIC
THE USES OF PUBLIC REASON
THE SECURITY CONSENSUS
CAUSATION
TIME AND SPACE
THE COST OF LOSING MAGIC
SCIENCE AS INSTINCT
SUBLIMATION AS PREFERABLE DISPLACEMENTS
THE ORIGINS OF GOOD AND EVIL
EPILOGUE
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
FOREWORD
My thesis here comes close to a remark once made by Mark Twain: "The human race consists
of those who are dangerously insane and those who aren't." Humans, that is, are
naturally somewhat crazy, by all definitions of that term among practicing
psychologists.
A book on human nature, especially if it contains a theory of instincts, needs an
apology. The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences of 1968 carried no article on
human nature. Its direct predecessor, the Encyclopedia of Social Science of 1932, did
publish such an article, written by John Dewey, where he opined that social experiments
might ultimately reveal the limits of what humans could achieve and tolerate; we hope
that they have not yet done so.
Some 16,000 articles and reports in psychology were noted in Psychological Abstracts in
1979. None was grouped under the heading of "human nature." There was no such heading.
In the area of information storage and retrieval, what is not indexed tends not to
exist. Researchers usually follow marked paths. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox presented a
book on The Imperial Animal recently with nary a peep or growl about human nature,
although, if I read it aright, that is precisely the subject.
My teachers at the University of Chicago, a fashion leader in matters intellectual
before World War II, generally regarded the search for "human nature," and "instincts,"
too, as futile. It was the heyday for stressing cultural influences and cultural
differences. "Human nature" was suspected of being a tool of conservative theologians
and politicians. The ordinary man had made it a vehicle of his biases, his hopelessness,
his social darwinism and his need to generalize, no matter how foolishly.
In respect to the concept of instinct, McDougall and Freud were influential. But the one
by overclassifying the phenomena of instinct, and the other by using the term broadly
and vaguely, aroused suspicions of it. G. H. Mead, in the vanguard of imperialism for
the concept of culture during the 1920's, substituted "impulse" for instinct. There came
a period of "motivation," "values," and "drives" and now, too, one can see certain
nuclear meanings that are handled by "reflexes," "genetic factors," and "genetic
predisposition."
So the term "instinct," too, went by the board of Psychological Abstracts. A third term
to which I refer often is "schizophrenia" and here, I am privileged to say, a computer
printout of the Abstracts will convey hundreds of titles every year. As we shall see,
however, "schizophrenia" is scarcely less diffuse and troublesome a term than "human
nature" or "instinct." To me the term "human nature" signifies the traits most
distinguishing humans from other life forms. A model or system of behavior can be
constructed of these traits such that their interrelations are perceived, along with the
mechanisms energizing them. As will be observed from the chapters to follow, the half-
million studies in psychology that accompanied the near demise of the two terms, "human
nature" and "instinct," nevertheless changed what can and cannot be said about them. I
may remark, as did Konrad Lorenz once, upon returning home from some American
disputation over whether behavior was all learned, "I think I have taken some of the
stink out of instinct."
Empirical research, both macroscopic and microscopic, now offers pertinent data in
abundance. New perspectives are invoked. The study of the brain has made excellent
progress as, for instance, in the comparative study of cerebral hemispheres. The French
newspaper Le Monde, quoted a Delegate to the World Congress of Biological Psychiatry in
1981 to say: "Psychiatry will slip away from the psychiatrists if they don't want to do
biology." Ethology and socio-biology are aggressively pushing into the realms of
anthropology and sociology. Chimpanzees have been house guests. Women have lived as
neighbors to gorillas. More and more of animal instincts are observed to be subsumable
under deliberate decisions and experiential learning. We have more systematic knowledge,
as well, about the human social condition and what brings it about. Also, physical
reconstruction of human nature has become theoretically possible, if some pronouncements
upon gene-splicing, cloning, drugs, and brain surgery are to be believed.
Although many books are related to questions of human nature, few works attack the
subject head-on. Almost all of these latter are old. They may come out of any field of
knowledge, but usually emerge from philosophy, theology, anthropology, psychology, and
political theory. The present work derives in part from twenty years of teaching
political psychology and the sociology of invention, and from a decade of studying
prehistoric and ancient cultures which were undergoing ecological disturbances and
creating myths and legends meanwhile. It connects ultimately with a merged set of
pragmatic, psychological and anthropological traditions that were especially well
represented at the University of Chicago a generation ago. I am indebted beyond words to
that community of scholars.
The sequence of chapters can be explained in a few sentences. First I seek a usable
concept of the normal human being. I cannot find it, for it sinks into the quagmire of
ideas concerning man as a rational animal. Thereupon I look for a description of the
mentally ill today, and how they are treated. It appears that psychotherapy is seeking
vainly to reduce bizarre behavior, but such behavior crops out in normal people too as
their perverse inheritance.
So both the disturbed and the normal gyrate around a central complex of behavior
(including mental activity) that is schizoid, and this schizoid complex cannot be
reduced to "normal." The "normal rational person" is a fiction, undiscoverable in
reality, unsupportable and misleading theoretically. The concept of "normalcy" becomes a
portion of a statistical distribution of the population whose behavior is appropriate.
Thus, a person who eats moderately is sane; one who is a glutton is sick. One who kills
in self-defense behaves reasonably; one who kills in a religious sacrifice is mad.
Conventional behavior makes a poor key to human nature. A more workable key can be
fashioned from the traits assigned to schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is not an aberration
of human nature but a powerful and influential expression of the basic personal and
social format. It becomes especially conspicuous when social structures are displaced or
destroyed.
I find that it emerges from a general genetic failure of the human instinctive system, a
blocking of responses. This instinct-delay brings self-consciousness, a plurality of
selves, whose disorganization imparts a continuous, unstoppable and ineradicable fear.
The fear transforms into a drive for total interior and exterior control. There occurs a
set of strategies for coping with the fear. Language and science coordinate the
strategies. The ideas of the good, true, and beautiful that eventuate convince the human
being that, if not a divine creation, he is at least the monarch of nature.
An analysis of human nature is likely to prove pessimistic. Although it may deny
"original sin," it uncovers too many lapses and contradictions in human behavior to
conclude with a happy prognosis. Nonetheless, I cannot but feel that the bio-psychiatry
of homo schizo presents human nature in a perspective which scientists and philosophers
will readily comprehend. From understanding to research, and then on to description, and
finally to applications is a familiar path in our times.
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE
THE NORMALLY INSANE
Niccol• Macchiavelli, the clear-headed founder of modern political science, was not
above a little harmless hallucinating:
When evening comes I return to the house and enter my writing-room, and on the
threshold I take off my everyday clothes full of mud and mire and put on royal and
court robes, and properly reclothed I enter the ancient courts of the men of antiquity
where, received by them affectionately, I pasture on that food that alone is mine and
for which I was born, where I am not too timid to speak with them and ask them about
the reasons for their actions; and they in their courtesy answer me; and for four hours
of time I feel no weariness, I forget every trouble, I do not fear poverty, death does
not dismay me: all of myself I transfer into them [1] .
This is acceptable behavior. The relatives of a young farm lad who behaved so would
think him rather mad. An atheist regards similar behavior in a working priest as a
typical and appropriate feature of the great delusion of religion. It verges on the
delusory, the megalomanic, the impractical, the hallucinatory. Abandoning the living to
identify with the dead; treating words as voices; speaking to several people a thousand
years apart in defiance of time and space. The genius of Machiavelli lay in his ability
- cultured or genetic - to abandon himself to his mad world and afterwards to return to
everyday chores, but more than this, to draw upon his conversations for writing that
has been for several centuries a by-word for realism and the scientific approach to
politics.
Identification - a set of projections of himself to a wide net of characters - and
control, the ability to grasp them and organize them within his personal ego system: we
see these qualities fairly sharply. But we also see a typical syndrome of human nature
- the conventional and the alienated rubbing shoulders, so to say: the security blanket
of his authoritative clothing that admitted him to the great company; the compelling
obsessiveness to tie his life experiences into the mainstream of his culture; as well
as the other qualities which I have already labeled. Thus does Schizotypicality crop up
in Machiavelli.
A book could be easily filled with material to show that "People do the strangest
things." It is not difficult to prove that all humans are a bit crazy. Quirks,
exhibitionism, phobias, dizziness, hang-ups, depressions, avoidance, suspiciousness,
acid stomach, fear of abandonment, nightmares and other symptoms of stress and troubles
of the mind abound in ordinary experience. To have psychological problems is normal,
even universal. "Do you know, Martha, I think everybody is crazy, except thee and me,"
said the Quaker to his wife, "and sometimes I'm not so sure about thee." Most people
can joke about the prevalence of psychic disturbances. "It's a funny world." And it
takes but a minute to get them to agree that politics, the world of public affairs, is
a circus of abnormal behavior. An informant of the F. B. I. in the Abscam expos‚s,
which recently disgraced a number of American officials, repeatedly declared on network
television that "congressmen are crooks, perverts, and alcoholics."
I do not intend to fish in these shallow waters. Down deep the big fish swim. There we
can expect to locate the monstrous forms of an idea, that the human being is
essentially and normally "insane," that what we call normal human thought and behavior
are derivatives, vitally important to be sure, of the same schizotypical core that
manifests itself in those whom we label insane. If everybody, at some time, acts a bit
crazy, it is not because they are departing from their normal human state but because
they are reaching for their normally insane nature.
Of course, then, the term "insane" should have to be dropped. "Insane" is a deviation
from a standard, that of "sanity." If the standard is "insane," then the deviations
must be something else - sanity? It is uncomfortable to say so, but, yes, in a way,
although and until a better term should be found. For the insane of society are no more
fixed and pure representatives of the core of human nature than the sane. All of
humanity, sane or insane, normal or abnormal, typical or untypical, forms globally
around the core of human nature that we can best describe with the word "schizoid."
Human nature is a set of qualities to be found only among people. Of course we must
keep a wary eye on the animal kingdom and its curators, the ethologists, who persist in
finding identities between animals and men where once only large differences were
thought to exist. We must avoid saying what is human nature, only to find that it is
animal nature as well.
At the same time, we cannot get around the fact that our chromosomes and culture manage
to fashion hundreds of differences between animals and humans. No matter how close the
similarity, no animal trait is precisely typical of humans. We differ in every way
conceivable, just as, for that matter, humans differ as individuals in every respect,
no two people being alike. Withal this book must confine itself to those qualities
which are both distinctively human and important as such.
But, granted that a quality may be proven distinctive, who is to say that it is
important? We must say, partly begging the question, that what is important in human
nature is whatever has the greatest effect in producing those human traits and
activities that we regard as most important. This leads directly to the human mind; the
nub of human nature is in the mind. In the "minds" - because, whatever the propensities
of the individual mind, the human species does not exist except in transacting minds.
We have then before us homo sapiens. We declare that we shall make of him more
specifically homo sapiens schizotypus, homo schizo for short [2] . We would strip from
our tunics the noble title of homo sapiens sapiens, which is often now accorded us,
reserving it for a species of some future event and time. So drastic an action may not
be taken, however, without due process of law, and our book is intended as a hearing on
the allegation that homo sapiens sapiens not the "wise wise" man and cannot by nature
be so. What is the nature of homo sapiens that he should be relegated to the status of
schizotypicality? According to Pascal, "Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad
would amount to another form of madness." Mainly the nature of the human is that he is
either normally insane or insanely normal, or both. If either or both, he is not the
man we thought he was. Whereupon we should analyze his nature more critically than has
been the custom, and learn what makes him behave so, and what we can expect of him.
Dunbar points out that "Through the study of the unusual or deviant, the obscurity of
many normal processes is penetrated. Just as the mutant is the ultimate ancestor of the
race, so the deviant is often the common denominator of processes too complex to be
broken down in the norm."
In searching for the roots of human nature, I have to use a number of concepts that are
modern, psychiatric, and originally invented for the diagnosis of disease, beginning
with the very word schizophrenia. However I also use the terms of old science, like
human nature and instinct, and the jargon of the computer age, and of electricity and
politics. For the assault upon the problem of the human constitution and its origins
levy verbal troops from everywhere. If the assault is successful, there will be time
enough to provide these with the linguistic uniform that new science invariably
prescribes.
A first step, then, is to show how homo sapiens is insanely normal, implying
paradoxically that the concept of normality is quite confused in practice, and ends in
contradictions. It cannot then be a helpful idea, if its meaning collapses from one
moment to the next. It is like a tall pole without a base, which can stand upright only
so long as you steady it; nor does it matter where you stand to steady it.
"Normal" is an interesting word of the 18th century Enlightenment; it is a late arrival
to our language. Its function was probably being served before by words such as "good"
and "healthy." It comes from geometry hence science, directly from the Latin norma, the
right angle rule used in drawing. From "rule," came "mold," "unit," a point of
comparison. Then a century later "normal" came to be a state of a living being or an
organ which is not affected by any pathological modification, as in a "normal human
oral temperature." Later it acquired the senses of "devoid of exceptional character,"
"conforming to the most frequent type" (typical), "occurring according to habit," a
"normal person." So we see an object needed by the new applied physical sciences which
is expanded abstractly to include a model or verbal rule; already it is forcing its way
as an objective concept into the moral sphere; then we watch it attach itself to an
undiseased state of a living being (which concerns us here) and ultimately to the
statistical type or the ordinary (which we also consider).
The problem when the world deals with human nature becomes apparent: the non-
pathological state, and the ordinary or typical, are mingled in the idea of a normal
human being. The normal person should be of the normally healthy majority. The trouble
is that there is neither a normal standard state, nor a normally healthy majority. On
those matters closest to the important code of human nature, we cannot decide on what
should be termed "non-pathological." And on even those traits which are conventionally
deemed healthy, we cannot find a great concentration of individuals to cluster.
The normal engages the range of the abnormal, even some of its extremes, and the
abnormal is a set of improvisations on the normal. We do not deal with a rational
person of healthy mind and then someone who is broken down into insanity as with a bad
fall off a bicycle. Rather there is the human being whose essential functions are the
same, homo schizo, who is always behaving "madly," but as one of his defense mechanisms
divides people into the sane and insane according to largely societal canons.
The prudent approach in these circumstances is to locate a foundation for normality. By
all tokens, it should be in the idea of sanity. The human species has to be composed of
normal sane people; else it is a contradiction in terms. But suppose that we find
mostly insane people; then something is wrong with the definition of insanity, or of
normality. So we go in search of the normal great majority of sane human beings. To
define who is normal is not like sounding the concert pitch for the orchestra. Various
writers emit their own authoritative sounds, and these and many others bring in their
peculiar instruments, whose construction and qualities defy brief classification. There
are those for example who offer an anatomical definition of man. They measure heights,
head shapes, dentition, and so on. They have a rather precise job. For they know in
advance that they are dealing with contemporary man. They can categorize sub-races, sex
differences, blood groupings, and ranges of variation on many other traits.
They know that some people have small brain cases but are observably intelligent. They
know that the Congo Pygmies are human, although a foot below average in height and
their brains are smaller, but they have a reputation for unusual cleverness, complex
polyphonic music, a large repertoire of legend, and great skill in hunting; they
intermarry with tall neighbors of different race. There have been giants on the earth,
too, bones and records tell us, and legends have them "normal," though on occasion more
"wicked" than the storytellers - just very big. Many others traits vary around the
world and within peoples: hairiness, skin color, eye color, head shape, etc.
S CULTURED MAMMALS
Today we are witness to rapid progress in the knowledge of brain and central nervous
system chemistry and electricity. Soon we shall be able to define every mental
aberration by a test result showing a surplus or deficiency of a chemical or gas or
electrical charge in critical locations. This achievement will not define human nature
but will certainly facilitate efforts at controlling behavior deemed sick or criminal.
The normal may thus be precisely measured. Moreover, those elements of the abnormal
that are regarded to have positive value, that is, those elements of the abnormal that
we seek to make normal, such as "altruism," or "intelligence," or "dexterity," can
probably be manipulated electro-chemically so as to produce specifically acceptable
behaviors within a larger set of undesired behaviors.
Try as we may, with dozens of testing instruments, we cannot find a genetically non-
miscegenable, intellectually inferior (or superior), uncivilizable, ungodly, mother-
marrying, physically defective, short-lived, crawling (or arboreal) unselfconscious,
mythless breed. We find genetic sports, who are six-digited specimens, brain-damaged,
sickle-celled, or have prodigious IQ's, and so forth, again all among normal human
groups. A host of human variations exist, none of them obviously in fundamental
contradiction to normalcy, either as usually defined or as schizoid normal. When a
person has suffered some neurological disorder or brain injury, none can object to his
being labeled sick - mentally ill, if his voluntary behavior is altered - and, even
though the injury has effects much like that of ordinary psychic abnormality, and even
if his treatment, too, is that tendered the mentally ill, we perceive the case as
exceptional and as another class of illness.
Sometimes we get the impression that the animal kingdom supplies a baseline for normal
behavior in humans. To be called "a healthy animal" is ground for pride in some
quarters -images of exuberant spirits, strong musculature, and high sexual potency come
to mind. Everyone has his favorite animal story to show how human a beast can be -
whether a dog, a cat, a pig, or a bird, not to mention elephants, octopus, dolphins and
monkeys. And it is generally true that well-cared-for animals are healthy and not
crazy, while demented humans do not seem to take proper care of themselves, being often
enfeebled, unkempt, and of ungovernable or poor appetite.
Ethologists, who lend animals their full attention, are often taken in by their charges
and come to see in them all too much conduct that is human. Still it is to be admitted,
as the latest returns from the field come in, fewer and fewer human activities lack a
close analogy or counterpart in some other species. One after another, the "unique"
traits of homo sapiens are washed away. Chimpanzees talk, flatworms reason, seagulls
adapt, the devoted dog performs religious rites before his god, the ordinary biological
cell contains the human code of life.
The best that can be said of man is that he does more of everything and does it more
consistently and continuously. And the best of human performers are mad, for is it not
true, what Lombroso said, that genius and madness are akin, that only by his product is
the creative genius released from the burdens of the unsuccessful madman? It is
certainly true in politics. In the benighted United States, a man who drinks his urine
and bathes in it is locked up, while in India, not for that, of course, he may be Prime
Minister.
"Of the 113 geniuses that have most helped civilization, 37 percent to 40 per cent were
psychotic, 83 per cent to 90 percent were psychopathic or sociopathic, and 30 percent
of the most important were committed." So says Johnson [3] .
All the figures are questionable, including the 113 to begin with, but nevertheless
impressive in the round. Painstaking investigations of cultures, from the deep forest
primitives of the Philippines to the penthouse dwellers of Manhattan, bring to light
only cultural forms that are readily analogical, even homological, with all other
cultures. They can all become the life style of whoever happens to become engaged in
them from infancy. This transferability, universality, and relativity of culture, is
highly important to the definition of normalcy. It enables one to say that whatever may
seem to be abnormal behavior in one culture will be found to have a normal place in
some other culture. Properly directed hallucinating is a gift, or a symptom of
insanity, according to cultural norm; in a doubting and liberal culture, as for
instance the United States today, one may discover even psychologists who cultivate
hallucinating, whether for religious reasons, adventure, or self-experimentation.
Practically every symptom of nervous disease disappears into the tolerant maw of
culture.
Intercourse among uncles and nieces is taboo in some cultures while in other cultures
uncles teach their nieces how to copulate. Judging by its lurid prominence in writings,
an instinct to commit incest seems more likely than an instinct to avoid it. Most
commentators have viewed the stern injunctions against incest that are so widespread as
proof of the intensity of the instinct. Yet N. Bischoff argues a propensity to avoid
incest, which is not strong enough "to determine but only to motivate our behavior"
[4] . Thus, we are free enough to act contrary to our nature; but we are not free
enough to do so with impunity. Individuals are not transferable so easily in practice
as in theory. By the time their abnormality becomes developed, they are too encrusted
with the rest of their culture and too enmeshed in their failures or careers to make a
computer date via the Human Relations Area Files with a culture normally harboring the
abnormality. So they appear to be condemned to being treated as sick.
S SAMPLING FOR THE NORMAL
Perhaps, however, one's society is changing, and one may discover a niche of
acceptability. The poet Oscar Wilde was a public homosexual ahead of his time. He was
jailed. Today he would meet only with mild, and extralegal, disapproval in his mating
habits. English law has changed, following upon a change in elite opinion.
People are not at all sure of behavior occurring within their own cultures, whether in
Singapore or Chicago. "You can't imagine the things that go on!" a tendentious paranoid
third of the population will tell you. And they are correct, even if their attitude can
lead to some undesirable social distrust that pulls at the weak fabric of social
consensus. There are many kinds of abnormal "things that go on," conspiracy, for
example, as when gangsters, politicians, businessmen and any other group for that
matter plot actions better kept undisclosed, for tactical or moral or legal reasons.
There are undisclosed criminal offenses, to which the American people confess in great
numbers to priests, psychiatrists, and interviewing strangers. It appears that nearly
everyone has committed at least a couple of crimes that he knows about and can recite.
Of the conspiracies and crimes, a great many are moral in nature. Child-abuse, spouse-
abuse: these are examples. Millions of such cases occur; are they normal behavior? Are
they crime or illness? Or both? Benevolent associations and fiction writers try to
catch up with them, and the latter at least win only a reputation for caricature and
morbidity, harping upon the "abnormal." Not foreseeing how uninhibited literature would
become, a French writer, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, addressing himself to famous
writers, in his short stories about diabolic women of a century ago, said: "Ask them
how much incest is to be found in families, whether of the poorest or highest class,
and see if literature, which is accused of being so immoral, has ever dared to tell of
them, even to frighten the reader," complaining that one had to go to the ancient
examples of Myrrha, Agrippina and Oedipus, although, all around, there were cases to be
found.
But then there is the category of abnormalities called madness, or mental illness,
which the legions of science strive to segregate from acts of conspiracy, immorality,
and crime. Possibly they are moved by an instinct of territoriality - for without a
field of study there cannot be a fat herd of scientists. More largely, they are
searching for their identity in their object, as a shepherd in his flock, a priest in
his parishioners.
We cannot speak individually to a whole people, asking them whether they belong to the
psychiatrist's flock. But we have learned to sample a population, assuring that those
sampled truly stand for the whole, and we can interview these. Perhaps here the search
for the normal person can end. If there is anything that is uniquely human and normal
to mankind, it will have emerged from the great factory of the mind to find its way
into the communication of ideas, thoughts, and feelings. All other normality can be
consigned to our generic kinship with apes, fish, and bacteria.
The result of such surveys of mental health gives scant comfort to expectations of
normality. They disclose more people to be sick than well, many more. And if one adds
to the self-confessed illnesses, the sickness that is not disclosed, because of the
suppression of recall or the inadequacy of the questioning, the scene darkens and many
more of the normal become abnormal.
In one study of sample of householders of a rural Canadian count, as many as 69% were
deemed to be psychiatric cases [5] . Most others had troublesome mental problems. Only
17 % were classified as "well." To be "well" then is to be statistically abnormal. In a
middle-class white section of New York City, a different sample survey of mental health
was conducted [6] . Here 1660 adult residents were interviewed at length by trained
workers and the materials adjudged by psychiatrists. Some 18.5% were deemed mentally
"well. " A third had mild symptoms, and the rest, about half, suffered moderate or
severe symptoms of mental illness. Again the "well" or "normal" are statistically
abnormal.
Other studies can be cited. A recent World Health Organization report gives a figure of
40 millions for the gravely sick of mind in the world; another 200 millions are too ill
to function well. One in every six Englishwomen is receiving care for mental disorder,
one in every nine men. Deliberate self-therapy must treble these figures. Then, too,
people go in and out of treatment, self-administered or not. A third of the American
population, where hallucinations are neurotic or psychotic, nevertheless hallucinate
from time to time. From one-third to one-half of normal persons aged 12 to 35 years
report episodic symptoms of dissociation or depersonalization. A third, not necessarily
the same two-thirds, suffer neurotic anxiety or worse. Practically everyone engages in
psychosomatic illness from time to time. There appears to be little doubt: the normal
is abnormal and the abnormal is normal, statistically, intraculturally and
crossculturally.
When one adds up the diagnosed ill, the ambulant ill, the suffering normals, the
individually destructive, the sexually different, the genetically abnormal, the
culturally and criminally diverse and perverse, the infantile and the senile, and
proceeds to some type of summation the remainder, if they have a strong sense of
normality, can be classified as megalomaniacs.
Feeling bad is the norm, in one or more of a thousand ways. Mental suffering must be on
an immense scale throughout the world. The "normal" human being is not the healthy
animal he is supposed to be.
Throughout history, anxiety has been recognized as an inherent part of man's being.
Discussion of the origins of anxiety has become explicit in the 20th century and is a
frequent theme in today's literature. The definition of anxiety is as varied as the
experience itself, and its biological basis is obscure. While anxiety may be thought of
as an unpleasant state, characterized by uneasiness and apprehension, it is also a
strong motivating force in many forms of behavior and, like fear, has fundamental
adaptive and perhaps evolutionary significance [7] .
Perhaps the very idea of "normality" is a sickness. Psychopaths and neurotics often
hate abnormality or atypicality in others, as Hitler hated gypsies and a meticulous
drill sergeant may dislike a tall recruit who stands out from the line. One must
consider whether the idea of the normal human is not some unrecognized myth,
functioning to hold an individuated lot of persons in a tighter society. If so, we
should dredge up the myth, for it may be blocking our understanding of human nature.
THE IDEAL PERSON
An obvious relative of such a concealed myth would be the idea of the "noble savage."
Something like the idea of the "noble savage" is to be found going back thousands of
years. The "Golden Age" of mankind fascinated many ancient historians and peoples. It
was an age of easy subsistence, warmth, equality, and peace. The Romans associated the
Golden Age with Saturn; they stored their weapons in his temple when at peace.
Upon the Age of Discoveries, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and despite much
evidence to the contrary, Europeans conjured a vision of happy primitive peoples living
in a benign state of nature, even foregoing governments, taxes, war, and civil strife,
to which the Europeans were habituated. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose deservedly famous
Confessions frankly recited his many "abnormal," "neurotic" behaviors, played a greater
role than any other writer in building up the myth.
He felt a compulsion to reveal his shocking evil and errors. He was the son of a
watchmaker, an obsessive occupation, and was himself a musician. He suffered from
paranoia, strong ambivalences, incontinence, phobias, hallucinations. He enjoyed being
spanked on the rump. He believed his portrait, though excellent, was part of a
conspiracy to make him look like a monster.
Rousseau yet claimed that the human being was born with natural reason and good
motives. In his educational writings, he argued that to confine or restrain the pupil
was to pervert him. Anthropologists, while they could not deny the most astonishing
"perversions" among the peoples whom they were newly studying, nevertheless added the
idea of relativity: that is, if all is not good, then it is at least different and
hence we must not insist upon our absolute standards of the good.
Rusticism, the belief in simple rural existence and its virtues, has been a chronic
"neurosis" since times immemorial. One encounters the idea among people of all classes
even, or especially, in America today, while only three per cent of the population are
farmers; many politicians play upon the rustic theme.
Sigmund Freud, of all people, may be perceived, in his essay on Civilization and Its
Discontents, to assign mental malignancies to the burden of discipline and complexity
attributable to civilized life. He, at least, explains how impossible it is to take up
the rustic life again. But he does not doubt that there was and can be a rustic life.
And there is little doubt he regards the human being as potentially happier if ever he
would return to the "normal" of his mentality. Given his many different writings, this
can only be regarded as a contradiction and a minor nuisance, still it is capable of
distracting him in his search for the origins and condition of human nature.
Psychologists, disobeying the first principle of science -factuality- have been loath
to lay their cards on the table. "The mentally ill person, helped to discover the
origins of his illness, will use the knowledge to cure himself, to become normal." So
goes an ordinary principle by which many psychologists operate. Finding oneself, coming
to terms with oneself, and similar slogans amount to the premise that there is a normal
human self that is within us all, a core that, when struck, will resonate natural
goodness. Attempts to elaborate scientifically the syndrome of normality scarcely
produce an integrated core of rationality, goodness, or creativity. They elicit
conventional syndromes. They tend to bring out diffuse characteristics that are
tolerable. It seems almost as if, in striking parallelism with the myths of the noble
savage and the rustic, they are turning back towards a docile and agreeable hominid.
Johnson remarks that "tests show that so-called normal individuals have little
imagination, limited interests and social activities, limited aspirations, and no
ambition." [8]
Gaillant presents material on life careers that reveal students testing "normal" to be
less subject to illnesses that are of psychosomatic origins [9] . The finding is not
soothing, for it points back to the association of creativity with mental illness, and
lets one wonder whether normality is a "success story" blocking (psychophysical)
illness but questionable as to the grounds of success, which can itself be grounded
upon mental operations basically abnormal.
A schoolmaster or legislator might define the normal person as one who imitates well
the norm, who obeys the authorities, who eats moderately, does not take drugs, sleeps
well, fulfills sexual desires within suggested limits, accepts responsibilities when
charged with them, has only appropriate fears and associates these with the real source
of danger, is hygienic, loves one's family, is careful in dealing with strangers, feels
gratitude, and believes in gods.
Not only are such persons unusual, but they do not constitute an integral psychological
type wherein contradictions are absent. They, too, must be the results of high test-
scoring on separate items of inquiry. More than this, however, is a fact which will be
looming up as crucial to this book, that "normal" qualities, such as moderation,
hygiene, responsibility, belief in gods and others as well, are qualities that are
sculpted out of a basic natural "insanity."
In everyday behavior, there are clich‚s for every symptom of mental disease. Consider
only the following. Others readily suggest themselves.
dissociation: "I'm not myself today."
fear and control: "Afraid of her shadow.." "Get hold of yourself.."
anhedonia (masochism): "Suffering is good for the soul."
aversiveness: "Don't trust a stranger." "Keep them at arm's length."
paranoia: "The walls have ears." "May God strike me dead if..."
catatonic: "All things come to those who wait." "Rest is the best cure." "I hate to get
up in the morning."
obsession: "Genius is 99% hard work." "I can't help but feel that.."
cognitive disorder: "Pray for peace." "Keep the family together."
megalomania: "Aim for the stars." "Nothing is impossible."
aggression: "We need law and order." "Equality." "National Security."
Each trite expression feeds upon a human dimension that also feeds general
schizophrenia. Each can be linked to others, too. "National security" is a slogan with
paranoic, obsessive, and fearful as well as aggressive nuances.
But is not "national security" also, at some times, in some places a reasonable demand,
raised in defense against a measurable threat? Yes. I have said that it fits into a
reciprocating scheme of madness and normality. It may be correct under the
circumstances to arm one's nation. Should those who disagree, however, be categorized
as insane, or merely as ignoramuses? And the pacifists? And, further, is it not the
pride of the human animal that it can plan its "national security" far ahead of this
day; and is it not true that it will be especially paranoid, aggressive, nationalistic-
identifying, and obsessive characters who will be most insistent upon this human
farsightedness? We shall say more of such matters as we go along. The average person
lives a life of "madness." Analyze his or her activities minute by minute in the course
of the day. It is loaded with sleep (a life-suppressor); dreams (by definition insane)
while asleep; waking fantasies of glory, sex, escape; guilt feelings; nursing
animosities; feelings of inferiority; futile gestures; self-doubts; moments of mania;
laughter; doing what "is bad for me;" reminiscing; praying; ruminating; brooding;
projecting false pictures; making required and excessive purchases; repeating routines
uncomprehendingly or automatically; relapsing blank-minded; playing psychological games
with co-workers and others - at the end there is a "product" which justifies the
passage of the day, lends meaning, provides ego support if assured so sufficiently by
others (whom one in turn assures also). Where the brutish activity of sleep and feeding
and physically moving about ends, what must be human begins, but this human is almost
entirely madness redeemed by defining "work instrumentalism" and "realistic appraisals
of self and others" as sane behavior, perhaps 10% of the total of life.
Rarely, a scientific writer, (Harold Lasswell is one of them) will so much as frankly
acknowledge that he is interested in advancing a certain kind of person in society, an
"ideal man and woman," an "ideal citizen," in effect, whose etiological dynamics
psychiatrists (and statesmen) should explore, understand, and propagate [10] .
The "normal" is waived in favor of the "ideal." Indeed, one suspects that it is
precisely in order to control the true normal population that the ideal norm is set up.
He is what he is, not because he is a natural man, but because he might be artificially
created to go against nature!
Lasswell speaks of the values for which humans strive. These are a type of instincts;
they are generalized appetitive urges that crop out in many ways. The values are power,
respect, rectitude, safety, wealth, well-being, enlightenment, and affection. The
objective of public policy should be to develop the sharing of these among the people
of the world. The means to the end is the creation of democratic characters who are
willing and ready to share. "Failure to develop democratic character is a function of
interpersonal relations in which low estimates of the self are permitted to develop."
Reminiscent of Alfred Adler's "inferiority complex," a prevalent low estimate of
oneself leads people to wish to deprive others, thence misunderstanding and aggression,
among a host of other neuroses and psychoses.
The democratic man, then, has an intact ego, open to thought and impression; is
possessed of many values and disposed to share them with all. He is free from disabling
anxieties and increasingly in command of the flow of energies from his unconscious
self. Lasswell grants the difficulty of creating a dominating psychic type: "The task
is nothing less then the drastic and continuing reconstruction of our own civilization,
and most of the cultures of which we have any knowledge."
Lasswell frees himself from the rustic fallacy: a new kind of man is to be created,
whose life is to be supported by especially designed institutions, a utopia, to be
sure, but one unencumbered by dreams of normalcy and myths of a golden age. We shall
see below whether, in fact, there is a potential within the human being to create or
develop, much more to sustain, such a type. To Thomas Hobbes, writing several centuries
earlier, the idea would be ludicrous: man is naturally conflictful, party to a war of
all against all, and capable only of receiving a brutal regimentation by a sovereign.
Indubitably, history bears down on this side of the scales.
Our arguments here against the prevalence of "normal people" are not intended merely to
"broaden our minds" regarding normality; many writers have done this job well. Nor are
we aiming to set up an ideal type, which has an elite that can create artificial
normalities. We assert rather that the very logic, the very substructure, the very
physiology of the concept of normality sought for as a base for judging abnormality is
not present.
SELF-AWARENESS
What is there in the jumble of physiques, cultures, behaviors, in this preponderance of
crimes, immorality and aberrations among the normal, that we can fix upon as unique to
the human species, and that is found in the sick and the well, in criminals and judges,
in leaders and followers, in Patagonia and Canada, in the first days of the human
species down through history to the present.
The answer is well-known, and might perhaps have been written in the beginning. It is
self-awareness. Whatever recognizes itself is human. Whatever can see itself without a
mirror is human [11] . Whatever thinks that it thinks: cogito ergo sum, is human.
Whatever doubts is human. But the ramifications of self-awareness are so many that they
may be categorized in the dozens and detailed in the thousands. We need not go farther
with them here. Essentially we can say that with a couple of possible minor exceptions,
involving heavy training, animals and plants are not self-reflective: they may be
conscious to any degree of sharpness, ranging from rocklike inanimacy to laser-like
concentrations of attention.
Only by the most strenuous efforts can we deprive a human of self-awareness, and then
only temporarily without lethal consequences, and without genetic effect. Never can a
human maintain an alert consciousness without lapsing from time to time into sensations
of self-consciousness.
Pause, for a moment, to consider the fantastically complex mind that is operating in a
self-aware schizophrenic. The classical tell-tale symptom is the auditory
hallucination, which the patient( 1), describes to the doctor (or a friend) (2), as a
voice of another (3), which the patient hears (4), and is the patient (5), talking to
himself (6), and which the patient asks the doctor to believe (7), but also asks the
doctor to deny (8), because he the patient is sick (9), and denies the voice is real
(10), although he admits (11), and argues against the correctness of the message of the
voice (12), which in fact we know (13), is not uttering anything at all (14), and
sometimes the patient hears several voices speaking in unison (15.. n), or uttering
different messages (16.. n).
Traits ordinarily attributable to human nature are derivatives from the basic fact of
self-awareness. For instance, Aristotle's famous sentence, "Man is a social animal,"
seems to accord to sociability a unique human quality. Social, even political, behavior
is characteristic of many animal species, and in a meaningful sense plants that must
live in clumps can be termed social.
Going beyond this obviously inadequate characterization of man, we should also comment
that this sociability, when it becomes particularly the human kind of sociability, has
to be an appendage of individual self-awareness. It is not, cannot be, "herd behavior."
Human individuation is rife within the human group. Regardless of how they are raised
and trained, the style in which they live, and whether they are criminal or judges,
moral or immoral, mentally sick or well, in or out of groups and crowds, humans are
self-conscious. If not self-conscious in the immediate, flashing sense, they are
coasting along with all the momentum of self-awareness imparted by the motive force of
their total prior life-experiences.
Not only are all mental diseases diseases of self awareness, but also all mental
operations, diseased or not, are inflicted or shaped by self-awareness. The ability to
go mad is almost entirely human, no matter how madness is defined. And if, in the end,
all that is uniquely human is exposed and one is prompted to exclaim: "But that is
madness," we had better redefine madness, and medicine, and policy, and philosophy.
Again, my position is not far from those psychotherapists who say that all mental
illness is centered upon problems of the ego. It will take some paragraphs now to tell
how true this is, and to begin to use the diseases of the ego to construe the elements
of human nature.
CATEGORIES OF MADNESS
The redoubtable Cardinal Richelieu, ruling minister of France under Louis XIII, had
said "Give me a sentence a man has spoken, and I'll give you enough to hang him." The
same expression might end "... and I'll show you that he is demented." Nor have modern
police-states been unaware of the new alternative. The Soviet government often prefers
to treat political opponents as mad, rather than treasonable; the Chinese communist
government of Mao popularized the term "brainwashing," implying that its political
dissidents had cluttered and dirty minds. The early Italian Fascists, more earthy and
ironic, force-fed opponents with large doses of castor oil to purge them. Apropos, the
French word for "asylum" has only the two meanings: "political asylum" for fugitives
from a country's law, and a "mental asylum."
Our grounds for suspecting the ordinary person of some admixture of madness are already
considerable. Indeed the very excesses of pursuing the distinction of being mad contain
more than a hint of obsessive compulsion, prompted by self-doubts. Politics aside, what
is the punitive and aggressive impulse to be called that drives men to segregate
indistinct orders of people in order to call them by special names- anonomania?
Nonetheless, our fidelity to scientific method bids us continue, this time reversing
the order and asking, "What is mental illness, the class of abnormally ill and
atypical?"
One may search for a classification, expecting to find an acceptable set of categories
for ordering the millions of mentally ill for contemplation and analysis. No such
classification exists, to our way of thinking. One can choose among many systems, each
with its defects- too lengthy, too brief, lopsided, stressing any given specialist's
area of expertness and giving him this as a reason for preferring it. Eugen Bleuler's
scheme of 1911 is still influential, although by now encrusted with novelties and
frills.
From Bleuler's work we can derive roughly two groups, one of organic lesions and
strongly hereditary, the other less hereditary, with strong social components [12] .
So we have a first list consisting of: congenital mental detectives; cretinism and
idiocy; cerebral tumors; paresis; and senile dementia.
Then we have a second list containing: drug addiction; paranoia; hysteria; neurasthenia
(obsessive-compulsive ideas); neuroses; schizophrenia; epilepsy; and psychosomatic
disorders. The first category can be excluded from consideration here because the
elaboration required to integrate its components into our theory of human nature would
take up too much space, and furthermore is unnecessary, since the second category leads
us more directly to the points we wish to make. The second group has been of course
heavily discussed so that, again, we may save time and conserve attention by omitting
descriptions and comparative treatment. I exhibit the list only to say that the
symptoms that constitute all of these diseases have in one way or another, and by some,
though not necessarily most, psychologists, been dealt with also as symptoms of
schizophrenia and will be so considered for our purposes here. Few if any of their
indications exclude them from what can be termed general schizophrenia. Once we
abstract and reroute the major symptoms of insanity, we find that a not-too-rare
concept of schizophrenia can hold them all neatly.
Alcoholic intoxication simulates mental illness in many ways, beginning with the wide
variability of its symptoms, a fact that has baffled attempts at its analysis despite
the ready access to experimental and natural subjects. We note that fears, both
existential and immediate, promote the use of this drug (and others) and that
withdrawals from intoxication are often accompanied by panic; tranquilizers are
sometimes supplied to reduce such agitation. A drunk may suffer distorted perceptions
and cognition; slowed reaction speeds; hallucinations and "flights of fancy"; mania,
recklessness, megalomania; depression; paranoiac aggression; change of roles and
depersonalization; reduced bodily control; and heightened associational ability and
creativity.
All mental illnesses may be encountered in some single episodes, it would appear: can
it be that there is only one mental illness, and that alcohol can induce it? If so,
alcohol must be pressing upon the core of human nature from all-around, not only
figuratively but literally. Perhaps all instinctual responses are slowed down, and at
the same time all inhibitions are overwhelmed by the stimuli to respond. So the stimuli
roam throughout the brain, seizing upon any neural outlets they can find, riding upon
any neurotransmitters that are available. Irrelevant behavior of many kinds ensues.
Ultimately, the sleep reaction is triggered in the "lower" animal sections of the
central nervous system, there comes a significantly deep sleep, possibly death. Later
on, much will be said to put psychosomatic illness in its proper place as a mimic of
all mental illness, rather like alcoholism, so we shall not discuss it here.
THE HUMAN DISEASE
"Schizophrenia" is a widespread affliction. Its provenance is world-wide and has little
regard for social class. Dunham reports its worldwide rates as "quite comparable," with
a prevalence between two and nine per thousand [13] . His narrow definition, of
course, leaves us the task of showing that some 90% may be "schizotypical." J. Murphy
also found comparable rates of indigenously defined schizophrenia (non-hospitalized
cases) in Sweden (5.7 per 1000), Canada (5.6), and among Eskimo (4.4) and Yoruba (6.
8). "Explicit labels for insanity exist in these cultures... Almost everywhere a
pattern composed of hallucinations, delusions, disorientations, and behavioral
aberrations appear to identify the idea of 'losing one's mind, ' even though the
content of these manifestations is colored by cultural beliefs" [14] . intellectuals
are prone to the ailment; counselors at leading universities sometimes warn
psychologists not to use their students as standards for psychological testing because
they are skewed towards the schizoid.
The rates of schizophrenia rise with rising indices of social disorganization,
according to many studies [15] . One might guess that "wherever anything important is
happening" schizophrenia rates will increase, beware of a departure from "normal"
routines (but we shall have to explore later on whether "routines" themselves are
"normal"). Beware, too, of the masking of increased schizophrenia when the non-routine
and important happens; war and religion are often ways of containing the increase in
madness by legitimizing them. One percent of the American population is markedly ill
with "schizophrenia." Since it is a gradient illness, the number may be defined upwards
or downwards. Their family members may reach thrice this number, and are sorely
disturbed and often "infected" by them; the victims of the disease are outnumbered, so
to speak, by their public.
Borderline cases are in the millions. Practically anybody who reads a piece on the
subject (and literature on the subject reaches into the mass media) finds the symptoms
uncomfortably close to home.
And, of course, we shall be insisting throughout this book that everyone who is human
is schizoid, that is, a borderline case. But this requires absorbing all mental disease
into schizophrenia and then reabsorbing all schizophrenia into human nature.
With all this interest, there is a little corresponding illumination. It is an
exasperating mental illness. Its symptoms are so diverse and irreconcilable that many
savants deny that it exists. They make and unmake classifications often so as to order
the mental diseases by some abiding and knowable principle. Hyperclassification is a
disease of ignorance. When a new family of phenomena is discovered (or admitted to
discussion), be it mental illness or sub-atomic particles or geological strata, a
plethora of terms and categories is excreted.
Hundreds of mental events are named. The names are kept until common causes are found
to join their referent events or some control technique (therapy) compresses many into
one. Six experimenters in a Science letter of April 1979 refer to "a valid clinical
classification, be it Bleulerian or otherwise," as all that can be provided
"considering the arbitrary nature of all presently available diagnostic criteria for
schizophrenia. [l6] ] In the end, Karl Menninger has explained, all attempts at
classification have failed, and a single mental disease bordering upon the concept of
"maladjustment" may be the answer [17] . We might call it "holopathy."
Yet other writers are convinced that schizophrenia not only exists but has a genetic
basis: they claim that a special inheritance sets the stage. A family, a culture, and
"the age of anxiety" can interact to produce a total stress upon the person sufficient
to cause schizophrenia only when the genetic component is present. It appears that the
disease in its more perverse state involves a person who is likely to be descended from
schizoids and who is subsequently helped towards his illness by a set of environmental
influences that are well known and generally agreed upon. Such influences include
parents or guardians who behave in a schizoid way towards the person. They also include
a general breakdown of norms in the near-environment and even the world-angst as a
whole. These provocative stimuli bombard the person from all sides and continuously
over time.
S. Matthysse and K. Kidd speak of a "genetic heterogeneity among schizophrenics;" the
same genes may not be involved in all cases; about one in eleven schizophrenics has an
extremely high genetic risk, over 99% [18] . Edward Foulks writes that "the predicted
incidence in identical twins and in offsprings of dual matings is too low for a single
major genetic locus model and too high for a polygenic model. An interactional model
involving four alleles is the most likely mode of inheritance." [19]
W. E. Bunney, who directs the National institute of Mental Health, probably offers the
now-established view when he declares that "The issue... is not whether a genetic
component exists, but how is the genetic component transmitted, and how do the genetic
component and the environment component interact." A colleague who heads the NIMH
Laboratory of Psychology and Psychopathology, D. Rosenthal, reports from a study of
several thousand Danish adopters, that the adoptees typically pursue the schizophrenic
or non-schizophrenic condition of their natural parents, not of their adoptive ones.
"The genetic factor comes through loud and clear." But again the mode of transmission
is unclear: "a dominant gene, a partially dominant gene, a recessive gene, or poly
genes [20] .
In his admittedly fruitless search for fundamental symptoms, Bleuler once wrote that it
is the "accessory" symptoms that usually cause hospitalization, that is,
hallucinations, delusions, disturbances of memory, changes in personality, changes in
script, speech and physical functions, and catatonic behavior. Problems of "another
person" talking in an abrupt, simple and important manner, and of excruciating body
sensations in practically all organs, are common.
So all-embracing are the manifestations, that schizophrenia appears to engage all
mental ills, as Menninger suggested. And Bleuler said of his work, "It may be that
there is only one kind of mental illness, in that case the clinical conditions which we
delineate would be artificial creations and there would be no corresponding boundaries
in nature... the psychoses may be simple deviations from a norm in varying directions
and degrees." [21]
The singularity of mental illness is evidenced in the shifting of symptoms from one
named disease to another. What is diagnosed as manic-depression may, at the next
examining session, be perceived as schizophrenia. "'Thought disorder' is characteristic
of all psychosis and not peculiar to schizophrenia." [22] A certain proportion of
schizophrenes are not thought-disordered, while some, perhaps all, mental diseases can
display thought-disorders. Thought disorder can be viewed as a problem of self-control,
with anxiety or even terror accompanying it.
A pain in the head may transfer its site to the stomach functionally, that is,
psychically but with organic consequences. Too, one practitioner suggests that "the
basic physiopathology of schizophrenia is a lack of coordination of brain-functions all
the way from the cortical cells to the process of feeling and thinking." [23] This
idea is rendered more compelling by the congenital relationship between schizophrenia
and humanization which is postulated here and developed in Homo Schizo 1. What seem to
be contradictions are resolved when the primitive history of the syndrome is uncovered.
From the beginning, Schizotypicality has been the essence of human nature, and
schizophrenia has been the thrusting spearhead of human nature. These were established
as such when mankind was "quantavoluted." Their existence tends to prove that mankind
was created in a leap, and not evolved point by point over millions of years. On one
day, in one place, and under knowable conditions, the hominid was transformed into the
creature, homo sapiens, that perhaps should more properly be called homo sapiens
schizotypus.
Thence, by understandable and logical processes of adaptation, domination and
succession, this creature came to represent the human race and still does. Mind,
behavior, and institutions veer towards the schizophrenic. Not only is the disease of
great importance in society, but actual schizophrenia is only the eminently visible
surface of a heavily schizoid world.
SYMPTOMS OF MENTAL ILLNESS
In the address already cited, Paul Meehl offers four sets of behaviors that altogether
compose a full illness. One consists of recognized cognitive and perceptive disorders.
A second is known to be ambivalence of love-hate, or pro-con, impulses and attitudes
toward objects of identification and affect. Third comes the rejection of pleasure in
any form (anhedonia). A fourth is aversiveness to other people, even and particularly
those near and dear. Negativism and paranoia suffuse the symptomology.
I would expand Meehl's and Bleuler's list of symptoms and regroup them for our own
purpose of coming to a focus on the core of human nature. An expanded list would at
least contain all of these.
addiction to drugs
ambivalence
amnesia
anhedonia
aphasia
aversion/ paranoia
compulsiveness
depression
displacement
epilepsy
mania
multiple personality
negativism/ denial
neurasthenia
neurosis
obsession
perception disorders/ hallucinations/ illusions
projection/ blame
psychosomatic disorders/ functional physiopathy
thought disorders/ rationalization/ delusions
These pathological symptoms will be associated with normal symptoms, and tied together,
before this book ends, into the model of Homo Schizo, so that they may all be viewed as
elements of human nature, emanating from the human core dynamics.
If the list is satisfactorily inclusive, the many facets of mental illness can be
reduced to two key parameters, depersonalization or the dissociation of identify, and
fears concerning self-control. (" Dissociation," translated from "desagregation," has
been in the scientific vocabulary since 1889, when Pierre Janet used the concept. )
Both are obviously and strongly connected with self-awareness, the central human trait.
Depersonalization symptoms (episodic) are reported by from one-third to one-half of
normal persons aged between 12 and 35. They are usually classified under "dissociative
disorders." If self-awareness is uniquely human, depersonalization must be the most
human of all symptoms. Fear is omnipresent, for self-control is the problem of coping
with self-awareness, the human trait.
I have already incorporated alcoholism into general insanity. Epilepsy, too, despite
its lesser prevalence and exotic history, can be contained in the general syndrome of
schizophrenia and homo schizo. George Steiner, in Language and Silence, writes: "In the
early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream. Dostoievsky tells of it.
One is somehow lifted free of one's body, looking back, one sees oneself and feels a
sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one's own person, and there is no
avenue of return. Feeling this fear, the mind gropes to a sharp awakening." Epilepsy
often involves a double or multiple personality. From ancient times and around the
world come reports of the "sacred disease" as it was often called. Seizure by a god or
a daemon occurs; a feeling of being beaten by others is common. Certainly epilepsy can
be considered a schizophrenic seizure. It is too severe to tolerate and apparently
remits until the next occasion.
For another example, the symbolic process in humans is known (perceived and understood)
as a map or tracking of salient coded components of oneself. Symbols tie the selves
together and connect them with outside affinities. A dissociation and fear of oneself
will produce and interact with disorders of signs, symbols, language, speech, writing,
and reading.
We shall go much farther in this study, until all of the symptoms or diseases are
perceived to generate under conditions of depersonalization and existential fear and
theat. "Normal" behavior, too, can be fitted into both the symptomatic categories,
where useful, and into the generating conditions.
RECONCILING THE NORMAL AND ABNORMAL
The symptoms of mental illness generally exhibit a relationship with normalcy in the
adjectives that are used in describing them. These adjectives are often of a
quantitative and comparative (or relative) kind. Thus Melvin Gray, cited above, says:
"A 'healthy' person does not dwell unduly upon his body and his functions." We note the
word "unduly." In many places, the textbooks and monographs use words of a similarly
undefined character: "inappropriate," "bizarre," ''harmful," "preponderant,"
"unreasonable, " "insufficient, " "disturbing, " "disturbed, " "uncontrolled,"
"unreal," "chronic," "beyond the normal," ''interminable, '' etc.
If these are qualities of parameters of normal behavior, then we should expect the
normal behavior to contain the same essential properties. Thus, "a normal person does
dwell duly upon his body and his functions." Why does he do so? My intent here is to
show that mental disease exaggerates, but mirrors, average human behavior. It is as my
professor, Earl S. Johnson, told me when I was a 15-year-old freshman. "Crazy people
are like you and me, but more so."
Laing, Siirala, Arieti, and many other authorities view schizophrenia as a common sort
of sickness shared by the healthy. The paranoid schizophrenic simply responds more to
the hostile world than does the ordinary person says Arieti. In changing his position,
as have others, from asserting that the schizophrenic interprets the world as hostile
to saying that he sees the world fairly accurately for what it really is, Arieti
resembles those, such as myself, who have changed from viewing the original basis of
religion and primitive cosmology as grand delusions to arguing that there was, in
addition to the nature of man, events that made the world terrifyingly hostile. One
type of "normal" then who should be suspect is the incurable optimist who insists that
the world is better than it really is. The "normal" says "please excuse the temporary
confusion," whereas the "abnormal" says, "If things look confused, that's because they
really are."
The issue arises whether normal behavior includes any important operation that is not
reflected in insanity. The answer is negative. There is no human characteristic that
cannot lend itself to a symptomology of mental disease. When one thinks of the hundreds
of human traits, this generalization acquires impressive scope. What is salient,
though, is that a definition of mental illness is readily convertible into a definition
of human nature. The model of mental illness can be a model of human nature. Is it the
only possible model? Is it the most useful model? The answer to the first question is
"no," to the second, "yes."
If we list our symptoms of general schizophrenia, the all-human mental disease, we find
that they include all of the most important traits of the human being. Opposite each
parameter of mental illness we might place a parameter of 'normal' human nature (as in
the accompanying chart) and in the course of this book much more of such will be done.
This habit, "the great flywheel of progress," in the words of William James, may be
shown to be indistinguishable basically from obsession, which is usually treated as a
mental disorder. Symptoms that are rooted in the same psychological complex take
different forms in religious and secular mentalities. I indicate examples of this in
the accompanying chart. Any religious sect or political ideology can be placed into the
chart, so also any type of individual, varying the clich‚s, expressions, and attitudes
to suit the case. Readers here may test their own self-knowledge.
As many as there are of these symptoms, just as many natural human behaviors can be
found to correspond to them. Symptoms resemble the effects of the kaleidoscope; out of
several bits of colored cut glass, a great many patterns can emerge when the tube is
given a shake. In mental disease all of these patterns are called symptoms, and also
often called diseases. The several basic mechanisms- the bits of glass-may not be
recognized and known to the person playing with the toy.
Between insane and normal conduct are differences of degree. We can pair off the normal
and abnormal, no matter how long the list. If it were not for the fact that many people
are convinced that something exists called "reasonable behavior," we would have no
problem in looking upon human nature as a set of core symptoms of qualities that are
common to both the sane and insane. Then, since the insane facets of the quality seem
to fit better to a description of human nature, the nature of man can best be analyzed
by means of the concept of the insane. The denomination of the "sane" has been the
prisoner of theologians and rationalists. The miasma of wishes, ideologies, ego
defenses and rationalizations constitutes itself a schizoid syndrome, a cognitive
disorder, to the end that the symptoms of normality are excluded from a formulation
that would realistically distinguish human nature. Man does not really want to know
himself; most of those who are regarded as specialists in knowing human nature do not
want to know man either.
SCHIZOPHRENIC AND SCHIZOTYPICAL
Examples from thousands of evident cases of normal and abnormal common mental
aberrations from the psychiatry standpoint found in typical human mentation.
Symptom category Insane non-sectarian Christian (normal) Jewish (normal) Homo Schizo
(normal)
Fear World destruction Judgement Day Holocaust or divine Annihilation Self-
destructiveness
Displacement "I am a kind of god" Jesus and Mary Yahweh and Moses Heroes
Cognitive Disorder (causation) "If I say so, the building will shake" When Jesus was
born, God sent a star to guide the kings "If we suffer it is because we do wrong in the
eyes of God" "Humans are metamorphosing into machines"
Hallucination "They order me to kill and burn" "God answers my prayers" "The Lord
attends our sacrifices" "I must listen to my better self"
Human Aversiveness "Danger is everywhere" "All people are Incorrigibly sinful" "Other
people are unclean" "You can't trust strangers"
Anhedonia Self-flagellation "In the footsteps of Jesus" "To labor condemned after our
fall from grace" "Work is fun"
Obsession "I must continuously wash my hands" "Pray before eating" "Dietary rules are
to be strictly observed" "I watch my diet carefully"
Illusion "People know what I am thinking" "God is on our side" "We are God's chosen
people" Thinking machines
Logic "The world is black as doom" "Paradise has no night" "Shoul is dark and dreary"
"Night and day are opposites, like men and women"
Having said this, we cannot now agree with those who maintain that sharp boundaries
separate the well, the nervous, the neurotic, and the psychotic. Thus we have Jeffrey
Gray saying that "by and large, quite different tests differentiate normals from
neurotics and normals from psychotics; and psychotics do not behave differently from
normals on tests sensitive to neuroticism, nor do neurotics behave differently from
normals on tests sensitive to psychoticism" [24] . The tests involved are, of course,
statistical, and therefore the scores must exhibit an overlapping among all three
categories.
Now Gray would surely recognize the overlap. He would probably also assert that each
category, in verging towards some cluster of responses peculiar to itself begins to
manifest behavior which warrants its being labeled as normal, neurotic, or psychotic.
None can properly deny this to be the case and this is precisely what we have been
saying. For example, he says agreeably that neuroses are "fear gone wrong, either
because it is excessive, or because it is inappropriate, or because it has no apparent
object." "Fear gone wrong" is out of control. Certainly Gray would not deny that fear
plays a major role in psychoses, or, for that matter, in normal behavior. Nor would he
totally disagree with Alfred Adler when Adler declares that "the neuroses and psychoses
are attempts at compensation, constructive creations of the psyche which result from
the accentuated and too highly placed guiding ideal of the child." [25]
Nor perhaps would he deny Carl Jung when Jung writes that, in respect to treatment,
the schizophrenic patient behaves no differently from the neurotic. He has the same
complexes, the same insights and needs, but not the same certainty with regard to his
foundations. Whereas the neurotic can rely instinctively on his personality
dissociation never losing its systematic character, so that the unity and inner
cohesion of the whole are never seriously jeopardized, the latent schizophrenic must
always reckon with the possibility that his very foundations will give way somewhere,
that an irretrievable disintegration will set in, that his ideas and concepts will lose
their cohesion and their connection with other spheres of association and with the
environment. The dangerousness of his situation often shows itself in terrifying dreams
of cosmic catastrophes, of the end of the world and such things. Or the ground he
stands on begins to heave, the walls bend and bulge, the solid earth turns to water, a
storm carries him up into the air, all his relatives are dead, etc. [26] .
We conclude that differences can and must always be discovered between any two groups
professing symptoms. The differences are to be described in whatever way best
contributes to devising a therapy or fitting into a model. The theory of homo schizo
regards all behavior as symptoms and all symptoms as issuing from the schizoid core of
human nature. We are still permitted to disclose genetically stronger tendencies in
some people than others: some people are more "human" than others. I doubt that we can
say that some "cultures" are more human than others unless it is discoverable that some
isolated cultures originally branched off with a significantly lesser component of
schizophrenic genes in the make-up of the group as a whole.
THERAPIES
Intense suffering often accompanies mental illness, a suffering as agonizing as the
worst physical pains, as prolonged as the longest organic illness, more frightening
than the worst tidings from the medical doctor, so hopeless as to lead sometimes to
suicide. What of the cures, then, for insanity? Do they reveal anything of the nature
of man?
I will not speak of cures that are madness twice compounded, a form of direct
punishment for the sake of the punishers -confinement, beatings, ostracism, moral
obloquy, brainwashing. Sebastian de Grazia wrote in two books of mental illness and
therapy [27] . The preventative against most mental illness he found in love, of the
early attendants for the infant and growing child, and of the community later on for
the person. The latter evolves into the security afforded by "law and order," by
ideology, by consensus and custom, by authority.
When he came to examine the systems of psychotherapy, he found at their base the idea
of authority, often accompanied by punishment in disguised or sublimated form. He was
not obliged to distinguish sharply between the shaman of the tribe and the therapeutic
psychologist and psychoanalyst: the main therapeutic message was nearly always a
combination of exorcism by the authority of the healer and needed practical advice.
Primitive, religious, and psychiatric therapies are successful, up to a point, because
they wittingly or unwittingly treat the diseases of schizophrenia by the therapy of
authority. Authority, as an obsessed compulsive force, is zeroed in upon the patient,
who is comforted, appeased, re-rationalized and redirected.
The generally "benign" authority of psychotherapy stands in contrast to the authority
that produces psychosis. In Bruno Bettelheim's words, "the psychotic person breaks
because he has invested significant figures in his environment with the power to
destroy him and his integration." [28] . He speaks in this work of concentration camps
and psychological clinics.
If one abstracts the message of Michel Foucault in his book, Madness and Civilization,
it says that the mad inspire madness in others, on a grand scale [29] . Just as the
violence of war brings out the violence on all sides, madness elicits the madness of
those who deal with it. Foucault deals principally with the period of the
Enlightenment, when rationalization of human relations reached new heights.
Consequently a methodology of therapy developed. Patients were shocked in order to
"awaken" them. Theatrical performances were encouraged to let them displace their
personalities upon acceptable or controllable roles. The "return to the immediate" was
offered sometimes-work on the land, physical labor, so that patients might divert
themselves by exhausting emulations of the primordial struggle for brute survival.
Travel was promoted- a mobile theatre, after all - to match internal with external
turbulence, to provide culture-shock therapy. All of this was a gloss on the underlying
punishment for the relief of the observing and suffering punishers, the wardens and the
public.
Nowadays, the struggle to control the bodies and minds of the mentally obstreperous
continues. Besides the punishers, there are the facilitators, one leader being Laing,
who grants self-government and "foreign aid" to psychotherapeutic communes, and the
deniers, exemplary in Thomas Szasz, who finds in most definitions of insanity a
political plot or at least a myth. How does the theory of homo schizo stand relative to
the popular theories of Szasz, whose brilliant forensics (forensic medicine?) against
psychiatry culminated in 1976 with a work called Schizophrenia [30] . There he labeled
schizophrenia as everything and nothing, a myth, a practical fiction for the
elaboration of new prisons, of new professions, of new religions, of new crimes against
liberty and creativity, of non-science calling itself social science.
With sympathy for Szasz and for all the victims of unfeeling, unwise, and self-serving
therapy (equally present in "organic" medicine?), I will say this: He believes that
there is no disease, and therefore nothing to treat, whereas I say that this is indeed
the human disease and we are all patients; he is Aristotelian, Cartesian, an orthodox
rationalist and materialist whose sympathy for humans, undoubtedly genuine, is an
inversion of Hobbesian materialism on the one hand and Thomistic Catholicism on the
other. That is, he is an old-fashioned mind rejecting new fashions (call them
"paradigms") in their own terms and disclosing their new contradictions. He has written
a dozen volumes to argue that "abnormality" is "normality" but it is also wrong to
conclude that "normality" exists in its rational conventional sense. There is no better
way to show this than to go on with the theory of homo schizo, which I shall proceed to
do.
Cure by professional therapy is still far from certain. Bleuler, long ago, wrote that
"We do not speak of cure but of far-reaching improvements" for schizophrenia; he
confesses to have never seen a full recovery [31] . A typical, almost randomly
selected follow-up study of psychotherapy for schizophrenia today, this of 88 patients
eleven years after a median 80-day hospitalization for therapy in Southern Canada,
reports 12 deaths, 2 by suicide, and 51 recoveries (showing "no social or intellectual
deficit''). Most had been medicated or readmitted subsequent to release from the
hospital. Major tranquilizers and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) were employed in some
cases, heavy tranquilization alone in most. Verbal therapy was not predominant, nor
were therapeutic communities organized. Out-patient attention and job-assistance was
available. The period covered was one of full employment, economic growth, and general
optimism in the area [32] . We are accepting the premise that all patients were
diagnosed properly to begin with.
Another type of evaluation, autobiographical, is provided by Werner Mendel, based upon
the five hundred patients of his career in psychiatry [33] . He would not score so
optimistically his successes, but rather finds that when his patients were sick enough
to be very sick, they were most unlikely to be entirely cured. A patient might assume
after prolonged intensive psychotherapy a typical social role, such as mother and
housekeeper, but would on occasion require counseling and medication. It should be
stressed that illness is a form of habit or obsession and that, as you would not expect
to turn a life-long blacksmith into a fine ballet dancer, you would not expect to
typicalize a life-long deviant.
The situation seems improved, then, since Bleuler's times. Granted that the social
setting is not producing the preventative antibodies, affection and authority, of which
S. de Grazia writes, the professional therapy and social ambiance of mental illness
have attained a cure in perhaps two-thirds of those treated, cure being a fair social
and job competence with no more than occasional therapy.
Spontaneous remission (which means self-cure if it means anything) occurs in a number
of cases. Where therapy has been administered, therapy may take more credit than is
due. As the larger studies show, most psychological difficulties are self-treated, with
the help or hindrance of whoever happens to be around.
Professional therapy today consists largely of reductionism. Reductionism is
discoverable in the authoritative explanations of verbal psychotherapy, in communal
security and "nests of toleration," hypnosis, tranquilizers, pain-killers,
electroconvulsive therapy, physical restraint, and the less commonly used leucotomy
(lobotomy). Surgery, drug, and shock: these all seek to diminish and delimit the
psychic energy of the sick, to shrink the ego boundaries, "to get out of Vietnam," so
to speak, to "cut your losses." They can be used interchangeably.
Usually they must be used interchangeably. In psychotherapy there is scarcely ever a
specific, a single shot in the bull's eye. Thus electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which
is applied generally by electrical wires to opposite sides of the skull, is certainly
punishing: the patient is strapped down so as not to flail at the menace to his well-
being. Patients can "feel better" afterwards if only because they have assuaged the
guilt of their deviancy from social norms. ECT then arouses the cerebrum generally,
drowning out "other voices," and alerting consciousness and arousing self-awareness. It
brings temporary and sometimes prolonged amnesia of life experiences: the animal can
begin life anew without the nagging of memory, even pleasant memory. The zones of
sleep, appetite and sexuality are scoured. Hormones such as prolactine and vasopressine
are made to circulate more freely. The cortisol level, which is elevated in 75% of
patients suffering from depression, is lowered. The patient usually is relieved from
the catatonism and morbidity of depression; he "lets himself live."
Common aims in therapy are to make the patient follow cultural norms, to be peaceful,
and to suppress his symptoms: to act less human perhaps. Punishment is often implied,
whether in verbal, chemical, or surgical cure. The lesions (wounds) of leucotomy, which
removes cerebral tissue, tend to break up the disturbing "character-fix" of the
patient; following the trauma, in the course of coping with the injury and
reestablishing self-control, the patient often finds a new, more peaceful social
character [34] .
It is notable that some schizophrenics incur certain forms of atrophy of the brain.
This is expectable, not as showing the organic origins of schizophrenia, but as an
instance of self-therapy by psychosomatization. The suffering person performs his own
lobotomy. He reduces his own personality structure. He performs a hysterical
trephination. He devises a hysterical paralysis with attendant desuetude and shrinkage
of tissue. Only in certain verbal therapies, as psychoanalysis, does theory take a
rationalist, Socratic position, that if one knows oneself, one can cope with oneself.
It may be regarded as left-brain-hemisphere therapy, seeking to restore a person to the
status of a thinking mammal, as contrasted to reducing the patient to a more hominidal
equilibrium. Even here, the psychoanalyst and psychologist find themselves
administering authority, willy-nilly, and relying upon it to cure.
Therapeutic methods, which may hold to distinct conceptions of mental disease, are
likely in practice to become part of a melange. Thus Melvin Gray, arriving at the
treatment of neurasthenia, a vaguely defined hysterical set, says "Multiple forms of
treatment- psychotherapy, environmental adjustment, drugs, rest, exercise, proper
nutrition, etc. - were and still are the best approach."
The general formula for psychotherapy appears to consist of: A. Break obnoxious habits
of the patient to the point of docility (by authority, by uncovering traumas, by drugs,
electrically, surgically).
B. Re-instinctualize, re-program, re-educate, re-habilitate the patient to a less
demanding level of life.
C. Observe the patient's new behavior. D. Repeat A and B. changing the technique as
seems indicated. E. Re-observe as in C. F. Reinforce prescriptions routinely until
therapy is no longer demanded, indicated, or affordable.
These regrettably brief passages on psychotherapy have achieved their intent if they
have exposed the prevalence of reductionism in dealing with aberrant human minds. For
the object of reductionism is to get the patient back into the culture camp. And behind
this objective is the realization that human nature tends to be "irrational and
ungovernable," not knowing naturally "what it really is," and that it is very
frightened at its lack of control of itself or, may we say, its selves.
GENETICS: ARE THERE HOMINIDS AMONG US?
A great many traits are inheritable, among them some predisposition to insanity. W. R.
Thompson states that "any chromosomal aberration produces a variety of psychological
symptoms, including cerebral changes akin to minimal brain damage. This in turn, may
result in changes in personality that dispose to many forms of abnormal behavior [35]
.
Over one hundred "errors" of metabolism are heritable, most bringing mental
disturbances in their wake. The same writer refers to the heritability of sex behavior,
musicality, introversion/ extraversion, aggression, anxiety, attention to detail,
social attachment, level of activity, emotionality, general intelligence (including
some specific components such as verbal ability, spatial intelligence, word fluency,
and numerical ability), and numerous motor traits affecting skills and athleticism. IQs
shows high heritability, 70% to 80% attributable to genetic as opposed to phenotypic
variance, and is transmitted via an estimated 100 genes (which may indicate the
cloudiness and ethnocentrism of the concept of IQ). It is probably safe to assume that
every trait has a heritable variable component; thereby we may be saved much memorizing
of lists, disputation, and even research effort. Too, heritability can work with
seeming contrariness. "Unaffected offspring of schizophrenic mothers included more
conspicuously successful adults than were observed among a control group." [36]
Since mad behavior is variegated no two madnesses are alike either. We have already
alluded to the genetic component in schizophrenia. Since some "one-third of the
population suffers from excess anxiety" [37] , and perhaps half of normal people
suffer symptoms of depersonalization at times, and, as we have argued, other
abnormalities of mind are abundant, and we are normally insane, the whole issue of
heritability of insanity may well become a "paper tiger." All symptoms of insanity will
have their demonstrable genetic referents. The central problem of genetics in
psychology may turn out to be the heritability of human nature itself. If our
developing theory is correct, and all normal human behavior together with all mental
illness descend from a schizoid core in human nature, there arises the question of
whether this is a "genetic" trait. Is the peculiar function of the human brain the
result of a mutation? If so, then the mutation would have small visible anatomical
effect and one would be hard put to distinguish between the human and his immediate
ancestor, especially were it to be his very mother.
Now the question of time enters. Has there been enough time since homo sapiens
schizotypus evolved or quantavoluted to spread the human gene of self-awareness (if
there is such) to all persons of the human family? Some persons have blue eyes,
denoting a recessive gene. Some genes produce quantitative, not sharply contrasting,
qualities, as for example the bone structure favoring high-speed running, or the gene
transmitting skin-coloring instructions. Racial genes have not had time to diffuse
around the world. Mammalian and other species can spread rapidly around the world; yet
some remain isolated. The hominids australopithecus and homo erectus, or their
predecessors, diffused through Asia, Africa, and Oceania, but have been conventionally
assigned long periods of time to do so. We wonder whether the critical human genes have
yet had time to be thoroughly bred into all going under the name of homo sapiens
sapiens. We may not all be genetically prone to insanity. But, if so, this means that
we may not all be genetically prone to humanness! For just as culture can effect, and
impose controls upon, insanity, it can govern hominidity. It is distinctly possible
that some humans are genetically human- with the schizoid core that we are elucidating
- whereas some humans, perhaps even most humans, are culturally produced in their
entirety. If this were the case, it would be the greatest irony of all times! Unless a
person could prove himself genetically insane, he would need to consider himself a
hominid and bow down before the schizoid culture that makes him human! I do not intend
to solve this puzzle in this book, and indeed there may be no means of doing so. We
cannot subject people to the ultimate test, which is to arrange for many small groups
to be born and grow up wild, watching for the one group that may be composed entirely
of Hominids to appear and behave like non-humans, that is, unaware, unanxious,
speechless, and uncultured.
Notes (Chapter 1: The Normally Insane)
1. Letter to Francesco Vettore, 10 Dec. 1513, trans. and reference from paper of S. de
Grazia, citing F. Gaeta, ed., Nicolo Machiavelli: Lettere, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1961,
304.
2. See Paul Meehl, "Schizotaxia, Schizotypy, Schizophrenia," in Arnold H. and E. H.
Buss, eds., Theories of Schizophrenia, Atherton, New York, 1962, 21-45, 27. Here I use
schizotypy, schizoid and schizo as interchangeable forms.
3. Fred Johnson, The Anatomy of Hallucinations, 1978, p. 29.
4. In Robin Fox, ed., Biosocial Anthropology, London: Malaby Press, p. 62.
5. Dorothea C. Leighton, et al., The Character of Danger: Psychiatric Symptoms in
Selected Communities, III. N. Y.: Putnam, 1977, 56.
6. Leo Srole, Mental Health in the Metropolis, N. Y.: McGraw Hill, 1962.
7. John F. Tallman, et al., "Receptors for the Age of Anxiety," 207 Science Jan. 18,
1980), 274.
8. Johnson, op. cit., 1978, citing Cole's Survey of 1970.
9. Quoted in Johnson, op. cit.
10. H. D. Lasswell, "Democratic Character," Glencoe: Free Press 1951; Power and
Personality N. Y.: Norton, 1948.
11. George G. Gallup, Jr., "Towards an Operational Definition of Self-Awareness," in R.
H. Tuttle, Sociology and Psychology of Primates, The Hague: Monton, 1975, 310-41.
12. Eugen Bleuler Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911, J. Zinkin,
tr., N. Y.: Intl. U. Press, 1950, 266ff, 304ff. Cf. Am. Psychiat. Assn., Diagnostic
Criteria for Schizophrenia, 1978.
13. Dunham, cited in Johnson, op. cit.
14. "Psychiatric Labelling in Cross-Cultural Perspectives," 191 Science (1976), 1019-
27.
15. D. C. Leighton et al., op. cit.
16. Farley, et al., "Brain Norepinephrine and Dopamine in Schizophrenia," 204 Science
(1979) 94.
17. K. Meninger, The Vital Balance, with Martin Mayman and Paul Prnyser, N. Y.: Viking,
1963.
18. "Estimating the Genetic contribution to Schizophrenia," 133: 2 Amer. J. Psychia.
(1976), 185-91.
19. "A Sociobiologic Model of Schizophrenia," unpubl. paper, March, 1976, 11.
20. The quotations are from the National Observer, March 6, 1976, 1, 14.
21. Bleuler, op. cit.
22. Meehl, see fn. 2 above.
23. F. Lemere, letter, 132: 1 Amer. J. Psychia. (Jan. 1975), 86.
24. The Psychology of Fear and Stress, N. Y.: McGraw-Hill, 221-2 citing studies of
Eysenck and Cattell.
25. The Neurotic Constitution, N. Y.: Dodd Mead, 1930, trans from 4th German ed. 1912,
219.
26. "Schizophrenia," in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Princeton U. Press, 1960,
180-1.
27. The Political Community (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press 1948) and the Errors of
Psychotherapy (New York: Doubleday, 1950).
28. Surviving and Other Essays, N. Y. . Knopf, 1979, 29
29. New-York: Pantheon-Vintage, 1965.
30. New York: Basic Books.
31. Op. cit., 258.
32. R. C. Bland and J. H. Parker, "Prognosis in Schizophrenia: A Ten Year Follow-up of
First Admission," 33 Arch. Gen. Psychia. (Aug. 1976), 949-54.
33. Werner M. Mendel, Schizophrenia: The Experience and Its Treatment, San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1976
34. William Sargant, Eliot Slater, and Desmond Kelly, An Introduction to Physical
Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry, N. Y.: Science House, 1972.
35. W. R. Thompson, "Genetics," 8 Ency . Britannica, 1973, 1149.
36. Ibid.
37. M. Gray, 90.
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWO
THE SEARCH FOR LOST INSTINCT
Most babies cry when they are born. If they do not, they are liable to receive their
first spanking. This, say their attendants, will clear their lungs; it will circulate
their blood; it will exercise their reflexes. It is good for them. This crying may be
uniquely human. Calves, for example, do not cry when they are born. They lay stunned
for a moment, and then gradually pick themselves up, pull themselves together, receive
some licks, and crawl or stumble around. The mothers of apes drop their young almost
disdainfully and hardly attend to them at first; the orangutan mother is more
considerate, more human.
Perhaps babies cry because they are already more frightened than animals. A famous
psychoanalyst, Otto Rank, found the mental state of the baby deplorable, and traced the
major behaviors of later life to the trauma of birth. Some conscientious mothers even
followed his line of reasoning to the point of giving birth by caesarean operation,
thus assisting the baby's birth and relieving its pain of passage from womb to open
air. I do not know that the effects of their altruism have ever been reported.
Dr. Rank, passing over the possibly similar plight of calves, babes of monkeys, and
puppies, ascribed the most marvelous effects to the human birthing experience. He sees
"in the birth trauma the ultimate biological basis of the psychical." Even the myths of
the creation of the world, that are [1] told in many cultures, are regarded by him as
a sublime attempt to undo the birth trauma and to deny the separation of the infant
from the mother. Although everyone has undergone and many have later witnessed the
radical experience of parturition, Rank interpreted myths and fantasies of the end of
the world as wishes and efforts of the human individual to be reabsorbed into the great
All and Oneness. Further, "the Flood which initiates a new world period is nothing but
a 'universal' reaction to the birth trauma, as the myths of the origin of the earth or
the sea also show." Religion, creativity, humanness - all are to be attributed to the
tragedy of parturition. No one is exempted. I think that he is reversing the order of
nature.
Attacking the perinatal problem by another method, Stanislas Grof employed psychedelic
drugs, particularly LSD, in seeking to learn of people's re-experiences of the earliest
events of their lives [2] . He could identify four matrices of recollections. One
expressed feelings of unbounded ease; another, frightful threat, confinement and
torture; a third appeared as a struggle for survival and an ecstatic release; the
fourth, a separation that seemed a kind of death followed by resurrection. These would
connect with the physical sequence of natal events and incorporate analogous later
effects. This is matrix (2); the unbearable and inescapable situation of the foetus,
sensing uterine contractions while confronting a still-closed cervix, would and did
engender visions of fear, plague, and natural catastrophe.
Lacking evidence that historical experiences can affect the germ plasma, we must regard
these as visions of other life experiences, as secondary or derivative suggestions, and
attached to the perinatal process by mental association. We do not deny that they
originally occurred. Rather, when they did occur and were experienced and remembered,
they reinforced the analogous perinatal feelings. And, if what we have said concerning
Rank's theory is correct, the perinatal experience is a reinforcement of the pre-
existing genetic fear of oneself that already begins with the foetus. Hence, a double
reinforcement may operate upon the original fear. Every species, indeed every
individual, has its own pre-existing structure for experiencing; experience is species-
specific and organism-specific.
Otto Rank and Stanislas Grof are asking too much of the nasty surprise of birth.
Rather, I should say, the baby is crying because, unlike the animals, he already
possesses a kind of fear that they do not, and cannot, know. This is his existential
fear, an anxiety sensed upon the realization of the existence of himself. He is
reacting to a harsh accident, true, but knows already this existential fear and is
demanding immediately that he be relieved of it. He already has a frustrated
Voluntarism, a will that he expects to appease by action. He is terribly frightened
because he is already trying to put his head together and to find himself in himself,
whereas the animals have merely to compose their circulation and limbs.
The infant already wants more than to fix upon comfort, although this, and food later
on, will usually quiet him. Surely, given the option, the baby would prefer to return
to the womb. But there, too, he may well have been frightened, not only by jostling and
growth pains, but by the sense of the greatest problem of existence, how to form his
identity. For his brain has begun to operate in the peculiar human way. He may be
already indecisive, unlike the beasts, feeling that there is a decision to be made, and
wants to do more than to wait upon the comfort of the nursery. Perhaps it is well to
slap him if he does not cry: he should stop dreaming and come to attention.
INSTINCT-DELAY
The baby cannot realize his problem. He does not know that his instinctive mechanisms
are blunted, blocked and delayed, and that he will pass his life in a mammalian
vehicle, a jalopy that he must tinker with and fix up at every turn of the road.
Luckily, he is to be trained immediately as a mechanic. Not for him are the joys of a
long life of instinctive behavior, consisting mainly of speedy, replicating responses
to specific stimuli.
The delays of instinct, touching upon the whole gamut of behavior, provide the human
with a continuous fear. The instincts cause tension in their persistent efforts to
complete themselves. At the same time, the person finds himself inundated by the
tongues of instinct, lapping upon areas of behavior often little related to the
original direction or object of the stimulus-response mechanism. The sexual instinct,
for instance may emerge as Oedipal, romantic, homosexual, fetishistic, sadistic,
aesthetic and/ or aggressive behavior; rarely is it merely the highly relevant
"display; hop on; hop off; go away" sequence that even higher animals perform. The
delay of instincts by a possibly genetic blockage is all-important: it permits the
chaotic creational flood to rush into all the crevices of the forming human nature. The
retardation of his animal instincts is viewed as flexibility in the human's behavior.
Human flexibility is both cause and consequence, therefore, because both the
"decisions" and the follow-up activity are subject to delays in the central nervous
system.
The animal world, by contrast, exists by instinct: events emit stimuli; instinctive
reactions succeed or fail; the residuum reassembles amidst the continuing events.
Almost never is the process punctuated by pauses to consider a dilemma. If its spasms
of calculation fail, the animal surrenders to the inertial process. It falls back upon
its collective line of defense, it breeds. The animate world can depend upon
exponential reproducibility to render individual choice unnecessary for species
survival.
Meanwhile the human creature depends upon what he calls mind or intelligence. He has
not chosen to do so. He cannot do anything else. Would that he could, for his lot is
fearful. His reactions blocked at every turn, if only for an instant, he lives in
anxiety over the last turn, the present turn, the next turn, and all the ones he can
remember or imagine or foresee. Stripped of ready instinct, he confronts an instinct-
ready world. He is innately, individually, and culturally anxious, and the world he
encounters is too large to cope with non-anxiously.
Terror drives him to act quickly, but not instinctively, and instinct is the quickest
action. Why must he forever fearfully reflect? If, unlike animals, man has to make up
his mind, there must be some unique quality in the mind. If two or more options rush
into the open question raised by the blocked instinctual response, there is a conflict,
an anxiety. Even if there is but a single and obvious solution, a pause to determine so
can cause anxiety.
SELF-FEAR AND SELF-CONTROL
When the posing of options is continuous and inevitable, the very existence of a single
mind can be doubted. The pervasiveness of choice and anxiety in the actions of the
human being must signify that "ordinarily he is of two minds" about everything he
experiences. "Two souls within me live, damn!" said Goethe.
Two souls may be too few. The well-known case study of Sybil documented sixteen
different persons in a single human female, each conscious, aware, able, and resting
upon the substrata of the other fifteen. Whatever the number, so long as it is more
than one, it suggests that a third trait can be allocated to the non-instinctual,
fearful creature, which is a multiple personality.
Called by another name, this is self-awareness, a kind of behavior that could never
come about were it not for the fact that someone is asking questions of someone else. A
self is aware of itself. "I think, therefore I am", wrote Descartes. Not quite, we say.
Rather, "I recognize myself; therefore, we are." When, 3000 years before, Moses turned
aside to inspect the fiery un-burning thornbush, he found there Yahweh who spoke to him
saying "I am the I am" and Moses worried (says the Bible) about what people would say
when he said to them "I am the voice of the I am that is the I am."
Because our selves share nearly identical anatomical housing and have highly privileged
access to each other, for all practical purposes they are considered as "one in body
and soul." In fact, the compulsion to be oneself is so suspiciously strong that no
matter what the proof to the contrary, the self will always be the irreducible unit of
human existence. Like non-Euclidean geometry and warped space, the poly-self will
remain a theoretical construct, out of the realm of the common sense. It will help to
understand human behavior, however, and have powerful applications in psychological
therapy and law. It will, among other things, clarify an idea that is to be found in a
many "primitive" and "advanced" cultures, that a person "possessed" is not to be
treated as himself. So now we have the human creature, living in a house of fear,
governed by a committee, and acting accordingly in non-instinctual ways.
What is the agenda of this committee of egos? The agenda seems infinitely varied; it
can contain anything in the whole world, internal, external, from a microbe to the
stars, unlimited, too, in time or space. But the preamble to every item on the agenda
is always the same: "This is a bill to control fear by..." So the human seeks control,
first of himself, that is, of the committee: "This house must put itself in order."
Then he must seek to control others; he must at the same time, just like a government,
govern himself while he governs others. And, besides the others, he must seek to
control the world, for he senses that not only these others, but also the whole world,
threatens him and needs to be ordered. Something of this conduct of operations seems
implied in Anna Freud's idea about the ego's "tendency to synthesis," as opposed to the
fear of ego destruction, which she recognizes as an instinctual anxiety [3] . (I say,
of course, that the ego was hardly there in the first place.)
Control implies power, the determination of the wills or behaviors of people and
events. "Power is an ingredient in the transactions which take place within all object
relationships and is thus an ingredient in the interlocking forces which determine
personality," so declares Arieti. Veritably we may contemplate now a being that is
instinct-delayed, poly-ego, fearful on both counts and power-driven: ecce homo.
Control is said to occur when someone determines the behavior of persons or things. The
drive to control is a reciprocal of fear. All humans, possessing existential fear and
self-fears, must seek control, primarily of the self. Very quickly in all situations
the physical self becomes the arena of only a portion of the struggle for control.
External objects and beings are also incorporated into the struggle. The self, others,
and the natural world are the triple object of efforts at control.
The total of objects, both inner and outer, operate subjectively without
discrimination. Whether a person feels he controls his temper or an empire, by
physiological indicators of stress, or by any other tests, he is calmer and more
relaxed. If he is insatiable in his wishes to control, the diminution of tension with
success will be brief and shallow; his fears will cause him to move immediately to
assume control in other spheres. Under no circumstances can the urge to control be
satisfied.
Assuming that all humans are basically alike, rather than divided between those who are
genetically human and those who are only culturally human (a question already alluded
to), the challenge may be offered that women are less interested in control than men.
This would imply, by our theory, that they are more instinctive, more unified and
stable as persons, and less fearful. More hominidal, therefore? Less instinct-delayed?
Such may be the case. There is folklore about "a woman's instinct." This special female
capacity is a popular belief today. In the Western European Middle Ages, women were for
a time denied a soul, until a Church conference finally decided the issue in their
favor. A "soul" translates into the more active madness and suffering often
characterizing males.
But it is suggested that for the time being we assume a close similarity of the sexes.
We offer, as adequate and at least temporary justification, that women are generally
forced out of formal control activities, that they operate "underground" for control
purposes, and that, anyhow, an accurate and thorough inventory of control activity
would disclose an equality of the sexes.
The absolute renunciation of control-needs and efforts is sometimes attempted. The
cosmic indifference of Buddha lets nothing matter save finding nothingness. Once filled
with nothingness, one will be at peace. All identifications and attachments are
renounced in order to concentrate upon control of the self. With an elaborate strict
regimen of diet and exercises, and by abstemious human relations, bolstered by a
sophisticated rationale appeasing conventional philosophical demands, a mental balance
is achieved that is distinguishable from selfishness, catatonism, or bestiality.
Resemblances to autistic trances are present. The discipline remains severe; the drive
for control of the world is not abolished. A more than casual resemblance to the
Buddhist outlook is to be perceived in Teilhard de Chardin's attempt to extricate
mankind from its dilemma [4] . He sees the remedy as man's reflectiveness, enlarged
greatly until the world is co-reflected in his mind in a universe of ultra-reflexion.
This is a vague formula, but it takes on greater meaning when we ask what is Chardin's
human dilemma. This, it seems, is a state of fear, which he describes abstractly: the
great fear of the human species is to be closed in and lost in an unfriendly world,
condemned to live with himself as a fixed species.
THE SENSE OF "I AM"
Identity and identification begin with the question of the self or ego. "Everyone is to
himself that which he calls self," wrote John Locke, in discussing the idea of a person
[5] . The self is "an object to itself," said G. H. Mead. The reflexive form reveals
"that which can be both subject and object." This is what distinguishes man from
animal, he argued, rather than the alleged possession of a mysteriously endowed soul
[6] .
Sommerhoff regards self-awareness as part of consciousness and, in his study of The
Logic of the Living Brain, says that it is formed of "coherent internal representations
of the physical self," hence also of the self's relations to its surroundings. "... The
unity of the physical self finds expression in a family of characteristic
transformation expectations the brain accumulates during ontogenesis." [7]
Sweeping in more closely toward the concept sought here, Hilgard declares, "The unity
of consciousness is illusory. Man does more than one thing at a time - all the time -
and the conscious representation of these actions is never complete." [8]
When the personality degrades to "a delusional chaos," some awareness survives. "Part
of that total complex which we call the ego, the 'self, always remains alien to the
delusions. This constellation accounts for the fact that the non-affected part of the
ego may disbelieve and even criticize the delusions; on the other hand, the
incorrigibility and the senselessness of the delusions are precisely due to the fact
that many associations contradictory to the delusional are simply not brought into any
logical connection with it."
Building one's self is then every person's lifelong occupation. As we have said, he is
driven by the fear of not being oneself to begin with. The self is a predisposition,
but not a bequest, of nature. Indeed, it is never fully achieved. Man is always an
infant in this regard. While apes grow quickly and soon act "self-possessedly", the
human can grow in every respect but this, that he never achieves a single self. "The
mature person is self-confident," by which is signified that his existential fear is
under control and that he egoistically regards himself as one. A total lack of self-
confidence results in a kind of vegetative existence, a sickness as grave as any; even
the most elementary kinds of self-control disappear into incontinence and catatonism.
Both "identification" and "role-playing" are in the area of the dispersed self. A
"role" is behavior according to a social sub-type, which is employed to escape
insecurity by virtue of a more secure status. A role may be manifested as casually as a
costume for the mardigras once a year, or as intensely as a permanent switch in
identity accompanied by amnesia. Role changes are common in modern society; they are
rare in simple communities, where a fisherman is son of a fisherman, but even there the
person goes through life-roles such as adolescence or grandparentage, has a role in a
church, and so on. Roles are culturally defined, often assigned, and when fully
developed and effective, encapsulate the dispersed self, guarding and maintaining it
against dissolution.
Identification can be attested in the assumption of a role, as the boy who identifies
with his father, the fisherman, but can more broadly extend to all manner of being and
abstraction. Thus one may detach some part of himself and affix it to an identification
with the working-class movement, or with the Virgin Mary, or with his family and
neighbors, or with a bird. Identification is associated with the wish to control its
object; this may be difficult, for frequently ambivalence arises out of an obviously
uncontrollable identification. The self, though it may appear so, is not a social
creation, as G. H. Mead and others would have it be. Man would never have a self, a
poly-ego, if he were not structured genetically to engage in the search for self by a
mind that has to be pulled together. Mead's work is completely intelligible and useful,
except on this crucial point. It is significant that he does not seek to go beyond
society and culture as the determinants. Meanwhile, he provides us with precisely those
kinds of observations which we need, as, for example: "The phenomenon of dissociation
of personality is caused by a breaking up of the complete, unitary self into the
component selves of which it is composed, and which respectively correspond to
different aspects of the social process in which the person is involved." [9]
He advanced and stressed the concept of "social roles," those social housings for the
individual selves, and showed how small children could play games with their selves, as
well as others, being now one kind of person, now then another - father, mother, evil
one, good one, police and bandit, and so on. This author's grandchild was raised
bilingually in Athens, and when playing with a toy car and policeman, would speak as
the policeman in Greek, then reply as the car-driver in English.
Bleuler used the word "schizophrenia" to denote a split personality, merging the Greek
words for "split" and "brain" or "heart," thus meaning more than brain. Schizophrenia
was applied to madness of the disordered personality, and numerous mental illnesses
received different names in the early years of psychiatry. Afterwards, it became
fashionable to assert that one should ignore the etymology of the word, even ignoring
Bleuler, for that matter.
The trend of my work, however, has been to extend the term in its literal meaning -
that is, to introduce the idea of multiple "splits" - to extend it to cover practically
all mental disturbances not attributable to organic and accidental lesions, whether
congenital or post-natal, and to transform the disease into the elements of normal
behavior, regarding normal individual and social behavior as specific resultants of
certain adjustments to a natural schizophrenia. Thus self-consciousness is what might
be termed in the lexicon of psychopathology a form of delusional thought. To be human,
then, is to be schizotypical, or schizoid. Not to be so - that is, not to be self-
aware-is impossible, or is stupid in the sense of being of the hominidal species of the
primates.
Again, all humans, including mad humans, are self-aware. Even in a case of severe
catalepsy, self-awareness is evident. Bleuler reports cataleptics who can maintain the
same position for months. But, as a patient is moved, his muscles flex and adjust so as
to maintain any position in which he is placed. Normal children and hystericals will
sometimes do the same, after being punished. Hilgard describes a hypnotised subject who
can, as instructed, divide himself into two beings, one who feels no pain upon
stimulation and says so, another who feels it and comments upon it.
The source of the phenomena of self-awareness is the dispersed selves. One would not
know oneself unless there were at least two of one, the observer and the observed, the
knower and the known, or, better, two mutually perceptive observers. In Hilgard's
experiment above, he was able to elicit two speaking selves with contrasting points of
view regarding a painful stimulus.
Since there is so much of the delusory in human nature, as Bleuler and many other
students have shown, it occurred to me at first to regard self-consciousness only as a
form of delusion. I think now that it must be reality and that the concept of the
single self must be delusory, a kind of megalomania based upon an illusion of the
dominating self. Just as the human sees one image with eyes that register bi-focally,
so he mentates, especially when asked, as a whole, though his mind be operating
eccentrically. Both neurological and psychological evidence of this will be advanced
later on.
The ego is not singular. "It" perceives and exists as a poly-self. Any single self in
the set is a sensed or perceived claim on an acting and behaving organic system in
relation to or in conjunction with claims of others. A person is a system of selves, a
polyself system. Ordinarily, people successfully inhibit irrelevant material from
enough of their mentation to assure others and cause others to believe that they are
acting as a single or at most a self-aware self. Even too much self-awareness is a
cause of disturbances, akin to disturbed behavior in the eyes of observers and in the
concerns of the subject; suspicions are aroused; rapport is weakened. When persons
begin to operate on several levels almost simultaneously, they are accorded various
complexes by medical practitioners. Bleuler gave numerous illustrations of such
behavior among his schizophrenic patients.
Hilgard's studies of divided consciousness by means of hypnosis expose a "hidden
observer" or "co-conscious" as an ordinary concomitant of existence. This self among
selves is not a monster, a "beast of the unconscious." "The concealed part sometimes
turns out to be healthier than the openly presented self." [10] Expert though he was
in hypnosis, Sigmund Freud fashioned his theory of id-ego-superego from classical
social psychological theory, from Plato's Republic (I argued in a paper of 1949) rather
than from experiential materials readily available to him. He thus may have posed the
wrong parties in psychic conflicts. The polyego concept is structurally and
biologically manifest; it can be the subject of experiment; it can be operationally
described.
The origins of the poly-ego, the core of human nature, must be in neurological
transformations at some time in the past. Here we assume the poly-ego to exist, leaving
its ancient origins to be traced in Homo Schizo I. Sufficient for the moment is the
hypothesis that when this transformation occurred, a number of critical innovations
occurred with it, enough so that we can assume a quantavolution of creation, a
Hologenesis. Human nature came all at once. As the first humans experienced for the
first time a poly-ego and have until now repeated the experience with every new person,
we look for a massive effect upon the human being and find it in the eternal fear that
possesses mankind.
EXISTENTIAL FEAR
Students of fear in humans and animals are rarely satisfied by obvious causes; human
fear is not a pie to be cut up and assigned to wild animals, bad dreams, strict
parents, and the like. It is well to make tallies, thus a third of the population fears
snakes, most of these fear them intensely; a great many fear heights or being alone in
public places; many fear injury and illness; and nearly everyone fears an assault at
the time that it occurs [11] . But, perhaps because they are difficult to study and
even to conceive of, "little systematic research has been applied to the nature of what
are sometimes called existential fears." [12]
As with the concepts of human nature and instinct, many psychologists would like to rid
themselves of the concept of "fear," believing it to be vague and operationally
undefinable. But, as Jeffrey Gray puts it, "Experimental psychology - as well as common
sense - has been forced to invent the hypothesis of a complex psychological state,
'fear, ' precisely in order to make sense out of the otherwise shifting and imprecise
relationship observed between stimuli and responses." [13]
We do not distinguish here between fear and anxiety. "Anxiety, the psychological
equivalent of pain, is characterized by a feeling of dread.. a vague fear.. not related
to specific situations or objects.. part of the human condition." So says Mendel,
abstracting from a lifetime of administering intensive psychotherapy [14] .
Physiologically, insofar as anxiety can be detected, it exhibits the chemistry and
muscular tensions of fear. And fear, when slight, is indistinguishable from anxiety.
And anxiety can become terror and panic. The common use of the term "anxiety" has to be
attributed to the need to allay people's fear that they may be suffering from fear.
Fear is part of the human and of all that he creates. The role of fear in religion is
large, so that a working out of fears often has taken place in the arena of the sacred.
Religion approached by faith, says Rudolf Otto, cannot be the same as religion
approached through reason. Central to faith is numen, the specific non-rational
religious apprehension and its object, at all its levels, from the primitive stirrings
to exalted spiritualism. And central to numen is dread, for it is the sacred, holy,
awful confrontation of man with god or the divine essence [15] .
Fear can be both immediate and existential. Immediate fear erupts upon the encountering
of threat to the poly-ego system, a learned and/ or sensed emotion that sends an ad hoc
electro-chemical alarm through the central nervous system. Existential fear, also an
electrochemical effect, is normally at a constant level which we posit to be above some
pre-human level.
What evidence is there for a continuous higher level of existential fear in human
nature? That man is an anxious animal has been a byword in psychology. This means
ordinarily that the human is never at ease with himself. Rare cases of such are a
subject of marveling comment, probably misplaced and incorrect. To suit the needs of
homo schizo, all neonates are trained to high levels of anxiety.
It is often argued that humans are culturally indoctrinated in fear, and therefore
generally exhibit that continuous anxiety which has every conceivable object as its
trigger or focus. Cultures are discoverable that train their children not to possess or
display fear. Many mothers of modern western culture earnestly try to preserve their
children from the sense of fear. The mothers are reinforced by cultural institutions
that have special needs. These, where successful, invariably train only an ignorance of
or resistance to fear in some respects deemed crucial by the society, such as facing up
to an enemy in battle.
Here, in the first place, there is reason to regard the training as retraining, that
is, the acquisition of one set of habits to overwhelm a contrary set. The partial
training underscores the practically limitless outlets to existential fear; global
courage is not hoped for. The brave Spartans were obsessively fearful of their Helotic
slaves; fearful of alliances; fearful of women; fearful of their gods; and would turn
tail for home even from a battle if an earthquake occurred. The display of fear is
culturally determined; the fear itself is universal. The most persuasive argument
against the presence of an existential human fear is that the human is occupied with so
many objects over such large spans of memory and futures that one is bound to be always
in a state of anxiety over something. If it is not one's health, it is the apparitions
of a stormy sky; if not an enemy, it is an institution.
As in so many areas, here too, one must ask first of all if the logic is not reversed,
possibly in a type of cognitive disorder: why does the human tend to so many things in
the world, not only the infinite now, but the infinite past or future? Is the object
pursued or attended to because it serves as an outlet for fear or must one believe that
the human is so naturally rational as to fix his concerns upon practically everything,
only then to discover a fearful aspect to it all? I think that the answer to this
question will emerge from this book.
Briefly, though, a fixation upon a single or very few objects is suspiciously
phobiaphilic; the expansion of the scope of objects occupying one does not increase the
general fearfulness of one's state, but rather the contrary: it makes the state of fear
more bearable. Extraverted, "neurotic" characters typically disperse their attention
and, as a result, acquire unusual versatility.
Furthermore, as we shall argue later, fear is not eliminated by therapy. The objects
may be changed. Or, by a variety of means, including drugs such as tranquilizers and
alcohol, a high level of fear may be reduced even greatly. Fear is controlled by
forcing the physiology, not by clearing away impediments to natural courage.
Comparing the occasions for fear it is doubtful that the human lot is beset by more
fearful stimuli than engage the attention of animals. Yet we see in man a variety of
psycho-pathological tendencies and behaviors - such as merciless aggression and global
attentiveness - not present in mammals and apes. Hence we must seek the source of
existential fear in a logical and real condition, which we say is the poly-ego. Self-
awareness, inevitable in mankind, produces continual anxiety over his inevitably and
profusely invented fears. In 1933, Freud laid down the theme ".. that the ego is the
only seat of anxiety, and that only the ego can produce anxiety," and "that the three
main varieties of anxiety - objective anxiety, neurotic anxiety and moral anxiety - can
so easily be related to the three directions in which the ego is dependent, on the
external world, on the id and on the super-ego." [16]
This reads, in our terms: on nature, on others, and on the variegated selves. The self
is too complex to be divided into id, ego, and superego. There is a pragmatic
instinctive principle involved, but there is no reality principle. The self is never a
real self, either.
In systematizing psychology, Freud might better have dispensed with external
objectivity and relied upon a phenomenological theory of the world as a wholly
subjective creation of the mind. The clutch of components of the ego engage themselves
in anxiety-reduction operations. The so-called id, ego and superego elements are
ancient and misleading ideas of how the mind works, even though they are conventionally
handy for political, moral, and hence therapeutic disputation. Certainly, though,
Freudian psychology is erected upon the presumption of ever-present anxiety.
Not until we learn how this continuous drizzle of fear and anxiety is precipitated in
human life by the delayed instinct and the split self will we understand existential
fear. For the moment, we should counsel alertness against assigning to any experience
the accountability for generalized fear. This means to avoid any commitment to sweeping
theories such as that of Rank's birth trauma, or to presuppositions like Otto's that
dread is validated by its divine associations. Or such large categorical explanations
as "castration fear," which is undoubtedly of diagnostic utility. Or, for that matter,
to any summing up to 100% of fear by adding experiences from the womb to the tomb.
Rather, hypothetically at first, and then as certainly as the evidence and logic
permit, let us maintain that the human would be fearful and anxious even if he lived a
life totally free of frightening experience. The whole human mental structure appears
to be given over to controlling the mind so as to reduce the stress of fear. The poly-
self is elected as a governing committee by a central nervous system that was
previously under more centralized management. The brain of the hominid loses
coordinative ability and in so doing produces the human brain, which imposes a new
system of coordination.
The poly-ego, hence self-awareness, would not be present if it were not for the
depression and confusion of instincts in humans. What forced the human egos to emerge
was the necessity for continuous decision-making and what made this in turn necessary
was the delaying of instinctive response. How this happened is to be discussed later
on; what it consists of is relevant here.
INSTINCT IN MAN AND ANIMAL
We begin by a comparison. Legions of horseshoe crabs (which are more related to spiders
than to other crabs) make their way up the beaches of Cape Cod to breed with precisely
the most predictable heavy tide, that which occurs with the full moon nearest to the
summer solstice. In the swirling low waters the females discharge their eggs, which are
fertilized by the sperm discharged by the males. The adults retire with the tide (save
for a few who are trapped in retreating, and bury themselves in sand until the next
heavy tide). The fertilized eggs sink into the sand where they develop and wait to
hatch upon the occasion of the tide of the next full moon, whereupon they move out to
sea.
Instinctively, one may surmise, the horseshoe crab has mastered complex processes that
homo sapiens would have to learn by pragmatic science. One is the relation of sun and
moon to tides, or at least the empirical knowledge of when the heaviest reliable tide
of the year occurs. Another is the organization of legions of males and females in rut
to congregate at the same place for the purpose of conceiving upon the beach a new
generation, which itself develops within the narrow limits of the next lunar month, at
which time it can emerge to descend upon the sea. Thousands of such instinctive
processes are possessed by the animal kingdom. In many cases one animal's instincts are
aligned to exploit the instincts of other animals. The human, and perhaps the human
alone, can make a great many adjustments of his behavior to imitate or relate to and
exploit the instinctive behavior of the biosphere. The human's blocked instinctive
structure is the basis or take-off point to invent a multitude of instinct-like habits
that, for example, would have him waiting upon the beach at the summer solstice to
capture the horseshoe crab and sell it for fertilizer and souvenirs. Some animals
exploit instincts of other animals, as we have said.
The term "instinct," like "human nature," and "ego," has a suspicious slackness about
it. No wonder, given its history. Charles Darwin used it not quite as loosely as he did
the idea of "natural selection," S. Freud used it as a workhorse for one speculative
probe after another; MacDougall, the social psychologist, pounded it into mincemeat;
Tinbergen managed to use it respectably in his study of animal behavior; and Fletcher
recently reconciled its ethological and psychiatric meanings usefully.
N. Tinbergen defined instinct as a hierarchically organized nervous mechanism,
susceptible to primary releasing and directing impulses of internal and external
origin, which responds to these impulses by coordinated movements [17] . The hierarchy
is altered by changes in the intensity or by suppression of other instincts. An
influential hierarchical order by Rensch gives as instincts sex, deference, feeding,
cleaning, and ultimately hunting and collecting. I doubt, however, that there is any
hierarchy of instincts in humans except in a group statistical sense, owing to the
human ineptitude for specific instinctive response.
Obviously, all writers have had in mind the large fact that animals and men respond
automatically when stimulated in certain ways: they blink quickly when about to be
struck in the eye, for instance. (Even so, madmen and small boys can teach themselves
to control the blink.) This unrestrained reflex is instinctive, as are a great many
chemical and motile reactions of the organs and limbs. In the human bloodstream are to
be found leucocytes, cells that hunt infectious bacteria - instinctively? Then where is
the instinct: in the whole person or in the leucocyte?
As instincts come to require training (the baby can be toilet-trained) or as the
stimulus of the instinct provokes a broader response (when struck, the creature dodges,
snarls, and strikes back), they enter an area of science that can ultimately merge with
speculative philosophy, as when one speaks of an aesthetic instinct in man. Freud's
last thrust in the arena of instinct emerged with a death (thanatos) and a life (eros)
instinct [18] . This dualism reminds us of entropy and negative entropy, the universal
breaking down of motion and material and the countervailing creativeness of life,
which, if given optional conditions of sustained full reproduction would soon cover all
the stars and the spaces between with organic matter, and then presumably expand the
universe beyond even the dreams of the explosive universe theorists. This thought might
be taken as an irrelevant comment on the irrelevancy of Freud's two-fold
classification. But neither is the case.
In this very book on the pleasure principle, Freud came as close as he ever did to the
theory of homo schizo. In the course of denying the domination of pleasure over human
mentation, which relates to the anhedonia symptoms adverted to later on, he moves to
the question of unpleasure. "Unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of
excitation" that is present but unbound in the mind; pleasure is a diminution of
excitation. [19] He thus agrees with G. T. Fletcher (1873) who linked pleasure and
unpleasure with stability and instability, in between which lay indifference. And he
foreshadowed the behavioral conditioning school of today several of whose
representatives occupy an honorable place in this book.
Now Freud, typically pushing ideas to their limits of tolerance (and toleration), makes
death a pleasure and then an instinct. "Instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to
restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon
under the pressure of external disturbing forces." [20] Instinct: reversion: death.
Freud's "death instinct," so readily misunderstood, can be shown to make sense in the
light of the theory of homo schizo. For we say that man seeks to revert to the animal
in order to recapture the instinctive bliss of the single self. That is, man
unconsciously seeks his death as a human, and of the human species. This must be very
close to what was gestating in the mind of Freud.
I see confirmation of this thought in a cloudy but weighty remark that relates to the
dependent clause of the quoted sentence. For he writes: "In the last resort, what has
left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live
in and of its relation to the sun. Elementary things do not wish to change but are
forced to evolve organically by external disturbing and diverting influences." My work
in Homo Schizo I deals heavily with such "influences." What is pertinent here is that,
by the theory of homo schizo, the evolved thing, man, wants to rid itself of the burden
of the very trait that speciates it, that makes it a unique species, and such is the
instinct-delay that creates and maintains its perpetual angst.
Freud's early preoccupation with the sexual instinct is less pertinent, disclosing, as
critics have pointed out, an ideological attachment to the worries of well-to-do
patients in a bourgeois society before World War l. The varieties of sexuality, it
rather seems to us, given the cultural accent upon the subject, indicate a dispersed
instinct, a conflict of selves, and an employment of sexual displacements to dispose of
existential fear. Love consists of identifying an ego element with people and objects
(even a 'security blanket') which reassure one against fear. Love is usually deeply
involved with control, and control of course is a heavy motive in sexual attraction.
Affection plays so large a part in nurturing and training an infant that it becomes
naturally a well-developed area of fixation for many problems of other instinctive
zones besides the sexual. One can understand how affection is attached to all manner of
"irrelevant" encounters and objects. It can be plucked out and credited with being the
basic drive. But we always should refer to the human basic drive as self-control, then
to other essential interests such as sex and food, and finally to myriad mixed displays
of all of these.
Without enthusiasm and with qualms, a definition of instinct may be put forward:
instinctive behavior in a species is present when, in the absence of training, a
uniform behavior reliably results following upon a definite stimulus. The number of
instincts in mammal species subsumable under this definition must be in the hundreds.
An important fact is that for every primate instinctive action, there is a human
equivalent, ontologically recognizable. This fact is relatively easy to argue. However,
the near reverse may be also true, as ethologists and sociobiologists increasingly
contend: for every type of human action, defined with increasing specificity, there may
be a genetically related primate instinct, with allowances made for training in both
cases.
The discussion of human instinct centers about the comparative laxness of instinct in
the total behavior of man when compared with the behavior of animals most closely
resembling him. Compare the separation of the mother bear and her cub, so simple, with
the separation of the human female from her child, so complex, so full of woes, the
inspiration of thousands of customs and volumes of literature. And include especially
the "exceptional" societies such as those in which the mother is trained like the bear
mother, who lumbers away leaving her cub whimpering on the limb of a tree, or the
societies employing all-male initiation ceremonies to break the maternal grip, or
fascist and soviet societies whose nursery schools are intended to abort family
influences deemed incompatible with the ideas of the regime, or societies where the tie
is broken by taking up one's first job in a distant city. Humans can come close to, or
seemingly go very far from, animal practices.
When giving birth, women in comparison with primate females are more agitated and
uncertain, and follow practices not observable among the primates, such as engaging
attendants. Again, primate females have a defined rut period when they will accept
sexual advances, whereas human females frequently are receptive of sexual overtures
most of the time. Kinsey found that a mild rut period is present in slightly over half
of a human female population. The complications in the life of humans introduced by
just these two departures from the instinctive norms of the primates are numerous. On
the one hand there are the "unhappy" components in the difference of instincts:
confusion, doubt, malaise, anxiety, ignorance, ineptness. On other hand there occur
some "happy" elements: flexibility in relating to other environmental demands, such as
planning hunting absences; reasonable timing; more frequent opportunities to breed; and
the possibility of introducing healthy practices; not to mention luckier males. Here
are two behaviors, in primates and humans; they "could be" alike. But some mechanism
generalizes and renders indistinct the human behavior. The words used to rate human
against non-human instincts are many; observers find in the human instinctive structure
"atrophy," "depression, " "generalization, " "abortion," "diffusion, "
"disintegration," "vagueness," "blunting," "delay," and "suppression." Obviously we
have many words to choose from in denoting the main peculiarity of human instincts.
Pursuing the concepts of poly-identity and fear, and considering that we shall have to
provide later on an operational and etiological system for whatever word we choose, we
settle upon "delay," instinct delay. This can be postulated as a general suppression of
brain-mediated responses to stimulus such that an instruction can intervene to make
unreliable any response. Among instructions can be included decisions, so that one can
imagine the delay as automatized, unconscious, or deliberate. Culture, that is,
training and education, can affect both instructions and decisions.
POLY-EGO VERSUS INSTINCT
The basic product of the instinct delay is the poly-self. Assuming that several centers
of the brain can become seats of an "ego," the delay of instinctive response will cause
these centers to develop and exercise influence. The instinct delay produces
milliseconds of "hesitation" and "doubt." This is enough for the several centers to
sense a problem, that is, non-fulfillment of the instinctive loop of stimulus-response-
extinction of impulse, and to react. The general consciousness is supplemented by a
superior and dominating special brain center and several inferior but rival ones.
The dominant consciousness now perceives its rivals and the "problem." It casts a pall
of fear over the central nervous system, including itself. The problem of non-immediate
fulfillment of the instinct impulse is complicated by the sense of competitive
decision-making or instruction-giving centers associated with it. Hence the external
fear of ourselves is established. Physiologically a low-level of Cannon's fear-flight
effect, involving the adrenals, is produced.
Now we have in operation: instinct delay, poly-ego, and existential fear. The person
behaves accordingly. He seeks control of the laggard instincts and their wayward
derivatives. He seeks to organize his poly-ego into an effective and more comfortable
relationship. He tries to abolish his fear, which, after all, is nothing but a
continuous play of the fear sensations of animal life and which, mistakenly, he treats
as nothing more than an interminable chain of immediate fears.
Man can and would like to fill infinity with his control activities. "... The
overriding purpose of the behavior is an attempt to achieve some security and certainty
for the person who feels threatened and insecure in an uncertain world. The possibility
of controlling oneself and the forces outside oneself by assuming omniscience and
omnipotence can give one a false illusion of certainty. Therefore the main ingredient
is one of control." So writes L. Salzman on The Obsessive Personality. [21]
Time and space concepts are great instruments for control. Man in effect enlarges the
world by imposing more and more of a time frame behaviorally upon it. He obsessively
connects himself with natural instruments of time-passage, hence time-reckoning.
The same occurs in the space world. This is part of an irresistible expansion of Man's
will to control, which is of course dependent only upon his insatiable need to control
his head which in turn depends upon the unquenchable fear that fills his head (and
total body libido). And the fear comes from his inability to execute promptly and
certainly the numerous and varied, often contradictory, orders of the incoming stimuli.
He is more agitated in civilized than in less complex, calmer societies, and more in
rapidly changing than in "stagnant" cultures. And the inability is fostered by the
blocking and diversion (displacement) and echoing of incoming orders. The brainwork
involved is discussed in the next chapter.
Control by evolutionary reversion is impossible. Man is unable to reestablish the
instinctual basis of existence. He cannot speed up his responses and eradicate their
derivatives, except that his attempts at doing so produce the astonishing phenomenon of
culture. Nor can he put aside his centers in favor of "one king, one throne, one
people." Nor finally can he do away with his fear. The failure to complete
automatically his instinctual urges, the dissipation of these urges into bizarre forms,
and the conflicts of his "split brain" guarantee a level of fear that would approach
panic if it were not channeled into new worlds of activity and location.
"YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN"
Animals possess analogues, structurally and functionally, to human compulsions,
obsessions, displacements, identifications, and other human mechanisms. Further they
can be trained and experienced so as to approach in limited ways the enormous human
ability to alter behavior by training and experiencing.
Chimpanzees use sticks to hit the ground, throw at predators, poke for termites
(breaking off awkward projections), and choose the more suitable from a set of sticks.
They can invent. Their females (and the gorillas') anticipate and protect their infants
from potentially dangerous situations. They use sign-words and hover on the brink of
making symbols of them. A mother rhesus monkey, whose young male has approached a
female and aroused the leader, will divert the leader from chasing him by suddenly
assuming an attentive position towards a remote point; this alerts him to his duties in
foreign affairs and allows the rascal to escape. And so on [22] .
What must be stressed is the unique human dependence upon these mechanisms. Humans are
absolutely helpless without constructing these mechanisms. We can picture the situation
as a trade-off. In return for losing a huge number of instinctive reactions, the human
acquires an ability to reconstruct reactions quickly and in manifold forms.
As loss of control occurs, fear erupts. The human seeks to return to the hominid and
restore the animal mechanisms, but in marvelous ways. By continuously searching to
retrieve his nature, man provides himself with thousands of behaviors of the same
categories but inestimably greater in appearances and consequences. He even creates
robots, near to absolutely instinctive "animals."
Seen from one perspective, the human behavior is homologous to the animals. Seen from
another, the human behavior is only analogous. Whether one opts for the former or the
latter view is simply a question of whether to regard as important the phases that
intervene between stimulus and response: instinct delay -loss of control - existential
fear - diffused or diverted reaction. Since these phases create the human, we prefer
the view that human behavior as a whole is only analogous to animal behavior, but that
man and primate share homologous infrastructure and functions. The human adds a special
neural loop to the stimulus-response cycle.
Identification is strictly constrained among animals, for instance. The animal self is
monolithic. An evanescent mother love of the bitch for her pup will only temporarily
crack the stone of self. Yet one may not ignore the dog who anticipates the feelings
and command of the master, and who may die in mourning upon his demise, a strong but
narrow identification, possibly of human-like physiological origins.
Fletcher, in his work on instincts, classified affection as instinctive in both animal
and man. Affection consists of the satisfactions brought by a sense of identity, with
sexual and control overtones, but, again, often exists side by side with resentment and
hostility as ambivalence depending upon the apparent effectiveness of the controls
being sought through identification. However, not only abundance and variety
distinguish human from animal affections, but also self-consciousness. Insofar as a
person is self-aware, his self-awareness will travel with his identifications and
affections.
But even in self-awareness, we should preserve the useful hypothesis, as put by
Lashley, that "the rudiments of every human behavioral mechanism will be found far down
in the evolutionary scale and also represented even in primitive activities of the
nervous system." [23] . Conflict and self-destructive behavior can be trained into a
rat.
Most ethologists seem presently to agree that the differences between man and other
species, while apparently wide, are still differences in degree rather than in kind.
This view may be correct on a phenotypical level; as stated, analogous behaviors can be
extracted from man and beast. But this is not the crux of the matter. If the human
utilizes a mechanism that duplicates animal behaviors but this mechanism is implicated
at the same time in other functions which do not accompany the animal behavior, even
though in some cases the animal uses other mechanisms for the implicated functions, we
have an important structural difference.
Phenotypically the behaviors may be alike, genotypically they operate differently. A
bird may be musical, and so a man, but a bird can compose music rarely and never
invents an instrument like a violin. This may have to do with such findings as that
animals seem not to possess cerebral specialization in any manner like humans. No
double dissociations, for example, have been reported in animals [24] .
Even if it can be proven that "animals have an ability for perceiving rules,
incorporating them, and then applying them to appropriate situations" it is not correct
to add "whether or not this ability is learned or innate is not important.." [25] The
vast role of training in human behavior is a proof of instinct delay. I cannot think of
a more significant distinction on which to base a separation of species. Man is
condemned to a life-work of completing his instincts. If he were not so proud of
himself as a species, he would perhaps say that the transition from hominid to man
offers a splendid example of regressive evolution. The individual is constitutionally
unable to reinstinctivize himself. It is commonly imagined that humans can revert to
the beast. Not if it is homo sapiens schizotypus whom we are discussing. Mental disease
(i. e., schizophrenia) cannot cause such a reversion and does not in fact do so. A
person is not genetically capable of becoming (by mental illness or otherwise) a
healthy (or even unhealthy) mammal. Such a person can commit every imaginable peculiar
or abnormal act, but it will be a human act. One should not be misled by the multitude
of instances in which sometimes, in cults, ceremonies and mental illness, a person will
play the role of a pig, bear, horse, etc., or for that matter, identify with clouds,
angels, chairs, and rocks.
This inherent incapacity to re-mammalize is one of the most persuasive proofs that a
genetic mutation occurred in the final transition from hominid to human. For, even if
human behavior had changed from the hominid to a new fixed behavior owing to a
permanent change in environment, such as we shall later discuss, it would be possible
to retreat from mental illness in the direction of mammalianism. That is, a way would
be found to psychosomatize and build up a new chemico-electrical combination to supply
a new type of person. It may be noted that when a mammal is driven into "insanity", it
seems to become self-aware, that is, human, and when it is cured it reverts usually to
its normal un-self-awareness.
De-instinctivization is accompanied by another important development in the human,
namely, individuation. A social group is forced to tolerate deviations, if only because
its totalitarian intentions must founder upon the rocks of its inabilities. The
individual must fail, as well, in his desperate attempts to control himself, that is,
his alter ego. Much less can he attune himself perfectly to the modal group behaviors.
Under such circumstances, the ideal of individualism evolves and prospers in the very
presence of the ideal of group conformity. The person becomes ultimately aware that he
is different from others, the gaps between the various demi-instincts and the required
definite response in actions and habits become filled with his unique character. Each
human can be different - and comes to think of himself as different - because he has a
unique set of habits or activities to fill the gap between demi-instinctual response
and definite practices as the norm.
As with other animal-human analogues, the observations of Eihl-Eihesfeldt and Lorenz
are illuminating but theoretically inconclusive. Their explanation of aggression comes
down to the following: two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In the
case of animals, two cannot eat the same morsel, couple with the same female, hide in
the same small hole. When inflamed by the same desire at the same moment for the same
object-use, they lack (permanently or temporarily) a sense of indirect consequences -
which is to say, a sense of plan or of future - or they conceive of no other known
solution; or when there are "actually" no consequences, beyond the encounter, that
matter subjectively to all participants and the group, then a specific violent (or
implicitly violent) exchange may occur.
Next, animals that behave in groups have codes about their aggressive and other
behavior. These codes both limit and enlarge the scope of dominating and violent
behavior that may be expected in any representative set of encounters.
In the case of man, the limits are so broad and the impulses so complicated that so far
as we can tell, any innate tendency can be converted into a type of encounter that
everyone concerned would regard as non-aggressive and, of course, aggressive.
We conclude that homo schizo produces more behavioral effects than any species, as many
as a great many species put together. When operating with a perceived challenge and
under scientific rules, he can imitate or reproduce almost every animal behavior. He
can reproduce his logical apparatus by computers. He can outwhistle birds, and decoy
ducks. He can cut his birth fertility to nil, or stimulate multiple births by
chemicals. He is the most flexible animal, the most individually varied, a virtuoso, a
polymath, and so on. Prod his brain electrically and an endless flow of free
associations and a stream of consciousness is verbalized, though it is neither free nor
conscious. And what is in his mind is potentially in his behavior. Considering that his
physiology is almost identical with certain primates and that the apparatus used for
being human has been hitherto practically indistinguishable from them, we much seek the
origins of his uniquely broad and sophisticated outputs in a freedom from instinctive
binding. The search is just begun. We go on with it now, in the operations of the
brain.
Notes (Chapter 2: The Search for Lost Instinct)
1. The Trauma of Birth, London: Kegan Paul, 1929, xiii., 104-5.
2. Realms of the Human Unconscious, London: Souvenir Press, 1979.
3. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, N. Y.: International Univ. Press, 1966.
4. The Future of Man, N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1964; The Phenomenon of Man, N. Y.: Harper
and Row, 1961.
5. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, Bk 2, 448ff, N. Y.: Dover ed. 1959.
6. Mind, Self and Society, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1934, 136-7.
7. 350, 349, et passim.
8. Ernest Hilgard, Divided Consciousness, New York: Wiley 1977, 1.
9. Op. cit., 142.
10. Highland, Op cit., 249.
11. Jeffrey Gray, op. cit., ch. 2; Stanley B. Rachman, Fear and Courage, San Francisco:
Freeman, 1978.
12. Rachman, op. cit., 145.
13. Op. cit., 34.
14. Op. cit., 29.
15. The Idea of the Holy, London: Oxford U. Press, 1928.
16. New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, N. Y.: Norton, 1933, 118-9.
17. The Study of Instinct, London, 1950, ch. 1.
18. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, N. Y.: Liveright, 1950.
19. Ibid., 2.
20. Ibid., 30, 32.
21. 1968, 13-4.
22. M. R. A. Chance and C. J. Jolly, Social Groups of Monkeys, Apes and Men, London:
Jonathan Cape, 1970, 165-8.
23. Quoted in Trevarthen, op. cit., 1951.
24. Hicks and Kinsbourne, in Marcel Kinsbourne, ed., Asymmetrical Function of the
Brain, N. Y.: Cambridge U. Press, 1978, 523. cf. Trevarthen in the same work, 379.
25. Trevarthen, Ibid.
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THREE
BRAINWORK
The human skull is an impressive work of natural architecture, especially when bald. It
seem to be an apt crown for a creature of will and decision. But look inside this
formidable bone casing and see what a disappointing glob of ooze is the master of
thought. Undifferentiated, it has a pasty white stuff over a grey matter, spangled with
fibrils and fibers, the whole suffused with pink from countless blood vessels, and, if
it could be dug into, it would reveal firmer membranes, and a chunky stem that connects
to the long spinal chord.
The differentiation of large areas is so vague that some surgical operations are
couched in how many grams (of the 2000 or so) are removed or how many millimeters of
depth one may safely penetrate.
Unlike other organs in the body, the brain does not usually reject tissue transplants.
This feature not only suggests that the chemistry of the brain is generalized but also
why specific functions can locate here and there and relocate, too.
Brain operations are delicate partly because we do not know what to be delicate about.
Still, successful brain operations must be as old as the oldest settlements of mankind,
because a number of ancient skulls exhibit trephinations, penetrations by bores and
saws, and a subsequent healing and continued life. What came out is unknown or perhaps
the aim was to relieve pressure; there is, after all, little reason to believe that the
atmospheric pressure on earth, or the electrical pressure for that matter, have
remained conveniently the same. Anyone who has confused brains with "sweetbreads" at a
butcher shop will agree that "the brain has many characteristics of a gland." And R.
Bergland and R. Page go on to say: "it contains hormones, it is bathed in hormones, it
has hormone receptors, hormones may serve as its synaptic neurotransmitters, and
hormones modify the brain's main function, behavior. .. Endorphin and other hormones
may be produced in small quantities locally within the brain but transported in larger
quantities from the pituitary to the brain on demand." [1] We see one reason for the
brain's innocuous appearance now: its innumerable cells are like a massive inelegant
hotel, in and out of which hordes of tourists flit. It houses a great many
transactions.
This grand hotel is well lit. It is completely electrified. Every neuron is an
electrical capacitator. The hormones could not move so readily otherwise. For the brain
lacks muscle to lever the hormones about, and it is insulting slang to call a man a
"musclebrain." The blood capillaries of the brain are very numerous and carry around
the food of the cells and remove their excrement. They also transport hormones to their
work sites. If the mechanical pumping system is out of order, even for a few minutes,
and the hormones do not get to work, many brain cells asphyxiate and the lights go out
forever. The capillaries may burst, too, from time to time; the larger the rupture, the
greater the damage, but the location of the stroke is more important; vital faculties
may be impaired. Although the brain can switch many functions around its inchoate mass,
there is a limit to its versatility.
Its liability to asphyxiations and strokes does not mean that the brain is overworked.
A persuasive case can be made for the belief that humans have far more brain matter,
especially of the highly touted "grey matter," than is needed for normal functions. J.
Lorber found a "socially completely normal" young man with a large cranium, a 126 I.
Q., and a first class honors degree in mathematics, but with cerebrospinal fluid taking
the place of at least nine-tenths of the normal complement of cerebral tissue.
Highly excited and continually enraged characters are sometimes subjected to
leucotomies in which, perhaps emulating unknowingly the ancestral practice, some
material of the frontal lobe is cut or burned away like a malignant tumor, leaving the
patient afterwards somewhat dulled but relaxed. One wonders whether there is a
disproportion between the storage capacity and the practical facilities, among other
problems, so that the active behavioral outlets are technologically backward. Perhaps
this might account for the displeasurable unsatisfied agitation of people, who sense
too much, undergo spasmodic muscular urges, and want to express an impossible number
and variety of thoughts.
Suppose infants were to be typically relieved of some of their cerebral matter, in a
practice like circumcision. (Frantically crying small children have been experimentally
leucotomized, in fact.) How would they develop? Would they be nicer to their parents?
Then Bleuler would not have to laugh at those who, he said, attributed insanity to the
lack of family discipline.
They might even be relieved of one of the two hemispheres of the brain, preferably not
the left hemisphere, which seems to have some rational qualities. One would hardly know
the difference - after all, who knows that a person is going about with a kidney
removed? - and, as we shall see, some difficult human problems might be solved. For one
thing, everyone, without exception, would be right-handed; this would represent a
considerable social gain and relieve many people's anxieties. But it might handicap the
ten per cent or so of genetic left-handers whose left brain is on the right, and they
would lose some of their more "rational" faculties! This could be prevented by waiting
until the handedness of the infant is proven, but would leave society with its left-
handers. Still, the government might wish to allow another ten per cent or some
percentage to lose their left hemisphere as a low-budget method of supporting arts and
culture, we would have an anatomically generated group inclined to be musicians, poets,
and artists who will be right-handed, but in other major respects distinct from the
rest of the population; they would probably not understand fully the joys of
mathematics, logic and spelling; the caste system, sought for thousands of years in
India and elsewhere, would become a fact.
THE ANIMAL BASEMENT
Little is known of brainwork, but what is known can carry us surprisingly far in our
conception of human nature. It is well, first, to remind ourselves of how the human
brain and central nervous system relate to their lower class relatives of the animal
kingdom, and how much of human activity begins, and ends, in the basement. Then we can
suggest where to look in the central nervous system, especially in the brain, for the
source of those operations that are peculiarly human: the activations and transmission
system, the electric and chemical processes, and the proneness to specialization of
functions found in the cerebrum. With this knowledge, we may venture such hypotheses as
appear plausible on the dozen or so aspects of human nature that are the hallmarks of
this book: the poly-selves, control, anxiety, instinct-delay, displacements and
projections, memory, obsessions, habits, language and symbols, pragmatism and
sublimation.
Animals sense their surroundings - smells, chemicals, sights, temperatures and so on.
Their sensitivity can be more varied, greater, subjectively "more ingenious" than the
human's, or less. Like man, "an animal does not react to all the changes in the
environment which its sense organs can receive, but only to a small part of them." [2]
(A carnivorous water beetle does not attack and devour a tadpole simply if it sees one,
but it will attack any solid object, tadpole or not, if a kind of "smell of meat"
arouses it.) Internal operations of the nervous system must contribute "motive" in
animals.
Thus Tinbergen goes on to say:
There is a mutual relationship between internal and external factors in the sense of
an additive influence on the motor response. A high intensity of one factor lowers the
threshold for the other factors. A high hormone level increases the responsiveness to
external stimulation; if the hormone level is low, very intensive external stimulation
is required to bring the total of causal factors above threshold value.
Automatic centers of the Central Nervous System maintain a continuous flow of impulses
to central nervous motor mechanisms; but some kind of block prevents an uncontrolled
and chaotic discharge of muscles. The discharge requires adequate stimulation by signs
typical to the species, whereupon an innate releasing mechanism removes the blockage.
All of this about the CNS and instincts of animals apply to humans. Rigidity of
instincts and behaviors, and the restriction of choice and decision, in animals,
generally are more than among most humans but are not to be exaggerated. That food
cannot divert animals from sex and vice versa is of course incorrect, and so on to the
confusion of decision-making, that is, the selection of what drive to pursue and how
far, which is vulgarly considered to be a human problem alone. Any animal can take a
long time to make up its mind - too long, in many cases, and disaster or failure or
good fortune may result.
In the thirty years since Tinbergen wrote his book on animal instincts, ethology has
run wild and is pressing upon the sacred functions of the human mind. We need to be
most cautious in our defense, consequently. The cerebrum of higher animals directs the
hypothalamus to cause the pituitary gland to stimulate by an "adrenocorticotrophic"
hormone the adrenal medula to exude catacholamines and the adrenal cortex to emit
corticosteroids that plague the motor and nervous system from the brain to the toes for
action. The hypothalamus governs the pituitary gland, controls the clocks of the brain,
alerts the body to changes soon to occur, and synchronizes the performance of the
endocrines throughout the body.
The hypothalamus, buried deep in the brain, is so widespread among animal species that
it is unlikely to be the source of distinctive human behavior or to have changed to
become so. The fact that it is responsive to cerebral signals suggests that the "human-
disease", when it affects the whole system just described, originates in the cerebrum.
The human anatomy offers essentially three brains, it is true -four, if the cerebral
hemispheres are accorded autonomous status. One is reptilian (the archicortex), one
from the lower animals (the mesocortex), and one from the higher animals (the
neocortex). A. Koestler has argued that grave problems arise for humans because of
"insufficient coordination between archicortex and neocortex [3] . He ascribes
intellectual operations to the new brain, and emotional behavior to the lower, older
systems. MacLean refers also the "schizophysiology" of the limbic, as the older is
called, and the neocortical system, saying that the old brain provides a crude and
confused animalistic and nonsymbolic picture of the outer world [4] . Koestler
proceeds to the theory that rational behavior, housed in the neocortex, is interrupted,
disorganized and overwhelmed often by the activity and responses of the older systems.
I cannot follow this reasoning. For one thing, it could take no account of the late
splurge of research into inter-hemispheric differences and of late electrochemical
research. More significantly, the theory seems to be based upon an old theory of human
nature, the mind and body distinction, the reasons-and-emotions duality, the rational-
irrational distinction, that has led psychological theory nowhere. The human can be
viewed as fully nonrational, or as rational, but so can the earthworm. H. J. Morowitz
has gone the limit and asks sympathetically, "Can Bacteria Think?" They are human-like
in tissue, functions, and genetic coding. They respond to varied stimuli, exhibiting
sensing, big-clocks, memory, and aimed organic mobilization (decision). The human is,
of course, very different on traits that humans deem important.
The cerebral cortex or neocortex activates intensely and overall when stimulated by
pain or strong anxiety. Blood flow, metabolism, and electrical fields and discharges
increase. The person becomes alert to the self and the world around him. There is no
question that the pragmatic philosophers were correct in assigning to anxiety, to the
sense of problems, the major role in problem solving efforts, hence intelligence. Man
would like to solve his problems by automatic reflexes but he must feel pain and
anxiety, both specifically and generally before he can perceive the problem, and while
he works upon it and resolves it.
The cerebral cortex, for all the noble brow it presents and the most important tasks
assigned to it, results from a slap-dash design. Surprisingly, when the subject is at
rest and awake, in a comfortable supine position with eyes closed in a silent
laboratory and neither spoken to or touched, the pattern of flow throughout the cortex
is not uniform. On the contrary, the flow is always substantially higher in the front
part of the cortex than in the central or rear parts [5] . The density of blood
vessels is the same hence "the remarkable difference in flow rate suggests that the
overall activity level of the front part of the resting brain is about 50 percent
higher than that of the rear parts." [6]
Apparently, as expected, the aware human is spending his quiet time "getting his head
together." The phrases are: "busy planning and selecting" behaviors; "focused on inner
thoughts, particularly on reflections on one's own situation;" "simulation of
behavior." Notable is the fact that the perennially excited frontal region of the brain
seems to suffer from poor evolutionary logistics, a merely ordinary blood circulatory
system. It is as if Washington, D. C., had the same postal system as Detroit, but the
employees worked longer hours. The situation suggests that the evolutionary saltation
or quantavolution which precipitated mankind, in order to evade helpless confusion, may
have selected large frontal brain mass but that this expansion in volume did not result
in all-around equalized work assignments in coping with the problems presented.
Widespread among animals and working to all intents and purposes as it does in man, is
the neuro-transmission system. In humans, neural impulses are passed from one neuron or
nerve cell to another; 10 billion neurons, these with their projecting fibriles - an
axon to emit a message, dendrites to receive them - are half in the brain and half
elsewhere in the body. No two neurons are chemically the same, because, said Polyak
once, "All neurons have different shapes." [7] And they carry differently shaped
muscles along their dendrites, too, according to Crick. Between any two neurons exists
a gap, a synapse, where chemical neurotransmitters wait like boats to ferry messages
among the neurons. There may be a dozen types of boats; a few pick up a message merely
to dump it, while the others transmit their messages dutifully.
An increased electrical potential of a neuron, relative to an adjacent neuron, makes it
emit a charge which rides a chemical molecule, the neurotransmitter, across the synapse
gap to hand it over to the adjacent neuron. The neurotransmitter then breaks down like
the exhausted messenger in King Lear. It seems a great waste to lose these myriad
molecules when they might be left to ferry many another charge between neurons; perhaps
it is to keep the hormone factories humming. This island-hopping path may be considered
"slow" or "fast" depending upon what kind of speculation one is indulging in. Speeds of
a mile a minute are common. Delays here may be significant in letting messages go
elsewhere. Also the messages may not get through because of the insufficiency of
neurotransmitters to carry them and because of sabotage by other boatsmen.
The neurons are exercised to do their part. They beat electrically in the nervous
system's rhythm of perhaps ten times a second. "Neurons... have electrical beats, and
large numbers of them beat in place, as armies marching in step. When impulses come in,
from the eyes particularly, the neurons begin to scintillate, to get out of step with
each other, and the brain wave rhythm breaks up." So says Ralph Gerard [8] . Too much
synchronization gives tubular vision, too strict an attention to one thing. Too weak a
synchronization would promote inattention and flightiness. Perhaps, thinks Gerard, the
strictness would depress attention and be a cause of mental depression; perhaps
slackness would elicit anxiety, mania, even epilepsy.
We say, yes, this is an old and common system, but we can see in it some possibilities
of human peculiarities. Gerard gives us more food for thought: the thresholds for
messages crossing the gaps fluctuate; electron movement, Brownian movement, and other
factors vary at any given synapse. If this were not the case, every input would excite
exactly the same output. Innovation would be as minimal as with spinal and emotional
reflexes. With threshold fluctuations the same, stimulus may vary the paths of its
impulses and thus favor innovation. Of course, he suggests, in this case there would be
less coherence and more flights of ideas.
THE LOCATION OF INSTINCT DELAY
We wonder whether the synapse may be the location of the instinct-delay that we regard
as the basic glory and problem of humans. Gerard points out that
The synapse can only be present because it is important not to have a message go
through on an express track from one receptor to one effecter. Otherwise, why break the
nerve path and cause slowing, the chance of confusion, and all the rest? The synapse
permits changeability, allows the units to connect now this way, now that way... Every
synapse is thus, in effect, a decision point. A message comes to it from the pre-
synaptic fiber; does it go out over the post-synaptic one or doesn't it go out? That is
the decision the nervous system makes - at a near infinity of places and times [9] .
Many animals have the same system, indistinguishable in detail from the human. Let us
grant that here may be the source of animal decision-making, for instance the
determination to hunt rather than rest, or simply to rest rather than move. With this,
I see two possibilities for the "Human Difference."
We may have a pollution problem: the human system may be dumping so many
neurotransmitters and neuro-inhibitors into the synaptic canals that messages cannot
pass or cannot pass clean. This would occur, say, if the human endocrine glands were
overbusy at a constant rate, whether from mutation or some physiological constant,
environmentally induced. Suppose that dopamines, which are neurotransmitters, generally
clutter the passages: the results would be a universal set of schizophrenic behaviors.
Remove a large proportion of them and we revert to the hominid.
The present interest in dopamine receptors in the brain and elsewhere highlights the
electro-chemical complexity of the human being. Dopamine neuroreceptors are more
numerous in the brains of diagnosed schizophrenics, especially in the limbic area and
the candat nucleus. Depressing the receptors suppresses schizophrenic symptoms. The
energizers of the dopamine receptors are numerous drugs, some of which exist naturally
in the body. Does a particular diet or food do so? Does an atmospheric gas do so? A
particle? An ion as attached, for example, to oxygen? Does ambient stress level? Does
climate? (hot, cold, damp. . . ?) Winds? Could a combination of these stress the
hominid to the point of humanness? And persist permanently?
The body absorbs a continuous supply of small negative ions, negatively charged
molecules. There are some 1000 to 2000 ions per cubic centimeter of air over open land,
in a ratio of five positive to four negative, according to Soyka and Edmonds [10] .
Many reports declare overdoses of positive ions are unhealthy, inducing overproduction
of serotonin and emotional imbalance and listlessness. A. P. Dubrov has assembled a
volume of studies, many of them from the Soviet Union, on the effects that the
geomagnetic field has upon the biosphere, including humans [11] . The two effects -
the ion and geomagnetic - are related, and both are implicated in brain activity. At
today's levels, they condition the anxiety level of humans, and the behavior of plants
and animals. Whether the present rates were established in the course of human
evolution is important for explaining human nature today, but is consigned to the
volumes on Homo Schizo I and The Lately Tortured Earth for discussion. How these
phenomena affect the speed of mental operations and memory recall is unknown.
Like people, who pollute their own environments, the brain is frequently its own
poisoner. For, in a coup d'‚tat which may have occurred at the time of humanization,
the "higher center" of the brain seized most of the power to requisition the drug
supplies of the body and to order the manufacture of more. Even though a hemo-
encephalic barrier exists to protect cerebral tissues from most of the drugs going
though the body tissues, the barrier can be breached by concussions, intoxication, and
"affective storms" which result from the sudden flushing of the brain with certain
hormones. The storm could originate from traumatic fear - accident, rape, battle, etc.
Acute states of anxiety ensue. If "continuous and successive, they might weaken the
hemo-encephalic barrier, causing an increase in permeability, and, consequently, the
affective ability of the individual." [12]
The instability of the cortex is rendered more possible by its separation by other
barriers from the midbrain extra-pyramidal apparatus. Cortical agitation may itself
promote increased stress on itself, also, and on the central nervous system if it
breaks up, as for example happens temporarily in hypnosis; its transactions with the
midbrain and limbic system through the extra-pyramidal apparatus are destabilized.
A baffling problem is presented in that no single substance seems to control any given
behavior of the human or his brainwork. The brain has a great many endorphins and
peptides, which are identical with hormones found throughout the body. What
instructions do they convey? Are they coded or merely combined in their association
with other substances and electrical charges? The flow of adrenaline from the adrenal
medulla, a neural tissue atop the kidneys, is excited by nerve fibers which can
ultimately be excited by the cerebral cortex. Electroconvulsive therapy, for example,
applied to the brain, activates the adrenal medulla. Drugs can motivate cerebral
activity but also distort it. Since enhanced motivation always presents the problem of
its control, the distorted attitude is most likely out of control.
The pituitary gland is associated with the brain, part of it being composed of brain
tissues. It emits perhaps a dozen hormones. These affect growth; they stimulate thyroid
gland activity, the sexual organs, pigmentation; they influence blood pressure; and so
on. These processes and many others in endocrinology are not well understood yet.
Substances come from several sources; they may have specific or general inhibitors.
They may affect several organs, their quantities do not have well-measured effects.
When later we speak of displacements, the multi-functional overlap in behavior
affecting endocrinology becomes a factor of importance; it invites confusion (including
perversions) in the absence of intense directiveness toward a goal.
If one also asks only which gland or organ is the most important determinant of human
nature, one would have to give the traditional answer: the brain, and particularly the
cerebral cortex. All else is almost indistinguishably animal and no peculiar human
operations have been noted for any function or secretions. We cannot discount the
possibility of a constant change of a quantitative nature in the total endocrinal
system or even in the adrenals that would place the human in a distinctive drug
environment, compelling him to behave differently - to think, to talk, to make war, to
have gods. However, if this has happened, it is because of a "decision," a forced and
involuntary command, of the cerebral cortex. It orders its own drugs, its own blood
supply, its own electrical currents and charges. It can both reduce and increase its
orders: that is the vital point. It may appear, all too early, that I am coming to the
idea of the World as Will, to use Hegel's expression, so I must say that I am
exceedingly aware of the complex interaction occurring inside the human and between the
human and his environment. Homo sapiens schizotypus is not at all the traditional idea
of cerebral homo sapiens sapiens.
The human cerebrum, we hypnotically repeat to ourselves, is much larger than the
primates', even if exceeded by the elephants'. If the human central nervous system,
including the endocrine glands, is not proportionately increased in size, we have a
situation where electrical and chemical supplies have to be generated or, if not
generated, then rationed among a vastly greater number of neurons and synapses.
This, although working against the first mechanism of Human Difference - pollution and
excess - would yet have the same effect, of confusion, dispersion and delay by frequent
non-achievement of synaptic threshold requirements, overworking feedback signals for
more supplies. Far more displacements would occur. The most "ridiculous" and
"irrelevant" behaviors and thoughts would be normal. A chronic general anxiety would be
present: justified fears of failure coupled with continuous interference in the
completion of tasks. This begins to look like the Human Difference.
That the speed of neural activity accounts for differences among species is
unquestionable. Alexander von Muralt has called "saltatory conduction" a great advance
in evolution [13] . The speed with which nerve impulses are transmitted is lowest in
primitive forms and highest in mammals. It is 25 meters per second at 20 deg C in
myelinated (sheathed) frog nerves to 100 meters in mammals. The velocity depends upon
the conducting mechanism, the diameter of the fibre, the myelinisation of the fibre,
and the ambient temperature. The cephalopod nerve must carry a far heavier bulk of
fibre and consume much more oxygen to carry the same message as a frog nerve. The frog
nerve relies upon tubular sheaths of high-resistant protein, myelin, to concentrate the
passing electrical impulse, and upon feeding the impulse at nodal intervals between
sheaths with ions and dyes to accelerate it by leaps from one sheathed interval to the
next. Mammals have evidently a more efficient system than the amphibious frog.
Experimentation is in too early a stage to distinguish between man and primates with
respect to their relative efficiencies in saltatory conduction. That man's conduction
velocity may be less, or may put strains on the supply of charges and accelerators is
conceivable; humiliating though it might be to possess a "regressive" evolution, this
could promote a generally higher level of nervous tension, hence "intelligence."
Holding neural speed constant in all "higher" animals, there would still exist a speed
problem with humans. We should inquire whether the human brain expanded coincidentally
with humanization or "long before." If the two happened together, humanization might be
the effect of slowed responses owing to greater synaptic distances. In the simplest
model, two types of distances are involved in a stimulus response. Thus: the left hand
transmits a feeling through the central nervous system to the right brain hemisphere,
which feels "hot" but must transmit the information through the intervening fibers of
the corpus callosum to the language center of the left brain, which then forms the
words "it's hot !" for the voicing apparatus to exclaim. First, does the large size of
the right cerebral hemisphere make any difference to the speed of the impulse of the
heat signal? Second, does the distance traversed within the brain to inform the left
brain mean another delay? Third, does the distance from the language center to the
exclamation center and then the voice muscles add more delay? The answer in all three
cases is probably "yes."
Unfortunately, we are not in a position today to know these three speeds, nor those of
a primate with which we would compare them. The interhemispheric transfer time has been
studied and times of from 3 to 28.5 milliseconds have been obtained for fairly
comparable tests. R. Puccetti, calculating that a flash of light through the left
visual field to the right hemisphere, thence to the left hemisphere for conscious
reporting, would take 9.75 msec for a certain subject, reasons that perhaps twice this
time, 19.50 msec, would be required for the right hemisphere to 'know' that the signal
had been completed; that is, only after 19.5 msec would the transaction be fully
perceived. He believes the delay must be unconsciously perceived but suppressed,
"fudged over", to use the vernacular [14] .
Swanson and Kinsbourne found interhemispheric transfer times of from 2 msec to 21 msec
depending upon the degree of uncertainty and displacement of location with which the
subjects were presented the stimulus; the findings led them to doubt that the
interhemispheric delay was significant [15] . The difference between 21 and 2 was
assigned to the searching process. The authors grant the simplicity of the test. Even a
minimal difference would be greatly enlarged if the brainwork had to zig-zag many times
across the corpus callosum. (An experiment with a cat showed a first interhemispheric
crossing of under 10 msec velocity and a second interhemispheric delayed response to
occur 40 to 50 msec after the initial response.)
Swanson, Ledlow and Kinsbourne conclude that "crossing the structural link does take
time, but the time is short and is overshadowed by other factors that involve how the
subject distributes attention before stimulus presentation and how the stimulus directs
attention after presentation. '' [16] This generalizes from tests so simple that
ordinary animal behavior must involve many times the interhemispheric delay. And only
in the case of humans is there a significant specialization that would necessitate
interhemispheric transfer and coordination in a large proportion of brainwork and
behavior. The human exercises many of his important qualities through myriad transfers.
When a hemisphere is performing one of its special functions, high electrical measures
register, by contrast with the opposing hemisphere. The activity is evidenced in high
average evoked potentials (AEP) and in electroencephalogram beta waves [17] . These
results confirm that the experiencing which is taking place in one hemisphere is not
occurring strongly in the other [18] . Under such circumstances, there must ensue over
time a great many contradictions between the left and right brains, in memory, method,
and predispositions of attitudes and behavior. Every new experience therefore requires
more preparatory transfers for coordination and planning.
The "ever restless human mind" thus must be more than a metaphor and more than an
abnormality of some people. To behave as a whole unity, decisively, with both
hemispheres, requires continuous trade-offs of impressions. If enough cannot be done
while awake, dreamwork must go on apace. Here, too, is a source of obsession. Transfer
dyssymmetry of several types occurs analogous to coordinating two allied armies on a
battle front, one can never be sure that all are agreeable, informed, supplied, and
prepared for action, and the action carries its own nasty surprises.
But, before going further with the potentialities of the bicameral brain for producing
human nature, a brief statement of the situation may be in order. Many studies have
appeared in the past few years [19] . An impetus was provided by the availability of
persons who had undergone a commissurectomy in which the cord of fibres constituting
that giant commissure, the corpus callosum, was severed. With this, the great part of
all direct connections between the two cerebral hemispheres is broken. The left side of
the brain is not privy to new information or signals presented to the right brain, and
vice versa.
The patient is not apparently abnormal; indeed, if the operation were performed to
block epileptic seizures, he feels better, because the electric storming of the right
hemisphere cannot cross the chasm of severance so as to storm the left hemisphere.
Sperry wrote: "Everything we have seen so far indicates that the surgery has left each
of these people with two separate minds, that is, with two separate spheres of
consciousness," [20] -together, we would add, with the general consciousness discussed
above.
The gist of the studies, whether carried out upon normal brain structures or
commissurectomized ones, is that the brainwork of the two hemispheres differs. Although
either hemisphere can carry on all known mental operations alone, when the two sides
are coordinated in the normal manner, each has its special functions and
"superiorities." "Asymmetries are in general present at birth or in early childhood or
even in utero.. very probably genetically determined.. not absolute, but are
distributed along the spectrum.." [21]
The left hemisphere, which, contrastingly, connects with the right side of the body, is
called dominant (except that in true left-handers the right hemisphere is dominant),
not so much because it specializes in the logical and analytic processes, and verbal
and mathematical functions, as because it controls the right hand. The right hemisphere
specializes in spatial orientation, arts and crafts, recognitions of whole images, and
music and acoustics, including vowels but not consonants. Generally the left brain is
more localized, the right more diffuse and prehuman [22] .
Yet something of all of these occurs in both hemispheres. Some of it is culturally
induced; fluent Japanese speakers carry their vowels on the left, westerners on the
right [23] . The right hemisphere (until the Japanese case came along) was described
by some students as feminine, the seat of intuition and artistic taste, whereas the
left was labeled rational and correct.
Memory is notably diffused throughout the brain, although a single hemisphere or less
could store more memories than one could ever recall. A hemisphere is insensitive to
its sources. It does not footnote a datum as coming from outside or from across the
corpus callosum.
In fact the brain receives, recognizes and stores information and sensory bits without
discrimination. They all become electrochemical transmissions whether they begin as
caviar or cacophony. Once they reach the brain the transmissions generate resonances in
a number of cells, sometimes widespread, sometimes localized. If they are intensive
experiences, they resonate thousands of times on top of the electrical rhythms already
present in the cell. They dig in especially where similar circuits already are
patterned, and both reinforce, refer to, and learn from (are modified by) the
preexisting patterns. Discriminations of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste are
created in the brain. A taste of nectar is a gang of electrically resonating cells with
experiences of sweet things from the mouth. A mild electrical stimulation of related
cells in the brain might provide an even sweeter taste.
The latest model of the brain - and there have been many before - views it as a
repository of holograms. A hologram is a global representation of an object produced by
two laser beams, one focused on the object prior to interfering with the other beam,
and the interference pattern can record itself on a photographic plate with what our
brains regard as verisimilitude.
Karl Pribram has illustrated the holographic process by a tennis novice watching an
expert play. As he observes, his brain makes transformations of the whole
configuration, activating and impressing the appropriate motor patterns. That is, the
brain resonates to the watched behavior and is reminiscent of the gestalt theory of
learning and problem solution [24] .
In his treatise on the brain, Pribram points out that any piece of an artificial
hologram film reproduces the whole of the figure, which, if analogous in the brain,
means that every cell or a great many clusters of cells might contain total images of
much that enters the brain. This may be why, in so many instances, a lesion of the
cerebrum is compensated for, the brain being in this regard one of the most dispensable
tissues of the body.
In addition, the hologram concept lets one explain better one of the two basic types of
logic engaged in by the brain to simulate the recapture of primate instinct, the
analogue and the digital logics. Without reliance upon the calculating modes of the
left hemisphere or of speech, the right-handed person can employ his left hemisphere on
a parity basis with his right in accomplishing instant intuitions of the connections
between all manner of distantly related objects, memories, and ideas by superimposing
new holograms upon old and reacting to the new experiences in the light of the old.
The brain is perhaps receiving and storing prior holograms in the millions, and is
recognizing its own when its ordinary feat is duplicated outside, as artificial
holography. Animal brains must make holograms too. The point is that humans may be
making two sets for each hemisphere. Such a situation may have grave consequences,
because the two hemispheres are not identical and add different resources to the
process.
The division of holograms, together with the specialization found in each hemisphere,
and even adding the delays occurring in interhemispheric transmission, cannot overcome
the centralization forced by the pragmatic needs of the one body, the shared limbic and
midbrain elements, and the central nervous system and musculature otherwise. There
exists a sensation of consciousness pervading the whole brain down to the stem.
For example, a concussion will usually act to depress generally all electrical
activity; the localized blow is referred generally. Again, in a 15-year-old right-
handed boy, callosally sectioned, the right hemisphere could not initiate speech, but
could understand nouns and verbs, could carry out oral commands and could write with
the left hand [25] .
S. J. Diamond describes a circuit that spans the whole brain from the parietal lobe on
one side to the opposite parietal lobe, and which encounters the corpus callosum in
passing [26] . Giraud describes a global sensory psychic experiencing, common to man
and animals, that arises out of the sympathetic nervous system, glandular secretions
and muscular tone [27] . Jerison warns against overemphasizing localization and
specialization, which may be useful to isolate parts of the system in order to study
them more easily: "recent evidence points to the waking brain as being a complex
interactive system in which truly isolated functional systems probably never occur."
[28]
Sommerhoff, who ignores the "split brain" entirely in his large treatise on the Logic
of the Mind, writes "In terms of internal representations the unity of the physical
self finds expression in a family of characteristic transformation expectations the
brain assimilates during ontogenesis." The unity of the whole self requires the
additional inner representations where the object is seen by the observer who knows he
is observing. Thus the self comes from experiencing, and is the record of experiences
and expectations of further experiencing.
The source of consciousness appears to be still in the brain stem. From there, even in
commissurectomized subjects, some alternative - that is both left and right side -
operations are controlled. Such operations "are capable of exercising a metacontrol
over the higher processes of consciousness." [29] This would be the animal
consciousness, not self-awareness.
How vulnerable the unity of the self is, and yet how adamant everyone is, including
ourselves, about the self being an absolute unity. The analogy of a social organization
comes to mind. It is in a perennial conflict between the division of labor and
centralization. As Kinsbourne has pointed out, bilateralism, by which he means a highly
coordinated dualism of the hemispheres (for learning, perception, memory, and volition,
as his own effective investigations have shown, are independently able in each
hemisphere), is not needed for linear information processing, hence specialization
[30] . This is a matter of dispute. And a certain amount of information is dualistic.
It must be stressed that specialization in the brain is not complete in any respect, no
more than the division of labor in society is ever absolute (there is always a
shoemaker or tailor at work despite the great factories). Brain specialization is
limited to a dominant ganging or bunching of cells such that they alone respond (or do
not respond) unless they are excised, in which event the minor gangs take over their
functions, on a reduced level at first, then increasingly so, and sometimes with full
capacitation. The union shop, when on strike, so to speak, finds its work taken on by
less skilled scabs.
We can assume that even the very minor specialized bunches here and there are active
all the time. It may be these which are responsible for some of the competitive mutual
inhibitions, as well as collaboration, between the hemispheres that Kinsbourne has
noted [31] . Hoppe speaks of the quantitative and qualitative impoverishment of the
dreams, fantasies, and symbols of commissurotomized patients, laying it to an
interrupted preconscious interhemispheric stream [32] . He suggested that a
"functional commissurotomy" may be present in some severe psychoses. That the
hemispheres can pull themselves apart functionally seems no more absurd than the known
cases of total hysterical paralysis or catatonism.
J. Levy argues that differentiation of functions which are lateralized is a result of
competition whereby speech and language, e. g., develop in the dominant hemisphere and
displace less elaborate psychic processes such as patterning images into the opposite
sphere [33] . The source of this pushy competitiveness must be humanly genetic.
Anatomical and physiological differences between cerebral hemispheres develop in the
human foetus [34] . "Non-human animals have not been demonstrated to possess cerebral
specialization in any manner similar to humans, that is, no double dissociations have
been reported in nonhuman mammals." [35] The genetic impetus may have originated in a
mutation to the large cerebrum, with a neural "weakness for data collection and
transfer" in one hemisphere, which required continuous orderly attention.
That these minor locales may be disaffected is not an extreme view; the researchers,
perhaps in their exuberance, speak of contradictions. When callossally sectioned, one
hemisphere can be led to think and act angrily against the other. Are we to believe
that there is no tension between left and right brains in the presence of specialism,
when the corpus callosum is exchanging not only sensory information - albeit sometimes
traumatic - but novel commands to change itself, give up its habits? Hence sensations
of hesitation, doubt, reflection, disobedience may be part of interhemispheric
relations since a hemisphere does not know the source of a message, it cannot be
declared that doubt and disobedience and fear are "external" sensations, incapable of
being incited from a source within, namely the opposing hemisphere.
Nor should we ignore another reciprocating effect of specialization. In society as a
whole, a tendency to specialize intensifies efforts at coordination. The same logic may
apply to interhemispheric relations. A great many more messages will flow as the brain
specializes. This may occur in a given lifetime and be more cultural than genetic. The
civilized capabilities are left-brain and may be at the basis of the larger ever-
present anxiety of the civilized person.
HANDEDNESS
Handedness, usually to the right, may itself be an important factor in precipitating
humanization. It is genetically predisposed. For example, newly born infants turn four
times more to the right than to the left. It seems quantitative in its intensity; it
can be ranked by how much it dominates a person's relevant activity. It can be altered
and reinforced by training. Injury to the dominant hemisphere can of course affect it
partly or totally.
Handedness is observable in some mammals, for instance lions [36] and various monkeys.
It may have been elicited and stressed because human activity was being stymied by
conflict and hesitation in the brain. A hand and the right one was potentiated, had to
be given preference. The novel decisions (calculating, symbolizing) were being made by
the left brain; perhaps it could not count upon the right brain passing the commands to
the left hand without blocking or censorship. Otherwise why would not the left brain
have resigned the extra quantum of dextrousness to the left hand under the control of
the right brain? And passed its share of manual tasks to the right brain to execute, as
the right brain does now do it?
The latter "choice" makes it appear that either the dominant brain by its peculiar
specialization otherwise makes for dexterity, or that dexterity induces specialization
in one hemisphere. But what do language, abstraction, logic, and symbolism have to do
with dexterity? Is it sheerly genetic coincidence that the two are enclosed in the same
hemisphere? The right brain could use dexterity, or bilateralism, as well. Music,
sounds, spatialism, images: these need a right hand also. Nonetheless, a right-hander
is left-brained altogether. And the brains of mammals, including primates, are only
slightly asymmetrical, and behave, with clumsy hands, more like two right-brain human
hemispheres.
The apparent solution for the human effect is to introduce a third factor, the fear of
loss of control owing to the onset of left-brain specialization. Owing to a pressing
need to specialize, whether genetic or electrochemical, a leadership or dominance
problem is presented. "Somebody has to be boss" in the face of increased inputs of
unresolved differential impulses, attention and decisions between the two hemispheres.
"The wheel that squeaks gets the grease." Let the left brain, which is causing the new
problems and is even physically enlarged to a degree, take the initiatives and give it
the baton, the hand, the already most developed instrument for dealing with the world.
Sperry reported that monkeys with sectioned commisures accept either of two
contradictory solutions to a problem, one solution coming from the left, the other from
the right. Not so man. For matters in the right-handed domain, the left brain insists
upon its solution even if wrong and forces the left hand to give in, if necessary. In
its few manual competences, the right hemisphere does the same. It must be one hand,
not two, else the problem will be sent "back to the drawing boards."
Species changes are rarely neat. A solution is piled upon unresolved problems. New
tissue is made of old. A new task is given to an old bone. Two holes become a nose, two
feet a fishtail. In cats and monkeys, personality, temperament, coordination, internal
functions, alertness, activity, achievement of learning, and responses - all remain the
same after the corpus callosum is severed [37] . Bilateral symmetry persists, rather
uselessly, in the brain. The hominid surrendered bilaterality and gained a human mind.
Human nature begins with an unbalanced brain and a determined hand.
Dexterity by its very existence reinforces poly-egoism. Apart from what may be
happening in the brain (though never separated from it), the full anatomical
laterality, manifest in a thousand ways, makes itself felt as a division between major
and minor modes, dominance and subordination, ruler and ruled. The dominant body side
is even sensed as heavier, Ornstein has pointed out. When someone slaps his own
forehead guiltily (usually with his dominant hand) and says "I could kick myself," it
would probably be with his dominant foot.
The brain as such is an insensitive organ, so we feel no contradiction in the left
brain dominating the right side of the body. Hence the right (though representing the
left brain in action) is obviously authoritative in legend, custom, law, politics,
work, and other practice [38] . The right is morally right. Right-sided behavior and
authority are connected. Since the right side is authoritative, the opposite of
authoritative is antiauthoritarian. Often it is "leftist." We may surmise that also in
the individual the left-side is anti-authoritarian. The basic polyego is of a ruler and
ruled, but the ruled is frequently anti-authoritarian, a leftist. In authoritarian
cultures the left-handed are said to use the "wrong" hand (e. g. Alsace, France). In
administering a pretest of a national survey questionnaire, employing the occasion of
an all-female meeting of Planned Parenthood, a birth control group appealing to
independent-minded women, I observed that the baker's dozen of members present were all
left-handed. I received incredulous and suspicious reactions when I remarked about it
afterwards.
An experiment may be presumed that would demonstrate that persons protesting an
imagined "capture" by another party (paranoia) will reveal the resentment against the
offense by uncoordinated hand behavior when compared with authority-accepting subjects.
Perhaps even the enduring conflict between "science" and "humanism", the "Two Worlds"
of Professor Snow, can be construed as an interhemispheric conflict situation.
The specialization of the left brain encompasses speech, grammar, figures, signs,
abstract solutions, classical logic, and the dominant right hand movements. These are
products, not the Ding in sich, the underlying drive of the brain. They must refer to a
more basic concept, and I find it in the term "order." "Order" contains nuances of
"Truth," authority, goal-setting, completion, instrumental and linear progression. This
is all that we would expect from human nature (of course, the left brain simultaneously
contains its mammalian routines of half the body). We need only turn over the final
card: the opposite of order; what prompts order: confusion, delays, fear, disorder. We
need not be amazed and then suspicious at the stupendous analogy with society and
social thought, where right and order fight together against anti-authoritarianism and
disorder.
It may be that the more the asymmetry the greater the disorder of the brain, the
greater the perception of fear and of the need to control the self and the world. Sex
differences may be salient in this regard. Lionel Tiger reports: "The single fact, that
some part of the brain is characteristically different in males and females, is one of
the most significant findings in neuroendocrinology." [39]
Perhaps the hormonal variation is related to brain asymmetry, for we discover in the
research of Jerry Levy proof of the greater symmetry (bilaterality, hominidity?) of the
female brain. The right hemisphere of a woman has greater verbal capacity than the
male's and her left brain can handle perceptual information better than a man's. This
confirms older psychological tests comparing boys and girls on spatial and language
tasks.
It does not obviate the possibility of total cultural determination of the difference,
but this is not likely. The differences collate also with the insistent, though
disputed, claim that men are more dominant and power-seeking than women. Again, it
would be important to have intensive research done on the correlation between the gamut
of asymmetries and the range of control demands with regard to the self and others.
In much mental illness and in personal and collective disaster, as Deikman and Parry
have indicated [40] , there occurs a takeover of behavior by right hemisphere
religious, aesthetic, ecstatic, imagistic thinking and intuitive irrational action. The
reader may be reminded of an expression from World War II: "There are no atheists in
foxholes." According to A. Shimkunas, in schizophrenia the left hemisphere is
overactivated and overloaded, and is accompanied by a highly arousable right
hemisphere. Interhemispheric transfers are defective and cannot be processed in the
commonly organized manner [41] .
ORDER AND DISUNITY
If there is a fear of oneself, where does the presence and fear of several selves and
of ego dissolution originate? The split brain is obvious but whence the multisplit? As
ventured above, the minor locales of specialization in both hemispheres may, in
handling events, offer different solutions than the dominant solution, no matter in
which sphere. I am tempted to suggest that the resisting major hemisphere may enlist
minor special spheres as allies. For instance speech can be interrupted by a blockage
of imagery from the right hemisphere. The blocked imagery can go to vague speech
centers in the right brain or spread to motor centers that refer back to the major
speech center as compulsive vocalization. Bleuler (359f) described how patients were
observed to operate on as many levels of identities as they had "complexes," whereas
normal people inhibited irrelevant material.
Although certain human operations generate from a bicameral brain and the problems of
its coordination, we must not regard these two cerebral chambers as the two centers of
homo schizo. The conditions resulting from the brain discoordination can include not
only a sense of several identities and no identity at all, but also an interplay of
elements, messages, responses, and directions within a single hemisphere. As a by-
product, and ultimately a possibly great achievement (or defect) of the lack of phase
coupling between the two hemispheres, elements of a single hemisphere may develop
embarrassing or inspiring contradictions.
A one-hemisphere person can maintain as many mind-sets and behaviors, perhaps, as a
two-hemisphere person can. These would include neurotic and psychotic and all other
types of behavior. This thesis stands yet unproven. Perhaps it cannot be proven, like
the feral man, the hypothetical human who from birth has not known humans. Infants are
on occasion born without corpus callosa and other commissures, but this condition is
accompanied by abnormalities that render general judgements difficult. Persons with
extensive one-sided brain damage are studied under similar limitations. The origins of
human behavior in utero and its rapid extension outwards from birth, make even the
meaning of post-callosolectomy behavior in a young child unreliable. His lack of basal
anxiety, or excess, or typicality in respect to it, can hardly be laid to the
sectioning of his corpus callosum.
The reasons why psychosis and neurosis may be possible in persons with severed callosa
are several: observers and experiments practically all agree that such persons are
surprisingly "normal," which for us means to possess the nature of "homo schizo" and
the potential for mental disturbance. Second, the two hemispheres still retain rich
connections with the limbic system through the brain stem, and through this indirectly
with each other; both the direct and indirect connections can produce typical and
atypical behavior. Third, within itself, each hemisphere carries thousands of well-
trodden neural pathways, including atypical ones, so that each can maintain its own
peculiar behaviors; it does not matter absolutely that these paths drive off the cliff,
so to speak, when they arrive at the sectioned callosum.
If a living person is discoverable who by mutation or accident has always subsisted
upon one hemisphere, we would have to argue that he or she is not quite human. He
should reveal a defect on the basic parameters of homo schizo that we have laid down.
That he would not be devoid of human qualities and would be generally human might be
surmised; the heavy acculturation that would discipline his mind and behavior from
birth onwards would earn him membership in the human race.
Pursuing this line of reasoning leads to the possibility that humanization occurred in
one place, at one time, to one person and with sufficient systematic force to account
for a left-brain/ right brain difference plus an endocrinal or electrical potential,
say, that conferred what we call "human nature" soon upon a small number of persons and
then later upon a larger number. (Yet once more we reserve the possibility that only a
minority of humans have possessed the dominant genetic structure peculiar to the
species, which was necessary to establish the constitution and behavior of the
species.)
MEMORY AND REPETITION
We have fixed upon hormonal and cerebral imbalances as the probable source of human
delayed-instinct behavior. Humans are prone to hormonal and electrical irregularities
in the processes of neural transmission. They also convert a phylogenetic bilateralism
into a species-specific division of labor and heavy-handedness. There is enough
"wobble" and "conflict" in message transmission and brainwork to delay all instinctive
behavior requiring cerebral references, to the point of genetically predisposing self-
awareness or a poly-self, a general fear or anxiety, and a grasping for control
wherever the attention may settle, in order to assuage fear and gain self-control.
The remaining concepts that were introduced in order to explain human nature in the
first chapter can be explained readily in terms of the brainwork already described;
these would be memory and obsession; habit and compulsiveness, to which I now append
psychosomatism; and displacement, utilizing language and symbols. Memory consists of
electro-chemical gestalts or holograms diffused around the brain with some asymmetry:
so much we have said. A recent theory, not to be dismissed, even argues that every
neuron contains all memories. The deeper the imprinting, or the more active the
electrochemical gestalt, the more obsessive it becomes, prone to compete with other
experiencing for attention and volition; by these last terms - attention and volition -
we mean connecting with general consciousness and pushing past or suppressing all other
gestalts of the moment with a heavier charge, "beating them to the punch." Presumably,
unlike animals, the human develops his memory by continual brainwork; that is,
memorizing is itself an obsession, transferring and reinforcing memories is part of the
overtime behavior of the human mind. The desire to forget is in competition with the
fear of forgetting. Who is to judge when memorizing has become obsession, and should
cease? Decisions of what to forget and what to remember are "policies" of the "highest"
importance to the person and to society. I shall have more to say of this in the next
chapter.
Enough has been said earlier on habit and compulsion to carry us forward into the
subsequent chapters. Memory, obsession, habit, and compulsion all reduce to a single
basic operation in the brain: that of repetitiveness. It is for the ameliorators of
undesirable symptoms and for ethical philosophers and politicians to make innumerable
distinctions of practical conduct. People and cultures can be graded and scored,
encouraged and deprecated, in hundreds of ways. Within the brain, sometimes dealing
with itself, at other times transacting with the outer world, a constant busyness
occurs which a) experiences by internal and external sensing, b) imprints neurons
electrochemically, c) distributes and redistributes charges, and d) emits commands,
many to be aborted, to change some internal function or external relation.
Homo schizo's aim in life is to recover his instincts so as to reduce fear. In a
roundabout way, the being seeks to control all the ultimately uncontrollable operations
to reestablish the tranquility of conscience-less, instinctive behavior. Even when
unsuccessful and painful, he persists. Given the options of a blow from outside or an
unending succession of self-blows, what creature would choose the way of man and rest
content with it? What blow can equal the premeditation of death - a thousand blows to a
coward and who is a hero, except the animal, while man suffers the inevitable
consequences of identification with the dead, poignant recall, projections into the
future and anticipations thereof?
PSYCHOSOMATISM
All brain operations instigating somatic change are psychosomatic conversions. This is
obvious, upon reflection: the sight of food stimulates the appetite, which sets the
guts to "growling." Indeed, it is no quibble to say that all brainwork is somatic,
hence psychosomatic; every thought leaves its trace. But even psychiatrists say
"psychosomatic," meaning some physical abnormality that they will track to its psychic
lair and despatch by psychotherapy. At the same time, if possible, they will be
applying medicine and surgery to the physical wound. They are materialists, as is this
book. In what we are saying, there appears to be no need to introduce a new kind of
psychic essence. Going along this route, our ignorance, too, is assumed to be
materialistic.
Many observers, even, or should I say, especially, medical men, incompletely realize
the full "harmony" (to use a pejorative term paradoxically and with malice
aforethought) of psychosomatism and "purely" mental aberration. So we find, for
instance, Hoskins accepting the common idea that schizophrenics are frustrated,
inadequate, lacking in robustness, and unable to face the stresses of life [42] .
The same can be said of infantry soldiers being withdrawn from the front lines. The
losing battle of control has been fought in the inner and in the outer systems, in the
tissues and in the conventional expressive apparatus of voice and conduct. Not only
this - crowds of schizoid "draft-dodgers" have escaped the line of battle and carry on
in politics, the stage, in all walks of life - not least at the dinner table.
"If anything can go wrong, it will," is more than a joke in psychosomatism. There seems
to be no limit to where the brain can reach in its flights from fear. It is not only a
matter of being tired in the morning, but also of paralysis, of being covered with open
sores, of a stomach digesting itself, of fingers like claws, of heart attacks, of
impotence, of deathly coma. The brain, and it must be the "higher centers," dealing
with the "lower centers" in lieu of dealing with the outside world, exercises its
obsessions and compulsions. "The stomach doesn't need more acids? Give it acids
anyway." "I've already ejaculated a holy word? I'll repeat it a hundred times."
The brain's decision to do one of these seems to be based upon a victory, a pyrrhic
victory, of course, of one lively gestalt over another, both sides unleashed to battle
upon the breakdown of the ego order. Both have their "traditions" or habits behind
them, their memories and training, their proneness, so that whether a person
psychosomatizes or bays at the moon is predictable to a degree, this despite the fact
that both tendencies are rooted in the dense thicket of same-seeming cerebral neurons.
If all psychic phenomena are somatic and have somatic effect, is the reverse also true,
that all somatic disease is psychic? If a skier breaks her leg in a fall, does she have
a psychic wound? Medically, it may be irrelevant to say so: an ambulance, a hospital, a
bolt, a cast, and in several months she will be skiing again. Psychologically, her case
may have so many aspects as to defy analysis in a few lines; to quote her mother,
"She's crazy to take chances like that, just to be with the others."
Perhaps further study might arrive at the conclusion that the only facet of the whole
affair that was not psychic was the breaking of the bones. Then it is like a duodenal
ulcer; the only facet that is not psychic is the ulcer. Or the heart attack of the
manic depressive; only the cardiomuscular erraticism is not psychic. It is probably
significant that most people, in explaining a personal accident, find themselves at
fault; we suspect that the source of the guilt feelings may be not only their religious
training, but a private knowledge that they were psychically not in command of
themselves. "Civil conflict" within the brain, because of specialization and the larger
regionalization, must be far more frequent than observed, even continuous. It is the
monitor and censor from the dominant section that gives out regular bulletins that "All
is quiet on the western front" - until the front collapses.
Migraine (megrem, ultimately from the Greek and Latin hemicrania, half-skull) may
provide significant testimony of inter-hemispheric conflict. Migraine is a common
severe headache of one side of the head, occurring more frequently among women. Since
no apparent organic cause can be assigned that does not merely reiterate the symptom,
and because psychic distress often precedes a migraine, it may be heavily
psychosomatic, more specifically an ego conflict engaging the left and right cerebral
hemispheres.
The preference of the disease for women may be attributed to their more eccentric
endocrinal secretions and indicates that the chosen weapons of battle are hormonal, and
the crux of the battle the resistance to an equilibrated flow in the handling of
material that requires smooth inter-hemispheric cooperation. That women are less brain-
lateralized than men would appear to excite less hemispheric conflict, unless the
psychic cause of the conflict was not in a prominent aspect of laterality, that is, not
in speech or handedness. I have noted that a mother and daughter suffering migraine
were, respectively, rigidly conscientious and slackly rebellious, opposites in
temperament. Perhaps the source, then, is in a general neurasthenia, a question-begging
word, but at least meaning a genetic lability with respect to brain-transfer under
stress and hence a potential responsiveness to fear-reduction therapy. To the genetic
lability is added the ambiance, the mother in the case cited, who demonstrated the
model and earned emulation by identification [43] . Homo schizo does not possess
psychic command of himself. It is rare that a person will acquire a strong, united
selves-image and be able to play the game of countering one anxiety with another, each
in a positively desirable guise, and come to do this so habitually that one's whole
character appears to be instinctively balanced. Whereupon, if anything goes wrong, one
may correctly say "it's not my fault," and "Bad luck;" or a bacterium, or a structural
genetic effect is a sufficient explanation of the evil. As for the brain tissue, it is
a "no-fault" system. It moves in remorseless neutrality. Sensory data, whether
endocorporeal or exocorporeal, turn on and off the same kinds of gestalts, stimulate
the same score of hormones. The body system is more passive, it carries on by means of
a skin, the animal distinction between an inner and outer world, but the human has in
his nature to evade this skin-deep difference, to shame the snake and shed his skin a
thousand times a season.
Notes (Chapter 3: Brainwork)
1. "Pituitary-Brain Vascular Relations," Science (6 April 1979), 23.
2. Tinbergen, op. cit., 27.
3. The Ghost in the Machine, N. Y.-Macmillan, 1968.
4. MacLean's theory is discussed by Koestler, ibid.
5. Niels A. Lassen, D. H. Ingvar and E. Skinhoj, "Brain Function and Flow," Scientific
American (1975), 71.
6. Ibid., 65-6.
7. Related by Kluver in Jeffress, ed., Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, N. Y.: Wiley,
1951, 78.
8. In J. N. Spuhler, Eovolution of Man's Capacity for Culture, Detroit: Wayne U., 1959,
16.
9. Ibid., 18.
10. Fred Soyka and Alan Edmonds, The Ion Effect, N. Y.: Dutton, 1977, 23, 146-7.
11. The Geomagnetic Field and Life, N. Y.: Plenum, 1978.
12. Fletcher, op. cit., 164.
13. "A Decisive Step in Evolution: Saltatory Conduction."
14. "Bilateral Organization of Consciousness in Man," 299 N. Y. Acad. Scl. (Sept. 30,
1977), 454 et passim.
15. Swanson and Kinsbourne, in Kinsbourne, ea., Asymmetrical Function of the Brain, N.
Y. Cambridge U. Press, 1978, 284.
16. Kinsbourne, ibid., 289.
17. Call Marsh, in Kinsbourne, ibid., 308, 295 et passim.
18. H. T. Chang, "Cortical Response to Activity of Callosal Neurons," 16 J.
Neurophysio., (1953), 117-31.
19. The works cited here can be supplemented by up-to-date references in the
Psychological Index and a reading of Joseph Boger's "The Other Side of the Brain," in
Ornstein, The Nature of Human Consciousness, San Francisco: Freeman, 1973, 101-25.
20. Quoted in Ornstein, op. cit., The Psychology of Consciousness, San Francisco:
Freeman, 1972, 58.
21. M. Le May and N. Geschwind, "Asymmetries of the Human Cerebral Hemispheres," in A.
Caramazza & E. B. Zurif, eds., Language Acquisition and Language Breakdown, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 324.
22. J. Semmes, in Ornstein, 1972, 63-4. Typically, new ideas generate many metaphors
(the right brain at work?), some of which, relevant here, are carried forward in
Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformations in the
1980's, Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1980.
23. Tadanobu Tsunoda, The Japanese Brain: Brain Function and East-West (in Japanese),
1978.
24. Karl H. Pribram, Languages of the Brain, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall,
1971, 149-151, 369-70.
25. Cazzaniga et al., "Language, Praxis, and the Right Hemisphere," 27 Neurology
(1977), 1144.
26. "Brain Circuits for consciousness," 13 Brain Beh. and Evol. (1976), 376.
27. Paul Giraud, in 40 Evol. Psychiatrique I (1975), 41.
28. 1970, 232.
29. Trevarthen, op. cit., 378.
30. Op. cit., (1979), 6.
31. Op. cit., (1974).
32. Klaus D. Hoppe, 29 Psyche 10 (1975), 919.
33. University of Chicago Magazine (1964).
34. Trevarthen, in Kinsbourne, op. cit., 379,376.
35. In Kinsbourne, ibid., 523; also Trevarthen, 379.
36. See the photo, p. 280, pc, in J. P. Hallet, Congo Kitabu, N. Y.: Random House,
1966.
37. "The Great Cerebral Commissure," Sci. Amer. (Jan. 1964), 52.
38. S. de Grazia, "Left-Right in Politics: The Case for Symbolic Lateral Asymmetry, 29
Pol. Studies 2 (June 1981), 254.
39. L. Tiger, quoting Hutt in Fox, op. cit., 115.
40. T. A. Parry, quoting Deikman, 6-7, in "The New Science of Immanuel Velikovsky," I
Kronos 1 (1975).
41. A. Shimkunas, "Hemisphere Asymmetry and Schizophrenic Thought Disorder," in S.
Schwartz, ed., Language and Cognition in Schizophrenia, N. Y.: Erlbaum, 1978.
42. R. C. Hoskins, The Biology of Schizophrenia, N. Y.: Norton, 1946, 75.
43. And c f. Margaret W. Gerard, "Genesis of Psychosomatic Symptoms in Infancy" in
Felix Deutsch, The Psychosomatic Concept in Psychoanalysis, N. Y.: Intl. Universities
Press, 1952, 82-95.
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOUR
DISPLACEMENT AND OBSESSION
We have come to view the human as a poly-ego casting forth throngs of displacements,
paradoxically in order to recapture instinctive certainty and so reduce the level of
one's anxiety. "Paradoxically," I say, because there is a heavy return flow of
displacements; they are in the mind and hence cannot simply be cast off, but are to be
regarded as transactions: what goes out must come back.
From this elementary state of human nature, the morphology of thought emerges. It begins
like a person who seeks to build a crude dam across a brook. He seizes and places rocks
in the path of the flood, intending to embed enough of them to block the flow, and,
after a time, he does, but there is leakage, and there are diversions of the water, and
anyhow the flow must continue by some means. But still he has a structure. In the mind
these would be obsessions. And the rocks of obsessions are also of different forms,
which we call compulsion, habit, attention, and memory, all of which we shall define
here.
Before confronting the ideas of displacement and obsession, an aside may be permitted,
an apology. For it seems that I am culpable for using metaphoric language in describing
a neurological and behavioral world, as with the analogy of bridging a stream. But not
only this, which may be excused if the metaphor does not beg the question; further, I
may seem to choose terms too often out of the jargon of psychopathology, as with
"displacement" and "obsession," perhaps even preferring them to terms describing normal
behavior. I have found, however, that the terms most useful in describing mental
operations are technical words tinged with reproach, as if a person should not
ordinarily engage in such an activity. In the very first chapter, it will have been
noticed, I took the step of distinguishing human nature largely by what would be
considered a fault in animal behavior and hardly sounds nice when attached to people -
an instinct-delay. And then "schizo" itself. I must warn that this verbal situation may
become worse.
But names come out of attention and identities. A family will love a dog and whiles away
many an hour talking about "what old Shep is thinking of now. Look at him ! He knows a
lot more about us than we think he does. Too bad he can't speak." I should hardly wish
to challenge such a statement, which would arouse a united family against me, but what
word would we use for the process going on in the people if not "projection," the
ascription to "old Shep" of ideas that are our own. Much more could be made out of the
simple remarks quoted, too, but we must move along.
The qualities of humans that one cherishes are aspects of the qualities one dislikes.
And, because the empirical science of psychology has been built upon what is
problematical and evident, the most helpful terms may be those conferred upon disliked
qualities. The "good" comes out of "bad," so to speak. One takes what one gets, as in
evolution where the marvelous eye comes out of a "damaged" skin, the tongue from the
endoderm, the leg from a fin, the breasts from enlarged sweatglands, the cerebral cortex
itself called a successful tumor, etc.
If it were not for the throngs of displacements, we would be able to attend to very
little of what we are pleased to attend to as humans. And without projection, a delusion
certainly, we could not "know" the world. The "sick" propensity to displace and project
in uncontrollable quantity is the fundamental basis for human behavior and its
competences. To speak of "cures" for these mechanisms is like asking how we may best
perform cerebralectomy. The most clever humans are those whose displacements and
projections are the most varied, free, abundant in hypothesis, while stupidity can be
readily associated with an inability to perform these operations whether because of
blockage or hominidalism.
Some words I might otherwise use would belong to a defunct theology and philosophy that
prospered for 2000 years from Aristotle to Descartes, which, as will be described in
another chapter, employed ideas of man as a rational being, much of whose behavior would
be termed irrational. In that vein, savants spoke of "reason against faith," and argued
interminably but inoperationally over the conflict between the two faculties.
Most people still use the language of, and tackle problems of human nature in the manner
of, Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, so that we have an additional task set for
ourselves, namely, to show that one does not get very far in understanding human nature
by this traditional route. But again, the analysis of reason is for Chapter Seven.
In this chapter, stress is placed upon the major mental strategy that the human mind
employs to exist and ply through life. I employ the word "strategy" realizing that it is
teleological and that things without purpose should not be granted purposes. (But not
such usages as: "The strategy of the French generals in World War II was obsessed with
the Maginot Line complex." That is, strategy can be both conscious and unconscious.) I
can also use the word "mechanism" leaving to some demiurge the purpose of constructing
this "mechanism." I mean by "strategy" or "mechanism," of course, a system by which the
human operates, but again one must beware of the word "system" because that implies an
order, and again an author or a demiurge or a will to operate systematically. Shall we
say that by these words we mean: "It happens that a pattern (or gestalt) is evident when
a human acts"? And, given the operational pattern, typical consequences follow." Thus we
can rationalize some suspicious terms here, and also in the chapters to come and in the
past chapter, where we talked of the urge to re-instinctivize, a pattern of behavior
that is largely unconscious, uncontrolled, and unwilled.
Upon the elementary state of human nature, the morphology of thought is erected. It
hardly matters that some of its aspects are regarded as "normal" and others as
"abnormal." It is like a mountain that is a precipice when viewed from the north, and a
slope when seen from the south; the core can be of the same mineral substances. The
basic shape of thought occurs by displacement and obsession.
DISPLACEMENT
Personal histology and history cast their images against the screen of instinct delay. A
major effect is the human displacement complex. Animals displace, but humans do so with
a plenitude and magnificence that lets us be astonished at ourselves.
N. Tinbergen, an authority on the stickleback fish, unsurprisingly took examples from
the animal in his general treatise on instincts. A male stickleback cannot ejaculate
sperm until he seduces a female into depositing eggs in the nest that he has built. If
two males are forced to nest closely together, they dig nests continuously "and the
result is that their territories are littered with pits, or even become one huge pit."
Their nest-digging activity here is part of their fighting repertoire. Similarly,
"herring gulls, while engaged in deadly combat, may all at once pluck nesting
material..." American television seems at times to follow only one plot: "Sex and
Violence: guess which is which?"
Tinbergen writes, "The motivation of an instinct when prevented from discharging through
its own motor pattern finds an outlet by discharge through the centre of another
instinct." Further, "the fact that a displacement activity is an expression, not of its
'own' drive.. but of a 'strange' drive.., makes it possible for it to act as a signal to
fellow members of the same species, provided it can be distinguished from the 'genuine'
activity, activated by its 'own' drive." As I've heard boys jeer at truculent comrades,
"Are you tough or hungry?"
Every action involves an emotion, which is the sensing of action, therefore an
experience. And every other experience involves an emotion. Every experience invites a
response, an experience feedback of some affect. Both the experience and the feedback
cross the neural synapses and are in the human manner delayed at the crossing. Wherever
they may wander, while waiting for their vaguely denominated neurotransmitters, they
inspire a new activity, a new experiencing, which is a displacement.
The human has all the instinctive foundations of the animal. But once unleashed, human
instinctive behavior can rarely reach its target, if such can be discerned, but
expresses itself all over the cerebrum in a splatter of displacements. Tough and hungry
and devout, the Aztecs cannibalized their enemies. The Hebrews of Leviticus devised
fulsome logic to accompany the slaughter and eating of a beast.
It is a basic proposition of anthropology that in a "pure" culture, all practices and
artifacts are interrelated. Human culture is one grand intermeshing of displacements.
The result, working backwards, is to defeat the blind workings of the brain. Everyone is
given to know, and to see it proven, that displacements, no matter how remotely
scattered among the recesses of the central nervous system, are logical and under
control. "Hold onto your mind! Nothing happens but that it is all of a piece." The
stickleback and the seagull have relatively so few displacements (although even these
were hard to discover and label), that Tinbergen can readily assert that they are
genetic. I think that only the infinite variety of human displacements lets homo schizo
congratulate himself on his large imagination, splendid lucubrations, ingenious
associations, and poetic invention. It is important, all-important, "what we live for,"
etc., but who says so is ourselves - judges in our own trial. The human is sufficiently
depressed instinctively, and thereupon anxious enough, and has enough continuously
active positive and negative feedback operating, amidst ample gray matter, to support a
world of delusions, no two of them alike.
We can appreciate then how absurd it is to attempt physiological distinctions between
good and bad (healthy and unhealthy) displacements and projections, just as it is to
divide good from bad (healthy from unhealthy) psychosomatism. Nor can we even speak of
true and false displacements and projections. Once the brain casts its affect upon the
external world, that world is physiologically real. When a god suffuses the starry
heavens and a lover glances covetously at a stranger, what happens to the brain is as
real as what happens when one drinks a wine or receives a blow in the stomach. All are
real experiences.
Displacement might be conceived very broadly as one's sensing of anything as having
effects upon one. Surely it is animal, yet the concept is the same in ethology and
psychoanalysis [1] . Thanks to displacements, a great world exists that has no "excuse"
to exist. But it is a virtual cornucopia in humans. "Anything" means just that; no
matter is ineligible as an object of human displacement. Attempting to segregate
logically or empirically those things - an enemy, a swamp - that will surely affect one,
and other things - a sound, a shape - that will most certainly not affect one is largely
useless. We merely say, an animal displaces little, while a human displaces much.
PROJECTION AND PEDAGOGY
So it is with projection, which is a common feature of displacement; anything can be a
subject of projection. Projection is the animation of the universe. Everything
potentially is sensed to have a will with regard to oneself. The breeze sings to one,
the birds call one, the volcanoes command one, one's automobile refuses to run, the
enemy possesses one's thought. Displacement and projections operate in the thousands in
the human mind. While the mammal tends to a few things, the human extends almost
unlimited attention to the world, an attention containing affect, that is, psychic
involvement.
Displacement is accompanied by affect or emotion. The human, and for that matter the
animal, does not pay attention to anything unless it invests the thing with emotion and
anxiety. This process seems predictable, inasmuch as the reason for the displacement in
the first place is to test the capacity of the displacement object to receive a neural
load that is not being fully unburdened by an instinctive reaction to a stimulus.
The displaced affect being unloaded may be called positive or negative depending upon
the instant state of the discharge. The perception of hovering vultures in the distance
is a cultivated interest, with an ambivalent response, to which a new positive or
negative affect is added, depending upon whether one imagines them to be focused upon a
foreign body or a body with which one is identified. It is clear, too, that ambivalence
accompanies attention to a great many displacements, even gods and spirits whose
presence has signified both benefits and deprivations in times past. Indulgence and
deprivation become forever related to the identification-affection nodes.
The central nervous system is laced with interconnections of affection. Once the larger
world opens to the baby, he must begin to accept those displacements that his attendants
point out as the true sources of indulgences and deprivations. His teachers, while
pointing to certain nearby objects with a cause-and-consequence nexus fairly obvious
even to the inexperienced human are especially interested in indicating to him some very
great abstractions as ultimate causes of his well-being or ill-being; they are not at
all scrupulous, even if they could be, in pursuing cause-and-consequence in such cases.
For most teachers, logic has an authoritative meaning. The myriad names of gods and
spirits are short-hand vulgar logic. So it happens that their obsessions with gods and
laws and great natural forces are imprinted early upon the young. A consensus of
obsessions is achieved, along with some disrespect for necessary causal connections
between the objects of identification and the actual production of benefits and evils.
To inculcate in a child the determination to use only a special pot for his toilet needs
can be, depending upon the age of the child and criteria of correct performance, a
massive exercise in the transfer of obsessive behavior from adult to child. The
displacement of toilet-training obsessions upon many other objects occurs readily,
whether the object is an administrative routine (a "clean desk") or the traits of god,
so the Judaeo-Christian god is not imagined to have an alimentary canal, but many other
cultures dwell upon the excretions of their gods, the very word "urine," for instance,
being originally from the god "Uranus," who rained many things upon the Earth.
TIME AND REMEMBERING
Man practices displacement and projection in creating space and time. The space
dimension is little more than the scope of displacements, to begin with. Measure the
area of displacement and one has the boundaries of space. The poly-ego can fill space;
put another way, all space can be internalized so that a most remote object - a star,
say - or a thought or an hallucination can vie with an insect bite for his attention,
even affecting the way in which he scratches the bite. A person, and not necessarily a
savage, feeling guilt before his god, may scratch himself roughly.
There is a need to sense time, one more empire for the mind to conquer. Memory is of the
animal, too, and so is the ability to reach back for the pattern of experiences to
relate to an immediate or approaching experience. The distinction of human memory arises
from its flexible control of recall. Since man's experience is rich, his memory
impressions are richly patterned. It is one more great area to which he can resort for
the resources of control. He can play one film against another, like a curator of a
hologram museum, until he selects one or imagines a new one that will cope with an
ongoing experience. Once more, fear drives him over the stubble field of instincts.
The delayed impulses that are aroused by experiencing flow out electrochemically in all
directions through the mind and back and forth between the hemispheres of the brain.
They excite the glandular and muscular system. The feedback of "flowback" is voluminous,
too. The irrelevance of much of the activity does not embarrass the brain. It highly
stimulates it. Some twenty percent of the typical person's oxygen intake is consumed by
the brain.
What effect does this have upon the level of fear? It makes the universe fearful; for
owing to projection, now the fear which is displaced upon others returns, relevant, and
reinforced. But, at the same time, the fear is probably thus rendered more bearable, at
the price of weakened identity and a great many unnecessary involvements.
What, then, happens to the need to control? "Divide et impera": the more one's
displacements are scattered, the more the selves feel secure. The need to control,
already strongly felt respecting the alter egos, is also pointed towards the outer
world, other people, things, notions, the sky, the phantoms out there. The great power-
seeker of the universe is homo schizo. He seeks to control everything onto which he
displaces and projects. Where his fear is sensed to lie, there he will seek control.
Time is an expansible contoured traveling bag to carry displacements, indexed by the
pockets they occupy. Old memories rest as imprints that become expectations in present
action. The present is a developing succession of snapshots upon used film, especially
film containing analogous memories from the file. Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New
Orleans thinks: "We can expect the British troops to attack us in rows and frontally, as
they always do," and they did and were mowed down. An hallucinator says: "Members of my
family were across the football field yesterday and that made it easier for me to talk
to the crowd on the other side;" and he asked his family really to attend the following
week, to lend further aid. Time's veritable meaning in any person's life is almost
entirely a plastic envelopment of shapeless experiences, erratically related.
Cultures take over the obsession with time that the individual cannot avoid and pro bono
publico define the intervals of time that must be mastered. This requires certain
schizoid distortions of time. "Pure time," or "absolute time," does not exist save as
another delusion yet one of the greatest of all cultural drives since the beginning has
been to find absolute time. Lunar time is a mass of obsessive behaviors - rites, lore,
and scientific study - surrounding a fairly expectable cycle. Past bad experiences and
their anticipated reoccurrences are probably the chief factors in the choice of time
clocks and the ways of using them. Disputes over time-reckoning and calendars have
precipitated many bitter struggles in human history.
The "rational" student protests: "See the big pay-off from marking time: planting,
hunting, saving resources, warfare, rendezvous." No doubt, these are the pragmatic
effects (gains) from partially restoring animal instinctive capacities. And they can
only come when a culture's people succeed in frightening themselves into observances of
certain obsessions. As an aide de peur, gods and suns and terrible memories are called
upon to assist as aides-m‚moires. In consequence the obsessed biologist and souvenir-
hunter can calculate exactly the time to arrive at Cape Cod when the instinctively
driven horseshoe crabs arrive to breed.
Time is also a way of watching oneself, hence watching the world of one's displacements.
The sky-watcher is fascinated in part because he can see how "absolute time" is up there
and controlling his destiny. As Immanuel Kant once said: "Two things fill the mind with
ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more and the more intensely the mind of thought is
drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." [2] There
ensue the obsessions of mental discipline, the routines by which life is conducted so as
effectively to generate, in individuals and groups, those technologies, artifacts, and
means of subsistence that so exceed the capabilities of other species.
The rules of memory and the rules of forgetting are the two sides of the same coin. Who
says remember, says select. Who names memory, names forgetting. In the earliest human,
memory was a desperate structuring of current events to retain on the surface of the
mind what was necessary to be human -that is, a sense of time, a manipulation of symbols
and projections, and the practical means of ordering the environment - while
relinquishing to the subconscious the impressions so intense that they would catatonize
or panic the organism.
The sharpness, detail, and durability (in conscious and subconscious form) of
remembering is proportional to the gravity of a trauma, that is, to the deepness and
adverseness of its effect upon one or all areas of life. Forgetting speeds up with the
intensity of the trauma. Thus a severe memory and its forgetting in all or part go hand-
in-hand, and they follow upon the heels of the traumatic event.
The most intense memories occur without being willed. They emerge encased in dreams and
myths. The less intense memories ride upon and cover over the more intense ones.
Disorders of recall, of forgetting, otherwise unexplainable, can be interpreted as the
effects of what is memorable having become willy-nilly attached to the un-rememberable,
and often relate to the symbols and affects of the repression of the great disaster,
that is, the primal conditions that established the rules of the conscious human.
Memory and forgetting operate like a bookkeeping system to keep the mind in balance.
Little is forgotten, and therefore the balance will continue to show a profit or
increase throughout life. Like many bookkeeping systems in commerce, memorial
bookkeeping has numerous ways of casting a balance. With the forgotten material, the
mind works to create myth and art, even scientific hypothesis. By storing and
recategorizing forgetfulness, the mind achieves its ability to maintain consciousness
and behave with instrumental rationality (that is, with a cause and effect logic in
relation to practical goals).
Memory, in the specifically human sense of ability to recall at will, is inseparable
from the sense of time. One can bring back the past in part voluntarily. This past can
be shared with others through signs, symbols, and language. It can also be cast into the
future, just as other current and past experiences are cast forwards in time.
The future-thought is born and partakes of the delusional quality of human nature in
general. For time is a concept whose only existence is that given it by the time-keeper.
Yet its implantation in humans gives them a tool for mental expansion and environmental
control (as well as for suffering), not otherwise recognizable in the plant and animal
kingdoms.
Culture institutes furious rites to make people remember something that they are
forbidden to remember in all of its detail. Saturnalias, the prototype of all
anniversaries, famous scenes of joy and orgy, are masquerades literally of the end of
the world. They must be compulsively celebrated in order, by aggressive joy and
wantonness, to cover up, to ensure the amnesia, of events that cannot be forgotten.
People create an elaborate mnemotechnology, to use Friedrich Nietzsche's term, to assure
that they do not forget whatever it is that they have forgotten, that is, suppressed. In
this same sense, a great paradox emerges: we remember most emotionally what we forget
most determinedly.
Memory of animals is set into "naturally" occurring categories by the predictability of
instinctive response. "As I respond, so must the world be," would be a fancied animal or
plant cosmological formula. The information storage and retrieval system are
automatically coordinated for the most part. The human has the unique problem of
determining what data to store and in what forms to retrieve it.
He is very much helped by instinct, of course. Like the beginnings of most modern
computer data banks, the material going in is predetermined - bank cheques, social
security accounts, tax records. Thereupon, however, the human stores immense amounts of
material that an animal computer technician would call "garbage." The vast weird human
universe of displacements is duly punched into the memory bank. When the experience is
recalled, it emerges not in the pristine sharpness of the original experience, nor even
in a dulled image of it, but as a new thing, like a raised rusty anchor encrusted with
weeds and shells. It entails various distortions, suppressions and reinforcements.
OBSESSIONS, COMPULSIONS, HABITS
Lorenz tells of a goose that at sundown habitually climbed a flight of stairs, always
stopping on the landing to look through a window. One day, she climbed the stairs in too
great haste, forgetting to stop at the window. She was very agitated in consequence; to
relieve herself from her agitation, she climbed the stairs back down, and then up again,
stopping dutifully to look out of the window before proceeding, now in a becalmed way.
Obsession, not habit, we say, was involved. To specify the occurrence of an abnormal
resistance to change in routine is not proper language when referring to a goose. But no
clear line is to be drawn. Many a person is silly as a goose. In "normal" humans, we
expect an acceptance of the frustration and an adaptation to the new condition. Why do
we accept this? Because we appreciate that "normal" people are aware of what they are
doing habitually and hence are capable of letting a frustration flow over into
"irrelevant" spheres of activity. No sooner do we claim this, though, than we realize
how few people are without severe reaction to a break to some of their routines. That
is, most people are more or less obsessed. If they cannot find their shoes in the
morning, they will behave strangely for a long time, until somehow they find the shoes,
find substitutes, are given "reasons," or develop a new lifestyle for spending the
morning without shoes. Stern memories, pathologically called obsessions, are an
important part of human memory. Obsession is "excessive," "unstoppable" attention to
something (by which, as usual, we mean "anything"). An animal can be trained to "extra"
obsessions. Humans are naturally obsessive. They can be obsessed with a pair of shoes, a
piece of cow dung, an inner voice or pain, the Second Coming of Christ, or a line of
poetry. This "obsession with obsessions" determines what is remembered, what is
recallable from memory, what the person will spend his time on, where the important
things of life are in his estimation to be found. Moreover, it will give him an enormous
capability. A person will be able to abandon all other thoughts and temptations and
stick to a task through thick and thin. With this one (or two) abilities, he
reconstructs animal instincts with some embellishments. That is, provided that he is
compulsive as well as obsessive. Freud speaks of "the compulsion to repeat - something
that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual that the pleasure principle
which it overrides. . . the pleasure principle - to which, after all, we have hitherto
ascribed dominance in mental life."
A simple example of compulsion is the patient who insists upon playing the same chord a
thousand times in succession. Or the repetition of nonsense syllables unendingly, which
reminds one of religious liturgies that depend for effect upon an obsessive idea and the
compulsion to repeat, which in turn must be related to the catatonic wish to stay as one
is, forever in place. This again connects with the obsessive compulsive return to
origins, to a recollected and imagined primordial set of events, illud tempus (that
primordial time when ...) which M. Eliade has so well abstracted from primitive
ceremonies.
The terms "obsession" and "compulsion" are separate but confused in the psychiatric
lexicon. No special neurology is assigned to one or the other. Each can be tied to both
behavior and thoughts. Obsession is of the family of memory, planning, and habit. It is
a compulsion to repeat. Compulsion is the kind of driven act which is likely to become
an obsession. Insofar as all major problems associated with the terms are internalized,
they are indistinguishable. Furthermore, they may originate together and act together.
Existential fear, and the need to control it, pursue the logical line of reestablishing
the human as an effective mammal. It is not our choice whether to vary from it. We have
no recourse; if we seek to follow the smithereens of our explosion of attachments, we
shall go to pieces ourselves, psychologically and shortly afterwards as living
organisms. We must stay at home while our displacements travel adventurously, and here
recompose the hominidal character as best one may: hence, obsession and compulsion, or
obsessed compulsiveness.
Obsessions are linked to habit. They are deemed "bad habits". Compulsion may be an urge
to shout obscenities upon entering a church. Obsession may be an agonizing repetitive
recall of an embarrassing scene, like the time one uttered a string of obscenities in a
church. The relation of obsession to habit is clear in this case. The relation of
compulsion is not, as in many compulsive behaviors the thought has preceded the deed and
has occurred obsessively prior to the occasion when the act is finally committed. Then
it is a habit of thought converted into a deed.
Obsession can be viewed as a form of deeply imprinted memory, which repeatedly calls the
attention of the self to its selves. If a person suffers a fearful accident, the memory
of it may occur with or without volition and despite a will to the contrary. At the same
time, an obsession (and even faint memory is in a sense an obsession) is a repetitive
trained behavior. Therefore it is a habit. It is also a compulsion, for one is compelled
to recall.
Compulsions as acts are distinguishable from habit only by intensity. A drug habit
becomes a compulsion, or addiction, when the behavior that is represented in the mind
forces itself upon the organism, consciously or unconsciously. It is impossible
physiologically to distinguish between a compulsive tic of the eyelid and a compulsion
to step on the brake when a deer surprisingly leaps out ahead of one's speeding
automobile.
Furthermore, a great many compulsions are consummated repeatedly, especially when
uninterrupted by the forces of law, the community, the family, another person, or by
destructive reaction or nature of the objects, or by self-destruction as in the
compulsion to commit suicide.
We have two further cases where a compulsive element is present: one when the act is
singular in its nature, but lacks a history of obsession with it, and springs forth
compulsively as an invention. Such would be an impulse out of nowhere, as a model worker
for twenty years is seized by the idea of walking out of his office immediately,
forever, and does so. We would surmise that the thought had been formulating in an
obsessive form but unconsciously, for a long time. This contrasts with a case in which,
after a decade of concentration upon a mathematical problem, a solution offers itself to
a professor abruptly, and the obsession is extinguished. The place of habit in both
cases, despite the compulsion and extinction upon their conclusions, is manifest. In
this second case a compulsion might be exercised upon the completion of the compelled
act. The professor might insist upon the correctness of his solution, despite all proof
and urgings to the contrary, and then proclaim it, marking the close of his prolonged
studies.
Habit and obsession are distinguishable in two ways, one misleading, the other
appropriate. In Aristotelian terms, a good person is one of good habits, and habits are
what are rationally accepted by the free will of man. In modern and preferable terms,
habit is an obsession that is governed by awareness and instrumentalism; a habit can be
broken or strengthened; conversely, an obsession is a rigid habit. A controllable
obsession is then a habit. The habit can be generated, moderated, and extinguished,
according to the consequences sought from its practice.
Only when the obsessive foundations of habit are understood, however, can the
distinction be made. The human "naturally" is prone to obsession. This is because "the
cheapest way to run the works" is to concentrate energy upon the most forceful options
and derive security and profit from them. The infant gains all he can by means of
affection, so his whole life becomes colored by the exercise of and the memory of the
affection he achieved in the beginning. All his other values are supplied via this one
value which of course in its turn is not only a way to food and warmth but a way to
reduce existential and immediate fear.
One ought not slip into half-way explanation, the sophistry of "Which came first, the
chicken or the egg?" Toilet training is an obsession that is culture-bound, varying
widely. To be instituted it had to be preceded by an obsession for obsessions. The
question is: "What generated the master strategy obsession?" And, once more, we revert
to the theory of a disordered poly-ego that welcomes order and repetition as a
substitute for instinctive reaction.
People speak of animal habits, though not of animal obsessions. It would appear that an
animal habit is already an obsession. If a human trains an animal, too, the animal's
habit is more obsessional, in our terms, then habitual. The same difficulties are
encountered with the two words, in the animal and human settings, and we had better
abandon any distinction here and regard the two concepts as interchangeable in the
physiological context.
The human is obsessive-habitual because he cannot otherwise cope with existence. His
obsession-habits are infinitely variable. They succeed, not precede - although the
organic structure is partly in place - the basal human disorder and are the human method
of correcting the disorder, with all due limitations and difficulties.
In the illumination provided by psychopathology, habit is more readily understandable as
an obsession under some degree of control, but at all events as a repeated practice, the
regularity of and insistence upon which makes it obsessive, and the social judgement of
which makes it reasonable as opposed to pathological. So it goes with compulsiveness
very often. One might say that all obsessions are compulsive, but not all compulsions
are obsessive; these latter are better called impulsive acts. Still, it would be rare
that an impulsive act does not proceed from unconscious obsession, or from an impulsive
character, typically given to such actions.
Examining behaviors known as memorizing, commemorative (as with the need to celebrate
collective anniversaries), obsessive, bureaucratic, conventional compulsive, and
ritualistic, we find in them the essence of habit. Habit originates in the need to
control exploded behavior and unruliness. Fear or anxiety reduces in the presence of
habit, increases in its absence. If fear diminishes, one can claim that instinctual
behavior has been in some sense restored and the reduction of fear was anticipated in
the creation of the habit.
Notes (Chapter 4: Displacement and Obsession)
1. Tinbergen, A Study Of Instinct, 113-g.
2. Critique Of Practical Reason, conclusion.
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIVE
COPING WITH FEAR
"First of all, the gods created fear in the world." So goes an old Latin saying. The
expression can be reversed, for it was also said, as by Statius, "In the beginning,
fear created the gods." Let us suggest the primordial condition: human fear and holy
dread. The fear is the existential fear of which we speak in this book. It remains,
when immediate causes of fear are absent. So it is incorrect to blame ravages of
ordinary life, as did the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for mankind's fearful
state. Regarding primeval man, there occur several famous lines of his Leviathan:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to
every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security,
than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In
such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain:
and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities
that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and
removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no
account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual
fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short.
Hobbes, by our theory, is incorrect in two important regards. He explained "progress"
as a result of "order" whereas, in Homo Schizo 1, order and progress are seen to have
always and necessarily been mixed; man is by nature bent upon order. The twentieth
century, and Hobbes' own times even more, provide "poor, nasty, brutish, and short"
lives in large numbers. Hobbes also conceived of human life as originally solitary.
From his birth, homo schizo was individuated, it is true, by his human character, but
he still required the group, actually demanding a larger group to work out his
insatiable appetite for controls.
Further, as we have been saying, man was very much more dependent upon psychological
"income" in comparison with material subsistence. However, fear accompanied him on his
widest and wildest searches. Contrary to the speculations of Hobbes and markedly
against John Locke, writing in the same period, man's mind was no "blank tablet"
(tabula rasa) upon which experience alone might write. By origin, ever since, and at
present, man's mind is congenitally inscribed with an existential fear that inspires
his most important human operations.
Closer to our concept of existential fear were the ancient philosophers Epicurus and
Lucretius. They understood such fear, even in "good times." Lucretius (96?-55 B. C.),
who sought a scientific account Of the Nature of Things in order to allay human fears
of death and of the gods, presented the universe as an essentially neutral and natural
order. Significantly, in view of Chapter Seven to come, ratio, whence "rational," is
the synonym for order.
Time to Lucretius was an infinite succession of cycles of creation and destruction,
fashioned out of eternal atoms. Mankind should come to see death and disintegration as
the work of nature; "to be able to regard all that is with a mind at peace," wrote
Lucian (V, 1203). To no avail. Philosophers and theologians can pile all of their
wishes for mankind, Ossa upon Pelion, without his ever attaining the heights of the
peaceful mind.
OMNIPRESENT FEAR
People will agree with the observation that life is spent largely on the problem of
feeding themselves. The comparable idea that life is spent largely in coping with fear
is met, by contrast, with disbelief. That fear should be central, dominant, and
universal in humans is hard to believe, and harder to accept. Indeed one may propose,
to begin with, that a cloak of denial is spread over the idea. We are afraid to admit
what is forever present and all-determining because the admission, we fear, will simply
worsen the condition.
No amount of testimony by heroes as to their frequent fears, no expositions of how
humor erupts as a safety-valve to fears, nor all the case studies and historical
treatises on fear and anxiety available for affirmation, can dispel the will to believe
in a life without fear. How can fear be so all-pervasive, it is objected, when our
lives are crowded with details of thought and behavior from which fear is usually
absent, as when tying a shoelace, eating a dessert, digging a ditch, reciting prayers,
or reading a romantic novel? Once more, to reply, the very fact of crowding our
existence with details arouses suspicion that a mechanism of avoidance and adaptation
is operative, avoidance of and adaption to fear.
To convince oneself of pandemic fearfulness, one ought to consider the total life-ways
of all people in all cultures in all times. One checks off the major portions of life
clearly beset by fear: infancy, childhood, dreams, religion, war service, competitive
sports, risks of all kinds, old age. Then note the component of fear in all conscious
mental illness and normal "neurotic" feelings. Then recall all the fear one seeks to
impose upon others - intimidation, command, coercion, and so forth: is this not one's
own fear projected (and milder) and is one not the victim, too, in one's own turn?
Further, are not all those behaviors that are included in the paradigm of legendary
creation, primeval stories and fairy tales emergent from fear? And, as Hobbes declared,
does not man live in fear of violence when he is not engaged in it - just as foul
weather affects not only the days when it happens but also the times when it might
occur?
Still, where is the fear in apple pie … la mode? Dietary, to be sure, whether fear or
defiance of overweight. But the lusty appetite of the twelve year old boy: where is the
fear there? In the mother-figure looming over the culinary transaction? In showing
fathers how mothers love their sons? The apple and Eve? In the haste to gobble the pie
and get away from the table? Why must one explain? This is all trivia; but it is in
explanation of the trivial that science shows its muscle. Here is an instinct to eat a
sugary carbohydrate, a culturally defined concoction, with ramifications into the
habitual cuisine, the family table, with "Mom" and the "sweet tooth."
If it were a cannibal feast - then none would doubt that terror is at the diner's
elbows. Instead we have a most generalized, sublimated human activity, but still human,
and hence suffused - even if remotely and joyfully - by fear. For the history of this
particular feeding is incomprehensible (indeed there is no history to tell) without,
like the Last Supper of Jesus, its carrying along the most ancient determinants of
human species behavior. The trivium is generalized into a multitude.
This line of reasoning is no different than that so well employed in sociology and
economics when we say casually that "Joe is one of the army of the unemployed."
Whatever the special circumstances of Joe's case, he is part of a large statistical
aggregate responsive to general causes. He is part of an army of fear. Or should we
choose some stumbling, famished French soldier in the retreat of Napoleon's army from
Moscow in 1812?
PHYSIOLOGY OF FEAR
In terms of the psychology of conditioning, existential fear is to be regarded as
continuous self-punition, whether it is called fear, anxiety, frustration, or
depression. (Depression, writes J. Gray, is "a state induced by sudden loss of
important sources of reward." [1] ) The punishment takes the form of inhibiting
rewards, the most basic of which is probably the surcease from existential fear itself.
According to Neal Miller and his associates, in a conflict between approach and
avoidance the animal will come to rest at that point where the forces favoring the
simultaneously feared and desired goal equal each other. The "decision" is to come to
rest. Then the human, by our theory, cannot come to rest, nor does the wild animal
completely, in the presence of the effective extinction of the stimulus. The human
continues to live in a heavily displaced world where the avoidance-fear sensation will
always find some home and sustenance.
The physiology of existential fear, apart from the brainwork of cerebral conflict, is
not structurally or electro-chemically much different from that of mechanical fear (in
the presence of accident, blows, threats of punishment, aggression of divine wrath).
Nor is it distinguishable from the long-term fear of death. It is clear that it does
not constitute a major structural leap in evolution, though its actual effects are
quantavolutionary. Hence it operates much like the animal mechanisms.
Especially apropos is the "fight or flight" system, about which we can say, with
Tepperman [2] :
Although people who are disturbed by teleologically 'impure' thinking in biology are
sometimes made uncomfortable by Cannon's 'fight-flight characterization of the
sympathoadrenomedullary discharge, the fact is that the over-all effect of such a
discharge is to mobilize the individual to meet an emergency.
Hans Selye elaborated a model of the fight/ flight mechanism, as well as Cannon,
generalizing it into a "General-Adaptation-Syndrome" or G-A-S [3] . So much of total
human activity implicates the G-A-S, that one is compelled to view it as the dominating
action determinant, which by the theory of homo schizo, means that once the G-A-S comes
into play, once the Central Nervous System is operative, the essence of the response to
stress is also functioning. One does not flick off the G-A-S when one is thinking about
the rings of Saturn or washing dishes. And Jeffrey Gray employs in his own theory of
fear essentially the Cannon-Selye model, "a single fight-flight mechanism which
receives information about all punishment, and then issues commands either to fight or
for flight depending on the total stimulus context in which punishment is received."
[4]
The enhanced release of the adrenomedullary hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine,
denotes that a fight-flight signal has been passed to the central nervous system. In
humans, the signal (l would argue) is incessant, or at least intermittent and rapid,
and comes from a high level of excitation of the cerebral cortex, which is continually
dealing with conflicts - past, present, and future. For a precise description of the
body's response, we may best refer to Tepperman:
The over-all response to the effects of simultaneous sympathetic discharge and
adrenomedullary secretion involves cardiocirculatory responses which are qualitatively
similar to those seen at the beginning of exercise -an increase in cardiac output,
increase in pulse rate, rise in blood pressure. In addition, after a brief initial
period of apnea, there is an increased minute volume of respiration. Splanchnic
vascular constriction (including a reduction in renal blood flow) and dilation of the
skeletal muscle vessels produce a redistribution of the enlarged cardiac output which
anticipates muscle work. The central nervous system arousal effect of the catecholamine
substances results in alertness and quick responsiveness. Hepatic glycogenolysis, its
attendant hyperglycemia, and the mobilization from the fat depots of a large supply of
free fatty acids (FFA), all collaborate to provide a quick charge of readily available
energy to muscles that may be called on. Chemical changes in the muscles themselves
increase their capacity for work and possibly diminish the generation of a fatigue
signal by the muscle. The central nervous system effects of the substances may, at the
same time, diminish central perception of fatigue. As if in anticipation of blood loss,
the spleen contracts while the coagulability of the blood increases. If a committee of
expert physiologists were appointed to draw up specifications for a set of
physiological responses that would meet emergency needs it would be difficult for them
to devise a more interesting effective set than that described here [5] .
Notable is the cyclical effect - for the brain, arousing itself to signal a fancied or
real threat, is immersed in the products of the responses to the signal, and hence can
be forced to continue the signaling. Fight and flight tend never to end, save out of
exhaustion. And human thresholds of exhaustion - of will and of muscle - tend to be
forced to farther limits than those of animals. Horses and dogs reach their limits
because men drive them. Whether in sex, sports, eating, warfare, prayer, business, or
art, humans frequently test their limits.
Anxiety is moderate and continual fear and, were we dissatisfied with the mechanisms of
fear in producing human nature, we should seek the mechanisms of anxiety. But they are
the same as those described already. The dozens of physical and mental symptoms of
anxiety [6] , if they are not subsumable under the fear/ flight system in operation,
are by-products or effects of the system.
The explanations of anxiety are significantly related to the theory of homo schizo. M.
Gray mentions five types of hypothesis. That anxiety is a catastrophic response of the
organism to stress is advanced by Goldstein. That anxiety is a threat to one's concept
of the self is advocated by Rogers. That anxiety arises out of unassimilated percepts
is put forward by McReynolds. That it is related to commitment and awareness is
Kirkegaard's notion. And that it signifies perceived threat to existence as a
personality is conceived by May [7] . All can be related to the poly-self problem.
Going beyond Gray to the sources, one can synthesize from them a concept of anxiety as
an unending (because not quite exhausting) flight from oneself occasioned by defeat in
containing emotional stress and by inability to face up to the everyday world. These
opponents would be never a sufficient cause, however, were there not the ever-present
existential fear that the self is not itself, but rather a dissociated confederacy.
And the outer world per se is a source of fear because with this discordant
confederacy, who can be sure that the world is real and fixed? One need not be a
philosopher to sense this fear, but it helps in expressing it. As Schopenhauer wrote,
"The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the
consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its
existence."
Is anxiety normal? Yes, endemic. Is anxiety part of the fear-flight syndrome? Yes. But
for the "flight" part of the syndrome, we must investigate other behavior, beginning
with punishment.
GUILT AND PUNISHMENT
A taboo forbids some relationship of a group's members to an object or being. It
functions as an obsessive phobia. It can also be regarded as an unconscious plan by a
social group to proscribe an activity in general but to grant that the prohibition will
be violated by "sinners." Despite the score of theories as to the nature of taboos,
there seems to be no significant difference between a taboo and the process of law in
rationalized societies except in the degree of analytic awareness accorded to the two
types of phenomena.
Both condemn a transaction, elicit guilt for its performance; excite reliably the
"satanic" impulse of individuals to violate the proscription; thereby exciting impulses
in the satanist and, by identification, the society, to feel guilty; punish the guilty
and give thereby a sado-masochistic bonus to the group members; and then conclude with
the expectation that the cycle will repeat itself. So the taboo, and the law, are
techniques of varying awareness for producing routine behaviors, with exceptional cases
providing a leavening of guilt and punition.
A taboo and a law that are never violated are not only unnecessary, but undesirable,
and a contradiction in terms. It is for the group consensus that the law or taboo is
needed, for "reasons" and "consequences" that are more or less clear but in any event
affirmed, if only in order to exercise the ritual guilt and punishment that the human
uses to assure that his psyche is under governance and can control its aberrations,
both internal and external.
Punishment of the self and of others has the same etiology. Humans who could punish
others but not themselves, or vice versa, are structurally impossible. That observers
have been misled to believe that people exist who are capable of one but not the other
attests to the deluding permutations that are possible in the essential need to deal
with the punitive aspects of the gods.
Guilt is an obsession with the conceived need to punish some part of oneself.
I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the
wrack, And the victim and the torturer.
Thus Baudelaire [8] . Guilt and punishment are both "moral" activities, meaning by
moral that their processing in the central nervous system is associated with compulsive
identifications with symbols or beings of authority. The wish for, or condoning of,
such authority is a wish to control oneself and others, thence ultimately existential
fear. The origin of morality is frequently the perceived behavior of the gods, whether
based on some reality or hallucinatory. The behavior of the gods is an effective
instrument for inculcating fear because of their actual behavior as perceived by the
delusory and projective apparatus of the primeval human mind.
The gods, as perceived, commit wanton injury, cease to commit injury, and commit
benefits more infrequently. They do so ostensibly in all the combinations and
permutations of the high-energy natural forces - lightning, seismism, volcanoes,
hurricanes, meteoritic phenomena. They also do so by facile penetrations of the minds
of people - demanding, exhorting, frightening, and promising.
The individual split-self, comparing itself with others, works to discover a pattern of
actions that distinguishes his behavior from that of others, and one category of others
from another category. Driven by extreme anxiety, his hypotheses become obsessions. He
discovers what he thinks to be such patterns and the relation of such patterns to the
response of the gods.
He proposes and follows with obsessive subjectivity and paranoid zeal the line of
conduct that appears to promise the greatest benefits and the lightest treatment from
the gods (and their representatives - men, animals, plants). He projects his own
correlations into the motives of the gods. Depending upon his charisma and the degree
to which the god's behavior actually has a consistent appearance to others as well as
himself, he makes a consensus of believers, a religious sect.
To strengthen his own self-restrictive behavior and to bargain for control over others,
he transfers his authority to the sect. He finds thereby an accommodation that far
exceeds, in the security and satisfactions that it brings, even the great benefits
being experienced by group cooperation in hunting, farming, and manufacturing. Indeed,
this basic security is so beneficial, that it causes the great development of these
latter activities, and of art, sex and procreativity. All of these activities,
affecting all life, became then suffused with and dependent upon the origination of
guilt and punishment.
Punishment takes many forms - of the self and of others, of the world and of the
thought, of the body and of the mind, of deliberate action and of subconsciously driven
behavior, of mildness and extremeness. All emanate from self-awareness and the
reservoir of primeval fear filled by it.
The need to punish is always independent of the demonstrable effects of the punishment.
Fear finds its nexus whenever it encounters the obstacle of its own illogic. To
sacrifice one's own child to a demanding god is by its own extremity of pain and sorrow
the proof that the punishment must be effective. Moreover, the persistent and universal
presence of human sacrifice is the mere outcropping of self-destructive and destructive
activity, both deliberately and subconsciously conducted, which masses itself beneath
the innumerable different cultures that have evolved since mankind originated.
The kind of punition that asks first for the logical connection between offense and
punishment, and seeks to follow the crime with correction in the future, has only
occasionally and especially in recent times had some impact upon deliberate punishment.
Even then, though faced with psychiatric theories attacking primeval guilt and
punishment, the urge to punish has tended to go underground into the subconscious,
there to expand upwards once again in destructive behaviors that are handled in a
context of fear in which punishment occurs as an ever-present instrument of relief and
discharge.
Basic patterns of behavior are infused with appropriate modes of punition - catatonism
with paralysis for having moved, and by moving, moved the world order to destruction;
obsession with numerous rules to proceed in fixed ways on pain of a variety of
punishments ranging from mild social disapproval to the most horrifying extirpation
that can be devised; sublimation with the torturing of thought, art, and institutional
behavior, generally playing out the eternal drama of the sin of being human; orgasm
with displays of violence, sacrifice and ecstasy.
The common need for authority, especially one who can punish and forgive, is plain, for
punition tends to unite the self, whether it be by the self or by the authority, and a
god is therefore much needed. So is the god needed in external relations, interpersonal
affairs where, as Martin Buber, the theologian, says, God, the Great Thou, enables
human I-Thou relations between one person and another to subsist [9] .
It is plain what an important role the gods play in holding the self together, and why
gods are assigned the tasks of punishment. The tenuous self, striving for integrity,
for self-rule or selves-government, invites a third party, the god, to intervene, who,
by definition rather then logico-empirical proof, restores order in the self by
punishing one or more of its components; it matters not which, and matters not why.
What matters is that the punished being feels whole, feels "better" afterwards. Such is
probably the essential dynamic of masochism.
The transfer of godlike qualities to the rulers of the state-kings, judges, and
generals - and of institutions (presidents) and families (parents) lends these real
beings authority, which hoi polloi can disregard only at the risk of punishment,
whether self-inflicted or imposed by the rulers.
Witness today, for instance, a typical sequence of problems and behavior in the
"educated" family, pictured through the mind of the father: 'My children have no
conscience... They discovered that I was not obeying a third party... they don't obey
me... they feel free to attack me... they should have been given a party [abstract and
delusional] to which both I and hence they would refer judgements... I could have
dominated them [paradoxically] much more if I showed them that I was submissive to a
third party... then they would join me in relation to the third party and I would not
be the target of their hostility..."
Every life activity displays guilt and punishment - sexuality, food production, tool-
making, war and justice, death. The peculiarly human aura of sexuality, like that of
other human life areas, is owing to the architectonics of fear, with its
archinstruments of guilt and punitiveness, working its way through the continuous mind-
exploding mechanisms of the split self (selective memory, symbolization, control-
seeking).
As M. Gray has mentioned, fright in man is more complex than in animals because "the
new dimension that is reached in man can be viewed as symbolic fear." [10] Sex and
fear systems are tied together in endocrinal secretions, so that there is little need
in psychology to devise a logico-rational explanation of how, beginning with fear, the
human mind runs to sex, or vice versa. The fight-flight system is basically the fear
system, and is "ubiquitous," using Tepperman's word.
Bleuler discovered early that "the idea of intercourse is often expressed by that of
murder," that "wars and duels are symbols of cohabitation," and that the idea of being
burned is tied up with murder and sex [11] . Often we observe that peacetime anxieties
or fear produce sexual impotency, whereas wartime fears, where violence is pervasive,
produce lust and rape. Men going about looking for jobs develop impotence; men
infiltrating an enemy town or abandoning it seek sexual outlets. Unleashed violence
uses sex as a screen for and release of fear. However, regarding murder, say, sex is
not the originator. The life areas are intertwined, as are all others.
The human does not compartmentalize, especially when under stressed fear, nor do many
animals, but the human has a lower threshold of compartmentalization than the animal
and must endure, indeed often enjoys, the confusion and mingling of life activities.
Strange, because the human is the greatest analyst of mixtures, and can separate, in
his mind and by scientific tests, the life areas so that pure categories of sex and
aggression and work, etc. are educed.
A wide range of "normal" and abnormal" behaviors are developed in man, reflecting every
known special sex behavior of every species, even at least up to the point of
zoological impossibility as in divine and mythical hermaphroditism. (In rare cases, as
today, and in perhaps a flurry of mutational cases in primordial natural disaster,
hermaphrodites may have provided the grain of truth to the common myths of divine
hermaphroditism.) Man's mind certainly dwells upon hermaphroditism. Resistance,
obsession, sublimation and orgiasm, in turn and in combination, emit a host of various
sex behaviors, in the individual and group.
What the mental strategies do to characterize the sex instincts of humans is also done
in the other areas of life. Consequently, if one were to eliminate, in each successive
area of life, the generic holistic mechanism working upon continuously renewed and
stored fear, one would discover at the end of each process of elimination a root
element, the sexual, the grower, the maker, the fighter, the dying person. Although no
more complex than the fullness in toto of animal behavior, these areas are elaborated
in an exceedingly rich manner within humans by the basic mechanism operating out of
fear in unending supply.
AVERSION AND PARANOIA
A common element in schizophrenic symptomology is an aversiveness to humans. This
includes social distrust, desire for privacy, fear and dislike of others, expectation
of being rejected, and the conviction that one is unlovable - all on an intense level.
A strong rejection to being helped is common. It is a mutual rejection of the
bodyselves and a separation from the world and others of the poly-self. It is self-
conscious - not animal awareness, but a delusory standing off from oneself, with the
whole world (inner and outer) thus revealed, expanded by the sense of time - of recall,
memory, and forgetting - and of space.
The "paranoia" comes from the Greek where, anciently, to be "out of one's mind," that
is para (beside) and nous (mind), denoted insanity in general; in American vernacular
one would say "I was beside myself with worry." Now, narrowly, paranoia is restricted
to projections of threat. The paranoic aspects of primordial and existential fear are
well known. Fear fathers destructiveness. Whenever the skies darkened, or certain stars
approached, or the Earth trembled, paranoia was stirred up. Legends often openly assert
that "because" the gods were destroying the world, men took up arms against each other.
Even voices out of highly civilized cultures, such as Alsatian peasant culture, will
assure one that wars follow upon great meteoritic showers, as in 1914.
What the gods are intending, as projected, is retrojected back to oneself, to one's
group members, and to outside humans. In extenso, it often happens that the gods
instruct men to destroy each other. Official psychiatric reports of the great Alaskan
earthquake of 1964 describe how blame for the disaster, often couched in terms of an
Act of God, was expressed in guilt-feelings and in accusations against others, such as
"I changed my church," or "He changed his church."
The inventive aspects of paranoia are considerable. The paranoid is highly energized.
He stresses symbolism. He acutely discerns remote analogies as he searches for
conspiracies. He prospers upon the unknown and unintelligible. He is obsessive,
confident where others falter; he has answers, and insists that others adopt his
answers. The dominating role of the paranoid in the origins and history of civilization
becomes understandable. His "sickness" was no sickness in primordial times.
Nor, properly rationalized in the language and procedures of existing culture, is the
paranoid "sick" in the world of today. For every provable connection of effect with
cause, humans resort to hundreds of paranoic assertions. The reason, when experts are
asked why, is usually given as "ignorance." But is it not as easy to apply a simple
logic on what is known, or to confess ignorance, as it is to learn or invent false
accusations continually? The primary ego is compelled to assert its omniscience and,
since the function of "knowing" is really to reduce internal fears, accusatory
explanations are in heavy demand.
A paranoid is usually beset by ambivalence, the love-hate double face and double mind
of the schizophrenic, the abrupt turn from one to the other make relations between
schizophrenics and others often more terrifying than consistent hostility.
AMBIVALENCE
But ambivalence, we should argue, if we are set to follow homo schizo theory, must be
universal in man and culture. And so it is. It is the good and the bad of everything.
It is "the two sides to every question" that underlies the judicial systems and many
cultures. It is manifest in the fact that people and cultures "choose" to differ in
every way that they can, from one another and within themselves. The alter egos must
emerge. Cannibals can be divided into those who eat their enemies and those who eat
their friends.
Levi-Strauss says that the incest prohibition is the only universal culture trait, a
bold and learned claim. But a moment's consideration will put the claim into a
revealing context. The scope of incest rules differs: some stop with parents, other
with nuclear families, others with uncles and aunts, other with clans and so on in
various combinations. By their existence and limitations, the rules implicate contrary
wishes, hence ambivalence.
Furthermore, societies have rules about everything that can be the subject of rules;
incest is no more specific a concept than murder, and all societies have rules about
murder; further, all societies "by right" are totalitarian implicitly if not explicitly
endorsing the old army saying that "there is a right way and a wrong way to do
everything in this Army." (There is an alternative rendering which is, "There is the
right way, and there is the Army way; you do it the Army way!") Finally "rules are made
to be broken;" without infractions there would be no rules which means, more subtly,
that it is desirable to have infractions, if only to gratify the punishers, but, more
than that, in order to let what is right be known.
Today the gods are less frankly present in the operations of the "normal" mind and
institutions; but the schizoid meaning of the primordial gods is clear. It is not
enough to say that the first human mind could imagine the gods and imitate their
imaginings (projection and retrojection). It actually did so on the basis of more
reality than is fashionable to admit nowadays. The human mind was born with the gods,
that is, with those terrible entities of the sky that are said to have wrecked the
world, and that were hovering above and swooping down over a period of thousands of
years, ever refreshing the reservoir of fear in the human mind.
The animation was imagined, or so our modern logic insists. No matter, for every symbol
stood for a memorable sign, every myth represented an event, then came imitation -
prompt, unquestioning, and illogical. Above all other relationships in the world was
the identification with bodies that both hated and loved humans on a massive scale;
these were the gods who turned upon another, castrating (Saturn-Uranus, Jupiter-Typhon,
etc.), maiming, tearing off heads and limbs, hurling mountains and cosmic discharges at
each other and at men.
"Black magic" sees a hand in everything that happens. The paranoid often sees the same.
Comets and meteors readily simulate the hand. The prehistoric caves contain the hand in
great numbers. The "Hand of God" is frequently reported stretching out from the heavens
to the agonized populace. At one and the same time, it is the image of terror, of
inevitability (the hand finally grasps), of help and of punishment. He also "Holds the
Whole World in His Hands."
But the hand is only a part of the rich assemblage of forms that natural bodies can
assume, all of which contributes to the original and continued reification and
anthropomorphizing of the gods. Schizophrenics, more commonly than controlled normal
schizoids, reify the outer world. insofar as the schizotypical human has been in the
forefront of human development, the gods as "humans writ large on the skies" are
unending.
What they did to men was beyond modern belief and was deeply suppressed. But it was
never truly forgotten. The myths of old, the dreams of the normal, and the autistic
reveries of the schizophrene are basically alike in structure and purpose: to manage
the unmanageable. Whoever survived had to believe that they were the chosen people of
the gods. Further, all the new aspects of their environment (like the manna and the
ambrosia from heaven) that helped them to survive, kill enemies, give birth, and carry
on creatively (arts and crafts) made them believe in the love of god. It is the famous
"double bind," which social environmentalists attribute often to a mother who works out
a hate-love relationship with her child, and which makes the child schizophrenic. But
going back generation-to-generation to the earliest times the mother, and her mother,
and so on, can only deal in hate-love ambivalence, because they were so dealt with by
the primeval divinities.
ANHEDONICS
After ambivalence comes the pleasure-phobia, the symptom of anhedonia, which Meehl has
called "one of the most consistent and dramatic behavioral signs of the disease" of
schizophrenia. It is a "marked, widespread and refractory defect in pleasure capacity."
Man has been mistakenly called a hedonistic or pleasure-seeking animal. The
psychiatrist would say that this is correct only if self-destructive and other
anhedonistic behaviors can be termed pleasurable. If whatever the organism seeks
becomes, by definition, pleasurable, then it is hedonistic.
The hedonistic theory is inherited from the Benthamite school of early nineteenth
century England. The psychology of hedonism had taken over a commanding position in
Western societies in the guise of democracy and socialism. Certain philosophers -
ancient Epicurus for instance - certain societies, not many - the United States for
example - take up the idea enthusiastically. Or, at least, so imply the advertisers.
But, say the critics of American civilization, the attempt at hedonism fails miserably.
In reality, the pursuit of hedonism is always a secondary social aim. No society has
ever been founded upon the pleasure principle. All societies are ideologically
committed to the principles of anhedonia: pleasure is evil; pleasure is impossible;
pleasure brings punishment, suffering is good; pleasure is a release from disciplined
suffering; pleasure is to be tolerated only upon the celebration of a disastrous
anniversary, as an orgy inviting repentance. The orgy is a complex of smile and snarl -
as in dogs we have known, and in humans we should wish to investigate. It is from the
human person that society is constructed, and where anhedonia is born. To prove this,
one may begin with deduction. Pleasure-phobia is logically implied in the theory of the
fearful polyego. The mental construction of the human is fundamentally unsettled. The
frustrations of existence - to satisfy needs and evade the blows of nature - write an
undulating pattern over the basic unsettlement.
Now if one is permitted the irony, is it not strange that pleasure should be regarded
as natural and in this day people who are anhedonic should be regarded as mad, when it
is the hedonist who perhaps should more naturally be taken to be mad? It is significant
therefore that the definition of pleasure itself is the greatest weakness of hedonism
as a philosophy. The hedonist begins by thinking of pleasure as a commonplace idea:
"eat, drink, and be merry," "a car for every family," "peace and plenty," "a chicken in
every pot," "free love," etc. That is, the hedonist turns out to be a superficial
psychologist who has a rationalist uni-dimensional view of people.
However, most people seem intent upon rejecting this kind of pleasure in part or whole.
As soon as one asks of the hedonist, "What gives people pleasure?" he must reply:
"People get pleasure from whatever they wish to do or have done to them." Pleasure,
then, in a word, is "Voluntarism," as in the old-fashioned expression, found in several
European languages as a mode of address to superiors, e. g. "What is the gentleman's
pleasure?" Under the Ancien R‚gime in France, the King signed all of his promulgations
with the phrase, "Car tel est notre bon plaisir," which phrase would be related upon
every reading of a law or judgement, as when a man was condemned to death, "For such is
our good pleasure." But of what does Voluntarism consist in primeval humanity?
Assuredly it is in fulfilling those devices that are animal in kind: feeding,
fornication, fighting and fleeing danger. More than that? Yes, hanging around where one
can feed and fornicate and feel free from danger the next time on each cycle.
What else, that is typically human? To refuse food, to refuse sex, to fight instead of
flee. Even more, to do all that can possibly be imagined to use these elemental desires
in ways that will establish and secure the most wanted triple-control of the self,
others and the gods.
Let us look at the earliest legends of mankind. What do they have him doing in these
regards? A great many unpleasurable things. He sets up a host of taboos against the
most plausible kinds of enjoyment.
He eats only certain food, and at only certain times. He eats what is bad to eat when
good foods are available. He eats in a certain way, giving a portion of the best of his
food to the gods, as hungry and insecure as he may be. He fasts. He eats his gods and
his enemies. He builds a great oral literature on what to avoid eating and subsidizes
priests to tell him what not to eat, when, and how to prepare what he does eat, ulcer
or not. Would it be permissible to suggest that two out of every ten humans who have
ever lived have died prematurely from pursuing irrational eating habits? (Meaning by
irrational: ingesting or avoiding because of non-dietary reasons what is severely
prescribed or proscribed.)
Sexual behavior, too, is thoroughly permeated by restrictions and impositions. Name an
animal that lingers in coition. Other than man, of course. That exults in creating a
female orgasm. Whose orgasms are compared with death itself? Not "I am born," but "I am
dying" is the sometimes climactic ejaculation by the sexual partner, with subsequent
relief and relaxation from having met with death and survived. And again creates a
philosophy, as the Hindu, for one instance, that explains how you weaken yourself unto
death by sexuality. So, too, conflict. To defend is "natural," to flee is natural; but
not to attack deliberately with one's guts roiling, in row upon row with bayonets
fixed, with death ahead, yet death from behind upon whoever falters. Whence the awards
go to those who have suffered most joyously, doggedly, "without questioning why, but to
do or die." Verily who seeks pleasure seeks its own reward; who seeks pain and
suffering is exalted before oneself, before man, and before god.
The earliest glyphs and scripts of mankind are pleasure-phobic to the degree to which
they are sacred. Coming from the Egyptians, Hebrews, Sumerians, Mayans, Chinese,
Icelanders, Myceneans and Greeks, these coherent patches of history and morality stress
without exception that the pains of existence must be and should be, hardly ever do
they set up mammalian or sublimated pleasures as a human ideal.
The anhedonism of primordial and schizophrenic humans is understandable: existential
fear demands not pleasure, but relief. And this relief results from a broad spectrum of
activities that are hardly pleasurable: self-mutilation, sacrifice, cannibalism and
exhausting ritual. The ambivalence of the gods and of the self, too, warn against
pleasure.
T. Reik has argued that the original sin was not sexual but rather of hubris, the
imitation of the god's power, such as the seizing of the God's fire [12] . It was
alright for the Homeric heroes to address the gods as "blessed and happy;" but calling
themselves happy was an invitation to disaster.
Far more institutions have been created in ancient and modern times for the suppression
of pleasure than for its enjoyment. But as Freud intimated in his Civilization and Its
Discontents, without suppression of the instincts there would be no civilization.
Herbert Marcuse has more recently elaborated upon the thesis in Eros and Civilization.
Even these trenchant criticisms for culture now seem superficial. They have but carried
forward another version of "the noble savage" of eighteenth century philosophy. One
cannot discover, nor properly induce from pre-history, a human culture that sought to
provide pleasure except as it might be incidental to relief and escape. Anhedonism is
imprinted upon human nature, the individual schizoid psyche, which is pleasure-phobic
more than pleasure-prone, abets and invents the anhedonistic institutions. And
institutions "hate pleasure," whereas they cultivate suffering.
Usually, pleasure-phobia is an aversion to interpersonal and "animal" pleasure rather
than to cognitive and aesthetic pleasure. The schizo-type can evince aesthetic and
intellectual hypercathexis without the fears and guilt of interpersonal pleasures (i.
e., human pleasures). Anhedonia is not apathy, but is pseudoapathy, a tense and anxious
state; its final form is catatonism, which is really "playing possum" with the gods.
CATATONICS
Manu, the Noah of the Hindus, "practiced severe and great self-mortification." Wearing
a bark shirt, his hair matted, "while he stood on one foot with his arms raised, with
bent head and eyes unblinking, he performed awesome austerities for 10,000 years." He
was chosen by order of the gods to recreate all creatures after the Deluge. "By virtue
of his very severe self-mortifications the manner shall be manifest to him." [13] So
the model of man is taught the greatest knowledge by the greatest suffering.
Freud in one place quotes Kaempfer on the taboos governing the Japanese Emperor of old:
In ancient times he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning,
with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue, without
stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because,
by this means, it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquility in his
empire; for if, unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he
looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was apprehended that war,
famine, fire, or some other great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country
[14] .
Gurdjieff reports an experience from Central Asia. There in a village a religious sect
was playing games of magic circles. A girl was frozen in the circle that other children
had drawn around her. She could not move out nor could adults from the sect drag her
out. Persons who entered and left the circle remained in a catatonic state for many
hours. It seems that one entering the circle grants her vital force over to an outside
being as a bribe to prevent harm to oneself. Thus emptied of vitality, one cannot move.
There is more than an analogy with some psychological problems in a rigid bureaucracy.
The incubant at his desk gives over his life forces to an outside being - in this case
the inanimate collective representation that is the agency or bureau. Whereupon the
employee becomes inert, immobile, and cannot direct the very forces he is employed to
manage.
Workers concerned with disaster assistance comment frequently upon the fatalism and
denial of the victims; often the outsiders are baffled and become angry. In one of the
few honest reports ever written on this question, a transport expert working intimately
with the truck drivers bringing food in the recent Sahelian drought and having
substantial contact with the rural population, reported that at first none of the local
population seemed ever to have heard of the drought; later he concluded that they felt
it deeply and were taking rational steps to minimize the hurt in ways they had known
all their lives. In much of the Savannah and desert of Africa, people take drought to
be a necessary divine warning that religions and moral standards are slipping and that
a revival is due. The harm done to them must actually be received in a sacred mood. It
is notable that this report is of rare honesty. Ordinarily the nervous givers of
charities must be reassured that the recipients are responding "logically" and
"rationally," and reporters generally supply such news upon demand.
What is the fear of change of habits, customs, society and human relationships, even of
aging? Is it based upon some pragmatic calculus of cause-consequence; that is, is it
based upon the experience of change, discovering that change is always for the worse?
And why does the feeling vary so greatly, then, among individuals, so that, for
example, a social psychologist such as Lowell could divide politicians and public
opinion into two categories: the optimistic and the pessimistic?
The fear of change derives from the anxiety over the potential loss of an ego
stability, which is markedly worse the less the poly-ego is stabilized to begin with.
May this not explain the phenomena of personal and social conservatism and stagnation?
The process in society, as in the person, is self-aggravating. As a society
destabilizes in revolution, whether social, industrial, or political, far from people
becoming habituated to the change, they become more desperate. Even though the change
may be rationalized as beneficial, any material improvement and a formal lift in
dignity become inadequate consolations for the failures of individuals to compose new
poly-selves for the new times. This should constitute a lesson for non-Marxian
revolutionaries.
A catatonic patient, like Manu, is far from "despairing" of control of the world. He
may hold a position for months, but if moved, flex and adjust so as to maintain the
assumed position [15] . His ability is unconscious in that it far exceeds any normal
ability. Other patients (Bleuler called them "waxy cataleptics") were without
spontaneous movement but maintained any position in which they were placed. Another
type went on repeating motions that were supposed to have begun and stopped. Often the
cataleptic exercises himself in an "affirmation of negativism" that requires great
muscular energy and coordination.
Here is what other mental patients say: "I can't move if I am distracted by too much
noise. I can't help stopping to listen. That's what happens when I am lying in bed. If
there is too much noise going on, I can't move." Another says, "I get stuck, almost as
if I am paralyzed at times." They are driven sometimes to losing their subjectivity.
They become objects and, as one patient said, "Objects don't have feelings. '' [16]
Catatonism tells the gods or other authorities: "I do not move, lest when I move I am
noticed, and the world, too, will move." Catatonism is a common response to the shocks
of primeval and historical disasters. It is seen in every accident ward and especially
in military hospitals. In a great disaster, such as Hiroshima, catatonism is a major
behavioral response.
Non-rationalized cultures (mistakenly termed "primitive")) simulate catatonism when
reenacting the earliest days of creation. Members of a certain Jewish sect must remain
throughout the Sabbath in the same posture that they were assuming when the Sabbath
began. Children present during traditional religious ceremonies are warned to be
particularly silent and immobile while the priest reenacts the primordial end of one
world and beginning of the next. Wherever the authority of religion has descended upon
secular institutions - be it a library or the mausoleum of Lenin - a "respectful"
silence is maintained. Gestures become restrained. Clothing becomes "appropriately"
somber, unobtrusive. All that is individually outward is suppressed, and it all
"happens naturally."
Short of catatonism and beyond anhedonia exists the realm of apathy. Schizophrenics,
the psychiatrists say, are so contradictory: sometimes excessively voluble,
hyperactive, frenzied, and then again and for prolonged periods apathetic. Nothing
interests or excites them. They may be occasionally aroused, and then retreat
dramatically into torpor of manner, posture, and speech. They are impossible to arouse.
No one knows what stimulus will once more perhaps excite them. Meanwhile no indignity
inflicted upon themselves or others, no injustice, no deprivation seems to matter.
Electric shock treatment is resorted to, a horrible experience, a repetition of
primeval bolts of Jove. Occasionally, a cure of apathy results, but note that it is a
worse pain, a greater fear of the lightning discharge, that arouses the patient, not a
pleasure; no pleasure will ever do the job. Pain, not pleasure, is the route to
resuscitation, a recovery of a status as a punished one, a way to please the self,
others and the gods.
Self-deception of anhedonia and catatonics can be carried to the expected extreme of
self-destruction by suicide, just as with the other delusions of man. Karl Meninger
sees in all mental illness a core of self-destructiveness. Freud's last paradigm had
"Thanatos," the death instinct, juxtaposed to "Eros," the life instinct. There is no
use in trying to draw a line to include only the mentally ill. Self-destruction in its
most obvious forms, leading to death, is an extreme anhedonism, by definition, which is
to say that other self-destructive behaviors that are not so obviously leading out of
anhedonia are tied into anhedonia for the simple reason that man seeks self-control
holistically and hologramatically; the symptoms are interrelated. Oblivion in
catatonism and death is the ultimate control of the self by surrender; the self is no
longer divided or in disarray or scattered.
ORGIES AND HOLOCAUSTS
But a place must be made for orgiastic behavior. Whereas one kind of violence emerges
from the discipline and sacrifices of "law and order" or obsessive social forms and
institutions, a second kind of violence entails the tearing down of structures and
institutions. Sometimes this occurs in Saturnalian orgies where deliberately, for the
nonce, all social forms are turned upside down; masters serve slaves, equality reigns,
contracts are broken, wealth is burned or otherwise wasted. Amidst the Assyrian terror,
Isaiah cries out: "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die." (Is 22; 13)
Ecclesiastes does him one better: "Eat, drink, and be merry..." At other times,
orgiastic violence becomes warfare and social purges, such as witch hunts and political
reigns of terror.
"The conscience for which [Hitler] stands," wrote Lasswell in 1933, "is full of
obsessional doubts, repetitive affirmations, resounding negations, and stern
compulsions." [17] Mass death followed. The obsessional and the orgiastic work hand in
glove. Human sacrifices, an ancient Pharoah inscribed, will purge you to the
satisfaction of the gods. Warfare, for the Aztecs, was continuously needed to provide
prisoners whose sacrifice was demanded to keep the world orderly and the sun regular.
Sizemore and Myers have connected schizophrenia, fear of world destruction, and ancient
catastrophes [18] . Eissler calls Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of the end of the world
by flood, fire, hurricane, and explosive seismism his last and greatest works [19] .
The orgiastic event commemorates the end of the world or of one world. "Better a
terrible end than an endless terror," said the Nazi slogan. Again, it is a replay of
the primeval times of disaster, a carrying out of the will of the indignant or new god.
Political force represents phylogenetically the force that overturns the earth;
therefore, necessarily often, political force is adored, is not to be restrained, and
when abused, remains still genealogically right. There are many analogies in the human
mind between natural and political violence; Shakespeare, as Irving Wolfe demonstrates,
interchanges social, personal and nature's language in a shower of metaphors.
Holocausts are demanded. "The beast within us" is called forth. But, of course, it is
not a beast; no beast acts so; it is the human within us that is called out. A common
phrase in writings about repulsive practices is "Even as late as..," as if mankind had
been on an upward track of moral conduct. "Even as late as the Roman Empire, infant
sacrifices to Saturn occurred... etc." "Not until the Spaniard arrived, did the Aztecs
cease their regular cannibal sacrifices of thousands of persons," or "the Jews of
Czarist Russia and the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were not freed from the dread of
pogrom and massacre until 1920," or "As late as the 1880's the Shawnee Indians
sacrificed a maiden upon the near approach of planet Venus."
However, relief is not in sight. Progress is a matter of a few years. Somewhere, at any
given time, a massacre or deadly persecution is probably taking place. The human
"holocausts" of the German Nazis, Russian communists, Chinese communists and
nationalists and of the lesser Balinese military, Cambodia communists and other groups
of the past half-century took perhaps one hundred million lives. Wars and starvation by
neglect killed another hundred millions. And the world arms, while it talks in terms of
killing more hundreds of millions of people.
It is not difficult to prove that homo schizo is nearly as far from "killing only to
eat" as he ever was. Nor has any social invention appeared that might promise a
definite end to such catastrophic behavior. This, more than anything else, ought to
motivate the study of human nature. We know, do we not, that the historical modes and
inventions of systems of social cooperation have failed all critical tests?
There is an automatic anhedonia about modern holocausts. The pleasure-phobia sacrifices
others to reassure itself: "The only good Indian is a dead one." But the phobia then
goes farther to hide the emotionality of the deed by bureaucratizing (routinizing) it.
The self-suffering (which is not rationalizable to others) is translated into
sublimated self-suffering that makes sense to others. In cultures where religion
provides infinite legitimated anhedonia, this is an easy matter; every impulse to
suffering can be indulged.
SUBLIMATION OF FEAR
Nevertheless, older religions (theocracies, specifically) set up channels of suffering
that lead to astonishing aesthetic and intellectual products. Especially in cultures
deviating from heavy religious norms, self-suffering by sublimated activity is given an
individual or scientific-bureaucratic base, and it is here that the schizophrenic is
identified; since he is not incorporated into bureaucracy and rituals, his activity is
exposed as psychopathic; then wonder is expressed at the great aesthetic and
intellectual product that emerges from his suffering mental state as in the case of the
composer Schuman, the sociologist Max Weber, the novelist Kafka, and so on.
Aesthetics and invention are displacements and trans-substantiations of interpersonal
suffering, conveyed in ideas and symbols. Thus frequently the schizoid patient
surprises his keepers by contrasting behaviors, on the one hand completely
uncoordinated and erratic where people are concerned, but on the other hand competent,
cool, logical in the pursuit of music, mathematics, and zoology.
In such pursuits, the schizoid leaps over his uncontrollable anxieties of the other
self, the other person, the living nature and gods. Then he (or she) doubles back upon
the percepts and cognitions left behind, purging them until they form a colorless
fabric of abstractions which he drapes comfortably over himself.
In movies, novels, and journalism people (normal) express surprise and anger at how
many institutions of love and priests of love behave contrarily; these are unfeeling,
inhuman, interested mostly in abstracted aspects of people and things. Such frequent
behavior of "welfare officials" is partly their anhedonism and partly their personal
aversiveness, whether expressed by them characterologically or as typical
representations of institutions.
A climactic case of a love institution built upon a great fear and hatred is afforded
by the American Jonestown community of Guyana, South America, where several years ago
some 900 people living in a community of love were suddenly transformed by their
leadership into a community of suicides and killers, to the end that within a few hours
almost no one was left alive. In the interviews and reports issuing upon the disaster,
the phrases of terror and doom dominate.
Man cannot lift himself by his own bootstraps. The human has been and is always in some
combined state, varying cyclically in intensity, of self-punition, aversiveness,
anhedonia, ambivalence, paranoia, catatonism, and orgiasm, as well as obsession. The
social structures are but an extension to help him control these embodiments of
anxiety. It may be hopeless to seek exceptions via cultural anthropology or special
religious sects.
Fear phenomena can be manipulated, handled, understood, balanced, but not erased.
Otherwise we should have a vegetable or simple animal, for the animals closest to man
have also a problem of eternal angst. A normal scientist (and to be a scientist implies
an abnormality), admittedly a superman of rationalized controls, is ipso facto allowed
and trained to mistrust his senses, to mistrust the word of others, to regard
everything as important (that is, engage in the most remote displacements), to check
and recheck anxiously, to be obsessive about his subject, to avoid personal
identifications and emotions, and to suffer self-punition over extended periods of
times. What is science, indeed, but a capitalization of instinct-delay and the heavy
anxiety-alert to develop and exploit them as actual products?
Notes (Chapter 5: Coping With Fear)
1. Op. cit., 234-5.
2. Jay Tepperman, Metabolic and Endocrine Physiology, Chicago: Year Book Medical
Publishers, 1962, 136.
3. The Physiology and Pathology of the Exposure to Stress, Montreal: Acta, 1950.
4. Op. cit., 195.
5. Op. cit., 136-7.
6. Cf. Melvin Gray. op. cit., 97ff for a list.
7. Ibid., 93.
8. Baudelaire, (Penguin ed., 1961), 160.
9. I and Thou, 1937.
10. M. Gray, op. cit., 131.
11. Op. cit., 415-6, 27.
12. Theodor Reik, Myth and Guilt. 13. J. A. B. van Buitenen, "Manu, Ut-Napischtim, and
Noah," U Of Chicago mag. (Winter, 1975), 10-3.
14. Totem and Taboo, 1913, N. Y.: Norton, 1950, 45.
15. Bleuler, op. cit., 180.
16. Mc Ghee and Chapman, 63, Patients 12, also patients 3, 5, 20, 14,1.
17. Harold D. Lasswell, "Psychology of Hitlerism," in Political Behavior (studies),
London.
18. Warner Sizemore and John V. Myers "Schizophrenia and The Fear of World
Destruction," I Kronos, (Spring, 1975), 75; cf. W. A. Spring, "Observations on World
Destruction Fantasies," 8 Psychanal. Q. (1939), 48-56.
19. K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci: Psychoanalytic Notes on an Enigma, London:
Hogarth Press, 1962.
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIX
SYMBOLS AND SPEECH
Speech is the favorite among the traits said to mark the human being. "The chain of
nucleosynthetic evolution.. breaks over the derivation of language," T. A. Wertime
writes. To speak and understand "marks the crucial breach in the symbiosis of primate
and nature, the onset of contrivance and 'sin'. '' [1] Language breaks the instinctive
bond between man and nature and sets man free in a maelstrom of delusions. Other
species are outdistanced in the race to set up communication systems, but still their
achievements limit the human claims.
Speech is systematic symbolism. Symbolism characterizes all outputs and effects of
human behavior. Whether we grow crops, organize business, or sell books, what we do has
symbolic origins and is conducted by and amidst symbols, and deals with symbolized
things. The final form of much human output is largely symbolic, as with scientific,
technical, and ordinary discourse, also with art, some myth, and a part of religion and
magic. Ernst Dichter, a well-known human relations consultant, produced for the use of
manufacturers and advertisers an encyclopedia devoted to the Psychological connotations
of a great many industrial designs [2] .
Human speech, language, the 'vox humana' does not consist of written words. The written
word is merely a representation of speech in another (and more constraining) medium - a
further level of symbolism, since language itself is a set of symbols for concepts
which themselves correspond but poorly to external reality. Language is a code of a
code; writing is a code of this code of a code [3] .
I quote this out of a personal letter from the linguist Malcolm Lowery.
SILENT SYMBOLISM
Not to be excluded from symbolism are graphic codes, signs, marks on trees and stones,
sacred paths and benchmarks, routes among the stars, and very many other human
productions. All are sent and received as symbols. Illusions are symbols inasmuch as
non-existent objects or facets of objects present themselves significantly to the
brain, standing for something else.
Studies of American Sign Language, a system imparted to the deaf and employed by the
deaf, sometimes by the deaf to the deaf, establish "the fact that to be a medium
capable of expressing the full range of human intentions language need not be spoken.
It is the human brain, not the mouth or the larynx that makes language possible. ASL is
a complete language." [4] Wit, humor, poetry and song are within the capabilities of
sign language.
Hence, language without speech is possible. Signals (smoke or flags), gestures (deaf
mutes), whistling (cf. Harpo Marx), and writing (letter, romances) are alternative
modes of communication. So is pantomime. This would suggest that speech is not the
"cause" of language, but that language prompts speech and other means of communication.
Eric H. Lenneberg shows that at the age of 21-37 months the age of "acquisition of
language," the "right hemisphere can easily adopt sole responsibility for language and
language appears to involve the entire brain.. though the left hemisphere is beginning
to become dominant toward the end of the period." [5] By the age of fourteen language
is markedly left-lateralized, irreversibly. I conclude that the internal language code
is first set up; then the physico-motor apparatus and left-brain dominance usurp
language for external and public behavior.
The road is clear, then to consider whether self-speech may prompt public speech,
admitting that public speech may govern self-speech to a degree. Or, more
appropriately, we should assert that self-symboling prompts public symbolism.
ANATOMY
Speech occurs similarly in all humans: sound waves are made by muscles and tubes, and
consist of phonemes (vowels and consonants, etc.), combining into morphemes (e. g.
words), which acquire a morphology (sentences, etc.) and broader levels of syntactical
patterning - the whole largely unconscious except on the superficial level of the
"spelling bee."
No specific speech center occurs in the brain, a fact of large significance: there is
no speech organ, no lobe, no sign of an organic mutation, no high density
concentration, no neural bunch, no exclusive territory. Speech is controlled from a
large cortical area extending from just in front of the visual area, across the
auditory to the edge of the motor region. The area can be tested functionally in the
left hemisphere for the right-handed person, and in the right for the left-handed.
The tongue and larynx have muscles and the brain accords them special motor areas. The
area for the tongue is much larger than for the whole leg, one more instance of the
dye-economy, or at least "indifference" of "nature," assigning to the "less important"
a large housing while the more worthy tenant sleeps wherever he can. The whole central
nervous system supplies the messages that are framed by the lips and tongue.
The chimpanzee enjoys no such grandeur, says Ralph Gerard, "I strongly suspect that you
could not teach a chimpanzee to speak chimpanzee, let alone English, because he doesn't
have large enough areas for his tongue and his larynx. '' [6]
We are not convinced: an ape can make several distinct sounds, say six; this would
allow about 26 or 128 unrepetitive combined sounds, many more if repetitive, viz.,
"hubba, hubba."
Attacking the assertion of one pongid researcher, that "language is no longer the
exclusive domain of man," one group of scientists has concluded from its study of a
chimpanzee called "Nim," and an analysis of other pongid and infant studies, that an
"apes's language is severely restricted. Apes can learn many isolated symbols (as can
dogs, horses, and other non human species), but they show no unequivocal evidence of
mastering the conversational semantic, or syntactic organization of language." [7]
But all this is not because of a lack of tongue-motor. The brain stores, exercises as
memories, and emits signals according to its history. What is used is banked and what
is not used has no bank account to draw upon. If apes cannot talk, it is not because of
a lack of these evanescent motor centers of the cortex. Nor is it because the brains of
apes are too small. Fluency of speech is not correlated with brain size in humans, with
a span of difference of hundreds of cubic centimeters, as much as one fourth. For that
matter, the human brain is largely disused, so an ape ought to have brain-room for
talking, even if only "small talk." The chimpanzee also has space for data storage in
his brain, beyond motor areas. Nor are apes untrainable, witness the responses obtained
by dedicated keepers over a period of time; they can be made to imitate man closely.
Yet, as claimed above, very little speech ensues.
Is it then that the ape does not want to talk? Yes, that hits at the central problem.
There is not enough internal conflict in the primate to "justify" the installation of a
symbol and signal system. Even if it were to be, or has been partially installed, the
animal is not schizoid enough to levy continuous demands upon the system, and it
deteriorates from desuetude. George Miller says, agreeably, that "talking and
understanding language do not depend on being intelligent or having a large brain. They
depend on 'being human'." [8] So long as the source of human nature cannot be
pinpointed, it is well to put "being human" in quotation marks. But I think that we
shall no longer be required to do so. Perhaps to get apes to talk, infant apes must be
first neuroticized by continuous injections of chemical sensory excitants and
neurotransmitter depressants.
NEUROLOGY OF SPEECH
Monod (1971) maintains that the instructions for building human language may be
contained in the genetic code. If so, the instructions are probably not complicated, as
we shall explain. Writers are verging towards the concept of outer language being the
language also of inner thought. Johnson writes:
Although it must be recognized that language is not the only tool of thought, for we
have unconscious thinking as well, it remains true that most of the mental processes of
humans actually use verbal symbols as stimuli for nonverbal responses. Inner speech is
produced, and it can be used as an instrument of rational processes such as voluntary
movements. Herrick (1956) states: 'l repeat my conviction that some form of symbolism
is requisite and that without the invention of language symbols the human type of
mentation is impossible [9] .
Schizophrenic patients show a profound intuitive understanding of symbolism while
trampling the rules of grammar. Otto Fenichel holds that their symbolism is not a
tactic of distortion but an archaic form of thinking, thinking by metaphor, we would
say. The right hemisphere can assemble word forms by itself, when cut off from direct
communication with the language apparatus of the left brain; this would only confirm
the residue in both brain hemispheres of the bilateral primate ability to utter a
variety of sounds. The chimpanzee can use words, if strongly trained to do so; one of
them, Washoe, used veritable sign language, derived from American Sign Language,
leading Pribram to say that "primates can construct and communicate by signs, context-
free, consistent attributes of a situation which are discriminated and recognized."
[10]
In accordance with the theory of human Hologenesis, to be advanced later, and in
striking coincidence with the philosophy of pragmatism, we can argue that language is
thought, and thought is language. What happens interpersonally also happens
intrapersonally. Since, as we have just argued, the brain treats "inner" and "outer"
indiscriminately in relevant ways, the brain may actually employ language without
discrimination as to the location of its referents. The infant babbles; a year later he
utters a "word", that is, a reference that outsiders can comprehend. Whether one is
talking to an audience or talking to oneself may be a reference that is learned. It is
within the ken of many people to hear a victim of trauma - an exhausted survivor, a
tired soldier, a mourning widow - range back and forth from talking to the outsiders to
talking to oneself and to "insiders" of the self.
Black (1971) has reviewed recent work which demonstrates that hallucinated words and
sounds can affect the EEG [electroencephalogram]. The normal production of alpha waves
are changed by such experiments, and evoked potentials are altered in hallucinating
situations. The conclusion was that the EEG responds in a manner which demonstrates
that hallucinatory material is processed as a reality to the nervous system just as any
other phenomenon might be perceived [11] .
And again:
It is a fact that Gould (1948, 1949) used a stethoscope to listen to the hallucinated
inner speech of a patient. The externalized sounds can be heard when the instrument is
placed in front of the patient's mouth, and normal speech can be heard at the larynx
[12] .
It is suggested that inner thought forms itself as a neural network of neutral
references among cerebral engrams (gestalts, holograms). Consequently the network
itself becomes a code for interaction among the references. That is, the holograms are
indexed, or given names; then grammar becomes the rules for drawing upon the names. The
basic linguistic expressions, such as: "Dogs fear men"; "Gods exist"; "Go away";
"Spring will return"; are references to a key set of holograms engaging the attention
to expectations based upon their summated behaviors, to egocentric wishes that can be
couched as demands or "laws of nature." The "decision" to employ sound for language is
partly unconscious and habitual, since sound is an old underemployed facility, and then
an invention. Sounds can readily be correlated with the thought code. Silent speech
connects with the speech motor system and springs outward, with striking effects. The
outer world responds to the degree that it is human, or it seems to respond.
Furthermore, experientially, the world responds to the thought rather well than badly.
What begins as ejaculations, develops into propaganda, and propaganda in turn becomes
principles - ethical and scientific. The language changes by feedback and alteration.
Meanwhile, the patterned object of the grammar becomes himself a subject, if single,
and a game between two subject-objects produces a "universe of discourse." Consensus on
words and syntax develops. What happens "outside" happens "inside": the code one uses
internally is never much different from the language used in dealing with the world.
The private language of schizophrenics or anybody is merely a paranoic secret like the
"Pig Latin" of children within hearing distance of their guardians.
If displacements are infinite, so are codewords for them; indeed, the wide variety of
displacements determines the scope of the language. Economically, efficiently, quickly,
energy-conserving: language proceeds. The words need be very few to refer to everything
and all the interactions among them. A half-century after Shakespeare's niagara of
words, Racine's 1000 words and even less were deemed adequate to say everything in
French, and for a long time thereafter anyone inclined to be more verbose, at least in
tragedy, was obsessively resisted.
THE STRUCTURE OF SPEAKING
What produces systematic symboling in the human? The elements of the process are self-
dispersion, anxiety, self-collection, coding, metaphor, and algebra. There is a
sequence in all of this, but it happens so quickly and continuously, and with so much
overlapping, that it is misleading to make neat phrases. Of self-dispersion, anxiety,
and self-collection we have already spoken. The self, split by instinct delays that
scramble the ego, undergoes heavy anxiety, and strives for reinstinctualization or any
other forms of what is hoped will be self-control. For this purpose, it ranges through
the world and time by its techniques of displacement, lodging everywhere but then
having to control these lodgments, too [13] . The displacements do not enter the brain
pell-mell and without discrimination. The impulse that identifies them in the first
place is motivated. A displacement must belong to a realm of control associations; it
is metaphorical. The brain codes it by an ever-so-slight but significant tag so that it
resolves into a data bank whence a codesymbol can retrieve it. If it is to be used to
characterize an individual thing, it is pulled out in its entirety, sign upon sign,
until it becomes a vivid picture. If it is to be used as part of a category, it is
retrieved more or less as a naked index reference. As Benjamin Whorf once said, no word
has a precise meaning. Mathematicians hate to admit it, but no mathematical symbol or
arithmetic number has a precise meaning, either.
The poly-selves are pocketed or diffused all over the brain, the body, and the outer
world, including the past; the poly-self is in millions of places, a shepherd, or
better, lead sheep, of a gigantic flock. Wherever and whenever perceived, they return,
finding their coded abodes and reinforcing their electrobiochemical walls. Given the
strength of the major ego components, the selves or roles, the coded items are not
randomly distributed in the brain, but aggregate according to an abstract hierarchical
classification item. If this seems like a metaphor of the rational human operation of
classifying subjects, the metaphor is reversed; I would conjecture that the external
work of classification in every walk of life derives from an intuitively perceived
basic classifying going on naturally in the brain; man is imitating his internal
central nervous system operations, just as he copies, often subconsciously, his legs,
musculature, eyes and other parts of the body in designing tools.
The permutations and combinations of the stored and coded material are practically
infinite. The coded item which is both an abstraction and a metaphor, is "willed" to
collect a sentence. (By "will," here, let us mean the set of determinants representing
past operations which now demand a new operation.) The brain performs its algebra,
imitating itself, and then speaks the presumably understandable words to the
communicant. The algebra is simple, such as a/ b; c/ d; a= b, or a= c, or a-b = c.
After all, once the wish is present and the analogues are retrieved, what still needs
to be said can be formulated according to a few basic functions. Formal characteristics
of the statements are not required, nor are verbs and nouns, nor singular and plural,
etc.; languages have varying codes for these; they produce interesting ideological
configurations in their speakers but are probably not of essential importance in
creating sub-classes of human nature.
Description, interrogation, demand: these three may suffice. Basically the mind works
with such statements, putting into them the information bits supplied or wanted.
"Fence-sitting tobacco-chewing man;" "name?" "Down, John." The first is additive of
qualities, but could be of quantities; then comes the specification of an unknown blank
in the "man" code data bank; finally an attempt to impose one's will.
The public words needed are the question of the name, the name "John," and the command
"down!" Really, only the command is needed if the intent (and power) are clear. Even a
glance would suffice, if the John had been half-trained not to sit on the fence. But
the little that needs be uttered hardly represents the internal processing, very rapid
speech signifies a disturbing problem, not that a speaker can talk as rapidly as he can
think; this is an impossible feat, though listeners tend to correlate the two.
Noam Chomsky was probably on the trail of such facts when he foresaw the road that
linguistics was taking.
Contemporary work has finally begun to face some simple facts of language that have
been long neglected, for example, the fact that the speaker of a language knows a great
deal that he has not learned and that his normal linguistic behavior cannot possibly be
accounted for in terms of "stimulus control," "conditioning," "generalization and
analogy," "patterns," and "habit structures," or "dispositions to respond," in any
reasonably clear sense of these much abused terms [14] .
Also, "The speaker has learned his art by internal processing." Ernst Cassirer
discussed the case of Laura Bridgeman, who was a deaf, dumb and blind child. She made
distinctive sounds for people she knew, when she encountered them. Later on, like Helen
Keller, she was delighted to discover that various objective (external) community names
for things and people existed. Both girls wanted immediately to learn the name of
everything [15] . This fact supports the theory of Homo Schizo 1, that language, like
culture as a whole, was hologenetic with the first humans.
Many more coded messages are circulating interiorly than find their way into vocal
utterance. They are of the same kind. The most brilliant and learned voices play upon
these simple themes, so that we may follow for a considerable distance those students
who have reduced brainwork to an immense computer, only we say, as we shall again in
the next chapter, that a combined analog and digital computer is at work. Further, the
computer invention is an intuited imitation of human ratiocination. The computerized
robot is man's high hope for recapturing his primate instinctive behavior.
VOX PUBLICA
Symbolism is a neurological network set up to cope with the polyego predicament.
Talking with oneself is not to be separated etiologically from talking with others.
Basically, the same motives and the same sensory maneuvers are implicated, with the
same basic effects.
Once again, we encounter the hysteron proteron phenomenon, a normal logical delusion:
it is believed that language is a social achievement enabling people who are apart to
exchange meaningful messages, and, further, that these messages are sometimes initiated
by the insane to talk to themselves.
Instead, language develops as a solipsistic and holistic control of inner and "outer"
messages. Without the compulsion to talk to ourselves, we would not talk to others. The
outer messages are still messages to ourselves; the selves in this case are the
identified, displaced objects outside of our bodies. And the aim of the outer-directed
messages is to control the outer world. Carl Jung stressed the psychological difference
between extroverts and introverts. Certainly the consequences of inward as opposed to
outward displacement-biases are many and important for analysis and therapy. No doubt
the human race can be divided into the two groupings. But both groupings derive their
existence from the same, more basic human polyego origins of speech and the dilemmas of
choosing internal as against external modes of polyego integration. The greatest and
most urgent need of the poly-self is to "put one's house in order," part of which task,
because of the excessive and demanding fear, is delegated to outside persons and
objects.
The feedback is extensive and compelling. The only way, or at least the best way, to
control the world outside the body is to communicate with it, and the most effective
mode of communication is by code or symbol, and to control by symbolism requires
accepting a common medium of exchange, signs and words which prompt external behavior
that reduces the anxiety of the person.
The solipsistic origins of the language are clearer in an oral culture. Writing assures
the objectification and authority of language; it takes people out of themselves and
helps to delude them into believing that they are not talking to themselves. Thus,
writing disciplines and socializes the people, taking up a centralized responsibility
for their fear therapy and not permitting them to go too far towards anarchic
solutions. The origins of the alphabet, proclaimed among the greatest of inventions and
originating, says Santillana, from astronomy and games, shows a great capacity to
generalize from observation (hearing sounds, especially). Thus 20 or 30 letters are
given the task of abstracting all speech. Pictograph and syllabic writing employed
symbols much more extensively, revealing a lesser application of the human power of
generalization.
A schizophrenic patient often invents "outer" language, swinging his clever symbolic
manipulations of his dissociated egos to others, usually to ill effect, so far as his
controlling them is conceived, but in certain cases, as when he "speaks in tongues,"
actually converting others to his will. The typical internal struggle to accommodate
one's egos often requires relinquishing attempts at controlling the outer world by the
language that the "egos" understand: first things first.
F. de Saussure distinguished general language from speech, which is uniquely
individual, like a fingerprint of structure and content. No two people speak alike.
Each person has his own code, but the codes are forced together by the felt need to
communicate on the part of both individual and group [16] .
CULTURAL DISCIPLINE AND SPEECH DIVERGENCE
Emperor Frederick II of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor, yclept "Stupor Mundi," set up in
the 1300's a nursery of neonates attended by mutes, to discover from their untutored
babbling how the original natural human tongue might have developed. The infants died
from various causes before they could arrive at speech. As with experiments to isolate
existential fear, experiments to discover the origins of speech are difficult to
contrive. Psamtik I of Egypt tried a similar experiment two thousand years earlier, and
James IV of Scotland also did so two centuries later. And there now is a humanistic
topic for a master's degree in educational psychology. Lingua Adamica, it came to be
called, whatever it might be.
Cultural agents teach the infant a language. The discipline is severe, rewards and
penalties are numerous: "Speak our language or not at all." Teachers of immigrant
children recognize this dilemma; children sometimes stop talking altogether. Exceptions
occur privately, in dreams. 'Mad poets' can speak differently. So can scientists.
Drunks can babble. Religiously-inspired persons can "speak in tongues" unknown. We can
learn other languages, best when very young and the process is approved by our
attendants.
It is not uncommon of old people, who have practiced a second language, an accent, a
dialect or a jargon to perfection during their lives, to relapse in their final months
into their infant and childhood language. The reason may be not that they performed
best in their original language, or that the memory traces of the original words in
themselves were more deeply imprinted, but rather that they established their poly-ego
system and its embedded network in the earliest years of life. The strength of their
original tongue is in fact the strength of their ultimate ego defenses, holding
together against the dissociations brought about by the erosion of approaching death.
Feral children do not speak a language, but can learn one very slowly. Some pygmy
tribes are said to possess no pygmy language, but to speak the language of nonpygmy
tribes with whom they associate, giving it a special accent of their own to the speech
that makes their tongue incomprehensible to outsiders.
Kester in his book on Upper Paleolithic language sees six basic roots in all languages
and finds thousands of analogous idea-centered words surrounding each root [17] . The
roots are ha, all, tat, os, acq, and tag. I agree with Lowery, who, in an unpublished
manuscript, asserts that Kester has not succeeded.
Nor probably did Cohane in his book, The Key, where several sacred root words such as
have, og, ash, and her were pursued into hundreds of presumably derivative geographical
sites around the world. Yet 1 have been long in sympathy with Whorf, who in a
fellowship application to the Social Science Research Council, in 1928, talks of
"restoring a possible common language of the human race or in perfecting an ideal
natural tongue.. perhaps a future common speech into which all our varied languages may
be assimilable, or, putting it differently, to whose terminology or.. to whose terms
they may all be reduced." [18]
There is a question of course as to whose code, whose exclamation would be
authoritative for any given object, but the primordial scenario, which I portray in
Homo Schizo I, has only siblings or mother and offspring as the communicators, and we
must suspect authority in the second case to be in the mother and in the case of the
siblings the same authoritative situation as arises in a gang of children coining new
and secret words at "play." Language is essentially symbolism, a code that shortens
inner and outer communication in respect to economy and speed of transmission. More
plausibly than not, it may be maintained that whenever and wherever homo schizo
originated, he spoke one language and it is from this language that all subsequent ones
have descended. We may also premise that, in the beginning, descriptive epithets (Great
Zeus !) were ejaculated and a vocabulary of names that included the state of the object
grew rapidly until every displacement was given a name. In part simultaneously, the
equal sign of the "is" was generated, with its opposite, the "is not," and sentences
began.
Little else need be said here: speech is basically an agreed-upon code referring to
classes of objects and to their losing or gaining qualities. "Dog is wolf not wild;"
"Sun is not, Moon is." But one cannot imagine a simple vocabulary and syntax enduring
even for a few years. Nor can we imagine new features being deliberately invented.
Language came in a rush - originated spontaneously, says Levi-Strauss. It was a
cultural and organic quantavolution. Why should the first speakers stop at one or one
hundred words, as if they were apes in training? There were, as I speculated in Chapter
Two, impelled by the breakdown of the instinctive mammalian ego to busy themselves with
coding inner communications and outer communications to their outflowing
identifications.
Genera and families of language in the world are few, but derivative languages,
comprehended by outsiders only with much learning, number in the thousands. It has been
estimated that at the time when Columbus arrived in America some 2000 distinct
languages were in use. Europe is dominated by Latin, Germanic and Slavic tongues with
many national and sub-national derivatives. The North African littoral speaks Arabic,
while in Central Africa hundreds of diverse languages are spoken. We do not know what
produces many tongues and what causes a single speech to prevail without much change
over a long period of time.
All effort is made to discipline people to a common tongue; yet languages ramify
profusely. As propellants of divergences in speech among groups once linguistically
united, several factors can be imagined on the basis of instances from history.
Physical or social isolation is a necessary basis for most, if not all, cases of
linguistic divergence. Movements of population with the associated ecological change
promotes new terms and disuse of old ones. Differential increments of new technology
add new postures towards linguistic content and style. Partial incorporation of the
language of groups newly encountered, whether as subjects of conquest or as conquerors,
is often a factor.
Religious divergence is especially important when disasters of various kinds occur,
focusing intense attention on new sacred beings of the world and all objects and
relations supposedly touched by their holy hands. The practice of tactical secrecy, at
first in sub-groups, then in dominating groups accompanying the fragmentation by
violence or politics of the principal group, must also be considered.
Memory failures, collective amnesia, accompanying abrupt splits of human groups
regardless of the source, can select and discriminate vocabulary, style and usages.
Conflict, competition, accompanied by hostility, snobbery, and "trade secrets" can
accelerate linguistic divergence as well. Most divergence is unconsciously generated; a
little is deliberate.
Without a chronology, which is rarely discoverable, one cannot tell time by divergence,
because the aforesaid causes may be quantavolutional or uniformitarian. The Australian
dog, the dingo, is thought to have arrived 7000 years ago, but all tribes have special
names for it [19] . The multitude of American tongues might have occurred in 12,000
years, or in much less or more time. Nor do we yet know how many languages were
extinguished during the period, or whether the full impetus to change affected a single
Asian mother tongue or also other Asian along with some proto-American tongues that
preceded the conjectured recent invasions via the Bering Straits.
We would stress that languages can be constructed rapidly. In a few years, a youthful
cohort aged thirteen to nineteen, granted libertarian linguistic practices, can
fabricate an argot that is incomprehensible to the general society. The extent of the
divergence and the rapidity of change are partially concealed because the argot is
discouraged in youth-to-adult contacts and the written media go their own way
linguistically. Charles Morris describes the various special languages of political,
poetic, bureaucratic, religious, and other cultures in his book on Signs, Language and
Behavior. Zvi Rix points out [20] that "the accurate placing of by-gone happenings on
the time-coordinate is the precondition for the understanding of reality. Reduction or
loss of the time-component (i. e. flattening the four dimensional space-time universe
into our less plastic three dimensional world) leads by consequence to misconceptions
and delusions of paranoic character." It can lead to other forms of schizotypicality.
The Hopi, for example, who are said by Whorf to lack a word for time, are said by him
and others to have a global immediate consciousness that would be regarded as abnormal
if encountered by a Euro-American.
That is, we are under the influence of symbols but we do not know their origins and
time of origination. Note how the invention of new words and language are attempts to
get us out from under the influence of old behavior and ideology, while the opposition
to new words and language is a conservative attempt, knowingly or unconsciously, to
keep us under the influence of ancient symbols.
It matters not what is the elapsed time since the generation of a language, in judging
its sophistication. Languages, like cultures, may be tribal, but they are never
primitive. No scholar has yet advanced a viable method of differentiating old from
young languages, or developed from undeveloped, this despite the availability of such
recent historical models as Italian-Latin and American-English. Much less has anyone
been able to demonstrate the primitivity or even the irrationality (except in missing
technological terms) of a language. "Many American Indian and African languages,"
declares Whorf, "abound in finely wrought, beautifully logical discriminations about
causation, action, result, dynamic or energic quality, directness of experience, etc.,
all matters of the function of thinking, indeed the quintessence of the rational. In
this respect they far outdistance the European languages." [21]
INNER LANGUAGE
We return now to the internal constitution of language. Language is useful in the
animal-work of humans, as in hunting, growing, working, cooperating, and also in the
displacement labors of worshiping and sacrificing. Still, language does not exist for
these purposes. It exists as an internal message center. We note how words come out in
a flood from a "quiet child;" the child has been talking to itself and belatedly
concedes that it will have to talk to others. I think that in the behavior of Kamala,
the Indian wolf-girl, who took years to emit words and then progressed rapidly [22] ,
one can detect an inner speech, just as in mental patients who refuse to speak but who
can be heard to talk to themselves, even their speech-muscles and EEGs betraying the
fact.
The utility of internal speech can be identified as a message exchange in lieu of a
missing automatism. A machine that is set to imitate a perfect animal, which receives
and responds to stimuli undeviatingly, does not need a language. But the human mind is
out of control and messages have to be sent throughout and back and forth in much
greater volume than in the animal. The flock that is scattered everywhere has to be
gathered. "Instead of dealing with things themselves, man is in a sense constantly
conversing with himself," said Ernst Cassirer [23] .
Inner language is not identical with outer language. A mad person may abandon society
to control his selves, speaking a "disordered" language, which must bear significantly
upon his struggle for self-organization. He does not care whether his speech helps
others to coordinate the world. The effort seems not to be worthwhile; he is
demoralized because he is depersonalized. If you cannot speak the language, you cannot
be a citizen; and vice versa, in a radical double meaning.
Working inside the social system, there is leeway to use a broader and richer language,
still recognizable but suspect by those who control the system. The language of
politics and power is normally barren; cliches abound; conventional images are
recommended in rhetoric. As is true of language and culture so with language and
politics: each can stupefy the other. But collective enterprises cannot move without
rules, and rules, including language, stupefy. They do so insolently, too, and
arrogantly, because connected with power and unconscious of their roots.
IDEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE
What appears as speech is a voiced code shared by the speakers. The silent or
unexpressed language is both the full code and the key to the voiced code. When Whorf
says that the voiced code represents an ideology or weltanschauung that is peculiar to
its speakers, he may be criticized for comparing the overt results of linguistic
expression of two or more peoples. This enables them to assert a more marked difference
between humans than may be the actual case.
As Whorf and kindred scholars have established, a group's spoken language, properly
studied, reveals many affinities, more or less cryptic, with the special outlook of
this group on the world. Call this "the overt linguistic ideology." But now Whorf may
be making too much of what is spoken. First, he assumes a mirroring of the overt
language by the covert language of thought, especially since he can decipher subtle
aspects of the logic of the speech. However, the covert language may contain precisely
those elements of thinking seemingly absent in speech. Seen from the surface, a
flounder is a brown fish with eyes; seen from the sand it is a white fish with a mouth.
But it is a fish like other fish in most significant respects.
If this is so, then the many linguistic groups may not represent such profound
ideological differences as Whorf maintains. What surfaces as speech, that is, may be
phenotypical and the genotype may be even universal. This condition, if real, has much
importance for our theory of human nature. Put bluntly, "Man thinks the same
everywhere, but you'd never know it to hear him talk."
Whence, to appraise Whorf's original contribution, we would say, "Yes, the language
that surfaces limits what can be readily communicated. Yes, the surface language,
properly analyzed, shows many connections with the internal thinking processes. Yes,
the surface language plus its discoverable connections with the subsurface language
gives an operating distinction between two languages that can be called an ideological
divergence. Yes, too, although Whorf does not digress upon it, gestures, timbre,
amplification, inflections, posture in speaking, and facial expressions are part of
linguistic communication, and can distinguish speakers, even of the same language;
Marlene Dietrich did not speak the same German as Hitler.
But no, now, these subliminal linguistic ideologies are not the human ideology; they
are not basic. Language, linguistic analysis, even Whorf's penetrating analysis, does
not mirror human nature. It is not the key to open all doors. The whole study of human
behavior, human action, is the master key. Language, as a portion of behavior, deserves
its place. If we were to bring together two strangers and they were urged not to speak,
write or use conventional gesture, that is, forbidden to symbolize conventionally, they
would begin to communicate by actions and imitations; emotional expressions, perhaps
touching, would play a role. They would be almost incapacitated in the beginning but
their activity would soon graduate into a new symbolism, and before long a common
discourse would unite them. Perhaps some such mode of arriving at a universal language
is better than the Basic English that Whorf so trenchantly criticizes for being so very
English.
Language, Whorf properly insisted, is not merely a technique of expression, but ''first
of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which
results in a certain world-order, a certain segment of the world that is easily
expressible by the type of symbolic means which the language employs." [24]
For instance, "the Hopi language contains no reference to 'time, ' either explicit or
implicit." Yet the Hopi "equally account for all phenomena and their interrelations,
and lend themselves even better to the integration of Hopi culture in all its phases."
The Hopi language is rich in verbs and verb forms (but not tenses) whereas the Etruscan
language prefers nouns. "Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns.." Whorf
finds the Hopi possess two "grand cosmic forms," the objective and subjective, or the
manifested and manifesting [25] . I would venture that these resemble the ancient
Greek notions of Being and Becoming: whatever exists, is material, and what is
historical must be distinguished from what does not exist (or is on its way), is
subjective and is in the future.
A most impressive feature of Whorf's analysis of languages is his demonstration (which
I am extending logically) that languages can be graded according to how much of the
logic and philosophy of the users is buried in the language as opposed to how much must
be added in speech [26] . Whorf regards "thinking as the function which is to a large
extent linguistic." Then, "silent thinking is basically not suppressed talking or
inaudibly mumbled words or silent laryngeal agitations..." It is the "rapport between
words, which enables them to work together at all to any semantic result." [27] These
are neural processes (Whorf makes an unsatisfactory distinction between motor and non-
motor processes in order to get rid of the 'mumbling' and agitations) that are, "of
their nature, in a state of linkage according to the structure of a particular
language, and activations of these processes and linkages in any way, with, without, or
aside from laryngeal behavior... are all linguistic patterning operations, and all
entitled to be called thinking."
He writes, later on, "Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others,
in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not
only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship
and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness." [28]
Whorf takes pain to elucidate that "in linguistic and mental phenomena, significant
behavior... are ruled by a specific system or organization, a 'geometry' of form
principles characteristic of each language. This organization is imposed from outside
the narrow circle of the personal consciousness, making of that consciousness a mere
puppet whose linguistic maneuverings are held in unsensed and unbreakable bonds of
pattern." [29] And he insists that the savant and the shepherd are bound alike in the
toils of their mother tongue.
Actually when we reach the pith of Whorf's message, it is that different linguistic
groups express the same idea in different ways. And these different ways expose the
falsity of thinking of language in its acceptable European form. But this is what we
have been waiting for. We have now a genius in linguistic analysis to tell us that the
same basic process is occurring, but is independent of our logical, grammatical,
syntactical forms.
Speech does not determine psychology, but the psyche finds many ways of expressing
itself. There are many codes. They arrive at similar ends. To take an example from
Whorf: in English, it may be said: "He invites people to a feast." In the Nootka
Amerindian speech, a long word says: "Boiling - cooked - eating - ers - he goes for."
(tl'mishya/ is/ ita - 'ill - ma) [30] . But the English-speaking poet can say: "Boil-
feasters he invites," or "Feasters he fetches." I am sure that the Nootka word sounds
no more one than the English words when these are rattled off.
Whorf in several essays adverts briefly to the
schemes like Basic English, in which an eviscerated British English, with its concealed
premises working harder than ever, is to be fobbed off on an unsuspecting world as the
substance of pure Reason itself. We handle even our plain English with much greater
effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness... Western
culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without
correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only correctives lie in
all those other tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at
different, but equally logical, provisonal analyses [31] .
Whorf would seem here to reach backwards for a larger truth than linguistic-thought-
relativism, namely: a language whose practitioners are acutely self-aware and ingenious
can be coaxed into ways of speaking that are like those of any other language. Is this
not what occurs, actually, when an English dialect becomes after some time an American
dialect, reflecting a new ideology and lifestyle? And what occurs when a science takes
hold of its mother-tongue and reflects and creates a new logic, an ideology and
philosophy with it?
The tasks of logicians, poets, and anthropological linguists should center, then, upon
the interpretation of naturally emergent speech, upon what a culture does to it, upon
what it does to the culture, and how cultures interact through speech.
Language is here regarded as an immediate, primary function and manifestation of human
nature. It is not, as often portrayed, a sort of luxury that the mind resorts to after
its job of running itself is completed and it wants to communicate with its fellows.
One should avoid the grand conceit that humans have a natural, built-in, realistic, and
rational way of dealing with themselves and their environment, despite occasional
vagaries.
What is rational is not to be demeaned. There is a pragmatism of the human that extends
to his speech. It begins with the kind of problem-solving that besets and befits a dog
or ape. The primordial needs of food, warmth, security, defense, and sex are addressed
in recognizably mammalian ways. But, quickly, lacking the instinctive definitiveness
that turns one to a tunnel-like solution or none at all, the human shifts first to a
schizophrenic state and then into a process of trial and error, retrial, and possible
success. He requires a computer that stores, retrieves and manipulates data, and so
copes with these problems in linguistic form. This is the most rational level of which
the human being is capable. Here he fixes his mind as closely as possible upon the
strict requirements of life as he views them.
But this is the farthest development from his born condition, the "buzzing and
confusion" of William James' famous description of the infant mind. He has to pass
through all the symptoms of madness before arriving at this accommodation, the closest
to instinctual as he can ever be. His heads are pressed together by a culture and by
the exercise of the structures dealt with in this chapter, along with cultural
specifications. Between the animal and the pragmatic is the natural level of homo
schizo, resisting and unmaking and remaking the animal and the pragmatic in the
vicissitudes of life as homo schizo.
And, if the world is ever to be united in mind, it will be partly owing to a new
language, in our sense a rational language, fashioned to its goal. The history of
rational languages begins, like most scientific history, with a mistake. Thus one John
Wilkins laboriously constructed, saved from the flames of the Great London Fire, and
finally published in 1668 a treatise Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical
Language, wherein for example, the word "salmon" becomes the word "zana," a river fish
with scales and reddish flesh. Jorge Luis Borges wrote recently about his brilliant,
advanced ideas.
The socialists and communists, following Karl Marx, produced in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries a handful of words and slogans that dissidents of many countries
might share, feeling that they spoke a common tongue. It is not technically beyond our
means today to fashion a language that is much more efficient and appealing that Pidgin
or Basic English, or Esperanto or Marxese to facilitate communications among the
sharers of a new world belief and participants in an accompanying grand movement. This
language would of course become a cultural language after overcoming its severe trials
as a rational language.
Notes (Chapter 6: Symbols and Speech)
1. "Culture and Continuity," 9 Tech. and Culture (April, 1968), 210
2. See this author's review of Ernest Dichter, Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The
Psychology of the World of Objects, in 8 Amer. Behav. Sci. 2 (Oct. 1964).
3. Malcolm Lowery, letter to the author, 4 Dec. 1976.
4. J. B. Gleason, "Gestural Linguistics," 205 Science (21 Sept. 1979), 1253.
5. "The Natural History of Language," in F. Smith and G. H. Miller, eds., The Genesis
of Language, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966, 248, 219-52.
6. "Brains and Behavior," in Spuhler, op. cit., 17.
7. H. S. Terrace et al., "Can an Ape Create a Sentence?" 206 Science 4421 (23 Nov.
1979), 901.
8. Psychology of Communications, New York, 1967, 104-5.
9. Johnson, op. cit., 170. He cites Monod.
10. Op. cit., 309.
11. Johnson, op. cit.
12. Ibid.
13. Cf. T. Thuss-Thienemann, The Subconscious Language, N. Y.: Wash. Sq. Press, 1967 on
the thoroughly metaphorical and associational development of language.
14. Cartesian Linguistics, A Chapter in the Historical Rationalist Thought, N. Y.:
Harper and Row, 1966, 73.
15. An Essay on Man, New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1944.
16. Ibid., 122.
17. Sprach der Eiszeit, Berlin: Herbig, 1962; mss. trans. by Malcolm Lowery, 1976.
18. Carrol, intro. to Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge, Mass., MIT
Press, 1956, 12.
19. Norman B. Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Berkeley U. of California Press,
1974, 118-20.
20. Letter to Peter James, Aug. 28. 1977.
21. Op cit., 80.
22. J. A. L. Singh and R. M. Zingg, Wolf Children and Feral Man (N. Y.: Harper, 1942).
23. Op. cit., 25.
24. Op. cit., 55.
25. Ibid., 58-61.
26. Ibid., 85.
27. Ibid. 67.
28. Ibid. 252..
29. Ibid., 257.
30. Ibid., 242-3.
31. Ibid., 244.
32. London: Royal Society Printers, 1668.
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GOOD, THE TRUE, AND THE BEAUTIFUL
The good is what one wants; the true is how to get it; the beautiful is a mask of the
good and true. Such is the frame of the argument here to come. The repugnance that
should be aroused by it is one which I can feel as sensibly as the reader, for do we
not appreciate that the good is what we good ones want? And the truth is more than mere
means, but ought to be good means? And the beautiful is the subtle expression and
adornment of our good means and good ends? But let us hide our light under a bushel and
speak of others.
How does human mentation work on these matters? Most mentation, we should have to
admit, is a muddle, testifying as a whole to the frustration and futility of humankind,
but this is so widely known that we need not take the time to describe it. Mentation,
like human behavior generally, seeks to recapture instinctiveness and, by so doing, to
hold its poly-ego in a comfortable balance as near to automatism as possible. The
closest it has come to this Nirvana is a state in which the rules for quickly achieving
goals are routine and effective, and the sublimation of the instinctive ends and means
is at a minimum. This is ordinary scientific and rational behavior. Man chooses art,
and whatever else is blessed as voluntarism and beauty, because he cannot attain
instinct directly, or finds himself stranded in the muddle.
THE MUDDLE OF MENTATION
A most apparent excrescence of the human mind is egotism. The human emits a plentitude
of ejaculations, demands, and wishes, which he believes are reasonable simply because
they emanate from himselves. To all of his positive identifications he ascribes a good,
to all negative ones (and many are ambivalent) an evil. He characteristically emits
denials of whatever would appear to oppose his good, quite aside from the rules of
logic or reason or justice, although to these he may even subscribe. His capacity for
denial of the opposition extends to non-perception and non-recognition. The very
sensing of things by eyes, nose, taste, ears, and feeling is broadly prejudiced. Nor is
this selective sensing a "logical condition for survival" or "a preference - de
gustibus non disputandum est"; it is a severe effort to destroy what threatens.
The human possesses a rudimentary notion of cause which labels whatever he dislikes as
the cause of the evils he perceives and whatever he likes as the cause of the good.
Guilt and blame are displaced liberally upon his negatively construed objects.
Everyday thought exhibits an abundance of what psychologists term "erratic cognition."
Some Hindus say that "The Sun and the Moon rise and set only because the brahmin
recites the Jayatri." The Aztecs, who were butchering and eating an estimated 200,000
persons per year when the Spaniards arrived upon the Mexican scene in the sixteenth
century, claimed that, without a gift of human organs, the sun would not rise. Still,
four centuries later, the Nazis, adorned with the prehistoric swastika, conducted a
holocaust of millions of humans in the belief that they were purifying themselves and
Germany. Among those killed were some persons institutionalized for mental
disturbances.
In a related type of case, a disaster occurs; it is "normal" to believe that it
happened because the victims had been bad. "They deserved what they got." The reasoning
is to be discovered both in the Bible and in present-day Christian communities, whether
in Alaska during the 1964 earthquake or in the Wilkes-Barre, Pa., flood of 1973; it
permeates every culture's ideology. Nor is this universal reasoning simply a product of
the lazy human mind, which does not seek scientifically for the antecedents of a
disaster. It is an effort to control the world. It gives humans a great collective
responsibility, an intolerable one. The destruction of the world itself is laid to
human wickedness. In order to believe in human control, it may be necessary to believe
that humans can bring the world to an end!
Considering that the first psychic and social formations, such as religion, were put
together under most unfavorable internal and external conditions, the basic mentation
of humans is quite understandable. The formation of the logical person was a pragmatic
process and still is; to the instinctive animalistic behavior that yet remained was
added the ability to determine the consequences of actions and thenceforth to adjust
one's behavior in accord with predictable consequences. But this pragmatic process has
always been stifling under a blanket of Schizotypicality.
Human mentation is normally preoccupied with the great battle for control of fear. This
is and has been of much more interest and concern to the organism and society than the
pragmatic concerns of the several areas of life - work, sex, science, health. All of
these life areas - the immense structure of civilization -emerge from a "madman" trying
to control his head. That pragmatic behavior is neglected in the frenzy for control is
normally observable in human thought and behavior.
Governments operate in the same muddle as individuals, whether they be democratic,
communist, military, traditional-authoritarian, theocratic, or tribal. It is quite
clear among them that the good is what they want, the truth is how to get it, and the
beautiful is what adorns their good and true. The documentation of this statement is so
profuse that I can only allude to it here [1] . A century ago, Ratzenhofer expressed
the consensus of the most discerning political scientists when he suggested classifying
politics as a branch of psychopathology.
Raison d'‚tat carries properly its cryptic original sense: whatever the state wants is
reason enough. "Do not ask questions; it will do you no good." The governments consist
of the men who run states; these men are basically similar to those whom they rule;
they are constrained by attitudes, ideology and capabilities. They have the same or
slightly more of the schizoid traits of split personalities, fear, obsessions,
paranoia, and immersion in symbolism that are observable in ordinary people.
THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT
Man exercises from his gouty toe to the heavens above what Freud has called "the
omnipotence of thought." He builds in his mind an image of a new reality that is under
his control and, further, will believe and act as if the corresponding events are
occurring as planned. The concept appears obviously when a physically constrained
mental patient claims a power to move the world and to consult with others, such as
gods and kings, who are engaged in the same business. Thus it is a kind of megalomania.
Still the indulgence of omnipotent thought is ordinary, even usual. The notion of "free
will" in morals and law is an example. A person is expected to claim voluntarism and,
if he does not, the community claims it for him. It is appropriate behavior. He must
practice affecting himself, others, and the world with his mind, and he is abetted and
encouraged often in imagining his own spheres of power; so heaven is attainable, as is
hell, good as well as evil, world destruction and world renewal, the triumph of the
Ideal, of Truth, of Order.
What grammarians say "ought to be" is obsessively regarded as "is," that is, achieved:
"God is on our side." "Work is fun." "Parents are good." The distinction between a
preference and a fact is overridden, not because some humans cannot comprehend it, but
because they cannot tolerate the world that exists. In the beginning, and in the case
of every infant, the "is" is painfully segregated from the "ought" so we should not be
surprised at the universal recidivism from "is" to "ought." When philosophers like J.
R. Searle, in a desperate spasm of sublimity, attempt to derive "ought" from "is," they
end up deriving "is" from "ought." Still the naturalistic fallacy is an indefatigable
Sisyphus.
The overriding drive to control the self and everything else is the "should be" of all
"should be's." The gods are made "to be" as they "should be," friends of ours, of our
tribe, or perhaps even of humanity. No matter that they are also believed to have
repeatedly destroyed the nations and that they will do so again; they remain, in
Homer's cliche, "the source of all blessings."
Wishful thinking, in matters both small and large, is universal and practically
ineradicable. Megalomania is but an obvious pathology, slightly out of step with the
fundamental human delusion of making a wished world out of a real world. Masses of
people who are helpless and frustrated by lack of control achieve miracles by prayer -
for the cure of illness, salvation of the soul, and the recovery of popes and
presidents who have been shot.
That will and morale are powerful agents cannot be denied. Not so long ago, in the dust
bowls of empiricism, these words brought shudders. The development of psychosomatic
medicine, the infiltration of the West by Hindu Yoga, the respectabilizing of
consciousness-raising and, paradoxically, of suggestive techniques, brought them into
new prominence.
Hilgard discusses the experiments of Spanos and others on suggestion [2] . Hypnotized
subjects believe all the more readily that their arm is becoming stiff if beforehand
they have been supplied with fantasies, as that the arm is in a splint or made of wood
or iron, and therefore cannot bend. Spanos calls these "goal-directed fantasies." We
regard them also as a type of psychosomatic conversion. We see in them evidence that
will-power can become an operational concept, even in practical affairs, after a
century of ridicule and obloquy. Will-power in politics, religion, sports, or business
must be an exertion upon external objects of the same physiological system that
accounts for psychosomatism up to the point of the system impacting on the body tissue,
which completes the operation if internal, but carries the operation only into an
external activity if involving a displacement removed from the organism.
There is little question but that homo schizo can mobilize his mind for remarkable
feats of organs, mentation and behavior. We note this, too, in the connection between
so-called visceral learning and yoga, and the illusion of omnipotence of thought. All
serve to validate the very old supposition of homo schizo that he could do anything if
he only wanted to do so badly enough. The fact that our contemporary world is so
extreme a chaos of wills and wants obscures the enormous potential that this age-old
idea possesses when harnessed to modern psychology. "We demand a character for which
our emotions and active propensities shall be a match. Small as we are, minute as is
the point by which the cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel
that his reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast whole - then
he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do what it expects of him." [3]
Once again we must allude to the enormous impact on the world of the drive for control
genetically engendered in homo schizo by the failure of animal instinct and the fearful
balkanisation of the human self.
SECRET WORDS AND PANRELATIONISM
Ordinary language is like the language behavior of primeval humans and of the mentally
disturbed. There are many repressed inutterables and also blasphemous ejaculations.
Words are kept secret; words are coined in profusion. Words are made to be deceiving
and used to deceive the self, others, gods, animals. Words are given reality, made more
"real" than the real. Names, too, are often secret; to name a person or thing is
believed to possess it. Words are sacred: "In the beginning was the Word."
God-words are addressed to those who appear both in the skies and on earth as
controllers of the world and these have nevertheless to be controlled to relieve one's
fears. Words are played with like fire-crackers: known to be dangerous, they are yet
thrilling and give relief to anxieties. They are covered up or sublimated - all through
poetry and philosophy.
From Plato to Rudolf Steiner philosophers and poets have been word-players and handlers
of words as sacred and secret. Words are regarded as absolute: one is forbidden to
touch them. There is a fear of clarifying them or defining them operationally: to
define a word instrumentally is to murder it. There is much of this in philosophy, as
well as in politics and aesthetics.
The animate world has never been and is not now limited to life. Animism is rife.
Everything is alive. Thus the world may be controlled by incorporating it in oneself.
Considering the "natural reason" supposedly granted to humans, it should be simple to
draw a distinction between natural forces and animate forces. Yet it was not and is not
done. In fact, the more disturbed that people are, the more they see themselves in
animals, plants, rocks, and skies. This phenomenon is of course closely related to
paranoia, as for example, in the belief that eyes are watching one from everywhere. The
"all-seeing eye" is one of the earliest and most nearly universal symbols. It is,
incidentally, inscribed upon the "Almighty Dollar" and the Seal of the United States of
America.
The "eye" of myth and symbol relates to primeval and schizoid thought. Isaac Vail
believed that the primordial eye was the boreal opening from which Saturn on his throne
looked down upon his domain [4] . He thought that it was an illusion of solar light
playing upon a hole in the thick cloud canopy covering the Earth. That is, it was based
on reality and psychologically perceived as an eye, and it is in keeping with the
universal association fallacy: "like" means "same."
Homeopathic magic, superstition, homeopathic medicine, and many more behaviors rest
upon the belief that things that appear to be alike are "in each other." The "cosmic
egg" is the vault of heaven and bird's egg. Both become broken. Each is the other. It
is by means of such associations that mankind is not only deluded but also charged with
an interest in the mundane; for the mundane is infused with the sacred. It is only then
worth much attention control, development.
Pan-relationism, the stretching for analogies in all of existence, is typical of
mentation. The "most remote" things are brought together by a fancied resemblance. This
would seem to contradict the schoolboy's resistance to recognizing the "most obvious
parallels," unless we allow for his contradictory motives; and, of course, once outside
the schoolroom, his heart hangs upon a cloud.
Misplaced metaphors; the use of the part to indicate the whole (and vice versa) the
tendency not only to dissociate analytically unanalogous things but to super-associate
(" to flounder in a mire of uncontrolled associations," as Bleuler put it); to coin
many neologisms - all of these "illogical" techniques of mind along with those
mentioned before are rife in primordial thought, in psychopathic thought, and when
dispassionately analyzed, in individual and social thought today.
In German legend and folk tale, Erlk"nig (King of the Alder trees) is vaguely an ogre,
who skulks in the fogs, a pedophile who then disposes of the young bodies; he is also a
late descendent of Odin (identified as Wotan, a complex of Saturn and successor gods).
He is also related to Rbezahl, the threatening companion of Santa Klaus (Saturn).
Whence one is permitted to connect oral ingestion (cannibalism) with the sexual
(especially the sexually aberrant). One does not elaborate a major connection here, but
only a typical overlapping and transacting of cultural and religious displacements,
according to what should be understood as the omnipresent holistic character of culture
and religion. We leave it to psychiatrists to search in their practice for the
suggested connections and refer to other passages in our works, Homo Schizo I and The
Divine Succession. Folk tales, mythologists now generally agree, are a happy hunting
ground to the sublimations of the culturally perverse, as well as for the most ancient
images and experiences.
If a group were miraculously to be deprived of its illogical schizoid forms, it would
collapse immediately, for it has been founded upon them and penetrated by them
throughout its existence. That "language loses its power to communicate on a rational
level" under all of these circumstances, is true and expectable. It is also
operationally and structurally not so significant as one is given to believe; for there
is only a highly limited rational level in language. The human does not distinguish
well between "friend" and "foe," even on the level where these interact personally with
him as people and animals, much less on the level of spirits, ideologies, and gods.
Again we hear that he does distinguish, but the task is difficult, "causation being
often impenetrable by rational means. ' More likely, the human elects friend and foe
out of a need to like and dislike and as part of his translation of reality into
opposites.
Quantitative thought is difficult for the human, at best, and even a slight anxiety
will cancel his efforts at shading his distinctions. Useful though this latter shading
may be for other purposes, it is not so comforting and reassuring to a temporary ego
stability as a clear-cut invidious distinction. Whenever A is not identical with B,
either A or B is deemed bad. Under conditions of the highest sublimation, A * B becomes
Yin and Yang, logos and mythos, and other concepts that lend themselves to disputation,
and provide fuel for the ever present ambivalence, which is conveyed by the ever
present anxiety into doubt, distinction, and dislike.
Most of the mentation that occupies the human mind is composed of operations such as
the foregoing. They are the easiest way to believe. They arouse the least internal
resistance, even though they hardly make the human consistently successful. They rather
lend to his life and history that miserable erraticism upon which thrive moralists and
mind healers.
RATIONALIZATION
In this age that is dominated by a belief in "rationalism," much that is believed not
to be rational is gathered together in the concept of "rationalization."
Rationalization is supposed to be finding persuasive arguments for doing what one
thinks one wants to do. It therefore depends upon the sophistication of the persuaded
and upon the demands that the rationalizer makes upon himself. Rationalization is
assigned to linguistic emissions whose purpose is to conceal real mentation by
describing it in acceptable linguistic, moral and logical forms. Thus, as in the case
of the anarchist, G. Zangara, a man hates his father, displaces his hatred upon a
remote authority, the president, and tries to kill the president, believing and
asserting that the sole source of his action is in the policies of the president. The
idea of a separate process of rationalization characterizes all human communities, but
especially modern communities, where all behaviors are supposed to become "rational,"
tied in as cause-and-effect with appropriate and approvable community conduct, or at
least with an ideal ethic recognized as such, even if opposed, by the community.
In the theory of homo schizo, rationalization is nothing but a pandemic mode of
discourse; it is the "rational," but defined and shaped by whatever level of
rationality that the community manifests. The most exalted philosophy, as well as the
lame excuse of a malingering schoolboy, are equally rationalizations. The human does
little but rationalize its wants; it does not do something extra and special called
"reason."
Where is the line to be drawn between rationalization and rationality? Out of the
clouded mental sky do not some few stars of intelligence shine? If intelligence exists,
we would say, it is a rare ability to continuously compress mental operations according
to symbolized rules along a track of highly correlated "cause-effect-cause-effect... n"
ties, and to make many track-switching associations, as we shall soon discover. But it
is worth investigating.
THE DISSOLUTION OF LOGIC
The digital (or linear) and analog logics can perform all mentation thus far ascribable
to "reason," it would appear. I know of no computer designer who would admit an
inability to program any sharp rational process on one or the other or both kinds of
machine. As I would portray these logics, in homo schizo theory, the digital or linear
is a coding to take care of "elapsed time" on delayed instinctual reactions, while the
analog is a coding to utilize the displacements engendered by the same glitch. In both
cases a language appears, which when working "as it should" accomplishes "rational
thought."
"Rational thought" is defined as appropriate public symbolic behavior aimed at a
solution. The public may be anyone or everyone. A trite lesson in logic goes: "all men
are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal." (All X is Y; S is X; ergo
S is Y.) Presumably, the lesson is based upon reality. We characterize many men, and
then observe that Socrates shares their modal characteristics. Further, one observes
that, among other happenings, they all die; whereupon Socrates must die, too. It helps
to observe that Socrates did die, unfortunately.
Obviously, all depends upon whether Socrates is accurately placed as a member of the
human species and whether any exceptions to death occur. It is clear that Socrates can
be deviant from all human norms except this absolutely inclusive norm of death. The
problem is first one of analogy, then of algebra.
The procedure is called an Aristotelian syllogism and has long been regarded as the
classic deductive proof, but, even as William of Occam surmised in the late Middle
Ages, it is an emanation from the structure of the mind, not a quality of reality, that
is being processed. The lioness who has seen and hunted many antelope knows that all
antelope are mortal, and that the antelope she sees now is mortal, and she can expect
it to die by her claw and fang like the rest. The philosopher has to prove it
symbolically, cutting through a mass of confused human neurology before putting the
major and minor premises together in a conclusion.
Modern psychology and pragmatism have pushed much of Aristotelianism into a corner and
occupied its premises otherwise as well. Its three basic laws have become tautologies:
that a thing is itself, 'A' is 'A'; that a thing cannot be both itself and something
other than itself, 'A' cannot be both 'A' and 'not-A', and that a thing must be either
itself or not itself, 'A' being either 'A' or 'not-A'. These statements are
suppositions of narrow utility, overwhelmed by the multitudinous demonstrations of
modern psychology and anthropology that 'A' may or may not be 'A'; 'A' can be both 'A'
and what 'A' is not; and 'A' can be either 'A' or not 'A' or both. That is, no thing,
no occurrence, no process, no 'A' exists but exists holistically, in the company of its
opposites. Causes and anti-causes cohabit. This is the actual operation of the human
mind, acting out of its structure. It is also homo schizo theory, which is non-
Aristotelian and non-Cartesian.
The mind can recite "2 and 2 are 4" and is trained to insist upon its rationality; it
can apply the form in a number of cases in which it understands how numbers stand for
things. It thereupon resists "entraining," which is the strenuous achievement of
philosophers and psychologists; these say, "You must ask what the number-base is; and
what is '2' in each case; what do 'and' and 'are' mean, and '4'?" So the mind
resentfully goes from primordial muddle to philosophical muddling.
The question of whether this is the actual condition of the real world rather than of
mind alone might not appear germane to the present discussion. However, inasmuch as
homo schizo seeks to control the universe because he is displaced throughout its time
and space, he will presumably seek to know it for control purposes. Therefore, he will
wish to elaborate and perfect whatever human apparatus is best adapted to that end. All
of his efforts at controlling the divine and the mundane, objects and existence, will
be pragmatically judged. All of the non-logical and logical procedures generated in all
of human history are so tested.
The modern age has proliferated not only forms of non-Aristotelian logic to this end,
but it also witnessed occult ideas, cults, therapies, and countless other modes of
confronting reality. Every nook and cranny of psychiatry, philosophy, mysticism, magic,
behavior, life as art, group configuration, and of Siberia, the Caucasus, Egypt, South
America, the Caribbean, China, Indonesia, Rumania, Iceland, Tahiti, Africa and India -
the whole geographical and ideational world and outer space, too - have been poked,
prodded, pierced into and opened up for a better way. All are driven by the hope of
discovering and seizing upon a procedure that will give the longed-for control and set
the human mind once and for all at ease. After reason has failed to prove reasonable,
it is every man for himself, sauve qui peut.
Internally, the "appearance" of the linear and analog logical forms must be "messy."
That is, nothing is as clear in neurological language as it is in public language; this
is a truism, since public language has to pursue a clearly communicative format. When a
few scientists first began to speculate about the brain as a computer, John von Neuman
remarked that probably "it is futile to look for a precise logical concept, that is,
for a precise verbal description, of 'visual analogy. ' It is possible that the
connection pattern of the visual brain itself is the simplest logical expression or
definition of this principle." [5] Pribram, with the hologram image in the vanguard of
his work, can today supply much of what was missing then [6] .
In any event, preceding public speech, "the mess is cleaned up," in anticipation that
the company to be entertained will be critical. In babbling children; senile adults;
persons with "thought disorders" or brain lesions; feral boys; "mad" poets; flows of
free associations provoked by psychoanalytic therapy or electric shock; dreaming;
autistic reveries; or deliberate imitations of stream of consciousness as in James
Joyce's Ulysses- the internal language is not sorted out and cleaned up prior to public
delivery. Such is accidentally true as well of what Freud called "The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life," the multitude of slips of tongue, memory failures, etc. that
accompany us through life - and of course, we understand that the "accident" is not a
'real accident," not fortuitous.
In ordinary cases, training maintains its grip on the external communication. The mind
selects the arithmetic and analog rules which, it has been thought, are acceptable
manipulations of terms. The mind "makes sense," publicly. The degree to which its
public demonstrations of logical mastery grip the mind, and influence it, can vary
greatly. The display logic may convey little of the "true" thought processes; it may
conceal them and in any event express only some part of them. But, we stress, this
display is what excites much of the response in the transactions between external
minds. So two people deal in a currency that scarcely measures the internal values of
the exchange.
The language expressed by schizophrenic patients with "thought-disorders" is reported
to differ markedly from the language of a comparable non-thought-disordered group of
"schizophrenics." [7] But it appears that the language of the second group, whose
thought did not exhibit disorder is not somewhat disordered, nor is it normal; it is a
guarded, more concise tongue, showing that the speakers are exercising stronger
controls over language than either the normal or the thought-disordered patients are.
In general, what makes for intense memories in people also makes for obsession with
"correct" logical expression and for following compulsively the dictates, or solutions,
provided by the logic. People in logical or rational communication must convey what
they intend to convey in all critical circumstances, whether football players or
bankers or scientists, or else the language breaks down.
THE USES OF PUBLIC REASON
The languages of general and specialized social groups realize this principle, and they
exact discipline in communication and impose heavy penalties for not speaking the
language fluently and functionally. It does not matter much what "gibberish" the same
people speak to their spouses in bed, or to themselves internally, or in their "free
time," so long as they speak properly when "on duty."
The advantages and limitations of rational language and thought are now becoming more
clear. When a Corrections Commissioner says to a Prison Warden: "your remission rates
are 59%. You must do something about it," the Warden understands him on the level of
the discourse. The Warden does not recite to himself the history of corrections in the
world and in modern society, the history of the concept of "rate," the significance of
rates, all that is known about his prison, changing economic conditions, the full
background of the Commissioner, and all the options facing him along with their
rationalizations. He takes the statement as close to its face value as he can and tries
to deal with it as narrowly as he can. "Yes. I've already set up a pre-release
rehabilitation program." We can make much or little of the exchange. We can extol the
marvels of speech, that lets a few words stand on top of a mountain of explanations. Or
we can regret how pathetically little the words convey of the world in which the two
men are operating. The language is acceptably "rational": a condition is quantitatively
denotated. The condition is offered as a non-refusable challenge. The challenge is
accepted, even anticipated, and a "step in the right direction" is assured. Released
prisoners returning to jail may be fewer, future remission rates even decline (although
the situation and the problem are grossly simplified here).
The example is fairly typical of the use of reason in human affairs. As the problem
becomes more special and the need for a specific result becomes more acute, humans are
capable of herculean efforts at instrumental rationalism. To dispatch and recall a
space shuttle, many thousands of highly trained people must work for years under the
most intense discipline and supervision, and billions of dollars must be spent. Success
of the venture can be said to represent every form of rational behavior known to man,
from the navigational computers to the psychiatrist watching over the astronauts'
social behavior to the public relations experts erecting a network to keep the public
as intimate and yet non-interfering as communications technology and socio-psychology
will allow.
Success of a shuttle flight does not include, however, full assurances of rational
behavior. For example, no one doubts that space shuttles of the next generation will be
more highly rationalized in their technical and human operations. Furthermore, the
original decisions to attempt a space shuttle are not of the same order of rationality,
but rather typical of political decisions. Would the resources have been better
allocated to the construction of new American cities? Or to other presumably beneficial
ends? In such a case, too, all known types of instrumentally rational behavior might
have been exercised, as indeed they are when a military nuclear missile system is
designed, organized and installed.
Knowing how such decisions are made does not solve the problem. Public opinion,
interest groups, legislators, officials, scientists, and the media enter the decision-
making process. With the increasingly rationalized tools of social science analysis,
one can follow the course and weight of influences leading to the final choice, just as
a radiologist, by employing chemicals, can trace the ramifications of a foreign element
in the human circulatory system. Even so, one cannot locate an ultimate rational
source.
One can only ascend to ever higher levels of instrumental rationalism, investigating
choice-behavior, with a mathematical precision that can win a Nobel prize, but without
ever reaching a heaven where choice is made absolute by marrying "the Good." The Good
forever basely remains what one wants, hence what one is capable of wanting and trained
to want, be it comfort, love, landing on the Moon, ridding the earth of enemies,
worshiping one's gods, or something else.
THE SECURITY CONSENSUS
Thus rationality is ultimately the practical ability to achieve one's good, including
all lesser goods or bundles of goods that add up to the configuration of one's good.
Moreover, this good of one may be the greatest "evil" as well as the greatest "good."
It is only made "good" or "evil" by persons, such as the readers and author. Finding
the "good" is not a discovery of the treasure in a sunken ship. It is the assembling of
an internal psychic code prompted and guided by external coded transactions resulting
in futuristic code-images. If the emergent image possessed by "Jean Smith" and "John
Doe" coincides with your image and my image, we share the good. By many means, some
more logical than others, we can determine the fit, thus the consensus. Thereupon, we
may proceed with this collective good, more or less in logical language, in some cases
foisting our codes upon other people and things, obtaining a broader consensus.
The consensus, despite the brevity and vagaries of external language, is reassuring. It
unites our externally displaced identities with our internal identities, making us "one
with the world." Our sense of control is heightened, our anxieties lessened. Credit
must be granted to logical processes for the welcome security, insofar as the
transactions are actually or apparently couched in logical language. When children
chant the table of multiplications together: 1 x 6 = 6, 2 x 6 = 12 etc., they are
exchanging passwords for security, as well as confirming the validity of the terms and
building habits of rationality. They also may chant prayers, identically, except that
habits of non-rational belief are established.
Plato's Timaeus as interpreted by Taylor argues also that those who cannot do a sum
take fear when the planets show oppositions, occultations and reappearances [8] . This
is not the only indication from ancient legend and science, nor from modern psychology
and behavior, that numbers are a security device as is measurement, hence astrology,
astronomy and astrophysics. The universally observed magic of numbers and the
superstitions of numbers support this hypothesis.
Numbering may have originated in the fight against fear; numbers and measures may
ultimately become logical-rational procedures; but they may originally have been
methods of fighting fear. Counting, ordering, measuring, have in them a fear therapy.
So children are told to count sheep in order to fall asleep. "Hail, Mary's" are recited
by soldiers until panic passes. Parachuters count before leaping. The count-down before
space-vehicle launching is a public ritual of prayer, wish, and suppression of last
frightened thoughts.
CAUSATION
For thousands of years, the leading forms of philosophy of truth have been directed
generally at the destruction of commonsense truth. The analysis of discursive symbolism
among the ancient Greeks affected human communications with these questions: What do
you know? (perception and cognition) ; how do you know it? (logic and proof); then, do
you know yourself? (Socrates). The three questions cast much of what passed (and still
passes) for knowledge into the realm of the non-rational. Strong currents even of
skepticism and cynicism moved through the intelligentsia. The classical Greeks were
neither first nor last to go through the act of first constructing natural laws and
then of finding out how to evade them. It would appear that this constructive-
destructive process is characteristic of high periods of mental development, whether in
the Arabic enlightenment, the high Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth Century
Enlightenment, or the past century. The more man subjectivizes, the more he can control
the outer world, but also the more he can see of the limits of his truths.
So it happened that in more recent times, we have seen the destruction of Euclidean
geometric space as an absolutely existent phenomenon; "time" has been reduced to a
relative, generically impelled habit and coincidence, and the "caused" has become a
"function." Needless to say, the outlook of science has been forcibly affected by this
relativism, but ordinary life has proceeded on its commonsense paths, carrying on
faithfully the belief in absolute truths of knowledge while of course carrying along
its full complement of illusions and delusions. Yet ordinary life has been always
affected by the relativism of time and space, and the incidentalism of causation.
The concept of causality has caused philosophers infinite headaches, leading up to its
final denial; but the path remains to support the commonsense belief that stress causes
pain. Analysis of alleged "causation," freed of commonplace prejudices, quickly arrives
at the conclusion that in any given case of "causation," everything in the vignette can
be termed a casual factor, and that what is called "the cause" is whatever the judge
deems it to be.
Thus, in the statement, "I rang the doorbell," "I" may be presumed to be the cause only
because I, at least, am interested in my participation in the event. But, ultimately,
the simple act breaks into infinite smithereens of the universal moment and of the
endless past, eliciting statements such as, "if copper were not once geologically
formed,... there would be no bell," so ancient deposits of copper are the cause; or,
"my finger caused the ringing. . . etc. ," or millions of other causes more or less as
meaningful, sub specie aeternitates, as "I." To make matters worse, lurking beneath the
superficial determinism is a notion of free will that would furnish a potential "non-
bell ringer." If I were completely free to not ring the bell, one would have to say
that at least one and by extension millions of past decisions were unnecessary. The
bell was rung, but by an unnecessary cause. Perhaps the cause was all the more
unnecessary, since my excitedly expectant friend, say, opened the door just as I was
about to ring the bell, and claimed that she heard it.
Quantum mechanics also would destroy ordinary causal theory, lending as it does an
indeterministic element to the "decision" of a causally potent condition as to whether
or not to actuate, that is, happen.
A given electron may or may not "choose" to leave its radioactive atom, for example.
Or, in order to discover the momentum of a given particle (which is at the same time a
wave), one foregoes by the conditions under which this can be observed and measured,
the chance of discovering its location - and vice versa. With quantum theory and the
Heisenberg principle of indeterminism (uncertainty), the following must be foregone:
certainty; predictability; causation; space and time; Aristotelian logic (see above);
nor can the quantum-uncertainty principle be proven true or false empirically. What
remains, however, are statistical probabilities governing aggregate behavior. As we
cannot ask an explanation of the basic fact that "inertia is", neither can we ask why
there is a state of indeterminism [9] .
As if this were not enough, what we see in causality in the human mind is a spasm of
incompleteness between two events that it is felt ought instinctively to happen in
sequence. Here again is the instinct glitch. Anything once delayed builds a secondary
displacement circuit or hologram. The circuit continues to be excited by analogous
events and the analogous sets become grouped into perceived causal classes, as, for
example, "stress causes pain."
When I press the bell button by a door, millions of past events, known and unknown, are
bridged, but to the self-aware human, the act (or the hesitation before the act) is
interpreted in the light of many analogous actions. The principle of causation seems
obvious even to a child: "Go ring Auntie Mabel's bell to see if she's home."
TIME AND SPACE
The world, it may be agreed, is essentially vacant of time, space, or causality. So is
the human mind. No time-clock as such registers impressions and expressions of the
central nervous system. However, what comes to be sensed as time is the neurological
superposition of halos imprinted upon neurons as they occur. Then, typical left-
hemisphere operations ensue, ordering impressions by digital logic, cleaning up inner
time for incorporation into external and especially cultural time schedules.
The past tense of time is perceived as one's recall reaches for lower figurations in
the "stack" of impressions. The "lower," the older. When a woman tells a man, "you
remind me of my father," perhaps tens of thousands of circuits are retrogressively
lighting up. In her mind, a coded representation of his behavior is vigorously seeking
analogues (holograms). If, is as likely, she is engaging in wishful thinking, non-
analogues and distasteful analogues are being censored.
As with practically every other human trait, a rudimentary time sense is invaluable to
the communication of animal instincts, and the storage of time in memory as well as the
projection of time are readily observable. A dog will crouch patiently besides a hole,
from which once a squirrel emerged, in the hope that he will once again appear. We
resort, as usual, to the human glitch and the splatter of displacements to account for
the rich human display of temporal effects.
No matter what philosophers may say in derogation of time, every cell and every
species, even every grain of sand and atom, enjoys its big-sequences and big-rhythms.
Not only are all things in change; they are also changing in patterns, and uniquely,
hence a kind of triple paradox of change, pattern, and uniqueness occurs. "Our fearful
mind anticipates the future but we can only understand what was in the past," declared
Kierkegaard. Something has been said earlier of the sense of dread regarding death, the
divine, and the future. To the schizophrenic, writes Meerloo, "the past is something
demonic. The feeling of unbroken homogeneity with the present has been lost... 'The
world clock stands still, ' says one patient." [10] Mendel perceives the dissolution
of historicity and with it the future as a major characteristic of disease.
Exaltation, which can be viewed as an agitated nervous crisis of the present moment, of
which the use of the historical present in literary style partakes, is frequent in
mental states pronounced insane as well as divine. It collapses both history and the
future. It also reverses time. The ancient prophets - the Hebrew Isaiah, Saint John the
Evangelist, the unknown Egyptian author of the Ipuwer papyrus concerning the
destruction of Egypt, for example, used the future tense to say what had happened in
times past. Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius included a set of Profetie, also refers in
these prophecies to historical materials using the future tense [11] . Time becomes
like the chain that propels a bicycle, going backwards as it moves forward. The faster
a person or culture moves, the more its future and its history are changed. But a
culture denies that it can change, it denies the charge of hubris, and celebrates
continually its very beginnings as if they were today and in the future. Time, man's
great tool, is repeatedly and deliberately destroyed. Time is projected memory. To
control himself, man must control his projections both past and future. Time, to him,
is an event, a fact, that must be controlled along with every other happening.
Left hemisphere brain damage interferes with the perception of sequence but right
hemisphere damage does not [12] . If our theory that two types of logic form in the
brain, one analog, the other additive or digital, and that the first is right-brain or
bilateral while the second is left-brain, the inability to perceive sequences may be
attributable to a disturbance of time-counting by digital sequence coding. The analog
contribution to sequencing would be by superposition of images. It may operate like
holography, as was suggested earlier, allowing replicated images to be stored in large
numbers, so that the excision of even a great many holograms in either or both hemi-
spheres would not disturb the detection of sequences.
Future tense arises out of obsessional expectations of the return of an event. For
ordinary and minor events, the future is helped to emerge by the transference of
analogous major obsessions. The anniversary complex has deep roots in the human mind:
an intense private celebration, when congruent with a public consensus, forms the peak
type of human memory event. When an anniversary is forgotten, whether private or
public, it is because of dread of the reoccurrence. Ordinarily, a deep enough trauma is
quite suppressed and is celebrated only unconsciously, with depression or
psychosomatism or displacement behavior. Thus any of these neuroses may befall a woman
upon the anniversary of the painful death of a dear mother, especially if her age
approaches the age of her mother at death. Public trauma can be bifurcated to give a
mourning occasion followed by a saturnalian release, or a joyful one, as before
Christmas, or at Eastertime, among Christians and Jews, for different reasons, the
Judaic mourning and joy in these cases relating to the great Deluge of Noah and to the
Passover of Exodus, respectively. Thus we both remember and forget.
Space may be dependent upon time. That is, without time, space might be inconceivable.
An animal is master of the space around it, more than the human, who probably suffers
more awkward bumps and falls in the house he has built than do the animals that may
share it with him. But only the human is driven to conceive of, measure, and manage all
space, so that one must guess that he is the jack of all space for being master of
none.
Human concepts of space are perhaps built upon an infrastructure of time. Once the
sense of time is developed, space can be calculated as elapsed time between the self
and the displacements of the self, where they were in the memory, where they occur now.
Thus we think of primitive space as distance in time from an object or event to the
experiencing self. Direction is also a point of reference from one's body -front,
behind, right, left, up, down. Accurate mapping of space within the confines of
experience becomes possible. What is beyond direct experience - over the mountains, the
stars above - may be naively construed as far away, but much less far than they really
are. The celestial bodies are measures of space - " I live a day's walk from you," or
"six hours by airplane." But, thus, too, is time.
THE COST OF LOSING MAGIC
James Fraser, a century ago, explained the practice of magic by two principles.
According to a law of similarity, like produces like; a magician can produce an effect
by imitating it in advance. By sprinkling water, one can bring rain, providing other
matters are attended to also. Second, the law of contagion maintains that things once
in contact continue to interact ever thereafter. A spot struck by lightening is forever
sacred to Jupiter. Such was the belief and practice of the ancient Etruscans.
These principles are found in current as well as ancient and tribal thought. Science
often proceeds by imitating nature and unraveling strings of consequences. In them one
can locate the operations of analogy that seem to be naturally produced in the brain.
Analogy took the primary and more powerful role in the development of Greek science
from magic and myth [13] .
We do not change brains or develop new organs in going from "falsehood" to "truth." We
get rid of the "hocus-pocus" that accompanies magic. We make the magic public (open
display and repetition of experiments). Then we increase the validity of the analogies
and sequences until they become reliable.
The history of science shows us many a relation in tandem between magic, religion and
scientific practice. Astrology as astronomy and magic is perhaps the most famous. The
ancient Chinese could foretell eclipses, a major achievement of scientific observation
and logic. But at the same time they applied rituals and emergency policies to quell
official and public fear of eclipses and to repel astral invasions. Mesmerism and
hypnotism are another example, from the nineteenth century, of parallel evolution of
cult practices and scientific method.
The discipline involved in the change from magic to science is intense, obsessive, and
costly. An experiment by Liam Hudson performed upon students of history and engineering
involved interrupting their sleep upon observing signs of dreaming and asking them to
report their dreams. The engineers reported more frequently that they were not dreaming
at all or could not recall the dreams. "The engineers' inhibition in dealing with
'primary process' thought - with ideas and images that have not been ordered in a
conventionally rational way - is not a superficial aspect of their thinking; it is an
integral part of the way in which their minds work." [14]
What we are observing here and in primitive magic are lesser and greater degrees of the
conversion of obsession into bureaucratic and scientific habit and showing that, like a
form of psychosomatism, the specialized disciplined worker overdevelops a point
d'appui, working from the conscious into the unconscious along a narrow band. This is
not science as new theory or hypothesis, not science as poetry, which is an altogether
different mental operation, distinguishing two types of scientists as night from day.
So must the routine administrator or bureaucrat be distinguished from the
organizational innovators of the type of Epaminondas, St. Therese, I. Loyola, Thomas
Jefferson, Henri de Saint-Simon, Mussolini, Trotsky, Henry Ford and Gandhi; a great
many unnamable persons have produced the largest number of inventions - there were,
after all, engineering students who did recall their dreams. The rational is the
routine, true, but ought one not permit the term for the creative? But, then, the
creative is non-rational. So it is both rational and non-rational, a contradiction if
both are the same.
Therefore do we propose discarding the term "rational" or letting "rational" mean the
ability to obtain what one wants, namely, "truth." We must disagree with those who,
like Arthur Koestler, assert of the human dilemma: "No matter how much the symptoms
vary, the pattern of disorder is the same: a mentality split between faith and reason,
between emotion and intellect. '' [15] Faith and reason subsist cheek by jowl in the
mentating process; we must abandon this medieval dichotomy if we would understand human
nature.
So, too with emotion and intellect: emotion is intellective and intellect is emotional.
At the turn of this century, George Mead was lecturing at the University of Chicago
that: "It would be a mistake to assume that a man is a biologic individual plus a
reason, if we mean by this definition that he leads two separate lives, one of impulse
or instinct, and another of reason.. On the contrary, the whole drift of modern
psychology has been toward an undertaking, to bring will and reason within the
impulsive life." [16] There is little neurological or pragmatic basis for the words.
Nor do they help in programming policies for humanity.
Close in outlook to Mead, John Dewey, too, was long engaged in combat against
traditional logic and psychology. In 1929, in his book The Quest for Certainty, he
devoted a chapter to "Escape from Peril," where he continued his attack upon the
philosophers' search for the immutable, the truth, by way of "pure knowledge." "The
quest for certainty," he said, "is a quest for peace which is assured, an object which
is unqualified by risk and the shadow of fear which action casts. '' [17] We would add
that homo schizo normally wants to escape his perils and invented first historical
religions, then theology, then philosophy, moving outwards into abstractions to develop
the sense of certainty that would relieve his anxieties. But each further stage of
abstraction displaces him farther, too, from the origins of existential fear in his
inability to act like an animal.
SCIENCE AS INSTINCT
If theologians and philosophers vainly sought certainty in order to displace fear, are
then scientists merely at another stage of displacement or sublimation? Would the
counting of binary star systems be such, too? Might the rejection of the holistic term
"human nature" be a collective schizotypical symptom of depersonalization among
psychologists? Would perfecting solar energy systems fall in a similar category? Yes,
we would say, but all with a notable difference.
Truth or the rational is how to get what one wants. Then "howling for bread" is true if
it brings bread. So is prayer. Yes. What works, what is effective, is considered
rational and true.
Would not bread be more certainly forthcoming if one farmed wheat and baked bread?
Perhaps... in some cases... yes, on the whole... etc. The sparrows don't look for the
morrow, said Christ; trust in the Lord. The infant howls and is fed. The mob riots and
is fed. The primitive band gathers nuts and fruits and herbs. But we applaud the
ancient inventors of the science of agriculture. Now they could feed more mouths while
resting in place.
Science - and reason - are suppressors of unruly processes [18] . They discipline the
fearful selves to follow rules which, they assert, will reliably bring desired
consequences. "Get rid of the excess and costly baggage of superstitious behavior:
don't chant and dance around the growing crops; hone your spades, plant more seed, dig
deeper; (then, reluctantly) it may help if you play music for the crops to grow by."
The rules of science and reason are simple. All things are sensible. They must be given
exclusive denotations. These must be acted upon in exclusively denotable ways. They can
then be grouped within a closed system of logical counting which is not so empirical.
The process and the consequences are to be watched and confirmed by others. At no stage
of the process should "wishing" be admitted and given any weight. Scientific procedures
give homo schizo controls to add to his kitbag of controls. To some extent they are
more reliable controls, though often for things that he wants to let be uncontrolled or
cares little about, or are not what he wants most to control
Behaviorally, what homo schizo has done, which has come to be called "rationality" and
"reason," is to select out of his experience certain operations whose traits are that,
first, they give success (by test) in naming, and in the transfer of naming (also by
test), and, second, the names can be counted and the count tested. Success in testing
is validated inasmuch as the names and their manipulation produce psychic and material
effects deemed favorable. Why does man select these operations, and make so much of
them that a wonderful science ensues? He finds their effects reliable; he can make easy
and gratifying obsessions of them.
Is this all? This is a great deal. It makes the difference between uncontrolled fear
and a bearable equilibrium, between helplessness and ruling the earth and all of its
denizens. It is the difference between a blank gaze and a child counting apples, or
even more, a computer guiding a spaceship out and back to earth.
By temporarily giving up his chaotic mentation, by submitting to the controls
determined by others, by obsessively dedicating his mind to the proven possible and
proven practical, he can gain a share of control. The rules, the identifications, the
promises, the secrets of language and experiments, the mystique and authority of
science - all help him feel comforted and less fearful. The myriad displacements
augment the normal complement of animal foci of attention and sources of stimuli.
The responses are the fantastically engendered capabilities of the human. Satisfactions
emerge from a perceived coping with the stimulus by the selected responses. Science
takes homo-specific urges, applies species-specific responses and obtains species-
indulgent effects. To a foreign intelligence, none of these would make sense, much less
truth. What the process resembles, in a sinister shocking way, is where it all began,
the home that it never left, amidst the unselfconscious breeds of life.
The closest I find to this idea of the search to recapture instinct as inherent in
pragmatic or operational science is in Mead's essay on the biologic individual.
After describing the physical world that faces the human as a biological and
instinctive organism, Mead says "Just in so far as we present ourselves as biological
mechanisms are we better able to control a correspondingly greater field of conditions
which determine conduct. On the other hand, this statement in mechanical terms
abstracts from all purposes and all ends of conduct. '' [19] Then he compares modern
scientific method as a way of moving into the "now" to test reliability and truth.
On the whole, homo schizo would prefer more direct and easy methods of reaching the
good, the true, and the beautiful, than science has thus far afforded him. If he were
always comfortable, he certainly would not be rational; but then, if he were always
comfortable (that is, had his quota of the values of sex, respect, health, knowledge,
affection, and power) he would not be homo schizo, for there is no quota, only endless
discomfort. Paraphrasing Heraclitus, we could say, "One can never bathe in the same
river of truth twice." But homo schizo would hate this truth, even though he has had to
live by it.
What homo schizo would most desire, because it would bring him immediate surcease from
his existential agony, would be to become once more a generalized mammal, whose mind
fit its body, able to act decisively, unconsciously, instinctively upon the
presentation of a stimulus. The good, and the truth that leads to it, depend upon
reestablishing the unitary ego, defining stimuli, and affixing their specific
responses, all to occur together, holistically. Linear and analog science help. They
build a bridge over the stimulus-response chasm.
If only science might find a holistic way of bridging the chasm, of healing the
instinct glitch, man would feel even better. The clue to this is in the incessant human
attempt to embrace the good, the true, and the beautiful in one holistic motion where
what is called ethics, science and art have no place and little interest, where he
feels at one with himself and the world, an intuitive well-being. Although stoicism and
Buddhism and Taoism and many other formulas of conduct prefigure this kind of
confrontation that brings comfort and surcease from fear, they cannot manage reliably
to control the "reality principle," that is, the persecution, hunger, massacre,
frustration and demands visited upon them by the unregenerate homo schizo outside the
cult.
SUBLIMATION AS PREFERABLE DISPLACEMENTS
Sublimation is a concept that should desist and refrain from spoiling clean scientific
analysis. Originally it arose out of an exaggerated interest in sex and purported to
designate how sexuality might be unconsciously suppressed, and disguise itself as a
virtuous activity, so that, for instance, a man who was inordinately and illegitimately
fond of his mother plunged obsessively into sofa design, and thereupon was deemed to
sublimate. Sublimation was looked upon as a socially welcome outlet for unmanageable,
if not perverse, sexual impulses, hence applauded.
But a scientific definition of sublimation, divorced from preferred behavior, must go
rather like this: sublimation is a displacement activity whose original motivation is
unrecognized publicly. Then sublimation is for all practical purposes identical with
displacement, as in Tinbergen's example of the stickleback fish quoted earlier. Why,
then, use the term, unless it be to propagandize a form of behavior, a way of life?
German youth leaders say, "When you are hiking and hungry, sing to forget your hunger."
Perhaps that is why the child in the old English nursery rhyme "sings for his supper."
Here is a sublimation, quite explicit because the locus of the displacement barely
shifts around the oral cavity. Sex, food, respect, well-being, safety, knowing,
capability: such are most activities, running on tracks dug early in life, and taking
up most of later life. All of these values must be satisfied within the larger control
framework. No solution suffices, it appears, or succeeds except temporarily, with all
of these goods, unless it carries with it a quota of control. The human is readier than
any other animal to give them up, or compromise or complicate them in order to get on
with the business of the triple control of his selves, others, and the world.
Ethically, of course, it is important how homo schizo spends his time. As was said, the
good is what we want. And if we wish to call good ways of handling problems of fear and
control by the word "sublimation," none may interfere. We may apply our flighty word to
an emaciated artist who paints "still-lives," a gynecologist who is sexually
unarousable, a politician with an adoring public and no friends, a rich woman who
hobnobs with bohemians, and a miser who leaves his wealth to his university alma mater.
What can we call a man who cannot paint but loves to eat; a Don Juan who detests the
physical apparatus of females; a strict parent who leaves a personally irresponsible
life; a "public enemy" who is loved by his friends; a poor social-climber; a generous
man who ignores his community's needs? These are fixated on "primary gratifications;"
and then what?
The human is so displaceable, that one might even put up stiff arguments against his
having definite primary needs, as have, for example, some advocates of homosexual
liberation. As is often complained by western generals, the Chinese soldier can fight
on a bowl of rice. But then there was the Persian folk hero, Nastrodjin, who had just
managed to teach his donkey to work without eating when, unfortunately, the animal died
- showing that even animals can be trained to displace.
Superficially, homo schizo is infinitely devious, because basically he is terribly
interested in sensations of control and will go anywhere into himself or into the
furthest reaches of space and time to find surcease. Or he may not need to go very far
but will sing, or dress like a peacock, rather than eat.
I trust that we are all in favor of fine arts, literature, history, and science and
will do our best to commit homo schizo to their practice. Nevertheless, or should I say
therefore, the analysis of cultural product must proceed apace. When we enjoy to
witness the Amphytrion of Plautus or of Moliere, we must observe, too, the fascination
which the plot holds because of its play upon the confusion of selves - Zeus and the
Theban general two look-alikes, Hermes and the general's valet the same, and who is
talking to whom? When we watch Shakespeare's As You Like It, there to observe the
dissolution of court life into a forest of exile, where Celia receives the name Aliena
and Rosalind becomes a transvestite and the philosophers speak schizophrenese, we
realize in ourselves, the audience, the same transformations, the controlled momentary
loss of control of ourselves and the world, joyful and comic when and only when we can
reestablish ourselves afterwards. And so with the catastrophic underpinnings of Hamlet,
Midsummer Night's Dream and Anthony and Cleopatra, as Irving Wolfe has shown [20] .
The same person, homo schizo, is operative in the creation and uses of science and
history, the former already treated, the latter more adequately analyzed in Homo Schizo
1. Only two examples are put forward here, to suggest the need for applying more
trenchant theory to the "highest" products of homo schizo.
Proclus, the Neo-Platonist philosopher (410?-485), wrote of the planets and gods. In
several passages, he described unmistakably not only the rings of planet Saturn but
also the bands of planet Jupiter, phenomena not rediscovered until the nineteenth
century. He explained them by the self-discipline of the god, Jupiter, who, in binding
his deposed father, Saturn, to a new regime of law and order, also righteously bound
himself to his own laws. A set of natural events in the sky was observed, and was
animated into a theophany; the gods were made to behave as man wished they might, as
guarantors of order in the skies, and brought to earth as exemplars of order in human
affairs. The language of philosophy thoroughly subdued the frightful story of the
bloody struggle of gods; a euphoria emerged from an age-old collective amnesia. Thus
have philosophers sought to create certainty, as John Dewey claimed.
Ernst Cassirer, like Proclus a distinguished philosopher, a German refugee to America,
wrote a book on human nature, entitled An Essay on Man [21] , during World War II. I
studied it well among the first books coming to hand when I returned from long army
service. The book maintains throughout a high rational level of discourse. It is
learned, soothing, endearing, acceptable - a shimmering smooth amnesiac screen behind
which other types of homo schizo were destroying the total culture of Europe which he
was discussing. As in Ovid's Metamorphoses the most frightful activities are blended
into a lovely serene background setting. So well was the philosopher's job done, that
none, not even myself then, could suspect that here was as fine an instance of the mind
of homo schizo at work as was the disastrous scene of slaughter and rapine from which I
had just separated. I say of these two examples of Proclus and Cassirer, as might be
said of the higher products of the human mind in general, that they are all suitable
candidates for analysis by the conceptual implements of the theory of homo schizo.
Ordinary appraisals of art, literature, science, and philosophy are pathetic. This has
much to do with Wissenschaftsoziologie, the sociology of knowledge. But the sociology
of knowledge still requires the appropriate launching pad for its flight of analysis:
this the model of homo schizo may provide.
In his work on Schizophrenia in Literature and Art, John Vernon explains by way of
Aristotle, Locke, and especially Galileo how it came about that the world was made to
split into divisions of objectivity and subjectivity, so-called. Galileo, he reminds
us, performed the schizoid feat of thinking "I do not believe that there exists
anything in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, but size, shape,
quantity, and motion swift or slow." Thus came about the distinct "soft world" and
"hard world." [22] .
Says Vernon, "The threat the world presents for the schizophrenic is often a threat of
control. In the West, the split of the world into two absolute principles, subject and
object, has enabled civilization to control and manipulate nature.." This all "makes
reality something unreal and makes the structures of classical thought that constituted
that structure insane - that is, schizophrenic." [23]
Subjectivity appears to be fantasy and is relegated to the fantastic humanities. Now
the same culture that creates the absolute reality-fantasy division also creates an
absolute sanity-madness division.
But we have always had bifurcations and contraries that obsess philosophies, science,
and religion, outlooks that we have said earlier may emerge from the essential
ambivalence of homo schizo. The division of man into a body and soul is one such, which
rationalizes the polyego to make it more logical, following the impression that there
must be a sharp difference between ape and man and discovering this in the human soul.
So, too, the difference between mind and conscience, which even Freud could not evade
and finds favor among many psychologists; there the attempt is made to have the split-
selves appear to be an imposition of a "false reality" upon a "true reality," the
former being subjective and socially imposed whereas the latter is totally mammalian.
THE ORIGINS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The monarch of bifurcation is "good" and "evil." On the shoulder of every little girl
and boy perches a good angel who speaks into one ear (the right ear?) while upon the
other shoulder perches an evil devil who speaks into the other ear, as the catechist
would explain. Human existence and fulfillment, it is generally believed, depends upon
the recognition of good and evil and of their consequences. This juxtaposition of
forces is certainly a crowning obsession of mankind.
No one knows where France's great dramatist, MoliŠre, lies buried, because he was a
comedien, an actor, a player of roles, a deviser and divider of human souls whose
dividends did not equal the "angel" and "devil" into which the Catholic Church insisted
and insists still, for reasons valid on its premises, that homo schizo must be divided.
Unless an actor repented on his death bed, he (or she, as for example, Adrienne
Lecouvreur, of whom Voltaire had something to say) was denied burial in hallowed
ground.
The ordinary person thinks he understands this but often may not, believing, "Yes,
actors are naughty and must repent their licentious and blasphemous lives." But, no,
even a hypothetical blameless actor, who is punished on the stage for every sin he
commits on the stage, must also be barred from consecrated soil. The culture, as
authoritatively represented by the Church, decrees that the schizotypicality of man
should consist of two contraries. Other poly-egos are regarded as culturally
dysfunctional and are tabooed. A common anthropological misapprehension, couched in
sympathetic terms, would observe: "Unfortunately, humans are often superstitious and
misguided, and go about seeking the good and bad, making a great many mistakes,
exaggerating, failing to consider their own motives, casting stones at others and not
looking into their own sins." Underlying such commentaries is the feeling that a
rational procedure must exist somewhere for discovering and applying the good.
To the contrary. it is perhaps obvious by this point in our proceedings, that some
mechanism of homo schizo is operating to perpetuate and maintain in royal style the
distinction of good and evil. Good and evil are the product of ingenious and successful
attempts of homo schizo to reduce his poly-ego problem to manageable proportions, in
order to control himself and extricate himself from his predicament.
If a dominant self can be named head of the confederation - and let this be called
"good" - and the other members of the confederation can be joined together as the
opposition and called "evil," then we shall have a ruler and this ruler shall be
preferred to the other - the evil devil - on all matters and decisions: and ego
conflicts can be blamed upon the evil of the other. Further the evil other can be
transferred almost at will, both consciously and unconsciously, among the inner selves,
interpersonal relations, the natural world, and the divine world.
Ideas of "good" and "evil," we conclude, wherever they manifest themselves, function as
schizotypical ways to control the world on behalf of homo schizo. It may be informative
and intriguing to depict the nuances of value, the quantitative and transient nature of
preferences, the complicated and multiform balances in concluding the truth of
propositions or the desirability of behavior - so confesses homo schizo. But then he
adds resolutely: "When the moment of truth appears, and a choice must be made, and my
soul is tortured by doubts, then I must have the good, and only the good, and nothing
but the good, so help me Good-God !"
Notes (Chapter 7: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful)
1. H. D. Lasswell and A. Kaplan, Power and Society (1950) and D. Truman, Governmental
Process (1951), both dependent to some extent upon prior works, such as Machiavelli's
Prince (1532), Michels' Political Parties (1915), Pareto's Mind and Society (1916),
Mosca's Ruling Class (1890), Bentley's Process of Government (1908), supplemented by
many case studies such as N. Leites' Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), where he
reconstructs the logical and thought systems of the leaders of the Soviet Union until
1950, and one can nitpick the "rational" from the multi-colored weave of ideology.
Perhaps to be mentioned also are such works of this author's as Politics for Better or
Worse (1973); the more formal Elements of Political Science (1952); and, as a ease
study, God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus (1983).
2. Ernest R. Hilgard, op. cit. 230.
3. W. James, Essays in Popular Philosophy, 84.
4. Isaac N. Vail, Selected Works, Santa Barbara, Calif.: Annular Books, 1972.
5. "The General and Logical Theory of Automata," in L. A. Jeffress, ed., Cerebral
Mechanisms in Behavior, N. Y.: Wiley, 1951, 24.
6. Languages of the Brain, op. cit.
7. Rochester and Martin, Thought Disorder and Schizophrenia, also Steven Schwartz,
Language and Cognition in Schizophrenia, N. Y.: Wiley, 1978.
8. Thomas Taylor, Timaeus of Plato, e. q. p. 244. on counting, fear, and planets.
9. F. Waisman, "The Decline and Fall of Causality," in A. C. Crombie et al., Turning
Points in Physics, N. Y.: Harper, 1961 84-154.
10. "Father Time," 22 Psychiatric Q (1948), 599.
11. Eissler, op. cit., 247.
12. Carmon and Nachshon, 7 Cortex (1971), 410-8 cited in Ornstein op. cit., 1972, 89.
13. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, N.
Y. Harper, 1953, chap 9.
14. "The Limits of Human Intelligence," in Jonathan Benthall, The Limits of Human
Nature, N. Y.: Dutton, 1974.
15. The Ghost in the Machine, 259.
16. G. H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1934, 347-8.
17. N. Y.: Putnam's, 1960, 8.
18. Cf. J. R. Kantor, The Logic of Modern Science, Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press,
1953, Part 11
19. Op. cit., 352
20. "Heaven and Earth: Catastrophism in Hamlet," III Kronos 4 (1978), 3-18; IV 1
(1978), 67-89; "The Seasons Alter: Catastrophism in A Midsummer Night's Dream," Vl
Kronos I (1980), 25-47. Cf. R. J. Jaarsma, with E. L. Odenwald, "Nor Heaven Nor Earth
Have Been at Peace: The Contemporary Foundations of Shakespeare's Cataclysmic Imagery,"
V1 Kronos 1 (1980), 12-24.
21. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1944.
22. Urbana, Illinois: U. of Illinois Press, 1973.
23. Op. cit., 28, That science may not pursue this dichotomy much longer is evidenced,
e. g. in Judith Wechsler, ed., On Aesthetics in Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1978.
HOMO SCHIZO II:
Human Nature and Behavior
by Alfred de Grazia
EPILOGUE
The elephant's trunk is not a nasal tumor. The androvorism of the praying mantis is not
a perversion. The seal's flippers are not a deformity. Nor is the human polyego a tumor,
a perversion or a deformity. It is the humble beginning of his claim to rule the world.
In his immediate arrogance, like a newly ennobled baron, man invents his ancestry. The
gods created him specially. The event was attended by the shaking of heaven and earth.
All the beasts and flowers attended his dispositions. His every blemish became a sign of
nobility: fallen hair, clumsy toes, an appetite for everything that sprouted or moved, a
jerky gait, a never-ending anxiety, superstition, and suspiciousness. Compelled to
count, he summed up everything. Compelled to displace, he permuted all objects into
personal associations. When all is done, he looks at his work, and like Elohim, is
satisfied.
But he does not rest. He destroys. He tortures himself by inner contradictions. He
attacks his fellows - not with the simple anatomical instruments of the beast but with
an ever-elaborating paraphernalia and by all media - by the word, the organized
onslaught, the manipulation of the whole range of the humanly valued - persons, objects,
ideals, subsistence, affection, dignity, freedom and life itself. No insult is too
subtle, no injury too enormous. If it can be conceived, it must be developed for use. So
goes history; so goes the world. All of man is good and bad, mingled inextricably,
beyond separation, beyond therapy, probably even beyond meaning in his brain. What is to
be done with this creature?
The chances that an intelligent, sharing, and peaceful creature can be formed of what
exists are low, so low that it appears useless to bank upon them. Gross deficits exist
in knowledge, in design, and in power. We can imagine three different scenarios. One is
organization. Another is selective breeding. A third is cloning. Organization has been
the largest hope of theologians and philosophers from our beginnings. By its promise,
evermore increasing with the advancement of the human sciences, a leadership would be
recruited to promote all observable tendencies in the cultures of the world that elicit
intelligence, generosity, and pacifism. These qualities would be so fortified by all
that we know or may come to know about discrimination for "good" and against "evil" that
opposing individual, popular, and organizational tendencies would be frustrated, and
socially extirpated. Eternal vigilance would be required, and every investment provably
promoting the three virtues would be jealously protected.
A second scheme is selective breeding. What is now unknown would have to be discovered:
tests for genetic tendencies or docility with regards to intelligence, sharing and
pacifism. This is not an impossible task. Ever more refined research may eventuate in
methods of analyzing genetic correlates of these traits, as has already been done with
intelligence. It might even be accomplished with crude means. Such would be the
licensing of births, conditioned not only upon prospects of health but also upon the
prospects for intelligence, generosity, and pacificity, as judged by ancestry to the
extent possible. Where at least some precision were obtainable, for a few if not for all
potential parents, a sperm bank might be created whose use would become a condition for
birthing, in the absence of positive criteria otherwise.
The third scheme would foster research into cloning, roughly considered as the
substitution of certain undesirable genetic material in the egg of potential parents by
desirable material. This would have an acceptability in that potential parents, who are
often cognizant of their own deficiencies and those of their families, would accept just
enough alterations to permit genetic gains while preserving most traits that are their
own. All three visions have a probably fatal flaw: homo sapiens schizotypus fears them,
naturally, as he fears all things. Fearing them, he will wish to control them. The more
obsessive, selfish and violent his efforts at control, the more likely he will succeed
in Q-CD vol 7: Homo Schizo II, Epilogue 240 obstructing, or suppressing, or perverting
the three types of human reform.
At the very best, a determined group, thoroughly dedicated to the visualized plans, and
agreeing to subject themselves ultimately to them, would come to command the power to
put the plans into effect, and, once in power, would do so. There are isolated instances
of this kind of behavior in the world, but no indications of their having broadened into
a world revolutionary movement without losing their raison d'‚tre. Cincinnatus resigned
his post as Dictator of the Roman Republic and returned to his farm and plow. Not only
are there few persons like him, but retiring from the scene is forbidden under the rules
of the utopian game under discussion. We must conclude that even were science to
guarantee high probabilities of success for these proposed solutions of homo schizo, we
would not be able to obtain the power for the solutions without losing the dedication to
them.
Under such circumstances, only one course can be recommended - that whoever believes,
should do what he can, no matter that it may be an iota of the envisioned state of
affairs. Devise a politics - call it "kalotics" - and apply it. Invent a therapy and
proceed to apply it. What else can one do without doing evil?
We know this: that homo schizo has the capability for anhedonic, obsessive
identification with an ideal, and he may as well work to transform himself as to destroy
himself. Then, one day, just as a humble change made homo schizo, another humble change
may be discovered to remake him. What a great day, when homo sapiens schizotypus becomes
homo sapiens sapiens.
End of HOMO SCHIZO II
CELESTIAL SEX, EARTHLY DESTRUCTION, AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY:
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA
Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey
Notes on the printed version of this book:
This book was processed by the Princeton University Computing Centre,
using the processing language called Script.
Photocomposition, cover make-up, lay-out and printing
were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services.
The photograph on the front and back covers displays a marble male figure, glancing to
the skies and playing the harp; it is of pre-Homeric Aegean origins and now possessed by
the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York.
ISBN: 0-940-268-09-4
Copyright 1984 by Alfred de Grazia
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
Limited first edition.
Address:
Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213,
Princeton, N.J. 08542, U.S.A.
To
Immanuel Velikovsky
(1895-1979)
"Iron sharpens iron,
and one man sharpens another."
Proverbs, IV, 27.17
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
CELESTIAL SEX,
EARTHLY DESTRUCTION,
AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION
IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY:
by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA
TITLE PAGE & FOREWORD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Part. 1:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER
Chapter 1. AN ATHENA PRODUCTION
Chapter 2. THE SONG OF LOVE
THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE
HAPPY ENDING
THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA
Chapter 3. THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY
AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS
THE HIDDEN STORY
AUTHOR'S CODA
Chapter 4. CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION
THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE
THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS
Chapter 5. HOLY DREAMTIME
THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE
BURLESQUE OR RELIGION?
THE PIOUS DRAMATIST
Part. 2:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
Chapter 6. THE RAPE OF HELEN
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN
THE AGE OF MARS
Chapter 7. CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES
THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES
SOCIETY IN SHOCK
THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE
Chapter 8. THE TWO FACES OF LOVE
A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS
TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY
ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS
THE COSMIC SPINNER
CONFUSION COMPOUNDED
A MATCH OF SOURCES
HOW TO NAME A PLANET?
THE ROMAN VENUS
Chapter 9. THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY
THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS
RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS
THE RILLES OF MOON
Chapter 10. HE WHO SHINES BY DAY
THE EPITHETS OF VENUS
CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY
ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES
APPENDIX TO Chapter 10
LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA"
Chapter 11. THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY
THE QUALITIES OF ARES
THE FATAL WOUND
Chapter 12. THE LAUGHING GODS
MERCURY
APOLLO
POSEIDON
HELIOS
A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR
Chapter 13. HOW THE GODS FLY
THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO
ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS
Part. 3:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR
Chapter 14. THE USES OF LANGUAGE
METER AND METAPHOR
HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE
THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT
HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE
THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE
Chapter 15. THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY
TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY
THE RULES OF MEMORY
FORGETTING
AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS
Chapter 16. THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA
DREAMWORK
SEXUALITY AND DISASTER
IN ILLO TEMPORE
THE KERNELS OF HISTORY
Chapter 17. SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND
WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
A CLAIM OF SUCCESS
FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY
Appendix: CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
INTRODUCTION
The theory to be expressed here is hardly believable. We discern behind a famous Homeric
scenario about the misconduct of the gods the shadow of a second scenario of
astronomical catastrophe. By pursuing the connection relentlessly, many reasons are
uncovered to suspect that the human drama is unconsciously imitating what the human eye
witnessed as a prior catastrophe in the skies. Chant and catastrophe, dance and disaster
seem to be historically linked.
Can a dance and poem be a piece of astronomical history, tightly, not vaguely, related?
If they are, then an idea that many psychologists have considered: that humans have a
tendency to suppress the memory of terrible events, but also are somehow compelled by
unconscious psychic forces to reenact the events - this idea is supported by our theory.
It appears that the reenactment may take place through religious rites, through wars,
through literature, through individual and group behavior of many kinds. Here it is
through the sublimated medium of poetry and dance. I think that such a process is
occurring in the story of the Love Affair of Venus and Mars. If my readers will agree,
then we shall begin to shape a consensus on a matter of great importance to several
fields of science and the humanities.
The literature referred to is a brief lyric of a hundred lines, sung in Book VIII of the
Odyssey. It tells how the bright-crowned goddess Aphrodite loved Ares, god of battle,
and how they met repeatedly to make love "in the home of fire," until they were
entrapped in a marvelous net made by her outraged consort, the god Hephaestus, and
released only when Ares pledged to reform his conduct.
The lyric tells of a much longer opera ballet sung and directed by the sightless bard,
Demodocus, who, some say, is Homer's self-image. The recital plays to a fascinated
audience at the palace of Alcinous and to his guest, Odysseus, or Ulysses, hero of the
War against Troy. The frank sexuality is Homer's, no matter how often it has been
translated vaguely. The story is the archetype of the adulterous love triangle, as neat
a plot and piece as anyone has ever composed, and a model for a thousand imitations. But
it may also be the masking of a catastrophe visited upon the Greeks from the skies.
I studied the lines and read some translations of them. I rendered them in something
like the original epic hexameter, and shall present them below (Chapter 2) in that form.
Still, examining the words was but the beginning of an investigation that carried me on
odyssean wanderings into various fields of knowledge.
I asked myself what spirit breathed into Homer and saw that it was the goddess Pallas
Athena. Athena moved the Homeric Age. She led the Greeks in the Iliad and guided
Odysseus through his many adventures of the Odyssey. I found her everywhere. She
dominated the skies as a phenomenon, and human strife on Earth.
I concerned myself with the context of the song and discovered that it was a Holy
Dreamtime song, not a sacrilegious burlesque. It was presented as an opera-ballet, meant
to take place among the gods in heaven. The same art form exists today among the
aborigines of Australia.
I asked myself how such holy songs could arise, and found an answer in the modern theory
of catastrophism. Precedents and parallels from many countries and cultures justify
searching for catastrophism behind the lines of the love song of Demodocus. Greek
culture was badly damaged by natural disasters of the eight and seventh centuries before
this era, and Homer's poetry (which I place later than is usual) shows both the effects
of the disasters and the ways in which the Greeks recovered from them.
The song of the love affair of Aphrodite and Ares is to be stripped of its facade. It is
to be considered as a song about planetary gods doing violence to the world. I assign
this Aphrodite of Homer to the Moon, with reservations that I believe are fully
explained herein, rather than to the planet Venus. Ares stands for planet Mars without
doubt. Hephaestus or Vulcan, though male, surprisingly stands for the planet Venus in
this episode. Sea-god Poseidon represents the worried Earth, and persuades Hephaestus to
release Aphrodite and Ares from the invisible net by which he has trapped them. Poseidon
stands bond for Ares. All this suggests the unspeakable horror of natural disasters
brought by these planetary gods upon Earth and humanity.
That Aphrodite was always a great goddess of the Moon is maintained, again with
reservations, for she may also have had her name assigned to other sky-bodies,
especially planet Venus which the Greeks and Romans, following the Orientals, came to
call Aphrodite. We tell of how the Moon-Aphrodite received in Homeric times the wanton,
irresponsible, and imperturbable character by which later ages came to know her.
Aphrodite is tied to Helen of Troy, and Helen to the Hellenes or Greeks. The Trojan wars
evolve psychically into campaigns to recapture the Moon from planet Mars (Ares) by the
followers of planet Venus (Athena).
The stories of the Trojan wars thus use the historical and mundane battles to play out
on Earth the drama of the skies. The skies of the Homeric age must be recent: 776 to 687
B. C. - or so I calculate, taking up Velikovsky's chronology. Although natural disasters
had befallen the numerous settlements of Troy (possibly Hisarlik) throughout its
history, a final major destruction by natural forces may well have occurred during
Homer's boyhood. It was an awesome tragedy to him and others, which could not be
recalled without pain, fear, and distortion.
It is to be expected that the life of survivors of worldwide natural catastrophes would
be fearful and turbulent. Hence I argue that the social psychology of the Homeric Greeks
is framed in a concept of mania and madness, rather than in the conventional view of a
primitive people gradually achieving a higher culture.
Further, as on Earth so in heaven, there must be signs of the cosmic disasters of the
age. I examine the Moon, as the astronauts have seen and sampled it for evidences of
recent disaster, and shall recite indications that it did experience torrid bouts in the
near past involving immense electro-gravitational stresses.
I do the same with the planet Mars, from the evidence of the latest explorations. Mars
has been the victim, it appears, of recent abysmal ruptures and explosions; I explain
how these might have been caused by near encounters with Earth, Moon and Venus. Planet
Venus is played by Hephaestus in the love Affair. He is a stand-in for Athena, director
of the show, who is more frequently identified with the planet Venus than he. Venus is
exceedingly hot, and marred beneath her dense atmosphere by shallow surface craters of
great diameter.
The other gods of the Love Affair introduce to the first modern bedroom comedy its
humor, which can be explained in Freudian theory as yet another cover-up of the
disaster. In reality they too are heavenly bodies. The role of the Sun, Helios, is shown
to be secondary to that of the planetary gods and responsive to their behavior, as it is
pictured in the earliest development of theology everywhere.
If the characters of the Love Affair are to be placed in heaven, their motions too must
be given meaning. The best explanation lately offered has the Sun and planets forming an
electric systems, subordinate to and part of the galactic electrical system. They act as
charged bodies separated from an oppositely charged space plasma by space-charge
sheaths, the rupture of which destroys a balance and creates havoc through discharges
among the bodies. These efforts seem to be discernible in the special motions of the
characters of the Love Affair.
We present physical and historical evidence in general agreement with the love song sung
by Demodocus. How the human mind manages to react to such events in a way to preserve
its own balance, and to give forth its most beautiful literary expressions, needs to be
learned. An examination of the language of the Love Affair, and of Homer generally,
brings forth a theory of myth: to succeed in telling the truth about an unspeakable
event, a myth must fail to convey the truth. This fateful contradictory task is achieved
successfully through the Love Affair.
Homer was probably an editor and publisher of such great myths. He labored to write down
in a fresh and convenient alphabet what he thought should be sung. He was a bringer of
peace between gods and men, and the symbolizer of a unified Greek culture.
Memory, I offer, is of traumatic origin. Human memory begins in horror and the need to
forget. To remember is to forget; to forget is to remember. From the beginnings of true
human nature until now, no one has been exempted from the rules of amnesia, not even the
philosophers whose sublimation of the terrors of becoming a creature of memory have
seemed to carry them very far from particular events.
Myth and dreams coincide, operating according to similar laws. The conscious and
unconscious parts of the mind exchange with each other what is required for a sense of
control to exist so life can go on. Still the balance is scarcely a happy one. Human
nature is imprinted by a deeply buried, unresting, and generalized great fear. The fear
is reflected today and in the earliest human institutions of religion, politics, sex,
schools, commerce, and war.
I concluded in the end that the hundred lines of the Love Affair dramatize
subconsciously the history of a catastrophic encounter of the planets at or near 687 B.
C. Further, the mythical and literary transformations of the event mark a high point in
the development of the European mind and its culture.
I ask the reader - no matter that he may disbelieve me - to pursue his disbelief through
the pages to follow, and acquire, at the least, a reasoned disbelief. To the reader who
is familiar with my ideas, I offer assurances that the revelations contained in this
introduction do not exhaust the surprises that he will encounter, one after another, as
he moves through these pages upon his personal Odyssey.
FOREWORD
In this book, I extract a dreamy bedroom comedy from Homer's Odyssey, analyze it as a
dramatic form of myth, detect that it might have a real astronomical origin, seek this
origin in world-wide disasters, and assert that an unconscious parallel occurs between
astronomical events and artistic production.
The narrative is well suited to readers of venturesome tastes, who may have a passing
acquaintanceship with the history of the theater and ancient Greece, with
psychoanalysis, with mythology and the ideas of catastrophism and astronomy.
The work was written and offered for publication over a decade ago. Well-founded
criticism from several British experts on mythology, particularly Peter James, Malcolm
Lowery, Brian Moore and Martin Sieff, led me to withhold the manuscript, despite the
encouragement coming from other quarters to publish it. I have indeed held it, to near
the end of the Quantavolution Series, and release it now, benefited, I believe, by the
amendments that my friends induced.
Thanks on this occasion go also to professor William Mullen of St. John's College, whose
advice extended from greek poetic meter to the full ancient oecumene; to Eugene
Vanderpool of Athens, Greece, who was consistently sympathetic; to Dr. Elizabeth
Chesley-Baity, who discussed with me the archaeo-astronomical anthropology of dances,
fire-rites, ballgames, and sword ceremonies; to the late Dr. Zvi Rix of Israel, whose
enchanting letters on problems of mythology kept the book and its author warm over the
years of its hibernation; to George English for his editorial advice and Jungian
interpretations; to my colleague, Professor Cyrus Gordon, for his appreciations of the
values in my approach; to the late Professor Livio C. Stecchini, whose absence from the
scene of ancient history and science is sorely felt; and to Dr. Jay Lefer who responded
keenly to the questions here raised in the field of psychiatry. Finally, I would
acknowledge the inspiration afforded by my friend, the late Immanuel Velikovsky, who
designated the Greek gods as sky-bodies threatening the Earth.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER
CHAPTER ONE
AN ATHENA PRODUCTION
The Love Affair, as I shall call it, is a story of how the arrogant god of war, Ares,
made love to the Golden Goddess Aphrodite in the bed she was supposed to share with her
husband, Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith god. Hearing of their adultery from Helios, the
sun-god, Hephaestus fashioned an invisible net that trapped the pair in bed. Returning
from a pretended trip, he called upon the gods to witness their guilt and would release
them only on the promise of the sea-god, Poseidon, to stand bail for the disreputable
Ares.
Perhaps this was the first bedroom farce of literature. Its producer, in a manner of
speaking, was the Goddess Pallas Athena, patron of the arts and crafts, daughter and
favorite of Zeus, father of the gods. She was born some centuries before 1500 B. C. [1]
and was originally envisioned in the planet Venus.
Athena was not only the producer of the 'Love Affair' but also of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, as I shall seek to show: so she was not a novice in the field of dramaturgy.
Her versatility was proverbial. She probably inspired the magnificent setting of
Phaeacia and directed the scene closely. She sang it in the guise of the god-inspired
Demodocus. Like Shakespeare she acted in her own plays: as herself, she planned the
occasion for the story, and in the person of Odysseus, was the honored member of its
audience. "I am Pallas Athene, Daughter of Zeus, who always stands by your side and
guards you through all your adventures," she reminds Odysseus at one point.
Odysseus's name means "troublemaker" or better "the inveterate troublemaker." Writes
George Dimock, "In the Odyssey odyssasthai means essentially 'to cause pain (odyn‰) and
to be willing to do so. '" [2] In her unruffled and sanguine way, often behind the
scenes, Athena is the world's greatest troublemaker, as we shall soon learn.
Though she is a mistress of disguises, Athena permitted a picture of her natural human
form to develop over the centuries. E. V. Rieu, who has provided one of the many
translations of the Odyssey that are available, writes that "we may think of her as a
tall and beautiful woman, with brilliant eyes, clad in the white robe, with the aegis, a
goatskin cloack, across her breast, a crested helmet on her head, and a long spear in
her hand." [3] Sometimes an owl and a snake accompany her. However, we would warn that
Athena's appearance is as varied as her characterizations, and her names are so many
that some are still to be unearthed.
"Most vivid and alive of Homer's gods," writes Rieu, "she dominates the Odyssey. And
this is true even though there are moments when we are at a loss to say whether the poet
means us to imagine her actual presence or to understand only that his characters are
exercising the motherwit which she personifies."
The whole story of the Odyssey itself can be retold briefly here. The saga begins with
an assembly of the Gods. Athena catches her father Zeus reminiscing on the just killing
of an evil man, and, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon, reminds him that the
worthy Odysseus has still not reached home, although it is the tenth year after the
destruction of Troy; for seven years he has been detained by the nymph Calypso on an
island. And for three years before then, he had wandered: he had sacked a town, landed
among the lotus-eaters who relished an amnesia-promoting vegetable, and had been
captured by a giant man-eating Cyclops whom he blinded in order to escape.
This proved to be unfortunate. The Cyclops was a son of Poseidon, whose enmity now
marked Odysseus for unending disasters.
The wanderers landed on the floating island of Aeolia where they were treated royaly.
Upon departing, Odysseus was given a bag of rushing winds that was not to be opened, and
granted a fair breeze for home. But his crew, acting in the typically greedy and
impetuous manner that was to destroy them all ultimately, opened the pouch in envy of
its supposedly precious contents. The fierce winds escaped; the way was lost. A landing
among savage Laestrygonians brought a slaughter of many of the company. Fleeing, they
found the island of the witch, Circe. After some difficulties (she changed a number of
the men into pigs for a time), they conciliated her and spent a luxurious year at her
palace.
Upon his departure, Circe gave Odysseus means of discovering his own fate and reviewing
the history of many a departed soul through a visit to Hades and a talk with the seer
Teiresias. Pausing at Circe's island afterwards, Odysseus received further instructions
that would carry him past the seductive Sirens, and through the narrow straits between
Scylla, a grasping monster, and Charybdis, a swallower of ships.
However, he is overruled by his men when he begs them to sail past the Island of the
Sun. They land, and are kept ashore by storms until out of supplies. While Odysseus
sleeps, the crew seize and eat the fat cattle of Helios. The Sun protests to Zeus
(Jupiter) who destroys their ship and lets Odysseus drift alone for nine days until
washed up on the shore of Ogygia, the island of Calypso. Seven years pass.
Then it is that, following upon Athena's plea, the order of Zeus moves him on and he was
sailing well until Poseidon, returning from a visit among the Ethiopians, spied him and
dashed his little boat to pieces. The nymph Ino helped him to stay afloat and Poseidon
turned away, satisfied. Athena smoothed the winds and seas so that he might survive, and
arranged for him to fall into the hands of the Phaeacians.
Now it is to the Phaeacian episode that I shall attend closely, but a few words more
will bring the story to an end. Odysseus is transported from Phaeacia, with many gifts,
and laid upon Ithaca, asleep. Athena appears to him and advises him: his wife, Penelope,
still withholds her choice of a betrothed, though it is demanded of her by her many
suitors, who meanwhile feast at the expense of the palace. His son, Telemachus, also
faithful, is young and indecisive. Odysseus is to go first in disguise among his people,
then to prepare his weapons, then, with the help of his son and two loyal slaves, to
challenge and slaughter the suitors. So he does, and wins back his possessions and his
wife. A final battle with the surviving opposition ensues but Athena calls Odysseus off,
for he is supported but warned by Zeus. "So spoke Athene, and he obeyed, and was glad at
heart. Then for all time to come a solemn covenant betwixt the twain was made by Pallas
Athene, daughter of Zeus, who bears the aegis, in the likeness of Mentor both in form
and in voice" [4] . Thus ends the Odyssey.
Notes (Chapter 1: An Athena Production)
1. William Mullen, "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts," III Pensee No 1 (1973), 10; pp. 13-
4.
2. George E. Dimock, Jr., "The Name of Odysseus," in George Steiner and Robert Fagles,
eds., Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Prentice Hall, 1962, p. 106.
3. The Odyssey, Penguin edition, introduction.
4. A. T. Murray, translator, Homer: The Odyssey, 2 vols. (New-York: Putnam's Sons,
1919), II, 443. Mentor was the lifetime guardian and advisor of Odysseus. He had been
left behind when Odysseus sailed for Troy. (All line references to the Greek text will
be to the Murray translation.)
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER
CHAPTER TWO
THE SONG OF LOVE
Here then is this song of love. It is presented fifth-hand: My literal verse is based
upon a number of translations of what is ultimately a tenth century A. D. manuscript in
Greek (the earliest extant - as written down in the seventh-century B. C. and reedited
in the next century) of Homer's Odyssey, which reports what was sung by a blind harpist,
Demodocus, in a time and place that have been debatable questions for over two thousand
years.
Alcinous the King announced the event: Now, all and one of you dancers, Phaeacia's
finest! form in your corps de ballet so our stranger and guest can tell all his friends
upon going back home, we're surpassing all manner of mankind; We are the paramount
sailors on sea, and in running a foot race, singing of songs, and in dancing. So someone
around us here go, go without loitering, bring to us here for Demodocus's use, that
precious harp that so clearly resounds; it's the lyre carefully standing, it's
somewhere, I know, within one of our great halls." Sacred commands of Alcinous! Quickly
arose a herald, seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from its palace
place. Rising as well were a chosen nine men who were Lords Ceremonial, publically
called, whenever the people foregathered and needed an ordering. These cleared out space
for the dancing to come; they measured a broad ring. Meanwhile the herald returned; he
carried the clear-intoned lyre. Taking the lyre in hand, Demodocus moved in the midst of
the young boys standing there, all of them skilled in the dance though they blossomed
with fair youth. Down stamped their feet on the floor made for beauteous magical dances.
Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid-air!
THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE
Whereupon the song of the Love Affair begins. Striking his masterly chords in the
prelude to singing his sweet song, Demodocus charmingly told of Ares' love affair and
Aphrodite, Golden of Crown. In secret they lay in the home of Hephaestus. Ares came
carrying all manner of gifts to dishonor the Lord's bed.
Straightaway then went with the news, of course, Helios, who'd spotted them loving.
Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful story. Deep down below to the
depth of his forge he proceeded; there, placing a thunderbolt stone on the block of the
anvil, he struck, and struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could hope to dissolve,
for fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his fierce aim. Then
having fashioned his snare, imbued with a wrath against Ares, up to his chamber he went,
by his bedstead of love, and all over, everywhere, round the four posts of the bed he
moved, spreading the ligaments, dropping a number of them from above, from the beams to
the floor, too, fine as the web of a spider, so fine that the Blessed Immortals, looking
for them could not see them, such excellent craft was he capable of.
Soon as the bonds had been stretched over all of the lovers' trysting couch, Hephaestus
pretended to move on the way to his well-founded Lemnos, dearly loved island. Wherewith
the unwavering gaze of the Golden-bridled Ares fixed without fail on Hephaestus, Most
Famed among Artisans, going off. And Ares straight made his way to the house of the
Famous Hephaestus, eager for love of Cytherean Aphrodite of the Bright Crown. She had in
fact come before him just now from her father, mighty Son of Kronos, and rested herself
to await his arrival. Ares entered directly the house, reached for her hands, and spoke
calling her name: "Dearest one, come to bed now with me; let us together lie. Hephaestus
is no longer here or about and I do think he's gone. Lemnos must have him; he's gone to
his Sintians who speak like barbarians." He spoke like that, and she was quite thrilled
to lie in his lean arms.
Going to bed, they laid themselves together. But upon them showered the bonds engineered
by versatile Hephaestus, tight drawn. Try as they might, they couldn't remove their
limbs or even move them. Then they did realize no way could be found to escape the close
bonds.
Nearing them now, having turned himself back before reaching his Lemnos, came close the
Famous, the Strong-armed, the God with Disabled Legs. Helios had watched as before and
again had delivered the story. So, to his mansion once more he returned, his heart so
heavy. Standing astride of the door he was seized by a wild anger. Terrible cries went
up; all of the Gods heard his shouting: "Zeus, my father and all of you Blessed Gods who
are Eternal, come down! See for yourselves here a laughable matter, unyielding fact.
Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus, has ever shunned my lameness, but loved Annihilator
Ares who is handsome and straight-footed, born to stumble that I am! Yet no one to blame
save my parents. Better had they not begotten me. Here you can see how this pair climbed
into my bed and twine around each other so lovingly. I am torn apart by the sight. But
believe me, their desire will vanish. However in love, their lust is gone, and an end to
their fornication. Nevertheless, the trap and the net will not let them go free. Gifts
that I gave for the right to the bride, with her eyes of a spaniel, first must be paid
back to me by her father; fair though his daughter, she is a wanton and reckless." So
spoke Hephaestus, seeing the Gods had now met at the house by its brazen bright
threshold.
Poseidon came, the Mover of Earth, and Hermes the Helper, too. Lord and Director of Far-
removed Works, Apollo: he came. (Goddesses were absent, they remained home, away from
the shameful scene.) Standing around the door, then, were the Gods, the Givers of Good
Things. Laughter arose from the Blessed Gods, inextinguishably gleeful they were at the
sight of Hephaestus' shrewd craft and cunning, saying amongst themselves, glancing at
each other, "Bad deeds prosper poorly. The slow one can catch the most swift. See how
Hephaestus, though slow he may be, has caught up with Ares, fastest of Gods who command
high Olympus. Lame although he be, yet he has caught him by skill, so Ares must pay the
just fine owed by one in adultery." To each other they spoke in this manner.
Apollo, Lord and the son of Great Zeus, said aside to God Hermes, "Hermes, the son of
Great Zeus, and our Messenger, Giver of Good Things: would you be willing, on oath, to
wed with the Golden Aphrodite, even though trapped by strong bonds?" The Messenger God,
Slayer of Argus, retorted: "Would that this happened to myself! Yes, O Master Apollo,
Unfailing Marksman. If unbreakable bindings of three times the number would fasten me
down, yes, and all of the goddesses were to be looking upon the two of us. Would that it
happened that I should be sleeping with Golden Aphrodite!" Speeches like this caused new
laughter to rise from the Heavenly Deities.
Poseidon laughed not at all; he besought on the contrary Hephaestus, Supreme-of-all-
Craftsmen, to let go of Ares, speaking in winged words: "Loose him, I promise, when
ordered by you, to compel him to pay you all that is right, and I swear this before all
these Gods, the Immortals." Famous and Strong-armed Hephaestus replied: "Do not ask
this. Think! Poseidon, Earth-Surrounder. Bail for a reprobate! How can I place you in
bondage among the immortal gods, granted that Ares will avoid both the debt and the bail
and depart." Still the Shaker-of-Earth was insistent; Poseidon declared, "Surely if Ares
shall flee from his debt I shall pay you Hephaestus." Then the Famous, the Strong-armed
Hephaestus conceded in answer: "I am not right to deny you, nor would such an action be
proper." Suddenly, so saying, the Mighty Hephaestus unfastened the bindings.
Straightaway, freed from their powerful bonds, the lovers sprang upwards. Ares proceeded
to Thrace, but Aphrodite, Lover of Laughter, went on to Cyprus, to Paphos, her domain
with her fragrant-smoke alter. There she was bathed by the Graces, who salved her with
oils of immortals, ointment refulgent on Gods who are Deathless. And they clothed her
body. Such was the beauty of raiment, the vision astonished the eyes.
HAPPY ENDING
The opera is over, its audience charmed and relaxed: This was the song that the famous
bard sang and Odysseus rejoiced; glad in his heart was the guest while he listened;
glad, too, the Phaeacians, men of the long oars, famed for their sea-going vessels.
Forthwith Alcinous bade Halius and Laodamas to dance by themselves. No one could match
them. They grasped in their hands a beautiful purple ball that Polybus the Wise One had
fashioned for them and their dancing. One would lean backwards and toss it up high
towards the shadowy clouds. His brother would leap off the ground in the air, and
skillfully catch it, even not touching the ground with his feet until holding it firmly.
Showing their skill at casting the ball straight up high was a prelude; Now they began a
new dance on the bounteous earth, flinging the same ball to and fro, to and fro, as
other youths stood in the wings, beating time. Great was the din that arose! Odysseus
then turned to Alcinous, saying: "Lord and Renowned among mankind, you boasted of your
dancers; best you had said that they be, and true are your words in our full sight.
Looking upon them, amazement takes hold of me here."
Alcinous is gladdened by this praise. He impetuously ordains that all manner of rich
gifts be heaped up for the guest to carry along home when he leaves Scheria.
THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA
The "Love Affair" stands as a complete story in itself. More exactly, it is a summary of
a long dramatic presentation which will never be heard or seen. And this long story is
of course part of only one episode of the Phaeacian Adventure.
Phaeacia itself is a marvelous creation of Homer-Athena. If the "Love Affair" as a
literary genre can be called the first bedroom farce, Phaeacia may be called the first
Utopia, to be succeeded by hundreds of utopias in the millennia to come. It has aspects
of More's Utopia, of Campanella's City of the Sun, of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, of
Hilton's Shangrila, of Skinner's Walden II, and of many another.
Phaeacia means in Greek the "Shining Land". It is a new community, now in its second
generation. Its people were once settled in Hypereia, probably far to the East, when
they were oppressed by savage giant neighbors, "a quarrelsome people who took advantage
of their greater strength to plague them", says Homer.
Their first king, Nausithous, father of the present king, the divine Alcinous, "made
them migrate and settled them in Scheria [probably a mythical name, like Phaeacia and
Hypereia], far from the busy haunts of men."
"There he laid out the walls of a new city, built them houses, put up temples to the
gods, and allotted the land for cultivation." They have an abundance of food and water,
and of niceties of civilization. "We run fast and we are firstrate seamen. But the
things in which we take a perennial delight are the feast, the lyre, the dance, clean
linen in plenty, a hot bath, and our beds." The wash is done in "the noble river with
its never-failing pools, in which there was enough clear water always bubbling up and
swirling by to clean the dirtiest clothes." [1]
The beautiful princess, Nausicaa, is impelled by Athena to go with attendants to the
river banks to wash clothes and play games, activities suggestive of the rites of Spring
to at least one authority, Emile Mireaux [2] . There she inevitably encounters
Odysseus, begrimed from his many days adrift but refreshed from sleep. Her ball falls
near the thicket where he lay, she meets him and he wins her trust. She in turn
reassures her playmates.
"Stop, my maids. Where are you flying to at the sight of a man? Don's tell me you take
him for an enemy, for there is no man on earth, nor ever will be, who would dare set
hostile feet on Phaeacian soil. The gods are too fond of us for that. Remote in this
sea-beaten home of ours, we are the outposts of mankind and come in contact with no
other people." [3]
A town square, marketing-place and meeting place, well-paved, adjoins the Temple of
Poseidon, chief of the gods favoring the city, for he fathered king Nausithous. Poseidon
is not always pleased with his Phaeacians, because they are sometimes too hospitable to
travelers who have offended him, and it was fore-told by King Nausithous that Poseidon
would be jealous enough one day to petrify a vessel of theirs and swing about the
mountains behind them into a ring that would foreclose the sea.
Meanwhile they lived well and gave their energies to the building and sailing of fleet
ships. They held commerce, too, in contempt. Neither grim warriors nor merchants, yet
they enjoyed all the good things of life.
The King's name of Alcinous (Alkynoos) is significant. The central star of the Pleiades,
the gate to Paradise and to the world of spirits, is Alkyone. Alkyonic Lake is the
waters of death leading of Paradise. There has since time immemorial been a worldwide
knowledge, among tribes and great civilizations, about the Pleiades, early November
celebrations occur centering upon them [4] .
The palace of Alcinous, too, is shining and grand, "for a kind of radiance, like that of
the sun or moon, lit up the high-roofed halls of the great king." The palace enjoys a
large household of retainers and its gardens extend into a bush-enclosed orchard.
Homer is as respectful of women as anyone in this age of brutal male chauvinism. Queen
Arete, mother of Nausicaa, "sits at the hearth in the light of the fire, spinning the
purple yarn, a wonder to behold, leaning against a pillar and her hand maids sit behind
her," [5] but she is a powerful factor in setting policy for the realm. "If you secure
her favor, Nausicaa tells Odysseus, you may hope to regain home and friends. "On
mother's wishes much depends." [6]
The places of public assembly can hold "many thousands": all of the nobles, their
families and the population. The king is beloved, but ruler by consensus. Social and
political functions are performed by men chosen, perhaps elected, from the aristocracy.
For example, when the performance of "Love Affair" was announced, a committee of nine
official stewards took matters in hand. "They were public servants who supervised all
the details on such occasions."
The Phaeacians are a well-organized community. They have a public opinion. There are
conventional moral standards: gossip, respect, a time for marriage, a place for everyone
and for strangers: these seem all the more utopian as they seem real.
A peaceful people, we are induced to believe, a people beloved by and respecting the
gods, a people who lived serenely under an ultimate belief that their special god,
Poseidon, would take away their sea, their precious sea-fairing way of life.
In the end, we are told, these beautiful people, hospitable, who had sublimated all
terrors to the arts and crafts, were punished as Poseidon had promised: for their
kindness to Odysseus, their returning ship was frozen to stone and a range of mountains
was about to encircle them.
Notes (Chapter 2: The Song of Love)
1. Ibid., VI.
2. Vol I, chap. X.
3. Loc. cit.
4. R. G. Halliburton, 25 Nature (Dec. 1, 1881) 100-1; E. B. Tylor 25 Nature (Dec. 15,
1881) 150-1; R. G. H., 25 Nature (Feb. 2, 1882) 317-8.
5. A. T. Murray, op. cit., I, 229.
6. Robert Fitzgerald, Homer: The Odyssey (New York: Doubleday, 1961).
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER
CHAPTER THREE
THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY
The song is sung. The play is over. Now the question is, "What does it represent?" It
represents, I think, and I must take the rest of this book to explain myself, a shocked
spell amidst conditions of horrifying natural disaster. The Greeks experienced it,
suppressed its memories, remembered it subconsciously, and converted it ultimately into
the symbolic form of a comedy.
The Greeks assumed the Love Affair took place in the sky nor could it have any other
location. The gods move swiftly from place to place, the Sun is one of the actors, some
of the brilliant imagery such as of "the brazen bright threshold" suggests the heavens,
the gods involved are all sky-gods, and the decor and associated games are celestial.
Hyginus is not alone in speaking of the play as going on in the sky; speaking of Venus
exciting Mars, he writes that "since she inflamed him violently with love, she called
the star Pyroeis, indicating this fact." [1]
Hyginus' Poetica Astronomica also says that: When Vulcan married Venus he watched so
Mars could only follow but never catch her.
This indicates the nature of the "love-affair" as a planetary engagement and hints at
prior close encounters of Vulcan with Aphrodite and then a relationship such that Vulcan
would always be closer to Aphrodite than Mars could be.
Effective planetary encounters must be accompanied by grave disasters.
Probably the primordial elements of The Love Affair were composed of the incoherent,
intense feelings of people in a frenzy of despair and fright [2] . Words of today
cannot express their feelings. The biblical prophets convey some impressions of the
state of mind in the throes of disaster. The mind of today, developed in the imagery of
nuclear bomb devastation, can perhaps understand something of their feelings. Accounts
of historically experienced natural disasters such as Vesuvius, Krakatoa, the Pestigo
(Wisconsin) forest fire, and the great Lisbon earthquake lend analogous material.
What had really happened had probably caused repeated surges of disjoined symbols and
thoughts. The poetry must have sprung originally from a chaos of sounds, sights and
human babel and ejaculations, uttered by many tongues, over hours and days of time. A
"normal" adult would probably have been reduced to bodies of expression such as follows:
The worst is happening... just as feared!... all sacrifices failed... here it is...
annihilator... oracles... monster-body... war... death sun... red dogs, blood...
Aphrodite... sex... moon... darkness... thunder... trumpets... golden... Ares... Zeus...
sword... stretched fireballs... moon rape... heat... god, god... who... suffocation...
stinks... stand still... run... hide... don't move... a giant in the sky calling... he
was away... his flares are out... moon is his... we give it... pray take it... all this
can't happen... we did not mean it... abah, awah, abah... we are dying... glowers...
shakes... where is he going... where has she gone... din... deafness... the sky and land
are afire... Poseidon stop it... shake them off... take everything... let us be... uh.
And so on. But the horror once past paved the way for music and literature. The state of
mind of the audience of Demodocus can be reconstructed into a more coherent story in
which the matching of a new plot with the original real story is nicely achieved. The
original memories and anxieties are blended and smoothed over by the new story so that
they erupt under control. History cannot be forgotten, but it can be made tolerate. The
Song of Love is telling something that only the collective unconscious can understand,
and which the unconscious rarely permits to be verbalized. I shall try, nevertheless, to
force to emerge some of the unexpressed and unconscious feelings of the people of
Phaeacia as the Love Affair is sung and played. To do so I may resort to a rhetorical
device.
AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS
If an old priest of Delphi were to be instructing acolytes about events of the song, we
imagine that lecture-notes upon his discourse would read as follows:
We know these gods for what they are, uncontrollable and primeval; we cannot say what
we think of them; we must not even say who they are or where we first met them; we must
not say what they did to us or in any way accuse them; we must not even remember too
much lest we feel agony and panic. The rhythms and the chords keep our feeling under
control, reinforcing the screen of words alone. The story, as Demodocus signs it, is
familiar. Yet it contrives to excite and appease us. We shall feel better afterwards.
That is because otherwise we might be compelled to confront the true story, which is
rather like what follows, although we cannot be sure that it is more than a terribly
realistic dream.
THE HIDDEN STORY
Ares and Aphrodite are the planet Mars and the Moon. The Planet Mars is ruddy and far
away now, but was then close to the Moon who was bathed in her golden aura. Hephaestus
is the planet Venus. He is not married to Aphrodite. He approached her on various
occasions in times past, and ourselves too, our Earth, and was terribly destructive. And
the Moon was disturbed and drawn to him and then was drawn back, and so we gave her in
marriage, or rather Zeus gave her in marriage, for how else could they be legitimately
coupled save by the ruler of the skies and of humanity, who has for three thousands
years dominated us.
Mars and Moon are not in love, nor do they make true love. They are destroying each
other and us. Mars' huge body which once seemed like a flaming sword interjects itself
between Moon and Earth. And the whole primal violence of extreme sexual activity occurs
on a world scale. The bed of Earth shakes, the skies glare brilliantly, electricity is
all-pervasive, the Moon disappears and reappears. A massive rape is occurring.
Hephaestus is far away. It is night but for the brilliance of the scene, secret night
when sex flourishes and Aphrodite, the Dark One, makes love. Perhaps if he would return,
he would divert the assailant Mars and spare us from total destruction. We would
ourselves imitate this orgy, if we were engaging in an alternate mood of anxiety-
therapy, or we would propitiate by sacrificing ourselves or what belongs to us or
whatever and whomever we can lay our hands on.
We know what "gifts of Ares" are. They are meteors. They are the steeds of Mars. They
have struck us and are showered upon Moon. When our King Nausithous led us out of
Hypereia, it was because of the stone-giants which Mars and his horde had hurled upon
our land.
The secret will be exposed. Helios the Sun is rising. He never takes part. He cannot
rescue us. But he will attract the attention of the Planet Hephaestus and perhaps an
intervention will occur.
It does. Planet Hephaestus looms large, in blazing anger, his immense arms and stunted
legs making him look like a comet. Then he disappears. He does not approach the lovers
closely. He goes to the other side of Earth. We wonder whether he will reappear. The
destruction upon Earth is terrible. Mars is twice the size of the Moon. We are struck
repeatedly by his "gifts"- gases, stones, quakes. The waters are disturbed. The tides
are high, the volcanos are erupting. Will the other gods do nothing? Now the Moon and
Mars are behind us, leaving us rocking and quaking. But Hephaestus is once more in
sight. He is as large as Mars, brilliant, and trailing electric sparks even against the
gray sky. But if his legs drag, not so his arms. His huge arms flap as they hammer out
the sparks. The whole sky around him is brazen. He drops flashing clouds over our heads
and from the corner posts or pillars of the sky.
But again he departs and again come Mars and Moon. She had returned separately to the
region of Jupiter and comes back once again to meet Mars who has come flying along
parallel to us. Moon attracts Mars once more. Great electric sparks envelop them. They
are perturbed. They pause and move, pause and move. Now Moon appears in an unusual phase
or position, now she disappears behind Mars and he moves ahead showing another part of
her. Mars is closely following the Moon, which is to say that he is moving swiftly
parallel to the Earth.
But Hephaestus now approaches, even larger than he was a few hours ago (who can measure
such agonizing time?) A thunderous noise fills the heavens, like the enraged shouts of
the cuckolded husband. It is something to cause ugly laughter; it is a tangible, an
enormous, a highly visible fact, this entanglement of the two.
We shall now witness the catastrophe, as we Greeks call the end of an age and also that
part of a drama which brings the culmination of a plot.
"The Gods of the Sky must come!," says the thunderous noise. The scene must attract
them, for it is their milieu. It is the end of the age, the end of the world. They will
be our salvation or our doom. Hephaestus is lying. He knows he is not the son of Zeus
but was cast down by Jupiter and took his strange misshapen form (compared with the
other Olympians) from the accident. The bed of Hephaestus is by the Moon, not as it is
today, even though he is often far away and invisible in the northern sky.
But Mars has climbed upon this bed and is trapped in the invisible electrical-
gravitational net. The sex bout has ended with the bodies suddenly largely stilled. Our
Earth also pauses.
Hephaestus hovers in the sky, glowering, raging, exchanging bolts with Mars. Mars tries
to emerge from the bed of the Moon. Hephaestus demands his brideprice back from Jupiter.
They are the same "gifts" as Mars, which Hephaestus had showered upon Moon in olden
time, when the marriage was first consummated and we have not recovered from that
marriage of the gods yet.
Jupiter stays away. He is retiring more and more. He has claimed to set up the order of
the skies, such as it is. He is scarcely responsible, it seems to us, for he should
return to strike Mars with thunderbolts and drive him away. Instead of the conflict
being adjudicated, it will have to be compromised.
Other gods gather. Actually they do not. But memories of them do because of the terror
of our experience. New terrors pile upon the old and explode them. Here we see Hermes
and Apollo, the lucky and the wise. What can we except from them? Hermes is the helper.
We say he is so, because we hope he will help and because once long ago he had been near
us when we were going through a similar crisis; he fled to safety and we followed; so we
say he led us.
But now he is tormenting us. Prompted by Apollo, he tells the grim truth as a sexual
joke; he is an old lover of Moon too, and great is the ruin they brought upon each other
and ourselves but great also is the attraction these gods of the sky have for one
another. They laugh at the tragedies of others because they suffered the same themselves
and no one consoled them.
The goddesses stayed away, "out of shame", we sing. The goddesses are not ashamed; it is
male conceit. Their names are taken by the male gods whenever they please. Artemis "is"
Apollo. Hera "was" Poseidon and "is" now Jupiter. And Athena? Well, Athena "is"
Hephaestus, the only planetary female, so she is here in fact and deed.
Hephaestus-Venus will stay married to the Moon. We know how it will end. The only
question is whether Mars should pay anything. Apollo remains aloof and laughing. But for
Earth and Sea it is no laughing matter. Poseidon stands for Earth when Mother Earth is
absent, as well as for the all-encircling seas and waters. He is The Earth-Shaker! He
repeatedly beseeches the Planet Venus on our behalf to uncouple Mars and Moon. Earth is
already paying its price and willing to pay more if only the disasters will cease.
The tension is terrible to bear. Fortunately Venus-Hephaestus is about to move away. The
disaster cannot continue. He therefore accepts the offer of the Earth-Shaker who may be
growing tired of his own exertions. More will be paid by Earth to the Planet that shines
in daytime. This bodes ill. More songs, more dances, prayers, sacrifices, suffering will
be required in the future, from Venus as well as from Mars.
So the two bodies are loosed and spring up and away. Thank the Gods! The break happened
fast. As Venus withdrew, Mars speeded away in a new orbit to the Northwest, propelled by
the planets Earth and Venus, and the Moon, violently abused, flew Southwest where all
smoke and fires were quickly quenched and she emerged soon, appearing as round and
golden as she did before but she now carries new pocks and scars. The character of the
Moon is unchanged.
The Gods are uncontrollable; we must not offend them; we must not pretend to be like
them; but we cannot help but sing and dance about them. It is one of the few things we
can do to prevent our utter destruction in the future and suppress our intolerable
memories of the past.
And the old priest would conclude with a warning to the acolytes: "Someday you will
understand this, but what I have told you must always remain a secret from everybody."
The song, the music, and the dancing are ended. The transition to the ordinary frame of
mind occurs. The sons of the good King Alcinous perform a dance to lighten the minds and
hearts of the audience. They cast a beautiful purple ball far into the air, leaping to
catch it. It seems to reach the shadowy clouds. They seem to touch the sky, to be as
light as air. This heavenly sphere has no counterparts on earth. Perhaps it is a
stretched and round-stitched bladder or skin filled with feathers, fashioned by a master
hand, or a round-shaped gourd ball. It makes contact with the celestial spheres-Sun,
Moon, Planets. They keep them up and leap after them; all is done quickly; it is a
trompe l'oeil, a dazzling coda.
AUTHOR'S CODA
If the preceding replay of Demodocus' song as a representation of the unconscious
contains both a new "real" parallel plot and a certain "madness," one need not be
repelled or even surprised. Literature was not invented by humankind out of boredom with
spending long nights in caves. It emerged as a method of controlling psychological
distress.
Both the "real" story and the "madness" will come in for more lengthy discussion. One
asks here simply for a beginning of understanding. As the plot breaks down under
analysis, it should evidence some well-known psychoses of which the mind is capable
under stress. In its suffering and terror the mind engages in many forms of delusional
thought. An important effect is the belief that the skies and the earth are alive with
beings who resemble oneself and are similarly motivated. This anthropomorphism helps the
transfiguration of the uncontrollable and huge forces into the images of sex, social
power, and property that the mind is accustomed to dealing with.
Ambivalence to the gods erupts quickly, once the gods are born out of nature. Hate is
just as quickly suppressed and turned upon oneself, for fear that one will be terribly
punished if it becomes known to the gods. A persecution complex occurs instantly; one
cannot evade the mighty punishers. Symptoms of schizophrenia are abundant: attempts at
shutting out the real world; attempts at reconstructing quickly a new world of one's own
in which events are controlled only by the mind.
Forgetting and distortion proceed quickly. As soon as possible, means will be invented
to screen off both the real story and its effects on the psyche. Literature, songs, and
games will be invented. Wars will be waged, for one must handle the urge to punish
oneself by moving out wildly and attacking others. Temples and palaces for the provision
of security and order must be erected; these will celebrate, in a different screening
language, of course, the events of those days; they will see to it that the right food
is eaten and digested and the proper mating and reproduction will occur.
Notes (Chapter 3: The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy)
1. Poetica Astronomica, II 42. The root "pyr" denotes "fire."
2. Alfred de Grazia, "The Palaetiology of Fear and Memory," (Lethbridge, Canada:
University of Lethbridge, 1976), Part I.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER
CHAPTER FOUR
CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION
One may dare to suppose that the Love Affair stands for a tragedy of humanity if there
is borne in mind a larger theory, already considerably developed, even if not yet widely
employed. The larger theory, the modern scientific theory of ancient catastrophes -
quantavolution - functions as a kind of general engineering scheme to guide the
reconstruction of the song of Demodocus. It is both chronological - telling what
happened when - and analytic - telling how it happened. As a consequence of work done in
quantavolution, many ancient and recent discoveries have come together, attracted as if
by a magnet.
THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE
I state here the several components of the general theory of ancient catastrophes and
quantavolution, shaping it to present needs to a degree, and illustrating it to the
minimal extent required for its comprehension. Ample documentation and qualifications
are to be found in the "Quantavolution Series" [1] and other works - of a controversial
nature, to be sure.
1. Grave catastrophes have befallen the planet Earth. The evidence of geology.
oceanography, meteorology, paleomagnetism, and archeology are continuously bringing
forward new evidence, and rediscovering old evidence, that in times past the Earth
suffered repeated devastation by quakes, floods, fires and winds whose dimensions are
fantastically beyond any historical experience of the last 2700 years. The surface of
the Earth has been twisted and turned, sunk and raised, scoured and ploughed on a
continental scale. The orbit of the Earth, the rotation of the Earth, and the axial
inclination of the Earth to the plane of the ecliptic have changed suddenly, with
frightful consequences. 2. The catastrophes have been initiated in great part by changes
in the solar system. Planets have changed their orbits and other motions, nearly
collided, acquired or discarded satellites, become heated and cooled, accumulated and
discharged electricity, and, on some of these occasions, involved the Earth in their
titanic activities. One planet, Venus, may even have been newly created out of Jupiter.
The number of meteors that have struck Earth is large but responsible for only a portion
of the catastrophic damage, since atmospheric, electrical, tidal and seismic
disturbances can occur with or without body impact.
3. Some catastrophes have had large effects upon mankind. They have been allocated to
past periods during which hominids and humans lived, whether these are traced back
thousands or millions of years. The last ice age has been moved up to a point where homo
sapiens is readily recognizable, and has been given by many geologists a huge, abrupt
beginning and/ or conclusion. All agree that, on occasion, as far back as the fossil
record may carry and up to the dawn of history, many species were quickly and
concurrently wiped out or reduced to a few survivors.
4. Some catastrophes have occurred at times within the capacity of humanity to transmit
their memories to successive generations. All peoples have myths of chaos and creation,
and of the destruction of civilizations and their recreation, in a set of cycles. As one
moves from earlier to later catastrophes the linkages between oral (and transcribed)
myths and factual reportage, recognizably modern in form, increase. Additional
corroboration comes from the developing science of myth-analysis, contributed to by
classicists, anthropologists, philologists, psychologists, and archaeologists. In
addition, archeology has disclosed periods of total and simultaneous devastation of
existing civilizations in areas stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to China, and from
Mexico to Peru.
5. Wherever symbolic and linguistic evidence is available, and usually also where only
oral traditions are preserved, the catastrophes suffered on Earth and by humanity were
attributed to changes in the celestial system, and particularly to Ouranos (the Sky),
the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Apollo (now transmuted beyond ready identification),
Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The latest catastrophes are associated with the erratic and
destructive behavior of Mars in the years 776 to 687 B. C., ending that is, 2662 years
ago. These precise years, which Velikovsky initially proposed, cover the scenarios of
this book, and in my view are generally acceptable.
6. Putting aside the sudden destruction of many civilizations in the course of thousands
of years and granting that the sheer survival of these species was all-important,
retroactively considered, and furthermore leaving to my book Homo Schizo I the question
whether a highly significant mutation took place among proto-humans in a cerebral or
endocrinal form that contemporary paleophysiology can barely recognize, the greatest
effect upon humanity of the catastrophes was their contribution to the making of the
human mind and human nature.
The exceedingly heavy experience of disaster from all forms of elemental turbulence,
with its associated disruption and dissolution of human communities, caused widespread
amnesia. As much as they could and as quickly as possible, surviving humans suppressed
the memories of those times.
But the fear and the anxiety produced now by one and then by another catastrophes could
not be forgotten and surged repeatedly to the surface of consciousness. The massive
collective anxiety was displaced onto many different subjects, altered the ways in which
these subjects were viewed and treated, until finally our modern human nature emerged,
replete with a variety of sublimations, that is, the continuous and partly controlled
discharge of the never-to-be forgotten experiences and fears of disaster [2] .
THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS
The sublimations of catastrophic anxiety diffused into three major areas: expressive
communication; passive controls; and active controls.
In the area of expressive communication, the primitive language was expanded and grew
more abstract and conceptual to describe the behavior being observed in the skies. The
astral events were associated with prior experiences of the closest analogous types,
especially sex and conflict, and humanized. The terrific visible skyforces were
understood then to be human-like but superhuman to the nth power. (" The Lord made the
mountains skip like rams," recited the Hebrew psalmist.) All manner of recounting the
events was called for; no matter which mode, it was bound to be loaded with anxious
affect.
The different modes were sorted out, the most heavily charged from the less, the most
denotative from the more connotative. Different formulas were worked out for handling
the modes of expression; those that were the most direct or challenging to the
superpowers had to be the most carefully licensed and regulated. Little by little,
songs, ballads and fables were developed that could be granted more freedom of
expression. So began the history of literature, both liturgical and profane.
Passive controls include the incorporation of catastrophic anxiety into prescribed
conduct, whether personal or social. The governance of behavior by taboos, fixation of
archetypes and stereotypes, and the performance of rituals alone and in crowds received
so much impetus from the catastrophes and their aftermaths that they practically may be
said to have sprung from them. If a word had to be chosen to represent the motivation
for all of these passive controls, it might be an obsession, which may be defined as the
inability to move one's conscious attention from the centerpiece of one's anxiety
without enchaining the attention.
The greatest taboo of all is to forget the circumstances of disaster. One freezes like
death, like the possum, like the soldier against a brilliant flare, like the humans who
were turned into statues by the Greek gods, like the Judaic sect whose members
immobilize at the first moment of the Sabbath, in the position of the moment, until the
Sabbath passes. A great proliferation of ideas and customs can come from this attitude
but they will all be deductively connected to the primeval chaos and creation. "Good"
education comes to be making the young both as fearful and as habituated as oneself.
People think, "If I do something new, it, the thing, nature, god, will do something new"
and therefore it isn't worthwhile; it is taboo in fact, to try to do so [3] . The third
great area affected by catastrophe governs human efforts at active control of other
people and the environment. Here is included the sharp growth of the power motive (and
corresponding ability) in individuals that start up the centralized kingdoms (and which
prospers from the passive control behavior just noted). The urge to wage destructive
warfare is enhanced, but also the proliferation of invention: all in imitation of the
celestial forces who hammered, shouted, put on dazzling displays of light, showered down
many types of materials and objects, and changed many species of animals and plants.
"For the Spartans," wrote Lucian, "Lycurgus drew from the sky his ordering of their
whole polity." [4]
The Love Affair is an example of the first area of sublimation, the expressive
communication, and of one kind of myth, the holy dreamtime song. But, as has become
already apparent, the words alone are an inadequate description of the event. It dwells
upon what was the last or nearly the last of the great catastrophes. Every major element
of the general theory of ancient catastrophe put forward above is represented in the
song, its latent meaning, and its physical and social contexts. At the same time, every
element of the general theory of catastrophe had happened before in earlier disasters,
as in the case of the repeated incursions of Venus upon the Earth's orbit, which
occurred between 1500 B. C. and the time of our story and which have been described in
detail by Velikovsky, by the "Quantavolution Series," and in related works. And it all
happened again and again before 1500 B. C., which is a vast and difficult history only
now being told.
Notes (Chapter 4: Catastrophe and Sublimation)
1. The reader is referred to the volumes of my Quantavolution Series (Metron
Publications : Princeton, N. J., 1981-4), especially Chaos and Creation and its
bibliography.
2. These matters are discussed at length in Homo Schizo I and II.
3. Cf., e. g., Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 6-7 et passim.
4. From "Astrology," p. 367, Vol. V of Works (Loeb ed., Harvard University Press, 1936).
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER
CHAPTER FIVE
HOLY DREAMTIME
Before the Love Affair had been played and sung Odysseus was reduced to tears by
Demodocus' singing of the Trojan War. And, later on, hours after the Love Affair has
been played Odysseus offers a gift to Demodocus and addressed him:
Demodocus I proclaim you the most distinguished of all mortals. Either the Muse,
daughter of Zeus, instructed you, or Apollo you directly. For you chant the fate of the
Achaeans absolutely according to its proper ordering: What they did and had done to them
and what distress they suffered - as if, in some way, you had been present yourself or
had heard it from someone who was there [1] .
One may wonder whether, although Odysseus does not recognize it, the Love Affair, too,
is sung "absolutely according to its proper ordering," and as if Demodocus "had been
present" himself "or had heard it from someone who was there."
Strange it is that Odysseus, when the song is ended, has been transported and is
joyfully at ease. One would imagine that the story of an adulterous love triangle might
have reminded him of his own plight - long away from his palace and beset by rumors of
his wife's unfaithfulness. One might believe that the song was in bad taste, or that
afterwards he might gnash his teeth and rend his garments. Not at all. Homer and he
obviously did not feel any such connection between the performance and his plight.
When the singer, Demodocus , "struck the chords in prelude," his audience was already
entranced. He himself is blind; Homer, whose image he may reflect, is also called "the
Blind." He is Homer's "good minstrel, whom the Muse loves above all other men, and gave
him both good and evil; of his sight she deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet
song." [2] There is a hint here that ancient bards were sometimes blinded, as smiths
were ritually lamed, and young singers castrated, to heighten their symbolic role and
competence. No god might then envy the bard, especially not Apollo, and his blindness is
an assurance that he will not see what is divinely forbidden to see. Athena, too, was
known to play tricks with human sight [3] . Furthermore, his audience will not be
discomfitted at being viewed in their musing mood by a sensibly alert musician. And, of
course, a blind man may develop epic powers of memory. An alternative, less radical,
would be to sing with eyes closed, or blindfolded.
The audience is settled around as an organized community, king and queen, nobles,
council of state, the citizens and retainers, and the Hero, Odysseus. The dancers
continue their movements, acting out the scenes of the sacred play. Those who have
competed in sports rest, their aggressiveness dissipated, their minds relaxed to receive
now a flow of aesthetic communication.
The singer carries the melody; it is sung in long, measured lines. His lyre was
originally a gift of Mercury and Apollo, and is a beautiful instrument; its strings are
attuned to the heavenly bodies, as Pythagoras will demonstrate mathematically a century
hence. Although the earliest lyres held three strings, the age of seven-stringed lyres
may have already arrived. The rhythms are supplied by the ballet who stress movements of
the opera.
The production is a drama, not a ballad or folk song. Its plot is conventionally
complete, perhaps the earliest of the dramatic plots of what is to become the literary
history of Classical Greece, therefore a great invention, with a pair of protagonists,
an antagonist, the development of a line of conduct, its interruption, a climax, a
resolution, a disposition of participants and values. All happens in a time span close
to what Aristotle discovered, centuries later, to be the ideal unity of dramatic time.
One notes particularly, in the jargon of literary analysis employed from the time of the
early Greek tragedians, the "catastrophe." The word means "the climax," "the point of
denouement;" in general, the word means "the turning-down point," and also "the end of a
period of time." Yet it was historical experience that lent itself to the definition of
plot, not plot of history. It was first an unconscious invention, then a conscious one,
that ordained the classical climax of drama. The archetypical plot is that when the end
of an age arrives, the gods foregather, and societies turn abruptly downward, after
which the cycle begins once more. The Love Affair is a relic of the end of the Mycenean
Age of Greece.
THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE
What has been made of the Love Affair? It is at least a song, for it was chanted to the
chords of a lyre, to the accompaniment of rhythmic dancing. Perhaps, first off, I should
stress that its 'songness' has been variously imparted. In the version by the famous
Alexander Pope, one would sense a different spirit. The bard, Demodokos,
The loves of Mars and Cytherea [4] sings; How the stern god, enamour'd with her
charms, Clasp'd the gay panting goddess in his arms, By bribes seduced
And as Hephaestus traps the lovers, Pope's Homer sings:
Stern Vulcan homeward treads the starry way: Arrived, he sees, he grieves, with rage
he burns: Full horribly he roars, his voice all heaven returns. "O Jove, (he cried) O
all ye powers above, See the lewd dalliance of the queen of love! Me, the awkward me,
she scorns; and yields her charms To that fair lecher, the strong god of arms."
Translation of the Odyssey are numerous. One that interested me to the point of inquiry
was by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679,) prepared when he was in his eighties. His long life as
natural philosopher and political scientist carried him through the extensive
revolutions and religious debates of the times and up to Newton and Whiston. This was
the Hobbes whose view of mankind included the famous phrase that in a state of nature
man's life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Poetically, I must agree with Pope, who said
that Hobbes' version of Homer was "too mean for criticism." [5] But did he treat the
Love Affair in some unusual way? Not at all - though it contains a touch of unwarranted
political expertness:
And the judges rise In number nine, who had elected been By public-vote, of games to
hold assize, And order took for large room in the middle, And made it to be planed well
and even. [6]
But, as a I shall explain, even if beautifully rendered, the lines of Homer must read as
the pale representation of their original pronouncement and context.
Experts upon Homer have generally denied serious consideration to his song about a love
affair. It seems to be what Alexander Pope makes it out to be, burlesque entertainment
for a visiting sailor. One seems to hear the typical commentator: "A bit scandalous, but
then you know how lightly the Greeks took their gods and goddesses!"
One translator, Professor Murray, indicates conscientiously that "the whole passage was
on moral grounds rejected by some ancient critics." [7] Walter Otto tells us that "even
in antiquity many readers, Plato among them, found this story offensive, and in modern
times it is generally regarded as a frivolous burlesque." [8] Professor Finely, an
expert upon the society and economy of Homeric Greece, speaks of "the little pieces,
like the myth of the adultery between Ares and Aphrodite" [9] that infiltrate the
Odyssey. George Sarton, the encyclopedic historian of science regards the whole of the
Odyssey, indeed, as a story of peace, a gentle romance [10] . Such observations can
only reflect the nostalgia for one's school-days: the blood and guts spilled in the
Odyssey, and the terrors entailed, would put to shame the authors of a typical evening
of violence and horror on American commercial television. T. B. L. Webster mentions the
possibility that "the light-hearted treatment of the gods in some Egyptian stories may
have influenced Demodokos' lay of Ares and Aphrodite in the eight book of Odyssey." [11]
E. V. Rieu, introducing his translation of the Odyssey, says that "in the famous Lay of
Demodocus" Homer provides "a treatment that we can only regard as humorous."
This merely betrays, he claims, "a very tolerant understanding of their motives and
frailties," not an absence of respect for the power and beauty of the gods [12] .
But, then, the distinguished Robert Graves, premature women's liberationist that he is,
says: "though masquerading as an epic, the Odyssey is the first Greek novel; and
therefore wholly irresponsible where myths are concerned." Graves tends to agree with
Samuel Butler, author of the utopia, Erewhon, who, in another book, Authoress of the
Odyssey, ascribed the work to a young and talented Sicilian noblewoman of the district
of Eryx [13] .
Experts can be piled "Ossa upon Pelion" without reaching heaven. Otto's elaborate
concern over reason and respect reminds one of a prude explaining why his sister is
loitering on a Piraeus street corner. "The story is naturally not a moralizing sermon,
but that does not make it frivolous. Its tone of lofty humor removes it from both
moralizing and frivolity." Ares is a bloody savage, disliked by everyone. "All interest
centers upon the discreditable role played by Ares... And Aphrodite? If we consider the
story carefully we suddenly realize that she receives no attention whatsoever." His
final gaff regarding Poseidon is monumental: "Poseidon is so touched by Ares' situation
that, unable to laugh, he prevails upon Hephaestus to release his hapless victim and is
so kindly as to provide a guarantee for him." [14] This comment would perhaps have made
the surly Poseidon laugh for once.
BURLESQUE OR RELIGION?
One cannot be satisfied with these explanations: a little piece, a casual ballad, a joke
at the expense of the gods, or a pardonable escapade. Suppose the passage is reread,
beginning with the paragraph before the song commences.
"Sacred commands of Alcinous." Do godlike kings incite simple public pornography?
"Quickly arose a lithe herald, seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from
its palace place." Are treasured instruments of music employed casually? "Rising as well
were a chosen nine, men who were Lords Ceremonial, publicly called, whenever the people
foregathered and needed an ordering." These are nobles. They are nine, the magic number
of days in the week may then have existed or once existed in a 36-day or 27-day month
[15] . They are chosen representatives of the community, a council of ministers of
public order. Are these august personages activated for the sake of a ditty?
"They cleared out space for the dancing to come; they measured a broad ring." Is a large
dancing ring being readied without apprehension and excitement?
Demodocus "moved in the midst of the young boys." He is the star performer, blind,
revered, also godlike (of these qualities we read in other passages). "All of them
skilled in the dance though they blossomed with fair youth." This is not to be
improvised. The performers know their places. They have all achieved high competence.
"Down stamped their feet on the floor." The rhythms begin, even before the lyre sounds.
"Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid-air!" The little song is
introduced, it is clear, as a full court opera. The preliminaries portend a significant
event. Odysseus, and the rest of the audience, have become transformed by the rhythm,
flashing movements, and apprehension into an unusual state of mind, a new mood.
The mood is not vulgar or profane. It is not lecherous. Something more profound is to
occur. The audience has experienced it all before; their contagion affects Odysseus. The
incident, from its very beginnings, portends an affair of state, not a moment of
minstreling, a story of significance rather than cocktail hour music. It is to be even
rather sacred, I think.
Perhaps reassurance is needed. Is this behavior, this kind of performance, unanalyzed in
science? Not at all. It is universal and has been generalized. Mircea Eliade, a
distinguished religious ethnologist, would lend his support:
All dances were originally sacred;... they had an extrahuman model... The model may
have been revealed by a divinity (for example the pyrrhic, the martial dance created by
Athena) or by a hero (cf. Theseus' dance in the Labyrinth). The dance may be executed to
acquire food, to honor the dead, or to assure good order in the cosmos. It may take
place upon the occasion of initiations, of magico-religious ceremonies, of marriages,
and so on... What is of interest to us is its presumed extrahuman origin (for every
dance was created in illo tempore, in the mythical period, by an ancestor, a totemic
animal, a god, or a hero.) Choreographic rhythms have their model outside of the profane
life of man; whether they reproduce the movements of the totemic or emblematic animal,
or the motions of the stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals (labyrinthine
steps, leaps gestures, performed with ceremonial instruments) - a dance always imitates
an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment. In a word, it is a repetition,
and consequently a reactualization, of illud tempus, 'those days. '" [16]
The Love Affair appears then as a sacred song, not bawdy lyric; or at least its context
is unmistakably holy, putting aside its plot and words. One cannot be sure of either its
full context or words, of course, because Demodocus tells of another, apparently long
operatic ballet that we are not privileged to watch and hear.
THE PIOUS DRAMATIST
The Phaeacian audience is in illo tempore. It is in Holy Dream-time, a state of being in
the past and in the present, where a great event is happening and still away from it in
the here and now, in the presence of those who were involved in the action. One cannot
watch the Phaeacians as R. M. Berndt did the aboriginal Australian Wonguri in a similar
format and mood [17] , or as other anthropologists have observed primitive tribal
performances; one must imagine them with the aid of all the evidence that can be brought
to bear upon the scene. If one is successful, it will be owing to another scholar, in
this case Giovanni Patroni, whose total immersion in ancient Mediterranean sources has
permitted him elaborately to reconstruct the format of the song of Demodocus. He says:
The most important observations that the singing of Demodocus merits (and has too long
awaited) concern the generic type of the song, its aim and function in Homeric and pre-
Homeric society, the probable frequency and importance of recitations analogous to that
we see held in the agora of Scheria by Demodocus with the aid of a corps de ballet or a
chorus that will interpret the narrative of the singer (but we do not mean exclusively)
through the medium of movements and dance figures.
This is not epic poetry. Nor is it a song, nor a fragment of a song, nor an episode of
an Achaean saga... Neither, for that matter, notwithstanding that its subject concerns
exclusively the gods, a sacred hymn. If it is the last, it reflects the higher personal,
profound and polemical religiousity of Homer; in this sense it should be entitled: 'The
triumph of Mediterranean religion over the foolish and sacrilegious heresy of Olympia.
'" [18]
By this, Patroni means that Homer adores the ancient Great Goddess, detests the single-
minded destructive god Ares, and upholds the peaceful sovereignty of the female
principle that antedated the barbarous incursions of the Achaeans into Minoan and
Mycenaean civilization.
In effect, says Patroni, the Song is not sacred poetry because one could not come out
openly and formally to the greater glory of Aphrodite, even though the Song carried her
through a tedious trial at the hands of a repulsive husband and a mindless warrior
lover.
So Patroni classifies the cantata of Demodocus as "opera theatre," midway between our
ballet and melodrama with dance, a musical satire perhaps.
But, in fact, Patroni goes beyond his own real interpretations, so prejudiced for the
archaic Mediterranean religion is he (and alike to Robert Graves in this regard). We
must insist that he stay with his own judgement - it is sacred poetry even if influenced
by the personal religion of Homer. It is sacred enough, as he points out immediately, to
prompt extraordinary preparations, measure the magic circle, place the venerated poet in
the center that is to be occupied many years later by an alter of Dionysus, use the
sacred instrument of religious and funereal singing of the Minoans, and employ the
incredible acrobatic dancing of the bull-leapers of Tyrins and Knossos. The song, he
knows, is the abbreviation of a long performance, and takes place in the halls of the
prince. Indeed, such is the enthusiasm of Patroni for what he believes must have
occurred in the opera-theater of the Love Affair that he uncovers ultimately the vast
majority of criteria that for anthropologists and psychologists denote the Holy
Dreamtime. And he forgets that he has for a moment faltered and said that the hierarchs
could not allow a religious character to be granted the triumph of Aphrodite.
He gives, actually, a full set of stage directions for the production of the Disastrous
Love Affair of Mars and Moon. Dancers leap high into the sky. The Sun mandates a
messenger to Hephaestus (for the sun, reasons Patroni, cannot move from its course).
Direct quotations are sung by actors, the rest by Demodocus. The climax brings together
all of the actors to determine the resolution of the plot, and the finale must be
beautiful and ecstatic; Ares is summarily dismissed, but Golden Aphrodite, unabashed,
flies to her island where she is perfumed, beautified, and made virginal altogether.
The goddess - impersonated by an actor - hid herself momentarily in the base of the
tower that had been put at the disposition of the spectacle, while the music and ballet
entertained the audience; and, from another exit that gave upon the sea (at Scheria the
agora was next to the arsenal: it was the same in all the maritime cities; elsewhere the
sea was simulated by pulling a boat with a pulley) she embarked on a boat kept in
readiness and reappeared from the other side, landing and reentering the arena with all
of her cortege, quickly then joined by the entire corps de ballet which, having given
further proof of its unmatchable competence, composed itself for the final scene. And
what could be the meaning of the scene if not: The Triumph of Aphrodite?
The answer to his rhetorical question would disappoint him. It could be, it was, the
Triumph of Athena the Producer and Director of the opera. Zeus said to Hera in the Iliad
when Hera proposed to fight Ares: "Go to it then, and set against him the spoiler
Athene, who beyond all others is the one to visit harsh pains upon him." [19]
The chorus of this Mycenaean drama moved directly into the classical Greek chorus, says
Patroni (p. 250). Here is one more indication of the interface between Mycenean and
Greek, rather than a five hundred year chasm of barbarism. The circle we see in Scheria,
too, persisted in the theatre at Epidaurus.
Patroni's informed visions of the dramaturgy of Homer are captivating. The production of
the Love Affair in Scheria was complete and elaborate, as much so as the Dreamtime
production of the Moon and the Dugong that I mentioned above, though relative to the
culture of the indigenous Australians. Patroni's assertions, that Homer was heir to the
Minoan and Mycenaean theatre, and that he was a fully experienced choreographer and
dramatist, are acceptable too.
The anthropological and mythological evidence should induce Patroni to acknowledge his
own immense cultural panorama and to grant that the "marveling" and "spellbound"
Odysseus, along with the Phaeacian audience, was in the state of Holy Dreamtime, midway
between the pomp and circumstance of the religious "mass" and the nearly secular games
that preceded the spectacle.
Here Emile Mireaux has hit the target briefly and sharply:
Choral lyric poetry naturally remained closer to its religious origins. It was really
the poetry of the sacred songs, with their accompaniment of music and dancing... (It
included the hyporcheme which involved mime dancing. The mischievous story recited by
Demodocus... may be simply a hyporcheme... All these collective displays were designed
to 'inspire' the community and lead to the exorcizing of the 'demons' of envy, discord
and civil strife [20] .
The Olympic Games themselves, agglomerates of athletics and poetry, had been instituted
in the year -776, and no one doubts their religious and cultural aims. Then and at the
time of the Love Affair, the Greeks, of many ethnic subcultures with local versions of
the gods, and with all manner of archaic and foreign vestiges, were pulling themselves
together. The divine Homer was striving to lead them.
Notes (Chapter 5: Holy Dreamtime)
1. Odyssey, VIII,* s. 487-91.
2. VIII, I. 62-4; V. I, 263 in Murray, op. cit.
3. Graves, I, 23: I, p. 87.
4. Cytherea is one of the epithets given Aphrodite. Cytherea was the holy island which
the newly born goddess touched while floating towards her destination of Cyprus.
5. The English Works, Vol. X (London: ed. 1677; John Bohn, 1844, W. Molesworth, editor),
p. iv.
6. Ibid, p. 376.
7. Op. cit., p. 276.
8. The Homeric Gods, trans. by Moses Hadas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1954).
9. M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1954, 1967,
1972), p. 40.
10. A History of Science: Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece, 1958 (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), p. 135.
11. From Mycenae to Homer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958, 1964), p. 88.
12. Page 5.
13. The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (New York: Braziller, 1957). Cf. v. II, pp. 376,365.
14. Op. cit., p. 245.
15. Immannuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, hereafter cited simply as W in C, (New
York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1950), pp. 343-4.
16. The Myth of the Eternal Return, originally in French, 1949( Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1954, 1965), pp. 28-9. As a well worked out case, see R. M.
Berndt, "A 'Wonguri-Manzikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone," XIX Oceania (September, 1948,
16-50)
17. Ibid., and see my note on this song in The Burning of Troy.
18. Commenti Mediterranei all'Odissea di Omero (Milano: Marzorati, 1950), p. 249
19. Richard Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p.
148.
20. Daily Life in the Time of Homer, trans. by Iris Sells from the 1954 French edition
(New York: MacMillan and Company, 1959), p. 102.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
CHAPTER SIX
THE RAPE OF HELEN
It began during the furious quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at the rich feast of
the gods, sings Demodocus, "for it was at this very moment that calamity began to unroll
upon both Trojans and Danaans by the plans of the Great Zeus." [1]
The Iliad is sung as the wrath of Achilles on one level - the Poet says so - but is of a
type with the battles of the sky gods recited in Scandinavian, Finnish, Hindu, Mexican,
Babylonian, and other epics. The Greek gods of the Trojan Wars engage in plain
soldiering, hurling rocks and spears, shooting arrows, and driving chariots. They make
onslaughts from heaven; they launch disasters upon Earth: plagues, fires, hurricanes,
earthquakes, floods, hail of stones and arrows, famines, fogs, and darknesses in the
day.
The gods negotiate amongst themselves and with humans. They engage in fighting,
trickery, argument, and bribery amongst themselves. They build morale and conduct
psychological warfare; they provide military intelligence but also distort information
for the good of their favorites. They counsel the warriors on tactics. They enforce
rules of warfare that they sometimes themselves violate. They manufacture weapons. They
promote and reverse events, battles, and decisions of leaders.
Whole sections of the Iliad are devoted to the warring of the gods. On the Achaean side
there range Athena, Hera, Poseidon, Hephaestus. On the Trojan side, the line-up includes
Ares, Aphrodite, and Apollo. The victory is with the Achaeans and their gods, although
the Homeric element ends with Achilles' killing of Hector, the burial of Hector, and a
mere pause in the struggle; however, all known versions of the rest of the story,
occupying the tenth year, agree that the Achaeans "won the war" and razed Troy. Whether
or not Troy was actually destroyed by the Achaeans cannot be told from the ruins of the
city. Troy VI and VIIa are the best candidates for the historical city; Schliemann's
Troy (now referred to as Troy IIg) is not regarded anymore as a possibility; I have
written of this case in the Book, The Burning of Troy. Troy IIg was destroyed by an
atmospheric conflagration; Troy VI by an earthquake; Troy VIIa by an atmospheric
conflagration. These, to Homer and his audiences, would be the gods in battle, the
effects of "a divine-kindled fire of stones" (Iliad) and other superhuman operations.
The "Fall of a City" is a legendary symbol in various cultures for a disaster, that is,
the disruption and end of a celestial order. It is likely that the Fall of Troy was such
a catastrophe, in which human agency played less of a role than the divine.
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN
Some of the Trojan story is reported in the Odyssey, by Demodocus no less, and by
Odysseus from Hades. There and elsewhere the post-war adventures of the Achaean heroes
are recounted and it would appear that for the most part they received very little for
their pains except more suffering, mishaps, treachery, and misadventure.
But let us examine, with Finley's words, the case of
Helen, who is a very peculiar figure. Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, was
Aphrodite's favorite, and thanks to the gifts of the goddess she succeeded in embroiling
Greeks and Trojans in a gigantic struggle that cost both sides dearly. Helen was no
innocent victim in all this, no unwilling captive of Paris-Alexander, but an adulteress
in the most complete sense. For Paris there was no atonement ... But Helen received no
punishment, and scarcely any reproach. She ended her days back in Sparta, administering
magical drugs obtained in Egypt, interpreting omens, and participating in the life of
the palace much like Arete [queen of the Phaeacians and a strange, powerful figure] and
not like a proper Greek woman [2] .
The "enigmatic" and "complicated" image of Helen, that Finely alludes to, has a simple
solution. Helen of Troy stands for the Moon. She represents the goddess Aphrodite.
Paris-Alexander, Prince of Troy, represents the god Mars-Ares. The Moon that had been
"embraced" over centuries by Hephaestus (Athena-planet Venus) in his encounters with the
Earth is taken away from him; Athena-Hephaestus and their allies must repossess it.
Helen is the Moon Goddess and the world is the male version of Helen, father of the
family of all Greeks. Etymologists have also indicated a connection between "Selene" and
"Helios," the latter deriving from the same Indo-European root as sun and solis [3] .
Thus she symbolizes in the battle of the gods the coming of the Hellenes into their
revived nationhood in conjunction with the triumph of the Athena faction of the family
of Zeus.
Let us read in Graves briefly:
The Ionians and Aeolians, the first two waves of patriarchal Hellenes to invade
Greece, were persuaded by the Hellads already there to worship the Triple-goddess and
change their social customs accordingly, becoming Greeks (graikoi 'worshippers of the
Grey Goddess, or Crone'). Later, the Achaeans and Dorians succeeded in establishing
patriarchal rule and patrilinear inheritance, and therefore described Achaeus and Dorus
as first - generation sons of a common ancestor, Hellen - a masculine form of the Moon-
goddess Helle or Helen ... Aeolus and Ion were then relegated to the second generation,
and called sons of the thievish Xuthus, this being a way of denouncing the Aeolian and
Ionian devotion to the orgiastic Moon-goddess Aphrodite - whose sacred bird was the
xuthos, or sparrow, and whose priestesses cared nothing for the patriarchal view that
women were the property of their father and husbands [4] .
Hans Jones, author of The Gnostic Religion, may also be quoted. For he has traced a very
old belief in the connection between Moon and Helen:
"Some Greek mythological speculation seems to have associated the Homeric Helen with
the moon, whether prompted by the similarity of Helene and Selene, or by her fate
(abduction and recovery) interpreted as a nature myth, or by Homer's once comparing her
appearance to that of Artemis. One story had it that the egg which Leda found dropped
from the moon; and the late Homer commentator Eustathius (twelfth century A. D.)
mentions that there are some who say that Helen fell down to earth from the moon, and
that she was taken back up when the will of Zeus was accomplished. When and by whom this
was said, Eustathius does not state; neither does he say (or imply) that in this form of
the myth Helen served as a symbol of the anima..." [5]
The plot of the Iliad, then, would become the plot of the Love Affair, where the central
action concerns the recapture of Aphrodite from Ares by Hephaestus (Athena). The theory
would explain many problems (and no doubt will create some). The question raised
endlessly by students, "How could people of little discipline fight so murderously and
for so long over a mere woman in an age when women were nearly ordinary chattels?" is
answered. Beautiful Helen, eternally unravisheable and unconquerable, was Moon-
Aphrodite. Aphrodite was also a Great Goddess, and retained qualities of a Great Mother
Goddess; so the psychic prize was not only the Moon and the beautiful women, but also
the Mother of Greece.
The connection between the two wars - one of men, the other of gods - is often explained
as a form of hyperbole and egocentrism: it "heightens the glamour of the human
warriors." This kind of explanation would no longer be necessary. The two wars are
inextricably and originally linked now; they must be told together because they happened
together. As for the city of Troy and the Trojans, it is as much a mythical place as the
Shinning Land of Phaeacia. The Trojans are the Moon-capturing followers of Ares.
As has been argued increasingly for two decades, the Trojans may have been Greeks who
were set up by Homer to provide a counterforce to the Achaeans. Perhaps no saga in all
mythology treats the enemy so objectively, even with positive sympathy. An epic singer
usually delights his audience by heaping sins and defeats upon the enemy. Even Achilles
may have to assume a new character, that of Athena-Hephaestus, triumphant, but falling
finally through a wound of the foot from the arrow of Paris-Ares-Apollo-Aphrodite.
If this were generally so, and it is not to be demonstrated here, then at least the Love
Affair portion of the Odyssey may be fixed as concurrent with the Battle of the Gods in
the Iliad. It has been affirmed that the Love Affair is a late piece of the Odyssey. We
would not contest this placement at all. We are thinking of the middle 7th century for
the composition of the Iliad, and of the culture and the skies being both of the
preceding two generations.
Yet one more theory needs to be put forward respecting the Odyssey, before agreeing that
the work may well be composed of older materials and have its own hidden plot. Compare
the strong affection that Athena holds for Odysseus in the Iliad. He has her traits. See
him again in the Odyssey. Again he has her traits.. From beginning to end, the work of
the Odyssey is the divine work of Athena. She was not only the producer of the Love
Affair, and of the Iliad, but also of the Odyssey as a whole, and as she was the
principal actor in the first two, so she is once more the principal actor. For the
Odyssey is, in its latent plot, the story of the wandering planet Venus between 1500 B.
C. and her final settling in her present orbit, personified in her human mirror-image,
Odysseus. She it is who saves him at the beginning from the enraged Sea-Earth god,
Poseidon, and places him safely in command of his royal sphere in the end. If the Love
Affair is a Holy Dreamtime cycle, and the Iliad is sacred History, then the Odyssey is
to be categorized as Sacred Saga.
For all of this we praise Homer and his kind. He chose for the leitmotif of his works
the natural history of seven centuries. He rationalized the sky-gods for the Greeks and
transfigured unbearable truth into tolerable myth. His myths coordinated the basic
activities of sexuality, subsistence, respect, power, technology, and wealth into a
consistent cultural pattern and created the archaic Greek character. He restored to the
Greeks an ethnic identity consistent with the changed nature of the Gods and heaven.
THE AGE OF MARS
"When the gods fought" was a stock phrase among the ancient Greeks. Or they referred to
"the strife of the Gods," meaning something that was not simply confined to passages of
the Iliad but was a historical event. According to Velikovsky, the period 776 B. C. to
687 B. C. experienced at least four catastrophes at fifteen-year intervals that were
felt throughout the world. There were probably six terror-filled episodes.
This disastrous agenda began with an earlier event, which he dealt with in the first
part of his work called Worlds in Collision and in his Ages in Chaos. The former amassed
evidence that the planet that we know as Venus appeared before our ancestors as a comet
and nearly destroyed life on Earth around 1500 B. C. Thereafter the eccentric orbit of
the planet threatened the Earth at intervals of fifty-two years. The comet was
worshipped as a god, Pallas Athena, in the Greek world. Sometimes before 776 B. C. and
perhaps close to that year, Venus, in a diminishing elliptical orbit, encountered Mars.
Thereafter, and until both planets were impelled to take roughly their present safe
orbits, now one and now both approached Earth and Moon with consequent devastation to
the participating bodies.
Awe-inspiring celestial phenomena accompanied the founding of the Greek Olympic Games in
- 776. Hercules is supposed to have organized the games, ushering in what later came to
be a quadrennial all - Greek spectacle of religion, athletics, and poetry. The Greek
Mythikon calendar ends in - 776. The Historikon calendar begins. But Stecchini says that
it may have actually begun, or soon was redone, in - 748/ 7 [6] . And this would
conform to those who say that Hercules did not enter upon the games until they had been
operative on eight prior occasions.
In the west, the town of Rome was founded in - 748 or - 747. Some say - 753. It was a
period of commotion. Fabius Pictor's ancient adoption of the date - 747 seems most
likely to have been accepted for an event which probably did not take a single day but
had best, for patriotic reasons, to accompany some climactic events.
The founding of Rome was in the name of Romulus who was sponsored by Mars. Romulus was
the direct descendant of Aeneas, hence of Aphrodite, mother-protector of Aeneas. Aeneas
founded towns in her names on his long journey to Italy. Barely had the Trojans become
latinized when Rome was founded. Once more, the revised chronology connects well with an
ancient tradition. In the time of Romulus the week and month were reckoned long, and the
early calendar began with the month of Mars and proceeded in four nine-day weeks for ten
months, a total of 360 days. Romulus himself disappeared on the occasion of a natural
tumult during which, says Ovid, the earth shuddered, clouds obscured the heavens, and
the sky was riven by flames; "The people fled and the king soared upon his father's
steeds to the stars." [7] (His "father" was Mars.) No people on earth came to be
dominated more by Mars and imbued wit the spirit of ruthless, single-minded warfare
personified by Ares-Mars.
In a study of the validity of carbon-dating in ancient times, H. E. Suess has come upon
"a most conspicuous and so far unparalleled irregularity in the *C14 as a function of
time. There was a "rapid C14 increase at the beginning of the 8th century B. C. and the
sharp maximum between 780 and 770 B. C... It is also the time of a general climate
change that took place on the North American continent... The climatic change was not a
temporary one; it marked the beginning of a completely new climate epoch." [8] So
severe a change introduces the probability of extraterrestrial encounters, for reasons
that I have advanced and supported in The Lately Tortured Earth.
In Egypt it was the time of the Libyan and Ethiopian dynasties. These were foreigners,
whose domination over the greatest of empires has not been satisfactory explained,
except as a consequence of natural disasters. In Italy, Vesuvius exploded with a fury
not to be approached until the milder eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. In
Judah, heavenly commotion excited the populace and brought destruction in the times of
Uzziah (783-742), Ahaz (735-717), and Hezekiah (717-687); the kingdom of Israel was
dissolved and its people dispersed at this time. The Assyrians were under six different
kings, the last of whom, Sennacherib, saw his army blasted to death before the city of
Jerusalem in a single night of the year -687. It was the period of a Babylonian-Chaldean
empire; of Laomedon and Priam of Troy; of the destruction of the now Greek-speaking
Cretans at Knossos; of the destruction of Mycenae; and, at the end of the period, there
came Homer and Hesiod. They are the oldest known Greek writers, and the first whose
writing have appeared in the classical Greek script and alphabet. The adoption of a new
calendar by the Assyrians in -747, the beginning of the "Age of Nabonassar," suggests
that heavy disturbances occurred in the first and second encounters; probably the
Earth's orbit, rotation, and axis all underwent changes.
Thales, one of the great "seven sages," calculated the Greek calendar, perhaps shortly
after Homer and possibly around -600. But, as Velikovsky points out, Thales re-
calculated the seasons and year after the period of turmoil and changed celestial
periodicities. For, "all around the globe the years following -687 saw activity directed
towards reforming the calendar." [9] Velikovsky asserts, too, that the day shortened in
-717 and lengthened in -687. These would indicate orbital changes, axial tilts, changes
in rotational speed, or a combination thereof.
Accordingly, in the Greek-speaking and Middle East areas, crushing damage to late
Mycenaean and early Hellenic civilization occurred in the period -776 to -687. One or
more of the type of encounters pictured in the Love Affair took place, with Moon and
Mars largely barren of atmosphere, and susceptible to nearly complete destruction on the
faces that they turn to Earth.
Velikovsky dates the last disaster as centering upon 23 March -687. It is noteworthy
that the Romans celebrated the festivals of both Minerva (Athena) and Mars about the
same time. The Exodus has also been assigned this day by Velikovsky, over seven
centuries earlier. Probably this is more than a coincidence, and the double celebration
is evidence of both bodies participating in an encounter about 23 March -687. That the
same date would also correspond roughly with the spring fertility rites in which the
Moon would have long played the major role would stress, too, the occasion.
This Seventh Century date would put the story that Homer writes down and Demodocus sings
in the period of heavy Greek colonization of the Western Mediterranean. The physical
destruction of the pre-existing civilization, the movements of people, the loss of their
written language, the capture of initiative on the part of the uncouth survivors, the
loss of memory (that is, loss of will to report the disaster), the revival of poetic
forms, the mastering of the forms and then the Homeric collection and integration of
them in writing would have to take place in no more than a hundred years. Only a radical
reformulation of the nature of Homeric studies would permit this. But one must pursue
this approach, for, in the words of Lucian, "It is the conjunction of Venus and Mars
that creates the poetry of Homer."
Notes (Chapter 6: The Rape of Helen)
1. Od. VIII, 81-2.
2. The World of Odysseus, p. 150.
3. So I am informed by the linguist, Malcolm Lowery, who adds, "conversion of original s
- to h - is also exampled by hex-six and hepta (septem, seven).
4. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths, Vol. I., p. 161.
5. (Boston, Beacon Press, 1958) Fn. 9, p. 109.
6. "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data," in Alfred de Grazia, ed., The Velikovsky
Affair (New York: University Books, 1965), pp. 158-9.
7. My source is a discussion with Stecchini. On nine-day divisions of the months, see in
Worlds in collision, II, viii citing Sicke (1892), Kaegi (1891), Kugler( 1907), Naville
(1875), Roscher( 1903, 1904); and Ovid; for the ten -month year, he sites Schiefner
(1857), Male (1846), Nilssen (1920), and Frazer (1931) together with Plutarch, Eutropius
and Procopius.
8. "The Three Causes of the Secular C14 Fluctuations. Their Amplitudes and Time
Constants," Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology (Proceedings. 12th Nobel
Symposium at Uppsala Univ. 1969), ed. Ingrid V. Olsson (Almquist and Wiksell, Stockholm,
1970), p. 602, quoted in Pens‚e, Fall 1972, p. 41.
9. Worlds in Collision, p. 358.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
CHAPTER SEVEN
CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES
It was early Springtime [1] in Pylos, a Mycenaean town of the Peloponnesus, facing
the western sea. The year was between 776 and 687 B. C. It may even have been March 23,
-687. A force of 800 men was posted along 150 kilometers of shoreline. With them were
liaison officers from the Palace of King Nestor. The famous old sage of the Achaean
warriors himself would have been home from the siege of Troy.
A clay tablet, one of those inscribed "immediately before the destruction which baked
them and rendered them durable" [2] begins, "Thus are the watchers guarding the coastal
regions." [3] What could they be watching for? Obviously no enemy had been sighted nor
could the men be in fighting formation, so thinly dispersed were they. It might be as
in Jerusalem around this time, when Isaiah the Prophet was answering the call,
"Watchman, what of the night?" [4]
Another tablet may have been the last:
A single large tablet bears evidence of haste and changes of mind during its writing.
The retention of such an ill-written document in the archive might occasion surprise,
unless it was in fact only written in the last day or two before the palace fell. The
meaning of some key words is still uncertain, but there is no doubt that it records
offerings to a long list of deities. The offerings are in each case a golden vessel,
but the principal deities, if male, receive in addition a man, or, if female, a woman.
It has been suggested that these human beings were being dedicated to the service of
the deities, but the grisly possibility that they were human sacrifices cannot be
lightly dismissed. At all events the offering of thirteen gold vessels and ten human
beings to a whole pantheon of divinities must mark an important occasion; and what
occasion more likely than a general supplication on the receipt of news of an imminent
attack? [5]
The "occasion more likely" is catastrophe. Tidal waves were to be watched for, and the
setting of the sun behind the flaming horizons. Matters quickly worsened. The news was
bad. The gods and goddesses had taken to the skies. "The whole pantheon of divinities"
was supplicated, with the richest offerings; gold and human bodies. Not a solitary god
of the sea, or a single god of the hearth, or of love, of battle. All of the great sky-
gods seem to have been involved.
So Pylos perished. The Palace was destroyed in a "holocaust" which "consumed everything
that was inflammable within it, and even melted gold ornaments into lumps and drops of
metal." The flames melted brick and stone into "a solid mass... as hard as rock." In
one room two large pots were fused "into a molten vitrified layer which ran over the
whole floor." Everything that a human invader might desire was reduced to
shapelessness. Stone was burned into lime [6] . No human hands and hand-set fires
could have wreaked such ruin. Only blasts from the sky-electrical, gaseous or both.
THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES
The name of King Nestor graces both the annals of the siege of Troy in the Iliad and
the Linear B tablets. Which came first, the burning of Troy, or the disaster at Pylos,
or did they occur simultaneously? If Pylos were consumed by fire at the same time as
Troy was, than its King Nestor would have been away at the siege of Troy. He would have
been, shall we say, fifty-five years old, with plenty of fire left in him. One day,
before the gates of Troy, he told a long story, whose irrelevance is only seeming.
Professor Denys Page refers to it significantly as "a brilliant piece of late Ionian
composition, but it has a continuous pedigree ascending to the Mycenaean era." [7]
That is, ascending 400 years or so, by his reckoning; by mine, Nestor was a Mycenean in
the Homeric Age of 800 to 650 B. C.
When Nestor was a child, Hercules had descended upon Pylos and a battle of the gods
ensued. Hercules and Athena were on one side, while Ares was on the other, and Hercules
bested Ares. "Herakles had come in his strength against us and beaten us in the years
before, and all the bravest among us had been killed. For we who were sons of lordly
Neleus had been twelve, and now I alone was left of these, and all the others had
perished."
Little by little the Pylians had recovered until they were able to raid their northern
neighbors and revenge themselves somewhat for the ravages of old. The revenge came when
Nestor was still young - shall we say fifteen years older? Perhaps he was nineteen, for
he had been warned from the fight because of his youth, yet had become its hero. If he
was fifty-five in -700, say, he would have been nineteen in -736. The disaster that
killed all but a few Pylians would have come around -747.
Working in the other direction, one learns something else about the wise old time-
clock. Nestor lived to entertain Telemachus, son of Odysseus, shortly before the
latter's homecoming in Ithaca. Therefore, we would add ten years to Nestor and ten
years of life also to his palace. It could not have been destroyed when the city of
Troy was. Supposing Pylos to have been consumed by an atmospheric disaster, and Troy
VIIA by the same (for it was indeed incinerated), it is possible still then that the
end of Troy VI, which was wrecked by earthquake, might have marked the end of the
Trojan War and the departure of the Greeks. We recall two stories of the war: Poseidon
battered down the famous Achaean defensive wall near the sea after the Achaeans
departed; further, the breech in the Trojan Wall was made to admit the Trojan Horse,
which may have been the symbol of Horse-Tamer Poseidon, whose tides swept over all
barriers like charging steeds.
If such were the case, Pylos and Troy VIIa would go down in -687, along with pitiable
Phaeacia. Troy VI would go down eleven years before. And the War of Pylos involving
Hercules, Ares and Athena would be set around -747.
We may take this occasion also to tie in the "neighboring giants," who made life
impossible for the Phaeacians when they lived in Hypereia. These were probably astral
phenomena of monstrous shape who hurled debris upon them from the skies. The
Babylonians were chanting in their hymns to Mars-Nergal: "Great giants, with awesome
members, run at his right and at his left." [8] This may have been part of the
terrible destruction wrought in Asia Minor in -747 in the time of King Uzziah [9] .
For King Nausithous led them to Scheria, and he was the father of their present King,
Alcinous, who is in the prime of life.
The excavations of Schliemann and Blegen at Hisarlik were valuable as ordinary
archaeology; they contributed almost nothing to solve "the Homeric Questions." What we
derive from their reports is an important negative: if either Schliemann's Troy or
Blegen's Troys were "the real Troy," then Troy was destroyed not by the Achaeans, but
by "the gods" - by earthquake and by conflagrations exceeding any possible human agency
[10] .
Unfortunately, one cannot at this point be certain of how many celestial encounters in
the period -776 to -687 involved simply Mars alone. As we shall see, the years -687 and
-747 are candidates for the triple encounters.
If the Battle of the Gods and the Love Affair took place in 698 then, accepting the end
of the Trojan War in its tenth year and then years of wanderings of Ulysses, one would
have the destruction of Pylos and Odysseus' killing of the Suitors [11] occurring at
the same time, eleven years later, 687 B. C. On both occasions, both Venus and Mars
were active in the sky. This is not impossible. Venus was "seeking" a circular orbit.
Mars may have been "knocked out of the ring" of its more regular orbit. Professor Earl
R. Milton and I discuss this matter in Solaria Binaria. Two encounters with Earth as a
participant might have been needed.
This interpretation is preferable to one that would dissolve the Odyssean temporal
sequence and have Pylos come crashing down at the same time as Troy, with Nestor in two
places at the same time. The scene at Pylos upon which Telemachus, son of Odysseus,
happens, when in search of news of his father, is convincing. Nestor tells him that he
himself had hastened home from Troy (wise old man that he was) in fear of divine wrath,
and that those who tarried suffered greatly. Now we find the King and his whole people
on the seashores sacrificing a hundred rich cattle to Poseidon. The skies and Earth
have not settled. It may be that a month later, Pylos will be destroyed by "star-fire"
or astro-flame. If we check back upon Velikovsky's accounting of concurrent events in
the Middle East, we see that Sennacherib's Assyrian Army was blasted in 687 B. C. but
also that the army of Esarhaddon, his son, fled in terror of astral phenomena on a
successive invasion of Palestine [12] . Here again, the puzzle was whether to unite
the two events or treat them successively, and Velikovsky chose the latter course, as
do we.
The present state of speculation may be conveyed in tabular form:
The Pylos story is not ended, however. There is more to it, and it fashions a warning
to scholars who have accepted faithfully the theory that a Mycenaean age was ended
about 1200 B. C. by barbarian invasions and a "Dark Age" set in that was to be
illuminated by the great poets, Homer and Hesiod, finally around 800 B. C. The Love
Affair holds a light to the Dark Age and the disposition of the Dark Age provides a key
to the Love Affair.
To return to the story, we call upon the research of Isaacson on Pylos. The destruction
of Pylos has been compared with the destruction of Gordion, in Asia Minor. The city
whose Gordian knot was later cut by Alexander, perished also in a disaster. Pylos was
of Mycenaean Greek culture: Gordius was Phrygian. At Pylos were found ceramics that
resembled Mycenaean ware that was associated with Egyptian ware and therefore assigned
the Egyptian dates because these were the basis of Near Eastern chronology. The
Phrygians, however, are honored by their own archeological and historical dating system
and Gordius is said to be of the eighth century before Christ.
Table
Hypothetical Benchmarks: Planetary Encounters and Historical Coincidences
Calendar Elapsed time Nestor's Personal events Other events Sky encounters
(B. C.)* between possible
periods age
================================================================================================================================================
776 - - - Olympic Games Founde Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon
761 15 - - Hercules Destroys Troy Mars/ Earth-Moon
and Wins Olympic Games
747 15 5 Nausithous Moves to Phaeacia; Pylian War of Gods Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon
Iliad and Odyssey begin Career
as Epic Cycles; Hercules and
Heralids in Peloponnesus
(Nestor Sole Survivor)
732 15 20 Atreus and Thyestes; Pylians Raid Elians Mars/ Earth-Moon
(Nestor a Hero)
717 15 - Alkinous Becomes King of Phaeacia Mars/ Earth-Moon
702 15 45 Nestor and Odysseus at Troy Start of Trojan War Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon
698 - 55 Nestor at Troy; Agamemnon Fights Troy VI destroyed Mars/ Earth-Moon
Memnon the Ethiopian Prince (Egypt) by Earthquakes (War of Gods)
687 11 66 Demodocus Sings - Odysseus Returns. Troy VIIA Destroyed by Fire; Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon
Nestor and Telemachus at Pylos. Pylos Falls (Last War of Gods);
Homer Born. Phaeacia Falls by Earthquake;
Sennacherib's
Army Destroyed at Jerusalem Skies clear
670 - - Greek Alphabet Developed Calendars Reordered; Earth Trembles
630 - - Iliad Revised and Transcribed by Homer Present skies
Odyessey Revised and Transcribed by Homer
*The six major intervals are 15 years each, placed largely on the reasoning of
Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp 362 ff., that Mars' present orbit is in "favorable
opposition" respecting Earth every 15 years. Since Mars had a different orbit before -
776 and might have changed its orbit at every encounter between -776 and -687, we must
of course ultimately use historical evidence to plot all of the encounters. We must
bear in mind, too, that the geological and ecological aftermaths of disaster provoked
by celestial behavior can continue for some time. Here, also, we have reasoned that
only an 11- year interval separated the last two disaster, that is. Mars was on its way
to becoming an outer planet and suffered two encounters close together. Although the
problem is not insoluble it will require a great deal of research to established
empirically the dates of several peak disasters and the rate of subsidence of
disturbances in the aftermaths. (Worlds in Collision, 274-8).
Charcoal of both burnt-out sites was tested at the same laboratory at the same time to
determine its carbon-14 loss. For it is by living that a plant or animal ingests carbon
14; after death the ingestion stops and a decay of this radioactive substance begins.
Measuring the loss of Carbon 14 in charcoal samples of the two towns, the investigators
discovered what they had expected: the samples of each site could give dates that
conventional archeology had already established. But to do so, the investigators
performed miracles of purification of the Gordian sample to reduce its age by several
hundred years, while they let the samples of Pylos go by polluted and unchallenged
because they "proved" what was expected.
Not content with casting the Pylos samples back into the ash-heap, Isaacson advanced
three further conclusions from the materials of these two towns far apart, whose dates
may now be said to be close together. He discovered that the C14 dates of the olive
pollen in a core from the bottom of a lake near Pylos conveyed eighth century readings
when the pollen was at its peak. Reasoning that Pylos was tending a maximum of olive
trees when the town was flourishing, and that there would be little cultivation in the
"Dark Ages" when the population would be sparse, Isaacson logically deduced that the
maximum of the short-lived pollen in the eighth century could mean that Pylos was in
full flower then as well, although, once destroyed, it remained uninhabited ever after.
He went on to a second point. Analyzing the famed reports of the University of
Cincinnati excavations at Pylos, he read in their pages accounts of the mysterious
mixing of Mycenaean pottery and geometric pottery in strata where neither could have
intruded upon the other. Yet these two types of ceramics were supposed to have been
fashioned centuries apart.
Now the basic and perhaps the only unassailable law of geology and archaeology is the
law of superposition. Unless proof of accident if brought forward, what is on top is
younger than what it rests upon. The Mycenaean and the Geometric Ages then had to be
contemporaneous! The "Dark Ages" of 400 to 500 years appeared to have been squeezed out
at Pylos. Pondering this point, one is led almost reluctantly to the third point of
Isaacson. Gordion of Phrygia in the 8th century has walls that strikingly resemble the
walls of Troy VI, which were devastated by earthquake. Archaeologists who are faithful
to their conventions must bargain with an architectural similarity that flatly denies
their 400 years' or more gap between Gordius and Troy.
Isaacson's work was following a trail already laid by Velikovsky, who had observed that
archaeologists of the 19th century had somehow lost their way. Velikovsky exposed the
problem and its probable solution in 1973 by the long-deferred publication of his
manuscript on the famous rampant lions gate of Mycenae [13] .
In 1881, W. M. Ramsey had noted that the Gate closely resembled a Phrygian tomb gate of
the 8th century. Flinders Petrie, the renowned pioneer of Egyptian archaeology and
history, had established an authoritative chronology of Egypt which could be applied
wherever Egyptian artifacts were discovered, or conversely when foreign artifacts were
discovered in Egypt. Petrie discounted Ramsay's evidence, because Mycenae had already
been "dated" by the association of its artifacts with those of Egypt. Resemblance or
not, the Lions of the two cities were moved four hundred years apart.
Petrie's Egyptian chronological imperialism, spreading over the Near East and the
Mediterranean island, compelled scholars to invent a long period of Hellenic culture in
which "little happened," barbarism prevailed, the Greeks were illiterate, the arts and
sciences were lost - the Dark Ages of Greece, in short, conventionally dated between
1300 or 1200 B. C. and 800 B. C., a span of perhaps 500 years. Not until Velikovsky
[14] challenged the Egyptian chronology frontally could any scholar imagine that
various baffling puzzles of Phrygia, Mycenaean Greece, and Homeric Greece would have
ultimately simple solution; the Gordian Knot was cut. Isaacson's studies of the
excavation records at half-a-dozen famous sites, following Velikovsky's hypothesis,
have shattered the empirical foundations of the theory of the Dark Ages [15] .
SOCIETY IN SHOCK
Speaking of the aftermath of catastrophe, Plato declares of the survivors; "At first,
they would have natural fear ringing in their ears which would prevent their descending
from the heights into the plain." [16]
If one were, at this pint, to take up in order the authoritative works of history and
archaeology it might be shown that they are in every case affected by a blind spot in
regard to the Dark Ages. This method would be repeating much of Isaacson's work and
would expand unduly the present text. It may be better to fashion a new model of the
Homeric Age and, by demonstrating its consistency and efficiency, to buttress the
theory that the Love Affair portrays an astral and earthly disaster that had recently
occurred. Let us call this model, "The Crazed Survivors of Disaster."
It stands in contrast to the conventional "Greek Dark Ages" model. The latter holds
that the Mycenaean Age collapsed over the period of a century because of barbarian
invasions and that these barbarians in the course of centuries acquired the mentalities
and facilities of a civilized people.
The "Crazed Survivors" model is constructed from the theory that a general catastrophe
involving great ecological and cultural damage is followed by a shocked society. The
shocked society would exhibit a complex of expected behaviors that distinguish it from
stable or moderately changing or even revolutionary societies, or more significantly,
from a society that is slowly evolving from a "primitive" to a "civilized" culture. In
the societies of crazed survivors, personal and mass self-destructiveness and
destructiveness of others and of culture increase as terror and guilt interact on a
complex and massive scale. Depending upon the extent of the disaster, a totally
amnesiac and stupefied society of cultural degenerates may ensue or a more furious
cultural coping that may eventuate in a flowering of religious institutions, crafts,
and arts.
The Homeric heroes, Odysseus and Achilles among them, typified the bands of survivors
of the extensive Mycenaean civilization that was largely destroyed in the catastrophic
interventions of the planets Mars and Venus in the Earth-Moon system in the 8th
century. The plots of the Iliad and Odyssey, despite 2700 years of trying to make
something else of them, clearly point to the skies as the source of the disruptive and
awful events that produced the crazed heroes of the dark times. Western civilization
has treasured and imitated the posturings of these mad warriors, hardly ever realizing
what they were and how the docile mind of later generations would be affected when this
madness was presented to it as normality and for inspiration. We shall proceed now to
enumerate and describe briefly a number of psychological and social indications that we
are dealing with human beings behaving in the aftermath of catastrophe.
The Homeric Greeks developed a pantheon of skygods and assumed that these gods would
continuously manifest themselves by thunderbolts, showers of arrows, tidal waves,
earthquakes, meteorites, and so on. They venerated all sky signs and objects from the
sky, such as meteoric iron and stones. The earth itself was a living animal and
thoroughly animated in its parts [17] . A number of gods and demi-gods contributed to
a continual geological and ecological restlessness. Animals, plants, and rocks changed
readily into humanoid forms and vice versa. Ovid's Metamorphoses elaborates this theme
interminably.
By the time of Thucydides, free will and controlled change were accredited to mankind,
but the Homeric Greeks were yoked to moira, fortune, destiny, lot - the law of chance
that determines human fate [18] . Uncontrolled license and little self-discipline were
ascribed to (projected upon) the gods. Well-developed priesthoods had dissolved, just
as other specialized occupations crumpled into individuals. (Finley calculates that
over 100 occupations discernible in the linear B tablets dropped to a mere dozen in
Homer.) Nevertheless there were ritual guardians and diviners with prodigious memories,
aides to kings but not members of kingly families. Priests, bards, and madmen were
possessed by gods.
The priests "were guardians of ritual and of the forms and language of the sacramental
songs; preservers of the motions and rhythms for the due observance of ceremonial;
interpreters of those signs and often obscure sayings by which the gods manifested
their decrees, desires or warnings; and, lastly they were the custodians of the science
of precedents in all domains;" [19]
The preceding Mycenaean bureaucratic and feudal order had broken down. Finley and other
experts have described an oikos (household) system as a kind of feudal plantation
system that survived the collapse of bureaucratic urban centralism. It is true that the
oikos system prevails, but it is really a piratical or ship-wreck system in which
people gathered around surviving leaders. A great many expatriates, outcasts, outlaws
and refugees were to be found among the community. There is a remarkable lack of the
stable assignment of social, economic, and political rights to the types of people who
clustered in these strongholds.
Practically all of the titles of hierarchical officialdom disappeared. The chiefs of
households (that it would be a mistake to call "clans") [20] ruled a mixed community
as judge and religious-political protector.
The "Argive Kings" and the kings who were supposed to have developed from and after the
Homeric heroic age were actually the same traditional kings whose Greco-Mycenaean
kingdoms had come tumbling down in the disasters of the 8th and 7th centuries [21] .
The warlords and oligarchies followed. Alcinous of Phaeacia rules like Agammemnon. We
quote Denys Page:
When history dawns on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century B. C., we discover
there a mode of government hardly distinguishable from that of Agamemnon at the siege
of Troy. The will of the sovereign power, Agamemnon himself, is not absolute: he must
first summon a council of elders, and whatever they approve must be declared to an
agora, an assembly of all lesser noblemen. In the seventh century, B. C., at Lesbos the
political constitution is exactly the same; and it happens that the sovereign power is
still in the direct line of descent from the family of Agamemnon [22] .
This startling claim is followed by one even more sweeping: "In this place certainly,
and in other places presumably, the royal family survived throughout the dark ages from
beginning to end." We cannot grant either the Lesbos presumption or the general
presumption. It is rare in the annals of history to find a genuine 400-year old
dynasty, and hard to imagine one that would have suffered 400 to 500 years of the so-
called Dark Ages. If the family of Agamemnon of Troy still ruled Lesbos in the seventh
century, it is simply because the Trojan War took place less than a century beforehand.
Indeed, Agamemnon himself had probably an upstart pedigree like most of the Homeric
heroes. The heroes spoke of home frequently but there is a lack of definition of their
homes, Nestor's account being exceptional in the Iliad and those of the Odyssey being
largely mythical and savage. The heroes boasted in the names of their parents, some of
their grandfathers, and usually stopped at this point; some lapsed into claims of
divine forebears in the second generation. Glaukos and Diomedes, in a famous encounter
in the Iliad, discovered while bragging of their antecedents that their grandfathers
were guest-friends and decided not to fight each other [23] . The absence of "family
trees" among self-assertive "nobles" raises doubts that they either knew their
ancestors or, if they did, could claim any distinction on their behalf.
The Dark Ages, as a catastrophic century, found ancestors in short supply. So also
communities. Homer "does not talk a great deal about tribes and groups and clans and
sects and varieties of idealistic associations, whether pacific or belligerent. What
Homer does is to confine himself to the immediate family of the warrior in question."
[24] Only a short paternal link is stressed, along with guest-friends. This is
exceedingly strange. It is not at all like "primitive peoples" whose lives are bound
into communities of blood served by totems. Nor like a bureaucratic society. But by the
"dawn of history," in the next century, we find definite blood lines as the basis of
organization of the Greek polis. Apparently, though missing in Homeric times, they are
quickly reestablished in the succeeding generations.
The warriors stayed away from their "homes" so long that we could question whether they
had any. They remind us of Vandals and Vikings who left home never to return. Of all of
Ithaca's warriors, only Odysseus ever reached home. Odysseus played the pirate -
looting, killing, raping. For the sake of Athena, he had to be brought home, there to
face and slay a horde of suitors of his "long-suffering" wife. His shepherd slave,
Eumaeus, was armed against other shepherds and wild beasts. Marauding was frequent, if
not from one's neighbors then from pirates and foreign warriors. Slaves abounded, of
various nationalities, one may note. It was a society where every man's hand was raised
against his neighbor. Homo lupus homini. "The bearing of arms, particularly lance and
sword, on all solemn occasions of civil life, was the distinguishing feature which,
more than any other, marked the separation of classes in Homer's time." [25]
In battle one encounters a frenzied behavior whereby fear is whipped up in order to
gain courage. Eliade's words apply to the heroes: "The frenzied berserker, ferocious
warriors, realized precisely the state of sacred fury... of the primordial world." [26]
In a famous scene of the Iliad, Achilles went so berserk that he battled the river, the
River-God and the gods themselves. Ajax went mad and finally committed suicide.
A frank, hollow, extreme braggadoccio characterized the best and the worst of the
fighters. The glorification of destructiveness seems interminable. Apart from a chosen
few, the women are subjects of aggressive degradation and measured by head of
livestock; yet some time before, in Minoan, if not Mycenaean, civilization, women had
achieved high position and status. More information about Mycenaean women is needed
before we can claim what we guess to be true: that the degradation of women was not a
trait of the Indo-European but was the outcome of catastrophically induced aggression.
Certain undercurrents of attitude haunt the passages of Homer. The boasts of the
warriors are often about the conquests and destruction of towns. The similes of Homer
are overwhelmingly rural and pastoral. May we surmise that the heroes sacked many a
half-destroyed town? There is a pervading sense of splendors of the past being gone and
citations of armies, cities, and wealth appear to be grossly exaggerated. This
pretentiousness is not that of nobles, or of a people who had lost something they once
knew, did not own, but had given them their character.
One senses also the general lack of awareness, a "mind-blown" stupidity, a calloused
morality. Am I reading feelings into Homer's poetry that are not there? Perhaps. But
the interpellations of morality in the Iliad and/ Odyssey are mostly those of the poet.
Are these traits not typical of "primitive man" ? Definitely not. It is only by getting
one's concept of primitive man from Homer that one can believe so, for usually modern
"primitive man" is gentle, aware, and only occasionally "possessed" or obsessed. The
Homeric warriors are not primitive types.
The "guest-stranger" concept of Homeric times is intriguing too. The Homeric peoples
had an ambivalence towards outsiders. Deep mistrust alternated with sometime hysterical
acceptance. Apparently, a person entering the precincts of an unknown community, one
such as Odysseus, for example, would not know whether he would be maltreated or well-
treated. This ambivalence appears to have gone beyond logic or normal behavior [27] .
Odysseus was warned by Nausicaa that he should avoid being seen in Phaeacia because of
the general mistrust of strangers. Yet she also assured him, that if all went well, he
would be royally treated. And so he was. The forms of human relations, like the world
itself, were shaky. Augeas, "the king of the Epeians, treacherous to his very guest-
friends, not long thereafter saw his own rich city, under stark fire and the stroke of
iron, settling into the deep pit of destruction. Augeas was himself dragged to the edge
of steep death, nor escaped it." [28] It was for double-dealing over the cleaning of
his stable that Augeas incurred the wrath of Hercules which destroyed his city and him.
We should say that this same Hercules is an active participant in many of the events of
the dark times and one day it may be confirmed that he is an alter ego of the planet
Mars. He destroyed Troy once before its destruction by the Achaeans of Homer. He
destroyed Nestor's Pylos once. He is often berserk, a paragon of the crazed survivor,
and was deified upon death.
Hercules (or Heracles) had progeny, the Heraclids. They were so many that they seemed
to be whole bands of people. More than that, they have been identified with the Dorians
whom scholars believe to be the Greek ethnic strain that devastated the Mycenaean
kingdoms and carried on their primitive development during the so-called "Dark Ages."
For example, Rhys Carpenter [29] is to be discovered on a magnificent tour de force
aimed at proving that long term intense climatic change from wet to dry caused the
Mycenaean civilization of the "14th century" literally to collapse and permitted the
starving country folk to sack and burn the centers of civilization in search of
necessities. The country and islands were practically abandoned, and only with time did
a better acclimated population begin its rise.
Carpenter encounters many obstacles, only two of which need be mentioned here. He is
confronted by sudden disaster; yet it is apparent from his own words and in meteorology
that climatic disaster can only be sudden and quite destructive if an immense external
source produces it. Second, everywhere he turns he sees terrible incendiarism (or,
rather, he turns everywhere to avoid seeing the terrible incendiarism that destroyed
Mycenaean civilization).
We cannot help but thank him, however, as one must thank practically every strainer and
stretcher of the Dark Ages. For he describes in many an incident the takeover of
Mycenaean areas by the Heraclids, whom he obligingly postulates as Mycenaean refugee
families returning a couple of generations later at the head of mixed bands of other
ethnic Greeks, especially Dorians. The Heraclids, in our theory, are crazed survivors,
sons, naturally, of Hercules, who is identifiable in myth with Ares or Mars, even
though he sometimes fights Ares. The Heraclids are borne back in the name of the God
who destroyed their kin and culture.
"How unsettled and mobile were all these heroes," writes Mireaux [30] , after he has
devoted a book, like Finley, to discovering a social order that would make sense. "The
heroic world of the epics appears in our eyes as something mobile, effervescent and
tumultuous."
They depended upon the seas but were bad sailors. There was no class of specialized
sailors. Everyone was a "sailor." Maritime ventures were not materially distinguishable
from piratical excursions. We can imagine what confusion and fear drove them over the
seas to found their many colonies, for the period 750-600 B. C. was the great period of
colonial expansion. The journey from Crete to Egypt took five days and nights, "a
terrifying venture for such poor navigators as were the Greeks of Homer's time." [31]
They were meat-eaters: cattle, sheep, and wild game, animals of the uplands. "For Homer
fish is a detestable food, while Hesiod does not even deign to mention it. Never is
fish eaten at the Homeric repasts." [32]
Probably around 67\ 87 B. C. Gyges the Lydian overthrew the Heraclids of Maeonia in
Asia Minor, and struck the first coins. Actually they were not the first coins, but the
Greeks had largely abandoned coinage. Homer mentions a gold talent of fixed value,
reports Mireaux, but exchange was almost entirely in kind rather than in money.
Gift-giving was often a spectacular affair. It was more a system of exchange than a
pleasant supplement to normal exchange like bonuses or birthday presents. The things
given seem often to be for re-giving, to be untouched and unused, even homely objects
like linens, and the metal gifts seem all too frequently to have semidivine or divine
"makers" which, as false pedigrees conceal humble origins, may have concealed their
origins in loot and theft. Their description, too, conveys an awesomeness, as if they
were not familiar objects to the childhoods of the gift-exchangers. They are described
as pirates would speak of their misunderstood loot of pots and laces.
Altogether there is an incongruous mixture of ethnic names, events, artifacts and
practices in the works of Homer. Names that are "centuries old," and not to be heard
again in history, occur. Chariots are used, not as battle-wagons, but to convey
warriors to places where they would descend and fight. Their use was partly forgotten
or had not been familiar to the types who owned them. T. B. L. Webster [33] shows
that Homer is indebted to Minoan and near East influences in plots, style, and
references. He is influence by the archaic Mediterranean culture. He is very Mycenaean,
Webster concludes. But in all of his speculations, Webster does not speculate upon the
important chronological puzzle: If it is proper to imagine that all of these influences
happened so "early" and Homer came so late, why not speculate as well that all of these
similar bits actually existed almost within the living grasp of the poet? At one time,
many scholars believed that Troy and the Trojans were poetic inventions. Then
Schliemann discovered "Troy" or something that corresponded to indications found in the
poetry. His site at Hisarlik has revealed in successive excavations a number of
"Troys." It appears now that the Troy of levels VI and VIIa may have been Homer's Troy
but it also appears now that the Trojans were akin to the Greeks and that the Trojan
War( s) pitted Greek against Greek. Homer probably stressed differences between Greeks
and Trojans as a splendid device, first, to convey the battle of the gods, and, second,
to give the disarrayed and scattered Greek communities a common weltanschauung - a
common religious, political and cultural outlook on the world.
Moreover, now we permit ourselves another conjecture: The besieged Troy was a congress
of allied forces containing Greek and non-Greek forces, clustered survivors, who could
be called Greek or Anatolians, who might provide characters with connections as far
away as Etruria and send an Anatolian like Aeneas to seek kin in Italy after the wars
(as Virgil says).
The Trojan Wars were plural, most likely, during the Martian period. Armies may have
come and gone; the occupants of Troy may have changed several times. The artifacts dug
up could be interpreted as coming from a melange of cultures - Greek and Anatolian. The
revolution of heaven and earth is the heart of the primordial myth and the epic poem.
The Homeric epics are no exceptions to the rule. An old era was being destroyed and a
new one was arising [34] .
The Iliad and the Odyssey used various dialects of Greek blended by the genius of the
bard. Homer used metaphors of the clearest and most ordinary kind, to the exclusion of
far-flown and fancy comparisons. Words expressing "fire" abound, for example. His
poetry seems to be addressing audiences of low verbal ability; or they might have
understood a melange of dialects and phrases, a lingua greca like a lingua franca or
both. On the other hand, his similes are prolonged and complicated, dealing with rural
and pastoral comparisons. Obviously Homer was not primitive, nor inexperienced, nor
bereft of imagination; nor were his confraternity of poets, nor their audiences. Why
should this melange be used, and not, say, a single preferred dialect like the Tuscan
that Dante's genius made to become the preferred Italian tongue? A reasonable answer
would be that there was then only a gathering of tongues: the audiences were related,
widespread, itinerant, and diffused.
More significant is the non-use of a sacred, liturgical language. If there had been a
Mycenaean dead language, like classical Greek is to modern Greek, or Latin to Italian,
then would not that have been the basis for portions of the epic poems? But it was not,
not even for prayers. Therefore it did not exist. Mycenaean Greek was probably a living
and related set of dialects whose standard expression had disappeared with its ruling
class and scribes.
It gives cause for bewilderment. If a sacred language was not understood, that would
place the old civilization far into the past; but there are many tie-ins of Homeric and
Mycenaean cultures. Conversely, the fact might indicate that the old civilization was
either foreign (which it was not) or largely destroyed (which we think was the case).
The linguistic melange (with its numerous catch-phrases of all Greek sub-cultures),
which was Homeric Greek, was "instant prosody." There had been no time, no more than a
couple of generations, to build an epic language. Yet such an epic language would
surely have evolved smoothly and uniformly over the several centuries of any "Dark
Ages." What emerges therefore is a people and culture exploding in space and time,
whose language, that of Homer, had not yet caught up with its expanding front.
The Greeks of Homer, to conclude, did not come as an invasion from afar. They consisted
of all kinds of Greeks. They were survivors, largely from the rural areas and the
interior highlands. From personal experience and hearsay, they knew of the centers of
their societies that had been destroyed. They often lacked kith and kin; they lacked
communal security; they lacked law and order; they lacked education; they trembled upon
the trembling earth.
The experts commonly remark on the unabashed juxtaposition of knowledge and ignorance
in the epics. Mireaux has said, "There was decidedly nothing primitive about Homeric
civilization." The very sophistication of the poets, like Homer and Hesiod, who told
about them, indicates an age whose savagery could easily be penetrated by civilized
forms.
For a grandly disciplined, informed, and stylized poet like Homer to write so
sympathetically of his subjects, he had to be of their age, and to be of their age
required that their age be the eighth century.
The massive destruction of Mycenaean civilization fully attested in the
archaeological record, was accompanied by a complete social transformation, in which
all the institutions by which men organized their existence were refashioned to met the
new situation... When Mycenae fell, the surviving Greeks, in their new kind of society,
had no need for records or for scribes; in fact, on the evidence we have at present,
they had no need for the art of writing and they lost it altogether, improbable as that
may seem to modern men [35] .
What seems "improbable" to us is that anything but abrupt catastrophe could cause "the
massive destruction" in so many places - Crete, Mycenae, and elsewhere. The Homeric
scribes, working with new dialects and a new alphabet, did not need centuries of time
to accumulate material on the chaotic life that followed.
Homer did his best to reassure the survivors and to set them on their way again. The
incongruences and inconsistencies of material culture, nomenclatures, customs, and
attitudes found in his works are not sloppy artistry; they are of the essence of the
people whom he was describing. And his work was not an oral conglomerate of centuries,
but a description, from two main sources, those of the Iliad and the Odyssey, [36]
with as much consistency as he could import to them, of the suddenly produced cultural
chaos of the eighth and seventh centuries. He took as his task the assembly of plots
dealing with erratic and fear-driven survivors and inspiring these folk to become "one
nation under the gods."
THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE
The contrast with conventional historiography is obvious: Homer flourished in the
middle seventh century. His writings were an agglomerate of the early century. The
pieces of his writing came from different quarters; many from the period -670 to -776,
some from times stretching far before (-766 to -1500). The people active in his
writings were from the crushed cultures of -776 to the beginning of his own lifetime.
The Mycenaean Civilization collapsed in a set of natural disasters. The marginal
survivors regrouped repeatedly in the following century. They fought bitterly amongst
themselves, used what they could manage of the old tools and skills. Homer sang about
them and their destroyed culture.
The assumption is tied to a brief time sequence derived from evidences of natural
disaster. (See the Chart on pages 64-65). The theory of causation seeks evidence of
abrupt takeover of a destroyed culture by marginal survivors who cast aside, or employ
ceremonially, practices they do not or cannot use or understand. Then they proceed to
draw from every source their new synthetic culture.
On the other hand, most Homeric experts nowadays believe that Homer lived a century
earlier, that his writings were an agglomerate of centuries before, that the pieces of
writings came from different quarters, some of them as early as 1500 B. C. The people
acting in his writings, they believe, are fictional characters referring to real
characters occupying a space of 400 to 500 years. Their culture is believed to be a
composite of all this time, but is concentrated in a true primitive culture that made
savage contact with the civilized world in 1300 B. C. or thereabout, and after half a
millennium, arrived at the stage of producing Homer and Hesiod. The Mycenaean
civilization weakened and then was ruined by invaders. Centuries of primitive
illiterate history followed. The pre-Homerics emerged and found new tools and skills.
Homer at this point sang about their deeds. They were learning to sail boats; they
disliked eating fish; they were learning to use chariots.
This conventional theory is tied to a time sequence derived from an incorrect Egyptian
chronology. The society and behavior of the pre-Homeric Hellenes are viewed in a
sequence, according to a theory of causation that has a culture being gradually born.
Practices are invented or adopted slowly from abroad.
Thus occurs the confrontation of two theories. The reader has already some means of
adjudging it. Other means will follow. But before this chapter is ended, a suggestion
may be offered to all those who read and write about the Dark Ages of ancient Greece.
The suggestion concerns methodology, or, more simply, logic.
The logic of writing about history, that is, about the sequence of cause and events, is
that events are arranged by time and then causes are uncovered. This usually works
because the succession of events is ordinarily known before the causes are discovered.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, though strictly speaking a logical fallacy, establishes a
presumption of cause: After this, therefore (perhaps) because of this. However, the
less the evidence of temporal sequences, the greater the possibility of logical
fallacies. Hysteron proteron, as the Aristotelians called it, or "putting the cart
before the horse" is one of them. When a temporal sequence is not known, but a
presumption of the sequence is held, then the possibility of the reversal of cause
increases. The logical problem that is involved in "putting the cart before the horse"
is exemplified in the saying, "If the Brahmin do not pray, the Sun will not set." Wise
skeptics know that "If the Sun will not set, the Brahmin will pray." (As a matter of
fact, they will pray anyhow, if only because in illo tempore the sun did not set.) At
the same time, many people, zealous or simply naive, will let the cart be placed before
the horse and believe that the cart pulls the horse. In a subtle way, much of the
writing about the Greek "Dark Ages" falls victim to this fallacy. Take, for instance,
the statement that "the Dark Age Greeks were poor sailors." This fact is usually
interpreted to mean that these Greeks were evolving from land animals into seafaring
animals; they had not learned yet to sail. But these Greeks had no reason to be good
sailors because they were raised as herders and warriors. Seamanship had disappeared
with the washing away and destruction of the seacoast settlements. Or take the fact
that "the Greek warriors before Troy misused their chariots, dismounting from them
instead of fighting from them." This fact is usually interpreted to mean that they were
just learning of the chariot from a superior culture with whom they were now coming
into contact. But their chariot subculture had just been destroyed with the palaces,
and the survivors had not been raised as chariot warriors but used chariots because
their "betters" had used them.
"The government of Phaecia was a typical emerging primitive state heading towards the
polis of classical Greece out of tribalism." But no tribe stands behind the Phaeacians;
they are a colony surviving its mother country and organized more simply than it was.
Or take the fact that the "The Achaeans attacked Troy in the name of their gods, and
Troy was destroyed." To most, the statement means that the Achaeans destroyed Troy. On
the contrary, "the gods" destroyed Troy and the Achaeans occupied it. Not, "the wrath
of Achilles elaborated into "the battles of the gods," but rather "the battles of the
gods reduced to the wrath of Achilles."
Finally, considering the Love Affair in this light, the "gods" do not act so that
people can have comedy; comedy is played so that the effects of the gods can be
controlled.
Further, the dance forms and opera theater of the Love Affair were ancient and Minoan.
So asserts Patroni [37] He points out that the dancing circle and chorus carried from
Minoan to the classical Greek theater. But when the Greek theater appeared, he writes,
we find the rustic god Dionysus, with a goat-cult of dancers cloaked in skins. The
poverty of the means, the few actors, the vagabond origins of the Thespian theater, all
showed - still according to Patroni who follows the Dark Age theory faithfully - that
the primitive real Greek theater was not receiving the subsidies of princes, not the
interest or participation of Mycenaean high society; it was left to the rural folk.
Again "the cart before the horse." In the general destruction of societies, the art of
the survivors made its way quickly forward. The elite and its sophisticated art forms
were destroyed; folk art (not primitive art) dominated the scene. An analogy with the
problems of geology is tempting. When folds and faults occur, the principle of
superposition is thrown off and the effects are baffling to explain. So in history,
when temporal evidence is scarce, the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc loses its
ability to guide one. Then, in geology, one says of a layer of shells and pebbles:
"This land was raised from the sea", while another will say, "This land was once
flooded with shells and pebbles."
A rather lengthy example may be excused, especially since it is the last. After
describing what appears to have been a solid and regulated archaic system (which led me
to suspect my theory), Mireaux [38] concludes:
Thus one is led to believe that the (lack of) care for agriculture, and the dispersal
of a peasantry so firmly rooted in the soil, must have brought about, in most of the
cities, at a quite early stage - and no doubt as early as Homeric time - the
dissolution of the primitive brotherhoods of youth and soldierly companionship, and the
breaking up of their community-centres. Nevertheless, even if the traditions of a life
in common and an armed confraternity were growing looser, they were not yet so obsolete
that they could not still color the lives of the rough peasant classes, guiding them
and instilling into them the old ideals of honor and pride; for they still knew that
their lands were only theirs as long as they could defend them, with helmet, buckler
and javelin, after an appropriate training and a traditional initiation received at the
hands of their elders.
In this quotation and all of the chapter containing it, Mireaux first establishes the
existence of a rigid (old) order, which he calls "primitive," because presumably he
believes it to have followed the Mycenaean culture over the centuries.
Then in the same breath, as above, he speaks as if this order preceded the Homeric
order which was a breakdown of it.
That is, he reverses the logic of his own evidence. He moves back and forth
uncertainly, reversing precedence and effect, and, of course, cause and effect. It is
more likely that the "primitive order" he describes was the collapsed remains of the
Mycenaean order that had persisted into the eighth century and was retained especially
long by the Spartans who clustered fearfully in villages rather than committing
themselves to a great polis. This order could only be feebly reinstituted by the
Homeric crazed heroes. But a new civilization, which developed out of the Homeric age,
moved in all directions; it quickly blended new and old forms. The Love Affair was an
effort, on the literary front, to establish the new age by mastering the trauma that
came with the end of the old age.
Notes (Chapter 7: Crazy Heroes of Dark Times)
1. The Cambridge Ancient History (1973), Vol II, Part I, p. 611. We recall the
suggestion that Odysseus may have awakened to Nausicaa's spring washing rites.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 624.
4. Cf. Velikovsky (1950), p. 214 et passim.
5. The Cambridge Ancient History, loc. cit., 626.
6. The above details of this paragraph come from Israel M. Isaacson, 'Carbon 14 dates
and Velikovsky's Revision of Ancient History." III Pensee no. 3 (1973), 26, p. 29 who
is quoting C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western
Messenia (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966), I, pp. 167, 40, 199, 210, 169, 66.
7. History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ of California Press, 1959), p.
255.
8. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 281, quoting Bollenbucher, Bebete and Hymnen and
Nergal, p. 29.
9. Worlds in Collision, p. 213.
10. T. Blegen, "Troy VI," Cambridge Ancient History (1973), p. 685.
11. The interpretation of this event, which we cannot take at face value, must await a
later day.
12. Worlds in Collision, pp. 268-9, quoting Sidney Smith's Babylonian Historical Texts
(1924), p. 5. I refer the reader to The Lately Tortured Earth for explanations of the
phenomena of extraterrestrially produced incineration and blasts.
13. "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," Pensee, III (1973). p. 31. supported in the same issued
by Lewis M. Greenberg, "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," p. 26.
14. Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (1946); Ages in Chaos (1950);
"Astronomy and Chronology," III Pensee, No. 2. 38.
15. I. Issacson, op. cit., and "Applying the Revised Chronology," IV Pens‚e (Fall,
1974), 5. Posthumous studies of Velikovsky are expected in re Dark Ages and Issacson's
(Schorr's) studies are being prepared by him for publication.
16. Plato, The Laws, III, p. 57 of the translation of B. Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, v.
V (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1871).
17. Mireaux, p. 24.
18. Mireaux, p. 28.
19. Mireaux, p. 79. Cf. p. 14.
20. As e. g. Mireaux does, p. 55.
21. Contrary to Mireaux, cf. p. 31.
22. Denys Page, The Homeric Odyssey, pp. 145-6, citing Alcaeus and Aristotle.
23. IL, VI.
24. John Cowper Powys, "Preface to Homer and the Oether," p. 146, cf. Mireaux, 124-5.
25. Mireaux, p. 137.
26. The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 21.
27. Cf. Finley, op. cit., pp. 115-20 et passim. Sociology delineates a "stranger"
concept and says it is always observable; but it is a quantitative ambivalence that has
a norm which is here far exceeded.
28. pindar, "Olympian Ode 10." (Loeb ed.) It would seem that Augeas and his city were
swallowed up by an earthquake or volcanic fissure.
29. Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966).
30. p. 241.
31. Mireaux, p. 249 and 242-5.
32. Mireaux, p. 146, citing Od XII, 329-32, IV, 368-9.
33. From Mycenae to Homer (1964), p. 197 et passim.
34. See Mircea Eleade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, chap. IV.
35. Finley, p. 168.
36. See pages 134ff below.
37. Op. cit., pp. 250-2.
38. P. 124-5.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE TWO FACES OF LOVE
The Aphrodite of the light Olympian-age character plays opposite her usual star in the
Love Affair, Ares. Her husband, Hephaestus, earns little affection from her, and,
though the story is not mentioned here, she is the mother of three children by Ares.
She is one of the few ever to have expressed love for Ares, and in "The Battle of the
Gods," in the Iliad, she goes to his aid in battle and is roundly smacked by the
Goddess Athena.
If we look into Homer for the precise astronomical referents of Ares, Aphrodite,
Hephaestus and Athena, we are disappointed. Homer does not say that the three sky
bodies - planet mars, Moon, and planet Venus are represented by them, not in the Iliad,
nor the Odyssey, nor in the Love Affair. How then are we to assure ourselves that we
are on the right track when we allocate among them several celestial bodies? We cannot
be certain - not now, nor in ancient times, if we follow the record. Our difficult task
of astral-mythical correlation is to be made even harder by the requirement that we
show that Aphrodite in the Love Affair is, if not certainly, then most likely, the
Moon. However, we shall proceed to the task, taking four steps. First we inquire
whether Aphrodite was tied to the Moon in Greek, Near Eastern and other sources in
primeval and ancient times. Next we ask whether Aphrodite was the name of entities
other than the Moon. Further, we ask whether she was possibly both the Moon and another
entity. Finally, we ask whether Aphrodite stood for the Moon specifically in the Love
Affair, in the song of Demodocus.
A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS
The Aphrodite of whom we speak is an old goddess. Always speaking in relative terms,
"old" means coming into recognizable form and identity before Jupiter, Venus and mars,
probably after Uranus, and possibly early in the age of Saturn - using the Greco-Roman
Eastern Mediterranean theogony and names as points of reference.
A quotation "On the worship of Venus-Urania throughout the East," from the work of a
famous scholar, G. Rawlinson, begins our introduction of the Love Affair's goddess:
[1]
She was the 'Queen of Heaven, ' the Moon... she corresponded to Minerva, and in
Greece to the original Aphrodite, who became at last the mere personification of beauty
and voluptuousness.
In the work of another scholar, Jane E. Harrison [2] , we read a passage from the
Danaides of Aeschylus, and we are told something of the jurisdiction of this Aphrodite
- words put into her mouth by the great dramatist:
Lo, there is hunger in the holy Sky To pierce the body of the Earth, and in the Earth
too Hunger to meet his arms. So falls the rain From Heaven that is her lover, making
moist The bosom of the Earth: and she brings forth to man The flocks he feeds, the corn
that is his life. To trees no less there cometh their own hour Of marriage which the
gleam of watery things Makes fruitful - Of all these the cause am I.
These lines seem to convey what we would expect of a lunar goddess. We are moving far
back in time. In a passing reference, Mircea Eliade writes of a "regime brought about
by Aphrodite and later governed by Zeus, in which the species are fixed, there is
order, balance, and hierarchy." [3] I have carried the birth of the Moon back in solar
system history to an astronomical catastrophe occurring even before the Age of Saturn.
We hear Theopompos quoted by Plutarch: [4] "From Kronos and Aphrodite all things take
their birth." So Aphrodite is moved back to the time of Kronos.
Back of Zeus, stands his father Kronos, and back of Kronos, his father, Ouranos. Hesiod
(8th century?), the earliest Greek source of all, places Aphrodite with the earliest
great god of the cloudy skies, Ouranos (Uranus). The motherless Aphrodite is daughter
of Ouranos, and Eros - a figure of love - seems to have been born with her, nor will
this divine helper ever leave her.
A little while after Hesiod wrote, Homer worked, and Homer alludes to a second
Aphrodite Pandemos, daughter of Zeus by Dione, aided by Eros Pandemos.
Cicero, a typical confusion emerging out of his elegant prose, has Hermes as husband of
the Uranian Aphrodite who is given Hephaestus as a husband and Ares as a lover. A third
Aphrodite is the sister of Hermes and daughter of Heaven and Die. Finally a fourth
Aphrodite emerges as a Syric-Cypriot wife of Adonis, by the name of Astarte.
We have almost nothing to say of the latter two personae. It is enough to discuss
Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos, if indeed they amount to two distinct
goddesses. If the former is the Moon, there is no reason to make of the second also the
Moon. Rather, this latter may even have been the planet Venus, who as the goddess
Athena, was born out of Zeus' forehead, lacking association in such case with either
Dione or Eros. Proclus, much later, but still authoritative, has this second later
Aphrodite also born from the sea like the first [5] .
The first goddess, Aphrodite Urania, was born in the throes of the destruction of
Ouranos by his son Kronos (Saturn), who severed his father's genitals with a sickle of
jagged flint and flung them into the sea. From the foam of these organs arose
Aphrodite, a foam god, literally foam-born (aphrogenis), the "one who is generated from
foam." [6] Only three words in Greek are known to carry the Aphr-root: "foam"
(aphros), "recklessness," and "sexually stimulating," All are obvious associations with
Aphrodite's birth and character [7] . This will become more significant when we ask
why Aphrodite Urania cannot have been Athena, or Ishtar, or another goddess.
TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY
The later myth might have both confusing and clarifying elements, confusing in its
resemblances to the Uranian episode, clarifying in that, if it were Athena-Venus which
was involved, foam-covered seas are understandable (" Beaufort 10" in navigation has
the surface of the sea foaming, hence sperm) and a turbulent setting in which
Aphrodite-Moon (does Dione relate to Diana?) was destructively involved and Zeus'
activity might have been construed as an attempted (and actual) ravishment of the Moon
in the days of the birth of Athena seven hundred and more years before the Love Affair.
The Homeric "Hymn to Athena" reproduced in chapter X chants of the foaming seas
resulting from her birth.
"Sea" foam, we can see, had reason to be brought in a second time on a later date. Of
the name "Aphrodite" itself, a case can be made for its being of an origin earlier than
the planet Venus, because of the temporal precedence of the Moon and the definite
designation of Urania, an impossible name for a later deity; long before historical
nations began, Ouranos was a deus otiosus. The goddess Amphitrite Thalassa (" of the
Sea") shares this epithet with Typhon and his paredra, "making one being with foam-born
Aphrodite," according to F. Nork [8] . Here is another indication that Aphrodite
Pandemos is lateborn and accompanies the birth (and death) of Typhon.
We employ the scenario of Aphrodite Urania in Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria to
approach the reality of those days. Uranus is a giant luminescent planet that fissions
in the earliest days of humanity. There occurs a separation from the electric arc or
"tree of life" which humans saw reaching up the god-planet. A major fragment from the
nova takes cometary form. In the severance from the tree and in the cometary form, a
castration of Ouranos is perceived. When the Moon is seen to arise from the disturbed
Earth, it is perceived as born out of the turbulent seas, out of the froth, and the
connection is made with the genitals of Ouranos, from which foam-born Aphrodite Urania
is generated and rises into the sky.
The bloodiness ascribed by myth to the foaming scene would refer to the ruddy color of
the turbulent elements and to the horrific analogy of the divine actions; the same
color relations would occur upon the much later occasion of the mythical fall of Typhon
and the birth of a new goddess. Many thousands of years separate this catastrophic
primordial scenario from the fully sublimated painting by Botticelli of a tender,
beautiful Aphrodite riding upon the sea-shell. In Sumerian mythology, the god of the
aether, Enlil, who can be compared with Uranus, separates the interlocked Earth Mother
and Father-Nammu, and then creates the Moon god, Nanna.
Among the thousands of verses of the Rig Vedas of ancient India there is an allusion to
the birth of the Moon, which is not among those presented in my other works but was
culled by J. Ziegler during his study of the Vedas. The Moon is "the Prudent (Moon)...
allied by birth to Heaven and Earth in kinship. The Gods discovered in the midst of
waters beautiful Agni (the Moon) with the Sister's labor. Him, Blessed One, Seven
strong Floods augmented, him white at birth and red when waxen mighty.... Then they,
ancient and young, who dwell together, Seven Sounding Rivers, as one germ received
him." [9]
Ziegler has also identified as Moon-names of the Rig-Vedas : Pusan, Indu, Two-Mothered
Sun, Pavamana, Sura, Wanderer, Red Bird, Lord, Bull, Vaisvanara, Maghavan, Brhaspati,
Brahmanaspati, Kutsa, Sindhu, Sage, Shining One, Agni and Indra, and probably many
more. We note how other gods are called by Moon-names or there is a confusion, as with
Agni and Indra. The same duplicity may occur in the Mediterranean area.
John Bentley, writing of India, supports us from his peculiar point of vantage: in the
war between gods and giants, "the goddess Sri, or Lakshmi, was then born, or produced
from the Sea."
"The Venus Aphroditus of the Western mythologists (is) emblematic of the lunisolar
year; therefore she is called the goddess of increase, abundance, etc. She is the
daughter of Durga, and the Proserpine of the West; and, considered as time, she is the
same as her mother. Metaphysically, she may sometimes represent the Moon." [10]
Later on, we shall see that Bentley's support has its problems. He may be confusing two
Aphrodites (Moon and planet Venus) and Hindu mythology, it seems, may have the same
problem as the Greek.
In geological terms, however, and according to a view that I present at length in the
Quantavolution Series, the Moon has recently arrived upon the sky. It was assembled
electro-gravitationally from a vast explosion of crustal material from the Earth. It
began to orbit the Earth, always facing it, within the traditional era of a cultured
humanity that recorded the events through legend later on. Inasmuch as a number of
ancient authors declare that there existed, still intact, cultures that claimed
existence prior to the Moon's appearance, there was a "Proselenian Period" before the
Moon existed [11] .
Among the Proselenians, doubts existed; the Moon may have come into position earlier
but, owing to a thick canopy of clouds girdling the Earth, it may have merely come into
evidence at a later time, and therefore the Proselenians witnessed the coming of the
Moon as an emergence from behind a cloudy barrier, after it had been present in the
nearby sky for some time.
Around the world, the moon was more often attributed female gender for several reasons
that can be touched upon only briefly here. A matriarchal system may have come into
being at times and the Moon was deemed female. Or the rough coincidence of the normal
menstrual period of women and the cycle of lunar phases - 28 days, 36 days and perhaps
other periods as well, in various calendar ages - could have produced numerous
speculations, "confirmations," institutional and ritual tags for the measure of time
and religious behaviors. The Moon would thus become female because of its behavior
according to the menstrual cycle? Yet, we think, could not a male Moon have commanded
and ordered the menstrual cycle, according to the mythmaking mind? Only Venus, of the
planets, is often female. The others and the Sun are regularly male. A number of
qualities are associated with the Moon and these are also associated with the Moon and
these are also associated with the female sex. The chief among these is a role in
fertility. But could not the qualities have been ascribed to the Moon after they were
developed in females ? Not altogether, of course, because certain qualities are found
so universally among women that they would appear to have originated in a common source
such as the Moon. One refers here to the function of women in spinning and weaving. Do
these derive from lunar behavior?
ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS
Robert Graves refers to "Selene the Moon, alias Aphrodite" and develops the lunar
traits of Aphrodite extensively. "The Athenians called Aphrodite Urania 'the eldest of
the Fates' because she was the Nymph-Goddess, to whom the sacred King had, in ancient
times, been sacrificed at the summer solstice... Aphrodite is the same wide-ruling
goddess who rose from Chaos and danced on the sea, and who was worshiped in Syria and
Palestine as Ishtar, or Ashtaroth [12] . She was regarded as a queen-bee. "She
destroyed the sacred king, who mated with her on a mountain top, as a queen-bee
destroys the drone: by tearing out his sexual organs." As Cybele, Phrygian Aphrodite of
Mount Ida, she accepted "the ecstatic self-castration of her priests in memory of her
lover Attis." [13] Concessions, suggests Graves, to the need to grant her masculine
powers as society moved under the influence of Jovian patriarchy [14] . Thus could
society employ the fantasy of bisexuality to further a political cause.
The Scythians, it is asserted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (16-44) worshipped
"Artimpasa (Aphrodite Urania), goddess of the Moon." The famous Encyclopedia of Pauly-
Wissowa tells us that Philochorus, "resting on the oldest conceptions of nature," finds
a duplicity in Aphrodite and the Moon (p. 2738). It refers to Horace speaking of dances
to Aphrodite in the night under the Moon (Horace, Carm. I: 45). It pitches the Lemnos
myth of a marriage between Aphrodite and Hephaestus against a Theban myth of her
marriage to Ares, which are then merged in the Song of Demodocus (p. 2769); the Orphic
hymns stretch far back of the Homeric period of the Eighth and Seventh Centuries; the
image of Aphrodite here seems lunar rather than planetary, but we realize that the same
Mistress of the Heavens title is given to Astarte in Syria, who is probably more planet
Venus (with Ananna) than she is the Moon. Also, as Astarte is seen by some as Aphrodite
barbata (bearded), still Pauly-Wissowa can find at least that the ancient authority
Philochoros again calls the bearded goddess a Moon figure.
Numerous writers besides Graves, among them Winthuis, Jeremias, and Rix, have stressed
an original bisexuality of ancient deities.
The primordial All-Mother of ancient tradition is a man-woman, or a woman-man, virgin
not in the physiological but in the cosmic sense.... A naive androgynous symbolism for
the primeval mother, forming a part of the doctrine, is apparently shown in the oldest
temples to the Virgin Mother, when the All-Mother is represented with a beard...
Astarte may appear in a masculine form... sometimes with the characteristics of the
masculine sex. Certain authors have even offered the hypothesis of an androgynous
Ishtar [15] .
There are many of such androgynous representations of Aphrodite, as in Cyprus where the
goddess wears a beard, female garments, and seems unisexual. Pilgrims to Paphos there
received 'gifts of a phallus and salt, ' the latter standing probably for the sea-froth
and semen of which the goddess was born. In Rome, like New York City, anything could be
found, including this, too.
The case for bearded Aphrodites representing the planet Venus occurs partly because the
ankh (shown below), the crux ansata or 'cross with a handle, ' is associated with both
the planet and with a number of representations that must be regarded as the goddess
Aphrodite. The ankh is an ambivalent symbol that denotes bisexuality, a combined
phallus and vulva. The cometary references seem clear, for a comet's generally round
nucleus and straight-out long tail convey in the sky a genital meaning. Insofar as the
history of the planet Venus is known, and that may well be from its beginnings, the
ankh has been a sacred symbol and one appropriated for the planet Aphrodite-Venus.
Athena is not without bearded associations. Male, bearded serpents were to be found on
a pediment of the archaic Athenian Acropolis. These would have been representations of
the dragon who was Typhon, and also a part of Athena as cometary Venus. The larger
question to be dealt with later on, is whether Athena had a double, a male duplicity, a
god of prominence.
The Dictionnaire des Antiquit‚s is more confident than Pauly-Wissowa of the lunar
identity of the goddesses Aphrodite and Venus. It recognizes the duality of the Uranian
and Jovian Aphrodites which grew close with time or may even have been originally the
same. (91 fn1) We quote here two passages from the extensive article on Venus:
She came from Asia where almost all of the Semitic peoples worshiped a lunar deity
representation of fertility and animal fecundity. Artakatis-Derketo at Ascalon, Mylitta
at Babylon, Ishtar in Assyria, and above all, Astarte among the ancients.
From Cyprus and Phoenicia, the goddess moved North to the shores of the Black Sea,
Northwest across the Cyclades, West to Cytherea, to Sparta, to Sicily, Carthage,
Latium.
Aphrodite Urania is identical to lunar Astarte of the Semites, who appeared at Carthage
under the name of the Celestial Virgin. The relations of Aphrodite with the night star
are further implied in the myth of Phaeton whom the goddess seized to make guardian of
her temple. Phaeton is, in effect, the star of the morning and evening, whose vivid
brightness naturally associated it with the Moon whose brilliant acolyte it appeared to
be. This star, among other names, is also called the star of Venus, and the
assimilation of the goddess to this double star contributed, at Cyprus and Pamphylia,
to the idea of an androgynous Aphrodite.
It is to be noted that this authority not only awards Aphrodite and Venus to the Moon,
but also Ishtar and Astarte, two goddesses that a number of writers, the present author
included, assign confidently to the catastrophic comet-planet Venus. Are we to win one
position only in order to surrender another, perhaps more important in the total
picture? For much of the best material on the history of the disasters of the mid-
second millenium B. C. comes out of the histories of Ishtar and Astarte.
Sophie Lunais tells us that lunar cults are more ancient than solar, that the Moon was
worshiped more than the sun, that Diana came to be identified with the Moon and so,
too, Artemis, and of course Hecate, Selene, and Luna, but despite all of this,
"curiously the mythology of the Moon is practically nonexistent." [16] Her surprise is
not surprising, considering that often myths of the Moon do not come forth labeled
clearly as such, and that in the book is to be found no reference to Aphrodite ! Most
of the mythology of Aphrodite is lunar mythology. Diana and Artemis were late arrivals
as Moon goddesses, she reports; certainly later than Aphrodite, we add. We could
further add that, if moon mythology is not abundant in the Latin authors, it is because
Aphrodite tended to monopolize it, and in art as well.
Reports Graves: "The later Hellenes belittled the Great Goddess of the Mediterranean,
who had long been supreme at Corinth, Sparta, Thespiae, and Athens, by placing her
under male tutelage and regarding her solemn sex-orgies as adulterous indiscretions."
[17]
Graves continues: the Moon, to whom "the sun yields precedence" [18] in early myth
has three phases - the maiden of spring, the nubile nymph of summer, and the crone of
winter, to correspond to her three phases: new, full, and old. She could also be
identified with Mother Earth's vegetative year, who produced first leaves and buds,
then flowers and fruits, and then a withered barrenness. "She could later be conceived
as yet another triad: the maiden of the upper air, the nymph of the earth or sea, the
crone of the underworld - typified respectively by Selene, Aphrodite, and Hecate. These
mystical analogues fostered the sacredness of the number three, and the Moon-goddess
became enlarged to nine when each of the three persons - maiden, nymph, and crone -
appear in triad to demonstrate her divinity." (We note, in passing, that the council of
Phaeacia numbered nine men, who measured the magic circle of the dance and whom we have
also associated with a nine-day week.)
Aphrodite was the nubile female, par excellence, declares Graves. She wore the Golden
Girdle of the Moon, whose magic would incite concupiscence in any man. In addition, she
could stand in the place of the "General Chairwoman," from time to time and from place
to place, as the Great Goddess protem.
By the time Demodocus sang, Aphrodite was officially of the family of Olympian Gods, a
daughter of Zeus, a relatively specialized god of desire, and the moon by inference as
the dark time of trysting and loving. She is fickle, light-hearted, willful, beautiful,
golden, perfumed, and anointed, with, of course, all the powers of her station in
respect to humanity and an invulnerability in fact to terrible retribution from her
father or sisters and brothers. She was a seductive, but no longer active, force.
Still, the universal help and harm, of which she was capable in earlier ages and even
now, remained impressed upon the minds of the audience of Demodocus. Whatever happened
to Aphrodite was of importance and if she might be treated good-humoredly, it would be
still with respect, with awe, with ceremony, and behind the protective shield of other
gods, who alone could be the causes of whatever embarrassment her shameless character
would permit her.
THE COSMIC SPINNER
The most penetrating studies of Aphrodite as the Moon Goddess come from Elmer George
Suhr. He entitles one of his books Venus de Milo, The Spinner; the Link between a
Famous Art Mystery and Ancient Fertility Symbols [19] A decade later he published The
Spinning Aphrodite; The Evolution of the Goddess from Earliest Pre-Hellenic Symbolism
through Late Classical Times [20] . The Venus de Milo, as is well-known, is a statue
without arms. Suhr, reconstructing the statue anatomically and on the basis of more
complete representations of Aphrodite, concluded that she was occupied at spinning
yarn. A fine picture is to be found on the Berlin lekythos where beside the spinning
goddess are Ares and Eros. "The moon... is in full view behind Aphrodite, where it
serves as the total center for the whole composition." Suhr associated a whole complex
of attributes and functions with Aphrodite: the Moon directly, the shadow of the Moon
(its cone), spinning, the vortex theme in myth, the emblem of the spiral, the dew and
rain, Klotho, Hecate, Medusa, the omphalos (sacred navel of the world), rainfall (the
dropping of threads upon the Earth), the turning of the vault of Heaven, the forming of
thunderhead on her distaff with the help of Ares, lunar calendars. She was "worshiped
as the dispenser of the divine elixir running through all life, the mistress of fate
and fortune, the author of all things fair and lovable." She is generally antagonistic
in various manifestations to Athena. She is a long-time enemy of Athena, in the Iliad
but elsewhere, too.
Aphrodite, Suhr thinks, was reduced in importance during the age of Zeus, but could not
be fundamentally deprived of form and function.
The Moon, which heretofore had played an important part in this program (of cloud,
thunder, and lightning) was also relegated to the background. But Aphrodite was too
powerful to be lightly brushed aside. As a goddess of love and beauty she became a
respectable member of the Olympian family, both causing the other gods much trouble and
bringing them countless pleasures by trapping them in the net of desire. Since Zeus was
a male, he never took over the spinning equipment as an adjunct of creation; such an
attribute was below the dignity of the father of the gods and men. Aphrodite was
allowed to keep this attribute and though she remained a powerful divinity, she was
pushed aside in Athens, no doubt in the days of Theseus, by Athena, the bachelor girl
goddess who became a favored child of Zeus.
That the Moon goddess was a spinner is also to be discovered in Meso-America and Egypt.
Hence if Aphrodite is connected with spinning in Greece and the Near East, then
Aphrodite is to be connected with the Moon, for the Moon and spinning are generally
associated.
An article and photograph of the National Geographic Magazine (Dec. 1975) describe
.... The Mayan moon goddess Ixchel, patroness of fertility, weaving, and medicine. Wife
of the sun, she consorted with other gods, just as the moon crosses paths with the
stars and planets. In this 4 3/ 4-inch figurine from Jaina Island, off Yucatan, the
moon goddess takes a grinning rabbit for her partner.
The grinning rabbit might in other place be taken to be a wolf, a mouse, a dove or
another animal such as have been associated with the planet Mars-Ares in Greece, Rome,
and the Near East. The Indo-Iranian texts of the Bundahis refer to a planet called
"Gokihar" or "Wolf - progeny" as "special disturber of the Moon" [21] while the
Slavs beheld a wolf-shaped Vukadlak that devoured the moon (or sun) [22] .
Medusa is identified with Aphrodite and with Selene (moon) by Suhr, who points out that
Selene was the patroness of generation and "as a friend of Poseidon (one among other
reasons) she became offensive to Athena." We bear this in mind when we see Odysseus
protected by Athena and murderously pursued by Poseidon, and when we see Poseidon in
the Love Affair arranging an easy exit for Aphrodite and Ares out of the vengeful hands
of Hephaestus (hence Athena who, we shall see, is tied to Hephaestus and a protagonist
and director of the action in the Love Affair).
Suhr speaks of the countless clay cones of Mesopotamia that copy the shadow of the
Moon. They rotate upon the face of the dark land, and become a type of menhir turned by
human figures of stone. Nannar the moon god of Mesopotamia works hard to keep the cone
rotating. The cone emblem is found on a coin of Byblos (Syria) and at the city of
Paphos (Cyprus) where a large cone stood in the open court of the Temple of Aphrodite.
With regard both to Aphrodite of Cyprus and Astarte of Syria there was a close
association with the Moon. "Both are heiresses of the moon god of the city of Ur" with
many cone figures.
CONFUSION COMPOUNDED
We have already given reasons for the oriental associations of lunar Aphrodite so we
are not surprised but confirmed at finding her great temple at Paphos, Cyprus,
constructed in the Phoenician style (or is it vice versa? No matter here, but relevant
chronologies should be approached skeptically). In this temple, we have noted, stood a
monolith that Tacitus, the Roman historian, described as "A rounded mass rising like a
cone from a broad base to a small circumference." Some scholars think it to have been
an aerolith or meteoroid that had fallen and was emplaced in honor of Aphrodite. This,
indeed, it may have been. To suspect that the fallen stone may be set up in deference
to a cometary Venus or would be a meteoroid associated somehow with Athena is certainly
permissible. We know of a Palladium of Troy, a probable meteoritic stone, associated
with Pallas Athena [23] , who is herself identified with the planet Venus. Other
meteoroids have been associated with other gods. In the present instance at Paphos, and
following Suhr's earlier theory, we would have more reason to see in the meteoritic
cone an accidental resemblance to the Shadow Cone of the Moon, and its many fabricated
images going back to the city of Ur. Aphrodite of Paphos would then be, if not
exclusively lunar Aphrodite, largely or partly such.
Pliny, the natural historian of Rome, writes that Venus is given the name Lucifer as
another sun bringing the dawn, whereas when it shines after sunset it is named Vesper
as prolonging the daylight, or as deputy of the Moon, and he credits the discovery of
the twin property of planet- Venus to Pythagoras of Samos, 142 years after the founding
of Rome. Others besides Pythagoras are also credited with the discovery, Parmenides and
Ibycus of Rhegium among them.
One implication of this remark, corroborated broadly in Plato, is that planet Venues
did not occupy the same course after the incidents that we are tracing in the Love
Affair. Planet Venus arrived to be deputy of the Moon following the disastrous scenario
in time.
At some period when the planet Venus was emplaced in its modern orbit and coming to be
recognized as such, in its morning and evening manifestations, there may have been a
movement in Greece to call it Hera, for Hera it was called by some. Perhaps the
astronomers, more in touch with oriental thought, won out with their name, Aphrodite.
Another source of confusion turns up in the pages of Robert Graves, where he
distinguishes the animals of the Moon, Selene, and Aphrodite as those that 'parted the
hoof' in the manner of lunar crescents so that the lunar symbol occurred as two facing
arcs, contrasting with the single simple disc of the sun. The sacred cow that directed
Cadmus (from Ugarit, facing West) to the site of Thebes was so branded on each flank.
At Denderah a red bull was sacrificed formally as Typhon. Temples there for Isis and
Aphrodite were found, as well as shrines for Seth-Typhon. Cows, young bulls, bulls, red
bulls: to whom does each category belong, to what gods, in what aspects? There were
more sky-bovines than bovine species to assign to them. It will be a long time before
the pattern is fully discovered. At Denderah, there is something of Aphrodite as the
Venusian goddess implicated in the mid-second millennial events. Cloven-hoofed animals
are not alone of the Moon, whatever may be the inclination of the symbol of the double-
facing crescents elsewhere. Just as Lucifer is the light-bearer of the morning, but is
also the Prince of Darkness, Satan, Seth - the light that brought darkness, the
darkness of wanderings in the wilderness, of Egypt following the Great Light?
What, then, should one do with the many indications from Egypt, the Near East, and
Western and Northern Europe that the Planet Venus is associated with the cow and even
the young bull (as in the Revolt of the Golden Calf in Hebrew Exodus)? It would appear
that we are dealing once again with mysteries of the succession and amalgamation of
divinities in the course of experiencing and forgetting, mnemotechnology. Especially
because of the ultimately close physical association of the Moon and Venus and the
skies, the facile mirage of celestial horns, and the shapes that comets take, we can
reason that Aphrodite would be party to and victim of a confusion between Moon and the
Star of the Moon. Hence, Symbols of the one may develop some distinction from those of
the other, but an overlapping occurs, enough to tell of the merger of gods, a merger
perhaps supremely important in preventing the human mind from taking sides against
itself. That is, the very confusion that sets us to arguing is the therapy enabling us
to live mentally with historically opposing gods. And such is carried into the
sublimations of the arts. "There is something for everyone," "everyone" being the
society seeking consensus (therefore a consistent history) and the individual seeking
personal sacred integrity.
A MATCH OF SOURCES
The time has come, it appears, to switch perspectives, to show how it might be argued
that Aphrodite is also tied to the planet Venus, thus rescuing the several goddesses of
the planet Venus from capture by the Moon.
Perhaps following Plutarch, St. Augustine went as far as to assign the archetype of the
comet-planet Venus, Athena, to the Moon.
As for Minerva (Athena), they have given her the responsibility for the arts of
mankind; but they have not found her a star to be her habitation, and so they have
identified her with the upper region of the ether, or even with the Moon.
We can do without this sort of help. This is as unlikely an assignment as any
identification can get in mythology and I join Peter James in dismissing it. But James'
adamancy on the balance of the equation remains to be dissolved. It lets him turn
around and accept Augustine's comment that Aphrodite won the Judgment of Paris about
which goddess should represent Venus (the golden apple), "but as usual Venus wins. For
the overwhelming majority give the star to Venus." [24] Is it not once more likely
that Aphrodite won the star of Venus, that is, the planet that attended the Aphrodisian
Moon? The Greeks, he insists, regularly applied the name Aphrodite to the planet Venus,
and addressed prayers to that body as the planet associated with her. They could not
really be thinking of the Moon in all of this.
If Velikovsky and de Grazia are right, then Lucian of Samosata, Ptolemy, Aristotle,
Plotinus, Diordorus Siculus, Manetho, Sappho, Bion, the Emperor Julian, Nonnus, ... and
... the ancient Greeks were all wrong.
My list of debatable sources here is perhaps as long and may be longer. Several of the
star witnesses are contradictory and can be controverted. Augustine mentions two
groups, one awarding planet Venus to the goddess Venus, another insisting also that
Venus is the Moon. Other witnesses can be called: where are Hesiod, Homer, Plutarch,
Cicero, Hyginus, Augustine, Proclus? And where are the modern encyclopedists?
They may do no worse, or better : James of course knows them well; I have already
joined him in discussing Plutarch and Augustine. But to take another example, Hesiod is
the earliest source extant to refer to the transformation of Phaeton, felled by Zeus
for threatening the destruction of Earth, into a star. Hesiod writes of "Phaeton, a man
like the gods, whom... laughter-loving Aphrodite seized and caught up and made a keeper
of her shrine by night, a divine spirit" (987ff). Clearly in line with what we are
saying the proto-planet Venus was said to be captured upon her fall from the skies by
Moon-Aphrodite and thereafter employed as her divine priest. In a second example, I
cannot understand why Sappho is forced to take sides. She sings:
And may Hesperus lead thee full willingly to the place where thou shalt marvel at the
silver-throned Lady of Wedlock.
Here, clearly, planet- Venus is performing as the acolyte of the Moon. Nor, to take
another instance, is Bion less than a Moonie. The pastoral poet addresses the
Evening star, which art the Golden light of the lovely Child of The Foam, which are the
holy Jewel of the blue night.
Here again we are permitted to regard the Moon as lovely Child of the Foam, Aphrodite,
whose acolyte is the Evening Star. I suggest that the passage and the poet are
ambiguous, and would not rely upon it for support or denial in the argument.
The ancient source Nonnus speaks of an astrologer who "looked especially for Ares and
spied the wife robber over the sunset house along with the evening star of the
Cyprian." Is the evening star "the Cyprian" or "of the Cyprian;" if "of the Cyprian"
then the evening star is the planet Venus and the Cyprian is the Moon, whether present
or absent. The modern source Jean Richer (G‚ographie Sacr‚e du Monde Grec) speaks of
"... Cythere, whose Venus was foremost a lunar goddess."
On the other hand, Cicero is often confused, too. Cicero writes that "Diana they
identify as the moon... while the name Luna is derived from Lucere, 'to shine; '" and
he says that Diana to the Greeks is Lucifera (the Light-Bearer) and is one of the seven
planets or wanderers. Diana is generally involved with the Moon, it is agreed, and with
menstruation and childbirth, hence the Greeks were making an erroneous transfer unless
they carry the Moon as a wanderer and planet which in fact was often done; so Lucifera
could be the Moon as well as the planet Venus of the morning. I prefer to renounce the
lunar argument here, and to let go of Cicero, rather than to assert it as evidence. The
best that can be said is that Lucifera is a feminine brightness that can be ascribed to
the Moon as well as to its primary reference, the Morning Star.
James would cease to "strenuously deny that Aphrodite had anything to do with the
Moon," perhaps, if he were to realize how large a contribution his own work has made,
first, to my being able to reinforce the Moon identification of Aphrodite and,
secondly, to arrive at my final theory on the matter, namely that the two bodies - Moon
and planet - interacted physically, became confused in history and myth in certain
regards (though not in many others) and were to be found, in the end, to have played
now one role and then another. I have shown that their alternation of roles occurred
elsewhere; I would only insist that Aphrodite is quite capable of the lunar role I
assign to her (and believe that subconsciously the Greeks assigned to her) in the Love
Song of Demodocus in Book VIII of the Odyssey of Homer.
Peter James proposes another theory - or sub - theory - on the issue, suggesting that a
lunar Aphrodite can be totally excluded from consideration if only we imagine that
warlike Athena was early granted the Morning Star (Phosphoros) while peaceful Aphrodite
was given the Evening Star (Hesperos); thus both goddesses might be accounted for and
the Moon excluded.
No less an authority than Kugler can be called on to state James' position on the
double nature of Ishtar, hence planet Venus, in his work, Sibyllinischer Sternkampf und
Phaethon (1927, p. 14) he says of the Babylonian Ishtar: "Venus-morning star there
represented Ishtar-Kakkabe, 'Ishtar of the Star', and is thought of as 'masculine' - in
distinct contrast to Venus-evening star, the Belit-ile, 'Queen of the Gods, ' the
goddess of love and motherhood."
In examining a rock relief of the Hittite pantheon, James discovered that the Venusian
planet Shaushga held a double identity and preceded the Moon god on the one side and
the Sun god on the other. She also wore wings. She must be here the planet in its
morning and evening aspects [25] . This indicates a young (Velikovskian) age, not an
old (Jamesian) age of the rocks, if one believes that the planet did not settle into
its morning-evening routine until the period of the Love Affair. Still, one should
acknowledge that the double goddess and the Moon are distinctly different.
Steven Langdon, another authority, has it that the morning star was called in Babylonia
"the male Venus" and the evening star the "female Venus", with Ishtar, of course, as
the word for Venus; there is "Ishtar of Agade" and "Ishtar of Anech", for morning and
evening manifestations of the planet.
We can go so far as to say that Athena was Venus in her cometary phase, ending in her
status as the morning star during the early years of the new status of the morning
star. We cannot well imagine the second because of definite statements associating
Hesperos with Moon-Aphrodite. We accept, too, that Lucifer was planet-Venus and the
morning-star. Such were Ishtar and Astarte, and other gods.
At the same time, although the Aphrodite of the morning was not the Aphrodite of the
night, the morning-planet-Aphrodite was working her way into many of the traits of the
night-moon-Aphrodite, so that goddesses of the morning star could ultimately possess
traits genetically possessed by the Moon goddess - lovingness, peacefulness, sexuality,
Queen of Heaven. S. A., Bedini, too, sees this process as occurring - that Ishtar, for
instance, guaranteed contract among men together with the Moon God Sin. She was goddess
of love, fertility and war. She took qualities from the Moon with her when she moved
fully to occupy the morning and evening stars, Venus [26] . Also, long after and for
many centuries of the present era, many Arabs worshiped the morning star as both
Lucifer and Aphrodite, never mind the evening star.
The scum of the salty foaming sea, held in revulsion by Egyptians, was again two foams,
the original Aphrodite-Moon foam of the seed of Ouranos, and the later Aphrodite-Typhon
foam transferred from the mid-second millennium. The latter foam came about, the
Egyptians thought, from the falling of Typhon (the cometary tail of proto-Venus) into
the sea (after Zeus had struck him with a thunderbolt, according to the Greeks), this
according to Plutarch. There are in sum numerous reasons to explain the confusion, to
assign the name to the planet, and to retain it for the Moon for all the purposes that
we have in mind here.
HOW TO NAME A PLANET?
We know that the Moon had names - Selene, Luna, Sin, etc. - which an astronomer or
educated layman could apply, whether in Greek or Latin; but the planet Phosphoros and
Hesperos had only this double name, implying two distinct bodies, and the Greek
intellectual reformers needed a name for the planet that would denote a single entity,
a point that they were trying to get across to their public.
They could not and would not take away Moon's name and affix it to a planet. But
Aphrodite had long since left the Moon in a conscious sense though she was stubbornly,
obsessively the Moon in the subconscious. The literal minds - such as Pythagoras,
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Diodorus, Manetho, Pliny and Cicero were less (or
differently) imprisoned by their subconscious: "Let the planet be called Aphrodite,
after the famous goddess." Today we name a new planet Neptune or Pluto; such is
astronomical tradition of naming; it can be false to history, unless saved by
subconscious memory. Aphrodite was still Aphrodite in a host of connotations, memories
and expectations - and she had a wandering star named for her. All the other planets
had names of gods, new names, though the names had long traditions behind them - Zeus,
Kronos, Ares, Hermes. Now the Romans too would call them Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and
Mercury. As for the Moon, it already had names enough.
But what did the Greeks call the planet before it received its new name? It is said
Phosphorus-Hesperus. What was its name when, as our scheme calls for, it was raging
through the heavens as a new blazing comet? Perhaps then it was called Phaeton, Typhon,
Pallas, Baal, El, the Archangel, or "Daughter of Zeus," or "Athena," or perhaps "She"
and then "He," or "The Thing," "It," or why not "the God." Hundred of appellations can
be found for it around the globe. What did the Mycenaeans call the planet? No one yet
knows. Under such conditions, it would be foolish to be hooked by a name assignment, to
neglect natural and human history, and to become illogical in the face of other types
of evidence, especially when we are fairly confident that the name was deliberately
imposed upon the planetary body by highly sublimated intellectuals.
Does this mean that the Greeks and Romans then stopped upon applying he word, and never
added their prior traits of goddess Aphrodite to the planet? No. As soon as an object
is called by a name with a history, the history begins to flow onto the name. Further
all that was previously attached to the object continues with it.
Suppose nowadays we were to decide that the asteroidal belt, whose materials are being
discovered in every greater detail, had to be called by a name, and hence called it the
"Belt of Mars." Suppose that subsequently some traits of the ancient god were evidenced
in the asteroidal belt and some students decided to call it "the Belt of Apollo." This
does not make Apollo out of Mars, or vice versa. It brings confusion. Soon the word
"belt" would be dropped, and just the names would be used. The "Mars Program" and the
"Apollo Program" would be erroneously associated with the planets. After a century or
so, only some priests of NASA would be able to explain the history, and, if NASA were
dissolved, practically no one would know the story. And, after a sky-war in which
civilizations were shocked and reduced to subsistence level, only a cultist now and
then would revive the terms. Where would truth exist under such circumstances? Probably
where truth exists under present circumstances concerning the ancient history of Venus
and the Moon.
In the case of the planet Aphrodite-Venus, some of what was Aphrodite in the collective
mind attached itself to the new Aphrodite. Furthermore, some that was in Astarte,
Ishtar, Isis, and a dozen other Eastern relatives, began to be transferred over to the
name Aphrodite.
In the end, the goddess Aphrodite changed. She was now two psychic entities, Siamese
twins, in the categories of the mind. Concurrently, the gods that have lent their
qualities to the new member of the planet-family, borrow her qualities of old; they
take on the history and rights of the Moon. This reverse borrowing results in dubious
but understandable claims that Ishtar is the Moon, Astarte is the Moon, even Athene is
the Moon (Plutarch, Bedini, etc.). The confusion that must always occur in the
association of great gods with natural objects and events here was compounded and
intensified by the transference of Aphrodite to an actually antagonistic planet.
We must reckon, too, that a new god may be given an older name in order that humans may
prove to the god that "we knew all along who you were, even if it seemed not so. We did
not have to await your coming to destroy us before knowing of your eternal being." ("
Therefore, planet Venus, cease and desist from your threats to the Earth and Moon.")
On one occasion, depending upon prior conditions such as the background of the subject,
the subject's felt needs, and the information and setting provided the subject, the god
who appears is a selection of one set of divine expectations. On another occasion, the
god who appears may be different. In God's Fire, I explain how impossible is true
monotheism, and that even Moses was in a realistic psychological sense a polytheist.
The same reasoning may be applied here, where Aphrodite is now one god and now another.
It is unscientific and pedantic to charge that a name is all that there is to a complex
and subtle mental operation.
After the name Aphrodite is given to the planet, the Greeks began revising their
religious history. Planetary conjunctions of Venus and Mars were of course known. So
now Lucian of Samosata could claim that it was the juncture of Aphrodite and Ares that
creates the poetry of Homer, and probably means by her the planet and not the Moon. So
Eratosthenes and others. But this is not a proof of what Homer meant or, regardless of
what Homer meant, that Aphrodite was not the Moon in the reality behind the poem and
psychically in those who heard the Song of Demodocus chanted. Especially are these
reservations proper if Athena is conceded to stand for the comet Venus, whence it may
be truly said that the war is between planet Venus and planet Mars, but certainly,
since Aphrodite and Ares were allies, the epics of Homer could never have been plotted
on the liaison or juncture of Ares and Athena. So insistent are the ancient claims of
the classical age that the same planet was at a late time discovered to be not two but
one, and therefore given a name, that of Aphrodite, that we must believe so and allow
that in the mind of Homer and Demodocus, Aphrodite did not posses that planet, except
as the Moon. Several generations had lived and died between the last Battle of the Gods
and the willful emplacement of the name of Aphrodite upon the planet. By the time of
Plato only vague memories stirred of the original behavior of this doubly duplicitous
body and of its dramatic roles in the skies of times past.
Revivals occur. Suhr writes that "the association of Aphrodite with clouds, the moon,
spinning and fertility was more popular in Greece after Alexander had opened up the
channels for a free exchange of ideas with the East than before, but this we may
consider a revival; Aphrodite was known and worshiped, even in Athens, in very early
times."
There is no suggestion that Aphrodite of the Love Affair is trespassing upon the
identity of Ishtar. Ishtar is goddess of the morning star and also of the evening star
in the usage of a removed culture. Aphrodite of the Greeks is made to be the goddess
standing behind Phosphorus and Hesperus and their duality. Meanwhile she remains
goddess of the Moon. Plato mentions a Syrian law-giver as the source of the name. But
after considering this surprising suggestion for some time, I think now that Plato may
have been of the opinion that a Syrian lawgiver with the advice of the court
astronomers gave to the planet Venus the name of Ishtar or Astarte or another such
name. In following this learned and authoritative source, the Greeks applied the old
name Aphrodite to the planet. Once to the Europeans, the Western hemisphere had no
names - or rather, numerous names. A geographer published a map drawn by an Italian
navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. It was the map of Amerigo, describing a vast land. What
was the land called? Not the "country of Amerigo" but, eventually "Amerigo," Latin
masculine Americus, for a feminine country becomes "America."
THE ROMAN VENUS
We ought not settle the Aphrodite identity without a parallel investigation of the word
"Venus." Malcolm Lowery conducted appropriate etymological research. Its root, he
discovered, contained the senses of seek, desire, want, wish, and winsome, while its
relative venire (to come) also relates to the same root, that includes the word "to go"
in Greek. Velilovsky follows Cicero's idea that "Venus" meant "the goddess who comes to
all things" and extended it to mean "newly come" to fit his theory.
Lowery effectively discusses Velikovsky's speculation and limits Cicero to a possibly
very old truth about the word, a truth established long before the time when the
goddess would have been attached to the planet Venus. An implication here is that the
goddess called Venus may earlier have been attached to a conception of a goddess like
Aphrodite, even lunar, before the planet Venus was identified.
Lowery may err in his innuendo that the Roman Venus was "unlike the Greek Aphrodite,
whose name, meaning 'foam-born, ' was subsequently applied to the human activity of
which she served as patron, namely love-making. born in and from sperm." If the modern,
vernacular of the English-speaking world uses the word "come" to designate an orgasm,
there is reason to suppose that the less sexually restrained ancient Greeks and Romans
could employ the same word in their goddess of coming and thus allow to the Latin word
its obvious root meaning.
Lowery misunderstood his own contradiction, for he writes that "the layman may find the
range of meaning here attributed to one root something of an obstacle to acceptance of
this reconstruction: achievement, supposition, habit and delight are, after all, rather
a distance from seeking or desiring." Rather a small distance, we should say. And, once
again, we see an old goddess at work, a lunar goddess, a pre-planet-Venus goddess at
work, an Aphrodite of the Love Song of Demodocus.
Some etymologists say that the word "Venus" is of an unknown Italian origin but crept
out of fertility and bucolic functions onto the skies, where it may have become a
mistress of heaven but ultimately became the planet Venus, when the Greeks named their
planet Aphrodite.
The Greeks have no letter "V". The letter "B" is used instead. The intermediate Greek-
English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott offers only two words beginning with "ben." One is
"benthos," poetical for "bathos," meaning the "depth of the sea." This is not too
removed from the lunar role, for the Moon rules the night and the night seas, and was
born from the sea.
The second meaning is "Bendis" which is a name of the Thracian Artemis, found in
Lucian. This is more suggestive to us. For if Aeneas and the Trojans of Northwest
Anatolia brought their gods with them, Bendis may have been among them; Thrace is not
far away. And if Bendis is Artemis; and Artemis, we know, is the Moon; and if Bendis is
a progenitor of Venus, then Venus, too, is lunar, and there is good reason to tie her
to Aphrodite as Venus.
The faithful Aeneas, on this way to found settlements in Latium, that later spread to
Rome, may well have founded a town in Thrace, as he did Aphrodisia in the Southeastern
Peloponnesus (Gulf of Boiai) and other settlements elsewhere. This shows not only how
disorganized and turbulent were the eighth-seventh century decades of Mars-Ares, but
also how Aphrodite may have come to Italy, there to become identified with Venus, who
thereafter came to be identified with the later Jovian Aphrodite, which came then to be
connected, in the wake of Greek insistence, with planet-Venus. We note, however, that
the Aphrodite of Aeneas was she of the Iliad and Odyssey, and of the Love Affair, enemy
of the Athena-Venus-Aphrodite goddess therefore and holding to the Moon in history and
traits except that now her name superficially will be taken over almost entirely by the
planet Venus.
Or, as some believe, Venus may have come out of the Etruscan Pantheon, whence she may
too have arrived as Bendis, for we think that the Etruscans came from Anatolia, as we
shall argue later; further the island of Lemnos between Troy and Thrace contains
Etruscan inscriptions, and, as we develop the argument, is significantly connected with
Hephaestus, a principal character of the Love Affair. Aeneas was a son of Venus, that
is, Aphrodite, and Romulus a son of Mars. Julius Caesar claimed the same descent.
If we did not believe that substantive connections may have existed between Aphrodite
and the Moon, we should not be so concerned with demonstrating the linguistic
associations. In our case, the allegation that Aphrodite was not thought to represent
the Moon to the audience of Demodocus is tantamount to refusing much of the theory of
this book. It is not the same as asking whether the Venus of Willendorf is really the
planet Venus, or Aphrodite, or whatever; this is a conventional term invented for a
class of small, crude prehistoric stone sculptures of obese females, and is little else
than a playfully applied name, which we hope, will not throw our descendants into
confusion a thousand years from now.
Those going before Plato knew Aphrodite as a goddess, and probably as a lunar figure,
although this latter may have become subconscious. "A new ferment was introduced by the
first knowledge appearing with Plato of the oriental significance of Aphrodite as a
star." [27] It would seem that the Greeks, especially the astrologers among them,
were now to call Hesperus and Phosphorus the stars of Aphrodite, and were thereafter to
live with two sets of symbols and references intermingling and causing confusion.
There were enough similarities to permit the duplicity to endure to our day. Both were
"foam-born." Further, each in her own way was "One who wanders over the foam," (Aphr-
Oditi). Both were strongly female, even while male on occasion. Both were beautiful, in
their own way. Often they traveled the night skies together. Whether referring to the
planet or the satellite, both could be "of Aphrodite." Both might be called the "Queen
of Heaven." Both had been heavily involved with Mars-Ares, and in destructive behavior
with regards to Earth. Both were in the Olympian family and council of gods, one as
Moon-Aphrodite, the other as Athena-Aphrodite, but who was to say or needed to say,
after Hesiod's time, which heavenly body the two goddesses possessed? On the other
hand, each goddess - call one of the Moon and the other of planet-Venus - owned
peculiar traits that never to be reconciled or assimilated one to the other.
The possibility that "foam-born" could be rationalized for the birth of the Planet-
Venus-Aphrodite should not obscure the importance of this difference. Being foam-born
from the Uranus incident means from the seed in the genital and blood foam, not a mere
roughing of the waters that would occur with the passage of cometary-Aphrodite.
Another important distinction was occupational. Athena-Minerva-Ishtar-( Aphrodite)
never lost her military and craftsman-like qualities. Greek and Roman warriors marched
into battle led by these but not by Aphrodite. Why not Aphrodite, if she were among
them? On the other hand, Aphrodite-Moon never lost her connection with the motions of
the spinning complex in the domestic occupation that emulated the motions of the
universe.
Yet another kind of difference persisted in the realm of love. Aphrodite-Moon generally
portrayed what today's vernacular would call "straight" sexuality, while Aphrodite-
Ishtar-Athena would be assigned to "kinky" sex. The former was the marrying type, the
latter an independent and ambiguous lover. Eros helped Aphrodite-Moon, and Suhr has
placed this child-god in the closest association with her; he helps her spin and weave
to attract "straight" lovers. It is possible that Eros, though as old as Moon-
Aphrodite, merged with Hesperus, the Evening Star, and carries this association as
well. Eros certainly resembles the later cherubs that float around the Mother of God in
Roman Catholic paintings.
The stimulation of fertility belongs to Ishtar-types as well as to Moon-Aphrodite, yet
not so much so, and this must be a quantitative judgement for the moment. Virginity is
a technical word and should not be confounded with the idea of concupiscence. But
consider that Athena-Ishtar is celebrated for her virginity and in one startling
portrait is carrying her babies in a basket. "Not only was she never in woman's womb,"
wrote Helene Deutsch, "but she herself apparently had no womb, for when she carried
children, it was in a basket." [28] Such marsupial behavior is hardly the symbol of
fertility for womankind. Planetary Aphrodite is semper parata like the U. S. Marines.
Granted that planet-Aphrodite or Venus was once a comet that lost its tail, then the
aura of sexual "kinkiness" around Athena-Ishtar-Aphrodite makes sense: bisexuality,
unisexuality, technical virginity, androgyny, vestal virgins, castration - these
cluster around the cometary Aphrodite and relate to the phallicized comet that loses
its male organ in a sky-conflict and becomes a special type of female. She is not
sexually stimulating, at least not to a conventional male. Moon-Aphrodite is more
languid, less aggressive, usually "there when you need or want her." Athena and her
planetary counterparts are artists appearing one moment here, the next moment gone.
The materials assembled here help us to understand that the nations at some point were
observers of a great change in the sky, an implantation upon the human vision: a single
body of double aspect and less terror.
A cometary Venus was greatly feared in the period 1500 to 700 B. C. and the Moon god
had been heavily worshiped long before then. We will suppose, therefore, a competition
of these two gods, female, for a long time before the disastrous natural events of the
Eighth and Seventh centuries that involved Mars. By the process that might be called
divine succession, the god of cometary Venus was the more terrible in this period of
700 year and took over a number of traits and much of the obeisance given previously to
the Moon goddess. The Shaushga, Astarte, Annana, Anat, Minerva, Ishtaroth, Ishtar,
Isis, and Aphrodite figures would have become largely proto-planet Venus in their
connotations, orientation, and imagery. The Aphrodite idea would have moved from lunar
to cometary, carrying a conglomerate of old and new traits.
When, however, the catastrophes of the Martians age reduced and confounded the pre-
existing civilizations - Mycenaean, Trojan, Near-Eastern - a readjustment of the
Pantheon had to occur. New relationships had to be invented within the family structure
of the gods. Mars, for one, had to be granted a larger role. Proto-planet Venus was at
a new peak of activity, but was apparently tamed by the god of Mars.
When the disasters subsided, the skies had to be resurveyed; a new astronomy occurred.
After some decades, astronomers discovered, first, that two new bodies existed, a
Morning Star and an Evening Star. The former was quickly re-identified as old cometary
Venus, on a new regular and unthreatening orbit. Soon thereafter the Evening Star was
declared to be the same planet-star. Then came the fateful attachment of the old names,
once ambiguous and now still ambiguous, to the planet in both of its manifestations.
Goddess Aphrodite once more became strongly planet Venus, with lunar attributes. With
the passage of time, Aphrodite became a more ambiguous figure, because peace had
settled upon the heavens; she was once again lunar, a peaceful spinner, a sensual
lover. To some, psychically, she was the planet Venus; to others she was the Moon and
the planet was "of Aphrodite the Moon;" to others she was the god of night and the
lunar heavenly spaces. So she was a complex "herself," the goddess, rather like the
Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which, they say, was neither "holy" nor "Roman", but
he could act either way on occasion.
After all of this complicated research and reasoning, it is hard to recall ourselves to
the present issue and to its vulgar denouement. The question is still, "How did the
Phaeacian sailors, women, courtiers, adolescents and priests imagine the heroine of
Demodocus' Love Affair?" As in a modern public opinion poll, the gravest questions of
world concern have to be reduced to extremely simple questions. Here our respondents
(in Phaeacia, Naxos, Athens, or Syracuse of about 650 B. C. before the Scientific
Revolution of Thales et al.) are to be interrogated, with (I think) the following
results:
"There are those who say that Aphrodite stands for the Moon (Selene)?" Do you (indicate
the response closest to your opinion): agree-15%; maybe-25%, disagree-10%; no opinion
or don't know-50%.
Next, of those (10%) who disagreed, the question is asked: "Who, then, does Aphrodite
stand for?" Athena-3%; Hera-5%; Hesperus-32% Phosphorus-10%, No opinion or don't know -
50%.
That is, I would estimate that even on the conscious level, there is a tendency to tie
Aphrodite to the Moon. The high level of unconcern and ignorance as to the question
would signify that the Love Affair is making no demands of ordinary people to extract
subconscious materials and bring them into consciousness. Both this figure and the 25%
of "maybe's" would indicate that many persons mixed up Aphrodite with the Moon, Athena,
Artemis, Hera, et al. I would maintain that on the subconscious level, the
identification with the Moon would be much more common and intense. I have tried to
describe earlier what the subconscious contained, and will try to express this
subconscious mood in a later chapter.
It does not matter that elsewhere and at other times and among other people, the name
Aphrodite signifies the planet Venus. Indeed we have been pleased to contribute to an
understanding of her plural personality and worship. On the basis of this chapter and
of other congruencies and support found throughout our work, we conclude that for the
purposes of this book and in the scene of the Love Affair Aphrodite acts the role of
the Moon and is so understood by the audience. Aphrodite represents the Moon in the
drama and, insofar as the drama represents a memory, then Aphrodite acts out this
memory.
Notes (Chapter 8: The Two Faces of Love)
1. Appendix to Herodotus, Histories, Bk III.
2. Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis, Cambridge, Eng. 1921,
reprinted IIyde Park, N. Y. : University Books, 1962, p. 176.
3. Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 77.
4. Isis and Osiris, Lxix.
5. Plat. Kraty. 1-116.
6. Hesiod, Theogony, 196.
7. Using the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 7th ed,
1968.
8. Etym., Symbol. Mythol. W"rterbuch, 1844, reference kindly supplied by Dr. Zvi Rix.
9. J. Ziegler, The Vedas pp. 233-4 (1983, unpubl. mss)
10. A Historical Review of the Indian Astronomy Part I "The Ancient Astronomy" (1825;
reprinted 1970, Osnabrck: Biblio Verlag).
11. A. M. Paterson, "Giordano Bruno's View on the Earth without a Moon," Pens‚e,
(winter, 1973), pp. 46-7; I. Velikovsky, "Earth without a Moon," Ibid., p. 26. Both
writers, at least then, believed that the Moon was recently captured. The present
author decided upon the Earth-fission model in the years that followed, cf. Chaos and
Creation, Lately Tortured Earth, and was supported by Earl R. Milton, cf. Solaria
Binaria.
12. Graves, I, 49. We disagree that Ishtar was the Moon, at least finally, for she is
clearly Athena and Planed Venus, cf. Velikovsky. Further, on Aphrodite as the Moon, see
the conclusion of this chapter.
13. Graves, I, 71. Unity with the goddess excited anxiety over violating the incest
taboo and brings on sacrifice of kings and priests.
"As Goddess of Death-in-Life, Aphrodite earned many titles which seem inconsistent with
her beauty and complaisance" - Melaenis (black one), Scotia (dark one), Androphonos
(man-slaver), and Epitymbria (of the tombs). At Cyprus she would sometimes wear a
beard, and was also portrayed as "bearded and having the male member, but clad in a
female dress and holding a sceptre," 1 George Hill, A History of Cyprus (Cambridge:
University Press, 1972), Vol. I, 79-80, citing Macrobius (Sat. III, 8) and Fragmenta
Historica Graecorum (1878-85), Vol. I, p. 386.
14. Graves I, 73. When Plato (Epinomis, lines 99-101) gave the name Aphrodite to the
planet that we call Venus, he said that he was using the name of "a Syrian lawgiver"
and in the next statement uses the pronoun "him" in referring back to it. He could mean
the "authority" or "in the name of" the Syrian.
15. Personal letter to the author from Dr. Z. Rix.
16. Sophie Lunais, Les Auteurs Latins -Recherche sur la Lune, I, Brill: Leiden,
1979,99.
17. Graves, I, p. 18. I.
18. Graves, I, p. 12.
19. New York: Exposition Press, 1958, Foreword by Rhys Carpenter.
20. New York: Helios Press, 1969.
21. Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, Part II : 3.
22. Ibid., ch. 4.
23. See Harrison, op. cit., p. 87, who finds "Pallas" in the "Palladium."
24. Citing The City of God, VII: 15.
25. Op. cit., I : 2, pp 3-4.
26. S. A. Bedini, p. 23, in Bedini, Werner von Braun, and F. L. Whipple, Moon: Man's
Greatest Adventure (New York: Abrams, n. d., ca. 1970).
27. Pauly-Wissowa, p. 2772.
28. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Myth of Dionysus and Apollo, New York: Int'I U.
Press, 1969.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
CHAPTER NINE
THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY
In the Iliad, Aphrodite leads her wounded lover Ares off the field of battle after he is
pierced by the spear of warlike Athena-Venus, and in so doing is herself struck.
The poets and historians of ancient times may have known more than we do of disasters
among the planets, "That the Moon was attacked and scarred by the comet Venus was known
to the Greeks and described graphically by Nonnus." So writes Peter James, and we quote
the fine passage from this historian of late ancient times, Nonnus:
"Many a time he (Typhon) took a bull at rest from his rustic plowtree and shook him with
a threatening hand, bellow as he would, then shot him against the Moon like another
moon, and stayed her course, then rushed hissing against the goddess, checking with the
bridle her bulls' white yoke-straps, while he poured out the mortal whistle of a poison
spitting viper."
But Titan Mene would not yield to the attack. Battling against the Giant's heads, like-
horned to hers, she carved many a scar on the shining orb of her bull's horn; and
Selene's radiant cattle bellowed amazed at the gaping chasm of Typhon's throat." [1]
The fable bespeaks cosmic cyclones, where earthly and celestial effects are
simultaneously visible and apparently connected by an uncontrolled raging dragon-god.
THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS
The Moon, as a round rock in the sky, was a manifestation of the Goddess Aphrodite. What
happened to it happened to her and what happened to her, in many cases, happened to it.
We turn, therefore, to geology and astrophysics and ask what, if anything, happened to
the Moon in the time of Homer. The Moon is old, as all matter and energy may be said to
be old - even infinitely old if one considers that "matter" and "energy" are convertible
events and that neither can become space or non-being. That is not a point to be
disputed.
The question is whether the Moon, as a chemical agglomerate, pursued its present set of
motions at the time of which Homer wrote. Moreover, was its chemistry the same after
that time as it was before?
The moon is enveloped by a crust of igneous anorthosite to the depth of 35 kilometers,
"which must have resulted from melted rock of at least twice that depth." [2] Lunar
rocks were discovered to have undergone heating and bubbling, probably more recently. A
large part of the soil consisted of tiny glass spheres, probably resulting from the
evaporation of boiled lunar rock that collapsed back upon condensation in the cold. Some
trace of organic, aromatic hydrocarbons were found in lunar sample returned by the
astronauts of Apollo XI. Carbide rocks were found on the lunar surface. Rocks of the
moon also revealed magnetic properties, a remanent magnetism that could not have been
implanted by the moon's own weak magnetic field and certainly not at any time since the
rocks solidified from a molten or gaseous state. The equipment implanted on the moon by
astronauts of Apollo XII returned to its monitors on earth a record of moonquakes,
averaging one a day. Lunar rocks were found to be rich in argon and neon; the larger the
ratio of surface to mass, that is, the smaller the rock particle, the more of these
gases was contained in it, leading to the conclusion that the source of the gases was
external. Some unusually radioactive "hot spots" were observed.
It thus appears likely that the Moon experienced devastating events within a period of
time into which the Love Affair might have fallen. Conventional theorists of lunar
history have been relieved of a number of expectations, founded on the belief in a three
to four billion years old object that, since then, "has been a remarkably quiet body
suffering only the occasional large meteorite impact. Subsequent modification of the
surface features has been mainly erosion due to the impact of small meteorites, cosmic
rays, and particles from the sun. This is in great contrast with the earth's history
which has been one of continued volcanic and mountain-building activity up to the
present day." [3]
RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS
Nowadays, such statements are not to be heard. It is difficult to conceive how such
could even have been written in 1972 in view of the lunar quakes and the other
discoveries recited two paragraphs above. But the author of the quotation, Derek York,
was holding fast to what others were telling him about the general situation and was
supporting his faith by work that he had been hired as a specialist to do: radioactive
clockwork. He used three clocks: the uranium-lead, the rubidium-strontium, and the
potassium-argon methods of determining the ages of rock samples picked up and returned
to Earth by the astronauts.
York offered, against Velikovsky's proposition of a recently molten lunar surface,
alternative explanations based on the fact that all three tests showed the lunar surface
to have been last molten 3.6 billion years ago at least. In each case, a determination
of the amount of the first chemical element that radioactively decayed into the second
element was used to estimate age, since physicists believe that we know the rate of such
transmutation and can rely on its constancy over all conceivable time spans. York
therefore argued that either
(a) this part of Velikovsky's thesis is wrong. (b) Velikovsky is right but the four
Apollo landings and the Soviet Luna 16 landings were in areas which escaped the
'catastrophes' referred to by Velikovsky. (c) There is something seriously wrong with
the radioactive clocks or our reading of them.
In reply, Velikovsky cited two additional "commonsense" tests in his favor. Geologist
examining the samples of Apollo XI recorded "the extremely fresh appearance of the
interior of all crystalline rocks, in spite of their microfractures and high potassium-
argon age." [4] Moreover, noting a widespread glazing of the lunar surface, T. Gold,
writing in Science had conjectured upon "a giant solar outburst in geologically recent
times" that glazed lunar surfaces less than 30,000 years ago." [5]
Velikovsky mentioned here yet another prediction of his, earlier in time, that gained in
validity when the Apollo 15 team discovered that the outflow of heat below the surface
was almost three times greater than expected by those who believed that the moon
originated gaseous and then became molten: those who thought the moon had always been
thoroughly cold could make nothing of this internal heat at all.
Specifically with regard to the challenge of the tests, Velikovsky argued that lunar
rocks would be argon-rich (and therefore seem very old) because they would have
captured, while molten, some of the argon of the atmosphere of Mars. (In 1974, Russian
reports spoke of a Martian atmosphere of argon in the 10's of percent.) [6] As for the
reading of the uranium-lead test, the explorers had apparently sampled rocks not only
poor in lead but in all volatile elements: bismuth, cadmium, thallium, indium, etc. He
surmised, therefore, that the volatile elements had escaped their rock housings in a
period of high heat and melting, such as the episode in Homer that occupies our
attention. The third radioactive clock appears to be the most absurd of the three, since
rubidium vaporizes and migrates from its housing with strontium even under the
conditions of present-day temperatures of the lunar day (+ 150 degrees Celsius) and the
continuous bombardment of surface rocks by hydrogen ions from the solar wind. A period
of electrically and gravitationally induced heating such as occurred in the Love Affair
would have greatly reduced the rubidium present in the tested rocks. Velikovsky and
Wright [7] are not alone in their criticism of these tests. We cannot close these
brief passages without referring to the brilliant critique offered of these and other
clocks by Melvin Cook in his book, Prehistory and Earth Models 1966. In brief, what York
regarded as impossible was true. "There is something seriously wrong with the
radioactive clocks..." [8]
The one test that Velikovsky asked for was to determine the degree of thermoluminescence
of lunar surface cores extracted at about three feet of depth to avoid contamination of
the test by the effects of normal solar heat. The more the time that passes after a
heat-up of over 150 degrees Celsius, the more luminescence is stored and given off in a
laboratory re-heating. When the tests were performed on cores gathered by Apollo XII
between 4 and 13 centimeters underground, it showed "anomalies resulting from
disturbances "10,000 years ago." Such disturbances had to be thermal, that is, events of
great heat upon the moon. Velikovsky thought that increased radioactivity may have
promoted a quick-aging effect on even this test and suggests sampling from sites that
are least radioactive.
We return now to the problem of the remanent magnetism in the rock samples brought back
from all Apollo missions. Velikovsky's theory of the Mars-Moon encounters required that
such fossil magnetism be traceable in the rocks, and it was found. Robert Treat has
written the history of the affair, from which we quote:
Scientific deliberations grew in intensity after the third (Apollo IV), and the fourth
(Apollo XV) missions testified to the bewilderment of astrophysicists. It transpired
that sometime in the past the moon must have been heated in the presence of a strong
magnetic field. The best guess was: 'It is a thermoremanent magnetism acquired when the
specimen cooled in the presence of a magnetic field. ' Other possibilities were
weighted. Was the inducing field due to a close approach of the moon to the earth? "In
this model the hard remanence suggests a distance of closest approach of 2 to 3 earth
radii," But this is 'an uncomfortable proximity to the Roche limit.... ' The moon would
have been broken into pieces if it ever approached the earth so closely. Another team of
scientists found that the magnetization "shows a well defined curie temperature at 775
degrees Celsius": the lunar surface must have been heated above this temperature in the
presence of a magnetic field and must have cooled off thereafter [9] .
Surface marring, "hot spots" of radioactivity, high past heat, and encounter with
another large celestial body spell devastation. Fresh-looking rock, high
thermoluminescence levels, "hot spots" seismic movement, and below surface heat spell
recency.
The "recency" suggested by our interpretation of the explorations of the moon is "under
10,000 years." The world-wide historical and legendary record strongly indicates about
2700 years. There is good reason, therefore, after having passed the 10,000 year
barrier, to proceed without hesitation to the 2700-year point.
THE RILLES OF MOON
The recent devastation of the Moon is the subject of an analysis also by Ralph Juergens
[10] . He focused especially upon its hundreds of wavy rilles, its canyons and its
craters. The craters are sites of explosions. Some, like Aristarchus, are still warm.
The rilles cleave the surface and often seem to feed into the craters, going up-ground
to do so with whatever they might once have carried. The craters seem to have exploded
after the rilles reached them, since debris obscures the ends of the rilles.
Juergens examinations of the rilles shows that they cannot have been produced by water
erosion; they flow uphill and have no deltas. Nor can they have been produced from the
collapse of underground tubes that once carried lava; for the margins of the rilles
reveal upturned strata and empty bottoms; Nor can gas explosions have created the
rilles, for they are exceedingly tortuous; and they are not vented holes. Only
electrical currents, declares Juergens, could produce the jagged trenches. The currents
erupt, heat up the land and excavate it, and cause secondary melting in the rille
valleys. They move as streamers upwards. A return stroke explodes the ground and creates
a crater.
What caused the rilles to erupt and the craters to burst? On the basis of his general
theory of the electrical nature of the solar system, to be explained later, Juergens
posits that Mars and Earth-Moon each held (and hold) massive electrical charges of
negative valence. These charges, on the close approach of the bodies, repel each other.
But if the bodies are approaching with great momentum, the repulsion is not sufficient
to divert them entirely. The charges are driven to accommodate. By "accommodation" is
meant that, if there is any possibility of a reversal of charges on one or both bodies,
the negative electrons will "flee" from each other. Assuming that Mars, with an
atmosphere, and a larger surface, more readily permitted its electrons to flee to
regions far removed from the nearest points of contact, positive ions would congregate
and set up an anode-cathode relationship, that is, a situation matured for an exchange
of thunderbolts. The rilles ditches erupted by a rapidly moving and charge-accumulating
current. Craters are the spots where the exchange of opposite charges, attracted for
discharge, occurred, usually at prominences of the two bodies. A map of the major rilles
of the moon shows a concentration of them in the general area of the great crater,
Aristarchus. Emanations of radon-222, whose parent element is radium-226, were detected
from Aristarchus. The rays are several times more intense there than in areas farther
removed, indicating a local source. Radium 226 isotopes decay rapidly. In 1620 years,
half the element is transmutated; that is, it has a half-life of 1620 years. "If the
radium were produced by an electric discharge to the Aristarchus site some 2700 years
ago, more than 25% of it would still be there, emitting radon -222." [11] Lightning
strokes of 100 billion volts can constitute a high-energy projectile capable of creating
heavy elements such as radium-226.
It should also be pointed out that visible light, as well as heat, has been observed
from time to time, from Aristarchus and other sources. Again, a sign of recency.
Glass found that glass ejecta along the banks of the Hadley Rille and procured by the
astronauts of the Apollo 15 and 17 expeditions exhibited significant peculiarities in
comparison with other moon glasses. Tests on one sample showed that cooling rates of
1000 F/ sec. were necessary to form the glass. The researchers considered the
possibility that volcanic eruption might have caused the glass to form, but the cooling
rate was too fast. So they conjectured meteoritic impacts. However, for meteorites, the
glasses are too uniform and are not splashed or shattered. Furthermore, meteorites would
not line themselves up along a rille valley, if such is the case here. Juergens
conclusion is acceptable [12] . The glass is a product of an electrical current that
melts instantaneously, explodes simultaneously, and withdraws its heat immediately along
the meandering course of the rille before streaming upwards from the ground at the end
of the rille.
The surprises that the Moon holds for scientists are not ended. Because of the
nonexistence or prior extirpation of life forms that would have ingested radioactive
carbon, there appear to be no possibilities of applying Carbon 14 tests to Moon
material. Still, the electrical mechanical behavior of the Moon and Moon-space are
coming to be better understood. The Moon's several spherical asymmetries deserve
pondering. Unmanned excavating apparatus may bring back more material for analysis.
Moreover, ancient records and myths are still largely unanalyzed.
The "beauty of raiment" with which the Graces "clothe her body" and the "refulgent
ointment" with which they anointed the Moon, once her love affair with Mars was ended,
may refer to a shift to a position nearer Earth; the month of 29.5 days replaced a
longer month [13] . Greater brilliance indicates that the change was in orbital radius,
rather than in orbital speed.
It is also possible that the lines of Homer may be a reference to a chain of colorful
low mountains whose origin has baffled astrophysicists. Juergens has suggested that, if
the theory of electrical discharges is credible, the explanation of these anomalous
protruberances may lay in a simple and surprising theory of cosmic welding [14] . They
are Martian material electrically heated and exploded, which fastened electrically upon
the surface of the Moon.
To the wishful eyes of men, women, and children of the eighth and seventh century,
Aphrodite emerged more beautiful than ever from her escapade with Mars. Perhaps it grew
less lovely thereafter, for Plutarch was speaking of its craggy appearance seven
centuries later [15] . The astronauts and geophysicists of today have to report the
disillusioning fact that the face of the classical beauty was ruined.
Notes (Chapter 9: The Ruined Face of a Classic Beauty)
1. Dionysiaca, I, 213-23, trans. W. M. D. Rouse (Loeb Library).
2. Neil P. Ruzie, "The case for Returning to the Moon," Industrial Research (July,
1973), pp. 48-54, p. 51.
3. Derek York, "Lunar Rocks and Velikovsky's Claims," II Pens‚e no. 2( May 1972), p. 18.
4. "When Was The Lunar Surface Last Molten," II Pens‚e, no. 2,( May 1972), p. 19.
5. Ibid.
6. James B. Pollack, "Mars," 233 Scientific American (Sept. 1975), p. 110.
7. Also in Pens‚e (May 1972), loc. cit.
8. Ibid., p. 21
9. "Magnetic Remanence of Lunar Rocks: A Candid Look at Scientific Misbehavior," II
Pens‚e, no. 2 (May, 1972), p. 21-2.
10. "Electrical Discharges and the Transmutation of Elements," IV Pens‚e 3, (1974), pp.
45-6; "Of the Moon and Mars, Part I," IV Pensee 4 (1974), pp. 21-30.
11. Juergens, "Electrical Discharges...," op. cit., pp. 45-6.
12. "Of The Moon..," op. cit., pp. 27-8.
13. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp. 342-4.
14. In a communication to the author, October 1973.
15. "The Face of the Moon."
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
CHAPTER TEN
HE WHO SHINES BY DAY
Not satisfied with setting up the production of the Love Affair, Athena, the virtuoso
of Olympia, must play a leading role in it. Will it be masculine? Athena has been known
to play such roles. Actually, she ends the Odyssey playing the male role of Mentor,
Counselor of State. By now we know that gods can readily become transvestites.
Hercules, for all his impressive masculinity, dresses and behaves like a woman when he
lives in the court of Omphale, Queen of Libya. More strikingly there is the beautiful
Aphrodite who sports a beard as the so-called Cyprian Aphrodite.
A major role is intended. In the Love Affair, there is only one such role for her that
is logical: that is Hephaestus. Athena, the goddess of the Planet Venus is Hephaestus,
also the planet Venus. No one appears to have said so, but the evidence is strong to
that effect.
Velikovsky and the scholars associated with him have presented evidence that Pallas
Athene was the god of the planet Venus, that the planet appeared in the sky sometime
before 1500 B. C., that she behaved as a comet, traveled on an eccentric orbit that
brought her perilously close to Earth, and that around 1500 B. C. and on several other
occasions caused tremendous destruction here. The foundations or refounding of the city
of Athens may be of this date [1] , just as those of Rome were concurrent with the
raging appearance in the skies of the planet-god Mars 700 years later. References from
a number of cultures lead one to believe that, as the Greek theogony put it, Athena
sprang from Zeus fully-armed with a shout.
Athena sprang quickly from the immortal head and stood before Zeus who holds the aegis,
shaking a sharp spear: great Olympus began to reel horribly at the might of the bright-
eyed goddess, and earth round about cried fearfully, and the sea was moved and tossed
with dark waves, while foam burst forth suddenly; the bright Son of Hyperion stopped
his swift-footed horses a long while, until the maiden Pallas Athene had stripped the
heavenly armor from her immortal shoulders [2] .
Hephaestus, some said, had to split Jove's aching head with an ax to help him give
birth.
THE EPITHETS OF VENUS
Velikovsky, James and others offer numerous connections between Planet Venus and Pallas
Athena through analogies of birth, traits and deeds. They further offer persuasive
cross-identifications of Athena and Planet-Venus with the corresponding divinities of
the same planet from other cultures, among them the Hebrew, Egyptian, Babylonian,
Chinese, Mexican, and American Indian.
Graves, for example, lays out in detail the material on Pallas, whose primary myth-
ensemble is as foster-sister to Athena. Pallas means simply "youth" or "maiden." Athena
and Pallas were raised on the shores of Lake Triton in Africa. While playing at armed
combat Athena accidentally killed Pallas. In grief, she placed the name Pallas before
her own. The incident is symbolic of the world tragedy of that time. An immense Saharan
lake, called Triton by the ancients, suddenly disappeared, leaving a great desert and
some marshes, with the dry beds of rivers and streams. A flourishing civilization
subsided with the lake, a civilization that perhaps dominated the Mediterranean and
surely represented a pre-Hellenic, matriarchal culture, whose women wore the same
garments and aegis of Athena, even down through many centuries following the
catastrophe.
The destruction provoked and wrought by Planet Venus probably encompassed in North
Africa not only the Egypt of the Exodus but the recently explored Saharan "Libyan"
culture. And if, as Velikovsky argues convincingly, Phaeton, which plunged somewhere
along the longitude of the Red Sea, was a part of Comet-Venus, Planet-to-be, then
Pallas was the earthly destructive force of comet Venus in North Central Africa.
Stecchini, from his studies of the architectural measurements of the Parthenon, the
crowning temple of the Virgin Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, offers a confirmation.
The Temple was erected in the glorious late period of empire. The Athenians,
subconsciously true to remote history, set their Pallas Athena pediment facing directly
and accurately towards the marshes of present-day Tunisia, and portrayed on the
pediment the birth of Pallas Athena [3] .
In the manner of legend, an alternative myth is offered. "Some Hellenes say that Athena
had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later attempted to outrage her,
and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of skin to make the aegis, and
of his wings for her own shoulders...." [4] . Hardly a "maiden" and hardly a maidenly
reprisal. Perhaps, as Graves suggests, the myth came from an ancient story of one of
Athena's many combats. But, more interested in what force can have carried this
underground myth, we would suggest that this "fake Pallas" is a diabolic representation
of Zeus; the physical contacts of Athena with the Father of Gods are numerous. And
humans, as already argued, have ways of getting back at the gods who caused them so
much fear and suffering.
"Pallas" may also designate Athena as a comet before it lost its appendage. Visually
and astronomically, it should be recalled that everyone speaks of the "tail" of a
comet, whereas this "tail" sometimes moves in directions parallel to the "head" and
"coma." The ancients often were excited by the image of the comet "tail" as a phallus.
Hence Athena would be phallus-Athena before Pallas was destroyed and she became a
proto-planet without a penis. In Sanskrit, palas means Phallus. The altars of Athena
were called Palladia, as at Troy. The dropping of the "ph" (j) sound takes away the
sexual "fire."
One would proceed farther. The "goatish giant" who attempted to outrage her has
additional dimensions. He may stand for Hephaestus who, in another legend, attempted to
rape Athena at his smithy and was repulsed. So that Athena's killing of this monster
corresponds to the professed Hellenic triumph over the powerful proto-mediterranean
religious culture. The mythic mind can support this idea along with the contradictory
apotheosis of Athena as the ideal castrating female of psychoanalytic theory.
Hephaestus has a resemblance to the Etruscan smith-god and death-demon, Tuchulcha, who
dispatches people with a giant hammer. Tuchulcha is assisted by a winged demon with
snakes [5] , So that the composite suggests a god-monster like Typhon, a devastating
winged dragon who, like Seth and Lucifer is sent crashing into the underground, there
to fulfill his destiny.
The Love Affair lends support to the quadrilateral relationship: Hephaestus/ Tuchulcha:
Greeks/ Etruscans. There one hears Demodocus singing that the cherished home-island of
Hephaestus was Lemnos. Also, he has Ares speaking disrespectfully of Hephaestus having
left to join his barbarous-speaking Sintians of Lemnos. (By "barbarous" is probably
meant non-Greek.) Now recently some inscriptions found on Lemnos have been identified
as Etruscan [6] , even though they are not yet deciphered. Etruscan has been connected
also with Hittite and Minoan (Linear A) by Barry Fell [7] . New information has
appeared, too, placing Etruscan relatives in the area at the same time as the Love
Affair. These people of Lake Van are not only culturally close but close in blood types
to the Etruscans [8] . The Etruscans feared and were obsessed by this Hephaestus-
Tuchulcha. They offered human sacrifices frequently: the planet Venus, says Nicolo
Rilli, was a favored object of such bloody supplications [9] .
It will be a long time before the identities of the gods of one and all cultures are
clarified. The sublimation of God requires a smokescreen of confusion and the
allocation of ambivalence. If a god has been given too much of good, a balancing evil
is allocated, and vice versa. The interplay of names and epithets is part of this
process, but more unconsciously, the neural equivalents must function. Basically such
is the meaning of the practically universal theological belief: "God cannot exist
without the Devil."
Athena was a "glorious goddess, bright-eyed, inventive, unbending of heart, pure
virgin, savior of cities." [10] She was brilliantly beautiful, a great warrior; she
enjoyed the confidence of Zeus to an extent unequaled by any other god. In the Iliad
(iv, 74), she sweeps down upon the Trojan plain like "a shooting star," trailing fire.
She was furthermore the most creative god, mother of invention, teacher of the arts and
sciences. It is bizarre that we should find her the female counterpart of Hephaestus.
But that she was, of course, an evil destroyer as well, emerges from many an earlier
description. She was, in the Greek mind, a desexualized good-bad mother. Many deeds
ascribed to her directly and indirectly would make lame and slow Hephaestus appear
quite harmless and capable of exciting laughter of a grim sort. She in fact, as a
planet, broke up the Jovian order of the universe and kept it in confusion until the
eighth century, when Zeus, through Homer's and Hesiod's work, deserved to the full his
reputation as the law-giver. At least so far as Greek myth was concerned, and we cannot
go farther here.
CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY
Athena's birth from Zeus
is expressly related to the birth of Hephaestus. A quarrel between Zeus and Hera had
been mentioned in what preceded the fragment (of Chrysippus), and in consequence of
this quarrel, Hera gave birth to Hephaestus without Zeus' aid, and Zeus lay with Metis
and swallowed her. But she conceived Athena, and Zeus gave birth through his head. That
Hephaestus' birth was a complement to Athena's, and connected with a quarrel between
Zeus and Hera, is also implied in (Hesiod's) Theogony (924-9), but the logical order of
events has been destroyed.
So writes West in his Commentary on Hesiod's Theogony (pp. 401-3). We need not agree
that Metis was the mother of Athena, because Athena is not only called parthenos
(virgin) but also parthenogenous (the offspring of a single sex).
West (with others) suspects that the quarrel may have arisen over the capacities of the
sexes. Hera and Zeus disagreed concerning whether man or woman achieved more pleasure
in sexual intercourse. Teiresias, called to arbitrate, declared that the pleasure is
woman's in the ratio of ten to one. Hera, a poor loser, blinded Teiresias and Zeus gave
him the gift of prophesy as a consolation. Then each defied the other and gave birth
parthenogenously. Hera to Hephaestus, Zeus to Athena. In a striking parallel, Hera also
bore parthenogenously the monster Typhon, who was also sent crashing to Earth by Zeus
[11] .
Plato has Critias (109 b-d) declaring that Hephaestus and Athena are of the same
father. They are of the same nature. "In the days of old the Gods shared out the earth
among themselves... Hephaestus and Athena, for instance, being brother and sister...
obtained this our land as their joint portion... They raised its aboriginal population
to the status of a great nation." It was protocatastrophic Attica, much larger in
extent, before the disasters that ended an epoch. When Poseidon (god of deluges and
waters and chief god of Atalanta, the Moon) struggled to possess Attica, he had to
contend with both Hephaestus and Athena.
We find in Robert Graves' The Greek Myths these words:
Hephaestus and Athene shared temples at Athens, and his name, if it does not stand for
hemerophaistos, 'he who shines by day' (i. e. the sun), is perhaps a masculine for he
apaista (shortened in Stesichorus: Fragment 97 to aista), 'the goddess who removes from
sight, ' namely Athene, the original inventor of all mechanical arts [12] .
Graves, like most authors upon whom we depend, did not ascribe real celestial behavior
to the gods and demigods, planetary or otherwise. When a celestial reference is forced
upon Athena, the Sun or Moon or other bodies are called upon. This has resulted in the
Sun, workaday Helios, being elevated to a divine status such as he never achieved in
the minds of the ancients. If the minds of scholars had not been embraced by
uniformitarian principles, that is, the ideology of science of the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, they might have asked, as for instance in this case, why "shining by
day" should be the exclusive prerogative of Helios or, at least, why bother to name a
god by this trait which is so ordinary and expected? Every ordinary thing shines by day
as well.
A nearby cometary body, meteorite, or planet, especially if it is incandescent, as was
Athena (Hephaestus), will shine like the sun, and supplement the brilliance of the day
to a painful degree until clouds intervene, mercifully in some cases, destructively in
others if they shower down red waters, brimstone, ashes, and noxious gases. She and he
have a habit of disappearing. They blind humans; and they cover up deeds. Both are
great dissemblers.
As for the alternative base of his name, we can rephrase what was just said: His name
again would be a name of Athena, for the action implied is the beclouding of the human
vision. Who might shine brilliantly and also block vision - contrasting behaviors? A
cometary intruder in the skies is one answer, and there are not very good alternative
answers, especially when the details of both behaviors are collected. An enormous
volcano will shine brilliantly in the daytime as it erupts, and afterward darken the
vision of humans. But one volcano does not inspire a whole people in communication over
thousands of miles to create a major god. Hephaestus is, for that matter, god of
volcanoes and fire, but this is not his sole or even major life-activity.
Graves reports (I, 51-2) that Hephaestus seems to have been the title of the sacred
king as solar demi-god. We have alluded to the former; for "solar" we insist upon
"Venusian," because the sacred kings of the ancient Mediterranean flourished
concurrently with Cretan and Minoan civilizations and were both well-remembered and
hated as an institution by the misogynist Hellenes, for whom kings were not to be
periodically set up the sacrificed by queens.
Hephaestus ruled with Athena over the realm of arts and crafts.
Sing, clear-voiced muse, of Hephaestus famed for inventions. With bright-eyed Athene he
taught men glorious crafts throughout the world, - men who before used to dwell in
caves in the mountains like wild beasts [13] .
"Athena was frequently linked with Hephaestus, as in the simile in which a comparison
is drawn with a goldsmith, 'a skillful man whom Hephaestus and Pallas Athena taught all
kinds of craft (techne). '" [14] Hephaestus was the Smith-god [15] , suggests
Graves, to be found in many distinct cultures. We understand that Hephaestus is a
technical genius, like Athena. He is more circumscribed; he is a Master Electrician, a
fabricator of thunderbolts. Often he is portrayed as lame; sometimes the smiths were
lames, says Graves to prevent their wandering far from their proprietary city. This is
all very well. We recognize the need for towns to retain their smiths, even as we
recognize [16] that the smith was one of the few "strangers" to be invariably
welcomed in their wanderings, along with poets.
However, one must acknowledge that just as there are sacred kings who are put to death
annually, there may be "sacred smiths" who have to be lamed in order that they behave
like the god whose skills they possess. "Smith-god" surrogates, like "sacred kings,"
were also anciently killed in sacrifice, every 20 years, says Graves, to correspond
with a solar-lunar calendar conjunction; we are entitled to question whether it may be
a Venus-Moon conjunction, the 20 years being a playback of time of modern calendar
reckoning, but we find no grounds presently to challenge the periodicity and its
source.
Which leads us to the general problem of the lameness of Hephaestus, the god and the
Planet. There is more than one legend of the source of his disability.
One legend would have it that Hera chose a monster to conceive of Hephaestus and,
naturally, the offspring was ugly and deformed. So she cast it from heaven.
A second is that Hephaestus defended his mother, Hera, for leading a revolt against
Zeus and Zeus cast him from Mount Olympus to Earth, crippling him. Here we find
Hephaestus as the monster, Typhon, that part of Athena the planet that was struck by a
thunderbolt of Zeus while it was wreaking destruction upon Earth, and crashed, some say
near the Red Sea, others say upon what is now the Sahara, burning and drying up the
area and pushing the waters of the Great Lake Triton into the ocean.
To pursue the parallel, instead of the monster Typhon, it was Hephaestus who came
crashing down and, presumably, he picked himself up, physically the worse for the
experience, and rejoined the Olympian party of gods when the father of the gods graced
him with his pardon. Vase paintings show Hephaestus mounted upon a mule (symbol of
sexual barrenness), plodding back up to Heaven, escorted by Bacchus (Dionysus), satyrs,
and bacchantes.
Both descents of Hephaestus-Athena from the skies precede Homeric times by 700 years.
Krates of Pergamon explains that Zeus was determining the measure of the universe by
means of "two torches moving with the same speed:" the Sun from east to west, and
Hephaestus from Olympus to Lemnos. Hephaestus struck Earth as the sun was setting. The
measure of a new age of the world was taken [17] . Graves points out the Hephaestus
has affinities with Prometheus [18] , Talos, Daedalus, Icarus, and Minos [19] .
Graves further illuminates the emerging picture in giving us further details of the
birth of Athena Tritongeneia. "As Zeus walked by Lake Triton [the great Saharan Lake
that disappeared]", say the priestesses of Athene, "he was seized by a headache and he
howled until all heaven echoed. Hermes ran up, divined the cause, and persuaded
Hephaestus (or possibly Prometheus) to take a wedge and beetle and make a breach in
Zeus' skull, from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout." [20] So
Hephaestus was involved in Athena's birth.
Hephaestus has enough reason to be lamed. However, a marvel of myth, like creative
works in general, is that several levels of meaning can be simultaneously conveyed,
both consciously and unconsciously. If Athena is a virgin, and ushered in legions of
virgins in many parts of the world (as Peter Tompkins relates in The Virgin and the
Eunuch, citing the Vestal Virgins of Rome, among others), not to mention their
contraries, the sacred harlots of the temples, then how would Hephaestus portray the
analogous quality? By being a eunuch, a castrato, one would reply. But a god, not, in
any event, a Homeric Hellenic god, could not suffer this indignity unless, like
Ouranos, he was Deus Otiosus, that is, permanently removed from the scene.
The lameness, we are bound to suggest, was a genital lameness. To match Athena,
Hephaestus had to be unsexed. The crippled feet would represent this to the
unconscious. Psychoanalysts find such to be the case in their analyses of dreams. We
note again how Hephaestus in pictured riding a mule, a barren animal, on his way back
to heaven after his fall. Also, the Roman Hephaestus is Vulcan; Vulcan is represented
by several Roman authors in the form of a phallus in the hearthfire [21] , an image
that joins together Hephaestus fire, and the comet's severed phallus-tail.
Slater stresses not so much the idea of Hephaestus' lameness as a symbolic castration
but "what might be called his 'interpersonal' self-castration. By this I mean his
withdrawal from the lists of sexual and marital rivalry, his role of clown - in a
sense, his resignation from manhood." [22] Consistently, he is rejected both by Zeus
and Hera, for he was also cast into the sea by his mother, Hera.
Now again, one may ask about the marriage of Hephaestus and his famous marriage bed,
that four-posted imitation of the four-pillared sky he was wont to occupy with
Aphrodite in the Love Affair. It was on the instigation of Zeus, once, perhaps as a bad
practical joke, that Hephaestus when Athena arrived to be fitted for a fine suit of
armor, made the amorous advances upon her, which she repulsed. Apart from marking a
further association of these two parthenogenous gods, mulishly incapable of offspring,
the tale stresses Hephaestus' unluckiness in love. Aphrodite is his "better half,"
fully sexed, unlike Athena; he wants her (the Moon) but also rejects her, for he cannot
cope with her.
Aphrodite has not been known to copulate with him recently, although in a dim past
there was a marriage and contacts resembling sexual relations. But now, in the Love
Affair, the bed is cold. Aphrodite's children come from others, including especially
Ares. Hephaestus may be the indignant husband, but he is impotent in sexual affairs and
it is perhaps because of this empty show of dignity that the gods Apollo and Hermes
laugh.
Hephaestus' advances upon Athena were strangely fruitful, says another account. As he
gazed at Athena, he ejaculated and his seed fell upon Gaia, "the Earth," from whom
Erichthonios (Auriga) was born. Athena succored the infant when Gaia rejected him. He
was half-man and half-serpent; later on he became King of Athens and instituted her
worship [23] . Once more we find interconnected Athena-Hephaestus - sexual
incapacities, the serpent Typhon, destruction visited upon Gaia, and the Athens
connection. Dr. Z. Rix of Jerusalem, a medical doctor and mythologist, writes me on
January 26, 1975, that :
"Hephaestus is the primordial father whom Freud recognized again and again in his
patients' dreams. He is cometary Venus who struck by Jupiter's lightning fell from
heaven. Many mythological narratives recount the event of Lucifer's, Phaeton's, and
Typhon's (the Egyptian devil's) fall. It is comprehensible that the onlookers wished
that the forbidding figure should lose its tail - conceived as male attribute - with
which it threatened to annihilate the whole population of the earth."
Again, Dr. Rix calls my attention to the deity, Nephthys (in Egypt, Nebti), who is wife
and sister of Typhon. She is the seashores: Typhon is the sea, according to the ancient
Egyptians. This same Nephthys is pictured in various Egyptian sources [24] together
with Isis (the Egyptian Athena), lifting the sun-ship at dawn. Surely this is
additional evidence of the connection Athena-Hephaestus, corresponding to Nephthys-
Typhon. Herodotus mentions that there were numerous temples to Hephaestus in Egypt.
At the same time, such is the overlapping that readily occurs in the memory of the gods
as the ages pass, that foam-born Aphrodite later is said to be created, not by Uranus,
as we assert, but by the seed of the drowned Typhon that becomes the salt-foam of the
sea. Now one may perceive how some confusion between Athena-Aphrodite-Urania and
Aphrodite-Planet Venus arose: the former sprang out of the sea earlier from the fallen
member of Uranus; the latter arose later from the seed of the fallen Python. Probably
the new myth was grafted upon the old.
On still another level of suggestibility is the profile that the hobbling smith in the
sky would provide. It is easy to see in many artifacts the shapes that celestial bodies
like meteors and comets take. Nevertheless it may be of some value to mention that a
comet in a typical apparition is an angel with wings and flowing gown, a head with
horns, a helmeted head (Athena), a long-haired one (coma means hair in Greek), a
phallus with testes, and even a head with two massive arms - "Hephaestus of the two
strong arms," Murray translates the phrase, and then, curiously, notes that other
scholars translate the phrase as "Hephaestus of the lame legs." We wonder at the
possible original sight of the mighty-armed bronze-smith trailing his feeble legs like
the tail of the comet, and at the etymology that could cause such an alternative
construction. In connection with the language of the Love Affair, to be treated below,
additional symbolic issues will be discussed.
Finally there is the sentence: "The slow catches the swift; even as now Hephaestus,
slow though he is, has outstripped Ares for all that he is the swiftest of the gods who
hold Olympus. Lame though he is, he has caught him by craft." Once more the
synchronization of reality into a plausible plot seems incredible. To take part in the
cosmic drama, as it probably occurred, Hephaestus (as Planet-Venus) would make his
planetary approaches at a great distance and behind Moon and Mars, which would put him
actually a half-million miles distant from the pair with a gravitational-electrical
effect sufficient to repel the Earth's magnetic envelope and cause their liberation.
Under the circumstances, Hephaestus would move with apparent slowness, as would,
mirabile dictu, be in accord with his crippled condition.
So it was then, that Pallas Athena, Hephaestus the strong-armed Smith, and the planet
Venus are locked in unconscious identity in the human mind as indissolubly and
unbreakably as Ares and Aphrodite were by the invisible net.
ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES
Velikovsky summarizes the late history of the protoplanet that became Venus in the
following words :
Venus, which collided with the earth in the fifteenth century before the present era,
collided with Mars in the eighth century. At that time Venus was moving at a lower
elliptical velocity than when it first encountered the earth; but Mars, being only
about one-eighth the mass of Venus, was no match for her. It was therefore a notable
achievement that Mars, though thrown out of the ring, nevertheless was instrumental in
bringing Venus from an elliptical to a nearly circular orbit. Looked at from the Earth,
Venus was removed from a path that ran high to the zenith and over the zenith to its
present path in which it never retreats from the sun more than 48 degrees, thus
becoming a morning or an evening star that precedes the rising sun or follows the
setting sun. The awe of the world for many centuries, Venus has become a tame planet
[25] .
The planet now called Venus, identified with the goddess Athena (and later with
Aphrodite ) in Greece, Minerva in Rome, Tistrya in Iran, Ishtar in Babylon, Baal and
Lucifer-Mazzaroth in Judea, Hathor in Egypt, and Quetzalcohuatl in Toltec Mexico, was
to become only the morning and evening star, an ever-pleasant sight, if, at the sight,
people could rid themselves of its historical connotations. The planet circle nearer to
the horizon, and, because it did not approach Earth closely again, was smaller in
apparent size. Isaiah proclaimed (14: 12-13):
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning ! How art thou cast down
to the ground Who did weaken the nations!
Still human sacrifices were offered to Venus, the planet, when she approached closest
to Earth on her famed journey. Still she was the greatest goddess of Athens and the
fountain of some of the world's greatest literature. Still, in the sixth century, Jews
evading the Babylonian captivity and settling in Egypt rued their abandonment of Venus-
Baal for the abstract single God. At the same time, the Greeks were circulating a
legend of Cadmus who had killed a dragon, a son of Hephaistos, no less, and the
devilish lame Hephaestus had laid upon Cadmus and his descendents, including Oedipus, a
curse; thus was the sin of castration punished in hereditary succession [26] , and the
sin of Oedipus foredoomed. And walk down any street where astrologers tell fortunes or
pick up any book on astrology, and see that the deeds and spirit of Venus are still
part of human nature, speaking now literally, and not even of the unconscious role she
plays in our religious rites and our forms of thought and behavior.
But in those days when it was visible to mankind that "the star Venus pursued Mars and
inflamed him with an ardent passion," as the geographer-astrologist Erastosthenes wrote
in the third century, B. C., (thinking probably of the planet as the Aphrodite of the
Love Affair, in the confusion which we addressed earlier) what happened to Venus is
marked upon her today. From the encounters with Mars, of the eighth and seventh
centuries, we seek positive evidence, and that is difficult to find.
Velikovsky has been proven correct in several of his judgements respecting her seven-
hundred-year reign of terror. It is now known, as Velikovsky claimed beforehand, that
Venus is a hot planet, whose surface attains 9250 Kelvin without explanation except by
a recent origin (from Zeus) and/ or a recent heating-up [27] . Although only more
simple compounds have until now been found, her fifteen miles of dense clouds may
contain some of the chemicals that could have mixed with the Earth's upper Atmosphere
under electrical discharges to make and precipitate the ambrosia and manna that
tradition says preserved various early peoples wandering in desolation and darkness
[28] . We know an ever-enlarging fraction of what the surface of the earth and
archaeology can tell us about the catastrophic events of her pre-Martian period. We are
aware of, and shall soon understand better, how the horror of her visitations affected
the human mind.
But precisely because of her erratic, destructive, and self-destructive, earlier
history, it is difficult, more difficult than in the case of Mars, say, to pinpoint her
presence by the scars left upon her by the Love Affair. Let us look again to the song
of Demodocus and see whether Hephaestus-Venus signals any possible effects of its role.
Velikovsky has gathered historical, legendary, and geographical evidence to the effect
that the shortened tail of the cometary proto-planet was effectively destroyed in the
Mars encounters. Hephaestus trails his legs; that may be indicative of the tail. He
also manufactures his gossamer trap in a shower of sparks and lays it about the
trysting place of Mars and Moon. These actions may signify the shedding of cometary
material in great quantities, producing meteoric effects of high visibility and
destructiveness. Some of the voluminous debris here portrayed as sparks off the anvil
and netting for the trap may be what supplied Mars with the troop of "terrible ones"
that stories from Greece, Palestine, India and elsewhere described, a host of
terrifying images in the sky and real storms of missiles and gases.
As a result of the Martian encounters, several gods of planet Venus became lesser gods,
the Fallen Lucifer and the Etruscan Tuchulcha, an underworld god. In the Love Affair,
Hephaestus does not win his case: he has been the victim of the crime of cuckoldry. He
has discovered the culprits. He has captured them and turned them over to the police
and to the great judge. Yet, instead of retribution and triumph, he receives
indifferent admiration for his technical skill, a jest from a policeman that he would
commit the same crime if he could, jeering laughter, a bail that may or may not be
paid, and a bail-jumping by the criminal. The great judge does not even put in an
appearance. Indeed, how Lucifer is fallen !
Does Hephaestus change his ways? Does the orbit of Venus change from the elliptical to
the circular to some degree, in the course of the Love Affair? This is difficult to
say. He is wont to visit the barbarous-speaking Sintians of Lemnos. He starts back to
see them, but doubles back again to view the lovers caught in his trap. This may
signify an axial tilt of Earth. (See Chap. XIII.) Does Hephaestus ever return to
Lemnos, as the others return to their familiar places? Probably not. Like many an old
warrior, the time has come to write his memoirs and live off his past deeds. Still
heated up but without a tail, the planet is braked as it has been for some time by its
own viscous surface, but more speedily. Then it is struck and forced into an inner
orbit by the combined energy of Earth and Mars. Thus it may have achieved the circular
orbit it has maintained since the regularization of Venusian movements. Records, newly
ascribed to the eighth century in Babylon, appear to show that by the seventh century
Venus was approaching a circular orbit and, by the sixth century, it is definitely
revolving on a near perfect movement [29] .
Not only was there an orbital change in this period, but also a rotational deceleration
of the earth was experienced. Velikovsky shows that the day grew longer, at one point,
and then shorter. Also, the Moon changed its orbital speed. Also an axial tilt was
experienced. Can these possibly be accounted for from a small treasury of poetic lines?
Hardly. As the next chapters will show, many motions can and probably do change at the
same time. We may solve some of the problems in the future, but at this time, we can
only point to two indications of such change. The Sun, Helios, appears to have behaved
erratically. Patroni, we recall, thought that the Sun had to send a messenger to inform
Hephaestus of events in his brazen palace. This might literally indicate a tilting of
the earth's axis momentarily, and twice, as a matter of fact. During such tilts the Sun
and Venus, as seen from the Earth, would apparently come closer together and then
resume their distances. However, electrical solar flares of great magnitude might have
stretched out from Helios to give the same impression, as Kugler surmised.
The second indicator of changed position in the story would be the freezing of the
action at its climax. Hephaestus roars his anger to the skies. (Was this when, in the
Battle of Troy, Athena "uttered her loud cry. And over against her spouted Ares, dread
as a dark whirlwind, calling with shrill tones to the Trojans"?) The gods stand with
him at the threshold. Ares and Aphrodite are paralyzed in their trap. The Sun may be
gone. There is a definite and portentous pause here. It could be the climactic
conjunction of the four bodies: Earth, Mars, Moon, and Venus. It could be a moment when
"the sun stood still," or more likely, when the night lengthened and the day refused to
come. But what a night ! The sky would have been more lighted up and colorful than ever
by ordinary solar day.
Finally, Planet-Venus may be searched for some signs of surface and atmospheric damage
that might be attributed to the Love Affair. It is easy to say, and undeniable, that
since Venus suffered such an experience also with Earth, Moon and Mars, then it would
have to exhibit the same effects as they did, given, of course, the differences in its
composition. An already hot planet would be heated up more, but other effects could
cool it. More of its atmosphere would be dissipated to a larger planet and some gained
from a smaller planet that possessed any, but this would depend, too, upon the
composition, atomic weight, electrical discharges and pressures exerted.
More recently, an important set of observations of the surface of Venus was made by the
use of radar [30] . In August of 1973, American astrophysicists announced that they
had penetrated the hot dense clouds by radio waves, which were then able to probe
features of the unknown surface. They discovered the equatorial region to be marked by
craters of large diameter, dozens and hundreds of miles wide. But these gave shallow
soundings. A crater of one hundred miles diameter appeared to have basin whose depth
was only a quarter of a mile. We should expect a depth of several miles.
If Venus were incandescent in 1500 B. C., it will have been cooling up to the present.
Originally, any exchanges of material that might have occurred in its encounters with
Earth and Moon would have been promptly concealed by the sinking and melting of the
foreign bodies. Over time, the temperature of the molten surface would have reduced to
that of today.
It is conceivable that by 776 B. C. the surface temperature might have solidified to a
point that would register the imprint of a large body falling upon it through its dense
cloud formations. Of course, the foreign body would itself become heated, but if it
were large enough it might not disintegrate before striking home. If the craters had
been formed by electrical explosions, again the soft terrain would have shortly reduced
their depth. Shallow craters would, then, be explainable either by explosions alone or
by an exploding body, and would tend to support the theory of Venus' cometary history,
and the theory of its exchanges with Mars, Earth and Moon of the eighth and seventh
centuries.
In 1975, Soviet scientists landed an apparatus upon Venus, named Venera. Venera endured
the hostile environment long enough to register brisk winds and to photograph, in a
surprising amount of natural light, a shambles of sharp rocks. The rocks were described
as seemingly "new." They are probably new. Whether the area in which they were found
was struck by planetary debris or by electrical discharges, a splattering of foreign
and indigenous rock would have occurred in and around the craters. The great heat, the
heavy winds, and the high atmospheric pressure (90 times that of Earth) would very
shortly have metamorphosed any terrain of sharp rocks. Volcanism, of course, would not
throw off sharp rocks, but lava and Tephra. Therefore, Venus may now exhibit the scars
of very recent events.
Such were the effects of Athena's last battles. As if to commemorate the occasion,
planet-Venus resonates periodically with the Earth. On April 23, 1966, P. Goldreich and
S. J. Peale reported to the American Geophysical Union the surprising discovery that
every time Venus passes between the Sun and the Earth it turns the same face towards
Earth. T. J. Gordon, rocket scientist and author, wrote, "This type of resonant motion
resists outside disturbances; once locked, the motion tends to remain locked. When did
the Earth capture Venus' rotation?" [31] Might it not have been on or about 687 B.
C.?
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER TEN
LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA"
We are pursuing a set of identifications in this book. We say Hephaestus stands for
Athena, for instance, and Athena is also the planet Venus, and the goddess of the
Greeks. She is also Hathor, Ishtar, Lucifer, and Minerva. Some aspects of a lunar deity
have also affected her identity. To a remarkable degree the validity of this book
depends upon such identifications. In this chapter, for example, everything said which
favors the identification of Hephaestus with Athena-planet Venus ipso facto supports a
separate Aphrodisian identity for the Moon. We must be careful of the word "is," short
of writing a volume of philosophy on the question. For "is" can never mean some
absolutely simple "is." It has to mean something that never quite "is" no matter how
close two things are to being the same.
One scholar who appreciates this process in which mythologists commonly engage is
Philip E. Slater. In his book on The Story of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek
Family (1958), we read:
"To demand an exclusive interpretation is equivalent to insisting that a Spanish
peasant, a tropical flower, the Hudson River, an oyster, and the fountains of the Villa
d'Este are identical because they contain H2O. It tells too much and therefore tells us
too little of what we need to know precisely... A myth draws material from events in
the history of a group, but orders it according to the desires and stresses common to
those participating in the culture of that group."
An extreme example can be offered. Suppose we say A is H, or A is P. We intend by these
two statements that: A and H refer to one and the same thing; A and O refer to one and
the same thing; and H and O are the same. Even so they differ - these A and H and O -
by the fact that they are named differently, and, however complete their shared
identity, they are called by a different name. And every name has some connotation,
some affect-load in the sensing organism. Now let us proceed to the other extreme, and
declare: A is quite non-B. We will, no sooner than we are told this, tend to affirm an
identity of A and B, namely that the two are associated in the same sentence, capable
of undergoing the same logical analysis, have qualities that are comparable, and
further that he who says so has some ulterior motive which joins them in his mind.
From these examples we are led to various surmises, pertinent to the Love Affair. One
is linguistic. One symbol can excite stimuli by being related logically and empirically
to a predicate. It must be also related illogically, through sheer conditioning by
"irrelevancies."
We can imagine this seemingly foolish conversation:
1st speaker: "See the planet."
All: "Yes."
1st speaker: "It is Athena."
2nd speaker: "It is Lucifer."
1st and 2nd speakers: "Athena is Lucifer."
3rd speaker: "I sacrifice when the planet arises. You must sacrifice too."
4th speaker: "I sacrifice only to the god Hephaestus who helps me make sturdy plows."
3rd speaker: "My planet represents the invention of the plow."
1st speaker : "Athena invented the plow."
1st, 3rd, 4th speakers: "All hail to the plow, the planet and the gods Hephaestus and
Athena. Preserve our way of life."
2nd speaker: "Lucifer is cast down by God."
All others: "Lucifer is cast down but restored to heaven by his father, Zeus. If you
don't believe it, we shall hate you."
2nd speaker: "Lucifer is not Athena or Hephaestus. Lucifer is the devil cast down."
All others: "Go to the Devil! Hail the gods of Olympus! '
Let us proceed with speakers (1, 3, 4) whom we recognize now as a group of the Olympian
Culture. We find in them: "H is A" meaning
a. H is identical with A
b. H is related to A
c. H represents A
d. H symbolizes A
e. H & A share similar relations to L in each case with respect to:
1) Speakers 1, 3, 4 for certain subjective functions, but
2) H and A are separate for other functions serving speakers 1, 3, 4.
That is, Athena is Hephaestus and vice versa when and insofar as they share similar
qualities (traits and behavior) in the minds of any person or group.
Athena is Hephaestus when the effects of Hephaestus and Athena produced on any person
or group are similar.
Athena is Hephaestus when their names are used interchangeably.
Athena is Hephaestus when their names are not used interchangeably, because to avoid
the interchange permits the fulfillment of and resolution of a cognitive dissonance.
That is, where what must be said about the one psychically precludes that the same be
said about the other.
For understanding both natural and social relations, all forms of "is" must be taken
into account.
When a Q-behavior of A produces changes in X that H also produces, then A is HQ and H
is AQ. When a speaker affirms (or denies in such a manner as to affirm) that A and H
are the same, in respect to Q, this is evidence also that AQ is HQ.
When the behavior of a body X activates A and H with similar effects AQ( X) and HQ( X),
then A and H are also given an identity.
When similar X effects are observed upon A, H, L, S... n, then we can say that A has
psychological and organic existence in the group (A, H, L, S... n).
To say that A "is" or has existence apart from (XQAG) and (YQAG), we resort to a second
group (abc... n) and observe whether (XQVg) and (YGVg) are observable. If yes, then
this is a confirmation. If (XQVg) and (YQVg) are different than (XQVG) and (YQVG) then
we must investigate whether the two sets of effects are reconcilable according to the
logic of each group, G and g. That is, discover whether Q is the same, despite the
different logics of G and g. This is essentially what we do when we inquire whether the
planet Venus know to modern observation (G) is the same as the planet Venus known to
the ancients (g).
Carl Sagan is only reciting a phenomenon well-known to ethnologists when he says:
"legends and myths, handed down by illiterate people from generation to generation, are
in general of great historical value."
From the remnants of what has been handed down, we are here trying to discover a
history in which "who is who?" and "Who is what?" are central questions.
Notes (Chapter 10: He Who Shines by Day)
1. Stecchini, op. cit., p. 145. The destruction of Thera-Santorini about 1100 B. C.
would have overwhelmed the Attic shores, even if it bad occurred as a solitary
catastrophe (Cf. S. Marinatos, whose writings on the subject began on Minoan Crete,
XIII Antiquity (1939), p. 425); Velikovsky interprets the myth of Solon concerning
Atlantis as occurring around 1500 B. C. (W in C, pp. 146-8). Plato refers to Athens
after Atlantis as a remnant civilization, peopled by illiterate survivors. I believe
that Solon's Atlantis was sunk about 4000 B. C., but that Plato, not knowing of the
disasters of 1500 B. C., telescoped the two catastrophes in his mind, and made them
more ethnocentrically Athenian.
2. "Hymn to Athena" XXVIII.
3. Telephone communication of October, 1973.
4. Graves, I, ch. 9, p. 45.
5. See Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, II, frontispiece.
6. Patroni, op. cit., p. 244, fn. 3; Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II (1973).
7. Occasional Publ., Epigraphic Society, Vol. 4, no. 77 (Sept. 1977), Harvard
University.
8. G. A. Wainwright, "The Teresh, the Etruscans, and Asia Minor," IX Anatolian Studies.
9. Conversation with the author, 1966. Cf. his Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino
(Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina, 1964), where the Etruscan obsessions with lightning,
flood, and fire are treated.
10. Homeric "Hymn to Athena," no. xxviii.
11. Slater, op. cit., 130; see Apollodorus i, 3, 5; Homeric Hymns to Apollo; Hesiod,
Theogony 924-5.
12. Vol. I, p. 87; 23: 1; cf. I, 393.
13. Homeric Hymns, no. XX, in the Loeb edition of Hesiod. The "men" referred to are
possibly the catastrophized victims of this same pair 700 years earlier.
14. Finley, p. 83, citing Odyssey, 6, 232-4.
15. The Greek Myths, I, 51-2.
16. Cf. Finley.
17. Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechand, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, inc.,
1969), pp. 273-4; cf. 73-4. This book contains on page 272 a design from ancient China
showing twin deities, male and female, dragon footed, surrounded by constellations and
carrying a plumb bob, square, and compass, reproduced in Chaos and Creation and Solaria
Binaria.
18. Graves, The Greek Myths, I, 149.
19. Ibid., 1, 315-6, 172.
20. Ibid., p. 46.
21. Ovid, Fasti VI, 627; Pliny, 36.70; Ling, I, 39; Plutarch, Lives, Rom., 2; Pauly-
Wissowa, Realenzyklop"die article on Tullius, Ocrisia, Tarchetius; Frazer, Golden
Bough; II, 198; O. Gruppe, Griech-Mythologie (1906), p. 1311. (Citations kindly
supplied by the late Dr. Z. Rix, Jerusalem.)
22. Op. cit., 130.
23. Ibid., p. 264; Graves, I, 25b, c, d, 1, 2. Erichthonios means "wool-strife-earth"
or, possibly, "from the land of heather," but the heather-country meaning may picture
the former meaning.
24. Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, "Nephthys," Vol 53, p. 100.
25. W in C, p. 259.
26. Anton Ehrenzweig, "The Origin of the Scientific and Heroic Urge," 30 International
Journal of Psychoanalysis (1949), 115.
27. See Eric Crew, "Thermal Equations of Venus," 3 Society Interdisc. Stud. Workshop 4
(Ap. 1981) 1-4.
28. See The Lately Tortured Earth and God's Fire surveying recent research on these
matters.
29. Lynn Rose, "Babylonian Observations of Venus," III Pensee no. I (Winter, 1973), pp.
18-22; C. J. Ransom and L. H. Hoffee, "The Orbits of Venus," " Ibid., 22-25.
30. E. Driscoll, Science News, 4 August 1973, p. 72; Andrew and Louise Young, "Venus,"
Scientific American, 233 (Sept. 1975), pp. 70, 78.
31. Ideas in Conflict (New York, 1966), p. 37.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY SWORDSMAN
A Homeric hymn addressed Ares:
"who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses through the
aether wherein your blazing steeds ever bear your above the third firmament of heaven."
[1]
Ares had many names and epithets in and among the peoples of the world. He is Mars of
the Romans, Nergal of the Babylonians, Gokihar (and Indra) of the Hindus, Odin of the
Teutons, Huitzilopochtili of the Aztecs, and the Archangel Gabriel of the Jews. In
Babylonia, writes P. F. Gossmann, he is Nergal, and also Era, Irra, and Death [2] .
Odin had over fifty names and epithets. This Gokihar of the Hindus was "born of the
wolf," was a "special disturber of the Moon," and became involved in yuddha, which in
ancient Hindu astronomy meant a clash of planets in conjunction [3] .
THE QUALITIES OF ARES
Ares, scholars typically assert, was the simplest character among the Olympian gods.
Ares means in Greek "male warrior." Eris, "strife," is his sister. He is bloodthirsty,
ruthless, warlike, fleet, ruddy, and, of course, well-muscled. He is drunken,
quarrelsome, impetuous, and a favorite lover of Aphrodite; he had a number of children
by her and other women.
"Rushing Stars" often appear to the vision as swords Ares seemed especially prone to the
sword. Velikovsky expounds the theme of the sword in the international background of
Ares. He quotes a hymn to Nergal:
Shine of horror, god Nergal, prince of battle, Thy face is glare, thy mouth is fire,
Raging Flame-god, god Nergal.
Thou art Anguish and Terror, Great Sword-god Lord who wanderest in the night, Horrible,
raging Flame-god... Whose storming is a storm flood [4] .
Of the Scythians, Solinus wrote: "The god of this people is Mars; instead of images they
worship swords." [5] . Herodotus tells that they sacrificed human beings and poured
their blood upon the sacred sword.
The Romans, sons of Mars, perfected their sword, a short, straight, double-edged steel
weapon with an obtuse-angled point. Their drill, their fighting formations, and their
tactics were based upon the sword in the hand of the legionnaire.
The male-chauvinist Greeks and Romans made Mars out to be a handsome athletic lover. He
both vanquished and loved Aphrodite-Venus. The sword is a phallic symbol by an easy
stretch of the imagination: a "dashing young blade" and "a swordsman" are used in
vernacular epithets today of the sexually eager pursuers of women.
Homer, pro-Athena, grants her the victory over Ares in his epics, but around the world,
Mars is victor more than vanquished because planet Athena never threatened Earth again
after the age of Mars. Ares was called "Alloprosallos" because he fought
indiscriminately, without principle, "on one side or the other."
We have pointed to Odysseus in his wanderings as the representative of Athena in her
planetary behavior over the centuries. It would be well to investigate Hercules as the
representative of Ares, performing an analogous set of tasks. Although his exploits find
him sometimes assisted by Athena and in opposition to Ares, he is said to be Mars
himself by Eratosthenes and Varro, the ancient commentators. Hercules, son of Zeus,
wanders and is directed over much of the world. He destroys Pylos; he captures Troy in a
preview of the Trojan War. At times he goes mad, explicitly so. His stories often do
parallel the probably older Babylonian Gilgamish, but his exploits are sometimes
transferred to the western regions where the Greeks have gone in large numbers. Indeed
Hercules is engaged in measuring the new dimensions of the world.
Hercules spawns the Heraclids who are identifiable with the Dorian invaders (reinvaders)
of post-Mycenaean Greek places in the period following the planetary disasters visited
upon earth in the eighth and seventh centuries. More than Odysseus, Hercules is one of
our crazed heroes of the catastrophic generation, just as his godhead is a cause of the
catastrophes.
Gods, like people, have different reputations depending upon whom you ask about them.
Priests, poets, and people - all have a say. Gods have a good side and a bad side. In
the case of Aphrodite - sheer beauty and concupiscence may pass for good in the later
Greek lexicon, whereas sheer irresponsibility denominates evil. In the case of Ares,
physical beauty combine with swift force on the good side; ruthless destructiveness
highlights the bad.
The terrible presence of Mars attended the birth of Rome and warranted him a longer and
more fateful career than the Greeks could afford him. The Judeans, striving for
monotheism, incorporated the visitations of Mars variously - now as a divine
intervention of the Lord (and the archangels) against the army of Sennacherib, blasting
it to death, then again as a divine retribution for a collective "immorality" that the
population and its rulers appeared to exhibit prior to each natural or human disaster
visited upon them [6] .
Good and bad traits of a god are, hence, a combination of what happened alike to a set
of cultures, what happened differently to them, and whether in either event what
happened chanced to be good or bad in its contemporary historical circumstances [7] .
Also, the fear of offending a god brought about the coinage of multiple names and
related gods, so that good and bad epithets might be buried in obscure and "innocent"
references.
THE FATAL WOUND
Let us examine more closely the present and possible prior condition of the "blood-
stained stormer of walls" as the Iliad called Ares. The state of Mars today is known not
only by means of transcribed legends, but by telescopes and space explorations.
Ancient history, myth, and theology have advised what to expect in general. They suggest
that Mars underwent severe electrical encounters and some exchanges of material
involving Venus, Moon and Earth. Its satellites entered the picture as the Steeds of
Mars, the Maruts, etc., terrifying "animals" or "angels" indeed, if we heed the ancient
accounts. J. Ziegler, a physicist interpreting the Hindu Vedas, finds the "Maruts" to be
electrical phenomena, or at least short-circuits and resistors for cosmic electricity
[8] .
The two satellites of Mars are rough rocks of small size. Today they are called Phobos
(fear) and Deimos (rout), names given to the steeds of Mars by the ancients. There is
some likelihood that, although they are invisible now, the ancients may have recognized
them [9] . Legend has it that they are the sons of Aphrodite . Hence we must raise the
possibility that they were engendered in the Love Affair, the lovers' last encounters.
Just as some mascons of the Moon may have been welded upon it by interplanetary
thunderbolts, the sons of Aphrodite and Mars may have been exploded from the Moon and
carried off by their father. They were part of a frightful bombardment of debris and
ball-lightning which Earth suffered in the days of the Vedas and the Hebrew Prophets
[10] .
Velikovsky wrote in 1950 that an atmosphere, now residual, existed on Mars and that
organic carbons may characterize the polar caps. Soviet sources now report that a
considerable proportion of the thin Martian atmosphere is of argon. Recent photographs
indicate that the polar caps, which advance and retreat seasonally, are composed of
solid carbon dioxide with possibly some ice beneath [11] . In Solaria Binaria, Milton
and I speculate that all planets have had experience with life forms. That the surface
of Mars was devastated beyond recognition and beyond any remaining possibility of
"higher" forms of life is consistent with the legendary damage done to the warrior god,
and also with the legend concerning the removal of Venus from an orbit that threatened
Earth.
As was remarked in Chapter Six, a heavy contamination of the carbon constant was noted
to have occurred in the 8th century B. C. This might result from several causes, granted
the near presence of Mars in the sky. Electrical and geological disturbances on Earth
and material and atmospheric exchanges among Earth, Moon and mars are suggested.
Electrical charges can assemble and disassemble molecules of many different types. As a
smaller planet, Mars was much larger than Moon and might devastate it, but be equally
devastated in turn by Earth. In the heavens, even more than among men, the larger force
strips the smaller.
The present features of Mars are becoming known and even give hints of what it might
have lost 3200 years ago. First its geosphere. The mariner IX flight (1972) that
provided year-long observations by camera in orbit provide evidence that, in
Velikovsky's words (1950), "Mars has been subjected to stress, heating and bubbling
activity in recent times." [12] . Also that hot spots of presumed radioactivity would
be found as evidences of electrical exchanges [13] . The cracks of Mars, concentrated
upon one face and along the equator, appeared quite fresh to the readers of its
photographs. Little erosion has occurred. It was as if, some said, a highly vigorous
water system had carved itself onto Mars' face and then all the water had been instantly
removed.
How fresh is "fresh"? No one will speak up, unless one has a prior theory (the
Velikovsky position). The uniformitarians are hesitant.
"One week?"
"Impossible, we would have photographed it."
"One century?"
"No, we would have observed something going on through our telescopes."
"One-two-three thousand years?"
"Events of this magnitude even then would have caused apparitions that are neither
recorded nor geologically possible if not observed."
"Apparitions were observed in the eighth and seventh centuries B. C. respecting Mars."
"That is astronomically impossible."
"Well, how fresh is fresh, then, do tell?"
"Fresh is millions of years. It has to be."
"What happened then?"
"We don't know, but we know that you cannot know either."
As Eugene Rabinowitch, physicist and editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists once
wrote, historical evidence is "inevitably tentative and often controversial matter."
[14] "I see.. Unlike historical geology."
The "erosion," "vulcanism," or devastation of Mars is most impressive, by earthly
standards. Its major feature consists of a canyon running along the equator for nearly
2200 miles in a sinuous line that brings the "crack" to 3300 miles. The canyon, called
Coprates, is over 300 miles wide near its center, and about 4 miles deep. Proceeding
beyond the canyon and various associated faults with the same general orientation, one
encounters "volcanoes" of massive diameters and great heights relative to earthly
experience. Nix Olympica, previously believed to be a crater, appears now to have a base
that is 300 miles wide and a 100-mile peak. The Island of Hawaii, the world's largest
volcano, can be easily lost in it, along with Fujiyama, Vesuvius, and Etna.
The response of the scientific establishment to the evidence produced by its own work
may have been predicted but is continually frustrating. It is not only that conventional
hypotheses are advanced, but that they are exclusively employed. For example, an article
by Bruce C. Murray in the Scientific American of January 1973 is possessed of full
documentation from the flight of Mariner IX and illuminated by all the graphic tools
that imagination and skillful hypothetical speculation might demand. The article
describes the enormous canyons and craters, and a number of features of the battered
Martian hemisphere.
But faced with the facts, the same author reverts to conventional theory. He accepts the
eternal, unchanging order of the heavens. He resorts to internal heat and vulcanism. He
wonders at the sudden burst of activity that must have erupted upon an earth-like
atmosphere and that produced canyons, craters, and liquid flows in dozens of meandering
rifts by a single event. Then a sudden freeze, et voil…, the present surface of Mars.
The author says he cannot believe this could happen but he is forced to believe in
miracle. The "waters" that "produced" the vast canyon and rift system are nowhere to be
found, nor is there evidence that they existed. Further, the "waters" would have existed
solely in one region of the Martian surface.
The claim is made that Mars has no magnetic field, yet the enormous dust storms that
howl over the planet go unexplained, too. The cameras of Mariner IX circled the planet
for weeks before the dust settled enough to photograph the surface. Now would not
cavities miles deep and many miles across, and craters that would contain cosily the
great cities of Earth offer a settling place for this dust? How does this dust pick
itself up and fly about the planet? And, if it is once up, and accelerated in a vacuous
atmosphere, whatever brings it down? It would seem reasonable to assume that the Martian
"atmosphere" is capable of regular electrical phenomena such as produce clouds, winds
and tides on Earth even if the constituent material is so humble as to be called "dust."
In fact, as Ralph Juergens has mentioned, airborne dust is an ideal medium in which to
"brew" electrical discharges [15] .
Nor, for that matter, is Murray perturbed by the fact that the carbon dioxide caps
photographed at the poles of Mars are a couple of hundreds of kilometers off center.
Here, again, is evidence of a tilting of the axis of the planet. The obvious hypothesis
is that Mars was intruded upon externally in recent times; and suffered an axial tilt.
The polar caps have not had time to reassemble around the true geographic poles.
Furthermore "Mariner 9's pictures also disclosed a most peculiar terrain in the south
polar area... It covers much of the south polar region up to about 70 degrees south
latitude. The laminated terrain is composed of very thick layers, alternately light and
dark, whose gently sloping faces exhibit a certain amount of texture, or relief." [16]
These "plates" are perhaps half a kilometer thick and up to 200 kilometers across, with
slopes that face outward. They exist only in the polar regions. They have few impact
craters.
To our eyes the feature appears as a frosting to a turning cake applied erratically by a
baker between filing orders, each layer flowing out and hardening before the next
diminished batch was poured over the center. In the wintertime of mars, the error is
partially concealed by a coating of carbon dioxide. These laminated plates may well
reflect a series of meltings of the Martian surface, produced concurrently with a series
of axial tilts. If in the six or seven near passes of Mars with Earth, the Earth's axis
tilted twice (or, for that matter, not at all), the possibility of more numerous changes
in the Martian axis of rotation would be greater.
However, there is also to be considered, given the thermal melting of the surface, the
possibility that a period of axial wobbling from a single blow would produce the "start-
stop" effect observable on the poured-out area. The thermal melting itself might have
been produced by the rush of electrons to the poles of Mars, when, with a negatively
charged surface, Mars approached other like-charged bodies, especially Moon,
equatorially; there the electrons would pour out into space inciting discharges upon
encounter with the positive ions that had been contained from them hitherto by a neutral
belt.
Whereupon we return to the main features of the devastation of "fiery, bridling" Mars:
the canyons and crater system. None of the hundreds of Mariner-watchers who have spoken
up under establishment sponsorship by the time these words are written have dared to
mention an external force. Much more is at stake for the human mind than a scientific
theory; Holy Dreamtime is threatened if a disorderly cosmos is recalled. Only a few non-
establishment scientists, almost exclusively sympathizers with the ideas of Velikovsky,
were quick to recognize how relevant were the materials of Mariner 9 to the theory of an
erratic cosmos.
Allan Kelly has described what may have happened to create the gigantic canyon of
Coprates. He had written, with Frank Dachille, a seminal book on comets and geology in
1953, and has lately come to regard close-encounter as important as collision in the
carving of planetary surface [17] . An "Intruder (much more massive than Mars) was
traveling in the same direction as Mars and in nearly the same direction as the Martian
rotation about its axis. This nearly parallel movement of the two bodies provided a
relatively long period of time in which the gravitational force could act... As the two
bodies approached each other, the gravitational power of the Intruder suddenly came to a
focus [we would say "arrived at a sufficient intensity"] on the surface of Mars, ripping
off the crust in a swirling motion beginning at the eastern end of the canyon called
Coprates." Mars was zipped open. The sinuous "unzipping" we would imagine to be the
effect of erratic jostling between Mars and the Intruder.
From the wound crustal material exploded and lava flowed. Possibly the satellites of
Mars, with their rough shapes, blew out at this time along with a stream of material
that was not recaptured. The metaphor of the unzippering of Mars reminds one of the
battle of the gods in the Iliad, when Pallas Athena charged Ares and cast her spear
"mightily against his nethermost belly," upon which "the brazen Ares bellowed loud as
nine thousand or ten thousand warriors cry in battle, when they join in the strife of
the Wargod." And Homer adds, marvelously, "Even as a black darkness appears from the
clouds when after heat a blustering wind arises, even thus... did brazen Ares appear as
he made his way among the clouds towards the sky."
As for the "volcanoes" of Mars, Kelly argues, these number twenty and all except one are
found along the same straight line, but at some distance from the unzippered canyon.
These Kelly explains as being created by related, gravitationally induced, explosions
produced as the Intruder pulled away from Mars.
In the Iliad (Books XX and XXI) we find additional details of the fighting between
Athena and Ares. Athena screams great war cries (one thinks of Wagner's Valkyrie). Ares
comes "spouting" against her, shrieking to his Trojans, and leaps at her with his spear,
driving it into her tasseled aegis. She gives ground, but smites him on the neck with a
huge rock that "loosed his limbs," or, as we say, "shook him from head to foot." When
Aphrodite tried to help him off the battlefield, she too was struck by the hand of
Athena and her heart melted.
Planet Athena-Venus was probably the Intruder that devastated Mars. The Earth, while
doing damage also, was too remote to have produced the Coprates complex. Yet it may be
incorrect to believe that the Coprates complex was a product of gravitational explosion
alone. Electrical forces were assisting. True, the point of minimal distance and weakest
material strength between two bodies would be the first disrupted area. But to overcome
the resistant gravitation of these two points inwards upon their parent body is not all
that is needed to cause material dislocation. At the protruding points, the chemical
bonding of the material would have to be overcome. That is, a rock is self-contained
hardly at all by its center of gravity, but is held together by the chemical ties among
its molecules. Otherwise mountains would flow down to the sea like water.
The Coprates complex exhibits the important qualities of the rilles of the Moon, which
the electrical theory of Juergens appears to explain. The zig-zag eruptions (also
explainable as "wobbling"), the sharp cleavages in the waterless environment, pointy
canyon bottoms, "river" valleys that stop in the middle of nowhere instead of by the
banks of a sea, and rilles that do not approach "volcanic" mountains close enough to
"drain" them of liquid are reasons to diagnose the "blood-stained stormer of walls" as a
victim of electrical as well as of gravitational disruption.
Therefore, probably both Moon and Mars were affected during the Love Affair by
electrical discharges building on gravitational pulls. These were sufficient to soften
and break the chemical bonds of many places on both spheres. Such, at least, is the
terminology I am using in this book. Elsewhere, most prominently in Solaria Binaria, I
join with Earl R. Milton in an exclusively electrical formulation of interactions
between large bodies. We find that the concept of gravitation is no longer needed, in
accounting for the transactions.
From all over the world, a small collection of peculiar meteoritic stones has been
collected over the past hundred and fifty years, half of which were originally seen to
fall from the sky, none of them anywhere near active volcanos. Lately, examinations have
been made of the rocks by new techniques, and they have been deemed to have originated
from Mars. A high content of mineral maskelynite along with crystals of augite,
indicates that they were originally igneous feldspar and later were converted by an
explosion or impact that did not melt them. Their chemical composition is "unlike that
of any known Moon rock," reports S. P. Maran [18] . The clouds of Venus would prevent
such material from escaping. The rocks are young with respect to the time of impact
(assigned 180 m/ y), and they could not be part of the asteroid belt because the
asteroids are supposed to be much older and a large one would have to explode more
recently producing a great many more small rocks of the same age than have been
observed. Io, the explosive Jupiter satellite, is dismissed because it appears to have
much more sulphur in its constitution than these so-called SNC meteorites. "The tests
reveal that the meteorite's content of neon, argon, krypton, and xenon, and especially
the relative amounts of two isotopes of argon and two isotopes of xenon, have an uncanny
resemblance to the relative abundances of these gases as measured in the Martian
atmosphere by the Viking Landers." There is an equally good match with the chemical
composition of Martian soils.
"Mars would accordingly appear to be the parent body of the SNC meteorites," writes
Maran, "but how did they get from there to here? Alternative theories are, first,
collision, but the heat of such would have melted the rocks when they separated from the
parent body, or, second, a glancing encounter with an obliquely approaching body that
pulled off rock fragments in its vapor stream without melting them." This problem is not
serious, it seems to the present author. Furthermore, to these two mechanical theories
may be added electrical effects: lightning strokes can pull up material from the ground
without melting it; so can tornadoes which are closely related to lightning phenomena; I
discuss such matters in The Lately Tortured Earth.
As expected, the dates given to these episodes by the investigators are uniformly far
older than the mere 2700 years of which we speak in Moon and Mars. Still, within their
very old framework, the SNC meteorites "represent notable exceptions," to all other
extraterrestrial ages, 1.3 b/ y instead of 4.5 b/ y. Also, the shock waves that produced
the maskelynite are dated only 180 b/ y. In the grossly short-time perspective of the
Quantavolution Series, the .180 b/ y figure would be 2700 y and the 1.3 b/ y figure
would be between .5 and 1 m/ y.
As to whether the Earth or Venus was the wounder of Mars, Venus seems the more likely,
astrophysically as well as historically. The evidences of change and destruction on
Earth, although great, are less than those of its earlier encounters with Venus.
Furthermore its motions changed less than did those of Mars and Venus. Tentatively
Venus-Hephaestus is designated as the assailant.
More will be said on this subject later on, in pondering "How the Gods Fly." For now, it
is proposed that the main encounter devastated Mars - that it was caused by Venus, that
an enormously long venting fissure and holes opened up, and that it was recent. Too, the
blow was forceful enough to change any and/ or every motion that characterized Mars
beforehand.
Furthermore, the Martian surface and atmosphere may have been quite different before
this particular incident, as before the series of incidents with Venus, Moon, and Earth
that Mars experienced. It probably vented poisonous carbon dioxide clouds through the
Earth's atmosphere, in association with electrical discharges, resulting in occasional
episodes of mass asphyxiation such as I have cited in The Lately Tortured Earth. It may
also have lost a considerable atmosphere, a soil (that precious few feet upon which all
terrestrial life depends) and a hydrosphere (on which all marine life depends).
Apart from signs and remnants of these features, the planet Mars has been reduced to a
naked force, resembling what the Greeks thought of Ares as a god, a narrow-minded
compulsively destructive force whose solitary spark of sensitivity was reflected in the
perverse love that Aphrodite bore for him. But virtue triumphed:
"Behold on wrong Swift vengeance waits...
... and the god of arms Must pay the penalty for lawless charms."
Notes (Chapter 11: The Blasted Career of the Mighty Swordsman)
1. Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard U. Press, Loeb edition, 1950), p. 433.
2. Das Era-Epos (Wurzburg, 1956).
3. W in C, p. 256.
4. W in C, p. 261.
5. Ibid., p. 263.
6. W in C, Part II, Chapter 1.
7. See the author's The Divine Succession (1983).
8. Manuscript kindly lent to the author for reading, 1982.
9. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 279-80.
10. Ibid.
11. Bruce C. Murray, "Mars from Mariner 9," The Scientific American, January, 1973, p.
60.
12. Worlds in Collision, 36-5, 367-8.
13. Ibid., 368.
14. Actually in a letter to the author, June 23, 1964.
15. Letter to the author, Oct. 27, 1973.
16. Bruce Murray, p. 60.
17. The early work was Target: Earth (1953); the present account is based upon an
unpublished paper kindly furnished the author by Mr. Kelly.
18. "Rocks from Mars," Sky Reporter, 36-9, 38.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE LAUGHING GODS
When Hephaestus roared out his anguish and humiliation at being cuckolded, he demanded
that "Father Zeus and all you other eternal and blessed gods come here to see for
yourself this laughable, this unyielding truth." But not all the gods came to gaze upon
the trapped "embedded" couple at his copper-floored house. There came Poseidon, Hermes,
and Apollo, all three being important Olympian sky gods.
From Father Zeus came only silence. He deigned neither to appear nor to return the
bride-price that Hephaestus had paid him. The "gifts of wooing" were unlike the gifts of
Ares to Aphrodite; they were injuries received, not injuries given. Most of the gods had
"taken their lumps" from the Father, from time to time.
To imagine Zeus upon the scene could only occur to the raving Hephaestus. He is not to
be called upon for a laughable matter. Indeed, the presumptuousness of calling upon him
is comic. The scene would become too heavy, the literary critic would say, if Zeus
should appear. Besides, Zeus was in truth absent. In the tragic setting of the Trojan
War, Zeus had been engaged, acting to preserve the balance of power so as to work out
the preordained plot, arbitrating, mediating. Still he is remarkably aloof, even there,
his thunderbolts remembered by gods and men alike, but held in a kind of nuclear
missiles reserve. His deeds were deeply etched upon human memory but physically he was
receding into the far skies.
Why then, would Hermes, Apollo, and Poseidon make an appearance?
MERCURY
Hermes does not enter upon the action, As the planet Mercury, he may have been in a
conjunction with one or more of the principles, in which event he may have vented some
unusual expression. He may have presented an apparition at the time. For the scene may
not have had the celestial clarity in the actuality that it achieved in the dancing
circle. In a time of storm, of darkness and ashes, of lightning strokes, of different
visual and acoustical perspectives - especially at the climax of the celestial
disturbances - it is possible that a convocation of the gods was perceived.
Perhaps Mercury appeared as an optical illusion and also as a re-engagement of memory,
as both crisis and the memory of crisis struck hammer blows upon the mind and, later on,
made demands upon the unconscious to recreate the "pluperfect" along with the "perfect."
Venus was there; Mercury had been there, too. The climax of tension produces in the mind
both memories overlaid.
The fourth day of the month in Greece was sacred jointly to Aphrodite and Hermes,
celebrating a game of dice between Moon and Hermes, the outcome of which added five days
to the year, bringing it from 360 to 365 days. (The legend is probably of Egyptian
origin.) In my book of Chaos and Creation (1981), Mercury was assigned a period of heavy
worship between 2200 and 1500 B. C., that is, up to the Exodus, when Athena-Venus became
the cynosure of Earthly eyes. M. Mandelkehr has more recently informed me of several
additional authoritative sources who found Thoth active throughout the Old Kingdom of
Egypt, and points out that his ibis symbol existed even before dynastic times [1] .
One should not be astonished by the implication that the planet Mercury had inflicted
its presence upon Earth. Other volumes of the Quantavolution Series have explored this
possibility in detail. The natural history of Mercury is significantly marked by its
appearance earlier as a most prominent god in the succession of gods. Its physical
composition and size resemble the Moon's; the two bodies possess, too, with one of Zeus'
satellites, an odd angular momentum. Like the Moon, it has suffered heavy bombardment
from space.
Called by different names in different cultures, he was represented often by various
animals, especially by monkeys, in Egypt for instance, among the Gauls, and in India.
Hanuman, the Indian monkey-god, once became as resplendent as the sun and moved whole
mountains. The planet is suspected of having played a major role in the destruction of
the Tower of Babel; there in Babylon it was called Nebo and emperors carried his name in
theirs. A Jewish legend says that the survivors of the disaster and fire were turned
into monkeys. The recollection may have arisen from a gibberish, the confounding of
tongues, following upon mass electroshock; it may also have pertained to many
physiognomic changes by mutations or congenital defects [2] .
As a god, Hermes has more than a touch of the Moon's irresponsibility. He is fleet,
perhaps because his solar orbit is shortest of the planets. He is the lucky god of
gamblers, the messenger, the robber, the friendly night. He leads downwards into Styx
and upwards into heaven (as a planet rises and sets). He guides the flocks. He is a
helper, a healer; he is - writes Otto - Priapus, Tychon, and Perseus. He may have
inspired Moses as scientist and electrician. He caries a snake-entwined rod, nowadays
the symbol of healing medicine. He is younger than Apollo, older than Athena.
He can laugh. His responsibility here is as spectator, apparition, and "extra" brought
in to reinforce the climax of the story with more bodies. But he not only laughs. He
speaks several significant lines. Asked by his older brother "would you really be
willing, despite being tightly netted, to couch yourself alongside golden Aphrodite?"
Hermes replies that he would gladly be witnessed by the gods and goddesses and suffer
twice as many fetters for the pleasure of Aphrodite's love.
Perhaps, then, he is reminiscing; perhaps once upon a time he, too, had enjoyed the
devastating experience.
"Again the laughter arose among the immortal gods." Unless Mercury was laughing at his
own joke, Apollo must have been laughing alone. In two places, the poet has more gods
laughing that appear to be present and in a laughing mood. It is possible that several
dancers are emulating unidentified minor gods or the idea of collective divine laughter.
APOLLO
Apollo, himself, is always a character of ambiguity and mystery. We have an abundant
mythology about Apollo, from several cultures, but he has never been placed among the
heavenly bodies, except that, for lack of better, and because he is "shining", he is
commonly identified with the Sun [3] . But most, if not all, of his Sun-identity comes
later in the history of mythology, and much of this ascription is readily traceable to
an effort to clear the skies of gods.
Apollo earlier commanded greater respect and fear than did the Sun. He was the god of
prophecies, of music, the archer-god, the source and also healer of plagues. He showers
rocks and poisonous airs as well as arrows upon humans who have incurred his enmity. He
has an aloof, judicious temperament. He does not interfere in the Love Affair but plays
the minimal role of lending his presence and posing a question to his younger brother.
In the Iliad, at one point, he disdained a challenge to personal combat.
If Hermes is a subconscious memory of an apparition which itself is the subconscious
memory of an earlier celestial appearance, Apollo may be the same. But he may be even
more so, as I explain in Chaos and Creation. Unlike Hermes, who existed in the sky as
the planet Mercury, Apollo most probably did not then exist in the sky at all. He may
represent a lost planet, a destroyed planetary body of an earlier age. He may be the
belt of asteroids between mars and Jupiter, whose existence has from time to time been
premised upon a previously existing body that disintegrated upon the approach of Jupiter
or another intersecting mass [4] .
Apollo's traits befit vanishing and disintegrated behavior. Plague, arrows and
prophecies have in common a widespread incidence of discrete events upon individuals. In
addition, Apollo acts from a distance. Murray, in one of his few interpellations,
explains his translation of an Apollonian ephitet as "the archer god" by adding "or,
possibly, 'the averter of ills. ' The word means literally, 'he who works afar. '" [5]
Apollo is a retired and disoccupied god, Deus Otiosus; he is a god who works as a ghost
presence.
Apollo has been moved in myth closer to the events of which we speak, for he is the
slayer of the monster serpent Python. Python, says Graves, is none other than Typhon
[6] , hence to us a form of Hephaestus. But Graves is probably mistaken, for the Python
incident seems to have been an earlier analog, following the death of Saturn (Osiris).
So we use it here to explain further how the presence of Apollo at the Love Affair
climax was subconsciously prompted. The closeness of the names strengthened the
suggestibility of Apollo's presence, and originally Typhon may have been named out of a
wordplay with echo of the more ancient Python case.
There is yet another hint of Apollo's presence. If he does represent the asteroids, if
he does pelt the earth with various small missiles and gases, then the disintegration of
the cometary tail of Venus-Hephaestus, not to mention the material exchanges occurring
among other bodies, would prompt the subconscious memories of Apollo and bring him into
the climactic scene of the opera.
POSEIDON
Poseidon is present, "yet did not laugh." He is disturbed, impatient, persistent. He
wants Hephaestus to set Ares free. He offers to guarantee Ares' just debts as an
adulterer.
Hephaestus at first refuses: "Don't ask this of me, Poseidon, You're sure to be sorry if
you give bond for a miserable rascal. And how would it be among the gods, if Ares should
escape both his fetters and his debt and I should have to bind you instead?"
Poseidon is etymologically "master of the earth." He is the sea and the mover of Earth.
Here now, he insists. "Even should he avoid his debt and flee, I shall pay for him."
Hephaestus cannot refuse. "It is not permitted me to say 'no', nor would it be proper."
Why? Is this mere politeness, to move the plot along? But a plot in literature is as
determined by psychology as falling rock by gravity. Is it respect for a feared uncle,
brother of Zeus? Hephaestus once sympathized with a rebellion against Zeus; he is
clamorously angry at his parents now. No; the end is foreseen because that is the way it
happened in nature. Hephaestus cannot command the planetary gods. They move ultimately
in freedom according to their natures.
So the fetters were loosed and the freed pair sprang up and off. Poseidon has reason to
feel relieved, although he is still in bondage to Hephaestus.
Poseidon is here a representation of Earth. He is the masculine of the Earth-Goddess.
Before the Olympians came the Earth-gods. The Earth Gods were female, as Erinyes in
Aeschylus' Orestes. In Sophocle's Antigone, the chorus chants of Gaia, "the eldest of
the gods, the eternal and inexhaustible earth".
Poseidon, says Graves, is lord of the seas and the Earth-shaker, but is always greedy to
possess himself of land, if by no other way, then by loosing floods upon it.
The "Love Affair" threatens turbulence for both land and seas. Poseidon is the only god
to fit the role, and the plot might have had to be completely redesigned if the role
were absent. Besides, the evidence of the ancient accounts and of the calendrists and
geologists lend confidence in the designation of Poseidon and Earth.
Michael G. Reade, in a brilliant study of perplexing perturbations registered in the
famous "Ramesside Star Tables" of Egypt, has fixed the critical year to which they refer
as around -700, about the time of our Love Affair. It would be the time of the Trojan
War, too, when Homer says, as Lattimore translates the line (p. 405), Poseidon
"shuddered all illimitable Earth, the sheer heads of mountains." We quote Reade's
conclusions.
"... the axis of the earth was forced out of its hitherto normal alignment with the
stars at a season shortly after the summer solstice... the displacing force was a
sustained one rather than a shock... it was associated with an acceleration in the spin
rate of the earth... the effects of the disturbance were in many respects only
temporary... the axis of the earth did eventually drift back in the same attitude with
respect to the fixed stars (subject to a minor discontinuity in the precession of the
equinoxes)..." (IV S. I. S. R. 213 1979-80, 49.)
Any such disturbance in the motion of the Earth would have caused earthquakes,
volcanism, tidal movements, and atmospheric turbulence.
Poseidon has reason to feel surly and "put upon." It is Earth that has suffered
devastation in these sky-battles. This is no laughing matter. Earth has had to change
its calendars. Its cities have been battered, its plains flooded, its skies filled with
poisons and ashes, its magnetic field has been reversed [7] . Earth will chance future
disaster at the hands of cometary Venus if Venus will only deliver it from Mars.
Besides, the Moon is with Earth. If Hephaestus-Venus lays claim to Moon, that is one
thing, a claim long experienced. If Mars now claims Moon, that is another thing, a
serious conflict indeed. Already, the Moon may have been drawn away from Earth. It would
be noticeably smaller.
Earth-Poseidon is put in the sky, as a sky-god. This should not cause surprise. he was
born brother of Zeus and son of Chronos (Saturn), and assigned Earth, when Zeus received
Heaven and Hades the underground. Earth was immemorially conceived as an entity, a
unity, a being. Further, even the idea of Earth as a space-ship, like the other gods,
had been developed in a number of pre-Homeric cultures. The sense of the instability,
the changeability, the restlessness of Earth affected Homeric and pre-Homeric humanity
much more profoundly than it affected mankind more recently.
To the Greeks, as expressed in Plato's writing, the Earth was an organism, alive, as the
planets and stars were alive. In conceiving of this state of affairs, modern man might
not simply imagine that it was alive simply because it was covered with live plants and
animals but that it was full of gods (as Thales said), alive as a whole, breathing and
moving as the Mother Earth Goddess. Poseidon, her counterpart, was masculine, but so was
the god-earth of Egypt, Geb. This conviction was a sensual impression, not a metaphor
and was born out of thrashings, twistings and turnings, and from transformations for
which people have today only the barest of sensitivity.
So the song has the Earth siding with the lesser of two evils to retain the Moon, to
settle peace upon the Moon-path and thence to tranquillize its own way through the
skies.
HELIOS
Helios is not present among the laughing gods and there is no reason why he must be.
There are so many differences between the Sun and the sky gods that one must continually
suspect mythological claims that assimilate their identities to him.
Helios is an everyday herald, a routine chariot-driver of the sunlight. Whatever
importance late historical man may ascribe to his life-giving powers, he did not
contribute significantly to the development of the human mind and soul in the Homeric
age. A Homeric hymn begins "tireless Helios who is like the deathless gods," and ends,
"now that I have begun with you, I will celebrate the race of mortal men, half-divine."
[8]
Something of the passive incapacity of the Sun is revealed in another place in the
Odyssey. Helios, when his cattle are stolen and eaten by the sailors of Odysseus,
exclaims: "Father Zeus and you other happy and eternal gods, I call on you to punish the
followers of Odysseus, son of Laertes. They have had the insolence to kill my cattle,
the cattle that gave me such joy every day as I climbed the sky to put the stars to
flight and as I dropped from heaven and sank once more to earth. If they do not repay me
in full for my slaughtered cows, I will go down to Hades and shine among the dead."
"Sun," the Cloud-gatherer answered him, "Shine on for the immortals and for mortal men
on the fruitful earth. As for the culprits, I will soon strike their ship with a
blinding bolt out of the dark-wine sea and break it to bits." That is, the Sun must keep
to his course. Only the great gods fly freely. Helios must use the gods for his needs.
Graves reminds us that "Helios was not even an Olympian, but a mere Titan's son; and,
although Zeus later borrowed certain solar characteristics from the Hittite and
Corinthian god Tesup and other oriental sungods, these were unimportant compared with
his command of thunder and lightning."
Further, Graves tells us, "The Sun's subordination to the Moon, until Apollo usurped
Helius's place and made an intellectual deity of him, is a remarkable feature of early
Greek myth [9] . It appears that the herds of Helios are numbered by lunar multiples,
that "cattle are lunar rather than solar animals in early European myth", and that
"Helius's mother, the coweyed Euryphaessa, is the Moon-goddess herself." [10]
"Thessalian witches used to threaten the Sun, in the Moon's name, with being engulfed by
perpetual night." [11]
A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR
When the gods are no longer near enough to be recognized as dwellers in their celestial
homes, the age of philosophy begins. They are assigned to a mundane abode or relegated
to astrology and denigrated. A Mount Olympus is provided, together with such local
vacation places, you might say, that they favor for rest, recreation, rehabilitation,
and retreat. The gods must be kept nearby. It is well enough for astrologers to watch
remote planets and to bank their fears and hope thereupon, but for most people,
displacement of the gods upon more familiar grounds is preferable.
For humanity can suffer great fear, but it is an animal with a formidable physiology for
converting fear into intelligence and power. Much of the complexity of theology is the
rationalization of how the powerless, the misbehaving and the ashamed can nevertheless
infiltrate their will into the almighty and the all-knowing, living a successful
perennial paradox. By the time of Homer, men are beginning to strut, to smile grimly, to
mutter innuendoes. Hybris?
This laughter of the gods has puzzled ages of scholars and schoolboys. However, the gods
jest with each other. They do not laugh at pathetic, troubled, insubordinate, vicious or
the occasionally happy human beings. Nor do humans indirectly laugh at the gods. The
sight of the gods in good humor is still a sacred sight. One of the means that enable
the plot of the Love Affair to come off so well is the absence of humans in the cast.
This precludes a dangerous conflict of interests; one need not fear the overstepping of
bounds.
Which is not to say that the audience is not laughing at the gods. It is, but by the
completely safe psychological technique of displacement and projection. The Greek sense
of humor, itself derived from the way its theomachy is constructed, writes into the
gods' behavior what they would laugh at in themselves and at the same time feels
dissociated from that behavior by its imputation to sacred character. Therefore, the
audience may have laughed as the dancers and singer spun out the humor; more likely they
marveled, were fascinated, and thought of themselves as receiving moral instruction from
the gods.
The humor itself - the laughing at the discomfiture of Ares and Aphrodite, at the
insulted dignity of the insultable Hephaestus, and at the desirability of committing the
same crime if one could (spoken in the very presence of the injured party) - this falls
readily into the category of sadistic and savage humor. Except that we do not understand
the genesis of humor very well yet.
Two major contributors to the theory of humor are Sigmund Freud and Arthur Koestler.
Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious explains a joke as the subconscious
prevention of a wish from completing its natural aim. For that aim is tabooed or
aggressively hostile or tragic. Hence the mind switches onto a parallel track that
unexpectedly carries it to a conclusion of minimal threat.
In Act of Creation, Koestler insists, besides, that both humor and creativity rest upon
hidden associations. These associations are inharmonious. They are wrestled into contact
with one another in a double frame of meanings that resolve into a synthesized single
frame with a new more acceptable meaning.
Since the whole of the Love Affair proceeds on a double level of meanings, two sets of
mental events that lead to humorous resolutions may occur, or six in all, because there
are three mentions of laughter.
For the Love Affair, Hephaestus is first to confess the laughable. It is that he should
be victimized for his born disabilities. On the overt level, the threat is that he will
prove false assurances of fidelity had been given him when he married Aphrodite. The
expected and feared result is that he will prove these false assurances and gain an
undeserved right. The situation is to be resolved humorously, laughably, as Hephaestus
himself confesses in advance, because other people actually will see that he has been
denied his rights despite his assurances.
Covertly, Hephaestus is threatening to possess the Moon himself, though rather
impotently. The danger is nevertheless that the Moon will go beyond all bounds in losing
its free and irrepressible spirit. However, all will gather to see that the assurances
are denied of their validity.
There was probably also amusement, though not named as laughter, in calling upon all the
gods to appear. Nothing would be less funny in the play or more tragic in reality than
the coming of Zeus, the father of gods. Fortunately "everyone knows" that Zeus is not
likely to intervene in such a ridiculous affair. Hence, humor. In fact, Zeus does not
appear. Again, comic relief.
Next, the gods laugh as they see how "swiftness," speeding to its rendezvous, is
unexpectedly and ignominiously trapped by "craft." Here the overt thrust of the action
is that Ares is bound to steal a love. It is expected that he will succeed. But he is in
fact trapped. Covertly, Mars is moving towards the ravaging of Moon and Earth. The fear
is that he will succeed. The comic release follows when he is trapped and exposed to
view by the public of gods.
Then the gods laugh because Hermes gives an unexpected and amoral answer to a question
about himself. Apollo asks whether he would agree to such fetters if he might lie with
Aphrodite and Hermes answers that he would accept thrice as many bonds for the pleasure
it would give him. Here the thrust is towards repeating the adultery. The expectation is
that he will falsely deny it. Instead he affirms it, but does so "harmlessly." The
covert parallels are that Mercury too now (as once) is invited to ravage Moon and Earth.
The result expected is that the disasters will continue; instead the memory is affirmed
while the future possibility is dismissed. There are here, in effect, four types of
joke. But in all there are four overt thrusts leading to expected disappointments; four
covert thrusts leading to subconsciously feared disasters; and eight triumphs of evasion
leading to laughter.
So then a conclusion is manifest, in general, regarding laughter: that the formula of
laughter is ipso facto satisfied when laughter occurs, but an audience will laugh only
when a threshold of anxiety has been reached. Also, laughability (and its companion, the
plotting of laughability by a jester) is moral one in which criteria of savagery,
vulgarity, virtuosity, and sophistication enter. To know when to joke is to know when to
harm; to know how to joke is to know how to dodge the larger harm - which is to say that
high wit and laughter become a property of morals and genius.
Notes (Chapter 12: The Laughing Gods)
1. E. A. W. Budge: Osiris, The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection, (Univ. Books, 1961),
pp. 81-3; J. Bonwick: Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought, (Falcon's Wing Press, 1956),
pp. 101-2; R. T. R. Clark: Myth & Symbol in Ancient Egypt, (Thames & Hudson, 1959), pp.
124-6; D. B. Redford: "The Sun-Disc in Akneton's Program: Its Worship & Antecedents I",
Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 13 (1976), p. 57; Cambridge
Ancient History, Third Edition, Vol. 1, Part 2 Early History of the Middle East, p. 53.
2. Hugh Eggleton, "Mercury and the Tower of Babel," V Society for Interdisciplinary
Studies Workshop 2 (1982-3) 10-1; and see the present author's God's Fire, Chaos and
Creation, and The Lately Tortured Earth.
3. See discussion by R. A. Herring and others in 2 Society Interdisc. Stud. Workshop 4
(april, 1980) and subsequent issues.
4. Cf. Fritz Heide, Meteorites, 1957, trans. by E. Anders and E. Dufrense. (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 130, and Solaria Binaria.
5. Op. Cit., p. 281.
6. Op. cit., Apollo used a bow and arrows fabricated by Hephaestus, ibid., 21. a. We
must suppose this is an incidental mythical reversal of time. for Hephaestus, we reason,
is active later than, unless he earlier participated in, the events of Apollo's life and
death.
7. Science News (Penguin Publications, July 1949). Manley discusses the reversal of the
Earth's magnetic field as evidenced in Attic and Etruscan pottery of the eight century.
The reversals, cited in Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1955) p. 283, seem to have been a
temporary phenomenon resulting from "The Battle of the Space Sheaths;" See below pages
265ff.
8. "Homeric Hymns," no. XXXI, contained in the Loeb edition of Hesiod, p. 459.
9. Graves, I. 156.
10. Ibid., 156-7.
11. Ibid., I, 13 citing Apuleius, Metamorphoses iii, 16.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HOW THE GODS FLY
My readers, who thus far have been kind enough to loose me on a long tether, have
probably been conducting their own more restrained examination of the events being
discussed. I suppose that I can rely upon their achieving a certain respect for the
connections shown between gods, skies, Earth, and the audience of Demodocus. Reviewing
their own information, they will have recalled that a great part of human activity,
especially in earlier times, has gone into watching the skies, relating the movements
and events there to human affairs and celebrating the connections by religious
observances, astronomical observations, fairy tales, song, and dance. They would readily
acknowledge the occasional episodes of conjunctions of planets, earthquakes, clouds of
volcanic dust, lightning storms, and cometary apparitions; these they might think are
adequate to explain the celestial imitations occurring in the Love Affair. More than
this may be in their opinion unnecessary and probably untrue. Indeed, the reader may
feel that every step that I take to tighten the correspondence between a sky episode and
dramatic poem and dance becomes less believable until finally every step become false.
"Let well enough alone !" would be their advice.
I grant that this liberal view may be correct, and that I should be thankful for it and
that in pursuing my radical exercise I am constructing a model of the absurd.
Nevertheless, I shall proceed, on and on, until if I fail to validate the relationship
between the scenarios of drama and disaster, I shall have opened up new lines of thought
about ancient history, dramaturgy, religion, human memory, and the psychology of the
unconscious. Whereupon, since the cast of characters in the "Love Affair" is composed of
celestial bodies, it needs to be explained how they can move about in the skies as they
moved in the opera theater of ancient Phaeacia. The movements of the scenario should be
translated into astrophysics. One will encounter three major problems. The first, which
has been dealt with in Part One and will be treated again later on, is to discover and
justify the movements of the plot as being the movements to be traced in the sky. How
strictly must one be able to follow the scenario in the sky in order to accept its
general validity? Up to a point, it is excusable to perceive a physically impossible
movement; myth and dream, in the interest of censoring content and creating an aesthetic
experience, may have Hephaestus-Venus, for example, doubling back on the "celestial
bedroom" too quickly for any conceivable physics to account for. On the other hand,
suppose that Ares-Mars had flown off to Cyprus with Aphrodite there to be reunited with
her. This would present an obstacle to credulity, although there are some twenty-eight
movements, and "one swallow doesn't make a summer." The whole set of movements must be
nevertheless both necessary and possible leaving only an occasional screening anomaly to
be justified by causes outside of astrophysics and astronomy.
Secondly, there is the problem of apparent movements of celestial bodies. The
Phaeacians, proud of their navigational skills, will nevertheless have set the story on
a flat stage, a platform of the celestial map of the vault of heaven emplaced upon the
platform Poseidon-Earth. They will have been perceiving apparent speeds, flattened
orbits when the bodies were close-in, apparent sizes that would not make allowances for
distances in space. How great a problem is presented by the semblances, as opposed to
the reality, of vision of bodies in outer space, remains to be seen. Although the best
of ancient astronomers struggled to actuate the apparent frame in their observations and
calculations, still the Phaeacians may have carried an astronomical sense from extremely
ancient times. That the Earth is round has been discovered and forgotten several times.
The measured circle of the dance and the Coda Dance of the Purple Ball are suggestive of
many early theories of the vault and dome of heaven.
The problem is that of translating apparent motion into acceptable and probable real
motions. If one cannot offer an explanation of the movement of the scenario that is
respectable, even if controversial, as a working hypothesis in astrophysics, then the
credibility of the structure here established will slump. Accordingly, after discussing
the movements of the scenario, we shall consider in the section on "Electro-mechanics of
the Gods" certain theories of astrophysics under development today, and use them to
explain the events of the Love Affair.
Another indulgence is besought. Consider, for a moment, that there are five bodies plus
considerable debris whose matter, motions, and positions are to be accounted for. Each
body has orbital and rotational motions that provide its angular momentum; it has
orbital distances from the sun and the other bodies, orbital speed, and mass. It has
volume. It has rotational speed. It possesses an angle to the ecliptical plane, and an
axis of rotation at an angle to that plane. It has a magnetic field. These still do not
include "minor" eccentricities, such as the fact that the shape of the moon reveals
three "remnant" asymmetries, or that the earth is swollen at its equator and flattened
at its poles. More ominously, the other planets, notably Jupiter, are excluded from the
scenario.
Consider, too, that each property of a body may have an effect, provided it changes,
upon all these other properties of its own body and upon any one or all of the
properties of the remaining four bodies. The number of possible combinations of changed
motions - taken in the bare qualitative sense of change, not as a quantitative set of
relations that would give us azimuth readings or particle counts - will be (pardoning
the metaphor) astronomical.
From one moment of time to another, one state of affairs may transform into another. It
is as if one had come upon a round billiard table with five balls already struck and in
motion at each its own speed. Each is of different size, each is capable of a change in
its volume; each is spinning at a different rate and angle to the board; each possesses
a magnetic field of different size and intensity that is capable of change, plus a
changeable electric charge; each is drawn invisibly and is electrically related to the
center of the board (the Sun).
If commanded to describe the scene, one might pray to God to restore order immediately
by sending the bodies into non-intersecting circle moving around the center of the board
according to a single law of gravity and with unchangeable speeds. Failing this, one
might invoke the most skillful mathematicians and latest computers to tell us what is
happening. But they would be distressed by the lack of data. "Give us some benchmarks,"
they would plead, "Give us parameters." At which point one would have to offer some
fuzzy archaic snapshots with their double and triple exposures saying; "Here you are. We
must do the best we can with them."
Thirdly, concerning how the gods may fly, is the problem of power to change all the
motions involved in the scenario. Briefly, the gods fly by electrically assisted
inertial power, gravitationally maintained. This, too, requires explanation, much more
than what can be supplied here.
THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO
The group's dance in the measured circle that precedes the song is intended to indicate
the celestial and sacred nature of the story. It is not counted here as a spatial event.
Nor is the Dance of the Purple Ball that follows the story. In general, the scenes are
brilliantly lit, 'Phaeacia, ' 'Hephaestus, ' 'brazen, ' 'copper, ' 'golden, ' 'sparks, '
'bronze, ' and 'blazing' are among the metaphorical suggestions of light; brilliance is
carried as the 28th movement or change.
The "Love Affair" proper gives the following spatial changes. They are listed in the
order in which they occur.
1. Secret copulation of Ares and Aphrodite in the house and bed of Hephaestus.
2. Ares gives gifts to Aphrodite 3. Helios moves past their bed.
4. Helios passes and reports to Hephaestus
5. Hephaestus goes to his smithy.
6. Hephaestus places his anvil on the block and hammers out fetters in his smithy.
7. Hephaestus goes to his house and bed.
8. Hephaestus spreads the net from ceiling and bed posts.
9. Hephaestus moves towards Lemnos.
10. Ares is moving towards house and bed.
11. Aphrodite goes from Zeus presence to house.
12. Ares arrives at house after Aphrodite does, and speaks to her. He reaches out for
her hands.
13. Ares and Aphrodite copulate in the bed.
14. Ares and Aphrodite are paralyzed.
15. Helios passes by their bed.
16. Helios approaches Hephaestus and reports to him.
17. Hephaestus moves to the doorway of the house and stops.
18. Hephaestus shouts terribly to the gods.
19. Poseidon arrives at doorway and pauses, disturbed.
20. Hermes arrives at doorway and pauses.
21. Apollo arrives at doorway and pauses.
22. Hermes and Apollo laugh, jest and draw conclusions.
23. Poseidon argues with Hephaestus and gives guarantees.
24. Hephaestus strikes off the fetters.
25. Ares flies to Thrace.
26. Aphrodite flies to Cyprus.
27. Aphrodite is bathed and anointed.
28. Overall and repeated brilliance.
Let us classify these movements, following their temporal sequence in the scenario and
retaining their given numbers. When a movement is appropriate to more than one category,
it is carried more than once. At this point we shall also change to astronomical names.
1. The first category of movement includes all passages of bodies through space. In
astronomical terms, we are speaking of the relative motions of these bodies in the
terrestrial sky. The left-hand numbers correspond to the list of spatial changes above.
3 Sun passes Mars and Moon
4 Sun moves and passes Venus FIRST
5 Venus moves to a false setting DAY
7 Venus moves to Moon and Mars apparent orbital rendezvous location
9 Venus moves to a second false setting
11 Moon moves to rendezvous location NIGHT
10 / 12 Mars moves to rendezvous location
15 Sun passes Mars and Moon
16 Sun (approaches) passes Venus
17 Venus moves to apparent rendezvous point slower than Mars SECOND
19 Earth moves to rendezvous point DAY
20 Mercury moves to rendezvous point
21 Apollo moves to rendezvous point
25 Mars moves from rendezvous point
26 Moon moves from rendezvous point
From these movements comes confirmation that the action takes place in the sky. The Sun
gives an orientation by pursuing its regular rounds. Although Demodocus does not say so,
the elapsed time may be two days; the Sun makes two rounds; better say two days and
their intervening night, but the climax (catastrophe) of the scene probably occurs after
sunset of the second day. Moon appears generally to hold its course. Venus moves
erratically and may not have set during the period. Mars appears to be moving on a near
collision course parallel to the Moon-and-Earth solar orbit (the persistent lover) until
sprung into a farther orbital track by Venus.
II. The second category of movement includes all decelerating and accelerating events,
including pauses, that is, what would be referred to astronomically as changes in
orbital and rotational speed.
1 Erratic, jostling movements of Moon and Mars in close proximity
6 Venus apparently pauses for discharges remotely
8 Venus apparently pauses for discharges near at hand
12 Mars stops at Moon's house (apparent rendezvous point)
13 Erratic, jostling movements of Moon and Mars in close proximity
14 Longer pause and slowed movements of Mars and Moon as Venus approaches
17 Venus apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
19 Earth apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
20 Mercury apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
21 Apollo apparently pauses at apparent rendezvous point
25/ 26 Mars and Moon move at opposing adjacent angles for rendezvous point
From this collection of movements, it may be inferred that marked changes in the orbital
speed of Mars, Moon and Venus occur. The two sets of encounters tend to confirm the two-
day calendar. Earth's rotation is slowed to give a strong impression of the whole action
being frozen during the dramatic crisis, when Mars, Moon, Venus (and Earth) are all
lined up (in perilous conjunction). Mercury and Apollo, with Earth, join the scene at
this point, as archetypical memories from earlier crises being forced upon the scene of
the present crisis. If it is objected that the convocation is simply a literary device
invented to stress the literary catastrophe, one should recollect the theory that
experience calls forth devices of literature.
III. The third category of movement involves motions, sounds, and colors that connote
exchanges of energy and/ or mass.
1 Erratic responsive jostling of Moon and Mars in close proximity
2 Material leaves Mars for Moon
4 Venus increases in size, darkening as Sun passes behind
6 Venus thunders and discharges streams of electrified clouds
8 Venus discharges streams of electrified clouds all over sky andaffecting Earth
12 Noises from Mars/ Moon as Mars approaches rendezvous. Electrical belts stretch out
between the two as they near each other.
13 Erratic responsive jostling of Moon and Mars in close proximity
14 Venus' relative movement halts or slows jostling
16 Sun passes behind Venus, darkening it apparently
18 Giant cacophony apparently from Venus, which also explodes materialagainst Mars
22 General noise
23 Quakes on Earth promised
24 Venus approach suddenly propels Mars and Earth-Moon to resume movement
27 Moon returns to serenity with new face
28 All major bodies (Venus, Mars, Moon) and their atmospheres achieve some
incandescence during the experiences The events of the third category include Mars
disturbing Moon and Earth disturbing Mars with discharges of electricity and material.
Earth slows Mars' rotation causing heating and jostling. Venus showers Moon with the
sparks of Hephaestus' smithy. The intervention of Venus behind Mars and Moon causes
heightened disturbances.
Terrible noises are heard - electrical, atmospheric and/ or meteoric in origin.
Incandescences of Mars, the Moon, and Venus (already incandescent for over 700 years)
are noted, from which great heat is inferred caused by electrical discharges, crustal
frictions from altered motions, vulcanism, and atmospheric turbulence, especially on
Venus.
The appearance of the Moon is altered. Its rocks seem new, contain remanent magnetism,
and are freshly glazed. For the Earth to magnetize the rocks of the Moon would require
that the Earth approach its satellite to at least three and possibly two earth-radii
distances, there to heat up and magnetize its surface [1] . This is unlikely to occur in
any event because Moon might disintegrate at about that distance from the electro-
gravitational force pulling at it. Since in the period of the Love Affair the Moon
appears to have been drawn for a time away from Earth, and Mars came between the two
bodies, it is likely that while Earth beat upon the one face of Mars, Mars beat upon the
Earth face of Moon.
The perspective of the scenario is probably that of an observer in the southeast corner
of Asia Minor. Then, as evening came and Earth rotated eastwards, and the bodies were
accelerated, they would see Mars-Ares fly northwest to Thrace; Sun-Helios would fly
west; and Moon-Aphrodite would spring southwest to Cyprus. Venus-Hephaestus is
presumably left in charge of the moonpath from a great distance and follows the setting
sun.
Phaeacia was discovered to be a Utopia, but positioned in Homer's mind in the west. Some
have assigned it to Corfu. Patroni insists upon Malta. Pocock opts for Trapani. Etc.
Notwithstanding this doubt, Phaeacia was recently founded, by Nausithous, the father of
King Alcinous, who hosts Odysseus. He took his people on a long journey to the
deliberately preferred isolation of Scheria because they had been persecuted by
neighbouring giants (more likely, the meteorites of Mars). But Phaeacia is now doomed.
Two days after the recital of the Love Affair, as the boat that carried Odysseus home
was returning to its harbor, it is turned to stone; a circle of mountains erupts and
girdles the town, land-locking it forever.
We can surmise, therefore, that the Phaeacians had witnessed the Love Affair in
Southeast Anatolia and had played the drama later on in the West, without realizing that
the actions in the sky would have followed a different terrestrial mapping if witnessed
from their new home.
ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS
Isaac Newton cleared the skies so tidily, and his laws imparted such regularity and
tranquillity to the solar system, that, amazed at his results, he imagined that only a
God could create the heavenly order. There was born in those times a new deus ex
machina, a mechanical god, from the laws of gravity, inertia, and angular momentum. But
the real historical gods are created out of catastrophes, not from order. And the
heavens are as prone to disorder as to order.
Attention is called to two additional facets of Newton's mind, one naturalistic, the
other religious. He could not believe that gravitational attraction between two bodies
could exist without a medium for transmitting the gravitational force. And, putting
aside his deux ex machina, he went searching for his real God, the Old Testament God,
who brought the Deluge down upon mankind, even seeming to agree with Whiston, his
disciple, that a cometary force might have provoked the Deluge [2] .
The latter is an irony that needs no elaboration here. But the former sets one to
wondering. That all things are "falling" towards other things with measurable momenta is
apparent; also that motion and matter are communicable, intra se and inter se, seems
indubitable; further both seem to be inextinguishable. One must be wary, however, in
using general laws of physics and astronomy when questioning the validity of observed
events and historical-mythical accounts. The task of reconciling the two kinds of data
is so difficult and frustrating, that many a good mind ends up in some dogmatic or
empirical monomania. All this is a prelude to saying that the Love Affair portrays
cosmic events that require extraordinary explanations. Yet one can take heart from the
direction in which the current revolution in astrophysics is moving.
Much of the new astrophysics is based on non-equilibrium - even explosive - phenomena,
rather than the steady state thermal phenomena which have been the primary concerns of
astrophysics in the past. It is the violence of the phenomena discovered in the
astrophysics of the past fifteen years that has changed dramatically our current views
of the universe [3] .
That some physicists are moving closer to a determination that gravitation may be
transmitted by waves, and that others are pushing ahead rapidly in electromagnetism and
plasma studies likewise enhances the plausibility of the events of the Love Affair.
For the Love Affair appears to have the planets moving in an essentially electric
environment, with gravitational movements largely subsumable under the law of the
conservation of momentum (inertia), which in turn may remotely have originated as a
product of electrical laws. The imagery of the story is conveyed in motions that appear
arbitrary, reversible, and erratic - qualities more characteristic of electrical than of
gravitational forces. The examination of Moon and Mars has already shown features, such
as rilles, that electrical theory can explain.
Ralph Juergens, who has made a special effort to reconcile the much-neglected science of
gaseous electrical discharges with the theory of cosmic catastrophism, has recently
proposed an electrical concept of the solar system that appears to fit the scenario of
the Love Affair [4] . He suggests that the Sun's corona and the surfaces of the planets
carry a heavy electric charge of negative value. Interplanetary space, on the other
hand, is a plasma, a gas of dissociated positive ions and electrons. This highly
conducting medium isolates the electric field of the planetary body; it shields itself
from it. The shield is called a space-charge sheath.
"In the space-charge sheath, positive and negative charges collect and arrange
themselves in such a way that the electric field of a body with alien potential is
contained within a limited region surrounding the body." [5] The electrical
composition of the sheath is a function of the need to segregate itself from the
interplanetary plasma and thus the plasma from the charged planet.
The electrified body, however, has to continually receive a current of like charge from
the outer environment in order to maintain its charge. This the planets do from solar
and galactic sources, Juergens theorizes. Thereupon "when no orbital conflict exists,
the system operates serenely under the direction of forces accounted for in conventional
celestial mechanics."
However, he continues,
... Let us imagine what might occur should two electrically charged major bodies in this
system find themselves on intersecting orbit... The stage would be set eventually for a
rendezvous at one or another point of orbital contact. Since the space charge sheaths of
the bodies would occupy greater volume than the bodies themselves, a collision between
sheaths would actually be more likely to take place than a direct, bodily collision.
When the moment arrived for the inevitable encounter, sheaths would make contact.
Unleashed electric fields would clash. Almost instantly, forces immeasurably greater
than gravitation would be brought to bear on the charged bodies. Cosmic thunderbolts
would flash between the bodies in an effort to equalize their electric potentials [6] .
In the present case, Mars, according to Velikovsky's reconstruction of the events of 776
B. C. or thereabouts, was caused to shift its orbit by the planet Venus, that had
previously caused periods of cataclysm on Earth. The orbit of Venus grew more round,
while that of Mars enlarged. The new orbit carried Mars on a collision course with
Earth. In due time, the encounter occurred.
The encounter witnessed in the Love Affair was one in a series that agitated the world
in the period between -776 and -687. The first encounter between Venus and Mars may have
taken place at a great distance, with a largely visual impression being created on
Earth, an impression that the terrible and eccentric proto-planet Venus was following a
new course and that Mars too had changed its orbital movement to an eccentric one that
brought it periodically - every fifteen years by Velikovsky's reckoning - racing on an
elliptical orbit almost tangent to that of Earth. There were six such near-misses in the
period between 776 and 687 B. C., until a final encounter among Venus, Mars, and Earth
brought about the present planetary system by expelling Mars into a new orbit. That
Earth may have had the last word may be the inference to be drawn from the coincidences
between the rotational period of Mars (approximately 24 hours) and its inclination to
the ecliptic (approximately 24§) and those of Earth. For these qualities, "swift Ares"
may have exchanged orbital speed and an outside position on the racetrack around the
Sun.
Let it be supposed now that the Earth and Moon compose a type of binary system bearing
negative charges on their surfaces: the two bodies tend to revolve around each other;
but the only sign of this is the perturbation of the Moon, because Earth is so massive
relative to the Moon. The same electric sheath, however, (which may coincide with the
magnetosphere of the Earth) keeps them in electric balance with the plasma. The sheath
is elongated to embrace the Moon as the Moon, pulling the earth around it,
ineffectually, because of the great inertial orbital momentum of the Earth, revolves
around the Earth. When the sun shines upon Earth, the Earth's magnetosphere streams away
from the sun-side to a perceived distance at least sixty times the distance from Earth
to Moon.
The approach of Mars, on a generally parallel course to Earth, disturbs the Earth-Moon
system. Repelled by both bodies from a direct encounter, it passes between the two. (One
argues this midpassage because of the recent searing of the Earthward face of the Moon
and the one-sided searing of Mars, also recent.) Its orbital momentum is also great and
there is no question, under these conditions, of its becoming a part of the binary
system.
Nevertheless, it introduces a new negatively charged body into the sheath and the sheath
undergoes violent adjustment. All three bodies intrinsically repel one another, bringing
about bodily vibrations of considerable amplitude (the "sex bout"). The electrical
repulsions overcome the gravitational attractions. Earth pushes Mars; Mars pushes Moon,
and pushes back at Earth; the Earth's orbit expands slightly. The two sheaths
temporarily strive for electric assimilation and equilibrium, although this is doomed
from the start by the differential in inertial momentum (including factors of speed and
angle). The space sheaths expand enormously into the plasma to acquire the electrical
charges they need on their peripheries. They probably invade and excite the electrical
sheaths of Venus.
As the sheaths move to assimilation, they invade the negative fields of the body
surfaces and cause physical conversions of several types - chunks of matter are
exchanged between the bodies (in a sense, "gravity falls apart" as opposite charges
momentarily prevail); thunderbolts strike the surface of all three bodies, with immense
violence.
Some of these are not typical thunderbolts. They are the weapon of the sky gods, at
least of Jupiter, Athena and Hephaestus. Thyestes, a hero of the period, is portrayed by
Seneca as asking Jupiter to still his anguish by bringing disaster upon Earth, "not with
the hand that seeks out houses and undeserving homes, using your lesser bolts, but with
that hand by which the threefold mass of mountains fell... These arms let loose and hurl
your fires." [7] Juergens refers to them as of the species of plasmoid, explosive
projectiles of electricity consisting of equal numbers of electrons and positive ions,
rare examples of which have been duplicated in the laboratory by Winston Bostick. They
carry immense electric and magnetic energy at the speed of solar flares [8] .
A simple principle might explain which body will receive the greater damage. Since the
electric charge of a sheath is proportional to the surface size of the spacebody, the
destructive potential of the sheath in reference to a second sheath is proportionate to
the surface size of the body contained by the second sheath. This would account for
devastation of the side of the Moon facing Mars and Earth and of the side of Mars that
locked its face upon Earth. Nor should we neglect the protective capacity of the Earth's
atmosphere against all types of bombardment.
The Earth's rotation brought repetition of the incident the next day. Now, however,
Venus is much closer than it was on the day before and Mars is greatly retarded. It is
said that today Mars rotates at less than half its expected speed. Such may be an effect
of one or more of the encounters. Here Venus actually seems to catch up, watch, and then
passes by. It is possible that at this point, Mars was driven back by Earth and Venus,
and moved into its present outer orbit. That Mars is locked in on Earth in its
rotational speed and axial tilt may indicate that its final pass by Earth came after
Venus had sprung loose the "loving couple."
Also, when Venus "loosed" them, it perhaps added a push to the Moon that reduced its
orbit, restoring the lunar month to very much what it had been before the series of
incursions by Mars began, and to its present length of approximately 29 1/ 2 days. Thus
the electromechanical scenario may be synchronized with the year -687, with calendar
adjustments that began all over the world after -687, and with the physical description
of the Moon following her devastating Love Affair. Concerning the last of these, we
recall that Aphrodite emerged more beautiful than ever - bathed, anointed, and
astonishingly clothed. That would mean with "new beauty marks" and an aura caused by
heat and dust clouds.
In effect, both the destruction and the preservation of the bodies in the encounter are
due to the electric environment which lets only a limited collision of spheres take
place. At the same time, the electrical theory permits one to explain how planetary
surfaces can be torn, exploded, and heated - including in all cases the dissolution of
the chemical bonds of matter - without carrying the bodies implausibly close enough to
call upon gravitational pull alone.
The primary effects of encounter are the penetration of the atmosphere and surface of
the bodies by attracted oppositely charged ions. A secondary effect is the retarded
movement (rotational and orbital speed), displacement (oscillations), and orbital shift
of all bodies.
The gravitational force, which, if the bodies were nearing in a non-electric vacuum,
would draw them together in inverse proportion to the square of their distance, is
canceled out by the repellent negative charges on the surface of the bodies which
operate with quite opposite effect and force. (They are repelled in proportion to charge
and the square of the distance.) The "Battle of the Gods" resolves into a battle of the
space-charge sheaths.
The tertiary effects are heating of the bodies and their atmospheres, resulting both
from electric particle bombardment and from atmospheric, hydrospheric, and lithospheric
shearing friction. New levels of surface crust are developed on all of the bodies, new
"scar tissue," new stratigraphy.
The effects upon the biosphere are grave. They have been described time and time again
by the ancient observers, by early students of the Deluge such as Whiston, Newton, and
Boulanger, by modern catastrophists such as Cuvier, Donnelly and Beaumont, by
contemporaries such as Patton and by Kelly and Dachille [9] , Lane [10] , Schaeffer,
and, in especially systematic form, by Velikovsky.
There emerge, in the perspective of the human race, disasters without number. The
gaseous composition of the atmosphere changes (a noticeable thinning and occasional mass
poisonings). Large-scale destruction of herds and crops, and of wild-life and forests
occurs. Basins are emptied or filled with water. Tidal waves wipe out nearly all coastal
settlements (where perhaps 80% of the Greek-speaking population was contained in 800 B.
C.). Chasms are opened; volcanoes are created and activated. Surface soils are ripped
off by winds traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. Communities are obliterated or
disrupted by showers of ash and debris, winds, water, fire, and famine. The apocalyptic
vision, historically founded, is renewed.
The stupefaction and manias of the survivors are understandable. Older, similar
experiences are reinforced in the memories of the group. That every aspect of human
feeling, thought, culture and creativity should be affected is to be expected. To the
explanation of these psychological and cultural transformations, the next chapters turn.
They continue, at the same time and to the degree possible, with the exegesis of the
torrid Love Affair of Moon and Mars.
Notes (Chapter 13: How the Gods Fly)
1. R. Treash, Pens‚e, May 1972, p. 22.
2. Stecchini, op. cit., pp. 89-105.
3. John A. Simpson, "Journey to Jupiter," The Univ. of Chicago Magazine (Nov.-Dec.,
1973), 6-11.
4. "Reconciling Celestial mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," II Pens‚e (Fall,
1972), 6-12. The concept is full developed by Early R. Milton and the present author in
Solaria Binaria.
5. Ibid., p. 6.
6. Ibid., p. 7. Recently, what are believed to be electrical discharges have been
observed between Jupiter and one of its satellites, Io, whose distance is many thousands
of miles. The heavens have settle since 687 B. C., but the same natural phenomena may
continue in a subdued form.
7. Atreus and Thyestes (Miller, trans., 1917), quoted in W in C, 217: and cf. p. 272.
8. Ralph Juergens, Pens‚e, Jan., 1974, pp. 2-4, citing Bostick, 16 Scientific American
(oct. 1957), 87-94.
9. The scenario of geological effects is well-delineated in their book. Target Earth,
The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science (Carlsbad Calif.; Box 225, Target Earth
press, 1953). See also this author's The Lately Tortured Earth (1983).
10. Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965).
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE USES OF LANGUAGE
The Love Affair is not a double entendre and was not viewed as such in its ancient
production. It is not an opera with two levels of conscious meaning. If it were, it
would have arrived in our hands in a different version. But the Love Affair does not
permit a conscious second level. In order for the drama to have been born at all, it
had to become the mask of a historical reality. It had to speak and sound and mean a
love story, first and finally.
Nevertheless, upon being created, the story still had to develop in two contradictory
directions. It had to retain its hidden meaning, and it had to shed more and more of
its hidden meaning. It had to tell the truth and in the same breath deny it. This
formidable task of the unconscious was doomed from the start, but yet it is perennially
successful.
Such "success through failure" is achieved not only in the Love Affair but in all myth.
It is granted to few minds to comprehend the mechanism. Even philosophers build
defenses against its comprehension. Some are rigidly obsessed with the attachment of
words to objects (nominalists), or with words to operations (operationalists). Others,
their opposites, insist upon the correspondence of words to ideal images (idealists,
Platonists); to them the contradiction is anathema. It is intolerable, unphilosophical,
confusing, meaningless. To the anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and psychological
linguist, however, it is the veriest grist for the mill.
METER AND METAPHOR
Homer's 28,000 lines were six-footed, the hexameter, which Paul Maas [1] renders
schematically and typically as:
Each of the six long, stress syllables is followed by two short ones except at the end
of the line, where a stressed sound prevails. Besides the stress, there runs a pitch
that rises on some of the short syllables. The fifth and sixth syllables present a more
variable combination than the other feet; they often embrace a "caesura," a pause or
rhythmic division of the melody of the line. "All methods of imposing an order upon
discourse by means of rhythm... are on a lower level, from the point of view of metric,
than the oldest type of Greek verse, the Homeric hexameter." [2] Unfortunately,
little is known about the rhythmic feeling of these measures or how dynamic and tonal
accents were introduced as well. Furthermore, "we have no means of reading, reciting,
or hearing Greek poetry as it actually sounded," [3] and can only form a shadowy
notion of it. And, to make matters worse, nearly everyone believes that it is
practically impossible to render English acceptable into epic (dactylic) hexameter, a
judgement with which we do not agree. The reader may address the question by means of
the author's working carried in Chapter Two above or search out a now rare translation
by H. B. Cotterill done in 1911.
The rewards of metric and phonetic analysis of the Love Affair may appear slender. One
can listen time after time to tapes of it recorded by a trained actor without the
rhythms registering more than the serious, singsong, long-drawn tread of the epic
narrative. The sophistication of the rhythm finds itself in the length of the line and
the large variety of subordinate rhythms that emerge from the counterpoint of whole-
word against metric division, producing a harmonic unity and disunity at the same time.
No doubt it was this last that induced Aristotle and others to affirm that the basis of
poetry was the syllable; but the syllabic structure, taken alone, would collapse unless
coordinated with the word structure, phonetic structure, and meaning structure. These
all confirm the belief that Homer's
1 € € 3 € € 5 €€ 7 €€ 9 ___ 11 ___ Ô Ô Ô Ô Ô ÔÔ ÔÔ form is "advanced," technically, as
Maas asserts, in consistency with the total state of his culture, regardless of the
remanent social chaos of his times.
A little more is to be learned by investigating the technique of metaphor. One might
expect that, if there is a second level of meaning to the passages of the Love Affair,
it would crop up in the guise of metaphor. W. B. Stanford writes that Homer generally
engages heavily in metaphor but that his metaphors are ordinary and uninspired; "with a
very few exceptions, Homer seems always stilted and even deliberately archaistic
[liturgical] in his use of metaphors." [4] In the Love Affair, we find only three
"genuine" metaphors among the hundred lines: "fine as a Spider's web" refers to
Hephaestus' net; Aphrodite "bridles not her passion" is an expression that may well
have had the ordinary meaning of "restrain" and therefore not be metaphorical; and
Poseidon speaks "winged words," a favorite hackneyed Homericism.
Hephaestus goes home "with a heavy heart," but one may regard this as literal,
especially given Homeric physiological theory. And the lovers "shamed the bed" of
Hephaestus, which illustrates a displaced object rather than a metaphor. Also there are
epithets that refer to the gods - Poseidon, "the earth-enfolder," among others - but
these we again see as literal adjectives and part of the divine names; the gods are
described "as they are."
Moreover, only the single simile is to be found in the passage. Yet it would have been
easy to conceal catastrophe in one of Homers' famous similes. He might have chanted,
"and as the gods laughed, it was as when great thunderclaps and bursts of light came
from the blue skies, shaking the trees and setting the rocks to trembling, alarming the
shepherd to gather his flock into the shelter of the cave."
Instead, the Love Affair is completely matter-of-fact. Hence one may consider the
opposite hypothesis: there must be reason for the passage to be barren of metaphor and
simile. The reason is not slow to suggest itself. Since the parallelism between what is
said in the lines and what is happening in the sky and on earth is so close, and,
furthermore, so well-kept a secret, the need for metaphor and simile is negligible.
Indeed, the whole passage is a single great simile ! And similes upon similes don't go.
A second clue is intriguing. Stanford was cited to have praised Homer's similes and
depreciated his metaphors. "Why," one asks, "would Homer be apt to this criticism?" A
statement of Stanford deserves repetition:
The essence of effective metaphor is a clear and definite understanding of the two
constituent ideas incorporated in the metaphorical term, together with an appreciation
of the new concept integrated from those constituent ideas... In order to insure that a
reader or hearer will thus fully appreciate his metaphors, a poet must be certain that
his audience understands clearly and precisely the meanings of words as he uses them
[5] .
Then comes his thesis: "Because words lacked precise definition in Homer's time, Homer
could not, even if he had wished, have used daring metaphors." [6]
Since Stanford is unaware of catastrophic theory and of this book's alternative short-
term theory of the Dark Ages of Greece, he pursues his arguments in the typical manner.
Homer was building a primitive language and savage customs into the dawn of Greek
civilization. So again, Stanford's evidence support unwittingly the 'Crazed Survivors'
theory.
Stanford quotes C. M. Bowra who holds that Homer's language is clearly not primitive
but "in other ways he employs a speech which has not settled to fixed forms and uses...
This inexactness of function is natural in speech which is still finding itself."
Stanford agrees and adds, "This is the common experience of all readers of Homer. In
his dialects, grammar, prosody, and syntax, everything points to the growth of
conciliatory order out of chaos and not to deliberate variation of an existing
uniformity." [7] Demetrius long ago had written, "Homer impresses his hearers greatly
by the employment of words descriptive of inarticulate sounds, and by their novelty
above all." Homer had to make the meaning of many words - "to combine," as Stanford
puts it, "with his poetic gifts the work of a pioneer grammarian, semiologist, and
rhetorician." Another facet of the greatly and eternally confused "Homeric question,"
it appears, is resolved by our theory. Homer is too sophisticated to be a primitive
minstrel, yet he is first and foremost of the Greek poets, and nobody feels that he
stood upon the shoulders of great predecessors. Many contradictions, both technical and
sociological, characterize his work, his subjects, his times. These are largely
resolved if Homer is regarded to be part of his times, at one with his subjects and
their fathers and grandfathers, and working in a new alphabet upon a polyglot,
untutored Hellenic population surviving from a set of recent natural and social
disasters.
HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
Scholars have arrived at a fair concert of opinions about Homer. "The prevalent theory
today" is that the Odyssey is not the full creation of one person [8] . Since it would
be senseless for Homer to have put on a somewhat different vocabulary for each story,
this evidence is weighty.
The Odyssey's language is more consistent than the Iliad's, hence it is considered to
be the later work. Its concepts are more abstract, another sign of its being written
later. However, both these facts would also jibe with the two-author theory.
Page makes the telling point that the Iliad and the Odyssey do not refer to each other.
He repeated Monro's claim that the Odyssey "never repeats or refers to any incident
related to the Iliad." [9] They neither boost nor knock each other. Yet they are
consistent; there is no discrepancy between them. Some of the characters overlap, of
course, and some of the statements correspond.
Further, both epics are written from the same perspective of time. Their parallelism
with regards to the events described extends beyond coincidental probability, whether
these events were 400 years or 30 years before Homer.
Both poems carry a style that is agreed to be oral. That is, they were intended for
oral recitation, in parts and as wholes, extending over some days of recitation, if
needs be. The major internal evidence of this rests in the great number of formular
phrases that are employed time after time. "If the poet wishes to begin his verse with
the thought 'But when they arrived... ', he has one way, and one only, of expressing
this..." He has to deny himself all other ways [10] . In a sense unappreciated by
modern writers, who search unendingly for an expanded, particularistic vocabulary and a
way of avoiding cliches, the Greek epics were built upon collections of phrases, not
words. The conclusion is that "the creation of the vast number of formulas, adaptable
to almost all possible emergencies, must have been the work of many generations of
poets... This is the memory technique of verse-making." But many formulas might be
adapted to any long poem; ancient formulas would be the bricks that a mason could use
quickly to erect a house; more closely similar is the practice of popular musical
composers of folk, rock, fox trot and blues music in America who turn out great numbers
of songs from a certain number of stock romantic lines and musical phrases.
A number of elements of both poems were explicitly Mycenaean. They are idiomatic, even
identical, They are so tightly linked with the Mycenaean culture that they could not
all have been carried orally over 500 or 400 devastated, savage years. But they could
represent what was destroyed one or a couple of generations before and still obtruded
in the culture of the Homeric people. Further, it is agreed that many elements of the
poems were non-Mycenaean, meaning contemporary or Near Eastern or Western
Mediterranean.
Here, our explanation is that the shocked society of Homer carried various cultures
within itself, having no control over their incongruities. The oral technique would
have been a continuation of centuries of recitation from memory that can prosper
alongside any bureaucratic society, such as the Mycenaean, in which scribes could
write, but the people could not.
C. M. Bowra believes of Homer "that since he himself was alive when the wonderful art
of writing returned to the Greeks in the form of the Phoenician alphabet, he dictated
his poems to someone who knew it and the written texts were guarded by professional
bards who recited them to later generations." [11]
Page puts the Odyssey not later than -700. We would guess its composition at about -
650, its transcription soon thereafter. He mentions the possibility that the poet of
the Odyssey may have been a contemporary of Archilochus, Callinus, and Alcman, two
generations or more later [12] . He says there may in fact not have been any written
version of the Odyssey before the sixth century [13] . The Iliad would have preceded
this event by several generations. We suggest that just as the Iliad preceded the
wanderings of Odysseus, the Iliad preceded the story of them. One then arrives at dates
for the composition of the Iliad in several stages between -700 and -670.
The great literary historian, Aristarchus, places Homer some sixty years after the
return of the Heraclids, whom we have assigned to the late Eighth Century. Arie
Dirkwager, in an unpublished manuscript lent to this author, has reasonably calculated
that Homer "lived somewhere between 715 and, let us say, 640;" he connects Homer with
Archilochus, whose grandfather Odysseus is supposed to have encountered when he visited
Hades, and with Lycurgus, the "Spartan lawgiver, who we think owes his fame to his work
in social reconstruction following upon natural disaster."
Despite the ancient's insistence upon the single identity of Homer, Page considers
finally "the relation between the two poems to be that of father and son: is it not
much more probable that they are elder and younger brother, living in different places
and developing in different ways? I suggest that this is so, and that it can be proved
to be so."
Of course he does nothing of the kind, but the concept of a family shop is congenial.
It reminds one of Robert Graves' effort, possibly heuristic only, to place the
authorship of the Odyssey in the hands of a daughter of Odysseus, named Nausicaa! The
opinion of the present study is that Homer was unique. This is maintained not so as to
ride free on the wagon of the traditionalists but because of what has already been said
in this section and in this book.
Homer was a trained Greek bard living in the seventh century in Asia Minor. The skies
were settled and society was coming out of a century of shocks. Like Shakespeare, not
only could he act but he could also invent poetry. His age was not like ours, an age of
personalized authorship and copyrights. His inheritance of poetry was both his and non-
his; it mattered little. Homer was alert to the future. Thus he succeeded well in
binding up the past. Moreover, he witnessed the new alphabetization of Greek [14] .
Excitedly he seized upon its practice and went to work. Like an editor of today, he
brought into the shop what he regarded as the most vendable story in Greek culture -
"Achilles and The Siege of Troy." It was an epic that he himself could recite, checking
now and then its lines with another bard, discovering frequent inconsistencies and
correcting as many as he could, losing patience often perhaps with the scribes of the
new alphabet who must have had to make hundred of linguistic decisions in collaboration
with him.
The epic in writing was an instant success. In the beginning, he who writes things down
is the author, with all due regard to the gods and muses. So Homer was the author. He
was more the creative editor and publisher. Probably no sooner had the original version
been produced than it was copied - under his supervision for he would not have let out
his treasure.
If the Iliad was such a success, would there be a second epic of like proportions to
transcribe? There would be. Homer, Editor and Publisher, would be sought after by other
bards who lacked his editorial genius and workmanship in the new literary genre. Would
he help them - at a price, of course? The work would be in his name, but his patronage
would be valuable. So one may conjecture that after he had created the Iliad in written
form, he sought out and selected a second epic coming from another part of the Greek
world, singing of Odysseus, a character whom he favored beyond all others.
The signs of a common editorial hand in the two works exist; they have encouraged the
belief in a unique "author" over the whole time. There is evidence of deliberate
tampering with the two poems to make them consistent and related, but never
duplicative. Thus Nestor's story of his early life in Pylos, found in the Iliad, is
"remarkably Odyssean in style." [15] The Odyssey, coming from another bard or
geographical area than the Iliad, would not be so familiar to Homer and a number of
inconsistencies would escape his editorial scrutiny. Or perhaps he was anxious to
complete its transcription and get it out on the market. The major inconsistencies of
plot and dialogue are found in the meshing of the Telemachus story into Odysseus'
return, although Professor Page adds analyses of other contradictions and lapses [16]
.
Inconsistencies of general outlook, ethics, theology, and philosophy scarcely exist.
Homer may have made his greatest contributions here. He would have been not only copy-
editor, but also moralist, bent upon securing the larger Greek cultural community to
its ultimate values in human relations and the human in relation to the divine. It is
for reasons like these, and because the terrors of continuous disaster stretch their
penumbra over the actors, that Mircea Eliade diverges from his contemplation of the
remotest antiquities and calls the Iliad a kind of creation epic. It is a new age whose
story Homer reorders and edits for publication, one that begins a century before he
deals with it.
TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE
By the time the first Greek grammarians went to work, the language of Homer was quaint.
The language changes. The references of words change. Associations are formed and join
in the same word. Words expand their meanings and simultaneously contract them. Words
are invented by new combinations of sounds, relating to the events referred to, and to
familiar sounds of nature, and previously exciting words of like character.
Take the word "brazen." It connotes 'bronze. ' It also means 'hot. ' This is easy
enough.
Examine the epithet "golden-bridled Ares." It means to Murray, "Ares of the golden
rein." Both are "correct." Why, as the authoritative translator (Murray) would have it,
does it mean the latter, when a translation bearing in mind the hidden construction
could picture Ares as a darkly ruddy planet with electric flashes and belts playing
across its face, bridling it like the head of a warhorse [17] ? Alexander Pope,
puzzled, finds it, "He glows, he burns," (with love, of course). Fitzgerald gives
simply "golden Ares."
Graves discovered that Hephaestus can be rendered as "He who Shines by Day." Phaethon,
of the same root, means "shining, the shining one, radiant" and was the name of the
mythical son of Helios who, paralyzed by fright, let the chariot of the Sun scorch the
Earth and plunged to a fiery death, an occasion that quite probably corresponded to an
earlier catastrophe, associated with the planet Venus. One should also note that
Phaeacia is the Shining Land, land of Fire, the Phaeacians being "Phaecixikos." The
words of "shining" and "fire" are dear to Homer. He uses them on hundreds of occasions
in his epics, perhaps ninety percent of the time in symbolism of passion, heroism, and
death [18] . He calls Hephaestus "the fire of the world."
The early Greek philosophers, reports Burnet, called the planet Saturn "Phaenon," the
planet Jupiter "Phaethon," Mercury "Stilvon" (Brilliant), Venus "Phosphoros" (light-
bearer), and Mars "Pyroeis" (Fiery one) [19] . Perhaps someday a scholar will go back
to the symbol and root of the j and find there only "fire, feuer, fuoco, feu, phaeton,
etc." with perhaps an astral significance in the birth of the language and perhaps even
search out the origins of other root sounds in the same vein. We should know, however,
that j seems to have had phallic associations as a letter of the Greek alphabet [20] .
And fusiz means creativity, talents, and the penis. At Lemnos, in probable reference to
Hephaestus, there was found a medal with the inscription, "kabeireia pythia phi," or
"the strong one, python, phi." [21]
Moreover, the (j) of Hephaestus is close to the modern symbol of the planet Venus. But
this is also close to the apparition of a comet,
with its tail; a planet could better be a circle or a star. Many ancients designated
the planet Venus by the same symbol. And Aphrodite contains in her name the same
letter, and, generally, is described by a number of words conveying brilliance and
light.
The symbol is a hieroglyph of Egypt but is also found around the globe, in ancient
Mexico, for example. In Egypt it may also be rendered
or And as it was ascribed phallic meaning in Greece, so it was in Egypt. The statue of
Horus at Coptos has a phallus in his hands which is said to have been taken from Typhon
(the monster, the part of Venus-Hephaestus, that crashed into Earth).
Isis-Athena and Typhon-Hephaestus are recalled unconsciously in the symbol of the ankh,
both as comets and as dismembered comets. It then recalls terror and can join with the
castration fear, so that the phallic symbol and the astronomical symbol unite in a
syllable that is both pornographic and anxiety-causing. But, with typical ambivalence,
the ankh comes down to us in a long procession led by the Christian church, where the
ankh is the symbol of "life." Still, the Egyptian 'Ankh', the symbol of life, is a
combination of male and female.
Moving to line 273, one finds a complicated sentence; Hephaestus fashions a device to
capture the secret lovers in flagrante delictu. No translator feels the need to
indicate that the original meaning of akinon is thunderbolt, not anvil (from which
sparks fly). It also means a meteoritic stone. The mundane word derives from the
astral; the significant aspect here is not the precedence, but the insistent astral
atmosphere of the passages. Hephaestus, after all, might have woven a net of cord, or
dug a collapsing pit; or "bummed a ride" on Helios' chariot: he is a versatile genius,
not only a blacksmith. The device is of copper, again not of fibre, as fishing nets
are.
A slightly different sentence emerges than the other translators, who are in rough
consensus, give. Murray studiously emerges with "But straightaway one came to him with
tidings, even Helius, who had marked them as they lay together in love. And when
Hephaestus heard the grievous tale, he went his way to his smithy, pondering evil in
the deep of his heart, and set on the anvil block the great anvil and forged bonds
which might not be broken or loosed, that the lovers might bide fast where they were."
And we read: Straightaway then went with the news, of course, Helios, who'd spotted
them loving, Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful story. Deep
down below the depths of his forge he proceeded; there, placing a thunderbolt stone on
the block of the anvil, he struck and struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could
hope to dissolve, for fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his
fierce aim.
Little can be done with the most common verb of the passage; Ercomai meaning simply "to
go and come," and Homer uses almost no other word of movement. "Why not 'fly'?" one
asks, for, in general, Homer is fond of metaphors of birds and flight. Or even
"rushed." Alexander Pope translates the word into airy and flighty language, indeed
gives the whole play a fully heavenly treatment. Still, although the language openly
describes events in the skies, the word "go and come" is just that and one has to be
resigned to the correct perception that these heavenly bodies did not fly; they came,
moved, stood, departed. The personages were huge masses, not birds or "shooting stars."
To conclude, a slight tendency exists for the translators to reduce the instances when
the words and phrases of the original might have suggested hidden parallels of an
astral and catastrophic character. To this they are driven not only by their own
preoccupation with the evident and conventional, but by lexicons that are a product of
the establishment, in effect, a guarantee that when in doubt they will follow the
consensus.
It is of little use to appeal to "The Original," dismissing all translations. A
thoroughly versed classicist would be similarly tempted to "read" or "explain" in
classical Greek the meanings of the words in their singular romantic sense. One can
imagine Homer himself, half composing, half reporting the story; even he must have
contributed to its integrity as romance at the cost of greater ambiguity as history.
For basically all words describing events are a translation abinitio (See above, page
29). Even the most rigorous scientific language begins to wash out meanings through
metaphors. Only in the subconscious minds of the earliest singers of the song and their
audience would there exist openly sensible connections between the event and the signs,
and between the denotating signs and the connotating signs. And soon only these latter
were permitted to bubble up into awareness.
THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT
Thrusting at these arguments from another point, a critic may offer the reasonable
observation that the Love Affair is only an instance of the ever popular plot of the
love triangle. Two people owe each other love. A third in fact captures the love of one
of the pair. The third is outraged at being excluded from the prior love. And,
naturally, preceding this plot came many familiar personal histories from time
immemorial.
At the risk of offering a theory of literary creativity that cannot be amply defended
here, I would say that we are treating of time immemorial and even of the rise of
language and literary forms. Long before the Love Affair could be composed, there had
to be a language; that language, to be invented, had to be preceded by and based upon a
ritualized culture fascinated by repetitions and order.
The "obvious plot" had not only to be experienced, but had also to be perceived as
important in two regards: to be certified by higher authority (i. e. the behavior of
the gods); and to be translated from common occurrence into Symbolic form. (More will
be said of this later.)
The Oedipus story, from which the important psychiatric complex derived its name, had
occurred innumerable times in the dawn of humanity. But it took a particular episode of
Egyptian history, involving a God-Pharaoh, which I. Velikovsky has brilliantly detected
in Oedipus and Akhnaton, to sponsor the translation and elevate into literature, first
spoken and then written, the general human experience and anxiety over the sexual love
between mother and son.
Among the several facets of Homer's genius is that he carried wars, sex and feasting
into the humanly experienced life of the gods so that divine behavior could be at least
partly understood, though full of contradictions that themselves created, including a
contemporary practical wisdom and a later "rational" philosophy. Too late after the
events, in the third century, A. D., Quintillus wrote a sequel to the Iliad. It is
insipid, uninspiring. It affords no sense of the presence and reality of the gods when
compared with the Wrath of Achilles or the "Return of the Heroes" sung to Odysseus
before he hears of the Love Affair. It is as if our primeval myth-maker knew the crude
principle of stardom in Hollywood. "If they can't remember the story, they'll remember
who starred in the movie."
Hence one speculates that the enduring plots and themes of the arts, including history,
were invented with great effort and through a real-perceived event, sparking a
combustible mixture of instruments and institutions - linguistic, behavioral, and
technical.
HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE
A child likes to repeat words, phrases, and sentences. One will chant the same line
indefatigably. It may be newly invented or a thousand years old. It may or may not
"make sense". A relief of anxiety occurs in the repetition. The speech of the old and
dying often becomes repetitive, and an old person who has spoken an acquired language
will often revert to the sole use of the language he first learned. When pinned down by
enemy fire, a soldier will often chant words incoherently, or if he had instruction,
say, in the Catholic Church, will repeat the "Hail, Mary" prayer times without end. Sad
folk ballads and neurotic "rock-and-roll" songs are obsessively simple in word and beat
and prolong themselves to the agony of anyone not afflicted who must endure them. The
language of sudden grief and disaster is often "No! No! No!..." or "She can't be dead!
She can't be dead..." The sacred dream recital and liturgy, plus many institutional
offshoots, are a repetition of events that once occurred. That the original event was a
terrible event followed by great anxiety is evidenced in many ways, as in the
punitiveness with which unbelievers are regarded, for the unbeliever is saying that
"the tragedy that once happened to you is insignificant." In the realm of rhetoric and
linguistic pragmatics, the sacred expression is using symbols as a way of regressing to
stress, reenacting it, rememorizing the events, and ultimately releasing tensions.
Insistence upon correctness in detail prolongs the generation of memory and at the same
time insures that the gods realize how faithfully these humans have remembered their
lesson. The repetitiveness, another aspect of obsession, and another means of insuring
memorization, progressively fixates the ritual participant upon the root of his
ailment. "She can't stop scratching her mosquito bite," "He wallows in his misery;"
these are trivial obsessive actions. The original recital of the Love Affair would have
taken hours; Homer cut it and shaped it to a new form of art, but note well that he
lets one know that it is far form the original version; he did not steal, abridge it,
and present it as original.
The sacred originates in a stressful and tragic condition. In the process of
sublimation, the tragic stress gives way to liturgical language, promoting the
development of language itself, in both "hieratic" (priestly) and popular (" demotic" )
forms. Tragedy is never lost. Its final triumph is to give birth to comedy.
THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE
The rules of scientific language are well-known. They should actually be called
"ideals," since they cover far less of science than they "should," and necessarily so,
because scientific language cannot generate its highest flights unless it resort to
philosophic language. To the scientist, the rule is: "one event should receive one
signification." Further: "the signification should be the same for anyone to whom it is
communicated." Moreover, "the signification should be testable, by repetition of the
event sequence in experiment, etc." Finally, "events should be described and combined
in forms of signification that do not add external meanings;" that is, no extraneous
feelings or meanings should slip in by design or surreptitiously to spoil the purity of
the generalization. All of this began with Aristotle's nominalism (words are distinct
from, and refer to, objects) and has arrived at Whitehead's operationism (the meanings
of words can only lie in the events they describe).
Aristotle had another side, also. He understood rhetoric and pragmatics. While
developing a rational grammar of science, he was preparing a science of influencing.
Given a particular audience, what symbols should be chosen and manipulated to produce a
desired effect? Here words are signs of mental affections, not exclusively of the
dualities of things. Once pursued, this line of thought has ever more fearful
implications. Not until the latest stage of the modern scientific outlook has a body of
scientific work been permitted to arise that would inquire into the reasons for
reasoning, the meaning of meaning, the ideology behind every body of action, including
the activities of science itself.
When science has come this far, it is capable of analyzing the language of myth
scientifically. The first rule for the interpretation of myth is that symbols in their
content will have a determined and possibly determinable meaning. The second is that
"what the symbols mean" contains, besides other things, "the psychological effects
produced by them." Thirdly, there is an "unconscious science of myth," as well as
certain principles of the "conscious" science of myth that we have dug out and can
apply with predictable effects. Just as the athlete, poet, orator, and composer may not
know the scientific rules of their successful performances, so the myth-teller and
myth-hearer will not usually understand what rules of linguistics and psychology he is
applying.
The most important of these unconscious rules, all of them practiced and evident in the
Love Affair, are perhaps the following:
1. Make a myth of any collectively experienced event that had tragic consequences in
order to give symptomatic relief to the perpetual illness. (The myth of the Love Affair
exemplifies this rule.)
2. Remain steadfastly true to the event. As the consensus that perceived the event then
and there defined it, so relate it. (As a result of this rule, many generations later,
we can behave as cryptographic detectives in relation to the historical character of
the myth. We are trying to replay this rule as it guided the producers of the Love
Affair.)
3. Conceal the truth of the event insofar as it is disturbing. (We are seeking the
truth of the Love Affair in many areas, not the least of which is in the language,
where we observed a number of techniques of concealing the truth while telling it.)
4. Use methods of concealment that contribute symptomatic relief. (We find in the Love
Affair a thoroughly satisfactory plot that amuses, a suggestive language, reiteration,
ritual, collective reassurance.)
5. The therapy should last for the duration of the pain. (Over a span of forty memorial
generations and eighty reproductive generations some portion of humanity has obtained
symptomatic relief from the Love Affair. However, the myth has lost impact steadily
from the settling of heaven, and from more philosophical methods of coping with the
symptoms. The doctrines of the eternal constancy of the heavens, the practical
timelessness of earthly change, and the gradual evolution of humans - sometimes
referred to altogether as the ideology of uniformitarianism - have proven a more
effective repressor and a partial therapy in the long run. They have made the Love
Affair mainly a salacious tale, told in a thousand forms, whose insistent threats and
memories linger only vaguely.
As for adults, so for babies.
So turkey-lurkey turned back, and walked with gander-lander, goose-loose, drake-lake,
duck-luck, cock-lock, hen-len, and chicken-licken. And as they were going along, they
met fox-lox. And fox-lox said "Where are you going, my pretty maids?" And they said,
"Chicken-Licken went to the wood, and the sky fell upon her poor bald pate, and we are
going to tell the king." And fox-lox said, "Come along with me, and I will show you the
way." But fox-lox took them into the fox's hole, and he and his young ones soon ate up
poor chicken-licken, hen-len, cock-lock, duck-luck, drake-lake, goose-loose, gander-
lander, and turkey-lurkey, and they never saw the king to tell him that the sky had
fallen! [22]
The story is much longer, of course, because one after another of the little animals is
added to the fearful procession following chicken-licken, and the list is repeated
liturgically. The sky is beginning to fall; the people are frightened; they seek the
religio-secular authority to ease their fears or perhaps to do something about it.
But they encounter the fox who, ancient myths relate, "nibbles continuously at the
thong of the yoke which holds together heaven and earth" (Proclus) and "German folklore
adds that when the fox succeeds, the world will come to its end." This same fox can
also be a wolf, and a dog. It is a star. It is also called "Electra, mother of
Dardanus, who left her station among the Pleiades, desperate because of Ilion's
(Troy's) fall, and retired above the second star of the beam... others call this star
'fox. '" So write Santillana and von Dechend, from their sources, calling finally upon
the great expert on ancient astronomy, F. X. Kugler who had said: "The star at the beam
of the wagon is the fox star: Era, the powerful among the gods. In astrological usage,
it represents above all the planet Mars/ Nergal." [23]
The same story, whose origins disappear into the immemorial (read "memorial") past, has
been altered over the last century of time. Today, people may read to their three-year
olds in a new version [24] that the little animals encounter, not a fox, but a wise
owl, and that the owl skeptically asks to be shown the fallen piece of sky: heaven
cannot fall; it turns out that it was only an apple that had fallen. They found the
apple and Chicken-Licken ate it and was happy.
Alas, they are back to the owl, which happens to have been a paramount symbol of "owl-
eyed" Athena [25] , and they are eating the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden.
Once more, "success through failure."
Notes (Chapter 14: The Uses of Language)
1. Greek Metre (trans. from German ed;, 1927 and addenda, by H. Lloyd-Jones, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 59.
2. Ibid., pp 1-2.
3. Ibid, pp. 3-4.
4. Greek Metaphor (1936, reprinted New York: Johnson reprint. Corp., 1972), p. 120.
5. Ibid., p. 121.
6. Ibid., p. 121.
7. Ibid., p. 65.
8. D. page, The Homeric Odyssey pp. 52, 72 et passim. The Iliad and the Odyssey do not
seem to have written by the same person either. The two epics have divergent
vocabularies. Ibid.. pp. 149-57.
9. Ibid., p. 158.
10. Page, Ibid., p. 139.
11. "Problems Concerned with Homer and the Epics," in Thomas, op. cit.. pp. 16. 18. 42.
12. Op. cit., pp. m147-8.
13. Ibid., p. 97.
14. A. J. B. Wace writes in the Foreword to M. Ventris and J. Chadwick's Documents in
Mycenean Greek (Cambride, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1959), XXViii. that Linear B
probably carried over until driven out by the more efficient Phoenician alphabet. We
Would agree that both alphabets were concurrently used, and, moreover, the success of
the new alphabet was precipitated by the natural disasters and social destruction.
15. Page, Ibid., p. 161, fin. 8.
16. Summarized, Ibid., p. 159, 53 ff.
17. This construction is supported as conceivable in an electric encounter in the study
by Franz Xavier Kugler of the Sibylline oracles, Stecchini, op. cit., p. 143. "The
Battle of the stars began with the appearance in the eastern sky of a body as bright as
the sun and similar in apparent diameter to the sun and the moon. The light of the sun
was replaced by long streams of flame crossing each other."
18. Cedric H. Whitman, "Fire and Other Elements; "in Steiner and Fagles, op. cit., pp.
40 ff. Cf. also D. page, The Homeric Odyssey, 152-3.
19. J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophers (London, 1920), 3rd ed., p. 23; Plato's
Epinomis (Harvard edition, Oxford: Clarendon press, 1928, lines 986a-987d) first gives
the planets their Greek Present names.
20. W. B. Stanford, Greek Metaphor (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1936), 67, 81, citing
Franz Dornsieff, Pindars Stil (1921). Cf. supra, p. 175.
21. Isaac N. Vail citing Eckhel, p. 45, of Mythic Mountain (Santa Barbara, Calif.:
Annular publications. 1972). see also above. p. 160.
22. This last part of the typically repetitious (liturgical) story for tiny children
called "Chicken-Licken," is quoted from James O. Halliwell-Phillips, Popular Rhymes and
Nursery Tales (London: J. R. Smith, 1849), p. 31. The story is found in Africa, India,
all over Europe. Cf. my own note in The Burning of Troy.
23. G. de Santillana and II. van Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame
of Time.( Boston: Gambit, 1969), p. 385.
24. Chicken Little (Racine, Wisc.: Whitman Publ. co., 1958).
25. The owl is a marvelous tranfiguration of a blazing-eyed twin comet that may have
been one source of the duality of Athena-Hephaestus and the many twin serpent symbols
of antiquity.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY
In Pieria, Memoria, ruler of the hills of Eleuther, gave birth to the Muses out of union
with Zeus, son of Chronos, and thus of the forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow.
So writes Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer in his Genealogy of the Gods. The Theogony was
composed after 730 B. C., that is, during or after the era of troubled skies; but it was
a mythical work, "reporting" on events that had occurred hundreds and thousands of year
before. "The ordered pantheon of Hesiod ended in supplanting the anarchic society of the
Homeric Gods." [1]
A functional psychology rests in the quoted passage. "Remembering" was no mere
scratching of experience upon a tabula rasa of the mind. Memoria or Mnemosyne or
"Recollector," is the mother of history (Clio). She has as her progeny the means of
controlling herself, for Zeus is the ordering paternal force. There are nine (some said
three or five) muses governing the arts and sciences - dancing, music, and singing, but
also history and astronomy. They will lend human memory its possibilities of selective
attention, delusion, illusion, abatement, extension, a shadowing and heightening - all
that is necessary to achieve that combination of remembering and forgetting which makes
social life possible on a level that is higher than the level of non-remembering or
total amnesia. Significantly, Memoria is the daughter of Uranus, who was the grandfather
of Zeus; she is no mere sprite. Her Eleutherian Hills are the realm of freedom, so she
governs freedom.
Without further ado, we may assert that the muses were created "by Zeus" to control the
human memory so that humans should forget their catastrophes, and in so doing get
surcease from sorrows. The word "muse" by itself has a meaning of happiness. And that
the Muses will achieve this by transforming events through art and song, through myth.
The memory of disasters is doctored "by Zeus" ultimately to brainwash humanity and to
present the new order of heaven as proper, lawful, and beautiful. Hesiod, reciting this
profound truth, goes on to describe how the muses work, reminding us of a combined team
for domestic propaganda and psychological warfare.
As a result, all the arts and sciences have been manipulated by the muses. What we know
of the catastrophes must come from a "natural history" - geology, biology, physics and
astronomy - and a politics, philosophy, and theology that have been censored by the
Muses. Additionally, we must obtain our historical material from myth, song, dances, and
drama that are similarly screened. It is well to insist upon this premise, whether we
come to the problem from an acquaintanceship with the natural sciences or the social
sciences. The gods and especially Zeus, who seems under various names to have developed
the patterns of anthropological psychology among most cultures, have required this
premise of us.
The science of remembering and forgetting - what shall it be called - mnemonology? Its
scope ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the "psychopathology of everyday
life," as Freud put it, to the "collective amnesia" that Velikovsky asserts of ancient
catastrophes and that German educators observe as they try to teach the history of
Nazism. It must deal with the Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite that masks a world
disaster, and with nursery songs that mask the murder of kings.
We may quote what Katherine Elwes Thomas found when she explored The Real Personages of
Mother Goose:
The lines of Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue, which to childish minds have only
quaint charm of meaning, which suggest but the gayest of blue skies and rapturous-
hearted creatures disporting in daisy-pied meadows, hold in reality grim import. Across
all this nursery lore there falls at times the black shadow of the headman's block and
in their seeming lightness are portrayed the tragedies of kings and queens, the
corruptions of opposing political parties, and stories of fanatical religious strife
that have gone to make world history.
For instance, the child sings of "four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie." And "when
the pie was opened the birds began to sing," now, "wasn't that a tasty dish to put
before the King?" The child is singing of actual history that was never heard or
learned, of an incident in the grim struggle between the English Crown and the Church,
during which, to appease the greed and hostility of the King, twenty-four deeds of
church land were sealed into a pouch of dough and delivered to his castle. In old slang,
the dough was handed over; in new slang, the "bread." The elapsed time from event to
amnesiac song might have been less than a century.
The Oedipus myth, to take another instance, is capable of providing an accurate account
of an episode in the history of Egypt. Its central figure was the Pharaoh Akhnaton. The
story survived its original obliteration at the hands of the theocracy of Egyptian
Thebes. It held intact as it was transferred across cultures, probably via Ugarit whose
King Nikomedes may have founded Grecian Thebes, as Cadmus. By the time of Sophocles'
tragedy, Oedipus Rex, seven mnemonic or fourteen reproductive generations had passed,
that is, about four hundred years. [2] .
Heavy trauma, it is here proposed, is at the source of many features of the higher
intellectual operations and "advanced" social institutions of humankind.
An experience which we call traumatic is one which within a very short space of time
subjects the mind to such a very high increase of stimulation that assimilation or
elaboration of it can no longer be effected by normal means, so that lasting
disturbances must result in the distribution of the available energy of the mind [3] .
TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY
In a prescient passage Friedrich Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals, 1887) stabs into the
heart of the matter. He asks, "How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can
one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the
passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there?" [4]
And he continues,
"One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem
were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in
the whole prehistory of man than his mnenotechnics. If something is to stay in the
memory it must be burned in; only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory -
this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on
earth. One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and
gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of the terror
that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still effective: the
past, the longest, deepest and sternest past, breathes upon us and rises up in us
whenever we become 'serious. ' Man could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices
when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most repulsive mutilations
(castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all
religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) - all this has its origin in
the instinct that realized pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics." [5]
Unfortunately, after this amazing passage, Nietzsche's genesis collapses. Although he
immediately goes hunting for the acts that provoked such mnemotechnics, he shoots a
little rabbit: the primitive forms of contract between buyers and sellers. In order to
trade, men had to keep promises; in order to ensure obligations, the failure to repay
had to be punished severely: thus the genealogy of morals.
One is reminded of Sigmund Freud's alternate route to fundamental error in Totem and
Taboo: that in the oedipal conflict and the slaying of the father, man achieved a (bad)
conscience and the need to justify and to punish. The Oedipus myth, as was said above,
has much breadth and staying power, but a still greater and universal fear had to be
imposed to support its recollection, and this was the fear of (devotion to) the god of
Akhnaton. And it is difficult to conceive of anything more grand and durable than the
catastrophes attendant upon encounters between Earth and other heavenly forces.
It is significant that Freud, perceiving an inadequacy of general sexual theory, moved
Beyond the Pleasure Principle [6] , searching out a deeper fear that he termed the
death instinct and observed to be present especially in veterans suffering from "shell-
shock," whose nightmares and hallucinations found them continuously repeating what,
after all, could hardly be called a pleasurable wish. Nor did such "symptoms vanish when
their unconscious antecedents have been made conscious," as Freud remarks concerning
obsessive fixations, following his earlier theory [7] . He and many others would have
done well to stick with Nietzsche's brilliant premise and continue the search for
historical psychological experiences of great stress befalling humankind when it had
arrived at a complex state of organic potential.
The Love Affair involves both a disgraced contract and a disgraced sexuality. But these
are cover-ups for a disaster too great to talk about. Indeed, by the time that the Love
Affair occurred, only sexual imagery and violence were sufficiently eloquent to use as
disguises, at least in literature; beyond that, one would have to resort for the
patterning and recapitulation of such traumas to religious and political institutions -
hierarchic, obsessed with the symbolism of violence, compulsively repetitive. The Love
Affair, one must bear in mind, was only the latest in a series of catastrophes over
thousands of years, from which human nature as we have known it was born and which
shaped the physical world in which we live today.
Man's memory itself, the prototypical remembering, is a consequence of catastrophe more
than of any other incidental or habitual interest of humanity. The Love Affair, in
reflecting a catastrophe, reflects a late event in a series of catastrophes that created
memory. It was perhaps the last of the qualitatively distinct mass events on the basis
of which memory was institutionalized, routinized, and socialized. Humans now remember
(and forget) according to rules in which social forces play a continuous role, but this
role evolved from catastrophes.
THE RULES OF MEMORY
All memory occurs under conditions that guarantee its imperfection. Given its mode of
creation, remembering must function compatibly. No datum will enter the mind
photographically. Rather the inputs will be screened not only by the senses, which
themselves, in large part, perceive because of their prior social conditioning, but by
the willingness to admit only censored data. This holds true, as many careful studies
have shown, for the most noncontroversial and trivial kinds of experiences. Who says
remember says select, who says memory, says forgetting. By the time of Homer, numerous
natural disasters had befallen humanity; the perfect ease of the whole Phaeacian
episode, including the Love Affair, attests to the approaching achievement of "perfect
imperfection": nothing of the original truth need be omitted, so well under control are
the conditions creating imperfections. We are on our way to the climax of artistic
sublimation.
The concept of "perfect memory" is a useful fiction. One is compelled to say that it is
a theocratic fiction. For the content of what is remembered is in the broadest sense
religiously and politically determined. The ideal canons of registering and remembering,
set by modern science, are evidence in themselves that "you cannot trust your memory"
and "independent observers have to confirm the same facts." But also the establishment
of scientists as a social system lays down the rules of what is to be watched for, what
is to be ignored, and what is to be distorted. The Homerids were the practitioners and
teachers of "accurate memory" as defined to protect society against its anxieties.
The intensity of remembering is directly proportional to the gravity of a trauma. By
intensity is meant sharpness, detail, and durability in conscious and unconscious form.
By gravity is meant how deeply and adversely one is affected in the major regions of his
life: his physical being, his cherished ones, his group, his wealth, his control, his
beliefs about good and the true. Machiavelli said to the rules: it is better to be
feared by the people than to be loved, if you cannot be both. Fear and anxiety drove
primeval humanity to invent and to organize. Fear mixed itself early with love, and
produced the continuous ambivalence towards sexuality that is exhibited in the Love
Affair.
The most intense memories are likely to occur without "willing" them. This is
understandable once we consider that no one will willingly subject himself to the
conditions that produce intense memories. But one will try to will a pleasant memory.
How many times do people think: "I shall never forget this beautiful sunset... I shall
always remember this kindness... I shall never forget this orgasm," only to lose their
grasp of the memory shortly thereafter. If a person remembers "a kind act" done to him
long ago, it is in the context of a generally unkind and fearful environment of acts.
The most that can be done to "will" the memory is to tie it consciously and
unconsciously to disasters and especially institutionalize the disasters so that the
group will continuously reenact them. All great historical religions are based upon
these psychological operations.
The most intense memories are most likely to be unavailable to the conscious mind, and
to be buried in dreams and myths. These latter act to suppress and control anxiety. The
dream and myth language is likely to approach as close as possible to the ultimate
universal, traumatic experiences, without becoming unbearable. It rides on the tracks of
birth throes, the fearful side of sexual copulation, death scenes, violence and
conflict, including all the conventional transformations of these materials into
religious and social activities, routines and institutions. This "step-down" principle
works on the descent into the depths of the unconscious; it works, that is, on the depth
of burial, and it brings about the selection of the next less traumatic kind of material
as the screen for the more traumatizing type.
The speed of remembering is proportionate to the intensity of the trauma. "The
experience burned itself indelibly upon my mind," one says. A single experience is
enough to cause remembering, if it is grave enough. If it is too grave, physical
collapse occurs and no further memorization is possible. At the other extreme, in the
absence of fear, interest or even recognition - as in most classrooms, an abundance of
knowledge moves, as they say, "from the notes of the teacher to the notes of the student
without passing through the minds of either." If our physical analysis is correct, the
astral Love Affair occupied a few hours among many years of experiencing all sorts of
things.
The phenotypes of the myth are functions of the archetypes of the cultural personality,
which is merely to say that the kind of story told, together with its details, are
characteristic of the culture. Some more ancient pre-Greek and proto-Greek cultures
practicing group marriage would have had to find a different plot and details to screen
the reiteration of the Moon and Mars encounter. It is characteristic of "Western man's"
partially Greek-born culture, and a proof of his cultural ancestry, that the adulterous
love triangle, descended from the Greeks, is still a favorite artistic theme.
FORGETTING
Forgetting is subject to the same rules as remembering. We remember to forget. That is,
amnesia is activated in the same way as memory. Glancing at the list of rules of
remembering, one can substitute forgetting for remembering and get the following rules
of forgetting.
Like remembering, forgetting is guaranteed to occur under all conditions, and to be
imperfect, never complete. Nor is forgetting accurate: it is ragged, affected by many
particular causes. If the popular metaphor speaks of the stream of memory, one can speak
as well of the stream of forgetting. Forgetting occurs proportionate to the gravity of a
trauma, and forgetting occurs without willing to forget.
The most intense forgetfulness is most likely to be available to the conscious mind; one
must admit "we cannot recall what it is that we have forgotten," when the thing
forgotten is a matter of grave threat to the mind.
Forgetting, too, speeds up with the intensity of the trauma. For this reason one can
believe that events that occurred perhaps only a generation before Homer, or even in his
lifetime, might achieve a complete aesthetic screen at his hands. Of course, a multitude
of local scenarios are possible; but let us imagine what may have happened in a typical
disaster of the "Age of Mars" that is, in the eighth and seventh centuries [8] .
An ordinary person is alerted and examines the sky with a foreboding of evil. A
brilliant speck grows larger from day to day. He is told that it has done so before,
with terrible consequences. The memory is already excited. Calendars are studied and
worked over. Oracles are consulted. All group efforts are mobilized to control the
menace: rituals of subservience and devotion; the stricter punishment of any suspected
deviants in all areas of law and conduct; the destruction of enemies if they can be
promptly engaged; the sacrifice of more and more valuable properties and persons.
Relentlessly the menace approaches. The sky is full of lights, shapes and turbulence.
The Earth begins to respond - to live, to move, to smoke, to blow up strong winds, to
shriek, to take fire. Thunderbolts strike on all sides. Our hero watches, bemused. He is
exceedingly frightened, as are his family and neighbors. There may be a pandemonium in
which he faints or is struck dumb; he may scramble into a temple or house or cave; he
will cover his head. The young will observe more than the old. "The disaster occurs in
successive kinds of turbulence, in all the various destructive forms of earth, air,
fire, and water, the primordial elements. Animals, both tame and wild, crowd in upon
people, terrified, unaggressive, unhungry. Eardrums are blown in or sucked out by abrupt
pressure changes. Some are struck blind, others gassed. Strange objects and lifeforms
drop from the sky. The sky reels. The waters gyrate madly and rush to and fro."
The vista is one of unmitigated disaster. There is nowhere to go. The survivors regroup
after each incident. They are partially paralyzed with fear and despair, partly striving
for survival and control.
"What god is angry?" they wonder, if they don't already know. What other gods can they
appeal to and how? What trait of a god should they address themselves to? The most
important religious and political decisions of their lifetimes are made; the most sacred
instruments and skills of the immemorial past are called upon in the crisis. Nothing,
nobody, will ever persuade him to behave differently, or his children or, if they can
help it, their descendants into the eternal future.
When the disasters subside, the survivors are crazed. They must regroup, recollect their
thoughts, and do something about the memory. This is not a task for an astronomer
sitting in the air-conditioned hall of a giant telescope in Arizona. Nor for a sober
historian. It is a task for any surviving priest rulers: "We have been visited by the
gods. The figures they strike in the sky are their various apparitions when destructive
and punitive... Good gods and spirits fight evil ones. Our conduct displeases them: we
must strengthen our observance of rituals: purify ourselves; expiate our sins; sacrifice
ever more precious possessions; kill more enemies; control the libertarian; guard the
names by which we call a god; and remind ourselves forevermore of the events of these
days while we watch for their eventual recurrence."
Again history is quickly subverted: indeed, it has never existed. Instead memorial
activities are planned by the community that will register whatever intensity on the
memorial-screen is sufficient to suppress the pain of the memory of the original
experience plus all the preceding related and similar traumatic experiences.
It is well to be quite explicit: No sooner is a disaster experienced than it is
remembered: no sooner remembered than it is forgotten. All the rules of remembering are
rules of forgetting.
What? Is memory a forgetting while to forget is to remember? One seems to be approaching
this paradox; if it is not indeed an absurdity. Yet, if we resolve this paradox we shall
better understand the great mystery of myth, which bids us remember ferociously in order
the more firmly and securely to forget.
The paradox disappears with one fact, well appreciated. The fact is that a memory can
enter the mind, but can rarely leave it. Except by organic lesion, there is little
forgetting. The biological system can scarcely throw off a memory; it can readily
manipulate it.
What is called "forgetting" is the eternal bookkeeping system of memory. From conception
to dissolution and death, the system will always show a net profit. But, like many a
bookkeeping system in commerce, memorial bookkeeping has numerous ways of casting the
balance so as to conceal the surplus. It is with the forgotten material that the mind
works to create myth, art, and hypothesis. The concept of forgetting is needed to
describe the handling of the transactions of memory that permit consciousness,
instrumentally rational conduct, and normal behavior.
Where is the balance cast that makes these two opposites indeed opposite? In the
functional machinery of the mind, where opposites are coined according to the needs of
the moment. Whatever stabilizes the organism's "normalcy" is chosen; and the organism
remembers or forgets conveniently.
AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS
Whatever the finesse with which memory and forgetfulness may be explained, there must
remain some incredulity in the modern mind. Scientists believe proudly that they can
read any evidence unflinchingly. If the human mind that experienced catastrophe should
not remember consciously, and discourse liberally and frankly upon it, what then of
those tough intellectuals of ancient times who conducted inquiries afterwards? Why have
they not handed down frank evidence of catastrophes? The disbelief of the theory of the
Love Affair that was based upon archeological, geological and astronomical grounds may
have changed to acceptance. But what of the silences of ancient history?
Though certain biases of languages and philosophy that formed after the catastrophes
have already been noted - several additional suggestions may be offered as to why
Hesiod, Homer, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato and other illustrious ancient Greeks do not
frankly tell their curious descendants of the true deeds of Mars and the Moon.
In the first place, natural disasters and sudden change did occupy the minds of ancient
thinkers (sticking still to the Greek-speaking area). Homer's Iliad is replete with
accounts of god-enacted and god-caused disaster. In Aristophanes' comedy, "The Clouds,"
the gods reprove the Moon for having brought disasters to the calendar and their cult.
Plato begs us to take him seriously when he relates the story of the destruction of
Atlantis. (One may infer that there were a great many spoofers of old myth in Athens.)
In The Laws, he asserts that mankind has been reduced to marginal survivors on numerous
occasions owing to natural disasters. Conversely, he is angry at the "immorality" of
Homer, which he takes at face value, and in the same dialogue he proclaims the god-given
harmony and regularity of the heavenly spheres and would punish severely offenders who
claim disasters have come or will come from the skies. Plato's self-contradictions in
respect to catastrophism are serious. They reveal great doubts in his mind, and what in
an ordinary person would be called "typical neurotic aggressiveness to resolve the
tensions provoked by his doubts."
In the Epinomis, Plato is again exhibiting his anxieties, in a form that has not been
generally appreciated. As mentioned in an earlier place, he gave the present Greek names
of the planets for the first time. He offers the lame excuse that the fiery terms used
for the heavenly bodies were so similar because the Greeks did not know the planets and
did not want unfairly to give names to some but not to others.
Perhaps the whole matter of naming was controversial, involving as it did ancient
psychological associations, theological theories, and intercultural contacts with
Egyptians, Syrians, and others.
In any event, attention should be called to Plato's statement that the heavenly bodies
are gods without souls. He distinguishes these from the Olympian gods, whom he dislikes,
precisely because of their reputation for immorality and uncontrollability. He is, in
effect, trying to rid the mundane scene of these gods, by exiling them in the eternal
immutable astral regions. He would then fix the calendar of festivals to their periods.
This would seem to be a major unconscious philosophical step towards controlling the
gods and paving the way for a lawful universe. Thus it happened that Plato usurped the
Olympian gods.
Aristotle, over three hundred years after the Love Affair, was still conscientious, if
serene, in his study of the skies: heaven and the planets are self-moved movers
executing perfectly regular motions; they are substances immune to change and far more
perfect than man. He is nevertheless impelled to write of planets:
Our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down to us, their posterity, a
tradition, in the form of a myth, that these substances are Gods and that the divine
encloses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical
form with a view to the persuasion of the multitude and to its legal and utilitarian
expedience; they say these Gods are in the form of men or like some of the other
animals, and they say other things consequent on and similar to these which we have
mentioned. But if we were to separate the first point from these additions and take it
alone - that they thought the first substances to be Gods, we must regard this as an
inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art and science has often been
developed as far as possible and has again perished, these opinions have been preserved
until the present, like relics of the ancient treasure. Only thus, then, is the opinion
of our ancestors and our earliest predecessors clear to us [9] .
Moreover, the ancients were habituated to a level of natural disaster that would
astonish moderns. Earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and "rushing stars" (meteorites and
comets) were much more common in the era following the settling of heaven. Earthquakes
were ordinary in Rome, for instance, even five centuries later. The Greeks did not
develop a tradition of geological and astronomical reporting until the scientific period
began, over a century after Homer sang (seventh century). Herodotus carries remarks
about disaster in his Histories (fifth century); Thucydides, who could describe plagues
in acceptable modern medical style, flourished 250 years after the Love Affair. He
reported no astral phenomena of consequence during the Peloponnesian Wars.
Third, the number of survivors was small. Many storage and retrieval systems of memory
were blasted or drowned out. If the many dutiful clerks of Pylos, Mycenae, Knossos,
Troy, and other centers had continued their bureaucracies, the records might be ample.
Furthermore, astral encounters and an earthly turbulence would provoke dense or
brilliant atmospheric conditions that would render stable observations rare. Encounters
would often be obscured and only partly visible in the areas where there would be
potentially competent observers. One would always expect disputation as to what occurred
when the celestial armies clashed.
The printing press was unknown and only the bark of the papyrus, clay tablets, stone,
and several types of leaf were the media for the inscription and transmission of
messages nonorally. Although more durable than modern books and film, they lacked the
widespread dissemination that can be achieved with the printed word. Records were always
few and a great burden was placed upon accurate memorization and repetition to the
young, to an extent quite unappreciated today.
Oral accounts, like writing to be sure, have intrinsic mnemonic techniques, which, to
the discredit of our scientific age, have not been adequately analyzed, and which lend,
therefore, a greater semblance of error that actually exists in the accounts told.
Personification of events, for example, is a technique of illiterate memorization, as
well as a psychological process that is pervasive of mental operations in nearly all
cultures.
There has been an almost total destruction of records, both from the time of the
catastrophes and later. Only several thousands of the clay tablets from several
locations carrying the language "Linear B" have been rescued from the ruins of Mycenaean
culture. These tablets, by their paucity and scorched condition offer mute testimony
that a well-administered civilization became a shambles of fire, destruction and death
perhaps in a few hours, and a few events.
The classical period produced thousands of volumes by scientists on most subjects.
Almost all of these have been lost owing to carelessness, barbarian depredations, and
political and religious fanaticism [10] . Of 150 known Greek authors of tragic drama,
we have full plays by only three of them and only thirty-three of the 297 creations of
these three men remain. From this ancient treasure would have come a number of plays
such as Seneca's Thyestes, which could only be a pale later replay of Sophocles' lost
Atreus, both concerned with the devastating commotions of the globe in the period of the
Love Affair.
Owing to the rules of memory and forgetting, one should not expect an elaborate
literature of catastrophe to have existed in scientific form, but the writings of
Pythagoras, Eudoxos, Alcmaion, Eratosthenes and many another author would have
established ample foundations for a set of modern sciences that would admit of
catastrophism in their theories.
When the great modern astronomer, Schiaparelli, reconstructed the planetary theory of
Eudoxos (408-355), the colleague of Plato (427?-347) and Aristotle, he had this to say:
For Jupiter and Saturn, and to some extent for Mercury also, the system was capable of
giving on the whole a satisfactory explanation of their motion in longitude, their
stationary points, and their retrograde motions; for Venus it was unsatisfactory, and it
failed altogether in the case of Mars. The limits of motion in latitude represented by
the various hippopedes were in tolerable agreement with observed facts, although the
periods of the deviations and their places in the cycle were quite wrong." [11]
We would surmise that Eudoxos' problem arose from an absence of data concerning the
classical and present celestial order. For the other planets, he may have had access to
several centuries of observations from Egypt or Mesopotamia. For Venus, and even more
for Mars, there may have been fewer ancient sources and less lengthy series of
observations available to him. These planets, too, in their present motions, are more
difficult to plot than the others. Perhaps the problem of theory was even more important
than the problem of data; he might have had to disencumber himself of a theory of
motions and cycles that was more adequate for an earlier sky than for a classical sky.
If this speculation about Eudoxos is tenable, one may dissever in him the factors of
amnesiac relief through abstraction, a lack of fundamental data from the past and
puzzlement owing to incorrect theory. Eudoxos was striving to order the cleared skies;
he would in any event have found ancient evidence of erratic skies a nuisance and
impediment.
These several reasons why direct scientific observations of ancient catastrophes have
rarely reached us complement the primary and most striking reason that has already been
discussed: massive instantaneous amnesia in direct proportion to the pain and horror of
disaster, followed by heavy ritualistic, aggressive, and expressive displacement of the
fear and avoidance involved. Nichomachus of Gerasa and Lucian agreed; the divine Orpheus
was the founder of astronomy and the inventor of the harp. "The harp, that had seven
chords, discoursed the harmony of the errant spheres." [12]
The "errant spheres;" the disasters; the memory and the forgetting; the muses; the harp
for the sublimation of memory; and the "holy dreamtime songs" like the Love Affair.
Notes (Chapter 15: The Birth and Death of Memory)
1. Mireaux, op. cit., p. 429, who acutely perceives that Hesiod is a "futurist," not a"
reactionary," and that his book on farming and farm life, Works and Days, was a treatise
searching for justice and orderly existence.
2. Cf. I Velikovsky, Oedipus and Akhnaton (New York: Doubleday. 1960); Cyrus Gordon,
"Oedipus and Akhnaton," II Pens‚e, no. 2( 1972), p. 30: also notes in the same issue. We
are using Velikovsky's revised chronology; John Holbrook, Jr. interprets this in III
Pensee, no. 2( 1973). I use term "mnemonic generation" to denote a sixty-year "memorial
generation" in which the oldest members of a group can convey information to young
children.
3. Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916-7: Eng. trans. 1929), New
York: Washington Square press, 1935), p. 286.
4. p. 496 of the Kaufman edition.
5. Ibid., p. 497. Cf. Carl J. Jung, "Approaching the Unconscious," in Man and His
Symbols (New York: Dell, 968), 1-94, for related material on fear, and on memory, pp.
34, 52-3.
6. 1920, published in English, 195-, rev. ed. 1961, New York: Liveright; Psycho-Analysis
and the War Neuroses( 1919), Stand. Ed:, XVII, 207;
7. General Introduction, op. cit., p. 291, 287.
8. Frank W. Lane's book, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), Can be
used as a kind of reference manual for all that happens when the forces of nature
intensify into their disastrous forms.
9. Metaphysics (W. D. Ross trans.) Vol. II, L. 1074b.
10. Cf. H. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), pp. 44-7, for
details of the destruction of ancient records.
11. Quoted in Ross, op. cit., II, P. 390. Cf. Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in
Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. by E. L. Miner (Cambridge Harvard U. Press, 1972), part
IV, regarding, inter alia, Eudoxus' influence on Plato.
12. Lucian (second century, A. D.), "Astrology," in Works, Vol. V, A. M. Harmon, trans.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ, Press, 1936), p. 355. Nichomachus (first century A. D.)
was famous for his mathematical accuracy.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA
One thunderstorm does not make a great god, nor does one volcano. Further, ordinary
nature does not make a great god, neither its abundances nor its famines. The struggles
of old bulls with young bulls over cows do not make a great god. A great god dwells in
heaven, but can be everywhere. A people will recognize another people's great god as
kindred but, too, the god is often hostile. Every great god emerges out of an apparently
universal disaster in which the skies are involved, not excepting the great Mother -
Earth Goddess, oldest of all, who cast off from her heaving body the oppressive Heaven,
Uranus.
The gods of the Love Affair are great gods. And to the skeptic who deplores the deceit,
adultery, an generally libertine and human deportment of these "stars," one might
remark: "You cannot imagine how really badly these gods behaved; it was inutterably
worse... Anyhow, no one is saying that these are your gods, and we had better not get
onto that subject."
The gods of Demodocus opera theater behave as they do to cover up their real behavior
which is infinitely more destructive, indiscriminate, and punitive. The next problem of
this stage is to show how their more intolerable behavior works itself out as a bedroom
farce. How was the traumatic disaster transformed?
DREAMWORK
The best available model for the interpretation of a myth is the dream. As was shown in
an early chapter, the staging of the telling of myth creates a collective Holy
Dreamtime. The audience is prepared to dream, to engage in dreamwork themselves, and to
emerge with a sense of heightened reality. For reality is the unreality that enable
people to compose their anxieties. In The Interpretation of Dreams, his admitted
masterwork [1] , Sigmund Freud told how dream functions to keep one asleep, and one can
only stay asleep so long as the unconscious problems that bother him most are censored
and reworked into a form, which, while often disgusting and disturbing upon
recollection, is nevertheless better than the unconscious reality.
To discover the latent wish whose fulfillment keeps one asleep is not always easy, as
many a psychiatrist will attest. Homer tried his hand at it, in an astonishing
scientific leap over two millennia:
It is dark. Odysseus has returned to his palace. He presents himself to Penelope, his
wife, in the disguise of an old beggar who has some knowledge of her husband, the long-
wandering king of Ithaca. He wins her confidence. Penelope speaks to him (in disguise as
an old beggar):
Let me ask you to interpret a dream of mine which I shall now describe. I keep a flock
of twenty geese in the place. They come in from the pond to pick up their grain and I
delight in watching them. In my dream I saw a great eagle swoop down from the hills and
break their neck with his crooked beak, killing them all, There they lay in a heap on
the floor while he vanished in the open sky. I wept and cried aloud, though it was only
a dream, and the Achaean ladies, gathering around me, found me sobbing my heart out
because the eagle had slaughtered my geese. But the bird came back. He perched on a
jutting timber of the roof, and breaking into human speech he checked my tears. "Take
heart," he said, 'daughter of the noble Icarius. This is not a dream but a happy reality
which you shall see fulfilled. The geese were your lovers, and I that played the eagle's
part am now your husband, home again and ready to deal out grim punishment to every man
among them. ' At this point I awoke. I looked around me and there I saw the geese in the
yard pecking their grain at the trough in their accustomed place.
"Lady," replied the subtle Odysseus, "nobody could force any other meaning on this
dream; You have learnt from Odysseus himself how he will translate it into fact. Clearly
the suitors are all of them doomed: There is not one who will get away alive." [2] The
cunning and cautious Odysseus agrees quickly, in an uncharacteristic way. (Or can one
believe that Homer was so extremely subtle as to make him here super-cunning?)
A psychiatrist does well to avoid counsel where his own private involvement is deep.
Penelope's wish may not have been that her husband return and the suitors be slain, but
quite the contrary, that her legendary patriarchal husband not return so that her
beautiful geese could continue to play about her and eat from her board. This latent and
ambivalent wish has been bothering her and making her sleep badly, we hear. Perhaps the
best that the dream could contrive for her was to act out what she feared, followed by a
hysterical awakening; and then came the half-asleep explanation, with which Odysseus
emphatically agreed [3] .
It is perhaps one of the signal achievements of humanity to have discovered and applied
the principles of collective dreamwork. The sacred conscious dreamers of ancient Phaecia
do stay asleep and it is an amusing dream. They are awakened gently by the boys leaping
into the air after a ball. Odysseus, one might think, should have been upset by the Love
Affair dream. It would not stretch the imagination to put himself in Hephaestus' place,
long absent, with his wife rumored to be consorting with various suitors, enjoying his
bed as they were his board. Instead he was "glad at heart, following the Song of
Demodocus." There was fundamentally more at stake in the dream than his Penelope and
possessions.
The reduction of the gods to human terms in the Love Affair myth under examination is
basically a way of coping with them. It is universal in religion, as annoying as it may
be to rational philosophers. All religion is a dream; the actions here analyzed are a
mere flicker played upon a universal human screen.
Within itself, however, the present myth has an external logic that most dreams do not
possess. Freud speaks of the occasional reorganization that occurs in dreams so as to
reassemble the transmuted pieces into an acceptable form that fools one with its facade
of "really the way things happen." The myth has been worked upon consciously. It is not
Kafka-esque or Ionescu-esque; it does not double back upon itself like the theater of
the absurd. Homer had gone far, but not that far. His myth is classical, "rational,"
"normal."
His handling of the material gives a clue as to how the Greek and Western mind will work
from then on in transmuting its unconscious material into its fictional components:
"realism," romanticism (in the vulgar sense), explicit motivation, clarity of plot. At
least, this has been the leading thrust of western literature, especially of popular
literature, until now.
Freud mentions also the reversal of cause and effect in dreams. One is uncertain, for
example, exactly "how the gods flew." The astrophysical uncertainty leaves one uncertain
whether such a reversal may have affected the myth. Since destruction was mutual among
the parties, the myth-work could have enjoyed some leeway in deciding "who did what to
whom" and thereby ease its task.
Other features of dreamwork that Freud analyzed have already been treated. He says that
the dreamer is always present in his dream, although somewhat apart as a kind of third
person, and our myth contains its dreamers as well, from Athena and Odysseus, down to
the ordinary household retainer crowding at the periphery of the audience, the ordinary
man beset by the disastrous conduct of the gods.
Freud says, too, that the dreamer commands symbolic language which he has never been
aware of learning. And George English has neatly stated that "a dream is a tool for
rubbing information against information." So, although the ordinary Phaeacian was not a
master of the ceremonies, he was, as a community member, entitled to identify himself
with the action; the symbolism of the myth may have meant as much to him or her as it
did to Odysseus, or more.
Freud discovered that when the wakened dreamer recites the dream, he is prone to deny
most vociferously those elements that are exercising the dreamwork censorship.
Everything may be made clear except that which is most obvious - the purpose of the
dream. What might have been going on in the unconscious mental operations of the
Phaeacian dreamers was described in the pages on "The Love Affair as the Mask of
Tragedy." But if Odysseus or any Phaeacian were to be questioned about the myth, his
most assured remark would be that it was comedy, not a tragedy; that disaster was not
his concern, that the gods had everything under control and didn't mean what they were
doing anyhow - in short, a total contradiction of the covert meaning of the myth.
Elsewhere in these pages, other Freudian injunctions as to the components of dreamwork
were considered: the transmutation of catastrophic symbolism into the symbols of the
smithy and the bedroom; the matching of plot with reality, and reality with wish; the
uncovering of the levels of meaning.
Freud can help on at least one more perplexing point, because it bedeviled him too. One
cannot help but wonder at the sanguine piling up of levels of different meaning upon
single words, phrases and symbolic deeds; this author must seem like a table waiter
setting upon his arm an alarmingly tall stack of plates. Freud talks in The
Interpretation of Dreams of the genius of dreamwork.
It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the abundance of the unconscious
trains of thought, all striving to find expression, which are active in our minds. Nor
is it easy to credit the skill shown by the dream-work in always hitting upon forms of
expression that can bear several meanings; My readers will always be inclined to accuse
me of introducing an unnecessary amount of ingenuity into my interpretations; but actual
experience would teach them better [4] .
Even when the mind is carefully trained to perceive and understand by one sign only a
single referent, it does so under duress. For such perception and cognition is not only
inhuman; it is false to "reality." And when freed from the bonds of an everyday meaning,
the mind exhibits an astonishing genius for combinations and patterns of "unreal
reality." Hephaestus' lameness means all that we have said it means, and perhaps even
more. The movements of the plot of the Love Affair are of the number and variety of the
movements of great bodies in the sky, a double-tracked reality that scarcely strains the
myth-making mind.
Given that Ninevah and Sparta were designed by their rulers to imitate various celestial
archetypes, can one still be amazed that the same archetypes will have been working
within the unconscious mind to produce many other manifestations, concealed as well as
overt?
Where Freud cannot help one, or rather, where one would not want his help, given his
theories, is in the interpretation of the larger framework of sexualism and catastrophe.
For here, as mentioned before, Freud, like every other authority except the rare
predecessors of, and those of the circle of, Velikovsky has not known or been willing to
acknowledge the priority of catastrophes over other drives and behaviors in the creation
of human nature and institutions as found today. Freud may have postulated an instinct
for "ego-survival," but he did not conceive how catastrophically the ego had been
threatened.
SEXUALITY AND DISASTER
The Love Affair is especially appropriate for the analysis of the causal forces in human
history because it seems on its face to show that sex is so important that even
disasters are translated into sexual terms. This is true only in a quantitative sense;
sexuality is a step down from catastrophe in the mental turmoil associated with it, and,
as such, is a logical deflator of catastrophic anxiety. The Love Affair, paradoxically,
reveals sexuality to be secondary in the definition of human nature.
At the beginning one must of course grant the obvious: the Love Affair is saturated with
sexuality. It would be difficult to conceive, furthermore, of any area of behavior that
would provide such a complete analogy to the latent action and at the same time one that
would communicate so readily with the audience of ancient Greeks. We have already
remarked on the Grecian fascination with the struggle between the sexes.
Sexuality is primeval, familiar, a continuous source of conflict. It is both marvelous
and understandable, surrounded with mishap, steady, dangerous and humorous. It lends
itself to moods, to sharing and exclusiveness, to love and hate. It is endlessly
diverting and suggestive with respect to ordinary nature. In its reproductive aspects,
it is profoundly meaningful to short-lived and disease-prone people. But, one should not
forget, sexuality points "downward," to the animal kingdom, further to the plants. What
has sex to do with the astral gods? No. The philosophers are right in their way, Sex is
tossed by man onto the laps of gods. It is an expiative and control mechanism. "You
shall have all we have, and, (cunningly) you will be controlled by it, too."
One must not go too far afield. This ground should be left for a later ploughing. One is
faced in the Love Affair with a sexuality thousands of years beyond its first
ramifications into human nature. Here it is necessary only to throw up a barrier against
interpreting the Love Affair as a love affair because sexuality is deemed to be the
fountainhead of myth.
Sexuality can also be a cloak of disaster. It stands here with all of its traditional
and well-developed imagery in place of the true story. There is reason for its use.
Catastrophe can be buried well beneath sexual imagery; there are enough intimations of
fright, noise, violence, love, hate, strangeness, explosiveness, conflict and damage in
the "primal scene," the "birth trauma," the lust to mate, and the competition for mates
to inspire the most profound analogies. Still, they are partial analogies, not "the
whole real thing."
And when the direction of causation is reversed, there is additional reason to believe
that the catastrophes of the gods are the teachers of sexual conduct, as they are the
teachers of religion, of politics, of war, of the arts and crafts. Catastrophe
reinforces sexuality, provides taboos, devises perversions, excites sexual orgies, and
poisons relations between the sexes even while it exalts them. That the often repeated
song of Demodocus must have taught the audience something about sex, marriage and
justice is quite likely. The "calloused attitude" toward such affairs may have been
Dorian Greek but where did the Dorians get it from?
The sexual psychoses, which Sigmund Freud and every doctor from the shaman to the Park
Avenue psychiatrist have treated, are aggravated by the uncontrolled amnesia of disaster
and by many of the transfigured forms of behavior that man invented to ameliorate the
symptoms of disaster. Not having yet uncovered the source of the infernal angst that
crouches ready to produce psychotic behavior, therapists, whether specialized in
sexually oriented crises, or religiously inspired, or war-peace directed, or of any
other inclination - alienation, materialism, etc. - can go on in endless circles, curing
when easing of symptoms will occur in any event, curing through authority, or passing
along through symptomatic relief a psychosis from one object-fixation to another [5] .
Withal one should not deny that a skillful cutting of the brain and drugging of the
glands may someday excise the primeval angst; it may be that the stoneage men of many
areas were up to treating a catastrophically-induced psychosis with their frequent
resort to trephination of the skull.
IN ILLO TEMPORE
It is common for persons who have suffered a personal disaster to have a recurrent dream
respecting it. The same dream or one like it may repeat itself for years, disappear for
years, and recur. Similarly, every known human group has developed in its prehistoric
period various myths that have to be retold and rituals that have to be repeated. All of
them go back to the great times of destruction and creation, illud tempus, a phrase that
Mircea Eliade finds useful as a pivotal point in his far ranging studies of comparative
religion.
Writing of the activities of archaic man, which would include Homeric man, he declares
that "their meaning, their value, are not connected with their crude physical datum but
with their property of reproducing a primordial act, of repeating a mythical example.
Nutrition is not a simple physiological operation; it renews a communion. Marriage and
the collective orgy echo mythical prototypes; they are repeated because they were
consecrated in the beginning (in those days in illo tempore, ab origine) by gods,
ancestors, or heroes." [6]
"We must do as the gods did in the beginning." [7] Time must be regenerated
periodically, in endless cycles; in accord with the temporal period, many things are
renewed: fires are put out and rekindled, the dead return to visit, the original combats
between gods and devils are reenacted, and orgies commemorating the destruction of all
values are held to precede the new year. The year in illo tempore ended in a catastrophe
of earth, air, fire, and/ or water. "In fact, among many primitive people, an essential
element of any cure is the recitation of the cosmogonic myth." Also, it is recited on
the occasions of birth, marriage, and death, indeed for practically every occasion when
a person needs to build up morale [8] .
Yet this same "archaic man" dreads history. He wishes only to recapitulate his
beginnings, the sacred events, not the profane events that have happened since. He is
not simply a conservative, a traditionalist; he is superconservative, obsessed with what
happened in illo tempore. For there was a dreadful thing then, beyond all historical
measure and until it is controlled, nothing else is controllable.
With all his acumen and learning, Eliade himself does not penetrate the iron curtain
illius temporis. Something Big Happened! He writes one work entitled Myth and Reality,
but the "reality" is not what happened; it is the interposed reality of a revisionist
philosopher, not the reality of which the myths speak in deafening language and blinding
imagery. And he entitles another of his works The Myth of the Eternal Return, but here,
too, he confines himself to providing valuable illumination from all quarters of the
globe on the obsessive need to make the great leap backwards to the traumatics events,
not to the actual conditions that mankind returns to.
The terror in illo tempore, the fact that "for archaic men, reality is a function of the
imitation of a celestial archetype," the association of the return with cures that
practically scream out, "If we survived chaos and creation, we can survive anything!"
the fixation upon cycles of disaster and revival and the incompetency of humanity over
millennia to get onto a longitudinal temporal plane - all of these facts and many more
constitute evidence that unspeakable disaster governs the so-called "archaic mind" and
carries through to modernity.
Indeed, one must credit the doctrine of uniformitarianism, and all of its ramifications
in the sciences and philosophy, as being the first successful counterattack of the human
mind against the fetters that catastrophes imposed upon it. It was largely this modern
doctrine in astronomy, geology, biology, and finally religion and politics that smoothed
out the external cycles, made the proven details of history important, claimed millions
of year for human development, and set up the idea of progress - all of these being
achievements that would have been difficult without denying the importance of what
happened in illo tempore.
The myth of the Love Affair is not a basic document to establish the general theory of
the first days because it is not a myth of creation. That it is in direct line with
cosmogony may, however, be asserted. It is a tale told in a newly settled land under
semi-cosmogonic conditions of dream, dance, rhythm, and verse. The gods struggle; the
Moon is renewed.
It is a second-level myth in the last series of catastrophes. Its relationship with the
events in illo tempore is apparent, but it is of the last days of that time. In the next
century and a half, the first group of uniformitarians will have appeared, with the
colossal nerve to say, with Plato, that "the ruler of the universe has ordered all
things with a view to the excellence and preservation of the whole." [9]
THE KERNELS OF HISTORY
Millions of words of myth have been born of the human mind through the ages. Myth is
still being created, not only among the so-called primitive peoples whose numbers are so
rapidly diminishing everywhere, but also in the sophisticated editorial rooms of giant
newspaper and television monopolies and in the halls of law and bureaucracy. The myth
that "the President works with great energy and command of information" is comparable to
the myth that "Hercules cleared the Augean Stables." (Amusingly, Hercules was accused of
a conflict of interest for taking pay from two sources for his work.)
This is so if we take, as the superficial rendering of the word, that myth is a factual
narrative whose aim is to some important degree to stabilize the ever-flowing stream of
anxiety of the organism within itself and in regard to the outer environment. It is like
a dam that commands the flow of water from the rains and streams above in the interest
of the consumers of the water below. By using common symbols, the system operates on
behalf of a community. As a result, a myth will perform little or no functions for a
person who belongs to another community, to a different hydraulic control system. One
should not be put off, therefore, when a scoffer exclaims, "All these myths do nothing
for me."
The greatest sources of trouble and fear are the greatest and most enduring sources of
myth. The doings of the gods (nature), supplemented by the dynamics of sexuality and the
competition for the other scarce values of power, respect, wealth, knowledge and health
provide both the anxieties and the linguistic references used to compose myths. The
combinations and permutations of expression that give rise to particular myths are
infinite, especially when one adds the universal factors of wish fulfillment, already
mentioned, and functional design, by which different types of myths are to be used as
supplications, expiation, lessons to children, augury, dramatic entertainment, and so
on. Myth is adapted, also to create the type of person a society's ideology needs.
That millions of words have been composed for such personal-social reasons over 10,000
years, say, is not at all surprising. and that most myth is untranslatable without
knowledge of its culture, its language, the context in which one myth is employed, and
its typical audience is also understandable. Which is to say that the problem of the
historic message contained in a myth is to be solved only when these features of its
expression are known.
Afterwards, the historic content of the myth can be approached directly. In this sense
all myth contains history about a group; it could only come about as a result of
experiences, whether one or many; and its detail contains empirical and linguistic
references. Ares does not "bridle" in a horseless culture, nor does one smite a rock to
get water in swampland. That Achilles is known by 36 epithets and Odin by fifty names,
gives some idea of the variety of traits of a hero or god in a given culture.
But now to the most difficult problem; the portrayal of an actual event in a myth, as in
the Love Affair. If one has arrived at the historic message contained in the Love
Affair, what is to prevent him from putting all of Greek myth or any other body of myth
through a historiographical sausage-grinder, emerging with thousands of little links of
Greek history? It is conceivable. But much is trivia and repetitive. Or the history
involved has such vague parameters of time, space and references when treated as history
as to be useless.
Also, a great, if unknown proportions of myth consists of references to cultures, sub-
cultures, priesthoods, temples, occupations, and schools that are lost to history. Their
local contexts are missing. Furthermore, many myths are hopelessly successful in their
function of telling about something while at the same time concealing it (the opposite
of scientific communication which aims at telling something and only that something in a
special language designed to communicate it clearly and exactly).
Still, the impression of impenetrable jungle and inescapable labyrinth that the first
sight of the body of myth makes upon one retreats remarkably upon application of the
tools of the sciences and the virtues of patience and imagination to particular
segments.
Then the questions occur: "Who cares?" and "What resources are we willing to devote the
task?" For most people, and experts, too, the use of myth is largely that of symbolic
poetry: the mind reacts to it, is startled, pleased, achieves a phantasmagoria or
pandemonium akin to the effects of various drugs. Enough.
On the other hand, where there exists little of other types of knowledge of important
historical problems, natural or social, resort to myth analysis is necessary and its
techniques will be continuously improved. To the degree that such systematic work is
accompanied by an equally alert and extensive archaeology, considerable advances in a
number of sciences might ensure. As the expert on Babylonian and ancient science, Otto
Neugebauer, once commented to the author in a few moments of smoking of the peace-pipe
between exchanges on the work of Velikovsky, we could dig up the whole ancient world
with a fraction of the funds of the space program, and thus find out what it has to say
to us. The art treasures to be excavated would, of course, be also of value.
Notes (Chapter 16: The Transfiguration of Trauma)
1. (1900). Vols. IV and V of the Standard Edition (London: Hogarth press, 1953; New
York: Basic Books; Avon Books, 1972.
2. Lines 531-590, Murray, op, cit.
3. An alternative reconstruction, more Jungian than Freudian, is that Penelope was
suffering a crisis of Character, in which the eagle (her stronger, more dictatorial,
dogmatic aspect) was moving bloodily to dispose of the geese (her inner weakness), and,
in the course of the resolution, identifying with her absent husband. George English,
who pointed out this interpretation to me, thought as well that the transition was a
bloody bridge that often is crossed at the presumed age of Penelope age of, between 35
and 45.
4. Page 562, 332 fn., 560, 60, 534 ff.
5. Cf. Sebastian de Grazia, Errors of Psychotherapy (New York: Doubleday. 1952).
6. Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 4.
7. Ibid., p. 21.
8. Ibid., pp. 66, 68, 73, 82-3.
9. Plato, The Laws, book X, p. 290, loc. cit.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND
Great myths are the stories of human tragedy on a grand scale. If mankind no longer
exists in an age of myth, it is not because of a new intelligence or style but because
of the lack of terrible stimulus. Even so, the ages of myth-making have left a legacy of
serious problems. One does relive the ancient terrors; they have left deep tracks in
minds and glands, regularly revived by a horde of customs and rememorized. Furthermore,
man is a myth-maker and he will always find sufficient personal and social crises to
inspire individual and collective repressions of memory, though not on the original
grand scale.
WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED
Earlier, we decided to place Homer's "publication" of the Odyssey around 630 B. C., two
generations after the end of the Martian catastrophes. We mentioned in another place
that amnesia can set in abruptly following a grave event and the sublimation of the
troublesome subconscious memory could be accomplished quickly as well. We alluded to
nursery rhymes based upon atrocious political acts for an example.
Still, the question gnaws at us: "Did Homer really not known of the disasters of the
century before him?"
The catastrophist reaches, all too easily at times, for the "proof by non-existent
proof," which comes close to begging the question. Thus, physical and biological
destruction, if complete, makes memory non-existent, therefore impossible. Psychic
destruction (total amnesia) also makes proof impossible in the sense that the
remembering mind cannot remember any of the events one is called upon to remember. Total
Psychic Destruction and/ or Total Physical Destruction equals Zero Proof, hence zero
recall of the catastrophic events. We have advanced in these pages and elsewhere many
conditions approaching the Zero Proof formula, but never has history been totally
obstructed. Therefore Homer must have had some means of knowing the catastrophic events
of two generations earlier, even in his childhood.
We now can suppose that he did remember terrific destruction and social turmoil,
directly or through his elders. Why would these memories not enter into his work
directly? Why would he not attach the Greek gods (except Helios, the Sun), to their sky-
bodies?
In the first place, he would not dare to or wish to tie the gods explicitly to their
bodies. The gods were much more than the bodies, much older than the events in which
they acted, and hostile to presumptions (hubris) of humans about them. Homer and other
dramatists might also have agreed to a convention not to portray the gods in this
manner.
On the subconscious level, Homer may have written of the gods in such a way as to
display their natural histories, even knowing of their history in some part and
consciously, without realizing that he was writing the history of the gods. He could
describe Ares as Ares, actually appreciating that he was doing so, protesting (as
writers accused of libel or of autobiography sometimes do), "I am only writing fiction,"
and furthermore they will believe it and so will their hearers.
This is no more than happens with children, who, in their play, will often reenact
disagreeable experiences with cruel attendants or playmates in a comic or brutal
scenario with toys, and, when questioned, will sincerely deny that they were reenacting
the real experiences. I need only mention similar and well known behavior among persons
who are mentally ill. Nor need I discuss again the technology of dreams, whereby the
dreamer translates the experience into a detailed representation, which he may promptly
forget, or he is unable to retranslate into real terms, or which he may refuse in either
event to accept as connected with his experience.
We conclude that, behaving typically, Homer could know both subconsciously and to a
degree consciously of a horrendous history, could rewrite the history as poetry, could
refuse to make explicit connections that would be obviously revealing, and could deny
that his story was historical. "How can you doubt me," we hear Demodocus and Homer
crying, "am I not blind?" There is no end to the self-deception and deceptiveness of the
schizoid human.
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
Scientific theories are metaphors that, when pursued, place their users into a position
of control and prediction. Scientific theories are also consensuses in as much as they
cannot be communicated or believed, much less worked out and routinized, unless a number
of competent persons accept them as a basis for conducting operations.
Modern science has made great efforts to put aside, first, the primitive metaphoric
systems such as are found in the myth we are studying, second, the mystic metaphorism,
though much more agreeable, of Pythagoreanism and Platonism, and, third, though with
great reluctance, the empirical nominalism of Aristotle and of the Newtonian Laws.
Now it moves uncertainly on a stripped-down linguistic and mathematical basis, purely
operational and denotative, so far as particular small areas are concerned. Ironically ,
the bigger the library and the greater the equipment of a university or research center,
the more likely the scientists in it will be utterly specialized and isolated from each
other's group. Their metaphors will communicate with the smallest number of persons.
Then it happens that many chasms are created which no one dare approach and the bridges
over these chasms become and will remain forever the operational constructions of
metaphor.
Pythagoras and his associates, who flourished early in the sixth century B. C., give us
a crucial lesson in the transformation of "true myth" into "false science". We say that
until the 7th century (687 B. C.), the planets moved erratically from time to time. This
fact was known to "pre-scientific" Greeks. Planos, the root word, means leading astray,
cheating, deceiving; a wandering, roaming, straying; (metaphorically a wandering of
mind), a madness, in uncertain fits (of disease). (These all from Liddell-Scott Greek-
English Lexicon.) Wanderer meant as Odysseus wandered - without knowing what would
happen next. (And, of course, Odysseus, complemented by his mentor, Athena, is the
greatest deceiver, the trickiest of men, "the born trouble-maker.")
The eminent historian of science, George Sarton, says that Pythagoras aimed to prove
that the planets were not "planets". He points out that "as their Greek names implied;
plana• means to cause to wander, to mislead; planŠtŠs is a wandering, erratic,
misleading body." [1] To Pythagoras, " the planets cannot be 'errant' bodies; they must
have circular and uniform movements of their own.. If one could not but analyze those
complicated motions they would be reduced to uniform circular ones . The whole of Greek
astronomy grew out of that arbitrary conviction." [2]
We begin to perceive what happened. Even though Sarton sees the origins of Pythagorean
astronomy in an id‚e fixe - that heavenly bodies must move regularly and circularly, he
believes that his arbitrary idea had a true result- namely to "discover" that the
planets do have such motions.
Hence, astronomers and public now agree that, as the contemporary popularizer Asimov
puts it, "the Greek astronomers realized that there must be more than one canopy. For
while the 'fixed' stars moved around the Earth in a body apparently without changing
their relative positions; this was not true of the Sun, Moon, and five bright starlike
objects (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn)- in fact, each moved in a separate
path. These seven bodies were called planets (from a Greek word meaning 'wanderer'..."
[3] .
So the word "planet" means "wanderer" but wanderer on a path, a contradiction in terms.
Pythagoras asserted their paths to be regular. We know that they have been so, since
then.
Two events have occurred. The first is that the planets, which were originally named
correctly, have stopped acting so as to deserve their name. Pythagoras denounced the
meaning of the name and postulated their orderly movement. Modern astronomers accepted
his meaning and introduced their order on top of his order.
Pythagoras indeed was far more anxious than they to reduce the planets to order. He was
obsessively concerned with the development of all abstractions in accord with fixed
formulas. Not content with abstraction, he founded a secret society to contain his
truths and avert public examination. Propelled by "the Great Fear," he led the search
for absolutes of order, a search that led Plato less than a century later to propose
imprisonment in a "House of Better Judgement," and even death for those who would deny
the immutability and harmony of the heavens.
Laplace is regarded as the founder of the science of probability. Writing two centuries
ago, he disposed of the providential hand that Newton had postulated to set the solar
system in orderly motion and maintain it. Order there was, declared Laplace, but it may
be explained as originating in natural causes and as preserving itself by regular
motions whose disruption was quite unlikely.
However, he declared, in passages rarely quoted, the probability of a comet striking the
earth in the course of centuries is great and its result could be devastating if the
comet were very large [4] . Besides, he warned that his own calculations, reinforcing
Newton's conception of regularity in the movements of the orbs, did not take into
account "various causes that can be ascertained by careful analysis, but which are
impossible to frame within a calculation;" such would be comets, meteors, and even
electric and magnetic forces. "The sky itself, despite the orderliness of its movements,
is not unalterable." So spoke Laplace.
However, because the heavens have "settled down" in recent millennia, major
displacements and encounters are increasingly unlikely. The celestial encounters of 2700
years ago may have been the last for some time to come.
In 1974, Robert W. Bass went beyond this self-critique of Laplace into a critique of
Laplace's famous calculations of stability for the solar system [5] . Instead of
confirming the practical immutability of the planetary motions, Bass emerged in
agreement with W. M. Smart's thesis that the theoretical term of assured reliability of
the planetary orbits is in the hundreds or few thousands of years. The fabric of
mathematical "proof" of the orderly skies has been torn to shreds.
A CLAIM OF SUCCESS
When the lines of the Love Affair were read, of a summer day on the island of Naxos in
July of 1968, the hypothesis of this book sprang to life. Nowhere, whether in writing or
in conversation, had I come upon a parallel between the song and external events. Nor,
for that matter, had there ever been, to my knowledge, a predecessor to the story itself
in ancient times. Overtime, the means of providing theory occurred in three forms, each
depending upon a number of theories, techniques and facts.
One method would be to draw up all parallelisms (and lacks thereof) between the Love
Affair and the celestial disasters that contemporary quantavolutionists, particularly
Velikovsky, had described as occurring around the time of Homer. This has been done and
a close parallelism discovered.
A second method would be to translate the myth by psychological and linguistic theories
into a set of events that would most closely adhere to the characters, setting, dynamics
(plot), and language of the myth. This has been done and the set of events that was most
satisfying to the myth was the aforesaid catastrophic period of encounters among Mars,
Earth, Venus and Moon.
The third method would be to search for the effects of the events, both upon human
behavior and the cosmic bodies involved. The human avenue led into a stream of effects
that has been accumulating from previous disasters; indications of collective behavior
expected under the circumstances of the Greek disaster were also found. In the geologic
and astrophysical areas, recent explorations of all three extra-terrestrial bodies,
together with revised theories of cataclysmic changes on earth, tended to confirm the
historicity of the Love Affair. As Isaac Newton would say, "To the same natural effects
we must as far as possible assign the same causes." [6] The probability of the theory
as a whole being correct is enhanced by the concordance of the three results of the
three methods. One should remain critical, however because in each area of method,
theories are being developed and employed that are controversial, and also because in
each methodological area, much less than an "ideal" amount of factual material is
available.
Also this study attempted to do what Laplace avoided doing, to introduce many factors
whose quantification for the purposes of a calculus of probabilities was impossible.
Considering the confusion of theories and the onrush of incompatible facts in every
related area of knowledge, it may appear to have done rather well.
From time to time, in the course of research, a question would return to haunt the
author: suppose that an older version of the Love Affair were to be discovered.
If there were a predecessor to the Love Song of Demodocus, it would be Homer's work, a
work well known to Homer, and/ or a fable known to other contemporary cultures or
preceding ones. Thus far, none has appeared. However, the effects of such a hypothetical
discovery would be considerable. It would undercut my logical insistence that this
particular plot is a screen for historical events of the early seventh century.
Almost certainly "love triangles" were observed and caused trouble for millennia before
Homer. For that matter, walruses and apes snorted and grunted their way through similar
affairs. Adultery found itself condemned under laws that were promulgated before Homeric
times; Deuteronomy bans it, and also Genesis. Depending upon the culture, the emotions
evoked by such triangles might be no less than the outrage of Hephaestus. The
fearfulness of earlier catastrophes may have helped to build up the emotions. So the
preconditions of the particular plot- the triangle and the emotional charge - were known
and diffused.
In order to nullify the theory, however, the structure of the pre-existing plot would
need to be closely parallel, and analogous gods would need to participate in it. An
Egyptian creation myth, much older than "the Love Affair," has a marriage between the
Sun (Re) and the Heaven god (Nut, Roman Uranus) that is disturbed by copulation between
Heaven and Earth (Geb). The Sun forbids Heaven giving birth to children during the year
(360 days), but clever Thoth (Mercury) gambles with the Moon for Time, wins 1/ 72 part
of the day, and hands over to Heaven five extra days (365) in which to give birth,
whereupon Heaven bore Osiris (Saturn), Horus (Jupiter), Set, Isis, and Nephthys (the
last three Venus-connected) on 5 successive days. Many events are incorporated here, but
the major characters are from an earlier age and the plot is not analogous or homologous
with the plot of "The Love Affair".
Respecting divine participation in Genesis, God does intervene against Abimelech to
prevent his consummation of a relationship with Abraham's wife, Sarah, whom he has taken
in god faith and with the consent of Abraham. It is plausible that other plots of
adultery of a historical and fictional character, involving deities, should have
existed.
There is no reason to believe that Homer had written (as Patroni insists) or knew of an
original Opera Ballet of the Love Affair, parallel to the plot found in the Odyssey, and
including the same gods as characters. The details of the story of the song are stuck
off so firmly that a complete version resounds from behind the lines. Assuming that
Homer or another had presented the Opera Ballet before, would this fact preclude a late
dating of the underlying historical catastrophe? I think not, if it is in the same
generation, and especially if it were the work of a younger Homer. Hence, the haunting
question can be answered by a denial: this certain plot probably did not exist before
the celestial events that it represents in disguise took place.
FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY
If it is true that mankind suffers infinitely from the gods, it has become human because
of them. They are in a sense, then, entitled to do with man what they will. As the old-
fashioned property-owner used to say: "It's my property. I can dispose of it as I
please." Many will assert that man would have been better off without the gods. No. This
is a materialistic, mechanical view of human origins and human nature, more in keeping
with tight suppression of memory and uniformitarian ideology, than with the lessons of
catastrophe. Man was created by catastrophes and made to some degree what he is by them.
This is a point on which pragmatists, phenomenologists, and idealists may agree.
But - it is more doubtful that the species would have become human if it had not
humanized the gods. It is almost impossible to conceive that humans would have become
humanly intelligent if they had been physiologically capable of experiencing the
disasters mechanically, "in cold blood". They could have forgotten the disasters more
easily over the generations. They would not have developed the arts and sciences. That
is, there are few, if any, grounds for believing that they could have become scientific
before they had passed through a stage of being monstrously human.
If people are able now to become "rational" and view ancient catastrophes and natural
history as truly natural, it is only because they did not have the capacity for viewing
events as natural in the first place.
The first humanoid who pointed at an active natural force with a capacity to impress a
whole people and said: "There is our god. He made us and is now sending us a message" -
that humanoid became the first person.
After the dreamtime dance and song of the Love Affair ends, and the dance of the spheres
completes the ceremony, a peaceful and generous mood pervades the audience. King
Alcinous announces that all the nobles must give fine personal gifts to Ulysses. This
they do: cloaks and tunics and bars of gold. Euryalus, who has slandered Ulysses, gave
the best gift of all, a gleaming copper sword with a silver belt in an ivory sheath. All
these are heaped before the visitor. A hot bath is prepared for him and preparations for
dinner are made.
I allude to these lines to stress once more the effects of the dance. The sublimation of
unconscious effect has been well-nigh perfect. The ancients who heard these passages
would imagine the full and blissful original scene, the way in which a sacred song and
dance should ideally be conducted, the effects upon the participants and audience that
should ideally occur.
This no one may deny. All that may be said by way of criticism is that such is the
intent and result of great literature, of music, of dance, of plastic art, of liturgies,
indeed of all constructive crowd behavior whose aim is social internalization. In the
group, an anxiety is present whose specifications are hidden for fear of their
depressive and disruptive effects. A spell must be cast; the symptoms will be displaced,
discussed and alleviated; and everyone will feel better afterwards.
Objectively one can appraise the effect; it is good therapy; people are kinder to each
other; possible alternative means of handling the anxieties are rendered unnecessary.
Amidst the frequent crowd panic and madness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the Bible,
of aggressive, ritualized, stupefied, and senseless self-sacrifice and others sacrifice,
the Song of Demodocus in its context, for all that the gods misbehave, is superior
therapy.
It is well that those ancient censors who called the story false and sacrilegious and
would have ripped it out of the Odyssey did not have their way. This is said, not alone
on behalf of many bored and salacious schoolboys, not even for the sake of Truth, but
for the realization it can bring of how ancient cultures, no less than primitive and
modern ones, strove for alternatives to the labyrinthine rites, collective murder and
bloody offerings by which societies sought to extirpate the hidden anxieties of
catastrophe.
The present age is fraught with anxiety; still it has not reached the levels of our
ancestral disasters. Up to this moment, the settled skies have allowed scientists and
poets in free countries to move ever more boldly in exploration of the world within and
the world without. The most radical investigations of nature and human nature have been
permitted. The most radical experiments in the expressive arts have been tolerated. It
is no longer true that the human mind cannot face, at least intermittently and "for the
record," the evidence of ancient catastrophes. On this account one may predict that,
within a few years, much more proof than is presently available will be collected and
advanced in favor of the general theory of quantavolution and catastrophes and that the
theoretical reconstruction will proceed apace.
When Odysseus is about to complete the slaughter of the suitor's relatives, Athena gives
him pause: enough of bloodshed [7] . And when Eurycleia caught sight of the slain
suitors in the palace hall, "she was about to cry out in exultation, beholding so great
a deed. But Odysseus restrained her... 'Rejoice in your heart, old woman, and restrain
yourself and do not cry aloud. It is an unholy thing to glory over slain men. These men
the destiny of the gods and their own merciless deeds have overcome. '" [8]
The Hero resigns. The Moon is in place. The Goddess Athena is in her heavenly sphere.
And Mars in his. Mercy begins once more.
And 2500 years later, the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, writes: "Two things fill the mind
with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely one's
thoughts are drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me "
[9] .
Notes (Chapter 17: Settled Sky and Unsettled Mind)
1. History of Science, V. I, op. cit., p. 13.
2. Ibid.
3. An Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, p. 17.
4. Stecchini, p. 107.
5. "Did Worlds Collide," and "Proofs of the Stability of the Solar System," IV Pens‚e
(1974), 8-20, and 21-6.
6. Principia, Bk. III, Chap. V.
7. Even if someone later than Homer wrote these last lines of the Odyssey (D. Page, op.
cit.) and they lack poetic merit, their moral function is apparent.
8. Rieu trans., Is. 411-17.
9. Quoted by Stecchini, op. cit., p. 44.
THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS
by Alfred de Grazia
PART THREE:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR
APPENDIX
CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK
(Italic-faced ones have a direct part in the plot and action in THE LOVE AFFAIR)
GODS
Athena (also Athene, Pallas Athene):
Greek Goddess of wisdom, war, and the arts and sciences, "officially" declared to be the
same as the Roman goddess, Minerva; identifiable in her planetary aspect with the planet
Venus. In other cultures, she carries many names, including Ishtar (Babylonia),
Quetzalcohuatl (Mexico), Lucifer (Rome), Helel (Judea), Aten (? Egypt), Subari (India).
Protector of Odysseus.
Hephaestus (Hephaistos):
Husband of Aphrodite. Greek god of fire and of the crafts and sciences, comparable to
many smith-gods, also a solar deity; called Vulcan by the Romans and probably is
Tuchulcha of the Etruscans. Identifiable with Athena and planet Venus.
Ares: Lover of Aphrodite.
Greek god of war, called Mars by the Romans, Nergal by the Babylonians. Identifiable
with the planet Mars.
Aphrodite: Lover of Ares.
Greek goddess of the Moon and of love. Also, Greeks called the Moon "Selene" and
partially transferred Aphrodite from the Moon to planet Venus and called the planet
Aphrodite; meanwhile, the later Romans transported the name of the Italian goddess,
Venus, to the Goddess Aphrodite and named the planet Venus. The Roman "Selene" was
"Luna".
Hermes:
Messenger god and god of luck. Identified with the Planet Mercury.
Apollo:
God of Far-Distances and music. Personifies detached Wisdom. May represent a destroyed
planet, now the meteoroid belt. Was later identified with the Sun.
Zeus:
Son of Kronos and called the Father of the Olympian Gods in Homer. Identifiable with the
Planet Jupiter.
Poseidon:
God of the Sea, of Earthquakes, and ultimately of the Earth. Brother of Zeus. Enemy of
Odysseus.
Helios (Helius):
God of the Sun.
HUMANS
Demodocus (Demodokos):
Great singer and harpist of Phaeacia, who recites the story of The Love Affair, and may
be a self-portrait of Homer.
Odysseus:
Hero of Homer's Odyssey. Epic poem of wanderings after the Trojan War. Known in Western
Europe also as Ulysses. Guest of King Alcinous. His name, in American vernacular, would
be "the born trouble-maker."
Penelope:
Wife of Odysseus.
Alcinous (Alkinous):
King of Phaeacia.
Nausicaa:
Daughter of Alcinous.
Halius:
Son of Alcinous. Dancer.
Laodamas:
Son of Alcinous . Dancer.
PLACE AND TIME
The ancient Mediterranean and the ancient skies above, possibly 687 B. C.
Phaeacia:
Realm of King Alcinous, probably based on real places in the Western Mediterranean, but
fictionalized by Homer.
Scheria:
The larger land of which Phaeacia formed part.
Troy:
Fabled site of the Trojan War, identified by most archaeologists and classicists on the
site of the town of Hisarlik in Turkey, near the Dardanelles Straits.
Lemnos:
Island in the upper Aegean Sea where the Sintians lived, favorites of Hephaestus.
End of The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars
TITLE-PAGE
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
Metron Publications
Princeton, N.J.
Notes on the printed version of this book:
ISBN: 0-940268-03-5
Copyright C 1983 by Alfred de Grazia
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S.A. Limited first edition
Address:
Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213,
Princeton,
N.J. 08542,
U.S.A.
To Stephanie Neuman
"It takes a chaos within oneself to give birth to a shooting star."*
*(Nietzsche)
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE-PAGE
FOREWORD
I PLAGUES AND COMETS
Comets and Angels
Cosmic Plagues
The Destruction of Egypt
II THE SCENARIO OF EXODUS
High-Level Negotiations
Why Pharaoh pursued the Hebrews
The Organized Move
Opening and Closing the Waters
Unforeseen Circumstances
III CATASTROPHE AND DIVINE FIRES
Whose Angel?
The Censored Designs of Heaven
The Gentile Exodus
The Horror of Red
The Electrostatic Age
Yahweh's Electrical Fire Conglomerate
The Celestial First Cause
IV THE ARK IN ACTION
The Golden Box
Dangers of Electrocution
The Ark at Work
The Electric Oracle
The Battle of Jericho
The Ark's End
God's Fire Gone
V LEGENDS AND MIRACLES
Radiation Diseases
The Electro-Chemical Factory
Manna
The Burnt Offering
The Brazen Serpent and other Rods
The Pouch Of Judgement
VI THE CHARISMA OF MOSES
The Love Child
A Disliking for Hebrews
The Meek Killer
The Courtly Shepherd
Circumcision and Speech Problems
Scientist and Inventor
Talking with Gods
The Centralization of Hallucination
An Israelite Opinion Survey
Routinizing Charisma
The Maniac Scientist
VII THE LEVITES AND THE REVOLTS
Numbers Leaving Egypt
Impedimenta
Technicians and Security Police
Blame the People
Revolt of the Golden Calf
Korah's Rebellion
Freud and the Murder of Moses
Beth Peor
VIII THE ELECTRICAL GOD
The Name of Yahweh
The Character of Yahweh
Sin vs. Science
Immortality
Monotheism
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX: TECHNIQUES FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF LEGENDARY HISTORY
The Limits of Distortion
Unbelieving Theologians
The Pragmatics of Legends
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. A Comet in Human Form
2. The Plagues and Exodus
3. Pharaoh's Army Drowned
4. The Tidewaters Passage
5. The Route of Exodus and Wanderings
6. On Eagle's Wings
7. Moses' Tablets and the Golden Calf Heretics
8. Zeus Strikes Down Phaeton
9. The Leyden jar
10. Egyptian Ark in Procession
11. Cherubim of Nimrud
12. The Ark's Structure and Function
13. Ground Plan and Design of the Tabernacle
14. The Destruction of Jericho
15. Moses with Horns, Veil and Mask
16. The Brazen Serpent is Formed
17. The Burning Bush
18. Mass Electroshock
19. Myth of the Death of Moses
20. The Moses of Klaus Sluter
LIST OF TABLES
I. Attitudes of Israelites Encamped at the Holy Mountain.
II. Affection and Aggression in the Books of Moses,
III. Sin, Blame, and Compulsion.
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
.
FOREWORD
The Judaic, Christian, and Islamic religions go back to the Exodus from Egypt of the Hebrews
under the leadership of Moses. They center upon this event and upon Moses. Ernst Sellin, a
distinguished German authority on the Old Testament, once declared, "The ultimate and most
important question for the investigation of Israelitic-Judaic religion must inevitably be:
'Who was Moses? '" [1] Despite his own reply and notwithstanding the hundreds of works on
Moses that are catalogued by the Library of Congress, the question has remained unanswered.
I have found no book that deals adequately with the psychology of Moses, and therefore have
portrayed fully the workings of his mind. No study has properly embraced Moses in his two
great capacities as a manager and scientist, and so I have reconstructed these his qualities
as well. Furthermore, the Exodus and Wanderings, those operations that Moses directed, are
generally misunderstood, both in their particulars as Jewish history and in their
representation of what was happening throughout the world in those days.
Part of the 3000-year misunderstanding stems from the strange environment in which Moses
lived and worked. The Exodus was not a stroll through the desert by some truant slaves. The
Exodus occurred in an extraordinary setting of great atmospheric and physical turbulence, a
catastrophic world. Unless we comprehend precisely the natural and social upheavals of those
days, we cannot grasp Moses. Nor can we fathom the religion of Moses. I have introduced in
every chapter new methods of viewing the environment of the Exodus. Meteorology and
electricity are joined to chronology, archaeology and biblical study, and all of these with
psychology, sociology and political analysis.
I have some confidence in this multidisciplinary approach, and I hope that others will
capture from its results some of the exhilaration that I experienced in its conception and
elaboration. The very first chapter tells how a comet passed by and the plagues struck. The
second chapter describes the failed negotiations between Moses and the Pharaoh, and the
subsequent pursuit and escape. Each subsequent chapter picks up a critical part of the story
-- to explain it, to add evidence, and to place it naturally, coherently and sympathetically
into the general scheme. In the end, the reader will perhaps have derived the same
conclusions as I have from the Old Testament account of the most human of all experiences,
the birth and establishment of a great god. Alfred de Grazia Washington Square New York City
21 June 1983
Notes (Foreword)
1. Ernst Sellin, Mose und seine Bedeutung fr die Israelitisch-Jdische Religionsgeschichte
(1922).
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE
PLAGUES AND COMETS
Disbelief in the Book of Exodus, for the modern educated person, begins with the fantastic
story of the infant Moses' survival and salvation in the bulrushes of the Nile, advances
through Moses' encounter with the Burning Bush whence speaks Yahweh, ascends rapidly with
the plagues of Egypt that follow his threats as Yahweh's messenger, and reaches a climax in
the parting of the waters to let the Israelites escape and the closing of the waters upon
the Egyptians.
Thereafter the incredulous reader can only sigh as one after another lesser miracle occurs -
- water from tapping a rock with a wand, manna from heaven, tablets engraved by Yahweh, a
little Ark with a bench on which Yahweh perches when he pleases, and a tent in which he
dwells. Overall is the panorama of the people wandering in the desert, observed closely by
this same Yahweh, who calls them his chosen people, despite their giving every indication of
not behaving as chosen people should, and indeed not wanting to behave as his chosen ones.
I doubt that we can make sense out of these or other events of the Exodus if we insist upon
examining them as separate and distinct bits. If it were only a question of a man being
addressed by a bush, we might reach into the mental asylums and locate thousands of
hallucinators. And if it were only an earthquake that was shaking down the houses of Egypt,
we could assert that hundreds of earthquakes occur annually. Of slave rebellions, there are
a great many in history. Of stubborn pharaohs, how very many world leaders are stubborn. And
so on, until every event is identified with its own kind, but the kinds do not mesh
together.
There is, in every episode of this whole history, a mysterious factor "X", something that is
common to all of the behavior and events. Rather than let a realization of this factor "X"
dawn upon us gradually, I think that we may identify it now. It is not Yahweh, the God of
Moses, at least not conventionally Himself. It is an uncomfortable idea at first, but it
lends shape and meaning to all the parts. Let us call it only a hypothesis at the start, a
large supposition, leaving it to the reader, as events progress and one's thoughts progress
with them, to decide in the end whether the supposition helps pull the pieces of the story
together, and furthermore whether it is the probable all-embracing influence that lends a
very special character to those days and years.
COMETS AND ANGELS
Beginning with the famous plagues of Egypt, occurring just as Moses confronts the Pharaoh
and beginning shortly before the day of the Exodus proper, we search for the common factor,
"X". What were these plagues? A legendary account gives us a convenient summary of them.
Thus did God proceed against the Egyptians. First he cut off their water supply by turning
their rivers into blood. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He sent the noisy,
croaking frogs into their entrails. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He brought
lice against them, which pierced their flesh like darts. They refused to let the Israelites
go, and He sent barbarian legions against them, mixed hordes of wild beasts [1] . They
refused to let the Israelites go, and he brought slaughter upon them, a very grievous
pestilence. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He poured out naphtha over them,
burning blains. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He caused His projectiles, the
hail, to descend upon them. They refused to let the Israelites go, and He placed scaling-
ladders against the walls for the locusts, which climbed them like men of war. They refused
to let the Israelites go, and He cast them into dungeon darkness. They refused to let the
Israelites go, and He slew their magnates, their first born sons [2] .
All of the incredible plagues (including related phenomena that go beyond the magic number
of ten) would come from a near passage of an awful celestial body; and nothing but the
passage of such a large celestial body could cause the incredible plagues.
Many ancient writers known to us, who had something to say of the period of Exodus,
mentioned a great sky-connected disturbance of the world. Among them are such well-known
figures as Eusebius, Pliny, Plutarch, Ovid, Seneca, Varro, and Augustine [3] . Further,
every modern archaeologist and geologist whose investigations can be indisputably fixed in
the period have reported serious physical upheavals [4] . I use this insistent form to
express the generality of agreement; contemporary egotism, we realize, fears and hates to
believe that ancient times might have witnessed natural behavior of a scope and intensity
not experienced today.
In 1602, Abraham Rockenbach, a German Professor at Frankfurt University, published a
"Treatise on Comets according to a New Method," there offering the following conclusion:
In the year of the world two thousand four hundred and fifty-three (1495 B. C.) -- as many
trustworthy authors, on the basis of many conjectures, have determined -- a comet appeared
which Pliny also mentioned in his second book. It was fiery, of irregular circular form,
with a wrapped head; it was in the shape of a globe and was of terrible aspect. It is said
that King Typhon ruled at that time in Egypt. (This king, assert reliable men, subjugated
the kings of Egypt with the help of the giants.) [5] Certain (authorities) assert that the
comet was seen in Syria, Babylonia, India, in the sign of Capricorn, in the form of a disc,
at the time when the children of Israel advanced from Egypt toward the Promised Land, led on
their way by the pillar of cloud during the day and by the pillar of fire at night [6] .
Yahweh, says the Bible, led the people out of Egypt "with his face." [7] The comet joined
the people when they began their march and provided their posterity with a familiar image:
"And the Lord [Yahweh] went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the
way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and
by night; the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from the
people." [8] When not Yahweh, the comet was an angel of Yahweh. The comet's head is the
Angel of the Lord, its coma the wings, its tail the trailing gown. A recent compendium of
cometary photographs and drawings displays several such images. Reproduced here, as Figure
1, is one of them.
Figure 1.
A Comet in Human Form (Click on the picture to get an enlarged view. Caution: Image files
are large.) Source: Atlas of Cometary Forms, J. Rahe et al., NASA, Washington,
D. C., Sp-198 (1969). Isodensitometer tracing of Greenwich photograph of Oct. 3, 1908, 30
min. exposure, Comet Morehouse 1908III.
A star with a rod is a cometary image. So we understand Balaam the Prophet when he says: "A
star shall advance from Jacob, and a staff shall rise from Israel" that will destroy Moab,
Suthites, Edom and Seir [9] . Commenting upon this verse, B. Gemser explains why the word
"staff" or "rod" here should actually be read as "comet." The Hebrew word is shevet and for
comet is shavit. Jacob is Israel, and "father" of the tribes of Israel out of Egypt [10] .
A variety of cometary shapes with the names given them, such as "horn-star," "goats,"
"daggers," "serpents" etc. is offered by Pliny. He reports also "a shining comet (called
Zeus' comet) whose silvery tresses glow so brightly that it is scarcely possible to look at
it, and which displays within it a shape in the likeness of a man's countenance." [11]
Since Yahweh watched out for them as Israel passed out of Egypt, "on this same night all
the Israelites must keep a vigil for the Lord throughout their generations." [12] There was
a physical presence in the sky, else they would have nothing to watch for. With the
retirement ofthe original body, the anniversary merged with and strengthened the rites of
spring, for the time was near the Spring equinox.
One more quotation can suffice here to suggest the cometary presence: "By a mighty hand and
an outstretched arm, and by great terrors the Lord has snatched your nation from the midst
of another. Out of heaven he let you hear his voice and on Earth he let you see his great
fire, and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire." [13]
The Bible dates the Exodus 480 years prior to the beginning of the construction of the
Temple to Yahweh at Jerusalem, about 960 B. C., some twelve generations having passed. [14]
This provides a date of 1440 B. C. for the Exodus, not too far from Rockenbach's date,
allowing for calenderizing discrepancies. Cyril of Alexandria assigns both the great fire of
Phaeton and the deluge of Deucalion to the sixty-seventh year of Moses; Kugler regards the
idea as plausible. Velikovsky's reconstruction of Egyptian-Judaic chronology, partially
supported by Bimson, permits the retention of the Biblical date, and we shall use it in this
book. [15]
Whether we are or are not descended from that fraction of humanity whose story is told here
or from that larger fraction -- called Christian or Moslem -- whose story has assimilated
this particular story, our lives are spent under the lingering effects of the great comet.
Our minds, religious attitudes, social institutions, wars, sex behavior, eating habits and
even the sciences are pervaded by its influence. Human memories and consequently human
histories have not yet fully recovered from the shocks of the event. We bury, distort, and
sublimate the memories in many ways. [16]
The Bible itself is a case in point. There myth is cozy with history. And the combination
has been fiercely, obsessively retained, as if a purely historical recollection would be
unbearably painful. Although the second of the five Books of Moses, the Exodus, is the best
account that we have of that year, its most ancient lines were written down under stressful
circumstances; to these lines, perhaps of Moses himself, a full oral tradition was added in
the course of several centuries. The materials were sometimes lost; they were copied,
rewritten, amended, translated and retranslated, time and time again.
A similar history befell the other Books of Moses. The basic document which we use was given
its penultimate form some 2500 years ago and its study today depends largely upon this
canonization plus some volumes of legends and commentaries of the Jews, some old writings
that are based upon writings no longer extant, and many modern archaeological discoveries in
Egypt and the "Lands of the Bible." Further involved in the study of Exodus are the social
sciences, such as the anthropology and psychology of religion, the history of science, and
the sociology of organization, and even the natural sciences, especially geology, the
atmospheric sciences and astronomy. All are usable at various stages of investigation. When
the facts are few, and their reference, the Exodus, is still only a few pages long, then we
must admit of every imaginable intellectual and scientific contrivance to
extract from and add meaning to those few facts. Withal, the reader will be astonished when
he comes to see how rich and unequivocal are the sources in the Bible itself for the main
theses of this work.
Not to be passed over is an obvious fact of a stubborn significant type: the Jews have
always claimed the inseparability of catastrophe from the foundation of their religion. Thus
when the medieval publicist and commentator Judah Halevi argued the merits of Judaism over
Islam and Christianity, he fixed its superiority upon its unique origins in divine
revelation amidst catastrophe [17] . Despite their philosophical defense, both of these
religions had to remain in effect branches of Judaism because they had to claim a part in
Moses and the Exodus.
We return now to the Comet of that winter as it approaches ominously the Earth. It is on a
stretched solar orbit, counterclockwise like the Earth, and of similar speed. It is
producing a number of effects, although it is months away from its apparent target. When it
finally closes in for a near pass at the globe, it gives rise to the famous plagues of
Egypt. These effects could occur, since the comet was very large and radiant, so long as it
was within a million miles of Earth, and would be heavily experienced on both its approach
and recession.
Generality cannot be avoided here. We wish, as Aristotle phrased it once, to be as precise
as the facts will allow. Data would be needed on a number of motions, speeds, volumes,
densities, and charges in order to calculate the pattern, timing, and effects of the Earth-
Comet encounter. Given ever more intensive research and repeated calculations, I think that
the scenario could come much closer to the reality of the encounter.
Its mass may have been smaller than the Moon's or even larger than that of planet Venus, as
Velikovsky thought. Part of the mass would be contained in the far reaching cometary tail or
train. N. Bobromikov ascribes to several modern comets an original mass, taken together
before explosion, of the Moon [18] . Astronomers are most reluctant to conjecture a comet of
such size or greater, lacking an historical experience, and it is true that, at a close
distance or in collision, a very much smaller body would do the same damage. [19]
The comet called by many "Typhon," brought "destructive, diseased and disorderly" changes
with "abnormal seasons and temperatures," wrote Plutarch [20] . We shall have more to say
about it in the next chapter.
COSMIC PLAGUES
The fateful encounters between ex-Prince Moses and Pharaoh Thoum took place at the Egyptian
capital city, of 'Itjtowy, near the Delta [21] . They occurred amidst cosmic and mundane
turmoil. Moses had returned from exile abroad ahead of the events. After dealing with his
followers, he felt secure enough of his backing and certain enough of the emergent
unsettling natural forces to approach the king of Egypt as the chief spokesman for the
Hebrews. Estimates of the period occupied by the plagues and the negotiations between
Hebrews and Egyptians range from a few weeks to years. A tradition gives one year for the
plagues. Pliny, writing in the first century A. D. reports that the briefest comet was
visible seven days, the longest for 180 days (following Seneca). [22] A few weeks may be
presumed necessary and sufficient. More would be inconsistent with the phenomena of a
cometary encounter; less would not allow time for the goings to and fro, the shocks of
experience, the communication of rumors and reports.
Early "Eloist" editors named four plagues: blood, hail, locusts, and darkness [23] . The
number of plagues is an abstract of reality, a literary device for the editors of the Bible
on the one hand (because they liked decimals) and a scientific abstraction for those who
were and are trying to divide the turbulent natural unity into types of effects. The
variation in the "number" of plagues is, in itself, an indication of an underlying complex
and catastrophic reality.
Philo Judaeus, in his 2000-year-old Life of Moses, reaches close to reality in a seemingly
naive comment that all four basic elements of the universe - earth, air, fire and water -
were involved in the plagues of Exodus [24] . Legend points out that the plagues proceeding
from air and fire were entrusted to Moses whereas the others were reserved for God with the
solid parts assigned to Aaron [25] . There are ten listed here. To these ten, traditionally
denominated as plagues, we may add two logically and causally connected phenomena, the
serpent-rod contest between Aaron and the Pharaoh's magicians, which preceded the first
plague, and the opening and closing of the sea waters that let the Israelites safely out of
Egypt.
Moses had already gained experience with a lively, twisting rod at the instigation of his
mentor, Yahweh. This was when he encountered Yahweh at the Burning Bush, of which more will
be said later. (Yahweh will often be spoken of as if he existed; it is a convenience of
reference to be clarified as the book moves on; care will be taken not to lead the reader
astray by creating a special figure, distinct from Moses, who acts independently of Moses or
freed from a priestly or editorial formula.)
Moses would not have gained access to the Pharaoh and his advisers if he were not already
known and respected and if they had not been uneasy. Moses and Aaron would not have
introduced their rod into the conference with Pharaoh unless they were convinced of its
superiority. It was perhaps heavily magnetized; it would behave strangely in the presence of
metal objects, whether on the robes of persons, or on furnishings, or perhaps unobtrusively
carried by Moses and Aaron, who might have borne other magnetized or electrified objects as
well [26] . A tendency to draw to one end of itself the rods of the Egyptian scientists, as
they were cast down near it, would give rise to the story that it had swallowed them.
Moses was already quite aware of the enhanced electrical excitement of the Earth in
anticipation of the comet, and might well have played upon static charges on gilded
draperies or clothing to let Aaron's rod cling, and climb and spark. That Moses would have
been able to produce a rod and perform such tricks better than the Egyptian scientists has
to do with who Moses was. Again, we will defer this matter.
Now came the reddening and poisoning of all the waters. Both should indicate a heavy fall-
out of some combination of radioactive red phosphorous, cinnabar, ammonia, sulphur, and
ferrous oxides. Since the population was not reported dying in large numbers yet, the fall-
out may be presumed to have not been heavily radioactive, except that one must decide
whether the radiation disease soon to come was part of this fall, or of a later one.
Radiation came probably with the later plague of dust that caused sores and boils on all
exposed animals and people, for this latter is so specific. But meanwhile there were other
troubles. There were frogs, then lice or gnats, then beasts or flies. So far as troubles go,
these are all of a kind, pests, all, they agitate and multiply and emerge into the human
habitat in response to a warming of the earth, and enhanced electrical currents flowing
though the earth, and an increase in the food supply occasioned by the death of water
animals and organic life generally.
Their great numbers present no problem. An isolated, luminous cloud in a clear sky in
Hutchinson, Minn. USA, dropped 50-100 insects of the non-luminous species hemiptera per
square foot [27] . A Dutch woman, fleeing with her babies through the woods near her house
from the explosions of the volcano Krakatoa, Java, in 1883, found herself covered with
leeches when she halted. All kinds of animals were fleeing from above and below the ground
[28] . So the dust crawled with vermin and swarms of flies were everywhere, proliferating on
the dead fish and frogs. But, as yet, no great number of persons had succumbed to the evil
conditions.
The water supply was the worst problem. Unlike fairy tale plots, there was here no neat
progression from bad to worse, such as would be concocted to bring increasing pressure upon
the Pharaoh. For a poisoned water supply is worse than a plague of insects and frogs. It
stank, of course, from the death of its organic life and a combination of the gases and
putrefaction and perhaps the causes of its pollution, sulphur and phosphates.
Daiches thinks that he finds an inconsistency in the Bible between a verse that tells of all
the water turning to blood and another that describes the Egyptians as digging round about
the river Nile for water to drink [29] . In fact, the contradiction is a confirmation of
what is said here: new wells bring in filtered, unreddened water. With invisible
radioactivity (which he did not of course consider) a shelf of ground water could be
contaminated, but would be unnoticeable at that time and for years afterwards, if at all,
there being the vague word "leprosy" to cover the symptoms.
We wonder whether something could be made of the magicians predicting the plague of frogs
but not that of lice. (A legend calls this "prediction" to our attention.) There is some
ambiguity in Velikovsky's conjectures about vermin, since he wondered whether they might be
underground productions or would descend with the train of the comet. If from below ground,
the vermin, we guess, would have been predicted; if extra-terrestrial in origin, there would
have been no precedent for the prediction.
It has become scientifically permissible recently to suppose plagues to descend from space
via dust, comets, or meteorites, and the search for evidence of organic evolution on
meteorites is an acceptable scientific issue [30] . I doubt that the comet had to inject
the atmosphere with vermin in order to explain them; there have been ample cases of local
fall-outs of fast-breeding and erupting insects. An Italian observer of the Neapolitan
earthquake of 1805 had much to say of unusual animal behavior, of which I quote a few lines.
Rabbits and moles were seen to leave their holes; birds rose, as if scared, from the
places on which they had alighted; and fish left the bottom of the sea and approached the
shores, where at some places great numbers of them were taken. Even ants and reptiles
abandoned, in clear daylight, their subterranean holes in great disorder, many hours before
the shocks were felt. Large flights of locusts were seen creeping though the streets of
Naples toward the sea the night before the earthquake. Winged ants took refuge during the
darkness in the rooms of the houses [31] .
A legend calls "the fourth plague" "a mixed horde of wild animals, lions, bears, wolves and
panthers, and so many birds of prey of different kinds that the light of the sun and the
moon was darkened as they circled through the air." [32] In great natural disasters -
earthquakes, floods, volcanism - the beasts, both wild and domestic, are driven by their
psychological and physiological needs to invade the haunts of humans. If the Bible does not
include this, one must conjecture it; it is a logical event, not exaggerated in the startled
eyes of the people experiencing it.
Figure 2.
Pestilence, locusts, fire and hail are shown to obdurate pharaoh. then comes the slaughter
of the first born (which the Hebrews avoided by marking their door with sheep's blood).
Finally the Hebrews are bidden to leave Egypt. (Click on the picture to get an enlarged
view. Caution: Image files are large) Source: reproduced with the permission of the trustees
of the Pierpont
Morgan Library, New York
But perhaps we are leaping ahead of ourselves, for other things happened before the Egyptian
earthquake, to wit, electrical fires running along the ground, a plague of boils and sores,
and a hail of burning naphtha and meteoritic stones. After these came a plague of locusts
(we presume these to be belated arrivals from outside the centers of population, awakened
from dormancy by electrical and thermal currents in the ground), then afterwards only came
the earthquake.
The plague of boils and sores on flocks and people came in connection with a fall of hot
ash, as from a furnace. Moses, it is said, casts a handful of furnace ashes into the air
before the Pharaoh to demonstrate his point (reminding one of some of the more popular
college instructors of elementary physics and chemistry). Sure enough, shortly after his
announcement, the ash fell and plague or infection spread. One wishes the Bible supplied
more dates. If the ash were radioactive, within a few days sores would appear. The ashes
"produced leprosy upon the skins of the Egyptians, and blains of a peculiar kind, soft
within and dry on top." [33] The boils were burning blains and blisters [34] . Centuries
later, Solomon reminds Yahweh of "the people which thou didst bring out of Egypt, from the
midst of the iron furnace." [35]
Fine dust was failing, but quick death was contained in the fall of barad (the Hebrew word
for "meteorites"). This hailstorm not only inflicted a heavy death toll upon people and
animals - it fell in heaps - but carried fire with it. Fire can fall with stones when a
volcano is vigorously erupting near at hand. Volcanoes were erupting everywhere but
seemingly not near at hand. Fires running on the ground were probably electrical. They were
probably running up the taller buildings of the government and of the official class, and,
too, the pyramids. People were burned in the palace, even the King's son, according to
legend. The indications of a mixed fire and stone downpour are logically associated with a
cosmic fall-out from a cometary tail [36] . The fires were of naphtha (hydrocarbons) and
simultaneously electrical.
A fire rested in the hailstones as the burning wick swims in the oil of a lamp. The
Egyptians were smitten either by the hail or by the fire. In one case as the other their
flesh was seared, and the bodies of the many that were slain by the hail were consumed by
the fire. The hailstones heaped themselves up like a wall, so that the carcasses of the
slain beasts could not be removed [37] .
The legend tells how the Pharaoh, in refusing permission to the Israelites to go, following
the hailstorm and fire, declared that his god Baal-Zephon would block them, and that truly
the Israelites were in desperate straits when they came before the sanctuary of Baal-Zephon
[38] . This may have been when they discovered their passage blocked by the rushing tidal
waters. Possibly the Pharaoh saw in Baal-Zephon the celestial source of the hail and fire.
Hordes of locusts emerged prematurely from the ground and were blown in from other parts by
furious winds, which just as quickly swept them away. "I will bring locusts into your
country and they shall cover the face of the lands." Thus speaks Yahweh, implying a foreign
terrestrial invasion [39] . But why did the locusts then quickly move on, after what must
have been a brief respite and repast? Probably the heavy winds as explained drove them on;
but also they might have been impelled by the sense of worse things to come.
The darkness that came next was unearthly, says the legend; it came from hell and it could
be felt. The winds blew out the fires or else the density of the dark swallowed up the fires
that could be lit. The winds were carrying in the dense clouds of dust from everywhere,
obscuring all natural light. Local, and even world-wide obscuration from natural disasters
is not unknown in recent times, sometimes with long-lasting effects as with Krakatoa. But
this was only the beginning of a dimmed world destined to endure for many years.
The profound darkness lasted for seven days, or perhaps nine. It became worse: people moved
about for the first three days. It was still dark, on the seventh (ninth?) day, when the
Egyptian army launched its pursuit of the Hebrews, who had been on the road for three days
from the morning after the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt by Yahweh [40] . Did this
earthshaking event occur in full darkness, then? If so, how could Moses find his way to the
Pharaoh's palace for the final permission to leave? I am inclined to think that the great
upheaval had come before the full darkness, and that Moses met with the Pharaoh for the last
time amidst the gathering gloom. Then it was that he received permission for the Hebrews to
depart with all their worldly possessions.
A strong implication rests in Moses' words to the Pharaoh on being refused as the darkness
of the third day continued to grow. Pharaoh says angrily: " Never see my face again; for in
the day you see my face you shall die." Replies Moses: "As you say. I will not see your face
again." [41] The next and last meeting in the middle of the night after the passover and
smiting of the first-born would have been in even greater darkness, and Moses' face would be
obscured.
Many terrible things happened in the gloom. Although the Bible says that "all the people of
Israel had light where they dwelt," [42] some of the Hebrews lived in dark zones, according
to legend. The great light of the comet did not break through the clouds until the night
before they departed. According to legend, "the infliction of darkness served another
purpose. Among the Israelites there were many wicked men, who refused to leave Egypt, and
god determined to put them out of the way. But that the Egyptians might not say they had
succumbed to the plague like themselves, God slew them under cover of the darkness, and in
the darkness they were buried by their fellow-Israelites, and the Egyptians knew nothing of
what had happened. But the number of these wicked men had been very great, and the children
of Israel spared to leave Egypt were but a small fraction of the original Israelitish
population." [43]
A legend has the Pharaoh complaining: "Thou didst say yesterday, 'All the first-born in the
land of Egypt will die. ' but now as many as nine-tenth of the inhabitants have perished."
[44]
What are the facts of the first-born, we must ask? Gressmann tried to solve the riddle
anthropologically. Yahweh wanted the Hebrews to go out to the desert to sacrifice their
first-born to him. The Pharaoh was frustrating this appetite of the god and hence Yahweh
turned upon him to kill his first-born. This story, ways Gressmann, can be composed from the
most ancient sources of the Old Testament [45] .
Velikovsky sought to solve the riddle linguistically. Thus, Yahweh decrees that he shall
kill the first-born of all of Egypt, from the Pharaoh to the maidservant, not excepting the
cattle. Moses passes the word along; Pharaoh again refuses; the event occurs as predicted;
the Pharaoh accedes to the departure from Egypt. Velikovsky finds a link between the almost
indistinguishable Hebrew words, "first-born" and "well-born," and explains that the latter
was intended, and that the earthquake was especially severe on the Egyptian upper classes
who lived in stone houses, whereas the Hebrews and others, less smitten, lived in mud or
thatch houses. This ignores the fate of the other "first-born" of maids, prisoners, and
cattle - "I will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt both man and beast" [46] -
and is doubtful, given the history of earthquakes, which strike crowded quarters of the
poors and let the rich flee to their courtyards.
It may be more logical to give partial exemption to the people of Goshen from all the
plagues simply because of the erratic nature of the disasters. Enough truth may rest in this
geophysical separation to justify a later tale of a special dispensation for being Hebrew.
So far as concerns the first-born, Moses had already proclaimed to the Pharaoh:
Thus says the Lord, Israel is my first-born son, and I say to you, 'Let my son go that he
may serve me'; if you refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay your first-born son [47] .
The analogy is clear: Israel is first-born son, i. e. the chosen ones, to Yahweh; Egypt is
first-born, the chosen ones, to the divine Pharaoh. Let mine go, else I will kill yours.
Afterwards, references to first-born are to be interpreted in the light of this analogy.
Further, if the Pharaoh's first-born son happens to have been killed, there will have arisen
a general rumor to the effect that the "cream of Egypt was destroyed." Hereditary elites are
notoriously self-centered.
The lintels of Hebrew houses were marked with sheep's blood to inform Yahweh not to destroy
his people dwelling within, particularly the first-born. Many Arabs continue this custom.
Yahweh would "pass over" them. Prof. Beer finds in the word "passah" the original meaning
"Jumping of the ram." Several images now occur: the original spring sacrifices, the
identification of Yahweh with the ram of Egyptian Thoth (Hermes) and thus a clue to Moses'
religious origins, the passing over of the god in a cometary form, the awesome destruction
of most homes and buildings by violent earthquake, and the passover into the desert from
Egypt.
Moses and his Hebrew cohorts knew beforehand much of what happened, and understood the
interconnections, and therefore the succession, of many of the events. The Egyptian leaders
knew, too, although perhaps not so clearly as Moses, but they had to stay put. They had no
"promised land" towards which to flee.
THE DESTRUCTION OF EGYPT
An immense gravitational-electric strain interrupted the Earth's rotation. Earthquakes
faulted the ground and fires broke out, mingling with the electrical fires. In many areas
most houses were shattered. The pyramids stood the strains well. They were an excellent
solution in stone for shock-proof structures. They must have been ablaze with Saint-Elmo's
fire with great eyes of the gods alight at their peaks, The eye at the peak of the pyramid
is of this age. (Thanks to the Masonic order, it may be found today on the American dollar
bill.) Now the Earth prepared to tilt, in order to decelerate less. A tilt of the axis
wreaks less strain upon it than a sudden slowdown of rotation or revolution [48] . An
oblique approach of the comet would also have contributed to the choice of the tilt over the
abrupt slowdown, since its electrical-gravitational pull was at a sharp angle to the
rotation.
Whether it actually tilted is a highly debatable question, to which we address only a few
remarks in this book. We say here merely that the strain to tilt must have occurred and had
consequences. The question is not beyond the capabilities of geophysics to resolve. A
research team would obtain a set of measurements showing the angles of stress of disturbed
monuments and geological features; it would postulate several chronological settings; it
would calculate a number of possible movements of the crust resulting from combinations of
decelerating and tilting forces; and significant statistical correlations would be computed.
Tidal waves swept the coastal areas, and whenever the land was flat, raged inland for many
miles. If the Delta area of Goshen was spared some of the disaster until some of the Hebrews
had left, it was a miracle, perhaps related to the preventive measures that Moses and the
leaders ordered. But Goshen may have been overturned as the Hebrews were crossing the Sea of
Passage; a Jewish legend says that the cities they had built for the Pharaoh collapsed.
Here again is what happened, told, now, from the Egyptian viewpoint. It is taken from the
papyrus of Ipuwer, an Egyptian writing shortly after the Exodus [49] . Velikovsky located
it in its true historical context, and independent sources have fixed the same time for it
[50] .
Forsooth, great and small say: I wish I might die.... Would that there might be an end of
men, no conception, no birth! He who places his brother in the ground is everywhere, There
is not a house where there was not one dead.
The children of princes are dashed against the wall; The children of princes are cast out in
the streets. It is groaning that is throughout the land, mingled with lamentations.
0 that the earth would cease from noise, and tumult be no more!
Years of noise. There is no end to noise The land turns round as does a potter's wheel.
The towns are destroyed. Upper Egypt has become dry. All is ruin. The land is not light
Gates, columns and walls are consumed by fire The fire has mounted up on high. Plague is
throughout the land. Blood is everywhere. The river is blood. Men shrink from tasting and
thirst after water. Hair has fallen out for everybody. Women are barren; none can conceive.
Trees are destroyed. No fruit nor herbs are found. Grain has perished on every side. Cattle
are left to stray.
The laws of the judgement-hall are cast forth. The storehouse of the king is the common
property of everyone. Behold no craftsmen work. A man strikes his brother. One uses violence
against another. If three men journey upon a road, they are found to be two men; the greater
number slay the less. Noble ladies go hungry. She who looked at her face in water is
possessor of a mirror. Serfs become lords of serfs.
The Desert is throughout the land A foreign tribe from abroad has come to Egypt There are
none found to stand and protect themselves Enemies enter into the temples - weep. Woe is me
because of the misery of this time.
We note here, in addition to the other plague evidence of the Bible, complete social
breakdown of a type never observable in modern disasters, even at Hiroshima (where outside
help came); prolonged chaos, for Ipuwer has experienced weeks and months of it; a foreign
desert tribe has taken over the country and its temples; death is everywhere; wobbling of
the Earth, possibly the tilting axis slowly coming to rest; fires mounting to the sky,
consuming stone; radiation disease (falling hair, women barren); all Upper Egypt affected as
well as Lower Egypt. Ipuwer mentions the baffling death of his Pharaoh, but much more detail
is supplied, again from the Egyptian side, particularly as to the manner of death of King
Thoum. This is from the inscribed stone of el-Arish [51] :
The land was in great affliction... It was great upheaval in the residence... Nobody left
the palace during nine days, and during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest
that neither the men nor the gods could see the faces of their next.... His majesty went to
battle against the companions of Apopi [fierce god of darkness]. His majesty [the culprits]
finds on this place called Pi-Kharoti. Now even the majesty of Ra-Harmachis fought with the
evil-doers in this pool, the Place of the Whirlpool, the evil-doers prevailed not over his
majesty. His majesty leapt into the so-called Place of the Whirlpool.
The el-Arish inscription reports that the King's son led a search party that heard "all that
happened... the combats of the King Thourn" and that the prince was badly burned and his
companions killed by a "blast." "The children of Apopi... fell upon Egypt at the fall of
darkness. They conquered only to destroy." The prince fled the land in the face of the
invading Hyksos. Later "the air cooled off, and the countries dried."
Notes (Chapter 1: Plagues and Comets)
1. Generally this plague is said to be of flies, not of beasts as in this rabbinical
tradition. I also here prefer the reading of "lice" to "mosquitoes," as some writers say.
2. Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, Philadelphia, 1909, vol. II, 3423. (Hereafter this
is cited as e. g. II G 3423.)
3. These and others are collected and quoted in Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (New York:
Doubleday, 1950). Additional sources will be cited below.
4. For example, Claude Schaeffer, Stratigraphie Compar‚e et Chronologie de l'Asie
Occidentale (London: Oxford U. Press, 1948), and Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth:
Their Geologic Origins, (Indiana University Press, 1973), 179-271. The reader's attention is
called also to a book by two British Astronomers, V. Clube and W. Napier, Cosmic Serpent,
who assign a comet to the Exodus days. See appendix below, section 1.
5. These giants are of certain tribes, well distinguished by Bimson (see below, 1977), of
very large stature, who were never numerous or organized well enough to become a major
nation, and were finally extinguished; Goliath, fighting with the Philistines and killed by
David's slingshot, was one of the last such types.
6. John J. Bimson, "Rockenbach's De Cometis' and the Identity of Typhon," I Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies Review (hereafter cited as SISR), 4 (Spring 1977), 9-10. F. H.
Baker, 189 Living Age (1891) 818-23, gives Halepo (Da Aleppo, Halep) credit in connecting
the comet with the Exodus and the destruction of the Egyptian army.
7. Deut. 4: 37, Unless noted, Biblical citations are to the Oxford Bible, Revised Standard
Version. Annotated. Martin Buber's transliteration (155) in his Moses.
8. Ex. 13: 1.
9. Num. 24: 17. To the Biblical scholar, Hyam Maccoby. I owe the suggestion that Suthites
may be read "Se'thites" (" wicked people") and the embracing phrase may mean in effect "the
whole human race."
10. Quoted by Z. Rix to the author in an unpublished manuscript "King Shepherds or Moloch
Sheperds?" 2, 1976; Gemser, "Der Stern aus Jacob," 45 Zeitsch. fr Alttestament. Wissen.
(1925) 301 ff; and also quoting W. Staerk, "Die Jdisch Gemeinde des neuen Bundes in
Damascus," in 27 Beitr. Zur F"rederung christ. Theo. 65 (1922).
11. Natural History, II, ch. XXII, 89-91.
12. Ex. 12: 42b (Douay tr.)
13. Deut. 4: 34-6.
14. 1 Kg 6: 1.
15. Ages in Chaos (1952); Peoples of the Sea (1977); Ramses II and His Time (1978); John J.
Bimson, Reading the Exodus and Conquest, Sheffield, 1978; Donovan Courville, The Exodus
Problem and Its Ramifications, Loma Linda: Calif., 1971, 2v.
16. N.-A. Boulanger, L'Antiquit‚ Devoil‚e par ses Usages, 4 v., Amsterdam, 1766, was the
first major scientific writer on the social effects of cometary encounters. More recently,
see Nahum Ravel, ed. From past to Prophesy, Bronfman Centre, Montreal, 1975; Earl Milton,
Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, Lethbridge U. Press, 1978; A. de Grazia, ed., The
Velikovsky Affair, 3rd ed., London; Sphere Books, 1979.
17. The Kuzari (ca 1140 A. D. ), intro. by H. Slonimsky, New York: Schocken Books.
18. "Comets," in Lynch, ed., Astrophysics, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951)
19. A. O. Kelly and F. Dachille, Target : Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth Science,
Carlsbad, Calif., 1953.
20. "Of Eating of Flesh," in Morals, quoted by Velikovsky in W. in C., p. 12; cf. 85ff:
21. Thoum is a name of the Pharaoh of the Exodus as reconstructed by Velikovsky (see Ages in
Chaos, New York; Doubleday, 1952, p. 40). I do not support the theory that Ramses II or
other famed kings, were the Exodus pharaoh. J. Bimson, "Israel in Egypt, "IV SISR 2 (1979),
15, identifies the place, not far form Memphis.
22. Natural History, II, ch. XXII, 90, Rackham trans., 1938.
23. Hugo Gressmann, Mose and Seine Zeit, G"ttingen, 1913, pp. 97-108.
24. I. p. 96 He was of the generation of Jesus.
25. II G 341.
26. The royal courts and public were excited by the revival of electricity at the hands of
early eighteenth century European and American scientists. One experimenter (Wall) fashioned
a kind of cane of amber, which could collect and hold charges, would give cracking sounds
and "infinite flashes of light," and puff and explode. It would attract to itself smoke and
then give it off "like a small cloud."( Joseph Priestley, I History and Present State of
Electricity, with Original Experiments, London, 1767, 12-4.)
27. John Zeleny, "Rumbling Clouds and Luminous Clouds, "75 Science, (15 Jan. 1932), 80-1.
28. Rupert Furneaux, Krakatoa, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964, 69,74.
29. David Daiches, Moses, New York; Praeger, 1975, 60; Ex. 14: 24.
30. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, "Does Epidemic Disease come from Space?" New
Scientist, Now. 11, 1977.
31. H. V. Gill, 63 Nineteenth Century (Jan. 1908), 144-150, in W. Corliss, comp., Earthquake
Phenomena, G2-151 (GOE-030).
32. II G 352-3. Significant, in view of our later discussion of the origins of the
Israelites, is the added statement that the plague of beasts came "as a punishment for
desiring to force the seed of Abraham to amalgamate with the other nations." This may refer
to a considerable assimilation of the Hebrew, Egyptian, and other peoples during the sojourn
in Egypt.
33. II G. 354.
34. II G 354. The air-exploding Tunguska meteor of 1908, apart from knocking down some
eighty million tress, radiated the surviving trees, caused vegetables to increase in size,
and induced mysterious scabs among the reindeer of the region in that year. (Vera Rich, "The
70-Year-Old Mystery of Siberia's Big Bang, "274 Nature (1978), 207).
35. I Kings 8: 51, as derived from the pen of the second Deuteronomist again much later.
36. I. Donnelly, Ragnar"k, New York, Appleton, 1883, ch. 2.
37. II G 356.
38. II G 358.
39. Ex. 10: 4.
40. II G 359.
41. Ex. 10: 28-29.
42. Ex. 10: 23.
43. II G 345; see also 14.
44. II G 369.
45. Mose und Seine Zeit, 103.
46. Ex. 12: 12.
47. Ex. 4: 22ff.
48. I. Michelson, IV Pens‚e nø 2 (1974) 20, 18, estimates a force of 10 24 ergs is required
for a 180ø (North to South) reversal of the geographical poles; and to bring the Earth to a
stop 10 36 , a trillion times more. We are speaking of incomparably smaller changes in
rotational velocity. More recently, Warlow has shown that "to turn the Earth upside-down,
with all the attendant havoc such an action can produce, a mere three-hundreth of the
Earth's rotational energy will suffice - and that is only borrowed for half a day."
"Geomagnetic reversals?" J. Physics, Oct. 1978 repr. in III. S. I. S. R. 4 (1979); cf. IV S.
I. S. R. 2-3 (1979-1980) 8ff.
49. The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage from a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden, Alan H. Gardiner,
trans., Leipzig, 1909; Velikovsky, W. in C., p. 18-24; L. Greenberg, "The Papyrus Ipuwer,"
III Pens‚e (Winter 1973), p. 36-7; anon., "A Concordance of Disaster, "I Kronos 2 (1975),
16-22.
50. J. Van Seters, 50 J. Egypt Arch. (1964), 13; W. F. Albright, 179 Bull. Amer. Sch.
Orient. Res. (1965), 41-2. Malcolm Lowery, "Dating the 'Admonitions': Advance Report" II S.
I. S. R. 3 (1977-8), 54-7, gives the most useful lines of Ipuwer's Lament, and affirms that
"the Admonitions offer us an eye-witness report of the events at the end of the M. K." (57).
51. See Velikovsky, A. in C., 39-45. ;
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWO
THE SCENARIO OF EXODUS
Amidst the escalating terrors of the plagues, the Egyptian government struggled to control
the total situation. Boldly exploiting the disasters, Moses and his followers hastened to
organize the Exodus. Negotiations proceeded in an ever more tense setting, The antagonist of
the God-King Pharaoh Thaoi Thoum was the man Moses. What Moses was really like and what his
background was will be portrayed later. In anticipation, here one may consider that Moses
was a Hebraic Egyptian raised in a royal household, on the princely level of an adopted son
of a princess. He had a named father whom he never saw. He was exiled by his pharaoh-father,
and was now back on the scene of his earlier life, dealing with a pharaoh who, considering
Egyptian royal incest practices, could have been his step-brother, his step-uncle, or his
step-father, or even a combination thereof, and whom he had once known well.
Much that the Bible contains about the behavior of the Egyptian elite seems to come from an
inside view. Professional journalists assigned to world capitals would probably agree that
the exchanges between the Hebrew and the Egyptian leaders sound true. The general format
could hardly have been corrupted, although Moses' reports must have been extensively
rewritten. Whoever was writing the scene originally (and it was probably Moses) dealt
familiarly with their conduct. Moses "knew his way around."
HIGH-LEVEL NEGOTIATIONS
When it came time to deal with the Pharaoh, there appears to have been no trouble in gaining
access to the greatest ruler on earth. Moses, if an ordinary agitator, would have been
jailed or executed offhand. His background, scientific reputation, and government
connections prevented this fate. And that is precisely what Aaron and the Jews had counted
on in seeking him out as their leader (not to mention Yahweh, who insisted that Moses be his
spokesman and that of Israel.)
Moses had found an ethnic connection; very well. The Pharaoh's government wanted to solve
the problem of growing unrest in Goshen and elsewhere. "That the Levites, who promote the
state of unrest, are not interfered with is apparently due to the uncanny air of power which
the Egyptians scent as emanating from Moses." So writes Buber [1] . "Ben David has asserted
that Moses possessed some knowledge of electricity," reported Salverte. [2] "Some
knowledge" is an understatement; we shall see him as the world's best electrical scientist
until Benjamin Franklin. Actually, I think, the Egyptians wanted Moses to help them not only
to settle the unrest, but also because he came out of exile already known to them as one of
their top-ranking scientist-magicians, and his predictions, noisomely ethnic as they were,
gave them another input on what was happening in the natural world.
The negotiations over the permit for the Jews to leave their homes in Goshen, Egypt, were
based upon conditions and motives clear to both sides. The Hebrews were primarily interested
in economic freedom, not religious freedom; Yahweh wanted to help them, but it is always
"Let My people go, that they may serve Me." Moses, that is, was interested in theocratic
power.
Moses did not plead the economic cause. It would be useless to do so: no ruler in the world
would let a useful subject people resign from the nation where they had resided for
centuries. Imagine, for instance, the response of the Habsburg Emperor of the old Austro-
Hungarian Empire in the face of such a demand. He would laugh and be pleased to hear that so
much work was being exacted, especially considering that the same complaining people had
houses, flocks, and lambs to slaughter in most homes when sacrifices were called for.
Furthermore, the Hebrews had religious freedom. They were not being denied their God
(significantly, the Egyptians refer to the Hebrew god as "Elohim".) True, at one point in
the negotiations Moses actually made his strongest argument: that some Egyptians would stone
the Jews if they conducted large public religious celebrations. The Pharaoh does not object
to this argument; he is in fact sympathetic (and mind you, the Hebrew Bible is saying
this!). But he feels that this problem of free public worship can be overcome by means other
than letting the Jews move out of Egypt with all of their worldly goods, and without
compensation.
The Pharaoh Thoum is not quoted in support of his father's policy, but it must have still
remained the official policy: the Jews were to be suppressed and mistrusted, lest, as the
Bible itself quotes the father: "If war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against
us and escape from the land." [3]
Were the negotiations conducted in good faith? No, not on the Pharaoh's side nor on Moses.
Moses intended all along to take his following out of Egypt forever, but he let the Pharaoh
believe it would only be a brief trip to conduct sacrifices in the wide-open spaces. The
Pharaoh never did believe this and made Moses appear insincere by counter-offers that would
have let the Hebrews sacrifice freely within Egypt. Then again he said he would let the men
alone go forth to sacrifice; only the men, after all, conducted sacrifices. Then again,
later, all the people might go, but without their herds. He says bluntly, well along in the
negotiations: "You have evil purposes in mind. "
Moses never believed the Pharaoh, either; all along the voice of Yahweh dinned in his ears
that the Pharaoh would be impossibly obdurate. Pharaoh Thoum guaranteed on three separate
occasions the permit, only to rescind it after the occasion for the permit - a plague had
passed.
So far as the script reads, there were fourteen encounters between Moses and Pharaoh, plus
three unsuccessful attempts by Moses to see him. The initiative was taken by Moses on seven
occasions and by Pharaoh on seven. The scenario is plausible; an expert on labor bargaining
or diplomacy would readily grant this. Most of the initiatives of Moses occurred in the
early part and middle of the series, when Pharaoh was apparently incensed and confused. The
calls by Pharaoh came mostly later. And in the last stages both parties responded to the
events unpretentiously, for matters were quite out of control, When the final permission to
leave came, the Hebrews were already in motion.
So Moses pleaded what he knew best and what the Egyptians knew that he knew best. And he
played upon the foreknowledge of disaster that he possessed, and here again the Pharaoh and
his staff knew that Moses could advance evidence in his favor. Moses identified the agent of
these forces of impending disaster as the Israelite god. The Egyptians were wondering whose
god was agitating the world.
The largest lessons in anthropology and theology are sometimes forgotten in the haste of
students to address the details of Exodus. No rulers would ever conduct any kind of
discussions in which plagues were the topic, without watching the sky; they were talking of
gods and the gods had one true home and one main realm - the sky. This had been true since
the days of creation, thousands of years before, by ancient reckoning in many cultures.
The Pharaoh did not dispute the existence of Yahweh, indeed he reasoned and behaved as a
typical sceptical and sophisticated ruler: "Maybe their god, which is not unlike our gods,
Amen, Thoth, and Horus, has gotten something going for them." His obduracy, of which the
Bible makes much, is to a certain degree rational and prompted by his knowing full well that
the Hebrew complaint was almost entirely political and economic.
It was Moses' scientific renown, coupled with the increasingly terrible natural
manifestations, that prompted the Pharaoh to conduct the negotiations on Moses' religious
grounds. He wanted any information (and so did his advisers) that would help cope with the
deteriorating general situation caused by a raging great god. He begged Moses, not on one
occasion alone, but twice, to intercede with the Lord on his behalf and to ask the Lord to
bless him. One would say that the ruler was converted, not so much to Judaism, as to Moses
as a verified expert and predictor. This came later with the breaking down of the hard heart
of Pharaoh. Most commentators on the Exodus and indeed most careful readers of the Bible are
baffled by a large problem. It has incited theologians and philosophers to perform
remarkable feats of rationalization ever since the mosaic tradition came to be reassembled
and committed to writing 3000 years ago.
Why did Yahweh, time after time, harden the Pharaoh's heart? Why did Yahweh predict
repeatedly, beginning with his first appearance at the Burning Bush, that Pharaoh would not
let the Hebrews go, and that he, Yahweh, would not let the Pharaoh let the people go? Why
was it necessary to visit every single plague upon the helpless country? Why is everyone
concerned - Moses, Yahweh, the Pharaoh and all others who participated in or reported the
events - willing and ready to let the plagues run their full course?
Childs, for example speaks of the "strange atmosphere which surrounds the plague stories,"
of "the extravagant length of the stories," and of "a pervading quality of historical
distance" not characterizing miracles such as that of Elijah on Carmel [4] . He wonders at
the "mystery of Pharaoh's resistance" and "the ultimate strangeness of the plague
narrative." [5] Childs then demonstrates that the narrative was edited to impose the idea
of Moses as a prophet upon the events, but that Moses was not behaving like a true prophet;
rather, Moses, too, was watching the events.
That is, the Bible was assembled to portray the history of the world as the working of
divine will. Its editors took up Moses as a prophet of the divine will. It therefore had to
shape the account of the plagues to incorporate Moses as their prophet. This procedure later
led many, including scholars such as Gressmann, to see Moses as the miracle worker and
magician. But, in fact, the narrative is independent of Moses.
The narrative is independent of Pharaoh, too. "Repeated efforts to illuminate the concept of
hardness" [6] of Pharaoh have failed. And Yahweh moves inexorably, while insisting that
these humans play out their pathetic roles. There can be only one reason for these
behaviors, and theologians, not knowing it, have labored vainly to explain otherwise: the
great natural force - the body in the sky - that was operative would hear no plea, see no
reason to cease, change not its course until it had completed its approach, destruction and
departure in its own time, inevitably, remorselessly, heartlessly.
Further the Bible is reporting after the fact; it had to give meaning to the fact; it had
therefore to implant free will where there was no free will, call for solutions when there
was only resolution, and present history in the catastrophic model of Greek tragedy, where
the characters are set into motion as if they were free, while affirming in the end that
there was no alternative to what they did or what happened to them.
Loudly, clearly, and predictably, the Bible sends forth the signals of desperate creatures
from a world in distress. Under such circumstances, the hardness of Pharaoh is
understandable, just as it is understandable why in the end he surrenders permission for the
Exodus to occur.
Buber asks "Why does Pharaoh permit himself to be convinced? We find ourselves face to face
with a historical mystery." [7] Nor does Buber try to answer his own question. It is just as
well. He has already destroyed, in his impeccable unbelieving theological style, the grounds
for its solution. "The negotiations between Moses and Pharaoh and the associated plagues,
can scarcely be fitted into historical reality." [8] How could a king negotiate with "a
representative of the slaves," he asks. He proceeds farther, with what he - and most other
scholars - regards as the only way to demystify the plagues, to diminish them: "masses of
small frogs which come out of the river (it is summer, and the season for the flood);" a
winter hailstorm; next year a swarm of locusts; one spring a sandstorm of hitherto unknown
fury bringing darkness for days; a children's epidemic which cuts down the king's own son:
"Go forth! he cries" to the "hated one standing before him." [9]
If, by contrast, our version of the events is accepted, we may give credence to Jewish
legends that other nations besides the Hebrews were mutinying [10] . Moreover, riots had
broken out prior to the final earthquake and passover, a riot of the "first-born." Was a
group of highly-placed Egyptians in incipient rebellion [11] ?
The final night of the Passover may refer to the passover from Egypt into Sinai, or the
passover of the Lord's Angel to destroy Egypt, or the Yahweh's passover of the protected
Hebrew area "on his way" to the Egyptian concentrations, but certainly not merely to a
traditional shepherd's festival to usher in spring (Buber, sic!).
It was on this night before they departed from Egypt, incidentally, that the Hebrews baked
bread for the feast. The haste before the departure, say many biblical authorities, prompted
instructions to take unleavened bread, whence has come the matzos of ages since and today.
Folklore, however, has long told us that bread dough will not rise in a thunderstorm. The
Hebrews could not get their dough to rise, owing to intense electrostatic disturbances, but
baked the flat dough into bread anyhow. The earth heaved and, as with the greatest
earthquakes, electrical storms broke out in the darkness. The two are interconnected. Yahweh
"appeared in Egypt, attended by nine thousand myriads of the Angels of Destruction who are
fashioned some of hail and some of flames, and whose glances drive terror and trembling to
the heart of the beholder;" but Yahweh took the main task of destruction upon himself [12] .
A rabbinical source [13] maintains that 49 out of 50 Hebrews perished in the plague of
darkness, and a legend declares that the faction readying for the flight slew their fellow
Hebrews who would not go along [14] . Eusebius quotes a passage ascribed to Artapanus about
the last night before Exodus: there was "hail and earthquakes by night, so that those who
fled from the earthquakes were killed by the hail, and those who sought shelter from the
hail were destroyed by the earthquakes. And at that time all the houses fell in, and most of
the temples." [15]
Velikovsky adds, too, a source from the midrashim: "The seventh plague, the plague of barad
(meteorites): earthquake, fire, meteorites." He points out that the Egyptians have always
regarded this night, the 13th of the month, and the number 13, as unlucky, a superstition
the Jews did not share, and that the Aztecs, across the seas in Mexico, marked the 13th day
of the month as "Earthquake day" when the sun began a new age [16] , and all work ceased on
this day, that was passed in a kind of catatonic fear.
WHY PHARAOH PURSUED THE HEBREWS
Given the chaos and the final consent to the inevitable, it may seem surprising that the
Hebrews should be pursued. Yet "when the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled,
the mind of Pharaoh and his servants was changed towards the people, and they said, "What is
this we have done, that we have let Israel go from serving us." [17] Or, as a Jewish legend
has it, "Now that the children of Israel had gone from them, the Egyptians recognized how
valuable an element they had been in their country." [18] It was not the whole Jewish
people as a working force that they pursued; it could not have been; it would have been
unreasonable, impolitic, rash, and inconsequential, given the sad circumstances of the
country. The target of the pursuit was Moses, the Levites, and the knowledge, designs,
metals, jewels, and equipment with which they were absconding.
Political science is largely a study of non-rational behavior; still, a fear of loss of
secret knowledge in the Exodus cannot be deemed non-rational, even if the chase was doomed.
A parallel may be drawn. According to Heilbron [19] , in the "world's greatest collections"
there are some 315 electricians of the period between 1600 and 1790 whose publications are
noticed. Calculating with 40 years as the average duration of a scholarly career, the
average of published producers per generation for Euro-America, which had an average
population of perhaps fifty millions over the whole period, was then 67. In any year, that
is, one might expect one or two active electricians per million people. In Egypt and the
Near East, before the Exodus catastrophe, there lived perhaps twelve million people.
Supposing a higher electrification of the environment and a greater theocratic interest in
electricity, the ratio of experts to population was probably greater. The Egyptian
government might reasonably view with alarm and suspicion the subversive activities of Moses
and his Levite followers, even if there were only a dozen of them. The Soviet and American
governments strenuously sought to seize and employ a small group of German scientists at the
end of World War II.
Also, the Egyptian leadership wanted to prevent a junction of the Jews with foreign enemies.
The Egyptians would have just learned of the movements of the Hyksos tribesmen towards
Egypt. "Putting two and two together " and, as sometimes happens in military intelligence,
coming out with five as the answer, the Egyptian high command would have reported to the
Pharaoh at this very moment that the Jews were heading for a rendezvous with these forces
out of Arabia, and together they would turn upon Egypt. Moses, it would appear obvious, had
been in touch with them while in exile [20] . Little did Egyptian intelligence realize that
the Jews themselves were soon to enter into desperate battles with elements of the same
Hyksos who, in the Bible, are called Amalekites [21] .
In the midst of the chaos, the idea finally possessed the top elite of Egypt that they were
losing some of the best applied scientific talents of the country all at once, at the moment
when they were most critically needed, together with some of the most advanced technical
apparatus in Egypt. Whether the Egyptians knew that the lands of their foreign enemies were
also stricken is immaterial; they would have behaved in the same way. They must have felt a
fearful loss of power, already experienced from the natural and "divine" forces. But now, as
politicians often feel when otherwise powerless, "'Here is a matter we can do something
about."
We shall go deeply into the matter, but might presently declare what lay behind the changed
mind of the Egyptians. In Egypt during the Middle Empire, electricity was a central concern
of the government. Among many functions ascribed to the pyramids, one stands out as the most
plausible: they were electrical guidance and control equipment, The great gods Horus, Thoth,
and Amon, the nearest to Israel's Yahweh, were thunderbolting and cosmic fire gods. The word
"pyramid" is Greek and "pyr" means "fire" as in "funeral pyre." Especially later on, the
distinction among fires lessened and electrical fire and combustion are given the same word.
The Great Pyramid compound at Giza was caled Khuti , "the Lights". Egypt was flat and the
best way to observe and utilize electricity was by the pyramidal design; the pyramid was a
superior artificial mountain from whose peak (a metallic cap), St. Elmo's fire would
frequently be discharged skywards. At times, a whole pyramid would light up, miraculously
without signs of burning afterwards.
The pyramids had long been the rock and strength of the Pharaohs and Egyptian elite, too.
They were of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, of the age of thunderbolting electric gods, and
must have been centers of atmospheric science and of electrical phenomena. Religion and
science were tied to the pyramids, and the genealogy, traditions, and faith of the royal
family and elite.
Even today, thousands of miles and thousands of years away, more people belong to the
"pyramid cult" than, say, to the Episcopalian Church. Millions of people believe in pyramid
electricity. Associations with roots in secret pyramid knowledge number their members by the
millions. Books on pyramids are continually being published. Hundreds of general stores in
America have recently carried pyramid devices, which are said to prolong life, to sharpen
razor blades, and perform other marvels.
These facts should suffice to stress the obstacles facing someone like Moses who did not
deny the religious and scientific phenomena that are observed by means of the pyramids, such
as the voice of the gods and the electrical "temperature" of the environment, but who argued
that they might also be observed by means of a small electrical device of the type of the
Leyden jar, which could even be portable. The great pyramid compared with the tiny electric
device was like the early giant computers compared with the miniature computer of today.
So, his argument would go, when the peak of the pyramid lit up, a compactly constructed arc
(ark) would also activate, and when a lower pyramid would light up, the ark would signal
faster, and that "eyes" would appear on both) and that when the pyramid edges began to light
up from the top edge and run down, the ark would talk "a blue streak" ' and its surroundings
would become dangerous. And in the end, in both cases, fire would leap down and run around
the premises [22] . The Ark, then, must be defined in a preliminary way here; very much is
made of it later on, as the secrets of Moses' science took concrete form in the Ark of the
Covenant, among other things.
The ground ark, unlike the pyramid or mountain altar, makes its own divine fire. It does not
depend upon a single point high up to provide the electrical discharge. In a small machine,
grounded by one pole and pointed to the sky at the opposing pole, the two being insulated
from each other, an opposing charge is accumulated at the poles and, when sufficiently
charged, the poles exchange a spark, a light, a divine fire. Unlike the pyramid, or
mountain, the Ark can be moved to where its sources of strength are greatest and its effects
can be most effective for psychological or other purposes.
The Ark is not weak. Set up properly, and given the electrical conditions of today, a
sparking machine, a large Leyden jar, can accumulate and discharge tens of thousands of
volts. It was something, both in actuality and potentiality, that would indeed interest the
rulers of an empire. We may recall that it was only the awareness that a nuclear chain
reaction might be created and fashioned into a bomb that prompted the American President and
his closest advisers to launch the huge and top secret Manhattan project.
In this chapter, I will provide only a single indication of the Ark at work, for the weapon
is treated heavily later on. This is a passage from a legend of the Jews, and has some of
the typical markings of a fairytale:
It was through the Ark that all the miracles on the way through the desert had been
wrought. Two sparks issued from the Cherubim that shaded the Ark, and these killed all the
serpents and scorpions that crossed the path of the Israelites, and furthermore burned all
thorns that threatened to injure the wanderers on their march through the desert. The smoke
rising from these scorched thorns, moreover, rose straight as a column, and shed a fragrance
that perfumed all the world, so that nations exclaimed: 'Who is it that cometh out of the
wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of
the merchant [23] ?
It may be useful to continue in this fanciful vein. Probably the Egyptian leaders knew about
the Leyden jar effect. They seem to have had an interest in studying such phenomena. But
they were probably "isolationists," disinclined to making new weapons for foreign adventures
and also without inclination to change the established order and rites. There were probably
budgetary priorities involved. A new temple or pyramid would have the same effect on defense
spending as a large aircraft carrier does now, Moses was perhaps a "hawk" in foreign
affairs, coming from an internationalist Near East background, and would have been keen on
weapons systems that could be carried abroad.
Thus, if for some time Moses and some fellow-scientists, mostly Hebrew and Thoth religious
pragmatists, had been experimenting with ark devices, and urging applications of the devices
for military expeditions, domestic propaganda operations, and even "home-made altars" for
middle-class funeral parks, the Egyptian conservatives would be deeply concerned and
hostile. And they would exile Moses for this kind of trouble-making far quicker than for the
accidental homicide of a labor foreman (which is the reason the Bible gives for his being
condemned to death by the Pharaoh and forced into exile). And, too, it is typical of human
behavior that when Moses had gotten his own electrical system going, he had the same
obsessions about its being duplicated in other forms, about its falling into the hands of
the enemy, or regarding even its being understood by ordinary people.
THE ORGANIZED MOVE
The instant that Moses heard the voice of Yahweh at the Burning Bush, two deep motives in
his ambitious character joined. One was to act upon the knowledge of the tremendous changes
about to occur to the world. The other was to tie in his actions, not with an Egyptian
bureaucracy of which he had been heartily sick and disenchanted, but with a restless people
with whom he was also connected. This kind of switch is common, witness George Washington.
Furthermore, Moses was in a unique position. He knew the sources of technical support
personnel that others did not. These were the Levites. He was a Levi himself. They were
assimilated Egyptian Hebrews. "Levites don't work like other Israelites," goes the legend
[24] . They knew the Egyptian technology. They had probably flourished in Egypt since the
time of Joseph, not a tribe but a skill echelon; skills are housed in families and clans,
not in tribes which are more like nations. Many Levites had Egyptian names. The ill-fated
Levite, Korah, was reported to have been Treasurer to the Pharaoh. Maccoby calls them a
"leader and liaison class." [26]
The idea of a Hebrew sub-proletarian mass is nonsense. How could the descendents of Joseph
be mere slaves? (Unless, indeed, they were like the generally competent Greek slaves whom
the Roman took.) Recalling the earlier quotation of the Pharaoh's father, how could the Jews
as a nation "Join our enemies and fight against us and escape" without their having in the
first place a potential social organization? Look only at the preparations for departure.
Give the scheme, as detailed in the Bible - including even the elaborate instructions for
stripping the awed Egyptians of their jewelry and roasting the last dinner before moving out
to a logistical expert, and ask his opinion.
There are several references to the Egyptians who were neighbors. The Hebrews were not in
ghettos. Many did not want to leave, and probably many that did leave, and their Egyptian
friends, were leaving in fear of being enveloped by the successive disasters.
Israel, the core element, that is to say, was organized down to the last battle ration and,
indeed, so says the Bible, moved out girded for battle. Slaves are never permitted weapons.
The Hebrews, says a legend, bore swords and "five sorts of arms." [27] Moses knew long
before Machiavelli "why unarmed prophets fail." Further, slaves are not permitted
genealogies, but a legend about the first battle of the Jews in the desert, with the
Amalekites, the Hyksos, has the enemy luring unsuspecting Jews out of the camp by calling
out their family names that they uncovered among the captured Egyptian archives [28] .
Compare them with the Huns, the Tartars, the Teutons, the American wagonŽtrains, the
SudŽAfrikaaners of the Great Trek Ž and say whether the popular imagination of a throng of
fleeing people could be correct. We note, too, that a "mixed multitude" accompanied the
Hebrews. Apparently many friends and gentile relatives thought that they would be better off
leaving with the resolute and wellŽorganized Hebrews than to remain in Egypt.
It is conceivable, then, that a people moving out under such duress, with such immense
natural and human forces pressing in upon them, would have among its leaders men who would
seek to seize amidst the confusion the most valuable technological devices that they knew
about and could possible use in the journey and battles ahead of them.
Legend has it that Moses was a poor man in the desert. For, many Jews were carrying jewels
and metal that were .. given" them by the Egyptians, out of superstitious hope promoted by
the Jews themselves, that their departure would end the plagues. But Moses was burdened down
with the remains of the great Joseph. it is well, however, that the charismatic leader think
not of material dross. Carrying the dust of Joseph was possession of legitimate authority.
The Bible uses the same word for the coffin of Joseph as for the Ark. And Joseph's coffin,
like the later Ark, may well have carried Mose's most closely guarded secrets.
Indeed as one re-examines the relation between Moses and the people, one gets an impression
of a kind of expeditionary contract that is subordinated to the Lord's covenant with Israel,
of which Moses is executor. It is glued by a common resolve and a professed religious unity,
but nevertheless a kind of agreement which we can imagine to have been worded: We have heard
of you, Moses, and you've heard of us. You say that you can do this for us? We can do this
for you. Now let's get going.
The people are continuously recalling Moses to his promises: "Is not this what we said to
you in Egypt, 'Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better
for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness." [29] Some Bible-editors,
totally committed to Yahweh and the leaders, berate the people continually for
"complaining". Moses in turn is saying: You must follow me because I speak for God. You
cannot turn back on God (me, Moses). At the Sea of Reeds, with the Egyptian force fast
advancing upon them, they say to Moses in effect, the whole thing was your idea! (And with a
Yiddish humor, the first in history: "Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you
have taken us away to die in the wilderness?" [30] Evidently, from a kind of well-qualified
expedition manager, Moses was quickly transformed by events into a charismatic leader.
OPENING AND CLOSING THE WATERS
"And the waters of the Red Sea divided, and not they alone, but all the water in heaven
and on earth, in whatever vessel it was, in cisterns, in wells, in caves, in casks, in
pitchers, in drinking cups, and in glasses, and none of these waters returned to their
former estate until Israel had passed through the sea on dry land." [31]
The legend makes a point. The earth tilted in its attraction' to the passing comet. The
Almagest sky map of the astronomer Ptolemy shows a bit of sky to the south unseen today and
fails to show a bit of sky to the north; the map was probably copied from maps drawn before
the Exodus [32] . Probably all Egyptian temples shifted several degrees north to catch the
sun in a new position on the winter solstice following the Exodus [33] .
In Upper Egypt, at 32ø 34'E/ 21ø 46'N, at Ovadi es Sebova (South), excavators discovered
three temple foundations; one, the original, rested against the hillside from before Exodus;
two were constructed later on. A shift of 5ø 01' between temple I and the temples II-III is
evident. When the temple by Amenhotep III was built, the innermost target of the solstitial
sun of winter had to be shifted to catch the sunrise on the eastern horizon farther north.
One may reason that the axis of the Earth shifted, carrying Egypt further North by 5ø 01' or
that a great earthquake moved the hill and its attached temple counterclockwise [34] .
Figure 3. Pharaoh's Army Drowned
The waters that confronted the Israelites were unexpected. Else the Exodus would not have
gone in that direction; they would have known that they would be trapped. But the Red Sea
sent a tidal wave north that ran through the belt of lakes between it and the Mediterranean.
(Today it is the route of the Suez Canal.) The Israelites watched with distress the oncoming
Egyptian army. The light in the sky never faded on that gloomy night before the sea [35] .
"Then the Angel of God who went before the host of Israel moved and went behind them; and
the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, coming between the host of
Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness; and the night passed
without one coming near the other all night." The Hebrew version carries "and the night
disappeared in light..." [36]
"God caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind, the wind He always makes use of when
he chastises the nations," as in the Deluge, the Destruction of the Tower of Babel, of
Samaria, of Jerusalem, of Tyre [37] . Battles of Egyptian and Israelite Angels waged in the
skies. The Egyptian soldiers were met by strong winds, fiery darts, lightning flashes,
thunder, hailstones and coals of fire [38] . The chariot wheels and the hooves of the
horses were burned by divine fire and got stuck in a boiling mud [39] . (America's worst
earthquake was around New Madrid in Missouri, in 1811, and an observer tells of his horses
suddenly sinking up to their bellies in new black mud.) [40] It would appear that, even
while all the aspects of the plague of the first-born repeated themselves, a tidal motion
was added because here waters were involved. The accompanying Figure 4 displays several
possible movements of the waters and of the two masses of human beings.
The plan of march of the Israelites was southeastward through a known gap in the shallow
lakes that stretched between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. When they arrived at the jump-
off point at Pi-ha-khiroth, they were met by a wall of water. It was the tidal wave moving
north from the Red Sea, following the comet and the tilt of the earth.
They waited out the night in sight of the pursuing Egyptian force. The earth's tilt paused.
The tilted waters continued to rise [41] and rush north. But gaps opened. The Israelites
passed through, Moses and his Levite troops in the vanguard. The Egyptians perceived the
gaps, too, and headed somewhat south of the Israelite passageway, intending to gain time.
Then the tidal flood drops from its heights and reverses to the south. It catches some of
the Israelites and the main body of the Egyptians and their leaders, including the Pharaoh.
Even before the flood engulfs them, the Egyptian forces are deep in mire - perhaps in the
old bed of a lake, perhaps in a new earthquake fissure eruption. The Israelites who remain
alive continue southeastwards (Figure 5) leaving Egypt behind. They learn then something of
what would have happened if they had taken the northern route to Canaan by the Great Sea.
The peoples have heard, they tremble: Pangs have seized upon the inhabitants of Philistia.
Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed; The leaders of Moab, trembling seizes them; all the
inhabitants of Canaan have melted away. Terror and dreadfall upon them; because of the
greatness of Thy arm, they are as still as a stone. Till Thy people, o Lord, pass by, Till
the people pass by whom Thou hast purchased. [42]
Fig 4. The Tidewaters Passage
(Present-day maps of these waters may not be helpful, although a careful hydrological study
might reveal ancient basins and flood channels.)
Figure 5. The route of Exodus and wandering
I have chosen Mt. Horeb at the Eastern end of the Gulf of Aqaba as the "Holy Mountain" of
Moses, instead of Mt. Sinai, following Winnett's arguments. (The Mosaic Tradition, p. 86 et
passim.) This would be the Midianite (and Kenite) territory, where Moses passed his exile.
Gressmann (Mose, 414) agrees and sees the Exodus moving along the Egyptian "Highway of
Reeds," which continues, after Horeb, down to Arabia. Bimson places the capital of the XIII
Dynasty at Itj-towy, near the Delta (" Israel in Egypt," p. 15, citing Hayes 12 JNES, 1953,
33-8)
UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES
It is doubtful that even Moses, when he first conceived of returning to Egypt and exploiting
his connections, knowledge, and daring - an event that can be fixed from his sight of the
Burning Bush from which Yahweh addressed him - had any idea of how bad conditions would
really become. And if, at the beginning, in the typical psychology of the great but
frustrated man, thinking in the lonely wilds of his life's purpose, he began to hear from a
superhuman being, and only half-believed in what he had heard, but was nevertheless seized
by the idea of uniting his return to Egyptian affairs with the need of the Hebrews for a
spokesman, then by the middle of the series of disastrous events, he could well be fully
convinced that Yahweh was personally guiding all, and that even Egypt's best scientist-
politician could do little without a god.
Although the Jews were compelled by coastal tidal waves and hostile terrified nations to
head southwards on the Sinai peninsula, they may also have chosen that direction upon the
instigation of Moses. Moses may have believed that "the Promised Land" was where he had
already been. For, after all, if the Jews had come from Palestine, and were to return there,
it would be a returning home to the old condition, not a discovery of the Promised Land.
Biblical scholar Auerbach believes that the goal of Exodus was to settle down at the oasis
of Kadesh where Moses saw the Burning Bush.
Although Moses had in mind Kadesh or Midian as the terminus of the Exodus, it is possible,
even probable, that he thought of this location as an organization and staging area for the
ultimate descent upon Canaan. His great ambitiousness and the dreams and wishful thinking of
his officers would point to Canaan; also, he would have foreseen the need to consolidate his
forces, to integrate their diverse elements, to train and discipline the people, and to
gather resources for the second phase of the movement.
Moses could hardly have imagined the horrible immensity of the natural catastrophe. A legend
recites that the plague of hail in Egypt had brought great famine to Jethro's Midianites
[43] . Upon arriving in his "promised land" there was little left there but parched earth,
dry water holes, flaming mountains, and, Thank God, Yahweh. By now Moses and the leaders
must have known that they could go nowhere until they were in better shape all-around and
the natural forces had become subdued.
The Bible says, as things get better and then bad again, "Moses spoke thus to the people of
Israel, but they did not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and their cruel
bondage." [44] The words read like a modern sociology textbook: their "slave psychology"
couldn't stand up to the idealistic behavior that they had promised. But noone could have
foreseen the catastrophe visited upon gentile and Jew alike. Even princes despaired.
So Moses promised too much, and the people of Israel expected too much. And they paid for
promises unperformed and conditions unforeseen. The Bible says that some 2.5 millions plus a
great number of outsiders, "a mixed multitude," set out from Egypt. The general view is that
this was a greatly exaggerated figure for "how could the desert into which they were moving
support such a mass of people?"
The desert did not, unfortunately, support them. Jewish tradition, more believable, says
that the vast majority of the people perished in the passage out of Egypt. If the Biblical
figure is used, perhaps only one out of a hundred survived. The waters that closed upon the
princes of Egypt and their only "strike-force in readiness" washed over most of the pursued
as well. A great number may have turned back immediately. Nor did the desert support even
the remainder, though well-organized and led.
By that time, Moses must have been as fanatically possessed as any man could be, insane with
the problems of a people clinging only to hope and staring wild-eyed and worshipfully at
alternative hopes. Whatever he did had to be quite mad. But what he did was rational unto
the occasion. He insisted upon his obsessions. He exercised his talents, and those of the
Levites and Aaron, and all the capabilities of his instruments.
He worked Yahweh, "the Lord," furiously, wrenching from this Great Father Figure concession
after concession, arrangement after arrangement, law upon law, giving up in the end only his
right to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land. And it is said by some, such as
Sigmund Freud, that he did not give up this right. Rather, he was put to death in a final
revolt against his rule, possibly on the grounds that he, Moses, was impossibly intolerant
and unfit for a new society - a leader of a long march that had now to end.
And, with the understanding of Moses' behavior, the parts of the Exodus pursuit come
together. In the dire national emergency, the Pharaoh and his national security council had
to do what any modern high command would have done: turn their backs on a country in turmoil
and disaster in order to regain control of the men and apparatus, which were needed to
control nature (the gods), and to prevent them from being used by foreign enemies.
What followed spelled the ruination of Egypt for centuries. "In the morning watch the Lord
in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down upon the host of the Egyptians, and
discomfited them so they turned to flee." But then Yahweh gave the word to Moses to wave his
hand, and the sea closed down [45] .
Not only were the weaponry and Hebrews now beyond recapture, but the only organized striking
force of Egypt perished, with its Commander-in-Chief, in the whirlpools of immense
crosstides near Pi-ha-khiroth just as the forward elements of the Jewish column passed
beyond the waters. Then it was, as Egypt lay helpless and in ruins, that the furious and
equally distressed "King-Shepherds" Hyksos of Arabia, the Biblical Amalekites, fleeing from
their own ruined lands, swept into Egypt and subjected the country to their rule. The XIIth
Dynasty that had endured over centuries and that had extended Egyptian sovereignty as far
north as Byblos (Syria) was ended in this year of Exodus [46] . For hundreds of years to
come, the Bible speaks only rarely of Egypt and then merely of the popular nostalgia for the
great land. The silence is awesome: we see it in the catastrophe and the Hyksos take-over.
And also the actuality of the disaster of the pursuing army. Else we should have had
repeated expeditions to recapture these slaves. The American army was quick to pursue the
Sioux Indians after the massacre of General Custer and his Seventh Cavalry regiment. The
Hebrews, whether they were few or many, would have been marked for implacable pursuit -
immediately, soon, or eventually, repeatedly, too, if the Empire of Egypt were not
prostrated. For centuries the peoples of Sinai, Transjordan, and Canaan were left free of
Egypt and Babylon to fight among themselves.
Perhaps the most aggressive of the peoples was the new nation, the heterogeneous federation
of Israelites, forged by the steel-willed Moses in the name of the electric god of war,
Yahweh. In the miraculous turbulent atmosphere of the wilderness, Moses established the
illumination and voice of Yahweh upon the Ark. Speaking then for Yahweh, he organized the
people, taught it a new law and discipline, and injected it with an inextinguishable
monotheism, proofed by fire against enemies within and without. Israel scourged the
borderlands before finally descending upon Canaan. Moses, the archetype of the mad scientist
and religious prophet, beat down successive rebellions that, if successful, would have
dissolved the new identity of Israel into the larger surrounding culture. Then, the terribly
oppressive and vindictive old man mysteriously died.
Notes (Chapter 2: The Scenario of Exodus)
1. Buber, 67.
2. The Philosophy of Magic, quote by Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (1887), I 528.
3. Ex. 1: 9-10.
4. Brevard S. Childs, Exodus, London: SCM Press, 1974, pp. 142-3.
5. Ibid. p. 149.
6. Ibid., pp. 170ff.
7. Buber, p. 64.
8. Ibid., p. 61.
9. Ibid., p. 68.
10. III G 12.
11. II G 365.
12. II G 366.
13. Velikovsky, W. in C., 59.
14. Cf. II G345 where Yahweh does this slaying.
15. Velikovsky, W. in C., 4, from Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospels (transl. 1903), IX,
ch. 27.
16. Ibid., 66.
17. Ex. 14: 5.
18. III G 11.
19. J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Berkeley: U. of
California Press, 1979), 98.
20. That is, Moses had dwelt on the borderlands of Arabia, whence came the Hyksos.
21. Velikovsky, A. in C., 57ff.
22. It is noteworthy that Worth Smith a century ago was able to charge a Leyden Jar with
extraordinary success by carrying it to the top of the Great Pyramid. (See Peter Tompkins,
Secrets of the Great Pyramid, New York: Harper and Row, 1971.)
23. III G157. See below III, 3a.
24. II G 248.
25. III G 286.
26. Hyam Maccoby, "Freud and Moses," Midstream (February, 1980), 9-15
27. III G 15.
28. III G 56-7. An alternative explanation is that the Amalekites extracted this information
from captured Jews.
29. Ex. 14: 12.
30. Ex. 14: 11.
31. III G 20.
32. See p. 225 in 2 Ency. Brit. (1973), "Astronomical Maps."
33. Tompkins, pp. 159ff, for instance, incorrectly explained, I think, as following changes
in positions of fixed stars, an old theory of Lockyer. cf. K. Mohlenbrink, Der Tempel
Salomos, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1932, 79-85.
34. My source is an unpublished study by Ren‚ Roussel, Albon, France.
35. III G 21; Ex. 14: 20.
36. Oxford Annotated Bible, 85, note p.
37. III G 20.
38. III G 26-8.
39. III G27. Re pre-Hyksos Chariots cf. J. Bimson, "Israel in Egypt," IV SISR 2 (1979), 17-
8.
40. E. M. Shepard, 13 J. Geology (Feb. 1905), 45, in Corliss, comp. Strange Phenomena, G2-
GQE-026, 147.
41. Granted the passing body, there would be no question that the tides would be elevated as
well as moved horizontally (See Velikovsky, W. in C. p. 86). Priestley in his famous History
and Present State of Electricity with Original Experiments (2v. London, 1767) describes (73)
Grey's simple experiment with a bowl of water. He passed an electrically charged object over
the bowl, which drew up the water into a "hill;" at the point of nearest encounter, a spark
was exchanged, and the "hill" collapsed, sending out waves.
42. Ex. 15: 14-16.
43. III G 73-74.
44. Ex. 6: 9.
45. Ex. 14: 24-5 The Douay translation indicates the head of the comet is Yahweh: "The Lord
cast through the columns of the fiery cloud upon the Egyptian force a glance that threw it
into panic."
46. Bimson. "Israel in Egypt," IV SISR, no 1, (Aug. 1979), 15. ;
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THREE
CATASTROPHE AND DIVINE FIRES
If the Israelites did not know that a great comet was visiting disaster upon the Earth, they
would be the only people in the world from whom the knowledge was withheld. In fact, they
did know. And they called it by god-names just as everybody else did in those days. But it
is also true that a peculiar kind of suppression of cometary evidence is present in the
Israelite record, for which there is an explanation.
In Chapter 1, I offered several pieces of evidence that the Israelites knew a comet was in
the sky, and that the disasters on Earth were from heaven, and, furthermore, that the Lord
bore them "on Eagle's wings" from Egypt. (See Figure 6) More evidence is due here. I must
reason out the position as well. Was the whole world electrified beyond any later historical
awareness? Is there an alternative to the comet: could there be another cause of all the
disturbances? What was the fate of the comet?
Figure 6.
On Eagle's Wings
"You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagle's wings and brought you
to me." Ex. 19-4 (The Torah: The Five Books of Moses, trans from the Masoretic text.
Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society, 1962) Cf. Deut. 32: 10-3. The cometary images are
of Comet Swift-Tuttle (1962) III, NASA, op cit., 29.
WHOSE ANGEL?
It is said that the Israelites were frightened in their Exodus by the sight of the Angel of
Egypt darting through the air, "as he flew to the assistance of the people under his
tutelage." [1] This tutelary angel was also called Uzza by the Jews [2] , strangely,
because the name is found among the ancient Arabian people in reference to the planet Venus
[3] . It is to be identified with Seth, god of the Hyksos and the anti-god of the Egyptians,
with Lucifer, and Phaeton-Typhon. Hence the "Egypt" referred to is already the conquered
Egypt. Uzza is also Azazel, the devil to whom the Jews dispatched the scape-goat carrying
their sins on the annual Day of Atonement. A very large body it would be.
Uzza, goes the legend, accosted the Lord, with a plea to return the Israelites to Egypt. A
debate ensued between Uzza and the champion of the Jews, the Angel Michael. Archangel
Michael is identified by Velikovsky as a Hebrew equivalent of the planet Venus. So that we
had here the same figure debating itself, that is reasonable, for a myth as for a dream.
Uzza claimed that the bondage of the Hebrews had not been completed; only 86 years, not 400
had passed. No explanation is given of the 86 years; Auerbach and others believe that the
Jews had been in Egypt for that time or less; perhaps only 60 years had passed since
Joseph's death, since the pharaoh who "did not know Joseph, succeeding to one who did, laid
heavy hands upon the Jews." The point may not be important [4] ; the characters to the
debate are. Uzza, of course, loses the debate. The Jews owned the comet, not the Egyptians
(or the Hyksos).
Another of the explicit references to the comet is contained in a legendary speech of Moses
to Yahweh, following upon the adoration by so many Jews of the Golden Calf. Imploring the
angry Yahweh not to annihilate the chosen people, Moses says: "Fulfil not, I implore Thee,
the prophecies of the Egyptian magicians, who predicted to their king that the star "Ra'ah"
would move as a harbinger of blood and death before the Israelites." [5] "Ra'ah" in
Egyptian must mean "the Great Sun," the comet luminous and larger than the sun.
The night before departure from Goshen, the terrible night of the killing of the first-born,
was said by one legend to be a bright night, as bright as the brightest day of the year [6]
. This legend contrasts with another, that the darkness persisted in the Egyptian capital.
Might the comet tail be falling so densely in some places as to block the light, while the
comet appeared larger than the sun in others, at least to accommodate these particular
differences? Perhaps. The prophet Isaiah, recalling the Exodus long afterwards, preached:
"The People that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of
the shadow of death (which must mean Egypt), the light of Noga was upon them." Noga, insists
Velikovsky, means planet Venus in Hebrew [7] .
In the year 1666, a young man called Moses Suriel from Brussa, Turkey, claimed to be a
prophet and supported Shabatai Zevi as savior of the Jews. He pointed to a comet that had
appeared and explained that this, too, had appeared in the sky during the Exodus. (In 1665,
G. A. Borelli probably used the same comet in calculating the parabolic forms of cometary
paths.) [8] We infer that an insistent Jewish tradition tied the cometary form to Exodus.
Velikovsky claims that the adventuring Israelites saw this and more. That they saw the full
comet in the apparition of a serpent. When Moses, later on, made a serpent of brass and put
it upon a pole," [9] he was in fact modelling the image of the great comet as it snaked
through the sky [10] . The same sculpture had, as we shall see, electrical utility, and
could well have been a symbol that united the electrical events of heaven with those of the
ground.
Legend has Yahweh at the Burning Bush foretelling to Moses: "I behold what cometh after, how
the people will worship the steer, the figure of which they see upon My chariot " [11] This
has a four-fold significance: it conforms to cometary images in general; it connects the
comet with the "golden calf to come;" it puts Yahweh into the driver's seat of the cometary
chariot, and it parallels the Greek myth of Phaeton, searing the world from his solar
chariot.
But the most powerful and exercised of cometary references is the towering column of smoke
and fire that was first before and then behind the Israelites as they crossed into the
desert. In ancient history and in folklore comets are often "hairy" and "'smoking" stars. I
have already quoted this apparition of the lord that had led them from the beginning; it
"did not depart from before the people." [12] The Lord here must be the comet. Ilse Fuhr,
writing of comets in 1967, says [13] :
A comet which approached the Earth moving for a time - for the sake of argument - in
synchronous orbit with the Earth between latitudes 33ø north and south, would move back and
forth in a flat figure eight with the two halves meeting at zero (this was demonstrated by
the orbit of the synchronous satellite Syncom II), in other words, during a period of 24
hours it would seem by an Earth-based observer as appearing once behind him and once in
front of him in the sky (cf. Exodus 13: 21).
It is not announced when this apparition ceased, but it was the veritable incarnation of
their god in their eyes. It was a monstrous verification that they were being watched over
by the god whose protection and leadership Moses had prophesied.
We never escape this deity during Moses' life, for it assumed terrestrial form. It was
Yahweh who led them on their wanderings, in a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by
night, he who encamped with them and whose very same manifestations emerged from the sacred
enclosure that Moses had built for him.
There is a naive myth, founded indeed upon the very words and acts of Moses, that the
Israelites shunned the gods of the sky - the sun and moon, planets, and stars and would not
fashion religious images. Although Yahweh is reconciled to the existence of other gods, he
is zealous to be first and exclusive with his chosen people, on pain of their destruction.
Yet the people knew there was more to the sky-scene than Yahweh. Heaven to the people of
Israel was a thickly populated region. Besides the gods of their enemies, there were hosts
of angels, animals and ancestors, not represented alone in the stars but by all the
meteorites that flew in the disturbed skies. The heavenly host rained down fiery darts,
lightning balls and wheels of light, stones, and coals of fire. The Bible is purged of most
of these visions, but the legends carried forward the visions of the people [14] . They are
admitted to the Scriptures on occasion, as in the Revelation of John of the Apocalypse in
the New Testament.
"In a somewhat indefinite way some Biblical scholars have recognized that Jacob's Bethel
might have been a meteorite." [15] The Greek word for Bethel was Baetyli, meaning a Jovian
thunderbolt. Baetyls are sacred thunderstones or meteorites carried by the holy litters or
arks of various Bedouin tribes. Originally, directly or indirectly, the Ark of Moses carried
the Ten Commandments on such tablets, as we shall understand later on. Very material things
from the sky, then, were connected with Yahwism.
THE CENSORED DESIGNS OF HEAVEN
The Israelites were therefore eager to construct their habitat on earth in the image which
they transported of heaven, and felt constrained to carry out as closely as possible the
instructions that Moses received from Yahweh in this regard. These were numerous and the
designs that he carried down from his first forty days and nights of isolation atop the
sacred mountain of Sinai were particularly impressive. "And see that you make them after the
pattern for them, which is being shown to you on the mountain." [16]
Yahweh's 'commands were not so easy to execute: "Upon the occasion of the erection of the
Tabernacle, God gave red, blue, black and white fire to see and imitate. To the question of
how this might be possible, God answered: "I fabricate my glory; you make your own
colors..." [17] A legend conveys what must have been the feeling of the people, that the
existence of the world depended upon the construction of the Tabernacle, sanctuary of
Yahweh, "for when the sanctuary had been erected, the world stood firmly founded, whereas
until then it had always been swaying hither and thither." [18]
If, as now seems probable, the Earth suffered a moderate tilt at the climax of the Exodus, a
celestial unsteadiness would be perceived, both in the general turbulence and in the erratic
movements of the stars and heavenly bodies. And one can be sure that in the retelling, if
not in actuality, the earthly and heavenly climaxes would be brought together for maximum
effect and symbolism. Perhaps the new awareness came in intervals of light in darkness or
from reports received from the larger world. Nor can one be positive that the reference is
not to continuous earthquakes. Then, too, "The land (world) turns round as does a potter's
wheel," in Ipuwer's metaphor [19] . And the Psalm sings out: "God, when you set out at the
head of your people, and marched across the desert, the earth rocked... The heavens deluged
at God's coming " [20]
It may be premature to claim definitive proof, but we can make the following statements with
some confidence; no settlement anywhere in the world escaped heavy destruction in the finale
of the Middle Bronze Age, at the time of the Exodus, that is, about 1450 B. C.; further, no
temple that existed before 1450, and that was reconstructed or added to afterwards, was
given the same astronomical orientation that it possessed before.
The implication of these statements will not escape the reader. With the accumulating
evidence of worldwide destruction, it will no longer be permitted scholars to cast the
Exodus in whatever form they please - as a stroll in the desert, the flight of some slaves,
a Jewish fairy tale. The Exodus occurred in a catastrophic setting.
Secondly, shifts in temple orientation form the strongest possible proof of an historical
shift in the angle of the axis of the globe with respect to the ecliptical plane. And when
an axial tilt occurs, great destruction is visited upon the Earth: tidal waves, adjustment
of the equatorial (rotational) bulge by rising and sinking land, earthquakes and volcanism,
vast and violent storms, and electrical discharges of all kinds. Further, the almost certain
cause of an axial tilt is the near encounter of Earth with a great passing body.
Some of the objects of the Tabernacle stood for celestial bodies - stars, cherubim, the
curtain of the sky [21] . "The separate parts of the Tabernacle had each a symbolical
significance, for to all that is above there is something corresponding below." [22] The
great encampment of the Israelites follows a celestial plan.
The division of the tribes of Israel according to four standards, as well as their
subdivision at each standard, is not arbitrary and accidental; it corresponds to the same
plan and directions as that of which God made use in heaven. The celestial throne is
surrounded by four angels: to the right Michael, in front Gabriel, to the left Uriel, and to
the rear Raphael. To these four angels corresponded the four tribes of Reuben, Judah, Dan,
and Ephraim, the standard bearers [23] .
The sacred ball-courts of the Olmecs of the same age and of other Meso-Americans are
authoritatively acknowledged to be tied to the cardinal points of the sky. The planet Venus
is prominently represented in the games [24] . The players fought to the death. The Roman
circus had on its axis altars of the planets [25] . There, too, blood flowed freely.
"Ninevah proclaimed itself the seat of stable order and power by its seven-times crenellated
circle of walls, colored by the seven planetary colors." [26] Chariots would run along the
top of the walls.
"Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven " So goes the Lord's Prayer. The idea is
worldwide. "Ancients believed that earthly temples and their cultic equipment were made
according to the pattern or prototype of heavenly models." [27] The comment is too mild; it
was imperative to imitate heaven, to placate, identify with, and control heaven. In most of
this construction is to be seen a cultural heritage going back long before Moses and
deriving from many gentile nations. Yahweh, himself an old god in many ways, puts old things
together to make new ones.
But when it comes to mirroring himself, Yahweh is avant-garde. There is no throne in the
Tabernacle. He is not carried about as a beautifully enthroned image, as Arabs carried their
palladium and Europeans carry their saints and the Son of God. He has a "Mercy Seat" -
strange contradictory words of the King James translation - the lid of the Ark-box a
"vehicle" is the more literal translation - where he makes himself visible from time to
time.
That invisibility had drawbacks is indicated by the Revolt of the Golden Calf when, before
Moses' designs can be implemented, a great many Israelites melt their gold and fashion an
animal form whom they immediately term their god. (See figure 7.) This is usually regarded
as Baal, but "what Baal?" is the question, for Baal means "god" unless a special context or
appellation is provided to further distinguish the Baal.
Here, say some scholars, it is Baal the Cow, or Baal the Bull, which could mean Baal Venus,
inasmuch as the great comet, so often identified with the planet Venus, took on the
appearance of a cow, its head elongated, its coma looking like horns and its tail pulling
itself into the perspective of a great thick body dropping ambrosia or manna like milk, and
like excrement, too.
The legend has it that the Golden Calf heresy "is in part explained by the circumstance
that, while passing through the Red Sea, they beheld the Celestial Throne, and most
distinctly of the four creatures about the Throne, they saw the ox. " [28]
On Earth, in those days of high electrical effects, the homology is proven by the discharge
of fire between the horns of the animal. (A sculpture in the Athens Museum from Mycenean
times, perhaps paralleling the Exodus period, carries a bull's head with a double-edged ax
between the horns; the ax, as well as the ox horns, conveys electricity - mountain climbers
write about the lights streaming from their axes.) The altar of the Tabernacle carried four
gilded horns at its corners.
But why is this Baal of the Israelites a calf and not an adult animal [29] ? It is called a
"bull" on occasion in Jewish legend, however. "The word (translated 'calf' from Hebrew) is
not a pejorative term for an ox, as many surmised. It denotes a young ox, an ox in the full
vigour of its youth." [30] The only reason I can offer for this modification of the
universal cow-bull theme is that the Israelites knew that the comet was a young body in the
sky. It had not been known to them for long. The bison and bull, always with a divine
celestial connection, had been worshipped and were sacred since time immemorial [31] .
Zeus, the thunderbolter, assumed the image of the bull. Thoth (or Hermes or Mercury) took
the image of a ram, afterwards.
Figure 7.
Moses' Tablets and Golden Calf Heretics.
La Somme le Roy, ca. A. D. 1295 British museum Add. MS 54180, folio 5v)
Zeus, it will be recalled, had fathered and mothered Athene who was the Greek planet Venus.
The new heavenly body, the Messiah, would take the form of a calf. The Venus connection is
obvious, with Baal, then, being Venus. And for some hundreds of years the Baal Venus cult
occupied a great many Jews. It was not generally admitted, but usually the god who competed
with Yahweh and aroused the indignation of the Yahwists was the cometary Baal.
That the rebels of the Sinai incident had deep roots in the community was evidenced much
later on, when the writers of Judah had to mention them again in order to demonstrate the
terrible end that awaited their likes: when the Northern Kingdom of Israel, hundreds of
years later, under Jeroboam, built two golden calves, one for each of its principal
sanctuaries, in competition with and defiance of the Kingdom of Judah that possessed the Ark
of the Covenant and the Temple at Jerusalem. But even before Moses' death, the Hyksos in
Egypt had elevated the new young bull to divine status as Apis [32] .
Enough sights, apparitions, effects, events, and experiences come with a large-body near-
collision to supply readily all the personnel and myths of a full-fledged religion. Yet
Moses was not alone in rejecting the absolute identification of a comet as a mainstay of his
god. Generally so-called planetary, solar, or lunar religions are not exclusively such:
there is a marked body giving substance to their god, and its behavior is carefully observed
for indications of how to conduct themselves. In addition, there occur innumerable god-named
manifestations and designations in the sky, the biosphere, the air, and the falling stones.
When the profound prejudices in favor of the Hebraic religions are waived, their
resemblances to other religions, even to planetary religions, are great.
But Moses probably had something special in mind, and the subsequent Judaic priesthood in
their mind, in laboring against cometary (or planetary) worship. Moses wanted to root his
religion in earthly phenomena to the maximum extent possible so that he could control it.
And the priesthood, too, had the same motive, plus a strong desire to make ritual all-
important, so that they might control the worshippers as well as the god. The transition
from the charismatic religion of Moses to the ritualistic anti-charismatic religion of the
body of priests can be so understood.
Another reason occurs for banishing sky-body worship, and suppressing reference to any
distinguishable body as being part of Exodus. If a named natural object were worshipped,
even only as a manifestation or presence of the god, then all other peoples who saw the same
body could pretend to the same god. They could match their experience, and counter their
claims against those of the Jews. This would not do for Moses' exclusive people, exclusive
god, exclusive religion. Furthermore, the comet was terrible and damaging to the Jews.
Undoubtedly the behavior of the god immanent in it was a large factor in permitting the
extremely harsh rule that Moses imposed upon them. But the relation to Yahweh could be
controlled; deep down there was an ambivalence, a hatred that could hardly be governed,
working against a gratitude for an escape from "slavery," together with all that was
provided for survival - water, manna and the poor subsistence coming from hard labor.
Moses himself could not help but feel this intense ambivalence, for of all people he could
understand how the comet was wrecking the Earth. So he would not wish to make the phenomena
of the skies of Exodus any conscious part, much less any identifiable part of the new
religion and new god that he was building. Other religions with multiple gods, or gods and
devils - and we should note that Moses would deny the existence of a devil - could handle
ambivalence toward divinities much more easily than Yahwism could.
Now we are face-to-face with the phenomena of psychic repression. Yahwism sees no comet; it
sees as little of the sky as possible; it allows only the fire of Yahweh to be seen. Z. Rix
is "convinced that the prohibition to show an image of Yahweh is a repression, very
injurious to the human mind." [33] What begins as traumatic terror is suppressed in memory;
then, rather than gradually becoming adjusted to the memory, the mind is committed to the
suppression by priests and ritual. And it never can adjust to the reality of recollection,
and hence never can accommodate to the reality of the present. This mental condition is
bound up with the invisible god and is a large factor in the psychological operations of
mosaism and Yahwism.
If the mental process were to be divided into phases, in the first phase a perception
occurred: the sight and force is then accorded life, that is, anthropomorphization. The
reality of the comet passes and the memory remains, but not a memory of a comet as such;
rather the memory of a divine intervention, of a god who can be controlled by sacrifices and
subservience. Memory always has a function and, to have this function, especially in
terrible instances, must be distorted. The trauma of anthropomorphic natural force can be
managed; a great natural force cannot, and hence must be denied. Thus, the Romans had gods
with human qualities and permitted themselves psychologically to associate these gods with
planets - as in the case of Mars - but in only one case, cited by Pliny, was an actual comet
consciously named and admitted to the pantheon as a god, that of Augustus Caesar.
THE GENTILE EXODUS
The experience of Exodus was critical in the history of the Jews; further, a long chain of
history has bound up over a billion people, indirectly the whole human race, in its
consequences. Yet, at the time, the Israelite experience was special, affecting only a small
fraction of the world's people. I say this not only to extend history but to contract it,
and then I contract it in order to extend it differently. It has been a source both of pride
and sorrow to the Jews in that they have unwittingly made the whole world suffer their
Exodus. But every people of the world suffered its exodus at the same time. By taking on the
record of the Hebrew Exodus it has been substituting the Jewish Exodus for one of its own,
or blending them, or reviving its own. Whether this is for better or worse depends upon how
each of hundreds of surviving cultures and many more dead cultures incorporated their own
catastrophe.
In this age of one humanity and a sense of the good of all, I cannot but feel sympathy for
the hapless nations and tribes that succumbed or survived in wretchedness. If only all had
written books and these had been preserved, what a sense of common destiny, amounting
practically to a common humanistic religion, we might share. Nevertheless, we have this one,
with its terror, strife, and striving. And, here and there within it, we glimpse the
distraught other peoples, the Egyptians of Ipuwer and El Arish accounts, but also especially
of the Bible, written by their presumed enemies, the Israelites.
In the chant of Moses, already quoted, we hear of the people by their great highway into the
Near East, the Philistines, Edomites, Moabites - all prostrated by disaster [34] .
Velikovsky is like many people when he forgives the desperate Jews their transgressions upon
others, while denouncing their equally desperate enemies such as the Hyksos-Amalekites for
their transgressions. This is not only unfair; it obscures also the motives of peoples,
their common fates, and the origins of their gods. It continues the destructive notion of
the chosen people whether it be Israel or the mosaic-inspired Kaiserdom of "Deutschland šber
Alles."
From the scene of the Exodus we can fan out in all directions, finding everywhere in the
records and ruins of the time the same elemental fury. We look of course for the same things
that we have found in the Biblical setting: the plagues, the years of darkness, floods,
earthquakes, wanderings of people, continuous heavenly fire, electrical effects, new
frenzied and obsessive forms of worship and gods on the ruins of shattered cities and among
groups of survivors.
"Plagues of insects, drought, earthquake in the night, the most terrible devastation, clouds
sweeping the ground, a tidal flood carrying away entire tribes - these disturbances and
upheavals were experienced in Arabia and Egypt alike." [35] Amidst tumult and disorder, the
Amalekites-Hyksos managed to reach and conquer Egypt.
During the Late Holocene period, which may actually have included the time of Exodus and
later catastrophic episodes as well, the Sinai subplate was subjected to heavy uplifting,
folding and submerging at its East and West margins. This is the scene of the Exodus drama;
however, archaeological evidence is not yet available to tie a phase of this turbulence to
the end of the Middle Bronze Age. (As matters stand, a connection can be made with an
uplifting event and the disturbed astronomical years 776 to 687 B. C. that I refer to and
describe in Chaos and Creation, in The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, and, with
Earl R. Milton, in Solaria Binaria.) [36] In a paper published elsewhere [37] , I surveyed
the evidence for the catastrophes of the Near and Middle East, which I can summarize here.
Claude Schaeffer, whose archaeological work in Syria brought him many honors, published as
early as 1948 a great compendium of the destruction of settlements in the second millennium
before Christ. The end of the Middle Bronze Age, corresponding to the end of the Egyptian
Middle Kingdom that we have been studying, seems to have witnessed the complete destruction
of every city that had been excavated. The effects of earthquakes were most common.
Since it is believed sometimes that the pyramids and other strong stone structures have
escaped damage through the ages, it is worthwhile mentioning that even the Great Pyramid
exhibits severe damage by earthquake [38] . I do not make more of this case and others
because there is presently no way of judging whether the damage was caused in the
earthquakes of the Exodus.
The destruction of Minoan Crete around the same time was exposed by Evans. Evidence of a
Chinese catastrophe with a hiatus between the Hia and the Chang dynasties was adduced by
Schaeffer and Velikovsky. Previously, the Indus River civilization was shown to have
collapsed in ruins then, too, and the extent of the fall has been steadily expanded north,
east and south on the Indian subcontinent in the past half century of excavation[ 39]. The
Euphrates River systems of channels moved west at this time and hundreds of settlements were
abandoned in a long dark age [40] . It was then, too, that "the ancient cities of Southern
Turkmenian civilization perished at about the same time as the proto-indian, and the reasons
are still unknown." [41] The antiquity of Meso-American civilization is only now being
discovered. The Olmec civilization, which had the lodestone compass before the Chinese,
suffered devastation by fire and flood at this time [42] .
To the evidence of the spade may be added the evidence of legend from around the world.
Greco-Roman civilization knew of the Exodus catastrophe, which Pliny gives passing mention
to, in part by way of the stories of Typhon and Phaeton. Phaeton loses control of the
chariot of the sun and sets fire to the world; Zeus has to strike him down with a cosmic
thunderbolt to save the world from destruction. (See figure 8.)
Stecchini has recently publicized the work of the Babylonian astronomical scholar, F. X.
Kugler, that assigns to about 1550 B. C. the adventure of Phaeton. By Kugler's
reconstruction, "a sunlike meteorite" passed by Earth from South to North creating various
disasters until it, or some portion of it, fell in the Thracian region. This would be the
region of the Celts, whose representatives, when asked one time by Alexander the Great what
it was that they feared most, replied "that the sky might fall."
Typhon, too, was part or all of a monstrous sky body, which Zeus was supposed to have felled
with his thunderbolts. Bimson shows that Typhon has another identity, that of the first
Hyksos king of Egypt following the Exodus. Either the comet or the king was named for the
other. The typhoons of the South Seas carry the name, too, and resemble, as do the American
tornados, the pillar of smoke, water and fire.
The legends of the world are rich in material probably of this period. From Egypt we have a
depiction of the "red (angry) eye of Horus in the mouth of Seth," who is the Typhonic
monster. Sutherland has given us an account of how the unlucky dragon of China originated at
this time and developed into the "lucky dragon" of later times, honored by being woven into
the Emperors gown, even as magnificent as the ephod, robe and breastplate of Aaron. He
depicts a large serpent-like creature with stubby feet and jets of flame flashing the length
of its body as it pursues with jaws agape a round globe that may be taken to be the head of
a comet [43] . Obviously the Jews were not alone in converting the harbinger of disaster
into a benevolent and beneficent being.
Figure 8.
Zeus Strikes Down Phaeton.
(Source: Sixteenth century embroidery of scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses)
On what must be the last day of Passover week, but in every month, the Babylonians
celebrated a 'Day of Wrath' of the goddess Ishtar with the stoppage of work and
lamentations; Ishtar was Athene, Minerva, Venus, and Baalzevuv. Baal Zevuv or "god of the
flies," whom Americans know by the popular devil's name of Beelzebub, was also Baal of the
Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and of the Canaanites; god Ares in the Iliad
calls Athene: "dog-fly;" a reading of the voluminous cross-cultural evidence brought forward
in Velikovsky's books should provide assurance that the four plagues of diverse insects or
vermin before Exodus were inextricable from a celestial, catastrophic event.
THE HORROR OF RED
The horror of the color red in Egypt after 1450 B. C. is an understandable result of the
Exodus catastrophe and most precisely the red plague. "Red is regarded as a purely
calamitous color." [44] Yet the heavenly gods of Edfu (third dynasty of the Old Kingdom)
were clad in festive red. The tracing of just this detail of a culture, the color red,
illuminates how the cometary disaster produced long-lasting psychological and material
changes,
The Egyptians could not even enjoy a red sunset or sunrise for a long time thereafter,
deeming the sun to be ominous of danger and anger. It was "Horus raging with red eyes." The
Red Sea was probably named for those days of the red plague. "It is remarkable that the
designation of 'Red Sea' has no precedent in Old Egyptian; to the contrary, expressions
regularly contained no mention of color." [45] The seas all around were feared and the
Egyptians did not go to sea but left the waters to other peoples. The whole foreign world
was called "the red " with the same loathing that a modern capitalist might talk of the
"reds" of communism.
While the murex, the shell that makes a beautiful red dye, was the object of brisk trade
elsewhere, the Egyptians would never deal in it. In the sarcophagi, a bull at one end of the
tomb was painted red. The dead who were buried with broken red pots were said thus to ward
off Seth and recognize Osiris.
The Egyptians were probably the source of imagining the devil to be red. Seth - god of the
conquering Hyksos, but eternal foe of Horus - was sent into the underground after the
expulsion of the Hyksos. The color of Seth was red. So was the color of Typhon, who came to
be a monstrous identity of Seth. Human sacrifices - the highest compliment that humans can
make to a deity - were offered to repeat and thus reassure the destruction of Typhon.
According to Rix, Jews were often chosen for Typhonic sacrifices, especially red-headed
Jews. Possibly thus the historical connection of the Jews with the red plague could be more
sharply symbolized. "Therefore the nuggoi (red) people were persecuted, therefore only
nuggoi animals were chosen for sacrifice, therefore also fiery colored people (Typhonians)
according to Diodorus in ancient times were offered at the tomb of Osiris, and according to
Plutarch, later, were burnt in Eileithyia and their ashes winnowed to the winds." [46] Yet,
"the name (or nickname) 'the red one, ' referring to skin color or hair color had at first
no negative value," [47] When animals were substituted for humans, "the sacrifice of a red
bull is represented at Denderah with the formal statement that the animal was Typhon." [48]
Cows, bulls and asses were portrayed as red on ceremonial occasions. Seth was also the red
ass and hippopotamus. However, the bull-god Apis, object of the Hyksos cult, is colored
black [49] .
The Pharaoh of Egypt wore a double crown to represent both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt,
which includes Memphis and the Nile River Delta whence occurred the Exodus: the crown of
Upper Egypt was white, the crown of Lower Egypt red. This was to show the domination of
Lower Egypt by Upper Egypt. But this domination meant probably the disaster, suppression,
and finally liberation of Lower Egypt from the Hyksos, the people of Typhon. "Because red
had an evil meaning, the red crown was referred to euphemistically as 'the green." ' A
district governor from Siut declares his resolve "to bring order to the red." [50]
The god, Horus, was connected with the color white but when angry, his eyes became red.
Isis, when siding with her brother Osiris, is black; when shown as the sister of Seth, she
is red. Although red originally was used on a papyrus as "the color of high rank" it
"becomes later the symbol of the unfavorable and dangerous." The Pharaoh's name is in red in
the Book of the Dead. Calendars marked their unlucky and evil days in red ink [51] . The
pervasiveness of the attitude toward red as evil is a measure of the trauma of cosmic
catastrophe, followed by foreign oppression, that befell Egypt as the Israelites under Moses
departed.
THE ELECTROSTATIC AGE
His lightnings lighten the world; the Earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax
before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth.
This Psalm 97 of the Bible seems to have been composed by a devout but advanced electrician.
So also seems Deborah: "The mountains melted... even that Sinai." (Judges 5: 4-5). Only
lately, and by means of satellites, have scientists known of mega-lightning, 100 times more
intense than the typical thunderstorms discharges, which shoots bolts of 10 13 watts and 10
9 joules between the highest atmosphere and low clouds or earth [52] . Such discharges, of
which there are many and which were probably once more common, can transmute heavy elements
and create radioactivity in abundance.
Since we have had no recent experience of lightning-like electrical discharges between a
large body and Earth, we need to draw analogies from extra-terrestrial astronomy to imagine
what can have happened during Exodus times. The closest analogy may be what is happening
between planet Jupiter and its moon-sized satellite Io.
"Probably the most spectacular discovery of the Voyager mission has been the existence of
active volcanoes on Io, erupting material to heights of several hundred kilometers above the
surface." [53] According to T. Gold, these "volcanoes" are probably of electrical origin.
Seeking out points of high potential and conductivity on Io, lightning from Jupiter shoots
ten trillion watts of power repeatedly across the space gap between the two bodies. It digs
volcano-like craters with high heat and explosive force, raising pillars of material to
heights of up to 270 kilometers, whereupon most of it falls back around its caldera. The
electric current or arc "can be expected to be an accurately repeating process." [54]
I would add here, and discuss later, the comment that the Earth-to-comet discharges would
range from such enormous discharges (which would however be not so repetitive) to much less
powerful, non-explosive electrical melts of mountain-tops. The tie-in of electrostatic
discharges with a thermal flow through mountaintops is still a problem for a future science.
Meteorologists and geologists have no sense of its history, possibility, and effects. Hence
for thousands of years Psalmist 97 has been regarded merely as an exuberant poet.
The Age of Exodus was perforce electrical, judging by the traits and behavior of the
greatest gods of the age, such as Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Marduk, Thoth, Amon and Yahweh,
electric phenomena were pervasive and intense, and took many forms. As G. B. Vico wrote,
every gentile nation had its Zeus. Every mountain had its fire sanctuary. The Etruscans,
probably in the Near East in Moses' time and, later on, a powerful and advanced Italian
nation, are a case in point. They exhibited the most frenetic obsession with lightning;
every stroke made its target sacred and approachable only by one of the powerful priesthood;
today every eminence in Tuscany seems to reveal to the aerial infra-red camera a ruined
development beneath its soil. The Etruscans gave the Romans Jupiter, who was Jove or Ioweh
or, who knows, Yahweh; they originated in the Near East and some of their linguistic roots
are in Sumer, their blood types resemble an Anatolian group, and they possessed creation and
flood legends strikingly like those of Genesis.
Throughout the world, altars were placed on eminences, where a "priesthood of the mountain"
would collect and administer static electricity in the course of its rituals, orgies, and
oracles. These would not necessarily be the highest peaks. Very tall mountains discharge
readily and invisibly into the vapor clouds that hover over them and frequently envelop
them. For electrical purposes, lesser eminences, with the proper types of conductive rock,
the proper network of fractures, and the presence of groundwater steeply descending would
facilitate the religious function. Everywhere priesthood developed an expertness in
selecting and shaping sites for the exploitation of divine fire. The Druids of Britain
distinguished between the lightning of priesthood (drui-lanack) and the lightning of god
(dis-lanack). In Egypt, the age of pyramids preceding Exodus brought the mountain
priesthoods to the flat Nile Valley.
Everything that was luminescent, that emitted a high density of photons, was termed "fire."
Left with this general word, we of this age, when much less of fire is left in nature, are
likely to regard all ancient references as combustion or lightning. The term may mean these
two forms; or it may be a metaphor; but very often it refers to strikingly different
manifestations.
The incessant attention given to many forms of fire is one reason why I believe that certain
ancient periods were undergoing a universal change in electrical conditions. Already highly
electrical before Exodus, the world was impelled by the comet of those years into a yet more
widespread and intense electrical condition.
There is every reason to believe that "present conditions" - meaning by this the past 2500
years - have experienced in no way the conditions of the Jovean age which we are discussing,
and the Bible misleads or is read wrongly when Moses is pictured as a traveling magician
with a tent full of trinkets. Seneca, the great Roman stoic, recalls in a tragedy a Jupiter
whose bolts would level mountains; this is the kind of god with whom we are dealing. Experts
on lightning who have looked into paleontological lightning evidences - such as E. V.
Komarek [55] - draw pictures of heavy past electrical activities; immense fields of
lightning-caused fulgerites are to be found embedded around the world. No such processes
have been reported in historical times.
Electrical fires may have been responsible for scorching of some sealed tombs of the period
[56] . The pyramids or Egypt may seem to have evaded divine melting, but calcination is
manifested in certain places, and the plated stone that covered the pyramids is missing. We
do have a provocative instance of burning in Babylon, such that it has been considered by
some as the original Tower of Babel, whose brick and bitumen construction was struck by
divine fire [57] . It was of the stepped, ziggurat type.
It appeared that the fire had struck the tower and split it down to the very foundation.
In different parts of the ruins immense brown and black masses of brickwork had changed into
a vitrified state. At a distance the ruins looked like edifices torn apart at their
foundations. Evidently the fiercest kind of fire created the havoc. The most curious of the
fragments found were several misshapen masses of brickwork, black, subjected to some kind of
heat, and completely molten.
The whole ruin has the appearance of a burnt mountain. On one side of it, beneath the
crowning masonry, lay huge fragments torn from the pile itself. The calcinated and vitreous
surface of the brick had fused into rock-like masses. It is difficult to explain the cause
of the vitrification of the upper building. Great boulders were vitrified, and brickwork had
been fused by fire [58] .
It is probable that thousands of burnt eminences exist around the world whose tops have seen
the electrical fusion of rocks, perhaps even Troy IIg, the "Burnt City" so-called [59] .
The famous site, whether or not it was the real Troy, is on an eminence. While not high, the
city would have had many small reservoirs of water, whereas the ground outside might already
have been dried out. In Troy IIg a sulphurous color suffuses all outdoor spaces and
passageways of the town. A deposit of lead and copper melted and flowed around the town. (It
is possible that this melt had been scavenged after Schliemann reported it in the 1880 s and
the discoloration was all that was discoverable when the Blegen expedition re-excavated the
site in the 1930's.) No human hand could have or would have set such a fire. The heat was
fierce. The ash was far too abundant for a deliberate fire from local materials, and carried
a red color. No one would have wanted to destroy precious metals (not to mention even more
precious metal left in abundance in the scorched houses and the "treasure of Priam," found
on a wall.) Noteworthy is the almost complete absence of human and animal skeletal material
in the ruins. Either they turned to dust from the heat, or the electrical buildup was
sensed, as it is by animals before earthquakes for example, and they fled from the hill onto
the plain where the sensations were absent. Troy IIg, however, should be dated around the
time of the Tower of Babel, and exemplifies the unusual play of electrical forces in pre-
Exodus times, rather than during the Exodus itself.
In this connection, it is suggested that a great many eminences without settlements or
special conditions may, in the process of conducting a charge to or from deep below the
surface, have liquified silicates and ferruginous substances together as a conductor, or
fused them from the ancient rocks and from by-products, and brought these materials up to
the top of the eminence where they are today found, resting on loose, hardly consolidated
rocks, as a hard dense cap. This phenomenon is usually explained as a metamorphosis, of very
old age, that somehow raised the temperature of water-laden deep limestones and granites and
caused them to nearly melt and to rise. Silification is abundant around igneous
metamorphism. In a hot and fast reaction, siliceous fluid is introduced hydrothermally and
replaces the host rock, such as limestone, into which it intrudes. It is possible, with or
without water, for an electric discharge to assemble and flow quickly as a current up the
core of a hill, heating as it moves. Resistant rock heats up like the resistant coils of an
ordinary electric room-heater. The taller the mountain, the less time and chance for the
siliceous fluid to reach and cap its peak before the current is dissipated in heat or finds
enough discontinuities of strata and faults to disperse in different directions.
YAHWEH'S ELECTRICAL FIRE CONGLOMERATE
Yahweh is present in smoke and fire both in the Tabernacle and elsewhere, giving rise to the
naive view that he was simply a typical volcano god, of which, presumably, there are as many
as there are volcanoes [60] . Freud adopted this view as part of accepting the primitivist
bedouin theory of much of Exodus. The volcano gods that inspire this belief are the small
"retail" gods of today, not the wholesale volcano and fire gods of old - like Hephaistos.
And Yahweh was more than a wholesale volcano god; he was a giant fire conglomerate god.
When Moses invited the elders to visit Yahweh with him, they came upon his presence on a
vitrified surface, sapphire as of heaven. This was the Sinai that "burned like wax." On the
occasion when Moses had spent days and nights on the Holy Mountain, the electrical currents
were so heavy that he had crouched in a cleft for fear of electrocution as Yahweh passed by.
The Israelites had their own electrical mountain:
There were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud
trumpet blast... And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord descended it in fire
[61] .
The fire came down to the mountain. Only Moses could approach its heights safely. The people
had to stand below, which is something nevertheless that they might not do if it were a
violently erupting volcano. A column of smoke went up. The horns sounded ever louder. Fiery
darts dropped everywhere. There were frightening electrical storms and earth movements.
Stones were cast down from the sky. The people scarcely dared approach the foot of the
mountain for fear that they would be destroyed by fire. They did finally run away.
Since Mount Sinai does not behave like a volcano, one is not surprised to learn that
explorers have not found a volcano, whether extinct or alive, at any of the sites proposed
for the location of Moses' Holy Mountain. The two major contenders for the position are
Jebel M£sa in the South Central Sinai Peninsula and a mountainous location at the
northeastern head of the Gulf of Aquaba (see map of Figure 5) referred to as Mount Horeb.
Following Winnett's tracing of the Wilderness itinerary, I am adopting the latter in my
considerations, partly because this is in Midian and Horeb is placed in Midian by Ex. 3: 1
and Moses has had so much to do with Midian otherwise [62] . Geological investigations are
required before Mount Sinai-Jebel Musa is definitely pronounced a possibility for
"electrico-vulcanism," and even less is known of the geology of the several locations
heretofore proposed near modern Eilath, in ancient Midian or modern North Hˆgaz.
On various occasions Yahweh sent consuming fires upon the Israelites, once even at a place
renamed Teberah, "the Burning Place." [63] The fire: "wrought havoc among... the murmuring
and complaining multitude that had joined the Israelites upon their Exodus from Egypt." [64]
It was a fire that destroyed fire. It spread on all sides. It was the same fire that "found
its place on the altar of the Tabernacle," and that destroyed Aaron's sons and Korah's
company. "Moses took bundles of wool and laid them upon the divine fire, which thereupon
went out." [65] Wool is of course more effective than water in extinguishing electrical
fires.
One cannot be sure what kind of fire it is that runs along the ground. It is not ordinary
combustion; it may be fleets of ball-lightning such as have rarely been observed in recent
times [66] . "Fire has mounted up on high" (Ipuwer) is significant. This is not lightning:
the combination indicates a type of St. Elmo's conflagration - there are cases reported even
recently like this with a climbing of whatever eminences are accessible. Pyramids, obelisks,
buildings, perhaps even balls and jets of fire leaving the ground and moving through the
dense atmosphere upwards, like a clutch of balloons, are probable.
The repeated Biblical references to Yahweh's sending darts of fire, jets of fire upon the
enemies of Israel and even upon the Israelites when they displease him inspires one to seek
the corresponding natural phenomenon, even though it would be enormously amplified in a
general catastrophic encounter. Juergens has suggested plasmoids, pieces of plasma, as being
formed and bombarding earth on some ancient occasions. These electrical footballs are formed
of a balance of positive ions and electrons. They retain their identity and appear as
luminous objects of the size of missiles. They would cause explosions near the ground and/
or dig craters [67] .
It is the voltage difference that promotes electrical activity; opposite charges that
attract are not necessary for a discharge. A high negative charge will discharge to a low
negative charge; the electrons explode or spark to the less dense negative region, or follow
a highly conductive medium. The difference in potential is the setting for an activity.
The Earth as a sphere carries an overall charge but no one knows what it is [68] . The
concept of "charge" is effectively meaningless except in relation to other aggregates that
carry an electric charge. The charge of the Earth as a whole then is significant when any
part of the whole - its rocks, its waters, its atmosphere, its depths and heights - becomes
electrically differentiated, which means that these are electrically potentiated for
activity when their charges or distances or media of conduction change in relation to one
another. Also the Globe is charged in relation to other aggregates of the solar system
environment, be they plasma, gases, meteoroids, planet or sun, just as it may have a
gravitational relationship to them. And just as that gravitational relationship varies
exponentially with the distance of the aggregates, so does the electrical relationship vary.
The solar system as a whole, moving as it does in relation to millions of bodies of the
Milky Way Galaxy, operates in a changing electrical environment. This is constant so long as
the solar system as a point in the Galaxy retains a stable position, though moving, in
relation to all other significant charged points. And it does so too, so long as such body-
points are not rapidly changing their electrical condition, as for example happens when a
star explodes as a nova or supernova.
In good weather a point on the Earth's surface carries in the meter of atmosphere above it a
negative charge of about 100 volts. (Ground zero is a relative concept; an immense voltage
might conceivably be in the Earth.) The luminous halo-discharges from points, known as St.
Elmo's fire, "are caused by a sharp increase in the voltage field to a value a thousand
times greater than the average 120-150V/ m." [69] At a height of 50 kilometers, the
ionosphere carries a positive charge of about 400,000 volts, which would indicate an average
vertical voltage gradient of about 8 volts per meter. This difference produces no visible or
felt effects ordinarily. A sudden change, such as occurs just before an earthquake, will
excite greatly the biosphere and produce weakness, giddiness, and tense feelings among
people [70] . Eric Crew points out that there is a normal leakage in the atmospheric
column; this current is tiny and totals 1800 amperes, which is balanced by the charging
effect of lightning carrying negative charge to the ground [71] . Changing atmospheric
conditions also play upon this voltage gradient causing electrical effects.
Any changed deployment of external aggregates also plays upon this voltage gradient and
often it is by no means child's play. A volcanic eruption or a meteorite fall plays havoc
with its ambiance, electrically as well as otherwise. Sun spots, which are electrified
explosive events, have meteorological and climatic effects on the Earth and may even disturb
the Earth's motion.
If two large bodies - such as the earth and a great comet - approach each other, they will
invariably be carrying unequal charges at various lines of potential contact. They will
exchange charges between their plasma sheaths (magnetospheres), between their atmospheres,
between their surface prominences, and between their surfaces, which are graded according to
conductivity and resistances. Even if all of these changed states and all bodily motions
were known and this data were fed into a computer, and even if all the laws of electricity
now known were programmed to manipulate the data, the pattern of exchanges would be
exceedingly complicated, fast, often violent, and in any event impossible to plot given the
present state of knowledge and the many behaviors that are beyond history.
A long-term charge exchange of Earth with its atmosphere and interplanetary space is
postulated, together with a large-body encounter, to explain the apparently heavy electrical
effects of the mid-second millennium B. C. A third major producer of electricity would be
the crustal stresses of the Earth in the aftermath of a large-body encounter, whether
involving a slight or major deceleration or axial re-orientation of part or all of the
Earth's crust, mantle and core. These would bring about a long period of earthquakes and
piezo-electric effects.
The relation between earthquakes and lightning has been foolishly neglected for two
centuries until now. The Chinese earthquake of July 28, 1976 lit up the sky in red and white
colors for 200 miles around its epicenters for hours [72] . Observers, from antiquity to
the present day, have spoken of the flames emerging from earthquake fissures; one student
counted ten such reports in a survey of several hundred earthquakes. [73]
Piezoelectricity comes from stresses of pressure and heat upon quartz rock, which is widely
dispersed over the Earth's crust, particularly in lavas. "The North Idu peninsula earthquake
on November 26, 1930, the best documented instance of seismoelectricity (over fifteen
hundred sightings), occurred in a region with widespread quartz rich lava flows." [74] In
quartz whose axis has been lined up by tectonic strains, an earthquake can create "an
average electric field of 500-5000 volts/ cm. For distances in the order of half the seismic
wavelength, the general voltage is 5 x 10 7 to 5 x 10 8 V, which is comparable with the
voltage responsible for lightning in storms. The discharge will seek outlets through tooth-
like (Sinai= Sinn= Tooth?), sword-like (Horeb= sword), and especially quartz-loaded
eminences, or in fissures, or, if needs be, in fires "running along the ground" (plagues of
Egypt). The piezoelectric effects, occurring from earth strains, would long outlast the
cometary encounter, and provide continuous high voltage above ground.
E. A. Von Fange quotes 37 passages from the Old Testament referring to great destruction by
fire, only one of them from Exodus, which we find has numerous references to fire. He also
mentions "a total of 28 fields of burned and broken stones called harras, has been found in
Western Arabia, covering up to 7000 square miles each. " [75]
A comprehensive list of all electrical phenomena that are mentioned or hinted at in the
Bible and Jewish legends would include: celestial eyes; angels and other apparitions on
prominences; St. Elmo's fire; blasts; jagged lightning; jets or darts of fire; exploded gas
pockets or petroleum fires; electrically induced or electrically accompanied dust and water
typhoons and tornados; ionized winds; charged and ionized dust-falls; illuminated skies,
including earthquake lights; the electrical flashes from volcanoes; point discharges on
controlled machines or near to such apparatus; smoke clouds of luminous quality; night
lights; phosphorescence; thunder, trumpets and singing; piezoelectric effects; and natural
electrochemical compositions of manna and other substances. To these should be added the
fall-outs of electro-jet transported stones and dust, and electrically accompanied
radioactive fall-out or explosion. Nor should one neglect the many electrical changes
overcoming the great comet in its movements through space, that gave it so many different
identities - animal, human and divine.
We can be sure that a full range of electrical effects - visual, auditory and physiological
- would be experienced by the whole population and that many changes would occur in the
atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. Furthermore, the effects would be
enduring. Centuries would pass before the numerous causal chains would emerge into an
apparent equilibrium. Then all spheres of nature would gradually have been adjusted to all
others. Earth rock strata, discontinuities, faults, and contours would carry differing
currents, generate piezoelectricity, and so-on, but at a level finally recognizable as of
the present day. Like water seeks its own level, electricity gropes for a balance of
charges.
THE CELESTIAL FIRST CAUSE
Given the Exodus symptoms which were exhibited in the Near East and elsewhere, which were
not all confined to Lower Egypt, we can surmise that physical convulsions overcame the
Earth. These were provoked either by internal causes or external ones. But what would
provoke a quiescent Earth, as we know it today, to such energetic reactions as we observe
during the Exodus? If the Earth's interior were as it is now, and as many believe it to have
been for a billion years or more, and if its motions were then as they are now, as they are
believed to have been for a billion years or more, neither Exodus nor any other such general
catastrophe would have been experienced in history and prehistory.
We have a convenient test of this statement. The island of Thera-Santorini, north of Crete,
and only some hundreds miles from the scene of the Exodus plagues and tides, has recently
been accredited with that disaster [76] . Thera, an ancient center of Minoan civilization,
suffered more than one explosion in the second half of the second millennium. The date of
its climactic destruction may be about 1000 B. C. based on Isaacson's matching of cultural
remains with Bronze Age remains of Egyptian origin also found there [77] . The incredible
blast, 50 times that of Krakatoa offshore Java in 1883, is known to have filled the sky with
a fall of ashes and excited great tidal waves.
I eliminate Thera as the source of the Exodus catastrophe, not only because of the late date
of the most destructive outburst, but also because it alone could not have brought about the
long period of ground and air turbulence of Exodus, the biosphere behavior, the sky scenes
of moving bodies, or the years of dust, chemicals, and dark clouds. Further, it is more
likely that a general thermo-electric effect of the Earth's crustal torsion brought on the
explosive series of Thera than the reverse. Mount Vesuvius exploded with a force equal to
the climactic Thera explosion about 3500 years ago [78] . Many other eruptions would have
occurred, both conical and fissure in type. The great explosion of Thera, when it did happen
hundreds of years later, may have contributed to the rapid decline and fall of the Hyksos
empire of Syria and Lower Egypt, a fall made final by an alliance of King Saul of Israel and
Pharaoh Ahmose of Egypt [79] .
Therefore, there must have been some extra-terrestrial cause of the Exodus catastrophe.
There might have been a change in the sun, which we consider because of its great size to
represent also any considerable change in the galactic environment. Or there might have been
a wandering cloud of gases or meteoroids that invaded the Earth's "air-space." Or there
might have been some large-body intrusion, coming close enough to the Earth to provoke the
destructive effects experienced on Earth.
This large body would be by definition a comet, because any body on an irregular orbit or
path near us cannot be called a planet, and further, there is no fundamental difference
between a meteoroid and a comet (although it used to be thought that meteoroids were short-
distance travelers in the solar system and comets long-distance travelers [80] . As for the
coma, or "hair" (Latin) that characterizes the comet, any body moving through different
types of space will react gaseously and electrically to the differences, and grow or lose
its "hair" or "tail."
Since large meteoroids behave like comets, we may turn to smaller meteoroids. A meteoroid
of, say, the diameter that caused the Berringer Crater of Arizona, or the Tunguska blast in
Siberia, which exploded aboveground, falls on rare occasion. Today Earth experiences
incursions by swarms of meteorites from time to time. A regular swarm hits the atmosphere
and is to be seen on or about August 10 of each year. Their effects go generally unnoticed.
Several reliable accounts of meteorite swarms of greater moment are available: the
widespread terror is noticeable; the incitement of earth's tremors has been attributed to
some meteors. Strange effects such as gas clouds, ball-lightning, and small gelatinous
masses have been partially verified. No effects comparable to those of Exodus are
demonstrated.
Especially in view of the astonishing irregularities that have been ascribed to the sun in
the past several years [81] , one might think of blaming the sun for the Exodus
catastrophe. But here the problem is that those who experienced Exodus did not blame the
sun. The Phaeton legend is practically alone in asserting that the son of Helios stole his
chariot and lost control of it, careening about the sky to the great distress of the Earth
and its inhabitants. I have already referred to the study of Kugler who severed any
relationship between Phaeton and the sun, giving an independent existence, path and
destruction to this large sun-like body. The Greek legend of Zeus striking down Typhon, and
the Egyptian legend of Horus defeating Seth and sending him to hell represent much better
the celestial events surrounding Exodus. It is probable, however, as I explain in another
work (Chaos and Creation), that changes in the sun and solar system precipitated the great
body upon its errant course.
Nevertheless, the body is independent, very large, and distinct in the eyes of the
beholders. Velikovsky says it was the planet Venus; I term it elsewhere the protoplanet
Venus or Cometary Venus. This is because of the abundant connections made in antiquity that
associate the great body of the Exodus skies with the planet Venus. But this point has been
heavily discussed in many places and we can be satisfied, for the purposes of this book,
with the realization that an enormous body passed near the Earth and that only such a body
could have produced the Exodus effects.
Notes (Chapter 3: Catastrophe and Divine Fires)
1. III G 13-4.
2. III G 17.
3. Velikovsky, W. in C., 156.
4. If 430 years (not 400) are divided by 86, and the dividend is 5; then Uzza could have
been calculating in some cycles of 86 years, but the legend is mute about the further
meaning and I know of no such cycle. I mention later that the years of Moses, some
patriarch, and other events before 1440 B. C. may have been calculated on a sacred year of
260 days, perhaps the work of Amon-Jupiter or Thoth-Hermes.
5. III G 126. For other references to the great celestial light over Exodus, cf. II G 37,
III G 133.
6. II G 373. Earlier, in contradiction thereof, we spoke of Moses' last meeting with the
Pharaoh being in heavy darkness.
7. Is. 9: 2; W. in C., 175.
8. B. Feldman, in a letter to VI Kronos, 2( 1981) 92, reporting from G. Scholem's Sabbatai
Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (trans. Werblowsky), Princeton U. Press, 1973.
9. Num. 21: 9.
10. Velikovsky, W. in C., 176.
11. II G 316-7.
12. Ex. 13: 21-2. Cf. 14: 19-20.
13. Translated as, "On comets, comet-like Luminous Apparitions and Meteors," VII Kronos 4(
1982).
14. III G 26.
15. G. A. Wainright, "Jacob's Bethel." Report. Pales. Explor. Fund, 1934, 32.
16. Ex. 26: 49.
17. VII Reallexikon fur Antike and Christentum, p. 376, citing a Midrash.
18. III G 150-1.
19. Velikovsky, W. in C., 107.
20. Ps. 68: 7-8.
21. III G 151.
22. Ibid., 165.
23. Ibid., 231-8, with each of these four were grouped two others, making four groups of
three. The Levites, not a tribe, were centered around the sacred area in the middle of the
roughly nine square miles of residential area.
24. E. C. Baity, "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Thus Far, "14 Current Anthropology 4(
Oct. 1973), 389.
25. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechand, Hamlet's Mill, Boston : Gambit, 1969, 239.
26. Ibid., 239-40.
27. Oxford Annotated Bible, fn. Ex. 25: 40, citing also Ex. 25: 9; 26: 30; 27: 8.
28. III G 123.
29. It is called a "bull" on occassion in Jewish legend.
30. Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the book of Exodus (tr. I, Abrahams) Jerusalem: Magnes
Press, Hebrew U., 1967, 412.
31. Coe. Henri Breuil, "Le bison et le taureau c‚leste chald‚en, "XIII Revue Archeologique,
series IV, Mar-Ap 1909, 250-4.
32. Velikovsky, W. in C. 181, quoting Nechre-Wahibre.
33. Unpubl. letter to author.
34. Ex. 15: 14-16.
35. Velikovsky, A. in C., 62, quoting Arab sources.
36. David Neev and G. M. Friedman, "Late Holocene Tectonic Activity Along the Margins of the
Sinai Subplate, "202 Science (27 Oct. 1978) 427-9.
37. "The catastrophe Finale of the middle Age," Proceeding, IX Int'l, Congress Prehist and
Protohist, Nice, France, 1976.
38. W. F. Petrie, Egyptian Archaeology, p. 67.
39. G. L. Possehl, "The Mohenjo-daro Floods " 69 Amer. Anthro., nø 1, 1967, 32-40.
40. R. M. Adams, "From sites of patterns," 68 U. of Chicago Mag., winter, 1975, 19-20.
41. Alex. Kondratov, The Riddles of Three Oceans, Moscow, U. S. S. R, 1974, 164:
42. William Mullen, "The Mesoamerican Record," 4 Pens‚e, 4 Fall 1974, 34-44.
43. "China's Dragon," 4 Pens‚e, 1 (1973-4), 47-50.
44. Reallexikon fur Antike and Christentum (Anton Hiersemann, Stuttgart, 1969) 366.
45. Ibid., 362-6.
46. Zvi Rix, unpubl. mss., quoting K. B. Stark, Gaza and die Philistaische Kste (1852), s.
268.
47. Reallexikon for Antike and Christentum.
48. Rix, quoting E. Lefebure, "Le Sacrifice Humain d'aprŠs les rites de Busiris et
d'Abydos," III Sphinx (Upsala), 1900, 143.
49. Reallexikon, 368.
50. Ibid., 372.
51. Ibid., 374.
52. New Scientist (20 Oct. 1977), 150.
53. B. A. Smith et. al., 204 Science (1979), 961.
54. Thomas Gold, "Electrical Origin of the Outburst on Io, "206 Science (1979), 1072.
55. "The Natural History of Lightning," Proceedings, III Tall Timbers Fire Ecology
Conference, Tallahasse, Fla., 1964, 150.
56. Velikovsky, W. in C., 56-57.
57. Gen. 11: 1-9.
58. E. A. Von Fange, "Strange Fires on Earth," 12 Creation R. Q. (Dec. 1975), 132.
59. A. de Grazia, "Paleo-Calcinology: Destruction by fire in Pre-history and Ancient Times,"
I Kronos 4 (1976) 25-36; II Kronos (1976), 63-71.
60. Cf. Oxford Annot. Bible, Ex. 3: 2 fn; 19: 9; 33: 9; 40: 34-8; 1 Kings 8: 10-11.
61. Ex. 19: 16-19.
62. The Mosaic Tradition, 74 and 71ff. Pythian-Adams is cited as first to suggest, in his
Call of Israel, that all Sinai reference were Post-Exilic while the reference to Horeb are
older and original.
63. Num. 11: 1-3.
64. III G 244.
65. III G 245.
66. Cf. W. Corliss, comp., Strange Phenomena, 2 v. (1974) GLB series for recent cases.
67. The plasmoid may be distinguished from ball lightning by its more volatile and heavy
explosive quality. Cf. R. Juergens, "Of the Moon and Mars," IV Pens‚e 4 (1974), 21.
68. Contradicting this, V. Manoilov, Electricity and Man, Moscow: Mir, 1978, 54, sets the
Earth's charge at 50 million coulombs, granting that the charge is continually changing
globally and locally.
69. Ibid., 55.
70. Cf. W. Corliss, comp., Strange Phenomena, 2 v. 1974, GE-GQE-029, 030, et passim.
71. Eric Crew, "Electricity in Astronomy," II SISR 4( 1977), 24.
72. U. S. Geological Survey, "Earthquake Lights," (July 3, 1977, Wash. D. C.)
73. The space available here does not permit citation of the numerous scientific articles on
electrical effects of earthquakes such as would have been experienced during the Exodus and
in the wilderness. A number of useful reports are cited and partially reprinted in Corliss,
compiler, op. cit. (GQE series, Sourcebooks, 1974f).
74. David Finkelstein and James Powell, 228 Nature (Nov. 21,1970) 759-760.
75. Op. cit., 131.
76. D. Vitaliano, op. cit., ch. 8ff.
77. I. Isaacson, "Some preliminary Remarks " I Kronos 2 (1975), 93-9.
78. M. R. Rampino, S. Self, R. Fairbridge, "Can Rapid Climatic Change Cause Volcanic
Eruptions," 206 Science, 16 Nov. 1979, 826, citing J. Keller et al.
79. Velikovsky, A. in C. 79, ff. The cause may have been an isostatic adjustment or a
cometary revisit.
80. Richard A. Kerr, "When Disaster Rains..." 206 Science (16 Nov. 1979), 803-4.
81. John A. Eddy, "Case of Missing Sunspots," 236 Sci. Amer. (May 1977), 80-92; Earl s.
Milton, "The Not So Stable Sun," V Kronos 1 (1979), 64-78.
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ARK IN ACTION
Salem, Massachusetts, a century after it achieved fame in witchcraft, became an exciting
center of the new science of "electric fire." Of an evening, for instance, according to an
advertisement of March 7, 1765, one might attend lectures at David Mason's house, learning
there:
That the Electric Fire is a real Element, - That our Bodies at all times contain enough of
it to set a House on Fire, - That this Fire will live in Water, - A Representation of the
Seven Planets, showing a probable Cause of their keeping their due Distances from each
other, and the Sun in the Center... [1]
Until the 17th century, "experiment (what little of it there was) belonged to 'natural
magic, ' " [2] Then, three thousand years after Moses, the European-American world
rediscovered electricity through experiment, that is, "natural magic." We see clearly now
why the tradition that Moses was a great magician, no matter how often "rebutted" by his
admirers and "advanced" theologians, persisted. He who was an experimenter was thought to be
a magician. He who was a magician performed experiments.
It is not surprising that Moses regarded the electrical fire as divine. Nor that Jesuit
priests were among the most active modern experimenters. A prolonged debate divided early
modern electricians into those who believed electricity to be a substance, and those who
considered it to be an influence (both attractive and repulsive). It is of the essence of
Yahweh that he be such an "incorporeal" substance on a cosmic and microscopic scale and be
at the same time an invisible influence for good and evil.
Long before the early modern scientists found their deus ex machina, Moses displayed Yahweh
from the Ark of the Covenant. The divine presence luminesces from the pillar of cloud [3]
and from between the two cherubim "visible to the people as the radiation of the divine
substance, as the kabod always visibly directed towards or pointing to the tent." [4]
The invention of the Leyden jar in 1745 aroused great scientific and public interest. The
Jar, which has found its way into hundreds of classrooms in elementary physics since then,
was independently contrived by two scholars. One was the German scientist E. G. von Kleist.
The other, a Dutch scholar, Peter van Musschenbroek, was affiliated with the University of
Leyden. Innumerable ingenious applications took place.
Working with materials and instruments that were available to Moses, the new scientists
literally played with every device and scheme that, according to my study here, was employed
by Moses. So secular were the new scientists and so futuristic their pride, that practically
never did they think to search among the most ancient records for their origins. A few years
after the invention of the Leyden jar, Georg Wilhelm Lichtenberg (1743-1799), one of the
founders of electrical science, called attention to its resemblance to the Ark of the
Covenant, to the "Powerful One of Jacob." [5]
Another distinguished electro-physicist, Maurice Denis-Papin (1900-x) asserted that the ark
as an electrical capacitor was capable of producing from 500 to 700 volts [6] . This is
quite enough to electrocute humans and animals as well as to perform many other electrical
operations such as apparitions, smoke, and fire-making. However, neither scholar had in mind
the effects upon the ark of the electrical turbulence of the Exodus period, a condition that
was deduced from many circumstances and the Bible itself by Jerry Ziegler (1977), in his
book YHWH.
The Leyden jar collects electricity. In its simplest form it consists of a pointed metal
aerial conducting rod that is insulated from the ground by being immersed in water inside a
glass jar, An electrical charge accumulates on the rod and will discharge to any grounded
conducting element that touches it or comes close enough for the charge to jump the gap with
a spark. (see figure 9)
A similar device will add a conductor to load the opposite ground charge. A jar is coated
with a metal foil on the outside, and another metal foil on the inside; the glass, which
will not conduct a charge effectively, insulates the one charge from the other. Water is
unnecessary. A metal rod affixed to the inner foil helps to gather the atmospheric charge. A
potential difference of voltage will build up between the two conductors and if it is heavy
enough, will discharge by a spark or by a conducting contact like a wire, between the two,
or by a deliberate or accidental interposition of a hand or another resistant or short-
circuiting medium.
The voltage between the stored charges is dependent upon: the electrical condition of the
earth and the atmosphere; the material of which the conductors are made; their shape and
size; and the time elapsed for the accumulation of charge. Various means can be taken to
enhance the electrical potential, and therefore the force of the discharge. Benjamin
Franklin in 1752 charged a Leyden jar by attaching to it a silk thread that could conduct
electricity from a kite that entered a thunderstorm. He was taking a great risk.
He drew up a list of ways in which the "electrical fluid" of the Leyden jar resembled
lightning [7] . Concluding that the phenomena were identical, he thought to capture and
store lightning, but luckily he did not pursue his dangerous designs; a Swedish scientist
did so and was struck dead by the badly stored charge (see page 100 case of Dr. Richmann
below). The abundant electrostatic phenomena, both natural and humanly induced, of the
Exodus, have been generally attributed to "lightning" as we know it today; this is a
convenient category that disguises all references to other types of "fire."
Figure 9.
The Leyden Jar.
If A is touched to AI, and B to BI, simultaneously, the jar will discharge at the points of
contact and sparks will probably illuminate the two points of contact.
Nicola Tesla in 1881, produced spark discharges five inches long in his New York loft; the
potential was estimated at 100,000 volts. He elicited "a variety of new forms of
illumination." [8] By 1900 Tesla was imitating lightning. He claimed he could produce two-
mile long sparks conveying ten million horsepower. He wanted to create electric power by
using the whole earth as a kind of Leyden jar (condenser) and resonating coil combined [9]
.
Franklin and others experimented with "the power of points ... drawing off and throwing off
the electrical fire." He exploded cork balls from a muzzle and said that at night the muzzle
cast off lights. He observed that the shots caused halos of smoke [10] . Sulphurous smells
were associated with them in other instances.
Franklin also set up an electrostatic device to ring a bell when the atmosphere was charging
up. Aaron, High Priest of Israel, had to wear the blue ephod, a gorgeous pullover to whose
skirt are attached golden bells, "and it shall be upon Aaron when he ministers, and its
sound shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the Lord, and when he comes
out, lest he die." [11]
Petrie reproduces from an Egyptian priestly garment a border of "lotus-flowers and seed-
vessels" that seem like "bells and pomegranates." Few doubt, however, that the Israelite
bells would ring. Cassuto says that they would sound so that the priest would not enter the
sanctuary unannounced and irreverently. And in departure the priest would prostrate himself
and the bells' sound be a blessing [12] . But perhaps Moses grafted electronics upon the
original design. Thus, at Dodona, seat of the oldest Greek oracle, dedicated to Zeus Naios,
there was "an oak grove hung with vessels of brass, by which the god's voice was thought to
be made audible." [13] This Zeus Naios was related to Zeus Ammon of Libya and Amon of
Egypt, who is not unrelated to Yahweh. Priestley describes eighteenth century electrical
experiments with bells besides those of Benjamin Franklin [14] . The bells of Aaron's ephod
might usefully have been agitated by an excess of electricity about him, warning him not to
come into the Inner Sanctum or sometimes to get out while he could (" lest he die ")
Franklin did not escape unscathed from his experiments. On one occasion he was knocked
unconscious when he made an accidental connection while hooking up two Leyden jars to
electrocute a turkey. Franklin was a humane man who liked turkeys - he once nominated the
turkey for the American national bird in preference to the eagle totem - and was probably
seeking a less painful way of butchering them. The device, it needs be said, does not
display its charged condition to the eye; it is an invisible power of "an invisible god."
Musschenbrock, foreseeing such accidents, wrote: "The hand and the whole body is struck in
such a terrible fashion that it is hard to describe. In a word, I thought the end had come."
He advised a friend to "never repeat this new and terrible experiment." [15]
THE GOLDEN BOX
The Ark of the Covenant, so named because its hollow interior probably contained at first
solely the stone tablets that Moses had brought down from Mt. Sinai with the words of
Yahweh, measured probably between 45 X 27 X 27 and 63 X 38 X 38 inches, That would be close
to the bulk size of a secretarial desk. Tradition maintains that the Ark itself was
fashioned by Moses [16] , and, of course, the design was his, dictated to him by Yahweh on
the sacred mountain.
An ark "denotes here a kind of chest or box." [17] Its Hebrew word is 'aron. ' It may have
meant once something other than a box; that is, the structure embracing the function may
have appropriated the name of the function in later ages. The root of 'aron, ' says Strong's
Concordance, signifies a gathering in; in this case, charges are collected and Aaron is the
collector. The name of Aaron thus may be closer to the function, the priest of the ark or
arc science.
Flinders Petrie, the greatest of Egyptologists, used the word 'ark' to describe one of a
number of Egyptian depictions, such as is portrayed in Figure 10 here [18] . One is tempted
to speculate that it is an engineering sketch of the Ark itself, lacking the box below.
There would be little reason for the construction of these poles or this arch, aesthetic or
otherwise, except to manage an electric arc or system of sparks. This ark in operation would
flare at the junctions of the grounded poles and the top horizontal bar.
Why would the Egyptians set up an ark upon a boat? The implications are surprising. We think
first of where a box to generate an electric arc would function more continuously and
intensely. This would be a location on water, where charges gather more readily because of
high conductivity of the medium. Especially in pre-cometary or post-cometary times, when the
Earth was discharging less strongly, the ark as pictured in the illustration would create a
more active arc discharge.
Figure 10. Egyptian Ark Procession
Source: Hugo Gressman,
Die Lade Jahves und das Allerheiligste des Solomonischen Temples. Leipzig: Kohlhammer, 1920,
from III Denkmaler 14. See also F. Petrie, Egypt and Isreal, p. 62a
Secondly we revert to the puzzle of why the Jews named the Ark of Noah and the Ark of the
Covenant similarly. The answer is probably that the electrical phenomena of Noah's Ark were
stupendous, that the Egyptians generated their arcs on boats, and that Moses derived his
land-based Ark from the aquatic models. These may have descended to the Egyptians from the
Noah tradition via the Hebrews, or have been a joint Egyptian-Hebrew development, or may
have been indeed Moses' invention, whether in the aquatic forms or the land form or both.
Regarding this last item, we may recall that Moses the infant floated on the Nile in an
"ark", the same rare word.
Priestley tells us that "as the electric fire may be made to take whatever circuit the
operator shall please to direct, it may be thrown into a great variety of beautiful forms."
[19] With various adjustments, all of which were recapitulated in the renaissance of
electrical science in the eighteenth century, the poles or bars could be made to scintillate
throughout their lengths, the wings of the cherubim would light up, and a glow would occupy
the space beneath or shrouded by the wings, with the four ankhs (pictured at the corners in
Figure 10) sparking like brilliant erratic candles. A god was present. The only meaning of
'Ark' in the dictionary of Egyptian hieroglyphics is the name of a god.
But when was this Egyptian ark constructed? Was it for a shrine made before 1450 B. C. or
afterwards? The ankh answers the question. It is the paramount symbol of the planet Venus.
Though it is also a symbol meaning 'life' and 'salvation' and the procreative membrum
virilis, it reverts to Typhonic Venus in the end [20] . Therefore it is mostly of the
period after 1450 B. C., by the chronology I am following, Thus were joined the Ark of Noah,
the Egyptian ark, the ark and ankh of the gods, and the Ark of Moses.
Then five possibilities occur, assuming the gift of the design from Yahweh (see figure 12)
to be a theological invention. The Ark of the Covenant may be an invention of Moses based
directly upon Egyptian models known to him as a member of the Egyptian theocratic-scientific
establishment. Or the Egyptian ark may be a copy of Moses' Ark. Or the ark might have been
independently invented in both countries. Or Moses' Ark may be an outright theft of an
Egyptian ark. Fifth, the Arks of Moses and of Egypt may be Hyksos inventions that Moses
acquired under Hyksos subjection.
The independent invention I would regard as impossible; the details are too close and are
not found elsewhere in the world. Continuing, it cannot be a copy of Moses' Ark because
Egypt was not free to copy until the Ark had lost its puissance. Therefore, the Ark must
come from possibility 1, 4 or 5. Number 5 is possible, but the Hyksos were on a lower
technical level, before and for long after their conquest of Egypt. Numbers 1 and 4 are
compatible. They move towards each other. Moses knew and worked with Egyptian science and
technology, He would certainly draw on them for the design of the Ark. Then the question of
whether a specific ark or set of arks was operating in Egypt before the Exodus is not too
important. The ark was in Egypt. The Ark was also Moses' (and possibly Aaron's) invention
for Israel [21] .
A capacitor or condenser of the size of the Ark might be rated in many thousands of volts if
atmospheric electricity were more continuous and abundant then it is today and if the earth
had suffered shocks and were emitting electricity in the aftermath. Large sources of leaking
or gathering earth charges and a heavily electrified atmosphere would be required. The
operators of the Ark system would, under such favorable conditions, be able to induce
repeated sparks, of heavy or light intensity, slowly or rapidly.
Early modern science also discovered that electricity could be induced from the atmosphere
and ground to produce differential charges and then sparking or shocking discharges. This
discovery was combined with the knowledge that a charge could be built up by scraping the
electrical "fluid" off of certain materials and loading it onto other materials. So they
went about rubbing and storing and discharging electricity with cloths and amber or glass or
gem sticks. They devised machines to create ever larger charges. One experimenter was sure
be could create a discharge attaining the power of a lightning bolt by enlarging the surface
to hold the charge which a rubbing machine would create. Some inventors imagined they might
fabricate a circular series of lugs that could turn a wheel whose bits would be alternately
attracted and repelled until a perpetual motion machine was thought to be possible.
Did Moses and the Levites explore frictional electric manufacturing so thoroughly? They
probably did; once begun, the logic and direction of experimentation is irresistible [22] .
However, the difference between those days and nowadays is that the Exodus atmosphere had
more than enough to offer to build any usable charges without further exertion. Like
agriculture was unnecessary in the climate and ecology of Adam and Eve's Garden of Eden,
electrical manufacture in Moses' time did not require hydraulic, fossil, animal, or human
energy input.
I think that similar circumstances may have discouraged the development of wire for the
transmission of electric charges or current. Early modern scientists used fibre and silk
lines to transmit charges; these could have been employed by the Israelites as well. The
moderns used hammered and stretched metallic wires; the technology was obviously within
Israelite capabilities. Hundreds of copper necklaces have been recovered from Middle Kingdom
sources.
In Petrie's catalogue of Egyptian artifacts, we read that "the necklet of a single stout
wire of metal belongs almost entirely to the Twelfth Dynasty [before Moses] and the
Ptolemaic to Coptic period." Number 28 is "a silver wire with curled ends." Number 32 is of
"two silver wires bent double and linked together " Petrie describes the sophisticated
technology of wiring and soldering in the Twelfth Dynasty. A single piece evidences
soldering, wire stretching, die stamping, and a gold tube to carry a thread wire.
Whenever a spark jumps a gap, a conductor suggests itself to induce the discharge, be it a
hand, a dagger, or a metal rod. We reexamine the Egyptian ark in Figure 11; it is bent at
90§ in two places. Would it be wood or metal? Most likely metal. Why is it then, that
museums do not exhibit lines and wires? Does it matter that Moses had an affinity with the
Kenites? Their "name means 'smiths, ' so we take it that some of the Midianites were
coppersmiths." [23] Sometime afterwards, Kenites worked for the Egyptian government at the
Sinai copper mines and were using the alphabet, "the earliest known." [24]
A curator would not be likely to postulate an electrical science if handed fragments of
stretched organic or metal line. Nor likely would any be received by the museum in the first
place; the materials are quite decomposable. In contemporary paintings they would appear as
indistinct lines, on the rare occasion when they would be drawn. Wires would be short;
insulation, new technology, and much metal alloy is needed for long wires. Telegraphy
inspired wire technology in the nineteenth century. The ancients used fires and torches from
eminences and may have employed "divine fire" in the electrified ages. There are hints of
this in ancient historical ages a millennium and more after Moses, when technology generally
was not much advanced over his times.
Moreover, natural electricity is erratic and powerful. It can disintegrate a line or wire,
whether or not insulated, quickly, by explosion or intense heat. A heavy conductor, as in
the Egyptian ark, would be prohibitively expensive. It would be used only for in-house
contraptions, entirely religious or experimental (that is, playful).
So we return again to a basic reason: the sufficiency of atmospheric or natural electrical
electricity, and add that its oversufficiency may have contributed to blocking further
development. As natural electrification diminished in the environment, the religious
"atmosphere" added its weight to the causes forestalling development of electrical
manufacture and wires. The divine fires were for priests and the priests were for tradition.
The early modern electrical scientists, although evincing surprise at how electricity seemed
alive, (just as Thales, the Greek philosopher, remarked at the spirit that animated the
electrified amber), paid no further attention to gods or church. They went ahead
individually, men women and children excitedly and delightfully playing the new game.
Catastrophe, too, inspires great tragic games. It frees its survivors. Wars are games of
catastrophe and play out the catastrophic mentality. Moses was induced and permitted by
catastrophe to change and manipulate people and things in many ways, to invent with a rare
freedom.
The Ark box was gold outside and gold inside with an insulating layer of hard wood in
between. The lid of the box, the kapporeth, also of wood overlain with gold, held at each
end a cherub of gold. These cherubim faced each other with their wings spread out. In
between them, over the lid, when he chose to be among his people, hovered Yahweh. This was
his "mercy seat," in the anachronous English translation. Here he manifested himself to his
people and, it is important to stress, to their enemies.
The limitations of space on the kapporeth or coverpiece of the Ark define in part the
sculpture. Unlike the winged lions and bulls, griffins and other animals fashioned as
cherubim in Assyria and elsewhere, the Ark's cherubim were probably two-footed with
unisexual human features [25] . A later Assyrian assemblage (Figure 11) is similar. So are
two figures from Egypt, showing two winged goddesses hovering protectively over idols of
Osiris, in one case, and Thoth in the other [26] . The cherubim could not be seated or
squatting, because they were facing Yahweh, but would stand with faces elevated, says the
legend [27] . Figure 12 may convey some notion of their appearance, in accord with legend
and with the Bible. It may be seen that their wings would be spread wide as a covering of
the box so that, in effect, two platform levels would be created, one on the ample but
separated pair of wings and again on the lid of the box.
The Bible affords images of Yahweh enthroned on the wings, speaking of "the ark of the
covenant of the Lord of hosts, who is enthroned on the cherubim." [28] He at the same time
is "the Lord, that dwelleth between the cherubim, whose name is called on it." And another
verse speaks of "the ark of God, whereupon is called the Name, even the name of the Lord of
hosts who sits enthroned on the cherubim." [29]
Then Yahweh is appealed to, with the words: "Thou that dwelleth between the cherubim, shine
forth." Moreover, Yahweh says, I will speak with you from above the Kapporeth, from between
the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony of all that I will give you in
commandment for the children of Israel." [30]
If Yahweh sits upon the wings as a throne, then the lid below is his footstool. Thus, "Let
us go to His dwelling; let us prostrate ourselves at His footstool." [31] Hence, Yahweh
when present in name, voice, or image might be above the wings, between the wing
separations, and between the wings and the footstool. The variant expressions imply what
Priestley said earlier of the electrical effects he had achieved by similar devices, that
they make different and beautiful figures as the charges move and sparkle. When conditions
were propitious, a great leaflike sheet of fire might define itself over the sculptured
golden group as a whole. It would be three-dimensional, like a hologram. (See Figure 12.)
Figure 11. Cherubim of Nimrud.
In this piece open work of ivory, a pair of winged female figures wearing the Egyptian
double crown protect with their outstretched wings the aegis of Bastet on the flowering
"Lily" tree between them. Since Nimrud (or Kalah) became the Assyrian capital city only
after 880 BC The plaque must be post-Mosaic. The resemblance to the floral pattern to flames
and even the Lion of Judah may indicate the invisible electrical flames. A very old
principle of opposing and yet cooperative forces seems to be incorporated in the twin
figures so often encountered around the world -- from Castor to Pollux to Yin and
Yangmartin, pp 293ff: Ziegler, pp 113ff) It appears more likely than not that the two
identical cherubim of the Ark are mossaic version of this universal twinship. (source:
redrawn from Kenyon p58)
Buber, apparently dissatisfied with biblical description, writes that "The Royal covenant is
followed by the building of a throne," generally speaking. But "we have no reliable reports
as to the original appearance of the Ark... We do not know why the description 'Throne' for
the Ark was avoided. " [32] What bothers Buber is that it is not a throne, not a shrine,
although it is like the litters carrying the throne of god that the Bedouin tribes
possessed. It is yet a "genuine migrating sanctuary." It comes from the time of Moses, as
various archaeological findings have proven.
The learned Buber, a hero and good man in the terrible Nazi period, is at his wits' end when
he approaches the obvious. He laboriously formulates the question: "Was there a moment in
the life of Moses which drove him overpoweringly to unite and mould the elements familiar to
him from extended observation and knowledge of tradition, and to make some new formation out
of them?" [33]
"He said, to be sure, did that man, that God goes before them and that He makes His presence
known by one or another sign; but the sole firm and unshakable fact was, in the last resort,
that the God could not be seen; and all said and done you cannot actually follow something
which you cannot see." [34]
Figure 12.
The Ark's Structure and Function.
Top: View from top
Middle: View from side
Bottom:
" Thou that dwellest between the Cherubim shine forth." (Psalm 80: 1) The Ark with Yahweh
displayed. Legend claims the wing spread of the Cherubim was eleven spans( of the hand) plus
a span for the head, and that the Cherubim were 10 spans tall from head to ground( III G
158-9)
Buber is now rationalizing why the Israelites should have preferred a Golden Calf to an
empty litter. In the face of the most explicit references, which he himself employs, that
the Ark was occupied, or would be, when Moses made it, he abandons his inquiry into its
design.
Gressmann is also baffled by the apparent emptiness of the seat of Yahweh. He insists [35]
that there must have been a little figure of Yahweh, or an animal, or at least a meteoritic
stone that rested or could be placed beneath the wings of the cherubim. The perplexity is
understandable but wrong-headed. What is to be found elsewhere, sometimes, and later, is not
definitive of the Ark of Moses. And how, when the Bible says that Yahweh sits upon the
cherubim, is a figure beneath the Cherubim to be accounted for? The answer must be that
Yahweh, the Electrical God, was both present and invisible.
Certainly the Bible does not go heavily into describing the functions of the Ark but it has
many brief direct and explicit references to its electrical operations, and how and when its
effects would come about. Nothing about the human mind is incredible, but it is almost
incredible that for three thousand years the Ark has not been understood, whether by the
friends or foes of Yahwism, or by theologians or scientists. Or, lacking absolute proof, why
has this theory not been before the world as one of the most plausible explanations of
Moses, of Yahweh, and of the Ark?
Perhaps the savants of ancient times preferred description to analysis, statics to dynamics,
Aristotelianism (Maimonidism) to pragmatism. With all of their zeal for mummification, the
Egyptians have left us no recipes for the technique. Perhaps the electrical powers were only
vaguely known to those who may have inserted most of the description much later - that is,
after it had ceased its active functions and become a "period-piece." Perhaps its externalia
were more gaudy than its unknown, even sacred, interior dynamics -rather like, as they say,
the automobile today that is sold on its appearance to people who never lift the hood of the
motor.
Another answer, too facile, is that a few critical points of design were deliberately
omitted from the Bible for the sake of secrecy. For instance, if the connections of the
cherubim were machined to serve as opposing poles, and were minutely described, the secret
would practically surely be revealed. Perhaps all of these reasons enter into the
mystification, and to them we should add the strong, even unconsciously strong, wish to
reject any mechanical explanation of the sacred. And it was precisely after the Ark ceased
to be operative that the desire to explain its former workings would be suppressed.
The most perplexing problem of the Ark as an electrical worship, control, and weapons system
does, in fact, involve the cherubim. Two descriptions of the Ark are provided [36] . In
both, the cherubim are facing each other from the two ends of the Seat. But we note: "Of one
piece with the [gold] mercy seat shall you make the cherubim on its two ends." [37] This
would imply, if accurate, that the cherubim would be of the same charge and that the ark
would not function electrically by a discharge between them. Against this seeming design
defect are the dozen and more descriptions of the Ark in action.
Ziegler does not address this problem and says that one cherub would be grounded, the other
affixed to the inner gold shell of the Ark. In short, only one cherubim was of a piece with
the lid or seat. He thinks that the intricate mechanisms of the ark are kept secret. However
he does assign a function to Aaron's rod which he believes would have been the aerial
conductor.
This, it seems to me, is close to the solution. The Ark is a variable machine and the
control of its power must be capable of modification, This is impossible with the fixed
cherubim alone. They can only store charge, the same charge. But what can be varied is a
rod, preferably and inevitably a sacred rod, Aaron's rod or Moses' rod. The rod would
connect with the inner gold lining of the box while the cherubim connected with the outer,
grounded lining. The rod would be adjustable in relation to the cherubim, in one or more of
four directions, such that weak or powerful discharges, under unfavorable or favorable
charging conditions, could be made with the cherubim. Sockets and ratchets of simple design,
and a telescoping rod, could manage all of the required motions.
Remarkable phenomena could be induced. Perhaps the most inspiring would be the luminous arcs
of fire that would be emitted between the two cherubim and the pole, bringing into a high
intensity image the presence of Yahweh at the center of the Mercy Seat.
The arc or spark will jump the gap as often and as rapidly as the voltage can build up.
Writes Priestley, "If the knobs of two wires, one communicating with the inside, and the
other with the outside of the phial, be brought within four or five inches of one another,
the electrical spider will dart from the one to the other in a very surprising manner, till
the phial be discharged." [38] It can become almost a column of fire to the naked eye.
In the presence of prolonged discharges, an ionized cloud of dust will gather around,
concealing the discharge in the daytime at least and making it less visible at night. There
are ways of placing an arc apparatus more advantageously to produce electrical phenomena,
ways of guarding it, of measuring its potency, of enlarging or diminishing its activity and
noises, of enhancing the surrounding cloud, of using water and dirt and various stones for
visual effects, and treating, blessing or magnetizing metals and metal alloys. One might
also produce some mental phenomena by feeding and extracting ionized air to and from the
device. We are dealing with a complicated technical apparatus and set of operations and
effects.
Nor was any other religious device so activatable. The ark made the pyramid obsolete. In an
age that saw no reason to distinguish between inanimate and animate natural forces, the
liveliness of electricity would put it definitely in the sphere of the animate and, if not
in a god, then in a voice of the immediate presence of a god. As Ziegler writes, the word
electricity comes from the Greek electron, which may come from El, meaning "god" (as in
Elohim) and ech meaning "to have," that is, "what gods have." And ark is surely related to
the arc that it creates, and to the form of arch that an arc takes, and probably to early
ages (archeons and archaic) and forms of rule (monarchy, oligarchy). The archaic electrical
age may have sponsored these words [39] .
DANGERS OF ELECTROCUTION
The Ark was a highly dangerous machine. Ordinary Bible reading and anthropological training
about primitive customs condition one to pass over indifferently its taboos. The people,
officers, dissenters, priests and in fact everyone except Moses are warned to avoid the Ark,
or to approach it carefully on pain of death. The Holy of Holies is well away from strange
hands when Israel is in camp. (See Figure 13.)
The invisibility of electric charges is, of course, a major concern. The danger is unseen.
People must have faith and discipline to observe safety precautions respecting electricity.
Not until the studies of S. Jellinek in Austria during the 1920's did it become quite clear
"that death from electric shock could be instantaneous and without any visible signs of
injury." [40]
Figure 13.
Ground plan and Design of the Tabernacle.
(Source: redrawn from the New World Translation of the Bible, after a reconstruction by
Conard Schick)
Some body areas are more sensitive than others: the back of the hand, the neck, the
shoulders, the temples. Some persons - perhaps Moses - are less sensitive to electric injury
than others. Perspiration (and all water) heightens conductivity; the minute burns
discoverable sometimes in different places on the body of a person who has suffered
electrocution may signify resistances in such conductive spots. Washing therefore helps to
avoid or pass a shock, as priests of various cultures still do, even if symbolically, when
approaching an altar. Burns can be severe, but occur at voltages of 200 or more; meanwhile,
lower voltages can cause death with little or no visible markings on the corpse. Voltages as
low as 10 have been known to kill, according to the Russian expert, Manoilov. The heart or
brain electrical systems need only be interrupted for life to quickly cease, often with the
disruption of breathing control, hence asphyxiation.
Yet high voltages are used in penal death by the electric chair, 1200 to 2000 volts, and
excruciating minutes of time can be required to kill. This may be owing to a strange fact,
that a person who is anticipating an electrical current or sparks can, especially if not too
fearful, absorb or pass a larger voltage without death or with less serious an injury than
otherwise [41] . Four-legged animals are more sensitive to death by ground charges or
lightning than two-legged people or birds.
The electrical potency of the Ark or a similar mechanism varies with the differences in
charge between air and ground. If the air is losing charge rapidly, the ground will
concentrate a charge rapidly and on a point contact discharge will cause a heavy explosion,
a brilliant arc, and a deadly experience for anyone or even a group who short-circuit the
contact. If St. Elmo's fire is arising naturally from an elevated point, an arc machine
nearby would carry a heavy static charge, capable of jumping more forcibly.
Amidst general rejoicing at the fine manner in which Yahweh was coming down upon their
offerings at the new shrine, Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, priests themselves, "each took
his censer, and put fire in it, and laid incense on it, and offered unholy fire before the
Lord, such as he had not commanded. And fire came forth from the presence of the Lord and
devoured them, and they died before the Lord." [42]
According to a legend: "From the Holy of Holies issued two flames of fire, as thin as
threads, then parted into four, and two each pierced the nostrils of Nadab and Abihu, whose
souls were burnt, although no external injury was visible." [43] Modern medicine knows that
the nostrils are peculiarly susceptible to electric shock. It is generally known that
electroshock can kill and injure without signs of burning. The Bible implies that the two
men were drunk and hence unholy before Yahweh, whence we may see in the accident the kind of
negligence that does occasionally cause fatal accidents among skilled electricians.
Rabbi J. H. Hertz, in one of his enthusiastic interpretations, blames the sons of Aaron for
their "intoxication, unholy ambition, arbitrary tampering with the service, and introducing
'strange fire' into the Sanctuary." [44] Hertz believes (p. 445) that they were struck by
lightning, since their garments were not destroyed. Further he defines "strange fire" as
"unconsecrated fire, not from the Divinely kindled flames on the Altar." It is a more
meaningful translation of the words "unholy fire," which can mean anything or nothing.
"Strange" or "alien" means that it is not the fire that is appropriate to the fire of the
Holy of Holies; for it is fossil, not electric, fire [45] .
Moses explained then to Aaron what the Lord was doing: "I will show myself holy among those
who are near me, and before all the people I will be glorified," says the Bible, "and Aaron
held his peace." As they were carrying off the corpses, Moses, in his genial manner, tells
Aaron and the remaining sons, "Do not let the hair of your heads hang loose, and do not rend
your clothes, lest you die " He says that it is up to the general congregation to mourn for
them. Further, he says, apparently not sure of their self-control: "And do not go out from
the door of the tent of meeting, lest you die." For there was a crowd of spectators outside
[46] . Poor Aaron had to take much scolding with his bereavement and hear many safety
lessons:
The Lord spoke to Moses, after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they drew near
before the Lord and died; and the Lord said to Moses: 'Tell Aaron your brother not to come
at all times into the holy place, within the veil, before the mercy seat which is upon the
ark, lest he die; for I will appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat [47] .
One must also bow low before Yahweh, if only to avoid a shock. But this practice presumes
that a divine fire is hovering above [48] . In a history of electrical science, we read the
following:
A. D. 1753. Prof. George William Richmann (1711-1753), native of Sweden and member of the
Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, who had already constructed an apparatus for obtaining
atmospherical electricity according to Franklin's plans, was attending a meeting of the
Russian Academy of Science, on the 6th of August, 1753, when his ear caught the sound of a
very heavy thunder clap. He hastened away in company with his engraver, M. Sokolow, and upon
their arrival home they found the plummet of the electrometer elevated four degrees from the
perpendicular. Richmann stooped toward the latter to ascertain the force of the electricity,
and "as he stood in that posture, a great white and bluish fire appeared between the rod of
the electrometer and his head. At the same time a sort of steam or vapour arose, which
entirely benumbed the engraver and made him sink on the ground." Sokolow recovered, but
Richmann had met with instant death [49] .
The sad story of Uzzah who was electrocuted for trying to steady the ark which was on its
way to Mount Zion in a cart will be told shortly. He was not a Levite. But the Levites had
their problems too.
The most distinguished among the Levites were the sons of Kohath, whose charge during the
march through the desert was the Holy of Holies, and among the vessels particularly the Holy
Ark. This latter was a dangerous trust, for out of the staves attached to it would issue
sparks that consumed Israel's enemies, but now and then this fire wrought havoc among the
bearers of the Ark. It therefore became a customary thing, when the camp was about to be
moved, for Kohath's sons to hasten into the sanctuary and seek to pack up the different
portions of it, each one planning cautiously to shift the carrying of the Ark upon another.
But this even more kindled God's anger against them, and He slew many of the Kohathites
because they ministered to the Ark with an unwilling heart. To avert the danger that
threatened them, God ordered Aaron and his sons to enter first into the sanctuary, and 'to
appoint to the Kohathites, every one, his service and his burden, that they might not go in
to see when the holy things are covered, lest they die. ' This was done because previous to
this command the sons of Kohath had been accustomed to feast their eyes on the sight of the
Ark, which brought them instantaneous death. But, according to this order, Aaron and his
sons first took apart the different portions of the sanctuary, covered the Ark, and not till
then called the sons of Kohath to bear the burden [50] .
This legend is technically and behaviorally so clear that little interpretation need be
supplied by this author. As a modern example, one needs only picture the scene of deadly
sputtering which occurs when some object like a pole falls against a gang of live wires and
machines.
The Ark makes a noise, a hissing, crackling, moaning complex that can rise to near-deafening
decibels. If the air-ground differential remains large, the arc and the noise can continue
for minutes, hours or days. Various observers have written that electrostatic discharges on
mountain-tops and elsewhere make a noise like vast swarms of bees. Yahweh tells the
Israelites: "I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out Hivite, Canaanite, and
Hittite before you." [51]
THE ARK AT WORK
An obvious first function of the Ark is to be the main vehicle of a procession. All too many
students have ceased their inquiries after making this observation [52] . They are
reinforced in their belief by witnessing religions where litters carrying sacred images are
borne - whether on camels of bedouin tribes supposedly like the primitive Jews, or upon the
shoulders of devout males in Catholic feasts of the Virgin, or even in the form of the wagon
of juggernaut of India. Yet practically the only reference to the Ark in procession is
hidden in Psalm 24: 7-10:
Raise your head, 0 you gates,
And raise yourselves up, 0 you long-lasting entrances,
That the glorious King may come in!
Who, then, is this glorious King?
Jehovah strong and mighty, Jehovah mighty in battle.
Raise your heads, 0 you gates;
Yes, raise [them] up, 0 you long-lasting entrances,
That the glorious King may come in!
Who, then, is he, this glorious King?
Jehovah of armies - he is the glorious King. Se'lah.
The staid editors of the Oxford Bible, Revised Standard Version, comment blandly that the
Ark "served to guide Israel in wandering (Num, 10: 33), to lead in war (Num. 10: 35-6), and
to be a medium for oracles (1 Sam. ch. 3.)." [53] From this, one might imagine the Ark to
be a kind of brave flag carried at the head of a troop; the flag is also used when swearing
to agreements and making promises for the future. The Jews, however, had plenty of banners
inscribed with tribal legends and Israelite mottoes. The Ark was no mere banner or image.
The Ark would always give psychological consolation, of course. It would indicate by its
activity and sounds the comforting presence of Yahweh. In what seemed to be interminable
periods of despair and starvation, it lived for its people. Thus:
And they departed from the mount of the Lord three days journey: and the Ark of the
Covenant of the Lord went before them in the three days journey, to search out a resting
place for them [54] .
I would stress here the separation of the Ark from its people; it went ahead with its
special guard of Levites to spy out a camping ground. There is no reason for this tactic
unless the Ark was required to perform a real special function.
Although it was the clouds that gave the signal for taking down and pitching tents, still
they always awaited the word of Moses. Before starting the pillar of cloud would contract
and stand still before Moses, waiting for him to say: 'Rise up, Lord, and let Thine enemies
be scattered; and let them that hate Thee flee before Thee, ' whereupon the pillar of cloud
would be set in motion. It was the same when they pitched camp [55] .
Ziegler tells us: "The mysterious Ark seems endowed with intelligence. With this viewpoint
we see that the ark was an instrument carried by men and was capable of measuring to some
extent the electrical activity of the atmosphere. In a safe place, the ark or electrical
capacitor would charge up little, if at all, and no electrical discharge would occur. If
placed in a dangerous region, the ark would build up a charge quickly and give a strong
discharge. " [56]
The rule was to rest when the ark was active. A pillar of smoke by day (or smoke and fire by
night) indicated that the Lord was present and the people must remain encamped. When the ark
was less active and the smoke vanished, the hosts of Israel moved on, carrying the ark in
their front ranks.
"And it came to pass, when the ark set forward, that Moses said, Rise up Lord and let thine
enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee. And when it rested, he
said, Return, o Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel." [57]
No Jew could or, later, was allowed to speak the real name of Yahweh. Yahweh means "I be,"
according to Moses. Clear enough: He is the basic principle of life and existence. He cannot
be known in his full being. I doubt those Jews and gentiles who say the "word" Yahweh was
the name of God and not to be spoken. More likely, Yahweh spoke his own name from the Ark,
which could not and should not be mimicked.
THE ELECTRIC ORACLE
That the ark had oracular powers can be explained. The ark would charge even at low
potentials. No electricity would be manifest here. But the ultimate discharge would give
some measure of how rapidly a charge had been accumulating. "This same idea is used to
measure the electric potentials of the atmosphere by modern scientists," comments Ziegler
[58] . The fatal accident to Professor Richmann, recounted above, occurred when he stooped
to examine an atmospheric electrometer. The Ark in the hands of Moses and the Levites was a
fire-measuring instrument. Dangerous ground could be avoided, not only high places, such as
all could soon learn of, but lower places where underground water could result in quick
accumulation and discharge or where unseen rock formations fostered lightning exchanges with
the atmosphere through the unhappy animate contacts moving in-between ground and air.
But, too, insofar as the voice of Yahweh was heard coming from the "mercy seat" or divine
vehicle emplaced between the two sparking cherubim, and there are actual variations in the
sounds of rapidity, rhythm, pitch and tone [59] , oracular instructions could be
systematized and related to reality with a degree of reason much superior, let us say, to
the kinds of relationship among the stars that astrologers used then and now to prophesy and
advise.
The Jews did not ignore the predictive science of astrology: far from it; a Roman author
called them "star-obsessed." But their astrology was purged from the Bible over time for
being close to a violation of the commandment against worshipping other gods before Yahweh.
And besides, these earliest times were not adapted to astrology, since the skies of the
Exodus period were largely obscured. During the Egyptian crisis, the crisis of the plagues,
and during the many years in the wilderness thereafter, careful astrology would have been of
little help, except for watching the cometary behavior of Venus-Baal.
Hence, we have another practical reason for the preoccupation with electricity. It was
temporarily the only major method of discussing the will of God and the movements of the
cosmos in a systematic way. So it was not only that electrical phenomena were abundant, but
also that the basis for another oracular technology was inaccessible. Without the Ark, how
could Yahweh communicate to His people? "There I will meet with thee and I will commune with
thee above the mercy seat from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the
testimony." Not only was the ark voluble, speaking for Yahweh in tongues, but also visible:
in Psalm 80: 1 the direct statement is made: "Thou that dwellest between the Cherubim, shine
forth."
Ancient Greek theurgy sought sometimes to induce the presence of a god in an inanimate
receptacle, and sometimes in a human form. Luminous apparitions were favored, as in the
Chaldean Oracles, which promised that by pronouncing certain spells the operator should see
'fire shaped like a boy, ' or 'an unshaped... fire with a voice proceeding from it." [60]
An oracle of Porphyry speaks of "the pure fire being compressed into sacred forms..."
Elsewhere, "the 'strong immortal light' replaces the mortal light of the lamp... the watcher
sees the light of the lamp become 'vault-shaped, ' then finds it replaced by a 'very great
light within a void, ' and beholds the god." [61] Such practices, a thousand years after
Moses, suffered from a paucity of god's fire; they seem to reach back in time for more
auspicious electrical conditions.
THE BATTLE OF JERICHO
At the time of Aaron's death, legend has it, the skies cleared and the sun and moon came
forth. This was not long before Moses' death and towards the end of the wanderings. The
lower atmosphere would carry less charge and the Ark could not be so continuously loaded.
Recalling, however, the simple rule of potential difference, we would be able to judge the
new conditions if we knew whether the earth was still releasing charge regionally as the
lithosphere sought electrical equilibrium. Indications of disequilibrium could be obtained
if we knew whether volcanism was still raging in many places, if earthquakes were frequent,
if St. Elmo's fire were common on higher places, and if the state of all such activities
were changing not only in the Palestinian area but in the broader areas with which Palestine
was connected, such as the great Syro-African-Mediterranean rifts, the Danubian region, the
Upper Nile, the Anatolian mountains, and so on. Further, we would wish to know the
conditions of the upper atmosphere, whether the dust on high had dissipated, whether large
meteoroids were circling and occasionally falling, whether the great comet were returning on
an earth-approaching orbit from time to time.
If Velikovsky is correct in ascribing the 52-year jubilee cycle of the Jews and the 52-year
ceremony of atonement of the Mexicans to the regular return of the great comet, we would
expect a renewal of electrical activity regularly, and a heavy residual effect during the
interval between visitations. The jubilee was a time for the cancellation of obligations
such as land tenure and slavery [62] , and for repentance among the Mayans and the Aztecs;
there human sacrifices were made, fearful convocations were held, and then great bonfires
celebrated the passage of the 52nd anniversary without a new catastrophe [63] . I am
accepting the attack upon Jericho as an event close to the 52-year cycle and as probably
affected in its outcome by the cosmic event.
Strong traditions attest to forty years of wandering in the wilderness; perhaps another
dozen years found the Israelites before Jericho and then before Gibeon; the conquest of
Canaan is said to have occupied 14 years and Joshua's leadership in all 28 years, so the
time schedule seems appropriate. I am sceptical of the old ages attained by both Moses and
Joshua, and think that they may have been measured on a shorter-year sacred calendar from a
prior epoch. Studies of earlier and later human remains indicate a younger average adult age
of death than in modern times.
The Ark was used many times in battle. Going to war without it was foolhardy. Onetime Moses
said to a gang who wanted to raid the enemy: "Go not up, for Yahweh is not among you." [64]
They disregarded his words and were thrashed by a combined Amalekite and Canaanite force.
Moses was not an infallible oracle, but he had more foresight than others, partly because
Yahweh's vehicle was providing him with intelligence on fighting conditions.
And Yahweh, too, was worth a regiment. When the Ark behaved in an excited fashion, it
foretold heavier discharges, The enemy, observing the Jews, could see their renowned Yahweh.
When the same phenomena began to manifest themselves inside their fortress they would
imagine that "Israel - the Fighting God" - was in their very midst. (People unacquainted
with the immediate circumstances of battles are inclined to judge their outcomes in terms of
gross figures of men and equipment committed. The spearheaad of the vast armada of Americans
that descended on "D-Day" upon Normandy in 1944 was blunted for many hours by a single
German artillery piece, well-emplaced and manned by a stubborn, well-trained crew.)
"In any terrain Israel had the advantage with the Ark of the Covenant," argues Ziegler.
"They were warned earlier of the electricity by it and could seek out a better shelter."
[65] Cities that were built up for protection found themselves vulnerable to Israel. In
some cases, with advance knowledge of a cosmic electrical storm, the Jews could surround the
town and capture the population as it came fleeing down the hill.
The conquest of Canaan by Moses' successor, Joshua, was swift and decisive. Many small
kingdoms were destroyed, many towns burned, many people slaughtered, many idols smashed.
The ark worked well. Its use in the battle of Jericho is exemplary. When, some 52 years
after Exodus, Joshua's army approached Jericho, his spies reported the city already in a
state of fright. They were huddled behind the massive stone revetment of their hilltop town
[66] .
Very likely the heavens were disturbed, and a return of the great comet was expected by the
Jews (and most likely, the Canaanites as well). Joshua could have timed his invasion in
anticipation of it. The Jews were already, as Moses and the Levites would have them, a
"People of the Book," obsessed in their tactics and memory. When the earth shook and the
river's northern sources were blocked [67] , the Jordan River was regarded and treated as
another Sea of Reeds. The whole people marched across the river-bed saluting the Ark there
upheld to view.
The tactics for Ark employment called sometimes for electrical disengagement. Thus the
people were kept at 2000 cubits from it during the approach to Jericho but then ordered to
pass close by it on the stopped-up river bed of the Jordan. Disengagement would be
accomplished by removing the center pole affixed to the Lord's seat between the cherubim and
elevating the cherubim. A crossing of the dry river bed of the Jordan might be accomplished
at a speed of three miles an hour. We can allow therefore that a two-mile column of people
could walk across in an hour. Perhaps there were 40,000 in all that day. The whole Jewish
nation with its impedimenta and herds could cross readily in four hours, if they didn't stop
to stare at the Ark. Even in historical times, the Jordan has been blocked by seismic
landslides for that long and longer.
Figure 14 gives us the story in the collapsed time perspective of a medieval mosaic. Yahweh
commanded a daily march around the beleaguered citadel for six days, and seven rounds of the
city on the seventh day. Armed men went first, then seven priests blowing rams' horns, then
the Ark whose behavior by now must have been transfixing the garrison, and finally a rear
guard. On the seventh day's seventh round of the hill, the trumpeters blew their horns, and
the expectant people of Israel, hitherto silent by command (probably to let the voice of
Yahweh give the city "the screaming meamies") huzzahed as they had been told to do. The
walls collapsed in a great blast. The slaughter began. The terrified survivors of the blast
tried to flee and the Jewish shock troops poured through the breaches. Their comrades
stationed below walked up the hill, cutting down the people attempting to escape. Only the
whore, Rahab, and her family were permitted to survive, for she had earlier helped the
Jewish spies to hide [68] .
Jericho is on a western rise of the Jordan Valley, seat of the catastrophe of the Cities of
the Plain, which forms part of the northern line of the great African Rift. Its earthquakes
have been frequent, and electrical phenomena are associated with seismism. Joshua was
maneuvering in accord with the ionization and charge-up of the ground and air. He expected
electrical display and fires, and a nervous enemy. He could hardly have expected the huge
walls to be overturned, although the connection among electricity, fire, and seismism must
already have been known to him.
Archaeologists have discovered that the great Middle Bronze Age walls of Jericho were in
fact overturned by a great earth shock. John J. Bimson presents archaeological confirmation
of the events [69] .
Figure 14.
The destruction of Jericho.
(Source: Mosaic in Church of Santa Maggiore, Rome, about 432-440)
MBA [Middle Bronze Age] Jericho was destroyed by Joshua, around 1400 B. C. Then followed a
long gap in occupation [Joshua cursed whoever should try to rebuild the city.] In the time
of David a settlement of some kind was established on the site, though this was very small
and no traces of it have been found on the mound, pottery and scarab from Tomb 5 being the
only indication of its existence. A proper town ... was rebuilt in the Amarna period, ninth
century B. C...
The blast must have included cosmic electricity as well as seismism, because one excavator,
John Garstang, found plenty of evidence of intense fires; storerooms were burned; stone
houses were reduced to calcinated debris and white ash was overlain with thick layers of
charcoal and burnt debris [70] . (I am reminded here of the Trojan case, recited in the
preceding chapter.) Granted that the Jews had made the eradication of Jericho a holy war;
there is still a limit to the amount of ash that can accumulate from hand-burned stone
houses with a few wooden utensils and some wooden beams. An atmospheric discharge probably
occurred, accompanied by numerous thermoelectric pyres, concurrent with the earthquake.
That is not all: Jericho, like the typical Middle Bronze Age ruin, presents several
mysteries. Kenyon reports a plague in Jericho then [71] . Bimson links this plague with the
death of 24,000 in Israelite territory shortly before the crossing of the Jordan [72] . The
Bible says this was a plague in punishment for the Beth Peor popular heresy [73] . The Beth
Peor plague or scourge may have been a massacre or civil war; we discuss it at the end of
Chapter 5. The Jericho plague or scourge, evidenced by tombs crowded with bodies, may not
have been a disease either.
Zeuner found an extraordinary preservation of organic material in the tombs of the multiple
burials [74] . He ascribes the phenomenon to natural gas, a combination of methane and
carbon dioxide, which may have entered the tomb shortly after burial. The gas, he believes,
may have originated from fissuring of the ground during an earthquake.
The Bible reports that the last fall of manna occurred just before the Jews entered the Holy
Land, that is, at this moment of time. Formaldehyde vapor, also a preservative, falls with
manna and is poisonous, apart from whatever chemicals may be falling with it. The cause of
death, then, and the cause of the plague, may have been external and atmospheric; the bodies
were preserved before burial. A cometary origin of the gases, and even of viral material,
cannot be ruled out.
THE ARK'S END
Apparently the Ark was used less and less as a mobile weapon. Electrical conditions were
changing so that it became more difficult to operate along the full range of its original
functions. "The clouds of glory" vanished for the first time with the death of Aaron. People
born in the desert saw the sun and moon. They had to be warned against worshipping the
heavenly host [75] .
Also the skills of the personnel assigned to it after Joshua may not have been adequate;
perhaps they knew the procedures well enough but could not adapt them to new conditions or
invent new procedures. I would suppose, too, that as the division of labor proceeded after
Moses, the priests might be content with managing a tractable ornamental ark, and the
military men would like to get rid of "civilian" participation in matters of the sword [76]
. The very sacred nature of the Ark and the taboos surrounding it would also obstruct any
bright young scientist from tampering with its structure.
We hear on one occasion that the ark was duplicated by a young man named Micah in his home,
a surprising occurrence, reminiscent of claims that the nuclear bomb can be home-made. The
lad's mother was quite proud of him; she had consecrated her silver for the purpose. [77]
He made a graven image, a molten image, an ephod, a teraphim and hired a priest. Nothing
untoward occurred save that the tribe of Dan descended upon the household and carried away
the ark and the priest.
Later we learn that the true Ark was kept at Shiloh, whence it was occasionally employed.
Once the Philistines captured the Ark in battle, killing its attendants. They sent it from
one city to another, but it acted so disastrously at each place in turn - perhaps as they
sought to make it work - that the Philistines finally made a substantial offering of gold
objects and a sacrifice of beasts to it and conveyed it back to the Israelites. The
propitiatory golden mice of the offering are connected with Apollo Smintheus of Crete and
Palestine, sminthos meaning "mouse." [78]
In several passages, Ziegler reaches for connections between the mouse and electricity [79]
. "Sminthos" was "mouse" in Greek and "mus" in Latin. "Mys" is another word for "mouse" in
Greek, and "Mystery" (as in Eleusian Mysteries) is a cognate term and appears variously in
connection with electrified rites. Apollo is also called "Mysagetes," which relates him to
mouse and to his role as protector of the Muses.
Much later, and the historian Herodotus relates the story told him, the army of Sennacherib,
besieging Jerusalem, was set upon by an army of mice in the night; they gnawed the
bowstrings of the archers and caused the army's total discomfiture. The Bible has it, and
the date must be around 687 B. C., that a blast from heaven destroyed the Assyrian army. I
discuss elsewhere this incident and ascribe the blast to an electro-gas explosion. Whether
or not the cloud descended in the form of a mouse, a horde of mice would be drawn from the
ground by the electricity. At all events, the Egyptians memorialized them by erecting a
statue of a mouse (for they, too, opposed the Assyrians), at a city called, significantly,
Letopolis, meaning "City of the Thunderbolt." At least two Greek towns were named Leptopolis
(" Mouseville").
Josephus said that "Moses" should be written "Mouses." [80] This seems ridiculous; but let
us ponder the matter. The usual Hebrew for Moses is "Mosche." The French version is "Mo‹se"
but was once "Moyse." Depending upon the vowels that go between the consonants "M" and "s"
we can be dealing with Moses, a mouse, a god, a ritual, a statue, or a musical muse, all of
these somehow in an electrical context. The root flourishes, too, in several cultures, and
attaches to events stretching at least from 1450 B. C. to the present era.
The mouse involved is sacred, as at Letopolis and other mouse-named places, and has some
association with a god, and in the present case sacrally with the Philistines and the Jews.
In Chapter VI we shall trace and assign the name "Moses" to the Egyptian word for "child."
Could it also be the Egyptian word for "a little being"? For a "mouse"? Probably not; we are
fairly certain of our etymology.
However, this is not to say that a mouse in the age after Moses might not have acquired from
Moses the root of his name, especially since electricity seems to have been connected over
some centuries with both Moses and Mice. Words often derive from the names of famous
practitioners of what they refer to. An electric figure rather like a mouse could clump at
the top of a rod like that of Moses or Mercury (brother of Apollo); it can surmount a
turret, crouch upon a church steeple, or move restlessly about the top of a promontory.
Numerous modern reports have ball-lightning "'scurrying like a mouse" around a house. A
connection between Moses and the mice of the Philistines may, therefore, not be entirely
fanciful.
The Philistines also placed in the Ark as a propitiatory offering several modelled gold
hemorrhoids. This would appear to be a singularly unaesthetic gift; it has quite baffled and
embarrassed biblical students. Finally, now, we have clues. Thoth, we know, was the god of
healing and is associated with Hebrew-Egyptian mosaic religions, even in the Bronze Serpent
Rod (or caduceus) of Moses. Serious electrical shocks can cause nose-bleeding and anal
bleeding. So can radiation. The membranes of both organs are electrically hyper-sensitive.
Electrical and magnetic shifts promote plagues and changed incidences of heart disease and
other troubles [81] . Not to be dismissed is the possibility that, during the Philistine
affair, electrical conditions were disturbed. A disturbed electrical situation and probably
radioactive fall-out, or some heavily ionized fallout would provoke simultaneously epidemics
of several illnesses, hemorrhoidal and general bleeding, enhanced and uncontrolled Ark
activity, and thence the religious, unitary "solution" of the biblical scenario.
But, still, a model of hemorrhoids or piles seems unlikely and inexplicable. Then a solution
appears, from deep in the etymology of the word "hemorrhoids." We find "haemorrhoid" also
"haemorrhe," from the Greek meaning "blood-discharging." It is "a serpent whose bite was
fabled to cause unstaunchable bleeding." [82] The Bible refers to these "serpents" and the
plague of bleeding that they caused. These serpents (could they be leeches?) are the same as
caused the plague which led to the fabrication of Moses' homeopathic Serpent Rod of Brass,
sparks and jets of hissing fire breaking out in connection with radiation and electrical
storms. The specific disease of hemorrhoids was probably a conspicuous part of the general
bleeding epidemic and was attached to the word after general bleeding epidemics were long
forgotten.
The totem and taboo of the Ark would deter other enemies (or allies) who might have been
tempted to acquire or imitate the Ark. It is noteworthy that the Bethshemites, in whose
territory the Ark was abandoned by the Philistines, and who were connected with the
Israelite, suffered the plague, too, and pleaded with the Israelites to come down from the
hills and take the Ark away. It had the tabooed reputation of being the Jews' god. Those
would properly be accepting Yahweh who accepted the Ark. Other peoples lacked, too, the
history - the mixture of catastrophe and science in the Egyptian context - that the Ark grew
out of.
Then again it was difficult to construct and operate. Moses was a genius at synthesizing
elements and a terrible bully at seeing that the machine was handled properly. Also, the
others were probably too sky-oriented, astrological, and the idea of Baal, say, marching
along with them humming his own name, would appear weird. Then there was the ever-present
problem of technological change: what would their feather-bedding priests do without their
sacred time-honored tasks to perform? (only the machinegun finally broke the centuries-old
habit of European armies to attack in fine straight rows.) In all of this, I am not arguing
that the ark machine was solely Israel's. The same may have been invented elsewhere, even in
Egypt, but would not be adaptable to the central complex of functions - military,
theological, political, and managerial - which it performed among the Israelites.
When David was King he wished to bring the Ark to Zion where he ruled. So "David went up and
all Israel to bring up thence the ark of God, the Lord, that dwelleth between the cherubim,
whose name is called on it." [83]
Yahweh was still there saying "Yahweh." A great festive party accompanied the ark as it
moved on its way drawn by oxen. But at the threshing floor of Nacon, a man named Uzzah "took
hold of it, for the oxen stumbled and God smote him there because he put forth his hand to
the ark; and he died there besides the ark of God." [84] The electrocution frightened David
so that he waited three months before his second attempt to move it, and this time installed
it beside him. (One wonders why the Levites were not tending to the Ark; they are not
mentioned.) In a queer incident, David is so happy at having the Ark that he dances naked
around it, incurring the reproaches of his wife for making a public display of himself. She
is suitably punished for her prudery by becoming barren for the rest of her life.
Now the Ark was ensconced on high ground. It no longer went to war. Yet it is not known
whether the Ark was regularly employed for its remaining functions. With David we are in the
tenth century, five hundred years after Moses. We wonder whether electrical conditions can
any longer support the Ark and whether Yahweh's presence will ever again grace the mercy
seat between the cherubim.
In a plaintive passage, Yahweh tells the Prophet Nathan to tell King David that he has not
had a decent house but has had to live in tents since leaving Egypt. And we are informed
that "the people were sacrificing in high places because no home had yet been built for the
name of the Lord." [85] He asks therefore for a temple, but warns David against rushing
into the job. David thereupon designs the Temple and leaves it for his son, Solomon, to
build.
Meanwhile it is clear that the Ark needs artificially supporting conditions to work at all.
This bodes ill for the Ark as a mobile weapon, and as "inspector-general" of the tribal
centers. It is discovered that the Ark works best standing upon a source of natural heat.
The proper thermal conditions may be found usually on threshing floors, where in some
ancient time the threshing of grain and the heat have become associated [86] . Matthew
refers metaphorically to "unquenchable fire" that "will burn up the chaff." [87] David goes
looking for a threshing floor on which to place the Ark [88] . Beneath the floor may be a
source of ionization, a conduction of charge through rock - many floors being of smooth bare
rock.
Gressmann wonders at the Ark being regularly placed upon stones [89] . The Ark has no legs;
very well, one might think; therefore it must be placed upon a stand of stones. Rather, the
Ark had no legs so that it might be placed on stone. For it is on stone and rock, whether
from the Jordan River or an old threshing floor or whatever, and especially on meteoritic
stones, that the Ark can charge up negative electricity.
The next artificial support of the Ark comes from being elevated. On high, it can profit
from the accumulation of ground charge for point discharge into the atmosphere. Mt. Zion is
a hill of Jerusalem. The Ark is there more active. Yet it should now be confessed that the
original principle of the Ark is being lost - that it was a weapon of the plains and desert
capable of being moved and of assaulting the mountain fortresses where St. Elmo's fire was
active, and sometimes too active, as in the case of Jericho.
A third artificial stimulant was water. Water conducts electricity and wetted conductors
function better [90] . If the Ark were on deep smooth rock whose surface was wetted, the
chances of the Ark becoming operational would be much greater.
Any sacrificial object to be burnt by Yahweh had also to be wetted. So we find King David
pouring water around the altar to assist in his sacrifices [91] . He may have also supplied
water to the grounding and casing of the Ark to promote its conduction of charge. The altar
was on a bare rock threshing floor and Yahweh sent a fire down upon his burnt offering.
All facilitating conditions are brought together in the climactic Temple of Solomon high in
Jerusalem - Ark, rock, height, top water, bottom water, and finally a temple that is itself
designed as an Ark with devices in its Holy of Holy Rooms, the Inner Sanctum to connect the
Ark to the building itself. Seven years were required to build it.
The roof was of gold-plated wood. Indeed there was a separate house of wood inside the outer
walls, which were of stone. Inside, "no stone was seen." [92] No metal connections were
used on the outer wall; no hammering or metal work resounded during the construction. Stone,
then wood, the insulator; then gold, the conductor. In the Temple court, a "molten sea"
holding 12,000 gallons of water rested upon twelve couchant bulls facing in the four
cardinal directions; it was for the priests to wash themselves [93] .
A multitude of sharp gold points covered the roof of the Temple. The Temple was never struck
by lightning during its long existence [94] . Michaelis and others have identified the
points as lightning rods and he says that they connected "with the caverns in the hill upon
which the temple was situated, by means of pipes in connection with the guilding which
covered all the exterior of the building..." [95] Ancient Hindu fountains were also
protected from lightning by rods that grounded charges, and the Temple of Juno in Rome was
protected by a roof of many pointed sword-blades [96] .
One may surmise that the Ark was connected with the deep natural rock and water, and that
the smaller cherubim of the Ark were in contact with the giant cherubim, that in turn
connected with the roof where exterior rods or spires induced the atmospheric charging.
Scrutinizing the appropriate Biblical passages, we can reconstruct the ultimate setting of
the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was set in a windowless room that was a perfect cube of 20
cubits (about 30 feet). It was placed below two giant cherubim of wood, covered with gold,
the tips of whose wings touched each other and the golden walls of the rooms; that is, each
cherub had a wingspread of 10 cubits. Gold covered the whole inside of the Temple including
the inside ceiling of the roof.
Three possibilities appear: that the whole was a purely symbolic creation not intended to
work; that the design was intended to function under the new and weak atmospheric
conditions, but could not work without blowing up the Inner Sanctum; that the system was
designed to work but could not function, or its functioning was believed to be too dangerous
and the connections were deliberately broken. King Solomon, in his dedication speech, is
supposed to have said to the assembled throng: "But will God indeed dwell on the earth?
Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I
have built." [97] The speech does not ring out with confidence.
In the very next verse, Solomon prays that "thy eyes may be open night and day toward this
house, the place of which thou hast said, "My Name shall be there." ' Electric eyes and
electric name! "When the priests came out of the holy place," on this first occasion, "a
cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because
of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord." [98] Either the
system worked, or the priests lit a phosphorous smoke and bungled it in the closed quarters.
I doubt that it worked. The conditions were not propitious; if the gigantic apparatus had
loaded and sparked, the lightning bolt would have blasted the room of wood and gold to
pieces.
Thus stands the Ark. Ultimate perfection. But the "Holy Ghost," so to speak, is gone. Yahweh
says little: the mobile weapon of the plains has surrendered to the pyramidal weapon of the
mountains. The assimilation is completed. Still the gods of the mountain scarcely speak, nor
does Yahweh, now also a god of the heights.
It may be appropriate to use the fact that out of Egypt, in the fifth year of King Rehoboam,
son of Solomon, came Shishak, Pharaoh of Egypt. Jerusalem was surrendered without siege.
Shishak "took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasure of the King's
house; he took away everything," [99] It is ironic that Shishak should be identified as
Thut-Moses III [100] - "Child of Thut" echo of Moses, "the Child. "
It is doubly ironic that Thut (Thoth) should mean the god "Thoth," "Mercury" in Latin,
"Hermes" in Greek, who was an electrical god - distinct from the "greater god" Horus or
Yahweh or Zeus-Jupiter; his famous caduceus, composed of a winged rod with a serpent
entwined upon it is nothing other than Moses' rod of the brazen serpent, the original of
which probably ended up in the trophy rooms of Shishak-Thutmoses [101] . It is trebly
ironic that Thut-Moses III might have had, as aunt and Queen Mother, Hatshepsut, who has
been identified as the Queen of Sheba who visited Solomon and admired so his treasures
[102] .
An inscription of hers has recently been publicized, in which she boasts that "when I became
king, my uraeus threw fire against my enemies." [103] The uraeus denotes a symbol of royal
power, but here may refer to an Ark display, employed hundreds of years after Moses and at
the time of King Solomon.
Finally, it is ironic that the Ark ended where its idea had begun with Moses - in Egypt,
impotent [104] . Nor perhaps were the pyramids employed under Shishak of the New Kingdom as
they had been under Thoum and his predecessors of the Middle Kingdom. The "Ark School" of
Moses was moribund. So was the "Pyramid School" of electricity. The age of pyramids was
over.
The Romans relied upon heated oil, levered projectiles, assault towers, well-worked
battering rams. Somewhere in the Near East was invented "Greek fire," a sticky, nearly
inextinguishable mixture, that was hurled upon the enemy. Everyone relied upon banners,
trumpets, drums and images to inspire themselves and terrorize the enemy. Not until the
deployment of explosive power in bursting units or by blunderbuss were the effects of the
Ark achieved. But then, of course, the natural conditions for the progressive development of
an electrical weapon had disappeared. And there was no Moses around and about to develop
electrostatics into other electrical forms - unless it was Nicola Tesla (1856-1943), who
sought to make of the whole world globe and its atmosphere an electrostatic machine. But
Tesla, a lonely genius akin to Moses, lacked Aaron and Joshua, and led no revolutionary
people. He encountered the effective neglect of the "Motor and Wire School" which he himself
had helped create. Nor had he the Great Comet or Yahweh.
GOD'S FIRE GONE
What was left of the electrical function was carried out on altars in high places, which
would serve on occasion to induce St. Elmo's fire upon sacrifices to produce burnt
offerings.
Psalm 78 chants: For they provoked him to anger with their high places; They moved him to
jealousy with their graven images. When God heard, he was full of wrath, and he utterly
rejected Israel, He forsook. his dwelling at Shiloh, the tent where he dwelt among men, and
delivered his power to captivity, his glory to the hand of the foe.
It is registered that as the Jews were being carried into captivity in Babylonia, Jeremiah
the Prophet hid the fire of the Altar in a secret waterless pit [105] . Upon the return
from captivity, the priestly posterity repaired to the place and found only "thick water."
They took this and placed it upon the Altar, whereupon, the sun striking it, a great flame
was kindled. The pit was made a sacred enclosure, sometimes called the chamber of Nephtar
(Naphta, oil). The thick water was probably petroleum. The incident is connected with the
celebration of the Festival of Lights (Hanukkah). The possible use of petroleum then, at
such other times, would supplement the true "Lord's fire" when this became unavailable, or,
as may have happened here, too [106] , when a chemical fire was needed to excite an
electrical discharge.
The age of the prophets had been an age of renewed electrical phenomena. We ought not here
discuss this subject, which is extensive in itself, because the Ark was not in action. Then,
as Ziegler writes, "The age of the Prophets came to an end with the death of Haggai,
Zachariah and Malachi. A Rabbinic book says at this time: "The Holy Spirit ceased out of
Israel." [107]
Electricity might still be induced in sacrifices on high places. The Jewish historian,
Josephus, writing in the first century of this era, said that the light which "shined out
when God was present at their sacrifices" ceased for the Jews two hundred years before his
time, "'God having been displeased at the transgression of his laws. " [108]
Under special conditions and with the most elaborate arrangement, high sites such as that of
the famous Delphic oracle would still produce electric shocks. These would inspire the
Pythoness to utter sounds, which would be interpreted by the priests. A young Scythian
visitor, who paid his charges and watched the scene, exclaimed in disgust in a letter
afterwards at the great many personal decisions and determinations of public policy which
had been arrived at by these means. Plutarch, 1500 years after the Exodus, wondered "Why
oracles cease to give answers." He had been himself a priest at Delphi [109] . During his
tenure, as described by him, a Pythoness was killed in a way that suggests electrocution,
after the oracle's weakness of response had induced unsafe practices in fact, an over-
watering of the ground in the oracle chamber.
Three centuries later, an anti-Christian emperor, "Julian the Apostate," decided to help the
Jews rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem, probably to spite the Christians. The project "was
dropped when it was reported (as it was on both an earlier and a later occasion) that 'balls
of fire' had issued from the old foundations and scared away the workmen." [110]
The name of Yahweh lapsed among the Jews upon their return from the Babylonian exile in the
sixth century. One scholar [111] suggests that this happened because Elohim was a more
universal god and the Jews began to proselytize in the Greco-Roman world. Or else, says he,
the divine name may have been too sacred to utter, and the ritual of the synagogue replaced
it by "My Lord Adonai." Both may be true reasons and connected with the third, more basic
reason, that is, that Yahweh was no longer manifesting himself because he could not. Or he
had retired, deus otiosus, and would not create the electrical conditions of the earlier
world. The name is hidden, not because it was too sacred to utter, but because it was not to
be heard.
Notes (Chapter 4: The Ark in Action)
1. Paul F. Mottelay, Bibliographical History of Electricity and Magnetism, London: Griffin,
1922, 235. Mason's advertisement is the earliest explicit mention that I have found of the
idea that the organization and motions of the solar system can be explained on the
principles of electrical forces.
2. T. A. Hankins, 206 Science (30 nov. 1979), 1066. cf. J. L. Heilbron, op. cit. ; Bernard
Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 1956.
3. Ex. 33: 9.
4. Buber, 161.
5. Ps. 132: 2; 5.
6. Tompkins, 278.
7. Heilbron, op. cit., 340.
8. John J. O'Neill, Prodigal Genius, 1944, 91 et passim. Kenneth M. Swezey, Science (May 16,
1958). Tesla lived 1856-1943.
9. Ibid., 188, 182.
10. Heilbron, op. cit., 327ff.
11. Ex. 31: 23-5.
12. Cassuto, 383.
13. Jotham Johnson, ed., The New Century Classical Handbook, New York: Appleton-Century-
Crafts (1962), 411.
14. Priestley I, 140.
15. V. Grigoryev and G. Myakishev, The Forces of Nature (MIR Publ. Moscow, 1971).
16. Deut. 10: 3.
17. Cassuto, 328.
18. From page 62a of Egypt and Israel.
19. Priestley, II, 154.
20. Zvi Rix, "The Androgynous comet," I SISR 5 (1977), 17.
21. Worth Smith is cited by P. Tomkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, New York, 1975, p.
278, to the effect that the unlidded open box or coffer of the Kings Chamber inside the
Great Pyramid of Cheops had "exactly the same cubic capacity as the Ark of the Covenant."
This is almost surely incorrect. The coffer holds 8 cubic royal cubits by Livio Stecchini's
computations. The Volume of the Ark would be roughly 5.625 cubic royal cubits. Further, the
coffer could readily have been a sarcophagus because of its 78" length, the Ark at about 45"
not at all. And the coffer is of a single piece of granite. See also Stecchini, in Tomkins,
pp. 322-6. Stecchini identifies three different cubits in Egypt. Piazzi Smyth held that the
"sacred cubit" used in the Great Pyramid was the same as the one used by Moses for the
design of the Holy Tabernacle (25. 025 Br. inches), Ibid. p. 77.
22. A systematic exposition of what the ancients knew about electricity, and a refutation of
the liberal position that they knew very much, is contained in T. H. Martin's La Foudre,
l'Electricit‚, et le Magn‚tisme chez les Ancients, Paris: Didier, 1866.
23. G. E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, London, 1957, 65.
24. Ibid.
25. The legend says faces of boys. III G 158.
26. II. Gressmann, Altorientalische Texte und Bilder zum Alten Testamente, Tubingen:
Siebeck, 1909, plate 106.) The goddesses are probably Isis and Nephthys.
27. Ibid., 158-9.
28. I Sam. 4: 4; Cassuto, p. 333; also I Chron. 13: 6 and Ps 80: 1.
29. 2 Sam. 6: 2.
30. Cassuto, 336, translating Ex. 25: 22.
31. Cassuto, 330, rendering Ps. 132: 7; see also Ps. 99: 5; I Chron. 28: 2.
32. Buber, 157,159.
33. Ibid., 150.
34. Ibid., 151.
35. For instance, 12.
36. Ex. 25 and 37.
37. Ex. 25: 19; cf. 37: 8.
38. II Priestley, 150.
39. Ziegler, YHWH, Princeton, N. J. : Metron Pubns., 1977., 10.
40. Manoilov, 120; Jellinek, Elektrische Unfalle, Vienna, 1925.
41. Ibid., 150.
42. Lev. 10: 1-2. A parallel occurred in Roman history: Tullus Hostilius was a prince "who
found in the Book of Numa instructions on the secret sacrifices offered to Jupiter Elicius,
made a mistake, and, in consequence of it, 'he was struck by lightning and consumed in his
own palace. '" (H. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1877, 527, quoting here Livy, Rom. Hist. I, ch.
31 and also Piso and Pliny.
43. III G 187.
44. The Pentateuch and Haftoras, London: Soncino Press, 1938, 480.
45. Velikovsky thinks (W. in C. p. 56) that the "strange fire" was petroleum.
46. Levit. 10: 1-7.
47. Levit. 16: 2.
48. Ziegler, 27.
49. Mottelay, 204.
50. G III 228-9.
51. Ex. 23; 28 (New World Trans.)
52. Gressmann, Die Lade Jahves, 3-6, is baffled at the idea of the Ark being a direction-
finder (see next page) and thinks it was hitched behind animals who were "given their own
heads" with the Israelites trailing along behind.
53. Footnote to Ex. 25: 10-22, p. 99.
54. Num. 10: 33.
55. III G 235-6.
56. Ziegler, 23.
57. Num. 10: 35-6.
58. Ziegler, 24.
59. II Priestley, "The Musical Tone of Various Discharges Ascertained," 355.
60. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1968 298.
61. Ibid., 299.
62. Lev. 25: 9ff. Cf. Velikovsky, W. in C., 155.
63. W. in C. 153-154.
64. Num. 14: 40-5.
65. Ziegler, 28.
66. K. M. Kenyon, Digging up Jericho, London, 1957, 43.
67. Chaim Herzog and Mordecai Gichon, Battles of the Bible, New York: Random House, 1978,
28. Although these military men are psychologically insightful, the several pages that they
consign to the Exodus and the Battle of Jericho suffer from "the four sins of modern
biblicim": confused chronology; reductionism; primitivism; and uniformitarianism.
68. I think that Herzog and Gichon perceive correctly that the present word "harlot" was
originally a "victualler" or "hostess of an inn", 27.
69. I SISR 3 (1976), 2-7 and II SISR (1977) 16, 19.
70. Ibid. and K. M. Kenyon, Archaeology in the Holy Land, 3rd ed. London (1970), 197.
71. Kenyou, p. 254-5.
72. "The Conquest of Canaan and the Revised Chronology," I Interdiscip. Bible Scholar 1
(Aug. 1979), 43.
73. Joshua 3; Num. 33: 48-9; 25.
74. "Notes on the Bronze Age Tombs of Jericho," PEQ, 1955, 128, discussed by Bimson (1979).
75. G III 330-1.
76. When in Vietnam in 1967 the American leader urged a broader approach to the problems of
pacification, a Marine general was widely quoted for saying: "Grab them by the balls and
their hearts and minds will come along behind."
77. Jud. 17: 3.
78. Theodor H. Gaster, Myth, Legends, and Customs in the Old Testament, New York, Harper and
Row, 451-3.
79. Ziegler, 107-8.
80. Ziegler, 107 and cf. Josephus, II Works, Ch. 9: 6, 120.
81. Manoilov, pp. 60-1, 72; Fred Soyka, The Ion Effect, New York: Dutton, 1977.
82. The Oxford English Dictionary.
83. I Chron. 13: 6.
84. II Sam. 6: 1-7.
85. I Kings 3: 1-2.
86. I Chron. 21: 15-22, 26.
87. Ziegler, 229; Matt. 3: 11.
88. 2 Sam. 24: 18-24.
89. Die Lade Jahves, 17.
90. Cf. R. T. Omond, 40 Nature 102, May 30, 1889 for a description of the enhancement of St.
Elmo's fire by water.
91. II Sam. 24: 16-25; I Chron. 21: 15-22,26.
92. I Kings 6: 18.
93. II Chron. 4: 6.
94. Josephus the Historian, Jewish Wars, bk V, ch. 5; Motteley, Biblio. Hist., p. 10.
95. Magazine Scientifique de Gottingen (1783), no. 5: quoted by H. Blavatsky. Isis Unveiled,
I, 528.
96. Ibid., 527-8.
97. I Kings 8: 28.
98. II Chron. 7: 1-2.
99. II Chron. 12: 9.
100. Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos, ch. 4, Eva Danelius, "Did Thutmose III Despoil the Temple in
Jerusalem?" II SISR 3 (1977-8), 64-79.
101. The rod destroyed by Hezekiah was most likely an imitation of the original.
102. Cf. Eva Danelius, (discussing Velikovsky, A. in C., ch. 3)," Identification..," I
Kronos n§ 3 (1975), 3.
103. New York Times, May 4, 1941, pp. l, B12. Hans Goedicke associates the tablet with the
Exodus, and the tidal wave of Exodus with the explosion of the volcano of Thera-Santorini to
the north. But Hatshepsut came in Solomon's time (948-927 B. C., see Geoffrey Gammon, "A
Chronology for the Eighteenth Dynasty," II S. I. S. R. no. 3, 1977-8, 90-4); the Exodus
occurred around 1440 B. C., by Biblical reckoning, as developed by Velikovsky in Ages in
Chaos; and Thera, or Thira, exploded bout 1000 B. C. (see my Chaos and Creation, 1981,
following Isaacson).
104. Since the Ark is no longer mentioned until the 7th century B. C. (R. H. Kennett, "Ark,"
I Ency. Rel. and Ethics, p. 791), and three possible arks are pictured on the bas-reliefs of
Thutmoses' booty, and no ark is mentioned in Nebuchadnezzar's booty from Jerusalem,
Velikovsky's reliance upon legendary source for believing the Ark was not taken (A. in C.,
p. 158) may be misplaced. Cf. III G. p. 158. But Velikovsky in A. in C. p. 210, fn. 14,
reports in contradiction an Abyssinian legend that Menelik, a son of Solomon and one who may
be the Queen of Sheba [Hatshepsut], stole the Ark. In a booklet published by a
fundamentalist sect, the British Israelites, and reported to me by Hyam Maccoby, the thesis
that Shishak looted the Ark is asserted.
105. The first letter of the Second Book of Maccabees.
106. 2 Ma. 1: 31-6. Perhaps a search for the pit of Naphtha might locate a source of badly
needed oil for Israel.
107. Ziegler, 72, citing Tosefta Sotah, xiii, 52.
108. Works, III, 9, 194.
109. Ziegler, ch. 19.
110. 10 EB, "Julian the Apostate," 333. III. X EB 786. ;
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIVE
LEGENDS AND MIRACLES
Settled temporarily by the Holy Mountain, Israel awaits miracles. Moses and no one else must
provide them. The Mountain is very active - smoke and fire abound. The scene is obscured by
the continued high dusty and turbulent sky. Moses ascends the Mountain and gets initial
instructions regarding preparation of a covenant. Moses returns and receives the assurances
of the people: "All that Yahweh has spoken we will do." [1] Yahweh, hearing this, commands
Israel to be present at the foot of the mountain on the third day of their consecration.
The third day broke with horrendous thunder, lightning, clouds, and trumpet blasts upon the
mountain. The people assembled as instructed. Yahweh called up Moses and Aaron and delivered
the Ten Commandments to the multitude. Apparently the people could not make out his words
with all the thunderings, lightnings, the sound of the trumpets and the mountain smoking, so
they said to Moses: "You speak to us and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we
die." [2] So Moses drew near again to the "thick darkness" where Yahweh was and he received
many ordinances.
Moses is told to invite the leaders of the people up to see Yahweh; do not let the people
come up. Before doing so, Moses sacrificed oxen and sprinkled their blood over the people as
they gave their pledge to the Covenant.
He brings the seventy elders and three priests - Aaron and his sons (later to be
accidentally electrocuted) - up to a marvelous plateau, a table or pavement of sapphire
stone, evidencing prolonged electrical discharging, raising a heat that glazed the rock,
perhaps metamorphosing it [3] . There "they saw the God of Israel;" it is repeated: "They
beheld God." [4] Not so, the exegetes say, Yahweh is invisible; ergo they could not have
seen him; never mind the explicit language. Nonetheless Moses is inspired and hears Yahweh
calling to him. He tells the elders to await him and, during his absence, to refer any
problems to his adjutants, Aaron and Hur. Joshua, who is called his servant, goes part of
the way up, and halts. Moses waits because of a dangerous cloud that hovers over the summit.
On the seventh day, Yahweh calls, and Moses enters the cloud. All Israel, meanwhile, can see
from below "the glory of Yahweh like a devouring fire on top of the mountain." [5]
After forty days and nights, Moses descends from the mountain with the laws, written by
Yahweh on two stone tablets. Awaiting Moses is a full scale revolution - the Golden Calf. He
destroys the tablets in shame and anger. He suppresses the revolt ruthlessly. He begs Yahweh
for another chance. Again he goes up the Holy Mountain. This time, Yahweh admonishes him to
hide himself from His person, so Moses enters a crevasse, a cleft, a kind of cave, and there
crouches as far in as possible (" bows low") when Yahweh's brilliance passes by him. Not
even a pinprick of light penetrated his cave, says a legend, or else he would have been
consumed when Yahweh and his retinue passed by; still the intensity of illumination was such
that "he caught the reflection of it so that from its radiance his face began to shine." [6]
When he descends, the people recoil from him in fright and awe. His countenance is radiant.
He has a halo - the first halo, and the only one on earth - Neher states enthusiastically.
Others give Moses horns on this occasion. Michelangelo's great conception of Moses depicts
him with horns. Why didn't the Jews and Catholics complain of this?
Daiches presents an unconvincing etymological argument [7] . All the medieval and
Renaissance scholars and churchmen, led astray by St. Jerome, read a word wrong: Karen (H)
is a verb meaning "shone" or "gave forth rays of light"; the noun keren means "horn" or ray
of light" (Ex. 34: 35). He objects to deriving the latter from the former word. But the
words are obviously related; Hebrew vowels are notably unreliable in sounding words (as when
a preference is sought between "Jehovah" and "Yahweh"); the earliest etymologies are often
indefinite and partial. Perhaps something with connotations of both "horn" and "ray of
light" may be intended, inasmuch as the phenomenon was capable of giving both impressions,
and people were quite sensitive to "horns" in this aftermath of the revolt of the Golden
Calf.
Ruth Mellinkoffs enchanting study of The Horned Moses concludes that St. Jerome's
translation of Exodus 34: 29 as 'horned' appears "in keeping with the context and meaning of
'horned' in the ancient world as well as the metaphorical meaning of 'horn' and 'horned' in
the Bible. It meant strength, honor, victory, power, divinity, kingship, and salvation..."
The scholar-theologians of the Church saw them as "horns of light, or light emanating in the
manner of a horn" - an interpretation first suggested by Rashi, the famous eleventh-century
Jewish commentator. [8]
Moses has unusual ways of conducting, storing, and discharging electricity. Or was there so
much of a voltage gradient as he descended that he discharged static electricity in coming
down? As mountaineers have testified, St. Elmo's fire under certain propitious conditions,
even now, will stream like horns from the ears of a subject and from any tool he is
carrying. The horns of animals stream fire, too, in such circumstances. And always in mind
is the comet with its horns reaching far out from its head. Close the horns and there arises
a halo, given to Moses and to saints. The later saints got their radiant 'halos' by
traditional inference; for them it is a medal, like millions of Christians wear the crucifix
without experiencing crucifixion. Earth and heaven are united in a single symbol once more.
Moses "did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking to Yahweh."
He ordered all to draw close so that he could give them the laws. The people's faces shone,
too, briefly [9] . Perhaps they felt a sympathetic contagion. Afterwards Moses put a veil
over his face whenever he was in public. He removed it when he spoke to Yahweh in the tent
and then replaced it when he came out. St. Paul spoke of "Moses, who put a veil over his
face so that the Israelites might not see the end of his fading splendor." His skin was
probably desquamating. When it was cured, an explanation for removing the veil would not be
difficult: to avoid claiming a permanent gift, or as punishment by Yahweh for some
peccadillo. One rare picture of ca. 1000 A. D. gives Moses all three: horns, veil, and mask
[10] . (See Figure 15.)
We may go farther into the mysteries of Moses' halo, Hugo Gressmann [11] , one of the
greatest of Old Testament authorities, asserts that Moses always wore a mask, that Moses
wanted to play god and, after he had come down radiant from the Holy Mountain, he assumed a
sacred mask. Gressmann had no idea of the atmospheric turbulence nor of its affecting Moses'
skin; he claimed that priestly masks were to be found elsewhere, whether among the Egyptians
or Semitic tribes. By intensive linguistic analysis, Gressmann demonstrates elisions in the
Bible where the word "mask" would occur, and says that the word "veil" is a weak and vague
substitution of a thousand years later [12] .
On the contrary, I find a powerful connection between Moses' perilous sojourn on the
mountain, the radiation disease symptoms, his donning the veil or mask, and his
incorporating the mask into the required equipment of the priests when working amidst the
divine smoke and fire of the Inner Sanctum. Gressmann lets us believe that Moses' mask was
his permanent public face; if so, it can only mean that Moses was disfigured for life and
therefore wore a mask, naturally proclaimed sacred; or more likely that Moses' facial
disfiguration was itself considered a permanent mask of Yahweh, and that Aaron's and other
masks were artificial, in imitation of Yahweh's mask and for protection against dangerous
radiation and shocks around the Holy of Holies.
I find additional support for this view in the advice of Hyam Maccoby, who asserts that the
word in dispute is in fact Karan, the only occurrence in all of the Bible in this form. The
phrase would then read that Moses' skin became of horn-like texture
RADIATION DISEASES
The cause of Moses' halo may have been phosphorous burns,
Figure 15:
Moses with Horns, Veil and Mask.
(Source: Bible of Lubeck, 1494)
compounded by a dose of radiation. Both elements would be present in abundance in the clouds
of the mountain and the artificial clouds of the Tent of the Tabernacle. Whoever entered the
Tabernacle unless under order was to be stricken with leprosy [13] . Many sins are
punishable by leprosy [14] . And there are various types of leprosy; despite all the detail
on the diagnosis and treatment of leprosy in the Book of Leviticus (13: 1-59; 14), no clear
single disease emerges.
A "leprosy" that is not excluded is radiation sickness, which of course during all the
centuries when the Bible was seriously studied by scholars was an unknown disease. Skin
lesions, blisters, and ultimately death among experimenters with radium and X-ray are a
twentieth century phenomena. When the first atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima, and
features of radiation disease began to emerge, it was thought at first that an infectious
plague had followed in the wake of the disaster.
In the Revolt of the Golden Calf, Aaron, whom Moses had appointed high priest, lost hope for
Moses and deserted briefly to the opposition. Later Aaron and their "sister," Miriam, who
had become a kind of priestess for women and children, entered the Lord's tent and accused
Moses of such irrelevances as taking for his wife a non-Jew. The woman in question may have
been the daughter of Hobab, the Kenite, although referred to only as the Cushite
(Ethiopian?) in the Bible. Thus suggests Winnett, who adds that this bigamous liaison was
probably contracted for political reasons inasmuch as the Jews were now leaving Midianite
territory and moving northwards into Kadesh, land of the related Kenites [15] .
Moses promptly squelched his relatives. He said, in effect, that if it was Yahweh they would
complain to, all three of them should have a talk with Himself. They did, and Miriam, I
think, emerged from the tent with a mild case of radiation sickness and phosphorous
poisoning that blanched her skin, and greatly frightened her and Aaron. She was to be
permanently expelled from the camp for leprosy; but Moses put in a good word for her with
Yahweh who limited the expulsion to seven days, after which she returned, healthy, perhaps
having fed meanwhile upon the honey-like manna which, like honey, would have been an
antidote for radiation sickness and blood-poisoning [16] .
According to legend, when Moses wanted to cure Miriam, he drew a circle around himself and,
in praying to God, concluded with: "If Thou do not heal her, I myself shall do so, for Thou
has already revealed to me, how leprosy arises and how it disappears." Perhaps he was
referring to his own "halo" case.
Miriam may have lost a lot of blood cells but she did not become bald. Many in those days
were not so lucky. Isaiah probably had their history in mind when later he prophesies: "The
Lord will give the women of Zion bald heads, the Lord will strip the hair from their
foreheads." [17] Since he raises the same point twice elsewhere, Isaiah must have had an
experience in mind in which he firmly believed. But then, far back, in the time of Exodus,
the Egyptian Ipuwer had been lamenting: "Indeed, hair (has fallen out) for everybody, and
the man of rank can no longer be distinguished from him who is nobody." The upper classes
had worn their hair long. A Swedish commentator, Ragnar Forshufvud, writes that "a dose of
300-400 rem will give temporary epilation while 700 rem will give permanent epilation." (1
rem = the radiation dose of 1 Roentgen of X or Y radiation.) If the whole body is subject to
a single dosage of 450 rem, there is only a 50% chance of survival, which may be another
reason why Ipuwer had written of Exodus in Egypt, "Indeed men are few, and he who places his
brother in the ground is everywhere." [18]
Thomas Foster, "a physician of some note in the scientific world and member of several
learned societies in England and the Continent, in a work published in 1829, devotes forty-
one pages to a catalogue of plagues and epidemics, in nearly every instance accompanied by a
comet." [19] Sometimes beasts (the "murrain") are afflicted as well as or instead of
humans.
The relation between chemical and radiation plagues and "real plagues" of viruses and germs
is close in the history of Exodus and its aftermath. Realization that their sources may be
cosmic disturbances will no doubt help in their investigation. In a recent BBC interview
(1977) regarding his research on "Diseases from Outer Space," Professor Chandra
Wickramasinghe maintained that "invasions of this type could be responsible for all the
major plagues and epidemics which have punctuated our history from antiquity to modem
times." He was seconded by his colleague, Fred Hoyle [20] .
THE ELECTRO-CHEMICAL FACTORY
Of clouds in Exodus, there are the high clouds of obscuring the sky and causing the long-
enduring darkness; next the cloud or pillar of smoke that leads the Jews out of Egypt; the
cloud and pillar upon the mountain; the cloud arising from the Tabernacle sanctuary; the
cloud that moves with the ark; the cloud above Moses' tent outside the camp; and occasional
clouds that are dangerous to the camp. Yahweh's fire, which we find synonymous with
electrostatic fire, is present in all the clouds. The fire can come before, with, and after
the cloud's appearance. The experience of clouds is frequent. These clouds do not carry
rain. They carry vapors which have serious consequences for evil and good. The clouds in all
cases are associated with Yahweh; they are dangerous; Moses is uniquely competent to deal
with them, and even he is overexposed on the mountain and perhaps on other occasions.
The great pillar of cloud and the high obscuring blanket of cloud are probably connected,
the first being an earlier state of vision and contact with the comet's tail and the second
being a later state of the elements of the tail that diffused throughout the earth's
atmosphere. Comet tails can be millions of miles long and thousands of miles in diameter.
Since we have had no late experience with large comets, their components are subject to
debate. It has lately become permissible in scientific circles to attribute many kinds of
materials to them - elemental and molecular gases, particles, ice and rocks. Should a large
comet-tail pass through the atmosphere, it would deposit its own materials, and combine its
materials with those of the earth, not only with normal atmospheric components but also with
the discharges peculiar to volcanoes and typhoons or tornadoes.
In the major catastrophic columns or typhoons of a comet-earth encounter, therefore, would
be discovered a variety of chemicals under turbulent conditions of pressure, heat, and
electricity. Picture a vast gaseous and heavy meteoritic fall-out mingling with the
eruptions of volcanoes and electrical discharges by the many thousands, and one has the
beginnings of a conception of the event. In such a maelstrom, miracles would be
multitudinous. We are dealing with a vast electro-chemical factory. The first response of a
catastrophized human group is to relate itself to the turbulent skies. Moses was exceedingly
busy - up and down the mountain - trying to reproduce on earth what he saw in heaven. Hence
what we expect is that certain "miracles" happen naturally and others, much simpler and
crude, but nevertheless amazing, happen as the artifices of man. Reciting the Biblical
references, we can derive radiation and radiance of various types: a complex chemically-
loaded dew; red phosphorus; hydrocarbons; unidentified poisons; sulfur; mercury; ammonia;
cinnabar (cinnamon); formaldehyde; manna; and perfumes. The sky and earth are producing
enough heat and electricity to manufacture many products.
The element phosphorus might have been prominent in the Exodus chemical environment. It may
have had poisonous effects, especially if accompanied by radioactive materials, in the Nile
and the wells of Egypt. It was probably present in the clouds of the mountain. It was a
major ingredient in Moses' arsenal, possibly for helping to send up smoke when smoke did not
originate in satisfactory abundance from the ark, possibly for communicating with Yahweh in
his tent, possibly as smoke bombs. When Moses set up his tent far outside the camp for
living and counseling, Yahweh would visit him there: witness the cloud or pillar of smoke
that descended whenever Moses entered the tent door [21] .
Phosphorus is "not found free in nature except in a few meteorites " because "it takes fire
spontaneously upon exposure to air and forms dense white fumes of the oxide." [22] It is a
colorless, transparent, soft wax that glows in the dark. It converts to red phosphorus with
sunlight or heat, after which it neither glows nor spontaneously combusts in air. White
phosphorus is used to make smoke shells for military use.)
White phosphorus is easily made. Calcium phosphate, a stone, is ground into powder and
combined with silversand (silicon dioxide) and charcoal. Carbon monoxide is a by-product.
When exposed to air, the phosphorus burns with a bright hot flame, a voluminous dense white
smoke, and gives off a poisonous gas. Moses would have known from Egypt the properties of
these common materials, what they smelled like when burned, what the clouds on the mountain
appeared to be. His main problem would have been to encapsulate the white phosphorus in
order to deprive it of air until the moment of use. Small gourds, ceramic jars, or bladders
would contain the material under seal. A poisonous grenade would be available to toss into
the tents of opponents of Yahweh, such as Dathan and Abiram. They had refused Moses' summons
and denied his authority. Moses supervised their execution by Yahweh. The ground was said to
split open and swallow their households. The crowd fled the scene, which might have
resembled the hell-fires bursting out and enveloping them. Small amounts of phosphorus would
suffice to emit a smoke cloud about the Tabernacle and tent of Moses,
Phosphorescence, which may characterize many objects, is "the emission of light from a
substance exposed to radiation and persisting as an afterglow after the radiation has been
removed." [23] A phosphorescence may last for an instant, days, or years and will react
whenever agitated by heat or optical waves. This refers to the cases of Moses and Miriam and
a kind of leprosy, but also to the "footstool of Yahweh" that the elders witnessed; various
apatite phosphate minerals are of a green glassy appearance and "are often fluorescent in
ultra-violet light...; phosphorescent; sometimes strongly thermo-luminescent." [24]
Although we cannot be sure of the processes of the clouds of Exodus, the existence of a
special electro-chemical environment and an applied science thereof are fairly demonstrable.
The dew that fell in great abundance in the wilderness was no ordinary vapor. It was often
red, often poisonous, often conductive and facilitative of electrical discharges. The
wearing of Moses-designed heavy and full priestly garments, the washing that went on before
and after rituals, the placement of veils and curtains within the Tabernacle, the holes in
the tent tops, the arrangements of vessels and paraphernalia: - "Aaron and his sons are to
do this lest they die" - these were safety practices and procedures for handling dangerous
products. Only later could they be called psychological obsessions, when their functions had
disappeared with the fading of the electrical age and the great electrochemical factories of
nature.
One scholar, Von Fange, writes that "In the Middle East in Ancient times there was an
amazing number of literary references to a garment of flame, the goatskin dyed red, or a
ramskin dyed red, or a red-dyed goat. The meaning is completely obscure." [25] An editor's
footnote reads: "Obviously references to ramskins dyed red as in Exodus 25: 5 [describe]
directions from God for construction of the sacred Tabernacle, and would have no connection
with pagan use of goat skins dyed red." Both are connected probably to the red dust and dew
that covered everything dead and alive in the Egyptian plagues and from time to time in the
wilderness. The startling, ominous, and effective events are typically perpetuated in design
and rites. Earlier, we had occasion to discuss the taboos of redness.
MANNA
"When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it." [26]
Obviously, despite the darkness of the days, a solar heating and nocturnal cooling were
occurring in the wilderness. The manna may cure the very radiation sickness often caused by
the radiation-loaded dew. Both are part of the Exodus experience of Egypt and Israel. Few
scholars doubt that something natural and edible was being made available to the starving
Israelites. Almost always, they have sought some desert plant that by its excrescences or
pollen fall-out would give nourishment. Buber writes as if the matter were settled [27] :
"The tale is told of manna (a secretion of cockineal insect, tasting like crystallized
honey, which covers the tamarisk bushes at the time of the apricot harvest, drips to earth
by day and becomes hard at night)."
This is a whit short of absurdity. The large volume of manna, its long duration, its fall
from heaven, the technique of its baking, and other details of the story are shunted aside.
More persuasive incidents are available, with lichen as the possible agent, thus: "In 1829,
during the war between Persia and Russia, there was a great famine in Orumiah, south-west of
the Caspian. One day, during a violent wind, the surface of the country was covered with a
lichen which 'fell down from heaven. ' The sheep immediately attacked and devoured it, which
suggested to the inhabitants the idea of reducing it to flour and making bread of it, which
was found to be good and nourishing." [28] Electrical winds have been blamed for such
drops, which is a step in the right direction. Manna is described in two places, in somewhat
different terms [29] . "Almost any reasonably experienced confectioner will recognize the
substance concerned as a common constituent of sugar confectionary, usually called invert
sugar." [30] It fell nightly as seeds, for a long time then occasionally. The last fall was
reported just before the Battle of Jericho, "and the people of Israel had manna no more."
[31] It could be baked into sugar-carbohydrate loaves. Although at first delighted and
grateful, the people ultimately became heartily sick of it.
The basis for its natural production was the huge volume of formaldehyde gas, formed by the
incomplete combustion of many organic substances. "At least one worker has actually produced
sugars directly from very freshly formed gaseous formaldehyde at a temperature of 150§-180§
C (H. Vogel at the University of Geneva in 1928)." [32]
A British expert on the chemistry of confections, M. G. Reade, has followed the various
processes whereby, from the formaldehyde of incomplete combustion in the atmosphere, edible
manna could have been naturally fashioned. The problem is like that of artificially
accomplishing photosynthesis. He concludes that "Synthesis in a burning fiery cloud is
feasible, even probable when other environment conditions are favourable." [33] He thinks
that Moses designed the Tabernacle to produce manna, but only because of the tent's
construction [34] and not because there is any evidence of manna being actually produced.
(Reade does speculate ingeniously that the reason why the often grumpy people followed the
leader and Tabernacle was in order to get the manna that Moses was producing artificially.)
His comments on the tabernacle are revealing: "Perhaps the single most basic association is
that between the 'Tabernacle of the Lord' and the physical characteristics of the cloud. In
laying down guidelines for the construction of a tabernacle, or church, it was clearly
stated that the whole was to be the same as had been seen by Moses in the cloud... A burning
fiery cloud has to have a fresh air intake... This air intake would probably be at its base
and, it would be tent-shaped." Here one can be best protected from "poisonous or
asphyxiating fumes."
One might locate such air intakes on mountain tops or man-made tents. Observing, as a
trained scientist, from the "eye of the cyclone," that is, for many days and nights, Moses
produced the design and specifications for the ark, tent, and tabernacle. Here, as
elsewhere, the imitation of nature is used as the basis for an applied science; a priest or
layman or political boss or "Just a guy hearing voices" could not produce the works of
Moses.
THE BURNT OFFERING
Servius, a commentator on Virgil, writes that "the first inhabitants of the earth never
carried fire to their altars, but by their prayers they brought down the heavenly fire."
[35] Even in the first century after Christ, Josephus the Jewish historian could describe a
successful sacrifice to Yahweh: "There came a fire running out of the air, and rushed with
violence upon the altar, in the sight of all, and caught hold of and consumed the
sacrifice." But such fires of Yahweh had long been rare, Josephus himself having testified
that the Holy Spirit disappeared two centuries before his time. I think that the great
electrical flood was mostly dammed by the time of Joshua and then was reduced incrementally
from century to century, with perhaps a century or two of revival of flow during the time of
the prophets and the end of the Late Bronze Age.
I have paid little attention to the altars of Moses and those that followed. I do not mean
the Israelite altar of unhewn, heaped-up stones that was called for by Yahweh at first [36]
, or the Altar of Incense, but the elaborate one for sacrifices designed by Moses during his
mountain retreat. The design of altars generally was fairly straightforward. It is clear
what the priests were seeking; it is evident what they found and what failures they
experienced. What is most obvious is that altars were uniformly constructed to carry out a
simple electrical function, throughout the Near and Middle East. The Cretans, for instance,
had horned altars, as did others. Perhaps the very origin of altars goes back to the
beginning of the electrical ages, about six thousand years ago, when Zeus in all his forms
became a great god and Saturn withdrew.
The concept of archaeo-electro statics permits us to imagine that altars were designed for
burnt offerings when it was observed that the gods whom one wished to propitiate were in the
habit of dispatching sparks upon metallized prominences such as horns, spears and elevated
plates. This was direct contact of a most exciting kind between god and humans. One could
scarcely doubt that the gods were receiving and acknowledging the offerings. When Yahweh's
fire is not called for, the worshippers use ordinary combustion. When the oil lamps of the
Tabernacle were readied upon their seven-pronged lampstand, Moses "then fit up the lamps."
[37] Fire did not descend from the atmosphere to do the job.
The great horned altar of Israel in the wilderness was another of Yahweh's Mount Sinai
designs that Moses applied at the foot of the mountain [38] . It was a hollow, ninety-inch
square cabinet of bronze-plated wood, standing fifty-four inches high, with carrying poles.
It was hollow to permit its being filled with stones and dirt according to Yahweh's first
instructions out of Egypt. The horns of the four corners were one piece with the rest.
According to tradition, this magnificent altar did not work at first; but finally "there
came a fire out from before the Lord and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and
fat." The fire stayed there for 116 years without melting the brass or burning the wood, the
legend concludes, leaving us to wonder: why '116'"? [39]
A legend has Yahweh reproaching Moses, who wondered whether the divine fire would consume
the thin altar brass and wood: "Thou judgest by the laws that apply to men, but will these
also apply to Me?" Then, referring to the fires and ice of heaven, he goes on: "Doth the
water quench their fire, or doth their fire consume the water? For, 'I am the Lord who
maketh peace between these elements in My high places. ' No more shall the brass overlay of
the altar be injured by fire; even though it be no thicker than a denarium [a coin]." [40]
Obviously, he had in mind an electric fire, not one of coals.
Cassuto [41] insists, against exegetes and legends, that the altar had an earthen and
stone top. The legendary metal and wood top would be quickly destroyed by a heavy wood or
coal fire, as other sceptics, too, have pointed out. I am inclined to disagree with the
distinguished Cassuto; electrical conditions were such at this time and so well controlled
by Moses that he could be confident of exciting an electrical fire whenever it was required.
The sceptics have not considered an electrical fire.
As with the Ark, once the significance of electricity is perceived in regard to the altar,
we may deduce certain behaviors and understand others. We appreciate, once again, the
immensity of electrification in those days, the universality of electro-static applications
in worship, and the possibility of following electrical sensitivities wherever they may lead
over the lithosphere and especially up into the mountains, the "high places" to which the
Jews repaired more and more as the Earth-charge in relation to near space diminished and the
atmosphere cleared.
By "burnt offerings" the Bible means an offering destined for sacrifice on an altar, as well
as the same sacrifice after it has been burnt. On one occasion, Moses and Aaron entered the
Holy Tabernacle and came out again; then the glory of Yahweh appeared to all the people. And
fire came forth from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering [42] .
So far as one may tell, a burnt offering is successfully burnt when it is struck by a spark
discharged from above, a divine fire... It need not be cooked; it should be marked or
signed. Occasionally the enthusiasm of the language lets one imagine that Yahweh in fact did
sometimes voraciously "consume" the burnt offering.
To get Yahweh to accept an animal sacrifice, it may have been prudent to drain the animal of
its blood, whence would perhaps come the Judaic taboo of animal blood. Blood conveys
electric current. A spark might be dissipated if it short-circuited through a bloody
offering. On the other hand, the blood was useful in the sacrifice for inducing a charge to
collect on the metal of the altar base. Moses taught the Israelites to pour the drained
blood upon the sacrificial offering, on the altar, and on the ground around the altar.
Levites, clean-shaven all over to minimize risks of shock, performed such tasks. Ordinary
fires by friction and combustion were also built to burn offerings and to encourage, as with
blood, the descent of divine fire.
Water, we indicated in the last chapter, will also expedite an electrical discharge. Altars
worked better if means were available to wet the same surfaces that Moses used to pour on
blood - not inside the offering but over it, on the altar, around the altar, taking care not
to move too close or in any way short-circuit an impending spark.
Elijah, the prophet, was mostly incredible as a worker of miracles. There was enough of the
scientific in his behavior in his famous contest with the four hundred and fifty prophets of
Baal to judge it correct as to structure even if exaggerated [43] . In a time of great
drought for the Northern Kingdom of Israel, when the king and most others were whoring after
false gods, Elijah, hiding out from sure death, suddenly catches the message that finally a
great thunderstorm is coming to end the drought. He impatiently importunes a friend to ask
the king for an interview. The friend says in effect : "Why are you in such a hurry to get
killed and to get myself killed?" Elijah insists, and the king sees him. Elijah asks for a
chance to confute all the false prophets and the king agrees. A contest is set up on
Elijah's terms - the opposition is to choose a bull, sacrifice it, and ask for a sign of the
Lord's acceptance. He, Elijah, will do likewise. Whoever receives the sign wins.
The opposition builds its fire, places its offering, dances about, and gets no response.
Elijah builds an altar of stone, places his offering, and then pours twelve barrels of water
upon the offering. He dowses the offering thrice. He digs a trench around the altar and
fills it with water. The time is approaching evening. The water soaks down and makes contact
with the water table. The approaching thunderstorm is preceded by a heavy, moist, ionized,
and charged lowering atmosphere. The fire of Yahweh descends upon the offering of Elijah.
His triumphant followers escort the prophets of Baal to a nearby place and kill them.
THE BRAZEN SERPENT AND OTHER RODS
A final "miracle-product" permitted by the electrical age to the ingenious scientist was a
variety of rods. The most famous was the caduceus of the Greek god Hermes (in Egypt, Thoth),
nowadays the symbol of the medical profession because Hermes was also the greatest healer.
The next most famous rod was the Brazen Serpent of Moses, then Aaron's Rod, and then, of
course, we hear of other wonderful staffs. Every shepherd needs a staff, every walker a
cane, every boy a stick.
So we should expect great disbelief to be visited upon rods. Yet rods have a mysterious
quality: they are "guns" in slang; they are phalluses among many prehistoric peoples; they
are water-finders in the sensitive hands of dowsers; they are electric attractors and
lightning-rods; they are Upper Paleolithic batons; they are lances, tilting weapons, flag-
poles, may-poles, dolmens, bethels, etc.; no man is complete without one.
Yahweh, in a legend, advertises that "dead things come before Me and leave Me imbued with
life," referring to the rod of Aaron which had lain in the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle
one night and then "brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and even yielded almonds."
[44] This is a flagrant challenge to legend-analysis: what can be made of it?
The Bible tells that Moses, in need of proving why Aaron should be High Priest of Israel,
decreed that a beam of wood should be cut into twelve staves, that the Levi's should have
one marked for them, and all other tribes one each as well, the Levi staff being that of
Aaron. The rods would be left with Yahweh overnight to see which tribe shall have its rod
singled out by him as the rod of the High Priest. Aaron's, and Aaron's alone, was
transformed in the night, and his priesthood was divinely authorized by test once more. If
there is a kernel of truth in this sacred competition, it must rest with the manipulation of
Aaron's stick in the middle of the night. It may be conjectured that it was subjected to
severe shock on the mercy seat of Yahweh until it evidenced changes sufficiently symbolic to
suggest the buds, blossoms, and almonds described in the Bible and legends. The ark when
operative is somewhat like a tornado: it discharges sparks that set up a column of gases and
dust and modifies whatever conductor it may embrace.
A tremendous tornado occurred in Chatenay, France, in 1836, and an expert report was made
upon it for insurance purposes:
All those (trees) which came within the influence of the tornado, presented the same
aspect; their sap was vaporized, and their igneous fibres had become as dry as if kept for
forty-eight hours in a furnace heated to ninety degrees above the boiling point. Evidently
there was a great mass of vapor instantaneously formed, which could only make its escape by
bursting the tree in every direction; and as wood has less cohesion in a longitudinal than
in a transverse direction, these trees were all, throughout one portion of their trunk,
cloven into laths. Many trees attest, by their condition, that they served as conductors to
continual discharges of electricity, and that the high temperature produced by this passage
of the electric fluid, instantly vaporized all the moisture which they contained, and that
this instantaneous vaporization burst all the trees open in the direction of their length,
until the wood, dried up and split, had become unable to resist the force of the wind which
accompanied the tornado [45] .
Aaron's rod, by discontinuous and repeated sparks, could achieve something of the remarkable
representations that the observers saw in it the next day. The other rods had been laid
aside, of course. Moses had had several rods, the rod that impressed the Hebrew welcoming
committee in Goshen, the rod that he carried into his negotiations with Pharaoh Thoum, the
rod that he held high in the first battle with the Amalekites, the rod that he used to find
water, and the rod that was the Brazen Serpent. I have mentioned some possible special
quality of each in another chapter. Of these, only the battle-staff appears to have been
luminously activated; "the Midrashim narrate that the Israelites encountered the Amalekites
in a thick veil of clouds," [46] hence it must have sparked a light to have such effect on
friend and foe alike.
The early rods that behaved like snakes may have been metal or metalized for high
conductivity, insulated at the grasping points, and with pointed head to encourage a
discharge upwards. If they discharged they would rustle and hiss like snakes. Possibly, too,
by a certain disjointing, sparks might be induced to leap the hinging points and cause a
wriggling effect by attraction and repulsion. (Priestley, quoted earlier, was calling such a
spark "spider.") As with other magical tricks, the competition of professional magicians
would accord to someone the fame of being the best of magicians. If a god or demon is
associated with the basic phenomenon, that god, that magician, and that device are
altogether connected and acknowledged superior.
The Brazen Serpent (see Figure 16) was the outcome of popular grumblings and protests which
provoked Yahweh into sending fiery serpents among the people to bite and kill many of them.
Moses, begged to intercede, was told by Yahweh: "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole;
everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live." [47] There was no doubt always cause
to blame the people for their disagreeable temper. The snakes that caused anguish were
probably innumerable animals driven above ground by thermoelectrical phenomena [48]
accompanied by fiery electric charges snaking though the ground, else why so many? Why so
homeopathic a solution as another fiery snake that is under control? And why the cure from
seeing the model excepting that thus would Yahweh and Moses lend their authority to
psychosomatic therapy? But the bronze serpent, as an independent spark-generator, might have
occupied a private tent of healing. Dr. Mesmer, famous for "mesmerizing" people, was one of
"a long line of electrotherapists, that even today practices with some success. Healing
might originate in certain cases by electroshock with the priesthood as therapists
administering sparks to patients. Other cases of healing might occur by the bactericidal
effect of ozone in the rooms where the electro-static machines were operated" as with Mesmer
[49] .
Figure 16:
The Brazen Serpent is Formed
(Source: Bible of Lubeck, 1494.)
The bronze serpent, representing unconsciously the comet by its shape and electrification,
was carried with the Ark; as Ziegler has suggested elsewhere, it might have been used as an
independent capacitor with its rod and snake separated by an insulator so as to permit the
tongue to discharge against the head of the rod. It might, too, be employed just behind the
mercy seat as the target for discharges from both of the grounded cherubim; and it might be
operated as an independent electrical demonstrator affixed to the Ark. Numerous instrumental
assemblies and adjustments could be managed for different purposes, with more or less
sparking, smoking, noise-making, and explosions.
Since Pliny described the great comet of Typhon as spiral-shaped, [50] there is some reason
to connect the serpent with the celestial apparitions of Exodus.
King Hezekiah broke into pieces the Serpent of Moses or a reproduction thereof six centuries
later on grounds that it had become the object of idolatry. Or perhaps it could cause panic
if it were electrified and, as Ziegler guesses, there would be nowhere to go from a city
undergoing siege, or about to do so. The electrical signaling had to be astutely controlled
to prevent its causing self-demoralization.
Twenty-five hundred years later, in the first modern outburst of enthusiasm for the
rediscovery of electrical fire, there comes once again the idea that electricity cures. The
spark-spitting is not from snakes but from jars. Some religious evangelists, admirers of the
new science, unconsciously emulate their Old Testament hero, Moses. So we find in a
bibliography the following item, which speaks for itself: [51]
A. D. 1759. - Wesley (John), the founder of Methodism (1703-1791) and the most eminent
member of a very distinguished English family, publishes "The Desideratum; or Electricity
made Plain and Useful, by a Lover of Mankind and of Common Sense." In this he relates at
great length the cures of numerous physical and moral ailments, attributed to the employment
of the electric fluid, under such curious headings as "Electricity, the Soul of the
Universe," "Electricity, the Greatest of all Remedies," etc.
THE POUCH OF JUDGEMENT
Moses, who hates sorcery and divination, provides a special place for a pair of objects, the
Urim and Thummim [52] . He orders to be made a pouch of cloth that is closed at top and
bottom but open at its two sides, with gold chains attached to hang it from the High
Priest's shoulders and to tie it around his waist. It is the size of a man's hand. To the
front of the pouch is attached a gold plate into which are fitted twelve different precious
stones, each containing the name of one of the Twelve Tribes. "And into the pouch of
judgement you shall put the Urim and Thummim." '
No one has found an origin for these two words. They are thought to be a very ancient
device. Their shape is "impossible to ascertain." [53] Only top officials, perhaps only
heads of state or tribes, could ask the priest to employ them. "They served as a means of
inquiring of God, that is to say, of obtaining from the deity, with the help of the priest,
an answer concerning matters beyond human ken." [54] Since they were used to choose which
of two goats would be sent into the desert to Azazel on the Day of Atonement, it is thought
they were a kind of lot. Other incidents of their employment are known. They gave short
answers, usually "yes" or "no," to carefully framed question about a highly uncertain
decision. Only one question could be handled at a time. Moses never used them, probably
because he could speak directly to Yahweh. But Joshua did, and Saul, and David. After David,
the two objects disappear from the Bible. Legend does not go farther than to implicate the
Urim and Thummim in the processes of inquiry. The open-sided pouch indicates that the pieces
were not carried in it, but employed in it, for at least a hand might enter it,
Legend says that the two words mean "Light and Truth." "Only a high priest who was permeated
with the Holy Spirit, and over whom rested the Shekinah, might obtain an answer, for in
other cases the stones withheld their answer. But if the high priest was worthy, he received
an answer to every inquiry, for on these stones were engraved all the letters of the
alphabet, so that all conceivable words could be constructed of them." [55]
For lack of any better explanation, we are impelled to think once more of electrical
mysteries. The Holy Spirit and Shekinah, like angels, may be metaphors for a manifestation
of electricity. The "Light" does not always appear. The priest must be worthy. King Saul
could not get an answer one time, and searched then who had done wrong, for Yahweh "did not
answer him that day." [56]
A successful attempt is described by the legend: after the King or head of the Sanhedrin
looks into the face of the priest and makes inquiry,
The high priest, looking down on his breastplate, then looked to see which of the letters
engraved on the stones shone out most brightly, and then constructed the answer out of these
letters. Thus, for example, when David inquired of the Urim and Thummimm if Saul would
pursue him, the high priest Abiathar beheld gleaming forth the letter Yod in Judah's name,
Resh in Reuben's name, and Dalet in Dan's name, hence the answer read as follows: Yered ,
'He will pursue. ' [57]
More electricity is revealed here: certain stones shine brighter than others, "gleaming
forth." The priest ponders the letters and composes the reply as best he can. We cannot
truly solve this mystery with all of its mechanisms - or electronics. Relevant is the fact
that the famous early modern scientist, Gilbert (1600), performed and described hundreds of
small experiments to determine the electromagnetic properties of precious and semi-precious
stones. For most of 200 years following him, scientists pursued the same type of
experimentation. Efforts were made to classify all stones by their electrical properties.
Jewish legend claims to know what the twelve stones of the Pouch of judgement were. A
discussion of the truth of the legend and of these stones and other stones also proposed is
not possible here. It suffices to speculate that the original stones fell into a similar
order of electrical behavior; particularly, each engraved tribal gem would collect, hold,
and emit the same charge under like conditions, as would befit a confederation of equals.
The Urim might be an electrifying brush, a "rubber" the modern scientists called it. The
priest would rub the gems until they held a charge, or rub them one by one. This he could do
more easily by steadying the pouch with one hand from inside it. The Thummin might be a
stubby rod of metal. The priest would whirl it in the air a fixed number of times and then
present it to a tribal stone. He would repeat the procedure with all other stones in
succession. If a spark gleamed forth, the letter would be used, otherwise not. Then the full
word would be combined from the letters that lit up. The procedure was not dangerous;
nevertheless it was most holy. King Saul would have killed his son, Jonathan, that day,
because, in successive inquiries of the pouch, Jonathan was blamed for the absence of
Yahweh. But the people rebelled "and redeemed Jonathan and he did not die." [58]
Notes (Chapter 5: Legends and Miracles)
1. Ex. 19: 8.
2. Ex. 20: 18.
3. Cf. Ps 97: 4-5: "hills melted like wax;" "the mountains melted, even that Sinai" Jg 5: 4-
5.
4. Ex. 24: 9, 10.
5. Ex. 24: 15-18.
6. G III 137.
7. Moses, 243.
8. Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1970, p. 138-139.
9. G III 92-3.
10. Mellinkoff, op. cit., plate II.
11. Hugo Gressmann, Mose und Seine Zeit, Gottingen, 1913; cf. Cassuto, 448-51.
12. Wayne A. Meeks (" Moses as God and King," 254-71 in Jacob Neusner ed., Religions in
Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 1970, 370-1) writes that "in very diverse sources there persist
the remnants of an elaborate cluster of traditions in Moses' heavenly enthronement at the
time of the Sinai theophany."
13. G III 190.
14. G III 213.
15. P. 198; Cf. Num. 11: 35; 12: 1-15.
16. Ziegler, 45-7.
17. Is. 3: 17; cf. 7: 20; 3; 24.
18. In II SISR 2( 1977), letters, cf. comments on both famine and depilation in 3 pp. 101-2,
and B. O' Gheoghan in II SISR I (1977), pp. 2-3, Where radiation disease is discussed as
causing abrupt stoppage of childbirth at time of Exodus in Egypt.
19. Francis II. Baker, "Comet Lord," 189 Living Age (June 27, 1891). pp. 818-23, repr. in W.
Corliss, comp., Strange Universe, A2-ALC-001.
20. See also their book Lifecloud, Harper's and Row, New York, 1978.
21. Ex. 33.
22. VII Encycl. Britannica 1964, hereafter referred to as E. B.
23. VII EB p. 962.
24. Ibid.
25. (1975), 136, citing George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation, Baltimore: John Hopkins
U. Press, 1973, 43,109.
26. Num. 11: 9.
27. p. 80.
28. M. J. Teesdale, "The Manna of the Israelites, "3 Science Gossip (1897) 229-33.
29. Ex. 16: 14-15,21,31; Num. 11: 7-8.
30. Reade, "Manna as a Confection," I SISR 2 (1977), 9.
31. Joshua 6: 12.
32. Reade, p. 10.
33. Ibid., p. 12.
34. Reade believes that the tent was pitched high at the center to let out fumes. Though
logical, this view conflicts with the ordinary reading, which results in a construction as
depicted in figure 13.
35. Commentary on Virgil: XII, 2OO; cf. Eclogue VI, 42, quoted by Blavatsky, I, 526.
36. Ex. 20: 24-5.
37. Ex. 40: 24-5.
38. Ex. 27: 1-8.
39. III G 184.
40. III G I62.
41. Cassuto, 362-3.
42. Lev. 1-9; 10; 23.
43. III Kings 18.
44. G III 162.
45. Hare, R.; Journal of the Franklin Institute, 54 (1852) 28-29.
46. Velikovsky, A. in C., 60; 55-6. Ex. 17: 8.
47. Num. 21: 4-9.
48. Before the Haicheng (China) earthquake of Feb. 4, 1975, "there were a multitude of
warnings, local changes in the earth's magnetism and snakes coming out of their lairs in the
frozen ground." NY Times, Oct. 1, 1979, 60.
49. Manoilov, 81.
50. Natural History, II, ch. XXII, 91.
51. Mottelay, 216.
52. Ex. 28: 15-3; see Cassuto 372-87.
53. Cassuto, 380.
54. Ibid.
55. III G 172-3.
56. I Sam. 14: 37-38.
57. III G 172.
58. I Sam. 14: 45.
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIX
THE CHARISMA OF MOSES
"To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be
undertaken lightheartedly - especially by one belonging to that people." So goes the first
sentence of Sigmund Freud's book on Moses and Monotheism, that views Moses as an Egyptian
disciple of Pharaoh Akhnaton, and he continues: "No consideration, however, will move me to
set aside truth in favour of supposed national interests." [1]
If Freud had published his first line in 1980 rather than in 1937, he might perhaps have
taken advantage of the reconciliation achieved by the leaders of Egypt and Israel to
advertise his works as an historical gift to the reconciliation. For the first time in 3400
years, some people were speaking well of the Egyptians. (It matters little in the rhetoric
of religion or ethnicism that neither the Egyptians nor the Israeli of today are much like
their namesakes of Exodus.)
THE LOVE CHILD
What strikes me about Freud's determination that Moses was an Egyptian was that he should
not ask whether Moses might have been both Egyptian and Hebrew. This I attribute to Freud's
own problem of identification.
On the one hand, Freud believed himself consciously to be a latter-day Moses, a point that
will be explained in Chapter VI here below. On the other hand, Freud disbelieved strongly in
ethnicism and wished time and time again that psychoanalysis become universal, rather than
an isolated Jewish school of thought, to the point where he conceived of himself
unconsciously as an assimilated gentile, a Christ-figure, whose teachings would become
universalized. Freud's first act, when he arrived in Rome on a long-delayed trip, was to go
view the heroic statue of Moses done by Michelangelo. It was, I say, psychologically easier
for Freud to claim that Moses was all-Egyptian than to think sociologically and
psychologically of the obvious possibility that Moses was half-Egyptian and half-Jewish.
"How much" easier can be measured by the frail, yet psychologically significant,
rationalization that Freud gave of the two sides of Moses - the universal Egyptian and the
tribal Yahwist - that there were two Moses, separated by a century or so, and brought
together later to rationalize Hebrew history.
Who is rationalizing what? Freud was irrationally led to postulate two Moses, rather than
descry a half-gentile, half-Hebrew Moses. In doing so, he was perhaps unconsciously
admitting the two elements of Moses, asserting, also surprisingly covertly, that Moses was
schizophrenic, and revealing that he, Freud, was ambivalent about the relations of gentiles
and Jews. Needless to say, Freud brought down upon his head the wrath of all mosaists.
With such controversy over Moses' origins, perhaps the fairest resolution would be to divide
Moses in half Hebrew, half Egyptian. Let both mothers claim him, … la Solomon's judgement.
Philo Judaeus says that when the princess saw the beautiful weaned child of three months,
"she adopted him as her son, having first put in practice all sorts of contrivances to
increase the apparent bulk of her belly, so that he might be looked upon as her own genuine
child, and not as a suppositious one." [2] One might believe this - and take the ethnic
position - or half believe it, seeing in it a denial that confesses: that is, the princess
was pregnant with Moses. Then several problems are solved, quite apart from ending the
argument.
Moses would be the son of a Hebrew official and an Egyptian princess (or, as the Moslems
claim, the wife of the Pharaoh). Probably only such a love-child would have received the
adoption and attention that Moses got. Hebrew women would understandably be his wet-nurse
(his "mother") and baby-sitter (Miriam, daughter of the wet-nurse); Aaron, older brother of
Miriam, would be a devoted admirer of the young gentleman from childhood. Thus we solve the
relationship with Aaron and Miriam - no brother and sister, but possibly half-brother and
half-sister through their father, or cousins by an uncle, with his step-mother or aunt his
wet-nurse.
The Jewish legends, unlike the Bible, make a number of references to the Egyptianizing of
the Hebrews, their abandonment of their old religion, their working against their own people
and for the Egyptians, and, of course, the non-tribal "mixed-multitude" that joined in
Moses' expedition into another world. In a curious legend, Yahweh blames Moses for the
Revolt of the Golden Calf [3] , saying that it was Moses who wanted to bring along the
mixed multitude that wanted to join them... It is now these people, 'thy people', that have
seduced Israel to idolatry. And Moses replies that, yes, "that it was chiefly my people, the
mixed multitude, that was to blame for this sin..."
Exogamous marriage and concubinage, as well as incest, were common among Egyptian royalty.
If recent American statistics are any indication, among the upper-middle classes the Hebrews
might have achieved a rate of miscegenation of 15% or more. In more than one legend, the
loss of Hebrew race through intermarriage is denounced, it might even be that "Levites" was
a generic term for mixed Hebrew-Egyptians (see our index to the book), a thesis defensible
both in theory and on the evidence. Jacob-Israel, in his last words, blesses the descendents
of Simeon and Levi (perhaps similar in composition) [4] by calling them ruthless, violent
people, saying: "I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel." [5] This puzzling
passage might mean: they will live individually spread among the Egyptians in Egypt, and (as
occurred) they will be disposed in gangs among all the tribes as an arm of the central
Israelite nation.
Moses would perforce acquire his combination of arrogant and schizoid traits, his large
erudition, his familiarity with the ways of the Egyptian court, his immense ambition and
quarrelsomeness, his ready promotion in the Egyptian hierarchy and introduction into both
cosmopolitan and esoteric scientific circles. He would be cut off from the line of
inheritance to the throne, which would rankle him and bring him enemies too, even those who
feared that he would in any event become a threat. He would have an access to the Pharaohs
that would otherwise be incredible.
But, beneath the veneer of his life and character, he would actively identify with the
Hebrews. He would know them and understand them in a special detached way, particularly the
assimilated leading Hebraic-Egyptian types among them. If and when the time came to switch
roles, the ground would be prepared. His birth would be nicely managed by a myth typical of
the birth of heroes. His infant attendants, or relatives, would become his "true" family -
mother, Aaron, Miriam. His Egyptianized friends and supporters would become the Levites. His
tongue-tied speech would have an additional psychosomatic source in his fear of his loss of
identity (nor would I discard completely Freud's suggestion that be might not have spoken
Hebrew perfectly, at least not idiomatically). The land of Midian where he was exiled and
married was an ally of Egypt; it is mentioned that when the Exodus army came upon them, the
Midianites had to make apologies for their faith in Egypt. Much later on, the Midianites
fell victim to an Israelite attack.
One can only wonder, in the end, why Moses has not been considered the offspring of a Hebrew
and Egyptian love-affair. Certainly because the word of the Bible is sacred to many people.
Also, the legend of a chosen people demands a full-blooded leader for their birth as a
nation (despite history's frequent waiving of this rule). Moreover, the Judaic rule that
descent as a Jew occurs through the mother, regardless of the father, contributes to
ignoring the possibility. Judaic traditionalists are prone to frown upon miscegenation.
(Apropos of this feeling, Senator Barry Goldwater once quipped at the peak of Egyptian-
Israeli hostilities that he would be shot at from both sides of the Nile.) But Joseph
married an Egyptian beauty, Asenath, daughter of the priest of On, by whom he had Ephraim
and Manasseh, who were blessed by Jacob (Israel) and destined to be founders of tribes. And
David's grandmother was Ruth, the Moabite...
According to the Bible, Moses was born of humble but good Hebrew parents at a moment when
the king, advised by a prophecy that a newly born child would live to kill him, had issued a
blanket order to kill all Hebrew babies. Indefinitely, says the Bible; for nine months only,
says the legend [6] , and all babies of Egypt. When the edict was publicized, legend
reports, Moses' Hebrew father divorced his Hebrew mother to avoid having a child [7] .
This, too, gives pause. Is there some implication of illegitimacy here? Perhaps.
Put in a rough basket and set afloat amidst the marshy sidewaters of the Nile, says the
Bible, the infant Moses was found there by none other than a princess, daughter of the very
same king. He was raised in secret by her, even was nursed by his real mother, hired
unknowingly by the princess for the purpose. He grew up a prince, but somehow realized that
he was a Hebrew. Not much can be made of this story at first, which Otto Rank, Joseph
Campbell, and other scholars would agree is a typical birth of a hero in myth and legend. We
gather from it that Moses was probably born in Egypt during an anti-semitic period, that he
was related to Hebrews, and that he was related to a highly placed Egyptian woman who raised
him in a princely fashion. Everything else seems questionable and in need of analysis and
reassembly according to a new theory.
It is possible, too, that a general heavy pressure of population was occurring, and
infanticide would be a policy, not unknown in many lands, to reduce the numbers of people,
with expectable suspicions or actual overtones of genocide among minorities. The Pharaoh
mentions overpopulation as a reason for his edict. Whether it was decided to let the
minorities pay the price, we cannot say; the Jewish legend says that it was a temporary
moratorium on births for all people. Even birth control policies in America have been
declared forms of infanticide and genocide by religious and racial minority leaders and
writers. Egypt was a heavily regulated, bureaucratic state.
There is something to be made of Moses' name. It is clearly Egyptian, meaning "child" or
"son" [8] and lacks the surname or prefix as, for example, in the pharaoh's name, Thoth-
Moses, or "Child of the God, Thoth" (Mercury, Hermes). A variant theory says Moses means the
"born one" in Egyptian, which is only a clumsy version of "child." Buber says: "That Moses
bears an Egyptian name, no matter whether it means 'born, child (of somebody) ' or something
like 'seed of the pond, of the water, ' is part of the historical character of the
situation; he seems to derive from a largely Egyptianized section of the people." [9] Some
say the Hebrew etymology is "he who is drawn from" the Nile River, which is the popular
Sunday School meaning, but Buber reverses this to mean "he who draws forth" the Hebrew
people.
Otto Rank, citing Winckler, gives Moses as "the Water-Drawer." Psychoanalytic theory permits
a reversal of meaning, so it becomes "he who is drawn from the water." Whatever route is
taken one comes back to the profound simple meaning of "the water-born one." All children
are born in the water of the womb. And legendary heroes are sometimes placed amidst water
imagery at birth, as King Sargon of Assyria, who, like Moses, was a real person. The box or
ark (tebah) of the infant Moses represents the womb of the mother.
Eduard Meyer, upon whom both Freud and Rank draw, says that "Presumably Moses was originally
the son of the tyrant's daughter (who is now his foster mother) and probably of divine
origin." [10]
A DISLIKING FOR HEBREWS
Moses would have known Goshen by passing through it on the way here or there but would have
little familiarity with the Hebrew people. Legend has him meeting his first connections when
grown up; then it was that he observed the complaints and hardship of the Hebrews; he used
his court connections to help lighten their burdens, says the legend [11] . It is likely
that his relatives there would bring him problems from time to time. When he returned from
exile to lead the Hebrews, he was a delegate of Yahweh, not a Hebrew who had met with Yahweh
for new instructions. Yahweh, not Moses, chose the Hebrews.
Moses was launched upon a splendid career. The best teachers were brought in to educate him
[12] . He is said to have exercised military command, to have traveled outside Egypt, and to
have been well-versed in the science of the times, It is said, too, in a legend, that he had
originally an evil disposition, that he was "covetous, haughty, sensual" [13] (reminding me
of Mahatma Gandhi as a young man before his great alteration of character) [14] . He cured
himself of his vices by a strong will to change.
He seems to have submerged his original traits in a kind of inhibition and reserve. He is
not "a man of the people," a kindly father-figure, and seems to reject, for himself, the
paternal role in regard to the "Children of Israel", giving this all over to Yahweh, Any
love that he might have for the people of Israel, and indeed for everyone, including Aaron
but with the possible exception of his devoted aide-de-camp Joshua [15] , is suppressed; he
scarcely permits himself to use Yahweh to express love for the people. In the Pentateuch,
forms of the word "love" occur only 41 times, disproportionately in Genesis with 15. (see
Table II) Yahweh's "love" for the people is mentioned seven times, Moses' love for the
people not at all. The duty to love Yahweh receives 13 mentions, love among individuals 13,
social love 5, and the love of pleasure and things 3 [16] . For every word of affection
there are a dozen words of reproach, censure, adverse criticism, and dogmatic command. One
would be naive to search in the Torah for any but the most feeble sources of the often-
experienced warmth and graciousness of the Jews. Two notable exceptions - the happiness over
the Golden Calf and the union with the people of Beth-Peor - end in horrifying slaughters.
Almost never does Moses indicate that the Israelites are his people, and usually, in
speaking to Yahweh, he refers to "your people." When Moses heard all the families weeping
about the lack of meat, and saw Yahweh getting angry, he exclaimed to him: "Why have you
caused evil to your servant... in placing the load of all this people upon me? Have I myself
conceived all this people? Is it I who have given them birth...?" In fact, Moses urges
Yahweh out of motives of self-esteem not to exterminate Israel: what would other people
think if, after all his public boasting and Moses' advertising, Yahweh were to destroy his
chosen people?
This would be Moses himself speaking; Moses would look the fool (to his imaginary and now
mostly deceased Egyptian reference group) if this great adventure were to fail and the
people killed or scattered. The projected conscience is often more juvenile than its
possessor; so we need not think it odd that Moses, through Yahweh, should be so
unsophisticated.
At best, then, Moses and Yahweh are ambivalent about the Jews, both hating and loving them.
A peculiar, stunted affection for them exists, growing feebly amidst the abuse. It takes
sometime the form of a feeling of responsibility for them, having brought them out of Egypt.
They were characteristically suspicious of the people's loyalty and affections. Time after
time they allege that these are only pretenses, shams. And they allow no excuses, insisting
that the people willed their own defects and aberrations. This refusal to accept and receive
affection is the paranoiac expression of ambivalence.
Part of this suspicion was warranted. A considerable proportion of the people did hate Moses
and Yahweh. Moses knew this and said so. Yahweh directly accuses them of knowingly defying
him and breaking their promises. Of course the people had good reason to hate Yahweh since
the god was the cause of their worst disasters as well as their savior. Moses would be
strongly interested in their hating other gods, that is, in displacing the people's
hostilities upon Baal and other heavenly gods, and in trying to suppress the destructive
side of the great comet. Baal later became the devil figure, Lucifer, who was the "Light-
bearer" in Latin (or "Phosphorus" and the word for the planet Venus in Greek). The process
of displacement did not work perfectly. Unconsciously many people hated Yahweh as well as or
instead of Baal and certainly hated Moses, while Moses and Yahweh did not even try to divide
and transform their ambivalence toward the people.
The love that is behind Jesus' feeling of atonement for the sins of humanity is not present
in Moses and therefore the doctrine itself is largely absent. But Daiches goes too far when
he writes that "the concept of vicarious atonement was quite foreign to Mosaic thought."
[17] He adds, rightly, that Moses was a "mediator and intercessor" and that sins were
forgiven even of all Israel for the sake of their great ancestors. (This latter atonement in
reverse being also a way of getting them to focus favorably upon a line of national
history.)
However, Moses based the authority of the Levites upon vicarious atonement. By taking on
onerous sacred tasks, they relieved all Jews of the duty to sacrifice their first-born
children and beasts to Yahweh [18] . Further there was the custom of the scapegoat.
Annually the goat conveyed the load of Jewish sins away into the desert to the demon Azazel
[19] .
Following upon the worship of the Golden Calf, Moses himself is on the brink of atoning for
Israel's crime, but lets Yahweh pull him back into his typical egotism. For he declares to
the people: "you have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can
make atonement for your sin." [20] Then to Yahweh he says: "If thou wilt, forgive their sin
- and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book..." Yahweh refuses and lets Israel live
as a personal favor to Moses [21] .
THE MEEK KILLER
Machiavelli commented once: "Whoever reads the Bible sensibly will see that Moses, in order
to push through his laws and orders, was compelled to kill an infinity of men who were
guilty of nothing but opposing his designs." [22] Time after time, Moses imposes rules and
hardship upon others in the name of Yahweh. His famous meekness, which the Bible stresses
and his biographers claim to find is in psychological terms the "meekness" of an inhibited
rage type, who cannot trust his deep passions to public display. He insists, in effect, that
he cannot help himself, that he is executing the will of Yahweh, like the foreman who
explains to his workers "I'll see what I can do, but you know how things are up there. I
can't do much about it." Such is his "meekness."
Andr‚ Neher recalls that "one searches vainly in the Books of Moses for the exposition of a
doctrine or theology." Moses "had no need of dreams, trances, quackery, ecstasies, but spoke
with God man-to-man." [23] His was a down-to-earth religion. He was a cold, careful, bold
manager of schemes and driver of men. There is pressure by Miriam and others to begin a line
of hereditary seers [24] . He rejects them. He is hardly ever called a prophet; the word is
far too limited for him. Moses is called by Yahweh only three times: from the Burning Bush,
from the Holy Mountain and then at the Tabernacle where Yahweh instructs him how sacrifices
shall be done [25] . He is moderate, too, in hallucinating; he does so almost always in
private and restricted circumstances. He does not prophesy hysterically.
His only outburst occurs when, returning triumphant from the Holy Mountain, he comes upon
the Golden Calf worshippers, whereupon he dashes the sacred tablets of Yahweh upon the
ground. The frequent violence that bears his imprimatur is phrased in divine rhetoric and
impersonally ordered and executed. His murder of an Egyptian work-boss has a surprising
explanation.
After this killing, Moses goes into exile. He has been betrayed to the government by two
Hebrews (brothers, says a legend) who were fighting, These workmen know of the secret murder
of the Egyptian, who had been beating a Hebrew, and when Moses, now perhaps 30 years old,
intercedes between them and admonishes the assailant, this person replies in words typical
of lower class insolence to an upper-class member of their minority group: "Who made you a
prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?"
Moses was startled because he had "looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the
Egyptian and hid him in the sand." [26] One wonders how they learned the secret, by the
next day, too, unless they were working for or near Moses; and then how did Moses kill the
foreman? Legend says be killed him not by violence, but by uttering the secret name of god
[27] . We know that this word is the treasure of the Ark of the Covenant. It is the
equivalent of the word YHWH.
Was the Hebrew who was being abused by the supervisor a Levite or helper of Moses? And did
Moses electrocute the supervisor on one of his dangerous experimental contraptions?
Ordinarily, in a highly stratified society, a highly placed person will not demean himself
by physically fighting a member of a lower stratum, but will have the job done for him by
the man's equals. Were the Hebrew accusers other workmen in the same establishment, who had
perhaps helped Moses bury the body? A body is heavy and not easy to dispose of , nor would a
prince dirty his hands with a body.
If my guess were correct, it would explain why a princely official could expect to be haled
before the highest authority, and why he would in person or in absentia be condemned to
exile. The enemies of Moses in the pyramid priest-science establishment would be awaiting
such an occasion to demand the punishment of this rash and controversial man.
Philo Judaeus is close to arguing in this vein. Pharaoh punished Moses, not for killing the
foreman but for siding with those perceived to be enemies of the Pharaoh. "When the Egyptian
authorities had once got an opportunity of attacking the young man, having already reason
for looking upon him with suspicion..., they even implanted in his (Pharaoh's] mind an
apprehension that Moses was plotting to deprive him of his kingdom." They told Pharaoh, "He
will strip you of your crown. He has no humble designs or notions." [28]
THE COURTLY SHEPHERD
Next we come upon Moses in exile among the Midianites. "In his general appearance and
clothing he looks like an Egyptian." [29] Buber, too, comments on his "court dress" when he
first appears at the water well in Midian.
At the well, the daughters of a priest-shepherd named Jethro, who came early to water their
flock, are being pushed away (molested and sexually attacked, says the prurient legend) [30]
by several rough shepherds. He must have been impressive, this stranger, to browbeat the
local roughnecks. Upper-class Egyptian dress was known, most likely, and Egyptian authority
was not far out of mind. Moses must have been generally well-equipped to appear so well
turned out several days' journey from Memphis. He rescues the damsels, and is presented to
their father and referred to by him as "the Egyptian" who helped them so. "Egyptian?" goes
the legend; that is why the Lord kept Moses from entering the Promised Land: Moses should
have insisted immediately that he was Hebrew, not Egyptian [31] .
Moses bought a flock, or tended the livestock of Jethro. He was a careful and methodical
shepherd, the legend goes. And he fathered two boys by Zipporah, daughter of Jethro. His
mind was on natural events and the court of Egypt; his ambitions raged within him. He
explored the area, for the site where he came upon the Burning Bush was removed from his
pastures.
Besides his trained and self-developed scientific acumen about things electric, he may have
been one of those unusual persons who are hypersensitive to static electricity [32] . He
would become the world's most famous dowser, finding water miraculously in the desert [33]
. No student, to my knowledge, has yet graded a sample of people by test as to their
electromagnetic fields which can be measured by vacuum-tube voltmeters and vary in intensity
from 15 to 20 millivolts, depending upon emotional states and certainly upon hereditary or
bred differences [34] .
The famous "Burning Bush" was a "thornbush," its spikes pointed to heaven. (See Figure 17)
It was speaking with the sounds of electricity and releasing fire without being consumed.
Moses knew better than any man what this meant. His imagination began to work rapidly. He
took off his shoes to help ground any electrical contact and examined the bush closely. He
touched his staff to the active area and it jumped like a snake. A phosphorus dew whitened
his hand and he wiped it off.
A surge of excitement might have overwhelmed him. He is said to have had a revelation that a
great god was addressing him from out of the bush. The bush suddenly symbolized all that he
wanted to be and would be. The portents of heaven were in the sound and flames. They
culminated in the Burning Bush experience: Moses who had been watching carefully for changes
in the sky, would tell of this experience when asked: "When did your visions come together
in you for the first time?"
Figure 17. The Burning Bush.
He explained his prophetic revelation to Jethro: the new presence of the great god in the
world, the fitting of this god to the aspirations and religion of a discontented Hebrew
people. He sent a message to the priest Aaron (Yahweh had assured him that Aaron would come
to meet him) and when the reply was received and was favorable, he was ready to return to
Egypt. He departed with his family [35] .
CIRCUMCISION AND SPEECH PROBLEMS
An episode occurs on the way to Egypt that surprises and puzzles many students. Yahweh tries
to kill his own representative on Earth. Some say by lightning, others by Satan, in serpent
form, swallowing him. Moses simply cannot keep away from electricity in one form or another.
At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah [his
wife] took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, and touched Moses' feet with it and said,
"Surely you are a bridegroom to me." So he let him alone. Then it was that she said, "You
are a bridegroom of blood, because of the circumcision."
No more is written [36] .
There is a question of pronouns here. Some say that Moses must have been already circumcised
and all the pronouns refer to his son, making even "Moses' feet" "his" (the son's). Others
say that Yahweh was trying to kill Moses because he had still not attended to his own
circumcision. That is, lacking a proper scientific hypothesis, they make of Yahweh's action
something arbitrary.
The Editors of the Oxford Bible become avant-garde and write in a footnote: "Feet, a
euphemism for the sexual organs (Is. 7: 20)." Isaiah does support this interpretation,
speaking there of a razor shaving the head and "the hair of the feet." I would agree with
this view,
It is surprising that Freud, who certainly knew of this psychoanalytic principle, if indeed
he were not its discoverer, makes no mention of it in his Moses and Monotheism. Can it be
that this great objective mind was too fixated upon his idea that Moses imposed circumcision
upon the Jews to notice who was circumcising whom? Freud further ignores the son and has
Moses being circumcised explicitly; but he says the story is false and that Moses must have
been circumcised since he was Egyptian, a kind of petitio principiis that is not otherwise
absent from Freud's book. Buber has Zipporah both circumcising the boy and touching the
boy's legs. Daiches suggests that Yahweh was aiming his bolt at Zipporah and the boy.
Were the Hebrews circumcised at this time or not? Freud says no: the Sumerians, Semites, and
Babylonians were not; but the Egyptians generally were [37] . Hence another proof that
Moses was an Egyptian and wanted his Israelites to do the same. But then why, if he were an
Egyptian, would he not have long before been circumcised?
The situation seems totally confused, and I could make the situation worse by asking how
Zipporah, a Midianite, happened to be expert with the flint and incantation? Or why did not
Moses do the job himself? If Moses were a Hebrew or an Egyptian he would have been
circumcised at one time or another. How could he expect to lead a circumcised people if he
were not circumcised himself, and even demand their circumcision before admittance to full
membership in the new nation?
I go into the matter because it may bear upon Moses' character. If Moses is part Hebrew and
part Egyptian, and assimilated almost completely to Egyptian thought and ways, and his
Levitic friends are almost all circumcised in the Egyptian mode, then he is under cross-
pressures. But perhaps he has always been too proud to let himself be circumcised as a
concession to Egyptianization. And by "proud" I mean "regards it as a threat to himself" and
perhaps in this was defended by his freethinking Egyptian mother: "No part of my precious
boy will be taken away." And there is no patriarchal father to put the boy in his place by
circumcision.
At the same time, Moses has become in character extremely authoritarian and patriarchal.
Thinking of himself as his own remote father plus the father who has rejected him, the
Pharaoh, Moses projects all of his patriarchalism onto his god Yahweh, who becomes a most
arbitrary and autocratic father, carrying all of Moses' subjective passion into the role,
and letting Moses loose upon the world in his name.
Now Moses, the uncircumcised, becomes Moses, the all-powerful father, in favor of the
circumcision of others. Here he may be supported by Levitical-Egyptian scientific opinion.
It is the modern argument on behalf of the practice. The Levites and Moses were of a
character to believe in health practices; it is only because of the modern tendency
(certainly not of many younger scholars, though) to think of ancient thought forms as
primitive and incapable of pragmatic behavior, that the idea of a "health practice" as
opposed to a ritual is usually ignored. I would surmise that Moses believed the Egyptian
practice sane and civilized so that "rational" as well as "unconscious" motives spurred him
in his campaign for circumcision.
Again cross-pressures, if Moses were not circumcised himself. But profound and sincere
hypocrisy is of the essence of the charismatic leader: Do as I say, not as I do;
furthermore, I am symbolically circumcised before Yahweh himself, simply one more of the
miracles that set me off from ordinary men, Joshua (5: 1-9), beyond the Jordan, calls for
the total population to be circumcised. Evidently, the practice had fallen into desuetude,
implying either that all or some of those born in the desert had not been circumcised.
Whether this had grown out of Moses' inability to exercise control over the many new
adherents to Israel gathered up along the way, or whether a second mass circumcision of
confirmation of unity and dedication to Yahweh was here performed is debated; probably both
are true.
Moses has a speech defect. He is slow of speech and tongue [38] . The words do not come out.
The legendary story of how Moses became thick of tongue is an excellent example of how myth
speaks truth even when highly improbable. Moses was only three years old at the time and was
sitting with his mother the Princess Bitriah, daughter of Pharaoh, at a dinner party. Moses
took the crown from off the king's head and placed it upon his own head. The group was
astounded and Balaam, son of Beor, reminded the Pharaoh how troublesome and clever the
Hebrews could be and suggested killing him. Pharaoh called for advice, however, from wise
men and so came Angel Gabriel in disguise. Let the boy choose between a coal of fire and an
onyx stone. If he chooses the gem, slay him, but if he chooses the coal, he shall be judged
a simple little child. Moses was forced by Gabriel to seize the live coal, and because he
thrust his burnt hand into his mouth and burnt his lips and tongue, he became slow of speech
and tongue.
Legend here expresses Moses' mind, I think. Possessed of great ambitions, Moses "burned his
lips and tongue" psychologically so as not to confess them. One is reminded of a kind of
common saying: "She bit her lip to keep from exclaiming in protest..." An alternate common
expression, at least in Germanic culture, can occur when a person blurts out words that she
instantly regrets: "Oh, I've burned my tongue." It is pertinent here as well to point out
how frequently schizophrenics develop speech patterns of an odd, disjointed, fragmented, and
irrational kind.
When he explains his lame speech to Yahweh at the Burning Bush to avoid going on his mission
to liberate Israel, he is told that Yahweh will tell him what to say and Moses can put the
words into the mouth of the eloquent Aaron who is coming to meet him,
In two further incidents, he is depressed and tells Yahweh that he cannot persuade the
reluctant Hebrews nor the Pharaoh of what Yahweh wishes, because he is "a man of
uncircumcised lips." And, again: "I am of uncircumcised lips." Yahweh dismisses him the
first time and on the second occasion again says he needs only Aaron to speak for him.
Yahweh then adds, significantly: "See, I make you as God to Pharaoh; and Aaron your brother
shall be your prophet." [39] This metaphorical expression is not used again, For it does
make Moses his two fathers - Yahweh and Pharaoh. It reveals for an instant the otherwise
suppressed wish of Moses. In any event, the first metaphor is a transference from the
genital region to the oral one, and vice versa.
Moses cannot get his words out for reasons also bearing upon sexuality. Jewish legend has it
that at the same encounter by the burning bush, Yahweh instructs Moses to forego hereafter
the pleasures of the marriage bed; two children are enough; he is now to be wedded to the
female holy ghost, uniting with "the Shekinah, that she might descend to earth for his
sake." [40]
But this is post-climactic in Moses' life. He has long been mumbling in an attempt to
control his fierce resentments against the father who was not and the father who exiled him.
(The pharaoh who exiled him was, besides the great father figure of political authority, his
mother's father and, given the incestuous customs of the Egyptian royalty, perhaps his
mother's spouse or lover and therefore his "father.")
I would therefore ascribe Moses' incoherent speech to his inhibited rage, a rage reaching
the magnificent heights which only the most ambitious achieve [41] . "He repressed all the
principal impulses and most violent affections of the Soul..." [42] And the connection of
his speech with his genital integrity - verbally as well as in fact - is psychologically and
physiologically strong. From this powerful foundation in the unconscious, it is therefore
possible to conclude, first, that Moses was never circumcised, that he seized upon a
symbolic circumcision before Yahweh himself as adequate for his own conscience and to
appease others, that his wife and son were apt tools for the purpose, that he could insist
that all Israelites, as Yahweh's children, must do their duty by their father and be
circumcised.
Moses neglected his wife sexually and was reproached by Miriam, one legend states [43] .
Philo Judaeus wrote: "He never provided his stomach with any luxuries beyond those necessary
tributes which nature has appointed to be paid to it, and as to the pleasures of the organs
below the stomach he paid no attention to them at all except as far as the object of having
legitimate children was concerned." [44] He scarcely neglected legislating on the subject.
If the fulsome detailing of sexual taboos in the Pentateuch is more the product of
unoccupied priestly successors and purist prophets than of Moses himself, he designed its
framework. It is nothing new: the striving for absolute power and authority go along often
with sexual impotency, or uninterest. Moses in de-imaging Yahweh did a more conscientious
job in the sexual realm than in all other parts of the anatomy. The de-sexing of Yahweh may
have been part of the motive for de-imaging him, in fact, rather than the reverse.
Every movement, whether political or religious, that has since been tinged with mosaism has
stressed sexual repression, Aside from outright prohibitions in most life circumstances,
there has occurred an infinity of regulations on the management of the sexual organs, making
of Yahweh a gynecologist as well as an expert butcher.
Z. Rix and Peter Tompkins have traced some cometary sources for this painstaking religious
interest in sex [45] , and argue cogently that, when the comet lost its tail, whether it
was cut off, struck off, or bit off, a fine precedent for all manner of sex neuroticism
presented itself to human view. Hardly a glimpse of this enters the Bible of course; largely
the effects occur without treating of the underlying causes, whether in Moses or in the
great comet. The lightning bolt, or serpent Satan, or nightmare inspired Moses to think, and
to think meant for him to act upon some major problem. Since those who speak of a close
escape from death infer a divine presence, Moses had to put his mind upon Yahweh. Here was
his immense new revelation of a father "not trusting Moses," say the commentators. No;
conversely, Moses was not trusting the father. Not yet. But in the decision to circumcise
himself symbolically and to lead a group united by circumcision, be could gain one more
measure of control of the father. He could accept and please his close followers, the
Levites. He could preserve his own bodily integrity and possess the female Holy Ghost. Thus,
three items of the Old Testament carry a profound illumination of Moses - the Burning Bush,
the assault by Yahweh, and the case of the tongue-tied prophet.
More is to be made of Moses' speech problem; it has to do with the character of Yahweh,
which is treated later on. The reader will probably guess correctly that a man with a speech
defect will prefer an ideal without one. Even better than this, a man with a speech defect
will invent a model whose speech defect will be, not a source of humiliation, but a divine
gibberish to which all must bow down, on pain of death, and who speaks to him alone so that
he, who cannot be well understood, is the only one in the whole world capable of
understanding all that is spoken by this other unintelligible being. Thus he punishes those
who would not understand him, by the act of interpreting another voice for them.
SCIENTIST AND INVENTOR
Most of the scientific and inventive genius of Moses is shrouded in a general
misunderstanding of the biblical language of fire, spirit, and the Ark. Much is short-
circuited by the interjection of Yahweh in all affairs. Still, enough emerged even in early
times to create a legend of Moses as a scientist.
Philo Judaeus wrote of his intellectual precocity [46] . A composite portrait can be drawn
from the Pagan writers of Greece and Rome [47] . Moses was an Egyptian who invented sun
dials for solar worship in place of obelisks. He was learned, a great magician. He was the
best of alchemists, a copious writer, and was called Thoth-Moses by the Egyptians. The
legend of Pythagoras influenced the writing of the life of Moses during the late Alexandrian
times, writes Buber [48] . Another source relates that in the same general period, in a
fashion then typical, Jewish legends grew up asserting "that Moses, blithely identified both
with the semi-mythical poet Musaeus and with the Egyptian Thoth, had been the teacher of
Orphaeus.. and the inventor of navigation, architecture, and the hieroglyphic script." [49]
As the French say: "One lends only to the rich..."
We have already presented enough evidence (and there will be more) to show that Moses was a
master of electrical science. Until it should be discovered that the Egyptians possessed the
Ark, that great technology must be credited to Moses in Israel. His altar does not stand out
technically from the other altars of the priests of the high places [50] . The age of the
Delphic altar technology is uncertain. It may well go back to Mosaic times. Here again, we
await archaeological and mythological studies that are illuminated by appropriate
hypotheses. We will question later how the god Thoth (Hermes) and Moses were connected.
There is an old tradition both flattering and uncomplimentary, that pictures Moses as a
magician, a sorcerer, a medicine man, and a seer. From the presumptuous modern perspective,
these words are insults and invitations to disputation. I see no reason for defining and
distinguishing them, and fitting them well or illy to Moses.
Buber barely skirts the "our boy is no magician" attitude, yet we can quote him here as
showing that Moses was a better magician, ergo a better scientist, than others, and I have
argued earlier that Moses was tolerated up to the last plague precisely because the Egyptian
court knew and respected his science, going back many years. Discussing the plague of frogs,
Buber is moved to say: "That he has... foretold the incident, and unlike the usual
magicians, has done so without any magical conjurations... and that he further knows how to
interpret the signs of the incident; these facts have a somewhat weird atmosphere not
inviting any too close contact. The unwieldy words, with which a strange God jerkily moves
his throat, only serve to enhance the weirdness." [51] If correct prediction is the test of
a scientist, then, never mind the sorcery, augury, conjuration or magic; Moses is a
distinguished scientist.
Moses himself is at the same time interpreted as one who banishes magic, augury, and
divination. But, even when we discover that science underlays the Ark, we must grant that
the Ark is intended for augury and divination. No one except Moses can go to the Holy of
Holies for oracles, but he does so himself. Judgement is rendered upon Korah and his band of
rebels by seeking signs from Yahweh, and so on. One man's science is another man's magic.
Our position here is that Moses exceeded by far the then normal ratio of science to non-
science in a large realm of practices having to do with discovery, instrumentation,
application, and foresight.
Moses' alleged detestation of the non-sciences is part fact (granted he was more of a
scientist) and quite expected. His suppression of non-science is part of his desire to
suppress science as well, for he did not want more than one Ark, nor more than one "research
center," for reasons of political control. Nor did he want people to engage in practices,
which, quite apart from their scientific validity, would make of them independent leaders in
prophecy, ceremony, or combat. Yahwism was to be a central rule interpreted by priests after
Moses and enforced by the security police. Free science was believed to be inimical to
religion and good government.
We have already dealt with Moses' competence in the field of radiation diseases, phosphorus,
and manna. According to legend [52] , Moses claimed to know "how leprosy arises and how it
disappears." He certainly knew in Miriam's case and could be sure that seven days outside
the camp was enough to heal her "leprosy" or phosphorus burns.
We should also remind ourselves of Moses' Brazen Serpent, probably his final perfected
instrument of the type of the rod. Used in conjunction with the Ark, it found a place
therein, and was exhibited for a long period as a healing caduceus on its own account until
it was destroyed. The contraption could by itself act as an electrical sparker, and it is
conceivable that it was used both for charismatic (psychosomatic) therapy and for
electroshock therapy.
Moses was not an astrologer (except in the sense that any astronomer whose ideas are
mistaken or outmoded is an astrologer). On the contrary, his preoccupation was earthly, and
he hated astrological science. This probably stems from his controversies with the Egyptian
"pyramid scientists" and his perceived "persecution" by them.
In Deuteronomy [53] he warns the Jews against worshipping the heavenly bodies, condemning
to death by stoning any man or woman who is proven to have "gone and served other gods and
worshipped them, or the sun, or the moon or any of the host of heaven..." But there is no
question of his meteorological interests and competence; he is a master of atmospheric and
electrical arts.
Why did he not expand Yahwism to take in the heavenly movements? The answer is fairly plain:
there is too much fatalism, too little drive, permitted in the fascination with celestial
bodies; further, other religions were performing astrological services as effectively as the
Jews with their scant resources might, and hence people would hear the fatal call of Egypt
and Babylon. Again the problem of control. Precisely during Moses' tenure, also, the skies
were usually clouded and dusted over; it was a poor period for astronomical observation.
Finally, a sedentary observatory would be needed for star studies; this a wandering nation
could not provide.
In Jewish tradition we hear that a new calendar was divinely ordained to begin in the month
of Nisan, with the Passover to be celebrated on the 15th of Nisan, "but the computations for
the calendar were so involved that Moses could not understand them until God showed him the
movements of the moon plainly." [54] God ordered a court to be set up to attest to each new
moon. Apparently there was some change in lunar, solar, and Earth apparent motions, together
with an intervening cloudiness. New calendars were required. One of Velikovsky's surprising
hypotheses was that the 365 day year did not exist before Exodus, and that before Exodus the
year was of only 360 days. He denied that available evidence supported such beliefs. He
cites hints that the new Hyksos rulers introduced the 360-day year in Egypt and that while
the Jews were in Egypt, 210 modern years passed, although 400 revolutions of the sun
occurred [55] . Here I confine myself to the indication of mosaic calendar change, and to a
second suggestion namely, that the year's length before Exodus may have been 260 days. This
was the sacred year of the Mayans tenaciously adhered to by these great ancient American
calendrists for long after they designed and employed a new calendar [56] .
Evidence of Mayan-Egyptian interconnections is not absent, but the problem is too complex
and controversial to treat briefly. Suffice it to suggest that the 360-day year would give
Moses an age at death of 85, instead of 120, 360-day years, and other time counts of the
several centuries before Moses would also make more sense. I fear however that the temporal
confusion is so great that no easy formula will ever deal with all instances.
Perhaps the most enduring of Moses' scientific contributions has to do with the beginnings
of popular records and historiography. Hardly had the Israelites left Egypt when Yahweh said
to Moses: "Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua..." [57]
it being a curse upon the Amalekites. In another surprising sentence of Exodus, Yahweh
declares: "Whoever has sinned against me, him will I blot out of My book." [58] History and
anti-history: god as a writer and bookkeeper! Had this ever happened before? What faith in
the record! Yahweh was supposed actually to have written the first set of tablets of the
Decalogue. They were written with "the finger of Yahweh." When Moses broke them, he had to
repair back to the Holy Mountain, like a dutiful schoolboy, with a new set of writing
materials.
Moses made the Jews "the People of the Book." From then on, they were literate and regardful
of the written word. That Moses was quite literate surprises no one, yet it should. Probably
only scribes then wrote, and the priest scientists of Egypt. Neither common man nor noble
would be able to write, one more indication that Moses had been more than a prince in Egypt.
Some scholars and an old tradition credit Moses with inventing the alphabet [59] . The
alphabet that matches sounds with signs, as contrasted with communicating written meaning by
pictures and constructions, is accredited to a North Semitic person and group of the same
mid-second millennium of which we are speaking in this book. We know, too, that the
Israelites were a people forged - in a strict sense of integration of diverse elements - in
anticipation of, and amidst catastrophe. They established their continuity precisely in the
period between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages when other peoples that we know about were
experiencing a rending asunder of their cultural continuity. Therefore, more rapidly than
others, the Israelites might have captured the peak development of the Middle Bronze Age and
applied it under the new conditions of the Late Bronze Age.
At the time of Exodus, Israelites knew probably three kinds of script, the Egyptian
hieroglyphic, the Babylonian cuneiform, and a popular script. Ernst Sellin called it "a
popular alphabetic writing." He says: "The only piece of evidence that goes to suggest that
Israel may have been acquainted with it as early as the Mosaic period is that the Mosaic
oracular symbols, the Urim and the Thummim, appear to be not unconnected with the first and
last letters of this alphabet... but it would be perfectly possible that Moses might have
taken it over from the Kenites. Cf. I Chron. 2: 55. This alphabet made it possible to
express everything with exactitude in the national idiom, which was not possible with the
cuneiform.." [60] Sixty years after Sellin's remarks, Barry Page, employing the revised
chronology used here for Egyptian history, can conclude:
The initiation of a 'developed' linear alphabetic script in Canaan occurs after the
conquest and occupation of Israel by Joshua, and one is strongly tempted to suggest that
Israelite scribes brought a developed linear alphabetic system with them from Egypt to
Canaan [61] .
Moses is of the right time, the right place, and the right race( s). He has, too, a thorough
education and literacy; he knows how to work with symbols. He has the explosive ingenuity as
a person, and what is crucial, he exercises the necessary social control over his people;
for an alphabet is a communication technology; it must be imparted with coercive sanctions
or high voluntary motivation. With the adjustment of dates so that the Hyksos invasion of
Egypt coincides with the Hebrew emigration from Egypt, the thought that the Hyksos may have
carried an alphabet into Egypt is lamed by the fact that they did not impose the alphabet
upon the Egyptians. There were many movements of tribes and peoples now, but was there any
people whose particular situation was equally congenial to the invention? Several theories
of Ugaritic and other origins must go by the way, because, by the chronology we are using,
their alphabetic usage must be advanced to a later period and the Israelite presence placed
ahead of it.
Nor have we finished with the circumstantial evidence pointing toward Moses. The tongue-tied
genius was inherently interested in sounds. He is, we know, also interested in communicating
- both because he is a distant type of character and because he is embarrassed at his speech
- through agents (Aaron, yes) as well as written messages. Further, he was the originator of
the idea that Yahweh speaks his own name; Yahweh can be pronounced like a string of
phonetics proceeding from an electrical discharge of the Ark. If one imitates the various
hums of live wires and St. Elmo's fires, one can imagine the name of Yahweh continuously
repeated. If this name is written down as in the First Commandment of the Decalogue, it is a
phonetic name, perhaps the very first.
But Moses is still adding to his points as inventor of the alphabet. He carries the
Decalogue down from Mount Sinai on two tablets. Could he do so if they were written in
hieroglyphs?
A scholar complains that the Decalogue could not be compressed into two tablets, But it
could if it were Moses writing in the abbreviated and new script. Of course, one cannot yet
prove that Moses was the principal effective inventor of the alphabet, but, on the evidence,
he may be acknowledged as the leading contender for the honor with regard to the Near East.
With all this, I have hardly begun with the inventions of Moses. Bearing in mind that no
invention comes without a buildup of antecedents and precedents and that Moses, as hero,
even autobiographer, of the Pentateuch, will be credited for some discoveries not of his own
making, still the total is astonishingly great. I shall adduce here briefly five sets of
inventions, amounting to fourteen important individual inventions in all, that are in
addition to the inventions of the Ark, the calendar, historiography, the alphabet and
several others hitherto described.
The first set is national: Moses invented the idea of a new nation, the concept of Israel,
and the plan for it to come into existence - the Passover and Exodus. Surely there was
insurrectionism in Egypt and among the Hebrews; surely the name of Israel-Jacob was known as
a grand patriarch of old; surely there was a plethora of desires and schemes to win
independence or set up a colony somewhere; perhaps a vague notion of the Promised Land
existed. But Moses alone, so far we can tell, confirmed that all of these things could be
planned and carried out, and he directed the operations. That he met with a response
adequate to the occasion, and could rally the people and find the resources, that he could
evade a crushing preemptive suppression were effects of his workable scheme. The outcome was
the republican confederation of Israel.
A second set of Mosaic inventions is religious: the new Covenant of Yahweh with Israel which
he "negotiated;" the idea of a Constitution of morality: the Decalogue of Commandments; and
the Code of Laws [62] . Of these, the Decalogue is outstanding, both as to form and to
contents. Let me abbreviate these commandments of Yahweh [63] :
1. I am your god-ruler. 2. Do not experiment with other gods. 3. Do not employ me
needlessly. 4. Rest from labor to celebrate my being. 5. Respect your parents. 6. Do not
kill amongst yourselves. 7. Confine sex to your spouse. 8. Do not steal. 9. Do not slander.
10. Do not covet.
The first four are intended to protect Yahweh. The six that follow are for the protection of
the community. All are designed for the circumstances of life then and there. They are
designed for people moving among disasters and disorganization. That they have been
considered to be for all time and have been proclaimed as eternal simply proves that mankind
has been forever in a state of disaster and disorganization, one step, two steps, but ever
hardly more, from the Israelites in the desert.
They are almost entirely negative, a criminal code, rather than positive, and punishment for
their violation is intended to be heavy. To contemplate god; to sympathize with the gods of
other people; to wish divine help for all who need it; to enjoy one's rest from labor; to
love and respect one's parents in the measure of your maturity and their worth; to respect
human life everywhere; to give a full measure of intimate love; to guard the possessions of
others as your own; to be benevolent and generous to others; to wish all people well: these
are hardly suggested in the Decalogue, nor are many other positive virtues. The Decalogue is
a hard-hitting, explicit set of solutions for survival, brilliantly conceived and
promulgated by Moses (though almost frustrated by the preemptive apostasy of the Golden
Calf).
Even with this explanation, modern exegesis has presented a hurdle to believing that this
Ethical Dialogue is of Moses. Winnett [64] assigns the Ritual Decalogue [65] to the
times of Moses and the Ethical one much later, to others. Judging its linguistics, it is, he
argues, of a more cultivated age. The question can hardly be solved by stylistic
considerations, inasmuch as, throughout the history of the Old Testament, we have a
condition prevailing whereby, alongside what has found its way into writing, there runs an
oral tradition that has not been written down and a problem of lost written pieces that had
later to be recomposed.
Moreover, the Ritual Decalogue is heavily agricultural. It contains instructions on how to
make an altar, to sacrifice, and to cultivate; on attending to Yahweh's words but to mention
no other god; it defines the Sabbath and feast days, and prescribes dietary practices.
If my analysis is correct, Moses was quite able, and indeed more likely, to have produced
the Ethical than the Ritual Decalogue, The catastrophe of Exodus would not have destroyed
Moses' cultivated and managerial mind nor those of the elders. The Ethical Decalogue would
have been the more useful one in the wanderings. The Ritual or Cultic Decalogue would have
emerged as a product of post-mosaic times, when the culture of the leaders would have
slumped for several centuries.
The third set of Mosaic inventions treats of anniversaries and history; the change of the
Sabbatical Year (from, I should say, a Saturnian-Elohist baseline to a Jovian-Yahwist
baseline); an intense revival of the Sabbath day with the purpose of serving Yahweh; the
possible inculcation of the second creation myth, that of Adam and Eve (which again I
attribute to Jovian Yahwism), to follow the Saturnian-Elohim creation myth of Genesis. These
are innovations, rather than heavy inventions. The Yahwist creation myth, like Mosaism in
general, is sin-obsessed, punitive, and vengeful. It tells of an age of fire rather than
water. It must have come into existence thousands of years later than the Elohim myth of
creation.
The fourth set of inventions, more important here, deals with social organization. Moses
created a new organization of twelve tribes that he called Israel, counted the people by
tribes, and had them organized by tribes and by military units within tribes. The military
units were based upon the decimal system, not upon families or clans. At the same time, he
created a separation of powers between the priesthood and the security police (Levites), and
defined their functions; these men he placed over all the tribes, and then created an
apparatus of state: the Ark, centralized worship, the Tabernacle; and provided (at the
instigation of his father-in-law Jethro) a means of instituting complaints and pleas in the
tribes and carrying the more important cases before Moses himself.
Finally, there is the religion itself: Yahweh and Yahwism as an integrated religion. The
Elohist tradition "quite unambiguously states that Yahweh was a newly received god for the
Israelite war confederacy received through Moses" [66] . So far as we can tell, Moses
invented the name "Yahweh." Merely to imagine that this is possible is amazing. The
Egyptians had not heard of the name, nor probably had the Hebrews. Both groups used Elohim
until Moses brought Yahweh from his exile. Later on, this point will be argued further,
Although I believe that I have proven Yahweh to be in one sense an electrical engineering
system, in the broad sense Yahweh stands for an integrated social system, a religion replete
with a tradition in Genesis, a priesthood, a mobile cathedral, and a host of ordinances.
This last achievement of Moses may also be considered as the invention of an integrated
system of law related, of course, to the Decalogue. Thus Moses belongs with Confucius,
Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed as an inventor of religion. There can be no question but that
mosaism was as far from Elohimism as from Christianity and that these two latter
manifestations may be closer to each other than to mosaism.
TALKING WITH GODS
Among the many thousands of Israel, there must have been a hundred who talked with god, the
holy spirit, or angels - some once, some many times, some with every authentic sign, others
lacking all substantiation. No one but Moses talked with god authoritatively: there is the
difference. One has to earn the right to be believed to talk with god. Moses had very right
to do so. Practically everybody admitted this; and almost all thought it fitting and proper
that, as the Pharaoh of Egypt was himself a god, so the leader of the Hebrews might bear the
Lord upon him like a crown.
When one claims to be talking to supernatural super-powerful beings one is "talking with
gods." Such behavior is not at all uncommon and is engaged in sometimes by most contemporary
people. One "prays to god" and god "answers one's prayers." In cases of disaster, such
behaviors are normal. About ten percent of a western population in non-catastrophic times
experience visual or auditory hallucinations, or both. [67] Many of these talk to the
"other." When there is great physical and nervous stress and difficult decisions must be
made, tendencies to hallucinate increase sharply. The environment, then afterwards the
person, is deranged. Thus, a Dutchwoman on Java, when Krakatoa is exploding, flees in terror
and arrives in complete distress and agony among people, where she hears her own voice as
someone else talking [68] . An "Evil One," to quote one survivor, is everywhere causing
confusion and driving people mad.
In ordinary times, persisting delusionary behavior is deemed unjustified and therefore a
symptom of mental derangement. When the behavior is part of a syndrome of activities and
attitudes adjudged antisocial or personally deleterious, it is grounds for special
repressive measures against (on behalf of) the person. When the behavior is associated with
"beneficial" attitudes and activities, the person is tolerated and even promoted in esteem
and encouraged to develop.
From culture to culture, or (which is to say the same) from one epoch to another, talking to
god is deemed more or less possible and more or less rational by the therapeutic rulers, who
are theologians, psychiatrists and politicians. The role of ordinary people in relation to
the therapeutic rulers is generally similar to their role in relation to the elites of other
areas of social rule.
In the case at hand, that of Moses and the politico-religious environment of Moses, there is
every reason to believe that the situation was highly favorable to exceptional cases of
talking to god. In the Egyptian setting the general power configuration was a theological
bureaucracy, with a rationalized god-man ruler whose divine qualities were part of the law
and did not have to be frequently demonstrated by charismatic acts: such was Pharaoh. On the
same side, the Egyptian people may have been inefficiently coordinated to the ruling
religion in that they were prone to accept wayward actions and ideas connected with
religions. This, again, is not uncommon. It may be presumed that the present populations of
the secular regimes of the world are also prone, though not to the same extent, to expect
"true" and "real" divine manifestations, including talking with god.
Further, in the Egypt of the late Middle Empire, the Hebrews were generally a separately
organized, ethnically distinct, and geographically concentrated element of the Egyptian
population. It is precisely among groups of such special distinction and traditions that
deviant religious manifestations may appear, often in connection with political movements
arising out of perceived grievances. Numerous instances may be located in the history of
protestantism and heresy in the Christian empires and among American Indian tribes of the
past century. If, under such circumstances, a figure like Moses originates, the grounds are
prepared for manifestations of charismatic leadership.
In such cases, talking to god is one of a number of attributes, though a key one, that are
attributed to the leader, here Moses. Indeed, given the circumstances, so fertile for
charisma and dedicated believers, it is to be remarked how widespread was the scepticism and
opposition faced by Moses among the Hebrews. One may speculate that, if there had been an
Egyptian policy of promoting an alternative Hebrew leadership and if the Egyptian elite and
mass had not themselves been subjected to immanent tendencies to religious deviations, and,
most importantly, if natural disturbances were not mounting in intensity, there would have
been no real chance of Moses' assumption of power and successful leadership of a mass
insurrection. Moses himself realized this and returned to Egypt when he deemed conditions to
be favorable.
On the question of to whom Moses was talking and the functional analysis of this
relationship, we are led to several conclusions. Although it is by no means clear how long
Moses had spent in the psychically incompatible Midianite environment, probably a period of
some years is involved. He is granted a family. One legend has him spending forty years as
King of Ethiopia before arriving in Midian to begin his period there. These stories indicate
at least the passage of some time, and the development of a character which while basically
operating with a mind that knows intimately the Egypt of the high courts, of polyglot areas,
and jealously competitive theo-sciences, would have suppressed much and fixed upon a
relationship between the old life and new life over the years.
Moses is an originally internalized rage type; his renowned humility rides upon a deep inner
belief in his superiority both of genesis and of mind. He would therefore be prone to
hallucinating and projecting with great conviction this deeper level of his personality.
Finally it became what was so obviously offered by the relatively devout and unidimensional
shepherding culture - a god who discussed issues with him and who alternately browbeat him,
cajoled him, and seduced him. Biblical historians have wrangled over how much of Yahweh
Moses brought from Egypt and how much he brought to the Hebrews from the Midianites. The one
critical export to Egypt was the talking god.
The pattern of hallucinatory projective development is so obvious that one would have to
believe either that many thousands, perhaps millions, of characters in similar etiological
circumstances have spoken to their god, or else that Moses was talking to himself, employing
a spectacular set of media provided by natural events. Once more we recall the theory based
on tradition and on evidence that Moses was a great magician and derived much of his
political power from his successful competition with other renowned contestants in this
sphere. Yes, we say, Moses was a successful competitor in contests of the marvelous. But his
magic was the expression of a condition much more profound than magic.
Those scholars who are inclined to attribute magic to phenomena such as were played upon and
excited by Moses and magicians, are usually ignorant of the intrinsic, embedded place in the
history of religion and politics of persons possessed. The magician is, at least in the most
common usage of the term, a person who is in rational and cynical command of a limited
number of media of obscuration and symbols. The sincerely dedicated person of magical powers
who acts consistently in matters of political and religious organization, negotiations, and
leadership has to conduct himself in affairs that, intermittently magical, are ordinarily
replete with pragmatic judgements of reality, heartrending failures, dull routine, and
practical communications to mobilize human action. Agonizing self-appraisals, fits of
disbelief in the capabilities of his associates and the possibilities of the situation, and
divine discussions in both dysphoric and euphoric moods are not marks of the specialized and
self-aware magician, but of the charismatic leader. The leader can be relied upon for
responsible hallucinations. Thus was Moses.
THE CENTRALIZATION OF HALLUCINATION
The Holy Tabernacle and tent of meeting was not a public place. Moses had exclusive rights
to its use and extended that right to Aaron and other carefully supervised personnel. "When
Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with the Lord, he heard the voice speaking to
him from above the mercy seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two
cherubim, and it spoke to him." [69]
Hallucinations were exclusively his right, and were rarely delegated, Aaron was permitted
them from time to time. The occasion of the visit of the seventy elders to see Yahweh on
Mount Sinai was a command invitation from Yahweh conveyed by Moses to them. It was to be a
visible visitation, not a talk, and certainly not a roundtable, and was not completely
successful. The "footstool" of Yahweh was manifest in the gleaming sapphire rock and it is
said that the visitors saw Yahweh but not how or what they saw of him.
A more extensive visit with Yahweh was achieved later. For he commanded Moses, when the
people were desperate for meat, to bring seventy elders and "officers over them" to the
Tent. "And I will come down and talk with you there; and I will take some of the spirit
which is upon you and put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with
you, that you may not bear it yourself alone." So they came and were placed around the Tent.
"Yahweh came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was upon
him and put it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they
prophesied. But they did so no more." [70] It was their first and last "pep talk" from
Yahweh. That Moses and his aids were managing an electrochemical sound and light event here
is manifest.
Meanwhile, in the camp, two invited elders, Medad and Eldad, did not come and were
prophesying on their own account. A young man ran to tell Moses about them, and ever-ready
Joshua said: "My Lord Moses, forbid them." But Moses, in a surprisingly benevolent mood,
replied: "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, that
the Lord would put his spirit upon them." Needless to say, precious little of this occurred;
Joshua's posture was the official one. Talking to Yahweh was centralized.
Suppose that Moses had no god, as perhaps was the case before his revelation at the Burning
Bush. Suppose that he had otherwise all of his genius and driving energy. Might he not have
been accepted to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt and in the years of wandering? Could he not
have established his authority and held his power out of sheer ability to solve their
problems?
With all due regard for the pragmatism of people and for the effectiveness of sheer force
(which was not originally available to Moses), there must be an identification with a god, a
constitution, a popular will, or a possession by long inheritance to lend enough authority
to a person to rule a people. The leader may then monopolize the source of authority, but he
must rule in its name. The most obvious, striking, immediate, effective identification in
this case was with a god. Moses found the god and established the ruling formula: Yahweh,
through me, governs you for your own good. Moses could never have achieved his great tasks
by his admittedly great energies, genius, and artifices. Yahweh, his companion, had to be
acceptable to others, so that he, Moses, might be believed.
But how could such a stern god be acceptable to a people? It would not be Moses' Yahweh of
course if he were anything but rigorous and stern. But, again, if Moses could perform the
impossible feat of inventing a benign, good-humored, tolerant god, would not everyone be
happier (everyone, that is, except Moses!) and the god made more acceptable?
The answer may very well be that Yahweh was not so acceptable. We shall soon look into the
matter of revolts against Yahweh, but meanwhile we might try to visualize the Israelites and
the state of their beliefs. Truly we are dealing with a practically unknown situation and
there is nothing to be done about it, no public opinion surveys to call upon, no interviews
of people to determine the degree of charisma in their relation to Moses.
Nevertheless, it is more useful to guide our thought with a model of the people's beliefs
than to rest forever in a vague and confused cloud of ideas or to insist on some impossible
idea such as that Moses was faithfully served by the Children of Israel unto his death. As
soon as such an idea is abandoned, and one forces himself to roam with the help of an
instructed imagination over the square mile or more of the Israelite encampment, one begins
to appreciate how limited Moses' charisma must be.
AN ISRAELITE OPINION SURVEY
Granted his greatness and energy, given the need to believe in authority, given the marvels
of manna and water and quail, given the glorious Ark, prescribed a god to follow,
nonetheless with all of this, strong forces work against the total harmony of convictions
and behavior under the formula: 'Do thou as I say because I am uniquely assigned to your
salvation': the nearly impossible situation of the people out of Egypt - beset on all sides
by enemies, without a fixed territory, victims of repeated natural disasters, composed of
diverse ethnic and religious elements, holding little realistic hope for the future, death
on all sides. It is a charismatic setting, but by the same token, it is a setting for
disenchantment, despair, and opportunism. Gressmann thinks that Aaron and many others were
anti-Yahweh [71] .
I have supplied a table of what may have been the situation. If my analysis falls anywhere
near the true situation, then it is sharply evident that Moses had plenty of reasons for his
dyspeptic view of the people of Israel. It would require altogether too many pages to
discuss the numerous cells of the table. To repeat, it is presented so that a reader of the
Torah may realize the importance of thinking of the whole people of Israel and so will not
abandon them to the good graces of Yahweh and Moses.
TABLE I
Attitudes of Israelites (grown males) Encamped at the Holy Mountain (Hypothetical)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
. % of % of %of % of
Egyptian Mixed Midianites Total Elite
Hebrews Multitude
(7000) (2000) (1000) (500)
True Believers
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
in Yahweh
neutral or opposed to Moses) 8 10 20 15
in Moses (neutral or opposed to Yahweh) 8 10 5 15
in Both 10 20 10 10
Self-Servers
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
support Moses 5 10 3 10
oppose Moses 10 2 2 5
avoid commitment 5 15 5 7
Apathetics
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(tied to group by family or accident;
nowhere else to go; taken care of; etc.) 20 20 35 3
Disbelievers
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
in Yahweh (neutral to Moses) 10 6 5 10
in Moses (neutral to Yahweh) 14 5 10 20
in Both 10 2 5 5
============================================================================================================
TOTAL 100% 100% 100% 100%
============================================================================================================
See Chapter VII first section, for the population in Exodus. Here the total population (with
grown rnales in parentheses) is taken to be 25,000: 15,000 (7000) of (A); 5000 (2000) of
(B); and 5000 (1000) of (C).
To take one case, those who believe in Moses and are neutral to or opposed to Yahweh, and
those that believe in both amount to 18% of the male Hebrew Egyptians, 30% of the Egyptians
and other ethnics, and 15% of the Midianite and Kenite proselytes. This would total 2010
grown males who were the "true believers," the hard core of Moses' support, his charismatic
followers. They would amount to about one-fifth of the potential warriors, and since the
women and children would be inclined more than the males to be true believers, perhaps a
somewhat larger percentage of the total population of 25,000. 1 believe that political
scientists who are experts on elite theory would regard this as a robust basis for a tough
and even despotic rule. The core of the opposition would be the 1970 disbelievers in Moses
or in both Moses and Yahweh.
For the hard core of true believers, the charisma of Moses is evidently based upon many
proofs: that the Israelites survived due to Moses was the main proof and incessantly,
compulsively repeated as a soldier tells of a dud bomb landing next to him; then the litany
of his miraculous infancy (Did you know, too, that Yahweh sent a plague of boils upon Egypt
just then ?); [72] his immense erudition; his princely connections; his works with divine
fire; his halo; his tablets written "with the finger of god"; his escapes from two Pharaohs;
his rod; his forty days and nights on the fiery mountain without food and drink; manna,
quail, water; his knowledge of healing everything from snakebite to leprosy; the strong and
deep men who obey him; his silence and aloneness; his speaking in tongues; his amazing
timing of when to move, when to stay, when to fight, when to evade; and all the laws that
keep the camp from anarchy and licentious chaos. He talks "mouth-to-mouth" [73] with
Yahweh; Yahweh lives through him; Moses does nothing without Yahweh; who is against Moses is
against Yahweh, and if you don't believe in Yahweh, you must all the more believe in Moses
who knows how to pronounce himself in the "court language," the divine jargon of earthly
rulers.
ROUTINIZING CHARISMA
I doubt that Moses was author of most of the as yet undeciphered rituals of the Books of
Moses. A brief "Decalogue" may be traceable to him. The "safety rules" for handling the Ark
and altar which extend to a danger zone beyond the tent are his. There are certain
organizational ideas that would have been instigated by him. And, certainly, much else that
was attributed to Moses in the Bible was his in fact. But the veritable avalanche of rules
and taboos that have fallen into the Torah are the work of people who needed to lay the
heavy hand of god upon every detail of existence in order to give themselves occupation and
power. Moses gave them certain concepts - national pride, ethnocentrism, law, written
records, fear of Yahweh, circumcision, repression and suppression, punishment. He opened the
door to mosaism. They entered and took possession in his name, and dwelled there forever
after.
They routinized the charisma of Moses. Mosaism without Moses, like Christianity without
Christ, or like Leninism without Lenin, brings about a different social order; behavior, and
even the teachings change. However, the process began early, with Moses himself. He
personally took charge of digging up and carrying the coffin with the bones of Joseph -
traditional Hebrew authority - on the Exodus. Poor Moses, says the legend; while others
carried their valuable loot from Egypt, Moses was burdened down by Joseph. Not at all. The
coffin was like a suit of armor against his Hebrew opponents. And there was probably more in
it than Joseph. It is another proof of Moses' genius - and the competence of the people
around him - that hardly had they left Egypt when, with a greatly reduced people, in hunger
and amidst disaster, he began to fashion ideological and social structures for the new
nation. The central headquarters system, the reorganization of tribes, the provision of
eternal slogans such as the curse against the Amalekites and the framing of laws - not
despite the chaos of Mount Sinai, but taking advantage of that very chaos - all tended to
move the nation into a future. Promises, promises: the people were fed upon these as well as
miracles of springs and manna and quail, and were fed up with them. Yet there was always a
developing system of rule that carried its own promise. Perhaps those people who survived
ancient catastrophes best were those whose religions in some fundamental ways imitated the
catastrophes and whose nations were born in the name of the disasters: it is a thesis we
should like to develop sometime. It seems, at any rate, to have been the case with the
Israelites.
Like all charismatic leaders, Moses had problems in delegating authority: Aaron was a superb
assistant but not harsh enough, Joshua was too harsh and very young. The tribal heads had
little legitimacy in their own tribes. Moses complains to Yahweh: "I am not able to carry
all this people alone, the burden is too heavy for me." Yahweh suggests an assembly of
seventy elders come to him. Along with the Holy Spirit, they get executive responsibilities,
by nearly direct divine authority, "nearly" I say, because Moses is explicitly tied into the
donation of the spirit and power [74] .
Jethro came upon Moses, his son-in-law, occupied endlessly with hearing disputes and advised
him to appoint subordinate hearing officers. Moses promptly did so [75] . This probably was
the institution of the elders [76] .
As soon as he could, Moses institutionalized the Levites. They were given religious
foundation, functions, authority, and a claim on the revenues of the tribes. Yahweh, in one
of his most bloodthirsty moments, had claimed all the first-born of Israel for his
sacrifices. Moses, speaking for a more moderate Yahweh, dedicated the Levites as surrogates
for the infants. What better basis for the authority of this security police force than
their having ransomed by their own persons the first-born of the Jews from infanticide?
The Bible implies strongly that the whole Jewish nation was to have one Ark of the Covenant
alone. It would be at the seat of government, the principal town. In fact it was literally
the "mercy seat" of the government of Yahweh. This was certainly true centuries later, when
it was installed in Jerusalem.
More significantly, in the earliest period, when the population is divided by tribes and
assigned regions in which to settle, the Levites alone are not given a special place but
spread out as detachments among all of the fifty-eight townships. This would confirm the
role of the Levites as special troops of the central government but would also indicate that
each township was expected to have its own ark, if not immediately, then later. The Levites
would operate it. I guess that after Moses, Israel decentralized, but had agreed in
principle to keep a single ark which would be under central control.
If one could rely upon the tribes to construct, maintain, protect, and employ their arks
properly, there would be no cause for concern. However, in periods of low ark activity, they
might expect too much from their arks and abuse them or abandon them; further, they might
hear Yahweh with different ears, and disputes about the voices of Yahweh would occur. So,
splendid and edifying as might be the possession of twelve or fifty-eight means of hearing
and seeing manifestations of the Lord, and using arks in local warfare and criminal justice,
there were probably even more compelling reasons for letting there be only one Ark, one
Voice, one Interpreter (Moses or the high priest), one weapon system to maintain and control
at instant readiness.
THE MANIAC SCIENTIST
If what has been said here were presented to a personnel officer or an occupational
psychologist for a determination of the true vocation of Moses, the reply might be: he was a
scientist. Educated. Literate. He is slow in speech, apparently modest but prone to
indignation. Does everything in the third person (laying it onto Yahweh). Uncircumcised
(indicating that neither Egyptians or Hebrews who raised him thought the question important,
and that would mean a secular environment.) Heavy on abstract ideas. Does not believe in
immortality. Impatient. Likes everything in writing. Handy and knows materials and tools.
Weak on family life and sentiment. Marries outside the tribes of Israel. Needs help in
political negotiations. Has an international reputation as a "magician." Is highly respected
by establishment scientist. Although revered by many, never fully trusted by most people.
Understands phenomena like electricity, manna, plagues, phosphorus, fire, smoke. Continually
experimenting and inventing. Likes to number things and count people. Does not eat much or
carouse; doesn't like people very much, and likes to see them well-ordered, serious. Does
not believe the priesthood should have full authority. Keeps records. Was very open-minded
on questions when young until he learned the "truth"; then he becomes dogmatic and insistent
upon "the one right way" to do everything. Now he tends to be dogmatic from the first moment
of a problem. Contemptuous of idols and images, though strongly object-oriented. Perhaps our
imaginary occupational psychologist would agree, "Yes, the man's a scientist, one of these
new-type administrative scientists." The question whether Moses had traits of a scientist
may not interest the reader so much as whether he was a madman. I should say that by every
criterion of madness, especially the test for schizophrenia, Moses would appear to have been
mad. My answer, however, is that Moses was mad in theory but sane in context.
Whereupon, of course, we become involved in the distinction between madness and sanity,
psychosis and normality. Let me first recite the indications of madness and then afterwards
explain my position. Not only may we arrive then at a determination concerning Moses but
also at a better understanding of the perennial mad leader.
Taking Moses to be psychotic, his illness would be termed obsessional neurosis leading into
auditory hallucinations and culminating in paranoid megalomanic messianism.
The disease begins with a weak early identity and a loss of self-respect, arising from
circumstances such as I have already related in Moses' early childhood - a biethnic
parentage with a confusion of attendants and conflicting messages from Hebrew and Egyptian
attitudes playing upon him. He must suppress his speech and, in so doing, adds a
physiological handicap of incoherent speech to his already diminutive self-respect. His
drive to achieve intensifies and, because of circumstances, is repressed into autistic
reveries of grand scope and ambitions. On both his Egyptian and Hebrew sides, his educators
encourage him (build up his expectations) but at the same time his ideals are incompatible
and unachievable, frustrating him when he seeks a clear realistic directive. He turns to
scientific (and necessarily, in those days, partly magical) studies which reinforce his
solitary and exclusive character while producing a value that both his sets of attendants
recognize - priestly scientific magic.
When we apply the Hoskins-Boisen basic behavioral manifestations of schizophrenia [77] -
lack of self-respect, delusional misinterpretations, the externalization of conscience, and
the sense of compulsive behavior, we can surmise that Moses is potentiated in all of these
regards even before he gets into trouble and must leave Egypt. He is already a trouble-maker
in the Egyptian scientific-priestly establishment. Naturally, excluded from the semi-
theocracy of the pyramid cult, he is developing cultist tendencies of a different sort,
probably Hermetic (Thoth), for Thoth (Hermes, Mercury) is the most ambulatory and earth-
bound of the pantheon, and probably in the direction of experiments and machines that are
excluded from the main career line of science. His quietness, incoherence, and seeming
meekness are the outward cover for a demand-system that is really excessive, harsh, and
incredible.
The conditions of exile, as I have detailed them, reinforce Moses' traits. He does not
forget Egypt; his obsessions are nourished by the quite incompatible silences and solemn,
accepting unrelatedness of the wilderness. God-names with a sound even of "Yahu" are heard
among the tribal Semites [78] . His cultic tendency is confirmed when he hears a force that
he has long thought to be everywhere - electricity - increasing its activity and producing
god-like sounds, even the name of god itself.
There is a decisive change, a worsening of his mental disease from a psychiatric standpoint,
a move towards one of the most noble ventures in history according to another viewpoint. In
the years to come, Moses exhibits the full range of schizophrenic symptoms. To those already
suggested may be added those indexed by Paul Meehl [79] . Meehl describes schizophrenia as
characterized by a deficiency in the ability to enjoy life or people (anhedonia), an
aversion to other humans, a loss of control over certain kinds of perception including the
introduction of a special logic, concerns about the abnormality of one's bodily organs and
functions, ambivalent confusion of simultaneous love and hostility towards all upon which
and whom his interest is centered, and a hypercathexis or superabundance of intellectual
activity of a possibly fully rational sort.
The application of these mechanisms to Moses is apparent. Respecting anhedonia, there is
scarcely any passage to be found in the Torah respecting pleasure. In a negative sense,
Moses berates the people for not enjoying their poisoned quail and endless manna. But the
point is too obvious to belabor - sex, food, all is: "Be glad you're alive: Thanks to
Yahweh!" Miriam leads a victory chant and dances one time, a pleasant surprise, though she
sings bloody murder [80] . If a Harry Golden would appear and call to Moses a hearty
"Enjoy!" he would be thrown out of the camp. But we know from Puritanism, a mosaic
throwback, that pleasure is a sin.
I have commented already on Moses' inability to support affectionate human contacts. The
loss of control over perception is the famous "talking with Yahweh" of which we have said
much and more is to come. But note only how well-regulated Moses is in this regard; he
disciplines his hallucinations marvelously, according to a special logic of schizophrenia.
And the result is not only persuasive as to the reality of his discourses with Yahweh, but
also fits into Moses' general psychological dynamics, and this too is appealing: thus Moses
projects his immense aggressive superego or conscience upon a god; then creates a bad family
of children for the great father, namely the Israelites; then has Yahweh play the strict
father of this bad family, punishing them on every possible occasion. He, Moses, finds the
spectacle edifying, while preserving a remarkable detachment.
This matter of "cognitive slippage" may contribute to the solution, also, of the great
riddle of how Moses, the scientist, could give what a modern scientist would regard as an
unreasonable and inadequate description and explanation of his intricate and ingenious works
and of natural events. I said earlier that the answer may be partly for establishing the
greatness of Yahweh and partly out of contempt for the popular intelligence. But one may
perceive another reason: a schizophrenic need to satisfy only himself with explanations of
why he is acting so and he is satisfied by bizarre or simple explanations. Further, when an
applied scientist, here Moses, cannot explain whether in thought or in language the theory
and causes of his scientific operations, he may satisfy himself by introducing the deus ex
machina: Yahweh causes all things to happen - end of argument. Putting together the last two
impulses with the first two reasons, a conventionally acceptable cognitive slippage will do
great service.
In regard to concerns about his bodily image, we have little of Moses' physiognomy to go on.
The legends say he was a beautiful young boy and man. Obviously, his speech difficulty is
relevant, as is the circumcision issue, already discussed. Yahweh is supposed to be
invisible, and Moses is accredited with the great religious invention of abolishing
anthropomorphism. Yet a review of the Bible and legends in search of anthropomorphic
passages discloses them in abundance. Yahweh has mighty ears, arms, legs, brow, eyes,
nostrils, lungs, and everything as Michelangelo paints him on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel in Rome. He also hates, loves as a father, threatens, burns with rage, gives, takes,
instructs, commands, discriminates, plays tricks, tests, and of course, is jealous. And as
with Yahweh, so with Moses who is living in his image of Yahweh, and - apropos - it is not
Yahweh who is the jealous god so much as Moses in his other self as Yahweh. Obviously this
metaphorical kind of imaging did not violate the Third Commandment , whereupon we think that
Ziegler may be correct in that the most important meaning of the forbidden "image" and
"standing image" may be the visible presence of Yahweh on the Ark of the Covenant [81] .
Next we consider Moses' ambivalence, alluded to earlier on in this chapter in connection
with the Israelites. In several specific passages, Yahweh is directly described as the
source of good and evil. Moses had no need for Satan: why? Because Yahweh was the devil and
in Moses' unconscious mind there could be no separation of god and the devil: he must both
hate and love the same personage. Again, going back to the bad children of Israel, Moses
uses them to express all of his hatred of Yahweh - their willful disobedience, their
unfaithfulness, their whoring after false gods, their ingratitude, their forgetfulness of
the past, their disregard of obligations, and so on. Then, reversing the ploy in a
marvelously acceptable but mad logic, Moses displays his detestation of the Israelites by
having them continually and severely chastised by Yahweh. Thus Moses safely hates both
Yahweh and the Jews.
As for Meehl's final criterion - the hypercathexis of intellect among schizophrenics - Meehl
makes it clear that in some cases the schizophrenic often pursues, alongside his rocky road
of cognitive slippage and incoherent behavior, a straight path of intellectual hyperenergy
and achievement. I have already advanced much evidence of the superiority of Moses in this
regard. Such genius is already a sign that a most extraordinary emotional dynamic must be
operative.
With all of this, how can one avoid concluding that Moses was a madman? I refrain not so as
to appease the billion labeled followers of Moses in the contemporary world. I refrain
because Moses effectively managed the Exodus in ways that were the outcome of his character
and depended upon his character. Given the disastrous conditions, the heavy risks and the
loosely aggregated people, it is highly improbable that another man could have succeeded in
any other way than that of Moses.
I see two major errors in decision produced by Moses' character. The first is that it may
not have been wise for the Hebrews to leave Egypt at all, or it may have been wise for the
people to return, even if Moses and the cohort of leaders might lose their new power. The
second is that there may have been enough stability and responsibility among the elders and
representatives of the people at the time of Korah's revolt, of which I shall speak, to
convert Moses' tyranny into a federal republic, with the ultimate result of holding all the
tribes of Israel together in times to come. Other errors of judgement occurred, none fatal
to his mission. Other traits of his also made life difficult beyond necessity for the people
of Israel.
There is another and imperative reason for not applying the term "psychotic" to Moses. Many
of the biblically related events of the Exodus and its aftermath took place in a physical
environment that was as chaotic as it was unforeseen. It was surreal. It was the substance,
but the real substance, of which the visions of the schizophrenic are composed.
Quoting alternately the studies of Hoskins and Boison [82] , we see in the mind of the
psychotic what was the real world of Exodus:
To the patient himself, his ideas and emotions are the matters of primary significance...
To him they represent firm, terrifying, torturing, mocking, and fascinating reality. An
initial feeling of strangeness is rather common. In the words of one patient, the subject is
often beset by a 'flood of mental pictures as though an album within were unfolding itself.
' Elements of the unconscious come into awareness and are interpreted as manifestations of
the supernatural, often with devastating impact. In the new world into which the patient is
thrust, previous principles and standards seem irrelevant. 'He sees strange meanings in
everything about him and he is sure of only one thing, that things are not what they seem. '
His new ideas and mental pictures become so vivid as to constitute the voices and visions
that a large proportion of the patients experience. 'Very commonly it is as if the conscious
self had descended to some lower region where it is no longer in control but is at the mercy
of the terrifying ideas and imagery that throng in upon it. The eyes are opened so that one
seems to see back to the beginning of creation. One seems to have lived perhaps in many
previous existences. To the individual, the new experiences are so vivid that they seem to
represent profound, new revelations and the marked sense of mystery is often associated with
the more profound types of disturbance, with characteristic archaic symbolism, bizarre
ideation, and often deep religious concern.
A second set of observations confirms this view of the world as catastrophe.
The latent schizophrenic must always reckon with the possibility that his very foundation
will give way somewhere, that an irretrievable disintegration will set in, that his ideas
and concepts will lose their cohesion and their connection with other spheres of association
and with the environment. As a result, he feels threatened by an uncontrollable chaos of
chance happenings The dangerousness of his situation often shows itself in terrifying
dreams of cosmic catastrophe, of the end of the world and such thoughts. Or the ground he
stands on begins to heave, the walls bend and bulge, the solid earth turns to water, a storm
carries him up into the air, all his relatives are dead, etc. [83]
Here again, notably, is the Weltanschauung or cosmic image, this time observed by Carl G.
Jung. It corresponds to the real images of the external world during natural catastrophe and
the feelings normally inspired by the images. In the case of Moses, and generally in the
psychology of catastrophe, the real and the unreal confirm and reinforce each other; they
interact, but so in tandem are they that when the real pulls ahead of the unreal (or mental)
it drags it along and vice-versa. This is what I mean when I say that Moses, with a
character appropriate to an environment "gone mad," is not himself of chaotic and disordered
mind in the framework of the surrealist natural and human behavior he was experiencing.
Although Moses was beyond madness, the question of whether his life-work was "good" is
swamped by "ifs" and "buts." Certainly he helped a small population to survive. However, the
good in the survivors has consisted in the greatest degree of aberrations from, conflicts
with, and transformations of mosaism. I shall explain this line of thought later on and in
the light of more information about the revolts against Moses and the character of Yahweh.
Professor James Breasted wrote that Moses was "cognizant of all the wisdom of the
Egyptians." [84] But he was a creator, too. He was a type of Leonardo da Vinci in the
variety of his scientific and military inventions, although we would have to reconstruct his
tabernacle and clothing designs to evaluate his aesthetic ability. He was a ruthless
monotheist who slaughtered his own charges, the "Children of Israel," to keep them in line.
He was a hallucinatory genius, without his own father (his own father being practically
unknown to him and powerless, and the Pharaoh unaccepting and remote), who made the voice of
god his father and everyone else's father in a pure patriarchal absolute form spelled out in
a system of laws and political organization of which he was the dispassionate proponent. He
was a George Washington (even to his inarticulateness and the combination of arrogance with
humility) who fathered a nation and led it through difficult years. Moses was even a kind of
adventurer, clever and unscrupulous, who conceived a scheme to fit the times and pulled it
off successfully, giving Israel the most sophisticated weaponry of the Middle Bronze Age and
thus ensuring the capture and holding of a considerable "Promised Land" against a ring of
powerful enemies for centuries. All of this was achieved amidst recurrent natural chaos.
There was too much of Moses to make of him a god or a son of god: this at least all scholars
and priests have agreed to and seen to. Moses was more than a man; he was many men at once.
Yet he himself declined any relation to Yahweh other than being Yahweh's exclusive
intermediary with Yahweh's "Children of Israel." From this one concept, which might be
termed a legal fiction, ramified the structure of mosaism, then and thereafter.
Notes (Chapter 6: The Charisma of Moses)
1. New York: Knopf, 1939, 3.
2. Life of Moses, 5.
3. III G.
4. The tribe of Simeon was quite lost to history, either assimilated to Judah or lost with
the people of the tribes of Northern Israel.
5. Gen. 49: 7.
6. II G 269.
7. II G 262.
8. Auerbach, Moses, 17, and others.
9. Buber, 35.
10. "Die Mosessagen und die Leviten," xxxi Sitzungsberichte der koniglich-preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften (1905), 640, quoted in Rank, fn. 83.
11. G II 277-8.
12. G II 275.
13. Ibid.
14. Sebastian de Grazia, "Mahatma Gandhi, Son of his mother," 19 Polit. Q. 4 (1948), 336-48.
15. A legend says that Joshua had already a vocation as an executioner before joining Moses
on the Exodus. (My source here was I. Velikovsky in a conversation in Oct. 1979; the passage
is in Ginzberg's Legends.)
16. The relevant verses are listed in James Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible,
Nashville: Abingdon, 1963, based upon the Authorized Version.
17. Moses, 243.
18. Ex. 30: 11-6.
19. Azazel was also a fallen star or Lucifer and called also Azzael, Azza and Uzza. Uzza we
have found is the star angel of Hyksos Egypt, and was thrown into the sea during Exodus; al-
Uzza is the planet Venus in Arabic, to which human sacrifices were once made. (see
Velikovsky, W. in C., 157-8.
20. Ex. 32: 30.
21. Ex. 32: 33-5; 33: 12-16; 34: 6-10.
22. Il Principe e Discorsi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960, p. 468.
23. Neher, 79.
24. Buber, p. 167-8; Cf. Philo Judaeus, On the life of Moses, 5.
25. Ex. 3: 4; Ex. 19: 3; Lev. 1: 1.
26. Ex. 2: 12.
27. G II 281.
28. Philo, 11.
29. Auerbach, 25.
30. II G 290-1.
31. G II 293.
32. Cf. W. Hosford, "Extraordinary Case of Electrical Excitement....," 1: 33 Am. J. Sci.
(1838), 394-8, about a woman with such a faculty, unexpected and unwanted.
33. He would not be the only Hebrew dowser, but the only one with authority to whom
attention was due. At this writing, on the Island of Naxos, Greece (pop. 15000), anyone may
dowse, but only one dowser, Aristoteles, is hired to dowse.
34. H. S. Burr and F. S. C. Northrup, "The Electrodynamic Theory of Life, "19 Q. J. Biol.
(1935), 323-33.
35. Probably he sent them back to Midian when the crisis deepened, for they were with Jethro
when finally Moses returned to Midian after the Exodus. Ex. 18: 5-6.
36. Ex. 5: 24-6.
37. Freud's statement is supported by Gressmann, Altorientalische Texte, op. cit., 126,
plate 254, which depicts an Egyptian circumcision operation.
38. Ex. 4: 10-6.
39. Ex. 7: 1.
40. II G 316.
41. I find myself having to criticize Freud for his neglect of the unconscious again. He
lays Moses' speech impediment to his inability to speak Hebrew properly! Even then, his
reasoning is illogical, because Moses complains of his affliction as an impediment to
persuading also the Pharaoh, who presumably spoke Egyptian. Arthur Koestler once pointed out
that the Greeks called stutterers and foreigners by the same name, "barbarous" (IX Ency.
Britannica 9). Here is a hint of support for Freud. We cannot eliminate the possibility that
Moses confronted his speech problem by employing a special or stilted form of Hebrew.
42. Philo Judaeus, 7.
43. III G 256.
44. Philo Judaeus, Ibid.
45. Rix," The Great Terror," I Kronos n§ 1 (Spring ;1975) 51-64 and "Note on the Androgynous
Comet," I SISR 5 (1977), 17-9; cf. P. Tompkins, The Eunuch and the Virgin, New York: Potter,
1962.
46. Moses, 6.
47. John Gager, Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism, Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1972.
48. Moses, 41. 208.
49. 10 Encycl Brit., 193.
50. Ziegler, 105ff.
51. Moses, 67.
52. III G 260.
53. Deut. 17: 2-5.
54. II G 362.
55. Velikovsky, W. in C., 124.
56. M. Coe, "Native Astronomy in Mesoamerica," in A. F. Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre-
Columbian America, Austin, U. of Texas, 1975.
57. Ex. 17: 14.
58. Ex. 32: 33.
59. Neher, 62-3, citing signs sculpted upon a statue at Serbit-el-Hadim.
60. Ernest Sellin, Introduction to the Old testament (tr. London, 1923), 13-14.
61. Barry Page, "A Palaeography of Biblical Israel," I Interdisc. Bib. Scholar 1 (1979), 26.
62. Max Weber credits Moses with inventing the Convenant with the deity, p. 78, Ancient
Judaism, Glencoe: Free Press, 1952. The Covenant codes of Ex, 20: 22-3; 33; 34: 11-6. cf. M.
Greenberg, "History of Judaism," 10 Encycl. Brit. 304.
63. Ex. 20; 24; Deut. 5.
64. Winnett, 30ff.
65. The Ritual Decalogue (Ex. 20: 23-6; 23: 10-9) is assembled by Winnett, 192-3.
66. Weber, 121.
67. Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976, 87.
68. Furneaux, Krakatoa, 219.
69. Num. 9: 89.
70. Num. 11: 17-25. The exceptions prove the rule. The spirit of Yahweh changed the false
prophet Balaam into an absurd but true one (Num. 24: 2). Jephthah, with the "spirit of the
Lord" upon him sacrificed his daughter (Jg. 11: 29). Elijah the Prophet, transfers his
spirit to Elisha before he is carried to heaven by a chariot of fire (2 Kg., 2: 9-10).
71. Mose and Seine Zeit, 441.
72. Actually, scorching heat, leprosy and boils, in legend. II G 266.
73. Buber, 168-9.
74. Num. 11: 10-25.
75. Ex. 18: 13ff.
76. III G 68-72.
77. R. G. Hoskins, The Biology of Schizophrenia, New York: Norton, 1946, pp. 82-9.
78. Buber, 50.
79. Paul E. Meehl, "Schizotaxy, Schizotypy, Schizophrenia," om A. and E. Buss, eds.,
Theories of Schizophrenia, New York, Atherton, 1969. 21.
80. Ex, 15: 20-1.
81. Ziegler, 33-7.
82. 85
83. Carl G. Jung. Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1906, tr. Hull, Princeton U. Press, 1974).
181.
84. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (1934), 334. ;
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE LEVITES AND THE REVOLTS
The "Hebrews" of Exodus were of various degrees of Hebrew-ness. Many were quite Egyptian.
Many others were assimilated to Egyptian culture. The most important larger group were
traditionally loyal Elohists. Few could have been Yahwist, inasmuch as Moses was only then
expounding the new cult.
In what would have been Goshen, at Tell ed-Dab'a, a town of the Middle Bronze Age has
recently been excavated. It reveals a heavy non-Egyptian, Palestinian aspect. Skeletal
remains, etymology, and artifacts disclose a heterogeneous population of Semitic and other
backgrounds [1] . This would support our theory that the proto-Israelites were a
geographically separate and autonomous people, to some degree maintaining their old ethnic
identity, living among Egyptians and other peoples from East and West, intermarrying,
holding a full range of occupations, but now caught up in a xenophobic, anti-semitic period
and forced to supply corv‚es and employ birth-control. It is not surprising to learn that
the Book of Exodus, as befits a historical work of those times, has much in it of the
popular Egyptian language [2] .
The some three million souls that the Bible asserts left Egypt are far too many. It is not
that aggregated tribes of 500,000 or even more have never moved long distances; they have.
The Cimbri and Teutons migrated in this number over a period of years at the end of the
second century B. C. from the North Sea region to southern France and Italy; after seriously
threatening Roman power, they were annihilated by the Roman legions of Marius.
NUMBERS LEAVING EGYPT
The number of persons in Exodus has been estimated variously from 2000 to 6,000,000 [3] .
The great range of figures adds confusion to the theory of Exodus. We should at least
estimate, if we cannot know, how many persons left Egypt and how many were alive to muster
for the handing down of the Ten Commandments at the Holy Mountain a couple of months later.
Avoiding such estimates, although usual, leaves many questions open and lends an air of
unreality to the grand project of Moses and the Israelites. Therefore, reasoning from what
little is known and what would have been possible, I shall try to establish how many people
were involved at the several stages of Exodus.
The conditions of Exodus, as we have described them, were peculiar. The Exodus of three
millions in one group in a few days would imply a line of marchers stretching from Goshen to
Horeb; ten abreast with beasts of burden or one wagon, three meters apart, say, would
produce a column 900 kilometers long. The flocks and herds would flank the marchers. If so
many did leave Goshen, perhaps as a horde fleeing from the disasters, believing that the
Israelites possessed secret knowledge of an undestroyed "Promised Land" (as likely a
reconciliation of Bible and reality as one might conjecture), the refugees would have
dropped to a figure nearer the one out of fifty that a rabbinical source says completed the
march.
Even in this case, I would distinguish between the two types of persons abandoning their
region, and allow for only 60,000 or so organized marchers at the end of the first two days.
I would assume that of the three millions of refugees, some 300,000 may have been affiliated
to the Exodus movement, but turned back on the vague promise, half-welcomed, of making up a
second wave of Exodus at a later time. This has happened often in tribal migrations and in
the wagon-train movements of the American western settlements. Another 240,000 Hebrews more
or less would have refused to go from the very first [4] , and it would have been with
these that the departing Hebrews had their rumored conflicts.
The 60,000 who arrived at Pi-ha-khiroth near the frontier would include more warriors than
is typical of a tribal migration. Many would have left their families. Men of working age
would be the most anxious to leave. But when the pursuing Egyptian army was espied, many,
especially of the Egyptians and physically weaker elements, would have deserted and fled to
all quarters during the long bright night. A drop of some 10,000 persons would be expected
at this critical point.
Next came the crossing. Here the legends, as well as logic, would dictate another serious
loss, perhaps another 10,000. [5] The panic would be extreme, the time very short, the
waters appearing from all quarters of the compass in cross-tides, the muck deep in places,
exhaustion general.
The many days of march between the "Sea of Reeds" and Mount Sinai (or Horeb) would have cost
another 10,000 lives from weariness, thirst, starvation, and illness. And the assaults of
the Amalekites would have cost yet another 10,000 lives, first from the slaughter of Hebrew
rear elements and then, much less, of warriors in battle.
The survivors of Exodus, then, would have numbered 20,000 of which probably a full 10,000
were warriors. This figure of 10,000 is one out of sixty of the figure of 600,000 males of
battle age carried, as "planned hope" and "lost vision," in Exodus and the Book of Numbers.
The Bible mentions that the Israelites did not march as a single body but in phased stages;
too large a number were involved to proceed in a single, or even in two, marching units.
These would then be reinforced by the followers of Jethro, a tribe, or part of one, of the
Midianites, who had been struck by their own disasters, and who accepted Yahweh and little
else in the way of conditions for becoming Children of Israel. Perhaps 5000 were thus joined
to the 20,000 from Egypt.
The 25,000 would still be a considerable and formidable people. Most were warriors, too. It
would explain the prompt organizational step that Moses and the Levites took. The twelve
tribes of Israel were filled out around cadres of the same name, in almost every case
greatly outnumbered by the new elements - Egyptian, Asiatic and non-tribal Hebrews. The
tribes were then assigned quotas of fighting men, organized by the decimal system, which
would be called upon by Moses and Joshua when the hour for battle struck.
IMPEDIMENTA
I have already explained, in Chapter One, that the Exodus was not a pell-mell flight of a
horde of slaves, but that it was well-organized, with a highly competent and determined
Hebrew leadership under Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Hur, and others [6] . As soon as he had
finished his last session with the Pharaoh and Egyptian councillors, Moses hurried to
Goshen, a few hours away. He may have cut across to a planned rendezvous with the advance
elements already moving out. So far as he could tell, he had done his job well; the Egyptian
forces were under orders not to interfere with the movement.
The people of Exodus were carrying all that they could. The headquarters materiel
transported by Moses and the Levites consisted of more than one ordinarily imagines. On the
wagon and in the coffin or ark-box carrying Joseph's remains would be the most secret and
precious items. It would not hold much. They would also have collected and carried a
complete collection of tools, including construction, metal working, medical and sculpturing
instruments; metal rods; gold, silver, bronze; copper and lead, and preferably alloys of
lead and copper already smelted; perhaps meteoritic iron or even iron from the Caucasus or
Anatolia; levers and ratchets; nails; amber or a substitute; glass rods; magnets; surveying
instruments; sun dials; water clocks; straps and ropes of various kinds; various small
wheels; buckles and pills; artificial and volcanic glass; drugs; poisons; phosphorus (white
and red); flint; a large quantity of papyrus; clay tablets; styluses; bales of cloth,
especially canvas and wool, and skins of animals; cut hard and soft wood, especially cedar
and shittum; written tablets and papyri, containing history, formulas, and instructions;
military equipment including tools for its repair - swords, lances, slings, and missiles;
staves; possibly some apparatus and models that Levites were working on or knew about; plus
a variety of then known and now-forgotten implements and provisions, various idiosyncratic
fancies and expressions of ideas of varying utilitarian possibilities, and, of course,
rations for weeks of time, including tons of unleavened bread.
The collecting process had gone on for months. The Bible mentions almost none of this
effort. In a number of passages, both in the Bible and the legends, we are offered a strange
picture - of the Hebrews first borrowing valuables from their Egyptian neighbors for the
trip and then being given them, with a strong implication of blackmailing and looting the
frightened people - both Egyptian and Hebrew - who were staying behind, and stripping the
ruined houses and settlements.
The implication, too, is that these activities were ordered by the leaders for the purpose
of supplying the expedition. It would be in accord with the Bible's mode of expression,
also, to lay the activity upon the departing people, whereas, in fact, the Levites and their
helpers probably engaged in the work systematically, going to the known sources of the
required or desired materials. Livestock was probably rounded up from wherever it was
corralled or had strayed, the clip of the ears notwithstanding.
Calculating solely the transportation of the materiel of the headquarters and of the special
assault and guard troops, perhaps a hundred carts, a hundred mules, donkeys and horses, and
many litters would be needed. After the Levites, the Judah tribe seems to have been
organized and of high morale. Moses and the Levites would march in the vanguard preceded by
reconnaissance patrols of Levites and Judahs. The throng of followers was too great to
organize properly and probably a detachment of Judahs was used as a rear guard, with a small
Levite staff, under instructions to delay and hamper any pursuit or harassment but not to
fight uselessly for the unorganized crowd of followers.
In the passage of the Red Sea, by which is meant the tongue of waters and lakes extending
north of the Red Sea, the headquarters detachment and the special troops, with Moses, would
move through first, hoping that some or most of the people would pass before the waters
returned. The sight of the heavily loaded caravan marching out would have been impressive.
Reports and rumors of it and its contents would have been immediately relayed to the
Egyptian armed forces headquarters and the Pharaoh at Memphis from road guards and small
military posts that were not overrun before they could flee. Most unnerving of all might
have been the sudden intelligence that a number of trusted officials and technicians had
decamped with the Hebrews. The astronomers would have been quite discredited by events; the
military would call the next move; logically, it was to pursue and recapture the materiel
and slay or take prisoner Moses and the elite element. The pursuit was launched.
When the pursuing force and head of the Empire were lost, the regime of the Middle Kingdom
collapsed and the Hyksos entered immediately. They would become aware promptly of the mass
exodus when they found the land of Goshen stripped of valuables, livestock and goods. Soon
afterwards, the Jews found a detachment of desert warriors at their rear, slaughtering the
lagging elements. They showed knowledge of the Jew's history in Egypt. Moses detailed his
best troops to engage them and accompanied them. I think that these Amalelite-Hyksos were
not encountered by chance; they were on the same mission as the Egyptian forces, to retake
the spoils of Egypt.
Moses took part in the first battle, standing on a prominence with Aaron and Hur, holding
his rod of Yahweh aloft to encourage the Israelite fighters; before the day was over, he
needed their help to keep his arm up. His staff would be the famous staff that performed
before the Pharaoh. The three men may have been able to induce an electric charge from the
ground and bring about a discharge into the clouds and dust that hovered very low above
them. An effect of this kind would tend to intimidate the enemy and revive the Israelite
morale. It would be especially effective because the troops were battling in near-darkness
under the cosmic clouds. Every time Moses lowered his arms, the enemy gained an advantage,
it is said [7] .
TECHNICIANS AND SECURITY POLICE
More practically, now, we can consider the nature of the Levi's, the Levites, who were
critical in the management of Exodus and the succeeding wanderings and conquests. Not a
tribe, not priests, the Levites may have included representatives of all the tribes, says
the article in the Encyclopedia Britannica [8] . I said in the first chapter, too, that the
Levites may have been assimilated Hebraic Jews, many or most of mixed ancestry.
What is a tribe, and what is a nation? The Hebrews of Egypt became in basic ways the Jewish
Nation in Exodus. A tribe is sovereign; it may be part of a confederation of tribes, but it
can go its own way when it feels it must. Moses put an end immediately to any pure
confederation.
It would have been exceedingly difficult to mobilize and lead the Hebrews from Egypt, and
organize them into the masters of a promised land, without strong central leadership. This
implied a group to wield the central power and carry out the central plan. Such were the
Levites who had in many cases developed their skills under the Egyptian imperial
administration. Only among the Levites were Egyptian names found in later times [9] . The
Exodus marked the end of the Dynasty. In Egypt, the other Hebrews were terrorized and driven
to work without pay, "all except the tribe of Levi who were not employed in the work with
their brethren Since they had not been with their brethren at the beginning" they were not
disturbed [10] .
The Levites appear in modern terms as a kind of technical police and fire brigade. They seem
to be in families, yet not a blood clan. They served as individuals. They are competent.
They are not as beloved or revered by the people, I think, as were the priests. At first,
they are not permitted priestly functions. They have orders to "shoot to kill" should
anybody approach the holy premises. In fact, they turn out to be something like the special
forces that the Department of Defense organizes from time to time with high technical
qualifications because of the special weaponry involved. They were indeed handling deadly
equipment. They were in charge of the mobile worship-weapon system: the tabernacle, tent,
altar, and ark. Various wagons were assigned to them for transporting this national
equipment [11] .
"Historians are still unable to explain satisfactorily such problems as the relationship
that existed between the Levites and the hereditary priesthood." [12] Moses developed the
Levites as a special arm of Israel. Satisfied that his older "half-brother" Aaron should
have the priesthood and guarantee its security, he appointed the Levites, the best educated
secular element of the Hebrews, many of whom had served the Egyptians along with Moses
himself, to manage the Tabernacle with its equipment and the most precious goods of the
people. No wonder there was puzzlement about the Levites centuries later as the environment
became more orderly, uniform, and electrically balanced. Why should the Levites have shaved
from head to foot, for example, if electric shock were not a danger? From elite troops, the
Levites became property and stage managers, with a right to read the Torah following upon
the preeminent right of the Kohens or priesthood. However, as one reads in Deuteronomy [13]
, during some lengthy period, after Moses, the Levites performed the duties of the priests
themselves.
Moses decided, in the name of Yahweh, of course, that death would be visited upon a priest
who approached the Ark with unclean hands - death by accidental or deliberate electrocution
in some instances. Down to today, significantly, the Law does not get read in the Synagogue
before a Levite washes the hands of the Kohen who is to begin the reading. A psychiatrist's
reasons for this ritual purification (and individual problems of the genre) in an
uncontrolled liberal society are usually adequate, but shaving one's body completely,
wearing special clothes, removing one's shoes before the altar, and washing one's hands
begin to make up a complex that primordially might have to do with precautions against
unwanted electrical connections. And the technical expert is he who insures precautions.
Thus the Levites were to serve, but also to control the priests and their equipment.
Exceptions from their control were Aaron, of course, and Aaron's son, Eleazer, subsequently
High Priest. The reason is given in one place "that there may be no plague among the people
of Israel in case the people of Israel should come near the sanctuary." [14] Here the
intent to avoid a dew of dangerous chemicals and radiation seems clear. The plagues would be
widespread outbursts of skin lesions and sores (mistakenly called leprosy), but would
include plagues of vomiting, diarrhea and eye diseases, all of which occur with radiation
poisoning. These are related in turn to the plagues of Egypt preceding the Exodus, when the
red dust poisoned the water and covered the land. The natural excitation, emergence and
proliferation of frogs, insects and vermin that would also be lifted and dropped in the
cyclonic winds would be connected by observers with the chemically caused plagues.
Yahweh exempted the Levites from the Mobilization and Census of the people because they were
his retinue, says a legend [15] . Only Levites from 30-50 years of age were called to
active duty. They were divided in eight sections.
Levites were to consecrate themselves to Yahweh in lieu of the consecration of the first-
born. The implication is strong here that the Jews were supposed to sacrifice their first-
born, of all children and animals, to Yahweh. The Levites might always impress upon the
people that they and they alone were responsible for and to be credited for removing a great
load of sacrifice from everyone else. Too, one may consider whether there is a threat
contained in this relationship, in the fear that the Levites may renounce this surrogation
and ask Yahweh for a resumption of the obligation upon all.
Yahweh spoke to Moses and said:
I myself have chosen the Levites from among the sons of Israel, in place of the first-
born, those who open the mother's womb among the sons of Israel; these Levites therefore
belong to me. For every first-born belongs to me. On the day when I struck all the first-
born in the land of Egypt, I consecrated for my own all the first-born of Israel, of both
man and beast. They are mine; I am Yahweh [16] .
Yahweh said to Moses:
Take a census of all the first-born among the sons of Israel, all the males from the age
of one month and over; take a census of them by name. Then you will present the Levites to
me, Yahweh, in place of the first-born of Israel; in the same way you will give me their
cattle in place of the first-born cattle of the sons of Israel.
As Yahweh ordered, Moses took a census of all the first-born of the sons of Israel. The
total count, by name, of the first-born from the age of one month and over came to twenty-
two thousand two hundred and seventy three.
Then Yahweh spoke to Moses and said,
Take the Levites in place of all the first-born of Israel's soils, and the cattle of the
Levites in place of their cattle; the Levites shall be my own, Yahweh's own. For the ransom
of the two hundred and seventy three of the sons of Israel in excess of the number of
Levites, you are to take five shekels for each, reckoning by the sanctuary shekel, twenty
gerahs to the shekel; you must then give this money to Aaron and his sons as the ransom
price for this extra number.
Moses received this money as the ransom for this extra number unransomed by the Levites.
He received the money for the first-born of the sons of Israel, one thousand three hundred
and sixty-five shekels, sanctuary shekels. Moses handed over this ransom money to Aaron and
his sons, at the bidding of Yahweh, as Yahweh had ordered Moses [17] .
From first to last Moses depended upon the Levites for maintaining his absolute power.
According to legend, the Levites were the most faithful to Yahweh in Egypt where so many of
the population lost their religious ardor. (I think that they may have had the most skilled
and curious religious cultists.) They passed Yahweh's test at Massah (" proof") and at the
waters of Meribah (" contention") where they rallied around Moses when rioting began over
the shortage of water and before Moses had had time to discover it beneath the rocks [18] .
Nevertheless, leadership in domestic security and war went to Joshua, son of Nun, of the
tribe of Ephraim, not a Levite. He was Moses' personal bodyguard from the beginning of
Exodus. His devotion, diligence, and aggressiveness were all that Moses could ask for, and
sometimes more. He had neither sons nor daughters; when spies were sent to survey Canaan and
report back whether Israel should then and there descend upon the Promised Land, Joshua was
criticized by the other spies for having little to lose by going into battle [19] .
Legend gives several surprising comments on Joshua, more consistent with this book's
findings than with ordinary opinion. Joshua grew up without knowing his antecedents; he was
raised by strangers, and his father's name, "Nun," means "fish," because, the legend says,
he was cast into the waters, and swallowed by a whale, then spit up. "The government
appointed him to the office of hangman. As luck would have it, he had to execute his own
father." [20] He was called a fool because of his general ignorance and the spies called
him a "head-cutter." [21]
BLAME THE PEOPLE
At first, Moses, Yahweh and Aaron were concerned that they would not be able to assemble and
march out the mass of people. The Egyptian taskmasters were instructed to demand more work
of the Hebrews for their unruliness; there was a general uneasiness, a feeling that the
Exodus might not come off, and that all Hebrews would suffer severe discriminatory
penalties. Moses and his following prevailed; the plagues were most impressive.
When Moses and the Levites could not control the situation, blame for it is projected upon
the people. Because of their unseemly complaints to Yahweh, "His anger was kindled, and the
fire of the Lord burned among them, and consumed some outlying parts of the camp." The
people cried to Moses, who prayed to Yahweh, "and the fire abated." [22] Moses no doubt
consulted the Ark and recognized that a temporary excess of electricity was leaving the
Earth via tent poles and metals and exposed rock floorings. The electrical fire would travel
to and enhance cooking-fires in or by the tents. Having practiced several tricks with Yahweh
at the Burning Bush - using an electric jumping rod and phosphorus - Moses employed them on
a group of Hebrew leaders at a conference arranged by Aaron. They were impressed enough to
hear his proposition, and liked it. But he had other difficulties from the beginning with
organizing the people for Exodus. A change seemed gradually to come over him.
When the people cried in terror at the sight of the pursuing Egyptians and reproached those
who had brought them out of Egypt, Moses spoke to calm them and to "see the salvation of the
Lord which he will work for you today." [23]
The problem of bitter water three days into the wilderness from the Sea of Passage caused
murmurings against Moses that he stopped by casting a certain tree made known to him by
Yahweh into the waters, which made them potable [24] .
When the people groaned with hunger and talked of returning to Egypt, Moses and Aaron
addressed them, saying that all was the work of Yahweh:
"For what are we, that you murmur against us?... Your murmurings are not against us but
against the Lord." [25]
Quail fell in great numbers, as did manna, that could be baked into bread. Moses became
angry when people tried to hold the manna overnight and, as he had warned them, it turned
foul and wormy.
Then thirst assailed the Israelites. To their reproaches and threats to stone him, Moses
retorted "Why do you find fault with me?" and, upon the advice of Yahweh, found water
beneath rock. The Levites, we learn, earned high praise for helping Moses to suppress the
protesters.
When a protest was raised, the complaint was turned against the people. To strengthen their
own position, Moses and Aaron displaced responsibility upon Yahweh, let the people know how
sinful they were to attack the Lord, and then punished them whenever they could.
The Books of Moses are generally unfair to the Jewish people, giving little credence to
their opinions, requiring of them self-abasement, piling up rites endlessly, dwelling upon
their "unfaithfulness" and exalting the wrath of God. As I labored to fix my mind and
feelings within the mental, social, and physical state of the Exodus and Wanderings, I was
often diverted by free associations to find myself once again amidst the English dissenters
of the 17th century, the American colonial puritans of the same age, and the westward
movements of the New Englanders. All of these, which I had studied when young, were attempts
by groups to relive the Pentateuch; in some ways they are better analogies than the
anthropological and historical comparisons of the Mosaic Jews with other semitic and nomadic
groups, which are so common, for we have more information on precisely those matters which
are left vague in the Bible - namely the reasons for the resistance to mosaic theocracy, the
limits of the theocrats as nation-builders, and the souls and aspirations of the common men
and women who were caught up in the new Israels.
Despite the considerable successes of the Jews in surviving as a people within the Mosaic
framework and despite their occasional successes, under David and Solomon, for example, in
setting up a larger national state, they could not establish an enduring nation over the
centuries. It used to be believed that the position of Israel between great nations such as
Egypt and Assyria made their military position difficult. But this is post facto reasoning;
military history reveals a Roman Republic that wrested central Italy from numerous
apparently stronger neighbors; a revolutionary France surrounded by enemies, which defeated
them all; a Germany surrounded by enemies that required a concerted alliance including
overseas America to contain it; and a contemporary Israel that has had to be restrained by
distant great powers from conquering an empire in the Near East. I am permitted, therefore,
to think that the dominating influence of mosaism in Jewish history was a principal source
of Israelite misfortunes over many centuries. By way of analogy, it was only the breaking
away from mosaic theocracy - the taking in of other peoples, the revolt of democratic sects
such as the Baptists of Roger Williams in Rhode Island, the coming of new democratic sects
such as the Quakers, the rise of free science and a commercial life free of religious and
state regulation - that permitted the explosive expansion of American culture in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within a unified and great domain.
Because the people of Israel were downgraded and thwarted and kept as Children of God and
Moses, the Jewish nation labored between an absolute monarchic vision and the squabbling
tribes. The change in Moses, from a supplicating organizer of a loose aggregate of new
believers to a religiously inspired autocrat, occurred in the first few weeks of Exodus and
might have been predicted from his character. He was afraid at first that the people would
not follow him, but once in control of the people he set about becoming their absolute
master.
It was no doubt Moses who led the Israelites to believe that they had been abominably
enslaved in Egypt. This was required to counter-balance the call of Egypt to which many of
the Israelites responded wistfully and by rebellion over many years. It was also a useful
myth to inspire gratitude for Moses and Yahweh. The slogan is dinned into their ears: Yahweh
(and Moses) led you out of slavery in Egypt. Obey them gratefully.
As soon as possible, Moses proclaimed a "Royal Covenant" [26] to replace the implied
covenant with Pharaoh. A new authority, Yahweh, had to replace the old. (Thus were the
mosaic Puritan covenanters of New England, who were fracturing their bond with the royal
authority of England.)
About a dozen insurrectionary crises are registered in the Bible and legends [27] . In
organizing the Exodus within Goshen, Hebrews clashed amongst themselves and with gentiles. A
legend goes so far as to say that all Hebrews who refused to leave Egypt were massacred
under cover of the plague of darkness. The leaders wanted no one to know of the dissent in
the Hebrew ranks. The Bible gives only a hint of this; Moses and his cohort are opposed by
many doubters and realists.
Next, Pi-ha-Khiroth; fights break out as so many desert the Exodus. The Levites acquitted
themselves well here, but there was no way of avoiding a great many desertions. The sea was
crossed and a great feast of singing and dancing by all, led by Miriam and including angels,
took place. But after the ball was over, Israel petitioned Moses for a return to Egypt. The
legend recites the story in a reasonable way:
Hardly had they seen that the Egyptians met death in the waters of the sea, when they
spoke to Moses, and said: "God has led us from Egypt only to grant us five tokens: To give
us the wealth of Egypt, to let us walk in clouds of glory, to cleave the sea for us, to take
vengeance on the Egyptians, and to let us sing him a song of praise. Now all this has taken
place, let us return to Egypt." Moses answered: "The Eternal said, 'The Egyptians whom ye
have seen today, ye shall see them again no more forever. '" But the people were not yet
content, and said, 'Now the Egyptians are all dead, and therefore we can return to Egypt. '
Then Moses said, 'You must now redeem your pledge, for God said, 'When thou hast brought
forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain. '" Still the people
remained headstrong, and without giving heed to Moses, they set out on the road to Egypt,
under the guidance of an idol that they had brought with them out of Egypt, and had even
retained during their passage through the sea. Only through sheer force was Moses able to
restrain them from their sinful transgression [28] .
Might this indeed have been Moses' greatest error, that he did not turn his expedition
around, and, leaving a force to repel the oncoming Hyksos-Amalekites, go back to conquer
Egypt in the name of Yahweh?
Then there are protests and demonstrations when the first crisis of thirst occurs, only
several days into the desert. The word "murmuring" in the Bible must be distrusted; it means
protest, demonstrations, a crisis requiring defense and resolution by Moses and the armed
forces.
Next comes the food crisis. It lets one imagine that most sheep and cattle were lost in the
first week of Exodus. Now came the quail - a gift and a punishment from Yahweh. Great
flights of the birds fell - probably not quail alone. But the high doses of pollutants to
which they had been subjected and which helped to bring them to earth poisoned many of the
people. The Anger of God rose and "he slew the strongest of them, and laid low the wicked
men of Israel." [29] Quail can carry a viral infection, it is argued, but a legend says
that they came in a great wind, and the results were dramatically sudden.
The manna was certainly a godsend; it was not only nourishing but probably contained a
specific antidote to radiation poisoning as does honey [30] . Next came the second crisis
of thirst. Here, on the rock at Mount Horeb, Moses produced water with his rod.
In the third month of the Exodus, Israel was encamped below Mount Sinai. Moses ascended the
mountain and, upon his long-delayed return, was greeted by the spectacle of the Golden Calf.
This revolt will be described shortly. Then came the mysterious fire of Taberah, so
unconnected with a specific misconduct of the people that the most general explanation is
required; the Wrath of Yahweh was kindled and burned down portions of the camp. It was an
electrical fire. Dissent and complaint were blamed. A legend speaks persuasively on the
subject of the fire. The fire wrought havoc upon the idolatrous tribe of Dan and upon the
Egyptian and foreign mixed multitude [31] . Yet we learn that as a result of this dissent
and fire, Moses decided upon the election of the new elders by means of a lottery.
Then Aaron and Miriam personally remonstrated and demanded a showdown with Moses. Yahweh
called Aaron and Miriam to the tent. Miriam emerged a "leper." Moses was appeased and kept
both at their appointed functions. The people could see that not even the close-in family
could affect the bond of Yahweh with Moses.
A legend says that Miriam and Aaron "talk against Moses" because his wife is a foreigner, a
Kushite, hardly true, since Zipporah was from Jethro, the Midianite, not out of Ethiopia.
Perhaps it is his second wife, we suggested earlier, also a foreigner. Perhaps Miriam wants
Moses to begin a hereditary line of seers of Hebrew tribal extraction. Moses refuses and has
Yahweh punish them. A foreign wife is preferable to a Jewish wife; she is without familial
and tribal support, without hereditary linkage to Jacob. Moses is not interested in a
succession; perhaps he does not foresee the survival of Israel, as we imply later on. He is
not "a family man" as we have already indicated.
Next came the Report of the Spies [32] . All who disputed Moses' intimation that the time
might have come for an incursion into the Promised Land were executed. Many others died in a
plague, for once again harkening to the Call of Egypt. "Let us choose a captain and go back
to Egypt, they said." Further all must now wander a full forty years and never would those
who had departed from Egypt live to see the Promised Land except Caleb and Joshua who had
refused to agree to the majority report.
According to legend, when the people thought that Moses was going to go against the Report
of the Spies, "in their bitterness against their leaders they wanted to lay hands upon Moses
and Aaron, whereupon God sent His cloud of glory as a protection to them under which they
sought refuge." The crowd even cast stones into the cloud in trying to smite them [33] .
Moses here does something only a true Machiavellian ruler would do; he punishes the spies
for their pessimistic report and punishes the people for believing it. But he believes it
himself, and he tells the people that now they must continue wandering because of their lack
of faith in him and Yahweh. He also talks Yahweh out of exterminating the Jews for their
general pessimism and nostalgia for Egypt. Later on occurs the serious revolt led by Korah.
For this episode, we reserve ample space a little later on. After Aaron's death, bitter
civil warfare broke out again, between those who wanted to return to Egypt and those,
especially the Levites, who insisted upon continuing toward Palestine [34] . The legend
says that they actually retreated eight stations to Moserah. The Tribe of Benjamin lost most
of its warriors and six other tribes lost heavily. Several divisions of Levites were mauled
and did not recover until the time of David, some centuries later. Peace was made in a great
mourning ceremony for Aaron.
Once more there is a grave insurrection, this time at Beth Peor, just before Moses' death,
and of this too we shall shortly speak. When Joshua assumed command before the entry into
the Promised Land, he instituted severe measures to unify the Israelites. He had all
households destroy their god-images, masks, and other sacred representations [35] . And he
ordered by command of Yahweh a general circumcision; the Bible says that those born in the
desert had not been circumcised [36] . This is odd, coming so long after Moses had appeared
to demand it; it does indicate, I think, that circumcision was a relatively new practice
without heavy sanctions of opinion and tradition or else that a great many non-Hebrews had
joined Israel on exceptional terms, or both. The population was now consecrated to the Holy
War in Palestine.
Ringing in their ears were the words of Moses' last address to the people of Israel: "You
have been rebellious against Yahweh from the day that I knew you." [37] True words, spoken
by Moses-Yahweh, implying once more that Moses and Yahweh came late to know the Hebrews.
Moses was not born and bred a Hebrew.
REVOLT OF THE GOLDEN CALF
Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai, at the command of Yahweh, and there received for the first
time the Law and the tablets engraved by the finger of Yahweh. Returning from the lengthy
isolation on the mountain, he discovered to his consternation that in his absence the people
had melted down their gold and fashioned a calf of it, and around this marvelous image were
worshipping, eating, dancing and singing.
For they had beset Aaron, demanding: "Up, make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this
Moses, the man who brought us out of the Land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of
him." So Aaron asked for their gold jewelry and melted it and fashioned it into a molten
calf. And the people said: "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the
Land of Egypt." Whereupon Aaron "built an altar before it" and declared a feast day for the
Lord.
The people then betook themselves to the seventy members of the Sanhedrin (the ruling
council of elders) and demanded that they worship the bull that had led Israel out of Egypt.
'God, ' said they, had not delivered us out of Egypt, but only Himself, who had in Egypt
been in captivity. ' The Sanhedrin remained loyal to their God, and were hence cut down by
the rabble [38] .
This legend indicates that the Revolt was even more bloody than the Bible depicts (as well
as testifying to the cometary bull).
In his fury, Moses cast down and broke the tablets given him by Yahweh. He seized the calf.
Aaron blamed the people: "You know the people, that they are set on evil." [39] The people
were scattered all about; the military aspect of the camp was quite lost. Moses stationed
himself at the gate of the camp and called: "Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me."
The sons of Levi gathered around and Moses' orders were brief and harsh: "Put every man his
sword on his side, and go to and from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man
his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor." Within the day, the
Levites slaughtered three thousand men of Israel. Moses had the image of the bull burned and
ground into powder. Then, mixing the gold powder with water, he forced the heretics to drink
it. Order was restored. Moses spoke to the people, reproaching them but promising to
intercede with the Lord regarding their great sinning. But Yahweh sent a plague upon the
people because of the Golden Calf [40] .
Although the Golden Calf disappeared into frightful memory, this was not the last of non-
Mosaic Judaism, and most Jews were lost to Israel and Yahwism for the worship of Baal and
other gods in the centuries to come. The Northern Ten Tribes, breaking away from the united
kingdom to find a northern Kingdom of Israel "worshipped all the hosts of heaven and served
Baal." King Jeroboam founded at Dan and Bethel sanctuaries that rivaled the Temple of
Jerusalem. He set up in each a golden calf image to Yahweh, and appointed non-Levites as
temple custodians [41] . They were destroyed in 723 or 722 B. C.
Similar events occurred in the Southern Kingdom under Manasseh. Then, shortly before the
Babylonians descended upon them and carried them off into exile, Josiah restored Yahweh
against much popular opposition. Many Jews fled then and later to Egypt where they
worshipped Anat-Yahweh, Venus, "Queen of Heaven." [42]
What did the Golden Calf represent, if not Anat-Yahweh (as it is called in a Psalm)? It was
the child of the comet Venus-Baal-Ishtar-Athene-Minerva-Isis-Devi and a hundred other names
from all over the world. The same calf became the sacred cow of the Hindus who were moving
just then into India.
The young bull was the apparition of the great comet at some points of its approach and
retreat from near collision with the Earth, when it looked like a cow, bull and calf. "Only
if we realize the planetary-cometary significance of the egel (meaning 'young bull', but
also 'roundness'), do we find any sense in the reaction of the People of Israel to the
calf." "... and... they cried: This is thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the
land of Egypt!" [43] One legend says that, while passing through the Red Sea, the people
saw the Celestial Throne and most distinctly the ox among the four creatures around the
throne (lion, man, eagle, ox) and therefore they thought to worship the ox as the helper of
God in the Exodus [44] . Another report, already cited, says that the bull was inscribed on
the chariot of the Lord as he drove across the skies in aid of the Hebrews.
The comet was regarded as the offspring of the greater god Jupiter-Zeus-Marduk-Amon-Yahweh
in many places, and confused with these divinities, who were universally fire-and-thunder
gods.
Moses would not have it so: His Yahweh spoke from heaven and mountains, true, but was a god
of electric fire. He filled the heavens but not visibly. He was among his chosen people,
went with them in those days in an awe-inspiring physical sense. Still, apparent in the
verses of the Bible is the fright of Moses that somehow Yahweh would not act for him in the
aftermath of the revolt. He pleads for assurances; he has to repeat the whole act again,
returning to the mountain and descending once more, this time in a subdued triumph.
No Golden Calf could fight for the Jews like the Ark of the Covenant. No astrology could
have provided a people with so personal a god as did the electrical science of Moses. Yahweh
was always moving, always up to something new. All, even in the remote outskirts of the
camp, had their attention focussed upon Moses and the Tabernacle.
Moses had every reason to become furious. The shock of betrayal was great. The people were
ungrateful, too. They must have hated him to think him dead and become so happy. The
fragility of his charisma was apparent. All of his plans seemed wrecked, the designs of the
sacred machinery and of the religious center, detailed even to the priestly clothing and
ornate draperies. The gold that the leaders had caused to be begged, borrowed, and stolen in
Egypt was now unclean, and could not be reused for the instruments of the sanctuary. If the
dancing and singing were not enough, a mere glance at the young bull exhibited its sexual
connotations. Why was it a young bull - to replace Moses, the old bull? (Moses had already
designed an altar with four corner-horns of undesignated species fashioned of wood in one
piece with the altar.) [45] Many of his subordinate leaders had been massacred in the
attempted coup d'etat. For it was such; Levites, among others, were involved. A cometary
image would replace Moses as the center of sacramental behavior; half of his power would be
gone. His electrical science would be demysticized, desacralized.
The reprisals of the counter-revolution were severe. Perhaps thousands were slaughtered. All
weapons were seized [46] . The gold-poisoned drink killed many. The legend says it was a
form of "capital punishment." [47] A plague of Yahweh raged among the guilty people, until
all who were involved were dead or had fled into the desert; Moses exterminated all those
who had been unclean. As for the loyal and the non-participating, and for himself, he
discussed seriously with Yahweh the question whether they too were unworthy to survive.
After the Revolt, Moses had his tent removed from inside to outside the camp. He posts
Levite guards before it and says it is a tent of coming together. Actually it marked a new
phase of reaction. He needed greater personal safety. He felt more strongly than ever in
isolation from and aversion to the people. Perhaps he thought, too, that one day Yahweh
would set the whole camp ablaze with a fire from his "Mercy Seat" and strong winds.
KORAH'S REBELLION
A 13th century English painting of the Rebellion of Korah [48] shows the rebels being
assailed from the heavenly canopy by many pointy little tongues of flame. "These tongues
remind us of 'little quadrants of light... constantly jumping' along a wire at the Harvard
College Observatory at Pike's Peak, Colorado, as described in a report [50] .
Korah's revolt posed a grave threat to Moses' absolute rule. The boldness with which the
rebels moved in upon Moses and close-in loyal supporters indicates a large confidence in
their chances of success. It happens at the semi-permanent encampment at Kadesh, whence a
short time before the spies had been sent out. Korah, himself, is rumored to have been
Treasurer to the Pharaoh of Egypt. He was both a Levite and a Kohathite, therefore of the
division of Levites directly responsible for the management of the sanctuary, except that
the most critical jobs were given to Aaron and his priesthood. Legend has it that Korah was
angered at having been passed over by Moses for the leadership of the Kohathites. Moses
probably had already had trouble with Korah.
Top leaders, at least 250 says the Bible, were openly lined up with Korah. They had a large
popular following, which Moses appreciated. And when the leaders confronted him at the
Tabernacle the day after the rebellion began, they brought with them their popular
following. Moses invoked the crowd to disperse, and it did so, possibly because he
threatened them with a plague and also because he seemed to be striking a deal with the
rebels.
The philosophy behind the rebellion was well thought out. The rebels declared to Moses: "You
have gone too far! For all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is
among them; why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?"
Notwithstanding that he is the one accused of exalting himself, Moses transfers the problem
to a grasping for the top offices: Isn't it enough, you Levites, says Moses, that you do
special services for Yahweh and are near him. "Would you seek the priesthood also? Therefore
it is against the Lord that you and all your company have gathered together; what is Aaron
that you murmur against him?" [51]
Moses promptly changes the grounds of debate. He does not address the main charge that he,
Moses, acts as alone holy, whereas the doctrine of Yahweh is that all Israel is holy, each
man in his own special relationship to God, as the Covenant with Yahweh would imply. Moses
points out that Levites are in fact privileged and separated from the people of Israel. Thus
he begins to isolate them from the people and limit their demands.
Moses then, I think, carries out a secret plan which he had held in abeyance for just this
eventuality. No doubt he had conducted experiments with animals, and, I would guess, with
prisoners who were caught in holy wars and brought to receive judgement within the courtyard
or even before the "mercy seat" of Yahweh [52] .
He announced to the rebel chieftains that, since they claimed equality before Yahweh, they
should arrange to present themselves fittingly, lighted bronze censers in hand, with Aaron,
before the Holy of Holies to see whom Yahweh would select to receive a sign of his favor.
The decision would be up to Yahweh; this is repeatedly stressed. And they must not bring
their weapons.
The rebels consented and repaired to their tents. Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and their most
faithful assistants went to work. They set the Ark to accumulate its maximum charge short of
sparking, Given both the atmospheric charge held by the cherubim and the ground charge
gathered by the outer golden sheath of the box and focussing in the rod that extended above
the outer box at the rear center of the mercy seat, a voltage of from 20,000 to 100,000
could be accumulated.
The total Tabernacle area was about 15,000 square feet, and was fenced off and guarded. The
area enclosing the Altar of Incense before the curtain of the Holy of Holies was some four
hundred square feet. Many, perhaps all, of the rebel chieftains, could press into the inner
sanctum and the rest would crowd at the entrance. The tent would have been pitched
originally on all area where ground currents of negative ions could readily be attracted.
Lightning is the discharge of the electrical potential (termed "voltage") between two points
of different charges, when the setting is between air and ground or is air-to-air. Average
amperage (current) may be about 20,000 [53] . Electrical charges are measured in coulombs.
Current is measured in joules or amperes. Resistance is measured in ohms. Electrical
discharges can peel a sapling, undress a person, and pluck chickens. The effects of
electroshock upon the human body depends upon the individual constitution, both genetic and
acquired, and upon the intensity of the current (amperage) which enters the body and where
it passes in relation to the heart or brain. "Fatal traumas from potentials of 10-24 V are
described in the literature." [54] The current in such cases is perforce low, even under 100
Amperes. In most deadly instances, voltages of under 400 are involved. "As the great
majority of electrical fatalities are due to currents passing between an arm (usually the
right) and the legs, the current passes through the chest and affects the organs within it."
[55] The longer the "juice is on," the greater the danger.
Earth current can be a source of great danger. If a current of 50,000 amperes enters the
soil at a point and spreads out uniformly in all directions, the current density, and hence
the voltage drop, along the ground surface will be appreciable even at a considerable
distance from the flash. The furrows which sometimes radiate from the point actually struck
show that the voltage-drop may be sufficient to produce actual discharges through the soil.
The voltage between two points on the earth separated by the length of an animal's stride
might therefore be quite sufficient to pass an appreciable current up one leg and down the
other. There are many cases of cattle-killing which can be explained in no other manner.
When 126 sheep out of a flock of 152 arc killed by a single flash it is hardly conceivable
that they were all hit by the main channel [56] .
But we need not speak only of lightning. Closer at hand and more controllable was the
artificial lightning of Moses. Granted that an electrocution of a herd of livestock is
possible by lightning, we may surmise that a deliberate mass electrocution of humans would
be possible, especially 3400 years ago, when electrical conditions of nature were disturbed.
In the earliest beginnings of modern electrical science, and in a mood of dangerous play
that forms an ironic and tragic contrast with the Old Testament setting, we find enough
ideas and procedures to understand the behavior of Moses and the Israelites. It is worth
citing in detail the new scientists of the mid-eighteenth century in connection with Korah's
Revolt.
Mr. George Graham shewed how several circuits for the discharge of the Leyden phial might
be made at the same time, and the fire be made to pass through them all. He made a number of
persons take hold of a plate of metal, communicating with the outside of the phial; and all
together, likewise, laid hold of a brass rod with which the discharge was made; when they
were all shocked at the same time, and in the same degree [57] .
Scientists elsewhere produced similar effects:
In France as well as in Germany experiments were made to try how many persons might feel
the shock of the same phial. The Abb‚ Nollet, whose name is famous in electricity, gave it
to one hundred and eighty of the guards, in the King's presence; and at the grand convent of
the Carthusians in Paris, the whole community formed a line of nine hundred toises (1754
meters), by means of iron wires between every two persons (which far exceeded the line of
one hundred and eighty of the guards) and the whole company upon the discharge of the phial,
gave a sudden spring, at the same instant of time, and all felt the shock equally [58] .
Joseph Priestley's own experiment is especially worthy of attention. It is contained in an
essay entitled "Entertaining Experiments performed by means of Leyden Phial."
A great deal of diversion is often occasioned by giving a person a shock when he does not
expect it; which may be done by concealing the wire which comes from the outside of the
phial under the carpet, and placing the wire which comes from the inside in such a manner in
a person's way, that he can suspect no harm from putting his hand upon it, at the same time
that his feet are upon the other wire. This, and many other methods of giving a shock by
surprise, may easily be executed by a little contrivance; but great care should be taken
that these shocks be not strong, and that they be not given to all persons promiscuously.
When a single person receives the shock, the company is diverted at his sole expense; but
all contribute their share to the entertainment, and all partake of it alike, when the whole
company forms a circuit, by joining their hands; and when the operator directs the person
who is at one extremity of the circuit to hold a chain which communicates with the coating,
while the person who is at the other extremity of the circuit touches the wire. As all the
persons who form this circuit are struck at the same time, and with the same degree of
force, it is often very pleasant to see them start at the same moment, to hear them compare
their sensations, and observe the very different accounts they give of it [59] .
Priestley's happy sublimated imagination was far removed from mosaism. (He was, in fact, a
founder of Unitarianism.) He could go on and on with games, given a few basic electrical
principles.
This experiment may be agreeably varied, if the operator, instead of making the company
join hands, direct them to tread upon each others toes, or lay their hands upon each others
heads; and if, in the latter case, the whole company should be struck to the ground, as it
happened when Dr. Franklin once gave the shock to six very stout robust men, the
inconvenience arising from it will be very inconsiderable. The company which the Doctor
struck in this manner neither heard nor felt the stroke, and immediately got up again,
without knowing what had happened. This was done with two of his large jars (each containing
about six gallons) not fully charged [60] .
A number of drawings of mass shockings are to be found. The one in figure 18 from Japan is
chosen precisely for its lack of explicitness. Made far removed, culturally and
geographically, from the scene of the experiments, it would inform or persuade us of nothing
scientific. Therefore it suggests how the memory of Moses' electrical operations might be
distorted, sublimated, and finally misunderstood over the centuries. The drawings we possess
of Korah's rebels show them dying mysteriously, victims of the invisible Yahweh.
In the deep shadows of the past, grim real games were going on. We can watch them only half-
understanding. We imagine only the simplest devices and system, even though the applications
may have been more sophisticated.
Moses and his officers, early in the morning, poured water over the rock floor of the tent,
wetting it thoroughly to make it as fully conductive from the earth as possible. A copper
wire was laid down and around the floor of the area. Then the carpets ordinarily covering
the floor were replaced, hiding the wire [61] . The wire connected at the Ark on a metal
rod extending from the outside golden plate of the Ark. Thus a very large negative charge
could gather and be prepared to discharge if contacted or approached close enough by a
positive charge.
Figure 18. Mass Electroshock.
(Source: Figure 13.2 from Heilbron. op cit)
The positive charge was in fact gathering from the atmosphere on the golden cherubim and
inner lining of the Ark. The whole inner metallic complex of cherubim and lining were
separated by a screen of wood or glass from the stored negative charges of the outside
lining and its upright rod.
It is apparent now that the Ark is charging up heavily but is being prevented from
discharging upon itself by the insulation. We recall that the wire beneath the carpet is
disconnected, so we imagine that it was carried around to the Ark and affixed to a heavy
metal bar. The movement of this bar is controlled by the priest Eleazer, son of Aaron, who
can push it into a lock against the positively charged wing tip of a cherub. He is insulated
by gloves, masks, heavy clothing and non-conducting wood tongs. This is usual equipment for
tending the Ark.
The rebels assembled the next morning, lighted censers in hand [62] , before the Tent. Their
large following had come as well, and Yahweh was enraged. They were threatened and dismissed
by Moses. The sight of Joshua and many armed men frightened them, too. But also and even
before the test of the rebels with censers, Korah and the two men who were rebels but
refused to appear with the assembly at the tent had been killed dramatically at the instance
of Moses. These two men had called out to Moses defiantly: "Are you going to bore the eyes
of these men?" [63]
Aaron stood beside the Holy of Holies on an insulator, with insulating footgear and
clothing, out of contact with any of the possible lines of electrical charge. He welcomed
the rebels, who crowded, elbow to elbow, into the tent. They prostrated themselves before
Yahweh, head, arms, knees, feet and censers touching the ground. Eleazer pushed the bar into
the wing lock. Most, if not all, of the rebels were promptly electrocuted as the charges
raced towards each other and coursed through each man, striking upwards at the brain and
heart. Those merely stunned and shocked would be dispatched by the swords of Joshua's
guards, moving in from their insulated corners, after the charges were spent, or the
connecting bar was pulled out.
"Fire came forth from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering the
incense." [64] Thus the Bible. "The souls, not the bodies of the sinners were burned " [65]
Thus the legend.
Perhaps this method of mass execution was not followed [66] . The Ark might provide a
second method by individual sparks. In both is involved the ancient and primitive means of
administering justice through the trial by ordeal. Such is the trial of a woman for
adultery, for instance, in the Bible [67] . The accused is traumatized, and is deemed guilty
or innocent depending upon the outcome of the test or ordeal: "Yahweh will show who is holy,
and will cause him to come near to him." [68]
Electrocution by the Ark of so many, individually, would be much more difficult. Since each
leader was to be judged by Yahweh, each in turn would be marched to the altar and struck
down. Men who were physiologically resistant to fatal shock would be dealt with by sword.
(The Abb‚ Nollet in 1746 "gave the shock with porcelain, and observed that some persons were
much more sensible to it than others in whatever part of the circuit they were placed.")
[69] Those who refused the test would be dispatched by the sword; for the refusal was taken
to be a confession of guilt. A ring of guards around the tent prevented any break-out of the
group.
From a rubbed and electrified jar, Von Kleist, dean of the cathedral in Camin, in 1745, took
"a nail, or a piece of thick brass wire" that carried a charge; "it throws out a pencil of
flame so long, that, with this burning machine in my hand, I have taken above sixty steps,
in walking about my room." [70] Around the same time, Monnier discovered that "the Leyden
Phial would retain its electricity a considerable time after it was charged, and to have
found it do so for thirty-six hours, in time of frost. He frequently electrified his phial
at home, and brought it in his hand, through many streets, from the college of Harcourt to
his apartments in the King's gardens, without any considerable diminution of its efficacy."
[71]
Heilbron sums up this development: "Physicists soon learned that an electrified phial need
not explode to be intriguing: when doing nothing at all, innocently insulated, it
unaccountedly preserved its punch for hours or days. Even when grounded it remained potent,
provided that its top wire was not touched." [72]
The English experimenter, Wilson, equally early (and all of these experiments and many more
occurred before Franklin's discovery of positive and negative charges), found that the first
discharge of a simple Leyden jar was the most explosive and dissipated the load quickly.
"Whereas, when water was used, the subsequent explosions were more in number, and more
considerable; and when the phial was charged with nothing but a wire inserted into it, the
first explosion and the subsequent ones were still more nearly equal." [73]
Aaron, of course, came out well from the ordeal. The manner of Korah's death, by turning
into a ball of flame that rolled into a cleavage of the Earth, is not too far removed from
what might have happened in several cases, with help from the special police, and could have
been a report displaced from these to Korah, the most important figure, as often happens in
the garbling of news reports. Now Eleazer was told by Yahweh "to take up the censers out of
the blaze; then scatter the fire far and wide." [74] Afterwards, the censers were melted
down and fashioned into a plate for the altar. Thereafter nobody save of the seed of Aaron
would dare to "come near to burn incense before the Lord ," lest he die. This grim reminder
was an endless source of sorrow to the families of the deceased, the legend says [75] .
The next day a mob approaches the tent of Moses, "murmuring" as was their wont, whereupon
the cloud of Yahweh appeared dispersing them. "Wrath has gone forth from Yahweh, the plague
has begun." [76] Some 14,700 people were killed in this manifestation, says the Bible,
before Aaron, with his blessed censer, could move out and halt the plague. The implication
is that the cloud was directed into the crowd of people, for Yahweh told Moses to get out of
the way before he consumed them. The cloud was of some type of poison, evidently, probably
white phosphorus grenades cast into their midst by Moses' soldiers. Faced with declaring
this, or assigning the action to Yahweh, the Bible, as it commonly does, simplified and
moderated the action by laying it upon Yahweh; ruthlessness becomes justice when done by
him.
To confirm the end of the three-day tragedy, another contest is rigged. This time a beam is
split into twelve rods, Aaron receiving the rod of Levi, and the tribes a rod marked for
each of them. After a night by the Ark, Aaron's rod has grown blossoms and almonds. Let us
say that it has been sundered in a most interesting fashion, which we have already
described. Thus Aaron receives one more sign that he is to remain High Priest; Yahweh does
not fear nepotism as did Korah and his rebels.
Following Korah's rebellion, Moses dowses, after Miriam's well dries up.
Moses then fetched out of the Tabernacle the holy rod on which was the Ineffable Name of
God, and accompanied by Aaron, betook himself to the rock to bring water out of it.
He refused to find water from any random rock, despite the jeers of those who said he knew
how to find water not because of Yahweh but because he had once been a shepherd. He insisted
upon a chosen rock and succeeded in two attempts [77] .
FREUD AND THE MURDER OF MOSES
Sigmund Freud, inventor of the psychoanalytic method, and principal creator of the theory of
psychoanalysis, could not resist, in the last years of his life, the temptation to publish
his highly speculative book, Moses and Monotheism. Correctly he foresaw that he would offend
Christians and Jews - and, of course, the world of biblical scholarship.
Brave intellectual that he was, Freud offered frank answers to several moot issues. First of
all, he claimed Moses to be Egyptian. So were most of the Levites, the retinue of Governor
Moses (for Freud placed Moses most likely as the official in charge of Goshen, with its
unruly Hebrew population). Moses was a devout follower of Pharaoh Akhnaton (Freud calls him
Iknaton) and, upon the overthrow of this great reformer and monotheistic sun-worshipper,
Moses aroused the Hebrews and others in his bailiwick to follow him out of Egypt to a land
where they might worship Aton instead of Hammon or Amon or the solar identification of Aton,
for Moses was more enlightened, and derived the first abstract god. For his pains, Moses
received death in the end. Following the biblical scholar, Ernst Sellin, Freud argues that a
rebellion overthrew Moses and he was killed.
The curtain then drops upon this hapless abrogation in the desert. Perhaps a century later,
the same group, with the now assimilated Levites, make a religious and political pact with
their ethnic relatives, the Midianites. If the Midianite "Jews" of Kadesh agree to a
watered-down version of monotheism that takes in the ancient patriarchs such as Abraham and
Isaac and accept, without mentioning his name, their one god (Aton?), and upgrade the
history of the Exodus, then they - the Egyptian faction, now practically a tribe - would
agree that Yahweh, a local volcano god who hovers about Mt. Sinai, become their special god,
too, and lead them in a totally chauvinistic, ruthless career of expansion to the north and
west. As token of their good will to their Egyptian brethren, the Midianites must also
accept circumcision, which Freud, particularly in this case but also in general, believes to
originate as a form of mutilation carrying on from generation to generation the punishment
of the young for the murder of the father. The leader of this new Israel would be known in
the future rewriting of history as Moses (number 2) and the intervening century or so would
be forgotten.
Having concocted this scenario, Freud, a Jew, has brought the Jewish nation to an all-time
historical low. They were, in the days of which Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy
chant, mere barbaric Semites, acknowledging the memory of a single Egyptian god, guilty of
murdering their greatest leader, and set to follow a frightful marauding God, Yahweh, whose
main claim to fame was that he was better than any other god they were likely to encounter
in the course of their bloody wars. As for the Exodus, while not a stroll in the desert, it
was a group departure when conditions in Egypt were unsettled.
Freud does not hesitate, in this forceful little book, apologetically presented, to promote
three of his older scientific theses: religion as a collective neurosis; the unconscious
collective memory of humankind as having begun its guilt-laden career with the murder of the
father of a horde by the sons for possession of the womenfolk; and the slow release of the
load of guilt upon tribes as well as individuals by a suppressed traumatic incident of early
times or early life.
Freud uses the Exodus as a kind of unreliable case study in which the three concepts are
displayed. Moses, says Freud, proclaimed a good god, a universal god, and became identified
in people's minds with him. Although, to be sure, every attack upon a father or father-
figure repeats the primeval prototype patricide, presumably the more meaningful and great
the figure (e. g. Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln), the greater the burden of
guilt thereafter. The killing of Moses was the greatest historical shock for the Jews and
they have lived ever since in the guilt of this recollection, which they suppressed and
denied even a few years after the rebellion against him. But over many centuries this guilt
has worked itself out by an increasing devotion to the ideals of Moses the First: an ever
purer monotheism, a dedication to philosophy and intellectualism, a renunciation of
instincts to violence, and an obsessive claim to the lion's share of the early history of
universal religion. Little by little, they strove to eliminate the Yahweh in themselves in
favor of the unknown universal god. They cannot help but feel the chosen people of God;
their unique guilt goes to prove this.
It might be thought that, having gone this far, Freud would bestow his blessings upon
Christianity. For Christianity, he points out, is founded upon the murder of the son who is
also the father. As grateful recipients of this favor from Jesus, who stands for all sinners
and who dies for their sins, the Christians are relieved from the very heavy burden of guilt
carried by their fellow-Jews (speaking now of the earliest Christians who were all Jews):
Freud offers this possibility. But, he argues, it does not happen so. For, the relief from
the burden of their sins only permits Christians to behave badly with less troubled
consciences. And especially badly towards the Jews who raised the issue in the first place
in this particular form.
Hence Freud ends where he began - and where most scholars feel that he should have stayed -
in the anthropological perspective that regards all religions as a more or less
uncomfortable treatment of neurosis. But a great mind, like Freud, or Picasso, or Plato, or
Leonardo, or Marx, or Dewey, is incapable of a work that is all bad. In the present
instance, Freud does not labor under the compulsion of biblical scholars to cover up for
Yahweh. He makes Judaism a part of the anthropology of religion. He reveals, by his very
errors and wild speculations, the flimsy foundations of biblical exegesis that are made to
seem solid by the silent consensus of biblical experts to assume or ignore them.
But there are a number of improbabilities and impossibilities in Freud's study of Moses and
the beginnings of the Jewish nation. For some of these he was responsible, such as various
exaggerations, as when he exaggerates the unconscious guilt felt by Jews for the "murder" of
Moses; it is most doubtful that the average Jew has, since the Romans became Christian, been
more guilt-laden than the average Christian. And one must challenge, too, whether a group-
trauma operates in the group over the millennia just as an individual trauma functions in a
single lifetime. The old bulls are disposed of in many a mammal group without guilt-
feelings. There had to be an interposition of conscience, which would require a more
fundamental genetic or environmental change than a repetition of an act that had been going
on long before humanization occurred.
Freud's official biographer, Ernest Jones, provides illumination: Freud had thought of his
idea for many years. Nearly thirty years earlier he was looking upon Carl Jung as his
successor and referred to him as "son and heir." Further, "Jung was to be the Joshua
destined to explore the promised land of psychiatry which Freud, like Moses, was permitted
to view from afar. Incidentally, this mark is of interest as indicating Freud's self-
identification with Moses, one which in later years became very evident." [78] I pointed
out earlier how, when in Rome, Freud was drawn to Michelangelo's statue of Moses and
contemplated it for a long time.
So the "truth" which Freud revered was hidden from the master of unconscious truths. When
the time came to analyze Moses, his genius failed him, for he was talking about "himself."
Moses was not to have the traits that are strewn about the biblical record for the
edification of the psychoanalyst, nor commit all of the horrendous acts that are described
or to be inferred. Moses the First was a good man, like Freud; rather flat in profile, to be
sure; and Egyptian, not Christian, because of some inconvenient lapse of time. Moses the
Second was the Bad One and the Jews had become unhappily stuck with him and his Yahweh.
For two additional errors in his scenario, Freud was not completely responsible, but they
are fatal to his work; they are errors of the same biblical historians who denounce him. The
first is the false and evasive notion that the Exodus was not a journey through catastrophe.
There was nothing in the experience, Freud believed, to determine Moses' behavior or a
people's character or the events of history or a peculiar religion.
The second error that the professional establishment handed Freud was that Akhnaton lived
before Moses. Velikovsky has demonstrated the opposite: Moses came first. [79] This of
course is logically fatal to the thesis that Moses was a devoted disciple of Akhnaton and
led a utopian community to the practice of his religion. The Encyclopedia Britannica, to
exemplify what confronted Freud, even in 1974, some sixty years after Freud got his key
idea, gives the reigning dates of Akhenaton (their spelling) as 1379 to 1362 B. C. and calls
him "possibly the first monotheist in recorded history." (Freud uses the dates 1375 to 1358
B. C.) The same work accords Moses the date "fl( ourished) 13th century B. C." and reports
that "Ramses II (1304-c. 1237) was probably the pharaoh at the time." Freud puts the Exodus
between 1358 and 1350 B. C., dates that he regards as shortly after the death and obloquy of
Akhnaton. Hence Moses is supposed to have followed Akhnaton, and closely enough so that the
fluid dating might even have permitted Moses to have personally known the guidance of
Akhnaton.
Freud, the iconoclast, followed the great majority of traditional scholars on the key fact
and went wrong. But how was he to know? Velikovsky had not begun to work on the problem.
Freud was one more victim of the chaotic Egyptian chronology. The other psychoanalyst gone
egyptological, Velikovsky, had discovered the weak point in Freud's psychic armor, and knew
"in his heart" that Hebrew and Egyptian history must be synchronized. So he proceeded with
an iron will, indefatigably, to disassemble the "unassailable" structure of ancient Near
East chronology. In the process, and with the help of an unsupported, unpaid, self-
disciplined, polymathic group of scholars, he ended up engaged in an assault upon the belief
system of modern science as well [80] .
BETH PEOR
There is usually a suspicion of foul play when a person disappears. Moses, says the Bible,
went off alone to die and was buried by Yahweh in a gorge below Mount Nebo whence he had
looked out over the Promised Land. (See figure 19) Strangely, it seems, he was buried facing
Beth-Peor, where the last of the collective disturbances that marked his rule had occurred
[81] .
There the Israelites in large numbers had united with settled Moabites or Midianites in
unauthorized religious festivals - particularly, recounts the Bible with some indignation,
fertility rites encouraging free love in the fields in the name of the local Baal, with the
purpose of inspiring nature to greater productivity.
Freud cited Ernst Sellin, a German scholar, as proving Moses died in a revolt, but gives
little detail on the occurrence, referring only to Hosea, a prophet of six centuries later,
as insinuating the events. As I read this on a remote island, far from a copy of Sellin's
book, I sought to follow the hypothesis by myself, in anticipation of ultimately locating
the work.
Hosea writes a diatribe against the Israelites, which he acts out. Imitating, so he says,
the behavior of Yahweh towards the Jews, he takes in marriage a prostitute. The history of
his relationship to the prostitute whom he has freely and firmly wedded then comes to stand
for the history of the wedding and marriage of Yahweh and the whoring people of Israel. I
thought that Hosea or Yahweh here could as well be Moses, speaking as he often did for the
Lord. And I thought of how Moses might have acted in the circumstances of Beth-Peor.
I concluded that there was a possibility that the old man, Moses, would have met his death
in a murder or under undignified circumstances - a stone thrown, a stroke - in the course of
suppressing the Baal-Peor heresy [82] . He was fearfully agitated and may have been fatally
strained in dealing with the heretics and their Moabite seducers. Moses' loathing of sexual
deviancy, his strenuous efforts to keep Yahwism free of sexual imagery (No Zeus bull rapist
of Europa he! No Baal bull here!) and his severe attitude in general towards breakdowns of
law and order, made him more ruthless than ever: the peoples' chiefs were hanged, murders
were committed and sanctified, and plague carried off thousands of Israelites, 24,000 says
the Bible. Moses directed, further, the extirpation of the Midianites [83] , first the men
in battle followed by massacre, then cold-bloodedly the male children and all women who were
not virgins. Their camps and cities were burned, and their livestock and valuables taken as
booty.
Figure 19: Myth of Moses Blessing the Tribes, and His Death.
(Bible of San Paolo Fuori le Mura ca. A. D 870., folio 49v)
The verses on executing the Israelite leaders carry a grim double meaning 1) "Take all the
chiefs of the people and execute them in full sunlight before the Lord so that My blazing
wrath will be turned away from Israel" and 2) "Cut off the heads of the leaders of the
people and impale them in the courtyard before My Holy Tent so that my blazing wrath will be
turned away from Israel." Further, Moses ordered his officers: "Each of you slay those of
your men who attached themselves to Baal-Peor."
The crowd before the court of the Tabernacle was full of grief and rage. To the many deaths
occurring with the raging plagues of Yahweh there was added to their grief this harsh remedy
to propitiate Yahweh which would also strike down many of their loved ones.
At this juncture, there passed before their eyes the noble Zimri, with his Midianite
companion, the lady Cozbi, as they went into his family tent. Phineas, son of Eleazer and
grandson of Aaron, in a fury, seized a spear and followed them. He drove the spear through
their bellies. Moses approved. The plague ceased. Moses heard from Yahweh that Phineas' zeal
for Yahweh's honor had saved Israel from extinction. Phineas earned the perpetual right to
the priesthood for his family by this action. But what Moses had said was good in the eyes
of Yahweh was perhaps beyond the sufferance of the people.
It was Moses' last battle on behalf of Yahweh. He knew that he was to die and perhaps wished
to leave things tidy [84] . We note in Hosea, moreover, a repeated violent denunciation of
the tribe of Ephraim, to which Joshua belongs, and which took for itself perhaps the richest
section of the Promised Land. Possibly, Ephraimites accompanied Moses on his last journey.
No matter how Moses met his death, the Bible would adorn it with some elements of the
legendary. Founding heroes of a nation are not permitted to die ignominiously or even
ordinarily. Romulus, founder of Rome, was reported to have been swept into the skies where
he joined his father, Mars. But, as Freud says, a murder by his own people would be
shameful, considering what role Moses must be given in the founding of Israel. Hence what
would be in any case censored and elabo-rated for the sake of the sacred egoism of the tribe
would in this case invariably result in strong guilt feelings. Proportionately, as the
return to Mosaic rule and law would be demanded by the prophets and priests, the guilt
feelings would be restimulated, and work their way out in an even more frenzied and
dedicated mosaism or Yahwism. This, then, would be the effect of a murder of Moses upon the
history of Judaism. It is to be expected that the verses involved are considered as some of
the most confusing and esoteric of the Old Testament.
So much was surmised by me from the normal open lines of the Bible. Three months later and
five thousand miles distant, a microfilm copy of Sellin's work at the New York Public
Library was consulted [85] . What had Sellin discovered? First, in various places the Bible
refers to a Messiah, a servant of God, who is to deliver the Jews from their enemies; this
person, says Sellin, was Moses. Moses was once the Redeemer and would return again to save
the Jews and establish in Jerusalem "a Kingdom of God for all nations." [86] In line with
Hosea, Moses was considered by tradition, writes Sellin, to have been the atonement victim
of the Baal Peor heresy. Long before, Moses had asked Yahweh to kill him in atonement for
the sins of the people. This was during the Golden Calf Revolt [87] . The tradition of a
second coming of Moses persisted into the third century and is even to be located in the New
Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew (17: 1-13).
The major thesis is summarized by Sellin: "Moses, in Shittim in the Holy place of his God
was killed by a trick of his own people after they turned to Baal Peor and Moses had called
them to repent or in any event had called down punishment upon them. Maybe his sons
encountered death with him as well." [88] Sellin derives this scenario from three places in
Hosea's book, and relies upon a reconstruction and some rearrangement of lines at ambiguous
points; in these respects his ability is unquestionable and I would accept his new
rendering. I repeat the verses here:
"They have dug a deep pit-trap in Shittim." [89]
"The days of terrible ordeal arrive; now come the days of reckoning.
Israel shrieked:
'A fool is the Prophet, a madman in his mind,
Because of the enormous guilt and the great making of enemies. '
Ephraim skulked by the tent of the Prophet and laid snares on all his paths.
In Shittim in the house of his God they have dug a deep pit.
Like vines at the panicle I found Israel, like an early fig on the fig tree.
They came to the Baal of Peor and gave themselves up to shame, and became abominable
fornicators.
I have seen Ephraim as a poisonous plant.
Ephraim chose as its hunting game the prophet and Israel led his sons out to be strangled,
The people shall disappear beyond sight like birds .
May it be the end of child-bearing, of conception, of pregnant bellies.
Even should their sons grow, I shall take them away until there will be no one left.
But a curse upon themselves as well, when I come skulking upon them.
Give them, o Yahweh, what you can and will,
Give them a childless belly and withered breasts." [90]
"But through a prophet I brought Israel out of Egypt, and, it was shepherded by a prophet.
Ephraim aroused his anger. Israel made him better.
So long as Ephraim read my Torah the prophet was preeminent in Israel.
Though he made atonement because of Baal he was killed.
I will leave his blood upon you and I will make you pay his shame." [91]
From the new rendering emerge certain clues. A great crime has been committed. The prophet
who is involved was certainly not Hosea and is not any prophet before Hosea but Moses.
Ephraimites are most involved in the sin and the crime. The people are enraged against
Moses, a "fool" and "madman", burdened with the guilt of massacring his charges and hated
for it. The conspirators hide themselves on the approaches to his tent, seize him, take him
to the Holy Tent where stand the altars, and there dig a pit and bury him in it. They kill
his family as well. Not since the original sin of Adam and Eve has such a sacrilegious act
occurred. Ephraim (and by implication Israel) repeats the original sin; it is the original
sin of the history of Israel from its founding to Hosea's time [92] . For it, Israel and
especially the Ephraimites are cursed and must pay in days of terrible ordeal and reckoning.
The worst curses of Hosea are in these lines. He would have the land and the people return
to the desert so that Yahweh might rule as of old.
The Biblical scholar, Gressmann [93] , and others, among them Sellin, believe that the
judges refused to carry out the orders of Moses for the killing of all the people implicated
in the Baal Peor orgies and rites, and that the Levites, obeying Moses, began to carry out
the massacre. I think that these deaths must be the 24,000 who were scourged by Yahweh, as
the Bible reports. The scourge or plague now was of the Levites' swords.
My theory is this: While the Levites were dispatched and dispersed upon their murderous
mission, the Ephraimites trapped Moses, killed or disarmed his guards, killed him, buried
him, and held prisoner Joshua of their own tribe. When Joshua agreed to recognize the coup
d'‚tat and to take command, as was his right, and as Moses would wish, he was released, and
he ordered the Levites to cease operations. The killings by Phineas are passed over in
arriving at the new ruling formula, and his sacred role is confirmed.
We note in connection with Joshua's role a legend educed by Elie Wiesel [94] :
When Moses refused to die, says the Talmud, God made him jealous of Joshua... God's
explanation to Moses that he must die, to allow Joshua to take over, meant to Joshua that so
long as he himself would not take over, Moses would go on living. For him to rule, his
beloved teacher had to die,
One perceives here what could be a rationalization of Joshua's conduct and a hint of the
killing of Moses.
An impressive network of authorities stress that Moses' death took place in public. It is
witnessed, or almost witnessed, or circumstantially witnessed, even though the Torah and
Bible assert that he finally died alone. Ginzberg [95] thinks that the legendary
assertions originated to combat the vulgar demand that Moses not die but be made to ascend
to heaven. A typical scenario has all of the people following him until they were dismissed;
then the senate followed him until they too were dismissed; then finally a cloud descended
over him and he was lost to the view of his last companions, Eleazer the priest and Joshua
the generalissimo and heir apparent to Moses' authority.
Can we decipher this legendary scenario? Only within strict limits. Suppose an alternative
hypothesis; not Ginzberg's, but one in keeping with the theory of these pages, is suggested:
if a great hero is killed and secretly buried by some of the very people to whom he is and
will remain a hero, he must in legend either "really" not be killed and/ or ascend to
heaven. Thus Jesus is said to have been voluntarily killed and to have ascended to heaven.
If he had been killed by his own people who had continued to believe in him, he would have
ascended to heaven when his mission was completed without having being killed. But the
Christians' discrimination against both Roman and Jewish authorities permit them to assert
that he was killed; they need not cover the fact.
A second point may be induced from the scenario. The public is asserted as a witness of
Moses' death, at least down to the very last moment, when the two witnesses are left
standing outside of the cloud enveloping Moses. If, on the one hand, the Bible has Moses
dying quite alone, and the traditions have Moses dying in public, the contradictory
insistence now upon the one, and then upon the other, implies that neither is correct and
that both are straining for their own kind of credibility. If the solitary death admits the
public, it must explain what kind of public was present and what it saw. If the public death
admits the solitary, it must implicitly allow the belief that Moses was secretly killed. So
the two legends exist in eternal uneasy partial contradiction,
The legends of Moses' death dwell pathetically upon his desire to live, particularly to live
to lead Israel into the Promised Land. The legends seem to feel an injustice is being done.
We weep in sympathy with the grand old man's frustration and importunities to Yahweh. Why,
too, must he die so alone? Why does Yahweh harden his own heart so, we wonder? Then, in a
start of realism, we recall that Yahweh is Moses, and lives after Moses in the minds of the
tellers of the story. Moses is condemned, dies, and is buried by Yahweh no more than the
sons of Aaron are electrocuted by Yahweh for approaching the Ark in an improper frame of
mind. Moses is killed by his enemies and his remains are disposed of. Both murder and burial
probably occurred within the sacred precincts. Foes and friends join thereafter in a
conspiracy to cover up the deed and refashion its circumstances into a sacred lie. Soon the
sacred lie transforms itself psychologically into holy myth.
When the Israelites had crossed over the dry bed of the Jordan, Joshua did not immediately
press on to attack Jericho. Instead, following the order of Yahweh to "circumcise the sons
of Israel again, the second time," [96] Joshua performed the ceremony and "when they had
completed circumcising all the nation, they kept sitting in their place in the camp until
they revived." [97] Yahweh, satisfied, said "Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt
from off you." In these passages, the Bible explains that all the circumcised men out of
Egypt were dead but "all the people born in the wilderness... had not been circumcised."
[98] Max Weber believes that the operation was performed so as to emulate the circumcised
Egyptians and "allegedly in order to escape the scorn of the Egyptians." [99] Neither
reason is correct, I think; rather the mass circumcision was an atonement for the collective
guilt in the death of Moses, and a fresh affirmation of loyalty to the army of the
confederation in preparation for the campaigns ahead.
The location of Moses' grave was taboo to all except the High Priests and his attendants. In
a sense, and as it would appear, Moses died by order of Yahweh. The Bible's insistence upon
the unknown grave, while declaring it to be nearby, seems needless unless it is an unwitting
confession that Moses was deliberately put into a grave that should be unmentionable and
unknown (except in this metaphorical sense). And, as the Bible says, "his eyes had not grown
dim and his vital strength had not fled." [100]
Notes (Chapter 7: The Levites and the Revolts)
1. Bimson (1979), 16.
2. A. S. Yahuda, The Language of the Pentateuch in Its Relation to Egyptian, vol. 1, London:
Oxford U. Press, (1933), 294.
3. Some say that Jacob (Israel) and his twelve sons and families (Gen. 46: 37) totaling 170
persons in Egypt could not in 430 years grow to 2 millions. They could have grown to 10 or
100 millions or more, theoretically, by the exponentials of population theory. Daiches (p.
82) estimates 2000 to 6000 marched in Exodus, on no evidence. Cf. Ginzberg II, p. 375;
600,000 heads of families plus five children each on horseback, plus a mixed multitude,
"exceeding greatly, the Hebrews in number." The "mixed multitude" referred to in Ex. 12: 38
in some translations is termed "persons of mixed ancestry" im the Douay (R. C.) translation
and a fn. p. 89 defines the term as "half-Hebrew and half-Egyptian." Sir Flinders Petrie
(Egypt and Israel, p. 67) offered an ingenious explanation of the numbers... Instead of
translating the Hebrew word for "thousand" as a numeral, he would translate it as "family"
or "tent" Thus the number in the tribe of Manasseh in the first census at the Holy Mountain,
32, 200, would really mean 32 tents for 200 people, at six people per tent or family. The
total number in exodus would be 5-6000 people. This attractive hypothesis is not accepted by
experts in the Hebrew language. G. Mendenhall, 77 J Bib Lit (1958) 52-6, says the same word
may mean "military units."
4. A legend (IV G fn, 806) claims that only one in fifty Hebrews believed in Yahweh and left
Egypt. (Cf. Psuedo-Philo, 14: 156)
5. Psalm 68: 22 speaks of the people lost in the depths of the Sea of Passage and promises
them redemption and revenge.
6. See also Ex. 1: 9-10; Ex. 4: 3-4; Ex. 16: 22, all indicating an organized movement. But
they are not tight tribal groups, more an insurrectionary movement like the Long March of
Mao and the Chinese communists. "The human groups whom he proposes to lead out are only
loosely associated with one another; their traditions have grown faint, their customs
degenerate, their religious associations insecure." (Buber, 69).
7. Ex. 17: 8-14.
8. VI EB 180-1 Cf. Buber, p. 218-9; fn 284, on theory and literature of Levite origins.
9. Freud, 46, and curiously, several XIII Dynasty Pharaohs possessed semitic names (Bimson,
17 fn. 50).
10. III G 248.
11. III G 194.
12. IV EB, 180-1.
13. Deut. 33: 8-11.
14. On Levite functions, cf inter alia Num. 4: 4-15; ch. 18; 6: 22-7.
15. III G 224, 228.
16. Num. 3: 11-13.
17. Num. 3: 40-51.
18. Ex. 17: 1-7; Num. 20: 2-13.
19. III G 272.
20. IV G 3; (cf. IV G 353-4)
21. IV G 3 fn2.
22. Num 11: 1-3.
23. Ex. 14: 13.
24. Ex. 15: 25.
25. Ex. 16: 7-8.
26. Buber's term, pp. 102-3; 108.
27. Winnett offers a close discussion of the murmurings. For mnemonic purposes, the Biblical
editors sought to contain the number at ten. Winnett establishes the important point: the
editors labored to change the insurrectionism against Moses into tests of Yahweh.
28. III G., p. 36-7.
29. Ps. 78: 31; cf. Ps. 106: 13-15; Ex. 16: 12-13; Num. 11: 20, 31-2, 33.
30. Ziegler, p. 47.
31. III G 243ff.
32. Num. 14: 1-4; cf. III G 172.
33. III G 277.
34. III G 333ff.
35. Buber, 202.
36. Joshua, 5: 2-8.
37. Deut. 9: 24.
38. III G 122-3.
39. Ex. 32. 22.
40. Ex. 32: 35.
41. 2 Kg. 17.
42. Velikovsky, W. in C., 297.
43. Gunnar Heinsohn ltr. II SISR I( 1977), 3.
44. III G 123.
45. Ex. 27: 2.
46. III G 132.
47. III G 130.
48. Num. 16.
49. Daiches, 183.
50. Ziegler, 15.
51. Num. 16: 8-11.
52. In the early years of modern electrostatics, experimenters used animals and human
subjects repeatedly. Grey, in 1731, electrified a boy and suspended him from a rope; he
suspended a second boy, unelectrified; then he connected them with a wire and observed with
satisfaction that the "fire" (charge) passed to the second boy. (Cf. Priestley, pp. 52-3.)
Only rarely did someone die; Moses would probaly have no qualms about "putting the heat" on
prisoners; it would be an easier death than others then in vogue.
53. "Lightning" 10 EB 967.
54. Manoilov, 133.
55. 16 EB 698, "Electrical shock."
56. Corliss, op. cit. cf. Manoilov, 152.
57. Priestley. 122.
58. Ibid., 125-6.
59. Ibid., II 151-2.
60. Ibid., II 152.
61. Joseph Bozolus, an Italian priest and professor, proposed in 1767 to lay two wires
underground connecting with a Leyden Jar at one end and close enough at their other ends to
let sparks jump in coordination with coded messages sent at the Leyden Jar end. This was one
of the first schemes for a telegraph. (Stottely, pp. 226-9.) Heilbron recalls (320) that Le
Monnier "passed the shock through a mile of long-suffering Carthusians joined together by
grounded iron wires. In fact moist ground may offer a discharge path as good as a human
chain."
62. In Galvani's classic discovery of the neural response to electro-shock, the scalpel that
discharged to the frog's nerve and caused the leg muscle to contract had been charged
accidentally by ionized air emanating from an idle electrostatic machine that happened to be
nearby.
63. This follows the New World translation; some Bibles view the "blinding" as a metaphor,
e. g. "Do you expect these people to be blind?" (Jerusalem Bible.)
64. Num. 16: 35. The number seems impossibly large, like the number of those leaving Egypt
and other numbers. There may at one time have been a formula for inflating biblical numbers,
but no one has yet been able to break the code. Decimal numbers and numbers to the base of
60 are preferred. Here a clue that about 50 might be involved is available in the melting of
the censers into an altar plate subsequently (see below, VI-40). The altar would not hold a
plate, even a thick one, made up of the bronze of more than fifty melted censers.
65. II G p. 303.
66. Martin Buber rather believes (309-10) that Korah and the Rebels were doused with oil,
burned, and cast into a pit, than that they were electrocuted by a powerful battery, as
Fisher had suggested (in Beitr"ge zur Urgeschichte der Physik in Schweig-ger's Sinne, 1833,
pp 4 ff), My position would be that such a "voltaic pile" was not beyond Moses' capabilities
but was unneccessary, since the electrical trubulence of those times in effect provided
continuous "batteries" of nature for electrostatic devices and procedures. As for Martin's
theory, it wanders too far from the story, which is obviously attempting to be historical.
Velikovsky's similar solution (W. in C. p. 56) is similary mistaken; furthermore, he
generally interprets electrical fires as petroleum fires.
67. Num. 5: 16-31.
68. Num. 16: 5.
69. I Priestley. 125.
70. Ibid., 102-4.
71. Ibid. 125.
72. Heilbron, 320.
73. I Priestley, 122.
74. Num. 36: 37.
75. III G 303.
76. Num. 18: 46.
77. III G 310-2.
78. Jones, (1 vol. ed. ) 246. Cf. I. Velikovsky, Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960) 196-202.
79. Velikovsky, A. in C. 329 et passim, where Akhnaton is made contemporary of Ahab.
80. The literary sources of this paragraph are extensive. Cf. de Grazia et al. (1978), and
Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, A revised Chronology for the Ancient Near East,
Cleveland (Eng.), 1977.
81. Num 25: 1 ff. "Peor" says a legend, is a second name for an Angel of Death that Moses
had once scared away for excessive vindictiveness against the Jews, and by facing Peor, he
would continue to frighten the angel away from this same task.
82. Numbers 25: 3 Baal Peor, it is suggested, is the god or lord of fire. Mendenhall noted
there is no satisfactory semitic etymology for the word Peor, but the meaning now seems
clear. Peor is the Hittite word for fire. It is the base of the Greek word, Pyr, meaning
fire, and of course the English word fire." (Von Fange, 136.)
83. Num. 31.
84. Deut. 31: 1-2. "The lord spoke to Moses, saying, Avenge the Isralite people on the
Midianites; then you shall be gathered to your kin."
85. Ernst Sellin, Mose and seine Bedeutung fur die Israelitisch-Judische Religiongeschichte,
Leipzig (1922).
86. Sellin, 81-113, based mostly on a study of Deutero-Isaiah. See also Sellin, Introduction
to the new Testament, 142-4. The second original sin is rendered below for Hosea, 9: 10.
87. Ex. 32: 32.
88. Sellin, 49.
89. Hosea, 5: 2. The accursed Shittim was the point of entry into the Promised Land (Num.
33: 49; Joshua 3: 1; Ex. 33: 1-6; Hosea 6: 4-6).
90. Hosea, 9: 7-14.
91. Hosea, 12: 14-13: 1.
92. Hosea, 9: 10.
93. Citing Num.. 25: 6-15.
94. Five Biblical Portraits, South Bend, Ind. :U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
95. IV G fn 904.
96. Joshua 5: 2( New world tr.).
97. Joshua 5: 8.
98. Joshua 5: 5.
99. Ancient Judaism, 443 fn. 2: 92.
100. Deut. 34: 7. ;
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ELECTRIC GOD
A famous figure of the French Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Voltaire, reduced the
miracles of the Bible to a laughing stock of the French salons. Voltaire nevertheless
believed in a god. In a world then bemused by the technology of clocks, with clock-makers
and clock-philosophers everywhere, he examined the astronomical system of the Earth and the
heavens and pronounced it a clock. With all of this clockwork, said he, there must be a
clock-maker somewhere. So Moses and his men will be readily understood when, in an
environment that exhibited electrical effects in many places, they found, behind the grand
son et lumiŠre show, a great electric god, Yahweh.
It may be that Moses, in ways unsuspected by the psychohistory of science, has infiltrated
the lives and work of Newton, Darwin, Edison, Einstein, and others; by his tenacious
insistence on the single god, he made all things dependent on a single system incorporating
a key machine assembly, and therefore made an integrated philosophy of nature imperative. In
one legend, Moses cannot get the great natural bodies Sun, Moon, Earth, Heaven, Stars,
Planets, Sea, Rivers that is, all the gods of the Greeks, to intercede on his behalf with
Yahweh because, they said, they were but Yahweh's helpless creatures [1] . Possibly
Yahweh's invisibility was a model of the ordinary invisibility (immateriality) and
omnipresence of electricity, and of its appearing as incorporeal "fire" when it was visible.
I think it no coincidence that among the enthusiasts and practitioners of early electrical
science were numerous mosaist clergyman, both Catholic and Protestant. G. Beccaria, pioneer
of electrical field theory, was a Piarist; John Wesley, founder of Methodism, wrote
copiously on electricity.
By one cause or another, being mortal, Moses died. But Yahweh did not die. Even in the
technical sense of "the name of the Lord," he did not die, because the Ark and Altar
remained in the Yahwist repertory for some centuries. He was no longer, thereafter, much of
an hallucination; he joined the ranks of the gods as a pure collective delusion. With the
ups and downs typical of divine careers, he has come into the present.
Moses' greatest triumph was to bequeath a portion of his mind to posterity by means of
Yahweh. Unfortunately, it was the wrong part, the conscience-loaded superego, but so it must
go with the birth of religious cults. Since it was the hallucinatory and delusionary
operations of his mind that were handed down, these would in some ways not be truly Moses.
They would be idiosyncratically Moses, but not completely him.
Moses stopped far short of placing all his religious impulses into the hallucination of
Yahweh; he seems to have been previously what might be called a liberal Hermist, a devotee
of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury. His invention-conversion to Yahweh did not eradicate the Hermetic
qualities that took deep root during his Egyptian years. His great and versatile skills gave
him a reputation throughout the ancient world for being a veritable Hermes.
Julian Jaynes has developed a theory that the human race, for a period of time extending up
to the classical period, was of two minds, one rational and pragmatic (corresponding to the
traits of the left hemisphere of the brain) and the other mind hallucinatory and occupied by
gods who talked to men and appeared before them (corresponding to the traits of the right
side of the brain) [2] . Moses, he said, was an archetype of this type of mind. The
hallucinations are of a type well-known in psychiatry, often if not always associated with a
diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. This is true, I think, and also Moses was much more
than Yahweh, and maintained a pragmatic balance that brought him great and justified fame as
a scientist and leader,
There is much to be said for Jaynes' theory. Its analytic side is in line with what is
advanced in these pages, and I have elsewhere pointed out that the complex membrane dividing
the two lobes of the cerebrum, the corpus callosum, may well be the site of schizoid
behavior; in fact, I have hypothesized that behavior which is specifically human has
occurred because of a possible physiological-psychosomatic microsecond block in transfers of
information and impulses through the corpus callosum; this delay would constitute an
instinct block and therefore would promote human self-awareness, reflection, and the feeling
of talking to oneself, whence one hallucinates others as well [3] .
Jaynes was not able to cope with the historical materials, largely because he relied upon
conventional ancient history and chronology. As a result, he was put into a position where
he had to perceive just the opposite of the actual process. He says that the "bicameral
mind" as he terms it, finally broke down because world-conditions became unsettled and the
gods that had satisfied the needs of the hallucinators such as Moses lost face. In reality
it was the catastrophes of the world whose terrible stresses made hallucinatory leaders out
of borderline cases and staunch believers out of normal people. (And elsewhere Jaynes makes
this very point.) There is every reason to believe that long cycles of history occurred
before the time of Exodus and Moses when there were "golden ages" of Saturn and Elohim,
whose central and celebrated significance was the reduced role permitted to mosaic
characters, that is, reduced schizotypical behavior.
Yet, as one studies Moses as a person, it is plain that his peculiarities as a human being
are remarkably well reflected in Yahweh as a god. If Yahweh were given a worldly childhood
and experience, like some gods and god-heroes, instead of being presented full-blown, they
could be like the childhood and experience of Moses. If Yahweh were extinguished from
Biblical history as a god and become a kind of sequestered ruler speaking only through
Moses, he might appear inexplicably incoherent, stupid, non-revealing of his motives and
reasons and of his knowledge of the world. Moses would be continually besought by his people
to seize the name and authority of the hidden power.
One is placed in a tight logical-psychological corner here. Speaking now for persons bred in
cultures colored by mosaism, one's conception of a father is Moses' conception and is also,
in fact, Moses. So when one says Moses is like a father, and is also like Yahweh, who is the
father, one is measuring a standard by the standard itself.
One has to make a very simple statement, which sets up a very different anthropological
perspective, namely: "I would not want Moses, hence Yahweh, for my father." When asked
"Why?" one responds in the pragmatic manner: "Because I do not like the consequences." Then
one lists those experiences that emanate from fathers like Moses-Yahweh. Those that evolve
from other kinds of fathers are possibly better; in any event, one rejects the mosaic
consequences.
THE NAME OF YAHWEH
Recently circles of biblical scholarship were agitated by some newly uncovered tablets of
the ancient city of Ebla in Northern Syria that were reported to contain the name "Ya." If
this were a contraction of "Yahweh," it might be Moses' Yahweh, and place the god several
centuries earlier than we have him here. One of Moses' inventions would be struck from our
list. More lately, it appears that the syllable might have had several usages in the Semitic
languages, and that no single tie with Moses' Yahweh has appeared [4] .
There is some likelihood, however, that Moses derived the name from the Midianites or
another tribe thereabouts when he was in exile. Buber, for instance, says that Yahweh may be
related to "Ya-hu," that is "O He!" of the Dervishes and that this cry occurs once in
Genesis during the blessings of Jacob [5] . The name is not foreign to Genesis; Abraham
uses it, but more commonly used is Elohim, and most likely, Yahweh was implanted in the Book
of Genesis by Moses or Yahwist editors [6] .
A suggestion can be made that would lend integrity to such an assertion. In the years of the
grandson of Adam, "men began to call upon the name of Yahweh." I make the identification, as
have others elsewhere, of Yahweh with gods of lightning and fire, such as Zeus and Jove, and
I place the beginnings of the great electrical gods around the time of Adam and Eve,
replacing Elohim and Saturn. Yahweh may have been inserted into Genesis to claim his own
from times long past.
Ziegler maintains that "the original god of the Hebrews at the Exodus was Zeus." The Greeks
change H to E and final H to S. (Jeremiah is Jeremias). The "Y" was originally a "Z". Thus
YHWH becomes ZEWS or ZEUS, and with the erroneous transliteration of Y for J, "Jews." The
Etruscan-Roman case, "Jove," pronounced "Yowe" is so close to Yahweh that the Roman Jupiter
may be considered as basically the same entity [7] .
Another theory holds that Moses framed the word from Egyptian roots, meaning "I am."
Egyptian was familiar to all Hebrews and was Moses' native tongue. A Jewish legend says that
Yahweh's first word when he announced the Decalogue was Egyptian: "Anoki!" (" It is I") [8]
. The Bible has Yahweh announcing the well-known "I am that I am" from the Burning Bush. The
phrase has been played upon endlessly, which is what a religious phrase should be and do for
people. Moses is given to understand this when he asks Yahweh for more concrete
identification, and it is denied him.
Let me now assemble the name of Yahweh in the context of this book. Moses, learned as he
was, had known the syllable "Ya"; he heard it, and also other compound words including it,
in Egypt and then in Midian among the Kenites and the nearby tribes. It was a godword, part
of various sacred epithets. He heard a sound very much like "Yahweh" streaming with light
from the Burning Bush. This is the essence of god, he thought; it is the name of god and is
hinted at in all the "ya" syllables that I have heard.
Now he asks what it is, and "Yahweh ehweh" is heard. This makes sense. "I am that I am." "I
am the great I am." I am It!" "I am the essential principle." Not the principle of light
alone. It is already sound and light. It is the activity of the skies and earthly nature. It
is the main and primary manifestation. It is connected with the old gods as well. Yahweh
tells Moses: "Say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you Yahweh, the God of
your fathers has sent me to you: this is my name forever and thus I am to be remembered
throughout all generations. " [9]
Then Yahweh tells Moses that his plea before the Pharaoh is to lead the Israelites thither
to worship him. Unless Moses convinces the Hebrews that they should worship Yahweh [10] and
that this will be the way that they will be able to break through to freedom, and unless he
is ready to give the Pharaoh a good reason for their leaving Egypt, after so many years of
sacrificing within Egypt, his plan will not work. He must therefore tie in Elohim, whom both
Hebrews and Egyptians acknowledge, with Yahweh. So Yahweh is a very new god of special
manifestations and a concrete task to perform: getting Moses through the specific obstacles
on both sides to an Exodus.
Hence, Moses was the inventor of Yahweh in every meaningful sense of an invention, no
invention ever being unprecedented and quite new. Merely to imagine that it would be
possible to propose a new god to the world was audacious and brilliant. Yahweh is explicitly
new, yet another name, as Yahweh says, for the old god of the Hebrews. His name dwells most
precisely on the mercy seat of the Ark, and then in the place in the temple chosen by him.
With negligible exceptions he speaks only to and through Moses.
Moses invents Israel as well, in the sense that he takes a nickname given to Jacob after
Jacob has wrestled with God or the Angel of God, and attaches it to the descendents of Jacob
and the initiates into the new Yahwist Israelite group led by Moses himself. The term is
translated variously as "the god-fighter " "God fights," [11] "the god who battles," or
"god rules." [12] Israelites were then "the people of the fighting god." Yahweh is of
course a bellicose god, so the name is apt, and both "Israel" and "Yahweh" become battle
cries of the newly founded nation.
The idea that the Jews never spoke the name YHWH seems to me preposterous. The name was
inutterable simply because its authentic voice came only from the Ark of the Covenant. When
the time came that the Ark was rarely functional, the name became secret. The name of "Amen"
had the same history; presumably the Egyptian pyramids, too, were no longer displaying or
sounding the god's name; whereupon it was said that Amon hid himself - not of course from
all prayers and enunciations to which the response is "Amen."
Does not the idea that YHWH has the electric name of god when he spoke through the noise of
the ark contradict the very Third Commandment that says: "You shall not take the name of the
Lord your God in vain?" Of this, Ziegler says, "with the idea of YHWH as an electrical
discharge, there are at least three possible reasons for the commandment. First, there might
have been a danger of injury to those using the power indiscriminately. Second, its use
might have allowed the enemies of Israel to obtain this secret, Third, a frequent use of the
power might discourage the worship of it." [13] Or at least, so Moses thought at the time.
Actually the ark ceased to speak as YHWH when the electric age ended - around 600 B. C. -
and the substitute notion arose that the commandment referred to the human voice not
uttering the word YHWH, because it was the name of God [14] .
Moses was concerned with law and order, and therefore with blasphemy. The Douay (R. C.)
Bible adds abruptly to the Third Commandment: "For the Lord will not leave unpunished him
who takes his name in vain." [15] The Jerusalem Bible (also R. C.) renders the verse as
banning utterance of the name of Yahweh to misuse it (that is, maliciously or for unholy
purposes).
Ziegler argues that "we are warned against effecting the sign or signature of the powerful
YHWH. More specifically here, the Third Commandment forbids us without good reason to
discharge an electric arc with its accompanying flash of light and noise. It is believed
here that this discharge is the name of God, YHWH." [16] Later on the sound becomes a word
and then a secret word, for the sound has gone.
Cassuto gives this version of the Commandment: "You shall not take up the name of the Lord
your God for unreality, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name for
unreality." [17] I think that Cassuto's version gives us the clue for expatiating fully the
commandment.
The word is the thing. We face here the crux of the ancient philosophical debate between the
"realists" and "nominalists," Platonists and Aristotelians. (Primitive, untrained thinkers,
and religious devotees are generally realists; the word is a sacred entity and not to be
used as a mere tool nor certainly for deliberate blasphemy.) The thing, by reverse (and
incorrect) logic, is the word, and especially the sounded name, for the most ancient sacred
associations of things and sounds came before the written word.
The electrical discharge is the voice (as well as the vision) of Yahweh, and, in the Ark,
the name of Yahweh. Blasphemy is any assertion that the sound of Yahweh is unreal and does
not exist, and by inference that the name is an inconsequential incident; and by extension
blasphemy is also any assertion that the name can be used for purposes other than harkening
to the emanations from the sole source of the authentic God on the Ark. For common people,
the sin of blasphemy is ordinarily a denial of the reality of the word, or ridicule of it.
Bearing in mind this anthropological and psychological process, one can understand how the
cult of the secret name of god developed and how the common sin and crime of blasphemy
evolved.
Does not the design of the Ark contradict the second commandment: it says "You shall not
make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or
that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow
down to them or serve them.." This is altogether strange since the Lord also commands that
Moses make the Tabernacle and the Ark "after the pattern for them, which is being shown you
on the mountain." And the Ark even carries two cherubim. The Ark itself was duplicated at a
later time by a private person and carried off by the tribe of Dan. The answer is, of
course, "I am a jealous god," who reserves the right to spot and destroy possible
competitors, such as the Golden Calf
The cherubim were almost surely recognizable likenesses of living things, although Cassuto
apologized that since they were composites of more than one being, they were not to be
banned. He surmises that "on the kapporeth [the lid or mercy seat] there was not sufficient
room for two images of quadrupeds, and it appears that the cherubim on it were erect
figures, like the cherubim of Ezekiel's visions and those of Solomon's Temple [18] . R. W.
Moss also believed them to be winged human figures [19] . The mention of quadruped is
logical, inasmuch as many winged bulls and other animals are to be found of the same general
period throughout the Near East, The word "cherubim" itself seems related to an Assyrian
word for the winged bull.
Yahweh was a ground force sometimes exhibiting himself, but ruled the heavens invisibly. By
keeping Yahweh as a heavenly god, under a new name, and invisible, Moses could avoid
choosing among the specific historical heavenly gods. Moreover, Yahweh must not be
identified with a heavenly body, for a good reason; the heavenly body could not be
controlled or possessed uniquely by the Jews, that is, by Moses,
As time passed and the name of YHWH disappeared along with his image in electrical form and
his burning of the altar-offerings, the Jews might have been expected to bring back images,
especially of YHWH. But here we may call into play Freud's concept of instinctual
renunciation which he applies to the self-denial of holy image-making [20] . This refusal
of the strong urge to reproduce the forms of the deity was probably built up in the mosaic
period and later on maintained by the compulsive repetition of the highly ritualistic
religion, with discipline maintained by the priesthood. Referring to Max Weber's analysis of
rabbinical Judaism, we may speculate that any image of Yahweh would have to represent some
other culture's image and therefore violate the "pariah" tendencies of the Jews.
Yahweh and Moses made the Jews a lonely people, isolated, not sharing other gods, as other
nations did whenever they so desired for purposes of international amity and communication
of sentiments. This was a source of pain to many Jews, as it was a source of pride to
others. Many more Jews chose other gods than other people chose Yahweh. No wonder, then,
that the Jews as a group never could fulfill the promises of Yahweh that they would multiply
in vast numbers. Moses' deep aversiveness to humanity determined in the beginning of Israel
that this should be so.
THE CHARACTER OF YAHWEH
Yahweh says and Yahweh does. What he says consists of describing himself, expressing his
emotions, relating what he has done, instructing as to what must be done, and foretelling
what he will do. In describing the hallucinatory voices of schizophrenic patients, Jaynes
stresses that they speak "often in short sentences." [21] They command, yell, curse, and
consult. They are sometimes rythmical. The abrupt commands of Yahweh, his great noises,
curses, and marvelously clear consultative advice enrich the verses of the Books of Moses.
The lack of explanation is typical of both hallucinatory voices and of Yahweh's words. One
must wonder whether the hallucinatory patients have learned through mosaism to speak like
Yahweh or Moses is the prototype of hallucinators.
All that Yahweh says is in an absolutely authoritative mood. This includes those expressions
which comment upon behavior that is against his will or interests; one learns of the crime
when Yahweh refers to it and considers what punishment to meet out, without trial, of
course. This last kind of behavior is presumably an exercise of "free will" on the part of
Israelite believers or non-believers or on the part of gentile non-believers. They have the
uniquely human ability to obey or disobey him. It is a totalitarian system in that no human
act is done outside of his jurisdiction or without religious meaning. A secular sphere does
not exist for him.
What Yahweh does, supplementing what he says, is to cause all things to happen, even
expressions of disobedience coming out of "free will", in the sense that if he wished to do
so, he could make people will what he wanted them to will. He is thus all-powerful, even
against free will. Sometimes, as with Pharaoh, Yahweh plays a mean game with people, forcing
them to be bad so that he can punish them more. "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I
multiply my signs and wonders..., he will not listen to you." [22]
He even asserts a power to be bad, to do evil. He is not bound by notions of good or evil.
"Who makes peace and creates evil, I Yahweh do all this." [23] Speaking through the
prophet, Ezekiel, Yahweh proclaims of Israel: "I defiled them through their very gifts in
making them offer by fire all their first-born, that I might horrify them: I did it that
they might know that I am Yahweh." [24] Nor is he bound by promises and laws or a principle
of consistency. Thus he is unlike Zeus, as Eliade Points out. [25] He is in this sense,
like Moses, charismatic, above the rules.
Although he causes all things to happen, only selective actions of Yahweh are described.
Yahweh acts in categories set up almost always by his worshippers, rarely by non-believers
or opportunists outside of Israel. He rules the heavenly host, destroys nations, feeds
Israel, punishes friend and foe, and so on; he wills all natural forces and especially great
or unusual natural forces.
Particular actions are of the same kind, but deal with special cases that come to his
attention, such as punishing a named person or giving a sign at a certain time and place or
appearing on the mercy seat of the Ark, or sending down manna or causing all East wind to
blow. As with his speech, all that he does is likewise in an authoritative mood. Can one
then slip in a substitute word for Yahweh such as "nature" and read the Exodus and
wanderings as natural history? If one uses the word "nature" or "a natural force," can one
then also eliminate all anthropomorphic or metaphorical references? Such would be, for
example, reading only the first three words from "Smoke went up from his nostrils " etc [26]
Perhaps, yet one must not dismiss metaphor. In a certain broad sense all language originated
metaphorically, and further, one can often find a fact through the metaphor used to describe
it. If Yahweh (Nature) melts mountains like wax, it may be that sudden eruptive thermal
melting is occurring, producing the viscous appearance and softness of wax. Or, whenever
Yahweh "appears," is it to be taken as metaphor? A god who is everywhere, omnipresent,
cannot "appear" in one place; he was already there; or, logically, since nothing is beyond
him, he can appear, even in seeming contradiction to himself.
No, Yahweh is not Nature animated. And he is not metaphor (unless hallucination is metaphor,
which in a way it is but in a way that is irrelevant here). The activities of nature -
especially the powerful, disastrous and brutal forces - are contained within the sum total
of activities - moral, social, political, and military - of a hallucinated, all-powerful
man.
But then, in the end, all words and deeds are but weak tools to describe one to whom the
absolutes of presence, knowledge, power, and activity are assigned. One either makes of
blind faith a virtue or brings to bear the tools of psychiatry. A logical exposition of
Yahweh's mental labyrinth is impossible. It is the ghost of Moses' mentation.
A religion cannot come to be without voices sacredly and definitively authorized to speak
accurately on behalf of the god; therefore, it has to be presumed that Moses, who claims and
is accorded such credentials, is speaking the truth about Yahweh. Yet Moses himself is but a
delegate of limited instructions, and often repairs to Yahweh for further orders or
clarification. But Yahweh, the absolute one, knows that, at best, Moses is only a superior
human; that is, Moses is still a weak reed to lean upon for establishing godly rule among a
portion of the human race. And, as for the Jews as a body of people, Yahweh has little
confidence or trust in them, and the grounds on which he has chosen them as his "peculiar
treasure" are indefinite, to say the least. The choice seems to have been practically a
random act of grace on his part.
An outside observer can scarcely be faulted, then, if he feels himself racing giddily in a
circular trap, with his every attempt to question a fact or a cause being referred back to
an absolute quality which respects neither fact nor cause. He can only cease his anxious
circlings, he is assured, if he accepts to believe, or if he is coerced into non-believing
acceptance. Accepts what? Authority, of course, and please do not begin circling around
again in search of the justification of authority. That is merely another circle around
Yahweh.
Are the words and actions of Yahweh such and only such as would emerge front the delusionary
projections of Moses? Generally, yes, and nothing important comes other than through the
screen of Moses or through the operations of nature. Are all the events that occupy the
perceiving apparatuses of the speaker( s) of the Pentateuch - Moses and all the preceding
rememberers and all those who have worked upon the materials after Moses - possible or
probable when appraised by the rules for testing the occurrence of events that are laid down
by social and natural scientists? Again the answer is yes. The "unscientific miracles" that
are left to explain are few and casual, not worth explaining, one might say. I am not here
denying the great mysteries of existence, I merely assert that these are in no wise
explained by the Pentateuch-Torah: Moses and mosaists are not theologians, much less
philosophers.
Those who accept such scientific answers do not generally find themselves less in control of
themselves and of the world about them, and less happy, than those who have accepted the
authoritative complex of Yahwism or have resigned themselves to the coercion to accept the
same. That this should be generally believed, even among psychologists after the manner of
William James, does not make it so. It is ordinary to feel, when anxious, that "the grass
grows greener on the other side of my fence." I would not deny, however, that one day a
religion might be invented that would deliver a delusional system that would make humankind
happier than even a dependence upon truth and consequences.
SIN VS SCIENCE
If Moses is a scientist, a great inventor, why does he not hallucinate a god who is
recognizably a scientist? Yahweh writes; he organizes lists or rules; he keeps books; and
little else that is technical; he is the product, not the fountainhead of the science of
Moses. Yahweh, though, is an unlimited, ungoverned power. Being a great scientist is
certainly sometimes a strong fantasy and even can be hallucinated, but the urge to know is
subordinate to the urge of power. The urge to power was exceedingly strong in Moses, for
reasons and in ways already put forward. Further, hallucinations generally fulfill a role
that is absent in the person, not one that is satisfied.
Everybody had always said that Moses was a supremely intelligent person. But that was not
enough. They also withheld from him, partly because his demands were so excessive, the power
that he wanted. Only god could give him that, so Moses, the archetypical mad scientist,
invented a god.
This invented god is full of instructions but is a perfectly bad model for a teacher. He
rarely connects things causally. He rarely explains. He simply asserts and commands. That is
quite satisfactory for Moses who has no love for his pupils, and, more and more, wishes them
simply to memorize and obey.
Moses' Yahweh begins as a set of creative miracles coming out of Moses' science and his
cooperation with and exploitation of nature. Then, owing to the rush of catastrophe, what
begins as a fairytale ends in a monstrous takeover by wild natural forces. Yahweh becomes
catastrophic. Yahweh symbolizes the most terrible memories.
Moses is changing his own character, though in directions pointed out by his earlier
character. Yahweh is accompanying this change with changes in his character. Every attempt
is made by Moses, the Bible, the people, to assemble and reorder their minds in the process
and aftermath of the natural catastrophe of Exodus. Moses' mind and to a quintessential
degree that of Yahweh moves towards severity, punishment, and order. As much as must be
forgotten and reassembled, that much is to be converted into sin, blame, and chastisement.
The invention of a punishing god is to help people to remember lessons of unity and
ethnicity. "Early Israel was the dominion of Yahweh, consisting of all those diverse
lineages, clans, individuals, and other social segments that, under the covenant, had
accepted the rule of Yahweh and simultaneously had rejected the domination of the various
local kings and their tutelary deities - the baalem." [27]
To recall the slogan: "Yahweh brought you up from Egypt," is to recall slavery and
catastrophe. And it is also to recall simultaneously Moses. So the edifice of history and
religion is the private property and power of Moses. In the famous formula of Harold
Lasswell: the power-driven man displaces his private motives upon public objects, and
rationalizes the displacement in terms of the public interest [28] .
Moses needs a god of power - nothing very much else. Once Moses has his god, and that god
has become identified with a catastrophe, then the god has to be the center of a cult of
power centered around the expiation of disaster. For Moses, and therefore Yahweh, there is
no other route, and for the people who became Israel there was no escape, no turning back to
the call of Egypt, no popular vote on what type of character Yahweh should be, no fairytale
religion except in the underground of their popular legends, no evasion of his rule. The
continuous disastrous circumstances of nature and society, beginning in Egypt and ending
generations later, reinforced the authority of the god that the people had taken, for better
or for worse, as their spouse (as the prophet Hosea would call the relationship). Not even
by turning whore (again using Hosea's image) could Israel escape the claims of its husband,
and indeed suffered the mosaic penalty for adultery, death.
It is not hard to prove the primary obsessions of the Books of Moses. One can examine, even
if summarily, the amount of declaiming about sin, guilt and compulsion that occurs in their
pages. Should the reader at this point complain that everybody knows this to be true, I
would grant that most may know it but few have the nerve and stomach to bear it in mind. As
their part of the general trend of scholars and ministers to make the Bible unthreatening,
by erasing the natural catastrophes, and by "humanizing" Moses, they also downgrade or
dismiss its obvious impact and look in it for sweet and rare words like love. Buber's
elaborate Index to his life of Moses contains no references to sin, guilt, blame, or
punishment. Nor does the equally detailed Index of Daiches.
The major concordances of the Bible list references and passages to all except minor words.
If we look into a concordance to see how often certain significant words are used in the
Books of Moses, we shall find them in context. Should we count the references to sin, guilt,
punishment, coercion and enemies, and then their contraries of love and friendship, we might
test our impression that aggression in its various forms overbalances affection in the Books
of Moses. And, as Table 11 shows, so it does. Overwhelmingly. In the two concordances, based
upon two different translations, differences occur. But both versions agree emphatically at
all important points.
The five books of Moses carry from eight to twenty times as many accusatory, demanding,
punitive and hostile references as they do affectionate and friendly ones. If Genesis is
removed from the calculation on grounds that it was mostly inherited by Moses from the
earlier Hebrew religion and incorporated partly to bolster his claim to base Yahwism upon
the "god of the fathers," then the extreme misanthropism of mosaism becomes all the more
evident [29] . Love and friendship are absolutely wanting in Moses himself, if this
statistical indicator possesses any validity.
To search out additional evidence, we can fashion another kind of sample, this time the
first verse that appears on every upper left hand corner of every page of the Oxford Bible.
Of the Pentateuch, there are 262 pages and therefore a sample of 262 verses. Statistically
the sample approaches randomness and adequacy, so that what is represented in the 262 verses
is probably close to what is contained in the whole. We judge in each case whether the
statement does or does not directly involve sin, blame, or compulsion. Table III reveals the
findings.
Sin is guiltiness and is defined as an ascribed quality of deserving punishment, implicitly
or explicitly stated, and attached to an action. Blame is the assignment of guilt or sin or
evil to a person or object involved in an action. Compulsion is a holy penalty established
in the verse or referred explicitly to its being provided elsewhere for this described
action.
TABLE II
Affection and Aggression in the Books of Moses
Explicit wortds of Books of Moses
Explicit wortds Strong's 5 Concordance Presbyterian 5 Concordance
of Books of Moses Books of Moses Genesis Books of Moses Genesis
only only
=============================================================================================================
Love,
Loved,
Loves
Lovest,
Loving 41 15 52 14
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guilt,
Guilty 16 1 66 2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Must 17 4 24 11
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lest CA 17 22 1
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anger,
Angry 43 7 66 12
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obey,
Obedient,
Obedience 21 3 12 5
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sin,
Sinned,
Sins,
Sinning,
Sinners,
Sinful,
Sinneth 204 8 179 6
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enemy,
Enemies 58 3 64 6
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friend,
Friends 5 3 12 5
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sources: James Strong, Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1963) based
on the Authorized Version; and the Living Bible Concordance, J. A. Speer, ed., Poolesville,
Md.: Presbyterian Church, 1973, based on K. N. Taylor's (Paraphrased) Bible, 1972. Half of
the Books of Moses, we would conclude, is devoted to alleging sin, casting blame, or
inflicting and threatening punishment. Very few of the balance of actions are concerned with
love, neighborliness, mutual help, sowing and reaping, or the like. The rest is mainly
comings and goings. The catastrophes of Genesis such as the Deluge and others less
definitely treated are long gone into thousands of years of tradition. Moses copied Genesis;
he lived and wrote the essentials of Exodus, and the other books are in a way commentaries
upon Exodus or extensions of it. Hence they reflect his character.
We can observe that little place is left in mosaism for an honest mistake or an error in
judgement, There are no means of discriminating between pragmatic and sacred action. This is
truly primitive or, better, traumatized; practically everything is within the grasp of
religion. It reveals, too, how profoundly Moses had changed from a scientific genius; to all
intents and purposes, apart from his bag of techniques, Moses had become a wholly obsessed,
hallucinatory, punitive theocrat.
TABLE III
Book Actions involving Sin,
Blame, or Compulsion All other verses
==================================================================
Genesis 18 = 27% 48
Exodus 32 = 58% 23
Leviticus 30 = 79% 8
Numbers 19 = 35% 35
Deuteronomy 26 = 53% 23
==================================================================
Total 125 = 48% 137
Those who profess a Christian, Moslem or Judaic mosaism, or who are subjected to mosaic
education in the contemporary world number some 1.3 billions, a third of the world's people.
The history of Europe and the Near East has been deeply affected by mosaic conduct and ideas
for 1900 years - since the Christians let them out of the bag, so to say.
There should not be so many mosaists in history if the momentum of mosaism came only from
Moses. That is, people have had within themselves, as a product of their genesis and ancient
history, a capacity for grasping and becoming Mosaists and Yahwists. They can become
something else - and obviously most people who have ever lived were something else - but not
something so different that they are freed in utero or in culture from the possibility of
lending themselves, as leaders or followers, to mosaism. The human is catastrophically
constructed and prone to a kind of schizotypical behavior.
What universally appealing features can make mosaists of normal humans? First there is the
world out of control: the heavy anxiety in the face of disturbed nature and nations creates
the need for psychological, if not actual, control and security. In ancient history, and
still today, nations imitate nature. There is a constant interplay of metaphor between the
two: rulers and winds are strong; saviors and suns bring illumination; and so on into
hundreds of parallels. When we have "Gott mit uns" we feel a control over both our human
problems and our natural problems.
Mosaism very clearly places gods on earth among us. It establishes a worldly god who is
interested in the smallest details of our existence, so as to control us; but we are
controlling him (little does he know) by occupying him with our problems. A jealous god,
like a jealous lover, is a prisoner of his chosen one. This limitation of, or demand upon,
the divinity is most useful for the organization of primitive political power and of
political power primitively. If people look elsewhere than within the fabric of their
conscience for their god, the rulers cannot so neatly use him.
Further, the insistence upon a single god, monotheism, pyramids the possibilities of
employing the one god for the purpose of absolute social control. There has been a great god
in most cultures and the erosion of his powers is fought in order that power may be more
concentrated in the hands of rulers. Monotheism simplifies the monopoly of authority and
totalitarian rule.
Inasmuch as societies have not discovered how to exploit the mines of human energy without
coercion and oppression, they may find in mosaism an ample and simple ideology of sin,
blame, and coercion. Unconsciously, sincerely, and manipulatively, the power to speak in the
name of a single, absolute, demanding and unbound god is a very great power; it leaks into
politics, family relations, work groups, and every other sphere of life, with plenty of
power to spare: it is theoretically unlimited.
When, to this power, is attached the logic of sin, blame, compulsion, and punishment, the
power is greater and more effective. Thus occurs the formula: Yahweh has an interest in all
your actions; all your actions are good or bad; that is, either demanded by or prohibited by
him. If you fail to be good, you can expect punishment now or later, and punishment then is
never a surprise, for the storing up of evil is great in you. If you do good and suffer,
this is for a past misdeed, even as Moses was kept from the Promised Land by an obscure
fault.
Even the most heinous deeds are in the name of Yahweh or are committed as a punishment by
him. Sacrifice to Yahweh of the first-born of children and cattle was originally proclaimed
as the price of his guiding the Israelites out of Egypt. It is avoided or discontinued by
Moses by the expedient of dedicating the Levites as substitutes for the sacrifice, the cost
being obedience to the Levites. The duty of such sacrifices remains as a holy theoretical
obligation. Exceptional killings of offspring occur in the royal families of Judah and
Israel, and elsewhere.
The gruesome passages on infanticide and cannibalism in Deuteronomy (28: 53-75) are put into
the future tense. However, it is not reasonable to believe that the prophets, in accord with
what scholars say often, told history in foretelling events, whereas the Deuteronomist had
no historical sense when foretelling events. Both recited history. The terrible memories of
sieges and famines erupt in the present tense. We stress here that the people are assured
that they were condemned to commit these acts because of their disobedience to Yahweh.
Again, as we said earlier, the concept of absolute, peak obedience to Yahweh makes all other
crimes pale into insignificance, and all evil actions are capable of losing their criminal
quality. Moses could commit his frightful actions because they were in the name of Yahweh.
When any and all crime can be justified if attributed to a god, then secular authority will
not lag far behind. Rarely is an action mentioned that is good, either pragmatically and
socially or religiously; much less is it praised. A dreadful negativism pervades the
Pentateuch or Torah.
All of this is helpful in controlling a population without their consent. At any instant,
the criminal or charitable or pragmatic (useful) nature of an action may be altered; the
psychological bind in which a person finds himself is obvious, as is the inherent connection
with schizophrenic training, where Moses is the trainer.
The connection with ritual becomes manifest here as well. One reaction to contradictory and
inexplicable behavior of authorities is catatonism. The person dares not move in any
direction. To reestablish control over this numbed mind, highly explicit and numerous
behaviors are prescribed; life processes become ritualized.
Moses inaugurated an obsessive ritualism, that was to be perpetuated over the generations by
the succession of priests. The signal quality of obsession, which can begin with the
obsession of sin, is that it provides a compulsiveness to behavior. That is, once put on the
treadmill of obsessive-compulsive conduct, the person cannot get off of it. If a population
behaves so, the rulers know at any given moment where the people are and what they are
doing. They will not become friendly with foreign people, as at Beth-Peor; they will not be
running up to the high places and behaving licentiously, as the Yahwist prophets later
complain. They will be working painstakingly, guiltily, and reserving the Sabbath for
Yahweh.
There is this to be said on the positive side of mosaism, but only from a psychological and
not from an ethical or religious viewpoint. By keeping people eternally in pain and guilt,
with a sense of being continually observed by the kind of mean father that Moses conjured,
there would be produced not only many mad-persons but also some unusual number of geniuses.
For creative, driving genius is a kind of malady of deviance that can win freedom from
mosaism but cannot win freedom from the watchfulness, self-consciousness, restless movement,
and obsessiveness that had been inculcated by mosaic training.
Unfortunately for mankind, more humanistic and pragmatic forms of pedagogy, as in classical
China and Greece, Augustan Rome, Medieval Islam, Renaissance Italy, and the centers of
nineteenth-twentieth century science - including always the formidable humanistic Judaic
contribution - have had only small constituencies, and are always in danger, whether from
some extended form of mosaism or another religiously founded authority-formula.
IMMORTALITY
In Yahwism, life after death is a matter for legends and rabbinical speculation. Moses is
given a guided tour of all the wonders of heaven says one story, while he is supposed to be
on Mt. Sinai elaborating designs for the Israelite camp and carving the tablets of the
Decalogue. But the Bible, more correct as to Moses' mentality, has Yahweh visiting face-to-
face, "mouth-to-mouth," with Moses on solid ground.
Yahweh does not grant immortality nor even comment upon it. Death is everywhere in the Books
of Moses, and death is final. There is no intimation that Moses believes in heaven as an
abode for the souls of the departed or as a place for terrestrial visitors, nor for that
matter does Moses believe in a hell or a sheol, where the dead may receive punishment or
purgation. This lapsus on Moses' part is strange. First, one might think that so ambitious a
man would find a place where he might continue his mission after death. Whether he would
have received the inspiration from Egyptian, Hebrew, or Mesopotamian sources, he might have
felt the need to project himself into a prolonged relationship to Yahweh. Further, it might
have consoled his people "in the land of the shadow of death" [30] to provide a place for
at least the better among them in heaven, and it might have helped him to control the people
were he able to assure them, as did later Christian mosaists, of burning in hell-fires for
their wrong-doing to Yahweh-Moses while they were alive.
Various explanations occur to us. Moses was in need of immediate obedience, not in allowing
a lifetime of choices to qualify for heaven or hell. "Obey, or be burnt now!" is rather
obviously his theme, whether addressed to individuals or to all of Israel. On the annual Day
of Atonement, one goat is burnt before Yahweh and another, the scape-goat, is heaped with
the sins of all the people and loosed into the wilderness to find his way to Azazel, the
evil demon. Atonement is earthly, too. Moses would have felt threatened with the loss of
control of the people, if each had come to think of himself according to Plato's vision as
destined to occupy one of the myriad of stars.
Moses is intent upon conquering an earthly Promised Land where Israel may dwell in material
comfort and seek to please Yahweh. "The God he discovered was eventually a protecting
lawgiver who enunciated comments to the people in their own interests, not in the interests
of their eternal salvation, for such a concept was quite foreign to Moses' way of thinking,
but in the interests of their earthly welfare [31] .
This nationalistic goal would be rendered vague and even unessential, if a heavenly goal and
immortality were projected as well. Perhaps he believed in an eternal nation, with endless
religious and blood descent, whose people would fulfill their need for immortality in the
transmission of Yahweh along the lines of their descent as the Chosen People, "the Peculiar
Treasure" of Yahweh.
There is another side to this matter of the Chosen People. Yahweh commands the destruction
of all peoples who stand in the way of his "children." The limits of their territory, it may
be argued, are those of the Jordan Valley and Canaan; but the directive is without limits,
according to another argument. Since even related tribes come under the annihilating
directive, thanks to the monopoly the Israelites allow themselves in the use of the
Ineffable Name, one would have to conceive of a special heaven for Israelites only. This
invites theological problems, and we know that, as Neher points out, Moses was adverse to
such. Later on, Christian and Muslim sects would produce the theologians to invent exclusive
heavens for their true believers.
Moses himself would probably not care for such a heaven, no matter how thinly populated by
select yahwists such as Aaron, Joshua and himself, some of the people of Israel, of whom he
has little good to say, might by some independent judgement of Yahweh, find their way there.
He would not like his decision-making powers to lapse, and, if they were tendered to him ad
infinitem, heaven would soon be cleared, and hell full.
These musings may not be in vain, because ultimately they lead us to a hard theory. Moses,
we have stressed, possesses a catastrophist mentality and an earthly mission; he has no
interest in preserving the souls of the people of Israel. If one were to judge by the many
times that he prophesies for them, and threatens them with, total destruction for their
failures in respect to himself and Yahweh, one might guess that he fully expected the world,
or at least the world of the Jews, to go up in flames and destruction at any time. And
certainly, he would believe that, upon his own demise, and deprived of his leadership, the
chances of their prompt destruction would be greatly increased.
Can we go one step farther and say that Moses harbored the wish, not very deep below the
surface of his consciousness, that the Chosen People be destroyed? Yahweh occasionally toys
with the idea. In the Revolt of the Golden Calf, Yahweh says of Israel: "Let me alone, that
my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great
nation." [32] But when Moses remarked that he would lose face with the Egyptians, and that
he should remember his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel [Jacob], Yahweh repented and
forebore to kill them all.
Again, quoted by Ezekiel [33] , because they profaned the sabbaths and walked not in his
laws, Yahweh says: "I promise to pour out my fury upon them in the wilderness, in order to
exterminate them." He withholds his hand: "But I acted for the sake of my own name that [it]
might not be profaned before the eyes of the nations, before whose eyes I had brought them
forth." Again, too, a vulgar regard for public opinion.
This catastrophic wish and its related belief disposes of the problem of immortality. Like
many a sick and dying person, and like many otherwise normal persons, Moses wanted to take
the world with him. Or, if he refused to entertain such a notion, he would expect and
prophesy such an event. Then there would be no problem of immorality; the solution would be
total. Neither Moses nor Yahweh, when they argue the question of extirpating the Israelites,
wonders how to go about judging their merits and assigning them a place in the afterlife.
I would conclude, until otherwise instructed, that Moses carried like a great lump with him
an obsessive idea: when Moses dies, Israel must die with him. Reinforcing his obsession was
the unconscious appreciation that Yahweh also must die with Moses.
Moses did not grow kinder with age; the obsession would have become more and more difficult
to suppress and conceal; it might ultimately have contributed to the cause of his death - by
a flying stone, by shock, by accident, by abandonment, by physical removal from office, by
execution. Then, despite his unconscious wishes, Yahweh, mosaism, and Israel did survive. As
the psychological imprints of Moses, they survived.
The brand of Moses and Yahweh upon the character and history of the Jews carries this sadism
into a corresponding masochism of self-destruction. No matter how successful in mundane
terms, no matter how let to live in peace, they were haunted by the fear that they would be
destroyed as a people. It is of course part of the tragic game that they should be
encouraged by their religion and leaders to believe that this destruction is the desire and
intent of the outside world, for they could not permit themselves to recognize that it was
Moses and Yahweh who wanted them to die as a people. Yet, with unerring technique, they set
themselves up time after time for destruction, expecting, in the end, to tell themselves:
"You see now it is as it is written in the Law. We shall be destroyed for our sins." And
they permitted their destroyers to say: "By your own profession, it would not happen, if it
were not that you are wicked."
One after another national disaster is attributed to Yahweh - whether the instrument is some
now-dead nation, whether the Egyptians, or the Neo-Babylonians; it happens because they have
misbehaved towards Yahweh; the score of millennia amounts to an impressive collective
masochism. Hardly is one disaster ended, than the prophets of new disaster arise, recalling
to them all the previous disasters back to Exodus. Although it cannot be said that people
behave as they say or believe, nevertheless, in the absence of a competing ideology - and
the Jews have never permitted one in their midst - it cannot be argued that the dominating
ideology has been without effect.
MONOTHEISM
Myth presents us with a cluster of ideas about Judaic-Christian-Islamic religion which are
in significant respects untrue and harmful. The function of the myth (as is typical) is to
make its believers feel well and superior to others. So it is with the myth that Yahwism is
monotheism; further, that Yahweh is invisible; further, that monotheism is good for people
and naturally reasonable.
Yahweh is very much anthropomorphized, in fact. He is portrayed as a magnificent man. He is,
like Moses, exclusive and will not show himself to anyone in his true figure. Once he
promised Moses to exhibit himself to the Elders on Mount Sinai, but they were treated only
to a smooth rock and bright light. "No prophet had anything to tell of a figure resembling
the human until Ezekiel " [34] He does reveal his presence by the light of the Ark and the
column of smoke. He sits on the "mercy seat." He directs campaigns, promulgates laws,
decrees punishment and in every way, save sexuality, which he treats almost entirely by
restrictions, he is human. I have found it difficult to distinguish between Moses and Yahweh
once Yahweh is assumed to be Moses' other self and his presence is otherwise manifested in
forces of nature and in the good and evil fortunes of people. Then, too, he has the normal
emotions of hate, love, anger, boastfulness, jealousy, mercy, but not fear, because fear is
the reciprocal of power, and power is the essence of Yahweh.
Yahweh does not claim that he is the only god. Nor does Moses claim that Yahweh is the only
god. He is content to quote Yahweh to the effect that Yahweh is the same god as the god of
the Hebrews. At the Burning Bush we hear "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." [35] And again, after Moses' first meeting with
Pharaoh, "I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El
Shaddai), and by my name of Yahweh I did not make myself known to them." [36] Buber says
that Moses saw the god of his wife's tribe but recognized him as the god of the fathers
[37] . This is interesting but goes unexplained: how do you recognize a god as your own?
It is perplexing. Surely the Hebrews of Egypt knew their god, Elohim El Shaddai, God-Most-
High, well enough to tell whether he would permit himself another name. Gressmann, among
others, declares Elohim and Yahweh to be two distinct gods. "Yahwism, in mosaic times,
suppressed the older religion of El." [38] "The legends treat the patriarchs as
thoroughgoing pacifists. Their god is a god of peace-loving men," writes Max Weber [39] .
Moshe Greenberg tells us so:
The God of the patriarchs shows nothing of YHWH's 'jealousy'; no religious tension or
contrast with their neighbours appears, and idolatry is scarcely an issue. The patriarchal
covenant differed from the Mosaic Sinaitic Covenant in that it was modeled upon a royal
grant to favourites and contained no obligations, the fulfillment of which was to be the
condition of their happiness [40] .
Perhaps the Hebrews had become Egyptianized and religiously indifferent, as legends
indicate. Messianism is not specifically conceptualized in Exodus; but sociologically Moses
would have to be understood by the Hebrews and related populations as a messiah coming with
a representation of the old god on a specific mission of deliverance.
And always there were the looming catastrophe, the perceived comet and the plagues to
validate a return to religion and messianism. With Moses there came another kind of god.
With Jesus there came still another, closer to Saturn-Elohim than to Yahweh. The disciples
and crowd of Jesus formed one more of the several splinter movements that took their
devotees from Judaism. The Israelites had no sooner struck the deserts when they began
building variant gods: idols of Egypt came out of the luggage; a new cometary Baal emerged
in the Golden Calf.
Following the proclamation of the Covenant, Yahweh claims the whole earth; Israel is but his
"peculiar treasure." [41] In Amos' prophecies, Yahweh asserts that he led other nations to
safety at the same time as he retrieved the Hebrews from Egypt. He says that he punishes
them all alike, including the people of Israel [42] .
These seem but minor claims when contrasted with the striking verses that, along with much
other evidence, put Yahweh in his place. They are the words of Moses, in a farewell address
to Israel, as recomposed by a writer during monarchic times, six or seven centuries later:
When the Most High [Eyon] gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the
sons of men, according to the number of the sons of God. For the Lord's [Yahweh's] portion
is his people, Jacob [43] his allotted heritage.
The Lord [Yahweh] alone did lead him and there was no foreign god with him [44] .
Clearly Yahweh here is one of the sons of god, to each of whom a nation of the Earth's
people was distinguished and allotted. Yahweh receives Israel, and is free of interference
from any foreign god.
"The sons of god" are "the divine beings who belong to the heavenly court," and when god
speaks of them he uses the term "us" and "our." [45] It is a very old relationship,
encountered in the first chapter of Genesis, The resemblance here to the Olympian family of
gods under Zeus the Father is notable; the Greek gods take up the sides of different nations
as in the Iliad; have favorite countries as Athene with Athens; and so onto other
conformities.
A god is usually an idea of a people about a being that controls their destiny. The people
establish a religion to control their god by being in step with him. The more out of control
their destiny, the more they look for and seek to control a god. The god takes on traits
that are appropriate to their problems: if fire is threatening to their world, a fire-god
occurs; if sheep are critically important, god will tend their flocks. The worse the
problem, the greater the status of the god attending to it.
Stabilizing the universe is a most common trait of the most powerful gods. Therefore we
reason that the unstable universe has been the most important problem when the greatest of
gods came upon the scene. The moral dogmas of humans are avocational pronunciamentos of the
great gods; try as may the philosophers and theologians of another, later age, they cannot
get rid of the essence of divinity, the bringing and removing of catastrophe. Yahweh saved
the Hebrews from catastrophe: specifically, he brought them out of Egypt and through the
years of wandering; but these events are formal history, the idiosyncratic chronology moving
on top of the informal history of the catastrophe.
Elohim (God-in-Heaven) would appear to have preceded Yahweh in the Hebrew theogony. He is
frequently mentioned. He is securely identified by a number of writers as the Osiris of the
Egyptians, the Saturn of the Romans, and the Kronos of the Greeks. Other god-names in
Genesis are El Shaddai, El Eyon (God Most High), El Olam (Eternal-God), El Bethel (God of
Bethel), and El Ro'i (God of Vision) [46] . The word "Elohim" denotes a plural entity in
Hebrew. Isaac Asimov, in his commentaries on the Bible, discussing this point, concludes
that an original polytheism existed; we would agree.
Cyrus Gordon in all analysis of Psalm 82 shows that Elohim is regarded as the "President of
the gods." [47] The gods let rulers be wicked. Whereupon "all the foundations of the earth
totter." Elohim then says:
Ye are gods And all of you are deities.
But ye shall die like mankind,
And fall like any of the princes
Arise, 0 God [Elohim], rule the earth;
For Thou shalt take over all the nations!
Gordon finds a parallel to the Psalm in the Ugaritic epic of Krt. We would again see in
Elohim the great god Saturn whose recall of the world's people to his Golden Age is longed
for. The character of Yahweh, like Indra, as well as Zeus, is bound up with catastrophe and
war. Max Weber writes [48] :
Yahweh, like Indra, is fit to be god of war because, like Indra, he was originally a god
of the great catastrophes of nature. His appearance is accompanied by phenomena such as
earthquakes [49] , volcanic phenomena [50] , subterraneous [51] , and heavenly fire, the
desert wind from the South and South East [52] , and thunderstorms. As in the case of
Indra, flashes of lightning are his arrows [53] as late as the prophets.
Yahweh includes insect and snake plagues, and epidemics in his repertoire.
The connection of the qualities of Yahweh as a god of frightful natural catastrophes, not
of the external order of nature, preserved down to the time after the Exile, [that is, for a
thousand years] was, beside the general relationship of those processes with war, based
historically on the fact that God had made use of his power first in battle
We have seen in this book that what Weber says of Yahweh as god of catastrophe and battle is
exactly correct. But we have also seen that Weber is quite deceived by a Biblical
reductionism of the Exodus environment so that he reverses the order. Yahweh, in fact,
historically, made use of his power first to create catastrophes, then to bring wars. His
pugnacity, Moses' pugnacity, and the bellicosity of the Israelites, Hyksos and many other
nations followed, both in time and as effect, the natural disasters whose turbulence
destroyed the social order.
Gressmann, like Weber, committed "the four sins of modern biblicism": confused chronology;
reductionism; primitivism; and uniformitarianisin. He too observed that catastrophe was
connected with Yahweh. "The catastrophe of the Sea of Reeds," he declares, "laid the basis
for the Yahwist religion." [54] He treats this event as a local disaster caused by a
volcano and tidal wave at the gulf of Aqaba, far from Egypt; the plagues are to him
relatively meaningless. Therefore he is in no position to make the correct statement, which
is that cometary Yahweh brought the ecological catastrophes of Yahweh, which incited Yahwist
aggressiveness among people, and all of this laid the basis for Yahwism.
But, if Yahweh is just coming upon the scene, and Elohim is Saturn, how could Yahweh not be
known to the Hebrews before Moses, since Yahweh is like Zeus and Jove, and Horus-Amon? And
these gods have been heavily worshipped for perhaps 2500 years. There is a gap. A god of the
Hebrews is missing.
Perhaps, unlike other peoples, they clung to Elohim from the first creation of the world in
Genesis and through the flood and thereafter, disregarding candidates for a Jove-type god
until Yahweh was introduced. Then Elohim would be given an additional name and, with this
new name, certain new qualities,
The early Hebrews moved long distances, had many skills, were not bellicose, and lived among
many nations. Their religion shared many legends and features with other peoples. Perhaps
their monotheism had its origins in an innocuous name that was not objected to by their
neighbors, not a source of contention. That is, Monotheism may be a pantheistic device. We
tend to think of it as we see it in Moses, as a parochial, exclusive, anti-polytheistic
device. It may not be so.
But if Moses were the Messiah, coming upon a people in distress with a new version of god,
there would seem to be good reason why a universalistic uncompetitive god should suddenly
acquire the traits of a nationalistic jealous god - keeping monotheism constant.
Still this would presume that Elohim, and also El Shaddai, were plugging the gap. However
Elohim-Osiris-Saturn, while still a great god in Egypt, had long given way there to Horus-
Amon and Thoth. "From the sixth dynasty on, Horus alone appears as the true patron of
monarchy" until the end of the Middle Kingdom. [55] Then Seth, who can be identified as the
perennial antagonist of Osiris, Horus, and Isis (Venus), becomes the principal divine
monarch of the Hyksos until their overthrow by a combined Israelite-Egyptian army.
But Thoth is not to be neglected. He is the Egyptian Hermes or Mercury, who bear a caduceus
like Moses' Brazen Serpent. Just as Hermes served under Zeus in Greece, Thoth might have
served under Horus in Egypt. His cult in Egypt was huge. His character is singular. In
Egypt, Rome, Greece, Phoenicia, India and Mexico, he is powerful and gives judgement on the
law; clever; rebellious; electrical; inventor of writing, expert scribe and linguist;
magical; a wizard; a healer; mundane; instructor; guide of wanderers and roads; equivocal;
he hides himself; but never so great as the greatest on high, never El Shaddai (God
Almighty), never Jupiter. But when Horus resigned his earthly power, Thoth succeeded to his
throne [56] . The cult of the ram followed the cult of the bull in Egypt [57] that is,
Thoth followed Horus.
It is conceivable that Abram when he changed his name to Abraham, was adding the Egyptian
god Ra to the name of his Hebrew capital city of Ramah. Ram is Thoth and its totem animal is
the ram. In this case, one might investigate whether the god of the fathers may not always
have been a Saturn or a Jove, but a Mercury.
Moses would have been familiar with Thoth - the sophisticated man's god - in Egypt. Perhaps
when he began to hallucinate Yahweh, the traits of Yahweh became a combination of those of
Jove and Mercury, Horus-Amon and Thoth. The mundane Thoth is perhaps the strongest model.
What he found the Hebrews enjoying was a composite of Elohim and Amon-Thoth, perhaps so
indefinite as to be the source of legendary complaints that the Hebrews had lost their
religion in Egypt.
Thoth, believed the Egyptians, created the world by the force of his word [58] . And the
Gospel according to John says, "In the beginning was the Word." Whose word, Thoth's? We have
noted how strong for the word were Yahweh, and Moses: "Write it down in your Book!" And how
Moses has been inextricably identified with Thoth-Hermes by scientists of the occult over
the ages. Biblical exegetes insist that "Logos," the original word in John, means more than
Word; it means Life, Intelligence, Light, and metaphorically, Christ the Savior, present in
the Word and in God from the beginning of creation. So did Thoth represent his Word, too, as
life, intelligence and light striking upon mankind.
We must observe closely and speculate cautiously: Moses as a "rational" cultist was Thoth-
Hermes; Yahweh was Zeus-Horus-Amon. That is, when it came to projecting a god, Moses'
personal need was for a stern, heavy father-figure, connected with lightning and meteors
[59] , admittedly more powerful than Thoth. Moses does not introject Zeus as well as he does
Hermes, Horus as well as he does Thoth. This may explain why Yahweh is such a crude and
simple power-directed god, so unidimensional. He provides the strength and will, the
compulsion, and the brute force. Thoth-Moses provides the brain.
The reasons why Moses chose monotheism are fairly plain. Not only was there this
syncretistic monotheism to work with among the Hebrews, but Moses had only the technology
for one god. If the god were to be wandering with, talking to, and working with a tribe, he
should better be unaccompanied by potential competitors.
Moses did not have the ability to talk to more than one god at a time. He was a rigid
person, and changed roles only with great difficulty. He could not be the executive
secretary of a council of gods. He had in mind the concentration of power in his own hands:
as on earth, so in heaven. A single god seemed logical, and could manage everything alone,
with occasional messengers or angels. By the same line of reasoning, we may understand why
there is no devil in Yahwism; Yahweh is his own devil-demon when necessary. Moses did not
need to split his ambivalence into personalities. The destructive behavior of Yahweh gave
Moses all the satanism that he needed.
To be possessed by two or more gods at the same time is not at all impossible; indeed, such
is the case with most people and most of history: monotheism is claimed only for some few
religions. The human mind compartmentalizes readily. Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and other gods
occupied the Roman mind, and no one will say that the Romans were confused or impractical,
at least not by historical standards.
Nor does personal development - although many imagine such - shunt all that is god's onto
one's superego or conscience. Just as a boy will take several men as his models, believing,
whether true or not, that these men possess abilities and traits that he must emulate, so he
may take on several hypothesized gods as his inspiration for learning different skills and
achieving different goals in life.
So it was that Thoth-Hermes could fill the developing Moses with desires, techniques, and
traits, and then bow down within Moses to let pass the new god of the conscience, the
aggressive and absolute Yahweh, who is exclusively to occupy the grand ballroom of world
dominion in Moses' mind.
In this basic sense, Moses was a double religious personality, and thus, quite specifically,
polytheistic. He was Thoth-Hermes in his ego and unconsciously, while he was Yahweh-Zeus in
his superego and consciously. This, if nothing else, can explain why monotheism may never
have existed in mosaism except as a formal, scholastic, linguistic construction, ex post
facto.
This construction of monotheism, once it burst its priestly bonds, encouraged everyone from
philosophers to mechanics to shave off strips of reality from the religious sphere. They
might invest their conscience in Yahweh while inventing a realistic, objective, scientific
world, as did Isaac Newton and a host of other workers. Or they might reinvest their
conscience in Jesus, while dealing pragmatically with the scientific world. Joseph Priestley
(1733-1804), one of the founders of electrical science and experimental method, was an early
Unitarian leader. John Wesley (1701-1791), founder of Methodism, wrote on "Electricity made
Plain and Useful, by a Lover of Mankind and Common-sense."
Such is the "monotheism" that the present world inherits and passes on. It is descended from
the monotheism of Moses. It consists of concurrent and successive images of a single god,
who is usually accompanied by a host of celestial figures. It is certainly not the logically
sharp and eternally consistent monotheism, such as the human mind has conceived and
maintained.
Monotheism belongs actually in the category of legal fictions, together with concepts such
as "sovereignty." All the world may be persuaded of one god, with no single person agreeing
within himself on the matter, and with no two persons agreeing between them. Nevertheless,
the persuasion of monotheism will have substantial effects upon mind and conduct.
Notes (Chapter 8: The Electrical God)
1. III G 431.
2. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1976.
3. The Palaetiology of Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis, Princeton: Quiddity Press, 1976. See,
now, Homo Schizo volumes I and II, Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publns., 1983.
4. William J. Broad, "Syria Said to Suppress Archaelogical Data." 205 Science (31 August
1979), 878-1, 880.
5. Gen. 49: 18; Buber, 50.
6. Winnett, 20-4.
7. Ziegler, 98.
8. III G 94.
9. Ex. 4: 14-15.
10. II G 318-9.
11. Auerbach, 189.
12. Buber, 113-4.
13. Ziegler, 14.
14. Ibid., 72. See A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publns, 1981,
where a setting of the skies is said to begin at this time.
15. See also Lev. 19: 12 against swearing falsely and profaning the name. Lev. 24: 15 sets
the death penalty by community stoning for cursing the Lord or blaspheming his name. Weber
writes (p. 447, fn. 23), "The abuse of the name of Yahweh finds its Correspondence in the
sanction of blinding." Why? So that they may not ever see Yahweh upon the Ark speaking his
name? Cf. Gaster, nos. 187, 72; Erman, SBAW (1911) pp. 1098 ff.
16. Ziegler, 13.
17. Cassuto, 243-4.
18. Ibid., 334.
19. III Ency. Relig. and Ethics, 510.
20. Moses and Monotheism, 144.
21. Jaynes, 89ff.
22. Ex. 7: 3-4. See also here in chapter I, where it is shown that this "hardening" theme is
owing to the comet's implacability.
23. Is. 45: 7; Cf. Buber, 58.
24. Ezek. 20: 26. See Ex. 13: 1-2; 34: 19-20; 23-29; Lev. 27: 26-7; Num. 3: 13; 8-17-8; 18-
15. Cf. Gen. 22: 1-19; I Kg. 16: 34; II Kg. 16: 3; Mic. 6: 7.
25. M. Eliade, Trait‚ d'Histoire des Religions (1964, 1974), 88.
26. 2 Sam. 22: 9.
27. George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition,
Baltimore: John Hopkins U. Press, 1973.
28. Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1930.
29. This sharp statistical distinction between the religion of Genesis and the other Books
of Moses supports the argument made elsewhere in this book, that Moses invented Yahweh and
that Yahweh is unconnected with Elohim in actuality.
30. Jer. 2: 6.
31. Daiches, 154.
32. Ex. 32: 9-10.
33. Ez. 20: 13-14 (New World transl.)
34. Buber, p. 117; Ezek. 1: 26.
35. Ex. 3: 6.
36. Ex. 6: 2.
37. Buber, 44.
38. Mose and seine Zeit. p. 433.
39. Max Weber, 49, citing Gen. 13: 8f.
40. "Judaism," 10 EB (1980) 304. Also Cassuto (27) and Sellin are unusual in stressing that
Moses was a Messiah and Savior.
41. Buber, 105.
42. Amos 9: 7-10.
43. Jacob is Israel.
44. Deut. 32: 8-12; Oxford Bible, fn 256-7 says "sons of god" means "the divine beings who
belong to the heavenly court."
45. Cf. Gen. 1: 26; Ps. 29: 1; 1 Kg. 22: 19; Job. 1: 6; Is. 6: 8.
46. Andrew Jukes, The Names of God, London: Kregel, 1888.
47. Contained as pp. 129-31 in G. A. Tuttle, ed., Bible and Near Eastern Studies, Grand
Rapids, Eerdmans.
48. Weber, 128-130.
49. Ibid. I Sam. 14: 15; Is. 2: 21f, 46: 6.
50. Ibid. Gen. 19: 24; Ex. 19: 11f; Psalm 46: 6.
51. Ibid. Is. 30: 27.
52. Ibid. Zech. -: 14.
53. Ibid. Psalm 18: 14.
54. Mose and seine Zeit, 443.
55. J. Van Seters, The Hyksos (1966), 99 quoted by Bimson, I SISR 4 (1977) 9.
56. Larousse Encycl. of Mythology, "Thoth."
57. Tomkins, 169.
58. Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 22.
59. See G. A. Wainwright, "The Relationship of Amun to Zeus and His Connection with
Meteorites," XVI J. Egypt. Archaeo. (1930), 35-8.
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
CONCLUSION
In what could be called his last sane moment, before he had ever talked to Yahweh, Moses was
leading his flock and saw a bush that was alight and not reduced to ashes, and said to
himself: "I will turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt." [1] This
kind of "why" stood behind my undertaking this book and has, I hope, conveyed my reader
rewardingly through its pages.
The work is now finished, with its details fitted into its major parts and there assembled
into the whole. Some 3500 years ago, the area subject to the Bible came under an extra-
terrestrial force, apparently a great comet, which, amidst the destruction that it wrought,
set into motion the human characters whom we have come to know well: Moses, the Pharaoh,
Aaron, and especially the Israelites, who were shaped into a chosen people.
The experiences of this people contained the material of a great and true story of disaster
and survival. The story centers upon a scientific genius - Moses - and a new god - Yahweh.
Yahweh is recognized as a great comet, as an electrical presence on earth, as the
hallucinations of Moses, and as all cognate mental and social behavior in the times and
places of Exodus, the Wanderings, and the invasion of Canaan. Of Yahweh, Vriezen has stated
correctly: "If this God has to be typified in one word, that word must be: Power; or, still
better, perhaps: Force. Everything about and around Yahweh feels the effect of this. He as it
were electrifies his environment." [2] His electrifying force is more than psychological and
metaphorical; "The Great I Am" is electrical in fact. The ideology of mosaism, a set of
formulas for tying the aims of Moses to the purposes of Yahweh, proved to be adaptable from
one restricted area and culture, the Judaic, to several grand civilizations - Byzantine, West
European, Islamic, and American.
The Ark of the Covenant, "the Vehicle of Yahweh," symbolized, as well as played a critical
part in, the whole story. Its electrical functions represented the achievements of the
Egyptian theocratic establishment from which Moses, one of its luminaries and scientific
managers, was expelled. The Ark was the centerpiece around which the aggregate of survivors
of the flight from Egypt were organized into a new nation. The Ark gave voice to the new god,
Yahweh, distinguishing him from related old gods, and lent credibility to his being one god,
the great god, the most active god, a god who moved and rested with his followers, an
invisible god, a god of explicit advice, a god who was independent of any sky body once he
was defined by Moses,
Numerous miracles of the Bible have been shown to be based upon historical happenings: the
escape from the enemy, the finding of food and drink, the punishment of sinners by god's
fire, and so on to all significant miracles. They are demonstrable by ordinary rules of
anthropology relating to a group interacting with nature to produce recognizable cultural
behavior. Much of the non-miraculous but apparently nonsensical - the clothing, the taboos,
the prayers, the rites, the devices, the social behavior, the attitudes of people - can be
linked to the miracles, the setting, the motives and purposes of the leaders and people. All
of this invites a renewed attention to old problems under a new light. We may be in a better
position to learn from the Bible and to know what is not to be learned from it. The
experiences of Moses and Israel may be better guides through history than they have been in
the past.
Yet even such generalities seem bland and anti-climactic following the outburst of arguments
and propositions in the individual chapters. But rather than summarize all of these too,
which are clearly signalled where they occur in the book, I should like to enter a plea on
behalf of their implications. It is that Biblical scholars may join with specialists of other
cultures throughout the world in reviewing materials of this electrical period of Exodus. It
is, furthermore, that natural scientists, especially geologists and meteorologists, may lend
their skills as historians of nature to the researchers in human history. I have no doubt
that my book is to be corrected in many ways; I would, however, be gratified if the process
of correction be managed so that all benefit in their own field of interest, rather than that
I be loaded with the sins of all and sent into the desert to Azazel.
Figure 20: The Moses of Klaus Sluter.
( Sculpture at chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon A. D 1404)
Notes (Conclusion)
1. Ex. 3: 3.
2. The Religion of Ancient Israel (London: Lutterworth Press, 1967), citing N. Soderblom, P.
Volz and J. Pedersen. ;
GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus
by Alfred de Grazia
APPENDIX
TECHNIQUES FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF LEGENDARY HISTORY
The Book of Exodus reminds one of the Iliad and other great epic poems. But Iliad and
Odyssey chanted of much later events [1] . I am ready to believe, with Cassuto, that "one of
the principal sources - possibly the principal source - was... an ancient epic poem, an epos
dating back to earliest times, that told at length the story of the Egyptian bondage, of the
liberation and of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness." [2] It has
numerous lyric passages still, also word and sound play, and formulas and fixed numbers to
help remember its verses.
V. Cassuto points out various sacred literary harmonies through the text: the play upon
threes, sevens, and seventies, for example; the repetition of words for emphasis; the use of
expressions of salvation and deliverance in the 3rd episode of Moses in Midian, and so forth
[3] .
THE LIMITS OF DISTORTION
There was a major difference, however, between the Exodus and other epic accounts. The
Exodus began in writing, under the authorship and direction of Moses, then was carried by
epic tradition in oral form, and then was revived in written form in the tenth century at
which time there was no Homer to reassemble it. So it came together afterwards piece by
piece for five hundred years, as sacred history and in writing. In inception and conception,
the Exodus was modern; it was to be a sacred written history.
Luckily for students of ancient events, the Exodus was from its beginnings a sacred
happening so that no despot, no matter how powerful, could afterwards rewrite it with
impunity. Apart from the theological miracles that the Books of Moses describe (which we
translate into historical and scientific miracles), the book in itself represents a set of
historical miracles. First there was Moses who believed in historiography. Then there was
Moses' Yahweh whose imprimatur on the mosaic word made tampering sacrilegious. Afterwards,
there was spawned by the new nation a priesthood, Aaronites, Levites, and popular priests
and prophets that oscillated between centralized and decentralized federationism. These men
were compelled to recite historical truths even when the truth hurt their interests; they
could never erase it; they could only accent their own position in the process of history,
swearing continuously that they were only repeating what had been historically said. The
divisiveness of the Jews let this process go on for many centuries.
Then, in exile in Babylon and fortunately deprived of their own secular leadership, the
priests crystallized their Torah, and upon their return to Jerusalem, decided once and for
all that they possessed the sacred truthful history that must hereafter only be discussed,
never changed. Thenceforth, no matter where they might be, those who claimed descent from
the Exodus preserved with very little change the writings, while the Christians, who might
have rewritten them, were from their own beginnings somehow persuaded that the Books of
Moses were reconcilable with the teachings of Jesus and therefore sacred and untouchable.
Thus happened the miracle of the Torah, that unique book.
As a result, we have found much history in the Books of Moses, and we shall find much more.
But perhaps the moment has arrived to explain how this adventure in historical discovery is
engineered. What logic and techniques am I trying to employ? I shall explain my procedures
now, hoping that the reader has reached "the point of no return."
First of all, we need some agreement on the composition of the Pentateuch. Who wrote or
pronounced what in Exodus? Who says that they did so? When did they say so? And we begin by
asserting that Moses himself kept the log of Exodus; he wrote, too, of his talks with
Yahweh; he recorded as well the laws that he promulgated. We have already learned of his
passion for the written word, which is integral to his character, and became part of the
Jewish national character. The log is reported in the Book of Numbers: "Moses recorded their
starting points in writing whenever they broke camp on Yahweh's orders." [4] We recall,
too, that Yahweh refers to Moses' book and tells him what to write in it as well as helping
him write the Decalogue.
Probably most scholars will agree that writing was indeed occurring in the wilderness. The
major problems occurred subsequently. The writings were entirely lost. The period between
the events, which in great part, no doubt, were not even originally recorded by Moses, but
in vital parts were, and the canonization of the experience and its discussion consists of
some eight or nine hundred years. "The final redaction and canonization of the Torah book...
most likely took place during the Babylonian Exile (6th-5th century B. C. E.)." [5]
Hence the attempt to establish the authenticity of Biblical passages has depended largely
upon linguistic analysis, and, to a lesser degree, upon internal consistency, comparative
history and archaeology - all supervised by logical and anthropological speculation.
Linguistic analysis allows an expert to criticize and perhaps rearrange passages in accord
with what is known of the progress of the Hebrew language and of the style used by different
individuals whose accounts have come down to the present.
Linguistic analysis is inadequate often not only because of the uncertainty of its data and
of its premises, but also because it cannot discover the career of oral traditions. We know
from general anthropology and ancient literature that an exact rendition of a large body of
verse and prose (such as Homer's Iliad and other epic works) can be transmitted over
generations and centuries. The same exactitude can be expected of a sacred written work
which is committed to collective memory, then lost in written form. Even though the style
and other minor changes may be introduced when the oral version of the original written
version is written down, the substance of the account may be exact. In both cases, in the
period of oral transmission, trained speakers can memorize and reproduce exactly thousands
of lines heard from the lips of a teacher. All along the line, a sacred duty to repeat the
original faithfully encounters social interests to whose advantage certain changes might be
made. In the case of the Bible, much effort must go into locating such interests, whether by
internal analysis or by matching the known later political and natural environments with the
suspected changes in the text over time.
We have to take it for granted that those who had the last word to say on the Old Testament
said it the way they wanted it. Nobody knows the name of these gentlemen, but they were a
group of Jewish scholar-priests living 800 years after Moses. We can assume that they were a
corporate group and, therefore, the "very last word" would have been that of a "research
director," namely a qualified priest with political and social engagements and contacts,
more attuned to the mission of the Old Testament as he saw it than to the literal nuances of
the text.
We know, too, that the period in which the last important editing was done was without
general physical upheavals. Hence, the editing would lack the first-hand experience with
catastrophe that marks the age of Moses and the age of the prophets and would not be
conversant with strong references of the words, as compared to alternative weak references.
Lacking direct comprehension, they would be tending toward using the name of Yahweh ever
more promiscuously as a shorthand substitution for natural explanations or references. They
would be uniformitarian (" conditions were the same then as now") and metaphorical (" what a
fine analogy is implied in this language about angels.") Pari passu, the translations that
are generally used now exhibit both tendencies of the text editors to a marked degree.
The editing, moreover, occurred in a parochial and depressed period of Jewish history, the
period of the Babylonian exile from which only some fraction was freed by the Persians and
wanted to return to the Jerusalem area. The priest-scholars would be intent upon preserving
their small ethnic and linguistic group, and would be without hope of expanding their
realms, as contrasted, for example, with Jesus and Paul, working with the protection of and
with the model of the seemingly universal Roman Empire before their eyes. The unwritten
directive that would guide their minds and hands would then be:
1) The "Chosen people" are a "select and exclusive people," and should preserve their
religious heritage against any infiltration, expansion, or assimilation.
2) Establish the continuity of Yahweh with Elohim, i. e., between the gods of Genesis and
Exodus.
3) Eliminate realistic and natural explanations of events in favor of the indefinite, all-
explaining "hand of god."
4) Provide a maximum of ritual so that the priests must be involved in all personal actions:
"Whatever is not forbidden, must be prescribed."
5) Let it be clear that all that Moses did he did under strict orders from above, and
further that he was the last man to be under such direct divine guidance.
6) Stress the undeserving character of the people; build up their guilt; establish, as the
only route for the expiation of this guilt, renewed obedience to the Torah (the Law) and to
the Priests and Levites who administer it.
7) Evade the secular, the political, and the contemporary environment of Judaism.
Then, of course, the last word to the people of Israel would carry a meaning like: "now you
have your inalterable sacred text. It is your first and last resort on all life's issues.
And you have the priests to answer any questions. Lucky, undeserving people under Yahweh
that you are!"
I would argue that something like this revisionary process actually occurred and needs to be
watched for in educing history from the Torah. Nevertheless, one must not take the naive
cynical view that anybody who handled Biblical material in the course of a thousand years
could shape it to his whims and fancies. On the contrary, the great scandal of the Bible is
its uncompromising confrontation of real human behavior which in modern "scientific" society
is confessed to psychiatrists or kept secret at all costs.
The Revolt of the Golden Call offers a case in point. Frederick Winnett flatly declares that
the story of the Golden Calf (incident, affair, revolt, revolution - one names it out of
prejudice often, just as modern scholars quarrel over whether the Korean or Vietnam conflict
was a "war") was a product of the southern penmen of Judah after the Northern Kingdom had
been destroyed in 722 B. C. and its inhabitants lost to Judaism [6] . The Northern Kingdom,
reports the Bible, had two major places where images of golden calves were worshipped.
Hence, southern blame-mongers had inserted the Golden Calf of the Holy Mountain into the
story of Exodus to prove just how blasphemous and deserving of destruction were the idol-
worshipping northerners. This intervention would have occurred shortly after 715 B. C.
However, as we have already evidenced earlier, we here take the Golden Calf revolt
seriously, and fit it neatly into our total theory of Moses' character, of Yahweh, and of
how the people really felt about religion.
Are we now to erase our theory and loosen one of the stones of our edifice? I think that the
answer must be negative, for several reasons. The weakest of these reasons is that
practically all biblical scholars accept and discuss the Golden Calf revolt in its place in
Exodus. This is an appeal to authority; but it is the authority of linguistic analysis in
which we ourselves are weak and impressionable.
The next reason, concerning which we feel stronger, treats of the minds of the vindictive
writers of the Southern Kingdom. These men, scholars themselves, are caught in a bind. Just
as rulers nowadays almost invariably reject rational advice to assassinate their political
enemies, the priestly writers cannot violate the rules of the Bible, including that what
goes into it must be sacred and true, and, further, must not violate a widespread
appreciation of what the book ought to contain. Tampering with Moses was like playing with
dynamite.
A third reason is a question: Are we certain that Jeroboam did indeed cause two golden
calves or bulls to be erected at two principle sites of his Northern Kingdom of Israel? Or
is this one the concocted story? Or were these images only rumored to be "golden calves,"
and were something else; or were they metaphors for the very word "images"? They might be
arks, even the ark seized by Dan.
A fourth reason for maintaining the credibility of the Golden Calf Revolt is that, after the
return from the exile in Babylon, a priestly group had occasion to make revisions in the
Hezekiah recension that, says Winnett, had produced the story. They had good reason to
remove the story if it were not true, because the Southern Kingdom itself had also been
destroyed shortly after the Northern Kingdom and therefore the redactors may have felt less
triumphant and scornful and more subdued. They let the story stand.
A fifth reason is that the Torah did not then and does not now include accounts of all that
happened during the Exodus. The oral tradition was rich and exact. It is likely that the
scholars who wrote down the story found as their basis something closely matching the act of
elevating the image of the Golden Calf to worship among numerous stories of Moses' struggle
to maintain an imageless Yahweh. With malice aforethought, they wrote up this story and
inserted it at a most logical place, if it were not indeed the proper place. What more
likely occasion for this act to occur than after a prolonged absence of Moses on the
Mountain? Winnett advances this possibility when he writes that "the story was present in
the form of the [mosaic] tradition that reached D [the redactor], and, of all the incidents
related in the tradition, that of Aaron's making an image of Yahweh in the form of a bull
seems to have made the greatest impression on his mind." [7]
At this point, it may be proper to argue a scenario: the great revolt at Sinai (Horeb)
happened; among the gods raised up was the golden young bull; Moses put down the revolt
harshly; the people never could quite believe Yahweh was fully competent when invisible or
that the whole outside world of bull-worshippers was wrong; the bull theme reappeared many
times, usually tied loyally to Yahweh, and in the days of Jeroboam, images, including the
bull, were well-received, just as Zeus, not a bull, could be represented as such on
occasion, as when he kidnapped Europa.
Without question, the written Books of Moses expanded with time, as in this case, and
usually, where a major affair is concerned, an oral historical tradition and a structure of
truth are present. So it goes with the Moral Decalogue, the plagues, the confusing infancy
of Moses, and other important elements; the written increments, uncovered by linguistic
analysis, are founded upon ancient and authentic oral accounts and lost fragments. I think
that more barriers to understanding the Bible have been erected by poor sociological and
philosophical theorizing than by the more commonly criticized exegetes.
UNBELIEVING THEOLOGIANS
Theodor Gaster's book of Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament is a compendium of
analogous actions performed by characters in a number of different cultures. His typical
procedure is to take an act or practice from a passage in the Bible and to show that similar
behavior is discoverable in several other tribal or folk cultures here and there in the
world. Explanations are rarely afforded. As an example, he writes of the taboo on touching
the Ark of the Lord [8] . As we have already told it, the unlucky Uzzah tries to steady the
Ark when an ox drawing it on a wagon stumbles; he is struck dead. Gaster gives two
parallels. One is from Troy, where Ilus tried to rescue the Palladium of Athene from the
flames and was blinded. In the second, Metellus rescues the same type of object from the
temple of Vesta and is also blinded. Both have their sight restored. Gaster then ends the
discussion.
This procedure is purely descriptive and primitivist anthropology, even less sophisticated
than that of Frazer on whose nineteenth century work Gaster's is founded. Human behavior
must of course be analogous everywhere. People talk, eat, produce, have sexual relations,
fight with weapons, and symbolize their actions, in basically similar ways everywhere. The
resemblances of the three actions that he cites seem to be superficial. His implication
here, as throughout his book, is that these are not events; they have no causes nor
consequences; they are simply cartoon sketches coming off the brushes of long-gone legend
creators. But our book is dedicated in part to showing that each and every legendary episode
has a lesser or greater accumulation of characteristic symbolization centered around a core
of historical reality; it is like the trillions of manganese lumps on the deep ocean bottoms
that have accumulated around cores of shark teeth and other bones and stones; they are all
alike but have a unique happening as a seed.
By way of contrast to Gaster, U. Cassuto's Commentary on the Book of Exodus (1951, 1959)
uncovers a string of three stories of wells, with Abraham, Jacob, and Moses as the heroes,
each obtaining a bride thereby [9] . In this case, however, the fact that wells were
universally employed for meetings and rendezvous is made significant by a close parallelism
of Jacob's story with that of Moses. The two plots, involving other shepherds and the
damsels Rachel and Zipporah, suggest a deliberate embellishment to tie Moses to his ancestor
Jacob. Nonetheless Cassuto explicitly denies that his book aims at establishing historicity.
In 1957, Greta Hort published two articles on "The Plague of Egypt," [10] there tying
together skillfully much scientific knowledge pointing towards the actuality and sequence of
the plagues. Briefly she argues that an unprecedented rainfall in Ethiopia eroded the red
soil basin of Lake Tana and the banks of the Blue Nile and sent red floodwaters causing down
the some 2000 miles of river, carrying with them a red micro-animal Euglena sanguinea as
well. This polluted flood killed the fish of the Lower Nile and drove the frogs ashore,
where insects infected them with an anthrax. Infestations of mosquitoes and flies followed.
Independently a fierce hailstorm from the North blew up the Nile Valley. Fire is not
mentioned. Weather conditions were propitious afterwards for a massive locust invasion. The
dried-out land gave up its coating of red powdered dust to the first khamsin or sandstorm of
the year, bringing days of darkness. She advances plausible reasons why the Hebrews should
have been spared, in their partial isolation, some of the plagues.
The plague upon the first-born is reduced to a ruination of the first fruits of the harvest
that were ordinarily consumed in spring. The Israelites left then partly out of fear of
being robbed of their harvests by the less fortunate Egyptians. Pharaoh was hard-hearted
about letting them go; although prayer expeditions to the desert were not unknown, he would
not chance the Hebrews leaving, because their god might answer their prayers and
discountenance his god, and because sedition might be served with such moving about of
people.
I cannot do justice to Hort's ingenious scenario here. By way of negative criticism, I would
allude to the enormous distance the red dust and flagellates would need to descend. Also,
the lack of repetition of the plagues in earlier or later times makes the Exodus still
unique. Critical connections are missing between the other plagues and the hailstorms and
locusts. The first-born killing is laid aside. The magic wand contest is evaded. So is the
climactic movement of waters in the passage out of Egypt. Nor are the negotiations or the
human movements incorporated precisely into her scenario.
The actuality of biblical events is, of course, a provocative issue in scientific quarters.
A few rears later, Dorothy Vitaliano, in Legends of the Earth [11] stresses again a
geological approach in attempting to restrain popular faith in ancient and folk accounts of
unusual natural events. Vitaliano confronts causation directly, like Hort and unlike Gaster.
She offers to explain the plagues as natural events, giving as much credence to the Bible as
she can admit.
But she is operating with a weak instrument, the uniformitarian law that the same natural
conditions of today have prevailed over millions of years. Consequently, there is not enough
energy in the ordinary, terrestrial, natural forces she employs to deliver the quick
succession of shattering blows to the Egyptian Empire. Nor are the forces integrated by a
single, sufficient cause. Her a priori refusal to consider an extra-terrestrial force cuts
short the explanation at an unsatisfactory point. The major concession that she makes to the
literalness of the Bible is the connection (which earlier I have adversely criticized)
between the explosion of Thera-Santorini and the tidal waters sweeping in upon the Egyptian
army [12] .
A much greater freeing of the intellect is required before the Exodus events can be
understood. It is notable that upon the conclusion of her heavily researched studies, Hort
qualifies the results by reference to research by Professor Bodenheimer "on the connection
between solar activity and pests" and the hope for an ultimate explanation by "cosmic and
terrestrial" connections [13] .
The combination of uniformitarianism and disbelief in legend leads, as with Buber and
Daiches and Gaster, to a general distortion of the Bible by reductionism. The result is a
sugar-coating of reality by a questionable commonsense. Shrinking from the realities of
Exodus, not one but most editors and scholars have painted its human and natural background,
the wanderings, and the struggles, as a quaint nineteenth century romance. Martin Buber was
one of the best of biblical scholars and a hero of resistance to the Nazis; but little of
the madness that he experienced under Nazism ruffles his calm book on the life of Moses.
He is a rationalist - wrongly regarded as an existentialist - who ever so subtly deflates
the rhetoric and propositions of the Bible, following a principle of maximal reductionism;
at the same time, he is trying to keep his people, the Jews, bound together in a community,
with the Bible as its glue. Perhaps the double task is impossible, or perhaps he is more an
expert than a theorist; for his book is littered with disconnected, uncontrolled, and
fallacious surmises. At one moment he may be Machiavellian. Thus he thinks that Moses had no
clear mission in Egypt but, when rejected by the Hebrews, got himself accredited as the
representative of the Hebrew god at the Pharaoh's court [14] . Machiavelli himself might
have approved this notion; he regarded Moses as a model prince, perhaps even better than
Caesar Borgia: Moses formed a nation and led it forth to survival.
Then again Buber stretches time with an uncontrolled imagination; Moses is a kind of spook
who haunted Pharaoh's court for years while the plagues went on at large intervals [15] .
Buber analyzes the passover feast as an old shepherd festival of spring [16] . (Why each
family should stay in its own home during a fiesta is rather strange.)
His scenario of Moses talking with Yahweh is a fine example of reductionism, himself, quite
unbelieving, yet letting his reader believe:
In our vision, we see this man Moses at times, following some new and wearing experience
with his people, entering the leader's tent, sitting down on the ground and for a long time
weighing in his soul whatever may have befallen; until at length the new comprehension rises
to the surface and the new word oppresses his throat; till it finally darts across into the
muscles of his hand, permitting a new utterance of the Zealous God to come into being on the
scroll [17] .
This is practically all that passes for psychiatry in the book. Is Moses, or is he not,
talking with Yahweh?
Of all that is said and done in the Crossing of the Sea, Buber concludes: "It is irrelevant
whether 'much' or 'little', unusual things or usual, tremendous or trifling events happened;
what is vital is only that what happened was experienced, while it happened, as the act of
God." [18] Here is your second greatest episode in Jewish history! (If the handing down of
the Decalogue is the greatest.) "Miracle, he says, is "nothing but an abiding astonishment."
But he cannot escape the urge to trivialize events: "It may be assumed that the frontier
guards set out in pursuit of the fugitives." [19] As for the greatest episode, at Mt. Sinai,
"every attempt to penetrate to some factual process which is concealed behind the awe-
inspiring picture is quite - in vain." [20]
The principle of uniformitarianism leaks out now and then: "We must maintain the conclusion
that, for times about which we have nothing more than reports impregnated with material of
an obviously legendary character, it is necessary to assume the same fundamental forms of
historical behavior as we know in periods which have found more sober chroniclers." This,
regarding the Passover! Things were then as they are now, legend-analysis is futile!
(Notwithstanding that in the aftermath of catastrophe, legend, rather than purely factual
history, is more likely to be written and to survive.)
Gripped by philosophical confusion, he speaks of natural forces at the crossing from Egypt:
"Here there is no Nature in the Greek, the Chinese or the modern Occidental sense. What is
shown us of Nature is stamped by History." [21] And the history is stamped by wonder, he
says, which produces cosmic exaggerations. "The defeated Egyptian 'dragon' grows into a
symbol as vast as the world in the drama of rescue which serves as prelude to the revelation
" From what unconscious source did Buber conjure up the Egyptian 'dragon'? It can be none
other than Typhon, the great monster whom Zeus struck down with thunderbolts at the time of
Exodus, and the name of the first Hyksos king of Egypt whose forces were invading the
country at the moment of Exodus.
If this be sheer conjecture about Buber's mind, let it pass as such. But let me nevertheless
conjecture about a similar effect in the mind of David Daiches, for he, like Buber,
dismisses any psychological approach to Moses. In the Epiloque to his learned and beautiful
"coffee-table" book on the life of Moses, Daiches writes "For generations schoolboys have
asked each other: 'Where was Moses when the light went out? ' and replied, 'Under the bed,
looking for the matches. ' Thus he moved easily from the sublime to the ridiculous, a fate
shared by many great names." [22] Perhaps Freud, master of the theory of wit, a biographer
of Moses to whom Buber gave only one demeaning sentence and Daiches gave two, quoting Buber
approvingly, would have noted this remark. Also, that the remark is in the last paragraph of
the book.
Why should schoolboys "for generations" (I remember well the joke) associate Moses with the
light going out and why was he "under the bed looking for the matches"? Moses was the great
leader of the times when darkness befell the world. Under the grim pall (pallet?) was it not
he who was finding matches to make light?
I play this game only to show that it is serious. Humor is an escape from fear. When
legendary characters or historical characters or identifiable substitutes for them are
involved, not alone Freud, but also anthropologists generally nowadays suspect that a clue
to something that happened in history is contained in the joke. That Daiches should choose
these words to be among his last of the book, which tackles an awesome subject, is nothing
more, I suppose, than a little giggle of unconscious self-depreciation. It confesses that he
has not solved the problem of Moses and has hardly dared to address it.
THE PRAGMATICS OF LEGEND
Many scholars specialize in analyzing legends, but I do not know of a manual of their
techniques. Whoever has not worked with legends is prone to believe that their analysis is a
waste of time, baseless, or even fakery, like persons often believe who have not worked with
the analysis of dreams, handwriting, or propaganda, or with the authentication of documents
and paintings. On the other hand, some of those who have done so believe that rules of
analysis are impossible to formulate and an informed intuition is the only resort.
Nevertheless, I feel an obligation to announce what rules I try to follow, and to accept the
critical consequences. Actually the rules are simple enough and can be practiced generally
with fair success. We can take as a first rule what was to some degree done earlier in this
chapter: Locate and dissolve the editorial screen imposed later upon a legend by well-
wishing, malicious, power-seeking, or unbelieving translators, reporters, or scholars. An
extra brief example is the word "Noga" translated "great light" from Isaiah, without regard
for the fact that the word has another meaning "the planet Venus." Now I think that the
reader will wish to analyze my own book here in this way.
Read god-names as words performing specific functions. The fire referred to in the
Pentateuch is of several varieties, and it is possible, although I have not studied the
matter, that in a significantly high proportion of cases, the possessive "Yahweh" is
appended to instances of fire other than ordinary combustion. The same may be true of
natural phenomena other than fire, as for example, it was "Yahweh's wind," not simply a
heavy wind, that brought down a massive flight of quail. It is ordinarily believed, in
instances such as these, that the taking of the Lord's name is either to indicate that all
things are caused by Yahweh, or else that any benefaction (or punishing act) is the work of
Yahweh. That is, the grammar is to be read as, for instance, we might say that interference
with radio reception is caused by the Van Allen belts, meaning a special kind of belt, not
that Van Allen caused the belts.
In the Books of Moses, the name Yahweh, when it occurs, can have six additional functions
besides this first, which is a shorthand substitute for the cause of a variety of natural
events or a confession of ignorance of such causes. "Yahweh" is a battle-cry; the Israelites
attack or rally with the calling of a name, as in the old American song "Rally around the
flag, boys!"
Yahweh is a collective, abstract fiction of authority, objectified in the minds of community
members, giving binding force and security to their transactions. Yahweh is who is obeyed
when obedience is demanded.
Yahweh is a label or designation of what is collectively sacred. A secular (slightly sacred)
example is the label "Property of the U. S. Government." It joins hundreds and thousands of
things, actions, persons in a commonalty. Yahweh is an attribution to a delusionary
universal being of responsibility, accountability, or blame by people who wish to evade or
avoid or are ignorant of such. "My son died by the will of Yahweh."
Perhaps the most important function of the word is the dynamic for activating Moses and
hence Israel. Yahweh is the inner necessity of Moses to objectify and reify his conscience
and to spread his inner dialogue upon the official public record. "Yahweh says 'Do this'
lest you die." Finally Yahweh is the inner necessity of other Israelites to objectify and
reify their consciences in a privatized dialogue or collective sanctioned discourse, as
limited by authority, sacred labels, and Moses' priority. They are discouraged save on rare
occasions to place any hallucinations or delusions upon the public record or to discuss them
in public.
Different Israelites, as I have explained elsewhere, would have various Yahwehs. No two
Yahwehs are the same. Yahweh is a somewhat different component in each Israelite's mind,
character, and behavior. No doubt many of the people neither perceived Yahweh nor believed
in other people's perceptions, such as Moses'.
A corollary of this general rule about god-names is: If you accept an authoritative voice
speaking for god, or talk with him yourself, then there is no point in your analyzing a
legend; it is done for you, you are in a different kind of ball game.
A third rule is to treat every legend as a confused and bothersome collective memory
containing some truth and therapy for those telling it. Yahweh's wind blew a great flight of
quail down around the Hebrews when they were starving for meat. Thus he answered their need
upon hearing of it from Moses. But then, because they had complained of him, he caused many
to die of eating the meat. We expect and know of the destruction of the biosphere occurring
in catastrophe. Violent atmospheric turbulence with heavy radioactivity would both bring the
feast and poison the feasters. A legend says that the wind that downed the quail was
terrible enough to destroy the whole world. Tornados, it is now demonstrable, have plucked
chickens [23] . The bird was probably coturnix coturnix, the common quail of Europe, Asia
and Africa and the only migratory gallinaceous bird.
If long ages have said so, respect a legend's claim to history. Persistent discussions of
infanticide or cannibalism under extreme conditions merit belief. More broadly the intense
conviction that the Exodus happened is some proof of it. But what of the intense conviction
of Yahweh? The belief that Yahweh happened is true in relation to all the qualities that
make him an historical god, and make many other divinities also "historical gods." He is a
unique god, and says so himself, therefore historical, with a highly touted, historical
mission as well.
Do not be arrogant about how scientific our age is, and about how much is known today that
used to be unknown. One thinks of perfumes, mummification, herbal medicine, etc. The
evidence of this book shows that, partly because of hyper-electrical activity in nature,
Moses' generation knew more about electrostatics than did the modern world until perhaps
1850. I speak not alone of natural history but in some cases of pure science and applied
science. Where not lapsing into oblivion, a great deal of material, and the literary
evidence of it, has been destroyed. It is hard to believe that the many thorough and even
brilliant scholars who have dug and delved into the Old Testament setting could otherwise
have believed that the wandering and desolated peoples were ignorant primitives. But they
have been seduced into following the excursions of anthropologists into primitive cultures.
Robert Temple has recently shown how advanced is some astronomical knowledge of the Dogon
tribe of Mali; they have known since time immemorial of the invisible dwarf white star,
Sirius B, and it is important to them. Obviously they have held onto sound remnants of a
lost scientific corpus [24] .
Harken, also, to new scientific knowledge that may require old analyses of legends to be
revised. Radioactivity was unknown or quite misunderstood until recently. The possibility of
explosive meteoric "chemical factories" was ignored until recently and hence the manufacture
of great quantities of manna in the atmosphere by natural means was not considered. Another
area of recent scientific progress has been psychiatry. Even a century ago there did not
exist the systematic, empirically tested categories of mental aberrations such as we here
apply to Moses. Or, in the field of geography, it has been established that three large
rivers once flowed west to east across the whole width of Arabia, and that there was a great
lake, now dead, in Northern Arabia, and that, too, immense areas of blasting and burning are
discoverable [25] .
Bear in mind that, within broad limits of individuality and broad limits of culture, human
nature and behavior do not change. People hallucinate today and hallucinated then, under
similar conditions. By torture, starvation, a volcanic eruption, and fear, a great many
people are compelled to hallucinate. "Angels" may be hallucinations but sometimes only in
the limited sense of reifying incredible natural operations and events occurring in the
atmosphere.
Neither believe nor disbelieve an event on the first reading of it. This rule applies to
very many cases in the present work. The problem arises mostly, or course, in relation to
disbelief, regarding the quail, the manna, the rod of Moses, etc. I first disbelieved the
story of over three million souls joining the Exodus. Continually nagging the passages, I
finally theorized that many people could have left Goshen, for various reasons, and only a
small fraction accomplished the Exodus.
Judge a possible truth both by itself and by its context. The story of Miriam's rebellion
against Moses and her punishment by leprosy is rendered believable in the context of many
cases of leprosy that do not conform to medical definition today. Knowing what the Inner
Sanctum contained and the Meaning of the ominous cloud allows one to deem the story
credible.
Transform the words of a legend to behavior. Words too are a form of behavior. Visualize
them as real operations. Just out of Egypt, Moses holds up his rod all the long dark day in
battle with the Amalekites, but needs to be propped upon a stone and helped by Aaron and
Hur. Why doesn't Yahweh hold it up or give Moses the strength? The "self-reliance" imposed
upon Moses lends an air of factuality; further inquiry leads me to regard the story as true.
The darkness makes light a heavy morale factor.
Translate the legend into a story-form and a language that you read in the newspapers or
watch in films or use in your ordinary work and days. I could not understand Pharaoh's
actions until I displaced him into the setting of a contemporary head of state, interposed
all I had come to know about the goings-on in, say, the U. S. Presidency, and then carried
them back again to the Middle Bronze Age in Egypt.
Accept the possibility that two legends may be talking about the same event in a different
way. Did Moses really spend two forty day-night periods on Mount Sinai, or was there so much
material coming out of one episode that it was made into two? Nothing vital is at stake in
either case. The first prolonged period has to stand, in order to make the Golden Calf
Revolt and other matters plausible. The second does not. It may have been a brief return
following the suppression of the revolt for prayer, supplication, and redemption of the
wicked people, whereupon the halo and the message. It would also let people test themselves
in Moses' absence and redeem themselves by passing the "faith and patience test." Another
case, already discussed, is that of the Greek Phaeton and Typhon legends, both evidently
dealing with the cometary events of the Exodus.
Ask what elements are missing from the legend that should be there, and why so? By any
ordinary standards, twelve springs of water are insufficient to draw water for 20,000, much
less two million people. But so the Bible says, a few days out of Egypt, at Elim, this
happened [26] . Until 1930, Tehran, Iran, with 200,000 people gathered all of its water
supply from twelve wells above the town which discharged 800 liters (212 gallons) per second
[27] . What is available now at Elim is not binding upon our judgement. The behavior of
giant bodies of water in catastrophes is an encyclopaedia of the amazing; the Mississippi
River reversed itself for several hours in the New Madrid (U. S. A., Missouri) earthquakes
of 1811-2 [28] . A single verse on the volume of flow of the springs would have helped, but
then who would accept the Bible generally and doubt this fact?
Grant the legend a generous quota of exaggerations, time lapses, and contradictions. I have
addressed the problem of the numbers in the Exodus in this spirit. The problem of the great
ages of Moses and others by modern standards continues to baffle one. One possibility is
some electrical and/ or atmospheric effect upon life duration. Another possibility is the
calculation of ages by a different calendar, perhaps one of 260 days such as obtained in
earliest times among the Mayans and other Meso-Americans and persisted as a sacred calendar
after they knew and practiced a contemporary calendar. Then at 120 years of age, Moses would
have lived 31,200 days. Measured on the year base of 365 days, he would be 85 years old. I
prefer this solution.
There is much rhetorical exaggeration in the Bible, which is in part a panegyric for the
Jews. Still I doubt whether the promise of Yahweh to multiply his chosen people to the
number of stars and sands of the seashore exceeds in optimism the promises contained in the
typical annual State of the Union Address of the President to the American people. Nor does
it exceed the optimism with which the President views the heights achieved in the American
standard of living, inviting now a comparison, too, with Moses' haranguing the Jews on their
fine diet of quail (poisoned) and manna bread (wormy). Nor should one forego comparison
between an American speaker describing the history of the U. S. A. on the Fourth of July and
Moses in Deuteronomy, reciting the history of Israel since the Exodus.
Another rule is to seek particular truths in a legend which is false as a whole, and seek
truth as a whole in a legend which contains false particulars. Thus, by rule number two of
this list, we do not see a real Yahweh addressing Moses in the episode of the Burning bush.
But the electrical environment and effects, and the reactions of Moses' character are such
as to make the event believable and significant. In converse, the Plagues of Egypt are
convincing as a whole set of interconnected events that should not be dismissed because of
perplexities in connection with the death of the Egyptian first-born, and because of
repeated statements that the Hebrews in Goshen were exempted from them. Wishful thinking
usually exaggerates the pains of one's antagonists and would create out of a quantitative
difference between the sufferings of Goshen and Memphis a qualitative difference,
An explanation of all events should be attempted, within the limits of time and space
available. It is not only irritating, but also and more importantly unscientific, to
interpret only those events for which plausible explanations are available, while avoiding
others more obscure and contradictory. One should not explain manna without conjecture upon
the strange dew that fell with it. Further, a Bible critic cannot be both an historian and a
faithful believer. He cannot pick and choose, preserving his reputation as now one and then
again the other.
One may not say, as has Daiches, that normal natural conditions prevailed at Sinai during
the handing down of the Ten Commandments, and that perhaps "the Kenites, who were desert
smiths and would therefore carry fire about with them and whom the biblical story associates
closely with Moses, were able to produce smoke and fire which came to be looked on and
remembered as some kind of divine sign." [29] For then, after this incredible reductionism,
he blandly finishes his book on Moses without twanging the nerves of even a moderate
believer by tucking in a few 'words where he "concludes" that it would be "too crude" to say
that Moses thought that he might get people to obey him by getting them to believe in Yahweh
[30] ." Too crude , but he will let it slip off his tongue anyhow. The most significant
actions are denied to Yahweh, but he will not address the question of whether Yahweh exists
only through Moses or even whether Moses manipulates Yahweh.
Sigmund Freud's paraphernalia of psychiatry is simply abandoned when he writes about Moses
as a person. Velikovsky evades arguments that may antagonize, whether nationalistically or
religiously, Jews or fundamentalist Christians. Eliade, while including all other religions
within his generalizations of historical cyclism, finds that Christianity is donated a
particular linear course of history, leaving us with the uneasy question whether he is
postulating an indefinitely long, perhaps eternal, course for Christianity; at any rate, it
is made an exception to various generalizations by this method.
It is helpful to check out the common psychological mechanisms in legends to see how they
are operative: wishful thinking (Freud's omnipotence of thought and James' will to believe);
the fear of loss of control of the self and the world; hierocentrism, ethnocentrism, and
self-centrism; reification of nature and objects; and the projection of feelings of guilt,
blame and punishment onto the legendary characters and actions. Whose wish for what control
over what fear is evident in what animated beings, and in the plot of their behavior?
Nor are the rules of historiographical criticism to be overlooked. One needs to look for
signs of repeated confirmations of an event, of the implied presences of eyewitnesses, and
even of expert witnesses, and of chronological sequences making logical sense. The Bible is
heavily historical in its approach to events; the chains of interconnections among events
are many and strong. Unlike practically all legendary material, it carries details of
chronology.
With the later help of Christians and Moslems, the Jews were able to assert the authenticity
of the Old Testament and benefit from a general approbation of its contents. The pagan world
was not so benevolent, lacking the same spiritual investment, whereupon it occurs to us to
check whether pagan sources provide some contrary renditions of our subject and supply an
alternative theory. We find in the negative.
The opinions of the pagan writers of the Hellenistic and early Christian periods about Moses
and the Jews are generally stereotyped. Almost none are in depth, whether friendly or
unfriendly. On the basis of John Gager's research [31] , the pagan stereotype can be
depicted in an understandable form: Moses was an Egyptian, possibly a Heliopolitan
scientist, said Apion; Moses led "numerous reasonable men" out of Egypt (Strabo). Moses and
Yahweh, his god, brought plagues upon Egypt. The plagues "disfigured bodies", said Tacitus
(radiation diseases?) The Jews were carriers of the plagues. They were expelled because they
were lepers and forever resented their treatment. They were iconoclasts and destroyed all
gods wherever they went; they were atheists, in this sense. The Jews were aloof, aversive to
contacts with other peoples, suspicious and misanthropic. "Having been appointed leader of
the exiles, he [Moses] secretly took the holy objects of the Egyptians. In trying to recover
these objects with force, the Egyptians were forced by storms to return home" (Pompeius
Trogus, 1st century A. D.).
It is remarkable that this caricature, assembled from numerous fragments, can be applied to
the scenario of the book here. Every element in it, no matter how distorted, can be
associated with corresponding realities of Moses and the Exodus. Like an elaborate rumor, it
has a certain probative value, in that its parts can be traced to reality, while it contains
no fundamental contradictions of it. However, without full historical understanding, the
stereotype leads directly down the road to anti-semitism.
It is useful also to apply certain rules about rumormongering to legendary materials
directly. This is to disassemble artificial conglomerations and reveal the underlying
reality. In solving for the original event, one recognizes a heavy simplification occurring
initially over time: single causes eject multiple causality; a leader replaces a group of
leaders; one reason is given for a complex of reasons. The simplifying process lends an air
of stupidity to legends; however, it is a way of buying temporal endurance at the cost of
realism.
There is also an invariable stereotyping, such as we have found in historiography as well.
Again the Bible as legend veers towards history because of its frequent insistence upon the
uniqueness of events and personalities. Aaron is, like Moses, authentic psychologically and
yet not stereotyped. Even Miriam is not, though less is said of her. Joshua, of whom almost
no characterization is given, can be put together into a convincing personage.
Events, too. When it is said of the plague of frogs that the animals came onto the beds and
into the ovens, this actually happens in local situations. And when there comes the "very
heavy hail such as had never been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation," [32]
the superlative is precise amid a context of precision, and is validated by this, and within
the natural realm of events, and within the context of the total set of disasters. We know
what pride the ancient Egyptians possessed in their knowledge of their own history; Plato
tells of how Solon of Athens was lectured by the Egyptian seers on this point. The usage is
stereotyped; the validity of the fact conveyed is not.
One watches, too, on all sides for the inevitable distortions that accompany the memory of
events, bearing in mind, when observing the distortions, the inevitable hints of their cause
which they contain. The repeated references to the Egyptian people as complaisant in lending
and giving their valuables to the departing Hebrews hardly succeed in covering up the
spontaneous and systematic looting that occurred in the disorganized and chaotic situation.
The need to preserve for racist Yahweh a pure race of his chosen people is a continual
source of distortion in the verses dealing with the character and conduct of the Hebrews in
Egypt and their mingling and merging with tribes during the wanderings and in the Promised
Land.
There is, too, as with rumor-mongering generally, a vulgarization in the account of events.
What Moses does is reduced typically to the level of understanding and gullibility of the
common man (though much of this may be the work of the priests and editors.) Legend lives by
speaking to the common denominator of people; they must hear it, like it, be moved by it,
and demand that it be passed on for generations without end. History reduced to miracles is
the best insurance that it will live, somehow, for a long time. The Torah strives mightily
to preserve history in the face of the competitive temptations and advantages of legend.
Finally, I should like to mention the pitfalls of a simplistic anthropological approach to
the Old Testament, a matter that has arisen already on occasion in the chapters of this
book. German scholars, following James Fraser, were especially impressed by the
possibilities of reducing the peculiarities of the Biblical text to the commonality of
comparative primitive cultural anthropology.
The bedouin primitivist school of Old Testament interpretation is well expressed in America
by Julian Morgenstern who in 1929 wrote of the origins of the ark and continued in 1945 with
studies of the ark, ephod, and tent [33] . Briefly summarized, he finds numerous Arab and
pre-Arab mobile boxed and tented litters, carrying god images and sacred stones (or
bethyls), usually on camels. These performed ark-like functions of pointing out routes,
rallying tribesmen in battle, and transporting and exhibiting the deity. He concludes that
the Ark of the Covenant was of this ilk and not much more - even less, since it would not,
at least later on, have carried the image of Yahweh. Further, he claims that to the
Ephraimites' tribe belonged the first ark, which then diffused among the confederation.
Against this line of arguments two major thrusts can be directed. One, represented by Roland
de Vaux, is historical. The Ark and the Tent, says this authority, were present and together
from the very beginning of the wanderings [34] . Lacking here the justification and space
for an extended comparative analysis of the two propositions, of which I favor that of de
Vaux, I can move to a second mode of rebuttal, which is logical and provides at the least a
stalemate.
In the history of artifacts and institutions, there frequently occurs that these
possibilities exist: that the historical actuality, form, and function of the central
concept evolves, stagnates, or devolves. Thus "an ark" at any point of time, say between
2000 B. C. and 2000 A. D., may exist, but its form and functions may be significantly
different. One might find among the bedouins of North Africa, following World War II,
artillery shell cases of 105 mm. caliber. Judging by their form and function, carrying nuts
or valuables on camels, they are of the species of mobile storage jars. In a brief prior
period they carried high explosives and were associated with a complex propelling machine
and military organization. They have devolved, or evolved, depending on the "ideal" function
assigned them. This is an extreme example of what occurs with all artifacts and institutions
over time.
Another example is to be found in the Ark of the Torah, the standard chest that contains the
Law in Jewish temples. Its design was traced by Joseph Jacobs. Its original was clearly a
Roman desk constructed to hold scrolls [35] .
Whatever arks and ephods and tenting may have been before and since the Ark of the Covenant
and Tabernacle, and even elsewhere at the same time, the problem of the particular Ark of
Moses remains. Logically not only can it be all that we said it is (and for our purposes the
Biblical description is as justifiable as any other design), but also it is to be expected
that the Ark, like all inventions, was built upon prior artifacts and institutions and was
part of the inheritance of subsequent peoples who changed its form and function, keeping its
"spiritual" functions, say, and depressing its physical construction, and forgetting (partly
because of changed meteorological and social circumstances) its illuminating divine
occupancy.
If thus, historically and logically, we can substantiate our position respecting the
actuality and functions of the ark, we may proceed to a third point, a counter-allegation.
This is directed against bedouin primitivist thinking in general, which is a learned and
potent kind of reductionism of the Bible. Once the catastrophic setting of Exodus is
dismissed as exaggeration and falsehood, and most that we know of Moses is regarded as
merely a fanciful hero's tale, then the door is opened wide to a new history of the Jews as
an escaped slave remnant finding haven among an undisturbed nomadic tribe, and, in gratitude
or by necessity, adopting their local volcano-god. But once the natural conditions of Exodus
and the character of Moses and his cohorts are established, there can be assigned to bedouin
primitivism only the limited role that I have already granted it in this book.
Notes (Appendix)
1. I examine the Homeric origins in a 1968 manuscript on the Disastrous Love Affair of Moon
and Mars, yet unpublished, but Velikovsky, in part II of W. in C. presents the original
case.
2. Cassuto, 2.
3. Ibid., 27-8, et passim.
4. Num. 33: 1-49.
5. "Biblical Literature," 2 EB 882.
6. Winnett, op. cit.
7. Ibid., p. 132.
8. 1969, p. 476.
9. Tr. Israel Abrahams (1959), Hebrew U., Jerusalem, 26-7.
10. 69 Zeitschrift fur Alttestament. Wiss. (1957), 84-103 and 70 ZAW (1958), 48-59.
11. Op. cit.
12. This approach is also used by A. G. Galanopoulos and E. Bacon, Atlantis, Bobbs-Merril
Co.: Indianapolis, 1969, 192-9.
13. Hort, p. 59.
14. 66.
15. 67-8.
16. 69-73.
17. 144-5.
18. 77.
19. 74.
20. 111.
21. 79.
22. 256.
23. J. G. Galway and J. T. Schaefer, "Fowl Play," 32 Weatherwise (1979) 116-8.
24. The Sirius Mystery. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1976.
25. Von Fange, 131.
26. Ex. 15: 27.
27. 17 EB 519.
28. James Perrick, Jr., The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812, (1976)
29. Daiches, 90.
30. Ibid., 237.
31. Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972.
32. Ex. 10: 24.
33. The Ark, the Ephod, and the "Tent of Meeting," Cincinnati: Hebrew Union CP, 1945.
34. The Bible and the Ancient Near East, New York: Doubleday, 1967, ch. 8, 136-51.
35. "Earliest Representation of the Ark of the Law," 14 JQR (1902), 737-9.
End of God's Fire
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
A Science of Gods Old and New
by Alfred de Grazia
Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey
Notes on the printed version of this book
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data de Grazia, Alfred, 1919 -
The Divine Succession:
A Science of God Old and New
Includes Index
1. Theology
2. History of Religion
3. Human Behavior
ISBN: 0-940-268-05-1
Copyright @1983 by Alfred de Grazia
Printed in the U.S.A. Limited First Edition
Address:
Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213
Princeton,
N.J. 08542,
U.S.A.
The cover is a composition based upon Kandinsky's Circles (1934) and two reconstructed
friezes of the Temple of Zeus of Olympia. The text was set on Compugraphic machines in 10
pt. Paladium type by Get Set, Inc. typesetters, Lambertville, N.J. and the cover was made
by Carol Stoddard. Printing and binding are by Multiprint Company, New York City.
to
Earl S. Johnson
melior magister myriadis
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION:
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
A Science of Gods Old and New
by Alfred De Grazia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE-PAGE
PART I. THEOMACHY
01. The Genesis of Religion
02. The Succession of Gods
03. Knowing the Gods
04. The Heavenly Host
05. Legends and Scripture
06. Ritual and Sacrifice
07. Man's Divine Mirror
08. Indispensable Gods
PART II. THEOTROPY
09. Sacral Vs Secular Man
10. Ethics and the Supernatural
11. Religious Elements in Science
12. New Proofs of God
13. Catechism
CONCLUSION: The Divine and Human
A Note on Sources
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION:
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
A Science of Gods Old and New
by Alfred de Grazia
FOREWORD
Plato could already say in ancient times "that when men first had thoughts about the gods,
with regard to the way they came into being, their characters, and the kind of activities
in which they engaged, what they said about these things was not an acceptable account of
them or what well regulated men would approve.." (Epinomis) We should have to agree and add
that the subsequent 2500 years have managed, also, to obscure the origins, characters and
deeds of the gods.
Many philosophers have quit concerning themselves with religion, believing that the road to
wisdom is paved with logical forms. I doubt, however, that they can evade St. Thomas
Aquinas' medieval injunction, to wit, "The name of being wise is reserved to him alone,
whose consideration is about the end of the universe, which end is also the beginning of
the universe." (Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 1)
In this book we take up the history of religion and consider the meaning of the universe.
From the first, humanity had to be religious. It is still so. Further, it will be religious
so long as it will exist. Religion is ultimately hope, and humans live on hope. So goes, in
other words, much of my story. But to my surprise, I have discovered that there is really
something to hope for. The two parts of my book, going from theomachy to theotropy, pursue
a way from despair to new hope.
At all times every aspect of the human mind and behavior has been religiously affected. No
bit of culture escapes religious relevance or effects. I mean this literally. Such is the
cultural dimension of religion, which will be explained.
That religion penetrates the fullness of history and culture licenses us to draw upon any
and all human settings for illustration and proof. Every person in every setting, no matter
how secular, merits attention as religious man.
No trick is intended, no cunning definition of religion. Religion for us here is simply a
belief in the existence of a metaphysical order, together with the practices relating to
it.
The means that I employ to select, analyze, and report religious material will be
recognized and approved by aficionados of scientific method. Not that the scientific method
is used throughout; but, when I move off the frame of positivistic, empirical science, I
execute the movement self consciously, so that an ordinary reader, a scientist, or a
philosopher of science will be alerted and recognize in the procedure a defined and denoted
mode of thought. Once again, no trick in intended; all of my cards are on the table.
What will follow, then is a narration in two parts and three themes. These themes are:
religion as delusion; religion as politics; and religion as truth. Although treated vaguely
in this order, they are also intermingled throughout.
Under the topic of religion as delusion are carried the most important components of human
nature and the most important historical transactions. We shall name and discuss these.
Psychology, anthropology, and history are the conventional disciplines most heavily brought
into play.
Under the topic of religion as politics, we survey the religious aspects of collective
behavior, showing religion again to be the most important part of social behavior, with the
disciplines of sociology, politics, and philosophy most sharply involved. Science can
explain every aspect of religion, but paradoxically, it is religion in the end that
determines the metes and bounds of science.
Under the topic of religion as truth, we move into metaphysics. All that historical man has
attempted to achieve with religion is adequately describable by the scientific method. Most
of it is also disposed of as anthropological material, not true religion. The residuum of
true religion, which is also describable by scientific method, is not only considerable but
also exists in its own right, functionally and eternally. This body of religion does not
logically or essentially engage in controversy with science, nor with politics.
Religion is an autonomous human activity, a fact of existence, like a rock or a sexual
discharge. It may be useful, but its utility is not its justification nor even ordinarily
expected of it. We call this activity "divine," meaning simply a person acting truly
religiously. Appreciating the immediate challenge that will arise at any claim to the word
"truth," we hasten to ask for a postponement of its trial until more can be said about
"truthful" activity . Few will object if, in the meanwhile, we define truth as an open
question of religion; one need not fear being forced to his knees.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE
THE GENESIS OF RELIGION
To the fresh, mad eye of primeval man, the world was full of gods. The human mind worked so
as immediately to create religion. It does so now and it did so at its beginning. This is a
function common to all humans everywhere, at all times, intrinsic, inherited, irresistible,
Religion is then naturally ecumenical; any two people anywhere can agree in general on what
it is that they are talking about.
The mechanism is simple. The thousands of books, the infinite discussion over millions of
fires, the pomp of parades, the grandeur of cathedrals, and the hysterical wars and
killings about religion - all of this intimidates inquiry. Yet all of this, as we shall
see, descends from the operation of the mechanism as if a holocaust would flare from a
flint striking stone.
The human mind, as soon as it starts working, builds a multiple identity, a self-awareness.
In the origins of the race, this trait is so pronounced as to set the creature apart from
other forms of life. Self-awareness is the psychological manifestation of a physiology of
the central nervous system, especially the cerebral cortex, which presents a person with
the feeling of being at least two persons. It is like the bother of two eyes that cannot
focus well upon a single object, but it is of course enormously more ramified and
important.
Since the body is one alone, it is "intended" for one mind, one spring of action, a single
commanding organ. Never mind that in some remotely related animals two brain centers occur,
or, for that matter, that in man himself, there are such "lower" brain centers that have
escaped the parturition which we speak about here as self-awareness. A person has the
instinctive appreciation of and a nearly total apparatus for realization of unitary
conduct. But this preparedness for the life of an ordinary mammal is rudely challenged by
the sense of an inner conflict of selves, which can 'change one's mind' and redirect one's
energies at any time, whit seemingly little possibility of control. It delays by
microseconds the instinctive response that the mammalian physiology and neurology crave.
The result of the perceived conflict, that "I am I, but who am I that says 'I am I'" is
fear. We can call this fear existential because it is the absolute quality of human
existence. The fear is indistinguishable physiologically from the anatomy and process of
mammalian fear that arises out of non-existential causes; such would be the fear of a blow
or of a lightning stroke. If it is to be distinguished at all from animal fear, existential
fear has to be discovered by statistical means, by logical reasoning, by experiment, by
psychiatric theory. We assume, hoping to be more empirical later on, that existential fear
is a "free-floating" fear overload that characterizes the human and is attributable to the
"fear of oneselves" associated with self-awareness.
This state of affairs called "self-awareness" is instinctively undesirable. Its advantages
are ambiguous. It interferes with peace of mind; it blocks the instinctive action of the
beast; it introduces unwanted self-consultation concerning decisions and evaluation of the
effects of action. It introduces continuous distrust of the self. It requires, as will be
amply discussed, an endless stream of devices and decisions, all basically intended to
adjust the elements of the self to each other, some of them taking place within the bodily
frame, others occurring in interpretations of and controls upon the outer world of other
people and nature.
Obvious schemes occur to the human person. One is to stamp out the other selves, to produce
a granite-like person unbothered by internal inquiries. Another is to kick out the other
selves like unwanted children or undesirable tenants. The first method is workable only up
to certain point; many subconscious activities occur and leak out onto external objects, no
matter how impressive the monolith.
The second method, expulsion of internal conflicts, creates the human's world, but is not
effective as intended, either. A lady who has a bad dream, and then doubles her
contribution to a church collection, may successfully lower her level of anxiety, but is
likely to receive more cordial solicitations from her church, which, if refused, may give
her more bad dreams. A boy who perceives a ghost under his bed will in time flesh out the
ghost with various traits, motives, and activities. Displacements of anxieties, that is,
are boomerangs which, no matter how far flung, unerringly return.
Since the struggle of the selves is essentially psychological, it can be called
supernatural. Then it is even more proper to call the projection and displacements of the
self supernatural. To become more focused upon religion, it should be said that there is
absolutely no resistance of the part of the human to displacing his internal world, in
effect, living his life - upon super-sensory or ultra-sensory phenomena. It ill behooves
the source to deny its essence in the world outside.
At the same time, the operation of tying a world of external supernatural phenomena to the
world of internal supernatural phenomena is invariably expressed in ritual practices, that
is, repeated related performances. The lady and the boy in the instances above establish
practices. The ramifications of practice are limited both by the environmental forces
governing practices and by the tendency to reiterate actions. From action to practice to
habit to obsession goes the continuum, a rating scale on which, given the object in the
world to which people relate, the same people can be graded, like churchgoers from once-in-
a-great-while to those who would rather die than miss a church service. Paul Radin has
properly pointed out "that all people are spontaneously religious at crises, that the
markedly religious people are spontaneously religious on numerous other occasions as well,
and that the intermittently and indifferently religious are secondarily religious on
occasions not connected with crises at all."
"Fear made the first gods of the world," wrote the Roman Statius (c. 45 to 96 A. D.). In
the long history of religion it is the only theory to come close to the truth. And man, in
return, is theophobic, full of dread of god. The first gods were also the first humans, a
scheme of delusions to map and control the immense, live universe. Everything seemed
capable of turning into a god; hence gods were in everything (as the early philosopher
Thales conjectured). They controlled everything, it appeared, but were unaccountable and
did both the expected and the unexpected.
The simple mechanism of religion is then self-awareness, fear of the self, fears or
anxieties displaced upon supernatural or tangible appearances of the world, and the
development of practices to control and maintain transactions with the supernatural
appearances. The drive to control oneself (oneselves, we should say) is paramount and moves
man to wherever his rears alight. Again, Radin's anthropological surmise is acceptable:
"man was in a state of fear, physically, economically, and psychically. Man thus postulated
the supernatural in order primarily to validate his workaday reality." His aim was "the
canalization of his fears and feelings and the validation of his compensation dreams."
The judgment of what is supernatural and what is tangible may bother intellectuals and
theologians but has never been much of a problem to the ordinary person or priest. The
logic of the multitude is foolproof: the supernatural is everywhere and is incorporated in
tangible things. We shall come to understand science better when we appreciate the
futility, yet inevitability, of its struggles to squeeze the supernatural out of the rocks
and out of the mind. It is trying to make an animal out of man, just as the pesky
theologians say, that is, trying to destroy all outward manifestations of the uniquely
human person, if not he mind itself. Mircea Eliade has reported will the state of mind of
the "religious man" through the ages.( He uses the term as, for instance, H. D. Lasswell
uses the term "political man," as the "pure" or obsessed type of actor in history.) Where
we employ the term "supernatural," Eliade uses the term "sacred."
"For religious man," he writes, "the world always presents a supernatural valence, that is,
it reveals a modality of the sacred." Every bit of the cosmos has its sacrality. "In a
distant past" (but why not include today?) "all of man's organs and physiological
experiences, as well as all his acts, had a religious meaning," "Homo religiosus always
believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but
manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real." "For religious
man, nature is never only 'natural'; it is always fraught with a religious value."
Finally, "the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The
sacred is saturated with being... Religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in
reality, to be saturated with power. This rounds out an accord with our ides of religious
genesis. Man naturally sees the world supernaturally. Reality is supernatural. His heart
and soul go into tying this reality to himself, to gain its powers. We should say that all
of this grandiose ambition is to stabilize his mind, to let him live unanxiously,
unfearfully, to be at peace with himself."
How good it is to be assured of this, too, as the Hebrew Elohim assures man, that he shall
"fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the
birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth," and furthermore
has given him "every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every
tree with seed in its fruit..." Elohim is thinking and working like any ideal reasonable
man would think and work. All is divinely created, by hard labor. All is sacred, therefore.
Yet, granted that humans are bent upon creating the supernatural and tying it into
themselves, why should they dispose of the credit to gods? Why should they not he frankly
proud of the world that they create and control, whether it be supernatural of tangible?
First there is the fearful fact that they do not control it. Second there is the fear that
disregards fact. They fear that they may not control anything; man is born with an
inferiority complex from not controlling himself. Third, there is the appearance of
purposeful control of the world by non-humans, an appearance, one may insist, that has both
invisible and perceptible substantiation.
Take up first the fearful fact that man does not control himself, or the world. Hence
religion arises to drug mankind, according to Karl Marx: "religion is the moan of the
oppressed creature, the heart of heartless world, the sense of senseless conditions. It is
the opium of the people."
Perhaps the most powerful suppressant of religion is the promise of science to give one
such controls. "Serious" scientists do not pretend to such abilities or make such promises.
On the other hand, they at least feel relieved when other "non-responsible" people, like
science fiction writers or humanists or philosophers, make such claims in their name. "We
are approaching the time when we will be able to control..." - and every human anxiety has
its assurance - "our anxieties," "climate," "earthquakes," "approaching comets," "plague,"
"birth defects," "war," "governments," and ultimately "the challenge of death itself." This
wealth of promises emerges from the instruments and procedures of scientific method, a
process finding its way only through provably material entities.
For those who doubt the fulfillment of these promises, the outlooks of cynicism, stoicism,
and pessimism - or, alternatively, religion - are available. A society dominated by the
scientific outlook will, however, endeavor to persuade many of these of its promises, and
for that will take over all of the trappings of propaganda and organized pressures
developed over the ages by religions, and, later, political systems. The secular society is
then in being. However, there is still the fear that disregards fact. There is a factual
element in anxiety, but additionally the aforementioned existential element. It is highly
probable that no change in the human condition can erase this anxiety except the
eradication of the human in man. Self-awareness can be detrained, stunned and doped, but
never with complete success and never over a whole population for very long. If it could be
done, it would long ago have been accomplished. We may suppose that most cultures, in one
way or another, have tried to do so, with no lasting effect. Man has achieved every
imaginably bad society except one of lasting soullessness.
But fear alone might bring forth the supernatural, and the ways of dealing with it, without
gods, unless some inherent part of religious mechanism demanded them, For this we require
both an internal and external cause. The divine being must be both in us and in nature.
The internal sequence may be suggested. If it is the plural self that disturbs our peace of
mind, then the infinitely varied displacements of this self that are employed to ease the
fears engendered by the civil strife of the ego are likely often to emanate as living
forms. That is, the world created by the human mind is animated. The world is alive.
It is an absurd but common notion, fostered unfortunately by scientists who are disciplined
observers trained precisely to observe objects as "stripped-down," that the human neatly
undresses his thoughts of their libido before placing them upon the world. To the contrary,
the human is naturally surprised, like the child bumping his head on a table, when whatever
he encounters turns out to be unalive according to the battery of tests that his mind
applies consequent to the encounter. "Everything is alive until proven dead" is the natural
psychic principle to go along with "Everything is sacred, unless demonstrated to be
secular."
To say then that a natural force has to be animated into a god by some separate
superstition which the observer must be trained to apply is incorrect. Depending upon its
impact, the force is a god or a manifestation thereof. It is historically, as well as
psychologically, incorrect to think that humans invented gods as a kind of convenience to
collect their thoughts and then gave them names. It is more likely that gods were observed
and in the very process of perception named by ejaculations (so beginning human speech),
and then, following natural observation, the world was ordered in consonance with the gods.
As Hock well says about the early gods of Greece "... these gods were not felt by the
Greeks to have been manufactured or invented as the 'Personification' implies; they were
discovered and recognized, precisely as the modern scientist discovers and recognizes the
effects of something that he calls 'electricity. '"
Furthermore, the apparitions of nature are anthropomorphized insofar as they seem
purposeful and humanlike. The human, responding to a vast range of stimuli in time and
space, entranced by the sky as well as the abyss, infiltrating his spirit into this vast
world, is both psychologically and materially affected by them. It is practically
impossible, for any length of time, to take the apparitions of the world impersonally.
There is "every reason" to regard the fall of a meteor as a purposeful intervention in
one's life. It moves through the air like a flaming lance, sword, chariot, or torch held
high. It is faster than a bird. It screams like a tiger. It strikes with the might of ten
thousand men. As scientists say, "Everything must have a cause." Well, here the cause is a
superhuman thunderbolter. From effects, one reasons to causes.
If especially there are periods of time when great effects are common and men are shaken by
them, the gods are implied, even visualized, as when a comet resembles different human
figures and organs. Men measure the effect carefully, as the ancient Etruscans every spot
struck by lightning, to see in the measure of a divine intervention the intent of the god.
In summation, the age becomes confirmed as religious. The more intense, pervasive, and
frequent the experiences, the more religious the age becomes. It is as certain as any other
proposition of science, that, were an asteroid or comet of modest size to strike the globe,
astronomy would promptly become astrology, meteorology divination, biology creationist,
politics catastrophic, and theology revivalist. Evidence for this statement is strewn among
all writings on the effects upon humans of close-in and crashing celestial bodies.
This divinity, perhaps the same, perhaps another, is known not only by celestial or other
natural apparitions; it is also manifested in ways that will be demonstrated in chapter 3.
The god is as prompt to appear as religion itself, inevitable in the primeval mind, as
culture, too, is prompt to appear and as fast as it is instrumented, married into, if not
born of, the sacred. We speak thus, of a hologenesis of homo sapiens, culture, religion,
and gods.
Logically, the evolutionary theory of a slow final development of homo is gone; so is the
theory of cultural evolution, of the evolution of religions, and of the progressive
evolution of a concept of god. All of these things are today very much perceived, afforded
and functioning as they did in the first centuries of humankind.
The science that those of us who write books so highly esteem represents a sharp break with
the history of mankind, but scarcely less a break with the human thought and behavior of
today. We can, and shall, make much of it, but should remember all the while that the
proportion of science to religion in human behavior is like the ratio of the depth of the
surface crust of the Earth to the radius of the whole globe, one to four hundred. And as
the thickness of the crust varies beneath oceans and continents, so does the depth of
penetration of the scientific method vary in different cultures and minds.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWO
THE SUCCESSION OF GODS
The first god who was, remains in the latest god who is. The gods have been of the same
descent, always, everywhere. I mean this not in the sense of many theologians, that, "Yes,
God has been eternally Himself but we have gradually learned more about His nature," nor in
the sense of many sectarians that, "Yes, people have forever worshiped false gods but
gradually we are coming to see my God," but rather I mean it to say that the gods were
discovered once, in the earliest times, and that there had been a direct descent of the
same divinities down to the present. By "discovered" is meant that the first humans
perceived gods in the world; they perceived the supernatural, and they took immediate steps
to control it.
Such statements may provoke panic in various intellectual quarters, and we wonder whether
to arrest the panic or let the room be cleared. Much of out religious thinking depends upon
refusing or denying the statements. Even some hard-boiled anthropologists meekly purchase
meliorism in religious history, part of the famous idea of evolutionary progress, some such
belief as that by indistinguishable degrees, dull-witted savages become plant-worshipers,
and these grow into deists, who later become monotheists and finally begin to be
secularists - and anthropologists. Even those who do not believe in gods are quite sure
that they are competent to distinguish good gods from bad ones.
Yet the history of religion permits the statement. Leroi-Gourhan believes that the Upper
Paleolithic hunters were probably religious. I have supported this view in Chaos and
Creation with illustrations of a probable mating of Heaven as a bison and Earth in the form
of a woman. Much earlier practices respecting burials and the mounting of bear skull accord
to Neanderthal man also basic religious ideas. Leroi-Gourhan (in Religions de la
Prehistoire) produces a scenario of a large primordial religion from an "insignificant"
incised tablet. What is revealed by relics must be only a token of full-scale rites of
religion. A recent Soviet excavation finds religious incisions on animal skulls hundreds of
thousands of years ago; for that matter, Pietro Gaietto attributes sculptures to "hominids"
of 1.5 million years of age; but, as I have argued in other works, the measurement of time
is a sorry state of disrepair. In Homo Schizo I, incidental to establishing the hologenesis
of culture, a connection of symbols and the supernatural is made. In my general attempt
there and elsewhere to shorten drastically the time of homo sapiens and to identify to
erase the need to account for a long period of stupid human development prior to a
mutation, or natural selection, or social invention that would initiate religion, along
with man.
Further, I am in accord with the claim of anthropologists Washburn and Moore, that mankind
could have originated only once. It seems to me that humanity is so distinctive in its
self-awareness and symbolism, and that these traits are so suffusive over the scope of
human behavior, that, once human in these regards, thence human in all regards.
Paul Radin (Primitive Religion) agues against the belief, represented especially by Andrew
Lang, Pinard de la Boullaye, and others, that the primordial religion contained a belief in
a Supreme God or High God. Rather, "wherever a Supreme Deity or a High God... exists it is
the belief either of a few individuals or of a special group." He is persuaded that
ordinary people are bereft of sky religion, a thesis that is patently false and can only be
precipitated out of the materialistic brew of early Marxist anthropology.
Our interest is not to inter this debate but to veer towards a more important truth.
Earliest humans gave preeminence to sky gods, as soon as one or more might be discerned
through the thinning canopy of clouds. Ouranos and his counterparts in other cultures were,
as we have remarked, first Heaven, then God, corresponding to the canopy and the appearance
of a great sun-like object (among many others) in the new skies. However, since we believe
this tumultuous set of natural events took a part in creating the human race itself, we
would maintain that man was never human before he was religious.
Some tribes appear to follow spiritualism and animism and lack astral heavenly gods of
human quality. We find ancestral spirits and ghosts usually inhabiting territories and, if
they are disembodied, lower parts of the atmosphere; or the atmosphere is a medium through
which they may move more easily than by treading the earth. Indeed, was not the vault of
heaven itself low? And was not the Earth the goddess, sufficient itself to the first age of
religious awareness? The Clouds of Heaven were many and low, until descended in deluges.
The Vault of Heaven was lifted and humans saw the heavenly bodies removing themselves to
remoteness and, too, the gods and hosts of heaven behaving destructively and benevolently
with their own wills and human features.
We can agree with Mircea Eliade (The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion) Where,
discussing Wilhelm Schmidt (Ursprung der Gottesidee) he says,
It is true that the belief in High Gods Seems to characterize the oldest cultures, but
we also find there other religious elements. As far as we can reconstruct the remote past,
it is safer to assume that religious life was from the very beginning rather complex, and
that 'elevated' ideas coexisted with 'lower' forms of worship and belief.
Thus, a prominent, although not dominant school of thought in the history of religion,
exemplified in the work of A. Lang, M. Muller, R. Pettazoni, W. Schmitt, and M. Eliade
propounds the thesis that the first worshiper and hence the ancestors of all religions
believed in sky-gods. We find their arguments persuasive and add to them what we know about
actual prehistoric skies and catastrophic occurrences affecting the skies. The belief in
sky-gods is attested to both by the most ancient sources of religious practice and by the
studies of modern so-called primitive peoples (whom we prefer to call "tribal"). All of the
"great" religions begin their stories in the skies: The Judaic complex, the Greco-Roman
complex, the Egyptian, the old Chinese religion of Heaven, the Meso-American complex, the
Teutonic, the Persian, the Hindu. "The Chinese T'ien means at once the sky and the god of
the sly." Among the less familiar religions, the Mongol, the Sumerian, the Babylonian, the
Celtic, the Baltic, and the Slavic have nominated the sky and its god( s) for preeminence.
Not only this; so far as one can tell, all primitive religions have important celestial
referents, and we may quote cases from Eliade again:
The supreme divinity of the Maori is named Iho; iho means elevated, high up. Uwoluwu, the
supreme god of the Akposo Negroes, signifies what is on high, the upper regions. Among the
Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego God is called Dweller in the Sky or He Who is in the Sky.
Puluga, the supreme being of the Andaman Islanders, dwells in the sky... The Sky God of the
Yoruba of the Slave Coast in named Olorun, literally Owner of the Sky.
The Samoyad worship Num, a god who dwells in the highest sky and whose name means sky.
Among the Koryak, the supreme divinity is called the One on High, the Master of the High,
He Who Exists. The Ainu know him as the Divine Chief of the Sky, the Sky God, the Divine
Creator of the Worlds, but also as Kamui, that is, Sky. The list could be easily extended.
Why is the sky the seat of the gods and even the gods themselves? From his unmatched
scholarship, Eliade fetches a proposition which we believe to be incorrect: "Simple
contemplation of the celestial vault already provokes a religious experience. The sky shows
itself to be infinite, transcendent... For the sky, by its own mode of being, reveals
transcendence, force, eternity. It exists absolutely because it is high, infinite,
powerful." This speculation which figures over several pages, stands without supporting
evidence. It seems to say, "since heaven is divine, and the gods are celestial, there must
be a reason; the reason is a) since the gods are there, the sky must have impressed man and
b) the sky is impressive (for the gods are there)." The logic is confusing and borrows,
though not with conscious purpose, the propaganda technique of showering agreeable
statements upon the reader.
Indeed, if one shows ( as has been done in recent decades) that the religious lives of
the most primitive peoples are in fact complex, that they cannot be reduced to 'animism, '
'totemism, ' or even ancestor-worship, that they include visions of Supreme Beings with all
the powers of an hypotheses which deny the primitive any approach to 'superior'
hierophanies are nullified.
One must return to the beginning. Granting that the sky-gods and sky-religions are
primordial, how is man prompted to perceive the supernatural there, place preeminent divine
activities there, and make the sky the centerpiece of religion? If humans existed long
before religion was invented, then it should be embarrassing to argue that the skies might
exist for millions of years before the idea of religion popped into the minds of people
everywhere (and very much the same idea of religion, that is, sky-religion without aeons of
animism, pantheism, ghosts, totemism, and such other forms of religion).
Eliade does not explain how early religions would move from sky-gods to demonism, totemism
and animism, and sometimes back, for modern tribes of this ilk meet no insuperable problem
in adopting a sky religion such as Islam or Christianity. We offer two explanations. First,
these religious practices were originally, have been, and are always with us, and are not
at all embarrassed at co-existing with sky-gods.
The second explanation is consistent with the first. The sky-gods seem to have disappeared
from many minds of our "high" civilization in favor of the worship of technology, cinema
and political heroes, and a number of psychopathological quirks. "Primitive tribes," since
explorers and anthropologists began their profuse reports, seem to have lost their sky-
gods, too, or never to have had any, or to possess dei otiosi. May not these tribe people
be acting like these civilized people in focusing upon the sky-gods when the gods are
active, or when the memory of them, consciously or unconsciously, is acute, tending to
dismiss, forget, and deny them when they are not causing great trouble? The skies became
peaceful and the world stopped shaking; people turned to the supernatural manifestations of
their closer environment. In this case, we may surmise also that the sterner the
institutions of memory (records, graphics, priesthoods, bureaucratic churches, holidays)
the longer the sky-gods will persist in a culture.
Faced with embarrassment, the idea of long evolution of religion (but then perhaps, too, of
the long evolution of man) might be dropped. Then at least, we see man becoming human and
sky-religious concurrently.
But another embarrassment occurs. If this occurs at one place and one time, as we have
asserted, how do all people settle upon the sky and often the same creation stories of
first generation gods, as we shall see? "Diffusion," one might venture; from the first Adam
and his home locale, there went forth the common focus and story (" Just as the Hebrew
Genesis says!"?). If so, the first human must have achieved the diffusion; there would be
no humans to pick up the story elsewhere.
In his book of Timaeus, Plato accepts and rationalizes in its early pages the existence of
"everything visible, and which was not in a state of rest, but moving with confusion and
disorder" prior to the work of the Divinity of demiurge which in its plenitude of
intelligence and power "reduced it from this wild inordination into order."
Here is the first revolution; a Chaos, worked upon by a Demiurge (God) produces Order. This
is a common ancient myth but we recall that Timaeus is a highly sophisticated Pythagorean
and thinker. I conclude that the first of all great events remembered by man and
emplaceable in primevalogy is the separation of Heaven from Earth.
The Divinity, according to Plato-Timaeus, using earth, fire, water, and air from the
universe formed (generated) it into a figure, an animal containing all figures and animals
and gave it the 'most becoming'... "spherical shape, in which all the radii from the middle
are equally distant from the bounding extremities." So says Taylor in his great commentary
on Timaeus. This universe moves in a circular revolution.
Taylor concludes that the boundless, the universe before god was composed of thick cloud or
mist to early and late Greek philosophers. Fire made it visible and that is why it became
the first of the elements.
There is a major dilemma in Timaeus, faced by all philosophers and theologians who explain
creation. Was God always around but disinclined to do anything about the Chaos? Then
finally did he act and make order, i. e., the universe as man knows it?
My interpretation is as follows:
The Cosmologist is Man. Man senses ancient experiences. He asks when did experience begin.
In fact, he is asking "when did I begin?" i. e. my inquiring mind.
He thinks everything always was, because this is a logical thought. He recollects, however,
a time before the time he recalls, and remembers such time as chaos or disorder (or thick
fog).
This time of the ordering of chaos must be either a memory of when man first got his head
straight, i. e. could reason and ask basic questions, or an actual revolution of his nature
or environment (a catastrophic set of events involving perhaps the lifting of a law canopy
from Earth) which he recalls because he was already homo sapiens in all or part; but he
cannot recall any specific catastrophic events before this time ; therefore it becomes his
creation moment, his gestalt of creation.
Then there are later stories about divine and celestial behavior that are found throughout
the world, as, for example, the later coming of an electric or thunderbolting god. For
instance, Eliade comments, as have I, on "the later transformations of sky gods into storm
gods." Is this diffusion, or a common experience of separated people? Evidently, religious
historians do not sense that a sequence of gods might exist, which are related to real
natural events as experienced by widely separated people, such events being originally
involved in the selection of the sky as the first god and the home site of the gods.
Religion begins and endures in the sky, and the gods with it, because the sky has been much
more than the sky that we experience today. The oldest religions and tribal legends agree
generally that the skies were a heavy and full covering of the Earth, that they become
turbulent, descending upon the Earth, that the broke and discharged liquids and solids upon
the world, that before man's eyes the god of the sky tool shape, and that here was the
first or Ouranian religion.
The primordial heaven and god do not endure forever. And at this point, Eliade recalls the
famous ancient concept of the deus otiosus, the distant, removed, hence disoccupied god.
Having created the world the first gods generally retire. "Celestially structured supreme
beings tend to disappear from the practice of religion, from cult; they depart from among
men, withdraw to the sky, and become remote, inactive gods( dei otiosi);" Eliade presents
relevant cases. "Everywhere in these primitive religions the celestial supreme being
appears to have lost religious currency. . . Yet he is remembered and entreated as the last
resort. . ." A quantavolutionary would surmise that the tribal (' primitive') response to a
long period of settled skies is exactly like the civilized society's response: to forget in
part the great gods of disastrous ages, to secularize, to reduce religion to superstition,
and also to make the Sun a catch-all for the gods.
But once again Eliade resorts to reductionist explanation and writes such lines as, "The
divine remoteness actually expresses man's increasing interest in his own religious,
cultural, and economic discoveries." He illustrates the "remoteness" by cases where in good
times, gods are ignored, only to be appealed to in desperate times. This is a very
different remoteness. In the celestial archetype, god is remote because he is not around
and operative; in the second case, god is present but neglected.
Eliade does not bring out the most striking fact about the retired god. His is often a
forced retirement, following a bloody, world-shaking revolution. The Greek Ouranos was
castrated by his son Kronos in a terrible revolt, and moved into exile, with no intimations
of a return to power. A new great age begins.
The birth of the great goddess Athena is reported in the Homeric "Hymn to Athene."
Athene sprang quickly from the immortal head and stood before Zeus who holds the aegis,
shaking a sharp spear: great Olympus began to reel horribly at the might of the bright-eyed
goddess, and earth round about cried fearfully, and the sea was moved and tossed with dark
waves, while foam burst forth suddenly: the bright son of Hyperion stopped his swift-footed
horses a long while, until the maiden Pallas Athene had stripped the heavenly armor from
her immortal shoulders.
Moreover, the new great gods are also celestial. They are not household familiars, woods
sprites, or volcano ghosts. The Greek pantheon is well-known, but there are others as well.
All of the great Greek gods are sky gods, though they may keep house on Earth as well,
Hephaistos on Lemnos, Hades in the nether regions, and so on. The great ones are identified
with the moon and planets: Aphrodite, Kronos, Zeus, Hermes, Athena, Ares, and possibly
Apollo, Uranus, and Poseidon. (We do not refer, of course, to contemporary nomenclature.)
When these gods are entered upon the historical record, dim though this time be, a period
of greatest power can be assigned to each; this project was undertaken in Chaos and
Creation. Then the sequence goes: Ouranos, Aphrodite as Moon, Kronos, Zeus (Hera), Apollo,
Hermes, Athene and Hephaistos as Venus, and Ares. And there is substantial reason (not
commonsensical) that these gods achieved power, fame, and worship because they were
identified with great sky bodies, such as the planets, upon the occasion of great natural
catastrophes be falling the Earth. Scanning Samuel Kramer's collection of Mythologies of
the Ancient World, we find persistent outcroppings of the procession of gods and ages
despite his complete disregard of events in the heavens that might differ from the behavior
of the sun, moon, planets, comets, and stars today. We find dual splitting creation gods,
of the type of Earth and Ouranos; we identify Saturn, Zeus, Venus, and Mars, and also
stories of cataclysms of the raising of the sky, and of world ages.
In the Epinomis, Plato is accomplishing a significant trick of theology. Complaining of the
mythology that places the gods on Mount Olympus, he replaces them upon the planets where,
he says, they belong, hoping to reform their bawdy characters thereby. He says we must get
rid of any notion of the strife of the gods. They move always in order. (Elsewhere, Plato
would have any disbelievers in orderly skies punishable.) The astral gods are the real
ones, he insists, and gives them their names. (He anthropomorphizes the vault of Heaven,
Kosmos.) Their names, he suggests, should be coordinated with Syrian and Egyptian
observations, which are much older and "tested by vast periods of time." To us it occurs
that bringing the gods down to Olympus was psychologically an effort on the part of Greek
myth-makers to control the gods; they became human and tied to human fortunes directly. Now
Plato, feeling no threat of planetary disorders, wants to send them back to their former
homes, which are once again safe. De otiosi, the removed gods, will be doubly safe, safe
for themselves and safe for mankind.
We note that the Greek and many other cultures regard their sky gods as blood-related. To
the Greeks - to us, for that matter - this could only mean that their history was
intertwined, overlapping, of the same order of celestial experiences.
We note further that the greatest Greek philosophers and scientists did not argue against
the succession of gods. They did not challenge the succession because somehow it was real
to them. Somehow they were experientially or psychologically inhibited from claiming that
the gods were born together. And so it was with other great ancient mythologies. Eliade
hardly pries into the secrets of the Hebrew gods; yet, guided by the hypothesis that gods
occur in succession, and lend their new traits to religion it is not difficult to see in
the Bible and the legends of the Jews a series of gods, not badly matched with the Greek
and Mesopotamian gods. These were objects of worship by hostile factions. At the least
monotheism becomes, if not polytheism, then serial polytheism. Thus, in the opening
passages of Genesis, the figures of Ouranos and Kronos are vaguely discernible, occurring
in turn, whereupon intimations of worship of the Moon, Jupiter, Hermes, and Baal-Venus
intrude. The Archangel Gabriel, through Jewish legend, can be linked to the planet Mars,
and the destruction of the Assyrian army of Sennacherib in 687 B. C. Yahweh, who is linked
to Elohim (Saturn-Kronos) by Mosaic fiat, seems to be a Zeus-Horus-Jupiter figure to most
scholars, and seems also to be a Thoth-Hermes-Mercury figure, blended with the Zeus figure,
to the present writer (see God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus). This latter
god( s) can be fitted into history at the beginning of the Old Bronze Age in Egypt and the
Near East. Thus, there has been a succession of gods and goddesses in human history. Yet
human nature is obsessive, that is, faithful; further, it was a great sacrilege to forget
god, and severe punishment and expiation not only followed forgetting but were performed as
prophylaxis. The compelling reason to change gods is to be found in reality. The reality is
that the gods have changed, and, despite all his efforts to be loyal, man has been forced
to worship new gods over the ages.
The ambivalence of the gods caused mankind from the beginning to exert itself strenuously
to control them. A continuous redefinition occurred. Yet never has the nuclear complex of a
god been put aside without great external pressures, the most excruciating of which has
been the advent of an apparently more flexible and potent deity. In these cases, people
have, as often as they could, tried to merge the new and the old; any evidence of
continuity and any confusion of identities, whether physically or psychologically produced,
have been seized upon to establish that the worship of the new is faithful to the worship
of the old.
Therefore it happens, consciously or not, that all gods have an unbroken line of ancestors
going back to primordial chaos; there the gods are made from the abstract elements such as
air and water or the world begins out of nothing. We should bear in mind that when Egyptian
history opened, with the Pyramid texts, Osiris( Saturn) was already dead, deus otiosus, and
Horus (Zeus) reigned. Thus too, recorded history and ruins of civilized settlements portray
the Saturnian (Osirian) "Golden Age" and its horrendous destruction.
The god Nun of Egypt, first god of the first recorded cosmogony, bears in his hieroglyphic
name that he is of the primordial wastes of water in the sky, and Egyptian legends state
this to be the case. Mother Earth, Terra Mater, the Universal Genitrix, Gaia, is the most
durable of the gods, and found practically everywhere. In Hesiod's Theogony, she gives
birth to Ouranos who is "a being equal to herself, able to cover her completely." It is
clear, however, that Earth (who may even be conceived of as masculine sometimes) reacts to
the changing gods of change. This Nun or heaven is "father of the gods" and father of Atum
or Re. He or it is the demiurge of the boundless, featureless darkness, from which evolved
the first hills or eminences. There appeared in early Egypt four different cult centers
with special creation myths, all of which were essentially the same.
In Sumer in the 5th millennium before the present, as legend has it Nammu, whose ideogram
carries the meaning of "sea," was called the mother of heaven and earth who also bore the
gods. Fluids and gases are favored elements of chaos and materials of creation. There is
more than a semblance of logic alone in this accord of legends; the idea that gases go with
chaos is attractive but is more than ex post facto explaining of legendary fiction. Fluids
and gases must indeed have enveloped primordial man and attended the birth of the gods.
Ouranos emerged out of the watery and turbulent wastes of the sky cloaked in robes of
clouds. Philo Byblius anciently reported from earlier sources that the first Phoenician god
was Elium or Hypsistos (" the Highest") and was succeeded by Ouranos who was succeeded by
El or Kronos. But I would interpret this primordial god as the first stage of Ouranos, the
adamantine condition of the sky prior to its breaking open to reveal the great light of
Ouranos.
The Babylonians, successors to Sumer, in the early third millennium B. C. worshiped Marduk-
Bel (Baal) as patron god and world creator, exalted over the old Mesopotamian pantheon just
as Jupiter came to be exalted over Saturn in the Roman-Greek pantheon. Poseidon (brother of
Zeus and son of Chronos) remained in heaven after his father fell and only later, upon
agreement with Zeus, descended to rule the seas. He also flooded the land as he did so and
was known as the land-encroacher. Thus the descent of Poseidon (Neptune) is to be
identified with a great deluge, perhaps a name for, it not a later part of, the same great
deluge that is connected with the crippling and binding of Kronos (Saturn) and is the same
as the flood of Noah brought down by Elohim in Hebrew Genesis.
The qualities of new gods were thus to replace, overlap, and add to the qualities of the
old; theology assisted by political power and the manifest abilities of the new god
performed the task. Jupiter, for example, was called "fecundator," but the original
fertilizer of the Earth and founder of agriculture was his father, "Saturn fecundator." The
process by which the Sun usurped the identity and history of the old gods over the past two
thousand years is homologous; when the skies settled down, this great and apparent sky-body
grew in religious stature.
Buddhism climbed upon Hinduism; Confucianism and Taoism evolved from the worship of T'ien.
The Christians and Muslim supplied "new testaments" to the Hebrew "Old Testament." There
are no "Great Religions" in the world whose occurrence cannot be contemporaneously
connected with natural events of the caliber of world-wide catastrophe. The same applies to
small but persistent, durable religions such as modern Judaism, and Parsiism, descended
from Persian Mazdaism through Zoroaster. I do not speak of many other religions of the
world, some of which may well be "superior" or more deserving of the title "great" by such
criteria as may be advanced in discussion. Nor do I distinguish among sects within the
"Great Religions," while recognizing that in reality there may exist distinctions as
significant, say, among Christian groups as between the "average" Christian religion and
other religions. We hear of many instances in which Christians or Muslims are more
comfortable among "head-hunting" sects or gnostic or totemistic religion than among their
own kind.
An important line of attack may be leveled against our assertion that he succession of gods
reflects a series of natural catastrophes upon Earth. Religions have continued to acquire
new gods without actual catastrophes and have spread widely without catastrophes to help
them do so. Some of these religions have been militarily aggressive, others peaceful. Thus
Islam conquered large areas at first by the sword, as is will known, but in recent years
has converted peoples readily with little bloodshed and compulsion, as in central Africa.
Father back in time, as Wheatley (The Pivot of the Four Quarters) asserts, the Hindu
pantheon moved into Southeast Asia along with its social institutions. Along with the
religion went peaceful commerce. Many shrines were erected, around which there grew up
cities. So enthusiastic were people for the peacefully inculcated religion that sometimes
the near totality of a state's economy was given over to oblations to the pantheon.
The 2600 years since the probable last great natural catastrophes have not been
distinguished by peacefulness. War and slaughter have been conducted in the name of a
warlike religion (or interpretation thereof), or of a peaceful religion, or in the name of
no religion but the state or tribe. We are led, then, to conjecture that homo sapiens
himself, though relieved of direct models of destructive behavior in the skies, continues
to carry out deeply rooted impulses to destruction, whether through unconscious memory or
because he is constructed genetically to do so. That both are in fact the case is a main
thesis of my volumes on Homo Schizo. So long as the skies were disturbed, and the Earth
with it, the character of religion reflected clearly natural events and imposed models of
conduct upon man. But religion itself was born in the creation of man and, if he were other
than true to his nature or were of another nature, he would not have a peaceful religion
and behave peacefully in all probability. Religion is a dependent variable of human nature.
It is a dependent variable of natural events. We shall have to inquire, as we proceed,
whether, in some other sense, in another kind of reality, religion may be an independent
variable, owing its existence to conditions freed of human nature and ancient natural
disasters.
To speak of religion as a variable reminds us of how vague and intangible are the materials
of the history of religion and even of religious behavior today. We must toy with notions
of impractical super-surveys, in frustration over this situation.
To speak properly about the religion of a person, a standard intensive interview at the
least is required. "What precisely are your perceptions of the supernatural?" "What
practices, life-pattern, or habits do you possess that are related to these perceptions?"
Then, of course, inasmuch as one's behavior is never quite aligned with one's professed
beliefs and behavior, one should bring in some external objective testimony to supplement
the interview. We should have hundreds of pages per person, but only from these would we be
able to define operationally the person's religion.
Were all the people on Earth thus interviewed, and the results properly classified,
tabulated, and analyzed, we should be able better to generalize about the relation of
present religion and gods to the historical religions and gods - provided, we should add,
that we have assembled and ordered all that might be known about historical religions back
to their origins in the origins of man; this, however, we should probably be incapable of
doing unless we were to adopt as the guiding hypotheses those already suggested in these
first chapters: namely:
The earliest human cultures were simultaneously religious.
The earliest and most important supernatural objects everywhere were celestial.
The Ouranian complex of Heaven and Gods was the first list of Dramatis Personae of religion
everywhere.
The Ouranian complex was overthrown by nature and simultaneously by man.
All successive gods everywhere have descended from and relate to the Ouranian complex.
Man believed himself forced to change gods from time to time by evidence in nature.
Man, as he changed gods, accomplished the transition with as few variations as possible in
previously assigned powers, traits, names, vestments, rites and religious conceptions.
In these transitions, man became adept (to his way of thinking, which was and is delusory)
at reconciling and controlling his gods through his religion, whence, by controlling the
gods, at controlling the world, all with the ultimate and impossible goal of obtaining
self-control and peace of mind.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THREE
KNOWING THE GODS
The collected qualities of gods resemble a bazaar where all types of potentially useful
objects, frequently queer, are brought in by all sorts of people. The childish, outlandish
and genial effects of the human mind are displayed in seller and buyer alike.
What brings one to he market: curiosity? hope of a rare beautiful utensil that one can
afford? something to lighten our spirits? the euphoria of the busy scene? a thing - we know
not what - that may change one's life? So one shops for gods. Some say, they are in
everything. Some say, you cannot find what don't exist. Some say, they are most useful.
Others say, they are not to be found when you need them.
If it were not for the fact that two billion people claim to know one or another god,
perhaps we should scarcely bother to take up the question of what is known in this regard.
Further, since most believers claim that their god wishes to be adored, and is infinitely
capacitated, should not the god display himself clearly and prove at least his own
existence, if not his other qualities, beyond a shadow of a doubt? But he avoids the flea
market. He seems to want privacy, but then he should certainly resent the continuous
universal efforts to bribe him to appear.
A few hardy souls venture to say that gods have little interest in humans and therefore
have no motive to prove themselves. Some, like the deists, argue that the gods created
everything and set it into motion; then, retiring, the gods left the world to develop by
itself. Some merely say: "God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform." (There is,
incidentally, a religious adage for every circumstance.) Most who believe in gods - these
are in numbers largely of the Hebraic complex or Hinduism - prove their case by pointing to
divine signs (hierophanies), including the marvelously intricate reality of the world, by
asserting there must be a purpose to everything, and by commanding, "Don't ask questions;
have faith."
Gods appear directly to people, especially to heroes, on occasion; if not the gods
themselves, then surrogates or messengers reveal themselves, if not these, then
hierophanies or manifestations of gods occur. Dozens of gods, thousands of agents and
subordinate gods, and tens of thousands of hierophanies, performing in plural appearances,
would, if catalogued, constitute millions of appearances. Zeus knew many women; Athena
marched before many soldiers; Buddha came from a noble family; Jesus was known among the
people as a man; Paul met him on the Road to Damascus, resurrected; children of Fatima
conversed with Mary, Mother of Jesus.
Millions of such encounters have gone unreported because of the modesty of people; they
could not believe their good luck. In Some religious sects, it is expected that now, if not
earlier or later, every member must experience at the least a significant hierophany and a
changed life thereafter.
A divine appearance or hierophany must be social, not individual, in the sense that it must
the authenticated by the belief of others. This has not prevented millions of individuals,
at some risk of persecution, whether criminal or medical, from claiming encounters.
Who validates encounters? This is properly a subject for the political science of religion.
Who "should" validate them is the claim of as many theistic religions as exist. A large
bureaucratic church may devote much energy to acknowledge any encounters, sometimes saying
that god does not conduct himself so, so that he did once but now does not.
All sects lay down (that is, their gods lay down) rules for encounters. It is unthinkable
that a Christian could conceive of his god going about raping women as Zeus was inclined to
do. On the other hand, Yahweh, the god of Moses, delighted in the killing of enemies both
foreign and domestic; at least so says Moses in numerous cases, as when the heresy of the
Golden Calf is discovered, and the Lord's order is "slay every man his brother, and every
man his companion, and every man his neighbor." Three thousand Israelites were killed that
day.
In the Hebraic complex, Moses is the central figure. "Moses spoke with God." These
conversations have been subjected to analysis for thousands of years and it is unlikely
that late psychiatric explanations such as have been offered by Julian Jaynes and the
present author will be final. Be that as it may, the relationship of Moses and Yahweh can
be analyzed within the framework and propositions of the psychology of hallucinations and
delusions. That is, Moses was conducting interior psychological operations. Yahweh was, to
his mind, a real sacred Lord God.
By treating the world around him - the Egyptians, the Israelites, the desert, the
architecture of sacred enclosures, the bushes, rocks and waters, and his disciples as if
they too were under the direction of Yahweh, Moses created a marvelously integrated
religious complex recomposing this world and himself in the midst of great natural
turbulence. The more one studies the Books of Moses, the more sense one can make of them as
literal history written by a deluded and masterful genius. But this hardly advances the
cause of the Hebraic religions.
Increasingly, psychiatry and physics are pressing upon religions to surrender all cases of
alleged hierophanies. The majority are easy to prove false. But, as we shall see later on,
science is "getting too smart for its own good," and beginning itself to present important
arguments concerning the supernatural - its own hierophanies perhaps.
Certain types of ancient hierophanies lend themselves to scientific reinterpretation.
Examples are the collectively witnessed catastrophes of great magnitude - such as the
Deluge of Noah - and electrical discharges of types no longer experienced, such as were
central to, the operations of Moses' Ark and the Delphic Oracle. Whereas new evidence and
scientific interpretation go to prove the veracity of ancient reports, the super natural
character of the reports is thrown into doubt. Thus, a substantial proportion of the
appearances of Yahweh in the Book of Moses occur in connection with (literally "on") the
Ark of Moses; most probably these were electrical displays, ingeniously managed, and
believed to represent the fiery essence of the deity.
Deluge legends are worldwide. Survivors included not only Noah's family but, to believe
their legends, other people in different places on Earth. Evidence of large-scale flooding,
totally beyond present experience, is worldwide. The cause, focusing now only upon the
floods contemporary with Noah, were exoterrestrial and the water was in large part new
water from outer space most likely from a nova of a theretofore much larger Saturn. The
establishment of this theory, even if it is accepted as the second most likely alternative
to "no worldwide flood at all," reduces the religious and hierophanic aspects of the Hebrew
story (and of all other religious descriptions).
Those who before saw the direct intervention of an explaining, instructing, humanly
motivated god in the deluges gain a minor victory from the validation of sacred scriptures,
but suffer a defeat of the notion of a divinely chosen people working under the immediate
personal direction of their god. Dozens of peoples, perhaps all of them, inherit the belief
that the gods once saved only them from a worldwide ruin. Doubt is cast upon all
ethnocentric religious aspects of the Deluge, whence some persons will be led to a "higher
religious synthesis" of the relations between gods and the natural world, while others will
be led out of religion entirely.
Many people believe that they know gods by their effects, not by the grand effects of
nature but by targeted effects upon issues of personal concern. The word "god" in Aryan
etymology stems from the words "to sacrifice" and "to invoke." Invocation, prayer, and
rituals are seen to be followed by events unexplainable except by a direct divine
intervention. A sick child is for example, the object of medical therapy and religious
solicitations; a cure is accredited to the divine; a failure of cure may be deemed to be in
part a punishment, or the result of unconvincing solicitations. Seeking divine attention
and determining whether and how it was provided take altogether too many forms, most of
them well-known, to consider them at length here. The scientist will say "Explain all
effects by natural causes; those not precisely determinable must be natural as well; where
psychological effects are produced, these too are natural; for the human mind and its
morale can be significant producers of effects in the context of human activity."
Modern theologians and religious practitioners tend to transmo-grify all forms of knowing
about gods that seem vulnerable to the lances of science. Most theology has been apology
for vulgar religion. Realizing, for instance, that mental asylums are well populated by
hallucinators, they are most approving of more subtle religious encounters. Encounters are
favored that do not implicate divine personages or voices or external visions but which
display simple faith, spiritual resources, and the Lord secondhand. Thus, "I have faith in
a benign Intelligence. It enables me to draw upon deep spiritual resources. I feel like
Jeremiah, when the Lord told him 'Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. '" The problem
of hallucination ceases as soon as one uses indirect quotation, "I think that god would
help me to defeat the enemies of our country." This technique works all the better because
in a bureaucratized society it has become rather insane for any job-holder to say "I" do
this or that, rather than "We" or "our policy" or "the management" or "they."
It is not an accident that the most strongly individualistic and anti-bureaucratic
groupings of modern America overlap largely the religious sects with the greatest
expectancy of personal encounters with their god. (This, incidentally, may explain the
"mystery" to many people of how the suave Hollywood product Ronald Reagan came to be allied
with the simple direct primitive evangelical Christians; he was a "rugged individualist,"
anti-bureaucratic.) The belief in gods arising from "faith" is a step away from personal
encounters and authoritative testimonials. "Faith" is an affirmation. As such it is taboo
in logic, for logic is grounded upon reasons and proofs. Logic would not exist if faith had
its way. Faith cannot be proven, but it can never be driven from its deep psychological
recesses; it can only be surrendered. What is reported by a triumphant rationalism as the
"destruction" of faith must always remain the dubious word of a third party. If the
believer resists the terms of surrender, faith will never be conquered.
Faith cannot prove itself by logic, but it can be justified by its effects. "See how happy
is the person who believes. If you would be happy, believe!" If the faithful receive more
than the usual share of what are regarded as the goods of life, their faith acquires a
pragmatic proof, different from and inaccessible to empirical proof. Insofar as "the goods
of life" are psychic and exoterrestrial, one can construct an infallible circle from which
the non-faithful are excluded. One can come from heaven, live bathed in heavenly light, and
return to heaven, invulnerable to mundane contradiction.
Let one step for a moment out of the charmed circle into competition for mundane "goods of
life" and one finds oneself amidst a crowd of the variously successful where statistics
come into play, and one can no longer be sure that faith is associated with achievement.
"God must love the poor; he made so many of them," it is said. Moreover, if the "goods" are
doubted and "faith" as a good is committed to definition, debate and proof by conduct, then
evil is the lot and behavior of many of the "real" faithful. "Faith moves mountains," says
the Gospel of Mark (II: 22-4), but faith in whom, and to where are the mountains moved?
"Faith, hope, and charity," are supplicated by Paul the Apostle, but faith in its uttermost
recess may be another word for the strong and unquenchable hope of a divine existence.
Scientific psychologists will agree; faith is an attitude established by, preserved by, or
destroyed by all that makes, maintains, and breaks other attitudes and predispositions: as
for instance, drinking and smoking, quarreling, charitability, studiousness, political
party affiliations, etc. All this is what concerns a college course in developmental
psychology: the workings of indulgences and deprivations of infancy, family life, and
society systematically and authoritatively explained. Faith is educed as a pattern of
expectations, endorsed and rewarded, such that the faithful one, under normal conditions,
will never regret his course of life nor lose his expectations.
Besieged and buffeted in its last traditional trenches by modern science, faith
nevertheless survives, because nothing else survives better, because the desperate refugees
from science and reason crowd in with it, and because a variety of non-traditional licenses
are granted to privateers who venture to vest their faith in ancient astronauts, flying
saucers, and the like.
Philosophical arguments for the existence of the divine can scarcely capture the popular
imagination and suffuse popular religion with practical implications and a precise
operative morality. A mention of the traditional arguments for the existence of god may
illuminate the problem.
There is first the argument of the necessary reality of perfection: if we can conceive of
the idea of a perfect being, the being must exist, because existence is an aspect of
perfection. We join most philosophers in refusing this argument. A great deal of nonsense
exists in the human mind, product of its inner machinations; must it all be granted the
status of reality somewhere, sometime, someplace? All the monsters of fairy tales and
science fiction would come alive. Dante's Inferno would be awaiting its newest victims even
now.
Most conceivable things do not exist. Nor can we make them exist by an act of will, by the
mechanism that has been called "omnipotence of thought," although we can make them exist as
operative forces in people's minds, as illusions. Furthermore, we know that people lie in
part according to their illusions, in all areas of existence - politics, love, economics,
beauty, etc. Illusions have consequences. Hence if the consequences of a belief in a being
of specific absolute perfection are good, or at least better than the consequences of any
substitutable illusion, we may seek earnestly to establish and maintain the illusion, or
myth (for that is what it is as well.)
A second traditional argument for the existence of god pleads that the world as we see it
cannot have come about without a previously existing cause. Since the universe is so grand
and so complex, containing by definition everything, its cause must be at least as great,
conforming to what may be called god, the demiurge, the first cause, the creator.
Everything does have a precedent form - call it a sense. This we sense; and every
experiment can probably prove it.
But it may be of the nature of the world to extend itself indefinitely in an infinity of
forms occupying time and space or a presently unimaginable dimension. Hence the gods as
creators are unnecessary. One may slide into a counter-assertion to prove their existence:
that the gods are in the principle of change, there being no ultimate reason for change
other than the will of a demiurge, who may be Aristotle's "unmoved mover," or Heraclitus'
inherent changefulness of all things. So close are such abstractions to scientific
generalities, so far removed from practical religion, and so vulnerable to contradiction
(for all things can be viewed in their unchanging aspects a la Parmenides), that the gods
would soon shuffle off to Sheol with their help.
The most popular of arguments for the existence of gods is the (humanly perceived) design
of the world. So marvelous are the construction and interconnections of things and so
purposeful (that is, moving towards their proper goals) that an infinitely masterful
designer must have created the universe. However, even before modern science exposed some
of the guts of the material world, including the physiology of psychology, philosophers,
priest, and ordinary people were acutely aware of the evils of the world. They were aware
that the world had been nearly destroyed on occasion by natural (divine) forces, so that
the gods came to represent destructiveness as well as constructiveness. Under such
conditions, the problem of evil was tied into the grand design, so that interminable
arguments might occur concerning what parts of the world and its people were deliberately
designed by the gods to malfunction. The tedium of this discussion hardly assists in any
proof of divine design, while the issue keeps people in a prolonged and useless state of
fear and quarrelsomeness.
To be sure, a great many processes of the world seem to be moving toward a definable end.
Thus, the common astronomical theory is that the sun will ultimately burn itself out; so is
the idea already cited that the present fragmented universe of starry bodies was created by
a primordial explosion, but that a limit of expansion will be reached, whereupon the
universe will implode. Again it is often said that man will colonize space, etc. All such
processes appear to be non-random, hence to some thinkers, purposeful.
Take the biological "law" that evolution cannot reverse itself. If this is so, evolution
appears to have some goal, which encourages certain theorists to feel better about the
world and others to believe in gods. Materialists can take a different view: non-random
processes develop an evermore specific direction out of inertia; once an ear begins to
evolve in animals, it will develop into various ears unless it finally quantavolutes; the
developing ear preempts some proportion of the changeability of the organism. Therefore, an
"end" or "purpose" can be claimed. It is hardly an occasion for divine pride, or for pride
in the divine. And sense organs may degenerate in evolution, not only among blind moles,
but in man, whose senses are stunted by comparison with those of one or more species.
With an irresistible thrust, most theistic religions have promoted the idea that "nothing
is impossible to the gods," The gods are usually allowed perfection. They are eternal,
omnipotent omniscient, omnipresent, omnivirtuous, unchanging and unchangeable (for how can
perfection change?) So naive are such assignments of qualities, that they seem to be pure
projected delusions. Just as one can solve a mathematical problem by manipulating the
concept of infinity, one can arrange and interpret any divine action with the concept of
complete qualities.
It seems that design is found where the heart is: one who is healthy, reared to optimism,
indulged, and promoted in life, is likely to find better designs in what he senses and
experiences than others find who are less blessed. Indeed, a goodly part of much religion
consists precisely in designating the world as evil, in anticipation of our arriving
shortly after death in a better world, or escaping presently from the world about.
The stress of religions upon suffering is unavoidable. Suffering is not only blatant in
ordinary lives; it is also regurgitated as feelings out of history, not merely church and
social history, but the history of great disasters engineered by the gods. Finally,
suffering gestates in the very genetics of humanity, in its eternal fearfulness, in the
contradiction between wishing for everything and controlling nothing.
At times, religious factions diverge and sects spring up which preach a religion of secular
joy and the elimination of suffering and sorrowful memory. But secular joy as religion soon
liquidates the religion. The joy of religion generally must consist in the appreciation of
man's lot and a surcease from it upon death, or resurrection, or otiose earthliness.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant perceived in the moral laws always present among human beings
a proof of the existence of god. Unlike the beasts, men rule themselves by voluntary
ethics, it is said. This unique and universal search for the good suggests a divine
purpose. Only the magnificent order of the heavens, which moved Kant to "ever-increasing
wonder and awe," was comparable to "the moral law within me."
Modern quantavolution readily demonstrates the inconsistency of the order of heavens. As
contrasted with older generations of scientists, the younger generation sees more and more
the history of the heavens as of quantavolutions and catastrophes. Ethology and socio-
biology meanwhile are asserting vigorously the presence, now here and now there, in animals
and plants, of moral rules and moral behavior that man used to regard as products of his
superior and voluntary ethics.
As for the "moral law of man," sociologist Louis Wirth used to remark to his students that
"people differ in every way that they can." A thoroughly relativistic and pragmatic
philosopher would add that it is "the moral law within me" which causes most of the worst
human conflicts in this world. I agree with both men. The claim to know gods, so general in
history and today, has not reduced differences so much as it has promoted fights over them.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FOUR
THE HEAVENLY HOST
The animation of nature is an instinctual interpretation, primordial with humankind. It
occurs with humans today, more obviously among the young. To exorcize it takes training.
The earliest gods took shape as the Sky and Earth. There developed next a more definitely
formed solar god of the Sky. A change in nature was responsible for the change in divine
forms. Logically, and in accord with most evidence of what was manifest, the primordial
welkin was densely packed, without brilliant separated lights, until the sky was broken up
and these appeared. The great god would have come first in his solar (or planetary) form if
the sky had been penetrable.
Until nearly 2700 years ago the skies were periodically invested with changing forms, and
much of this turbulence was impacting upon the Earth physically, as well as upon the minds
of humans. The scene was conducive to polytheism. Divine presences of all types might be
discerned. Yet there was usually a great god, a father of gods, an Ouranos, a Kronos or a
Zeus.
We infer from this fact that such beings were at some time most impressive features of the
sky and, when they were not, were scalding memories, which had so dominated the human
setting that no successor, no matter how prominently active could match what its "ancestor"
or "father" had achieved.
Some cultures, such as the Roman, Greek, and Hindu, did not conceal the succession of
fathers, and assigned family roles to junior actors, while the Hebrews over a period of
time accepted the Mosaic rationalization which fitted several great gods into a unity. This
did not come without ideological and political struggles of great intensity and long
duration, some of which are recounted, in expurgated form, in the Old Testament.
"Varro had the diligence to collect thirty thousand names of gods - for the Greeks counted
that many. These were related to as many needs of the physical, moral, economic, or civil
life of the earliest times." He found 40 Hercules alone. So writes G. Vico. The sacred book
of the Mah…b…rata (1: 39) claims 33,333 Hindu deities, and later sources say that there
were a thousand times as many. The Nordic Grimnismal gives over 50 names to Odin. The
Babylonian Emunia Elis culminates in a recital of 50 names of Marduk. In the history of
symbolism and language, words may actually have begun as god-names. Words might have been
more sacred than pragmatic, until an advanced state of collective amnesia and sublimation
had been achieved. Even today, a great many people cannot adapt to the idea that words are
not real hard things.
If the Greeks had 30,000 god-names, and the Hindus even more, then all the world's cultures
must have had hundreds of thousands. The great numbers, however, reduces to a
comprehensible order when a proper theory is applied to them. The total of this heavenly
host includes, first, a few great gods, whose real existence in the sky lent structure to
the ages. Second occur the thousands of names of the great gods, most of which have yet to
be identified with their referents. Many of these names are concealed references; others
are what foreign cultures call a certain culture's gods; some names isolate a quality of
the gods; some names are used to marry the gods of one culture to those of another.
The principle of ambivalence (in the form of opposites) leads to the division of great gods
into gods and devils. Here the human mind seeks to control the gods by projection of
benevolence and beneficence upon a good god, and malevolence and maleficence upon a bad god
or devil, hoping that the one will outwit and outstruggle the other. Devils have invariably
extruded from an animated religious setting, there being no way of exorcizing them from
man's primordially established soul. In the Hebraic complex, god cannot commit evil; if a
bad effect is deemed evilly inspired, it is attributed to the devil.
Some religions have merged the contradiction of good and evil into the same god, who holds
different names for his given qualities and exercises benevolent or malevolent impulses for
inscrutable reasons, or for "obvious" reasons, or for reasons not to be inquired about. The
Greek gods were rather of this type. One significant result of the differences may be in
the potential intensity of the "guilt complex." The Greco-Roman pagans suffered less from
guilt-feelings than their Christian counterparts. Such gods may acquire many appellations,
some of them contradicting others. New appellations may also serve to avoid the designation
of new gods, an ever-present "problem" in a polytheistic system.
Appellations may thus be congruent and complementary, that is, logical and harmonious
qualities that a single personality may possess. Or they may appear nonconforming, leading
nonparticipating observers (enemies or scientists) to question the nature of the god.
However, as with great contradictions - " God vs. Devil" - so with lesser contradictions
- "god of arts vs. god of war" - the contradiction might be only apparent, the same
supernatural being having apparently produced a variety of effects during his primary
effective manifestations in nature. Thus Mercury-Hermes is both thief and healer. And
Santillana and von Dechend refer to "the baffling Mesopotamian texts dealing with gods
cutting off each other's necks and tearing out each other's eyes."
In the eternally agonizing search for a great god with whom one might co-exist peacefully,
those who followed the path of opposites have been plagued by the possibly triumphant
fearful powers of the devil, whereas those who pursued the path of the contradictions had
to admit the mutability of their god and the impossibility of more than incessant recurrent
reconciliations between god and people.
Another major source of divine names (besides the attributions) is the outcome of processes
of memory and forgetting. To forget the disasters that characterized the appearance of the
gods was urgently demanded by the bruised mind; but any lapse of memory would be
accompanied by fear that god will not permit himself to be forgotten and will punish
forgetfulness. The mind then works to define and characterize god so that his image will be
tolerable upon the conscious level. It further adds new words to its vocabulary of the
divine, discovering that a god called by another name is less threatening. Still further,
by the logic of delusion, a god whose name is mysterious or hidden will respect the awe and
fear bound up in the secrecy and at the same time will restrict himself to activities that
do not threaten the very core of terror that crouches in the human soul. A plethora of non-
names, secret and cult-names, and common partial names comes forth.
Effects of many kinds are produced, the least of which is the confusion of names that
confronts the outside observer; the selective remembering is tolerable; occult elites can
dominate societies; the language and concepts of a people are enriched as the naming of
gods flows through the symbolic world by association, analogy, and implication.
Although some thousands of names are those of great gods in one form or another, other
thousands are assigned to angels, minor devils, minor divinities, spirits, divinized
natural phenomena of the earth, air, water, fire, plants and animals, divine heroes, and
divine heroes, and divine kings. This myriad of names also possesses its logic. Prior to
human creation the names could not exist: there was not stimulus, impulse, or mechanisms.
Once the mind had exploded into self-awareness, however, a great many beings might move
into it.
Limits to the number of names were set by the "behavior" of such beings, there being more
sub-gods in disastrous than in peaceful times. The need for alleviation of anxiety
occasions a sort of subconscious shifting of cargo with an invention and appeal to a new
god following the failure of performance of an old one. The logical operation or reduction
of "beings" is useful, when, for purposes of control, fewer sub-gods are needed. Finally,
the ability of the inventor to achieve collective consensus may sometimes fail; no doubt
heroic charisma or priestly office allows one to designate a new god only to a degree.
But, while these factors restrain the process, in any given culture the number of
supernatural beings is apparently magnified by the telling of tales from foreign and
destroyed cultures; these beings of course enter the mind only as subordinates or evil
opposites of one's own gods. Moreover, as in classical Greek mythology, supernatural beings
pile their traits and presence upon the true beings of the culture until, to the
undiscerning mind, they become indistinguishable from the humans; the totality of
divinities and spirits becomes a seemingly nonsensical mass.
By analogy with the cultures of modern tribes, and by reference to surviving cave drawings
and artifacts, it would seem that people are naturally inclined to perceive gods in all
aspects of nature. This perception is true insofar as the gods of creation must be assumed
to be genetically behind every divine or spiritual (supernatural) communication, symbol,
and image. It is also natural even among apes (The neuter gender, the "it," is itself
probably a product of divinely inspired categorization; "it" is needed not for inanimate
objects, as school children are told, but for a godly presence that is neither female nor
male.)
The collective experience and interpersonal communication of an event that requires a
naming - an event whose connection with the numerous high-energy expressions of nature is
obvious but whose direct efficient cause is not a great god - is a final way by which many
a demigod is produced.
Thus the breezes are named, the meteors, the volcanoes, the erratic boulders, the deeps of
caves and seas, the ancient trees, the animals of curious form and expression, and so on to
many thousands. Then, too, the early kings, the kings of crises, their mothers, the
sorcerers, saints, inventors, prophets, and so on to many more thousands of the divine and
semi-divine. Then, further, the products of their work: "devil's hole," "angel rock,"
"Mount Zeus," "Meteora," and so on through a world whose geography - that was once worked
upon by the gods - belatedly and usually mistakenly accredits the heavenly host via a
largely invented name. All of these processes of naming are consistent with and dependent
upon the primordial appearances of the gods.
The saints of several Christian churches are a form of minor divinity, who are deemed to
have performed celestial miracles, given great social services, communed with the Lord, or
served gloriously in battle. Saint Joan of Arc comes readily to mind. Periods of natural
and social crisis are their favored setting. The Hindus, who do not draw scholastic
distinctions so fine, have created divinities of the same order. Thus the villages of West
Bengal worship Sitala, Goddess of smallpox, though smallpox no longer troubles the area. R.
W. Nicolas has found the origins of Sitala in the 18th century, upon an unprecedented
outburst of the plague. Bengali doctors soon became preeminent in their analysis and
treatment of smallpox, using variolation. Simultaneously, the disease was ascribed to
Sitala, who had been born late among the gods and found none who knew how to worship her.
So she chose to infect especially children with the pox, for "a late-coming goddess
required such terrible weapons." Hers became an annual and major rite, accompanied by
processions, animal sacrifices, and music. When the plague was absent, she was also served,
for "both the presence and absence of disease are manifestations of the grace of the
Mother." One notes the psychic need, that science cannot fill, to displace blame to a
divine party, to turn punishment by the God back upon the self, and to propitiate and thank
the divinity for not exerting its full powers if bestowing evil.
Divinity has often been assigned to kings and emperors. Egyptian, Assyrian, Roman, Chinese,
Japanese, and the rulers of other cultures were considered gods, and worshiped in life and
death. They have been pronounced by themselves and their associated elites as a relatives
of gods or even one of the gods. This practice, so repulsive to democrats, is a means by
which an elite and the people it rules can deal with and control the gods. At the same
time, rule by divine kings is easier because the source of the rule is a god. He claim to
divinity varies with the secularism of the elite and masses, so that it is by no means rare
that the god is usurped, overthrown, and killed.
In some forms of society, now extinct, kings were not only gods or semi-divine but were
used as sacrifices regularly or in emergencies (often but by no means always in the form of
temporarily appointed surrogates).
We see once again, as we no repeatedly and more clearly than in other life spheres, the
basic functioning of religion to secure humans from fear of celestial disasters, and all
fears of matters deemed to be connected with the heavens gone astray and chaotic. The
Japanese Emperor used to be regarded as a god and was compelled to severely restrain his
movements upon critical occasions, such as during some unusual celestial phenomenon. This
catatonic state was believed to restrain the gods and heavens; if the god emperor does not
change even his countenance, one believed, the countenance of heaven will not change
either.
The puzzle of the god-heroes, with their half-and-half ancestry, still occupies us. Why
must there be everywhere these hundreds of men and women who muddy the waters of great
gods?
Typical explanations are unsatisfactory. It is said that gods and god-heroes are the same -
a truth, but too limited a truth to answer the question. Others say that people want to be
descended from gods, as, later, we shall see that they cannibalize their gods. This also is
apparent. And some are content to say that gods are really only big heroes. Because of such
explanations and simply because of the inordinate confusion from the plethora of names and
deeds, the truth behind myth is difficult to find and, indeed, few are ready to believe
there is a truth.
A quantavolutionary explanation of who and what are god-heroes can be set forth for what
its worth. God-heroes are sublimatory. When, in periods following the direct and evident
appearance and behavior of natural gods, there occurs a lull and a stability, humans,
continuing their search of means to control the gods begin the process of denying their
existence by humanizing them. If people were left to pursue this process, the gods would be
ultimately erased from the human mind (and history). The first phase, that is, consists of
direct experience of gods in nature. The second phase permits god-heroes, the third phase
pure heroes, and the fourth phase calls for plain human beings with typical human
behaviors. To take an example: Mars is Ares; Ares becomes Hercules; Hercules is a god, but
also Hercules becomes human, first as a god-hero; Hercules becomes quite human; Hercules
becomes subject of a mass of folk tales; the unconscious artistic mind can push to all
limits of the imagination with him.
What halts the process of losing gods entirely? On occasion (and many live in such
expectations) the gods reappear, wreak havoc, and, so, self-sufficient, unassisted, full
and direct god ship is restored. At the same time, the most obsessive and schizoid
officials and prophets outlast the social sublimation that is occurring, and insist that
gods directly are the only authorities, and will not let the process of creating god-heroes
go too far.
Then, too, a minor phenomenon occurs, which is incorrectly elevated to the major
explanation by uniformitarianism and psychic monolithics: pride of ancestry; elite self-
elevation, etc.; "credenda et miranda" of ruling groups. Heroes are built into a group's
history: "A treason it is to deny them." "We can't eliminate god-heroes without denying the
gods." That is, the heroes of a ruling class are made divine. This, we stress, does happen
but is not the primary and independent cause of gods and god-heroes. The impregnated
themselves in the god-heroes.
There is little question that Campbell has succeeded in telling the universal plot of the
hero found throughout the world from the most ancient times.
The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the
formula represented in the rites of passage: separation - initiation - return.... A hero
ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder:
fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back
from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons of his fellow men.
How does this universal and even obsessive plot of mankind relate to the theory of
quantavolution? Simply, we think. First we note cycle: the going forth ends in the return.
Second, the world of the hero begins ordinarily, though almost always with premonitions and
prophecy; indeed the ordinary may be actual nothingness. This may be interpreted as a
regular order of the universe. Next come the disastrous experiences: a succession of
personalized natural forces beat against the hero, testing his will to survive, and to
control himself and the human and natural environment. When the forces have subsided or
have been defeated, the hero returns to a stable social order upon which he bestows his
moral and material gains.
The career of the hero thus mirrors the career of the gods, who mirror the career of
nature. At first the tie to gods is direct; imitation is permissible, but not "heroic
myth," which would be considered intolerable insolence by the gods. Only after a period of
the suppression of experiences and after a working out of psychic methods of dealing with
them, can a human act out the plot of the gods and be called god-names. Once the process is
begun, however, it has no end of sublimated ramifications until the gods are treated
cavalierly and even desacralized -until the next catastrophic event.
Campbell joins himself to the psychoanalytic school that regards gods as non-existent
psychological means for the human to jump beyond the ordinary world into the imaginary
world; "gods are only convenient means to the ineffable." They, and myth, help the mind to
transcend phenomena and achieve the great void or openness of spirit. Although this theory
is functionally true, it is very limited, and without realization of the grave primordial
dependence of the human mind upon the real events of its history and of nature. Connections
between divinities or sacred thing and stars are usually the result, not of the activity of
the stars nor of the playful resort to placing fairy tales among the stars, but of the
fixing of the location from which a great event appeared to originate. The Deluge of Noah,
by its many designations, is connected in widely-separate countries with the planet Saturn,
but also with the star-cluster known as the Pleiades; some grave event affected the sky and
earth when the Pleiades could somehow represent effects of Saturn. Scorpio is the
background setting from which cometary Venus launched herself on a destructive swoop upon
Earth. Scorpio is identified, if not before the event, then after the event, in new
associations with the event. Early and later events occur in connection with Scorpio and by
extension are associated with the Venus episode. Myths of one time and character become
mixed up with others later on. The stars themselves, alone or in clusters, come to acquire
legendary histories, and, as such, acquire future functions as places of resort or
transubstantiation or limbo for worldly or otherworldly heroes, people, and divinities.
Plato insisted that the stars "are not small, as they appear to the eye, but each of them
is immense in bulk." Further every solid body of heaven had "a soul attached" to it. Thus
Proclus in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus declares that each celestial god has angels,
demons, and heroes who are phases and extensions of it. And usually these characters have
abodes or posting places in the sky. The rich Polynesian legends carry their heroes on many
travels that are often imagined as terrestrial and maritime but which originated as travels
of gods though the vast stellar and planetary regions. In one of its dimensions, the legend
of the Argonauts is of a sky voyage that carried the adventurers to Circe (Corsyra, the
Boreal Circle) where the island of Drepane (" sickle") lay, beneath which was buried the
sickle of Kronos.
Much of what might be told of angels is sung by Rainer Maria Rilke. Here we have the multi-
faceted visions, the mixed love and terror, the mirroring of the human mind, and the sense
of co-creatures of genesis long ago.
Every angel is terrible. Still, woe to me, I sing to you, near fatal birds of the soul,
full-knowing of you... Early-achieved and over-indulged of creation, you high ridges, dawn-
reddened peaks of all genesis, - pollen of the flowering godhead, links of light, halls,
steps, thrones, welkins, shields of joy, uproars beauty then suddenly, singly mirrors
scooping up outpoured beauty back into your own faces.
To the quantavolutionist, the presence of naturally occurring "angels" is logical and
historical. More puzzling is whether they were comets, planets, or meteorites. Thus, the
astronomers Strube and Napier attempted a natural history of the encounters between Earth
and comets, and argue that in the early days of mankind disastrous comets were variously
named and, when they had retired to the farther reaches of the solar system or had crashed
or broken up, their natures and behaviors were assigned to the planets who were the
regularly eccentric movers of the solar system.
That is, they would deny the asseverations of those such as Santillana, von Dechend,
Velikovsky, Milton and myself who assigned the active roles in legends to the planets, and,
in the case of the last three, give large changes in motion and behavior to all of the
planets such as to fulfill the requirements of some angelic behaviors. This is not to say
that comets did not occur, but that their original creation and impetus arose out of
planetary explosions and disturbances. Too, it may be borne in mind that any body changing
its movement in space will behave as a comet, growing horns and tails and trails and
presenting a variety of apparitions.
It will take many years of study, and even then it may be impossible, to determine the
historicity of the celestial solid body identity of even the more important "angels" and
"sky-heroes" of world legend. Dwardu Cardona, in his studies of the Archangel Michael and
others, has set an example of what must be done on a large scale to eliminate the confusion
of planets and angels.
Humans have been polytheistic even when their ruling religion states that one god and only
one god exists. The people (and usually, too, their religious guides) establish a heavenly
host (including devils) to complement, supplement, and assist the supreme god. So it was in
the beginning and ever thereafter.
The propaganda for monotheism is massive, so that people claim to believe in one god while
worshiping many. The monotheistic illusion occurs in two forms. First, monotheistic
affirmations are made by people who upon psychological investigation obviously mean
different things by the word "god." Thus, a sample of the American people in 1982 indicates
that all except 2% believe in god.
If the same people were interviewed in greater depth, however, different 'gods' would
emerge: a punitive god, a loving god, a deus otiosus, a god who pries into every nook and
cranny of every mind, a helping god, a god who helps those who help themselves, a very
human 'old man', an abstract principle of good, a god of true believers, a god of all
people, and so on. Some people feel close to god, others not. God confides in some humans,
but such an idea seems preposterous to other believers.
Then, other divinities would appear: the Holy Trinity, Christ the Son, the Virgin Mary, the
Holy Ghost, each taking some godlike qualities upon themselves, supremely competent in some
regard. Saints, agents of god, would appear in abundance. Many person's religious mentation
and practices are given over to a saint, whose direct protection and assistance one feels
to be superior to those services obtained from god the Father or God the Son; these latter,
it seems, "are never there when you need them." The devil comes up with some or many divine
qualities, almost always evil but "doing god's work," and god is often deemed helpless,
even if by his own will, to rid the world of the devil. Historical and contemporary heroes,
such as George Washington and the incumbent President, find themselves contending with
saints for the possession of divine qualities and the performance of miracles. In sum, a
great variety of gods exists in fact under the name of The God. Such people may still be
called monotheistic, so long as we understand the limits of this term.
Then other peoples of the world confess to more than one god. Such are the Hindus and
Taoists, for instance. They need not agree, either, on the definition of he gods of their
pantheon, any more than the Teutons, Greeks, or Romans would have agreed upon theirs. A
peculiarity of the Hebrew religion of Moses was its very early achievement of an
abstraction of the Lord which permitted an easier succession of gods (so long as integrity
of a Hebrew nation was preserved). This is so despite many deviations and p polytheistic
cults, and much editing of the story to stress the unity of the Lord.
Not all early Hebrews were devout worshiper of Yahweh alone. Also, several rebellions
against Moses were directed at his special, all-inclusive, exclusive god, Yahweh.
Theologians have occasionally surmised, and correctly, I think, that Aaron, High Priest of
the Jews under Moses, would have been fully tolerant of the worship of Baal, and that by
Baal was indicated possibly more than one god besides Yahweh, possibly Saturn, Mercury, and
Venus (to employ planetary representatives who had many parochial names.)
When Korah and his followers rebelled against Moses, one of their principal complaints,
which has not been fully excised from the Bible and is also the subject of legend, was his
suppression of their freedom to commune directly with the Lord. One encounters the same
demand among the English Levellers of the Seventeenth Century, now raised against Oliver
Cromwell, their Mosaic leader of the protestant revolution against the Crown. One god, the
rebels are told, means a monotheism both of god and worshiper, by authoritative definition.
This other kind of anarchistic monotheism cannot be tolerated by a theocratic regime. Else
every person would have his own god.
Jewish legends, which should be generously interpreted in the face of the monotheistic
propaganda, accord a place for religious beliefs and practice connected with the Holy
Spirit, The Archangels Michael and Gabriel (both identified with planets), the Moon hosts
of angels, characters out of Sheol, and the Devil. Legends speak of these entities
cordially and understandingly, as well as accusingly. From these stories and the historical
record, it is clear that the victory of Yahweh was never complete among the Jews, and that
much of the time he was "the professional man's god," the god of priests, military
officers, and most kings and judges.
And so it went thereafter; the seekers and executors of "the Truth" sponsored monotheism.
Moses was a scientist as well as a monotheist, I have concluded from my study of his life.
Akhnaton, monotheist Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, proclaimed his slogan as
Truth ma'at, and was overthrown by polytheistic priests and populace. I suspect that he
derived his monotheism from the Levant where he spent his childhood, perhaps even from
Israel.
Polytheistic societies have had their monotheists, often connected with a free-thinking
intelligentsia, akin to scientists. Thus, around 500 B. C., we find the Greek Xenophanes
saying, "There is one god" (Fragment 23), and "He sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and
hears as a whole" (fragment 24). The philosophical discovery of a single god often, too,
verges upon pantheism; the idea that "all things are full of gods" is not far from the idea
that "god is in all things."
When the Romans put down the Jewish rebellions of the first century and ultimate dispersed
the population, they acted partly in order to defend the principle of extending religious
rights to all gods that would tolerate other gods. This the Yahwists would not accept.
Meanwhile, the Christians, having promoted the Son of Man to become the Son of God, and
then to become an identity united to a redesigned Yahweh, penetrated the larger population
of the Roman Empire. They were persecuted as often as not on grounds that they would not
tolerate other gods or worship the divine aspects of the secular power latent in
monotheism; nor could the regimes succeeding to the Empire integrate the Christian doctrine
firmly into their moral and legal order. The Byzantine Empire accomplished the first
unification,. Only after a tine Empire accomplished the first unification. Only after a
thousand years from its legitimization, could certain western regimes quite dominate
monotheism.
For this triumph, they required a weakened Roman Catholic Church, a theory of divine right
of monarchs, and ultimately popular nationalism that in democratic form placed god and
country in the hands of the "people." There came them in government and industry the theory
of centralization, carefully developed over centuries by the church and embodied in many
ideas, ranking from that of papal infallibility to proofs of the existence of god built
upon absolute and extreme values.
Finally, monotheism could obtain support from science because science derived support from
monotheism. Science has been a greater exponent and defender of monotheism than has
traditional Christianity. Almost all scientists who have confessed to a religious belief
have been deists, that is, believers in a god whose qualities and behavior bordered upon
the laws of Nature. Nature (" herself," we note in a singular transposition of sex) tends
to acquire among scientific religious believers and scientific non-believers much of the
omniscience, purposefulness, immanence, transcendence, power, absoluteness, lawfulness,
orderliness, and responsiveness to human goodness and sin otherwise characteristic of the
single deity. There is widely believed to be only one truth, one ma'at, in science.
In addition, then, to its other peculiar historical features, mosaic monotheism operates
still as a vital feature in the ideological, hence structural, processes of modern
religions of the Hebraic complex, in conventional bureaucratic and single headed
(especially charismatic) governments, in judicial fictions (such as "finding the law"), in
international politics, in science, in pedagogy, in communist (but hardly "Marxist")
regimes, in tradition; philosophy as in most humanistic disciplines, and, of course, in the
family.
The sociological treatise whose writing we are imagining would probably conclude that some
of the most powerful and pervasive influences of monotheism have been manifested in
"enlightened" secularized processes of the scientific revolution of the 17th to 19th
centuries and the largely secular political history of the 18th to 20th centuries. Nothing
of this should surprise us. Religion, we have already explained, seeps into all things.
A final comment on the effects of monotheism may be in order. Elsewhere, in Homo Schizo I
and II, I explained the grave and genetic human problem of combining the several egos
naturally emanating from the structure of the human mind into a single ego, "a person who
can live with himselves." A percipient authority once termed the ancient Greeks
schizophrenic, and central in the syndrome of their behavior was their polytheism. We can
surmise that monotheism was not available to them to help "get their heads together."
Further, we say that monotheism fashions a therapy for one kind of schizophrenia by
creating another kind. It allows an orderly mind by pushing every object and tension onto
one or the other pole - oneself or a god. In line with what we have already said of the
effects and function of monotheism in society and science, we can expect from the
monotheistic homo schizo a more orderly and consistent accretion of symbols and a greater
psychological penchant for mental discipline and linear logical forms (as opposed to
artistic, analogical and intuitive modes of thought). Monotheism thus can serve as a tool
of inquiry in seeking to understand why certain groups and individuals historically and
today have more disciplined minds, are logically consistent, and are superior at scientific
investigation and human organization. We stress once more, however, that monotheism does
not clearly distinguish religions - all being polytheistic in one or more senses - but
that a belief that one is monotheistic may create special qualities in oneself.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER FIVE
LEGENDS AND SCRIPTURE
The biggest difference between myth or legends and sacred scriptures is that the latter are
selected legends, called "divinely inspired or spoken" by their believers, which have been
carefully guarded and edited to pursue the continuous but also continually changing
religious goals of their custodians. Myth and legends, not so regarded, or whose line of
custodians died out, were left like abandoned children to wander through time as casual
history and unconstrained imagination, until caught up by scientific mythological studies.
Giambattista Vico was the first modern scholar to perceive this process when, two centuries
ago, he wrote:
The fables in their origins were true and severe narrations, whence mythos, fable, was
defined as vera narratio (a true account).. But because they were originally for the most
part gross, they gradually lost their original meanings, were then altered, subsequently
became improbable, after that obscure, then scandalous, and finally incredible. . . These
are the seven sources of the difficulties of the fables...
One of many debts that we owe to Plato is his respect for myth and legend. He, too,
fulminated at those who dismissed or, worse, corrupted history by their misuse of legends.
In my skeptically minded exploration of the story of the destruction of Atlantis, the
attitude of Plato mitigated my doubts. Plato goes out of his way to insist that the story
be taken seriously, despite its prehistoric origins. Critias, his protagonist, is given to
claim repeatedly that he heard and learned the story from his grandfather as a true and
exact account. Significantly, to a modern mnemologist, Critias declared that although he
had forgotten much of what he had heard of the previous day's discussions, he had forgotten
none of what he had learned as a child about Atlantis.
The Atlantis story is generally disbelieved, yet if an educated unbeliever were to compare
it with the story of the Deluge of Noah in the Bible, it would appear to be just as (im)
plausible. It is no less specific. The "author" of one is Plato, of the other, Moses; who
is more reliable? True, Atlantis is no longer to be found, above or below the sea, and
therefore presumed not to have sunk; but the flood that climbed to great heights all over
the Near East has vanished, too. Objectively, one would have to be as skeptical (and no
more so) about the one account as about the other. The difference is that a great many
millions of people believe in the Noachian Deluge because they believe in its sacred
format, while the Atlanteans are long dead and the moral of their story - that Zeus
destroyed them because he found their squabbling and vices intolerable - no longer lives
in people's minds.
A legend is history which has been largely unconstrained by realism and objectivity since
the happenings that it describes. The boundary zone between legend and history is, of
course, thickly populated. Thus, we have the well-known legend of the founding of Rome by
close descendants of Aeneas, exiled prince of Troy, who settled in Latium. Many ancient
scholars believed the story. Most Romans accepted it as true. The actual beginnings of the
legend occur before Virgil, who related it in his epic poetry. If historical, the legend
should go back to the also legendary beginnings of Rome, in the Eighth Century B. C. Then
it was that Romulus and Remus, grandsons of Aeneas, built the town.
But while scholars have accepted the legend's time of the founding, the Eighth Century,
they have rejected the Aeneas story because the last war of Troy was placed in the Twelfth
Century or earlier. However, recent studies have emptied Greek chronology of four to five
centuries of time, which would permit placing Aeneas within a century of Romulus and Remus.
To confirm the connection is a task of future research, but in support of it is the
important fact that when faced with a collection of practically all the evidence of art,
archaeology, inscriptions, stories and ancient comment about the earlier times of Rome, one
finds a striking gap in the collection extending between the 13th and 8th centuries, as was
manifested in the great Bimillennial Exposition of Virgiliana held at Rome in 1982.
Another case of the interplay among history, legend, and scripture may be offered. It
concerns the Christian Gospels of the life and work of Jesus. These are four in number, all
written some years after the death of Jesus, under circumstances that have never been
clear. Furthermore, as the reader will acknowledge, attitudes towards the Gospels and Jesus
have ranged from the denial that he ever existed, passing through an acceptance of the
Gospels as generally or exactly true, to other extreme ideas such as that Jesus was a
Jewish radical rebelling against Roman rule, whose story was censored in the Gospels.
Dr. Livio C. Stecchini, both an ancient historian and a historian of science, for several
years before his death taught a college course on the trial of Jesus. There he developed a
theory that Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and Roman statesman, was the basic
source for the Gospels. His brother met Saint Paul of Tarsus when Paul was imprisoned in
Rome awaiting trial and execution, and Seneca himself could have interrogated Paul at will,
given his high state position. That the Stoic and Christian positions on many ethical
issues were similar - more so than the Mosaic-Christian position - has been often
remarked upon. That Jesus follows the birth history of many Greco-Roman heroes is manifest:
His father being divine, his mother human.
Seneca, said Stecchini, composed a great tragedy, later lost, and upon its manuscript and/
or performances the Gospels drew very heavily. Thus it happened, as Stecchini has
elaborated, that the plot of the trial and execution, the actions of the characters, and
the timing and scenes of the Gospels are framed in the traditional structure of Greco-Roman
drama.
As important as Stecchini's theory may be, we cannot treat it here as more than a
conjecture. The conjecture, however, allows us to make a point about legend and scripture.
To the studious non-believer, sacred scripture is forever the source of historiography and
the analysis of myth and legend. Scripture may be dissected from as many perspectives and
in as many ways as the creative and scientific mind can imagine and instrument. On the
other hand, to the studious believer, sacred scripture is first of all literally true, and
all that the creative mind can imagine must be consistent with the literal truth. Even if,
by every empirical test that is respected by historical and natural science, Jesus were
deemed to have never existed (an unlikely prospect), the believer can continue to believe
in the holiness of his mundane being and therefore in the literalness of the gospels, just
as the Roman Catholic believer asserts in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the
veritable body and blood of Christ in the Holy Communion.
What we should then, by scientific standards, possess would be an entirely fictional and
mythical complex contained in identical form in millions of cerebro-neural systems
governing a host of behaviors. The reality of these systems and behaviors cannot and would
not be disputed by science. Science would say, here we have a purely delusional system to
accompany the larger delusional system that is a mixture of history, legend, myth, and non-
reality known as the Old Testament or Mosaic system. And if all of the Old Testament were
empirically disproved (also very unlikely), the scientist would then retire to the same
position, namely treating the total New Testament - Old Testament complex as a purely
delusional system with behavioral consequences.
Myth may be defined as a religious and aesthetic interpretation or story based upon legend
and history. Its goal is to serve essentially non-historic functions while reminding its
audience of a significant historical happening. Myth is closely related to rituals and
sacrifices, which have the same goal, but, like sacred scriptures, are under severe
theocratic constraints.
Myth is often indistinguishable from legend, but this occurs in part because the original
culture to which a myth and legend belonged no longer exists to explain to us the
difference between the two; myths and legends intermingle in a flow through time which we
experience much later and find indistinctly composed of both. The famous myth of Phaeton,
who drives the Sun's chariot, burns up the Earth, and is destroyed by a thunderbolt of
Zeus, is by common standards today an entertaining myth, but appears upon investigation
more and more as a legend supporting an historical intrusion of a cometary body upon the
Earth's atmosphere.
Sacred scripture consists of authoritative prescriptions of various compounds of legend and
myth, frequently describing rites and commands for their recital, together with moral
judgments. All legends and myths of the most ancient kind contain some sacred quality, but
scriptures enhance sacrality by ascribing their own origin to divine or divinely authorized
sources.
Debating sacred scriptures is deemed to be arguing with god, which is not only useless but
sacrilegious as well. One effect of this view is to allow only such discussions and
research whose intended effects are to prove the scriptures correct in morals, rites, and
history.
This situation is antithetic to scientific method, which permits only hypotheses, never
absolute and eternal truth. Nevertheless it often happens that believers in holy
scriptures, when justifying and proving them, cast many bones from their campfires into the
darkness where the jackals of science prowl. The very insistence of literal Biblicists has
driven scholars to test the authenticity of some reported events, thereupon to learn to
their surprise that these can in fact be confirmed.
One of these was the dropping of manna among the hungry Israelites in the desert. Fitting
precisely the details provided in the Bible and legendary sources to the conditions under
which manna-like confections could be manufactured - electrical discharges, high
temperatures, strange atmospheric gases, molecular compounding, etc. - a considerable
degree of confirmation can be accorded to the Biblical story, enough to swing the
scientific balance in its direction. Once more, however, I would stress that by proving the
capability of natural causes to have produced the Biblical "miracle," ordinary science
erodes sacred scripture. It removes Yahweh from the manufacturing process and the product,
and tends to make him a deistic god, that is, an ultimate cause or designer of
manufacturing machinery.
Here, to be sure, Yahweh is still very close to events, according to Moses. But we recall
that Moses is under suspicion of hallucinating; that is; another science, psychology, is
working to erode the sacredness of the scripture, even while providing another form of
natural explanation which authenticates in its own way the actions and speech conveyed in
the scripture.
Sacred scriptures will always contain a high proportion of vague, indecipherable,
incomprehensible, contradictory, and substantially untestable material. They will also have
lost much, as historiographic methodology increasingly shows, owing to the alteration and
accidents of their form of transmission, through cultural miscegenation, by reconciliation
of older history with later history, by imposition of patterns of integration and new
styles, by the collective amnesia that seeks both to forget actually and recall
symbolically the traumas provoked in terrible ancient catastrophes, and by other changes in
referents to accommodate ancient to present conditions, as a comet becoming a star, or as
invisible electrical discharges which are now referred to as purely symbolic
manifestations. Therefore there are limits to the scientificity that can be granted to the
Rig Vedas, Bible, Eddas, Book of the Dead, I Ching, Popul Vuh, and other scriptures.
Nor can it benefit the credibility and influence of believers in sacred scriptures to be
relegated by general consent, including their own, to the nonsensical remnants of the
works. For example, many Biblical scholars refuse to employ or give credence to Talmudic
commentaries and ancient legends of the Jews, when these documents will often testify to
the authenticity of Biblical statements and elaborate them in a way that enhances their
credibility. Ominous conclusions emerge from these several pages. There is much history in
myth, legend and scripture everywhere in the world. In a sense, all religions are
desperately honest in their fundamental statements. Yet it is appreciated that, in a memory
choice between a delusion and an historical fact, a religion will prefer the delusion. An
attempt to "clean up" an historical religion by eliminating historical and empirical errors
cannot succeed. Meanwhile we affirm that a religion cannot subsist on delusions alone: it
must make historical and empirical statements. Are we to believe then that historical
religion must be abandoned? We are not yet ready to answer this question.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SIX
RITUAL AND SACRIFICE
The Spanish conquistadors were appalled when they came upon extensive human sacrifices and
cannibalism in Aztec Mexico some five centuries ago, and they killed an unnecessarily large
number of this "master race" in the name of Jesus Christ. The bones were thrown to the
dogs, which the Aztecs also liked to eat. An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand
people were being killed and eaten annually, about one percent of the population of the
whole region. It is argued by a student of the subject, Michael Harner, that this increment
of meat went far toward making up for a serious protein deficiency in the Aztec diet.
When asked the reason for the sacrifices, which were conducted always with religious
rituals, the Aztec spokesmen replied that the god managing the Sun depended on them. If the
sacrifices were suspended, the Sun would not rise and set, and this glorious Age of the Sun
would terminate in chaos. So quite aside from the matter to dietary protein, the stability
of the cosmos was at stake. There had to be here, as elsewhere, a religious justification
for cannibalism and human sacrifice.
The Spaniards were not impressed by this argument. They by now had many centuries of
experience in confining their sacred cannibalism to the body and blood of Christ, which
they absorbed whenever they partook of Holy Communion, which, if they were devout, ought to
have been daily. The authority for this was Jesus Christ himself, as confirmed by no less
than Saint Paul. This ritual sacrifice and cannibalism sufficed, and does to this day among
the majority of Christendom. Nor did the Spaniards sacrifice animals, or even slaughter
them ritually, which the ancient Jews, who almost always avoided any semblance of human
sacrifice, faithfully performed according to the precepts of the Old Testament, and the
Muslim followed suit.
No culture has been free of cannibalism in its history, nor are most religions that profess
gods fully exempted today. Apparently cannibalism touches upon some vital nerve center of
historical religion. Else there would be only the onetime universal practice, which would
have been stopped, and there would not have continued the substituted sacrifice and eating
of animals nor the complicated symbolic sublimations whereby at the same moment religious
believers both eat and do not eat human flesh. There has never been anything but sacred
cannibalism except in dire life emergencies, such as occur now and then.
Actually it is easier to understand why cannibalism originated and flourished than why it
has been severely constrained and, in some god-supporting religions, abandoned.
Cannibalism, like killing others of his kind, is spontaneously human. It is a product of
the set of mechanisms that generate when the self-aware, self-fearing human first appears.
Seeing his alter ego in himself, he sees himself in other. He is continuously seeking to
assimilate himself; he seeks to assimilate himself in others.
The identification with others is but a prelude to empowering himself by his ingestion of
others. One does the same with the gods, here abetted in one's actions by the perceived
behavior of the gods. The gods are frequently cannibalistic, he thinks. Gods fall to Earth
or are cast down to Earth or are cast down to Earth and are devoured. Gods encounter one
another electrically in meteoritic and cometary forms in the sky, are split up, are
attracted and repelled.
When Giorgio di Santillana comments on the "baffling" bloody battles of the gods in
Mesopotamian legends, he might as well have spoken of all legend and of the cannibalism of
the gods. It may always be moot whether men got their ideas of warfare, sacrifice, and
cannibalism from the gods. They say so in holy writings, but who can trust sacred scripture
and get a degree in astronomy without being as contradictory as the gods themselves?
A decline in celestial divine struggles and in the horrendous fears incited thereby in
humans may explain why cannibalism has declined. The less fearful the human, the less
inclined to sacrifice and the lesser the oblation. Man, it may be said to his credit,
drives a hard bargain with his gods. The Aztec-Nahua rites were the last large-scale frank
cannibalistic exercises, although small populations in Africa and Oceania pursued such
practices until this century, and, from time to time, cannibalism is reported in chaotic
and deprived human settings, as in Germany during the Thirty Years' war of the 16th century
and in Cambodia during the terrible Indochinese wars of the mid-twentieth century.
Yet the Aztecs were two thousand years removed from what we suggested were prime
catastrophic motivators of cannibalism. So far as we know, the latest universal
catastrophes brought on by exoterrestrial forces were in the eighth and seventh centuries
before Christ. Later, however, Mexico and Central America were subjected to extremely heavy
volcanism (related, we think, to the earlier exoterrestrial episodes) with clouds of ashes
that darkened the days and obscured the sun.
None can scientifically estimate the duration of memories. Many of today's customs go back
thousands of years, indeed probably to the very first men, so obdurate and obsessive is the
transmission of collective experience. With occasional heavy disasters and appropriate
mythology, a people can behave in the ways of their remote ancestors.
None can deny that some of the Israelis of today see themselves as reenacting the scenes of
the Israeli conquest of Palestine of 3400 years ago. Prime Minister Begin was himself a
"Moses buff" who enjoyed greatly long discussions about "those days" with other members of
the "Club." Yet he appeared to all the world as a substantially secular figure, operating
efficiently amidst high Twentieth Century technology. Although anti-religious in a
conventional sense, but professing a racial credo claimed to be consistent with ancient
Teutonic legend, the Nazis of Germany between 1942-5 consigned millions of European Jews of
all shades of religious belief to death by methodical gassing and burning. They murdered
many millions of other Europeans, too. The routine, almost automatic procedures used for
most of this holocaust, and the absence of traditional religious rituals in its execution,
seem to remove it from the scope of religious study. No conventional religion would
tolerate such conduct.
Still, the initial impulse, in Hitler and other Nazis, was that of "purification of the
race" and the creation of a new master race (" chosen people") to rule the world. Nor did
Hitler's status rank below that of the divine heroes of legend; his book, Mein Kampf, was
given to newly-wed couples in place of the Bible.
The rituals frequently staged by the Nazi rulers of Germany were as spectacular and soul-
stirring as any in history. The holocaust, however, was not a matter of public spectacle
and in this regard was a source of sacrificial strengthening in the minds of some thousands
who directly participated in the killings.
One might venture that these were special ceremonies reserved for the Nazi priesthood.
There is small chance that the Nazi genocides would have stopped with the Jews. Gypsies
were already suffering the same fate. The treatment meted out to civil populations in
Eastern Europe teetered on the brink of genocide. If the Nazis had won World war II, there
would have been ample opportunity to extend the holocaust in East Europe, Asia and Africa;
a successful cleansing genocide of six millions might readily extend to sixty million, or
until some historical accident would happen to stop the process.
Sacrifice and anthropophagy are still in the religions of a billion people and in the
everyday life of almost totally secularized billions. The typical American follows the
secular rules of eating, being very early in life told, "Don't just shove the food into
your mouth." We are advised that "it is bad to eat between meals," we are told to "wash
before coming to the table," to "set the table properly," to dress decently for dinner, eat
the proper foods in the proper order, to serve foods in the proper order (' no dessert
before the meat'), that father carves the meat, to leave a bit on the plate, to observe
decorum at the table, and, in lesser numbers, to pray before every meal."
There are a hundred or more such typical rules of etiquette, rationalized as prophylaxis,
"consideration for the feelings of others," and other particular explanations involving
breeding and health. But there also were and are rules, of course, for the genteel
cannibal, and well-educated sacrificer. The proverbial Englishman who used to dress for
solitary dinner in the jungle was doing his part to hold the universe (and his own mind)
intact. It was, of course, a joke when Cathedral Dean Jonathan Swift, viewing Ireland's
dismal economic state in 1792, sardonically recommended that the poor sell their babies to
the rich for eating.
Slater, a careful scholar of the Greek mind, thought the Greeks more mad than other
peoples. Especially did they dwell in their myth upon parents eating their children. This
he blamed upon the fathers for putting down the mothers, who thus, in fancy at least,
revenged themselves pedophagously.
The children of Alsace are treated around Christmas time (at the feast of Saint Nikolaus,
December 6th), to cookies in the shapes of children distributed by Saint Nikolaus (Santa
Claus) who is accompanied by Rubezahl, a gigantic man in a mask and cloak, a late
impersonation of Wotan, and who can best be identified with Saturn, as indeed can Santa
Claus. The one gives the imaged cookies to the good children; the other menaces the bad
children. It should be recalled that infant sacrifices and cannibal rites to Saturn
survived well into Christian times; in the present rites, unconscious of origins, the
ancient rites are sublimated more or less in playfulness.
Ritual is prominently displayed in matters having to do with alimentation. But it covers
all aspects of religion, therefore all aspects of life. There is a rule for everything.
Man, deprived of instinct, is a habit-former, an obsessional creature. Not only is his
language founded upon obsessive reiteration, not only are his dietary manners as well, but
likewise his sexual, affectional, social, agricultural, industrial, physical, and learning
behavior. In all of these regards, religion and ritual come in the beginning of human
existence and remain forever.
If religion persists despite the extensive and eroding process known as secularization, or
rationalization, or pragmatization, it will do so logically in the centers of life prone to
chaos and accident. That is, religious rites focus upon and persist in the fearful and
catastrophe-prone areas and, as from a lantern, diffuse their light perceptibly and
gradually into the secular.
For instance, baptism, ceremonializing the creation of new life in the world is a critical
juncture, hence persistently ritualized; the Christian Baptists, who are relatively non-
ritualistic and even anti-ritualistic, nevertheless are insistent that baptism into the
church should occur by total immersion of the freely consenting new member in water to
signify death of the old life and rebirth in the new. Baptism in a church is general among
the French, even though the population has abandoned almost all rituals of the Roman
Catholic Christian religion. Early Christian leaders believed that they had found in the
Deluge of Noah the ultimate precedent and model for baptism, which repeats for each "saved"
initiate the end of the wicked world and the entrance into a new epoch.
Rituals are centered upon the creation of the world and man, upon the first time everything
was done, upon catastrophic breakdowns of an age and the beginning of new ages, and upon
the rites de passage of human life - - birth, maturation, marriage, and death. Filling in
as important subcategories of these are such features of human existence as warfare, where
the gods are the models and the gods "Bless our weapons," as the Kaiser of Germany (and
many others) once prayed.
Celebrations of cosmic breakdown are a feature of the focusing of rites upon controlling
the world against chaos, as in the case of the Aztecs. The New Year is ignored by no
culture, because it stands for the end of one age and the beginning of another; the usual
rationalizations are afforded, that harvests are now gathered, that the calendar now
repeats itself, etc. Nonetheless, beneath the considerable excitement, stirs the anxiety
that the year may not repeat itself, the sun may not turn backwards to reenact the seasons,
that once upon a time the world went out of control and could not provide assurances of the
repetition of its orderly cycles.
The bacchanalia were orgies named for Bacchus or Dionysus, a god, reputed to have traveled
the world with a wild troop of both sexes, carrying wands and serpents, acting out a mad
composition of dancing, drinking, battling, sacrificing, cannibalism, and feasting. Regular
and sporadic orgies, patterned upon the mythology, persisted for centuries before Christ
until the Roman Senate with some success banned them for their flagrant challenge to
morality and political order.
The crimes attributed to Dionysus were infinite, yet he received a place on the Olympian
council of gods, replacing the gentle Hestia, according to one legend. Dionysus was a sky-
god, perhaps originally an errant and destructive comet; the orgiastic behavior
accompanying him resembles the kinds of social disorder that have been historically
reported upon the fear-inspiring apparition of cometary bodies.
The saturnalia of the Greco-Roman world are more precisely applicable to prehistoric
events, when the god Saturn was allegedly overturned in a revolt of his wife and children,
particularly Jupiter. The last days of the year are regarded as the period when chaos
begins, and the new year is seen as the coming of a new age.
Even if, as the result of successive calendar reforms, the Saturnalia finally no longer
coincided with the end and the beginning of the year, they nevertheless continued to mark
the abolition of all norms and, in their violence, to illustrate an overturning of values
(e. g. exchange of condition between masters and slaves, women treated as courtesans) and a
general license, an orgiastic modality of society, in a word a reversion of all forms to
indeterminate unity.
So says Mircea Eliade. Types of saturnalia are found throughout the ancient world - - the
Middle East, the Mediterranean, China, Japan, and tribal societies of America. The Hebrew
religion is not excepted, according to Santillana and von Dechend. And they continue in
many places today.
Eliade merges the saturnalia with creation myths. This is contra-indicated by his own
evidence. The catastrophe of Saturn and the end of its Golden Age involves the destruction
of a preexisting, ante-deluvian, "old world," and therefore comes long after the original
creation.
The dramaturgy of the Babylonian Akitu Festival is illustrative of "the abolition of lost
time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act." The
god Marduk slays the dragon of chaos, Tiamat, and creates the cosmos from the fragments of
its body, including man from the blood of a demonic ally of Tiamat. In the chaos all social
forms are confounded, as in the Roman Saturnalia. It is probable that both creation and
recreation are handled together in the drama; that is, Marduk (Jupiter) is in a sense a
creation god but the Babylonians and Sumerians had older more authentic creation gods;
Marduk would be, let us way, a recreation god. Eliade implicitly grants this, when, in
discussing the Akitu drama, he adds, "The creation of the world... is thus retroactualized
each year," and, a little later, "the hierogamy is a concrete realization of the 'rebirth'
of the world and man."
Eliade tends to force all celebrations and rites into illo tempore, "those first great
days." He has made an important contribution to the theory of the history of religions by
assembling from all over the world evidence of the obsessive reiteration in human
activities of the earliest days of mankind. However, he scarcely considers whether real
events lay behind this compulsive return to origins of all peoples, a mechanism exactly
consonant with Sigmund Freud's mechanism of compulsive reenactment of traumas. Freud, when
he essays to explain the origins of the mechanism, postulates a primordial social crisis
among the hominids whereby the "father" is killed by the "brothers" of a horde to gain
access to the females whom the "father" monopolized; this theory is so weak, as I have
shown elsewhere, as not to deserve treatment here.
Eliade does not offer a theory to explain compulsive repetition of chaos and creation, the
most prominent of all ritual behavior. He quotes lines from Jensen's Mythes et Cultes chez
les peuples primitifs that call out to the original events: "The sacrilege of not having
remembered is logically expiated by remembering with special intensity. And because of its
special meaning, blood sacrifice is a particularly intense 'reminder' of this sort."
Perhaps relevant as well is an inscription of the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Seti I: "The
Light God Ra said: 'You are forgiven your sins. The slaughtered victims remit your
extinction. ' Such is the origin of the sacrifice of victims."
The shocking psychic fear associated with human creation and the terrors of the active sky
can be combined to explain why mankind has persisted, openly or beneath many kinds of
subliminatory activities, in reenacting the earliest scenes. But the general catastrophes
were several, accounting for the succession of gods, whereas the creation trauma was
singular and unique. The human has been responding not only to the successive natural
catastrophes which, of course were also treated as recreations. In racial memory the
traumas blend over time. It is noteworthy that they have not entirely merged, with all
distinction erased, but they have apparently merged enough so that on the one hand the
historian and theorist Eliade does not separate them chronologically, and so that on the
other hand most creationist scholars who hold to a literal interpretation of Biblical
history are preoccupied with the Deluge of Noah, seeing it as the unique catastrophe that
sculpted the face of the Earth.
Mankind, in bursting forth upon the Earth, experienced catastrophe, and thereafter was
confirmed in his catastrophized memory by a succession of natural catastrophes. His global
sense of the sacred, a sense that Otto and others have described as ambivalent feelings of
fearful danger and creative power, expanded with each quantavolution of nature and relaxed
between the age-breaks.
Rituals are attempts at close encounters with the gods. They are a primary instrument for
controlling oneself and the environment as the gods approach. We find the formula quite
clearly perceived by theologians who refer to the sacrifice as the use of an intermediary,
the oblation, to communicate between the mundane and the divine. "Sacrifice is ... offered
to a divinity in order to establish, maintain or restore a right relationship of man to the
sacred order," thus writes R. L. Flaherty in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on
sacrifice.
The means of ritually controlling the gods (for "communication" conveys the subservient
theological mood more than it does the aggressive political mood) can be analyzed. They are
scarcely exotic, though often esoteric. First, man behaves in imitation of the gods. This
is in every sense the same as the behavior of the child with respect to his adult guardian
and model. It is intended to gather in oneself the strength of the god, and at the same
time disarm the god from directing aggression to him. "Imitation is the sincerest form of
flattery," as the saying goes. So, if the god fights, the man fights. If the god rages, man
rages. If the god bestows generous gifts, so does the man. And so on.
Appeasement of the god's proven potential for aggression against his very worshiper, as
well as his enemies, takes many forms. Giving of one's most valued possessions is the most
appropriate sacrifice. All manner of bribery, solicitations (it must be discovered what the
god wants, even if by trial and error), prostitution (whether as vestal virgins or as
temple harlots) - - these are common gifts.
Nor does worshipful man stop short of trickery. That god knows what one thinks does not
prevent the most ludicrous practicality and flamboyant excesses. "It can't hurt to perform
the rites." Do this and that, not because it is right in the eyes of god, but "lest you
die;" ritual is to be performed, not understood, nor does it matter to understand. The
important thing is to obey the command. Miserliness is common too: "We are not sacrificing
at all to Awwaw this year, since rain has fallen early," remarked an Iyala priest of
Nigeria, quoted by Paul Radin.
Much of ritual therefore is a kind of tactical game to exploit the gods. The human
encountering god is thrown into a panic, He often overcompensates and contradicts his own
view of god as all-wise . He will stop at nothing to be on the right side of his god -
never mind inconsistencies, preserving other life values, and saving a personal
relationship. It is the politics of absolute autocracy to some, to others the politics of a
monarchical court with its courtiers, to still others a two-person game, intensely
personal.
Without a theory of origins and earliest history it is perhaps impossible to say whether
man modeled kingship upon gods or gods upon kings, Whether rituals were practiced among men
and them upon gods, or vice versa. Our particular theory here would make kingship and
politics initially religious and soon afterwards transferred into a partially secular
sphere, there ultimately to be pragmatized and secularized.
Later one could have a secular republic such as the U. S. A. or France, highly ritualized
with specific rules excluding religion from the rituals. Finally one would arrive at the
Marxist republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and others, where the very
permission of religious ritual is viewed as an anomalous and temporary concession.
Consistent with its denial of religious ritual, religious faith and revelations are treated
as mental aberrations.
Religion without ritual is fear without defenses. Secularism without ritual must be the
same. The suppression of supernatural belief does not eradicate the existential fear of man
but only its referents - gods, spirits, etc.
The French Revolution after 1789 burst upon both the political regime and the church.
Churches were seized, the clergy laicized. A great Feast of the Supreme Being was
inaugurated, conducted on the Champ de Mars in Paris. It is clear that the Supreme Being
was Reason and Nature. Some churches were rededicated as temples to the Goddess Reason, who
was sometimes represented by a pretty girl. New rituals were improvised to replace the old
ones.
Numerous writers have pointed out that the supernatural is actually irrepressible and finds
it way into astrology, "life in other worlds," " the unexplained" (an enlarging, logically
boundless area), and the like. Furthermore, the religious finds its way into the
divinization of political heroes - - "St. Karl Marx," "Comrade Mao," the entombed and
preserved Lenin, the charismatic leader Mussolini, or de Gaulle, or Franklin Roosevelt, or
Gandhi, et al.
We offer no argument against this line of reasoning. A religion of the supernatural, of
faith and of revelation can be educed from such secular social phenomena. We would only
wish to supplement them. There may be a reciprocal growth in secular ritual to accompany
the loss of religion and its ritual.
Two phenomena accompanying modern secularization display conspicuous growth, and may be
surrogates for ritual. One is bureaucracy, the other centralization. The two are
interconnected: the logic of bureaucracy tends to centralization. The logic of
centralization demands bureaucracy. One sees the shadow of religion and ritual in the two.
The French Revolution, anti-religious, gave a great boost to centralized bureaucracy
throughout the world.
Centralization is a search for a central truth and law toward which all procedures may be
directed. Bureaucracy supplies the procedures. Large-scale armies, mass media, huge
building complexes, human and computerized industrial giants, mass transportation, global
planning - - all of these supply, whatever else they provide (and religion once supplied a
distribution system for food out of sacrifices) reiterative, compulsive (compulsory, too),
routinized activities lending a feeling of awe and security to those whom they engage and
serve. The idea of "efficiency" is offered frequently as a purely secular notion, an
activity that can be carried on without a hint of the supernatural or the rite. In the
first place, "efficiency" like "god" is all things to all people, hence is not to be
accepted as meaningful at face value. Efficiency as a reduction of activity (energy)
between two points (from "here" to a goal) to a minimum is flagrantly contradicted by
bureaucracy. Efficiency seemingly contradicts sacrifice and ritual, superstition and magic,
but actually religious ritual can and has been over the ages consistently intended to be
efficient. The idea is not new; it is only aimed at different goals. One can be sure that
ancient priests worked continuously to increase the efficiency of fires on altars.
The orders, rules, and laws, practically all now in written form, which pour out of the
ruling organizations of the world take up many thousands of large volumes a year. Is this
not ritualized behavior? It secures those involved from the nagging fear of existence,
acting as a lifeline for the weak psyche to grasp. The summary effect of this overwhelming
flood of order is to tell people what they must do and how to go about doing it, in the
sacred written word of authority.
Gone for most modern people is the lifeline of religious ritual; in its place is secular
ritual. We think of the novels of Franz Kafka (The Castle, Amerika) and of George Orwell
(1984) to illustrate our point. It is untrue, although Dostoevski wrote so in The Brothers
Karamazov, and one hears it often said, that "if God doesn't exist, everything is allowed."
After all, is it not said of the great Soviet State that "Whatever is not forbidden is
compulsory"?
The problem is too large for discussion here. I mean merely to add for consideration that
the secularized world has a rich and abundant ritual, as well as secular divinities,
charismatic experiences, and supernatural "pastimes" that are more serious than religion to
their practitioners. The modern secular child knows more rules than the ancient religious
child. And so, too, the adult of this world today. At some stage hereafter we must contrast
the two modes of life and evaluate them.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAN'S DIVINE MIRROR
No god is the same to any two people, nor to any two sects. This is a psychological fact,
akin to saying that no two people share the same experience. It would be a more definitive
statement if the gods existed in no other realm except the minds of people. It also relates
to the fact that no two delusions or hallucinations are alike, although especially when a
group happens to hallucinate the same image - - an angel, say or unidentified flying
object - - the description may be close, and when a mass of separate hallucinations is
analyzed statistically, one does obtain averages and types.
When two people discuss a similar religious experience - a visual revelation of the Second
Coming of Jesus Christ, say - one can statistically adumbrate shared social and psychic
features of the people that tend to qualify them for the experience, such as a deficient
formal education, erratic and disturbed personal backgrounds, and so on. Cases where a team
of scientific observers, warned and trained to be objective, are rushed to the scene to
corroborate the vision are rare.
Even were such to occur, the new (and probably negative) evidence would have to be
dismissed on grounds that the preparation for objective identification would necessarily
incapacitate the team to share the experience. If the two people had seen a monster in the
Sewanee River and called it a dragon and the team had hastened in with cameras and nets, an
alligator of a certain size might be captured and the vision placed upon a firm scientific
footing. It would not be surprising, then, if the original viewers claimed an improper
identification, insisting that the wrong creature had been snared. Whereupon psychologists
would once more be called upon. That gods are often snares and delusions must be admitted.
Yet the occurrence of the delusions, we have implied, takes on patterns evocative of actual
events and of common mechanisms of the analyzed human mind. Natural expressions of high
energy occur in cometary approaches to Earth, deluges of water and other material from the
skies, anomalous intensifications of heat and cold by conflagration or sudden icing on a
large scale, simultaneous large scale volcanism, and otherwise. Much evidence goes to show
more of such catastrophes in ancient and prehistoric times than over the past 2500 years.
We say that the more frequent these occurrences and the greater their intensity, the more
that gods appear and the more religious humanity becomes. If these be called gods insofar
as they are apparitions and because of their enormous effects, then there is a real
historical reason why mankind once was much more religious than now. Geology and
archaeology can demonstrate (with much more research than they are inclined to provide) the
actual basis for enhanced early religion. Psychology and the history of religion can show
how the religious mind has expectedly peaked in these actual stress periods and subsided
when the strains relaxed.
Practically all historians of religions of religion and renowned modern theologians have
accepted evolutionary theories of cultural development in describing religious history.
Even Henri Bergson who spoke of a "discontinuous evolution which proceeds by bounds" saw
this progressive achievement of higher forms of behavior against the backdrop of an
unchanging natural scenery. To all of such thinkers, religion must have progressed out of a
rational advancement of humanity (even though Bergson credits mysticism with innovation in
religion). That is, rationally evolving man creates ever more rational religion.
Without correcting the human mental infrastructure, they have placed an ever heavier
superstructure upon man, not knowing that when man has assumed the burden of what they term
rational behavior, it is because natural conditions have allowed him to do so, and that
this happened as much or more during the Golden Age of Saturn as during any period of
modern times. Horses have not become smarter; horses have not; how should man have done so
without a proven physiological alteration of his mind?
If one wishes to animate the ancient apparitions (metaphorically or delusionally) and
assign the fantastically great natural events to interventions of the gods, defining gods
as "whatsoever can produce such effects," and further goes on to distinguish and assign
gods to the different effects of, say, air, fire, water, and earth, there can be no logical
objection. So long as one does not proceed beyond the evidence to impute motives, make
misleading classification, and imagine an organization of the cosmos, none of which can be
even partly demonstrated, the gods of nature can be said to exist as truly as "democracy"
or an "infinite regression series."
Here is where mankind gets into trouble with the scientific authorities of anthropology and
psychology: it assigns a great many undemonstrable qualities to the gods and spirits. Then,
hardly pausing, it fashions such qualities into a mirror of man, which like the mirror in
the fairy tale of Snow White, so long as Snow White is sleeping, always tells the ugly
Queen that she is beautiful. The mirror lies.
We can make two principal statements and several dependent propositions about the Divine
Mirror of Man: first, all human qualities are found among the gods; second, divine
organization portrays a reorganization of the human mind.
To demonstrate that every human quality has been sometime, somewhere, and even frequently,
a divine quality requires hardly more than a list of references on the history of religion
and anthropology. Let the reader make the test himself; let him try to think of any human
action or trait, no matter how trivial or significant, which a god does not exhibit. The
humans build a great tower to reach the sky. Very well, the gods have already their sky-
topping mountains, their cosmic trees, their pillars of heaven, and many sacred paths by
which souls can ascend and angels descend. When the constructions threaten the gods, the
gods destroy them. So it happened with the giants who piled Ossia upon Pelion to reach
Zeus, who, however, overthrew everything, and as happened with the Tower of Babel, which
the Hebrew Lord sent crashing by lightning and quaking.
But this is a sublime challenge, someone may object; an ordinary act is not divine, for
example, excretion. But urine is a word from Uranus who copiously watered the earth in
earliest times; and gold is the excrement of the gods to some people, perhaps remembering
vaguely an exoterrestrial fall-out of the precious metal.
Is the god assembled anthropomorphically? The implication, even when not stated explicitly
in sacred scriptures and legend, is that all of the traits of the divine do amount to a
creature not unlike man. That Elohim created man in his or their image is, of course, a
direct statement of the Hebrew Genesis, and if one were to compose a physiological mosaic
from all references to Yahweh, the mosaic would evolve to look like Moses and act like him,
including how Moses would like to have acted.
The Divine Mirror, it seems, is more perfect than the gazer. For it contains all of his
qualities and all of his dreams and desires. Sometimes these are contradictory, but the
mirror finds a solution. It may show a god with devilish features, or a god who is both
female and male. Does it ever show a god who is both brave and fearful? Often; despite the
fact that fear creates gods who are afraid of other gods, afraid of themselves, or
mistrustful of their worshiper, this last being a kind of fear that drives gods (as it does
men) to excesses of all kinds. So, indeed did the Lord behave toward Job, when the Devil
drove him to be suspicious of his devoted and good worshipper.
In an early work, C. J. Jung wrote an Answer to Job where brilliantly but in a
fundamentally naive form, he hints that man is too clever for God. "It were better,"
however, "not to wax too conscious of this slight moral superiority over the more
unconscious God." One notes the marvelous schizoid behavior of the human, Job, when he is
trying to control God. The making of the ambivalent god and them the controlling of him
becomes the greatest work of man.
God suspects and is jealous of the game that man is playing, a contradiction-in-
contradiction, mirror in a mirror in a mirror, contra-contra-contradiction, which the
schizoid can continue indefinitely, always one step ahead of God. In the story of Job, one
finds the full range of schizophrenic conduct, including the creation of the Lord as the
preferred instrument for working out human delusions. I trace the schizotypical character
of the human race in other books.
Significantly, wherein lies at least his early naivete, Jung separately focuses his
research upon Job and then upon schizophrenia. In the story of Job and God we even locate a
tendency of humans to make of gods what they would make of themselves if they could, a kind
of unreflective healthy instinctive animal, rid of the curse of self-awareness - - though
this same self-awareness is the only true mark of the human and the source of god as mirror
of man.
Usually, it is declared that the gods are not like man, because they possess an infinity of
virtues. But who is to say what is virtue, except man-bound-in-culture? And what are the
traits that appear infinite in the Divine Mirror but extensions of the valued traits of
mankind. Even philosophers, and certainly theologians, submit to the dictates of mirroring
when they accept the challenge of defining gods, and thereupon they say god is omni-this
and omni-that : omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnicreative, omnivalent, all-loving,
absolutely just, and so on, setting, to be sure, on precisely those qualities that man has
and wants much more of: power, respect, affection, wealth, skill, and knowledge.
To win a debate over whether all divinity that man can know is anthropomorphic hardly needs
empirical evidence. So logical is the proposition, that it is probably tautology. That is,
granted that man can only know by an extension of himself, the self becomes the model of
the real, and no trait can be imagined that is not already present in humanity. Therefore,
in the anthropo-centric sense, all divinity must be anthropomorphic.
In the days when gods were rampaging upon the Earth, theology was close to the disaster-
ridden life of the people, naming and describing the fulsome operations of the divine
forces, transmitting direct commands from above, concocting rites, and letting out the
chains of fear carefully into sublimatory and practical behavior.
When the gods remove themselves somewhat, the chains are slackened. Language, symbols, and
myth are allowed to bury memories deeper. Religion becomes less depictive and denotative,
more general and abstract. Finally, philosophy is freed to play about the sacred and
rationalize the cosmos. The gods of the philosophers are mirrored. "An otiose God, then,
surveying unmoved 'this dusty, fuliginous chaos, ' is the residuum of all this furious
apostrophising." So wrote once Frederic Harrison.
We find that the most ancient people - and we are not told how -- knew that the planet
Jupiter had bands and the planet Saturn had rings. Probably they witnessed them directly
and more closely than at any time until the year 1659 A. D when scientists observed them by
telescope. By the time of Plato, several centuries before Christ, this knowledge was
perhaps only present in legend, and was part of the legend that has the god Zeus Jupiter
overthrowing his father, the god Kronos-Saturn, and binding him to prevent his return to
power (and thus bring further destruction upon the world). The knowledge comes to us via
the works of the platonic philosopher, Proclus, eight hundred years later( ca. 410-1485 A.
D.).
Proclus, in startling clear language, but philosophical language, tells us that Jupiter,
mighty and powerful, the supreme intellect of the universe, bringer of law and order to the
world, asserts his own reason upon the world by putting the also perfect intellect of
Saturn under bonds. Then, because Jupiter is logical and just, he binds himself, too, so
that he also will be subject to his own ordering principles. As I proceeded elsewhere to
trace the development, the statements of Proclus exemplify how a primordial real experience
becomes anaesthetized by its traumatic effects on humans; it is forgotten as direct
experience. Yet it is remembered obsessively in the form of a religious creation legend,
and then the suppressed memory and the legend are subliminated one more step into
philosophy where they are used to express concepts of divine rule and natural law. The new
ideas still give relief to the deep hidden anxieties over the horrible warfare of the gods,
and they promote respect for human government and laws, which, it is said, are and should
be modeled upon the behavior of the gods.
The nature of the gods is geared into the nature of religious organization. The jealous
Yahweh of Moses was not the syncretistic, confederational, religious organization closely
similar to the imperial, bureaucratic, secular-dominated, religious organization of
Solomon. Forms of religious organization have been many, no two quite alike as we are prone
to say. This, too, is a Mirror of Man. From the organization of spirits-shaman-tribal
culture to the organization of the Holy-Trinity-priesthood-Roman Catholic world religion,
variation is endless.
The descent of secular organizations from theocratic ones is well marked. For instance, the
13th century forms of political representation in England and elsewhere owed much to the
representative convocations of the Dominican Order of the centuries preceding. Where not
well-delineated, the lines of descent are concocted, In the 17th century, the Stuart line
of England was "demonstrated" to go back to Adam, the First Man, and the divine right of
monarchy was sustained. We might begin at the earliest age, and go on for many pages
listing the religious structural forms and their secular descendants.
Suffice to say here that the secular forms, so far removed from the primordial religious
ones, are nevertheless still "sky-struck." Stars and totems adorn their banners; the right
and the left factions stem from the Saturnian Throne in the sky; the official secular
calendars are largely religious in origin; the American dollar portrays ancient Egyptian
cosmology; parades, processions, decorations, robes and a multitude of rituals precede and
accompany officers even after they swear an oath, in which "So help me God" may be absent
but the pledge is as symbolically complete and solemn.
Celestially or mundanely, man is operating with the same mental mechanisms and their
external social extrusions. Symbolizing, displacements, identifications, memory, obsession,
cognitive disorders, aversion to others - these psychic movements (were they not mostly
unconscious, they would be called maneuvers or tactics) are all directed at handling
fearfulness, and function in both religious and secular contexts. They are expressed in
habitual, orgiastic, catatonic, and sublimatory behavior, which again have religious and
secular counterparts.
The reader may have remarked that these mechanisms and expressions are schizoid and, if
practiced in full conflict with the customs of one's group, would amount to a full-blown
case of schizophrenia. The human is naturally schizotypus - I call him homo sapiens
schizotypus elsewhere - whether speaking of religious man or secular man; when an
individual diverges from the peculiar schizotypicality of his culture, he is identified as
schizophrenic.
We would stress how much our view contrasts with the conventional approach, which analyzes
the human as a rational individual with egoistic impulses who is struggling to reconcile
these with social or altruistic demands. The distinction between self and society is itself
a socially imposed distinction as it is presented, say, by Henri Bergson or the English
utilitarians (whom he assails). The distinction is ex post facto. The factum is the
schizotypical mechanisms mentioned above. These are what set into motion the operating
religious and secular person. The "social" is immediately part of the person; it arises
from the original gestalt of creation of the human species and in the birth and development
of every person thereafter. The experience of all peoples has been generally the same,
intense ecological stresses anciently operating upon a divided, fearful mind. To say
therefore that gods are "good" and men are "evil" makes anthropological history impossible,
theoretically or as fact. We have already said that gods, relatively or crossculturally
considered, display all "evils" and all "goods". It matters relatively, not absolutely,
that the burden of good and evil is shifted to certain different gods, devils or spirits
going from one culture to another. The basic facts are the common experiences of "gods" and
the ambivalence of the human mind in relation to itself. The ultimate expressions, such as
"selfish" against "altruistic," are just that - expressions - not the fountainhead of the
social problem or of the problem of man against god.
The obverse to "how the gods could be believed to do evil to people" is, "how the gods
could be believed to do good." The efforts of humans to justify the evils visited upon
themselves are extraordinary, considering the gravity of those evils. Some profound reason
must prevent them from declaring that gods and devils are one and the same - a disaster.
Why do they not recognize the animated high-energy forces of the world as the open enemies
of the human race? Indeed, this did become finally the feeling of a great many people in
modern times, whose change of attitude coincided with a de-animation of the forces of
nature.
Primeval man and his successors found good in the gods because in the first place the ideal
of the good god itself performed useful functions. The gods created man, and man was
superior to the mammals whom he resembled and lived among. Therefore, gods should be loved
for their creative deeds.
Still, gratitude is a refined subliminatory trait that would hardly result from this
syllogism. There had to arise a satisfying powerful identity out of the gestalt of
creation: the creative god was built into the mind of the creature; it was his first
projective delusion. His first great relief from fear was placing the responsibility for
his creation, not upon himself (an idea that must promptly have occurred) but upon "some
himself not himself," ergo a god. Who denied god, denied himself; who denied himself would
not survive. The madness of great delusions was the condition for survival.
There remained only the elaboration of the madness into human norms. A quick transfer of
traits occurred - man gave to god all of his abilities and took them back as blessed
gifts, down to the rudiments of stone age technology, the very fashioning of a club.
Because of the obvious powerfulness of the gods, the gifts acquired power in the human
mind, and man would step forward to control the world with an obsessive confidence, a false
confidence, very often, yet with enough successes to accredit the transfer. At the same
time, man could deny his personal responsibility for all that he was creating.
Further, by imitating the gods, invention was promoted. More and more objects and
procedures for controlling himself and others were imagined to descend from the gods and
more and more were created under divine inspiration. This despite the interference of the
gods thenceforth in inventions of all kinds, wherein nothing could be invented and applied
unless it had come from the gods or was blessed by the gods. The psychological mechanism
had its drawbacks; in the most peaceful and pragmatic periods, the wellsprings of invention
were overlooked, while the subservience of practical innovation and social reforms to
religious dogmas and rituals was damned.
The mechanism for projecting and retrojecting gifts of power and techniques was in itself
adequate to explain why a punitive god could be assigned benevolent and beneficent
qualities. Yet it was not the only source of the idea of the good god. The first mutant
humans came into being in the midst of chaos and destruction. That they had survived while
all around them lay a biosphere of death and destruction, including what had been their own
kind, was a miracle; their minds were now equipped to reflect upon it.
Mourning was a trait already possessed; mammals and primates mourn. Beyond mourning,
however, or if human mourning were t be distinguished, was a new consciousness of the self,
an individuation from the group, that could see what had happened to others, see what
oneself had escaped, and assign to the escape a selective feature, a blessedness, a sense
of being chosen for survival.
Thus arises the quality of personal satisfaction and joy amidst ruin, that interjects
itself into the most grandiose human tragedies, and causes people to dance, laugh, and sing
when the world shakes and burns around them. It was a primordial human acquisition,
directly connected with the animated forces of destruction. Sailors, returning aboard a
ship off of Krakatoa in 1883, who watched the desolation of their families on the shore
from volcanic explosion and tsunamis, laughed and jumped with joy that they were being
spared. Hysterical conduct, to be sure, in awful fear, but such is the nature of hysteria,
and laughter often is a fringe around hysteria.
The divine identification and imitation justified and provided morale for survivors to
revive and conquer. A newly-acquired super-mammalian aggression abetted the profits of
survival. Those who survived could move out, reinforced by grace of the gods, and in
imitation of the gods, readily loot, kill, or enslave whoever remained alive and strange.
The material gains of aggression were thenceforth regarded in the category of gifts of the
gods, and regularly some portion of them was returned to the gods by means of sacrifices.
From old Mexico Brundage gives us a song composed by the Emperor Axayacatl: "The flower
death (for sacrifice and cannibalism) came down to Earth. It came here. It had been created
in Tlapallan (Heaven)."
Nor were these the only material benefits that came from the divine delusion. On some
occasions, carbohydrates descended from the sky, notably during times associated with
terrifying celestial phenomena between 3000 and 3500 years ago when manna, soma, and
ambrosia were provided to starving survivors. This I explain in The Lately Tortured Earth,
where too, many legends are reported insisting that copper, gold, silver, petroleum and
iron were exploded or dropped onto Earth and used by their finders. Meteoric iron was
commonly used long before the controversial "Iron Age" and may have fallen in amounts
sufficient to institute this age. Myths of dragons burying gold are met with. And so on.
The stone (and wood) age might have gone on forever if the surface of the Earth had not
been blasted into metals and by metals from the skies. If this is a fact, then mankind
would be historically as well as psychologically blessed by the gods.
Fountains and springs of water erupted, too, in many places, even where the pre-existing
waters had been diverted or buried, so that the gods could be said to have first removed
good things and then relented and given them back. The gods, sang Homer, were the givers of
all good things. Jupiter took away fire to punish mankind; the god-hero Prometheus stole it
and gave it back to man; Zeus enchained and tortured Prometheus eternally for his gift. But
the fire remained.
We have spoken largely of displacement, identification, projection, and aggression
heretofore. Alongside these mechanisms moves habit, the human's answer to the blunting of
instinctive behavior during the creation of self-awareness.
Outstanding in human behavior is the voluntary and unconsciously motivated repetition of
actions in every sphere of life. In individuals, instinct serves for habit, the distinction
generally being that instinct is untrained. Habit and custom are inculcated by training or
imitation. Not only is habit pervasive of normal activities of individuals and groups. It
is also characteristic of many psychopathologies, where it is called obsession.
The origin of habit and custom lay in the primeval fears of the self-aware human, and the
discipline that such fears subconsciously and later consciously impressed upon him. First
came schizophrenic obsession. The more intense a blow or trauma to the body (mind), the
more intensely and frequently it is autoinflicted neurologically afterwards. An obsession
is an auto-inflicted reiteration of some or all of the initial reaction to a trauma. An
obsession discharges quantas of the stored force of the trauma, which originally could be
tolerated short of death only by it redistribution (i. e., memorizing) in successively less
related circuitries contacting the affected area. Some effect of a trauma also are
discharged through interfering circuitries, some of which were developed in primeval man
analogously obsessive and some in non-analogous behavior, especially symbolic
manifestations and erratic uncontrolled seizures.
These forms of dissipating the impactive force of the trauma are founded upon analogous
primate behavior. They establish themselves as quasi-voluntary and voluntary activities of
the split self, which more or less observes its own reactions and discharges. They are seen
by men as voluntary because the self views the action as a decision of two or more
compromising internal selves.
Four major patterns of expression emerged finally from the primeval trauma: catatonic,
obsessive, sublimatory, and orgiastic behavior. Authentically human behavior was ever after
derived and composed from one or more of these patterns. Hence all human behavior reflects,
no matter at how great a distance in time and pragmatic relevance, the traumas of cosmic
destruction and creation that made and successively battered primeval humans.
The catatonic consists of activity whose primeval function was to keep the world unchanged.
The Atlas who held the world on his back was a catatonic symbol of arrested movement; when
Atlas shrugs, the Earth shakes, The Hindu Manu who held the world up for ages while
standing on one leg and meditating is another catatonic god. Since the Hebrew god rested on
the seventh day of creation and ordered his example to be followed forever, many millions
of people have dreaded to violate the Sabbath, fearing that the world would be upset in
various ways by the angry God.
Physiologically, catatonism is a freezing effect, to prevent the conscious from opening up
blockages of suppressed fear. It acts promiscuously, but also in more sophisticated ways,
that is, partially and selectively, reluctantly forced to do so by other more determined
modes of coping with the needs of the organism.
Primevally, the person froze with fear. Symbolically, humanly, the meaning of freezing with
fear became the preservation, at all costs, of existing circumstances, the arresting of the
world, of sense intakes, of outputs, of activity, and especially of free or creative
activity, all both individually and socially. By projection, if the person and group stop,
the disorderly processes of nature will stop; the disorderly processes are deemed to
proceed because people are moving and acting.
Obsessive activity has the function-effect of sustaining a line of behavior, of repeating
it endlessly with as little deviation as possible. The first symbols and sighs of the self-
aware persons were naming and ejaculating. Almost instantly this became liturgy, a
continuous repetition - - expressive, denotative, and expiatory - - - of anguish,
labeling of the cause of anguish, and formula for control of the cause, all in one
utterance, repeated continuously. Thenceforth, over thousands of years, the obsessive in
symbol and behavior become infinitely varied and yet basically recognizable as originating
in fearfulness and its reciprocal of ritual controls. Habit, "the great flywheel of
progress" (William James), and custom came to dominate human affairs.
Sublimatory activity functions and has the effects of discharging impulses that are
traumatically aroused, together with associated agglomerated impulses, by deviant behavior
that simultaneously and subconsciously is analogous enough to the impulses to be
organically tolerated and yet sends the organism in new directions that not only complement
and supplement but also contradict other behaviors. Even when contradictory, the
sublimation is subconsciously recognized by others to be providing such discharges and is
accepted and even encouraged by them.
Symbolic communication is heavily developed by and originates in sublimatory behavior
because it is like an endless treasury of ambiguities, flexible for the most remotely
analogous tie-ins of original impulses and ultimate conduct.
Orgiastic behavior functions and has the effects of discharges through explosions of the
original traumatic force. It has the characteristics of erratic displays of energy, of
spastic behavior, and acknowledged as such: it is actually approved not despite, but
because of, its senselessness. It demands death, sacrifices, cannibalism, self-mutilation
and the wounding of other human, animal, plants, property. It is both suppressed by and
revenges itself upon the other patterns of behavior-erasing obsessions in a burst of
destructiveness; alternating with catatonic behavior sometimes side by side; destroying and
giving new forms to sublimatory behavior.
The cumulative effect of the four behavior patterns of man was to set him apart as a
voluntary self-mover. The continuous gap between the two aware selves allowed a kind of
fission-fusion reaction on an energy scale immensely larger and more efficient than that of
which animals and hominids were capable. Projects of many different kinds could be
generated and carried on. Combinations of the four patterns provided a large variety of
model or test cases, the effects of which might be pragmatically adjudged good or bad,
before deciding to adopt them as ordinary behavior.
The divine, thereupon, becomes a mirror image of the human, just as schizotypical as, or
more so, than man, exhibiting human traits, mechanisms, and expressions. No two minds can
see the same image in the mirror. This mirror is emphatically not divorced from human
experience. It reflects indeed man's most destructive and exhilarating experiences. All
gods are connected with disaster, the greater the god the more central his role in ancient
disasters whose scope is unimaginable to most people today. The primordial human mind
governs the modern mind, being the same mind, being retentive of the same experiences. We
presented the view earlier that all religion goes back, overtly or covertly, to the first
gods . We presented arguments that mankind was a creation of the very experiences that
presented the gods to view. In discussing scripture and legend, we mentioned that the
figure of Christ was heavily Greco-Romanized, perhaps even formed for the Gospels by a
philosopher-dramatist, Seneca.
The reader may then have wondered: since early Christians had a New Testament, a new model
of God and were antisemitic (Seneca was so too), why did they not cut their ties with Old
Testament Judaism? The reason, I think, is clear: the Christians needed the catastrophic
history afforded by Old Testament religion; they required the Creation chaos, the Flood,
the harassment of Job, the Tower of Babel, the Destruction of the Cities of the Plain, and
the Exodus. Otherwise, they would have condemned themselves to early obsolescence and
extinction.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER EIGHT
INDISPENSABLE GODS
We have progressed so far from the early chapters of this book that a review of them is
probably needed, a final commentary on the divine succession and historical religions.
Historical religions conserve the memory of a certain time when the world was created and
humans came into being. None says that mankind always existed, or that he evolved
mechanically by random association of particles. A purposeful act took place at a certain
time. Most religions say that mankind was subsequently destroyed and recreated. Almost
always the extermination of humanity stops short at a surviving couple or the equivalent.
The subsequent homologue of the first chaos is a subsequent set of catastrophes by flood,
fire, wind, and earth movements.
To preserve the memory of the first time of creation is a function of rituals, liturgy,
anniversaries, and sacrifices. Many religions have strenuously sought to reproduce, short
of deliberately re-annihilating themselves, the exact circumstances of chaos and creation.
They have obsessively kept forms, practices, and words that go back to the beginnings of
all religion and the first experience with the gods.
All historical religions are therefore highly conservative and weaken their foundations as
soon as they admit deviations. The function of inescapable and exactly repetitive practices
and symbols is to relieve the massive anxiety stored from the earliest times by confessing
what happened in those times and reliving them successfully.
What appears to be radical in religious history is reactionary. Practitioners of the
religion, wrought up beyond sufferance, find even the rigid rites of their church
insufficient to recapture the moments of chaos and creation. Prophets, apostates,
evangelizes, and orgiasts arise. So do whirling dervishes and berserkers. They are chiliast
or millennialists. They proclaim the end of the world while demanding that everyone
acknowledge the full and immediate meaning of the creation of the world. They prepare to
die and be saved in the recapitulation of the original catastrophic times.
All historical religions are based upon punitive gods, are self-punitive and are punitive
towards others. Gods are adjudged good to the degree to which they refrain from destroying
their creatures. Humans exist by divine tolerance. A common word for a good person in most
religions in "god-fearing". Personal merit through skills, altruism, and dogmatic belief
and practice is sometimes, but more often not, a guarantee to a greater of lesser extent of
the gods' benevolence; never is merit a perfect or universal guarantee. This belief in the
denial to merit of its due is not, therefore, as some think, a connivance of religion with
the envious mob.
Sacrifices are forms of punishment of the self and others to forestall, and therefore to
control, a punishment from Heaven. The concept of representation effectively lets a partial
sacrifice stand for a full sacrifice and a sacrifice of others stand for a sacrifice of
oneself. Sacrifices are said to be gifts freely given; yet it is acknowledged that
withholding sacrifices will be followed by divine retribution. The more valuable the
sacrifice, and the more strict the rules under which sacrifice and all other kinds of
punishment occur, the more pleasing to the gods.
Guilt is self-punishment. It is the refusal of pleasure to some negative degree. We often
knows it in its late and rather pragmatic sense: guilt is what makes a fickle creature
responsible; without guilt, personal and social discipline would be impossible. To get
relief from guilt, one follows religious directives or some secularized substitute such as
warring for one's country or pursuing "the work ethic."
But primeval guilt originated from the terror of "the other self," the terror produced out
of the minute systemic delay of instinctive impulses. At the same time, the heavens were
turbulent and terrifying. To control one's unbalanced self, one signaled the gods to
arbitrate; and the gods responded, saying, "Your soul is a struggle of good and evil. We,
with your cooperation, will take care that the good dominates you. You are not sick. Be
hopeful. Help is on its way." This formula, although it can be called delusion, was a great
invention. Granted the essential incurability of human schizotypicality, it alone could
lead to a manageable psychic world.
Important anniversaries or holy days are celebrations of divine destruction and near escape
from destruction. Every truly religious anniversary celebration is therefore ambivalently
tragic and joyful. Anniversary excesses and orgies, at both extremes of somberness and
exuberance, are nevertheless occasions for the relief of tragic memory, more or less deeply
suppressed. Anniversaries cluster around the great cycles of the ages, which give evidence
of having been common to most of the world's cultures. Calendar diversions, not
psychological changes, have driven apart the anniversaries of different cultures; they are
farther apart in days than they are in mind. The end of the year inspires saturnalia in
many cultures. Also thus, Roman Catholic and Greek churches mark a different Easter holiday
for unessential reasons. Anniversaries sometimes are pulled together in a given culture by
their original proximity during a cycle such as a solar year and by their psychological
resemblance. Thus, Venus (perhaps at -3437 B. P., where Before Present =1984 A. D.) and
Mars catastrophes (perhaps in -2671) occurred around March 23, close to the Spring equinox;
the holidays were merged ultimately, and are submerged at Easter time in Christendom and
comparable holidays in other cultures.
Sublimation, like ritual, is universal in religion; it pacifies, dissembles, represents,
and rationalizes the strict conditions of the fatal times. Sublimation becomes more secular
and pragmatic with the evaporation of stored anxiety over long periods of prosperity and
peace. Disaster, deprivation, and frustration raise anxiety levels; they cause reactions
against secular sublimation occurring in the artistic, social, political and religious
spheres; these activities are attacked as irrelevant and blasphemous.
Furthermore, all religions incorporate directives for every aspect of life -- work, sex,
property, power, relations, health, and knowledge. Humanity was created and made deistic at
the same time; the human mind is not logical, but it is wholly occupied by a way of looking
at the world as a supernatural creation. The question of separating special values and
calling these "the province of religion" has no meaning to a mind that was originally
formed with every value at stake.
Religious practices are basically similar everywhere and have been from the start.
Permutations of practices are innumerable. The new humans executed religious observances
among their first acts. In this sense, all the world's religions came from one religion,
that of the first and only band of humans. Then different experiences befell the different
peoples. Some were non-catastrophic experiences and these brought many minor changes. Other
experiences were catastrophic -- global and intense -- and these reinforced the basic
resemblances of religions while at the same time prompting many minor variations. Thus
ultimately, history came to witness a similar succession of great gods ruling amidst a
congeries of ethnic religions.
One god has been replaced by another on various occasions. Almost always, the replacements
successful because of unconscious techniques of cross-identification and rationalization.
Sometimes men sought to replace gods by deliberate choice, with or without the help of
events such as cultural amalgamation; invariably then compulsion and heavy propaganda were
employed. Such occurred when Hinduism moved over Southeast Asia, when Christianity came to
dominate the Roman World, and when Islam moved across Asia and Africa.
The replacement of all gods by materialistic and atheistic ideology is a special case,
discoverable, in non-catastrophic times, among philosophical schools such as the ancient
cynics, among scientists and humanists of the post-enlightenment, and among communists.
Invariably secular replacers have argued the lack of empirical proof of the existence of
gods; they have also stressed the contradictions of ruthlessness and mercy in the concepts
of god; and they have attacked the behavior of religious establishments. As alternative
behavior they have recommended principles of brotherly love, cooperation, and mental
health, among humans, or principles of an ideally organized state that provides enough
goods to satisfy people's needs without recourse to supernatural agents.
The major proof that such ideologies might succeed is based upon the waning of the gods
when societies possess a pragmatically optimistic morale and are materially prosperous or
believed to be potentially so, as recently. Then the gods have seemed remote and unneeded;
considerations of logic and efficiency would appear to dictate their abandonment, removal,
and forgetting.
Even under optimal conditions of prosperity, secular morale, compulsion and propaganda, the
replacement has proceeded slowly and painfully. At the peak of their success, the ungodly
ideologies have been undermined by new gods (e. g., Christianity in the Roman Empire),
resisted successfully by the masses (e. g., communist Poland, 1945-1983 A. D.), transformed
into secular religions of temporary duration (e. g., Roman Emperor worship, der Fuhrer
Hitler, Comrade Lenin), or transformed into pseudo-scientific therapeutic or philosophical
sects employing substitute semi-divine agents (e. g., gurus, anthroposophists).
The fundamental obstacle to ungodliness has been the construction of the human mind.
Inasmuch as the events of creation that split the hominid character introduced the
splitters as gods, humans become god-seekers as part of becoming human. The particular
manner in which the universe was seen for the first time implied perforce the
instrumentality of divinity. Self-awareness, formed a nature which was unceasingly prone to
discover gods.
Far from being an afterthought, the gods were a first thought. To excise this thought,
after thousands of years of experience with it. was not only most difficult pragmatically;
it was structurally impossible, at least as long as the origins, function, and mental
structure of religion were not understood.
To forget the gods is impossible; the memory deck can only be reshuffled. To retain self-
awareness without schizotypicality is a contradiction in terms. Human creation involved a
basic reconstruction of mammalian mind; to extinguish this essential schizotypicality would
restore man as an instinctive mammal, but is in any event now physiologically and
psychologically impossible. Symbolism as the effect of the split self, flows naturally and
cannot be obliterated. By the same logic and dynamics, treating symbolically with both the
"other self" and the "outsider-others" must inevitably result in projectional thought, that
is, treating the "outside other" with the same mechanism and feeling that the self utilizes
in dealing with its "own other."
All of this process is transactional and the transaction is of the essence of human being.
Therefore a group mode of projection, a group communication, is inherent in the individual-
social complex. Thence, naturally, whatever is unanswered and questionable becomes a matter
for resort to authority -- that is, a prevailing, preponderant group opinion. Since the
group is forever under historical and existential stress, it is forever seeking authority
and incapable of receiving satisfactory answers to its questions without a symbolic,
abstract and animate referent that provides solution. Thus it happens that, if humans
exist, god exists. God is the closing of the circle -- both question and answer. But so
inextricable are the question and answer that only logical artifice can distinguish and
designate the two.
Man's need to control the terrible and the terror causes him to invent gods. Nowadays, if
one were asked how to control or stop an advancing comet, he would dismiss the possibility,
and say that we must await it. He is not prepared to undertake all the actions that ancient
man had ready just for such approaching catastrophes -- propitiation, sacrifice, ritual,
saturnalia, "going on the warpath." Nevertheless, as catastrophe approaches, at first
slowly and then rapidly, and then hysterically, the modern human will act like his
ancestors, including the excesses of guilt for not having foreseen the deserved end of all
folly. He will draw upon the dwindling and remaining reserves of the "old time religion."
If the fossil voices telling us of the nature of the gods and of the rules for man's
behavior respecting the gods are distorted and incorrect, and though they are not valid and
reliable guides, yet these voices have told us things of positive value. They have given us
foundations of history. They have recounted the basic facts of existence repeatedly. They
have conjured existences differing from ours. They have in effect performed innumerable
experiments with the allegedly divine from which we can learn what not to do religiously,
and to a lesser extent what to do.
Perhaps the greatest lesson they have taught us (by negative inference) is that the
religion of today and tomorrow should not be sought in the religion of the past: that
humans, until they reach some certain level of perfection cannot be trusted to have known
and arrived at the nature of the gods. Whenever historical man has said "Let us change our
religion," (even if he does so in the name of preserving the old religion) he is saying "We
were wrong about god and religion and it is up to us now to find a new way to god and a new
religion."
The gods have retired into new forms, but they still operate through the busy humans whom
the poet Rilke called "the bees of the invisible." The gods are still everywhere and are
not as remote as our scientific texts would have us believe. They are in astrology, in
magic, in fortune-telling; they fly to the scenes of disaster; they augment the forces of
authority; they heal and console; they scare; they make anxious; they set the rituals for a
multitude as they have done since the times of Ouranos. They assume their own negation: for
they argue with themselves in Natural Law, Bureaucracy, in Dogmatic Materialism, in Reified
Words, in Mummified Heroes, in Times and Worlds without End. They let themselves be molded
into One and the One obliges his necessities by becoming Many. Beyond all else, they stand
at ease waiting for Armageddon and the Day of Judgment. Then they will don their armor and
gather their hosts.
Although they have retired it still takes rare courage to contemplate all of their
continuing manifestations and to resist the invention of new negations. There is yet
nowhere else to go and few who would follow.
By skimming along on the thin ice of the cerebral cortex or by mathematical astrophysics or
metaphysics or another such exercise, the gods can be sublimated. Dumb bestiality may be
equally functional. We think that of all ways of facing them, the best is to look at them
everywhere, contemplate their every manifestation, anticipate their reappearance, but do no
more. If there is any question of human madness, it is erased when one pretends to be
divine. Our human destiny is an open question. We deny our humanity if we try to close it.
We belittle ourselves if we plead with the gods to answer the question at any cost.
Whenever gods and religious practices have been abandoned, put aside, forgotten, changed
consciously or unconsciously, those who made such changes are saying to us their
descendants, "Do not think that our ancestors, or us, or even you, will have the answer.
There will be New Testaments without end." We the present generation are told that we are
not the first, nor the last, but a truth-seeking figure in the series of forevers until the
day when somehow, somewhere, we shall be perfect. At which time, we might, if we dared,
claim omniscience, omnipotence, and the fullness of virtue.
In hastening to accuse traditional religion of claiming falsely absolute truth and
morality, we often fail to see in the seeming absoluteness its inherent self-confessed
contradiction. Just as psychiatry has proven that excesses of anger, self-destructiveness
and aggression have ordinarily come out of self-doubt and self-hatred, so we can see in the
madness and excesses of historical religious behavior the same psychological sources of
self-doubt and self-hatred transformed into dogma, authority, bigotry, punition and guilt
in the name of absolute achievement and arrival at the nirvana of perfection. Yet even
while civilizations and peoples are being destroyed in the name of absolute truth, newly
arrived at, a class of readers or priests of the absolute are contradicting the behavior in
gushes of explanations and interpretations of the ways of the gods. As the Hindu Brahmin
calculates, the warrior slays. As Anselm seeks proof, King Arthur crusades.
The most important question of religion is not how to eradicate gods, but to establish gods
at one with humanity and the human soul. For there can be no logical or moral objection to
the concept of and belief in gods in themselves; again the human being, insofar as he knows
any happiness, has known it in activities of a sublime sort that are inextricable from the
divine. A formula and model is required, which is physically possible, and which will
forego conflicts of the self, among humans, and between devils and gods. Specifications
are: a) sufficient relief from fearful stress to permit the search for a new formula; b) a
search for physico-chemical change agents (whether mutational or continuously operative)
that would eliminate terroristic memories, with all that subtends from such in the way of
self-destructiveness and other-destructiveness without damaging, and optimally while
promoting, the affectional and inventive facilities of humans; c) and, while the search
goes on, and anticipating that the search may be unsuccessful, the invention of social
strategies( therapies and institutions) that will hold the conflicts in abeyance
indefinitely.
Secularism is a negative counterattack against religion, justifiable as a restraint against
malpractices known to everyone. Generally, however, humankind is not in a state to abandon
religion and the gods. At best it is capable of achieving a concerted view of an overall
divinity and the sacredness of existence. It can borrow from and encroach upon science.
Great good would ensue, provided that the concerted belief could work its way into the aims
and practices of myriad rituals of human lives.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART II.
THEOTROPY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER NINE
SACRAL VS. SECULAR MAN
Any old religion is likely to have a complete life-program, guaranteed to give
satisfaction. It will include answers to all problems that arise, with a counseling service
from birth to death. This is no mean achievement, but rather a work of unceasing genius
characterizing all ages and all cultures, and therefore thousands of designs and operative
systems. Our admiration of the astronomical universe pales in the light of universal
religiousness. Indeed, if one is hungry for proofs of the existence of ultimate design and
intelligent gods, here is fertile ground to plow.
But why, out of all this experience has there not occurred one religion of all times and
places for all people such that a model human being would lead a happy life? Why should not
one formula have been discovered? Why all the changes, conflicts, misery? In replacing the
instinctive existence of other creatures, why could not man rapidly invent just that proper
set of behaviors that would satisfy the respective and combined needs of his human
mechanisms and culminate in expressions of satisfactory existence? Is there some practical
impossibility, the fault of the external world? Or is there some inherent contradiction of
the mechanisms of human nature?
Let us set up a model of religious citizen (not a leader) and inquire whether he should be
happy, and, if not, why not. We call him "sacral man." not because he is sacred, but
because he believes a great many phenomena and actions are sacred. He sacralizes.
A thorough moral defense of religion from the standpoint of its expression through sacral
man has not appealed to modern writers. Such old and religiously circumscribed works as
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress will hardly do for these days, when the field instruments of
sociology, biology, psychology, economics and political science need to be orchestrated for
the purpose. Available are negative critiques of ritual and assaults upon the supernatural.
But where are the moral scientific (as opposed to merely sociological) studies of the
Baptist and the Secularist living on the same street, multiplied a thousandfold to cover
the world scene?
The ideal sacral person is born of religious parents, is baptized at an early age, and
attends schools whose curriculum and teachers are of same belief. He or she hears of the
gods, and experiences religious rituals, at an early age, so that by the time of receiving
catechism he is already identified with supernatural beings and is pleased to learn that
they have played the most important role in all major and many minor events of the history
of his culture. Well before receiving formal religious instruction, he has been rewarded
and punished in the name of the gods, and (he is convinced) by them directly. He knows this
latter to be true, because he has had indirect and accidental rewards and punishments at
the hands of what "must have been god." He has a fairly concrete impression of at least one
god, the Great God, anthropomorphic but dressed in ritual clothing. He knows of many
instances in which God has intervened in the current lives of persons dear or near to him,
and to many others that have been the objects of his affection or the attention of his
closely identified mentors.
Following upon years of catechism, he can explain events by himself to the satisfaction of
members of his religion, and possesses a general history of his group and of mankind from
their earliest creation by his gods. He can sacralize readily, that is, impute sacred
meaning to any event, natural or human, consistent with his religion. His religious mentors
have long since informed him of the political climate of his larger culture respecting his
religion, so that he can know what to expect from strangers in and outside of his culture.
He knows how to invoke the gods by prayers and rites, even only by mentation and, perhaps
with a poor sense of statistics, believes his score of successes far outnumbers his score
of failures. He enjoys a logic that employs heavily the formula, "This follows That because
God willed it;" "God must have willed This" (where 'This' is an event with significance and
within the expected scope of God's actions -- love -- death, etc., or so unusual as to be
the work of God); "This other cannot be, because God would not will it."
He questions authority, since he is early forewarned of its religious untrustworthiness. He
pursues a line of secular work regularly and responsibly, as an offshoot of religious
ritual behavior. He understands readily the news of the larger world, for there is a
general correlation between his political and religious friends and enemies. By virtue of
his early training in displacement and projection, he can readily conceive of the larger
society, even the whole world's people, within the sphere of and dependent upon his gods.
His sources of mundane authority, if not religious, partake of the respect, authenticity,
and reliability granted religious authority. Births, marriages, accidents, careers,
illnesses, and deaths of all with whom he identifies -- who are part of him -- are handled
by old, well-known procedures. He is probably better able to confront a personal disaster
by appropriate sacred explanations, instead of trying to cope with it independently as for
instance, does the character Charlotte, in Joan Didion's novel, A Book of Common Prayer,
who, highly secularized but also fearful of self-examination, slips into catatonic denial
and mourning when it develops that her daughter was pursuing another life, an alter ego, of
political criminality. For sacral man, ways and limits of mourning are well-set. Reactions
and decisions are pre-fabricated. He can feel secure that all happens as part of a sacred
history, elevated to celestial levels of meaning, and contemplates and suffers his own
death in the same frame of mind. Since he identifies with gods, his time scales for
personal achievement and for the expected future history of the world, including even
rewards and punishments for actors on the present scene, are celestial as well as according
to the secular calendar. He is confident of indirect and unknown measures being taken on
his behalf by supernatural agencies.
From early childhood, he has been god-fearing. By satisfying the gods, he is exempted from
much fear of men and accidents: "If I please God, God will take care of me;" "When God
calls, I am ready to go." He realizes very early in life that he has problems of self-
control; he projects the unruly selves onto the deities, and thus can "bargain with them at
arm's length. Self-hate becomes devil-hate. When his psychic system becomes well
established, he acquires self-confidence.
He has several persisting problems. Some are due to his inherent structure as a human
being. Others are owing to his uniqueness when confronted by what must, after all, be a
general formula of his religion for handling all humans. There occur also conflictful
features of his larger culture, and accidents and natural disasters. Thus his religion, so
holy to him, may be disliked by other groups with whom he must deal. He ( and his group)
may have such consistently bad luck with nature that active punitive measures are
continually taken -prayers, sacrifices, guilt, fasting and abstentions. Aggressive behavior
against outsiders is sometimes called for by prophecy and divination: "God needs help in
punishing his enemies."
Furthermore, he may be genetically a "difficult character" for his religious institutions,
a "nervous type" uncontrollably impatient with ritual, a person whose parents were a little
deviant and unwittingly made him more deviant from the religious norms of belief and
behavior. Guilt-feelings, self-destructiveness, suspiciousness, extravagant behavior
(aggressiveness, asceticism, etc.) may result.
Finally his modes of logic may interfere with what he wants to do with himself and the
world. If the gods manage so much, he is left to cope with little, and may see little need
for pragmatic learning. He may, by continuous resort to his religious logic, become stupid
and retarded in contributing to and gaining from the larger culture, where different logics
are called for, such as "This cannot occur without That" or "To obtain, That, do This and
no more." He may suffer from a great many floating opinions, unanchored to mundane cause
and effect, good for ritual, useless for practical life, whether dealing with people or
tools.
Regarding these issues as a whole, one large risk seems to confront model religious
citizens. The near impossibility of a general religious system being all things to all
people all the time causes universal individual problems within the religion. It also
causes divisions into priesthood and parishioners, mystics and ritualists, managers and
managed, and so on, which aggravate the insecurities of all affected by the divisions, that
is, of all believers. Ritual resembles instinctive behavior and may cover most aspects of
life except revelation. No religion exists without a place for mystic revelation. Yet
revelation is the opposite of ritual. Somehow every church must give birth to and nurture
this hero (or assassin).
In addition, every religion exists within at least a partially secularized society; even in
the most simple tribal society, where all seems to be definitively sacralized, there is an
everyday need to confront and exploit nature, to use tools variously, to deal with
outsiders. Conditions change; religion is conditioned; religions change. Every ritual
change is a slap in the face of the religion, and face-saving tactics are numerous.
I am not taking present Western European society as typical of religious settings, for this
would be too easy. Change and secularization are rampant. I am trying here, as elsewhere in
this study, to employ the most conservative type of analysis, and to avoid taking advantage
of the many loop-holes of speculation and illustrations that religious history and
philosophy ordinarily profit from.
I am asking consideration of relatively changeless culture, while asserting that there is
never a state of changelessness. And so, within and outside the model citizen, change is
happening and causes him lifetime anxieties which the religion cannot possibly control by
scripture or rites. A calculus of felicity is not difficult to imagine. The greater the
stresses within the church and in the relations (direct and indirectly effective) between
the church and the environment, the greater become the anxieties and uncontrollable
outbursts of our model citizen; the greater then the changes within his groups as well.
In none of this discussion have we spoken of the moral values of the activity, except we
have presumed a kind of dolce vita religiosa for the citizen. We have not asked how many
orphans has he sheltered, how many cannibal feasts has he enjoyed, or how productive has he
been, nor have we made any quantitative gauges of his feelings of nearness to god.
It seems that we must always come up to the point where we are saying "What his religion
happens to say is good, is in fact good." whereas we know "in our hearts and minds" that
this cannot be. There has to be more than this to justify a religion on moral grounds. Is
there some metaphysical morality that can weed out bad from good religions, bad from good
citizens?
Or, perhaps, a model of secular man can reveal, by way of contrast, a morality
overshadowing religious morality. Let us see. As with sacral man, we shall be taking an
optimistic view of his development; the model is optimistically biased. Here now the person
we have in mind begins life as the child of parents and in a group who disbelieve in the
supernatural and practice no rites in the name of gods or spirits. They point out to the
infant actions and persons whose effects are good or bad. The child is taught that nothing
exists unless it can be experienced by himself and proven to his authorities, for he has
these, too, in his parents and attendants. He is trained to reason pragmatically rather
than to practice religious rituals or seek revelations.
He is ritualized, but in the name of necessary training to achieve good or logically
necessary effects. By reward and punishment he is taught to seek or avoid objects, persons
and activities that he is likely to encounter. He is discharged from training when his own
sense of right and wrong appears to rule him adequately.
He learns that his society is benign in its intentions toward him, behaves justly toward
him and others, and protects him from himself, potential assailants, and foreign enemies.
If he participates voluntarily in his own training, he will acquire skills that the
economic system and the governments will welcome and pay him to use.
Ritualized or routine training is justified in terms of its consequences. As the British
Statesman Gladstone put it (1876) in the years when the concept was becoming current, "The
Secularist.... does not of necessity assert anything but the positive and exclusive claims
of the purposes, the enjoyments, and the needs, presented to us in the world of sight and
experience."
There is only body, not soul (except metaphorically), and no afterlife to look forward to
or worry about. He may enjoy fictional stories about the supernatural; he may pretend "for
fun" that any phenomenon is unreal. He observes a number of secular holidays arising out of
political, social, and heroic events.
His respect for scientific method (empiricism, facts, logic, experiment, control of the
environment) is high; he claims to believe only in its application and findings, whether in
the human or the natural realm. He expects a continuous upgrading of his life, partly
because of a general upsurge in health and living standards. His feelings are not rigid nor
profound, He expects every person to do his duty, and does not accept authority without
explanation in material, empirical, and logical terms. He seeks generally to belong to
groups whose leaders are elective.
What will be our felicity calculus for such a model citizen? He may be on the whole as
"happy" as the religious citizen. The word "happy" would mean a usual mild euphoria, which,
we must admit, may come genetically, or as a result of brute affection generously granted
the infant being. Still, this affection may be tendered by his identification with "Infant
Jesus" in certain cultures, which would therefore allow an intrusion of religion even into
the recesses of infancy.
What he loses of the security in the perceived protection of the gods, he makes up for by
an increase of security owing to the perceived way in which changing explanations go along
with changing events. His defenses stop at the grave, but his hopes of increased beneficial
effects of science for himself and his human identifiees are greater.
He has fewer judges of his actions, and perceives fewer entities to please. He will,
however, be more frequently and poignantly disappointed with humans, because their conduct
is not mediated through his gods, and strikes him directly and rudely. His only hope is
other humans. This increases his load of fear and anxiety, and probably this will be
heavier than the fearload of religious man.
His temperament may also be more mercurial. On one hand, his life offers less inspiration
and may be insipid, while on the other hand he may strain for sensory stimuli and orgiastic
behavior. He is not likely to be less aggressive or less vicious than religious man.
His morality is no more explainable than that of religious man. He simply holds it on
natural grounds: "That is the way people behave when they are not driven by superstition or
authority."
The secularization of modern times may well have had its likenesses at certain times and
among certain groups of the Golden Age of Saturn, the Confucian period of China, the Middle
Bronze Age in the Near East, the Classical age of Greece, the pagan Roman Empire, the
Renaissance, and other eras. The clash between the religious and the secular is prominently
displayed. We have an idea that a large section of the elite, at least, in these eras was a
disbeliever, a shopper for ideas, luxuriating in freedoms of choice among supernatural
views and between cultism and materialism. Here may be the difference -- freedom of choice
against a bound-up cosmos, not secularism versus supernaturalism or religion or sacralism.
We cannot be certain at all that the secular man has ever been really secular, rather than
merely a disintegrated sacred man.
The modern secular man was emerging in the Renaissance. Machiavelli was living at the same
time as Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuit order. Loyola, unlike
the author of the Prince, who moved fully and confidently into the modern disintegrated
secular society, was seized by the need to keep the total image of Jesus under control and
in mind, and to capture and reintegrate any escaping impressions and thoughts. Roland
Barthes has grasped the essence of Loyola's mission and procedures, as spelled out in
Loyola's book of Spiritual Exercises.
The obsessional character of the Exercises blazes forth in the accounting passion
transmitted to the exercitant: as soon as an object, intellectual or imaginary, appears, it
is broken up, divided, numbered. The accountancy is obsessional not only because it is
infinite, but above all because it engenders its own errors... [Every failure induces,
requires, more accounting.] Everything is immediately divided, sub-divided, classified,
numbered off in annotations, meditations, weeks, points, exercises, mysteries, etc. [That
is,] The Exercises can be conceived as a desperate struggle against the dispersal of images
which psychologically, they say, marks mental experience and over which -- every religion
agrees -- only an extremely rigorous method can triumph.
The whole aim and process is a totalitarian domination of the mind for the purpose of
putting oneself into a position to ask God questions and to receive passively the answers.
All vagaries were returned to the Source. There is no denying the social impact of the
Jesuit method and practice. Allowing that traditional Catholicism continued inertially,
Jesuitry become a great active sword that held much of secularism at bay while causing it
to involute. Evidence abounds that secular man is actually a form of sacral man with
Jesuitical control. What is sacred possesses for its experiencer an aura of the holy, of
awe, of fear, of divine arbitrariness, of supernatural animation. Sacral man in his extreme
expression sees the cosmos and all its details as sacred; there are few of such men, of
course. The extremely secular man sees everything as void of the supernatural and fully
accessible to the senses; there are very few of such men, too.
Let us provide some categories of behavior that might be regarded as sacred or at least
non-sensible, to which most so-called secular men adhere. For one thing, they believe in
many myths, myths of their descent and families, of their country, of the history of their
locale, of wars and voyages. More, and now we make a few specific allusions applying to
some, by way of illustration, they hold myths about GM, GE, IBM, their President and
political leaders, Albert Einstein, Hollywood, the Mafia, the flag (" Old Glory"), Harvard
University, the "Spirit of Saint Louis," the Philadelphia Eagles Football Team, Bellevue
Hospital, the "Monopolies," "Justice," "free will," "reason," "truth," "nature," snakes,
elephants, diets, and so on and on.
What do we mean by associating such people first with myth, then with the supernatural,
hence with the sacred? The myth has in common with the sacred a non-empirical aura of
"emotion" or feeling attaching itself to a non-existent or otherwise psychologically
incomplete perception such that, whatever it is, it would not recognizably exist unless it
were mythified. International Business Machines (IBM) does not exist as entity, but only as
hundreds of millions of mental and physical operations of people, partly related to
machines. But "it" is "mighty," "global," "venerable," "rich," "progressive," "losing money
this year," "in need of revitalization," and so on. One is "loyal" to it, "depends" upon
it, "accepts its policies," "questions it sincerity," "sues it," tries to "break it up,"
"ignores its complaints" and so on. Lawyers hop around on "its giant body like fleas on an
elephant," "defending it," "justifying it," and of course "living off of it." A great many
people derive a feeling of the supernatural and sacred form when functioning in the
corporate ambiance. The Chief Executive of the great Schlumberger multinational enterprise
said recently that a corporation nowadays must learn from the Japanese that "we have the
responsibility that religion used to have."
Are these behaviors and beliefs any less religious, say, than the behavior of believers in
a volcano religion? The typical secularist worships a dozen such volcanoes; he is
polytheistic; he believes in the supernatural and practices rites in regard to it. I do not
argue here the consequences: this mythicized aggregate produces millions of hard objects
for people; what does the religious aggregate produce but "useless objects" such as church
buildings and a superabundant "software?"
We cannot maintain that secular man is less superstitious than sacral man. Does he more
often believe "13 is an unlucky number" or carry a rabbit's foot for luck? Encyclopedias of
false beliefs and superstitions are available, but they do not speak to this issue.
Superstition is sacralization gone wild, uncontrolled by formal religious authority or
science. There is very little difference, too, between superstition and the "false cause"
of an anxiety; worrying over the number 13 is not much different in cause and effect than
worrying that the airplane in which one is sitting will plunge to earth. Secular man has a
plethora of both types of illnesses.
Inseparable from myth in practice are symbols and fictions. Language is but the greatest
set of all fictions. That it is magical is provable in the behavior of humans in regard to
it from their beginnings up to the present. Words lead a life of their own, in the world of
words, distinct in part from the objects to which they ordinarily refer. Modern secularists
use words freely; a candy is "divine;" every accident is a "catastrophe." No matter; that
the world turns with an energy of 10 37 ergs of energy does not deny to a leaf wafting down
from a tree its own erg. What we have in secularism is a disintegration of the sacred
cosmos into infinite particularistic ergs of the supernatural, but at the same time a
denial of the cosmic supernatural. Words merge into symbols, which may be words, pictures,
displays, but also contain the impact of sets of words, without integration with the
grammar of the language. A symbol contains a stimulus to arrive at an attitude or
predisposition of mind or behavior. The symbol of the cross has been found throughout the
world from the time of the earliest gods up to the present, denoting the chief god or a
reference and extension of the god. Wherever a cross occurs, the supernatural does as well;
in the ancient world, stones of Hermes were put up at crossroads. Many symbols are likewise
ancient. Some of them, like the cross, find their way into the secular crests of noble
families, secular institutions, the trademarks of modern corporations, and the escutcheons
of government agencies.
Such modern references are very weak, it is said; this is true, and art designers and
public relations experts will invent trademarks and other symbols for a price, using
scientific techniques for determining how readily the public will recognize and accept the
symbol. Still, unauthorized use of the trademark can incite a law-suit for millions of
dollars; something sacred must be conveyed. It contains more than a single erg of the
supernatural.
So it is with fictions, which are of several kinds, including the words, myths and symbols
referred to already. We need only to mention that others remain, and also contain qualities
of the supernatural, and they are continuously and necessarily employed by the secular mind
The "average" is one of the most useful concepts of science, but it does not exist. Very
often sought, like the Golden Fleece, once found, it leads to marvelous gains. That
"everyone knows the law" is a fiction treated as fact in a court of law; "ignorance of the
law is no excuse for an offense."
Science, law, literature, drama, and music constitute a veritable fictional world that no
amount of secularism can eradicate. Secular man can only claim that these are all piecemeal
tools, that he "uses" them, that they do not make him a believer in the supernatural, and
that he can understand me when I tell him that these are unreal. But this must be a very
special secular man, not an ordinary one, for the ordinary one does not see the dizzying
use of hundreds of tools; he is used by them, attaches all kinds of fleeting supernatural
associations to them, and does not understand well at all when I speak of them as unreal.
So the ideal, extreme, purely secular man will try to squeeze out of life all that is
fictional, we suppose, if it ever ended in anything but the most mad hermeticism, with
various rituals for exorcising fictions, in a direct confrontation of the real. Pure
secularism would be a life of instinctive stimulus-response: wordless, thoughtless, myopic,
and solitary. Wrung out of existence would be the arts, politics, law, the market-place,
love, human relations, and science itself, including both the conception of all these and
all of their ritual accompaniments.
Since he must himself employ the supernatural and its rituals, secular man, we see, does
not so much want to destroy religion as he does to particularize it, to make it pantheistic
and kaleidoscopic. He wants to keep all his options. He wants full freedom to pick up and
lay down any iota of the supernatural or any practice connected with it. He is like the
sophisticated Roman of 2000 years ago who also wanted to pick up and lay down any god or
rite as he pleased. He does not wish to be part of an all-embracing and integrated cosmic
religious system, not even to be reminded that everything in the world and in culture is
tied to everything else, even secularly, if not sacrally.
Religion as such threatens his options. He wants to freely disperse his affects and
attentions. He wants to be free to change them. He admires the composer who builds
idiosyncratic tonal works or the sculptor whose "Composition in plastic, number 18"
pretends to communicate with nothing or nobody. Just so, he wants individually to compose
and recompose the vignettes of his life.
There is accordingly a strong trend toward the disintegration of morality. Morality, too,
is piecemeal in secularism. Each item is judged right or wrong by itself. We note this in
pragmatism where the consequences of an act determine its morality. We note it in American
law where social consequences tend to be the measure of a crime and its punition. We note
it in the press, where instantaneity and shocks push aside moral priorities. We note it in
democratic politics, where the politicians must, and willingly do, fix the plight of
whoever is complaining most, generally ignoring the "good of the whole," scales of values,
or long-term considerations: "The wheel that squeaks gets the grease."
Still, the supernatural of everyday life in modern society is not enough religion for a
great many secularists and they solicit new religions, inventing them, so they think,
actually "reinventing the wheel" time and time again. These are by no means to be
dismissed; they are heroic endeavors to join science and traditional religion, to worship
the Divine and the Good without reference to the succession of gods, to build peaceful
humanistic communities, to make contact with presumably intelligent beings in outer space,
to achieve sacred communities with new rituals that dignify rather than abase their
members, and to build a satisfying non-materialistic life around ideals. To ridicule them
is by implication to ridicule ourselves. (To ridicule ourselves, on the other hand, is not
far from our minds, as we mistake one turn of the road after another; we feel always on the
brink of absurdity, that the whole enterprise of penetrating and ordering religion is
surreal.)
We hear of physical therapy communities, where diet, exercise, and love build new souls,
and of group therapy communities where, in one case, one learns to love oneself and, in
another case, to give up selfish love of oneself to love others. We learn of astrological
networks of believers who adjust their lives to the elaborated meaning of planetary motions
and conjunctions.
There are communities and networks of haute couture, work, skills, fraternity, "rock and
roll," sexual practices, diet, outer space communications, sports, and many other special
areas that go far beyond occasional meetings and informational exchanges into the dense
supernatural and ritual affairs of religious cults. They are voluntary. Participation may
be brief and intense; it is for that period sacred, supernatural and ritualistic.
We begin to see an overall pattern of the people of a secular society; they live amidst
many intense but sporadic religious episodes, where their minds are fully occupied in
recapitulating birth, baptism, initiation, marriage, priesthood and death in brief compass,
and in between these episodes, they float and paddle in a swirling world of secular
symbols, legends, myths, and fictions. Are they happy? Have they found Truth and Morality?
Once again, I would warn against a hasty denial. What is "happy"? Who is happy in this
world? "Happy" may be a little thing, quite evasive, quite accidental and lucky, though
subjectively grand in its effects.
As for "moral", that, too, may be the accident of a soul that is bumped and tossed about
like flotsam, until finally jettisoned onto the shores of goodness.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART II. THEOTROPY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TEN
ETHICS AND THE SUPERNATURAL
After a brief military campaign in the Falklands (Malvinas) Islands in 1982, memorial
services for the dead of Great Britain and Argentina were held at the Cathedral of
Canterbury, England. To some of the British, the idea of memorializing the Argentine dead
was already irksome. Then going beyond ceremony, the Archbishop in his sermon deplored
warfare, asserting that it proved the failure of a foreign policy. Whereupon he was
verbally chastised by Prime Minister Thatcher and like-minded representatives of English
jingoism for not having made it clear to the assembly that the British were righteous and
victorious in the eyes of The God of the Established Church of England. Reasonably the one
party might complain, of what use is the State Church if it does not support the State's
wars? Just as reasonably, the Archbishop might say: Of what use is a religion if it cannot
teach peace to politicians?
The peacemakers often go unblessed by the religions, too. Mirza Ahmad Sohrab, in his grand
tome, The Bible of Mankind, compares the great world religions to the strings of a single
harp each of which gives forth its own dominant note, while the harmonious blending of all
produces a symphony of music. The dominant note of Hinduism is the divine presence
pervading nature; of Buddhism, remuneration; of Zoroastrianism, purity; of Confucianism,
filial piety; of Taoism, the path to reason; of Judaism, righteousness; of Christianity,
love; of Islam, submission, and of the Bahai Cause, universality, "In their efforts to
admit and confess all humanistic doctrines of religions, the Bahai have been frequently
persecuted by god-fearing believers, and, even while the British were wrestling with
Christian "love," the Bahai were being dispossessed and killed, allegedly for religious
and statal treason , by Iranian Muslim practicing "submission" to Allah.
Secularists frequently pronounce religious slogans for lack of a substantial ethics of
their own. Moral issues often intimidate secularists, too. There is a sacredness about
them, a confusion, a threat, a secret, a god buried somewhere among them, a priest ready
to pull one in like a fish if one takes the smallest bait.
There used to be a major area of study called "the moral sciences." It is defunct. In
turn, every field of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities has tried to
extricate itself from moral responsibility and qualify for the name of science. Even
practical schools of business, medicine, dentistry, law, agriculture, engineering,
architecture, nursing, social welfare, etc., claim to provide an objective education; they
have achieved the logically impossible feat of inculcating in their students an abundance
of the best ways of doing things, while pretending not to consider good from bad, right
from wrong.
We know this to be nonsense. All applied science most exhibit preferences for lines of
conduct. Scientific method is itself a moral system. And just think of the vast proportion
of alumni of schools who confess, with a quaver in their voices, to all that they know and
owe to their alma mater. Somebody is teaching somebody something in the way of morals!
What is happening?
Is this hypocrisy? Are the schools and students, the society and its people, claiming one
thing and practicing another? Yes. They are using a technique that places upon an
unreachable, untouchable level certain problems such as god, religion, and the
supernatural, along with the associated problem of the ultimate sources of morality and
their justification; they take up all other problems as only of instrumental importance,
as problems of means, not ends, as problems whose solutions can be taught to burghers,
brigands, and beggars alike.
Whereupon a society becomes secular, segmentalized and instrumental (hence exploitative)
in its behavior as well as its morals. From many a segment are cast many grappling hooks
for the larger morality, some of which catch hold and from here and there spring the many
varieties of religious practices characteristic of the secularized society.
Where there is not a grappling for religion there is often a contradictory pair of
behaviors: the one a specialized nose-to-the-ground empiricism, the other a hopelessly
dispersed attention. The former was discussed in the last chapter as an aspect of
secularism and occurs again for treatment in the next; the latter requires a few more
words here. Religion generally focuses attention onto a few, high-priority objects of
value; secularism dissipates attention.
Attention is itself a value imposed on whatever is attended to. It is a preference for its
object, selected out of all potential substitutes as objects of attention. Attention is
instinctively determined in non-human creatures and modified by parental and group
training in many species; the ambiant force impinging on the creature also helps to
determine the objects of its attention. As with other creatures, man's attention in part
is a valuing of the object, elementary, without training, without justification.
Very few persons will even admit that their valuational life is already half described
when their attention spectrum is drawn up. But so it is, pathetic as it may be.
They would like to believe that attention is a real, natural, automatic experience, about
which they promptly cogitate. This is Cartesian rationalism, for does he not offer as a
first principle of his Discourse on Method, cogito ergo sum, "I sense that I perceive,
therefore I am," and, further, "I perceive because I want, and therefore am."
So, straightaway with birth, we fix the infant, if he had a mind to wander, upon the
right, proper, goods things -- the nipple, the nurse, the movements of the nurse, her
voice, his bowels moving, his eyes lightening, his muscles flexing, all following after
the not so good things -- his wonderment at himself, a loss of his boundaries, a panicky
feeling of loss of his warm pool, stunned dissolution exposed into infinite space.
Suppose his family to be church-goers. He is habituated to church as soon as he can be
counted upon to be quiet most of the time there. Time passes, and one day, when he hears,
"We are getting ready for church," he displays a mind of his own. "Why?" "Because..."
"Because of what?" "Because it's Sunday." "Why do we go to church on Sunday?" "To worship
God." And so on. It is almost entirely a morality of means, that carries him from one step
to the next, not "really explaining."
Sometimes this begins, or he is catechized, even if he asks no questions. "Why should I
worship God?" "God gives us our blessings in life." "Like ice-cream?" "Yes." And like your
mother, and father, and bed to sleep in, and food to eat, to train him properly, the
trainer is usually clever enough to number only things which the trainee likes. But there
is small pay-off for the trainer unless he slips into the list of blessings things that
he, the trainer likes. So they go to church to assure the blessings that each wants. They
already have different religions, in a sense.
Still later on, the child has a habit of church-going, as a result of which, his
authorities are happy to observe, he feels better with himself, when he attends, and
guilty if he misses church. He knows people there, and may even enjoy an occasional
service. Unfortunately for his educators, he now changes, we presume. He is bored and
fidgety in church; people scowl at him. He does not get the blessings he especially wants.
He is drawn to television, and wants to play baseball with the kids who do not go to
church. Here are better rewards in his mind; though he has no doubt of God, God's command
to "Worship Me in My House," does not get to him forcefully enough. He begins an argument
with his educators that will go on for years.
What can be said of morality in this simple story? There is a great deal of moral training
and moral response. The church and its religion are part of, and will always be part of
the child's life. Unless he undergoes heavy secularization he will posses hundreds of
ethical views that are connected directly and indirectly with his religion. Almost none of
them has come about through autonomous action, reasonable analysis, a survey of cases. The
morals collect upon him like fuzz upon a rubbed glass rod.
I am saying merely what dozens of writers have said before me. With regard to practically
all those who have practiced religion throughout history and today, the whole of religion
may be regarded as a generally effective machine to structure a collection of behaviors
and bring about their enforcement. The key to the ramshackle edifice is the reduction of
cosmic, existential self-fear.
For all that religion has dominated the human world from its beginnings, its ethical
results have been paltry. The one thing that is supposed to justify religion is precisely
the thing that religion does worst, making the human a satisfactory ethical creature.
But it must be said that religion has forever assumed the most difficult of all tasks:
supplying human existence with an objective morality. The problem is multiplex: how to
deal with oneself, one's inner relations; how to deal with others; how to treat with the
animate and inanimate world of nature. In the end, one is supposed to be able to say
"ought" confidently, to live according to the same "ought," and to be happy. In all of
this, one's morality ought to be consonant with the real world and its operating
principles, science, that is. Hence, morality is the governance of behavior by rules for
preferring and achieving certain human and natural relations and states of being.
Unfortunately the simplest, most general rules crack under the stress of psychology and
anthropology. "Don't drive while drunk" is a reasonable rule. It should readily illustrate
what Emmanuel Kant meant when he propounded his famous dictum: "Act only on that maxim
through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Yet
Kant's rule, though it might work to his personal satisfaction, might bring about
continual disasters if it were allowed to justify others, such as many suicidal and dying
persons who would be pleased to have the whole world die with them. Even the drunk may a)
deny that he cannot drive safely, b) suggest that everyone should enjoy a drunken drive
from time to time, or c) suggest that drunken driving is a good way to play the necessary
game of half-wishing self-destruction. If he does not express such ideas, it may be
because he realizes that the police make no distinction between common drunks and drunk
philosophers. But now we speak of authority, not Kantian rationalism.
If we ask what functions are performed by an ethical judgment, we get a more lively sense
of this feeling. Feeling ethical, one praises or reprimands, one rewards and punishes
another. This sometimes changes the behavior of the targets of such feelings in the
direction desired by the moralist. More broadly, then, one exhibits a preference in order
to arouse enthusiasm or indignation, to rally support. One raises an ethical feeling in
order to determine a policy, and to get on with affairs in an orderly organized way. None
of this would be done without our or someone's expression of value.
Subjectively, too, the very power to make an ethical judgment is a satisfaction in itself,
which often is sufficient unto itself, regardless of consequences. To express one's
feelings is in fact synonymous with giving vent to ethical judgments.
Alongside all of these functions is the one which religions stress but which very few
people feel regularly, that is, to carry out the will of the gods or of the supernatural
or fate or nature, because an ordinary resort to this function floods the sluiceways of
personal and collective action; it is usually blocked very early in its manifestation.
However, it can be the most powerful of all functions of ethical judgments, as we see in
the Crusades, the Islamic conquests, or nowadays the rule over Iran by Khomeini. We can
agree. These are the functions of words. Man is irretrievably consigned to a life crowded
with them. Morals are now a heap of functions as well as forces.
Thousands of unsuccessful moral philosophers attest to the frustrations abounding in the
pursuit of morals. Voyaging to the Moon is less difficult than the problems of morally
justifying the effort involved in the accomplishment. Nonetheless, all humans behave
morally and always have. By moral behavior we mean acting one way rather than another
because, among other reasons, one feels that it is right and good, and that not acting
that way would be wrong and bad. This "feeling" is a "real" thing, physiologically
compelling, with physical disturbance and mental states called frustration, indignation,
anger, humiliation, and anxiety if the moral act is not performed and euphoria,
satisfaction, and physical and mental relaxation if it is performed.
The easiest way to "solve" the moral question is to deny it, that is, to assert that
people feel moral or immoral, right or wrong, in consequence of a heap of experience,
commands, forces, and natural traits. There would be found in this heap no specific
independent moral quality. Morality then is no more than what is in the definition above,
"among other reasons."
The only fault that I can find with this idea is that I do not like the way people behave,
and I feel that I am not alone in this regard, so I wish to change people. But how do I
extricate a moral principle from the heap? Why should anyone else care what I like or what
I do not like, unless I had power to force compliance with my morals and they would do
well to obey my rules, or else -- "lest you die ..." as Yahweh might say.
So I must search for "justification" of my morality (call it M). What is meant by
justification?
1)
What so appeals to those I wish to change (adopt my preference) that they change their
a) attitude
b) behavior
c) both.
That is, I manipulate them. Nothing here can be considered the satisfying "justification"
which I seek. I have, after all, used completely knowable means to warp their wills and
minds (" applied social science"). The forms of manipulation include:
a) force;
b) bribes;
c) persuasion by symbols and propaganda, by example, by citing god, priests, scriptures;
d) proof of advantages they derive for and by themselves (" 'x' or 'y' is good for you").
They will feel better, look better, etc.;
e) 'logical' proof (" If you want 'x' do 'm'").
But in all of this (M) remains unjustified (except the word of God, but which they
dispute, hence, is unjustified); that is, I have no right to inflict (M), that is, to
change others.
2)
So I examine myself. How does it happen that I
a) do not like their behavior (M),
b) want to change it (M) and I find many causes (reasons) for
a) and many causes for
b) which boil down to material benefits, property, convenience, and control. All of these
are without validity so I must go on. I also feel embarrassment, guilt at their behavior.
3)
Why am I guilty when they behave so.
a. Identification: I feel that I am part of them and hence suffer their effects.
b. Projection: I feel that their motives are my own.
c. Self-punition: I feel guilt for them. For all of this, I change them.
But why do I feel guilt?
a) Because I am trained to feel guilt.
b) Because I want to behave like them or did once and was punished or harmed.
c) Because of experience (e. g. "I let my younger brother behave so, and look at him
now!")
So none of these justify either!
4)
I listen to My god, and don't let them interpret god their way, and get support to
suppress them. But now my insight (still active) tells me I may be wrong re god.
Is there any other means of justification?
5)
Can I now say, "What I want is what I want, and it is, at least, 'good' in that if I get
it, I satisfy whatever it is that makes me want it."
Now what is it that I am satisfying?
a) A psycho-physiological process of which there are several, viz.: damping of fear,
extension of control (over self, over others), displacement of affect, identification,
obsession (repetition), ambivalence;
b) possessing one or more of, more wealth (things); affection; power; well-being (safety,
health, strength); respect; skill (knowledge).
Thus everything said of 1) to 4) beforehand may in fact be the superstructure of 5) here.
6)
The only way I can budge from this position of 5) which has established my Basic Morality
is by changing myself so that another different or an altered want takes the place of (M).
But, if M2 is substituted for M1 (no matter how little time or how long it takes) then I
am changed and have a different morality.
7)
What can cause this different morality (M2)?
a) Failure by resistance;
b) accident;
c) internal change (metabolism goes down, illness, different glandular flow, etc.)
8)
Then I repeat M2 with respect to the group of people whose actions I did not like before
and go through 1) to 7) again.
9)
Now is M2 better than M1 and will M3 be better than M2... Mn? How would one know?
10)
Suppose Mx has these subsequences or consequences? It is significantly easier to run
through the process. Further, no change occurs when it is achieved in me, i. e. Mx = Mn,
the final value of morality.
11)
Therefore, I settle upon Mx and practice Mx and all closely analogous Mxa.. n . This
becomes in effect my moral system in regards to the class of behaviors we are discussing.
12)
We note:
a) Mx is mine, but also other's moral system because we are effectively transacting within
its rules!
b) The system is both egoistic and species-racial (social). It works. It can be
mythicized, religified, philosophized.
In the sequence of events, 1) to 12) it will be noticed that all processes are explained
in natural terms, as instances of well known and common psychological and social dynamics.
The supernatural is involved on the level of such fictions, concepts, perceptions, and
illusions as are usually encountered in human psychic and social transactions.
Moral demands, moral behavior, and moral struggle are occurring. Ethical resolutions and
principles are evolving. But it is all happening without resort to a moral source existing
and coming from beyond the act and process themselves.
Let us consider the choices of a typical person, Abel. We assume that he makes an average
of 140 choices a day, and therefore roughly 50,000 in a year. They range in significance,
for example, from deciding whether to brush one's teeth quickly or thoroughly, to whether
or not to begin setting aside $3000 a year towards the college education of a child. If it
is argued that brushing teeth is hardly a moral or ethical issue, one can either argue in
rebuttal or simply raise the threshold of a moral question by some criteria of
significance that excludes brushing the teeth. Where this latter point would commence is
not easy to define. Perhaps it should be an issue which, whatever its subject, involves
conscience, that is, a slight or larger factor of anxiety and guilt pursuant to an
uncertain decision (if it were to be uncertain). Since we are being so speculative, we can
presume to estimate also that 10% of the decisions will have such a guilt factor, giving a
total number of about 4000 moral decisions per year, or about 13 per day.
Thus, one would count as containing the guilt factor: a choice of watching a television
entertainment or doing school homework; drinking a second glass of whiskey or not;
deciding how much money to put in the church collection box; whether or not to eat a
gourmet garlic sauce before going on a blind date; slapping a child; etc. We shall not
attempt a fine mathematical analysis of our typical citizen, Able, but merely assign him
categories and percentages, basing the categories on the kinds of mentation occurring as
the decision is made. (The classification is obviously slap-dash.)
TYPES OF MORAL MENTATION BY HYPOTHETICAL TYPICAL CITIZEN (On Annual Basis)
A. Practically automatic 40% 2000
B. Conscious, sloganized 20% 1000
C. Rationalized gibberish 15% 800
D. Carefully calculated 1% 50
E. Passionate, intuitive 5% 250
F. Troubled by aware internal conflicts 5% 250
G. Troubled by aware social conflict 6% 300
H. Flights of fancy, fantasy, solipsism 7% 350
- - 100% 5000
Thus, imagining one certain day in his life, Abel might make the following ethical
choices:
Moral Action Type of Mentation Involved
Withholding a child's allowance F
Giving a seat to an elderly lady on the bus A
Overcharging a tiresome client E
Working a little overtime on his job A
Fantasying adultery with an attractive woman H
Buying a lottery ticket A
Absorbing news of a friend's death C
Angered by a newspaper article on crime A
Explaining his preference for a politician B
Commenting on an office quarrel F
Wondering whether to bring home a cake B
Deciding to be sick and not work one day D
Signing a negative report on an employee G
Moral Action Type of Mentation Involved
Withholding a child's allowance F Giving a seat to an elderly lady on the bus A
Overcharging a tiresome client E Working a little overtime on his job A Fantasying
adultery with an attractive woman H Buying a lottery ticket A Absorbing news of a friend's
death C Angered by a newspaper article on crime A Explaining his preference for a
politician B Commenting on an office quarrel F Wondering whether to bring home a cake B
Deciding to be "sick" and not work one day next week D Signing a negative report on an
employee G
It happens, we say, that each of these decisions gave Abel a moral twinge; the other 117
moral choices did not. Other people will have different numbers, types, and intensities of
moral action in a day's time. If one reads James Joyce's Ulysses, a fictional masterpiece
on a day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, Ireland, taking up some hundreds of pages
of print, we realize that we are probably greatly underestimating the profusion of ethical
choices in a 24 hour period.
Yet I have no idea of the range, average, or typical kinds of moral actions in a day's
time. People are called by those who know them "conscientious," "unconcerned," "busy-
body," etc., words that must refer to the extent and types of their moral behavior, but
the appropriate sample survey with what happens in moral discourse of the self with itself
and others has very little resemblance to the kinds of problems analyzed by philosophers
and imagined by most preachers and teachers. Bloom, the character, had, I guess, an
unusually active mind and more conflicts to resolve by the nature of his background,
romantic wife, advertising work, avidity for many things in life, and continuous movement
about the city.
Still, we have enough of exemplary material and a frame of reference to allow suggesting
several points about moral mentation and action. The average life presents a great
abundance of moral choices. The form of mentation employed before, after, and in the
course of acting morally is largely absurd. What happens in moral discourse of the self
with itself and others has very little resemblance to the kinds of problems analyzed by
philosophers and imagined by most preachers and teachers. Only a small portion of it is
related to science or theory except indirectly. Only a tiny percentage of a modernized
population spends much moral energy on the divine, or on methodical calculation (unless it
is one's paid job to do so).
In Civilization and Its Discontents Sigmund Freud points out the commonly known problem of
ethics:
that ill-luck -- that is, external frustration -- so greatly enhances the power of the
conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a man, his conscience is
lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he
searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience,
imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself with penances. Whole peoples have
behaved in this way, and still do.
He calls this an "original infantile state of conscience."
fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is unfortunate, it
means that he is no longer loved by this highest power; and, threatened by such a loss of
love, he once more bows to the parental representative in his super-ego ---- a
representation whom, in his days of good fortune, he was ready to neglect.
Fate is looked upon as an expression of Divine Will. Fatalism is very strong in early
religions and ethics. Why? The authorities and experts say: because primitive man was at
the mercy of savage natural forces. Still, if man were to be of the same ideological cast
today, he would also be fatalistic because obviously, when one think of it, very little
real control has been exercised over the immense and infinite area of difficulties
besetting us. Rather, the change of attitude has come about as a result of changed
ideology, weltanschauung, and this has changed because of a fairly long calm condition of
the Earth and the skies, and the development of a progressive, free-will, uniformitarian
(self-contradictory) philosophy. Perhaps the distinction between traditional sacral and
modern secular man is that the former has not forgotten his primeval scenarios, whereas
the latter has suppressed them very deeply and become overtly pragmatic.
John C. Caldwell wrote a memorandum, not formally published, on the Sahelian Drought of
the 1970's. We take leave to quote him lengthily:
Fatalism
Fatalism is an unsuitable term because it can be used in two ways: to mean the
rational acceptance by those living in a traditional society that they have little control
over the forces affecting their lives; and to mean such a reluctance to attempt any
control that they are more battered by such forces than need be the case.
The acceptance of the blows of fate is often so great in traditional society that it is
difficult to measure the personal impact of disaster or even to discuss it properly. Often
technical aiders give up the attempt and go to talk to other technical aiders who seem to
speak the same language, and thereby sustain the conventional wisdom and often lose all
chance of adding to worthwhile knowledge about the situation. Sometimes they wonder if
they have been entirely misled about the reality of the position. In one of the few honest
reports ever written on this question, a transport expert working intimately with the
truck drivers bringing food relief in the recent Sahelian drought and having substantial
contact with the rural population reported that at first none of the local population
seemed ever to have heard of the drought; later he concluded that they felt it deeply and
were taking rational steps to minimize the hurt in ways they had known all their lives...
In Yelwa, northwest Nigeria, it was reported that, "The Emir of Yauri and the Divisional
Officer, head of the Local Administration, held that drought did not occur in Yelwa and
that no problem with shortage of rains was extant". Even the farmers talked of locusts,
weeds and lack of good lands as much as drought.
There are many reasons for this kind of reaction. One is that the matter is irrelevant to
the outsiders, whose lives are demonstrably not affected by the climatic conditions.
Another is a belief, held also by the outsiders, that nothing can be done to alter the
weather. Actually this view is usually more rational still -- a feeling that the bad years
are as much part of the totality of what must be experienced as the good years and that
the lot of man is to bend with each wind. Such attitudes are embedded deep in the culture;
they find religious expression and are reinforced by religion. In much of the savannah and
desert of Africa, people take drought to be a necessary divine warning that religious and
moral standards are slipping and that a revival is due. Drought provides assurance that
Providence is paying attention and is still concerned. It indicates a need for religious
leaders to intercede with God. If the drought is long and severe, resort will also be made
to age-old methods, long predating Islam, for encouraging rain... From the Western Shael
to Somalia drought and religious observations are deeply linked.. In profane literature
and oral tradition references, the need for water [is] equally pervasive. In these
circumstances it is not surprising that the common man is somewhat apprehensive about
recalling the last drought or predicting the next one. The Yelwa survey reported that,
although there was clear agreement about the nature and seriousness of drought, there was
complete disagreement in the farmers' responses as to when the last one occurred and
three-quarters did not wish to encourage bad luck (or to trespass into the domain of
Allah) by suggesting that one would ever again occur...
Not only is the origin of drought either divine or in any case not to be influenced by
Man, but so is death -- a proposition that is still true over most of the Shael most of
the time. Western doctors working in the drought refugee camps were disturbed when the
mothers of dying children seemed to be more concerned about obtaining cloth to serve as
shrouds for their dead or dying babies than they appeared to be about the fact of death
itself. Their reaction were partly explained by the fact that the babies had symptoms
which have always presaged death in the savannah. Part, too, was the religious conviction
that the babies were being called away and had been destined at this time to leave the
world (the Fulani express it as the child wanting to go.) These are not societies in which
determined efforts are likely to be made to counter the condition of an apparently dying
child or indeed to prevent the births of children. Urbanization and other types of
economic modernization ultimately lower child mortality both by providing greater health
services and by convincing people that one can and should intercede with the forces that
determine children's sickness and death.
We see how sacral man confronts secular problems and converts them into forms amenable to
sacred solutions.
The thousands of cultures existing in historical time and space have given us a fair
sample of the ideal and practical ethical capabilities of religion. The experience on the
whole has been unimpressive to one looking for a happy human way of life. The more one
trusts to religion, it seems, the less good one can obtain from science and politics. On
the other hand, science in itself (that is, science which is entirely positive and
empirical) is quite helpless to address the moral perplexities of man.
Politics, moreover, has, if anything, a poorer record than religion, speaking now of
politics as a secular approach to human issues; for politics tends by itself to depend
upon sheer physical force to order a population, and systematic violence is hardly an
improvement upon whatever chicanery and delusions historical religions employ to rule a
people. Would one have preferred to be governed by the barons or by the monks of the
European Middle Ages, by the warlords or by the Shinto and Buddhist priests of Old China,
by the shaman or by the priest, by Aaron or by Joshua? And, today in America, if the
lawyers, lobbyists, and military contractors were replaced in the ruling circles and
representative assemblies of the country by ministers, priests, and the religiously
devout, would the country be better governed, its people more peaceable, mentally healthy,
and prosperous? Would one prefer to be governed by the Shah of Iran or the Ayatollah
Khomeini?
The questions are difficult, enormously complicated, and perhaps biased. Still they are
worth considering if only as a means of suggesting that ethical progress in a society is
not to be identified with its secularization. The key to good governance is an ethical
system beyond facile contrivance. Neither religion nor secularism, as such, promises
success.
Even though it may be true that our morals come in a tangled concatenation, the human
could scarcely accept the fact. One whose overriding aim is self-control and control over
the world will refuse to recognize in a garbage pile his towering morality. This in itself
would seem to prove him a moral failure -- shifty, gutless, inconsistent, contradictory
(all that he really is, someone might comment). He feels that there must be an absolute,
pure source of right conduct somewhere, and is all to ready to find and proclaim one, even
an impostor.
Yet occasionally the human becomes ashamed of living a lie and hates himself and hates his
religion and gods for having created his dependency upon delusions. He admires the
"honesty" of the bear, the trout, the dog; they are not of two minds and forked tongue.
Why cannot his morality be so straightforward?
Blame part of it upon his obsession with history, his compulsion to repeat his worst
experiences. He demands that his morality today be that of five thousand years ago. He
demands that it be of the highest order: We know what that means; it must come from
Heaven. Further he demands that all people share in an ecumenical morality. The logical
and sociological impossibility of both demands will not deter him. He is implacable. He
will not pluck his morals from a garbage heap.
What can the scientist counsel? Try as they might, the anatomist and physiologist cannot
separate a pig and a man far enough for comfort. The biologist, try as he may, cannot
worship an arrangement derangeable by an unseen particle, and a lucky hit out of hundreds
of millions of spermatozoa. Try if he would, the anthropologist could not work up an
agitation over adulterous intercourse and let the commandment be written down by the hand
of a god. Nor can the geologist see in an awful blasted out crater more than a crashing
meteoroid. Nor the astronomer see more than a vast number of worlds in just that, a vast
number of worlds: it seems that the gods, too, have a compulsion to repeat. No, the
scientists cannot appease their consciences and man's sacrality with any consistency.
Besides providing people with morality, it is said, religion puts them directly in touch
with the supernatural realm. For the mass of people this is untrue, just as it is that
their religion gives them some special ethical competence. A few practitioners must enjoy
the facilities for communion with the spiritual universe which churches and temples
provide. The mass media (motion pictures especially) and drugs, as T. Leary has eloquently
argued along with others, and, too, many gurus, seances, and non-church rites provide this
type of communion.
The supernatural is hard to distinguish from political illusions and fictions. To the
practitioners of scientific method, a devotee of astrology and a political fascist share
several features. Both analyze the present state of world and personal affairs, and gain
confidence and make predictions on the basis of their beliefs. Knowing that a person is an
astrologist or, on the other hand, a fascist, enables the social psychologist to assert
and predict with high probability that each will possess certain attitudes. The fascist
believes in his leader as the possessor of semi-divine qualities, a superman. He has a
warped conception of history and the future (according to our scientists). The astrologist
believes his astrologer has access to supernatural knowledge; he, too, has a warped
conception of the path of history and the future. Both types are paranoiac in believing
that a great deal of what is really happening in the world is concealed by the
establishment or conspiratorial powers.
The far departure from reality in both cases may have little to do with their success in
life. General knowledge and matter-of-factness are only loosely connected with achievement
in society. The belief of both the astrologist and the fascist in the supernatural lends
each a confidence denied to less convinced persons; self-confidence is in many life
situations more of an asset than knowledge of the situation. Whereas the ordinary human is
only schizotypical, these two tend more towards the schizophrenic.
We seem to be at an impasse, owing to my downgrading of the creative moral and spiritual
functions of historical religion. Supernaturalism appears to be all manner of anti-
scientific folly. Morality exists concerning countless particulars in human activities,
even while neither religion nor secularism can justify its source, hence their
application.
We see no easy solution, perhaps none at all. Later on, we may offer some grounds to
justify a relatively absolute" morality, meaning by this verbal barbarism some unchanging
moral propositions that are themselves changing. If one might conceive of a religion that
is an integrated whole, accommodates change easily, and that does not fundamentally and
continuously violate the controls and benefits supplied by science, then this religion may
not only be superior but also popular.
Does this mean that morality is human and mundane, part of an endless process going on in
millions of transactions every day everywhere? Yes. Does it mean that the supernatural,
the divine, the gods are not the source of morality, that ethics exists without religion?
Yes. Does it mean that mankind is morally sui generis and autonomous? Yes.
Does it mean that humans are "immoral" and "wicked," with no means of setting ethical
standards? No. Does it mean that the supernatural, all that is divine and sacred, has no
effect upon ethical behavior? No.
The supernatural, as non-knowledge, is knowledge of a sort. Those who transact or seek to
transact with the supernatural in order to think upon the divine, engage in an ideational
relation with the divine, and are affected by the knowledge which we possess of the
divine. They will behave differently than those who deny the supernatural and avoid it.
Religion, to put it in commonplace language, can make people better. It should be the
"right" kind of religion, and, of course, this would be the form we are here advocating:
self-aware, open, relativistic, non-historical, connected with the sciences of natural and
socio-psychological processes, non-anthropomorphic morphologically, anthropomorphic
structurally. Let us see what science is doing that is religiously relevant and can be
adapted to religion.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART II. THEOTROPY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ELEVEN
RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS IN SCIENCE
Out of religion came politics and then science, each reacting upon the others while going
its own way. Science is a set of interests that is religiously, socio-politically, and
autonomously determined. Science struggles to conform to a scientific method in whatever it
does. The struggle lends it its distinction, providing it with its social character.
Without the method, it is useless to speak of science. The method is applied to whatsoever
extension of the senses is of interest and controls such extension; both operations
sometimes fail but also often succeed in our day.
A scientific procedure typically puts forth a hypothesis about what is measurably expected
to occur under certain conditions, and, by finding or producing the conditions, finds or
produces the event. Wherever conditions permit, these are produced under controls; wherever
they occur naturally, they are overseen as strictly as possible. No place is allowed in
theory for supernatural conditions or supernatural effects, that is, for the intervention
so factors that are undefinable in material terms, or of an external ungovernable will.
As Alexander Hamilton quipped, when Benjamin Franklin suggested prayer at an impasse while
composing the American Constitution in 1787, we should not call upon the help of a foreign
power. Hamilton, intending for politics what Franklin had already practiced in electrical
experiments, had in mind a republic whose behavior might be predictable when certain
regular operating conditions were established by its structure.
The incident reminds us that science includes social as well as natural science. Humans are
a material factor in the one, if not in the other; they are a contaminating factor in both.
The human factor has so continually disturbed the scientific method in its application to
natural phenomena that, in a sense, all science becomes social science, especially as the
material conditions of study become more difficult and less amenable to continuous ordinary
sense observation. We cannot go here into the progressive discoveries of the intervention
of anthropo-sociology and especially psychology in the workings of natural science, citing
the works of P. W. Bridgman and others, but we can, without fear of rebuttal, warn of the
inevitable effects upon experimenters and researchers of their psychological as well as
physical presence amidst the supposedly materially and logically observer -- proof
conditions of scientific work.
Already, then we have to be on the alert, in all that passes as science-applying-
scientific-method, so as to detect the interest that inspires the work and to discern the
sometimes exceedingly subtle intervention of the mind in the process of discovery, proof,
and disproof. The "interest" in a scientific task may range from the most banal, obvious,
and limited (e. g. to polish better a lens so as to see stars more clearly; to adjust the
angle of a spade to bite the ground with less energy input) to the general and ideological,
that is, unconscious (e. g. to validate evolution by setting up hypotheses implying or
excluding neo-darwinian evolution; to calculate pre-historical sky charts by
retrocalculating or presumptively modifying present motions of the Earth and Solar system).
The aggregation of "outside" interests creates a continual uneasiness in scientific work;
like barnacles on a fine yacht, it keeps science from being "clean;" but the barnacles are
part of life at sea: no barnacles, no sailing. We may sympathize with scientists who call
up their psychic mechanisms of unconscious denial by indignation at the idea that they may
be skirting the supernatural, or, worse, serving the supernatural, or by backing up into
ever narrow slips of material phenomena where it is hoped that none can say that anything
but sense data are implicated in their work. The search for a body of pure science,
however, like the search for the Golden Fleece, eventuates in taking aboard a witch with
the long-sought prize, and Jason and his Argonauts must move on evermore in unresting
adventure.
The main theories of astronomy are as remote from experience as to be spooky. Astronomers
walk on a tightrope between science and religion, depending upon a few principles that are
empirically formulated to keep the field aloft as a science. The most that astronomers can
say empirically is that much of the universe, including fortunately most of the solar
system, exhibits some large uniformities of behavior. As soon as they retroject or project
by thousands of years they become vulnerable, that is, unbelievable.
The theories include largely a set of Newtonian laws that are fading fast and may soon be
abrogated, and which serve to fire projectiles from the Earth in the direction of objects
in space, such that, by deft ad hoc maneuvering, arrive on target. Otherwise, they boast La
Place's mathematical explanations, which La Place himself declared to be dependent upon
uniformitarian premises. Then there occur various ways of measuring brilliance, heat,
distance, chemistry, speed, and chronology of heavenly bodies, which are hopeful
speculations, thanklessly spared from all but an iota of factual proof, leaning upon one
another for support but also begging each other's question.
So great, however is faith in the one "law of falling bodies" that all else passes as
science simply because, as I said, the proof of science is the scientific method, and all
of astronomy, by this time, has become couched in scientific form. That some of the more
famous astronomers and related scientists of these decades - Urey, Hoyle, Wickramasinghe,
Crick, T. Gold, and Sagan, the name only several, have toyed with bizarre theories
impermissible to laymen, acknowledges the essential fragility and defensive posture of the
field.
Nowadays an astronomer, provided that he has an appropriate university degree, can profess
the Doppler Effect, Bode's Law, intelligence in other worlds, the "Big Bang", the La Place
theorems, empty space, straight lines, exact solar time and motions, and a dozen other
mostly conventional concepts. Whatever the mix, it is apparently unsystematic, unreliable,
ad hoc, and temporary. If scientists lay claim to authority on grounds that such a mix is
true and fully representative of reality, they can deny a "union card" to whoever disturbs
the mix. If, however, they place claims of authority in the procedures of scientific
method, then they must give a respectful hearing to any educated person who seeks to
establish an identity for Plato's "divine animal" in the universe or to prove empirically
any number of such hypotheses.
The same kind of reasoning can be directed at biology and geology. Basic conventional
theories in both of these areas of study are weak and straining at the point of collapse
into disintegration, if not supernaturalism. No more than physics can define energy other
than by fiction, operations and hypothesis, can biology define life. Fringe life forms are
several, with subatomic behavior, crystals, and viruses providing initial confusion, and
sending practitioners to more comfortable empirical fields to work. Ethology is rampant in
the fields distinguishing among animals. Evolutionary theory is a shambles; "natural
selection" is invoked as often as God in the Bible, but it is an embarrassment to do so.
The Earth Sciences, like the other fields, are making many advances to which the name
"revolutionary" is increasingly applied with some pride. Yet two of their greatest
operational concepts -- that of time and that of uniformitarian change -- are in peril.
They invest much hope in radiochronometry to preserve long time spans and therefore smooth
out curves of change, but, as I have explained elsewhere, radiochronometry is based upon
radioactivity which is affected by the kind of history that it claims to prove; that is,
catastrophe destroys time even while time pretends to disprove catastrophe.
Psychology and anthropology include so many variations of methodology that discerning the
supernatural in them is not difficult; only the naive can persistently believe that variant
methods are independent of moral perspectives, simply grasping the struggling corpus by a
toe instead of its nose. Every psychological or anthropological "school" is a supernatural
sect, whether it seeks to confront the supernatural or turn its back to it.
But, although moral and supernatural, science in itself is not capable of justifying human
action; it cannot even justify its own. The myth that it can, which was exposed as soon as
science was mature enough to bear the truth, lives on like any other supernatural belief,
lending motivation, inflaming passions, claiming moral credits, inspiring lives, and
narrowing thought and options. Probably, too, many scientific secularists labor in the hope
that something marvelous and morally convincing will grow out of their work, as penicillin
emerged serendipitously from a mold.
Willy-nilly all sciences, in their healthy vigor, are wrestling with the supernatural and
contributing to its expansion thereby. In this sense, all sciences are addressing the
foundations of religion and theology. The more scientific work that is performed, the more
areas of uncontrollability and contradiction come upon the stage. Science itself is the
biggest factory of the supernatural. It tears holes in the fabrics extending reality. It
works all the while surrounded by amateurs of the supernatural and theologians, pelted by
derision. Perhaps one might forecast the most esteemed and influential religion of the
future by locating the contemporary cult that is closest to the anomalies and radical new
interests of science.
Theology can be a science, whether it be formulated as pure or as applied science. As the
latter, it can be called religious science, or, simply, religion, just as certain
departments of political science in American universities call themselves departments of
politics (New York University) or departments of government ( Harvard University), both of
these terms meaning applied political science. A proposition (hypothesis) in theology might
then read: "All cultures denominate historical gods."
We suppose that this proposition, empirically tested, may eventuate with exceptions, such
as the Buddhists or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and possibly several other
totalitarian socialist regimes. Then, if we wish, we may restate the proposition, as some
have, to include "pseudo-gods," saying that "a god includes a figure with 3,4. .n
attributes of which at least 'x' have to be present to permit the designation 'god' to be
used." Hence certain cultures have figures such as Lenin or Mao Tse Tung who possess at
least 'x' attributes, while others have celestial figures that border upon gods such as
Region 'A' in China where "Heaven" (Ti'en) is accorded at least 'x' traits of a god, and
still others elevate masters and gurus to the stature of Mohamet.
We perceive that the pure proposition is heading in a certain direction and that by the
manipulation of the definition of the term "god," certain areas of empirical research are
opened up, and, furthermore, that some hidden intent may even be present, such as to
demonstrate the ineradicability of the worship of gods.
A related proposition in applied theology or religion can continue to illustrate the nature
of theology and at the same time show how applied propositions formulate matters often more
transparently, from the viewpoint of ideological research. Thus, one says: "To disestablish
gods of traits 'a.... n' including 'g' and 'h' it is necessary to establish a totalitarian
regime with semidivine figures of traits 'a... n' less 'g' and 'h'."
So elementary an introduction will hardly persuade anyone of the profoundity and
possibilities of theology as a science. The reader may be justifiably impatient to hear
what theology can do with propositions of the supernatural. He may be wanting to know
whether the supernatural exists, for example, and how the science of theology proves this.
One ought not be evasive; nevertheless, it must be pointed out, in anticipation of the
answer to this question, that no science pretends to answer impossible questions, even
though these may be scientifically formulated and studied. Medicine has few researchers
(perhaps one-ten thousandth of its energies?) given over to the long-term prolongation of
human life, although this may be a strong interest of the public. Nor are many
astrophysicists preoccupied with voyages of a duration greater than a few seconds of a
light-year. Nor are many political scientists or psychologists devoted to the attainment of
utopias. That is, one can conceive of a flourishing science of theology that concerns
itself hardly at all with proving hypotheses on the existence of the supernatural (and,
indeed, may flourish for that very reason, just as chemistry flourished only after it
stopped seeking for an Elixir of Life and to transmute lead into gold).
So warned, we can put forward a proposition that deals with the central interest that many
people have in religion. One may hypothesize thus: "The spiritual, defined as any event
contradicting existing laws of science relating to materiality, and probably
nonreproducible by known scientific procedures does (or does not) exist." I see no
objection to arguing that this statement is scientific. For instance, let us suppose that a
person claims to achieve a certain vision, that no one else can see. (" No one" here means
nobody in a large random sample of a population to which the visionary belongs.)
Suppose an adept in drug-use demonstrates that 'X' percent of the population, to whom a
certain drug is administered, claim the same vision as 'A. ' The vision is therefore proven
to be possible, although not proven to deal with real objects. A scientific explanation of
'A' is not forthcoming, even though the state of 'A' is reproducible. Theology takes in
consequence the position that the vision itself is actual, that 'A' and possibly some other
rare persons are capable of it, and that many others can attain it upon taking the certain
drug. Obviously we are not faced with a powerful proof of the existence of the
supernatural.
But suppose that 'A' reports that this vision is of a vaguely defined human form who tells
him "You shall see my power at Bunting Green Airport in 48 hours." Two days later a plane
crashes at said airport. This has happened while a quarter of the large sample has been
taking the drug and many of these had images predicting dire events at the same airport or
some airport at roughly the same time. It would not require many cases of this sort to
prove the validity of this type of supernaturalism (the type is very commonly asserted in
legends, mythology, and religious documents, as, e. g., when Yahweh tells Moses to fetch
the Elders on the Holy Mountain to be near The Lord and they come and do see the Lord.
(Exodus 24)
However, if one were a foundation grants officer he might give money to the "control group
drug study" as described, but not in any expectation of a resulting byproduct such as the
air crash prediction. For he would be warned by practically every alert and informed person
that cases such as this occur only insofar as visionary figures make predictions and that
the predicted events practically never occur. If you cannot expect definite and defensible
results from it, you should not grant funds to a project. Never mind the appeal that to
prove god at work once in a million projects is enough.
Suppose yet another type of proposal comes before the foundation. This asserts that,
"Totemism in religion functions to repress human creativity, while anthropomorphism in
religion increases it." The applicant conjectures simply that if people imitate an animal,
even in imaginary behaviors, they will not become very clever, whereas if they imitate an
equally fictional superman, they will become more clever. "Imitation" is, of course,
defined and measured operationally as part of religious totemism and anthropomorphism, as
are the concepts "totemism," "anthropomorphism," and "creativity."
Whatever the results of such an inquiry, which is highly relevant both to anthropology,
where pre-existing theories of the origins of totemism amount to over forty, and to
theology, where, whether or not one believes in the well-nigh universal anthropomorphism,
it is useful to know how it functions in the social structure, they are relevant to main
lines of investigation in these fields and a priori must be useful.
Our imagined foundation is not likely to look so kindly, however, upon another proposal
which crosses its threshold proposing to show that A) Moses' monotheism is anti-democratic
and B) leads to politically harmful ideas of the supernatural among persons steeped in its
learning. If government-financed and American, the foundation might decide that support for
the program might be liable to court action on grounds that it violated the constitutional
guarantee against abridgment of the freedom of religion, even though the argument might be
advanced that the Constitution has the right to discover and protect itself against
potential enemies.
A private scientific foundation would probably decide that the study would bring in no
valid or useful results. The probable pro-Moses trustees would also determine that such a
study is not scientific, even if the word "harmful" were replaced by several categories of
consequences, empirically verifiable and undeniably relevant, such as "proneness to belief
in charismatic authority," "totalitarian," "highly ethnocentric," and "highly aggressive
and non-conciliatory."
Perhaps the term "anti-democratic" might escape similar close scrutiny, although quite
vague and usually meaningless as employed; here again, the proponents of the research would
no doubt advance empirical indicators, such as scoring high in attitude test of tolerance,
respect for discussion, consultation with others, compromise in decision-making, belief
that opposing views may be right, and relative immunity from paranoia and hallucinations.
In sum, expertly espoused, the project could rebut all attacks against its scientificity,
and certainly would transport scientific method into the core materials of theology. But it
would be unlikely to win support. Generally speaking, scientific investigations have
scarcely been employed in the field of theology proper. To the degree that theology in a
given setting could be studied scientifically, it is deprived of the means, the intervening
variable being indifference. This can be promptly and cheaply demonstrated by examining the
articles in standard encyclopedias having to do with the field and those who have worked in
it. What is to be observed, creeping into the area from its fringes, are studies in
anthropology, ethnology, sociology, political sociology, and psychology, few of which ever
gain entry except through works such as Mircea Eliade's in the history of religion or works
carrying a favorable attitude (from the standpoint of the market in ideas) such as Henri
Bergson's and Teilhard de Chardin's or Hans Kung's.
A group of scholars working in the area with an approach termed "creation science" have
developed their own audience and market. Their efforts to correlate natural history with
sacred scripture qualify for the field of theology, too, and there is nothing un-scientific
about quoting words attributed to Elohim or anyone else as a hypothesis for testing human
or natural history. One would not refuse as the hypothesis for the study of, say, American
politics (1965-80), or of history generally, a quotation attributed to an historian, Harold
Acton, "All power tends to corrupt; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." One would
however have to assure himself of the usual criteria: that "power," "absolute" and
"corrupt" are operationally defined, and empirical indicators or measures provided for
them.
When certain scholars determine to test the veracity of the Bible by quoting therefrom "God
said to Noah... I will bring down a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in
which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die,"
and plan to adduce evidence from natural history of such a deluge, they are certainly
proposing an ambitious project. And to qualify as scientists, they must clarify precisely,
hypothetically, the extent of the destruction that is mentioned and its main instrument, a
watery deluge, then validate by geological and ethnological evidence the occurrence of this
particular flood (as distinct from a series of floods, etc.) And they would have to eschew
any direct test of whether in fact the conversation took place between Elohim and Noah,
because it is unverifiable. Most scientists would be logically compelled to accept a
properly drafted study proposal of this type as belonging to the realm of scientific work.
Some scholars, gripped in the avoidance mechanism previously alluded to, would deny the
relevance of any study whatsoever that would tend to confirm a scriptural statement. When
one examines an encyclopedia such as the Britannica which assigns millions of words to
theological matters and many more millions to geology and ancient history, with only a
dozen paragraphs treating the deluge issue, whether as an issue or as a disputable event,
and when one considers that the deluge problem has agitated all generations of man
everywhere since the beginning of history and before, one is inclined to ask, at least in
this instance: "Who is the more biased against science: the creation scientists accepting
scientific terms, or the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica avoiding the subject
unconsciously?"
Waiving the question, whose intent is obviously polemical, one may note once again how
important is the matter of "interests" and the motives for such interests in science. The
choice of subjects for hypothesis and study is obviously crucial in human culture and
welfare, and yet has little to do with scientific method but much to do with the
meaningfulness of science. And what is "meaning"? And who shall determine it?
"Meaning" is certainly among the most profound questions of philosophy and theology. "Why
do we exist?" "What is our destiny?" If scientists choose to interest themselves, or are
forced to occupy themselves with research on the advertising of commodities and with the
perfection of weapons of destruction, to the extent say of ten thousand times the efforts
put into the most meaningful questions of human existence, then they can hardly complain
that the profound questions are overvalued.
One is led, therefore, to suggest that the supernatural is a proper and major concern for
scientists, even if successes in the field come hard and require that they conduct humbling
investigations of themselves. Perhaps a tithe of ten per cent of one's scientific energies
and resources to theology is in order, and a similar tithe to the basic needs of humanity
in regard to a basic minimum material subsistence, a basic possibility of gaining life
experience through free movement and education, and a basically equal access to
disinterested justice in all situations of conflicts of desire or interest. For, in this
latter regard, scientific effort is also hugely biased against giving itself over to just
those problems that render mankind incapable of an adequate material substratum of
meaningfulness. It is from the basic desire for new experience that the interest in the
supernatural emerges. To stunt it, by allowing it a meaningless diet according to the
scientific method, is a form of deliberate, if unconscious, deprivation, just as much as to
stunt it by forcing it into obsessive narrow ritual which has nothing to do with scientific
method.
Under such circumstances, it becomes ironical indeed to speak of "meaningless"
propositions, as many modern logical positivist philosophers call considerations of the
supernatural, for it is precisely against their "meaningless" reductionism that religious
man is rebelling. "Words" are important in thought, but to carve them down into nothingness
except as they have rigid and narrow denotations is but an unconscious method of assuring
that the thought that occurs is to be equally rigid and narrow.
The kind of person who is then to be fashioned out of the raw material of homo sapiens
schizotypus comes to depend upon only very limited mechanisms of fear-control, to wit,
obsessed and catatonic behavior according to scientific rules, with a limited capacity for
displacement of the selves of a person, a limited ability to identify the selves with the
larger human and natural world, a severely suppressed ambivalence turning back upon the
self, and a general lack of animation of the psyche. Surely this is not the intent of
science, which only hopes to use words instrumentally and to solve otherwise impossible
problems by a sure-fire method; but it does tend to be the effect of science when science
exceeds its logical limits, demands to be "pure," and goes so far as to restrict its own
method to areas guaranteed not to possess deep human meaning.
We can take up two attitudes in the face of the threat posed by many scientists to human
development. One is that scientists are bound to fail in this method of coping with man's
essential madness. "Just be patient; the movement will collapse from its inherent
weaknesses," and indeed scientists do feel an overpowering weakness, and ensuing
exasperation, when human cultures fail to embrace their interests and techniques or, worse,
fashion crazy worlds of science fiction to dwell in while waiting for science to solve all
problems without the aid of politics or religion.
A second attitude, much to be preferred, is to encourage science in every way possible to
examine itself and proceed to the examination of human nature, upon whose basic mechanisms
science, politics, and religion must ultimately depend. What must this human being be fed
to keep him creative and within bounds? The answer may be scientific theology. Bring
together all that science is producing, half-consciously, in the way of theological
findings and blend them into an integrated metaphysics, the whole of which addresses, not
"mythical" or "rational" man, but the operative homo sapiens schizotypus.
I have examined human mental structure and operations in other works, so am permitted to
relate here only the central relation of religion and science, and of this most clues are
already familiar to the reader. Science emerges from the limited but most significant
ability of the human mind to capture pragmatically, that is, to control, the connections
between the person and an immense world of identifications and displacements. From his very
beginnings, mankind has identified and sought to control the heavens and the gods, the
mountains and oceans, the plants and animals. No other being on Earth is so ambitious; all
others are confined to such rational activity as instinct requires for the purpose of
survival and propagation.
The human mind, disordered by genesis and at birth, has the immense problem of extending
pseudo-instinctive (that is, voluntary) controls over connections with existence that have
very little to do with survival and propagation. The human, for instance, will sacrifice
(both in the functional and symbolic senses) everything -- food, family, sex, lesser
powers, safety --in his efforts to command the skies.
Furthermore, besides the skies, there is many another realm of being that he is compelled
by his mind to deal with, an infinite set of realms it seems, even though his mind, we must
remember, is assisted by only moderately competent sensory organs, so that he is encumbered
in his ingesting, questing, and adjusting.
So the need to order one's head requires that the cosmos be set in order, and it is natural
for one to apply the pragmatic( scientific) techniques that substitute for instinct in the
obtaining of both very close necessities and the most faraway necessities, and hence the
elaboration of science out of immediate pragmatism occurs on both the intimate material
level and the cosmic level.
Science is a human activity and therefore can be characterized as such, no less than
religion is a human activity. It has a history, a sociology, a sub-culture, a psychology.
It exhibits struggle, cooperation, ambition, failure, success, inducements --payoffs and
penalties, a total range of material subjects to study, just as religion is subject of
study, by the scientific method. It has religious and political aspects. It deals in
authority, fictions, myths, claims, anomalies, rituals, and hypotheses, all of which are
perilously reminiscent of religion and the supernatural. And, of course, to distinguish it
especially from all other social activities, it is obsessed with the secular ritual of
scientific method, and tends to extend the practice to all spheres of life.
The basic rite of scientific method is similar everywhere. But there come into being
elaborations, embellishments, and variations of the basic rite. Some scientists like to
think of the changes in naming, conceptualization, procedures, research interests, and so
on as "progress" or at least "different ways of looking at the same thing." Other
scientists know that they are in the grip of fashion and fads, whether in astronomy or
geology, psychology or sociology. Magic, cultism, and other overtones, usually sounded and
noticed in religious practice, can be heard in any science.
Every science must have a supernatural auxiliary. I would call it a suprascience, if such a
term would not offend. I mean that the science itself consists of a stripped-down method
and its findings, and that there must form around it not only a halo or encrustation of
fictions, hypotheses, and non-empirically derived speculations, but also an attitudinal
complex, rather like a system of illusions and delusions, or like a ruling formula (a term
which Gaetano Mosca applied to the field of political science).
This auxiliary suprascience functions as a propaganda machine to make the science appear to
its practitioners and public as continuously worthwhile, to tie it non-empirically into
various problem areas of life, to act as a lightning rod (I will not argue whether
lightning rods really are effective against lightning) to dissipate attacks gathering
against the field, to give the field a history (much of it pseudo-history) and a future
(much of the genre of science fiction).
As political science is impossible to consider without its ruling formulas (elites,
democracy, kingship, laissez-faire, militarism, etc.), so astronomy cannot exist
unaccompanied by schools of astrology, or geology without forms of uniformitarianism, or
economics without models of "economic man," or literary analysis without fads and fashions,
or medicine without magic and homeopathy, or chemistry without suprasciences, one or more
for each of its numerous subdivisions such as diets alongside food chemistry, drug cultures
alongside drugs, aesthetics alongside plastics, and so on.
There is no fakery here; there is strict necessity; man lives in the skies as well as in
his hovel; culture marches along all paths and all paths are psychically connected, even
when, especially in a scientific and pragmatic age, they may be, by an effort of will,
separated for specialized solutions.
Under these circumstances, man lives throughout the cosmos, effectively. He lives
pragmatically in the cosmos that he can experience and command through sensory
manipulation. He lives mentally (and, by ritual, pragmatically) in the cosmos that is
beyond experiencing but which he can imagine and bring into order. We may fancy that Jesus
of Nazareth would speak this parable:
A woman of the mountains saved her money to buy a rain cloak, for she was often wetted by
the rains there, and when she had sufficient she ventured to Jerusalem to buy a cloak. But
the cloak was so beautiful, that she would not wear it, so as to preserve it, and all her
clothing became wet and damaged. Now I say unto you, wear your beautiful cloak of religion
and all of your other clothing will be saved, and your Father in Heaven will replace your
rain cloak with the raiment of angels.
Reason, many theologians and secularists pray, will serve religion, and show a person what
is good and bad in religion. So, if there is bad religion, it is because men do not use
their reason to find the good, or they exercise their free will to choose to do bad with
religion.
Rationalism is thus used in two ways to damage religion. First, it becomes secular and
refutes most or all religious pretension, as with Voltaire and Marx. Second, and more
important here because it is a lesser known argument, rationalism erodes religion because
it claims that mankind, possessed of the gift of telling what is "true" religion from what
is "false" religion, only needs to be educated to distinguish "truth" in order to pursue
true religion.
Thus the problems of religion can be said to be solved by the independent pursuit of the
principles of reason with regard to supernatural beings and rituals. In this second
situation, the rationalist theologians, counting here Saint Thomas Aquinas insofar as he is
Aristotelian and rationalistic, lend themselves to the continuation of evil in the name of
religion; for evil becomes the result of ignorance and neglect of reason.
Reason, as conceived in traditional and conventional philosophy and theology, presumes
"free will." Free will is considered as the endowment of human nature with the capacity to
choose one out of two or more alternative options as the basis for action upon an issue.
Thus, employing reason, a choice of good over evil is imposed by free will, and an opposite
decision becomes a free choice of evil. It is this "free will" which has been used in many
cultures to explain the harsh effects of religion. Man is wicked and is therefore punished
by his gods; by no means can the wickedness be blamed on the gods.
This argument would appear to constitute an imposing defense of traditional religion and
may even explain why all other life activities are dealt with by the principles of
rationalism and free will (rather than the other way around). If so, it is one more
important indication of the extent to which the religious sphere permeates and dominates
the structure and operations of the other seemingly separated spheres of life.
Actually, the belief in free will can be viewed as a primary obstacle to the improvement of
religion. Not only does it make of man in his own eyes a wicked sinner, much more fearful
of the gods, the authorities, and the people around him than he would otherwise be, hence
aggravating his natural paranoia, ambivalence, and hostility to others. But it also makes
it impossible for man to govern himself; for he believes that he has within him, quite
divorced form the really essential set of mechanisms according to which he behaves, the
ability at any time to change himself from good to bad and from bad from bad to good.
Furthermore, the "bad" and "good" are themselves applied in the religious sphere often
quite apart from any connections which they might have with the other spheres of life.
"Free will," and rationalism as well, are fantastically individualistic fictions. They
permit the dissociation of an individual decision from all that in fact determines, and
should determine, the decision. Neither a balky donkey nor the gods themselves can prevent
man's exercising his will upon them to turn along his way.
By contrast, the theory of homo schizo holds that man derives his religion from the same
set of mechanisms whence he derives all his religion, from the same set of mechanisms
whence he derives all his other interests and activities. One cannot allow the concepts of
free will and rationalism to enter. All of human behavior considered as a mind transacting
within himself and throughout the medium of his culture is of one piece, holistic.
Free will is no longer, if it ever was, a useful idea. The known and experienced deviations
or range of choice available to us is large enough, whether determined or free, to allow
for extremely diverse decisions.
Now see what this theory of homo schizo does to the status of the supernatural and of
religion. It elevates their status, rather than depressing it. But, more than that, it
makes sacred and religious man impregnable to separatistic assaults upon his religion. For
he can say and he can prove, or others can do this for him, that even if his religious
aspects are suppressed, he will be different only in those particulars where a transference
occurs, from the prohibited areas of religion, to the permitted secular areas.
Religious man can further declare that the elimination of religion does not eliminate evil,
but merely introduces more evil to other quarters of human behavior. And he can heap up
evidence showing that secularized societies and secularized man have shown no noticeable
improvement in conduct denominated as good.
Until we decide who we are and what we want to be, we are at fault in what we are and want
to do. Unless we shut the doors against all unwanted conduct from all spheres of life,
shutting the door against religion in the hope of stopping all unwanted conduct is futile;
it will enter by the other doors. As well as saying that religion cannot be suppressed, and
as well as stating that much of religion behavior is true both in itself and in
reconciliation with science, we are now prepared to say that the suppression of religion
will not consign evil beyond man's ken. For that great task, a reconstruction of human
nature is required.
Such a reconstruction may well be impossible. We do not know enough yet to define the terms
of reform. What we can do at this stage of our study is to argue for the incorporation into
religion of our findings, both to prepare the ground for the possible coming reconstruction
and to maintain the best possible, the least damaging, of religious as well as of all other
systems.
The problem of absolute morality -- of the standards of good conduct and the means to
practice it -- must go unsolved here. Absolute morality may be forever beyond human
abilities to demonstrate. Short of this, we resort to what many philosophers before us have
advocated, a natural law of human behavior: How people have always behaved and seem
compelled to behave is restructured so that the consequences which people seem always to
have wanted -- even when acting in contradiction -- will ensue.
Since we do not appeal to gods, reason, or secular authorities, nor to charism, faith, and
revelation, it would appear best to label our natural law as hypothetical, tentative, and
only so good as its consequences are acceptable to most people, whether educated or not, in
all cultures. This might be called a natural moral consensus.
To summarize from suggestions offered in various passages of our work, we perceive four
essential and general human demands: for freedom from fear, for material subsistence, for
new experiences, and for a disinterested arbitration of human conflicts. Fearlessness;
subsistence; experiencing; and justice: these words may be used also.
All of these require controls over the self (selves), others, and nature. Control requires
skills (considering even brute force as a kind of skill at leverage, if nothing else), and
mankind is obsessively driven to elaborate his internal and external control system to a
stage where he has obtained what he can regard as minimal and sufficient guarantees of his
several needs.
The overall problem of a culture is, unconsciously or consciously, to provide a network of
practices that will supply its people with excellent chances of obtaining these guarantees.
And so we proceed to human relations, technology, politics, religion -- family government,
world government, cosmic government -- and science, which acts to supply better ways for
cultures to fulfill these needs.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART II. THEOTROPY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER TWELVE
NEW PROOFS OF GOD
Ideas of quantavolution -- of sudden great changes -- attract the attention of historians
of religion in especially two regards: religion was, and must remain in whatsoever guise,
the companion of the newly born, traumatized, self-aware human mind; and the earliest
religious voices, still speaking through the sacred documents of ancient times, were
telling many truths, even literal truths about natural events, human nature, and human
institutions -- truths that bespeak quantavolutions.
Yet quantavolution also presents a distressing problem to those who believe that, if once
they could approach closer to the earliest days, when "the gods walked on earth" they would
be inspired, ennobled, and reinforced in their faith. This is not the case and they may
become downhearted and skeptical.
They should realize that even before quantavolution was assembled as a body of theories,
those theologians, mystics and millennialists who ventured into the great first days of
creation had to feel the terror and suffering that comes with "looking upon the face of
god." Hence, indeed, most religions have calibrated the approaches to the sacred, so that
only the well-prepared and thoroughly-warned would attempt the journey. That is, long
before quantavolutionism, it was fully known that only the hardiest of souls could cope
with the revelations of the first ages, could endure the historicity of the apocalypse.
It is possible to absorb the theories of quantavolution solely in the form of science,
eschewing all contact with the religious experience as truth, while pursuing every avenue
to religious experience as sociological and psychological fact. That is, quantavolution
would only ask of its students that they exercise its hypotheses and evidence according to
the current general methodology of science. This would be the more comfortable and easier
choice.
Alternatively, however, one may confront the issue of the religious truth contained in this
body of revolutionary theories, probing, inquiring whether perchance there is inherent in
them something that those seeking a truth that is religious will recognize as valuable. The
road is hard, and lined with the philosophical tombstones of many catastrophists and
uniformitarians who have gone before, trying each in turn to transport a body of science
into the realms of religious truth. Nevertheless I shall aim at the same goal.
I shall try to reach my goal in several steps. A metaphor of a box is used throughout. The
human mind is inextricably contained within a physiologically limited box of perceptive
possibilities and cyclical redundant logic.
The truths of religion are not within this box. Yet the existence of the box is proof of
the supernatural, this being what is outside the box, which, we must admit, has an outside.
It is well that religious truths are not within this box, for the box limits and shapes its
contents, and therefore disciplines the fields of knowledge that it holds.
The box nevertheless is indefinitely expansible. Its resources and limits have not been
fully tested or strained. (This differs from the expansion mentioned above, which was only
communicative expansion.)
In whatever direction the box expands, it is not likely to be limited. Hence the
supernatural is not bounded by the accomplished full testing of any of its facets.
The simplicity and complexity of things are subjectively perceived or operationally
invented. Things is themselves cannot be defined as absolutely simple or complex. The same
is true of the concepts of space (size), time, past, and future. The same is true of "life"
or "animism." It is subjective percept or operational invention, not defined other than by
the human mind.
Now, if god is whatever is beyond the box (i. e. limitless), god must be also what is in
the box, inasmuch as what is in the box is speculating upon what is outside of it, as we
here.
Therefore, all that we sense and think in ourselves and our perceptible and thinkable world
is part of the supernatural. If the supernatural and god are joined, we are pantheists.
Putting god into an animistic metaphor, god is our judge; god has already judged us. We
already are composed and function according to god's cosmic spirit, by intelligence, and
necessity.
The very nature of our ignorance, then, cribbed and confined in our cosmic box, constitutes
a proof of the existence of gods. The agreement of extended ignorance from the crypto-blind
bio-box probably stands up better under modern scrutiny than the traditional arguments for
the proof of god that we mentioned in an earlier chapter. Furthermore, a second modern
proof may tend to confirm the existence of gods, and support the proof from the cosmic box.
The universe is presently thought to be some billions of years old, probably finite,
although the boundaries are not clear, and populated by many billions of stars. Many stars,
if not most of them, are believed to have spawned planets. Planets will have had ample
occasion to acquire atmospheres and "the building blocks of life," as we like to say from
inside our cosmic box. We are also forced to admit that life as we know it is defined from
inside our box, and "intelligence," as we might conceive it without actually knowing it,
may be a product of other means of manufacture and assembly.
Even if we have to conjecture the birth of gods from the elements of the atomic table, the
combinations and permutations of this, plus the practically unlimited conditions of time,
space, temperature, and pressure can provide the substance and form of a god whom even
scientific materialists, even Karl Marx, must recognize as authentic and in being.
In the creation of all things, we must contend with the principle of entropy, a term
invented by Clausius in 1865 to refer to the state in which thermal energy is no longer
available for mechanical work. Later, and especially with Norbert Wiener, the term was
broadened to describe "the running down of the universe." Clausius himself had written "the
entropy of the universe tends to a maximum." (Thus the idea merely subsisted until a
century of history changed the optimistic mid-nineteenth to the pessimistic mid-twentieth
century intellectual climate.)
Given even a time of short duration, or of a conventional dozen billion solar years, the
number of occasions for "phenomena" or "phenomenal intelligence" to appear in the universe
is extremely large. Cases of "negative entropy," that is, of existence moving toward
creation rather than desuetude, must be very numerous.
There is no reason to use life on earth as the archetype of the universe. As the
Encyclopedia Britannica reports, "all the organisms of the earth are extremely closely
related, despite superficial differences. The fundamental ground pattern, both in form and
flesh, of all life on earth is essentially identical." Nor ought we take mankind as the
measure of the product of potential habitats of intelligence. In some proportion of them,
something much more than homo sapiens schizotypus must have emerged. There should exist
planets or complexes where beings of much greater intelligence and competence than
ourselves exist. There must be a range of such superior intelligences from superman to
gods.
Whether individuals, conglomerates, complexes, spirits, physiological aggregations unknown
to us, or even creatures suggesting ourselves, these will all have many times our
abilities. Perhaps some will have supernatural capacities (for we cannot understand them) a
billion times our own. Perhaps one of the beings may have generated power to move the
universe itself; for, as the second law of thermodynamics maintains that the universe and
all matter within it is running down, but an exception is made in the case of life which is
negatively entropic, so there is an excellent chance that somewhere in the universe in an
intelligent being, of which we can conceive but which we cannot become, whose powers are
such that it is in control of the universe moving in the direction of intelligence and
progress as we conceive of it: this being certainly must be called god. It would then be
for all practical purposes omniscient and omnipotent. That it would be all-caring, omni-
benevolent, may also be presumed, for to take care of itself it would have to take care of
the universe in some part, as a case of "enlightened selfishness," in our limited human
terminology.
Thus the traditional concept of god is exercised with a new proof involving the probability
of supreme negative entropy. God is created by the universe, working in opposition to the
principle of entropy with the equally universal principle of creation. The creative
principle, arising like the phoenix from its ashes of entropy, must naturally turn to
controlling the universe.
If this god is not already a fact, still, in the aeons of time to come, it must become a
certainty. As the local gods of the solar system were born and died in succession, there
may have been many temporary or quasi-omnipotent gods in times and spaces beyond all solar
system experience. The universe offers billions of chances for a supreme god to arise in
the future. Sooner or later, the universe will create its supreme master, just as the
earth, this indescribably minute place, has created its locally supreme master, the human.
Whereupon truly the universe would be intelligently ordered, as contrasted with the present
chaos, and the far-flung parts, including our own, would be irresistibly induced to
cooperate.
Let us proceed to discuss this theory of divine actual or potential existence at greater
length.
To establish a new religion on solid grounds requires that the history of religion as the
history of the true god be rejected. If one relies upon the scientific history of religion,
one would be led to the conclusion that gods do not exist. Luckily for those who yearn for
gods, one can go beyond the history of religion, to psychology and philosophy. There they
will learn that the human mind is basically limited. Its perceptions and condition are
structurally bounded. To exceed this structure they must rely only upon corollaries of the
cosmic proof: 1) extension of some hitherto neglected remote recesses of the structure of
mind and body and 2) a type of reasoning that proceeds on an "if.... then" basis which
says: This is desirable; the question is open; the desirable is therefore not foreclosed.
If god exists or gods, and is as we think god ought to be, then we are happier and can seek
progress. Since the "if" cannot be foreclosed by any known means, the "then" is always
possible.
What is greater than the self can only be known anthropomorphically, that is, by extensions
of the self as it is known to one. Hence, if the universe has dimensions that are quite
divorced from human traits (or their extensions), we can never know them. But the premise
that more exists, which we cannot possibly know, is itself a proof of the existence of
gods, even though we cannot know them in any other way than in this paltry manner.
Moreover, it is possible that dimensions of the universe hitherto unknowable to us will
make themselves known, whether because they change so as to be comprehensible (" God makes
himself known,") or we change ourselves structurally by genetic accident or manipulation.
If the universe has only those qualities which we now possess or may in the future possess,
or if the universe changes its qualities, then we can come to a knowledge of the gods that
we, in our limited way, know must be there.
Are these possibilities of knowledge additive? can we say that our full knowing potential
plus the potential of the unknown gives us virtual certainty that gods exist? Like the lost
sailor, we know that land lies in every direction. Also we know that land may be far away
if we go in some directions. Can we determine in what direction the divine land lies? A wee
mouse, five centimeters long, is in many ways superior to the human. In proportion to size,
he can run 20 times as fast, jump fifty times as high, scale walls, swim naturally well,
has senses superior to those of men, and trains readily for reactive tasks. His brain and
his organs are marvels of miniaturization, relative to ourselves. The outstanding
difference is that homo is schizotypical, that is, self-aware and all that flows from this
fact.
We know nothing about any species that has the equivalent of schizotypicality and what this
affords us. We can conjecture how many species in all the universe might be schizotypical
or have other systems capable of performing operations that we designate as being along the
parameter of the human-as-divine up to the exceedingly divine, that is, the full god.
Moses and his followers claimed that Yahweh could see and punish malefactors and
delinquents. The Christian religion says that God can know the minds of all persons.
Paranoids will sometimes say that they can tell what all minds in a crowd are thinking and
single out individual minds, too. A body containing 10 20 cells can pass a signal to most
or perhaps all cells in a brief time so that they are all reacting consonantly. The number
of Jews is 10 7 +, of Christians 10 9 , of humans 4 x 10 9 . The coordination of "nature"
exceeds that of gods, so to say, in some respects, and goes far beyond the most paranoid
human mind. (Indeed, many humans are content to control one other person, such as a spouse
or child.) Coordination means two things: communication and control.
Thus far, the shocking modern revelation of the numberless stars and vast extent of the
universe has been converted into constructive thought regarding the possibility of there
being other intelligent beings in the universe, with whom we might possibly communicate.
Inevitably the thought has been elaborated into contentions that at some time in the past,
astronauts have settled upon our planet, assimilating biologically with lesser breeds, or
constituting the human race itself. The thought has also moved, theoretically, to the
contention that more intelligent or hostile or flagrantly incompatible beings might be
confronted, to our embarrassment, should we be successful in communicating with
exoterrestrials.
These discussions employ formulas not essentially different from what we employ here. We
take up estimates of 10 11 galaxies of 10 11 stars each, without counting dark stars or
clouds, reaching thus 10 22 stars. We count 10 22 dark stars and dark clouds as having
theogonic possibilities (" darkness" is our problem). Gods take time to develop, but we may
assume that the average body has had enough of such time, billions of years. Whether, for
instance, the Earth has subsisted for 4 x 10 9 or 10 6 years, it has had at least a 1/ 10
44 possibility of generating a god. Of the total source bodies, some 10 11 (plus dark stars
and clouds) would exist in our galaxy alone. We are not counting the separate planets or
comets, that would multiply these several stellar figures by 2, 5, 500, 1000 or some other
multiple not known, but depending on the average number of planets per star.
Suppose that science on Earth expands its capabilities ten times, a figure not in excess of
many predictions from various fields. Suppose the human achieves an IQ of 160, lives to be
200, and can travel to the neighboring star cluster of Arcturus. Suppose the human is even
morally set upon acting as god. The human will probably not be a god, but he will show that
gods are possible somewhere. That is, it does not take too much more than man can be in
order to define a god or demigod.
If there also are and have been 5 x 10 11 centers for realizing divine beings in the galaxy
and this over a period of time -- in fact, why not infinity? -- then the chance that one or
more gods have developed is certain. Probabilistically, at least one is certain; let us say
five are highly probable; 5000 are likely; 5 million are at least 50% probable; and some 50
million gods are possible, this in our galaxy alone. In the universe as a whole, these
figures would be multiplied by 10 22 . At 5000 per galaxy, the gods would number 5 x 10 25
, too many by far to crowd into Valhalla. If gods should die (speaking of the
g"tterdammerung), that is, lose some or all of their capabilities, one would halve the
number of gods in the confines of the stipulated universe.
Among all of the probable godships, should not many have evolved to a multi-galactic god ,
and at least one to supreme god of the universe? An interesting feature of the results here
is that there appear to have been more gods than the conventional formulas claim there to
be planets with intelligent life forms. This paradox occurs because one does not constrain
estimates by looking for something close to man, to technical civilization, or intelligent
life as we know it. Further the requirements of an environment similar to man's can be
waived; the gods need not be limited by humanly severe temperatures, or the presence of a
long string of prior primitive life forms called for by nonquantavolutionary evolution.
Thus, as soon as less conservative considerations than are customary are set for
intelligent forms in the universe, the number quickly exceeds the number of gods estimated
here. Ordinary calculations of life spans are irrelevant, too; the occurrence of gods
presumptively reduces time constraints; the possibility of divine viability stretching over
much, most or all of the age of the universe adds to the probability that gods are active
now.
In sum, of the terms of the formula used in many discussions of communication with
extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) only the gross number of celestial bodies is usable in
estimating the likelihood of the existence of gods. To find the number of extant technical
civilizations in the galaxy, by the "Green Bank formula" of F. D. Drake, N, one multiplies
R* (the average rate of star formation over the lifetime of the galaxy), by fp (the
fraction of stars with planetary systems), by no ( the mean number of planets per star that
are ecologically suitable for the origin of life as we know it), by fe (the fraction of
such planets on which life in fact has arisen), by fi (the fraction of such planets on
which intelligent life has evolved), by fc (the fraction of such planets on which a
technical civilization such as our own has developed) and by L (the average life of a
technical civilization). That is, N = R* (fp)( no)( fe)( fi)( fc)( L). [Product of these
factors.]
Results, depending upon the estimates fed into the formula, have ranged from one to
millions of technical civilizations in the galaxy. Our own technical civilization capable
of interstellar radio communication is only a single generation old. The 1000-foot-diameter
telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, existing transmitters and receivers, and a
presumption of the same type of equipment on another planet would provide a communication
medium of 1000 light-year diameter, providing 10 6 stars. Space travel and laser
transmission are technically near availability to extend somewhat the range. There is
therefore some chance of a communication exchange now.
But how have we defined a god that gods should be so numerous? By god is meant a
coordinated divine activity such that 1) it can endure or reproduce or replicate itself
indefinitely under highly varying ambient conditions, that 2) it can act so as to expand
communication pathways and thus its influence at an exponentially increasing rate, that 3)
its proven scope and domain of intervention is extensive within a galaxy or is
multigalactic, and contains no inherent limits, that 4) it provably (in human terms) acts
so as to increase the aptitude and appropriate behaviors of the most promising existences
(including humans) with the end in mind of reducing entropy and establishing theotropy as
the dominating principle of the universe.
How do these qualities, if applied to the human condition, reduce fear, war, and famine,
while increasing love and knowledge? I have mentioned but a few of such moral connections
in these pages. Their deduction from the principles of godship do not appear to present
problems in excess of those traditionally and successfully solved by theologians such as
Saint Thomas Aquinas when deducing human moral behavior from the qualities of gods.
Theotropy can be considered from the standpoint of gods and of humans. Regarding gods, the
achievement of influence is by means and in terms that we understand or cannot understand.
So far as we can understand, gods must extend themselves either immediately or by a
succession of moves.
Insofar as our world is governed by no intelligent divine influence -- at least no
sufficiently powerful and satisfactory influence then no "great" god has even in our
short -- time view extended itself over us, whereupon we can probably more correctly
imagine that any god occupying itself with humans is proceeding by a succession of moves,
that is, by growth. Both may be occurring, a onetime immediate assumption of our world and
a succession of moves to change us.
A reader who has pursued our works on quantavolution knows how we believe man to have
acquired his nature and how the world as we know it has come about. Thereupon he may ask:
"Why does man need a god, considering all the troubles gods have appeared to cause?" Worse,
"What legitimate reason has man for seeking god?" Worse of all, "What can any god do for
man that is good for man?"
First of all, none of these questions can destroy the gods if they do indeed exist. No more
than one can dispose of tax collectors who are troublesome, unwanted, and useless. From a
homocentric point of view, however, we can be more cooperative in responding.
We need all the help we can get, plainly and simply. We are inadequate to our dearest
wishes for the universe: that it be controlled and beneficent to ourselves and the
posterity with which we identify.
We need help of a quality that is beyond the ability of everything whose qualities we know
directly. Our faithful dog, Shep, is not up to the task. Nor are even our most trusted
friends and allies. If there is a god, we need him.
The third question gives us pause. If the price exacted by seeking, finding and cooperating
with god is our most priceless gifts, we may prefer our troubles, death, entropy, and
oblivion. This leads abruptly to the question which we seem to confront at every turn of
the way. What does, what ought, the human wish to be? If he wishes to be like the gods, and
the gods are likely to be so indulgent, then all is well and good, and we should search
eternally, if necessary, for the gods.
One's purpose on Earth will then be answered from the divine point of view: the human is
created for the divine task of helping to save the universe. He, and all developing and
positive matter, are assigned this overall function. The universe has bred the human as a
way to its own survival, as a challenge to its death, as an antibody against the death and
dissolution foretold by the second law of thermodynamics.
Elsewhere we have written of man's basic needs, to fearlessly subsist, experience and live
justly. If the gods are theotropic, we have nothing to fear from them except the loss of
that element in us which is self-destructive and entropic.
What might this element be? Let us call it the diabolic, because it will turn out to be
that often highly attractive mixture of uncertainty, fear, hatred, spite, lies, greed and
egotism that goes into some of the most wonderful human creations. Will not the gods take
from man the taste of evil for which he slavers? Or will the gods, like certain historical
gods, allow man the gift of diabolism with all that it does for his music, dance, art,
inventions, and politics?
This is one question; another question, equally important, is related: will the gods take
away self-government, self-rule, decentralization of decisions, whether large or small?
There is indeed an argument, posed as, "Let every man go to hell in the own way." The felt
uniqueness, the exultation, the happiness of determining one's way are not to be given
over, even to the gods, one senses -- and we can hear the most stupid as well as the most
brilliant of humans saying so.
Perhaps the gods will be indifferent to such trivialities, perhaps they work sloppily,
letting as much as we know of life pursue itself along their general guidelines. Or perhaps
it will happen that in their intense pursuit of godliness, humans will get their fill of
risks, conflicts, imagination, and autonomy. In any event, this crisis is far down the line
of theotropy, whereas man's decline and destruction are always close at hand. We prefer to
think therefore that, in the pursuit of the divine, humanity will have all that it will
want of symbolism, diversity, and excitement.
From the human standpoint, gods are to be awaited and solicited. If they are awaited, the
presumption is that the gods are interested in expansion for its own sake. Any part to the
universe will do. This is probably an unsafe assumption because it implies a certain kind
of god. But god is more than a mere "land-grabber," we reason. He is interested in his own
development; he is maximizing his opportunities of theotropy and not interested in entropic
refuse. Therefore, gods are to be invited. For some lucky mystics, gods may indeed already
have been entertained. I cannot understand the means, hence cannot confirm the encounters.
But what are the occasions for conflict among potential and actual gods in the galaxy and
universe prior to the universal achievement of a single supreme god? Will there not occur
what even mankind has experienced on its low level of achievement, a set of squabbling
barons, a battle of the gods? Then the gods themselves will do what it is now widely
believed that man will do - destroy themselves and contribute to the entropy of the
universe?
As they move out to order and exalt the universe what will determine their jurisdictions
and, as implied in their aims, will merge them into one? Let us look once again at the
traits of the divine bodies. They excel in expansiveness, in sensitivity to domains of
potential theotropic existence, and in promoting theotropism (countering entropy). It is
this last that determines outcomes. The theotropism or divinity that competes most
effectively to eliminate entropy will merge with other divinities to the degree that they
operate in the same way. It is to their interest to behave in this way. In the end it will
be the constructive principle of the universe that will influence and absorb all potential
theotropy in the universe. Creation will triumph over destruction. This is the aim of the
universe, the greatest of natural laws, and is the ultimate good.
A second objection occurs. If, as has been asserted in this work, man is not a rational
animal in any usual sense of the term "reason," and if sublimation is employed to move him
from his great fear of himself and the world into large intellectual, imaginative and real
worlds far beyond himself, then why is this proof of the existence of divinity not another
sublimatory consideration? Is this all "mere" sublimation?
The answer is that sublimation is not unreal, even though it may refuse to treat directly
with its origins in human nature. Its rationalizations are testable by rules of reality,
logic, consensus, pragmatism, and evidence; this, too, we have said earlier and will
discuss later as well. Granted this, the theotropic proof must contend with all other
assertions about divinity on the basis of which ones best fit the state of the world as we
barely know it and of whatever provides the best consequences for the human condition. Homo
sapiens schizotypus is released from his fearful bind and contradictions by this view of
the supernatural and is directed to employ his energies constructively --theotropically
rather than entropically.
If the principle of entropy exists -- and we think that this is so out of our material
perceptions -- then its opposite principle may exist because, first, the world is not fully
entropic, next, there is an anti-entropism observed, and, third, entropism must originate
from something that decays. In this last case, the something that decays must have been
non-entropic, possibly anti-entropic, that is, theotropic.
The entropy and theotropy can co-exist: they do so under our eyes. It may appear that the
theotropic is declining, but this may be false. Our narrow perspective may be giving false
measures, and we are better conditioned to detect entropy than theotropy. Especially with
our present confidence in materialism, that is, our indifference to theotropy and our
desire to emulate the ideal instinctive animal, we may be today underestimating theotropy.
But is not the theotropic also material? It can properly be conceived as such, but only if
we realize that most of what we call material is the refuse of theotropic materialism. As
to what composes theotropic processes, we submit that theotropy is composed of what is
tangibly material, of some extremes of the knowably material (particles, waves, light,
etc.) of material potentially known to us but not yet known, and of material unknowable to
us. I only call it material for fear of erecting barriers between the "material" and
"immaterial."
Under the regime of theotropy, it appears that mankind is to be more of an observer,
thinker and admirer of the abstract than the active being who is acted upon. How can he
behave religiously otherwise, and how can his morals connect with this religion?
First, one who possesses this religion will be occupied with the future, as historical man
has first sought a heavenly salvation and lately has sought salvation in the future also
but in a more scientific and technological way.
Second he will be more objectively self-searching and theological than historically he has
been. He is looking for a different kind of divinity; this affects the quality of the
search.
Thirdly, he has to consider the question: Do I wish to attract gods? Do I wish to be
adopted by gods, lightning-struck so to speak; do I wish to become chosen by the gods? Do I
wish to be embraced by a larger theotropy than I have means of becoming in myself??
Surprisingly the answer to all of these questions will be a strong affirmative. (I say
surprisingly for I feel personally that we have no right to expect such definite answers to
questions that we have formulated with such difficulty and hesitation.) Behind the banners
of entropism stands a sad, scientoid diabolism. We do want to live in theotropy, in the
future, in the realms of the gods.
Then the question becomes : How do we attract the gods? Do we do so with signals, search
parties on vehicles, sending care packages of our little technical tricks into outer space?
Or do we go seeking the gods with a message that we think will have meaning for them? What
could such a message be ?
Our best message, our invitation to the gods, is our ability to take care of our own world
and its surroundings. It stands to reason that the gods, if they have already reached us
actually or potentially, or if they were to come upon us in their expanding operations in
the universe, would either embrace us or dismiss us by indifference or destruction.
What would achieve their embrace? Obviously, they would embrace theotropy, for that is
their essence. What are the signs of theotropy, which in our older language we might call
blessedness? They would have to be signs of which we are capable. These signs are not
negligible; they are signs of godliness.
Theotropy is the trend of existence to achieve divine influence. Inasmuch as humans may be
capable of it, it calls for an expansion of the influence of life over death and of mind
over matter. Thus, it appears that the very principles that we have ascribed to the
theotropy of the gods are principles that reverberate down the corridors of human time and
thought.
If these principles go unattended or are unsuccessfully pursued by mankind, the gods will
not punish us; the gods have more important matters on their more universal "minds." They
will ignore us, and let us continue in the predictable shortness of our forever to suffer
both from our own behavior and being god-forsaken, which must mean the loss of our hopes,
of our development, and of our future. There are a great many people who believe that god
may exist but always has reason to punish people, so much so that it is useless to attempt
even a decent peaceful and material subsistence for mankind. Famine, plague, flood or war
are seen to be inevitable divine visitations. Such apathy and fatalism go along with the
succession of gods who could hardly allow mankind to recover from one catastrophe before
bringing down another upon it.
At the other extreme of materialism stands the vanguard of the technical achievers. So
flushed are they with the successes of empirical science, that they predict a never-ending
invigoration of life and conquest of vast reaches of outer space. Among these are the ones
who would fill capsules with gimcracks to fire into far space.
The fatal flaw in their vision and plans is a misperception of human limits. The human race
stands at a crisis of will and belief, of world disintegration and warfare, even as
vehicles hurtle into outer space. Humans have not solved their basic issues of life over
death, and mind over matter. They may be incapable of doing so without the help of a great
achievement, is to invite the gods for help on matters of life and mind. This the
technocrats and military operators of the political economy and outer space are of no mind
to do, whether they by acting in the name of mosaism or atheism. In their arrogance, they
see no need to invite the gods to their feast. Or they try to beckon to them by exercises
paralleling the long history of sacrificed beings and the destruction of nations.
We conclude that gods -- or god, if you will -- exist. They do not exist in fear; fear is
human alone. They exist in our mind as the mind tests the limits of reality and invents,
while integrating these limits, a special kind of reality in the supernatural -- the area
of the divine. Gods exist outside the mind with as much probability as the universe that we
contemplate is real. In these two senses, god is reality.
Granted reality, the divine must be our most important reality. This may seem to be skating
on the thin ice of scholasticism. "Tell it to a starving man." But it is a statistical
reality and in the final analysis it is statistics that compose reality of all kinds. The
divine is the most important because it is the only distinction that is uniquely human; it
comes straight out of the awful realization of one's divided soul, two or more material
contradictions, ineradicable and appositionally creative.
Climactically a reconciliation takes place in philosophy and science. To know oneself is to
know more than oneself; it is to know the divine. Here is the reason for the failure of
historical religions, which damaged the soul is order to force it to hold delusions about
"hard reality" and external gods at the same time.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
PART II. THEOTROPY:
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CATECHISM
A catechism can summarize the fundamental facts and doctrines of religion from our
perspective. The word "catechism", which now broadly means an elementary instruction manual
in a given field, has for seventeen hundred years meant, more precisely, exercises for
instructing Christian neophytes. Before the word achieved popularity in its Latinized Greek
form, it may have come from the combined words "tying down", connoting a binding divine
covenant. Less religiously, it recalls a metaphorical American usage of the same words, as
when we "tie down" a matter so as to put it is form for easy handling. Our catechism here
intends to tie down in a well-known format the basic facts and doctrines of religion
deriving from our study.
Setting forth a catechism exposes to a pitiless light our beliefs concerning religion. The
onus of proselytism comes with it, for a catechism must tell people what they should
believe. There are health and strength in such an exercise.
1. How was the universe created?
The world has always existed in some of its infinitely possible manifestations, and is
being created in some others today, and so it will go on.
2. How long will this Earth endure?
The Earth will endure for an inestimable time, depending upon mostly unpredictable natural,
and divine human events.
3. How much can a person know about the world?
One can know more than one can learn and much less than what exists. 4. Can one know
oneself?
One can know oneself within the limits of one's abilities to know oneself.
5. Are the limits of these abilities known and achievable?
The limits of the abilities to know oneself are unknown but more extensive than the
abilities anyone has shown.
6. What should a person know of oneself?
One should appreciate one's operative complex of self-controls.
7. Does a person have free will?
One acts in accord with one's nature and circumstances; free will as action in ignorance of
one's nature and circumstances can exist, but is not characteristic of an autonomous
rational person.
8. What is known absolutely?
Nothing that matters. The absolute should be ignored because its main function is to
promote absolute fear.
9. What is absolutely clear?
Nothing, and tolerance of ambiguity should be a religious principle, both to combat fear
and to express the supernatural.
10. What is science?
Science may be usefully defined as the method of choosing the largest chance of certainty
in solving problems whose conditions and objectives are known.
11. How should science relate to religion?
Science should solve an increasingly large number of the indefinitely large number of
problems of religion, while religion expresses some of the directives and limits of
science.
12. How should we express our relation to cosmos?
We should relate to the cosmos by understanding it and celebrating it.
MORALS
13. What needs has one?
One's needs are fearlessly to subsist, to experience, and to be treated justly.
14. What duties has one?
One's duties are to help others fearlessly to subsist, to experience, and to be justly
treated.
15. Who is divine among people?
Whoever studies and expresses the divine is divine.
16. What differences exist between means and ends?
A means is a process of action that contributes to a more general process of action; it is
rational according to how it works; it is deemed good or bad in its own effects and
therefore contributes more or less good or bad to the end process.
17. Is good rewarded?
Insofar as the religious and secular realms are consonant, good action is rewarded in both;
the rewards of religion should be in its practice and in the health of character that it
fosters.
18. Should evil be punished?
Evil should be compensated for, personally and socially, not punished; it should be treated
as a problem of coping with natural forces.
19. Do right and wrong belong in the realm of the gods?
Yes, they belong where the human and divine realms interact.
20. Can a person distinguish right and wrong?
Yes, by exercising himself in the fringes of the supernatural realm where the mundane realm
fashions its judgments.
21. What is right or wrong?
Right is a determination of consistency in the consequences of an action with the divine
aspect of a person.
22. By what rules should a person act?
A person should act by the rules of one's nature adjusted to the related ordinances of a
consensus of like-minded others.
23. How should a person behave toward oneself?
One should accommodate consistently one's divine and mundane character.
24. How should a person behave towards others?
One should act towards others as to a differently shaped development of oneself, hence part
of oneself, hence considerately, hence helpfully.
25. How should a person behave toward plants and animals?
One should behave toward plants and animals as toward others, while recognizing in them an
acute differentiation from oneself in the tragic divine need to derive instinctive
gratification from their exploitation.
26. How should a person behave toward natural objects?
As toward animals and plants, in descending series of their divinity.
27. How should a person behave toward the supernatural?
One should practice an understanding of its potential.
28. What morality is devoid of religious significance?
All morality should be religiously and politically promoted.
29. What morality should be religiously and politically promoted?
Morality should be promoted which comes from a constitution that is based upon consensus
and offering procedures that among other effects tend to establish the dominion of divinity
in humans.
30. Is a person without religion bound to be wrong and evil?
His views are narrow and he may not understand his own religiousness, but his actions may
neither err nor have bad consequences.
31. What function does a person serve in the world?
The person represents and takes part in universal manifestations.
THE SUPERNATURAL AND DIVINE
32. Is there a supernatural part of the world?
What one cannot perceive and what one cannot understand, even if he learns something about
it is the supernatural.
33. Is the supernatural divine?
The supernatural is divine insofar as it is meaningfully integrated into human mentation,
but divinity implies no superiority over the pragmatically knowable.
34. What is the divine on Earth?
The divine on Earth is a uniquely human way of looking upon oneself and the world.
35. How does one worship the divine?
The rituals for worshiping the divine are whatever exercises are useful to achieve it.
36. What is sacred?
Everything viewed in its supernatural and divine manifestations is sacred.
37. What is faith?
Faith is positive morale, a conviction of meaningfulness about what one is thinking and
doing, which when related to the divine is religious faith.
38. What is revelation?
Revelation is the recognition by an internal or external stimulus of an important pattern
to existence, not previously experienced, to which if a divine element is present, the term
"religious" can be attached.
39. What is discovery?
Discovery is a revelation purposefully brought about, whose applications are readily
apparent and available to others.
40. What should authority be?
Authority should be the legitimate power of one person over another, which may be
religious; it should receive its legitimacy by the consensus of those ruled and should lose
its legitimacy to the extent to which it is physically and mentally coercive.
41. How should we behave toward the sacred?
As toward the mundane, although, as with mundane varieties, we should act toward the sacred
appropriately in accord with its distinctions.
42. How much of our energies should be given to the divine?
As much as necessary in order to receive divine energies in return, from ourselves, others,
the world and gods.
43. What is divine energy?
Divine energy is the morale that comes from developing relations with the supernatural.
44. Is there a sacred community?
Yes, the community of those whose understanding of the divine is similar in forms, scope
and intensity.
45. Will the cosmos ever be divine?
The theotropic universe will ultimately dominate the entropic universe.
46. Is the divine also god?
Yes, insofar as its mental integration functions as a presentation of the human mind, the
divine is godly.
47. To what futures should a person relate? A person chooses and lives partially in
whatever futures one wants and is capable of participating in, except that upon death one's
future is resolved into the cosmos and reconstructed beyond personal minding and control.
GODS
48. Is it proper to expect gods?
It is proper to expect gods, as it is to expect enlightenment.
49. What is a god?
A god is a generalized and immanent being, manifesting itself in material ways and through
a demonstrable external cosmic spirit, operating in the human mind as the repository of the
supernatural.
50. Is god material existence?
All material is effective: insofar as the divine is effective existence, and existence is
all material, the divine is material, and so is god.
51. Where is god?
The god is wherever it can be and acts so as to be.
52. Is there one god or many?
There are both one and many gods, depending upon how the mind assembles the divine facets
in its behavior.
53. Do gods behave like humans?
Yes, but only as the human in its universal and supernatural aspects.
54. How many gods exits?
We have not discovered how many, if any, gods exist on Earth, while in the universe myriad
gods exist.
55. What proofs do we have that there exists a supernatural, a divine, and a god?
That divine beings exist is known by the logical extension of our ignorance and limitations
into areas where divinity must being and exist.
56. Do all gods have the same traits and behavior?
Traits and behavior are limited ideas and actions to which the gods cannot be bound.
57. Where is god in relation to the human?
The god is where the human mind is affected by the supernatural and the divine, or may
ultimately be in conscious contact with it.
58. How is a person related to god?
Personally, as to an aspect of oneself, socially as to a joint aspect of oneself and
others.
59. Does a person elect god?
A person chooses god but his election is jointly with others to the extent that the gods of
others permit a joint representation.
60. Can I will against gods?
One can will against gods entropically for self or universally, including reductionism to
greater instinctive animality.
61. Can all historical gods be attributed to catastrophes and other natural causes?
All historical gods are in at least some of their manifestations catastrophic.
62. Are gods historical?
Historical gods have been the outcome of persons interacting with events, and, though
probably non-existent, persist in some of their earlier manifestations, so that all are
partly gone and partly present.
63. Should a person obey historical gods in their original ascribed apparitions?
The gods of the past are to be treated as hypothetical models to avoid and imitate as they
reflect upon the present and future and satisfy today's conditions of existence.
64. Are the gods rational and welcome?
Insofar as they are theotropic rather than entropic, the gods are rational and welcome, and
are to be preferred.
RELIGION
65. Can society hold together without religion?
Society cannot be conceived without religion and therefore cannot hold together without it.
66. Should two persons have the same religion?
No two persons can have or should have the same religion; all religion is therefore
personal.
67. How are persons united by religion?
Persons sharing significant religious perspectives identify with each other and constitute
a church if they recognize their mutual identity.
68. How should we regard existing religions.?
We should regard existing religions as in large part historically invalidated in terms of
the ongoing and future historical process of religion, and encourage their voluntary
assimilation and development into current standards of validation.
69. Should there be priests?
Priesthood as religious leadership must exist, and should be practiced ideally by all when
they can, and by the fewest possible full time forever.
70. What gifts should religion bring?
Religion should bring joy of thought, wonderful awe, a divine community, and freedom from
fear.
71. What gifts should be made to religion?
One should give to others by devotion, rituals, and cooperation the intelligence afforded
by religion.
72. What does religion offer to human suffering of body and mind?
Religion offers to the suffering body and mind the knowledge of self, morale, scientific
pragmatic support, and a cosmic sense of proportion.
73. What symbols should be sacred?
Symbols that retain the least historical implications and represent the major points of
this catechism should be created and promoted and become subjects of admiration and
stimulation; present sacred symbols should be reduced in significance and intensity.
74. What are sacred scriptures?
All graphic and written material that was ever sacred is still sacred and worthy of wonder
and study, but at a reduced level of psychic investment, while new contributions intended
as sacred scriptures should be no more sacred than any other sacrally intended or
scientific or literary work for which merit is claimed.
75. Should our rites be simple or elaborate?
Rituals should be as elaborate as necessary to learn the purpose of the ritual, as stressed
as necessary to enjoy its reassurances, as simple as the available energies would afford,
and should be productive of other goods aesthetically and otherwise.
76. What is the educative task of religion?
Religion should educate people theotropically, which is the constructive life force.
77. What is the task of politics?
The task of politics is the same as religion morally, but politics contends largely with
the pragmatic problems issuing from theotropism.
78. To what extend should we be bound by our religion?
We should be bound to our religion to the extent and so long as it helps us fulfill our
obligations to ourselves and the world.
79. How long will it be before humanity becomes religious?
Mankind will become religious when it discovers the existence of gods on experiential
principles without delusion.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
by Alfred de Grazia
CONCLUSION
THE DIVINE AND HUMAN
Having begun with a pessimistic understanding of the divine succession, I have concluded
with an optimistic belief that the search for the supernatural is a virtuous, healthy, and
constructive activity. The divine exists and can be achieved to a significant degree by all
who properly seek it. It is probable that the divine extends to the existence of gods,
regarding whom the question of one or many is probably nonsense and should certainly not be
sloganized.
Religion is the system of relations sought for and maintained among the humans and the
divine, the divine being more extensive than the human. Religion or religiousness is
morally effective and can often change secular behavior with beneficial effects upon human
life and the satisfaction of human needs. Rituals are exercises of the human character and
are beneficial in the context of a proper religion.
The search for religion is the most civilizing and lofty human experience; the claim to
have found religion has been usually a disaster. Religion came with the first kit of
mankind, mentally and physically. Religion covered all existence and does so even today and
will do so. Neither the purely secular nor the purely sacral type of person is suited
either to study or to maintain the divine search.
Secularism has never been fully accomplished because it contradicts itself when it reaches
its psychic and moral origins. As the method of secularism, science can help greatly sacral
man achieve the divine, provided that it accepts the help of theology.
Historical religions, based upon the terrible power of natural forces, limited strictly the
extent to which humanity could pursue divinity. The gods were born as disastrous natural
occurrences playing upon the existential fear of the self-aware human.
The theory of quantavolution explains, thus, substantially the history of religion and
culture. It strengthens the scientific basis of religion by cutting off the claims of
traditional religion to authorize personal miracles and to arrange divine intervention.
Quantavolution furthermore discerns and pursues the consistent delusional schizoid syndrome
of human nature from its beginnings. It explains the unbreakable connection between the
sacred and secular.
Still, varieties of historical religions, such as Platonism, Stoicism, Christianity,
Buddhism, and Bahai, have often approached the divine by the same routes as we have
ourselves. They enlarged the human perspective and performed experiments; they organized
social and intellectual infrastructures for launches into the future.
The goal of religious practice is the revelation of the divine through the human, and the
integration of the human with the universally divine. This aim, which may be infinite and
unachievable, promotes operations extending beyond the blinded box in which the human mind
must work and seeks to establish relations with divine probabilities wherever they may
exist and be sensed.
The world of entropy is the dying universe of the second law of thermodynamics, and of the
dying mind. Entropy is confronted and contradicted by theotropy, no less valid, nor less
empirical, which is diffused through the universe as creation and life. Many glimpses of
the universal titanic effort of the forces of light against the darkness have been afforded
by historical religions operating at their best, and many unconventional and scattered
secular and religious voices presently sound a call for a new religiousness that can use
all that the scientific and secular might afford. Under such circumstances, religion need
not depend upon its past. It can become a new kind of divine procession into the future.
THE DEVINE SUCCESSION
by Alfred de Grazia
A NOTE ON SOURCES
If we were to scan all of the written, graphic, and artistic works of mankind prior to the
second World War, we should discover that religion was their chief topic, with political-
military subjects a poor second, and commercial records ranking a close third. This fact,
significant in itself, daunts whosoever wishes to delve into the literature of religion, or
to advise others about doing so.
My direct references are imbedded in the text. To assemble my general sources is an
exercise in self-searching that may not profit others. As is the case generally with the
humanities and sciences, the ideal reader and critic may have read few of my sources but
instead "something else," as good or better, or may have shared few of my experiences that
made my sources meaningful, but may have been a keen critic of the language and practices
of religion as observed from childhood to old age in his or her own social settings and
have read little but thought much, so that he would review his religious materials like
Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce reworked their lost pasts in their
autobiographical novels, making of the past a rich and elegant library.
There are, of course, encyclopedias about religion and philosophy, and a general
encyclopedia, excepting the Soviet, will offer perhaps a fourth of its articles as entries
related to religion. James G. Frazer's Golden Bough (13 vols.) is itself an encyclopedia of
the anthropology of religion. Also creations of Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell pertain
here.
Almost encyclopedic, yet entering boldly upon the analytic and systematic, are the studies
of Mircea Eliade. His Patterns in Comparative Religions, The Myth of the Eternal Return,
Myth and Reality, Images et Symboles, and other books are as indispensable as any
particular writings can be in an age when hundreds of books and articles descend upon every
subject. It may not be too early to alert the reader to the multi-volume encyclopedia that
is being prepared under the editorship of Dr. Eliade through the auspices of Macmillan
Publishing Company. [This work is now available]
Every country has had its religious wars, every religion its heretics and apostates, and
political history is loaded with religious conflicts. Bibliographies about them can be
initially retrieved through encyclopedias and card catalogues. Too, every sect has its
sacred scriptures and polemical masters, readily accessed through its leader's name --
Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Wesley, et al, as for instance, one proceeds along a particular
Protestant Christian line of thought.
Should not one begin with philosophy, to avoid trivia and a waste of time? Would that such
were the case. A careless saunter into the woods of theology and philosophy may end up in
the oven of a seminarian. Plato is recommended but not without Aristotle, nor Aquinas
without Eckhart, nor Loyola without Kirkegaard, nor Hegel without Marx, and so on.
The sociology of religion seems to me to be continually useful and I am sure that some of
the trails of my mind pass through Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Hans
Vaihinger, Benjamin Nelson, and the pragmatists with philosophical links, such as William
James and John Dewey. From here it is but a step to the commentators upon science, such as
Percy Bridgman and Alfred North Whitehead. In 1873 John W. Draper published a History of
the Conflict of Religion and Science, but today one seeks out also various works on the
conflict of science itself within science. Among the best of these might be Owen Barfield's
Saving the Appearances, David Bohm's Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, D. G. Garan's
The Key to the Sciences of Man, and Roger S. Jones' Physics as Metaphor. Norbert Wiener's
famous works on communication science are supplemented by God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment of
Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Roger Shinn and Paul Albrecht have
edited a two volume collection on Faith and Science in an Unjust World. Among several dozen
journals, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, occurs in this connection. E. A. Shneour
and E. A. Olteson have compiled writings and bibliography on Extraterrestrial Life.
Psychoanalysis provides a systematic awareness of the subconscious interaction of religious
material with the sexual, familial and symbolic. Sigmund Freud's relevant writings are
indexed and readily available. One might read Carl Jung more selectively. As in other
fields, an occasional perusal of major journals is called for. Most names in this note are
of famous men, and fame breeds fame, so that, as here, lesser luminaries are discriminated
against erroneously.
Much is made of catastrophe and quantavolution in this work. The reader will have noticed
that a background thereto is contained in other books of the author's "Quantavolution
Series;" thus, for the physical evidence of quantavolution and disaster, Chaos and
Creation, The Lately Tortured Earth, and Solaria Binaria; for the anthropological and
mythological ambiance of religion, Homo Schizo I, God's Fire, and The Disastrous Love
Affair of Moon and Mars; for the psychological, Homo Schizo II, as well as the foregoing.
My exposition adopts the format of ordinary language, the structure of whose utterances
must be systematic and conventional. Hence the form of communication renders obscure the
meanings of mystics, already beset by the problem in their own turn when they write. Such
is the case with Meister Eckhart, St. Theresa of Avila, or of Vedanta, Gnosticism,
Quakerism, Zen Buddhism, or Sufism; or of the pure symbolists and the occult. Still, laid
in the depth psychology of the present work and concealed by its positivistic style are
paths that a mystic might perhaps follow in exploring the divine within oneself.
End of The Divine Succession
THE BURNING OF TROY
AND OTHER WORKS IN QUANTAVOLUTION AND SCIENTIFIC CATASTROPHISM
by ALFRED DE GRAZIA
METRON PUBLICATIONS
PRINCETON,
N.J.,
U.S.A.
Note on the printed version of the book:
This book was processed by the Princeton University Computing Center, using the
processing language called Script. Photocomposition, cover make-up, layout, and printing
were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services.
Copyright * 1984 by Alfred de Grazia
ISBN: 0-940268-09-8
Copyright * 1984 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S.A. in a limited First Edition
Address:
Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213
Princeton,
N.J. 08542
To
Eugene Vanderpool
Friend of the Agora of Ideas
THE BURNING OF TROY
TITLE-PAGE
FOREWORD
01. The Quantavolutionary Scan
Part One: Historical Disturbances
02. The Burning of Troy
03. The Founding of Rome
04. Micah's Ark
05. The Catastrophic Finale of the Middle Bronze Age
06. Updating Schaeffer's Destruction Inventory
07. Nine Spheres of Venusian Effects
08. The Obliteration of Human Signs
09. Ancient Astronauts
Part Two: Geological Issues
10. Indians of Illinois
11. Ice Cores of Greenland
12. A Failed Excursion to the Caves of Aquitaine
13. The Latecoming Olduvai Gorge
14. Athens Quakes
Part Three: Working of the Mind
15. Comptinology and Tohu-bohu
16. Sandal-straps and Semiology
17. Making Moonshine with Hard Science
18. Holy Dreamtime in Wonguri Land
19. The 'Unconscious' as a Literary Revolt Against Science
20. O.K. Origins
21. Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings
Part Four: Polemics and Personages
22. Marx, Engels, and Darwin
23. Religion and Education
24. The Outlook of Scientists
25. 'Scientific' Reporting
26. Eulogies to Three Quantavolutionaries
Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model
27. A Cosmic Debate
28. Syllabi for Quantavolution
29. I.Q.: A University Program
30. Past, Present, and Future
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
.
FOREWORD
Entering a sparsely occupied and generally unknown region of thought is like moving into a
new land. The vistas are fresh, the soil unbroken. One wishes to settle down, put in
roots, build a house, raise a family. Yet the very restlessness that carried one to the
frontier will not subside. There is an opportunity to do everything, it seems; the whole
world attracts one and is in need of attention. So it often happens that an erratic and
mobile existence evolves. An energetic spell of construction ensues; a cabin is built,
animals are bred, a garden is grown, a mate is enticed, a stone wall begins to go up. Then
the winds blow, the wild animals pass heading upland, the rising sun beckons and the moon
waxes nervously full. Off one goes, leaving the finished things, the half-finished work,
freeing the pigs, and letting the roots wither. Now it is a new sight very day, a spring
discovered, a strange bird and animal, a day fishing, a day hunting, a day in the hollow
of a tree with a pain. The wonders of the region spin unendingly with the vault of heaven.
One is not fulfilled, but then one was not fulfilled before: such is the curse and its
thrilling clutch upon the pioneer.
I had thoughts akin to these while preparing this book. It contains pieces from
everywhere, notes and essays, topics vigorously attacked and promptly abandoned, because
one is moved by a different wondering. The earliest piece, concerning the mind of
scientists, was written decades ago, the last piece just the other day. Some of the work
reminds me of an abandoned plot of frontier land: if only a person had stayed there, he
could have built a life upon it, as neat as a Swiss chalet. And is the world not built
upon the stable creations of centuries? Yes -- but also upon the scouting parties, the
forays, the fantasies.
My friend Gerd Roesler came from Germany to an island of the Aegean, to Stylida on Naxos,
and I came there too. And there was none on the wild promontory and he wrote his Master's
thesis on the geology of Stylida, and years passed, and he wrote his Doctoral thesis on
the geology of the whole island, but after all of that he comes back and builds a house
next to mine, which has stood alone all the while except when I might be there. Knowing
much more of geology than I, to him the promontory was very old, whereas to this natural
philosopher, it seemed very young. So we stand upon it side by side, and I say to him,
"You see, Gerd, Stylida is young, even by your evidence." And he replies: "No, Alfred,
these rocks are millions of years old... but maybe..." and he laughs, for he likes the
feeling of the frontier, too.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE
THE QUANTAVOLUTIONARY SCAN
The nature that offers itself to our view, which includes the solar system, the earth,
and the biosphere, assumed its present form in a series of sudden leaps, occurring over
short periods of time. So goes the theory of quantavolution. Besides the idea of sudden
leaps, other principles are basic. First the original source of great changes in the
nature of the earth and man has been in the skies. Second, the latest period of time,
roughly the holocene period, say 14,000 years, has witnessed catastrophes. Third, the
great changes of recent times have created modern humans. In sum, nature and mankind
have been recently catastrophized and transformed by forces of exoterrestrial origin.
Science is full of controversies. It thrives upon dispute. Catastrophists are far fewer
than uniformitarians, but they are, if anything, more disputacious, both amongst
themselves and with others. Those who interpret natural history by the "sudden leap" of
quantavolution or catastrophe may not accept even one, much less all three of the
aforesaid principles.
For instance, one of the greatest current catastrophists, the geo-physicist Melvin Cook,
has treated a broad range of problems in the fossil record, movement of continents,
radiodating, and atmospheric changes without resort to comets or other exoterrestrial
forces. Another, Donald Patten, a geographer, makes it quite clear that his work is
related to and supported by Christian theology. The most famous catastrophist, Immanuel
Velikovsky, did not challenge the presumption that mankind is very ancient; although
unfriendly to Darwinism, he might well disagree with some of the mechanisms and
interpretations of human events that I have proposed. He would probably disagree as well
with other theories connected in my opinion necessarily with the catastrophic model.
These three examples could be multiplied. A practical difficulty faces a student of
general quantavolution in that its materials are nowhere properly indexed as such and no
special library of the field exists. Until lately, it has been the unwritten rule in
scientific journals to "tone down" any indications of catastrophism in articles and
especially in titles. Still I have come upon many hundreds of relevant items. They
emerge mostly from conventional sources of science. A smaller number are centered upon
quantavolution, with the appropriate perspective, and these are found in only several
special magazines or in old scientific sources. One moves among the conventional
literature with a practiced glance, like an archaeologist spotting bitty shards among
tons of debris.
William Corliss publishes at Glen Arm, Maryland, a quarterly scan of anomalistic
material, "Science Frontiers", often quantavolutionary it so happens. Thus, examining a
list of fourteen items, which he chose for Number 15, Spring 1981 --and these are only a
fraction of the works published around the time -- my brain was twitched by every one of
then, and I would like the reader to see how these raw twinges first enter the mind:
1. "Ancient Basque inscriptions are identified by noted expert on the so-called
Mechanicsburg Stones of Pennsylvania." Yes, Basque dwellers of the Tethyan Sea, fringes
of Atlantis, survivors of 6000 B. C., see Chaos and Creation. (NEARNA Journal)
2. "Agriculture was not a step forward in human development." Yes. Why plant when you
can reap without sowing. Probably a response to ecological stringency; humans could
plant immediately; cultural hologenesis. (Science)
3. "New discoveries of buried and changed Stonehenge stone configurations." Cf. changed
and variant stone and temple orientations also in Mesoamerica. Earth tilts involved. As
sky changes, orientations change. (Nature)
4. "Continental crust found 450 miles west of Gibraltar." Possible Atlantis material,
sunk and left behind by rapidly rafting land masses moving both sides of the Rift,
perhaps in the Saturnian deluge period. (Baltimore Sun, AP) 5. "Distant galaxies
resemble near galaxies." Yes, cf. Solaria Binaria. Short time. No "Big Bang." (Science
News)
6. F. E. Segal on "tired light." Light not tired. Just Busy. Gravitation very tired,
needs to be retired. (Nature)
7. On "free quarks." Not only are "fractional charges... almost as unnerving as
irrational numbers," but so too the ideal of infinite regression (or progression) in the
'size' of events: "man is the measure of all things" -- hardly. (Science)
8. "Do bacterias think?" Everything thinks, "Higher organisms, cf Homo Schizo, conduct
more elaborate transactions with the environment (and internally) to achieve "the
thinking effect". (Psychology Today)
9. Quick evolution: quantavolution of immunological systems, in re Ted Steele's studies.
Functions of organisms have their own bio-time, time not absolute. Life-career (birth to
death, etc.) is subjectively concept of the dominating ego, cf. Homo Schizo,
momentarily in charge: the trapped soul? How free is it if it is in a paraelectric
frame? (New Scientist)
10. Cf deep thrusting and folding burial concept in M. Cook's Earth Models, also my
Lately Tortured Earth. Deep is very deep, perhaps embracing the surface (including
exoterrestrial) origins of Soter and Gold's erupting, abiogenic, natural gases.
(Geotimes)
11. Iceland a meteorite crater, according to Whipple, with high iridium at Cretaceous-
Tertiary boundaries. Cf. galloping continental drift in Chaos and Creation. Was the C-T
boundary laid down yesterday in the chaos of Earth parturition and Moon eruption and
escape? (New Scientist)
12. "The Novaya Zemlya solar mirage" is likely, along with many such early phenomena of
the disordered skies, to sponsor some fine animistic legends of the heavens. (Physics
Today) 13. In re admitted "ice-ball fall in England," page C. Fort's comparable cases.
Electrical fashioning of balls, see E. Crew's new essay. (J. Meteorology - UK)
14. Lorber's work on an intelligent human with 1/ 10 normal brain matter fits Homo
Schizo theory, where I develop the concept of humanness being largely independent of the
large brain but a product of self-awareness, of the fearful loss of instinctual
integrity. (Science)
The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies (London) publishes Workshop, containing
quarterly annotations of a score and more of titles relevant to quantavolution studies.
Thus, the eye catches the following points of the varied list of Volume 5: 1 (1982).
1. New 700 B. C. Martian period tablet: "The natural order of things somehow has gotten
reversed and the response of the high gods, the Shaddayin, is to turn day into night."
(Bull. Amer. Schl. Orient. Res.)
2. More material on the Thera disaster (of -1100?) and the confusion of dates. Tsunamis
devastate Greece and the Near East.( Bib. Archaeol. R.)
3. Reviews special issue of Frontiers of Science on Velikovsky's work.
4. The disputed case of Prof. A. C. Arp, who faces shut-down of project because he
believes quasars are close, not exceedingly remote, relative to our galaxy. (Daily
Telegraph report 9 March 1982).
5. Critique of N. Hembest's attack on 3 different theories of rapid (i. e. catastrophic)
shifts of Earth's poles. (The Unexplained, magazine).
6. Some birds (e. g. Japanese quail and zebra finches) are unexpectedly in-breeders, not
out-breeders, contra "need" for genetic variability. (New Scientist).
7. Two newly spotted asteroids make total of 40 on Earthcrossing orbits, ergo potential
encounters. (New Scientist). 8. Soviet Venera 13 and 14 results show solar radiation is
absorbed by Venus at 60 km and the clouds are mostly sulphur. How can "greenhouse
effect" work with these conditions? Implication: Venus heat is internal. (Aviation Week
and Space Tech.)
9. Viking Orbiter pictures heavy meteoric, volcanic, and erosional effect on Mars, with
possible meandering dry river systems. (New Scientist). Was Mars once (lately) biophile?
10. Review of "Burt Scandal" (BBC radio 4) on ethics and prestige of scientists.
11. Controversy over evidence of "plate tectonic" continental drift without continents
on Venus (Venera 14 findings) (BBC, Science in Action).
12. On the temperature extremes endurable by dinosaur's eggs. (New Scientist, Corriere
del Ticino)
13. A primitive "precursor" of the even-toed hooved animals (pigs) is now revealed to be
of a different family (mouse deer), so another "missing link" is gone. (New Scientist).
14. Jurassic find in China exhibits an earlier line of mammals that may have evolved and
extincted 30 million years earlier than accepted beginnings of present mammalia. (New
Scientist).
15. The Eocene-Oligocene boundary is marked with extinctions, microtektites and high
iridium levels of exoterrestrial event. (New Scientist).
16. Gravitational Constant may be changing, as applied to changing lunar orbit
(Astrophy. J.) Is one more Absolute deteriorating?
17. Venus and Earth have different origins, or Venus had no potassium or lost its argon-
40. (New Scientist). 18. Well-preserved Carboniferous Age fossil deposits near Glasgow,
both marine and terrestrial, with confused sedimentation (Nature)
19. Source of earthquake lights in rock friction discharges (New Scientist).
20. Soviet Kola peninsula Bronze Age settlements contemporary with Mediterranean, with
utensils and paintings, slate trade with far-off points. (Soviet Weekly). Possible polar
shift or drastic (exoterrestrial) climate changes.
21. High proportion of Late Minoan Cretan copper artefacts made from Greek, not
Cypriote, copper. (Nature Science). Culture shifts, or copper mine discoveries.
22. Density of wood in tree rings can indicate outer space events and exact weather
data. (Soviet Weekly).
23. Reviews listed of Clube and Napier's Cosmic Serpent as indicating mood of scientific
reception system re catastrophes.
24. Work of J. W. Follin on possibility of 4 billion year old solar system as a binary
(report in Memphis Commercial Appeal).
25. Ophiolites (from oceanic crust) found in mountain sediments suggest catastrophic
oceanbed lava extrusions buckling to form mountains. (Scientific American.)
26. Lack of texts -700 to -750 and erratic texts of mid-second millenium in Babylonian
otherwise accurate Babylon records in R. Stephenson studies. (New Scientist.)
27. Low-density comet impact blamed for Tunguska 1908 event (U. S. R. & D. Associates,
New Scientist).
28. Meteroid impacts (5 to 10 km diam.) may have created various large basaltic oceanic
plateaus. (Nature.)
30. Comets now observed frequently to impact on Sun. (New Scientist).
31. High anomalous magnetism and radioactivity detected at megalithic sites may indicate
ancient man had sensing devices for astronomical constructions. (New Scientist.)
32. Lunar rock magnetism without lunar magnetic field raises questions of origins of
rock. (New Scientist.)
Most of the items were culled from conventional scientific sources such as the New
Scientist and Nature. A much more extended, regular survey is obviously needed; still,
that limited and antagonistic sources should provide access to so much relevant
quantavolutionary material is noteworthy.
The eye of the catastrophist (this quantavolutionary primevalogist) is trained to see a
record of natural destruction in the history of nature and man. Others, trained in
uniformitarian ways of thought, will try to explain the same sight by gradual processes,
or be oblivious of it. Niagara Falls, whose turbulence soothes the doubts of
honeymooners, excites the catastrophist. For it cuts back into its source by a certain
footage each year and this permits us to measure how long its gorge has been growing.
Apparently only several thousand years have passed since the Great Wisconsin Ice Cap
suddenly melted to create the Great Lakes and their Niagara outlet towards the sea. The
age of the Falls has been reduced by 300% in consequence. But perhaps a great deluge and
flooding created the lakes and a great earthquake the rift of the St. Lawrence River.
Let us continue our noting of some relevant studies, going back in time for a few years.
On January 6, 1977, the New York Times reports the detection of a quake on Mars. One
asks, for the hundredth time, "How can seismism shake celestial bodies that have
supposedly been undisturbed and cooling off for billions of years?" The inconstant Sun?
A recent encounter?
The eye notes an article in the newspapers of early 1976: a Soviet scientific expedition
has moved into the territory of the Tunguska (Siberia) meteoritic explosion of 1908
where a flourishing new kind of forest has sprung up and new species of plants have been
seen. The catastrophist thinks, "This explosion has been long on my mind. If it had
maintained its path for minutes longer before striking St. Petersburg (now Leningrad),
the capital of the Russian Czars would have disappeared in heat and dust. The heat was
fierce, in thousands of degrees; no wonder odd biological phenomena have occurred. But
why the absence of a crater? Was the meteoroid actually an explosive gas cloud, and was
it a gas cloud that blasted Sennacherib's great army besieging Jerusalem in 687 B. C.?"
In 1975 Soviet astronomers detect X-rays emanating from planet Saturn. X-rays signify a
very recent explosion, a nova event, on a star. In a small nova, one that does not
disintegrate the body completely, the shell blasts off, and the wounded body bleeds
these rays for thousands of years. The quantavolutionary thinks: "Mythology from several
places reports that Saturn, the planet-god, flew into a fiery rage... Velikovsky in 1965
wrote Harry Hess of Princeton, to urge that Saturn be studied for the emission of x-
rays." And what a truculent monster appears to be the son of Saturn, Jupiter, upon
examination by spacecraft.
In 1974 the astrophysicist Robert Bass demonstrates mathematically that the structure
and motions of the solar system cannot be presumed to be stable even to one thousand
years. Bass is a catastrophist. He is also sympathetic to biblical creationism. The
quantavolutionary reads him carefully. "Will Bass lead me astray out of enthusiasm, or
into the Promised Land? Will any uniformitarian arise now to challenge him, to prove his
equations wrong, to defend what is after all the heart of the uniformitarian position,
that the solar system is stable because the laws of Newton and the mathematics of La
Place claimed them to be so?"
In 1974 oceanographer Cesare Emiliani of the University of Miami published results of
core drillings showing that the Gulf of Mexico had filled with fresh waters from
tremendous recent flooding and speculated that the event may have been tied to the
sinking of Atlantis, with both occurring around 11,500 years ago. The catastrophist
conjectures about the fresh waters of the Gulf of Mexico. First, they could be the
floodwaters of the suddenly destroyed ice cap, an inconceivably great deluge, perhaps
tied into the practically complete resurfacing of the earth about 11,500 years ago. In
1974 the chemist John Anderson reports experiments indicating that radiocarbon activity,
the chief present method of dating back to 50,000 years ago, was neither random nor
constant. If the isotopes of radioactive carbon, for reasons yet unknown, decay
sporadically or eccentrically, may not the method be unreliable?
In 1973, chemist Harold Urey, a Nobel prizewinner, conjectures that a cometary encounter
with Earth could explain the abundant tektites from extra-terrestrial sources that are
strewn about the world. Several scientists have collected and studied these small glassy
stones and estimate their amount in the billions of tons. Since time immemorial the
Chinese have called them "pearls of the dragon" and collected them. And Urey thought
that the cometary collision might have annihilated the dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs looked like the Chinese dragon. Perhaps Urey is right in principle, wrong
in time. Quickly the quantavolutionary puts on the cap of a mythologist. All heavenly
animals (the Zodiac for instance) represent recognizable species; perhaps the most
ancient men knew dinosaurs by sight. Thus the peculiar revolutionary vision, like that
of a surrealist painter, contorts time and form, then settles down to give battle over
the evidence.
In 1973, the geologist Derek Ager of Swansea College (Great Britain) writes that "the
history of any one part of the earth, like the life of the soldier, consists of long
periods of boredom and short periods of terror." Elsewhere he says, "the periodic
catastrophic event may have more effect than vast periods of gradual evolution." He
think that "for the ultimate control, sooner or later, we must face the possibility of
an extra-terrestrial cause, though in most geological circles one seems to be expected
to blush when doing so." The catastrophist understands the dilemma of Ager: he longs to
test his intellectual weapon, but the minds and materials of 150 years of science are
constructed to refuse the test.
In the same year, 1973, I am reviewing, from the revolutionary perspective, evidence
about the famed "Burnt City" of Troy. I concluded that neither the torch of the invader,
nor accident, nor earthquake, nor a single volcano had suddenly scorched and collapsed
the famed Troy IIg. Multiple volcanic venting and extra-terrestrial electrical encounter
had to be invoked to explain the observed facts and myths. Uniformitarian methods of a
century had failed to identify the problem precisely and permitted not a whisper about
the high energy expressions of catastrophes.
In 1972 the engineer Ralph Juergens announces his theory that the solar system was an
electrical system operating on galactic fuel. Particles from the Milky Way bombard the
sun, building up a heat that sends out the sun's radiance. (Concurrently, experimenters
announced the failure to detect the sun's presumed neutrino output from its supposed
atomic furnaces.)
The theory of Juergens poses a dilemma to catastrophists. Velikovsky adhered to the
nuclear-furnace theory. He did not feel the need for Juergen's theory to win the war for
catastrophism. C. E. R. Bruce and Eric Crew in England were catastrophists as well,
whose interests, as pioneer and disciple, were in extending the discussion of cosmic
electricity. They, too, disagreed with Juergens. Again, the quantavolutionary worries
about the stultification of connections and internal disagreements.
But when Juergens publishes two articles on electrical types of destruction found lately
on the Moon and Mars, the catastrophists agree and applaud. The electrical ravaging is
by cosmic lightning and probably happened within the past several thousand years.
Juergens general theory is held in abeyance. (It is, incidentally, accepted by me, and
is used and extended by Earl Milton and me in the model of Solaria Binaria.)
In 1970 the palentologist D. J. McLaren, in a presidential address to his colleagues,
reviews the wholesale extinction of species at certain times, and then ventures that a
heavy meteoroid explosion should be introduced by way of explanation. Following an
explanation of the effects of what I have since termed a "catastrophic tube,", he
remarked, "this will do." He would have pleased George Cuvier, who for a century has
entered the textbooks as "the father of fossil paleontology" but "unfortunately a badly
mistaken catastrophist." In 1968 René Thom publishes his first paper on the topological
mathematics of catastrophe theory. After eight years, the less specialized media, such
as the Scientific American, described his work. Actually, Thom is concerned with
describing symbolically and graphically the basic types of ways in which situations
build up and come crashing down.
In 1966 the geo-physicist Melvin Cook lays down a barrage of arguments against accepting
uranium-lead, potassium-argon and other techniques for the dating of older ages. As a
catastrophist, his accomplishments are numerous; none, to my knowledge, has so
competently analyzed the overwhelmingly authoritative techniques of radio dating that
have come to dominate geological, astrophysical, and archaeological dating.
In June 1956 the New York Times reports that the temperature of planet Venus, newly
measured by radio astronomers, exceeded the boiling point of water. Studies increased in
number; so did the estimated heat. When finally in the 1960's and later the space
vehicles of the USA and U. S. S. R. reached Venus, they found a globe whose surface
temperatures hovered around 925d. But in 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky had published Worlds
in Collision. There he described Venus as hot to the point of candescence. He reasoned,
mostly from ancient sources and legends, that it had ejected from Jupiter's region
burning. Further, its erratic course through the skies had involved it in heat-provoking
encounters of the second and first millennia B. C. with Mars, Moon, and earth.
In 1953 geologists Alan Kelly and Frank Dachille propose the island of Bermuda to be the
focus of a giant meteoritic explosion in recent times. Their work, if known, would have
stimulated among a small circle of scholars an interest in discovering impact craters
around the world. (It should also have stimulated the writers of the 1970's who were
excited by the mysteries of the "Bermuda Triangle.") Between 1950 and 1955 Velikovsky
published three of his celebrated works. In 1963, I prepared a special issue of The
American Behavioral Scientist on "The Velikovsky Affair." It analyzed the reasons why
scientists generally were refusing to hear of theories and evidence contradicting the
uniformitarian paradigm. If there is any lesson to be taught from this cause célèbre, it
is this: "You must be ready to consider conflicting theories. You cannot stand rigidly
in the face of contrary evidence. You cannot be mass-minded and call yourself a proper
citizen of science."
In 1950, the German paleontologist Schindewolf tied exoterrestrial impacts and
radioactivity directly to the main periods of biological extinction and creation.
I could move, too, into the 1940's, when Claude Schaeffer assembled massive proof of a
set of concurrent destructions of Bronze Age civilizations by natural causes. I have
found many sources of quantavolutionary thought and studies ranging farther and farther
back in time; often they are inaccessible to most readers and buried from sight inasmuch
as they are not referred to in modern literature. A large job of recapturing them is
before us. Indeed one could recede for thousands of years back to the now faintly heard
primeval voices that are fossilized in bone, stone, pots, and oral myth.
In concluding here, I wish earnestly that my readers will turn to my books without the
preconception that studies of catastrophes must be science fiction, or a work of the
occult, or a defense of Biblical literalism. I do not criticize adversely such works,
some of which I admire; it is simply that they are different. My books should be read
and judged form the standpoint of a cosmogonic model of quantavolution that is derived
from a growing body of scientific studies in various fields and a review of the most
ancient as well as of the most recent sources.
Just as an archaeologist reconstructs a pot from a few shards, and a paleontologist an
animal from a few bones, we have to reconstruct a general history from the rare
"treasures that have come down to us", as Aristotle said. I ask not for belief but for
consideration. I seek for open thinking upon another model in the competition for the
best design of the sciences and humanities.
This said, let us take up a study of "The Burning of Troy," a work which I began, as I
mentioned above, in 1973. The idea came to me while on the Island of Naxos. I was
reading Schliemann's famous story of how he found the Treasure of Priam on top of a
wall, and I exclaimed to myself, "What a strange place to bury a treasure!"
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part One: Historical Disturbances
CHAPTER TWO
THE BURNING OF TROY
[1] Scientists probing the subsoil in their attempts to build up the record of
prehistoric and ancient humanity have paid little attention to ashes and other
evidences of high heat and conflagration that they have encountered. We would agree
with Claude F. A. Schaeffer who wrote in 1948 that "Our inquiry has often been made
difficult by the rarity in most reports of observations on beds as a nuisance or of
little interest" [2] . The recent excavation of settlements of Minoan times, buried
beneath or affected by the tephra of the exploded volcano of ancient Thera-Santorini,
did posses the broader perspective that Schaeffer sought. Marinatos and others
introduced research on the far-flung effects of the disaster. Heezen and Ninkovich
discovered a layer of ash on the south-eastern floor of the Mediterranean Sea that they
could ascribe to the Santorini explosion. Charles and Dorothy Vitaliano followed up
with analyses of tephra from scattered locations on Crete and elsewhere [3] . The
search and testing are continuing. Still, the Thera case is exceptional, and even yet
far from complete. The ash coverings of settlements have rarely been analyzed. We speak
of overall calcination, and not so much of the bones of hearths that have lent evidence
of the ecology, cuisine, and religious ceremonies of early human groups.
Overall calcination has sometimes, with less than complete evidence, been interpreted
as the work of torch-bearing invaders. For example, James Melaart uses the convenient
phrase "Whether by accident or by enemy action" to describe the destructive combustion
of Troy IIg [4] . Earthquakes, too are invoked with some frequency, although a
determination that a fire is an effect of an earthquake is by no means simple. On rare
occasions, where there exists a historical record such as Pliny the Younger's
description of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A. D., volcanism is admitted and may lead
ultimately to excavation. There are still other possible causes, as we shall see.
The contention of this paper is that reports of past excavations should now be reviewed
with a revised set of questions. Moreover, and because of the ultimate inadequacy of
the information typically contained in them, it is suggested that a new
interdisciplinary calcinology be devised and carried into future excavations and the
testing of soils and debris generally. The rich experience afforded by the excavations
of Troy can serve to expose the problems that justify a new approach. Afterwards, we
can define in a preliminary way the body of techniques that needs to be assembled and
developed.
THE "BURNT CITY" OF TROY
In some exciting passages, which have unquestionably been among the most widely read of
all archaeological writing, Schliemann describes how, in May of 1873, he uncovered "The
treasure of Priam," King of Troy during the war between the Greeks and Trojans.
(Neither his identification of the Treasure as Priam's nor of the City as the Troy of
Homer is at issue here, and therefore these problems are passed over lightly.)
Schliemann reports [5] that the "Trojans of whom Homer sings" occupied a stratum of
debris "from 7 to 10 meters, or 23 to 33 feet, below the surface. This Trojan stratum,
which, without exception, bears marks of great heat, consists mainly of red ashes of
wood, which rise from 5 to 10 feet above the Great Tower of Ilium, and the great
enclosing Wall, the construction of which Homer ascribes to Poseidon and Apollo; and
they show that the town was destroyed by a fearful conflagration." He calls this ruined
level "the Burnt City," and others have used his phrase since then.
The large slabs of stone leading down to the plain from "The Scaean Gate" for 10 feet
were so weakened by heat that they crumbled upon exposure, though farther on the slabs
continued hard and intact.
"A further proof of the terrible catastrophe is furnished by a stratum of scoriae of
melted lead and copper, from 1/ 5 to 1 1/ 5 inches thick, which, extends through the
whole hill at a depth of from 28 to 29 1/ 2 feet." Several visiting geologists and a
construction engineer gave this opinion, and all concluded that large deposits of these
existed at the time of the city's destruction.
Schliemann continues: "That Troy was destroyed by enemies after a bloody war is further
attested by the many human bones which I found in these heaps of debris, and above all
by the skeletons with helmets, found in the depths of the temple of Athena; for, as we
know from Homer, all corpses were burnt and the ashes were preserved in urns. Of such
urns I have found an immense number in all pre-Hellenic strata on the hill."
Then he says: "Lastly, the Treasure, which some member of the royal family had probably
endeavored to save during the destruction of the city, but was forced to abandon,
leaves no doubt that the city was destroyed by the hands of enemies. I found this
Treasure on the large enclosing wall by the side of the royal palace, at a depth of 27
1/ 2 feet, and covered with red Trojan ashes from 5 to 6 1/ 2 feet in depth, above
which was a post-Trojan wall or fortification 19 1/ 2 feet high."
Schliemann spotted the Treasure through a protruding copper article. "On the top of
this copper article lay a stratum of red and calcined ruins, from 4 3/ 4 to 5 1/ 4 feet
thick, as hard as stone, and above this again lay the above-mentioned wall of
fortification (6 feet broad and 20 feet high) which was built of large stones and
earth, and must have belonged to an early date after the destruction of Troy."
With his knife, he first withdrew this small copper shield, then a copper caldron with
handles, then a copper plate to which a silver vase "had been fused ... in the heat of
the fire" [6] . Next came a copper vase, a bottle of gold, a cap of gold and then other
vessels of pure and alloyed metals, wrought and cast-copper, silver, gold, electrum.
There were useful objects, ceremonial objects, and daggers, battle-axes, and lance-
heads. Various weapons had "pieces of other weapons welded onto them by fire."
"As I found all these articles together, forming a rectangular mass, or packed into one
another, it seems to be certain that they were placed on the city wall in a wooden
chest ... such as those mentioned by Homer as being in the palace of king Priam. This
appears to be the more certain, as close by the side of these articles I found a copper
key about 4 inches long, the head of which resembles a large safe-key of a bank.
Curiously enough this key has had a wooden handle; there can be not doubt of this from
the fact that the end of the stalk of the key is bent round at a right angle, as in the
case of the daggers."
Schliemann conjectures on the scene: It is probable that some member of the family of
King Priam hurriedly packed the Treasure into the chest and carried it off without
having time to put out the key; that when he reached the wall, however, the hand of an
enemy or the fire overtook him, and he was obliged to abandon the chest, which was
immediately covered to a height of from 5 to 6 feet with the red ashes and the stones
of the adjoining royal palace... [7] .
That the Treasure was packed together at terrible risk of life, and in the greatest
anxiety, is proved among other things also by the contents of the largest silver vase,
at the bottom of which I found two splendid gold diadems..., a fillet, and four
beautiful gold ear-rings of most exquisite workmanship: upon these lay 56 gold ear-
rings of exceedingly curious form and 8,750 small gold rings, perforated prisms and
dice, gold buttons, and similar jewels, which obviously belonged to other ornaments;
them followed six gold bracelets, and on the top of all two small gold goblets [8] .
Finally, Schliemann adds, "The person who endeavored to save the Treasure had
fortunately the presence of mind to stand the silver vase, containing the valuable
articles described above, upright in the chest, so that not so much as a bead could
fall out, and everything has been preserved uninjured" [9] .
Schliemann says that death was risked in hastily retrieving the Treasure. Like many
another digger, he was preoccupied with artifacts and architecture. And indeed there
seemed to be nothing in the literature than a Greek-set fire. Furthermore, he was
already reading the ancient story of the burning of Troy into his findings. He "knew"
what he would find. So did the world of readers.
But there are puzzling aspects to his account. First of all, there is the immensity of
the blaze. Can the burning of a stone and wood town of 5,000 or so inhabitants produce
a bed of ashes that may have amounted to 15 to 20 feet on its first fall? For we read
that it was reduced to several feet of thickness and was so hard that a huge stone wall
nearly 20 feet tall could be built on top of it afterwards. And the whole area was so
completely buried that the walls of the subsequent settlement were planned and built in
complete ignorance of the orientation of the walls and passageways below. "The more
recent walls run in all directions above the more ancient ones, never standing upon
them, and are frequently separated from them by a layer of calcined debris, from 6 1/ 2
to 10 feet high" [10] . The depth of the ashes is all the more impressive when it is
observed that they formed on top of a wall. Then or afterwards, some part of the ashes
would fall or drift or be blown off the top of a wall. And why would the bearers of
such a Treasure, if they had even half a minute of time, leave the Treasure on top of a
wall when they might at least have tipped it over onto the ground, and then fled?
The ashes are spoken of as "red Trojan ashes," "ashes and stones" that buried the city,
"mainly red ashes of wood." How thick a layer of ashes does a hand-burnt ancient city
dissolve into? What kinds of heat would have been generated on the average outside and
within houses? The answers are not now known, but might well be discovered.
Craig C. Chandler writes that he has "never seen 'red ashes of wood' in natural fires,
and the term sounds much more like a distillation residue than a combustion residue"
[11] . With the suggestion of a distillation, the remote possibility of an early
invention of "Greek Fire" intrudes. This presently unknown, highly volatile and intense
weapon was possibly of petroleum plus an accelerant, and was used by the Byzantines
against their enemies for centuries. But this was more than two millennia later.
Further, "Greek Fire" would not account for the huge amount of ashes.
A completely wooden and overstuffed contemporary house will leave no more than ankle-
deep ashes when it burns to the ground, and then only on its own foundation. A
flourishing natural forest and the ground cover is estimated to provide 200 tons
organic matter per acre [12] . When reduced fully by heat, it will give up 160 tons of
water, gases and other compounds to leave 20 tons of carbon residue and 20 tons of oily
distillates. Further reduced to fine cinder and ash, it would weigh less and have less
volume. If spread over an acre, the residue would amount to perhaps a pound per square
foot; its height could scarcely measure 6 inches in its freshly fallen state. Chandler
has pointed out that forest fires of the greatest intensity do not consume more than a
fraction of the living material, producing perhaps 3 tons per acre of ashes. "This is
an amount about 10 times as great as the fertilizer you spread on your lawn in the
spring ... Ash residue from the burning of a city is measured in inches, rather than
feet" [13] . And we seem to be faced at Troy by perhaps 15 feet, or 30 times as much
ash, even allowing for no wind to blow the cloud of city ashes off the citadel onto the
plain and for no drift off the top of the city wall.
But, to proceed, if the city were under tight siege, would not the Treasure have been
carefully packed and readied for any emergency? Would it not perhaps have been buried
in a safe place or carried off to a friendly town? Schliemann assumes that a Trojan
custodian was transporting the box. He discovered what appeared to be a copper handle.
Would not at least two persons have carried it? It was heavy. Moreover, several guards
and priests would have been assigned to accompany the porters on their urgent mission.
The key to the box was found, but it may have been placed inside the box; its presence
does indicate haste, or else it would have been kept by a keeper of the keys or by the
chief of the little group of movers and would have vanished with him.
If the "Greeks" were in hot pursuit, as Schliemann implies, would they not have caught
up with the Treasure and carted it off? It would have been laid down by its porters,
who would have fled for their lives. Would the "Greek" warriors have set such a blaze
that they were frustrated in one of their primary objectives in capturing the city, to
loot it of its valuables? Conquerors try not to burn a city before they loot it. Other
treasures and valuables were located by Schliemann. Apparently the "invaders" were in
some part, at least, frustrated in one of their most enjoyable missions by
conflagration. We might assume that other treasures were indeed found and carried away.
Their neglect of the deposits of lead and copper, an unconscionable dereliction, is
puzzling; lead and copper supposedly ran in streams over the city grounds.
Schliemann found no bones or warrior's equipment at the site of the Treasure save for a
small copper shield, which may have been in or on the chest. Indications are, unless
his search was incomplete, that the porters separated themselves physically from the
Treasure in a great hurry and that the "pursuers" were blocked from reaching it. Unlike
the ashes with which Vesuvius buried ancient Pompeiians and from which Fiorelli in 1863
ingeniously extricated their images by injections of liquid plaster, the ashes of Troy
were apparently hot. They fused and welded exposed metal objects. The wood chest had
disappeared. Any humans would have been incinerated and would have disappeared like the
box, but they would at least have left their buckles and arms, and possibly teeth or
long bones.
Why did the porters try to go over the wall, instead of through the gate? Schliemann
suggests that the "Greeks" commanded the gates. Possibly.
But now we wonder whether, in fact, there were any Greek invaders climbing out of their
famous Wooden Horse and reinforced by their returned comrades. For Schliemann does not
find typically "Greek" (Achaean) utensils or weapons; therefore the conflagration could
not come sometime after the foreigners had occupied the city and mingled their
artifacts with those of the Trojans. Also, we should be inclined to deny that any
invaders of any type were present. We are aware that contemporary scholarship assigns
Schliemann's Troy to a period long before the "real" Trojan War. It is now called
TroyII and Troy VIIa is the "real Troy," in one leading opinion [14] .
A half century after Schliemann's work, a University of Cincinnati expedition returned
to the site of Hisarlik. They explored painstakingly the area, employing the best
archaeological techniques that the state of the art and the typically modest funding
could provide. Apart from their extensive work on the other levels, the Cincinnati
archaeologists, under the leadership of Carl Blegen, examined closely the ruins of the
Burnt City-Level IIg by their code. The debris over the whole site is deep, yet less
deep that the debris atop Schliemann's Wall.
The stratum of Troy IIg had an average thickness of more than 1 m( eter); it
consisted mainly of ashes, charred matter, and burned debris. This deposit apparently
extended uniformly over the great megaron and across the entire site, eloquent evidence
that the settlement perished in a vast conflagration from which no buildings escaped
ruin. This is the 'Burnt City' of Schliemann ...
In all areas examined by the Cincinnati Expedition, it was obvious that the
catastrophe struck suddenly, without warning, giving the inhabitants little or no time
to collect and save their most treasured belongings before they fled. All the houses
exposed were still found to contain the fire-scarred wreckage of their furnishings,
equipment, and stores of supplies. Almost every building yielded scattered bits of gold
ornaments and jewelry, no doubt hastily abandoned in panic flight.
Most of the famous 'treasure' recovered by Schliemann may now be safely attributed to
Troy IIg... [15] .
Thus writes Blegen (1963) and the evidence behind his words stacks up in several large
printed volumes and a considerable archive. Blegen continues, seeking to explain the
destruction:
Whether the disaster was brought about by enemy action or by accident cannot be
certainly stated, though there are considerations that point to each of these
alternatives. If the city had been captured and razed by conquerors, some of the
luckless inhabitants would surely have fallen victims to the attack, and an excavator
might expect to find in the ruins remains of human skeletons. So far as is
ascertainable in the archaelogical records, we have actually only one instance in which
a fragment of a small adult skull was definitely found in the stratum of Phase Ilg.
Schliemann mentions the skeletons of "two warriors" with bronze helmets, found in the
burnt layer; but the stratigraphic position is not certified, and the helmets later
turned out to be fragments of a bronze vessel. One might therefore conclude that the
occupants of the town escaped. On the other hand, if an invading army took the city it
would surely have thoroughly looted the houses before putting them to the torch; and
few if any 'treasures' of gold and silver would have been left for archaeologists to
recover. But again a counter-argument might hold that if all or most of the citizens
had run away to safety, they would surely have returned sooner or later to recover the
treasures they had left behind. Their failure to do so can only be accounted for by
assuming that some powerful deterrent prevented their returning. What actually happened
to bring about the burning of the whole establishment is still an unsolved mystery, but
it is a fact that Troy II was totally destroyed" [16] .
The mystery remains, and the range of speculation is both limited and expanded. We are
compelled to put aside the Schliemann reconstruction as a rather complete fictional
tale. In doing so, we are led to the alternative that some huge natural force ruined
Schliemann's Troy. Enemy forces had not shown a gradual "intent" to destroy Troy, else
the Treasure would have been packed and readied for transport. The disaster did not
begin by slow degrees, else it would have permitted exit by the main gate. Or perhaps,
to avoid panic or disorder, the Treasure was being sneaked out of town.
Might it have been an earthquake followed by fire? There are few indications of fallen
stones. It would not have been these that prevented the Treasure from being carried out
the Gate of the city. Although the scene that we are reconstructing was not created by
a great earthquake, a mild earthquake may have occurred. If it did, it had not prompted
the government to abandon the town up to this last moment of disaster. Valuable objects
were strewn on the floors of numerous homes. The evidence from "the depths of the
Temple of Athena," where bones and skeletons were found, is ambiguous: people, sensing
an earthquake, flee from the crashing roofs and walls of their structures. A large
quantity of bones was found in the debris of, and next to, adjoining apartments [17] .
Were these people trapped and buried by the quake? Possibly. Or did they die of heat or
suffocation and were their bones preserved freakishly while most bodies were quickly
consumed by intense heat?
The main event may have been a sudden fall of ashes that began as a light warm shower
and then developed into a heavy downpour of hot material. The fall would have
incinerated all organic material except those people, plants and animals that were
already in deep refuge where they suffocated and were later buried. It would have
melted all exposed supplies of metal and partially exposed metal parts. Within a space
of hours the city would have been covered and its life ended.
There would have been no survivors or enemy awaiting outside to reoccupy the destroyed
city, excavate it, collect its treasures, enjoy its strategic location [18] , and
carry on or provide a substitute for its culture. If there were, they would have been
blasted, drowned in ashes or suffocated by gases while the city disappeared before
their eyes.
The destroyed setting does not support a firestorm, such as incendiary bombs, dropped
en masse from airplanes, inflicted upon the cities of Dresden and Hamburg in World War
II. There the ash levels were insignificant, because "firestorm winds scour the burned
area clean" [19] .
The setting suggests the action of Vesuvius in burying Pompeii and Herculaneum, the one
in falling cinders and ashes, the other in towering lava flows. It was the falling ash
and gases that buried and suffocated the people whose images were recovered seventeen
hundred years later. Some had chosen not to flee and took refuge in their houses;
others could not flee; still others were drowned in ashes while in flight. Pliny the
Elder was gassed to death as he stood, miles away, directing a rescue operation.
The destruction wrought by the explosions and collapse of the islet of Krakatoa off
Java in 1883 was done largely by tidal waves [20] . Although many persons were burned
severely and succumbed to exhaustion in the hot ash-laden and gas-polluted air, the
fall of ashes was not great enough to bury houses. The fall-out colors are not well-
described; at least white, gray, black, brown, green, and red material was mentioned.
Examining the territory around Troy (modern Hisarlik), we find no active or extinct
volcanoes [21] . Mount Ida, famous in Homer, is 30 miles to the Southwest of Hisarlik.
It is not reported as an active or extinct volcano. At 30 miles of distance, in order
to have caused an ash-rain that would bury Troy, it would have had to explode in
successive bursts of fury, exceeding the Krakatoan and Vesuvian (79 A. D.) disasters.
The Thera-Santorini explosion of late Minoan culture occurred hundreds of miles away in
the South Aegean Sea, and is not synchronized [22] . In any event, although it might
have generated waves capable of battering the coastline of northwest Asia Minor, its
ash-fall would probably not have reached so far and so heavily. Ninkovich and Heezen
seem to have found that the overwhelming fallout of Thera ash occurred in the
Southeastern Mediterranean Sea.
Yet geologists might consider whether internal earth stresses could have induced not
only the familiar cone volcanoes but also fissure eruptions, which, no matter how
voluminously eruptive, leave little evidence for the unsuspecting eye once they have
become extinct. A geologist might then search for some scars and volcanic products on
the modern landscape.
It is well to remind ourselves that Homer, in describing at least one Trojan war, has
Mt. Ida behaving in peculiar ways when the gods of heaven enter the battle of Greeks
and Trojans:
"From high above the father of gods and men made thunder terribly, while Poseidon
from deep under them shuddered all the illimitable earth, the sheer heads of mountains.
And all the feet of Ida with her many waters were shaken and all her crests, and the
city of Troy, the ships of the Achaians" [23] .
The underworld god shrieked in terror and leapt from his throne at the prospect that
"Poseidon might break the earth open." And Hera laid such a dense fog upon the
battlefield that none could see to engage. There is a terrible fire over the whole
scene that "first was kindled on the plain" and parched it and burned the dead
warriors, then turned to the river, boiling it and its tributaries. Hera, wife of Zeus,
ordered up tempests from seaward to fan the flames, which another sky-god and also
volcano god, Hephaistos (Vulcan), had started. All of this bespeaks volcanism with
accompanying earthquakes, and possibly fissure volcanism too. Here again, we should
remind ourselves that a) the site of the "real Troy" may not be the Hisarlik site, b)
there may have been several wars over the site through the ages, c) the war of which
Homer sang was possibly an image of several partially idealized wars, and d) the final
Homeric war probably occurred, if Velikovsky's reconstruction is followed (which
eliminates the Greek Dark Age), in the late eighth and early seventh centuries. Troy
IIg therefore existed at an earlier time, and we are quoting here passages regarding
the landscape, nature forces, and effects of a later age or composite of ages. The date
of destruction of the "Burnt City" is not at issue here.
The ancients were adamant concerning the activities of the great sky gods. Hence a look
into the skies for the cause of the burial of Schliemann's Troy is not unreasonable.
But will it be only for the effects of remote volcanism? An anomalous detail demands
attention: Schliemann mentions that the stones of the road out of the gate had been
heated to the point of disintegration but, a few feet further out, the stones continued
in good condition. The natural force seems here to have been selective, destroying by
heat the crown of the hill, but sparing at least this part of the plain around.
Alternatively the outer stones may have been relaid at a later period, or the first
fires may have consumed the city premises alone, with the ash-fall coming later. Or
again, at the Vitaliano's suggestion, should we return to an attacking force that
heaped fires before the wooden gate to force an entrance; too, they may have hurled or
shot many fiery brands at the gate. The total context is indeed important to bear in
mind, whatever its complexity.
Lightning can be hot and selective and may focus upon elevations. Ancient lightning and
fire have received little attention from archaeologists and geologists. E. V. Komarek,
Sr. writes, "I believe that the reason we have so little information on ancient fire
scars or lightning streaks is that apparently no one has searched for them" [24] .
Seneca, the Roman author, has a character in Thyestes begging Jupiter to bring disaster
upon Earth "not with the hands that seek out houses and undeserving homes, using your
lesser bolts, but with that hand by which the threefold mass of mountains fell ...
These arms let loose and hurl your fires" [25] . Could there have been a qualitatively
different kind of Jovian thunderbolt playing about the world in mythical and
prehistoric times? A ramified bolt of hundreds of strokes is not impossible to imagine.
The myriad lightning and fire effects in the Krakatoa disaster are worth recalling, but
these occurred within a radius of a few kilometres [26] . The mysterious melted copper
and lead, alluded to above, which covered a large area, according to Schliemann, might
have originally been deposits that contributed to the attractiveness of the site for
lightning discharges.
They form a "stratum of scoriae, which runs through the greater part of the hill, at an
average depth of 9 metres( 29 1/ 2 feet)." Were they stored by the Trojans or were they
"welded scoriae (Schweisschlacken)" of volcanoes; that is, fragments carried up by the
powerful blast of expanding gases, ejected in a molten state, and solidifying after
falling with a smacking sound back to the ground? --"upon impact, they are squashed out
flat, and are welded together where they fall" [27] . Volcanoes are not known to eject
such scoriae to any considerable distance.
Still another possibility needs to be added: a meteoric fall or shower, Homer's
"divine-kindled fire of stones." If a large meteor had passed nearby without crashing,
its immense heat would have consumed and raised into the sky the ashes of countless
trees and the dust of exploded and cyclonized fields. But the people appear to have had
warning, however brief.
A veritable deluge of meteoric particles from outer space, as from a large comet's
tail, might produce and contribute to combustion and burial. A cometary or planetary
near-encounter, and resulting fall of gases, hydrocarbons, burning pitch, and stones,
of course, is Velikovsky's "first cause." Even metals (again the layer of copper and
lead) have been reputed to fall. Such events are unknown to modern experience but are
indicated by ancient legends from many places [28] , and by various geological and
biological phenomena [29] .
We cannot ignore the Biblical sources that speak of "fire and brimstone (sulphur)" such
as that which wiped out "the cities of the plain." The Cincinnati team writes in
several places of the greenish-yellow discoloration characteristically found in the
debris of streets and other once open areas [30] . Was this brimstone?
The clays are curious. Area 210 of the city shows much disintegrated clay and debris,
plus pots, but no signs of burning. A house of Square A3-4 is in ruins "covered by a
mass of clay more than 0.50 meters thick, which has turned red from the effects of
internal heat" [31] . The roofs were of clay and wood, but the depth is remarkable and
so is the color. Is there more than one kind of clay in the ruins? Is this the same
"red" that Schliemann reports as "the red ashes of Trojan wood?" For that matter, is it
part of the omnipresent red dust that Velikovsky pursues through early references from
numerous cultures in connection with the planet Venus [32] ?
At this stage of research, one craves evidence that the rude Achaeans were quite stupid
but were geniuses at setting great fires from above. Or that all excavators exaggerated
in their reports. Barring these explanations, the evidence speaks, or rather, whispers
faintly, on behalf of a regional multiple volcanic explosion of gases, hot scoriae and
ashes, some element of which rained down suddenly and heavily upon Troy, burning,
burying, and baking. The Treasure of Priam would be buried atop the wall where it had
been placed as its bearers cast a final despairing glance upon the abysmal world on all
sides.
One should be warned, however, that a theory of concurrent regional plinian eruptions
would call up a search for causes of a more fundamental kind. Volcanism on a grand
scale is another word for general catastrophe: What force can roil up the mantle and
wrench around so much of the crust of the Earth at a single moment of time?
A NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY METHOD
The mystery of the "Burnt City" of Troy will soon be a century old, but its solution
may be within grasp. It can now be reviewed in light of substantial advances in
empirical technique and general additional and spectacular theories. The latter are
provided most forcibly by Claude Schaeffer and Immanuel Velikovsky.
In 1948, Professor Schaeffer, who had excavated at Ras Shamra-Ugarit, published a
treatise on comparative stratigraphy of the Near and Middle East during the Bronze Ages
of the second millennium B. C. He incorporate the work of many predecessors, including
the investigators of Troy-Hisarlik, into a theory that a sequence of fires and
earthquakes had destroyed Bronze Age civilizations concurrently, several time over, in
the vast area stretching from Troy and Egypt to Persia, and even beyond into China.
Similar phenomena are recorded for Etruria (Tuscany), Meso-America, and elsewhere [33]
and might someday be synchronized. At the time of Troy IIg, reports the Cambridge
Ancient History (I: 2, 406), following in Schaeffer's footsteps, three-quarters of the
settlements of western and southern Anatolia were permanently destroyed.
Although he is a catastrophic revisionist, Schaeffer has not gone deeply into causes.
He demonstrated the hard evidence of universal destruction. He invoked earthquakes
followed by fire, or where earthquakes were not in evidence, simply enormous
calcination. He exculpated invaders as the destroyers of civilization in many
instances, even though he employed conventional terms such as "the Peoples of the Sea"
that are used to explain the abrupt termination of many civilized communities. He can
point often to disturbed and unsettled human elements who came upon the sites
afterward.
(Significantly, Blegen had already shown that a new cultural element did not succeed
Troy IIg; the Troy III culture was closely related [34] . This is remarkable because
the calcinated debris of Troy IIg was never dug out and was probably unknown, yet the
debris of the old city was strong enough to become the foundation of the new city
walls.)
In his command of the natural sciences involved and their interweaving with ancient
sources and psychology, Velikovsky has excelled all writers on questions of
catastrophe. Working independently, he published in 1950 his account of universal
destruction of the second half of the second millennium. He asserted that heavy seismic
disturbances and devastating flames consumed the same ancient civilizations. But, with
the aid of ancient legends and documents, he insisted upon the role of overall
volcanism, heavy meteoric falls, and as "first cause," a derangement of the planetary
system that brought down upon the earth the proverbial "wrath of the gods," not only
Olympian gods, but Hebrew, Egyptian, Babylonian, Olmec and other gods [35] .
Unfortunately, for twenty-five years, the assemblages of ideas and facts of Schaeffer
and Velikovsky, "an extraordinary polymath," in the words of the late Columbia
University classicist, Moses Hadas, were subjected to unscientific vilification.
Schaeffer, Professor at the Sorbonne and a renowned excavator, has been hardly cited
for his magnum opus. Few scholars have been ready to confront the anomalies of their
own findings. One exception was Spiridon Marinatos, who plunged to his death in 1974 at
the famous site of his work. His excavation of the Minoan culture of Thera-Santorini,
from beneath the effects of the plinian explosion of the island, called international
and interdisciplinary attention to the destruction of a critical portion of
Mediterranean civilization.
But Blegen of Cincinnati was also an exception; he was disposed to a cautious
empiricism, but was piqued by the strange events that had befallen Minoan and Mycenaean
civilization. In the voluminous published records of the Cincinnati expedition, we find
the following lines:
"A large collection of earth samples was also made this year. (1937). Specimens were
taken from all strata of all main layers in the principle areas of digging, and the
number of small bags thus collected exceeded 400. They were shipped to Cincinnati for
scientific examination by specialists in geology and botany" [36] .
When, in 1974, we discovered this passage, we made inquiry, only to find that the
sample had never been analyzed. The long period of World War II had intervened.
Personnel left, never to return. Other interests took priority. The samples rested in
their cloth bags in the attic of McMicken Hall at the University of Cincinnati.
Finally, in 1975, material from the bags was provided to Professor George Rapp of the
University of Minnesota for eventual analysis. This material will serve for the first
calcinological testing of the causes of the destruction of Troy-Hisarlik. It will
perhaps form the basis of testing also the more general theories advanced as to the
causes of the destruction of many ancient civilizations.
What questions should be asked of these humble sacks of debris, and, by extension, of
all similar samples to be drawn from other destroyed settlements? In other words, of
what should consist the science that investigates ancient destruction by combustion --
call it "calcinology," perhaps?
We may address this question either by taking up one by one the theories as to the
origins of the combustion, or by taking up the techniques for the investigation of
combustion. In respect to the theories, one would inquire into the possibilities of one
or a combination of accidental fire; "the invader's torch"; Greek Fire; seismic-caused
fire; explosive local volcanism from fissures or now extinct cones; fall-out of tephra
from remote, perhaps general, volcanism; ramified lightning; petroleum (bitumen,
asphalt, naphtha) rain, non-volcanic and extraterrestrial; and gas explosion in the
atmosphere, terrestrial or extraterrestrial by origin.
In respect to the techniques, one would speak of ambiance induction; artifact analysis;
comparative historical deduction; thermal-visual examination; morphological
examination; electron scanning microscopy; chemical mineralogical tests; thermo-
luminescence tests; tests for paleo-magnetism. Inasmuch as individual techniques may
dispose of more than one theory, it may be best to proceed by offering a few words
concerning their relevance.
Fundamental to pursuing all causal alternatives is a careful inductive study of the
ambiance of combustion. Whether performed on records of past expeditions or upon a
setting itself, a skeptical and fully alert reading or examination is required. We have
entertained too close a circle of interests and hypotheses; the Trojan record shows
this. So do hundreds of other excavation reports.
First of all, an interdisciplinary group of scientist must set standards and criteria
for entering upon a testable location. Conventional archaeology has certainly proceeded
far along these lines, but new parameters need to be added, taken from geology and
meteorology, as for instance, the effects of wind and the strength of building
materials. The camera that has come to play an important part in contemporary
investigations needs to be aimed at the hypotheses, so to speak. The pioneering work of
the engineer, C. Lerice, in magnetomatic and radiotropic anterior probing of subsurface
forms is worthy of generalization to standard practice. Standards for measuring depth
of debris, original and actual density of calcination, percentage of ash content, and
architectural and object deformities should be set up. Pre-selection and logging of
samples should be systematically done in the manner of the Cincinnati expedition of
1937.
The analysis of artifacts is sometimes conducted as part of a treasure hunt. To this
day, objects from the Treasure of Priam have not been studied carefully to determine
whether they have been fused by heat or by oxidation. Objects are described as they are
found but not to the extent that a specific set of hypotheses is applied to each object
as to how it might have been placed or dropped, or slipped, or fallen as a result of
direct or indirect natural causes.
Nor has an inductive, comparative, historical method been always conscientiously
pursued. A single anomaly in a closed layer may be worth more to science than a golden
chalice. To dismiss the anomaly as an "impossible" intrusion, a "similarity", and
"forerunner" is all too common practice. The attempt of the University of Cincinnati
expedition to reconcile the anomalies of location of their carefully uncovered sherds
in the face of the conventional Egyptian-anchored chronology is a case in point. "The
discovery of these 7th-century sherds 'in several areas in the strata of Troy VIIb1
stratified below layer VIIb2', which is supposed to represent the 12th century,
"presents a perplexing and still unexplained problem." [37] . Fortunately the self-
restraining, objective empirical techniques of the expedition simply stood even against
an authoritative chronology at a later date. One goal of calcinology is to establish a
frame of analysis that can be transferred from one excavation to another both to
interlock events and to serve eventual critiques of received versions of the
comparative development (and destruction) of civilizations.
I should place in the same category of historical comparative method the application of
mythology. Dorothy Vitaliano, pursuing a strict uniformitarian theory, has nonetheless
exemplified the necessary marriage between myth and geology that research properly
demands; to her, myth serves as a clue to past events, especially when they are
extraordinarily forceful [38] . Sometimes, as in the case of Troy, there are direct
myths describing events overtaking the site. In other cases, myths may be transferred
from other times and places as hypotheses.
The examination of bones found in circumstances of combustion may well be expanded.
Paleosteology ordinarily does not address itself to the degree of heat to which human
remains have been subjected, or whether the heat was searing or slow. For example, a
separate volume in the Cincinnati Troy series, its other merits aside, does not answer
questions relevant to the sudden destruction of the city [39] . How much heat reached
the people whose skeletons remained? Would the heat elsewhere have erased entirely any
humans and animals? Contemporary arson experts can transfer their "know-how" to such
queries.
Contemporary fire experts and combustion chemists can also contribute useful principles
for the visual examination of thermal effects. A high sensitivity to variations in
color and texture is still not a prerequisite for professional archaeology.
Conversations with persons concerned with combustion problems come around repeatedly to
unanswerable questions of color, stains, textures, bubbles and cracks.
The morphology of combustion environments would deal with terrain features that might
have altered, of for that matter remained significantly unaltered, in the course of the
destructive combustion. Earthquakes uplift and crack the earth. Volcanic and seismic
fissures leave different traces. Lightning can burn and dig distinctive fissures as
well.
It would be useful to perform core drillings in the hinterland of destroyed settlements
to discover whether the ash trapped about the ruins is also present in some natural
lowland areas of slow deposition, removed from human habitations. Recently, for
example, the Athens Metro project tested the subsoil to a depth of 20 meters in 228
locations for the purpose of planning subway construction. Archealogical finds were
noted and covered over, but the ordinary corings were not handled properly for the
analysis of combustion or other natural phenomena. Almost all samples show "Athens
schist," a vague term for sandstone, siltstones and the like; most of the preserved
cores are disturbed and eroded by water used in the drilling [40] . (The rock cores,
incidentally, show highly intense fracturing near the surface.)
Unfortunately, oil exploration does not concern itself with logging the cores brought
up from the near subsurface of wells during the drilling [41] . It may be possible in
the future to make a cooperative arrangement with petroleum geologists to provide such
data. Apart from its usefulness to social and natural history, near subsurface samples
may reveal chemical and morphological peculiarities of areas overhanging oil pools,
such as distillates of hydrocarbons indicating surface origins. (Again, this would
appear to be an appropriate scientific response, as there are frequent references in
myth to rains of sticky substances from the sky.)
This conjecture leads naturally to inquiry into the composition of shales, clays, and
soils found in connection with ancient destruction. An analysis of "samples that cover
depositional chemical environments ranging from continental and coastal soils to marsh
and subtidalmarine deposits" of recent ages had disclosed complex polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbon assemblages (PAH) with "a high degree of similarity in the molecular weight
distribution of the many series of alkyl homologs" [42] . This PAH is carcinogenic and
mutagenic. The soils sampled were from widely separated locations on and off the New
England coastal region. Forest pyrolysis and atmospheric transport was suggested. A
search for other nonbiological organic compounds was indicated. The cause of such an
immense fire is conjectural, as is indeed the postulate of the fire itself.
Are we so swollen with pride that we cannot review Ignatius Donnelly's Ragnarok (1883)
and not gain from it at least a doubt as to the origins of some of the world's clays?
Clay is conventionally assigned to sedimentation or decomposed structural material,
without inquiring as to possible volcanic or other sources. Yet a geological walk along
many a Greek island beach may pass across deposits of pumice dust and of gray clay that
visually suggests bentonite. Donnelly claimed a cometary origin for a heavy rain of
fire and gravel that destroyed part of the globe and most of mankind. What does the new
geology say to this? At least in regard to calcinated settlement debris and top open
area subsurfaces nearby, what is called for is an increased resort to professional
morphological, visual, and tactile examination, then to chemical mineralogical tests,
and also to electron scanning microscopy.
Reference was made earlier to the extraordinary layer of copper and lead scoriae found
by Schliemann in the burnt city. Is this mined ore, purified metal, or ore in a natural
state? The origins of metals are not a settled matter. There is too long a stone age,
too ready an access to ores, too abundant a mythology to relax in the arms of
conventional theory.
Sample tests are generally inexpensive and well structured; they require only small
amounts of material, often only a gram. But of course, the sampling technique is
critical and a manual of instructions for sampling calcination with a mind to covering
all hypotheses raised by this paper is a task for the future.
The idea that thermo-luminescence, radiocarbon, potassium-argon, and fission-tract
dating techniques can be applied to combustion studies with good effect is natural but
perhaps overly optimistic. Of course, calcinology is interested in dating inasmuch as
one of its aims is the establishment of concurrences in destruction; if two spatially
separated combustion processes point to the same or related causes, then their dating
will not only confirm their relationship but will also permit a more secure dating of
other sites where similar combustion but insufficiently related artifacts and
structures are discovered.
Thermal effects encountered on calcinated sites play a large role in permitting age-
determinations (as in thermoluminescence tests and fission-track dating) by providing a
basal date from which calculations of age may be made, and in obscuring chronology by
contaminating burned substances through mixing, as in radiocarbon dating. However, it
will be of interest to apply long-term dating techniques such as the potassium-argon
method if only to check whether the test gives an impossibly old date to a recent
volcanic event. Where uranium minerals have been used to give color to artifacts of
glass, the fission-track technique may provide reliable dates and a check on
radiocarbon dates. If an artificial glass is subjected subsequent to its manufacture to
combustion temperatures of over 600 degrees centigrade, the fission-tracks may be
partially or entirely erased, permitting the date of the new calcination to be
determined from the tracks now present. Tracks in volcanic glass should date the
eruption that produced it. Extra-terrestrial microtektites lend themselves also to
fission-track dating and can be searched for in ruins [43] .
Tests for radiation levels of the debris are indicated because of the possibility that
the destruction may have involved atmospheric or air-transported agents. For instance
the radiation levels would vary from the norm if lightning had struck or a meteoric
pass-by had greatly raised temperature levels. Lightning effects may also be indicated
by magnetization of metal pieces; for this reason and also to determine whether a
change in the magnetic pole had occurred, supposing a catastrophe to have been
widespread, the then-exposed rocks should be tested for abnormal magnetism, and ceramic
sherds of successive levels should be tested for the same and for possible reversal of
direction from one level to another.
As the gamut of tests and procedures is subjected to the concerted attention of
scholars of relevant fields, it may be expected that a system of producers and a
battery of tests will evolve -- simpler, easier to employ, practicable given the
conditions of archaeological exploration. The resultant research and testing would
possibly confirm that archaeology and geophysics have overlooked some significant part
of the absolutely small fund of ancient data. At that point, not too far away, we may
begin to speak of a new subfield of science called paleo-calcinology.
And when this task is finished, we might turn to another new subfield, which beckoned
us temptingly even as we tried to concentrate upon calcination, paleo-seismism. Here
the implication is that the Mercalli scale may be quite inadequate to denominate
thrusting, folding, and crustal rising and falling that may have occurred in the time
of man, and that the present awareness of settlement sites is merely fractional; much
more may have disappeared or is effectively hidden so as to lend a false perspective to
the human story.
Also paleo-diluviology, the study of ancient floods and tidalism. And still another,
paleo-meteorology, a study that would include the great winds that can sweep away
everything down to bed rock, given the slightest faltering of the earth's rotation, or
the passage of any substantial material from outer space through the atmosphere. Part
of the total task, we seem to be saying, is to separate ancient real occurrences from
ancient myth. The larger task is to distinguish real ancient catastrophism from literal
theology, not to denigrate theology but so as to recognize catastrophism for what it
did to shape man and his environment.
POSTSCRIPT OF NOVEMBER, 1983
The author's interest in the calcinology of Troy led the University of Cincinnati
authorities to propose an investigation of samples of debris that had been stored for
many years at the University. Generous grants were obtained from several foundations
and in 1982, the Princeton University Press published Supplementary Monograph 4 of the
University of Cincinnati Excavation at Troy, under the title of Troy: the
Archaeological Geology, by George Rapp, Jr. and John A. Gifford. The present author,
whose own research proposal had failed to receive support, was not consulted at any
stage of this work. However, since his original memorandum, on which the preceding
article was based, had been made available to the investigators in the very beginning
and he had called their attention to the possibilities residing in the neglected
samples, there may have resulted some effect on what was done in the investigations.
If so, it is not notable in the book just cited. The book does not state its
hypotheses. Its tests discovered only that in almost all samples, whatever the level, a
reed (arundo donox) occurred; the finding lacks significance since the reed is used in
making bricks. In sample number 81 (p. 130) of Phase IId, burned earth was analyzed to
revel charcoal, bone, and pelecypod fragments. There appears to be nothing of further
interest to calcinology proceeding from the entire investigation. The soil samples were
not, however, exhausted, and a future investigation is still possible, hopefully by
means more sophisticated than those described in the published work. The senior author,
without serious defense of the thesis, seems to support earthquakes as the cause of
destruction. ('... one earthquake of Richter magnitude greater than seven to affect the
Troad about every three hundred years. ' (p. 46)).
Notes (Chapter 2: The Burning of Troy)
1. This paper is an expanded version of one that was first presented on June 18, 1974
before the international symposium --Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar
System --held at McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario, and was published in Volumes I: 4
and II: 1 of Kronos magazine. The author is wholly responsible for the theory and
presentation of this report. He wishes to acknowledge his obligation, however, to a
number of persons who kindly supplied information and advice as he was preparing it.
Among them are: C. C. Chandler, Director of Forest Fire and Atmospheric Sciences
Research, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service; Arthur Brown, Geological
Engineer, Technical Consultant, Athens Metro Project; Ruben G. Bullard, Department of
Geology, Cincinnati Bible Seminary; J. L. Caskey, Professor of Archaeology, University
of Cincinnati; Dr. Howard W. Emmons, Karman Laboratory of Fluid Mechanics and Jet
Propulsion, California Institute of Technology; John Greeley, Professor of Physics,
University of the Bosphorus; Billie Glass, Associate Professor of Geology, University
of Delaware, Newark; W. A. Hans, Engineer, Fire Protection Department, Underwriters
Laboratories Inca; John Gnaedinger, President, Soil Testing Services Inc., Northbrook,
Ill; Jorg Keller, Professor of Mineralogy, University of Freiburg, West Germany; G.
Marinos, Director, Department of Geology and Paleontology, University of Athens; Dr.
Charles D. Ninkovich, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Palisades, N. Y.; Dr. Gerd
Roesler, Consulting Geologist, Naxos, Greece; Eugene Vanderpool, Archaeological
Photographer, American School of Classical Studies, Athens; Eddie Schorr,
Archaeologist, Houston, Texas; Dorothy Vitaliano, Associate Professor of Geology,
University of Indiana, Bloomington, Ind.; Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, Princeton, N. J.
2. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, Stragigraphie comparée et chronologic de l'Asie Occidentale
(London: Oxford U. Press, 1948), p. 7.
3. J. W. Mayor, Jr summarizes the work of Marinatos and Galanopoulos in "A Mighty
Bronze Age Volcanic Explosion," XII Oceanus (Woods Hole, Mass.), 3 April 1966, and
Voyage to Atlantis (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1969). Christos Doumas summarizes the
latest "official" theory of the succession of events at Thera in Antiquity XL VIII
(1974), 110-15, plates. Also, cf. D. Ninkovich and B. C. Heezen, "Santorini Tephra,"
Colston Research Society Papers, 17 (1965), 415-53; the papers of J. Keller, D. L.
Page, and C. and D. Vitaliano in Acta of the First International Scientific Congress on
the Volcano in Thera, Greece, 1969 (Athens, 1971); and C. and D. Vitaliano, "Volcanic
Tephra on Crete," Amer. Jrnl. Archaeology, Vol. 78, no. 1, Jan. 1974, pp. 19-24.
4. IX Anatolian Studies (1959).
5. This and the following quotations are from pages 16-17, 348, and 325 of H.
Schliemann, Troy and Its Remains (1875).
6. Ibid., p. 330. Schaeffer, op. cit., 223-4, claims that he saw no evidence of flame-
exposure (feu d'un incendie) on the objects exhibited at the Berlin Museum from the
treasure, and suggests chemical fusion. Also, radiative heat would be an alternative to
"chemical fusion" if one must be sought.
7. Schliemann, op. cit., p. 333.
8. Ibid., pp. 334-5.
9. Ibid., p. 340.
10. Ibid., p. 302; cf. p. 347. The walls and gates of ancient cities had usually an
orientation to the cardinal directional points. The "de-alignment" of successive Trojan
escarpments is itself cause for suspecting and investigating a possible reorientation
of the hill.
11. Communication of March 7, 1984. Bruce V. Ettling and Mark F. Adams accelerated
combustion of woods, cotton cloth, and plastics by hydrocarbons (fuel oil, gasoline,
could be etc.) and discovered by gas chromatography that accelerate hydrocarbons could
be distinguished from the natural hydrocarbons in the char. (" The study of Accelerate
Residues in fire Remains," N. D. offprint, Washington State University. College of
Engineering Research).
12. Allan O. Kelly & Frank Dachille. Target: Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth
Science (Carlsbad, Calif.: the authors, 1953), p. 192.
13. Loc. cit.
14. Blegen, Troy and the Trojans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), pp. 161-4. Troy IIg
is presently dated to ca. 2200 B. C. by the conventional chronology.
15. Ibid, p. 69. There is a contradiction here with fin. 13, as to how many bones were
found.
16. Ibid., p. 70.
17. Op. cit., p. 17.
18. It is well to stress that an influential school of experts on Troy consider the
Trojan War( s) to have been essentially a struggle for the command of the Dardanelles,
through which heavy commerce funneled. Cf. Emile Mireaux, Les Poems Homériques et
l'Histoire Grecque, 2 vols. ( pairs: Albin Michel, 1948), ch. II, XIV, et passim. A
strategic city that had to be put to good economic use might be thoroughly destroyed,
short-sightedly, and another later on built upon the site. Even if this were true of
Troy VII, would it have been also true of the earliest Troys, a habitual
shortsightedness?
19. Chandler, loc. cit.
20. Rupert Furneaux, Krakatoa (1964).
21. Communication from Prof. Jorg Keller, Institute of Mineralogy, Univ. of Freiburg,
June, 1974.
22. Israel M. Isaacson (E. M. S.), "Some Preliminary Remarks about Thera and Atlantis,"
KRONOS I, 2 (Summer, 1975). pp. 93 ff.
23. Iliad (Lattimore trans., 1951), p. 405.
24. "Lightning and Fire Ecology in Africa," Proceedings Annual Tall Timbers Fire
Ecology Conference (April 22-23, 1971), 473-511,475.
25. Quoted in I. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (N. Y., 1950), p. 218.
26. Furneaux, op. cit., 73, 97, et passim.
27. A. Rittmann, Volcanoes and Their Activity, trans. by E. A. Vincent (1962), pp. 12-
13. 218.
28. Worlds in Collision, especially "The Hail of Stones," "Naphtha," "Ambrosia,"
"Rivers of Milk and Honey," "Samples from the Planets."
29. Harold Urey, "Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods," 242 Nature (March 2,
1973), p. 32; Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1955), 147-53.
30. Troy (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton U. Press), Vol. 1, 325, 363.
31. Ibid., p. 373.
32. Cf. Worlds in Collision. 48-51, "The Red World."
33. CF. Nicola Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina,
1964). Also, Michael D. Coe R. A. Diehl, and M. Stuiver, "Olmec Civilization, Veracruz,
Mexico: Dating of the San Lorenzo Phase," 155 Science (1967), 1399-1401 (the authors
report that many pieces of asphalt litter the excavated ruin level). F. Wendorf, et.
al., "Egyptian Prehistory," 169 Science (18 Sept. 1970), no. 3951, pp. 1163, 1169 and
figure 1, speak of widespread brush fire in reference to a bed of ash in the Nile
Valley. Geologist Louis Lartel, in his first studies of Cro-Magnon man near Les Eyzies-
de-Tayec, Dordogne, in 1868 uncovered five archaeological layers covered with ash. And
so forth.
34. Op. cit., p. 700.
35. E. C. Baity, "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Thus Far," 14 Current
Anthropology (October, 1973), 389-449.
36. Vol. I, p. 17.
37. I. M. Isaacson, "Applying the Revised Chronology," IV Pensee, no 4, 5, p. 14,
quoting C. W. Blegen, Troy, V. IV, 1, p. 158.
38. Legends of the Earth (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1973).
39. J. Lawrence Angle, Troy: The Human Remains (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton U. Press,
1951).
40. Site visit with Arthur Brown, Geologist and technical consultant, Athens Metro
Project, September 11, 1974.
41. Communication of April 24, 1974 from K. F. Huff, Manager, Exploration Division,
Exxon.
42. M. Blumer and W. W. Youngblood, "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Soils and
Recent Sediments," Science (April 4, 1975), p. 53.
43. W. Gentner, B. P. Glass, D. Storzer and G. A. Wagner, "Fission Track Ages and Ages
of Deposition of Deep-Sea Microtektites," 168 Science (17 April 1970), 359-61.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part One: Historical Disturbances
CHAPTER THREE
THE FOUNDING OF ROME
For some time now, the founding of Rome has been accredited to truculent Latin rustics
lost in the miasma of VIII century history. The more glorious legend of its
establishment by Homeric heroes, particularly Aeneas, prince of Troy, has been in
abeyance. However, in the light of recent theory and newly uncovered fact, the two
stories can be blended in to a credible account. To suggest the new history is my
purpose here.
To begin with, I would allude to two larger ideas, which we shall be carrying into the
Italian setting. One is the increasing probability that a period of over 400 years of
accepted chronology around the Mediterranean world did not exist and should be stricken
from the record. These are the so-called Dark Ages of Greece, which were placed in the
historical record in the first place to correspond with four hundred years of Egyptian
chronology that were also non existent. "The Aegean prehistorians", writes J. Cadogan,
"have no choice but to adapt themselves to the Egyptologists" [1] .
This may seem still to be true to most ancient historians, but a generation ago
Velikovsky, in his book Ages in Chaos, knocked out the Egyptian centuries at issue and,
following his cues respecting the Greek Dark Ages, I. Isaacson (Schorr), the Review of
the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies of England, the journal Kronos, Velikovsky
himself, and even the present writer have worked to close the Greek time gap.
Hence, it is possible now to connect Cadmus of Thebes with Akhnaton, the butning of
Pylos with the destruction of Troy, to tie together in fact a number of natural
catastrophes and movements of people that Claude Schaeffer had coordinated in time, and
that could readily be slipped down by four hundred years into the VIII century. For
Schaeffer's inventory of destroyed sites of the XIII century "Peoples of the Sea" period
reveals that these settlement were succeeded by towns of archaic Greek, Greco-Roman, or
other much more modern settings not older than the VIII. century.
The case of Troy, so close to our subject here, is especially instructive about the
pseudo-time gap. As J. N. Sammer sums up the evidence [2] , Troy-Hisarlik VIIb was the
last Bronze Age city of the famous site. There followed a Greek town of the VII century
or later; no deposits intervened. Furthermore, there was an abundant continuity. Gray
Minoan pottery was found in Troy VI, Troy VII, and the Greek Age Troy. The forms of
settlement were identical in the Late Bronze Age (supposedly the XII Century) and the -
700 or later Greek settlement. A Late Bronze house was obviously used by VII century
Greeks. Beset by the dogmas of Egyptian chronology, scholars such as Blegen and
Coldstream resorted to the excuse of an abandonment followed by contamination in a
mixing of debris.
In Egypt this was the time around the pharaoh Ramses III, on whose temple of Medinet
Habu relating to the year 8 is recorded the "Invasion of Sea Peoples," that "They were
coming while the flame was prepared before them, forward toward Egypt" [3] .
Fire "before them" is not metaphor but refers probably to the innumerable cases of
destruction by fire at this time, a fire which may have been from fierce earthquakes,
volcanism, and exoterrestrial sources, which desolated many peoples and sent them out as
marauders and colonists. Or so it is argued in a number of places, and it is precisely
this kind of general ecological destruction encountered in VIII and VII century history
that helped to confuse the dates by seeming to cause "Dark Ages" of barbarism,
depopulation and continual movement and strife of peoples. Hence, the second point about
the background of Rome is that the town originated in a turbulent period when the war
planet Mars, Homer's "bloodstained stormer of walls," became a top god in Troy and not
by coincidence in Rome.
The latest consensus may be expressed in the words of F. Castagnoli: [4]
Archaeological excavations have opened up new prospects: the considerable
documentation of evidence of the Late Bronze Age (particularly in the zone involved
directly with the legend such as Ardea and Lavinium) and the Mycenean imports in
Southern Etruria, and between Reatino and southern Umbria, has reinvoked the thesis (for
some time cast aside) of a true historical reality adumbrated in the legend; joined to
this suggestion is the hypothesis that various manufactures of the oldest Latium
civilization reflect Cretan models and finally the theory that the Latin language
reveals Mycenean traces. In consequence, the coming of Aeneas to Latium my not be an
artificially created myth, but instead, in a certain sense, a tradition, that is, the
echo of real occurrences, the arrival of Aegeans in Latium during the period of the
Trojan War.
This certainly does not go far enough to suit our views, but will do for a start.
At the magnificent bimillennial exposition honoring Virgil in the beautiful setting of
the Campidoglio in Rome in 1981, the heroine was the famous sculpture of the wolf of
Rome, suckling Romulus and Remus. A small boy listened while his father explained: "She
nursed the orphans, and Romulus then founded Rome." The wolf was fashioned alone in
ancient times, possibly by an Etruscan master, and the twins were added only several
centuries ago. The wolf of Rome and the Mars-Ares of Aeneas' may not have been far
apart.
Already in antiquity and possibly based upon the word of Herodotus alone, the Trojan
wars had been placed in remote antiquity, the XII and XIII centuries. When the Romans
came to deal with this date, they found that their tradition of Romulus as founder of
the city proper in the VIII century (753,747, etc) was impossibly disconnected with the
Trojans, who now seemed to have disappeared four centuries earlier. Thereupon at the end
of the III century B. C., Q. Fabius Pictor, a Roman writing in Greek, first (to our
knowledge) bridged the gap by inserting an Alban line of Kings: but a more recent
quotation from him (see below) seems to contradict this reputed view. In contrast,
Ennius and others connected Aeneas and Romulus directly, as grandfather and grandson.
F. Castagnoli tells us how skepticism discounted the tradition :
The Trojan origin of the Latins was already put in doubt in the seventeenth century by
the humanist Philipp Cluever, a rigorous critique of philological aspects begun in the
middle of the Eighteenth Century (Niebuhr, Klausen, Schwegler, etc.); principally upon
their work has been based the interpretation of legendary material accorded by most
historians of ancient Rome.
It is understandable that since the Romans had not been able to stabilize the history of
their origins, the legendary part would fall prey to the new scientists who were bent
upon sharpening their tools against superstition.
Later on the strong interest of the Etruscans in Aeneas was exposed. Also presented was
the theory that Greek writers had created the legend. But then, after Mycenean
connections had been liberally displayed in the archaeology of Italy, the notion of
archaic elements corresponding to the myth grew up. More recently Latium has come under
exploration, including especially Lavinium.
In the Iliad (302-8), the god Poseidon saves Aeneas from being killed by Achilles so as
to preserve the house of Dardanus, beloved of Zeus, whose head will be Aeneas and also
Aeneas will be king of Troy with many generations to follow. Hera adds that Troy must be
substituted. So went the logic behind the legend.
But of course there was more than nonsense in the Iliad. In the years when Virgil was
writing the Aeneid, Properzio publicized him, announcing that he would revive the armed
exploits of the Trojan Aeneas and the wall built upon the Lavinian strand. "Take
yourselves back, Roman and Greek writers! There stands hidden something greater than the
Iliad."
In the middle of the VIII century, Ilioupersis of Arctinus and Miletus spoke of the
secret flight of Aeneas from Troy up Mount Ida. Later the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite
promises Aeneas a kingdom with a glorious future, a Troy restored. In the VI century a
coin of the city Aineia on the Chalcidean peninsula displays Aeneas in flight from Troy,
whence to found this same settlement.
That Aeneas went west appears for the first time in the fragmentary record in a table of
the Capitoline Museum illustrating the work of Stesichorus of the VII century. In one
scene Aeneas leaves through a Trojan gate; in another, Aeneas, with his father,
Anchises, son Ascanius, and companion Misenus board a ship eis ten Hesperian, "toward
the west." Anchises carries the sacred idols.
A direct connection of Aeneas with Latium appears a century later, at the end of the V
century, with two Greek historians, Ellanicus of Lesbos and Damaster of Sigens. The
story also appears of the burning of the Trojans' ship by their womenfolk, and of the
naming of Rome after the Trojan heroine Rome, ringleader presumably in the affair.
The story told by Greeks (and no Roman history in Latin is known until much later) is
seen in Italian perspective about 300 B. C. when the historian Timaeus of Tauromenium
attests to sacred Trojan relics preserved in a sanctuary of Lavinium. Several decades
later, the poet Licofronius, depending upon Timaeus, confirms him and details on the
existence of the legendary Lavinium.
About the same time, Q. Fabius Pictor was writing his history. A recently discovered and
fragmented inscription says only this about him:
He enquired into the arrival of Hercules in Italy and (?) the alliance of Aeneas and
Latinus ... Not (?) much later Romulus and Remus were born [5] .
Thus contrary to his reputed view, Pictor (or Pictorinus as the inscription has it)
carries Aeneas in the VIII century. The mention of Hercules is not queer. In The
Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, I review the legendary ties between the good-
man figure Hercules and the god Ares-Mars, and place the sons of Hercules, the
Heraclids, as the invaders of Greece in the VIII century, at Pylos, for example, where
they fight against the Pylian kinsmen of the young Nestor, later famous as an old
warrior of the Trojan War. Another case implicating Hercules-Mars and the Heraclids
reminds us of the Roman case. It is introduced by Desborough in his book on the The
Greek Dark Ages [6] .
Temenos was one of the three Heraclid leaders who with the Dorians seized the
Peloponnese, according to the conventional Greek chronology at the end of the twelfth
century. He had a grandson called Rhegnidas, who gained control of the little town of
Philius; this would be not much later than the middle of the eleventh century. This
event, as we are told by Pausanias, resulted in the departure to Samos of the leader of
the opposition party in Philius, Hyppasos; and Hyppasos was the great-grandfather of
"the famous sage Pythagoras." Pythagoras should then have been living at the end of the
tenth century, and so one might think, one has an admirable Dark Age situation : until,
that is to say, one discovers that Pythagoras belonged to the middle of the sixth
century, a difference of no fewer than three hundred and fifty years.
The Heraclids are evidently of the eighth century. In the superior guidebook to the
Bimillenario Virgiliano at the Campidoglio in Rome, 22 September to 31 December 1981, we
find the major leads needed to connect Enea nel Lazio to the larger Mediterranean
framework of time and events.
Hundreds of archaeological discoveries are displayed and all of the sites excavated
until now are described. The distinguished editors and authors do not speak of a "Dark
Ages" in Latium or Italy. They act nevertheless as if they existed. Therefore we find
that when all the artifacts can be grouped by centuries they concentrate into two groups
, the first from the XI to XIII century B. C. and the second from the VIII century to
the end of the Republic.
The archaeological record of contacts between the Aegean world and Tyrrhenian Central
Italy are few and difficult to interpret. Presently one treats with seven fragments of
pottery and five fragment of bronze coming from the areas of Luni sul Mignon, San
Giovenale, Monte Rovello, and Prediluco-Contigliano none of them coastal... It is almost
impossible to assign them precise form and the decoration is too generic to permit all
but the broadest dating [7] .
Not only is there an absence of imported articles over the centuries between the
supposed time of Aeneas and the time of the founding of Rome, but indigenous discoveries
of the period are also rare (and, we argue, perforce non-existent). Hundreds of dates
and artifacts mark the Bimillennial Exposition. Perhaps only a dozen are slipped into
the period between the XI and VIII centuries. The earlier objects and dates are of
Italian provenance; the later ones are heavily Greek.
The earlier period carries Central Italy into late Bronze and the beginnings of the Iron
Age. The cultural uniformity of southern Etruria and Latium is called total already at
this XI century boundary. Iron tools of Aeneas are attested to. And then, following the
"Dark Ages", there occurs an outburst of production and trade.
The king and cities of Virgil become then historical realities only when figured in
the early Bronze Age: it is on the other hand certain that their origins need be sought
in that crucial period, the Late Bronze age [8] .
The arrival of "Aegean" people in the XIII Century, writes one authority, Renato Peroni,
should have inaugurated a process of elements deriving from various fields of human
activity, beginning with the material culture.
Yet of all this, in the archaeological sources related to the period of Latium that
interests us, there is not the slightest trace. It is hard to imagine a cultural
continuity, in ceramics for instance, greater than that which is presented during these
centuries [9] .
Peroni, after expressing grave doubt that one could have an invasion and occupation
without cultural impact, though that is what archaeology seems to reveal, repeats that
in the XIII to XI Centuries (and significantly for our argument he terms the XI "less
developed") "the cultural uniformity of southern Etruria and old Latium appears to be
total."
What else can he say, so long as he believes the long chronology inherited from the
Egyptologists: "The literary sources and archaeological evidence permit us to assign the
destruction of Homeric Troy to the XII century. The Latium of the 'saga' of Aeneas is
therefore of the period contained between the Middle Age of Bronze (XVI -XIV Century B.
C.) and the first phase of Latin civilization (X Century)" [10] .
He goes on to survey the town sites occupied in the late Bronze Age, and finds a
continuity of occupation going into the age of iron, such as Ardea, Ficana, Pratica di
Mare, and Acqua Acetosa Laurentina. This in itself is remarkable, considering the lapsed
centuries and the absence of cultural remains of the long period of time.
Also remarkable is the evidence that between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning
of the Iron Age the number of inhabited places of Erturia dropped by four fifths [11] !
At the same time, the underpopulated regions of Latium and Sabina held their own and
increased slightly their settlements.
"So rapid a process of depopulation (in some cases occurring violently, in others
voluntarily abandoned) and the incorporation of the population in a few proto-urban
centers will make way, in its turn, to the mechanisms of formation of a complex society,
even of a 'stratal' type, at the beginnings of the Etruscan nation." Meanwhile, the
Latins were beginning to accrete settlements.
This scenario of Peroni suits exactly our theory of a period of natural catastrophes and
survivors occurring in the VIII century. One age disappears into another without
evidence of transition. As in Greece the culture reverts to survivorship; strife is
rampant. The Trojans arrive amidst a general desolation and disorganization, gain a
foothold without difficulty even welcomed in a way, and begin to expand and to found new
towns, among them Rome.
In Southern Italy and Sicily a similar set of events is occurring. The scholar's "Dark
Ages" myth prevails. After the mid-XIII Century, writes L. B. Brea, "a real Dark Age set
in only to be brought to an end five centuries later with the Greek colonization of
Sicily and Southern Italy." Before it set in, there had been much trade with the
Mycenean century and a flourishing civilization. However, we find that the city of Gela
was established by a warrior from Troy in 690 B. C. We also note that at Agrigento and
Segesta artwork in Mycenean style was practiced at both of the interfaces of the Dark
Ages. Further, dome-shaped Mycenean tholos tombs were closely alike across the imagined
500-year gap. And that at Morgantina excavators founds a Greek fort constructed just
above and on top of a destroyed Mycenean level.
Virgil has Aeneas landing in Latium, at the mouth of the Numicus river (Sol Indiges,
Troia and by today's name Fosso di Pratica). The hero, desperate to feed his men, chase
an animal for distance of all 24 stadi (4440 meters) and comes upon a herd of pigs on a
hill. He sacrifices them there and founds the town of Lavinium. The names and distances
between the two given by Virgil are exact today [12] . Titus Livius remarks on the
name, Troy, given to the place of landing. The Trojan altars were said to be still there
at the end of the pagan era, by Pliny the Elder and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the
historian.
At Lavinium, named for Aeneas' wife, Dionysius visited in the I century B. C. There he
witnessed relics supposedly of Aeneas held in a sanctuary and tomb dedicated to the
Trojan hero [13] . The preservation of the relics and the identification of the tomb
might well have been impossible if they have originated in the XII century; it is more
plausible that they had lasted from the VII or at least until the time of Timaeus of
Tauromenum about 300 B. C., who saw them. Recently, the "tomb of Aeneas" has been
uncovered and placed in the VII century, with remodeling into shrine occurring in the IV
century [14] .
Dionysius describes a round temple at Lavinium that housed the idols of the Trojans,
which seems to have been emulated in the round temple of Vesta and the Penati of the
Roman Forum. The small Lavinium temple is replicated on a coin of the Emperor Antonius
Pius.
Aeneas probably rested in several places on his way to Latium, in Asia Minor, Macedonia,
Crete, Carthage, and Sicily. Apollo's oracle at Delos told him to seek the lad of his
ancestors and this was taken by his father, Anchises, to mean Crete. The refugees did go
there, finding a desolate and abandoned settlement. They began to settle down but were
beset (significantly) by a natural disaster that made further consultation with Apollo
necessary. Luckily, a second trip to Delos was not required because voices authorized by
Apollo urged them to find the true place of their origins, and they set sail for the
West [15] . Anchises could not remember Italy, hence had not been born there, but
recalled that certain ancestors had come from there, Dardanus and Iasius, and had been
Olustrians or Italians.
On the way to Italy, they stop at Carthage, which is, says Virgil, still under
construction by Queen Dido, who has fled with her supporters from a berserk brother who
ruled Phoenicia. Here we encounter a chronological problem; to be sure it is not a
matter of centuries but of a generation. Dido is best placed at -804 or -803, before the
dates which we accept for the Trojan War( s), which may have occurred over most of a
century, at which time Aeneas would most likely have left Troy. Moreover, the dates
assigned traditionally to Romulus, a grandson of Aeneas, are -772 (-771) to -717, and to
the founding of Rome -747 or thereabout.
Either Aeneas left upon an earlier sack of the city, or someone related to Aeneas and
therefore confused with him visited Dido. The stop itself was not unexpected. There
appears to be a non-Greek connection that binds in alliance the Trojans and their
Thracian and Anatolian friends, the Carthaginians, and the Etruscans. Etruria, said
Herodotus, was settled by Anatolian Lydians before the Trojan War [16] .
But who might have visited Carthage and could be mistaken for Aeneas? Philistos and
Appios clearly give 50 years before the Trojan War as the date when Carthage was
founded. Timaeus gives -814 and Josephus independently gives -826. Yet Carthage's
earliest archaeological remains afford specimens of Greeks material ascribed to the last
quarter of the VIII century, presumably -725 to -700 [17] .
Were the Phoenician and Trojan refugees in motion a century apart? Not according to
Virgil, obviously, who describes a torrid love affair between Aeneas and Dido. And not
according to the traditional dates for Romulus and the founding of Rome; if Aeneas
abandoned Dido at the turn of the century, he could have grandfathered Romulus at the
appropriate moment, about -772. Arie Dirkswager, in an unpublished manuscript lent the
author, offers a solution. He suggest that the king of Tros who founded Troy then moved
to Italy where he founded Etruria and gave the Etruscans his name, about -815. It was he
who knew Dido! Then later, the refugee party led by Aeneas would join its kinsmen about
747 B. C., when Troy burned.
However, although we also view the Etruscans and Trojans as related, we see a later date
for the Trojan wars finally to end, and one has to place Romulus and the founding of
Rome into the very end of the VII Century.
We are perplexed now and have exhausted our meager supply of information. The most
plausible suggestion I can afford is that the Trojan Wars were several until the city's
final destruction (and we cannot confirm the site of Hissarlik - Schliemann's discovery
- as more than a frontier post in the struggles). Given the practices of those times, an
age of colonization and restless wanderings having begun, Aeneas, Prince of Troy, led
his party of refugees out at an early stage of the wars (which Homer combined into one
for literary effect and from amnesiac causes), did visit Dido at the turn of the
century, and so history picks up with Romulus and the founding of Rome in the middle of
the next century. We are introducing one doubt in order to relieve ourselves of several.
And we should be grateful if some brilliant scholar carried down the whole scenario by
another century to place it squarely in the catastrophic VIII and VII centuries.
We have relieved ourselves of several notions: that Virgil was only glorifying Rome by
mythmaking; that the "Dark Ages" existed Italy between -1200 and -700; that Aeneas and
Troy were of the XII Century; that Aeneas and Romulus were fictional characters; that
were was no significance to Mars and the Wolf of Rome; that he Etruscans were long
settled in Italy and were a natural and continual foe of the new Latins; that the Romans
were a simple farm folk who took well to fighting; and that in the VIII Century natural
conditions were normal.
We understand better why the exasperating gap between Aeneas and Romulus was created:
the need to integrate chronology of diverse cultures by basing it upon what was believed
to be the nearly perfect chronology, the Egyptian; the scholarly skepticism of all
legend until recently, especially when wolves and feral infants are tied to the mythical
package, not to mention the hallucinogenic pantheon; the seeming circular confirmation
of Etruscan-Greek-Roman interrelations; the ignorance and neglect of great natural
disasters, such as Aeneas encountered in Crete; alternative explanations of the Dark
Ages such as long-drawn-out climatic changes, restless northern tribesman, and normal
decay of civilizations; the injection of artifacts and personages falsely into the gap
of time; and the vanity of Roman noble families who had attached themselves genetically
to the fictitious personae of the noble line of Alba Longa extending back to Lavinium,
including even the Caesars.
We surmise, by way of contrast, that Aeneas was a Trojan noble, active around -800. He
left a beleaguered Troy in an early stage of successive sieges, founded settlements in
several places, eventually in Latium, near Etruscan relatives, and among a disastrously
weakened native population.
A prompt acculturation and cultural homogenizing began, catalyzed by the disorganizing
effects of a turbulent nature. His daughter Elia mothered Romulus (and one fantasizes
that his godmother was Roma who led the female party which burned the Trojan ships to
prevent further wanderings). The heavens were producing some of the disasters, and the
planet Mars was connected with them to the point that the god could be the godfather to
Romulus who eventually joined him in a cyclonic episode. The wolf of Rome was the symbol
of Mars. The experience of Italy was being replicated throughout the world in those
times; many peoples were practically destroyed; many new towns were founded. The
Mycenean civilization was wrecked, so too the Cretan, so too many another including the
Siculian of Italy and Sicily. The Bronze Age lurches abruptly into the Iron age.
Notes (Chapter 3: The Founding of Rome)
1. An extension of remarks at a conference of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary
Studies at Lake Kashagawigamog, Ontario, August, 1983.
2. "Dating the Aegean Bronze Age without Radiocarbon," 20 Archaeometry (1978) 212.
3. W. F. Edgerton and J. A. Wilson, Historical Records of Ramses III (Chicago: U. of
Chicago Press, 1936), 53; While J. H. Breasted (Ancient Records of Egypt (1906), IV, 37-
8) translates "They came with fire prepared before them, forward to Egypt."
4. In Enea nel Lazio: Archaeologia e Mito (Milano: Fratelli Palombi; 1981), 5.
5. R. M. Ogilvie, Early Rome and the Etruscans, New York: Humanities Press, 1976, 16.
6. London: Benn, 1972; Malcolm Lowery provides this instance in I Soc. Interdiscip.
Stud. 1 (Jan. 1976) 16. I cite another in The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars,
"Crazed Heroes of Dark Ages."
7. Enea nel Lazio, 107.
8. Alessandro Guidi, in Enea Nel Lazio, 94.
9. Enea nel Lazio. 87.
10. Ibid., 88.
11. Ibid., 92.
12. Ibid., 157.
13. Ibid., 158.
14. P. Somella, Rediconti 44: Atti di Pontificio accademia di Archeologia (1971-2), 47-
74; Enea nel Lazio, 157-8, 172-7.
15. Aeneid, III, 94-6 (Humphries trans.) pp. 64, 66.
16. Histories I, 94, (80-1 in the Penguin ed., 1954).
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part One: Historical Disturbances
CHAPTER FOUR
MICAH'S ARK
Velikovsky persuasively traces the ruins of Baalbek to the ancient seat of a fine city
constructed during the reign of Solomon [1] . Baalbek, too, was the second capital of
Dan. "The Danites, migrating to the north, took with them Micah and his idol, and it was
placed in Dan of the North." (3.14) The Oracle of Micah probably was set up in the
"house of high places," a temple that was built at Dan by Jeroboam "to contest and to
surpass the temple of Jerusalem." (3.15) The oracle remained in high esteem at least as
late as the fourth century of the present era, when Macrobius in his Saturnalia wrote of
Baalbek: "This temple is also famous for its oracles." (3.14) The Emperor Trajan
questioned the oracle in the year 115.
Velikovsky's notes, compiled by Jan Sammer, show two more indications of what the oracle
might have been. Of Baalbek-Dunip-Seti's Kadesh, "the place is known as Yenoam (' Yahweh
speaks') which refers to the oracle." Then , "Yenoam-Dan (Yehu probably introduced the
cult of Yahweh at Dan). Yenoam, read in Hebrew, could be interpreted as "Ye [Yahweh]
speaks..." Writes Sammer: "Velikovsky evidently saw in the name a reference to the
oracle of Dan." I agree, and Yehu might be interpreted as a form of Yahweh.
But Velikovsky did not proceed to identify the oracle further, although this would have
strengthened his case all around. In my book on God's Fire: Moses and the Management of
Exodus there occur the following lines:
We hear that on one occasion the Ark was duplicated by a young man named Micah in his
home, a surprising occurrence, reminiscent of claims that the nuclear bomb can be home-
made. The lad's mother was quite proud of him; she had consecrated her silver for the
purpose (Ju. 17: 3) He made a graven image, a molten image, an ephod, a terraphim, and
hired a priest. Nothing untoward occurred save that men from the tribe of Dan descended
upon the household and carried away the ark and its Levite attendant. Later we learn
that the true Ark was kept at Shiloh, whence it was occasionally employed.
I owe the realization that Micah's image was an ark to J. Ziegler (YHWH, 34-35). He
points out that mere images of material are common in ancient Jewish household; that the
word which is translated "image" as in "any standing image" comes from the word "neck,"
hence refers to any arrangement or instrument capable of discharging an ark, that Micah
needed both insulating carved wood and metallic sides, that is, both "a graven image and
a molten image" to fabricate his ark. Ziegler perceives that the first and second
commandments go together, expressing the absolute preference for Yahweh followed by the
prohibition of graven images, by which is meant any competitive presentation of the
divine who was displayed on the true Ark.
The Danites, after stealing the image (ark), erected it in the capital of the country
that they had savaged. "And they kept the carved image of Micah ..., all the day that
the house of the God continued in Shiloh," an obvious reference to the prototype "true"
Ark of the Covenant that rested at Shiloh for a long time.( Ju. 18: 13)
Hence a functioning Ark, an electrical apparatus that has been described elsewhere
(Ziegler, op. cit. A de Grazia, "Moses and his Electric Ark," Midstream, Nov. 1981),
found a home in Baalbek, where appropriately, it was mounted upon a hill site. There, in
the years of declining terrestrial discharges, it might still on occasion approach the
norm of activity that its prototype (then in the temple of Solomon at Jerusalem)
displayed during the Exodus under the direction of Moses.
In Velikovsky's article, the "thing" is an "oracle," an "image," and an "idol," vague
terms applied to the Ark in conventional Biblical exegesis. Too, they are terms that the
editors hostile to the Northern Kingdom would use to avoid suggesting that something
approaching in shape, intent, and functions the most sacred Ark would be operative
there, or anywhere else. The oracle of Micah was also called "a voice ... from Dan" by
Jeremiah, and "voice" was a term used literally and liberally in regard to the presence
of Yahweh on the Ark.
The "oracle of Micah," or Micah's Ark, lends authenticity and credibility to
Velikovsky's reconstructions of the history of Baalbek. Some fifteen years ago, during a
rambling conversation that took in the crises over Lebanon, Velikovsky fixed me with a
confiding gaze and said: "Baalbek was part of Israel. I have never published it because
it might cause trouble." He felt that such proof would be made the basis for a claim to
Lebanon by Jewish extremists. He was complex; here he was a man of peace; but usually
his scale of demands paralleled or even advanced beyond those of incumbent rulers of
Israel.
The complexity of his character is involved in the oracle of Baalbek, too. We note his
statement about Jeroboam, who built the "house of high places" at Baalbek-Dan and had
built the Jerusalem walls under Solomon; "before becoming king of the northern kingdom
he lived as an exile in Egypt. He introduced the cult of the calf in Dan."
Velikovsky despised any Jewish minion of a foreign power. Nor did he like the "Golden
Calf." He acknowledged its enduring presence in Hebrew religious history, opposing it to
the "superior" abstractions of Moses Yahwism. Velikovsky did not see the Ark as a
functioning electrical machine, and merely grunted in response when, a year before his
death, I mentioned to him that an electric Ark was a feature of my manuscript of Moses.
Two years earlier, I had raised the subject of Ziegler's book YHWH and it was obvious
that, although he had received it, he would not read in it.
Probably he saw, in the image of the calf, which was the only ritual image turned up by
the Baalbek excavations, a synopsis of Baalbek Dan's dedication to the apostasy of
Jeroboam and the Ten Tribes, a taboo-guarded subject in Jewish tradition. In sum,
Velikovsky probably regarded the Ark of the Covenant as a mere holy litter, in the
modern scholarly conception of bedouin ritual apparatus, and may have assumed, with
embarrassed haste, that the oracle of Micah related to the worship of the calf and
embodied its image, whereas most likely the oracle was the Ark of Micah and preceded
Jeroboam's assumption of power in Baalbek; it was infuriating to the southerners, who
later on supplied the editors of the Bible.
Notes (Chapter 4: Micah's Ark)
1. III Kronos( 1981-2) nos. 2, 3.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part One: Historical Disturbances
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CATASTROPHIC FINALE OF THE MIDDLE BRONZE AGE*
(* A paper presented at the IX Congress of the International Union of Prehistorical and
Protohistorical Sciences, Nice, 1976.) Catastrophes are defined as large-scale intensive
natural disasters. All the world's religions are founded upon original catastrophes.
Indeed, so obsessive is the connection between catastrophes and gods, that human
cultures, even the most scientifically advanced ones, refused to turn over the study of
catastrophes to science. As a result, science and scientific history made their way
after 1840 in defiance of the very idea of catastrophes, that is, of a quantavolutionary
as contrasted with an evolutionary primevalogy. Quantavolution promises, as I would like
to illustrate here, an ability to penetrate some pre-historic and historic problems that
have caused confusion in uniformitarian, gradualist, evolutionary theory.
We are dealing here with a large area of the Earth, and with 2500 years of time. We
should guard against defining catastrophe by some measure that turns out to be a mere
uniformitarian statistic. The incidence of catastrophe between 3500 B. C. and 1000 B. C.
must be much greater than the incidence of the past 2500 years, an equal length of time,
to support my thesis. That is, we should add up all the Vesuvius and Krakatoa eruptions,
the Caribbean hurricanes and Kansas cyclones, the Siberian meteoroid falls, Swiss
avalanches, sinkings and risings of town harbors, Yangtse and Mississippi River floods,
frozen Baltic winters, prolonged Saharan droughts, etc. Then convert the intensity and
rate of these events into 2500 year averages. Then, further, if these recent indicators
appear to compare 1 to 1, or even 1 to 2, with the Bronze Age indicators of the
expression of high natural energy, perhaps the thesis should be abandoned... And many
scholars would be pleased to confirm that the human record has been uniform, gradual,
and linear, instead of catastrophic and cyclical. Furthermore, they would feel that the
technological progression "from stone to bronze to iron ages" had some essential
meaning, or that a sociological progression "from hominid, to hunter-gatherer, to
pastoral, to agricultural, to industrial" also has meaning. They would further be
reassured that the great gods that succeeded each other on the altars of ancient
cultures were only the typical occasional results of the human pastime of inventing new
gods whenever normal life routines were disturbed by the tides of fortune or war.
But suppose the incidence of catastrophe is 1 to 3, or 1 to 5, or 1 to 100, comparing
the modern age with the Bronze Ages! Then the catastrophic or quantavolutionary thesis
will be nailed upon the door leading to ancient history. If it becomes reasonably
apparent that the Bronze Ages exhibited high energy expressions and effects in multiples
of 2, 3, 5 or a hundred times the expressions and effects of high energy in recent
years, then all fields of ancient history and ecology must undergo change. Many cultures
would have been caused to disappear in natural disasters. Human nature may have acquired
the character of desperation. Personal behavior and institutional practices may have
become suffused with the effects and expectations of intense traumas. In short, the
world of natural and social history becomes a different world and had better be studied
differently.
Let us look briefly, then, into the middle of the second millennium B. C., that is, some
3500 years ago. (Because there is some confusion of chronology and much controversy
about it, I shall mention dates between 1700 and 1400 B. C. and venture an opinion later
respecting their simultaneity and succession.) Did the events so dated happen at the
same time or not?
I shall commence by paying homage to Claude Schaeffer. For it was he who, despite
onerous preoccupations during the French War of Liberation, assembled and analyzed the
mass of data which was finally published in 1948 under the title of Stratigraphie
Comparée et Chronologie de L'Asie Occidentale, IIIe-IIe millénaires. In this great work,
he compared some 40 important archaeological sites in the Near and Middle East for
evidences of sudden destruction. And he found, without fail, that there had appeared
several levels over a period of thousand years when destruction seemed simultaneously to
descend upon Bronze Age cultures.
His general conclusions were several:
1. Certain outstanding events... struck simultaneously a definite number or even the
totality of urban centers of Western Asia... Not only is this conclusion persuasive as
originally inscribed, but many locations can now be added to the doomsday list.
2. The catastrophes struck six times: roughly, about 2350, 2100, 1700, 1450, 1365, and
1235 B. C.
3. "The various countries of Western Asia affected by the perturbations reacted
according to their own resources. Now these varied considerably, sometimes from one
region to another, as a function of the climatic and geographic situation. Thus the
chronology of the layers deposited during the periods of real stability between the
great crises may present a deviation from one site to another. That is, nevertheless,
never considerable and hardly ever exceeds fifty years." Even this discrepancy may be
due to errors in dating the material uncovered.
4. The perturbations of cultures were caused by natural catastrophes, often giant
earthquakes and fires, rather than by the hand of man. Cultural ruptures only rarely
were caused by human elites, but "by atmospheric cataclysms or other calamities, such as
earthquakes ... We perceive as yet only imperfectly the initial and actual causes of
certain of these great crises. We put ourselves here expressly en garde against a
generalization of the seismological explanation."
5. Long-enduring hiatuses or lapses followed the destruction, as after 1700 B. C.: "In
all the sites examined up to now in Western Asia, a hiatus or period of extreme poverty
causes a rupture of the stratigraphic or chronological sequence of the layers around
1700 B. C., and revival began only around 1550 B. C., 150 years later."
John J. Bimson, reviewing "the Conquest of Canaan" in the time of Joshua, finds in the
records of excavation half a dozen destroyed settlements beyond those reported by
Schaeffer in Palestine alone - Arad, Hormah, Gideon, Hebron, Hazor, et al. All went down
in violent conflagrations. It is noteworthy that Bimson, on the say-so of Epstein,
excludes Megiddo, holding that there was no break between Middle Bronze and Late Bronze
ages. In this case, Schaeffer is in contradiction: "The stratigraphic picture of Megiddo
shows an interruption of occupation between 1650 and 1550 B. C. The excavators report a
variety of remains from the Recent Bronze Age, subsequent to 1550, and of remains from
the Middle Bronze Age, antecedent to 1650, in the zone of contact of the two layers."
There do not seem exceptions to this world-wide disaster which so many scholars have
perceived in their own digging but are blind to overall.
6. Cultures were transformed in the times that followed the disasters. Many movements of
peoples occurred. Economies changed. Some sites were abandoned entirely.
Also working during World war II, carrying on in New York as a journalist and
psychoanalyst far from his home in Palestine, was Immanuel Velikovsky. In 1950, after
rejection by eight publishers, his Worlds in Collision appeared, followed shortly
thereafter by Ages in Chaos (1952).
Like Schaeffer, Velikovsky reported the universal destruction of settlements in the
Exodus period, which he assigned to around 1450 B. C. So all that Schaeffer says
happened about 1700, Velikovsky says happened about 1450. We resolve the dating
discrepancy in favor of Velikovsky. The two scholars are discussing the same set of
events that brought the Middle Bronze Age to an abrupt and terrible end. Both inculpate
natural catastrophe as the general cause, and relegate the usual causes of change in
recent times (leadership, weather, inventions, wars) to a minor causal role.
Unlike Schaeffer, Velikovsky introduced a first cause, a comet that he identified as the
erratic proto-planet Venus, which has a hundred names around the world. This comet, said
he, first closely encountered the Earth in the mid-second millennium. Granted this
single ultimate cause, Velikovsky could support strongly the theory of the simultaneity
of the catastrophes, which Schaeffer espoused.
Velikovsky further asserted that the set of disasters repeated itself, in reduced
degree, at intervals of about 52 years, as the comet dropped its tail and assumed a more
circular orbit. When it did approach, extreme religious celebrations were inaugurated in
places as far apart as Palestine and Central America, celebrations that continued until
recent times and were invariably connected with planet Venus. The disasters on Earth
diminished, then, until the 8th century B. C., when a new deviant celestial force began
to play upon the Earth and a new and heavy set of disasters began. Also unlike
Schaeffer, Velikovsky wove voluminous legendary, mythical and geological material into
the fabric of proof offered by archaeology.
Spiridon Marinatos and the island of Thera (Aegean Sea) is another part of the mid-
second millennium story. As early as 1939 Marinatos began to publish theories of the
destruction wrought by the explosion of the volcano of Thira upon Minoan civilization.
Minoan culture, centered in Crete, promptly and abruptly declined. Not only Thera itself
but many places of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were badly hurt by the extensive
fall-out, hurricanes, and tsunamis from the explosion of Thera sometime after 1750 B. C.
Isaacson, however, whom I follow, ascribes the Thera disaster to the Tenth Century, B.
C., perhaps in the years of King David.
A part of the debate over the dating of this event has been occasioned by the
expectation of some scholars that this one explosion could carry the full responsibility
for all the human and ecological changes occurring over a large area in the mid-second
millennium. My opinion is that, both at the same time as the Thera disaster and before
and after it, a multitude of other natural forces were unleashed, adequate to explain
the total hiatus found over a great region and for a long time. Velikovsky was not the
first to point to a comet as the instrument of destruction. I would only pause to
mention others here -- William Whiston (Isaac Newton's disciple) in the 17th century;
the brilliant young Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger in the 18th century; the American
politician, utopian, and scholar, Ignatius Donnelly in the 19th century. Although they
may not have been preoccupied with the Bronze Ages as such, there is no doubt of the
proximity to the Bronze Ages of the events which they describe.
More modern (in the 1920's) is the case of F. X. Kugler. Kugler was a Babylonian scholar
and astronomer of the top rank. His last book, on the Sybilline star battles and the
Phaeton myth, is a tour de force. In it, as Malcolm Lowery has shown, are the
conflicting moods of one who dogmatically accepts primordial catastrophes of creation
and the Noachian flood, but who is stubbornly uniformitarian otherwise. Kugler, studying
the hysterical lines in the poetry of the Sybilline oracle concerning the battles among
the stars (which describes a shifting struggle among the animals of the Zodiac),
concludes that this must be considered a metaphor.
However, he crosses the bridge to scientific catastrophism in his analysis of the myth
of Phaeton. This, he argued, embodies a factual event of the mid-second millennium when
"one and the same stream of meteors passed over Africa (in particular, Ethiopia) and the
Aegean, producing respectively great fires and violent flood waves." Kugler, it seems,
strives to limit the Phaetonic catastrophe as severely as he can, while allowing the
grave reality.
A number of Soviet, American, and Bulgarian students are delving into the area of the
Black Sea, with the mid-second millennium as one possible breaking point. Oceanographers
of Woods Hole, for example, date to something over 3000 years ago a heavy precipitation
of organic material in the cores that they have drawn from the bottom of the Black Sea.
In my opinion, this is a layer of sudden death.
Regarding the region to the South, Robert Adams (who holds a triple interdisciplinary
position at the University of Chicago) is urging a shift of archaeological and
anthropological perspective from the individual site to a pattern of sites. No longer is
the paradigm to be the single urban center, he says, but rather zones of cultural
interaction that "will require work in many countries and over many decades." He finds,
for example, "a major westward shift in the Euphrates system of channels as a whole
during Kassite times." That is, perhaps in the mid-second millennium, there occurred a
"dark age," "a population nadir." He finds hundreds of unknown sites to plot. Regions of
culture disappear, reappear, switch places.
In their Central Asian work, apart from the Black Sea simultaneities already mentioned,
Soviet researchers have noted widespread destruction. In a popular but authoritative
book, the linguist Alexander Kondratov writes, "In the middle of the second millennium
B. C. the ancient cities in Southern Turkomenia declined and were abandoned by the
inhabitants. The South Turkomenian civilization perished at about the same time as the
proto-Indian, and the reasons are still unknown."
The case of the proto-Indians of Mohenjaro, Harrappa, and a vast area besides is well-
known, if not well understood. There is one theory that they lived so well off the fat
of the land that their economy declined and they were extinguished. (This strange theory
reminds me of the long-accepted idea that the magnificently equipped Magdalenian hunters
of France, after flourishing beneath mountains of ice, gave up everything when the ice
melted, because their reindeer prey left the area.)
Yet another theory about proto-India is quasi-catastrophic, Robert Raikes holding that
natural dams formed and then broke, swamping the Indus cultural centers. The formation
and collapse of natural dams can truly create great destruction; in the State of
Washington Scablands case, the scenario has also been well worked out by geologists.
However the timing of this special proto-Indian dynamic of catastrophe is significant.
Why not later? Why not today? Why were these floods coincidental with a world that was
in the throes of general destruction?
Further, the proto-Indian related cultures were widely diffused and most of them would
not have been affected by the special flood dynamic referred to. It is most unlikely
that such a great civilization of vast extent, with its city-planning, excellent
cuisine, fine arts, and decimal numeration would succumb to swamping by mud, or for that
matter to desperate invaders, themselves probably survivors of some northern sectors of
the universal disasters. Further, Raikes has mentioned recent disasters of meandering
rivers (but no culture has been destroyed). I suppose then that the conviction that
catastrophe struck the proto-Indian cultures before the Aryan incursions occurred is
correct.
Perhaps this was a time of great flood in Northcentral Africa or both flood and sudden
desiccation. Who tipped or cut into the basin of the historically known Lake of Triton,
said by Aristotle to be separated by a narrow belt from the Sea? The Lake may have been
so large as to permit the luxuriant development of the Saharan region and its culture.
Great rivers, including the Niger, flowed into it then. If Triton did burst into the
Mediterranean, a Tyrrhenian flood catastrophe that destroyed western civilization may
become a viable hypothesis.
The playful girlhood of goddess Pallas Athena (the Greek planet Venus) on the shores of
Triton is suspicious. It was said that she accidentally killed her playmate Pallas and
took the name herself in remorse. This same Pallas, however, is in another story a
monster whom the notorious virgin goddess dispatched when he attempted to rape her. Even
more, this Pallas is elsewhere identified with Typhon, the dragon and would-be destroyer
of the world whom Zeus finally struck down in the middle of the second millennium.
Pallas Athena was present in this episode, too, in the form of the protoplanet Venus,
now tailless or without a phallus, by the loss of Typhon.
In Italy and Sicily at this time, abrupt cultural transitions are commonly reported,
although none has conducted a survey of destruction levels. At Lipari, for instance, a
totally new culture (the Ausonian) entered upon the scene. At Prato, in Tuscany, the
Villanovan ruins, themselves separated from the Etrusco-Campanian period by "a colossal
fire," to use Nicola Rilli's words, are based upon yet another enormous bed of ashes. I
suspect that this bed may be tied to the mid-second millennium, but the question
requires much more study.
Surveys are needed for the Western Mediterranean area and Northern and Central Europe
generally. An abundance of legends of catastrophes is offered, and the shadow of
catastrophe hangs heavily over prehistory. Vast forests may have swept into or been
drowned by a Baltic Sea formed at this time. Offering themselves for mid-second
millennium construction and abandonment are hundreds of megalithic monuments throughout
the vast area. The astronomical interest of these peoples is now proven. But, even if
one is not a psychologist, one cannot think it is normal for people to cut and lug 100-
ton stones to do a job that a few sticks of wood would accomplish -- watching the Sun
and Moon. I think that around this time, in despair and disgust, the survivor custodians
of Stonehenge may have given up their job.
Suggesting a need for oceanographic archaeology are the legendary sinkings of lands
mentioned in Eastern contemporaneous records, and in later classical and medieval
sources. Where located and explored, as with Pharos at the head of the Nile, "the
greatest seaport of the Bronze Age," according to R. Graves, the question of the date of
the submarine tectonism that sank the city remains. Off Cornwall, England, even a log
has been recovered from the depths.
Rilli, to take another example, believes that the Etruscans were related, if not
descended from, the culture of a sunken central region of the Tyrrhenian Sea. In 1971,
B. C., Heezen and others reported in Nature magazine upon the evidence of continental
crust that lies foundered beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea. Of course, the dates are
impossibly divergent.
Across the Atlantic, we need not believe that the mid-second millennium was peaceful.
The Olmecs, as William Mullen of Princeton University reported, relying on Michael Coe,
appear to have been deep in trouble, floundering in ashes, tar, and destruction. Apart
from the still flimsy archaeological evidence, there exists a mythology, well introduced
in the analyses of Velikovsky and Mullen, that appears to treat of this disaster. In the
southern part of the Valley of Teotihuacan, 28 occupation levels of an abri stretch from
1500 AD back to 10,000 B. C. The only great interruption, according to Richard McNeish,
happened between about 2300 B. C. and 900 B. C. This is a wide gap, but obviously no one
there seemed to be in a culturally creative mood in the mid-second-millennium.
Both Schaeffer and Velikovsky attempted an appraisal of the Chinese condition. Both
allude to mid-second millennium floods and earth movements which marked the practical
destruction of one Chinese civilization and the beginnings of a new system of society.
In my opinion those sinologists who take the evolutionary position that this break
marked the transition from a legendary society to a historical society are wrong. The
break separates two highly distinctive societies and ages; the Chinese "Bronze Age"
bursts out with the Shang dynasty after 1500 B. C.
Apparently, the atmosphere was not a silent witness to the global events of this period.
There appear to have occurred remarkable deviant ingestions of Carbon-14 by organisms of
this time, as disclosed in statistical studies by P. E. Damon, A. Long and E. I.
Wallick, and analyzed by G. W. van Oosterhout. If you had died in this period, the
likelihood that your anniversary would be correctly celebrated by Carbon-14 today,
supposing your bones were nicely preserved, is very low. The likelihood is high that any
two readings of Carbon-14 for organic death happening around then will very greatly.
This indicates, at the least, fluctuations of atmospheric nitrogen, or cosmic or solar
particles, or carbon dioxide (or all of them) beyond uniformitarian norms.
All such fluctuations, one may be warned, are themselves possible reflections or
opposite deviations. That is, we cannot say that the several forces causing atmospheric
deviations or aberrations were tending in the direction solely of the increased
deviation. A cloud of CO will act to age a living thing for future tests and a cloud of
cosmic particles will act to young it for future tests. The same organism in its
lifetime can become not only much "younger" but also much "older," depending upon the
inconstancies of its Carbon-14 intake; it can thus falsely line up uniformly with the
Carbon-14 "constant" owing to contradictory inconstancies.
We may conclude, I think, that the mid-second-millennium was a period of serious
atmospheric perturbations. The chemical measuring device seems to agree with the mass of
legends about the catastrophic events of the mid-second millennium and may even
underestimate their atmospheric effects.
Perhaps now I have inventoried enough evidence of devastation throughout the traditional
region of the Bronze Ages and indeed over most of the world. The Middle Bronze finale
composed a period of catastrophes certainly over twenty times as heavy as the past 300-
year record shows, perhaps hundred times greater, perhaps much more. Even in the works
cited, not to mention a hundred lesser compendia, more evidence might be adduced. I am
inclined to convert the hypothesis into a challenge. No stratigraphic column, whether
geologic or archaeological, can fail to show evidence of natural destruction dating from
the middle of the second millennium.
BROADER CONSIDERATIONS
I shall rest the case for the mid-second-millennium catastrophes and move on to address
additional issues.
First, I would stress one implications of the works cited. Earthquakes were only a part
of the devastations wrought by natural forces. Schaeffer sensed this. The Middle Bronze
Age civilizations and their counterparts throughout the world were too highly developed,
organizationally and technologically, to have been overthrown by earthquakes alone, even
if one could identify tectonic forces of the deep Earth that would strike to the tops of
the Richter and Mercalli scales. The long hiatuses of cultures and the depopulation
reported upon all sides suggest intense heat (causing death, plagues or vermin and
disease), hurricane winds and tsunamis that can exterminate the biosphere, and an
atmosphere often poisoned by volcanic and extraterrestrial particles and gases.
Second, if the identified destruction is plausible, probably an equal or greater amount
of unidentified destruction occurred. Hurricanes of 250 miles an hour strip a land and
all man-made works down to bedrock. Great tsunamis, such as are caused by huge
earthquakes and meteoritic passthroughs of the atmosphere, do the same. Lava flows can
cause the sudden deep burial of the surface. So can heavy tephra showers, not to mention
the heavy burning rains of naphta that are carried in various legends. If land can rise
by kilometers, as is known, so can it sink, carrying forever from view what its surface
contains.
Third, the clustering of disaster between the claimed dates of 1750 and 1450 points to a
centralization of the cluster in time. This we shall know when the various claimed dates
are brought into closer order. One thing is sure: the dates can only move towards
simultaneity not away from it.
Such general simultaneous havoc strengthens the argument for celestial encounters as the
first cause. Therefore, when one such as Velikovsky steps forward with the most
persuasive kinds of legendary testimony, this testimony must be cast in the balance. If
catastrophe on a grand scale occurs, and if all the voices of the age name the sky as
its source, and if much of their behavior is organized around attempts to obey, placate,
and predict the sky-beings, it becomes reasonable to incorporate astral events in
attempting to explain the events of the age. In a flashing epigram, Friedrich Nietzsche
once wrote: "to the sage as astronomer: as long as you still experience the stars as
something 'above you, ' you lack the eye of knowledge."
When archaeologists strike a destruction level hovering around the middle of the second
millennium, they are probably looking at a global event, a cultural fracture, a movement
of peoples, religious revival and suppression, revolutionary regimes, despair, spectra
terribilem (on earth and the sky), pandemonium, economic wretchedness, heavy atmospheric
pollution, death on all sides.
To sum up, by my reckoning, the Bronze Age of the mid-second millennium experienced
natural catastrophes on a scale inconceivable today. Hundreds of cultures were destroyed
and their survivors were few in numbers.
The broad scale and intensity of the disasters, when aligned with much direct testimony,
send us looking into the skies and then to the chain of earth-air-fire-water events that
follow.
A SCHEDULE OF CATASTROPHIC AGES
What happened at the end of the Middle Bronze Age happened earlier and later. It is
likely, for example, that the first dynasties of Egypt began on the relaxing slopes of a
disastrous period, which brought new human cultures out of the West and South into the
surviving neolithic milieu of the Nile Valley. The suggestions of catastrophe at the end
of the Old Kingdom are likewise numerous. These extended straight through the Old Bronze
Age, Neolithic and end on the Paleolithic, into the Ice Ages and therefore throughout
the Holocene which may one day be defined, at about 14,000 years in length, as the
Period of Catastrophes. On the more recent side, the catastrophes extend through the
Recent Bronze Age and into the Iron Age of the Eighth and Seventh Centuries B. C.
Are we not therefore compelled to take up a new classification of the ages? I should say
'yes. ' The present divisions should be reordered and renamed. Putting aside the absurd
local categories in the hundreds, the division by metals is poor on five counts: it is
parochial; misleading; presumptuous; non-anthropological; and undynamic. Actually
various ancient classifications offered by writers such as Hesiod and Ovid are at least
as useful. They furthermore introduce cycles of creation and destruction with each age,
and sometimes a long linear or spiral development running through the cycles (that is,
progress). Nor do I see any superiority in the optimistic, linear, evolutionary schemes
of Fraser, Morgan, Engels, Spencer, and the others who perceived a rational
technological sequence moving from hominid to contemporary mankind.
In dividing historical time, cultural change is the most logical concept to use. Where
do the points of maximum cultural change occur? It appears that these points coincide
with natural catastrophes. Lesser points of change can be connected with minor or
localized catastrophes. Only afterwards come the uniformitarian periods, even with their
brilliant episodes of Akhnaton's Thebes, of Periclean Athens, of Augustian Rome, of
Medici Florence, Elizabethan England, or the France of the Enlightenment.
Since ages must be arranged, let them be arranged by peaks of change that correlate then
with peaks of catastrophism. Since ages will be given names, let them perhaps be named
after the sequence of great gods, those anthropomorphized expressions of disaster. For
when the human race was cast down, it was from the natural forces; and the forces of
nature originated from the skies; and these forces were called gods and as such invaded
the mind and history. But to the scientific community, sensitive to its public image, an
Age of Mars or an Age of Venus may be embarrassing. Whereupon we may resort to Roman
numerals and speak of Holocene I, Holocene II, and so forth. Whatever the nomenclature,
a revised conception of ancient times is in prospect.
Nevertheless I would suggest that we use the theological approach to fix our sights and
ask "What gods ruled when?" If a certain god ruled during a certain time, and the same
god flourished at the same time in different areas, then the same age could be
distinguished in its natural and human condition by the nature of its god. From the
blessed gods, all good things flow, just like Homer sang, so all the sciences would
achieve inspiration and rejuvenation from a theological division of the ages.
If a revival of interest in catastrophe occurs, the sciences of pala-psychology, pala-
politics, pala-theology, archaeoastronomy, geology, and history need to reexamine many
of their findings an theories. The methodologies employed in ancient studies require
both intermeshing and invention. An ideal archaeologist needs to know something of
psychology and geo-physics, anthropology and astronomy, the history and science of human
management. (I could make the ideal even more impossible, but why go on save to
underline the need for interdisciplinary cooperation.) Claude Schaeffer, a generation
ago already, was writing: "We have often had to deplore the absence, in the reports of
excavations, of all information relative to these layers considered unprofitable by the
searchers." (That is, the layers of destruction.) David and Ruth Whitehouse have
recently published an Archaeological Atlas of some 500 sites around the world. There
are, of course, a great many more. These sites are mostly reported with the same lack of
attention to such details as Schaeffer refers to. Were these reports to be scrutinized
as he examined the Middle East reports, we would be already envisioning some five
hundred man-years and woman-years of reading and analysis. It would be well worth the
effort. A masterpiece of catastrophic analysis could possibly emerge, for example, from
a review of the rich paleolithic-neolithic materials of the caves and sites of
Aquitaine. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that future archaeological technique will
make such laborious information-retrieval unnecessary. This would surely occur if the
revolutionary dimension were carefully provided for in the designs and operations of
archaeology and human geology.
The question all can ask together is: "What happened so as to destroy and reconstruct
past worlds?" The question is the foundation to quantavolutionary primevalogy, as
opposed to evolutionary primevalogy. It seeks its evidence and benchmarks in the genesis
and destruction of cultures.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part One: Historical Disturbances
CHAPTER SIX
UPDATING SCHAEFFER'S DESTRUCTION INVENTORY*
[* A summary of Professor Shaeffer's findings and notes of a research proposal to extend
his work. A memorial to Professor Schaeffer (1898-1982) by Geoffrey Gammon occurs in V
The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review 3 (1980-1), 70. The sites studied by
Schaeffer and a map of them is contained in his work of 1948, Stratigraphie Comparée and
this author's Chaos and Creation (1981).] In concluding his massive inventory and
analysis of strata of destruction in Bronze Age settlements, Professor Claude Schaeffer
of the University of Paris wrote as follows: The great perturbations which left their
traces in the stratigraphy of the principal sites of the Bronze Age of Western Asia are
six in number. The oldest among them shook, between 2400 and 2300, all of the land
extending from the Caucasus in the North down to the Valley of the Nile, where it became
one of the causes, if not the principal cause, of the fall of the Egyptian Old Kingdom
after the death of Pepi II. In two important sites in Asia Minor, at Troy and Alaca
Huyuk, the excavators reported damage due to earthquakes. Under the collapsed walls of
the buildings contemporaneous with the catastrophe, the skeletons of the inhabitants
surprised by the earthquake were retrieved. However, in the actual state of our
knowledge, it is not possible to say to what extent the earthquakes are the direct cause
of the disasters which, at a date situated between 2400 and 2300, fell upon so many of
the countries of Western Asia. We are better informed in that which concerns the second
of the great perturbations which in the order of time shook all of the Bronze Age
civilization in Western Asia. In Anatolia, these brutal and sudden events struck fatally
the brilliant centers of Troy III, of Alaca Huyuk famous for the riches of its royal
tombs, and Alishar I B and of Tarse. As to the nature of this third great perturbation,
registered in all of the countries of Western Asia at the end of the Middle Bronze Age,
and whose effects, in certain regions, were prolonged into the midst of the Recent
Bronze period, we are reduced, in the actual state of our knowledge, to hypotheses. In
most countries occupancy suffered a notable reduction, in others sedentary occupancy was
replaced by nomadic. In Palestine and the island of Cyprus the situation appears to have
been complicated by epidemics; collective tombs without durable offerings and apparently
established with a certain haste were brought to light in the necropolises of the end of
the Middle Bronze Age and the beginning of the Recent Bronze Age. Calamities of the same
nature appear to have caused the eclipse of the Hittite empire from 1600 on in round
figures. Persia and Mesopotamia in their turn then went through a severe crisis;
likewise in the North, the countries of the Caucasus; our study has shown that here too
there is no continuity between the civilizations of the Middle Bronze Age and of the
Recent Bronze Age. This brilliant period of the Middle Bronze Age, during which
flourished the art of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt and the refined industrial art of the
Middle Minoan, and in the course of which the great commercial centers such as Ugarit in
Syria enjoyed a remarkable prosperity, was ended between 1750 and 1650 by a new
catastrophe, equal in severity and in scope to the two preceding perturbations. However,
around 1450, a new perturbation, the fourth since the middle of the third millenium,
struck Western Asia, particularly the Mediterranean regions. Evidently less severe than
the preceding ones, it was accompanied by revolts in Syria and in Palestine, resisted by
Thutmose III and subdued by Amenhotep II. A century later, around 1365, mean date, in
the time of the reign of Amenhotep IV or Akhnaton, an earthquake of great violence
ravaged several cities on the Syrio-palestinian coast as well as in the interior of the
countries. In Asia Minor also the urban centers (Tarse and Boghazkeui and Troy) suffered
damage in the same period. This fifth perturbation is very distinctly marked in the
stratigraphic sections of most of the sites explored in these countries. From about 1250
or 1225, the sixth and last great catastrophe fell upon the civilizations of the Bronze
Age in Western Asia. Vast ethnic movements are launched again of which one, probably the
most important, proceeds across the Syrio-Palestinian corridor and along the coast
toward Egypt. Professor Schaeffer then searches for causes and assigns the greatest
weight to natural disaster, and not necessarily purely seismic disturbances. Our inquiry
has demonstrated that these successive crises which opened and closed the principle
period of the third and second millenia were not provoked by the action of man. On the
contrary, compared to the amplitude of these general crises and to their profound
effects, the exploits of conquerors and the machinations of statesman at that time
appear modest indeed. In the 1970's the present author was introduced to Professor
Schaeffer by Mr. René Roussel, then an inspector of air navigation system for the French
government and an exchange of letters and meeting followed. Dr. Schaeffer expressed a
willingness to collaborate and to supply the study with later materials of the period
1945 to 1975 from his own archives. I applied for support to the National Geographic
Society, without success. There follows now the statement of the proposed study. The
data to be obtained is to be found in the great libraries of the world and it is hoped
that an institute or department of archaeology will undertake the task.
*** The project aims to inventory all excavated sites of the Mediterranean-Middle East
(4000 to 600 B. C.); to scan their reports for indications of destruction by earthquake,
volcanism and cultural periods or phases; to plot the sites on a seismic and geological
background map of the large region: to test the hypothesis that all existing ancient
settlement of the period 4000-600 B. C. were destroyed by concurrent natural disasters
at points in time conventionally denoting the various Bronze Ages; and to publish the
results.
The materials of research are those contained in Claude Schaeffer's published work and
archives, which are being made available to this project, and the many excavation
reports contained elsewhere and obtainable by library research mail requests, and
personal contacts. The data will be collected and systematically reported in manual and
electronic form, and the subsequent analysis should provide a firm quantitative base on
the degree of correctness of the hypothesis of the destruction of ancient civilization
at significant time intervals by natural forces.
CORRELATING NATURAL DISASTERS
The reformulation of the Schaeffer Hypothesis can be summarized as follows:
A. All excavations in the Near and Middle East of the period 4000-600 B. C. will show
levels of heavy destruction.
B. The levels of destruction are correlative.
C. The levels of destruction will have counterparts outside of the Near and Middle East
here particularly the East and West Mediterranean.
D. Natural Disasters are demonstrable.
Phase 1
1. Review and updating of the same 40 sites as presented in Schaeffer's Stratigraphie
Comparée.
2. Transfer to new standardized format.
3. Preparation of a list of all excavations performed since 1945.
4. Search the excavation reports for levels of destruction and categorize them as:
a. no evidence of destruction levels
a1. Unsearched and not definite
a2. Demonstrably not destroyed
b. levels of destruction
b1. Concurrent with those previously reported in SC.
b2. Not-concurrent
5. In every case, Determine where possible whether naturally caused or provoked
6. Merge data.
Phase II
7. Determine the quantitative degree of correctness of the reformulated Schaeffer
Hypothesis in all of its parts.
8. Write a narrative of the findings
9. Accompany the narrative of findings with
a. an up-to-date map of the Mediterranean-Middle East exhibiting fault lines as shown
by NASA satellites, zone of modern seismic intensity, and the location of excavated
sites plus
b. a differentiation of the mapped sites according to how many of the presumed
destruction levels they actually reveal at the critical culture points. For example Troy
shows all levels, and would be so symbolized on a map.
c. a supplementary plotting on a separate map, of all natural destruction levels that
are not correlated with the presumed major destruction levels and of missing levels of
destruction adverse to the hypothesis.
d. an appendix of all sites reported upon (and of those either unreported or lacking
data).
e. a simple constructed Index of conformity of findings to the hypothesis.
f. an Appendix of techniques of discovering and reporting destruction levels and their
causes.
g. photographs of selected destruction levels showing ashes and calcination (Troy,
Tuscany, Alaca Huyuk, etc).
Phase III Theoretical Discussion
10. On the character of the natural disasters implicated.
11. On the exceptional or anomalous cases of verified concurrent non-destroyed sites, if
any.
12. On chronological problems exposed in the study, and their possible solution.
13. On the degree to which excavation leader have responded to the challenge of
Schaeffer's Hypothesis since 1948 (30 years). 14. On the implications of the findings.
a. for the study of the rise and fall of civilization.
b. On the comparative study of religion.
c. On the causes of sudden, significant cultural changes.
d. On the possibility that the boundaries of the
Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages have been basically determined by natural
forces.
In applying for foundation support, the word "exoterrestrial" or "extraterrestrial" was
not mentioned. Now, with the publication of The Lately Tortured Earth, it should be more
apparent than before that the destructions of the Bronze Ages could have been produced
by several causes, acting together and initiating in celestial disturbances. Other
regions of the world too will lent themselves to an enhanced comparative analysis,
especially in the U. S. S. R. and Meso America.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part One: Historical Disturbances
CHAPTER SEVEN
NINE SPHERES OF VENUSIAN EFFECTS*
(* This paper is an edited version of a talk to a meeting of the Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies, London 26 April 1980. The help of Mr. Peter James on
important points of material evidence is gratefully acknowledged.)
Whether from timidity or misapprehension, hypotheses of general destruction about 3500
years ago are felt to be based upon scraps of evidence from scattered and often
unreliable sources, whereas their conventional counter-theses are solidly founded. To
the contrary, as I shall maintain here, the evidence from this period points to an
extraordinary destruction in culture and nature. I shall offer nine propositions to this
effect, adjoin an example or two, and challenge anyone to present and defend an opposing
case. Seven of the propositions govern large special areas of science. The balance cover
all areas of knowledge.
Since the total effect produced many great changes, and the effect in each field was
also large, I do not hesitate to give them the name of quantavolutions. Quantavolutions
are abrupt, intensive, large-scale changes, and contrast with evolutionary changes which
are, as they say, drop-by-drop and point-by-point. The time, about 3500 years ago, was
that of Exodus. The catastrophe of the Exodus is described in detail in God's Fire and
Ages in Chaos.
I.
We begin with astronomy and physics. We speak of calendars, reports of sky bodies in
action, legends of the gods, sky-struck human behavior of the period. We say of the
Astrosphere: "No available record of astronomical events from anywhere presents astral,
planetary, or solar movements as unchanged or uniformly changing from before that time
to afterwards."
When Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision appeared in 1950, many a critic leaped at it
claiming that eclipses of the times before 700 B. C. were known and hence the skies had
been orderly for long before then. Over the years he and his supporters put to rest this
claim. No such historical record exists; there is no anomaly present.
Other critics were discovering in Stonehenge and other megalithic constructions an
astronomical orientation that went back to the New Stone Age and is still valid. This is
not so. Dr. Euan MacKie wrote about his investigations: "In the 16th or 15th centuries
B. C. a second period of crisis began during which the dressed bluestone setting was
dismantled, and joints on its stones battered off where possible, and most of the
sockets for a new circle of bluestones were dug. This project was abandoned before
completion.." Again no anomaly.
A corollary of our first Proposition says that no calendar based on the present solar
year or lunar cycles is available that comes from the period before 3450 B. C. or
thereabouts. However we find a severe challenge. Hastings in 1910 wrote that "the
Egyptian calendar [amounting to 365 days] appears throughout the whole of its history.
However far back we may trace it, we cannot reach the moment of a change in it."
Malcolm Lowery stresses the anomaly in correspondence to Zetetic Scholar (3/ 4, April
1979, p. 60):
To cite a case in point: according to Egyptological authorities, monuments from Old
Kingdom Egypt unimpeachably and unequivocally record a year consisting of twelve thirty-
day months plus five days of the year; and this 365-day year is confirmed by students of
other Near Eastern civilizations.
His footnote reads:
"Two references must suffice here (a) Hastings: Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics
(Edinburgh, 1908-1926), II (1910), p. 93: "As it has just been described [with a year of
(3 x 4 x 3 x 10)? 5 days] ... the Egyptian calendar appears throughout the whole of its
history. However far back we may trace it, we cannot reach the moment of a change in
it." (b) Helck/ Otto (eds.): Lexikon der Ägyptologie (Wiesbaden, 1975), III, 298,
article: Kalender by J. von Beckerath: "Auf der Grundlage eines [unregelmassig 12-bzw.
13-monatigen] Lunisolar Jahres wurde in Ägypten schon früh ein... Kalender...
geschaffen, der aus unveränderlich 365 Tagen bestand. Er war nach dem Vorbild des
natürlichen Kalenders in 12 Monate zu je 30 Tagen eingeteilt, wozu noch 5 Zusatztage
(Epagomenon) kamen."
An attack from Peter Huber in the same issue (p. 67) reads:
Another one [problem with Velikovsky and his followers] is that they tend to repeat
the same, clearly wrong assertions ad nauseam (for example, the 360-day year mentioned
by May is a fairytale, it has no more physical reality than the 360-day year nowadays
used in interest calculations).
Several days before his death, Velikovsky indicated to me his impression that we had
only to answer one ultimate source for these statements, a single ancient document, and
Malcolm Lowery and Christoph Marx helped me locate it in Breasted's Ancient Egyptian
Texts. It is a business contract mentioning an addition of five days to the year of 360
days. Until this matter is thoroughly investigated and rebutted, it stands as an
anomaly.
A most common expression of critics is that the orbits and behavior of the planets,
including Venus, were known before -1500 and are the same as today's. This has been
shown to be untrue, much to everyone's surprise. The records are not there, nor can they
be retrocalculated, for this would beg the question. Venus has been shown to have been
perceived and observed to take an eccentric course that is compatible with the behavior
of a comet. This finding, along with those mentioned above and in many other works
beyond recitation here, tends to confine strictly and cast into doubt the 365 day year
anomaly mentioned above.
II.
The Atmosphere seems intangible as a source of evidence for events of 3500 years ago,
but in fact much evidence of atmospheric turbulence is available. A rationalistic and
literal interpretation of the Bible at the time of Exodus reveals high electrostatic
levels, high radioactivity levels, dense and persisting cloud covers, high carbon
content in the air, oppressive darkness and falls of a spectacular type -- quail, manna,
barads, fire etc.
We are entitled to say, "There were radical disturbances and some lasting changes in
atmospheric electricity, radioactivity, temperatures, winds, climates and solar radiance
in the mid-II Millennium." Radiocarbon dates for the years involved require adjustments
of serious consequence, as Suess and others have disclosed. The prevailing view that the
Exodus was a gambol of truant slaves or a return of some bedouins to their ancestral
desert is absurd and useful to divert attention from how bad conditions really were. The
Jews were operating in the middle of catastrophe; there is no anomaly here.
III.
The Geosphere was disturbed. The world was shaking. Rivers were stopped and changed
their courses. Mountains were moved. We are obliged to hypothesize: "Every geophysical
feature or process in the world capable of exhibiting the effects of continuous stress
will show that such stress occurred around -3500." Here we share problems with
conventional students of Holocene geology: what tests can pinpoint geological events in
time --radiocarbon dating, possible chemical changes in rocks and soils, changed
stratigraphy and morphology that can be tied to historical or protohistorical events?
So when we read a contrary statement in the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the effect that
the Euphrates River bed was unchanged over many thousands of years, we must juxtapose to
this a statement by R. Adams, for instance, that there occurred in the mid-second
millennium "a major westward shift in the Euphrates system of channels as a whole during
Kassite times." And when Robert Raikes, a quasi-catastrophist, theorizes that giant mud
dams formed and broke and flooded out the Indus River civilization of this time, we have
to carry his argument farther and, viewing the tremendous destruction throughout
northern India and the bases of the Himalayan Range, insist upon a much more universal
disaster than the mud-barrier floods. We have Sagan in his "An Analysis of Worlds in
Collision," Scientists Confront Velikovsky, p. 66:
But the claim that there were extensive lava flows and volcanism involving "all
volcanoes" is quite another story. Volcanic lavas are easily dated and what Velikovsky
should produce is a histogram of the number of lava flows on the Earth as a function of
time. Such a histogram, I believe, will show that not all volcanoes were active between
1500 and 600 B. C., and that there is nothing particularly remarkable about the
volcanism of that epoch.
How does this anomalistic claim stand against the evidence of volcanism put forward in
my Lately Tortured Earth, against the finding of Phoenician vases embedded in lava dated
to 3500 years ago, against the plinian explosion of Mt. Rainier in America dated
concurrently? Not well. Volcanism was not behaving normally. Velikovsky was speaking
loosely and deductively, meaning all volcanoes must have erupted if the Earth paused and
a great attractive celestial body was close. Elsewhere, insofar as the data allowed, he
spoke in statistical language, foreshadowing the vaunted histogram. When Sagan says
"volcanic lavas are easily dated" he is mistaken, even on the premises of
radiochronometry. My own position is that many volcanoes were initiated, many fissures
opened, all active volcanoes erupted, and furthermore a great many eminences erupted
electrically.
More difficult to dispute is the claim that recent ice cores drilled from beneath the
Greenland Ice Cap pass through the mid-second millennium with an extraordinary
appearance of debris, but not enough to suggest world disaster. I shall have to deal
with this anomaly in a future study. (See below.) The cores by the way are not showing
other expected effect around this time anyway. Oceanographic theory has a drastic drop
of catastrophic proportions in the ocean levels of the age. Could there have been a
great freeze, a deluge, a breaking into new basins such as the North Sea and Baltic Sea
(actually in both cases indicated)? Or could the land have risen around and below the
seas -- just as disastrous an event?
IV.
"Every biological species underwent radical change around 3500 years ago in numbers,
habitat, behavior or genetics:" such would be our fourth proposition, concerning the
Biosphere.
There is much evidence regarding numbers -- including human destruction as for instance
among the Israelites and Egyptians, also much concerning changes of habitat, abandonment
of settlements, changes in behavior. Ovid is not to be believed when he said that the
passage of Phaeton at this time burned the Earth and turned Africans to black from the
heat, but it is not unbelievable that so many of the non-black peoples of Africa were
destroyed that the continental population noticeably blackened after the event. Those
who deny marine disasters can of course rely upon the absence of datable fossil events,
but there are mammoth destructions datable to the time, and a Woods Hole Oceanographic
Expedition to the Black Sea uncovered a general layer of coccoliths that occurs at the -
3500 level and could not simply have died normally and drifted to the bottom en masse.
The ancient historian Josephus said that nature, in a revolution, produced "mutations in
the bodies of men, in the earth, in plants, and in all things that grow out of the
earth." There is little fossil evidence yet uncovered from the period or most of what
there is has been assigned to later or earlier times or ignored or is of current
species. Apparently "very fresh" fossil mucks have been found, but the assignment of
dates to them has progressed little.
V.
The situation is different when one turns to the Ecosphere, the human settlements. Here
the evidence is abundant, and has been presented in a number of works discussing every
region of the world. Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near, Middle and Far East, and Meso-
America provide evidence. Every advanced civilization suffered destruction, whether in
China, Africa, the Causasus, Anatolia, Crete, or elsewhere. So we add the hypothesis:
"No human settlement in the world escaped heavy destruction from natural causes in the
midsecond millennium." I discussed this proposition with Professor Claude Schaeffer two
years ago, and he agreed with it. Hundreds of sites that he had not included in his
massive volume on comparative stratigraphy might now be added. A corollary of this
proposition, which is also related to the one on astrophysics, is that "No religious
temple that was built before about -3500 and rebuilt afterwards shows the same
astronomical orientation afterwards as before." Peter Tompkins, for instance, carries a
diagram in his work on the Great Pyramid that shows four different historical
orientations of the Temple at Luxor, one of which was probably at the end of the Middle
Bronze Age. René Roussel has written a report (unpublished) showing that a rupestral
temple at Ouadi es Sebous (Upper Egypt) was oriented to different winter solstices
before and after -3500. A disaster occurred to the temple in between; great fire damage
and layers of ash are to be seen.
VI.
We can call the human documentation (the oral and written records, of the mid-second-
millennium period) a kind of history and coin the following hypothesis regarding the
"Historisphere":
"All legendary or contemporary historical accounts from any people in the world which
discuss events of, or attribute events to, the mid-second-millennium mention a general
and natural disaster."
Much of Greek myth centers upon catastrophe-born Pallas Athena, upon Hephaestos and
Dionysus. The Books of Moses center upon the Exodus disasters. The Vedas of the Hindus
focus upon momentous natural events at the time of their main descent upon India from
the North, which time has been generally accepted as mid-second-millennium.
The Ipuwer papyrus which conforms rather closely to the Biblical Exodus account appears
to be datable to the end of Middle Bronze, hence confirms our thesis. Ancient pagan
accounts of the doings of Moses, often unfavorable, as often agree that plagues and
natural destruction were occurring then. Are there exceptions? None that I know of. Only
evolutionary modern writers have presumed a benign history covering this period, and I
await any contradictory thesis referring to any document or legend. I await the
uniformitarian anomaly.
VII.
The seventh thesis, the Anthroposphere or cultural sphere, says: "Every culture complex
in the world changed radically in mid-second-millennium." Here we refer to social
organizations, religions, and modes of life.
We know that the Egyptian Middle Kingdom underwent the political and social traumas of a
takeover by the Hyksos. Most often, as Schaeffer has shown, "sedentary occupancy" of an
area "was replaced by the nomadic." In Persia, Mesopotamia, and the Caucasus, he writes
"there is no continuity between the civilizations of the Middle Bronze Age and the
Recent Bronze Age."
A recent corollary of our hypothesis number 7 is this: "No god of before mid-second-
millennium B. C. remained without change of status or family change or serious
incident."
Zeus found a new daughter, Athene, and what a daughter she was! The Hindu goddess Devi
conforms to all appearances with Athena, with the same violent entrance upon the skies
and the human mind.
Yahweh appears and explains to Moses, rather unconvincingly: "I am the same god of your
fathers, but different." "Not different enough," replied a great many Jews and they
insistently chased after Baal - represented in the young Baal-bull.
Can any scholar offer an unchanging religion for this period: I think not. Certainly, if
so, it would be an anomaly.
VIII.
At this point, I am prepared to assert that all major spheres of existence have been
incorporated into a quantavolutional scheme of the mid-second-millennium: astrosphere,
atmosphere, geosphere, biosphere, ecosphere, historisphere, anthroposphere.
Let us then generalize a Holosphere, that which contains all modes or forms of
existence, and offer an VIIIth proposition, thus:
"All spheres of existence change together by a mutual interaction in the mid-second-
millennium," or conversely,
"No major quantavolution in any special sphere occurs independently of quantavolutions
in other spheres."
The Exodus case represents the best studied and perhaps the most documented history of
the times we have, and, viewing it, we can confidently say:
"When all spheres are quantavoluting, then the whole world is involved and the cause is
universal."
The forces at work are so strong and transactional that we may add an event to the
workings of the Astrosphere:
"There can be only one necessary and sufficient cause of the quantavolutions of the mid-
second-millennium, and that must be a large-body encounter with Earth; by definition it
was a cometary encounter, if a comet is considered as any substantial body pursuing an
elliptical or changing orbit."
The challenge is to be phrased thus: "Nothing but a god-like comet could have produced
the quantavolutions of 3450 60 B. P."
IX.
There occurs, then, a Ninth Proposition. It concerns the subsequent history of effects
of the Quantavolution of Venusia: the present-day lingering of the tail of the
flattening logarithmic curve of the catastrophe. We can call this the Neosphere. "Every
institution, behavioral pattern, and natural setting that exists today, if its history
is complete, will reveal an inheritance of specific effects from the Venusian
Quantavolution of -3500."
"Arabia Felix" - Happy Arabia - of 3500 B. C. is a waste of sand with vast fields of
stones and hundreds of dry stream beds resting upon layers of petroleum.
Zvi Rix wrote extensively on the sexual complexes derived from the human experience with
Venus. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger related basic human problems to the everlasting fear of
a great comet.
Moses was a reconstructor after the catastrophe of Exodus. The Jews gave in to Moses or
got out of Judaism. Jesus Christ was the child of mosaism and of the morning star (as W.
Sizemore and others are showing in a book underway). Islam is more mosaic than
Christianity is.
The Iranian mosaists are telling the other Islamic mosaists that they must kill the
Jewish mosaists; and the Christian mosaists and Russian Stalinist mosaists are urging a
similar business upon themselves and others. And American mosaists are contemplating
nuclear war a) because they believe god is on their side b) god will take them into
heaven.
But the Cambodians, Indonesians, Ugandans, Vietnamese, Chinese, have no Moses; and
flutter toward the same candle flame of destruction.
What I am finally saying is this: Because of the lingering effects of past catastrophes
mankind has long been in the business of producing catastrophes in order to recapture
the madness of ancient disasters. Wars, aggression, suppression, compulsive and punitive
behavior are connected with the primordial past. It is as if we are congenitally
convinced that good comes only from greater evil -- to roast a pig we must burn down our
house.
The psychological de-programming of the catastrophized mind is still a little-understood
process. Both the morale, and the rational invention of means, for moving directly to
good without the intercession of great evils are very weak currents or motifs in
contemporary civilization.
But, to an existentialist and pragmatic mind, there can be no alternative to trying. We
must keep trying. Like Sisyphus we must push the great rock of reason up the mountain,
time after time, prepared always to see it fall, until one day, who knows, mirabile
dictu, whether by invention or luck, the rock will stay fixed up there and we shall have
surcease from our labors.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part One: Historical Disturbances
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE OBLITERATION OF HUMAN SIGNS
The conventional scientist says to the catastrophist: "How convenient it is for your
purposes to place your catastrophes just out of reach of true history, tantalizingly so.
Is it so that the falsity of your views cannot be proven, that your assertions can
remain forever in the limbo of seductive fable?"
The answer is another question: "How is it that your accuse me of something for which I
am not accountable? You ask me to provide records of an event whose great force was
exercised precisely in the destruction of those records? Does this not make our scores
even?"
Both feel frustrated, but perhaps become a little more sympathetic, too.
Nearly every work dealing with prehistory and antiquity must lament the paucity of
evidence. If there is pride in this study, it comes from having made so much out of so
little -- a jaw fragment, an arrowhead, a doll, an artificial pile of stones, etc.
Under evolutionary primevalogy, there seems to be little need to build lament into a
missa solemnis. If the human past was developed modestly and uniformly, a sigh over the
incidents that destroyed or silted over a single site is enough and then on with the
work. And so forth at whatever sites turn up. For instance, if it is believed, as Childe
has said and most have agreed, that paleolithic mankind began in the British Isles with
a few hundred souls, that a few hundred more dwelt there thousand years later, and so
on, primevalogy might as well proceed as usual with the question of obliteration of
evidence. On the other hand, if quantavolutionary theory is postulated, then a different
attitude and approach are called for. Every sign of human presence in the distant past
has to be taken as a survival of one in a thousand or even a hundred million events that
had the potential of surviving to this day for the shovels and eyes of the
primevalogist.
Furthermore, the perspective in which the residue or remain is viewed has to be
radically altered. It is looked upon as strange aberration, something of an event that
had a rare quality to it in addition to its bare survival, something that kept it from
being obliterated along with millions of like events from the eyes of the future. It
must have had a marginal quality, some special features to augment its chance of
survival, and therefore is rarely to be considered typical prima facie of its culture.
The revolutionary primevalogist must also become a macromorphologist of the earth, while
the evolutionary theorist can and indeed is impelled to rest with micro-morphology. The
former has to look at whole areas, regions, even the globe itself, asking where the
centers of human activity may have been and what might have happened to them. She or he
makes different demands upon geology.
"Can you tell us," she queries, "what quantities of what material were moved, how, from
where to where, from what elevation to what new elevation or depression in an area of
such and such dimensions and where, if at all, would indications of settlement exist,
and, if indicated, what would be the chances of detecting matters of importance,
considering the capacity for obliteration of the forces involved?" The complex question
is bound to elicit productive answers sooner or later. And, or course, accidental
macroscopic primevalogical discoveries do occur s when cliffs fall away and streams
erode canyons or coal mines are dug.
But meanwhile one should have at least some conception of the possibilities that what
one has discovered micromorphologically is likely to represent but one-millionth of what
was there. Or, to invert the issue and specify a hypothetical situation: assuming a
population of a half-million persons in Britain in the year 12,000 B. C., what reasons
can you give for the fact that only a few scattered stone tools and bones will confront
the scientist of today who is working with conventional theories at the present "state
of the art?"
To answer the question, one must tell what has been discovered in the nature of remains
and legends of this period. Then one must say what kinds of events would reduce "then-
time" surface evidence to "now-time" surface evidence. Afterwards, one queries the
likelihood of such events, matching present evidence with the proposed history.
If the resulting theory is as plausible as or more plausible than the evolutionary
theory, then, of course, it must be pursued, and similar inquiries launched in other
macromorphological settings. A first procedure then could be to see what is left in
Britain of its hypothetical 12,000 year old culture.
Whereupon one continues by conjecturing upon the events necessary to destroy beyond
rediscovery the hypothetical British culture of 12,000 years ago.
After much reading and discussion, I came to realize some years ago that there was no
simple checklist of kinds of disaster - all the forces, chemicals, and conditions that
can destroy the biosphere. But before I came to realize it, a long time passed when I
could not even think of the need for one; I could not ask the question. In modern times,
both because of specialization and because disasters on a large scale are unusual,
theory in its primitive form of simple questions and basic classification is missing.
Frank Lane's The Elements Rage turned up as a rare and valuable discovery, because he
uniquely takes up a fairly full list of disastrous natural forces, one by one. From that
position, I could go on to offer a general classification in Chaos and Creation of
super-disastrous forms and, by the time I was writing The Lately Tortured Earth, I could
think easily of a set of very heavy, "cosmic" mega-forces interacting as such and
with a given biosphere, atmosphere and lithosphere. High-energy forces and chemical
outbursts reach toward the extermination of evidence of a biosphere. Low-energy uniform
and gradual forces also tend to exterminate such evidence. The truth of the past thus
remains for us in the evidence of niches where high-energy forces acted but were not
totally destructive -- mountains that were not leveled, elevations by-passed by cross-
tides, humans buried swiftly in a clay that quickly hardened, and so on.
If at the time of Stonehenge about 3500 years ago there were a million people in Britain
(for they were building other sites as well and carrying on the chores of living), and
if we find no sign of them, either we have not searched very well, or there was some
catastrophe that erased all signs. The very existence of the megaliths does, however,
discount the notion of complete disaster -- there were no Washington Scablands barrier-
bursting floods, or giant oceanic tsunamis or Biblical overturning of mountains.
And of there were a few utensils found, as there have been, and even more remarkable, a
few bones (unfortunately yet not found), we should say that certain forces such as
atmospheric and chemical ones may have occurred - an icy climate may have come and gone,
a great flooding may have happened, a devastating fire may have fallen from the sky, and
so on. Now these actors, too, might be eliminated from consideration, and we might end
up with an historical view that Stonehenge has been relatively peaceful and insofar as
it represents the Earth, the Earth has been likewise peaceful. Of course, some force
toppled some huge stones, and several stones have disappeared, or have they?
This shows what I mean: there must exist, and we need it, some manual for
quantavolutionary appraisal of sites and regions, a set of 1001 questions to ask and the
kinds of answers to expect. Since we have nothing like this Field Kit of
Quantavolutionary Questions, we scarcely realize that there is anything to ask about. It
took a long time for science to work itself up to a set of questions about Stonehenge
and we have hardly yet broached a full array of them. So when we ask how many people
lived in Britain 12,000 years ago, we find that we have no intellectual tools to address
the question; we lack the 1001 questions that follow the leading question.
One would think that we might find a model to consult in paleontology. But the field has
not gone far beyond associating some life forms with some rock strata and not even this
is done with full microscopy and chemistry on computerized data banks. The leading
question, "How many species have existed at a given point in time, or ever, or even at a
given place and point in time?" is not well-answered. Estimates of all the species that
have ever existed have been argued on figures around 200,000 up to some 20,000,000.
That's like asserting that there may be half a million people living in Canada, but then
again there may be fifty million of them. We need to have surveys of what existed
before, in order to learn what and how much was obliterated.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part One: Historical Disturbances
CHAPTER NINE
ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS
Seeing that humans are very different from primates and yearning to stress that
difference without the help of current religion, many people have taken an interest in
the idea of the "ancient astronauts" [1] . Popularized especially by Erich von Daniken,
and given intellectual respectability more recently by Robert Temple, the view maintains
that primitive "backward" humans were visited by anatomically compatible beings from
outer space, and taught the arts and sciences, including finally an enduring reverence
for the visitors as gods.
Most sets of myths do include a belief that god-heroes walked the Earth in early times
[2] . They are connected with the skies. Some early signs and pots bear sky-references.
Evidence accumulates, too, that the earliest civilizations were far more sophisticated
than scientists believed until recently. All of these are connected with the suspected
foreign visitors by the theory of ancient astronauts.
The idea is not catastrophic (although scholarly catastrophists fear it will be
catastrophic to the reputation of their work). It enlists catastrophes merely as a
convenient means of explaining why the evidence of visitations is almost totally
lacking: it has been buried or destroyed.
Moreover, the idea is eclectic. Much of the material that finds its way into the
writings about "ancient astronauts" consist of exotica (" Did you know that...?" and
"Believe it or not, but..."), or of questions aimed at needling archaeologists and pre-
historians about their many anomalies, oversights and unknowns.
Catastrophists and uniformitarians alike usually reject the theory indignantly. Von
Daniken himself is excoriated for his meanderings, his lack of logic, pretentiousness,
vagueness, unscholarly innuendos, and profit-taking in the market of ideas. Still it
seems odd that scientists such as C. Sagan, who earned fame and fortune in part from
writing science fiction, should denounce the analogous efforts of others. At the least,
Von Daniken's work is like the newspaper comic strips, which get people to buy the
newspaper, encountering thereupon whatever else it may contain in the way of information
and ideas.
In any event, humanoid development in other planets or areas may have been possible in
recent ages. We know the climates and resources of Mars, Mercury, and Venus today. They
were probably quite different even a few thousands of years ago.
It is even possible to imagine that foreign astronauts, highly advanced, would have
foreseen the doom of their planet and taken off for a habitable place (a favorite theme
of science fiction). Or they may simply have undertaken a routine exploration and been
stranded and assimilated, or taught and disseminated peculiar human qualities, and
exited forever.
There exist, further, infinite possible combinations of genes of which only a few have
been exercised to create life on Earth as we know it. It is conceivable, but quite
unlikely, that parallel developments of being and existence could occur in isolation,
one development (the foreign visitor) ahead of the other (potentiated primitive homo).
The chances of two assimilable races developing independently are practically nil,
despite the narrow band of evolutionary choices referred to earlier. They are rendered
nil when the timing factor is considered: in all eternity, why did the two races
converge at the moment when man was ready for everything except reflective thought?
Although it is true in a sense that "everything is miraculous," it is false that
therefore every highly improbable idea must be true.
And, even if the improbable were accepted, and a fully technologized modern type of
human developed elsewhere, one would still have to explain their evolution. If backward
Moonmen had existed and surrounded our landing craft on July 20, 1969, and had been
impregnated culturally and otherwise by our doughty astronauts, the Moonmen's
descendents would still have to figure out how the astronauts evolved.
Those who flirt with the idea of ancient astronauts are justifiably critical of the
absence of evolutionary explanations for the great leap from pre-culture to culture. But
being dissatisfied with existing evolutionary theory does not permit one to believe in
all far-fetched substitutes. The "ancient astronaut" is too much like the "magician's
rabbit, pulled from a hat."
It is also true, as von Daniken insists, that the early humans were sky-watchers. It is
fundamental to catastrophic theory that this be so. But the gods that were watched for
were not his god-heroes. They were the displays of natural forces as perceived by an
aroused, deluded mind.
There is no evidence, anywhere and earlier, of a human skill of powered machine that
goes beyond the technology employed during the "Old Bronze Age" of Egypt. These would
not have been paraphernalia typical of a hypothetical culture that travels through
space. It is conceivable that machine civilizations, now completely destroyed, may have
existed on Earth millions of years ago, (although we are arguing in Solaria Binaria that
these millions of years have not existed in Earth's history); but even this idea will
not advance the question of whether living culture inherited advanced techniques.
The famous Peruvian Nazca ground patterns may not be fully understood; but if
"aeronautical direction-finding" is contained in them, it is more suited to a Piper Cub
plane than a space vehicle. They may have been laid out under instruction from heat-
lofted balloons or from look-out points on heights. Theoretical geometricians could also
achieve the patterns, and may have ordered them along the lines of meteorite falls. All
ancient monuments -- megaliths, pyramids, temples -- were sky-oriented; the Nazca lines
may have followed star-lines, also.
There remains a possibility that only the theory of Solaria Binaria permits. I mentioned
this theory in a talk to the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies in London in 1975 and
have since developed the model in collaboration with Professor Earl R. Milton. It calls
for a binary system of the Sun and Super-Uranus, electrically connected by a pulsing
axis of fire and enveloped by an electromagnetized tube reaching between the binary
partners and providing a vast intervening space with a viable atmosphere for planetary
and biological genesis. The breakdown of Solaria Binaria occasioned the set of
catastrophes that originated and imprinted homo sapiens.
The rotating magnetic tube that enveloped the planets in the age of Pangea on Earth
endured for a long time. Hence the planets would have shared an atmosphere, and might
possibly have engendered similar life forms. Passage from one planet to another would
have been possible without highly specialized airborne vehicles. It is also possible
that several planets were grouped close together. Something like the "Piper Cub" plane
just referred to would not appear so ludicrous. For the vehicle would not have to cross
through "outer space."
If the "ancient astronauts" theory were true, and adapted the scenario of Solaria
Binaria, the knowledge of genetics and evolution gained in field studies of earthlings
would not have been wasted. It can be transferred to the exoterrestrial location that
had produced the visitors, because both on Earth and on the other planets within the
plenum of the solar system the same atmospheric and hence life conditions would prevail.
Then one may go on to conjecture that these intelligent beings from far away were human
in a way that was related to the hominids of Earth, but had progressed much farther
along. And that these ancient astronauts, coming upon the hominids of our Earth, bred
with them [3] . The resulting strain, now dominant on Earth, with both astronauts and
hominids having disappeared (bred out), would be the homo sapiens schizotypus that is
described in Homo Schizo I and II. However, the present author, despite his attempts
here to rationalize the idea of "ancient astronauts," regards the slight evidence behind
it and its logic as sufficiently disposed of within the scenario of his
Quantavolutionary Series.
Notes (Chapter 9: Ancient Astronauts)
1. The literature is large. A scholarly work to be recommended is Robert Temple's The
Sirius Mystery.
2. See Joseph Campbell's collection and analysis of The Hero of a Thousand Faces.
3. A suggestive legend is carried by H. Bellamy in Moons, Myths and Man (1936) p. 269.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Two: Geological Issues
CHAPTER TEN
INDIANS OF ILLINOIS
June 14, 1974
To: Professor Howard Winters
Department of Anthropology
New York University
From: Professor Alfred de Grazia
Dear Professor Winters:
Thank you for the materials on the S. Illinois digs at Modoc, Riverton, Koster (et al),
and the U. S. Corps of Engineers surveys on Southern Illinois. I am returning them
herewith, since I shall be leaving for Greece soon, but I would like to talk to you more
about them before leaving, if that is possible.
My problem was this: the stratigraphic work of Schaeffer and others show heavy ashes and
calcinated debris from natural disasters over "Old World" settlements and cities, ending
the Old, Middle, and Recent Bronze Ages; that is, effectively terminating these
civilizations. Therefore, the "New World" in some likelihood would show the same. If,
however, the stratigraphy of American Indian settlements of the Mississippi Valley is
continuous and shows no catastrophic effects between, say, 3,000 B. C. and 600 B. C.,
then the hypothesis of world-wide catastrophe is disproved. (The same would hold for
Meso-America, which I am not considering here.)
Catastrophes are indicated by effects of violent flood, wind, fire, and material fall-
out. Hence I examined your materials for evidence of such effects. First I considered
cases without reference to carbon dating, which in all cases produced dates during and
before the mentioned critical period. I note the following:
1)
The strata in all cases involve very narrow bands of settlement, measurable in inches.
For instance, the Modoc case is said to move one foot per 1,000 years (in the earliest
period) to one foot per century in the latest. But the question arises whether we are
dealing with short-term values. The cross-sections show only thinly settled camping
materials; nothing indicated the presence of women and children.
2)
The fauna and flora remain unchanged throughout the period of several millennia, even
from 9,000 B. C. The same mammals, fish, birds, nuts, and vegetation characterize all
periods with frequency distributions that could be annual or irregularly annual. One
wonders, then, too, about the Indian campers whose successive waves occupied a great
stretch of time.
3)
The technology scarcely changes. Even the mix of material does not radically alter.
4)
The area in general is subject to flooding even nowadays. The stratigraphies show
effects separating older layers of artifacts an hearths from newer ones; that is, silt,
loess, and clay. Again these are in thin layers.
5)
The area generally exhibits frequently strata of lignite and coal near the surface,
which is mined farther north. These can be scenes of catastrophic combustion (See e. g.
State Coal Circ. 332, table 5,3 and Francis, COAL, new ed.)
6)
The stratigraphy of the area in general permits the hypothesis of catastrophic swirling
cross-currents of flood occurring in a short period of time (i. e. weeks or centuries),
depositing in rapid succession thin layers of loess, silt, clay, and organic matter that
are noted everywhere. Whereupon in a late period, after the catastrophes, human
occupancy resumed in periods of resettling of the landscape and regrowth.
7)
The descriptions of the limestone "foundations" that underlie the more evident material
are typically vague. Limestone, I imagine, could signify a conglomerate of sudden
sediment soaked by heavy floods and solidified by heat [electricity] and pressure.
8)
The settlements are sunk into the same "alluvial" material that they rest upon. That is,
the pit sides, except for the ploughed area, contain the same material layers as the
bottom projections of the pits up to a certain rock depth. Hence, unlike the sites of
the Near East, apparently nature was building up as rapidly as the human settlements
were accruing. That is, either the land mass was building up enormously, or the
occupancy of the sites was exceedingly thin, or was sinking or dug in. If the first,
30,000 years would have built up an extensive plateau.
Therefore, I ask myself (and you) the following questions:
1)
Apart from the superposition of artifacts, is there any proof of a succession of ages?
2)
If a succession of ages is granted, is there any proof that more than a century or two
of occupancy were involved?
3)
Could not the occupancy take the typical form of returning to a site, clearing the brush
and grass to a clay and pebble base, and thus digging in the site over a period of time
under a couple of centuries?
4)
In view of the major catastrophic hypothesis, might not catastrophe in the central
Mississippi Valley region take the form of devastating floods and fire, wiping out most
of the biosphere? The old biosphere would be represented in the near surface lignite,
fusain, and coal deposits where flood waters and tides, driven by wind and surface plate
movements, would dump the burning debris, cool it by flooding and bury it with
successive waves of sand and silt dragged from other mostly denuded surface areas. In a
few years, a new growth would occur overall, but evidences of antediluvian human
occupancy would be totally absent. Also absent, of course, would be any calcinated
debris of settlements, and in this area of America, any huge aqueous intrusions or lava
flow.
If this set of questions is answered in a way tending to support the possibility of
neartime catastrophe, that is, between 3,000 and 600 B. C., then there still remains the
defiant evidence of radiocarbon dating.
These data, as given, are often irregular and sometimes conflicting. At Modoc, for
instance, Stratum 3 which goes from 15.3 feet (below the ploughline?) to 22.3 feet moves
from 3314 B. C. to 9246 B. C. or 6,000 years more or less in 7 feet (with one gross
anomalous reading). This seems excessive for a "continuous occupancy" site. I cannot
conceive of any kind of settlement building only about one foot per thousand years. (I
knew the American Indian was a great natural recycler of materials, but this is too
much, especially since the occupants were carelessly dropping their hard-worked stone
implements all about.)
Radiocarbon dating is known to present three types of problems. The first involves
stratigraphic techniques of sampling and cleaning, that is, selection malfunctions.
These can be serious and amount to a general bias in a set of cases.
Another C14 problem is presented by water-soaking. Water is known to wash out C14 and
produce great age even for young organisms. The materials of Illinois Indians were
frequently flooded and therefore may give old readings.
A third is in the atmospheric mix and flux that builds up the Carbon-14 residue in the
organism to the point of death. Here the difficulty lies with the factors creating
Carbon-14, the flux of cosmic particles and the density of the earth's atmosphere. The
geo-physicist, Melvin Cook, argues in a fully detailed quantitative study, that the
carbondating method in itself gives us an atmosphere that is only 12,000 years old. ("
Carbon 14 and the Age of the Atmosphere," Creation Research Society Quarterly, June
1970.) Apart from this, it is apparent that carbondating as a test begs the question of
an inconstant atmosphere. That is, like so many tests, the IQ for example, it tests
itself.
All of this leaves us, don't you think, with thermoluminescence tests, if the antiquity
of the Illinois Indians is to be proven, and then not for pre-ceramic periods?
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Two: Geological Issues
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ICE CORES OF GREENLAND
There is a certain grim quality to the confrontation of uniformitarians and
catastrophists. The antagonists prowl in the jungle of natural history seeking the one
definitive test that will finally discomfit and silence the other. If only the
evolutionist could show that some major change in the world has come about with
exquisite gradualness -- the ice ages, new species, the ocean basins -- then the
opposition might be forced into silence. Just as relentlessly the quantavolutionary
stalks among the events of history searching for the one indisputable catastrophe that
has introduced a major change in the natural world -- a wholesale simultaneous
extinction of species, a brush with a large comet, a meteoroidal crash, a deceleration
of the Earth, or some similar expression of great effective force. Each must avoid the
thrust of the other, even if it is blindly delivered in the course of an "empirical
study" whose deadliness to the opposition was not originally intended.
Such would be the study of ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica. Their purpose is
multiform; a Danish group of glaciologists writes: "Ice cores have become an important
tool in geophysics and atmospheric chemistry. Langway (1967) first perceived the great
and many-sided aspects of extending physical and chemical analyses of snow and ice to
what Crary (1970) calls: 'the thin dimension' of glaciers, thereby adding time to the
parameters considered. In a more recent paper, Dansgaard and others (1973) listed the
potentialities of polar ice-core and bore-hole studies relevant to glaciology,
meteorology, climatology, geology, volcanology, atmospheric chemistry, cosmic and solar
physics, and 14C dating" [1] .
No mention is made of the small group of catastrophist scholars shuddering at the brink
of the bore-hole, but it happens that if the ice core were to demonstrate the regular
passage of a long stretch of uneventful time, quantavolution would simply have to
surrender its claims to serious scientific consideration.
The glaciologists begin their investigations with a natural pastiche:
All kinds of fall-out from the atmosphere, including airborne continental dust and
biological material, volcanic debris, sea salts, cosmic particles, and isotopes produced
by cosmic radiation, are deposited on the ice sheet surface along with the snow.
The passage of time, it appears, has little effect on the frozen material, except by
tiny regular increments:
The snowpack is gradually compressed into solid ice with small cavities containing
samples of atmospheric air. In the coldest areas of the ice sheets, the impurities
remain in the ice as indicators of the chemical composition and physical condition of
the atmosphere at the time of deposition. Nothing is added, nothing runs off or is
displaced, and no chemical reaction takes place; in fact, the composition of the ice
layers changes only by decay of radioactive impurities and by extremely slow diffusion
processes in the ice crystal lattice.
The ice layers sink into the ice sheet in an undisturbed sequence with continuous
horizontal stretching and consequent thinning; in areas with no melting at the bedrock,
the ice layers approach zero thickness close to the bottom.
The results, though complicated to obtain, produce marvelous evidence of historical
conditions.
This is why, under favorable conditions, an ice core obtained by drilling through an
ice sheet can be used to establish continuous and detailed time series of many
geophysical and chemical parameters reaching several hundred thousand years back in
time: the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere; climatic changes in terms of
accumulation rate and, with certain reservations, surface temperatures; the chemical
composition of the atmosphere; volcanic activity and its cooling effect in the
troposphere; fallout of cosmic dust; and the cosmic radiation flux [2] .
The implications of this work has not escaped the nervous eye of the quantavolutionist.
One student, R. G. A. Dolby, writes:
The Earth's upper atmosphere is convected downwards in the polar regions, and with it
some of the finer extraterrestrial dust that falls on our planet. A proportion of this
is deposited on the snow falling on the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland. Thus,
samples of the extra-terrestrial material are trapped with other atmospheric dust in
successive levels of the ice and snow that have built up the ice caps. In recent years,
deep holes have been drilled through this thick ice, and the cores of the holes
extracted, to provide a continuous record of what was in the atmosphere over many years.
The interesting question arises: could this record be made into an empirical test of
Velikovsky's idea?
According to Velikovsky, large quantities of cometary material fell upon the Earth in
a number of catastrophes, the most recent being nearly 2700 year ago. Some of this
material would have reached the polar ice caps, and should still be present at the
appropriate depth in the cores that have already been collected. It is simple matter to
study the cores carefully for signs of this material. To the best of my knowledge, the
only significant nonaqueous material reported is a certain amount of dirt in six layers
up to 0.5 mm thick of the Byrd Station Antarctic core, at depths between 1300 and 1700
meters. This dirt was tentatively identified as volcanic ash, and attributed to
eruptions from volcanoes less than 300 kilometers away [3] .
Another perplexed correspondent, C. L. Ellenberger, writes:
I have heard some fantastic intellectual gymnastics from people trying to refute the
Greenland core evidence... With them [the ice cores] we have a chance to observe a dust
layer( s) and/ or volcanic acid layer( s) that one would expect to be significantly
thicker or more concentrated than those which are known to have been produced by large,
single, historical eruptions [4] .
Hitherto, analogous technologies have threatened, namely carbondating, soil varves, and
dendrochronology, but quantavolutionaries have learned to coexist with them. In at least
the first two instances, the catastrophic event may itself adjust the hands of the
geological clock, while in the third case, the trees to provide the data are limited in
space and time. Setting up Mother Nature to count out past time has inspired other
technologies rather less close, and sometimes more helpful than threatening to
catastrophists. The rates of growth of coral and of stalagmites and the cutback of
waterfalls come to mind. Because they are an example, but also because they may bear
upon the ice bore-hole issue, the studies of Richard F. Flint and F. B. Taylor (1963)
may be mentioned. Speaking of two late Wisconsin Ice Sheet invasions of the St. Lawrence
region, Flint turns to the date of formation of the Niagara Gorge. Retrocalculating the
current rate of recession of Horseshoe Falls, Taylor claims that the present flow
channel was freed between 3000 and 3500 years ago. The time is surprisingly recent.
It happens that the Greenland ice core exhibits some dust concentration around this
time; -1390 50 is given. The connection is made with an explosion of the volcano of
Thera-Santorini in the Aegean Sea, in the early Late Bronze Age. Are the breaking of a
new Niagara channel and the Thera explosion connected? Conceivably, for, after all,
hundreds of extraordinary and catastrophic events seem to cluster around the middle of
the second millennium B. C. [5] . If the ice core of this period shows only a modest
increment of dust, no more than is revealed by a dozen other known incidents of the past
4000 years as measured in the core, then little in the way of disaster would have struck
upon the Earth at a time that practically all quantavolutionaries regard as a moment of
worldwide destruction, most probably exoterrestrial in origin.
Several stations have been boring into the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica; bedrock
has been reached in both continents. Annual or close to annual series of ages achieving
100,000 years have been claimed for the cores. One core, already referred to, drilled at
Camp Century, Greenland [6] , exhibits the following characteristics on its test of
"acid rain" fallout.
1390 50 BC. This is the only signal exceeding 2.6 uequiv H + Kg -1 between 1100 and
2700 BC, and we therefore interpret it as being due to the large eruption of Thera
(Santorini) in the Aegean Sea, which is generally agreed to have been of the same
magnitude as that of Tambora (1815). The tephra production has recently been estimated
at more than 28 km 3 (13 km 3 of dense rock equivalent) [7] . This unusually large
eruption has been radio-carbon dated at 1720 50 BC on the calibrated radiocarbon
scale... However, archaeological evidence from the excavation of the Minoan settlement
near Akrotiri on Santorini strongly suggests that the island was inhabited least up to
1500 BC judging by Egyptian pottery style chronology; it was apparently abandoned
shortly before the eruption, and in good order because no valuables have been found nor
people killed by the heavy ash fall (10-40m). The discrepancy between the datings may be
partly explained if the organic material used for the radiocarbon dating were partly
built up by radioactively dead carbon-dioxide exhausted from the volcano before the
eruption (an effect which has been observed recently). Our dating around 1400 BC
supports Marinatos' theory of a causal connection between the Thera eruption and the
decline of the Minoan civilization centered on the island of Crete. The dating can be
further improved to 10 yr, if and when a deep Central Greenland ice core becomes
available.
Since the date assigned, -1390, confronts a radiocarbon date of -1720, a 340-year
difference, the authors say that the destroyed Akrotiri settlement lasted until -1500
"judging by Egyptian pottery style chronology." Apparently they are prepared to throw
carbondating to the wolves; even so, granted Velikovsky's reconstructed chronology of
Egypt, which is achieving some acceptance among younger scholars, this will not suffice,
because the Thera artifacts at the time of destruction now move down to about -1000.
Several centuries of discordance would be excessive, given the evidence that the ice-
core method is accurate within several percentage points. Either the method is rendered
unreliable by the time that history loses its specificity, or carbondating, conventional
dating and reconstructed dating are wrong.
We cannot know whether there may have been other large volcanic disturbances that are
not recorded in the same ice core. Icelandic volcanism is certainly overrepresented
because it occurs not for away. The Antarctic cores reflect only volcanism of some
several hundred kilometers distance. The Greenland record will not readily signal
disturbances unless worldwide or above 20? south latitude. Krakatoa (1883) and Tambora
(1815), two large Indonesian blasts seem to have registered with acid fallouts. Mt.
Mazama, Oregon, seems to be responsible for a strong signal assigned to -4400 -110
years.
Perhaps because it lacked an acid effect, the great exoterrestrial intrusion of Tunguska
(Siberia) in 1908 is not signaled in the core; it seems to have produced no sharp
deviation in the tests of oxygen isotope extremes, or in dust micro-particles, or in
acid rain. Since this blast was more powerful than others that did register, and since
it raised enough dust to darken the skies for a long period of time, its absence from
the lists is strange. Furthermore, Tunguska's blast produced nitrogen oxides in the
Earth's stratosphere that lowered the Earth's temperature 0.3? C for a decade (1908-18)
[8] . The unusual gases and temperature drops should have affected the O 18 measure for
those years as well as provided ample microparticles for an exhibition of deviance.
Nor are climatic crises such as the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) noticeable in the
published record of the cores. In this case, a "Little Ice Age" around the world has
been attributed to a cessation of sun spots. The period should evidence itself in the
ice core in some manner. Nor can we locate unusual years around the times conventionally
assigned to the end of the Upper Paleolithic cave culture of the Dordogne, although the
general view is that the people of that Age were forced to follow their animal quarry to
cooler northern regions. The enormous quantities of ice could not disappear while the
Greenland ice cap was still picking up its usual ration of new ice each year.
In 1982 we read of the Soviet discovery of well-developed Bronze Age settlements in the
Kola Peninsula, about the same latitude as the Greenland drill sites, with materials
(slate) imported from far to the South [9] . Velikovsky pointed long ago to the
discovery of human artifacts beneath the huge hecatombs of mammals and trees jumbled en
masse in the Fairbanks District of Alaska; he reported, too, the hills of smashed bones
on the islands of New Siberia, product of very recent events, and the findings of
paleolithic, neolithic, and bronze age settlements in northeastern Siberia. The coasts
of the Arctic Ocean permitted well-developed cultures in early historical times;
metallurgy was practiced at Yakutsk "to make axes, beautiful bronze tips for the spears,
knives and even swords" [10] . "Organic vestiges in the drift of the last glaciation
have been found to be of a radiocarbon age pointing to a time 3500 years ago" [11] ,
while the ice appeared to be advancing about 10,000 years ago and therefore the last ice
age decline or collapse must have occurred more recently. If this last figure were
valid, and compared with the muddled ice of the "last glaciation" assigned 20,000 years
in the ice core, most of the ice core would be foreshortened by 50%, throwing of all
historical and prehistorical calibrations. Be it as it may, the chief problem is the
undeniable occurrence of geophysical activity quite incompatible with the radiometric,
varve, and microparticle indicators of the Greenland glaciologists.
Nuclear blasts of recent years do put in an appearance. Why is it then that remote
events are apparently prevented by wind patterns of the upper atmosphere from carrying
signals to Greenland? A cyclonic explosion large enough to expel material from the Earth
into space might not send dust the great distance to the Greenland ice cap, but I doubt
this.
The most remarkable feature of the ice core records is their uniform quality. Could this
be a "defined" hence spurious uniformity? Precipitation of water and oxygen isotopes,
climate, and underlying rock temperatures are surprisingly constant over thousands of
years. "Post-glacial" times show "surprisingly stable accumulation conditions" [12] .
The 800 top meters of the Camp Century core count off 4000 years with uniform
temperatures. No other climatic indicator on this planet shows such a uniformity.
Microparticle concentrations do alter substantially with "the end of the Wisconsin
glaciation;" they "suggest high storminess and/ or atmospheric turbidity at that time"
[13] . Considering that Greenland was so-named not only because Eric the Red was
hustling immigrants but because he found the land more verdant than today, the waxing
and waning of pollen signals should have by now prompted another technique of validating
the use of ice varves in setting up a time scale. A continuous series of annual (or
decennial) pollen density rates have not been published, to my knowledge. The Greenland
scientists report concentrations of volcanic activity in this latest millennium and in
the millennium from -6000 to -7000. This does not conform to the impressions left with
us by ancient history and geology. The first millennium and the second millennium B. C.
were both marked by very heavy volcanism so far as legend and archaeology can be
depended upon, and heavy disturbances may have been almost continuous before then.
The Danish group speaks of a dry period 18,000 years ago in the ice core period [14] .
In other places [15] it marks dusty turbulence, but not in the dry period. Why does
not the dryness raise dust in noticeable amounts? And why does not precipitation in dry
years contain more microparticles than in wet years?
The Greenland core ends in many meters of debris, which may or may not originate from a
grinding of the bedrock; it may be a settling of debris when the undermost ice diffuses
and spreads out leaving the debris behind, or turns to water and seeps out. In the
Antarctic, the lowest meters constitute a shallow lake, rendered so perhaps by the
pressure of the ice sheet alone.
Or is the pressure supplemented by warmth emanating from the rocks below? And is this
temperature constant? Does an ice cap melt from the top or from the bottom, or both?
Does it glide off and calve from the top or the bottom? Most scientists will agree that
ice is disposed of from below. If such is the case, the time measured by different cores
will probably be affected by the conditions of the Earth - the depth of the crust, the
proximity of mantle magma intrusions, the stresses and strains horizontally suffered by
the ice.
Will dust and particles descend in a given column faster over time than the original ice
varve to which they pertained? Probably so, because of greater density and hardness.
This may be the source of the bottom debris, but the bottom debris may not be so
immobile as we conjectured above and may be moving out laterally at a faster rate than
its bulk presence would indicate. An accelerated rate of bottom removal would only make
the core younger and the present ice age longer than the scientists believe. Instead of
registering the 100,000th year at the bottom, hundreds of thousands of years may have
slipped away, and only the latest 100,000 years is present in the core. That is,
provided the years are registered accurately.
But the core is measured annually for hundreds of years at the top, and then in averages
for the balance of the core. The statistical projection may depart far from the reality.
The curve adopted to portray the rate of thinning of varves in the first hundreds of
years will take very different shapes with only slightly different initial assumptions
and observations. Also, the warmer the base of the core, the younger the core averages
above.
The Greenland cores have been synchronized to some extent by the investigators, and they
are well aware of the serious discrepancies that begin to appear, and of how at one
slice a core will signal an event that is not signaled at what should be the
corresponding slice of a second core. That is, local conditions on the Greenland ice cap
itself, operating in what is logically the most uniform of environments, will occasion
salient differences between presumptively equivalent crosssections. If this is happening
within Greenland, how well can Greenland register events around the world? Not even the
Laki (Iceland) eruption of 1783 correlates. This immense disaster registered high at the
Crete drill site in acid fall-out but at best feebly at the Dye 3 and Milcent drill
sites. The incongruity demands a satisfactory explanation.
Some small and large parts of each core are defective for analysis, for various reasons.
The defects do not, in the investigators' opinion, occur because of external events
destroying the validity of the rest of the cores, and we must accept their judgment in
this regard. But suppose that there occurred a severe temperature rise over the whole of
the cap and much of the ice melted and flooded away, and upon their remnant was founded
a new progression which endured for a thousand or even three thousand years; would not
this catastrophe go unnoticed in the ice core, and the remnant be dated as a regular
recession from rates calculated from the layering of the new ice? Is this not very
similar to a typical problem of unconformity in stratigraphy?
Again we turn to the unreal niceness of the rates of accumulation and the neatly
descending diminishing varves. The oxygen 18 isotope, annually giving us a high and low
of its deposition as the year cycles from warm to cold, seems like a measures too good
to be true. Is it possible that the measure works only in those years that have a high
and low between certain limits, and that when the limits are exceeded, one way or the
other, the ratio
no longer registers? Is it possible indeed that the O 18 ratio is defining, rather than
measuring, temperatures?
And what is true of the ice may be true of the measuring instrument. Why should the
oxygen 18 isotope be constant in vapor of the atmosphere (apart from normal temperatures
that affect whether it falls or does not fall)? Would not cosmic and solar storms, and
everything else affecting the atmospheric gases
tend to disturb the measuring gas, too? The O 18 uniformity may be both judge and
executioner of time and occurrences. The investigators have endeavored heroically to
stabilize irregularities of the isotope signal by checking microparticle density, varve
thickness, and acid content against the gas test, and one can observe in their efforts
the progression of the common sense idea of varves into a nightmare of adjustments,
extrapolations, complex indices, and averages. No articles can contain and describe for
the outsider all the reassurances that he may need and should have; good faith and the
objectivity emerging from teamwork will have to be involved.
The anxiety of the external critic is augmented by the inattention of the literature to
seeming contradictions of the type previously alluded to, the studies of glacial
conditions elsewhere which indicate decisive events that somehow should be called forth
from the ice cores-cases like Niagara Falls, for instance. Another example would be a
study of the late ice-free period off of Labrador, when a considerable flora grew on the
land nearby at 21,000 carbon-14 years B. P., and where postglacial vegetation had
hitherto been dated at 8,000 to 10,000 years B. P. [16] . Other examples would be the
massive recent deposits and arctic human communities referred to earlier. There have
been severe recent climatic changes, say most glaciologists, natural historians, and
historians of ancient cultures. It is inconceivable that these are not, in one way or
another, sometimes if not always, registered in ice cores of 100,000 years of age.
Climatic and disastrous events would clump together at times, guaranteeing a more
effective signal to be registered in the ice; Tunguska would be only a single instance
of this. That the proven inconstancy of solar storms, hence of particle bombardment of
the atmosphere, would not
affect O 18 concentration in atmospheric vapor from one year to the next and from one
century to another, is highly unlikely.
Walter Sullivan of the New York Times, himself author of a formidable treatise on
geology, Continents in Motion, reported directly upon the Greenland drilling expeditions
(August 9, 1981). He describes the physical set-up at Dye 3, a multi-national effort
with scientists of five nations as participants, that has drilled 6600 feet to bedrock.
He writes:
Like the North Sea drilling platforms, it is a community on stilts, with extensive
living quarters, dining facilities and recreation rooms. Every few years it is jacked
higher on its stilts to keep it well above the accumulating snow.
Bemused by their predicament, I inquired of Mr. Sullivan on August 20, 1981:
Perhaps you can solve this puzzle which has occasioned some friendly arguments
hereabouts. If the stilts of the living quarters of the scientists have had to be raised
considerably since the project began, because of the accumulation of snow, say 10
centimeters of snow [actually the true fall is more], and this 10 centimeters represents
at the same time a compression downward of the ice (that is, it is a true rise in the
altitude of the ice cap) would not, at a uniform rate of precipitation, the ice cap of,
say, 2 kilometers depth, have been built up from bed rock in 20,000 years?
Sullivan replied on Sept. 10, 1981 that "the station's true elevation above sea level
does not change substantially," for "The snow accumulates; Dye 3 is jacked up; and the
ice beneath it flows away toward the coast." Also, "Central Greenland has probably been
covered with ice considerably more than a million years, but the older ice has long
since gone out to sea as icebergs."
For the moment, it may be that the altitude of the camp remains the same, although this
may be difficult to measure from "8700 feet above sea level." This means that roughly
every decade about 100 centimeters moves out toward the sea. But this bottom 100
centimeters represents many hundreds of years. All of this ever-worsening bottom record
is finally destroyed each decade.
A warming period with high precipitation might wipe out long stretches of time, younging
the entire core, fattening the top layers and pressing out larger sections of the
bottom, even while the total column length might remain the same. The action might
proceed rapidly, under certain meteorological conditions. Even though the recent period
of several centuries might be well-marked, the lower sections of the core would be
uninformative. But as we have seen, there do exist problems with the recent sections.
I have implied that the altitude has not been measured, or at least precisely measured,
within the limits demanded of the problem, that is, over several decades and in
centimeters. All glaciologists are divided into three parts: those who say the ice caps
are growing, those who say they are diminishing, and those who say they are constant. If
it happens that the cap is here growing, and has grown by an average of a meter per
decade, then the drilled core will be only 20,000 years old or less, which would suit
short-time quantavolutionists well.
I cannot think that the glaciologists, so apparently scrupulous in their methodology,
have calculated coefficients of correlations between the a) ? (O 18 ) and b) particle
and c) varve-thickness measures of the cores drilled at the several Greenland sites. Yet
I have not come across them, and my cursory ocular inspection leads me to fear that the
correlations are low, perhaps even to the point of insignificance. But these measures
are themselves complex indices and the several variables that compose them also require
correlation. Multiple correlation techniques need to be applied. If the correlations are
absent, but can be raised to significance by grouping annual varves into decades, or
even centuries, then some claims of ice core glaciology will be damaged but the large
claim that interest us, from our radical perspective, will possibly remain strong,
namely, that no worldwide catastrophe involving atmospheric contamination can have
occurred over the past 20,000 years. If this single claim is or were to be firmly
established, it would have to be concluded that glaciology has eliminated the theory of
recent quantavolutions in natural history.
Has this claim in fact been established on scientific and empirical foundations? The
more regular that glacial history in Greenland is portrayed by the tests, the more a
critic is inclined to see some major and fatal flaw in the system. It is too early to
take a final position on ice core chronometry, and incomparably more research into the
matter would be required than is presented here. As with sedimentary varves and tree
rings, a great confidence must be devised upon the investigators, or the outsider must
be guided hand in hand through the process to appease his doubts; some of the greatest
catastrophists have been persuaded of their views by intimate contact over long periods
of time with the morphology of the regions of their work-the Utah deserts, the Sierra
Nevadas, and so on, yet they are not believed by most scientists.
Meanwhile, every interested scholar will take up his position in terms of his interests,
biases, and hopes. Acting as one of them, the present writer must shepherd his own flock
of theories. These contemplate a world history that experiences a half-dozen major
quantavolutionary episodes over the past 14,000 years. During this period of
catastrophes, Greenland would have been severed on all sides from a Pangean land mass.
It would have been deluged by ice, then overrun by tides, then subjected some 6000 years
ago to another deluge of ice. Much of the ice (and snow) would have originated
exoterrestrially. Cataclysms are pictured that would build a kilometer of ice in a short
time. Many successive waves of snow and ice, whirled about, as pure and free from dust
as outer space itself, would have plunged upon Greenland. Would some semblance of a
calendar of the years finally remain to be manifested when, on top of it, two thousand
fairly regular years succeeded, lending a false conception of what lay below? Probably.
Notes (Chapter 11)
1. Hammer et al., "Dating of Greenland Ice Cores by Flow Models, Isotopes, Volcanic
Debris, and Continental Dust," 20 Glaciology, 82 (1978), 3.
2. W. Dansgaard et al., 218 Science 4579 (24 Dec. 1982), 1273
3. Unpubl. note of August 1977. Cf. II S. I. S. R. 2 (1977) 31; Soc. Interdisc. Studies
R. 4 (1980), 82.
4. Letter of Sept. 20,. 1983.
5. See I. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, Part I, A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, and
V. Clube and W. Napier, Cosmic Serpent, together with other studies of the same writers
and numerous other authors, cited in these texts and in the pages of the S. I. S. R.,
Kronos and Pensée magazines. See also Part I, here above.
6. C. V. Hammer, H. B. Clausen, an W. Dansgaard, in 288 Nature, 20 Nov. 1980, 233.
7. New Scientist. Sept. 2, 1982, 620.
8. Soviet Weekly. June 26, 1982.
9. Earth in Upheaval, "Supplement: Forum Address," (1953).
10. Ibid. 287, citing studies of Suess, Science, Oct. 24, 1952.
11. Glaciology, 20.
12. Ibid. 12.
13. Science, March 15, 1976.
14. Glaciology, 12, e. g.
15. G. Vilks and P. J. Mudie, "Early Deglaciation of the Labrador Shelf," 202 Science
(15 Dec. 1978), 1181-3.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Two: Geological Issues
CHAPTER TWELVE
A FAILED EXCURSION TO THE CAVES OF AQUITAINE
When the Ninth Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric
Sciences announced an excursion to the paleolithic sites of Southwest France, I joined
up. It was September 1976.
The Guidebook of the Excursion was admirably executed and was prefaced by a motive for
the excursion: "In the first place, to return as a pilgrimage to the sources of the
science of prehistory; to see or revisit these world-renowned sites, which have given
their name to the great epochs of Prehistory: Abbevillian, Acheulian, Mousterian,
Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian and so many others of the Mesolithic, Neolithic,
and Protohistory." What's in a name? - something of national pride, I fear. Who dares
to question "the great epochs of Prehistory?"
My personal motives were sinister, as is discoverable in a journal entry upon arrival
at the Hotel Terminus in Bordeaux, August 30.
I go to the Hotel Terminus, whose dignified greystone mass juts out from the trystone
facade of the station. It is quiet and polished at the reception. "I am a day early but
am reserved for tomorrow night with the archaeological group." No problem with the
room. But no archaeological group is expected. "Wait," says the pretty receptionist to
the handsome assistant-manager. "There is a letter here about a Monsieur Halloway, from
an archaeological society." (I wonder whether it is the anthropologist Halloway.) I
know at least that something will be happening with the tour. "Please ask Mr. Halloway
if he might phone me when he arrives."
My room is broad, tall, and old-fashioned. The hotel was built to outlast the recent
growth of the city. When I draw the long draperies and throw open the large windows, I
am just above the melee of the railroad station. A paradisiac room for an urban
sociologist. I am content. I feel like working immediately. I clear the little mirrored
table, pour out a glass of Glenfiddich's whisky, and begin to leaf through my folders,
stopping at a point where it occurs to me to write down the kinds of questions I must
be asking myself and others throughout the field trip through the country of the famous
prehistoric caves. I copy them here.
1)
Is superposition the same everywhere?
2)
How clear are the separations of "cultures"? Nearly always very sharp and clear?
Sometimes very sharp and clear? Only occasionally very sharp and clear Never very sharp
and clear
3)
At how many sites are: all cultures represented? 'x' cultures represented?
4)
Are animal remains found? In what % of the caves? Are human remains found? In what % of
the caves?
5)
Are C14 dates compiled from 'x' caves? and available?
6)
Has any K/ A [Potassium 40-Argon 40] dating been done? Where?
7)
Any other radiochronology, e. g. on ceramics?
8)
What is the substance of "sterile" layers inside a cave? Why formed? Do these layers
correspond to ash or in the same type of material outside the cave? (Where can I find
statistics of the caves? Dating (absolute) of the reported 5 ash-levels around the Cro-
Magnon dig?)
So the questions. But these are only a beginning. For several years, I have wondered
who these people of the caves where? Where do they belong in time? Are they truly a
presence that ranges from 5,000 to 15,000 to 30,000 or even 100,000 years in age?
What created the caves? Opened them up? Sealed them? Opened them and sealed them
repeatedly?
What natural forces were playing about the world outside? The caves must have been
used and disused while the last ice age came and went.
The great paintings. Were they to celebrate the presence of animals or pray for their
return? Where are the heavens represented in the caves? Could some of the animals be a
zodiac of the caverns?
I begin once more to riffle my pages. I am unprepared for the trip. This summer,
until now, I have been writing of other subjects, related to ancient catastrophes - on
schizophrenia among the first humans, of sudden destruction of cultures in the Middle
Bronze Age, of the science of catastrophes. Now and then I would come across some
mention of the cave country of France, of Spain, of grottoes of Africa and Italy, of
the great Choukoutien cave of pithecanthropus in China. I know of ice caves as in
America where ice lies deposited between layers of lava and schist, and melts very
gradually over thousands of years. Why are none of the caves of Aquitaine 'ice caves'?
The ice was near.
But I know nobody - neither expert guides nor "congressistes," as the group of us are
called. I have found no geological map of the area: how can I ask questions, or ask the
all-important critical follow-up questions without sub-surface and contour information?
I have not read enough about the caves to be more than a sponge of information, too
little to be a cross-examiner.
The telephone rings. It is Halloway, just arrived. He is pleased to know, too, that
someone besides himself has appeared on the scene. He is from Providence, from Brown
University, a classical archaeologist. We arrange to have a drink together in half an
hour. I take a hot tub bath, rearrange my tangled jumble of possessions, and walk down
the broad stairs of the foyer to meet him. There I note a puzzled couple, and hear the
receptionist clerk saying to the man: "You are not by any means the first of this
archaeological group of which we know nothing."
Halloway appears. About 40, bearded, sturdily built, bespectacled. We shake hands.
"Let's try the competition across the street," I suggest. We go to the bar-restaurant
of the Hotel du Faisan, and order Pernod. He is just in from the States, changed planes
in Paris. Tired. He will go to bed directly. He has been digging in Southern Italy for
several years, an early Bronze site particularly, where metal and pots are cooked on
platforms of vitrified rock that they made. There is an abundance of ash. I inquire
where the ash comes from. "From their work. When it got too high, they built another
platform." "Any signs of a level of destruction?" "None," "Why did they stop?" "The
work simply stopped. We don't know. Maybe if we dig up the area around we may discover
why." We pay 12 Francs and leave. I return to my room, glance through Whitesides'
Archaeological Atlas for a while, and descend to the Buffet-Restaurant of the train
station. A vegetable soup, merlu fried with lemon, crème caramel, bread, wine
(Bordeaux, of course). I discover I can see faces in the distance distinctly better
with my bifocal glasses. This is a surprise. My eyes are getting old. To bed, quite
tired, at 11: 30. The Atlas drops from my hands.
The next day I bought for the trip a Masson geological guidebook to Western Aquitaine
and a camera. Back at the room in the evening. I am writing: " 'Why did they have to
close the caves at Les Eyzies? ' And the answer, as often as the question: 'The
pollution of the crowd was destroying the images. ' The heat, the torches - I recall
one beautifully printed book saying something about thousands of sweating bodies and
the vanishing images. What of the sweating caves themselves?
"Do caves not sweat? Stalagmites, stalagmites. An image in paint. Who can seal it in
a wet tube of dripping walls and clay bottoms for 10,000 years and find it intact
afterwards? I can understand the images carved into rock, but the paint that outlives
them and the paint laid on flat - what preserves it? There must be good answers.
Geologists and specialists on paints have visited the caves by the hundreds. How stupid
I am not to figure out why! Just as I felt stupid when I stood at a headland day before
yesterday, at St. Jean de Luz, and watched belts and streams of thinly laminated rock
plunging crazily, tortured at all angles, into the sea, which rushes at them, foaming.
What manufactured these fine layers in the dozens and then pushed them negligently over
the sea like a jumble of tissue, like rolls of toilet paper?"
Within three days, I gave up the idea of an extensive account of my observations. At 11
p. m. September 3rd, I am writing in my journal at Périgueux:
Three heavy days and two bad nights have brought me to think that I shouldn't
continue. Nothing ever works out the way that is expected. When the mind lacks
coherence, everything lacks meaning. When the environment is confusing, it is difficult
to be coherent. Why be so abstract when the simple fact is that I have been struggling
for three days merely to keep pace with a group that is moving all the time with little
sense of itself through strange country and unanticipated petty troubles of existence.
The beds have been bad, the meals poor, the bus-riding tortuous and prolonged, the days
of forced company ranged around the clock... What is the writer to do?
But most of all, the prehistoric times as they are advancing towards me from
Aquitaine are a rough and dismaying array whose frightening aspect makes me want to
retire from the fray.
In 3 days, we have ridden hundreds of miles, inspected 3 caves (I have gone into
Lascaux today), 4 sites, 22 cuts, and spotted a number of caves, sites and cuts from
the halted or moving bus. In addition we have visited three museums. Sets and trays of
paleolithic or later artifacts march through my head in silent columns.
The people of the group are of greater interest, what they say, who they are. It is
pathetic, in a way, to watch the paleolithic age scholar with his or her miserable
accumulations of evidence and desperate concentration as if by specialization on the
edge of a blade one can pierce the gloom of the birth of mankind. I am imitating them
as well as I can, gazing fiercely at the cobbles and chips, hoping, too, for the
Message.
Sporadic entries followed, but in the end I was left with handbooks and notes and
questions, whereupon we all lost ourselves in the melee of the great Congress at Nice.
There was nothing left but to reminisce. I was overwhelmed by the organization, the
discipline, and the assuredness of the Masters of the Caves. I do not see how any
individual, unless he could lead a precarious double life over a decade of time, could
treat with the Ideology of the Caves. Lacking access and resources, an outsider could
only work with the printed materials, a few visits, and a deductive theory bringing to
bear the general materials of archaeology and geology.
Could not some authoritative scholar, long versed in the intricacies of Aquitanian
archaeology, emerge in due course to say, "Dear colleagues, we must review and
reevaluate the conventional theory of the Upper Paleolithic." Impossible,
sociologically impossible. One would have to reverse his spin of perspective and
contemplate a strange new model. Then, once persuaded of its utility, he would need to
persuade others to listen to him, obtain resources for seemingly absurd research, and
hold onto his job - not likely!
To compose a new theory of the caves, one must consider the origin of the caves. Could
they have been quickly formed and folded in the orogeny of the Massif Central and the
bursting of hundreds of volcanoes in the Holocene, even while the great Atlantic
cleavage shoved Europe to the East? Heat and steaming waters can form caves quickly,
and so the interesting natural sculpture within the caves, as I noted in our visit to
the caves of Oxocelhaya and Isturitz.
Does any animal besides man penetrate into these grottoes? What geologically explains
the great variety of forms? Different floodings and temperatures? The impossibility of
any informed layman or ordinary scholar gaining much from visiting the caves. Bronze
Age is found in the cave at Isturitz. Each chamber looks as if done up by a distinctive
decorator. Red and black paint on the walls still from Paleolithic, little black
horses. (Humidity constant? Young?) Stalactites make different sounds when struck. Any
evidence that they were used as producers of sound? Recall: guide (" untrained") who
made anthropomorphic figures out of every calcite formation. Recall: the glass cases
where hundreds of objects were arranged "technologically" with no indication of where
they were found, how originally, etc. (Compare with taking 2 congresses and by putting
all Republicans in the first and all Democrats in the second, you show that a pure
Republican was succeeded by a pure Democratic age.) All the hoopla (the comic strip
ascendancy of man from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon, etc.)
At Eyres-Moncube, we come upon the Gisement of Pennon, dug out by Professor Thibault,
who explains it to us. He is:
very confident, certain in his modes of expression, polite, direct, says when he
rarely doesn't 'know. ' Shows occasionality of use of this site. Maybe used as a flint-
cutting site. Again deposits of sand that could be laid in a week or 100,000 years,
followed by occupation, then another huge deposit contrast, another occupation... No
hint of catastrophism among the 45 people... Time calendar not even discussed by anyone
so far... Interest is general, attention good, but questions almost entirely factual
and answers accepted. No controversy. Is this science: maybe so. Some complaint about
not enough manpower to dig. Not one mention of skies. One American, expatriate in
Canada, says unusually, 'Why did these people use the caves? ' Practically no interest
in psychology. No talk of institutions. I probably initiate (stimulate) one half of the
total volume of psychological or theoretical talk, now here, now there, often walking
off, never completed. Desultory.
As we near Lascaux, I jot down a nearly undecipherable note, written on the bus.
I notice how often 2 or more (or all) of belts of deposits in Aquitaine look exactly
alike save for a slight color and grain change. If you don't peer at it, it looks like
a huge subsoil of the same sand (except here and there are stones). Yet they are dated
even in a single profile as far apart as Holocene, Pleistocene, Quaternary, Tertiary
and maybe even earlier. (And of course Riss, Wurm, Mendel I, II, III, and all of that,
in between). Strange! Highly improbable.
At Lascaux:
Whenever calcite grains capture color they hold it. When the powdered rock is painted
it has lost the paintings. Thus Case A: Bottom half of horse clearly and nicely
painted, little affected... top half has disappeared, "because it is on calcacerous
stone but not on the calcite like the lower half is." Quite persuasive. But what does
this indicate about time? Two factors are involved in question whether a color will be
preserved: the surface (calcite or not) and the pigment (whether organic carbon as in
oil smoke or inorganic as in earth-oxide colors).
At the overhanging Gisement of Micoque:
Almost no assemblages are in order, and could be disastrous. Lots of open air digs.
More than caves. Everywhere in Dordogne you dig you find some paleolithic artifacts.
Never cases of reversed superposition of cultures: one is always earlier (below) other
according to the progression. Sometimes contemporaneity, causing concern, but, to
repeat, never true bouleversement... No tectonic bouleversement.
Settlements occurred even during the cold glacial periods, as at Aschenheim during Riss
II. Different types of limestone form in different caves. I was watchful for signs of
ashes. Very little reported or to be noticed. Where, in one place, carbon flecks were
noticeable amidst clay sands laying over a silt bank and solid reddish soil, there
occurred white bones on the same level. The carbonized bits could have been percolated
from an occupancy location, or wind-blown or carried in by a flood that swept in and
dispersed hearth ashes, or they dissolved into a soil. No systematic testing of soils
for organic carbon content seems to have been done. In one case a 20 X 20 meter area
carried an 8 inch band of carbonization; it is explained as the effect of many hearth
fires, which I accept.
It appears that peat is heavily deposited in Aquitaine. How would this peat relate to
Mackie's study of a peat deposit about half a meter deep over a megalith otherwise
dated at about 800 B. C.? Neolithic farmsites are found under bogs of peat in Ireland.
Over 10 meters of peat formed in the Holocene and is found below the river valley of
Eau Claire. Another river running parallel runs on top of a peat bed of the same
proportions.
La Cluna abri-cave contains a one-meter level of Mousterian culture stuffed with bones
of different species, including large mammals. Mousterian sites often end with blocks
of animal and human bones mélangés. Magdalenian sites were usually smashed up sooner or
later by seismic disturbances, or so it is believed.
A scholar present told of the extinct volcano, now Laacher See, 80 km South of Bonn. It
lacks cone or crater lip. Over 100 extinct eruptive sources of same type are found in
the same region. Laacher is said to have exploded during the Allerit Period, around
11,000 B. P. Deep tufa is scattered around and to the East as far as Thuringia. A band
of carbonized vegetation in the coastal area of the Netherlands is placed at the same
time. We have only begun to fathom the fire remains of the Paleolithic. At Langerie
Haute, for instance, a meter of ash rests on top of the Upper Magdalenian culture,
coinciding, it is believed, with the very end of the Ice Age.
I note (Sept. 7) that the excavators do not find materials of recent times, and it
would seem that after Magdalenian VI, the sites were abandoned. Upper Magdalenian is
loaded with doubts and controversy. Some experts see sub-periods when others do not.
Magdalenian III, IV, V are often clumped together; some argue this is an effect of
seismism, others that warmth may have cracked and caused rock overhangs to fall. Water
action, too, is blamed. But also some say there were no plural periods.
The walls of Ruffignac contain two groups of mammoths marching towards each other. They
exhibit a fine sense of order, a disciplined composition. Elsewhere a parade of
mammoths is overdrawn by serpentine lines. At Ruffignac, all corridors are very soft
and wet, both floors and walls. One senses big water nearby. If in historic times, as
reported, a flood covered the first kilometer of the cave up to the ceiling, a larger
earlier flood would have swamped the whole tunnel complex and wiped out all artwork.
I make note that an anthropologist from the University of Massachusetts speaks
doubtfully of an arrangement of a circle of crystals and a triangular display of the
skulls of a deer, bison and horse uncovered at Nice. He says that this same site
contained post-holes to support shacks, which postholes remained unchanged over 100,000
years except for small movements here and there. I questioned the time, saying that it
was impossible for such a composition to remain unchanged for longer than a few hundred
years. A physical anthropologist from Cornell asserted that people made the same kind
of tools for 100,000 years or more, citing the Acheulian. I disputed this as well; he
agreed with me on the first, which concerned Pont d'Ambon, though not the second. The
psycho-sociology of invention would lead me to doubt that the strongest conservatism
can prevent technical adaptations to the forces of the environment. Technology may
often change faster than prayers.
The trip continues and I jot down another note:
The Pont d'Ambon site can be critical. A stream runs parallel to the bluffs, quietly,
slowly, 100 yards away. No allowance here or in numerous other gisements for violent
inundations from time to time. Yet, considering that the period is said to occur here
from 12,300 to 9300 = 2800 years, more or less, river floods must have occurred 50 to
100 times, enough to wash out the place. (Heavy climatic changes were said to be
occurring.) The best defense is that originally the stream was deep and not until the
whole shelf was filled up and abandoned in 9640 B. P. did any flooding of significance
occur. We discussed this question, some saying that the river started as a "V", but
then it would have been caused by a catastrophic flash-flood to begin with, which in
any event would slowly fill with sediments and broaden. But it is narrow. On the
objection I thought they might raise, that the stream might have been farther away, the
land rises on the other side gently. Further the men of the shelter would wand to be
close to the water, so the stream would not change that much. Further, if a stream did
change its course, it would do so in the course of catastrophe that would have
inundated the living or occupation site. One said that this area might have been spared
glacial flashfloods or heavy drainage, but I doubt this and, furthermore, heat and
humidity, by pollen tests, indicate watery climate part of the time.
In sum, there are grounds for believing that the neat-appearing stratigraphic profile
at Pont d'Ambon may testify to a rapid succession of a few seasons with stages of
Magdalenian and Azilian occurring with different occupants carrying the "latest" stone
chippings. The "climates" vary remarkably but may be erratic seasons; the flora and
fauna change, but so they will change even now from year to year. The correlations
among all four - technique, climate, flora and fauna are quite poor. There is a
considerable mixing of artifacts as well. The dates are based upon five radiocarbon
tests done on unscorched deer bone.
Over a thousand years (half the whole time) seems to have slipped away between the
earliest two strata of the Azilian levels: erosion? abandonment? never existed? The
absolute dates are probably far too old, to my way of thinking, which views radiocarbon
as having little knowable association with the passage of time before 3000 years ago.
With due caution for what may happen in the laboratory, the relative dates may be
significant, but there is one contradiction in dates among the five possible ones, and
the Azilian and Magdalenian periods are so close as to overlap when allowance is made
for error (i. e. 12130 160 and 12340 220).
The lack of profuse material deposits of the Upper Paleolithic would be explained by
the hunting-gathering complex, which seems to permit only a few inhabitants and these
usually on the move. Still, where are the permanent settlements of the age? We cannot
believe that the cave-users were dwellers therein; else they would be very neat
housekeepers (and, in fact, what material exists is strewn about in disorder). How deep
is 1000 years of an average Near Eastern tell? How deep is the typical thousand years
of paleolithic occupancy? No answers are given to these answerable queries.
Despite arduous labors of classification, the cultural divisions of the Upper
Paleolithic are not absolute, and may not hold out much longer, especially as the
geographical areas studied expand toward Asia and Africa. The Solutrean may be
contemporaneous with Magdalenian, with, it has been suggested, the tools developed by
horse-hunters especially. Some tools (including Levallois bifaces) that are classified
as Mousterian (Neanderthal) penetrate the kits of Upper Magdalenians.
I resort to my journal:
The typical stratification of an excavated abri, cave, or open site permits various
wash-outs and wash-ins of material, and gaps of flooding, of quick "decade" or
"century" pollen and faunal changes. The reason why this short-term stratification is
ignored or neglected is that C14 dates of charcoal and bones generally produce
"acceptable" dates from 9000 B. P. to 18,000 B. P. for these strata. From the earliest
level, say 15,000 to latest, say 10,000, there are 5000 years of time to account for in
the strata and hence they are regarded as long-term deposits, rather than short-term
ones.
Many of the papers and discussions of the IXth Congress centered upon the climates
and ecologies of the various hominids and men. Talk of 'warming' and 'cooling', of
interstadials, of Wurm I and II, of moist and dry, consumed much of the week's work and
hundreds of papers. Then came 'shards, ' and them came dates, which are intended to
bring order to the discoveries but, like climatic schedules, are a source of confusion
in themselves.
The chronologists and the stone-flake classifiers are preponderant elements of a
profession that has few findings with which to work, and a deep suspicion of theory.
Prehistorians prefer to study coprolites rather than human thought. They are like
pollsters who, by getting rid of anomalous, misunderstood, or complex responses,
present the public as speaking in "baby talk." When it comes to fields of megaliths
weighing tons, they go so far, under great pressure from a few cranks, as to believe
that early man wanted to find the solstices and equinoxes and plot the Moon's course,
but hardly attend to the question of motives underlying the movement of great stones.
But the megaliths of Stonehenge and Brittany are a better measure of the fearful
memories and expectations of their builders than of their astronomical skills.
The excursion ended at the Congress of Nice, subject of my last note.
September 13, 1976
French domination of the field of prehistory is especially evident in the grand
trappings of the IXth Congress whose name is emblazoned in giant letters upon thousands
of posters around Nice as if it were a World's Fair or at least the Cannes Film
Festival.
The field was taken up by the French a hundred years ago when the rest of the world
ignored pre-history, thought it was amusing (as with the American Indians) but not a
great discipline, or was deficient in all field research areas of historical science
(as e. g. Thailand, India) and relied upon legends.
But the concentration of leadership means the concentration of concepts and their
imperialism in many places where they are perhaps inapplicable. Written during a
thoroughly boring grand reunion in the Hall of the Parc d'Expositions. 1/ 5 of the 3000
people is listening, the rest gaze here and there, listen absentmindedly, think of
other matters, talk to their neighbors or as I, read and write. There are 21 on the
high, semi-circular rostrum. 2 hours are given over to it. I was able to be only 30
minutes late.
The Program is intimidating. Hundreds of papers are listed, among them mine. Yet
calculate the time per paper permitted, and it comes to 3 minutes each. Obviously some
will not have come to Nice, others will scarcely cover the sub-titles of their talk,
some will cling fiercely to the rostrum, some will summarize for others. The usual main
function of coming to meet one's kind is rather poorly provided for because the
residences are widely separated and as yet I've not seen the central "hall of
encounters" that should be the central focus of all such conventions. [Later I
concluded that the vast list of papers was an effective method of helping hundreds of
scholars to get a vacation from their repressive governments, to boost their local
reputations, and to qualify for travel funds and foreign exchange.]
The Congress ended, I posted a score of volumes of preliminary reports to America, I
met Dr. Elizabeth Ralph, Director of the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory of the
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Natural History, and we went home together.
Princeton, September 18, 1976
Elizabeth Ralph told me among many things, that:
a.
She thought Velikovsky was difficult and wrong.
b.
That the Ramses C14 dates of 13th century from at least 3 types of material disproved
him and that there were 19th dynasty 7th century readings.
c.
That she almost lost her job in the fracas over doing some tests for Velikovsky (those
were the ones that FOSMOS of which I was President authorized circa 1970 but Bruce
Mainwaring carried on all the negotiations and asked all the nasty questions in his
sweet way.) I doubt this but she was scared by her boss Rainey, I suppose, as well as
the unusual excitement over the matter of testing Velikovsky's stuff. She is a tough,
durable woman, masculine, straight-talking. Like just about everyone in the controversy
vs. Velikovsky, she is not as fully informed as she thinks nor understands all the
branches of logic involved.
d.
I raised question after question with her during the 12 hours we were altogether on the
ground and aloft, eating, drinking (she drank a lot) smoking (ditto) and talking. I
wasn't arguing, which is useless, but finding out what this remarkable woman knew about
many questions that bothered me. Most, of course, she couldn't answer. It was
important, I think, that she liked my rough sketch on an Air France route map of the
outlines of a Hudson Bay Crater (Chubb Islands as the center), a second circle of lakes
and water all around the center of Chubb Islands, including the Great Lakes and Great
Slave Lake, etc. She had no objections either to my theory of all-around mid-second
millennium destruction.
e.
She said, in answer to my question about magnetometers, which she has employed in
Greece and elsewhere, that they aren't too useful and are useless where ash and pumice
are measured. There must be metal in the rock to take a direction after the melt, so
she wasn't able to do much on Thera with Marinatos.
f.
She said that for political reasons, that is, the insistence of Marinatos, they've held
off their latest Thera measure for years, because it was 1650 while he was convinced
of its being 1450 . I know the Thera dating is in confusion, quite apart from this
incident.
g.
Yet Elizabeth said in answer to my careful questioning that all their dates were
published, for better or worse, even if they did not turn out well for the
investigators. (I cannot believe this, as see above [with Marinatos].) She takes
several runs on every date and if they aren't close to their average, she throws them
away and starts over again. "Throws them away" bothers me, although at the moment I
cannot stop to pursue the effects of the logic of throwing things away.
h.
She says all labs do the same, publish all in the carbondating mag, including British
Museum, of which we have contrary evidence (Mainwaring's report).
i.
I asked her whether she knew of the old article by Folghereiter that showed Etruscan
vases with South-North clay-iron filings orientations instead of North-South, which
would be expected if baked in the Northern Hemisphere. This is a sharp proof of
magnetic reversal of the Earth for some period of time in the 8th and 7th centuries B.
C., and was uncovered and advanced as such by Velikovsky.
Elizabeth says yes, but unfortunately kilns are stuffed with vases so as to bake more
ceramics and conserve heat. Therefore, a vase might have been baked on its head.
Yesterday I had a two-hour visit with Velikovsky in the course of which I asked his
opinion of the matter. He replied that the direction of the vase in baking can be told
by the glazing which drips a little in the time before it hardens. Very well. But did
the glazing occur in a simultaneous baking with the clay or might the ceramic body have
been backed earlier and then heated a second time for glazing perhaps at a lower
temperature. This is a neat and important little problem. If one absolute case may be
proven of a vase that was baked upright and acquired an opposite orientation
magnetically, then we have an important proof of 8th-7th century troubles. For, as I
explained to Ralph, the magnetic reversal, important in itself, would also be an effect
of causes with huge other effects.
With luck, this study might take a week.
1)
Restudy the articles of Fohlgereiter and Mercanton (see citation in Velikovsky's work).
2)
Read Monley's Science News (Penguin, 12, 1948 or 9) report on magnetism on vases.
3)
Consult experts unless one or more of these are perfectly precise in handling the
glaze-sequence problem.
4)
Conclude:
a) Further experiments on vases needed, or
b1) All OK for Velikovsky
b2) Problems in glazing, or
b3) Problems in position, or
b4) New problems
Then conclusions: How long does it take for the magnetic field to reverse itself, and
were vases dated accurately, and when did it reverse itself to the present?
Incidentally, if this test were performed with a large number of vases from the
Neolithic to present, a sample of each culture should have a modal group that is
logically positioned to show the N-S axis, and this axis would be presumed to change
when the modal axis changed. This might be one way of resolving the Etruscan vase
mystery. (Velikovsky said Mercanton, who praised Folghereiter, was Director of the
Meteorological Observatory at the University of Lausanne.)
It appears in retrospect now that my excursion to the Caves of Aquitaine was a failure,
yet the experiencing of it and its sequel were successes, if doubts of my own mind and
the minds of others are thrown into the balance. Almost nothing of importance can be
said of the Paleolithic that will stand up as fact, and almost nothing that I can add
as constructive counter-fact can be proven, either. Conventional and quantavolutionary
scholars dispute in a darkness like that of the caves. But we caught for a while the
exciting sense, around us, of another, an ancient contest, between vast, marvelously
ornate natural sculpting and determined, hard-lined drawing by tight, defiant human
minds.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Two: Geological Issues
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE LATECOMING OLDUVAI GORGE
In September 1976, I happened to meet Ofer Bar-Yosef, Ernst Wrestler, and other archeao-
anthropologists from Israel on an excursion through the caves of Southwest Aquitaine.
There I learned of the work that had been done at Ubeidiya, a location two and a half
hours' drive from Jerusalem. Stekelis, who died in 1967, had brought in Louis Leakey to
examine the site, and they got the idea that the Olduvai and Ubeidiya remains were
closely related. Yet the latter were placed well under a million years while the former
was considered a million years older. For sixteen seasons the Israelis had been on the
site, but work had been suspended now for two years.
I was impressed; then and now; with the probability that the East African Rift,
including Olduvai Gorge, was connected in time with the Dead Sea-Syrian Rift via the Red
Sea. Therefore cultural contemporaneity, I ventured to say, had also to be watched for
along the whole length of the Rift. My further speculations about the extreme recency of
human beginnings along the Rift were mentioned diffidently and heard with some
amusement.
In 1983 the Ubeidiya scholars emerged in Nature magazine with a reevaluation of their
hominid remains; they redated them to coincide in time with some of the oldest of the
African Rift hominids. Having gone this far, I expect that one day they will go farther
and will have to claim that all along the Rift, the hominid sites, "oldest" in the
world, must be brought up to the Holocene, perhaps only 14,000 years ago. Earlier in the
same year, I had been considering the radiometric datings along the Rift and wrote in my
journal of my doubts:
March 10, 1976;
Bones of humans are destroyed by weathering, animals, and disasters - fire, flood,
hurricane. Bones are preserved by burial in dry tombs or sand, and by dry ash or tuff at
low heat.
? All Rift burials and findings are from fall-out or quick wash flood and dry-out (i.
e. volcanism or flood.)
Dating by K/ A [Potassium 40-Argon 40] in Rift questionable in re:
1.
Erraticism of some of dates.
2.
Choice of small grains with more argon because more surface ratio to volume and
therefore older dates since argon from air contaminates surfaces.
3.
But younger dates may come from escape of argon at near melt temperatures following flow
or fallout.
4.
Questionable behavior of potassium.
5.
Averaging may be used questionably.
6.
Fudging and rejection unjustifiably of "impossible" dates; "reasonable" choice is
unreasonable.
7.
Superposition over short term can be achieved by an atmospheric condition of initial
high argon content which is absorbed by first-laid rocks and then as successive rock
layers are laid down (or sediments) the argon in the atmosphere is escaping and
therefore less and less proportionally absorbed, giving upon test a gradient of
pseudoage from bottom to top in seeming accord with super-positioning.
8.
?? Were accepted test results all reported and all blind, all from same size specimens
and sampled by same procedures?
9.
Regardless of age gradient of tests, tests give old readings. Since 0 argon is found on
new deposits and some argon on 3000 and 36000 year old (???) deposits, how can it be
said that the argon test is inapplicable to under 1,000,000 y? Such tests should be
highly erratic.
10.
Is K/ A a test of the amount of argon in atmosphere at time of deposit?
11.
Couldn't argon 40 be exuded from K 40 by earthquake and intruded into volcanic lavas and
kept there as these cooled, giving them long ages? Yes.
If "trace elements" rise to the top of the Earth's crust, and if "daughter"
concentrations follow suit; if "trace elements" are essential to methods of measuring
rock ages; if rocks are igneous; if igneous flow (fissure or cone) proceeds by erupting
lavas from the top rock melt layer, then the next to the top layer of melt, et seq., -
then, radiodating will show old dates at bottom of the column, and younger dates as
measurements move up.
This is as expected and found. But the layering could occur in a very short time set of
eruptions and evidence a series of old ages in some kind of proportions because the
daughter traces will be most abundant in the lowest samples and decline progressively as
the samples are taken from lower in the plasma melt.
Addressing himself to that part of the African-Red Sea Rift which stands on the
continent, R. B. McConnell argued a 2.7 billion year age for its beginnings and limits
severely the changes of recent times [1] , compares it with the Rhine Graben and Baikal
depression. I have linked all three with the simultaneous world rifting or fracturing of
only a dozen millennium ago.
With such old dates, McConnell has to confront a general opinion nowadays that the rift
system of the oceans (and, by inference and otherwise, land) is no older than 200
million years. Moreover, the great rifts of the world, oceanic and terrestrial, seem to
have been in motion as part of a world system. Spreading in widely separated regions
show similarities, including correspondences even when discontinuities are compared [2]
.
Gregory, an early explorer of the African Rift Valley, dated the vast diatomite deposits
of the lakes to the Miocene Period. But Louis Leakey found hand axes embedded in the
lake deposits and therefore called them Pleistocene [3] . Olduvai Gorge appears young
to the geologist's eye. All of East Africa seems so, too. The Victoria Falls and Zambezi
Gorge seem very young. Suppose the Falls to be of the same age as Niagara Falls; this
would place a spectacular bit of Africa within reach of 3500 years of age. A
quantavolutionary view of geology tends to bring more and more features more and more
together; the Earth's surface tends to be hologenetic and is seen in holistic
perspective. Olduvai Gorge could have been created during the Bronze Age of Egypt.
Willis speaks of a geologist's (Combe's) knowledge allowing him to tell that pebbles of
tin ore found in the Kafu River came from "downstream" instead of upstream, because the
course of the river had been reversed as a result of the great rifting.
Since the pebbles could not be of ancient origin, the story bespeaks the recency of the
change and of the Rift.
Flint, in his Glacial Geology (p. 523), refers to the Rift as late Pleistocene. S. Cole
discusses some of the material in a manner to support skepticism: the near total
confusion of climatic periods (52 and chap. 2); the unreliable use of advances and
retreats of lake sands to date Rhodesian cultures (53); the great tectonic changes of
the Pleistocene; the fact that neither neolithic nor bronze ages have been found in
Africa; the astonishing slowness of culture change ( million years of the same hand-
stone); the great destruction of mammals notable in Olduvai beds I and II, then
separated by "a million years."
She says (113-4) that Olduvai Gorge "assumed its present form, with narrow floor and
steep sides, in Post-Pleistocene times, when erosion cut right down into the Pleistocene
deposits, thereby exposing the great series of sediments seen today." Erosion, however,
does not "cut right down;" Olduvai Gorge split open quickly, hence the "narrow floor and
steep sides."
Cole, like L. Leakey and others, have a way of speaking of "people cultures," "industry
sites," "living floors," and "living sites" for the hominids, making one wonder whether
they had tile floors and awnings. A uniformitarian image is thus purveyed, and one is
led to think in terms of extremely gradual sedimentation as creating the scene. Yet the
australopithecine (1959) Zinjanthropus' skull "had been broken by expansion and
contraction of the bentonitic [i. e. volcanic] clay in which it lay, 22 feet below the
top of Bed I, which at this point is about 40 feet thick; but the bones had not been
distorted in any away, and even such fragile pieces as the nasals were recovered." (117-
8) And she remarks that three or more relatives were found on Floor I and 4 meters away
with "a worked bone tool." She surmises that the hominids lived upon the tortoise and
catfish of the shallow waters at hand (120-1).
Legbones were found standing upright; this seems impossible, given the undisturbed
condition of the clay encasement, unless the long period of "sedimentation" were in fact
the ash fall of a single day. "Coarse vertical rootmarkings are common in many of the
tuffs..." (III, p. 11). About one-fifth of the strata contain them. They also carry
through beds of sediment, evidencing other instants of high production to create the
geological column above the earliest hominids. Elsewhere, in Homo Schizo I., I have
spoken of the human traits of australopithecus. A perplexed discussion has long centered
upon the "people culture" of Leakey's first-found hominids, and much effort has gone
into depriving him of his human qualities, to no avail; Australopithecus Bosei was
probably the maker of Olduvai implements, of a "two-million year old" circular stone
barrier of the lowest level of Bed I [4] , a selective cracker of animal bones, with a
"frequency of implemental patterns of behavior" [5] .
Bed II rest conformably upon the older Bed I. Yet "a million years" has passed.
Conformity suggests continuity and absence of a gap in time, and an absence of natural
catastrophe. But both are evident. The fossil assemblages connote disaster. Groups of
mammals and primates or people do not congregate voluntarily to await death. An elephant
skeleton without a skull was found. The method and motive for separating the two are
found in natural forces. The hominid finds are not nicely segregated by time gaps (see
v. III, 229, 234).
Strange to say, a toe bone, possibly human and modern, was found in Upper Bed I (Tuff
If), belonging to an "upright, bipedal, hominid possessing a plantigrade propulsive
gait." (p. 230). Many years later, modern footprints of a three person-group were found
at Laetoli by Mrs. Leakey. These go towards establishing the humanness of
australopithecus, or else a most embarrassing confusion of time has occurred, and
australopithecus consorted with humans; the latter is possible, if all artifacts were
made by beings other than australopithecus.
Dr. B. Willis published in the 1930's two books which treated of the African Rift
system. He remarks, as is well-known, upon the foundation rocks exposed throughout East
Africa, where they are intruded or covered by volcanic products. Sediment are lacking or
thin. He asks, where does the great melting below the surface that lifted the continent
come from [6] ? To my way of thinking, the melting came from the immense catastrophic
push of the Atlantic Ocean cleavage that moved the African crust eastwards and from an
accompanying expansion of the Earth. The plateaus rose. Then the great arch cracked and
dropped, forming the Rift valley. Inasmuch as the Atlantic cleavage veered East and shot
up a northern branch, and this fracture cut off Madagascar and India from the African
continent, the Eastern rim of the new African format could accelerate into the widening
basin, and hence an auxiliary fracture, not so deep, the Rift Valley, opened; in effect,
it dropped between the steep plateau walls. Volcanic products are everywhere and in all
forms, ash, lava, tephra; Olduvai gorge was cut through many strata of volcanic
emissions.
Willis writes of meeting Louis Leakey, then of merely local fame, and J. D. Solomon, a
colleague, at Lake Elmenteita in 1919. "They even think he [man] may have witnessed the
later developments of the rifting to which the valley owes its character. If so, we
shall have to change the time scale, either by hurrying geologic processes or by greatly
prolonging the stone age of man's evolution" [7] . The latter course has been taken [8]
.
Yet since Olduvai Gorge fractured open after hominids and hominoids were already on the
land and long buried in the area, the catastrophic event must have been witnessed by
humans. Considering the topography, the Gorge is directly connected to the Rift; it is
370 feet deep; about 40 strata are identifiable in some 300 feet of depth, averaging
thus about 7 feet per stratum. The fossils are found embedded in the cliffs on both
sides of the gorge; the fossil beds are sandwiched between lava flows on both sides; the
oldest fossil bed is termed Bed I, the youngest Bed IV.
Alternative possibilities are weak: if the Gorge came first, then hominids of successive
ages dug themselves into the cliffs, taking care not to disturb the lower strata as they
climbed up to dig into their proper superposition. Or the Gorge may have been a small
stream valley, was settled by hominid I, then lava poured over one lip, filled the
valley, and covered the opposite rim, while on other occasions, volcanic fall-out
layered over the whole, and in both cases the stream washed away the valley deposits;
hominid II came in while the stream was cutting away the valley deposits, but then the
whole process repeated itself four times until today.
A third possibility is that the area was heavily settled. Then volcanic eruptions
brought in ash and lava and caused evacuation of the biosphere, except for rare trapped
remains. New settlements occurred, and then by the same means, Bed II occurred and was
covered; and so on. Then came the rifting and gradual erosion and exposure. Gradualism
contradicts evidence brought out here. And what kind of volcanic system is it, which
covers the region but conveniently lays down a blanket every quarter of a million years
and is resting in between-times?
By far the most plausible explanation for Olduvai Gorge and its contents is successive,
heavy rainfall, floods, lava streams, and ash falls, occurring over a period of a few
centuries. Human types moved in and out, chancing sudden destruction and quick burial
here as anywhere else. Finally the risen plateau ruptured, Olduvai being a local
incident in a global frame. The climate turned dry, the volcanoes became more peaceful,
soda springs hissed harmlessly and began to expire, the surviving mammal population
gathered near the remaining sources of water, as did the surviving and incoming humans.
To sum up, I would make several points. General quantavolutionary evidence of recent
global transformations supports a short-time or microchronic view of Olduvai Gorge and
its biosphere outcroppings. Potassium-argon datings support the conventional
macrochronism but they are discordant and may be basically flawed. Numerous geological
and paleontological indications support microchronism. The recent claim of equal age for
rift remains in Israel adds support, although both these and Olduvai remains should be
moved up, not back, in time. The Rift, hence the Gorge, split open late enough for human
legends to carry down a report of the events.
Notes (Chapter 13: The Latecoming Olduvai Gorge)
1. The reference here may be to a passage from Curtis and Everden, in Louis Leakey, p.
91: "... the few volcanic sanidines of historic age dated by us have yielded ages
inconsistent with the concept of zero argon content at the time of eruption. Both the
1912 eruption of Katmai and the 1304 eruption of Ischia yielded zero potassium/ argon
ages. Also dates of late or post-Pleistocene event have given reasonable ages. A late
Gamblian tuff from Lake Naivasha in Kenya gave 28,000 years and a prehistoric post-
glacial pumiceous rhyolite done near Mono Lake, California, gave 5600 years..." However,
two paragraphs later, they report a possible 11,000 year feldspar (sanidine) gave them
datings of several hundred thousand years.
2. 83 Geol. Soc. Amer. Bull (Sept. 1972), 2549, at 2565.
3. Heirtzler, Dixon, Herron, Pitmann and Le Pichon, "Marine Magnetic Anomalies,
Geomagnetic Field Reversals and Motions of the Ocean Floor and Continents," 73 J.
Geophysical Res. (1968), 2119-36.
4. Sonia Cole, The Prehistory of E. Africa (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964).
5. L. Leakey naively compares his "fort" to those erected by the Okombambi tribe today
(vol. III, p. 24), a two-million year old tradition!
6. P. V. Tobias, Olduvai Gorge, vol. 2 (Cambridge U. Press, 1967).
7. Living Africa, 289. And see his East African Plateaus and Rift Valleys (Washington,
D. C.: Carnegie Institution, 1936), publ. n 470.
8. Ibid., 270.
9. It is instructive to compare the processes of science that moved toward the
acceptance of Olduvai hominids of great age and the rejection of Calaveras man in
California, as reported in W. H. Holmes, "Review of the Evidence Relating to Auriferous
Gravel Man in California," Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1898-9, 419-71.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Two: Geological Issues
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ATHENS QUAKES*
They left without paying their bills, but that is not why the waiters hurried after
them. At 22: 53 hours of this evening of February 23, 1981 a strange deep bassoon called
the patrons of Philippo's Taverna to attention, and seconds later they found themselves
altogether swaying like a ballet, their faces turned on in the unique poseidonian awe of
earthquake recognition, and some were jostling at the door even before the lights went
out. Once outside, there were those who hurried to their children, those who walked the
middle of the streets towards home, and those who stood about in the little open plateia
exclaiming at the marvel of Athens' first earthquake. Several sheets of lightning played
over the scene. A car drove agitatedly by the human clots on the street, bewildered, one
driver shouting: "Has there been a coup?" The failed Spanish coup had been the topic of
the day. Shortly another tremor vigorously nudged the city, but it was the last until
hours later and, by then, many Athenians had left town in their cars. Others cowered in
their autos during the night; the plateia were crowded; so too the seashore; but most
people lay nervously in their own beds, hoping for surcease.
The tremors were counted in hundreds over the next several days. Only the most sensitive
people - and animals - could detect them. One woman - no doubt there were others -
exhibited a surprising ability to feel trembling that no one else could sense. (It would
be useful to investigate scientifically this acute sensitivity.) The next day, one could
park anywhere and the ordinarily crowded center of Athens was empty of workers, a sort
of class B movie setting of a city struck by plague. The Athenians who took flight
behaved like true Spartans. These doughty ancient warriors, who flinched at no army
whatever, would invariably be sent flying home at the rumble of an earthquake. It
amounted to a psychological complex. The Hebrews, for instance, had the reverse complex.
They might actually time their assaults with shaking of their enemies as witness the
battle of Jericho where Joshua's men paraded around the town until the walls came
tumbling down and they might rush through the breaches.
Ancient precedents were not the verbal currency of these several days, however. One
heard only that "Athens has never had an earthquake." Well, almost never, and never in
this generation. No matter that, in the times of its founding, Poseidon, god of the sea
and of earthquakes, wanted to take over Attica, and you know what that means. Pallas
Athene had other ideas, and Zeus lent her a helping hand, so Athens survived.
But Plato's Criton tells us that Solon was told by the Egyptian priests that, once upon
a time, his Athenian ancestors lost an army that was struggling for the control of
Atlantis when that fair land sank in furious trembling beneath the waves. This was fixed
at 9000 years before, but possibly the years had been shorter in an earlier age - since
a cosmic disaster, a comet or meteoroid, can both cause catastrophic earthquakes and
slow down the movements of even a planet.
More and more, the archaeological evidence would indicate that earthquakes were
anciently more terrible, not only in Greece but in Thrace and Anatolia and all over the
world in fact. As Helen Churchill Semple's book on ancient geography argues: "If
earthquakes would break the nerve and nullify the life-long training of Spartan troops,
there must have been abundant reason."
Ambrayses was able to trace 3000 earthquakes of the Eastern Mediterranean since Christ's
day, and perceives little change in frequency or intensity. So it appears that there
were in the founding of Greek civilization great seismic eras, but that the seismism has
petered out over the ages. Rome, to take another example, which presently is as "free"
from earthquakes as Athens, had a couple of hundred in one year according to the
encyclopaedist Pliny.
Plato also tells us that the fresh water springs that once flowed on the acropolis were
blocked forever by an earthquake. Pliny and Plato lacked a Mercalli or a Richter scale,
so it is hard to say how strong the early quakes really were. The Mercalli scale is the
common man and the politician's scale. It provides as scale markers the sensory
perception that accompany the different degrees of trembling.
The Richter scale was all that we heard about. It registered 6.6 and 6.3 at the
epicenter below the northeast waters of the Gulf and Corinth, and a lot of other jiggles
that duly engraved themselves upon the turning paper drums of the seismic instruments in
Greece and around the world. What does 6.6 means? It means that Southern Italy's extra
point months before was not just worse; it was many times worse - as if you moved not
from 99F to 100F fever but from 104 to 105, whereupon your mind and body begin to fall
to pieces.
Registers of intensity around 6.5 means that many structures will be destroyed at the
surface below which the rocks are slipping and sliding, and less damage will occur as
one moves out along the same rocks and the rocks with which they are connected by origin
or proximity. Those nice circles that are drawn around epicenters do not means much; the
area of spread should have been a splotch of many measurements at specific locations.
Nor was the graph with its kind of fever chart useful to people; but to feed the public
craving for "hard data" the newspapers publish these.
Perhaps Athens may be protected by its peculiar schist, a rock that has millions of
cracks, all in fact tiny fractures that have their own slip and slide patterns. So that
Athenians are provided with a kind of cushion that sends shocks flying in every
disorderly direction and has space to take up shock as well. If the city were glued to
the bedrock that was the prime mover, it would have suffered more extensive damage. As
for the origins of this Athens schist itself, I think that it must represent an age when
the ground below was in a continuous grinding torment of electrical and mechanical
churning at high temperatures. Earthquakes are frequently a time to placate gods, go to
war, and change governments. For a while we shall see not only a brisk commerce in
plastering and selling bric-a-brac, but also a certain heightened religious enthusiasm.
Something of this religious feeling must be behind the notion bandied about that the
Mother Earth of Attica was rejecting the body of onetime Queen Frederika from burial in
its soil (an event which had taken place only days earlier), an idea actually
foreshadowed by one newspaper, although unaware of the imminence of the earthquake. Such
absurd ideas can spread easily; an unscrupulous party might readily persuade an
unsophisticated third of the Athenians of its relatedness.
The quake was a tragic but local event; none will be swooping down upon hapless Greece
like the sons of Herakles during the huge earthquakes that ended the Mycenean culture.
War is not in the offing.
Blaming the government is another matter. The communists have already declared that the
government was forewarned of the quake to the very day by the seismic station at
Uppsala, which was "99%" sure, according to certain dispatches. We can doubt that this
"information" was provided or providable. That an earthquake or a set of them will soon
occur is hardly a useful prediction, but is more likely the prediction that was
provided. These paranoid rumors of "what others knew and we didn't know" were produced
largely out of the inferiority complex many Greeks have about foreign expertness and at
the same time fed upon the complex. (The American military's radio station, by the way,
was almost totally useless for information and advice despite the urgent need felt by
tens of thousands of English-speaking persons in the area.)
True, too, a science of earthquake predictions is slowly developing. Successful
prediction within a day or two can occur, as in Mexico recently, this by an American
scientist practicing for the momentous earthquakes building up along the San Andreas
fault in California, where the San Francisco Bay area is at stake. But for every one
such, there are numerous incorrect expert predictions. We can also be sure that, like
election prediction by sample surveys, the predictions will not be able to go beyond 90%
in accuracy as to the general time and place, and less and less accuracy as the moment
of the quake arrives, until, of course, the dogs begin to bark and the birds take
flight.
What can the government do? In one way, the state is more secure if earthquakes cannot
be predicted. It is not a matter of incompetence alone. Imagine a 90% sure prediction
for the long-range and the short-range of a 7-intensity quake in the Athens area,
something now quite unattainable. Regarding the long-range, would you build a permanent
vacant tent-city for three million people? And if so, where? And provide it unceasingly
with its blankets, cots, freshwater, canned rations, toilets and medical supplies? Or
would you rebuild Athens to withstand a 7-intensity tremor? Or would you design a new
city to replace a ruined Athens, perhaps the only solution for many of Athens' urban
problems, allowing, say, that three million people will live in tents or go home to No-
where until it is finished?
And it is well to bear in mind that none knows how intense earthquakes can be; the
measuring and reporting systems are less than a century old. I can hear the voices now:
"I told you we should have built against a number 8, not 7, quake." And they would
flaunt a study in Science magazine. (Or, "we should evacuate at the prediction of 6, not
7.")
In the short run, the curse of predictability is no less. Suppose you could march the
population out of Athens in an orderly fashion upon receipt of an expert opinion that
tomorrow or the day after all hell will break loose. Will the people resist? What
essential services will be risked to remain in the city -- police, fire, water, light,
bulldozers, building maintenance engineers, army units? Who will evict those who
remained in the city from their quarters in the houses of others who are returning? Who
will compensate businesses that must close down, some suffering damage, others very
little?
Then what if the earthquake does not happen? Who wants to decide at what point to order
everyone to return? Something like that occurred in Guadeloupe, in the French West
Indies, a few years ago: a volcano was about to explode, said various experts, and half
the people were sent to safe locations upon order of the prefect. The volcano did not
oblige and ever since then the French have been arguing over the decisions and the
restitution of losses in agriculture, business, and tourism. Too, should people be
forced to leave, even if they swear to take all responsibility upon themselves? Can
children be left to abide by parental decisions; can the injured then be left to scream
from beneath the debris?
No doubt, steps can be taken to minimize damage and deaths: public education should go
hand in hand with predictibility. A code of disaster behavior should be enacted and
taught to the whole people.
European and American media were talking about the Attic quake right away. In France,
where demonstrations had been held against building a nuclear power plant very near a
major Alsatian earthquake fault, the media, which are controlled by the government,
restrain their own coverage, especially in emergencies. In peaceful periods, it is best
not to build up fears that can turn quickly into panic. But, in the crisis itself,
prompt and full information and advice should be the policy. Much can be on ready-to-
play tapes to begin with, approved, say, by a parliamentary commission engineers,
political scientists, social psychologists, and seismic scientist. The same commission
could be convened immediately upon the emergency to oversee the diffusion of
instructions; if the commission holds public confidence, it can lessen the dangers of
panic and of senseless orders.
The problems are so grave, in sum, that only deliberately partial procedures can be
followed before, during, and after an earthquake crisis. Poseidon is tricky, cruel,
implacable, surprising and infinitely destructive; human foresight and reactions can
adapt to him but not prevail over him. He is no respecter of persons, no more than
Yahweh. The Pharaoh's son and the slave's as well were struck down in the Passover
before Exodus. The clients of the Hilton Hotel and Neofaleron cheap rooms sway in the
same ballet.
Someday it may be possible to explode or grease the faulting rocks threatening the
earth. Meanwhile, one might take comfort in the thought that the risk of being harmed by
nuclear missiles is thousands of times greater than from an earthquake. And what is
being done bout that?
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Three: Working of the Mind
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
COMPTINOLOGY AND TOHU-BOHU
Comptinology (from comptine: French for nursery rhyme, hence the study of same.)
Even a small child will sometimes chant a nursery rhyme and afterwards think, "where did
it come from?" "Oh, it's very old," says the mother. It is indeed very old. No one knows
where it came from. The child grows old and has passed the song to others. There are
variations. Beginning two centuries ago, they have been printed and the oral tradition
is helped in maintaining itself in a bureaucratic world. Stories like "Sinbad the
Sailor" go back and back until we discover that the dynastic Egyptians possessed them.
The longest lived comptines go back to the cycles of chaos and creation.
Although the temptation is strong (and it is conventional to succumb to it) to believe
that nursery rhymes evolve over great lengths of time, this may not be the case. It may
rather be that nursery rhymes begin shortly after a set of events, to put the
population, the young and thereafter unconsciously everyone, into a mood of dreamwork,
letting life go on in a community of memories, without heavy religious ritual every time
a disturbing line of thought occurs. The rhymes are a friendly mocking of the sacred.
Religious chants began even sooner, right away with humanization, we think, and within a
generation the mocking fantastic nursery poetry commences. We are helped to maintain
this theory by adhering to a larger theory, which is that mankind as such is young, and
came about in a prompt hologenetic quantavolution. We do not feel that a nursery rhyme
builds step by step over a hundred thousand years as the possibilities of song dawn upon
an ape-person.
The story of Chicken-Licken (alias Chicken-Little, Henny-Penny) comes to mind. Beginning
with a frightened chicken, pelted from above by a seed or drop, a procession of barnyard
animals forms, led by the conviction that the sky is falling just as the chicken claims,
and moves along seeking the protection of the king, personifying authority or a god,
fearful lest a wicked force, sometimes a fox, should eat them up (as he does in some
versions) or hopeful that a wise owl should explain the fear away (as it does in an
'enlightened' American version). That the fox is an ancient Mars symbol, and the owl an
ancient symbol of Minerva-Athene suggest that some very old mental process may be
repeating itself. The story of Chicken-Little is told from Finland to Tropical Africa
and from Central and South Asia to Ireland. It is entitled "The End of the World" in
Kennedy's Fireside Tales of Ireland.
I have jotted down in my journal, on several occasions, reflections of this sort and
take leave to transcribe several entries here:
Naxos, 10 April 1978
One of my favorite nursery rhymes went:
"Hi diddle, diddle,
The cat in the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see much a sight,
And the dish ran away with the spoon."
This pure nonsense probably bears meaning with every line.
1.
Hi= High. Or, Hey= Pay attention! Diddle = diddle the unconscious, play with the mind.
The line cues into what follows.
2.
Cat associated with music, humming, electricity, purring, "cat gut", static electricity
of cat's fur, cat's eyes, etc.
3.
Cow = Cometary Venus, passing over Moon in the period 3500-687 B. C. Note: Violin cow-
shaped.
4.
Little dog = fox = wolf= star = Mars = lupus Romanus; laugh = cry = disaster and also
Mars wanted Moon.
5.
Dish and spoon = Leyden jar with center rod = overelectrified, juggling, diddling
movements. Also comet with its tail.
There are far too many associated symbols and actions here to be mere nonsense or
coincidence. When the small child delights in it or is fascinated by it, as was I, he a)
loves the rhyme and rhythm, b) the images conveyed c) but are these enough for such old
and widespread, and obsessively appealing jingles unless some deep upsetting memory is
also being "diddled"? |Diddle" has an unknown origin and a long history, most meanings
centering around shaking, turbulence, sex, fiddling (violin) cf. Ox. Eng Dict. I recall
English mothers and nannies telling little boys not to diddle (their penis): "Stop
diddling!" "Hi" is probably "Hey" and pronounced "hay" but I'm not sure it's always so
and been so, many dialect possibilities of either. The "Hey-day" is the most sensational
of days, the peak day of some series of days.
Two months later the journal adds:
Ziegler [Yahweh [p. 85 re last line on Breton fire ritual woman singing: "Leave your
spoon in the bowl for the fire is rising." May be an allusion to the ark-box and
charging pole [of the Exodus, see my Moses book]; electrical conditions are charging up,
building up, and time is propitious to rituals on mountain-tops. Also women in Greece
jump over the flames of kindled bonfires crying "I leave my sins behind me." Compare
with "Cow jumped over the Moon" (Sinn) [Babylonian word for Moon.]
The sexuality of the poem is subliminal. Compare, for example, the bowl and spoon, the
Leyden jar, and the lingam and yoni of ancient Hindu symbolism. The fear and delight of
the first experiences with the Leyden Jar (see Heilbron's history of electricity and
God's Fire) can be associated with unconscious sexuality, the "female" and "male"
electrical connections used today. Electrical twinges have been associated with
pleasures of masturbation and ejaculation since ancient times. The mountain-top orgies
of Bacchus were associated with the relative ease of inciting electrical discharges
there. "Diddle" has an unknown origin and long history. Although the Oxford Dictionary
of English based upon etymological principles does not extend sexual meaning to "diddle"
(out of prudery) the connotation is present in the rhyme and the usage is indestructible.
Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechend talk in Hamlet's Mill (287) of Tammuz,
the grain-god aspect of Osiris, the Saturn of Egypt. A festival of mourning over his
death marked the opening of the Egyptian New Year. The holy event lasted through millennia;
lamented was the god who was cruelly killed by being ground up between millstones.
The authors were reminded of the rhyme of John Barleycorn (a name in American folk stories
that is synonymous with the drinker of whiskey, that is, grain-spirits drinker):
They roasted o'ver a scorching fire The marrow of his bones But a miller used him
worst of all For he ground him between two stones.
Journal, Florence, December 23, 1980
Ami cooked a fine dinner for us at Joe's and Laurie's tonight, Marco joining us. Leeks
wrapped in bacon stewed with white sauce, roast pork, rape. Fruit. Laurie whipped up a
hot zabaglione.
Twice today we talked of the taunting childhood tune, GGEAGE, GGEAGE, GE, GE, GEC.
This is sung while dancing around. All stop. Clap hands. Fall down.
Ring around the rosey,
Pockets full of poseys,
Ashes, ashes,
All fall down.
It looks as if we have another catastrophic theme. A sky body erupts in a ring-like
glow, possibly Sun takes on an aura, or Moon, or comet.
Pockets, pouches, collection, pocks [the pustules of an eruptive disease].
A rosa is a bloomlike sore in German, said Ami. A posey, read Joe somewhere, was a
festering sore of the fourteenth century bubonic plague [He is Deg's nephew, Alfred III,
and Professor at St. John's College; his wife is Laura Haskell.]
Ashes fall from the sky everywhere. The ashes fall down, the plague, and the people
fall down dead.
I think, too, of the recent theory of astronomers Hoyle and Wickramasinghe regarding
the source of plagues (and life) from outer space, independently contrived by Milton and
myself in Solaria Binaria.
Stylida, Naxos, January 5, 1981 Day before Epiphany. The village is on holiday between
Sunday and Epiphany. Twelfth Night - Wotan rides his eight-legged horse. Presents are
given tomorrow, not for Christmas. The Feast of the Kings come bearing gifts to Christ.
Feast of the Wandering Star over Bethlehem. Befana (Italy) is an old witch.
What is happening? What happened? In November is All-Souls and All-Saints Day. All who
died in catastrophe are resurrected. Why not now? Are there two discoordinated holiday
periods upon the subject of the explosion of Saturn, the brilliance of Jupiter, the
coming of the Flood? Forty days before Christmas is Advent. The Flood lasted 40 days.
This is a mourning and penitence period before coming of Christmas - why, so that
expectation and frustration of want of a savior is celebrated. And recall the Pleiades'
connection with November, remnants of the old god, celebrated by many far-separated
peoples in these days.
Christ Jesus is apparently Saturn (Osiris) and Jupiter and possibly Thoth-Christ
Scientist) and Venus (see Sizemore and Meyer: J. C., Morning Star) all accommodated into
one character. The celebrations are rationalized and spun out by Christian thought.
Never mind the searches for a falling star in the presumed days of Christ's birth:
whatever little surprise a meteor might have presented us, the real presence was Saturn,
Jupiter, and Venus in their climactic appearances.
Journal, Trenton, 15 September 1982 At breakfast Ami reads to me from Le Petit Robert,
so big that it shakes the frail table when she opens it. "Tohu-bohu" in French means
chaos. It comes from the Hebrew "tohu oubohou,.. chaos, or the primeval chaos which
precedes creation." Nice.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Three: Working of the Mind
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SANDAL-STRAPS AND SEMIOLOGY
The neophyte comes upon the word "catastrophe" and feels proud to discover within it the
Greek words kata (down) and aster (star), so "failing stars" is heralded as the origin
of the word. Not so, say our betters: the Greek words within it are kata and strophe
(turning) and refer to that part of an ancient drama in which occurs the denouement; the
plot, having reached its culmination, descends, often precipitously.
In a plea for the innocents, I would suggest that what we know of Greek etymology is
based upon late sources. We know only several hundred words of Minoan and Mycenean,
catastrophe not among them. Homer and Hesiod do not employ the word, and they are the
earliest of our Greek sources.
I am fortified in my opinion that catastrophe originally meant disaster (dys-aster) by
more than this lack of sources of early Greek usage. There is a common tendency in
linguistics for people to put two words together ungrammatically and against the
ordinary rules for linguistic construction. Hence, three meanings might arise
independently and join, since their cognition and perception are close, viz., down-
crashing star, huge disaster in general, and the disaster emulating collapse of the plot
of a tragedy.
Benjamin Whorf, in Language, Thought and Reality, p. 261, exemplifies how commonly in
linguistic behavior "a pattern engenders meanings utterly extraneous to the original
lexation reference," to wit: "the word 'asparagus, ' under the stress of purely phonetic
English patterns..., rearranges to 'spargras'; and then since 'sparrer' is a dialectical
form of 'sparrow', we find 'sparrow grass. ' Another case would be the transformation of
Kohlsalat into coleslaw and even, most recently, into coldslaw.
We turn to France for an English etymology, wondering at the word 'martinet' as in the
sentence "Her father was a martinet." In Webster's and then in Robert's French
Dictionary we discover that a martinet in the fourteenth century appears as a bird, then
a chandelier, and by 1743 we find it to be a whip used on children, while in the
seventeenth century there lived a French army officer, Martinet, who was a strict
disciplinarian, whence the usage of the word today.
Let us recall the book of Cohane on The Key with his several basic words, all god-words,
divine, and most likely astral in original reference, og, enah (or hawa), ala, and aza
among them. The Black Magellanic Cloud is the name for the seemingly starless patch in
the Milky Way near the Southern Cross. The British sailors called it the 'Coalsack' and,
coming then from a land of coal, it is understandable. One may choose, says Cohane, and
I agree, between imagining "coalsack" to derive from "coal" and "sack", or to think it
may be remotely related in the dim past to 'Quetzalcoatl' (the planet Venus). For "...
the ancient Mexicans believed that it was through these huge 'empty' spaces that Zoutem-
que and his band of fallen angels arrived on this planet." All but the "t" element of
the Mexican word is present, as we read Oc/ Hawa/ Ala/ Aza/ Ok or Ocoalazock which
sounds like "Coalsack" out of Newcastle. The fallen angel is our Latin Lucifer as in the
Bible, who is specifically the planet Venus; and we need not here explain that we have
in mind the catastrophic events provoked by cometary Venus in the mid-second millennium
B. C., who was not only Quetzalcoatl as savior, but was also a frightful all-destroying
god to the Mexicans.
We shall not proceed much farther here. A study of reversals of letters might be
rewarding (I wrote "rewording" and scratched it out). Thus I think that the word "Mkl"
who is Michael the Archangel and a Hebrew identity for Cometary Venus, may also be
"Mlkh" in reverse, who is Moloch, the godfigure dreaded by the ancient Hebrews. And so
Python (the dragon killed by Apollo) and Phaeton (the solar figure who was struck down
by Zeus to save the burning up of the Earth) and Typhon (the monster dragon also struck
down by Zeus) who is tied closely to the cometary-Venus of the mid-second millennium,
and who is also Typhoon, the storms of South Asia and Hurracan, the great wind god of
the original Americans. But, to refer to The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars.
Typhon is also the Pallas portion of Pallas Athene, the great Athenian goddess, who is
Hephaistos, whose name Robert Graves says means hemerophaistos (he who shines by day),
related to he apaista, (the goddess who removes from sight) who is none other than
Athena. Transmogrifying words is a continuous and eternal human exercise, often
performed unconsciously under disastrous stimulation. As agitation creates invention,
anxiety creates words; the greater the fear the more words - but the more of catatonism,
too - fear of words, being stuck upon words, avoiding words.
Recently two quantavolutionaries engaged in a dispute, the one Editor of the Review of
the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, Malcolm Lowery, a linguist, the other Zvi
Rix, a contributor to the Review and a physician. Rix became over the years the greatest
authority on that symbol of "divine life" and of many religious apparitions, the ankh,
the circle resting upon crossarms and vertical stroke, thus:
By virtue of intensive research, Rix had established that the ankh was not only a
widespread symbol, a religious symbol of wide dedication, but also a manifestation of
androgyny, that is, a representation of the female vulva and the male phallus, and
furthermore was securely identified with a cometary form, especially Venus, with ominous
indications that the comet being discussed was a head that had dropped its tail, the
victim of this accident being not only the two-sexed god concerned, but also the Earth
on which the tail in the form of Phaeton, Typhon, Lucifer and Pallas descended with
disastrous consequences.
Lowery, the Editor, partly out of deviltry and partly out of pedantry, pulled Rix up
sharply. Citing dictionaries of hieroglyphic Egyptian, he could say that "the evidence
of Egyptian script makes it unambiguously clear that when an Egyptian scribe drew an
'ankh' he, at least, was in no doubt that he was drawing a sandal-strap (somewhat
stylized)" [1] . This constraint upon the word excited Dr. Rix into a reply that
explained how Lowery was "putting the cart before the horse," and that "the original
meaning was substantially modified and moderated when terror-stricken humanity managed
to analogise these catastrophe-laden prime ideograms to similar-sounding phonetic
writings and spellings of less frightful character and of much later development" [2] .
The present writer defended Rix, with his complaint, and specified that the castration-
image of the dissevered comet, fully apparent in legends of Typhon and associated
events, would readily descend into a sandal-strap, for the word "foot" is in psychiatric
semiology a frequent substitute for repressed thoughts and words about the phallus.
Moreover, the sandal-strap binds securely the foot, thus, in reverse imagery, to keep it
from falling off like a comet's tail.
I would add another speculation, too far removed etymologically, perhaps, to take
seriously, that the English word "ankle" had once to do with the word "ankh" and for the
same reasons, and if one speaks of "ankle-strap" one might as well be speaking of
"sandal-strap."
When I explained this remotely possible connection to Anne-Marie Hueber, who is expert
in Allemanic (Swiss) German, she remarked that this language possessed a word "anke,"
now obsolete, meaning "butter." We pondered this until it occurred that the German word
"butter," the same as in English, could be confused phonetically with 'boot' or "foot,"
possibly by a Hun invader or an early Christian missionary, and, once again, we should
be on the track of the "ankle-strap" and its connotations.
The same line of thought led me to a story that I had once heard, of how the bread
called Pumpernickel had been named. It seems that the party of Napoleon Bonaparte had
stopped at an inn on one of his journeys through Germany and food was served him.
Napoleon tasted the proffered sour brown bread and handed it to an aide saying, "C'est
bon pour Nicole," this being the name of his horse. The uncomprehending but flattered
host announced that such was the name of his bread in French and so it would be called
thereafter. (Should this story be untrue we are permitted the Italian expression, "Se
non é vero, é ben trovato.")
The heart as the seat of love and soul is not Greek or Roman by origin, but Christian.
The Greeks and Romans were fully and explicitly phallic [3] . The Christian heart, it
need no retailing to modern folk, is and has been for long a motif to be found in a
great many paintings and is referred to in many prayers. The cult of the Sacred Heart of
Jesus originated in the Seventeenth Century with the counter-reformation texts of the
ecstatic nun, Marguerite-Marie Alocoque.
In searching for the origins of this shape, the heart, one is led ultimately to a most
common symbol of prehistoric man, the female vulva. The sign is often an inverted
triangle. As such, it abounds in ancient caves and collections of ancient artifacts.
That the ancient vulva had religious significance as great as that of the Christian
heart is relatively certain. An abstract of a recent article reads "A carved limestone
object found in the East Gravettian [Upper Paleolithic] site at Bodrogkeresztur,
Hungary, has been identified as a uterus symbol. It may also be a lunar calendar" [4] .
Lunar signifies Aphrodite the goddess of love in later times and also the Mother-God and
Mother-Earth.
What can we do but to explain what every scholar in a sense already knows: the eternal
vulva, origin of life and source of affection, was simply inverted by Christian thought,
into the more abstractly identified heart as the origin of life and love. The triumph of
Christianity, sexless in the origin of its god and sexless in the stern teachings of
Paul of Tarsus, required the abandonment of the old symbol and did so by converting it
to the new.
Humans are not always deprived of control over word-making and word-meanings. George
Kaufman the playwright once wrote a line for Groucho Marx - I am not sure of the exact
words. A man calls down for hotel service: "I'd like my ice water." Groucho replies:
"Send up an onion: that'll make his eyes water." If we could only know how many words
began so, unless horrified by the implied blasphemy, we should be continuously amused.
Playing with words helps a language to grow, especially subconscious play, accompanied
by subconscious laughter - relief from anxiety, that is.
Notes (Chapter 16: Sand-straps and Semiology)
1. II SISR (D. 1977), 33.
2. Ibid., 32.
3. Cf. H. M. Westropp and C. S. Wake, Ancient Symbol Worship: Influence of the Phallic
Idea in the Religions of Antiquity (London: Curzon 2nd ed., 1875); John Allegro, the
Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
4. Science (20 August, 1965) 855-6.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Three: Working of the Mind
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MAKING MOONSHINE WITH HARD SCIENCE
[1] Professor Irving Michelson wrote a little piece of "hard science" (his term) called
"Scientifically Speaking..." and subtitled "19-year Lunar Calendar Cycle: Accurate
Adjustment to 365 1/ 4-Day Civil Calendar" [2] . A Greek named Meton of about 432 B. C.
is credited with having discovered the 19-years repetitive coincidence of lunar month
and tropical solar year. Michelson said that Meton's "discovery of the 19-year cycle
presupposes precise knowledge of the length of the lunar month as well as of the solar
(tropical) year of 365.2421988 days, to the second-decimal accuracy at least." He then
claimed that such evolved knowledge would have taken observation of so long a period of
regular celestial motions that no catastrophe could have occurred, as the Velikovsky
circle believed, in the seventh or eighth centuries. The present writer addressed an
ironical reply to these ideas in a related journal.
A comment on Irving Michelson's column
"Scientifically Speaking..."
With all due respect to Professor Michelson, I cannot understand the rationale behind
Pensée's having allowed him (or anyone else for that matter) to pretend to be
"Scientifically Speaking..." It is a usurpation of authority, and an implication that
other contributors to Pensée have written unscientifically. "Science" is exhibited in a
work itself or in a judgment rendered afterwards upon it; it is also a propaganda term
when employed in Professor Michelson's usage. The phrase "hard science" adds insult to
injury.
But rather than continue along this vein, I should like to turn to the substance of
Professor Michelson's arguments. They are misleading and moreover incorrect. They are
also irrelevant to Dr. Velikovsky's theories, which they strain to affect.
Michelson says that "hard science" comes into being when the moon's revolution is
measured to the accuracy of an eight-digit number. But eight digits can be attached to
an IQ score, an automobile license, the average height of Americans, the temperature of
a frying pan, a tonal harmony in music, a rhythmic sequence of Indian dance, and so on.
And if we proceeded to an accuracy of ten digits, or twelve, we might find the moon
revolving a bit irregularly, which a genial mechanism such as Professor Michelson might
trace back to an old disaster.
The important questions are what the number means and what purpose it serves. In the
present case, we are held to believe that this eight-digit number will be shown to (a)
have been used or discovered by a Greek named Meton about 432 B. C., or (b) have been
known to the ancients at a time when catastrophes are alleged to have involved the moon
in changed behaviors. Neither of these is demonstrated, and indeed, Michelson indicates
later on that both implications are unnecessary to his story of Meton. Michelson further
presumes that 250 years are not long enough for a changed lunar month to be noticed or
calculated, but offers no argument on the point.
What Michelson does ultimately argue is that by 432 B. C. (255 years after the presumed
Mars disaster), a four-digit lunar cycle calculation would have been sufficiently
accurate to permit the design of a 19-year calendar involving an intercalation of moon
and sun, granted of course, the sun's 365.25 figure was known (as he takes for granted
and I would not oppose) and provided that anyone cared about the mater.
This is a useful line of inquiry, no matter how deviously pursued. It can help us
understand what was going on in those days.
What was going on? I hope that I may be forgiven for presenting some fictional excerpts
from the recently recovered journal of Kakrates, research assistant to the astronomer
Meton, the Hero of the Golden Letters of 432 B. C. (Incidentally, I doubt that any
Olympic games of that year were held in Athens, as Michelson says, unless some athlete
hurled a discuss awfully far.)
EXCERPTS FROM THE SPURIOUS JOURNAL OF KAKRATES
Tablet ? .
My friend Mikelson and I were drinking a bit heavily last night and I bet him that I
could produce a good all-purpose calendar without the resources of a holy temple at my
disposal. From a window of my house, I can see a skinny tree on the eastern horizon that
I can use for orientation.
Tablet ? .
I have observed the sunrise every day. I noted that after 365.25 days (or was it 365.24
or 365.26?) [3] the rim of the sun peeks up at the edge of the tree again from the left
or north side. I was cheered because I caught the cycle so closely (I didn't touch a
drop of wine the night before). Hence I continued.
Tablet ? .
I watched for another cycle, and then another. It does appear to be 365.25 alright.
Meanwhile, I have learned that various watchtowers and astologers in Thebes, Syracuse,
Memphis, etc. re getting the same effect. Some of them take this game seriously. If
365.25 is not observed perfectly, it can certainly be inferred from statistical
averaging. I haven't told Meton what I'm doing yet, but when I told him of my concept of
averaging, he smiled and patted me on the shoulder. He is busy with city planning. I
could bring his associate, Euktemon, into the picture, but why complicate matters?
Tablet ? .
I have also been observing the moon-days from the opposite windows of my house, as it
sets in the bay. The new moon turned out to repeat its appearance 12 times plus a tenth
less than 11 sun-days in the time it took the sun to touch back upon the tree. I
subtracted the 10.9 days from 365.25, and got 354.35. To get an average month, I divided
this by 12 and got 29.53 days. Suppose I distribute the 11 days among the months, giving
half-days to seven and one and a half days to 5 months. I'd have a workable calendar! I
shall do something later with that little lost time, maybe spread it over the years.
Some of my politician friends have become excited by the game and chipped in funds to
hire a diligent research assistant to help with the sightings. The watchtower and
astrological societies from here and there confirm that their instruments give the same
readings. (I am glad that I entertained several of these chaps at Selena's taverna
during the last Olympics.) Anyhow, it averages out. One phenomenal Chaldean with
sophisticated equipment (I hear he foretold the death of the king's mother-in-law)
reported that he got 29.5306 with averaging. Wow! Six digits! But who needs it. It's
just pedantic overkill.
Tablet ? .
(I wish I could afford papyrus.) Now I added up three solar years of moon-cycles and
discovered that 37 cycles came within a little over four days of matching perfectly.
Carrying out the arithmetical calculations further, I got rid of practically all of the
four-day fraction in 19 years. Much more refined observations would be needed to improve
this cycle. As it stands, even though I have not based it upon observations for a full
cycle, I can see that it will give enough accuracy for centuries. The days will not
perceptibly march ahead of each other over a person's lifetime, or even over the
lifetime of a kingdom.
Tablet ? .
I mentioned that I can match the sun and moon cycles almost exactly on a 19-years base
to the politicians in Selena's taverna, and they are going to make a political issue of
the Calendar. Others said, though, that the idea is politically impractical; a 19-years
"year" that means nothing will bring only ridicule. I said, however, that maybe I could
please the priests and cultists by getting the artist Petty to draw illustrations for
each month using the Roman vestal virgins as models. This must have been what Mikelson
meant when he mumbled something about "pretty-girl calendars," no doubt a Socratic slip
of the tongue [4] . It won't work, they said; these soft-heads want a year for the sun,
a year for the moon, a year for the seasons, a year to begin with the bacchanalia, or
the saturnalia, solstices, or what-not. And, of course, the archons like to have the
years named after their period in office.
Tablet ? .
I must find a way to appease the priests and cultists. They don't like the idea of
automatic calendars (the damned humanists). Maybe I'll intercalate days by the magic
number of seven. I'll figure out a common denominator and then decide what to do with
the extra time. Just as the festival and political calendars do nowadays, I'll take care
of the half-day problem by alternating 29-day and 30-day months. Then, to take care of
the surplus of days, I'll put in an extra thirteenth month of 29 days (the cultists will
like that 13-business); placing it in the years 3,6,8,11,14,17, and 19 will give us the
magic number 7, the number of moving celestial bodies (I'll call them "eternal" since
everyone likes the word.) It also sets well with the 7-stringed lyre. Mikelson has left
town and I can't collect on the bet.
Papyrus ? .
I'm in trouble. The priests won't buy my 19-years calendar. All this talk of late about
"an emerging power elite of secular science and politics" doesn't stand up when the
fortune-tellers start demonstrating on the street. They are pressuring Meton to stop my
moonlighting. He pointed out to them that an issue of academic freedom was involved.
Privately, he gave me to understand that the results of my work have to be published, of
course, in his name. He also insisted that I begin the year on the summer solstice and
that I count months by full moons. Moreover, we must wait for a full 19-years cycle to
prove my contentions. Mere prediction is not enough. Fortunately, some far-sighted
statesman has given Meton a research grant sufficient to set up an observation post with
a panel of three assistants (with myself in charge), and a few other amenities,
including a site-visit to Jerusalem. I put a brass stake by the tree and bought a
donkey, but now visit the research station mostly to pay the assistants and check out
the tree (fortunately, it scarcely grows at all and one of the assistants keeps the dogs
away).
... Here occurs a long time gap in the journal...
Papyrus ? .
I wonder why other Greeks haven't climbed aboard the wagon? Everyone still acts as if
they didn't need an automatic and standard calendar and now we're moving into the 19th
year. The other day I actually saw a priest of one kind or another taste the soil to see
whether spring had begun - with a crowd around him. At least they don't sacrifice humans
anymore to get the crops going. Are scholars afraid to tackle the problem? Haven't the
times been ripe for invention? The priests are always yapping against "taking the human
element out" of calendars. (their human element!).
I suppose that I should have confessed in the beginning that the Chaldeans and Egyptians
knew all of this. But it was pure patriotism that motivated me to suppress the
information. The Greeks must pretend to invent everything. Especially the Athenians.
They would have killed the project if they had thought foreigners had beaten us to the
results. Anyhow, this is all a problem for psychologists and political scientists - the
soft science guys.
Papyrus ? .
Finally! After 20 years. Everyone professes to be amazed. Our party is in power. The
Athenians are ablaze with patriotism. They praise Meton all over town. They are
certifying my formula in golden letters on a prime wall location! In Meton's name, of
course. That will impress the watchtowers and astrological societies - their President
in Gold Letters! He has authorized me to give them all free tickets to the Olympic
Games. But not to that Barbarian who had the gall to write him, "Meton, stop reinventing
the wheel. The Chinese have used your cycle for 100 years, and even the seven
intercalations." Not to mention that anonymity from Egypt who sent him a tablet with
just the obscenity "A" inscribed on it.
Tablet ? .
The gold letters are staying up, but the opposition is too strong. Meton's calendar will
not be adopted after all. They claim that they will check things by the formula from
time to time. Why do they do this? For as long as anyone can recollect, the skies have
been perfectly regular and before that, well, forever. Yet these unscientific idiots
pretend that they have to take their measure every day and every month to be sure things
are the same - as if the skies would fall if these nitpickers turned to more important
problems - like better housing, exclusion of aliens, etc.
... end of Kakrates' journal...
Since I was dubious of Kakrates' work, I asked a living historian of science about the
matter. This was Professor Livio Stecchini, who is an historian of science and has done
much work with ancient calendars and measurements. Professor Stecchini believes (as, in
fact, do I) that Meton knew all the while that the solar year was 365.25 and the lunar
month about 29.5 days, for Stecchini shows, in the following paper, how readily Meton
might have concocted the Metonic cycle, getting the .03 by chance, and then how
Callippus and Hipparchus improved upon it.
Meton was probably offering a simple formula from his stock of astronomical knowledge to
some people who were interested in routinizing and mechanizing the calendar. It was
ordinary applied scientific research and consultation. To demonstrate his formula (or,
better, to replicate the foreign experience for Greek eyes) one would need only
"poorboy" techniques. The Athenians, agree Meritt, Pritchett, and Neugebauer, did not
follow the Metonic cycle, and Meritt says that the Athenians did not tie their months to
lunar observations but followed a rule of convenience with alternate 29 and 30 day
months and an occasional check upon the Moon and Meton to prevent the calendar from
wandering too far astray. Moreover, the four-digit stability of the moon's revolution,
which had been in effect for a couple of centuries, could have been proven out in a few
years, and had nothing to do with when the last destabilizing encounter involving the
moon had taken place. Finally, I leave it to others to make fact out of my fable in the
Meton case, that is, to show how politics determines practical sciences in calendar-
making as in other areas.
Notes (Chapter 17: Making Moonshine with Hard Science)
1. Adapted from Kronos (Fall 1975) 52-6. L. C. Stecchini elaborates on the matter in the
same issue, p. 57. See, as supporting sources: Encyclopedia Britannica (1973) edition),
"Calendar," Vol. III; Benjamin D. Meritt, The Athenian Calendar in the Fifth Century
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press, 1928); Benjamin D. Meritt, The Athenian Year (Berkeley:
Univ of California Press, 1961); William K. Pritchett and Otto Neugebauer, The Calendars
of Athens (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1947).
2. Pensée (Winter 1974-5), 50-2.
3. Editor's note: for convenience, the fractional numbers that Kakrates used have been
converted to the modern decimal system wherever they occur in the journal.
4. Editor's note: the mistake was not Mikelson's. A tablet has come to light disclosing
that the slip was made by another taverna habitué, a scribe and a copyist.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Three: Working of the Mind
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HOLY DREAMTIME IN WONGURI LAND
Towards the Napier Peninsula of Arnhem Land in Australia, there dwell a native people of
the stone age, whose singing is the most developed of their arts. They are of the
Wonguri linguistic group of the Mandzikai clan.
Their traditional songs are rich in myth and often very long. They are arranged in
groups to form particular cycles. Although complete in itself, each song is related to a
central theme. It reconstructs some event or portrays some happening of the traditional
post.
There are sacred and secular song cycles, songs known only to the men or to the women
respectively, or those of interest where both sexes join in and children take part.
There are sacred ceremonial songs, secret songs, of the women, camp songs, love magic
songs, children's songs. There are gossip songs and mourning songs, and songs for every
event in a person's life.
Nearly all songs, even when... they are presented by one particular man in any given
area, are for the collective entertainment or well-being of the whole community; and it
is in this respect that we can observe one of their main functions, the bringing
together of all or a section of the people for the purpose of expressing and renewing
tribal unity and cohesion. The majority of songs, too, are correlated with ceremony and
ritual, with dancing, and the use of certain objects, which explain or represent the
events related in the songs.
There are secular and sacred song cycles but all partake of holy myths. Ronald M.
Berndt, in reporting a classical Wonguri song, the Moon-Bone Cycle, writes that it is a
secular version of some sacred songs of the moity, incorporated in a larger cycle for
age-grading ceremonies.
It is in the sacred version that the full myth is explained, and the totemic beings
and their actions are sung. In the Moon-Bone Cycle given here, the whole myth is viewed,
so to speak, in retrospect.
If a sacred song cycle had been chosen much more discussion would have been involved,
owing to the nature of religious concepts, to the extreme length of these cycles and to
the fact that the majority of words in each song need extensive commentaries... The
sacred singing (which we cannot discuss here) relates episodes of the Moon's adventures
in the same region; these songs bring into perspective the concept of the Eternal
Dreamtime.
In the dreaming period, the period where the utmost past and present are united, the
Moon who was "one of us," lived with the Dugong, his sister the sea-cow, who was also
one of us. The whole region was flat and became flooded in the wet season. There was a
large clay-pan here and
the Moon, after making it, lived here, and later it became his reflection. Here the Moon
and Dugong collected lily and lotus roots (which were to become the Evening Star). One
day when the Dugong was collecting these edible roots, digging them out with her tail,
the leech bit her. She returned to her brother and said: "This place is too dangerous
for me, the leeches are always biting me. I like this country but the leeches spoil it
for me. I am going out into the sea, where I will turn into a dugong."
"And what shall I do?" asked the Moon. "Why, Moon, you can stay in the sky; but first
you must die."
"But I'm not going to die like other people," the Moon answered.
"Why do you not want to do that, brother?" asked the Dugong.
"I want to die and come back alive again," he told her. "All right. But when I die, I
won't come back and you can pick up my bones."
"Well, I'm different," the Moon said. "When I die, I'm coming back. Every time I get
sick I'll grow very thin; then I'll follow you down to the sea, and I'll go with you a
long way out into that sea. And when I'm so thin that I'm only bones, I'll throw them
away into the sea and die. But after three days, I'll get up again and become alive, and
gradually regain my strength and size by eating lily and lotus roots."
"All right, brother," the Dugong answered. "You can stay in the sky, it is better for
you."
The author resumes the tale: "At the same place of the Moonlight and of the Dugong, a
little after the Dugong and Moon went out to sea, a large fight took place between the
Totemic Beings." As the Kangaroo-men were living around the clay-pan, collecting lily
and lotus roots, a Rat-woman gossiped to them that other men were coming to spear them,
and went about "setting one group against the other for no reason at all." Each began to
distrust the other. They began to dance war-dances and kill each other with spears.
"Many of these Totemic Beings were killed, and they were unable to become alive as the
Moon does; they followed the pattern the Dugong had set." They say that women today
gossip like the Rat woman did, and start fights.
So the cycle of songs begins and goes on; both single words and songs are repeated
frequently so that the whole cycle is rarely completed in one evening. "On such
occasions, the song man becomes the teacher of a small group of men who are of his own
particular clan and linguistic group. Stories relating to the songs are discussed,
meanings are explained and the arrangement of words in a song taught by constant
repetition." Sacred "inside" terms and "power names," as well as alternate and composite
words occur in the songs, and what follows is a set of self-descriptive songs.
The Moon song is begun; the people camp in the area of the Moon and Dugong. They store
their clubs as if preparing for the great battle of the Dreaming Period. They construct
carefully shade coverings worthy of their important headman who is related to the
Totemic Beings of the past. They gather like clouds and they work and rest. Then they
venture onto the clay pan looking for roots and disturbing the birds there. The
kangaroo-rats leave significant trails on the clay. Ducks come to leave eggs. The people
dive into the waters for lotus and lily roots. The leeches loosen themselves and fasten
to people. Prawns are burrowing all about. Tortoises swim. Berry-laden vines spread
across the waters. Then night comes and the Moon rises and reminds them of the whole
story (already told) of the Moon and Dugong. The Evening Star or Lotus Bloom rises and
sets, held by its stalk to the place of the Moon, to whom it owes its attachment to the
billabong or clay-pan. The song goes:
Now the New Moon is hanging, having cast away his bone: Gradually he grows larger,
taking on new bone and flesh. Over there, far away, he has shed his bone: he shines on
the place of the Lotus Root, and the place of the Dugong, On the place of the Evening
Star, of the Dugong's Tail, of the Moonlight clay pan...
And Berndt says, "At the rising of the New Moon and the Evening Star the wooden
'trumpet' is blown, the singing sticks are beaten and the songs begin; the shuffling
steps of dancing women are heard..." The Holy Dreamtime has begun. The group is now
where it was in those days, illud tempus. Those were the days of creation, when, with
intimations of catastrophe, the Moon and Venus rose into the sky, prompting the first
human beings to war amongst themselves. Myth, music, and dancing begin to sublimate the
otherwise unforgettable grave early events.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Three: Working of the Mind
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE 'UNCONSCIOUS' AS A LITERARY REVOLT AGAINST SCIENCE*
(* In 1978 the author sought support from the U. S National Endowment for the
Humanities to pursue a line of research that is described here. The application was
unsuccessful, but its theory appears to be worth publication, and it is to be hoped
that a more sympathetic reception will follow, and possibly that another scholar may
take up the theme.)
The final success of the uniformitarian over the catastrophist paradigm in the mid-19th
century signaled a class of scientific restraints upon literature. Writers had to
conform to a demanding science that viewed the universe as ordered and regular, old in
time, only slowly and evenly changing, with a retired God, if any, with species
evolving gradually in competition, and with a mankind who was mechanical and determined
even though the greatest product of nature. Sudden, violent, miraculous, heroic, and
divinely inspired events were reduced to a negligible place in the causative processes
of the world.
Of fiction writers, some conformed to the new consensus. Their novels accordingly
changed to slow and gradual process of realistic character development or a
sociological account without striking change at beginning or end. But literature of the
occult, of science fiction, and of mystery developed too. Most impressive of all was a
literature of the inner mind and especially of the unknown and uncontrolled unconscious
mind, that grew to a peak one generation after the uniformitarian triumph. In the
preceding two generations the concept of unconscious arose in mystical form, was given
philosophical definition by the Romantics, and then formed into a science by Freud and
others. Thus, the greatest writers, such as Dostoevsky, Mann, O'Neill, Proust,
Pirandello, Gide, Joyce, and Kafka, were granted a scientifically rationalized ballroom
of the literary unconscious within which they could work out a number of dramatic and
stylistic forms that were blocked in the external world by uniformitarian principles of
science. Present indications are that the pressures of literature together with new
scientific discoveries are eroding the uniformitarian paradigm and a break-out into new
forms of literary and scientific behavior is imminent.
Such is the thesis here: the concept of the unconscious in literature is postulated as
a reaction to the uniformitarian paradigm in science. The study intends to demonstrate
that the psychological concept of the "Unconscious" originated, developed into its
present form, and functioned in part so that creative writers (among others) might cope
with certain burdensome restraints imposed upon literature by the Uniformitarian (U)
scientific viewpoint that triumphed over Catastrophism (C) in the early nineteenth
century.
That is, the Unconscious is not explainable merely as an accident of the history of
psychology, nor as a necessary, pure scientific discovery coming at a certain stage of
scientific development. Nor was it a mere conceit of the intellectual salons. The
concept of the Unconscious was, perhaps with all of these, the product of an
unconscious alliance of psychiatry and literature aimed at accommodating the new
consensus of science. Specifically in literature, its a highly useful tool of the more
intelligent writers who had to adjust their dramatic forms to a rather incompatible and
unbending scientific scheme. The Unconscious was, almost literally, a means of their
finding Lebensraum after being evicted from the heavenly and earthly spaces of pre-
uniformitarian times.
The survival-service provided by the scientific theory of the Unconscious itself
developed unconsciously. To this day, although there is a general appreciation of the
scientific and literary value of the Unconscious, there appears to be no awareness of
its role in the unceasing interplay between the science and humanities. Actually, the
hypothesis might be extended, in a modified shape, to cover other forms of expression
and knowledge, such as the plastic arts or areas where a subtle appreciation of human
relations is demanded, such as political science and anthropology. In these areas, not
to be dealt with here, as in the literature of the novel, the Unconscious played its
double role as an expediter of adjustment between "the two worlds" of sciences and
humanities, and as an intellectual and literary tool.
Nor shall we dwell upon the study of the occult, of science fiction, of "lost worlds,"
of catastrophes, or of "last survivors;" nor such changes in form as the lengthening
and the "scientizing" or "sociologizing" of the novel, nor changes of substance such as
the decline of the divine and tragic hero. In relation to the great scientific
transformations, we deal only with the concept of the Unconscious, not with the broad
spectrum of literary and intellectual changes.
As applied to literature, the Unconscious aided and abetted writers to manipulate time
and space freely, to achieve sudden leaps and "catastrophes" in plot, and to
reintroduce "gods and devils"; such maneuvers had formerly been readily licensed, but
were no longer allowed if one wished to be considered a "serious" writer under the
Uniformitarian regime. One was under pressure to conform to the Uniformitarian paradigm
(or model, or Weltanschauung, or word-view, or ideology, or belief-system). How the
accommodation of literature to science was accomplished is to be shown by a general
historical analysis and an intensive study of the "unconscious" as employed by eight
great authors. The hypothetical that follows this memorandum may help
to clarify the purposes and procedures of the proposed research and serve as a guide to
the commentary that follows. But before going into details, a statement of the
significance of the project is in order.
Any illumination that the project may bring to the great particular works under
analysis can be considered of some significance. The possibility of success here lies
with the methodology (see below) which is expected to evolve in the course of study. We
have applied the method of content analysis to materials so diverse as open-ended
responses of Americans to questions about their politics, to description of hundreds of
budgetary programs of the federal government, and to the varied output of enemy
propaganda in wartime. We should, at a minimum, answer questions such as the following:
(Addressed to a particular author) What fraction of his work occurs within the
Unconscious frame? How does he move the "plot" within this frame? Is the Unconscious a
substitute for, an imitation of, and a contradiction of "reality"? How does he handle
transitions into and exits from the Unconscious? Do climaxes occur in or outside of the
Unconscious? In how many respects are the rules of the U paradigm obeyed in the exo-
Unconscious material? (Of all authors) Do they establish a consistent and complete map
of the Unconscious? Does the map conform to the "scientific" map of the Unconscious
used by Freud and other psychiatrists? In sum, what generally have the writers achieved
in putting across their messages, in movement, in style, in dramatic excitement by the
use of the concept of the Unconscious?
In a more general sense, the project has importance for understanding the genesis of
the concept of the Unconscious, which may have been the crowning achievement of the
human mind in the century, 1850-1950, and which may be a principal and still
unappreciated source of the relativity physics of Einstein and the indeterminacy
principle of Heisenberg and thence of the breakdown of Newtonian physics. (Schlipp,
1951) I intend to suggest such possibilities.
That the study postulates flatly that unconscious forces entered into the development
of the concept of the Unconscious itself is not without significance. Scientific
concepts, like ordinary parents, have a way of saying "Do as I say, and not as I do."
In the very beginning of the period under study, Wilhelm von Humboldt, that incredibly
active and resourceful explorer-scientist, coined the term "Weltanschauung" and
"claimed that the science of a certain period was always unconsciously determined by
its Weltanschauung." (Ellenberger, 1970, 201) This idea, which I originally obtained in
1939 from Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, pointed me towards my first book, Public
and Republic (1948, 1951), which demonstrated the unperceived connections between
Weltanschauung (for which, read paradigm or ideology or world view) and surprisingly
specific devices of political representation in American history (such as proportional
representation and universal suffrage).
In developing its hypotheses, the study can uncover more fully the important
transactional role that Freud played in the interfaces of the sciences and literature.
By insisting on the scientific character of the Unconscious, in the face of disbelief,
opposition, and rebellion, he built bridges among the three worlds and maintained their
defenses until a generation of thinkers and writers had crossed over them.
The historiography of ideas here proposed may make some contribution methodology (see
below). If the proposed "hard" component of the method - involving standardized content
analysis of some 40 volumes and auxiliary materials - contributes to the final
conclusions, which will depend substantially upon more conventional (no matter how
delicate) methods of ideological analysis, then the methodology of literary analysis
will take a step forward, and the techniques can be applied to other fields, most
directly to those in which the Unconscious plays an important role, as for example
political science. Here, for instance, one could hypothesize that a sociogenic route
ran from Malthus to Darwin to Freud to Lasswell, with a "rational" diversionary and
less productive route from Darwin to Bagehot to Wallas to Lasswell.
Still another point of significance has to do with why the investigator should propose
this study only now, after 38 years of interest in the general area. Until recently, he
has not known enough of the problem-area. He has long been familiar with the literary
giants that constitute the "panel of respondents" for the study, Doestoevsky, Mann and
the others, and used most of the tools and concepts in other areas. In the past dozen
years, he has been working steadily in the history of science and its relations to
religion, legend and ancient literature, and upon the origins of human nature, the
results of which research have begun to appear only very recently.
Lately, he has come to think that a new paradigm of science may be imminent, one which
synthesizes the uniformitarian and catastrophist Weltanschauung in futuristic terms.
Within the last decade, the universe has been dubbed "explosive," the sun "inconstant,"
the geographical poles "tilted" and "reversed," the globe of the world "cleaved," the
crust of the earth "convulsed," the civilizations of the Bronze Ages "razed" by natural
forces, the species "extinguished in waves," the atmosphere "ravaged" by mutagenic
radiation storms, the hominid recently transformed into a "hallucinatory" human, and
Uniformitarianism reduced to "a methodological hypothesis": all of these statements
have been made by "establishment" scientists of high rank.
We think that the signals of a changing major paradigm are to be found not only in
science but in the arts and humanities, perhaps in the burgeoning of interest in what
this study regards as other "escape hatches" of the literati: science fiction in all
media, extreme violence, catastrophes, the occult in many forms, "last survivors"
themes and "lost worlds." There is searching for a new paradigm in literature that
would burst the bounds of "the Literary Unconscious" and flood out into the exterior
world under new permissive conditions, upon the dismissal of the gatekeeper, the
Uniformitarian paradigm; and literature would then be partially emptied of the
Unconscious that had been elaborated in the century under discussion here. In such a
case, there may be something prophetic in this "Last Hurrah" for the Unconscious, and
the study may offer some theoretical and methodological possibilities to those who will
be addressing themselves to the literature of the future.
At bottom, the project owes much of its importance to the contribution it may make to
relations between "the Two Worlds" of science and the humanities. Indeed, we have here
"Three Worlds," for we envision a three-way interaction among social sciences
(psychology, sociology), the humanities, and the natural sciences. The study can reveal
how far-reaching are the transactions and connections between the worlds in these large
regions of intellectual movement, which, it is submitted, have not been as well
explored as is generally believed.
DETAILED EXPOSITION OF THE PROJECT
A number of elements composed the U paradigm as it emerged victorious from its
centuries of struggle with catastrophism, as the C paradigm is often called: time and
space are absolute; the Newtonian laws of gravity and motion govern natural events
rigidly; the heavens are constant and the universe is orderly; they operate through
measurably equal units of time and through measurably equal coordinates of space; time
is long and uninterrupted by sudden leaps; the surface of the earth has accumulated its
features over long eons of time; nor are sudden leaps found in biology and cultural
history, which have proceeded "by very short and slow steps" (Darwin); and social
change is part of "cosmic evolution" (Herbert Spencer).
We have not, apparently, defined the U paradigm in its present circumscribed form
(which already shows it to be on the defensive) as a mere hypothesis that rates of
change in geology are to be considered as having been uniform unless proven to the
contrary. Rather we take up the U idea in its broadest form as a world view, in the
period of its great victory. For it was tied to two centuries of prior changes in the
sciences of man and the skies. The philosopher-psychologists Locke, Hume, Fontanelle
and Diderot had made of man a mechanical creature, highly determined by external
forces. Hutton, the father of geological uniformitarianism, published his Theory of the
Earth in 1775. Writes Mason (1962, 403), "Hutton based his view that the rock-forming
agencies of the earth were constant on the by now established theory that the solar
system was mechanically stable and permanently self-sustaining."
The close friendship and association of Darwin with the great U geologists adds
credibility to the labeling of a U paradigm. In fact the peak prestige of the U
paradigm would probably be registered around 1875, after the publication of Descent of
Man. (The Origin of Species had been published and immediately sold out in 1859.) By
1875, too, Ernest Renan was widely known for his social-scientific studies of religion
and myth, foreshadowing The Golden Bough of James Frazer, of whom it has been said that
"Frazer seems an English Renan, so close do the two men appear at number of points both
in outlook and reputation" (Vickery, 1973). The U paradigm penetrated all scientific
fields, the social sciences, and social philosophy (including both Marxists and
capitalists).
The criterion most commonly attributed to U is that it held man and nature to be
forever undergoing a constant slow rate of change. Even if no other features of the U
paradigm were unfriendly to literature, this one would be fatal to amiable concourse
between science and literature. Literature has undergone great transformations from its
prehistoric origins onwards, but one crowning trait has persisted: literature depends
upon erratic and sudden rates of change; it demands them; its humanistic quality says,
"Give me surprising and revolutionary change - I must have such concepts as the Greek
'catastrophe, ' the 'turning down point, ' and only then can I give you a story."
By contrast with U, Catastrophism, whose principles had been steadily eroding between
1600 and 1875, offered the following beliefs: the world, the species, and mankind were
created abruptly; they were repeatedly subject to destruction by divine or natural
forces in the skies and earth; the time spanned by these catastrophes was short,
changes in temporal and spatial dimensions of the universe are brought on by divine,
heroic, and natural forces that are immense and unpredictable; all the hosts of heaven
-- sun, moon, stars, planets -- may change their motions and qualities; in this awful
setting, measurement is less of the essence of being than miracles.
The Unconscious may be defined briefly here as those mental operations that are
ordinarily not subject to awareness or recall. They exercise effects upon all life
processes, including intellectual and emotional behavior. The Unconscious is variously
portrayed and compartmentalized. One of the tasks of the proposed study is to compare
and contrast the topology of the Unconscious as psychiatry sees it with the topology as
it has been fashioned by literary figures for the purposes of their art. In literature
the Unconscious was scarcely developed so long as the C paradigm prevailed. It was
buried in sin and guilt, projected as the workings of gods and devil. Miracles and
'true' prophecy were accepted as movers of action. Authors could invoke seriously
mysterious life forms, natural disasters, and portents. The external world could be
turned upside down instantly. The skies were inhabited by a heavenly host that passed
to and from the earth.
As examples, consulting the Gospels (Strauss, 1820), or Shakespeare's Antony and
Cleopatra (Wolfe, 1976), one sees how the hero, framed in the C paradigm, lived and
died in company with prodigious manifestations of nature. The 'hero' in modern
literature died in a way to satisfy the U paradigm. The 'hero' has managed to stay
alive in politics by causing his own catastrophes, wars, and holocausts.
In the period of a century following 1870, frank expressions of catastrophism were
effectively stilled in the serious intellectual world of science and literature.
Literature (and indeed all art) might have been expected to show no structural and
thematic changes correlative with the changes in scientific philosophy, or to exhibit
changes that were in tune with the dominating world view of science. And, in fact, this
was true to a certain extent of the best literature as well as continuously true of
popular writing whose audience lived always in catastrophic as well as uniformitarian
belief systems. Stendhal's hero of Rouge et Noir rued that he was born too late for the
Battle of Waterloo, and committed murder finally to achieve drama, an indication
perhaps of the reluctance of the old pre-uniformitarian world view to accept the new
unglamorous world view. Manzoni's Betrothed dwelled in earlier times, endured a
terrible plague, but responded to modern economic 'laws' of Smith, Malthus, and
Ricardo. The popularity of the novel came rapidly, not only to please a new kind of
public, but also to supply the author's need for more pages to develop stories, to
embrace time, to attend to the once "insignificant." The poets, significantly, went
"mad," like Baudelaire, and art and poetry went "bohemian." And we would point out that
here was an escape route from the intolerable normality and statistical quality of the
uniformitarian historical and world vision.
But meanwhile a major "normal" substitute formation for the dying catastrophism was
occurring. It would be consonant, even if uncomfortable, with the Uniformitarian
consensus. Psychiatry began its long march. Indications of "the Unconscious" began to
appear. Henri Ellenberger's excellent (1970) book brings out the highlights. (It is
misleadingly entitled, The Discovery of the Unconscious. A small fraction of the large
book actually deals with the Unconscious, and nowhere does the work treat of the
hypothesis of the presently proposed research, except by utmost indirection and as
noticed by an ear cocked for it. Its subtitle of The History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry is more descriptive of the contents.)
Mesmerism, spiritism, magnetism and hypnotism dominated early psychiatric circles. In
literature, Edgar Allen Poe used the theories in his stories. The novelists Charles de
Villers, E. T. A. Hoffman, Alexandre Dumas, and even Balzac also incorporated
magnetism. "But," writes Ellenberger (p. 161), "magnetism was more exploited by popular
writers than by great ones." Further, "Magnetism was condemned by the Academie and
despised by Universities." (p. 160) Victor Hugo practiced spiritism. In Flaubert's
Salammbo (1859) the subconscious eroticism of a maiden brings about hysterical
behavior. "Hypnotism inspired a number of novels," (p. 165) such as George du Maurier's
bestseller Trilby.
It is fairly obvious that these modes of psychiatry could not long confront the
juggernaut of uniformitarian science. They passed and with them their literary
passengers. A second wave of ideas came into psychiatry with the German romantic
movement (1800-1830) --an ideal, a yearning, a love of nature -- but then also a school
of Naturphilosophie (von Schelling et al.), with a deep interest in the "soul" and the
unity of man and nature. Freud and Jung were heavily influenced by Romanticism, and of
course the intermediary psychiatric thinkers -- Von Schubert, Troxler, Carus, Fechner,
and Bachofen as well. "Fundamentally Romantic are the concepts of unconscious,
particularly as revived in Jung's 'collective unconscious' and the emphasis on dreams
and symbols." (Ellenberger, 205).
According to Ellenberger, "After 1850, the philosophy of nature and Romanticism seemed
to have completely disappeared. It was the period of positivism and the triumph of the
mechanistic Weltanschauung. (He excepts Fechner and Bachofen.) Wilhelm Griesinger
(1817-69) stands out here, a synthesizer of brain anatomopathology, neuro-psychiatry,
clinical psychiatry, and dynamic psychiatry. "He proclaimed that the greatest and most
important part of the psychic processes were unconscious." (p. 241)
Nietzsche is, of course, the exemplar of the Romantics in many ways and an enemy of the
uniformitarian credo, with his ideas of the super-man, the will, and moral
preoccupations. "Nietzsche is inexhaustible in his attempts to show how every possible
kind of feeling, opinion, attitude, conduct and virtue, is rooted in self-deception or
an unconscious lie. Thus, 'everyone is the farthest to himself, ' the unconscious is
the essential part of the individual, consciousness being only a kind of ciphered
formula of the unconscious, 'a more or less fantastic commentary on an unconscious,
perhaps unknowable, but felt, text. '" (p. 273)
Theodore Thass-Thieneman (1968) reports that the concept of the unconscious was
actively at work in linguistics before Freud and quotes Hermann Paul (1880, trans.
1888): "Perhaps the greatest progress by modern psychology consists in the
acknowledgment of the fact that a great many psychological processes go on without
clear consciousness, and that everything which has been in consciousness remains an
effective motive in the unconscious. The acknowledgment of this as a matter of fact is
of the greatest importance for linguistics, and it became utilized by Steinthal in
great extent. All manifestations of speech are growing out of this dark space of the
unconsciousness of the mind." (p. 23 of Principles of the History of Language, 1888.)
Steinthal's work was contemporary with that of Paul. By 1889, Hericourt could write in
the Revue Scientifique that the unconscious activity of mind was a scientific truth
established beyond doubt, and claimed that Chevreul had experimentally demonstrated so.
(Ellenberger, 314)
"In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the philosophical concept of the
unconscious, as taught by Schopenhauer and Von Hartman, was extremely popular, and most
contemporary philosophers admitted the existence of an unconscious mental life."
(Ellenberger, 312). There was no absolutely new theory, but the growth was exponential:
"The assumption had been held for many centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, it attracted more attention; in the nineteenth, as one of the cornerstones
of modern dynamic psychiatry. [N. B.: This term refers mainly to therapeutic as opposed
to laboratory or experimental psychology, but also to Fechner and Helmholtz.] The
traditional speculative approach, which was also that of the Romantics, was now
supplemented by two other approaches, the experimental and the clinical." (Ellenberger,
311) Sigmund Freud, trained in neurology, attracted to hypnosis, and inspired by
Romanticism, joined the scientific temper to the literary needs and produced a theory
of the Unconscious that would bridge (not without strains and stresses) the chasm
between uniformitarian science and creative literature. He opened up a grand ballroom
of the mind, showed how its scenery could be changed instantly, depicted the wars that
could be waged and the defeats suffered within it, extended its billings to include
everyday life and jokes as well as tragedy, introduced the gods as the gigolos of
illusion-seekers, and then, to help the literary writer more, even wrote the songs to
be danced to with his ideas of symbols and languages.
A most significant contribution of the builder of the mental ballroom was his life-long
pursuit of scientific respectability so that those who entered and departed would not
be ashamed or endure the hoots of derision from scientists gathered at the doors. The
occult, science fiction, allegories, fairy tales, and other literary devices to tell a
story despite the restraints of science have been extremely popular, but have not won
to their authors the kudos of the science-dominated elites. "Freud claimed... that his
world was grounded in reality, perceived by scientific method." (Roazen, 18) In
relation to literature, his attitude is that of a scientist who is trying to study by
scientific methods the writer's advanced ideas: "... Creative writers are valuable
allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host
of things between heaven and earth, of which our philosophy has not let us dream."
(Quoted by Roazen, 16-7.)
Freud, rather than Nietzsche, became the central figure in the history of the
Unconscious partly because he was a conformer to the uniformitarian ideal. By contrast,
Nietzsche was in revolt against science; science "is a principle inimical to life and
destructive. The will for truth could be a disguised wish for death." (Ellenberger,
273) So it came about that Nietzsche, who knew and spoke of the unconscious, of
inhibitions, sublimation, repression, functional amnesia, selfdestructiveness and the
"id" before Freud, and was admired by Thomas Mann, Carl Jung and a host of literati and
conoscenti, was banned from the precincts of Uniformitarian science where Freud was
allowed, no matter how reluctantly, to enter. Freud's striving for scientific status
has governed psychiatric history over nearly a century, and the realm of the
unconscious is widely regarded as one of the great scientific "discoveries" of the
modern age. Thousand of practitioners in many fields of science have employed the
concept. It was to this authoritative support, then, that the writer might refer when
asked his credentials as a speaker of truths. It is not generally appreciated how
important this was and now is to the serious writer who seeks to employ fiction in its
various forms as a teacher of humanity.
Just as it has become plausible that practically every scientific canon of the U
paradigm would threaten literary creativity, it may become credible that the U paradigm
would provoke defense mechanisms, and particularly, the Unconscious. But we have to
analyze carefully the dynamics of the events; they are quite roundabout. Here is an
hypothesis of how the "scientific Freudian" would reason, using U premises.
Human behavior is animal. Animal (human) behavior was a long time is developing. What
is civilized is also ancient (prehistoric, primitive [cf. Fraser]). Morality is animal
and relative. It is built up in a culture, like beavers and ants and apes build their
behavior patterns. Myth, language, and symbols develop either on a constant plane or
curve of rationality and clarity over long periods. The evidences of catastrophism are
interpreted as expressions of repressed instinctual tendencies. The developing
intelligence - mechanical though it be - is given the possibility of understanding and
controlling nature. Both the environment and human mind are in a "steady state." The
feelings of catastrophism are attributed to the repressed traumas and anxieties of
"normal" existence in civilization.
In the end, the theory of the unconscious substituted for analogous functions of pre-
Unconscious psychology. Thus was filled the vacuum left by the "scientific" destruction
of the latter when U took over from C.
The criticism often directed against the theory of the Unconscious, that it was non-
provable, non-testable, etc., is perhaps correct, but irrelevant to the functions of
the theory, which becomes in effect part of the U ideology.
Once introduced and elaborated as part of the scientific corpus, the Unconscious made
its way more readily into literature. As Steiner (1967, 6) has said, "The science will
enrich language and the resources of feeling (as Thomas Mann showed in Felix Krull, it
is from astrophysics and microbiology that we may reap our future myths, the terms of
our metaphors)... And it is precisely the 'objectivity, ' the moral neutrality in which
the sciences rejoice and attain their brilliant community of effort, that bar them from
final relevance."
However, by our theory, the Unconscious was not transferred as a topological field or
map into the novels and dramas. Rather it was reworked. The literary Unconscious will
probably be shown not to have the same geometry as the scientific Unconscious. For
example, Freud's typology of regressions is not the typology adopted by novelists. No
one yet knows what typology the novelists drafted and settled upon, perhaps none at
all, perhaps highly idiosyncratic forms. We may discover this structure in some part.
Yet, a priori, when Freud discerns a regression from conscious to unconscious, from the
present to childhood, and from language to pictorial and symbolic representations, we
are entitled to move with Proust's "Recovering of Lost Time," (as it is better
translated) for evidences of this typology, or for additional ones or for substitutes.
And so it is with a number of the mechanisms and delineations of the Unconscious; in
this study, even though it is not the central issue, the comparison of literary
structuring of the unconscious with scientific structuring will come naturally and one
day perhaps tell us much about the nature of literary needs and inventions.
The proposed study would proceed to identify among a selected group of authors the
biographical information that would indicate their awareness of and interaction with
the concept of the unconscious, then to show in the work of the same authors how the
concept of the unconscious is employed, and finally, to examine, by comparison with the
uniformitarian "real world," how the "unconscious world" of these writers manages to
satisfy the demands of scientific respectability while achieving the requirements of
literary fiction. Because the spread of the uniformitarian paradigms and the
development of the idea of the unconscious occurred throughout western civilization, it
might be well to study writers from several countries. Further, leading writers, rather
than typical authors, should such exist, were chosen, because of their influence upon
the other writers, teachers, scientists, and students of their cultures, and also, I
should add, because I am more familiar with their lives and work. Thirdly, authors who
altogether complete the range of literary activities made possible in "the ballroom of
the unconscious" were selected.
To these ends, the following authors and works were chosen: F. Doestoevsky (1821-1881)
for his pre-Freudian use of the Unconscious. The Insulted and Injured (1861); Crime and
Punishment (1866); The Idiot (1868); The Possessed (1871-2); The Brothers Karamozov
(1879-80)
Andre Gide (1869-1951) for his stylistic mastery and methods of disclosing unconscious
motives. Fruits of the Earth (1897); The Immoralist (1902); Strait is the Gate (1909);
Cellars of the Vatican (1914); The Counterfeiters (1926).
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) for objectifying the unconscious by treating reality as
surrealism. "Metamorphosis" and Other Stories (var. d.); The Trial (1925); The Castle
(1926); Amerika (1927).
James Joyce (1882-1941) for the frank and full integration of the "stream of
consciousness" (and unconsciousness) into reality settings. Dubliners (1914); Ulysses
(1922); Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Chamber Music (1907); Exiles
(1918).
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) for his frank devotion to the morality of Nietzsche and his
careful, logical delineations of the unconscious vs. the rational. Buddenbrooks (1901);
Magic Mountain (1927); Death in Venice (1911); Doctor Faustus (1947); The Confessions
of Felix Krull (1954).
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) for his explorations of tragic madness and the Oedipal
unconscious. Strange Interlude (1928); Mourning Becomes Electra (1931); Ah, Wilderness
(1933); The Iceman Cometh (1946); Long Day's Journey into Night (1955).
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) for his superimposition of scientifically possible
contradictions into plot and character. The Old and the Young (1913); Right You Are If
You Think You Are (1918); Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921); Naked (1924);
Tonight we Improvise (1930).
Marcel Proust (1867-1922) for his mastery of time in all of its unconscious aberrations
beneath the ticking of the "clockwork universe." Remembrance of Things Past (7 vols.,
1913-7).
Besides these authors, to whom distinct chapters of the intended monograph are devoted,
occur other intellectual figures who are to be treated in the proposed research. They
include Shakespeare, John Bunyan, John Milton, and Voltaire in Chapter I; Newton,
Fontanelle, Locke and Hume in Chapter II; Hutton, Lamarck, Lyell, Cuvier, Buckland and
Agassiz in IV. Boulanger, rarely mentioned, is discussed in Chapter VI; he combines
scientific catastrophism (comet and flood); a theory of the origins of religion in
real-world fear; a theory of collective amnesia; and the use of the myth from
suppressed traumas - all in an unprecedented manner.
For some time now (one may argue) the theory of the Unconscious has been turning
against the U paradigm. For it has been bringing to the fore unassimilable,
uncomfortable, anxiety-producing material. Since the disintegration of catastrophic
religions and political ideologies, there has been no vessel to hold its acids.
The U theory had implied that "in time" therapies would be devised to control and
appease the Unconscious. Behaviorist psychologists such as Watson and Skinner have
tried to turn their backs upon it. Under the U theory, all is explainable; when
explainable it is controllable; when controlled, anxiety is reduced and happiness is
produced. To the extent that this sequence has failed to materialize and disenchantment
with the theories has occurred, the concept of the Unconscious is counter-productive
for U. That is, the Unconscious (with the old C paradigm admission to "science" denied
and its controlling capacities foregone) can only turn on itself in literature and art,
allying itself with impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, the occult, science
fiction, yoga-tao-sufi, and other modes of compatible existence. The "tragic" departs
from the art and literature; the "contradictory" (irony, farce included) and "obscene
reality" replace it; there are phenomena to label "tragic" but no entity to judge them
to be tragedy; the tragedy is like the tree falling in the forest unheard and
unobserved.
Moving along in tandem with the U and Evolutionist injunctions, the Unconscious has
been revealed to affect thousands of psychological functions and social behaviors, in
areas that must be designated non-instinctual or at least not wholly instinctual, and
therefore human. Perhaps our historical study may generate hypotheses in answer to the
questions: What will follow the U paradigm? Or, after the Unconscious, what?
The literary mind is not happy with being a "reservation Indian." A continuous
bombardment of the scientists occurs. We are so used to it that we only know of its
excesses. The literary mind wants the real world to have the catastrophic qualities so
that it can turn its plots and characters loose upon it. This will continue to cause
tension between science and literature, with science requiring literature to be
'abnormal' and literature wishing its innermost thoughts to be 'normal. ' Perhaps, as
Neuman (1959, 25) has written, "the breakdown of consciousness, carrying the artist
backward to an all-embracing participation with the world, contains the constructive
creative elements of a new world vision."
Added note on Methodology: Types of Sources and Causal Connections Sought
The major methodological challenges of the project have to deal with gathering relevant
and ample data and establishing causal relations between several critical sets of
events.
I. Data Occur in Several Classes
a.
Writings in the History of Science, such as works number 9, 21, 27, 28, 29, 40, 47, 78
in the accompanying bibliography.
b.
History of Literature in general or in special aspects, such as numbers 1, 22-4, 71,
56, 59.
c.
History of Psychology, # 16, etc.
d.
History of Ideas, such as items 8, 37, and 65.
e.
Works of Figures Prominent in Parts I and II. These are generally available, as with S.
Freud, Standard Edition (20), Kaufmann on Nietzsche (38), Boulanger's works (3) are
rare, but have been read at Princeton U. Library where they remain available.
f.
Works of the Panel of 8 Authors: generally available both in original languages and in
translation. An estimated 40 volumes are involved here, averaging 5 per author.
g.
Derived Data: the systematically collected information obtained from the works of the
Panel of 8 authors. The parameters of this information, for which the collective terms
"questionnaire" and "framework of interrogation" are used above, have to be formulated;
this task is one of the most rigorous and demanding phases of the investigation. In a
vital sense, the project is the devising of a "framework of interrogation" for the
panel of authors and other data. Putting aside the systematic searching for
biographical connections and other material of use to the study, the examination of the
panel works to extract from them their "geometry" and the "dynamic" of the unconscious
that they employ. There occur questions such as: What proportion of the time in each
work does Author A deal with the Unconscious? In which of the following psychological
categories (derived from the scientific typography) does the U action take place?
(There follows a set of categories.) If there is no easy fitting, describe the image
(map, idea, functions) of the Unconscious that the writer is pursuing.
h.
Biographical and autobiographical writings involving the 8 authors, such as the
Journals of Gide.
II. Major Causal Transactional Connections
a.
Theory of the Unconscious in Science. Well-recorded in the sources.
b.
Between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. Data appears adequate and interconnections
already well developed.
c.
Between (a) uniformitarianism, (b) Catastrophism, and (c) psychology of the
unconscious. Difficult (an typical of historiography of ideas). If ab, bc, ac and abc
are identified (or distinguishable) as interacting according to certain typical modes,
then statements of their causal connections can be deduced. If influences between and
among them are directly attributed by participants, then causal transactions are more
strongly proven.
d.
Between the psychology of the Unconscious and literature of the unconscious. Appears
solvable because both universes (psychologists and literary figures), are in touch
abundantly, directly and through intermediaries of press, common acquaintances and
influences.
III. Topology of the Unconscious in Science and Literature
Topology of the Psychological Unconscious has not been finely drawn; existing schemes
of the Unconscious may be improved by our analysis here. Topology of the Literary
unconscious has to be invented almost entirely by the investigator. (This is the
"ballroom of the unconscious" metaphor used above.) Even isolated gems, such as this
statement from the pen of George Steiner (1967,31), are exceedingly rare: "As if aware
of the fact that science had torn from language many of its former possessions and
outer provinces, Joyce chose to annex a new kingdom below ground. Ulysses caught in its
bright net the live tangle of subconscious life; Finnegan's Wake mines the bastion of
sleep."
The topologies must then be related to the original topology of the Uniformitarian and
Catastrophist paradigms.
Efforts at introducing strict logico-empirical and quantitative method into the history
of new ideas are infrequent possibly because they are rarely successful. This does not
mean, however, that they serve no heuristic purpose, or that they do not result in an
underlying structure that produces a superior, if seemingly qualitative, work. I am not
relying rigidly upon the content analysis techniques described above to disgorge neat
tables; if, as is likely, they produce fairly organized heaps of data, I shall be
neither surprised nor displeased, but shall fall back upon the "tried and true" styles
of literary analysis employed in such works as Mario Praz' The Romantic Agony, or John
Vickery's The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. As H. T. Pledge wrote in his History
of Science (p. 143) "Science should explain what we notice... not notice only what it
can explain." I shall try to explain what I notice by the most exact means possible.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PERTINENT WORKS
1. Richard F. Atnally. "The Human Trinity: The Shapings of Time in Eighteenth Century
Literature" (Unpublished Paper delivered at MLA Convention, New York, 1976).
2. Marie Bonaparte. "Time and the Unconscious," 21 International Journal of
Psychoanalysis (1940), 427-68.
3. Nicholas-Antoine Boulanger. L'Antiquité devoilée... ages, 3v (Amsterdam: M. M. Rey,
1977).
4. Donald Brinkmann. Probleme des Unbewussten (Zurich: Rascher, 1943).
5. F. S. Cohn. "Time and the Ego," 26 Psychoanal. Q. (1957), 168-89.
6. F. G. Crookshank. Individual Psychology and Nietzsche (London: C. W. Daniel, 1933),
Pamphlet # 10.
7. Charles Darwin. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2v. (1871, many
editions since).
8. __________. The Origin of Species (1859).
9. Alfred de Grazia. "An Early Mathematical Derivation of an Election System," 44 Isis
(Jan. 1953), 42-50.
10. ___________. Public and Republic: American Ideas of Political Representation (New
York: Knopf, 1951)
11. Sebastian de Grazia. Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Doubleday, 196).
12. L. Dooley. "The Concept of Time in Defense of Ego Integrity," 4 Psychiatry (1941),
4: 13-25.
13. Jan Ehrenwald, ed. The History of Psychotherapy: From Healing Magic to Encounter
(New York: Aronson, 1976).
14. Loren Eiseley. The Invisible Pyramid (New York: Scribners 1970).
15. Mircea Eliade. Cosmos & History: The Myth of The Eternal Return (New York: Harper,
1959).
16. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books,
1970).
17. Linda Fleming. The Sub-Culture of Science Fiction (Chapel Hill, N. C.: U. of N. C.,
P D. Dissertation in Sociology, 1977).
18. P. G. Fothergill, Historical Aspects of Organic Evolution (London, 1952).
19. J. T. Fraser, ed. The Voices of Time (N. Y.: Braziller, 1968).
20. Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud (trans. and edited by J. Strachey with Anna Freud, London: Hogarth Press, 1955-).
21. C. C. Gillispie. Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific
Thought, Natural Theology and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (1951).
22. Charles Glicksberg. The Literature of Nihilism (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. Press,
1975).
23. ______________. Modern Literary Perspectivism (Dallas: SMU Press, 1970).
24. ______________. The Self in Modern Literature (U. Park, Pa.: U. of pa. State Press,
1963).
25. Stephen Jay Gould. "Evolution's Erratic Pace," Natural History (May, 1977), 12.
26. John C. Green. The Death of Adam (Ames: Iowa State u. Press, 1959).
27. George Grinnell. "The Origins of Modern Geological Theory," I Kronos # 4 (1976),
68-76.
28. A. R. Hall. The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern
Scientific Attitude (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954).
29. John Hampton. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger et la science de son temps (Geneve: Droz,
1955).
30. Edward von Hartmann. Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869).
31. Jules Hericourt. "L'activité inconsciente de l'esprit," Revue Scientifique, 3rd
series #1 (1889), II, 257-268.
32. Frederick J. Hoffman. Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge, U. of La.
Press, 1957).
33. _____________. The Imagination's New Beginning: Theology and Modern Literature
(Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame U. Press, 1967).
34. Pierre Janet. Névroses et idées fixes (Paris: Alcan, 1898).
35. Carl G. Jung. Man and his Symbols (N. Y.: Dell, 1968).
36. _______________. "The Psychology of the Unconscious," in Two Essays on Analytical
Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), pp. 117-130.
37. Walter A. Kaufman, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (N. Y.: Meridian,
1956).
38. ____________. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: P. U.
Press, 1974).
39. Frank Kermode. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the theory of Fiction (London:
Oxford U. Press, 1967).
40. Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press,
1962).
41. Harold D. Lasswell. Psychology and Politics (Chicago: U. of C. Press, 1930).
42. _____________. Nathan Leites and Associates. Language of Politics: Studies in
Quantitative Semantics (N. Y.: G. w. Stewart, 1949).
43. Nathan Leites. A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953).
44. Karl Mannheim. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge
(1936, N. Y.: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1968).
45. Frank Manuel. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge: Cambridge U.
Press, 1959).
46. Edward L. Margetts. "The Concept of the Unconscious in the History of Medical
Psychology," XXVII Psychiatric Q. (1953), 115.
47. Stephen E. Mason. A History of the Sciences (Collier Books, 1962).
48. Joost A. M. Meerloo. Along the Fourth Dimension: Man's Sense of Time and History
(N. Y.: John Day, 1970).
49. James Miller. Unconsciousness (N. Y.: Wiley, 1942).
50. Joseph-Marie Montmasson. Invention and the Unconscious (N. Y.: Harcourt, Brace,
1932).
51. Thelma Moss. The Probability of the Impossible (N. Y.: New Amer. Library, 1974).
52. Frederick W. H. Myers. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. 2 vols.
(London: Longmans, Green, 1903).
53. Erich Neuman. Art and The Creative Unconscious (N. Y.: Pantheon Books, 1954).
55. Marjorie Hope Nicholson. The Breaking of the Circle, Studies in the Effect of the
'New Science' Upon Seventeenth Century Poetry (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 1950).
56. __________. Voyages to the Moon (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1948).
57. Shelley Orgel. "On Time and Timelessness," J. Am. Psychoanal. Assn. (1965), 102-21.
58. H. T. Pledge. Science Since 1500 (N. Y.: Harper & Bros., 1959).
59. Mario Praz. The Romantic Agony (trans. London: Oxford U., 1933).
60. Paul Roazen. Freud: Political and Social Thought (N. Y.: Vintage Books, 1970).
61. Joseph R. Royce. "Psychology at the Crossroads between the Sciences and the
Humanities," in Royce, ed., Psychology and the Symbol (N. Y.: Random House, 1965).
62. Schlipp, P. A., ed. Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (N. Y.: Tudor, 1951).
63. Arthur Schopenhauer. World as Will and Representation (1814).
64. Robert Sears. Survey of Objective Studies of Psychoanalytic Concepts
65. Pitirim Sorokin. Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (1937-41).
66. George Steiner. Language and Silence (N. Y.: Athenaeum, 1967)
67. David Friedrich Strauss. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1820; trans.
Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1972).
68. Theodore Thass-Thienemann. Symbolic Behavior (N. Y.: Washington Square Press,
1968).
69. _____________. The Sub-Conscious Language (N. Y.: Wash. Square Press, 1967).
70. Hans Vaihinger. The Philosophy of "As If" (N. Y.: Harcourt-Brace, 1935).
71. John B. Vickery. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. (Princeton: Princeton U.
Press, 1973).
72. John B. Watson. "The Myth of the Unconscious," 155 Harper's Magazine (1927), 503-7.
73. Rene Welleck. "The Concept of Evolution in Literary History," reprinted in S. G.
Nichols, Jr., ed., Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1963).
74. Lancelot L. Whyte. The Unconscious Before Freud (N. Y.: Basic Books, 1960).
75. J. O. Wisdom. The Unconscious Origin of Berkeley's Philosophy, International
Psychoanalytic Library, #47 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953).
76. Irving Wolfe. "The Catastrophic Substructure of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,
" I Kronos, #3 (1975), 31-45, #4 (1975), 37-54.
77. Walter von Wyss. Charles Darwin, ein Forscherleben (Zurich & Stuttgart: Artemis-
Verlag, 1958).
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Three: Working of the Mind
CHAPTER TWENTY
O. K. ORIGINS
O. K. is also okay, okey, or okeh. It is a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. "O. K.,
the most successful abbreviation ever coined, in the United States or elsewhere, has
been borrowed by all the languages of Western Europe and some of those of Asia." So
writes the illustrious H. L. Mencken in his book on the American language. But where
does it come from?
Let us resort to this author's journal:
Stylida, Naxos, March 28, 1980
Stormy weather, some rain, high winds, thick clouds low-passing, two days running.
Working on my novel Ron's Norm last night. Talking of a chapter in which Ron cites John
Cohane on the pre-Christian Irish Christmastime Og Day when people engaged in drunken
orgies. Ami suggested moving a word to another paragraph. It was the word "OC." I said
"O. K." I looked at it, remembered the mystery of its origin, and thought "This O. K.
could be OC, the most ancient Irish god-name." I read in the Oxford English Dictionary
on Etymological Principles (Vol. II p. 4028 of microprint edition), "the earliest
occurrence so far noted is in the Boston Transcript of 15 April 1840. In this and two
examples from April and June the meaning is not clear, but the explanation oll korrect'
appears on June 18..." Then, "1840 Atlas (Boston), 18 June 2/ 1 The band rode in a
stage, which had a barrel of Hard Cider on the baggage rack, marked with large letters
'O. K. ' - oll korrect." I suspect that Irish immigrants, who were becoming exceedingly
numerous in Boston at this time, brought the word, a folk word, with them. The use of
the letters on a bandwagon and to mark a container of hard liquor can be related to an
archaic festival, it would seem. Other theories of the origin of O. K. are weak, such as
a misspelling by illiterates, which however goes well with the idea that the origin was
among "illiterate Irishmen," rather than with the slightly later attribution to General
Jackson who was not as uneducated as his detractors made him out to be - unless, which
is possible, Jackson, descended of Scots-Irish, did also pick up the O. K. from the
folklore of the ancient OC. Significantly, another explanation is that 'O. K. ' comes
from the Oklahoma (note: oc) Choctaw (note: oc) Indian word "oke" (" it is") in an
attribution of 1885. (Americans often use a simple "oke," one, not two syllables, and
'periods' may have been later additions.) It is conceivable that this "oke" (it is) is
like the Yahweh (I am) and was a Choctaw god name once. Both OG and HAUE are among
Cohane's half dozen key words.
POSTSCRIPT OF 1983
The oc syllable is a straight-out affirmative in the langue d'oc population of southern
France where oc meant yes, as contrasted with the langue d'oil of the North of France,
which prevailed (oil becoming oui).
Returning to the Irish drink, uech, one is led to another of Cohane's basic words, haue,
who he believes to have been a divinity preceding oc, and is found in Yahweh and Jove
(properly pronounced in Latin). The most sacred parish in Ireland is called Aughaval,
which disassembles into og/ ava/ ala.
Now H. L. Mencken comments about O. K. that "its long disputed etymology has been
practically settled by Allen Walker Read." Not so, although Read wrote three articles,
and Mencken one, on the subject between 1941 and 1963. He is probably correct, though,
in saying that "it arose from a vogue for acronyms which developed in Boston in the
summer of 1838." This would help explain the social readiness for the invention and why
it quickly acquired misleading punctuation points.
I prefer the bandwagon explanation, which combines the Irish, politics, music, holiday,
the god Oc, and the intoxicating drink. (Only in the 18th century did the Irish
authorities finally suppress the celebration of Og Night.) O. K. was early used as a
watchword and title, as the "O. K. Club," and is associated with revelry, noise-making,
and carousing, all of which the early Irish contributed to American politics in some
unusual degree. On April 3rd, 1840 the New York Daily Express reports, "About 9 o'clock,
a procession from the 10th and other up-town wards marched down Center Street headed by
a banner inscribed 'O. K. '" and on November 7, the National Intelligencer declares that
"The Irish Locosfocos [a political faction] in the 6th ward [of New York City] have been
parading the streets with shillelahs [batons], swearing 'O. K. ' etc." Apparently O. K.
was even yet an oath of some kind. O. K. is a strong affirmative, difficult to pronounce
dubiously, very definite, a password, watchword, acclamation, an expression of secular
camaraderie, with its sacred pagan meaning suppressed but lending force and universal
acceptance to the word. There still exist the expletives, Ugh! and Oc! (in Ireland) and
Och! (in Scotland). Such was Oc, says Cohane, "once the supreme ruler of the universe in
the minds and hearts of our ancestors." O. K.?
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Three: Working of the Mind
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
JUPITER'S BANDS AND SATURN'S RINGS [1]
With a mind to the present Pioneer explorations of the neighborhoods of planets Jupiter
and Saturn, an article by Thomas Taylor (of Walworth) - published in the Classical
Journal of 1819 - ought to be reviewed. Taylor was a renowned Platonist and his article
was entitled, "On the Coincidence between the Belts of the Planet Jupiter and the
Fabulous Bonds of Jupiter the Demiurgus" [2] . There, quoting passages of the neo-
Platonist Proclus (c. 410-85 A. D.), On the Timaeus of Plato and On the Theology of
Plato, Taylor points out "that Jupiter the Demiurgus is said by ancient theologists to
have put his father Saturn in chains, and also to have surrounded himself with bonds;
and that the moderns have found the body of the planet Jupiter to be surrounded by
several substances resembling belts or bands, and likewise that there is the faint
resemblance of a belt about the planet Saturn" [3] .
To have been capable of this assertion, Taylor would have had to educe declarations
concerning the two systems of divine bonds from the highly abstract writings of Proclus
and to realize the recency of telescopic identification of the two systems. Actually,
Galileo and his associates had sighted the rings of Saturn about 1608; however, he
mistakenly believed them to be two smaller bodies of a triple-bodied Saturn [4] .
Working with a superior telescope, Christian Huygens had identified the "ring" of Saturn
as such (but note the singular) and had drawn Jupiter with two equatorial streaks in his
Systema Saturnium of 1659. In his posthumously published Cosmotheoros of 1698, he wrote
of the bonds of Jupiter and compared them with the clouds of Earth [5] .
A review of what Proclus had to say gives no cause to dispute Taylor's translation and
comment. Proclus does not, in these lines, directly say that the bound gods are the
actual planets of the same names. But all known planets, including Jupiter and Saturn,
were identified at that time with gods, called by their names, and were supposed to
exhibit their traits. Plato further argued that the planets and stars were huge, and he
insisted that the gods were among the planets and not upon Olympus [6] . The modern
practice of arbitrarily labeling new objects of the sky from Greek mythology has
obscured the sacredness of the ancient belief in the union of astral bodies with divine
personages. If any distinction between the planet and god were required, it would
relate, as Taylor put it, to "the planet Jupiter, who being a mundane divinity,
according to the theology of the Greeks, is a procession from, but no the same with,
Jupiter the fabricator of the world" [7] . That is, the abstract god, Jupiter the
Demiurge, is something beyond Planet Jupiter, the concrete manifestation of the
Demiurge. Early Greek usage did employ the possessive or genitive case, "of Jupiter" in
referring to the planet, but by Aristotle's time the significance of the distinction had
been lost and the nominative "Jupiter" was used for both god and planet.
Proclus writes in a language and logic that are typical of theological speculation, but
evidently he reasons thus: Mighty Jupiter, god of law and order, god of the supreme
intellect, confronts his father, Saturn, also an all-perfect intellect, and places this
intellect under bonds to control its activity according to Jovian ordering principles.
Then, because Jupiter is logical and just, he binds himself so that he will be subject
to his own laws. Thus the intelligible intellect of Saturn is comprehended by the
intellect of Jupiter which then comprehends its own intelligibility.
Proclus writes: "As the intelligible is indeed exempt from intellect, but intellect is
said to comprehend it, thus also Jupiter is said to bind his father. And in placing
bonds about his father, he at the same time binds himself" [8] . Proclus refers
repeatedly to the bonds and binding of Jupiter and Saturn, and explicitly to Jupiter's
"Saturnian sections and bonds."
Taylor wondered at this coincidence of modern scientific observation and ancient
theology, and inferred that such theology must be "no less scientific than sublime." Is
there another explanation of the coincidence? One might postulate an ancient
civilization of a type advanced beyond Plato's Atlantis, which would have been
thoroughly devastated but whose telescopes would have been unmatched until the
nineteenth century. Only so advanced a culture could produce and systematically employ
such a telescope. Paleo-anthropology and archaeology, overseen by the sociology of
invention, do not admit of a specific technology that far exceeds the general level of
its culture. Then, if it had existed, the destroyed civilization would have inspired
myths of some essential correctness within the survivors' theology.
One may stretch farther for hypotheses, but they would be most unlikely: the reports of
informed visitors from outer space; the presence of magnifying atmospheres; larger, more
marked sets of clouds and rings around Jupiter and Saturn seen through a clearer
atmosphere of ancient times; ancient human sports with telescopic vision; a saucer
telescope of brilliant conception and low technological requirements; etc.
One is naturally driven back to the text and the probability that the ancient insistence
upon the bonds around the planets is an independently invented conceit, a remarkable
coincidence. Yet this probability is not large either. The coincidence is complex, and
the more complex a coincidence, the more likely a causal association.
Furthermore, the complex parallel is consistent with a great deal more of myth that is
connected with the same planets, such as the great heat and electricity of
"Thunderbolting Zeus," and the putting away of Saturn (Kronos) beyond the possibility of
his affecting the affairs of Earth or the rule of his son, Zeus. An elementary course in
the Greek classics will recite Hesiod's Theogony, wherein Zeus is pictured as the son of
Kronos, preserved from being swallowed by his father through the substitution of a stone
swaddled in cloth, who then leads a successful revolt of Saturn's other progeny who had
been swallowed and then vomited up. Galileo ceased his observations of Saturn for two
years, and when next he looked in December of 1612, the rings were out of sight. "Has
Saturn devoured his children?" he mused, but predicted that in 1614 they would return
[9] . If it were not for the massive conviction of contemporary science, backed by a
stable sky and a workable celestial mechanics - or more bluntly, if one were to dismiss
certain premises and conclusions of modern astronomy - one would apply modern
psychological and anthropological analysis to the coincidence and to the words of
Proclus, and suggest, as Taylor could not say 150 years ago, that the quotations
exemplify how a primordial experience is anesthetized by its traumatic character and
remembered as a religious obsession. This then produces a theology that proceeds to
generate concepts of rule and law in the universe so as to complete and perfect the
process of anesthesia or amnesia.
However, since few scholars are prepared to discount current astronomical retrojections
of the state of the skies, or to believe in an astronomically learned ancient
civilization that was subsequently destroyed, the coincidence may be handed over to non-
scientific folklorists of the occult, or laid to a naive poesy of the ancients revived
by a befuddled English savant.
Notes (Chapter 21: Jupiter's Bands and Saturn's Rings)
1. This article is one of 22 essays contained in a presentation to Dr. Immanuel
Velikovsky on December 5, 1975, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Worlds in Collision.
It was first published in Kronos, vol. II 3 (1977).
2. XX Classical Journal, No. 40 (181), pp. 324-6.
3. Ibid., p. 324. Taylor cites Bonnycastles's Introduction to Astronomy, p. 37 as his
source. He properly adds that the binding of Saturn by Jupiter was well-known myth, but
the binding of Jupiter occurs only in these two hitherto undiscovered passages of
Proclus.
4. Cf. Galileo's First and Third "Letters on Sunspots," to Mark Welser, May 4, 1612 and
December 1,1612, pp. 101-2 and 143, in G. Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo,
trans. by Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor Books, 1957).
5. A. Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy (trans., Interscience Publishers, New York,
1961), pp. 254-5.
6. J. Harward, The Epinomis of Plato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), pp. 93, 95ff.
7. Op. cit., p. 324
8. Ibid., p. 326.
9. Op cit., pp. 143-4.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Four: Polemics and Personages
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MARX, ENGELS, AND DARWIN
More research is needed to delineate the attitudes of Karl Marx and Frederick (or
Friedrich) Engels towards the Uniformitarian and Catastrophist paradigms of the
nineteenth century, and to explain why the two men chose to align themselves with the
Uniformitarian rather than the Catastrophist mode of thought. After all, were they not
complete revolutionaries?
The term "paradigm" has been popularized by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962; 2nd ed., Chicago, U. of Chicago Press, 1970). The term embraces much
of the theory and discussion employing the terms "world-view" (J. C. Greene),
Weltanschauung (A. von Humboldt), "ideologies" (Mannheim), "models" (R. Thom),
"fictions" (Vaihinger). Kuhn's term is unquestionably appropriate as he defined it:
"On the one hand, it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values,
techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community. On the other hand, it
denotes one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which,
employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution
of the remaining puzzles of normal science." (p. 175)
It may be too often assumed that there is little which is problematical in the position
of Marx and Engels on the present issue. That is, Marx and Engels were aspiring "modern"
scientists; the movement of "true" science was along Uniformitarian lines; therefore
marxism would join the victorious ranks of science, which, being politically neutral and
scientifically objective, could serve communists as well as capitalists in education and
politics. However, if the following steps are developed in the present research inquiry,
the matter may be cast in a different light:
1.
The Uniformitarians adhered to a paradigm of science that can be abstracted and observed
as a developing process. Its elements were composed typically of the following beliefs:
time and space are absolute; the Newtonian laws of gravity and motion govern natural
events rigidly; the heavens are constant and the universe is orderly; they operate
through measurably equal units of time and through measurably equal coordinates of
space; time is long and uninterrupted by sudden leaps; the surface of the earth has
accumulated its features over long periods of time; nor are sudden leaps found in
biology and cultural history, which have proceeded "by very short and slow steps"
(Darwin); and social change is part of "cosmic evolution" (Herbert Spencer).
The U paradigm can be considered broader than its circumscribed form as a mere
hypothesis that rates of change in geology are to be considered as having been uniform
unless proven to the contrary. Rather, the U idea is taken in its broadest form as a
world view, in the period of its great victory. For it was tied to two centuries of
prior changes in the sciences of man and the skies. The philosopher-psychologists Locke,
Hume, Fontanelle, and Diderot had made of man a mechanical creature, highly determined
by external forces. Hutton, the father of geological uniformitarianism, published his
Theory of the Earth in 1775. Writes S. E. Mason A History of the Sciences (1962, 403),
"Hutton based his view that the rock-forming agencies of the earth were constant on the
by now established theory that the solar system was mechanically stable and permanently
self-sustaining."
The close friendship and association of Darwin with the great U geologist adds
credibility to the labeling of a U paradigm. In fact the peak prestige of the U paradigm
would probably be registered around 1875, after the publication of the Descent of Man.
(The Origin of the Species had been published in 1859.) By 1875, too, Ernest Renan was
widely known for his social-scientific studies of religion and myth, foreshadowing The
Golden Bough of James Frazer, of whom it has been said that "Frazer seems an English
Renan, so close do the two men appear at a number of points both in outlook and
reputation." (Vickery, 1973) The U paradigm penetrated all scientific fields.
2.
The Catastrophist paradigm, whose principles had been steadily eroding between 1600 and
1875, offered the following beliefs: the world, the species, and mankind were created
abruptly; they were repeatedly subject to destruction by divine or natural forces in the
skies and earth; the time spanned by these catastrophes was short, changes in temporal
and spatial dimensions of the universe are brought on by divine, heroic, and natural
forces that are immense and unpredictable; all the hosts of heaven - sun, moon, stars,
planets - may change their motions and qualities; in this awful setting, measurement is
less of the essence of being than miracles; history moves in cycles.
Even since ancient Greek science (Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato (et al). there had been
a scientific type of catastrophism, employing the divine very much as Newton and most
modern Uniformitarians did, as a removed and/ or mechanical power. This strain had been
modernized, even as Newton was writing, by his disciple Whiston, and later by eminent
figures such as Vico, N. A. Boulanger, Cuvier, and Buckland. The strain was much more
evident in the time of Marx and Engels than now.
3.
Marx and Engels were deeply engaged in developing a paradigm of Socialism (or Communism)
that was composed of numerous elements: materialism (with atheism); economic determinism
(which Engels traced back to the beginnings of life itself); the stability of the
heavens and earth in the very process of continuous change. Science as a unity,
embracing nature, species, societies, and individuals, all responding to similar laws.
All is to be measured along a historical continuum in which (the Hegelian dialectic)
opposing forces move according to three principles: that quantities change into
qualities and vice versa, that the opposites interpenetrate, and that negations are in
turn negated. That geogeny teaches the evolution of the Earth was stated by Marx in
1844. The species evolved a will that is capable independently of abetting the
relentless historical process: "Man is the sole animal capable of working his way out of
the merely animal state." (Engels, Dialectics of Nature, New York: International Publ.,
1940, p. 187.)
4.
Given a sharply defined set of these three paradigms, one may expect to find that all
three paradigms "interpenetrate" to some degree, but that the Marxist Paradigm
overlapped considerably more with the other two. That is, close analysis may show that,
with an approximately equal logic, rationality and (at least at that time) "evidence",
either the Uniformitarian or the Catastrophist paradigm could be made to fit the Marxist
paradigm. There are clear indications in their work of this: for example, Engels
believed that mankind evolved first on the lost continent of Lemuria in the Indian
Ocean, which sank catastrophically. Elsewhere he adopts the theory that intense
atmospheric change (heat, etc.) can bring about conditions for new species of life and
life itself. He rejects Lamarck's "vital aim" of evolution but often shows Lamarckian as
well as Darwinian beliefs, even including the racial acquisition and inheritance of
mathematical aptitude. Both Marx and Engels held to a kind of cyclical or at least
helical theory in their historical dialectics, and Engels speculated upon a long-range
cyclical cosmology - with worlds being born and then dying out, only to be reborn. His
sense of absolute time was perhaps a little shaky, now taking in the grand new sweeps of
geological time enthusiastically, and then again conjecturing a rapid evolution within
the record of the human species. It remains to be seen how much he knew about or how
seriously he considered the scientific-catastrophists such as N. A. Boulanger, or the
scientific side of theists such as Buckland. At times he gave hints of backsliding;
thus, writing in Dialectics of Nature (led. 1966, 28); "The defect of Lyell's view - at
least in its first form - lay in conceiving the forces at work on earth as constant,
both in quality and quantity ... the earth does not develop in a definite direction but
merely changes in an inconsequent fortuitous manner."
5.
Marx and Engels were conducting a triple campaign a) to revolutionize philosophy: They
had turned Hegel upside down and were using his historical dialectics to unite all
phenomena of nature, biology, and society into a single scheme. b) to offer political
programmatics to the world: From the great philosophical scheme would be deducible the
principles of the future society, the classless communist society. And c) to lead a
political revolution. Any action on their part such as to align themselves with a
scientific paradigm could not be accomplished to the neglect of any of these three
goals. That is, to them a "fact" or "theory" of science, such as "long-term time",
"drop-by-drop geology", or step-by-step biological evolution through natural selection
could never be simply such. Either it could be made to fit their truly global paradigm
and world-scheme, or it had to be discarded, or it was a mistake. Yet they were
compelled to confront any assertion that engaged the attention of the "intelligentsia"
or "the masses," and, of course, such were the elements of the great paradigms.
6.
Whereupon, Marx and Engels assimilated, not without negative criticism, the
Uniformitarian paradigm to their own Socialist Marxist paradigm in several philosophical
steps. There is many a statement in the Marxian literature of the type of "We were first
to..." and "Come into our camp..." And, also, direct statements show under what
conditions they would accept "long-time"; "evolutionary biology"; stable nature, and
"natural selection" into this system.
7.
Simultaneously, they might have been seeking to attach to their movement the social
respectability that began to accrue rapidly to "up-to-date" science. Their contempt of
Catastrophists is manifest: "Cuvier's theory of the revolutions of the earth was
revolutionary in phrase and reactionary in substance" (Engels, Dial. of Nat., p. 10)
Their pride at being the essence of the modern scientist is manifest in many places.
8.
They attempted to recruit practitioners of the new science to their political movement -
or at least to their philosophy which, significantly, they felt would inevitably lead to
their politics. Charles Darwin was the most notable case. Considering how enveloped
Darwin was in the social circles of "gentlemanly" Whig England, and that his greatest
defender and "social equal", Thomas Huxley, was a "Social Darwinist", ergo an enemy of
the planned society, it can be ventured here that the attempt to capture Darwin would be
as foolish as trying to hijack an El Al plane with a penknife. The London Geological
Society was "composed of gentlemen", and was taken over by liberal Whigs, whose
perceived opponents were the church and Tory establishment, not the capitalist class.
(G. Grinnell, 131, In E. Milton, Ed., Recollections of Fallen Sky, 1978 (Distrib. by
Metron Publications, Princeton) Marx and Engels are among the founders of the sociology
of knowledge and were past masters at scrutinizing the motives behind people's actions.
Indeed, Marx wrote, promptly upon reading The Origin of Species, in a letter to Engels
(Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, p. 128): "it is remarkable how
Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of
labor, competition, opening up of new markets, 'inventions', and the Malthusian
'Struggle for Existence'". It may be considered whether they were here acting
irrationally, or perhaps rationally on a "nothing ventured-nothing gained", or "there is
nothing to be lost" basis. Whether there was actually some long-term losses as a result
of such a "calculated risk" is a question worthy of consideration.
9.
The study has an intense focus on such incidents, but its ulterior goals are larger than
the personal interactions studied. The earlier interest of the present investigator in
the connections between ideologies and practices (cf. The Velikovsky Affair) have
suggested to him other similar cases such as the present one of Marx and Engels. The use
of Catastrophists, Uniformitarians, and Socialists for case study leads in turn to a
larger interest in the sociology and psychology of science.
The opportunity is extraordinary, for Marx and Engels were interested third parties to
the widespread conflict of many years between Uniformitarians and Catastrophists. How
they made up their minds to support the former, and to what extent they would support
them, are questions whose answers bear importance in he history and philosophy of
science.
Such considerations imply that there will be no lack of publishing outlets for the final
manuscripts, but also that the final report should also avoid being "captured" by its
medium of publication and should appear in separate monographic format, or, if not,
under the most objective scientific auspices.
Monograph:
The proposed report is conceived as possessing a simple organization as follows:
Prospective Table of Content
The Alignment of Marx and Engels with Scientific Uniformitarians against the
Catastrophists
Introduction:
A paradox of the scientific and social revolution; Marx and Engels (revolutionaries)
reject "Revolutions of The Globe" (Cuvier's term) for drop-by-drop and bit-by-bit
evolution.
Part One
The Setting for Decision (1830-1870)
I. The Socialist Paradigm of Marx and Engels
II. The Uniformitarian Paradigm
III. The Catastrophic Paradigm
Part Two
Matching the Paradigms
IV. The Three Scientific Models Compared for "Scientificity"
V. The Theological Question and Agnosticism in the Three Models
VI. Social Pressures: Public Opinion and Scientific Opinion on the Paradigms.
VII. The Politics of Scientific Paradigms: The "Social Darwinists" Win the
Uniformitarian Paradigm; Marxists Are Trapped in It.
Conclusion:
A Fateful Decision for "Scientific Socialism." Revision of the conventional view of the
decision; query whether subsequent progress of "communist science" has shown effects of
the internalized paradox or contradiction (e. g. was the Lysenko episode an "aberration"
of Soviet science or was it an eruption of the internalized contradiction?)
Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
The topic of the proposed research is specific but the materials of research are diffuse
and far-flung. The material to be consulted does not lend itself to a preliminary set of
titles. On the one hand, a number of works on nineteenth century intellectual history
and histories of science (such as H. T. Pledge's Science Since 1500, 1959) carry
accounts of Uniformitarianism and Catastrophicism, Darwinism, Marxism, the struggle
between science and religion and so on to other topics under treatment here. There exist
some excellent more special studies as well, such as C. C. Gillispie's Genesis and
Geology (1951) and John C. Green's The Death of Adam (1959). The works of Lyell, Darwin,
Cuvier, and many another contributor are of course readily available. The complete works
of Marx and Engels are published in German and beginning to be published in English (in
100 volumes); meanwhile much of the essential work, such as Engels' Dialectics of
Nature, is available in English, too. The "Social Darwinists" who 'stole" Darwinism from
Marx and Engels (and socialism) are also treated in a number of sources, both original
and secondary.
On the other hand, the subtlety (if the word may be permitted) of the proposed
investigation requires that fragments of evidence and indicators be pulled from many
sources. Consultants, who have spent their lives reading in the voluminous archives, can
probably give some of the best clues to where to look for pieces of the mosaic. The most
important letter of Darwin to Marx refusing permission to let Volume II of Das Kapital
be dedicated to him (13 October 1880) was first published in the Soviet Journal Pod
Znamenem Marxizma in 1931 (un 1-2). In his speech at the grave of Marx (17 march 1883),
Engels, according to Valentino Gerratana (New Left Review, 1975, p. 61) quoting from
Marx-Engels Selected Works (London, 1978, p. 435), "publicly linked for the first time
the name of his great dead friend with that of Darwin," saying "Just as Darwin
discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of
development of human history." The statement is repeated by Engels in 1888 in his
preface to the English translation of the Communist Manifesto. Again, tucked away in
Marx' Theories of Surplus Value (London, 1969, V. II, p. 121), is the assertion that
Darwin could be used to refute Malthus (despite Darwin's statement that Malthus was his
inspiration for the theory of natural selection!) Or, in setting a benchmark for the
total disrepute of catastrophism (which is necessary to show that Marx and Engels would
have had strong motives for eschewing it), one searches out indicators such as The
Spectator (7 May 1887, 626) asserting, "No geologist of repute now believes that
mountain-ranges originated in catastrophes."
The literature in German, French, and Italian on evolutionism and Marxism is large, and
at this point it is hard to say which works may turn out to contain more than the
typical polemical and philosophical arguments. By the same token, it would be premature
and tedious to list the works of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Lamarck, Lewis Morgan, Herbert
Spencer, and others, who also have a general relevance and may be cited and quoted in
establishing the "circumstantial evidence" for the character of the missing pieces of
the puzzle. The three paradigms of Uniformitarian, Catastrophist, and Marxian thought
will have to be originally constructed, though with reference to numerous works. The
specific question of the research - the psychological dynamics of Marx and Engels in
"adopting" the uniformitarian model in whole or in part - has not, to the knowledge of
the investigator here, been asked before. The obvious "answer" given or implied in
numerous places in the literature, that "Marx and Engels liked Darwin's scientific
explanation of the origin of species" will, it is believed, be reduced to a misleading
simplism upon the completion of the research.
POSTSCRIPT: A CAUSE FOR EMBARRASSMENT
The research proposed above was submitted for support to the National Science Foundation
in 1977 and turned down smartly by its anonymous critics. A note in The Journal of the
History of Ideas, (Jan-Mar 1978, 135) based upon articles of Lewis S. Feuer (32 Annals
of Science, 1975, 33 Ibid., 1976), called the well-known writer Isaiah Berlin to task
for repeating a canard about Marx. Apparently, the widely disseminated story, that Marx
had written Darwin asking for permission to dedicate to him the second volume of Das
Kapital, was false; further, Darwin had not written to Marx in reply, refusing kindly
the permission. But the Darwin letter had been written to Eward Aveling.
In reply, I. Berlin explained that in truth Marx and Darwin had not written to each
other. Berlin's passage in his book, Karl Marx, was based on a 1934 article in
Biochronik which in turn cited a Russian translation of Darwin's 1880 letter in a 1931
work. He added that the story was still being disseminated in the Soviet Union. Of
course, it is also still carried in a number of English-language works.
Marx complained of the Origin of Species as being "grossly unfolded in the English
manner" and Engels of its "crude English method." Marx, long before Darwin, had
conceived of society as having a natural history and was a king of evolutionist, without
natural selection. But both approved of his work. If I were now, six years later, to
answer the question I posed for research: "Why did the great revolutionaries not support
revolutionism?" I would not have to contend with this annoying proof of their support. I
would perhaps move toward the theory that they gave Darwinism reluctant support because
they were being swept off their feet by the rush to evolutionism, and because they were
so totally joined in opposition to the religious establishment.
The implications of the problem posed here, and for my interest in it, are not alone
historical and philosophical. I foresee that communist theory, impelled by the logic of
revolutionism, may discover quantavolutionary roots in the thought of Marx and Engels
and find their development to be more compatible with marxist theory than is
evolutionism. If so, the center of natural philosophy and its subtended sciences might
shift to the Soviet Union.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Four: Polemics and Personages
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
RELIGION AND EDUCATION
Present here first is an editorial essay criticizing attempts to avoid the consideration
of the Bible in schools and to restrain schoolroom discussion of various hypotheses of
natural history. The second piece sketches a method for examining the relations of state
education to religious teachings. The author is generally concerned that the words "to
teach" should mean "to educate" or at least "to consider" rather than meaning "to
advocate" and "to indoctrinate."
I. QUANTAVOLUTION AND CREATION IN ARKANSAS
Sometimes when you see how winners behave, you sympathize with the losers. I have been
feeling that way about the Arkansas trial on teaching creation. The state's lawmakers,
in that mixed mood of cordiality and cunning not foreign to our fifty-two bicameral
bodies, decreed that creation science should be taught alongside evolutionary science in
the schools of the State. This, my experience as political scientist told me, was a bit
daffy to begin with - and probably unconstitutional.
But now experts have paraded before the court. The lawyers have had their say. The media
and the intellectual establishment have rooted against the enactment. The skeleton of
the ancient Tennessee monkey trial has been dangled before our eyes. The creationists
have been humiliated in one more contest. The prestigious scientists are back in their
academic locker rooms receiving congratulations. A few fans, carried away by remote
analogies, say that we will have to tolerate Reaganism awhile longer, but at least not
that bit about God building the world in a week. The expert testimony against the law
may have been misleading, however, as to the current posture of science respecting
biological change. Walter Sullivan (NYT Dec. 27) has deftly indicated the short-fall of
truth: that theories of evolution now also include theories of genesis in outer space or
in transferences from cosmic bodies; that evidence of transitional types or "missing
links" in evolution is today scarcely richer than in Charles Darwin's time; and that, in
some quarters, jumps in evolution are considered probable. In this last case, we go back
to catastrophic and saltation theories of the past century and to theories of a
directing inherent intelligence from this century.
Professor Stephen Gould of Harvard University was a witness in the Arkansas trial.
Although unfriendly to the creationists, he has himself devised a saltatory argument,
based partly upon increasing evidence that catastrophes have brought about both the
extermination and birth (one dare not say "creation") of species; this he calls the
theory of "Punctuated equilibrium." I favor the term "quantavolution" and find myself,
in consequence, sometimes in the company of Biblical literalists and creationists; they
are, it goes without saying, as intelligent and effective as their non-literalist
scientific counterparts.
Gould, like most educated people, is committed to very long ages of evolution. To him
and to them, the very thought of Biblical literalism, with its collapsing of time into a
few thousand years, is red flag to the bull. Here again, Sullivan has delicately hinted
of the possible vulnerability of measures of time. Very little time may have been needed
for evolution itself.
Quantavolution could have been a prompt, highly creative business under certain
catastrophic conditions, as, for instance, in great cyclonic chemical factories
fashioned from a bombardment of heavy meteoroids. This would leave thousands of
unchanging species hanging around "unnecessarily" for millions of years between
quantavolutions. "In other words," writes geologist Derek Ager, "the history of any one
part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and
short periods of terror." A number of empirical scientists and philosophers can be cited
to these points. A few of them go far beyond Agar and are severely critical of long-term
time scales. So, is the majority of scientists telling the majority of the State
legislature: Your majority cannot vote against our majority? I trust that this is not
the case. No. They must be trying to say, but awkwardly, that the name of God should not
be bandied about in the classroom, first because to do so is unconstitutional, and
second because discussions of God raise tempers unduly and go on interminably to the
detriment of empirical studies.
But, giving the legislators the benefit of the doubt (which is good law), they too may
have had such in mind. They may want taught in the schools something that they think is
creation science, meaning those forms and findings of scientific work that do not
exclude peremptorily the account of cosmic and human origins accepted by the majority of
their constituents. Besides, they may argue that young people would learn their biology
lessons better if they had more than one model of genesis put to them. Furthermore, they
may believe it harmful for students to hear one story in class and a second story at
home or church, or perhaps nowhere; such compartmentalization can only contribute to the
madness produced by our complex, contradictory, pluralistic, and confusing culture.
In the end, not much will have happened by virtue of the Arkansas creation trial and we
shall go on in the schizoid style of our culture. This is too bad. Discussions of
contrasting theories of the origins of life are educational. There might have been an
opening here to brighten up the drab and dispirited classrooms of some of our schools.
II. COSMOGONY AND THE CONSTITUTION
(The following memorandum was prepared in May, 1982 for the American Enterprise
Institute of Public Policy Research, Washington, DC. It outlines a research and public
policy project recommended for the issue that, in a cursory way, is addressed in the
article above.)
INTRODUCTION:
The issue is presently raised of opening educational offerings in public schools to
theories that can accommodate certain widespread religious beliefs. The theories deal
with cosmogony, a basic question for both religion and sciences: what brought about the
universe that humankind experiences? The answers are several and conflicting; public
consensus is absent. Hence, the issue belongs in the eternally important category: the
accommodation of nonconsensus views on basic matters under a Constitutional consensus.
In salient ways, the question resembles others once or now experienced: Can a
Constitution govern a nation half-slave and half-free? A nation half-socialist and half
capitalist? A people one-third living from governmental work, a third on welfare, an a
third on independently derived in come? One-half at war and one-half at peace? Of two or
more languages; different religions; different world views?
As the final product of the research, a report may be visualized in four parts: A
historical-philosophical section; a scientific section; a legal section; and a pragmatic
policy section.
The first describes the problems of maintaining essential constitutional consensus in
regimes split by diametrically opposing ideological factors, stressing the age-long tug-
of-war between religious and secular interests, leading up to and through the U. S.
Constitution, down to this moment. It focuses especially upon the educational system as
the prize of the various protagonists. It defines the present issues as centered upon
the demand of certain religious parties, having translated their religious authority
into secular convictions governed by the rules of science to impose consideration of the
new "creation science" upon the teachers of elementary and secondary school pupils.
The second section inquires how far the various natural and social sciences have gone,
if indeed they have so moved, in approaching the areas dominated by "creation science."
The points d'appui appear to be on the suddenness of creation and the role of natural
catastrophes in bringing about the changed state of the world. At the least it seems
that a growing body of science, which is nonreligious, is occupying common ground with
creation science on these three matters. The trend, moreover, is manifest in practically
every field of science.
The third section introduces the rationale by which opponents of the adamancy of
conventional public education (who are in turn backed by the claims of a great majority
of scientists and their organizations) seek to ensure equal status for their views under
the U. S. Constitution. An intensive examination of the case thus far argued and
adjudicated will be supplemented by an examination of cases pending.
The last section will discuss the views of the public, the politicians, and the
educators on the values implicated in the contests. It will project the consequences of
the possible legal outcomes. It will finally attempt a reconciliation of the views of
the parties in a public policy that, if it may not be entirely satisfactory, would
satisfy constitutional requirements and improve what is in the last analysis the goal of
all concerned, the mental and moral development of the young by way of the educational
system.
PART ONE: HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY
I. What attitudes do the public and its leaders hold on the cosmogonical issue in public
education, and how intensely? Who is active on it?
II. What are the young around the country hearing, reading and learning now that relates
to the issue?
III. Scientific freedom. Essentially all matters can be publicly discussed in philosophy
and science. Instances of opposition from governments, from private groups that include
scientific and educational establishments?
IV. Matters permitted (or disallowed) for discussion in schools
1. "Whatever the teacher can get away with" (like the policeman on the beat)
2. What the school (educational) authorities prescribe and permit
a) Free schools
b) Conventional schools
c) Conventional (trade) schools
d) Morally defined schools (religious)
3. What the political authorities prescribe and allow the school authorities to discuss.
4. What the publics prescribe and allow the political authorities to prescribe and
allow.
5. What the Constitution prescribes and allows to the foregoing.
6. What the courts determine to be what the Constitution prescribes and allow to the
foregoing.
V. What positions may be advocated in public? Practically any. What is disallowed? (e.
g. the overthrow of government by violence).
VI. What may be advocated in public schools? Describe and document
1. Systematically (in the curriculum), e. g. darwinism.
2. Personally (e. g. deism, sexism)
3. Unconsciously (e. g. class and race prejudice)
VII. Limitations on teaching as affected by competence and relevance. Problems of
preserving a boundary between discussion and advocacy. Might such an impracticality
justify a curricular limitation?
VIII. Distinctions of fact, propositions, theories, general theories, general
philosophy, world-views.
PART TWO: HOW SCIENCES COPE WITH COSMOGONY
IX. The Topics of Natural and Religious History: The logic of their handling in science
and religion (as distinguished in VIII. above). Common sub-topics:
1. Origins or genesis. involvement of the Divine and of First or Early causes.
2. The Time-table of the World, of Natural and Human History.
3. The occurrence and scale of catastrophism (e. g. "Deluge")
X. Astronomy and Astrophysics
A. Conventional rhetoric: "Big Bang," 5 billion years, gravitation, etc.
B. Deviations approaching certain religions: intelligent life, short duration, unstable
Sun, etc.
XI. Geology and geophysics (Earth sciences)
A. Conventional rhetoric: gradualism, landscape evolution, etc.
B. Deviations: catastrophism, recency, etc. XII. Biology
XII. Biology
A. Darwinian, neo-darwinian, mutation, natural selection, gradualism, etc.
B. Macro-evolution, inherent design of change, quantavolution, catastrophe-induced
change, recency.
XIII. Anthropology and Sociology
A. Long history of descent from primates, gradualism in evolution of culture, religion
wholly culture dependent, etc.
B. Culture is religion-dependent, short history, unknown descent.
XIV. Psychology
A. Ethological view (" man is one of the smartest animals"), etc.
B. Uniqueness of man; man creates his perceived world, etc.
XV. Summary: Norms of science and deviations therefrom (unconventional logic and
history).
XVI. Norms, and deviations therefrom, within and among religions and in the population.
XVII. Reconciliation:
What can be advocated as scientifically factual and theoretical.
What can be discussed under religion but not in science. What parts of views of certain
religions cannot be handled as science.
PART THREE: LEGAL
XVIII. A review of the law on separation of church and state, as related to the
cosmogonical issue.
XIX. A scenario of what the constitutional law "could have been" under the same
constitutional provisions but with different "public winds blowing." What future
scenarios are conceivable?
XX. The analysis of McLean vs Arkansas and related cases on the cosmogonical issue.
XXI. The extent to which the Constitution can be said to demand solely a secular and
scientific approach.
XXII. The extent to which the Constitution can be said to delegate the definition of
secular and scientific theory and "truth" to school boards, legislatures, scientific
bodies, and judges.
PART FOUR: PRAGMATIC
XXIII. The extent to which the secular and scientific approach is presently prescribed
and in fact controlled and pursued in the public schools.
XXIV. The extent to which the secular and scientific approach, if "properly and
logically" provided in public education, satisfies the logic, needs, and demands of
religious groups.
XXV. Whether religious views (considered as authoritative but unverified fact statements
and other rhetorical positions ranging up to world views) can be justified in education
generally, and especially in the public schools.
XXVI. Whether cosmogonical material, as presented in public schools, should be assigned
to the social sciences, biology, the natural sciences, or in a special combination or
department.
XXVII. The educated child, presumably the goal of everyone concerned with the
cosmogonical issue. What the pupil should be concerned with factually and morally. How
morality and moral teachings permeate all education in different forms and what the
effects of excluding the divine may be.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Four: Polemics and Personages
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE OUTLOOK OF SCIENTISTS
A social scientist studying scientific behavior can readily bring to bear upon the
subject certain facile propositions of his trade. None the less useful for being
imprecise are the injunctions against regarding all scientists as alike and to allow for
the temporal changes in their ways of recruitment and their environmental settings. So
we cannot speak of all scientists. Yet modes of behavior do exist and, in generalizing,
we should perhaps imagine a biochemist on the "pure" side and a structural or
electronics engineer on the "applied." Furthermore, if it is today rather than fifty
years ago of which we would speak, we should conceive of a fairly administered scientist
- listed on a payroll, belonging to associations, assured of a lifetime job, possessed
of an M. A. degree if an engineer and Ph. D. if "pure," using institutional rather than
personal library and research facilities, spending government funds, and accorded a
higher middle-class prestige.
Whatever we would say about our model men may be cautiously extended to the remaining
vast majority of scientists insofar as they are related in character, habit, and
habitat. Had we time, something extra might be said of the more absolute deviants among
behavioral and natural scientists; we wish we might, for it is tiresome to have
scientists judged by their extremes and rather ironic when the judges are, in other
spheres, experts upon sampling and restrictive interference. Surely, administration, of
which we have to do here, can only exist on a presumption of manageable clusters of
traits and actions.
FALLACIES ABOUT SCIENTISTS
Our typical scientists are not without various conceptions that they share with the
educated population and which, on the whole, do more harm than good, both in
understanding the role of science and in the practice of science itself. Although an
empirical validation of the extent and intensity of the attitudes is unavailable, they
may be set forth hypothetically:
1)
The scientist and his educated clientele are likely to believe that the scientist is
more specialized than he actually is. Sociologists of science would do well to supply us
with a variety of information: What part of the symbol-bank and logic-bank of typical
scientists is a result of pre-specialized education and training in the culture, the
family and the schools? What part of his symbol-intake is trans-disciplinary? What part
of it is irrelevant, strictly speaking? What part is "Mentally or operationally"
employed in ways more extensive than either the intent upon intake or the prima facie
"scientific" and "specialized" meanings of the symbols? The sum of the answers to these
questions would help define how specialized the scientist is. That question would
probably be answered "Not much." The typical scientist carries his specialization "on
the top of his head." And a gross miscellany rides below.
2)
A second harmful belief is that the scientific method is a UNIQUE behavioral set; its
procedures of hypothesis, controlled observations, findings, and relating - with all the
detailed stipulations, techniques, and modes of expressing the behaviors in symbols -
are thought to be the last word in human development and qualitatively distinct from
other behavioral sets. Instead, the scientific method should be construed as a distinct
but recognizable form of administration. That is, it may be viewed as a set of routines,
historically evolved and professionally sanctioned, for arriving at a decision of a
confirming or disproving sort, whose value is thereupon judged by the leaders (often co-
administrators) of the system of administration. Their judgment is affected by, among
other things, the relation of the decision to other decisions already made, and
especially the disturbance to the system of decision-making and decisions-made of the
new decision with its potentiality for heightening the efficiency (internal and
practical) of the total system, if adopted.
3)
It is further believed by the typical scientist (from whom emerges in collectivity the
general influence of science upon society) that the real world is the hard world of the
senses, that there is one world, and that science is objective in relation to this
world; that is, science "finds" the world. I suppose that scientists will go on
indefinitely en masse "finding" the real world, rushing in to fill the gap every time
that a deviant scientist or a poet, or an Idealist cracks open reality. Yet one can
still assert, no matter if pessimistically, that a number of the social problems of
science would be eased if scientists themselves were to permit themselves a hypothetical
theory of the reality that they presume to be dealing with.
An important consequence of this same recommendation, if adopted, would be that
scientists and their clienteles would cease to believe that they are seeking the truth,
except as a myth that is needed to inspire them. They seek an answer reflected back from
the packed closets of reality in the terms of the question as they ask it.
4)
It would also be socially and scientifically helpful, if scientists and their educated
clientele would abandon the notion that there is only one way of saying things
"scientifically." A proposition may be phrased in as many ways as may prove useful with
regard to the system of logic and science it is intended for or in relation to the
action it is intended to guide. A single event or action sequence may be phrased in
relation to several natural and human relations sets, and in prose or mathematical
language of sundry kinds.
In the view of science as administration, the difficulty referred to is one commonly
experienced in administrative systems. Once devoted to a special administrative role and
language, the administrator cannot adapt himself to other modes of expression; he
regards them as wrong and sometimes dangerous - even when the applicability of the
language is manifested in its control over behaviors and operations.
5)
It is further erroneously believed that the natural sciences are systematic. This
condition is thought to be of immense importance to science itself and to the society it
serves, as well as being a holy stigma that marks it off from "unsystematic social
science." (We may as well put aside the last point, the nonsensical quality of which is
highlighted by the general answer to the other points.) The natural sciences are not
systematic, however; some elements of mathematics are, but these are forms of non-
empirical logic, a world in itself. The science of mathematics shapes and is shaped by
the empirical sciences, natural and social. Not being anchored directly to reality
problems, it can sometimes unite a field or part thereof before the field has valid
propositions to "really" unite; "Devinez avant de démontrer," wrote E. Kasner, is the
principle of great mathematics.
However, systematic empirical science is hard to discover and is probably a myth. What
we have are a few major individual propositions whose practical implications are
numerous (for example, the Mendelian "laws"); a few links of large practical importance
(for example, the general principle of relativity); the useful predictive
classifications (for instance, Mendeleef's Periodic Table of Elements). Most laws of the
individual fields of science are not tied together logically, empirically, or
quantitatively. Men know them as impressive beings rising separately out of the formless
stream of existence. The situation is worse when the various fields are considered. As
they are written, understood, and applied, the statements of physics are as far from
biology as those of anthropology. Yet, "in theory and essence," they might be capable of
a common formulation even while carrying on their former interdisciplinary functions. If
by systematic science is meant an interlocking set of propositions, framed in the same
symbol-system and moving up and down the full range of generality and across the full
diameter of subject-matter, then systematic science only begins to exist. (We should
add, furthermore, that not one but numerous such systems is the conceivable ideal.)
6)
The typical scientist is also likely to believe that a certain system of politics
fosters the development of science. This is usually a "welfare state," centralized,
common-man democracy. Actually, the development of science has occurred richly in mixed
systems, in whose interstices science may house and whose inconsistencies feed it.
Bureaucratic nineteenth century Germany was favorable to scientific development, but not
bureaucratic Soviet Russia today. Elements of democraticness (in the Old Liberal sense)
and aristocracy played a role in the German situation; a totalitarian psychology
dominates Russian public policy today. In any event, the problem is most complex,
depending for formulation and solution upon a careful de-sloganized sub-classification
of political systems, but also a fine classification of scientists according to
personality-structure, field, and level of problem pursued.
7)
Most scientists and their clientele still hold that social scientists are not "true"
scientists and almost all of them will deny that the natural scientist is a SOCIAL
scientist. The first belief has been refuted elsewhere; suffice to say that no
acceptable evidence demonstrates any qualitative break in the continuous susceptibility
of social and natural materials to the scientific method.
It is more important here to deal with the second belief, that the natural scientist is
not a social scientist, when in his habits, his perceptions, and his statements he
behaves as one. He would be a better scientist and a more effective personality if he
acknowledged the fact. The following behaviors and conditions make him a social
scientist:
a)
He is a psychological product of his culture and behaves as such.
b)
His work and his unconscious or conscious critical faculties are based upon the
psychological preconditions of perception and cognition.
c)
He uses language. He has to communicate.
d)
He uses logic.
e)
He operates in an administrative setting whose rules are part of his work.
f)
His statements about natural events and relations are human-oriented, ultimately if not
immediately, and if "applied," probably immediate.
g)
Finally and most important, if least credible, any statement of natural relations (even
if it be discovering a sub-atomic particle) is a statement of social science - in all of
the above senses in the first place, and beyond that insofar as the "thing" described
only exists as the faint echo of a set of axiomatic behaviors begun in the everyday
world. Man can only know himself, and all of the finery of the artificial world is
himself mirrored. Once he disdains some part of himself, that part of his image
vanishes; once he fancies himself in a new guise, a new world, which may be new science,
appears. For example, today we speak of new developments in the life sciences and
psychology wherein the means of psychotherapy and pharmacology are joined and where a
new common language may be expected to develop. It is possible to conceive of a whole
range of social and natural sciences possessing a new common language, and
interchangeable operations wherein social and natural are "nonexistent" as separates.
This would occur, I should venture, when the major parts of critical sciences becomes
"objectified" in the fundamental sense of that world, that is, independent of the
"existence" of the things being talked about. At this point, scientific discourse will
be constructed around problems to be solved, including perhaps some systematic ethical
statement. There are indications of such a development in segments of the information
sciences, in empirical-logical philosophy, in operations research theory, in non-
parametric statistics, in game theory, and in model-theory in several empirical
sciences.
ALL SCIENCE IS SOCIAL SCIENCE
Everything said in the previous section about the fallacies of the typical scientist's
self-image, when reversed into affirmatives, help to describe the nature of the
scientific system. The scientific system is a human system in the complete sense of the
phrase. It can be viewed from the perspectives of a sophisticated time and motion study,
with the proportions of science feeding into the systemic process with all other
experience, with the extent of the system physically defined as the communicators of
frequency of relevant contact.
It is particularly important to reorganize affirmatively the last expressed thoughts
about "all science as social science." Going directly to the last defense of a natural
science as apart from human science, the question centers on the nature of a validated
theory:
1)
A validated theory expresses world relations according to a conventional set of
perceptions, dimensions, and symbols.
2)
It refers to values, understood implicitly, when couched in "pure scientific terms," and
made explicit, when in applied terms.
3)
It instructs all known parties (this is a pretense, since the unknowns share an enormous
common culture) that they will experience the equation, x= f( y), as its protagonist
does. It assumes that they are interested in the experience, indeed in the precise
experience or one very close to it. Thus, as in (1) above, the psychological state of
the unknown parties is vital to the validation and transmission of the communication.
4)
As well as suggesting that in order for x= f( y) to be true the function has to be
uniform to, assimilated to the symbol system of, and lead to understandable consequences
for all unknown parties, we would add that all of the factors essential to the
production of the equation have to be satisfied in all succeeding experiences of the
event being described. That is, it is not enough to have the equation and believe that
these events occur infinitely in isolation. The total human interaction pattern has to
be replicated with "sufficiently high" approximation of the original condition of the
communication. Only this can be the radical operationalist position.
If a "core" of natural science is left, it must reside in that very constricted
statement of an equation that isolates and abstracts the purely "non-human" interactions
of x and y. We have shown, I believe, that everything about this statement, except the
presumed "existence" of two interactants, is human, not natural. Yet there can be no
denying that it is precisely this de-humanizing of the natural world, the abstracting
and isolating of certain "things" in it, and the making of these particular and
concrete, that has given us a changed world. (This is so, even though many other
historical events of a more conventionally ideological sort, Christianity for instance,
have changed the world as much or more.) This core of science, we must say then, is
vastly effective. It is so because (a) it gets credit for all the human relations that
first composed and thereafter surround it; (b) its isolation is accompanied by magical
instruments and incantations; (c) its effects are "newsworthy" in an age when, by
circular definition, "news is what people want to hear" and what people believe in
(thus, even though no event is as crushing as the withdrawal of love, a nuclear
explosion is a new toy, unknown to other ages and the man on the street; but (d) most of
all because, on the whole, the new relations of non-human being - a chemical reaction in
a cell, a sub-atomic event, a new engine - produce new human relations, both
psychological and real; in this sense, still quite human, the purely physical equation
is a bridge between psychomotor present and human psychomotor potential.
THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCIENTISTS
The foregoing exposition of various dysfunctional perspectives of scientists and the
view of science s a human system may have some utility to scientists in the process of
discovery, research and development. This is usually termed the individual creative
process. It is, however, my major intent here to discuss some of their implications for
the science of the administration of science. For this purpose, we shall again take an
affirmative stance and talk about the ideal social setting of scientific work, the ideal
scientist, and the ideal scientific organization.
First, a clarification of the subject is in order. Administration is a process; the
science of administration is the science that describes it; and the applied science of
administration is the set of rules for conducting administration on behalf of specified
goals, according to the science of administration. Administration is largely
institutionalized habit with varying small introjections of hypothetical or creative
behavior.
An applied science of administration perforce introduces values. You cannot act
rationally without acting towards an end. The applied scientific administration of
science must have goals. These goals are the combination of elemental goals that are
found in all realms of life, with an emphasis, verging upon exclusiveness, on one goal -
discovery. If we use Harold D. Lasswell's classification of valuing behaviors, we say
that the total of elemental base values is eight in number -- power, wealth, well-being,
respect, rectitude, affection, skill, and enlightenment. The process of discovery is the
search for enlightenment by this scheme.
Hence, in the broadest sense, that social setting, that scientist, and that scientific
organization which can be termed most absolutely scientific are those that seek
exclusively and successfully the goal of discovery. At the same time, the definition of
the ideal in each case depends upon a set of preferences for means and ends behaviors
that may produce more or less of the absolute achievement. Still, for an organization to
be called scientific and a man a scientist it must be stipulated that they have as an
important high priority preference the ambition to make discoveries about natural and
human relations. Given this goal, administrative and habitual conduct must be oriented
toward efficiency, that is, the highest return toward the goal in exchange for the
lowest resource commitment possible.
THE IDEAL SETTING
Granted the vagueness of the value, enlightenment, and of its sub-value, scientific
discovery, we cannot expect too great a precision in describing the ideal setting of
science. We may list the following four event-complexes as favorable; very rough
specifications are given the major terms, simply to indicate how the setting must be
examined:
1.
A pluralistic society, to nourish and protect differences. (Say, at least four
autonomous sub-cultural groups of considerable functional and informal authority.)
2.
A social orderliness and stability of at least one segment of society that can provide a
nestling place for scientists. (Say, a considerable bureaucratizing or leisure set-up
somewhere, which the creative and eternal-minded can cling to and move out from.)
3.
A disciplined intellectual training of a significant number (5%) of the young for
intellectual pursuits. (Say, not too much "Progressivism" in education, but enough drill
in procedures and in the myths of intellectualism.)
4.
A willingness of the elite to commit heavy resources (always relative to what is
available) to discoveries. (Say, 5% of GNP).
All of these four items are, strictly speaking, beyond the province of scientists, as
such. If they occur, science is promoted, if not, then suppressed.
THE MOTIVATED SCIENTIST
In general, keeping in mind that we are discussing a problem now of the applied science
of administration, we must admit that whatever incentives produce more goal-directed
behavior - with discovery as the basic aim - must be "good" ones, holding aside the
surrender of certain mean incentives to other citizen goals (e. g. it may be deemed
socially unwise to accord too much prestige to scientists, or too much money,
considering democratic or anti-materialistic ideals). Suppose for instance a scientific
group has varying numbers of certain German types who are motivated to scientific
discovery by the power they gain in human relations; others of Jewish type who are
impelled by a search for high respect; and still other "Yankee" types who wish to "cash
in" on their knowledge or to find affable surroundings. Obviously the scientific
administrator had better give up any of his own prejudices as to what a scientist should
respond to in the way of incentives. So too those libertarians who universalize the
force of liberty in scientific work. Liberty is a social permission to choose without
restraint ultimate goals and the means necessary to reach such goals. Here too, the
scientific administrator cannot prejudge the directions of the demand for liberty, nor
himself demand wholesale liberty. So long as scientists and citizens make such a hash of
the term liberty, of course, the administrator may often be in the position of
proclaiming a desire for universal liberty on the one hand, while restraining a great
many of its potential manifestations on the other.
To a high degree, therefore, the administration of scientists becomes a process of
giving individuals the attention they require within a framework of liberties and
restraints imposed upon means-values in terms of the basic value of discovery and such
basic values as envelop the larger society in which the organization operates. The
sociology of science thus becomes fundamental to the administration of science.
THE CHANGING COMMUNITY OF SCIENCE
At one time, perhaps from 1600 to 1920, the scientific community was fairly close-knit.
Informal ties abounded. Journals were few and well-read. Dozens of the scientific fields
of today had not come into being. Individual scholarship, or scholarship-apprentice
teams, were almost the sole mode of organization. The lone tinkerer held the field. A
loose, informal, but effective system, we should say.
The rapid increase in new fields, an increase in scientific activity in different
countries, and an increase in technological orientation of societies brought about the
situation still prevailing. In this phase we find a great many professional associations
being organized, new journals appearing in abundance, and a developing crisis of
collective information procedures. Practically all of the communicative and
administrative processes are bigger imitations of the former system. Huge associations
use the vocabulary, machinery, and practices of old personal associations. Every journal
acts as if it alone existed and sufficed. Communications through libraries and
publishing is a halting step removed from 1600 A. D. Interdisciplinary project and team
research, however, are experimented with and come to be regarded as essential, but they
are administered "from outside" even when the administrators are coopted from the teams.
That is, administration is regarded as distinct from scientific process. One may say
that there has been a failure to achieve either effective informal or effective formal
community. Yet the costs of trying to maintain a community of scientists or, better, a
network of communities, are mounting rapidly. Exhausting conferences and consultation,
for example, are made to substitute for ample, calm flows of systematic data storage and
exchange. There is a loss of creativity, too, to auxiliary occupations, such as
foundations offices and research entrepreneurship. That is, there is a superfluity of
expediters, because of the basic malorganization of scientists. A new era of science
appears to be in the offing. In it, a rationalization of the role of the individual
scientist is occurring. Both the sources and the language of contributions to knowledge
are becoming collective and anonymous. Will a peak be reached in this regard and will it
be impossible to give credit where credit is due? What will happen to the prestige
motive that impels men to work as scientists? What "Fame" be replaced by more abstract
motivations such as collective honors, security, good pay, and good fellowship? The
network of scientists will be very wide, covering millions of souls, highly diversified
by field. But it will be tied together by a ramified system of interlingual machinery of
an interscience and inter-ethnic kind, of electronic data storage and retrieval
apparatus, and of improved methods of coordinating the scientists' operations with
policies and decisions.
It is in this kind of general system that science as administration and the
administration of science will work. It may be called a "tandem" system, for the
scientific work and administrative work will go together, with each scientist aware of
the communication problem as never before, seeking to observe the effects of his
statements upon human action rather than their separate commentary upon an objective
reality.
Strangely, this is a 2500-year-old lesson that has only been verbally learned. A naive
history of science is at fault. It has often been stated that the Greeks and other
ancients possessed a potential for science not much less than the present achievements
of science, but lacked a sense of technique. For example, Archimedes, who was the Greek
scientist most concerned with technology, reports that he did not publish some of his
work because it was too mechanical and practical. Far from being an aside in the history
of science, this observation is the critical statement of what brought about modern
science and where lies the embryo of the new science.
It is science as procedure that created modern science. To the classical idea of the
world as the real thing, Leonardo, Galileo, and especially Francis Bacon added "the
scientific method." But it is the fully self-conscious recognition of science as
procedure alone that would bring about the new science. Science is a hunt for all the
worlds there ever might be. Hence, when we appreciate the operations of science as a
communication system founded upon conventional agreements, we shall have a formula both
for new scientific discovery and for organizing the discovering activities of
scientists. Jean Piaget, psychologist of the origins of thought in children, once said
"logic is the morality of thought, morality the logic of action." By the same token,
scientific procedure is the morality of scientific thought, and the morality of science
is the science of applied science.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Four: Polemics and Personages
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
'SCIENTIFIC' REPORTING
The story begins in September 1963 when for the first time a professional journal, The
American Behavioral Scientist, investigated the circumstances surrounding the publication
of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision in 1950. The authors of the ABS studies,
which were collectively entitled The Politics of Science and Dr. Velikovsky, presented a
great deal of material that would appear to a reasonable man of good will to be damaging
to the pretenses of scientific institutions, scientific practices, and certain scientists
themselves. Various explanations for the behavior of scientists were offered, and
substantiated by considerable evidence. A plea was made to receive Velikovsky's theories
with a courteous and just appraisal, forgetting the disgraceful past treatment meted out
to his work and to his character.
The following material consists of an article reproduced in its entirety from the April
1964 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists together with comments on that article,
published in the American Behavioral Scientist of October 1964. A demand for a retraction
and a chance for a full response was not conceded by the Bulletin, and required the full
reproduction and response. Still, no way was available for answering the Bulletin before
its own readership, who were left feeling that Velikovsky and the ABS both had been put in
their place. The story is developed more circumstantially in The Cosmic Heretics.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW HOWARD MARGOLIS' ARTICLE.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Four: Polemics and Personages
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EULOGIES TO THREE QUANTAVOLUTIONARIES
I.
LIVIO CATULLUS STECCHINI
6 October 1913 - 28 September 1979
Oratio delivered 17 October 1979
Livio Catullus Stecchini - Beloved
child of illicit romance
A boy of lemons and flower
looking from Catania to the Ionian Sea
harking the threatening Fascist drums
following by way of eight tongues
and all manner of measures
the route of Odysseus,
the royal passages of the pyramids,
the Enlightenment and Disillusionment of modern man.
Tentmate of the corps of intellectual guards,
he stuck to his post to the very end,
weighing hypotheses,
until, not giving up, mind you,
he turned his face peacefully,
for a respite, and died.
Diminished, the great bear, by then,
so that he might, like a fairy child,
slip through the keyhole of the otherworldly door,
to where all measures cease
to where the few corpuscules - or
are they waves? - that
sail about in abounding space,
organized in the peculiar human mode,
begin their free swim in eternity, infinity.
Beyond claim is Livio Catullus Stecchini.
Humanists, Catholics, Jews might find a
birthmark there but no sign of manacles.
No groups, except this, our own
non-group, can identify his body.
What a compliment, post mortem,
for a man:
That none owns him, none owned him
Such a great man, without claims and chains,
Never, nor, now, no more, ever.
We, the non-group, assembled once and for all,
attest to him, our man.
He was a professor
but this academy
and others equally distinguished,
were too limited for him.
They can boast that they
gave him a living, but better ought they boast
that he gave them more
than they were set to handle.
Stoicly he stood
for the puzzled students
to milk his patience.
He had his beloved families
but roared when he sensed
the trap of familial love
and edged out the doors
as daily the claims were assembled
for Livio to take care of this and that:
"Where are you going Livio?"
"To the library - To
bring Immanuel a book - To see Alfred."
Not really higher claims, but freedom.
He was a man without cliques;
you could take advantage of him.
He was powerfully observant
when his attention was called;
he acknowledged good food
between the artillery booms of his rhetoric.
He was restless,
but satisfied for the moment with whatever he found.
He was generous. His wealth of mind
is distributed around the world now
in my pockets and yours, without usury.
He was full of secrets that he
would give away to any interested party - secrets
of private lives, of history, of science,
of myth, of writings, of books.
He was full of politics
but emptied of actions
because he knew the way
and that none would follow it.
He would not set out to do good,
but good would ride on his back.
He would not seize upon a cause,
but would give honest words,
a comforting example, a plan of campaign.
His attention was everywhere.
You must seize his ear and eye.
For when you talk of General MacArthur
he is reliving the disgrace of Alcibiades.
And while you trace the route of Exodus
he is watching the Giants assault Olympus.
You receive your answer,
not where you clear a spot to snare a reply,
but out of an Amazonian jungle, or the labyrinth of Crete,
or deep from the pages of the New York Times.
He could not hate,
agree as he might that
in every particular,
this one is an evil,
that is a bad idea.
He turns upon it,
curious, contemplative, even grinning --
it is agreeable, yes, exterminable in abstraction,
but, remarkable, droll, typical
"as Cicero said when..."
"like the Maori tribes who..."
"like the Bible which..."
He was a writer of many books
who published but one,
all to the advantage of the precious pieces
in his manuscripts, articles and notes.
They live the life of the incunabula, and bits of papyrus,
the legends, the rumors,
the surviving numbers of baffling series
that he found, distinguished, and appreciated,
like wild mushrooms of the forest floor.
We must supply the ending:
"Pythagoras said, whom Plato cites,
as Plutarch quotes,
which Stecchini renders" - but here the manuscript breaks off.
And he is right, now as before.
The book is never fully written,
as the play never ends,
except by convention,
which insists upon control of the world,
lest we die.
If we could control the world,
you would live forever, Livio,
a never-ending book
for us to read,
whose pages of warmth and surprise
move through all ages of time
to all ports of call.
There we visit the gods,
and the fishwives.
Anchors aweigh!
II
RALPH JUERGENS
Who are we to say but
Juergens' friends who call goodbye
and wish some testimony from
the world he leaves and joins concurrently:
Charges on the cosmic spheres should spark,
the electric sun confess its theft of power,
the academic hulks should shiver,
astronomy and physics classes suspend.
Tall sails of new bold abstraction
moved quietly his boat of exigencies
carrying family, offices, friends.
Diffident teacher calmly correcting.
His papers stand in orderly files,
called to attention for the future salute.
Magna cum laude his life work ends.
Princeton, November 7,1979.
III
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY 1895-1979 [1]
"Where have you been? I tried all yesterday to reach you," said my mother's voice early
on the day afterwards. 'Of course, I was in the library stacks, ' I said, wishing she
would not demand an accounting as greeting. I might go into the stacks one day, and come
out to discover that a catastrophic world war had meanwhile begun and ended.
'Your friend is dead! ' I thought, 'Velikovsky! ' My Mother, of an age with him and long
hard of hearing, did not trust herself to pronounce his name quickly. He died at 0800
hours on Saturday. Day of rest, a quiet death at daylight, his hand in the hand of his
lifelong love alone. It had recently occurred to me more than once that he might live
forever. But he did not. He glided off to sea.
I reflected foolishly and I could not be faulted for not maintaining a hot line. I was
even justified - more foolish thought - in being undiscoverable, for in the labyrinthine
Princeton Libraries, who could find me, and it was Velikovsky's fault; I might be in the
religious section, or in archaeology, or the astronomy collection, or the art library,
or in geology; I might be anywhere in the acres of buildings and shelves, thanks to
Velikovsky. Survivor's guilt, compounding the loss and mourning, so tattooed are we by
the ancient great losses - Noah naked drunk on the first post-diluvian vintage, the
unworthy remnant brought out of Egypt, Ipuwer's lament of survivors.
The great man was buried on Sunday morning, his close family in attendance, at a small
Jewish cemetery near the Atlantic Ocean, in a plot that he had selected just the year
before. Elisheva, Mrs. Velikovsky, is quite in command; the friends telephone one
another and mark time in place uneasily, wondering what is to be done now.
Before Velikovsky retired at eighty-four, he had stretched his large frame over a
multitude of people and affairs. I think that from the beginning he felt destined to
greatness. Out of Russia, but more than Russian, he absorbed Zionism, humanitarian
Socialism, and the marvels of science. He grew into a doctor of medicine. He returned
enthusiastically to Russia on the bright promises of the Revolution, only to be
instantly repelled by the anti-semitism that has always cursed Slavic Byzantium.
He never went back but found another life and social promise in Palestine, and
intellectual promise in the psychoanalytic circles of Central Europe. He began a series
of booklets on what we might call unified science. He studied, he worked; he watched the
mad world like a comet thrashing its head with its tail.
I have heard his reasons, and those which others give, for his next move. I think,
however, that the moment to achieve greatness had arrived and he required the proper
theater of action. At the decisive moment, Napoleon left Egypt for Paris. Velikovsky
left Palestine for New York as the war began. There he practiced psychiatry - a brief,
authoritative and evidently successful way of therapy characteristic of himself. He
became a publicist, too, and wrote many articles on international affairs, the War, and
Near East policies. But more and more he was digging into ancient history. For he had
found reason, while in Palestine, for a basic Cartesian doubt of the chronology of
ancient times. And he had grasped an almost mystical compatibility among his ideas of
Freud and Moses, of his re-storying of ancient Israel and Egypt, of his perspective upon
the contemporary turmoil of Palestine, and, yes, even on his view of the forces that
drive the planets through the heavens.
Velikovsky had civil courage. He never lost political stance. He was not recognizably a
politician of a democratic setting. He was more comfortable with a marshal's baton than
with a smile and a trick. It cost him much to restrain his heavy political instincts
during the numerous world crises of these several decades. But he had found bigger game
and a more certain target - a revolution in mankind's view of man's experience. His
ponderous, direct and clearly conceived kind of political action emerged in the politics
of science. It was a sublimated warfare. He never suffered a defeat, although, to hear
him talk, one would imagine total defeat imminent.
My former wife, Nina, with roots like him in Slavic culture, once said to me, 'You must
not try to cheer him up. He is a Slav. You must tell him that things are even worse than
he imagines, then he will feel better. ' So I did, once or twice, and it worked, but
it's not my style. One time when he was perturbed by the clamor of his opponents and the
diminishing faculties of old age, I exclaimed, 'What's the matter with you? Do you want
to live forever? ' This worked, too, and he was amused when I told him that these ego-
fracturing words were shouted at my platoon by our sergeant in World War II.
When the war ended, he converted his great energies totally to working out the
implications of his several radical ideas. He reordered Near Eastern chronology. He
brought to focus and fixed the causes and consequences of several cosmic catastrophes.
He produced masterly critiques of conventional astronomy and geology. By now there was
no question in his mind wherein lay his greatness nor, with the publication of his first
books, was there any question in the mind of a million readers. The gripe was with the
academic establishments.
Although prepared all his life for persecution, Velikovsky was startled and incensed at
becoming a target of persecution by scientists. Here was a tragic irony for one who had
believed and followed all the rules of the sciences to the best of his abilities. Here
was the reputedly freest part of the free world turning upon him.
Thirty years of struggle to defend his ideas and character ensued. He fought
magnificently. Even if there were not a valid sentence in his books - actually, several
of the greatest works of the century - Velikovsky should achieve a respectful prominence
for his work on behalf of scientific integrity.
Egocentric though he was (but who can deny him the right and need to draw up his
embattled wagons into a defensive circle?) he maintained under the interminable attacks
of those years an honesty, a personal correctness, a saliency, and a devotion to the
ideals of science that made his assailants by contrast appear as howling savages. For a
time, it seemed his defenses would be overrun and that he would be condemned as a
heretic by the scientific establishment. As was typical of him, he chose from history
the greatest intellectual heretics as his models, showing here as almost in every area a
fine discrimination in taste, preferring Giordano Bruno, for example, to Galileo
Galilei. The record is published in part, but there is more, much more, to come.
My feeling, however, is that by the time these latter works are printed, they will be
read wonderingly and happily. I think that Robert Jastrow's article on Velikovsky,
carried by the New York Times on the heels of a poor obituary, practically constitutes
diplomatic recognition. For Jastrow accredits to Velikovsky an impressive array of
scholarly skills and theories that carry a legitimate and considerable scientific force.
When the opposition consents to argue on the facts, a new juridical order comes into
being.
So much of Velikovsky is alive, it is conceited to call him dead. One needs to remind
oneself, even here, even a few yards from his home, that he has departed. What is to be
published of his now? There is much, none of it quite ready for the presses. His
exchanges with Einstein are almost in final written form; here his advocacy of
electromagnetic forces in astrophysics is on stage. His book on the Saturn catastrophe
needs only modest attentions. The two remaining links of his reconstruction of ancient
history -- dealings with the Greek 'Dark Ages' and the Assyrian conquests -- are nearly
completed. Several volumes of materials concerning the first decade of controversies
over his published works are finished, but not the two past decades. His manuscript on
Mankind in Amnesia requires much work. In addition, individual pieces and, I believe,
any notes of value should appear. Under favorable conditions, perhaps fifteen years of
further publication from his pen may be expected. Beyond all of this, there will exist
an archive useful to scholars in many fields. Professor Lynn Rose is to act as literary
executor of his will, under the general direction of Elisheva Velikovsky, whose
knowledge of Velikovsky's archives may exceed that of her husband. Together, his already
published books and articles and his publishable works fashion a monumental scholarship
of the age.
Apart from a few notes, autobiography is lacking. Velikovsky did no like the idea of
someone writing his biography. He wanted to do the job himself, and thought about it
much. He was half-convinced that no one would say the right things about him, but
further he was a poet and literary master for whom the task would be an aesthetic
pleasure. Far less would he like our obituaries, I am sure, for we are bound to be dull
or in error or inconsequential.
When my father died, Velikovsky sought to console me by predicting that, following his
own experience after his father's death, I would enter upon a period of heightened
productivity. I did no agree; nor did the predicted happen; we were too unlike.
Nevertheless, Velikovsky's death impels me to repeat his prediction, this now concerning
his many intellectual sons. It is a large brood. Even if half of them have linear
temperaments, like myself, there will rest a generous half who are like Velikovsky and
who will bring the next two decades to burgeon with revolutionist primevalogy.
Death is schizo. First it confiscates our dearest assets. Since billions have lost
meaning in today's financially inflated world, we cannot decry the loss of billions in
knowledge from the death of a man. Rightly we can say that the death of Velikovsky is
irreparable. When I think of the extra matter that we must all discover and learn now
that this prodigious man is gone, I am in despair.
One day, shortly before he died, we were talking of my own finished study of Moses and
His Electrical God, and of Freud's identification with Moses and assignment of Carl Jung
to be Joshua, I grumbled: 'Freud didn't know 'Joshua! '' Velikovsky turned his rugged
face and pale brown eyes full upon me and said evenly, like a weatherman reporting:
'Joshua was working as an executioner in Egypt. There is a midrash. ' I hate the robber
death.
But death releases the miscreants from school. I think not only of those sons of
Velikovsky already appearing in print - perhaps they will carry forward more
energetically the best of the new - but too of those persons around the world who have
been hidden, sheltering contentedly under the great oak, imagining that their offerings
are puny. And how these persons will now appear here and there and should be immediately
recognized and greeted as authentic, hitherto silent students and advocates of the new
science. Like the men who wrote letters to the Washington Star commenting on an
editorial obituary of Velikovsky: 'No one knew who they were, ' but one might perceive
that their letters were of an expertness and understanding that could not be called
momentary nor were they incidental to the passage of Velikovsky. These types are ready
to do something. They must do something now; no more free rides. Thus works death for
the greater good.
When all is said and done, I feel sorry for the many scholars and scientists who did not
appreciate Velikovsky in his lifetime. They labored often and deviously to bring up some
discovery to send crashing down upon him. By now it should be painfully evident to them
that they are sons of Sisyphus, condemned for their intrigues to push huge rocks up the
hill only to have them fall back to the bottom, times without end. They might have
enjoyed, as we have enjoyed, to live in communion with a great intellectual adventure
and its leader.
Notes (Chapter 26: Eulogies to Three Quantavolutionaries)
1. Princeton, November 1979 First published in the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies
Review IV 2/ 3 (1979-80) 29-31
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A COSMIC DEBATE [1]
I hope here to expound the ramifications of a coming cosmic debate in the sciences and
humanities. All of the disciplines might be affected if, as a result of such a debate,
there occurred a major shift away from the prevailing ideology of uniformitarianism in
the direction of quantavolution or catastrophism.
I attach the word "cosmic" to the debate with three meanings. First, as I have implied,
it is cosmic in that all fields of knowledge are involved. Second, I must have reference
to something of great importance, else why call it "cosmic"? Third, the subject will
have something to do with cosmology - the nature of the earth, the skies and humanity.
Also, the processes of cosmic change, creation and destruction, and the rate at which
great changes occur.
There remain then the words "coming debate." Debate requires two sides that are
determined to confront one another on rational grounds. I must state that the cosmic
debate is not in full swing. It is coming, approaching. The established and conventional
theorists of the sciences and humanities are still reluctant to engage in debate on this
delicate yet vital subject of the cosmos. No doubt you know how difficult it is for a
minor candidate to get into debate with a major candidate in a political campaign. The
major candidate has too much to lose and too little to gain in such an encounter. And so
it is with established scientists and humanists. Scholars are only human, after all; I
am tempted to say that they are only politicians after all. Why should they lend their
ideas to attack, to change, to reconstruction?
EVOLUTIONARY AND REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
I shall try to state the established position in respect to this cosmic debate and then
set forth my own position. The established position, with some over-simplification for
purposes of clarity, is as follows: the heavenly bodies as we see and experience them
have proceeded unchanged and unthreatening for ages beyond human recall, perhaps for
hundreds of millions, even billions of years. The earth, our globe, has existed in its
present form for hundreds of millions of years; some say that the continents have been
shifting at an unnoticeable pace that has accounted for large movements over many
millions of years - continental drift, it is called. Present species, including mankind,
have evolved over many millions of years from primitive ancestors, with excruciating
slowness; mankind is now recognized to have developed over millions of years from
recognizable club-wielding, stone-working hominid archetypes. Such are the components of
what may be called the uniformitarian, or evolutionary cosmology.
Standing in contrast to this evolutionary position is one that may be called
revolutionary, as Immanuel Velikovsky suggested to me a few weeks ago. Instead of being
uniformitarian, it is catastrophic. It reviews first ages of nature and mankind, and
draws several conclusions: The Earth has suffered wide-scale natural disasters in
consequence of changes in the solar system. These disasters have happened within reach
of human memory. Cultures everywhere have assigned disasters to the planets. Human
nature was both physically and psychically affected by catastrophe. The human mind
first, later, and always has suppressed its terrible memories of such events, and let
them emerge in altered forms, sometimes benevolent, productive and artistic, at other
times malevolent, destructive and deranged.
If these propositions of primevalogy are defensible, they will affect practically all
areas of human knowledge. This is perhaps obvious. Some recognize, in the theory of
revolutionary primevalogy, elements of the creation theories of the ancient religions -
still held by a majority of people of the world, incidentally - those talked-about gods
and floods and fire, and so forth. You know, of course, that this old view of cosmology
affected every aspect of life, through, and science. Then, when the uniformitarian
theory arose and supplanted the older theory in the minds of the educated, it too
affected every part of society and science. Hence the present proposed revolutionary
primevalogy may be expected to do the same. That is, it too will affect life, thought,
and science in all their manifestations.
I.
The first area of debate introduces issues of epistemology and ideology. Where did
mankind achieve full awareness, the basic requirement for human memory, prediction, and
control? Under what circumstances was awareness achieved? Whence came our capacity to
abstract the categories of time, space and individuality? The assumption of
revolutionary primevalogy is that humanity developed in great leaps, under circumstances
of extreme physical and social stress.
From this field of psycho-sociology, one enters the field of language, linguistics, and
symbols. Here, too, occurs a universal tongue. The biblical Tower of Babel story is not
a unique representation of a unity and subsequent dispersal of languages groups. Does
the behavior of "The Gods" cause language to diversify quickly, and yet at other times
to freeze its forms of meanings?
Theology is the heir of terrible experiences. It was the conceptual battering ram that
integrated animal and celestial operations. As the skies opened and engulfed mankind,
the human mind responded and worked back and forth productively.
Theology was the original queen of sciences because of its promise to control mankind's
response to the disorders of the heavens. The government of the passions, both personal
and social, is a persisting problem. Political behavior and dogmatic and aggressive
ideologies have their biological origins in the physiology of humans, but their
historical origins are founded upon abrupt as well as continuous change in human
ecology. When the skies fell, man was shocked into self-awareness, religion began, and
with religion and from religion came politics - the organization and direction of human
efforts towards the propitiation and control of the gods and the environment. The
controversy that has attended the publication and testing of Dr. Velikovsky's theories
itself presents issues of a fundamental kind in political science, the history of
science, and philosophy. The experience is already well-documented, and will, when Dr.
Velikovsky's archives are opened, be the best-documented case in the history of science.
A philosopher, viewing this experience, cannot help but become agitated over the
intellectual and moral rules under which scientists operate and govern themselves. But
even more elemental is the philosophical question as to the origins of philosophy in the
sublimation and rationalization of forms of thought and behavior originating under
traumatic conditions in "times beyond recall".
II
A second category of knowledge to enter the approaching cosmic debate is history. No
field of pre-history and ancient history can escape reappraisal.
The field of ancient Greek history will serve as an example. Gripped by the
uniformitarian and evolutionary ideology, and therefore unimpressed by evidences of
wide-spread, almost total, disasters that overtook the Minoan and Mycenean precursors of
Greek civilization, most historians have accepted a theory that allows 500 years of dark
ages. During this period they allege that one set of civilizations declined and the
primitive new Greek civilization began.
Revolutionary primevalogy says that these dark ages were not 500 years long, but
occupied about 100 years, and that what happened was the destruction of the great
civilizations by natural causes, involving disturbances of the earth and the skies, and
that the survivors of the catastrophe came out of a state of disastrous shock to
reassemble the new civilizations of Homeric Greece. Those survivors behaved in ways that
were full of contradictions and madness. And it was perhaps quite important, to the
history of the Western mind, that the crazed survivors and their ideas and behavior have
been taught to schoolboys for 2600 years as a model for manly behavior. Women's
Liberation advocates, please take note. Educators, take note. Why have these models been
allowed to persist? Is history but an obsessed recapitulation of disastrous experiences?
Is it but a shell-shocked capering?
Call the roll of the ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Crete,
Cyprus, the Aegean, Greece, the Etruscans, the Romans, the Megalithic pre-historic
humans of Europe, the Olmecs and Mayans, the Peruvians, the North American Indians,
China, India, Iran, and so forth. Wherever one ventures equipped with the revolutionary
theory, old historical evidence is reshaped and new theories emerge. Matters large and
matters small become involved. How did the ballgames of many cultures come to be
invented and why were they religious? Why do modern Peruvian Indians put bowls on their
heads when the earth quakes? Are ancient Meso-American statues wearing helmets because
they are astronauts, as one popular writer has implausibly said, or to shield them from
"flak"? Civilized centers known to us seem to connect with common centers that were
obliterated in catastrophes, leaving behind many puzzling connections between the
Orient, America, and the Mediterranean. All such problems extend beyond history into
anthropology and other fields, of course.
III
A third large area of fuel for debate would be the humanities. There are many fields
here and my breakdown of the fields cannot be very logical. Is costuming a field? Where
did clothing originate, or the helmets we have been talking of? Clothing was born of
disaster, says the Bible, of expulsion from the Garden of Eden, which may have
corresponded to a tilting of the earth's axis and the coming of the cold seasons.
Certainly mythology is a humanistic field. It seems odd to me that no contemporary
school of mythology, except of course the revolutionary school of which I speak, admits
to the reality and historicity of myths. Or if one does, it waters down reality to most
trivial occurrences before accepting it.
Robert Graves, in his famous collection of The Greek Myths, defines some thirteen types
of expression that might be called myth, none of which approach our own. Mircea Eliade,
the most distinguished mythologist of the moment, invented a phrase, illud tempus, "That
Time", to refer to a point to which all myth connected with the cosmos went back. But he
would not venture himself into the real precincts of That Time. He says, in effect, that
everyone and everything can be referred back to that Time, but nothing really happened
then. Strange indeed.
Certainly, much is to be done in the revision of mythology. Better than Freud, Jung and
others, the revolutionary primevalogist can explain myth in the context of a human mind
trying to cope with disastrous ecological experience. Mythanalysis goes hand in hand
with a reconstructed natural history to permit great advances in translating symbols and
making sense out of the apparently senseless. This will be true not only of so-called
primitive and ancient myth. But also of the great bodies of material summed up in the
Bible, the Vedas, the Koran, and other sacred religio-moral-historical works.
If the effect of massive collective shock is the suppression of memory, another effect
is the partly conscious and vigorous design of methods for ridding humans of the
impressions and anxieties bubbling up from the repressed memories. This is commonly
accomplished by divisionary, symbolically loaded activity. The study of religious
worship and rituals can view these human activities existentially - for their present
functioning, that is. It can view them, too, with their prayers and liturgies, as
endless repetitions, enforced through all succeeding generations, of the both terrible
and life-saving human-making events of the disastrous periods of human history and pre-
history.
The development of literature would be another diversion of anxiety. Every people has
its songs and dances that sooth the uneasy breast. I studied one song that is found in
the Odyssey of Homer, that I call the Love Song of Demodocus. It consists of a hundred
lines of poetry describing an opera ballet. I believe that I have discovered in its plot
a masking of the terrible planetary encounter between Moon and Mars that I mentioned a
moment ago. According to the song, Aphrodite (the Moon Goddess) and Mars (the war god)
are making love in the bed of the god Vulcan, who traps them by his electrical genius
and then is persuaded to release them by the Earth-god Poseidon. Like religious
observances, but much more roundabout, the song recalls the terrible days, and by
recalling them in a disguised form, relieves the mind of the people concerning them.
What people do and do not forget, and what they should and should not forget, are of
course important problems, and, if revolutionary primevalogy can throw light upon
stress, memory, and forgetting, psychologists will be grateful, as was a German
psychiatrist with whom I discussed last summer the question of controlling the memory of
Nazism. On the one hand, Germans have to remember the Nazi experience in order to think
straight and correct themselves; on the other hand they have to forget and distort it in
order for life to be tolerable. But now, you see, we have entered the fields of
educational psychology and political psychology.
IV
And so we move into a fourth large category of the fields of knowledge, the social
science. A related field of study is that of political institutions. How were the state,
law and order, and administration invented? Do the circumstances of the origins of
political institutions affect the ways in which these operate today?
To take one instance, the invention of kingship, what does revolutionary primevalogy
lend to the study of kingship? A number of scholars have shown that the earliest kings
were believed to be gods or closely identified with gods; these gods were celestial and
planetary; the power of the king was as unlimited as that of the gods; and often,
strangely, the kings would be put to death ceremonially upon the completion of that
period of time.
It seems unlikely that a man would be made a god unless people had experienced the
terrible turmoil of heavenly crashes and interventions upon earth, whereupon a strict
imitation of the celestial model would be in order - obsessions transformed into
institutions. But you see, an institution, defined as process, is nothing but a set of
channels for routinized behavior.
There is probably much left of this primordial desperation, fear, and propitiation in
modern kings and presidents. Why, after all, should not President Richard Nixon have
been fired or retired like any ordinary employee or executive? The fears and anxieties
surrounding his downfall were all too reminiscent of primeval methods of imitating gods
out of terror of being punished.
I may read to you from the Lawbook of Manu, one of the ancient East Indian documents
where the eight great gods that guard the points of the compass form also the eight
divine parts of the king:
When the world was without a king
and dispersed in fear in all directions,
the Lord created a king
for the protection of all.
He made him of eternal particles
of Indra and the Wind,
Yama, the Sun and Fire,
Varuna, the moon, and the Lord of Wealth.
And, because he had been formed
of fragments of all those gods,
the king surpasses
all other beings in splendor.
Even an infant king must not be despised,
as though a mere mortal,
for he is a great god in human form [2] .
Lacking self-knowledge, and therefore lacking self-control, modern men and women and
children repeat the same thoughts and mechanisms that produced the sacred absolute kings
of the earliest empires.
Revolutionary primevalogy has also brought new insights to bear upon two well-debated
older theories of human culture. One of these has held that human institution and
manufactures developed in the world independently, although similarly, in different
places of Asia, America, and Europe. The second theory has held that occasional
encounters between separate peoples had to be the method by which so many features of so
many cultures came to resemble one another. The revolutionary theory says "yes" and "no"
to both the independent invention and the diffusion theory. The revolutionary theory
alone can assert that at one time in the history of mankind, before a set of universal
catastrophes occurred, a universal culture existed. Further, the drastic changes of the
surface of the earth destroyed most of this grand ecumenical culture, leaving the
remnants of humanity in their isolated locations, there to continue many of their old
common practices and beliefs, but also there to reconstruct their cultures in accord
with their separately-experienced disasters.
The Bible speaks of at least four universal disasters; the creation of the world itself,
the drastic change of mentality and environment accompanying the expulsion of Adam and
Eve from the garden of Eden, the great flood, and the plagues and chaos of the exodus
from Egypt. Those stories have a reality to them that the continuous efforts of modern
evolutionary science have not succeeded in effacing. The task of revolutionary
primevalogy is to resume once more, and with all the improved tools of the sciences and
humanities, the reading and interpretation of the myths of creation and destruction from
all over the world. The success of such studies would of course strongly impress the
field of theology.
Besides anthropology and political science, other fields of social science where
revolutionary primevalogy enters into debate occur readily. If the disasters were tied
up with the creation of the human mind, then they would be intimately connected with
psychology, which studies the human mind, and with social psychology, that treats of man
and society. I have already mentioned the problems of stress and forgetting, collective
amnesia, displacement of anxieties, the psychology of symbols, the origins of
creativity. But I should mention as well the fascinating but dismal study of warfare, of
destructive aggressiveness, of war formations, of armaments. Would not our ways of
looking at and attacking the problems of human conflict change if we were to see them as
primeval recapitulations of projections of the battles of the heavenly hosts? Gods made
war, and men followed their example, rather than the contrary, as the apologists for the
gods would have it. Again, as with the large picture, so with the small. Did Roman
hegemony, based upon the legion, that was maneuvered around the short sword, to whose
exercise they devoted themselves so tenaciously, express in that dedication the image of
flaming Mars as a sword which various ancient cultures of the seventh and eighth century
attested to seeing in the sky?
Nor can the field of sexology, even as developed by the Freudian psychologists, escape
the debate, for it seems to me that the exceedingly ramified, refined, and violent
manifestations of sexual behavior found in humans may in many respects be a secondary
derivation from the catastrophic experience, rather than a primary result of biological
and familial evolutionary development.
I shall pass over the field of economics with a hint of the revolutionary challenge to
it. The biblical, and even worldwide, myth that work is a curse upon man laid by his
Fall from God's Grace is more scientifically correct than, say the theory of Karl Marx
that work is an imposition of the system of ownership, or the more generally accepted
idea that human beings were born workers. Work, I would postulate, is a catastrophically
indoctrinated obsession with routines and with the avoidance of future disasters. (You
will understand, of course, that I have no prejudice against work, and am typically
addicted to it.)
V
At the University of Lethbridge, early this years, I developed the question whether
physical changes may have occurred in man during the catastrophes that occurred over the
last 15,000 years. Here is an issue on the borderline of the anthropological sciences
and the biological sciences. I reasoned that one or a combination of events must have
happened to propel a large-skulled primate into the human being that we know: the
annihilation of numerous "competing" subspecies; activation of glandular systems not
apparent in fossils; obsessive social transference through many memorial generations;
and conventional, but greatly speeded-up, mutation; such are the possibilities of
explaining human history.
It may be understood, then, how the biological sciences will enter the debate: through
direct challenges to Darwinian uniformitarianism; through new hypotheses handed over to
the chemists of life and genetics, who are already making such rapid progress that they
encourage revolutionary primevalogists to think in turn of the famous literary work of
Ovid, not to mention a multitude of other ancient sources, where he catalogues a bizarre
zoo of metamorphosed beings; and, of course, by way of the science of ecology that would
have to gear itself to considerations of sudden and extreme adaptation of species to
atmospheric, climatic, and soil changes.
Revolutionary primevalogy contemplates a history of life that stresses massive
quantities of mutational stimuli, and the rapid proliferation and even more rapid
extinction of species. At the time they took over the world's educational and
intellectual establishments, the Darwinian evolutionists knew neither of mutation nor
radiation. They furthermore denied gross and rapid changes of the earth's morphology and
ecology.
This is the year of the ozone peril, however, with newspapers carrying the warnings of
scientists that if aerial nuclear bomb testing is practiced, if regular super-sonic
plane flights are scheduled, and if the use of aerosol sprays continues to grow, then a
point will be reached within half a century when half the high ozone layer may be
destroyed and with it earth's people and animals. It should be added that these points
are disputed. The Pentagon says: not so! Others, too, are content with the potential of
the ozone layer for replacement, barring extreme abuse. Still, solar and outer-space
radiation may do the job of killing off the species, once the ozone's protection is
removed. Once more, the fragility of the earthly ecology is highlighted.
Yet nothing that mankind can do is anything but a pale reflection of what nature has
done repeatedly in times past. The ashes of the immense explosion of Krakatoa of 1883, a
volcanic disaster that startled the world, now lay scarcely detectable on the floors of
the Indonesian seas. Below it however, in the cores taken by oceanographers, are to be
found six heavy ash layers, laid down within the past million years. By comparison with
any one of these six disastrous events, the greatest historical explosion, that of
Krakatoa, was insignificant. Sometime in the same period, another cosmic event scattered
an estimated billion tons of meteorites or tektites over the island areas of the South
Asia seas.
VI
I am tempted to go on describing the amazing discoveries of contemporary oceanography,
were our time not limited - for instance, the global cleavage of the earth. An immense
fracture runs from the Arctic to the Antarctic and then splits into a double-fork to run
around the other side of the globe. It would be well, also, to discuss the youngness and
biological sterility of the ocean deeps. Since the species that inhabit the deeps are
rather ordinary and few in number - Jules Verne to the contrary notwithstanding - one
may wonder whether some intelligent and well-organized groups of people will one day
achieve methods of breeding edible species for the deeps and feeding them in their
habitat. Or whether oceanic bio-culture might not be accompanied by developments in
thermal control, so that energy may be produced by thermal vertical differentials in the
ocean, and so that climates may be moderated by current diversion. A new comprehension
of why the oceans developed only in recent times will abet humanity's search for the
earthly environment of the near future.
Almost without saying, now, we have passed from biology through the earth sciences, the
sixth large grouping of fields of knowledge where important debates should shape up
along revolutionary versus evolutionary lines. I have referred to issues of mineralogy,
vulcanology, oceanography, and meteorology. Apart from the boundaries of fields, there
stand some basic physical questions. Under the pressure of discoveries of the
catastrophic events happening in the universe - pulsars, quasars, black holes, galaxy
collapse, and so forth - scientists must begin to consider the morphology of the earth
on a greatly magnified scale of forces. There have been some exertions of heat and
pressure upon this globe through extraterrestrial and internal sources quite far from
those normally taken into calculation by geologists in explaining surface rocks and
features. The challenge that the nineteenth century genius, Ignatius Donnelly, put to
the geological world, that the vast unstratified layers of clay, till, and stones that
cover much of the globe are of extra-terrestrial and cometary origin, was not too well
answered. But, with modern geochemical techniques, the challenge may be answered. That
is, if the appropriate scientists will attend to the matter.
In completing a short agenda of debating topics in the earth sciences, it may be well to
introduce the field of chronology. This has, of course, its several parts, which may or
may not be necessarily related. There are historical techniques where no documentation
exists and even the chain of memorial generations becomes broken. Datings are then made
by examining the stratification of fossils and human products below the ground. Here,
and far beyond, extend the working of chemical clocks, such as radiocarbon dating,
potassium-argon dating, and so forth.
Geological and archaeological dating are achieved by the penetration of strata of earth
and the remains of cultures, and assigning a later date to what is above something else.
Archaeology has not sufficiently considered the causes of sudden destruction of ancient
civilizations, and therefore has made many mistakes of time, nor has it concerned itself
with very ancient civilizations and centers of habitation that may have been entirely
erased. But these can be inferred in the future with fair validity. No one seems to have
considered, for instance, whether the cave artists of the Dordogne in France, or the
builders of Stonehenge megalithic monuments may not have been survivors of catastrophes
of the second, third or other millennia before Christ. And that the centers from which
they derived were much more highly developed artistically and technologically.
Nor has geology sufficiently pondered the effects of catastrophes in burning and
flooding deeply huge areas, and in thrusting and folding great masses of land beneath
and above other strata so as to create illusions of ages that did not exist. Nor for
that matter have conventional geologists given us sufficient assurances that the fossil
beds by which datings are made are not the result of fossil zoning, that is, the moving
of fossil beds into other strata, or above and below them, by catastrophic earth and
water flows. Indeed, far from feeling insecure in the face of criticism, geologists and
archaeologists have been greatly heartened in their evolutionary uniformitarianism since
World War II by the development of so-called chemical clocks. Often they abandon their
former datings in favor of what they believe to be more accurate radio-chemical dates.
Once having discovered that certain chemical elements are radioactive and decay into new
elements, scientists have elaborated techniques for counting how much of a parent
element is present in a certain things, how much of the daughter element is present in
the things, and then how much time must have elapsed to produce that much of the
daughter element. If uniformitarian theory held, then the measurement of the ages might
be satisfactorily achieved. But a serious challenge may be leveled against the concept
of chemical decay: why should we assume that an element decays today as it decayed a
hundred million years ago?
Furthermore, in many cases, in applying specialized clockwork to given specimens, the
history of the specimen is unknown. Today, the specimen may rest in a seemingly new bed;
but this may be only the latest of various beds that it has occupied over the ages. The
earth's surface, alas, may be a chain of flophouses for transient materials. What
matters to the cosmic debate is the experiences of matter, and aging is only one kind of
experience.
Besides, catastrophes, by frictional heat, pressure and electricity, and the mixing of
elements in disequilibrium, introduce revolutions of the atmosphere, of the rocks, and
of organic existence. If, for example, Mars, which is rich in argon gas, were to
exchange any argon with heated rocks of the moon and earth, then any potassium-argon
test of a rock might well show a very old age because of the presence in it of argon
from a foreign source. The substance will have many stepdaughters. In fact, the chemical
clocks registered great ages of the moon, although physically it gives evidence of
having boiled recently. Such severe criticism may be leveled against the uniformitarian
methods employed, that there is, to my mind, a strong probability that the moon was
subjected to highly disturbing events as little as 2700 years ago.
VII
Now we have mentioned six categories of disciplines, and there remains only a seventh to
exemplify. This would be the physical sciences: mechanics, terrestrial and celestial;
electrodynamics, terrestrial and celestial - all that is encompassed by astronomy and
astrophysics and the special subfield that take in the individual planets, the sun and
the moon, without, however, omitting the importance of the earth's external and internal
responses to its membership in the solar family.
Howsoever few are the fields and issues of the approaching cosmic debate in the sciences
that I can present to you here, I would be remiss if I did not bring up the subject of
astronomy, the "Queen of Sciences," it is called. Actually, astronomy is not the queen
of sciences; it would be rather a precious and dilettante science were it not for the
catastrophic events that the courtiers of the "queen of sciences" choose to ignore. Few
people, certainly not rulers of empires, would pay attention to the skies were it not
for the fact that the skies fell from time to time. As the children's fable about
Chicken Little goes, "Run for your life, the sky is falling," and when all the little
animals hear the refrain, they, too, run for their lives.
Within the last month, an American professor of celestial mechanics named Robert W. Bass
published articles that should stimulate debate on the stability of the solar system. To
my way of thinking, his work has put to rest the myth engendered by Pythagoras, Plato,
Newton, and La Place, followed by a host of scientists, that the heavens can be
mathematically demonstrated to be in a condition of long-term stability. Contrariwise,
Professor Bass has shown that, if the heavens are stable at all, they are stable for
empirical and experiential reasons, not because of any laws discovered by Newton or La
Place or anyone else following after them.
We are left with the evidence of historical geology and proto-history. I think that
these tell us, or they will tell us when the debate is finished, that the heavens have
changed recently and are not eternally fixed in their movements. Without pausing to
examine the mathematics of Professor Bass, I would call your attention also to the work
of an engineer who has occupied himself with electrical phenomena, Ralph Juergens. Mr.
Juergens, working alone and without support other than that provided by the inspiration
and encouragement of a few friends, has written articles that I am convinced will be
numbered among the most important of our age. The thesis which he advances, and which is
my candidate for the winning side in the approaching cosmic debate, is that electrical
forces of almost unbelievable magnitude were exercised upon the Moon, Mars, Earth and
other heavenly bodies in the recent past. His demonstrations are not beyond the grasp of
the educated layman, and are based almost entirely upon the evidence that the
evolutionary uniformitarians who command the space explorations have had to provide the
public in the course of their work.
Mr. Juergens has shown that many striking features of the moon's surface - its giant
craters and jagged valleys - and those of Mars as well - must be the product of gigantic
electrical discharges between planetary bodies, and that these occurred in times within
the memory of mankind. In a modest and incidental remark, Juergens has also suggested
that the key to the solution of the urgent problem of nuclear fusion, for the production
of cheap, non-polluting energy, may be in the study and understanding of the
interplanetary electrical discharges that have been reported in such primeval epics as
the Homeric battles of the gods.
SUMMARY
With the example of electromagnetics behind me, and the seven categories complete, I may
now proceed to summarize. I fully appreciate, I beg you to believe, that I have but
raised issues and not solved them. But such, after all, was the original intent of my
talk. I wish to explain to you why I thought that the moment has come for enlarging the
debate over cosmic issues in the sciences and humanities. I tried to explain why I
believed that in practically every field there would be ample material for debate,
provided only that the ruling conventional scientists permit themselves to be drawn into
debate. The problems are not all resolvable in favor of revolutionary primevalogy.
Indeed, the contrast between revolutionary and evolutionary primevalogy is not absolute.
Rather, I find, and I hope that you will agree, that there is a pressing need to present
the case of revolutionary primevalogy to the intellectuals and educated public. Let the
decision rest with them.
My own position, and that of other advocates of a revolutionary primevalogy, is simple
to state:
Humanity was born in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable set of crises.
This condition was caused by stupendous celestial and geological events.
Everything that humanity has done or achieved, since the baseline to this set of events
was drawn some thousands of years ago, has been affected, colored, and fashioned by
them.
The future of both science and ethics rests in an appreciation of this revolutionary
position.
From these theories, we can learn, first, that mankind is in a fundamental, natural
sense helpless in the lap of God or Nature. Second, mankind is all one, a unity, as he
faces the most fundamental principles of existence. Third, through education and new
attitudes, a future not at all inferior, indeed superior, to past existences can be
formed.
CODA
At this point, I had intended to conclude my talk, but in view of some of the questions
that have been asked in the meeting rooms and corridors, I would like to offer you an
extension of remarks, a kind of coda, if you please.
Perhaps you have noticed how I stress the need for the integration of numerous fields in
order to develop a theory that can face several ways at once. Others have spoken in the
same vein. The fact that on this platform we have had astrophysicists, humanists and
social scientists is some proof of the point. Yet, on the other hand, we must be always
aware of the pitfalls of synthesis. Synthesis flies off readily into mysticism,
generalities and scientific errors abounding.
The antidote is, of course, specialized knowledge. By specialism, I mean the capacity to
understand work with severely constrained hypotheses, which presume many things, and
which, braced by such presumptions, are able to dig in deeply at critical locations and
emerge with findings which have to be confronted, whether to disprove them, or accept
them, but in any event, to interpret them.
If revolutionary primevalogy is to progress in an orderly way and not to fly off wildly,
it must accommodate to existing specialists or breed its own kind of specialists. This
we are only beginning to do. We need not only to turn the other cheek when we are
slapped by the specialist; we have to persuade the specialist and especially the would-
be young specialist that our theories are eminently testable and that the smallest
problem, as well as the grandiose problem, lends itself to a particular intense interest
that they can recognize and that is important to the revolutionary view. Only if success
attends this process will the "Operation Bootstrap" be possible, or to use another
metaphor, will the circle of "integration - specialization - reintegration" be closed.
A second question that has been raised here, and often elsewhere, is the opposite of
what the revolutionary primevalogists have been saying to the evolutionaries. Just as it
can be rightly said that many evolutionaries are blinded by their need to find a secure
world, it can be rightly said of some revolutionaries that they are catastrophic
chiliasts, for whom the very next day is the great day of judgment and to whom the
prospect of unsettled worlds gives pleasure. They are dominated by a Freudian death-
instinct. They think of the end of the world like many of the ancient prophets are
alleged to have thought of it, wishfully, hopefully, in despair at the state of the
world.
But I must say, as I have watched the serious workers in this field, that if they are
wishful catastrophists, they have successfully sublimated the wish, and are as cheerful
and concerned about a constructive future as any normal person. This is the third
conference of 500 persons that I have addressed in nine months on related subjects and I
have remarked on the sanguine and rational temperament of the proceedings and of the
people in the audience as well. I should here say that this is in no small measure owing
to the circumspection, sobriety, scientificity and humanity of Immanuel Velikovsky,
whose work and whose general influence pervaded them.
And so now to my final comment. This is in answer to the repeated query: When will the
next catastrophe occur? Surely this is a natural human concern. It is even a scientific
concern, for one wished to know whether a set of events, occurring successively in times
past and at staggered intervals, will occur again, and if so, in what temporal ratio to
the past events. Nevertheless, I shall have to answer in a mood that Leo Rosten wrote
recently was characteristic of dialogues in Yiddish: I answer a question by asking other
questions. Why do you want to know when the human race will suffer another catastrophe?
How soon is soon? Worse problems are before us, so why worry? The human race is much
more likely to flatten itself or obliterate itself by hatreds and through techniques
that it displays at this moment of time than it is to become a victim of the raging
elements of nature. To these controllable human threats we should address ourselves. And
it may be that a theory of revolutionary primevalogy will help us do so.
Notes (Chapter 27: A Cosmic Debate)
1. This public lecture was January 11, 1975, in Montreal, Canada, at the Saidye Bronfman
Centre under the Chairmanship of Nahum Ravel, and at a symposium to discuss
"Velikovsky's Challenge to Conventional Beliefs."
2. However he rejected this term and we could never settle upon another one. I finally
coined the term "quantavolution," as contrasted with "evolution," but will be satisfied
if the theory and mentality associated with the latter word are changed, letting the
word "evolution" evolve suddenly, markedly, and generally.
3. Quoted in A-1. Basham. The Wonder that was India (New York: The Grove Press. 1959.
pp. 84-5.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
SYLLABI FOR QUANTAVOLUTION
I
G 53.2112 Social Invention PRIMEVAL ECOLOGY, INSTITUTIONS, AND HUMAN NATURE
Professor Alfred de Grazia, New York University
Spring Semester, 1976
Prerequistites: A Bachelor's Degree.
(For undergraduates permission of the instructor or advisor is required. Call 598-3277.)
The course is organized around a central concept, "Revolutionary Primevalogy," by which
is meant that drastic natural changes (disasters) have occurred in 14,000 years (roughly
the Holocene period) and produced a self-developing homo sapiens whose very mind and all
its works have been causally and environmentally conditioned by those changes.
Theories and evidence are drawn from various fields of the social sciences, humanities,
and natural sciences. Specifically, political institutions and behavior are treated as
relatives and adjuncts of human nature, behavior, and culture in general.
"Enlightenment" over the ages has been almost entirely a burial and masking of symptoms;
the basic problems of primeval mankind still rest with us and radical alternatives need
to be searched out if those are not to determine the human future.
Primevalogy is a most difficult and complex field, both because of the clash of
fundamental theories (religious-scientific, evolutionary-revolutionary), and because of
the scarcity and ambiguity of data. Indeed the field hovers on the edge of being a non-
field or anti-field. Sometimes one wonders: "If the events it deals with are provable,
then the field cannot exist." This paradox is analogous to certain new problems of
theoretical physics, where phenomena are so antitemporal or micro-temporal or spatially
contradictory that to observe them as occurring seems to be a proof that they cannot
occur.
The approach, nevertheless, is conventionally scientific, even though it opposes
conventional science and orthodoxy. We are not dealing with ghosts or creatures from
outer space. Nor do we prove the existence of God. We are simply doing the best that we
can with whatever the pragmatic and operational modern scientific tools and works afford
us.
Each session will be divided into two parts. From 6: 00 to 6: 50 p. m., the lecture will
present a straightforward statement of the theory of revolutionary primevalogy.
Following a brief intermission, the instructor will take up and assess objections to the
theory as presented; criticism and discussion by class members will follow and will
terminate the session at 7: 50 p. m. Since time may not permit all to participate who
wish to do so, written comments and questions for written or oral reply may be
submitted.
Towards the conclusion of the first session, members of the class will be asked to write
a note to the instructor on their background and preferences for areas into which they
might wish to delve when writing a paper for the course. Undergraduates may contribute a
paper as well. The instructor will then, later on, make suggestions concerning possible
topics. The final examination will consist of brief essays upon several of a list of
questions that will be distributed well in advance.
Calendar of Lectures (Wednesdays, 6: 00 to 8: 00 P. M.)
INTRODUCTION
1.
February 4
REVOLUTIONARY PRIMEVALOGY:
The science of first ages as products of abrupt, large-scale, intense events; evolution
and uniformitarianism, catastrophism; the intimate relation of nature to humanity.
2.
February 11
AGES OF CHAOS AND CREATION:
The timetable of revolutionary changes; great world cycles; rise and fall of
civilizations.
SECTION I
3.
February 18
HUMAN TIME AND REAL TIME:
Concepts and measures; how scientists defeated the theologians and created an old Earth;
radiochronology; traditional time; astronomical bench-marks.
4.
February 25
THE SUPER-FORCES OF NATURE IN THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE:
Nineteen expressions of super-energy and their effects upon ecology and humankind.
5.
March 3
THE DISRUPTION AND SETTLING OF HEAVEN:
Observations of primeval people; planetary, cometary and other cosmic phenomena;
Velikovky's synthesis; the heavenly waters.
6.
March 10
EFFECTS OF GEOLOGICAL REVOLUTIONS UPON THE BIOSPHERE:
Ice ages; cleavages of the globe; mountains, gorges, rifts; igneous patterns; adaptation
and extinction of species.
SECTION II
7.
March 17
WHEN AND HOW WAS HUMANKIND "CREATED":
From hominid to homo sapiens; creation legends; the schizoid gestalt and the triple
control problem; racial types and succession.
8.
March 31
MECHANISMS & FUNCTIONS OF MEMORY AND FORGETTING;
Great fears; the amnesia of holocausts; culture-creation through obsessive-compulsive
behavior.
9.
April 7
BIRTH, STRUGGLES, AND DEATH OF THE GODS:
Gods and heroes; fatal flaws; divine ambivalence to man and man to gods; the greatest
cover-up; Homeric plots; götterdämmerung.
10.
April 14
COMMUNICATION BY SIGNS, SYMBOLS, AND LANGUAGE:
Animal communication: earliest symbols; universal language; the Tower of Babel.
11.
April 21.
PRIMEVAL ORIGINS OF THE ARTS AND LITERATURE:
Crafts, myths; liturgy art; dance; poetry.
12.
April 28
PRAGMATICS AND INSTITUTIONS OF CONTROL:
Group behavior; religio-political institutions and sacred-secular power forms; war;
sexuality; economies; instrumental rationalism.
CONCLUSION
13.
May 5
WHAT THE PRIMEVAL FORETELLS OF THE FUTURE:
Centrality of control problems; interconnectedness of knowledge; self-destructiveness;
the "Jupiter effect" and other possibilities.
14.
May 12
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION OF THE LECTURES :
Synopsis of the theory; problems of validations; practical uses; the politics of
science; a new science.
II
THE CATASTROPHIST TRADITION IN THE HUMANITIES AND SCIENCES:
ITS PERSISTENCE, RECENT DEVELOPMENT,
AND EFFECTS UPON THOUGHT AND BEHAVIOR
(A proposed seminar of 1982) Professor Alfred de Grazia New York University
I.
INTRODUCTION
1.
Explanation of the goals and work of the Seminar. Writing the Research Paper.
2.
The Tradition that General Catastrophes have occurred on Earth defined. Terms such as
revolutionism, macroevolution, punctuated equilibria, quantum evolution, quantavolution,
natural saltations, cyclism, catastrophe (in topological mathematics). The concept of a
sudden, intensive large-scale change in the process of natural and human history.
3.
Examples of the infiltration (amounting often to dominance) of catastrophic ideas and
theories into most fields of knowledge.
II.
THE PLACE OF CATASTROPHISM
IN THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
4.
Origins.
A. The ascribed and actual origins of all major religions in catastrophes: Cases:
Mosaism, Mazdaism, Greco --Romanism, Mesoamericanism, Hinduism.
B. The number and kinds of catastrophes claimed by religion.
5.
Practices.
A. The conversion of legendary experiences into forms of religious practices.
B. Cross-cultural identification of the principal deities and their traits.
6.
Ideology
A. The functions of catastrophic ideas in religion.
B. The sublimation of catastrophic religion in philosophy, ancient and modern.
C. Attempts to free religion and philosophy from catastrophe.
III.
THE SEARCH FOR CATASTROPHES IN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
7.
Archaeology: Levels of natural destruction and ancient excavations.
8.
Anthropology: the human species, a prolonged (or brief?) development.
IV.
THE EXTINCTION AND GENESIS OF SPECIES
9.
The Pleistocene and earlier exterminations.
10.
Origin of species in catastrophes.
V.
THE TREATMENT OF COSMIC DISORDER IN ASTRONOMY
11.
"Immutability of the Spheres," Plato, Whiston, Laplace, Ovenden, Bass et al.
12.
"The Explosive Universe," Hoerbiger, Baker, Velikovsky, Warwick, et al.
VI.
THE STRUGGLE TO DISCRIMINATE CHANGE AGENTS
IN THE EARTH SCIENCES
13.
The Change of Paradigm
A. Dominance of catastrophism in early geology.
B. The uniformitarian reconstruction: gradualism and terrestrial isolationism.
14.
Ostracism and reductionism: cranks, denial, and anomalies.
15.
Recent scientific literature (1970 to 1982) on extraterrestrial influences upon
meteorology and geology.
VII. THE CRUX OF CHRONOLOGY:
10 4 , 10 6 , 2 X 10 7 , 10 9 or 5 x 10 9 YEARS?
MODES AND TECHNIQUES OF TIME-DETERMINATION.
16.
Authoritative
17.
Astrophysical
18.
Biostratigraphical
19.
Radiochronometric
VIII. CATASTROPHISM IN LITERATURE AND POLITICS
20.
The Pentateuch, the Rig-Veda and early western epics (Homer, the Edda)
21.
Shakespeare
22.
Modern Forms
A. Science fiction
B. The mass media
23.
The Holocausts: the tendency of ancient collective traumatic experiences to repeat
themselves in politics and war.
IX. THE HUMAN MIND TODAY:
CONFRONTING AND COPING WITH CATASTROPHIC IDEAS IN SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
24.
The reception system of science
A. Problems of natural science models clashing with unconforming natural history
B. Evolution of Quantavolution: issues in the biological sciences
25.
Developing forms of thought
A. Catastrophism in contemporary religion
B. Psychological therapy and the catastrophic mentality
C. Cosmic and political catastrophism: the meaning of nuclear war
SUGGESTED READINGS, ON RESERVE
(Keyed to outline and fully cited in the master bibliography provided each member of the
Seminar)
I.
Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan et al., Scientists Confront Velikovsky; M. Truzzi, el., The
Zetetic Scholar (excerpts); A. de Grazia, "The Coming Cosmic Debate in the Sciences and
Humanities, " (offprint).
II.
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; D. Talbott, Saturn; A. Grazia, "Moses and
the Management of Exodus;" J. Ziegler, YHWH; Plato, "Critias" and "Timaeus
(selections);" A. Isenberg, "Devi and Venus;"
III
Claude Schaeffer, Stratigraphie Comparée.. (translated portions); A. de Grazia, The Rise
of Homo Schizo (excerpted chapters);
IV
Luis Alvarez et al.. (Excerpts on iridium concentrations at the Cretaceous-Tertiary
boundary, from Science magazine); Otto Schindewolf, "Neocatastrophism? in 2 Catas. Geol.
V
L. C. Stecchini, "The Inconstant Heavens" and "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data;"
Thomas Taylor, "Coincidence between the Bolts of the Planet Jupiter and the Fabulous
Bonds of Jupiter the Demiurgus," Classical J. (1819); R. W. Bass, "Proofs of the
Stability of the Solar System," in 4 Pensée; H. B. Baker, "The Earth Participates in the
Evolution of the Solar System," Detr. Acad. Nat. Sci. (reprint).
VI.
Cuvier, Revolutions of the Globe; Derek Ager, The Nature of the Statigraphical Record;
D. Stove. "The Scientific Mafia"; reprint, J. A. Eddy, "The Case of the Missing
Sunspots," 236 Sci. American.
VII
R. Juergens, "Radiohalos and Earth History," III Kronos (1977); "Geogullibility and
Magnetic Reversals," III Kronos (1978); A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, ch. III.
VIII.
D. Patten, The Biblical Flood; Peter James, "Aphrodite: the Moon or Venus?" I SISR
(1976); I. Wolfe, "The Catastrophic Substructure of Shakespeare's 'Anthony and
Cleopatra'", I Kronos 3 (1975-6)
IX.
Stephen Gould, "Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory," 216 Science (1982);
McLean vs. Arkansas (1982, Documents and Court Opinion); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions; Sigmund Freud on the repetition of traumatic experiences
(Selected Papers); Manifesto of Nobel prize winners on nuclear warfare and humanity
(1981).
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
All works cited as the specific background of the seminar meetings will be available on
Reserve. In some instances, purchase of the materials is possible: in other instances,
duplication of the materials has to be arranged. Although it is expected that the
instructor will be able to convey his own research in the course of the meetings, copies
of his relevant works will also be available on loan; these include in published or
Xeroxed form: Chaos and Creation: Quantavolution in the Natural and Human Science; Homo
Schizo (in two volumes): The Origins of Man and Culture and Human Nature and Behavior;
Solaria Binaria (with Earl R. Milton); Moses and the Management of Exodus; The
Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (in Homer); The Lately Tortured Earth
(Quantavolution in the Earth Sciences). In addition, members of the seminar will be
Provided with a supplemental Bibliography of several hundred related items. They can
expect to read at least 350 pages a week, apart from the reading they require for their
research paper.
RESEARCH PAPER
Each participant will be expected to write a brief, compact research paper along the
lines of an article in Nature magazine. Examples of acceptable topics might be: "The
Present State of Theory on the Origins of Tektites," "Astronomical Orientation of Towns,
Temples, and Carvings in Prehistoric Meso-America;" "Origins and Decay of the Earth's
Magnetic Field;" "A Possible Reconciliation of Virgil's Trojan Legend and the Historical
Founding of Rome;" "Electrical Phenomena Depicted in the Rig Veda;" "Was
Australopithecus Human?" "Popular Opinion Respecting the Historicity of Catastrophes;"
"Sources of Catastrophic Expectations in Certain Human Subjects;" "Statistical Frequency
of Catastrophe-relevant Literature, 1900-1982, in Nature and Science magazines;"
"Creation-time according to various Religions, Sects, and Writers;" "The Confirmation
(Disproof) of Schaeffer's Theory of General Periodic Bronze Age Disasters in the Near
East in the Light of Excavations since 1945;" "The categorizing of Donnelly's Ragnarok
in the scientific and Popular Press, 1883 to 1890 in America and England;" "Current
Astronomical opinion on the Fixity of Planetary Motions;" "Assessments of the Validity
of Potassium40 - Argon40 Radiochronometry;" "Migrating Eels and Continental Drift;" etc.
Each Participant will present a copy of his paper to all other members of the seminar.
Depending upon their quality, and granted the need for this approach felt in various
quarters, the papers may be published in a suitable format.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model
CHAPTER TWENY-NINE
I.Q.: A UNIVERSITY PROGRAM
[1] DEFINITION OF A FIELD
A continuous and perennial "fringe" area of a number of humanistic and scientific
disciplines centers upon the evidence that in the history and pre-history of man
extensive natural changes occurred abruptly and catastrophically, and brought
"quantavolutional" rather than evolutionary changes of geography, climate, the solar
system, the biosphere, culture, and the human mind. These quantavolutions or saltations
are capable of systematic scientific study.
The hypotheses of quantavolution pursue the following types of propositions: a) The
Earth and its people have been subjected to catastrophic natural experiences (flood,
heat, earthquake, meteoritic bombardment) of a kind unknown to recent history. b) These
have occurred both before and after the passage of homo sapiens from the hominid.
Evidence of them is to be located in legends, religions, psycho-social behavior , astro-
physics, the geological and fossil record. d) A new general theory touching upon all
fields of knowledge is evolving in the midst of conventional scientific theory,
introducing critical modifications concerning natural history, the solar system, ancient
history, and the origins of culture and human nature.
SCHOLARLY INTEREST
A number of scholars around the world are concerned with these topics, yet no university
has come to serve as a focus of research, writing, publication, and coursework. The
principal in scientific catastrophism has been Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, recently
deceased, whose published works, with several still to appear, have been read by
millions of persons in several languages. At present, three journals, "Kronos" (USA),
"The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review" (England) [2] , and "Catastrophist
Geology" (Brazil) are devoted to the area; the literature also appears in other
periodicals and in an increasing number of books; and William Corliss Co., Glen arms,
Md., is engaged in an extensive publication of source-books. Quantavolution has its
"fringe" problems, too, like all fields of leaning, and its scholars are as deeply
concerned with maintaining scientific standards and distinguishing between "science
fiction", "foolishness," and science and scholarship as their counterparts in other
fields.
CURRICULUM
The greatest single need in the area of quantavolution is a well-knit communications and
learning network, and it is the idea here that University College of the University of
Maryland may be well adapted to these functions. A program of sixteen courses is to be
outlined below for the potential student body of an Institute of Quantavolution. Courses
might be given for academic credit, whether two or four credits in every case. Courses
might be audited, where students are otherwise heavily occupied or cannot afford the
cost of tuition. It is recommended that for the first two years, courses would be
offered not for credit, but with the granting of a Certificate of the Institute of
Quantavolution, University of Maryland, in mind.
Later on, after investigating the first two years' experience, arrangements might be
made for an appropriate configuration of courses to constitute a major or minor offering
leading to the Bachelor's Degree. Furthermore, students already possessing the BA or
other degrees might earn a Master's Degree in Quantavolution upon completion of ten
courses and the presentation of an approved thesis.
It would be presently impossible to establish the Q program at an orthodox department or
an interdisciplinary program at any university in the country. If for no other reason,
the trained scholars, observers, writers, and theorists in the field are not to be found
at any university. This is an especially cogent reason for initiating the program in a
University College external-internal system, and, as such, it would perhaps demonstrate
the unique capabilities present in such systems. Also, continuing commitment to a budget
of a quarter-million dollars annually might be necessary were a university to undertake
a program in Quantavolution.
Course designations in the field of Quantavolution (with brief descriptions)
Q1. Introduction to Quantavolution.
The essential literature; the controversial character of the field; a history of
catastrophism: the hypotheses of Q.
Q2. Intermediate Quantavolution.
Systematic development of major theses of Q in the humanities, social sciences, and
natural sciences.
Q3. Primeval Quantavolution in the History of Science to 1950.
Quantavolution as reflected in Greek thought; the concept of the Deluge; cometary
theories of catastrophes;
Plato; G. Bruno, Whiston, Cuvier, Donnelly, et al.
Q4. The Scientific Reception System and New Science.
The Velikovsky Affair and analogies related to PQ in other problem areas of science:
ethics and rules of science.
Q5. The Catastrophic Origins of Human Nature.
Evolutional and quantavolutional possibilities in the rise of mankind; effects of
primeval experiences upon human nature, culture and modern man: Jung, Freud and racial
memories.
Q6. The Bible and the Catastrophic Record.
A review of ancient traditions of Exodus and the Books of Moses; influences of disasters
upon Judaic-Christian-Muslim thought and practice.
Q7. Catastrophism in Literature: From the Vedas to Joyce.
The Hindu, Biblical (Psalms. Job, etc.), Homeric writings reinterpreted. Hesiod, Ovid,
Shakespeare et al.
Q8. Catastrophes. Science Fiction and the Arts.
Ancient art, modern and therapeutic art; science fiction and catastrophe; catastrophe in
films and documentaries.
Q9. The Mythology of Disaster:
How myth and legend obscure while they discuss natural disasters and cultural
consequences; the great bodies of myth analyzed, compared.
Q10. The Ancient Electricians.
Study of ancient evidence before the present era of heavy atmospheric and earth
electrification in especially the Mosaic period, the Vedas, and the Greek mysteries.
Q11. The New Astronomy and Quantavolution. A binary solar system; origins of planets,
comets; electromagnetic effects; the surprise of space exploration.
Q12. Geological Problems of Quantavolution.
Ice Ages theory. continental drift and plate tectonics, general earth morphology as a
record of changes in global motions and heavy-body space encounters.
Q13. Quantavolutions in the Biosphere.
Modes of Biological change, atmospheric fluxes and their biological effects; evidence of
disastrous boundaries in evolution; fossil assemblages.
Q14. Chronology and Quantavolution.
Radiometric and other geo-physical methods of dating the past; critique of
uniformitarian assumptions; determining archaeological time.
Q15. Chronological Reconstruction in Ancient Europe and the Near East.
Velikovsky's attacks upon Egyptian chronology and their effects upon the dating of
Mediterranean and Near East cultural events. Western Europe and the megalithic
astronomers.
Q16. Professional Writing and Translating.
For the Certificate of the Institute of Quantavolution. For students having completed
eight courses and approved by an ad hoc committee after oral interview. Supervised work
on an approved topic discussed in committee.
INSTRUCTORS
Responsible instructors can be listed with the course titles. In the course of preparing
this memorandum, thirty-nine potential qualified instructors were identified, of which
sixteen were in the East Coast megalopolis. Especially in the formative stages, the
right to designate and relieve instructors should vest in the Director of the Program.
Because personal meetings are important to the purposes and method of the program, a
number of adjunct instructors might be made available in various locations that are
accessible to students not living within reach of the primary instructor. Every attempt
would be made in advance to provide students with appointments at mutually convenient
places and times with a traveling instructor. The flexible calendar of University
College may permit these arrangements. For example, a student taking a course in
Scotland, if the instructor is in America, or not "on circuit", might meet with an
adjunct professor at a Scottish institution or another location nearer to him. An
extensive bibliography is available for all of the listed courses. The required readings
can be made readily available for students anywhere in the world. A microfiche system is
planned to expedite communications at lower costs.
PROGRAM OF THE IQ
A.
A curriculum of 16 courses leading to a Certificate in IQ
1) At College Park (3 to begin).
2) Worldwide (16 to begin).
B.
A 2-day conference in London in collaboration with the Society for Interdisciplinary
Study in March, 1981, open to the interested public. A 3-day conference at College Park,
Maryland, open to the interested public, in January, 1981.
C.
Initiation of a library and archive of materials pertinent to Quantavolution. Works,
books, and archives of Livio Stecchini, Ralph Juergens. I. Velikovsky, and others may be
donated to the Institute.
D.
Summer Tours:
"Light on the Greek Dark Ages" - Greece and Aegean. "Megalithic Cultures of Ancient
Britain, Ireland and Brittany." "The Catastrophic Experiences and Legends of
Mesoamerica" - Mexico. Guatemala.
"Quantavolution in the Rocky Mountain Setting" - U. S., Canada, Mexico
These four tours are recommended to begin. Others are possible. The lifelong learning
program at the University of California, Berkeley, "Study Abroad in 1980" is offering
similar courses for credit. They can be excelled in originality, if not as conventional
travel experiences. Beginning in winter, 1980-1.
E.
An interdisciplinary faculty seminar open to University of Maryland and metropolitan
area faculty who are interested in familiarizing themselves with the concepts, methods,
and findings of quantavolution. (Like the Columbia University Forums). The seminar would
continue throughout the year.
SUPPORT OF IQ
The interests of the network of Quantavolution scholars are in teaching research,
residential conferences of members of the group, public conferences, and publication of
reprints and new works. In all of these respects, present resources and opportunities
are inadequate. The experience of the past twenty years, which has included scholarly
activities of all kinds, is indicative of the problems. The extent of personal economic
sacrifices by practically all of the scholars engaged up to this time has been
considerable. They are affected especially by the world-wide inflation and cannot cover,
for example, costs for even essential travel and modest accommodations. They can use an
abandoned barrack better than a Sheraton motel, a communal kitchen better than an
established à la carte cafeteria. All of this is not to say that past efforts have been
unsuccessful. Conferences at Frazer University in Vancouver, at McAllister University in
Canada, at Glasgow University in Scotland, at Lethbridge University in Canada, and at
the Bronfman Center with the University of Montreal, have been productive. The scholars
involved are impecunious, but unusually resourceful and productive.
The University College of the University of Maryland, in sponsoring the program of
Quantavolution, can consider the following items of support:
a)
Office space of 5 x 10 meters for individual conferences, content management of the
programs, and custody of a special library.
b)
Administration of the program, procedurally.
c)
$3000 for a substantive administrator of the program, working out of the College Park
office part time. At least for two years, the job here involves building up the ramified
network of communications among scholars and students, expediting assignments, watching
schedules, promoting conferences, facilitating the production and publication of
teaching materials, and receiving and maintaining a library.
d)
$5000 for the initiation of a microfiche newsletter, reprint and publication system for
the program, to be sold to students and through a commercial or university publishing
outlet.
e)
$3000 Expenses reimbursement for IQ developers for program-building, telephone and
travel expenses, disbursed through central office of IQ authorization.
f)
Publicity of the program through University College.
g)
$2000 additional publicity through the facilities of the IQ group to attract students.
h)
Classroom facilities for offering three (assembled or open type) courses at College
Park.
i)
Possible classroom facilities in London, New York (this may be provided by Professor de
Grazia, if necessary), and a Dutch or German site.
j)
$3200 for purchasing the basic (missing) published materials for each of the 16 courses
and duplication of the instructor's set of unpublished course materials (so that the
central office would hold a record of materials on all courses).
k)
Provision of promotion and management of a general College Park First Annual Conference
on Quantavolution in spring 1981, together with guarantees of $12,000 in expenses of
invited lecturers and discussion leaders.
l)
Expenses of shipping study materials, including archives and books intended for the
central office of the Institute of Quantavolution at College Park.
m)
Instructors' costs of cassettes, telephones, mailing and travel.
n)
Unreimbursed time of persons who may be involved in the promotion and establishment of
the program. The total outlay for items not handled directly by IQ is best estimated by
University College budgeting officers, but a figure of $16,000.00 is assigned here. The
value of the consulting time of the professors acting as the sponsors and organizer (n
above) is estimated at $8000 and waived here. The total special cash outlay of the first
year of a two-year experiment amounts to about $16,000.00 of which some portion may be
directly returnable and the rest returnable in the ordinary course of business.
Therefore, the total of investment, allowances, and advances may be in the neighborhood
of $32,000.00 for the first year.
A goal of 533 student tuitions would have to be set to meet this cost, of which perhaps
half at College Park and half worldwide. However, significant alternative or additional
income might be returned from conference activities at College Park and elsewhere, and
from sales of materials. (Tuition for a course is figured at $115.00 of which $50 is put
aside for its instructor and $60 is allocated to costs.)
ORGANIZATION
a)
An Institute of Quantavolution may be formed independently as a non-profit corporation
to work with University College.
b)
An IQ may be formed as a non-profit corporation by the University
c)
The name may be used without formal legal structure and the program handled as an
ordinary administrative sub-division.
Perhaps the third method (c) is simplest and most flexible in the early stage. However,
the group of instructors would wish to have freedom to develop a set of functions
perhaps not typical of University College programs: further they would wish to
accumulate ear-marked grants, contracts, etc. Finally, they would wish at some point to
set up a physical presence, a living-working-teaching arrangement that might or might
not be possible at College Park or even elsewhere in the University of Maryland system.
The Director of the Program (who could also be chairman of the Board of the IQ) can be
designated for a three-year trial period by the Chancellor of University College.
FIRST STEPS
a)
Approval in principle of the IQ
b)
Appointment of instructors and publicity of the program.
c)
Opening and administration of office of IQ 1980-1 beginning date may be possible, until
May 1, 1980, from the standpoint of recruitment of students. In addition to a Director-
designate, an Associate Director-designate may be appointed to act in the absence of or
under the Director.
BENEFITS
In general, the University of Maryland may benefit from the proposed program. The field
is demonstrably appealing to serious students. It has achieved a sufficient degree of
stability in its problems, methods and materials to avoid exoticism and cultism. It
addresses important philosophical and scientific problems in the traditional spirit of
the liberal arts and in the proper hypothetical and operational spirit of science. There
is a chance of showing a unique capability of the University College method in
developing a new field of science and humanities.
Notes (Chapter 29: I. Q.: A Unversity Program)
1. A proposal for an Institute of Quantavolution (I. Q.) submitted 20 February 1980 to
Dr. Malcolm Moos, Director of the Carnegie Study on New Directions for the University,
University of Maryland and Chancellor Ben Massey, University College, University of
Maryland. University College operates intra-murally and extra-murally, with centers and
students in various countries of the world.
2. See e. g. R. A. Kerr. Science, 18 Jan. 1980, 293. "Venus and Science's Fringe."
3. A. de Grazia, "The Coming Cosmic Debate in the Sciences and Humanities," in N. Ravel,
ed., "From Past to Prophesy." (1975) [see "a Cosmic Debate" here above.]
4. The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies has members in 19 different countries and
was founded four years ago.
5. At the writing of this memorandum, Egypt appeared closed as a possibility. At the
moment of publication (Dec. 1983) Egypt is open and the Society for Interdisciplinary
Studies (London) is planning to conduct such a tour under the direction of the ancient
historian, Peter James.
THE BURNING OF TROY
By Alfred de Grazia
Part Five: Communicating a Scientific Model
CHAPTER THIRTY
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
In the Quantavolution Series I have carried out my commitment to tell what the heavens
were once like and how they became unsettled, and what then befell the Earth and
humanity. The story of much of this was partly suppressed in the memory, partly carried
esoterically in myth and legend, partly lost in natural disasters, and partly destroyed
by human hand.
The world is lucky that the Nazi book-burnings came in an age of printing: what was
destroyed could be replaced from the stores of the free cultures. But in ancient times,
books were hard to replace. Few if any copies of them existed in the first place. When
the great libraries of Sumer and Akkad, of Ninevah, of Memphis and Thebes in Egypt, of
Syria, of Athens, of the Celtic Druids at Alesia, of China, of Rome (even Rome, 83 B.
C.), Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Tezcuco (Mexico) were burned, unique treasures were lost
forever. The ancient writings that survive to this day can be carried on the shelves of
a large bookcase.
Almost all of the lost works that dealt with astronomy, geology, anthropology, and the
history of religions must have treated of catastrophes and possessed a catastrophic
viewpoint. I venture this from the fact that the great majority of the works that remain
can be so described. There is no reason to believe that these are a biased sample of the
hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that were lost.
Indeed, because the later writers were prone to amnesia about catastrophe, they would
have quoted from and edited their sources to conform to the solarian consensus that I
have sometimes referred to. The Bible appears to the modern sensitive mind to be often
catastrophic in content and tone. Still, various humane Judaic and Christian pastors
play it sweet and low to their flocks. Even this Bible evidences many effects of having
been repeatedly edited, especially following upon the last series of "Mars" disasters,
so as to cover up and smoothen out the more incredible and harsher passages. (I suppose
that not one in a hundred Bible readers could imagine that the mysterious stranger with
whom Jacob wrestled was meant to be a sky body, probably a planet.)
Hence it can be said that the lost libraries of the world have been more heavily
catastrophic than the typical work that has come down. The trials and tribulations of
history have produced and perpetuated a kind of censorship on catastrophic thought. It
is far different from, but perhaps more effective than, the deliberate attempts to
suppress the uniformitarian ideas of evolution when these were advanced by Darwin,
Huxley and their allies, and more effective too than the uniformitarian efforts to
censor Velikovsky's catastrophism.
Catastrophism flourished in the religious dogma of the world and still does. Certain
doubtful exceptions are provided by a few primitive tribes, some modern versions of
Christianity, periodic cultic manifestations largely of oriental character,
materialistic "religions" such as the communistic, and scientific movements such as the
Humanists. Otherwise religions believe that 1) the heavens and earth were torn apart in
the beginning by divine forces, 2) mankind was created in the process, and 3) the
original chaos and creation were repeated upon several occasions, and might happen
again.
Scientific catastrophism as a school of thought accepted these premises, but, as we
know, the prevailing scientific majority rejects them. Significantly, the present
uniformitarian dominance was not achieved at the expense only of theology and religion.
Many scientists, including some great ones, had to be ignored or pushed aside.
I have already indicate that in the early days of science, the prevailing view of
history was catastrophic. Hindu science, Mayan astronomy, Mesopotamian and Egyptian
science, and Greek science and philosophy generally adhered to catastrophic principles.
The Chinese had probably the longest record of teaching uniformitarian principles. Two
thousands years ago and more they began to bet the life of their emperor upon the
stability of the heavens, and the emperor tried not to lose the bet. Yet the bet is
itself proof that a catastrophic fear was present. The Chinese could predict eclipses
but took no chances and conducted solemn rites upon their occasion.
Certain medieval philosophers in the west, such as Maimonides, argued on behalf of a
settled and orderly universe, but were outnumbered by Christian and Islamic philosophers
in the tradition of the apocalyptics and millennialism.
The brilliant harbinger of modern thought, Giordano Bruno, thought that worlds were
infinite in number and extent, that worlds were often born and destroyed, that the Moon
had come lately into its place, and that the Earth was only temporarily undisturbed.
Isaac Newton, for all that he laid down the laws that founded the dogmas of
uniformitarianism in astronomy, nevertheless gave a good part of his later life to
research in the chronology and authenticity of the Bible, with attention to the great
Deluge. It was his assistant, Whiston, who introduced a great comet as the force that
brought on the deluge. Therefore Whiston may be properly called the first modern
astrophysical catastrophist.
Over a century later, Giambattista Vico wrote in his New Science (1744) that after the
Deluge, Jove reorganized the world with his bolts of lightning: all the nations arrived
separately at the worship of Jupiter and called him by different names. Soon afterwards
Nicholas-Antoine Boulanger used an account of the comet and deluge to explain the
origins of religions. They were, he wrote, based upon the primeval terror of the
heavens. Sin and punishment were born, he thought, when the pleasant and egalitarian
conditions of primeval life were disturbed by the disasters of heaven and earth. These
events were attributed to the gods. To appease and propitiate the gods, rituals and
sacrifices were established, punishments were meted out for infractions of customs and
ritual rules, and great theocracies and monarchies were built up as the enforcement
machinery of the gods. With Boulanger, an engineer, a full-fledged theory of
catastrophism was born. Carli-Rubbi, an economist, was a worthy successor.
Almost all quantavolutionists since 1860 have worked under conditions of partial
isolation and ostracism from the major centers of science and scholarship. But this
condition may not persist much longer. Presently, as I have shown, there is a resurgence
of quantavolutionary thought. A new multidisciplinary science is being born. Until it
has grown, it must depend for its sustenance upon orthodox science. Repeatedly, and
often ironically, the evolutionists and uniformitarians have delivered evidence into the
hands of the catastrophists. The latter, after all, are very few in number and bereft of
facilities and resources.
ANXIETY AND CATASTROPHISM
The present age is one to support a resurgence of quantavolution. The twentieth century
has become an "Age of Anxiety" despite the soothing effects of the long-term dating of
the uniformitarian model of history. Apparently the most progressive element of the
human race was not to be consoled by modern science. Indeed, from anxiety, it moved
towards catastrophism.
When Sigmund Freud began to write in the anterooms of his comfortable apartment in
Vienna before World War I, he dealt at some length with hysterical women and
disturbances of middle class life. The sexual problems that occupied him are discussed
as commonplace in the mass media today and would perhaps amuse more than startle the
contemporary film audience if portrayed.
Freud invented the psychoanalytic interview, which eased the labors of the human mind as
it sought to recall its past. He rediscovered and placed upon a scientific basis the
"unconscious" and the analysis of dreams. All of these enter the science of
catastrophism.
As Freud grew older, the world changed rapidly around him. Great wars and revolutions
occurred; empires broke down; cultivated nations sought to exterminate whole classes and
peoples. Freud was driven to speculate about the origins of mankind and the future of
civilization. He wrote that civilization was a contradiction of the mammalian instincts
of humans and could never be founded securely upon such an insubordinate creature as
man. Finally, he thought that mankind was possessed by the instincts of eros and
thanatos, life and death. The death instinct was self-destructive, suicidal, and, when
projected upon the world, sought to carry the world into the grave as well.
Thus a great mind of the century passed from the "Age of Anxiety" into the "Age of
Catastrophe." And with him, yet regardless of him, whole peoples and cultures pursued
the same crossing. They began to move back from the ideology of progressive science into
an ideology of the mystic, the occult, of magic, and of "fundamental" realities. Instead
of pursuing pragmatic science and focusing upon cultural progress, many began to develop
a concern for the survival of the species and a fascination for the forces of
destruction.
Impending catastrophe had come to engage popular attention. Unidentified flying objects
are observed, said to be carrying intruders of superior technology from far space. Since
inspection at close quarters of Mars, Moon and Venus has rendered impossible a belief in
these bodies as bases of operations for the invaders, a farther space is postulated.
Efforts are made in the highest scientific quarters to communicate with some one of the
thousands of possible advanced types of being that must exist in the universe.
Too, exploding stars in many parts of the heavens have impelled people to become worried
about the stability of the skies, and various studies of the processes of the solar
furnaces and the tides that the great planets and sun exert upon the earth give them
grounds for further uneasiness. Californians live in anticipation of great earthquakes
along the San Andreas fault. Various ethnic and religious groups in a number of
countries including the United States, Israel, Lebanon, the Soviet Union, Nigeria,
Ethiopia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iran, and China live in fear of persecution and
genocide.
The case for an impending nuclear bomb holocaust is so strong that it has become a
"given fact" in the logical premises of the multitudes. The poisoning of the atmosphere
and of the food supply are freely predicted, with substantial justification. A climatic
change spelling death by famine and suffering for hundreds of millions of persons is
already happening. Laboratories of micro-biology are coming under official scrutiny for
the possibility that their experiments in genetics may leak uncontrollable diseases,
even while people, perhaps mistakenly, feel relieved that the armies of the great powers
talk about renouncing biological warfare and destroying stocks of germs and poisons.
Writings and films about catastrophe command audiences of unprecedented size.
One does well to appreciate, however, that throughout the past two centuries of
scientific optimism and of parochial solutions for human problems, the mass of people
has been convinced, as it always was before, that a catastrophic fate awaits human
existence. The religions have been, with rare exceptions (if any), catastrophic in their
world view. If to this permanent majority is now added the many educated backsliders who
watch the world of human and natural events with catastrophic expectation, it can be
said, without much exaggeration, that we are in an Age of Catastrophism: the
potentiality is present in nature and man, and the concern is widespread and evident.
It should not surprise anyone to notice the coincidence of public and scientific
movements. Sociologists of science and historians of science, such as, for instance,
Barber, Kuhn, and Stecchini, are fully aware that the scientific movements of an epoch
advance alongside public opinion; the two interact with unspoken accord to produce new
models of science.
THE POLITICS OF UNIFORMITARIANISM
Science is a set of peculiar operations conducted by human beings in a group setting.
Operations proceed over time with the rise and fall of different theories of man and
nature. The victory of uniformitarianism over catastrophism was a scientific,
organizational, and political victory. One instance may be provided here to show that
such was the case. A reading of accounts of efforts to discredit Velikovsky may serve to
supplement this example.
Incongruous though they may appear at first sight, the suppression of the word
"stratum," an election of the Geological Society, and the downfall of the English Tories
were at one moment in history tied together. A uniformitarian English activist of 150
years ago, George Scrope put the first two together in letters to Charles Lyell, which
George Grinnell, historian of science, has published.
Following Lyell's election as President of the Geological Society, Scrope wrote (April
12, 1831),
"By espousing you, the conclaves have decidedly and irrevocably attached themselves to
the liberal side... Had they on the contrary made their election of a Mosaic geologist
like Buckland or Conybeare, the orthodox would immediately have taken their cue from
them."
Next year, Scrope was writing:
It is great treat... that two thick volumes [Principles of Geology] may be written on
geology without once using the word, 'stratum... '" (September 29, 1832).
Why did "the father of modern geology" Lyell, shun the world "stratum" in his great
work? Why, for that matter, did Darwin not use the word "evolution" in the Origin of
Species? The most fetching geological sight to the eye of even the rankest amateur is
the layer upon layer of rocks that often break into view when a profile of land is
exposed. William Smith (1815), Lyell's predecessor, did use the word. Perhaps Lyell felt
that "strata" implied discontinuities, and discontinuities implied catastrophes between
strata. Which they may do. But Lyell failed. The word "stratum" was essential to
geological description and classification and he went back to it himself. Yet many
geologists see in the discontinuities of strata only a gradually eroded former body of
rock that would, if only it were still there, exhibit a nicely graded continuum into
what is there above now.
On May 3, 1832, Charles Babbage, a mathematics professor and political activist, wrote
to Lyell. "I think any argument from such a reported radical as myself would only injure
the cause, and I therefore leave it in better hands." Of this Grinnell comments:
"Uniformitarianism" was promoted by the liberals as part of the 'cause' to undermine the
theoretical foundations of monarchy and was not derived from field research." The
established Church of England and the Monarchy were Tory strongholds. Thus do the
politics of science, a scientific concept, and the English "Great Reform Bill of 1832"
go together.
Over many years I have had to consider by reason of my circumstances the ideology behind
such great developments of the nineteenth century as the mass army, the large, perfectly
coordinated symphony orchestras, the growth of bureaucracy in government and business,
and the factory system in industry, the mass media, and massed spectator sports. I
concluded that this routinization and massing of human behavior was an outstanding
leitmotif of the age.
I am now persuaded that uniformitarianism, the great scientific empirical data-
collecting movement of the century, was also part of this same ideology. For the
scientists of the century were also in the business of collecting factual evidence of
all kinds, assigning places and specialization to both facts and people, and routinizing
scientific work. To this great movement, catastrophe, as the rare destabilizing and
disruptive event - whether destructive or constructive - was anathema. It denied the
value of infinite, regular series; it upset the establishment of industry, bureaucracy,
economy, music, warfare, religion, and politics as continuous, infinite progressions of
small changes. Uniformitarian science, far from being the enemy of all religion, was a
key element in total religion, the unconscious world view of the nineteenth century.
One needs to be on guard against certain disturbing human behaviors that are inherent in
scientific behavior, as in all human behavior. Yet it would be incorrect to think that
the scientific establishment from dozens of fields is stupidly obstinate and engaged in
conspiracy regularly against better theories. Philosophy and science are organized
groups, suffering frequently from the ills that may afflict all bureaucracies and
cliques.
Science moves ideologically. It moves, too, as an administered, habitual form of
behavior. It moves with theoretical models, or as Thomas Kuhn has said, in theoretical
paradigms; under certain conditions the model fails and a scientific revolution occurs.
This happened in the change from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy and from
catastrophism to uniformitarianism.
But modern uniformitarian science, as we have experienced and enjoyed it, has achieved
important successes. It has provided a housing for much practical invention. It has
encouraged the careful, coordinated development of findings and techniques in many
fields. Only if it comes to pass that quantavolutionary primevalogy gives a greater pay-
off than evolutionary primevalogy, or when it is obviously worth setting up as a model
running along a parallel track, should a changeover occur. By a changeover is meant a
redistribution of effort and resources.
Uniformitarianism has enabled humanity to challenge nature (by giving nature a humbler
and gentler guise). It has removed the historical gods from parroting human stipulations
that hamper scientific investigation. It spawned the idea of a linear history,
destroying the more conservative and pessimistic cyclical theories of history.
It has encouraged the idea that progress is possible in a long future of mankind. It has
promoted faith in the stability of the world. An exquisite and productive division of
labor in all areas resulted. There was no rushing to the caves and wombs of theology. It
simplified religion, letting the deity be conceived of as a master designer and an
overarching and all permeating intelligence. It promoted generally the practice of
instrumentally rational bureaucracy and rationalism generally, and ultimately found
expression in pragmatic, instrumental philosophy. It helped to form a vision of
political and religious decision-making corresponding to the method of science - cool,
not catastrophic.
Granted such important social functions, plus the comfort of a now secure dwelling place
for humanity, plus the apparent scientific productiveness of the theory (which, however,
may be the result of the assurances, not the content of its theory), the replacement of
Uniformitarianism is neither a simple matter nor is it a victory to be celebrated
without anxiety.
We can only surmise and hope at this time that the catastrophic subconscious of
humanity, when dredged up, will bring with it its own comfort and some additional
possibilities to sustain the human spirit on our small planet in infinite time and
space. Unless it excites a strikingly novel religion, it may be a disastrous force in
itself. Can we plan and program the human mind for all the equivalent and hopefully
superior behaviors that should follow the demise of the old world-view?
That science will be entering upon at least a partially quantavolutionist phase seems
likely. Even without awareness, uniformitarianism and evolutionism have been eroding in
astrophysics (" the explosive universe," "cometary eruption from planets," "solar
uncertainty"), geology (" continental drift" and "catastrophic end of the Ice Age"),
biology (" systematic mutation," "great leaps," "mass extinctions," "punctuated
equilibria"), ancient history (" prehistoric missing high civilizations," "sudden
destruction of civilizations," "reconstruction of Egyptian and Greek chronology"), and
mythology (" the enlarged truth of legend" and "the celestial obsession of myth").
The Encyclopedia Britannica was published in 1973 in an extensively updated form.
Hundreds of its articles nevertheless were erroneous or lop-sided or incomplete
according to the theory of quantavolution. For an example, its article on Earth Forms
(geomorphology) may be selected. It begins incorrectly by arguing that catastrophism was
founded upon Bishop Ussher's calculation of a 6000 year-old world. (Actually,
catastrophism had been long in existence as a scientific outlook in both Christian and
non-Christian lands.) It proceeds hesitantly with a conventional explanation of earth
forms. Several examples of quick transformations are introduced -- mountain-building,
peat and coal deposits, glacial advances, etc. -- but they are labeled as exceptional.
Then the article lets out the quantavolutionary tiger: "Although present and past
processes are similar in kind, process rates must have been variable." Variable process
rates - exactly! For scientific catastrophists rarely said that processes themselves
were dissimilar, although some assigned a basic role to divine creation. To them "earth,
air, fire, and water" were always "similar in kin" but with rates of work that have been
variable: once very high, they are now very low.
Uniformitarianism and evolutionism are then under critical stress. Of what use would be
the emergence of a quantavolutionary model? In the first place, the newer view can claim
what science in general claims on faith: To know is good because what one knows will
bring good. Also, if knowledge in itself brings pleasure, then new knowledge of what
befell ancient man and the skies and earth will be useful in bringing pleasure.
The quantavolutionary view introduces an opposition party. In science as much as in
politics, a multi-party system is preferable to a one-party system. Like the elite of an
underdeveloped nation, prehistorians may suppose that their area is too poor in
resources and skilled manpower to afford a democratic opposition. On the contrary, like
an underdeveloped nation, archaeology and pre-history would show a new gain after costs
from the activity of a critical party espousing the revolutionary against the
evolutionary point of view.
It has been said that "if you begin by treating the scientific ideas of earlier
centuries as myths, you will end by treating your own scientific ideas a dogmas."
History and philosophy will be the gainers by a revolutionary challenge. All truth,
including mathematics, is based upon experience and also upon ideology. There is no
purely theoretical science, nor is there any purely objective science. Continuous
critical exposure of the foundations illuminates natural and early human history and
makes history a living part of the operations of science.
Sooner or later, as the area of natural history is mined with quantavolutionary tools,
significant discoveries should be facilitated. They may occur, for instance, actually in
the exploration and mining of minerals and ores. Space exploration and observations;
environmental conservation; the discovery of art treasures; the rediscovery of ancient
inventions in the arts, sciences and social organization; the search for new power
sources in electricity and nuclear fusion; sea bottom development; genetics; and
institutional and political oversight - these are some of the areas where a
revolutionary perspective may be turned to some use.
The question of psychological therapy arises. The catastrophized quiddity of homo
sapiens schizotypus raises a fundamental barrier to therapy. Human nature stands opposed
to its own cure. Nevertheless, this immense challenge should be confronted by the
development of a field of quantavolutional therapy. It would work upon the
quantavolutional human model through psychiatry with the aim of draining the naturally
provoked and socially obsessed build-up of fear. Sublimatory measures, including
personal and social pragmatics, might be devised.
But of what use is quantavolution to religion? Astronomer Fred Hoyle, in From Stonehenge
to Modern Cosmology, once answered the question of why modern man investigates the
structure of the universe. "The answer is no different in principle from the motives of
the builders of Stonehenge. The motive is religious." But the motive for religion is not
a religion. What shall the religion be? To get down to cases, what has been said in the
Quantavolution Series to illuminate the role of religion.
It must have become plain by now that a quantavolutionary primevalogy, in this book at
least, regards the historical gods as part and parcel of the sudden construction of the
human being. The historical gods have been delusions, possible pure delusions. We were
catastrophized, and wrapped up in the gods in our delusions.
Out of the study of animals, man, myth, and culture, we emerge with an historical and
comparative picture that seems clear and sharp. We sense an every-present danger when
the catastrophized, schizoid creature known as the human being speaks in the name of
gods, asserts that gods speak to him, calls upon the gods to intervene in the world,
treats in the name of gods with other people, and assigns human traits to the gods.
We feel that this all may be inevitable in our natures, but we refuse to accept it. We
feel that the better part of catastrophes is directly responsible for what humanity is
proud to be. But the larger part of catastrophism urges mankind along a path on the
brink of its self-destruction.
History has on the whole been a record of failure in human relations. And the historical
gods, those projected as experiences and teachers by the human mind, have invariably
contributed to the record of failure. Presently, governments whom there is no reason to
greatly trust are in command of populations that multiply beyond hope, of nuclear
weapons aimed specifically at the destruction of civilization, and of technologies that
are destroying the environment. If an ordinary person, under such circumstances, adds an
entirely reasonable anxiety to his primordial anxiety-load, he cannot be reproached.
However, anxious people make anxious societies. Anxious societies make anxious
governments. And anxious governments suppress liberties and make war. Great gods and
little gods rise up like thermometers in the social heat: historical gods, political
man-gods, gurus, and psychiatrists. A world vision is lacking. The people will not then
concentrate upon a consensus of behavior that would assure a benevolent and beneficent
world order.
The predicament is not for solution here. Never in the past 2700 years has humankind had
such close brushes with death as in these last few years. And never was it so threatened
by its own hand. Whenever natural disasters and the compulsion to repeat them occurred,
brother fought brother, and nations fought nations; but none commanded the nuclear and
chemical forces that today can consummate the terror-laden wish to destruction.
In comparison with the human threat to humanity, the natural threat appears to be
moderate. If my theory is generally correct, the solar system is in a relaxing phase. It
is settling down.
There remain four potentially disturbing elements. One is he Sun itself which is known
now to be inconstant. It is well hat the disappearance of sun spots for seventy years
three centuries ago caused only a "little ice age." The human suffering was
considerable. Were there to be more of a lessening or on the other hand, a more
explosive solar activity, the effects upon Earth could be quite damaging. It would be
reasonable policy on the part of the world's governments to divert resources from
armaments directly into solar study and into planning defenses against the possibility
of serious solar perturbations.
No comets capable of exploding the Earth are known to be circumnavigating the solar
system. There may be such long-term comets, now invisible, that would someday appear
before a startled world. Little could be done in such an eventuality. Happily the risk
is very small. Still, at least some group should prepare from time to time a scenario
and recommendations for dealing with cometary intrusions. A small comet on a collision
course could, for instance, be exploded with nuclear space missiles at a safe distance.
A third danger to the world arises out of the growth of ice caps. Whether they are in
fact growing is disputed. An answer to the question is technically possible. The answer
should be obtained. An overloading of the ice caps could create an imbalance to the
globe and cause an axial tilt. Horrendous floods, tides, earthquakes, volcanism,
hurricanes and climatic reversals would follow. The ice caps might avalanche. It is
already possible, however, to whittle away some of the ice by explosive melting or to
tow away some of it to warmer regions to melt and use.
A final larger danger, as unpredictable as the others, lies in he instability of planet
Jupiter. The "Jupiter Effect," which is tidal, is small by comparison. For Jupiter is
extremely hot and highly electrified. If it were to fission, that is, to explode
fragments of itself, the Earth might be directly affected by disastrous x-rays and other
particle storms. Large meteoroids and comets from the explosion might enter upon orbits
that could allow for encounters with the Earth.
The human race has suffered much from its birth throes, natural catastrophes, and its
own destructiveness. It would appear savagely ironic if mankind were to come to an end
so early in its career. There is no arguing this issue, and it is perhaps the point at
which to end the whole discussion. Whenever a strange object appears in the sky, people
everywhere are alerted and alarmed, with the panic of old surging within them. Whenever
the question of man's duration on Earth is brought up, the pragmatic answer is as it
must be "forever." A creature in search of eternity calls for a cosmology. Scientists or
not, we need to go seeking the divine in the universe, like children's chicken-licken,
preparing our minds and our Earth for cooperation with the divine wherever and when it
is encountered.
End of The Burning of Troy
KA
A Handbook of Mythology, Sacred Practices, Electrical Phenomena,
and their Linguistic Connections in the Ancient Mediterranean World
by H. Crosthwaite
with an Introduction by Alfred de Grazia
Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey, U. S. A.
Notes on the printed version of this book:
ISBN: 0-940268-25-9
Copyright 1992 by Hugh Crosthwaite
All rights reserved
Printed in the U. S. A. by Princeton University Printing Services.
Composed at Metron Publications.
Published by METRON PUBLICATIONS,
P. O. BOX 1213,
PRINCETON, N.].
08542, U. S. A.
for Shirley,
"..... the sweetest flower of all the field,"
and for Susan
KA
A Handbook of Mythology, Sacred Practices, Electrical Phenomena,
and their Linguistic Connections in the Ancient Mediterranean World
by H. Crosthwaite
with an Introduction by Alfred de Grazia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE-PAGE
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: AUGURY
Chapter 2: THE ELECTRIC ORACLES
Chapter 3: DIONYSUS
Chapter 4: AMBER, ARK, AND EL
Chapter 5: DEITIES OF DELPHI
Chapter 6: SKY LINKS
Chapter 7: SACRIFICE
Chapter 8: SKY AND STAGE
Chapter 9: TRIPOD CAULDRONS
Chapter 10: THE EVIDENCE FROM PLUTARCH
Chapter 11: THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS
Chapter 12: MYSTERY RELIGIONS
Chapter 13: 'KA', AND EGYPTIAN MAGIC
Chapter 14: BOLTS FROM THE BLUE
Chapter 15: LOOKING LIKE A GOD
Chapter 16: HERAKLES AND HEROES
Chapter 17: BYWAYS OF ELECTRICITY
Chapter 18: ROME AND THE ETRUSCANS
Chapter 19: THE TIMAEUS
Chapter 20: SANCTIFICATION AND RESURRECTION
Chapter 21: THE DEATH OF KINGS
Chapter 22: LIVING WITH ELECTRICITY
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B: READING BACKWARDS
GLOSSARY
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
PREFACE
THIS book, written for readers who are enthusiastic students of linguistics, of the
classics, and of ancient history, results from an effort to detect and collect instances of
a certain common factor in the history of the ancient Mediterranean world.
Casting my net as far and as wide as I could, I have assembled a body of myth and behaviour
in Greece, Italy, Palestine and elsewhere, that reveals a universal concern over
electricity, communicated among all the ancient peoples, and distinguishable in their
language, myths, and behaviour.
Because of the wide-ranging nature of the inquiry, which demands an interdisciplinary
approach, I have perhaps made more than the usual number of errors. I have also found it
difficult to be consistent in the matter of transliteration.
Translations and paraphrases are mostly my own; where not, I have tried consistently to make
acknowledgments to the author.
My chief sources are the ancient authors themselves, many of them available in the Oxford
Classical Texts, and Loeb Classical Library. For the non-specialist reader, the Penguin
Classics translations cover most of the ground.
I am greatly indebted to Prof. Alfred de Grazia. As a result of reading his 'God's Fire', I
decided to expand an article I had written into this larger work which owes much to his and
Mrs. de Grazia's help and hospitality.
I could not have written this book without the constant support, interest, and inspiration
of my wife Shirley. She made valuable suggestions and helped in many ways, in company with
our daughter Susan, who performed the arduous task of deciphering and typing my manuscript.
My thanks also go to Mr. David Brailsford for his help in making copies, and to the staff of
Metron Publications and Mr. Fred Plank of Princeton University Printing Services.
H. Crosthwaite Three map sketches to help recollect some of the principal loci operandi of
the Handbook --Greece, Italy, the ancient Mediterranean region.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
INTRODUCTION
SOME years ago, at my suggestion, Hugh Crosthwaite commenced this major work. Its first
pages appeared in the mails as parts of personal letters. He called them notes. They were
notes, yes, but like the "toying at the piano keys" of a maestro, they possessed
authenticity, reflected a great repertoire, and hit upon original meanings in every
direction a tone was struck. The notes began to modulate into cultures and tongues other
than the classic Greek as the research continued.
I should be remembered, perhaps, for not having said to him, "Please cease to send me your
notes and compose instead a proper monograph: thesis, proof, basta." Rather, as the messages
kept coming, I redefined for myself, and I hope for hundreds of readers to come, the
relation of form to value. The author carries, among other traits characteristic of English
scholarship at its best, the famed stubborn empiricism that has so often been the despair of
theorists and philosophers such as myself. The work is bound to factuality.
He loosens the reins in only two regards, both at my behest: the grouping of his facts in
respect to electrical phenomena, and the testing of words and behavior according to whether
they relate to divine behavior in the sky. In the end, this work by Crosthwaite, which we
may call a Handbook, took on its own form. It is a dismemberment and reconstruction of Greek
and associated myth such as has not occurred hitherto. Its hundreds of sketches and
etymologies are grouped to follow a theme: the electric fire and destructive behavior of the
sky gods, as these exhibit themselves in the language, rituals, myths, and behavior of the
ancient Mediterranean peoples.
A surprising form of "Handbook" emerges, which renders too limited the very designation. For
it appears that a major portion of the Greek language (and probably all others) derives from
human readings of divine sky behavior, and transfers itself into the necessary language that
guides mundane social life and thought. From far away China, the I Ching echoes this idea:
"Heaven produced the mysterious things, and the sages modelled themselves on them... Heaven
hangs out its symbols, from which are seen good fortune and misfortune, and the sages made
symbols of them." (Sec. 1, Ch. 11)
Furthermore, this same "divinely inspired" language, along with the rites and practices
associated with it, does not consist of independent etymologically-unique, tribally evolved
vocabularies and perspectives. Rather, there appears to have been, among many ancient
peoples, an ecumenical language of sacred, electrical, pyrotechnical ritual behavior.
Apparently, what had been happening, not long before the time our evidence comes into being,
was similar to the development of modern language of the age of electronics and space-age
technology, whereby Latinized English becomes a world-wide language among practitioners of
the associated arts and sciences. Moreover, it was a language everywhere of fire, god's
fire, electric fire or the closest simulations thereof.
The reader may express surprise and disbelief at the multiplicity of words concentrated in
these areas: I would advise him of two considerations. First, a language can be composed of
and reduced finally to a handful of syllables (with varying accents, intonations, and
syntax), a score of them providing thousands (conceivably ~ 2 raised to the 20th power) of
different words. Second, if the primal experiences of speechifying humans occur in
conjunction with preoccupying celestial visions and effects tied to them, the corresponding
preoccupation of a language, no matter how banal life will ultimately become and filled with
ordinary trivial objects, can well be with these original syllables from which the language
subsequently descends.
I have been continuously astonished at Crosthwaite's indefatigable and creative energy, not
to mention the boldness with which he has attacked an immense set of challenges. The results
make an important contribution to the study of linguistic origins and diffusion. The
linguistic connections evidenced, as well as the sacral outlook and practices tied to them,
are so close as to bring into question several dearly held beliefs regarding ancient
chronology and the relative antiquity of the Mediterranean civilizations.
It begins to appear as if all that was contained in the minds, speech and practice of the
ancients took place in the same skies and in everyone's sight at the same time. Greece,
Italy, Illyria, Anatolia, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Danube Basin: indeed all are
implicated.
Many pages of the present work suggest such a theory. A reading of the chapter on "Ka" will
let one understand what is meant here. It will explain, too, why the short title of "Ka" is
given the book: this favorite Egyptian monosyllable penetrates Greek and other languages as
well; it testifies, not so much on behalf of Egyptian chronological precedence, as for an
ecumenical, possibly even hologenetic development of religious and thence all language of
the ancient world.
Alfred de Grazia Princeton, New Jersey
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER ONE
AUGURY
READERS and students of the literature and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans are
faced immediately with a paradox. The people who did so much to develop rational thought in
so many areas of life devoted much time and energy to studies, practices and beliefs which,
in the eyes of many educated people today, are irrational and valueless, except in so far
as a vivid imagination can be thought helpful for the smooth working of the psyche. I refer
to the stories about the origin and deeds of the Olympian gods, the practice of pouring
wine and other liquids on the earth (libations) as offerings to powers under the earth, the
grotesque business of ceremonially slaughtering animals, especially bulls, goats, stags,
pigs and sheep, tinkering with blood and entrails, the attempt to divine the future by
consulting specialist prophets, the Pythia or Sibyl sitting on a tripod in an underground
shrine, the Roman augurs, and so on. Nor were the ancient Greeks and Romans the only ones
to hold such beliefs and indulge in such practices. Similar patterns of behaviour are found
not only in the Mediterranean area, but world wide. In this short work I attempt an
explanation of the apparent contradiction between the rational and irrational, and suggest
that the Greeks and Romans were acting rationally according to their lights.
The will of the gods had to be ascertained before any important undertaking. The Greeks
sent inquirers to Delphi and Dodona. The Romans and Etruscans relied heavily on the skill
of augurs, who watched all animals, but especially birds, and lightning. In Greece, the
eagle and vulture were associated with the supreme god Zeus, the crow with his wife and
sister Hera, and the raven with the god of prophecy, Apollo.
The Roman haruspex and the Greek hiereus (priest) studied the entrails, especially the
liver, of sacrificed animals. If the caput iecoris, head of the liver, was missing, it was
a bad sign, dirum, ill-omened. (In the Elektra of Euripides, Aigisthos is dismayed to find
the liver incomplete; shortly afterwards he is killed). Greek divination was di'empuron, by
fire, or hieroskopia, the study of entrails.
The Etruscans, Rome's neighbor to the north-west, were the recognised masters of the art of
augury, and claimed that the birth of their art was at Tarquinia, where a boy, Tages,
sprang up out of a ploughed field. Although a child, he had the wisdom of an old man [1] .
The fulguriator at Rome specialised in the study of thunderbolts. There are frequent
references to lightning and earthquakes in classical literature. Cicero, 1st century B. C.,
in his work on divination, writes that earthquakes have often given warning of disaster,
and that the Etruscans have interpreted them [2] . Some of Rome's most important
institutions were Etruscan in origin.
The general opinion in the ancient world was that Etruscans had come to Italy from the
east. Cicero mentions the Lydian soothsayer of Etruscan race, "Lydius haruspex Tyrrhenae
gentis." He mentions Etruscan books on divination, haruspicini (pertaining to entrails),
fulgurales (about lightning), and tonitruales (about thunder) [3] .
Ancient peoples considered that it was a king's duty both to be wise, sapere, and to
foretell the future, divinare [4] . At Rome in early times the augurs met regularly on the
Nones of the month [5] . The magistrate is spoken of as auspicans, taking the auspices, and
the augur is is qui in augurium adhibetur, he who is called in for augury.
In his history of Rome, Livy, 1st century B. C., tells us that during the reign of Tullus
Hostilius there was a report of a shower of stones on the Alban Mount [6] . This seemed so
improbable that they sent men to the Mount to check on the prodigium. They were assailed by
a heavy fall of stones like a hailstorm. They thought they heard a voice from the grove
(lucus) on the top (cacumen) of the hill, giving instructions about religious observances.
A nine days festival, novendiales, was declared and became a regular festival whenever
falls of stones occurred. The augur set up a tabernaculum, tent, in the centre of his
station, inside the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city. He must not cross the
pomerium before the completion of the ceremony. He carried a lituus, a staff without a
knot. Cicero has left us a description of Romulus's lituus: "Est incurvum et leviter a
summo inflexum bacillum"; it is a staff, curved and slightly bent at the top. It was kept
by the Salii, a college of priests, in the Curia Saliorum, on the Palatine Hill. After the
temple was burnt down, it was found unharmed. Under the king Tarquinius Priscus, Attus
Navius made a discriptio regionum with this staff [7] .
The augur wore the trabea, a state robe edged with purple. Such a garment was worn by
kings, augurs, some priests, and knights. He had to stand on high ground, and a stone was
needed. There are representations by Roman artists of the augur with his left foot on a
boulder. On the arx, or citadel, at Rome, there was a stone, probably a meteorite, and it
may appear in Livy's account of the procedure for finding whether the gods approved of the
choice of Numa as successor to the throne on the death of Romulus (8th century B. C.).
"Inde ab augure, cui deinde honoris ergo publicum id perpetuumque sacerdotium fait,
deductus in arcem in lapide ad meridiem versus consedit. Augur ad laevam eius capite velato
sedem cepit, dextra manu baculum sine nodo aduncum tenens, quem litaum appellarunt. Inde
ubi prospectu in urbem agrumque capto deos precatus regiones ab oriente ad occasum
determinavit, dextras ad meridionem partes, laevas ad septentrionem esse dixit, signum
contra, quoad longissime conspectum oculi ferebant, animo finivit; tum lituo in laevam
manum translato dextra in caput Numae imposita precatus ita est: Iuppiter pater, si est fas
hunc Numam Pompilium, cuius ego caput teneo, regem Romae esse, uti tu signa nobis certa
adclarissis inter eos fines, quos feci. Tum peregit verbis auspicia, quae mitti vellet;
quibus missis declaratus rex Numa de templo descendit. [8]
Numa sat on a stone, facing south. The augur sat beside him, his head covered, lituus in
right hand. He surveyed the city and countryside, prayed to the gods, and marked out the
area from east to west, with south on his right, north on his left. He transferred the
lituus to his left hand, put his right hand on Numa's head, and prayed to Jupiter for a
sign. He recited the desired auspices, which were sent, and Numa then descended from the
temple.
The augur marked out with movement of his lituus an area of the sky. The east-west division
was called Decumanus (sc. limes), the north-south division Cardo (hinge). The templum from
which Numa descended was originally the area corresponding to that which was cut off, and
transferred to the ground. The templum corresponded to the Greek temenos, from temno, cut.
Aeschylus, in his play The Persians, refers to the temenos aitheros, or temple of the sky,
and the Roman poet Lucretius refers to "coeli templa" [9] . The survey of the city and
fields may be referred to by Plautus: "Look carefully around you like an augur." [10]
Words for the enclosure are curt, in Etruscan, gorod, in Slavonic, and garth, in English.
Before a solution to the problem of what the augur was really doing is possible, we need to
consider some other words and their implications.
The cap worn by priests and augurs, especially by the flamen Dialis (the priest who
attended the fire at the altar of Jupiter), was called an apex, after the name of the small
rod on top, with a tuft of wool, the apiculum, wound round it. Such a white hat was also
called an albogalerus. The connection with whiteness and light may also be seen in the word
Luceres, the name of one of the original Roman tribes. The Etruscan word lauchume means a
chieftain; it is related to the root luk, light. Livy tells us that the young slave-boy
Servius Tullius was seen asleep with fire round his head. This was taken by Tanaquil, the
queen, as a sign that he would be the saviour of the royal household, even that he would be
the king [11] . Plutarch writes that the same thing happened to the young Romulus. In
Homer, Iliad: XVIII, flames are seen round the head of Achilles.
Livy tells a story of the augur Attus Navius. The king, Lucius Tarquinius, challenged him
to say whether what he, the king, had in mind could be done. When Attus said yes, the king
said that he was thinking of Attus cleaving a whetstone with a razor. "Tum illum haud
cunctanter discidisse cotem ferunt. Statua Atti capite velato, quo in loco res acta est,
gradibus ipsis ad laevam curiae fuit..." He did it, and they put up a statue of Attus, with
his head covered. [12]
Cicero mentions a rather similar occurrence. Numerius Suffustius of Praeneste, acting on a
dream, split open a flint rock. Oak lots with carvings in ancient letters emerged, "sortes
in robore insculptas priscarum litterarum notis." Honey is said to have flowed from an
olive tree at the same place [13] .
The authority of the augur was great. "Quae augur iniusta, nefasta vitiosa dire defnerit,
irrita infectaque sunto." What the augur marks as unjust, impious, harmful or inauspicious,
let it be invalid and of no effect [14] .
The names of the augur Attus Navius probably mean father (attus, at), and prophet (navi).
('Navi' is a Semitic word).
Having begun with examples of Etrusco-Roman prophecy, let us go back in time to the
establishment of the Greek oracles. Much valuable information is to be found in The Delphic
Oracle by Parke and Wormall; Greek Oracles by H. W. Parke; The Oracles of Zeus by H. W.
Parke, and Greek Oracles by R. Flaceliere. Generally speaking, an oracle was a place where
a deity spoke through a prophet or prophetess. The word means literally 'mouthpiece. ' The
most famous oracle was situated in central Greece at Delphi not far inland from the north
coast of the Corinthian Gulf. It was consulted by private individuals, cities, and kings,
and exercised a conservative and unifying influence on the Greek world.
The problem that has so far resisted attempts to find a generally accepted solution is that
of the nature of the prophetic inspiration in terms that are understandable in the modern
world. One may begin by distinguishing two kinds of activity: mantle, and inductive. The
Trojan seer Helenos understood in his heart (thumos) the plan of Apollo and Athene [15] .
The Roman augur, however, is described as using observation and induction.
For the most part, divining the future at a Greek oracle combined the two methods, mantic
and inductive. It was a matter of interpretation by priests or priestesses of the
utterances of a woman in a 'manic' or inspired state. The word 'mantis' for a prophet is
related to the word 'mania', or raging (of love as well as anger). The Greeks thought in
terms of possession of a human being, whether prophet or poet, by a divinity. They used the
word 'enthousiasmos', god (theos) being in one. It is usually translated as 'inspiration, '
but, as we shall see later, was not caused by breathing in, as the word inspiration
suggests. At Delphi, the woman whom the god or goddess entered was called the Pythia, and
was inspired, at any rate in classical times, by Apollo. She went into an underground
chamber and, in imitation of the deity, sat on the lid of a cauldron fixed on a tripod.
Tripods were of metal, and were highly valued.
For a poet's description of an oracle in action, we can turn to Virgil. Aeneas goes to
Cumae to consult the prophetess or Sibyl about the journey he is destined to make into the
underworld to consult the ghost of his father Anchises. "The side of the Euboean cliff is
cut out into a huge cave, into which lead a hundred wide entrances, a hundred mouths,
whence rush out as many voices, the Sibyl's answers. They had come to the threshold, when
the maiden said. 'It is time to ask your fate; look, the god is here! ' As she said this at
the entrance, her colour and expression changed, her hair went wild; she panted, her heart
was filled with frenzied raging, she seemed to grow in stature, and her voice was no longer
natural, as she was breathed upon by the presence, now close, of the god." [16]
There is a resemblance between the Latin rabidus, raging, and Hebrew rabh, great.
Line 77 ff.: "The prophetess, not yet accepting Phoebus, is filled with Bacchic frenzy,
trying to shake the great god from her breast; but he exercises her raving mouth all the
more, subduing her fierce feelings, and moulds her to his will with his force. And now the
hundred huge mouths of the place opened of their own accord, and carried the answer of the
prophetess out into the open."
Cicero says: "To presage is to have acute perception (sentire acute). Old women and dogs
are 'sagae. ' This ability of the soul, of divine origin, is called 'furor' (frenzy), if it
blazes out." [17]
Again in Aeneid VI: "With such words from the shrine the Cumaean Sibyl sings frightful
riddles that resound in the cave, wrapping true words in obscure ones; Apollo plies the
reins and drives his spurs into her breast." [18]
The oracle of Zeus at Dodona in northern Greece was held to be most ancient. In its oak
groves a dove, or doves, were said to speak. The priestesses were called peleiae (doves).
The priests, called Selli, slept on the ground and never washed their feet. The sound of a
sacred dove, of leaves in the wind, of water in a spring, and of bronze gongs suspended in
the trees, helped the interpreter to give an answer. At Delphi, the inspired utterances of
the Pythia were interpreted by the priests and put into verse, giving what was often an
equivocal answer, such as that to King Croesus: "If you cross the river Halys you will
destroy a great kingdom." It turned out to be his own that was destroyed.
Delphi is situated on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Parnassus has a huge cleft, with the
Phaedriades, the shining cliffs, on each side. The oracle was associated with a chasm in
the ground, and the inner room where the Pythia prophesied was underground. There were two
sacred springs, Cassotis and Castalia.
Oracles were not confined to the Greek mainland. The west coast of what is now Turkey,
especially the area known to the Greeks as Ionia, had many oracles, and it is even possible
that their existence was a factor in the choice of site for a city by colonists from the
Greek mainland. The writer, Berossus, mentions a Babylonian Sibyl. There was an oracle at
Marpessus in the Troad. The Hebrew marpe means healing. There was another oracle of Apollo,
also in a cavern, at Erythrae in Ionia. The late 4th century writer Heracleides Ponticus
mentions various Sibyls, including Herophile, the Sibyl at Erythrae. There was an Erythrae
in Boeotia, at the foot of Mount Cithaeron, and another in Locris on the Corinthian Gulf.
The red soil at Marpessus may account for the name of one of the towns (Erythrae = red).
Heracleides Ponticus expresses the view that the oracle at Canopus is an oracle of Pluto,
the god of the underworld.
The Sibyl Bacis, in Boeotia, and Epimenides of Crete, were manteis, inspired prophets.
Telmessus in Caria was famous for haruspicum disciplina. At Elis, two families, the Iamidae
and the Klutidae, were famous for their prophetic skills. In early times, the Roman Senate
decreed that six (some said ten) of the sons of the noblest families should be handed over
to each of the Etruscan tribes to study prophetic technique.
An Aeduan Druid, named Divitiacus, claimed to have studied the naturae rationem which the
Greeks called physiologia, the study of nature, and made predictions by augury and by
inference (coniectura).
Among the Persians, the Magi "augurantur et divinant" practised augury and divination.
Their king had to know the theory and practice (disciplina et scientia). [19]
The Spartans assigned an augur to kings and elders, and consulted the oracles, of Apollo at
Delphi, of Jupiter Hammon, and of Zeus at Dodona [20] .
Cicero writes: "Appius Claudius observed the practice not of intoning an oracular utterance
(decantandi oraculi), but of divination" [21] .
Cicero appears to refer to shamanism when he writes: "There are those whose souls leave the
body and see the things that they foretell. Such animi (souls) are inflamed by many causes,
e. g. by a certain kind of vocal sound and Phrygian songs; many by groves, forests, rivers
and seas. I believe also that there have been certain breaths of the earth, which filled
the people's souls so that they uttered oracles" [22] .
He then quotes words spoken by Cassandra, who saw the future long beforehand.
The Latin word anhelitus, breath, which is sometimes translated as 'vapours', does not
justify the assumption that inspiration at Delphi was caused by gases, steam from boiling
laurel leaves, or smoke. Inspiration is associated much more closely with panting as the
god 'breathes' fire into the soul, as Cassandra puts it in the Agamemnon. Furthermore,
Cassandra could prophesy anywhere, without restriction to caves. See, for example,
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1072 ff., where she prophesies before the palace at Mycenae.
Caverns and water were favoured surroundings for oracles. Mopsus founded one at Claros,
near Colophon, where there was a sacred spring under the temple. Cumae, near Naples, is a
good example. In 1932 Amadeo Maiuri found a cavern at Cumae. There was a passageway 150
yards in length, 8 ft. wide, 16 ft. high, of trapezoidal section, narrow at the roof. It
ran parallel to the cliff, and had a series of openings at regular intervals. The Cumaean
oracle is thought to have flourished in the 6th and 5th centuries B. C.. The oracle of the
dead at Ephyra in Thesprotia was in a labyrinth with many doors, reminiscent of Cumae, and
iron rollers were found there. Strabo, a Greek writer born in 64 B. C., quotes an early
writer, Ephorus, on the Cimmerians at lake Avernus. They lived in subterranean houses
called argillae, tended an oracle, and only emerged at night. Homer describes them as never
looked on by the sun, whether Helios is high up in the sky or underneath the earth. There
was an oracle of Apollo at Didyma, near Miletus, where the priestesses had to wet their
feet in a sacred spring.
The earliest reference to a Sibyl is by Heraclitus, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers
living in Ionia about 500 B. C., quoted by Plutarch, 1st century A. D.: "But Sibylla with
frenzied mouth speaking words without smile or charm or sweet savour reaches a thousand
years by her voice on account of the god."
At Delphi, before consulting the god, one paid a fee, a 'pelanos', or honey cake. The
Pythia was purified with water from Castalia, and drank from Cassotis. The latter was for
purification, not inspiration. A goat was sprinkled with water to make it shiver, and was
then slain. It is noteworthy that at Aigeira, opposite Delphi and Crisa across the gulf,
there was an oracle of Ge, the earth, where a Sibyl drank bull's blood and descended into a
cavern to be inspired by the goddess. The name Aigeira suggests goats (aix, aigos, goat).
When the goat was slain, the Pythia went into the 'cella', or shrine, where there were an
altar of Poseidon, the iron throne of Poseidon, the 'omphalos', votive tripods (dedicated
to the god), a hearth for burning laurel leaves and barley, and a fire that was always kept
alight. There was a golden statue of Dionysus, the god who was killed and restored to life
at Delphi. The Pythia descended into the innermost shrine. Livy, 1.56, has: "ex infimo
specu vocem redditam ferunt," "They say that a voice answered from the depths of the
cavern." She sat on the cauldron lid, in imitation of the god Apollo. The cauldron was
supported by a tripod. Plutarch mentions emanations. There is no archaeological or
geological evidence for fumes, only solid rock, nor is there any clear reference to vapour
in the context of other oracles. More will be said later about Plutarch's account.
The priests at Delphi wrote out the answer given by the Pythia, and put it into the
'zygasterion', the collection of answers. There is a tradition that answers had at one time
been written on leaves. Aeneas at Cumae asks the Sibyl not to do this. References to the
Pythia chewing leaves are late, and there is no experimental evidence of such a practice
causing inspiration.
Diodorus Siculus, a historian writing in about 40 B. C., gives us valuable information.
"Since I have mentioned the tripod, it seems appropriate to refer to the old traditional
story about it. It is said that goats found the ancient oracle; because of this the
Delphians even today use goats for consulting the oracle. They say that the manner of the
discovery was as follows: There was a chasm in this place, where now is what is called the
sanctuary of the temple. Goats fed round it, since it was not yet inhabited by the
Delphians, and whenever a goat went up to the chasm and looked over, it leaped about in a
remarkable way and uttered sounds different from the usual. The goatherd marvelled at the
strange occurrence, went up to the chasm, and having examined it suffered the same
experience as the goats; he acted like people whom a god enters, and he proceeded to
prophesy things that were going to happen. Subsequently the report was passed on among the
locals about the fate of those who approached the chasm, and more people went to the place,
and because of the unusual occurrence all made trial of it, and all those who went near
were inspired by the god. Thus the oracle was the object of admiration and was held to be
the oracle of Ge (Earth). For some time those who wished to get answers went up to the
chasm and prophesied to each other. Later, many jumped into the chasm and prophesied to
each other in their frenzy, and all disappeared. The inhabitants of the region all decided,
for safety reasons, to appoint one woman as prophetess, and that answers should be given
through her. So a contraption was rigged which she mounted. She 'enthused' in safety and
gave answers to those who asked. The device has three supports, hence its name 'tripod'.
Almost all, even today, are bronze tripods modelled on the lines of this one."
It is significant that the Hebrew 'chaghagh' is to dance, stagger; 'chaghav' is a ravine.
Next there is a valuable clue from Plutarch, 1st century A. D.. As well as giving the name
of the goatherd in the story, Koretas, he reports that during his term of office as priest
of Apollo at Delphi there was a fatal accident. The goat refused to shiver, and was
repeatedly dowsed with water. The Pythia went reluctantly to take her seat on the cauldron,
spoke in a strained voice, then rushed out shrieking and collapsed. Plutarch gives no more
details beyond saying that she died within a few days.
I append some examples concerning omens and divination, starting with Homer's Iliad:
II: 100: Agamemnon calls an assembly and stands up holding a staff. It was made by
Hephaestus, who gave it to Zeus the son of Kronos, and Zeus gave it to the guide, the
slayer of Argus. And Hermes gave it to Pelops the charioteer, who gave it to Atreus,
shepherd of the people. Atreus died, leaving it to Thyestes rich in flocks, and Thyestes
gave it to Agamemnon to carry, to rule over many islands and all Argos. Leaning on the
staff he spoke to the Argives. II: 265: Odysseus strikes Thersites with his staff, for
criticising Agamemnon.
II: 305: Odysseus tells how at Aulis, while waiting for a favourable wind for the voyage to
Troy, they were sacrificing hecatombs at the holy altar round a spring under a beautiful
plane tree, whence sparkling water emerged. Then there was a great portent: A snake, red-
backed, frightful to see, which Zeus himself had caused to emerge, shot out from the altar
towards the tree. On the topmost branch there was a nest of young sparrows, hiding under
the leaves, eight of them, nine including the mother. The snake ate them all up, but then
the son of Kronos of the Crooked Ways turned the snake into stone. The prophet Calchas
interpreted the omen. The nine birds were the nine years of the siege of Troy. The city
would be captured in the tenth.
II: 447: The Greeks prepare for battle. Athene joins them, wearing the aegis, unageing,
immortal with a hundred gold tassels fluttering from it. She gives them courage and
eagerness to fight.
At the start of Book V Athene inspires Diomedes. She makes his helmet and shield blaze with
tireless fire like the summer star which is brighter than others when it rises from bathing
in Ocean. Such was the fire that she kindled round his head and shoulders.
VI: 76: Homer mentions Priam's son, Helenus, the best augur in Troy.
VIII: 245: Zeus answers Agamemnon's prayer for help by sending an eagle -the most sure of
birds to bring something about -holding a fawn in its talons. It lets go the fawn by Zeus's
beautiful altar, where the Achaeans used to sacrifice to Zeus Panomphaios (Zeus Father of
Oracles). When they see that the bird comes from Zeus, they rush at the Trojans all the
more and remember the joys of battle. IX: 236: Odysseus talks to Achilles. The Trojans are
doing too well. Zeus, son of Kronos, has encouraged them with flashes of lightning on the
right.
X: 272: Diomedes and Odysseus set out at night on an intelligence-gathering mission behind
the Trojan lines. As they set off, Athene sends a heron on the right. They hear its cry,
and Odysseus sends up a prayer to Athene.
XII: 200: As the Trojans were about to storm the wall protecting the Greek ships, an eagle
appeared high up on their left, with a huge red snake in its claws, still alive and
gasping, still full of fight. It bit the eagle, which dropped it among the crowd and flew
away with a cry. The Trojans were terrified when they saw the snake lying wriggling among
them, an omen from aegis-bearing Zeus.
XIII: 821: When the Trojans are fighting by the Greek ships, Ajax taunts Hector. An eagle
appears on the right, and the Achaeans take heart.
XVI: 233: Achilles encourages his troops, the Myrmidons, for the battle, and prays to
Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona, where his hypophetae, announcers of the oracular answer, live,
the Selli, who never wash their feet and who sleep on the ground.
XVI: 450: Hera urges Zeus to allow Sarpedon to be killed by Patroclus. Zeus agrees, but
sends a shower of bloody raindrops to the earth to honour his son, whom Patroclus is about
to kill.
XVIII: 202: Hera sends Iris to Achilles with instructions to appear in the battle over the
body of Patroclus. Achilles has lost his armour, but Athene spreads her tasselled aegis
over his shoulders, and puts a crown of golden mist round his head, and creates a blaze of
fiery light from him. The charioteers are astonished when they see the terrible fire, sent
by Athene of the bright eyes, steadily burning on the head of the valiant son of Peleus.
XIX: At the end of Book XIX, when Achilles sets out in his new armour to avenge Patroclus,
his horse Xanthus speaks to him and says that the day of his death is at hand. It is
noteworthy that Hera enabled the horse to speak and the Erinyes, the Furies, checked its
speech.
Passages from Homer's Odyssey. II: 37: Telemachus summons an assembly. He stands up, and
the herald, Peisenor, puts the skeptron, the staff, into his hand. Antinous, chief of the
suitors, urges Telemachus to send his mother away. When Telemachus refuses, Zeus shows his
support by sending two eagles, who fight in the air above the assembly (1.146). The omen is
interpreted by Halitherses, who is best at bird lore and prophecy.
III: Telemachus goes to Pylos. At line 406 Nestor gets up and sits on a smooth white stone,
shining and polished, in front of his house. It is the seat where he sat with his staff in
his hand to rule his people.
XI: Odysseus goes to the underworld, and consults the ghost of Teiresias, who appears
holding a golden staff.
XVIII: 354: Eurymachus says that the beggar (Odysseus in disguise) must have been guided to
Ithaca by some god --at any rate light seems to emanate from his head.
XIX: 33: Athene accompanies Odysseus and Telemachus as they hide the suitors' weapons
before the battle. She carries a golden lantern. Telemachus cries to his father: "The walls
and fir rafters and panels and pillars look as if a fire were blazing. There must be some
god from heaven in the house."
XIX: 536: Penelope tells the beggar of her dream that an eagle swooped down on twenty
geese, killed them, and flew away. The eagle returned and told her that the geese were her
suitors and that the eagle was her husband Odysseus. When the beggar endorses the
interpretation, Penelope is dubious: dreams reach us through two gates, one of horn, the
other of ivory. Dreams from the ivory gate are deceitful and unfulfilled.
XX: 98: A double omen. Early in the morning Odysseus raises his hands to the sky and prays
for a pheme, utterance, from somebody in the house, and for a sign out of doors, that his
return is approved of by the gods. At once there is a clap of thunder. Then a slave,
grinding barley and wheat, amazed at thunder from a clear sky, expresses a wish and belief
that the suitors should eat in the palace for the last time. This second omen almost falls
into the category of kledons, which are discussed later in the book.
XX: 243: The suitors plan to kill Telemachus, but an eagle appears on the left holding a
dove in its claws. Amphinomus at once warns that the plan will miscarry, and proposes
dinner instead.
XX: 345: Athene leads the suitors' minds astray. When Telemachus has made a short speech
refusing to drive his mother from the house, unquenchable laughter, asbestos gelos, seizes
them. Theoclymenus, a god-like seer, is present. Their laughter stops and they seem to see
blood on the food they are eating. The seer speaks: "Your heads, faces and knees are
shrouded in night; a cry of mourning is kindled; your cheeks are wet with tears, the walls
and panels are sprinkled with blood. The porch and courtyard are full of spectres, rushing
down to darkness and Hades. The sun has perished from the sky, and an evil mist has come
upon all."
At the end of Book XXI, as Odysseus strings his bow, Zeus marks the occasion with a great
clap of thunder. Passages from Vergil's Aeneid. I: 393: Aeneas has been shipwrecked on the
coast of Africa. Venus meets him and gives him encouragement. An eagle has just swooped
down on twelve swans. They escape, some coming to land, others still in the air. Thus, she
says, some of the Trojan ships are safe in port, others are approaching.
II: 682: During the escape from Troy, "levis summo de vertice visus Iuli fundere lumen apex
tactuque innoxia mollis lambere flamma comas et circum tempora pasci." Iulus's cap poured
out light, and a gentle flame, harmless to touch, licked his hair and played round his
forehead.
While others tried to extinguish it with shaking and with water, Anchises prayed to
Jupiter. He was answered by thunder on the left, and "de caelo lapsa per umbrae stella
facem ducens multa cum luce cucurrit. Illa summa super labentem culmina tecti cernimus
Idaea claram se condere silva signantemque vias; tum longo limite sulcus dat lucem et late
circurn loca sulphure fumant."
A star fell from the sky through the darkness and moved fast, trailing a torch of brilliant
light. We saw the shining object glide over the roof of the house and plunge into the
forest on Mount Ida, illuminating the paths; then it left a long trail of light in its
wake, and everywhere around, far and wide, was sulphurous smoke.
III: 1-12: We have a summary of the fate of Troy. Its destruction was the will of those
above (visum supers), and the Trojans were driven into exile to seek new homes by divine
auguries (auguriis divam). They carry the Penates and Great Gods.
III: 90: Delos is one of their first stops. Aeneas enters the temple to pray. Suddenly the
hill seems to move, the shrine to open, and the cauldron (cortina) to bellow (mugire) like
a bull. III: 135: When they have sailed to Crete, home of their ancestor Teucer, pestilence
from a disturbed part of the sky afflicts trees, crops, and limbs. Anchises urges a return
to Delos to ask the oracle for guidance. Before they can go, the Trojan gods appear to
Aeneas in a dream, with advice from Apollo that Hesperia is their goal, not Crete.
III: 245: They approach the Strophades islands, home of Celaeno and the Harpies. Celaeno,
the prophetess of evil (infelix vates), prophesies that they will reach Italy, but fail to
build a city, and be so hungry that they will eat their tables. We shall see later that the
eating of tables is a kledon. III: 359: Epirus is their next port of call. Here the Trojan
seer Helenus has succeeded King Pyrrhus. When Aeneas asks Helenus for advice, he addresses
him as interpreter of the gods, who perceives (sentis) the presence (numina) of Phoebus,
the tripods, bay trees of Claros, the stars, the tongues of birds and omens of their
flight. Helenus sacrifices bullocks, asks for divine permission (pacem), unties the fillet
from his consecrated forehead, and leads Aeneas to the threshold of the god, and prophesies
(canit = sings).
III: 405: Helenus tells Aeneas that when he has sailed past the Italian cities on the
nearer coastline, he must, when sacrificing on the beach, wear a purple robe which will
cover his hair, lest while busy with the sacred fires in honour of the gods some hostile
face may be seen and disturb the omens. This is to be the Mos Sacrorum (sacred custom).
After urging him to be particularly careful to honour Juno, Helenus describes the raging
prophetess of Cumae; Aeneas must insist on direct spoken answers, not writing on leaves
which get blown away.
V: 704: After the funeral games held in Sicily on the anniversary of the death of his
father, Anchises, Aeneas consults the prophet, Nautes. He was the only pupil of Tritonian
Pallas (Athene). He could explain what the great anger of the gods portended, or what order
of events the fates demanded. VI: 779: In the underworld, Anchises reveals to Aeneas the
future greatness of Rome. The soul of Romulus is seen: "See how twin crests stand on his
head (vertex), and his father himself marks him out for the life of the gods above."
VII: 59: After his visits to the underworld, Aeneas sails north and reaches the river
Tiber. Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, the aged king of the Latins, is to marry Turnus,
prince of the Rutuli, but the gods send two signs. A swarm of bees settles on a laurel in
the palace. A prophet interprets this as the arrival of an army who will rule from this
citadel. Next, Lavinia's hair and dress catch fire as she stands beside her father, who is
kindling the altar fire. Prophets sing that she has a distinguished destiny, but that great
war is the fate of the nation.
The king visits the oracle of his father, Faunus, predictor of fate. At this oracle the
inquirer sacrificed sheep, then lay down to sleep on the sheepskins. The voice of Faunus
was heard prophesying the future.
Shortly afterwards the Trojans sit down under a tree for a meal. They use cakes of meal
instead of plates. Iulus exclaims "We are eating our tables!" Aeneas recognises the kledon,
and declares that this is the land promised them by destiny. He wreathes his head with
laurel and utters prayers to various deities, while Jupiter thunders three times from a
clear sky and displays a cloud gleaming and quivering with golden rays.
VIII: 608: Venus brings Aeneas his armour, made by Vulcan. The helmet is terrible with its
crests, spouting flames.
XII: 244: Iuturna, wishing to break the truce and prevent or postpone the death of her
brother Turnus in a duel with Aeneas, sends a confusing omen. An eagle seizes the leader of
a group of swans, but is attacked by combined tactics of the other swans, drops his prey,
and flees. The augur, Tolumnius, says, "This is the omen I prayed for. Follow me into
battle." VIII: 663: On the shield of Aeneas:
"hic exsultantis Salios nudosque Lupercos lanigerosque apices et lapsa an cilia
caeloextuderat..." "Vulcan had hammered out the dance of the Salii and the naked Luperci,
and caps with wool on their peaks, and shields that had fallen from heaven..."
VIII: 680: On the shield of Aeneas, at the battle of Actium, Augustus is seen, his brow
shooting forth twin flames.
Pausanias, a Greek from Asia Minor of the 2nd century A. D., wrote a guide to Greece. There
are many references to augury and oracles. The Penguin Classics translation, 'A Guide to
Greece' by Peter Levi, 1985 reprint, is readily available. The following are among the many
relevant passages. References are to the Greek text in the Loeb Classical Library edition.
I: 4: 4: When the Gauls tried to sack Delphi, they were attacked by thunderbolts, and by
stones and rock falling from Parnassus.
I: 21: 7: At Gryneion in Asia Minor there is an oracular temple of Apollo, mentioned in
Vergil, Eclogue VI: 72, and Aeneid IV: 345. Linen breastplates were on show there, a fact
whose significance will appear infra, Chapter IV.
II: 26: 5: Re the sanctuary of Asclepius near Epidaurus, he tells how the child Asclepius
was found by a goatherd, abandoned. A flash of lightning came from the child.
VII: 25: 10: At Boura, in Herakles's grotto, the oracle is consulted by throwing dice on a
table before the statue. There are many dice, and for every throw there is an
interpretation written on the board.
IX: 16: 1: Teiresias's observatory is behind the sanctuary of Ammon at Thebes. IX: 39: 5:
At Lebadeia in Boeotia is an oracle of Trophonius. To consult it, one had to live for some
days in a building nearby dedicated to Good Fortune and the Good Spirit. No hot water was
allowed for washing. Sacrifice was offered to Trophonius and his sons, to Apollo, Kronos,
Zeus, Hera the charioteer, and Demeter Europa, the nurse of Trophonius. One then had to
slaughter a ram, calling to Agamedes. Priests checked the entrails of all the sacrificed
animals. The inquirer had to bathe in the river Herkyne; he was then washed and anointed
with oil by two boys called Hermae. He drank water, first of forgetfulness, then of memory.
He looked at the statue of Daedalus, put on a linen tunic tied with ribbon, and wore heavy
boots.
The oracle was on the hillside above a sacred wood. It was surrounded by a circular
platform of white stone, the size of a small threshing-floor, about four feet six inches in
height. There were bronze posts joined by chains. Inside the circle was a chasm, like a
kiln ten feet in diameter, twenty feet deep. The inquirer descended a ladder to a hole at
the bottom, and took honey cakes. He was snatched down feet first as though by a river.
Inside, some heard sounds, others saw things. He returned feet first, and was put by the
priests on the nearby Throne of Memory. He was possessed with terror, but finally recovered
in the building of Good Spirit and Fortune.
X: 5: 7: Phemonoe was Delphi's first priestess and first to sing the hexameter. But a local
woman called Boio wrote a hymn for Delphi saying that Olen and the remote northerners came
and founded the oracle, and Olen was the first to sing in hexameters. Russian olenj is a
reindeer.
IV: 10: 6: The Messenian prophet Ophioneus was blind from birth. He found out what was
happening to everyone, private and public, and thus predicted the future.
VI: 2: 4: The Elean prophet Thrasyboulos son of Aineias was of the clan of the Iamidae.
These were prophets descended from Iamos (Pindar, Olympian Odes VI: 72). They studied
lizards and dogs.
The Cypria, scholiast on Pindar, Nemean X: 62: Lynceus climbed Taygetus and saw Kastor and
Polydeukes hidden in a hollow oak.
Herodotus, writing in the 5th century B. C., says that, according to the Egyptians, two
priestesses of Zeus at Egyptian Thebes were carried off by the Phoenicians. One was sold in
Greece, the other in Libya. The oracles at Thebes and Dodona were similar.
Callimachus writes: "Servants of the bowl that is never silent," of the bronze gongs at
Dodona.
Zenobius refers to Bombos the Prophet at Dodona. In Homeric pyromancy (telling the future
from fire) the priests burnt the thighs of the victim first. The altar flames should rise
high. The thigh may have been significant; cf. Zeus concealing the infant Dionysus in his
thigh, and Jacob and the angel.
A statue could apparently come to life, enabling a prophet to give a warning, as we see in
the next example:
Vergil, Aeneid II: 171: Sinon tells the Trojans that Minerva gave clear signs of
disapproval. The Palladium, an image of Minerva in Troy, was stolen by two Greeks, Diomedes
and Ulysses. Flames flickered from its staring eyes, salt sweat covered its limbs, and
three times it jumped from its base with trembling shield and spear. The prophet Calchas
sang of the need to leave Troy at once.
Aeneid III: 466: Fleeing from Troy, the Trojans stay with Helenus in Epirus. He gives them
presents when they leave, cauldrons from Dodona, etc. Homer, Odyssey XIV: 327: Odysseus has
returned in disguise to Ithaca. In the hut of Eumaeus the swineherd, he says that he has
heard of Odysseus. The king of the Thesprotians had said that Odysseus had gone to Dodona
to learn the will of Zeus from the oak trees with lofty foliage.
Asbolus the diviner is mentioned by Hesiod, Shield of Herakles line 185, in the
representation of the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs. Asbolus is with the Centaurs.
Frazer, in his edition of Apollodorus, mentions wizards in Loango, West Africa, who descend
into a pit to get inspiration.
Apollodorus I: 9: 24: The ship Argo speaks as the Argonauts sail past the Apsyrtides
islands. Apsyrtus was the brother of Medea, whom she murdered to facilitate her escape. The
Argo says that Zeus's anger will not cease until the murder is expiated.
Notes (Chapter One: Augury)
1. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' II: 23
2. Ibid. I: 18
3. Ibid. I: 33
4. Ibid. I: 40
5. Ibid. I: 41
6. Livy: I: 31.
7. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' I: 17
8. Livy I: 18
9. Lucretius: I: 1014
10. Plautus: 'Cistellari' IV: 2: 26
11. Livy: I: 39
12. Ibid. I: 36
13. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' II: 41
14. Cicero: 'De Legibus= II: 8
15. Homer: 'Iliad' VII: 44
16. Vergil: 'Aeneid' VI: 42
17. Cicero: 'De Divinatione= I: 31
18. Vergil: 'Aeneid' VI: 98
19. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' I: 41
20. Ibid. I: 43
21. Ibid. I: 47
22. Ibid. I: 50
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER TWO
THE ELECTRIC ORACLES
WE have seen enough evidence to attempt an explanation. I shall deal with augury first.
I suggest that augury was an art, or science, based on the combined study of the behaviour
of living creatures, especially birds, and of electrical fields both of the atmosphere and
of the earth.
Even today, the electrical effects of a thunderstorm are easily detectable by the naked eye.
Piezoelectric effects and earthquake light are recognised phenomena, and there are grounds
for supposing that conditions were more turbulent, electrically, in the ancient world [1] .
The Greek augur faced north, the Roman south, and watched especially the behaviour of birds
and animals. The Roman augur had a staff with a curved top. The contact with a boulder
indicates the discovery of the importance of a good earth connection. Finally, since the
augur worked in daytime, he threw part of his robe over his head to enable him to detect any
variations of brightness of electrical glow. A Greek seer wore a net garment over his
chiton.
It is not suggested that this technique would be useful under average present conditions,
merely that there was a time when electrical conditions were different, as we can expect
from the frequency of recorded earthquakes, and that elementary electrical principles were
being studied. Certainly experiments with magnets were carried out, for example at
Samothrace. Cicero mentions "auspicious militare in acuminibus", divination from the points
of spears (De Divinatione II: 36). This was presumably the observation of electrical
flashes.
When we bear in mind the fact that kings originally dealt with divine matters, we see the
significance of such words as lauchme, chieftain, and of the fire playing round the head of
a future king. Light, and lightning, were obvious indications of the presence of an
electrical deity. At Delphi the force was used to affect the Pythia by direct contact,
whereas at Dodona the emphasis was on sound effects, but there were tripods there too. At
Delphi the Pythia was stimulated by a force of earth. The gods spread their force far and
wide, sometimes enclosing it in caves in the earth, sometimes involving it in the human
body. [2]
According to Cicero, poetic inspiration shows that there is a divine power in the soul [3]
. He says it is possible that the earth force, which used to stimulate the soul of the
Pythia with divine inspiration, has disappeared because of age [4] . In Trimalchio's
Banquet, by Petronius, Trimalchio claims to have seen the Cumean Sibyl suspended in a jar.
When asked what she wished, she said "I wish to die." The story of a Sibyl small enough to
hang from the ceiling in a jar may originate in the gradual ebbing of the inspirational
force of the place.
Cicero speaks of oracles which are poured forth under the influence of divine inspiration
[5] .
I suggest that the breathing of the earth, spiritus, aspiratio terrarum, and the god's
breathing upon the Pythia, afflatus dei, are both examples of electrical stimulation, rather
like the feeling of the approach of a thunderstorm, as in the storm in Vergil, Aeneid IV.
Just as the Roman augur had to make contact with the earth via a boulder, so the Selli at
Dodona were forbidden to wash their feet and had to sleep on the ground. The Flamen Dialis,
or priest of Jupiter at Rome, slept in a special bed whose feet were smeared with mud. The
name of the famous seer Melampus means Blackfoot. Frazer, in The Golden Bough, writes of the
Agnihotris, Brahmin fire priests, who sleep on the ground. The 5th century B. C. dramatist
Euripides, in his play The Bacchae, describes the behaviour of the worshippers of Dionysus,
a god who fills his worshippers with frenzy. A Maenad, producing electrical effects from a
thyrsus, which resembles the wand in which Prometheus brought divine fire down from heaven,
went barefoot as she waved it in the air, then struck the ground [6] .
Good electrical effects could be obtained on high ground, e. g. Parnassus, Cithaeron, Mount
Sinai, etc.. Cithaeron, as well as being the scene of The Bacchae, had below it the town of
Erythrae. There is another Erythrae in Asia Minor. Clefts in rock if possible combined with
water, as at Delphi, would be helpful. Homer speaks of "rocky Pytho." Such places, together
with oak groves, as at Dodona, were likely to be enelysioi, containing Zeus Kataibates, Zeus
the sky god who descends in a thunderbolt. One may compare the mysterious flame that burned
in Thebes on the tomb of Semele, mother of Dionysus, killed by a thunderbolt from Zeus, and
also the fire round the head which did not burn [7] .
The tripod and cauldron are clearly important. The tripod as a throne for Apollo was
probably introduced between 1000 and 750 B. C., conventional dating. Votive offerings of
tripods were made to other gods as well as to Apollo. At Dodona the many votive tripods were
arranged in a circle, touching each other, round a sacred oak tree. I suggest two lines of
investigation. Firstly, they are generally of metal, and the legs of the tripod would be a
good electrical earth for the cauldron on which the Pythia sat. (See above for a reference
to iron rollers at Ephyra). Secondly, three metal legs are the most inconspicuous safe
support for a cauldron and occupant if one wishes to create the impression that the Pythia,
who is in contact with the god Apollo, is hovering in the air. There is a third possibility
which will be considered later in the section on tripod cauldrons. At this stage of the
argument we can well consider the play King Oedipus by Sophocles. Oedipus, king of Thebes in
Boeotia, is faced with plague in his city. A messenger has been sent to Delphi to ask the
god's advice. The chorus say: "elampse gar tou niphoentos artios phaneisa phama Parnasou."
Literally: "The voice of snowy Parnassus, recently shown, flashed (or: shone)." [8] The use
of a verb of shining rather than of sounding calls for comment, especially as this usage is
found elsewhere when describing oracular action. I give rough translations or paraphrases of
some instances.
Aeschylus, Eumenides 797 ff: Orestes, who has killed his mother to avenge the murder by her
of his father Agamemnon, is tried at Athens. The Furies, instruments of justice, are the
prosecutors. His defence has been that he was acting on the instructions of the god Apollo.
Athene, patron goddess of Athens, has a casting vote, and Orestes is acquitted. When the
Furies grumble, Athene consoles them: "But there was shining (lampra) evidence from Zeus,
and he who gave the oracle and he who bore witness were one and the same."
In the first play of the trilogy, the Agamemnon, the captive prophetess Cassandra sees
disaster looming when the triumphant procession arrives at Agamemnon's palace at Mycenae, on
his return from the capture of Troy. (Cassandra starts to prophesy) "Ah, it is like fire! He
is coming to me. Ah, woe, Lycian Apollo, woe is me!" [9] .
Certain Greek words are of significance in an oracular context. Pheme is a divine voice or
oracle, as also is omphe. The verb phao means to make known either by sight or by sound.
Aeido, sing, is sometimes used of wind in the trees, and of the twang of a bowstring. Audan,
to utter, of oracles, and aoide, contracted to ode, a song, are similar. Aoidos, like the
Latin vases, means a singer or prophet, and, in the Trachiniae of Sophocles, an enchanter.
The link between sound, sight, and divine revelation is close.
Heraclitus, the Obscure, was one of the philosophers working in Ionia in the 6th century B.
C., known as the Pre-Socratics. They all studied the problem of the nature of the physical
world, trying mostly to find a single underlying substance behind the variety of
appearances, whereas Socrates in the 5th century turned his attention to the problem of how
one ought to live. The ideas of Heraclitus are known from fragments quoted by later writers.
Fragment 93 (Diels) reads: "The god whose is the oracle at Delphi neither speaks nor hides.
He signals."
Gaia, the earth goddess, was the mother of various powerful creatures. She is probably to be
equated with Demeter, the Earth Mother. De is the same as Ge, earth. She was worshipped as a
source of fruit and crops, and was connected with the mystery religion of Eleusis. In the
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 275 ff., Demeter appears to Metaneira to instruct her about her
cult at Eleusis. Radiance like lightning fills the house.
Earlier I mentioned two kinds of electrical activity, that of the atmosphere, lightning,
auroras, etc., and that of the earth, earthquake phenomena such as earthquake light and
piezoelectric effects. It is possible to see in the succession of deities at Delphi the
development of Greek thought about electricity. The opening of the Eumenides of Aeschylus is
a good starting point.
Gaia, earth, is the first occupant of the shrine. She is succeeded by her daughter, Themis,
whose name implies 'the way things are established', and by Phoebe. There is a red figure
vase illustrating Themis on the tripod. According to Hesiod she was mother of Leto and of
Asterie by her brother Koios. Themis and Gaia are referred to by Aeschylus as pollon
onomaton morphe mia', one form with many names.
Koios suggests stones. The poet, Antimachus, tells us: "Koias ek cheiron skopelon meta
rhiptozousin", they hurl stones at the rock with their hands. The 'thriobolus' was a sooth
sayer who threw pebbles into a divining urn. There may be a link with the Thriae, three
goddesses who practiced divination at Delphi. They are compared by Hesiod to bees, and feed
on honey. Vergil describes honey as 'caelestia', and the infant Zeus was fed by bees [10] .
There are other points of interest in Georgic IV. Vergil speaks of a skilled farmer and
beekeeper, Corycium senem, an old man from Corycus. The Corycian cave above Delphi was
dedicated to Bromios, a name of Dionysus, and there was another cave of the same name in
Asia, where Zeus was kept prisoner for a time. Vergil also reports a belief that bees have a
share of the divine mind and ethereal essence [11] .
Themis is shown as the Pythia on the Vulci goblet. The name Phoebe, one of the successors of
Gaia, like Apollo's name Phoebus, suggests light, but before we move on to discuss Apollo in
detail, there is another occupant of the cauldron to consider, Dionysus.
There is a story that the god Zeus fought a battle in the sky against a monster, Typhon.
Typhon cut the sinews of Zeus's hands and feet and took him to Corycus in Cilicia. He hid
the sinews in a cave, with the dragon Delphyne on guard. Vide 'Homeric Hymn to Apollo', 39;
'korakos' means a leathern quiver. Corycus was the site of the sanctuary of the Hittite
weather god, and the incident illustrates the Oriental background of early Greece. Hesiod
says that Typhon married Echidna, a monster half nymph and half snake. The episode seems to
be duplicated at Delphi, where Delphyne is the name of the female dragon killed by Apollo,
and the Corycian cave was sacred to Bromios, or Dionysus. Heb. obh is a leather bag,
spectre, conjuring ghost, sorcerer, necromancer. Cf. obi, African witchcraft.
Examples to illustrate this chapter: Vergil, Aeneid IV: 518: "Unum exuta pedem vinclis." In
a temple at Carthage Dido stands before the altar with one foot bare. Pausanias, X: 5.9: The
Delphians say the second shrine at Delphi (the first was of bay branches) was of beeswax and
feather, made by bees, and sent by Apollo. Another legend is that it was built by a Delphian
called Feathers. Aptera in Crete (north-west coast) was named after him. The theory that the
shrine was woven out of feather grass growing on the mountain is not generally accepted.
The third temple was of bronze. A fragment of Pindar describes it as having enchantresses in
gold over the pediment, and reads "... opened the ground with his lightning and hid the
holiest..."
Pausanias mentions the bronze house of Athene in her sanctuary at Sparta, and refers to a
temple in the forum at Rome, which had a roof of bronze.
There was a story that Apollo's bronze temple dropped into a chasm in the earth or was
burnt. The fourth temple was built by Trophonius and Agamedes, of stone. It was burnt down
in 548 B. C.. The temple still standing at the time Pausanias visited it was, he said, by
the Corinthian architect Spintharos. He mentions legends about the founding of the city, e.
g., that one Parnassos discovered divination from the birds here, that it was flooded at the
time of Deucalion, that Delphos was the son of Apollo and Kelaino, that Kastalios had a
daughter Thuia, who was a priestess of Dionysus. (In Greek, Thuia suggests fire). As to
Pytho, the snake shot by Apollo was corrupted (Pytho in Greek implies corruption).
Pausanias X: 12: 1: A rock sticks up out of the hillside below Apollo's temple at Delphi.
The Sibyl Herophile used to stand on this to sing her oracles. The former Sibyl was the
daughter of Zeus and Lamia, daughter of Poseidon. The Libyans named her Sibyl. Herophile was
younger but prophesied the events of the Trojan war. She claimed that her mother came from
Marpessus, a city near Troy, on Mount Ida. Herophile is associated with Sminthean Apollo.
Other Sibyls mentioned by Pausanias are Demo, who came from Cumae, and Sabbe, who was
brought up in Palestine by Jews. Sabbe's father was Berosus, her mother Erimanthe. She was
also known as the Babylonian Sibyl, and as the Egyptian Sibyl. Phaennis was the daughter of
the king of the Chaonians; she and the doves at Dodona gave oracles. The doves were earlier
than Phemonoe. They were the first women singers to sing these verses: "Zeus was, and is,
and shall be, O great Zeus. Earth raises crops. Cry to the earth-mother."
Euklous was a Cypriot prophet, Mousaios and Lykos were Athenians; Bakis from Boeotia was
possessed by the nymphs.
Pausanias, X: 7: There is mention of the bronze head of a bison. X: 13: 4: The fight for the
tripod between Herakles and Apollo. Athena restrains Herakles, Leto and Artemis restrain
Apollo.
X: 24: 4: In the temple an altar has been built to Poseidon, because the oldest oracle was
his also. There are two statues of Fates, and the iron throne on which the poet Pindar used
to sit whenever he came to Delphi to compose songs to Apollo. Near the temple is the stone.
It is oiled every day, and at every festival unspun wool is offered to it.
III: 22: 1: In Laconia, near Gythion, is a stone called Zeus kappotas, fallen Zeus, where
Orestes sat with the result that his madness left him.
One may compare the Old Testament, Genesis XXVIII: 11: "And (Jacob) lighted upon a certain
place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of
that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he
dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and
behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it
and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac..."
And from verse 16: "And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in
this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this
is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early
in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a
pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel: but
the name of that city was called Luz at the first."
Romans sometimes swore by Stone Jupiter, 'per Iovem Lapidem. '
Pausanias, IV: 33: 6: There are two rivers, Elektra and Koios. They might refer to Atlas's
daughter Elektra and Leto's father Koios, or Elektra and Koios might be local divine heroes.
V 11: 11: When I asked the attendants why they didn't pour oil or water for Asklepios, they
said that the statue and throne of Asklepios were over a well.
The Old Testament, I Samuel VI. tells how the Philistines sent back the ark which they had
captured. It was transported on a cart.
Verse 14: "And the cart came into the field of Joshua, a Beth-Shemite, and stood there,
where there was a great stone: and they crave the wood of the cart, and offered the kine a
burnt offering unto the Lord."
Verse 18: "And the golden mice, according to the number of all the cities of the Philistines
belonging to the five lords, both of fenced cities, and of country villages, even unto the
great stone of Abel, whereon they set down the ark of the Lord: which stone remaineth unto
this day in the field of Joshua, the Beth-Shemite." Pausanias, II: 35: 4: There is a
sanctuary of Klymenos at Hermion, through which Herakles dragged up from Hades the dog
Kerberos.
Notes (Chapter Two: The Electric Oracles)
1. For destruction of Bronze Age sites, vide: Schaeffer-Forrer, 'Stratigraphie comparée et
Chronologie de l'Asie Occidentale (III. et II. Millénaires)( Oxford 1948).
2. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' I: 36
3. Ibid. I: 37
4. Ibid. I: 19
5. Ibid. I: 18
6. Euripides: 'The Bacchae' 665
7. Ibid. 757
8. Sophocles: 'Oedipus Tyrannus' 473
9. Aeschylus: 'Agamemnon' 1251 ff.
10. Vergil: Georgic IV 149
11. Ibid. 219
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER THREE
DIONYSUS
THE account given of the birth of Dionysus by the followers of Orpheus goes as follows:
Dionysus was the son of Zagreus, a son of Zeus and Persephone. He was torn to pieces by
Titans, who ate his limbs. Athene rescued the heart, and a new Dionysus was made from it.
This dismemberment is in Greek sparagmos. Osiris, in Egypt, was also dismembered and then
resurrected.
The Titans were burnt up by lightning, and men were born from the ashes and soot. Plato
refers to man's 'Titanic nature. '
This 'original sin' was known to other writers as well. Of special interest to us is the
fact that Zagreus is another name for Zeus Katachthonios, Subterranean Zeus, and is held to
mean 'Great Hunter. ' He must be a god of long standing, since he assisted Kronos in a fight
with a monster. The Greeks thought he was the same as the Egyptian Osiris.
The usual story is that Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele. Diodorus Siculus, 1st
century B. C., refers to an old Dionysus with a beard, who joined in an attack on Kronos,
and a young Dionysus, shaven and effeminate.
Semele is an earth goddess (Greek chamai, Latin humus, and Slavonic zemlya. She is long-
haired [1] .
Euripides, in his play The Bacchae, tells us how the thunderbolt from Zeus destroyed Semele,
and Zeus hid the infant in his thigh [2] . One version of the tale is that Zeus named him
Dithyrambus because he emerged twice, from his mother and from the thigh of Zeus. But in The
Bacchae, 526, Euripides appears to derive the name from his having entered a door in Zeus's
thigh, Dios thura, the door of Zeus.
Much can be found about the nature of Dionysus in The Bacchae. Dionysus on his travels comes
to Thebes in Boeotia, central Greece. His worship has been rejected by Pentheus, the young
king of Thebes. The stranger, who is Dionysus, fills the women with divine frenzy; they rush
out to Mount Cithaeron to worship and revel. Pentheus has the stranger imprisoned. There is
an earthquake and the stranger breaks free. He induces Pentheus to dress up as a woman and
spy on the women's revels. Pentheus is discovered and torn to pieces. His mother, Agave
(sister of Semele), triumphantly carries his head back to Thebes, recovers her sanity, and
recognises that she has killed her son. (Vide Agave in the glossary).
In The Bacchae, 594, "hapte keraunion aithopa lampada", the stranger urges the reveller to
kindle the blazing lightning torch. The scholiast on Euripides, Phoenissae, 227, mentions
automaton pur, spontaneous fire, at his sanctuary on Parnassus, with which we can compare
the 'mega selas puros', great blaze of fire, at his sanctuary in Crastonia in Macedonia. The
name of his priestesses, Thyadae, recalls the verb thuo, sacrifice by fire. As a god of
mountainous places, see Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 1105: "Bacchic god dwelling on mountain
peaks."
Pentheus vows to stop him "ktupounta thurson", making a noise with his thyrsus, and shaking
his long hair. Ktupos is the sound of an electrical discharge: "ktupei Zeus Cthonios",
Underground Zeus thundered; [3] . 'Chthonia brontemata', underground thunderings [4] .
'Ktupos' is a crash of thunder, Iliad XX: 66.
The plain near Cirrha was sacred to Apollo and was not to be cultivated. In the 4th century
B. C., during the Sacred War, the Phocians were fined for disregarding this prohibition. In
347 B. C., the officers on the staff of the Phocian general Phalaecus searched for treasure.
As they attempted to dig round the tripod in the shrine, an earthquake occurred and
frightened them away. The people living in the district, known as the Amphictyonic League,
had responsibility for the protection of Delphi.
The Bacchae, line 145: The Bacchant runs, waving a wand with a flame, rousing the wandering
dancers, raising Bacchanalian cries, tossing his luxuriant hair in the aither, or air.
Aither is an interesting word to use here; normally it is the upper air, home of the gods
and heavenly fire.
Line 185: The aged Kadmos asks the prophet Teiresias to join the dance and shake his grey
head. He loves to strike the ground with his thyrsus. Kroteo, strike, means to make a sound
by striking, and is used in music.
Line 306: Teiresias says: " You will see him on the rocks of Delphi, and leaping with
torches over the twin-headed mountain, striking and shaking the Bacchic branch." One peak of
Parnassus was sacred to Apollo, one to Dionysus.
Line 313: Teiresias says: "Pour libations, dance, wear the stephanos." The stephanos, or
crown, was of great importance, and a brief digression is necessary here.
A crown was awarded to a victor in the games. It was also worn by a poet, and by a
victorious general. At Olympia, a victor received a crown of wild olive; at Delphi, of
laurel, which was sacred to Apollo; at Nemea, of parsley; and at the Isthmian games, of ivy
and pine. In the case of ivy, kissos, the fruit formed a yellow cluster, corymbus, sacred to
Dionysus. Offering friends wine to drink in ancient Greece or Rome involved setting up a
mixing bowl, krater, for the wine and water. One put a crown of flowers not only round one's
head, but also round the rim of the bowl. A priest wore a crown when sacrificing. Wine is
described as fiery, Greek 'aithon'. In a Homeric house, the krater, or mixing bowl stood on
a tripod in the hall, left of the entrance. It was of silver, sometimes with a rim of gold,
as in Odyssey IV: 615, sometimes all gilt. Vergil has his father Anchises crowning a bowl,
filling it with wine, and calling upon the gods: "Tum pater Anchises magnum cratera corona
induit implevitque mero, divosque vocavit." [5]
The Bacchae, line 341: Kadmos suggests to Teiresias that he should put on his head a garland
of ivy to honour the god. In line 363 Teiresias has a wand with ivy on it. Pentheus
interrupts and says: "Hands off! Don't wipe off your folly onto me." Avoidance of infection
and pollution by touch and association was important in Greek life. The bringer of plague
was Apollo. This deep-rooted fear may have been encouraged by the sensation and effect of
electric shock, and even the movements of Greek dancing may have been influenced by it. The
word skirtao, dance, is to make movements and skip like a goat. See above, Diodorus Siculus,
on goats and herds at Delphi.
Line 494: Pentheus threatens to cut off the stranger's hair. The stranger replies: "My hair
is sacred; I cherish it for the god." The word for a lock of hair, phobe, is very close to
the word phobos, fear. In the Iliad, XXIII: 141, Achilles offers a lock of hair to the dead
Patroclus. In Vergil, Aeneid VII: 391, in a description of Bacchic rout, we see the phrase
"sacrum tibi pascere crinem", to let grow the hair sacred to you.
The Bacchae, 596. The chorus exclaim: "Do you not see the fire around the holy tomb of
Semele?"
Line 626: The stranger tells the chorus how he escaped from prison in Pentheus's palace. The
god caused an earthquake, and Pentheus, out of his mind, saw fire from Semele's tomb
attacking his house. Water is of no use against this kind of fire. Pentheus attacks a
phantom which Bromios (Dionysus) creates out of shining aither. The word used here for
shining is 'phaennos', reminiscent of the old name for Kronos or Saturn, Phaeinos. (Compare
the madness of Ajax in the play of that name by Sophocles. He slaughters sheep, thinking
that they are his enemies).
Line 665: The Maenads go barefoot, 'leukon kolon'. In the Dionysiaca of Nonnos a Bassarid
(follower of Dionysus) was apedilos, barefoot. One can compare the Selli, the flamen Dialis,
and the augur, mentioned above. We might also quote The Bacchae, lines 137 ff.: "He is
pleasant in the mountains when he falls to the ground." This recalls the giant Antaeus, who
derived his strength from the ground, and was defeated when Herakles lifted him up.
Line 704: A messenger reports the revels of the Bacchants. One of them obtains water from
rock by striking with a thyrsus, another strikes the plain and gets wine. Compare the words
spoken to Moses, Old Testament Exodus XVII: 6: "Behold. I will stand before thee there upon
the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that
the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel."
Line 757: Their hair is on fire but does not burn away. Line 918: The stranger talks to
Pentheus until Pentheus has hallucinations. He sees two suns and two cities of Thebes, and
horns on the stranger's head. Nonnus, Dionysiaca 46, has: "He saw two Phaethons and two
Thebes." Vergil, Aeneid IV: 469, has: "Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus, et
solem geminum et duplices se ostendere Thebas". Pentheus sees troops of Furies in his
madness, a twin sun and two Thebes.
Line 943: The thyrsus is held in the right hand, and raised in time with the right foot (a
somewhat equivocal instruction). Line 977: The hunting dogs of the goddess Lyssa are
mentioned. Is there a link with Artemis, the huntress and sister of Apollo? 'Lyssa', rage,
is used of martial fury, Iliad IX: 239. Later it is used of raving caused by gods.
In The Bacchae, line 851, "elaphra lyssa" means lightheaded madness.
Line 1082: Pentheus has been set up on a high fir tree, to see all the revels. The voice of
Dionysus is heard from the aither, ordering his punishment. As he spoke, "he set up a column
of holy fire to earth and to heaven, and the heaven was silent, and so were birds and
beasts..."
Line 1103: The Bacchants attack, as though with lightning, the branches of oak trees, and
scatter the roots (of the tree in which Pentheus is sitting) with levers not made of iron.
The word 'synkeraunousai', striking with lightning, is noteworthy.
Line 1159: At the end of the messenger's speech announcing the fate of Pentheus, the chorus
make a few comments, including the phrase "a bull leads to disaster." Already in lines 920
and 921 we have heard of the bull-like appearance of Dionysus. In this play, Dionysus
signifies a bull, Kadmos (the founder of Thebes) a serpent.
In The Bacchae, the disturbing forces seem to be electrical, rather than alcoholic as one
would be inclined to expect, given the connection between Dionysus and wine. Pentheus may
see double, but he is not drunk and incapable, nor is anyone else for that matter. Wine
would help when electricity failed. The thyrsus could be fitted with a sharp metal point to
simulate electrical shock.
The tomb of Dionysus was close to Apollo's tripod in the sanctuary at Delphi, and his
successor Apollo is described as Dionysodotes, a dispenser of Dionysus. When we think of the
ancestry of Dionysus, the name Zagreus, and the links with thunder, lightning and
earthquake, it seems that Dionysus is almost a double of Zeus. Zeus is a sky god, lord of
the clouds and the thunderbolt. The Romans worshipped Jupiter Diespiter, god of the open
sky. The Greeks also had Zeus Katachthonios, Subterranean Zeus. The Roman counterpart was
Jupiter Veiovis, or Vedijovis, Subterranean Jupiter. The title suggests seeing and
knowledge.
We have already seen Fragment 93 of Heraclitus: "The god whose is the oracle at Delphi
neither speaks nor hides. He signals." Another passage from Heraclitus is relevant: "Fire's
turnings: First sea, and of sea one half is earth, the other prester ...(?) is spread about
as sea, and is measured to the same account as it was before becoming earth." 'Prester' may
be connected with pur, fire, sterope, lightning flash, and aster, star or meteor. Turnings
presumably imply transformations, but might also imply a changing course.
There are two other fragments to consider with this one: Fragment 34: "The beginning and the
end on a circle are common;" and "The way up and the way down are one and the same." It
seems possible that Heraclitus is comparing celestial fire with electrical 'fire' as
experienced at shrines and in caverns in the earth.
Plutarch writes that a visitor to some islands near Britain had been greeted by a great
tumult in the air and many signs from heaven. There were violent winds, and presters fell.
Passages relating to: Dionysus, The Bacchae, fire, crowns. Homer, Iliad IV: 533: "Threikes
akrokomoi" Thracians with hair on the crown. This may mean shaved, except for a crest, or it
may mean drawn up in a top-knot. Iliad VII: 321: Agamemnon sacrifices a five year old ox to
Zeus, and gives Ajax the best part, the chine. Why is chine best? Presumably because of mane
and bristles which may have electrical significance.
Vergil, Aeneid III: 125: The Trojans leave Delos and sail past "bacchatam Naxum", the island
of Naxos, where Bacchic revels take place.
Aeneid IV: 469: Dido, despairing of marriage with Aeneas, begins to go mad, like Pentheus
who saw the Eumenides and two Thebes. Pausanias IX: 12: 3: There is a story that when the
thunderbolt struck Semele a log fell with it. Polydorus decked out the log in bronze and
called it Dionysus Kadmos. Nearby is a statue of Dionysus in solid bronze. Polydorus was a
son of Kadmos, brother of Semele.
Euripides, a fragment from The Cretans: The chorus address King Minos: "For when I become an
initiate of Zeus and herdsman of night-watching Zagreus..."
At Elis there was a festival, called Thyia, in honour of Dionysus. The anaklesis, or
invocation, has survived; the women call on him to be present with the Graces (Charites),
raging with his ox-foot. Plutarch, in his Quaestiones Graecae, asks the reason for this in
question 36.
The god's epiphany was followed by the miraculous creation of wine. There is reference to
Dionysus Tauromorphos, Dionysus in the shape of a bull, in Plutarch's Isis and Osiris. In
Orphic Hymns 44: 1: we have "Come, blessed Dionysus, created in fire, with the face of a
bull."
Sophocles, Fragment 94: "Iacchus with horns of a bull." Athenaeus mentions a tauriform
statue of Dionysus at Cyzicus. Frazer, The Golden Bough XLIII, says that Dionysus was
worshipped as Dionysus of the Tree. The Corinthians were commanded by the oracle at Delphi
to worship a pine tree "equally with the god," and they made two images, with red faces and
gilt bodies.
In Naxos he was Dionysus Meilichios, with face of figwood. There is a connection with honey
(scholiast on Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 159).
He was Dionysus Liknites, He of the Winnowing Fan. A winnowing fan was a shallow basket. As
an infant he was cradled in it, and his mask is portrayed on it as it is carried in the
phallic processions at the Eleusinian Mysteries. Greek 'kalathos' = basket. We shall attempt
an explanation of the word kalathos in a later chapter.
Plutarch refers to the immortality of the soul as revealed in the Dionysiac mysteries.
At Cynaetha (a name suggesting 'blazing dog') there was a winter festival of Dionysus. The
men annointed themselves with olive oil and carried a bull to the sanctuary.
He was in the shape of a bull when torn to pieces by the Titans. His worshippers thought
that by devouring a bull they were eating the god and drinking his blood. As a goat, he was
worshipped as 'He of the black goatskin'.
Dionysus wore long hair, phobe. Compare phobos, flight, the outward sign of fear.
For burning which does not consume, compare Old Testament Exodus III, Verse 2: "And the
angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he
looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses
said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when
the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush,
and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither; put off
thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."
Apollodorus, The Library, III: 4: Dionysus was entitled 'Kid', in Greek Eriphos. He was
turned into a goat when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon.
Antoninus Liberalis, Transformations 28) . Apollodorus III: 5: 3: Dionysus descended to
Hades to bring back Semele, whom he named Thyone.
Notes (Chapter Three: Dionysus)
1. Pindar: Olympian II: 26
2. Euripides: 'The Bacchae' 525
3. Sophocles: 'Oedipus at Colonus' 1606
4. Aeschylus: 'Prometheus Bound' 994
5. Vergil: 'Aeneid' III: 525
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER FOUR
AMBER, ARK, AND EL
FURTHER evidence for an electrical explanation of oracles is to be found in the Greek word
elektron, amber, Latin electrum. It has two meanings: amber, the tears of the Heliades,
sisters of Phaethon, when he was killed trying to drive the sun's chariot through the sky;
and a metal, four parts gold to one of silver. Tacitus refers to it as glaesum, flotsam and
jetsam, found on the shores of what he calls, in his Germania, the Suebic Sea.
There is uncertainty about the gender of the Greek word. The form elektros is found, both
masculine and feminine, as well as the usual neuter form elektron. Its derivation is
unknown. It may be connected with elektor, shining, of the sun [1] . A link with helko,
pull, has been suggested, because of the attracting power of amber. Examples of its use:
"having a gold chain, strung at intervals with amber beads," "meta d'elektroisin: eerto"
[2] ; a necklace, strung with amber beads, like the sun [3] .
I suggest that we look at the links between Greece and the eastern Mediterranean in the
period of, very roughly, 1500 B. C. to 500 B. C.. We find evidence of a knowledge and
application of electricity throughout the area.
One of the most remarkable artefacts mentioned in the literature of Israel is the Ark of the
Covenant. A recent study of the ark has been carried out by De Grazia, in God's Fire. There,
in Chapter 4, he describes the ark in action. Readers are referred to the book for a full
account of all the evidence, but a brief summary here may be helpful.
The ark was basically a Leyden jar, or collector of electrical charge, with the lid of the
box supporting two cherubim, figures with wings. The cherubim were earthed, in electrical
contact with the ground. Between them, and insulated from them, was a rod, which collected
atmospheric charge. The high priest probably controlled a mechanism which enabled him to
adjust the position of the rod to vary the display and sound of the ark. The "mercy seat" is
the wings of the cherubim, with the kapporeth or lid of the box underneath.
There are representations of Egyptian arks which support this reconstruction. Kabhodh, a
word associated with the ark, is the radiation. One may compare Greek kephale, head, and
Latin caput, and capio, take or contain; compare also the fire playing round the head of
Romulus, and of the slave boy Servius
Tullius. 'El', as in Hebrew 'Elohim' and 'El', means god. I suggest that elektron is 'el ek
thronou', Greek for 'God out of the seat'. The Greekless reader needs to know that 'th',
theta, was originally pronounced as a t followed by an aspirate, not like English th as in
'thing'.
There are many references in the Old Testament to images of Yahweh on the ark, ea. Psalm
XCIX: l: "He sitteth between the cherubims; let the earth be moved."
Exodus XXV: 22: "And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above
the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the Ark of the Testimony..."
II Kings XIX: 15: "which dwellest between the cherubims." The link between god on earth and
god in the sky, suggested by Heraclitus and the Delphic oracle, may appear in Psalm XVIII: 9
& 10: "He bowed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness was under his feet. And he
rode upon a cherub, and did fly; yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind."
In Exodus XXV: 10 & 11, we learn that the ark is made of wood, overlaid with gold, and in
verse 17 that the mercy seat is of pure gold. "And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold,
within and without shalt thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown of gold round
about." Exodus XXVI contains references to the use of silver for some of the ark's
equipment.
The use of gold, and some silver, could perhaps be the origin of the later use of the word
electrum to denote a metal. In any case gold and silver are excellent electrical conductors.
The ark operated best on a foundation of stones. The Roman augur, too, used a stone for an
earth contact. That the fire in sacrifice was 'ethereal' fire, not ordinary fire, is
suggested by the fact that water and blood were used to drench an altar and its foundation.
This would increase conductivity, and Elijah used this technique. He took twelve stones for
an altar, made a trench, and poured twelve barrels of water on the burnt offering, so that
the water filled the trench [4] . "The fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt
sacrifice..." [5] . Compare the report by Plutarch on the death of the Pythia, after much
extra water was poured over a goat unwilling to shiver.
We now have an explanation of the word 'enelysios' for a place struck by lightning. It is
sacred, because Zeus Kataibates, Zeus who descends, is god, 'el', in it, as in the tomb of
Semele in Thebes.
There may be other instances of 'el' in Greek and Latin. Samothrace, the home of electrical
experiments, is referred to as "Elektria tellus" (Valerius Flaccus 2: 431).
'Elysium' seems a possibility, but there is also the 'destination' idea derived from the
future tense eleusomai of the verb erchesthai, to come.
Elakata means wool, on a distaff, elakate. -akate suggests akamatos, tireless. Wool has long
been recognised as having some special significance; it may be the clouds from which a god,
or heavenly body, appears. Alauda, lark may be 'great songstress', from al, high or great,
and aude, voice.
Alcis, or Alci, was a deity, or deities, of the Naharvali, a German tribe mentioned by
Tacitus, Germania.
The Hittite god Alalu was the god who was displaced by Anu, who is the Hittite equivalent,
in this context, of Ouranos. Elektrophaes, gleaming like amber, occurs in the Hippolytus of
Euripides, line 741.
Elipharmakos is a plant for staunching blood. Before we leave the Psalms, here are two more
quotations: Psalm LXVIII: 4: "Extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Jah, and
rejoice before him." I suggest that here we have a link with one of the Titans, Iapetos. The
Greek verb petomai means fly, so the name Iapetos probably means 'Ia who flies'.
Psalm XXIX: 7 has: "The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire."
When the ark was producing a visual display, there would be sound effects. It was regarded
as an oracle; "towards the oracle of thy sanctuary..." [6] . Any student of speech or
singing knows that if one whispers the English vowels slowly in succession from E to U and
back changes of pitch of the whispered notes are inevitable. The reader is invited to try
this, portamento, several times. The resulting whispered sound is 'Yahweh', a tolerable
sound representation of a sine wave such as characterises alternating current.
Such a sound must not be intoned casually. There was a fear that electrical shocks or
lightning strikes might result. Sympathetic magic will be discussed in later chapters
dealing with the Greeks and the Egyptians. The Romans called certain days of the year fasti,
other days nefasti. Public business was not performed on the unlucky days, dies nefasti. Fas
means 'right', and is linked with the verb 'fari', to speak. Dies fasti may have been
favourable days, on which the god was present and spoke.
The Greek thespesios means 'divinely sounding', of the voice. It is used of the Sirens [7]
, and of the voice of a minstrel [8] . It also means ineffable, that which can be spoken
only by god. It can mean marvelous. [9] . Thespiodos, prophetic, is applied to persons, and
also is used by Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1134, with phobon, fear.
The divine sound was associated with the wind blowing in trees, as at Dodona; against a
statue, e. g. that of Memnon at Thebes, and in the prophetic grotto at Egyptian Thebes [10]
, sounding like a lute string.
At the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, prophecy was associated with the sound of brazen gongs, oak
leaves rustling in the wind, with the cooing of doves, and with the sound of the water of
the sacred spring. The possibility that the priests, the Selli, had to maintain good earth
contact by never washing their feet, suggests that electrical forces were involved, and this
theory is strengthened by the fact that there was a circle of tripods touching each other,
round a sacred oak, itself having associations with Zeus Kataibates, Zeus who descends.
The ship Argo was built partly of timber from Dodona, and spoke. Mopsus, one of the
Argonauts, was traditionally linked with Deucalion, the flood survivor, and founded an
oracle at Claros in Asia Minor.
There is an interesting similarity between the Greek omphe, divine voice, and omphalos, a
stone found at Delphi and elsewhere, which may represent the stone that Kronos devoured,
thinking that it was the infant Zeus. In general, sounds were important in Greek religion.
The Bacchae, line 156, mentions "barubromon hupo tumpanon" to an accompaniment of deep
sounding drums to the song, dancing, and flutes. Baines, in Woodwind Instruments and their
History, gives instances of flutes and drums being sacred in themselves, as well as the
music which is produced from them.
There is a reference to elektron in Pliny: "Chares vero (sc. dixit) Phaethontem in Aethiopia
Hammonis neso obisse, ibi et delubrum eius esse atque oraculum electrumque gigni" Chares has
said that Phaethon perished in Ethiopia in the island of Hammon, and that there is a shrine
of his there, and an oracle and electrum are created [11] . Note the present tense of
gigni: 'are created'. not 'have been created'.
Instances of elektron and Yahweh: Iliad XIX: 398: Automedon takes the reins, and behind him
goes Achilles, shining like elektor Hyperion, the bright sun.
Homeric Hymn to Artemis: "I sing of Artemis of the golden spindle (chryselakaton)."
Frazer, The Golden Bough 60, says that "Holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may
call that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or tabooed persons, is
conceived by the primitive philosopher as a physical substance or fluid, with which the
sacred man is charged just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the
electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good conductor, so the holiness
or magical virtue in the man can be discharged and drained away by contact with the earth,
which on this theory serves as an excellent conductor for the magical fluid. Hence in order
to preserve the charge from running to waste, the sacred or tabooed personage must be
carefully prevented from touching the ground; in electrical language he must be insulated,
if he is not to be emptied of the precious substance or fluid with which he, as a vial, is
filled to the brim."
It is interesting to reflect, at the time of writing (1987), on how close Frazer came to an
electrical theory of magic and divination.
Old Testament, I Kings VII: 29: (Phoenician work for Solomon's temple) "On the borders were
lions, oxen, and cherubims."
We have seen the possibility of a connection between El and Elysium. In Odyssey IV: 561 ff.,
Proteus prophesies to Menelaus: "You will not die in Argos, but the immortals will send you
to the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth, where dwells red-haired Rhadamanthus, where
life is easiest for men, with no snowfall, no violent storm or rain, but Ocean sends always
the sweetly sounding breezes of Zephyrus to restore men."
Hesiod, Works and Days 171: The demi-gods dwell in the Islands of the Blest at the ends of
the earth. They live free of sorrow in the Islands of the Blest along deep-swirling Ocean,
blessed heroes ....
Pindar, Olympian II: 71: The righteous go to the Tower of Kronos where the breezes blow
round the Islands of the Blest.
Euripides, Hyppolytus 732: The chorus wish that they were under the lofty cliffs, that a god
would change them into birds, that they could rise up, over the shores of Eridanus, where
the thrice-sad daughters of Phaethon shed amber-gleaming tears.
Aristophanes refers to Zeus Kataibates in his Peace, line 42. Trygaeus's slave, feeding a
huge dung-beetle, his master's pet, says: "This must be the monster of Zeus Kataibates."
There is a pun: 'Dio -Skataibates' = 'descending in the form of dung'.
We have mentioned already the use of stone as a foundation for the ark in Old Testament, I
Samuel VI. In verse 11 we are told that when it was returned, the Philistines laid on the
cart the coffer with the mice of gold and the images of the emerods. Verse 19 gives a
possible clue to this: "And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into
the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men:
and the people lamented, because the Lord had smitten many of the people with a great
slaughter. And the men of Beth-shemesh said, Who is able to stand before this holy Lord God?
and to whom shall he go up from us?"
I Samuel VII: 6 gives a hint of electrical technique: "And Samuel said, Gather all Israel to
Mizpeh; and I will pray for you unto the Lord. And they gathered together to Mizpeh, and
drew water, and poured it out before the Lord, and fasted on that day, and said there, We
have sinned against the Lord." (Mizpeh in Hebrew is an altar).
II Samuel VI:( David and all the chosen of Israel fetch the ark from Baale of Judah. They
play before it on instruments of fir wood, cornets, and cymbals) Verse 6: "And when they
came to Nachon's threshing-floor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold
of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God
smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God."
After this accident, David was afraid of the Lord that day (verse 9) and the ark was taken
aside into the house of Obed-edom.
The Greek threshing-floor, aloe, halos, or dinos, was sacred: Iliad V: 499; Hesiod, Works
and Days, 599.
II Samuel VI: 12ff.: "And it was told king David, saying, The Lord hath blessed the house of
Obed-edom, and all that pertaineth unto him, because of the ark of God. So David went and
brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom into the city of David with gladness.
And it was so, that when they that bare the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he
sacrificed oxen and fatlings. And David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David
was girded with a linen ephod."
II Samuel XXI: 20: The reference to giants, one of whom has twelve fingers and twelve toes,
suggests mutations caused by radiation, and forms a coherent picture with our other
information about the ark, and the special clothing and precautions taken by those who
handled it. It may be relevant that at the start of this chapter we learn of a three year
famine.
II Samuel XXIV: 16 ff. contains further references to a threshing floor as a place with
divine connections. In verse 15 we hear of a pestilence. Verse 16: "And when the angel
stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord repented him of the evil, and
said to the angel that destroyed the people, It is enough: stay now thy hand. And the angel
of the Lord was by the threshing place of Araunah the Jebusite."
Verse 24 ff.: "So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.
And David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace
offerings. So the Lord was intreated for the land, and the plague was stayed from Israel."
I Kings VI contains descriptions of the temple built for Solomon by Hiram. For the entrance
of the oracle he made doors of olive tree (verse 31).
VIII: 6: "And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the Lord unto his place,
into the oracle of the house, to the most holy place, even under the wings of the
cherubims."
Notes (Chapter Four: Amber, Ark, and El)
1. Homer: 'Iliad' XIX: 398
2. Homer: 'Odyssey' XV: 460
3. Homer: 'Odyssey' XVIII: 296
4. Old Testament: I Kings: XVIII: 31
5. Ibid. Verse 38
6. Psalm XXVIII: 2
7. Homer: 'Odyssey' XII: 158
8. Homer: 'Iliad' II: 600
9. Herodotus: I: 100; Aeschylus: 'Agamemnon' 1154; Plato: 'Republic' 365
10. Herodotus: II 57
11. Pliny: 'Natural History' XXXVII: 2: 33
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER FIVE
DEITIES OF DELPHI
IT is time to consider Apollo in greater detail. There is a vase painting showing Apollo and
Dionysus together at Delphi. A fragment of Aeschylus speaks of "Apollo, ivy-crowned,
Bacchic, mantle." Plutarch, in The E at Delphi, gives him three names; Apollo, not many but
one; Ieius, One; and Phoebus, Pure.
He came from the east. There are Hittite altars to Apulunas, discovered by Hrozny at Enni
Gazi and Eski Kisla. Pule is Greek for a gate. His title Paian links him with a Cretan god
of healing. The epithet Lykaios has been thought to mean: The god from Lycia (in Asia
Minor); wolf-slaying, from lukos, a wolf; and the god of day, from luke, light. These
different interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The name Loxias may refer to the ambiguity of his nature: god of plague and of healing, of
light and death, of uncertain answers. The Greek loxias means oblique, and is the term used
for the ecliptic.
He is the leader of the Muses. Scholars have often contrasted the intellectual nature of his
inspiration with the emotional violence of Dionysus, but Cassandra and other victims of the
Far-darter might have reservations about this.
Oulos is an epic word meaning destructive, baneful, fatal. Apo means from, from a distance.
The name Apollo would suit him well if it implied 'death from afar'. He is often described
as Hekebolos, the far darter, as is his sister Artemis. But Hermes, who is very like Apollo,
is Puledokos, guardian of the gate, and it is still an open question. Apollo's weapons were
the bow and arrow, but he, with his sister, and Demeter, are all called chrusaoros, with
golden sword.
The Trojan hero Hector is like an oulios aster, a baneful star, in Iliad XI: 62.
In the form of a dolphin Apollo boarded a ship from Crete and made the crew sail to Krisa,
the port for Delphi. He revealed himself as Apollo, and went to Pytho. This early name for
Delphi may come from a root puth, well, which suggests the chasm between the two
Phaedriades.
The name Parnassus appears to mean 'mountain of the house' in Luvian, a language of Asia
Minor. This, and the presence in Greek of such words as Korinthos, asaminthos, labyrinthos,
Hymettos, Mykalessos, is generally held to mean that the pre-Achaean people of Greece were
of Asian origin, and were hosts to an immigration of Achaeans in the 2nd millennium B. C..
Tartessus was a Phoenician city near Cadiz, ruled by King Arganthonius (Cicero: De Senectute
XIX).
The worship of Apollo at Delphi was not established until relations with Corinth were
established about 800 B. C.. The orientalising tendency of Corinthian art is well known. The
name Delphi itself suggests the Greek delphis, a dolphin. Delphyne was the name of the
serpent that Apollo killed on arrival at Delphi. Note also delphys, matrix. Early in his
career Apollo was a giant killer like Herakles and Hermes. He defended Olympus against the
giants who piled Pelion on Ossa in their attack on Mount Olympus and the gods. He killed the
giant Tityos. When Coronis, whom he had loved, decided to marry Ischys (strength), Apollo
sent his sister Artemis to destroy her. He then snatched her son, the infant Asclepius, from
the mother's corpse on the funeral pyre, and gave him to the centaur Cheiron to be educated
in medicine. One is reminded of Zeus snatching Dionysus from Semele. Later, as a punishment
for killing the Cyclopes, Apollo was servant to a mortal, King Admetus, as was Herakles to
Eurystheus and Omphale. As the deity at Delphi, he shines rather than speaks. Sophocles,
Oedipus Tyrannus 80, describes him as lampros, shining. His sister Artemis, called Loxo, is
referred to by Homer as eustephanos, with beautiful crown [1] , and in line 207 of the
Oedipus Tyrannus: "the firebearing rays of Artemis with which she rushes across the
mountains of Lycia." In line 186: "paian de lampei", the shout rings out (literally 'shines'
or 'flashes').
Cassandra, captive at Mycenae, begins to prophesy: "O Apollo of the roads, my destroyer,
apollon [2] , whither have you brought me?" There was an occasion when the oracle at Delphi
refused to answer Herakles. Herakles seized the tripod to smash votive offerings. Apollo
fought back until Zeus intervened. He had long flowing hair.
There is a history of disaster overtaking mortals who saw a god or goddess. The goddess Hera
says: "The gods are hard to look upon in their full brightness." [3] . The soldiers of
Alexander the Great were blinded when they invaded the temple of Demeter at Miletus.
Anchises was blinded by a thunderbolt for boasting of his union with Aphrodite.
When Hannibal wished to carry off a golden column from Juno's temple at Lacinium, he tested
it with a drill and did find it solid gold, but then had a dream in which he was warned that
if he removed the column he would lose the sight of his good eye. He had an image of a calf
made out of the gold dust, and set it on the column [4] .
A mediaeval Arab story tells that a certain pyramid that was built, according to Manetho, by
Nitocris, is haunted by a beautiful woman who drives men mad.
There are several instances of people being driven mad as punishment for similar offences.
At Patrae, a statue of Dionysus drove mad all those who saw it. A list of examples is given
in an article by R. G. A. Buxton in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1980. We have seen that
Apollo's sister Artemis was called by Homer Eustephanos, she of the beautiful crown. The
crown, stephanos, is associated with her brother, too.
Every eight years at Delphi there was celebrated the festival of the Stepteria. A wooden
structure was set on fire by youths who ran away, without looking back, to Tempe. The
burning is said to represent Apollo's defeat of the serpent Puthon, and the journey to Tempe
his eight years of servitude to Admetus. The situation is not unlike that at Thebes, where
Kadmos killed the serpent that guarded the spring of Ares, and had to go and serve Ares for
eight years.
Every eight years at Thebes the festival of the Daphnephoria was held. The Greek daphne is
laurel. A procession brought a piece of olive wood, decorated with bay and flowers, 365
purple ribands, and a bronze globe from which smaller globes hung, to the precincts of
Apollo Ismenios and Chalazios. The lower end of the stick was wrapped in saffron coloured
cloth. A boy whose parents were still alive led the procession. Next came his brother or
cousin, with the olive wood, then the daphnephoros (laurel bearer), a handsome boy, with
flowing hair, in a splendid long robe, golden crown and wreath of bay, and elegant shoes.
Last came a chorus of girls with branches. There is clearly some astronomical significance
in the ceremony --a purple ribbon for each day of the year --and the word chalaza, hail, can
also mean stones or meteorites, like the Hebrew baradh.
Let us look again at the Delphic succession. Gaia, Themis and Phoebe represent a powerful
deity, associated with the earth and female. Dionysus, in his later form as the god with a
pale face, long curly hair and epicene appearance guaranteed to enrage such a pillar of the
Theban establishment as Pentheus, is a half-way house between Gaia and Apollo. Apollo is the
male deity who operates as much above ground as from below ground. It is interesting that
inhumation of the dead was usual in earlier times. Contact is thereby made with the earth-
mother, Gaia. Cremation is practiced later, as if to link the dead with a sky god or the
aither. The effects of electricity on the human body were of great interest to the Greeks
and Romans. There is a fine example in Vergil. During the hunt organised by Dido for her
guest at Carthage, Aeneas and the queen take refuge in a cave during a thunderstorm. Earth
(Tellus), and Juno Pronuba, i. e. Juno as attendant of the bride and patron goddess of
marriage, give a sign; lightning flashes, the sky (aither) joins in as an accomplice [5] .
The ithyphallic statues of Hermes found in all Greek cities are outstanding examples of
electrical stimulation. One of the titles of Hermes is Stilbon, a name of the planet
Mercury. The Greek stilbo means 'flash'. Stilbein astrapas is to flash lightning [6] .
Among the Sybarites, stilbon meant a dwarf.
Hermes was the son of Zeus and of Maia, one of the Pleiades. He was born in the early
morning, by noon he had invented the lyre and played on it, and by the evening he had stolen
the cows of Apollo. He was the most cunning and deceitful of the gods, and gave early proof
of this when he dragged the cows backwards by their tails so that their theft should not be
discovered. His staff, the kerakeion or caduceus, enabled him to conduct souls to the
underworld, and he has the title of psychopompos, escorter of souls.
Aphrodite is described as 'eustephanos', of the beautiful crown, implying a link with
electrical fire. The word was taken to refer either to a girdle (zone) or to a crown.
Eros, or sexual passion, is connected with light. He appears in Hesiod as the most beautiful
among the immortal gods as well as being the first to come into existence [7] . In the
Orphic stories he is Phanes, he who brings everything into light, and as Eros he is
responsible for the marriage of earth and heaven.
The Greek word kledon means an omen or presage when one made an involuntary movement or
exclamation. Such a chance act was thought to be caused by a god. Sneezing was significant.
Epileptic convulsions were certainly of divine origin, and are now attributed to electrical
malfunctions of the brain. Shivering was a sign, and is to be connected with the stories in
Diodorus and Plutarch of the goats made to shiver before slaughter as an essential
preliminary to the Pythia's descent to the shrine to prophesy.
Readers of Pindar, the 5th century B. C. lyric poet of Thebes, will be familiar with
passages where he uses images of fire and light for poetry, e. g. "setting the city on fire
with my songs (aoidais)." [8] .
Passages concerning hair, light, Apollo and kledons; from Homer, Vergil and Pausanias.
From the Iliad: XIII: 435: Poseidon casts a spell on the shining eyes of Alcathous and binds
his gleaming limbs so that he cannot run away or dodge sideways.
XV: 256: Apollo encourages Hector. Apollo Chrysaoros, Apollo of the golden sword.
XV: 262: So saying, he breathed great power (menos) into the Trojan leader.
XXIII: 141: Achilles cuts off a lock of his hair to lay on the body of Patroclus.
XXIII: 281: Achilles announces the chariot race at the funeral games of Patroclus. He will
not compete with his own horses: Patroclus often washed them with clear water and poured oil
on their manes.
From the Odyssey: I: 90: Achaeans with flowing hair, kare komoontas. I: 153: The herald put
a beautiful kitharis in the hands of the minstrel Phemius. He played a prelude (phormizon)
and began his song.
The kithara, in Homer kitharis, was triangular in shape with seven strings. It was portable,
and was Apollo's instrument. It is virtually the same as the phorminx. The lura was a larger
instrument, with four strings; later with seven. Homer does not mention it, but the word
occurs in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, line 423.
IV: 122: Helen emerges from her room looking like Artemis of the golden distaff
(chryselakate).
VIII: 323: Lord Apollo Hekaergos (working far off). XVII: 541: Penelope says that if only
Odysseus were to return, he and his son would soon avenge the crimes of the suitors.
Telemachus gives a loud sneeze which echoes in a frightening way round the house.
From the Aeneid: I: 740: At a banquet with Dido, long-haired (crinitus) Iopas plays on his
golden kithara; he had been taught by great Atlas.
III: 80: When the Trojans land on Delos, they meet Anius, king of Delos and priest of
Apollo, who wears fillets of sacred laurel round his head.
III: 170 ff.: The Trojans suffer ecological disasters in Crete. The Trojan gods appear in a
dream and reveal that Corythus in Italy is their goal. Corythus was later Cortona, a town in
Etruria. The name resembles cortina, the cauldron or tripod. Korus, koruthos is the Greek
for a helmet. The gods who appeared in the dream had garlanded hair, velatas comas.
III: 257: When they land in the Strophades, the Harpy Celaeno prophesies that they will know
they are at their destination when they eat their tables. VI: 779: "Geminae stant vertice
cristae," twin crests stand on the head (of Romulus).
IX: 660: Apollo's quiver clangs. They recognise the god and his divine weapons and
resounding quiver, as they flee.
IX: 658: He vanishes from their sight, melting into thin air. X1: 785: The Etruscans charge;
Arruns prays to Apollo before hurling a spear to kill Camilla. "Great god Apollo, guardian
of holy Soracte (a mountain), whom we among the first worship, for whom pine logs blaze in a
heap, and, relying on our piety, we step on burning coals through the middle of the fire on
the bed of ashes..."
Examples from Pausanias, chiefly concerning Apollo: I: 31: 2: The shrine of Apollo at
Prasiae receives the first fruits of the Hyperboreans, by relay. The Athenians take them to
Delos. They are hidden in wheat straw.
I: 41: 8: Tereus is buried at Megara. The hoopoe first appeared there. (Cf. Aristophanes,
The Birds. The crest of the bird gives it magical significance.)
II: 24: 1: At Larisa is a shrine of Apollo, first built by Pythaios of Delphi. There is a
statue of Apollo of the Ridge. There is a priestess who once a month drinks lamb's blood and
is filled with the god.
VII: 22: 2: At Pharai in the agora there is a stone statue of bearded Hermes. It has an
oracle. In front of the statue is a hearthstone, with bronze lamps stuck on with lead. Burn
incense on the hearthstone, fill the lamps with oil, light up, put a copper coin on the
altar to the right of the god, and whisper your question in the god's ear. Stop up your
ears, go into the market place, unstop, and the first thing you hear is the oracle. The
Egyptians have a similar oracle at the sanctuary of Apis. (Vide Herodotus II :153, re the
temple of Hephaestus at Memphis).
IV: 34: 7: In Messenia, there is a seaside shrine of Apollo Korunthos (Crested).
III: 16: 7: At the Limnaeum there is a statue of Artemis stolen from the Taurians by Orestes
and Iphigenia.
Astrabakos and Alopekos, sons of Irbos, went mad when they found this statue. When the
Spartans of Limnae, and the men of Kynosouria, Mesoa and Pitane sacrificed to Artemis, they
quarreled and shed blood. Many died at her altar, and disease carried off the rest.
Originally there was human sacrifice; Lycurgus changed this to whipping.
III: 22: 1: Near Gythion is a stone, 'Fallen Zeus', where Orestes's madness left him. VIII:
15: 9: On Mount Krathis in Arcadia is a sanctuary of Pyronian Artemis. The Argives used to
fetch fire from the goddess for the Lernaean festival.
VIII: 38: The city of Lycosoura is the oldest of all in the earth, the first city the sun
ever saw. It is the source of men's knowledge of how to build cities.
Apollo is associated with the seven-day week, his birthday being on the seventh.
His title as leader of the Muses was 'Mousagetes'. The Muses themselves are sometimes
referred to as Leibethrides. This word is connected with the verb leibo, pour (of
libations). Libations were offerings of water, wine and blood to the dead and to the gods
below. In this context it is worth considering the importance that the Greeks and Romans
attached to remembering the dead, the Di Manes. The Muses were the daughters of Zeus and
Memory, according to the most generally accepted story
Artemis is 'Hekaerge', she who operates at a distance. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, line
529, Apollo promises Hermes a fine staff of riches and wealth, golden, with three branches,
which will keep him akerios, safe from harm.
Hermes: He is similar to Apollo, and may be considered here. Plato, Ion 534 E: Poets are
interpreters (hermeneis) of the gods. Iliad XXIV: 339: The guide and killer of Argos obeyed:
he at once bound on his feet the beautiful ambrosial golden sandals, that carried him over
boundless land and sea with the speed of the wind; he took his staff, with which he charms
men's eyes if he wishes, or wakes them from sleep.
Iliad XIV: 489: Ilioneus, son of Phorbas who owned many sheep, whom Hermes loved most of the
Trojans and had made him rich. In this capacity, as bringer of good fortune, he was known as
Eriounios, the Helper, and Akaketa, the Gracious and Benignant.
In his pastoral capacity he was Nomios. He was Dolios as an expert in secret dealings,
Odyssey XIX: 397. Autolycus surpassed all in theft and perjury; the god Hermes had given him
this skill. Hermes is Chrysorrhapis, he of the golden wand. He is Psychopompos, conductor of
souls to Hades, Odyssey XXIV: 1. He is Pyledokos, Watcher of Doors, in Homeric Hymn to
Hermes, I. 15. He is Hodios, or Enodios, a god whom you meet on the road.
Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus 680: Hermes killed Argus instantly: "Unexpected sudden doom
robbed him of life." Elsewhere Hermes charms him to sleep with his rod and then cuts off his
head.
His early life story is similar to that of Apollo. Passages concerning: Eros; Aphrodite;
electrical magic: Iliad III: 64: The lovely gifts of golden Aphrodite. Iliad XXIV: 611: When
Niobe's children were killed by Artemis, they lay in blood for nine days, since the son of
Kronos had turned the people into stone. The heavenly gods buried them on the tenth day.
Odyssey XIII: 119: When the Phaeacians take Odysseus in their ship to Ithaca, they put him
down on the shore fast asleep.
Aeneid 1: 660: Venus sends Cupid to inflame (incendere) the queen, and to put fire in her
bones (ossibus implicet ignem).
713: Dido looks at Ascanius, the young son of Aeneas, and is set on fire (ardescit) with
love of Aeneas by looking at him.
Aeneid IV: 23: Dido confides in Anna, her sister: "I recognize the signs of the old flame
..."
280: When Hermes has spoken, Aeneas's hair stands on end and his voice sticks in his throat.
VI: 224: At the funeral pyre of Misenus, they look away as they hold the torch, in the
approved manner.
VIII: 389: Venus wheedles a suit of armour from Vulcan: "He suddenly felt the well-known
flame, and the familiar glow entered his marrow and coursed through his trembling bones just
like a flash of fiery lightning from a thunder cloud."
Pausanias I: 14: 4: Epimenides of Cnossus went into a cave to sleep, and slept for forty
years. He then wrote poems and purified cities, including Athens.
IX: 25: 9: The anger of the Kabeiroi cannot be removed. Remnants of Xerxes's army who
entered their shrine in Boeotia went mad, jumping over cliffs and into the sea. Macedonians
of Alexander's army were destroyed by lightning.
X: 29: 9: When Theseus and Peirithous descended to Hades, they were trapped and held in
stone seats. There is a picture of them, amongst others, by Polygnotus, at Delphi.
VI: 25: 1: At Elis, inside the precinct of the temple of Aphrodite, mounted on a platform,
is a bronze statue by Skopas of Aphrodite riding a goat, also of bronze.
She stands with one of her feet on a tortoise. Euripides, The Bacchae 405: Cupids who
bewitch the mind. The word 'bewitch' is thelgo, and is what Hermes does with his wand.
Hermes is said to have been the first to kindle a fire. He used laurel as tinder. Probably
laurel symbolises a flickering electrical light or glow. 'Prometheus Vinctus' 599: Io
enters; her movements, skirtemata, are irregular; she is pestered by a gadfly sent by Hera.
See section on dance, in Chapter XXII.
Aeneid VIII: 372: Vulcan has a golden room, aureus thalamus.
Birds. Birds were so important in prophecy that they may well be discussed in this chapter
on the Delphic deities.
In Greek ornis is the word for a bird, whether wild or domesticated. It can have the same
significance as oionos, a bird of omen. Oionos can mean the omen itself.
In Latin, ales, alitis, winged, is used alone to mean a large bird. Small birds are
volucres. Fulvus Iovis ales, the yellow bird of Jupiter, is the eagle, minister fulminis,
the servant of the thunderbolt, flammiger, the flame carrier. Mercury, the messenger of the
gods, is Cyllenius ales, named after Mount Cyllene, his birthplace in Arcadia. Perseus is
aureus ales, the golden bird.
In augury, alites give omens by their flight. Such are the buteo, a kind of falcon, and the
sanqualis.
The latter was the osprey, sacred to the Sabine deity Sancus. The eagle, aquila, was another
bird watched for its flight.
The oscines gave omens by their voice; for example, the crow, cornix the owl, noctua, sacred
to Minerva, and the raven, corvus, sacred to Apollo. The raven's flight was favourable if it
was seen on the right, the crow's was good if seen on the left.
It may be helpful to glance at a play by Aristophanes, The Birds. It was first performed in
Athens in 414 B. C., at the Great Dionysia, in the middle of the Peloponnesian war, when
Athens was at war with Sparta. The play is anti-war and Utopian. Peithetairos and Euelpides,
sick of Athenian life, consult King Tereus, who had been turned into a hoopoe, and ask him
which is the best place to live. After some discussion, Peithetairos suggests that the birds
unite to build a great walled city in the air. It will be impregnable, for they will control
the food supply of gods and men.
The birds agree. The two Athenians grow wings, and Nephelokokkugia, Cloud-cuckoo-land, is
built.
Iris is caught trespassing when she inquires why sacrifices have stopped. She is sent away.
More visitors arrive --all mortals want wings. Prometheus arrives, tells of the gods' food
shortage, and urges Peithetairos to make hard terms, to demand Basileia, Sovereignty,
daughter of Zeus, as his wife. A deputation of gods arrives, Poseidon, Herakles, and a
Triballian god. Peithetairos is successful, and a marriage is arranged. Many kinds of birds
are mentioned in the play. The hoopoe, formerly King Tereus, plays an important part.
Apollodorus, 3: 14, tells of his past history.
Pandion of Athens had two daughters, Procne and Philomela. Tereus, king of Thrace, married
Procne, but also assaulted Philomela. In revenge the sisters killed his son Itys, and served
him up to his father Tereus for dinner. When Tereus pursued them, he was turned into a
hoopoe, Procne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale. This story can be compared
with the other instances of murders and feasts treated in the chapter on heroes and
Herakles.
The hoopoe had great religious significance. In Greek it is epops. The epoptes is an
initiate in the Eleusinian Mysteries; the word means 'one who beholds'. The bird has a
remarkable erectile crest, chiefly gold with a little black. In the play it sings a
serenade, in the course of which we hear that Apollo has golden hair. For its Hebrew name,
'dukhiphat', spirit revealer, see the glossary. There is a frieze of hoopoes in Crete, at
Knossos.
Other birds mentioned with crested heads and necks are the coot, phaleris, sacred to
Aphrodite, and the lark korudalle. In Latin alauda cristata is the crested lark. The Legio
Alauda was a legion named after the lark. The crested wren was called turannos, king. In
line 291 ff., we hear that the birds are crested as though for the hoplitodromos, the
soldier's footrace, in which each soldier wore a crested helmet and carried a shield.
The cock, alektruon, was the most important domestic bird. The Persian king wore a peaked
hat, kurbasia. The king alone wore it upright like a cock's comb. It is portrayed in a
mosaic of the battle of Issus.
The cock, alektryon, is not the only bird whose name contains the syllable al or el. We have
met the lark alauda. If its voice, Greek aude, is here associated with el, so that its name
is El's voice, we can see why a Roman legion should have the name. Alkuon, Latin alcedo, is
the kingfisher. Alkedonia are the fourteen days when kingfishers brood and the sea is calm.
The Greek kuo means contain.
The woodpecker is in Latin picus, in Greek druops. As drus is a tree, especially an oak
tree, it seems possible that the name means the voice from the tree. Another kind of
woodpecker mentioned in The Birds is the drukolaptes. Qol is the Hebrew for voice. The
woodpecker was important in augury for its note and appearance. It was sacred to Mars.
Perhaps its rapid fire tapping suggested a hail of missiles.
The eagle, aetos, was the bird of Zeus. It was often shown on a sceptre [9] . The falcon,
hierax, is obviously sacred with such a name (hieros, sacred). In Egypt Horus was the falcon
god.
The owl, glaux, was sacred to Athene, who is called Glaukopis, with owl-like appearance.
Some owls are called horned owls, but in the case of Athene the staring eye is likely to be
the reason for the epithet. Sufferers from jaundice were advised to look at the stonecurlew.
This bird has large golden eyes. Plutarch writes: "The bird draws out the malady, which
issues, like a stream, through the eyesight."
The wryneck, iunx, was used by witches for spells. This bird's magical importance may owe
something to the fact that it makes a hissing sound, suggestive of a snake.
A bronze eagle and a bronze dolphin were set up at Olympia where the chariot races were
held. The eagle was raised, and the dolphin lowered, as a signal for the start of a race.
Three more words of interest from The Birds may be quoted. Line 275: Exedros is a term used
in augury. It means inauspicious, literally 'out of one's seat'.
Line 521: The soothsayer is called 'tampon', shining. Line 364: Eleleleu is a Greek war-cry.
Among the Central American birds known as quetzals, the 'resplendent trogon' is well known
for its long tail feathers, causing it to be worshipped by the Toltecs. The god
Quetzalcoatl, whose name means 'tail-feathers' and 'snake', is associated with the morning
star, the planet Venus. The resplendent trogon not only had significance because of the
tail, but also resembles the hoopoe in having a crest.
The Greek adjective epitumbidios, crested, is applied to crested larks, from the resemblance
of the crest to a mound. Tumbos, mound or tomb, is the mound over the ashes of a dead
person, surmounted by a stele, tombstone. The divine fire in the head is discussed in the
chapter dealing with the Timaeus of Plato.
The Latin phrase 'jubar stella' means Phosphorus and Hesperus, i. e. the planet Venus. The
Latin jubar is the radiance of a heavenly body. Ar is divine fire. Juba is the flowing mane
or hair of an animal, the crest of a serpent, the crest of a helmet, the foliage of trees,
and the tail of a comet.
Notes (Chapter Five: Deities of Delphi)
1. Homer: 'Iliad' XXI: 511
2. Aeschylus: 'Agamemnon' 1085
3. Homer: 'Iliad' XX: 131
4. Cicero: 'De Divinatione' I: 24
5. Vergil: 'Aeneid' IV: 160 ff.
6. Euripides: 'Orestes' 480
7. Hesiod: 'Theogony' 120
8. Pindar: Olympian IX: 219
9. Herodotus: I; 195
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER SIX
SKY LINKS
ACCORDING to Heraclitus, "Thunderbolt steers the Universe. '' We have seen evidence that
this was the general view in the ancient world of Greece and Rome. Having begun this study
with chthonic forces, we need now to pay more attention to the sky, which was vitally
important in ancient thought as the place where action was taken to create cosmos, order,
out of chaos.
The main features of the Greek myths dealing with cosmogony are: marriage of earth and sky;
production of a succession of monsters and giants; a succession of gods; theomachy (battles
of gods with gods and with giants and monsters); allocation of spheres of influence;
interference with the earth by extraterrestrial bodies and forces.
The overall picture has much in common with myths from all over the world. It is important
to note that these myths appear at first as history; only later were they interpreted by
Greeks and then by modern scholars as anthropomorphic descriptions of natural phenomena, or
projections of human psychic activities.
The followers of Orpheus taught that the start of the order of the world as they knew it was
Aither, upper air, and Chaos, yawning gulf. Night and the wind produced an egg, and from the
egg emerged a shining creature, Eros, whose name means love. (Night was the first to
prophesy at Delphi as we shall see later). Eros was the same as Phanes, the revealer. Phanes
created the first gods. The Greek word theos, god, is probably derived from the word thein,
to run. The alternative derivation is from tithemi, put, set in order. An alternative
version, leaving out the egg, is given by Hesiod, a Greek poet active in probably the 8th
century B. C.. The gods were created by the mating of Ouranos and Gaia, or Ge, the earth.
The first god is Ouranos. The usual translation 'sky' or 'heaven' can be misleading. Even as
late as the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers (c. 500 B. C.), we have a reference to
numerous ouranoi or heavens. We should bear in mind the earlier Greek version which tells us
that Ouranos was a god in the sky.
Ouranos and Gaia had numerous offspring, e. g. the Titans, six sons and six daughters, whose
name implies straining and reaching. Their names were: Okeanos, Koios, Kreios, Hyperion,
Iapetos, Kronos, Theia, Rheia, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. Of these, Kronos and
Iapetos were the most important; at any rate, they are mentioned together by Homer [1] . At
first they all lived in the sky, later they were ejected from heaven.
Gaia and Ouranos produced the Cyclopes, huge one-eyed creatures, and the hundred-handed
monsters.
Ouranos had imprisoned his children in Tartarus, the world far below the earth, and their
mother Gaia instigated a revolt. Ouranos was displaced by his son Kronos, who castrated his
father and ruled in his place. The Romans knew him as Saturnus. Kronos heard that he would
be displaced by one of his sons, so he decided to devour them at birth. His wife, Rhea,
prevented him from swallowing his son Zeus by giving him a stone wrapped in swaddling
clothes, and sent the infant to Crete to be brought up in a cave in a mountain. Kronos
(according to Diodorus, Zeus) fought with and defeated a monstrous snake called Ophioneus.
After his victory he wore a crown.
Zeus banished his father and became ruler of Olympus. He himself had to defeat three
revolts. The first was by the Titans. The second was by the sons of Aloeos in Thessaly. Otus
and Ephialtes piled Mount Ossa on Mount Olympus, and Pelion on Ossa, in an attempt to storm
heaven. The third revolt was by the giants.
In all these battles, Zeus won with the help of the aegis (a goatskin) and the thunderbolt.
Zeus defeated a monster named Typhoeus or Typhon. It had a hundred snake heads and fiery
eyes. Zeus attacked it with thunderbolts and sent it down to Tartarus.
Typhon corresponds to Set in Egyptian myth. Set murdered and cut into pieces his brother
Osiris. Osiris was avenged by his son Horus. Horus defeated Set, but lost an eye in the
process.
Firmly established at last, Zeus divided the universe into spheres of influence. He himself
had the sky, Poseidon had Ocean, and Hades the underworld: The subsequent history of the
Olympian gods is the family history of Zeus, who fathered Apollo, Hermes, Athene, and many
others.
There was an old Egyptian saying: A god must die when he has seen his son.
The Greek deities tended to be classified in male-female groups. For example, there was an
archaic altar at Athens showing twelve deities: Zeus-Hera, Poseidon-Demeter, Apollo-Artemis,
Ares-Aphrodite, Hermes-Athena, Hephaestus-Hestia.
Two great floods, that of Deucalion, and that of Ogyges, were sent by Zeus to punish the
human race for its wickedness. The sea is described as a "tear of Kronos" in Plutarch's Isis
and 0siris, 364. The source of the floods may well be the waters above the firmament; vide
Old Testament: Genesis 1: 7.
The succession Ouranos --Kronos --Zeus has a parallel in Hittite myth, where it is Anu,
Kumarbi (Kronos), and the storm god Zas. Anu had previously driven out Alalu, the first king
of heaven. At Ugarit, on the Asian shore opposite Cyprus, the succession was El, a god with
characteristics of a bull; Baal, son of El, the 'rider of the clouds'; and Hadad, god of
lightning and the thunderbolt. Hadad, can mean 'The Torch', from Greek das, daidos, torch.
The brothers and sisters of Zeus were Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter and Hera.
The snake or dragon figures largely in world mythology, and calls for further study before
we can proceed. 'Chronos', which means 'time, ' in classical Greek, was a primary cosmic
figure, who was personified as a winged snake with many heads. The Babylonian monster Tiamat
was a many-headed dragon, according to some reports. It is possible that it resembled a
goat.
In the Bible, Rahab and Leviathan are serpents, enemies of Yahweh, who destroyed them.
"Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength; thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the
waters. Thou brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the
people inhabiting the wilderness'' [2] .
Can there be here a reference to manna? Which waters are referred to?
"The Lord shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent,
and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea'' [3] .
In Akkadian myth there is a battle between Marduk and Tiamat. In Hittite tradition it is
between Zas and Illuyankas. At Ugarit the snake is Lotan, slain by Baal. In Indian myth the
serpent is defeated by Vishnu. In Norse myth the fight is between the snake and Thor.
Blood is shed liberally in these myths. Anath slays the enemies of Baal and wades in their
blood; in Egyptian myth Hathor kills the enemies of Re, and Mount Haemus in Thrace is
spattered with the blood of Typhon as Zeus pursues and kills him. Horus cuts Apep, Ra's
enemy, with a flint knife. The river ran red in Egypt at the time of the Exodus.
Before we leave this short and incomplete account of cosmic myths, we may note that Ocean
and Night were two of the earliest cosmic entities. Okeanos should not be confused with
pontos, or thalassa, two Greek words for sea. Homer, Iliad 14: 200, reads: ''to visit
Okeanos, the source (genesis) of gods, and mother Tethys." Okeanos is to be located in the
sky, as the '" waters above the firmament," Genesis I. Anath is female, a sister of Baal;
Isis is the wife of the murdered Osiris, and in Greek myth there is a goddess, Athene, who
was a sky goddess, sharing the aegis with Zeus.
It is worth devoting further study to the eastern connection at this point. There were
Bacchic revels in Thebes. In Egypt, Thebes is 'Waset'. The Greek word astu, city, easily
becomes waste, with the help of a diagram. The legendary origins of the Greek Thebes involve
a serpent.
Kadmos was the son of Agenor, king of Tyre, the city on the coast of Phoenicia. Zeus fell in
love with the sister of Kadmos, Europa, took the form of a bull, and persuaded her to climb
on his back. He then swam off with her to Crete. In Crete she gave birth to Minos and
Rhadamanthus.
Agent sent Kadmos to look for Europa. The Delphic oracle advised him to follow a cow which
he would meet, and to found a city where it first lay down. The cow led him to a place in
Boeotia, where Kadmos founded the Kadmeia, the citadel of the future city of Thebes. His
companions, fetching water from a spring for a sacrifice, were killed by a dragon guarding
the spring. Kadmos killed the dragon and sowed the dragon's teeth (on the advice of Athene).
Armed men sprang up. He set them fighting each other by throwing a stone into their midst.
All but five were killed. The five survivors, the Spartoi or 'sown men', built the Kadmeia.
Kadmos taught the Boeotians to write (the Greek alphabet used Phoenician letters). He
married Harmonia, a daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. Among their children were Semele and
Agave. Eventually Kadmos and Harmonia turned into serpents and departed to Elysium.
After killing the serpent, Kadmos had to serve Ares for eight years. One may compare the
Daphnephoria, which took place every eight years at Thebes, and the killing by Apollo of the
serpent at Delphi, after which Apollo had to serve Admetus for eight years, an episode
celebrated in the festival of the Stepteria.
Melampus (Blackfoot) was a famous Theban seer. At his home near Pylos he rescued and brought
up some young snakes. They licked his ears, giving him understanding of the voices of birds.
Later, he met Apollo, who taught him prophecy by sacrifices. The association of Apollo and
snakes licking ears occurs also with the Trojan seer Helenos and with Cassandra.
Melampus was the ancestor of the kings of Argos, and of the two prophets Amphiaraus and
Amphilochus. Theoclymenos, mentioned in Odyssey XV: 256, is an Apollonian practitioner. He
has ecstatic visions. He too was descended from Melampus. Apollodorus, 3.17, tells how
Polyidos, an observer of birds and snakes, raised Glaucus, son of Minos king of Crete, from
the dead.
We will now look in closer detail at the sky, through the eyes of the Greeks and of some
other peoples. The link with electricity is lightning, and a pattern may emerge if we study
a representative selection of the scenes described.
An object, or objects, is described in ways that suggest a snake, a snake with wings, a
horned creature, a bull, a ram, a seething pot, a stag, a horned snake, a horned owl, a
goat, etc..
The Greek word drakon, a dragon, is also the aorist participle of a verb that means to see.
It therefore suggests an eye. We have already seen that the Ugaritic El was bull-like. The
Greek goddess Hera, wife of Zeus, is given the epithet ox-like or ox-eyed, "boopis potnia
Here"[ [4] . In The Bacchae, Dionysus seems to Pentheus to have horns, and the bull leads
to disaster [5] .
Turning to Akkad, we find the Akkadian monarch Naram Sin wearing, as shown on his stele from
Susa, a horned cap. The Cerastae, horned people in Cyprus, were changed by Venus into
bullocks [6] .
The ceremony of the Suovetaurilia at Rome was a sacrifice of a pig, a sheep and an ox. The
word hecatomb reminds us that oxen were sacrificed in great numbers. At a sacrifice, an ox
was a victima, a sheep was a hostia. Pigs, horses and dogs were sacrificed.
Kerastes is a horned serpent; keratias is a word occurring in Pliny, meaning a comet
resembling a horn. The Dorians who entered the Peloponnese after the collapse of Mycenean
civilisation worshipped a ram god, Karnos, and in the 6th century B. C., Zeus Ammon appears
with ram's horns on coins of Cyrene.
Links with the Celtic World: The Celts worshipped horned deities, and Taranis, the
thunderer, is the opposite number of Jupiter. Alces, Greek alkis, is the elk, and reminds us
of Al, El, horns being a mark of the divine.
Much important material is to be found in Pagan Celtic Britain, by Anne Ross, Routledge,
1967.
There were two kinds of horned deity. There was an antlered god, Cernunnus, the 'horned
one'. Keras is Greek for horn. He often wears a tore. His regular companion is the ram-
headed or horned serpent. This often appears with the corresponding version of Mars.
The stag god is portrayed as lord of the animals, e. g. on the Gundestrüp cauldron, and may
thereby have a link with Minoan Crete. There is an association with Mercury, the Roman
Hermes.
The second type is of a bull-horned or ram-horned god. This also is associated with Mercury.
It is commonest in North Britain, but is also found in Gaul. It is a god of war. There is an
example at Maryport, Cumbria, and horned helmets have been found at Orange in France.
While on the subject of horned deities, it is worth noting that Hesychius, a 5th century A.
D. writer, mentions the Greek word skorobaios as equivalent to scarabos and karabos. Karabos
is a stag beetle.
Ravens were important to the Celts; they were sacred to Wotan and to Apollo.
The North British god Veteris or Vetiris has a boar and a serpent carved on his altar.
The Belgae worshipped a ram-horned god, and had bronze figures of a three-horned bull.
A dog deity Nodous was worshipped at Lydney in Gloucestershire. Dog meat was taboo for the
legendary Irish hero Cuchulainn.
Celtic gods were to be placated by ritual, sacrifices and incantations. They were not
immortal.
At Reinheim, near Saarbrucken, in 1954, there was discovered a burial of a queen or
princess. A gold tore displayed a head of a female surmounted by an owl head like that of
Minerva. Owls, including the horned owl, were sacred to Athene. In 1891 in Denmark, a
cauldron, the Gundestrup cauldron, was discovered. The scene is the slaying of a huge bull.
When an Irish king was to be chosen, the men of Erin killed a bull. One man ate some of the
flesh, and a spell was chanted over him in his bed. The person he saw in his sleep would
become king.
The cult of the severed head in Celtic religion may be linked with the tore. Cernunnus, the
antlered god, often wears a torc. He is probably the same as Hern the Hunter in British folk
lore.
The Celtic for a sanctuary is nemeton, similar to the Latin nemus, a grove.
I append some passages referring chiefly to the sky and the bull, many from Homer and
Vergil, some from the east.
Iliad V: 654: Hades has the epithet Klytopolos, famous for horses.
Iliad XV: 184: Poseidon is angry when Iris is sent to tell him to stop fighting. He reminds
her that when the universe was divided between the three gods, the earth and Olympus were
held in common.
Iliad XV: 225: The enerteroi, gods who dwell below with Kronos.
Iliad XX: In this book, the gods join the war at Troy in earnest, Poseidon versus Apollo,
Athene versus Ares, Hera versus Artemis, Leto versus Hermes, Hephaestus versus Scamander
(the river).
Odyssey III: 6: Poseidon the Earthshaker, of the sable locks. Odyssey VI: 42: Athene goes to
Olympus, where the gods are said to have their eternal home. It is not shaken by winds, nor
drenched with rainstorms or snow, but cloudless air and white radiance play over it. In it
the blessed gods spend all their days in happiness.
Aeneid X: 565: Like Aegaeon, who they say had a hundred arms, and breathed out fire from
fifty breasts and mouths, rattling with as many shields and drawing as many swords as Jove
hurled thunderbolts, so was Aeneas on the battlefield against Turnus and his troops.
A. N. E. T. (Ancient Near-Eastern Texts, J. B. Pritchard (Princeton, 3rd Edition 1967):
''Primordial Apsu, and Mummu Tiamat. ''
Apsu is male, fresh water. Mummu is female, salt water. The Cyclops Brontes, thunderer, is
one of those named as father of Athene.
Centaurs were hybristic, and self-indulgent in sexual matters. Centaur, was a slang term for
pederast. Aristophanes, Clouds 346: Socrates: ''Have you ever looked up and seen a cloud
looking like a centaur or lynx or wolf or bull?" "Good Lord, yes! '' Glaucopis, bright-eyed,
a standard epithet of Athene, is also applied to snakes.
LEVIATHAN.
Yahweh controls the waters, smites Leviathan, and then creates day and night: "Thou didst
divide the sea by thy strength; thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou
brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting
the wilderness. Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood; thou driedst up mighty rivers.
The day is shine, the night also is shine; thou hast prepared the light and the sun. Thou
hast set all the borders of the earth; thou hast made summer and winter'' [7] . At Ugarit,
Baal (son of El) slays Lotan with the seven heads. In Egypt, Apophis is slain (in one text
he is slain by Set). Marduk defeats Tiamat in the Babylonian version, and the Hittites,
Illuyankas is slain by the storm god. Farther afield, one meets Vishnu and the serpent, the
Midgard serpent, and the Chinese dragon.
Chronos (Kronos) defeats Ophioneus (ophis = snake), and wears a crown.
In a quarrel between Ares and Hephaestus, Dionysus defeated Hephaestus by means of wine, and
led him to Olympus on a mule.
Mesonux: This is the name of the Midnight Planet, one of the seven planets, so named by the
Pythagoreans. It is mentioned by the poet Stesichorus.
The Moirae were spinners of the thread of life and fate. In the Orphic version, they lived
in Ouranos, in a cave by the pool, where white water gushes from the cave. According to
Hesiod, they were daughters of Zeus and Themis.
Ophion: Eurynome and Ophion ruled over the Titans before Kronos and Rhea. They resided on
Olympus.
Typhoeus: In Aeneid VIII: 298, he is described as 'towering'. PASSAGES ON VARIOUS TOPICS:
THE ORIENT; BULLS; THEBES.
Iliad XX: 402 ff.: Achilles strikes Hippodamas in the back; he expires, bellowing like a
bull dragged round the Lord of Helike by youths in whom the Earthshaker delights. Helike in
Achaea was a centre of worship of Poseidon. The roaring of the victim is taken to mean that
the god accepts the sacrifice.
Aeneid VIII: 77: Aeneas prays to the river Tiber: "O father Tiber, horned river, ruler of
the waters of Hesperia ... '' Pausanias I: 34: 2: Near Oropus the earth split open to
receive Amphiaraus and his chariot.
Pausanias IX: 8: 4: The Elektra Gate at Thebes is named after Elektra, sister of Kadmos. The
Neistan gates were named after the last lyre string, the netes, which Amphion invented at
these gates. But Amphion's brother Zethos was called Neis, and the gates may have been named
after him.
Neate chorde is the lowest string (highest in pitch). Kapaneus attacked the wall at the
Elektra Gate and was struck by lightning. Further instances from Pausanias: IX: 12: 2: There
is an altar and statue of Athene Onka, dedicated by Kadmos.
IX: 17: 2: Near the shrine of Artemis of Fair Fame at Thebes is a stone lion.
X: 15: 3: King Attalus of Pergamum was 'Son of the Bull'; he was addressed by an oracle as
son of a bull.
IV: 1: 6 f.: The Great Goddesses were worshipped at Thebes, in the oak-forest of Lykos. The
Kabeiroi initiations were introduced to Thebes by Methapos.
The Golden Bough, Chapter 36: Asiatic Greeks strung up an ox in a tree and stabbed it.
Zas and Chthonie. Iliad VI: 303: Hecabe chooses her longest and richest dress, Sidonian
work, as a present for Athene. Theano lays the robe on the knees of the goddess and prays
for Trojan success against Diomedes.
The Anakalypteria is the Festival of Unveiling, and a time for giving the wedding presents.
When the oikia, home and contents, are ready, Zas makes a fine big pharos, robe, and on it
he creates Ge and Ogenos and the halls (domata) of Ogenus. (Grenfell and Hunt, Greek Papyri
Series II: 11 p. 23. 3rd Century A. D.). Does Chthonie put on the robe to become Ge, or is
the robe hung on the tree?
Isidorus: "So that they may learn what is the winged oak and the decorated pharos on it, all
that Pherecydes theologised in allegory, taking his starting point from the prophecy of Ham.
''
But consider also the poetry of the man of Syros, and Zeus and Chthonie and the love in
them, and the coming-into-being of Ophioneus and the battle of the gods, and the tree and
the peplos. Maximus Tyrius: IV: 4.
I suggest that there may be a correspondence here with Yggdrasyl.
Some passages referring to the bull: Achelous. Hesiod, Theogony 340: He was a child of
Tethys and Ocean.
Iliad XXI: 194: Not even the mighty Achelous can fight against Zeus.
He had a bull's horn in his forehead, like Okeanos. Herakles had broken off the other.
Pasiphae was a daughter of the sun. She married Minos, king of Crete. Poseidon made her fall
in love with a bull as punishment for her husband's refusal to sacrifice to Poseidon a
beautiful bull that he sent. She gave birth to the Minter, half man, half bull. It was kept
in the labyrinth built by Daedalus.
The name Pasiphae means 'shining on all'. The name could well be given to a bright heavenly
body such as the moon, or a comet. The story is rather similar to the story from Ugarit
about Anath and Baal. An announcement is made that a wild ox is born to Baal, a buffalo to
the Rider of the Clouds.
This chapter would be incomplete without reference to the relationship between Zeus and his
sister-wife Hera. Their sacred marriage was celebrated each year in Crete. In Iliad XIV,
Homer describes the seductive wiles of Hera when she distracts Zeus's attention so that
Poseidon may help the Greeks. The fragrance of the ambrosia with which she anoints herself
reaches heaven and earth (line 174), and her veil, of spun material, is as bright as the sun
(line 185). When they embrace on Mount Gargaros, they surround themselves with a golden
cloud, and dew rains on them (line 350). Early in Book XV, when Zeus wakes up, he is angry.
He reminds her that he once fettered her and suspended her in the sky, and cast out of
heaven those who had helped her. In line 26 we read of Herakles being despatched by Hera
over the sea with the help of Boreas.
It seems likely that the sacred marriage aimed at restricting the god's amorous escapades,
and at preventing him upsetting the cosmos by introducing additions to the Olympic family.
Possibly Hera was the atmosphere round Zeus, and people feared the result of anger and
separation. when Ixion tried to rape Hera, he was deceived by a cloud in the shape of Hera.
The Egyptian hra means 'face, or 'upon. '
Notes (Chapter Six: Sky Links)
1. Homer: 'Iliad= VIII: 479
2. Old Testament: Psalm, LXXIV: 13
3. Old Testament: Isaiah, XXVII: l
4. Homer: 'Iliad' VIII: 471.
5. Euripides: >The Bacchae= 1159
6. Ovid: >Metamorphoses' X: 222
7. Old Testament: Psalm LXXIV: 13-17 95 a. 96 follow.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER SEVEN
SACRIFICE
THE Greeks (and many others) tell us that strange objects appeared in the sky, often with
unpleasant consequences for the earth. If we assume that they were telling the truth as they
saw it, then their reactions appear to have a certain logic behind them.
I suggest that imitation, better still imitation with slight alterations to portray a safe
outcome, was the reaction of the peoples of the world; in fact, sympathetic magic. The hope
must have been that a celestial object which, from previous experience, might be a threat to
survival, would go away, assume a safer orbit, etc.. Since it was not possible to repel such
gods or monsters by ordinary physical means, sympathetic magic and prayers were the only
possibilities. Here we have one explanation of sacrifice.
This is not a modern interpretation. Plutarch, in his Isis and Osiris, 362 E, tells us that
"the Egyptians sacrifice to Typhon with the intention of soothing his anger, yet at some
festivals they insult red-headed men, and throw an ass over a cliff, because Typhon was red-
headed and like an ass in colour." In 363 B, he says that the Egyptians sacrifice red cattle
because Typhon was red.
The Greek verb sphazo means slaughter, Hebrew zabhach. The thuoskoos was the priest who slew
and offered the victim. Thusiue are rites, or offerings. Thrustas boe is the cry uttered in
sacrificing [1] . 'Thuo', usually translated as "I sacrifice", implies 'I offer part of a
meal as first fruits to a god, by throwing it on the fire'.
The hiereus was a priest who divined from the victim's entrails. The procedure was that an
ox would have its horns gilded. Hair was cut from the forehead of the ox and thrown on the
fire before it was killed. At Rome a fillet, a band of red and white wool, was worn by both
priest and victim. The victim was bedecked with garlands, and some of the hair burnt. The
vitta, fillet, was worn by poets, brides, Vestal Virgins, tied round altars [2] , and on
sacred trees.
THE SACRIFICE OF GOATS.
The goat Amalthea was foster mother to Zeus. The monster Tiamat, according to an old
tradition, had the appearance of a goat. The animal was clearly of great importance to the
Greeks, and a he-goat was sacrificed in March at the start of the Great Dionysia, the drama
festival in honour of Dionysus.
The goat was used for removing guilt from a community, and the term scapegoat is still in
use today. "And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of
the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot
for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which
the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat on which the lot fell to
be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him,
and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness" [3] .
"And he shall go out into the altar that is before the Lord, and make an atonement for it;
and shall take of the blood of the bullock, and of the blood of the goat, and put it upon
the horns of the altar round about" [4]
"And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all
the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins,
putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man
into the wilderness: and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not
inhabited and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness" [5] . Goat and horse sacrifices
are mentioned in the Rig Veda. In Greek a pharmakos is a sorcerer, also a human scapegoat.
The word occurs in the Agamemnon, line 548, "pharmakon blabes", a scapegoat against harm,
and in Aristophanes, The Frogs, line 733. In the festival of the Thargelia at Athens two men
were driven out. Originally two men had been put to death in an expiatory sacrifice. In
Chaeronea, hunger, boulimos, was whipped out of the door in the form of a slave. At
Massilia, in time of plague, a poor man was feasted for a year, then expelled (see Greek
Religion, by Walter Burkert). In Greece, an ox was driven out, across the city boundary, or
towards enemies [6] .
The aegis was the shield of Zeus, and seems to have been made of goatskin. It appears on
statues of Athene as a short scaly cloak. It is fringed with tassels, thusanoessa.
'Thusanos', tassel, is also the arm of a cuttlefish. It is described by Homer: "phobos
estephanotai", crowned, or surrounded, with fear [7] . Strife, Might, and Rout are shown on
it, and it is set with the head of the Gorgon. The combination of goatskin and snake-like
arms suggests a connection with Tiamat, the cosmic serpent mentioned above. There are plenty
of accounts of monsters with writhing limbs, etc., so the derivation of aegis and of aix, a
goat, from the verb 'aisso', to move with a quick darting motion, is easy.
If we turn to Norse myth, we find confirmation. Thor, the sky god who wielded his hammer
Myollnir, lightning, with iron gloves on his hands and wearing a belt of strength, rattled
through the sky in his carriage drawn by goats. His hammer had a handle slightly too short.
This is normally explained by reference to throwing hammers with a hole in the end of the
shaft, but another interpretation is possible, since in mountainous country, if one sees
lightning strike the cairn on a peak it seems to fall short.
Thor was provided with gigantic cauldrons, which remind us of the seething pot in the sky
(Old Testament Jeremiah 1: 13). Thor had a red beard, and there is probably a connection
with what the Greeks say they saw in the sky. There is a story that the giant Thrym stole
Thor's hammer. To recover it, Thor disguised himself as Freya, to be married to the giant.
At the wedding feast Thrym tried to kiss the bride, but was disconcerted to see the fierce
glare of the bride's eyes under the veil. When the hammer was passed round to bring good
luck, Thor got his hands on it, and the crisis was over. Incidentally, a feather suit such
as Freya wore is also worn by Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan, the feathered serpent of Central
American myth.
Thor's encounter with the Midgard Serpent is well known. The Tarnhelm, or helmet of
invisibility, may be a link with Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.
The Greeks commonly used two words for an altar: 'bomos', and 'eschara'. Eschara means
especially a hearth, such as there was at the shrine at Delphi by the Pythia's tripod.
An altar was of stone and had horns at the corners. It was sometimes decorated in relief
with a serpent. There is a Celtic example, showing a ram-headed serpent, at Lypiatt Park,
Gloucestershire. There was an altar to Apollo at Delos, his birthplace, made entirely of
horn, according to Plutarch:
"I saw the horn altar, celebrated as one of the seven wonders, for it needs no glue or other
bond, but is fixed and fitted together only by horns taken from the right side of the head"
[8] .
It is obvious that this altar, and any other with horns of real horn as opposed to stone
representations, would not be used for an ordinary fire. The aim was to induce a lightning
strike on the victim. Electrical action from the sky would be more likely if water or blood
were poured over the victim and round the altar, and this is in fact what was done. There
are remains of altars on the island of Samothrace. A temple precinct there had a 'bothros',
or pit, and an eschara or hearth altar, and at Thera there is an open air temenos dedicated
by Artemidorus, a Greek from Perge. It is cut in the rock of a low cliff. The altar to the
Samothracian gods (who are closely connected with magnetism and electricity) has a hole six
inches in diameter cut in the top, a channel from this to ground level, a distance of forty
inches, and a shallow depression in front of the altar in the stone floor of the temenos. It
is well designed for conductivity.
The altar constructed by Elijah has been mentioned, but there is so clear a description of
the technique that it deserves to be quoted at greater length.
"And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress
it first; for ye are many; and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under. And
they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of
Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any
that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made. And it came to pass at noon,
that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud; for he is a god; either he is talking, or he
is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked. And
they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the
blood gushed out upon them. And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied
until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice, nor
any answer, nor any that regarded. And Elijah said unto all the people, Come near unto me.
And all the people came near unto him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken
down. And Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of
Jacob, unto whom the word of the Lord came, saying, Israel shall be thy name: And with the
stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord: and he made a trench about the altar, as
great as would contain two measures of seed. And he put the wood in order, and cut the
bullock in pieces, and laid him on the wood, and said, Fill four barrels with water, and
pour it on the burnt sacrifice, and on the wood. And he said, Do it the second time. And
they did it the second time. And he said, Do it the third time. And they did it the third
time. And the water ran around about the altar; and he filled the trench also with water.
And it came to pass at the tune of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the
prophet came near, and said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this
day that thou art god in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these
things at thy word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the
Lord God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again. Then the fire of the Lord fell,
and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up
the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces:
and they said, the Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God" [9] .
If electrical effects began to fade the design would be changed, altars and horns would be
of stone throughout, to allow an ordinary fire to be used to stimulate or to replace the
electrical fire from the sky.
There is another word for an altar in Greek --thumele. It was analtar-shaped platform with
steps, practically a mini-ziggurat, which was placed in the middle of the orchestra, the
circular area in front of the stage in a Greek theatre. 'Thumele' suggests the verb 'thuo',
sacrifice by burnt offerings. It is also called 'eleos'. The Greek writer Julius Pollux, fl.
A. D. 180, tells us that it was an ancient table; before the time of Thespis a man mounted
it and spoke to the chorus. Yet another name for an altar is thuoros. Presumably it is from
thuo, sacrifice by fire, and oros, mountain. It means a sacrificial table, for offerings.
According to Pherecydes, a 6th century B. C. logographos or chronicler, it is the gods' word
for trapeza, the usual word for a table. Opinions differ as to whether a trapeza originally
had three legs or four. Trapeza also means a part of the liver.
MAGIC; SACRIFICE: SOME RELEVANT PASSAGES.
Iliad XVII: 520: Just as when a strong man with a sharp axe cuts behind the horns of an ox,
cutting right through, and the ox jumps forward and collapses, so he (Aretus) jumped and
fell on his back.
Odyssey III: 418: Nestor gave orders for a heifer to be brought from the field. The
goldsmith Laerces gilded the heifer's horns. Wood was brought to go round the altar, and
fresh water. The smith beat the gold into foil and laid it round the heifer's horns. Aretus
brought a flowered lustral bowl and a basket for barley grains. Thrasymedes held a sharp axe
(pelekus), and Perseus held the dish (amnion) to catch the blood. Nestor started the
sacrifice by sprinkling lustral water and grain, and throwing a lock from the ox's head into
the fire ... They prayed and threw grains of barley, and Thrasymedes struck (elasen). The
axe cut the tendons of the neck and the heifer collapsed. The women raised their cry. The
men lifted up the heifer from the ground and Peisistratus cut its throat (sphaxen). When the
blood had run out and it was dead, they cut up the body, cut slices from the thighs, wrapped
them in folds of fat and laid raw meat on them. The old man burnt them on the faggots, and
sprinkled fiery wine on them. The young men beside him held five-pronged forks. When the
thighs were burnt and they had tasted the inner parts, they cut up the rest and skewered it
on spits over the fire.
Odyssey III: 464 ff.: Polycaste gave Telemachus a bath, rubbed him with olive oil, and he
looked like a god. He sat down to the feast. When they had roasted the flesh on the spits,
they ate and drank. Then Nestor, mindful of the laws of hospitality, ordered horses and
chariot to be prepared so that Telemachus would not have to start on his journey alone.
Aeneid II: 268 ff.: Aeneas is asleep while the Greeks are mounting the final attack on Troy.
Hector appears to him in a dream, and urges him to leave at once with the Penates. He brings
out from their shrine the fillets (vittas) and mighty Vesta and the eternal fire.
Aeneid IV: 54 ff.: Dido confides in her sister Anna, and consults the gods about her hoped-
for marriage with Aeneas. They visit the shrines, asking for the favour of the gods. They
sacrifice selected sheep to Ceres, to Phoebus and to Bacchus, especially to Juno, who
presides over marriage. Dido herself holds the dish and pours the wine between the horns of
a white cow, or walks up and down before the faces of the gods' statues at their altars
covered in offerings, and celebrates each day anew with gifts. She studies the open breasts
of victims, gazing with parted lips at their steaming entrails. Alas for the ignorant minds
of seers! What help to the infatuated woman are prayers and shrines? The flame consumes the
soft marrow of her bones, the wound in her heart is silent yet alive. Unhappy Dido burns;
she wanders, out of her mind, all over the city.
Aeneid IV: 450: Bad omens on altars: The sacred water turns black and the wine turns into
blood.
V: 84: At the funeral games for his father, Aeneas sees a huge snake, writhing in seven
coils, creeping over the burial mound and altars. It consumes the offering, then departs.
Pausanias I: 16: 1: When Seleucus set out from Macedonia with Alexander, the firewood on the
altar moved and burned spontaneously.
II: 5: 5: Between Corinth and Sicyon is a burnt temple to Apollo. One story is that it was
dedicated to Olympian Zeus, and sudden fire fell on it and burnt it down.
GOATS Iliad IV: 166: Agamemnon consoles the wounded Menelaus: Zeus who lives high up in
heaven will be angry at the Trojan's treachery and will shake his dark aegis at them all.
Pausanias III: 15: 9: The Laconians sacrifice goats to Hera the goat-eater. Herakles founded
the sanctuary and was the first to sacrifice goats.
Iliad XVII: 593: Apollo inspires Hector, and the son of Kronos takes up his glittering
tasselled aegis, veils Mount Ida in cloud, and sends a lightning flash with a great clap of
thunder. He shakes his aegis, and gives victory to the Trojans, putting the Achaeans to
flight.
Herodotos IV: Greeks took the aegis for statues of Athene from Libya. The dress of Libyan
women is of leather and has tassels of leather instead of snakes. Libyan women also wear
goatskins dyed red, fringed.
Aristotle refers to the fall of a meteorite at Aegospotami (goat's river), when a comet was
in the sky.
Frazer, The Golden Bough XLIII, mentions Dionysus as "The one of the black goatskin." When
the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat.
At Rome a she-goat was sacrificed to Jupiter Vedijovis. At Tenedos the new born calf
sacrificed to Dionysus was shod in buskins.
At Delphi the dragon Python had a son called Aix (goat). ALTARS Aeneid IV: 219: Iarbas, the
unsuccessful suitor, prays to Jupiter Ammon with complaints against Aeneas, this second
Paris, wearing a Phrygian cap tied under his chin and over his oiled hair, accompanied by
the train of effeminates. As he prayed, he held his hand on the altar.
Iliad XX: 402: A bull is dragged round the altar. The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, line 325:
Homer crossed to Delos to the assembly (paneguris), and standing on the horn altar he
recited the Hymn to Apollo.
Notes (Chapter Seven: Sacrifice)
1. Aeschylus: 'Seven Against Thebes' 269
2. Vergil: 'Eclogues' VIII: 64
3. Old Testament Leviticus XVI: 7-10
4. Ibid. Verse 18
5. Ibid. Verse 21
6. Plutarch: 'Quaestiones Graecae' 297
7. Homer: 'Iliad' V: 738 ff.
8. Plutarch: 'The Intelligence of Animals' 983
9. Old Testament I Kings XVIII: 25 ff.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER EIGHT
SKY AND STAGE
WE are now in a position to reconsider the origin and significance of Greek tragedy. A goat-
song festival began with the sacrifice of a bull at the beginning of the Great Dionysia at
Athens.
The bull was slain as the procession entered the city; a he-goat was sacrificed, probably on
the thymele, and the festival of drama began. The sacrifice was accompanied by a dithyramb.
This was a form of lyric poetry heard especially at Athens. It was in the Phrygian mode, as
befitted Dionysus, accompanied by pipes. The leader mounted the eleos (thymele), or altar,
to recite a tale in trochaic metre about Dionysus. There was a circular movement of the
chorus, probably with reversal of direction for the antistrophe. There is a fragment of
Aeschylus, addressed to a female chorus: "You are to stand round this altar and shining
fire, and pray, in a circular formation."
The word tragedy comes from 'ode', song, and 'tragos', goat. The other word for a goat, aix,
is used by Aristotle to mean a fiery meteor. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, developed from
the leaders (exarchontes) of the dithyramb. The first name known to us of a tragedian is
that of Arion, who flourished around 600 B. C. in the city of Corinth. Choral odes in
tragedy retained the Doric dialect of Dorian Corinth. Thespis, about 536, wrote the first
recorded tragedy. There was one actor, and the chorus.
In the early days of Greek dithyramb, inflated goat skins were covered with olive oil. The
chorus jumped on them and slithered off. The scenery for a tragedy was usually a palace or a
temple. In the 5th and 4th centuries B. C., there would be a prologue, in which one, or
sometimes two, actors introduced the subject of the play, but this was a later development.
A primitive tragedy began with the entrance of the chorus, originally resembling satyrs
(capripedes satyri Horace). They were generally humble inhabitants of the city where the
action of the play took place. There would be twelve or more of them. At each side of the
orchestra there was a parodos, or entrance, which gave its name to the opening song,
parodos, of the chorus, which was accompanied by a musician playing a pipe. The actor, or
'struggler' (agonistes) came onto the stage. 'Episode' is an entrance. The chorus, rather
than solo actors, were the original performers, but a second actor was introduced by
Aeschylus in the 5th century, and a third by Sophocles. The first actor was the protagonist,
the second the deuteragonist, and the third the tritagonist.
In a very early tragedy the subject matter would be the life and death of a god, especially
Dionysus. Later, heroes would be the subject, and eventually ordinary people. When
tragedians abandoned stories about Dionysus, public criticism said 'It's nothing to do with
Dionysus'. Aeschylus introduced the tetralogy to meet this objection. His 'Oresteia' had the
'Proteus' as a satyr play to follow the three tragedies.
The actors wore masks. We learn from the Roman poet Horace that Thespis, regarded by many as
the inventor of tragedy, went on tour with wagons, presumably used as a stage; his players
coloured their faces red with wine lees. He is also said to have introduced masks made of
linen. In the 5th century at any rate, the masks had expressions that suited the character
of the wearer. The mask had a projection, onkos, at the top, supporting a high wig.
The actor wore cothornoi or buskins. These were high boots, laced at the front, with a thick
sole which would increase the height of the actor and help to give an imposing and even
supernatural appearance. Since a buskin could be worn on either foot, the word became a
nickname for a trimmer in politics.
The actor wore a wig, headress and a long robe. Female parts were played by men. (In a
comedy, actors wore a sisura, goatskin, like a shawl, over the tunic).
The episodes in a tragedy were scenes involving actors and chorus. Between episodes the
chorus would sing a stasimon, a song during which they would stand in one place, as opposed
to the parodos when they entered. The stasima were reflections on the action that had just
taken place in the episode.
After the final episode, there was a final stasimon, then the exodos or final scene.
It is generally held that in Aeschylus's plays the emphasis is on the gods controlling
events, as in the Iliad; in the plays of Sophocles the clash is between man and god; in
Euripides the heroes and heroines may be brought right down to earth, but the gods are never
far away. Euripides was attacked by Aristophanes for clothing his characters in rags. To
give an example in detail, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus portrays the murder of Agamemnon by
his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aigisthos. In the next play of the trilogy, Orestes
murders his mother to avenge his father, acting on the instructions of the god Apollo. In
the third play, the Eumenides, he is under attack from the Furies, or Eumenides, divine
pursuers who take a different view of the action of Orestes from Apollo. Man is a puppet,
pulled this way and that by warring deities.
In his clash with an opposing force (god, hero, man or woman), a fatal flaw in the character
of the tragic hero is revealed. Hamartia, the Greek word for sin in the New Testament, means
in classical Greek missing the mark, going astray. The cause of the error is probably
hubris, or arrogance, going too high and too far, like a god. The corresponding word in
Latin, which comes from the same root, is superbia. It implies setting oneself up above
one's fellow mortals. This results in a confrontation, and at some point the complications
of the plot are resolved by a change of direction and fortune, the peripeteia. The hero who
was successful and powerful is overthrown. In most tragedies, great importance attaches to a
recognition scene which leads to, or indeed is part of, the peripeteia. In the Oedipus
Tyrannus, Oedipus, king of Thebes, has been very, even too, successful. He has answered the
riddle of the Sphinx, been rewarded with the throne of Thebes and with Jocasta, the widowed
queen. When plague affects the city, he undertakes to find the guilty man who has brought
pollution. He is himself revealed as the guilty man, a man who has murdered his father and
married his mother. It is through his own persistence that he finds out who he is, and is
revealed as the cause of the plague.
In The Bacchae of Euripides, it is the Stranger who is revealed as the god Dionysus.
After the katastrophe, or overturning, things settle down to a new order, possibly helped by
the appearance of a god or goddess from the sky, lowered by a crane (deus ex machina). Scene
shifting and stage effects were employed in a Greek theatre. The ekkuklema was a device for
rapidly removing scenery to reveal the interior of a house. There was a lightning machine,
keraunoskopeion, and a thunder machine, bronteion.
The tragic pattern is a sequence: koros, a surfeit of happiness and success; hubris, the
resulting arrogant behaviour; nemesis, the desire of the gods for vengeance. They are red in
the face with anger. They send ate, the blind folly which is associated with disaster which
the victim brings on himself. Then come the peripeteia and katastrophe.
It is noteworthy that the word peripeteia is cognate with a verb meaning to collide, with
unpleasant results. It is used, of ships colliding, by the historian Thucydides.
The Greeks felt that life was a matter of walking along a razor's edge. Any excess in any
direction might prove disastrous. 'Nothing to excess' was one of the precepts engraved in
stone at Delphi. With luck, life would go smoothly with the appropriate rites and sacrifices
carefully observed. The slightest irregularity, hamartia, could bring ruin. This idea may
have influenced the Greek philosopher Epicurus, best known through his follower the Roman
poet Lucretius, whose account of nature and the universe is expressed, as was usual for
exalted subjects, in a poem, De Rerum Natura. The gods, if they exist, are far away. There
is no need to fear them and placate them with human sacrifices, as was done in the case of
Iphigenia in the hope of getting a fair wind for the voyage to Troy. There is a rational
cause for everything that happens. But Epicurus and Lucretius were then faced with the
problem of free will. The solution put forward by Lucretius, that the atoms of which matter
is composed have a tiny swerve, exiguum clinamen, introduces an element of uncertainty
worthy of Heisenberg (De Rerum Natura II: 292).
It begins to look as if a Greek tragedy was a religious ceremony originally connected with a
threat from the sky. In particular, it tried to counter a threat which had assumed the
appearance of a goat. The aegis or goatskin inspired terror when waved, and, with the
thunderbolt, played a leading part in the battles in the sky which are described so vividly
in stories from all over the world, including Greece. The members of the chorus were in
rectangular formation, but originally, in the dithyramb, they were in circular formation, as
mentioned above. I suggest that they represented the solar system as the Greeks understood
and described it. The intrusion of a strange body, with glaring eye (drakon), prominences
that are compared to horns, a fiery crown, and a flowing tail, causes a disruption of the
status quo. The danger is only averted when the object assumes a different course, is
brought low like Lucifer, and is sent down to Tartarus. The representation by chorus and
actors was not only a matter of remembering great events, of returning to Eliade's 'illud
tempus', the past events and tune of great significance. It was also, and primarily,
apotropaic, aimed at preventing disaster. We have already met a similar idea in the previous
chapter in Plutarch's reference to Typhon.
The axe used for sacrifice was the pelekus, a double edged axe. In Odyssey III: 442, it is
used for slaying a bull. In Iliad XVII: 520, Automedon uses one in battle, and lays low his
opponent like a priest at a sacrifice. For the word pelekus, compare Peleg, O. T. Genesis X:
25, in whose days the earth was divided.
The head of the double axe resembles the thunderbolt as portrayed in the hand of Zeus. It
can be compared with Thor's hammer Mjollnir, lightning.
COMEDY The word 'comedy' is cognate with the Greek word 'komos', a revel, and resembles
'kome', a village. Aristotle says that comedy owed its origin to the leaders of the phallic
songs.
It shares with tragedy certain features. The chorus, twelve men and twelve women, wore masks
and were caricatures of ordinary people, sometimes dressed as, for example, birds or wasps.
They were generally padded, but removed their outer garments when they danced. They were
equipped with phallic symbols, and specialised in a lascivious dance, the Kordax. This
dance, associated with drunken revelry, originated in the Peloponnese, in honour of Artemis.
After the parabasis (entrance of the chorus) there was a contest between two leading
characters, an agon.
The function of the chorus in comedy was to spur on the contestants, whereas in tragedy they
usually only commented and tried to appease.
After various episodes, a comedy ended with an exodus of celebrations, feasting, or a
wedding.
Just as electricity in the sky played its part in the origin of dithyramb and tragedy, so on
the earth, in comedy its physiological effects were demonstrated and perceived by the chorus
as the force behind fertility rites associated especially with Dionysus, Hermes, Demeter,
and Pan.
POETIC INSPIRATION
If we accept the idea that the Greek oracles exploited electrical stimulation of the Sibyl,
we can hardly avoid considering an electrical basis for the Greek theory of poetic
inspiration. The 7th century Greek poet Archilochus, Fragment 120, declares that he can
create the dithyramb when lightning-struck by wine [1] . The Roman poet Statius has
laurigerosque ignes, laurel-bearing fire, for poetic inspiration (Achilleid I: 509).
The Muses were led by Apollo. They, together with the oracles, were the source of
information which the Greek and Roman poets tapped. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 69, has: "I
sent Kreon to Phoebus's temple to find out (pythoit) what I should do to save this city."
The resemblance between Pytho and pythoit, the verb 'to find out', is a happy one.
Line 8 of the first book of the Aeneid reads: "Musa, mihi causas memora..." Muse, tell me
the causes ...
The poet was thought of as inspired by an external force causing a condition akin to
madness, 'mania'. 'Mantis' is the Greek for a prophet, and we have seen instances of mantic
possession of the Sibyl at Cumae, when consulted by Aeneas, and of Cassandra on her arrival
at Mycenae. Poetic inspiration was originally like this, accompanied in some cases, perhaps
always at first, by dance. The verb skirtao, dance, which is used in The Bacchae, is
associated with the frolics of goats. The temenos or sacred precinct at Samothrace had Ionic
propylaea, or entrance gates, with a sculptured frieze of dancing girls.
At Delphi, the Thriae, three goddesses who were associated with prophecy by lot, relied on
honey for inspiration (Homeric Hymn to Hermes, line 560): "And when they are inspired
through eating yellow honey, they are keen to speak the truth."
"Inspired" here suggests 'set on fire', Greek 'thuiosin'. We can compare Vergil, Georgic IV,
where honey is "caelestia mella", and bees have a share of the divine nature. The Homeric
bard or rhapsode wore a purple cloak when reciting from the Iliad, and a green one when
reciting from the Odyssey.
The word rhapsodos is generally thought to come from rhapto, stitch. The minstrel stitches
words together.
It also suggests rhapis, a staff, and the satrap, the rod of Set, and the augur with his
lituus. It is likely that the minstrel originally carried a staff not merely as a symbol of
authority, but because of its association with electrical influences, as in the case of
Moses's rod, and the ark. The words of Archilochus, already quoted, are certainly not
against this idea. A. E. Housman spoke of poetic inspiration in his own case coming as a
physical sensation while shaving.
The poet Hesiod, Theogony 30, describes his inspiration by the Muses: "So spoke the
beautifully sounding daughters of great Zeus, and they cut off and gave me a shoot of strong
laurel as a rod (skeptron), and breathed into me a divine voice, so that I should celebrate
things future and past.
"In the Euthydemus of Plato, 277 d, there is an argument as to whether a learner in a class
is wise or not. Euthydemus is questioning Kleinias. Socrates intervenes to warn Kleinias and
his friend Dionysodorus:
"Perhaps you don't realise what the two strangers are doing to you. They are doing what
those do in the rite of the Corybants, when they hold an 'enthronement' around the one they
are going to initiate. Furthermore, there is a kind of dancing there and children's games,
as you know if you have been initiated. And now these two are simply dancing round you, and
are dancing in play, initiating you afterwards."
According to Nonnos, Dionysiaca, Kadmos saw a dance at Samothrace, with music from double
pipes, and the clashing of spears on shields. In the Ion of Plato, Socrates discusses with a
bard, Ion, the nature of a minstrel's art and inspiration.
"I see, Ion, and I come to show you what I think this is. For this speaking well of yours
about Homer is not a 'skill', as was said just now, but a divine power which sets you in
motion. Just as in the stone which Euripides called the Magnesian stone, and most others the
Heraclean. Further, this stone not only leads the iron rings themselves, but also puts a
power into the rings so that they can do this very thing which the stone does, attract other
rings, so that sometimes a long chain of bits of iron and rings is formed, hanging from each
other. And thus the Muse herself makes people full of god, and through these inspired people
a ring of other inspired people is found. For all epic poets, if they are good, utter all
their fine poems not through art, but by being filled with the god and possessed, and good
lyric poets similarly, just as Corybants dance when out of their minds; thus lyricists are
not in their right minds when they create these beautiful lyric poems. But when they embark
upon harmony and rhythm, they are filled with, and controlled by, Bacchic frenzy, just as
Bacchants when they are in their right minds; and the soul of lyric poets does this, as they
themselves say. For the poets tell us, indeed, that they bring us lyrical poetry from
springs flowing with honey from certain orchards and glades of the Muses, like bees, and
they fly, too, like the bees. And they speak truly. For a poet is a light, winged and holy
creature, who cannot create before the god enters him, and he is in ecstasy, and reason has
left him (as long as he is in his right senses, every man is incapable of creating and
singing prophetic songs). So in so far as they create not by art and by saying many fine
things about men's deeds, as you do about Homer, but by divine lot, each one is only able to
do that to which the Muse has impelled him, one to dithyramb, another to panegyrics, one to
choral odes, another to epic, another to iambics. In other branches he has poor ability. For
they create this poetry not by art but by a divine power, since if by art they knew how to
create well, they would be able to do so in all branches. For this cause the god robs them
of their reason when he uses, as his servants, prophets and divine seers, so that we who
hear may know that it is not they who say such valuable things while out of their senses,
but that it is the god himself who speaks, and is intelligible to us through them." [2]
When reading the above remarks about the Magnesian stone, or magnet, Chiron comes to mind.
He was a centaur, son of Kronos and a daughter of Oceanus. He was half man and half horse,
since in a domestic crisis Kronos had disguised himself as a horse. Chiron was the teacher
of Asclepius and of Achilles, and was wise and just. He is referred to as the Magnesian
centaur by Pindar, Pythian III: 45.
Plato, Ion 535e: "Do you realise then that the spectator is the last of the rings which I
said took their force from each other under the action of the Heraclean stone? You, the
rhapsode and actor, are the middle man, the poet himself is the first. And the god, acting
through all these, pulls the human psyche in whatever direction he wishes, making a
suspended chain of force. And, just as from that lodestone, a great chain is set up of
dancers, directors and assistants, obliquely dependent from the rings suspended from the
Muse. And one poet is dependent from one Muse, another from another; we say 'possessed', but
it is the same thing, for he is held; and from those first rings, the poets, others are
suspended in turn and filled with the god, some inspired by Orpheus, some by Musaeus. The
majority are possessed and held by Homer.
PASSAGES REFERRING TO INSPIRATION AND POETRY
Iliad XIV: 508: "Tell me now, Muses who live in
the halls of Olympus, who of the Achaeans first took the bloodstained spoils from a slain
enemy, when the glorious Earthshaker swayed the battle."
Iliad II: 100: Agamemnon holds his staff as he stands up to speak in the assembly.
Aeneid IV: 60: Dido holds the dish during sacrifice as she seeks the will of the gods.
PASSAGES THAT SHED LIGHT ON GREEK TRAGEDY
Iliad XIX: 85 (an apology for hybristic behaviour): When Achilles has declared in the
assembly that he is willing to end the feud and rejoin the fighting, Agamemnon stands up and
speaks. "The Achaeans often reproached me for what you have just mentioned. But it is not I
who am the cause, but Zeus and Fate (Moira) and the Fury (Erinys) that walks in darkness,
who in the meeting cast fierce Ate into my mind, on that day when I took away Achilles's
prize."
Odyssey VIII: 260: When Odysseus is entertained to dinner and a display of dancing by the
Phaeacians, officials enter and clear the dancing floor and a ring, agon, wide enough for
the performance.
Line 264: The dancers strike the holy floor with their feet (choron theion, holy dancing-
floor). Odysseus marvels at the flashing movements of their feet (marmarygas).
According to Hesychius, choros is the same as kuklos and stephanos, circle, and crown. It
means especially the round dance of the dithyramb, or the floor where it is performed.
Choros kuklikos = dithyramb.
PASSAGES REFERRING TO THE AXE
Odyssey V: 235: Odysseus builds a boat to sail away from Calypso's island Ogygia. She gives
him a big axe with an olive wood handle. Aeneid V: 305: At the funeral games in honour of
his father, Anchises, Aeneas offers prizes. He will give two Cretan arrowheads shining with
polished iron, and a double axe (bipennis) with silver chasing.
Frazer, The Golden Bough XLIX: At the end of June in Athens, the Bouphonia took place. The
ox was brought to the bronze altar of Zeus Polios on the Acropolis. The ox was driven round
the altar. The axe and the knife were dipped in water. The ox was laid low by a blow of the
axe behind its horns, and its throat cut with a knife. The axeman threw his weapon away and
fled, and the knifeman did the same.
A trial was held in a court presided over by the king to allocate blame for the murder. The
girl who brought the water blamed the sharpeners, these blamed the men who handed the
weapons to the butchers, the butchers blamed the axe and the knife. The axe and knife were
found guilty and thrown into the sea.
At one time the killing of an ox had been a capital crime in Attica.
Notes (Chapter Eight: Sky and Stage)
1. Diehl: A. L. . G. 77
2. Plato: 'Iom.= 533d.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER NINE
TRIPOD CAULDRONS
IF put up into the air, a tripod cauldron resembles the popular idea of a comet. It also
looks like the seething pot of Old Testament Jeremiah I: 13. I suggest that the Greeks
linked the god in the ground with the god in the sky. There was a copper cauldron on the
roof of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and another at Delos.
Is there any evidence to support this theory? By simple metathesis, such as occurs with the
Greek 'kratos' and 'kartos', we get 'stephanos', crown, and 'setphanos', Set revealing or
shining.
The Egyptian god Set was well known to the Greeks. He killed Osiris; the Greeks equated him
with Typhon. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the tripod and cauldron, with a
crown of fire, were an attempt to represent, and to establish communication with a god in
the sky, elsewhere described as a seething pot facing north, and a cauldron for the use of
the god Thor. Homer, Iliad XVIII: 369 ff., describes the manufacture of tripod cauldrons:
they are for action in the sky.
It is significant that the oldest attendants of Dionysus were the Silenes, followed later by
the Saturoi, Satyrs. Oura is a tail. Were it not for the short 'u' of Saturos, philology
might suggest that the Satyrs were Set's tail.
At first a Satyr had long pointed ears, a goat's tail, and small knobs like horns behind the
ears. Later, goat's legs were added. Hesiod writes: "The race of Satyrs, worthless and unfit
for work" [1] . In the Doric dialect, Satyros is Tityros, but Strabo distinguishes between
Satyrs, Silenes and Tityri. A comet might display less tail with each return.
To the east of Ionia was the Persian Empire. The king ruled through provincial governors
called satraps. I suggest that Set explains the word satrap. Rhapis and rhabdos both mean a
rod or staff, like skeptron, English sceptre. Chrysorrhapis, of the god Hermes, means
bearing a golden rod [2] . A satrap was Set's rod, ready to punish rebellious provincials
with the speed and force of a thunderbolt. The festival of the Stepteria may have been the
flight of Set (Greek pteron is a wing).
A skeptron (staff) was not just for leaning on; the verb skepto means hurl or shoot
(lightning, for example). There is a passage in The Suppliants of Aeschylus where the king
is addressed. He controls the altar, the hearth of the land, and by his sole command
controls all, sitting on his throne to which alone the sceptre belongs (line 370 ff.) [3] .
Silenus, the oldest companion of Dionysus, had prophetic powers. He had a long horse's tail.
His name is explained by two Greek words, seio, shake; and linos, vat. He is shown on vase
paintings treading out grapes.
PASSAGES REFERRING TO TRIPODS Iliad XXIII: 884: As a prize, Achilles gave an unused cauldron
with a floral pattern, lebet' apuron, anthemoenta.
Iliad XXIV: 233: Priam chooses presents to take to Achilles as ransom for Hector's body. He
takes out of his chests two tripods gleaming like fire (aithonas), and four cauldrons. The
epithet aithon, of the tripods, is noteworthy.
Odyssey XIII: 13: King Alkinous proposes that Odysseus should be given presents, a big
tripod and cauldron from each man. Aeneid III: 90: The Trojans call on king Anius, priest of
Apollo and king of Delos. Aeneas prays for guidance; there is an earth tremor, and "mugire
adytis cortina reclusis", the shrine seemed to open and there was a bellowing sound from the
cauldron.
Aeneid III: 466: The seer Helenos gives advice, and gives them presents when they leave,
silver, and cauldrons from Dodona.
V: 110: The memorial games for Anchises are prepared. Prizes are displayed, including 'sacri
tripodes' and 'coronae virides', crowns of fresh greenery.
Pausanias IV: 12: 9: mentions one Oebalus at Sparta who happened to have a hundred
terracotta tripods. He took them to Ithome and dedicated them to the god, so as to fulfil
the Delphic oracle's promise. Those who dedicated a hundred tripods to Zeus of Ithome would
be the winners in the war between the Spartans and the Messenians.
Pausanias III: 18: 7: At the sanctuary of the Graces near Amyclae there are bronze tripods.
Under the first is a statue of Aphrodite, under the second a statue of Artemis, under the
third, of Persephone.
Pausanias X: 13: 7: He mentions: (1) the fight between Herakles and Apollo over the tripod
at Delphi; (2) a gold tripod standing on a bronze snake, a dedication from all the Greeks
from the spoil of Plataea.
Iliad XVIII: 343: Achilles called to his comrades to set up a big tripod, so as to wash the
bloodstained body of Patroclus as quickly as possible. They set up a tripod for washing
water in blazing fire, and poured water into it, and took wood and burnt it underneath. The
fire took hold of the belly of the tripod, and the water was heated. And when the water
boiled in the glittering brass, they washed the body and annointed it with oil.
In line 348, note the phrase "the belly of the tripod." Iliad XXIII: 702: For the winner a
big tripod (to go on the fire), which the Achaeans valued at twelve oxen. Iliad XVIII: 369:
Silver-footed Thetis came to the starry, imperishable house of Hephaestus, distinguished
among the Immortals, made of bronze, which he himself, the lame one, had made ... She found
him sweating, busied with his bellows, and in haste. For he was making a total of twenty
tripods to stand round the wall of his well-based hall. He had put golden wheels under the
legs of each, so that they might plunge into the arena (agon) of the gods of their own
accord, or return home again; they were a marvellous sight. They were finished, but for the
fact that the ornamental handles were not yet fitted. He was preparing them and cutting the
rivets.
This passage suggests that the tripod cauldron was a representation of an object in the sky.
The word 'puthmenes' for the legs or supports, is interesting. The word is also used for the
handles, or supports of the handles, of Nestor's cup. Compare the Phoenician work in Old
Testament I Kings 7: 30: "Every base had four brasen wheels, and plates of brass." And verse
29: "On the borders were lions, oxen and cherubims." Iliad XVIII: 417: The golden servants
hurry round their lord, like living handmaidens. They have a mind and voice and strength,
and their skill comes from the immortal gods. Iliad IX: 122: Agamemnon addresses Menelaus;
he intends to set out seven "apurous tripodas," tripods untouched by fire; or it might mean
purely ornamental, like "apurotos" in XXIII: 270, of a phiale, or libation bowl.
Iliad IX: 264: Seven untouched tripods. Iliad X1: 700: A tripod was a prize in the games.
Iliad XXIII: 264: At the funeral games for Patroclus, there is a tripod with handles, a
twenty-two measure tripod.
In Odyssey VIII: 434, a tripod and cauldron are heated for a bath. It will be seen in
Chapter XVI that the tripod cauldron was used in resurrection rites in ancient Greece.
THE TOPRAKKALI TRIPOD
This 8th century B. C. tripod from Urartu was found at Erzincan, near Lake Van, in 1938. It
is now in the Ankara Museum. It shows hieroglyphs that resemble Hittite, and is decorated
with bulls' heads with horns.
Tripods, thrones, footstools, beds, were standard equipment in Mesopotamian temples,
including that to the Urartian god Haldis, at Rusahina. This temple was probably founded by
the Urartian king Rusas I (733-714 B. C.). See Early Anatolia by Seaton Lloyd.
Set may appear in a number of words. The following examples are mere suggestions, not
certain:
Setania (Latin), was a kind of onion; also a kind of bulb. The onion and garlic were
powerful herbs. The bulbs and roots could resemble a comet in shape. Vide the Glossary.
Setia, a mountain in Italy, near the Pomptine marshes. Marshy land attracted lightning.
Saeta, seta (Latin), a bristle, hair. Cf. Gk. Chaita, mane; Egyptian chet, hair.
I suggested earlier that Saturos could hardly be 'Set's tail' because of the short 'u'. It
may not be a valid objection. Kastor and Pollux were twin sons of Zeus, the Dioskoroi or
Dios kouroi. The diphthong 'ou' in kouroi is long; in the compound word it becomes a short
'o'.
It was held that iron was Set's bone, and that iron came from him. The second of these
statements may be seen today as an inversion. We prefer to think that the presence of iron
attracts Set. The place where lightning struck was sacred and might be walled off with a
puteal, or curb, such as was built round a well. Rock containing iron would be especially
likely to attract the god of the thunderbolt, and this could easily have given rise to the
belief that lightning was responsible for the presence of iron ore.
Notes (Chapter Nine: Tripod Cauldrons)
1. Hesiod: Fragment XIII
2. Homer: 'Odyssey' V: 87
3. Aeschylus: 'Supplices' 370ff.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER TEN
THE EVIDENCE FROM PLUTARCH
MATERIAL relevant to our subject is to be found in the writings of Plutarch, A. D. 45-120,
who was born in Boeotia, central Greece, and moved to Rome as a teacher of philosophy. Among
his Moralia are Isis and Osiris, The E at Delphi, About why the Pythia does not now answer
in verse, and The Obsolescence of Oracles. The following extracts are partly translation,
partly paraphrase or precis.
In Isis and Osiris, a work dedicated to Clea, a Delphic priestess, he gives much information
about Greek and Egyptian religion. Very early in the work he declares that the truth is the
most important thing for men, and that the effort to arrive at the truth, especially the
truth about the gods, is a longing for the divine.
Typhon is mentioned, 351, as the enemy of Isis. In 353b he says that wine was thought by the
Egyptians to be the blood of those who had battled against the gods. This adds support to
the placing of Dionysus in the sky, with his oldest companion Silenus, who treads out the
blood-red grapes.
In The E at Delphi, 387d, he tells how Herakles tried to carry off the tripod by force,
explaining the occurrence as the contempt of Herakles for logical reasoning. Later, he says
that Dionysus has no less a share in Delphi than Apollo. Theologians declare that the god is
immortal and eternal, but undergoes transformations. He has various names: Apollo because he
is alone (a-not, polloi, many); Phoebus because he is pure and untainted; Dionysus; Zagreus
(the hunter); Nuctelios; Isodaites. And they sing to him dithyrambic tunes full of emotion
and of a transformation that contains a certain wandering and dispersion. Indeed, Aeschylus
says: "It is appropriate that the dithyramb with its mixed sound should occupy the revellers
who attend Dionysus."
392a: One of the explanations put forward for the letter 'E', which was inscribed at Delphi
along with 'Know Thyself', and 'Nothing To Excess', is that it means 'Thou Art'. The god
greets the visitor with the words 'Know Thyself', and the visitor answers 'Thou Art', as
being a true form of address, and the only one fitting, viz., the assertion of existence.
(This can be compared with the 'I Am' of the god of Moses). One of the god's names is Ieius.
In 393c, Plutarch derives this from the cry 'Ia', uttered when invoking Apollo. He thought
it to be the epic word meaning 'one'.
It might be well at this point to remember that we are not concerned here with the truth of
Plutarch's beliefs, but with the fact that he and, presumably, many Greeks held them.
394a: The names of Apollo, who is permanent existence, are to be contrasted with the names
of another god who is concerned with birth and destruction. Apollo (not many), and Pluto
(abounding); Delian (clear), and Aidoneus (unseen); Phoebus (bright), and Scotios (dark).
One is accompanied by the Muses and memory, the other by oblivion and silence. One is an
observer and discloser, the other 'Lord of dark night and idle sleep. '
In Why the oracle no longer answers in verse, 397b, Plutarch gives us a quotation from
Pindar: "Kadmos heard the god revealing correct music, not sweet nor voluptuous nor broken
up in the tunes."
397c: "The god does not compose the verses, but he supplies the source of the impulse, and
each of the priestesses is moved in accord with her natural tendency. He puts into her mind
only the visions, and creates a light in her soul directed at the future."
This is in accord with Plato, Timaeus 71 and 72, where we read that the liver plays a
decisive part in aiding or preventing prophetic vision. When the liver is relaxed by gentle
thoughts, the soul is open to divination and dreams, while reason and understanding are out
of action through sleep, or an abnormal condition caused by disease or divine inspiration.
It is the task of 'spokesmen' (prophetai) to interpret the visions and words, not the task
of the inspired person. They should not be called prophets, but expounders of the utterances
of the prophets.
In this passage, at the start of 72b, "whom they call them prophets ...," Plato's language,
using both 'whom' and 'them', betrays oriental influence.
In Plutarch 400b, there is a reference to talk by philosophers of the Stoic school about
'kindlings' and 'exhalations', and it is as well to bear in mind the connection with thumos,
thuo, and fire, in the word 'anathumiasis', exhalation. It is used of a rising in fume or
vapour, by Aristotle; of the soul, by Heraclitus; and of an exhalation, by Aristotle, De
Anima. The related verb anathumiao means to make to rise, to draw up vapour (of the sun, by
Empedocles), and to kindle. Polybius uses it in the phrase 'to kindle hatred. '
400f: The guide conducting Plutarch's party round Delphi pointed out the place where lay the
iron spits, property of the courtesan Rhodope. Iron may have owed some of its reputation to
the fact that it was attracted by a magnet. Iron objects are mentioned, and found, at
Samothrace, which will be discussed in greater detail later.
401b: There is a reference to Herophile, of Erythrae, who had the gift of prophecy, and was
addressed as Sibyl.
404 c and e: 'The god (anax, Lord, is the word used for Apollo), whose oracle is at Delphi,
neither speaks nor conceals; he indicates. ' Add to these well said words and reflect that
the god here uses the Pythia for hearing just as the sun uses the moon for sight. For he
shows and reveals his thoughts, but shows them blended with a mortal body, and a soul unable
to keep quiet or to offer itself unmoved and stable to the mover, but as if tossed by waves
and enmeshed in the movements and emotions in it, and making itself more disturbed."
404f: What is called 'enthusiasm' seems to be a mixture of two impulses, the soul being
influenced in the one case from outside, in the other in accordance with its own nature.
In The Obsolescence of Oracles, Plutarch tells us that whereas formerly Delphi (where he was
an official) was staffed by two full-time priestesses and one reserve, it now has only one,
who is adequate for all needs. The work is full of interesting side issues.
410b: The priests at the shrine of Ammon reported that the ever-burning lamp there consumed
less oil each year, and they regarded this as proof that the year was becoming shorter.
414d: We must not think that because oracles may die, the god himself is dead. He quotes
Sophocles: "The works of gods may die, but not gods."
415: Cleombrotos, one of the speakers, approves of the theory that there is a race of demi-
gods midway between gods and men. Hesiod, he says, mentions four classes of rational beings:
gods, daimons (demi-gods), heroes, and humans. There is a force that unites them in
fellowship.
417c: Concerning the Mysteries, in which one can obtain the best view of, and insight into,
the truth about daimons, "Let my lips be sealed," as Herodotus says. As to sacrifices, they
are performed apotropes heneka, for the turning away of evil daimons.
We have already met the word 'prester' in a quotation from Heraclitus. The word is used by
Plutarch in 419f. One of the speakers, Demetrius, tells how he voyaged to some islands near
Britain, almost uninhabited. Some of the islands bore the names of daimons and heroes. When
he visited one of these islands, occupied only by a few holy men, there was a tempest;
portents (diosemiae), and presters fell. The islanders said that the death had occurred of
one of the mightier ones.
From this passage it seems probable that prester, to Plutarch, has its usual meaning of
lightning or thunderbolt, though meteorite would fit.
421c: Among the stories about Delphi is one of the slayer of Python. The story of exile in
Tempe is untrue. When he was expelled, he went to another kosmos (world), and after nine
cycles of great years he became pure and bright (Phoebus), and returned to take over the
oracle, which had been guarded by Themis in the meantime.
Such, he said, was the case with stories about Typhons and Titans. There had been battles of
daimons versus daimons, then flights of the conquered or punishment of the sinners by a god,
as, for example, Typhon is said to have sinned in the matter of Osiris, and Kronos in the
matter of Ouranos. The honours you pay to these have become dimmer or failed altogether,
when the deities were transferred to another world. I learn that the Solymi too, neighbours
of the Lycians, honoured Kronos among the greatest. But he killed their rulers, Arsalos and
Dryos and Trosobios, and fled and left for another abode, they can't say which. Kronos was
neglected, and Arsalos and his followers are named the hard gods, and the Lycians invoke
curses, both public and private, in their names. Many similar examples can be found in the
works of theologians. If we call some demi-gods by the usual names of gods, one should not
be surprised, said my friend. For with whatever god a man is linked, and from whom he has
been allotted some power and honour, from him he is likely to take his name. Indeed one
amongst us is Dius, another Athenaios, another Apollonius or Dionysios, another Hermaios. A
few by chance have been rightly named, the majority have acquired divine names that are
inappropriate.
431e: As the others joined in asking this, I paused for a moment and said: "Actually,
Ammonios, by some chance you created an opportunity for introducing the subject on that
occasion. For if the souls which have been separated from the body or have never had one
are, according to you and the divine Hesiod, 'holy dwellers on earth, guardians of mortal
men, ' why do we rob souls in bodies of that power, by which it is the nature of demi-gods
to know the future and reveal it beforehand?"
432b: The soul has great powers of memory. But memory is the hearing of silent things and
the sight of invisible things. Hence it is not remarkable if, having power over what no
longer exists, it grasps in advance many of the things that have not yet happened.
432d: The earth sends up to men springs of many other forces, some ecstatic and bringing
disease and death, some good and helpful, as is clear from experience. The prophetic current
(rheuma) and breath (pneuma) is most god-like and holy, whether it is produced by itself
through the air or whether it comes with running water. It is likely that by warmth and
diffusion it opens certain passages which form a picture of the future, just as wine, rising
like fire, reveals many impulses and words that were stored and concealed. To quote
Euripides: "For Bacchic revelry and passion contain much prophecy," when the soul becomes
hot and fiery and thrusts aside the caution that mortal intelligence brings, and often
diverts and quenches the inspiration (enthusiasm). At the same time one might not
unreasonably say that dryness arising in the soul with the heat makes subtle the breath (of
prophecy) and makes it ethereal and pure. For this is 'dry soul', as Heraclitus puts it.
433: The prophetic (mantike anathumiasis) has an affinity and a relationship with souls.
435 c and d: After telling the story of the discovery of Delphic influence on goats and on
Koretas, the goatherd, Ammonios said: "The anathumiasis or exhalation, when it is present,
whether the victim (goat) trembles or not, will create the inspiration (enthousiasmos), and
dispose the soul correspondingly, not only of the Pythia, but of anyone whom it touches."
436f: For we do not make prophecy godless or irrational when we give to it, as material, the
human soul, and give the inspiring breath and the exhalation as an instrument or plectrum
...
437: When priests put garlands on victims and pour libations over them and watch the victim
tremble, they are watching for a sign that the god is present to give answers.
437c: Plutarch refers to the delightful fragrance that comes from the shrine. It does not
come often, nor does it occur regularly. He thinks it likely that it is produced by warmth
or some other force.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS
THE early philosophers before the time of Socrates help considerably in our investigation,
and give support to the view that electrical forces were a major preoccupation of the
Greeks. The earliest of them, the Ionian physicists, lived in a region that had close
contacts with the East and with Egypt.
The city of Miletus produced, within a century, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Each
searched for unity behind the diversity of the appearance of the material world. Each looked
for a single primary element as the basis of the physical world, and tried to isolate and to
identify it. With these three we can also take Xenophanes, who was educated at Kolophon, the
seat of a famous oracle. He was well informed about Ionian theories and moved to Western
Greece.
Thales is well known for having predicted an eclipse of the sun, probably the eclipse of 585
B. C.. His ancestry was Phoenician. It has been suggested that his parents were Kadmeians
from Boeotia, and that his father's name, Examyes, is Karian.
Aetius, A. D. 100, tells us that having been a philosopher in Egypt, Thales moved to Miletus
when older.
Thales seems to have regarded water as the original element from which the rest of the
physical world is derived. Aristotle says that Pherecydes and others, and the Magi, put the
"best thing" (ariston) as the first creating substance.
Pindar, Olympian Odes I, says: "Water is best, and gold is a blazing (aithomenon) fire."
Olympian III: 42: "Water is best, and gold the most precious." Aristotle, De Anima, says
that "Thales appears to have supposed that the soul (psyche) was something that could move;
if indeed he said that the stone had a soul because it moved iron."
Diogenes Laertius, 3rd century A. D., reports that Thales was said to have attributed a
share of soul to soulless things, calling in evidence the magnet, and amber.
Aristotle, De Anima: "Thales thought that all things were full of gods."
Anaximenes is the next writer to mention the soul. He says that our soul is air, and holds
us together, and that breath and air surround the whole cosmos. There is an important
distinction between 'aer' and 'aither', the damp misty air or breath, and the dry upper air.
Anaximenes held that by rarefaction and condensation one substance can be many different
things.
Anaximander (he was aged sixty four in 547 B. C.) is said by Cicero (De Divinatione 1.50) to
have warned the Spartans to move into the fields, as an earthquake was imminent. He
postulated a single original substance, 'to apeiron', the infinite. He was a pupil of
Thales.
Only one sentence of Anaximander's work Concerning The Physical Universe has survived.
Simplicius, quoting Theophrastus, 3rd century B. C., says: "Into those same things from
which they take their origin, all the things that exist also go on to their destruction, and
of necessity; for they are punished and make retribution to each other for the injustice in
accordance with the decree of time, expressing it in more poetical terms."
(R. Mondolfo, Problemi del pensiero antico, Bologna 1935, suggests that the crime is
expansion of the worlds caused by collisions). There are infinitely numerous worlds
(ouranoi) in the apeiron, all equidistant. Cicero, in his De Natura Deorum, I: 10: 25, says:
"nativos esse deos," i. e. that the gods come into being by birth.
Moira, one's lot, ananke, necessity, and dike, j ustice, make up the impersonal law given by
the apeiron.
Aetius writes: "Anaximander declared that the infinite ouranoi were gods."
The 6th century B. C. poet and philosopher Xenophanes wrote a philosophical poem on nature,
and a number of poems called Silloi, 'squint-eyed'. They ridiculed the anthropomorphic
deities of Homer. He studied fossils of fishes in mountains, and concluded that land and sea
must have undergone great changes. Simplicius reports of him that his single, non-
anthropomorphic deity "always stays in the same place unmoved, and shakes everything without
trouble by his mind."
This thought is similar to one expressed in Aeschylus, Suppliants 96 ff.: "Zeus casts
mortals down from the lofty towers of their hopes, to utter destruction. He puts forth no
violence, but sits and at once accomplishes his thought somehow from his holy resting
place."
Heraclitus, who flourished in Ionia about 500 B. C., is well known for his doctrine of flux:
"Everything flows, nothing remains constant," and "You can't step twice into the same
river." He has fire, and 'logos', as solutions to the problem that occupied the Ionian
physicists. The soul is a fragment of the surrounding cosmic fire. Macrobius, A. D. 400, on
the Somnium Scipionis, I: 14, says: "Heraclitus declared that the soul is a spark of the
essential substance of the stars, 'scintilla stellaris essentiae'." Stars are concentrations
of aither. In this context, Fragment 26 is relevant: "When man dies and his eyes are
extinguished, he unites in happiness with light; living man asleep resembles the dead, for
he, too, has his eyes closed; man awake resembles a man asleep." Heraclitus seems to have
regarded lightning as a manifestation of the cosmic fire. "Thunderbolt steers the universe."
The statement attributed to Heraclitus, that the way up and the way down are the same, may
imply the identity of the electrical weapon of the god in the sky, and the electrical force
of Gaia, the goddess of chthon, the earth. Plutarch describes Hermes as being both ouranios
(of heaven) and chthonios, of earth. Euripides (Alcestis 743) describes him as chthonios.
A similar view of the relationship between the soul and ethereal fire is found in Indian
thought. The flames of the funeral pyre help the soul to rise to join the heavenly fire. In
Homer, on the other hand, the psyche or soul is a breath soul. It survives death in the
house of Hades. When Odysseus descends to the underworld, he has to slaughter sheep so that
the pale ghosts can drink the blood and speak audibly (Odyssey XI: 23 ff.). Heraclitus
thought that knowledge of the soul was needed for knowledge of the cosmos, and Pythagoras
linked the soul with moral standards.
This brings us to the question of the Greek concept of justice. Let us start with lines from
a chorus in the Medea of Euripides, 410 ff: "The waters of sacred rivers flow uphill, and
justice and all things are reversed. Man's counsels are deceitful, and belief in the gods is
no longer firm."
The above passage is complemented by Heraclitus, Fragment 94: "The sun will not overstep his
measures; otherwise the Furies, ministers of justice, will find him out."
The Furies, Erinyes, Eumenides, the kindly ones, the winged females with snakes in their
hair, regard it as their especial duty to punish anybody who steps over the limit, who
strays or misses the mark. Hesiod says that the Furies are the offspring of Gaia, earth, and
the blood of Ouranos.
The word dike in Greek originally meant the way in which things are done. In the opening
scene of the Agamemnon, the watchman is standing on the battlements of Mycenae resting his
head on his hands kunos diken, in the manner of a dog, waiting for the fire-signal that is
to announce the capture of Troy.
Later, the word dike comes to mean justice and punishment. In Plato's Republic, it is not
one of the virtues, but rather a harmony of the other virtues; a balance. The Republic of
Plato is an inquiry into the nature of justice, and Plato proceeds by analogy. Just as in
the ideal state there is a harmony between the workers, the auxiliaries and the philosopher
rulers, with none becoming too powerful or overstepping the limits, so in the individual
there is a balance between the instincts, the 'high-spirited element', and the reason.
Zeus was above all others the god who stood for justice. To him a suppliant would pray,
raising his hands to heaven and crying out for justice. Open almost any Greek tragedy, and a
reference to Zeus and justice is likely to appear. In fact, we can go back to our
conclusions on Greek tragedy and see a link between justice in the individual human being,
in the Greek city state, and the stability of the sky and of the solar system. If the sky is
darkened by a monster one can but hope that the god of light will do battle and win.
In Pindar, Olympian II: 70, we read: "The souls of the just pass by the highway of Zeus to
the tower of Kronos." There may also be a connection between this passage and Nemean VI:"
Toward what mark we run, by day or by night ..." There may also be a link with Alkman, a
Greek lyric poet who flourished about 600 B. C.. A papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, number 2390,
published in 1957, contains quotations from Alkman. It is discussed in The Presocratic
Philosophers, by Kirk, Raven and Schofield.
"For when matter began to be established, a certain passage (poros), like a beginning
(arche), was created. Alkman says that the material of everything was confused and not made.
Then, he says, there came into being he (or that, masculine) who arranged everything; then a
passage came into being, and when the passage had gone past, a sign (tekmor) followed. And
the passage is like an origin, and the sign is like an end. When Thetis came into being,
these became the beginning and end of everything, and all things have a similar nature to
that of bronze, and Thetis to that of the craftsman, and the way and the sign to the
beginning and the end... on account of sun and moon not yet having come into being but
matter (hyle) still being without distinction. There came about therefore ... passage and
sign and darkness. Day and moon and thirdly darkness; the flashings; not merely day but with
sun; first there was only darkness, after this when it was separated (= distinguished?) ..."
Lyrica Graeca selecta, ed. Page (Oxford Classical Texts 1968). In the Partheneion of Alkman,
Poros, way or passage, is linked with Aisa as the eldest of the gods. Aisa is generally a
divine dispensation or decree, sometimes translated as 'fate'.
Alkman's poros may be compared to the phenomenon described by Plato in the story of Er, son
of Armenius. Souls assemble on a meadow before returning to the sky before reincarnation.
They travel to a spot where there is a pillar:
A straight light like a column (kion) extended from above through all the sky (ouranos) and
earth, looking like a rainbow in colour..." Republic X: 616 b..
The Greek 'kion' means either 'column', or 'going', depending on the pronunciation
(different accentuation). Egyptian ioon =column.
In Plato, Poros is the father of Eros (Symposium 203b). The mother of Eros was Night, and
Night made prophecies before Themis did (scholium on Pindar's Pythian odes, in Scholia
Vetera edited by Drachman; discussed by Kerenyi in Dionysus: Archetypal Image of
Indestructible Life)
The imagery of the pillar may perhaps be traced in the following passages:
Euripides, The Bacchae, 1082 ff.: "A light of holy fire stood between earth and heaven, and
the upper air was silent, and so were the forest glades, and you would not have heard a
sound from wild beasts."
The above translation is alternative to the one given in Chapter III. The verb sterizo can
be transitive (set up), or intransitive (stand). For the silence, compare the silence before
the god's voice is heard speaking to Oedipus before his death (in the messenger's speech of
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1623).
Pindar, in Pythian X: 29, may refer to the poros when he writes: "But neither in ships nor
on foot will you find the marvellous road to the agon of the Hyperboreans." The latter are
the legendary people who live beyond the North. 'Huper, ' as well as meaning beyond, also
means above. Agon is not only a contest but also a place where contests may occur, e. g. a
stadium, as at Delphi, or the sky, as in the case of the tripods of Hephaistos in Homer, or
a dancing floor, as at the court of King Alkinous.
The Greek concept of justice described above may not be unique. The Egyptian ma'at is truth
and justice. The Latin meatus is movement or course, especially of sun and moon. Lucretius
employs the word frequently in this sense, e. g. I: 28.
"... solis lunaeque meatus." The Egyptian "men ma'at Re" means, "The truth of Re remains".
The Greek meno = remain, stand firm, withstand. Cf. Egyptian menkh, linen clothes worn by a
priest, which I suggest were to give protection against radiation.
When moving the ark from the house of Obed-edom into the city of David, David "danced before
the Lord with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod" (II. Samuel VI: 14).
Similar precautions were taken by the Israelite priests, and at the temple of Apollo at
Gryneion linen breastplates were on show.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER TWELVE
MYSTERY RELIGIONS
FURTHER interesting material concerning the soul and the aither emerges when one looks at
the mystery religions, of which Samothrace and Eleusis were important centres.
The Greek mysteries were secret religious ceremonies. Initiations took place at festivals in
honour of Demeter (at Eleusis), and of Dionysus (the Orphic mysteries). They satisfied
religious yearnings that could not be met by orthodox religion or science, and helped people
to face misfortune, old age, and death.
Orpheus came from Thrace, north-eastern Greece. He was said to be the son of one of the
Muses, Kalliope. He was a follower of Dionysus, a god associated with Thrace. So great was
his skill on the lyre that his playing moved wild beasts, trees and rocks, and on the ship
Argo his singing diverted the attention of the crew from the song of the Sirens.
When his wife Eurydice died from a snake bite, he went down to Hades to recover her, but
forgot the condition imposed, and on the return journey he looked back, and she was lost,
this time for ever. He wandered through Thrace, lamenting his loss, until he was torn to
pieces by Maenads.
We have met this phenomenon, the sparagmos, or tearing in pieces of a man or an animal, in
The Bacchae of Euripides. The same thing happened in the case of the daughters of Minyas,
the eponymous ancestor of the Minyans who lived in Orchomenos. They resisted the worship of
Dionysus. The god drove them mad, as he drove mad Agave and other Theban women. They tore in
pieces Hippasos, the son of Leucippe, one of the sisters. They were subsequently turned into
bats.
This dismemberment of a god is followed in the case of Dionysus by a restoration to life, as
in the case of Osiris. It is sometimes explained as a sacrifice to a god; the slaughtered
animal is sacred to the god, indeed is the god. It is eaten by worshippers in an attempt to
achieve contact, even unity and identity, with the god. It is also generally thought that
behind Greek religion lurk ancient fertility rites, aimed at ensuring a good harvest. It
seems likely that things are first seen in the sky, and are then copied on earth.
There are plenty of stories about the dismemberment of gods in the sky. Ouranos and Kronos
are an obvious early example. One of the sights was a seething pot, Old Testament, Jeremiah
I: 13.
The Greek Tantalus killed and cooked his son Pelops, and served the dish to the gods at a
banquet to see whether they would be deceived. Pelops was brought back to life, but a curse
was on the house. His son Atreus killed and cooked the children of Thyestes, his other son.
Thyestes had a son, Aegisthus, by his own daughter, Pelopia. Aegisthus later killed the son
of Atreus, Agamemnon, on his return from Troy. We shall see later that a resurrection
technique was inspired by the idea of a seething pot.
Kings, priests, and people imitated what they saw in the sky. We have already had an example
of this in the word satrap, Set's rod, for a Persian viceroy. In the world of ancient
Greece, survival meant imitating on earth what was thought to have happened in the sky, and
examples of the influence of such thinking in early times permeated classical civilisation,
and are still with us today.
At Eleusis, on the coast west of Athens, the mysteries were associated especially with
Demeter and Persephone in association with Iacchos, who was a form of Dionysus. There is a
vase painting of a child in a cauldron which suggests the reborn Dionysus.
The other great centre was Samothrace, a rocky and mountainous island off the Thracian
coast, not far from the coast of Asia Minor. The name of Mount Phengari suggests light. Not
far away is the island of Lemnos, where Hephaistos, the god of fire and smiths, is said to
have landed when ejected from Olympus. In Iliad XIV: 230 the goddess Hera goes to Lemnos to
meet Hypnos and Thanatos (sleep and death).
One of the Titans, Iapetos, had a son, Prometheus. In one version of the story Prometheus
stole fire from the workshop of Hephaistos on the island of Lemnos. In another version he
stole it from Olympus and flew down to earth carrying it in the hollowed-out stalk of a
narthex. The pith of this plant was used as tinder, and the narthex was the thyrsus of the
Bacchic revellers.
Certain 'Great Gods' were worshipped at Samothrace, probably the same as the Kabeiroi of
Lemnos, who were companions of Hephaestus and experts in metal working.
Before looking at Samothrace in detail, it may be useful to review the subject of the Great
Mother and her worshippers, since earth, mining, metal-working, electricity and fertility
are related in the Greek mind.
The marriage of Ouranos and Gaia resulted in the birth of Rhea, known as the Mother of the
Gods. Her name may be linked with the word 'rheo', flow, suggesting Okeanos, or it may be
metathesis for 'era', earth. On the whole the latter was the preferred derivation. She was
called the Great Mother because she produced Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades; their father was
Kronos, himself a child of Gaia and Ouranos. Ouranos was a child of Gaia as well as a
consort. Such a relationship seemed inevitable and natural, and made easier the acceptance
of the relationship of Zeus and Dionysus which we have already seen in our discussion of
Dionysus and the Delphic succession. It also helps to understand how Dionysus can have an
alter ego, a child named Iacchos.
Rhea was worshipped in Asia Minor as Meter Oreia, mountain-mother. She has other epithets
derived from names of mountains. From Mount Berecyntos in Phrygia she is Berecyntia; from
Mount Dindymon in Mysia, sacred to Cybele, she is Dindymene; and from Mount Ida she is
called Idaia. In Phrygia she is known as Matar Kybele. According to Kerenyi, 'The Gods of
the Greeks', she is the same as the Cretan 'Mistress of Animals', who appears flanked by two
lions on top of a mountain. This reminds one of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and raises the
question of the significance of the two animals, and of the column between them which is
Cretan in style. 'Kybelis', according to Hesychius, is a double-axe.
Her procession has drums, pipes (or shawms or reed pipes, however one chooses to translate
the word aulos), rattles, bull-roarers and male dancers. The latter represented spirits of
gods, daimones. In Phrygia they were known as Berekundae, and as Korubantes.
The Greek equivalent of these worshippers of the Great Goddess were the Idaean Dactyls and
the Kouretes.
For the story of the Dactyls and the Kouretes, we can turn to Hesiod, Theogony 468. Kronos
had decided to devour his new-born children, having heard that one of them would displace
him. Rhea was received by Earth in Crete, and taken to a cave in Mount Aegeum. Dicte and Ida
were two other mountains in Crete which claimed to be the birthplace of Zeus.
Rhea supported herself on the soil by her two hands, and the mountain produced ten spirits
called the Idaean Dactyls (fingers). They were also called Korubantes or Kouretes, but in
some versions of the story the Kouretes are sons of the Dactyls. They danced round the child
clashing their weapons to drown his cries. The number of Dactyls and Kouretes varies.
Originally there were ten Dactyls and three Kouretes. The Dactyls from Rhea's right hand
were smiths and discoverers of iron. There is a story of three Dactyls, representing hammer,
anvil, and steel. In all the stories they were smiths, magicians, obstetricians, and dwarfs;
sinister, like the Nibelungs.
There was a Mount Ida in Phrygia, and it was said that Idaean Dactyls, called the Kabeiroi,
came from Phrygia to Samothrace with their secret cult. They were fertility daimons,
sexually well-endowed like the statues of Hermes. They came from the region round Mount
Berecyntus in Phrygia. It was believed that Rhea had established her sons, the Korubantes,
on Samothrace. Kabeiroi also lived on Lemnos, where they were called Hephaistoi.
The name Kabeiro suggests the Hebrew chabhar, sorceror. Kabeiro, mother of the Kabeiroi, i.
e. Rhea, had a son, Kadmilos, by the fire god Hephaestus. In one genealogy the father of the
Korubantes is Kadmilos, i. e. Kadmilos is both child and husband to the Great Mother. At
Samothrace two of the Kabeiroi were the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces. The Greek
'kadouloi' were boys used in the worship of the Kabeiroi; Greek 'doulos' = slave. Servants
of Ka? At Rome, boys, called 'camilli', assisted the Flamen Dialis, or priest of Jupiter.
The Dios kouroi, sons of Zeus, were the children of Zeus and Leda. Accounts vary, but
according to one account Leda laid two eggs (Zeus had taken the form of a swan), from one of
which emerged Kastor and Polydeukes, and from the other Helen and Clytemnestra.
In Homer, Iliad III: 243, they are mortals, but they were worshipped as protectors of
sailors. St. Elmo's Fire, flickering on the mast of a ship, indicated their presence. They
were brave fighters. When Kastor was killed in a fight, Polydeukes asked to be allowed to
die too. Zeus said that they should take turns to go to Hades, or spend alternate days in
Hades and Heaven. On the island of Rhodes, there were 'Telchines', even more underground and
sinister than the Kabeiroi. They went to Crete to help rear Zeus, and also reared Poseidon,
helped by an Okeanine named Kapheira.
The Telchines were servants of the Great Mother, and were nine in number. They made images
of the gods. They foresaw the Flood, and left Rhodes.
There was a Kabeiros at Thebes also, who resembled Dionysus. There is a full treatment of
the Kabeiroi and the Mysteries by Susan Cole, 'Theoi Megaloi: The Cult of the Great Gods at
Samothrace' (Leiden 1984).
The story went that Eetion and Dardanus, sons of Elektra (the Okeanine, wife of Thaumas,
'Marvel'), came to Samothrace, where Eetion founded the Mysteries. Dardanus subsequently
left for Troy, and founded mysteries there.
The Theban myth of Kadmos and Harmonia eventually stated that Harmonia was the third child
of Elektra.
The buildings that survive at Samothrace are mostly from the 4th century B. C.. There was a
sacred enclosure with two altars, a bothros, or pit, and an eschara, or hearth altar.
The myesis, or initiation, went as follows: There was a declaration that those with unclean
hands were forbidden to take part. This 'praefatio sacrorum', or preface to the rites, is
mentioned in Livy 45: 5:
Lucius Aemilius Paulus took charge of the Macedonian campaign that the Romans fought against
Perseus. Gnaeus Octavius put in at Samothrace, and Lucius Atilius addressed the people: "Men
of Samothrace, is what we have heard true, that this island is sacred and that the ground is
holy and inviolate?" When they all agreed that it was sacred, he continued: "Why then has a
murderer polluted it, and violated it with the blood of King Eumenes, and, although the
preface to the rites excludes from the ceremonies those with unclean hands, you allow your
shrines to be defiled by the presence of a blood-stained brigand?"
There was a similar preliminary announcement on the first day of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
There were three stages: myesis, telete, and epopteia. At Eleusis it took over a year to
become an epoptes, or one who has seen the highest mysteries, but at Samothrace it could all
be achieved in one night.
There was a round structure surrounding a central pit, with a narrow doorway. At the top was
a shallow recess, and at the bottom of the pit a stone. Libations may have been poured.
Certain rocks in the bothroi or pits were objects of special libations.
There was a frieze of dancing girls at the entrance to the precinct, and before the doors of
the sanctuary stood two ithyphallic bronze statues, with their hands stretched to the sky.
Herodotus reports, II: 51, that there was a holy tale about them in the mysteries.
It is probable that there were dances round a seated figure. Plato, in the Euthydemus,
quoted above, tells of thronosis, or Corybantic dances round a seated figure, and Kadmos,
according to Nonnus (Dionysiaca), saw a dance at Samothrace. The diaulos was played, and
spears were clashed on bronze shields. A large bronze shield and iron knives have been
found.
There was a lodestone, and a ring of magnetised iron. They are mentioned by Lucretius, 'De
Rerum Natura' VI: 1044 "It also happens that iron sometimes moves away from this stone, and
is accustomed to flee and to follow it by turns. I saw iron at Samothrace jumping, and
fragments of iron moving inside the bronze basin, when the Magnesian stone had been put
underneath. The iron always seemed to wish to escape from the stone." [1] Rings sometimes
had a layer of gold covering the iron. "Even slaves now put gold round the iron, and other
things that they wear they decorate with pure gold. The origin of this display reveals by
its name that it was instituted in Samothrace." Pliny, Natural History 33: 6: 23.
Plato, in his 'Ion', mentions the skill of the rhapsodist. It depends on a divine force,
which moves the rhapsodist just as the force in the lodestone makes iron move.
Bathing was important, just as it was for the Pythia at Delphi. We have what is probably a
description of the procedure in the Clouds of Aristophanes, lines 497 ff.. As Strepsiades, a
would-be initiate, is about to enter Socrates's Phrontisterion, or Thinking Shop, Socrates
tells him to take off his himation and to step down. Strepsiades asks for a honey-cake as an
offering, and says that he is frightened, as if he were descending into the oracle of
Trophonius. (There was an oracle in Boeotia, where Trophonius had been swallowed up by the
earth. He was consulted there in an underground room under the name of Zeus Trophonius.
Enquirers emerged from underground looking sad and uneasy).
At Samothrace there is a drain outlet, so the initiate probably went down, undressed, and
was purified by bathing.
We have some indirect knowledge of Samothrace from another site, Thera. There is an open-air
temenos dedicated by Artemidorus, a Greek from Perge. It is cut in the rock of a low cliff.
There are statues of Hecate, Priapos (a male fertility god), and Tyche (Chance). There are
reliefs dedicated to Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo, and altars to other gods. The altar to the
Samothracian gods has a hole six inches in diameter cut in the top, and a channel from this
to ground level, forty inches, and a shallow depression in front of the altar, in the stone
floor of the temenos.
The Dioscuri, Kastor and Polydeukes, were worshipped here. They are represented with tall
conical hats, piloi, and with stars carved in relief over their altar. Artemidorus dedicated
an altar to Priapus Lampsacenus. Evidently there was a fertility cult at Lampsacus too. Next
is an altar to Hecate Phosphorus, Hecate the Light Bringer.
We left the initiate undressed, washed, and shivering in the dark underground. He may have
worn a purple sash. At Eleusis, as far as we can tell, the final stage of the initiation
consisted in flashes of light revealing glimpses of objects symbolic of fertility,
resurrection and immortality, and probably a ritual representation of the birth of Dionysus.
Grains of corn, and the phallic symbols carried in processions in the worship of Dionysus,
would figure prominently.
At Samothrace, the "Elektria tellus", as Valerius Flaccus describes it (II: 431), and at
Eleusis, we see a combination of the worship of Hermes, and physiological stimulation by
electricity, wine, and magnetism. Orpheus, with his power to attract animals, trees and
stones, is a symbol of the power of music and the magnet. Phanes and Eros, the primal light
and passion, and the sky gods whom they created and revealed, are related to the earth
deities, and are equated by the Greeks with the action of the aither and of the soul.
Three words often occur when the Greeks write about the mysteries: zetesis, heuresis, and
tyche. Of these words, zetesis and heuresis, searching and finding, are straightforward, but
chance, tyche, calls for comment. The Greek verb that corresponds to it means to light upon,
to hit, to hit the mark. One might say that tyche is the opposite of hamartia, missing the
mark or sin, which we have met before in the character of the tragic hero. Electricity is
tricky stuff to track down, and who knows where and when lightning and meteorites will
strike?
PASSAGES REFERRING TO ORPHEUS, MYSTERIES, AND LEMNOS
Pausanias IV: 26: 7: He refers to a dream sent to Epiteles. He dug in a certain place and
found a bronze jar. Epaminondas opened it and found a leaf of tin inscribed with the
mysteries of the Great Goddesses.
The British Museum contains some gold leaf inscribed with Orphic instructions on obtaining
immortality after death.
Pausanias IV: 14: 1: The Messenian priests of the Mysteries of the Great Goddesses fled to
Eleusis when the war against Sparta ended.
Pausanias VIII: 15: The Phenaeans in Arcadia have a shrine of Eleusinian Demeter. They also
have a rock, two great stones fitted together, by which they swear. Once a year they open
the stones, take out the sacred writings, read them to the initiated, and replace them.
Aeneid VIII: 454: Vulcan is "pater Lemnius." There was a volcanic peak on Lemnos: Moschylos.
(Moschos, Greek, = calf). Cf. Stephane (crown), a mountain in Thessaly.
PASSAGES REFERRING TO KABEIROI, DACTYLS, GREAT MOTHER, VARIOUS DEITIES
Pausanias I: 4: 6: In antiquity, Pergamene territory was the sacred ground of the Kabeiroi.
Pausanias IV: 1: 7: Methapos established the initiation of the Kabeiroi at Thebes.
Pausanias IX: 25: 5: Three or four miles from Thebes is a sanctuary of the Kabeiroi. People
called Kabeiroi lived there. Demeter entrusted one of them, Prometheus, and his son
Aitnaios, with a sacred object. Those of Xerxes's men, and later those of Alexander, who
entered the sanctuary, went mad, or were struck by lightning.
Pausanias warns, VIII: 37: 6, that the Kouretes and the Korybantes are of different
families. Rhea, or Kybele, or the Great Mother, may have been the same as the Cretan
Mistress of the Animals. As such, she appears between two lions on a mountain.
Bull-roarers were used in her procession, together with pipes, cymbals, and rattles.
The Kabeiroi were called Hephaistoi. The Caucasus is referred to as the Mother of Iron.
Aeschylus: Prometheus Vinctus 303.
The Telchines forged Poseidon's trident. They had the evil eye. They had a sister, Halia.
Rhodos, Rhodes, was the daughter of Poseidon and Halia.
The Dioskouroi: They were among the Kabeiroi at Samothrace, so they may conveniently be
mentioned here.
Odyssey XI: 300: Odysseus visits the underworld, and sees Leda, who bore (to Tyndareus)
Kastor and Polydeukes. Each is alive and dead on alternate days. They are honoured like
gods. Pausanias III: 24: 5: There is a small cape at Brasiae in Laconia, where there are
bronzes one foot high and caps on their heads. Some think they are Dioskouroi or Korubantes.
Pindar, Nemean Ode X: 61 ff.: Lynkeus saw the Dioskouroi sitting in the trunk of a tree.
Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae 296, Question 23: "Who is the joint-hero in Argos, and who are
the Averters?
They call Kastor joint-hero and think he is buried with them, and revere Polydeukes as one
of the Olympians. Those who drive out epilepsy they call Averters, and think that they are
offspring of Alexida the daughter of Amphiaraus."
OKEANOS [2]
Early descriptions of Okeanos put him in the sky. Sea, sky, Poseidon, Hephaestus and Athena
are interlinked, as some of the following passages suggest.
"Water is ariston (best)." (Pindar). "Pherecydes and some others take the first generator as
the best thing." (Aristotle).
Pausanias I: 33: 2 ff.: At Rhamnous near Marathon is a sanctuary of Nemesis. Pheidias carved
the statue. She holds an apple branch, and an engraved bowl with figures of Aethiopians.
Some say that the river Okeanos is father of Nemesis, and the Aethiopians live beside
Okeanos. Okeanos is not a river, however, but the most distant part of the sea which is
sailed by human beings. It contains the island of Britain, and has Iberians and Celts on its
shores.
Iliad XV: 160: Zeus gives instructions to Iris to go and tell Poseidon to stop fighting and
to rejoin the gods, or go to the holy sea, eis hala dian. Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Tyche
(Chance) is a daughter of Okeanos.
Pausanias IV: 30: 6: mentions a statue of Tyche holding the sphere on her head and
Amalthea's horn in her other hand. Amalthea's horn is the cornucopia; Amalthea, nurse of
Dionysus, was a goat.
According to another story, Amalthea's horn was that of a bull; the infant Zeus drank from
it. A drinking cup in the form of a bull's horn is called a rhyton. Compare also Thor, who
lowered the level of the sea in a drinking contest.
Tyche, fortune, could be either good or bad. Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, received
Hephaestus, with the help of Thetis, when he was thrown out of Olympus. Eurynome and Ophion
ruled over the Titans before Kronos and Rhea. They dwelt on Olympus.
In the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, the Okeanines enter flying, followed later by their
father Okeanos on a griffin. A griffin had the head and wings of an eagle, and the body of a
lion.
Hesiod, Theogony 790: (Okeanos surrounds earth and sea). Far under the wide-pathed earth a
horn of Okeanos flows out of the holy river through night. A tenth part of it is allotted.
Okeanos, winding with nine silvery whirling streams round the earth and broad back of the
sea, falls into the salt water, and the one (part) flows out from a rock a great trouble to
the gods.
"Eis hala piptei" falls into the salt (sea): this may be the waste of waters on which the
earth floated, Hebrew Tehom, as opposed to the waters above the earth, Old Testament,
Genesis 1: 7.
"Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters." (Old Testament, Psalm LXXVII:
19).
Theogony 292: Herakles crossed the poros Okeanoio, the ford, or passage, of Okeanos. Compare
the use of poros' by Alkman, mentioned in Chapter XI supra.
Theogony 265: Thaumas (marvel) married Elektra, daughter of deep-flowing Okeanos. 274:
Gorgons who live beyond glorious Okeanos. ('Glorious' is 'klutos').
242: Doris, daughter (koure) of Okeanos, perfect river. 'Perfect' here is teleeis. 'Telos'
has the primary meaning of completion, end or boundary. 130 ff.: Earth first bore starry
Ouranos... She also bore the fruitless sea (pelagos), Pontus, with raging swell, without
desire and love. But then she lay with Ouranos and produced deep-swirling Okeanos, Koeos,
Krios, Hyperion and Iapetos .... and then Kronos.
107: "halmuros pontos", the briny sea. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 364: "The sea is a tear of
Kronos," a Pythagorean saying.
Among fragments from the Epic Cycle we have bits of the 'War of the Titans. ' "The poet of
the Titanomachy, whether Eumelos the Corinthian or Arktinos, has spoken as follows in his
second book: 'In it were floating golden-faced dumb fish, swimming and playing in the
heavenly water." ' Athenaeus VII: 277D. 'Heavenly' is in Greek 'ambrosios'. To Homer, fish
are 'hieroi', holy (Iliad XVI: 407).
Pausanias VIII: 41: 6: The Phigalians told me that it (the statue of Eurynome) is a wooden
idol tied up with gold chains, like a woman down to the waist, and below that like a fish.
THE OLD ONE OF THE SEA
He ruled the sea before Poseidon. Nereus, Phorkys, and Proteus are three names of 'The Old
One of the Sea'.
Pictures show Nereus with the body of a fish, with a lion, a buck and a snake thrusting
their heads out of his fish body.
Herakles wrestled with Nereus, who assumed different frightening shapes.
Hesiod, Theogony 233, describes Nereus as the eldest son of Pontus.
Triton and Rhodos were two famous children of Poseidon and Amphitrite. In Theogony 931,
Hesiod speaks of Triton of wide force, at the bottom of the sea, in a golden palace of
Amphitrite and Poseidon, holding the foundations of the sea (or: holding the pillars of the
sea).
POSEIDON
Odyssey III: 6: He is Enosichthon, the Earthshaker, Kuanochaites, of dark hair.
V: 292: He takes up his triaina and stirs up the sea to wreck Odysseus. (Ainos = dread).
Homeric Hymn to Poseidon: He is a great god, mover of earth and sea, Pontios (Lord of the
Sea), who has Helicon and wide Aegae. He has a double function, to be a tamer of horses and
a saviour of ships.
Hesiod, Shield of Herakles 105: He is a bull-like earth shaker, taureos; he is a guardian of
Thebes and its walls.
He was the son of Rhea and Kronos. Rhea gave Kronos a foal to devour. The infant was carried
to Rhodes by Rhea, and entrusted to Kapheira, a daughter of Okeanos, to nurse. The Telchines
forged his trident.
The Telchines had a sister, Halia (Greek hals = salt), whom Poseidon married. Rhodos was
their daughter.
Poseidon also married Demeter. He was dark haired, and their son Arion was a horse with a
black mane.
Poseidon wished to be the patron deity of Athens. At a blow from his trident a horse sprang
up from the rocky soil of Attica. The Greek 'hople' is a hoof; 'hoplon' is a weapon. Cf. the
story of Pegasus, who struck Mount Helicon with his hoof, thereby creating the spring of
Hippocrene. He saw Amphitrite of the Golden Spindle dancing with the Nereids on the island
of Naxos, and ravished her. On their marriage he became ruler of the sea.
Pausanias VII: 24: 6 ff., in a passage too long to quote in full here, gives an account of
the destruction of Helike by earthquake and tidal wave. He also distinguishes three kinds of
'quake. The usual warnings are continuous rain-storms or droughts for a long time
beforehand, sultry weather in winter, haze and red glare of the sun in summer, violent wind-
storms, electrical storms in mid-heaven with much lightning, new configurations in the stars
that bring terror to observers.
The fortunes of Athene and Hephaestus were linked, and they shared a temple. We will take
Athene first.
Pausanias IX: 19: 1: In Teumessos in Boeotia there is a sanctuary of Telchinian Athene.
Perhaps a party of Telchinians came to Boeotia from Cyprus.
Iliad IV: 8: Athene has the epithet Alalkomeneis, the Parrier. Zeus notes that two goddesses
help Menelaus, namely Argive Helen and Parrier Athene, whereas Aphrodite wards off disaster
from Paris. Alcis is a Macedonian name for Athene.
Iliad V: 856: Athene helps Diomedes to wound Ares. He draws blood with a wound to the belly.
Brazen Ares gives a shout as loud as nine or ten thousand men joining battle. Brazen Ares is
then seen going up to heaven in a mist.
Iliad XXI: 400: Ares strikes Athene's tasselled aegis, which is proof against even Zeus's
thunderbolt, with his spear. Athene picks up a big rough boulder, a marker in a field, and
hurls it at Ares, hitting him on the neck and making him collapse. His hair is full of dust,
his armour rings out, and he sprawls on the ground. Athene taunts him, then turns her
brilliant eyes away (phaeinos, shining).
Iliad IV: 70: Zeus sends Athene down to earth. She swoops down from the peaks of Olympus
like a meteor (aster) that the Son of Kronos of the Crooked Ways has sent, as a portent to
sailors or to a great army on land, blazing and sending out showers of sparks. Just so did
Pallas Athene rush down to the earth.
HEPHAESTUS
Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, with the help of Thetis, received Hephaestus when he was
flung out of Olympus. It was from a temple shared by Hephaestus and Athene that Prometheus
stole fire.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2: 10: 23, refers to furtum Lemnium, the theft at Lemnos (to
which island Prometheus brought the fire that he stole from heaven).
Hera was the mother of Hephaestus (without Zeus), and probably of Ares.
Another name of Hephaestus is Palamaon. In Iliad 1: 577 ff., Homer tells us that Hephaestus
is the son of Zeus and Hera, and that he makes peace between his parents. Hephaestus
assisted at the birth of Athene from the head of Zeus.
Hephaestus was physically abnormal; his soles and heels were turned backwards, and he rolled
rather than walked. This recalls a story about the origin of human beings in Plato's
'Symposium'.
Iliad XVIII: 395 gives another version of his fall: Thetis and Eurynome, not the Sintians on
Lemnos, saved him.
Hephaestus had the task of making thrones for the Olympians. There was an occasion when Hera
sat on her throne and was paralysed. The throne rose into the air. Only when Dionysus made
Hephaestus drunk, and led him to Olympus on a mule, could Hera be released. The wife of
Hephaestus was Aglaia, the youngest of the Graces (Charites). Charis can mean the charm of
art.
Aeneid VIII: 424 ff.: The Cyclopes, Brontes the Thunderer, Steropes the Lightner, and
Pyrakmon the Fire-Anvil, were making a thunderbolt. They had given it three spokes of
twisted rain, three of rain-cloud, and three of red fire and winged South wind. Now they
were mixing in it terror-flashes, thunderclaps and fear, and rage, with flames that pursue.
Elsewhere they were working on a chariot for Mars with the flying wheels with which he
inflames men and cities; also the aegis that fills with horror, the weapon of angry Pallas
.... They were competing to polish it with golden scales of serpents, with snakes
intertwined, and on the breast of the goddess the Gorgon's head rolling its eyes.
Pallas was said to be the father of Athene. He was winged. Athene killed him and wore his
skin.
The Cyclops Brontes (Thunderer) is one of those named as a father of Athene. The Cyclopes
were close to the Idaean Dactyls, phallic and primordial.
Itonos also was Athene's father, and supervised her education. Athene bore a son, Apollo, to
Hephaestus. Athene and Leto (mother of Apollo) were connected, according to stories current
in Athens and at Delos.
The Greeks had a tradition of unusual things happening in the sky, the sea, and on earth at
the time of the birth of Athene.
Pindar. 0l. VII: 32 ff.: To him the golden-haired one from the sweetly scented shrine said
that he should sail directly from Lerna's shore to a pasture set in the sea, where once the
great king of gods drenched a city with golden snowflakes, at the time when, by the arts of
Hephaestus, with his axe wrought in bronze, Athene, shooting up from the top of her father's
head, gave a great long war cry. Heaven and mother Earth shuddered at her. Iliad II: 653
ff.: In the catalogue of ships (of those who went to Troy) we meet Tlepolemus, a son of
Herakles, who brought nine ships from Rhodes. He had killed his great-uncle Licymnius (a son
of Ares), so fled to Rhodes, where he was favoured by Zeus, king of gods and men; and the
son of Kronos poured down on them divine wealth.
'Divine' here is thespesios. It implies sent from a god, mighty, awful.
Iliad XV: 669: Athene removes the "thespesion" mist that had covered the eyes of the
Achaeans.
Odyssey VII: 42: Odysseus lands in Phaeacia. Athene, disguised as a wondrous, young girl,
leads him to the town. She does not allow the Phaeacians to see him, for she pours a divine
'achlys', mist, round him.
Odyssey IX: 68: Zeus sends a north wind against their ships, with a storm from heaven
(thespesie).
In Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1154, 'thespesios' means prophetic. Homeric Hymn to Athene 7 ff.: At
her birth, Athene stood before Zeus, shaking a sharp spear. Great Olympus raised a loud
battle-cry at the wrath of the bright-eyed one, and earth gave a terrible echoing cry. The
sea was moved, tossed with purple waves; foam suddenly poured forth. The bright son of
Hyperion stopped his swift horses for a long time, until Pallas Athene had taken the
heavenly armour from her immortal shoulders. Wise Zeus rejoiced (gethese).
The break in the sun's routine marks an exceptional occurrence.
Notes (Chapter Twelve: Mystery Religions)
1. The entry under 'Pytho' in the Lexicon of Suidas states that at Delphi there was a bronze
tripod, with a bowl on top, containing divination pebbles which jumped when questions were
put to the god. The Pythia, supported on it or inspired, said what Apollo answered
(literally: what Apollo brought out). Suidas, Lexicon, s. v. Pytho, in Adler, ed., IV: 268-
9, quoted by Kerenyi in 'Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life' translated from
German by R. Manheim; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London). One of the phrases used for an oracle
responding is 'ho theos aneile, ' literally 'the god raised'.
2. Akkadian 'uginna' is a circle. Hebrew 'chugh' tch as in Scottish 'loch') means circle,
horizon, vault of heaven. Compare the Greek 'hugros', wet.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
'KA', AND EGYPTIAN MAGIC
HOMER and the Greek tragic poets often use periphrasis when addressing people. Achilles
might be addressed as "strength of Achilles." The words sthenos, is, menos, bia, each
meaning force of some kind, are used, also kara and kephale, head. The Latin word vis,
strength or quantity, suggests that a digamma was originally present in the Greek word is,
and that it was vis. Hesiod, Theogony 332, even refers to Herakles as "is bias Herakleies",
and Homer refers to Telemachus as "hiere is Telemachoio", the holy power of Telemachus.
Iphi, from is, means 'with might'; iphi anassein means to rule with might. Oidipou kara
means simply Oedipus, but literally it is 'head of Oedipus'. Phile kephale, dear head, is
used in greeting [1] , like the Latin carum caput. Vis, Latin for strength, is personified
as Juno by the writer Ausonius. In the seventh book of the Aeneid, the Fury Allecto in
disguise speaks to Turnus, the prince of the Rutuli, to whom King Latinus has promised his
daughter. She urges him to attack the Tyrrhenians who are threatening to supplant him. An
attack would have divine approval --"caelestum vis magna iubet", the great force of the
celestial ones orders it.
Phaos, light, is used as periphrasis by Homer. (Odyssey XVI: 23), and by Sophocles (Electra
1224). Ophthalmos, eye, is also used.
If we turn to Egyptian, we find a word which seems to correspond, and to explain some
important words in Latin and Greek. 'Ka' is a man's double, and also a bull. It appears in
the caduceus of Mercury, and in the kerukeion of Hermes. In the chapter on the Etruscans we
shall see that caduceus is caducens, leading the Ka.
The Aeolic form of the word is karykeion. The Greek 'eruko' means restrain, control. Hermes
was the psychopompos, escorter of souls. He was not only the messenger from sky to earth,
but also the god who led the soul of a dead person to the house of Hades. He used his staff
to keep them on the right path, like a shepherd with his crook.
The basket used in Dionysiac processions is a kalathos. The root lath in Greek means
'escaping notice'. Is 'Ka' hidden in the basket?
There are some possibilities in Latin. Cacumen means a mountain peak point, or extremity.
Pliny uses it of a pyramid, cacumen pyramidis, 36: 16. Etruscan katec, head, may be ka +
tego, cover. Livy, I: 34, uses culmen of a man's head, on which an eagle deposits his hat.
Cacus, a son of Vulcan and a contemporary of Evander, was a giant of great strength, living
in a cave on the Aventine hill in Rome. He stole the cattle of Geryon, and Hercules killed
him in return.
Camenae is a Latin name for the Muses, and the 'ca' may just possibly be an indication of
the electrical theory of inspiration held by the Greeks (see previous quotation from
Archilochus, "lightning-struck with wine").
The witch mentioned several times by the Latin poet Horace, is named Canidia.
There are examples of words which are likely to contain ka in the Phoenician and Hebrew. In
the Old Testament, Numbers IV, there are instructions for Moses and Aaron for the management
of the tabernacle and ark. When the camp is moved forward, Aaron and his sons have to cover
the ark of testimony with the covering veil, spread a blue cloth on it, and so on (verse 5
f.). The instruments and vessels of the altar are to be spread on a purple cloth on the
altar (verse 13). "The sons of Kohath shall come to bear it; but they shall not touch any
holy thing, lest they die." (verse 15) Kadhosh' in Hebrew means holy. Those who touch the
ark are in danger from the ka or electrical charge that it may carry.
The sound ka, with varying kinds of guttural or laryngeal sound at the start, occurs as qa,
with the Hebrew letter qoph, probably similar to the sound of koppa in the Corinthian
version of the Greek alphabet. It occurs with a kaph, like the Greek kappa; and as cha, the
Hebrew heth.
The Hebrew Kadosh suggests a combination of ka, and dasha, to produce. Qaran is to shine, to
put out horns. Qardom is an axe. Qayin, spear, is an eye, or radiation source, of ka. Qarabh
is to approach, to appear before god. Qebher is a sepulchre (Latin caverna), qesem is an
oracle, qol is a voice. Qatar is to kindle incense, to sacrifice. The connection between
electricity and writing is discussed in Chapter XXII, but we may note here qa'aqa, tattoo,
mark cut, and chaqaq, to engrave, to ordain; a sceptre.
Hebrew words beginning with heth include chaim, life; chabhar, sorcerer (cf. Kabeiro);
chaghagh, to dance, to reel; chaghav, a ravine, such as the chasm at Delphi where the goats
and goatherd found themselves dancing; chamman, sun pillar; chaziz, lightning flash; chazon,
revelation, prophecy. This word is not unlike the Greek schizo, split, and suggests Attus
Navius the augur, who split a stone with a razor.
Words beginning with kaph include kabhodh, glory, weight, soul. It resembles the Latin
caput, head, which may be a source of ka (puteus is a well), as was Delphi, whose other name
was Pytho. Kadh is pitcher, Latin cadus, Greek kados; kamar, a priest, and to be scorched.
It is possible that the Etruscan mer means to take, in which case kamar might be one who
takes or catches ka. Hebrew marach is to rub in, lay on. Kapporeth is the ark cover;
kashaph, sorcerer, to practice magic, suggests the Greek sophos, prudent and clever, and the
Latin sapere, to be prudent. Kashil is an axe or hoe. The Arabic kasdir and the Sanskrit
kastira both mean to shine. The Akkadian kudurru is a stele. The resemblance to the Latin
turris, tower, suggests that it is a tower for obtaining ka. Ark comes from the Latin arca,
a box or chest. Greek arkein and Latin arceo mean to suffice and to ward off. I suggest a
possible link with Etruscan ar, electrical fire, and ka.
There is a second kind of soul in Egyptian, the ba, or heart soul, and a third, the khu, or
spirit soul, which is also the sign for radiance. Perhaps we should think of the ba when we
see the Latin word baculum. It is generally linked to Greek and Sanskrit words mean 'go',
and is seen as an aid to walking. But baculum, stick, is also the word used by Livy for the
lituus [2] . The Greek bakteria was a badge of office of judges. Baculum is used of the
sceptre, and in the Vulgate [3] of a rod of punishment. Psyche is the usual Greek word for
soul or life. It was the possession of psyche which, in the opinion of the early Ionian
physicist Thales, gave the ability to make independent movements, and so distinguished the
planets, for example, which were gods, from mere lumps of inanimate matter. It leaves the
body with the blood on death [4] , and is the breath or sign of life. In Homer, the psyche
is a ghost, bodiless but with form. In general it is the soul or rational part of man, Latin
animus. It is the seat of the 'thumos', i. e. of the will, desires, passions. It is found in
this sense in Homer. In Plato [5] , it is the anima mundi, the world soul. 'Thumos' is the
Greek for the soul as a source of passions, anger, hunger and energy. Plato connects the
word with thuo, which we have met when discussing fire sacrifices. It can be breath, Latin
anima. The word is related to Russian 'dym', smoke.
Menos, bodily strength, often means spirit or rage. It can also mean disposition, like Latin
mens, but it is physical rather than mental. It is used in periphrasis, like bia and kara,
e. g. hieron menos Alkinooio, the holy strength of Alkinous (Odyssey). Sthenos, ardour, is
used in the same way, e. g. sthenos Hektoros, Hector. It is often joined with kartos, and
with alke, each meaning strength. It also means a large quantity of something, like Latin
vis, e. g. ploutou sthenos, great wealth. Vergil has odora canum vis, a pack of keen-scented
hounds [6] .
To sum up: Greek and Latin words for the soul, psyche, thumos, menos, mens, animus, anima,
have significant parallels in the Egyptian ka, ba, and khu. The Homeric mind and Homeric
body are both composite matrices rather than unities, as demonstrated in vase paintings of
the Geometric period. Bastet is an Egyptian animal god, the cat. Its hieroglyph shares with
that of Set the feature of a tail pointing straight up into the air. Compare, for the erect
tails, the electrical significance of Hermes and the ithyphallic statues of Hermes, and the
hoopoe, a sacred bird with a striking erectile crest, a principal actor in the comedy The
Birds of Aristophanes. The Greek for a cat is ailouros, wavy-tail.
Setekh is the Egyptian storm god.
STATUES AND MUMMIES
A man's ka and character could be transferred to an image or statue of a man. If we look at
relief sculptures or paintings of Egyptian gods and pharaohs, we often see some kind of
apparatus framing the figure. It looks like a rod, telescopically jointed, as if it were a
spark gap that can be adjusted for the best sound and visual display. It is shown well in
illustrations in God's Fire and in Hooke's Middle Eastern Mythology. The Hebrew chashuq
means 'junction rod, attachment'. Compare Greek arariskein, to fit, and Latin ars, skill, or
art. Was the ka some kind of electrical light or halo surrounding the head?
Livy tells how an eagle seized the cap of Lucius Tarquinius, flew up with it into the sky,
then descended and replaced it on his head as a 'decus'. The word decus means adornment, or
glory. Tanaquil, his wife, interpreted the omen as a promise of divine favour and future
greatness. 'Culmen' is used of his head, a word which also occurs in the form cacumen,
point, top of a mountain, etc.
Statues of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, 205-182 B. C., were set up, in wooden gilt shrines, by the
priests in every important temple in Egypt. Stelae, engraved slabs, were set up in the
eighth year of his reign, one of them being known later as the Rosetta stone. Were these
statues and shrines electrical devices for producing a glow of divine fire? His title
Epiphanes, from the Greek phaino, reveal, would be remarkably appropriate if so. It is
likely that a throne and footstool would be part of an electrical device for impressing
worshippers. The Greek 'throngs' is the Etruscan word for fear, drouna. Cicero mentions a
lightning strike that destroyed statues of gods [7] .
The Hebrew elilim means empty things, idols. This may perhaps be a clue to statue design.
The Latin adolere, to worship, means to magnify, to worship with fire. The concept of
magnification is important, and the word is only used in the context of worship. I suggest
that the ka was a visible halo which gave the effect of a magnified figure, larger than
life. The Hebrew gadhol means great, 'gadhal' is to be great. Livy says that the patres,
elders, were 'auctores', increasers or originators, at the election of Ancus Martius as king
to succeed Tullius [8] .
When Aeneas went to Cumae to consult the Sibyl, she appeared larger than life as the god
approached and took possession of her [9] . She became "maior videri', greater to behold.
Her hair also did not remain in order, "non comptae mansere comae."
The Latin word altaria is used of the vessels used in sacrifice, perhaps for holding the
sacred fire rather than flesh, which was roasted rather than boiled. 'Altar' does not mean
'altar' in modern English. 'Altaria sunt in quibus igne adoletur', literally 'altaria are
the things in which magnification (worship) by fire takes place. ' The Latin 'altus' is a
participle of the verb alo, nourish, and means nourished, well-grown, tall, high, and deep
if one looks at it from a different viewpoint. In the Old Testament we read that the priest
would elevate offerings and wave them in the air [10] . Hebrew 'nasa' = 'raise'; cf. Greek
anasso, rule. 'Ana' = up, above; 'aisso' = set in rapid motion.
The idea that the ka was a kind of halo enlarging and lighting the outline of a god or king
may throw light on the practice of embalming. Mummification was a means of preserving a
framework for the khu, the spirit soul, to occupy after death, and to assist resurrection.
Osiris was the 'holy ka'. Offerings were brought to tombs in order to keep the ka in the
tomb, and libations were made to the ka of Osiris.
Pyramids and caves would be the best sources of energy to ensure a successful resurrection.
Not all boats in tombs were sun boats decorated with symbols of Ra; some were hennu boats,
of the type that were mounted on sledges. A boat would provide excellent earthing when used
as an ark carrier or coffin transporter [11] . The Hebrew for a threshing sledge, bar-tan,
resembles baraq, lightning.
The Egyptian 'hen' means servant; 'neter hen', priest, is the equivalent of 'kohen'
(Hebrew), priest. At Rome the king was a servus, servant, of the gods.
Several kinds of sceptre appear in Egyptian art and hieroglyphs. The whip or flail is an
obvious sign of royal and divine authority, but the 'tcham' is of special importance. The
sloping top is an eagle. The eagle fits well as a lightning symbol, but the lower part of
the sceptre is less obvious.
One of the interesting sights in Greece is that of an eagle attacking a snake, seizing it in
its talons. This kind of sceptre is a scotch, and the whole thing is a symbol of the
lightning of Zeus destroying the monster snake in the sky. Sophocles writes: "skeptobamon
aetos," the eagle mounted on the sceptre [12] . The Greek aetos, eagle, is probably Hebrew
ayit, bird of prey. A probable link between Egypt and Greece is the word techenu, obelisks
or sunbeams, which sounds like Greek techne, device, skill. Ker, evil, suggests Greek ker,
evil spirit. Neb, lord, may be related to Neptunus. Poseidon, the Greek god, occurs in Greek
in the form Poteidan, lord of earth (da = ga = ge = earth). Ta-neter is Egyptian for 'divine
land'.
The ankh is an Egyptian symbol for life. Is there a link with the Greek onux, onuch-, a hoof
or nail? Pegasus created a spring of water on Mount Helicon with the spark and blow of his
hoof. The ankh will be considered in detail in a later chapter.
Onka, a Phoenician name, is applied to Athene at Thebes, where she was also worshipped as
Athene Kadmeia. Qadhmi, in Hebrew, is an Eastern man, and the story was that Kadmos came to
Greece from the east.
The Egyptian thaireaa, door, resembles the Greek thura, door. Egyptian thehen, lightning,
and Greek thuo, sacrifice with fire, are near enough to suggest that sacrificial fire is the
door to Re, or perhaps Re's fire is the doorway to immortality.
Music and sound effects are mentioned in Egyptian texts. J. B. Pritchard, in A. N. E. T.,
translates from a magical papyrus: "When the gods, rich in magic, spoke, it was the spirit
(ka) of magic, for they were asked to annihilate my enemies by the effective charms of their
speech, and I sent out those who came into being from my body to overthrow that evil enemy
(Apophis)."
There is another myth about the magical power of the name of god. Isis wanted to know Re's
secret name so as to use it for spells. She arranged for Re to be bitten by a snake that she
created. He applied to her for relief from the pain, and eventually told her the secret
name, on condition that no god but Horus should know it. Isis then cured him with a spell
using the secret name. (Quoted by Hooke in his 'Middle Eastern Mythology'). The seven vowels
are found inscribed in triangular shape on late Greek papyri. The Gnostics wrote 'IAOOEI', a
word of power. 'IA' was a shorter version that was also used. The vowels are associated with
the names of the seven archangels. (Vice Chapter IV supra for a reference to YAHWEH)
Egyptian priests were specialists in magic. The Hebrew 'kashaph' is 'magician' (Latin sapere
= know). They used magic to control people and things. Knowledge of the names of gods and
devils was needed, and was imparted to the dead person in his funeral rites, so that he
could pass safely through the various gates and regions of the world after death. Models of
the sky, with sun-boats containing the khu of the deceased, enabled him to travel in the sky
and be received in heaven.
Sympathetic magic was also used by the priests at Egyptian Thebes. Figures of Apep were
trampled on. The purpose would be to ensure that there would be no repetition of the battle
in the sky which threatened the earth.
Nektanebos, in about 356 B. C., is said to have had wax models of ships and a bowl of water.
He would put on a prophet's garment, a tunica or a network cloak and marshal the movements
of ships and men with an ebony rod. There is a story that Aristotle gave Alexander the Great
a box of toy soldiers with weapons pointing the wrong way, cut bowstrings and so on,
together with magic words and instructions for use. There is also a story of a wax model of
a crocodile being thrown into a river, turning into a real one, and seizing a man.
Magical rites and incantations were used to install souls in animals, to cure illnesses, to
provide a home for the dead person by preserving the khat, or physical body, and to raise
the dead.
The means for achieving all this is the god Thoth. He is referred to as the god who made
Osiris victorious, just as the Greek Hermes is referred to as the slayer of the monster
Argos. (Horus is called the Lord of the Divine Staff whereby all the gods have been made
victorious, and Hermes Trismegistos, Thrice Great Hermes, is a name of Thoth). He was the
"son of Aner, coming forth from the two Aners?" Egyptian aner is a stone. (Budge).
The ibis is a bird renowned for its skill in killing snakes, and Thoth has the head of an
ibis to symbolise his victory over the snake-like monster in the sky.
The importance of Thoth can be gauged from the Egyptian belief that it was through his word
that the world was created.
The co-operation of Thoth was achieved by the devices whose aims and procedures were:
1. To bring down electricity from the mountain tops. In Egypt this meant in practice
building artificial mountains, pyramids. Pur, fire, occurs in Greek place names, such as
Pyrgos (= tower).
2. To find places other than pyramids where he is at home, e. g. caves. Caves would be
especially sought for as the voltage gradient between atmosphere and earth declined from the
high point of a big natural disturbance such as those of the 2nd and 1st millennia B. C., of
which there is plenty of evidence. The Egyptian symbol for a deity, neter, has the same
consonants as the Greek antron, cave. In Cicero's De Divinatione we read of gods being in
caves, and of a vis terrae, earth force. This is most unlikely to have been gaseous or a
vapour. It is more likely to have been electrical, probably piezoelectric as a result of
severe earthquakes, of which there were many, at Delphi in particular. Ovid writes
"Castalium antrum", the Castalian cave, of the oracle at Delphi, and Livy uses the word
specus (chasm, ravine, water channel) of the place where the Sibyl sat.
3. To capture him from the atmosphere in condensers, capacitors, arks, chests, coffins,
Leyden jars, whichever term one wishes to use today to denote an early form of electrical
storage device. The snake was a symbol for electricity; it was said that an ark contained a
snake. One of the priests in a temple was the wab. His duty was to wash the statue. Probably
water was used to assist in obtaining electrical effects. The w of wab suggests the hard l
of the Slavonic languages, so we may see here a connection with the Latin lavo, wash.
4. To use a staff, probably to detect variations in electrical conditions, including the
state of rocky ground resulting from piezo-electric effects. The sceptre could also be used,
through magnetism, to move and look like a snake and to impress viewers.
A contest between Moses and the Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambres is mentioned in Old
Testament, Exodus VII: 10, and in New Testament, 2 Timothy III: 8, and de Grazia has
suggested that the brazen serpent could have been a device for the electrical treatment of
the sick. Moses was learned in all Egyptian wisdom (New Testament, Acts VII: 22).
The study of sound effects associated with arcing between terminals, and perhaps with the
Aeolian harp effect of high winds, proceeded on the lines of sympathetic magic. Secret words
of power, based on a succession of vowel sounds such as were discussed in Chapter IV, could
be used for good, or for evil. They might be uttered with the aim of triggering a response
from a capacitor which was slow to charge. To imitate the sound of the god's presence could
be a dangerous act.
The priest-electricians may have used the words pach, and lamina. The Hebrew pach is a plate
of metal. It also means a snare, danger or calamity. The plural, pachim, means glow, heat,
lightning. The Latin lamina is a sheet of metal, especially silver. It is tempting to see in
these two words a clue to the construction of a storage device for the electrical god,
perhaps on the lines of a Leyden jar or a modern capacitor. The Latin poet Ovid, Fasti I:
208: ff. tells that a praetor (Cincinnatus) made the possession of laminae a crime.
Fabricius, censor in 276 B. C., expelled a leading senator for possessing ten pounds in
weight of silver laminae. It is probable that more than the mere possession of riches was
behind this. The Latin word maiestas means not only majesty but also treason. Literally, it
is being greater, and could imply making oneself look greater. The Hebrew elilim means
hollow things, and idols. Lamina can mean a threshing-floor, and will be discussed later in
the chapter dealing with the Etruscans.
The whole electrical theory and apparatus in Egypt was available for achieving resurrection
of the human spirit after death. Pharaohs were at the head of the queue, but basic funeral
rites were performed for all. Our chief source of information about the ceremonies is The
Book of the Dead. A paperback translation by Sir Wallis Budge is available (Arkana, London,
1986). The Greek historian Herodotus describes embalming methods in Book 2 of his history.
The ceremonies are a mixture of ritual and incantation. The soul is given power to survive
in the afterlife and to ascend to heaven. For example, the mouth of the embalmed person is
touched with a hoof and with an iron tool, so that he may be able to utter names of deities
and of parts of gateways, and magical words which will ensure his safety. The hoof, Greek
onuch-, is a symbol of electrical power, and iron's reputation rests partly on its
properties as a conductor of electricity and for its magnetic associations. The human soul
may suffer many transmutations on its way to the stars, where Plato, for one, placed its
origin, mounting each soul on a star as if on a chariot, as we see in his dialogue Timaeus.
The scarab may be another link between earth and sky. Karabos, or skarabos, Latin
scarabaeus, is a stag beetle, so named in English because of its remarkable horns, such as
the ancients claimed to have seen on an object in the sky. More details of the resurrection
technique are given in the later chapter on sanctification and resurrection. Egyptian
magicians claimed to have rule over water. In the Westcar Papyrus there is a story of a
Pharaoh, Seneferu, who was rowed about on a lake by twenty pretty girls. When one of them
dropped a valuable ornament in the water, the priest Tchatcha em ankh was ordered to recover
it. He spoke words of power (hekau), which caused the water to be heaped up, and recovered
the ornament. The priest lived in the time of Cheops, or Khufu, 4th Dynasty. The document
was written during the 18th Dynasty, about 1550 B. C. (conventional dating).
Further material concerning water is found in The Book of the Dead, Chapter 163. Osiris Auf-
ankh prays to the soul lying prostrate in the body, "whose flame comes into being from out
of the fire which blazes within the sea (or water) in such wise that the sea (water) is
raised up on high out of the fire thereof ...". It is a prayer that the flame may give
eternal life to Osiris Auf-ankh. Further on, it is clear that the god Amen, the divine Bull-
Scarab, is being addressed, the lord of the divine utchats.
The resemblance to the story of Moses and the crossing of the Red Sea, Exodus XIV: 21 ff.,
is striking. Moses stretched out his hand, and the waters were divided, so that the
Israelites could cross.
One of the plagues of Egypt mentioned in Exodus was river-water running red with blood.
Cicero mentions a shower of bloody rain and rivers running red (De Divinatione II: 27).
We have seen some links between Egyptian and Hebrew. There is material from Phoenicia and
further east which may have electrical significance.
The Babylonian goddess Ishtar resembles Aphrodite. She was powerful and dangerous. After the
flood she wore a necklace.
The Syrian monarch Ben Hadad is named, I suggest, after the Greek word for a torch, dais,
daidos, Latin taeda. With 'son' for Ben, and the definite article for 'ha', it is possible
that Ben Hadad gave himself the title of "Son of the Torch", just as the Persian king's
viceroy was the rod of Set.
The Akkadian 'Shamash', the sun goddess, Ugaritic 'Shapash', is often called 'The Torch of
the Gods'.
The Greek tripod cauldron, lebes --lebetos, is, I suggest, el bet, the house of el.
Similarly, the dragon that Herakles killed on his journey to fetch the golden apples of the
Hesperides had a Semitic name, Ladon, El Adon, Lord El. And while on the subject of the sky,
the Phoenicians, the 'red people', wore feather headdresses; cf. Quetzalcoatl.
Terebinthos, a Greek word with pre-Greek undertones like asaminthos, bath tub, and
labyrinthos, is the turpentine tree. The Hebrew for terebinth is elah. The pine, Greek
elate, was of great importance to the Greeks; torches were made from it, and the Egyptians
used the resin to fill the emptied skull of a mummy.
The psalmist's disapproval of Greek-style sacrifices emerges in Psalm L, v. 13: "Thinkest
thou that I will eat bull's flesh, and drink the blood of goats?" At Aegira in Achaea the
priestess of Earth drank fresh bull's blood before descending into a cave to prophesy.
More instances of the close relation between Hebrew and Greek can be found. Hebrew has arar,
to curse; Greek has are, or ara, prayer or curse. Hebrew zabhach, slaughter, matches the
Greek sphazo. But one of the most suggestive is Hebrew cherebh, sword, compared with Greek
cheir, hand. Psalm CXXXVI :12 has "with a stretched out arm." Psalm XXII: 20 reads: "Deliver
my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog."
The Hebrew reads not 'power', but 'hand', and in this context one thinks of Greek chrysaor,
with golden sword. 'Aor', sword, looks interestingly like the verb aioreisthai, to hover, be
suspended in the air. Hebrew or = light. Chrysaor is applied especially to gods, Apollo,
Artemis, and Demeter. It has been suggested that aor is the sickle of Demeter, the bow of
Artemis, and the lightning of Zeus. Perhaps it is the golden sword suspended in the sky, the
hand or arm of Psalms CXXXVI and XXII, the Greek cheir, Hebrew cherebh.
We end this section with a word which is a bridge between Greece, Egypt and Phoenicia, sky,
earth, and the caves in the earth.
Elibatos, Doric alibatos, is a Greek word translated as high or steep. In Homer it is always
as an epithet of petre, rock or the plural petrai, crags, (Iliad XV: 273 etc). It occurs as
an epithet of oros, mountain, and akra, peak and is used of the Olympian throne of Zeus in
The Birds of Aristophanes, line 1732. One may compare Greek oros, mountain, with Hebrew or,
light.
In Odyssey IX: 243, the Cyclops puts an elibatos rock against the entrance to his cave.
It is used like the Latin altus, high or deep, e. g. "antro en elibato," in a deep cave,
Hesiod, Theogony 483. It is also applied to Tartarus, to keuthmon, hiding place, and to
pelagos, sea. Keuthmon is used by Pindar, Pythian IX: 34, to mean hollows of a mountain, and
of the nether world by Hesiod, Theogony 158, and by Aeschylus, Eumenides 805, to mean a most
holy place, like the adyton of a temple.
The derivation of the word has caused difficulties. It clearly cannot be from helios, the
sun, 'traversed by the sun', because the sun does not traverse all the places to which the
word is applied. Hesychius quotes alyps, equivalent to petre, a rock.
I suggest that it is from El, god, and batos, trodden, and means 'where El goes', for el is
electricity from the earth as well as from the sky. One may compare the Greek for a cave,
antron, with Egyptian neter, god, divine.
Notes (Chapter Thirteen: 'KA" and Egyptian magic)
1. Homer: Iliad VIII: 281
2. Livy: I: 18: 7
3. Old Testament, Isaiah: X: 24
4. Homer: Iliad XIV: 518
5. Plato: Timaeus 30b, 34b, etc.
6. Vergil: Aeneid IV: 132
7. Cicero: De Divinatione I: XII
8. Livy: I: 32
9. Vergil: Aeneid VI: 49
10. Old Testament, Numbers V: 25
11. De Grazia: God's Fire pp. 85, 116
12. Sophocles: fr. 766
13. Thoth was a peacemaker. Was he seen as a god who separated opponents? Appropriately
enough, in electro-magnetic terms, like poles repel. The Greek 'kreas', flesh, is another of
the words used, like 'head', and 'strength', for a person, especially when addressing a
person. It resembles the Latin 'creare', to create. Perhaps 'kreas, ' is another instance of
'ka', and creation is a flow of ka. See also the Appendix re the priests' language at
Delphi.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BOLTS FROM THE BLUE
THIS chapter is devoted to examples of meteors and thunderbolts, and intervention by
deities. It also deals with the question of the Greek prutanis, and the Etruscan lightning-
averter.
In the archery contest at the funeral games for Anchises, the arrow shot by Acestes caught
fire and marked its path with flames until it was burnt up and disappeared. It was like
those stars which often come loose in the sky and cross it, drawing their tresses after them
in their flight. Vergil, Aeneid V: 522ff..
Homer, Iliad VIII: 133 ff.: Zeus saves the Trojans by thundering and sending a terrible
shining bolt. He sends it to earth in front of Diomedes' horses. There rises a great flame
of burning sulphur.
Iliad XIV: 412 ff.: Telamonian Ajax picks up a stone and throws it at Hector, making him
spin round like a top. He falls, just as an oak tree falls under the attack of father Zeus,
and a great smell of sulphur comes from it.
Note: rhombos, a top; also strombos. Vergil, Aeneid V: 319: fulminis alis: Nisus, in the
race, is swifter than the wings of a thunderbolt.
Aeneid VIII: 524: Evander promises help to Aeneas, and Venus thunders and lightens. Weapons
are seen in the sky, and trumpets sound. Pausanias V: 11: 9: When Pheidias had finished his
statue of Zeus, he prayed for a sign of approval. A bolt struck the pavement. (A bronze urn
was still there when Pausanias visited the place).
Hesiod, Catalogue of Women: Zeus laid low Eetion with a flaming bolt because he tried to
seize Demeter.
Frazer, The Golden Bough, mentions the name "thunder besom," given to mistletoe, and
suggests that Balder was killed by lightning.
Lucretius V: 745: "Auster fulmine pollens," South Wind mighty with the thunderbolt. In III:
1034, he refers to one of the Scipios, conquerors of Carthage, as fulmen belli, a
thunderbolt of war.
Odyssey V: 128: Calypso tells Odysseus that Zeus killed Iasion by striking him with a
shining thunderbolt; arges, shining, not psoloeis, smoky.
The Greek for a flash of lightning is sterope, asterope, astrape; Latin fulgur.
Zeus is Prytanis (Lord) of lightnings and thunderbolts. The word prytanis in classical times
at Athens meant the President, one of a committee of fifty deputies who formed part of the
Boule or Council of Five Hundred.
It used to be thought that prytanis came from proteros, and protos, words that mean
priority. It is much more likely that we are dealing with pyr, fire, tanuo, stretch, and
tinasso, shake or brandish.
Iliad XIII: 243: asteropen tinoxen, he hurled lightning; Iliad XVII: 5ff: aigida tinaxen, he
brandished the aegis. Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus 917: to brandish in his two hands the
fire-breathing bolt. I suggest that the prytanis was originally he who tended the fire, the
stoker for the sacred fire of Hestia, Latin Vesta.
The Greek keraunos is the thunderbolt, Latin fulmen. Bronte is thunder, Latin tonitrus.
Frontac is the Etruscan for thunderer. The Greek skeptos means a thunderbolt, also a squall
from above, with thunder. The verb skepto is used of lightning striking, Aeschylus,
Agamemnon: 302,310.
Zeus struck Odysseus's swift ship with a smoky thunderbolt. Aithon means fiery, of
lightning; also of metal, flashing. It is applied to tripods, Iliad IX: 123; XXIV: 233.
Cicero mentions the Torch of Apollo, Phoebi fax (De Divinatione I: XI).
The Greek lailaps is a storm, especially a whirlwind sweeping upwards. Elijah and Romulus
are both described as having been taken up into the sky.
A link between sound, oracles, and lightning is illustrated by the resemblance between the
Hebrew ne'um, oracle, and na'am to murmur. The humming and buzzing sound, caused by
electricity, was interpreted as an indication of the presence of the god.
The sound could be heard in the sky as well as in a temple or physics laboratory. Edward
Whymper, in his Scrambles Amongst the Alps, writes of an electrical storm:
"The respective parties seem to have been highly electrified on each occasion. Forbes says
his fingers 'yielded a fizzing sound', and Watson says that his 'hair stood on end in an
uncomfortable but very amusing manner, ' and that 'the veil on the wide-awake of one of the
party stood upright in the air. '" Farther on, in Appendix B, 'Struck by lightning on the
Matterhorn', he mentions injuries, a long sore on the arm, and a leg weak and swollen next
day. Being struck resembled a shock from a galvanic battery. (The date of the expedition was
1869) Lucretius, VI: 1166, mentions ulcers as coming from sacer ignis, holy fire.
The above passage might be a description of an encounter with Apollo. He was the god of
music, of healing and of plague, and he struck from afar.
The French guide R. Frison Roche, in his book First on The Rope, 1940, describes an
electrical storm high up on one of the Aiguilles of Mont Blanc. There were violent gusts of
wind, thunder, then silence and calm. Mist gathered. The statue of the Virgin on the summit
was wrapped in flickering blue flame, her head surrounded with an aureole of fire. Invisible
hands seemed to be pulling at their hair. His companion, Jean Servettaz, said: "Les abeilles
bourdonnent," the bees are buzzing, "get down quickly, lightning's going to strike!" They
climbed down from the ridge and took shelter under an overhang just as lightning shattered
the rocks on the ridge.
This description of the approach of an electrical storm has points in common with the
accounts of the theophanies in The Bacchae of Euripides and in the Oedipus at Colonus of
Sophocles. Perhaps when we see a hieroglyph or relief of an animal with tail pointing
straight up, as in the case of the Egyptian god Set, we should think of the veil on the wide
awake standing upright in the air, of the buzzing sound of an imminent thunderbolt, and of
the bees that tended the infant Zeus in the cave in Crete.
'Arseverse' is an Etruscan incantation to avert lightning. It appears in an inscription at
Cortina addressed to Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire. 'Ar' is Etruscan for fire from the
sky; 'ara' is Latin for an altar, the place to which divine fire is enticed. Latin 'verto'
means I turn; severto, I turn aside.
There was a temple at Rome, the Bidental, or Fulminar, dedicated to lightning. It may have
been named after forked lightning. In Greece, a place struck by lightning was enelusios. At
Rome, a curb, puteal, was put round the spot in the Comitium where Attus Navius split the
whetstone with a razor.
INTERVENTIONS BY DEITIES AND HEROES (ALL FROM THE ILIAD)
III: 375: Menelaus fights with Paris, gets hold of his helmet and would have hauled him
away, had not Aphrodite broken the leather helmet strap under his chin.
381: Aphrodite then surrounds Paris with mist, carries him to his perfumed bedroom, and goes
off to summon Helen.
IV: 127: Athene, in disguise, urges the Trojan Pandarus to shoot Menelaus, thereby breaking
the truce. Athene wards off the arrow from the flesh and guides it to the buckle of his
belt, so that the wound is only a scratch.
V: 311: Aphrodite rescues her son Aeneas, who has been struck by a huge stone hurled by
Diomedes. She puts her arms round him and veils him in a fold of her gleaming peplos.
V: 340: Diomedes pursues Aphrodite, wounds her in the hand, and ichor flows out, ichor which
flows in the veins of the immortal gods. They do not eat food or drink fiery wine, so are
bloodless and are called immortal. Aphrodite gives a great cry, and lets go her son. Phoebus
Apollo picks him up and saves him with a dark cloud. Aphrodite borrows Ares's chariot to
drive home to Olympus.
X1: 690: Nestor recalls his youth, when he drove back the Eleans and took their cattle in
revenge. He went to Pylos, which had few men left to defend it since Herakles had attacked
it, and the best had been killed.
XIII: 242: Idomeneus emerges from his hut clad in armour. He looks like the lightning that
the Son of Kronos brandishes from shining Olympus, giving a sign to mortals. Thus the bronze
flashed on the breast of Idomeneus as he ran. XV: 262: Apollo inspires Hector. "Speaking
thus he breathed menos into the general." Menos may be translated here as ardour.
XV: 308: As Hector led the Trojans forward, Phoebus Apollo went in front, his shoulders clad
in mist, holding the aegis with its tasselled fringe, which Hephaestus gave Zeus for
striking fear into men.
XVIII: 202 ff.: Upon the death of Patroclus, Achilles emerges, stands on the rampart and
shouts at the Trojans. Athene lays her aegis over his shoulders and sheds a golden mist
round his head. His body emits a blaze of light.
XVIII: 223 ff.: The horses with the beautiful hair backed away on their chariots, scenting
trouble, and the charioteers were amazed when they saw the steady fire burning on the head
of the valiant son of Peleus. The bright-eyed goddess Athene kept the fire burning.
XVIII: 239: "Ox-eyed Hera sent the tireless sun unwillingly into the streams of Ocean."
Unwillingly, because she was shortening the day. Compare Odyssey XXIII: 243: Athene kept the
night waiting at its furthest limit, and she held back Dawn of the Golden Throne at the edge
of Ocean, and did not allow the swift steeds to be yoked, which bring daylight to men,
Lampos and Phaethon, the colts that draw the Dawn.
Note: Only here does Dawn have a chariot.
XX: 321: When Achilles prepares to kill Aeneas,
Poseidon goes down to the battlefield. He spreads mist before Achilles's eyes, and carries
Aeneas up into the air so that he flies over the ranks of men and lands in another part of
the battlefield.
XIII: 59: Poseidon encourages the two Aiantes. He touches each of them with his staff and
fills them with strength and resolution. Ajax the son of Oileus realises afterwards that it
was Poseidon, looking like Kalchas, who had encouraged them. He recognised him by his
ichnia, footprints, and knemai, legs. The word here for staff is skepanion, similar to
skeptron. XVI: 458: Zeus sends a shower of bloody rain to the earth (eraze), before the
death of Sarpedon. Cf. Hebrew eretz, land.
Cf. XI: 53: When Agamemnon arms himself, Zeus sends drops of bloody rain from the aither,
because he is going to hurl many brave men down to Hades.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LOOKING LIKE A GOD
OLIVE oil, as well as being valuable for food, light, medicine, and general cosmetics, could
help a human to emulate the electrical radiance of a statue or god. Unlike ambrosia and
nectar, it was available for mere mortals.
Our first reference is to the Odyssey, III: 464 ff. Telemachus is about to leave Pylos,
where he has been asking for news of his father. A feast is prepared for his departure.
Polykaste, Nestor's daughter, gives him a bath, anoints him with olive oil, and puts a tunic
and cloak round him. He steps out of the bath looking like an immortal god.
Baths and oil are frequently mentioned in the Odyssey, and it is well known that athletes
rubbed themselves with oil and scraped themselves with a strigil. Before looking at further
quotations, it would be as well to look at some Greek words.
The olive tree, elaia, was sacred to Athene, who first planted it, either at Colonus
(Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, 701), or on the Acropolis. It is described as chrusea, Pindar
01. XI: 13, golden, or xanthe, like Vergil's flava oliva, yellow, but most often as glauke.
(Athene is glaukopis, bright-eyed).
Moria, usually plural moriai, sc. elaiai, is the sacred olive in the Academy Aristophanes
(Clouds, 1005); hence all olives growing in 'sekoi', or temple precincts, as opposed to
'idiai', privately owned. Zeus Morios is the guardian of the sacred olives, Sophocles,
Oedipus at Colonus 705. Elaios is the wild olive, kotinos, Latin oleaster, used in making
crowns for the Olympic games. Elaion is olive oil.
EXAMPLES, FROM HOMER, OF THE USE OF OLIVE OIL
Iliad XIV: 170: Olive oil is 'tethyomenon', sweetly smelling. Hera cleanses herself with
ambrosia, then anoints herself with olive oil, whose fragrance, when stirred in Zeus's
palace, reaches heaven and earth. She combs her hair and plaits her shining locks.
'Tethyomenon' is also applied to 'alsos', a grove.
Iliad XXIII: 186: Achilles threatens to give the body of Hector to the dogs. Aphrodite wards
off the dogs day and night, and anoints the body with rose-scented olive oil. Odyssey II:
339: Telemachus prepares to set off for Pylos for news of his father. He goes to the
storeroom in his father's palace, where are gold, bronze, clothes, and fragrant olive oil.
Odyssey XIII: 372: When Odysseus wakes up on the shore of Ithaca where the Phaeacians have
brought him in their ship, Athene helps him. He hides his treasures, given him by the
Phaeacians, in a cave, and the two of them sit down at the foot of a sacred olive tree and
plan the destruction of the presumptuous suitors.
Odyssey VI: 79 ff.: Nausicaa, daughter of Alkinous, is to go with the maidservants to the
river to wash the dirty clothes. Her mother gives her food and drink for the outing, and
olive oil in a golden lekythos, oil flask.
Line 96: When the laundry work is over, they bathe, and rub themselves with olive oil,
before eating their food on the river bank. Then Nausicaa begins the molpe --ritual song and
dance --as they play with a ball.
Line 211 ff.: When Odysseus appears, Nausicaa orders her maids to give him clothes and olive
oil.
Line 227 ff.: After he has washed and anointed himself with olive oil, Athene makes him look
taller and sturdier, with hair like hyacinths hanging from his head. Just as when a skilled
man, trained by Hephaestus and Pallas Athene, applies a layer of gold on a silver object,
putting a beautiful finish on his work so Athene poured down beauty on his head and
shoulders. Then he went and sat by the sea-shore, radiant with beauty and grace.
Stilbon, radiant, is a name for the planet Mercury. Odyssey VIII: 11 ff.: Athene, disguised
as a herald of King Alkinous, urges the people to go to the assembly, where they will hear
about the stranger who has arrived at the palace, looking like one of the immortals. Her
words arouse universal excitement. The assembly ground and seats are quickly filled, and
there are many who marvel when they see the wise son of Laertes. Athene has poured down
grace from heaven on his head and shoulders, and made him taller and sturdier to behold, so
that he should seem a respected and revered friend in the eyes of all the Phaeacians, and
may perform the many trials that the Phaeacians may make of him.
Odyssey VIII: 450: As soon as Odysseus had fastened the coffer containing the presents given
him by the Phaeacians, the housekeeper invited him to have a bath. When the maids had bathed
him and anointed him with olive oil, they put a beautiful cloak and tunic on him. He left
the bath, and went to join the men, who were drinking wine.
Odyssey X: 365 ff.: Circe baths and oils him, puts a fine cloak and tunic round him, leads
him into the hall, and sets him on a beautiful chair decorated with silver, and puts a
footstool under his feet. A maidservant brings water in a beautiful golden jug, and pours
it, for him to rinse his hands, over a silver basin.
Odyssey VII: 105 ff.: In Alkinous's palace, the maids work at the loom, and sit turning the
spindles, like leaves of a tall poplar. The liquid olive oil drips from the close-woven
linen cloth.
References to oil in the Iliad are fewer than in the Odyssey, but the following are
noteworthy: Iliad XIX: 126: Agamemnon ends the feud with Achilles, blaming Ate, eldest
daughter of Zeus, for blinding his judgement. He tells the story of Hera's deception of
Zeus. When Zeus realised that he had been deceived, he expelled from Olympus Ate of the
glossy hair --liparoplokamos. Liparos means sleek, glossy, oiled. 'Lip elaio' means 'with
olive oil'. Plokamos is a lock of hair.
XXIV: 587: Hector's body is to be washed, anointed with oil, then wrapped in a fine pharos
and tunic.
It is an interesting coincidence that pharos (pronounced slightly differently) is also the
name of an island off Alexandria famous for its lighthouse, and that pharos comes to mean a
lighthouse.
The Latin for olive oil is oleum, and occurs in the phrase 'oleum addere camino, ' to put
oil on the fire; Horace, Satires II: 3: 321. Greek has the phrase 'to put a fire out with
pitch and olive oil'.
Oleum is the word used in the Vulgate to imply spirit, joy, in Old Testament, Isaiah LXI: 3,
and New Testament Hebrews I: 9.
AMBROSIA
It is the food of the gods. In the poems of Sappho and Alkman, it is a drink. It is an
unguent in Iliad XIV: 170. Hera began her toilet by removing all dirt from her beautiful
skin with ambrosia, and then anointing herself with olive oil.
Odyssey IV: Menelaus gives Telemachus an account of Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, and
what he told Menelaus.
When becalmed and short of provisions, Menelaus and his crew were helped by Eidothea,
daughter of Proteus. She dressed Menelaus and his men in the skins of freshly flayed seals,
and applied ambrosia under each man's nose (line 445) to counteract the smell of the seals.
The word for seal is ketos. It is used to mean a sea monster, and also a whale. There is a
possibility of confusion over the words ambrosios and ambrosia. The Sanskrit 'a mrita' means
not dying. Semitic 'anbar', ambergris, is a magic perfume. Ambrosia may originally have been
an adjective, with food or fodder as its noun. Ambrotos, a-brotos, means not mortal.
Ambrosios is rarely used of persons, but is applied to night and to sleep.
It is applied to all property of the gods, e. g. hair. Iliad 1: 529: Zeus nodded with his
dark brows; the ambrosial locks fell forward from the Lord's immortal head; he shook great
Olympus.
Dress. Iliad V: 338: Diomedes attacks Aphrodite. He strikes her hand through the ambrosial
garment that the Graces had worked for her. Ichor, the immortal (ambrotos) blood of the
goddess, came out.
Sandals. Iliad XXIV: 341: Hermes puts on his beautiful sandals, golden and ambrosial, and
flies down to Troy and the Hellespont to guide Priam.
Voice and Song. Homeric Hymn to Artemis, line 18: At Delphi she leads the beautiful dance of
the Graces and Muses. They sing hymns to Leto with their ambrosial voice.
Fodder. Iliad V: 369: Iris puts ambrosial fodder beside the horses that draw the chariot of
Ares.
Beauty. Odyssey XVIII: 193: Athene causes Penelope to fall asleep, then, so that the suitors
shall admire her, she gives her immortal (ambrota) gifts. She first cleanses her lovely face
with ambrosial beauty (kallos) such as Kythereia of the beautiful crown (stephanos) uses for
anointing when she enters the delightful dance of the Graces. (Himeroeis, delightful,
implies 'arousing desire').
Pindar uses ambrosios of verses. Iliad XV: 153 ff.: Zeus sits on Mount Ida in a perfumed
mist.
BRONZE
Not only people, but buildings, could be radiant. Odyssey VII: 81 ff.: Homer gives a
description of the palace and gardens of King Alkinous.
Odysseus was full of hesitation before he went up to the bronze threshold, for a radiance
like that of the sun or moon was in the lofty palace of the great king. Walls of bronze
(chalkeoi) were built on each side from the door to the back, with a coping of blue enamel
(kuanoio). Golden doors enclosed the strong building, and silver posts stood on the bronze
threshold, with a silver lintel, and a golden door handle. There were golden and silver dogs
on each side, made with great cunning by Hephaestus to guard Alkinous's palace, immortal and
ageless for ever .... Golden boys on strong pedestals (bomon, also = altars) stood holding
blazing torches to light the banqueters in the palace at night.
Aeneid I: 447: When Aeneas and the Trojans reached Carthage, they found that Dido's people
were building a temple, rich in gifts and in the presence (numen) of the goddess, with a
brazen threshold rising by steps. The beams were joined by bronze, and bronze doors groaned
on their hinges.
Pausanias X: 5: 11: Pausanias writes that the third temple to be built at Delphi was of
bronze, not remarkable since Akrisios made a bronze room for his daughter. He does not
believe the story that it was built by Hephaestus, or Pindar's ode about the golden Sirens
over the pediment.
The story was that this temple dropped into a chasm, or was consumed by fire.
The Iliad is full of references to flashing bronze armour.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HERAKLES AND HEROES
HERODOTUS writes about Egypt in the second book of his history. In Chapters 42 and 43 he
discusses Herakles, reporting that the Egyptians regarded him as one of the twelve gods.
Greeks, he says, took the name Herakles from Egypt, that is, those Greeks who gave the name
Herakles to the son of Amphitryon. Amphitryon and Alkmene were of Egyptian parentage.
Seventeen thousand years before the reign of Amasis, the twelve gods came from the eight,
and Herakles was one of them. Such is the Egyptian story.
Herodotus went to Phoenicia and talked to the priests of the temple of Herakles in Tyre,
where there were two obelisks, or pillars (stelae). The priests said that the temple was as
old as Tyre, at least 2,300 years.
At Thasos, he says, there was a temple dedicated to the Thasian Herakles, built by the
Phoenicians who founded Thasos after sailing in search of Europe. This was five generations
before Herakles, son of Amphitryon, was born in Greece. There was a story, he says, of
Herakles allowing the Egyptians to bring him in bonds to a sacrifice, and exerting his
strength (alke) and killing them all.
Herakles as hero is a link not only between god and man, but between sky and earth. From the
details of his life story we may learn a little of what was happening in the sky in ancient
times, just as his links with Troy may help in the reconstruction of the chronology of the
times. The birth stories contradict each other. We read that he was the son of Amphitryo,
but we also read that he was the son of Zeus, and incurred thereby the jealousy of Hera.
Later in his life she sent Lyssa, madness, to afflict him, and epilepsy was known as the
nosos Herakleie, Herakles' sickness. The connection with electricity accounts for the magnet
being called the Heraklean stone.
Although the Latin poet speaks of the 'ternox', the threefold night of Herakles' conception,
it was still thought necessary to carry out an adoption process when Herakles was finally
taken up into heaven. Frazer, The Golden Bough, describes such rites. Hera got into bed,
clasped Herakles, pushed him down through her clothes, and let him fall to the ground,
imitating a real birth. Such a procedure was usual in Greece.
Just before the annual festival of Herakles at Thebes, offerings were made to Galinthias,
daughter of Proteus and a priestess of Hecate. She had been turned into a weasel by the
Moirai, who were annoyed that she had assisted at the birth of Herakles.
Mayani, in 'The Etruscans Begin to Speak', quotes an Etruscan mirror engraving. Juno is
giving the adult Herakles milk from her breast. Mayani refers to a legend recorded by
Diodorus Siculus, that Juno once fed the infant Hercules.
While still in his cradle he killed two snakes sent by Hera. When he grew up, he was given a
choice between Pleasure and Virtue. His choice of Virtue accords with his life of struggle
against monsters, and against death itself.
In a fit of madness he killed his wife, Megara, and his children. The Delphic oracle told
him to serve Eurystheus, lord of Tiryns, for twelve years, and it was Eurystheus who imposed
the twelve labours. It was on his journey to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides that
Herakles killed the Egyptian king Busiris. He also killed the dragon Ladon that guarded the
apples. When the labours had been accomplished, Herakles led an expedition against Laomedon,
king of Troy, which was being attacked by a monster sent by Poseidon. Laomedon promised
Herakles a gift of marvellous horses if he rid Troy of the monster. When Herakles was
successful, Laomedon refused the reward. Herakles attacked and captured the city. His army
included Telamon, father of Ajax, and Peleus, father of Achilles.
To revert to one of his labours: when he killed the Hydra, he dipped his arrows in the
blood, and was from then on able to kill opponents with poisoned arrows. He used one to kill
the centaur Nessus. The dying centaur told Deianira, wife of Herakles, that his blood,
smeared on a garment, would win back the love of Herakles if ever he was unfaithful.
Herakles' reputation was such that Deianira kept some of the blood.
When Herakles carried off Iole, Deianira sent him a robe smeared with the blood of Nessus.
Herakles suffered so terribly from the burning of his flesh, that he had himself carried to
the top of Mount Oeta, and put on a funeral pyre. Poias, father of Philoktetes, was
persuaded, by the gift of his bow and arrows, to light the pyre. Herakles was carried up to
heaven, where he married Hebe, daughter of Hera.
Euripides' play, The Madness of Herakles, puts the twelve labours before the madness.
Herakles is absent in Hades, bringing up Kerberos. Kreon, king of Thebes and father of
Herakles' wife Megara, has been killed by Lykus (wolf) and his Theban supporters. Lykus is
about to kill Megara and the children at the altar when Herakles returns just in time to
save them and kill Lykus.
Hera now sends Lyssa, madness, to attack Herakles, who kills his family. When he recovers
his sanity, Theseus takes him to Athens for purification.
At line 1104, Athene hurls a stone to prevent Herakles killing Amphitryon. The blow of the
stone causes sleep. This stone was named Sophronister, that which makes sane and wise. It
was exhibited in the Herakleion in Thebes.
In line 131 ff., we learn that nobody would buy Herakles as a slave because he had fierce
eyes that flashed fire. His children's eyes have augai, flashing beams. He has golden hair.
Although Herakles was famous for his strength, he is described by Pindar as not being a
large man. Odysseus meets his ghost in the underworld, Odyssey X1: 601, Herakles himself
being with the immortals, married to Hebe.
To the first Herakles, the Egyptian god, belongs the story of the infant killing the two
snakes sent by Hera. He crossed the sea in a cauldron. There may be here a reference to
Okeanos, the waters in the sky. To the same Herakles we must refer the story that he broke
off a horn of Achelous, and that he shot Hera in the right breast, inflicting a wound that
never healed.
To the second Herakles, son of Amphitryon, we can attribute the attack on Troy. He also
attacked Pylos (Pausanias III: 26); Nestor took refuge in Enope, or Gerenia when Herakles
captured Pylos.
Herakles and many other heroes at times seem to be quite plausible historical characters,
leaders of migrations and general benefactors, yet at other times they rescue maidens in
distress by killing monsters, fly through the sky, and defy what are thought to be the laws
of nature and physics.
The confusion may be caused by the fact that terrestrial kings and princes imitated the
apparent behaviour of objects in the sky, with a view to increasing their control over their
subjects, and found it helpful to blur the distinction between man and god. HERO WORSHIP
The cult of heroes differs from the worship of gods, but in the case of Herakles there is
some confusion.
Sacrifices were made to the shade of a hero at his tomb. Such a sacrifice was called an
enagisma, as opposed to thusia, sacrifices to a god in the sky. The worshipper at the shrine
of a hero did not normally partake of a sacred meal, whereas a sacrifice to a god involved
the eating by the worshipper of a shared meal.
At a hero's tomb, blood was poured into the bothros or trench, the victim being held head
down, whereas in a sacrifice to a god, the victim was lifted up and the head drawn back to
face the sky. The hero's altar, eschara, was lower than a god's altar, bomos, and round. It
was for libations (pouring of liquid) only, and the rite was performed on one day only of
the year.
There was a hero cult of Herakles at Sikyon in Greece which was an exception. Here there was
not only heroic but theistic ritual. His heroon was a rectangular stone base, with a pillar
at each corner, and a pediment in front. It was unroofed, presumably for easier
communication with the sky.
Herakles was a god to the Egyptians; he was a mortal hero to the Greeks, but he became
immortal. He constituted a link between underworld, earth, and sky, with electricity, the
divine force that was detected underground, felt in one's own person, and seen acting in the
sky, as the common essence of god, man, and hero.
The Greek word for hero is similar to the Hebrew heron, which means conception, or
pregnancy. It is at any rate clear that a hero needed a divine parent in order to establish
his bona fides.
Herakles was identified in the east with Melqart, and this brings us to another aspect of
the Greek hero cult. Apollodorus, III: 4: 3:, tells how Ino, daughter of Kadmos and
Harmonia, in a fit of madness plunged her son Melikertes into a cauldron, and fled with his
corpse. Another version is that Athamas first killed Learchos, and was about to throw
Melikertes into a cauldron when Ino rescued him, fled, and sprang with him into the sea. Yet
another version is that Athamas killed Learchos, but his mother put Learchos into a cauldron
of boiling water, went mad, and sprang into the sea with Melikertes.
To understand this, we need to recall how Medea, in the play of that name by Euripides, cut
up an old ram and boiled it in a cauldron, then magically restored it to life rejuvenated as
a young lamb. She promised Pelias that she could rejuvenate him in the same way. He
consented, and she asked his daughters to cut him up. She omitted the spells, and Pelias
died.
Tantalus killed his son Pelops, and cooked and served his flesh to the gods in a banquet.
The gods realised what he had done, and Pelops was restored to life by either Rhea or
Klotho. Pelops, on whom a curse had been laid because of a broken oath, had two sons, Atreus
and Thyestes. Atreus became king of Mycenae, and his wife Aithra was seduced by Thyestes.
Atreus banished him, but later invited him to a banquet for which he had killed and cooked
the children of Thyestes.
Another story tells how Thetis plunged her children into a boiling cauldron to test their
immortality. None survived.
A Greek inscription from Syria of Trajan's time (early 2nd century A. D.) has the phrase
"apotheotheis en to lebeti," having been made a god in the cauldron, and is dedicated to
Leukothea, the white goddess who appears in the sea.
I suggest that in all these attempts to achieve immortality we see an attempt to copy
occurrences in the sky. We have already mentioned the seething pot looking like a tripod
cauldron, or rather the tripod cauldron looking like a seething pot in the sky. Ritual based
on imitation of a seething pot was one way of trying to achieve immortality. We shall see in
a later chapter that the Egyptian priests approached the problem differently, but in each
case electrical theory and experiment led to the belief that the sky-earth relationship was
a source of electrical influence and power, and even of life.
It may be relevant that the Greek verb 'zo', I live, 'zen', to live, could easily be
confused with the Greek verb 'zein', to boil.
The Cumaean Sibyl is described as living in a jar suspended from the ceiling. Could it be
that living in a jar was an attempt to prevent the wasting away of the divine (electrical)
force that was associated with inspiration? The ischus ges, strength of earth, wasted away,
and the oracles grew old.
THE APIS BULL Pliny writes that in Egypt the Apis bull was killed by drowning. Death by
drowning was thought to release the divine element. The dead bull became Osiris, the
underworld god.
In Chapter XIII I quoted from the Book of the Dead. Osiris Aufankh refers to the "flame that
comes into being from out of the fire which blazes within the water".
The connection between the tripod cauldron and the bull (the cauldron, cortina, could 'moo'
and breathe steam) suggests that funeral rites, the heating of water in a cauldron, the
washing of the body, and anointing it with oil, are based on a procedure for the
resurrection of the soul of the dead hero. See Iliad XVIII: 343 ff., for the funeral of
Patroclus.
It also appears that in early times kings of Egypt feasted on the flesh of the bull. The
king wished to absorb the strength and divinity of the bull. The running of the bull along
land boundaries, and the wearing by the king of a bull's tail, show the connection between
the bull and agriculture. The Latin arare is to plough; aratrum is a plough. A derivation
from ar, electrical fire, seems possible. The hoof of the bull, like that of Pegasus, had
magical power.
The Apis cult is a large and important subject, for which readers are referred to the
article in the Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum, Volume Two, "Apis and the Serapeum",
by M. Ibrahim and D. Rohl.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BYWAYS OF ELECTRICITY
HEAVEN and Earth, Thrones, Pillars and Trees: various and many are the attempts to copy on
earth what is seen in the sky, some having been mentioned already, namely the use of
sympathetic magic to bring low the monster, dragon, snake, bull, ram or goat that is
threatening the established order in the sky. The Roman augur marks out the 'templa coeli',
and transfers them to the ground. The helmet, plume, stephanos, painted faces and shields of
warriors, the Philistines with their faces painted red, actors similarly, can all be derived
from this. There are numerous examples. Here are two which seem to be possible candidates,
though less obvious than most.
Aeneid IV: 146: Dido entertains the Troians at Carthage. Among the company that go out for
the royal hunt, familiar to many through music by Berlioz, are the picti Agathyrsi, painted
Agathyrsi, a Scythian people living in what later became Transylvania.
'Aga' in compounds implies 'very'. Were they experts with the thyrsus?
Iliad XVIII: 590: The dance at Knossos starts as a round dance like the dithyramb, then
develops in confrontational style like the later tragic chorus, with two acrobats loose in
the company. The columns of some Greek temples appear to be cut in marble in such a way as
to suggest that wood was the original material. There may be a link between Yggdrasyl, the
sacred oak tree of Zeus at Dodona and elsewhere, the columns of the Greek temple, the Lion
Gate at Mycenae, and so on. Nails, Greek 'helos', were sometimes driven into wooden pillars.
This was a Roman method of marking the date.
Pausanias III: 20: 9: "On the way from Sparta to Arkadia is the Horse's Grave, where
Tyndareos made Helen's suitors swear to abide by her choice. Nearby are seven pillars in the
ancient pattern, said to be statues of the planets. Further on is a sanctuary of Mysian
Artemis."
There may be a link between the tree, the pillar, the poros and the tekmor of Alkman, and
the pillar of Plato, Republic X. The Greek kion, pillar, can also, with a change of accent,
mean 'going'.
Electrical displays, travelling through the sky, could be the explanation of the similarity.
Temple columns were thought of as supports for heaven. The Egyptian pylon, or gateway, is
seb (Greek hepta = seven). The pulvinaria or capitals of the columns may suggest the
cushions on which deities reposed.
SOME PASSAGES OF INTEREST IN THE ILIAD
VII: 44 ff.: Apollo suggests to Athene that they should rouse Hector to challenge one of the
Greeks to a duel. Athene has no objection to the idea. Helenos, Priam's son, understood (put
together in his mind) the plan that the gods intended. Helenos told Hector of this, assuring
him that it was not yet the time for him to die, "for I heard this from the voice of
immortal gods."
X: 313: Hector offers a reward to anyone who will make a night reconnaissance of the Greek
ships. Dolon volunteers. He takes his bow (line 333), puts on the hide of a grey wolf, puts
on his head a ferret-skin cap. 'Kunee' is a leather cap. 'Ktideos' is a marten or weasel or
ferret.
A digression is necessary at this point. Smintheus, an epithet of Apollo, may be from
Sminthe, a town in the Troad, or from sminthos, a Cretan word meaning a mouse, or both may
come from the Cretan word 'Mouse-killer' is a possible translation for Smintheus.
In the Old Testament, II Kings XIX: 19: 6ff., we read how Isaiah prophesied to king Hezekiah
that the army sent against Jerusalem by Sennacherib under the command of Rabshakeh would be
destroyed by the Lord.
In II Kings XIX: 35 ff., we read that the angel of the Lord went out and smote the
Assyrians; 185,000 were dead next morning. In XIX: 7, the words of Isaiah are: "Behold, I
will send a blast upon him ..."
It is significant that in the following chapter, XX: 9 ff., Isaiah prophesies that the
shadow on Hezekiah's sundial will go back ten degrees. In verse 11 we read that the Lord
brought the shadow ten degrees back.
Herodotus II: 141, gives another version of Sennacherib's defeat. He learnt from Egyptian
priests that Sennacherib's army had been destroyed in a single night. He saw a stone statue
of Sethos set up in an Egyptian temple, holding a mouse. Herodotus was told that a plague of
field mice gnawed away the bow strings, shield straps, etc, and the soldiers, their weapons
useless, had to flee.
In the following chapter, 142, he mentions the Egyptian report that on four occasions since
the time of the first king of Egypt, the sun had changed its position of rising and setting.
It is interesting to compare this with the fact that in II Kings XIX & XX, Sennacherib's
defeat is reported just before an account of a reversal of the apparent motion of the sun.
Is there any way of harmonising these two accounts of the cause of the destruction of
Sennacherib's army? The weasel-skin cap and wolf's pelt worn by Dolon may be a clue. The
object in the sky may have looked like a weasel, wolf or mouse, the size being inevitably a
subjective matter in the description. Cicero, De Divinatione I: XLIV, says that in the
Marsic War, shields, with the leather gnawed away (derosos), fell from the sky, a most
sinister portent.
Apollo Smintheus has a female equivalent in Mouse Artemis, mentioned by Pausanias.
DISTURBANCE IN THE SKY Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 4 B. C. to A. D. 65, wrote not only
philosophical dialogues, but also a number of plays, modelled on Greek tragedy. It is in his
Phaedra that we meet the well known passages about the moon, whose birth the Arkadians
claimed to have witnessed.
In Act IV of his Thyestes, the chorus after the Messenger's speech express their fear that
Chaos will come again, and that Nature will for the second time wipe out all the lands. The
sun has turned aside from its usual path, and gone back to set in the east.
Such a passage can best be considered in conjunction with the previously quoted stories of
Isaiah and the sundial of king Hezekiah, and the information given to Herodotus. The Greeks
and Romans, and other early ancient writers who dealt with the problem, first described
these happenings as historical facts. Psychological interpretations and rational
explanations came later.
Iliad XII: 442 ff.: Hector storms the Argive wall. Helped by Zeus, he picks up a huge rock
and breaks the gates.
Line 462: Shining Hector rushes in, his face looking like swift night. He shines like grim
bronze. His eyes flash fire.
IV: 439 ff.: In the fighting that follows the breaking of the truce by Pandarus, Ares spurs
on the Trojans, Athene of the flashing eyes the Achaeans, also Deimos (Fear), Phobos (Rout),
and Eris (Strife), with insatiable raving, a sister and companion of man-slaying Ares. At
first as she raises her head she is little, but then, though walking on the ground, her head
stands up in the sky.
XIII: 299: Meriones and Idomeneus, as they set out to battle in their shining bronze,
aithopi chalko, look like Ares and his son Phobos.
XIV: 243 ff.: Hera goes to Lemnos, armed with Aphrodite's girdle of Love and Desire, himas.
This word also means a leather strap, harness of a chariot, whip. At Lemnos she asks Hypnos,
Sleep, to lull Zeus to sleep. Hypnos is unwilling; anybody, even Okeanos, the father of the
gods, rather than Zeus. "You once gave me a command on the day when Herakles, the arrogant
son of Zeus, sailed from Troy after sacking the city of the Trojans. I sweetly lulled to
sleep the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus, and you, devising mischief, raised fierce gales on the
sea and bore Herakles away to Kos with its many inhabitants, away from all his friends. When
Zeus woke he was angry, and hurled the gods about in the palace, and looked for me
especially. He would have thrown me from the sky to vanish in the sea, had not Night, the
tamer of gods and humans alike, saved me.
Iliad XV: 1-27: Zeus wakes to find the Trojans in disarray, and Hector out of action. He
turns on Hera angrily and reminds her of the time when he punished her by hanging her high.
"I tied two anvils from your feet and tied your hands with an unbreakable golden chain,
leaving you suspended in sky and clouds. The gods in far Olympus were angry, but could not
free you. For if I caught anyone, I hurled him, taking him by the foot, out of Olympus (apo
Belou), so that he reached the ground powerless. But not even then was I freed from the
grief for god-like Herakles, whom you, having by your subtlety persuaded the hurricanes,
sent over the barren sea driven by the North wind." Akmones, anvils, were meteoric stones.
The stones fell near Troy, and were shown to sightseers.
Belos, according to a scholiast, is an old Achaean word meaning heaven, distinct from the
word belos, meaning threshold (Leaf and Bayfield).
MYSTERIES, MICE AND APOLLO.
The Greek work musterion, mystery, appears to be a compound of mus, mouse, and tereo, I
watch, I observe, wait for.
The prophet or augur watched animals and birds. They would give warning, by their behavior,
of an impending electrical storm or earthquake.
Tereus was the king of Thrace who was turned into a hoopoe. Musterion can also mean mouse-
hole. The Greek word, which is almost always plural, musteria, means religious
demonstrations, the knowledge being imparted in secret. The electrical significance appears
in, for example, Euripides, 'Stemmata' 470, "semna stemmaton musteria", solemn mysteries of
garlands. 'Stemmata' are the materials, flowers or wool, for making a crown, especially for
the head or for a sceptre. They probably represent an electrical aura or glow. The Roman
poet Status refers to the thyrsus as "missile lauro redimitum", as if it were a javelin
bound with laurel, like the fasces of the consul Marius. (Achilleid 1: 612)
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ROME AND THE ETRUSCANS
A brief summary of events just after the sack of Troy is needed if we are to be able, later,
to tackle the problem of the Etruscans, and the electrical terms in their language.
We noticed, when reading of the legendary origins of the mysteries of Samothrace, that
Dardanus left Samothrace and went to Troy, where he established mysteries. There is mention
in Hesiod, Theogony 1011 ff., of Latinos and Agrios, sons of Odysseus and of Circe, the
enchantress who delayed the return of Odysseus to Ithaca after the sack of Troy. He refers
to Latinos and Agrios, who ruled over the Tyrsenians. The latter have been thought to be the
Etruscans, who, according to Herodotus, came to Italy from the east. Whether true or not, a
link with the foundation of Rome begins to emerge. The Etruscan language is related to
inscriptions found on Lemnos.
Our source for Dardanus leaving Samothrace and going to Troy is Hellanicus of Mytilene, one
of the logographi, or chroniclers, of Greek history. He lived about the time of Herodotus,
5th century B. C.. Later sources say that Dardanus took statues and cult objects associated
with the Penates. Dionysius of Halicarnassus equates these with what Aeneas rescued from the
burning of Troy. Plutarch says that it was the Palladium that he rescued. The Palladium was
probably a meteorite, sacred to Pallas Athene, worshipped at Troy.
When Herodotus visited Egypt, he was told by priests that Helen of Troy and Paris, on their
way to Troy from Sparta, had been blown by storms to Egypt. In Chapter 114, Paris is
referred to as a Teucrian stranger. The Teucrians are first mentioned in Greek literature in
the 7th century B. C..
The father of Aeneas was Anchises, and the story of how Aeneas carried his father out of
Troy and escaped from the Greeks is well known. The mother of Aeneas was no less a person
than Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. There is an interesting parallel between the
stories of the foundation of Rome by Romulus and Remus, twins suckled by a she-wolf, and the
stories of Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess, in the Gilgamesh epic. There was a string of
lovers of Ishtar, starting with Tammuz, who was taken down to the underworld. Another lover
was a shepherd whom she turned into a wolf. There were lion and horse lovers whom she
trapped and whipped. All suffered some unpleasant fate at her hands. A love affair with
Ishtar was dangerous. It is of interest that at about 1500 B. C. (conventional dating), the
war functions of Ishtar increase.
Rome, according to a legend of about 400 B. C., was named after a Trojan woman. Capua may
have been named after Capys, a Trojan and friend of Aeneas. Capys was a king of Alba in
Latium, according to Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV: 613, and in Livy IV: 37 he is king of Capua.
Cape Misenum will have been named after Misenus, Aeneas's trumpeter.
The generally accepted view was that the foundation of Rome followed quite closely the
arrival of Aeneas in Italy after the sack of Troy. The earliest Roman historian, Quintus
Fabius Pictor, agrees with Greek historians in putting Aeneas in the eighth century B. C..
There is an obvious clash here with the view of those scholars who date the sack of Troy to
c. 1200 B. C. Such evidence as is normally adduced for the conventional date of Troy,
arrived at via orthodox Egyptian chronology, is increasingly under attack, but detailed
discussions of this, and of the difficulties that are caused by the extension of Dark Ages,
in the face of the archaeological and literary evidence, is beyond the scope of the present
work [1] .
PASSAGES REFERRING TO TROY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF ROME
Iliad V: 628: Hard fate brought Tlepolemus, son of Herakles, face to face with Sarpedon.
Line 648: Herakles sacked holy Ilion through Laomedon, who rebuked Herakles when he did not
give him the horses for which Herakles came.
Iliad XX: 215 ff.: Aeneas, about to fight with Achilles, tells of his ancestry. Dardanus, a
son of Zeus, founded Dardania. His son Erichthonius had a son called Tros, king of the
Trojans. Tros's three sons were Assaracus, Ganymedes, and Ilus. Ilus was father of Laomedon.
Among Laomedon's sons was Priam. Assaracus was father of Capys, Capys was father of
Anchises. Aeneas himself was the son of Anchises and Aphrodite.
Aeneid II: 781: In the blazing ruins of Troy, the ghost of his wife Creusa speaks to Aeneas,
and prophesies that he will come to the land of Hesperia, where the Lydian Thybris flows.
Pausanias X: 17: 6: When Troy fell, some of the Trojans with Aeneas were carried away by
storm winds to Sardinia, where they mingled with the Greeks. Many years later the Libyans,
who had landed in Sardinia much earlier under Sardos, crossed to the island again and made
war on the Greeks. Very few Greeks survived, and the Trojans fled to the hills. They are
still called Ilians, but have a Libyan way of life and appearance.
Aeneid VIII: 479: Evander talks with Aeneas: Long ago a Lydian race, distinguished in war,
settled on the hills of Etruria.
Aeneid VIII: 600: Near Caere is a sacred wood. There is a story that the ancient Pelasgians
had consecrated this wood, and a festival day, to Silvanus, god of fields and cattle. Aeneid
X1: 785: Arruns (an Etruscan name) prays to Apollo, whom he and his people worship more than
do others, and relying on whom they walk on fiery ashes.
Lydia seems to have been an important centre for fire magic. Pausanias, V: 27: 5, recalls
seeing in Lydia, among the Lydians who are called Persians, two buildings, each with an
altar covered with ash. A magician puts wood on the ash, puts a crown on his head, and sings
prayers. The wood catches fire.
The importance of the Etruscans for our subject is obvious, for they were expert in the
divination on which the Romans relied. Furthermore, where our knowledge of the origins of
Roman civilisation is still confused, we are helped by the Etruscan links with other
countries, as described in such works as The Etruscans, by Pallottino.
Herodotus and most ancient authors believed that the Etruscans came from the east (Lydia).
What is known for certain is that to the north-west of Rome was Etruria and that from the
8th century B. C., there were many flourishing cities, such as Mutina, Caere, Clusium,
Cremona, and Felsina. Many names end in -na, a fact that is useful in tracing links with
other areas.
Rome, according to the official chronology, was founded in 753 B. C., or soon after. It was
believed that it had a link with Troy, for Aeneas and his companions escaped from Troy and
reached Italy to found a second Troy. His son, Ascanius, founded the city of Alba Longa.
Alba Longa was destroyed by the Roman king Tullus Hostilius.
ROME, MONARCHY, AND THE GODS
In Mesopotamia, 'kingship came down from heaven', and the Roman state too was at first ruled
by a king. Under Tarquinius Priscus (the Old Tarquin), and his two successors, Rome was
under the domination of Etruscan kings. Servius Tullius enlarged the city, building new
walls. He built the Cloaca Maxima, which drained especially the low-lying Subura, the
densely populated area near the Capitoline Hill, and the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol.
His successor, Tarquinius Superbus, is thought to have been in close contact with Greece. He
consulted the oracle at Delphi over a proposed colony.
The monarchy ended in 510 B. C.. There were Etruscan attempts to recover Rome, led by Lars
Porsenna, and the stories of Horatius holding the bridge, and of Mucius Scaevola, refer to
this period.
Although the Etruscan alphabet is basically the same as that of Greek and Latin, progress in
understanding the language has been slow. There is no lengthy bilingual text. Certain words
are closely related to Latin, e. g. fanu, Latin fanum, a dwelling or temple. It is
recognised by some as an Indo-European language; the problem has been to establish the
divisions between words, the system of grammar, and to find the meanings of words which have
no obvious links with Latin or Greek. Readers are referred to The Etruscans Begin to Speak,
by Mayani, for a challenging account of the many attempts to understand the inscriptions and
few texts available. In his book, Mayani, relying chiefly on Albanian, claimed to establish
some of the grammar, and enlarged the known vocabulary, relying on the evidence that
Etruscan was based on Illyrian, a core of which survives in modern Albanian, quite apart
from Albanian's obvious borrowings from Latin and modern languages. Etruscan has features
linking it with the inscriptions on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean, with Lydia, Lycia,
Phoenicia, and with Egypt. In many instances the words involved have a religious
significance.
Indo-European languages can be put into two groups, the centum group, and the satem. In
essence this means that the letter 'c', e. g. in the word for 'hundred', is either
pronounced like a 'k', as in the Latin centum, or like an 's', as in Slavonic 'sto'. The
distinction between Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages becomes less useful and
harder to maintain the farther one directs one's attention towards the Baltic area, and let
it be said at the start that Etruscan sometimes resembles a centum, sometimes a satem
language, when it is using Indo-European material familiar to us from Latin and Greek.
The Greek word 'semnos' means solemn, divine. It was originally applied only to deities and
to things divine. Here are some examples of its use:
semnoi logoi, oracles; Herodotus VII: 6. semnai theai, the Erinyes, Sophocles, Oedipus at
Colonus. semnon antron, the cave of Chiron the centaur; Pindar, Pythian IX: 50.
semnon nomon, the august law; Pindar, Nemean 1: 72. semna orgia, semna musteria, solemn
rites; Sophocles, Trachiniae.
semnos paian, a solemn paean; Aeschylus, Persae 393. en throno semno semnon thokeonta,
sitting in state on his holy throne; Herodotus II: 173.
Of tragedy: Plato, Gorgias 502b. ta semn' epe, proud words (haughty); Sophocles, Ajax 1107.
semnomantis, a revered, venerable prophet; Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 556.
From these instances it seems likely that semnos is connected with Greek electrical
theology. Let us look at a few Etruscan words which illustrate the points so far raised.
Cemnac. I suggest that it is related to semnos. It implies lightning and thunder. Greek and
Latin 'gemo' means to make a groaning sound as a result of fullness. Ais cemnac truthtrachs
rinuth, God thundering like a formidable bull in the clouds (Mayani's translation).
Curte, carath, the Etruscan sacred enclosure, is the same as garth, Slavonic gorod which we
see in Leningrad.
Frontac, thunderer, is the Greek bronte. Truna, fear, means fear of a god or king. Compare
Greek throngs, throne, whence Zeus dispensed divine justice, zealously copied by earthly
monarchs and priests.
Spel, cave or vault; compare Greek speos, Latin spelunca. Tarkhu, bull, appears in part in
the Latin taurus. Tark suggests Tarquinius, also the neo-Hittite weather god, Tarhund.
Fear, and the bull, are fundamental concepts in Etruscan, as in Greek thought. The Greek
'tarache' means confusion, reminding one of the bull in a china shop .
The Etruscan connection with Troy and Aeneas is hinted at on the Tagliatella vase. The vase
is decorated with a picture of a labyrinth, labelled Truia. In Albanian the words troje,
truej, mean ground, area. I suggest that it is not only the Greek agon, the arena for the
contest, but also the place of the double-axe, Greek labrys, Latin dolabra, the lightning
symbol.
We have already met the young slave boy Servius Tullius, round whose head there was a crown,
stephanos, of fire when he was asleep in his nursery. The connection between electrical fire
and royalty appears in the Etruscan kvil, light, closely connected with the eagle, the bird
of Zeus, in the name Tanaquil, wife of Tarquinius Priscus.
Hungarian kivilagit means to illuminate. Frazer, The Golden Bough, suggested that the kings
of Rome may have been killed sacrificially. The regifugium, flight of the king, was a
ceremony held on 24th February. The rex sacrorum fled from the forum. This may be compared
with the Stepteria at Delphi, which has been discussed already. Marcus Curtius was said to
have ridden into a chasm in the forum, in order to save Rome; the chasm closed over horse
and rider. The story has links with a lake (Lacus Curtius) and with lightning.
The Romans were originally grouped into three tribes, Ramnes, Luceres and Tities. Luceres
resembles the Latin lux, light, and Tities suggests titio, a firebrand. If the link with
light is to be maintained, one might consider the Greek horan, to see, Egyptian Ra, and
Hebrew or.
The Greek menus means force, but any solution to the problem of Ramnes is speculative at the
moment.
The names of the Roman cavalry divisions are Celeres, Trossuli, and Flexuntes. Celeres
suggests Latin - cello, strike, found in compounds, e. g. percello. Translated as 'swift',
it suggests the speed of Apollo's arrow or the strike of a snake, both of which have
electrical significance in mythology. For Trossuli there is the Greek tarasso, throw into
confusion. Flexuntes may be from flecto, bend. Perhaps this detachment could bend the enemy
line.
The Etruscan zilc or zilch is a high official, a magistrate, perhaps 'praetor Etruriae', the
praetor, i. e. he who goes in front, of Etruria.
The letter 'z', zeta, in ancient Greek was pronounced 'sd'. It could approach the sound of
'st', depending on the degree of voicing of the consonants.
The Phoenician alphabet had consonants; vowels were added to the alphabet by the Greeks.
Furthermore, the farther east one travelled in the Mediterranean world into Semitic
territory, the harder it was for natives to pronounce two consonants together without a
vowel, such as an indefinite 'e' sound, the Hebrew shewa, between them.
This gives grounds for supposing that the word zilch began with the sound 'sed', resulting
in 'sedilch'. 'Ch' in Greek was a 'k' followed by an aspirate.
In Homer, one of the epithets of a king is skeptouchos, having a sceptre. 'Ouchos' is from
the verb 'echo', have, hold. Zeus is described as aigiochos, holding the aegis. It seems
possible that 'zilch' is sedilech, 'having a sedile', and that 'zil' is the Etruscan for
'sedile'. The Latin sedile is a seat, corresponding to the Greek thronos, seat or throne. A
senior Roman magistrate, one with imperium such as a consul or praetor, had an ivory throne,
a sella curulis. Sella means a saddle, as well as an ordinary seat. In Plato's Timaeus, each
soul has a star as its chariot. The Arabic 'cursa' is the name given to a star in the
constellation of Eridanus, and means 'seat' (cf. Latin currus, chariot).
Zilch is often found in conjunction with other words. Zilch spurana is an urban magistrate
(Subura is a part of Rome, and is originally 'city'). The zilch parchis may be a patrician
official. Maru, marniu, and marunuch are associated with the priestly title cepen (cupencus
= priest). The zilch eterau or zilch eteraias may be linked with the Egyptian hieroglyph
'heter', two women shaking hands, which means friendship. The link may be more acceptable if
one recalls the Greek 'hetairos', comrade. The feminine, hetaira, means in classical Greek a
lady who plays a more prominent part in public life than Athenian conservatives thought
desirable. Temple prostitutes were a feature of temples in the ancient world. Perhaps the
zilch eterau was in charge of the Vestal Virgins.
A priestess of Astarte is in Hebrew qadhesh, a consecrated one. In the Etruscan language
there are nasalised vowels. Hate, hatec is hantec, Hades. Muth = mund, the gateway to the
underworld. German 'Mund' = mouth. Other examples can be found. Ceus, grandfather or
ancestor, = Latin gens. Mayani quotes hutra, and hondra, lower, in the Tables of Iguvium, as
examples in the Osco-Umbrian dialect. The Hebrew athiq, splendid, suggests Latin antiquus,
ancient and illustrious. Nasal vowels occur in languages from the Balto-Slavonic area, e. g.
Polish.
This phenomenon, combined with z = sd, suggests that Zeus may be Sdeus, Sedeus, Sedens. The
genitive case, Zenos, gives support to this. His name appears as the present participle,
sitting, of the verb sedere, to sit. Zeus is often referred to as the god sitting on a
throne. In Aeolic and Doric, he is Sdeus.
It seems possible that the Greek ending '-eus' is related to the Latin present participle
ending '-ens', in English '-ing'. If we take the Greek for king, basileus, as an example, we
find that he may be 'basilens', 'basiling'. But what is the meaning of this imaginary verb,
to 'basil'?
Fortunately, Etruscan is of help here. There is an Etruscan word vacl, or vacil. I suggest
that it means a religious feast, referring especially to a feast in which the priests and
officials sacrificed an animal by killing it at an altar with an axe, burning the entrails,
cutting up the good flesh and sticking it on iron spits to roast, and eating.
That the basileus, or king, was a banqueter at a religious sacrifice, has an interesting
parallel in Albanian folklore. Albanian retains some of its ancient Illyrian basis. Mayani
quotes from a ballad by G. Fishta: A feast is provided by the good fairies for heroes who
have defeated a dragon in battle. They are rewarded with 'dy drej te majme', two fat stags.
Stags were sacrificed on threshing-floors, and here we have a scene like that of an Homeric
sacrifice. The bright sky-god is represented by the priests who probably wear white robes in
imitation. The snake-like entrails, and the tongues, are thrown on the fire, and other parts
are eaten by the priests. It fits the ancient Greek accounts, in Hesiod and others, of
lightning exchanges and the break-up of the snake-like tail in the sky. The subsequent
absorption of some of the debris by larger heavenly bodies has a parallel in Thor's great
appetite.
The vacl took place at numerous festivals, including the games, where the battle in the sky
was represented especially by the chariot race round an elliptical racecourse or orbit.
There were seven pillars in the spin, or barrier, of the Circus at Rome, one of them called
the fala (Juvenal: VI: 590). A chariot smash could easily be arranged at the turning point
round the fala. There was a cushioned seat (pulvinar), on the spina, for the benefit of the
senior magistrate. A fala was also a tower used in sieges from which to attack defenders of
a besieged city. Falando means the sky.
Etruscan art shows figures of humans, and of gods, banqueting. At a Roman dinner party the
guests reclined on cushions. Cushions, pulvinaria, were seen in the streets, with puppets,
models of deities, on them, at the festival of the Lectisternium. The priests in charge,
epulones, consumed the offerings that the devout gave to the puppets. (There is a reference
to cushion-shaped capitals in architecture, capitula columnarum, in Vitruvius).
There was an epulum, sacred feast, of Jupiter, one of Juno, and one of Minerva. Such sacred
meals were offered especially at the funeral of a great man. Funeral games were held for
Hector, and games were organised by Aeneas for his father Anchises.
The Etruscan words macstrevc and macstrna shed light on the Latin 'magister' and
'magistratus', magistrate. The Roman curule magistrate was accompanied by a body of lictors
who carried the fasces. The Vetulonia fascis is a double axe, with metal rods. It is
illustrated in M. Pallottino, The Etruscans (Penguin). It symbolised not only the legal
power to kill, but also the divine authority revealed in lightning; it might be wreathed in
laurel (which symbolises electrical fire) as a sign of victory. Support for this
interpretation comes from the Hebrew 'maghzera', axe. The Latin 'magnus' means great, and
the letter z was pronounced sd or st, helped by a vowel between consonants. It seems
probable that the Latin magister and magistratus, and the Hebrew maghzerah, are 'mag set
ar', the great fire of Set, or great Set's fire. Set, whom Plutarch called Typhon, killed
Osiris, and was in turn defeated by Horus, who lost an eye in the struggle. The winged axe
mould found at Mycenae suggests a link with the sky.
On the same lines as zilch, the Etruscan rumach may mean spear holder.
Ignis, fire, may furnish a clue to the Etruscan 'ichnac'. Etruscan 'zichne' may mean to
engrave. Pallottino suggests that it means 'write'. The link with Hebrew and with the god
Set is discussed in the next chapter. Etruscan tru, drouna, are similar to Greek thronos,
throne. Etruscan 'zac' is 'stac', blood, that which makes to stand, and to live. '-ac' is a
suffix in Etruscan denoting origin, occupation, or agency. When Odysseus visits the
underworld, he slaughters animals to fill a trench with blood. The Greek 'zo', live, and the
Latin, 'sto', stand, are cognate.
A Hittite relief from Malatya shows a king holding a lituus and pouring from a smaller
vessel into a larger one on the ground. Before him is a god wearing a conical hat and
holding a thunderbolt over the king's libation cup. It appears that a libation bearer hoped
to pour electricity onto the grave, to rouse the spirit of the dead person. It is
illustrated in O. R. Gurney, The Hittites, p. 207.
The Hittite, 'tipas' or 'tapas' is a cup, Mycenean 'dipas'. In classical Greek depas is a
libation vessel, usually of gold, and sacred. In Etruscan, 'thapna' is a cup, and 'putere'
is a kind of vase, Greek poterion'. Tipas, in hieroglyphic Hittite, = heaven. Etruscan
'spanza' resembles Hittite 'sipand'; Hittite 'panza' is 'five'. 'Spendo', Greek means 'I
pour a libation'. Sanskrit 'pancha', and Greek 'pente', mean 'five'.
'C' in Slavonic (pronounced 'S') means with, from, down from. Spanza, sipand and spendo all
imply 'down from the five. '
I suggest that 'the five' are the five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, all
of which were visible to the unaided eye, and were regarded as sources of divine energy from
the sky. In this context, it is noteworthy that the Greek pempabolon, the sacrificial fork,
had five prongs. See Iliad I: 463, Odyssey III: 460. [2] .
In Hittite myth there was a knife with which heaven and earth were separated. It was used by
Ea to split a diorite stone, thus anticipating the story of the augur Attus Navius at Rome,
who split a whetstone with a razor.
The name Corycus, on Parnassus and in Cilicia, links Greece and Asia. Delphyne, the serpent
killed by Apollo, is a name common to Greek and Hittite.
Before leaving the word 'magister', we may note that the fasces of the general Marius are
described as wreathed in laurel as a symbol of victory (Cicero; De Divinatione I: XXVIII).
Possibly laurel imitates an electrical glow, symbolising divine power.
PANTOMIME
Etruscan drama was introduced to Rome at a time of pestilence and national calamity.
"Ludiones ex Etruria acciti" players were summoned from Etruria. (Livy VII: 2: 4) Is there a
link between the Etruscan thanasa, actor, and histro, mime or actor, and the Greek thanatos,
death?
The Albanian 'heshtur', silent, may be the Latin 'histro', and Etruscan drama was dancing
and mime. There is a parallel in early 18th century A. D. Russia. When Peter the Great
invited foreign engineers to Russia, most of them German, they were called Nemtsi, mutes,
because they could not speak Russian. The Russian for a German is still Nemets. The
derivation from the Thracian Istro, speedy, strong, after the Danube's name, Ister, seems
less likely, expert though the Etruscan dancers may have been. Why should the Romans have
thought that the introduction of silent drama would allay the anger of the deity causing the
trouble?
Departed spirits (Manes) in the underworld cannot speak, only squeak and gibber. When
Odysseus descends to consult the ghosts of Teiresias and others, he has to slaughter animals
and pour their blood into a trench. The ghosts do not speak until they have drunk the life-
giving blood.
Cumae, near Naples, was a famous oracle and an entrance to the underworld, where Aeneas went
to meet the ghost of his father (Aeneid VI). The Hebrew qum means arise; cf. N. T. St. Mark
V, where Jesus raises Jairus' daughter. Thanasa-Thanasa was a name of Amen, the hidden god
of Neter-khert, the Egyptian underworld.
Perhaps the Etruscan mimes specialised in the portrayal of ghosts, and their drama aimed at
consulting and enlisting the aid of the dead in times of peril. We know from the Old
Testament that the spirits of the dead were consulted (Saul and the witch of Endor, I Samuel
XXVIII). Whatever the details, it was apotropaic, turning aside a threat, just like Greek
dithyramb and tragic drama. The Etruscan word svulare is an epithet of Apollo. The 's' has
the significance of the English 'un-'; compare the 's' in modern Italian, e. g. scoperto,
uncovered. Albanian is quoted by Mayani: zbuloj, to unveil. 'C', English 'S', in Slavonic,
is 'with', or 'from'. Svulare is the same as Sibylla, the unveiler. The Sibyl sat on a
cauldron on the 'cisum pute' or tripod (cis = three, pute = Greek pous, podos, foot), and
unveiled the future, or revealed the god's intentions.
We have seen the importance of the liver in Etruscan divination. Ie and iu are two words
meaning divine, god. In the Samnite language (mountain people east of Rome) gur, like the
Etruscan cur, cure, means stone, rock. The combination of the two gives iecur, the Latin
word for liver. The stone gives us a link with Delphi, where the thriabolos threw stones
into the divining bowl. Furthermore, 'cur' resembles some words in Slavonic. The Russian
'gora' is a mountain, and the verb goretj (Russian) means to burn. In due course we shall
see the link with a Latin word for a mountain peak cacumen.
There was an important ritual at Rome, that of the Manalis Lapis. This was the stone of the
Manes (departed spirits). It was sacred, and was carried in procession. It blocked up the
entrance to the abode of the Manes, and the purpose of the rite was to unblock it. The
Etruscan word 'muth' or 'mund', Latin 'mundus', world, meant a trench for offerings, near an
Etruscan temple. It was the entrance to the underworld.
It is tempting to relate the Greek 'nerteros' of the dwellers below, i. e. the dead and the
gods of the underworld, to Njord, the Norse deity, and to Nortia, the Etruscan goddess of
destiny. The interest the Etruscans had in the world of departed spirits is illustrated by
their elaborate tombs, vaults, decorations, and paintings on the walls of underground rooms.
Manthus was an Etruscan deity, Latin and Greek Rhadamanthus, one of the judges of the
underworld. Etruscan 'rad' means order, and is presumably the Latin 'ratio', reason, orderly
thought. The Greek manthano means 'I find out, learn'.
The following words suggest either electrical happenings or possible places of origin or
temporary or permanent home, of the Etruscans.
Arseverse, from ar, fire or altar, and severse, Latin severto, turn aside, means a lightning
averter or conductor. Mayani suggests that the word cupencus, a Sabine priest, or a priest
of Hercules, may be connected with the Etruscan cipen, Albanian cip, peak. The priest often
wore a peaked hat.
Spura, city; tular spura, city boundaries. The Slavonic sobor means a gathering of people.
In Lydian the word is Cibyra, in Latin Subura, the densely populated part of Rome which was
drained by the Cloaca Maxima.
Suplu, subulo, a piper; Russian sopetj, to puff quietly, and soplo, a nozzle.
Lakhuth, libation; Greek lekuthos, oil flask. Kathesa, jug; Greek kados, Hebrew kadh.
Capesar, shoemaker; kupassis, in Lydian, is a kind of footwear. Breseus is a Lydian name for
Dionysus. Albanian vere is wine. Finnish veri is blood.
Dionysus is Baki in Lydian, Pakhies or Pakheis in Etruscan. PakEhisa is the Hittite for a
stick. The thyrsus? Spel, Etruscan for cave, resembles Lydian pel. Elfaci is best explained
by Albanian ill, star, and pashi, vision.
The Hebrew argaz is a box or chest. I suggest that it is a combination of ar, Etruscan for
divine fire, and gaza, a word used by Vergil in Book I of the Aeneid. Aeneas and his fellow
Trojans are wrecked by a storm off the coast of Carthage. Trojan gaza is seen among the
wreckage. It is translated as plunder. This implies that it may be stolen treasure. Hebrew
ariel means hearth of God, altar.
De Grazia, in God's Fire, has suggested that the Egyptians pursued the Israelites to the Red
Sea because they were taking with them important electrical equipment such as the ark.
The Etruscan goddess Venth, or Vanth, may be Bendis, a Thracian goddess who shares the
characteristics of Artemis. Tark a divine name, is Trqnta in Lycian, and is presumably
related to Etruscan Tarkhies.
The Etruscan 'suv lusi' is translated by Mayani as 'look on my prayer'; the verb sv = look,
see. I suggest that we may have here the Latin verb 'specto', watch, see.
Cremia, firewood, may be an instance of the Egyptian 'ka' plus 'remus', an oar. Remus is
very close to ramus, branch of a tree. The two groves, 'luci', between the two peaks of the
Capitoline Hill at Rome, were originally on the peaks. Romulus here established a refuge,
asylum, which was named 'inter duos lucos', between the two groves.
We may detect a link with the Hittites in 'caerimonia', which in Etruscan and Latin means
religion, or a religious rite. The Hittite 'karimmi' is a temple. Etruscan 'falandum', sky,
may be linked to Palladium (nasalisation of Etruscan vowels). The Palladium fell from heaven
at Troy. Odysseus and Diomedes carried it off, since the safety of Troy depended on its
staying in the city. When Metellus saved it from the burning temple of Vesta he was blinded.
Tem, tema, may be the Greek demas, body, especially a body in the sky. The Book of the Dead
has 'Tem-bull of the body' (Arkana translation by Budge p. 437).
'Tem', in Etruscan, is translated by Mayani as 'bull'. Etruscan 'lamna', Latin lamna,
lamina, lammina, is a threshing-floor. Such places were sacred, with electrical
significance. Uzah was killed when he touched the ark on Nachon's threshing-floor (Old
Testament II Samuel VI: 6 f.).
Egyptian Seker boats were mounted on sledges, which presumably were similar to threshing
sledges. Stags were sacrificed on threshing-floors. Sert was an Etruscan deity who inspired
fear. Egyptian 'herit' is fear, awe.
Fufluns, an Etruscan epithet for Bacchus, is compared by Mayani with Albanian 'bubullij', to
resound, roar. He compares it with Bromios, a name of Dionysus. Fabulonia, henbane, produces
mental instability and ravings. Amongst other meanings of the Latin 'fabula' is 'plot', of a
play.
ETRUSCAN ORIGINS
There has been a conflict of views over the place of origin of the Etruscans. Some have
sided with Herodotus, who wrote that they came from Lydia; others have maintained that
Etruscan civilization came from the north, others again that it was formed in Italy.
The evidence points to all three being at least partly right. A possible scenario, based on
Mayani, is that some Indo-European speakers, including the Pelasgi, who had come from the
Danube area with a good knowledge of copper and tin technology (from Hungary and Bohemia),
settled in Illyria, then moved via Greece and southern Italy into Etruria. Others went via
Thrace to Anatolia, and thence to Italy, some taking part in a descent on Egypt, where they
were known as Tursha. There is a fuller discussion in Mayani of the names Tiras (O. T.
Genesis X: 2), Tursha, Rosh, Rasna, and Tyrrheni. Paris of Troy, alias Alexander, is
mentioned by Herodotus, II: 114, as a Teucrian stranger.
The vocabulary of Etruscan gives some clues to history and provenance. So far we have seen a
few words which suggest eastern influence or borrowings. It is straining things to attribute
these solely to the presence of Greek colonies in the south of Italy. The presence of
Illyrian words not only in Italy (e. g. Umbrian and Tuscan) but also in Macedonia, Lydia,
Lemnos and Phrygia, points to the presence of Etruscans (whose language was Illyrian) in,
for example, Asia Minor, and also to an origin farther north. Messapian, an Illyrian dialect
of Italy, is related to Slavonic and Lithuanian, as is Albanian. The Hungarian 'nincs',
'there is not', can be compared to the Etruscan 'ninctu' (in the Tables of Igavium). The
Hungarian 'kulcs', key, resembles the name of the Etruscan deity Culsu, and the infernal
deity Tuchulcha, who was similar to Cerberus in having snakes on his head and guarding the
mouth of the underworld. The Hungarian 'kvilagit', to illuminate, suggests Tanaquil, wife of
the elder Tarquin, mentioned by Livy (I: 34). 'Aquila', eagle, symbolises lightning.
Hungarian 'kert', garden, and 'kerit', encircle, are cognate with the Slavonic 'gorod, '
city, which appears in Italy as 'carth', 'carath', and in various Pelasgian place names such
as Gurton (Thessaly), Gortyna (Gete), Gortynia (Macedonia), and Crotona (south Italy). There
is even a resemblance to the Egyptian 'neter chert', underworld. Slavonic words abound, ea.
'sobor', assembly, which means 'spur' in Etruscan, 'Cibyra' as a place name in Lydia, and
'subura' in Latin (a low, thickly populated area of Rome near the forum). 'Sopetj', to puff
(quietly), and 'soplo', nozzle, become in Etruscan 'subulo', Latin 'tibicen', piper. Coins
of Phaestus in Crete bear the name Velchanos, a name resembling that of the Roman god
Vulcan.
Notes (Chapter Eighteen: Rome and the Etruscans)
1. For an account of the chronological impasse, vide The Journal of the Ancient Chronology
Forum, Volume I, The Institute for the Society of Interdisciplinary Studies.
2. The five-pronged sacrificial fork, pempobolon, of the Greeks may correspond to the Hebrew
'mazlegh, ' fork, flesh-hook. There is an interesting coincidence of the letters M, Z, and L
in the two Hebrew words mazlegh (fork) and mazzal (planets). Hebrew 'mazar' is the north, or
northern stars. Hebrew 'chamesh' = 5. It is interesting that the number 5 was associated
with planets, which were regarded by the Greeks as gods, concentrations of divine force such
as the Egyptian ka. In Slavonic, 'mesto' = place.
3. The finale of an Etruscan pantomime was a drinking session, Latin comissatio, from Greek
komazein, to revel. It may have been a survival of a libation, with all that that implies in
resurrection technique.
4. The wife of the Hittite king Hattusilis III (13th century B. C.) was called Puduhepa. Her
name is perhaps suggestive of the title 'Pythia'. Her father was a priest.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE TIMAEUS
IN the literature of ancient Greece, Egypt and Rome, there is a close connection between
theories of vision and fire. Seeing an object was an active affair, not a mere receiving of
light rays. It is necessary to digress for a moment and glance at a dialogue of Plato, the
Timaeus. The fact that the Greeks used the word 'pur', fire, for lightning, suggests that we
need to study their cosmology, with its frequent references to fire, from an electrical
angle, and here the Timaeus is of great importance. An English translation by Sir Desmond
Lee is available in Penguin, reprinted 1988.
The demiurge, i. e. the craftsman, created the cosmos, the ordered universe that we perceive
with the senses. He has a perfect model, paradeigma, and as he works he glances away,
apablepei, from his material to his model. The result is a universe made up of nous
(intelligence), psyche (life), and soma (body). Psyche is the essential vehicle for nous.
Psyche was created before soma, is invisible, and is a self-mover, the ultimate cause of
motion. It is a divine (theios) source (arche) of rational life. It contains reason and
harmony.
As to being a self-mover, Plato's view accords with that of Thales, who used the concept of
psyche when describing the action of the magnet.
The planets, sun and moon, seven in number, were created next as a moving image of timeless
eternity. They are living creatures, zoa, and are divine, theoi. Plato uses the term 'idea '
to illustrate his use of the word 'divine'. The word implies a shape or form that is seen;
it is closely linked with the concept of knowledge. The Greek 'oida' means 'I know', and is
a perfect tense, 'I have seen' (Hebrew 'dea' = knowledge). By supplying the missing digamma,
we get the Latin verb 'video', see.
Plato tells us that the idea of the theion (divine) is mostly fire, so that it may be seen
as being brightest and most beautiful (Oxford Classical Texts, Timaeus 40). This is the
origin of the fixed stars, eternal, divine, living creatures.
It is worth noting at this point that Plato here uses the word 'idea', of something which is
capable of being apprehended by a human physical sense. This appears to contradict the usual
view that the ideal realm can only be perceived by the intellect, or at least fails to
support it in a context where support might be expected.
Other gods, as well as the planets, exist, whom Plato calls 'daimons', but he says little
about these.
The creator is called father, maker, he who puts together, and god. He now creates human
souls, as many as there are stars, and puts one on each star, as on a chariot. Each soul
descends to earth for incarnation, and returns to its star on death.
The gods now create human beings. It is significant that it is the gods, not the demiurge,
that create humans. (43)
The head is the divinest part of the human being, containing fire. The eyes are the most
important organ of sense. Light is a non-burning variety of fire; vision is the result of a
stream of fire being directed outwards from the eyeball, mixing with daylight and impinging
on external objects.
Of the four elements, fire, air, water and earth, the one with the smallest particles is
fire. There are three kinds of fire: flame; radiation that does not burn, or light; and the
remains in the embers when flame has departed from the fire.
Elements are composed of particles whose surfaces are geometrical shapes. Those of fire are
a combination of triangles forming a pyramid. There are important mixtures of fire and
water, viz.: wine (warms both body and soul); oil (pitch, castor-oil, olive oil, etc);
honey; and acid.
The gods gave humans an immortal soul principle, in the head, and two forms (eidos) of
mortal soul below the neck. The word arche, principle, implies beginning, source, source of
authority, and rule. 'Eidos' is similar to 'idea', and refers here to the form or appearance
of something.
The head contains nous (intelligence), and fire. Below the neck the better part of the life
source (psyche) is above the midriff, the worse below.
To control the stomach the gods created the liver. It is smooth, shining (lampros), sweet,
and bitter. It reflects thoughts. But the soul in the liver area is capable of prophecy.
When we are asleep, or not in our right mind, it may spend the night in divination and
dreams. It is incapable of logos (reason) and phronesis (understanding). A man in his right
mind uses logos and phronesis to interpret the liver's message. A distinction is made
between the 'mantis' (person affected by the force), and the 'prophetes', the interpreter or
proclaimer.
At this point in the dialogue (72 b), Plato uses a clause with both a demonstrative and a
relative pronoun: "... whom some call them prophets, " 'hous manteis autous onomazousin
tines." Such a construction for a relative clause is characteristic of a Semitic language,
not of ancient Greek. It is standard procedure in Hebrew.
Marrow is the life-stuff for creating the body. It contains fire. The best of it contains
the divine seed, theion sperma, and goes into the head; the rest goes into the bones. The
head's skin covering is pricked by the fire of the divine contents. Hairs emerge through the
perforations.
The divine 'periodoi', circlings, in the head, copying those in the sky, can be upset by
phlegm and bile. Hence comes epilepsy, the divine disease, or Heraklean disease. The
intelligence, nous, can suffer from anoia, lack of perception, stupidity.
Plato reviews the situation thus: Of the three forms of soul, the most authoritative
(kuriotaton) is a daimon given by god, living in the summit of the body. It lifts us from
earth back to our starry home in heaven.
If a man eagerly pursues learning, wisdom and truth, he will achieve immortality as far as
is allowed to a human. He must attend to (therapeuein) the divine element in himself. Thus
he will be 'eudaimon', happy. (Therapeuein is a word used of worshippers tending a divinity
in a temple).
Plenty of material in harmony with Plato's views can be found in classical authors. Cicero
says that diviners perceive beforehand things that "nusquam sunt, sunt autem omnia, sed
tempore absunt," "that are nowhere, yet they all exist, but are absent in a time sense." He
refers to fate, the utterance of a god, as the Greek 'Heimarmene' or orderly linkage of
causes and effects.
Plato's statement that the planets, the gods, were given an 'idea', chiefly of fire, so that
they and their circlings could be seen by men, finds an echo in Cicero: "Religio est iuncta
cum cognitione naturae," religion is joined with a knowledge of nature. 'Cognitio' is used
of perception and finding out.
The Greek 'prepo' means to appear clearly to the senses. Zeus 'prepei', appears, in the
aither (Euripides, Helena: 216). This is the original sense of the word, but it usually
means 'to be fitting'. Vergil mentions "radii aurati," golden rays, round the head of a
statue (Aeneid XII: 163). 'Radiare' is to shine.
Plato's theory of vision is hardly different from that of the Egyptians. Sunlight is a
manifestation of the god Ra, and the utchat is a hieroglyph comprising a picture of an eye
and the radiation symbol. In The Book of the Dead there is a reference to gods with eyes as
sharp as knives. Greek 'kanthos' is the corner of the eye; Greek anthos = flower. I suggest
ka and anthos for kanthos.
The utchat itself suggests the curve of the snake's or lizard's tongue, possibly the augur's
lituus, and the Egyptian style of beard, chabes, flame of ka. In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus,
the watchman sees a beard of flame, pogon puros, from the signal fire announcing the fall of
Troy.
For the derivation of utchat, there is Greek chaite, hair, mane, and Hebrew chata,
transgress. A suppliant would touch a person's chin or knee, when asking for mercy or help.
Chins and knees were regarded as concentrations of divine muelos, marrow.
The Latin for a battle-line, the cutting edge of the Roman army, is acies. It also means
sight, the power of the eye.
Ra says that he is the one who makes light by opening his eyes, and there is darkness if he
closes them.
The name of the Egyptian heart-soul, ba, may be found in Hebrew. Labbah is flame, and in
Hebrew lebh and libbah both mean heart.
Important words connected with light include: esh (Hebrew), fire, lightning, flame of war,
anger, glitter, radiance; lux (Latin), loschna (Etruscan), losk (Slav.), light, gleam.
Luscus (Latin), means one-eyed. The poet Juvenal mentions a statue of a figure that is
taking aim: "Statua meditatur proelia lusca." The ancient theory of active vision leads
easily to the concept of the evil eye, Latin invidere, Greek baskainein, against which one
had to defend oneself by, for example, spitting.
The Greek 'phthonos', envy or evil eye, appears in the Timaeus, in the context of the
creation of the world. The creator was good, and a good person never has any phthonos in him
about anything (or: about anybody). Being without envy, he wished the universe to be as like
himself as possible (literally: close alongside, paraplesia). The power of a divine eye can
be either creative or destructive.
"We (sc. the Egyptians) were the first people of Asia to use shield and spear, shown by the
goddess." (Timaeus 24 b). The spear, Greek 'doru', is frequently a lightning symbol. A
shield could be decorated with pictures of snakes or rays to give it apotropaic power, and
to frighten the enemy.
Cicero says that an ox liver can be nitidum, shining, (De Divinatione II: 13.) This is in
harmony with Plato's description of the human liver as lampros, shining (Timaeus 71 b).
The soul, according to Cicero (De Divinatione II: 67), when we are awake, has inherent power
of self motion and is 'incredibili celeritate', of incredible speed.
The Book of the Dead has several references to the utchat, e. g.: "His majesty shone in the
primeval time, when the utchat was first upon his head." (Chapter 140, translated by Budge).
The Greek 'chaita' is hair, especially a horse's mane. Comets are, by derivation from Greek
'hairy' stars
The Timaeus has a reputation for being an obscure and difficult dialogue. The reader can be
puzzled by the theory of elements, particles and triangles which Plato presents to explain
the nature of the physical material of our world, and there are some interesting
anticipations of twentieth century physics. Also interesting is the fact that there is some
inconsistency in his statements, here and elsewhere, e. g. in the well known cave myth of
the Republic, referring to a distinction between a 'real' world of ideas, and the mere
shadow world of our physical universe. In the Timaeus we read that an 'idea' can be seen by
the human eye, not just grasped by the intellect and dialectic.
This uncertainty and this lack of consistency have an interesting parallel in the
uncertainty in the mind of the priest in, say, an Egyptian shrine, trying to determine the
nature of the strange deity, a deity who is at one moment invisible, at another is seen and
heard, and even felt, as a powerful force; that can be used to impress, to heal, to kill, to
exercise magical control of the sky, and whose help is sought to raise the dead and to avert
the forces of destruction.
Notes (Chapter Nineteen: The Timaeus)
1. The Hebrew 'ayin' is an eye. It is also a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Hebrew 'zayin'
is a weapon. We have met instances of the letter Z pronounced in the Eastern Mediterranean
as SD or ST. 'Set', in Hebrew, is a transgressor, or transgression. 'Saat' is to deviate.
'Zayin' is the eye of Set. Egyptian representations of the utchat, the eye of Ra, show a
curved line from the eye comparable with the curve of the Roman augur's lituus. The Hebrew
letter zayin is similar in appearance to a dagger pointing downwards. A small addition at
the bottom would turn it into the Egyptian tcham, the sceptre in the shape of a scotch for
killing snakes, with an eagle perched on the top, as described by Sophocles. The Greek verb
'sterizo' , set or stand up, has been mentioned in the context of 'The Bacchae'. Is this
'Set' and 'ara', Set's fire?
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER TWENTY
SANCTIFICATION AND RESURRECTION
WE have seen something of Greek and Roman sacrifices. Chapter Seven reviewed the Greek and
Hebrew apotropaic practices --red-haired men being killed to avert the red Typhon, and the
driving by the Israelites of a scapegoat into the wilderness. We have also studied the
earthing technique (trench filled with water, sprinkling of water and blood, etc.), and
details of an Homeric sacrifice and sacred meal, with slices of thigh wrapped up in fat,
entrails and tongues burnt in the fire, and other meat roasted on spits. Chapter Eight
described the apotropaic nature of the origins of dithyramb and tragedy, and the
significance of the axe was discussed in Chapter Eighteen, with reference to the Etruscans
and the Roman magistrate. It may be useful to have a summary of sacrificial procedure,
assembling some of the words used to communicate ideas in the ancient Mediterranean world.
The vocabulary used is one of technical terms, many of which were shared by Egyptians,
Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, and others.
Some of the proposed equivalences are mere speculation, but only a technical theory held in
common by priests and experts all round the Mediterranean can explain the many similarities
in vocabulary and practice. The electrical phenomena and concepts involved, e. g. lightning,
radiation, magnetism, sympathetic magic, and so on, are not a modern interpretation forced
on the ancient world, but are phenomena and procedures described by ancient authorities.
SACRIFICE: SOME TECHNICAL TERMS.
The altar is originally a device for bringing the electrical force, fire, lightning, god,
whatever one chooses to call it, down from the sky to earth. Originally, a god could not be
gratified by the sweet savour of roasting meat rising from the altar unless first the victim
had been struck by a bolt coming down.
The Greek bomos, altar, is raised. In Homer, it can be a stand for a chariot, or for a
statue. Eschara is a hearth, or an altar for burnt offerings. Thumele is an altar in the
orchestra of a Greek theatre, from which the chorus was directed.
In Egyptian it is khaut, in Hebrew harel (har = mountain). Etruscan ar = fire, Latin ara =
altar. The Latin altaria means ritual utensils on the altar. Anclabris is a sacrificial
table, anclabria are its vessels. The Etruscan cletram is a litter or chariot for offerings.
Batillum is a fire-shovel. In Hebrew such altar equipment was qadhosh, holy.
Fire is agni in Sanskrit. The Agnihotras were Indian priests who were messengers bringing
divine fire. We saw in Chapter I that they resembled the Selli at Dodona in that they were
not allowed to wash their feet. Fire in Russian is ogonj, also zhar, in Etruscan zar, Hebrew
esh, Akkadian ash or esh, Egyptian chet, Greek pur. Greek chaite, hair or mane, suggests the
tail of a comet. The Egyptian teha is a fire-stick tehen is a pillar; these two words should
be compared with Greek techne, device or skill. Techne sometimes implies a sinister kind of
skill, just as mechane is often a sinister device.
The Greeks in early times called the Persians Cephenes, but the Persians called themselves
Artaei. (Herodotus VII). A link with ka and ar seems likely. Shuti, the plumes of an
Egyptian crown, are the soul of Geb (Earth). Cf. Etruscan suthina, Hebrew tsuth, Egyptian
Sutekh = Set). I suggest that they all relate to electrical 'fire' or force. Cf. ischus ges,
strength of the earth (see end of Chapter XVI).
In Latin, focus = hearth; caminus is a hearth, also a fire for smelting metals. Ignis is the
element fire, igniculus is a spark. Incendo = kindle, ardere = to be on fire; excandescere =
to blaze out brightly. Cremia = firewood, titio = a brand, torris = a burning brand, fax = a
torch.
Scintilla, Latin for 'spark', and Semitic sikina, knife, may shed light on a Cretan dance,
the Sikinnis.
The flamen was a stoker who blew the fire into flame. Flare is to blow.
Calere is to be hot. I suggest that this is an example of ka, the double, the radiation or
halo round the head of a god, or statue. Greek kaio = burn.
The Etruscan and Greek prutanis was a stoker who waved a brand to make it blaze; from pur,
fire, and tanuo, brandish, as Zeus did with the thunderbolt. The Greek aisso means brandish,
and suggests the Hebrew waved offerings, when the priest raised an offering and waved it
over the altar. Hebrew nasa = raise; Greek anassein = to be king.
Man-made fire on an altar, with logs, was a copy of the divine fire. Kapnos, Greek for
smoke, is possibly ka, plus pnous, breath.
The axe was a lightning symbol; Greek pelekus, kybelis, Akkadian pilaqqu, Lydian labrys,
Etruscan tlabru, Cretan tlabris, Latin dolabra, securis. Hebrew seghor = axe, spear, refined
gold. Latin bipennis = axe (two-winged, like the winged thunderbolt); the Akkadian hazdi is
a spear, which is also a lightning symbol, and suggests the Latin hasta, spear. The Hebrew
maghzerah, axe, is the same root as Latin magister, Etruscan macstrna. Egyptian neter = axe.
Neter hen is a priest, servant of the divine, and is comparable with the Hebrew kohen,
priest; cf. the Egyptian hennu, boat. At a Roman sacrifice the person sacrificing wore a
crown. The animal to be sacrificed was called a victima, if a bull or cow, and a hostia, if
a smaller animal. A victima would have its horns gilded, and a chaplet, vitta, put on its
head. It was brought to the altar by the popa, the priest's assistant. Some hair was cut
from the forehead and thrown on the fire. Salted meal, mola salsa, was sprinkled on the
victim's head. It was stunned with a blow of an axe to the back of the neck and then its
throat was cut. Words denoting sacrifice include, in Greek thuo, perform a fire sacrifice;
in Latin, sacrifico, operor, macto. The latter is the archaic and poetic word, and is
therefore worthy of special note. The Hebrew maqqel means staff; the Latin macellus is a
butcher's stall or shambles.
The Latin percello = strike. The Greek skeptron, a stick, is related to skepto, strike, of
lightning. The Latin baculum, stick, is generally held to be from the Greek baino, go, but
is more likely to be from the Latin -cello, seen in the compound percello, strike. Greek
makella is a pick-axe. Makella Dios is the thunderbolt, Aeschylus, Agamemnon 526. Latin
curter is a ploughshare, or knife. The Greek sphazo, slaughter, resembles Hebrew zabhach,
slaughter.
Stags were killed on threshing-floors. The Etruscan lamna is a threshing-floor. The Latin
lamina is a thin layer of metal, gold, silver, bronze, or of marble, such as could be used
in constructing a capacitor, in an attempt to store electricity.
An important function of the priest was to see that water was used for adequate earthing, to
make a lightning strike more probable.
A holocaust was a sacrifice where the victim was burnt whole. Some of the Greek words for
lightning are: sterope, asterope, selas, pur, pur Dios (fire of Zeus), Dios belos, (missile
of Zeus), keraunos, skepto (hurl). Latin has: fulgur, poetic fulgor (cf. Hebrew 'or',
light); fulguratio, sheet lightning; fulmen, the destructive bolt, coruscare, to flash, to
push with the horns. The Greek adjective euruopa, far-seeing, is an Homeric epithet of Zeus,
and may be relevant in this context.
THE SACRIFICIAL FEAST
We have already seen, in Chapter VII, details of a Greek sacrifice. The body is cut up,
slices are cut from the thighs and wrapped in layers of fat. Raw meat is laid on this
foundation. It is burnt on the fire, and wine is poured on. The worshippers then taste the
inner parts, cut up the rest, and skewer it on spits over the fire. The tongues are thrown
on the fire (Odyssey III).
The partakers sat on the beach at Pylos, on fleeces. The word used by Homer for cutting up
the meat is mistullo. I suggest that this is related to Slavonic mjaso, Etruscan and
Albanian mis, meat, and to Hebrew mishte, feast, and mishman, fatness. We have already seen
in Chapter XVIII that there exists in Albanian folk-lore a tale of heroes being rewarded
with a feast of stag's flesh after their defeat of a monster. Olenus was an Etruscan
soothsayer; the Slavonic olenj is a stag, also a reindeer.
The Greek verb daio has two meanings: to kindle, and to divide. Dais, daitos, is a feast.
The Latin epulum is a religious banquet. The plural epulae is a banquet in general, not
religious, not a vacl. The Latin cena, archaic caesna, dinner, is derived from caedo, cut,
and the food was cut up for distribution. The Slavonic tsena means price, and the same root
occurs in modern Russian for price, precious, and expensive. The Latin visceratio is a
public distribution of sacrificial meat. Greek deipnon is a feast, Latin daps.
SANCTIFICATION
The Latin word sancire calls for special study. According to Lewis and Short's Latin
dictionary, it is related to the Sanskrit 'sak', to accompany, to honour, and is related to
sequor, follow, sacer, sacred, and to the Greek root hag, seen in hagios, and hagnos, holy.
Sancire is to render sacred or inviolable by religious act; to appoint as sacred and
inviolable. It is used of fixing and ratifying laws, and can mean to forbid under pain of
punishment. This latter concept of danger is significant, and we will return to it later.
A thing which is sanctus has been rendered sacred and inviolable. It differs from sacer in
that sacer is applied to, for example, a place consecrated to a deity, but sanctus locus is
any place which is to be inviolable, and is not necessarily sacer.
Sanctus also means august, divine, pure, holy. It is used of a deity and of divine objects
such as sedes, seat, fanum, temple or shrine, and sacrificial fires (Aeneid III: 406). The
sanctum sanctorum is the Holy of Holies, qodhesh haqqodhaskim, of Old Testament, Exodus
XXVI: 34.
Sacer means holy, associated with a divinity; Greek hieros. A vates, prophet, is sacer
(associated with Apollo). Sacer can also mean associated with divinity in a destructive
situation; impious, accursed. Sacerdos is a priest. There are two kinds of priest, those who
are in charge of ceremonies and rites, and those who interpret the utterances of prophets.
The verb sacrare means both to consecrate and to doom to destruction. The poet Horace uses
it with the meaning 'to immortalise in a poem'.
The Egyptian symbol, the ankh means life, or to live. In Egyptian, an intransitive verb such
as to live can have an 's' prefixed to give it a causative force. Thus, sankh means to make
to live. Here, I suggest, we have the origin of the Latin verb sancio.
A hieroglyphic text from Thebes tells of the application of protective magic. Budge suggests
that the god made passes over the nape of the neck to transfer the "fluid of life", sa-ankh.
(From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 487, Arkana edition). On p. 514, Budge writes that
Horus embraced the dead body of Osiris, thereby transferring to it his ka. Kings embraced
statues of gods in the hope of absorbing life from them.
Turning to Egyptian myth, we find that the god Osiris is torn in pieces, that the pieces are
found collected and put in a chest. He is then brought back to life. In The Book of the
Dead, Osiris, when he is in the closed chest, is given the title of Seker. Here, I suggest,
is the origin of the Latin word sacer.
In a previous chapter we met the idea of worship as magnification, adolere. Here are a few
more words connected with the creation of an electrical display, mostly in Latin:
Augeo, make bigger (auction), tollere, to raise, magmentum, that which magnifies or
glorifies. Auctificare is to honour by offerings, like mactare. 'Sacris numinum potentiam
auctitare', to honour the power of the divine presence with ceremonies.
Auctor is he who brings about the existence of something, or gives greater permanence or
continuance to it. Augmentum is a kind of sacrificial cake.
The Greek auxanein is to make large, exalt, extol, honour. Auxanein empura (to increase the
sacrificial flames), means to sacrifice (Pindar, Isth. IV: 68).
Cresco (Latin), means come forth, of things not previously in existence, to appear, grow,
become visible. Incrementum, growth, increase, offspring; "Magnum Iovis incrementum", great
offspring of Jupiter.
Promittere means to let grow, to forebode. Promissa barba, a long beard. Among the
experiments made by 17th and 18th century A. D. scientists, were those of the Italian
Galvani, who observed the movements of the limbs of dead frogs when he created an electric
current by the application of two different metals. The Egyptians, whose religion was almost
entirely concerned with the problem of death and resurrection, had a deity Heqt, in the form
of a frog. Heqt was a resurrection goddess; her name suggests the Greek Hekate, whose
associations are with the underworld. A live frog's sudden jumps would be similar to the
reactions of victims on altars, and we have here a truly remarkable coincidence.
Budge, in his Egyptian Magic, mentions Graeco-Roman terracotta lamps found in Egypt, bearing
representations of a frog. One of them is inscribed "I am the resurrection."
When we recall the word 'ka', the connection between magnification and worship in Hebrew,
Egyptian, Greek and Latin, and the apparatus of the statue or ark shown surrounded in
Egyptian and Babylonian reliefs by junction rods, Hebrew chashuqim, we have an explanation
of the verb sancio. It denotes the application of electrical technique to resurrect; to
create an image, the spiritual body of a resurrected god, whose glow could be seen by the
worshippers in the dimly lighted temple.
If further confirmation be sought, we can see the ankh appearing in the Latin word for
blood, sanguis. At a Greek sacrifice, the priest drained the blood from the victim before
proceeding to the cutting up of the body.
If poured on the body the blood would assist earthing and help lightning to descend and mark
the victim. In Sumerian, sanga is a priest.
This brings us to another kind of sacrifice, that to the dead. The Etruscan 'zac' is blood.
If, as before, we replace 'z' with 'sd', we have 'sdac'. The suffix -ac indicates the agent;
e. g. frontac, thunderer (Greek bronte, thunder). The combination 'sd' or st' appears in the
Greek zo, I live, and Latin sto, I stand.
In Homer, the blood is associated with life. The psyche leaves the body with the blood when
a hero is killed in battle. The Etruscans thought of it as that which makes an organism
live, hence their word 'zac', blood. Blood is that which enables one to live and stand up.
In a temple of the god Mithras, the worshipper was showered with the blood of a slaughtered
bull.
Greek has a link with Egyptian seker and Latin sacer in the verb 'skirtao'. (The letter 'e'
is used in English for a vowel between the 's' and 'k' of seker). The verb skirtan means to
spring, of horses, and to frolic, of goats, and to dance. It would be eminently applicable
to the behaviour of the goats at the edge of the chasm at Delphi, which attracted the
attention of the goatherds, and led to the establishment of the oracle. Compare the Hebrew
'chaghagh, ' dance, and 'chaghav, ' ravine.
There is another Greek verb using the same three consonants, skairo, which also means dance.
Skarthmos hippou is the foot of a bounding horse, and skarizo means leap, throb, palpitate.
One could hardly choose more appropriate vocabulary to describe the resurrection dance, or
the effect of electricity in such an experiment as that of Galvani.
Sanctification employed a powerful force that could both move the dead and kill the unwary,
or those who acted impiously. There were some accidents in temples, and some occurrences
that were not accidents, such as the suppression of the rebellion of Korah, Old Testament,
Numbers XVI, where the ark seems to have given warning of an earthquake.
The sounds 'skr' were used throughout the Mediterranean world. In Babylonia there were
towers (durr), whose name sounds the same as the Latin 'turris'; the shrine on a 'Tower of
Babel' is a 'saharu'. The Hebrew seghor, axe, Latin securis, extends the list.
David's dance, wearing a linen ephod (2 Samuel VI: 14), is not the only instance of a dance
before an ark. Egyptian pharaohs also danced. A tablet shows Semti, first dynasty, dancing
before Osiris, who is in a shrine on top of a staircase. Usertsen danced before the god
Amsu, or Min; Seti I danced before Sekhet, and Pepi I danced before Osiris. (Budge, The Book
of the Dead, Arkana, Introduction p. 40 ff.).
Egyptian artists sometimes show three figures on a stand. The stand is a box, the figures
are known as the ark trinity. They are Ptah, the opener (cf. Hebrew pathah, and Sanskrit
pathi); Seker; and Osiris.
The ceremony of the opening of the mouth and eyes was performed at the tomb of a dead
person, or before a statue of the deceased.
The dead person is identified with Osiris, and the ritual represents the burial of Osiris
and his resurrection. The evil god Set and his supporters had been defeated in their attack
on Horus, and Set's friends were changed into animals. A bull, gazelles, and ducks were
sacrificed. One of the bull's forelegs was cut off, and the priest touched the mouth and
eyes of the mummy or statue with it.
Next, he touched the mouth with two instruments, seb ur and tuntet. He "opens the mouth with
the instruments of Anubis, with the iron instrument with which the mouths of the gods were
opened." He then took the Ur hekau, the 'mighty one of enchantments', a curved piece of wood
with a ram's head and cobra carving, and touched the eyes and mouth. This enabled the dead
person to know the magical words to utter in the next world.
The mouth and eyes were touched by a metal chisel, a red stone, and four iron objects.
Further details of this ceremony are given in Budge, Egyptian Magic.
A picture of a figure holding a fore-leg and hoof is reproduced in Mayani The Etruscans
Begin To Speak. It may be significant that iron instruments play such an important part, in
view of iron's properties in magnetism, and as a conductor of electrical current. When
Osiris is shown on a staircase, it seems likely that this is a ziggurat. Ziggur is to be
compared with seghor and securis, the axe or lightning symbol.
Notes (Chapter Twenty: Sanctification and Resurrection)
1. Milk was used to extinguish the incense flame.
2. The Greek 'hepar', liver, may be another instance of ka. In Vergil, Aeneid IV: 60ff.,
Dido peers into the steaming entrails (spirantia exta) of sacrificial animals in an attempt
to discover the future. The Slavonic 'par' means> steam'.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE DEATH OF KINGS
AN early chapter of this book was devoted largely to the influence of electricity revealed
in the words and action of a play by Euripides, The Bacchae. Now that we have reviewed a
wider range of the relevant material, we can usefully turn to another play, the Oedipus at
Colonus of Sophocles. We shall not be concerned here with a good literary translation, or
with a balanced general criticism of the play; we shall concentrate on those details of the
play which suggest links with electricity. First, a summary of the play.
Oedipus has been banished from Thebes. In his wanderings, accompanied by his daughter
Antigone, he reaches Colonus, near Athens. The inhabitants, learning of his identity, fear
the pollution of incest and parricide, and ask him to leave, but Oedipus has heard from an
oracle that this is where he is to die. Theseus, ruler of Athens, arrives. He promises
refuge and help. Oedipus in return declares that his spirit and tomb will protect Athens.
Ismene, the other daughter of Oedipus, arrives from Thebes with news that her brothers
Eteocles and Polynices are about to make war on each other for the throne of Thebes. Kreon,
brother of Oedipus's mother and wife Jocasta, arrives, keen to secure the person of Oedipus
and thereby protect Thebes. His guards carry off Antigone and Ismene, and he is about to
seize Oedipus too when Theseus arrives. The Theban force is defeated and the girls rescued.
Polynices enters. He too wants the presence and help of Oedipus in his planned attack on
Thebes, whose throne had been unlawfully retained by Eteocles. Despite his father's anger
and curse, Polynices departs to marshal his forces against Thebes. Thunder is heard, a sign
to Oedipus that his end is at hand. He leads the way to a lonely, rocky place. A god's voice
is heard telling him to hurry. Watched only by Theseus, he dies. The nature of his death,
and the whereabouts of his tomb, are known only to Theseus.
We will now glance at some passages in the play susceptible of an electrical interpretation.
The play begins with the entrance of Oedipus and Antigone. The scene is the entrance to the
grove of the Eumenides, at Colonus. Antigone declares that the place where Oedipus wishes to
sit down and rest is holy. In line 17 she describes it as full of laurel, olive trees,
vines, and nightingales. She urges him to sit on the rock (unpolished, virgin rock). At line
36 a stranger enters, and asks Oedipus to leave his seat, for it is holy ground, not to be
stepped on. The place is inhabited by the Eumenides, dread goddesses, daughters of Earth and
the Dark.
Oedipus refuses to get up or leave this land, and asks for more information. He is told that
the entire area is holy, the home of semnos Poseidon and the fire-bringing Titan Prometheus.
The ground where his foot rests is called the road paved with brass, chalkopous. It is a
word applied by Sophocles to mean 'brazen footed', and applied to the Erinys, or Fury, in
Elektra, line 491. Euripides applies it to the word tapous, tripod, in the Supplices, line
1197; here also it means 'brazen-footed'. The 'brazen threshold' is the ereisma, the prop,
or support, of Athens. The word ereisma is also used, by the poet Theocritus, to mean a
hidden rock or reef. Homer mentions iron gates and a brazen threshold in Iliad VIII: 15,
where Zeus threatens to hurl down into Tartarus any deities who oppose his wishes.
When the stranger has departed to fetch Theseus, Oedipus prays to the Eumenides as a
suppliant, revealing that he was told by Apollo that he would find refuge and a place to
die, bringing profit to his hosts, at a shrine of the dread (semnon) goddesses, and that
signs of his arrival would be earthquake, some kind of thunder, or the lightning flash of
Zeus. His mode of address "powerful ones of terrible aspect", is a natural one in the
ancient world, where there were traditions of creatures or phenomena dangerous to behold,
such as Medusa, who turned to stone those who saw her. White robes, breastplates of double
thickness (at Gryneion and in the presence of an ark), masks (Moses), and mirrors (Perseus),
are among the protective devices recorded. Right at the start of the play, Oedipus finds
himself close to a shelf of rock. At Delphi, a suppliant embraced the omphalos, the stone
shown in vase paintings as set in the ground at the shrine (which may originally have been
not at the site of the temple of Apollo, but at the Castalian spring, in the cleft between
the Phaedriades, the Shining Cliffs).
When the chorus of elders approaches, Oedipus asks Antigone to hide him in the grove so that
he may hear their talk unseen.
When Oedipus emerges at the end of the wood, the chorus are horrified at the sight, and call
on Zeus the Averter. Oedipus advances to the shelf of rock and rests there while he reveals
who he is, to the horror of the chorus.
Ismene arrives, bringing news of the impending warfare between Eteocles and Polynices. The
chorus sympathise with Oedipus, and explain how he can make amends to the Eumenides for his
sin of trespass. They give him detailed instructions for a libation (water and honey, no
wine), and an offering of thrice nine olive shoots. He is to pray in a voice so low that
none can hear, and then turn away and depart.
One may recall the Hebrew na'am, murmur, and ne'um, oracle, and the purpose of turning away
may have been to avoid the consequences of a libation on electrically 'live' rock in an area
where earthquakes produce piezoelectric effects. We have already seen that a priestess
perished as a result of over-zealous pouring of water over the sacrificial goat in the
shrine, and that violators of shrines could be blinded. At the final scene of the death of
Oedipus we shall meet this phenomenon again.
When Theseus arrives, there is an interesting observation by Oedipus, at line 610, where he
warns Theseus that he will not be able to rely on friendship with Thebes, or indeed on the
general stability of things. "The strength (ischus) of earth wastes away..." If the
"strength of earth" is the prophetic force felt at Delphi, the remark accords with accounts
of the obsolescence of oracles, as described by Plutarch.
Oedipus is sure that his body, cold and buried, will drink the warm blood of those who will
be killed fighting over Thebes, as sure as he is that Zeus is Zeus, and that Phoebus is son
of Zeus. Does this turn of phrase mean "that Zeus is still enthroned"? I have suggested in
chapter XVIII that Zeus is 'Sedens' 'sitting'. In line 1643, Theseus is "kurios" lord. Here
we have a similarity with the Arabic and modern Urdu 'kursa', seat.
Polynices departs, having failed to secure the support and person of Oedipus. The comments
of the chorus are interrupted by a clap of thunder, and Oedipus anxiously asks for a
messenger to fetch Theseus. The chorus are terrified by more thunder and lightning; fear
makes their hair stand on end. Oedipus tells his children that the end of his life is at
hand. When Antigone asks how he knows, he answers simply that he knows well.
This is the first clear hint that Oedipus has special powers, which are soon to be
demonstrated openly. (It is possible that at the opening of the play he sensed some divine
presence in the rock where he rested).
As the thunder is repeated, he expresses the hope that Theseus will come in time to find him
alive (empsuchos) and in his right mind (katorthountos phrena, line 1487). Why the latter?
Does he fear that an electrical god may spark off an attack of the 'Herakleia nosos', or
some kind of madness such as is sometimes mentioned in the context of holy places?
When Theseus arrives, he asks whether the reason for the summons is a thunderbolt
(keraunos), or "rainy hail". 'Chalaza', hail, may be the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew
'baradh', which normally means not just ordinary hail, but stones, hot stones, or
meteorites, as in O. T. Joshua X: 11 and Exodus IX: 23. The word used by Theseus probably
means a stone shower. He would hardly have been summoned because of a shower of ordinary
hail.
In line 1514, Oedipus says that the incessant thunder and lightning from Zeus (also
associated with 'baradh' in the O. T.) are the signs that foretell his death. He promises to
show Theseus something which will profit his city for ever. "I myself will lead you, without
the touch of a guide, to the place where I must die." The place will be an "alke" defence,
for Athens. Theseus alone is to come with him, and learn holy things, things not "set in
motion" (kineitai) in speech. He must reveal them to nobody except, when about to die, to
his successor, and so it is to continue.
We have here one of the 'arcana imperii', secrets of rule, to be passed on to preserve
authority in the state.
Oedipus is anxious that Theseus and Athens should be safe from attack by the 'Sown Men', i.
e. the Thebans, who traced their ancestry to the dragon's teeth which, when sown, sprang up
as armed men. Snake or dragon ancestry suggests electrical influence from what is described
as a dragon in a cave or the sky. It has an interesting echo in the Nibelungenlied; in
Wagner's Die Walküre, the Volsungs Siegmund and Sieglinde are recognised as brother and
sister by Hunding when he notices the snake-like appearance of their eyes, betraying their
descent from Wotan, the god who wields the spear Gungnir and commands the storm. The same
characteristic is mentioned in the description of Clytemnestra in the opera Elektra, by
Strauss and von Hofmannsthal.
After his words of advice to Theseus, Oedipus says: "But let us now go to the place, for the
god (literally "that from the god") urges me on."
He asks his children to follow him, as their guide, and not to touch him, but to let him,
alone, find his tomb where he is to be concealed in the earth. He is being led by Hermes the
Escorter, and by the goddess below (Persephone). I suggest that he senses variations in
electrical conditions. He will not risk distorting or reducing his sensitivity by contact
with others, hence his 'noli me tangere' instructions.
His final words spoken to Theseus on the stage are: "For your prosperity, remember me when I
am dead, so as to be fortunate always."
This exemplifies the feeling in the ancient world that it was important to remember, recite,
and re-enact stories of great events. This combination of 'muthos, ' story, and 'dromenon',
action, was a magical means of averting future error and disaster.
When the principals leave the stage, the chorus sing an ode to the infernal goddesses,
requesting an easy passage for Oedipus to the plains of the dead.
In line 1579 the messenger gives details of the last moments of Oedipus. He led the way,
without a guide, to the sheer cleft in the rock going down by brazen steps to the roots of
the earth. At a place where the way is split into many branches, he stopped in one of them,
where there is the memorial to the pact between Theseus and Peirithous (who had once been
held powerless in stone seats and kept prisoners underground). The place was shaped like a
stone basin or krater (mixing bowl).
Oedipus sat down here, between the Thorician Rock and the rock basin, between a hollow pear
tree and a stone tomb, removed his ragged clothes, and asked his daughters to bring
'loutra', washing water, and 'choae', water for libation. He washed himself and put on the
appropriate garments, whereupon there was thunder from Zeus Chthonios, Underground Zeus. His
daughters shuddered with fear (rigesan). After his final address to them there was silence,
then a voice was heard. All were afraid, and their hair stood on end.
The god called many times, in many ways: "Oedipus, Oedipus, why are you waiting?" (The word
'god' is emphasised by its position at the end of line 1626). It is an interesting
coincidence that the words quoted by the messenger, "O houtos houtos, Oidipous," each have
in Greek a rise and fall resembling that of 'Yahweh, ' and the Egyptian magic words that
produce a similar sound. Oedipus extracts a last promise from Theseus to look after Antigone
and Ismene, then tells the girls to go. Only Theseus may remain. When the others, after a
short delay, looked back, Oedipus had vanished, but Theseus had his hand shading his face,
as if against some terrible sight that he could not endure to behold. Shortly afterwards,
Theseus prostrated himself on the earth in prayer, and then prayed to Olympus, home of the
gods, in the same prayer. (The latter would be by raising his hands to the sky). Chthonic
and heavenly deities are recognized together.
The scene is suggestive of an electrical incident. The water used reminds one of the death
of a priestess at Delphi in Plutarch's time. The phenomenon is associated with an
earthquake. Theseus appears to connect sky phenomena (lightning) with earth electricity
(piezoelectric effects), in his prayer. The messenger adds that there was no fiery
thunderbolt from god, nor was there a whirlwind from the sea. Perhaps, he says, it was a
"pompos", escorter, from the gods, or earth's foundation opened. His end was "thaumastos",
wonderful.
'Thaumastos' is related to 'thaumazo', I marvel, and to 'thambeo', meaning 'I am amazed, I
am stupified', the victim of some force that affects the working of the senses. This way of
looking at inspiration and the generation of ideas, namely that they come from an external
source, is typically Greek and especially characteristic of Homer, as seen, for example, in
the hero Odysseus. Odysseus does not so much formulate ideas as apply with cunning that
which is sent into his mind by Athene. Indeed, he does not have a mind in the modern meaning
of the word.
It would be oversimplification to say that Oedipus committed suicide by electrocution, but
it does appear that he went intentionally, not compelled by any human agent, to a death
brought about by electrical means. Oedipus, like all rulers in the ancient world, is closely
associated with the mantic arts. But with Oedipus the connection is unusually close. He was
the subject of an oracular warning before he was born, that he would kill his father and
marry his mother. He showed his understanding of monsters by bringing down a monster in the
person of the Sphinx. He was associated with the prophet Teiresias, a dominant figure in the
first of the Theban plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, and with the Argive seer Amphiaraus, whose wife
Eriphyle was bribed by Polynices with a necklace, to persuade her husband to join the
expedition against Thebes.
The early experiences of Amphiaraus and Teiresias are typical of Greek prophets. Seers and
prophetesses generally had the childhood experience of having their ears licked by a snake.
Seers were also frequently blind, physically, but had a compensation of seeing farther into
the future than others.
The importance of the snake stems largely from the fact that it resembles the monster in the
sky that Zeus defeated. The flickering tongue of the snake and the speed of its strike
syrnbolised lightning and electrical phenomena in the battles in the sky. The tongue of a
sacrificial victim was thrown onto the flames of the fire at a Greek sacrifice. It is also
possible that the snake's resemblance in shape to the human spine caused the Greeks to
associate it with the divine element in the skull and spine, as expounded by Plato in the
Timaeus.
The blinding of Teiresias was caused by his observations of snakes. He killed the female of
a pair of snakes. Another story, or more probably another version of the same occurrence,
was that he was called upon to settle a dispute between Zeus and Hera as to whether man or
woman derives more pleasure from love. Teiresias sided with Zeus, and Hera struck him blind
in her anger. Zeus made up for it by giving him long life and prophetic powers. Yet another
story was that Athene blinded him when he saw her bathing. Once more we have water used for
provoking an electrical display. Electricity is the link between snakes, blindness, and
prophecy. It is also the explanation of the building of pillars and columns, either single,
or in groups supporting temple pediments, representing the earth-sky link and the passage of
the electrical god to earth from the sky. Hollows in the earth, chasms in cliffs, represent
the presence of electrical forces from the earth. We have met it in the Mysteries, and Greek
comedy with its phallic displays reveals the influence of the Electrical god Hermes in the
field of sexual activity.
The story of a snake licking a prophet's ears symbolises the ability to understand bird
song, thunder, electrical humming and sparking, and the rumble of earthquakes. Perhaps
Teiresias's study of snakes was part of a study of Zeus and Hera, whose sacred marriage was
celebrated annually in Crete. Experiments could lead to blindness, but the knowledge
acquired in the augur's studies would have survival value in a turbulent world. Protective
measures against radiation were mentioned earlier in this chapter.
Poets too suffered from blindness, for example Homer himself, and the bard Demodocus
(Odyssey VIII: 64). The traditional view has been that a man whom blindness had made useless
for ordinary work might find a niche as a court poet and survive in that way, relying on a
good memory and some facility on the kithara. But Homer stood on the altar at Delos to
recite the Hymn to Apollo, and Pindar used to sit on an iron throne at Delphi. The word
'sophistes' is employed to mean 'poet', by Euripides, Rhesus 924, and by Pindar, Isthmian V:
28. 'Sophos', skilled in an art, or clever, is used especially of those who understand
divine matters, as in The Bacchae, line 186, where Kadmos asks the advice of Teiresias in
the matter of dress, dance steps, and thyrsus management. The poet had a rhabdos, staff. We
have met the Hebrew word 'kashaph', meaning magician, or magic.
In Iliad II: 594 ff., Homer mentions Thamyris, son of the poet Philammon, a son of Apollo.
Thamyris competed with the Muses, and was punished with blindness for his hubris. The
Phrygian satyr Marsyas learnt to play the pipe, which Athene had thrown away because of the
facial distortion involved in playing it. He had the arrogance to challenge Apollo to a
contest. The Muses judged Apollo to be the winner, whereupon Apollo tied Marsyas to a tree
and flayed him alive. One version of the story is that Apollo had him killed by a Scythian.
The northern connection suggests that an electrical interpretation may be suitable. Music
could be used to induce, by mimesis, sounds indicative of the desired electrical activity.
If the experiment got out of hand, the result might be as unfortunate as a miscalculation by
a snake charmer if the snake proved to have poison-fangs after all.
Oedipus exercises prophetic powers in the Oedipus at Colonus, most obviously when he
declares that Polynices and Eteocles will kill each other in the battle for Thebes. But
Sophocles also lays great stress on the fact that Oedipus can find the place where his tomb
is to be. We are told more than once that he is no longer the guided, but the guide, alone,
without the touch of a hand to direct him. He is now as blind as Teiresias. Whereas in the
Oedipus Tyrannus he had taunted Teiresias for being a failure as a prophet, and had been
accused by Teiresias of blindness in return, he now, sightless through his own act, sees far
enough into the future to find, unaided, the place of his death.
There remains the question of the motive for his apparent suicide. Why was he so anxious to
go forward to his death? Was it the suicide of a man who was tired of suffering and wished
to end it? In other words, was it simple suicide by electrocution? Was it obedience to an
oracular command?
There is plenty of evidence that the supreme task of a king, ruler, or prince was to be
willing to serve the gods by sacrificing himself, thereby saving his city from disaster. The
example of Kodros springs to mind. He was the last of the legendary kings of Athens. When
his city was under attack, an oracle declared that the army whose king was killed would be
victorious. Kodros dressed himself as a common soldier and advanced to certain death. The
ritual deaths of kings in games and chariot races can be explained on the same lines. From
Rome we have the story of Marcus Curtius. A chasm had opened in the forum. He saved Rome
from the anger of the gods by riding into the chasm, which closed and swallowed him up.
The Oedipus at Colonus contains examples both of electrical technique and of the duties of a
ruler. He must know the will of the gods, avoid hubris, be willing to be driven out as a
scapegoat, and be ready to save his country from disaster by dying a sacrificial death.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-One: The Death of Kings)
1. Pherecydes said that Zas, Chronos and Chthonia were the three first 'archai' (sources,
beginnings), and Chronos created fire, wind and water. From these elements, disposed in five
'muchoi' (recesses), the race of gods arose. Pherecydes uses the terms pentemuchos, and
pentekosmos. Vide 'The Presocratic Philosophers' by Kirk, Raven and Schofield for a full
account. The five gods would be the five planets visible to the naked eye. For the seven
recesses, compare the seven regions of the dead in Babylonian myth, and the seven gates
through which Ishtar had to pass. The number seven could signify the five planets plus the
sun and the moon. In The Book of the Dead, the seven arits (mansions) are mentioned (chapter
CXLIV, Arkana edition page 440). I suggest that the Greek 'arche', translated as
'beginning', or 'rule', may be connected with 'ar', 'ara', fire, and possibly 'ka'.
2. Dionysus was reputed to be the inventor of honey. (Ovid, Fasti III: 736)
3. With the Egyptian snake goddess Mehen, compare Greek 'mechane', a device, often of
sinister significance. Compare also the Greek 'techne', skill or craft, and Egyptian
'techen', obelisk.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LIVING WITH ELECTRICITY
THIS chapter is devoted to brief observations and suggestions about a number of activities
and aspects of life in the ancient world, in the light of ancient electrical theory and
practice.
ANIMALS, AND MAN'S ATTITUDE TO THEM
An object in the sky with two projections was held to resemble a bull, cow, stag, goat,
horned snake, or dragon. If the body or tail of a comet was reddish in colour, and was the
scene of what appeared to be lightning discharges, mutilation, murder and bloodshed, such
as were attributed to, for example, Kronos, Zeus and Athene, this was taken as a hint that
the action in the sky should be copied on earth, to ensure victory for the forces of light
and of law and order. Errant bodies must be brought low. Animals must be stunned and blood
spilt.
Two important features of the horse are the mane, and the hooves. The mane is in Greek
chaite, which can also be a lion's mane, or lophia. Lophia is also the dorsal fin of a
dolphin. The hooves produce sparks; "ignipedes equi" are fire-footed horses.
Chaite, long, flowing hair, is sensitive to electrical fields. The hair style of some
figures in Egyptian art suggests the symbol for radiation, which is seen as part of the
utchat. Horses were often employed on the threshing floor, a holy place.
The sensitivity of living creatures of all kinds to electrical fields is noteworthy. The
scarab has horns; it is a bull-head in Greek. The Book of the Dead speaks of the Bull
Scarab.
The goose, Greek 'chen', was known to the Egyptians as 'chenchenur', the great cackler. At
Rome, geese were sacred to Juno; they gave warning of the Gauls' night attack on the
Capitol. In the 1939 -1945 war, pheasants in country districts of England gave reliable
early warning of the approach of German aircraft.
We have already met the hoopoe with its erectile crest. The ibis was a symbol to the
Egyptians of the electrical god, because of its skill at killing snakes, and to the ibis
Thoth owes the shape of his head. Thoth armed the gods for their victory over Set.
The ichneumon, or mongoose, was sacred to the Egyptians because of a similar skill, that of
finding crocodile eggs, and the mongoose is known for its ability to catch snakes.
The jackal is sab in Egyptian. I suggest that this may be related to the Latin 'sapere', to
be wise. Anubis was the jackal-headed god.
Ambitious politicians and military men copied the priestly practice of dressing up in the
skins of animals. Just as in Crete and elsewhere there were ceremonies in which experts
jumped on bulls, killed bulls, or were killed by bulls in the agon, arena, or labyrinth, so
an Homeric hero or Celtic chief would wear a helmet, probably with horns, imitating a wild
and powerful animal either on earth, or in the sky, i. e. divine.
The centaur was a creature half man, half horse. Centaurs were archers, and the arrow is
often a lightning symbol. The centaur Cheiron was the model schoolmaster and instructor.
Pindar refers to him as the Magnesian centaur. We may have here a glimpse of ancient
education in electrical theology. Kings were required to understand all aspects of augury;
Herodotus mentions especially the Persians in this respect. Crete was not the only place
where there was bull fighting. The Taurokathapsia was a bull-fight at a festival in
Thessaly, and also at Smyrna. 'Taurelates' was a bull-driver or Thessalian horseman in the
Taurokathapsia. 'Taurokathaptes' was a stuffed figure, used to enrage the bull at a fight,
tauro-machia. This would be similar in purpose to the Roman pila, which, as well as being a
ball, was a stuffed figure for baiting bulls. Aeschylus, Fr. 27, refers to the Edonian
rites of Kottyto; the imitators, mimoi, of the bull bellow in a fearsome manner.
ARCHITECTURE The light-tower is in Egyptian 'an, ' 'techen, ' or 'ucha'; in Akkadian
'durr'; cf. Latin turris, Greek pyrgos, and perhaps stele, which is a memorial stone,
inscribed slab, or obelisk, Hebrew 'shath. ' When a pillar, Greek kion, was used in the
construction of a temple, it was a support of heaven. We have met a description by
Pausanias of pillars as planets; it may be relevant that the source of light for the palace
at Knossos was a courtyard surrounded by seven columns. (J. D. Pendlebury, A Handbook to
the Palace of Minos, p. 50; quoted by Kerenyi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible
Life, tr. R. Manheim. p. 95).
The capital of a column, in Latin pulvinar, was a cushioned seat for a god. The Hebrew
caphtor is the capital of a column, the crown of a candelabrum, the island of Crete, or
Cyprus. The Greek kalathos, basket, can also mean the capital of a column.
Temples and shrines were often situated on high ground, and bronze doors and thresholds
occur as features of Greek temples and palaces. The Egyptian pylon, or gateway, was
sebchet, the opening of fire. The similarity of hept, septem, seven, and Egyptian seb,
illustrates the use of a common technical language, such as was used when discussing the
seven 'wandering stars' and the seven recesses, Greek muchoi. [1]
Herodotus (II: 44) visited Tyre, where he saw a temple of Herakles. It had two columns, one
of gold, and one of emerald, which glowed at night. Theophrastus, in his 'De Lapidibus', on
stones, doubts whether such a large object could be of emerald. Green jasper and malachite
have been mentioned as possibilities. Smaragdos (Greek) is an emerald.
Herakles was associated with luck. His name was given to the highest throw at dice. One of
the names of Baal, as a Babylonian god of fortune, is Gadh (Hebrew spelling).
The Greek 'sema', sign or mark, resembles the Hebrew shem, sign or name. 'Ar' (Etruscan) is
fire. I suggest that smaragdos is the sign of the fire of Gadh. There is some support for
this in Hebrew. Bareqeth is an emerald or precious stone; baraq is lightning.
When Aeneas is shipwrecked on the coast of Africa, he views Dido's new city of Carthage
under construction. He sees huge columns, "scaenis decora alta futuris," lofty ornaments
for a future theatre.
In many passages where columns are mentioned, there is a possibility of a link with the
poros of Alkman, with Plato's column of light, and with Pindar's "marvelous road to the
agon of the Hyperboreans".
Radical proposals about the astronomical significance of electrical phenomena appear in
Solaria Binaria, by de Grazia and Milton (Metron Publications, Princeton), and may be
relevant when attempting an explanation of such passages.
The Latin 'decus', beauty, adornment, glory, and the verb 'decoro', to adorn, call for
study.
"Decus enitet ore," beauty gleams in (or from) his face. "Vitis ut arboribus decori est, ut
vitibus uvae," as the vine is an ornament to the trees, as grapes adorn the vine. Trees
here are the trees up which the vines were trained. "Larem corona nostrum decorari volo," I
want our (statue of) Lar to be decorated with a crown. The adjective 'decorus' means
shining. "Phoebus decorus fulgente arcu," Phoebus beautiful with his gleaming bow; Horace
'Carmen Saeculare' 61. Decorus is applied to faces, eyes, temples, heads, swords, helmets,
wrestling (gleam of oil);
Zeus is even referred to as decorissimus. Bacchus is "decorus aureo cornu," with golden
horn, Horace, 'Odes' 2: 19: 30.
I suggest that we should associate decorus with the appearance of an electrical glow round
an object. The Greek prepon means fitting, suitable, like the Latin decorus. Its primary
meaning is shining, conspicuous to the senses; e. g. 'Zeus en aitheri prepei', Zeus shines
out in the sky.
ART
The Greeks and Romans greatly valued realism. A painting or statue should be as much like
the original as possible, and should be suffused with a certain 'charis', charm. Zeuxis,
who could deceive a bird by inducing it to swoop down to peck at his painting of a bunch of
grapes, was held to be a great artist; his rival Parrhasios, who could deceive Zeuxis, a
human judge, by painting an easel and cloth, so that Zeuxis asked him to remove the cloth
and let him see the picture, was an even greater artist. In Plato's philosophy, everyday
objects copied the eternal, ideal, model. In art, too, the aim was mimesis, imitation.
Much of the decoration on vases, walls, buildings and columns is suggestive of flame-like
effects. Perhaps we have here the influence of electrical theology. It is also probable
that some ancient art is an attempt to communicate technical information. If Apollo is
represented sitting on a tripod cauldron which has wings, the painter may well be telling
the viewer that the god is to be thought of as dwelling in the sky. Similarly, wheels can
suggest not only land travel, but the movement of heavenly bodies, e. g. the tripods of
Hephaestus. Cup and ring designs are thought to be astronomical. Egyptian art is especially
rich in representations of technical apparatus, such as the telescopic rods round statues
of gods and pharaohs, hennu boats such as Moses would have known, and headgear. The object
in the sky described as a seething pot was probably responsible for the design of tripod
cauldrons, and possibly some pottery designs as well. The staring eyes seen in some
statuettes may be inspired by celestial phenomena, and the owl both looked and sounded
divine.
The patron goddess of potters was Athene, and her name may appear in the atanuvium, or
athanuvium, an earthen bowl used in sacrificial rites by Roman priests, and may be the same
as the Greek attanon.
In Homer, beauty is something external which is poured over a person or thing. Athene pours
charis over the head and shoulders of Telemachus, like a smith overlaying silver with gold
(Odyssey VI: 235). It is interesting to compare the Hebrew hedher, splendour, ornament,
with Greek hedra, seat or throne, and Latin hedera, ivy.
A study of art provides additional evidence for the thesis that there was a common
electrical technology throughout the Mediterranean world. Egyptian reliefs showing the
electrical arrangements round statues of gods are similar to a 9th century B. C. example
from Babylonia.
DANCE
We saw in Chapter VIII that Greek tragedy developed from the dithyramb. The Hebrew
'shiggayon' is dithyramb. Hebrew 'sheghiah' is transgression; 'shagha' is to wander. The
view of the nature of tragedy advanced in Chapter VIII is that it was concerned with
averting, by magical means, the transgression of an object in the sky that was guilty of
adikia, injustice, and hubris, assuming too exalted a position. Justice, dike (Hebrew
tsadiq = just), is the normal way of behaving. Injustice is the state of affairs when
someone or something misses the target, or correct path, going too high. In Chapter XVII,
we considered the dance at Knossos, and in Chapter VIII, the dance at the court of King
Alkinous. At Knossos, two acrobats were darting in and out among the dancers; at the court
of King Alkinous the dancing floor is an agon, a place for a contest or fight. When the
agon is cleared for dancing (Odyssey VIII: 260 ff. ), Demodocus sings of the love affairs
of Ares and Aphrodite.
The Cretans had a dance in honour of Sabazios, or Dionysus, called Sikinnis. It was danced
by satyrs.
Mention of Dionysus takes us to Delphi, where goats were seen dancing in a strange way. The
Greek words for dancing, skairo, skirtao, orcheomai, choreuo, komazo, enkrouo, all have
links with goats or the theatre.
In Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus 599, Io enters dancing. Her movements are skirtemata. The
Greek schematizo, suggesting attitudes or figures in the dance, may even be related to the
Egyptian sekhem, power.
The Salii, Roman priests, performed a dance on the threshold (limen). Salio = leap. They
were the guardians of the ancilia, shields. They went in procession through Rome with
stamping, solemn leaps, singing songs. "Salios ancilia ferre ac per urbem ire canentes
carmina, cum tripudiis solemnique saliatu iussit." (Livy I: 20, describing Numa's
instructions).
Dancing before an ark was done by Egyptian monarchs as well as by David, and was part of
resurrection technique. It was also associated with the attempt to renew the fertility of
the earth. In the 20th century ballet The Rite of Spring, members of a tribe stamp on the
earth to waken it from its winter sleep. At Rome there was a priestly college of great
antiquity, whose members were called the Arval brothers (arva means fields). They were
responsible for the fertility of the fields. Their dance was the Tripodatio, a solemn
stamping of the earth. Tripudatio is a dance of a priest round an altar.
The Arval brothers were twelve in number. They made offerings to the Lares of the fields
every year. The Karpaia was a Spartan dance in honour of Artemis. At Athens, it was a
wanton dance, like the Kordax. The Karpaia was danced in Thessaly. 'Karyatizein' was to
dance at a festival of Artemis in Karyae.
DRESS AND COSMETICS
Priests wore white robes. The Greek chlaina, a woollen outer garment stained purple, was of
double thickness, like the ephod and breastplate of the high priest at Jerusalem which was
also of double thickness, possibly in an attempt to shield the wearer from radiation.
Egyptian menkh, linen garments, may mean 'resistant to radiation'. Greek meno =
'withstand', ka = radiation. David wore linen when he danced before the ark, II Samuel VI:
14. Vide Pausanias I: 21: 9, for linen breastplates in Apollo's temple at Gryneion.
The Roman trabea was a state robe. Livy tells us that Servius Tullius, in his bid for
power, put on a trabea and summoned the lictors. There were three varieties of trabea: all
purple for religious use; purple and white, for kings; purple and scarlet, for augurs. The
toga was worn with a broad purple stripe by senators; by equites, knights, with a narrow
stripe. Children wore a toga praetexta, an outer garment bordered with purple, until they
assumed the toga virilis, a grey woollen toga. Men who wished to be elected to office and
join the ranks of the magistrates who had imperium wore a white garment, the toga candida,
whence the term candidate.
Egyptian priests and Greek gymnasium managers wore phaikades, white shoes. The word phaikas
resembles phaikos, explained by Hesychios as being equivalent to phaidros and lampros,
words meaning 'bright'.
Hats are seen on Hittite and Etruscan reliefs, and elsewhere, conical in shape. The mitra
may have been typical of Mitra, the Persian Aphrodite. We read of "a holy crown upon the
mitre," of the high priest, Old Testament, Exodus XXIX: 6. The dunce's hat may be an
attempt to obtain electrical, i. e. divine, help A Roman priest's hat had a twist of wool,
apiculum, round the apex or point. This was similar to the Greek stemma.
The Greeks and Egyptians attached great importance to hair styles. The elegant curl at the
end of the locks of hair on an Egyptian painting or relief, closely resembles the curve of
the utchat, like the Greek chaite, hair or mane. The beard looks much the same. Hair
standing on end may be an indicator of an electrical field. The Greek 'phobe', locks of
hair, is almost the same as 'phobos', fear.
Tassels on the edges of garments remind one of the aegis, which was waved in battle by Zeus
and Athene to terrify the enemy. The Etruscan augur is shown wearing a fringed robe in The
Etruscans, by Pallottino. The Assyrian king presented a fringed garment to the god Ashur at
akitu, the New Year festival. Herodotus (II: 81) mentions an Egyptian robe, the kalasiris,
which had fringes. The Egyptian 'secher' is a fringe.
CROWNS AND NECKLACES
Kronos, or, according to Diodorus, Zeus, assumed a crown after defeating the giant snake
Ophioneus.
The exalted tiara and the throne of kingship were first lowered from heaven to the Sumerian
king in Eridu. Naram Sin had a horned tiara.
In the Gilgamesh epic, after the flood has devastated the earth, Ishtar raises her necklace
of lapis-lazuli and swears never to forget the flood.
We have met the word stephanos, crown, in the context of crowning a bowl of wine, as a
wreath of, for example, olive, worn by priests and by victorious athletes, and I have
suggested that it is setphanos, Set, the seething pot in the sky. The prophet Amphiaraus is
described as having pyrilampea chaiten, fiery hair, stemmati daphnaio, with laurel crown
(Christodorus, Description of the Statues in the Public Gymnasium called Zeuxippus, line
259). The tore was worn especially by Gallic chieftains, and the god Apollo is sometimes
represented wearing a necklace. Necklaces, frequently of amber beads, may have had an
electrical, or even astronomical, significance.
FOOD AND DRINK
Ambrosia and nectar were for the dwellers in the sky. The story of food descending to earth
is not restricted to the Hebrew report of manna feeding the Israelites in the wilderness.
It is found in northern myth, too. Food from the sky saved mankind in the fimbulvetr, the
great winter.[ 2]
Wine was thought by the Egyptians to be the blood of those who had battled against the
gods. In Greece and Rome, it was usual to dilute it with water, and its use in libations
means that it could take the place of blood, Etruscan zac, to make the dead rise and stand.
The onion was valued for its health-giving action. It was similar top garlic in that divine
power came from it. In Latin it is allium, probably another example of 'el'; or caepa
(ka?), Arabic basal. In Greek it is krommuon. Garlic was in Greek skorodon, also gelgis,
gelgithos. Hebrew gulgoleth is a skull or head.
The consonants 'skr', occurring in skorodon, are significant because of garlic's
association with life.
The eating of meat was done as much for magical reasons as for nourishment, as we have seen
in Chapter XVIII when examining the vacl, or sacred feast. The rich and the priests grew
fat on a rich diet of sacrificial meat.
GAMES
The games celebrated in Elis in the Peloponnese (Alis in the Doric dialect), were a
religious festival in honour of Olympian Zeus. They may have been instituted in honour of
Pelops, son of Tantalus and grandson of Zeus, and reorganised in 776 B. C.. They were held
every fourth year, in midsummer. A sacred truce, echecheiria, was proclaimed, so that
people might travel safely from all over Greece.
Spectators and competitors met in the alsos, or sacred grove, where there was a stadium
with room for 40,000 spectators. The main events were foot races, pentathlon, boxing, and
chariot races.
The prize for a winner was a crown, stephanos, of wild olive. At an early date, chariot
racing was introduced, at first with four-horse chariots, later with two-horse chariots.
The signal for the start of a race was given by the raising and lowering of a bronze eagle
and a bronze dolphin.
Pausanias relates that the horses shied at a certain place on the course called Taraxippos,
where there was an altar. 'Tarasso' means throw into confusion.
One may compare this with the presence at Rome in the Circus Maximus of an underground
altar to Consus, a god of agriculture, earth, and secret plans. The latter suggest Hermes,
who was the electrical god par excellence, but ancient authorities equated Consus with
Poseidon. At his festival, the Consualia, on the 21st of August, chariot races were held,
and horses were crowned with flowers.
The altar was underground, but was uncovered for the festival. At Olympia, as elsewhere in
Greece, the gymnasia were places where athletes trained and rubbed oil on themselves; the
palaestra was a place where wrestlers trained. In the Circensian games at Rome, founded by
Romulus, there was a contest between two parties. One of them was clothed in white, the
albati. The Roman poet Juvenal mentions russati, clad in red, and there were greens, too.
Chariot races are often thought to be linked with the death of the queen's consort at the
end of the year, at the hands of the young challenger. Robert Graves maintained that many
Greek myths describe the replacement of a matriarchal system by a patriarchal one.
King Oenomaus of Elis promised to give his daughter Hippodameia to the man who could defeat
him in a chariot race. If the challenger lost, he was killed by Oenomaus with a spear.
Pelops, son of Tantalus who served him up in a banquet to the gods, challenged Oenomaus. He
bribed Myrtilus, the king's charioteer, to loosen a linchpin. The king crashed and lost,
but refused to give up his daughter to Pelops, and threw him into the sea.
Pelops had an ivory shoulder, replacing the flesh eaten in the feast by Demeter.
He was said to have migrated to southern Greece, the 'island of Pelops', from Lydia. His
name may mean dark-eyed, dark-faced, or, literally, mud-faced.
In Greek ops is a face, pelos is mud. It is more likely that his name comes from ops,
voice, and the Lydian pel. Lydian words sometimes have an initial s which later disappears.
Greek spelaion, Latin spelunca, and Lydian pel all mean 'cave'. His name could mean 'voice
from the cave'. The Hebrew me'urah, cave, may be the Egyptian meh, full, and ar, electrical
fire. (Echidna, half woman and half snake, lived in a cave at the place called Arima.) The
presence of an earth goddess would explain Taraxippos and the worship of Consus and
Poseidon. Poseidon was the Earthshaker, associated with the sound of horses, galloping
hooves, sparks raised as hooves struck the stony ground of Greece with its bits of flint
and iron ore, and with the groaning of rocks in an earthquake. His trident is an electrical
weapon just as much as the thunderbolt of his brother Zeus, even if it is only half a
thunderbolt. The thunderbolt held by Zeus resembles in shape the pattern regularly assumed
by iron filings on a sheet of paper when a bar magnet is put underneath. (The patterns of
lightning flashes are random.) The study at Samothrace of this behavior of iron particles
has been mentioned in Chapter XII.
Probably the chariot race originated in a representation of something unusual happening in
the sky. The smash symbolised an encounter between Zeus and a monster. It was, like
tragedy, an apotropaic rite, an attempt to save the world from an extra-terrestrial threat.
The use of the spear by Oenomaus symbolises lightning. The spear is a lightning symbol, the
favourite weapon, Gungnir, of Odin. In Wagner's Parsifal, it is also a healer.
The spina, or low barrier along the race-course, had a seat, pulvinar. In imperial times
the emperor sat on this seat on the fala. It would be a good place from which to observe a
smash, even to cause one.
The Greek palaestra, where wrestling took place, was holy ground, as was a threshing floor,
and the gymnasiarch wore white shoes. Perhaps the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel
(Old Testament Genesis XXXII) should be considered, together with the many Egyptian
references to the god of the thigh, which was situated in the sky. At a Greek sacrifice it
was usual to offer the god slices from the thighs of the victim. 'Kole' is the thigh-bone
and flesh. The Latin poples is the back of the knee, or the thigh. References to the thigh
are found in The Book of the Dead, translated by Budge: "Behold him whose face is in the
Lord of the Thigh." (c. 130). "Hail, O thou Thigh which dwellest in the northern heaven in
the Great Lake, which art seen and which diest not. I have stood over thee when thou didst
rise like a god." (c. 98). "He whose face is behind him ..." (ch. 125).
It is just possible that the last passage could be relevant when tracing the origins of the
two-headed god Janus.
MEDICINE
The Latin 'stupere', to be amazed, may be related to Greek hupnos, sleep, and to the god
Set. There are cases in Homer of deities, heroes and humans being immobilised, with
electric shock as a possible cause. Epilepsy was the sacred, or Heraklean, disease, and
hypnosis was used as an anaesthetic in sanctuaries of Asklepios, and in the Roman army. De
Grazia, in God's Fire, suggests electrical treatment as an explanation of the serpent
Nechushtan set up by Moses to cure sufferers from snake bite.[ 3] Henbane, fabulonia, may
be associated with stories about Dionysus, one of whose names in Etruscan suggests henbane
and raving. A play was a fabula, or story, and Dionysiac worship is all about raving.
Apollo is the god of healing, plague, and sudden death. The Greeks feared contact with
infected persons, whether the trouble was moral or physical. This is to be expected at a
time when there was much electrical activity, lightning, and radiation, whose effects were
called leprosy. It was dangerous to be under the same roof or in the same ship as a person
who behaved impiously.
The god of medicine was Asklepios, son of Apollo. His symbol was the snake; his healing
activity was associated with theatres at Athens and Epidaurus. The snake would be a symbol
of electrical power from both sky and earth, and is a link between the two. The curving
spine of a human skeleton would suggest a snake, and the snake's habit of renewing its skin
could be a resurrection symbol. The Roman house snake was a symbol of the genius of the
house.
MUSIC
Musical activity often took the form of imitation of the sounds of electrical activity, e.
g. in Egyptian sets of vowels, and the sound produced from an ark; probably also imitation
of storm effects, with rattles and other percussion instruments to suggest the sparks and
striking of pebbles and meteorites. The Aeolian harp is an instance of what can be done.
There is some evidence that a smooth, continuous flow of sound was considered to be more
archaic and authentic than staccato sounds separated by big pitch differences, (see
Plutarch; Why The Oracle No Longer Answers In Verse, 397 b, quoting Pindar).
It is necessary to bear in mind the technique of the aulos. Generally translated as
'flute', it was really a double-reed instrument, allowing flexibility of pitch from reeds
with a long lay.
Cicero writes: "inclinata ululantique voce more Asiatico canere," to sing in the Asiatic
manner, with an up-and-down wailing sound. (Orator VIII: 27) One may compare with this:
"Cadmus heard the god revealing correct music, not sweet nor voluptuous, nor broken up in
tunes."
The lyre generally had four strings, later seven. The number may be connected with the
number of 'wandering stars' that they saw in the sky.
The Greek Sirens, whose song lured listeners to their destruction, bear a name resembling
the Hebrew 'shir', song.
A lyre player is 'elater luras', a striker or driver of the lyre. 'Elater brontes' is used
of a deity who wields the thunderbolt. 'Elauno' is used of driving a chariot.
The Greek Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Memory, an interesting anticipation of
Wordsworth's 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'.
A less well known name for them is 'Leibethrides'. Leibo, pour, and libations are concerned
with tombs, and it was an important duty to remember the dead. Epic poetry was largely a
celebration of the deeds of the great heroes of the past (not necessarily a distant past).
Homer's poetry was the Bible of the Greeks, and the Romans acted 'more maiorum', in the way
of their fathers.
PHILOSOPHY
Early philosophy can hardly be distinguished from religion and science. Greek philosophers
tried to find a single reality behind the changing world, and their solutions affected
their concepts of behaviour and their ways of understanding and trying to control their
surroundings.
At times, the presence of electricity could be detected by the eye, when it lightened or
when there was a display in a temple. At other times, a man must be careful what he touched
and where he stepped; sudden death was always a possibility when experimenting with a
mysterious and powerful force. Xenophanes, a 6th century B. C. thinker, postulated a single
god, not anthropomorphic, who always stays in the same place unmoved, and shakes
everything, without trouble, with his mind.
Homer's gods live on Olympus, far removed from the hurry-burly of life on earth, though
they do have their domestic troubles at times, have to repel attacks by giants, and may get
involved in our lives in matters of war and sex. The Egyptian phrase maa kheru is used of a
soul which has been weighed in the scales after death, has passed the test, and is allowed
to work its way up to join Ra in the sky. The Greek word to describe the gods, the 'blessed
gods', is makar. It is used especially of the gods.
Greek writers frequently use the words logo men ..., ergo de ..., in theory on the one
hand, in practice on the other... What is the cause of this natural bias towards
antithesis? It accords well with the sense of an unseen force with manifestations which
were unpredictable.
POLITICS
Kingship is only one aspect of political life in the ancient world, but is the most
importat In Sumer, the god Enlil put the holy crown (which appeared after the flood) on the
head of the ruler. The exalted tiara and the throne of kingship were lowered from heaven in
the city of Eridu. In Babylon, Sargon, in the 8th century B. C., took the hand of Bel, and
in 538 B. C. Cambyses, son of Cyrus, took the hand of Bel in the New Year festival.
Sumerian kings were god's vicars at first; they always retained priestly functions. Priest
is sanga; cf. Latin sanguis, and Egyptian ankh. A prince in Sumer and Akkad was chosen by
Enlil to rule. Later, Enlil was replaced by Marduk, and priests and rulers became two
separate classes.
The king of Assyria regarded the god Assur as supreme among gods, therefore on earth he
must conquer other kings (vice Roux: Ancient Iraq, passim). Oracles, and election by
nobles, were part of the process of making kings. At a coronation the new king was carried
on a portable throne. He entered the temple at Ekur, offering oil, silver and an
embroidered robe. He was anointed by the high priest, and given the crown of Ashur and the
sceptre of Ninlil (Ashur's spouse).
He took part in important festivals, such as New Year (akitu), the eating ritual (takultu)
and the bath-house ritual (bit rimki). He could be a scapegoat in times of trouble, and a
substitute king might be killed. He consulted baru, priests (seers).
The New Year festival involved humiliation of the king to remind him that he was but a
servant of the god. The priest struck him on the cheek. It seems possible that this may
have had another purpose, that of giving him a red face like that of an important heavenly
body. Hebrew chapher is to turn red.
In the course of the ceremony, a bull was burnt, and two statuettes of evil were
decapitated, and their heads burnt. Statues of gods were taken in procession to the bit
akitu, where the triumph of the gods over their enemies was enacted. Music and incense
accompanied the procession. In classical Athens, one of the archons was entitled King
Archon, a survival of the days of monarchy. We have already seen that the prutaneis were
charged with the care of the sacred fire. At Rome, too, from 509 B. C., the powers of the
king were divided between the curule magistrates, rex sacrorum, priests, Vestals, senate,
etc.. If the consuls died in office, an interrex took over until new consuls could be
elected. The interrex was originally the regent holding power between the death of a king
and the election of a successor.
It was important that a high official should preside at theatrical performances and games.
At Athens, one sees the chair of the priest of Dionysus in the theatre; at Rome, the
emperor had his pulvinar, or cushioned throne, on the spina at the circus.
The king's great authority on earth sprang from the fact that he was the servant of the
gods. Servus in Latin, ser in Egyptian and sar in Hebrew, show the nature of his power. He
was especially the servant of the god in his temple, and was responsible for the building
and upkeep of temples.
Tullus Hostilius was elected king of Rome by the nobles (Livy I: 22). They were the
auctores, enlargers. Here we see the word, derived from augere, to enlarge, that refers to
the electrical glow that priests tried to stimulate round the head of a statue, or the
person of a king on his throne, making the figure appear greater than that of a mere
mortal.
We have already seen, in Chapter I, the significance of light in Etruria and Rome. The
Etruscan lauchme, Latin lucumo, or lucmon, is from the root luk and has several meanings.
Its basic meaning is an inspired or possessed person. To a Roman this means furor, and
insania. It was a title of Etruscan priests and princes.
The Etruscans in Italy did not achieve complete political unity. They had a number of
princes, each controlling his own city. "Tuscia duodecim Lucumones habuit, reges quibus
unus praeerat." (Servius on Aeneid VIII: 475 ff). Etruria had twelve lucumons, princes, one
of whom was superior to the others. The name Lucumo was given by the Romans, as his proper
name, to the son of Demaratus of Corinth, who became Tarquinius Priscus, the Old Tarquin,
king of Rome.
Lucumo had a wife, Tanaquil, whose name recalls the eagle, aquila, which seized Lucumo's
hat, carried it up into the sky, and then restored it to his head.
Lucumo may mean simply an Etruscan. The Roman poet Propertius, IV: 1: 29, has "Prima
galentus posuit praetoria Lycmon," an Etruscan wearing a hood first pitched a praetor's
camp. Galeritus, wearing a hood, is taken as meaning a peasant, but galerum, a skin helmet,
Greek kunee, probably has regal and divine significance.
In the realm of history, the original aim was the establishment, by memory or by written
records or monuments, of claims by rulers to divine authority going back as far as
possible; hence the equivocal nature of king lists in the copies of Manetho and elsewhere.
In the 5th century B. C., the Greek word historia and the historians Herodotus and
Thucydides mark an era of inquiry into the past, but ancient stories were valued for a more
important reason than mere curiosity or entertainment. It was felt necessary to be able to
commemorate and perform ancient rituals as the best means of securing stability, lest the
gods become angry and punish the world with floods like those of Noah, Deukalion, and
Ogyges, or scorch the earth as Typhon did. Ancient history is informed by a feeling of past
golden ages ending in disaster and a painful rise from the ruins. The course of
civilisation was cyclic, and the equilibrium was punctuated by battles in the sky and
disasters on a huge scale. If Sophocles could be resurrected today, he might marvel at
twentieth century technology, but he would probably see hubris (overweening pride) and ate
(blind folly) in modern man's drive for domination.
WAR
The war-chariot, Greek satine, harma, Latin currus, essedum, enabled the king, leading his
forces in battle, to inspire fear through his resemblance to a god. The horses with their
fiery hooves contributed to this picture.
Spears and swords were seen as earthly versions of objects in the sky, symbolising the
power of the shock or thunderbolt, as did the net and trident in gladiatorial combats.
There were apotropaic devices on shields, such as snakes or rays of light; radiation danger
is implied in the Gorgon's head with which Perseus turned enemies to stone. The Twelfth
Legion, named Fulminata, had shields that bore a device of Jupiter brandishing a
thunderbolt. Some of the shields painted on Greek vases of the Geometric Period have the
appearance of the double axe, as do Hittite shields.
The burning of towns by a victorious army may well have been done not only for practical
reasons, but also in imitation of the havoc caused by lightning, when a town had incurred
the wrath of Zeus, Jupiter, or Marduk. There would be sound strategic reasonings for
eliminating a trouble spot, but a commander also saw himself as the agent of Zeus or
Jupiter. Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Carthage, was a belli fulrnen, thunderbolt of war.
The helmet had a plume. Bronze armour was sometimes overlaid with tin, Greek kassiteros,
Sanskrit kastira (kastira = to shine).
Priests and augurs were consulted before declaring war or giving battle. If the sacred
chickens would not eat, an impatient commander who said 'let them drink instead', and threw
them overboard, had only himself to blame when defeated in a sea battle (off Drepanum, 249
B. C.).
When war was decided on, the fetial priest went to the territory of the people from whom
redress was demanded for an infringement. He put on his head a pilleum, with an apiculum,
piece of wool, round the apex. He invoked Jupiter, crossed the frontier, and delivered
demands to the first person he met. He then reported to Rome. After thirty-three days he
returned, and hurled a spear into enemy territory. The spear had a tip of iron, or was
hardened in flame. It was either of blood-red colour, or was dipped in blood, depending on
how one translates Livy's account in I: 32. Fetial may be from the Greek phemi speak.
Perhaps the priest spoke with the authority of Al or El.
In the realm of law, morality, crime and punishment, the ruling concept was that of dike,
the way things go, including in the sky, observing the limits and keeping on the right
path. The heavens were the pattern, and must be copied on earth. The keen interest in
homosexuality in Greece was probably inspired in part by imaginative observation of close
encounters in the sky. Kings, and judges, inflicted such penalties as impalement, stoning,
and decapitation.
The lictor's axe, securis, was a lightning symbol, and there are plenty of stories of gods
(e. g. Odin), hanging on a tree. These stories should probably be considered in the context
of the world tree, perhaps of the poros of Alkman.
WRITING
I have already suggested that the Etruscan zichne, to write, means the tracks of Set. There
is evidence that writing was associated with marks made on stone by lightning.
Exodus XX: 24 refers to God recording his name. In Deuteronomy IX: 10 Moses says that he
received two tables of stone written with the finger of God.
I have also suggested that electricity is frequently involved where ancient languages have
the sounds of ka, qa, or cha. There are examples of words with such sounds in the context
of writing. In Hebrew there are chartom, a scribe or cutter of hieroglyphs; charash,
charath, to cut or engrave; chaqaq, to ordain, to engrave, and as a participle, a sceptre;
kathabh, to write; qa'aqa, tattoo, mark on the skin. In Egyptian there is chaker, a design.
Thoth was the god of writing. Etruscan words include zichne, write, engrave; zichina, cut,
bite; cana, to carve. In Hebrew there is sakin, in Arabic sikina, knife. (Cf. Latin
scintilla, spark, and Gaelic skean, dagger.) It may be only coincidence that the Latin
caelum means both a chisel and the sky. The Greek grapho and Latin scribo may have a link
with sacer. Greek stizein means 'to brand', Greek 'hizein' means 'to sit. '
There is a striking coincidence in the fact that certain words in one language have the
same meaning in another language when the direction of the writing is reversed. Semitic
languages go from right to left, Greek and Latin from left to right, Etruscan now one, now
the other. Two key words in ancient religion, 'holy' and 'axe', appear each way. The Hebrew
peladhah means iron; Lydian, Greek and Etruscan have labrys, dolabra, falandum. Falandum is
the sky, thought to be of iron, from which pieces of iron sometimes fall, e. g. the
Palladium, which was probably a lump of meteoric metal or ore. The sounds F and P are
closely related (vide Grimm's law). The Arabic balta is an axe, very close to the Latin
dolabra, axe, and falandum, sky, when read backwards. The Arabic raqs means dance; read
right to left its consonants become sqr, Latin sacer. The Hebrew raqadh is to leap, jump,
start, dance, and we have seen the significance of dancing when discussing the goats at
Delphi, and David and other monarchs dancing before arks.
It must be emphasized that at the moment this can only be regarded as coincidence and
matter for speculation, but further examples may exist, and the matter could have relevance
to the problems of Hittite, Achaean, and Etruscan geography in an obscure period of ancient
history.
If one looks for a thread of Ariadne in this maze, for a single factor to explain the
practices and attitudes of the ancient world which we have been considering, one may find
it in the Greek concept of mimesis, imitation in the attempt to control a force which was
often invisible, but which had great power to destroy or to save. Attitudes towards the
gods changed as Greek and Roman thinkers concentrated, like Socrates, on the political and
moral problems of living together at peace in cities, or on solving problems in medicine
and agriculture, laying the foundations of the physical sciences, as did Aristotle. The
reason for this change may have been in part the gradual fading of electrical fields after
a time of disturbance, and intellectual hubris may have played a part.
However, the original stories survived, especially in the works of the Greek dramatists,
who taught that hubris, overweening arrogance, would bring blindness and disaster.
Xerxes ordered the waters of the Hellespont to be lashed when his bridge was broken down by
a storm. His hubris and impiety were followed by defeat in the straits of Salamis. The
god's anger was roused when Salmoneus emulated Jupiter by riding in a chariot like a god
running amuck in the sky, rattling brass pots and brandishing torches to imitate thunder
and lightning. He was struck by a thunderbolt and hurled into Tartarus.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
APPENDIX A
This book began with a study of augury and of oracles. The inquiry spread from Rome and Delphi
to many other parts of the Mediterranean world, from caves to the sky. On the journey we met
the Egyptian concept of the ka, or double, a manifestation of the electrical force, or god.
The ka may help us to a greater understanding of the terminology employed at Greek oracles.
One of the most commonly used words in ancient Greek is chre, 'it is necessary'. It comes from
the verb chrao, 'I give an answer'. This word is used of an oracle giving an answer, and it is
thought that theos, the god, must be understood as the subject of the verb, i. e. chre means
'the god answers'.
In the middle voice, chraomai means 'I consult', i. e., I get an answer from the god. It also
means 'I use'. Chreon is regarded as a neuter participle, meaning 'that which the oracle
says', and so 'fate', and 'destiny'.
There is an obsolete root rheo, 'I say', which appears in the classical Greek rhema,
'utterance'. It appears in ero, the future tense of the verb lego, 'say', in Attic Greek. The
verb rheo also means 'flow'.
The Greek word chresterion means 'oracle'. I suggest that the priest's answer to inquirers was
"Ka rhei.." (becoming "chre.."), "The God says.."
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
APPENDIX B
READING BACKWARDS
In Chapter XXII, in the section on writing, I quoted examples of words which, when read
backwards, have the same meaning in another language. I wrote that more examples may exist.
It seems best to put some of them in an appendix. Most have been mentioned already in
various contexts.
Correspondence between a Semitic language and Latin
Ar. balta, axe; Lat. dolabra, Lydian labrus.
Ar. raqs, dance; Lat. sacer.
Heb. sakin, Ar. sikina, knife, Lat. sica; Heb. nachush, bronze.
Ar. al shark the east; Lat. cras, tomorrow.
Heb. keneset, Ar. kinisa, religious meeting place; Lat. sancio, sanctify, give life.
Heb. palda, iron; Lat. fala, scaffolding, Etr. falandum, sky, Lat. dolabra, fire from the
sky, axe; Lydian labrus, Gk. laburinthos.
Heb. methalleah, tooth; Gk. metallon is a mine, especially a silver mine.
Lat. letum = death. The tooth of the cobra, and metal, may constitute a link with the
electrical deity and the danger of sudden death.
Semitic - Greek
Heb. baraq, lightning; Gk. karabos, stag beetle, scarab, boat. (all have divine
significance)
Phoenician Anath; Gk. Athene.
Heb. qol, voice; Gk. logos, word.
Etruscan - Latin
Etr. subura, city; Lat. urbs, city.
Etr. ims, Gk. hemisu, half; Lat. semi-, half-.
Lat. cortina, cauldron; Etr. tark, bull. Greek, is, in-, strength. cf.
Tarquin. Greek kerata, horns, Slavonic tur, bull, aurochs.
Egyptian - Etruscan
Eg. herit, fear; Etr. tru, drouna, fear. Cf. Sert. Semitic -Etruscan Heb. lahat, flame,
magic. Etr. thal, sprout, flourish. Cf. dasha, qadhosh, of divine fire on altar or ark. Gk.
thallo, flourish, abound. Heb. kashil, axe, hoe; Losk gleam (from Slavonic; cf. Finish
loista). Lat. luscus, one-eyed.
Greek-Celtic
Gk. temenos, enclosure, shrine; Celtic nemeton, Lat. nemus, grove.
Slavonic - Greek
Slav. gora, mountain; Gk. argos, shining. The link may be Etruscan, as in the case of losk
luscus.
Three of the above call for comment. Sakin and sikina, knife, read in reverse, give the
consonants nks, which could be Heb. nachush, bronze. The difference between the sounds of
sin, 's', and shin, 'sh', is not great enough to prevent confusion.
Sacer, holy, and raqs, dance, also suggest Lat. rex, regis, king. Kings danced before arks,
which in Egypt were associated with Osiris, who, hidden in a chest, had the title Seker,
the name of the earth deity.
The Greek akra, point, peak, which contains the Egyptian ka and ra, also contains the
Etruscan ar, fire, when the whole word is read from right to left, giving the Latin arca,
chest. Furthermore, 'car' in Egyptian is the pupil of the eye.
In general, Latin and Greek were written left to right, Semitic languages the reverse. It
is easy to see that mistakes could have occurred which resulted in the creation of new
words such as urbs. Etruscan is the joker in the pack; Etruscan inscriptions were written
sometimes from right to left, sometimes from left to right. The resulting confusion arose
from an area where the two styles of writing met, with Etruscan in the middle. A typical
example would be balta, axe, Lydian labrus (Gk. laburinthos), with dolabra entering Latin
via Etruscan. The pattern that emerges is in harmony with the statement of Herodotus that
the Etruscans came from Lydia. When asking oneself whether the direction of writing and the
connections between different languages are mere coincidence or not, the fact that the
words quoted all have a religious significance and, if the texts quoted and the conclusions
reached in this book are right, electrical implications, should be taken into account.
If the pattern were seen as significant, it would have obvious relevance not only to the
study of the Etruscan language, but also to the problems of the political geography, and
probably the chronology, of the Mediterranean world at a time of disturbances and
migrations.
The Greek 'limen' is a harbor. Its consonants, LMN, when read backward, give NML. 'Namal'
is Hebrew for a harbor.
Al Mina, 'The Harbor, ' was the Arabic name for a city and port on the mouth of the Orontes
in NW Syria. After its destruction, conventionally attributed to the 'Peoples of the Sea',
the Greeks rebuilt it. The Greek name for Al Mina was Posideion; the earliest level of the
rebuilt city, according to Woolley, its excavator, dates to the eighth century B. C., and
thus creates a gap of about 400 years between the rebuilding and the earlier destruction of
Alalakh, the associated city a little further inland which used the harbour, and Al Mina.
There is a full account of Alalakh, Al Mina and Posideion in Sir Leonard Woolley's book, A
Forgotten Kingdom (Penguin 1953). In Chapter X, he discusses its importance for trade
between Greece and the east.
Herodotus states that the builder of Posideion was Amphilochus. Amphilochus was the son of
one of the Seven against Thebes, Amphiaraus. He must therefore have been contemporary with
the siege of Troy, whose conventional date is, in round figures, 1200 b. c.
The chronological difficulty arising from the situation at Posideion is not unique. It is
typical of sites throughout the Mediterranean area. Several of the cited works below would
dispose of the "Greek Dark Ages," in order to marry far-removed dates and events.
KA
by H. Crosthwaite
GLOSSARY
In transcribing certain Hebrew letters, I have used the following rough equivalents: Beth,
bh; gimel, ah; daleth, dh; kaph, kh; pe, ph.
The 'h' is dropped if a letter has a daghesh (a dot inside the Hebrew letter to harden the
sound). Tau, th; he, h; waw, v; heth, ch as in Scottish 'loch'; qoph, q; tsadhe, ts.
In Greek, tradition makes it difficult to be consistent. The Greek vowel 'u' is often
rendered as 'y' and 'k' as a hard 'c'.
In Russian, the softening of a consonant can be represented by a 'j' (yod), as in 'ogonj',
fire. Some sounds in both ancient and modern languages have no equivalent in standard
English.
No claim is made that in this glossary identities are established, or that coincidence
plays no part. It is meant to raise possibilities, which the reader may accept or reject as
he or she wishes.
Akk. Akkadian
Ar. Arabic
Eg. Egyptian
Etr. Etruscan
Gk. Greek
Heb. Hebrew
Hi. Hittite
Lat. Latin
Slav. Slavonic
Sum. Sumerian
above Heb. al.
Acheron Ar. Achernar, river's end (star in Eridanus).
Adapa Sum., name of the first man. After his creation, the exalted tiara and throne of
kingship were lowered from heaven to Eridu
aegis Gk., goatskin. Heb. ez, goat; ezer, helper.
Agave Name of the mother of Pentheus in The Bacchae. Heb. agabh, to desire, lust after.
alphabet Pliny says that it was brought to Latium by the Pelasgi, that Cadmus imported an
alphabet of fifteen letters from Phoenicia, and that Palamedes (time of the Trojan war)
added zeta, phi, psi and chi (Nat. Hist. VII). Corinth and its colonies retained koppa,
origin of the Latin 'Q'.
also Heb. gam. Cf. Gk. hama, together with.
altar Eg. chaut; Heb. harel (har = mountain); Gk. bomos, thumele, eschara; Lat. ara; Etr.
ar, fire; cf. the Syrian city of Arpad; voice of the altar? (Gk. phatis is a divine
utterance).
Amar Sin Sum., bull-calf of Sin
amber Gk. elektron; Heb. chashmal, in Bible = radiant, in modern Heb. = electricity, as a
substance = amber. Eg. sakal, Lat. sucinum.
An Sum., heaven, sky-god. Cf. Gk. ana, up.
Anaqim Heb., descendants of the giant Anaq. Gk. Anakes, the Dioscuri; anax andron, lord of
men (of Agamemnon).
angry To become angry, Etr. ithe. Cf. Gk. ithuno, straighten, direct; of Zeus, to rule.
anoint Etr. luas; Gk. Iouo, wash.
Anu Akk.= An; Eg. Nu.
animals Etr. bacchetidis; Albanian bageti.
apex Eg. ap = top.
approach Heb. qarabh.
arena Etr. truia; cf. Troy. Gk. agon = arena or struggle.
Ariadne Her name may not be Ariadne, very holy, but ar yad na, hand of fire. The ending -na
is frequent inEtruscan. Ar, Etr., is electrical fire; yad, Heb., is ahand. She was a
goddess as well as a mortal princess, and may be the lady portrayed holding a snake in each
hand. She resembles Britomartis, Artemis, and to some extent Athene. There was a Cretan
festival, the Hellotia, in honour of Ariadne. Athene Hellotis was worshipped at Corinth.
German 'hell' = bright. It is noteworthy that snakes in the hands of statuettes are
sometimes suggestive of a bow, and vice versa.
ark Heb. aron. Cf. ar, fire, and ka. Lat. arca = chest.
art Lat. ars, skill. Cf. Gk. ararisko, join, fit, artuno, prepare, aresko, please.
Adjustment of fittings for the best electrical display.
Ashur Akk, great fire. Ur, great; ash, esh, fire.
atef Eg., headgear of plume, disk and horns.
Atrahasis Sum., very wise, a name of Utnapishtim, alias Ziusudra. Cf. Psalm XXIX: 9: 'The
Lord sitteth above the water-flood'. Cf. Heb. atarah, crown.
axe Lydion labrys; Lat. dolabra; Akk. hazi (Lat. hasta =spear); Gk. pelekus (cf. Peleg,
Genesis X: 25); Lat. bipennis, securis; Heb. seghor, axe, spear, refined gold; Heb. kashil,
axe or hoe, and maghzerah, axe. Cf. Etr. macstrna, macstrevc; Lat. magister, magistratus.
Kybelis is a double axe, according to Hesychius.
banquet Etr. vacl, epl; Lat. epulum, Heb. mishte; cf. Gk. mistullo, cut up meat; Slav.
myaso, meat.
Baradost In Iraq, name of mountain range with caves; cf. Heb. baradh, hail, fall of hot
stones.
battle Heb. milchamah; Gk. mache; cf. Heb. machah, destroy.
beard Gk. pogon; Lat. Barba; Eg. chabes. Eg. bes = flame.
bees Gk. melissa; Lat. Apis. There was a cave of bees in Crete, where Rhea gave birth to
Zeus. Every year a fiery glow is seen coming from the cave, caused by the blood from the
birth of Zeus. Four men put on bronze armour, took some honey, and viewed the swaddling
clothes of Zeus. At once their armour cracked and fell off. Zeus aimed his thunderbolt, but
was restrained by Fate and Themis. The four men were transformed into birds. Ovid, Fasti
III, says that honey was invented by Bacchus.
bird Heb. oph. See 'hoopoe'. Gk. omis, oionos; Lat. avis, volucris.
blood Heb. dam; Gk. haima; Etr. zac, thac; Lat. sanguis. Cf. Sum. sanga, priest.
boat Eg. hennu, a sacred boat.
Boreas The North Wind. He is the Kassite god Buriash. Fire of Bor? (esh, ash = fire) Cf.
sobor (Slav.), spur (Etr.), subura, and vide Appendix B, urbs. Cf. also spanza, libation,
down from the five.
breastplate choshen (of the Heb. high priest).
breath life Heb. neshamah.
Britomartis Wine-wife, wine-maiden. Hungarian ver = blood, bor= wine. Albanian vere = wine;
Breseus is a name of Dionysus. Gk. damart-= wife. Cf. Ariadne, who married Dionysus.
bronze Gk. chalkos (cf. alke, strength); Heb. nachush.
burn Gk. kaio; cf Eg. ka; Lat. incendo, uro, ardeo.
bull Eg. ka; Gk. tauros (tarache = confusion), bous; Lat. taurus.
carve Etr. cana; Albanian qane; Lat. cena; the old form, caesna, is from caeao, cut. Slav.
tsena = price, prize.
cauldron Gk. lebes, lebet-, El's dwelling.
cave Lydian pel; Etr. spel; Gk. spelaion; Lat. spelaeum, spelunca, caverna. Hesiod uses
glaphu. Gr. antron.
chariot Eg. urit; Gk. harma, satine; Lat. currus, essedum.
cherub Heb. cherebh; cf. Gk. cheir, hand.
city Heb. ir; Etr. spur; Sanskrit pur; Lat. subura, urbs; Slav. sobor, assembly; Gk. astu,
polis, city; Eg. Waset =Thebes. City boundaries, Etr. tular spural.
comet Gk. kometes, hairy; Lat. stella crinita, comata.
copper Copper or bronze, Heb. nachush. Nachash = to give oracles.
crown Gk. stephanos; Heb. nezer, tsephirah, atarah; cf. Gk. sphaira; Eg. teshe; Lat. sertum
is a garland. Eg. mech, tiara; cf. Gk. mechane, device.
cursa Name of a star in Eridanus; in Arabic, throne.
cut Heb. habhar, to cut, to divide heavens in astrology.
Damascus Dim ash ka. Slav. dim, smoke; ash, fire; ka (from Egyptian).
dance Heb. chaghagh dance, process, reel. Chaghav = ravine.
daughter Eg. sat.
dawn Heb. or = light; cf. Lat. aurora.
destiny Etr. rad; Lat. ratio.
destruction Heb. kalah; cf. Sanskrit Kali.
destroy Heb. machah; Gk. mache, battle, machaira, cutlass.
dithyramb Heb. shiggayon; Gk. sikinnis (a Cretan dance).
discern Heb. kerithuth; Gk. krino. Krites = judge.
door Eg. seb, thaireaa; Gk. hepta, seven; thura, door.
dome Dome of the Rock Heb. kipat hasela; sela, rock. Gk. selas = light.
double Eg. ka; Gk. eidolon, image.
dragon Heb. nachash (constellation). nachash with short 'a' = omen.
dwelling Heb. gar; cf. Gk. chara, charis, grace, and kara, head. Cf. Heb. shekhinah, divine
radiance or presence.
dur Dur Sharrukin, Sargon's fortress. Cf. Lat. turris, tower.
earth Eg. ta; Gk. da, ga, get Poteidan = Poseidon.
east Ar. al shark Lat. cras = tomorrow. A final 's' in Latin was less sharp than an initial
's', more like samekh than tsadhe. For the link between dawn and tomorrow, Gk. aurion,
tomorrow, and Aurora, goddess of the dawn. For the reversed direction of the writing of
'shark', cf. raqs (Ar., dance), and sqr (Lat. etc., sacred); balta (Ar.), axe, Lat.
dolabra.
element Gk. stoicheion, arche.
enchant Heb. kashaph. Lat. sapere = to be wise, understand.
engrave Heb. chaqaq = engrave, sceptre. Eg. chaker = design.
Enki Sum., lord earth; cf. Gk. ge.
Entemena Sum., lord of the temple platform. Gk. temenos = area cut off, shrine.
epilepsy The hand of Sin; the Heraklean disease, the holy disease.
Etemenanki The tower of Babel, temple foundation of heaven and earth.
evil Eg. ker; Gk. ker = evil spirit.
fable Etr. fabulonia = henbane; Albanian babullij = roar, rave. 'Fabulaeque Manes', Horace,
Odes I: 4: 16. Fabula is the plot of a play.
face Eg. her, hra, = face; also 'upon'. Cf. Gk. Hera.
fate It is fated, Gk. chre, = ka rhei ka speaks.
father Etr. at; Hi. atta; Albanian at; Russian otets; Heb. abh: cf. Lat. avus, grandfather,
ancestor.
fear Eg. herit; cf. Etr. Sert, a fearsome deity; Gk. thronos = throne. Etr. tru, drouna, =
fear. Heb. mora = fear, reverence, miracle. Lat. mora = delay. Heb. yirah = fear. Yirah
Yahweh, fear of god, religion. Cf. Gk. hiereus, priest, and hieros, holy.
feast Etr. and Lat. caerimonia; Albanian kreme.
fire Heb. esh (nephesh = soul); Etr. ar; Lat. ara = altar; Eg. chet, fire; cf. Gk. chaite,
hair, mane; Etr. zar; Slav. zhar. Etr. sarve, put fire; Albanian zjarrve; Lat. servo,
servio. Fire-stick, Eg. tcha. Eg. tehen = pillar; cf. Gk. techne. Gk. pur, Lat. ignis,
incendium, = fire.
firmament Heb. rakia. Gk. kio = go. Where Ra goes?
fish Eg. an; cf. Phoenician Dagon; Heb. dagh.
flail Eg. khu; also = spirit-soul, radiance.
flame Heb. lahabh, flame, lightning, spear-point. Lahat, flame; with long vowels, = magic.
Eg. besu, flame.
flint Lat. silex.
flourish Etr. thal = go out, be successful. Gk. thallo.
fly to Eg. pa; Gk. petesthai
footstool Gk. threnus, Akk. galtappu. Gk. threnos = dirge.
force Eg. Bi = The Mighty One of Iniquity. Gk. bia, force. form Eg. qaa.
foundation Eg. sent; cf. Vergil Aeneid I: 426, sanctus senatus, at Carthage.
fringe Eg. secher.
frog Eg. Heqt, frog goddess; cf. Gk. Hekate.
fruitful, to be Heb. para; cf. Lat. pario, bring forth.
funerary Etr. suthina, suthi; cf. suttee.
glory Heb. kabhodh; cf. Lat. caput; Eg. khu, radiance, and ka. See 'liver'.
glow Heb. chamam. Chaman = sun-pillar, idol of Baal.
goat Gk. tragos, aix, aig-; aegis, goat-skin; Heb. ez. Ezer = helper. Lat. caper, goat; cf.
Eg. ka, + per, house.
goat-stag Gk. tragelaphos, a bearded deer.
god Gk. theos, daimon; Etr. iu; Lat. deus.
gold Heb. zahabh; Lat. aurum; Gk. chrusos; cf. Heb. or, light.
good Heb. tobh; cf. Slav. dobr-, good.
goose Eg. khenkhenur, the great cackler, nekekur, smen. Gk. chen; Lat. anser.
governor Sum. en, ensi. Lat. ensis = sword.
great Heb. gadhol; Eg. ur; Gk. megal-; Lat. magnus, altus (tall); cf. Lat. adolere, to
magnify, to worship.
hair, mane Gk. chaite; Eg. Chet = hair; Lat. coma, iuba; Lat. iubar = radiance of heavenly
body, especially of Phosphorus and Hesperus (Venus).
half Etr. ims; Gk. hemisu; Lat. semi.
hammurapi 'The god Hammu is a healer', or 'the rod of Hammu'. Gk. rapis = rod
hand Gk. cheir; Heb. cherebh = sword. Gk. pux means 'with the fist'. Cf. Iapyx, Iapygia.
head Eg. tep; cf. Karatepe; Gk. kara, kare; Etr. katec. Ka + tego, protect?
healing Heb. marpe. Marpessus: an oracle of Apollo in Asia Minor. Gk. iatros, doctor; Lat.
sanare, to heal.
heaven Eg. pet; Gk. iatros Lat. Caelus (father of Saturn), caelum; Heb. shamayim.
helmet Eg. khepers; Lat. galea, cassis; Gk. korus.
Herakles Called Mars by some', Pliny N. H.: II.
high Heb. ram; Gk. hypselos; Lat. altus.
holy Heb. qadhosh; qadhach, to burn, glow; qaran, to shine; qayin, spear, point; qardom,
axe; qeshet, bow, rainbow, power.
hoof Gk. onuch-; cf. Eg. ankh, Coptic onkh. Gk. hople, hoof; hoplon, weapon.
hoopoe Heb. dukiphat. Cf. Slav. duch, spirit. Heb. pathar = explain; Sanskrit pathi, path;
Lat. pons, bridge, path; pontifex, priest; Gk. phatis, utterance; Lat. fatum, fate.
horn Heb. qeren; Gk. keras; Lat. cornu.
horse Heb. sus; Akk. sisu. Cf. Celtic horse deity Esus.
house Eg. per. Per = go out. Cf. Parnassus. Eg. het, house or temple; neter het, god's
house. Cf. Gk. antron, Lat. caverna, Etr. fanu, Lat. fanum, Albanian bane. House of Heaven,
the name of the temple of the goddess Inanna, Semitic Ishtar, Sum E-Anna.
ibis Eg. tehuti.
image Heb. tselem, tsalmaveth, shadow of death.
iron Heb. palda; cf. Etr. and Lat. falando, fala, scaffolding (symbolising sky).
Isis Eg. Ast, Auset, seat, throne.
into Etr. painem; cf. Heb. bein, between.
incense Eg. sentra.
jackal Eg. sab, also = a wise person; cf. Lat. sapere, to be wise, to understand.
Janus Lat. Bifrons; Etr. Culsan. He resembles a Sumerian deity who opens the celestial
gates to Shamash the sun.
justice Gk. dike; cf. Heb. tsadiq, just.
ka Eg., the double; cf. Heb. qadhosh, holy; Lat. cacumen = peak, point; ka + culmen, top.
Cf. columen; -cello, strike. ka also = bull. Cf. Lat. caverna, a cave.
Ka-dingir-ra Babylon. Karduniash = Babylonia.
kerukeion The staff of Hermes; ka + eruko. Lat. caduceus.
kill Heb. haragh; cf. Gk. charax, stake; Eg. Harachte.
king Eg. hen; Heb. melekh; Sum. lugal; Gk. basileus, turannos, anax, Lat. rex. King of the
four regions: Sum. Shar kibrat arbaim. Cf. Roma quadrata, the four quarters of Rome. Heb.
arba = four.
knife Heb. sakin; cf. Lat. seco, cut.
know Heb. yadha; cf. Gk. oida.
kudurru Akk. stele; cf. Lat. turris .
Ladon Serpent killed by Herakles. E1 Adon?
Lady Eg. turan; cf. Gk. turannos, despoina.
lamp Heb. ner. Nergal is the planet Mars. Gal = great; cf. Gk. megal-, great.
languid Heb. chalah, to be languid; = Gk. chalan.
laurel Gk. daphne; Lat. laurus. It makes loud noises when burned, as does holly.
lazy Heb. paghar; Lat. piger.
libation Etr. lacth; cf. Gk. lekuthos, oil-bottle. Etr. spanza, pour libation; Hi. sipand;
Gk. spendo. Cf. Hi. panza = five, Sanskrit pancha. 'S' (Slav.) = with, down from. Etr.
huriur, husiur, is a libation; Gk. cheo, I pour. Chusis, a pouring. Eg. ur = great. The
great pouring.
life Heb. chaim; Etr. knie; cf. Eg. Khnum, the god that creates man; and Lat. genius; Eg.
ankh.
light Heb. or; Gk. phos = man, phos (neuter) = light; selas, lightning flash; cf. Heb.
sela, rock. Etr. kvil light (Tanaquil); Lat. lux, Etr. loschna; cf. Slav. losk gleam; Lat.
luscus, one-eyed. light-tower Eg. an. Etr. kvil (aquila, Tanaquil); Hungarian kivilagit is
to illuminate.
lightning Heb. gachelet, bazaq, baraq (cf. bareqeth, emerald; barqan, threshing-sledge),
chaziz, cf. chazir, boar; lapidh; cf. Lat. lapides; stones; Etr; thehen; cf. Gkf. thuo,
sacrifice by fire.
lightning-conductor Etr. arseverse; cf. Lat. severto, turn aside.
lineage Etr. thur; Albanian dore; cf. Gk. thura, door.
lion Heb. ari. Ariel, lion of god, hero, Jer-salem, altar, hearth.
liver Etr. caveth, Heb. kabhedh; cf. kabhodh, weight, glory, soul, person. Lat. iecur.
look, to Heb. nabhat. Nabhi prophet. Cf. Gk. ana, up, and (v) idein, to see. The digamma
gives Lat. video, see.
lot Voting stone, Heb. goral.
linen Linen garments, Eg. menkh. Cf. Gk. meno, stay, resist.
lord Gk. despotes. Cf. Teshub, the Hurrian storm god. Gk. kurios. Eg. neb; cf. Lat.
Neptunus; Heb. adhon, Baal, sar; Eg. ser, ur; Lat. servus.
magic Heb. lat; see 'flame'. To practice magic, kashaph.
majestic, to be Heb. ga-a; also = to rise, grow up. Gaon, majesty, swelling.
man Gk. phos, anthropos, aner; Etr. aner.
mane Gk. chaite; Lat. iuba; cf. iu, god; ba, soul.
market Etr. terg; Slav. torgovlia, trade. meal Sacred, of meat, Heb. tebach; Lat. dapes;
Etr. vacl.
meat Etr. mis; Slav. mjaso. Cf. Gk. mistullo, cut up meat before roasting.
messenger Heb., malakh; melekh = king. The king was the interpreter of the will of the god.
metal Heb. pach = metal plate; pachim (plural), lightning, heat, glow.
milk Heb. chalabh; Gk. gala.
mountain Etr. mal Cf. Gk. mallos, Lat. mallus, lock of wool.
mummy Eg. sahu.
murmur Heb. haghah. Cf. Gk. hagios, and hagnos, holy.
Muses Gk. Pierides (from Mt. Pieros in Thessaly). Cf. Heb. pe'er, head-dress, turban,
chaplet.
nail Gk. helos, nail, in Homer is only for ornament. A sceptre has golden nails, as does
a sword. Zelos, envy, may be Set's nail; cf. phthonos, envy, in the Timaeus. Arizelos,
conspicuous, of the rays of a star (Iliad, XIII: 244), has the prefn 'ari' which may be
'ar', fire. When Zeus turns a snake into stone, he makes it 'arizelon'. (Illiad II: 318).
name Heb. shem. Gk. sema = sign, mark.
Nar Marratu Bitter river, Persian Gulf. Lat. amarus = bitter.
Neith Eg. Net, the goddess Neith.
net Eg. sat is a net-work garment, such as was worn by Greek seers. Net-man Retiarius,
armed with net and trident, in Roman amphitheatre.
night Heb. lailah. Cf. Gk. lailaps, storm. In the storm that Poseidon sends against
Odysseus, 'night rushed down from heaven' Odyssey V: 294.
Nile Eg. Hap. Hap-ur, the great Hapi, the Celestial Nile.
nod Heb. nudh; Lat. nutare, especially of Jupiter.
north Heb. tsaphon = north, northern sky. Tsaphah = to watch; as participle, a watchman,
seer, prophet. Ar. al shamal = the north. Cf. Heb. chashmal, amber. Gk. Boreas, the north
wind, the north; arktos, the north, the north star, a bear, and a girl at Athens who was a
servant of Arternis Brauronia.
Oak Heb. tirzah; Gk. drus.
Obelisk Cf. Eg. techen, and Gk. techne (skill, cunning device). Gk. obelos = a spit, for
roasting. When of stone, it is a pillar, Herodotus II: 111, 170.
olive Eg. baaq; cf. Lat. baca, berry.
Omen Heb. nachash, oth, othoth; cf. Gk. ototoi Cassandra's cry of woe; Aeschylus, Agamemnon
1072.
Onion Lat. caepa; Ar. basal. Cf. garlic, Gk. skorodon, physinx, gelgith-(cf. Heb.
gulgoleth, skull); Lat. allium.
Open Heb. pathah, to open, be open; pathar, explain; pethach, door; cf. Gk. ptuche, recess
(seven recesses?); Sanskrit pathi path; Gk. patos; Lat. patere, to be open; cf. pons, way,
bridge; pontifex, priest. Cf. Apollo Svulare, the revealer.
oracle Heb. massa = oracle, elevation, song, lifting of voice, desire. Ne'um, oracle;
na'am, to murmur. Gk. chresterion, oracle.
order Etr. rath; Lat. ratio; cf. Heb. sedera and Lat. sidera, stars. (Sedera = row).
ox Heb. par; cf. Slav. par, steam.
Pelasgians They were 'dioi'= divine, and were among the inhabitants of Crete mentioned in
Odyssey XIX: 177. I suggest that they were pel sagi, people with cave knowledge. Pel
(Lydian) = cave; sagus (Lat.) = wise, especially about divine and future matters. The caves
in the Northwest slopes of the Athenian Acropolis may have been of special interest to the
Pelasgians.
pelops Voice from the cave; pel, cave (Lydian), ops, voice (Gk.).
phoenix Eg. khu = head of the bennu bird.
pillar Heb. shath; Eg. an, ucha; Gk. kion, stulos; Lat. columna; Et. prezu; cf. Gk.
prester, thunderbolt. Eg. an, light-tower.
pitcher Jug, Heb. kadh; Gk. kados; Etr. kathesa.
planets Heb. mazzaloth. Slav. mesto = place. El's place? Cf. Mazzaroth (signs of Zodiac?).
prayer Gk. ara. Heb. arar, to curse. Etr. lut, to pray; cf. Gk. lite, a prayer or curse.
pride Heb. zadhon. Adhon = lord.
priest Sum. sanga; Eg. neter hen, divine servant; Heb. kohen (hen = servant); kamar, priest
serving an idol; Gk. hiereus; Lat. sacerdos, flamen (he who blows the flame), pontifex,
bridge or path maker. Cf. Heb. kamar and Etr. mer (take?).
prince Eg. ur, ser; Lat. servus; Heb. sar, lord. Philistine p., seren; cf. Lat. serenus,
clear (of the sky), of Jupiter.
prize Lat. cena, banquet; Slav. tsena, price.
prophet Heb. nabhi; chazah, prophesy. Gk. mantis.
protection amulet, Eg. sa; cf. Gk. saos, safe.
prytanis Senior Athenian official who tended fire by waving firebrands. Gk. pyr, fire;
tanuo, brandish. Etr. eprithieva, he was a prutanis.
pyramid In The Book of the Dead, a pyramid of Pepi is identified with Osiris (Budge p.
646).
pylon Eg. sebchet, fire-gate; cf. Gk. chaite, mane.
raise Heb. nasa; Gk. anasso = rule; ana = up, aisso, set in motion.
red 'I am the lord of redness in the day of transformations'. (The Book of the Dead, p.
609).
rock Heb. sela; cf. Gk. selas, light. Gk. petra, rock; petros, stone. Mummies were encased
in rock-crystaI, Herodotus III: 24.
sceptre Eg. tcham; Gk. kerukeion; Lat. caduceus, baculum; Heb. shebhet, sceptre, threshing-
stick rod.
seat Eg. ast; cf. Auset, the goddess Isis.
see Heb. ra'ah; or = light; cf. Eg. ra, and Gk. horo, see.
senate Cf. Eg. sent, outline of foundation of building. See Aeneid I: 426, on the
foundation of Carthage.
sepulchre Heb. qebher; cf. Lat. caverna. Gk. kamara is anything with a vaulted roof, Lat.
camera. The usual derivation is from kampto, bend, but note the Hebrew mearah, cave. Eg.
meh is to fill. Full of ar, electrical fire? Abraham buried Sarah in the cave of the field
of Machpelah, Genesis XXIII: 19. Pel (Lydian) is a cave.
serpent Eg. ara; Eg. serpent-goddess, Mehent. Cf. Gk. mechane, device, and Heb. Nechustan,
the brazen serpent, Numbers XXI: 9. Gk. ara, prayer, or curse.
seven Eg. seb, gate; cf. Gk. hepta, Lat. septem; seven planets, seven-gated Thebes.
shade Etr. hia; Gk. skia; cf. Hi. siu, god.
shepherd Gk. poimen; Finnish paimen.
sign Heb. oth, pl. othoth; cf. Gk. ototoi Alas! Aesch. Ag. 1072; Gk. sema; Lat. monstrum.
Gk. otobos, a startling noise, e. g. din of battle, thunder, rattle of chariots, noise of
pipes.
sin Heb. chata, to sin; cf. Gk. chaite, hair, mane; hamartano, miss the mark, sin; Lat.
erro (wander), pecco.
skin Heb. or; also = light. Shining with oil?
sky Etr. falando; Lat. caelum. Fala, scaffolding. 'Falacer' is a flamen.
slaughter Heb. zabhach; cf. Gk. sphazo.
slay Heb. haragh; cf. Eg. harachte.
smoke Gk. kapnos, ka, and pnous, breath?
song Heb. shir; cf. Gk. Seiren, Siren.
soul Ba, khu, ka, nephesh, psyche, anima, animus, genius, daimon, neshamah.
speak Hep. dabhar. Cf. Heb. tobh, good; Slav. dobr-; Etr. ar = fire.
spear Heb. chanith. Gk. kentron, goad.
staff Gk. skeptron; Heb. maqqel; Lat. macellum, shambles. Lat. macto, sacrifice, magnify,
worship, slaughter. Lat. baculum, stick.
stone Macedonian pela (spel, cave?); Eg. aner; cf. Gk. aner, man. Deucalion and Pyrrha
threw stones which became men and women. Heb. goral, voting stone; Etr. kur; Sanskrit garu,
heavy; Etr. penthuna, slab of stone; cf. Gk. Pentelikos, where marble was quarried. Gk.
petros Cf. Lat. iecur, liver (ie = god).
strike Etr. rach; Heb. haragh = slay.
summer Heb. kaits. Gk. kaio, burn.
sun Etr. erus, usil; Heb. shemesh.
sweet Eg. bener; Lat. Venus, Vener-; Etr. aplu; cf. Lat. placet, it pleases. Gk. ampelos,
vine; Albanian ambel, sweet.
sword Heb. cherebh; Gk. cheir, hand or arm; Heb. mekhera; Gk. machaira, cutlass.
Tarquin Cf. the Asian deity Tark or Tarkon.
terebinth Heb. elah; Gk. elate, pine.
Thebes Eg. Uast (child of Set). Cf. Gk. astu, city.
there Heb. sham. Shamayim, the there-waters, the heavens.
threshing Etr. lamna. Gk. halos, aloe, dinos.
throne Eg. ast, auset; Gk. thronos; cf. Etr. drouna, fear. Heb. kisse, seat; cf. Sum. kish.
Gk. kissos, ivy; Lat. hedera; cf. Gk. hedra, seat, especially of the gods. Ivy was wound
round the thyrsus.
thunder Etr. cemnac, frontac, thunderer. Gk. semnos, holy. (Astrape = lightning).
tin Gk. kassiteros; Sanskrit kastira = shine; Ar. kasdir.
tool Eg. met, tool or weapon. Gk. mechane?
transgression Heb. shal. Lat. salire, leap.
tripod Etr. cisum pute; cis = three; Gk. podes, feet.
Typhoeus He is 'arduus'. High, or is he blazing? Ar, fire; ara, altar.
under-world Eg. neter chert; cf. Etr., Slav., garth, gorod, etc.. Etr. muth, Lat. mundus,
German Mund (mouth), opening to the underworld.
urim Unm vethummim, (on the high priest's breast-plate. Gk. etumos = true). 'Light and
Truth'. Ve in Heb. = and.
vain, in Gk. maten; Slav. darom (as a gift = in vain); cf. Heb. mattanah, gift.
vine Gk. ampelos; Lat. vitis. Lat. vis = force, vita = life.
voice Heb. qol, Slav. golos; cf. Slav. glagol, word, as in Janacek's Glagolitic Mass;
Russian glagol = verb. Cf. Gk. logos, word. Gk. ops, voice. Pelops, the voice from the
cave. Arpad, voice of the altar. Gk. phatis, utterance, especially divine or oracular
utterance.
wagons Frequent in Celtic myth. Gods moving in the sky? Thor's cart was drawn by goats.
war Battle, war: Heb. milchamah; Gk. polemos; mache, battle. Lat. bellum, war; pugna,
proelium, battle.
way A going, Heb. derekh; cf. Lat. rego, dirigo, guide, rule.
west Heb. marabh; erebh, evening. Gk. Erebos, a place of darkness on the way to Hades,
Odyssey X: 528. The link between west and Hades appears in Eg. Amenti, Hades, and Ement,
the west.
with Etr. me, e. g. menatha, with the night. Gk. meta = with.
wizard Heb. yidhoni; cf. Gk. idein, see.
wolf Etr. vc; Albanian uc; Gk. lukos.
word Heb. milah; Gk. homilia, association. Heb. dabhar. Debhir, the Holy of Holies, qodhesh
haqqodhashim, sanctum sanctorum, at the west end of the temple. Debher, destruction.
young Etr. re, ri; cf. Lat. rite. Renewal by rite? Cf. akitu, the Babylonian New Year
festival, and Lat. ago, actum, do, perform.
youth Heb. alumim; cf. Lat. alumnus, pupil.
Zeus He is sedens, sitting on his throne. Cf. Ziusudra, and Psalm XXIX: 9, 'The Lord
sitteth above the water-flood'.
zil Etr. for Lat. sedile, seat, or throne.
zilch, zilc An Etruscan magistrate, zilouchos, chair-occupier. Cf. Gk. skeptouchos, holding
the sceptre, of Zeus, or of a king (frequent in Homer). Roman magistrates with imperium had
each a curule chair, sella curulis. Curulis is derived from currus, chariot, a divine
vehicle. Juno is addressed as Juno Curulis in an ancient prayer.
========= End of KA =========
A FIRE NOT BLOWN:
A FIRE NOT BLOWN..
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots
in Ancient Languages
of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
with an Introduction by Alfred de Grazia
Published by
METRON PUBLICATIONS
P.O. - Box 122,
Princeton,
NJ-08542,
USA
Copyright 1997 by Metron Publications.
All rights reserved.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
with an Introduction by Alfred de Grazia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE-PAGE
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
01: THE STORY
02: CRETE
03: KATREUS
04: ZEUS
05: DIONYSUS
06: ARIADNE
07: THE LABYRINTH AND AXE
08: THE BULL
09: NAXOS
10: CHRONOLOGY
11: CHANGING INTERPRETATIONS
12: CATASTROPHE, MYTH AND SKY
13: FIRE
14: THE GODDESS GAIA
15: AWARA AND KNOSOS
16: THE DANCE
17: ROCKS
18: RITUALS
19: LIFE
20: QUAIRO: RAISING THE KA
21: KINGS
22: SACRED BIRDS
23: BOLTS
24: THE NORTH
25: RESURRECTION TECHNIQUES
26: REVERSALS
27: GLOSSARY
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
PREFACE
In this work I have tried to develop some of the ideas that I put forward in my previous book Ka. The
chief aim has been to apply my first work's electrical interpretation of ancient myths and cosmology to
a particular area of the ancient Mediterranean world, then to quote further examples of religious
practice and the relevant vocabulary from a wider area. There has inevitably been repetitions of
examples and interpretations from my earlier work.
In my first book I gave about twenty cases of reversals of direction of writing, suggesting that
something more than coincidence was involved. The present work contains more than eighty examples for
consideration, and there are more possibilities which may justify mention at a later stage.
I am most grateful to a number of people for their help. I had useful discussions with the late Stephen
Yates on Celtic and Gallic vocabulary, and with Amanda Farrar on drama and the dance. My daughter Susan
gave me help in computing matters. Professor Alfred de Grazia once more has contributed the necessary
Introduction and has continued to give me encouragement and assistance. My thanks go also to the staff
of Metron Publications at Princeton.
H. Crosthwaite
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
INTRODUCTION
Some time ago, at a lecture, I made various remarks connecting catastrophes, electricity, and the
sudden hologenesis of speech, which were heard by Hugh Crosthwaite, a Birmingham schoolmaster in
classics and a musician. Perhaps I was expressing my opinion that originally an ecumenical language
served primeval humans, based entirely at first upon connections perceived to exist in the sky and to
transfer therefrom the objects experienced on earth. All language was in origin sacral and then became
pragmatic in the sense of coping with the mundane artifacts of existence. A prime cause of
humanization itself was catastrophe on a global scale, to be called quantavolution, and electrical
forces dominated the quantavolutions as they enveloped and influenced humans. The same electromagnetic
forces diminished with the passage of time between quantavolutions.
Mr. Crosthwaite proceeded incessantly to collect related words in several languages, and brought the
whole into print upon my urging. The name of the book was KA. So large was the body of material that a
second volume seemed to be in order --a book that we have here, A Fire Not Blown.
From these his latest studies his readers and I will have derived a plethora of new meanings to old
words and a way of looking at the origins of words. I cannot repeat here the hundreds of sharp little
surprises in the work, but I shall try at the least to nominate in a few paragraphs at least one major
point that is established by the Author in each chapter.
Practically all myth, and the Old Testament as well, referred continuously to sky events. That the
Minotaur's name was Asterios, and that Theseus seized the monster by its hair, comet-like, is an
instance, one of scores that are carried in this work skywards. Altogether the presence and activity
of electromagnetism and charges in the earth (often represented by the great goddess Gaia), and in the
sky and the interactions between the two, with mankind as mediator, victim, would-be controller, educe
a lively electrical mythology of the earth, where beings such as snakes find themselves especially
entrancing to men, who see them alive in the sky and in the earth and reacting simultaneously in both
places on quantavolutionary occasions.
The vocabulary invested with the phenomenon of fire is demonstrably capable of distinguishing
electrical from other fires, within individual languages and with trans-linguistic similarities.
The object of priestly study was theological electricity. Lightning, magnetism and piezoelectric
effects were related in the ancient mind as divine fire.
Although Crete was a land of many peoples and dialects, it followed a consistent pattern of ritual
settings, and these were akin to the Egyptians. Significantly, high places were known to attract
electrical discharges, but on lowlands and on hills wells could be dug and filled with stones that may
have come from more electrified sacral ground and been expected to enhance local electrical effects.
Lanuguage correlations include proper names, and here it is shown, inter alia, that two kings of Crete
are named Minos, one of the Old Bronze Age and one of the Iron Age, and likewise there is an ingenious
Daedalus in Minoan times and the same much later as pioneer sculptor of realistic marble statues in
Greece.
Katreus was the important successor to the king-god Minos of Crete, and his name is made up of the two
components, the aura of divinity and watching for something, here the essential electromagnetism.
Nomen est omen is to be borne in mind at all times in etymology. A linguistic root may never just
that, but is always something behavioral, real, connected with the direst and most blessed activities
of homo schizo. Once more, astronomy, electricity, gods, and bulls find a score of linguistic links,
and several identities and their associated myths become clearer.
Linguistic evidence implicates Planet Venus, it would appear, in the bolts of Zeus (we know that
Athene was the only God allowed to handle Jovian instruments) and in the highly controversial tablets
that registered it as irregular over a period of time when quantavolutionary activity was occurring on
Earth.
With respect to Ariadne, and to many another character in myth, a multiplicity of possible identities
is encountered. And with this comes a plurality of linguistic attachments in and out of the individual
culture. Then, notably, the main identity cluster is not the only one with electrical implications;
others possess the same.
The Island of Naxos in the Cyclades was originally called Dia (possibly a reference to the dioi or
divine Pelasgians who preceded the early Karians and Hellenes), then refounded (I might suggest a
catastrophe as the occasion) by a King Naxos or as well Nakaso, close to the Greek for a big shot,
hero or warrior king, anax, so to the tribe of giants of the Old Testament, Anakim.
Rulership --kings and high elite --is loaded with electrical trappings and obsessive practices. The
ruler is expected to appease the gods by tending to fire and keep the home and altar fires burning.
Labyrinths and all manner of ways, including especially the Column of Fire that connects Earth with
the gods and heavens, share word roots, for the humans who want ultimately to reach up and join the
gods in the sky. And then to the ax, which has so rich a mythology; in the age of metals, the sparking
of the ax reminded humans that copper and iron had fallen (or better descended as a gift) from the
skies on occasion, reversing the labyrinthine path that men could hope to follow.
In the comparison of Hawara and Knosos is to be found a typical anomaly of dates, the two
archaeologies exhibiting similar physical and psychic features. In them, one has occasion to
understand the pillar or column as a construction. It is a commemoration of the pillar of electrical
fire that connected the two major components of the system of Solaria Binaria and thereby all of the
planets and minor bodies and electromagnetic fields with their transported materials.
Resurrection was strongly promoted by electrical inducements mediated by sympathetic magic. The human
head was recognized as the seat of organic electrical phenomena.
The multitude of verbal connections of the direction North with religion, gods, rites, electrical
phenomena, and physical history.
Futhermore, does salt in various languages, contain the belief that salt came from heaven, from el or
al, or in Hebrew, melach, salt, from --m --plus heaven --el).
It is to be noted that, by extension, certain universal rites not directly electrical or
quantavolutional in origin, were connected with the original sacral sky and electricity, but then
dithered into what appeared to be disoriented and haphazard superstitions.
The Hebrew word for life is almost identical with the Greek for blood, and so the Egyptian and the
Latin. The connections are reasonable. By extension, when it came time to curse the memory of red
Typhon, the comet or proto-planet that nearly destroyed the world, the Egyptians persecuted red-haired
people as individuals and groups, threw a ruddy ass over a cliff, and sacrificed red bulls. One notes,
thus, everywhere, the back-to-back connection of the reasonable and the fantastic. Language plays this
game irrationally, pragmatically, intricately, interminably, and everywhere.
It may be reasonably put forth that rock platforms, especially white minerals of all kinds, as
flooring, and white garments simulate the serene sky, and that the function of the rocks --not all
rocks, but especially adapted or amalgamated rocks --was to stimulate electrical discharges between
earth and atmosphere. Sites of altars and temples often centered upon nodes of lightning and
piezolectricity. Split rocks, crevasses, metallized rock, and brazen thresholds are among the obvious
electrified objects encountered or emplaced in the ancient environment.
The attention given universally to the behavior of birds may alert us to consider that the environment
of ancient times affected birds as well as humans in ways little suspected nowadays. That is, it may
be that the ancients were not asking too much of birds; it may be that the birds were in a position to
tell them much more than they can tell us today.
Scores of words, hundreds, perhaps thousands, can be fitted into the Crosthwaite method of searching
for the key concepts in their roots. The number and proportion will be finally known only after
considerable research --as with quairo (Latin), later quaero, I search, springing from more than one
source, perhaps, but certainly reminding one of the endemic ka, and the Greek ku (ka) and airo, to
raise), hence Araising the ka.
When I published my study hypothesizing absolute correlation between myth and reality in The
Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, I understood it as a case to be made against the traditional
theories advanced by the founders of the science of mythology (Fraser et al.) and the second
generation (Freud, Jung et al.) which I would show to be critically vulnerable --vastly useful, of
course --for having denigrated the main issue, myth as reality-referential, capable of scaling from
low to high historicity. Velikovsky, as an example of a Freudian theorist, turned from his master in
part and became in a sense a Biblical literalist, because he failed to offer a theory. (Verily he had
none, which serves to explain his strong appeal to Judeo-Christian and Muslim religious
fundamentalists.) Other mythological literalists, too, have scored against conventional scientists,
but quantavolution has had to distinguish itself from them basically by pursuing nominalist,
empirical, scientific method.
Nonetheless, Velikovsky, a proud and stubborn character, opened and charted new pathways, some broad,
many small, and, beyond this, he had the charisma and came at the proper moment, to excite a serious
crowd following that kept his work and its critique on a high enough level of public discussion to
revive, sometimes against his will, his many important and sometimes great predecessors. Crosthwaite's
work has come many years after Velikovsky's work, and is much advanced over it and more specialized,
reflecting the original electrical theory of Ralph Juergens and Earl Milton, among others, and
extending the studies over many years performed by David Talbott, Ev Cochrane, and Dwardu Cardona,
especially having to do with Saturnian mythology. Viewing what Crosthwaite has accomplished, one may
hope for a continual increase in systematic empirical work in linguistic mythology.
There are critical and highly special issues that can be addressed. As an example, take the story of
Kronos swallowing one by one the infants born to his wife, until she succeeded with a ruse in hiding
baby Zeus, destined to be his successor, from him. Did the story arise by itself in the normal gradual
evolution from a myriad of fireside chats? If so, how were the pieces originated and interwoven? Or
did the tale require an original set of spectacles, real or apparent, and had the events attending the
spectacles to be catastrophic, or might they have been impressively amusing?
In the end, I think, we shall discover electrical phenomena to be the sealing wax of the universe of
theology, the means of consolidating the sacred and mundane spheres of life. They were the means of
finding the gods. Consciously and unconsciously, priest-rulers and their groups embedded the divine in
language, so that language flowered inexorably with its seed of reference coated by electrified
sacrality, ramifying root and branch. Via language, the a fire not blown came to be in charge of
important and ordinary human affairs.
Alfred de Grazia Island of Naxos, Greece,
27 July, 1997
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 1
THE STORY
This study is an attempt to investigate a small area of early Greek history with special attention to
the influence of electrical phenomena, which appear to have been of a magnitude greater than we are
familiar with today, and which can be traced ultimately to extra-terrestrial activity, not by a god or
monster in the superficial sense of the words, but by an intrusive body, or bodies, such as a comet,
causing disturbances in the solar system. A full study of this would range over many early
civilisations; the present short study has Minoan Crete as its starting point.
The story of Theseus, Ariadne, the Minotaur and Dionysus is well known, but a brief summary may be
useful. The accounts vary in details.
Theseus was born in Troezen, the son of Aethra and of Aegeus, king of Athens. Aegeus left his sword
and sandals under a large rock. Theseus, at the age of sixteen, lifted the rock and set out on a
career of eliminating troublemakers and criminals, e. g. Skiron and Procrustes who robbed and killed
travellers.
Aegeus and Medea ordered him to catch the Marathonian bull. This fierce animal had been brought to
Greece from Crete by Herakles.
King Minos of Crete had a son, Androgeos. Androgeos was killed on Attic territory, so Minos exacted a
three yearly tribute of seven Athenian youths and as many girls.
The Athenian youths and girls were sacrificed to a monster, the Minotaur, the offspring of Pasiphae,
wife of Minos, and a bull, in the labyrinth at Knosos. Theseus determined to kill the monster and end
the payment of tribute. He set sail in a ship with a black sail. It was arranged that if he returned
successful, the ship would have a white sail set instead of the black one, to give watchers early news
of the result.
On his way to Crete Theseus dived down into the sea to visit Amphitrite. This was supposed to prove
that he was descended from Poseidon. He was presented with a crown.
Minos had a daughter, Ariadne, who helped Theseus to find his way in the labyrinth where he was to
kill the Minotaur. The usual version of the story is that Ariadne gave Theseus a thread to help him to
find the way out. Another version is that he had a magic crown of light.
After killing the Minotaur, Theseus sailed to Naxos with Ariadne. Here, he either abandoned her, or
lost her to a rival, the god Dionysus. There was also a story that she was killed by Artemis.
Theseus then went to Delos, where he taught the Delian girls the crane dance. He sailed homewards to
Athens, but forgot to change the black sail for a white one. Aegeus, watching from the Acropolis at
Athens, assumed that the mission had ended in failure, and threw himself over the Acropolis cliff to
his death. While some parts of the story are like simple adventure stories such as are found in most
literatures, there are things that cannot be taken at their face value, and it is these which are
especially significant and they will be discussed later.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 2
CRETE
Crete was a melting pot in more than one sense. Ores were smelted, alloys such as bronze were
produced, metal and stone were turned into beautiful objects and jewellery. Crete was a mixture, a
melting pot, of peoples and of cultures. Its geographical position helped it to be a link between
Africa, Asia and Europe. We will glance briefly at the evidence of a variety of physical types.
At the start of the Early Bronze Age, most Cretans were of Mediterranean race, dolichocephalic, or
long-headed.
There was an Anatoliian element from Neolithic times, and early in the Bronze Age Armenoids, tall and
brachycephalic, entered Crete.
The skulls from the Cyclades are of varying types. In the Neolithic period and, in the Cyclades, in
early Bronze age tombs, steatopygous statuettes are found. This may be due to influence from Asia
Minor, where the Great Mother goddess was worshipped, but it may also indicate the influence of
Africa. Hutchinson, in Prehistoric Crete, Penguin, 1963, gives fuller information on racial types.
Evidence of attitudes, rituals and religious beliefs from other parts of the Mediterranean world
suggests that it was not only in matters of race and physical type that Crete was a mixture. For
example, Crete had many mountain top shrines, such as are found elsewhere. At Chamaizi, in a hill-top
shrine, there is a well, or bothros, rubbish pit, such as was found by Woolley at Alalakh on the
Syrian coast. Lightning, with its important place in religious ritual, explains the presence of such
mountain-top shrines. The study of lightning led to further studies of electricity such as were
conducted not only on "high places" in Asia Minor but also in Egypt and elsewhere.
In Egypt, Anatolia, Palestine and farther east, electrical experiments were conducted by priests in
the hope of capturing an electrical deity from the sky, or from the earth, and of achieving a degree
of control of him or her. For example, what appear to be electrical storage cells have been found, the
"Baghdad batteries". Kings, who had always performed some priestly duties, and who were expected to
know the will of the gods and ensure divine protection for their tribe or country, hoped to acquire
divine power and strength from contact with a divine force in shrines, caves, temples, and on mountain
tops. Such, I suggest, was the case with Minos in Crete, whether Minos was the name of one king or
that of a dynasty.
The name Chamaizi suggests the Greek word chamai, on the ground. If the letters de are added to a
Greek place name, as with Athens, giving Athenaze (Athenas-de), the idea of movement towards the place
is added. The Greek chamaze means "to the ground", earthwards. This suggests that the place was a
shrine attracting the electrical god in the form of lightning.
Woolley, in his book A Forgotten Kingdom, Penguin 1953, writes that he found in a temple "....
something yet more mysterious....", a shaft filled with boulders brought from hills some miles away,
with a packing of smaller stones. An 8ft. high mass of brickwork surmounted the filled shaft. At
Chamaizi, the "well" filled with stones, as at Alalakh, would be intended to invite and help the deity
to appear. Vide Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete, p. 134 and 169. Homer, in Odyssey XIX: 175ff., has
Odysseus describing Crete. There are many languages spoken; there are many peoples, e. g. Achaeans,
great-hearted Eteocretans (genuine Cretans), Cydonians, divine (dioi) Pelasgians.
Minos was enneoros, and oaristes, an associate of Zeus. Enneoros may mean 'at the age of nine',
'associate of Zeus for nine years', or that he associated with Zeus every nine years.
There may be a parallel with the Egyptian heb-sed ceremony, in the course of which the king underwent
a second coronation. The purpose of this ceremony may have been to rejuvenate the king. As part of the
ceremony the king had to run, probably through a field, carrying a flail. The flail may represent
forked lightning. He was accompanied by the souls of Nekhem. Edwards, in The Pyramids of Egypt,
Penguin 1947, observes that the souls of Nekhem were the prehistoric kings of Upper Egypt whose
capital was at Nekhem (Hierakonpolis}.
The Greek hierax is a hawk or falcon which, like most birds of prey in the ancient world, was seen as
a lightning symbol. Probably the intention was that the lightning, heavenly fire, would give life to
the crops. The Latin for to plough, aro, recalls the Latin ara, Etruscan ar, divine fire, which was
attracted to the altar.
Minos himself was the son of Zeus and Europa. He married Pasiphae. The Roman poet Horace describes him
as: "Jovis arcanis Minos admissus", Minos, privy to the secrets of Jupiter.
Minos and the nymph Paria had sons, who colonised the island of Paros.
According to Herodotus, Minos lived three generations before the Trojan war, and Thucydides refers to
his suppression of piracy and expulsion of the Karians. There is, however, a chronological doubling of
Minos, as there is of Daedalus, and this will be discussed later in the context of the Greek "dark
ages", which were extended, one might almost say invented, at the end of the nineteenth century in an
attempt to fit the history of the Mediterranean area into what was thought at the time to be a secure
chronology of Egypt.
Minos was succeeded by Katreus, a monarch whose name means "ka watcher", and this brings us to the
subject of Egyptian electrical theology, or science.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 3
KATREUS
Egyptian priest-electricians used the term 'ka' for the aura round a person. It is translated as 'the
double', and can also mean 'bull'. The word is comparable with the Hebrew qa of, for example, qadhosh,
holy, and with the Greek kaio, burn, kara, head, and Latin caput, head [source of ka].
The electrical god could be captured in a box, chest, or ark, and the Greek word elektron, amber, can
be explained as El [the god above], out of the thronos [seat].
We have suggested above that the Etruscan ar, fire, and the Latin ara, altar, are the fire from the
sky and the place to which it is attracted and strikes in the form of lightning.
Descriptions from all over the world of a snake-like object in the sky were probably inspired by the
sight of the tail of a comet. The head of a comet with protuberances would be seen as the head of a
bull, goat, stag or other horned creature.
Piezoelectric effects in rocks as a result of earthquakes led to the study of the earth goddess Ga,
Da, or Ge. The Egyptian neter, divine, represented by what may be an axe, has the same consonants as
the Greek antron, cave.
Antron probably means a cave formed by a split in the rock. The Lydian word pel, cave, is related to
the Greek spelaion. Pelekus is the Greek for a sacrificial axe, and it was in the days of Peleg that
the earth was divided [Genesis X: 25].
Furthermore, the German spellen means to split. The name of Katreus, the successor of Minos, may have
ka as a significant component. The 'treus' is probably 'tereus', which happens to be the name of a
Greek king who was turned into a hoopoe. The hoopoe is a bird with a prominent erectile crest on its
head.
Augurs watched mice, snakes, and other creatures, but especially birds, in order to detect behaviour
that gave warning of an electrical storm, or of earthquakes, which were numerous and violent in
certain periods of ancient history.
The Latin name for a hoopoe is upupa. In Greek it is epops. The Greek epoptes is the term for somebody
who beholds the mysteries at a Greek religious centre such as Eleusis.
One of the forms used as a perfect tense of the Greek verb horan, to see, is opopa, meaning 'I have
seen'.
Tereo is a Greek verb meaning 'I observe, I watch for something'. Tereus may be a form like the Latin
present participle ending in -ens. Regens, regent-, means 'ruling'. I suggest that Tereus is Terens,
observing, and that King Katreus was the ka-watcher.
The same phenomenon may be present in the Greek word basileus, king. The Etruscan vacl, or vacil, is a
banquet, and kings were the banqueting ones, feasting on the torn remnants of the intruder in the sky,
the goat, stag or bull. The Etruscan ber is probably the Latin veru, a spit, dart or javelin. Veru in
the plural means a railing round an altar or tomb. Spits, made of iron, suggest the vacl, the sacred
feasting on the slain monster. The uprights round an altar or tomb would be an encouragement to the
electrical deity to descend and kill, or bring to life. The mouse may appear in the Greek word
musterion, which is apparently composed of mus, mouse, and tereo, observe. It seems that a mystery was
originally mouse-watching as a means of detecting the presence and imminent activity of the divine
power acting on the earth. In Greek rituals such as the Eleusinian mysteries, the ceremonies took
place underground.
The prophet Isaiah, LXVI: 17, warns of the Lord's anger against those who eat the mouse.
It may have been thought that by eating mice one would ingest the ability of the mouse to detect the
divine presence.
The interpretation of the name Katreus as ka-watcher accords with the visits of monarchs to mountain
shrines, with Egyptian theory about the ka [a word which can also mean 'bull', and is therefore linked
with the electrical god in the sky looking like a bull with its horns], and with Greek, Roman and
Hebrew procedure at a shrine, where the priest went in fear of the deity, risked electrocution, and
wore special clothing. The Hebrew yirah Yahweh means fear of Yahweh. The Greek hiereus has a similar
sound, and means 'priest'. I suggest that the original meaning of hiereus was 'the fearing one'. There
was a frieze of hoopoes at Knosos. Homer refers to the 'divine Pelasgians'. 'Divine' frequently has
electrical significance. The Pelasgians should probably be traced back to an area, or areas, outside
mainland Greece. Pel is Lydian for 'cave', Greek spelaion. In Greek, initial 'S' sometimes disappears,
as does initial 'T'.
'Cave' in Hebrew is me'ara. We may here have the word ar, Etruscan for the electrical divine fire.
'Me' suggests an Egyptian word meaning 'fill'.
The Latin sagus means wise, with knowledge of the future or of divine matters. The Pelasgians were
probably the people who were wise about caves and rocks, where a difference of electrical potential
could be detected by sensitive creatures such as goats, and by Sibyls [unveilers], as at Delphi. Sibyl
is the title Svulare, Unveiler, given to Apollo, the god of prophecy. A goat, Latin caper, is a ka-
container; per is Egyptian for 'house'.
Homer writes that in Crete there were Achaeans. It is worthy of note that in the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, Ahaiu are fighter gods [Budge's translation p. 689, Arkana 1985].
In Vergil, Aeneid III: 105, Anchises, father of Aeneas, refers to Crete as gentis cunabula nostrae,
the cradle of our race, where Teucer had lived, before Ilium or Pergama existed. This passage may of
significance if one tries to solve the problem of the origin and movements of the Etruscans.
The name Teucer may mean 'he who makes fire'. The Greek verb teucho is to create, especially in wood
or metal; to create an eidolon, image. Zeus creates rain and hail, ombros and chalaza. Teucho is
related to tunchano, find, hit, light upon.
When Aeneas and the Trojans reached Italy, there was war between the newcomers and Turnus, prince of
the Rutuli. King Latinus, who had promised his daughter to Turnus, changed his mind, and favoured
Aeneas. Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, became the first king of Alba Longa, the chief city of the Latin
League.
The name of the wife of Aeneas, Lavinia, if reversed, becomes Inibal, presence of Baal. Was she from
the eastern Mediterranean area? In the context of the arrival of the Trojans in Hesperia, the 'land in
the west', it is worth noting the name of the city of Alba Longa. In Latin, longus does not only mean
long; it can mean distant. Was the city of Alba Longa named after a city far away, perhaps to the
east? Alba could be a reversal of Ebla, but this is even more speculative than conventional attempts
to unravel the history of the period.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 4
ZEUS
No less a person than the infant Zeus was sheltered in Crete. His father Kronos, hearing that his son
would displace him, ate all his offspring as soon as they were born. His wife Rhea deceived him by
giving him a stone, wrapped in swaddling clothes, which Kronos swallowed. Rhea had the real infant
taken to Crete and hidden in a cave.
The electrical significance of Zeus, the lord of the thunderbolt, is well known; that of caves is
almost equally important, if less appreciated and less dramatic. We have in the cave stories an
attempt to explain the fact that electrical phenomena appear to arise not only from the sky but also
from the earth, or from under the earth. Lightning at night was believed by the Romans to be caused by
Summanus, a god who may be Pluto, god of the underworld. The name Summanus suggests the Manes or Di
Manes, the Good Ones, spirits of the departed. The name would be suitable not only for a form of Zeus,
but also for Poseidon, Velchanos, or Dionysus, all of whom were associated with lightning, and with
subterranean thunder. There will be more later about Dionysus and his close relationship with Zeus.
There are various accounts of the birth and upbringing of Zeus. According to one version he was
brought up on the island of Naxos, where he had the name of Zeus Melosios. Another is that he was
actually born in Crete.
According to Antoninus Liberalis, Rhea gave birth to Zeus in a Cretan cave, and every year the blood
from his birth was seen as a fiery glow coming from the cave. Bees were present, and four men in
bronze armour took some of the honey. When they saw Zeus's swaddling clothes, their armour cracked,
and Zeus aimed a thunderbolt at them. Fate and Themis intervened and restrained Zeus. The four men
became birds.
The presence of the bees calls to mind the Egyptian habit of associating phenomena with those living
creatures that seem to possess the relevant characteristics, in this case the hissing and buzzing
caused by electricity, such as the sounds heard by mountaineers before an electrical storm high up on
a peak, especially on a rock ridge. There may also be a connection between honey and the stories from
the north and from Palestine and Persia of the descent of a sweet substance from the sky, manna or
honey rain.
The Cretans worshipped Zeus under the name of Velchanos. This name resembles the name of the Roman god
of fire, Vulcan. But when one thinks of the importance of the cave in the stories of the infant Zeus,
there is a temptation to see in the name Velchanos the root pel, rock or cave. Grimm's law helps one
to see here the German Felsen, crag. It is probable also that the name Velchanos has the Egyptian ka
as a component. The name Velchanos would be most appropriate for the electrical deity of caves in rock
peaks.
The Cretans were unusual in worshipping a Zeus who not only was born in Crete, as opposed to being
reared in Crete, but who also died there, at Iuktas. That the chief of the gods, who, according to
Homer, live for ever, should have died, calls for comment.
The association with rocks and caves indicates that the Cretans were aware of the piezoelectric
effects in split rocks and caves, and lightning strikes on rocky peaks, at times of violent storms and
earthquakes, together with earthquake light. The latter, which is the subject of recent research by
Japanese and American scientists, would be detected by a hoopoe, or by a quail, whose Greek name,
ortux, means 'the one who finds the light'. Ortygia was a name of the island of Delos, the birthplace
of a god closely associated with light, Apollo. Its name implies 'where the light happens' or 'quail
land'. Piezoelectric effects would gradually fade away through electrical leakage as things settled
down after periods of major disturbance such as affected the ancient world generally. The Zeus who
lived in the sky continued to brandish the lightning bolt, either in the forked form that we see close
to earth, or in the almond shape of the plasmoid for long range interplanetary exchanges [Greek
amygdale, almond, is the 'sceptre of the god above']. The Zeus Velchanos, the Zeus of the caves and
split rocks, gradually faded away. Perhaps the ritual uprooting of the sacred tree in a dance
symbolises the failure of the poros, the column of holy fire from sky to earth.
Several places in Crete claimed to be the home of the infant Zeus Velchanos. Hesiod suggests Goat's
Mountain. This is probably Dikte, where there is a cave, Psychro. The Idaean cave on Psiloriti, the
Kamares cave near Phaestos, and Arkalochori, near Lyktos, are among the candidates. The name Psychro
suggests a flow of electrical life.
The name Kamares may have ka and ar as components. Arkalochori has several possibilities. The Greek
lochos is a hiding place; or is a Semitic word meaning light, or skin, and resembles ar, the
electrical fire god.
The cave at Arkalochori contained miniature double axes in gold and silver, and other weapons.
In the Psychro cave a fragment of a jar was found, decorated with a leaping goat. Goats were thought
to be more than usually sensitive to electrical fields, or rather to the presence of a deity. They
were responsible, through their strange movements and sounds, for the discovery by the goatherd
Koretas of the conditions at Delphi [Pytho] that were favourable for the 'inspiration' of a Sibyl or
'unveiler'. The Latin caper, goat, may be 'ka container'; compare the German Kaefer, beetle, and the
Egyptian scarab.
Ornamental shields have been found in the Idaean cave, with decoration pointing to Oriental influence.
They reflect the presence of Curetes, youths who clashed their spears on their shields to drown the
cries of the infant Zeus.
Consideration of the cult of the Zeus worshipped in hill-top shrines, and of the Zeus Velchanos of the
rocks and caves, leads one to the god Dionysus. He closely resembles Zeus, being associated with
subterranean thunder, fire on peaks, earthquakes, caves and lightning, as readers of the Bacchae of
Euripides will remember. This will also bring us back to Ariadne, who was, amongst other things, a
Cretan goddess closely associated with the earth, the vine and animals. She will be considered in
greater detail later.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 5
DIONYSUS
Dionysus was a god of the life in ivy, trees and the vine, rather than the god of corn and crops from
the earth. Ivy, trees and the vine all had electrical significance, ivy because it suggested an aura
or glow round an object, especially round a throne. The near identity of the Latin hedera, ivy, and
Greek hedra, throne, suggests that ivy symbolised the glow, Greek charis, beauty, that flowed over a
person, or over such an object as a king's throne, or an ark when the electrical god had been caught
by the priest. Trees were important, especially the pine or fir, partly because of the fiery qualities
of resin, partly because of the world tree. The vine could be made into a drink which would produce
sensations which Greeks associated with electricity. The Greek poet Archilochus tells us that he could
write a dithyramb when lightning-struck with wine.
He was a god of noisy revelry, of earthquake and of lightning. It is possible that the musical
accompaniment at his rites, dominated by low-pitched [barubromon] drums, was meant to suggest
earthquake, thunder and electrical stimulation. For a modern equivalent one might turn to the Royal
Hunt and Storm, from Berlioz's opera The Trojans, where divine activity drives Dido and Aeneas to take
refuge from the storm in a cave.
Dionysus is said to have been born and raised in the island of Naxos. According to a mosaic from
Delos, his nurse was Ambrosia.
At the Lenaea, a festival held in Athens, ecstatic women worshipped a draped pillar with a mask on top
representing Dionysus. The fact that he was a son of Zeus may account for the letters dio- in his
name. Dio-frequently implies heaven or sky. The name of his mother Semele is the Slavonic zemlya,
earth. The other letters forming his name may perhaps be explained by the Syracusan word nusos or
nussos, lame. This is not very helpful, though Hephaestus, god of divine fire, was lame. On the other
hand, the Greek nussein is to prick, to touch with a sharp point. This raises the possibility of an
electrical explanation.
It was believed that he was born in the city of Nysa, in marshy land such as encouraged lightning.
Followers of Dionysus carried a thyrsus. This was the stalk of a plant, the narthex. It was the stalk
in which Prometheus brought fire down to earth from Olympus. The Greek thu-is fire or sacrifice, air-
is to raise. The thyrsus could be furnished with a sharp point, which could be used to give what would
be thought to be an electric, i. e. divine, shock.
Nussa was the word for the turning post in a circus. All these facts, together with the account given
of him and his actions in the Bacchae of Euripides, show that Dionysus was a god of electricity.
The name Bacchus suggests fa, light, or ba, Egyptian for soul, and cha. The Greek letter chi may be
onomatopoeia for sparks and lightning, and may be related to the Egyptian ka. Dionysus exemplifies the
effect of electrical stimuli and disturbances on the brain and nervous system.
Dionysus is the divine bull. A typical rhyton, or drinking horn, would be carved to represent the head
of an animal, often that of a bull.
In the Bacchae, there is a confrontation between the stranger [Dionysus in disguise] with his
revellers, and the young Pentheus of the Theban royal family. When arrested for causing disturbances
and promoting immoral behaviour, Dionysus frees himself from prison by creating an earthquake and
electrical fire [" against which every effort is in vain", l. 625].
Pentheus has an urge to spy on the women and watch their revels. Dionysus causes him to have
hallucinations and, with the help of a pine tree and lightning, causes him to be torn to pieces
[sparagmos] by frenzied bacchants led by Agave, the mother of Pentheus. The chorus declare that a bull
leads to disaster.
Pentheus, being descended from Kadmos of Thebes, has snake ancestry [Kadmos and Harmonia were turned
into snakes]. At one level, the contest is between snake and bull.
Such a contest may be seen as both electrical and astronomical. The bull with its horns symbolises the
head of a comet, the snake represents the tail. The stories of a monster in the sky, such as Zeus
defeated, and of lightning exchanges on a huge scale, probably with almond-shaped plasmoids, as shown
in the hand of Zeus, were accounts of what looked like a battle between the head of a comet and its
tail. Vide the Bacchae l. 1153ff.
According to Plutarch, the Greek seer Melampus learnt the name of Dionysus from the Egyptians.
Plutarch equates Dionysus with the Egyptian god Osiris. In each case there was a sparagmos, a tearing
to pieces, and a resurrection.
The link with Egypt is strengthened by the worship of the Apis bull. Egyptian monarchs imitated bulls
by wearing tails, worshipped them and cherished them, feasted on bulls, preserved them, and drowned
them to release the divine element. The ambivalence is explained by the ambivalent nature of the
divine force in the sky, symbolised by the bull's horns, a power that could cause life or death.
Diodorus refers to the civilising mission of Osiris, a mission like that of Dionysus, who brought
wine, music and dancing on his travels through Asia to Greece.
In the period after Alexander the Great, the Egyptian deities Isis and Anubis were worshipped on the
island of Delos, a great centre of worship of Dionysus.
Ivy, vines, and trees were in the custody of Dionysus, and a survey of the language imparted to these
in Greece and elsewhere would indicate their common electrical associations, quite aside from their
other connections.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 6
ARIADNE
Ariadne appears in the story in two different guises. In so far as we can talk about historical
characters, she is an historical character in the Athenian story of Theseus, whom the Athenians set up
as a hero like Herakles, but she seems also to have the superhuman qualities of a goddess.
It may be that such confusion, which occurs regularly with heroes, is caused by the desire of monarchs
and ambitious people to establish close relationships, or to persuade people that they have them, with
divinities of sky or earth, in their search for sources of authority and the ability to impress
ordinary people and subjects. The technical methods for obtaining divine ancestry will be discussed
later.
Ariadne was a sister of Deucalion. She is also thought to have been a fertility goddess. Her names
included Ariagne [very holy], Aridela [the very manifest one], and possibly Erigone.
It seems possible, if one looks at a statuette showing a girl with flounced dress, décolletée, holding
in either hand a snake, which also looks like a bow or even a horn, that she, like Dionysus, was
connected with electricity and the electrical aspects of fertility. Her name, Ariadne, could be 'hand
of fire', since ar is Etruscan for divine fire, yad is Semitic for a hand, and -na occurs frequently
as a suffix in Etruscan.
The Greek word bios means either a bow [as in bow and arrows], or life, depending on the intonation or
accentuation of the word. In Sumerian, ti and til can mean either bow or life. Horn was used in the
manufacture of the composite type of bow. A link with the bull appears.
Life, psyche, is associated with the power of self-initiated movement. Thales is reported to have said
that the magnet contained psyche. The bow imparts movement, i. e. life, to the arrow, which, like the
spear, is a symbol of the electrical fire.
In Hebrew, the spear is qayin, the ka eye. Zayin, the letter Z, the eye of Set, is a weapon, like the
Egyptian sceptre, the tcham. The snake symbolises electricity, in the form of both a sky and an earth
deity.
One form of the Cretan goddess is shown on hill tops. Hill tops were revered as places where the
electrical god or goddess descended to earth. One of the names of the goddess is Piptuna. The Greek
pipto means fall. The association of Dionysus with crags and mountain tops is a link between him and
Ariadne, and the same may be true of Artemis.
The Cretan nature goddess has doves and double axe. In this she resembles Kybele, the eastern goddess
whose name means axe. The doves remind one of Aphrodite. The electrical deity is associated with
reproductive urges and with life, as well as with unpleasant shocks and death by electrocution.
The Mistress of the Animals is associated with snakes and lions. The Lion Gate at Mycenae has a pillar
with a lion [or lioness] at each side. That a lion's mane had electrical or divine significance is
made more likely by the net pattern shown on some eastern representations of lions, a pattern which
appears also in Crete.
Babylon was a centre of the worship of the goddess Ishtar [Astarte]. She had a fierce and dangerous
side to her nature, as had Aphrodite and Artemis. An avenue of lions led to the Ishtar Gate. The lion
was symbolic of Ishtar. An avenue of lions can be seen today on the island of Delos. The prophet
Isaiah refers to Jerusalem as Ariel. Ari is Hebrew for a lion; El, god, means the one above. In XXIX:
1 he foretells the siege of Jerusalem.
The snake can represent an electrical force in the sky -the tail of a comet, for example - and is also
a symbol of the electrical deity, Gaia, in the earth. As in the case of Nechushtan, the brazen serpent
set up by the Hebrews in the wilderness to cure those affected by snake bite, the snake is a symbol of
both life and death. The bow or snake held by the goddess illustrates this point: the bow gives
movement, therefore life, to the arrow, which, as a symbol of radiation, may bring either life or
death.
Homer has the word kelethmos, magic, in Odyssey XI: 334. Plato has the verb keleo, to charm snakes,
Republic 358 B. It is probable that ka is present in the Greek keleo.
The Cretan goddess also resembles Dictynna, a hunting goddess. This name suggests the Greek for a net,
which had electrical significance. She is probably the same as the goddess Britomartis, who is
associated with hunting. They and Artemis seem to be variations on an electrical theme.
Solinos sad that the name Britomartis meant Sweet Maiden. It is worth asking why she should be called
sweet.
The Hungarian bor is wine. Albanian vere is wine. Hungarian ver is blood. Finnish veri is blood.
Egyptian irp is wine. Lydian 'Breseus' is a name of Dionysus.
In the above examples the reversal of rp to vr or to br is noteworthy.
The Greek damart- is a wife or maiden. It is likely that Britomartis is Veredamartis, wine-wife or
wine-maiden, and that she is a female version of Dionysus. Ancient deities were often grouped in
pairs, male and female, and brother-sister incest occurred, as with Zeus and Hera. Dionysus and
Ariadne are represented together under a vine.
A statuette of the Cretan goddess holding snakes or bows has her wearing a flounced dress. She looks
almost like a telescopic column or caryatid. The effect is like that of the djed column or tree in
Egyptian art, as seen at Dendera and elsewhere.
The significance of the column is electrical. Temple columns led up to the sky, where deities were
shown high up on the temple. The Parthenon frieze may be an example, especially if it is the scene of
the arrival in Olympus of the soldiers who fell at Marathon.
The column of light mentioned by Plato towards the end of the Republic is a road from earth to the
stars, along which souls travel after death before reincarnation. In Norse myth the world tree has a
snake at the bottom and an eagle at the top, each an electrical symbol. This is the most likely
explanation of the poros, passage, mentioned by the Greek poet Alkman in a cosmological context. It
could well be the "marvellous road to the Hyperboreans" mentioned by the poet Pindar, and photographs,
take from space, of light phenomena over the earth's north pole, show what may be what is left of the
poros or column.
Such a theory is supported by links between the far north and Crete, or at any rate Greece. We have
already seen evidence of shared vocabulary.
Priestesses of the winds are mentioned in Cretan Linear B texts, and Oreithuia was carried off by
Boreas, who is the Kassite god Buriash. Ash, or esh, is fire. Buriash, or Boreas, is likely to be
'fire of Bor', the fire being the electrical glow.
The first fruits of the Hyperboreans, wrapped in straw, were taken by relay to Prasiae, then on to
Delos, the birthplace of Apollo.
Reversal of the consonants of Prasiae gives srp, which could be the Hebrew saraph, burn.
There was a Cretan festival, the Hellotia, celebrated in Ariadne's honour. This festival constitutes a
link between Ariadne and Athene.
There was a tradition that Athene was born in Crete. Athene Hellotis was worshipped in Corinth, a city
which had strong oriental links, and the -ot of Hellotis recalls the Semitic oth, sign, which appears
in the Greek ototoi, signs. This word is uttered by Cassandra just before she prophesies at the gate
of Mycenae, in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, line 1072.
Two daughters of the Athenian king Kekrops were given by Athene a chest, with orders to guard it but
not to open it. They disobeyed and opened the chest. The stories, which vary slightly, agree on one
thing: a snake was in the chest. When the girls saw it they went mad, jumped over the Acropolis wall
and were killed.
There is evidence from elsewhere, e. g. from Egypt, that arks or chests contained snakes. Such a
statement probably means that there was a dangerous electrical god who was caught and stored in a
container based on the principle of the Leyden jar. Chests were frequently decorated with a picture of
a snake, probably to have an apotropaic effect.
Snakes, as well as being shown in the hands of the Cretan goddess, were encouraged in Crete as
guardians of the house. Snake tubes are found which encouraged snakes to emerge from the earth.
Putting out food for a snake would win the favour of a creature representing a powerful and dangerous
force. Not only could they catch mice; the procedure might also be thought to encourage an epiphany of
the earth goddess.
The words Hellas and Hellene call for comment. Different groups of inhabitants of Greece and
associated areas in Asia Minor went under various names at different times, such as Achaeans, Ionians,
Pelasgians, Hellenes, Dorians. The general picture is of waves of immigrants from areas mostly north
and east of mainland Greece. There are similarities between the languages of Greece, Etruria, the
Danube area, Poland, Lithuania, Finland, Palestine and Egypt. The preoccupation with fire, light and
radiation generally, suggests that there is a connection between Pelasgians, the cave experts, and the
Hellenes. The German word hell means bright, and may even point to the Selli, priests who shared with
the Agnihotris or fire priests of the Brahmins the practice of keeping their feet dirty - a practice
which may be explained by the need to establish good earth contact. Were the Hellenes named after an
expert in the study of light and radiation? Were they the 'bright'people?
It may be useful to review some of the material involving Ariadne. There are references to the 'strong
goddess'. Egyptian necht [man holding a rod], strength, is a reversal of the Greek techne, skill, art.
Ariadne's skill with snakes recalls Moses and Aaron, Jannes and Jambres, Exodus VII: 10f.
The name Ariadne could mean 'hand of fire'. Names of the goddess were: Eleuthia, Kerasia, Piptuna,
Ardoro, Pade.
Greek doron is a gift; Ardoro may be 'she who gives fire' or 'gift of fire'. Pade may be 'light from
the earth', but Slavonic padatj means 'to fall'. The Isopata ring shows four priestesses dancing, and
a descending goddess.
Ariadne, as wife of Dionysus, is Britomartis. The couple are portrayed under a vine. Her multiple
personality is shown by the four goddess figurines in a temple at Kannia near Gortyn. All have snakes
in their crowns; one also has a dove on her cheek and snakes on her arms.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 7
THE LABYRINTH AND AXE
The labyrinth at Knosos may have links with Egypt, Lydia and perhaps with the immigrants from the
Danube area and from the east, including the Etruscans. The axe is a symbol of the electrical god. Its
Lydian and Cretan name, tlabrys or labrys, appears in the word labyrinth [initial 't', like 's', is
sometimes dropped].
Homer mentions Daedalus as the builder of a dancing floor for Ariadne. The word for a dancing floor,
choros, is also the Greek for the dance itself.
The maze at Knosos was probably a dancing floor. It is described as achanes, roofless.
Spiral designs and meanders became popular in Cretan art at the time of the Egyptian monarch Amenemhet
III. This pharaoh built a 'labyrinth' in the Fayum, contemporary with the first palace at Knosos. It
was a temple whose design suggested a maze.
Fresco fragments at Knosos show a building with columns, the roof decorated with horns, and with
double axes on the capitals. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete p. 179, writes that it was presumably
painted in the Middle Minoan IIIA period.
This may be the moment to discuss the axe in greater detail. The Greek sacrificial axe was the
pelekus. The word resembles the name of Peleg, in the book of Genesis, "in whose days the earth was
divided". An Egyptian hieroglyph meaning god, divine, resembles an axe or hoe [a single, not a double,
axe]. The word is neter. The word has the same consonants as the Greek antron, cave.
When dealing with questions of vocabulary, it is necessary to bear in mind firstly, that Semitic
languages were written without the help of letters for a full range of vowel sounds. The Greeks
adapted the Phoenician alphabet, introducing written vowels. Secondly, Semitic languages are written
from right to left. Etruscan and Greek, after some uncertainty, changed to left to right. Confusion
would occur where Indo-European met Semite, as in Asia Minor. This offers an explanation better than
coincidence of why so many important words can be read backwards and give the same meaning but in a
different language. For instance, Phoenician namal, harbour, has the consonants nml; the Greek limen,
which has lmn, also means 'harbour'. Raqs, dance, becomes sacer, sacred.
The Latin dolabra, axe or hoe, is similar to tlabrys, axe, a word which occurs in the language of
Lydia, a country in Asia Minor which has Etruscan connections. Initial t and initial s are sometimes
dropped, so we have in tlabrys the Lydian version of labrys, double axe, Latin dolabra, which
symbolises lightning, and gave its name to the labyrinth.
Dolabra is ar falando, sky fire. Falando is an Etruscan word meaning iron, and the sky whence iron
falls in the form of meteorites. At Mycenae, in the Peloponnese, the mould for a winged axe has been
found. The Latin bipennis means axe; penna is Latin for a feather.
The chief Roman magistrates, who had executive authority, imperium, were the consuls, praetors,
dictator and master of the horse. They were each entitled to be accompanied by a bodyguard of lictors,
who carried the fasces, a bundle of rods and the axe, securis. The Hebrew seghor mmeans spear, axe,
gold. The Latin verb icio means to strike. The lictor is probably El, god above, and ictor, striker, a
word that could come from icio.
The Hebrew maghzerah is an axe. This word resembles the Latin magister and magistratus, e. g. consul,
praetor etc.. These words are probably magh, great, set, and ar, the divine fire, Latin ara, altar.
The altar was the place to which priests tried to attract the electrical fire from heaven so that it
could strike and mark the victim. Set was the Egyptian god who was equated with Typhon. For Set as an
interpretation of the letter Z, one may compare the Hebrew letter Z, zayin, which means a weapon. Ayin
is an eye, so zayin is Set's eye, a source of dangerous radiation. The letter zayin is also similar in
shape to the Egyptian tcham, a sceptre which looks like a scotch for a snake, with an eagle perched on
top of the stick. The Latin acies, line of battle, the cutting edge of the Roman army, also means eye,
or vision. There is a good account of the ancient theory of vision in Plato's Timaeus. The eye was an
emitter of rays, not just a receiver.
At Knosos, axes are found, resting on a base of horns. This may be an indication that the electrical
deity was perceived as a single force behind the two symbols. Horns are also found on altars. In
Greece, suppliants, and people taking solemn oaths, would touch an altar, probably a horn of the
altar.
The Cretan tlabrunth is assumed to mean "place of the double axe". The ending -unth calls for
examination.
The Greek hodos, path, way, is likely to be the same as the Etruscan uth, or uthi. The n of -unth
would indicate that the vowel u has a nasal sound, a phenomenon found in Etruscan and in modern Polish
which could explain certain Greek words ending in -eus, e. g. basileus, Tereus. One may compare the
Etruscan falando, sky, the Latin palatium, and the Hebrew palda, iron. The fall of meteorites led some
thinkers of the ancient world to the belief that the sky was made of iron.
Hodos, path or way, may mean the place where somebody is to be found, their dwelling or sphere of
action. Psalm 77, verses 13 and 19, gives some support to this: "Thy way, O God, is in the sanctuary:
who is so great a God as our God?"
"Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known".
The Latin cauda, tail, sounds like ka and uthi, where ka dwells. The Egyptian hieroglyph for Set shows
the animal with an erect tail. In Plato's Timaeus, the divine fire in the muelos inside the skull is
also found in the spine. Greek suppliants would touch a person's chin or knees, probably because the
chin and knees were regarded as containers of the muelos, marrow.
The lute is a musical instrument made of wood. The name comes from Arabic, al uth, wood [al is the
definite article]. Is there a link with the world tree, Yggdrasil, and the poros, passage, of the
Greek poet Alkman? The kion, column of coloured light [ka travelling], of Plato, Republic X, was the
hodos, road, par excellence, by which souls travelled back and forth between earth and stars.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 8
THE BULL
Bull leaping, as performed at Knosos, involved grasping the horns and performing a somersault onto the
bull's back. It may have been a rite in which magical power was obtained from the horns of the bull
which the leaper grasped. More than one meaning of the ceremony is possible. It may have been symbolic
of apotheosis or resurrection. Dionysus, the god who could appear in the form of a bull, as implied in
the Bacchae of Euripides, raised Ariadne to the sky. Europa rode on a bull. It is possible that the
seizing of the bull's horns and riding on its back symbolised the obtaining of control of the animal
to prevent it from doing damage [to individuals but also to the earth]. In the absence of more
specific literary information than we have, it is hard to say with certainty that any one explanation
is correct. All may have played a part.
The name Daedalus suggests the Greek daid-, torch, and Al, or El, the Semitic word meaning the one
above, god. He may have been named, or named himself, after a comet in the sky looking like a torch.
His work at Knosos ranged from the construction of the dancing floor to creating bull disguises for
actors to wear.
Electrical and astronomical links between Egypt and Crete appear in our consideration of the bull.
The attempt to produce an heir to the throne with divine ancestry, and therefore the right to be
obeyed, may be the explanation of the story of Pasiphae and the Minotaur. Monarchs and priests could
wear bull masks, horned helmets and tails in the attempt to obtain and pass on the divine force, the
Egyptian sa-ankh. Sankh and sa-ankh appear in the Latin sancio, sanctify, bring to life.
The priest portrayed in the cave of Les trois Frères in Ariège, in France, wears a stag mask.
The Cretan word bolynthos means 'wild bull'. The most likely derivation is from the Greek bous, ox,
and lussa, frenzy. The letter n in bolynthos would be a nasalisation of the vowel u, such as occurs in
Polish, and probably Etruscan, and is seen in the Greek basileus, king, and in the names Tereus [who
was turned into a hoopoe], and Katreus [the ka watcher].
The fight between a king and a fierce animal is a common theme in ancient art, especially oriental. At
Persepolis, in the 'hall of a hundred columns', the Persian king is shown defeating monsters. A Greek
equivalent would be Herakles or Theseus. Winged bulls with human heads are found at Persepolis, where
Xerxes erected a gateway.
The message is ambiguous: the king is the human representative of the divine bull in the sky, wings
being added to indicate that the creature concerned is a celestial one. The Apis bull was cherished
and worshipped. The king or his servants could also kill the bull if it was seen as a threat.
Columns at Persepolis not only have bulls on top, but also have human heads as capitals. The top of
the column represents the home of the gods in the sky; the column itself copies the phenomenon
referred to by Alkman as a poros or passage, and by Plato as a column of light [towards the end of the
Republic].
There were statues of bulls in the temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem. They were part of the
plunder seized by Nebuzar-adan, the captain of the guard, and carried off to Babylon. In chapter LII:
20 of his book, the prophet Jeremiah writes: "The two pillars, one sea, and twelve brazen bulls that
were under the bases, which king Solomon had made in the house of the Lord: the brass of all these
vessels was without weight".
The Egyptian Apis bulls are said to have been ceremonially drowned. Drowning was thought to release
the divine element.
It is possible that there is a link here with the tripod cauldron. The cauldron as a means of
achieving divine status, apotheosis, is mentioned in an inscription of Roman times. Medea pretended to
restore youth by cutting up the body of an old person and cooking it in a cauldron.
The tripod cauldron was probably a representation of the seething pot in the sky, described by
Jeremiah, I: 13, two verses after he mentions the rod of an almond tree. The almond may represent the
plasmoid, the weapon used by Zeus for long range warfare.
Asaminthos is Mycenean Greek for a bathtub. The word has something in common with Apollo Smintheus,
Mouse Apollo. Smintheus suggests sema, sign, in-, presence, or power, and theos, god. Possibly the
bathtub, with steam rising fron it, was compared with the seething pot in the sky of Jeremiah. In the
Odyssey, Odysseus emerges from the bath looking like a god. The chariot, the vehicle of a god in the
sky, might be thought to bear some resemblance to a cauldron, and in Homer the word bomos is either a
chariot stand or an altar.
The Greek kerat-means horn. Kratos is force. The bull is associated with strength, and the Etruscan
word trin, hero, is probably a compound of tur, bull, Latin taurus, and in-, Greek for strength or
force, divine presence. The name of Turnus, prince of the Rutuli, whom Aeneas defeated and killed
[Vergil, Aeneid XII], looks and sounds as if it had the same origin.
Because of the proximity of Etruscans to people who spoke a Semitic language, for example in Lydia,
and who wrote from right to left, accidents occurred with a number of words. Additional evidence that
the bull was a symbol of a deity in the sky is the fact that the Minotaur was called Asterios, or
Asterion. Aster is a Greek word for 'star'. Furthermore, Theseus is said to have seized the Minotaur
by the hair.
The word hair is regularly used to describe the tail of a comet; the word comet is originally Greek
for a hairy star. The Latin jubar, fiery mane, is a name of the planet Venus. Juba is a mane, ar is
the electrical fire. As well as the Egyptians, the early Greeks saw the object in the sky as a bull,
but their way of dealing with the situation was different. Traces of the early experiences and
attitudes are found in Greek tragedy, and in the games.
At the start of the Great Dionysia, the Athenian drama festival, a bull and a goat were sacrificed to
Dionysus. The horns of a goat can be particularly suggestive of the protuberances of a comet, and
stags too were sacrificed, especially in countries farther north.
The dramatic technique of the Greeks, their action for dealing with the threat constituted by an
errant heavenly body, was to resort to sympathetic magic, enacting an encounter so as to bring low
into a safer orbit, or to destroy, the thing that was guilty of hubris. Hubris means going too high,
or setting oneself up above others and claiming more than a sensible and humble mortal ought to claim.
Hubris was the act of a heavenly body whose orbit was such as to bring it dangerously close to the
earth, causing earthquakes, stone showers, floods and fire.
Dionysus himself had an epiphany as a bull. The Bacchae of Euripides contains references both to his
bull nature and to lightning. When Pentheus is detected in the top of the pine tree, spying on the
revels of the Bacchants, the women are inspired to tear the tree down, striking at its roots as though
with thunderbolts, sunkeranousae [line 1103]. Lightning, the electrical weapon of Zeus, Athene and
Poseidon, was also a weapon of Dionysus, and the horn-like protuberances of a comet could be
imaginatively viewed as the source of cosmic lightning strokes directed at the snake-like tail,
Dionysus versus Pentheus.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 9
NAXOS
As one approaches the island of Naxos by boat, one sees the sharp outline of Mount Za against the sky
behind the harbour and town of Naxos. If Crete could boast of Dikte and Ida for Zeus to inhabit, Naxos
has gone one better with Mount Za, named after the god himself. But the island was famed in ancient
times for its Bacchic revels: "... Bacchatam Naxum...", Vergil, Aeneid III: 125. Since Theseus in the
story took Ariadne to Dia, as Naxos was earlier called, it is worth considering for a moment the
island and its history.
It was said that one Boutes, son of Boreas, brought a band of Thracian men to what is now the island
of Naxos. For their wives, he brought a band of Maenads from Thessaly.
Wherever there are references to Boreas, Hyperboreans, the ox or bull, it is worth asking whether the
electrical god in some form or other is involved. In this instance, we may note that the name Boutes
suggests, to a Greek, oxen [bous is an ox]. There are well known stories of links between the north,
Delphi, Apollo, the Hyperboreans, and Delos. There is room for speculation that the Semitic word
shemal, north, may indicate 'the god up there', or 'the sign of El', and that shemal, reversed, might
be El ames, the sceptre of El. The story quoted by Ginsberg [Legends of the Jewish people] of the ox
seen in the sky at the time of the Exodus is perhaps less well known.
Later, King Naxos brought Karians to Dia. The island of Dia then became the island of Naxos. The name
Naxos, if written in the syllabic form familiar from Mycenean Greek, and influenced by the tendency of
Semitic speakers to insert a 'shewa',[ an obscure unaccented sound between two consonants, and
therefore between the two halves of a double consonant such as the ks of the x sound in Naxos], gives
Nakasos. The final s is the ending of the nominative singular, and, as in Latin, has no significance
in such a context. We are left with Nakaso.
The Greek anax is the usual word in Homer for a warrior leader, prince or chieftain. The Greek
princes, men such as Agamemnon and Ajax, are generally described as being big men.
In the Old Testament we read of a giant called Anaq. His descendants were Anaqim, the Hebrew plural
form of his name. Perhaps King Naxos was a man of more than usual size.
This may seem purely speculative, but there is still today on Naxos a huge stone statue of a kouros, a
Greek youth, and the island of Delos, too, had gigantic statues of Apollo and Dionysus. The hair style
of a kouros resembles the hood of a cobra.
The evidence for the existence of giants is partly literary, partly archaeological. The best known
literary evidence is found in the Old Testament.
In Deuteronomy, chapter II, we read that there were Emims, great, many and tall, like the Anaqim. They
were accounted giants, as were the Anaqim, but the Moabites called them Emims.
Later in the chapter, v. 19, there is a reference to the inhabitants of the land of Ammon: "That also
was accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time; and the Ammonites call them
Zamzummims; A people great, and many, and tall, as the Anaqim; but the Lord destroyed them before
them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead".
Deuteronomy III: 2f. tells of Og, king of Bashan, and of his iron bedstead. Joshua XII: 4 states that
Og and other giants lived at Ashtaroth and Edrei. Ashtoreth and Astarte are names of an eastern
equivalent of the goddess Aphrodite.
Joshua XI: 21f. refers to the destruction of the Anaqim. Only in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod were any giants
left.
The hint of ka in the place names [Gaza and Gath], the link with Aphrodite [Astarte], and the position
on the coast towards Egypt, all point to intense radiation in that area as one of the possible causes.
Edrei, the chief town of Og's kingdom, Bashan, suggests the Hebrew eder, garment, mantle, splendour,
and heder, which means splendour. The Greek hedra is a seat; the Latin hedera is ivy. Hedra is often
the seat of a god, an altar, a temple, the place where a weapon fixes itself. In the plural it means
the quarters of the sky where omens appear.
Numbers XXI: 33ff. mentions the defeat of Og at Edrei. I Samuel XVII tells the story of David and the
Philistine champion Goliath of Gath. Goliath's brother was killed in a battle in Gob [II Samuel XXI:
19], and in another battle, in Gath, one of the four giants killed there had twelve fingers and twelve
toes. There was more than one Gath in Palestine. Perhaps the name Gath is ka and at, 'power of ka', or
'ka as source'.
England has remains of giants. For example, near Aspatria, in Cumbria, there were found in a grave the
bones of a giant over seven feet tall.
The discovery at Amman of sarcophagi of great size gives some support to the statement in Deuteronomy
III that Og, king of Bashan, was a giant. The fact that the Philistines on the coast of Palestine
spoke a language that may have been Illyrian, and that Goliath of Gath was a man of unusual size,
raises the question of the origin of the Philistines. The Etruscan link that begins to emerge takes us
farther afield.
Two main explanations come to mind for the existence of giants. One is that Goliath and others in
Palestine were the result of mutation caused by phenomena such as those described in the Bible in the
books of Exodus and Joshua and elsewhere. The other is that they came from farther afield, in which
case the electrical conditions associated with the north pole and the god Bor may have been
responsible. Goliath and the other giants seem to have been exceptional; Philistines in general and
northern immigrants were probably comparatively large rather than gigantic.
Naxos exported marble and emery. The latter compound is carborundum plus either magnetite or
haematite. Magnetite and hematite are both ferric ores. The presence of emery in Naxos was attributed
to Ares, god of war. Ferric compounds would be reddish. Red was associated with Ares and with military
uniforms. An axe of Naxian emery was found at Calne in Wiltshire, U. K.
DELOS
Patara, the marble gateway on Naxos, faces the island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo. Delos first
flourished in the Mycenean period, which by conventional dating is roughly 1580 to 1200 B. C.. Apollo
did not have a monopoly of the worship on Delos. The island was a centre of the worship of Dionysus,
and the remains of his shrine bear witness to the intense interest that there was in the electrical
link between sky and sexual activity.
Delos is dominated by a hill, Mount Cynthos. Near the top of the hill is a cave which appears to have
been a shrine. The pit next to the altar may be compared to the 'well' or bothros at Alalakh, and the
shrine at Chamaizi in Crete. The aim would be to attract the god to the shrine.
Theseus left Naxos and sailed to Dia. He is said to have gone to the altar made of horn, and to have
performed the Crane Dance.
It may be that the Kordax, a Cretan dance in which the performers used a rope to link themselves,
reflects the thread of Ariadne used by Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth.
THE THREAD OF ARIADNE
There is a Jewish tradition that when the sons of Aaron were killed by the ark, thin threads of flame
went from the ark to their nostrils.
The Greek lin-is flax, and thread. Could its derivation be El, and in-, presence of El?
The Egyptian ankh could be held and pointed at a person's nose in order to give him life. There may be
a link here between the Egyptians and the Hebrews. The ankh, as an electrical symbol, was a device
that could kill as well as give life.
What was the nature of the thread of Ariadne which was so useful to Theseus? One difficulty in the
usual account is that the labyrinth was probably a dancing floor in the open air, and Theseus would
have had no trouble in seeing where he was, and anyway there is the story of the crown of light.
Can the story conceal an electrical attack on the Minotaur, the fabulous creature said to have been
the offspring of Pasiphae and the bull? The Minotaur was surely a priest, perhaps even a member of the
royal family, disguised by a mask, horns and tail. The crane dance which Theseus took to Delos had
harps for accompaniment. Harps have divine and astronomical significance; Hermes and Apollo were the
divine harpists of the Greeks.
It has been suggested that the Crane Dance, imitating the movements of birds, symbolises the
"sinuosities of the labyrinth". In the dance at Knosos described by Homer, the young men each carry a
gilt sacrificial knife, Greek machaira.
The crane dance may have been associated with the 'Troy game', of which a maze was a feature. One
could speculate that a maze or labyrinth might symbolise the winding course of a deity or monster in
the sky, with an orbit coming closer to earth at each return. A labyrinth was the place of the double
axe [the thunderbolt], and the climax of the wanderings would be a confrontation. In the sky,
lightning strikes would be thought to result in the defeat, sparagmos [tearing to pieces], and
absorption, 'eating', of the object resembling a bull, stag, or goat. The Etruscan vacl, banquet, is
the most likely explanation of the Greek word basileus, king, the one who is banqueting. The ending -
eus is the same as that of King Tereus, the hoopoe in the Birds of Aristophanes; he is the observing
one. Greek tereo means I watch for something, I observe.
There is food for thought in some of the place names in Crete and the Cyclades, for example Dia, the
early name for Naxos [the Pelasgians were dioi in Homer, usually translated as 'divine'], Chamaizi
[earthwards], Arkalochori, Kaloritsa, Psychro, Kamini, Kephala [the hill at Knosos], Sangria [in
Naxos, where there was a temple of Demeter], Patara, and Skardana [on Delos]. The Latin sacer means
holy. Ankh, sankh, are 'life', 'bring to life'; Latin sancio, I sanctify, means 'I bring to life'.
Ariadne was said to have had a tomb on the island of Naxos. She was also said to have had a tomb on
the island of Cyprus. The latter may reflect the close relationship of Ariadne and Aphrodite.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 10
CHRONOLOGY
So far, we have had to rely on Greek and Roman stories about an early Athenian king, Theseus, with a
certain amount of historical data in the way of texts, and to supplement this foundation we have
touched on certain motifs in art and architecture.
A study of the evidence from art and monuments has pointed to the electrical basis of ancient
Mediterranean religion, myth and magic. Another subject emerges, one closely involved with art, namely
chronology.
Up to the final years of the nineteenth century [A. D.] it was taken for granted that the discoveries
of Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae, which had caused such surprise, provided confirmation of the
general picture of the Trojan affair and the Argive tyrants that emerges from a study of Homer and
Thucydides. Only since the dating of Crete and Mycenae from Egypt has there been introduced such a
long dark age between the end of Minoan and Mycenean civilisation and the start of Greek, as opposed
to Mycenean, civilisation.
The interpretation of the data on which the astronomical dating from Egypt was based is increasingly
under attack, and there are grave doubts about the value of radio-carbon dating in the period
concerned. The general archaeological evidence does not support the conventional chronology.
One feature of the chaos resulting from the extension of the Greek 'Dark Ages' has been the doubling
of historical characters and events. Minos is an example of such doubling. The "early Minos, pre-
Hellenic and Middle Minoan", is the same as the Achaean Minos of Thucydides, with all that that
implies for the date of the Trojan war or wars.
Doubling also occurs in the case of Daedalus, one living in Minoan times, the other the father of the
artists called the Daedalidae, living in the eighth century B. C.. The second Daedalus was held to be
the first artist to have created statues standing in natural poses instead of having arms close to the
sides and one foot forward.
Dipoinis and Skylla were pupils and possibly sons of Daedalus. Hutchinson, in Prehistoric Crete, p.
126, refers to 'torsion' as a decorative device on vases from the Danube area and from S. E. Anatolia.
It is common in Cretan pottery. The Pelasgians, "divine" according to Homer, were among the
inhabitants of Crete, and had linguistic connections with the Danube area. Judging by their name, they
had specialist knowledge of rocks and caves.
At this point, we may usefully review some of the archaeological and literary material concerning
Crete and Minos. Readers who do not wish to spend time on details may safely skip to the chapter on
interpretations.
There was trade between Egypt, Syria and Palestine in the early Minoan period, conventionally dated to
about 2500 B. C onwards. A vase found at Byblos has a handle in the form of a bull. The name Byblos
may have a connection with one of the names of Dionysus, the Etruscan Fufluns, or Bubluns, meaning the
same as Bromios, the noisy one. This would refer to the drums that accompanied his revels, which in
turn imitated the thunder which was caused by the lightning, of which Dionysus was a god.
Spiral decoration is typical of Minoan art. It is also typical of Neolithic cultures in the Danube
area, in Thessaly in the Chalcolithic period, in Thrace, and in the Bronze Age Cyclades and Crete.
The meander and spiral pattern were popular in Egypt and Crete in the period when Amenemhet III built
his palace or temple, sometimes referred to as a labyrinth, in the Fayum, and a Cretan king built a
labyrinth at Knosos. The Egyptian palace has been described as a funerary temple, and both had enough
rooms for them to be called stores, possibly for food.
Cretan hieroglyphic script A has some Egyptian signs, e. g. the ankh, sign of life.
Thucydides, Book I: 4, writes that Minos was the earliest to control a fleet: he drove out the Karians
and put down piracy.
Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus relate that when Daedalus escaped from Crete, Minos, having pursued him
to Sicily, was murdered there by king Kokalos. The description by Diodorus of his tomb, with its two
stories, one below ground level, the other above, suggests a design similar to that of a temple tomb
at Knosos.
The Greeks had their Bronze Age Daedalus, and a Daedalic school of sculptors, in the eighth and
seventh centuries B. C.. Rhodians and Cretans colonised Gela in Sicily in 688 B. C. There was a city
called Minoa in Sicily, and others of the same name elsewhere. There are tombs in Sicily of the tholos
type, but it is thought that the architectural influence may have been from Greece rather than from
Crete.
Europa, sister of Kadmos of Thebes and of Minos, was a Phoenician princess. Zeus, in the form of a
bull, carried her to Crete.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 11
CHANGING INTERPRETATIONS
We may now usefully review some of the interpretations that have been made of those myths and legends
which seem the least consonant with 'rational' knowledge and views of the nature of the material world
in which human beings find themselves.
It is probable that the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would not have seen so many and varied
attempts to explain myths, magic and ritual had it not been for a reluctance to admit or even consider
the possibility of real events as the explanation of stories about extra-terrestrial interference with
what people were happy to imagine was the smooth, machine-like running of the world and the heavens.
Kirk, in his book The Nature of Greek Myths, Penguin 1974, gives an account of the various
explanations of the stories and actions, myth and ritual, put forward during the last two centuries.
Myths have been seen as explanations of ordinary natural phenomena, with gods and monsters as
personifications of natural forces. Thus in the 19th century Andrew Lang proposed that myths were
explanatory, and a form of early science.
Malinowsky suggested that myths are practical devices for supporting social structures rather than
attempts to discover theoretical truths.
Eliade holds that myths are an attempt to re-experience a remote past time of divine action and
creation. Such a return is not mere nostalgia. It gives power and inspiration in the present; the past
becomes alive and is felt to be present. Other writers, notably Jane Harrison, A. B. Cook, and Sir
James Frazer [in The Golden Bough], proposed that myth is to be associated with ritual, primitive and
savage fertility rituals being particularly significant.
In contrast to attempts to explain myths as being associated with nature, writers such as Freud and
Jung have tried to explain myths as psychic phenomena. Myth has been compared to subconscious images
and to dreams. Jung especially stressed the human need for myth and dreams to keep the psyche on an
even keel.
Followers of Levi-Strauss see myth as important in a society because of its ability to set up bridges
between contradictory views and needs. [Contradictions occur in Greek myths and legends between divine
law and human law, as in the Antigone of Sophocles.] They also see a similarity between the
contradictory workings of nature and the human mind.
Readers are referred to Kirk's book mentioned above for fuller information and comments on the various
views.
When looking at the theories, two facts emerge. Firstly, no one theory is a complete explanation of
all myths. Secondly, hardly any of them embraces the possibility that they should be taken, in the
case of the cosmic myths with battles in the sky, as colourful accounts of something that actually
happened.
Greek religion, from the point of view of the average Greek, seems to have changed from sacrifices and
the recitation of stories and the performance of games and plays, e. g. muthos and dromenon, to
mystery religions such as the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries. It became a matter of understanding and
coping with life's major challenges, especially birth, sickness and death. Let us turn to a twentieth
century A. D. opera. The interpretation made by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss of the story
of Dionysus and Ariadne laid stress on the ambivalence of death. In their opera Ariadne auf Naxos,
first performed in 1916, Ariadne decides that death is the only course left to her after Theseus has
abandoned her. She welcomes the appearance of Hermes, the psychopomp, the escorter of souls to the
underworld, as the one who will set her free. When the young god Bacchus enters, she welcomes him and
experiences a transformation and feeling of enchantment. She thinks that she is giving herself up to
death. In terror, she calls out "Theseus!". She then greets the stranger, the young god, as the
beautiful, peaceful god. The music and words of a duet suggest her rebirth. Bacchus too is
transformed, becoming a god through his love for Ariadne. To Ariadne, Bacchus is not only death, but
life. He effects her transformation from a deserted maiden to a goddess.
It is apparent from the above summary that the opera is an example of the restatement and
interpretation of a myth as a psychological experience, in terms adapted to the intellectual climate
of the time and place. Death, for example, is presented not as physical extinction but more as a 'rite
of passage'. It is the death of the love of Theseus for Ariadne which makes Ariadne, faithful to the
end, long for death, and it is the new love, that of Bacchus, which brings her peace from her
suffering, the joy and peace which she feels to be death, and which is the power that Bacchus
possesses to be resurrected [after his affair with Circe] and to bring others to life again, as he
does to Ariadne. It is interesting to compare him with his Egyptian equivalent, Osiris.
The apparent contradictions that von Hofmannsthal and Strauss portray in the behaviour of Ariadne
result from the ambiguities in the character of the god Dionysus. He is thought by many today to be
the god of life, of death, and of renewed life, not just psychologically, but in a physical and
material sense, as living objects die and new life springs from them. But Dionysus is no mere
vegetation god. It is not a matter of a plant, animal or human being dying, and new life being
nourished by the decomposing remains. The fertility explanation is not adequate. Dionysus is an
electrical god. He exists in every animal, in ivy, and in the vine, but he is greater than any one of
them: he exists outside them as well, in the form of lightning. In a sense, he is divine life. He
specialises in revealing the divine power to humans in their own experience as bacchants.
The power of the electrical force is such that it can both kill and bring to life. Moses was aware of
this dual function when the brazen serpent was set up to heal those suffering from snake bites,
whatever the exact technique and efficacy may have been. Radiation from the gods in the sky or
electricity from the earth helped Osiris to rise. The Egyptian ankh was life, but could be used as a
weapon. The ark could be used as a war machine, and Zeus saved the world from destruction when his
thunderbolts destroyed the monster in the sky.
The electrical god could be seen rising into the sky, described by the Greek poet Alkman as a passage,
poros, associated with creation, and described by Plato as a column of light which was the path for
the souls of the deceased to return to the stars and await reincarnation. It was a god of inspiration,
giving life, and, if one were struck by lightning, likely to give death as well.
According to Plato [Timaeus], the heavenly fire is to be found in the head and spine as well as in the
sky, and Hermes is an important character in Ariadne auf Naxos. Poros, the path between the electrical
source in the sky, and earth, was the father of Eros, and Hermes was a messenger associated not only
with sexual attraction and life, but with death, marshalling souls with his kerukeion, his ka-
controller, the caduceus of Mercury. [The Latin ducens means 'leading'; compare the name of the hoopoe
king Tereus, which probably means 'observing'.]
In ancient Greek, an initial 'h', the rough breathing, is almost a 'k'. Hermes is basically hrm, or
krm. Mercury is mrk; the two names, Hermes and Mercury, superficially different, are the same, as a
result of confusion over the direction of writing, probably in Asia Minor, where the Etruscans met
speakers of a Semitic language. This is just one of many instances of this phenomenon.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 12
CATASTROPHE, MYTH AND SKY
Floods, earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions as at Thera, the disasters that befell Knosos and most
other sites, are difficult to fit into the conventional framework. It is worth reviewing the story and
associated material from the standpoint of electrical theory and early study of electromagnetic
phenomena. Elektron, amber, 'god from the throne' is the starting point, and fine distinctions can
come later. When a king sat on a throne, he was imitating the presence of the electrical god above the
ark, chest, or capacitor.
Much of the mythical material calls for explanation on two levels. Firstly, many myths and rituals
deal with electrical phenomena. Experiments were made with magnets in Samothrace, the island famous
for its religious mysteries, like those of Eleusis. Furthermore, there are no grounds for supposing
that Benjamin Franklin was the first to try to capture the god from the sky.
Secondly, it is necessary to search for the cause of the more turbulent electrical conditions and the
catastrophes that are reported. This brings us to an examination of the astronomical material and to
the state of the solar system in not only prehistoric but also historical times. The final sections of
this study are therefore devoted to a review of a few instances where changed electrical conditions
and extra-terrestrial interference are the most likely explanation of the many stories and facts that
do not fit the conventional picture.
Some of the phenomena described in ancient records are easily recognised and comprehended, for example
lightning and radiation. In recent years the after-effects of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl have
included mutation, such as the birth of babies with fish tail instead of legs and primitive wings for
arms. Radiation from the sky as a cause of changes on earth was basic theory in the ancient world.
Other phenomena are less obvious. The similarity of some of the words found in ancient languages and
shared between different languages may in some instances be due to coincidence, but at this stage it
is better not to exclude the less obvious candidates for recognition. Progress in philology is helped
by an understanding of the physical reality that a word refers to or denotes.
The Old Testament contains references to phenomena which resemble some of those mentioned in other
literatures such as Greek and Latin. Jacob's dream, related in Genesis XXVIII, concerns an apparent
link between sky and earth, and the importance of stone. At a place called Luz, Jacob took stones for
pillows and went to sleep for the night. He dreamed that a ladder was set up, reaching to heaven, and
angels of God ascended and descended. God spoke to him and encouraged him with promises. Jacob set up
the stone that he had used for a pillow and poured oil on it. He named the place Bethel [house of
God]. We shall see later the electrical significance of the name Luz, and its presence, in disguise,
in Greek.
In chapter XXXII: 24, Jacob wrestles all night with a man. The man touches the hollow of Jacob's thigh
and puts it out of joint. He tells Jacob that he is to take the name of Israel. Jacob calls the place
Peniel, "for I have seen God face to face".
There are many Egyptian references [in the Book of the Dead] to the God of the Thigh. These probably
concern the constellation of the Great Bear in the northern sky.
The prophet Isaiah writes that "his rod was upon the sea", referring to Moses stretching out his hand
to cause the Egyptians to be drowned [Exodus XIV: 26]. Rods were associated with sky phenomena and
snakes.
Isaiah, XIV: 12, speaks of Lucifer, son of the morning, having fallen from heaven. Lucifer is the one
referred to in the words: "didst weaken the nations". Greek and Semitic literature both connect
disasters on earth, such as seem to have struck Knosos and many other sites, with irregular
occurrences in the sky. Greek tragedy is based on confrontation, where a character suffering from
hubris, behaving arrogantly as if superior to all others, is brought low.
In a passage attacking the idolatry of the Jews, Isaiah appears to refer to the practice of
incubation, on a mountain top, or, as in Babylon, on a ziggurat [tower of Babel]. In LVII: 7 he
writes: "upon a lofty and high mountain hast thou set thy bed: even thither wentest thou up to offer
sacrifice". It is probable that Minos paid similar visits to mountain top shrines.
There is an Egyptian reference to "the god on the top of the staircase".
Zeus, chief deity of the Greeks, god of order and justice, had the thunderbolt as his weapon against
the monsters. The thunderbolt is shown by Greeks in the hand of Zeus, generally like the lines of
force of a bar magnet, as revealed by iron filings on a piece of card held over the magnet. But it
also appears as an almond-shaped object, suggesting a plasmoid, appropriate for exchanges at long
distance and of great power. The Greek amygdale, almond, may be the Egyptian ames, sceptre, gad, a
name of Baal, and El, or Al, the god above. The Egyptian hieroglyph ames is shown as shaped like an
almond; vide Budge, Egyptian Language, p. 78, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
The Etruscan name of the god Tin recalls the Greek verb tinasso, brandish, and may even have been
Stin, since initial s is sometimes dropped. If this were the case, Tin may be Setin. The Greek is, in-
, means force, divine presence, so the name would mean 'force of Set', or 'presence of Set'. Tin may
mean thunderbolt, and Set is the Egyptian Typhon.
In Crete, Zeus was worshipped under the name of Velchanos, a word which may mean something like 'god
of the rock', or 'god of the cave'. Since the difference in electrical potential manifested by the
piezoelectric effect at the time of a severe earthquake would have dwindled through leakage, it was
reasonable for people to say that the god died. The death of the Cretan Zeus distinguished him from
the Zeus of the sky who was worshipped elsewhere.
The sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera, celebrated in Crete, may reflect an anxiety lest the atmosphere
surrounding Zeus should leave him and cause an outbreak of violence. Hera's name suggests 'face', and
'upon', Egyptian hra. Egyptian herit means 'fear'.
The sacred marriage occurs in the Sumerian myth of Dumuzi and Inanna, enacted by the king and a
priestess. Herodotus mentions the procedure in his description of Babylon.
The Egyptian reference to the "Lord of redness in the day of transformations" probably refers to an
object in the sky, such as the one that a Roman general, at his triumph, imitated by painting his face
red. The English word 'sanguine', means red in the face and cheerful. Its origin is the Latin sanguis,
blood. The Roman poet Horace, in one of his odes, describes death as pallida, pale.
Sanguis may in turn be related to Egyptian ankh and sankh, live, and make to live, and to Sumerian
sanga, priest.
Triumphus may be connected with the Thriae, Delphic goddesses. The thrioboloi at Delphi threw pebbles
into the divining bowl. Stone showers and meteorites would be associated with Mars. At Rome the
triumphing general, imitating Mars with his red face, stained with wine lees as if he were an actor,
rode in his chariot along the Sacred Way. The story goes that an attendant helped to stave off hubris,
arrogance, and nemesis, the avenging wrath of the gods, by whispering in his ear "Remember that you
are but mortal".
The Latin robigo means redness or rust. Its key consonants, rbg, when read backwards, give gbr. Gibor
is Hebrew for a hero, or leader.
The archangel Gabriel may be associated with Mars. Gabriel may be gibor el, divine warrior.
Zeus was the father of numerous deities and heroes. He was the son of Kronos, and behind Kronos lurks
the figure of Ouranos, whom his son Kronos castrated. There seems to have been an object or phenomenon
in the northern sky, named Bor, associated with light, and, in Jewish legend, with the ox. It may have
been what inspired Roman augurs with ideas for the street plan and layout of a military camp or city.
Electricity is the force behind other sky phenomena as well as that of the thunderbolt and its chief
users, Zeus and Athene. The bull, stag, cauldron, snake, thigh, Venus, column, eye, radiation, axe,
hand, arm, mutation and giants, tholos and dromos tombs, arks, libations and the five major planets,
and writing, all figure in attempts by the ancient priest-electricians to describe, explain and
exploit celestial phenomena. Monsters intrude, darken the sky, appear to cause the sun to stop or go
back in its course, and so on.
The dragon is a snake in the sky. In art it is given wings to show that it is the celestial monster
which the earthly snake resembles. Examples of imitation are the hair style of Greek kouroi, and the
uraeus, cobra, on the head of the pharaoh. The bull symbolises the power of a heavenly body with horn-
like protuberances. The killing of goats, stags, bulls and other creatures was sympathetic magic aimed
at checking the career of an object in the sky threatening the earth. The wearing of horned helmets,
masks and bulls' tails is an instance of mimesis. If all else fails, if you can't beat them, join
them. Furthermore, resemblance to a divine phenomenon instilled obedience, reverence and fear in
servants, subjects and enemies.
In Jeremiah's book, chapter I, the prophet sees a seething pot in the sky. The tripod cauldron, Greek
lebes, lebet-, is El's house, El beit. In Latin it is cortina, which suggests the Greek kerata, horns,
and in-, force. The Topprakali cauldron has bulls' heads round the rim.
The Minotaur was probably a man wearing a mask, horns and tail. The name of the Minotaur, Asterios, or
the neuter form Asterion, and the fact that Theseus seized it by the hair, support the view that
phenomena in the sky were involved and were models for imitation.
The constellation of the Great Bear, circling round the Pole Star, was referred to in Egypt as the
Lord of the Thigh. It could conceivably be linked with Dionysus and his birth from the thigh of Zeus.
Dionysus was one of the gods who could command lightning.
There is material from further east about the thigh. The stories about the hero Gilgamesh date back to
Sumer, and were known throughout the ancient Middle East.
One of the episodes describes the anger of Ishtar when Gilgamesh rejected her love, fearing that he
might suffer the same fate as the rest of her lovers. Ishtar persuaded Anu to send the Bull of Heaven
against Uruk, the home of Gilgamesh. With the help of Enkidu, who grasped the bull's horns, Gilgamesh
cut its throat with his sword. He then tore off its right thigh and threw it to Ishtar. Enkidu was
punished by the gods, who afflicted him with sickness.
Dionysus had a shrine on the island of Delos. The Stoibadeion, sacred to Dionysus, with its phallic
decoration of pillars, links fertility, sexual activity, and the sky. Dionysus was associated with
animals and the force embodied in them, especially the bull, the leopard and the other great cats.
Wine was thought to be the blood of those who had perished in battles in the sky.
Radiation was attributed to the five planets visible to the naked eye, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter
and Saturn. The eye was thought to be a source of radiation. Axe, hoe, spear and arrow were symbols of
lightning and radiation. Seven is an important number, being five plus the sun and moon. The Cretan
goddess is concerned, like Artemis, with both animals and radiation.
Thoth, the Egyptian god of electricity who was equated with the Greek Hermes and the Roman Mercury,
was active in the sky. He restarted Ra's boat when it had stopped. This Egyptian story is in harmony
with accounts from elsewhere, such as the record of phenomena at the battle of Beth Horon after the
Exodus, during the invasion of Palestine by the Hebrews under Joshua [Joshua X: 13].
The tholos tomb, a burial chamber approached by a passage, the dromos, may be an imitation of the
column rising into the sky. The word dromos is related to the Greek verb trecho, I run, aorist tense
edramon. It appears in English in the word hippodrome, originally a racecourse for horses. The
transport of the body, ashes or bones into the tomb would then be sympathetic magic, mimesis of the
soul's rapid ascent up the column to the stars, as described by Plato.
Greek games included what may be imitation of cosmic confrontations and exchanges in the sky. The Troy
game represented as a maze on the Tagliatella vase may have indicated the varying movements of an
object or god in the sky, resulting in a meeting and battle. Chariot races frequently led to smashes,
which may not have been accidental. In the case of the pentathlon, the number of events, five, may
have planetary significance.
Mayani, The Etruscans Begin to Speak, Souvenir Press 1962, puts forward some evidence that Etruscan
nobles sacrificed their lives in rituals aimed at saving their city from divine anger and punishment.
There is an Etruscan inscription on a stele found at Novilara. Its genuineness has been doubted. It
may refer to a ritual suicide by a charioteer, krustenac, in which case it would resemble the self-
sacrificing action of Marcus Curtius, who, to placate the angry gods, rode into a chasm that had
opened in the Roman forum.
Pessos, Greek for a 'man' at draughts, may come from pes, an Etruscan numeral. The name of Reshef, a
Syrian deity, may be a reversal of pes and ar, the five electrical fires. It is disputed whether pes
is five or four, but the objection is not necessarily fatal, since four-planet systems had a place in
ancient thought. The root ar implies movement, perhaps the movement of light along the poros of
Alkman.
Hubris, going too high, as if one were superior to all other people and considerations, is the Hebrew
zadhon, pride. This word may be 'Lord Set', since adhon means lord, so Set would be a celestial object
that went on a dangerous course, too high.
The Etruscan zichne, writing, engraving, is 'Set's tracks', ichne being the Greek for track or
footprints.
A hero was a man with powers so exceptional that they had to be attributed to divine parentage,
perhaps through incubation. The Hebrew heron means conception. The ancient view was that mutations,
including giants, monsters and heroes, were the result of divine interference, generally by a deity
whose home was in the sky, though earth too produced some unpleasant creatures that make one wonder,
in the words of Omar Khayam and Fitzgerald, whether the potter's hand slipped. Chernobyl and children
with fish tails and wings are a recent reminder of what the ancients appear to have suspected long
ago.
It is conceivable that the story of Herakles dying from the poison in the shirt of Nessus the centaur
may have an astronomical origin. Centaurs shot [radiated] arrows, and Herakles is associated with the
planet Mars.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 13
FIRE
In the ancient world, a city or society had as an essential aim a knowledge of the divine will and
intentions, and an understanding and some degree of control of the divine fire which, in the form of
the thunderbolt, closely associated with earthquakes, was the chief weapon of the gods.
The Greek aither is the upper air, home of the divine fire, pyr. The following words all mean fire of
some kind, usually divine, i. e. electrical, originating from the sky in the form of lightning, or
from the earth, e. g. piezoelectric effects from earthquakes, sometimes referred to by the general
Semitic term ka. I put forward suggestions for the meanings and derivations of these words, based on
the principle that in any philological inquiry the discovery of a link between a word and physical
reality should be the starting point.
Five of the most important words are: Pyr, or pur, [Greek], ar [Etruscan], ka [Egyptian], zichne
[Etruscan], ignis [Latin]. A Greek u may be transliterated as u or as y.
Flamma, flame, was used in Latin, like phlox in Greek, for ordinary chemical fire. The burning of wood
on altars was a trigger to encourage the divine fire to descend. The prophet Job, XX: 26, speaks of "a
fire not blown", i. e. not phlox.
Latin materia is wood for building; lignum [El ignis?] is wood for burning. Pyr
The Latin princeps, prince, is a compound of pyr, in-, and capio. The prince can capture the force of
the fire.
Pyramid is from pyr, fire, and amis, amid-, vessel, chamber pot. Greek amao means 'I collect, I
harvest. A pyramid was a fire collector. The Hebrew arah is to collect; aron is an ark. Arabic haram,
plural ahram, is a pyramid. Russian hram is a temple. Hebrew har means 'mountain'.
Plato, in his Laws, refers to the survivors of the Flood as "zopura of the human race". The word
suggests to us the phrase 'spark of life'.
Greek prasso, I achieve, act, is pyr aisso, I brandish fire. Greek pragma is a deed. The Akkadian
Akitu, New Year festival, resembles the Latin ago, actum, set in motion, act. Etruscan praco is a
step, and may be from the same root as the Greek pragma. Albanian prag is step.
Greek prinos, holm oak, may be pyr + in-, presence of fire. It was widely believed that oak trees were
more often struck by lightning than other trees.
The Greek prytanis was the official who waved the brand, imitating the god who brandished the
thunderbolt. Tanuo means 'I stretch out'. Tinasso means 'I brandish', literally 'I set Tin in motion'.
Tin, the Etruscan god of the thunderbolt, occurs also in the form Tinia, and, since initial s is
sometimes omitted, there is a possibility that he may have been Set + in-, presence, or force, of Set.
Set, the Egyptian god of evil, is also known as Typhon; Plutarch called him Seth. Ar
Latin ara is an altar, essentially a place to which the electrical god was persuaded to descend to
mark the victim. Ordinary fire would be lit to encourage the electrical fire to appear.
Water or blood would be poured over the victim to assist conductivity and earthing. The ancients knew
that water conducts electrical current. This may be a clue to the references in the Book of the Dead
to the "fire that is in the water".
An altar had horns. This creates a link with the horned object in the sky which was compared to a
horned creature such as a bull.
The Latin religio, sacred procedure, may be ar elicio, I entice the fire.
Mitra, headdress, tiara, may be a reversal of ar, and time, honour. The Greek mitos is a thread. An
electrical explanation of mitra becomes more likely when one thinks of the Greek for a crown,
stephanos, Set visible.
Thread may have some electrical significance. Images of ancestors were linked by thread in the atrium
of a Roman house.
Etruscan ve, put, appears in the Latin servio, I serve, I put fire. Zhar is one of the Slavonic words
for fire; ogonj [Latin ignis] is another.
Etruscan thesan means to kindle. Probably the word is from the Indo-European word detj, to put, and
refers to the task of stoking, putting fuel on the sacred fire. This is a possible interpretation of
the Greek word theos, god.
Theos has been traced either to tithemi, to put, set, or establish, as a basic function of a deity, or
to the verb theo, to run. The latter would be more appropriate to celestial bodies such as the
planets, the wandering stars, if they really did appear to run fast. They wander, but slowly. Perhaps
the various ideas present in the roots co-existed in the ancient mind.
A Roman priest might be a flamen, one who blew the flame [Latin flare is to blow]. The Vestal Virgins,
who tended the holy fire in the temple of Vesta in Rome, tended the life and soul of the city and of
the body politic on the hearth of the temple of Vesta, the Greek Hestia.
Erythrae is a Greek place name. There is an Erythrae near Cithaeron, in Boeotia, central Greece. The
name is a reversal of ar and of thura, door.
Egyptian, Greek and Roman pylons, gateways and arches symbolise an entry into the world of the
electrical god. They can symbolise planets; in this they resemble the seven pillars near the place
called the Horse's Grave, mentioned by Pausanias as being on his way from Sparta to Arcadia.
The Etruscan thur means much the same as the Latin gens, family. Thura, Greek for door, may be a
reversal of ar uth. Uth is Etruscan for the Greek hodos, road.
The name of the god Janus was in general use in Rome to mean an archway.
Shar kibrat arbaim is Akkadian for 'Lord of the four regions'. The Russian vorota is a plural word
meaning 'gate'. Lord of the four gates?
Arches, Latin arcus, symbolised an entrance to the world of the spirit, of divine fire, the way to the
stars. The Etruscan ar is present in arcus, as it is in the Latin arca, chest.
Aristotle, in his De Anima, On the Soul, writes that the soul enters the human body thurathen, from
outside. Probably thurathen should be understood as meaning 'from the fire door' i. e. from the stars,
which, as Plato writes in the myth of Er at the end of his Republic, are the places from which souls
come and to which they return.
The Hebrew timara is a pillar. There may be a link with the kion, column, of Plato's Republic, by
which souls returned to the stars.
Hebrew pathar means to explain. It may be 'reveal the fire'. Latin patera is a flat dish used in
libations for reflecting the radiation from a source in the sky onto the earth, perhaps to feed the
dead, help them to the stars, or resurrect them for advice. The Latin patere means to be open, to be
exposed.
There may even be a connection between the Hebrew pathar, explain, and the Greek pathos, suffering.
The Athenian dramatist Aeschylus associates mathos, finding out, with pathos, suffering. In a Greek
tragedy, there is a recognition scene, when a truth, previously hidden from some or all of the
characters, is revealed. It leads to a reversal of fortune frequently involving a principal character
in difficulty and disaster.
Hebrew qe'arah is a bowl or dish, and may conceal the Egyptian ka, which appears in Hebrew qadhosh,
divine.
The Latin lanx, lanc-, is a dish. It may be a compound of El, the god above, and ankh, life. The
Hittite spanza, libation, suggests 'down from the five', the five being the five planets easily
visible to the naked eye. The libation bowl was used to reflect and focus the divine radiation from
sky to earth, as shown on a relief from Malatya.
The Latin armum, weapon, especially a defensive weapon, may be connected with electrical fire. The
aegis was used by Athene as a shield, and inspired fear. Setting up the apparatus at a shrine involved
adjustment of telescopic rods, Hebrew chashuqim. Greek ararisko, fit, adjust, may be 'please the
fire', ar and aresko. Aresko means 'I please', artao means 'I fasten'.
It seems likely that the Latin ars, art-, skill or art, was originally the fitting together of
apparatus. In this context the Hebrew chashuqim, junction rods, may be relevant. Greek arthron, joint,
could be ar and thronos, seat.
The Greek stratos, army, may be the fire of Set, a body of men that was meant to strike like a
thunderbolt.
El and ar may be present in the name of Lars Porsenna of Clusium.
The Latin lustro, review, purify, may be 'release the fire of Set', i. e. burn. The censor conducted a
review of the people. He may be ka ensis, the sword of ka. Ka suggests the Greek kaio, I burn.
The Ossetic word zarand means gold. The letter z can be 'st' as well as 'ts' or 'ds'. Zarand could
sound like 'Set's fire'.
Marshy places attracted ar. Romulus met his mysterious death on the Goat's Fen, and Dionysus was known
as Limnaios, Dionysus of the marshes. He was said to have been born in Nysa, in a well watered plain.
Vide Ghirshman, Iran, p. 236, Penguin 1954.
The Latin ardea is a heron. It may have been a bird which, like the ibis, was thought to be expert at
catching snakes. Hebrew dea means knowledge; the heron's name may mean 'having knowledge about fire'.
[The snake is one of the commonest symbols of divine fire]. Ka
Ar was often equated with ka. Whereas ar was thought of as the god descending from the sky, the ka was
associated with the individual human being, as a kind of halo surrounding the head, and giving the
impression of a double. However, it was recognised that the two were essentially manifestations of the
same force; the terms ar and ka could be used indifferently. The name Ardoro was given to a Cretan
priestess who may even have been the same as Ariadne. The name Ardoro means'gift of fire', doron being
Greek for a gift.
The Greek ananke, necessity, is spelt anagke. The word ka, pronounced well back in the throat, could
have been spelt ga, Doric dialect for the Ionic and Attic word ge, the earth goddess. Ana means
'above'; ananke would thus be the ka above. Electrical forces in the sky were harder to control than
those on earth.
Ar and ka both appear in the Latin arca, chest. Ariadne is ar yad, hand of fire. She is represented in
a statuette holding snakes or a bow in her hands. We have already mentioned that Greek bios, like
Sumerian ti, til, means either bow or life. The arrow shot by a deity was electrical, as was the
brazen serpent of Numbers XXI.
When the priest had caught the divine fire in the ark, the deity was referred to as ka. The word
appears in Greek kaio, burn, Latin incendo [in-ka-do, I give the presence of ka].
Osiris, the Egyptian god who resembled Dionysus, was the holy ka who rose from the chest or ark.
The Greek verb airo, raise, may possibly contain the word ar. The application of ar was a method of
resurrecting Osiris/ Dionysus. In Hebrew qadhosh [divine, holy], the dhosh element means to sprout or
produce, and an ark would be made to sprout ka, to radiate sound and light. The prophet Amos, IX: 1,
writes: "... I saw the Lord standing upon the altar..."
The aura seen was often described, especially in Egypt, as a lotus. The Sanskrit padma is a lotus. Pa,
fa, are Sanskrit for light; demas is Greek for body. Padma may be the body produced by the light.
There is support for this from Greek: kreas, flesh, is a flow of ka, and the same thing occurs in the
Latin verb creo, create. The old spelling of creo was cereo.
In Genesis IV: 22, Tubal Cain is described as the first smith. His name can be explained on electrical
lines, but first we need to know two things: that there was a deity of springs and water called Lavis,
and that confusion could occur over the different directions of writing,, Semitic right to left,
others left to right. Many examples of this are given later in this work.
The reverse of Tubal gives Lav ut. Ut suggests authority or source. Lavis we have already met. Cain
looks like ka in, presence of ka.
In the smith's craft two essential processes are heating the metal, then plunging it into water to
temper it, a process known as annealing. The name of Tubal Cain, whether by accident or by design, is
a shorthand description of the technique of the blacksmith.
The smiths of Rhodes, the Telchines, had supernatural powers, and made statues of the gods.
The god whom the priest aspires to capture or persuade to descend is the one above; Hebrew El means
over. Elektron, amber, is Greek for the god who emerges out of the seat, ek thronou. The Greek
thronos, seat, is the chest or capacitor, the Leyden jar, on which the earthly monarch may sit
imitating the deity. Etruscan drouna, truna, means 'fear', especially fear of the king sitting on his
throne. "Before Jehovah's awful throne...."
Readers are referred to God's Fire, by Alfred de Grazia, for a full account of the working of an ark.
The fire, ar, could be felt internally by individual human beings. Artistic inspiration was attributed
to the thunderbolt by the Greek poet Archilochus. The Roman poet Ovid, Fasti I: 423, writes".. simul
aetherios animo conceperat ignes.." Inspiration is described as catching the ethereal fire in one's
soul.
The reason for attributing a feeling in the bones, or, as the Romans said, in the marrow, medullis, to
a sky god rather than to an earth deity, may have been the thunderstorm. A good example of the effect
of a thunderstorm is found in the fourth book of the Aeneid, when Dido and Aeneas take refuge in a
cave from the storm.
The Greek lagneia, lust, may be the fire of el. Agni is the Sanskrit name of the god of fire.
Zichne, ignis The Latin ignis, fire, is basically the same as the Etruscan zichne, engraving or
writing. Zichne is Set ichne, tracks of Set. Marks made by lightning strokes on rock were taken to be
writing by a deity. The German zeichnen is to mark or draw. Latin signum is a mark.
Ka may just possibly be an element in the name Pergama, the fortress of Troy. It is a curious
coincidence that, if reversed, Pergama resembles magrepha, the gong that was sounded in the temple at
Jerusalem at dawn to mark the beginning of the day's burnt sacrifices.
The Garamantes lived in the Fezzan, SW Libya. Silius Italicus has "Gar amanticus vates", a prophet of
the Garamantes. Greek mantis is a seer; Gara-may be ka and ar.
Greek gaio means 'I rejoice'. Latin gaudio, rejoice, is of inward joy, as opposed to laetor, outward
rejoicing. Ga = Ka.
Greek gauros means proud, haughty. It may mean 'great ka'; Egyptian ur = great. Alternatively, it
might be compounded of ka and oura, tail.
Cassum lumine, empty of light, means dead, Aeneid II: 85. It is possible that the light is that of the
ka. Greek ken-means empty; reversed, it becomes nek-. The Greek nekuia were rites for raising the
dead, those who are empty of ka, for consultation. Nekuia is the title of the eleventh book of the
Odyssey.
Greek chrusos is gold. Gold may have been regarded as symbolising a flow of ka. Rheo, rhoos, = flow.
The name of the Etruscan city of Clusium may be ka + luo [Greek, I release], the place which was a
centre for releasing the ka from its prison in the ark or chest. The other name of the city was
Camers. The Etruscan mar, or mer, means 'take'. The city was a place where the priest, or the
princeps, caught the god. Princeps is a Latin word. He was originally an Etruscan magistrate-priest,
and his title looks like pur, in-, and capio, fire, force, capture.
The Latin genius, a divine spirit accompanying and protecting a person, is probably related to the
Egyptian ka.
The Etruscan concept of deity was of something vague and omnipresent. In this it differed from the
anthropomorphism of the Greeks, which may reflect Egyptian ideas and the identity of the ar and the ka
as manifestations of electrical divinity. Heraclitus may have had this in mind when he wrote that the
way up and the way down are the same. The Greek kamara and the Latin camera are generally thought to
be derived from the Greek kampto, bend. Kamara can mean the roof of a vault, a covered waggon, and a
boat with an arched cover. Since the Etruscan mar, mer, means to take, it seems more likely that we
are dealing with places and vehicles for the capturing and transporting of ka, as with Egyptian ark
boats.
The Latin poet Catullus wrote a poem about his yacht. Phaselus is the word he uses for his yacht. It
means 'bean'. Another word for bean is faba, Greek kuamos. A boat used for transporting an ark or
similar electrical apparatus not only resembled a bean in appearance. Its name was composed of
syllables suggestive of Greek and Egyptian electrical terms, namely fa, light, and ba, spirit. Beans
had magical significance; Ovid, Fasti V: 388, tells how beans are used in exorcism.
The Hebrew qadhosh, holy, sprouting ka, is the same word as Arabic quds, which appears in the Arabic
name for Jerusalem, El Quds, the holy city.
The Etruscan caveth, liver, is probably the Hebrew kavedh, liver.
The Albanian ka is an ox. The word may well go back to Etruscan.
The Romans may have detected a link between the ka and the anima, soul. The poet Horace, Satires I: V:
41, refers to friends of his [including Vergil], as "animae quales neque candidiores terra tulit",
souls than whom earth has not produced any more shining.
The Latin vacuus, empty, suggests that the light of khu comes from an empty box [fa, pa, =light; khu
is Egyptian for spirit, or radiance]. The Hebrew hebhel means vanity, idol, breeze, nothingness. The
word is a reversal of Latin levis, light [in weight]. Wana is Lydian for fanu, Etruscan for Latin
fanum, shrine. Compare Latin vanus, empty, and cavus, hollow.
Shetai was a hidden god of Egypt. Compare Hebrew Shaddai, Almighty.
The Greek megal-, great, may mean full of the ka of El. Egyptian meh = full; ga = ka. El's ka would be
the ka of the comet or body in the sky. The head and radiance of a planet or comet were compared with
the head and ka of a human being.
Ankh, ka and ku may appear in other Greek words for containers, e. g. aggeion, pail, the human body;
aggos, pail, cinerary urn. Kupellon is a big-bellied metal cup for drinking, e. g. chruseia kupella,
golden cups, Iliad III: 248.
Kulichne is a drinking cup, also a dish. The Greek word tekton, carpenter and builder, may contain ka,
and it may be the Latin tego, cover, protect. A carpenter would be one who constructed a house, or
ark, to protect something or somebody. But cf. Greek techne, craft, and Egyptian techen, obelisk.
Vacuna was an old Sabine goddess. Vide Ovid, Fasti VI: 269. Amen was a powerful and invisible Egyptian
deity who was associated with the resurrection of the spirit.
Meh, power inherent in nature or in human institutions [Roux, Ancient Iraq p. 542], may be related to
the Greek mechane, device, and Egyptian meh, fill. The Greek megal-, great, is probably related. The
Sibyl seemed to grow larger as she raved, and senators were auctores, enlargers. The Greek kanoun,
basket, was a thing containing ka, as happened in the Dionysiac procession. Dionysus shared with
Osiris the fate of being dismembered. Another Greek word for basket is kalathos. Lathein is to lie
hidden.
Imperium, state authority, may be in-, force, and per, [Egyptian for house or palace]. A house could
be a shrine where a god spoke or the human monarch aspired to divine authority. In the case of Latin
dominus, lord, we may have dom-, house, and is, divine presence. It is significant that the Albanian
thom, say, is probably Etruscan in origin.
Hebrew pasil is an idol, image, and resembles the Greek basileus, king. Offerings were put before
idols of gods for them to eat and drink. The king was a banqueter, who at the banquet, Etruscan vacl,
or sacred feast, devoured the fragments of the monster slain in the battle in the sky.
It is likely that the bringing of offerings was originally sympathetic magic aimed at helping the god
to live and to save the world from a monster that threatened it.
The Etruscan fleres is an idol. The Greek pleroo means I fill. Perhaps the statue contained a god. But
pa, fa, means light, and leer is a Germanic word meaning empty. Whatever the explanation, chests or
containers that appeared to be empty were the chosen vessels for containing the god or goddess whose
manifestation the priests studied to achieve.
A summary of the vocabulary may be useful at this point. Agni, Sanskrit, ogonj, Russian, esh, Hebrew,
all mean fire. Nephesh, Hebrew, = soul.
Egyptian chet, hair; cf. Greek chaite, hair, mane. Etruscan zar, fire; Slavonic zhar. Etruscan sarve =
put fire, Albanian zjarrve, Latin servo, servio. Egyptian tcha = fire stick; tehen = pillar; cf. Greek
techne, skill, art.
Greek grapho and Latin scribo, write, both indicate that writing was a sacred act. The Latin scrobis
is a trench.
The Egyptian tcham is a sceptre in the form of a scotch [for catching snakes], with an eagle perched
on top.
Greek kaio, Latin incendo, burn and Latin calere, to be hot, all contain the word ka. Hebrew har =
mountain. Harel is an altar [El, god above, appears on mountain tops].
The Arabic haram is a pyramid; Greek amao means harvest, collect.
The Greek pelekus, axe, may sometime have had an initial s in Lydia; cf. labrys, tlabrys, axe. We have
the words spel, spelaion, cave, Latin spelunca. Lydian pel is a cave. Caves were often associated with
split rocks and chasms caused by earthquakes or lightning, resulting in a difference of electrical
potential, as at Delphi, where the presence of the god was first detected by goats and the goatherd
Koretas. The 'Sibyl's Rock' has a split in it.
The Calabri, mountain dwellers in southern Italy, an area where earthquakes were frequent, may have
been 'axe people', like the Pelasgi, the people who were wise, sagi, about caves. Their name includes
the syllable ka, and perhaps labrys, the double axe that represents the thunderbolt.
Hebrew seghor, axe, corresponds to the Latin securis, axe. Another Hebrew word for an axe is
maghzerah. The word ar may form part of it, giving some such meaning as 'great fire of Set', and it is
the probable origin of the Etruscan and Latin magister. The Samnites of central Italy wore feathers on
their helmets, like the Philistines. Philistines have been described as Minoans who fled to the
Palestine coast in the twelfth century B. C. [conventional dating; a revised chronology prefers a
later date.]
What may be an Etruscan link emerges: "Minos... cristata casside pennis..", Minos with his feathered
helmet.
Hebrew chets is an arrow, spear point, lightning. Qayin, spear, is electricity as a weapon, the qa eye
[Hebrew ayin is an eye]. Zayin, Greek zeta, is a weapon. Egyptian set is an arrow; cf. Welsh [i. e.
Gallic] saethau, arrows.
The Timaeus of Plato is a good source of information about fire. The stars and planets are
manifestations of the divine fire. In humans and animals, the fire is found in the muelos, marrow,
which is concentrated in the head, but is also found in the spine and tail. The Latin cauda, tail, is
ka uthi, where ka dwells, or goes.
The Latin caput, head, reveals a close link with Egypt and the east: it is composed of ka and put. The
Latin puteus is a spring or well; it is the same word as Pytho, the old name of Delphi, which was a
famous source of divine energy. Put-occurs in the context of sexual activity, and survives today in
Italian and Greek.
The snake was seen as a source of electrical fire. It resembled a monster in the sky; it resembled the
curved shape of the spine; with the speed of its strike it resembled lightning. A cobra could cause
sudden death. In this it resembled Apollo with his arrows, but it also saved, as in the case of
Nechushtan, the brazen serpent in the wilderness. Furthermore, the reactions of victims on altars,
like the frogs of Galvani, suggested that the god could give movement and therefore life. Hermes and
Dionysus exemplified the physiological effects on the human being, and indeed on animals, and the
snake was thus a feature of Bacchic revels and the behaviour of Maenads. Snakes, and dogs, were kept
in temples of Asklepios to lick diseased bodies.
The Arabic sikina, and Hebrew sakin, knife, explain the Latin scintilla, spark. Reversed, they
resemble the Hebrew nachush, bronze.
Chabes [Egyptian] is a beard. Bes is a flame, so it may be a flame of ka. Aeschylus, in the Agamemnon,
has the watchman see a pogon puros, a beard of flame, when describing the signal fires announcing the
fall of Troy.
Shuti [Egyptian], plumes, are the 'soul of Geb'. Geb resembles the Greek Ge, the earth goddess.
Etruscan suth, suthina, and Hebrew tsuth, mean 'kindle'.
Ar appears in the Latin jubar, radiance of a heavenly body. Juba is the hair or mane of an animal, the
crest of a helmet, the crest of a serpent, and the tail of a comet.
Jubar stella is Phosphorus, and also Hesperus, the morning star and evening star, i. e. the planet
Venus.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 14
THE GODDESS GAIA
The priest-electricians were aware that the deity was to be found not only in the sky as lightning,
but also in the earth.
In Greek, chthon is the earth, Gaia is the goddess in the earth.
The snake was seen in the sky as a dragon, and was associated with radiation and its effects, but it
was also a creature living in holes in the ground, and snake tubes were incorporated in Cretan houses
where the snake was like the Roman genius, guardian of the household.
We have suggested that the Egyptian ka was an electrical aura or halo round a person, especially round
the head, the electrical headquarters. It was associated with health and life, and appears in the
Greek greeting chaire! chairete! Hail! Raise the ka! [airo = raise].
Chairete is very close to the Hebrew chaya, to live, to be well, to enjoy life. The plural chayim is
life. Chai, alive, looks and sounds like a reversal of the Greek cry Iacche, which greeted Dionysus, a
god of the electrical life in living things.
When priests tried to capture lightning by charging Leyden jars in the form of arks or thrones, they
recognised the importance of a good earth connection. Altars and arks were put on rock or a base of
stone, if necessary deepened by a pit filled with stones, as at Alalakh in Syria and at Chamaizi in
Crete. In Assyria, a spear stuck in an altar, or a representation of a winged disk in the sky,
symbolised the god.
Earthquakes, which were associated in the ancient mind with divine activity in the sky as well as
underground, were a source of piezoelectric effects. The goats detected the conditions at Delphi.
The Psychro cave in Crete contained a fragment of a jar with a picture of a leaping goat. The Greek
verb skirtao, frolic, dance, describes the movements of the goats that the goatherd Korytas noticed at
Delphi, and its consonants suggest the Egyptian Seker, an earth deity. The title of Seker was given to
Osiris when he was imprisoned in the chest before being restored to life and raised up by electrical
force. The Latin securus means secure and enclosed. The Latin sacer has the same consonants; we shall
see the connection with dancing in a few moments.
It seems possible that ka represents the same phenomenon as the Greek Ga, Ge, or Gaia.
We have seen that the Pelasgians may be the people who were wise about caves, and that the tholos tomb
may symbolise a link between sky and earth. Inhumation brought the dead into contact with the divine
force in the earth. One had, or hoped to have, the best of both worlds.
The Egyptian neter, divine, a hieroglyph looking like an axe or hoe, has the same consonants as the
Greek antron.
Dancing was a sacred ritual. Egyptian monarchs, and king David, danced before the god. Etruscan mimes
danced to elicit the earth deity and to imitate and resurrect the dead for consultation. Skr, Latin
sacer, when reversed, becomes rks, a Semitic root meaning 'dance', Arabic raqs.
The hymn of the Salii, the leaping priests of Rome, included the words limen sali, leap at the
threshold. We may compare with this the words of the prophet Zephaniah, chapter I: 9: "In the same day
also will I punish all those that leap on the threshold, which fill their masters' houses with
violence and deceit"
The arch of Janus marked the start of the Via Sacra at Rome, for processions to the Capitol. As he
passed under the arch, a triumphing general crossed the limen, threshold, and by so doing became, to
the spectators, divine. Limen, threshold, is an interesting word. In Greek it is a harbour. Harbour,
port and threshold are all, in a sense, gateways. When read from right to left, limen becomes the
Phoenician word for a harbour, namal.
Epilepsy was a sacred disease. The jerky movements of a sufferer in a fit probably suggested that an
external power was in control of his or her body.
Perhaps the lotus eaters of Homer's Odyssey lost their memory as a result of electric shock. El and
oth are Hebrew for 'god', and 'sign'; a lotus is tse'el.
Augurs relied on watching birds and animals, especially small animals which would creep out of holes
in the ground when an earthquake was imminent. The hoopoe with its erectile crest was particularly
useful when its attention was drawn to earthquake light and changes in electromagnetic states. Its cry
was thought to resemble the Greek opopa, I have seen. Augurs must also have watched the quail, Greek
ortux, light finder.
Ankh, live, and sankh, make to live, are the origin of the Latin sancio, sanctify, a word whose
original meaning was to make to live. Sanctus, holy, means literally 'having been brought to life'.
The ankh was the most powerful of amulets and hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt. Its hieroglyph is
described as a sandal tie with loop. Why this should mean 'life' has not been made clear.
For a connection between a sandal and life, we might turn to the Selli, the Agnihotris, and the Flamen
Dialis or priest of Jupiter at Rome. All these priests had one thing in common: they could maintain
good earth contact. The Selli were not allowed to wash their feet, the Brahmin Agnihotris or fire
priests had to sleep on the ground, the Flamen Dialis had to sleep in a bed whose feet were covered in
mud. The common aim was to be in intimate contact with the earth goddess Gaia.
The ankh may have a different explanation, representing the dual character, celestial and chthonic, of
the electrical force. There may also be a link with the orb and sceptre, regalia with which a monarch
is equipped at a coronation ceremony. The orb, which is a sphere with a cross on the top, looks like
an ankh if it is turned upside down.
Herakles defeated the giant Antaeus, whose strength came to him from the earth, by lifting him up in
the air so that he became weak.
Alke is Greek for valour, especially of heroes. The inspiration and help probably came from above. I
suggest ka and al. Arete, courage, virtue, manliness and excellence may be ar and da, electrical help
from Gaia the earth goddess.
The Egyptian god who created human beings was Khnemu. The consonants of his name are found in the
Greek mechane, a device that was cunning and sometimes dangerous. This may be more than coincidence; a
temple contained a device, or devices, for producing a life-giving spark which would animate lifeless
matter or the dead. Khnemu's wife Heket injected life into the body that Khnemu had made.
Psyche, the Greek for soul or principle of life, is probably an onomatopoeic word for electrical
sparking, revealing the presence of the god.
The danger attendant on the operation of an ark, which, as well as being charged from the god above,
might be a source of radiation from shamir, a substance kept in a lead container, was such that the
Jewish High Priest wore special clothing: the choshen or breastplate was of double thickness, like the
protective clothing found at the temple of Apollo at Gryneion.
That the High Priest's breastplate was more than usually important is clear from the fact that in
Roman times it was in the keeping of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem and was issued to the High Priest
on special occasions.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 15
AWARA AND KNOSOS
In 1888 Sir Flinders Petrie excavated the mortuary temple of Amenemhet at Hawara in the Fayum.
Amenemhet's dates are 1839 to 1791 B. C.
It could have been the model for the rebuilding of the Knosos labyrinth in about 1700 B. C., but not
for the first large palace building at Knosos, if the latter is to be dated to about 1900 B. C.
Petrie assumed that it was the building described by Strabo early in the first century A. D., and by
Herodotus, who visited it in about 440 B. C.
Its builders were twelve kings, who were contemporaries and related by marriages.
It had twelve covered courts and two stories. There were three thousand rooms, half of them
underground, half above. Each court was of white stone, surrounded by a colonnade. Such a large number
of rooms suggests a storage depot.
Near the corner at one end was a pyramid, 240 feet high, with carved figures of animals on it. The
pyramid was entered by an underground passage. [Herodotus II: 148]
The Fayum temple and the Knosos palace were both temples. The use of white shoes [phaikades] and
gypsum may have something to do with cleanliness and purity.
The presence of a bath-house and of a guest-house fits the Greek tradition of hospitality involving
bath ritual and banquet such as are described in the Odyssey. There is evidence that child sacrifice
and cannibalism took place, a combination that reminds one of Kronos and Zeus.
Temple ornaments included snakes, bull, horns, axe and statuettes of goddesses.
What sort of temple was it at Knosos, and at Hawara for that matter?
I suggest that the labyrinths at Hawara and at Knosos, as well as being religious, administrative and
storage centres, were representations of heaven and earth, the cosmos. The same may be true of the
Hittite capital of Hattusas.
Several features tend to this conclusion. The vocabulary used for the pillar or column supports the
idea that columns and colonnades represented paths from earth to sky. A summary of the words connected
with pillars may be useful, and will demonstrate the close relationship between the various languages.
VOCABULARY
The Greek kion may have a link with Egyptian. Kion, column, can also, with slightly different
pronunciation [different position of the accent], mean 'going'. The letter k betrays the presence of
ka.
Greek pyrgos, tower, contains the word pyr, fire, and possibly ka as well.
Akkadian durr, tower, resembles the Latin turris, and Latin columna needs no translation.
Egyptian has an, light tower, and ucha, pillar. It is reported that in 665 B. C. the Assyrians took
from Egyptian Thebes two bronze-coated obelisks. Techen, another Egyptian word for a pillar, resembles
the Greek techne, skill or art. Techen, reversed, becomes necht, to be strong.
Hebrew shath, column, may have some connection with the god Set. Egyptian utchu, memorial tablet, may
represent the sound of a spark, such as occurs in tcham, the Egyptian sceptre or scotch that has an
eagle perched on the top.
Etruscan prezu, column, is the Greek prester, a word which suggests an electrical fire in the form of
a tornado. Reversed, it resembles the Hebrew tsarebh, burning. It also resembles Latin stirps. This
word is basically stirp-, the final s being only a case ending. Stirps is the trunk and roots of a
tree, or the stem and roots of a plant, and would be a useful word to describe a twister.
We have already looked at the story of Jacob and his dream of a ladder between earth and sky. He
called the city Bethel, house of El. Its original name, Luz, if reversed, becomes zul. The Greek stul-
is a pillar.
There was probably a connection between the building of pillars and columns and the concept of the
World Tree, Yggdrasil, of northern myth. The Greek hule means wood, material. Reversed, this word
would sound like el uch. Egyptian ucha is a pillar, so the word could have meant 'divine pillar'.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 16
THE DANCE
Dancing is often associated with magic, and we will consider several typical examples of dancing
described by ancient authors.
ARKS Not only king David, but also Egyptian monarchs danced. Vide II Samuel V: 14: David danced before
the Lord, girded with a linen ephod.
Why dance before an ark? I hope that the answer to the question will emerge later, after a general
review of what was done.
RESURRECTION
Dancing was part of resurrection technique aimed at fertility of fields and at raising the dead. In
the first millenium B. C. the Etruscans were the acknowledged experts in the Mediterranean world and
were consulted by the Romans.
Histriones were the Etruscan mimes who performed their dance ritual when summoned in times of danger.
Histrio may contain hia, the Etruscan and Albanian for a shadow, Greek skia. The aim would have been
to resurrect the dead, who would appear as a ghostly image, and to ask the dead person's advice. The
histrio may even have played the part of a shade that was the 'fire of Set' i. e. an 'electrical'
spirit.
There is support for this interpretation of histrio. The early form was hister, e. g. in Livy VII: 2:
6. Skia, shadow, is used by Circe for the spirits of the dead in Odyssey X: 495, when she advises
Odysseus on his journey to the Cimmerians and the land of the dead.
The chief actor and choreographer was Larth Matves. Larth, or Lars, means high, or chief. Matves may
be mat, dead, and ves, knowing, as in netsvis. He would thus be the one who knew how to communicate
with the dead and elicit their advice.
The tanasar, or thanasar, raised the Di Manes, the Good Ones, the departed spirits. His title is
probably related to the German tanzen, to dance, but a fuller explanation will be attempted in a later
chapter.
It may be that the special shoes worn by senators were originally dancing shoes, resembling the Greek
phaikades, worn by gymnasiarchs and dancers, and the white shoes worn by Egyptian priests. The
Etruscan lucairce, priest, is one who raises [Greek airo] the light [Latin luc-].
The Lydians were famous shoemakers. Cothurni, actors' boots, were of Lydian origin. The word may mean
'doorway of ka', ka + thura.
The title tanasar of the Etruscan spirit raiser resembles the name of the Egyptian chthonic deity
Thanasa-Thanasa.
EGYPT
The Arabic raqs means to dance. Reversed, it becomes sqr, the consonants of the Latin sacer, sacred,
and resembles the Egyptian Seker. Osiris, hidden in a chest, had this title, the name of an ancient
earth deity.
Thanasa-Thanasa is a name of Amen, an Egyptian hidden god. Vide Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 172; Book of
the Dead, p. 542. The word Thanasa suggests not only the Etruscan tanasar but also the Greek thanatos,
death.
The Greek schematizo, create dance figures, may be related to the Egyptian sekhem, power.
Board games were played in Ancient Egypt, Crete and Greece. The men on the draughts board were called
dancers, or dogs, by the Egyptians. The ark before which David danced had three main uses: it revealed
the presence of the divine power, it was an oracle that made sounds and gave a visual display, and it
could be used as a war machine.
GOATS
Hebrew chaghagh is to dance, or to stagger; chaghav is a ravine. A possible explanation of the
similarity of the two words is to be found in the history of Delphi.
Diodorus Siculus, 40 B. C., tells the story of the goats dancing and the conclusion that Delphi must
be a home of an earth deity. Plutarch, 1st century A. D., gives the name of the goatherd, Koretas, and
tells of the accident to the Pythia when the goat needed extra drenching to make it indicate, by
shivering, that the deity was present and ready to inspire the Sibyl.
Skirtao is a Greek word meaning to make movements like a goat.
Hebrew natar is to tremble, or to leap. It shares the same consonants with Egyptian neter, divine, and
Greek antron, cave.
The god Pan is half goat. Grottos were sacred to him, and the horns symbolise the electrical god in
the sky. The leaps of a goat reveal the divine presence in the earth as felt where there were split
rocks and caves.
A goat is in Latin caper. Per is Egyptian for a house. Was a goat thought of as a ka-container? The
German Kaefer is a beetle, and in Egypt the scarab was sacred. Scarab is another of the words based on
the letters scr or sqr.
THE THRESHOLD
The Salii, Roman priests, performed a threshold dance [salio means 'I leap']. Livy, I: 20, writes:
"Salios ancilia ferre ac per urbem ire canentes carmina, cum tripudiis sollemnique saltatu iussit".
Numa ordered them to go through the city with the shields, with stamping and solemn leaps, singing
songs.
In Rome the Arval brothers, an ancient priestly college, danced the tripodatio, a solemn stamping of
the earth to ensure the fertility of the fields, arva.
In the hymn of the Salii, there occur the words "limen sali". This probably means 'leap over the
threshold', as an invitation to the Manes to cross the threshold between the world of the departed and
the world of the living, and to appear and give advice.
The Hebrew shal means transgression. The Hebrew letters shin, sh, and sin, s, are almost identical,
and shal could be the Latin salio.
SHOES
Latin calceus is a shoe. An early spelling is calcius, suggesting a connection with cio, 'set in
motion', and ka may have been a component. Kupassis is a Lydian word for a shoe. There may be a link
with ku, or ka, and the Greek phaos or phos, light. Hungarian cipö is a shoe; cipész is a shoemaker. A
principal aim of dancing was to "raise the light of ka", like the Latin verb quaero, or quairo, to
give it its original spelling.
THE DANCING FLOOR
The labyrinth at Knosos was achanes, roofless [Sophocles, Fragment 1030, and Kerenyi, The Gods of the
Greeks, p. 270]. This supports the theory that the labyrinth was a dancing floor where drama was
enacted.
At Delphi, the drama of Apollo and the snake was performed on a threshing floor next to the Sibyl's
Rock, a rock which may have been chosen by the Sibyl Herophyle because it was split, and showed a
difference of electrical potential, presumably as a result of an earthquake.
DANCING WITH KNIVES
In the dance at Knosos described by Homer, the young men carry sacrificial knives, Greek machaira.
The Cretan sikinnis was a dance in honour of Sabazios [Dionysus], danced by satyrs. The root skn means
knife.
EPILEPSY
Epilepsy was a sacred disease. The jerky movements of a sufferer in a fit led to the belief that an
external power was in control of the sufferer's body. Such a belief may have influenced the movements
of Greek dancing; fits would certainly have been studied.
GREEK DANCE VOCABULARY
The adjective poluskarthmos, much-leaping, is applied to Myrine, an Amazonian queen [Iliad II: 814].
Skairo = dance.
In the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, l. 599, Io's skirtemata, dancing movements, are irregular.
At Samothrace there was a frieze of dancing girls at the entrance to the precinct. Plato, in his
Euthydemus, tells of thronosis, corybantic dances round a seated figure. According to Nonnos,
Dionysiaca, Kadmos saw a dance at Samothrace in which the diaulos was played and spears were clashed
on bronze shields. A bronze shield and iron knives have been found there.
The Karpaia was a Spartan dance in honour of Artemis. Karyatizein was to dance at a festival of
Artemis at Karyae.
Iliad XVIII: 590: The dance at Knosos begins as a round dance like a dithyramb, then becomes
confrontational like a tragic choros, with two acrobats loose in the company.
Odyssey VIII: 264: The dancers strike the holy floor [choron theion] with their feet. Odysseus marvels
at the flashing movements [marmarugas] of their feet. According to Hesychius, choros is the same as
kuklos and stephanos, circle and crown. Choros is especially the round dance of the dithyramb, or the
floor where it is performed. Choros kuklikos is a dithyramb.
HEBREW
Raqadh is to leap, jump, or dance, and is close to the Arabic rqs, dance.
We have already mentioned the Greek halma, leap. It may conceivably be a reversal of the Hebrew
melekh, king. Kings were leapers. But melekh may also mean 'he who has the honey', like the infant
Zeus.
ASTRONOMICAL
The two acrobats loose in the dance company at Knosos may be representing some sky phenomenon.
At the court of King Alkinous, the dancing floor is an agon, a place for a contest. In Odyssey VIII:
260ff., it is cleared for dancing, and Demodocus sings of the love affair between Ares and Aphrodite.
Agon can be the sky, and should be understood thus in the passage where Hephaestus is described in his
workshop, putting the finishing touches to his tripods, which have wheels so that they may be able to
travel and enter the agon.
CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of dancing was: to charge a war machine, the ark; to charge an ark for an impressive
display; to summon the deity at an oracle; to achieve the resurrection of Osiris; to bring to life the
Manes for consultation; to rouse fertility deities [e. g. the Arval dance]; to destroy monsters by
sympathetic magic, as at Knosos and in Greek tragedy; to imitate epilepsy, thereby showing that the
god is in one; to imitate animals, some of which were ka-containers.
There was considerable sharing of vocabulary and technique. Reversals indicate the meeting of Indo-
European and Semitic speakers.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 17
ROCKS
The gypsum slabs used at Knosos for floors and walls are significant because of their colour, white.
The white floors and walls could be thought to represent the heavens and the brilliance of the upper
air.
White floors were chosen not only at Knosos but also elsewhere. The courtyard of the palace at Mari on
the Euphrates was paved with gypsum slabs. The white dress of a priestess at Knosos was not only to
indicate purity and ritual cleanliness. It shows that she represents a divine personage, the Cretan
goddess in one of her manifestations.
It is probable that priestesses appeared in openings, as they are said to have done at Ephesus,
imitating a goddess so as to impress those present. Perhaps a goddess was lowered, as if in a Greek
play, to indicate descent from heaven. The name Piptuna, one of the names of the goddess, suggests the
Greek pipto, fall.
Epiphanies are also reported by Hebrew prophets. Amos, IX: 1, describes his vision of the Lord
standing upon the altar.
Zechariah, III: 1, writes that the Lord and Satan appeared together.
Ezekiel, VIII: 2, mentions an appearance of fire, and amber colouring. Amber is in Greek elektron, god
out of the seat. In Hebrew it is chashmal, a word which in modern Hebrew means electricity.
One of the most colourful references is from Isaiah, VIII: 19: "... wizards that peep and mutter..."
When Homer describes the dance at the court of king Alkinous, Odysseus marvels at the twinkling of the
feet of the dancers, marmaruge. It means the play of light; amaruge is the twinkling of stars.
Marmaros is stone. Amaruge hippou occurs in Aristophanes, Birds, l. 925, where it may mean the
twinkling movements of hooves, and perhaps sparks, as in the Latin phrase ignipedes equi, fiery-footed
horses.
White clothing, the pharos, is worn by girls at the dance portrayed on the shield of Achilles. It is
also worn by corpses prepared for funeral rites, as at the funeral of Patroclus, Iliad XVIII: 353.
The columns at Hawara were white, of marble. There was a theatre area in both Hawara and Knosos. It
has been suggested that the maze design may have been a pattern on the ground for a dance.
Perhaps there was a confrontation between two opponents, hero and Minotaur. The latter would be a man
wearing a mask that resembled a bull's head, with horns. There were probably a dance and battle that
symbolised the apparent movements of objects in the sky, and it is possible that we have here the
origin of Greek drama.
There is a clear link between threshing-floors, theatres, and the sacred and magical. It is easy
enough to say that the link is fertility rites, aimed at ensuring good corn or grape harvests, but
there is another factor, the nature of the site. The favoured base for not only threshing -floors but
altars was rock. Stones could be brought to supplement the living rock of a 'high place', or as a
substitute. The Old Testament contains many references to rock; the ark functioned best on rock.
Genesis LV: 11 mentions the threshing-floor of Atad, or Abel. When the people of Beth Shemesh looked
into the ark, there was a disaster: over 50,000 people were killed by the Lord [I Samuel VI: 18ff.].
The ark had been put on the "great stone of Abel". During war between the Israelites and the
Midianites, Gideon, who was threshing wheat under an oak, was visited by an angel of the Lord. In
Judges VI: 20 the angel tells him to lay food "upon this rock, and pour out the broth". In verse 21
the angel touches the food with his staff; fire rises out of the rock and consumes the flesh and the
cakes.
Gideon's reaction was fear because he had seen an angel of the Lord face to face. "And the Lord said
unto him, Peace be unto thee; fear not: thou shalt not die." Gideon built an altar there, and called
it Jehovah-shalom.
For an example of the sensitivity of an animal to a divine presence, see Numbers XXII: 23. Balaam's
ass refuses to go forward when the angel of the Lord stands in his way.
JERUSALEM Isaiah,
VIII: 18, writes "... the Lord of hosts which dwelleth in Mount Zion..."
There is mention of a threshing-floor on Mount Moriah. It was associated with Araunah, and with Ornan
the Jebusite: "and the angel of the Lord was by the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite."
This became the site of the altar of burnt offerings in the temple in Jerusalem.
The temple built by Solomon was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B. C. When it was rebuilt by
Zerubbabel, it was said that five things were missing: the ark, the holy fire, the Shekhinah, the
spirit of prophecy, the Urim and the Thummim.
The Samaritans sacrificed at the rock on the top of Mount Gerizim, the Holy of Holies of the Samaritan
temple.
The site of the temple of Solomon is now a mosque. In the Dome of the Rock, as it is now called, a
piece of living rock projects through the floor. Its name in Arabic is Es Sakhra. [Es is a form of the
definite article in Arabic] It was from this stone that Muhammad took off for heaven on his horse El
Baruq.
The Hebrew baraq means lightning. Muhammad is not the only person of whom it was said that he ascended
to heaven in a miraculous way. The prophet Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. Romulus was
said to have disappeared during a storm, accompanied by thunder and lightning, when he was holding a
meeting with the people on the Goat's Fen.
It is possible that we have a clue to these occurrences in the Etruscan word prezu, Greek prester,
tornado. A tornado is associated with turbulent electrical conditions in a severe storm.
There may also be a link with stories about the world tree, Yggdrasil.
The Latin stirps, root and trunk of a tree, uses the same consonants as the Greek astrape, lightning.
Tree, in Arabic, is shazhara. The Slavonic root zhar means fire.
The importance of thresholds, especially brazen ones, is to be attributed to electrical factors.
Temples and, later, Christian churches, were often situated in places associated with anomalous
electrical conditions, due either to splits in rock or to a special attraction for lightning [Zeus
Enelysios, Zeus who has descended to be in a certain spot]. For example, in the Oedipus at Colonus of
Sophocles, Oedipus, warned by the god that he is about to die, goes to a place where there are split
rocks, the Brazen Threshold. Theseus and Peirithous had been temporarily paralysed here, prisoners in
stone seats. His death was heralded by thunder and by sounds suggestive of a sine wave.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 18
RITUALS
Among religious practices in the ancient world were the following:
Acquisition of divine strength by the king, through anointing by the priests with sa-ankh.
Visits to shrines, e. g. to the sanctuary on Mount Iuktas, so as to be nearer to the lightning god,
and, in the case of caves, to places where there were differences of electrical potential between
split rocks, such as the 'Brazen Threshold' of the Oedipus at Colonus.
Visits to mountain tops, where lightning was known to strike frequently, aided if necessary by a
bothros as at Chamaizi. Fires on hill tops may in some instances have been mimesis, in an attempt to
atttract lightning. The reports of Moses and his visit to Mount Sinai would have been influential.
Worship of the bull: protection of the Apis bull. Slaughter of bulls and goats. Drowning the bull for
the release of the divine element. Eating the bull; compare the Etruscan vacl, banquet. Drinking blood
mixed with milk, honey and wine. In the worship of Mithras, the devout were drenched with bull's
blood. Imitation of the bull, by wearing tail, mask and horns. Grasping the bull's horns, being tossed
up and doing a somersault, perhaps, like Europa, riding on the bull to illustrate a degree of control
over a dangerous and powerful object. Tracking down the bull in a maze and killing it. The maze could
symbolise the sky through which the celestial bull pursued a dangerous winding course. At a Roman
sacrifice, the man who sacrificed the animal was the popa. It was his task to cut open the animal to
inspect the liver, in order to find whether the future was favourable or not. The Greek opopa means 'I
have seen'.
An Etruscan mirror shows an official inspecting a liver. The inscription is "pavatarchies", which
Mayani translates as "Tarchies has seen". [The Etruscans Begin to Speak, p. 25]
Hair [comet's tail?] was cut from a victim's head and thrown on the fire. This may symbolise Zeus or
Jupiter destroying his enemy by lightning.
Spiral decoration may have symbolised the maze, or the orbital circling of an intruder.
Wine symbolised the blood spilt in battles in the sky. Columns and trees were worshipped. The Latin
for an oak, quercus, shows that it was a ka-container. Khu is the Egyptian spirit soul.
Symbolic activity at Knosos included the destruction of dangerous monsters, union with the deity,
descent to the underworld, resurrection, and ascent to the sky.
The task of the ruler was to acquire and exercise divine powers. Incubation was practised with the aim
of uniting the royal family with the deity. Babylonian kings would spend the night in the saharu, a
shrine on top of a ziggurat, in the company of a chosen priestess.
The healing power of the snake was exploited in Greek and Roman temples. During an epidemic, snakes
from the temple of Asklepios at Epidaurus were taken to Rome. As the ship was approaching the island
in the Tiber, the snakes went overboard and landed on the island. A temple was built there; snakes
were induced to lick diseased or injured parts of the body. Dogs also were used and were sacred. In
Christian churches in the Middle East dedicated to St. George, rings were fixed in stone pillars.
Sufferers from mental disease were chained to a pillar for the night to be cured.
In this context, it is of interest to note that Morton, in his book In the Steps of the Master,
reports that the Oecumenical Patriarch of New Rome had a serpent-headed crozier.
An early term for Christians after baptism was 'illuminated'. Apparently there was thought to be a
link between water, divine visitation, and light.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 19
LIFE
Words for life cross the frontier between Semitic and Indo-European languages in the period of Greek
and Roman civilisation.
Greek bios resembles the Latin vigere, to be well and strong, in that it is a common word for life in
the sense of day to day physical existence. Grimm's law helps us to see the relationship. Related to
vigere are vis, stem vi, force or power, vita, life, and vivo, I live.
The Greek is, in-, force or presence, originally began with a digamma, a letter like our f. It is the
same as the Latin vis, and related to bios. Sanskrit giv is the Russian zhiv-, alive.
Turning from the material or physical aspect of life, we find the key word in Greek, psyche. It is
generally translated 'soul', and means the principle of life. The power of self-originated movement
was taken by the Greeks to be a sign of the presence in the object or animal of psyche. The Greek
philosopher Thales is believed to have said that a magnet contained psyche.
Latin anima means air, then life in the sense of breath and physical life; animus is the spiritual and
reasoning aspect of life.
We have seen that Egyptian ankh is life, and sankh is to make to live, and I have suggested that here
we have the explanation of Latin sancio, sanctify, meaning 'make to live'.
Is the Greek angelos, messenger, composed of ankh and El? In Numbers XXII: 23, the story of Balaam and
his ass illustrates how electrical phenomena could be interpreted as messengers. Hebrew chai means
'alive'; chaim [a plural form] means 'life'. Greek haima is blood. Egyptian sankh is almost identical
with the Latin for blood, sanguis.
It is possible that onomatopoeia played a part in the creation of vocabulary to communicate by sound
the effects produced by the electrical god. Psyche is an obvious example of a word which can suggest
the hissing or spitting sound of sparks and electrical discharges. Qa begins with a sound produced far
back in the throat. In Egyptian, tcham, sceptre, suggests the sound at close quarters of a lightning
strike, and ka probably sounded quite like the Hebrew qa of qadhosh, holy. Breathing, gasping and
choking sounds may have provided models for the varieties of 'k' sound. The letter z could sound like
st, and sometimes stands for Set.
The sky, and sky phenomena, are the usual explanation, in the ancient world, for the origin of life.
If the earth mother produces living organisms it is generally the result of action from above. Divine
activity could come from underground, and there was a pair of deities, Cerus and Ceres, who were
concerned with the fertility of the fields. But the Latin verb aro, plough, suggests the divine fire.
Much human activity was mimesis, imitation of divine activity observed in the sky or coming out of the
earth.
Hebrew dam, blood, may have been reversed to give the Latin madeo, madere, to be wet. Blood was used
to drench altars and increase conductivity. Sanga is Sumerian for a priest, who is concerned with
bringing to life the god. It is clearly the same as sanguis and sankh. In Hades, ghosts had to drink
blood before they were physically capable of talking to Odysseus and Aeneas.
Mayani has suggested that the Etruscan levac means 'anointer', and quotes in support the Albanian
ljej, to smear. Egyptian priests anointed kings with sa-ankh. This life force was electrical,
transferred from a statue that had been charged. Statues could be hollow, like Leyden jars. The
Etruscan levac resembles the name of the Levites, who had the dangerous task of looking after the ark.
Vide Numbers III.
We have seen that sancio is to bring to life. In Egypt, sanctification was the raising and bringing to
life of the holy ka, Osiris, who was enclosed in a chest.
Greek airo, raise, may be related to ar, the fire that gave movement and life, and enabled people and
animals to stand, Latin sto. Greek zo means 'I live'. Etrucan zac [stac] = stand.
One of the methods employed in Egypt was to set the coffin of Osiris in a hollow tree trunk, and raise
the trunk to an upright position. The trunk could symbolise the spine of Osiris, or the world tree
Yggdrasil.
The Roman writer and philosopher Cicero refers to the popular belief that human beings came from
rocks, or from oak trees. Both rocks and oaks attract lightning.
Human beings were created by the Egyptian god Khnemu, a potter. His wife Heket provided the soul which
was added to the clay.
Khnem means: a jug; to write; to be joined to. It may be significant in this context that Etruscan
zichne, to write, is Set ichne, the tracks of Set, i. e. the marks made on rock by lightning.
LIBATIONS
The Hittite spanza, and the Greek spendo, pour a libation, are best understood as meaning 'down from
the five', i. e, the five planets visible to the unaided human eye. [Greek pente = five] The
vocabulary used for the plates and vessels that could be employed deserves mention, and the process is
illustrated in a relief from Malatya.
Riqqu'a, Hebrew, plate, beaten metal. Qe'arah, Hebrew, bowl, dish. Cf. Latin patera, which may contain
ar. Hulsna, Etruscan, libation. The stem of the word is huls. German schlucken is to drink. A
reversal.
Cepen, Etruscan, priest. This may be spendo, since the letter c in Etruscan, as in English, is
sometimes an s and sometimes a k. But cepen may be an instance of ka.
Phiale, Greek for a libation bowl, is similar to the Latin patera, which resembles the Hebrew pathar,
explain. Fa, pa, mean light. Phiale is also a shield, and, in Iliad XXIII: 243, a cinerary urn.
Spendo, with the letter 's' meaning 'down from', as in modern Russian, has something in common with
Greek sophos, clever. Hebrew oph means 'birds'. The augur's knowledge came down from birds. The Hebrew
mophet is a portent, meaning 'from the birds'.
Greek aspis, aspid-, is a shield. It is a reversal of the Mycenean dipas, cup, or heaven. Hittite
tipas is a cup, and also means 'heaven'. The Latin lanx, lanc-, dish, may be El, the one above, and
ankh, life.
FIVES
Greek pimpremi, burn, may have a connection with the five planets that were held to radiate divine
force. The Cumbrian and Welsh, i. e. Gallic, word pimp, used by shepherds counting sheep, means five.
The draughts board was said to have been invented by Thoth. Alexander the Great also claimed to be the
inventor. Greek pessos is a 'man' at draughts. Etruscan pes is five. The squares on the board may
represent areas of the sky, and the Egyptians called the 'men' dancers. At Carthage there was an
important body of five magistrates called the pentarchy. At Rome the term quinqueviratus meant a body
of five officials.
CAULDRONS
The phenomenon described by Jeremiah as a seething pot facing the north may have had some influence on
the design of ancient pottery as well as being the origin of the popularity of the tripod cauldron.
The cauldron, or the object in the sky resembling a cauldron, could be a source of rejuvenation,
apotheosis, destruction and death [exploited by Medea].
There is an inscription from Syria of the time of the Roman emperor Trajan, dedicated to Leukothea. It
contains the words 'apotheotheis en toi lebeti', made divine in the cauldron. The Greek lebet-,
cauldron, is probably el beith, El's house.
Vases sometimes resemble in shape the human heart, the organ that ancient American priests regularly
tore out of the bodies of their sacrificial victims. Such a rite may have had a magical purpose
similar to that of Greek tragedy, and to that of the Egyptian practice of insulting red-headed people,
throwing an ass over a cliff, and sacrificing red cattle, because Typhon was red-headed and like an
ass in colour. The original aim was to bring Typhon low. Vide Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 362Eff..
The Hebrew parur, kettle or pot, may be a word inspired by the sight of the seething pot in the sky.
Par is a Slavonic word for steam; ur is Egyptian for great.
It is worth noting that the ancient views on what we might call a theory of evolution were more
intelligent and accurate than the popular science of more recent times has recognised. It is one thing
to explain how various species have either survived, or failed and become extinct, and to trace the
factors responsible. It is quite another thing to explain why there should be different species in the
first place from which nature can select. The recent study of radiation and extra-terrestrial
catastrophes, leading to an increase in the understanding of the causes of change, would have the
understanding and approval of the ancients, whose views amounted to a belief in punctuated equilibrium
or quantavolution.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 20
QUAIRO: RAISING THE KA
A classical scholar glancing at the above heading may be surprised at the spelling. The Latin verb
that means 'I inquire' is normally spelt quaero. Quairo, the older spelling, is the clue to the
original meaning of the word, a meaning that emerges from a study of an oracular shrine and what
happened there.
The Arabic name for Jerusalem is El Quds. It is the same as Hebrew qadhosh, holy, 'producing qa'.
The temple at Jerusalem was the site of an oracle, and this reminds us of an important point: an
oracular site was holy ground.
Greek chresterion is an oracle. The word indicates that it was a place where there was a flow of ka,
or qa. Chre is used in ordinary Greek as 'it is necessary', but its original meaning was 'ka flows',
implying that the oracular force is appearing or present.
Latin delubrum is a shrine. It may be 'Ge lubet', the earth goddess pleases. Ge, or Gaia, was the
earliest deity at Delphi, associated with the rock and the effects of earthquake and lightning.
In the Breton language today the word loc means a holy place, presumably the same as Latin locus.
The early form of locus is stlocus. This suggests a connection with Set, a deity who was electrically
live, and whose name appears in Greek stephanos, crown.
Greek pyr, fire, if reversed, resembles the Latin rupes, stem rup-, crag, rock. The Sibyl Herophyle at
Delphi prophesied while standing on the 'Sibyl's Rock'. The rock has a narrow crack, and could
therefore be a holy place where the difference in electrical potential could be felt.
The Albanian thom, 'say', may be the same as the Latin domus, house, via Etruscan. There is an
undercurrent of sanctity about ancient words for 'house', leading one to think that a domus was
basically a building to shelter the ground where the god's voice could be heard. The Hebrew qol,
voice, is a reversal of log-, Greek for word, and of Latin loc-, place.
In Russian, dom is a house. Domovina is old Russian for a coffin. Etruscan tombs are often in a form
suggesting a house. Etruscan thun is a house.
There were two main situations where the deity could be heard, or seen, by priests, or felt by a
Sibyl. The force could be felt in the bare rock, or a capacitor could be assembled and charged from
the atmosphere, a dangerous procedure at a time of electrical storm conditions.
The essential devices for capturing the electrical god were something hollow, a box, chest, ark, in
Hebrew aron, in Latin arca, and a rod. Hebrew arah means collect. The Etruscan goddess Vacuna may be
the one in the empty box: Latin vacuus is 'empty', cavus is hollow. In each of these two words there
are the Egyptian ka and khu.
Camera, a container, is a ka catcher; mer is Etruscan for 'take'. As we have seen, a pit full of
stones could be situated under the altar to increase the likelihood of a lightning strike, as at
Chamaizi.
At a shrine where there was a capacitor, the priest tried to obtain an epiphany of the god. Quairo, I
ask, is composed of the Greek airo, raise, and qu. The priest tried to raise the khu, the spirit soul
of Osiris, or the ka of Osiris. Etruscan lucairce is a priest; luc-is light.
Greek episteme, scientific knowledge, is in Homer intellectual power and artistic skill. Epi = on,
histemi = I make to stand. It may refer to the skill, Latin ars, art-, of the priest in making the god
stand up on the ark or chest.
Hebrew qesem is an oracle. Cf. Greek sema, sign, and ka. A Roman priest would utter the words 'Favete
linguis! ', be favourable with your tongues! Favere is to cherish the light. Fa is light; the verb
beare means to cherish. Beare is more familiar in the form beatus, blessed. Favete linguis is
generally taken to mean 'hush! '
Greek kluo, I listen, or 'I am talked about, I am heard', may be ka and luo, I release the ka. It is
similar to Greek akouo, I hear, I am talked about.
We have seen that padma is a lotus, composed of fa or pa, light, and demas, body. Greek anthos is a
flower [blossom], and may be present in the Greek manthano, I find out, and in the name Rhadamanthus,
judge and deity of the underworld.
The most important branch of learning was that concerned with the electrical deity. We may have here,
in the Greek manthano, the Semitic min or m, meaning 'from', and anthos, so that knowledge is 'from
the flower', i. e. from the lotus, which represents the aura or glow. The Greek mant-is a seer.
Lotus may be composed from two Semitic words, el, and oth, sign of el. The plural of oth appears in
the exclamation ototoi, said by Cassandra as she feels the presence of Apollo and begins to speak and
prophesy at the gateway of the palace at Mycenae, in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus.
Greek gignosco and Latin cognosco mean to get to know by observation. They are presumably from ka and
the Greek noeo, I notice. Similarly the Greek noun gnosis means the acquisition of knowledge by
observation. It is probable that the name of Knosos in Crete means that it was the place of observing
and getting to know ka.
The Greek oida, I know, is a perfect tense meaning 'I have seen', implying the presence in the mind of
a picture, shape or form, Greek idea. The Greek eidos also means form, shape or figure. Latin video, I
see, is the same word with the digamma at the start.
Creo, Latin, I create, has an earlier form cereo. A flow of ka? The Greek rheo has two meanings, to
flow, and to say. Greek kreat-means flesh, Latin caro, carnis. Chrema is 'thing'. Chre means 'it is
necessary', originally 'the god flows', or 'the god speaks'. Greek sophia, cleverness, originally
meant having the knowledge and ability to detect the electrical god by observing birds, especially the
hoopoe and the quail.
The Latin lumen, light, may be from the Greek perfect passive participle lelumenos, having been
released, from the verb luo, I set free. When the spark or glow appeared it was seen by the Egyptian
priest as the release of Osiris from the chest in which his mutilated body had been lying.
There is a resemblance to Greek louo, wash. The Egyptian wab was a priest charged with washing the
statues, a procedure which would increase conductivity and encourage the flow of ka. Latin lavo, wash,
may be the Egyptian word wab. [The letter w is similar to the hard l that occurs in Slavonic
languages] If the priests were successful, the god would emerge and appear on the box, or throne,
place of fear. Etruscan tru, dru, drouna, is fear.
The Latin capax, stem capac-, means 'containing', or 'able'. It could be composed of ka, fa, and cio.
It would thus have meant, originally, 'setting in motion the light of ka'.
El ek thronou is the god out of the seat. The reversal of thronos is Nortia, an Etruscan deity,
possibly an object in the northern sky. The Latin for science is artium studia, study of arts.
Studium, zeal and care, may be Set audire, to hear Set, i. e. the sound of a spark, hiss or hum
indicating that the ark, a capacitor, has acquired a charge. I have suggested earlier that ars means
skill in pleasing the fire by fitting the apparatus together, and that Greek ararisko, I set up, is
ar, and aresko, I please. Artao means I fasten.
Hebrew pasil is an image or statue, and resembles the Greek basileus, king, the banqueter on the
remains of a monster. Vacl is Etruscan for a holy feast. In Latin there is cena, dinner, which is the
Slavonic tsena, price, value. It was the reward for killing the monster.
Incense, Etruscan chim, was burnt in front of statues of ancestors, perhaps in an attempt to summon
the life-giving force, or even to encourage breathing. Vapour can be seen; Etruscan thum is smoke, and
Greek thumos can mean breath. Thuo, offer, burn, and thumos suggest the Russian dim, smoke.
Egyptian sentra, incense, may be a reversal of ar Thanasa, fire of the underground deity.
As we have seen, sanga, priest, with an obvious link with sanguis, blood, resembles sankh. Sanguis,
and anguis [snake], have a rare form of the accusative case, sanguen and anguen. Sankh and in-suggest
'force of life' or 'presence of life'.
Hiereus is Greek for a priest, and may be a link with the Hebrew yirah Yahweh, fear of the Lord. A
priest's work at a shrine was dangerous. The hiereus was the fearing one; the form of the word
resembles that of basileus and Tereus, the banqueting one and the observing one.
Hebrew kohen is a priest. In Egyptian, neter hen means 'servant of the divine'.
The Etruscan tanasar, mime, was a dancer who could bring to life. He is the one who holds out [tanas]
the fire [ar]. A tanasar is shown doing this in the Tomb of the Augurs at Tarquinia.
Latin sacerdos, priest, contains a reversal of the Latin for a king, rex. Rex, king, appears to be the
same word as raqs, dance. When the display at the ark disappeared, it was said that the god had left.
Gk. leipo = leave. Etruscan lupu = died.
Greek pothos, regret for what is missing, may have been apo, from, and oth, a sign. Pothos may have
meant the absence of the desired light and sound that indicated the presence of the god in the ark or
capacitor. Priests lamented his absence and prayed for his return.
Latin cadaver, corpse, is probably a compound of Semitic words, ka and the Hebrew dabhar, destroy,
indicating that the electrical presence in the body has been destroyed.
In Akkadian, Bit Mummi is the House of Knowledge. Knosos, or Gnosos, was the place of finding out,
Greek gnosis.
VOICE
Hebrew qol is voice. Greek logos, word, is a reversal of qol. Oracles were divine mouthpieces.
The sound that emerged from the capacitor was represented in Egyptian and in Hebrew by a sequence of
vowels, as in Yahweh. The smooth rise and fall, like a sine wave, can be experienced by whispering
[not singing] Yahweh, or the English vowel names EAIOU and back again. It seems possible that the
Latin Iov-, stem of the name of the god Jupiter, has the same origin.
One may speculate that the words 'sing', 'song', and German 'Gesang' are connected with ankh, sankh,
and sanc-. Singing would thus be a part of resurrection technique.
Imperium, authority, and dominus, lord, are two key words in Roman political language and thought.
Egyptian per and Lydian pir, house, combine with in-, to give 'house, power, ' as the meaning of
imperium, and power of the house [domus] for dominus.
Latin loquor, stem loq-, loc-, I speak, suggests Hebrew qol when reversed. Loc is a holy place. The
Latin fanum, shrine, is cognate with fari, to speak. An animal or bird that made a similar sound to
that which was heard at a shrine would be thought to be divine, or at any rate to be closely
associated with the divinity. The owl might be an example of this.
Apollo was associated with the wolf, as suggested by his title Lukeios. Greek lukos is wolf. The howl
of a dog or wolf may be represented by iaaooei.
The Russian for wolf is volk. Because the Russian letter L is hard in this word, volk sounds more like
the Latin voc-, stem of the word vox, voice.
The Russian bog means god, and may be the same root as vox. Hebrew has two interesting coincidences.
Dabhar is to speak; debhir is the Holy of Holies; debher is destruction.
Greek aeido, contracted to ado, is to make a sound, to sing. Latin aedes is a temple. Templum may be
from Greek temno, I cut [of the augur's movements with his lituus], transferring the sky pattern to
the ground for the foundations of a city].
Catena, Latin, chain, may be ka, and teneo, I hold. Experiments in magnetism were made on the island
of Samothrace, as the poet Lucretius records in his poem on the nature of the universe, De Rerum
Natura, VI: 1004. Plato, in his Ion, 533D, compares the relationship of poet to performer and audience
to a chain held by magnetic force. [Vide Crosthwaite, Ka, p. 79]
Latin verbum, a word, sounds like the first syllable of verbero, I strike.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 21
KINGS
There were various words for 'king' in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will glance at some of them
such as Hebrew melekh, Greek basileus, Latin rex, and at associated words such as Greek prytanis and
archon, Etruscan zilch, Latin princeps and flamen, and Norse godi.
Originally, all power centred on the king. The ideal aimed at by the ancient monarch was to combine
the functions and powers of prophet, priest and military leader. Later, the various duties and powers
were shared between political officers and priests. For example, augurs assumed responsibility for
discovering the will and intentions of the gods and advising the monarch about the probable course of
events.
Monarchs, officials and tyrants [in the Greek sense of the word tyrant] frequently assumed names,
titles and behaviour linking them with a particular deity, divine power or phenomenon. For example, a
viceroy of the king of Persia was called a satrap, the rhapis, rod, of Set. Taranos imitated thunder
as he drove about in his chariot.
There is often a link with an electrical term, for example, the fire from the sky, ar, which survives
in 'monarch', and in Greek arche, 'beginning' or 'rule'.
Kings are known to have danced, especially before an object looking like a staircase, ziggurat or step
pyramid, and David danced before the ark. Dancing was one of the king's duties. Etruscan and Latin
speakers, hearing the Semitic word raqs, dance, adopted the word in the form regs, spelt rex, king.
A place or thing was regarded by the Romans as sacer if it was associated with a divinity. Threshing
floors and places such as Es Sacra in Jerusalem, where the rock emerged from the ground, were holy,
and some of them became places where kings danced and plays were performed. At first the king would
dance to show that the deity was present, perhaps to impress by demonstrating that he was in touch
with the god or goddess. As time passed without further catastrophes such as earthquakes and major
electrical disturbances, the force ebbed away. The king's dance would then have another aim: to revive
the failing god.
One of the king's most important duties was to keep the god alive in his shrine. To build and maintain
a temple such as that of Hestia in Athens, or of Vesta in Rome, containing fire, tended by Vestal
Virgins or by a flamen, blower of the fire [flare is to blow], was a way of persuading a deity to make
the temple its permanent home and to continue to protect the city or persons concerned.
We have seen that Etruscan vacl, or vacil, means religious banquet. The v of vacl is interchangeable
with b [Grimm's Law], and the Etruscan letter c may stand not only for k but also for something like
the English s. A Greek basileus is a person who is basilens, feasting.
Mayani, in his book The Etruscans Begin to Speak, quotes from an Albanian ballad by G. Fishta. Heroes
defeat a monster, and feast on two fat stags in a celebratory banquet.
Any animal that had horns ran the risk of being sacrificed as a symbol of an object in the sky with
horns, regarded as a threat to the stability of the kosmos, celestial order.
The general resort to sympathetic magic, for example by the Egyptians, who sacrificed red cattle
because Typhon was red, since nothing else could be done, explains the willingness to spend huge sums
on sacrifices, games and drama festivals.
The Greek king, and the Etruscan or Roman noble, had to be prepared to sacrifice their own lives when
necessary. King Kodros of Athens did so, as did Marcus Curtius when, to appease divine anger, he rode
into a chasm that had opened in the Roman forum.
In Athens, and in other places in the ancient world, the king was replaced by officials. His duties
were shared among officers such as the Athenian archons, of whom there were nine. The first was known
as ho archon, the archon, the second as ho basileus, the king archon, in charge of public worship and
criminal trials, the third as ho polemarchos, the war archon. The others were hoi thesmothetae, the
lawmakers. A thesmos was an ordinance, enjoining the orderly and correct way of doing things,
reflecting order in the cosmos. All archons had something of the divine authority of the basileus, and
Homer refers to kings as diotrephees, of heavenly nurture, i. e. descent. They wore a crown,
stephanos, as a badge of office, as did any official or individual who was performing a sacrifice.
Greek arche means origin, beginning, and hence authority and rule. Ar appears in Etruscan, meaning
divine fire, lightning. Arseverse, an inscription in Etruscan, is a prayer to Sethlans, a god who
controlled lightning, to turn aside the fire. Latin severto means 'turn aside'. The Greek letter chi,
which appears in arche, is probably related to the Hebrew qa, which appears in qadhosh, 'producing qa'
and therefore holy. Greek stephanos is Set phanos, Set appearing, a manifestation of the god
encircling the head, and applied to an object such as a bowl of wine. In his Timaeus, Plato associates
the head with the divine fire.
Among the most important officials in Athens was the prytanis. Tanuo means 'I stretch out'. His title
is similar to that of the Etruscan tanasar.
The poet Pindar refers to Zeus as prytanis of lightnings and thunderbolts. The title means 'he who
holds out the fire', i. e. the hurler of lightning.
The prytanis was one of fifty committee members of the boule, council. It is probable that his duties
included tending the sacred fire of Hestia, the goddess of the hearth of the city. As a stoker, the
prytanis was the earthly copy of the god in the sky who waved the brand to make it blaze, then hurled
it. Such a deity was a theos. This word may mean 'he who puts the fire'. The Indo-European root detj,
which appears in Russian, means to put.
Another root found in Albanian is ve, to put. This is from an eastern, Caucasian, area, as are some
other words which go back to Etruscan. When combined with the Slavonic root zhar, fire, we have the
Latin serv-, servant. In this context, we may recall the slave boy, Servius Tullius, who became king.
The king was the one who preserved the fire. Servo means save, servio means serve. The two verbs,
superficially different, are basically the same. The king was the servant of the god, the preserver of
the holy fire, who added fuel to it, and waved a brand to make it burst into flame.
A flamen was a Roman priest, associated with the cult of an important person such as an emperor. Like
the prytanis, he had to blow the flame.
The genius of a Roman was a kind of guardian angel. Considering that the letter g is often a
transliteration of a Semitic q, it seems possible that the genius has much in common with the Egyptian
ka. The aim was that the genius, fire and life, of the head of state should not be extinguished.
Emperor worship and the building of temples to Egyptian monarchs and the royal ka reveal the political
importance of the priests.
Another of our words is the Latin princeps, chief, chieftain, or prince, equivalent to the prytanis as
referred to by the poet Pindar. The title is a combination of three words: pyr, in-, and capio. A
prince captured the power of the fire.
The Norse godi was a chieftain who had priestly powers, looked after a shrine and supervised the
worship of its deity.
ANOINTING
A Greek king was distinguished from another kind of monarch or sole ruler, the turannos, tyrant, by
the fact that he was the legitimate ruler. In Egypt kings were anointed by priests, and the Bible
contains many references to the anointing of priests and of kings. The practice survives today in
England. The king's right to the throne and sceptre [source and symbol of electrical divinity] had
support that was both human and divine.
An early reference to an anointing process is that of an Egyptian hieroglyphic text from Thebes,
quoted by Budge in From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Arkana edition p. 487ff. and 514. Horus
embraced the dead Osiris, transferring to the body his own ka. When a king embraced a statue of a god,
it is probable that the process was reversed, so that the king was hoping to receive divine life from
the statue. In such a case, presumably the priest would have attempted beforehand to charge the
statue, so that the sa-ankh could be transferred to the king.
According to Mayani, Etruscan levacs is an anointer [Albanian ljej to smear], revealing a possible
link with the Levites, who were entrusted with the management of the ark.
The Sumerian King List mentions the exalted tiara and throne of kingship, which first came down to
earth in Eridu. This celestial origin of the tiara is suggestive of the Greek stephanos, crown.
For a king to be able to claim divine ancestry was of great help in the matter of securing loyalty and
obedience. Furthermore, possible problems about the succession on a monarch's death could be
forestalled. The legitimacy of the heir's claim to the throne would be supported by belief in divine
parentage in the royal line. One technique employed for this end was incubation.
According to Sumerian myth there was a sacred marriage between Dumuzi and Inanna. This may be
connected with the story reported by Herodotus, that in Babylon, in the saharu, shrine, on top of the
ziggurat, a chosen priestess would spend the night with the king. Another example of a divine marriage
is to be found in Athens, where, at the festival of the Anthesteria, there was a sacred marriage of
Dionysus and the wife of the king archon.
One factor in the phenomenon of the Minotaur in Crete may have been an attempt to achieve divine
ancestry for the royal family at Knosos, but the killing of the Minotaur is more likely to be a
magical attempt to remove a cosmic threat.
Kings in Greece were very close to being heroes, in the specialised sense of the Greek hero. Heroes
were demi-gods, having a divine parent. They were a step below daimons, and were a link between human
and divine.
The word 'hero', from the Greek, resembles the Hebrew heron, conception. Infants might be hidden in
caves, to escape the wrath of a divine father, such as Saturn or Zeus. Kreousa hid her child Ion in a
cave to escape her father's anger. Hermes took the infant Ion to Delphi, where he grew up and was
eventually recognised by his mother. When Athene revealed the truth, Ion returned to Athens, where he
became the ancestor of the Ionians.
There were two sources for obtaining divine parentage: the sky, and the earth. The deity could take
the form of lightning, or that of the force perceived in caves and among split rocks.
The Etruscan trin, hero, may be tur, bull, Latin taurus, and Greek in-.
THE ETRUSCAN zilch
I have suggested in a previous work that the Etruscan zilch, or zilc, thought to be some kind of
magistrate, is the seat-occupier, sedilouchos. -ouchos, in Greek, means 'holding', or 'possessing'.
Sedile is Latin for a seat.
If the zilc is the seat-occupier, he resembles the king and the Roman senators. He is sometimes
qualified by an additional title, such as marunuch. The marunuch was probably an official who held a
marun, whatever that may be.
Reversed, the consonants of marun become nrm. Etruscan o and u are in many words interchangeable, so
it is possible that marun is norma, which means canon, rule, measuring rod.
I suggest that the marunuch was an official who carried a staff like that of the Roman senator.
Assaracus was a king of Phrygia, an area where Indo-European and Semitic speaking peoples met, and
therefore where confusion could easily arise over the direction of reading and writing, resulting in
reversals, of which we have already seen some likely examples. Assaracus was son of Tros, and
grandfather of Aeneas.
Latin currus is a chariot, a vehicle in which a god stood or sat as he travelled through the sky.
Arabic korsi is a chair. It is just possible that the name Assaracus, with its key letters src, is a
reversal of the Semitic root krs. Princes took names that suggested that they were of divine origin,
hoping thereby to increase their authority. Assaracus may have wished to be compared to, or related
to, a god riding on a chariot.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 22
SACRED BIRDS
In the ancient world, birds were studied because they were thought to reveal, by their behaviour, the
will, intentions and future activity of the gods. In modern terms, they gave warning of imminent
electrical storms and earthquakes. They are still observed today for this purpose in some parts of the
world.
The specialist bird watcher, the augur, was an adviser of the monarch and executive magistrates.
The Roman augur did not just stay at Rome and warn about likely future happenings elsewhere. Senior
magistrates and commanders could take the auspices, and sacred chickens were taken on campaigns. There
was an occasion when a Roman admiral was dissatisfied when told of the reluctance of the chickens to
eat their proffered food, a sign that the moment was unfavourable for the planned attack on the enemy
fleet. He said: If they will not eat, let them drink! and ordered them to be thrown overboard to
drown. This rash and impious act was regarded as the cause of the disastrous defeat that followed.
A broad distinction can be made between two kinds of bird behaviour studied by the augur:
1: The flight and direction of the eagle and similar birds of prey. The eagle's swoop onto a snake was
particularly significant because it symbolised what was thought to have happened in the sky in the
past and might happen again in the future.
2: The behaviour, generally on the ground, of such birds as the quail and the hoopoe. The hoopoe gave
warning when it detected changes in the atmosphere that heralded an electrical storm. It detected
earthquake light and piezoelectric charges on split rocks, in the ten or twelve hours before an
earthquake.
As in other branches of electrical theology, certain key words of the augur's technical vocabulary
cross the usual frontier between Semitic and Indo-European.
Hebrew oph, a collective noun meaning 'birds', is found in mopeth, omen. Bearing in mind that the
Hebrew preposition m or min is 'from', we may conclude that the Hebrew conception of an omen was
closely linked with the observation of birds.
Teiresias, the Greek prophet who lived in Thebes, and who figures so prominently in the Oedipus Rex of
Sophocles, had a hide, or bird observatory, oionoskopeion, outside the city. Thebes was a city with
oriental links through its founder Kadmos. The fact that he and his wife turned into snakes may be a
pointer to the meaning of his name, which suggests ka and the Greek demas, body.
The Latin name aquila for an eagle points to Ugro-Finnish origins. The Hungarian kvil is light;
kivilagit is to illuminate. Greek aigle is a ray. Greek aetos, eagle, resembles Hebrew ayit, bird of
prey. The Norse orn, eagle, lived on top of the world tree Yggdrasil. A squirrel, named Ratatosk,
carried messages between the eagle and the snake at the foot of the tree.
Orn resembles Greek ornis, bird, and there is even a resemblance to the Hebrew or, light. The Slavonic
orel is an eagle.
The Stymphalian birds, whose elimination was one of the labours of Hercules, may have had electrical
significance. Marshes, in which they lived, attracted lightning; Dionysus was Limnaios, 'of the
marshes'.
Sculptured eagles were used as lightning conductors on buildings, as at Delphi.
Hebrew azniya is a kind of eagle. Reversed, this becomes ayin za. Ayin is an eye. The falcon was the
lightning symbol of the Egyptians, and was associated with Horus.
The object appearing in Egyptian art and hieroglyphics and called the utchat, or udjat, was the eye of
Horus or of Ra.
The osprey, a bird of prey like the eagle, was in Latin sanqualis. As with the eagle, the Romans
watched its flight. The name may incorporate sankh; the radiation of the god was thought to give life.
The buteo, falcon, was watched for its flight. The ibis, which had great skill in killing snakes, was
associated with the god Thoth, who was equated with the Greek Hermes and was the Egyptian electrical
god par excellence.
Latin ardea is a heron. It was noted for the long crest on its head. Of the two elements of the word,
ar is clearly the fire. Dea is rather less obvious, but Hebrew dea, knowledge, is an attractive
possibility. Ardea was the name of an Etruscan city near Rome, capital of the Rutuli. The peacock was
sacred to Juno. Its Latin name was pavo. Perhaps the pattern on its tail, resembling eyes, associated
it with radiation. Its name resembles the Latin pavor, fear. The name of Juno's Greek counterpart, the
goddess Hera, suggests fear. In Egyptian, her, hra, mean 'face; upon'. Herit means 'fear'. It is
possible that Hera was originally thought of as the atmosphere surrounding the planet that the Romans
called Jupiter.
It was known that the peacock sheds its feathers from time to time. This may explain the hoplitodromos
at Athens, a race by hoplites, armed soldiers, wearing nothing but helmets.
The great significance of the goose may be due to the appearance of a heavenly body such as a comet,
with wing-like protuberances. Aphrodite is portrayed riding on a goose. The goose has a long neck, and
hisses like a snake. The owl was sacred to Athene. Its staring eyes suggested a pair of heavenly
bodies, and its cry could remind the hearer of the Egyptian and Hebrew sacred sound iaaooei.
The dove was the bird of Aphrodite, and represents the goddess in gentle form, in contrast to the
eagle.
The wry neck was used in the making of spells. It can produce a hiss like a snake, and owes its name
to the wide angle through which it can turn its head, as if it were the Janus of the bird world.
The cornix, crow, is mentioned by Horace as the prophet which, by its cries, foretells rain, cornix
augur aquae. Vergil also mentions it in the same context, Georgic I: 388. In Norse it is kraka. The
Greek korax is a crow or raven, and the word can mean something strange and unexpected.
Odin had two ravens, Hugin and Muninn. Huga is to meditate, muninn is to remember.
Princes and army officers wore feathers on their headgear to suggest that they would strike their
enemies as if with lightning. Minos is described as cristata casside pennis, with a crest of feathers
on his helmet. It was also a practice of the Philistines to wear feathered headgear. An Etruscan link
is likely.
If the eagle was the chief of the birds symbolising the lightning god in the sky, the hoopoe was the
chief of the birds that detected the electrical god in the earth. Its name, epops, beholder, indicates
that it could see the earthquake light. [Japanese and American scientists are now studying such
phenomena.] In the Birds of Aristophanes, a character says Quiet! The hoopoe is going to sing! A few
moments later, the hoopoe begins its song. Probably the hoopoe is on stage and it is the hoopoe's
crest that attracts attention.
The Greek horan, to see, has a perfect tense opopa, sometimes used instead of the usual form heoraka.
The hoopoe was the bird that saw, and there was a frieze of hoopoes at Knosos, the place of gnosis,
getting to know. We have already seen that the name of the hoopoe in The Birds is Tereus, a word that
comes from the Greek tereo, I observe.
The Hebrew for a hoopoe is dukhiphat. Duch is a Slavonic word meaning 'spirit'; phat is a Greek root
meaning revelation, either by sound or by sight.
The quail, ortyx, gives its name to an island: Ortygia is an old name for Delos.
In Umbria, a district of Italy, the word angla, plural anglar, was used of birds that were watched for
omens. There may be a link with the Latin angulus, corner. The point where a flight of birds would
suddenly turn, all together, would be of great significance to the augur. The Umbrian word verfale,
temple, may be from the Latin verb verto, turn. The place where birds turned could be thought to be
the right place for a temple. This may be the explanation of a passage in the Etruscan Tables of
Iguvium. Vide Mayani, The Etruscans Begin to Speak, p. 371. This is not the only possibility. A bird
was a messenger, Greek angelos, of the gods. We have already mentioned the Hebrew mopeth, omen, 'from
the birds'. It is likely that there is a similar explanation of the important Greek word sophia.
Sophia, usually translated as wisdom, means cleverness and natural aptitude, contrasted with mathesis,
which means learning by inquiry. The adjective sophos was applied not only to humans but also, as for
example by Xenophon, to animals. It is used to mean shrewd and wise in politics. Sophocles applies it
to oionothetae, augurs, in his King Oedipus, l. 484. The word can mean skilled in the sciences,
cunning, and abstruse.
In Wagner's opera Siegfried, the hero of that name has a conversation with a bird on his journey along
the Rhine.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 23
BOLTS
The Greeks knew of two different kinds of thunderbolt, and Zeus is shown with each type.
The ordinary one is shown in the hand of Zeus, with spikes projecting from either end. The design is
similar to the pattern of iron filings on a piece of card when a bar magnet is put underneath. This
makes it probable that it was copied from experiments with magnets and pieces of iron on Samothrace, a
Greek island where mysteries were celebrated, which were described by the Roman poet Lucretius in his
work on the nature of the universe, De Rerum Natura, VI: 1044ff.:
"It also happens that iron sometimes moves away from this stone, and is accustomed to flee and to
follow it by turns. I saw iron at Samothrace jumping, and fragments of iron moving inside the bronze
basin, when the Magnesian stone had been put underneath. The iron always seemed to wish to escape from
the stone."
The first kind of bolt was used by Zeus for short range work from a thundercloud hovering over an
impious person whose wicked actions called out for punishment. It was also thought that it was sent as
a general demonstration of power and as a reminder to mortals that they ought to behave properly.
Bolts were frequently seen in marshy districts. The Greek word kypeiros is of Semitic origin and is
the name of a marsh plant. It is possible that the Egyptian khu, soul, is present in the word.
Anything suggestive of brilliant flashes of light was likely to be associated with lightning. Ovid
speaks of the boar "fulmineo ore", with mouth [i. e. tusks] like a thunderbolt. [Fasti II: 192.] It is
possible that the Roman toga symbolised the clouds concealing the electrical deity who controls the
lightning. The Di Involuti advised Jupiter on when to hurl the thunderbolt. Their name suggests that
they were wrapped in cloud.
The Egyptian ames, sceptre, is represented in a hieroglyph as almond shaped. This is the second type
of thunderbolt.
Greek amygdale, almond, may be a compound of ames, Gad [a name of Baal], and Al, or El, 'the sceptre
of Baal, the god above'. Zeus can be seen holding a thunderbolt shaped like an almond, possibly a
plasmoid. This would be the high -powered long range weapon. There may be a link between this kind of
bolt and the planet Venus.
AMMISADUQA
The Ninsianna tablets give information about the apparent movements of the planet Venus. A recent
study of them by Michael Reade, "The Ninsianna Tablets, a preliminary reconstruction", appears in
Chronology and Catastrophism Review 1993 Volume XV.
If we assume that ames, rod or sceptre, is the first part of the name Ammisaduqa, an explanation of
the rest of the name becomes easier. Duq, or dug, suggests the Greek dokein, to appear. Could the name
mean 'the appearance of the sceptre'?
That the planet Venus should be referred to as a sceptre may seem strange, until we recall that Venus
is often referred to as the 'hairy star'. Jubar stella, the star with a fiery mane, is the morning and
evening star, i. e. the planet Venus.
Observations of Venus as they are recorded in the tablets are concerned with the disappearance and
appearance of the planet in its journey round the sun, as observed from the earth. Fear that it would
not appear on time was one of the causes of the close study of the planet by so many civilisations. It
was a good sign if it appeared punctually.
It may be significant that the Greek dokein, to appear, is the word used to mean 'it seems good', or
'it was decided'. For example, it was a good sign when the priest succeeded in eliciting a spark or
sound from a capacitor [ark].
It is an interesting coincidence that the reversal of dug resembles the German gut, good.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 24
THE NORTH
In ancient European literature, the north is associated with phenomena that may be the originals of
what has been photographed recently from space.
The phenomena described fall into two classes. The first is of those which were perceived and
experienced as threats, the timing of whose arrival was calculated by seers who expected from past
experience that a threatening object would reappear in the sky, probably the northern sky. Isaiah and
Jeremiah are examples of such prophets. The second class is of phenomena which were more or less
static and permanent, such as the poros or passage of Alkman, and the column or pillar of Plato's
Republic.
The Hebrew tsaphon, north, is the same root as tsapha, to watch. There are references in the Old
Testament to prophets watching the skies, ready to give warning of approaching disaster.
Egyptian meht means north. It is shown as a cross and a lotus flower. The Greek lotos is suggestive of
el oth, god above, and sign. We have seen that in the Sanskrit padma, lotus, we may have pa, light,
and demas, body. Demas is used in Greek of a living body, and may have some connection with Latin
domus, house, which in its turn is related to the root thom, to speak.
Egyptian meh is a tiara, like the Greek crown, stephanos, Set visible.
The Greeks used for the north the terms arktos, a bear, and Boreas. Boreas was used especially of the
north wind, and is the Kassite god Buriash. Esh, ash, is a Semitic root meaning fire. The names Boreas
and Buriash lead one to suspect that whatever was seen in the northern sky was thought of as the fire
of Bor. One may speculate and suggest a link between Bor and the Latin verto, turn, alternative
spelling vorto. The poli, heavens or poles, may have been thought of as a fire stick, with fire
produced as Bor caused the axis of the heavens to turn. This is a variant of the widespread myths of
the mill, with which a deity such as Saturn ground the salt that was generally believed to have
reached the earth from the sky. Vide A. de Grazia, The Lately Tortured Earth, p. 139f., Metron
Publications, Princeton, 1983.
Apollo was said to have come from the land of the Hyperboreans, a people whose name includes the word
hyper, meaning beyond, or above. A connection with fire and light begins to emerge when we remember
that the first fruits of the Hyperboreans were sent by relay, packed in straw, to the shrine of Apollo
at Prasiae, and then taken by the Athenians to Delos, the island that was sacred to him as his
birthplace.
Whatever it was that constituted the first fruits of the Hyperboreans, the people who lived beyond, or
above, Boreas, there is an interesting coincidence in the fact that the key letters of Prasiae, prs,
if reversed, give the consonants of the Hebrew tsaraph, burn.
The Greek poet Pindar writes: "But neither in ships nor on foot will you find the marvellous road to
the agon of the Hyperboreans". [Pythian X: 29] An agon is a contest, or a place, possibly in the sky,
where contests may occur.
When the Roman augur took up his lituus, and made movements with it in the air and down on the ground,
he was transferring to the ground the pattern that he claimed to see in the sky, to mark the outline
plan of a projected temple. A temple would be the main building round which the houses of the new city
would be built.
The Latin word urbs, city, may easily be an accident created by reading what is now the Slavonic word
sobor the wrong way round. In modern Russian, sobor is a cathedral, or a synod. The Slavonic
preposition 's' [written 'c' in Russian] means 'down from', or 'with'. Sobor, or sbor, could mean
'down from Bor'.
The Arabic shemal, north, resembles the Hebrew sham, there, which occurs in shammayim, the 'there-
waters', i. e. heaven.
Hebrew tav, cross, may conceivably be related to Latin vates, stem vat-, prophet or seer.
Latin arbor, tree, may be the fire, ar, of Bor, who is seen above, el, in the northern sky. His name
may even be the poros referred to by Alkman. Arbor may have been Yggdrasil, the world tree. Yggd,
frightful, is a name of Odin. Ross is a German word for horse, and might be translated 'steed'. Ill,
or Il, is light. Hungarian kivilagit means to illuminate. The Illyrians may even have been the people
of the great light, since the root ur means great. Perhaps Yggdrasil is the steed [means of travel],
of the light of the frightener, or the light of the frightener's steed. The name of the actual horse
of Odin was Sleipnir.
In Greek myth, the father of Eros, love, was Poros, the passage to the sky. This suggests a link with
Dionysus and Hermes. Hermes was the Greek equivalent of Thoth, and Dionysus was one of the deities who
controlled the thunderbolt. The Greeks were aware of the connection between a deity of the thunderbolt
and sexual passion.
Tall trees such as the pine [Greek elate], the sycamore and the cypress may be associated with the
poros. Greek hule means wood [as a material]. If reversed, hule becomes eluh, the final h being
pronounced more like ch, as in the Scottish word loch.
Egyptian ucha is a pillar. Hule, wood, is probably the tree of El, the divine pillar.
The Latin insula, island, may be derived from in-, power or presence, and sul, a Celtic word and
divine name, meaning column. A city may have been regarded as an island, copying what the augur
claimed to see in the sky. Egyptian texts refer to the island of fire, where Horus sits on the throne
of his father Osiris. Osiris had an iron throne.
Words connected with the north are rich in reversals. Subura was a densely populated area of Rome near
the forum, and is the Etruscan spur and Slavonic sobor, assembly. Reversed, these give the Latin for a
city, urbs. Polis, Greek for city, may be a reversal of El and op-, the face of El. El opope would
mean 'El has seen' or perhaps 'El has looked'. Reversed, it could be the Latin word populus, people,
but this is becoming very speculative.
The Latin word for the augur's curved rod, the lituus, is a reversal of the Latin utilis, useful. It
was the augur's most useful, indeed essential, tool.
The Greek halme, brine, is a reversal of Hebrew melach, salt. In Hebrew, yam is sea. Yam melach is the
Dead Sea. Hebrew min, m, means 'from'. Melach, salt, may indicate that the Hebrews shared the general
view held by the ancients that salt came from above. Latin sal, Greek hales or hals, could be 'from
El'.
One may compare with this the Greek and Latin mel, honey, which Vergil describes as caelestia, of
heavenly origin [like manna].
A king, Hebrew melekh, has his powers from above. The ekh part of melekh may be more familiar in the
form of the Greek echo, I have. A Greek prince is described by Homer as skeptouchos, he who holds the
sceptre. Could a king, melekh, be 'he who has the honey'? The evidence in Greek myth for this
interpretation is that the infant Zeus was fed by bees when hidden in a cave in Crete.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 25
RESURRECTION TECHNIQUES
The techniques for resurrection fall into two main groups, that of collecting or summoning the
electrical deity, and that of applying the electrical force. Sympathetic magic was used, and is the
explanation of some of the actions.
Much of the relevant material has been mentioned already, but in this chapter it may fit into a new
pattern, and there are a few new details.
The deity could be collected by charging a chest from the atmosphere. The chest or ark was constructed
on the principle of the Leyden jar. Obviously the quickest and most dangerous charging would be at the
time of an electrical storm. Egyptian art shows the god Osiris rising from a chest, holding an ankh in
each hand, and a relief from Dendera shows technicians carrying a length of what appears to be
striated cable, with pictures of snakes at the end to show that the god is present.
A more symbolic method was that of enclosing a statue of Osiris in a length of hollow tree trunk, and
raising the trunk until it was upright. I stand, sto, is closely related to zo, I live.
The Egyptian practice of embalming must be included among techniques aimed at assisting the soul to
continue to exist after death in a recognisable form.
In Egypt, Osiris was the god on top of the staircase. Pyramids were fire-collectors; the aim was that
a pharaoh buried in a pyramid should receive the full force of the electrical god.
Burial in a tholos tomb or in a shaft grave at Mycenae would have the aim of bringing the dead person
into contact with the deity in the earth, just as the burning of a corpse would have the aim of aiding
the soul in its flight to the region of heavenly fire.
Eating the bull, drinking the blood of goats, and so on, were more a matter of obtaining superhuman
strength than of obtaining immortality, but are worth mentioning because they are all part of the
general effort to cross the limen, threshold, between our world and that of the spirits of the dead
and of the gods.
Ghosts recovered the strength to speak by drinking blood. Sanguis, blood, is basically the same as
sanga and sankh. Greek haima, blood, is the same as Hebrew chaim, life.
The dancing of the Arval brothers at Rome was associated with the renewal of life in the fields in the
spring. It was presumably aimed at rousing the chthonic deities Cerus and Ceres, the deities of crops
and vegetation.
The dance of the Salii, the leaping priests of the Romans, was accompanied by a hymn. It contains the
words Limen sali! Sta! Berber! Vile vale! Staile! Itrile! Vide Mayani, The Etruscans Begin to Speak,
p. 316.
Anyone who has kept, say, a cat as a pet will know that the animal can communicate with its owner. If
it is hungry, it will run purposefully and repeatedly to the place where its food is put down and look
up, inviting one to imitate it and put down a plate of food. The Salian priests may have been doing
just this kind of thing in their dance. The aim would be to persuade the Manes to appear and give
advice and help. To do this the Manes would have to cross the limen, threshold. The Salii were showing
the dead what they wanted them to do by leaping over an invisible threshold, stopping and looking
backwards, returning and repeating the movements. The basic idea behind the verb salio, leap, is that
of crossing. Hebrew shal is to transgress. It is noteworthy that representations of priestly dancers
show them with the head turned, looking backwards.
The painting of a tanasar in the Tomb of the Augurs at Tarquinia shows him at work. In front of him is
a bird, perhaps symbolising a soul. His left palm is on top of his head, his right hand is stretched
out forwards. To understand this picture we have to examine the word tanasar.
One of the difficulties in understanding Etruscan is that words are often run into one another, and it
is hard to know how to separate them. In the case of the tanasar, it is two words, tanas, and ar. Ar
we know is the divine fire that descends from the sky and strikes the ara, altar, and is also found in
the head, as described by Plato in the Timaeus. We are left with the word tanas.
In Etruscan, words are found ending in the letters -ac, for example frontac, thunderer; cf. Greek
bronte, thunder. It is probable that we should regard the -ac as being -as; the letter c in Etruscan
is sometimes to be pronounced as a k, sometimes as an s.
The Lydian kupassis is a kind of shoe. Etruscan capesar is a shoemaker. Hungarian cipö is a shoe,
cipész is a shoemaker.
In Hungarian, the endings -as, -asz, and -esz indicate a performer of an action. Portas is a
doorkeeper. Munka is work, munkas is a workman. I suggest that we see this phenomenon in the Etruscan
tanas.
Greek tanuo means stretch out. The tanasar is he who holds out the ar, sacred electrical fire, as he
is shown doing in the picture from Tarquinia.
There remains the question of why he holds the other hand on his head.
The head was recognised as the electrical headquarters of the human body, as shown by the words
kephale, katec and caput. The Etruscan katec is that which covers the ka, and the Latin caput is a
well or source of ka, as was Pytho, as Delphi used to be called. The tanasar appears to be
transferring electrical power from his head through his left hand so that he can direct it at the
object with his right hand. The action is reminiscent of that of the Egyptian god Amen-Re as he holds
out the ankh, symbol of life, to Psammetichus III. [From the temple of Osiris at Karnak] Another
example of the invisible force being directed at a person or object is that of Kheri-heb, who is shown
holding his staff to the head of a statue. Vide Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 33,
Arkana edition.
In the Tables of Iguvium, the Osco-Umbrian word purdouiti occurs, meaning to sacrifice. Mayani
suggests that this is the Albanian pertetoj, to dedicate, to consecrate. Latin porrigere is to stretch
out, to offer. This makes good sense with pyr, fire.
It is tempting to speculate that the Greek word anthrop-, man, may originally have been santhrop-. A
number of Greek words lost an initial s. Santhrop-could then have been a reversal of prytanis, the
official who held out the fire. Humans were distinguished by their ability to imitate and even to
manipulate the electrical god. In general, jerky movements were taken as a sign of life. The angular
poses seen in Egyptian hieroglyphics for dancing support this idea; furthermore an electrical shock
can cause convulsive movements.
Libations were a method of rousing the dead. Greek spendo and Hittite spanza, libation, both show that
radiation 'down from the five' was directed onto the grave. The Egyptian hieroglyph tebh is a vase
containing an udjat, an eye as a symbol of radiation. Tebh means an offering, and is evidence that
radiation was what the king directed onto the ground in the relief from Malatya. It is, moreover,
noteworthy that when reversed, the word tebh resembles the Hebrew beith, house, and the Greek for a
tripod cauldron, lebet-, which is the dwelling place of El. It is possible that the significance of
mirrors, of which the Etruscans have left us so many, may be that a mirror gives the holder not only a
reflection of his or her face, but also a degree of control over the direction of the divine
radiation.
The Egyptian un hra is a mirror. Hra means 'upon', or 'face'. Un, Uni are forms of the name of Juno.
Singing was one of the methods of raising the ka, by sympathetic magic. 'Sing' may be related to Latin
sancio and to sankh.
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 26
REVERSALS
The following words may be reversals caused by the meeting of peoples with different directions of
writing, as could easily occur between Hebrew, Etruscan, Greek and Latin, with Etruscan territory well
placed in Asia Minor and elsewhere to be the meeting place.
This list is meant to be merely provisional and suggestive. No claim of certainty is made.
Abbreviations:
Akk., Akkadian
Ar., Arabic
Eg., Egyptian
Etr., Etruscan
Ger., German
Gk., Greek
Heb., Hebrew
Lat., Latin
Slav., Slavonic
akra point, peak, Gk.; arca, chest, Lat.
ames sceptre, Eg.; sema, sign, Gk.
Anath Athene
Anu Rav Great Anu; Varuna
ar Ra
ardeo burn, Lat.; drao, do, Gk.
aresko please, Gk.; kasher, pleasing, right, Heb.
argos shining, Gk.; gora, mountain, Slav.
ari lion, Heb.; ira, anger, Lat.
aspid- shield, Gk.; dipas, cup, Mycenean Gk.
Assaracus currus, chariot, Lat.
balta axe, Arabic; dolabra, Lat.
baradh hailstones, Heb.; thorubos, noise, Gk.
beth house, Heb.; Thebes.
bosheth shame, idol, Baal, Heb.; Teshub
cepen priest, Etr.; Nephesh, spirit, Heb.
charath engrave, Heb.; trachys, rough, Gk.
cherebh hand, arm, Heb.; bracchium, arm, Lat.
chets stechen, prick, Ger.
chlamud- cloak of a Greek general; dhu melekh, hidden king. Gaelic dhu = dark, hidden, as in skean
dhu, hidden dagger. Cf. sakin, knife, Heb.
clava club, Lat.; pilakku, Akk.; pelekus, axe, Gk.
cortina cauldron, power of the horns, Lat.; Tarquin
cras tomorrow, Lat.; shark, east, Ar.
Culsu an Etruscan god; sulcus, furrow, Lat.; -cello, strike, Lat.
dabhar speak, Heb.; rabid-, raving, Lat.
dam blood, Heb.; madere, to be wet, Lat.
dolabra axe, Lat.; vladetj, to be powerful, Slav.
Dolopes name of a people in Thessaly; peladha, iron, Heb.
edher garment, splendour, Heb.; rete, net, Lat.
falando sky, Etr.; tlabrys, axe, Gk.; dolabra, Lat.
Farsi Persian; saraph, burn a corpse, Heb.
garbh west, Ar.; vrag, enemy, Slav.
gibor leader, hero, Heb.; robigo, redness, Lat.
hebhel idol, nothingness, Heb.; levis, light, Latin
hemisus half, Gk.; ims, Etr.; semi, Lat.
Hermes Mercurius
herit fear, Eg.; tru, Etr.
hule wood, Gk.; el, Heb.; ucha, Eg., divine pillar.
hulsna libation, Etr.; schlucken, drink, Ger.
iacche a cry to Bacchus; chai, alive, Heb.
irp wine, Eg.; vere, wine, Etr.
keilaph hoe, axe, Heb.; pelekus, sacrificial axe, Gk.
keneset church, Heb.; sancio, bring to life, Lat.
kerata horns, Gk.; tark, bull, Etr.
labrys axe, Gk.; rabh al, great Al
lahat flame, Heb.; thallo, sprout, flourish, Gk.
limen harbour, Gk.; namal, harbour, Heb.
lituus augur's rod; utilis, useful, Lat.
logos word, Gk.; qol, Heb.; golos, voice, Slav.
losk gleam, Etr.; luscus, one-eyed, Lat.; kashil, hoe, axe, Heb.
Luz stulos, pillar, Gk.
mare sea, Lat.; ram, high, Heb.
marun staff, Etr.; norma, staff, measuring rod, Lat.
mitra tiara, Gk.; ar, fire; time, honour, Gk.
mors death, Lat. [stem mort-]; tromos, fear, Gk.
naga snake, Sanskrit; agan, too much [hubris?], Gk.
necht to be strong [picture of a man holding a stick; Budge, Egyptian Language p. 45]; techne skill,
Gk.
nekros corpse, Gk.; or, light, kenos, empty
nemeton grove, Celtic; temenos, shrine, Gk.
nemmet slaughter block, Eg.; temno, cut, Gk.
neter divine, Eg.; antron, cave, Gk., Retenu, Eg.
pach metal plate, snare, danger, Heb.; in the plural, pachim, lightning; hap, to hide, Eg.
patagos sound of striking, Gk.; kitab, writing, Ar.
pelekus axe, Gr.; Peleg, Heb.; kolpe, a blow, Gk.
pogon beard, Gk.; naghaph, smite, Heb.; pogonias aster is a bearded star, i. e. comet, Gk.
Prasiae saraph, to burn, Heb.
prezu tornado, Etr,; stirp-, tree trunk, Lat.
qal swift, Heb.; alacer, swift, Lat.
raqs dance, Ar.; sacer, sacred, Lat.
rex king, Lat.; sacer
rupes rock, crag, Lat.[ stem rup-]; pyr, fire, Gk.
Rutuli a Latin tribe; tur, bull, Etr.
sakin knife, Heb.; nachush, bronze, Heb.
schlafen sleep, Ger.; uples, sleep, Etr.
sentra incense, Eg.; ar Thanasa, fire of Thanasa
shemal north, Ar.; El ames, El's sceptre
siu god, Hittite; vis, force, Gk. and Lat.
subura assembly; urbs, city, Lat.
taphar sew together, Heb.; rhapto, sew, Gk.
thans life, Etr.; senatus, Lat.; Tanz, dance, Ger.
thumos high spirits, Gk.; Muth, spirit, courage, Ger.
thura door, Gk.; ar uth, fire road, Etr. vates life, Lat.; ghiv, alive, Sanskrit
A FIRE NOT BLOWN...
Investigations of Sacral Electrical Roots in Ancient Languages of the Mediterranean Region
by Hugh Crosthwaite
Chapter 27
GLOSSARY
It may be useful for the general reader to have a reminder of some features of Latin, Greek and
Semitic languages.
Final s may be a nominative singular ending in Latin and Greek. For our purpose the important part of,
say, logos is simply log-, or even lg.
Greek u can be transliterated as either u or y. P and f, b and v, may be interchanged [vide Grimm's
Law]. Latin and Greek verbs often appear ending in o, e. g. audio, I hear, but an infinitive may be
quoted, ending in -re, or -ein, e. g. audire, to hear, airein, to raise. In Hebrew, the endings -im
and -oth indicate the plural, e. g. othoth, signs, mayim, waters. The letter c is pronounced in
English sometimes like a k, sometimes like an s. This occurs also in Etruscan. The Greek letter kappa
is sometimes transliterated as k, sometimes as c.
The Slavonic hard L sounds more like a w. The Greek ending -eus, as in basileus, king, has a nasalised
sound approaching n, as in modern Polish. The Latin present participle ends in -ens, e. g. regens,
ruling, stem regent-, and in the case of a typical Greek verb, luo, I release, it is luon, stem luont-
, so that the name of the Greek king Tereus can mean 'observing', or 'the observing one'. Zenos is a
form of the genitive singular, meaning 'of Zeus'. The Semitic q is pronounced farther back than the
English k. It was sometimes replaced by g in Latin and Greek, e. g. Hebrew qol, voice, Greek logos,
word. Z can be ts, ds, sd or st, as in Hebrew zayin, the letter z, a weapon, Set's eye [ayin = eye].
Onomatopoeia played a part. The rise and fall of the sound iaaooei imitates the sound made by the
wind, and perhaps by an ark. The sound of the name Set, and of the Egyptian tcham, sceptre, suggests a
spark.
There are four or five words or roots that stand out for frequency of occurrence and as the keys to
many important words.
Ar:
Etruscan for electrical fire, as in arseverse, 'turn aside the fire', a prayer to Sethlans which one
might describe as a lightening conductor. Cf. arca, chest; har, mountain [where the fire often
appeared]; haram, pyramid [fire collector]. Sanskrit aras means 'swift'.
Ka:
Egyptian for the double. Cf. Hebrew qadhosh, holy; Greek kairos, success in raising the ka; Latin
caput, head, source of ka.
Set:
the Greek Typhon. Cf. Greek stephanos, crown, Set appearing; Etruscan zichne, Set's footprints, marks,
e. g. writing.
El, Al:
Semitic for 'above', implying 'the god above'. Cf. elektron, amber, el ek thronou, god out of the
seat.
Is, in-,
force or presence, is a Greek word that could be used in periphrasis when talking about a person, just
like kara, 'head'. "Greetings, Oedipus!" might be expressed as "Greetings, head of Oedipus!" Latin
cortina, cauldron, is 'power of the horns', in-, and kerata, horns. Cauldrons could be decorated with
bulls' heads, and the one at Delos mooed, "... mugire adytis cortina reclusis," Aeneid III: 92.
In Hebrew, a short unstressed vowel, a shewa, is often sounded between two consonants for ease of
pronunciation. The Greek stephanos, crown, is an example. It starts life as setephanos, Set revealing,
or Set appearing, and ends up as stephanos. Metathesis, as in the Greek kratos or kartos, power, can
be explained in this way.
GLOSSARY LIST
almond
Juergens and De Grazia have drawn attention to the resemblance of a thunderbolt in the hand of Zeus to
a plasmoid. Greek amygdale, almond, may be Egyptian ames, sceptre; the hieroglyph is of an almond-
shaped object. Gad is the name of Baal, the force above. The prophet Jeremiah, I: 11, writes that he
saw the rod of an almond tree. This is followed two verses later by his reference to a seething pot in
the sky. The Greek for an emerald, smaragdos, suggests the sign, sema, of the fire, ar, of Gad. There
was a temple in Tyre which was reported to have a column made of emerald. Sema, Greek for a sign, is
probably the Hebrew shem, name. Sema is a reversal of the Egyptian ames, sceptre.
Apollo
At his temple at Delphi, the motto meden agan means 'nothing to excess'. Agan, 'too much', is a
reversal of the Sanskrit naga, snake. The serpent in the sky went too high; the prophet Isaiah, XIV,
rejoiced that it was brought low. Agenor, king of Phoenicia and father of Kadmos [who turned into a
snake], has a name composed of agan, the snake, and or, a Phoenician word meaning 'light', or 'skin'.
arrow
In the Paradiso of Dante, God is said to shoot arrows to instil varied natures and gifts in humans. In
Plato's Timaeus, 42e, gods, probably planets and stars, and not the demiurge, create human bodies and
faculties.
ball game
In ancient China, 3rd. to 4th. century B. C., a ball game, Tsuchin, was played. It survives in similar
form in Japan, where it is performed ceremonially by priests. At the start of the game the ball is
held between two horns.
bees
The eating of honey may have been thought to give divine power; mead produces intoxication. The Cretan
name of Phaeton is Adumnos. Greek hedus means sweet, menos is strength and high spirits. The buzzing
of bees may have been compared to the sounds on a rocky mountain ridge warning that a lightning strike
was imminent. Herodotus reports in Book V that the farther north one travelled, the more bees there
were.
belly
The Greek gaster suggests ka, Set and ar. The word for treasure, gaza, applied by Vergil in Aeneid I:
119 to the treasure lost in the shipwreck off Carthage, may be related. The most important treasures
were the apparatus used for capturing and controlling the electrical god. This would be especially the
case on the occasion of the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, and perhaps that of the Trojans from
Troy. De Grazia, in God's Fire: Moses and the Management of the Exodus, gives a full account of the
apparatus and technique involved.
bow
The old spelling of the Latin arcus, bow, is arquus, fire of qu, or ka. Ariadne's bow or snake recalls
Artemis, Apollo and the arrows that symbolise radiation, plague and sudden death from an electrical
deity.
Ceres
An earth goddess responsible for crops. Her male equivalent, Cerus, is named in an inscription on an
Etruscan pot: cerus in ceri pokolom. Poculum is Latin for a cup [for libation?]; pokol is Hungarian
for hell, the underworld, home of departed spirits. Cerritus means out of one's mind, as does
larvatus, which suggests larva, a word meaning ghost, and mask. The Etruscan mime, the tanasar, was an
actor who might have worn a mask.
cobra
This word is said to have come via Portuguese from Latin coluber, snake. The hard L and the b-v link
suggest that it may be the Albanian word kove, bucket. The Hebrew kobha, bucket, may be a Philistine
word, the Philistines being associated with Illyria. Etruscan katek, head, and Albanian katoc, suggest
ka and Latin tego, cover, protect. The skull was the cover for the ka, the fire in the head.
djed pillar
This columnar structure, seen frequently in Egyptian reliefs, has been interpreted as the backbone of
Osiris, as a symbol of stability. Standing upright was closely connected with life. There is a relief
on the wall of the temple of Hathor at Dendera. It shows two attendants carrying what appears to be
striated cable; nearby a djed pillar leans like the tower of Pisa. The snakes shown at the cable ends
in what look like twentieth century thermionic valves indicate the presence of the electrical god, not
stone slabs; stone slabs could not possibly be lifted or carried in the manner shown. The god is to be
used to make the djed pillar stand upright.
Etruscans
They were Rasna. Lydian words could have had an initial t which disappeared, as with tlabrys, axe.
Thus Rasna could be Trasna, Tiras, Tursha, and Trusci. They were Tursha to the Egyptians; the name
Tiras occurs in Genesis X: 2.
eye
Greek ophthalmos. Ophis is a snake. Thallo = sprout, flower. Greek kanthos, corner of the eye, is ka
and anthos, a flower. The Greek auge is ray of light; German Auge is an eye. Greek baskaino is to
direct the evil eye at someone, to fascinate and bewitch. The word appears to be a compound of fa, or
ba, light, and the Semitic sakin, knife. In Latin, eye is lumen, oculus, acies. Hebrew ayin is an eye;
cf. Greek ainos, terrible.
fear
Latin pavor = fear; pavo is a peacock, sacred to Juno. Hera may be atmosphere or radiance around Zeus.
The bird's sensational display of plumage, with a pattern of what look like eyes, may have suggested a
celestial phenomenon.
flesh
Greek kreas. It may be 'flow of ka', implying creation, Latin creo or cereo. Another Greek word for
flesh is sarx, sark-. Latin caro, carn-, means flesh.
fool
In old Norse, skir means wise, or innocent. It may appear in the name of the Cumbrian village of
Skirwith. The holy fool was an important figure in Russia, and appears in the opera Boris Godunov. In
Hebrew, Kesil means fool, impious, and Orion. Kesil and Khima are mentioned together in the book of
Amos. Khima is equated with Saturn. In the Iliad, XXI: 410, the war god Ares is a fool; Athene hits
him on the neck with a rock. In line 401 it appears that the aegis of Athene is more powerful than the
thunderbolt of Zeus. Kesil, a fool, impious, means in the plural the constellation of Orion. There is
a parallel with Parsifal, the young innocent, who in Wagner's opera starts as a hunter. He shoots a
swan, an act which a Greek might possibly have interpreted as hostility towards Aphrodite, who is
associated with birds. Orion was a great hunter, whose dog was Sirius, the dog star. The Greek for
'fool' is moros. It is possible that the word is Semitic m, from, and or, light. Or-is also Greek for
a mountain. We have seen that kings, for example Minos, made a practice of visiting shrines on
mountain tops. It may be that exposure to electrical storms and priestly experiments on altars could
result in mental disturbances such as epilepsy, the sacred disease [electrical in origin], and amnesia
such as afflicted the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey.
glory
Latin gloria. Sumerian gal = great; Hebrew or = light. Greek or-is a mountain, megal-means 'great'.
Great light?
hearth
Greek eschara. Cf. Hebrew esh, fire, and Greek chara, grace and beauty. The eschara was a sunken
hearth.
honey
Greek meli, Latin mel. It was of celestial origin; Vergil refers to caelestia mella, honey from the
sky. The infant Zeus was attended by bees. Hebrew melekh is a king. Was a king fed on honey? Vergil
writes in Georgic IV that bees come from the body of a dead ox. There is a possible link here with the
head and horns of a comet at a time such as that of the Exodus and the fimbulvetr, when manna
descended as food for survivors. In Persia it was called 'honey rain'. When Zeus put bonds round
Kronos, Kronos was drunk with honey.
Isis
A Greek inscription on the island of Andros reads: "I am Isis.... I prescribe the course of the sun
and moon."
lamp
Greek lampo = shine. Latin lambo = lick. Snakes gave divine help to the sick by licking wounds etc.
The snake's tongue symbolised a lightning stroke.
lap of the gods
The Homeric phrase "tauta theon en gounesi keitai", these things lie in the lap of the gods, may refer
to the apparent tendency of objects in the sky to reproduce or to eject material, afflicting the earth
with, for example, stone showers, radiation, mutations and sudden death. The usual explanation is that
it refers to the holding of the thread of life, or wool, for Atropos to cut with the 'abhorred
shears'. But death of a person was not the only thing that depended on the gods. Much depended in the
mind of the ancients on the arrival or departure, presence or absence, of objects in the sky,
especially new arrivals. Much depended, too, on the power of heroes who had divine ancestry, on divine
inspiration and on radiation.
libation
As well as the Malatya relief which shows a god holding his thunderbolt over the cup at a libation
ceremony, there is a reference to libation in the Book of the Dead which is amenable to an electrical
interpretation: Thoth dwells within his hidden places and performs the ceremonies of libation unto the
god who reckoneth millions of years, and he maketh a way through the firmament." [Budge's translation,
p. 392]
magh
Hebrew for a Persian priest. Cf. Latin magnus, great. The Sibyl became maior videri, bigger in
appearance, as the god Apollo inspired her.
manna
Egyptian bener, sweet, may be related to the Latin Venus, Vener-.
mouse
Greek mus, sminthos. Smintheus was one of the epithets of Apollo. Augurs watched birds, mice and
snakes. 'Mystery' was mouse-watching. Smintheus may contain the Greek word sema, sign. 'Sign of the
god's presence'?
net
Greek diktys, Latin rete. The Great Net is called Anqet, The Clincher; Budge, Book of the Dead, p.
515, Arkana. Augurs wore a net-like garment. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete p. 337, notes the net-like
treatment of the lion's mane on some Cretan shields, with possible eastern connections. Cf. the Roman
retiarius, who had a net and a trident, matched with a swordsman in the gladiatorial games. There is a
possible link with Perseus, the swordsman like Ares or Mars, and Medusa, the Powerful One, who may
represent Aphrodite.
Odin
One of his epithets was 'the long-bearded one'. His beard may have been compared to the tail of a
comet.
pelor
Greek, a monster. Pel = cave; Hebrew or = light.
popoi
A Dryopian word meaning 'gods'. Used by Cassandra in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, when about to
prophesy.
rite
Latin ritus. Etruscan ri = fresh. A rite is a renewal, as at the Babylonian festival of Akitu, New
Year.
sea
Latin mare. Hebrew ram, high, becomes mar when reversed. Okeanos, Uginna, was originally up in the
sky, the 'there-waters'. Hebrew sham = there; mayim = waters.
study
Set audire, Latin, means 'to hear Set'. Studium is zeal. Concentration would be needed to hear faint
electrical sounds, such as sparks, from the ark, hence the priest's call for silence. thigh The
constellation of the Great Bear was named by the Egyptians 'The Thigh'. It was described as being in
the northern heaven in the Great Lake. It was also named Mesekhti, and was described as having a
bull's head. The Book of the Dead [Tr. Budge, Arkana p. 409] refers to the water flood which is over
the thigh of the goddess Nut at the staircase of the god Sebaku. The bull is described as enveloped in
turquoise [Budge, op. cit. p. 333].
thing
The Greek chrema, thing, may be a flow of ka. Creation may have been thought of as a flow of ka, as
the unseen god became visible. Greek rheo = flow. The phenomenon would have been helpful to Plato in
his formulation of a theory to account for the power and influence from an invisible realm.
thunderbolt
Pliny distinguishes three kinds of bolt: those that are sicca, dry, and do not burn but dissipant;
those that do not burn but blacken, infuscant; and the clear bolt, clarum fulmen, of remarkable
nature, by which jars are emptied with the lids untouched and no other trace left. Gold and silver are
liquified inside, but the bags themselves are in no way singed, and not even the wax labels are
melted. This appears to be the same phenomenon that has occasionally been reported in recent times,
and sometimes described, misleadingly, as spontaneous combustion.
tripod
As well as being a suitable support for a cauldron imitating an object in the sky, a tripod could
imitate the apparatus used for obtaining a display from an ark. Two terminals would be needed, plus
some kind of adjustable rod, making a total of three pieces of apparatus. It may even be relevant to
note that a basic feature of electronic circuits in the twentieth century A. D. has been the trio of
anode, cathode and grid, and, in the case of the transistor, base, collector and emitter.
west
Arabic garbh. Reversed, the consonants become bhrg, or vrg [bh = v]. Slavonic vrag is an enemy. In
augury, the west and northwest were the directions from which there was danger.
wild bull
In Crete, the word was bolynthos. Greek lyssa is madness, bous is an ox.
wizard
Greek goetes. This might be ka and at, Etruscan and Albanian for father, implying authority and
source. Russian otets, pronounced [approximately] atyets, is a father. Cf. the Egyptian ut in utchat,
or udjat.
writing
Etruscan zichne means tracks of Set. German zeichnen means to mark or draw. Greek grapho is likely to
be ka and rhapis, rod. In Hindi, nagari is a set of scripts of Indian languages, including the divine
script Devanagari. Deva means 'divine'. Naga, in Sanskrit, is a serpent, also a member of a race of
semi-divine creatures, half human, half snake. The Greeks were familiar with these ideas; cf. Kadmos
and Harmonia at Thebes, and the legendary first king of Attica, Kekrops.
========== End of Fire Not Blown... ==========
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
Papers presented at the University of Lethbridge
May 9 and 10, 1974
Edited by: E.R. MILTON
Notes on the printed version of the book
Cover -
Painting was made prior to the publication of Worlds in Collision, the work of a 30 year
old Canadian male who utilized painting and drawing as an aspect of his therapy for
neurosis. The artist shows the earth, identified by the lines of latitude and longitude in
a rather unusual view. Seen from outer space, it appears to be flooded since the normal
land masses are missing or submerged and the patient stands on an island reaching upwards,
perhaps in distress. Above the earth is what appears to be a mass of land with mountains,
river, perhaps a continent hovering in the air, To the left is an oddly shaped spherical
mass, the moon, or perhaps a meteorite. The patient described that large continental mass
above as a sheet of ice.
Courtesy of Professor John McGregor
The responsibility for producing the volume of papers presented at the symposium:
Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia, May 9 and 10, 1974, was delegated to an editorial
committee consisting of the following members of the Faculty of the University of
Lethbridge:
Earl R. Milton Chairman, Department of Physics and Chairman of the Committee
Paul D. Lewis Department of Biological Science
Laurie R. Ricou Chairman, Department of English
Ian Q. Whishaw Department of Psychology
Copyright 1978 The University of Lethbridge
All rights reserved excepting the Right of the Individual Authors to reproduce in any form
their contributions to this volume.
Afterword, Address to the Chancellor's Dinner, Address to the Convocation Dinner are
Copyright 1978 by Immanuel Velikovsky. Permission to reproduce granted by the Velikovsky
Estate.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
TITLE-PAGE
FOREWORD
Earl R. Milton
CHAPTER 1:
CULTURAL AMNESIA:
The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory and Their Later Emergence
Immanuel Velikovsky
CHAPTER 2:
PALAETIOLOGY OF FEAR AND MEMORY
Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER 3:
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE WORK OF IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY
John MacGregor
CHAPTER 4:
STRUCTURING THE APOCALYPSE:
Old and New World Variations
William Mullen
CHAPTER 5:
SHAKESPEARE AND VELIKOVSKY:
Catastrophic Theory and the Springs of Art
Irving Wolfe
CHAPTER 6:
CATASTROPHISM AND UNIFORMITY:
A Probe into the Origins of the 1832 Gestalt Shift in Geology
George Grinnell
CHAPTER 7:
CATASTROPHISM AS A WORLD VIEW
Patrick Doran
CHAPTER 8:
AFTERWORD
Immanuel Velikovsky
APPENDICES
I. About the Authors
II. Honourary Degree Awareded to Immanual Velikovsky
III. Addresses to the Chancellor's Dinner
IV. Address to the Convocation Dinner (Immanuel Velikovsky)
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY - VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA : CHAPTER :
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
FOREWORD
On Saturday afternoon 11 May 1974, the University of Lethbridge conferred upon Immanuel
Velikovsky the honourary degree of Doctor of Arts and Science in recognition of the
interdisciplinary nature of his scholarship. In awarding this degree the University was
recognizing a world famous scholar whose work epitomizes the ideology of the University:
that interdisciplinary studies have value.
For two day preceding the convocation ceremony, the University was host to an international
symposium which attracted delegates from the Pacific Northwestern region of the United
States and from six Canadian provinces. This Symposium, with the theme Velikovsky and
Cultural Amnesia, examined aspects of Velikovsky's synthesis centering on the Humanities
and Social Sciences.
The papers presented in this volume are revised versions of the papers originally presented
at the Symposium and from the first collection of papers on the subject of cultural Amnesia
since Velikovsky introduced the topic in Worlds in Collision [1] . The papers have been
examined by other experts in the field concerned, criticisms were collected, and the
authors were allowed to make minor changes in the hope that a more accomplished volume
could be produced.
Since Dr. Velikovsky's addresses to the Symposium were delivered without notes, and because
of Dr. Velikovsky's weakening health in the months following the Symposium, he was not
asked to submit written versions of his contributions. Instead, his papers were produced
from the tape recordings of the Symposium sessions. After editing them for clarity, the
transcriptions were revised by Dr. Velikovsky for publication here.
Although the papers all relate to some aspect of Cultural Amnesia, they deal with subjects
as diverse as anthropology, geology, narrative art, and psychiatry. While the task of
showing relationships between them is desirable, it is difficult. It is may hope that the
interpretation presented here, with which the authors might not agree, will stimulate
readers to consider carefully the papers and their relation to Cultural Amnesia.
In his address, Dr Velikovsky elaborates upon his theory of Cultural Amnesia. According to
his theory, mankind forgot about unpleasant catastrophic events on the conscious level, but
remembers on the unconscious level. Furthermore it would appear that the unconscious memory
is transmitted genetically from one generation to the next, a concept already postulated by
Freud and Jung but in disagreement with much of the current biological thinking.
Nevertheless, there are, as will be shown in the papers following Velikovsky's, substantial
reasons for thinking that memory is indeed transmitted, if not racially, then in some other
way.
If the cultural amnesia theory is correct, then it is possible to suggest that every
generation lives in a state of trauma induced by the conflict between subconscious memories
of past catastrophic events and the refusal of the conscious mind to recognize that these
events actually occurred in prehistoric and historic times. Dr. Velikovsky believes that
the trauma is responsible for mankind's aggressive hostility, a concept of importance to
every individual frightened by the prospect of thermo-nuclear war or of the instability
which seems to be increasing in society.
Moreover, the trauma is also responsible for the inability and at times the outright
refusal of science to recognize the overwhelming evidence pointing to the catastrophic past
of the Earth and the entire solar System. The trauma is also responsible, in part at least,
for the actions of some scientists who denounced Velikovsky without even reading his work.
Perhaps the men who did this really are saying that the truth is too awful; if the public
knew they would be furious, and the great prestige accorded to the leading spokespersons
for modern science would decline. The second paper in this volume, authored by Alfred de
Grazia, discusses the origin of fear. De Grazia is an internationally recognized expert in
politics and social systems. He became aware of Velikovsky because of the efforts made by
Livio Stecchini, a professor of ancient history. Stecchini had tried to interest de Grazia
not in the substance of Velikovsky's theories but in the political ramifications of the
attack by the scientific community on Velikovsky. Shortly thereafter, de Grazia read
Velikovsky's last book Oedipus and Akhnaton [2] and judged it to be "a fundamental
contribution to classical history and archaeology." [3] He then decided to meet with
Velikovsky and investigate the issue.
A change for the better occurred in Velikovsky's fortunes when de Grazia devoted the entire
September 1963 issue of the American Behavioral Scientist to aspects of the hostile
reaction of the scientific community to Velikovsky's revolutionary cosmology.
While preparing the special issue on Velikovsky [4] , de Grazia became interested in the
substance of Velikovsky's theories, an interest which has culminated in several
investigations into the origins of human nature and the development of human institutions.
A part of that work in included here.
De Grazia maintains that fear is ubiquitous in its influence upon the behaviour of mankind.
Partly it is animalian, partly cultural. It pervades all social institutions. Memory is
created by fear, a specific case of which is fear of catastrophe. Events recorded in memory
will be forgotten when the need to function sanely overrides the need to remember. Thus
primal fears, which exist in memory because of terrors experienced directly or
historically, are suppressed in the interest of day to day functioning of the organism.
In the next paper, John MacGregor outlines psychological aspects of the work done by
Immanuel Velikovsky. MacGregor, an art historian and psychotherapist, has applied
psychiatry to the study of art. His paper is the result of the work done to clarify the
views of Freud and Jung on the possibility of inherited transmission of memories. MacGregor
examines dreams which have cosmic content; patients often express inner disturbance in
symbolism involving cosmic catastrophe. Although the dreams refer specifically to events in
the patient's inner reality, the reason why a patient projects an inner crisis in terms of
catastrophes in outer space is not always evident; it is possible that some of these dreams
cannot be explained in terms of personal memories in which case they may be evidence for
racial memories imprinted during past global cataclysms experienced by mankind.
The fourth paper, by William Mullen, compares apocalyptic writings from the Old and New
World. These writings suggest that society is restructured after a catastrophe. The
survivors seek stability through worship of what they think is an appropriate deity and
through ritual activities. When another apocalypse is imminent, a new religion emerges or
old religions are altered in an attempt to avert the impending disaster. Mullen shows how a
catastrophe which occurred in the distant past becomes, because of religion, an apocalypse
which will occur in the future.
Where Mullen has discussed catastrophe as it is expressed through religion, the next paper,
by Irving Wolfe, proposes that catastrophic experiences are the inspiration for great works
of narrative art, in particular Wolfe discusses Velikovskian overtones in two of
Shakespeare's plays. Through narrative art, catastrophes may be discussed and examined
without the society (composed of individuals) having to experience the traumas associated
with enduring, but repressed, memories of the actual events. As "adult fairy tales" such
narratives provide a way to imply a rational order to an otherwise irrational universe,
thereby diminishing apprehension about the uncontrollable aspects of nature. The response
of the individual to such literature also can be understood in terms of the harmonizing
effect of that literature also upon the subconscious needs of the individual for comfort.
Neither the author nor the reader nor the audience can admit that there is an anxiety in
need of comfort but that it seems, is shy the work endures partly because it soothes a
hidden fear.
George Grinnell, once a geologist and now an historian of science at McMaster University,
shows how science has been altered to preclude all mention or examination of catastrophic
disruptions. In the same sense in which the Egyptian rituals of the Old Kingdom, described
earlier by Mullen, were designed to ensure a stable society, Grinnell shows how geological
language was changed in the nineteenth century to provide a stable philosophical basis for
the liberal movement which controlled urbanized industrial society in Britain. After a
century of use, the new language is scientific dogma. To discuss anything other than
evolutionary processes now requires that even the language of science be modified. It is
not surprising then, within professional scientific circles, that little or no credence is
placed upon attempts to introduce disruptive or revolutionary processes as part of everyday
happenings in the Universe. Grinnell however ascribes their exclusion to immediate
political expediency rather than to the wishes of scientists to forge dreadful catastrophes
of the past. If Grinnell is correct, the violent emotional response of contemporary
scientists to revolutionary hypotheses still requires explanation, especially in a world
where political liberalism is declining.
The eighth and final paper, by Patrick Doran, examines life after a cataclysm. Assuming
that western-industrial society has already produced an apocalypse for mankind, Doran
suggests that realization of the catastrophe must emerge into consciousness before survival
can be assured. In this case survival depends upon rejuvenation of earth's fragile
bioenvironment. Like Mullen, Doran then deals with how a society recovers from catastrophe.
He claims that the joy induced by realizing that one is a survivor is the key to freedom
from the buried fears of catastrophes long past. The acceptance of Velikovsky's cosmology
by western civilization is a first step to freedom from the despair induced by a crisis
laden World. The World has been changed in the cataclysm; those who know they have survived
now have the chance to redirect civilization to ensure continued survival.
In closing the Symposium, Dr. Velikovsky reminded those present that understanding
mankind's traumatic past is the key to understanding the seemingly irrational motives
behind the contemporary behaviour of men. In summarizing his scientific and historical
contributions, Dr. Velikovsky noted the response of scholars to his work and to the
evidence supporting it, and pleaded for younger minds to carry on and complete the
revolution started three and one-half decades ago.
It is my duty to report that two of the participants at the Symposium chose not to submit
manuscripts for publication; therefore their papers are not included here [5] . These
unfortunate decisions may reflect concern for the hostility exhibited by the scholarly
community toward any works which deal with Velikovsky and his theories.
The question I ask is, why do the issues by Velikovsky invoke an immediate emotional
response in the more conventionally-minded scholars of the academy? The answer in part
seems to arise from the division of scholars in general (and scientists in particular) in
to two broad and quite mutually exclusive groups, which I will describe, for want of better
term, as evolutionists and revolutionists.
The majority group, the evolutionists, believe that we live, at a special moment, the
pinnacle of creation, the end result of several billion years of gradual development
wherein Homo Sapiens has achieved dominion over planet Earth and through technology has
finally achieved understanding, albeit incomplete, of the rest of nature. This could be
described as the centre or liberal view of the universe. Believers in this viewpoint live
in a world where events are, in general, fully predictable, hence a rational planned life
is possible. Occasional upheavals, described as Acts of God, mar the otherwise tranquil
world from time to time, but afterwards the Universe resumes the normal process of
unfolding as it should.
The other group, the revolutionists, to which Velikovsky and his supporters belong, believe
that the history of the World, and of the Universe, is best described in terms of a series
of abrupt large-scale and intensive changes in nature and life with periods of slow
evolution in between [6] . Physical evidence of such changes is found in Earth's
geological strata and on the exposed surface of the planets.
For the revolutionists the task is to re-interpret the evidence which has been described in
the scientific and historical literature in terms of the evolutionary model, a project to
which the evolutionists usually react with intense hostility.
To rewrite the literature in such a manner that it is freed of conclusions which are only
valid if the evolutionary model is correct appears to be a difficult task, though in
reality it may not be. The correctness of such conclusions really depends upon the validity
of a small number of physical theories. By showing that these theories can be sustained
only by making unwarranted assumptions, the evolutionary viewpoint is undermined. The
foundation removed, the data can be re-analyzed possibly producing different conclusions.
In astronomy the long-time stability of the solar system is a key theory which recently has
been questioned by Bass [7] ; even the nature of gravitation itself if still in doubt [8]
.
In geology and biology the currently adopted time scale depends upon the decay of long-
lived radioactive atoms. The possibility that radioactive decays are environmentally
induced has recently been proposed [9] . Without radiometric dating the rampant inflation
in the magnitude of the cosmic timescale over the last century [10] will undoubtedly
enter a sharp period of regression. This question will be debated in detail in time; for
the present it is sufficient to say that if radioactive decay processes are not invariant,
then many problems facing Velikovsky will vanish. The end result might well be a widespread
reconsideration of Velikovsky's revised chronology. Similarly, if the cosmic time scale is
drastically shortened, then the physical history of the Earth and Solar System will have to
change.
In the interim, astronomical confirmations of Velikovsky's advance claims [11] are viewed
with suspicion by those believing in the evolutionary viewpoint.
As an example of an advance claim I shall cite Velikovsky's descriptions of Saturn. In the
keynote address Velikovsky refers to a nova-like explosion on Saturn [12] which occurred
long before the events described in Worlds in Collision. In closing the Symposium
Velikovsky notes how scientist and engineers will not deny that Jupiter's magnetic field
must influence other bodies moving through it [13] . Having concluded that Saturn once
exploded, Velikovsky has predicted that Saturn will be found to emit low energy cosmic rays
[14] . Pioneer 10 has recently measured the magnetic tail of Jupiter at the orbit of Saturn
[15] . Saturn enters Jupiter's magnetic tail every twenty years, at these encounters
Velikovsky predicted an enhancement of cosmic radiation's arriving at Earth from Saturn
[16] . A similar prediction has been made by an unidentified writer in Sky and Telescope
who claims that the Jupiter tail encounter with Saturn's outer radiation belts could
produce disturbances detectable by radio antennas aboard passing spacecraft [17] .
Synchroton radiation emitted by the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus has been detected
and cosmic ray sources have now been associated with these planets.
Velikovsky's contention that Saturn recently erupted is supported by evidence that Saturn,
like Jupiter, emits more energy than it receives from the sun [18] . The usual explanation
for this excess is the escape of primordial energy from the planet. Why the excess still
exists after billions of years is not obvious. Again the difference between Velikovsky and
the evolutionists is a time factor: the difference between 4000 years and 4000 million
years. While such great differences seemingly cannot be reconciled easily, the reader is
cautioned to remember that the time difference depends upon the correctness of assumptions
made in applying theories based upon an evolutionary model to the data. Usually assumptions
are being made because no proof is possible. Accepted assumptions represent the current
consensus of opinions put forth by the scientific establishment [19] .
The thoroughness of Velikovsky's scholarship is beyond question; his main heresy is to
question the evolutionary view and to champion a recently forgotten revolutionary viewpoint
[20] and his contention that electric and magnetic forces play an important role in the
Universe. Consideration of Velikovsky's cosmology as a possible reality restores to its
rightful place an old method of describing the cosmos; a method which had, at least in
part, become inconvenient for political reasons [21]. The question explored here is how
could the revolutionary world view be forgotten by mankind and why does its re-emergence
invoke such an emotional response from the believers of the currently popular evolutionary
world view. Glimpses of these answers, I believe, are contained in the papers that follow.
Together they are an important statement relevant to the question of the validity of
Velikovsky's revolutionary cosmology.
The fact that this Symposium took place at the seven-year-old University of Lethbridge and
the fact that the University granted an honourary degree in Arts and Science to Dr.
Velikovsky, generally regarded as a heretic, and even as an outcast by a few misguided
individuals, are extraordinary events which warrant explanation:
I believe that two factors allowed the supporters of Velikovsky to be successful at
Lethbridge in their attempt to have him awarded an honourary degree for academic reasons.
First and foremost there was the intense dedication of those persons working to document
the case for granting Velikovsky's degree. Without their enthusiasm, nothing would have
been accomplished.
Second, in a small university the lines of communication are short. When the case for
Velikovsky was presented to the General Faculties Council of the University, those voting
on the matter were friendly with those supporting Velikovsky. When one is sufficiently
informed about an issue it is hard to oppose known and trusted colleagues with good
academic credentials. The isolation which normally prevents frequent communication between
members of different departments is minimized at Lethbridge, as all are in one large and
long building. Given our size and the common cause, daily contacts in the corridors,
cafeteria, or library became more than occasions for passing social discourse; they became
occasions for the exchange of ideas. This was a precious period in the intellectual growth
of this University, especially for those intimately involved in the debate.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the effort of the editorial committee: Paul D. Lewis, Jr.;
Laurie R. Ricou, and Ian Q. Whishaw, who diligently refereed the papers, and helped
otherwise with the publication of this volume. I appreciate the help of my wife, Joan, my
secretary, Mrs. Elly Boumans, and Stan Heller, for their diligence in proofreading the
final manuscript and Proofs.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the members of the committee which planned the
Symposium; they are including myself, Lynne Pohle, Don Thompson, lan Q. Whishaw, and most
importantly, the chairman of the committee the man to whose memory this volume is
dedicated, my close friend and greatly missed colleague, the late John T. Hamilton.
For his contribution to the Symposium I want to convey thanks from many delegates to the
chairman, W. J. Cousins, Emeritus Professor of History. Throughout he directed the
proceeding with fairness, introducing levity when the occasion called for it, but always
maintaining decorum, especially where a chairman with lesser experience might have
faltered.
Notwithstanding all of the acknowledgements above some persons who have rendered valuable
assistance have been overlooked. To these persons I offer apology and thanks.
It is with gratitude that I acknowledge, for the University, the financial support awarded
by the Canada Council, which in part paid the expenses of the scholars invited to address
the Cultural Amnesia Symposium.
As well, special thanks are due to the senior academic administrators of the University,
President William E. Beckel and Vice-President Owen G. Holmes, who from the very beginning
supported this honourary degree and the concept of a symposium, who offered personal
support and who committed University funds not only for the Symposium but also to ensure
that this volume would be published, and could be sold at a reasonable price. For me it has
been a privilege to work with the authors preparing this volume. Several of them have
extended much appreciated personal courtesy, warm hospitality and stimulating discussion
during my visits to their homes and institutions both with respect to the revision of their
papers and in the wider pursuit of our mutual interest in revolutionary genesis.
I want to recognize the debt I owe to Philip Connolly for the wise counsel he has rendered
concerning decisions I had to make on the format and contents of this volume. His critical
remarks on the editing have assisted me greatly.
Lastly, but with special emphasis, I must thank my secretary Mrs. Elly Boumans who
persevered and worked very closely with me both in the difficult job of transcribing the
tape recordings of the Symposium (in view of their technical content which discouraged
others who tried to help), and in typing and proofreading of the several drafts of the
manuscript while the editorial committee and the authors negotiated the final form. Without
her dedication this volume would not be complete today.
E. R. Milton,
Department of Physics
The University of Lethbridge
October 1977
Notes (Foreword)
1. Velikovsky World in Collision, (Doubleday, 1950), See-part 2, Chapter 6, pages 298f
(Pocket Books, 1977) pages 302f; (Abacus, 1972) pages 286f. The pagination in the now out-
of-print but widely distributed Laurel edition (Dell, 1967) is identical to that in the
Pocket Books edition. The pagination in the earlier Delta edition (Dell, 1965) is identical
to that in the more recent Abacus edition, see ahead, footnote 3, page 21.
2. Doubleday (1960).
3. Press Conference, The University of Lethbridge, 8 May 1974.
4. The contents of this issue eventually were expanded to become the book The Velikovsky
Affair, (University Book, 1965).
5. Both papers are reviewed in the periodical Pensee 4( 5): 47 (Winter 1974/ 75) published
by the Student Academic Freedom Forum, Portland, Oregon. As well, both of these papers are
included in the recorded proceedings of the Symposium. A set of nine recorded cassette
tapes of the entire Symposium is available from the University Library. Inquiries as to the
current purchase price for the set of tapes should be directed to the University Library
Media Distribution Centre.
6. There is an increased awareness in scientific circles, particularly in the sciences,
that not all data can be fitted to the existing theories which utilize only evolutionary
process. For simplicity, most mathematical models of nature use linear system of equations,
despite much evidence that many natural phenomena are clearly non-linear in behaviour.
Discrepancies from linearity are in general, handled by introducing perturbing-terms into
the equations or by postulating local-anomalies in the specific environment under
discussion. Recently, Rene Thom has produced a catastrophe-theory which allows abrupt
discontinuous changes to be introduced into otherwise slowly evolving systems. Doing so
allows connection to be made between unconnected and differing sequences of behaviour for
an evolving system which seemingly exhibits markedly different behaviour in the present
from that recorded in the past. A consequence of Thom's theory is that extrapolation of
behaviour over many orders of magnitude, either in time or in quantity is inherently
dangerous. An example is found in certain mechanically stable system which can unexpectedly
undergo catastrophic breakdown, yet no apparent explanation for the breakdown can be found
by extrapolating from the initial conditions. See : Montgomery, M., "Why Gondolas Derail",
Boston Globe, 17 April 1976, page 32. Thom's theory is summarized in two recent articles
published in New Scientist; see : Stewart, "The Seven Elementary Catastrophes", 68: 447-454
(20 November 1975); and Walgate, "Rene Thom Clears Up Catastrophes", 68: 578( 4 December
1975).
7. Bass Robert, "Did Worlds Collide?" Pensee 4( 3): 8-20 (Summer 1974); "Proofs" of the
Stability of the Solar System, op. cit., pages 21-26.
8. The inability of Einstein to unify the gravitational field (general relativity) with the
electromagnetic field (special relativity) may arise because the two fields are different
descriptions of a single interaction. Until the nature of gravitation is realized, progress
can be expected to be slow in finding a physical mechanism for Velikovsky's cosmology.
9. Dudley, H. C. "Phenomenological Causal Model Of Nuclear Decay, Assuming interaction with
Neutrino Sea, "Lettere, Nuovo Cimento, 5( 3): 231-232 (16 September 1972); Anderson, John,
and Spangler, G. W. "Radioactive Dating: Is the Decay Constant Really Constant?", Pensee 4(
4) : 31-33 (Fall 1974).
10. Engle, A. E. J. "Time and the Earth" American Scientist 57: 458-483 (Winter 1969) see
pages 460f.
11. Dr. Velikovsky prefers to use the term 'advance claim' rather than prediction.
12. See ahead, Velikovsky, Cultural Amnesia: The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the
Racial Memory and Their Later Emergence, page 21.
13. See ahead, Velikovsky, Afterword, page 149.
14. Velikovsky, "H. H. Hess and my Memoranda" Pensee 2( 3) 22-29 (Fall 1972) see
particularly page 28 Saturn from the Memo to Hess dated 11 September 1973.
15. "Dimensions of Jupiter's Magnetic Tail Believed Enormous" NASA News Release 76-55.
16. Velikovsky Copyrighted lecture 5 November 1962. Are Cosmic Rays Emitted by Saturn?
17. News notes: Jupiter's Magnetic Tail , "Sky and telescope 51( 5): 375 (may 1976).
18. The measured thermal excess of Saturn is greater by a factor of two over solar
insolation. Reported by L. J. Caroff at the Northwest astronomy Conference Victoria B. C.,
1975.
19. In astronomy ten thousand galaxies can be counted but astronomers apply theories to
infer that one billion galaxies exist in the universe; thus there are about one hundred
thousand unobserved galaxies for every one that we observe directly. A similar factor
exists between stars that can be counted on photographs and the total number of stars
believed to exist within our galaxy.
To alter the time scale of the universe by an equal factor would bring events of one
billion years ago into the last lce Age and events from the beginning of the Age of Mammals
into the Christian Era.
Urey has proposed that collisions between Earth and comets occur from time to time. Such
collision may explain massive animal extinction which accompanied breaks in the geological
record. See Urey "Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods", Nature 242: 32-33 (2 March
1973). That Urey, explicitly contemptuous of Velikovsky, can bring a comet to collide with
Earth millions of year ago, while Velikovsky cannot propose that a similar collision
occurred thousands of years ago leads me to wonder if the recency of suggested events is
proportional to their capability to produce discomfort in the evolutionist's mind: even
catastrophic events if in the distant past are acceptable. Alteration of the timescale by
de-evolutionizing the assumptions can bring cataclysmic events currently ascribed to the
distant past into the historical period and thus to the time when the cataclysms may well
have occurred and been recorded.
20. Stecchini, "The inconstant Heavens: Velikovsky in Relation to some Past cosmic
Perplexities", American Behavioral Scientist 7: 19-35, 43-44 (September 1963), see
especially pages 22-27. This paper also appears in de Grazia, Juergens, and Stecchini,
editors of The Velikovsky Affair (University Books 1966).
21. See ahead Grinnell, Catastrophism and Uniformity.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
CHAPTER ONE
CULTURAL AMNESIA
The Submergence of Terrifying Events in the Racial Memory
and their Later Emergence
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY
I thank you Dr. Holmes for the introduction. My comments tonight consist of informal
remarks on material that I cover in a systematic fashion in the book that I am writing.
This book, Mankind in Amnesia, elaborates upon new aspects that follow from my other
published works [1] .
CATASTROPHES
In Worlds in Collision I describe two series of catastrophic events: The first took place
in the middle of the second millennium before the present era, the second in the eighth
century before the present era. The last of these catastrophic events occurred on 23 March
- 686 [2] . Fortunately, men were not illiterate at the time of these catastrophes.
One of the first clues as to what had happened I discovered in a book written over one
hundred years ago, by a French missionary who worked in Canada, but who wrote about Mexico,
C. E. Brasseur de Bourbourg [3] . He wrote several books on the subject of ancient Mexican
beliefs and ancient Mexican history. He also wrote a small book investigating possible
connections between Egyptian and Mexican beliefs.
When I read Brasseur's books on the ancient history of Mexico I found it strange that he,
being a clergyman, did not observe, or did not dare to report that in the Scriptures many
pages deal with the very same events he was describing. He reported that cataclysmic events
had been found in Mexican lore, events also described by several Spanish historians of the
sixteenth century. These were events of great violence. Mountains rose and moved; many
volcanoes erupted from the North-Pacific Coast of North America all the way to Tierra del
Fuego at the southern tip of South America. The ocean rose like a wall and moved,
accompanied by terrific winds. Fiery bodies were seen fighting in the sky. Stones descended
from above, followed by rains of naphtha. Men were maddened by the din and the paramount
danger. Houses collapsed and were carried away, hurricanes tore out great trees of whole
forests with their roots. If such a great catastrophe occurred today, what impression would
it leave in the survivors?
The catastrophe of the second millennium has been remembered on very many pages of the
Biblical Prophets and the Psalms. Our whole life is pervaded by influences originating in
these and other catastrophic events that took place in earlier ages. The catastrophes
survive in the liturgy still used today, only we choose not to examine them as such.
Whatever area of life we select to explore we find some vestige of the terrifying events of
the past. The calendar is a good example, either the Jewish calendar or the Christian
calendar or that of any other creed. Throughout the year the holidays are reflections of
catastrophic events. The midwinter holiday celebrated as either Christmas or Hanukkah, the
Week of Light, is a renewal of the Roman Saturnalia. If you read about the Roman Saturnalia
you recognize immediately almost all of the rites of Hanukkah or Christmas, now celebrated
at the end of December. They commemorate events of the days when the planet Saturn exploded
into a nova, long before the events that I describe in Worlds in Collision, Seven days
before the Universal Deluge began, the solar system became illuminated as brilliantly as if
by a hundred suns. In the Deluge, not only the Earth but also other planets of the solar
system were engulfed. Nature was wanton: the destruction was great, Mars, Mercury, and the
Moon, as the space pictures now reveal, became flying cemeteries. Nothing living remained,
although probably there was once life on those planets its destruction was complete. In
comparison, the Earth fared well and thus mankind could call itself the "Chosen People":
not because all men survived, not because there was no destruction; in fact there was
decimation, even extinction of whole genera, and massive mutations, caused mainly by cosmic
rays and X-rays emitted by Saturn. Subsequent to the Deluge an environment was created on
Earth in which life could not only exist, but could flourish, with an abundance of water, a
change of climate with changed seasons, with a magnetosphere now giving protection from
cosmic rays and an ionosphere giving protection from ultraviolet rays. The new orbit the
Earth circled was not too close to the Sun, not too far from it, a climate unlike that of
Mars (too cold) or Venus (too hot).
The Universal Deluge was not the first catastrophe to decimate life on our Earth: other
calamities preceded it, Dim memories from these more ancient times survive in mythology.
Before the age of Kronos (Saturn's "Golden Age") there was the age of Ouranos [4] ,
Egyptian myths of great antiquity relate stories of battles and changes in the sky and of
vast destruction on Earth, changes that we neglect to investigate and know in our desire to
believe that we live on a planet that is stable and safe.
AMNESIA
The phenomenon of racial amnesia occupied Freud's mind in the last decades of his life, in
fact it became his obsession.
Initially Freud claimed that the impressions made upon a child's mind dictate the child's
future and cause also neuroses in juvenile and adult life. Later Freud reversed his thesis
and claimed that man's destiny is triggered by images which exist within the racial memory,
deep within the unconscious mind.
From psychoanalytic studies we know that a traumatic experience, either of a physical or
psychological nature, leaves a strong vestige deep within the human soul. Such vestiges are
in the heritage that comes to us from antiquity. They are found in most of the written
documents that survive from the civilizations of the past; from Mexico, China, Iceland,
Iran, India, Sumeria, Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Judea. They also survive from traditions
carried from generation to generation, by word of mouth, in races that do not know how to
write. These latter traditions eventually are written down by anthropologists, who collect
together stories of catastrophes from north and south, from west and east, from Lapland and
the South Sea islands. We ask why we do not recognize this evidence the vestiges of which
exist within the souls of men, The answer is that because these vestiges are buried so
deeply we are unable to see the evidence before us.
The story is repeated in the records of the stones and bones uncovered at every latitude
and longitude.
Chief Mountain [5] , that you can see from here, was once overturned. The fossils that
belong near Chief Mountain's summit are found at its base. The Matterhorn in the Alps has
been moved to its present location northward from Lombardy and overturned. In several
different places in the Bible you can find verses describing mountains moving or
overthrown. Such biblical verses appeared even to fundamentalists as metaphoric
expressions. Today many theologians prefer to regard the Old Testament as a book of poetry
rather than what it seemingly is. The inability to see evidence which is clearly written
down and evidence so clearly presented by nature is a psychological phenomenon. Because the
evidence was so clear, it was not necessary for me to look far to find it. When I started
to collect the material for Worlds in Collision it was not the scarcity of material but its
abundance that was my impediment. I was able to use but a small fraction of what exists in
the surviving literature.
Amnesia is one of the defense reactions of man. Those who immediately survived did not
necessarily become victims of amnesia, though this may have occurred. We know the effects
of battle-shock on soldiers. it is likely that the ,larger amnesia took some time to
develop.
In the older Greek authors, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics, you find definite statements
indicating that catastrophes which occurred in the history of the human race and in the
history of our Earth were not abnormal events, they were actually dominant, repeating
themselves again and again. But from the historical records we see that the knowledge of
the catastrophes disappeared slowly into oblivion.
Plato described cataclysms in several works: he wrote about worlds destroyed and rebuilt.
In his Timaeus he noted that the Greeks do not remember ancient catastrophes, besides the
Deluge. He adds that the people of his time, as the priests of Sais told Solon, were unable
to remember these catastrophic events. in another work, whose authorship is probably
wrongly ascribed to Plato, he is presented as believing in a peaceful universe. Plato's
pupil Aristotle refused to believe in catastrophes. The scholarly world has accepted
Aristotle's view that the planets can never change their motions. He, more than anyone else
is responsible for the continuing belief that we live in a safe world, on a planet to which
nothing like collisions can happen. Aristotle argued that those who believe in celestial
catastrophes should be brought to trial, and if convicted, punished by death.
In the first century before the present era Lucretius knows of, and writes about these
catastrophes and their terror. Cicero, like Aristotle, denies the possibility of the
planets changing their orbits and advocates that people believing this should be brought to
court and severely punished.
ARMAGEDDON
At the beginning of the Christian era, or in the century before it, mankind awaited another
catastrophe. This catastrophe was expected because seven hundred years had separated the
last series of upheavals of the eighth-seventh centuries from the one of the fifteenth
century. This expectation created an eschatological literature and the appearance of
Messiahs. The Book of Revelation is one of the great books of this eschatological
literature. The end of the world is painted with the experience of the past serving as a
model. Look at Michelangelo's The Last Judgement. Sadism is as predominant as masochism in
this Christian description of the events of the Last Day. The catastrophe, the Last Day,
has now been transferred into the sky, into heaven, but not an astronomical heaven; these
are different heavens. In reality Michelangelo is painting events already described by the
prophets Isaiah, Joel, Amos, and Micah, who lived during the catastrophes of the seventh
and eighth centuries before the present era.
Because of man's aversion to knowing his past, science has been greatly retarded,
pretending unreality to be as truth. This explains the fury of the opposition that declared
war on my book, Worlds in Collision. If the book were fantasy, would it not have had its
season and died down? it has not died down. It survives. But scientists have not
investigated my claims nor tested the evidence presented, nor have they searched for new
evidence. Instead, scientists have chosen to oppose me and my book in most ingenious ways,
substituting name-calling and mockery for discussing and testing. Scientists are followers
of a cult, defending dogmas with which they do not wish to part. Scientists have proclaimed
these dogmas to be established laws, when in reality they are nothing but views, and
erroneous ones at that.
In my book Worlds in Collision there are footnotes which allow the reader to check the
sources of my claims. In twenty-four years those scholars who have taken time to check my
sources have found that my quotations have not been taken out of context. But, of course, I
do not claim infallibility. Establishment scientists, despite their proclaimed idealism,
deserve to be labeled pseudo-scientists. In science, claims are accompanied by proof; in
pseudo-science proof is omitted and any discussion that questions the dogma is suppressed.
In the discoveries of the Space Age there is now an independent proof of the claims made in
Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval. The Moon, and Mars, and Mercury, and also other
planetary bodies went through paroxysms.
The subconscious desire of man to know his past was the basis of progress which led to the
development of science. The aversion to accepting the truth about the past inevitably
blocks the road. Scientific efforts are directed away from the right channels, and so
science briefly progresses, and then regresses. For a full hundred years Darwin not only
advanced, but also retarded the development of science. My work has also produced both a
positive and a negative effect. Claims have been maintained that would not have been
maintained if the scientists had not felt obliged to contradict the iconoclastic views
expressed in Earth in Upheaval and Worlds in Collision.
SUPPRESSION AND REGRESSION
In postulating that the Earth was a planet travelling around the Sun, Aristarchus was the
precursor of Copernicus. Copernicus realized this, because in the original preface to De
Revolutionibus[ [6] he referred to Aristarchus, but removed the reference before the
book was published in the year of his death.
Between these men are seventeen centuries yet both were opposed by the scientific minds of
their day. Mankind has the need to live in an unreal world. Men did not wish to believe
that their planet travels through space. A moving planet might not be safe, it could
collide with something. The thought that the Earth could collide is by itself traumatic.
No ancient scientist is considered greater than Archimedes. Archimedes was irreverent
toward his senior contemporary, Aristarchus, for believing that the Earth revolves around
the Sun. Archimedes won, and after the time of Ptolemy (second century of the current era)
the victory was complete. Science accepted this untruth, not just for centuries, but for
more than a millennium.
Despite the fact that Aristotle did not profess beliefs which in any way resembled the
beliefs of Christianity, a strange symbiosis developed between the writings of Aristotle
and the Bible. Aristotle was the authority that dominated Christian thinking for many
centuries. Copernicus' theory was rejected, not because of the Bible, but because of
Aristotle.
In this century there was great opposition when I proposed that the Earth had nearly
collided with other planets. Science, too, is torn between the desire to know and the
aversion to knowing. But my revelation was really just a rediscovery, the evidence was
always there. I did not read any hidden texts, the words were clearly written, they were
shouting at me from all bookshelves.
The Darwinian Revolution was also a regression. Disturbing evidence was ignored; it was as
if he worked with closed eyes. Darwin proposed that only the fittest survive. He believed
that, through competition alone, the first unicellular bodies could evolve into more
complex life forms, as different as man, worm, and bird. Darwin did not know about
mutations.
His notebooks from the only field trip he ever undertook contain descriptions of
cataclysmic disruptions. He wrote that nothing less than the shaking of the entire frame of
the Earth could result in the mass annihilation of life forms that he observed. On the
continental scale he observed that life forms, large and small, were extinguished or
decimated from Tierra del Fuego to the Bering Strait. Darwin did not accept the
implications of the evidence that he saw with his own eyes.
The Darwinian Revolution was the rebirth of Aristotle, whose ideas had lost ground, if not
at the time of the Renaissance, then in the Age of Enlightenment. Even in the Age of
Enlightenment men espoused ideas of a peaceful earth. Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that
there was a happy beginning to the human race and that because of man's sinfulness, he has
become what he is today. That paradise existed in the past is another dream.
In the days of Rousseau and Voltaire there lived in France a man whose name is probably not
familiar to most of you. He was an engineer named Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. He wrote an
article on the Deluge for the great French Encyclopédie, published by d'Alembert and
Diderot. Boulanger also wrote l'Antiquité devoilé par ses usage's, a work in several
volumes. Voltaire and Rousseau and other great names pale in my eyes before Nicolas
Boulanger. At my request, Dr. Mullen [7] was kind enough to bring two of these volumes
from the Princeton University Library. I have displayed them on the floor as material
evidence of Boulanger's work.
I discovered Boulanger rather late in my research. First I read about him in Stecchini's
paper in the September 1963 issue of the American Behavioral Scientist [8] . Although I
still have to study Boulanger's work carefully, his findings surprise me greatly. I
realized that he was the precursorof Freud, and in many respects of myself. I do not know
what led Boulanger to his discovery. He writes mostly of the Deluge, but not only does he
realize that there were catastrophes, he draws some conclusions about the mental effects
they caused. The recognition of past cataclysms opens new vistas in all fields of inquiry,
even in morals and ethics. I wish to draw your attention to a book by Pitirim Sorokin [9]
in which he discussed calamities like world wars and famine. He discovered that two
reactions occur. One reaction is to help (a humanitarian reaction), and the other reaction
is to harm (a destructive reaction); he saw evidence for this in the excesses of the
Russian Revolution. Sorokin's idea of dichotomy is illustrated on the one hand by the way
the escapees from Egypt interpreted the noises caused by the folding and twisting of
strata, noises of the screeching Earth described also by Hesiod - the Israelites heard in
them a voice giving ethical commands.
Elsewhere on the tortured Earth, other races responded differently: Compare Olympus to
Sinai. The Homeric scandals on Olympus occurred at the time of the cataclysms; this was the
other reaction. Another example comes from Heraclitus 10 , who compared the different
descriptions of the Pantheon by Plato and by Homer. We see then, past and present, both
reactions to calamity.
PLANET GODS
The inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of man's aggression. Astronomy
preoccupied all ancient peoples - in Mexico, in Babylonia, and elsewhere. It was the
dominant occupation of the sages. The ancients watched the planetary bodies because they
were afraid that another disaster would occur. Astrology has its beginning in the deeds of
the planets. Many of the liturgies since antiquity are echoing in catastrophic events.
Around the world peoples of all faiths worshipped astral bodies. Great temples were erected
to the planetary deities. The Parthenon was built to honour Athene. In Athens, a few
columns of the temple to Zeus are still standing. Temples were erected to Jupiter in
Baalbek, and to Amon (Jupiter) in Karnak. The worship and sacrifices to the various deities
of the past have the same genesis, as do the establishment of priesthoods and priestly
rituals, many of which are still used. Even in the Christian era, temple architecture has
memorialized these events. The Gothic buildings of the Middle Ages refer to unconscious
catastrophic memories and to lingering mnemes of terrifying apparitions exemplified by the
dreadful figures of Notre Dame. The greatest feat of engineering of the past, the great
pyramids of Egypt, were royal shelters against possible repetition of catastrophic events.
In his Despotisme orientale, Boulanger discusses those ancient kings and tyrants who
behaved as if they wished to be regarded as earthly equivalents of the planetary gods. Only
rarely did they desire to be called sun gods because the Sun was never the supreme deity.
Today, we find this strange because we do not recognize the catastrophic history of our
Solar System. Macrobius, a Latin author of the fourth century identified Jupiter of
mythology and of religion as the Sun. Modern authors do the same thing when they say that
Amon was the Sun, or Nergal was the Sun; they were not. Around the world mythology and
folklore testify that some ancient terror underlies the origin of many social institutions.
The sacred prostitution of the past became the secular prostitution of today. Warfare has
its origin in the same terror. As the ancient Assyrian kings went to war they compared the
destructiveness of their acts to the devastations caused by the astral deities at the time
of upheavals. In creating symbols, men were depicting battles in the sky; the Mogen David
of ancient Israel or even of Israel of today the five-pointed star of Communist Russia and
China, and of the US Armed Forces are emblems of Athene-Pallas. The dragon, be it Chinese,
Assyrian or Mexican, or the dragon fighting with St. George or with Michael the archangel
originates from the apparition first seen on the celestial screen in the days of the
Passage of the Sea. All Mayan, Olmec and Toltec monuments and temples are constructed to
Quetzalcohuatl, the planet Venus and other planetary bodies which superceded in their
dominance one another in planetary ages. Quetzalcohuatl is omnipresent in Yucatan, a winged
serpent or dragon, exhaling burning water or naphtha.
WAR
The after-effects of what took place millennia ago do not lose their grip on the human
race. If anything, the trend continues and accelerates. Wars made by irrational nations led
by irrational governments have been recurring since the time of the Assyrian kings, and
have been growing in scale as preparations for war continue. in the last century the
Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov recognized that almost all technology for peaceful
uses had firstly originated and developed to serve destruction. The awarding of the Nobel
Peace prizes has been of no help in preventing military conflicts.
Freud exchanged with Einstein famous letters on the subject of 'Why War? ' - but he
resigned himself to the unavoidability of human carnage. Due to the persistent urge for
destruction in man, already early in the development of his theory he realized that
traumatic experiences, whether of physical or psychological nature, cause amnesia in the
individual; and further, as years passed, he realized that the victim of traumatic
experience, whether still on is conscious mind, or submerged in oblivion' urges the victim
to live once more through the traumatic experience, and sometimes, more often than not,
making somebody else the victim. But Freud thought that man was reliving the regularly-
repeated drama of the murder of the father by his grown-up sons which occurred in the caves
of the Stone Age. Freud believed that an indelible vestige of this prehistoric trauma lurks
deep within the human mind, and as years passed he came to the thought that possessed all
his thinking. Racial memory of some traumatic experiences dominates man and society to the
extent that the human race in his diagnosis, lives in delusion. But he did not know the
true traumatic nature of the historical past, namely, the outburst of wantonness in nature
itself, and so he insisted that each individual relives the catastrophes of the past, which
he believed to be the murder of the father, the Oedipus complex. He opposed the biological
view of his day, and of today, too, and insisted that this imprint was transported through
the genes from one generation to the next. He did not come to know the true nature of the
Great Trauma - born in the Theogony or battle of the planetary gods with our Earth, brought
more than once to the brink of destruction - which was the fate of Mercury, Mars, and Moon.
Freud died in exile from his home, when a crazed worshipper of Wotan was preparing another
Götterdämmerung. The great riddle unsolved, Freud closed his eyes when the hakenkreutz
(another ancient emblem) carrying troops marched into flaming Poland. Another generation
rose since the end of World War II. The technology of destruction since the days when a
mushroom rose over Hiroshima has advanced tremendously. The human urge to repeat the
traumatic experiences of the past did not subside, but grew, and he who tried to reveal
them was reviled. How many atomic submarines have been built? How many mushroom clouds can
be produced? In how many ways can we destroy all life on this Earth? A Damocles sword hangs
over the human race. The planets have finally retired into peaceful coexistence. But
mankind, though not in the center of creation, still, in its optimal place, is a
pandemonium of races and nations, while the blueprint of Armageddon is on the drawing
boards, and the arsenal to incinerate this globe and degenerate whatever population will
survive is growing from day to day. The adversaries on both sides of the Atlantic, with
many small nations emulating them are as if living with the urge to se . e again the
unchained elements in a nuclear multi-head explosion over every locality of the Old and New
Worlds.
I feel that I must speak out on this subject whenever and wherever I can. We are in a race,
and I do not know if I can help, but I must try.
Unfortunately my attempt to cure the mental illness which afflicts mankind cannot use the
methods of good psychiatry. You cannot put the human race on the couch. You cannot expect
to cure using blunt statements about the past. Without preparation, without giving the
patient a chance to prepare himself, you cannot slowly release from his subconscious mind
the necessary recognition of the traumatic past. Above all others, the scientific community
has experienced great paroxysms, and reacted in fury against the disclosures of a modern
book.
The price for my revelation has been high, but what choice did I have? The enemy is time. I
conclude with a verse which is not my own, and I don't remember it exactly, but the hour is
late, and I will repeat it:
We are in a race with the Reaper
We hastened, he tarried, we won.
I wish I could hope that it will be that way, and not the other way around.
Notes (Cultural Amnesia)
1. Dr. Velikovsky has previously published Oedipus and Akhnaton, the reconstruction of a
human tragedy, at the end of the house of Akhnaton, with the help of Greek legends, Earth
in Upheaval, discussing paleontology and geology, Ages in Chaos, Volume one and Peoples of
the Sea, the concluding volume, discussing archaeology and ancient sources, and Worlds in
Collision, discussing folklore and mythology.
2. Which is the astronomical way of indicating 687 B. C.
3. See Worlds in Collision (Doubleday, 1950) page 122, footnote 10; (Pocket Books, 1977),
page 134; (Abacus, 1972), Page 127, footnote 3. Because of their importance Velikovsky's
books will be cited for three editions. The footnotes refer in the following order to the
hardcover Doubleday edition, the new Pocket Books edition, and the Abacus Paperback
edition.
4. Velikovsky is suggesting that the Ouranos referred to in myths might be the planet
Uranus, rediscovered in the eighteenth century by William Herschel, or the planet Neptune,
rediscovered in the nineteenth century by Adams and Leverrier.
5. Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955), pages 71-72, footnote 5, (Abacus, 1973), pages 64-
65; (Dell, 1968), page 75; (Pocket Books, 1977), pages 66-67.
6. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published in 1543.
7. Dr. William Mullen, Hodder Fellow in the Humanities, Princeton University.
8. "The Inconstant Heavens", pages 19-35,43-44; this article has been reprinted in de
Grazia, Juergens, and Stecchini eds., The Velikovsky Affair (University Books, 1966) pages
80-126.
9. Man and Society in Calamity (Greenwood Press, 1968).
10. Heraclitus, author of The Homeric Allegories (1st century present era) not to be
confused with Heraclitus of Ephesus.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
CHAPTER TWO
THE PALAETIOLOGY OF FEAR AND MEMORY
Alfred de Grazia
Department of Politics, New York University
Palaeo-anthropology has reached a stage of agitation perhaps unparalleled since the
nineteenth century discoveries of palaeolithic man. Serious questions of chronology have
been raised. On the one hand, it appears that hominids have been long on Earth, perhaps
even five million years by certain radiodating, and have used tools for just as long a
time. On the other hand, the end of the ice Age has been pushed ever nearer to the
present, and with it many of the early creations of man, so that speculation upon a
neolithic revolution of mind and culture flourishes. That is, human nature is proposed
both to be extremely old and extremely young.
A second prominent question concerns the nature of invention. increasingly we understand
that every human "invention" or practice that is a "first" cannot be called first if only
because every invention is a complex of usages requiring a species that is functioning
holistically. An elaborated club requires a tool for its making, a sense of design, a
visualized succession of futures in which it may be used, a notion of property, a
hierarchy of force, and a directed memory. Add a firehearth with its myriad implications
and you have a culture.
If palaeochronology is correct even in general, and I am not sure that it is a Homo of
hammer and fire appeared exceedingly early. But, if so, then why the hundreds of thousands
or millions of years of stagnation? If a club, why not a panzer division and an automated
whaling expedition in the next two thousand years thereafter?
It may be that the datings are quite wrong. Or perhaps Homo has undergone sharp genetic
change on one or more occasions in the middle of his long course of life. Or maybe some
set of profound experiences propelled him into the modernity of the neolithic age.
Without addressing itself to the first two possibilities, this paper argues the last of
them. It maintains that mankind was goaded to leap into modernity by a series of
horrendous environmental changes. These events of the sky and earth closed down the age of
palaeolithic hammer-plus-fire people and introduced modern humans in their stead. A
furious socialization and inventiveness possessed an already acculturated people.
The transformation, according to this theory, must have forcefully involved as leading
elements in its development the systems of human fear and human memory.
PART I: FEAR
By our third year of life we are already communicating catastrophic experiences to others.
If we have not yet been catechized by religion, we may have learned to chant of
catastrophe by means of fables. We may have heard repeatedly of Chicken-Licken (alias
Chicken Little, Henny-Penny, "The End of the World"), and we wish to join the procession
of animals that hope to be sheltered from the falling sky, seeking the protection of the
king (authority), fearful lest the fox (a wicked force) eat us up in his cave, or hopeful
that an owl (knowledge) will tell us that we are only imagining disaster (dreaming). This
same story, with some variations, is found in many cultures. The same mental process and
types of output are found everywhere. People sense fear, share it with others, and treat
its symptoms by means of fable.
A FIRST APPROXIMATION
Psychology has long tried to pinpoint a "primal fear" or "primal anxiety" that seems to be
born with us or infects us soon thereafter. The fear seems to originate very early; else
why would we as infants be so eager to enter upon our therapy through chant and fable?
Such therapy appears to be attachable to any object, outside or within the developing
organism. By "attachable" (or should we use the term "displaceable"?) and by object," we
mean that early fear can be stimulated by, and subjectively perceived as caused by, a
hand, bottle, spasm, sight, noise, lifting or sinking in space, or whatever may occupy,
overlay or reinforce certain neural paths that course among our glands, brains, and
organs; the fear appears to have a preexisting depository somewhere within us. It has been
observed to be more intense among infants who were not handled, than among those who were
moved about and played with.
Close observers of the experiences of infants can see that a practically undifferentiated
combination of organs may respond to stimuli in all major categories of life thrusts. The
earlier in life that stress is applied the more quickly the total development of the
organism. Stress stimulates the organism's hypothalamus and pituitary glands, as well as
its spinal cord and celiac plexus, and the aforesaid glands release hormones (ACTH) into
the blood stream that activate the adrenal cortex to release more hormones that accelerate
metabolism. The system functions a few days after birth. In these senses, there is no
reason to deny the assertion that primal fear may be hereditary or even pre-natal.
We may categorize the life-thrusts as centered upon control of the environment, affection,
and well being (ingestion and excretion); that is, operationally, reactions to stimuli and
stress can be placed into these three groupings. Later on, these categories branch out:
well-being ramifies into purely organic health and the symbol system connected with it and
into far-flung-economic systems with their symbols; affection spreads over an area of
sexuality, respect, and altruism; control is refined into power and knowledge. The
categories need not be defined here, but are merely illustrative. Behavioral patterns (and
institutions) emerge from, cluster about, and fixate upon such categories. For example,
infantile sexuality gives rise to sexuality, then to family control, or control of
attendant's response, also to dominance, and to hierarchy - with all of their
differentiated patterns from place-to-place and person-to-person. "No two snowflakes are
quite alike." Here, too, we need not go farther.
ANIMAL AND HUMAN FAILURES ALIKE
Primal fear, we must admit, is observed in animals, whether infant or adult. When we say
of a person "she jumped like a startled doe" we begin metaphorically what could be a
minute comparison of all respects in which mammals respond to events with fearful
behavior. We go to accounts of disasters, which may be read into fossil palaeontology or
come from histories of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods. We note such facts as,
or see that, animal and humans flee alike and together into caves to avoid flood and fire.
Mammals, like people, become desperate with hunger, become aggressive and seductive with
sexual lust, and learn to exploit their environments.
But now we come to that well-worn concept: "the range of response." The range of searching
and reacting is very much greater among humans, marvelously greater, and even
"qualitatively" greater. Human behavior is immensely expanded; furthermore, by imagination
in the "hall of mirrors" that symbolism furnishes.
We discover that we have large brains. We think, "Here is the source and solution. The one
unique trait of humans!" Our vastly superior range of behavior results from a capability
for cerebral reflexes on a grand scale. We can gain more impressions, store more, classify
them more flexibly and finely, and use them more logically to solve problems.
Our triumph is short lived. The human of today does not have a larger brain than do
various fossil skeletons that were unearthed in an environment of deprivation and squalor
comparing badly with the hives of bees and the houses of beavers. Yet this style of life
lasted for many thousands of years. For that matter, a number of living groups and members
of groups seem to be only one step ahead - largely in symbolism we mark - from the mammals
around them. Moreover, we must admit that we cannot solve the most important problems that
beset all animals - food, death, and survival of the species. We have solved them "in our
minds" perhaps, but perhaps the animals have, too. Actually we must beg the question to
proceed further. We have to say "Granted our preferences, we are the best animal on earth
to achieve them." That is, we like what we like. Very well. What is it that we wish to
achieve. And then we say what any animal would say if it could speak: "Self-fulfillment!
We wish to be all that we might be. That is, healthy, loving, and wise. With such
variations of these themes as our species can enjoy."
Well, then, where is the place for primal fear in this scheme of things? Primal fear is
the uncomfortable feeling that we are about to be denied some or all of all that we want,
beginning with life itself, the prerequisite to health and all else. We have never been
successful as a group in becoming healthy, loving and wise. Our failures in each
generation, and the failures of those who train us, make us fearful.
With these obvious statements of fact, have we not solved the problem of the origin and
transmission of primal fear?
THE DRIVE TO FAIL
We wonder how far this simple solution has carried us. The application of invention and
administration to human societies has certainly erased fears, at some times and places and
in certain areas of life more than in others. We write books, build skyscrapers, land on
the Moon, muster armies, plough the land deeply and neatly with machines, and compound
billions of aspirin tablets. True, we suspect that some of these activities and others as
well have only in part to with becoming healthy, loving, and wise. Often our activities
seem to resemble a dog chasing its tail, or more abstractly, they suggest a vicious cycle.
We suspect that a great deal of what we do, of what we achieve, of how we fulfill our
desires to be healthy, loving, and wise - indeed all of our history shows it - is not to
become healthy, loving, and wise, but just the opposite: to suffer, to hate, and to
suppress knowledge! We choose very often the bad, if not for "us" then for "others" (a
mere non-psychological and pragmatic distinction); we make the bad look good; diabolism,
in a word. We can identify this diabolism, the evil principle of life, as a product of the
primal fear. Possibly Freud's "death - instinct" can be indicated as its product, as well.
How do we operationalize the concept "fear"? How many stones of the Cathedral of Notre
Dame were laid by fear? Whatever stimulates in an organism reactions of chemical and
perceived malaise, avoidance, and hostility produces fear. The greater the scope and
intensity of the stimulus (which we may call deprivation, also) the greater the fear and
anxiety.
The word "fear" more precisely denotes any one or a combination of chemical and behavioral
activities of the organism the sheer enumeration of which would consume pages. The list
grows, as more and more activities may be observed, in combination with others, to be
prompted to some degree by fear. B. F. Skinner, for instance, once he acquired a keen
perception of aversive training in all aspects of life, was driven to total reconstruction
of society, a Walden II, where alone may all the interacting primitive mechanisms of
society be avoided and substituted for by positive reinforcement of desired behavior.
Both stimulus and response may be social and/ or personal, and either or both may be
conscious and/ or unconscious. Much of the time we find ourselves telling someone, "You
don't know what's bothering you," which is all very well, provided that we know what is
bothering him and can prove it. Down, down, we are led - and back, back!
FEAR STORAGE
Fear is stored as a potential response. The word "stored" is convenient but we cannot mean
by it that a fear-bank is located somewhere in the organism like a slab of fat or a quart
of blood. Presently, a fear-bank is a fear-capacity, that is: a capacity of a system to
respond chemically and behaviorally faster, more intensively, and more extensively to a
fear-producing stimulus, plus a corresponding capacity to perceive fear-stimulating events
in the environment ever more finely.
The response is physically connected with objects identified by the person as the same or
similar. But the identifications are not easy and automatic. The logic is not according to
a rational "is" but is experiential. One proceeds analogically and culturally. One is
subject to the categories of mind, gland, and anatomy in general in matching a personal
historical event of fear with a present cause now of fear. But to these are added social
or "racial" or collective fears. One is subject simultaneously to indoctrinated matching
of the historically experienced fear with the presently socially identified cause of fear
which may or may not be (for many reasons) the "true" cause of the present fear here and
now.
Suppose that we call the emotional load of historical and catastrophic and present fear
the "affect" of fear, thinking of it as a kind of fear-depot. In what way, if any, may we
say the stored affect is hereditarily transmitted, as well as socially transmitted? If we
exclude chemical, radioactive and viral materials from the term "history," a historical
experience appears to be incapable of having a genetic impact on an organism that is yet
to be conceived. The organism is unaffected at conception by the impact and effect of
historical experience. A child is not frightened by a bomb that his mother heard long
before he was conceived, but by stories of its fearfulness.
Still the organic setting of the fear mechanism is inherited. Therefore, one's personal
history, whatever the person experiences that is structurally analogous to the ancestral
social experience will be organically experienced with
The same types of symptoms and affect. In other words, a maze of sensible and intelligible
tracks is set up genetically, and is the natural system to be used for analogous
experiencing by the person or for training purposes by the group as it organizes ancestral
group experiences (as symbolized) and new future experiences (as interpreted). (This
general condition varies within unknown limits according to individual constitutional
sensitivities to fear.)
PRINCIPLES OF THE FEAR SYSTEM
We may recall now several principles that have occurred to us thus far:
a) The areas of fear coincide with the areas of life (the ubiquity of fear).
b) The greater the scope and intensity of the deprivation over the areas of life, the
greater the fear (the fear/ deprivation covariation).
c) The greater the fear, the greater the storage of fear-affect (fear-bank).
d) Any new experience of deprivation calls into being as response the affect that is
anatomically and socially determined to be analogous (the analogous fear-response).
e) The greater the stored affect, the greater the new fear. (The over-response to fear).
Now I would suggest another principle that is not, in my opinion, difficult to accept:
f) The banking of fear-affect (of anatomical and/ or social origins) is not confined
strictly to a set of analogous areas of responses (the displacement of fear).
For example, anatomically there is no reason to believe that there is a distinctive
mechanism in the adrenal medulla that regulates the flow of the potent drug, adrenaline,
according to prescriptions marked neatly "to be used for sexual use only" or "use only in
case of food deprivation," or "reserved for screaming bombs." The neural instruction to
the gland is general: "Emit a little" or "Emit a lot," and there follows various juggling
measures by other organs to handle the flow of adrenalin, hopefully advancing the body to
a postulated, fictional "equilibrium".
The brain, especially the "higher" control centers in small crises (as perceived) and the
"lower" control centers in great crises (as perceived), does manage to institute some kind
of "cause-effect" or "stimulus-logical response" relation. So do many other more archaic
elements of the body.
However, we must add another principle:
g) The greater the stored fear-affect and the greater the present experienced deprivation,
the greater the overflow of responding affect that had been stored in remote "illogical"
"unanalogous" life-areas (Excessive fear-displacement).
Take, as one of many available illustrations, the expression, "When he thought he was
about to die, his whole life flashed before him." In a most traumatic experience, it may
occur that every area of life becomes instantly relevant, connected, and impressed.
Specialization, in fear as in other areas of experience, must surrender to generalization
in the face of crisis. Crisis mobilizes: psychologically, organically, and socially.
FEAR OVERLOAD AND FAILURE
Once more, we recall something already said, in order to fashion yet another principle. We
said that historically humankind has been, if not a failure, then only a restricted
success. The more marvelous and burgeoning our creations, the more reason we are given to
believe that the very exuberance of our endeavors is itself a fatal sign that we have
achieved little in the eternal struggle against fear. We have not become healthy, loving
and wise.
h) Humankind has stored up too much fear to become healthy, loving, and wise (unhappiness
through fear overload).
Wherever one is pricked by fear, the fear generalizes and is related to other areas of
life. One does not have to experience on "one's own account" more than a minimum of fear-
inducing experience. Most known societies have elaborate institutional and artistic
machinery for building and reinforcing fears without the need of experiencing deprivations
beyond the minimum. Societies carry an over-load of fear, which impresses generation after
generation; hence individuals suffering frustrations must ordinarily respond with fears in
a generalized rather than specialized, causally-connected way.
If this is true, what areas of life are to be held responsible for providing humankind
with its most excruciating and enduring terrors? Would it be in the struggle for food? In
the search for love? In the understanding of oneself and nature? Or what?
Let us speculate upon the history of these needs since the age of the hominids. Every
single being who has ever lived has had a number of crises or encounters, many of them
deprivational and frustrating, in all three areas. But meanwhile' in most cases, he has
enjoyed certain indulgences, and he has seen that others, enjoying momentarily either
better or worse experiences, are not overly agitated by his personal experiences. Whether
the human race is five million or fifteen thousand years old, a continuous, varied
lifetime of experiences has enveloped the individual human being.
At all times deprivation result in structural personal affect-deposits and social
deposits. For example, the birth throes are agonizing for mother and infant. The anatomy
registers the terror upon the infant for life, with some variance of intensity. The
society encourages the mother and attendants to reduce infant pain as much as possible,
and helps the mother by various rites and medicines through her agony. So with diseases,
famine, sex rivalry, accidents, and conflicts.
If human existence had been nothing but these frustrations, would man be what he is today?
No, we say. For he has suffered these always as an ordinary sensitive mammal. Could they
have accumulated bit by bit in our customs and institutions to give us ultimately an
overcharge of fear? Again we point to a largely unprogressive, artless primeval history.
But add now the experiences of local earthquakes, local storms, local volcanic eruptions
and occasional meteorite falls. Would these be enough to create a person who in several
thousand years moved from idiot to savant? Since these, too, have been among the eternal
fund of human experiences, we must a priori deny them major effect.
CATASTROPHIC FEAR
However, consideration of these shocking experiences suggests that if a much greater
disaster were visited upon the human species, inflicting severe deprivations of food,
light, air, water, heat, affection, property, and control, extending simultaneously to
practically all humans and animals, and suggesting in many ways an immense life force in
human and/ or animal form, then such a disaster would bring about a massive social fear
which, on top of the uniformly accruing fears, might overload the total fear-affect-
bearing capacity of the human race for thousands of years. That a series of such disasters
occurred in the period of the dawn of civilization seems to be highly probable. We may
cite here not only the striking documentation published by Immanuel Velikovsky from
religious myths and secular histories of the earliest times, but also the researches of
the Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars such as Giordano Bruno and Nicolas-Antoine
Boulanger, surveys of Claude Schaeffer on the comparative stratigraphy of the Near and
Middle East, and the ever-mounting geological evidence of widespread destruction in
Holocene times, much of which was also compiled by Velikovsky. Humanity was literally born
in an epoch of disasters, and it may be correct to say that man was created by disasters.
That is to say, by principle: i) Natural catastrophes must be the origins of the overload
of fear-affect that has driven man to create most of his goods and evils, his arts, and
his institutions (the catastrophic fear).
And, if we accept this idea, we place it with our other principles, and say:
j) The super-experience, the super-fear, spills its affect upon other areas of life and
makes them develop in multitudinous ways, all of them under the influence, the style, and
the behavioral conditioning of the primal fear (the cultural ubiquity of the catastrophic
fear). This catastrophic element, the "Disaster-factor," overruns all other life areas and
affects them all. The catastrophic "D-factor" becomes the most widely employed model for
the design of life - of religions, of governments, of transportation and commerce, of sex
practices and of conflict and war. That it has been until now the least obvious and the
most unconscious of human fear-burdens does not negate its presence or diminish its
quantity. Its deeply buried and fully generalized character contributes to the difficulty
of discovering and elaborating its origins and operations.
Since D-affect has been most pronounced in the development of affects in all value areas
of life, the accumulated D-affect is greater than any single source of fear and continues
to supply chemicals and behaviors when these other sources are stimulated. In this sense,
then, a person today responds to the disasters of several - thousand years ago. There have
been 77 reproductive generations of 33 years each since the last catastrophe located by
Velikovsky in -686. Calculated as Memorial or Mnemonic generations of 60 years, that is,
the years between a child and an old story-teller of the clan, the elapsed time is 44
generations. One is responding today to D-events of 44 generations of collective
remembering and reburial. One does so even when one (or an intimate observer) would claim
that he is responding only to fear of assault, rape, thunder, hunger, punishment or
whatever.
A "D-event" is both general and terrible. It supplies these two qualities. Because it is
general, it can be associated with all affect-types, that is, with areas of health,
affection, knowledge, etc. Because it is terrible it provides a substantial part of the
"D-analogous affect" stored in relation to such affects. Thus ordinary behaviors, then,
cannot be natural; they are already constructed of D-affect and loaded with D-associations
that are drawn upon habitually. Sex is not sex; commerce is not commerce; war is not war.
They are all this at a higher level of affect. Very ancient catastrophes at the dawn of
human nature continue to have pronounced effects upon a very wide range of behaviors
making it difficult even to speak of a pure event in love, commerce, conflict, and
science.
PART II: MEMORY
Fear stands in a reciprocal relation to memory. Each exists in the other and builds upon
the other. Memory is more than an instrument of fear. It is created by fear and yet alone
makes possible the constructive (destructive) elaboration of fear.
The science of remembering and forgetting - what shall it be called - mnemonology? its
scope ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the "'psychopathology of everyday
life," as Freud put it, to the "'collective amnesia" that Velikovsky asserts of ancient
catastrophes and that German educators observe as they try to teach the history of Nazism.
it must deal with myths such as the Love Affair of Ares and Aphrodite in Homer's Odyssey
that mask world disasters, and with nursery songs that mask the murders of kings.
We may quote what Katherine Elwers Thomas found when she explored The Real Personages of
Mother Goose:
The lines of Little Bo-Peep and Little Boy Blue, which to childish minds have only
quaint charm of meaning, which suggest but the gayest of blue skies and rapturous-hearted
creatures disporting in daisy-pied meadows, hold in reality grim import. Across all this
nursery lore there falls at times the black shadow of the headman's block and in their
seeming lightness are portrayed the tragedies of kings and queens, the corruptions of
opposing political parties, and stories of fanatical religious strife that have gone to
make world history.
For instance, the child sings of "four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie." And "When
the pie was opened, the birds began to sing." Now, "Wasn't that a tasty dish to set before
the King?" The child is singing of actual history that was never heard or learned, of an
incident in the grim struggle between the English Crown and the Church, during which, to
appease the greed and hostility of the King, twenty-four deeds of Church land were sealed
into a pouch of dough and delivered to his castle. in old slang, the "dough" was handed
over; in new slang, the "bread." Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, in his Genealogy of the
Gods, writes of Memoria, daughter of Uranus, the first great sky god:
In Pieria, Memoria, ruler of the hills of Eleuther, gave birth to the Muses out of union
with Zeus, son of Chronos, and thus the forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow.
The Theogony was composed after -729, that is, during or after an era of troubled skies;
but it was a mythical work "reporting" on events that had occurred hundreds and thousands
of years before.
A functional psychology rests in the quoted passage. "Remembering" was no mere scratching
of experience upon a tabula rasa of the mind. Memoria or Mnymosyne or "Recollector" is the
mother of history (Cleo). She has as her progeny the means of controlling herself, for
Zeus is the ordering paternal force. There are nine (some said three or five) muses
governing the arts and sciences - dancing, music, and singing, but also history and
astronomy. They will lend human memory its possibilities of selective attention, delusion,
illusion, abatement, extension, a shadowing and heightening - all that is necessary to
achieve that combination of remembering and forgetting which makes social life possible on
a level that is higher than the level of non remembering or total amnesia. Significantly,
Memoria is the daughter of Uranus, who was the grandfather of Zeus; she is no mere sprite.
Her Eleuthrian Hills are the realm of freedom, so she governs freedom.
Without further ado, we may assert that the muses were created "by Zeus" to control the
human memory so that humans should forget their catastrophes, and in so doing get surcease
from sorrows. And that the muses will achieve this by transforming events through art and
song, through myth. The memory of disasters is doctored "by Zeus" ultimately to brainwash
humanity and to present the new order of heaven as proper, "law abiding," and beautiful.
Hesiod, reciting this profound truth, goes on to describe how the muses work, reminding us
of a combined team for domestic propaganda and psychological warfare. As a result, all the
arts and sciences have been manipulated by the muses. What we know of the catastrophes
must come from a "natural history" - geology, biology, physics and astronomy - and a
politics, philosophy, and theology that have been censored by the muses. Additionally, we
must obtain our historical material from myth, song, dances, and drama that were similarly
screened. It is well to insist upon this premise, whether we come to the problem from an
acquaintanceship with the natural sciences or the social sciences. The gods, and
especially Jupiter-Zeus, who seems under various names to have developed the patterns of
anthropological psychology among most cultures, have required this premise of us.
THE TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY AS SUCH
In a prescient passage Friedrich Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals, 1887) stabs into the
heart of the matter. He asks, "How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can
one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the
passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there?"
And continues, "One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this
primeval problem were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful
and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. 'If something is to
stay in the memory it must be burned in; only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the
memory' - this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring)
psychology on earth. One might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, seriousness,
mystery, and gloomy coloring still distinguish the life of man and a people, something of
the terror that formerly attended all promises, pledges, and vows on earth is still
effective: the past, the longest, deepest, and sternest past, breathes upon us and rises
up in us whenever we become 'serious'. Man could never do without blood, torture, and
sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most dreadful
sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of 'the first-born among them), the most repulsive
mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all religious cults (and all
religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) -all this has its origin in the
instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics."
Unfortunately, after this amazing passage, Nietzsche collapses. Although he immediately
goes hunting for the acts that provoked such mnemotechnics, he shoots a little rabbit: the
primitive forms of contract between buyers and sellers. In order to trade, men had to keep
promises; in order to ensure obligations, the failure to repay had to be punished
severely: thus the genealogy of morals.
We are reminded of Sigmund Freud's alternate route to fundamental error: that in the
Oedipal conflict and the slaying of the father, man achieved a (bad) conscience and the
need to justify and to punish. The Oedipus myth has much breadth and staying power, but a
still greater and universal fear had to be imposed to support its recollection. And it is
difficult to conceive of anything more grand and durable than the catastrophes attendant
upon the Holocene period of Earth history.
We assert therefore that man's memory itself, the prototypical remembering, is a
consequence of catastrophe more than of any other incidental or habitual interest of
humanity.
THE RULES OF MEMORY
All memory occurs under conditions that guarantee its imperfection. Given its mode of
creation, remembering must function compatibly. No datum will enter the mind
photographically. Rather the inputs will be screened not only by the senses, which
themselves, in large part, perceive because of their prior social condition, but by the
willingness to admit only censored data.
This holds true, as many careful studies have shown, for the most non-controversial and
trivial kinds of experiences. Who says remember says select; who says memory, says
forgetting.
By the time of Homer, for example, numerous natural disasters had befallen humanity. The
perfect ease of the Song of Demodokos in the Odyssey of Homer about an adulterous love
among the gods attests to an approaching achievement of "perfect imperfection": nothing of
the original truth need be omitted, so well under control are the conditions creating
imperfections. We are on our way to the climax of artistic sublimation.
The concept of "accurate memory" is a useful fiction. We are even compelled to say that it
is a theocratic fiction. For the content of what is remembered is in the broadest sense
religiously and politically determined. The Homerids, reciting thousands of lines from
memory, were the practitioners and teachers of "accurate memory" as defined to protect
society against its anxieties. The ideal canons of registering and remembering set by
modern science are evidence in themselves that "you cannot trust your memory" and
"independent observers have to confirm the same facts." But also the establishment of
scientists as a social system lays down the rules of what is to be watched for, what is to
be ignored, and what is to be distorted.
The intensity of remembering is directly proportional to the gravity of a trauma. By
intensity we mean sharpness, detail, and durability in conscious and unconscious form. By
gravity we mean how deeply and adversely one is affected in the major regions of his life:
his physical being, his cherished ones, his group, his wealth, his control, his beliefs
about the good and the true. Machiavelli said to the rulers: it is better to be feared by
the people than to be loved, if you cannot be both. Fear and anxiety drove primeval
humanity to invent and to organize so that it could predict and control the world, and
thereupon its fears. Fear mixed itself early with love, and produced the continuous
ambivalence of sexuality that is exhibited throughout the most ancient literatures.
The most intense memories are likely to occur without "willing" them. This is
understandable once we consider that no one will seek to subject himself to the conditions
that produce painful memories. But one will try to will a pleasant memory. How many times
do people think, "I shall never forget this beautiful sunset ... I shall always remember
this kindness ... I shall never forget this orgasm," only to lose their grasp of the
memory shortly thereafter. If a person remembers "a kind act" done to him long ago, it is
in the context of a generally unkind and fearful environment of acts. The most that can be
done to "will" the memory is to tie it consciously and unconsciously to disasters and
especially to institutionalize the disasters so that the group will continuously reenact
them. All great historical religions are based upon these psychological operations.
The most intense memories are most likely to be unavailable to the conscious mind, and to
be buried in dreams and myths. In these anxiety suppressing and anxiety-controlling
mechanisms, the dream and myth language is likely to approach as close as possible to the
ultimate universal, traumatic experiences, without becoming unbearable: it rides on the
tracks of birth throes, sexual copulation, death scenes, violence, and conflict, including
of course, all the conventional transformations of these materials into religious and
political activities, routines, and institutions. This "step-down" principle works on the
depth of a burial, and it brings about the selection of the next less traumatic kind of
material as the screen for the more traumatizing type.
The speed of remembering is proportional to the intensity of the trauma. "The experience
burned itself indelibly upon my mind," one says. A single experience is enough to cause
remembering, if it is grave. If too grave, physical collapse occurs, and no further
memorization is possible.
At the other extreme, in the absence of fear, interest, or even recognition, an abundance
of knowledge moves, as they say of the classroom, "from the notes of the teacher to the
notes of the student without passing through the mind of either."
The phenotypes of the myth are functions of the archetypes of the cultural personality.
This is merely to say that the kind of story told, together with its details, are
characteristics of the culture.
For instance, the Love Song of Demodokos in the Odyssey has Ares and Aphrodite (Mars and
the Moon) trapped in adultery by Hephaistos, the smith god, or Vulcan, whom I identify
with Pallas Athena. I place the story in the late 7th Century before the present era, 44
memorial generations ago. Some more ancient pre-Greek and proto-Greek cultures practicing
group marriage would have had to find a different plot and details to screen the
reiteration of the Moon and Mars encounter. It is characteristic of our partially Greek-
born culture, and a proof of our cultural ancestry, that the adulterous love triangle,
descended from the Greeks, is still a favorite artistic theme.
FORGETTING
Forgetting is subject to the same rules as remembering. That is, amnesia is activated in
the same way as memory. If we think of our list of rules of remembering, we substitute
forgetting for remembering, and we get the following rules of forgetting.
Like remembering, forgetting is guaranteed to occur under all conditions, and to be
imperfect, never complete. Nor is forgetting accurate: it is ragged, affected by many
particular causes. If the popular metaphor speaks of the stream of memory, we can speak as
well of the stream of forgetting. Forgetting occurs proportionate to the gravity of the
trauma, and forgetting occurs without willing to forget.
The most intense forgetfulness is most likely to be available to the conscious mind; we
must admit, "we cannot recall what it is that we have forgotten," when the thing forgotten
is a matter of grave threat to the mind.
Forgetting, too, speeds up with the intensity of the trauma. For this reason we can
believe that events that occurred perhaps only a generation before Homer, or even in his
lifetime, might achieve a complete aesthetic screen at his hands. Let us imagine what may
have happened in a typical disaster of the "Age of Mars," that is in the 8th and 7th
centuries. I use here a model that I have developed in a forthcoming book, but if you
will, you can transfer the scene to Krakatoa in 1883 or Nagasaki in 1945. Immanuel
Velikovsky has discovered a mass of particulars that he has grouped and recounted in
Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval.
An ordinary person is alerted and examines the sky with a foreboding of evil. A brilliant
speck grows larger from day to day. He is told that it has done so before, with terrible
consequences. The memory is already excited. Calendars are studied and worked over.
Oracles are consulted. All group efforts are mobilized to control the menace: rituals of
subservience and devotion; the stricter punishment of any suspected deviants in all areas
of law and conduct; the destruction of enemies if they can be promptly engaged; the
sacrifice of more and more valuable properties and persons.
Relentlessly the menace approaches. The sky is full of lights, shapes and turbulences. The
Earth begins to respond - to live, to move, to split open, to smoke, to blow up strong
winds, to shriek, to take fire. Thunderbolts strike down up n all sides. Our hero watches.
He is exceedingly frightened, as are his family and neighbors. There may be a pandemonium
in which he faints or is struck dumb; he may scramble into a temple or house or cave; he
will cover his head. The young will observe more of the scene than the old.
The disaster occurs in successive kinds of turbulence, in all the various destructive -
forms of earth, air, fire, and water, the primordial elements. Animals, both tame and
wild, crowd in upon people, terrified, unsavage, unhungry. Eardrums are blown in or sucked
out. Some are struck blind, others gassed. Strange objects and life forms drop from the
sky. The sky reels. The waters gyrate madly and rush to and fro. The vista is one of
universal destruction. There is nowhere to go. Cohorts disappear. Strangers appear. The
survivors regroup after each incident. They are partially paralyzed with fear and despair,
partly striving for survival and control.
'What god is angry? ' they wonder, if they don't already know. What other gods can they
appeal to and how? What trait of a god should they address themselves to? The most
important religious and political decisions of their lifetimes are made; the most sacred
instruments and skills of the immemorial past are called upon in the crisis. Nothing,
nobody, will ever persuade them to behave differently, or their children, or, if they can
help it, their descendants into the eternal future. When the disasters subside, the
survivors are crazed. They must regroup, recollect their thoughts, and do something about
the memory. This is not a task for an astronomer sitting in the air-conditioned hall of a
giant telescope in Arizona. Not for a sober historian. It is a task for any surviving
priest-rulers: "We have been visited by gods and messengers of gods. The figures they
strike in the sky are their various apparitions when destructive and punitive. Good gods
and spirits fight evil ones. Our conduct displeases them: we must strengthen our
observance of rituals; purify ourselves; expiate our sins; sacrifice ever more precious
possessions; kill more enemies; control the libertarian; guard the names by which we call
a god; and remind ourselves forevermore of the events of these days while we watch for
their eventual recurrence."
Again history is quickly subverted; indeed, it has never existed in a value-free, fully
detailed form. Instead memorial activities are planned by the community that will register
whatever intensity on the memorial-screen is sufficient to suppress the pain of the memory
of the original experience plus all preceding related and similar traumatic experiences.
We cannot be too explicit. No sooner is a disaster experienced than it is remembered; no
sooner remembered than it is forgotten. All the rules about remembering are rules of
forgetting.
What? Are we to believe that memory is a forgetting and to forget is to remember? We seem
to be approaching this paradox; if it is not indeed an absurdity. Yet, if we resolve the
paradox, we shall better understand the great mystery of myth, which bids us remember
ferociously in order the more firmly and securely to forget.
The paradox disappears with one fact, well appreciated. The fact is that a memory can
enter the mind, but can rarely leave it. Except by organic lesion, there is little
'forgetting. ' The biological system can scarcely throw off a memory; it can readily
manipulate it.
What we call forgetting is the internal bookkeeping system of memory. From conception to
death and dissolution, the system will always show a net profit. But, like many a
bookkeeping system in commerce, memorial bookkeeping has numerous ways of casting the
balance so as to conceal the surplus. It is with the forgotten material that the mind
works to create myth, art, and hypothesis. The concept of forgetting is needed to describe
the handling of the transactions of memory that permit consciousness, instrumentally
rational conduct, and normal behavior.
Where is the balance cast that makes these two opposites indeed opposite? It is the
functional machinery of the mind, where opposites are coined according to the needs of the
moment.
Whatever stabilizes the organisms's "normalcy" is chosen; and the organism forgets
conveniently. A kind of mnemonic homeostasis occurs. But the forgotten, the fearfully
forgotten, becomes the Disaster-affect overload whose palaetiology was discussed in the
first part of this paper, with its "good" and "bad" results.
Now the principles of the memory system may be elicited and put before you, as was done
earlier with the principles of the fear system.
a) Human memory was created and subsequently sustained by catastrophic D-Fear.
b) Memory potentiates the constructive and destructive elaboration of fear out of its
primeval and subsequent tracks through the forms of the arts and sciences.
c) Memory (including history or group memory) is intrinsically imperfect and a reciprocal
of forgetting (amnesia).
d) Memory and amnesia increase directly with the severity of a trauma.
e) Less fearful memories surface to consciousness to function as blocks to the surfacing
of more fearful memories.
f) The act of forgetting is a human mental device that functions unconsciously to balance
the complex transactions between repression and recall. This process may be called
mnemonic homeostasis.
THE DIFFICULTY OF D-FEAR THERAPY
Given the fear and memory systems of humanity, is there some therapy that could rid a
culture of its great fear and at the same time maintain a distinction between "good" and
"bad"? We have seen that anatomical and social conditioners of fear and memory complement
and supplement each other, first in permitting, then encouraging, then finally demanding
the D-factor pattern of human development. A theory of genetic traits (post-human
acquired) or of genetic mutation is probably not necessary to explain the eternal play of
good/ evil, and indulgence/ deprivation. Neither, we stress, is it useful to postulate
primeval economic encounters (Nietzsche) or primeval sexual encounters (Freud) or
archetypes (Jung) as the origins of conscience and civilization. The ways in which such
encounters are carried on are the work partly of themselves and of each other, but in
large part of great prehistoric natural disasters, involving, perforce, changes in the
conditions of the skies as well as of life on earth. Ruefully, we must admit: The creation
myths are more right than we have been in their exposure of what made us human.
The prospects of personal therapy and public policy for the "Disaster-affect overload" are
not bright. Obviously, if our analysis is correct, we are ill prepared to meet present
fears on a one-to-one basis. Rather, we must overreact continuously, instead of reacting
in proportion to the need to act and in relation specifically to proven causes.
Furthermore, the worse the crisis, the greater the tendency to act non-rationally and
over-generally - to fire all guns of our ship at once in all directions.
Moreover, to our disappointment, if we observe social and religious movements that have
caught hold of the principle of "fear-affect reduction" as a way of fulfilling people's
souls and making them happier, such as the Quakers or Buddhists, we remark upon two
unfortunate concomitant and probably causally-related behaviors. In the first place, such
movements are themselves invariably subjected to severe social threats and deprivations in
their efforts to free an obsessed society from fear. Hence, often they become too loaded
down with fear themselves to be, as they desire to be, much less to cure the society. The
paranoia, hysteria, and rigidity in the behavior of peace-seeker movements have not
escaped comment.
Secondly, the arts and sciences, whether we speak of boiling a tasty soup or solving an
abstract problem, are intricately meshed with the fear-producing institutions of society
and their fear-laden histories. Therefore, fear-reducing movements tend to, and perhaps
must, tear down the fabric of what is defensively genial as well as what is diabolic and
fearful in a society. The Cultural Revolution of Red China, 1967-69, which attacked rigid
and bureaucratic individuals and institutions, is a case in point. Even if we were to
receive a lesser fear-load as a result of their activity, we would also receive a more
barren culture.
Obviously there is much need for philosophy and social invention to address themselves to
these two problems if a fearless benevolence is to be developed in the human race. The
flamboyantly denominated Homo sapiens sapiens needs to be replaced by breeding and by
cultural reconstruction. The new Homo humanitatis would lack a fear-overload and possess a
pragmatic spirit.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
CHAPTER THREE
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE WORK OF IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY
John M. MacGregor
Lecturer in Art and Psychiatry
Ontario College of Art
In that all of us come from different academic disciplines it seems necessary for me to
identify myself and to explain my interest in Dr. Velikovsky's research. I am an art
historian specializing in the application of psychiatry and psychoanalysis to the study of
art. I also work as a psychotherapist which explains the involvement you will see in the
paper with case material, although I have avoided individual cases with which I am working
because most of them are not reaching the depth of material that I will be discussing
today.
It was my interest in the application of psychoanalysis to historical reconstruction that
brought me for the first time into contact with Dr. Velikovsky. In Princeton, as some of
you know, he is a bit of a legend, if not a bête-noire. The origin of this particular bit
of research dates to an afternoon in April 1971, which I spent with Dr. Velikovsky
discussing the psychological aspects and implications of his work and his personal
involvement with psychoanalysis and Freud. At that particular time Dr. Velikovsky was
deeply involved with research for the book Mankind in Amnesia. He was filled with
questions about Freud's and Jung's conception of what we call inherited racial memory, and
I left Dr. Velikovsky that day with the intention of assisting him by investigating this
topic in the writing of Freud and Jung, and thereby clarifying for both of us exactly what
the views of these two men were on the possibility of inherited mental contents. My
remarks today should be seen as a belated and certainly partial effort to fulfill that
intention.
The fact that Dr. Velikovsky is a psychoanalyst has tended to be obscured. The enormous
range of his later investigations have covered over his original orientation. He himself
has pointed out on several occasions the importance of the psychoanalytic viewpoint and
also its clinical procedures, in guiding and stimulating his approach to the
reconstruction of history. In the Princeton lecture of 1953 he stated:
I came upon the idea that traditions and legends and memories of genetic origin can be
treated in the same way in which we treat in psychoanalysis the early memories of a single
individual [1] .
And in the preface to Worlds in Collision Dr. Velikovsky characterized the work that he
was going to undertake as an "analytic experiment on Mankind." [2]
I have a feeling that when Dr. Velikovsky first published Worlds in Collision he may have
chosen to conceal that he was an analyst. Although he talks about using an analytic
method, he never really points to the fact that this was his training. I am not sure why
that might have been, but the following quotation explains the way he saw the work he was
going to do:
The task l had to accomplish was not unlike that faced by a psychoanalyst who, out of
dissociated memories and dreams reconstructs a forgotten traumatic experience in the early
life of an individual. ln an analytic experiment on mankind, historical inscriptions and
legendary motifs often play the same role as recollections (infantile memories) and dreams
in the analysis of a personality [3] .
Dr. Velikovsky can and should be seen as a member of the third generation of Vienna-
trained analysts. He knew Freud and met with him on a few occasions, and of course he
published in the psychoanalytic journals of the time and Freud would have known his work.
His own analytic training was carried out under Wilhelm Stekel, who was a close co-worker
for some years with Freud. Dr. Velikovsky went on to practice for a number of years in
Israel as a psychoanalyst.
The ability of this man as an analyst is commonly ignored. The psychoanalytic community as
a group has been, probably deliberately, reticent about according him his rightful place
as one of the more brilliant minds to come out of the Vienna circle. I hope that Dr.
Velikovsky will forgive me if I quote from a letter which to some extent corrects this
omission on the part of his analytic contemporaries. This letter was written in 1947 by
Dr. Lawrence Kubic, a major American analyst who recently died, and in it he quotes Dr.
Paul Federn, certainly one of the most prestigious followers of Freud, as follows:
A genius. A great man. An excellent psychoanalyst. An M. D. member of the Palestine
group. Some revolutionary scientific ideas that some people think are crazy, but he is a
genius. Would not consider him for a teacher, but as an analyst I have sent him some of my
most difficult cases [4] .
If you are interested in understanding Dr. Velikovsky as a psychoanalyst, the unusual
perceptiveness which he has is best displayed in the essay which he published in 1941 in
the Psychoanalytic Review entitled "The Dreams Freud Dreamed." [5] In that essay he
presented some very interesting speculations about Freud's attitudes toward religion, and
explored certain problems that Freud may have had concerning his personal relationship to
Judaism. Those of you who know the Jones biography of Freud will know that Jones attacked
Dr. Velikovsky on this point, totally irrationally. The essay is actually a brilliant
piece of analysis. Dr. Velikovsky then went on to continue his observations about Freud in
the chapter in Oedipus and Akhnaton, entitled "A Seer of our Time." That brief chapter
represents the most insightful analysis of Freud's Moses and Monotheism which has been
published to date. In it he points to Freud's curious failure to utilize psychoanalytic
theory in his analysis of the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, Akhnaton. Dr. Velikovsky's own
writings have not avoided that challenge. He has cautiously applied psychoanalytic theory
throughout his work. In the chapter in Worlds in Collision entitled "A Collective Amnesia"
he put forth a series of speculative and highly controversial psychological hypotheses,
some of the implications of which I want to look at with you today.
Psychology, and psychoanalysis in particular, can contribute in a number of ways to the
study of Dr. Velikovsky's work. His theories, if they are looked at seriously, raise
profound psychological problems. it is odd that so little has been written about the
psychological implications of Dr. Velikovsky's theories. In Pensée for example there are
very few articles that concern themselves with a psychological examination of the
Velikovsky hypotheses. One exception to that is Dr. William Mullen, who in his article
entitled "The Center Holds" points out that if Dr. Velikovsky's psychological observations
are correct, and that of course depends on the rest of the cataclysm theory, then his
contribution to psychology would represent by far the most urgent aspect of his work [6]
. know that in recent years Dr. Velikovsky has never failed in lecturing to discuss the
psychological implications of his work. He has also told me that in the response he gets
from his audiences (letters, discussions with him and soon), it is the psychological
aspects of his work which holds the most interest for them.
As has been pointed out a number of times today, the reaction of the scientific community
and others to Dr. Velikovsky's proposals obviously provides a worthwhile topic for
psychological investigation in itself. As a psychoanalyst, Dr. Velikovsky could have
predicted in advance that his findings would have awakened the most intense resistance. I
think it strange that so much fuss is made about the strange behaviour of the scientific
community. It was and is perfectly predictable and understandable in terms of the very
psychological theories that are being proposed. The resistance would have to be intense if
indeed a collective amnesia is involved.
Dr. Velikovsky identifies somewhat with Freud in assuming the responsibility of
confronting mankind with information which provokes profound anxieties and defensive
reactions. if the Velikovsky hypotheses are correct, these violently negative responses
Are part of an understandable pattern urgently in need of change. If he is wrong, and of
course, if he is wrong he is dramatically, gorgeously wrong, then the irrationality of the
scientific community's response still demands a psychological explanation, except then the
nature of the explanation would be quite different.
Freud, speaking of the equally violent irrationality of Darwin's critics, offers some
words of solace to the belaboured bearer of unwanted reality. I quote:
The new truth awoke emotional resistances; these found expression in arguments by which
the evidence in favour of the unpopular theory could be disputed; the struggle of opinions
took up a certain length of time; from the first there were adherents and opponents; the
number as well as the weight of the former kept on increasing until at last they gained
the upper hand; during the whole time of struggle the subject with which it was concerned
was never forgotten. We are scarcely surprised that the whole course of events took a
considerable length of time; and we probably do not sufficiently appreciate that what we
are concerned with is a process in group psychology [7] .
Freud, of course, was speaking from agonizing painful experience of the same kind.
There is a second direction in which psychology could be applied to the work of Dr.
Velikovsky and that is in the area of psychobiographical investigation of Dr. Velikovsky
himself. So far this particular approach has only been used in the vituperative attack on
Dr. Velikovsky, confined to the somewhat unscientific goal of declaring him "crazy." But
whether Dr. Velikovsky is right or wrong, and probably particularly if he is wrong, his
life and work will eventually be the subject of intensive psychobiographical scrutiny.
As you will probably notice, the psychotic delusions of cataclysmic destruction of the
world, which I am going to discuss briefly, could easily be turned against Dr.
Velikovsky's theories and particularly against his personality. Should he be in error,
this will unquestionably be the punishment history will inflict upon him.
The task of the psychobiographer I prefer to leave for the future. It is always easier to
get away with when the subject under scrutiny is far away, usually in Heaven.
Now, I mentioned earlier, the curious lack of critical discussion of Dr. Velikovsky's
psychological observations. I think that this can be explained not so much in terms of
psychological resistance, although that plays a part, but as deriving from the fact that
psychology is unsuited and at present unable to offer any decisive support for, or
evidence against, the cataclysmic hypothesis. Nevertheless, it can contribute material
which enlarges the scope of the discussion and stimulates enquiries in new directions. But
be warned: nothing that I am going to say will help to decide the case for or against
cataclysmic hypothesis. I want to turn now to a brief examination of three points at which
psychology enters into Dr. Velikovsky's reconstruction of history.
The suggestion that the earth was involved in a series of violent near collisions with its
neighbours in space, as recently as -686, excites considerable skepticism in historians
and archaeologists. The writing of history was, of course, fairly well developed by this
time, and far less significant events managed to find their way into historical records.
Dr. Velikovsky has indicated that there-are, in fact, a large number of texts which can be
understood as detailed accounts of the cataclysmic events, which he feels he has
rediscovered. Nevertheless, the failure of a series of such terrifying experiences to
leave more of an impression on the memory and behaviour of mankind demands explanation.
Such events cannot possibly have been merely forgotten; and Dr. Velikovsky is well aware
of this, as he points out:
If cosmic upheavals occurred in the historical past, why does not the human race
remember them, and why was it necessary to carry on research to find out about them [8] ?
To account for this suspicious failure of memory, Dr. Velikovsky has suggested a
collective amnesia, preventing these traumatic experiences from reaching consciousness.
lt is a psychological phenomenon in the life of individuals as well as whole nations
that the most terrifying events of the past may be forgotten or displaced into the
subconscious mind. As if obliterated are impressions that should be unforgettable. To
uncover their vestiges and their distorted equivalents in the psychical life of peoples is
a task not unlike that of overcoming amnesia in a single person [9] .
In extending findings. derived from individual psychology to mankind as a whole, Dr.
Velikovsky follows in the footsteps of Freud of Moses and Monotheism. It is a jump which
even Freud made with some hesitancy. In the chapter of Moses and Monotheism entitled "The
Analogy," he "invites the reader to take the step of supposing that something occurred in
the life of the human species similar to what occurs in the life of the individuals." [10]
To proceed from the traumatic experience of the individual, to the suggestion of a
collectively experienced trauma and a collective repression of painful memory is a
considerable jump, with massive implications for both history and, as well, for social
psychology.
One wonders, for example, to what extent the memories of the Nazi death camps or the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have undergone what could truly be called repression.
it can't be doubted that many individuals have dealt with these agonizing memories by
utilizing this mechanism of defence, but to presume that a massive act of repression can
occur, an act of repression so complete that it interferes with the conscious collective
memory of mankind in general, is a step which should be undertaken with considerable
trepidation. It can be asked whether the entire historical reconstruction proposed by Dr.
Velikovsky depends on this defensive operation having occurred. (it should be stressed
that when we talk of repression we are talking about an unconsciously activated mechanism,
totally distinct from the conscious suppression of unpleasant memories. The only evidence
for repression of material having occurred would be an unexplainable vacuum in the mind in
connection with vitally important experiences which might be expected to have left
profound traces in the memory.) I believe that Dr. Velikovsky is correct in suggesting
that the failure of such historical events to be remembered in elaborate detail would
demand a psychological explanation. In short, if a collective repression of these memories
didn't occur then there were no such events! The hypothesis of a collective repression is
a crucial underpinning of the wider theory. The repression of events which he is
postulating was neither instantaneous nor complete. The existence of numerous historical
records which Dr. Velikovsky understands as references to a series of very specific
worldwide cataclysmic occurrences indicates an effort on the part of at least some people
in the human race to come e to grips with this traumatic experience on a conscious level.
As he has indicated, repression in this situation is not so much suggested by the absence
of memories in the form of written history, as by the inability of later civilizations to
comprehend the meaning of these quite specific and detailed accounts, or to their tendency
to see them as allegorical images that mean something quite different. And it is true that
repression frequently operates as something of a psychological blind spot, rendering us
unable to understand certain things which should be quite evident. A second psychological
hypothesis which Dr. Velikovsky has put forward is far more controversial. He is of the
opinion that the effect of the repeated experience of cataclysm was so intense that it was
implanted in the human mind permanently, and in his view, the memories of these
experiences are present to this day in the human unconscious mind, transmitted presumably
by heredity.
The collective human memory retained an inexhaustible array of recollections of the time
when the world was in conflagration; when sea engulfed land; earth trembled; celestial
bodies were disturbed in their motion, and meteorites fell [11] .
Here again Dr. Velikovsky is touching on a highly controversial hypothesis of Freud's,
enunciated in its clearest form in Moses and Monotheism. My constant references to that
book are not accidental. Dr. Velikovsky's work can be understood in many ways as a
continuation and revision of that late publication of Freud. Anyone who is interested in
Dr. Velikovsky's book would do well to read the essay Moses and Monotheism. Dr. Velikovsky
came to America in 1939, the year of publication of the complete form of Moses and
Monotheism, and the year of Freud's death, interestingly, and he came to do research on
Freud in relation to Moses, Akhnaton and Oedipus.
It is little realized that Freud felt compelled to accept the idea of inherited racial
memories. He usually used the term phylogenetic inheritance, but he means by this term the
inheritance of collective memories. He was well aware that such mental contents would be
collective in nature; a shared, inborn knowledge of the past history of the race, or, at
least, of crucially important aspects of that history.
This Lamarckian conception of inherited experience is totally ignored by all current
psychoanalytic theorists, in fact, one could go so far as to say that it has been
suppressed by the Freudian group. There are few articles published by Freudians on the
concept of inherited racial memory. They would prefer to forget that Freud ever thought
about this problem, or else they consider it an aberration on his part. On the other hand,
Carl Jung based an entire psychology on the description of such inherited collective
contents.
Again we can raise the question as to whether the phylogenetic hypothesis is an essential
aspect of Dr. Velikovsky's general theory. I personally feel that it is not. But, it has
tremendous usefulness, as you just saw in Professor Wolfe's lecture, in explaining the
occurrence over all the earth over hundreds of years, of certain legends and images which
seem to have exerted a curious fascination on the human mind.
Finally, in recent years, Dr. Velikovsky has begun to stress the possibility that
unconscious memories (if they do indeed form a potent content of the collective mind of
present day man) could be reactivated as a result of the compulsion to repeat. This
powerful irrational tendency to act out or reexperience a traumatic event was described by
Freud in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) where he characterized it in terms
of the individual patient.
He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of
... remembering it as something belonging to the past [12] .
In recent years Dr. Velikovsky has become deeply concerned that unless awareness of the
cataclysmic events can be restored to consciousness, mankind may be compelled by
unconscious forces to stage its own 'Weltuntergang man-made cataclysm on a near cosmic
scale. It is this possibility which lends some urgency to the consideration of his
theories. In this context, his psycho-historical reconstruction can be seen to have a
therapeutic goal. More than merely a psychoanalytic experiment on mankind, it aims at
rescuing mankind from its very obvious self-destructive tendencies. it is probably not
without significance that the conception of Worlds in Collision took place during the
Second World War when mankind was very actively involved in its own destruction.
I want to consider in slightly more detail the concept of inherited racial memory as it
occurs in the writings of Freud. It is of considerable interest to trace the evolution of
this hypothesis from "Totem and Taboo" in 1912 where it first appears, to Freud's final
and more elaborate discussion of it in 1939. It is usually suggested that Freud invented
the idea of inherited racial memory because he needed it to support his speculative forays
into the fields of anthropology and pre-history. In short, that the idea of inherited
racial memory is the creation of Freud the novelist, rather than Freud the psychologist.
Careful reading of all Freud's psychological oeuvre would quickly dispel this notion. The
concept of phylogenetically inherited material is found everywhere in Freud and this
despite the fact that he had an inherent resistance to the idea.
Writing to Jung in 1911, he displayed this ambivalence very nicely: "If there is
phylogenetic memory" and then he goes on "which unfortunately will soon prove to be so"
(he was prepared to admit it but he didn't like it one bit) [13] .
In a meeting of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society in 1911, he spoke of the idea of
inherited memory content with considerable reserve.
The influence of a phylogenetic inborn store of memories is not justified as long as we
have the possibility of explaining these things through an analysis of the psychical
situations. What remains over after this analysis of the psychical phenomena of regression
could then be conceived of as phylogenetic memory [14] .
It is highly probable that Jung's influence was a crucial factor motivating Freud to
consider the possibility of inherited memory. As you know, the break between Freud and
Jung occurred in 1912. Until that time Jung's ideas stimulated Freud to an examination of
many areas which he might otherwise not have explored.
Less well known is the fact that Freud continued to consider Jung's theories even after
they broke off relations. In 1912 we find Freud using the term 'collective mind, ' a term
which he thereafter avoided in his writings to avoid confusion with the Jungian term which
carries implications far beyond what he or his followers could accept.
No one can have failed to observe ... that I have taken as the basis of my whole
position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they
do in the mind of an individual [15] .
In 1917, long after they were no longer friends, Freud read Jung's important essay, The
Psychology of Unconscious Processes, and the next year, writing about the Wolfe Man case,
he stated:
I fully agree with Jung in recognizing the existence of this phylogenetic heritage; but
I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the
ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted [16] .
As he puts it,
All that we find in the prehistory of neuroses is that a child catches hold of this
phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills ills in the gaps in
individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by
occurrences in the life of his ancestors [17] .
As you will see presently, this tendency, if it exists, to replace individual experiences
with experiences derived from the history of mankind could possibly represent a
confirmation of the Velikovsky hypotheses. But Freud's warning must continue to sound in
our ears:
... I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before
the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted [18] .
Elsewhere he warns against "mystical overvaluations of heredity." [19] What motivated
Freud to suggest this idea of inherited racial memory? Certainly it was on the basis of
experience derived from his work with patients. He pointed out, first of all, that the
common heritage of symbols which he kept encountering, symbols in the unconscious which
seemed to be shared by all men throughout history, pushed him in the direction of thinking
about the possibility of some kind of collective inborn mental content. "it seems to me
that symbolic connections, which the individual has never acquired by learning, may justly
claim to be regarded as phylogenetic heritage." [20] Then the structure and the content
of certain kinds of phobic conditions seemed to point in a similar direction.
Among the contents of the phobias there are a number which, as Stanley Hall insists, are
adopted to serve as objects of anxiety owing to phylogenetic inheritance [21] .
The most significant factor which led Freud to postulate the existence of mental contents
which are not derived from individual experience is the occurrence of what he termed
"primal phantasies"; phantasies of castration, incest, cannibalism, parental intercourse,
etc., in children whose actual experience precludes any possibility of acquaintance with
such events.
I believe these primal fantasies are a phylogenetic endowment. in them the individual
reaches beyond his own experience into primaeval experience at points where his own
experience has been too rudimentary [22] .
The behaviour of neurotic children towards their parents in the Oedipus and castration
complex abounds in such reactions, which seem unjustified in the individual case and only
become intelligible phylogenetically - by their connection with the experience of earlier
generations [23] .
Perhaps you remember that Dr. Velikovsky in his book Oedipus and Akhnaton has raised the
interesting possibility that there may be an historical truth underlying the deeply rooted
human resistance to incest:
... is the Oedipus legend based on historical occurrence? If the latter is true, its
hold on the imagination of the literati through the ages could be explained as a real
experience that has been echoed in the dark recesses of many human souls [24] .
By 1937 Freud was prepared to make a leap of faith and to extend the concept of inherited
mental contents quite far. He did so despite the very active opposition of Ernest Jones
who warned him of the danger of accepting what Jones saw as an outdated Lamarckian
biology. Freud, with extreme forthrightness and some humility, stated:
On further reflection I must admit that I have behaved for a long time as though
inheritance of memory-traces of the experience of our ancestors, independently of direct
Communication and of the influence of education by the setting of an example, were
established beyond question. When l spoke of the survival of a tradition among a people,
or of the formation of people's character, l had mostly in mind an inherited tradition of
this kind and not one transmitted by communication. or at least l made no distinction
between the two and was not clearly aware of my audacity in neglecting to do so ....
And then the crucial words:
I must, however, in all modesty, confess nevertheless that I cannot do without this
factor in biological evolution; ... The archaic heritage of human beings comprises not
only dispositions but also subject matter - memory traces of the experience of earlier
generations. if we assume the survival of these memory-traces in the archaic heritage, we
have bridged the gap between individual and group psychology [25] .
Of course you wonder under what circumstances material experienced by our ancestors
becomes transmittable, through heredity, or whatever. Freud suggests two possibilities or
at least two situations in which this might occur. First, if the event occurred often
enough:
The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance, but, when they have
been repeated often enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive
generations, they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the
impressions of which are preserved by heredity [26] .
(This is the process which Dr. Velikovsky has challenged to some extent in his suggestion
that typical and commonly repeated events do not provide a basis for the creation of
myth.) Then, secondly, and of much more importance for the theory of collectively
experienced cataclysms, Freud suggests that a memory may enter the archaic heritage of
mankind if it was of sufficient strength, a traumatic and collective experience of the
human race;
An essential part of the construction is the hypothesis that the events I am about to
describe occurred to all primitive men, that is, to all our ancestors [27] .
As to when these events occurred Freud is very vague. At times he talks about "the
childhood of the race," a very difficult era to locate, although I think we can be quite
sure that he wasn't referring to the Bronze age or later. In Moses and Monotheism he
places the events in the period when language developed, again a rather vague moment.
Freud recognized that if there was mental content in the mind which was not individually
acquired but which was inherited and which reflected our experience as a race, then that
phylogenetic content could serve as a source of material for the investigation and
reconstruction of the early history of the human race. He suggested, in fact, using dreams
for this purpose:
The prehistory into which the dream-work leads is of two kinds: on the one hand, into
the individual's prehistory, his childhood; on the other, in so far as each individual
somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race,
into phylogenetic history - too. Shall we succeed in distinguishing which portion of the
latent mental processes is derived from the individual prehistoric period and which from
the phylogenetic one? It is not, I believe, impossible that we shall [28] .
Psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the
reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods at the beginning of the human race
[29] .
At no time does Freud ever refer to evidence of cataclysmic experience in material derived
from his dream studies or from the psychoanalytic treatment of patients. He encountered no
such contents. The phylogenetic memories that he referred to have nothing to do with
memories of cosmic disturbance or violent natural events. I remember asking Dr. Velikovsky
a few years ago whether he had himself encountered memories suggestive of such
phylogenetically derived experience in his own analysis or in his analytic practice, and
he was unable to recall anything of this sort. It is therefore of particular interest to
investigate case material in search of references to cataclysmic destruction, and such
cases are not lacking, as you will see.
For the remainder of this discussion I want to accept two hypotheses as facts, and to go
on to consider what would be the implications of these hypotheses.
First, let us assume (and many people here do more than assume), that a series of
cataclysms on the scale suggested by Dr. Velikovsky did occur, that mankind was exposed to
these terrible events and that some of them lived to deal with the consequences,
particularly the emotional consequences. Second, let us assume that after a time memories
of the experience, as well as the intense feelings stirred up by these memories underwent
repression and yet survived, not only in the unconscious of the victims who actually lived
through these traumatic events, but in the unconscious of their descendants up to the
present day. I am suggesting that we tentatively accept Freud's hypothesis of
phylogenetically inherited memory, and specifically, the possibility which Freud would not
have put forward that one of the chief fragments or complexes in the mind is a derivative
of the overwhelming experience of cosmic upheaval.
If such repressed memories are present in the collective unconscious of mankind now, we
can expect them to reveal themselves in a number of more or less predictable ways.
Remember that we owe what knowledge of the unconscious we possess, and it is very little,
to the relative failure of repression and to the fact that unconscious contents frequently
break through to the surface, or at least disturb the surface of the mind in
characteristic ways, which tell us something about the underlying strata.
1. Amnesia
Repression, of course, as Dr. Velikovsky has pointed out, implies an amnesia of limited
extent. Parts of the mind are withdrawn or "blanked out," not only the actual traumatic
memories themselves, but, through the associational chains which connect the contents of
the mind, this amnesia could be expected to extend over considerable areas. In terms of
the feeling aspect of our humanness, repression could be reflected in a precarious
emotional coldness or unresponsiveness to whole areas of human experience. In terms of
thought, it precipitates an inability to think about certain topics and a curious lack of
curiosity about whole areas of human experience and knowledge. if you are interested in
that aspect of repression, Freud's Leonardo essay provides a remarkable discussion of how
intellectual curiosity can be "blanked out" in certain areas [30] . The failure of
scholars to recognize the connectedness and significance of historical and mythological
accounts of cataclysmic occurrences would be an example of repression interfering with the
normal functioning of the intellect. if they have looked at this material over generations
and haven't seen the implications that Dr. Velikovsky sees, it could be explained as a
result of this 'blanking out' of the intellect.
2. Anxiety
The crucial factor which enables the psychologist to identify areas of repression in a
patient is the anxiety which is triggered when the repressed areas are touched upon. This
can vary from hardly noticeable anxiety responses, such as you obtain on the word
association test, to massive reactions approaching panic or shock. The danger represented
by such occurrences is the so-called "awakening of the repressed." You have come too close
to the repressed material. Any event which duplicates the originally traumatic event can
be expected to produce deeply irrational responses including stark terror. Typically, the
person to whom this thing is happening would not know why he is reacting with terror to a
situation which may very well be completely harmless. The recent visit of the comet
Kohoutek might have been expected to produce such responses in terms of the Velikovsky
hypothesis. Shortly after it was announced, I wrote to Dr. Velikovsky to point out that it
would be very worthwhile to collect and study the variety of responses to this event as
they developed over the course of weeks. it would happen in some people, but by no means
all. If he is right you could expect panic, flight reactions, religious frenzy of various
kinds, obsessional rituals and insanity. On a considerable scale all of this could be
predicted with some certainty if this hypothesis is correct. The reaction to Halley's
Comet can be seen as supportive of the Velikovsky hypothesis, though by no means
conclusive evidence. On the other hand, absence of any strong response beyond intellectual
curiosity would, I think, represent fairly conclusive proof that there are no such
inherited contents present in the human mind. Unfortunately, the fact that Kohoutek turned
out to be such a dud tended to ruin the experiment. Nevertheless, it was interesting to
observe the efforts that were made by a number of religious groups to try to artificially
stimulate reaction, particularly among young people. We encountered them on the streets
trying to convince everybody that the end was near.
3. Acting Out
The acting out response also involves an emergence of repressed content. it is rather
strange that the human mind should contain a drive to re-experience those traumatic events
which were once so painful, and yet, this seems to be the case. Motivated by an urge which
Freud termed the repetition compulsion, the human psyche can create actual situations in
the real world which duplicate the originally unbearable experience. Of course in so doing
it goes against the usually dominant pleasure principle and even bypasses the self-
preservative instinct to the point that self-destruction is a very real possibility. This
tendency to act out memories in reality rather than allowing them to enter consciousness
in the form of memories is extremely dangerous. When you have a patient who is doing this
it presents serious difficulty. Instead of understanding the past and allowing themselves
to know what happened, they will go out and try to relive it, which can be suicidal. It is
this particular form of the emergence of the repressed which causes Dr. Velikovsky to warn
of the danger of a man-made cataclysm, purposely designed, though unconsciously, to
reflect as closely as possible the experience of cosmic destruction of the planet.
4. In Dreams
Freud, as I mentioned earlier, pointed to dreams as a source of information concerning
phylogenetic memory traces. The study of cataclysm dreams would provide an extremely
fertile field of investigation in the search for cataclysmically induced memory fragments.
in fact, there is a typical nightmare, which many of you probably know, in which the
dreamer witnesses or experiences the destruction of the world, lives through the horror of
the last moments, and the final explosion, and then awakens at that very instant with a
start. Of course, it is not enough to point to such dreams. it would be necessary to
examine them in detail to discover both their source and their typical structure as well
as common associations to them. It would be of particular importance if there were no
associations to dreams of this type. This would be a strong indication that there could be
phylogenetic memory underlying them. Let me give you just one example of a dream of this
kind. The dreamer, a woman of middle age, in psychoanalytic treatment, dreamt as follows:
On a palisade of bricks I saw reflected a white meteor, which was about to fall and blow
up the earth [31] .
You are aware that dreams usually require interpretation before their meaning can be
understood, and, presumably, interpretation of this dream would lead us away from the
cosmic spectacle and into the patient's personal world. But it is worth inquiring why she
chose to embody that inner reality in a cosmic framework, why she experienced whatever it
was in her inner life that she was dreaming about in terms of meteors and the explosion of
the earth. Perhaps it is merely a residue from the previous day. If so you could find out
very quickly. But it is interesting that internal emotional conflicts are so often
projected into the sky.
5. Symptoms and Symbols in Neurotic Illnesses
Some neurotic patients do project their emotional conflicts into outer space, not in the
form of delusions but seemingly as a means of externalizing a painful inner reality in
terms of more comfortable symbols and images. (Plate 1). This painting is the work of a
30-year old Canadian male who utilized painting and drawing as an aspect of his therapy.
To assume that a painting such as this represents phylogenetic content would be foolish.
Obviously, one would have to attend to the patient's associations to the painting, which
in this, as in most cases, leads immediately away from outer space and into inner space.
This analogy, by the way, is of crucial importance in understanding the predominance of
cosmic imagery. At most one would expect the phylogenetic content to influence the choice
of symbols in which the patient embodied his personal reality. In this particular case,
the patient's associations led to his identifying the planets with his family. He saw the
blue planet as his father, the brown one as his mother and the small black one as himself.
He was trying to talk about his family and how he saw the dominance in that family. He
also saw that the influence of these cosmic
Plate 1
parents is seen on the figures below in the form of an astrological dominance of one
parent planet or another. The different individuals are dressed in different colours
relating to the planets above them. The figures could be in some kind of panic state, but
actually, if you look closely at them, they appear to be much happier than that: they are
dancing and turning somersaults. Since this painting fails to suggest anything of
interplanetary collision or destruction, it would be unwise to push the phylogenetic
interpretation into the foreground.
However, the same patient followed this drawing with another which carries his analogy
still further (Plate 2). 1 should mention that these drawings were made prior to the
publication of Worlds in Collision. Here we see the earth, identified by the lines of
longitude and latitude, in a rather unusual view. Seen from outer space, it appears to be
flooded since the normal land masses are missing or submerged and the patient stands on an
island reaching upwards, perhaps in distress. Above the earth is what appears to be a mass
of land with mountains and rivers, perhaps a continent hovering in the air. To the left is
an oddly shaped spherical mass, the moon, or perhaps a meteorite. The patient described
that large continental mass above as a sheet of ice. While admitting the inevitable
personal significance of such a drawing, perhaps we are justified in noticing that the
imagery bears at least some relationship to the cataclysm theory. The symbols which the
patient has chosen to embody his individual perception of his existential situation seem
rather specific; a fantasy product that may well extend beyond the realm of personal
experience, in the same way that the primal fantasies referred to by Freud did. But
remember, we cannot be sure because these are not the fantasies of an infant but the
drawing of an adult capable of utilizing experience and imagery drawn from an infinite
variety of sources. Such drawings provide no proof, but merely parallels worth noting.
Plate 2
Another drawing by the same patient reveals how the idea developed (Plate 3). 1 have made
no effort whatever to discuss the possible interpretation of these drawings because I feel
that to do so would take us away from the problem of their phylogenetic component, if any.
A Jungian analyst would proceed directly into an interpretation, which would involve very
specific references to primordial experience and would have not the slightest doubt that
the chief content of the pictures is a phylogenetic derivative. The patient himself had
very few associations to any of the visual images that he produced, "he simply felt that
he had to draw it like that." [32]
Plate 3
If phylogenetic memories of cosmic upheaval are postulated as present in the unconscious,
then we would expect to encounter them in an almost pure form in the mental productions of
psychotic patients. In such cases the defense mechanisms of the Ego are no longer
sufficiently strong to inhibit the emergence of repressed mental contents. Although this
material is still somewhat distorted and disguised, it provides our clearest insight into
the nature of unconscious mental contents, including material from strata of the psyche
not usually encountered in psychoanalytic therapy. Very few psychoanalyses reach this
level of material. Such patients frequently develop complicated delusional systems which
either completely obliterate their prior understanding of reality, or less frequently,
these ideas form clearly circumscribed, or contained, delusional systems which are able to
co-exist with normal behaviour and with more typical views of reality. Among these
delusional beliefs, one that is very commonly encountered is the conviction that the world
is about to end, or has already met its destruction. The patient has lived through this
experience. I am not referring here to the religious fanatic who with amusing regularity
predicts the world's demise, though they are also worth study, because in many instances
their delusional beliefs are shared by a group of people so that they are particularly
relevant to the Velikovsky theory.
Plate 4 is a painting called "The Explosion of the World" by a very seriously disturbed
young boy. Psychotic individuals who are preoccupied with world cataclysm, either past, or
to come, usually develop very elaborate descriptive ideas about the details of this
terrifying event, an event in which they commonly play a very central role. In fact at
times they are themselves the cause of the cataclysm. A manic-depressive patient during
the depressive phase of his illness wrote as follows:
If I could only kill myself, it might blow up the whole universe, but at least I would
get out of eternal torture and achieve the oblivion and nothingness for which my soul
craves [33] .
Plate 4
His description of his experience is entitled The Universe of Horror and the Universe of
Bliss, which gives some indication of the way in which the overwhelming experience of a
psychosis appears, in the patient's point of view, to include the destruction of the whole
universe, not only of himself. There is no question that the experience of psychotic
illness does involve such drastic change in one's perception of reality that the world
does really seem to have undergone violent, even cataclysmic change. The same patient
said, "At times the whole Universe seemed to be dissolving about me." [34]
Let me read another account by a psychotically depressed patient which conveys very
strongly the feeling associated with overall destruction of the world and what it is like
to live through:
There was even a day when I stood by the table in my room. lt was a sunny day, the
curtains were flapping, and the daffodils were all out in the grass below when I had a
sudden vision of the end of the world, a catastrophe caused solely by my fate ... As in
some monstrous cosmic general strike, all mankind was engulfed, all movement ceased, I
could see the steamships stopping in the middle of the ocean, while invisible waves of
horror encircled the world [35] .
In some cases other planets are involved, as in the following account:
Shortly after I was taken to the hospital for the first time in a rigid catatonic
condition, I was plunged into the horror of a world catastrophe. I was being caught up in
a cataclysm and totally dislocated. I myself had been responsible for setting the
destructive forces into motion, although I acted with no intent to harm ...
Perhaps you notice I am quoting from the patient's own feelings, his own statements about
what he felt. Notice also that if there were such a cataclysm, the people who lived
through it would probably appear to feel that the were to blame, that they were personally
responsible for what had happened They are overwhelmed with guilt.
... Part of the time I was exploring a new planet, (a marvelous and breathtaking
adventure) but it was too lonely... The earth had been devastated by atomic bombs and most
of its inhabitants killed. Only a few people myself and the dimly perceived nursing staff,
had escaped. At other times I felt totally alone on the new planet ... At times when the
universe was collapsing, I was not sure that things would turn out alright. I thought I
might have to stay in the end less hell-fire of atomic destruction [36] .
Psychiatric theorists account for these cataclysmic delusions in a number of ways. They
point out that the patient's sense of his body and of his ego boundaries is damaged to
such an extent that he can no longer differentiate between what is happening to him and
what is happening to the Universe. Since he feels destructive processes at work within
himself, he assumes that this destruction must extend to the whole universe. Megalomaniac
delusions are frequent and cause the patient to feel that he is literally at the centre of
the universe and that his fate must inevitably affect the planets and the stars. Inner
processes are projected onto the sky, and the disintegration of the ego is experienced as
natural catastrophe. The theme of world flooding and the submerging of continents is
usually interpreted by analytically oriented psychiatrists as the inundation of the
conscious mind by the contents of the unconscious. Patients threatened by "the rising
waters of the unconscious" actually do develop preoccupations with flooding. (Those of you
who come from Saskatchewan and Alberta will doubtless be relieved to know that a
preoccupation with catastrophic flooding could also be the result of a recent experience
of catastrophic flooding). There is a problem there actually. Are we talking about
symbolic material in need of interpretation, or are we talking about memory fragments
connected with actual historical events? Many analysts would tend to link the recurrent
motif of the flood in literature with the shared human experience of birth. You remember
Otto Rank's conception of the birth trauma, yet another primordial experience, occurring
at the beginning of our own lives.
It is in schizophrenic illnesses that one encounters mental content which inclines one to
consider the possibility of a phylogenetic derivation. Careful examination of these very
bizarre delusional ideas, and the violent feelings which accompany them, has led to an
awareness that despite the intensely private symbolic nature of schizophrenic language and
imagery, the ideas represent an accurate reflection of their experience, and at times,
they even represent an effort at communication. But what about the form in which these
experiences are embodied and the choice of symbols? Could there be an underlying memory of
far earlier experiences of terrifying cataclysm? No one doubts that the patient is going
through his own personal experience of cataclysm, but is it provoking in him a possible
memory of much earlier ones? Freud, referring to the delusional ideas of the insane, says:
We have long understood that a portion of forgotten truth lies hidden in delusional
ideas, that when this returns it has to put up with distortions and misunderstandings, and
that the compulsive conviction which attaches to the delusion arises from this core of
truth and spreads out on to the errors that wrap it round [37] .
He knew there was truth hidden in psychotic ideas, but, of course, he was talking about
individual truth. As you know, Freud's experience of psychotic patients was limited
because he didn't work in a hospital setting. His most intensive discussion of a psychotic
delusional system was based on a published autobiography of Daniel Paul Schreber [38] .
Schreber represents perhaps the finest example of a man whose extremely mad ideas
eventually came to be organized and limited to a well defined and clearly circumscribed
set of delusions which he was able to cope with, living a normal existence out in the
world, untroubled by any other signs of mental illness. He was convinced of the
correctness of his views, but he was well aware that they were not shared by others and
that they caused trouble if they were talked about. He saw his discoveries, as he called
them, to be the result of a form of insight which was available only to him. Nevertheless,
in generosity he sought to share his convictions about the nature of reality with others
by publishing an account of his unique experiences and his systematized delusions in a
fascinating book entitled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. I will quote a few lines from the
book in order to give you an impression of the detailed cosmic content of psychotic
delusions and of the difficulty of using this material as evidence for historical
speculation or reconstruction.
Connected with these phenomena, very early on ... (came) recurrent nightly visions ...
of an approaching end of the world, as a consequence of the indissoluble connection
between God and myself.
Bad news came in from all sides that even this or that star or this or that group of
stars had to be 'given up'; at one time it was said that even Venus had been 'flooded, '
at another that the whole solar system would now have to be 'disconnected, ' that the
Cassiopeia (the whole group of stars) had had to be drawn together into a single sun, that
perhaps only the Pleiades could still be saved, etc. etc. While I had these visions at
night, in daytime I thought I could notice the sun following my movements; when I moved to
and fro in the single-windowed room I inhabited at the time ... lt was as if single nights
had the duration of centuries, so that within that time the most profound alterations in
the whole of mankind, in the earth itself and the whole solar system could very well have
taken place. It was repeatedly mentioned in visions that the work of the past fourteen
thousand years had been lost - this figure presumably indicated the duration the earth had
been populated with human beings and that approximately only another two hundred years
were allotted to the earth. If I am not mistaken the figure 212 was mentioned. ... Later
... I thought this period had already expired and therefore I was the last real human
being left. I lived for years. in doubt as to whether I was really still on earth or
whether on some other celestial body. Even in the year 1895 1 still considered the
possibility of my being on Phobos, a satellite of the planet Mars ... and (1) wondered
whether the moon, which I sometimes saw in the sky, was not the main planet Mars [39] .
The idea that some of this material could have a phylogenetic origin finds support in
Schreber's own conception of what was happening to him. He tells us that he was in
communion with departed souls from all periods in history. If you were encountering
phylogenetic contents, ranging back through time, it would be like an experience of being
in contact with departed souls. He describes visionary experiences in which he traveled
back in time.
In one of (the visions) it was as though I were sitting in a railway carriage or in a
lift driving into the depths of the earth and I recapitulated, as it were, the whole
history of mankind or of the earth in reverse order; in the upper regions there were still
forests of leafy trees; in the nether regions it became progressively darker and blacker;
... I advanced only to a point 1; point 3, which was to mark the earliest beginning of
mankind [40] .
On the other hand any suggestion that this delusional material has a phylogenetic origin
must take into account the long list of scientific books which Schreber was reading. Prior
to his hospitalization he spent a great deal of time investigating the early history of
the world and he tells us about a few of the books which he read:
1. Haeckel: The History of Natural Creation
2. Caspari: The Primordial History of Mankind
3. du Prel: Evolution of the Universe
4. Maedler: Astronomy
5. Neumayer: History of the Earth
Given the list, there is no particular reason to jump to phylogenetic explanations.
Another quite similar case about which we have considerably less information is that of
Oskar H. It is a nineteenth century case which has the advantage of excluding experience
of the World Wars and the Atom Bomb as the basis for such catastrophic delusions. A recent
study has pointed out that the bomb has not in fact entered the repertoire of psychotic
productions to any significant extent. Oskar H. was a butler, hospitalized with typical
symptoms of schizophrenia. His fame is based on a group of very fine water colour
paintings (Plate 5) of delusional materials. This painting is called "Mrs. Gern". Oskar
was in the habit of writing lengthy texts to explain the pictures and these texts give us
some idea of his delusional system and his preoccupations. He was concerned at this time
with a number of scientific matters including, in this painting of Mrs. Gern, references
to electro-magnetic currents, hypnosis and magnets. The electro-magnetic currents you can
see streaming out of her head. Those things which he mentions are all part of the
therapeutic equipment of 19th Century psychiatry.
Plate 5
His unique importance for us derives from a series of pictures which he painted of the
destruction of the world as a result of the collision of comets (Plate 6). The text which
accompanies this painting reads as follows:
Explanation about end of the world. On 3rd April 2053 in consequence of collisions of
the ice comet with comet Biela main comet in indescribable distance on western horizon,
sun moon stars darken; drop vertically into endless night. O. H. General Director of Royal
Mental Clinic [41] .
Plate 6
As you can imagine, verification of the Velikovsky reconstruction of history would result
in an extremely different understanding of materials such as this, and would in fact
involve considerable disturbance in the fields of psychiatry and psychology as it has in
other disciplines. Whether any of the material which I have discussed can play a part in
contributing to the task of verification of the theory of inter-planetary catastrophe, I
leave to Dr. Velikovsky to decide.
Notes (Psychological Aspects of the Work of Immanuel Velikovsky)
1. Velikovsky, Immanuel, Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955), Supplement, page 272);
(Laurel Edition, 1968), page 254; (Abacus, 1973), page 338; (Pocket Books, 1977), page
246. This Supplement to Earth in Upheaval consists of a lecture delivered by Dr.
Velikovsky before the Graduate College Forum of Princeton University on October 14,1953.
2. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (Doubleday, 1950), Preface page viii; (Pocket Books,
1977), page 12; (Abacus, 1972), page 9.
3. Ibid.
4. Letter to Mr. Clifton Fadiman, dated October 23, 1947.
5. Velikovsky, "The Dreams Freud Dreamed", The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 28 (October,
1941), pages 487-511.
6. Mullen, William, "The Center Holds" Pensée 2( 2): 32-35 (May, 1972); this article has
been reprinted in Velikovsky Reconsidered (Doubleday, 1976), pages 239-249.
7. Freud, Sigmund, Moses and Monotheism (Amsterdam, 1939). Citations from Freud in text
are to The Standard Edition, Edited by James Strachey (London, 1964), Vol. XXIII, page 67.
8. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, loc. cit.
9. Velikovsky, op. cit., page 300; 304, 288.
10. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIll, page 80.
11. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, op. cit., page 274; 255; 239; 247.
12. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Vienna, 1920), Vol. XVIII, page 18.
13. Freud, Letter to C. G. Jung, 1911.
14. Freud, Minutes of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, November 8,1911.
15. Freud, Totem and Taboo (Vienna, 1913), Vol. XIII, page 157.
16. Freud, From The History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), Vol. XVII, page 97.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Vienna, 1937), Vol. XXIII, page 240.
20. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (Vienna, 1917), Vol. XV, page 199.
21. Freud, op. cit., Vol. XVI, page 411.
22. Freud, op. cit., VI, pages 371.
23. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIII, page 99.
24. Velikovsky, Oedipus and Akhnaton (New York, 1960), page 20.
25. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIII pages 99-100.
26. Freud, The Ego and the Id (Vienna, 1923), page A
27. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIII, page 81.
28. Freud, Introductory Lectures, Vol. XV, page 199.
29. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Vienna, 1900), Vol. V, page 549.
30. Freud, Leonard DA Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (Vienna, 1910), Vol. XI, pages
59-137.
31. The personal meanings of this dream, and the patient's association to it, are
discussed in: Garma, Angel, The Psychoanalysis of Dreams (New York, 1966), pages 164-166.
32. For a very detailed discussion of this case with reference to the personal and
archetypal significance of the drawings, see: Baynes, H. G., Mythology of the Soul
(London, 1969), pages 515-911
33. Kaplan, Bert, ed. The Inner World of Mental Illness (New York, 1964); see Custance,
John, "Wisdom, Madness and Folly", pages 56-57.
34. Ibid, page 59.
35. Op. Cit., see: Brooks, Van Wyck, "Days of the Phoenix", page 86.
36. Op. Cit., see: Anonymous, "An Autobiography of Schizophrenic Experience", page 95.
37. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vol. XXIII, page 85.
38. Schreber, Daniel Paul, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, (London, 1955).
39. Kaplan, op cit., from the Schreber case, pages 126-130.
40. Ibid, page 128.
41. A discussion of this patient and his art is to be found in: Prinzhorn, Hans, Artistry
of the Mentally Ill (New York, 1972), pages 80-83. A further case of great importance for
this discussion, which I omitted because of lack of time, is found in Jung, C. C., "A
Study in the Process of Individuation" (Zurich, 1950), Vol. 9, pages 290-354. (Also of
value in terms of this discussion is Jung's essay "Flying Saucers: A Modem Myth of Things
Seen in the Sky" (Zurich, 1958), Vol. 10, pages 309-433.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
CHAPTER FOUR
STRUCTURING THE APOCALYPSE:
Old and New World Variations
William Mullen
Hodder Fellow in the Humanities
Princeton University
My project here is a kind of spectral analysis of religions - Egyptian, Hebrew, Christian,
Islamic; Teotihuacano, Mayan, Hopi, Aztec - and since the subject of religion has
traditionally involved polemic, I would like to begin by considering calmly for a moment
the most effective means by which polemic can be avoided. We have had a taste of an ongoing
scientific polemic at this symposium, and need only remind ourselves of the greater heat
generated in the past by religious polemics to understand why both are best dispensed with.
The work of Velikovsky is in fact susceptible to use in religious polemic as well as
scientific. This has already been begun by the publication in Fall 1973 of a book entitled
God is Red by Vine Deloria, a Sioux. I intend to take as a starting-point some of Deloria's
ideas, but I would like to preface that with a Sioux tale he recounts on the subject of
civility in the exchange of religious beliefs. The tale goes this way:
A missionary once undertook to instruct a group of Indians in the truths of his holy
religion. He told them of the creation of the earth in six days, and of the fall of our
first parents by eating an apple.
The courteous savages listened attentively, and, after thanking him, one related in his
turn a very ancient tradition concerning the origin of maize. But the missionary, plainly
showed his disgust and disbelief, indignantly saying: "What I have delivered to you were
sacred truths, but this that you tell me is mere fable and falsehood !''
"My Brother," gravely replied the offended Indian, "it seems that you have not been well
grounded in the rules of civility. You saw that we, who practice these rules, believed your
stories; why, then, do you refuse to credit ours?" [1]
Dr. MacGregor [2] has drawn here a picture of the possibility that mankind is traumatized
by catastrophic events, and of the more distant possibility that memory of them is
phylogenetically transmitted. We should not let these possibilities make us entertain
fatalism. Nor should we let a mechanistic account of mythological events lead to pure
materialism, a rejection of all the spiritual values experienced and formulated by our
ancestors obsessed with catastrophe. All religious systems contain with them the
possibility of a broad spectrum of discourse, ranging from the oral tale to the sacred
book, and from the practice of reconciling theology and philosophy to the techniques of
mysticism. I hope this is kept in mind as I give some necessarily very broad accounts of
several religions, for I consider each of them susceptible to the same variety of
interpretation in the hands of their practitioners. What we need is a simple language that
can describe religion by accommodating the catastrophic elements within a larger structure.
This may be conceived as a prolegomenon to the reconciliation of religion and reason. We
sometimes forget that such was the very effort in which western man was engaged in the
century before the uniformitarian dogma took sway. In Eighteenth Century France the names
of Voltaire and Boulanger stand out; in Germany there is the work of Kant; and on this
continent we have the effort of Thomas Jefferson (usually neglected because he refused to
consider it other than a private preoccupation). I say this by way of supplementing the
account given by Dr. Grinnell of what happened once Darwinism began to be railroaded
through [3] .
Deloria's book, which in some ways renews the tradition of reconciling religion and reason,
contrasts Christianity with the tribal religions of North America in an effort to
articulate a clear language by which religious systems may be measured. He argues that the
content of the Judaeo-Christian religions is structured around their emphasis on the action
of divinity through time, while the tribal American religions are more directed towards the
presence of divinity in space. I would like to take up those terms to further the
articulation of a comparative language. It is, of course, pointless to make the distinction
between space and time without considering them together, and Deloria does not do this,
though in simplifying his argument I have made him seem to. Space and time together are the
necessary categories in which we experience events occurring. Whitehead has said that the
event is the unit of things real; and it seems that modern physicists, in describing what
they detect at the subatomic level, find it more convenient to formulate their observations
in terms of events rather than locations in space and actions in time separately. if events
are necessarily unfolded in space and time, this is also true of divine events, the central
subject of every religion.
Catastrophes, as divine events, were experienced as alterations of space and time. The
celestial bodies by which time is marked changed their courses, and therefore the units of
time were altered; simultaneously, the face of the earth, the space in which we live, was
transformed. The religious reaction to this kind of divine event is in almost all cases to
see an imperative in it. The divinity, through reshaping space and time, gives some kind of
imperative to mankind, and the driving question of ancient religions is: What kind of
behavior does this alteration dictate?
It comes to a question of syntax. The basic proposition is something like this: "Heaven and
earth are being remade" - a statement in the present tense. When this is then transferred
into the past tense, several deductions can be made. The simplest and most unquestioning
is, "Heaven and earth have been remade; great destruction was caused, and this we lament."
It is actually a lament, the papyrus of lpuwer, which Velikovsky uses as the starting-point
for his reconstruction. The alternative to lament comes by making the same statement,
"Heaven and earth were remade," and then adding to it, "Stability has now been achieved,
and this we celebrate." What follows on the ritual level is a celebration involving
reenactment by human beings on earth of the events which took place in the sky, and the
logical end of the ritual is the triumph of stability. So far, so good. it is when theories
of divine motivation come into play that the syntax becomes more complex and more
dangerous. One can say, "Heaven and earth were remade because of something the gods
suspected or decided in regard to man," or, "Heaven and earth were remade because of
something man did." In either case, obsession begins to grow with preventing reoccurrence
of the catastrophe by acting differently towards the gods. Syntactically the proposition
becomes transferred to the future tense: "Unless the gods feel thus and so, unless man does
this or that, heaven and earth will be remade." Finally, once obsession has reached the
pure stage where propitiation seems hopeless, the proposition becomes absolute: "Heaven and
earth are going to be remade; act accordingly." And that is the apocalypse.
Let me now apply these simple terms to some real cases. The religions I have chosen to
analyse are simply those which we, as inhabitants of this continent with a certain
tradition behind us, find most imperative. Through our language and culture the Judaeo-
Christian religions keep a hold on us, and they cannot be ultimately understood without the
Egyptian elements they react to or incorporate. Through our habitation here the archaic
American religions also have a kind of authority over us.
To start with Egypt, then, The Old Kingdom precedes the catastrophes reconstructed in
Worlds in Collision, and Velikovsky has promised a separate volume dealing with the earlier
catastrophes [4] which Egyptians in the Old Kingdom were concerned to memorialize. All
the religions I am using as examples make references to these earlier events, particularly
the Deluge, but in none of the others are there religious texts available in materials
which actually predate -1500. (Other cultures, such as the Sumerian, do possess such texts
in abundance; Old Kingdom Egypt will suffice ice for one example here.) The events with
which the Egyptians were obsessed from the beginning of their civilization were those of
the Deluge, and it can be shown that there are three distinct words or phrases in
hieroglyphic writing for a flood of water; one designating the annual inundation, a second
the primeval waters beyond the sky, and a third "The Great Flood which comes from 'the
Great Lady" ' the great lady being heaven [5] . The Deluge events in Egypt, as Velikovsky
has pointed out in some of his talks, were translated into the story of Osiris, Isis, Seth
and Horus. Osiris was great kings whose brother Seth murdered and dismembered him,
whereupon his wife Isis reconstituted his body and conceived a child to avenge him, the god
Horus. Velikovsky takes these as events involving Saturn and Jupiter. The primary Egyptian
reaction to these events was a massive effort to create political and agricultural
stability by coordinating all activity along the Nile, and at the center of this stability
was the institution of divine kingship. The living king was conceived to be the planetary
divinity which had won the struggle in heaven: the planet Jupiter was the god Horus, and
the living pharaoh was the god Horus. The king's activities were largely dictated by the
rituals reenacting these events, and the reenactment was meant to celebrate, ultimately,
the stability that succeeded them.
Now the only flaw in such a system is that the king is mortal. The experience of the
incarnate god's death precipitated a catastrophe on the ritual level which had to be
resolved. This was done by conceiving of the dead king as the god Osiris, who had been
reborn and instituted as king of the underworld. The living king who succeeds him and
honors his cult then becomes the god Horus. At the time of the king's death, his body was
embalmed and kept aside for a ritually correct date of entombment. The new king acceded to
the throne, but before he could be crowned he had to move throughout the land of Egypt
performing a mystery play which reenacted the struggle between Horus and Seth. The dead
king was then entombed at the end of the prescribed period with a solemn ritual of
resurrection. It is carried out in the pyramid built as his tomb, and the so-called
"Pyramid Texts" are the words inscribed on the walls of the pyramid's inner chambers and
recited during it. They are extraordinarily complex because the dead king is in fact reborn
as many different gods, but his identity as Osiris is one of the primary among them. This
ritual has a living descendent in the Christian Easter midnight liturgy. Like the Old
Kingdom entombment rite, the Easter liturgy memorializes the death and rebirth of a god who
once lived on earth and then descended to the land of the dead; occurs at the season when
vegetation returns; and consists of the reenactment of a passion followed by the
celebration of a resurrection.
Most of the spells in the Pyramid Texts have as their direct goal the transfiguration of
the king into one or many celestial divinities. Because Egyptian tenses are not easy to
reconstruct, the tense in which these texts are composed may be taken as either the
present, the subjunctive, or the imperative: "The King lives as Osiris", "May the King live
as Osiris", or "Live, O King, as Osiris". But there are also spells, often inscribed on
separate sections of the pyramid inner chambers, in which we find the first trace of
apocalyptic syntax in Old Kingdom Egypt. They take the form of a threat by the king; if he
is not permitted by the celestial gods to be reborn as one of their company, he will cause
a celestial catastrophe. Here is one such passage. The priest reciting for the king
addresses the supreme god and then the sun, and makes the following threat:
God whose name cannot be known
make a place for this single lord!
Lord of the radiance of the horizon
give place to the King !
If no place be made the king shall curse his father Earth,
Earth speak no more,
decree no more!
Whom the King finds in his way he will eat limb by limb !
The Pelican shall prophesy,
the company of nine come out,
the Great One rise,
and the gods in their nines cry:
"A dam shall dam the land,
cliffs crumble and banks unite,
ways be lost to the wayfarer,
steps of the land collapse on those who flee it!" [6]
It should be stressed that this is a text inscribed inside the pyramid. It is not a mode of
thought accessible to the general population of Egypt, but rather, if you like, an esoteric
text. In Old Kingdom Egypt it was celebration of stability that constituted the public
experience, and this kind of apocalyptic syntax was held in check.
In turning to the Hebrew experience one must begin with the Scriptures, and since
Wellhausen it has been agreed that to work with the Scriptures intelligently at all one
must be able to distinguish the times at which different strata were composed.
Unfortunately, it is impossible by this method to determine with any certainty when the
central Hebrew concept of monotheism emerged. The earliest remembered moment in the
specifically Hebrew religious experience seems to have been the covenant of Abraham with
the god of a nomadic desert people, and the nature of this god is difficult to make out.
The major moment thereafter was that of -1475, and it was passed on in memory as a law
giving at Sinai by the god who "caused" the catastrophic events of that time. We cannot
easily say whether he was himself originally a planetary god or was rather conceived of as
a god who controlled the planets, since the latter conception had already been developed
before the rescension in a text of the present account of the lawgiving. The next major
episode is the attempt to institute kingship in Israel. This was not destined to last long,
possibly because the king was not conceived by the Hebrews to incarnate a divinity who
walked on earth or even to be the high priest of the Hebrew religion. He was a strictly
political creation, the result of a demand by the Hebrew people to have a king like other
nations. What follows the unsuccessful attempt at kingship is described in the second part
of Worlds in Collision, which analyzes the writings of those prophets of the eighth and
seventh century who were contemporary with the last series of celestial disturbances. The
great phrase of these prophets is "The Day of the Lord." Again, we cannot say with
certainty if the Lord is a planet or a god manipulating the planets, but the day of the
Lord is in either case an experience of the reshaping of heaven and earth. Velikovsky has
indicated in some of his talks that it may be only in the later prophets, Ezekiel and
deutero-Isaiah, that a clear monotheistic and transcendental concept emerges. He has
stressed that this is a very speculative line of thought, certainly not one which he wishes
to introduce as an integral part of his work.
The only way to organize such a multileveled experience is to say that, for the Hebrews,
Yahweh acted over a long period of time for the benefit of his chosen people. He remade
heaven and earth for them; he altered space and time for them; and he did so in a series of
events so qualitatively differentiated from one another that there could be no hope to
telescoping them all into one ritual. Rather, the people that conceives of itself as chosen
must sustain the tension of this operation of their god through time intellectually, and
thus they become the people of the Book, whose existence is organized around the scriptural
record of the different events in their sequence. The concept of their chosen-ness denied
them the security of living in a world of immanent deity where the acts of the gods could
be reenacted in a yearly cycle. Rather, they had constantly to keep in mind the entirety of
their varied history. It is this sustaining of a tension that produced the rabbinical
tradition of elaborate interpretation of the Book.
The difficulty of sustaining such tension also in due time produced an apocalyptic
literature among the Jews, but the rabbinical tradition worked against it, and it remains
peripheral to the Jewish religion. Nevertheless, when Jesus of Nazareth entered his public
ministry the apocalyptic notions were at his disposal; and in some sense the gospels may be
characterized as a teaching of the ethics of the last days. if this historical figure was
convinced of an imminent end of the world, he must also have been passionately concerned to
tell people how they should act in regard to it. There is a different aspect of Jesus,
though, which may have been available to the minds of his contemporaries, and was in any
case soon developed by Paul into an essential part of Christianity. That is Christ in the
ancient pattern of a dying and reborn god whose death and resurrection promise salvation to
mankind, whether salvation in the form of the return of vegetation in the yearly cycle, or
salvation in the sense of life after the human death, or finally salvation as survival
during the process by which heaven and earth are next remade. Consider for instance, a
passage like Mark 13, where Christ's apocalyptic warning and his connection with the cycle
of vegetation are present together. He says:
For in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall
not give her light. And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven
shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great
power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect
from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.
Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth
leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things
come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors [7] .
The passage is remarkable because the first part of it can be read in the traditional
thundering apocalyptic voice, while the second is a tender parable from the realm of
vegetation, of the kind used throughout the gospels. Here two identities are present which
need not necessarily have been well integrated in Jesus' actual conception of himself or in
the perception of him by his contemporaries.
When Jesus died and Paul propagated the gospels, the apocalyptic literature of the Jews was
ready to hand for imitation by Christians. The remaining history of the West has been
deeply stamped by the fact that one such apocalyptic book was canonized, that of John the
Divine, which has become our symbol for apocalyptic feeling in general. It is unnecessary
to quote representative passages to give the tone, since even in our present culture it is
impossible to escape exposure to it in the course of one's upbringing. But one passage in
John is particularly remarkable for what it reveals about the syntax I have described.
And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to
heaven. And swore by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things
that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the
things which are therein, that there should be time no longer [8] .
The last phrase is appallingly simple, for it represents the logical termination of
apocalyptic thought, a psychological state in which endurance through time in fear of
cataclysmic events becomes intolerable. What is left is only an utterly irrational desire
that time shall cease. This reluctance to accept the temporal world, this demand that time
end, has been with the West ever since. Yet the apocalypse did not come, and the shape
Christianity took depended on that fact. With the failure of apocalypse in the generation
succeeding Christ it was inevitable that the cataclysmic imagery be counterbalanced. Thus
it was only a matter of time before the uniformitarian cosmology of Aristotle, diffused
already through the Hellenistic and Roman cultures, should be grafted onto Christianity.
Aristotle's entire view of the world is predicated on the assumption of an unending
cyclical repetition of time in the natural world and among the celestial bodies. To use
Aristotelian "reason" for the interpretation of apocalyptic "revelation" is therefore
nothing less than to attempt to synthesize two diametrically opposite views of the solar
system.
In the Islamic experience it is remarkable that all the phases of Christianity are
telescoped. Islam begins with the preaching of Muhammed at Mecca, in short fervent recitals
or warnings called Surahs in the Koran, whose message is entirely that the world is about
to come to an end and that when this happens the elect will be saved and the evil will be
damned. After the Hegirah, in which he moved to Medina, Muhammed's preaching becomes
legislative and longwinded, concerned with working out codes of existence. The world had
not come to an end, and his apocalyptic fervor waned. Within a few generations after his
death, schools of jurisprudence cropped up; debates were held on juridical interpretation
of the Koran; theological controversies became heated; Plato and Aristotle were again
grafted onto the apocalyptic message; and finally, in Sufism, there appears a mysticism
concerned to transcend space and time altogether.
I now invite you to move across the Atlantic. In doing so I must admit from the start that
what I have learned about the religions of the New World has inevitably been shaped by
analogies conceived with those of the Old. As long as this is recognized it is possible to
proceed. One cannot encounter something utterly strange without bringing analogies to it;
on the other hand, one cannot make genuine progress in understanding until the power of the
analogies has been separated out from the material itself.
In the New World there are no cultures that have left extensive evidence of religious
beliefs actually held before -1500. There are many Deluge legends, but no archaeological
remains from before -1500 to substantiate them. The archaeological starting-point is
conventionally put between the 16th and 14th pre-Christian centuries, which see the
emergence of the great cultures of Mesoamerica, pre-eminently that centered around the site
of Teotihuacan outside Mexico City, where the so-called "Pyramids of the Sun and Moon" are
located. Legends of many different cultures in Mesoamerica speak of a prolonged night
following a celestial battle, during which the tribes and peoples gathered at "Tula," and
it is simple to conclude that Tula was the name given to Teotihuacan. There is a later Tula
in Hidalgo modeled after it, but this was the original and central one [9] . After that
gathering during the period of darkness, which lasted months or years, the tribes dispersed
to wait for the sun each in a different place. They felt sorrow that they could not be with
their brother tribes when the sun finally appeared, but they remembered their first unity
at Tula. The civilization erected at the site of Teotihuacan in time became the dominant
empire of Mesoamerica, and its capital city Tula can only be compared to Rome in the
history of the West. Its earliest strata are from -1500, its great period of building is in
the centuries immediately before Christ, and it was destroyed by invading armies in the
fifth century. This is a very long existence for an empire with hegemony, both political
and cultural, over the peoples around it; and the myth of the original gathering at Tula
during the long night was undoubtedly one of the sources on which its claim to hegemony was
based.
Unfortunately the symbolic language of the religion which unified the Tulan empire is not
yet fully intelligible to us; we keep having to work back through later strata to get any
glimpse of it at all. Certain themes can be isolated. The myth of the long night in which
the peoples waited for the sun to rise involves the critical concept of sacrifice, to which
the pyramids at Teotihuacan themselves are monuments. The original sacrifice was not of a
man but of a god. The gods were in council at Tula in the darkness, and each offered to
give himself in order to make the sun rise again. The legend of Quetzalcoatl is one version
of this original sacrifice, and it is said that in his case, after the sacrifice, he became
the planet Venus. The model of sacrifice was then practiced by the peoples ascribing to the
various branches of the original Tulan religion. it should be observed that the practice of
penitential blood-letting and other forms of self-mutilation was no less widespread than
the practice of human sacrifice to the celestial deities. The compulsive logic of imitating
the sacrifice of the god led to masochistic as well as sadistic expressions.
Given the lack of detailed knowledge of this first Tulan civilization, like to turn to the
most highly developed and sophisticated Mesoamerican religion, that of the Mayans. It has
been speculated that their rise to brilliance followed the fall of the Teotihuacano-Tulan
empire in the fifth century, and their classical period is known to be from the fifth
century to the ninth. The signal feature of Mayan religion on is the way it deified not
only the planets but also the cycles of time and religion numbers 1 to 13. Thus time in
different manifestations - as a planet that changes time, as the cycle of time that
results, and as the numbers by which that cycle is measured - all became divine. Time
itself seems to have become the essence, or if you like, the substance, of divinity;
insofar as divinity was incarnate it was incarnate in space, but its essential nature was
as time. But these are western terms, and we had better stick to simpler preliminary
statements.
The Mayans were clearly aware of the possibility, or inevitability, of repeated world
destructions, and like the other Mesoamerican peoples, they spoke of four earlier "suns" or
ages, thought of themselves as living in the fifth "sun," and expected that "sun," too, to
perish by some celestial agent. But the remarkable point is that this expectation produced
so little apocalyptic frenzy or fervor in the Mayans. On the contrary, they developed their
system of time until contemplation of the beginning and end of a world age was held
completely in check and acquired no obsessive force whatsoever. Using units of four hundred
years, they speculated that the cycle between the destruction of suns was thirteen four-
hundred-year periods, thirteen baktuns. Steles from their classical period refer to them as
living in the eighth and ninth baktuns, and the date they gave for the last destruction of
the world has been computed as -3113. But they also computed in smaller units. They
worshipped the year in its present length of 365 days, and computed the quarter-day error
with greater precision than their contemporaries in the Old World. They also worshipped two
other sacred years, one of 360 days and another of 260. The simplest interpretation in the
Velikovskian context would be that these were extended back before the last celestial
disturbances; but it is also possible that they are different celestial cycles of other
bodies than the sun. The 260 day year was the most sacred, and the obsession of Mayan
numerology became to reconcile the cycle of 260 days with all longer cycles. This they did
by conceiving of the simultaneous journey through time of different divinities who were
themselves units of time and who also bore time on their backs as they walked along the
road. When a cycle ended, its god came to a restingplace and set down his burden. For the
Mayans it was a sacred event when more than one such burden-carrying divinity arrived at
their resting-places simultaneously.
The rituals developed for units of time smaller than the baktun must have played an
especially significant role in reducing apocalyptic anxiety. Most effective was that of the
Katun, the twenty year period, for this was the ritual by which time could be experienced
in a single human lifespan. They conceived that each twenty year period had a god presiding
over it, who bore it on his back. Ten years before that period began, they welcomed the god
as a guest in their temples, propitiating him and the god of the present katun at the same
time. This is a very civil process, a matter of good manners to the arriving god: it is
also a religious experience easily accessible to the imaginations of those who live long
after catastrophes, for it accords with the length of our own lives. It is thus a
magnificent check against obsession with that distant day when the "sun" would come to an
end.
The Hopis of northeast Arizona also trace their culture back to the great Mesoamerican
complex of civilizations, even though they live far north of the area normally attributed
to it. In them, one finds a conviction strongly parallel to that of the Jews, for the Hopis
too conceive of themselves as a chosen people. They claim that during the last destruction
of the world they, as a people, were chosen to survive, and that the divinity who reshaped
heaven and earth instructed them to preserve a yearly cycle of rituals reflecting the pure
pattern of creation, in order to prevent future catastrophes. Their theodicy also resembles
the Judaeo-Christian, in that they believe that it was some fault in man, some moral
failing, that precipitated the earlier world destructions. They are therefore concerned to
bear themselves with both ritual and ethical correctness, in order to survive the next
destruction as they have survived the previous ones. This ritual attitude is developed in
the most minute details; even the steps of their dances reflect it. Here is a description
of one such dance in which the cosmological symbolism is evident. It is the dance for Niman
Kachina, a festival after the summer solstice, when the spirits from the sky who have
visited the Hopi for half of the year are sent home.
The pattern of the dance embodies the familiar cosmological concept. The dancers first
enter the plaza in a single file from the east and line up on the north side, facing west.
As they dance, the end of the line slowly curves west and south, but is broken before a
circle is formed, just as the pure re pattern of life was broken and the First World
destroyed. The dancers then move to the west side, the line curves to the south, and is
broken as was the pattern of life in the Second World. Moving to the south side and curving
east, the dancers repeat the procedure at this third position, representing the Third
World. There is no fourth position, for life is still in progress on this Fourth World and
it remains to be seen whether it will adhere to the perfect pattern or be broken again
[10] .
This concrete example gives a sense of what Deloria is talking about when he emphasizes the
spatial nature of tribal American religions. The great events in time are transformed into
the position of dancers in a plaza.
Finally there is the Aztec religion, easily the most barbarous aberration from the
Mesoamerican civilizing norms. At the time when the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs'
obsessional fear that the sun would collapse if not fed by human blood had grown so great
that as many as twenty thousand people would be sacrificed in a single rite. Human
sacrifice existed in Mesoamerican culture before, but it was used with great reserve, if
one may speak of it that way; only in times of dire necessity would one person be
sacrificed. Among the Aztecs, apocalyptic feeling had dislocated the syntax of the
sacrifice and become obsessional in the highest degree. Scholars have reconstructed from
Aztec chronicles the possibility that there may have been one particular king who initiated
the idea of a ritual war for the purpose of gaining prisoners for sacrifice, and they have
speculated that this idea was manipulated by the skillful politicians of the Aztec empire.
In other words, these men were fabricating a kind of ideology or propaganda to justify
their conquests. This would be merely one among many cases in which an ancient mythical
obsession with preventing cataclysms falls later into the hands of people ready to use it
quite differently from the original intention, and the result can clearly be termed a
barbarization. The Aztec culture itself was in such tension as it continued to witness
these spectacles of mass sacrifice that when the Spaniards arrived it seemed to be
experiencing a desertion by its own gods. it may be this experience more than any other
which explains the immediate evaporation of such a large empire.
At the beginning I suggested that this talk might be some kind of prolegomenon to the
reconciliation of reason and religion. Hence it is not intended to be normative. And yet
inevitably when I come to something like the Aztec cult of sacrifice I call it a
barbarization, and when I come to the spectacle of the Mayans courteously welcoming the god
of the twenty year period I call it civilized. Such characterizations come instinctively
from my concurrence with the thought on which Mr. Doran ended his paper [11] . That is,
that the mind most definitely has the power to relieve itself of its apocalyptic syntax. We
can become aware of it when it is used or manipulated, when it becomes part of either the
conscious or unconscious behavior of others. And we can, whether by an attitude or a rite,
celebrate the fact that we live in stability now. In submitting religions to spectral
analysis, this last capacity is the wavelength to watch for.
Notes (Structuring the Apocalypse)
1. Deloria, Vine, God is Red (Grosset &Dunlap, 1973) page 99. quoted from: Eastman,
Charles, The Soul of the Indian (Houghton Mifflin, 1911) pages 119-120.
2. See behind, MacGregor, "Psychological Aspects of the Work of lmmanuel Velikovsky", page
47. (Ed.)
3. See ahead, Grinnell, "Catastrophism and Uniformity", page 131. [Ed.]
4. Dr. Velikovsky associates the Universal Deluge with a nova-like outburst of Saturn
caused by a close interaction of Saturn with Jupiter. These events will be described in a
volume with the title Saturn and the Flood. Dr. Velikovsky has not completed this
manuscript. He discusses earlier catastrophes in his Address to this Symposium. See behind,
Velikovsky, "Cultural Amnesia". Pages 21 and 22. (Ed.)
5. I have discussed these phrases, and the Pyramid Texts in general, at greater length in
"A Reading of the Pyramid Texts", Pensée 3( l): 10-16 (Winter 1973).
6. Pyramid of Unas, Utterance 254, Spells 276-279; my translation.
7. Mark 13: 24-29; King James Version.
8. Revelations 10: 5-6; King James Version.
9. For my discussion of the evidence supporting the identification of Teotihuacan with the
original Tula, as well as for the catastrophic features in Mesoamerican civilization in
general see "The Mesoamerican Record". Pensée, 4( 4): 3444 (Fall 1974). See particularly
the second note at the bottom of page 39.
10. Waters, Frank, The Book of the Hopi, (Viking Press, 1963), pages 204-205. For a
discussion of the reliability of this book as a source, see "The Mesoamerican Record", op.
cit., page 39.
11. See ahead, Doran, "Living with Velikovsky", page 146. [Ed.]
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
CHAPTER FIVE
SHAKESPEARE AND VELIKOVSKY
Catastrophic Theory and the Springs of Art
Irving Wolfe
Etudes Anglaises
Université de Montreal
*[Ed.] Parts of this paper were subsequently published in Kronos: A journal of
Interdisciplinary Synthesis, (Kronos Press, Glassboro, N. J.) see 1( 3): 31-45 (Fall 1975)
and 1( 4): 37-54 (Winter 1976).
I must begin with several caveats. First, I do not present these findings as a closed and
substantiated set of hypotheses. They are suggestions put forth for discussion, not
conclusions, but beginnings. Second, they are part deductive, part inductive, as they must
be when one is mapping out terra incognita. Third, because I am addressing an audience
fairly specialized in the sciences, but less specialized in literature and drama, I feel I
can refer to the Velikovsky background briefly, but that I must treat the action of the
plays in some detail.
Now to my paper. Quite simply, I have come across what appears to me to be astonishing
Velikovskian overtones in Shakespeare's plays, which I wish to present to this assembly
and then use to draw some tentative conclusions upon narrative art and the nature of man.
I have chosen two representative Shakespearian dramas, one a seemingly light comedy, A
Midsummer Night's Dream, and the other, Antony and Cleopatra, a worldly tragedy of lust
and politics. Neither might at first glance appear to have much to do with catastrophism.
In this first section, I wish to analyse William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
as an example of narrative art whose subconscious bedrock is Velikovskian. On the surface,
the play is a typical public comedy, seemingly light, fanciful and gay, intended mainly to
amuse. A significant portion of traditional criticism has treated it in just this manner.
Beneath a surface however, it is highly serious, like all of Shakespeare's comedies, in
the sense that what it wants to say, or what it is about, is as meaningful and profound as
the great tragedies. Indeed, some critics have argued that the comedies are more serious,
in that their scope of reference is wider, more communal. I propose that there is also a
deep level of seriousness in the play, a level which contains intermingled elements of
terror and comfort whose true source can only be appreciated in terms of the ideas of Dr.
Immanuel Velikovsky. I am arguing that we respond to the play in different ways, at least
one of which is subconscious, and that the full nature of our subconscious response can
only be understood if we perceive the catastrophic substructure which underlies the play.
At the outset, I want to stress the primitive, ritualistic aspects of A Midsummer Night's
Dream. I feel we must see it, to begin with, as a fertility play, a genre whose roots go
very far back into our past. Looked at in this way, the play is accessible to any
understanding, from the most primitive to the most modern, because it embodies certain
archetypal patterns of action which are universal. If we look at man's art as Jung looked
at man's dreams, we discover certain archetypes produced by every society in every place
and at every time in recorded human history [1] . We must conclude, as Jung did with
dreams, that man as a species shows a tendency to produce such archetypes in his art, and
we must then wonder why.
One of these archetypal patterns in narrative art is the genre of the comic fertility
play. In it, we begin with an opening situation which appears to be stable, but contains
the seeds of dangerous disruption. There is usually a conflict which has reached an
impasse. Then, typically, in Shakespeare, a certain person who functions as a catalyst is
dropped into the impasse, and his acts set a chemical reaction in motion. As a result, the
oppositions are crystallized and the play is propelled into the second phase. This is a
period of turbulence and confusion, of rapidly changing alignments, of a search for
correct bonding, of apparent but always comic danger. Things appear to be insoluble,
indeed disastrous, when suddenly a new factor is introduced which permits everything to be
sorted out in the third phase. Here, everything that must happen to achieve a happy ending
does, and everything that had to be prevented, for the same reason, is. I would therefore
suggest that Shakespeare's plays may be best understood if they are seen as falling
naturally into three parts, or, as George Rylands calls them, movements, one arising from
the other in a rather Hegelian sequence.
In Shakespeare's comedy, as in all fertility plays, the center of values is always and
principally society. Everything occurs for the welfare of the tribe, the group. In
primitive terms, the life of the tribe is threatened at the beginning by dangers within
it. The tribe, to guarantee its continued fertility, must maintain a harmony with the
divine and the natural, which are the major factors affecting physical existence. This
means that every member must play his role, and the mating and reproduction, particularly
among those at the top, must occur between those clearly chosen to be marriage partners,
and under the most auspicious circumstances. All of this, which means the very life and
future of the tribe, is threatened by the original situation, where power is in the hands
of those no longer able to rule, and the wrong pairs are urged to mate at the wrong time,
under the wrong circumstances. Of course, things must be altered before any irreparable
damage has been caused to the future of the tribe. in the second part of a universal
comedy, therefore, the confusions and turbulence take the form of dangers of identity,
dangers of insufficient self-knowledge, dangers of irresponsible sex, and, comically, the
danger of death. That is to say, all of the things which must be avoided for the welfare
of the tribe threaten to happen, and none of the things which must be achieved - the
purgation of youthful excess, of immaturity, of uncontrolled sexual response, of a facile
tendency to bravado and recklessness and violence - appear likely. There is always a
guiding force, however, which steers things in the right direction, and, at the end, when
all has worked out well, the period of turbulence is seen as a time of ordeal, of testing
and of purgation, by which those who survive doff their childishness and undergo a process
of change of maturation, of individuation, if one may borrow the term, whereby they have
been made ready to become responsible adult members of their tribe. One might say that,
for the young lovers of a Shakespearian comedy, the action of the play is a sort of ritual
initiation to adulthood, set in a context of affirmation of tribal harmony with the forces
which control and thus guarantee life and fertility. It is not an individual who triumphs;
rather, it is tribal death which has been avoided, and tribal life which has been assured.
To apply this directly to A Midsummer Night's Dream, we must look briefly at the plot. It
is a structure of four levels, or perhaps four boxes, each inside the next, from a group
of yokels at the bottom to the world of fairy spirits at the op. It is set in ancient
Athens, and the pivotal event about which the action occurs is the forthcoming marriage of
its leader, Duke Theseus, to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, with whom he had previously
been at war. In fertility terms, Theseus' union with Hippolyta will bring political peace
and a continuation of his dynasty. it is thus critically important for the future life of
Athens hat the marriage of its young leader occurs under the most auspicious
circumstances.
The play opens four days before the nuptials. Theseus is impatient to enjoy is bride, but
he must wait for the new moon, the right time for new beginnings and fertility, before he
can ease his sexual frustration [2] .
O , methinks how slow
This old moon wanes. She lingers my desires,
Like to a step-dame or a dowager,
Long withering out a young man's revenue.
1.1. 3-6.
Hippolyta politely but firmly tells him he must wait.
Four days will quickly steep themselves in night,
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.
1.1. 7-11.
Her reply is full of unconscious ironies having to do with sexual frustration, with
nightly dreams, with Theseus, frustrated, like a bow which is bent and ready to shoot, but
not released.
We shortly meet two sets of young lovers, whose combined story occupies most of the action
of the play. There are two young men, Lysander and Demetrius, and two young women, Hermia
and Helena, in a situation of love thwarted by obstacles. It is necessary that these
relationships be clear, and so I will set them out in some detail. With regard to the
first pair, Lysander and Hermia, he loves her and she loves him, but her father Egeus will
not approve of the marriage, wishing his daughter to marry Demetrius instead. As for the
second pair, Demetrius and Helena, she loves him but he does not love her, preferring
Hermia instead. Thus, there is an obstacle in the case of each pair. This is presented in
the following diagram as
diagram
Egeus, angry at having his authority challenged, hales his daughter Hermia and her lover
Lysander before Duke Theseus and demands justice. The Duke tells her she must obey her
father and marry Demetrius, or become a celibate priestess, or be executed. When they are
left alone, the two lovers decide to flee to some nearby woods and make their way
thenceforth to Sparta, where they will be free to marry. They reveal their secret to
Helena, thinking her an ally, but she, in an attempt to gain favor, tells it to Demetrius,
whereupon he vows to pursue the lovers into the forest to thwart their plan.
We thus have four young people fleeing Athens for the forest - Lysander and Hermia wishing
to elope, Demetrius the rival wanting to stop them, and Helena wanting to be near
Demetrius. At the same time, a group of yokels, preparing a rather inept play in honor of
Theseus' forthcoming wedding, also .decide to go to the woods, where they may rehearse
secretly and so avoid the throngs of admirers whom, they are certain, would otherwise dog
their heels.
So ends the first act. By this point we have met all the different levels of mankind in
the play, from the yokels at the bottom to the four noble young people to Theseus and
Hippolyta. We then move to the woods to meet the highest level of creation, the world of
the fairies ruled by Oberon and his queen Titania; and Oberon's attendant spirit, the
mischievous bubbling Puck, fills in the rest of the picture.
As he explains it, an argument has developed between Oberon and Titania concerning one of
Titania's attendants whom Oberon wants as part of his train. As a result there is discord
in the fairy sphere.
And now they never meet in grove or green, By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,
But they do square, that all their elves for fear Creep into acorn cups and hide them
there. 2.1-28-31.
This description is replete with romantic and fertility symbols - the sacred grove, the
magic green, clear water as the source of life, starlight as the natural environment of
true love - but these areas, which should be blessed by a united fairy world so they can
transmit their life-enhancing virtues to Athens, are now the setting for wrangling and
arguments. As a result, the fairy world, with which Athens should be in harmony, cannot
perform its fertility function because Oberon and Titania are not united. When they meet,
he greets her rudely, and she replies
What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence,
I have forsworn his bed and company.
2.1.61-62.
We can thus see that the crisis of the male being separated from the female he wants
applies throughout the whole world of Athens, human and spiritual. Theseus wanting
Hippolyta and being told he must wait, Lysander wanting Hermia and being told by her
father that he cannot marry her, Helena wanting Demetrius who rejects her, and now Oberon
and Titania not mating as they should - the reiteration at all levels becomes a metaphor
which delineates a situation of total infertility which has seized Athens' world the
moment before its leader is to wed. All the males are like bows tightly drawn, but with
nowhere to shoot. In fertility terms, if Theseus is to marry under such circumstances,
both leader and tribe will be cursed. There is the danger of the total annihilation of the
life of the tribe. As a result, the country is under a pall. Its communal life appears
desolate, for Theseus is forced to command his master of the revels
Go, Philostrate,
Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments,
Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth,
Turn melancholy forth to funerals;
The pale companion is not for our pomp.
1.1-11-15.
In a country like Elizabethan England, which was given to dazzling and elaborate pageantry
on state occasions, Shakespeare writes a play in which, four days before a royal marriage,
the monarch must plead for youth to be merry, mirth to be awakened, and melancholy to be
thrown out as more suitable to funerals. Things are not well in Athens.
Titania, in a long speech, explains to Oberon the consequences of their discord. When I
read a summary of Dr. Velikovsky's ideas in the May 1972 issue of Pensée [3] , I was
struck by the astonishing similarity between it and Titania's speech. I wish to compare
them now, to convey the eerie feeling I experienced. It almost seemed as if Shakespeare
had had the writings of Dr. Velikovsky at his elbow, or at least a copy of Pensée, when
composing the play.
Here is Titania's speech
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By pavèd fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or in the beachèd margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hats disturb'd our sport.
2.1.82-87.
That is to say, since the time when the crops begin to grow and thus need sunshine and
water, the meetings of Titania and on in appropriate places of fertility such as water
fountains, mountain brooks, and the strip of beach which is neither land nor water, where
they must dance in magic circles to assure good growing weather, have been disturbed. The
result is chaos.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they nave overborne their continents.
2.1.88-92.
The winds can bring life, or destruction. Here, where the natural order of which Oberon
and Titania are a part has been broken, the result is destructive. The winds have caused
great rain clouds to form, which have rained so heavily that there has been widespread
flooding. It must be pointed out that in Shakespeare, one of the most horrendous images he
can think of to portray chaos is that of water swelling beyond its appointed limits and
usurping the domain of the land. As a result, all cultivation - the main basis of
primitive life in addition to hunting - has become impossible.
The ox hath therfore strech'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock.
2.1.93-97.
Planting has been made futile, the young grain needed to sustain life has decomposed
before reaching full ripeness - another major Shakespearian image of waste, and no cattle
are able to be raised, so scavenger birds - instead of men - eat the carcasses of the dead
feed animals. The basis of settled civilized agrarian civilization has been demolished.
With this gone, all signs of human order disappear.
The nine men's morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are indistinguishable.
2.1-98-100.
The vestiges of human civilization, as in a long-forgotten archaeological site, are almost
obliterated, because people have no time - or inclination - to sport. Neither are they
inclined to worship, with further worse results.
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
2.1-101-105.
The consequences continue to grow, in a proper Renaissance progression from the particular
to the general, until the last image, which is one of universal chaos.
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
And on old Hiem's thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world
by their increase, now knows not which is which.
2.1.106-114.
Here we have reached cosmic chaos. Winter follows spring, summer follows winter, and no
man knows season or time; and the blame for all this is to be laid squarely at the feet of
Titania and Oberon.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissention;
We are their parents and original.
2.1.115-117.
Discord in the heavens has caused universal disorder on earth. For those not familiar with
Pensée's summary, I offer a few extracts [4] .
In great convulsions, the seas erupted onto continents. Climates changed suddenly, ice
settling over lush vegetation, while green meadows and forests were transformed into
deserts.
Fleeing from the torrent of meteorites, men abandoned their livestock to the holocaust.
Fields of grain which fed great cities perished. Cried Ipuwer, "No fruits, no herbs are
found. That has perished which yesterday was seen. The land is left to its weariness like
the cutting of flax."
In the new age the sun rose in the east, where formerly it set. The quarters of the world
were displaced. Seasons no longer came in their proper times. "The winter is come as
summer, the months are reversed, and the hours are disordered," reads an Egyptian papyrus.
The Chinese Emperor Yahou sent scholars throughout the land to locate north, east, west,
and south and draw up a new calendar.
This is the situation which must be remedied in the play, for it is the cause of the vast
disorder and infertility - symbolized by such patterns as the sexually frustrated males at
all levels - which threatens the very life of the tribe. if accord is not achieved in the
supernatural world, Athens is cursed. Something must happen - some chain of events - to
turn all of this about.
At the human level, if the tribe is to continue to function healthily, not only must its
leader marry auspiciously, but its best young noble blood must be well-mated too, for
these people must be available to aid the ruler in governing the tribe. Hermia must end up
marrying Lysander, while Demetrius must be brought to accept marriage with Helena, and
both of these marriages must occur within and with the full approval of the society of
Athens, if Athens is to reap the maximum benefit which such noble marriages can contribute
to its future.
Conversely, among the things which must not happen are sexual relations before marriage,
either between the young lovers or between Theseus and Hippolyta. In mythological terms,
they must be preserved in ritual cleanliness and purity, to be free to share in the rites
of social ordination at the end of the play. To Shakespeare, the institution of marriage
is always sacred, as compared with promiscuous sex, because it represents the subjugation
of sensual individuality to the interests of the group, or maturity triumphing over
youthful selfishness. Equally, no violence must occur between Lysander and Demetrius,
rival lovers, or they may be killed, wasted without having ripened to play their part in
the continuation of the life of the tribe. The yokels too must be preserved to serve the
state. Even the successful elopement to Sparta of Lysander and Hermia, without violence,
would be a severe loss to Athens, and so this too must not happen. The lovers must be made
free to marry each other in Athens.
The forest is the testing ground where all of these possibilities, whether for the life of
Athens or against it, lie waiting. The second, third, and fourth acts, all set in the
forest, are thus a period of growing turbulence, where all the impulses generated in
Athens are set one against another. Confusion mounts upon confusion, hatred and disorder
are unleashed, but, at the end, after all the tumult and passion, events are sorted out,
order is restored, and all ends well. Very briefly, that is the action of the play. Let us
now look more closely at the mid le section.
When appreciated in performance, the action in the forest seems totally confusing. Things
happen with bewildering rapidity, with great humor and imagination, until everything is
sorted out, we-know not how. However, when we look at the action in tranquility, a certain
pattern emerges. As described by Enid Welsford, it is the pattern of dance [5] . Because
it is a sequence of changing partnerships, like a minuet or square dance, it can be
efficiently set out as a series of diagrams.
In the opening situation, as the reader will recall, Lysander loves Hermia, who loves him,
while Helena loves Demetrius, who loves Hermia. This was represented as
1. Diagram
That is to say, both young men love Hermia, and neither loves Helena. Then, as we
remember, Lysander and Hermia run off to the forest, and Demetrius and Helena follow. When
Demetrius and Helena reach the forest, he looking for the fleeing pair, she pursuing him
heartbrokenly despite his repeated insults, threats, and rejections, Oberon observes them
invisibly and, offended by Demetrius' treatment of the girl, vows
ere he do leave this grove,
Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love.
2.1.245-246.
He then orders Puck to sprinkle a magic juice on Demetrius' eyes, so that he will fall in
love with the next woman he sees, presumably Helena. Puck, not realizing there are two
Athenians in the forest, comes upon the sleeping figures of Lysander and Hermia and
sprinkles the juice on Lysander's eyes. No sooner is this done but Demetrius and Helena
come into the clearing and, after some abusive language, Demetrius abandons Helena. She
stumbles over the sleeping Lysander, who, awakening with the juice on his eyes, sees her
and naturally falls in love with her and pursues her offstage, abandoning Hermia, who
awakes and finds herself the one who is now alone. The second pattern, therefore, is
2. Diagram
Each of the boys now loves the girl who does not love him. The next exchange occurs when
Oberon realizes Puck's mistake, as Demetrius pleads his love to the bewildered Hermia, who
cannot understand why her beloved Lysander has left her, and fears Demetrius has killed
him. Oberon charms Demetrius asleep and puts the juice on his eyes, ordering Puck to bring
Helena where Demetrius can awaken and fall in love with her. in a moment, Puck has brought
Helena back, with Lysander protesting his love for her, and Demetrius is duly awakened by
their arguing, whereupon he sees Helena and bursts out in rhapsodic love poetry for her.
Thus the situation now is
3. Diagram
At the beginning, both young men had been in love with Hermia, and no one had loved
Helena, where now both are in love with Helena, and neither with Hermia. The play seems to
be weighing all the different possibilities. The two men, quite naturally, strut like rams
at mating time, hurling threats at each other concerning the possession of the ewe Helena,
and the situation is further aggravated by the arrival of Hermia. Helena, with the two men
at her feet, cannot believe what has happened, and accuses the others of being in a
conspiracy to mock her. Soon the two girls are tearing at each other's hair and the men
run off to fight in another part of the woods. Puck is enormously amused by it all, but
Oberon is concerned to set it all right. He orders Puck to keep the men apart by magic and
tire them out until they fall asleep. He then gives Puck another magic juice, an antidote
to remove the first from Lysander's eyes, so he will love Hermia once more.
Puck accomplishes his task swiftly and efficiently. One by one, staggering with
exhaustion, each of the four young lovers is led by the disguised Puck back to the
clearing, where each simply collapses and goes to sleep on the ground, unaware of the
presence of the others. When they are all safely deposited asleep in the same clearing,
Puck amends his first error by applying the antidote to Lysander's eyes, and the night of
confusion comes to an end.
And the country proverb known,
That every man should take his own, In your waking shall
be shown.
Jack shall have Jill;
Nought shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.
3.2.458-463.
Shakespeare gives Puck generic and somewhat mocking terminology to make us recognize that
what has just occurred is not a private event pertaining only to these four individual
humans, but a universal sequence - Jack shall have Jill - relevant to all of mankind. And
so the final pattern in the square-dance sequence, after all the confusing do-si-do's and
bow-to-your-partner's, is
4. Diagram
The confusion is over, and now the lovers and yokels - all the humans in the forest -
May all to Athens back again repair,
And think no more of this night's accidents
But as the fierce vexation of a dream.
4.1.70-72.
Things will at last come to the desired relationship. When the lovers awake, all will
indeed be well. Jack shall have Jill.
In spatial terms, there has been a movement from a quadrangle to variations on a triangle,
and then back to a quadrangle again. Figure 4, the quadrangle, existed before the play
began, and will presumably exist after the play ends, but Figures 1, 2 and 3 are
triangles, with the fourth element separated in each case. They represent the main action
in the forest, but then, after Oberon's changes have been affected
The fourth act finds the quadrangle in its proper state, each
man attached to the right woman, restoring a situation
which predates the beginning of the play [6] .
The change from a grouping of three to a grouping of four is particularly satisfying
because it includes the missing element for the first time in an integrated relationship.
In terms of Jungian psychology, it is an archetypal move to fullness or wholeness, a
reconciliation, and, in this case, a restoration of a beneficent previous order. This
holds true in all ways, for, in practical terms, the result is good for all the parts of
the whole.
Thus, the restoration of the proper love relationships also restores the friendships of
all four. even Lysander and Demetrius, who were ready to fight to the death, are friends
again at the end of the play [7] .
That is to say, the scheme or structure in this play is so set up that the
interrelationship of the whole - from the yokels to Oberon and beyond to all creation -
depends upon the internal relationships within the constituent .parts, in which one
element in each must always dominate over the others, and yet all form part of an
interdependent system. in poetic terms, this can be a description of the cosmos.
The remaining obstacle to Athens' happiness is, of course, the discord in the heavens. To
summarize this plot level very briefly, Oberon had put the same magic juice on Titania's
eyelids while she slept, and Puck, by magic, had given one of the yokels an ass' head and
then led him to awaken Titania, so that she fell in love with an ass, a human ass. She
proceeded to decorate him with garlands and have her fairies sing to him, and have him led
to her bower. Oberon, pitying her at last, released her from the spell by applying the
antidote to her as she slept, as Puck had done to Lysander. Now she awakes and greets
Oberon with joy, and the fairy world is reunited as Oberon proclaims
(Music)
Sound, music. Come, my queen, take hands with me.
And rock the ground where on these sleepers be. [Dance]
Now thou and I are new in amity,
And will tomorrow midnight solemnly
Dance in Duke Theseus' house triumphantly,
And bless it to all fair prosperity.
There shall the pairs of faithful lovers be
Wedded, with Theseus, all in jollity.
4.1-88-95.
We can now see, in very general terms, what has happened in the forest. As the diagrams
illustrate, it has been a series of changing relationships, as if different combinations
were tested, and rejected, until the correct relationship was at last achieved, whereupon
the changes were ended and the final relationship fixed. In different terms, all of the
dangerous possibilities outlined above were avoided, and all of the desired events have
occurred. Shakespeare had sent into the forest a group of bumbling yokels, four angry,
upset, even desperate young lovers, and a quarrelling King and Queen of the Fairies. It
was a potentially dangerous mixture, for the individuals themselves but more particularly
for the future welfare of Athens, and Shakespeare had stirred his ingredients vigorously,
but nothing undesirable had happened - no uncontrolled sex' no physical violence, no
permanent rifts between lovers, no misalliances. The Voyage Perilous through the Forest of
Passion has terminated triumphantly. All have passed the test and are ready for
ordination.
Very few critics have appreciated the latent, subtly-suggested dangers lurking behind the
comic resolution in the play. To most, the play is gossamer; to some, it can hardly bear
the defilement of close analysis; to only two or three it is sober.
Modern productions, overstressing the nondemonic, have seriously misrepresented the
fairies as gauzy, fluttery creatures with no more mystery or authority than butterflies.
Something is lost by this. Oberon is not harmless: he is a prince from the furthest steep
of India, shadowy and exotic. Titania is a powerful force - "The summer still doth tend
upon my state" - and Bottom is virtually her prisoner. The marital disturbances of these
beings affect the weather and the natural cycles and result in floods, droughts, and
famines. Their benevolent presence in this play serves to emphasize the comic context only
if they are recognized as potentially dangerous [8] .
Equally few have appreciated the vastness of the context implied by the surface action of
the play.
The most effective and memorable pictures in the play are not the glimpses of single
figures and activities described above. They are the larger representations, full
landscapes with a remarkable sense of spaciousness and distance . . . Throughout the night
in the woods that follows, confined and hectic as it may be, we get glimpses of these
magnificent views and distances ... As daylight returns to the play, the panoramas regain
full splendor ... The function of these panoramas is not difficult to discern ... Only
such comprehensive vantage points would give us this sense of surveying all of nature in
order to discover man's unique position in it [9] .
Another critic unwittingly uses catastrophic language to defend the poetic richness of the
panoramic descriptions, saying they are
... calculated to make the audience respond with wonder to the effortless reach of the
imagination which brings the stars madly shooting from their spheres [10] .
Within the panorama, nature is presented in two ways, as a force of metamorphosis, or
change, and as an inscrutable, uncontrollable power. As one critic observes of A Midsummer
Night's Dream
... the whole of nature is seen to be in movement. Everything is changing [11] .
The impression created by the changes is that nature is unfathomable.
Those Shakespeare plays that specifically treat of nature more precisely, the nature of
nature ... all posit a universe which has neither order nor discernible limits [12] .
with the result that the action
... suggests that our knowledge of the world is less reliable than it seems [13] .
Although man cannot understand or affect the forces of nature which control his societal
existence, these forces are always pictured as benevolent in comic drama. To one critic,
the pattern is society to wilderness to an improved society, while to another,
schematizing the morality play, it is fall from grace to temporary prosperity of evil to
divine reconciliation [14] .
In the most universal terms, it has been a trip to the brink of chaos, but no further. The
life and stability of Athens, and thus by analogy of human civilization, of existence
itself, has been threatened, but all dangers have been overcome. The correct alignments
and bondings have occurred, and a night of confusion has given way to a morning of order
and fertility. In Velikovskian catastrophic terms, we have seen the brink of catastrophe,
but have been brought safely back.
There are other catastrophic, or at least celestial, overtones. For example, the whole
play's action occurs during the crucial part of a lunar fertility cycle. It begins when
the moon is on the wane, which is a period of danger and error in folklore, and so every
impulse seeking to run its course during this period must be held in check, must be
delayed until a time of better beginnings. The action then moves through a span of three
or four nights of darkness and confusion, finally reaching the moment of the new moon.
This is the correct time for beginnings, for impregnation and fertility, and that is
precisely when all the discord in the play has been reconciled, with nothing irreparable
having been previously set in motion. Thus, like the feminine moon, or the earth emerging
from a catastrophe, the whole tribe or society has been cleansed and refreshed, and is in
a sense reborn.
Secondly, the particular holidays which form the context of the play are originally pagan
and astral. The first is May Day, and, more particularly, Maying, or bringing home the
May.
No literacy was required for an audience to understand that the "rite of May" was both an
individual and a communal means of celebrating the arrival of spring and reestablishing
the human affinity with the natural cycles [15] .
The bringing home of May acted out an experience of the relationship between vitality in
people and nature. The poets have merely to describe May Day to develop a metaphor
relating man and nature [16] .
The other holiday is Midsummer Eve, the longest day and the shortest night of the year.
Midsummer Eve, associated with the summer solstice, is one of the oldest and most widely
celebrated holidays on record. Originally intended as homage to the sun at the height of
his powers, it had become by Shakespeare's time a night of general merriment with
overtones of magic. Its customary features included the building of bonfires and the
carrying of torches [17] .
In addition, J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough contains a section entitled 'The Solar Theory
of Fire Festivals' [18] . In sum, the mythological and folkloric context is suffused with
the presence of the classical moon - Phoebe or the triple deity Hecate Diana Proserpina -
acting at a time containing the double parameters of spring rebirth and solstice
celebration. We need only add that, in Dr. Velikovsky's view, the joy of the summer
solstice is a ritual born out of fear of celestial aberration [19] .
Thirdly, there are what appear to be a cluster of catastrophic memories concentrated in
Act 3, Scene 2, the largest and most important scene in the play, where, as I have
described above, a series of oscillating relationships is presented, growing more and more
intense, until all the possible variations have been experienced and the right one is
achieved and fixed. I feel that the events in this scene, and the context in which they
are set by Shakespeare, exhibit strong catastrophic overtones whose outlines I shall now
try to set forth.
As we recall, the original pairings were Lysander-Hermia and Demetrius-Helena. We turn now
to the point where, after Puck has placed the love juice on the wrong lover's eyes, Hermia
is distressed to find Lysander gone and Demetrius in his place, pleading love, and she
cannot understand the desertion of the former nor accept the affection of the latter. We
shall now look at the rest of the scene through the optic of catastrophic speculation,
which will involve an attempt to discern or reconstruct possible celestial events behind
the actions of the characters, which must begin with an attempt to establish precise
celestial roles for those characters.
When we come to assign specific celestial names to the major characters in the play, we
must proceed with caution for several reasons. First, we cannot determine for certain
whether it may be the events of the first set of Velikovskian catastrophes, circa -1475,
which lie behind the scene, or the events of the second period, from -776 to -686, or a
general collective memory of both cataclysms, and others. if Velikovsky is correct - and
he insists that there were catastrophes previous to the two he attempts to reconstruct
then all such sources potentially are available to the artist's mind. Second, we do not
really know how closely we ought to look for specific parallels, rather than general ones.
That is to say, should we try to tie the action to catastrophic events as such, which is
revolutionary enough in itself, or should we go even further, and link it to allegedly
specific events? Can we expect that an artist, at least 2200 years after the fact, should
be able to mirror precise occurrences, no matter how overwhelming those occurrences may
have been? Third, before arguing subconscious inherited racial memory as the basis for the
features of this play, we must take into account all possible conscious influences upon
Shakespeare, particularly the works of Ovid and the writings of classical historians, from
whom he might have derived the sort of cataclysmic worldwide images which we found in
Titania's speech. On this basis, to make a long story short, I have concluded that the
action of this scene may be both a surprisingly accurate recollection of precise celestial
events as described by Dr. Velikovsky, and, at the same time, an artistically modified
equivalent to those events. I might add that, if the memories of the original cataclysms
were deeply burned into the racial memory of mankind, as Dr. Velikovsky argues, this is
just what one would expect. I shall deal with the overt parallels now, and postpone a
discussion of the covert relations for the conclusion of this paper. I suggest that one
set of suitable equivalences may be
Earth - Hermia
Moon - Lysander
Mars - Helena
Venus - Demetrius
Sun - Theseus
Jupiter - Oberon - Zeus.
We note immediately a reversal of the usual genders - the Moon is a male, Mars is a
female, and Venus is a male. This is not entirely unknown in Greek mythology, where
certain planets are associated with both masculine and feminine heroes, nor, I suggest,
should it be unexpected in the sublimating hiding-process of art. As I will try to explain
in the conclusion of this paper, the creative mind must not let itself, nor the minds
which its art will affect, know consciously what it is doing, and a change in gender is a
fine subterfuge.
Applying these equivalences, we can see how the action can mirror celestial events, and we
begin by noting individual cosmic images. Hermia observes that Lysander is as true to her
as the sun unto the day, 50-51. He is then described as having been driven forcibly away
while Hermia was sleeping, 51-52. This may mean at night, or in the darkness of thick
clouds which so obscure the Sun that day is like night, as if the Sun has abandoned the
Earth at a time - day - when it should be true to Earth. This is followed by a puzzling
solar image, 47-50, of the Earth being bored and the Moon plunging through to the other
side and rivaling the Sun at noon, when it should be at the opposite pole. She then calls
Demetrius a murderer of the Sun, 56, and describes him as appearing dead, or pale, and
grim, or deadly, 57. That is to say, the rival in the sky who has driven off or killed the
Sun is pale, because obscured by dark clouds, and grim because it causes destruction,
which may poetically suggest the action of Velikovsky's Comet Venus. Yet Demetrius replies
that he too has been wounded, 59, pierced by Hermia's cruelty, and then tells her that she
herself looks as bright as Venus in the sky, 60-61.
Using these associations suggested by the words of the play, we can then derive more
Velikovskian parallels. Hermia begs for Lysander back, and Demetrius calls himself a
hunter who has killed Lysander and will let his dogs eat him. Hermia cries
Has thou slain him, then? Henceforth be never number'd among men.
66-67.
or considered a member of a stable society, whether of men in a tribe, or, by extension,
of planets in a solar system. She accuses Demetrius the Comet of cowardice, saying he
could never dare approach Lysander when Lysander was awake, 69-70, meaning, in primitive
terms, during the brightness of day, when the shining Sun is lord of the skies and thus
drives off all enemies. in primitive terms, if the sky were to become dark during the day,
it would be as if the Sun's power as lord of the heavens had decreased, and only then
could an enemy - a pale but deadly comet - rival or displace the Sun [20] . And in the
very next image Demetrius the Comet, the rival Sun, is described as a Serpent, 72-73. It
would appear that, with Shakespeare's imagination actively engaged, a series of primordial
and apparently catastrophic memories emerges in one flood of connected imagery.
Then Hermia, the Earth, parts from the Comet, refusing to accept it as a substitute, 80,
and the Comet does not follow. Helena, meanwhile, is described as sick, weak and pale, but
then Oberon anoints Demetrius with the magic juice, saying of Helena
When his love he doth espy,
Let her shine as gloriously
As the Venus of the sky.
105-107.
If Oberon is Zeus-Jupiter, then perhaps the application of the love juice represents an
electrical planetary interchange which begins a new phase in the celestial events. Ralph
Juergens, one of the editors of Pensée, has argued that the changes and movements which
the Velikovsky scenarios require do not refute conventional theories of celestial
dynamics, but could have been accomplished by the action of celestial forces, particularly
the clash of magnetospheres and electrostatic attraction and repulsion [21] . Velikovsky
refers to such events in Worlds in Collision, where he discusses the transformation of
Phaethon into the Morning Star.
This transformation is related by Hyginus in his Astronomy, where he tells how Phaethon,
that caused the conflagration of the world, was struck, by a thunderbolt of Jupiter and
was placed by the sun among the stars (planets). [22]
Helena duly appears in the clearing, shining indeed like Venus, and Demetrius awakens and
sees her, and in an instant shifts his attention to her, or becomes attracted to her.
Thus, she now exerts a strong attraction for both Lysander and Demetrius, an attraction
powerful enough to draw Lysander from his accustomed orbit around Hermia, 185. Helena is
now described as being unusually bright, 187-188, brighter than any other object in the
darkened sky. When both men appear attracted to her, Helena complains that she and Hermia
had once been very close, 202-214, almost twins, and now Hermia has joined with the men to
tear their former closeness apart, 215. What appears to be suggested here - and I proffer
this with the greatest trepidation -is that Mars may once have been a sort of sister
planet to Earth, perhaps before it was thrown out of the circle, as Dr. Velikovsky has
said tantalizingly but enigmatically [23] .
In any case, Lysander and Demetrius both follow after the sister planet, calling her a
celestial goddess, 226-227, and neglecting Hermia-Earth. Helena-Mars asks to be released
from her attachment to Demetrius-Venus, 314-316, and then the two girls clash, and now it
is Helena who is accused of having stolen Lysander from Hermia, at night, and Hermia is
described as being small and hot when angry, 323-325.
In the last stage of this turbulence, Puck and Oberon take control, as curative night
forces who do not fear the light, 388. In a period of intense darkness, fog and noise,
they keep Lysander and Demetrius apart, and do the same for the girls, until they can
settle all the young lovers - or Earth, Moon, Mars and Venus - into a stable relationship,
effecting these changes through the love juice and its antidote, or differently-charged
Jovian thunderbolts. They sort things out for the good of Athens, and so the night, which
is said to have been difficult, draws to a happy end. The pattern has been a seemingly
orderly but actually dangerous situation at day's end, changing to confusion and threat
Chaos in the night, but moving finally to salvation and then to seemingly total Chaos by
light. The pattern is substantially Velikovskian, and is also quintessential to most
creative art, myth, folklore, and religion. In Jungian terms, Oberon and Puck, as
different aspects of the restorative agency, may be Hare and Trickster, indicating that
the restorative process is beneficent in the total view, although troublesome at certain
points.
To summarize, we are presented in this scene with a gamut of changes based on attraction
and repulsion, set in a context of celestial images. In a period of nocturnal brilliance
and oscillating movement, where individual entities suddenly become as blazing as the
brightest planet, the Sun disappears, apparently killed and replaced by a pale and deadly
comet-like rival, also called a serpent, who does not deserve to be numbered among the
planets. This causes temporary misalliances - the Comet pursues Earth, but then is
repelled, after which another planet becomes bright and attracts both Comet and Sun. Then
there is a change to darkness, fog, vast noise and the disappearance of guiding light, and
in this context the forces of order arrive at last, realign the attractions, and the
difficult dark period is over. In the play, because it is not a dream, the variations have
been carefully, geometrically structured because they must fulfill a conscious dramatic
function, but, if one also looks at them as possible products of a suppressed primordial
memory, then the pattern of shifting electrical electrically-charged and luminously-
varying combinations may reflect celestial catastrophic events of the past being safely
realized in the sublimation of art.
It is only after this final and apparently desirable order has been established that the
night, or extended cloudy darkness, comes to an end when the Sun-Theseus appears. The Sun-
Theseus had left the play as soon as Demetrius-Venus had become attracted to Hermia-Earth,
when night and conflict as possible total destruction had descended upon the forest. The
second, third and fourth acts, in which all the varying alignments are worked out, take
place in darkness. Then, when order has been restored in heaven and on earth, the Sun-
Theseus reappears to mark a new day, a return of day, a new order.
This constitutes the main action of the middle and largest portion of the play, and the
two other stories developing in the night forest - the argument between Oberon and
Titania, and the adventures of Bottom - are simultaneously brought to a conclusion at this
point as well. To leap ahead for a moment, the third and final section of the play
culminates in the solemnization of this new order, and this is performed by Oberon-Zeus-
Jupiter, who no longer shoots thunderbolts at warring planets, but gives his blessing to
earthly stability and concord. The mind of man, stirred to uneasiness by the recalling in
sublimated artistic form of terrible catastrophic memories, is calmed by this final
picture, which the controlling artist provides, of cosmic stability approved by Jupiter,
the very source of such stability - or disorder.
Before this point is reached, however, the bulk of the third section consists of the
yokels' playlet and a general tying up of loose ends. it appears to contribute very little
to the development of the action and has been considered by some critics to be a weak
appendage, a simple attempt by Shakespeare to end on a purely comic note, to "leave 'em
laughing." I contend that it is very much more, for in it Shakespeare proceeds to make
clear the larger meanings in his play by throwing questions at us which we ourselves must
weigh and find answers for, so that we are provoked, through our own efforts, to perceive
and to grasp what Shakespeare is getting at.
There are very few authorial comments earlier in the play, few direct references to
overall meaning, but, here in the third part, after the main action has been in effect
virtually completed, Shakespeare begins to pile hint upon hint, signal upon signal,
leading us to reflect upon what has happened and to grasp its meaning. This process begins
as soon as the night has ended and the fairies have departed, when Theseus, Hippolyta and
the court go hunting in the forest and come across the four lovers asleep in the clearing.
Theseus awakens them and asks the young men
I know you two are rival enemies;
How comes this gentle concord in the world,
That hatred is so far from jealousy,
To sleep by hate, and fear no enmity?
4.1.145-148.
The question is also directed at us, of course. The lovers, totally confused by the past
night's events, can offer no satisfactory answer, but their ineffectual gropings after the
truth prod our awareness. Demetrius says of his conversion
But, my good ford, I wot not by what power -
But by some power it is - my love to Hermia,
Melted as the snow, seems to me now
As the rememberance of some idle gaud
Which in my childhood I did dote upon;
And all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object and the pleasure of mine eye,
is only Helena.
4.1.167-174.
This is what had to happen if Demetrius and Helena were to survive happily and contribute
to the welfare of the state, and we have seen how it has occurred.
The process continues after the royal party leaves the stage and only Bottom remains,
sound asleep. In a moment he awakens, minus his ass'head, ready to continue the rehearsal
which Puck had interrupted the night before, but he sees that it is morning and that he is
alone, and then he too, like the lovers immediately before him, begins to wonder about
what had happened.
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a
dream, past the wit of man to say what dream
it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to
expound this dream.
4.1.207-210.
But we have not slept. We have seen what happened. For us it is no dream, and therefore we
are being prodded, as we were in the immediately preceding episode with the lovers, to
reject Bottom's attitude, to think about the dream ourselves, or else we too are but an
ass. We must expound it, but Somewhat more successfully than Bottom.
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man
hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his
tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what
my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a
ballet of this dream. It shall be called "Bottom's
Dream", because it hath no bottom; and I will sing
it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke.
4.1.214-221.
If we are to perceive what Shakespeare is really getting at here, we must respond to the
Biblical allusion to Corinthians in this passage, as a good part of Shakespeare's audience
could have been counted on to do. Shakespeare is setting out to defend a play when plays
were attacked as mere fancy, mere entertainment, and so he appeals to a higher level of
truth.
And my speech and my preaching was not with
enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration
of the Spirit and of power:
That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of
men, but in the power of God.
Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are
perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor
of the princes of this world, that come to naught:
But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained
before the world unto our glory:
Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have
crucified the Lord of glory.
We are then told how we may perceive this wisdom.
But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the
heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things,
yea, the deep things of God.
For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so
the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we
might know the things that are freely given to us of God.
Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the
Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are
foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.
1 Corinthians, 2, 4-15.
This hidden wisdom is available to spiritual man, to he who is attuned to deep things.
Natural man, like Bottom, can never know such truth, for his dreams have no bottom, and so
to him they are foolishness. With consummate elegance, Shakespeare leaves it to us to
choose what we will be as we watch the last act - natural man or spiritual man.
What follows - the play presented by the yokels to celebrate Theseus' wedding - has been
considered by most critics a bit of lightweight burlesque spoofing the inadequacies of
inferior actors and theatrical traditions. It is this, undeniably, but it is much more,
and there are several major clues to its real significance.
First of all, we must notice the similarity between what happens in Bottom's playlet and
what happens in the play itself. Many critics have pointed out that the Pyramus-Thisbe
story bears some similarities to the story of Romeo and Juliet. Whether this be true or
not, however, is hardly as important as the relation between Plyramus-Thisbe and the story
of the four lovers in the same play, which very few critics have noticed. Pyramus and
Thisbe are in love, like Lysander and Hermia, and, like them, parental obstacles prevent
their marriage. Like them, Pyramus and Thisbe flee into a forest and a sequence of
confusions is set in motion; but, unlike the lovers, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe does
not end happily. Pyramus, seeing Thisbe's shawl which the lion had torn, assumes she is
dead and kills himself in grief, whereupon Thisbe returns, sees the dead Pyramus and kills
herself. Thus, the ending is precisely opposite to the story of the lovers, and the reason
for it is precisely the absence of Oberon and Puck. No supervisory force with extrahuman
power intervenes. The final meaning of the whole play will be derived in part from the
juxtaposition of these two stories.
Second, we must situate this playlet in its proper context. It occurs after the wedding,
but before the first physical consummation of the marriage bond. Theseus asks
Come now; what masques, what dances shall we have,
To wear away this long age of three hours
Between our after-supper and bedtime?
Where is our usual manager of mirth?
What revels are in hand? Is there no play
To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?
5.1.32-37.
In other words, the yokels' playlet which fills the gap here between Theseus' frustration
and the approved time of sexual release, is like the sequence in the forest which filled
the gap between Theseus' original frustration, as illustrated in his first lines in the
play, and the time of his wedding. There is thus a structural parallel established between
the whole forest episode and the playlet.
That is not the only similarity. Indeed, the connections between the two are many, and
strong. if we are to appreciate the full importance of the playlet, we must see it in the
following relationship - we must approach Shakespeare's play as Theseus' court approaches
the yokels' playlet. That is
Audience : play
Court : playlet.
In such a framework, a third set of clues can be perceived - the peripheral comments upon
the play made by the amused members of the court. For instance, when Theseus is told
A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,
Which is as brief as I have known a play;
But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,
Which makes it tedious; for in all the play
There is not one word apt, not one player fitted
5.1.1-65.
he replies
I will hear that play;
For never anything can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it.
5.1.61-83.
If we imagine that Shakespeare's play, like the playlet, is being presented before a noble
audience, perhaps even at a noble wedding [24] , we can see that this speech is a clue
and an apology, a plea for understanding and tolerance, and that is how we must react. A
few moments earlier, in his speech on poets, lovers and madmen, Theseus had been as
natural as Bottom, denying the validity of poetic insight, but in a trice he becomes
Shakespeare's spiritual spokesman, telling us how we may perceive the truth embedded in
the playlet. The point is made again moments later when Hippolyta, feeling sorry for the
inability of the yokels and their unavoidable scorn before the whole court, says to
Theseus
I love not to see wretchedness o'ercharged,
And duty in his service perishing.
5.1.85-86.
to which Theseus replies
Our sport shall be to take what they mistake;
And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit.
5.1.90-92.
That is to say, the fun for Theseus will not lie in the ridiculousness of the playlet, but
in taking what they mistake, in perceiving the sensible meaning behind the ludicrous form,
for noble respect - royal understanding -judges the intention of the effort, even if the
execution or merit of it is clumsy - and so must we, we are being told, even if we find
Mr. Shakespeare's play clumsy. Even utter dumbness must be eloquence to the perceptive
audience, as Theseus found when faced with a welcomer so tongue-tied with fright he could
hardly speak a word.
Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I pick'd a welcome,
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most to my capacity.
5.1.99-105.
The playlet itself, which occupies most of the fifth act, is excruciatingly funny, but
Shakespeare's hints tell us there is some method behind this apparent madness.
His speech was like a tangled chain;
nothing impaired, but all disordered.
5.1-125-126.
It is up to Theseus' court - and, by extension, to us - to perceive the chain beneath the
tangle. As the action continues, even the sympathetic Hippolyta is driven to exclaim
This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard
to which Theseus replies, in a clear authorial signal
The best in this kind are but
shadows; and in the worst are no worse,
if imagination amend them.
5.1.211-213.
That is to say, all plays are not real, all acting is feigning, a mirror or shadow of real
life, and thus the worst production can be as usefully instructive as the best one, if the
spectator fleshes out the production's weaknesses with his own imaginative understanding.
When the playlet draws to an end, leaving the noble audience weak with laughter, Theseus
does not permit an epilogue, for
The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve
Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time.
5.1.365-366.
The whole court leaves, with the three newly-married couples heading for their wedding-
night beds. The play had begun in universal sexual frustration, but it ends in universal
sexual fertility, properly controlled within the social bonds of marriage so as to furnish
the most lasting happiness both for the individuals and for the tribe. Nothing remains but
the blessing of the fairies, and the marriage of the leader of the tribe, complemented by
the marriages of those who must help him rule, will have occurred under all the necessary
auspicious conditions. Puck heralds the entrance of Oberon, Titania and their combined
train, and the blessing is performed in a magic ritual of words, music and dance. The saga
of Pyramus and Thisbe, however funny, was tragic. The tale of the lovers and their King is
salvation and rebirth. So the play itself ends, with everyone gone but Puck, who delivers
Shakespeare's epilogue. Our response to it must color our response to the whole play. it
has a rather humble tone, a very apologetic manner, and the act of making amends for any
offence the play may have caused is referred to three times outright, but I suggest that
the true feeling communicated by this speech is not apology, but authorial suggestion.
Here are the important lines.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumb'red here,
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend.
5.1.425-432.
If we take these words at their surface value, Puck is saying that anyone who may have
been offended by the play need only consider it a weak and idle dream, and dismiss it as
such. What he implies, if we have responded to the previous authorial hints, is precisely
the opposite. That is to say, if one has not understood the play, then, like the humans in
the forest, they can dismiss the play's events
And think no more of this night's accidents But as the fierce vexation of a dream.
If, however, one has been intrigued rather than offended, then one's reaction must be
totally different. The play, the shadows, are then seen not as idle dreams, but as
mirroring that which is truly real, like Plato's cave, and the wise spectator has, not
slumb'red and seen visions, but has been awakened and seen symbols of universal truth,
themes which are not weak, idle and unyielding of important ideas, but full of
significance. And so the final choice is left by Shakespeare to us - we can react like
Bottom, like human asses, failing to perceive the order behind the disorder, the chain
behind the tangle, or we can be like Theseus, picking meaning out of jumble, taking what
the action mis-took, seeing the grand pattern at work behind the play's seemingly chaotic
events, a pattern which, when understood, communicates the author's vision of the meaning
of life.
I have stressed the didactic nature of the third section because I wish to make clear what
I believe is the vision of life embodied in the total action. It is a vision in which, to
those caught up in the course of the events, there seems to be little cause for or purpose
in what is happening. To those outside the events, like Theseus and his court watching the
yokels' playlet, or we, the audience, watching Theseus in Shakespeare's play, there is a
meaning, a purpose. The next step in this progression, obviously, is that God, watching us
and our lives, sees the meaning of what happens to us, even if we sometimes do not. It is
thus Shakespeare's intention in this play to explain the ways of God to man. Shakespeare
is saying that the world, life itself, may appear to be veering to catastrophic
destruction from time to time, but that a supernatural force - in this case represented by
the omniscient and omnipotent Oberon - will intervene when necessary and sort things out
for the welfare of the state, which always comes first, and sometimes for the good of the
individual, who always comes second, or last. This is Shakespeare's comic vision, as it is
the vision of most great and enduring comedy. Such a play moves from an opening situation
fraught with danger, to a middle section of turbulence, fear, disorder and confusion, to a
final stasis of order, happiness and fertility. There is the feeling of a new birth to a
new and vastly better world, where all the dangers existent at the beginning have been
eliminated, where all the changes necessary for a happy future have occurred, where,
barring new difficulties, those who survive the ordeal of the middle section and manifest
the desirable qualities are ordained into the new order of things at the end. Total
societal chaos, which seemed a clear possibility at one point, has been averted, perhaps
forever, through a process of reintegration into a harmonious relationship with the
supernatural forces which determine the life and future of all tribes.
In the last section of this paper, I shall develop more fully the consequences of this
general action in relation to Dr. Velikovsky's theories on cultural amnesia and to my own
hypotheses on the nature of creative art. For the moment, let it rest at this - what
happens in A Midsummer Night's Dream, transposed without much difficulty into geophysical
and astrophysical terms, bears a satisfying resemblance in form and meaning to the
cosmological dramas reconstructed by Dr. Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision.
I turn now to Antony and Cleopatra, a play saturated with catastrophic images and themes.
First, Antony is consistently associated with Hercules and identified with Mars, as
Cleopatra is with Venus and Isis. Their love, therefore, and the perturbation which it
causes, is portrayed as an attraction between heavenly bodies which threatens the earth.
Antony glows like plated Mars, 1.1.4, he is Herculean, 1.3.84, his faults shine like stars
in the sky, 1.4.12, he is The demi-Atlas of this earth, 1.5.23, and when he utters sound,
he can speak as loud as Mars, 2.2.6. Cleopatra, even when she suspects his fidelity, never
questions his greatness.
Charmian,
Though he be painted one way like a gorgon,
The other way's a Mars [25] .
2.5.115-117.
He is a giant, a colossus who
with my sword
Quartered the world and o'er green Neptune's back
With ships made cities
4.14.57-59.
and when he loses his military prowess, it is believed that Hercules' power has left him,
4.3.15-16.
Cleopatra is both Isis and Venus. The love between her and Antony is described as an
attraction between Venus and Mars, 1.5.18, she is given to actually dressing as Isis,
3.6.16-19, and, at her death, where she again costumes herself for the role she will
assume, she is addressed specifically as Venus, 5.2.308, the suggestion that carries
through her death and colors the final memory we have of her. Thus, both of the lovers are
presented in cosmic and significantly Velikovskian roles.
Second, the power contest between Antony and Octavius is likewise given worldwide terms.
it is not a local political struggle between petty rivals for a petty piece of land, but a
battle for the whole of the civilized world, for the territory of man. Antony is the
greatest soldier in the world, 1.3.38, a grand sea, 3.2.10, and in his face the worship of
the whole world lies, 4.14.86. Octavius is The universal landlord, 3.13.72, and the whole
world listens to his all-obeying breath, 3.13.77. Together they are
The senators alone of this great world,
Chief factors for the gods.
2.6.9-10.
Thus, because Octavius is given a cosmic or at least worldwide dimension, the mythical
magnitude of the love affair is matched by that of the political conflict.
The consequences for Earth acquire the same sign if significance, ' and indeed a greater
one. In Old Testament terms, Egypt is the locale of the Exodus, and overtones of this
event are recalled for us in Cleopatra's exclamation
Melt Egypt into Nile, and kindly creatures
Turn all to serpents!
2.5.78-79.
This is reinforced at the Battle of Actium, where Scarus, Antony's lieutenant, compares
Antony's defeat to
the tokened pestilence, Where death is sure.
The image carries through in Shakespeare's creating mind, for Scarus then
Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt
Whom leprosy o'ertake !
3.10.9-11.
In three lines of dialogue, there is a conjunction in Shakespeare's mind of pestilence,
death, Egypt and leprosy. Yet, while the defeat of Antony may have overtones of a divine
Old Testament holocaust, its consequence, the victory of Octavius, is cast in a New
Testament mould. To quote from one critic:
Octavius - Caesar as he is always called in Antony and Cleopatra - was to become Augustus,
perhaps the greatest of Roman emperors, creator of the Pax Romana that closed the long
period of unrest, revolution, and war, with the time of peace in which Christ was to be
born. Thus, in the war with Antony, when Antony's allies have deserted and sympathy for
him is at its strongest, Caesar redresses the balance by a brief but significant reminder
of his future role in history:
The Time of universal peace is near. Prove this a prosp'rous Clay, the three'nooked world
Shall bear the olive freely [26] .
Thus, the political story acquires a vast religious dimension - it clears the way,
prepares the ground, for a new life, for Christ. The turbulence in this tragedy leads to a
welcome, beneficent stasis, a new situation much better and safer than the old one, and it
is the same process which we discovered in the comedy.
We have thus established that the lovers, who cause so much damage to the Roman empire,
are portrayed as Mars and Venus in dangerous conjunction; that Octavius, Antony's
antagonist, is also given cosmic stature; that the defeat of Antony is Biblical in
character, and that the whole process of the play is a movement from danger to conflict to
order. if we now take the step of transposing the action into possible astronomical or
catastrophic terms, as we had ventured earlier with the comedy, we can see that Antony and
Cleopatra are presented as heavenly bodies, specifically Mars and Venus, who have
abandoned their roles, or left their accustomed orbits, to pose a vast danger to the Roman
Empire, or Earth. They are then opposed and defeated by Octavius, who may be the Sun. When
they are dead, their names and memories can be safely elevated to myth, just as Dr.
Velikovsky tells us that the actual planets Mars and Venus, once so prominent in the skies
and so threatening, are now safely distant, in fixed orbits, presenting no living danger
to the Earth, and so they too can be safely venerated.
If one has read Velikovsky, the general action in Antony and Cleopatra is clearly
catastrophic, and it is on this basis that I wish to analyze the corresponding celestial
and catastrophic imagery which Shakespeare has used to characterize the lovers at every
important stage of their story's development.
Once they are in love, Antony's proximity or distance directly affects Cleopatra's
brilliance, 1.1.9-10. Their attraction takes them beyond all established bounds to find
out new heaven, new earth, 1.1.17. When Antony renounces Rome for Egypt his words are made
to unknowingly prefigure the worldwide destruction this will cause.
Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall !
1.1.33-34.
To him, Kingdoms are clay, 1.1.35, or ground covered by floods, and of Cleopatra's
passions, it is said sarcastically but with unknowing truth
We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are
greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report.
1.2.149-152.
When trouble brews at this level
whose quality, going on,
The sides o' th'world may danger
1.2. 194.
it is immediately associated with a serpent, 1.2.195-196, a quintessential primitive
symbol of celestial disturbance, as Dr. Velikovsky has pointed out [27] .
When Antony protests his love to Cleopatra, he does in swearing shake the throned gods,
1.3.28, and his propensity to violence is governed by her influence, 1.3.70-71. Cleopatra
is the serpent of old Nile, 1.5.25, and when she is aroused, she is unwittingly made to
predict her fall, like Antony, in catastrophic terms.
O, I would thou didst,
So half my Egypt were submerged and made
A cistern for scaled snakes!
2.5.93-95.
The image is as reminiscent of the Exodus as of Velikovsky, as indeed it should be if Dr.
Velikovsky is correct, for he dates the Exodus to the time of the first catastrophe
described in Worlds in Collision.
Later, when Octavia fears a battle between Octavius and Antony, what she says bears an
eerie resemblance to catastrophic upheavals and floods.
Wars 'twixt you twain would be
As if the world should cleave, and that slain men
Should solder up the rift.
3.4.30-32.
We think of the evidence Dr. Velikovsky presents in Earth in Upheaval of rock fissures
choked with massed broken fragments of bones [28] .
She herself, if considered a heavenly body consistent with the major personages, is drawn
from Octavius to Antony, and then back to Octavius again, as if she represented the Moon,
and her final return to the orbit of Earth is surprisingly tranquil, with no accompanying
army, no troop of horses, no noise or debris, as may have been the case earlier.
Nay, the dust
Should have ascended to the roof of heaven,
Raised by your populous troops.
3.6.48-50.
Later, when the two triumvirs do at last meet in battle and Antony abandons his fleet,
Scarus cries out
The greater cantle of the world is lost
With very ignorance
3.10.6-7.
where cantle means a segment of the sphere, the globe, and Antony ascribes his errancy,
his flight from orbit, to Cleopatra's astrophysical influence, because she knew
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me.
3.11.60-61,
Having lost humiliatingly to Octavius, he feels bereft of divine guidance, as if
my good stars that were my former guides
Have empty left their orbs and shot their fires
Into th' abysm of hell
3.13.145-147.
and Cleopatra's apparent treason appears to obscure the Moon and foretell Mars'
destruction.
Alack, our Terrene moon
Is now eclipsed, and it portends alone
The fall of Antony.
3.13.153-155.
When she protests her innocence, her words ironically predict the destruction of Egypt
accomplished by hail from a comet's cold heart, 3.13.159, which will also be poisoned, and
will destroy all generations of life, leaving the dead unburied, prey for scavenging
insects, 3.13-159-167. For a brief moment, Antony's fortunes seem to improve, and
Cleopatra becomes his Sun -O thou day o' th' world, 4.8.13. His soldiers are like scourges
of heaven, fighting
As if a god in hate of mankind had
Destroyed in such a shape
4.8.25-26.
and they glow like holy Phoebus' car, 4.8.29, like the chariot of the sun god. When Antony
pictures himself and his love reuniting, he imagines such vast noise
That heaven and earth may strike their sounds together,
Applauding our approach.
4.8.38-39.
There is a striking parallel in Worlds in Collision, where Dr. Velikovsky describes the
approach of comet Venus as accompanied by loud worldwide noise [29] .
The false hope does not last long, for in the next battle Antony's forces are soundly
defeated, and it appears that Cleopatra has truly betrayed him this time. Antony is driven
into uncontrollable anger, and compares himself to the frenzied Hercules, who, near death
through a poisoned garment, hurls the bearer of it on the horns o' th' moon, 4.12.45. We
remember how Dr. Velikovsky showed that many myths of divine and sometimes horned animals
scourging the earth are symbols of the catastrophic tempests [30] , and so it is with the
failing Antony, who Cleopatra says is
more mad
Than Telamon for his shield; the boar of Thessaly
Was never so embossed.
4.13.1-3.
We perceive that Antony's magnitude is diminishing, and it is accompanied by great noise
and rending.
The soul and body rive not more in parting
Than greatness going off.
4.13.5-6.
Antony's last description of himself is of inundating dissolution. He compares his self,
his identity, to a cloud which continually changes shape and so becomes nothing, a process
which
makes it indisctinct
As water is in water.
4.14.10-11.
In this last part of the play, concerned as it is with the deaths of Mars and Venus, the
catastrophic images cluster most noticeably. When Anton is told of Cleopatra's alleged
death, he describes himself as no longer incandescent, nor errant, and so
the torch is out,
Lie down, and stray no farther.
4.14.46-47.
He then tries to kill himself, and, as he lies wounded, his soldiers too seem to recognize
that an era is over, that their former astral guides are gone, and a new time, a new
calendar, will begin after Antony's darkness, as two of them observe
The star is fall'n.
And time is at his period.
4.14.106-107.
Dr. Velikovsky, of course, has argued that following each of the major planetary
interactions there was indeed a new time new lengths of day, month and year [31] .
With the approach of Antony's destruction, the relevant imagery becomes violently
catastrophic. When Cleopatra, from her monument, sees Antony's body being brought onstage,
she cries out
O sun,
Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in; darkling stand
The varying shore o' th' world.
4.15.9-10.
When Antony speaks his last and expires, she erupts in imagery which might almost have
been drawn from Dr. Velikovsky's theories.
The crown o' th' earth cloth melt. My lord !
O, withered is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole [which may be the pole-star] is fall'n:
young boys and girls
Are level now with men. The odds [that which was
distinctive and projecting] is gone;
And there is nothing left remarkable [there is nothing
topographically distinctive, as if all is smooth and
flat, like after Noah's Flood]
Beneath the visiting moon.
4.15.63-68.
She faints, and is revived, and conjures herself
It were for me
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods,
To tell them that this world did equal theirs
Till they had stol'n our jewel
4.15.74-77.
which may suggest that, with Mars no longer incandescent, nor nearby, it no longer lights
up Earth's space, so Earth no longer possesses its own star. She then continues the
reference to Antony as a burned-out star.
Come, away.
The case of that huge spirit now is cold.
4.15.87-88.
In life it was hot, bright, and life-giving, but in death it is dark, cold and contains no
spirit. Velikovsky informs us that Mars, which is now simply a tranquil distant point of
light in the night sky, was once a fiery, menacing, destructive entity much closer to
Earth.
When Octavius first learns of Antony's death, he is surprised by its lack of catastrophic
noise.
The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack [explosion]. The round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets
And citizens, to their dens.
5.1.14-17.
He then explains that the solar system could not entertain two rival suns, and so a
conflict between them was inevitable, 5.137-40, and one of them would have to decline, or
set.
Cleopatra remembers Antony as a figure of cosmic climension and stability, whose
face was as the heav'ns, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course* and lighted
This little O, th' earth.
5.2.79-81.
[* Italics the authors]
This celestial phenomenon was a colossal being who threatened the Earth.
His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm
Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder.
5.2.82-86.
Dr. Velikovsky tells us that, at certain times during the catastrophes of the eighth and
seventh centuries B. C., Mars appeared to be a giant warrior with his sword spanning the
sky, and that, when in this aroused state, his approach caused such extreme havoc and
thunder that the whole globe tottered, or shook [32] .
With Antony gone, with Mars defeated, Octavius the Sun is the only ruler of the skies, or,
as Cleopatra calls him, Sole sir o' th' world, 5.2.120. There remains, then, the death of
Cleopatra. It occurs distinctly apart from Antony's. Like Antony's, it is described as a
loss of brilliance and an explosion accompanied by loud noise and the breaking of
surfaces. just before her death, she refers to herself as almost extinct, although ready
to flare up if provoked again.
Prithee go hence,
Or I shall show the cinders of my spirits
Through th' ashes of my chance.
5.2.172-174.
As she prepares for her suicide, her handmaiden again emphasizes the loss of brilliance.
Finish, good lady, the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.
5.2.193-194.
Once she has been poisoned, another handmaiden prays that her soul and body may rive, or
break apart with a rending explosion, 5.2.310, and, when she dies, when her eyes close and
so symbolically she can emit no more rays, exert no more power, she no longer poses a real
threat to the Sun.
Downy windows, close;
And golden Phoebus never be beheld
Of eyes again so royal !
5.2.316-318.
Indeed, Phoebus the Sun, or Octavius and the Roman Empire, must never again be beheld or
challenged as an equal by eyes so royal, almost as powerful as the Sun, and that is the
point Shakespeare wishes to make. That is why he includes, at the very instant of
Cleopatra's passing, a reference to the Sun, to the paramount position of Octavius, who
must be the one who acquires sole power at the end. When she is dead, the Sun has
triumphed and the Earth is stable, more stable than it was at the beginning.
I might add, in closing this section, that Halley's (then unnamed) comet was visible in
Europe's skies about 1607, just before the generally accepted period of the play's
composition, and Kepler's Supernova burst into prominence in 1604. The Supernova may not
have been a matter of common talk, since the concept of change in the distant heavens was
still a matter of fierce scientific and theological debate, but the comet may well have
been a more popular sensation. This, however, is merely a tidbit, because catastrophic
overtones appear in Shakespearian plays written before the celestial events I have
mentioned, as we saw earlier, and also because I have not established to my own
satisfaction any distinct point of view regarding the role of actual events in triggering
catastrophic associations in an artist's mind.
Such is the basic story of the play. its meaning, however, has been the subject of much
controversy, with opinion basically divided between those who side with the lovers, and
hold the world well lost, and those who support duty and responsibility, seeing Octavius
as the necessary winner. Most recent criticism has tended to strike a note between these
extremes, arguing that Shakespeare balances love versus duty so carefully that neither is
solely to be preferred, but both are given attractiveness and importance.
To deal with this issue more fully - and it is the major topic in current criticism of the
play - I will turn in a moment to two quite recent studies of the play. I adduce them for
one reason in particular. it may be argued that celestial imagery in Shakespeare's play is
in order because he is dramatizing material only recently available to his culture,
material whose origin is Roman, and thus he might naturally use the Roman elements of the
story, which include the celestial. One might even wish to explain the catastrophic as
opposed to merely celestial associations surrounding Antony and Cleopatra in this way, as
natural offshoots of their Roman identification with Mars and Venus, although this is much
less plausible. The same, however, cannot be done for twentieth-century critics. If they
show evidence of Velikovskian catastrophic overtones or parallels in their criticism, in a
frequency and depth which seems to go beyond chance, one cannot attribute it merely to
cultural fashion or historical inheritance. Instead, one may be led to wonder whether
these similar features, produced some 400 years apart in relation to the same historical
material, may have similar origins which lie beyond the conscious act of writing a play or
commenting on it.
The first analysis I will deal with is by Robin Lee of the University of Witwatersrand, in
Johannesburg [33] . He is not by any means a conscious Velikovskyite, yet his analysis of
the play produces results which are surprisingly Velikovskian. First, he acknowledges the
mythic, even divine status which is given to the lovers [34] . Speaking generally, he
claims that all great tragedies contain archetypal patterns of general human experience,
with a stress on general [35] . In this play, he feels, the acts of the lovers take on,
in our imaginations as well as in their own, the dimensions of an archetypal human
experience [36] . In this way, the whole play acquires a mythic quality through the ritual
nature of several of the situations [37] . He suggests no cause for these archetypes and
rituals; indeed he seems to be suspicious of his own reactions for he hastens to assure us
I am not here proposing some form of dramatic collective
unconsciousness; but he has nevertheless recognized and
responded to the ritual suggestions, and mythic shapes
which will be felt by the audience [38] .
The questions we must put to ourselves, of course, are - Why are certain patterns felt to
be archetypal? Why do we perceive certain actions, however vaguely, as ritual? Why do
certain narratives, in prose or poetic or dramatic form, impress us with these features?
The answer to all of these, I suggest, lies in the Velikovskian catastrophes.
Lee sees Antony as a sacrifice, a scapegoat, and he notes that Antony, as Mars, is given a
poetic greatness which is contradicted by his smallness of action [39] . I suggest that a
conflation of these two roles - scapegoat and Mars - is a significant clue to Antony's
value, and that it derives directly from catastrophic memories. It is logical that, if
another entity destroys itself to save us, we can have our cake and eat it by giving this
entity mythic status but making it deserve its destruction. In this way, we can enjoy the
result of its action without feeling guilt over its ruin. If we make the entity repudiate
us and our values, we then repudiate it and our morality is satisfied. This, I feel, is
what happened to Antony, who suffers the fate of all scapegoats. To find a source for this
pattern, we need only think of Dr. Velikovsky's Mars, the once-bright and honored planet
which appeared to betray Earth by being drawn away by the comet, and was defeated and
expelled by the god of light as a result, to take a lesser position than before. If we
make Mars guilty, our consciences can tolerate the fact of its sacrificial destruction,
and thus the Velikovskian catastrophe may be the primal pattern behind the scapegoat
figure which appears so universally in human cultures. Velikovsky's Mars is certainly one
of the patterns underlying most tragic heroes. What Velikovsky says about Mars is What
tragedy shows happening to the tragic hero.
Specifically, Lee notes a vast decline in Antony. He says that Shakespeare describes him
as Mars, but Mars weak, old and unstable - ready to become frenzied and erratic in
behaviour [40] . In Velikovskian terms, the play pictures the last stages of the
catastrophic events, and the actual features of the action, as Lee discerns them, are
highly catastrophic. Lee describes the action as a series of vacillations or swings
increasing in speed as they decrease in duration, until all movement stops and a final
resting point is reached, so that he says
... the final point in time is the result of the swiftly alternating movement between
different points in space [41] .
In other words, the action impresses him as a process of (celestial) equilibrium.
The sequence of events in time reaches its stasis in these
scenes, as does the sequence of events in space [42] .
This quotation applies as readily to the catastrophic Mars and Venus as it does to
Shakespeare's Antony.
Second, the image groupings which Lee discerns in the play also complement a celestial,
and indeed catastrophic, interpretation.
The Roman life is associated with images of straightness
and stability, the Egyptian with images of fluidity
(o'erflows'), mingling ('stirr'd') and relaxation ('soft hours').
These patterns are projected through the play [43] .
He tells us that the play moves in an atmosphere of ambivalence which becomes the medium
through which the play is perceived [44] , and that this ambivalence is the product of
opposed images.
Egypt - and Cleopatra - are constantly associated with water [45] .
The second basic pattern of images associates Rome with the earth or land ... This pattern
begins as early as Antony's first speech, in which Roman 'earth' and 'clay' are opposed to
the emotional quality of his Egyptian love. Through this association we feel the stability
and solidity of the Roman world [46] .
As the tone of this passage suggests, Roman moral attitudes are basically stoical. They
endure rather than suffer [47] .
Between these opposing images of water and earth, Shakespeare creates a series of images
of the process of change. The most important of these are images of earth melting into
water, and finally water mingling with water ... This pattern of images reinforces the
sense of dissolution by perpetual movement between conflicting opposites that is so
important a part of the structure [48] .
Antony, wavering between solid Rome and fluid, changing Egypt, cannot keep his integrity
whole, and so he melts.
Antony compares his sense of his own existence - even of his physical existence - to the
tenuous stability of clouds drifting into clouds, and finally water mingling with water .
. . in the phrase 'the rack dislimns', (Arden editor: 'the drifting clouds efface')
similarities of sound suggest that he is undergoing almost a physical disintegration as a
result of torture - being torn limb from limb on the rack [49] .
We can thus see how the astronomic equivalences apply. Rome is Earth,. land, that which
must survive, and therefore Octavius is the Sun, Cleopatra the Comet, and Antony is Mars.
In the configuration of important entities, Antony is not a mere average man, but part of
a triumvirate which rules the Roman Empire, or the civilized world. In cosmic terms, Mars
is not a harmless star in distant space, but an errant planet threatening Earth and the
Solar System. In the social scale of values, Antony vacillates between love and duty. in
the solar structure, Mars vacillates between a dangerous affair with Venus and a required
role affecting the stability of the solar system. If Antony abandons his duty to pursue
Cleopatra, the Roman Empire is menaced; if Mars leaves its orbit to pursue Venus, Earth is
menaced. As we have already seen, the imagery in both cases is the same - land melts into
water, the structure of existence breaks, nature is disrupted. For Mars, the result was
extinction and expulsion. To Lee, Antony dissolves and is destroyed
...... because of an inability to hold a steady purpose or a steady view of himself [50] .
Lee sees Antony's need to break out of Cleopatra's sphere of influence [51] . for Antony
seems to recognize that this alone will save him. Like Mars, he becomes dangerous when
drawn to her orbit, for then he loses his identity. He used to define himself in terms of
soldiership, the army, and Rome. He then centered his world on Cleopatra and so lost his
former role. Mars too, Velikovsky tells us, left its orbit and so lost its previous role.
With Cleopatra, the process is radically different, for
the images surrounding Cleopatra's death are conversely of steadiness and constancy [52] .
Antony was steady, Lee says, and was ruined because he became inconstant. Cleopatra was
inconstant, and was suppressed by becoming steady. Again, this applies equally to
Velikovsky's Venus and Mars.
Cleopatra's stature increases as she dies, as if Venus emitted a final burst of brilliance
before expiring. Her purpose is
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change
5.2.5-6.
and the image is one of a passage from change to rest. When the poisonous serpent arrives,
she says
My resolution's placed, and I have nothing
Of woman in me: now from head to foot
I am marble-constant.
5.2.238-240.
As she is being dressed in her final garments, she anticipates becoming a celestial body
like Antony.
Husband, I come:
Now to that name my courage prove my title !
I am fire, and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.
5.2.287-290.
That is, she renounces her earthly aspects, earth and water, to become like a star - fire
and air. She who had ravaged the earth, the Roman Empire, will go off into space and
menace Earth no more.
As Lee sees it, death halts chance and change for Cleopatra. She passes to
.... the 'better life' that is impervious to the fluctuations of fortune and change ...
and so her sacrifice is an act that finally fixes our sympathy with her [53] . We can
afford to admire her now because in death she has at last become constant, and also less,
for the process, in stabilizing her, has also diminished her. Thus, in her very last
moments, she is forced to subside and to settle into a safe orbit by the influence of
Antony, whose
... power quite literally extends beyond the grave, and reaches out to modify her
attitudes after his death [54] .
When we last see her, she is brilliant but distant, and so we do not become emotionally
involved as we watch her ritualistic death on the stage, her literal transformation into
Venus, the Star of the East.
In conclusion, Lee says the attraction between Antony and Cleopatra produces
...... a universe in convulsion: the dramatic conflict between the characters is
extended by symbolic action and by imagery, to suggest the involvement of the whole of the
natural order [55] .
This corresponds with what several other critics, equally unaware of Dr. Velikovsky, see
in the play. To them, Antony and Cleopatra, each previously great in his or her own sphere
assert a new order because they come together. This order is a challenge to what is and
what must be, and so they are destroyed, which means catastrophic memories may underlie
the pattern of Luciferian revolt. Furthermore, to these critics the overthrow of the
lovers has consequences far beyond themselves.
Antony's political defeat and his and Cleopatra's individual tragedy are both set within
the context of a larger process, simpler and more universal [56]
which we can recognize as a process of change, of a new order, in both the natural and
political worlds. This is what we also discovered in the comedy, and so we may suspect
that the form of most great narrative art is dictated by suppressed catastrophic
experiences. Imagine that man, considering the catastrophes, had to see good in what
happened, or his existence would become unbearably anxious. He might then construe the
catastrophes as cleansing scourges provoked by the revolt of certain heavenly bodies who
had been duly chastised, and thus, in such a story, the solar system is left stronger than
it was before, albeit bereft of several of its more spectacular entities. Imagine then
that this rationalization, which has imposed a beneficent ethical meaning upon a
horrendous physical event, is transferred to creative art. The result might well be a play
like Antony and Cleopatra, in which William Shakespeare's depiction of Mars and Venus
bears so great a resemblance to Immanuel Velikovsky's.
I turn next to another recent study of the play, by Clifford Davidson of Western Michigan
University [57] . He stresses the inconographical, mythical and religious models which he
feels underlie Shakespeare's play, claiming it is in large part
... based on archetypal patterns which appear to have their basis in literature,
thought, and tradition of his own time [58] .
These traditional models, as Davidson elicits them, trace back to the time of Christ and
indeed earlier, and thus Davidson's linking of them to Shakespeare's play may indicate a
form of continuity of idea between the actual times of the catastrophes and Shakespeare's
day.
In general, Davidson's essay, like Lee's, seems almost to have been written about
Velikovsky's theories, so often and so consistently do his observations apply. I hazard
the guess that this is primarily so because the background which Davidson delineates -
myth, icon, religious parallel - is only one step removed in literality from the events
which gave rise to it. Thus, when I apply his discoveries to my approach, I feel I am
simply carrying his materials back to their true source.
Cleopatra, says Davidson, is given traditional sets of qualities which relate her, among
others, to The Whore of Babylon, a brilliant Queen, the temptress Circe, a provocative
gypsy, and the goddess Venus. To this list we must add Velikovsky's Venus, for she is also
given the qualities of a fiercely disruptive celestial body. For instance, Davidson
describes her as
. . . active and hot - so hot that the seeming Cupids on her barge with their fans only
make her "delicate cheeks" glow with their sensual warmth [59] .
She is portrayed as a disturber of natural order.
She stands for excess, since she will not pause at the limits set by nature [60] .
Her object is to disrupt a pre-existing scheme.
Thus she usurps the phallic role, Shakespeare suggests: of course, such usurpation is an
attempt to achieve a reversal of the natural order, which was, after all, the object of
the serpent in Eden [61] .
Because she is associated with serpents, notes Davidson, Cleopatra's Egypt is hideously
fertile, full of snakes, and poisonous.
She lives in a world which is reminiscent of Spenser's Bower of Bliss and which is fully
as poisonous, especially to male visitors from Rome [62] .
The poison affects Antony, who
... admits to Caesar that he had "neglected" his duty when poisoned hours had bound me
up/ From mine own knowledge (II. ii. 90-91). This poison is obviously to be identified
with the great Satanic enemy of life who in the guise of the serpent conveyed death into
the fertile Garden of Eden and hence into the whole world of human beings [63] .
Here we have the serpent, a poisonous Cleopatra and the destruction of Eden in one
passage. If we recall what Velikovsky says about the relation between mythological
serpents and the tail of Comet Venus, and about the poisonous consequences of Earth's
contact with that very tail, and about its effects on the planet Mars, which might
poetically be said to have neglected its duty in being forced to follow a new or errant
course, the parallels are suggestive, as if the appearance of what seemed to be a giant
serpent in the sky marked the apparent end of celestial stability. This also accords well
with Cleopatra's role as Eve to Antony's as Adam, which Davidson also establishes.
She is also Circe, as described in Chapman's translation of Homer, holding out a cup of
sensual pleasure which transforms men into beasts - or stable planets into unstable bodies
- and we are told her poison is associated with sweetness.
Not surprisingly, Chapman's translation describes Circe disguising her "harme full
venoms" with honey as well as with other nourishing food and drink [64] .
We might think of the connection Velikovsky makes between the poisonous atmosphere of
Comet Venus' tail and the sweet honey-like manna produced by its hydrocarbons.
From Circe, it is but a short step to Venus, both in her earthly form, where she was
considered a planetary prostitute [65] , and in her heavenly form, which taught men to
prefer eternal reality to immediate pleasure. She is also equated with Isis, just as
Velikovsky has done, but the most prevalent image she projected for the Renaissance,
Davidson tells us, was as a universal troublemaker, for
... though not true in every sense, the claim may be provisionally made that Venus ought
to be seen in terms of discord ... Cleopatra likewise is in one sense also-viewed by
Shakespeare as a major source of discord within the ancient Roman world [66] .
If we apply the celestial equivalents which I have tried to establish earlier in my
analysis of this play, we can see that the Renaissance picture of Cleopatra is much like
Velikovsky's picture of Venus.
Next, we look at Cleopatra's effect upon Antony. It was generally considered, Davidson
tells us, that Antony's attraction to Cleopatra debilitated him. The image Shakespeare
uses is martial, but it could also be considered Velikovskian.
Thus Antony's sword is "made weak" by [his] affection [67] .
The cause of this weakening, in medieval terms, is the sin of Idleness, or Sloth, and it
is curious that Davidson refers to an illustration of Idleness by Cesare Ripa, in which an
old woman, weak and poor, holds a fish. He quotes Ripa:
Fish, it was believed, when touched by a net or by hands become so stupefied that they
cannot escape. Idleness affects the idle in the same way; they cannot do anything [68] .
It is interesting that idleness, which traps Antony, is pictured as a fish immobilized in
a net, which recalls Antony caught in Cleopatra's strong Egyptian fetters, 1.2.113, and
also the net of Hephaestus trapping and immobilizing Ares and Aphrodite as they make love
illicitly. This last is a major point in Alfred de Grazia's The Torrid Love Affair of Moon
and Mars, where he draws a direct relationship between the celestial events of -780 to -
687, as described by Velikovsky, and the Song of Demodocus from Book Eight of Homer's
Odyssey, where the Ares-Aphrodite-Hephaestus love triangle is narrated [69] .
Antony was of course identified with Mars, Davidson points out, and thus, when he rebels,
it is described in geometrical terms as a rebellion against order - he does not keep his
square, he does not act by the rule. instead, he is drawn erratically to the East, to
Cleopatra, and the result is pictured as a startling disorder in the sky, with celestial
objects appearing where and when they should not.
By his lack of control, he will gain mirth and another chance "To reel the streets at
noon" [70] .
At another point, Davidson brings the love story even closer to the events described by
Velikovsky, when he tells us that Shakespeare was familiar with the Ares-Aphrodite rod -
Hephaestus triangle which de Grazia has seen as a mythological retelling of the Velikovsky
scenario [71] . In this case it is the Roman version, involving Venus, Mars and the
jealous Vulcan, as narrated in the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Mars'
excessive attraction to Venus, or Antony's to Cleopatra, is given explicitly catastrophic
dimensions by Davidson through reference to Shakespeare's own words, already quoted in
another instance some pages earlier.
The greatness of this love can only be measured in terms of the degree to which Antony
will neglect his duty. He will "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/ Of the rang'd
empire fall" (I. i. 33-34) [72] . Venus and Mars become hot when they join, but they are
cooled by Vulcan.
Such an interpretation of the myth would seem to have been an important element in
Shakespeare's depiction of Antony and Cleopatra [73] .
Cleopatra is thus pictured as the Fatal Woman who destroys the male, and the image which
Davidson uses bears an eerie resemblance to Velikovsky's own words.
Through her instrumentality, he loses his manhood and gives himself over to blind and
irrational Fortune, who then flings him from her wheel [74] .
When the warrior-like Mars came into conjunction with the seductive Venus, the result in
Renaissance myth was that he was emasculated, he lost his warlikeness, but we must also
think of Velikovsky, describing the celestial event, and saying enigmatically that Mars
was thrown out of the ring [75] . This must lead us to wonder whether the role of Comet
Venus as described by Velikovsky underlies the religious and mythological figure pictured
variously as Eve, Circe, the Whore of Babylon, an evil temptress, a celestial prostitute
and Cleopatra.
In political terms, which parallel the celestial events Dr. Velikovsky described, Antony-
Mars should be master because of his status in the Roman Empire, for Cleopatra-Venus is a
captive ruler, but he is subdued by Cleopatra, and
... as a result of his submission, he loses his potency. Hence there appears to be
justified male bitterness when Candidus exclaims that his "leader's led/ And we are
women's men" (III. vii. 69-70) [76] .
Cleopatra is described as
... the debilitating queen - the fatal woman - who in the end will sap all his warlike
heat and power ...
- What could be more like Velikovsky's picture of Mars and Venus? - ...
and thus will lead him to utter defeat at the end of a mismanaged war [77] .
Davidson at this point refers to a painting by Botticelli.
Mars, like Antony, has put aside his plated armor; nude and debilitated, he sleeps as if
nothing could ever wake him [78] .
We think of the planet Mars now, shorn of most of its atmosphere, terrain and hydrosphere,
of its brilliance, nude and bare as in the photographs, and weak, meaning with little
effect upon Earth or the stability of the Solar System. Dr. Velikovsky has called it a
flying graveyard [79] . There is no question, says Davidson
. . . that Venus was the active agent: in other words, what Venus did with Mars was to
render him her slave. As Ficino asserts in his astrological discussion of these
divinities, "Mars never masters Venus." [80]
Yet, despite Venus-Cleopatra's role as a disrupter of order, despite her deleterious
effect on Mars-Antony, Davidson emphasizes that the Renaissance saw a very positive
conclusion to their affair, for
... the Renaissance generally remembered that the love of Venus and Mars was a discordia
concors which led originally to the birth of a daughter, Harmony. The value of Venus'
dominance over Mars will thus be found in the mitigation of the god of war's ferocity, for
only through such dominance can conflict and war be reduced to harmonious peace ... in the
end, the love of the martial Antony and wanton Cleopatra will lead historically to the end
of the conflict between the triumvirs and to the harmony of "universal peace" into which
will be born the Prince of Peace [81] .
That is to say, the Venus-Mars turbulence, which appears so potentially troublesome,
actually precedes the coming of a new order. This is certainly the case in Shakespeare's
play, for Davidson refers to Octavius Caesar's prediction of future peace as Antony and
Cleopatra are close to their destruction.
"The time of universal peace" . . . is perhaps the most significant single line in the
play. This will be the "universal Peace through Sea and Land" which, according to Milton's
"On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," prepared the scene for "the Prince of Light" to
begin "His reign of peace upon the earth." [82]
It is at this point that Davidson's analysis of the classical and medieval background to
Shakespeare's plays merges virtually directly with my Velikovskian interpretation of it.
He calls our attention to the apocalyptic nature of the imagery with which this positive
result of the Mars-Venus disturbance is dressed, and, in so doing, he gives it precisely
the universal relevance which Velikovsky sees.
The old order is coming to a close, and the effect will be to reorient* men who believe in
a Christian message to the "new heaven" and "new earth" which will be ushered in after the
Second Coming. . . When the guards discover the fatally wounded Antony, one of them
exclaims: "The star is fallen," while the other one adds, "And time is at his period" (IV.
xiv. 106-107). In the Apocalypse, we read: "and there felle a great starre from heaven"
(viii, 10); and "time shulde bee no more" (x. 6) [83] .
[* italics the writer's]
If we transpose these last three quotes into literal solar-system terms, they apply to the
situation in the heavens from -779 to -686 as described by Velikovsky, especially if one
were trying to put a hopeful positive interpretation upon these terrifying events. If Rome
is Earth, then the Mars-Venus turbulence is indeed a discordia concors, creating conflict
in the skies, but then leading to the destruction of that conflict through Venus'
mitigation of
Mars' ferocity. It is a catastrophe in the ancient Greek sense - a turning down before a
new and better age begins. What it leads to, in religious terms, is a time of universal
Peace [celestial stability] through Sea and Land - no cataclysmic floods, earthquakes,
upheavals of land mass which prepares the way for the Prince of Light. We might wonder
whether the pattern of darkness to light, the idea that it is always darkest before it
becomes light, has its origin in the Velikovskian catastrophic events. Lastly, this
transition is described as a reorientation, caused by a great star falling from heaven and
stopping time, after which there is a new heaven - a different configuration of stars
relative to Earth's new axis - and a new earth, new lands thrust up and others submerged,
new poles and equator, new cardinal points relative to the rising and setting of the sun,
new seasons, new topography. In sum, disaster leads to survival. All is changed, but it is
for the better.
It is to the artistic ramifications of this hopeful attitude that I now address myself,
for they provide us with a clear insight into what might have happened between the
occurrence of the events and their emergence into art. It is an object lesson in how human
nature can make the unpleasant palatable and even helpful. Towards the end of his essay,
Davidson observes
To be sure, Cleopatra, like Venus and her protégé Helen, contributed to the fall of a city
and/ or empire because of a passionate attachment, but nevertheless may not be seen only
as a symbol of a passion which ought at all costs to be resisted. For, had not Antony
yielded to his passion, his life would hardly have appeared as appealing or as suitable
for being mirrored in art [84] .
This is a form of having one's cake and eating it, which Shakespeare, as a great artist
representing mankind, achieves on our behalf. By depicting the planets as humans, he makes
them weak, even despicable; this is our revenge for what they did to us; but the humans,
no matter how much we revile them, are based upon planets, great and terrifying stars
which once moved erratically in the skies, and we fear they may do so again, and so we
must also placate them, which we do by giving them - planet and surrogate - a final
greatness quite different from their earlier pettiness. This is what happens to the
disruptive lovers, for, when they are dead, Octavius Caesar praises them, and
Caesar's attitude reflects quite clearly the sympathy and wonder with which the audience
is encouraged to look upon the tragic events at the end* of the lives of Antony and
Cleopatra [85] .
[* Italics the writer's]
Cleopatra is transformed, apotheosized, but the key element in her transformation is that
she is rendered safe.
She longs no longer for any earthly man, but strongly desires immortality. She shall never
again taste the earthly wine from Egypt's grapes, nor may she participate again in any
earthly revels ... Her baser elements are purged away so that her love may pull her up to
where her desire rests upon the spirit of Mark Antony in bliss [86] .
In celestial terms, Venus is being forever separated from any connection with Earth. She
will not be like mankind, which tastes wine and participates in revels, and is mortal. She
will be immortal, but distant. She will be revered and honored because mankind can now
afford to do it, because Cleopatra is no longer a wandering comet, which might be
dangerous, but a planet in a fixed orbit.
This is a triumph of the mind and imagination of man, for
. . . the immortality which Cleopatra, under the guise of the goddess Venus, achieves, is
after all the immortality which art, not religion, has to offer [87] .
Art, and myth, the concealing and transforming processes of the human mind, make the best
of what had at first been a rather terrifying situation.
The common Venus, who stood behind the Cleopatra whose mind always had been focused on the
delight associated with generation, in the end by contraries melts into the heavenly Venus
who sets forth to take her last immortal journey [88] .
Who, we should read instead, by setting forth on this last journey, which implies that she
will not return, is rewarded with immortality.
Like Tasso who attempts to convert his witch Armida after Rinaldo is rescued from her
power, Shakespeare insists upon transforming the destructive passion which Cleopatra
represents into its seeming opposite [89] .
The same occurs with Antony. He
... at last is lifted up to a new and greater heroism by his martyrdom and by the miracle
of love. At the death of "Herculean Antony," Cleopatra laments that the gods have "stol'n
our jewel" (IV. v. 78); but he is set as a star in the heavens toward which Cleopatra may
now steer her course [90] .
That is to say, he too has been rendered distant, and safe, and so now mankind can afford
to grant him the awe due a primitive god.
Because of his acts, he ironically* will become the immortal object of wonder and the
subject of art [91] .
[* Italics the writer's]
Both of them are in fact repelled, exiled to new orbits, and the vision is cosmic.
Shakespeare at both ends of his drama is echoing the Apocalypse, xxi. 1-2: "And I sawe a
new heaven, and a new earth ... And I John sawe the holie citie newe Jerusalem come downe
from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride trimmed for her husband." Thus Cleopatra, who
has been imaged forth in the play even as the great Whore of the Apocalypse, in the final
portion of the play is portrayed as analogous to the "bride" of the great bridegroom,
Christ, who indeed when he returns for the second time will usher in a new heaven, a new
earth, and an eternity of love which is not diminished by illusion [92] .
We must remember first that, at the beginning of the play, Antony and Cleopatra had wanted
to create their own private new heaven and new earth, 1.1.17, which would have benefited
them alone, whereas now a new heaven and new earth have indeed been created for all of
mankind - new stars, new planets, new directions - out of their diminution, and second,
that Velikovsky has identified certain angels with comets, for now, when they no longer
threaten earth, the lovers are made angelic.
The imperial spirit of Antony, generous and great, is placed at least in imagination among
the angels. Mark Antony indeed will be remembered thus, for he has been miraculously
converted into angelic substance as a result of the gnosis of Shakespeare's art [93] .
If we look at the process in celestial terms, trying to decipher what the human motives
are behind this artistic transformation, we can see a transition from menace to safety.
Antony and Cleopatra have been made to exchange dangerous mortality for safe immortality,
a gangster's notoriety for a statesman's or benefactor's fame. This is the only kind of
greatness they can be permitted, an abstract, disembodied magnitude, for greatness on
earth proved too dangerous. It is true that they were tremendously influential on earth,
both as human personages in a worldwide political battle and as Planetary personages in a
cosmic battle, but they were also destructive, and so by proxy the planets for which
Antony and Cleopatra stand are being punished through their human representatives, who are
vilified and defeated, and then, like all scapegoats, trimmed like monarchs before their
death and expulsion and subsequent glorification. It is a form of revenge upon the
planetary powers, and a satisfying one too, for, by exhibiting desire but making morality
triumph, it lets us experience vicariously and for a controlled time the secret desire to
be as free-flying and destructive as the planets, but then, because we know that such
behaviour is harmful, and therefore wrong, it lets a pair of scapegoats suffer for our
brief wildness. The best of this experience applies to us, and the worst to Antony and
Cleopatra, who carry our earthly evil away in their destruction and then have a distant
celestial greatness conferred upon them for it.
I said at the outset that my paper is intended to be a beginning, not a body of rigidly-
proved propositions, and so, in this last section, I wish to step back from the plays
themselves and look at some of the larger implications of what I have just said.
First, let us explore the relation between individual and collective human nature. Not all
psychologists accept the idea of a subconscious or unconscious, but, for the sake of this
paper, I will assume that it exists. if we go further and accept Jung's concept of a
collective unconscious, which he defines as a racially-inherited set of paradigms, of
master plans for dream, myth and narrative, then it seems to me, pace Jung, that this must
necessarily imply collective memories, transmission of collective knowledge, and thus a
collective mind, which I take to be the sum or repository of man's noteworthy collective
experiences. In the knowledge-assimilation process, it is the long-term storage sector.
Now, taking this assumption as a starting point, we then consider the possible effects of
the Velikovskian cataclysms. If such horrible events have occurred - and indeed there
appear to have been more than two instances - can we not imagine them causing collective
traumas on each occasion, one reinforcing the other, burning their imprint onto the
collective memory? Looking at mankind as a collectively traumatized being, we may then
wonder what collective defense mechanisms man might erect so that the horrible memory of
the catastrophes, the conscious realization of which would make our living unbearable, is
suppressed. How would we bury the memories, and then, what collective neuroses or
delusions would we produce in their stead to let us cope with existence?
Dr. Velikovsky has argued that, unconsciously, the result is a collective amnesia, which
is the theme of this symposium, and he has also urged that, as a byproduct of this
collective amnesia, most of our religion, myth and folklore are an unconscious attempt by
man to sublimate repressed unbearable fact into conscious bearable illusion. The common
purpose of these illusions, he says, which are produced universally, is to describe, and
thus render friendly and controllable, that which would otherwise remain unknown and
therefore apparently uncontrollable. Through them, an explanation is offered for
everything' from the sparrow's fall to the largest disturbance. In this way, our fears are
assuaged, for we feel we are placed in a benevolent relationship with forces which would
otherwise appear too powerful for human influence. I then ask, can we not apply the same
dictum to narrative art?
What I suggest is that, if we do possess unconscious collective memories of enormous
natural catastrophes, then the collective function of the narrative artist may be to calm
our fears by creating narratives in which the catastrophes may be let loose in disguise,
examined in all their horror and then overcome. That is to say, just as, in a neurotic
traumatized individual, some part of his mind creates the delusions which permit him to
cope with his existence, so the artist, as a part of a collectively traumatized society,
creates collective delusions for that society [94] .
Thus, it may be that the enduring artistic narrative endures, remains permanently
relevant, because it provides a medium for expression and thus release of collective
apprehension. It is a collective defense mechanism against enduring collective fears, and
a comparison may be made with children's fairy tales. It seems to me that a chief function
of these stories is to diminish a child's apprehensions about huge, uncontrollable forces,
represented in the stories by a giant, bear, or wolf. The fairy tales actually speak of
these huge figures, and make them playable, even defeatable. Without wanting to
oversimplify great works of art, I suggest that they are in a sense adult fairy tales, and
that they perform the same function at a more sophisticated level. They imply a rational
and sometimes beneficent order in the huge and otherwise irrational universe. That may be
why the enduring narratives of almost every human society are so similar in structure and
intent - each collectively neurotic society, suffering from the same catastrophic trauma,
must produce its own artistic delusions, tailored and adapted to individual circumstances,
but of common, universal origin.
There is, however, a very significant difference between a traumatized individual and a
traumatized society. When an individual appears to be psychotic, or neurotic, the aim of
society is to cure him, to rid him of his excesses, so that he may become like other men.
With a collective neurosis, however, there is no such aim, because the patient, society,
is also the judge of acceptable behaviour, and a neurotic who thinks he can only survive
behind his delusional defenses is hardly going to set out to cure himself. Instead, where
the neurotic condition is communal throughout society, the creators of illusion for
society are not eliminated, but honored and encouraged. That which is feared by a group in
a neurotic individual is admired by the neurotic group in itself, and thus, the more an
artist, as a member of a neurotic group, calms its fear with his fables, the more it
applauds him.
I therefore wish to propose a new interpretation of what happens when man reacts to art. I
suggest that it occurs at two levels, the second being caused by the first. The first
level of response, of course, is conscious. It is intellectual and emotional, being the
product of the artist's technical expertise in his metier, and the ideas, themes, feelings
and suggestions which the work stimulates within us as a result of that expertise. The
quality of both these factors determines how deeply we respond to the total work in a
personal, conscious way, which I prefer to call aesthetic involvement. Virtually all
literary criticism must restrict itself to this, as it has done since Aristotle.
It is only with the advent of psychological and anthropological criticism that we have
considered looking beneath the surface, beneath the conscious, to try to discover whether
there are subterranean reasons why man creates art, and why his fellow men are moved by
it. I suggest, of course, that there are indeed such subterranean reasons, that we are
moved by deep, unconscious factors, as I have just outlined, and therefore I feel that
these produce a reaction to art rather different from the aesthetic involvement which I
have described above. To distinguish what happens at a subterranean level, I shall call it
racial involvement. Where aesthetic involvement is personal and conscious, racial
involvement is collective and unconscious. The first is as old as one's age, the second is
as old as the mind of man. I feel that, if a work is to affect us profoundly, then
aesthetic involvement must occur first, or we are simply turned. off by a work's
ineptitude; but, once we are gripped and involved and reacting aesthetically in a positive
way to a great narrative, that is when a deeper level of response, racial involvement, is
able to be awakened and called into play.
The element of the narrative which calls forth aesthetic involvement is its literary and
dramatic excellence, as described above; that which calls forth racial involvement is the
structure of the narrative, by which I mean the extent to which the catastrophic pattern
and details are embedded or embodied in it. The closer this structure comes to the
catastrophic events, the more powerfully will the work affect us at a subterranean level,
because the real events have been fixed in our unconscious memories as part of our racial
inheritance, and thus we will respond deeply, albeit unconsciously, to a narrative which
contains them to a high degree. As a result, I feel that only when racial involvement
occurs will a narrative endure as a human statement meaningful to other men in different
times. It talks to the future because it tells of the past.
To be more precise, it is not simply the catastrophic parallels in a narrative which grip
us, but, even more, the way in which the narrative is resolved. When it recalls the
terrifying events of the past, but then moves to a unifying, harmonizing, stable
conclusion, we accept and approve and applaud, for in such a narrative we have seen the
racial fears exposed but then controlled, which means that we have not simply been
reminded, but comforted. The fear has been brought forth only so that it can then be put
away again in tranquility. It must be understood, however, that the artist who does this
for us never has the slightest conscious inkling that this is what he is doing. if he did,
he might never create at all. When he reproduces catastrophic patterns, in a process which
no one yet understands, it all occurs at a level which, for want of a better term, I call
unconscious, or pre-conscious, or transcendental, or instinctive.
Somehow, without his being aware of it, the great artist's creative faculty can tune into
the wavelength of our racial memories to find there the grand schematic designs of his
art. This is what makes him an enduring artist, for, when the design is there, we respond
to it subconsciously because it is also racially in us. Only the artist can produce the
pattern, but all men can respond to it.
Yet, there is a curious rider to this point. We are comforted by a great narrative, but we
must never let ourselves consciously recognize that this has happened. We must act as if
there were no anxiety, which needed comforting, and, therefore, as if such comforting
could not have occurred. This is the ultimate in both having our cake and eating it - to
use a great narrative to comfort our suppressed collective fears, and yet pretend there
are no fears to be comforted. it is a game that we play with ourselves, so that we can
endure the memories of the past. It is our way of feeling that we have the past - and thus
the future - under control, and thus, when a certain work of art permits us to play this
game as we want it played, we respond very positively. Yet neither side, creator nor
receiver, knows that the game is being played; neither side consciously knows that such a
game exists; but that is what is going on when a work of art remains meaningful to many
generations of mankind - we are responding unconsciously to the catastrophic patterns and
comforting resolution in it. It is a transaction between creator and receiver carried out
entirely at an unconscious level.
In presenting this; theory of literary creativity and response, I am not breaking ground,
for, in one sense, I am following a path first set entirely new ground out by the
advocates of archetypal criticism. This approach centers first of all about the ideas of
Carl G. Jung, and in particular his concepts of the collective unconscious or racial
memory and the archetype in dream, myth and literature. To Jung, all three forms of
expression are rooted in the same ground, the universal human psyche, and so
The great artist ... is the man who possesses "the primordial vision," a special
sensitivity to archetypal patterns and a gift for speaking in primordial images, which
enable him to transmit experiences of the "inner world" to the "outer world" through his
art form [95] .
In trying to explain both literary inspiration and literary function, Jung decides that
..... the artist is "man" in a higher sense - "collective man" - and that "the work of the
poet comes to meet the spiritual needs of the society in which he lives." [96]
A second major source has been the work of a group called the Cambridge Hellenists, who,
early in this century, applied anthropological insights into myth and ritual to
literature.
Their inspiration was Sir James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, and it is from these two
roots - social psychology and cultural anthropology - that archetypal and mythic criticism
have grown, in such landmark works as Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry,
Northrup Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God. All of these
people are concerned to discover the identity of the universal attraction in literature.
For it is with the relationship of literary art to "some very deep chord" in human nature
that mythological criticism deals. The mythic critic is concerned to seek out those
mysterious artifacts built into certain literary "forms" which elicit, with almost uncanny
force, dramatic and universal human reactions. He wishes to discover how it is that
certain works of literature, usually those that have become, or promise to become,
"classics," image a kind of reality to which readers give perennial response - while other
works, seemingly as well constructed, and even some forms of reality, leave us cold [97]
.
They, and all serious students of the topic, unanimously assert that myth is truth,
powerful and meaningful, and that it is somehow magically alive in literature.
Concerning the origin of these archetypes, however, different schools of thought exist.
For most traditional anthropologists, the images derive from natural phenomena, in
particular the recurring seasonal and solar events, and are passed from generation to
generation in ritual and myth. They are poetic, imaginative explanations of the world,
inherited through cultural instruction and designed to promote fertility and thus life.
For the Jungians, and, more recently, for anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, the
archetypes are inherent in, or a product of the structure of, the human mind. Myth is
therefore described as a sort of collective dream, built of universal, nonrational human
components. As Jung says,
... these psychic instincts "are older than historical man ... have been ingrained since
earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the
groundwork of the human psyche." [98]
Levi-Strauss seems to be arguing along the same line when he claims
We are not, therefore claiming to show how men think the myths, but rather how the myths
think themselves out in men and without men's knowledge [99] .
It is here that I must part company with both schools, with the Frazerians because they
derive myth and literature predominantly from vegetation cycles, and with the Jungians and
Levi-Straussians because they are merely content to note that a tendency to produce
archetypal images or patterns exists in the human mind, or psyche, and that such images or
patterns exert a perennial and universal power over human imaginative response. They never
seek to discover why our minds or our psyches, are set up in this manner. I feel, of
course, that Dr. Velikovsky has shown us the answer, or at least one answer. if he's
correct, then the archetypes are neither coded vegetation symbols nor natural
manifestations of the constitution of the psyche or the brain, bur repressed memories of
catastrophic events, which manifest themselves in disguise as the master elements in
narrative art. for their continued power to affect us may emerge - they talk to us about
our grandest conceptions, and comfort us about our deepest fears, fears we could not
otherwise look at. Shakespeare is the most universal of narrative artists; his fables
appeal to more men, in more different societies, from the most primitive to the most
advanced, than any other body of created art. I have felt Or some years that this is
partly because Shakespeare ' s works touch a number of universal chords, to which all men
respond at a primitive, subconscious, almost instinctual level, but I have never been able
to formulate with any satisfactory precision what those chords might be. Dr. Velikovsky
may have supplied lied us with the answer.
Now, if this be true, the implications go much further. In an address to the symposium on
his work herd at Lewis and Clark University in 1972, Dr. Velikovsky referred to his early
detractors - whose names are justifiably dirtied by history - as 'guardians of the skies.
' I'm not sure what he meant, but the phrase has intrigued me. Guardians of what? Or
rather, from what? From the truth, I suggest, and this is the next point I wish to make. I
am proposing that such people, recognized authorities in their field at the time,
astronomers in the main, were not as interested in seeking for truth as in preventing
certain truths from becoming known, and that the way they sought to achieve this was by
present' partial truth which omitted so much that the resulting distortion did not
approach the whole truth, but was virtually an untruth. In pretending to reveal, their
intention was to conceal, and, most important, I suggest that all of this happened at a
subconscious level. They did not consciously know why they behaved in this way.
To grasp why they may have done this, we must compare these guardians of the skies to a
psychotic or neurotic who has constructed successful delusional strategies against reality
because he has no desire to face reality truthfully. He must therefore reject tune out,
even attack, whatever conflicts with his delusions. In classical psychiatry, I am told,
one of the most delicate steps in the process of cure is the way in which the doctor
communicates to his patient the actual causes of his disturbed behaviour. If this is not
done successfully, the patient will react with hostility and reject the truth outright. If
we accept that collective man has produced various delusional defenses against the fear
engendered by the collective trauma, as I have argued earlier, then he obviously has
little wish to have the trauma revealed. He will fight tenaciously to retain his world of
delusion, to conceal reality from himself. He will hate those who try to show him
otherwise, and he will fool himself into ignoring the truth whenever he happens to come
close to it.
But man is a rational animal, even though part of him may be collectively disturbed, and
so he must be very clever about fooling himself or he will see through the attempt.
Furthermore, he will hate anyone violently who tries to show him what he is really doing.
Now, it seems to me that the attacks upon Dr. Velikovsky have been basically irrational.
An irrational act as I define it is one which appears to have no intelligent, reasoned
motive, but seems to be performed upon deep inner emotional compulsion, against reason,
and the attacks on Dr. Velikovsky seem to me to have been insanely compulsive. It is
apparent that the normally intelligent and self-disciplined, even liberal people who
suddenly became possessed by the fierce, total, unrelenting hatred which Dr. Velikovsky's
ideas can provoke in certain cases were violating the most fundamental principles of order
of their own professions. They were behaving like blindly hostile neurotics and never
seemed to know it. In case after case the reaction was the same, as if all were suffering
from a common madness, betraying their own selves.
The cause of this phenomenon, I suggest, is that these people were not acting as
scientists, or academics, but as people, man, frightened and neurotic man unwilling to
face the truth, trying desperately to keep it concealed from himself. I would thus label
the hostility to Dr. Velikovsky not so much an irrational reaction as an unconscious
reaction - against the truth which their own theories had kept safely hidden, but which
Dr. Velikovsky's theories threatened to reveal.
I must emphasize again that these deeds, and the reasons for them, all originate
subconsciously. Velikovsky's fanatical detractors did not and do not consciously know what
they were doing, nor why, any more than a neurotic can recognize the basis of his hatred
for the doctor who seeks to show him the truth about himself, but each type is
nevertheless driven subconsciously to attack the truth in order to retain the lie which
gives him comfort.
And so they attacked him, to try to kill his ideas before they spread, before enough
susceptible people would be infected by his plague. Their common madness on this point, so
unlike what these people otherwise were, suggests a common cause - that Dr. Velikovsky was
about to let a terrible skeleton out of the closet, and they were rushing desperately to
try to shut the door. It is as if there were an unwritten, unspoken and indeed unconscious
taboo against dealing with the possibility of catastrophism, and thus celestial
instability, and Dr. Velikovsky, who had broken it, must be destroyed.
That is why they are 'guardians of the skies. ' The astronomy and geology and biology
which they had constructed was apparently true, but, being uniformitarian, it was only a
partial truth, revealing enough to keep man happy, but concealing what man should not
know.
The implications go further, for, if we consider man in this light - striving to erect
what appear to be perfectly rational intellectual disciplines, but which are actually
carefully-disguised half-truths designed to suppress the whole truth from himself - then
all areas of human endeavour become suspect. Is science the supreme disinterested search
for truth, or a principal weapon in the fight against truth? In the play Macbeth, the two
victorious Scottish generals Macbeth and Banquo are accosted by the Witches and given
tempting predictions, some of which instantly come true. Macbeth appears to be succumbing,
and so Banquo warns him
But 'tis strange; And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell
us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray 's In deepest consequence.
Perhaps it is the same, for example, with Newton and Darwin, whose descriptions of the
cosmos and life respectively appear to explain all, but may in fact only explain enough to
keep us from suspecting there is anything more, winning us with trifles while betraying us
indeed where the consequences are deepest. The pictures these men paint have a very
pacifying effect. They tell us that the universe runs like a clock, and that life on earth
has been developing in an equally bucolic way. There are occasional lapses from form, like
comets or tempests, but these, we are told, are minor aberrations, hardly noticeable in
the long run against the slow, steady clockwork of the cosmos. Are these men purveyors of
truth, or 'guardians' of celestial and biological mechanics? Are scientists unconsciously
structuring their discoveries, not to give us the truth about our world, but to foster the
illusion that we control it? Is science a collective delusion too?
It may be that certain types of literary criticism function in the same way, for most
criticism has been kept within safe bounds - character, plot, style, tone, theme, image,
language - none of which will lead to the taboo question of catastrophism. It is perhaps
not a coincidence that New or Formalist Criticism which is a desire to study a literary
work in a vacuum, so to speak, has emerged in the last few decades coincident with our
questioning of uniformitarian science. Formalist criticism looks at a work without
reference to who wrote it, or when, or where, or what else he wrote, or what type it fits
its into, or what else was being written at the time, or what traditions seem to have
influenced the author, and so on. It may be that the closer we get to recognizing the
truth about catastrophism, the more arduously has Formalist criticism tried to steer us
onto purely aesthetic paths. I do not say it is wrong, any more than Newton or Darwin are
wrong, but I do suggest that what Formalism excludes is more important than what it
includes, and so the final picture which it offers is untrue. The Formalist critic may be
the 'guardian of the fable. '
What I propose instead, in the realm of literary criticism, is a Velikovskian aesthetic, a
full, multi-disciplined, completely honest approach to narrative art, and to drama in
particular, the most public narrative art. Each instance must not continue to be judged
exclusively as a private individual artifact, but, like war and government and myth, as a
product of collective man in response to our collective nature and experiences; not simply
in terms of what we consciously discover about what the author has consciously created,
but in terms of unconscious collective motives which may drive artists to create and the
unconscious collective ways in which we may respond to them.
This is becoming more acceptable in the social sciences, where we admit the possibility of
unconscious motivation in various fields of human behaviour, but we are not as willing to
allow unconscious motivation, much less unconscious collective motivation, in narrative
art. The result is a very limited approach to literature and drama. To analyze a novel,
for example, strictly in terms of its purely literary characteristics, may be to miss the
forest for the trees. It is like an opera teacher analyzing the purely vocal quality of a
person's scream for help. The novel is of course a privately fabricated work of art, but
it may be other things as well - a product of a certain group or time or culture or race,
a reaction to certain common events or conditions, a product of man bearing a relation to
other different human products - and therefore it must be analyzed not simply by a
literary approach, but by a nonliterary or superliterary approach as well, one which is
based upon historical and scientific and cultural insights in addition to purely literary
concerns. Like war and the generals, narrative art is too important to be left strictly to
the professors of English.
When I say this, I do not mean to downgrade art, nor to imply that all examples, of good,
bad or indifferent quality, are ultimately the same because they perform the same
function. The work of art is one of the chief glories of mankind, one of the greatest
products of the human spirit, but to say that, no matter how true, is to look at art in
conscious aesthetic terms alone, to see it only with reference to deliberate artistic
creativity and those standards relevant to that domain. What I have been discussing makes
no attempt to undermine that type of approach, for narrative art can be many things at
once, but rather tries to suggest that there may be other approaches, equally relevant
ones, which see a work of art in different contexts. If art is judged as art, then
questions of evaluation and interpretation are in order, for these are indeed some of the
main functions of criticism. However, when art is considered anthropologically, as a human
activity among other equally significant human activities, questions of relative artistic
merit among different individual works are no longer relevant. Instead, one is concerned
with the activity's function, its social purpose, to see what it can tell us about human
nature, about what constitutes man. This sort of approach is neither better nor worse than
the others, it is merely different, and equally legitimate. It does not seek to detract
from one's enjoyment of, or admiration for, a great work of art, nor does it attempt to
diminish the stature of created art. It rather hopes to enrich one's experience of the
work itself by using the work as a key to gain insight into the nature of man. If we are
indeed rational creatures, we must do no less.
Notes (Shakespeare and Veliovsky)
1. See, for instance, Man and his Symbols, ed. with introduction by Jung, Carl G., (Dell
Publishing Co., 1964) pages 56-71.
2. All quotations and line numbers from A Midsummer Night's Dream refer to the Signet
Classic Shakespeare edition, ed. Clemen, Wolfgang, (New American Library, New York, 1963).
3. "Collisions and Upheavals", Pensée 2( 2): 8-10 (May 1972). Publ. Student Academic
Freedom Forum, Portland, Oregon.
4. Ibid.
5. Welsford, Enid, The Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1927).
6. Young, David P., Something of Great Constancy: The Art of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
(Yale University Press, New Haven, 1966) Page 95.
7. Ibid
8. Young, op cit., Page 29.
9. Ibid, Pages 76-81.
10. Barber, C. L., Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton University Press, Princeton,
1959) Page 148.
11. Sewell, Elizabeth, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (Yale University
Press, New Haven, 1960) Pages 139-140).
12. Young, op cit., Page 153.
13. Ibid, Page 91.
14. Ibid, Page 90.
15. Ibid, Page 18
16. Barber, op cit, Pages 18-19.
17. Young, op cit, Page 20.
18. Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, Abridged edition (London, 1954) Pages 643 ff.
19. See, for example, Velikovsky, Immanuel, Worlds in Collision (Doubleday, 1950) Pages
305-311; (Pocket Books, 1977) Pages 309-315; (Abacus, 1972) Pages 292-299. All subsequent
page references to Worlds in Collision will refer to these three editions.
20. In an interview recorded shortly before his death, the American folk singer Woody
Guthrie related how, during a particularly severe dust storm in Texas at the time of the
Depression, it once became so dark that daylight was virtually obliterated and the
frightened farmers who had gathered in a flimsy shack feared that the world was about to
end. He may have been speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but truth may be conveyed in
jest, and the folk connection between anomalous darkness and the fear of worldwide
cataclysm seems to be universal.
21. See, for example, Juergens, Ralph, "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian
Catastrophism," Pensée, 2( 3) (Fall 1972) Pages 6-12
22. Worlds in Collision, Pages 259; 264; 251.
23. Worlds in Collision, Pages 160; 169; 161.
24. Young, op cit, Page 56.
25. All quotations and line numbers from Antony and Cleopatra refer to the Signet Classic
edition, ed. Everett, Barbara, (New American Library, New York, 1964).
26. Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Everett, Barbara, lntroduction xxv.
27. Worlds in Collision, Pages 176; 184-185; 176.
28. Velikovsky, Immanuel, Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955) Pages 50-55; (Laurel
Edition, 1968) Pages 56-61; (Abacus, 1973) Pages 46-51; (Pocket Books, 1977) Pages 46-61.
29. See, for example, Worlds in Collision, Pages 96-100 and 274-278; 110-114 and 274-278;
104-107 and 263-267.
30. Worlds in Collision, Pages 166 and 180-182; 175-176 and 188-191; 167 and 180-181.
31. Worlds in Collision, Pages 120-125; 132-137; 125-129.
32. Worlds in Collision, Pages 256-258; 261-264; 248-250.
33. Lee, Robin, Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra. Studies in English Literature (Edward
Arnold, London, 1971).
34. Ibid, Page 10.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid, Page 13.
37. Ibid, Page 11.
38. Ibid
39. Ibid
40. Ibid, Page 29.
41. Ibid, Page 20.
42. Ibid, Page 21.
43. Ibid, Pages 30-31.
44. Ibid, Pages 31-32.
45. Ibid, Page 33.
46. Ibid, Page 34.
47. Ibid
48. Ibid, Page 35.
49. Ibid, Page 36.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid, Page 41.
52. Ibid, Page 36.
53. Ibid, Page 51.
54. Ibid, Page 52
55. Ibid, Page 56.
56. Antony and Cleopatra, Introduction xxxv.
57. Davidson, Clifford, 'Antony and Cleopatra': Circe, Venus and the Whore of Babylon.
Unpublished manuscript, Chapter V1.
58. Davidson, op cit, Page 150.
59. Ibid, Pages 152-153.
60. Ibid, Page 155.
61. Ibid, Page 154.
62. Davidson, op cit, Pages 154-155.
63. Ibid, Page 155.
64. Ibid. Page 158
65. Ibid, Page 165.
66. Ibid
67. Ibid, Page 152.
68. Ibid.
69. De Grazia, Alfred, Unpublished manuscript. As well, these ideas are treated in
Professor de Grazia's paper in this volume. "The Palaetiology of Fear and Memory."
70. Davidson, op cit, Page 151.
71. See de Grazia, Palaetiology of Fear and Memory, especially pages 42 and 43.
72. Davidson, op cit, Page 167.
73. Ibid
74. Ibid, Page 154.
75. Worlds in Collision, Pages 259; 264; 251.
76. Davidson, op cit, Page 154.
77. Ibid, Page 167.
78. Ibid, Page 168.
79. Public address at the Symposium Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System,
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, June 16-19, 1974.
80. Davidson, op cit, Page 168.
81. Ibid, Page 170.
82. Ibid, Page 156.
83. Ibid, Pages 156-157.
84. Ibid, Page 170.
85. Ibid, Page 171.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid, Page 172
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid, Page 173.
90. Ibid. Page 172.
91. Ibid, Page 151.
92. Ibid, Page 174.
93. Ibid, Page 175.
94. For support of this concept from a different quarter, see Parry, Thomas Alan, "The New
Science of Immanuel Velikovsky," Kronos 1( 1): 3-20 (Spring 1975). Parry explains the
process of collective amnesia from a neuropsychological point of view. Recent discoveries
concerning the nature and functions of the right hemisphere of the brain, he writes.
support Dr. Velikovsky's holistic, intuitive, psychiatric approach to myth and religion.
Parry's conjectures upon collective memory and forgetting also relate to de Grazia, op
cit, and to the contention of this book that art is a sublimated retelling of terrible
history.
95. Guerin, Wilfred L. et. al., A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (Harper
and Row, New York, 1966) Page 136.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., Page 116.
98. Ibid, Page 135.
99. Leach, Edmund, Levi-Strauss. Fontana Modern Masters (Fontana/ Collins, London, 1971)
Page 51.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
CHAPTER SIX
CATASTROPHISM AND UNIFORMITY
A Probe Into The Origin of the 1832 Gestalt Shift in Geology*
George Grinnell
History Department
McMaster University
[* This article has been subsequently published in Kronos: A Joumal of Interdisciplinary
Synthesis (Kronos Press, Glassboro, N. J.) 1( 4): 68-76 (Winter 1976).]
"I think any argument from such a reported radical as myself," Charles Babbage wrote to the
geologist Charles Lyell on May 3,1832, "would only injure the cause, and I therefore
willingly leave it in better hands."
Charles Babbage (1792-1871) was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1828-1839) at the time,
a dabbler in geology, theology and manufacturing, who had recently made an unsuccessful bid
for a seat in Parliament. In 1837 he was to publish his The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, an
attack on the theology of the Anglican establishment, and in 1851 he was to carry the
attack into the Tory camp in his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, the
purpose of which was to argue that wealthy Tory amateurs had a stranglehold on science
policy and were discriminating against socially less well positioned scientists, who were
more deserving of support.
Charles Lyell (1797-1875), to whom he was writing, had just published the second volume of
his Principles of Geology (Volume 1, 1830; Volume 11, 1832; and Volume 111, 1833), a work
written in support of political liberalism although ostensibly it was an objective work in
science free from any political implications. In his letter of May 3rd to Lyell, Babbage
was explaining why he would not write a favorable review of the book. Quite wisely, the
Whig scientists, like Babbage, Lyell, Scrope, Darwin and Mantell, did not want the public
to know that what was being promoted as objective truth was little more than thinly
disguised political propaganda.
The purpose of this paper is to explicate what Babbage means by the word "radical," and the
word "cause," when he writes, as quoted above: "I think any argument from such a reported
radical as myself would only injure the cause, and I therefore leave it in better hands."
The first part of this paper investigates the political implications of early 19th Century
Geology. The second probes the nature of Babbage's and Lyell's "cause," and the last part
of the paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this investigation for
Velikovsky's theory of collective amnesia.
PART I: THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF EARLY 19TH CENTURY GEOLOGY
In 1807, Humphrey Davy wrote to his friend William Pepys: "We are forming a little talking
geological dinner club, of which I hope you will be a member." Of the original thirteen
members, four were doctors, one was an ex-Unitarian minister. Two were booksellers;
another, Comte Jacques-Louis, had fled the French Revolution. Four were Quakers, and two -
William Allen and Humphrey Davy - were independently wealthy amateur chemists. Only one,
George Greenough, had any training in geology or mineralogy. He had paid a visit to the
Academy at Freiburg some years earlier along with Goethe, but did not by any stretch of the
imagination pursue the subject for a living. He was a Member of Parliament. Indeed, what is
extraordinary about the London Geological Society is that none of the original members were
geologists. "The little talking dinner club" as Davy put it was a club for gentlemen given
to talk, not to hammering rocks.
The following year twenty-six Fellows of the Royal Society joined, including Joseph Banks,
the President of the Royal Philosophical Society, and the year after the number of members
had jumped to 173. The "little talking dinner club" concept became unfeasible; apartments
were rented instead; there was talk of publishing transactions, and Sir Joseph Banks,
fearing that the Geological Society would soon grow bigger than his prestigious and ancient
Royal Philosophical Society, 'resigned in protest. By 1817, only ten years after its
founding, the Geological Society had more than 400 members, and in 1825 it was incorporated
with a membership of 637.
The founding and early growth of the London Geological Society is noteworthy for a number
of reasons. Earlier scientific societies, like the Royal Academy in France and the
Philosophical Society in London, had a much broader base. There had been a few abortive
attempts to start specialized scientific societies in chemistry and botany, but they had
come to nothing. The Geological Society of London was really the first specialized
scientific society and its early growth was unprecedented, and, in fact, very difficult to
account for, especially when one recalls that its early members were almost all doctors,
lawyers and Members of Parliament instead of persons actively engaged in what we would now
consider to be geological pursuits. Of the first Presidents (Greenough, Buckland, and
Murchison), George Greenough was a Member of Parliament, the Reverend William Buckland was
Dean of Westminster, and Sir Roderick Murchison was an independently wealthy retired Army
Officer.
That is not to say that there were no persons in England actively engaged in what we would
now consider to be geological pursuits, for indeed, England at the time was going through a
crash program of canal building and mine exploration and was about to enter the railroad
age, but one is hard-pressed to find these working geologists on the membership list.
William Smith, for instance, the most famous drainage engineer of the age, who discovered
the technique of correlation of strata by means of fossils, and is generally mentioned in
modern geological texts as the key geologist of the era, was not invited to join the London
Geological Society. Perhaps he was too busy doing geology to have time to talk about it,
but if the truth be told, the London Geological Society was a group of talking amateurs
whose interest in Geology was not for its application to mining and canal digging, but for
its theological and political implications, which were crucial to the social stability of
England and were thereby by no means irrelevant to the early development of geology.
The term "geology" had only recently been introduced by the Swiss Diluvialist, de Luc. In
the Medieval University curriculum one finds no place for the study of the earth, which was
deemed corrupt, a product of the devil, and therefore not worth studying. The Medieval
Catholics believed, following Plato, that geometry, numerology, harmony and astronomy
better reflected the wisdom of God than did the study of things of this world, but the
Protestant Reformation had changed all that. Between the years 1680 and 1780 some five
hundred books and articles were published on geology ranging from Bishop Burnet's popular
Sacred Theory of the Earth, which ran through seven editions between 1681 and 1753, to J.
T. Klein's scholarly monograph on a single class of fossils, Dispositio Echinodermatum
(1732). The Protestants were keen to demonstrate that God's handiwork was as easily seen in
this world as in the next, and particularly they were eager to demonstrate the literal
truth of the Bible which declared that God had not only created all the creatures of the
earth, but had also brought down the Deluge to punish man for his sins.
Shortly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Catholic monarch was driven out of
England, a rash of works appeared eared reconciling the book of Genesis with the new
research into Nature. Most successful of these was John Woodward's Essay Towards a Natural
History of the Earth, in which he explained the stratigraphic sequence of rocks by
supposing that during Noah's flood, all the surface rocks of the earth had been dissolved
by the sea, later to be gradually precipitated out into the stratigraphic sequences which
now comprise the secondary formations. Because the Woodwardian idea preserved the theme of
Genesis, that the flood was caused by divine decree to punish men for their sins, it was
favorably received by the Anglican Church and later became, at the hands of the Tories, a
major bulwark in their defence of monarchy. In 1728, the Woodwardian professorship was
founded at Cambridge, the first academic recognition of the field of what is now called
"geology," and his ideas were articulated not only in England, but also on the continent,
particularly in the popular classes of Abraham Gottlieb Werner at Freiburg later in the
century where Greenough, von Buch, Maclure, Jamieson, Berger, and most of the other
founders of geology studied.
In pursuit of Woodwardian Geology, a number of anomalies occurred, in particular a lack of
correlation between New and Old World strata, as well as overlays of basalt and granite in
what were supposed to be secondary deposits. As a result, Leonard von Buch and Georges
Cuvier modified the early diluvial theory into a more general catastrophic theory of the
earth in which the earth was seen as not having suffered one catastrophe, but numerous
catastrophes of which the Deluge was but the most recent. To deny catastrophism altogether
was to deny the truth of the Bible, and hence the theological implications of early geology
were quite clear.
In 1673, Bishop Bossuet, tutor to the Dauphin of France, had drawn up his arguments in
favor of kingship into a treatise: Politics drawn from the very Words of Holy Scripture
argued that monarchy was the most common, the most ancient, and the most natural form of
government. The key word there was "'natural." He argued that Nature provided evidence of
being ruled by a divine monarch, God Himself, King of the Universe, and that a King was
then emulating God when he ruled with absolute authority: "Thus we have seen monarchy take
its foundation and pattern from paternal control, that is from nature itself" Bishop
Bossuet writes, and the British spokesman for monarchy, Robert Filmore, echoed Bossuet's
words. Monarchy was natural, because all of nature was ruled by a divine absolute monarch,
God himself.
In the course of the 18th Century, as democratic sentiments grew not only in America but
throughout all of Europe, the political theory of Bossuet and Filmore was seriously
challenged. John Locke in his Treatise on Government and Jean Jacques Rousseau in his
Discourses argued against the naturalness of monarchy in favour of a social contract theory
of government. But to prove that monarchy was unnatural, it was necessary to prove that the
Bible's description of the Deluge was inaccurate, that God had not created the animals and
the plants of this earth, and that he had not introduced catastrophes to punish man for his
sins, for these were the biblical and geological models upon which monarchial theory was
based. In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, accompanied by Erasmus, Darwin, and
later by Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Simon LaPlace, the Scottish liberal geologist, James
Hutton, published his Theory of the Earth, in which he attempted to demonstrate that Nature
was not governed by a divine monarch, but by fixed geological laws of volcanic uplift and
erosive weathering. Hutton's friend, Adam Smith, was at the same time arguing in favour of
a laissez-faire economic policy, in which paternal monarchical power was again eliminated
in favour of a free-ranging liberalism.
"Some Judicious persons, who were present at Geneva during the troubles which lately
convulsed that city," the Reverend William Paley writes in a counter attack against the new
liberalism in his The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (5th edition corrected
1793), "thought that they perceived in the contentions there carrying on, the operation of
that political theory which the writings of Rousseau, and the unbounded esteem in which
these writings are held by his countrymen, had diffused amongst the people. Throughout the
political disputes that have within these few years taken place in Great Britain, in her
sister Kingdom, and in her foreign dependencies, it was impossible not to observe, in the
language of the arty, in the resolution of popular meetings, in debate, in conversations,
in party general strain of those fugitive and diurnal addresses to the public, which such
occasions call forth, the prevalency of the ideas of civil authority which are displayed in
the work of Mr. Locke. Such doctrines are not without effect; and it is of practical
importance to have the principles from which the obligation of social union, and an extent
of civil disobedience are derived, rightly explained and well understood." Paley then went
on to explain them not only in the ensuing 567 pages of his Moral and Political Philosophy
but also in the two volumes of a much longer work on Natural Theology in which the'
cosmological foundations of monarchy were once again reiterated.
The "cause" then to which Babbage was referring when he wrote to Lyell: "I think any
argument from such a reported radical as myself would only injure the cause" was that of
discrediting Paley and the other Tory Monarchists through an attack on its geological and
theological foundations.
PART II: THE CAUSE
After the Napoleonic Wars, England had fallen into a severe depression. Governmental
demands for military supplies ceased and there was no market for British goods overseas. To
add to the distress and general unemployment, nearly 400,000 troops were demobilized with
no place to go. in order to protect the British farmer from imports of cheap grain, the
corn laws were instituted in 1815 preventing the import of grain until the price had
reached 80 shillings a quarter, a price so high that laborers were starving without being
able to pay for it. Although the corn laws were passed to protect the British farmer, they
had a devastating effect on British industry and on the towns of the industrial midlands.
High food prices drove not only the workers into starvation, but also small businesses into
bankruptcy. The Tory solution to the problem was to advise the lower classes not to breed
so copiously. Still the towns of the industrial midlands continued to grow mostly, as it
turns out, from an influx of the younger sons and daughters of poor farmers. Manchester,
for instance, was a small town of 4,000 in 1688. A century later it was ten times that
size, and by the time Lyell published his Principles of Geology, it was approaching half a
million, most of whose inhabitants lived in wretched conditions. Malthus classified towns
like Manchester, along with wars, famines and plagues, as a natural check on the population
because the death rate was so high.
On August 16, 1819, a crowd of unemployed, underpaid, and underfed inhabitants of
Manchester gathered at St. Peter's Field to hear a speech on Parliamentary Reform and
repeal of the corn laws. The local militia from the countryside, fearing a rebellion,
attempted to arrest the speaker. In the fight that ensued, several were killed and many
injured. The monarchist Tory government instituted the "Six Acts" which curtailed the right
of free speech and forbade the training of persons in the use of arms. England was on the
verge of revolution - the Liberal industrial midlands versus the Tory monarchists - but the
memory of the French Revolution was still fresh among the middle class. They wanted reform
in Parliament, not riots. But to reform Parliament meant answering Paley's arguments, and
this entailed destroying Paley's Natural Theology.
Paley had argued that sovereignty descends from God to the King; the people are his
subjects. Because Parliament is an advisory body, if the king is content with its advice,
then there is no need to reform it. The fact that Parliament did not represent the present
distribution of people in England, Paley argued, was irrelevant since sovereignty did not
stem from the people to begin with. Sovereignty descended from God.
Paley's arguments were amazingly effective. His treatise on Moral and Political Philosophy,
in which he argued that "it is the will of God that the established government be obeyed"
was required for memorization before students could graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. The
only way the Liberals from the midlands could get Parliament reformed was to demonstrate
that the scientific foundations of Paley's Natural Theology were false, and this meant
destroying diluvial geology and catastrophism.
In 1825, Lyell's Liberal cohort George Poulett Scrope (1797-1876) published his
Considerations on Volcanoes in which he transformed the arguments of the Tories by which
every time they ascribed a natural event to God, Scrope ascribed the same event to a
Volcano, and thereby attempted to revive the geological theories of James Hutton. So
perfect - were the laws of volcanic uplift and erosion which God had created at the
beginning of time eons ago, Hutton and Scrope argued, that no more had been seen of God
since, nor was there any need of him to run the affairs of the universe, any more than
there was need of a king to interfere with the natural and intrinsic laws of economics and
of society.
Scrope's book was too radical for the London Geological Society at that time, and it was
dismissed without a hearing. Scrope, the son of a wealthy London merchant, bought himself a
seat in Parliament and pursued the cause by more direct means. But without a cosmological
proof that monarchy was unnatural and that sovereignty belonged to the people, the Liberals
remained relatively powerless.
Undaunted by Scrope's failure the young Whig lawyer Charles Lyell now tried his hand at
destroying the geological foundation of monarchical theory. In his Principles of Geology he
took a much more subtle line than had Scrope. In the 100-page introduction to the
Principles, Lyell argued not so much that the diluvial theory was wrong, as that it was
mythological and impeded the '. 'progress" of geology. In the first volume he went on at
great length concerning the forces of erosion and the effects of volcanic uplift in what
was a brilliant avoidance of all evidence of catastrophism. it was just what the moderates
were looking for. They rallied around Lyell and elected him first Secretary and then
President of the Geological Society.
"By espousing you," Scrope wrote to Lyell on April 12, 1831, "the conclave have decidedly
and irrevocably attached themselves to the liberal side, and sanctioned in the most direct
and open manner the principle things advocated. Had they on the contrary made their
election of a Mosaic geologist like Buckland or Conybeare, the orthodox would have
immediately taken their cue from them, and for a quarter of a century to come, it would
have been heresy to deny the excavations of valleys by the deluge and atheism to talk of
anything but chaos having lived before Adam. At the same time I have a malicious
satisfaction in seeing the minority of Bigwigs swallow the new doctrine upon compulsion
rather than from taste and shall enjoy their wry faces as they find themselves obliged to
take it like physics to avoid the peril of worse evils. I feel some satisfaction in this."
In this day and age when geology is far removed from religion and politics, and when
political issues are settled by election rather than at meetings of geological societies,
it is difficult for us to understand the extent to which the social shift in world view
which took place not only in geology but in astronomy and natural history, was related to
the Great Reform movement of 1832. All were part of the far more general shift in world
view from paternalism to liberalism, but the persons responsible for engineering this shift
were very conscious of what they were doing. "It is a great treat to have taught our
section-hunting quarry men, that two thick volumes may be written on geology without once
using the word 'stratum'," Scrope wrote to Lyell on September 29,1832, after Lyell's second
volume appeared. "If anyone had said so five years back, how he would have been scoffed
at." Just as the Conservatives had refused a hearing to the Huttonian camp earlier, now the
Liberals pulled the same tactics when they got into power. The stronghold of catastrophism
lay in a stratigraphy where unconformity and nonconformities, to say nothing of massive
conglomerates, told of wide-ranging geological disasters of the past. Lyell, like Scrope
before him, simply suppressed the evidence which did not fit in with his doctrines, and
once he was voted into power, the catastrophists found it increasingly difficult to publish
their research.
The Liberal take-over of the Geological Society, and the suppression of evidence favoring
the catastrophic position did not come about overnight. Rather, there was a slow
assimilation of catastrophic data until there was virtually nothing left to the theory as a
whole. When, in 1839, Louis Agassiz attempted to argue in favour of catastrophism with his
theory of ice ages, the uniformitarians simply adopted all his evidence, but reinterpreted
it in uniformitarian terms. Thus the data did not change, but the gestalt by which that
data was organized and given coherence was transformed from catastrophism to
uniformitarianism just as the social structure of England was changed from Tory
paternalism, in which sovereignty descended from God down to the King, to the new
Liberalism, in which sovereignty ascended up from the people through Parliament to its
Ministers.
Ironically enough the political battle which underlay the catastrophist-uniformitarian
debate of 1832 is now long over, but owing to the paradigmization of science, the
uniformitarian gestalt is still assiduously cultivated at universities and in professional
geological societies. The "cause" for which Babbage, Scrope, and Lyell were fighting is now
long since over and we should feel free to look again at the geological evidence itself,
which, if the truth be told, provides ample evidence for catastrophism as it always has.
PART III: CONCLUSION
In 1905 physics had been in a dilemma, some of the evidence from optics indicated that
light moved in waves, other evidence indicated that it moved in particles. The two concepts
seemed contradictory, but Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were able to show mathematically
that the two concepts were actuallv complementarv and provided us with a fuller picture of
reality if we accepted them both. Perhaps today geology is in the same situation. We have
inherited from our ancestors the idea that either catastrophism must be correct or
uniformitarianism must be correct, but not both. The reason they put this as an either/ or
proposition was political. Either sovereignty belonged to God and the King, or it belonged
to the people; it could not belong to both. Therefore geology had either to go with the
Tories to catastrophism, or with the Liberals to uniformitarianism; it could not go both
ways. Today we no longer have to worry about that. From the evidence of geology, it seems
quite clear that both theories are correct: the normal course of events is indeed as Lyell
describes it (gentle uplift and slow erosion), but there is also ample evidence that
Velikovsky is correct as well and that the earth has indeed been subject to some severe
catastrophes as he has so convincingly argued in his Earth in Upheaval
In this paper I have attempted to make five major points: first, the London Geological
Society, which gave birth to the uniformitarian paradigm, did not originally consist of a
group of practicing field geologists, but was comprised of gentlemen, Members of
Parliament, clergymen and lawyers, who were primarily concerned with the political and
theological implications of geology at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832 when the
concept of monarchical sovereignty was being challenged by the Whigs and defended by the
Tories. Second, that the London Geological Society has been split into two camps, with the
Tory catastrophists prevailing before 1832 and liberal Whigs, under the leadership of
Lyell, Scrope and, later, Darwin, taking over in the second quarter of the century. Third,
that "uniformitarianism" was promoted by the Liberals as part of "the cause" to undermine
the theoretical foundations of monarchy and was not derived from-field research. Fourth,
because the Tories were using repressive tactics in politics to prevent the reform of
Parliament, the social tension spilled over into the geological debate causing the intense
interest in geology in the 1820's and 1830's, and the exponential growth of the newly
founded London Geological Society. The Liberals, by seizing control of the London
Geological Society before the Reform Bill was passed, presaged what was soon to follow in
the political arena. And, fifth, once in control, the Liberals attempted to cement their
hegemony by repressing the catastrophists and by assimilating their data.
In the ensuing years of the 19th Century, geology became fully Professional and dogmatic.
It became a scientific heresy to believe in the catastrophic theory. The reaction of the
scientific community to Velikovsky was one of instinctive repression, not because
Velikovsky was wrong, but because it basically fears that he may be right.
Turning now, in closing, to the question of cultural amnesia, I have found little evidence
that the Liberals had "forgotten" the catastrophes of the past. Rather the evidence for
catastrophism was politically embarrassing to them. At times they may appear to have
repressed evidence, but actually they believed in their own liberal vision so strongly that
they sought more to reconcile the evidence of catastrophe to this vision than to repress
the evidence. If Liberal scientists and historians have remembered too much the peaceful
times, it may be that their unconscious has been seeking more a reconciliation of the past
catastrophic experience with their present experience of peaceful times, than a repression
of those terrible ancient events.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
CHAPTER SEVEN
LIVING WITH VELIKOVSKY:
CATASTROPHISM AS WORLD VIEW
Patrick Doran
Department of Anthropology
McMaster University
In this paper on catastrophism and its consequences, I consider Velikovsky and "the new
Anthropology"; this work removes the study of man from its present scientific, cyclical
world view and places it in an apocalyptic cosmos. This is only a shift in perspective. The
spadework, and most of the superstructure, have been done long ago at the formation of the
world religions, as Velikovsky argues so convincingly. I will present evidence that the New
World Hopis built their cosmology on catastrophism. For a present-day example, the authors
of the Whole Earth Catalogue illustrate a prototype gestalt which lives with a
consciousness of catastrophe. The pioneering effort in this paper lies in appreciating
Velikovsky's contribution to an existing paradigm of catastrophism.
My theologian friend, David Arnott, the Vicar of Roundshaw in London, England, read
Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision while I visited him recently. His criticism: "The fact
that a society is interested in a catastrophic understanding of the cosmos is more
indicative of the state of the society than of the nature of the cosmos."
This seems fair. We know that people seek world views which complement and support their
own perception of reality. So to some real extent the participants of this symposium have
already embraced the possibilities that earth exists in a cataclysmic universe, and that
man already may have experienced global collisions.
An historian of science doesn't have to look far for the roots of these perceptions.
Western, industrial man, whose imperial grasp has embraced all the sources of information
upon which Dr. Velikovsky draws (from the New World Codices to the extensive geological
records), is the same man whose philosophy and religious tenets became bankrupt, as
Nietzsche's madman proclaimed before the turn of the century. Although this announcement
went unheeded, the same message assumed material form in the massive destruction of the
World Wars, and by the more widespread trauma heralded by Black Tuesday in 1929. When we
consider that this same Man devised the atomic holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can
appreciate the setting for an understanding of a cataclysmic cosmos.
As participants in a new paradigm, we need not disregard the societal grounds of our being.
To those whose consciousness matured during the sixties, the fact of catastrophe becomes
the gateway to understanding - the first prerequisite. This catastrophic consciousness even
has its own annotated bibliography: the Whole Earth Catalogue, an already articulated
paradigm which shouts "Rejoice! The apocalypse has already occurred."
I shall argue that the Catalogue was conceived as a post-apocalyptic document providing the
readers with a sketch of the new world which unfolds once global catastrophe has surfaced
to consciousness.
My own appreciation of this consciousness arose first from infatuation with Anthropology.
My readings attempted to explore a basic canon of works dictated by Pope's maxim: "the
proper study of mankind is man." I thought I was doing strictly exploratory work (Jacques
Ellul and the nature of technological society; Lewis Mumford and his thesis of the
symbiosis of man and his use of tools; searching for spiritual truths of the aboriginal
natives of this continent, the James Bay Cree, the Oglala Sioux, the Yaqui sorcerer, the
potlatch, the Hopi ceremonialism; learning to keep bees and not sell honey; Arthur
Koestler; developing a detailed awareness of the ecological crisis from Rachel Carson to
the politics of the 1970's, from Edward Hall's The Hidden Dimension to Buddhist
meditation). All these seemed random pursuits, but to my great surprise they proved to be
part of this articulated paradigm with annotated bibliography, the Whole Earth Catalogue.
Both start with a cosmic view of disaster - the common "given" is a view of the eggshell
fragility of Planet Earth and its delicate biosphere. But whereas I speak prosaically, the
Whole Earth Catalogue sings. It is poetic. It quotes from The Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton:
The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl set in spangled ebony.
It was nacreous, it was opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. its patterned
colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the
intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness, I seemed to feel, as
never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely
yearning to wake.
The Whole Earth Catalogue began in 1968 as an ad hoc freak enterprise "Access" was its key
concept - how to link up people with tools in a form that would promote the development of
an ecological gestalt. Its editor, Stewart Brand, provided a clue to the precepts of this
gestalt in an editorial entitled "Apocalypse Juggernaut, Hello":
As if the spirits of our ancestors weren't trouble enough, now we're haunted by the
ghosts of our descendants.
Ken Kelsey claims that ecology is the current handy smoke screen for everybody's Dire
Report... I tend to view the whole disaster as an opportunity to try stuff. If you take all
the surprise-free projections for mankind's near future and connect them up, they lead neat
as you please right into the dead-end meat grinder. The only Earth we had, used up.
(Page 233)
The devotee of the Whole Earth Catalogue's peculiar compendium of survival tactics assumes
that the catastrophe has already occurred, or is now occurring. The agent may be seen as
social unrest or the industrial poisoning of the biosphere. For example: the January 1971
Whole Earth Catalogue Supplement devotes one page to Albert Speer, architect, Reich
Minister of Armaments and War Production for Hitler, writing as a prisoner:
I thought of the consequences that unrestricted rule, together with the power of
technology - making use of it but also driven by it - might have in the future. This war
(II) had ended with remote-controlled rockets, aircraft flying at the speed of sound, atom
bombs and a prospect of chemical warfare ... A new great war will end with the destruction
of human culture and civilization.
The nightmare shared by many people . . .. that some day the nations of the world may be
dominated by technology - that nightmare was very nearly made a reality under Hitler's
authoritarian system. Every country in the world today faces the danger of being terrorized
by technology; but in a modern dictatorship this seems to me to be unavoidable. Therefore,
the more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for
individual freedom and self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to
technology.
According to Stewart Brand, the living experiment of the Alloy community was the setting in
which the Whole Earth paradigm began to unfold. Alloy was held in the New Mexico desert
between the Trinity Bomb Test Site and the Mescalero Apache reservation, March 20-23,1969
(the Vernal Equinox).
150 people were there. They came from northern New Mexico (communes), the Bay area, New
York, Washington, Carbondale, Canada, Big Sur, and elsewhere. They camped amid the
tumbleweed in weather that baked, rained, greyed, snowed and blew a fucking dust storm. Who
were they? (who were we?) Persons in their late twenties or early thirties mostly. Havers
of families, many of them Outlaws, dope fiends and fanatics naturally. Doers primarily with
a functional grimy grasp on the world. World thinkers, drop-outs from specialization. Hope
freaks.
They left behind their proverbs recorded in the catalogue. Here's one: "There's a lot of
people who want the Apocalypse. Instead of looking at it as the death force, there's a
possibility of the emergence of something new, a reshuffling of the deck."
The Catalogue looks around for what might be salvaged from the great midden-heap of
civilization. According to proverbs from Alloy: "You're just saying that there is in
reality no guarantee that life will continue. The right to live is a fiction. It's a
pretense at a political reality." The Whole Earth Catalogue says: yeah-yeah, you thought
the liberal democratic uniformitarian world system was bust, but you didn't know how bust.
First, let's look at the big picture.
You're too close. Back off and survey the big picture and old mysteries will clear up for
you and other mysteries will arrive ... among the discoveries ... is that this lovely place
Earth is scarcely inhabited and scarcely habitable. Stare into the void. (Page 7)
The apocalypse has already occurred. And what might you want to know in order to live in
this newly collapsed world? The massive information bank of the Whole Earth Catalogue aims
to expand the capacities of each human individual so as to increase his survival potential.
... Surprises ... is what we (man) are here for. The standard Operating Law when a
species is in a bind is to diversify. Multiply alternatives. If you don't know what's
coming, the way to evolve ahead of the changes is to try everything.
(S. B. - Page 233)
The Catalogue redefines human potential, and provides access to tools for each to begin
exploration in their brave new world; it acknowledges the godhood of humanity and
challenges man to accept the responsibility. Although it may seem that only the selfish and
egocentric would interest themselves in learning to survive while the rest of humanity
perishes, that can be only the criticism of an outsider to this world view. Once the
paradigm is embraced, adventure, joy and the drama of discovery, with its colossal blunders
and momentary awards, provide the necessary spiritual tutorship - the centering knowledge
to live in the present - to be here now.
As one of the conscious inhabitants of this globe, Man is awakened from his lethargy by the
sound of alarm bells: crisis. The veil of amnesia has been lifted, the result is the
awakening of consciousness, whether the apocalyptic agent is perceived to be an extra-
terrestrial jostling, or biospheric poisoning, atomic weaponry overkill, or overpopulation;
or whether one has experienced the disintegration of his world view by chemical inducement
a magical mushroom or the fabled LSD. The generation of the Whole Earth Catalogue has
experienced the catastrophe and, consistent with Dr. Velikovsky's amnesia theory, they no
longer itch to re-enact the primordial paroxysm that heralded our present age - the bomb
has gone off. We acknowledge the Russian Roulette of the planetary system. People are dying
all around us. We live in the now. Now what?!
Much of the philosophy that the cataclysmic paradigm looks to is found in the eastern
spiritual teachings. Eastern man has honed his consciousness as assiduously as we have
developed our technology. He learned that to comprehend the cosmos, he must look into the
void. "THE VOID?!" Western man declares, "Why there's nothing there." This is the most
terrifying prospect for material man to envision. For centuries we have codified laws,
erected structures and systems, and designed labyrinths to cushion us from even a hint of
nothingness. Rational Apollonian scholarly Western man needs more than the ecstatic
revelations of an Eastern mystic to reveal the nature of the cosmos. And this is the great
contribution of Velikovsky.
Velikovsky not only argues in consummate detail (in the finest of Western scholarship), he
not only uses Western methods to illuminate his truths. He uses Western sources to prove
his case! His work reinterprets our own canons of knowledge, the whole Hebraic heritage and
the very precepts of the scientific tradition. These are the building stones of his new
cosmology. From the genesis of Judaism, with the flight out of Egypt during catastrophic
circumstances, to the frontiers of modern physics, his theory is revealed. Better than
affirming the possibility of catastrophe, Velikovsky has provided an argument in Western
terms for a catastrophic cosmology.
This symposium is in fact a celebration of the acceptance of the legitimacy of Velikovsky's
work. Far from being a crisis-induced scramble for an apocalyptic band-wagon (a revival in
the scholarly world, as so many established academics regard it, of the gloom-and-doom
popular hysteria fads about the end of the world) it is more the reaffirmation of much that
modern, progressive, liberal democratic science has shunned or railroaded completely out of
existence. Probably each participant to this symposium is attracted by a particular aspect
of Velikovsky's work. Appropriate to the physician's calling, Velikovsky has provided the
fragmented specialization of the multi-versity with the cool healing of an
interdisciplinary synthesis.
For my part, I celebrate the reaffirmation of an historic universe where unique events
inevitably alter our course. This affirmation of the Hebraic side of our heritage counters
science's preponderant influence from the Greeks and their cyclical cosmos, their search
for harmony in the heavens. With an historic perception, the mysterious potential to life
is reaffirmed. If we are in a paradigm shift of which Velikovsky is an integral part, it is
partly as a reaction to the confining vision of man that science imposed. For science's
cosmos operated by laws, and eminently knowable laws at that. The corollary: knowing those
laws provides science with manipulative power over that which operates by the laws, whether
people or principles of aerodynamics. Science has restricted too far the vision of biotic
potential; it has obscured past, present, and even future with predictability, and hence
monotony.
The catastrophic paradigm celebrates that which is mysterious in the nature of life. This
is Wendell Berry's Manifesto for the Mad Farmer Liberation Front in the Whole Earth
Catalogue:
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything made.
Be afraid to know your neighbours and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not
even the future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card, and shut
away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something, they will call you. When they
want you to die for profit, they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the World. Work for nothing. Take all that you have
and be poor. Love someone who doesn't deserve it. Give your approval for all you cannot
under stand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask
the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. Say that your
main crop is the forest that you did not plant and you will not live to harvest. Say that
the leaves are harvested - when they have rotted in the mould. Call that profit. Prophesy
such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees
every thousand years. Listen to carrion - put your ear close and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is
immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts..... As soon as the
generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a
sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks
than necessary, some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection. (W. E. C. - Page 25)
The mysterious open-ends what is possible, unlinks the chain and rejuvenates the world.
Velikovsky's thesis began with a reappraisal of the view that myths were founded on
material reality. His cross-cultural comparisons argue for a common material reality for
all the survivors of the last global upheaval. This interpretation acts as a great
restorative to the effect of the sludge which the functional schools of interpretation have
hardened over our understanding of world mythologies.
Let us read the first revelation of the Hopi's historic and religious world view of life
with this new acceptance of its validity. The Hopi hold that our planet has experienced
three world ages and that this is the fourth. Each age has been terminated by physical
apocalypse which has dramatically altered populations, bringing some to the fore and
casting down others. Each has set fresh conditions for the possibilities of life on this
globe, and dramatically altered the consciousness of survivors. In describing the end of
the second world age, they first tell of moral decay and the inadequacy of man to hold up
his part in the song of creation; then:
... as on the First World, so again Sotuknang called on the Ant people to open up their
underground world for the chosen people. When they were safely underground, Sotuknang
commanded the twins, Palongawhoya and, Poganghoya, to leave their posts at the north and
south ends of the world's axis where they were stationed to keep the earth properly
rotating. The twins had hardly abandoned their stations when the world with no one to
control it, teetered off balance, spun around crazily, then rolled over twice. Mountains
plunged into seas with a great splash, seas and lakes sloshed over the land; and as the
world spun through cold and lifeless space, it froze into solid ice.
Quite clearly the basis for the Hopi cosmology is a catastrophic view of existence. They,
like the Israelites, began this age amidst a violent upheaval which initiated their
migrations in search of their chosen land. Their goal, on the bleak mesas of the American
southwest, is
... to sustain forever responsibility for the well-being of the world. Theirs is the
mysticism not of change, but of the stability of the yearly cycle of one winter's food at a
time.
Now you have experienced this paradigm travel full-circle; for these lines are from the
review of the Book of the Hopi, contained in the Whole Earth Catalogue.
Velikovsky argues for the integrity of the Hopi cosmology with material reality. The Hopi
provide us with an archetypal response of life to a cataclysmic consciousness. Concern for
the welfare of the earth unites the new anthropology to the wisdom of the Hopi.
I have attempted to show that catastrophism is a current paradigm which Velikovsky provides
with a Western mythology. Since the writings of Thomas Kuhn, we acknowledge that one of the
properties of a theory is its contextual basis in an existing, but often unarticulated,
cultural milieu. My prime concern has been to explore the implications of living with the
knowledge of catastrophism. Here is the best statement of this calling my years of
ecofreaking have uncovered, authored as "The Four Changes" by poet Gary Snyder, and, of
course, contained in the Whole Earth Catalogue:
Our own heads: is where it starts. Knowing that we are the first human beings in history
to have all of man's culture and experience available to our study and being free enough of
the weight of traditional cultures to seek out a larger identity - the first members of a
civilized society since the early Neolithic to wish to look clearly into the eyes of the
wild and see our self-hood, our family, there. We have these advantages to set off the
obvious disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are - which gives us a fair chance to
penetrate into some of the riddles of ourselves and the universe, and to go beyond the idea
of 'man's survival' or 'the survival of the biosphere' and to draw our strength from the
realization that at the heart of things is some kind of serene and ecstatic process which
is actually beyond qualities and certainly beyond birth-and-death. 'No need to Survive !'
'In the fires that destroy the universe at the end of kalpa what survives? ' - 'The iron
tree blooms in the void! '
Knowing that nothing need be done, is where we begin to move from.
Patrick Doran
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
CHAPTER EIGHT
AFTERWORD
Immanuel Velikovsky
The symposium draws to a close. I appreciate the effort made by the organizers on behalf of
this University and the members of the faculty who participated as moderators; the
dedication of those of you who came from afar to read the prepared papers, and of those who
have followed my work with interest and devotion, some over many years since 1950, others
who have become new adepts. I appreciate those who participated in this is symposium by
listening to two days of papers on the subject of "Cultural Amnesia."
My work has ramifications in many fields of knowledge. Once I had begun to understand that
global catastrophes caused by extraterrestrial agents had occurred, I had to face problems
in many fields.
First I had to check in each field to determine the current situation and evaluate the
prospects for revision. As soon as you accept that a global catastrophe has occurred, many
problems thought to be insoluble solve themselves. In geophysics the origin of mountains is
not established, nor is the origin of ocean salt. Palaeomagnetic changes and reversals
create unsolved problems. The cause of dramatic changes in climate is not understood.
Exactly at those times when I determined that the catastrophes took place there were
records of unexplained changes in the ocean level.
Since its inception in 1859 the theory of evolution has altered the ways in which we think
to such a degree that even philosophy has become a branch of Darwinian evolution, and is
helpless to solve the problems that it creates for itself. Before the theory of evolution
emerged it had been maintained that our Earth was created in six days. Slow evolution
replaced instant creation. But was Darwin's theory right? No, it was only partly so. This
has become increasingly apparent in the last twenty years, and it should have been apparent
early in this century when mutations were first observed.
There are problems in astronomical cosmology where we attempt to explain how everything
came into being and how it attained its present state. Neither the Nebular theory nor the
theory of tidal disruption can fully explain the creation of the Solar System. Neither the
Big Bang nor the Steady State theory explains the beginning of the Universe. No single
solution exists, no one theory is flawless.
In celestial mechanics the dogma persisted until very recently (and still persists today
with some astronomers) that gravitation and inertia are the only forces that affect
celestial motions. Yet many astronomical motions are more readily understood when electric
and magnetic forces are included as the evidence now clearly requires [1] .
Frequently, I am called upon to speak to gatherings of space-scientists [2] . 0n such
occasions I ask the assembled physicists and engineers if there is anyone present who still
claims that Jupiter with its magnetosphere can travel through the interplanetary magnetic
field without being affected, or if the satellites of Jupiter can travel through the
magnetic field of Jupiter without being affected by it. Thousands have heard me lecture,
yet I have never seen one arm raised, whether I spoke at Harvard, Princeton, or NASA.
In 1950 my claim that electric and magnetic forces acted in the cosmos was considered my
greatest offense. Even before Worlds in Collision was published, Einstein warned me that
the importance I placed upon electricity and magnetism in cosmic problems would be
violently attacked by other scientists. But I stood my ground. Especially it appeared to me
that sun-grazing comets are carried around the Sun by electric and magnetic forces in
preference to gravitational forces. This is, of course, not yet proven.
Other critics told me that the greatest minds of the past had established with exact
precision the ability to predict eclipses centuries in advance on the basis of only
gravitation and inertia acting in the cosmos. But I was not dismayed, I met the competition
head on, whether the opposition criticized me fairly, as in the case of Einstein with whom
I argued often for long hours and exchanged quite a few handwritten letters [3] . or
whether the criticisms were attacks and defamation. The attacks do not help me to complete
my work.
Several other fields besides celestial mechanics must also be re-examined. How must global
catastrophes affect the interpretation of ancient civilizations? What significance do the
surviving relics of those civilizations have for the archaeologists and historians? We have
to re-examine the meaning of mythology. The Freudian ideas that traumatic experiences cause
the human race to be possessed by irrational motives, such as the urge to self-destruction,
is of fundamental importance.
In 1950, the appearance of my work created a new phenomenon in the politics of science.
Never in the history of science has there been anything comparable to what has happened in
the last twenty-four years. In the 15th and 16th centuries when there were no newspapers,
radio, or television, wholesale repression of an idea was extremely difficult.
Communication was slow, usually by exchange of letters [4] . But even when more rapid
communication became possible, nothing occurred which could be compared to the violence and
the dishonesty of many incidents in the "Velikovsky Affair." As a subject of discussion, of
papers, and of graduate dissertations, the "Velikovsky Affair" has become a favourite
subject on campuses across the country (although I speak about the United States I assume
in Canada too) for sociologists and historians of science.
No one can possess the knowledge required to be an expert in so many fields [5] . Equally,
we cannot understand the happenings in various fields if those fields are examined in
isolation. Nature is one: it is not subdivided into departments or separated compartments.
No one can spend enough time to emulate the ancient philosophers like Seneca or Aristotle
who discussed all of the knowledge of their day. Yet the understanding of nature becomes a
question of interdisciplinary synthesis. Generalization is increasingly being favoured by
the scientific press. It is clear that no progress can be made discussing an
interdisciplinary subject as a whole. This is why I published different evidence in
separate books, like Earth in Upheaval, where I deal with stones and bones and evolution.
There is not a single reference to anything from our human heritage. There were many
references in Pliny, Strabo, Herodotus, and the ancient Egyptian sources that I could have
used profitably in that volume, but I resisted. The geological evidence had to stand on its
own merits. Although we recognize the interconnection between fields, each field needs to
be discussed within its own frame of reference.
In defense of my theory I have had many confrontations. in particular, I remember one
confrontation at Brown University, some seven years ago, when I was pitted against four
specialists: one in Babylonian mathematics, one in astronomy, one in physics, and one in
geology. I stood alone.
At the AAAS meeting in San Francisco just two months ago I participated in a similar debate
which lasted seven hours. The audience showed by their standing ovation that they took my
side, the side of the heretic. I had shown that the very same problems which plagued
scientists in one field were identical to the problems in the next field. Common problems
plagued the astronomer, the geologist, and the historian of Babylonian mathematics. Each of
these specialists spoke about the very same subject without recognizing it.
This year there are five symposia discussing my work [6] . At each I will face assembled
experts and defend my work in each separate field.
I have now a more serious problem. The new idea which I have provided now spreads like
wildfire. Discussion on one campus leads to invitations to other campuses, the invitations
increase in geometric proportion. Just two hours ago I received an envelope containing an
invitation to travel to Montreal for another series of lectures.
I have much to do: I started late in life. I was forty-four when I arrived in this country
for an eight-month sabbatical. I have remained thirty-five years, the prisoner of an idea.
I did ten years of work before the publication of Worlds in Collision. Shortly thereafter,
my second book, Ages in Chaos, Volume One was published. The second volume of this latter
work was already in page roofs and I called them back for elaboration. For the past twenty-
two years I have elaborated upon Ages in Chaos, making the original second volume into four
new volumes [6A].
I must now ask the question, at my age, with only one short year and a month away from
being an octogenarian, can I continue to attend meetings and debate these issues? Can I
continue to answer questions which are sent to me? Can I advise scientists, and write
articles for Pensée? Each task is a heavy load by itself.
At the same time I will do my utmost while I am still physically able to finish those books
which are now partially complete. I have a manuscript for a book which discusses
catastrophes which precede those described in Worlds in Collision. I mentioned something of
these catastrophes in my talk yesterday. Most important, I must complete the manuscripts
for the four remaining volumes on ancient-history, Ages in Chaos [7] . would like this
series, my Opus Magnum, to be as complete as possible. It is my Opus Magnum even though the
main problems are in cosmology, psychology, and geology, and not in ancient history. When I
asked the question, could the catastrophes that are described in the ancient sources be
correlated between Egyptian and Biblical sources, I discovered a systematical chronological
error in ancient history. To my amazement, I discovered that descriptions of' ancient
history were confused; acccepted dates meant nothing. For the past twenty-four years
scholars have debated whether the beginning of the reign of Ramses the Second should be
moved from -1289 to -1303. As I show in Ramses II and his Time, this debate has absolutely
no meaning if Ramses belongs at the end of the seventh or at the beginning of the sixth
century before the present era instead of centuries earlier.
Another volume deals with the Dark Age of Greece. In it I will show how the Homeric Problem
can be eliminated [8] . No documents or buildings have survived from the Dark Age, the
ancient Greeks never mentioned it and seemingly knew nothing of it. its removal gave me
great satisfaction, and should exhilarate Greek scholars, because the last link to a
misguided Egyptian chronology can now be severed from Greek history. The traditional
Egyptian chronology was devised hundreds of years before the first hieroglyphics were ever
read, and was based upon erroneous astronomical calculations. In a recent issue of Pensée
[9] I published a paper discussing the astronomical basis of chronology. Can anyone who
has read this paper seriously believe in the traditional chronology based upon fallacious
astronomical calculations?
Imagine twelve hundred years of ancient history as the span of a bridge. Though this span
does not include all of ancient history, it does cover the period from the end of the
Middle Kingdom to the time of the second Ptolemy. I tore down one abutment in Volume One of
Ages in Chaos (which not every critic has seen or read) and now I am ready to do the same
thing to the second abutment in my next book, Peoples of the Sea. How can the middle span
between two abutments survive? It will topple down. Even with the revision chronological
problems will remain, but their number will be greatly reduced.
I need more of you to follow my path, I need help from those of you who can take my work
seriously, read my books, consider what I say, agree with my principal thesis, but then dig
a little deeper to find its flaws. I don't need more critics who never bother to read my
books (like the critic from this University who obviously never read Ages in Chaos before
speaking critically about it). I can't expect all critics to be positive, but critics who
are negative should at least be constructive.
Wherever in my studies I encountered an apparent difficulty on the way to a solution,
experience has shown that the difficulty usually opened a doorway to a new pathway; beyond
it lay a whole new vista. New solutions in one field provide the way to new understanding
in other fields. Of course, I have left many problems unsolved, I am not omniscient. My
work is not without error: I am dedicated, but I am only human.
I realize the scope of what I have discovered and I have been fortunate to live to see
parts of my theory confirmed. So many innovators have not lived to see any of their claims
confirmed. The history of science abounds with such cases. All innovators are iconoclasts.
They never start with a majority; always they begin as a minority of one.
I believe that now is the time for me to go into seclusion and wait. When my new volume
appears in print I must let the storm that may occur blow itself out. If I take time to
visit universities I will do so only to find dedicated young men, capable of following new
ideas: men of courage who are willing to consider ideas which are not very acceptable when
they are first put forward. Such men must be prepared to drop their ideas when facts show
them to be wrong.
Here on this campus I heard to my satisfaction that my ideas have been seminal, that
members of the faculty belonging to various departments that once had no common interest
now have much to discuss. This evening at the Chancellor's Dinner 10 I will stress how my
effort has provided a common coefficient for scholars in different 'subjects.
I ask for help from the younger generation who have already educated themselves in one or
another field which touches upon my work, to do those tests that I cannot perform, to
supply me with literature that I have no time to find, and to give me criticism when I err.
I want to hear from those of you who already do such research. I want to hear in what
fields you do your research and how it is proceeding. I am interested in your work, whether
it is the study of the ancient kings, geology, or genetics.
In this auditorium I am probably the oldest in years, but in spirit I am among the
youngest. I invite the younger among you, not just those who are young in age, but the
young in spirit to add your efforts to my own. Don't just be listeners, don't just be
autograph seekers. If you can, do your share. I have started, you must continue.
I am not the best listener, my eye is better than my ear. Yet I am a very slow reader, but
what I read I usually remember. Sometimes I quote from books that I read as a child and
have not seen for seventy years. My memory is very selective, I can't remember telephone
numbers, but I remember chronological data with ease. If I must memorize a telephone number
because I call it frequently, I connect it with some chronological dates, and then I can
retain it.
I appreciate the efforts in preparing the papers for this symposium. Certainly something
has been achieved. There are many new ideas included in, the papers presented here by de
Grazia, MacGregor, Mullen, Wolfe, Grinnell, and Doran.
And with these words, I repeat my thanks to President Beckel, Chancellor Oshiro, Vice-
President Holmes, to the members of the Senate, to the members of the Faculty, to those who
read papers, and to those who came to listen to somebody who was once a heretic, but whose
prayer is that his works should never become a dogma.
Again, I thank you all.
Notes (Afterword)
1. The importance of electric and magnetic phenomena in the solar system is not yet fully
appreciated by scientists. The discovery of extensive planetary magnetospheres, the
interplanetary magnetic field, the solar wind, the emission of radio noises by Jupiter, the
existence of net electrical charges on the Sun and probably upon the planets, and the non-
Newtonian behaviour of the solar prominences indicate that electric and magnetic phenomena
occur in all parts of the Solar System.
2. Dr. Velikovsky has lectured recently at several scientific centres and universities.
17 February 1972 - Harvard University
10 August 1972 - N. A. S. A. Ames Research Centre
15 - 17 August 1972 - Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon
10 October 1972 - Graduate College Forum - Princeton University
15 October 1973 - Expanding Awareness Program, IBM San José Research Centre
10 December 1973 - N. A. S. A. Langley Research Centre
He has participated in seminars and staff briefings with scientists working upon the Mars
Viking, the Venus-Mercury Mariner, and the Jupiter-Saturn Pioneer Space Probes.
3. In 1921 Velikovsky and Einstein collaborated in publishing a series of monographs, later
collected in two volumes, Orientalia et Judaica, and Mathematica et Physica under the
common title of Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum. Velikovsky was
the general editor and Einstein edited the mathematics and physics volume.
4. Dr. Velikovsky is implying that heresies such as Galileo's could spread outside the
confines of the specific jurisdiction where they were published. Poor communications
allowed the heresies to flourish elsewhere because the central authority was slow to hear
that the heresy had spread and by then counter edicts would arrive too late to extinguish
the heresies. [Ed.]
5. It took Dr. Velikovsky five years to acquire the knowledge necessary to interpret the
evidence needed to write Earth in Upheaval.
6. In 1974 there were five separate symposia organized by separate organizations or
institutions. At each a different aspect of Velikovsky's synthesis was discussed. Although
Velikovsky participated at all five symposia, he was not involved in initiating or
organizing any of the symposia. The five symposia were:
Velikovsky's Challenge to Science,
25 February 1974.
American Association for the Advancement of Science, San Francisco, California.
Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia,
9-10 May 1974,
The University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta.
Velikovsky and the Recent History of the Solar System,
16-19 June 1974,
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.
Velikovsky's Reconstruction of Ancient History,
30 October 1974,
Pittsburgh Historical Forum, Dusquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Velikovsky and the Politics of Science,
2 November 1974,
Philosophy of Science Association, Notre Dame University, Indiana.
6A. See note 7 below.
7. That these four volumes have taken twenty-two years to complete is indicative of the
thorough scholarship exhibited by Dr. Velikovsky. Two of the four volumes Peoples of the
Sea, which covers the Persian Period (-524) to the second Ptolemy (-279), and Ramses II and
His Time, which covers the period of the Chaldean Domination (-611 to -524), had been
typeset for printing at the time of this Symposium. The former volume is now published. The
latter will be released by Doubleday and Company Inc. (New York) in April 1978. In the
remaining two volumes Dr. Velikovsky discusses the Assyrian Dominations, the New Assyrian
Empire to the fall of Ninevah (-829 to -611), and the Dark Age of Greece (see below). These
two volumes have yet to be completed [Ed.]
8. The Homeric Question is a five-hundred year Dark Age interposed between the historical
period of Greece and the Mycenean-Minoan eras.
9. "Astronomy and Chronology", Pensée 3( 2),: 3849 (Spring-Summer 1973). This article
appears as a supplement to Peoples of the Sea (Doubleday, 1977).
10. 10 May 1974. See Appendix II.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
APPENDIX I
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Brief biographical sketches of each of the authors are reprinted here. These sketches are
adapted from the introductions given the speakers during the Cultural Amnesia Symposium.
IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY
It is my honor to introduce tonight's speaker, Immanuel Velikovsky. A few in this audience
know Dr. Velikovsky very well indeed and need no introduction. Some others know a good deal
about him and about his work and very little introduction is required. So my remarks will
be directed mainly at those who know something, of his work but perhaps not very much of
the man himself.
Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 in Vitebsk, Russia; the youngest of three sons of
Simon Velikovsky, businessman and Hebrew scholar, and Biela Grodenski, a fluent linguist.
Moving to Moscow he enrolled at the Medvednikov gymnasium where he excelled in Mathematics
and Russian and graduated with a Gold Medal in 1913.
He then proceeded to Montpellier in Southern France to study Medicine, sojourned briefly in
Palestine, then enrolled for further medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. Home
for the summer vacation in Russia at the outbreak of World War 1, he graduated in Medicine
from the University of Moscow in 1921.
For the next three years Dr. Velikovsky lived in Berlin immersed in scholarly publishing,
and attempting, among other activities, to establish a Jewish academy. There he met and
married Elisheva Kramer, a young violinist, who happens to be with us at this conference
today.
In 1924 the Velikovskys moved to Palestine where he practiced first as a general
practitioner, and later as a psychoanalyst in Jerusalem, Haifa, and TelAviv. During this
period he commenced research on Freud's heroes, Oedipus, Akhnaton, and Moses.
To further his growing commitments to this research Dr. Velikovsky and his family visited
New York in the summer of 1939. Influenced to remain in America through the forces of world
events as well as the course of his own research, he became interested in the theme of
catastrophes that he identified running throughout his studies of ancient records.
From 1940 to 1950 he researched and wrote Ages in Chaos and Worlds in Collision. In 1950
the latter volume was first published by Macmillan; and in 1952 Doubleday published the
first edition of Ages in Chaos. In 1955 Earth in Upheaval appeared, and in 1960 Oedipus and
Akhnaton.
Currently Dr. Velikovsky resides in Princeton, New Jersey, where more scholarly works are
in various stages of preparation.
But such a simple and sketchy recording of dates and places leaves so much unsaid about the
distinguished speaker at tonight's session, and it lacks the basis for insight into his
works. For example, it does not adequately describe a young lad maturing in a household
steeped in learning; his mother-tongue Russian, mastering Hebrew at four, German at six,
French at seven, Latin at twelve, and finally English - the eventual language of his famous
publications.
Nor the goals of his father, transmitted in part to the son, to recreate Hebrew as a living
language, to redeem Israel, and to found a Jewish academy.
Nor does the skimpy record reveal the ambitious youth repeatedly denied admission to the
University of Moscow because of his Jewish ancestry, only to enroll in the Free University
in Moscow maintained by dissident professors who had resigned from the Imperial University
in protest against violation of academic freedom.
Nor the rebel who once abandoned studies to explore with religious passion the ancient
ruins of the Holy Land. Nor does it portray the young intellectual who with burning zeal
co-published a series of volumes of the works of outstanding Jewish scholars, assisted by
Albert Einstein, who edited the scientific section, and encouraged by Chaim Weizmann, later
to become the first President of Israel.
Nor the early papers on Freudian psychology written by the over-burdened practicing
physician in Palestine.
Nor does my sketchy biography depict properly the excitement and stimulation of the
discovery of the Ipuwer Papyrus, the key that unlocked the Egyptian record of catastrophe.
Nor the eleven years of persistent painstaking search for worldwide evidence of cataclysm;
first into the library in the morning, last to leave in the evening, with no sabbaths or
holidays permitted.
Nor the laborious and meticulous recording of notes from more than 4,000 volumes for Ages
in Chaos alone.
Nor does it depict the reluctance to plunge into inevitable conflict with astronomers, but
the equally inevitable conviction of the cometary origins of cataclysm.
Nor the notorious attempts to suppress publication of his results and conclusions.
Finally, neither does it begin to suggest the intellectual excitement that the examination
of Velikovsky's works and ideas have engendered at this University of Lethbridge.
The records do report this concluding remark by Dr. Velikovsky to a graduate college forum
at Princeton University, and I quote
Imagination coupled with skepticism and an ability to wonder - if you possess these,
bountiful nature will hand you some of the secrets out of her inexhaustible store. The
pleasure you will experience in discovering truths will repay you for your work; don't
expect other compensation, because it may not come. Yet, dare.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky.
- Owen G. Holmes
(The University of Lethbridge)
ALFRED DE GRAZIA
It is not an easy task to introduce so eminent a scholar as the one I am to present now. To
do justice to the excellent records and achievements of Dr. Alfred de Grazia would deprive
you of at least half the time allotted for this session. For example, just some of the
universities with which Dr. de Grazia has been affiliated at one time or another include:
Chicago, Minnesota, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, Bombay, Istanbul, and Gothenborg.
So I will not go into detail.
As a political scientist, Dr. de Grazia is well known for his work, Public and Republic,
and more recently, Politics for Better or Worse, published last year. But Dr. de Grazia is
more than a political scientist. His interests in other disciplines and activities are well
attested by works such as he produced when publisher and editor of The American Behavioral
Scientist; creator of the Universal Reference System; his book Kalos, which incorporates
some of his own thoughts for future world order, and, of course, editor of the important
volume The Velikovsky Affair, published in 1963.
Dr. de Grazia is currently Professor of Social Theory and Political Psychology at New York
University. Now, as to his personal data, I can tell you that he was born in Chicago and
graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The University of Chicago in 1939 at the age of 19. His
military career began at the rank of Private and moved through to the rank of Captain. His
family background, he has told me, includes an uncle by the name of Charlie, "Kid Lucca,"
who won the Canadian Boxing Championship in 1910 in nearby Calgary.
While I could go on for quite some time adding interesting background points for you, I
feel I should cut this introduction short and let the eminent speaker speak for himself.
I'm sure all of you will enjoy his talk.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to present Dr. Alfred de Grazia.
- F. Q. Quo
(The University of Lethbridge)
JOHN M. MACGREGOR
John MacGregor obtained an honours degree in Art History at McGill University. Following
this, he went to Princeton, where he spent the years 1966 to 1971 qualifying for a Masters
Degree and completing the course requirements for the Ph. D. degree. During these years Mr.
MacGregor also conducted research in Morocco and in Germany.
Mr. MacGregor's studies have included various aspects of Psychiatry and Psycho-analysis. In
1967 and 1968 he studied with Dr. Rollo May at Princeton. Following this he was a guest at
the Menninger Foundation in Topeka. He underwent analysis with Jolande Jacobi at the C. G.
Jung Institute in Zurich, followed by intensive Freudian analysis in Montreal.
Mr. MacGregor is a member of the American Society for the Psychopathology of Expression.
His teaching activities give us some indication of his interests and of his competencies.
He has lectured on the history of Chinese Landscape Painting, Chinese Art and Archaeology,
Theoretical Investigations into the Art of Children, and Introduction to the Study of Art
and Psychiatry. Without further introduction, I present you John MacGregor.
- George Sanderson
(Saint Francis Xavier University)
WILLIAM MULLEN
I am very pleased to be here to introduce one of our speakers today. I am also pleased to
take part in this conference as a member of the Department of History and the University of
Lethbridge. This is not because I have come here either to praise Dr. Velikovsky or to see
him buried, but rather because I Support an old tradition, which goes back to New Testament
times at least. when en the matter of Christian preaching by the apostles was raised before
the Jewish Sanhedrin, one member of that body, Gamaliel, made the point that if what the
apostles taught were true, it would prosper; if it were not, it would fail. And I would say
much the same thing: if what Velikovsky has to tell us is true, it will stand, if not it
will fade away. But only through conferences such as this will we be able to ascertain what
the truth is. John Milton once said: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue
freely according to conscience, above all liberties"; while John Stuart Mill pointed out in
his famous work On Liberty that if only one among all men presents a new and novel idea,
even though it be heresy to some, it should be given a full hearing. I hope, therefore,
that we are within the spiritual tradition of those two great men when we examine the ideas
of Velikovsky and not the man himself.
I am proud that the University of Lethbridge has sponsored discussions respecting Dr.
Velikovsky's ideas so that we will have the opportunity to listen, to evaluate and to
reason. And, therefore, with that in mind, I hope you will give your attention and due
respect to our next speaker, Dr. William Mullen.
Dr. Mullen completed his undergraduate work at Harvard between 1964 and 1968, with a B. A.
in Classics - in Latin and Greek - and his graduate work at the University of Texas,
between 1968 and 1971, where he received a Ph. D. in Classics. Between 1971 and 1973 he
taught as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, in the
Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature, and in the Division of
Interdisciplinary Studies. He now holds a post-doctoral Research Fellowship, and is at
present Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University.* He has done work on the
Pyramid Texts from the Pyramid of Unas in the 5th dynasty, he has publications on the Odes
of Pindar and translations of Egyptian Hymns and Laments, as well as articles on Dr.
Velikovsky's interdisciplinary syntheses and a reading of the Pyramid Texts in the light of
catastrophisms. He is associate editor of Orion, a journal of Classics and the Humanities
published from Boston University, and Associate Editor of Pensée Magazine. He will speak at
McMaster University next month on the subject of the Meso-American Record Myth and the
Science of Catastrophism.
Dr. Mullen ...
- M. James Penton
(The University of Lethbridge)
*Dr. Mullen is now Assistant Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Boston University.
IRVING WOLFE
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact." Thus the Duke
Theseus in Act V Scene I A Midsummer Night's Dream concisely expresses his theory of the
Springs of Art. It is a fortunate accident, I hope, that I lit on A Midsummer Night's Dream
to introduce Dr. Wolfe, since he tells me that he is using the Dream as one of the central
plays in his presentation this afternoon. Theseus goes on to elaborate his theory of the
Springs of Art in a familiar passage which I would like to read to you. It goes on "The
poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,/ Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven; /And as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen/
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name." Now in
context in the play it is clear that Theseus is rather ambiguous; about this approach to
art, ambiguous about the nature of the poetic imagination and about the nature of its
products. The Velikovsky Symposium Committee is fortunate then to have found in Dr. Irving
Wolfe, a person who has been working on precisely this question, and who is able to
illuminate something of this ambiguity about the nature of the creative process, that
elusive thing in which we students of literature are particularly interested, and, I think,
the aspect of Dr. Velikovsky's theories, which particularly attracts people in literary
disciplines,
Dr. Wolfe was educated at McGill University and later at Bristol University where he took a
Ph. D. in Drama; he is presently Professeur assistant, Department d'études anglaises,
l'Université de Montréal; he teaches there Shakespeare and Drama, in particular, and his
contemplation of Velikovsky's theories over the years has led to the formation of a theory
about the sources of art, based particularly in his study of Shakespeare.
And so I would like you to welcome Dr. Irving Wolfe.
- LR. Ricou
(The University of Lethbridge)
GEORGE GRINNELL
It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Grinnell of McMaster University. Dr. Grinnell is an
assistant professor of History whose special area is the history of science. He completed
his Bachelor of Science at Columbia University in 1962, his Master's Degree at Berkeley in
1964 and his Ph. D. at Berkeley in 1969.
He has had a colourful background. Prior to pursuing his academic career he tried to be a
free-lance writer but, as he says, without success. After two, no doubt scintillating,
years in The Signal Corps of the U. S. Army he joined the Moffatt Expedition which crossed
the tundra by canoe in 1955, the films of which were shown on the T. V. program "Bold
Journey". The next year, 1956, he was stage manager for the Downtown Theatre Association in
Greenwich Village. Currently he is completing a book on the sociology of scientific
knowledge.
The history of science can give us, I think, a unique perspective not only of the past but
also of the present. And by doing so can help us understand the present. Dr. Grinnell's
paper tries to help us understand what has come to be called "The Velikovsky Affair" by, I
believe, fitting it into a larger historical content. Dr. Grinnell ...
- R. M. Yoshida
(The University of Lethbridge)
Patrick Doran
I think it is fair to say that when most of us speak of catastrophism we do so in past or
future terms, rarely considering the implications of our involvement in a catastrophe.
Patrick Doran, on the other hand, I think might best be described as a present-tense
catastrophist. He has notably been involved in a survival-day project in 1970, and was also
national co-ordinator of a nationwide effort to bring to the attention of the federal
government the ecological catastrophes in which we are presently involved. He was
introduced to the ideas of Dr. Velikovsky in 1968 through a course given at Selkirk
College, and has been personally involved with Dr. Velikovsky in the pursuit of the comet
Kohoutek, which he subsequently followed to Hamburg, Germany. Presently Mr. Doran is, in
his own words, "keeping bees and following the new anthropology". it is the latter subject
on which he will speak today. Mr. Doran ...
- Don Thompson (The University of Lethbridge)
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
APPENDIX II
HONOURARY DEGREE AWARDED TO IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY
On 19 March 1973 the General Faculties Council of the University of Lethbridge passed a
motion unanimously recommending "that Immanuel Velikovsky be granted an Honourary Degree
Doctor of Arts and Science at the Spring Convocation of 1974". This motion was forwarded to
the Senate of the University for consideration. At the Senate meeting, held on 7 April
1973, the recommendation from General Faculties Council was approved and the Senate voted
unanimously to award Immanuel Velikovsky the degree Doctor of Arts and Science, Honoris
Causa. In this appendix are letters and addresses relevant to Dr. Velikovsky's appearance
to receive this honourary degree.
April 12,1973
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky
78 Hartley Avenue
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
U. S. A.
Dear Sir:
The Senate of the University of Lethbridge recently voted to accept the unanimous
recommendation of our General Faculties Council that you be awarded the degree of Doctor of
Arts and Science; the degree to be conferred at the Spring Convocation in 1974.
The presentation of your name stressed the quality of your life as a humanitarian, a
humanist and a scientist. Many supporters among the faculty in the Humanities, the Social
Sciences and the Sciences came forward to speak on your remarkable books and your teaching
generally. You were seen as embodying our tradition of humane values, of intellect, of
aesthetic sensitivity, personal ethics and of the transcendental dimension of scholarship.
The University wishes to confer this degree on you at its Spring Convocation in 1974, a
year from now. We try to make decisions on the awarding of Honourary Doctorate degrees well
in advance of conferring them. l will admit that we usually delay contacting the recipients
until rather close to the Convocation at which the degree will be conferred.
In your case we wanted you to know of the award at the earliest possible time, particularly
as we are pleased at the prospect of honouring you and we are convinced that you have not
been properly honoured in the past.
Would you let me know whether you are prepared to accept the award of our Doctor of Arts
and Science, and whether, all being well, you contemplate coming to Lethbridge to have the
degree conferred on you in the Spring of 1974.
1 enclose a calendar of our University and some general information brochures to give you
some familiarity with us.
Sincerely,
J. Oshiro, M. D.
Chancellor
April 30,1973
Chancellor J. Oshiro, M. D.
The University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge, Alberta
Dear Dr. Oshiro:
Your very amiable letter with enclosed printed material was unduly long in transit - I
received it before the weekend. You may be aware that your General Faculties Council
followed by the Senate of the University made a selection and an unprecedented decision in
the Academia: I have not been yet honored with any honorary degree. This, however, was
never a source of disappointment to me: I was aware of the revolutionary character of my
studies and findings. Today these views of mine are no more so heretical much of what I
wrote entered the textbooks and the curricula even if in some disguise.
If everything goes well, my wife and I shall come to Lethbridge a year from now. I thank
you, dear Chancellor, the General Faculties Council, and the Senate of the University of
Lethbridge.
Truly yours,
I. Velikovsky
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
APPENDIX III
ADDRESS TO THE CHANCELLOR'S DINNER
The University of Lethbridge Cafeteria
Friday 10 May 1974
Introduction by Dr. Ian Q. Whishaw, The University of Lethbridge:
When I came to the University of Lethbridge four years ago I found that the University was
formed with a philosophy that it devote itself to a multidisciplinary approach to learning.
A year later when we moved to this new campus, I found that the building was specifically
designed to foster interaction between various academic departments. To go anywhere in the
building one has to use the main concourse and this creates an interaction between people
who would not ordinarily meet. Well, philosophy and architecture can help foster, but
cannot completely guarantee, a and approach to learning. For someone like myself who has
specialized for four years in the study of the hippocampus, the methodology which we were
to use to foster a multidisciplinary approach to learning was not clear.
Last year it became a little clearer to myself and others after reading Dr. Velikovsky's
book Worlds in Collision. We were struck not only by the imagination and scope of his
ideas, but more specifically were profoundly impressed by the way in which he had gathered
evidence from' such a vast number of academic fields as disparate as mythology, psychology,
and physics. It was out of respect for his approach to knowledge and a belief that the
ideals which he expressed were ideals which this University would like to incorporate that
we proposed Dr. Velikovsky - for an honourary doctorate in Arts and Science.
We were aware at the time, and became more aware as time went on, that the nomination would
cause controversy. After looking at the architecture of the building, however, we felt that
a little controversy would not shake it off its foundations.
In regard to controversy, I have a story to tell. Cajal, a Spanish anatomist and Golgi, an
Italian anatomist, through their studies came to quite opposite ideas about how the brain
was structured. In 1906 they jointly received the Nobel Prize, although the evidence
overwhelmingly supported Cajal. What is so interesting in this case is that Cajal came to,
and could only have come to his correct understanding by using the technological and
methodological procedures developed by Golgi, and it was the controversy between these two
men which led to the neuronal theory of brain organization which is the foundation on which
modern neuroscience is established. What I think this shows is that we should not fear
controversy or turn our backs on controversy, for controversy may be an essential
ingredient for the advancement of knowledge.
I would now like to introduce Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, who has had such a tremendous
influence on our thinking over the past year, and who, I am sure, will have a continuing
influence on our ideas in the future.
I give you Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky. Dr. Velikovsky: Chancellor Oshiro, President Beckel,
Members of the Senate, Guests.
Originally I came to this University in response to the invitation from the Chancellor' who
wrote explaining that the Senate had by unanimous vote invited me to accept an Honourary
Degree in Arts and Science. I accepted this honour and responded that I would repay the
honour by making this University the first and the only one from which I would receive an
Honourary Degree.
I announced earlier today at the Cultural Amnesia Symposium it is very questionable whether
I accept any other Honourary Degrees in the near future if they demand appearances and
participation in various ceremonies or dinners.
Considering the time left to this mortal, considering the gift for procrastination with
which I was endowed, postponing my work, postponing the publication of many volumes until
this decade which will make me an octogenarian (in less than thirteen months), I believe I
cannot permit myself the luxury of any more time away from my work, excepting to go to
symposia.
After I accepted the offer of the Honourary Degree, a second invitation came, asking me to
participate in a Symposium dedicated to one special aspect of that revolution of which I
was by chance the originator - Cultural Amnesia. This Symposium has produced much
discussion over the past two days, including two long speeches which I have already
delivered today, so I will not fatigue either you, or myself, with a third long speech; I
will only say that it has been worthwhile coming here, because I have discovered that a
greater honour was accorded me here than just offering me a degree of Doctor of Arts and
Science. It pleases me to know that in this University the various departments, which have
been separated from one another by the very nature of their disciplines, have suddenly
found a common ground. They have started to communicate with one another: physicist to
historian, historian to biologist, biologist to geologist, geologist to astronomer, and so
on. They have found a common subject, a common theme, they have found a way to realize the
purpose and idea behind the statement of philosophy for this University, which is to create
an environment in which interdisciplinary synthesis can occur. And so here I have found
that my work has brought ferment, and this is a great satisfaction to me.
I was pleased to find that scientific research has already begun in some of the
departments, based upon ideas that were expressed in, or that followed from, my own work. I
heard of the work of Dr. Stebbins (Department of Biological Sciences) and of Dr. Parry
(Counselling Centre). if the ideas that these men have in their minds can be substantiated,
they will produce great revolutions in their field of endeavour, and I will be very happy
if I have in some way contributed to their beginning.
I asked myself the question: should I accept the Honourary Degree? If I agree to accept an
Honourary Degree I lose my virginity. Until now, I had no Honourary Degree nor did I care
for any; my only distinction was a gold medal from the gymnasium. I considered that my
books were proof of my scholarship, my credentials. Those who read them can see from the
references, which I give in the footnotes, the amount of work that has gone into my books.
It is therefore of more satisfaction to me to know that in some universities there are
special courses which discuss my work. I believe there are almost one hundred such courses.
To me this is a distinction: Not every man who has an Honourary Degree (and some have fifty
Honourary Degrees) will see his work studied during 'his lifetime. I thought I would die an
iconoclast, and that the next generation, my children or grandchildren, would be privileged
to see me honoured.
It gave me pleasure to find truth, or at least to search for truth; and what I found gave
me satisfaction. And sometimes I even found pleasure by being able to hold back my ideas
for many years, knowing I was the only one to possess this knowledge. This is part of the
reason why some of my books are still in manuscript form when they should long ago have
been in print.
And so I decided to come here to receive this Honourary Degree in the name of all those who
were initiators, who followed their pursuits in solitude - the iconoclasts, the scientific
revolutionaries who are always in the minority: actually a minority of one when they
started. If it were a question of opinion, if it were a question which could be voted upon,
they all would have been voted down. if it had been a question of authority, none of them
would ever have reaped the harvest of their pursuits, because authorities always oppose new
ideas. To cite an example: Lord Kelvin, who was the most eminent physicist in the late
Victorian days and in the beginning of this century, staunchly opposed the electromagnetic
theory of James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's theory is the basis of the quantum theory, of the
theory of relativity, of all modern physical theory. Kelvin had the lowest possible opinion
of Maxwell's scholarship. And when young Rutherford became interested in the new idea of
radiotelegraphy, proposed by Marconi, it was the same Lord Kelvin who tried to dissuade
Rutherford: Keep away, there is no future in it at all, the most that will be produced will
be a connection between lighthouses where it is difficult to put in an undersea cable. It
was Kelvin who produced the calculation which made feasible the installation of the sub-
Atlantic telegraph cable. Most of you who watch television or listen to the radio never
think of de Forest or Marconi or the other pioneers who made broadcasting possible. Kelvin
also didn't believe Roentgen, the discoverer of X-rays. Not only didn't Kelvin believe
Roentgen, but he accused Roentgen of being a charlatan. I cannot remember exactly in what
year I broke my arm while doing calisthenics in a gymnasium, but it was probably 1907 or
1908. 1 remember being brought to a doctor who had the only X-ray machine in Moscow. I saw
my broken arm on the screen for myself. This happened about the time when Kelvin died, he
might still have been alive. Certainly Kelvin did not alter his view that Roentgen was a
charlatan to the time of his death in 1907.
I am here to receive this degree in the name of all those who started humbly, and who
started alone, often working under very difficult conditions, who never received
recognition or acclaim, unlike the pioneers I mentioned now. Somebody once said A man of
talent is one who can, but a genius is one who must. Take the case of Dolomieu, the
mountains in the north portion of the Adriatic Sea carry the name Dolomites in his honour.
Dolomieu served under Napoleon during the French invasion of Egypt. He was later imprisoned
in Napoli for several years. There he wrote his classic work on geology without having
either pen or pencil, or paper upon which to write. The only object he was permitted to
have was the Bible, and so he used the soot of a candle and the oil of a lamp, and he wrote
his famous book on geology on the margins of the Bible. Even under difficult conditions the
one who is possessed by an idea must follow it. It is not by desire, by caprice, by a need
of some external goal, nor for fame, or for riches, but because something leads him so that
he cannot stand still, he must follow the call.
A man's name becomes great because of what he does, degrees do not make a man great.
Darwin, who is not one of my heroes, had no degree, no doctorate in the sciences, no degree
in geology or in evolution, or in paleontology, he had only a humble bachelor's degree in
theology, nothing more. The lack of a degree did not mean that his ideas and his work could
not become the dominant idea for four decades into the twentieth century. Since the middle
of this century his ideas have started to give place to better ideas. I understand this
University is not like other universities, and this is what made me accept its invitation.
I understand there is a liberal spirit here, a spirit which is symbolized in this building.
I attended several universities in the course of my studies. In my day, students wandered
as they did in the time of Goethe, they spent two years at one university, two years at
another, a year here, three years there, studying history, poetry, and philology, and
politics, and other subjects, as they felt the urge. In earlier days it was even more so;
but I do not intend to give you a long lesson in the history of scholarship.
I understand that this University will soon have a bridge, a bridge crossing over this
valley and river, connecting the University with the town, and so both will prosper.
I think of the greater bridge that this University is already building. There are some
innovators here, they are men who carry torches, who do not just repeat that which has
already been repeated many times before. They are men who do not swear by Verba Magistri,
the holiness of their school wisdom. They are men who do not say: this is what we were
taught, this is what we will teach in passing knowledge from one generation to the next.
They are men who do not avoid the sacrilege of questioning fundamentals. They are like the
iconoclast, who, by his very nature, must question. Without questioning there can be no
progress, and without progress we would remain stagnated. Scholarship is a matter of
questioning.
I understand that the policy of this University is to seek a bridge into the spiritual
world, into the wider community, into other cultures. If it does, then despite the fact
that this is a young University, scholars will flock here, and students will follow. The
Senate, when it convenes, will not only have to advise wisely, but it will have to take
some responsibility to see that things are added to the University that government and fee-
paying students could not accomplish. Maybe not all of the Senators can, but some of them
must. This responsibility should be 'a pleasant yoke because nothing can give more
satisfaction than to know that you have helped to put together the material foundation for
something that is growing spiritually.
Accepting the Honourary Degree will not, I hope, deprive me of companionship within the
circle of those who died not having seen honours for their many works and achievements in
their lifetimes. And so in their name, I will accept tomorrow the honour of being
proclaimed and admitted to membership in the Convocation of this University as a recipient
of your Honourary Degree. For this I thank you. At the annual Spring Convocation ceremony
held on 11 May 1974 Immanuel Velikovsky, M. D., was presented to the Chancellor of the
University of Lethbridge, James Oshiro, M. D., by University President and Vice-Chancellor
Beckel. W. E. Beckel. Dr. Oshiro conferred on Dr. Velikovsky the degree of Doctor of Arts
and Science (Honoris Causa).
Dr. William E Beckel:
Mr. Chancellor -
Immanuel Velikovsky was born it Vitebsk, Russia, in 1895. His early formal schooling began
in Moscow. Following a brief period of study at Montpellier, France, and travels in
Palestine, he began pre-medical. studies in natural science at Edinburgh, Scotland, in
1914. When his schooling abroad was interrupted by the outbreak of World War 1, Velikovsky
enrolled in the Free University in Moscow and for a few years studied law, ancient history,
and economics.. Meanwhile, in 1915 he resumed work simultaneously toward a medical degree
at the University of Moscow, and in 1921 he received his medical diploma.
The next few years Velikovsky spent in Berlin, where he was involved in the foundation and
publication of Scripta Universitatis. In this series of volumes, conceived as a cornerstone
for what would become a Hebrew university, contributions from outstanding Jewish scholars
in all countries were published in their native languages and in Hebrew translation. The
late Albert Einstein edited the mathematical-physical volume of the Scripta.
In Berlin, Velikovsky met and married violinist Elisheva Kramer of Hamburg. Later the same
year, the young couple moved to Palestine and the doctor began his practice of medicine.
For fifteen years this practice - first as a general practitioner in Jerusalem, and later,
after psychiatric training in Europe, as a psychoanalyst in Haifa and Tel Aviv - occupied
most of Velikovsky's time. Nevertheless, he published a number of papers on psychology. He
also conceived a plan for an academy of science in Jerusalem and started a new series,
Script Academic, to which Professor Chime Weizmann, president of the World Zionist
Organization, and later first President of Israel, and a noted scientist, contributed the
first monograph in Biochemistry.
Velikovsky also had an idea for a book, and to complete the necessary research he decided
to interrupt his practice for an extended visit to America. He arrived in New York in the
summer of 1939, and plunged into his library research. The intended book had been conceived
as an analytic study of Freud's own dreams, as recorded in his writings, and a comparative
study of the lives of three personages - Oedipus, Akhnaton, and Moses - who had figured
prominently in Freud's thoughts and works.
The research was nearly completed by the spring of 1940, and Velikovsky began to make
preparations for the return home. Then, at the last moment before an already-postponed
sailing, he chanced upon an idea that was to completely alter his life plans and keep him
in America for decades.
Reflecting upon events in the life of Moses, Velikovsky began to speculate: Was there a
natural catastrophe at the time of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt? Could the
plagues of Egypt, the hurricane, the parting of the waters, and the smoke, fire and
rumblings of Mount Sinai described in the Bible have been real and sequential aspects of a
single titanic cataclysm of natural forces? If the Exodus took place during - or because of
- an upheaval, perhaps some record of the same events has survived among the many documents
of ancient Egypt; if so, might not such a record be a clue to the proper place of the
Exodus in Egyptian history?
After weeks of search Velikovsky came upon the story he sought. A papyrus bearing a
lamentation by one Ipuwer had been preserved in the library of the University of Leiden,
Holland, since 1828. Translation of the document had disclosed an account of plague and
destruction closely paralleling the Biblical narrative. Ipuwer bewailed the collapse of the
state and social order during what seemed to be a calamity of natural forces. In the fall
of 1940 Velikovsky traced in the literature of ancient Mexico and China events similar to
those described in the Old Testament. This confirmed his growing suspicions that the great
natural catastrophes that visited the Near East had been global in scale. Immediately he
expanded his research to embrace records of all races. The next five or six years he spent
developing parallel themes - reconstructions of ancient political history and recent cosmic
history - and as month followed month, the intimate details of a new concept of the world
emerged. Two manuscripts were the product of his labors: Ages in Chaos, reconstructing Near
Eastern history from -1500 to -300; Worlds in Collision documented the evidence and
sequence of catastrophes on earth and in the solar system. A few years later the book Earth
in Upheaval was produced presenting geological and paleontological evidence to buttress
Worlds in Collision. Only in 1960, many years after his first research, did Oedipus and
Akhnaton appear.
It would be an understatement to say that the Velikovsky hypotheses and theories convulsed
the scholarly community with joy and enthusiasm. However, they did cause convulsions.
Rarely has the scholarly scientific community reacted to revile and exclude an investigator
or his investigation as passionately as it did in Velikovsky's case.
But the integrity of the man and the value of his thinking and his careful research had
their effect and slowly but surely a more rational and appropriate examination and
acceptance of Velikovsky and his ideas has occurred.
But this says so little about this remarkable man. Imagine, if you can, the incredible
range of intellectual disciplines that had to be brought to bear on the development of his
theories. Anthropology, archaeology, biology, chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics,
history, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, ancient and modern languages, and philosophy.
And Velikovsky was alone, an outcast. He therefore had to painstakingly develop intimate
understanding and expertise in all the disciplines and to synthesize and distill their
truths as they related to his ideas, his heresies. In a simple way it has been said of him,
"He is a rara avis, a Benu-bird, that appears occasionally in the guise of a natural
philosopher, attempting to shed a little more light on our ignorance."
Mr. Chancellor, on the recommendation of the General Faculties Council, and on behalf of
the Senate of this University, I request that you confer on Immanuel Velikovsky the degree
of Doctor of Arts and Science, (Honoris Causa) in recognition of a man of intellectual
vision and courage; a man who has indeed attempted to shed a little more light on our
ignorance and who has challenged and stimulated in many parts of the world, the minds of
philosophers, theologians, humanists, social, natural, and physical scientists in the
constant search for the truth.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A FALLEN SKY
VELIKOVSKY AND CULTURAL AMNESIA
APPENDIX IV
ADDRESS TO THE CONVOCATION DINNER
Lethbridge Exhibition Pavillion
Saturday 11 May 1974
Introduction by Dr. William E. Beckel, President,
The University of Lethbridge:
We start this evening with an Honourary Graduate of the University of Lethbridge: Immanuel
Velikovsky.
Dr. Velikovsky:
Today I joined the alumni. in the old country the usual way of celebrating the end of
school was to sing Gaudeamus, which means: Let Us be Joyful, Let Us be Cheerful, Destroy
our Notes, Burn our Books, and Listen no longer to anything which is serious or scholarly.
But tonight I wish to, say something serious to you, I want to discuss Scientific
Conscience. I direct my remarks particularly to those of you who intend to continue your
career as a student, to the few among the two hundred of you who are considering an
advanced career in science, or in the humanities. My words come from experience. Although
this will be a very serious speech, I promise you one cheerful note toward the end.
To be a scholar, or a scientist, means that you must dedicate yourself. Scholarship is not
a part time job, it requires a lifetime of dedication. At some point in your career you
have to specialize in some field that calls you, a field that leads in the direction that
you desire to walk along the road of life. But do not specialize completely, prepare
yourself by becoming acquainted with many other fields.
Read widely, keep an encyclopedia in your house, keep a volume close to your bed. Often
when I cannot fall asleep, I read from my encyclopedia. I usually choose a short article,
something that I know a bit about, but I'm not acquainted with the details, or something
that I have heard about and seek a first glimpse of its essence. When you read a book,
studying for some particular purpose, make notes: preserve these notes, file them for the
future.
Don't seek to be original at any cost but also avoid trivial issues. It is of no value to
walk the easy road trodden many times by those before you. Select your tutors from those
who can guide you with an open mind, who will not demand that you only follow the accepted
views in blind fashion. Because science progresses by trial and error, look for new ways to
do old things. Learn to ask yourself questions, and if someday you come upon what seems to
you to be an original idea, don't rush to make it public, preserve it, carry it around
inside yourself, give it time to develop and to grow in your mind. But don't follow it
blindly because it is your idea and you wish to be original.
When you have perfected your idea, consult others who may give you good advice. if you find
out that somebody has already proposed your idea, don't pretend that you were the first,
give credit to those who were before you. But if you believe that you are original, try
honestly to convince yourself that your idea is consistent with all the facts that you can
collect. Don't hold on to an idea when the facts are against it, but do maintain your
convictions if it is only opinions that are against you.
Have courage, and by all means do not fear crossing the barriers between different
disciplines. Do not trust everything to memory, keep notes even as you develop new ideas.
Keep a diary, it could be useful to you some day if you have to establish your priority to
an idea. Think of the Chinese proverb The Palest Ink Is Stronger Than The Strongest Memory.
And remember, ideas have their time. When it seems appropriate to retreat, retreat. When it
is time to advance, advance. When haste is necessary, rush, for the appropriate moment is
often short. But if the time has not yet come, stand back and wait for your time.
To illuminate this last point I will tell you a story:
Once, at a railway station the stationmaster in charge of starting the train observed a
group of three scientists returning from a scientific conference. They were intentively
discussing something of great importance. They seemed to be there to board the train,
nevertheless they weren't paying attention to the stationmaster who was impatient to signal
the train's departure. Finally the stationmaster could wait no longer, and so he signaled
to the train, and the train began to leave the station. At this moment all three people ran
after the train, two boarded it but one could not make it. The stationmaster turned to the
one who was left behind and said: "Well, it's not so bad, two out of three made it", and
the man answered: "But they came to see me off".
End of Recollections of a Fallen Sky
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
by Alfred de Grazia (Editor)
With contributions by
Ralph Juergens, Livio C. Stecchini, Alfred de Grazia, Immanuel Velikovsky
Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey
Copyright © Alfred de Grazia, 1966, 1978.
All rights reserved.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
Scientism Versus Science
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITEL-PAGE
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
by Alfred de Grazia
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION
by Alfred de Grazia
1. MINDS IN CHAOS
by by Ralph E. Juergens
2. AFTERMATH TO EXPOSURE
by by Ralph E. Juergens
3. THE INCONSTANT HEAVENS
by by Livio C. Stecchini
4. CUNEIFORM ASTRONOMICAL RECORDS AND CELESTIAL INSTABILITY
by by Livio C. Stecchini
5. ASTRONOMICAL THEORY AND HISTORICAL DATA
by by Livio C. Stecchini
6. THE SCIENTIFIC RECEPTION SYSTEM
by Alfred de Grazia
7. ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES OF CORRECT PROGNOSIS
by by Immanuel Velikovsky
APPENDIX I: On Recent Discoveries Concerning Jupiter and Venus
APPENDIX II: Velikovsky 'Discredited': A Textual Comparison
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
Alfred de Grazia
January 1978
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
We dedicate this book to people who are concerned about the ways in which scientists behave
and how science develops. It deals especially with the freedoms that scientists grant or
withhold from one another. The book is also for people who are interested in new theories
of cosmogony - the causes of the skies, the earth, and humankind as we see them. It is,
finally, a book for people who are fascinated by human conflict, in this case a struggle
among some of the most educated, elevated, and civilized characters of our times.
These lines are being written a few weeks after the launching of a carefully prepared book
attacking the growing position of Immanuel Velikovsky in intellectual circles [1]. The
attack was followed promptly by a withering counter-attack in a special issue of the
journal, Kronos [2]. The events reflect a general scene which, since the first appearance
of this volume, has been perhaps more congenial to the temperament of war correspondents
than of cloistered scholars.
The philosophical psychologist, William James, who once proposed sport as a substitute for
warfare, might as well have proposed science and scholarship for the same function.
Scientific battles also have their armies, rules, tactics, unexpected turns, passions
bridled and unbridled, defeats, retreats, and casualty lists. All of the motives that go
into warfare are exercised. In the present controversy, the minds of the combatants must
also carry into the fray images of a distant past when the world was ruined by immense
disasters, whether or not they deny the images.
Unlike sport, the outcomes of scientific battles are as important, if not more so, than the
results of outright warfare. At stake in the controversy over Velikovsky's ideas is not
only the system used by science to change itself - which is largely the subject of this
book - but also the substantive model of change to be employed by future science - whether
is shall be comprehended mainly as revolutionary and catastrophic or as evolutionary and
uniform.
The controversy has had many striking facets. One has been the large participation of the
public. It continues to increase. Velikovsky has managed to talk to people about mythology,
archaeology, astronomy, and geology, without doing injustice to those disciplines, in an
amazing and unprecedented manner. Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, Freud, and Einstein - to
name a few thinkers who were implicated in 'crowd phenomena' - were not public figures in
the sense here taken. His public - a well-behaved, educated, well-intentioned and
diversified aggregate - has supported Velikovsky on every possible occasion. That he was a
foreigner with a Russian accent, a psychiatrist, unequivocably a Jew, denounced by some of
the most respected scientists of America and Britain, unbending in his person and in his
allegiance to science and in refusing every opening for support from demagogic or religious
quarters: these facts hardly disturbed the favourable reception granted him by a large
public.
That he is a charismatic figure is obvious: fourteen hundred people attended his talk and
awarded him a standing ovation at a critical scientific symposium in San Francisco in 1974.
But 'charisma' is a bit of jargon; the question remains 'why. ' Although I must reserve the
answer until another occasion, I would here suggest that his ideas have represented all the
legitimate anxieties about present-day 'knowledge' that educated people possess, whether it
be their own knowledge or that of their scientific tutors.
I have lived with 'The Velikovsky Affair' for fifteen years. Often I have been asked how I
came to be involved. Sometimes the question comes from my colleagues, who, like myself,
have wondered how a million, perhaps two million, serious readers can find that a book like
Worlds in Collision makes sense, while a great many scientists and scholars cannot even
come to grips with the book, turn away from it angrily, and irritably consign the whole lot
of favourable readers to the ranks of religious revivalists who have received The Word.
But there was little heroic, charismatic, revelatory, or even extraordinary about my
initiation. The year 1950, which saw the publication of Worlds in Collision, was a busy one
in my younger life; I had several infants, a new professorship, and a more than passing
engagement with psychological operations in the Korean War, then raging. So the scandal
over the book's suppression and success left only a faint scratch upon my mind.
However, in 1962, when I was publishing and editing the American Behavioral Scientist
magazine in Princeton, Dr Livio Stecchini, a historian of science also resident there,
spoke to me more than once about a man named Dr Velikovsky who also lived in Princeton and
had been victimized by the scientific establishment. I listened without enthusiasm to
Stecchini, for the annals of science and publishing, like politics, are crowded with cases
that are falsely or ineptly brought up, of hopeless theories trying to engage public
attention, of feelings of persecution.
Then, one evening, as I was saying my goodbyes at the home of my brother, I espied a book
entitled Oedipus and Akhnaton, by one Immanuel Velikovsky. The residual stimuli
precipitated a gestalt of curiosity. I borrowed it. I read it from cover to cover, brooking
no minor interruption. I thought that it was a masterpiece of true detective literature (a
judgement that I think is now confirmed), and telephoned Dr Stecchini to arrange a meeting.
As I talked with Dr Velikovsky - an impressive experience in a person's life - I was
introduced to his archive of materials on the case. It was astonishingly rich and ordered.
I concluded after several long meetings and much reading among his materials that the
history of science had few, if any, cases that were so well documented. I decided to devote
a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist to 'The Velikovsky Affair. '
It was this issue, finally appearing is September 1963 after prolonged, gruelling, and
enlightening sessions with Dr Velikovsky and my co-authors, Ralph Juergens and Livio
Stecchini and after long hours spent amidst the archive of Velikovsky itself, that formed
the basis for the present book. I would not go as far as some commentators in saying that
the books brought the great controversy to life when the cause seemed lost; my concept of
history is more Tolstoian. Still, the response to the issue was immediate. Eric Larrabee, a
publicist, who had a long-standing contract with the Doubleday Company publishers to write
a book on the subject, was spurred to publish an article in Harper's magazine about the
Velikovsky case. The American Behavioral Scientist issue was expanded, with new
contributions by Juergens and Stecchini, and published by University Books two years later.
(In the present edition, Dr Stecchini has revised and added much new material to his
contributions.)
With notable exceptions, to be described in the pages to come, the book was well received.
It was resented by many in the underground of science, which includes the mysterious realms
of foundations and government agencies. There, any association whatsoever with Dr
Velikovsky is likely to provoke discrimination and reprisals. But the distinction of the
panel of readers who endorsed my decision to publish its materials no doubt acted as a
formidable obstacle to public assaults upon it. It is difficult for someone, in the face of
the evidence offered, to contradict the book's two main ideas: that Dr Velikovsky was
unjustly treated, and that he maintains a set of propositions that must be seriously
considered by the sciences and humanities. A reading of the book apparently positions one
reasonably to annoy many scientists encountered in classrooms, professional meetings and
cocktail parties.
When my attention was first drawn to the sociological and legalistic aspects of The
Velikovsky Affair in 1962, my interest in the substantive problems of catastrophism and
uniformitarianism, or revolutionism and evolutionism, was that of a charmed spectator.
However it was not long before a question began persistently to intrude upon my mind: 'Was
there only misguidance and foolishness in the jungle-buried history of catastrophist
thought or was there lurking in it an alternative model of cosmogony? ' I have pursued now
for over a decade the substance of what, for lack of a better term, I sometimes call
'holocene cosmogony' and at other times 'revolutionary primevalogy, ' and am much more
committed intellectually to Dr Velikovsky's approach than I was when this material was
first published.
With the encouragement afforded by others who were travelling the same route, I have
achieved a measure of confidence in a two-part reciprocal answer: there is no 'fact' in the
great and varied growth of today's science that is 'true' enough to block a complete
cosmogonic model that is antithetical to uniformitarianism; there is enough of 'fact' to
supply the construction of a revolutionist model.
Dozens of pertinent incidents have marked my association with the realm of Velikovsky
politics and science over the years. One of the neatest, and of course indirect and
noncommittal, testimonials to the validity of the present book occurred lately. The new
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has recently appeared. In its vast uniformitarian
and evolutionist terrain there is set a biographical article upon Velikovsky, which I
discovered to be on the whole acceptable in the general frame of the Encyclopedia.
Nevertheless, two years or so later, Lawrence K. Lustig, the Managing Editor of the
Encyclopedia's Book of the Year, was possessed to write an article there containing an
orthodox, negative pronunciamento upon Velikovsky in the course of a general attack upon
pseudoscience. I wrote to Dr Lustig, decrying his position; he replied without retracting
his position by as much as a centimetre.
Yet, on the same day as the proposal to publish the present book arrived from Sphere Books,
Ltd, in England, there arrived also a letter from Dr Lustig, now Editor-in-Chief of a
large, new encyclopedia-in-the-making at Princeton, New Jersey. He asked me to write for
the encyclopedia the articles on 'Freedom, ' 'Freedom of Religion, ' and 'Freedom of
Speech. ' If this story may be taken as a compliment to integrity of the present work, it
may also be heartening to those scholars, young and old, who fear that their advocacy of
the philosophical principles of the book would deny them certain fruits of their long and
arduous studies and careers.
Professor William Mullen and I have separately published articles 'indexing in advance' the
fallout of Velikovsky's ideas upon the many academic disciplines [3]. In the politics of
exploiting this fall-out, the scholar-aspirant or scholar-turncoat can be shown two paths.
For the cautious soul, who would evade controversy and is shy of ridicule, it will be
relatively easy, now that many barriers are down, to introduce revolutionary hypotheses
into scientific areas where the ruling order is evolutionary, provided that one avoids
citing the works of Velikovsky and his school. One can, for example, speak of a
revolutionary turn of mind on the part of homo sapiens without mentioning Velikovsky, and
be applauded, as was Jaynes this past year [4]. One can discuss the catastrophically
deposited layers on the ocean bottoms as has Worzel, with only a tiny escape hatch for 'the
fiery end of bodies of cosmic origin'[ 5]. One need not cite Isaacson [6], either, in
disposing of the century-old concept of the Greek 'Dark Ages, ' especially since Isaacson
does not exist, it being the nom de plume of a young scholar in fear for his career; one
might criticize the concept without mentioning Velikovsky, given the new climate of
thought.
A scholar can play safe in elaborating the evidence for hundreds of hypotheses in the
Velikovskian literature that are already clearly stated and buttressed by evidence, and do
so without mentioning him and with the indulgence of authorities who are ordinarily fanatic
about the citation of sources. Scholars may now indulge in the heady alcohol of
revolutionary theory, so to speak, provided that they label their brew as medicinal
because, after all, the police are in cahoots, if indeed they have not already taken to
drink themselves. There comes to mind the chemical geologist and Nobel prize winner, Harold
Urey, who has on occasion reprimanded Velikovsky's supporters even though he has himself
speculated that errant celestial bodies might be the great age-breakers in geological
morphology and paleontology [7] (just as the ancients said that the ages were made and
broken by the birth and death of the planetary gods).
Alternatively credit may be given where credit is due. A scholar may virtuously confess his
research sources, hoping that the courts for criminals such as he will soon be too crowded
for him to have to worry about being brought to trial for a long time, trusting that before
that time occurs the rapidly changing climate of belief will have transformed his crime
into a propriety.
When will this Great Day befall? By 1973, a decade after The Velikovsky Affair was first
published, his group was cheered by the news that the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) would stage a symposium upon his work. On February 25, 1975,
the symposium took place before the greatest audience that this convention of the largest
American scientific organization produced. A full volume about the activities preceding the
symposium, of its proceedings, and of its aftermath would be a worthy objective of a
sociologist of science; it is yet to be written. However, the two works alluded to at the
beginning of this essay have already appeared, the one sharply anti-Velikovsky and the
other just as strongly pro-Velikovsky. Both works related mostly to the substantive
theories about the Venus and Mars scenarios that had been presented in Worlds in Collision
[8].
Without presenting a mass of evidence, it would be improper for me to pass judgement here
on the complicated hassle. I shall, however, go so far as to say that the reader of this
book will experience few surprises should he happen finally to hear the full story. All the
actors who were involved, both pro and con, including the group actors - the AAAS and the
press -performed true to type.
The Scientific establishment, I should add, was now more subtle in preserving proper forms
and a correct public posture - as if they had read the present book and were trying to
conduct themselves accordingly. There was even some familiarity with Velikovsky's Worlds in
Collision evident among the five panel-members (I include the Moderator) who opposed
Velikovsky, he standing alone. As it developed, the establishment advocates were in a state
of 'partial assimilation; ' so Professor Harold Lasswell has termed the process by which a
political revolution like the French or Russian is in part absorbed by its conservative
opponents as a defensive measure.
Indeed here was an interesting development. Little cordiality was exhibited among the
panelists. And no happiness was displayed at exploring new realms of scientific inquiry.
But apparently, without admitting so much, the critics of Velikovsky were being forced to
move into combat upon his terrain. Science as a whole cannot help but benefit from this.
For, as Adam Smith long ago pointed out, private competition may result in public gain.
Velikovsky has enlarged the scientific marketplace, J. S. Mill's marketplace of ideas, by
designing a new product. So we encounter the first halting steps of the so-called 'hard
sciences' to deal with the 'soft' materials of legends, myth, psychology, archaeology, and
history.
Scientists cannot any longer remain specialists and hope to deal for more than a moment in
this marketplace with its changed conditions. I recall the weeks of intensive study that
Velikovsky put in, not long ago, to master several points of chemistry for an article in
reply to chemistry Professor Albert Burgstahler. Hence, we should add that the same is true
of the 'soft' scientists - the Graves, the Schliemanns, the Freuds, the Jungs, the
Campbells and the Eliades: these must treat of oceanography, geophysics, and celestial
dynamics.
Also, and merely as one of 'the halt leading the blind, ' I would suggest that scientists
and scholars repair to the philosophical foundations of science and humanism upon which the
disciplinary structures rest; upon reading and reviewing Plato, Hegel, Dewey, Bridgman and
the like, and understanding the critical decisions of Galileo, Newton, Marx-Engels,
Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and the like, they may prepare new footings and erect
new structures. The history of science and natural history are composed of psycho-social-
empirical problems, inextricably intertwined, approachable by a science that is neither
'hard' nor 'soft, ' but malleable. If few persons can master learning of such scope and
depth, does not such learning then constitute a principal goal for that vaunted 'collective
enterprise, ' science?
It is not that the broader view will only help understand and give support to Velikovsky's
work; the broader view is also needed to criticize it adversely. I do not refer to his
manner and style as worthwhile targets. His writings are vigorously assertive. He does not
indulge in the polite and evasive mannerisms of most social scientists and humanists. Nor
can he rightly employ mathematics where the variables cannot be fixed or the data
measurably assembled. He has granted that he is dealing in hypotheses - and what empirical
scientist is not?
I mean that should one reasonably and incredulously ask: 'Is there nowhere an anti-
Velikovsky treatise of serious consequence? ' the answer, regrettably, is still 'no. ' Not
in general nor even in a special discipline such as astrophysics or archaeology. Thousands
of scientists and scholars have impugned his work. A few have stepped up to bat against him
or one of his team: they put on airs; they dance about; they come up unprepared; they take
blundering swipes at the ball; they strike out. When all is done, they say that it was not
a real professional ballgame.
In two cases major intellectual projects have been directed against Velikovsky. The
aforesaid Cornell Press book was promptly shredded by the aforesaid special issue of
Kronos. The second attack, indirectly launched to contradict Velikovsky and not even
mentioning him, came earlier; it was Hamlet's Mill by G. de Santillana and H. von Dechand
[9]; it concentrated upon mythology and the earliest scientific knowledge; its structure is
mysterious; it is useful largely because it indeed goes to show that proto-historic mankind
could be disciplined and scientific, and that mythology everywhere derives from the
behaviour of the planets. Both books received ample support. Both are being cannibalized by
the revolutionists, who are resource-starved and have become quite adapted to feeding upon
the evidence and criticism offered by their opponents.
Writing at end of 1977, a historian of science, A. M. Paterson, declared [10]:
Actually, the battle is over. Dr Velikovsky has emerged the victor because his scientific
hypotheses that there have been physical planetary catastrophes in historical times has
been proven to have enormous predictive power. For example, a few from very, very many may
be listed: Radio noise from Jupiter, strong charge on Jupiter (1953); Earth's extensive
magnetosphere (1956); an extensive magnetic field in the solar system extending to Pluto
(1946); the Sun is charged (1950); Venus is very hot, has a heavy atmosphere, and was
disturbed in its rotation and may have an anomalous rotation (1950); Mars' atmosphere
contains quantities of argon and neon (1945); Mars is moon-like, battered and geologically
active (1950); there have been many reversals of Earth's magnetic poles (1950); Some of
Earth's petroleum was deposited only a few thousand years ago (1950).
And successful deductions about the Moon: Hydrocarbons, carbides, and carbonates will be
found (July 2 and July 21, 1969); strong remanent magnetism in rocks (May 19, 1969);
pockets of radioactivity (March 14, 1967); excessive argon and neon in the regolith
(leading to incorrect age estimate) (July 23, 1969); steep thermal gradient under the
surface (July 2, 1969).
Perhaps Professor Paterson would be quick to agree that her first sentence was the
hyperbole of an enthusiast. As she points out elsewhere in her article, 300 years of
science may be used up in conflict over a great paradigm.
Furthermore, we have to contend with the possibility of real explosive warfare, occasioned
by the inane and insane politics of the age, which would foreclose the warfare of science.
Dr Velikovsky has been acutely aware of the threat of nuclear missiles. On the occasion of
receiving an honorary doctorate of philosophy at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta,
Canada, in 1974, he speculated that the threat to humanity as a whole could be traced to
suppression of the memory of early catastrophes and the unconscious, typically neurotic
urge of persons in power to recapitulate the terrible ancient scenes [11].
Here, however, we must assume that such a catastrophe will not occur. Then, if only because
the present world, unlike the past, rushes into the resolution of issues, a vindication of
Velikovsky's theories and hence a major shift in the ruling paradigm or model of science
may take place in a fairly short period of time. The challenge of the revolutionary to the
evolutionary view is sharp and clear, no matter what synthesis evolves in the end. There
are now available, yet unassimilated to either model of the world, hundreds of studies of
catastrophic import performed by uniformitarians who shrink from drawing appropriate
conclusions. Hence when the philosophical and ideological barriers are dropped, and an
archway of revolutionary theory is erected over the cleared roadway, empirical studies will
enter in veritable troops. The changeover-time from one to another model of holocene and
early human history might not be long.
Notes (References cited in "Introduction to the Second Edition")
1. Isaac Asimov et al., Scientists Confront Velikovsky, (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1977).
2. Velikovsky and Establishment Science, Vol. III, no. 2 (1977). Kronos (Glassboro State
College, Glassboro, N. J., U. S. A.) and The Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, which
published the SIS Review (c/ o T. B. Moore, Central Library, Hartlepool, Cleveland, Eng.)
carry continuously information on the controversies surrounding Immanuel Velikovsky, as
well as publishing articles by him and associated scholars on substantive concerns of
revolutionary primevalogy.
3. Mullen, 'The Center Holds' in Velikovsky Reconsidered, by the editors of Pensée (Abacus,
1978), p. 239-49; A. de Grazia, 'The Coming Cosmic Debate in the Sciences and Humanities, '
in Nahum Revel, ed., From Past to Prophesy: Velikovsky's Challenge to Conventional Beliefs,
Proceedings of the Symposium held at the Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada,
January 10-12, 1975.
4. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
5. J. L. Worzel, 'Extensive Deep Sea Sub-Bottom Reflections Identified as White Ash, '
Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 43: 349-55, March 15, 1959, 355; B. Heezen, Ewing, and Ericson,
'Significance of the Worzel Deep Sea Ash, ' ibid, 355-61.
6. Israel Isaacson, 'Applying the Revised Chronology, ' Pensée, IV: 5-20 (1974).
7. 'Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods, ' Nature 242: 32 (March 2, 1973).
8. With what seems a comic touch, the science fiction author and popular science writer,
Isaac Asimov, was brought in, very much after the fact, to introduce the book of the
'serious' scientists and the 'non-commercial' Cornell University Press. Also added was a
paper of Professor Donald Morrison, that had been tempered by earlier heated encounters
with Velikovsky's associates. Cf. R. E. Juergens, 'On Morrison, ' in Kronos, loc. cit.,
113.
9. Boston: Gambit, 1969.
10. 'Velikovsky versus Academic Lag, ' in Velikovsky and Establishment Science, Op. cit.,
pp. 121-31, p. 126.
11. 'Cultural Amnesia, ' in Earl Milton, ed., Recollections of a Fallen Sky (Lethbridge,
Can.: Lethbridge U. Press, 1978).
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
Alfred de Grazia, 1966
---
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION
In 1950, a book called Worlds in Collision, by Dr Immanuel Velikovsky, gave rise to a
controversy in scientific and intellectual circles about scientific theories and the
sociology of science. Dr Velikovsky's historical and cosmological concepts, bolstered by
his acknowledged scholarship, constituted a formidable assault on certain established
theories of astronomy, geology and historical biology, and on the heroes of those sciences.
Newton, himself, and Darwin were being challenged, and indeed the general orthodoxy of an
ordered universe. The substance of Velikovsky's ideas is briefly presented in the first
chapter of this book.
What must be called the scientific establishment rose in arms, not only against the new
Velikovsky theories, but against the man himself. Efforts were made to block dissemination
of Dr Velikovsky's ideas, and even to punish supporters of his investigations.
Universities, scientific societies, publishing houses, the popular press were approached
and threatened; social pressures and professional sanctions were invoked to control public
opinion. There can be little doubt that in a totalitarian society, not only would Dr
Velikovsky's reputation have been at stake, but also his right to pursue his inquiry, and
perhaps his personal safety.
As it was, the 'establishment' succeeded in building a wall of unfavourable sentiment
around him: to thousands of scholars the name of Velikovsky bears the taint of fantasy,
science-fiction and publicity.
He could not be suppressed entirely. In the next years he published three more books. He
carried on a large correspondence. And he was helped by a very few friends, and by a large
general public composed of persons outside of the establishments of science. The probings
of spacecrafts tended to confirm - never to disprove - his arguments. Eventually the
venomous aspects of the controversy, the efforts at suppression, the campaign of
vilification loomed almost as large, in their consequences to science, as the original
issue. Social scientists, who had been generally unaware of Dr Velikovsky's work, and its
importance, and who had been almost totally disengaged, now found themselves in the thick
of the conflict.
The involvement of the social and behavioural sciences in the scientific theories of
Velikovsky was higher than had been earlier appreciated. The social sciences are the basis
of Velikovsky's work: despite his proficiency in the natural sciences, it is by the use of
the methodology of social science that Velikovsky launched his challenge to accepted
cosmological theories. No one pretends that this method is adequate. New forms of
interdisciplinary research are needed to wed, for example, the study of myth with the study
of meteorites. Nor does one have to agree that Velikovsky is the greatest technician of
mythology, even while granting his great conceptual and synthesizing powers.
Whatever the scientific substance, the controversy itself could not be avoided or dismissed
by behavioural science. The politics of science is one of the agitating problems of the
twentieth century. The issues are clear: Who determines scientific truth? Who are its high
priests, and what is their warrant? How do they establish their canons? What effects do
they have on the freedom of inquiry, and on public interest? In the end, some judgement
must be passed upon the behaviour of the scientific world and, if adverse, some remedies
must be proposed.
It was in this light that, in a special issue, the American Behavioral Scientist published
three papers dealing with the Velikovsky controversy. The first by Ralph Juergens, recounts
the story of Dr Velikovsky from its beginnings to the present; tells something of the man
and his works. The second, by Livio Stecchini, analyzes the roots of the controversy in the
scientific past. A third, by the editor, searches for means by which new discoveries may be
brought into the corpus of science, and offers suggestions for reform of present procedure.
The American Behavioral Scientist did not enter the Velikovsky controversy heedlessly. The
papers were read by a number of respected scientists and scholars, who did not necessarily
share, of course, all of the views expressed by the authors, nor necessarily subscribe to
Dr Velikovsky's views. They agreed, however, to the usefulness of their publication; their
general help and encouragement in the original studies is now again gratefully acknowledged
as the studies go to press in book format. Our thanks are owing to:
HADLEY CANTRIL,
Chairman of the Board, Institute for International Social Research; past president, Society
for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
SALVADOR DE MADARIAGA,
Honorary Fellow, Exeter College, Oxford University.
LUTHER H. EVANS,
Director of International and Legal Collections, Columbia University, former Director
General, UNESCO.
MOSES HADAS,
Jay Professor of Greek, Columbia University.
R. H. HILLENKOETTER,
Vice Admiral, U. S. N. (Retired); former director, Central Intelligence Agency.
HORACE M. KALLEN,
Research Professor of Social Philosophy, New School for Social Research; past President,
Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
HAROLD D. LASSWELL,
Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University Law School; past President,
American Political Science Association.
HAROLD S. LATHAM,
former Editor-in-Chief and Vice-president, Macmillan Co.
PHILIP WITTENBERG,
Partner, Wittenberg, Carrington and Weinberger.
Publication of the papers brought immediate response. Numerous scholars, both in the
natural and social sciences, have written to the American Behavioral Scientist, commenting
favourably, on the whole, upon the presentation of the matter to the scientific public. All
documentation is being preserved, in the hope that the archives will be of use to future
discussion.
The new material in the present book is considerable. Ralph Juergens has brought the story
of the Velikovsky case up to date in a new paper. There is also a new paper by Dr Livio
Stecchini, carrying on from his first paper, this time on the uses of historical data for
astronomical theory. We publish here, too, Dr Velikovsky's own paper from the special issue
of the American Behavioral Scientist.
The Velikovsky case is in no sense closed. There is no reason why it should be. Undeterred
by the attacks upon him, and the obstacles placed in his way, Dr Velikovsky is pursuing his
studies, and now has several books nearing completion: three on the substance of his
theories, others of a general autobiographical character. He remains a faithful and
indefatigable correspondent, and his letters point to new challenges.
It is our hope that the publication of these papers in the present volume will make it less
easy for his new work to be suppressed, or lightly dismissed. We hope, too, that they will
help scientists and interested laymen everywhere to rehearse the problems and to reform the
errors of the vast enterprise of science.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
PART ONE
by Ralph E. Juergens
MINDS IN CHAOS
Seventeen years ago the appearance of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision
precipitated an academic storm. Prominent American scientists, roused to indignation even
before the book was published, greeted it with a remarkable demonstration of ill will that
included a partially successful attempt to suppress the work by imposing a boycott on its
first publisher's textbooks. The reading public witnessed the unique spectacle of a
scientific debate staged not in the semi-privacy of scientific meetings and journals, but
in the popular press, with scientists - in rare accord - on one side and lay champions of
free speech on the other. With the might of authority all on one side of the issue, the
debate was resolved in a predictable manner; Velikovsky and his book were discredited in
the public eye.
From the start there was more to the controversy than the simple question of a dissenting
scholar's right to be published and read; the atmosphere generated by scientific
consternation was charged with a peculiar emotion that Newsweek termed 'a highly
unacademic fury. ' Even if Velikovsky's books were, as one astronomer put it, the 'most
amazing example of a shattering of accepted concepts on record, ' the violence of the
reaction against it seemed all out of proportion to the book's importance if, as most
critics insisted, the work was spurious and entirely devoid of merit. Many nonscientist
observers concluded that Velikovsky's work was not run-of-the-mill heresy, but a thesis
that presented a genuine threat to the very ego of science. It seemed that Worlds in
Collision was being attacked with a fervor 'reserved only for books that lay bare new
fundamentals. ' Caught up in this fervor, more than one scientist-reviewer of Velikovsky's
book adopted tactics even more surprising than the overt and covert deeds of the would-be
suppressors.
Before attempting to trace the course of The Velikovsky Affair, we might first recall the
unsettling message of the book that initiated that strange chain of events. In Britain,
where Worlds in Collision was also rejected by almost all scientists, but with a lesser
show of emotion, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, the later Royal Astronomer, summarized its
thesis this way:
The central theme of Worlds in Collision is that, according to Dr Velikovsky, between
the fifteenth and eight centuries B. C., the earth experienced a series of violent
catastrophes of global extent. Parts of its surface were heated to such a degree that they
became molten and great streams of lava welled out; the sea boiled and evaporated;...
mountain ranges collapsed, while others were thrown up; continents were raised causing
great floods; showers of hot stones fell; electrical disturbances of great violence caused
much havoc; hurricanes swept the earth; a pall of darkness shrouded it, to be followed by
a deluge of fire. This picture of a period of intense turmoil within the period of
recorded history is supported by a wealth of quotations from the Old Testament, from the
Hindu Vedas, from Roman and Greek mythology, and from the myths, traditions and folklore
of many races and peoples...
These catastrophic events in the earth's history are attributed by Dr Velikovsky to a
series of awe-inspiring cosmic cataclysms. In the solar system we see the several planets
moving round the sun in the same direction in orbits which are approximately circular and
which lie nearly in the same plane. Dr Velikovsky asserts that this was not always so, but
that in past times their orbits intersected; collisions between major planets occurred,
which brought about the birth of comets. He states that in the time of Moses, about the
fifteenth century B. C., one of these comets nearly collided with the earth, which twice
passed through its tail. [The earth experienced] the disrupting effect of the comet's
gravitational pull,... intense heating and enormous tides... incessant electric
discharges... and the pollution of the atmosphere by the gases in the tail... Dr
Velikovsky attributes... oil deposits in the earth to the precipitation, in the form of a
sticky liquid (naphtha), of some of the carbon and hydrogen gases in the tail of the
comet, while the manna upon which the Israelites fed is similarly accounted for as
carbohydrates from the same source.
This comet is supposed to have collided with Mars... and, as the result of the
collision, to have lost its tail and to have become transformed into the planet Venus...
Further catastrophes... ensued... Mars was shifted nearer to the earth so that in the
year 687 B. C.... Mars nearly collided with the earth.
These various encounters are supposed to have been responsible for repeated changes in
the earth's orbit, in the inclination of its axis, and in the lengths of the day, the
seasons and the year. The earth on one occasion is supposed to have turned completely
over, so that the sun rose in the west and set in the east. Dr Velikovsky argues that
between the fifteenth and eight centuries B. C. the length of the year was 360 days and
that it suddenly increased to 365 1/ 4 days in 687 B. C. The orbit of the moon and the
length of the month were also changed... [1]
In short, Velikovsky's research among the ancient records of man - records ranging from
unequivocal statements in written documents, through remembrances expressed in myth and
legend, to mute archaeological evidence in the form of obsolete calendars and sundials -
and his examination of geological and paleontological reports from all parts of the globe
led him to conclude that modern man's snug little world, set in a framework of celestial
harmony and imperceptible evolution, is but an illusion. Velikovsky's reappraisal of world
history ravages established doctrine in disciplines from astronomy to psychology:
universal gravitation of masses is not the only force governing celestial motions -
electromagnetic force must also play important roles; enigmatic breaks in the geological
record denote, not interminable ages of languorous erosion and deposition gently
terminated by cyclic submergence and emergence of land masses, but sudden, violent
derangements of the earth's surface; the remarkably rapid annihilation of whole species
and genera of animals and the equally remarkable, almost simultaneous proliferation of
species in other generic groups bespeak overwhelming catastrophe and wholesale mutation
among survivors; the mechanism of evolution is not competition between typical and chance-
mutant offspring of common parents, but divergent mutation of whole populations
simultaneously exposed to unaccustomed radiation, chemical pollution of the atmosphere,
and global electromagnetic disturbances; ancient cities and fortresses were not brought
low individually by local warfare and earthquakes, but were destroyed simultaneously and
repeatedly in worldwide catastrophes; calamities described in clear-cut terms in surviving
records of the past - records almost universally interpreted allegorically by late-
classical as well as modern scholars - were common traumatic experiences for all races of
mankind, and as such have been purged from conscious memory.
The author of this strange new concept of universal history was born in Vitebsk, Russia,
in 1895. His formal schooling began in Moscow at Medvednikov Gymnasium, from which he
graduated with full honours. Following a brief period of study at Montpellier, France, and
travels in Palestine, he began premedical studies in natural science at Edinburgh,
Scotland, in 1914. When his schooling abroad was interrupted by the outbreak of World War
I, Velikovsky enrolled in the Free University in Moscow and for a few years studied law
and ancient history. Meanwhile, in 1915 he resumed work towards a medical degree at the
University of Moscow, and in 1921 he received his medical diploma.
The next few years Velikovsky spent in Berlin, where he and Prof. Heinrich Loewe founded
and published Scripta Universitatis with funds supplied by Velikovsky's father. In this
series of volumes, conceived as a cornerstone for what would become the University of
Jerusalem, contributions from outstanding Jewish scholars in all countries were published
in their native languages and in Hebrew translation. The late Albert Einstein edited the
mathematical-physical volume of the Scripta.
In Berlin Velikovsky met and married violinist Elisheva Kramer of Hamburg. Later the same
year the young couple moved to Palestine, and the doctor began his practice of medicine.
For fifteen years this practice - first as a general practitioner in Jerusalem, and later,
after psychiatric training in Europe, as a psychoanalyst in Haifa and Tel Aviv - occupied
most of Velikovsky's time. Nevertheless, he published a number of papers on psychology,
some in Freud's Imago. In one paper, to which Prof. Eugen Bleuler wrote a preface [2] ,
Velikovsky was the first to suggest that pathological encephalograms would be found
characteristic of epilepsy; distorted and accentuated brain waves of epileptics were later
found to be important clinical diagnostic symptoms. He also conceived a plan for an
academy of science in Jerusalem and started a new series, Scripta Academica, to which
Prof. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization and noted scientist,
contributed the first monograph in biochemistry. This series was dedicated to the memory
of Velikovsky's father, who had died in Palestine in December 1937.
Velikovsky also had an idea for a book, and to complete the necessary research he decided
to interrupt his practice for an extended visit to America. The Velikovskys and their two
school-age daughters arrived in New York in the summer of 1939, and the doctor plunged
into his library research. The intended book had been conceived as an analytic study of
Freud's own dreams as recorded in his writings, and a comparative study of the lives of
three personages - Oedipus, Akhnaton, and Moses - who had figured prominently in Freud's
thoughts and works.
The research was nearly completed by the spring of 1940, and Velikovsky began to make
preparations for the return home. Then, at the last moment before an already-postponed
sailing, he chanced upon an idea that was to completely alter his life plans and keep him
in America for decades.
Reflecting upon events in the life of Moses, Velikovsky began to speculate: Was there a
natural catastrophe at the time of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt? Could the
plagues of Egypt, the hurricane, the parting of the waters, and the smoke, fire, and
rumblings of Mt Sinai described in the Bible have been real and sequential aspects of
single titanic cataclysm of natural forces? If the Exodus took place during - or because
of - an upheaval, perhaps some record of the same events has survived among the many
documents of ancient Egypt; if so, might not such a record be a clue to the proper place
of the Exodus in Egyptian history?
After weeks of search Velikovsky came upon the story he sought. A papyrus bearing a
lamentation by one Ipuwer had been preserved in the library of the University of Leiden,
Holland, since 1828. Translation of the document by A. H. Gardiner in 1909 had disclosed
an account of plague and destruction closely paralleling the Biblical narrative, but the
similarities escaped Gardiner's attention. Ipuwer bewailed the collapse of the state and
social order during what seemed to be a calamity of natural forces. Mention of Asiatic
invaders (Hyksos) made it appear that the sage Ipuwer had witnessed the downfall of the
Middle Kingdom (Middle Bronze Age) in Egypt.
For nearly 2000 years scholars have conjectured and debated about the proper place of the
Exodus in Egyptian history. But the end of the Middle Kingdom which is conventionally
assigned to the eighteenth century B. C. had never been considered; it seemed much too
early according to Hebrew chronology. All efforts have been directed towards finding a
likely niche in New Kingdom history. Velikovsky, however, felt confident that his method
of correlation was valid; he resolved to establish the coevality of the Exodus and the
Hyksos invasion as a working hypothesis and pursue the inquiry through subsequent
centuries. He discovered so much apparent substantiation for the novel synchronization
that he was soon compelled to face up to its inherent dilemma: either Hebrew history is
too short by more than five centuries, an inconceivable premise - or Egyptian chronology,
a proud joint achievement of modern historians, archaeologists, and astronomers, and the
standard scale against which all Near Eastern histories are calibrated, is too long by an
equal number of centuries. The latter alternative seemed just as inconceivable; all the
excess centuries would have to be found and eliminated from post-Middle Kingdom history,
that portion of Egyptian history considered by all scholars to be unalterably
reconstructed and fixed in time. But soon Velikovsky found the apparent explanation for
the discrepancy: certain Egyptian dynasties appear twice in conventionally accepted
schemes - first, their stories appear as they have been pieced together from the monuments
and other relics of Egypt; then in history gleaned from Greek historians, the same
characters and events are given secondary and independent places in the time table. 'Many
figures... are "Ghosts" or "halves" and "doubles". 'Events are often duplicates; many
battle are shadows; many speeches are echoes; many treaties are copies. '
In the fall of 1940 Velikovsky traced events similar to those described in the Pentateuch
and the Book of Joshua in the literature of ancient Mexico. This confirmed his growing
suspicion that the great natural catastrophes that visited the Near East had been global
in scale. Immediately he expanded his research to embrace records of all races. The next
five or six years he spent developing parallel themes - reconstructions of ancient
political history and recent cosmic history - and as month followed month the intimate
details of a new concept of the world emerged. Two manuscripts were the product of his
labours: Ages in Chaos traced Near Eastern history from -1500 to -300; Worlds in Collision
documented the evidence and sequence of catastrophes on earth and in the solar system. The
late Robert H. Pfeiffer, then Chairman of the Department of Semitic Languages and Curator
of the Semitic Museum at Harvard University, read an early draft of Ages in Chaos in 1942
and conceded that the revolutionary version of history might well be correct. He felt the
work should receive a fair trial and objective investigation. He also read subsequent
drafts of the manuscript and made efforts to help find a publisher for it. To one
prospective publisher he wrote: 'I regard this work -provocative as it is - of fundamental
importance, whether its conclusions are accepted by competent scholars or whether it
forces them to a far-reaching and searching reconstruction of the accepted chronology. '
Notwithstanding Pfeiffer's endorsement, eight publishers returned the manuscript.
Before seeking a publisher for Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky tried to enlist the help of
scientists in arranging for certain experiments that would constitute crucial tests for
his thesis, which was essentially three-fold: (1) There were global catastrophes in
historical times; (2) these catastrophes were caused by extraterrestrial agents; and (3)
these agents, in the most recent of the catastrophes, can be identified as the planets
Venus and Mars, Venus playing the dominant role. All three postulates would be largely
substantiated if it could be shown that, contrary to all conventional expectations, Venus
(1) is still hot - evidence of recent birth, (2) is enveloped in hydrocarbon clouds -
remnants of a hydrocarbonaceous comet tail, and (3) has anomalous rotational motion -
evidence suggesting that it suffered unusual perturbations before settling in its orbit as
a planet. The first two of these points were selected by Velikovsky in 1946 as the most
crucial tests for his entire work.
THE EVIDENCE FROM MARINER II
He was confident of ultimate vindication for his conclusion that Venus is hot despite the
fact that the outer regions of its envelope were known to have a temperature -25 deg C.
Even as recently as 1959 astronomers believed that because of the great reflecting power
of its clouds, the ground temperature on Venus could differ little from that on earth.
Venus orbits closer to the sun, but more solar radiation is reflected away from Venus than
from the earth. Nevertheless, Velikovsky argued that the seeming contradiction in evidence
long available - apparent slow rotation, yet nearly identical temperatures on shadowed and
sunlit surfaces of the envelope of Venus - is illusory because the planet is young: it is
hot and radiates heat from day and night hemispheres alike [Fifteen years later, in 1961,
radio astronomers announced that radiation from Venus indicated that its surface must have
a temperature of 600 degrees F. And in February 1963, after analyzing data from Mariner
II, scientists raised this temperature estimate by another 200 degrees Ref. [3] No
convincing explanation has yet been advanced to square this evidence with orthodox
cosmologies.]
Velikovsky thought his second deduction about Venus - hydrocarbon dust and gases must be
present in its atmosphere and envelope - might be investigated spectroscopically. To this
end in April 1946 he approached Prof. Harlow Shapley, then director of Harvard College
Observatory. Without going into detail, Velikovsky explained that he had developed a
hypothesis about recent changes in the order of the solar system and that his conclusions
might be checked in part by spectral studies of Venus. Shapely pointed out that sudden
changes in the planetary order would be inconsistent with gravitational theory;
nevertheless, he agreed to consider performing such experiments if another scholar of
known reputation would first read and then recommend Velikovsky's work. At Velikovsky's
behest, Prof. Horace M. Kallen, co-founder of the New School of Social Research and at
that time dean of its graduate faculty - a scholar already familiar with the work - wrote
Shapley to urge that he conduct the search for hydrocarbons on Venus if at all possible.
But to Kallen's plea, Shapley, who had refused to read the manuscript, replied that he
wasn't interested in Velikovsky's 'sensational claims' because they violated the laws of
mechanics; 'if Dr Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy. ' Nevertheless, Shapley
recommended that Velikovsky contact either Walter S. Adams, director of Mt. Wilson
Observatory, or Rupert Wildt at McCormick Observatory.
In the Summer of 1946 Velikovsky directed identical inquiries to both Wildt and Adams,
stating that he had a cosmological theory implying that 'Venus is rich with petroleum
gases and hydrocarbon dust. ' So strong were these implications that he believed the
presence or absence of these materials in the atmosphere and envelope of Venus would
constitute crucial support or refutation for his thesis, and therefore he wished to know
if the spectrum of Venus might be interpreted in this sense. Wildt replied that the
absorption spectrum of Venus shows no evidence of hydrocarbons. Adams pointed out that the
absorption bands of most petroleum molecules are in the far infra-red, below the range of
photographic detection, and that hydrocarbons known to absorb in the detectable range are
not apparent in the spectrum of Venus.
All this notwithstanding, Velikovsky elected to defer once more to his historical
evidence; he left in his manuscript and later in the published book the statement that a
positive demonstration that petroleum-like hydrocarbons are or are not present in the
envelope of Venus would be a decisive check on his work. [On the basis of an apparent
ability to condense and polymerize into heavy molecules at a temperature near 2000 F in
the atmosphere, the clouds of Venus must consist of heavy hydrocarbons and more complex
organic compounds; thus concluded Mariner II experimenter Lewis D. Kaplan in February
1963.] Ref. [4] .
At the end of July 1946 the late John J. O'Neill, science editor of the New York Herald
Tribune, agreed to read Velikovsky's manuscript. O'Neill was immediately impressed, and he
devoted his column for August 14 to the work. In his opinion, 'Dr Velikovsky's work
presents a stupendous panorama of terrestrial and human histories which will stand as
challenge to scientists to frame a realistic picture of the cosmos. '
Between June and October 1946 Velikovsky submitted his manuscript to one publisher after
another, but the consensus was that the heavily annotated text was too scholarly for the
book trade. Eventually, however, the trail led to Macmillan Company, where trade-books
editor James Putnam saw possibilities in the book. In May of 1947 an optional contract was
signed and then, after another year in which various outside readers, among them O'Neill
and Gordon Atwater, then Curator of Hayden Planetarium and Chairman of the Department of
Astronomy of the American Museum of Natural History - examined the manuscript and
recommended publication, a final contract was drawn and signed.
By March 1949 word of the book Macmillan was preparing for publication had spread among
people in the trade. Frederick L. Allen, editor-in-chief of Harper's Magazine, sought
authorization to present a two-article synopsis of Worlds in Collision and had Eric
Larrabee, then an editor on the Harper's staff, prepare a tentative condensation from
galley proofs. Allen wished to submit this for approval, but Velikovsky did not respond to
the proposal for more than six months. In the fall, however, after more urging, he agreed
to see Larrabee to discuss a one-article presentation of his theme; Larrabee then rewrote
his piece completely.
Larrabee's article, 'The Day the Sun Stood Still, ' appeared in Harper's for January 1950.
The issue sold out within a few days, and so great was the demand from readers that a
number of dailies both here and abroad reprinted Larrabee's text in full.
In February 1950 Reader's Digest featured a popularization of Velikovsky's findings
prepared by the late Fulton Oursler, who emphasized their corroboration of Old Testament
history.
Collier's Magazine, in February and March 1950, published two instalments of an announced
three-part series. Velikovsky, who had agreed only to serialization - not adaptation or
condensation, was so dismayed by the cavalier treatment being accorded his work in the
highly sensationalized manuscripts submitted for his approval that he threatened to make a
public disavowal of the Collier's articles unless each was severely revised. After long,
stormy sessions, the first two manuscripts were approved; Collier's abandoned the third.
Early in February 1950, when Worlds in Collision was about to go to press, Putnam called
on Velikovsky to show him two letters Macmillan had received from Harlow Shapley. In the
first, dated January 18, Shapley expressed gratification over a rumour that Velikovsky's
book was not going to appear, and astonishment that Macmillan had even considered a
venture into the 'Black Arts. ' In his second letter, written on January 25 after Putnam
had answered the first, discounting the alleged rumour and assuring him that the book
would appear on schedule, Shapley, who had still not seen the manuscript, remarked: 'It
will be interesting a year from now to hear from you as to whether or not the reputation
of the Macmillan Co. is damaged by the publication of, "Worlds in Collision". ' At the
very least, release of the book would 'cut off' all relation between Shapley and
Macmillan. He also announced that, at his request, one of his colleagues who was also a
classicist was preparing a 'commentary' on Larrabee's article. He concluded with an
expression of his hope that Macmillan had thoroughly investigated Velikovsky's background;
however, 'it is quite possible that only this "Worlds in Collision" episode is
intellectually fraudulent. '
This second letter apparently struck close to home for Macmillan president George Brett,
for he personally answered Shapley to thank him for 'waving the red flag. ' Brett promised
to submit the book to three impartial censors and to abide the majority verdict of the
three.
Apparently the majority again voted thumbs up; the book was published on schedule. The
identities of the last-minute censors were never officially revealed, but one of them,
Prof. C. W. van der Merwe, Chairmen of the Department of Physics at New York University,
later disclosed to John O'Neill that he had been enlisted by Macmillan and had been one of
the two who voted in favour of publication.
Meanwhile, the February 25, 1950, issue of Science News Letter, a publication then headed
by Harlow Shapley, printed denunciation of Velikovsky's ideas by five authorities in as
many fields: Nelson Glueck, archaeologist; Carl Kraeling, orientalist; Henry Field,
anthropologist; David Delo, geologist; and Shapley himself, speaking for astronomers. This
medley of protest came forth just as Worlds in Collision went to press - none of the
critics had seen the work.
On March 14, the commentary on Larrabee's article by Shapley's colleague, astronomer
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, appeared in The Reporter. (An earlier draft of the article had
been mimeographed and circulated widely by direct mail to scientists, science editors, and
publishers.) Stringing phrases from three sentences appearing on as many pages of
Larrabee's article into a sentence of her own, Gaposchkin set it in quotation marks and
introduced it as 'Dr Velikovsky's astronomical assertions. ' The gist of her thoroughly
abusive article was that electromagnetic phenomena are of no importance in space, and in a
purely mechanical solar system the events of Worlds in Collision are impossible. The March
25 issue of Science News Letter, in a 'Retort to Velikovsky, ' who had as yet not been
heard from, cited Gaposchkin's critique as recommended reading for all scientists - 'a
detailed scientific answer to Dr Velikovsky. '
On April 11 The Reporter reproduced letters to the editor from Larrabee and Gaposchkin.
Larrabee challenged the propriety of her attack on a book she had not yet seen, and
Gaposchkin acknowledged that her review had been based on popularized preview articles
only; she remarked that she had since read the book (published April 3, 1950) and found it
to be 'better written... but just as wrong. '
The last few weeks before Worlds in Collision made its appearance were spent in strategic
manoeuvring by the leaders of the resistance forces. The late Otto Struve, then director
of Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago and an ex-president of the American
Astronomical Society, penned letters to both John O'Neill and Gordon Atwater, requesting
them to abandon their earlier positions with respect to Worlds in Collision. Atwater,
unaware that he was facing an inquisition, replied that he believed Velikovsky's work had
great merit, and although he did not accept all its conclusions in detail he was preparing
a favourable review of the book for This Week magazine. He was planning - indeed had
already publicly announced - a planetarium programme to depict the events of Worlds in
Collision. O'Neill composed a heated reply, but then destroyed it. He let it be known that
his earlier appraisal of the book had not since been altered in any way.
Atwater's planetarium programme was scuttled immediately. During the last week of March he
was summarily fired from both his positions with the museum - as Curator of Hayden
Planetarium and Chairman of the Department of Astronomy - and requested to vacate his
office immediately. Thus, when his review in This Week appeared on April 2, an article in
which he pleaded for open-mindedness in dealing with the new theory, the credentials
printed alongside Atwater's name were already invalid. Last-minute attempts to influence
This Week not to publish this cover story failed when the editor sought and followed
O'Neill's advice.
THE OPPOSITION TAKES ACTION
O'Neill's prepared review for the Herald Tribune had been scheduled to appear on April 2.
But instead of O'Neill's article readers of that Sunday's issue found a review written by
Struve. No concrete arguments were presented by Struve to justify his rejection of the
book; 'It is not a book of science and it cannot be dealt with in scientific terms. ' He
went on: 'It was necessary for readers to wait until a recent issue of the "Reporter" to
learn, through Mrs. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin... that the observations of Venus extend back
five hundred years before the Exodus, thus refuting the absurd theory of a comet that
turned into a planet. ' Velikovsky, however, had specified no date for the eruption of
Venus from Jupiter, except that it had occurred some time before the Exodus. And, as
Velikovsky pointed out in his book, the Babylonian tablets (Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga)
cited by Gaposchkin to support her claim ascribe such erratic motions to Venus that
translators and commentators have been baffled by them ever since they were discovered in
the ruins of Nineveh in the last century; he also pointed out that even if the apparitions
and periods of Venus recorded on the tablets date from early in the second millennium,
which is disputed among scholars, they prove only that Venus already then moved
erratically and quite unlike a planet.
Reviewing Worlds in Collision in the New York Times Book Review, also on April 2, the late
chief science editor of the Times, Waldemar Kaempffert, followed Gaposchkin into the same
territory and falsely accused Velikovsky of suppressing the Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga.
Kaempffert seemingly had not read the book very carefully before condemning it, for not
only did Velikovsky describe the tablets and quote the complete texts of observations from
five successive years out of twenty-one, but he discussed opinions written by various
orientalists and astronomers who had studied the tablets (Rawlinson, Smith, Langdon,
Fotheringham, Schiaparelli, Kugler, Hommel). In the next few months, 'a surprising number
of the country's reputable astronomers descended from their telescopes to denounce Worlds
in Collision, ' to quote the Harvard Crimson of September 25, 1950. Newspapers around the
country were barraged with abusive reviews contributed by big-name scientists; some of
these writings were syndicated to ensure better coverage.
Ignoring Velikovsky's alternate explanation that, perhaps in the grip of an alien magnetic
field, a 'tilting of the (earth's) axis could produce the visual effect of a retrogressing
or arrested sun, ' Frank K. Edmondson, director of Goethe Link Observatory, University of
Indiana, wrote: [5] 'Velikovsky is not bothered by the elementary fact that if the earth
were stopped, inertia would cause Joshua and his companions to fly off into space with a
speed of nine hundred miles an hour. ' This argument, first formulated by Gaposchkin, is
at best disingenuous, for the all-important time factor - the rate of deceleration - is
completely ignored.
Paul Herget, Director of the Observatory, University of Cincinnati, derided the ideas
expressed in Worlds in Collision [6] , but advanced no specific counterarguments on
scientific grounds. Nevertheless, he concluded that all the book's basic contentions were
'dynamically impossible. ' Frank S. Hogg, director of David Dunlop Observatory, University
of Toronto, and Oregon astronomer J. Hugh Pruett both reiterated the erroneous Gaposchkin-
Struve notion that observations of Venus made before the time of the Exodus refute
Velikovsky's theme [7] , [8] . California physicist H. P. Robertson chose the easy path
of invective: 'This incredible book... this jejune essay... [is] too ludicrous to merit
serious rebuttal. ' [9]
Atomic scientist Harrison Brown disdained to list the 'errors in fact and conclusion' that
he estimated would fill a letter 'thirty pages in length. ' Instead, in his review of
Worlds in Collision in the Saturday Review of Literature [10] , Brown assured his readers
that 'the combination of modern astronomy, geophysics, geochemistry, paleontology,
geology, and physics can state the following:
'The earth did not stop rotating 3,500 years ago. [Brown, too, disregarded Velikovsky's
alternative explanation for the visual effect of an arrested sun.]
'Venus was formed much earlier than 3,500 years ago. Indeed, it is probably about a
million times older than Dr Velikovsky suggests.
'Venus was not formed from a comet emanating from Jupiter (or, for that matter, a comet
emanating from anything else). '
The balance of Brown's review was devoted to 'book-and magazine-publishing
irresponsibility. '
Despite the vigour of the protracted campaign to discredit its author, Worlds in Collision
was heralded enthusiastically by many science writers and reviewers, and the book topped
the best-seller lists of the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune for twenty
successive weeks in 1950. [By a strange oversight, however, the Encyclopedia Britannica
Book of the Year covering 1950 failed to note the existence of Velikovsky's book in its
recapitulation of the year's bestsellers.]
On May 25, 1950, when sales of his book were at their peak, Velikovsky was summoned to
Brett's office and told that professors in certain large universities were refusing to see
Macmillan salesmen, and letters demanding cessation of publication were arriving from a
number of scientist. Brett beseeched Velikovsky to save him from disaster by approving an
arrangement that had been tentatively worked out with Doubleday & Company, which had no
textbook department. Doubleday, with Velikovsky's consent, would take over all rights to
Worlds in Collision. As evidence of the pressure being brought to bear, Brett showed
Velikovsky a letter from Michigan astronomer Dean B. McLaughlin, who insisted Velikovsky's
book was nothing but lies. On the same page Mclaughlin averred he had not read and never
would read the book.
While Velikovsky pondered his next move - whether to approve the transfer of rights to
Doubleday, or to make an independent search for a new publisher - his scientist-critics
apparently began to see their problem in a more serious perspective. Inability to dismiss
the events of Worlds in Collision, gleaned from a multitude of sources, suggested that a
substantial assault upon his method and sources was in order.
The June 1950 issue of Popular Astronomy carried another attack on Velikovsky by Cecilia
Payne-Gaposchkin. Her words were prefaced by a few lines from the magazine editor, who
explained, 'We are giving greater prominence to this analysis of "Worlds in Collision"
than is usually accorded to book reviews... for two reasons. 1. This book has been brought
to the attention of a large reading public by having been mentioned favourably in several
popular magazines. 2. The analysis here given is by a recognized authority in the field of
astronomy, the science with which the book comes into closest contact, or sharpest
conflict. '
Gaposchkin's 'analysis' was divided into two parts, first place being devoted to 'the
Literary Sources. ' By the simple ruse of ignoring both contextual material and
corroborative references, she purported to show that Velikovsky had misrepresented his
sources. Her 'Scientific Arguments' included restatements of undemonstrable dogmas and a
highly sarcastic synopsis of Velikovsky's thesis.
Prof. Otto Neugebauer of Brown University, a specialist in Babylonian and Greek astronomy,
in an article for Isis [11] that was mailed far and wide in reprint form, accused
Velikovsky of wilfully tailoring quoted source material. To support this charge,
Neugebauer specified that Velikovsky had substituted the figure 33°14' for the correct
value, 3°14, ' in a quotation from the work of another scholar. When Velikovsky protested
in a letter to the late George Sarton, then editor of Isis, that the figure given in his
book was correct and the 33°14' was in fact Neugebauer's own insertion, not his,
Neugebauer dismissed the incident as a 'simple misprint of no concern' that did not
invalidate his appraisal of Velikovsky's methods. And the reprint was circulated by an
interested group long after its errors had been pointed out.
The fundamental position of Neugebauer is that the voluminous Babylonian astronomical
texts from before the seventh century B. C., all of which are inconsistent with celestial
motions as we know them, were composed in full disregard of actual observations;
Velikovsky regards these records as representing true observations of the heavens before
the last catastrophe.
Four Yale University professors collaborated in preparing a rebuttal to Velikovsky for the
American Journal of Science [12] , which was edited by geologist Chester R. Longwell.
Sinologist K. S. Latourette acknowledged that Velikovsky 'has combed an amazing range of
historical records for evidence to corroborate his thesis, ' but apparently Latourette
could find no specific arguments to refute that thesis. George Kubler, mexicologist,
derided the suggestion set forth in Worlds in Collision that the Mesoamerican civilization
must be much older that scholars then conceded; 'The Mesoamerican cosmology to which
Velikovsky repeatedly appeals for proof did not originate until about the beginning of our
era. ' [In December 1956 the National Geographic Society announced: 'Atomic science has
proved the ancient civilization of Mexico to be some 1,000 years older than had been
believed. '] Rupert Wildt took Velikovsky to task for doubting the validity of celestial
mechanics based upon gravitation and inertia only, to the exclusion of electromagnetic
forces. Longwell scorned the notion that petroleum might have a cosmic origin. [Prof. W.
F. Libby, chemist of the University of California, has since suggested that petroleum may
be found on the moon. Prof. A. T. Wilson of Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand,
in 1960 produced high molecular weight hydrocarbons by electric discharges in a methane-
ammonia (Jupiter-like) atmosphere; in 1962 he, too, suggested that the earth's petroleum
may be of cosmic origin and that oil may be found on the moon.]
The article authorized by the four Yale professors and signed by Longwell was given a
preview run in the New Haven Register on June 25, 1950. A seven-column banner in blue ink
above the text proclaimed: '4 Yale Scholars "Expose" Non-Fiction Best-Seller. ' After
receiving assurances from Doubleday that it was immune to pressure from textbook writers
and buyers, Velikovsky approved the transfer of rights on June 8, 1950. On June 11,
columnist Leonard Lyons spread the news, and on June 18 the New York Times noted: 'The
greatest bombshell dropped on Publishers' Row in many a year exploded the other day... Dr.
Velikovsky himself would not comment on the changeover. But a publishing official
admitted, privately, that a flood of protests from educators and others had hit the
company hard in its vulnerable underbelly - the textbook division. Following some stormy
sessions by the board of directors, Macmillan reluctantly succumbed, surrendered its
rights to the biggest money-maker on its list. '
Leonard Lyons reported that the suppression was engineered by Harlow Shapley. When
queried, however, Shapley told Newsweek, 'I didn't make any threats and I don't know
anyone who did. ' The late George Sokolsky also discussed the case in his column, and
shortly afterwards received a letter from Paul Herget, who was apparently disappointed
that all the credit was going to Shapley. Herget wrote, and Sokolsky quoted: 'I am one of
those who participated in this campaign against Macmillan... I do not believe that
[Shapley] was in any sense the leader... I was a very vigorous participant myself... '
Dean McLaughlin wrote to Fulton Oursler: 'Worlds in Collision has just changed hands... I
am frank to state that this change was the result of pressure that scientists and scholars
brought to bear on the Macmillan Company... '
On June 30, Fred Whipple, Shapley's successor as Director of Harvard College Observatory,
informed the Blakiston Company, then owned by Doubleday, that, rather than continue to be
a fellow author in the same house with Velikovsky, he would turn over to charity future
royalties from his Blakiston-published Earth, Moon and Planets and would make no further
updating revisions in the text so long as Doubleday controlled Blakiston.
Dumping its offensive best seller, however, was but the first step in the re-establishment
of Macmillan's reputation. There remained matters of purgatorial sacrifice and public
recantation. James Putnam, a 25-year veteran with Macmillan, had been entrusted with
making the arrangements to contract for and publish Velikovsky's manuscript. His judgement
in urging that Macmillan accept Worlds in Collision had been confirmed in spectacular
fashion when the book became a best seller. Nevertheless, the negotiations to transfer
publishing right to Doubleday were carried on without his knowledge, and as soon as the
transfer had been consummated, Putnam's good friend, editor-in-chief H. S. Latham, was
delegated to inform him that his services were being terminated immediately. [In January
1963 Latham expressed in a letter to Velikovsky the great regret he still feels for
Macmillan's capitulation.]
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in
Cleveland in December 1950, a Mr. Charles Skelley, representing the Macmillan Company,
addressed the members of a committee specially appointed to study means for evaluating new
theories before publication. He pointed out that, as a contribution to the advancement of
science, his firm had 'voluntarily transferred' its rights to a 'book that the panel
regarded as unsound... ' His remarks were duly recorded and reported by panel chairman
Warren Guthrie [13] . Harvard geologist Kirtley Mather was the main spokesman before the
panel, discussing possible methods of censorship.
The British edition of Worlds in Collision was rushed into print within two months of a
contract between Doubleday and Victor Gollancz, and in September British scientists began
to publish reviews. Spencer Jones, quoted in part at the beginning of this account,
concluded: 'It is a pity that so much erudition should have been wasted in following so
false a trail. ' However, he was mistaken in arguing that, if there had been catastrophes
such as Velikovsky described, 'we should find that, at a certain epoch in past time, the
positions of Mars and Venus were identical. ' Velikovsky, in a letter published in The
Spectator on October 27, 1950 called attention to the Royal Astronomer's error; the last
catastrophe took place not between Mars and Venus, but between Mars and earth. He also
pointed to the present close approaches of the earth and Mars every 15 years, the similar
axial inclinations of these two planets, and the similar lengths of their days as vestiges
of near contact and magnetic interference in the past.
Evolutionist J. B. S. Haldane, author of Science and Ethics, reviewed the book in the New
Statesman and Nation for November 11, 1950. Haldane misquoted Velikovsky, then ridiculed
the misquotation; he mismatched dates and the events Velikovsky had associated with them;
he concluded that book was 'equally a degradation of science and religion. '
THE ARTICLES IN HARPER'S
In the fall of 1950 Frederick Allen sought a scientist to participate in a debate with
Velikovsky in the pages of Harper's Magazine. Shapley and Neugebauer, among others,
declined the opportunity, but Princeton astrophysicist John Q. Stewart accepted. The
debate appeared in Harper's for June 1951, introduced by several background paragraphs
prepared by the editors, who noted that 'there has been a remarkable lack of explicit
criticism of the book based on careful reading. '
Given the floor first, Velikovsky presented an 'Answer to my Critics. ' One by one he
described and analyzed fallacies in the principal physical or historical arguments that
had been advanced against his book. Among these points were the matters of ancient
eclipses, early observations of Venus, the substance of comets, electromagnetic forces and
effects in the solar system, and the consequences of stopping the earth's spin or tilting
its axis in space.
Stewart's article was titled 'Disciplines in Collision. ' He relied heavily on
Gaposchkin's earlier writings, quoting in full her synopsis of Velikovsky's theme - a
passage filled with parenthetical sneers. Stewart charged that records of ancient solar
eclipses contradict Velikovsky's thesis of changes in terrestrial and lunar movements in
the second and first millennia B. C. But Velikovsky, in his rejoinder, printed in the same
issue of Harper's, showed that the alleged eclipses, in the original sources, are
accompanied neither by dates nor by locality specifications. Moreover, of the three
mentioned records, the text of one (Chinese) referred to a disturbance of celestial
motions which had prevented the occurrence of a predicted eclipse, and commentary about a
second (Babylonian) by Kugler, the greatest authority on Babylonian astronomy, called
attention to the fact that an eclipse would not be possible at all on the indicated day of
a lunar month; Kugler conjectured that the phenomenon reported might have been a darkening
of the sky due to passage of the earth through 'an immense train' of dust and meteorites.
[In 1959 Prof. André Danjon, director of Paris Observatory, established that there are
abrupt changes in the earth's rotational speed following solar flares; this he ascribes to
electromagnetic influences. One implication of this discovery is that eclipses cannot be
dated by retrospective calculation.]
Stewart also claimed that the geographic position of the terrestrial axis could never
change; but since the debate of 1951 the idea of wandering of the axis with respect to the
crust of the earth has gained the acceptance of science.
According to Stewart, 'Tombs dated from the fourth millennium B. C. were not destroyed by
ocean floods in Ur (of the Chaldees). ' But Velikovsky, in his rejoinder, quoted Sir
Leonard Wooley, the excavator of Ur: 'Eight feet of sediment imply a very great depth of
water and the flood which deposited it must have been of a magnitude unparalleled in local
history... a whole civilization which existed before it is lacking above it and seems to
have been submerged by the water. '
The August 1951 issue of Harper's carried a letter to the editor from Julius S. Miller,
professor of physics and mathematics at Dillard University. Miller cited what he called a
'glaring paucity and barren weakness of explicit criticism' on the part of Velikovsky's
critics. He concluded: '( 1) The Velikovsky notions are not altogether untenable; ' and '(
2)... not yet refuted. '
Laurence Lafleur, then associate professor of philosophy at Florida State University,
brought a new argument to bear against Velikovsky in the November 1951 issue of Scientific
Monthly: '... the odds favour the assumption that anyone proposing a revolutionary
doctrine is a crank rather than a scientist. ' Lafleur itemized seven criteria for
spotting a crank.
Examples:
Test 6. Velikovsky's theory is in no single instance capable of mathematical accuracy. Its
predictions, if capable of any, would certainly be so vague as to be scientifically
unverifiable.
Test 7. Velikovsky does show a disposition to accept minority opinions, to quote the
opinions of individuals opposed to current views, and even to quote such opinions when
they have been discredited to the point that they are no longer held even as minority
views. For example, we may cite the notion that the earth's axis has changed considerably.
So Lafleur concluded that Velikovsky qualified as a crank 'perhaps by every one' of these
test. But having established this 'we must still deal with feeling, first, that scientists
should have attempted to refute Velikovsky's position, as a service both to him and to the
public... ' Thus the professor acknowledged that much of earlier criticism - thousands of
words printed in the span of more than a year and a half - was denunciation rather than
refutation. But in his own attempt to perform the recommended 'service, ' Lafleur, even
with the aid of astrophysical theorems contrived for the occasion, fared no better than
the scientists. On the assumption that an electroscope would detect it, he denied that the
earth carries an electric charge. (No scientist corrected, in print, this mistaken notion
or any other wrong statement by any critic during the entire Worlds in Collision
controversy.) Lafleur also claimed that an approach between two celestial bodies close
enough to bring their magnetic fields into conflict must inevitably bring about collision,
evaporation, and amalgamation of the bodies.
The American Philosophical Society met in Philadelphia in April 1952, and as part of a
symposium on 'Some Unorthodoxies of Modern Science, ' a paper, 'Worlds in Collision, ' by
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was read. Once again Mrs Gaposchkin repeated most of her earlier
arguments, prefacing them with an account of her 'Herculean labour' in ferreting out the
alleged fallacies in Worlds in Collision. She chose to disregard the great mass of
Velikovsky's evidence and isolate certain quotations from their context, making it appear
that Velikovsky had read into them ideas of his own. (See comparison of texts, Appendix
2.) Her audience could conclude only that Velikovsky had been guilty of the most heinous
disregard for the rules of scholarship. Towards the end of her address, which was read in
her absence, Gaposchkin professed bewilderment: 'Why is it, if scientists are really the
open-minded men they think themselves, that they are under so much criticism of the
"Science is a Sacred Cow" variety? I confess I do not understand why the revulsion against
science takes this form... '
Velikovsky was in the audience at the same meeting, and he was permitted to come forward
to offer a rebuttal to arguments presented earlier by archaeologists astronomers, and
geologists. The audience listened attentively and responded warmly. But when he requested
that his remarks be reproduced along with Gaposchkin's in the society's Proceedings [14]
, his bid was rejected. Appended to Gaposchkin's paper, however, was a 'quantitative
refutation of Velikovsky's wild hypothesis' by Donald H. Menzel, also of Harvard
Observatory. '... let us make the assumption with Velikovsky and try to determine what
would happen if the sun and the planets suddenly acquired gross electric charges. ' Menzel
calculated that for electric forces to contribute ten per cent of the gravitational
attraction between earth and sun equally charged, but of opposite polarities, each must
acquire a voltage of 10 19 volts (10 raised to the 19th power); the energy necessary to
place such charge on the sun would be 5 x 10 43 ergs (10 raised to the 43rd power), 'as
much energy as the entire sun radiates in 1, 000 years. ' Menzel then purported to show
that the greatest charge a positive sun could retain was 1800 volts. Now, the
specification of suddenly acquired charge, which Menzel apparently sought to ridicule by
calculation of the energy required to emplace it, is wholly arbitrary and misleading;
nothing in Velikovsky's thesis suggests that solar and planetary charges are acquired
suddenly. Furthermore, Menzel's necessary assumptions as to the dielectric properties of
the sun, earth, and space were wholly gratuitous and unsupported by observational
evidence. (It has been established in space probes since 1960 that interplanetary space,
especially close in to the sun, is filled with plasma. Thus Menzel's assumptions are
inapplicable to the situation. Furthermore, in 1960, Prof. V. A. Bailey of the University
of Sydney, Australia, reported [15] : 'It has been found possible to account for the
known orders of magnitude of five different astronomical phenomena... by the single
hypothesis that a star like the sun carries a net negative charge... ' Bailey calculated
that the necessary charge on the sun would produce an electric field with a potential at
the surface of the sun on the order of 10 19 volts.)
Walter S. Adams, director of Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories, was a rare exception
among astronomers who participated in discussions of Worlds in Collision. In
correspondence with Velikovsky, Adams complimented him on the accuracy of his presentation
of astronomical material, though he could not accept the premise that electromagnetism
participates in celestial mechanics. Whenever Velikovsky requested information or
explanations pertaining to astronomical phenomena, Adams answered courteously and in
minute detail. In February 1952 the author of Worlds in Collision visited the California
astronomer at the solar observatory in Pasadena and discussed with him at first hand some
of the problems raised by the historical evidence.
Constructive criticism came also from Professor Lloyd Motz, astronomer of Columbia
University, with whom Velikovsky on many occasions discussed problems of celestial
mechanics. Motz holds conventional views.
S. K. Vsekhsviatsky, director of Kiev observatory, has corresponded with Velikovsky on
problems in solar system phenomena and has cited Velikovsky's works on numerous occasions
in support of his own positions in theoretical matters.
Volume I of Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos appeared in March 1952. Proceeding from the premise
that Egyptian and Israelite histories may be synchronized by equating the upheaval
described in Exodus with the catastrophe that befell Egypt at the end of the Middle
Kingdom, Velikovsky worked down through the centuries from the fifteenth to the middle of
the ninth, highlighting contacts between the peoples of the two lands -- Egypt and
Palestine. The synchronization is carried almost to the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty in
Egypt, to the days of Akhnaton, who thus is revealed as a contemporary of Ahab and
Jehoshaphat in the ninth century rather than a precursor of Moses, as in orthodox
chronology. Unpublished portions of Ages in Chaos must dispose of six apparently
superfluous centuries in conventional Egyptian history, and Velikovsky promises that in
doing so, his work will show that no enigmatic half-millennium-long 'dark ages' need to be
inserted in Aegean, Mesopotamian, or Anatolian histories.
William F. Albright, Spence Professor of Semitic Language at Johns Hopkins University,
reviewed and rejected Velikovsky's second book in the New York Herald Tribune for April
20, 1952. Albright's only specific argument was that Velikovsky had mistaken the cuneiform
plural sign, mesh, in some of the El Amarna letters for the name of the Moabite King Mesh
(a) But in his text Velikovsky twice called attention to the fact that in several
instances in these letters the conventional reading cannot apply, since the grammatical
construction definitely pertains to an individual - a rebellious vassal of the king of
Samaria (Sumur), well known from the Bible.
Professor Harry Orlinsky of Hebrew Union College echoed Albright's remarks [16] , thus
documenting his unfamiliarity with the book he purported to review.
The scientific press did not devote space to analyses of Velikovsky's reconstruction of
history, but as Albright described it eight years later in the Herald Tribune [17] ,
there were 'howls of anguish' among the historians.
The Velikovskys moved from New York City to Princeton, N. J., in 1952, and the heretic
began to make the acquaintance of scientists in that university community. In October 1953
he was asked to address the Graduate College Forum at Princeton on the subject, 'Worlds in
Collision in the Light of Recent Finds in Archaeology, Geology, and Astronomy. ' In the
course of this address, in which he was able to cite many items in support of his thesis
among discoveries made since the appearance of Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky suggested
that earth's magnetic field reaches sensibly as far as the moon and is responsible for
certain unaccounted-for libratory, or rocking, movements of that body. He also suggested
that the planet Jupiter radiates in the radio-frequency range of the spectrum. (In April
1955, Drs B. F. Burke and K. L. Franklin of the Carnegie Institution startled their
audience at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society when they announced their
accidental discovery of radio noise emitted by Jupiter. However, when a Doubleday editor
wrote to call their attention to the fact that Velikovsky had anticipated just such a
finding, one of them replied that even Velikovsky is entitled to a 'near miss' once in a
while.) The text of the Forum address was published as a supplement to Velikovsky's Earth
in Upheaval in 1955.
From about the time of the 1953 Forum address, through 1954, and into 1955 up to the time
of Einstein's death, he and Velikovsky carried on private debate oral, and written, on the
issue of colliding worlds and the merits of an electromagnetic solar system. Einstein
remained adamant in his conviction that sun and planets must be electrically neutral and
space must be free of magnetic fields and plasma. Yet when he learned only days before his
death, that Jupiter emits radio noise, as Velikovsky had so long insisted, he offered to
use his influence in arranging for certain other experiments Velikovsky had suggested. It
was too late. When Einstein died, Worlds in Collision lay open on his desk.
At the same Philadelphia symposium where Gaposchkin's attack on Velikovsky had been read
in 1952, I. Bernard Cohen, Harvard historian of science, also spoke. In an abstract of his
address released before the meeting Cohen expressed foreboding that the reaction against
Velikovsky might signify that his work was of great importance; it appeared that
Velikovsky and his book were to be the principal topics of discussion. By speech time,
however, Cohen's theme had been altered considerably, and in the printed version of the
address in the Proceedings [18] Velikovsky was referred to but once, in an off hand
conclusion that Gaposchkin had already discredited him.
In July 1955, Scientific American published Cohen's tribute to Albert Einstein, whom he
had met on just one occasion, for an interview. Cohen took the opportunity to ridicule
Velikovsky with isolated adjectives allegedly quoted from Einstein. In an exchange of
letters with Otto Nathan, executor of Einstein's estate, in the September 1955 issue of
Scientific American he conceded that Einstein had compared the reception of Velikovsky
with that accorded Johann Kepler and had noted that contemporaries often have trouble
differentiating between a genius and a crank. Cohen ended by saying .'... There is no
basis for concluding that Professor Einstein might not have had a friendly feeling for the
author in question or that he might not have had some interest in his work... Professor
Einstein sympathized with the author when he was attacked and disliked the methods used by
some of his attackers. '
'EARTH IN UPHEAVAL'
During the same period Velikovsky himself was completing the manuscript of Earth in
Upheaval, a book presenting the evidence of recent catastrophes on earth. Einstein had
read portions of the manuscript and contributed suggestions in marginal notes; before his
death, according to Helen Dukas, his secretary, he was intending to write a letter
requesting the curator of the Department of Egyptology at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
to arrange for carbon-14 tests that might check the thesis of Ages in Chaos. Despite her
transmission of this appeal, and decade-long efforts directed to the British Museum and
other institutions by Velikovsky, the New Kingdom and late periods of Egypt, which span
more than 1,200 years in conventional chronology, generally have been left out of testing
programmes. In more than one instance, however, relics from this period have been adjudged
'contaminated' because they yielded unexpectedly low ages.
Earth in Upheaval appeared in November 1955. Velikovsky examined the century-old principle
of Lyellian uniformity by comparing its tenets with anomalous finds from all quarters of
the globe: frozen muck in Alaska that consists almost entirely of myriads of torn and
broken animals and trees; whole islands in the Arctic Sea whose soil is packed full of
unfossilized bones of mammoths, rhinoceroses, and horses; unglaciated polar lands and
glaciated tropical countries; coral and coal deposits near the poles; bones of animals
from tundra, prairie, and tropical rainforest intimately associated in jumbled heaps and
interred in common graves; the startling youth of the world's great mountain chains;
shifted poles; reversed magnetic polarities; sudden changes in sea level all around the
world; rifts on land and under the seas.
Then Velikovsky took up the question of evolution, arguing that Darwin had rejected
catastrophism in favour of Lyell's uniformity because the catastrophists of his day would
not acknowledge the antiquity of the earth. But in reality catastrophes suggest the only
plausible mechanisms for the phenomenon of evolution by mutation. Thus Darwin's
contribution to the theory of evolution, which dates from Greek times, consisted only in
the as-yet undemonstrated hypothesis that competition can give rise to new species. In the
controversy that followed the publication of The Origin of Species, the issue revolved
around whether or not evolution was a natural phenomenon, and it was resolved quite
properly in the affirmative. But what was obscured in the uproar, argued Velikovsky, was
the inadequacy of Darwin's hypothesis; 'if natural selection... is not the mechanism of
the origin of species, Darwin's contribution is reduced to very little - only to the role
of natural selection in weeding out the unfit. ' Velikovsky proposed in Earth in Upheaval
that evolution is a cataclysmic process: '... the principle that can cause the origin of
species exists in nature. The irony lies in the circumstance that Darwin saw in
catastrophism the chief adversary of his theory... '
It appears that at first scientific journals and reviewers, aware of the adverse effect of
their earlier agitation against Worlds in Collision, chose to ignore Earth in Upheaval.
But a few months after it appeared a New York radio station presented a 'Conversation
Programme' in which Jacques Barzun, then newly appointed to the position of Dean of the
Graduate Faculties at Columbia University, and Alfred Goldsmith, president of the Radio
Engineers of America and vice president in charges of research for Radio corporation of
America, discussed the book, with Clifton Fadiman as moderator. All three participants
were enthusiastic and affirmative towards Velikovsky's method, scholarship, and convincing
manner of presenting his evidence; they considered that his work may be a beginning
towards important new concepts in science and history. All agreed that his work deserved
objective treatment from scientists.
From this favourable discussion of Earth in Upheaval may have come some pressure to
discuss it in other scientific media. In March 1956 Scientific American presented a review
by Harrison Brown. His words, however, were devoted to an apology for the misbehaviour of
scientists who had suppressed Worlds in Collision and to a restatement of his own earlier
position with respect to that book. In a seven-column article, Brown dismissed Earth in
Upheaval without challenging one of its points. He dealt with the new book in a single
paragraph, then reverted to the old controversy. But he again refrained from producing any
of the arguments against Worlds in Collision which he had claimed would fill thirty pages.
[In 1963, Brown declared in a letter to one of Velikovsky's Canadian readers that his
review of Earth in Upheaval had been directed against the 'abominable behaviour of
scientists and publishers. ']
In December 1956, when the International Geophysical Year was in the planning stage,
Velikovsky submitted a proposal to the planning committee through the offices of Prof. H.
H. Hess of Princeton University: '... It is accepted that the terrestrial magnetic field
... decreases with the distance from the ground; yet the possibility should not be
discounted that the magnetic field above the ionosphere is stronger than at the earth's
surface. ' Also, 'an investigation as to whether the unexplained lunar librations, or
rocking movements, in latitude and longitude coincide with the revolutions of the
terrestrial magnetic poles around the geographical poles' might well be included in the
programme. Hess was notified by E. O. Hulburt of the committee that should the first
proposition be proven right by experiments already planned, the second might be
investigated later. [As it turned out, the most important single discovery of the IGY was
that the earth is surrounded by the Van Allen belts of charged particles trapped in the
far reaching geomagnetic field.]
Earth in Upheaval came to the attention of Claude Schaeffer, professor at College de
France and excavator of Ras Shamra in Syria. Schaeffer's independently conceived theory
that ancient Middle Eastern civilizations had suffered simultaneous natural catastrophes
on five occasions in the third and second millennia B. C. had been set forth in a 1948
volume, Stratigraphie Comparée et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidental. [Velikovsky published
an abstract of his own thesis in Scripta Academica in 1945.] Schaeffer wrote
enthusiastically to Velikovsky and the two began a correspondence that has continued ever
since. In 1957 Velikovsky met Schaeffer in Switzerland and again in Athens.
Oedipus and Akhnaton, a book that presents Velikovsky's identification of Akhnaton as the
historical prototype of the legendary Oedipus, appeared in 1960. It was an outgrowth of
the originally planned work, Freud and His Heroes, which had been set aside almost twenty
years earlier. [' Dreams Freud Dreamed, ' a reinterpretation of the dreams of the founder
of psychoanalysis, was published in the Psychoanalytic Review for October 1941.] This work
also met with silence on the part of most scholars, although Prof. Gertrude E. Smith of
the University of Chicago, one of the nation's leading classicists, wrote a favourable
review for the Chicago Tribune [19] . In the New York Herald Tribune [20] . Albright
opposed the thesis on the grounds that it was improbable that at such an early time there
could have been cultural intercourse between Egypt and Greece; yet Mycenaean ware was
found in abundance in the capital city of Akhnaton, and a seal bearing the name of
Akhnaton's mother turned up in a Mycenaean grave in Greece. The London Times [21]
attacked the book anonymously, using a method familiar from the campaign against Worlds in
Collision in America - discussing the book together with one of doubtful value to
establish guilt by association.
Ten years after the abrupt cancellation of Atwater's plans to dramatize Worlds in
Collision in Hayden Planetarium, U. S. space probe Pioneer V was launched. This experiment
was destined to destroy the idea that the earth and other planets are electromagnetically
isolated in a near-vacuum space -- the position Einstein could not abandon. After Pioneer
had been in solar orbit about six weeks, NASA called a press conference to report its
findings. As Newsweek relayed the news on May 9, 1960, 'In one exciting week, man has
learned more about the near reaches of the space that surrounds earth than the sum of his
knowledge over the last 50 years. Gone forever is any earthbound notion of space as a
serene thoroughfare for space travellers... a fantastic amount of cosmic traffic (hot
gaseous clouds, deadly rays, bands of electricity) rushes by at high speed, circles,
criss-crosses, and collides. ' Among the discoveries credited to Pioneer V are space-
pervading magnetic fields, electric currents girdling the earth, and high energy charged
particles from solar flares.
Between 1954 and 1960 Velikovsky appeared repeatedly before the faculty and students of
the geology department at Princeton University at the invitation of Prof. Hess, who
recognized the importance of exposing his students to a dissenting view. On April 12,
1961, Velikovsky again addressed the Graduate College Forum, this time on the subject 'How
Much of the Great Heresy of 1950 Is Valid Science in 1961? ' and offered an extensive list
of confirming finds from celestial and terrestrial spheres. Later that same month American
radio astronomers announced that the surface temperature of Venus must be 6000 F, and
scientists began an energetic search for an 'acceptable' explanation of this new aspect of
the solar system.
About the time Mariner II approached Venus, late in 1962, Princeton physicist V. Bargmann
and Columbia astronomer Lloyd Motz wrote a joint letter to the editor of Science [22] to
call attention to Velikovsky's priority in predicting three seemingly unrelated facts
about the solar system -- the earth's far-reaching magnetosphere, radio noise from
Jupiter, and the extremely high temperature of Venus -- which have been among the most
important and surprising discoveries in recent years. They urged that the Velikovsky
thesis be objectively reexamined by science.
Also at that time it was announced [23] that ground-based radiometric observations at
the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and at Goldstone Tracking station in
California had shown Venus to have a slow retrograde rotation, a characteristic that puts
it in a unique position among the planets.
Feeling vindicated by these developments and encouraged by the publication of the
Bargmann-Motz letter in Science, Velikovsky sought to publish a paper showing that the
points brought out in that letter were but a few among many other ideas set forth in his
books that have already been supported by independent research. The attempt was in vain;
Philip Abelson, the editor of Science, returned Velikovsky's paper without reading it and
published instead a facetious letter from a Poul Anderson, who claimed that 'the
accidental presence of one or two good apples does not redeem a spoiled barrelful. '
Mariner II, when its findings were revealed, confirmed Velikovsky's expectations, showing
the surface temperature of Venus to be at least 800 deg F and the planet's 15-mile-thick
envelope to be composed, not of carbon dioxide or water as previously supposed, but of
heavy molecules of hydrocarbons and perhaps more complicated organic compounds as well.
Retrograde rotation, organic molecules in the envelope, and extreme heat on Venus find no
convincing explanation, though they have already caused much deliberation; yet in Worlds
in Collision two of the three phenomena were claimed as crucial tests for the thesis that
Venus is a youthful planet with a short and violent history, and the third (anomalous
rotation) supports the same conclusions.
In spite of the clamour against the heretic, his books have found an enthusiastic
following in every country of the world. Here and there small study groups have sprung up;
Velikovsky's books are required reading in the courses of professors in a number of
universities. Letters from enthusiastic readers have poured in upon the author through all
the years since Worlds in Collision appeared. The British edition of that book is now in
its fourteenth printing, and the American edition is regularly reprinted. A German edition
went through five printings at the hands of its first publisher, then was attacked and
suppressed in 1952 by theologians (Kirchlich-historische Kreise); after being unavailable
for about six years, it is now back in print at the hands of a Swiss publisher.
Seldom in the history of science have so many diverse anticipations - the natural fallout
from a single central idea - been so quickly substantiated by independent investigation.
One after another of Velikovsky's 'wild hypotheses' have achieved empirical support, but
not until December 1962, in the Bargmann-Motz letter to Science, was his name ever linked
in the pages of scientific journals with any of these 'surprising' discoveries, and never
yet by the discoverers themselves. A platitude, repeated on various occasions, has it that
any one who makes as many predictions as Velikovsky is bound to be right now and then. But
he has yet to be shown wrong about any of his suggestions. Prof. H. H. Hess, who is now
Chairman of the Space Board of the National Academy of Science, recently wrote to
Velikovsky: 'Some of these predictions were said to be impossible when you made them; all
of them were predicted long before proof that they were correct came to hand. Conversely,
I do not know of any specific prediction you made that has since proven to be false. '
This record would appear to justify a long, careful look at Worlds in Collision by the
guild that not only refused to look before condemning it in the past, but actively
campaigned to defame its author.
Notes (References cited in "Minds in Chaos")
1. The Spectator, London, September 22, 1950.
2. Zeitschrift fuer Gesammte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 1931.
3. Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1963.
4. Newsweek, March 11, 1963.
5. Indianapolis Star, April 9, 1950.
6. Cincinnati Inquirer, April 9, 1950.
7. Toronto Globe and Mail, April 22, 1950.
8. Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1950.
9. Engineering and Science, Pasadena, Calif., May 1950.
10. April 22, 1950 (Saturday Review of Literature).
11. Isis, Vol. 41 (1950).
12. Amer. Jour. Science, Vol. 248 (1950).
13. Science, April 30, 1951.
14. Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., Vol. 96 (1952).
15. Nature, Vol. 186, May 14, 1960.
16. Jewish Bookland, September 1952.
17. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, May 29, 1960.
18. Proc. Amer, Phil. Soc., Vol. 96 (1952).
19. Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1960.
20. New York Herald Tribune, May 29, 1960.
21. London Times Literary Supplement, January 20, 1961.
22. Science, Vol. 138, December 21, 1962.
23. Science, Vol. 139, March 8, 1963; The National Observer, December 31, 1962.
PART TWO
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
by Ralph E. Juergens
AFTERMATH TO EXPOSURE:
'Minds in Chaos, ' reprinted here from the pages of The American Behavioral Scientist for
September 1963, chronicles more than a decade of controversy over the works of Immanuel
Velikovsky. But the story does not end in 1963. Events that have followed - set off in
large part by the Behavioral Scientist study - shape themselves into additional chapters,
and the image of objectivity so cherished by scientists loses even more of its luster as
these later events begin to take on perspective. The story has bright facets as well as
shadows, but in the glaring light of new knowledge from many fields the shadows cast by
acts of repression and vilification seem darker than before.
To place these events in their proper setting, it is necessary to backtrack a bit. In
August 1963 - the month before the appearance of the Behavioral Scientist's Velikovsky
issue - Harper's Magazine printed 'Scientists in Collision, ' an article by Eric Larrabee,
whose 1950 article in the same magazine marked the beginning of the controversy. Now,
writing 13 years later, Larrabee chose to point up the case for Velikovsky by citing
recent discoveries in astronomy, space science, geology, and geophysics that bring support
to the thesis of Worlds in Collision.
Like the authors of the articles in the Behavioral Scientist, Larrabee called attention to
a letter in Science (December 21, 1962) in which Valentin Bargmann, physicist of Princeton
University, and Lloyd Motz, astronomer of Columbia University, urged their colleagues to
recognize Velikovsky's priority in predicting three highly significant discoveries: (1)
the high temperature of the planet Venus; (2) the emission of non-thermal radio noise by
Jupiter; and (3) the vast reach of the earth's magnetic field in space.
The Bargmann-Motz plea for scientific good sportsmanship won no response in the journals
of science [1 and 2], even though almost simultaneously Venus-probe Mariner II eliminated
all doubt about the reality of the high temperature of Venus and gave strong support to
Velikovsky's further suggestion - offered as early as 1945 - that the envelope of Venus
consists largely of hydrocarbon gases and dust. After verifying that the editorial lid on
discussion of such matters was as tight as ever, Larrabee sought access once more to
Harper's.
'Science itself, ' wrote Larrabee, 'even while most scientists have considered his case to
be closed, has been heading in Velikovsky's direction. Proposals which seemed so shocking
when he made them are now commonplace... There is scarcely one of Velikovsky's central
ideas - as long as it was taken separately and devoid of its implications - which has not
since been propounded in all seriousness by a scientist of repute... His dismissal and
suppression by the scientific community require of scientists an act of agonizing
reappraisal. '
Almost immediately a reply issued from Donald Menzel, Director of Harvard College
observatory. This highly emotional essay turned up as a free-lance manuscript in the
editorial offices of Harper's. Hardly had it arrived, however, than it was recalled by its
author and replaced with a version less abusive to Larrabee and more abusive to
Velikovsky. It was so abusive that before printing it (Harper's December 1963), the editor
of the magazine struck one sentence, which read: 'Velikovsky has been as completely
discredited as was Dr. Brinkley of the goat-gland era or the thousands whom the American
Medical Association has exposed as quacks, preying on human misery, by purveying nostrums
or devices of no beneficial value whatever. '
Menzel was angered by the Bargmann-Motz letter in Science, considering it to be 'uncalled
for. ' He seemed infuriated that Larrabee in one noncommittal passage had called attention
to an ironical situation: in 1952, in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society, Menzel had offered calculations to show that if Velikovsky were right about
electromagnetic forces in the solar system, the sun would have to have a surface electric
potential of 10 19 (10 raised to 19th power, 10 billion billion) volts - an absolute
impossibility, according to the astronomer; but in 1960, V. A. Bailey, Emeritus Professor
of Physics at the University of Sydney (Professor Bailey died December 7, 1964, in
Switzerland - he was en route to the United states, where he hoped to see experiments
carried out in space to test his hypotheses), claimed that the sun is electrically
charged, and that it has a surface potential of 10 19 volts -- precisely the value
calculated by Menzel. Bailey, at the time his theory was first published, was entirely
unaware of Velikovsky's work and of Menzel's repudiation of it.
The idea that his 'quantitative refutation of Velikovsky's wild hypothesis' - Menzel's own
description of his contribution to the Proceedings in 1952 - should now be brought to
Velikovsky's support was intolerable to the Harvard astronomer. So, when he mailed his
paper to Harper's in 1963, he also sent a copy to Bailey in Sydney and asked him in a
covering letter to revoke his theory of electric charge on the sun. That theory was
casting doubt on the continuing efforts of Menzel and other American scientists to
discredit Velikovsky, and Menzel pointed out what he conceived to be an error in Bailey's
work.
Professor Bailey, taking exception to the idea that his own work should be abandoned to
accommodate the anti-Velikovsky forces, prepared an article in rebuttal of Menzel's piece
and submitted it to Harper's for publication in the same issue with Menzel's. Bailey had
discovered a simple arithmetical error in Menzel's calculations, which invalidated his
argument.
The editors of Harper's evidently taken aback by the heat of the controversy generated by
Larrabee's article, rejected Bailey's offering, but agreed to print some of his comments
if he would submit them in a brief letter. At the same time, however, Menzel was permitted
to correct the arithmetical error pointed out by Bailey, and he did so without
acknowledging the effect of the correction on his argument. Larrabee objected to such a
use of Bailey's rebuttal paper, and at first Menzel was not permitted to extirpate the
evidence of his carelessness; but after more pleading the correction was made.
Insight into the frame of mind of the Harvard astronomer at the time he wrote is to be
gained by noting his remarks about Velikovsky's score on predictions. In connection with
the radio noise of Jupiter, Menzel wrote that, since scientists for the most part do not
accept the theory of Worlds in Collision, 'any seeming verification of Velikovsky's
prediction is pure chance. ' In regard to the high temperature of Venus, the astronomer
argued that '" hot" is only a relative term. For example, liquid air is hot [196 deg below
zero, centigrade], relative to liquid helium [269 deg below zero, centigrade]... ' Later
in his article Menzel referred to this comparison: 'I have already disposed of the
question of the temperature of Venus. '
This is all Menzel had to say about the temperature of Venus, although in 1955 he himself
revoked his own estimate of two decades earlier that the ground temperature of Venus would
be 50 deg C. The revocation was explained by saying that the temperature must surely be
much lower. In 1959 the ground temperature of Venus was still estimated to be 17 deg C.
Mariner II found it to be at least 430 deg C, or about 800 deg F.
As for the extent of the earth's magnetic field, Menzel wrote: 'He [Velikovsky] said that
it would extend as far as the moon; actually the field suddenly breaks off at a distance
of several earth diameters. '
More than a year before Menzel took it upon himself to answer Larrabee, satellite Explorer
X had detected the earth's magnetic field at a distance of at least 22 earth radii and
gave no indication that this was its limit. Recently the Interplanetary Monitoring
Platform satellites - especially IMP I - have found that the tail of the earth's
magnetosphere extends 'at least as far as the orbit of the Moon' (Missiles and Rockets,
January 18, 1965).
Larrabee, limiting his reply to one page in the same issue of Harper's, pointed out that
'where Dr Menzel touches on points of fact he is either misleading or misinformed. ' The
summation that followed stands as a classic example of the demolition of a scientist's
arguments by a non-scientist; it is particularly noteworthy in as much as Menzel's main
theme was that non-scientists do not understand scientific issues and the scientific
method, and therefore should be rebuked for entering into scientific debate before the
general public. Just how successful Larrabee's counterattack proved to be is shown in the
examples given below:
Menzel claimed that astronomers recognized the presence of electrified gas and magnetic
fields in interplanetary space long before Velikovsky. Larrabee quoted Menzel's own words
written in 1953: 'Indeed, the total number of electrons that could escape from the sun
would be able to run a one cell flashlight for less that one minute. '
Menzel asserted that the earth's Van Allen belts contain equal numbers of positive and
negative particles. Larrabee noted that Dr. James Van Allen, who discovered the belts,
admits that this is an assumption for which there is no experimental evidence.
Menzel attempted to calculate the electric field in space near the earth that would result
from a charge on the sun of the magnitude suggested by Bailey. Larrabee, in reply,
observed that the calculation was based on the erroneous assumption that space is a non-
conducting medium.
Menzel claimed that satellite motions are not disturbed by electromagnetic forces.
Larrabee cited the publications of a number of space scientists to show that both orbital
and rotational motions are affected by the presence of charged particles and magnetic
fields.
Menzel argued that the disturbance of the earth's rotation by solar flares is attributable
to temporary heating and expansion of the earth and is not an electromagnetic effect.
Larrabee pointed out that Professor Andre Danjon, who discovered this phenomenon,
evaluated the thermal effect and found it altogether inadequate; Danjon concludes that
electromagnetism is the only likely cause.
Menzel insisted on his own earlier position that the envelope of Venus is made up of ice
crystals and ridiculed Velikovsky's suggestion of 1950 - actually expressed as early as
1946 in letters to astronomers Harlow Shapley, Rupert Wildt, and Walter S. Adams - that
hydrocarbons must predominate in the envelope. Larrabee referred the Harvard astronomer to
a number of publications, including the official report of the Mariner II flight to Venus,
in which it is stated that the clouds of Venus consist of condensed hydrocarbons.
Summing up, Larrabee wrote: 'Velikovsky offers evidence from numerous other sciences, in
particular geology and archaeology. Breaking the barriers between disciplines, he arrives
at conclusions which no discipline had reached independently. This is the real nature of
his challenge, and it is fundamental. '
In the limited space allotted his letter (Harper's January 1964), Professor Bailey
expressed surprise 'that Professor Menzel totally ignores the impressive testimony to the
worth of Dr. Velikovsky's predictions contained in the recent letter of that outstanding
scientist Professor H. H. Hess of Princeton. ' Bailey noted that Menzel's challenge to the
theory of electric charge on the sun 'is unconvincing since it involves certain out-of
date views about the material contents of interplanetary space as well as the unproved
assumption that the earthly laws of the electrodynamic field can be safely extrapolated to
bodies such as the sun of unearthly dimensions and temperatures. ' In Bailey's view,
'important [new] facts must compel scientists to adopt a cautious attitude towards the
astronomical ideas on which they were reared until the powerful new methods of observation
developed by space scientists have accumulated more knowledge. '
Earlier, Larrabee's article brought response from astronomer Lloyd Motz, who emphasized
that his purpose in writing (Harper's, October 1963) was to make clear his own
disagreement with Velikovsky's theories. Nevertheless, he stated: 'I do support his right
to present his ideas and to have these ideas considered by responsible scholars and
scientists as the creation of a serious and dedicated investigator... His writings should
be carefully studied and analyzed because they are the product of an extraordinary and
brilliant mind, and are based upon some of the most concentrated and penetrating
scholarship of our period... ' The debate in Harper's went on in the August, October,
December 1963, and the January 1964 issues. During the same period another effort failed
to break the editorial barrier.
In the spring of 1963, Velikovsky had reason to suppose that confirmation of so many of
his once-heretical predictions, and the even more impressive fact that none of his
predictions had gone wrong, might have altered his standing among scientists - that
finally he might be granted space in their journals. Despite the fact that a paper, 'Some
Additional Examples of Correct Prognosis, ' had been rejected without being read by Philip
Abelson, the editor of Science, Velikovsky now prepared an article on 'Venus, a Youthful
Planet. ' H. H. Hess, who served that year as President of the American Geological
Society, offered to transmit the new paper to the American Philosophical Society with his
recommendation as a member of the society that it be published in the Proceedings.
This simple act of contribution seems to have generated a storm that nearly spilt the
society before calm was restored.
The fortunes and misfortunes of Dr Velikovsky's paper during the half-year it was held by
the Philosophical Society are revealed, in part, in statements made by two men - George W.
Corner and Edwin G. Boring - both of whom played earlier, and thus far unrecounted, roles
in the Velikovsky story.
In 1952, Corner was chairman of a symposium on Unorthodoxies in Modern Science at the
annual meeting of the Philosophical Society. It was he who permitted Velikovsky to mount
the platform and offer comments of his own following the reading of a paper in which
Harvard's lady astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin attacked Worlds in Collision in a most
violent and irresponsible manner. This bit of fair play on Corner's part later was
repudiated by the society's publications committee; Velikovsky's correction of
Gaposchkin's misquotations were rejected for publication in the Proceedings. (See page 231
for a comparison of texts - Worlds in Collision versus Gaposchkin's alleged quotations
from the book). By 1963 Corner had become Executive Officer of the Society and Editor of
the Proceedings.
Velikovsky's Venus paper therefore came directly to the hand of Corner. For several months
following the submission of the paper by Hess there was no word as to its disposition. In
the meantime, Larrabee's article in Harper's appeared, as did the special issue of the
Behavioral Scientist devoted to 'The Politics of Science and Dr Velikovsky. ' Both
documents surely came to the attention of at least some of the members of the
Philosophical Society's publications committee.
At last, in a letter dated October 15, 1963, Corner reported to Hess. The publications
committee, after several sessions in which Velikovsky's paper was discussed 'at great
length, ' was stalemated by 'divided opinions. ' The committee split into two belligerent
camps, each unwilling to yield to the views of the other. Corner informed Hess that he had
been 'directed to seek the advice of several responsible scientists and scholars, all
members of the society' but not of the publications committee. He promised to keep Hess
informed of later developments.
Along with Cecilia Gaposchkin and I. Bernard Cohen, professor of the history of science,
Edwin Boring - a professor of psychology - was a scheduled speaker on the programme of the
1952 symposium on unorthodoxies. Thus the panel was dominated by Harvard professors.
Boring, in his talk and in the version later published in the Proceedings, did not neglect
to make sport of Velikovsky. Two years later, in an article published in the American
Scientist for October 1954, he classed Velikovsky with those who, bolstered by ego alone,
hold to ideas long after evidence turns against them.
Now, however, Professor Boring altered his position. On a visit to the campus of George
Peabody College in Nashville in the fall of 1963 he made known his new-found feelings
about 'the whole sordid mess' retold by the Behavioral Scientist. He was particularly
critical of the role played by Harlow Shapley.
Boring disclosed at Peabody that in stormy meetings of the publications committee there
had been heated discussion whether or not to print Velikovsky's paper. Further, he let it
be known that he was to be put in charge of a new Letters column in the Proceedings. Such
a column would provide what Boring described as an 'appropriate vehicle' for the
controversial paper, which would be the first item to appear in the column. Handling the
matter in this way would permit publication without implying approval by the Society.
As it turned out, however, even this face-saving compromise failed. In a letter dated
January 20, 1964, Corner reported to Hess that 'the Committee on Publications... completed
a long and careful study of the problem raised by the short manuscript of Mr Velikovsky...
During the past couple of months, at the direction of the committee, I submitted the paper
to an eminent historian of science and an equally eminent sociologist, and an astronomer
of very high standing completely outside the circle of Mr Velikovsky's critics.
'After extremely thoughtful discussion, at which every possible way of dealing with this
matter was considered, the committee decided that the Society should not publish this
paper... '
'The Politics of Science and Dr Velikovsky' appeared in ABS in September 1963 and quickly
became a subject of intense discussion and debate on college campuses around the country.
For the first time the story of the suppression of Worlds in Collision had been
documented. The initial printing of the issue, itself larger than usual, quickly became
exhausted in the face of a surge of orders for additional copies, and a second printing
was made.
Reader reaction was predominantly favourable. A number of scholars and foundation officers
wrote letters of commendation to the editor, Alfred de Grazia. Others wrote directly to
Velikovsky, expressing hope that recognition for his contributions to human knowledge soon
would be forthcoming. One of very few expressions of disapproval appeared in a letter to
the present writer from Warren Weaver, a vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation;
Weaver asserted that he was 'amazed, disappointed, and in fact appalled that this serious
journal [ABS] would devote so much space and effort to a series of articles of this sort.
' This was only the first of several occasions when the Sloan Foundation executives
constituted themselves a Committee of Public Safety against Velikovsky's ideas.
Professor Bernard Barber of Barnard College, Columbia University, reported within a few
weeks of publication that 'I have already used your Velikovsky issue to very good teaching
purpose in my Sociology of Knowledge course in connection with my general article on
resistance by scientists to scientific discovery. '
Charles Perrow, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate
School of Public and International Affairs, expressed the conviction that the ABS
Velikovsky issue 'should be required reading in social science courses. '
G. A. Lundberg of the University of Washington wrote: 'It seems to me that the A. A. A.
S., not to mention individual scientists and groups, must now prepare a detailed answer.
What is really at issue are the mores governing the reception of new scientific ideas on
the part of established spokesmen for science. '
Indeed, it was tempting for spokesmen of science to take up the charges made by ABS. Even
though Professor Menzel, taking it upon himself to reply to Larrabee's article in Harper's
had, in the opinion of many of his colleagues, fared very badly in the exchange, a more
cautious and cleverly calculated reply to the Behavioral Scientist might have a telling
effect.
Since the issues raised against the behaviour of the scientific community were essentially
questions of ethics, a seemingly natural choice of vehicle in which to pursue these issues
was the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal which prides itself on being a medium
of expression for 'the conscience of science. ' The Bulletin has a readership of more than
25,000, including most of the leading scientists of the world. It has prestige among such
people and an obligation to undertake inquiries into the politics of science - to demand
objective self-analysis on questions of scientific behaviour. Being a platform both for
confession of error and for expression of ideas for improving the image of science, it is
ideally suited as an arena in which to come to grips with the issues of the Velikovsky
case. Unfortunately, however, the Bulletin chose to take up arms against the suggestion of
fair play for Velikovsky.
As Eugene Rabinowitch, the editor of the Bulletin, later acknowledged in a letter to
Professor H. H. Hess (September 8, 1964), a widespread reawakening of interest in
Velikovsky's theories, and his being championed as a great savant by the Behavioral
Scientist, required remedial action. Clearly Rabinowitch took it to be his first duty to
close ranks with fellow scientists whose conspiratorial acts in suppression of Velikovsky
had been publicly charged against them.
Rabinowitch assigned his Washington reporter, Howard Margolis - no part a scientist - the
job of wielding the hatchet against ABS and Velikovsky. Margolis resurrected techniques
employed with devastating effect during the earlier outcry against Worlds in Collision.
His vulgar and thoroughly irresponsible article, 'Velikovsky Rides Again' (Bulletin, April
1964) is filled with misrepresentation and misquotations, jeers and sneers, bald
statements of unfounded charges, and dogmatic presentations of received theory as fact.
Margolis chose to discuss matters of philology and Egyptology -- fields unfamiliar to him,
but having intrinsic appeal in that most Bulletin readers could be expected to be little
oriented in them and hence dependent upon the integrity of editor and author.
Displaying ignorance even of the elementary French required to read one of Velikovsky's
sources, Margolis resorted to bravado - 'Now if you look up the actual inscription... ' -
and launched into a totally confused discussion of Velikovsky's interpretation of a
hieroglyphic text found at El Arish in Egypt. This is an inscription in stone telling of
storm and darkness and the death of a Pharaoh in a whirlpool. The place name Pi Kirot
appears in this inscription, and the name Pi ha-hiroth is given in Exodus as the place
where the tribes of Israel crossed the Red Sea; Velikovsky suggested in Worlds in
Collision - and amplified the argument in Ages in Chaos, unbeknownst to Margolis - that
both references are to the same place. The name appears only once in the Egyptian
monuments and only once in the Bible. And in context, both sources tell of storm and
darkness, and of catastrophe befalling a Pharaoh overwhelmed by water.
From the confused arguments presented by Margolis the only facts to emerge are that he
does not understand that Egyptian was written without vowels and that he is not even aware
of the use of 'ha' in Hebrew as the definite article. Ironically the Bulletin's Washington
reporter elected to challenge Velikovsky on a philological conclusion which had won the
acceptance of Professor William F. Albright, one of the world's leading orientalists and a
harsh critic of Ages in Chaos, as early as 1946.
Rabinowitch printed Margolis's vainglorious essay without comment.
At the appearance of this diatribe in the estimable Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
Eric Larrabee - a past contributor to the journal - contacted the managing editor and was
promised space for a reply in an early issue. But when he met the assigned deadline, he
was informed that the space was not longer available.
The mere vulgarity and unscholarly quality of Margolis's article did not deter its eager
reception in quarters dominated by organized science. For example, L. H. Farinholt,
another vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, sent a facsimile of the article
to Moses Hadas, Jay Professor of Greek at Columbia University. Hadas had remarked in a
published book review that 'in our time Immanuel Velikovsky... appears to be approaching
vindication. ' Farinholt thought Hadas should find the Margolis essay 'of interest and
perhaps amusing. '
Hadas replied that he had no opinion about the validity of Velikovsky's astronomical
theories, 'but I know that he is not dishonest. What bothered me was the violence of the
attack on him: if his theories were absurd, would they not have been exposed as such in
time without a campaign of vilification? One after another of the reviews misquoted him
had then attacked the misquotation. So in the Margolis piece you send me... [Hadas gives
several examples of Margolis's misrepresentations of Velikovsky's correct quotations] It
is his critic, not Velikovsky, who is uninformed and rash... The issue is one of ordinary
fair play. '
On May 12, 1964, Alfred de Grazia, as publisher of The American Behavioral Scientist,
wrote to Rabinowitch and demanded that the Bulletin editor repudiate the many distortions
in Margolis's article. 'Our contributors and our advisors have urged us to take action to
remedy the wrong done us. We hesitate to do this since we prefer to rely in the first
instance on your scholarly good will. '
Rabinowitch replied to de Grazia on June 23, in a long letter urging him not to go to
court; 'the magazine cannot disclaim legal responsibility for any defamatory statements,
but I do not see in the article by Mr Margolis any statements of such nature with respect
to yourself or to the contributors of your journal. ' Thus tacitly admitting that
Velikovsky had been defamed, Rabinowitch suggested that 'since Margolis brought up
paleographic evidence, fairness requires the Bulletin to give space to a letter disputing
this evidence (provided this letter is not more abusive than Mr. Margolis's criticisms). '
He offered to print an article presenting the views of Velikovsky, should it be written
and submitted by a scientist of standing. Rabinowitch concluded: 'It is in this spirit of
scientific argumentation that the whole problem should be resolved. '
Velikovsky, informed of Rabinowitch's stand, would not consent to enter into debate with
Margolis on matters of Hebrew and Egyptian philology and paleography. The author of the
Bulletin article had amply demonstrated incompetence in these subject. But since
Rabinowitch had written of the 'spirit of scientific argumentation, ' Velikovsky thought
he might be willing to publish a paper expressing a positive point of view. Professor Hess
agreed to submit for publication in the Bulletin 'Venus, a Youthful Planet, ' the paper by
Velikovsky which the American Philosophical Society had returned earlier.
On September 8, 1964 (in the letter already quoted in part, above), Rabinowitch replied to
Hess: 'I am afraid I cannot offer publication in the Bulletin [for Velikovsky's
manuscript] - not because we are "afraid" of publishing it, but because the Bulletin is
not a magazine for scientific controversies...
'I am not qualified - and have no time - to study Velikovsky's books, or even his article
(which I return with this letter), but I know enough of the absence of dogmatism in modern
science and its easy acceptance of revolutionary new ideas - including the relativity of
time and absence of exact causality in the world of elementary particles - to trust
qualified astrophysicists with an unprejudiced judgment about Mr Velikovsky's theories -
and so far as I am aware, not a single qualified scientist has raised his voice in favour
of [them] (even if you and one of your colleagues from Princeton have felt in their duty
to point out in Science the remarkable correctness of some of Velikovsky's specific
conclusions). '
It is interesting to compare this expression of complacency with comments made by
Robinowitch in his 1963 book, The Dawn of a New Age:
'As scientists, we have a common experience - that, in science, free inquiry and
untrammeled exploration by individuals are the ultimate sources of the most important
progress. The greatest scientific discoveries have come through efforts of non-conformist
individuals who have asked heretical questions and boldly doubted the validity of
generally accepted conceptions... ' (p. 222).
'I believe that the responsibility of scientists in our time is to bring into human
affairs a little more of such skeptical rationality, a little less prejudice, a greater
respect for facts and figures, a more critical attitude toward theories and dogmas, a
greater consciousness of the limitations of our knowledge, and a consequent tolerance for
different ideas and a readiness to submit them to the test of the experiment... For
scientists, there should be no final truths, no forbidden areas of exploration, no words
that are taboo, no prescribed or proscribed ideas... ' (p. 223).
'A scientist must always be prepared to submit his beliefs, findings, and generalizations
to the never ending test of observation and experiment. Not that he is entirely without
resistance to new theories that would overthrow the principles which he has become
accustomed to accepting as valid; but of all groups of men, he belongs to the most open-
minded one, the one most ready to accept change. He would be a poor scientist who would
refuse to consider new facts and to change ideas to accommodate them. The only thing of
which science is intolerant is intolerance itself - claims that certain concepts are
sacrosanct, true beyond doubt, and protected from the test of logic and experience. ' (p.
323).
In his correspondence with de Grazia and Hess, Rabinowitch admitted that he had not read
Velikovsky's books. Furthermore, he displayed an imperfect memory: to de Grazia he
expressed a vague recollection that Shapley and Menzel had analyzed Velikovsky's theories,
yet Shapley never published any arguments or articles on the subject; in his letter to
Hess, Rabinowitch gave evidence of confusion about more recent events, for he mistook Hess
for one of the writers of the Bargmann-Motz letter in Science. Still, on the basis of no
acquaintance with Velikovsky's work, and of hazy memories of what others had said and
done, he undertook a campaign against Worlds in Collision and put an unqualified
journalist in charge of the operation.
Professor de Grazia reproduced the Margolis text in full in the Behavioral Scientist for
October 1964 and appended an extensive commentary pointing out in detail -54 examples -
its many points of ignorance and misrepresentation. This elicited a letter from Margolis:
'May I merely suggest that before your readers reach a judgment on the matter, they take
the trouble to check Velikovsky's assertions, my assertions, and de Grazia's rebuttal
against at least one source. I suggest Augustine's City of God... Unlike the El-Arish
manuscript... the book is available in any library... ' In a covering letter, Margolis
offered to meet de Grazia to establish harmony.
Margolis, still uninformed - many months after his article appeared in print - that the
El-Arish document he purported to interpret is an inscription in stone and not a
manuscript, suggested that de Grazia's readers inform themselves of what Velikovsky has to
say about 'Minerva, Deucalion, Varro, Ogyges, Venus, and so on' by checking references to
those names in St Augustine. Clearly he hoped no one would follow through on his
suggestion; otherwise he would not have risked such innuendo.
De Grazia replied:
'You claim that Velikovsky misquoted St Augustine's City of God, but do not submit any
specific reference. In a matter of accuracy in quotations no issue can be settled except
by referring to the concrete texts. In the matter of quotations from St Augustine, in your
own article, you gave only one example, and on that point your charges were unfounded...
If you know of texts of ancient literature that contradict the thesis of Dr Immanuel
Velikovsky, you will do a service to knowledge by publishing them. But as long as you do
not quote them, any debate would be built on air. The solid fact is that the ABS proved
that you have misquoted or misrepresented the writers of ABS, the works of Dr Velikovsky,
and the two ancient texts mentioned in your article. Please do manifest your professed
concern with accuracy in quotations by taking steps to correct this matter.
'Since you are wrong in fifty-four ways already, it ill behooves you to increase your
score. '
The issue of irresponsibility on the part of reviewers was brought into focus again in the
summer of 1965. Book Week, a Sunday supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, the
Washington Post, and the San Francisco Examiner, published (July 11, 1965) a review of
Worlds in Collision by Willy Ley, author of popular works on rocketry and space travel.
The occasion for this review, 15 years after the first publication of the book, was its
appearance, along with Earth in Upheaval, in paperback form (Delta, 1965).
In his essay, Ley wheels to the firing line almost every device used by the earlier
reviewers: he dismisses the arguments of Worlds in Collision by summarizing them in a
manner calculated to make them appear ridiculous; he categorizes Velikovsky's works with
those of Hans Hörbiger, a long-discredited catastrophist whose speculations never led to
verifiable predictions; he indulges in the same false generalizations about Velikovsky's
handling of source materials (. '.. half the time the Bible does not say what it is
supposed to say'), but disdains the opportunity to be specific; he objects to a method of
scholarly deduction that he does not even attempt to understand ('... references to old
writings... is a peculiar way of establishing proof of physical events'); he flaunts his
own ignorance of material Velikovsky assembled in Earth in Upheaval (. '.. animal life
went through the fateful years of 1500 B. C. without any disturbance'); and he outlines
his own mathematical proof of 'the complete impossibility' of the eruption of Venus from
Jupiter -showing himself unaware that cosmologist R. A. Lyttleton recently demonstrated
mathematically that Venus must have originated by eruption from Jupiter or one of the
other major planets.
Velikovsky was invited by the editor of Book Week to write a rebuttal to Ley's
accusations. Taking the opportunity to answer his uncritical critics in general, he
prepared a long article, which appeared in Book Week for September 9, 1965.
Professor Horace M. Kallen, after reading the rejoinder, wrote to Velikovsky: 'I think you
have put Ley in a position he will find it very difficult to wriggle out of. '
The appearance of Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval in soft covers occasioned
another episode that bears recording.
In March 1965 a modest advertisement announcing the Delta editions was submitted by Dell
Publishing Co. for publication in Science and Scientific American. Both periodicals turned
down the ad, but were unwilling to put their refusals in writing. Eventually, however,
Robert V. Ormes, managing editor of Science, wrote to Franklin Spier, Inc., the ad agency:
'As Mr Scherago [advertising manager of Science] told you on the telephone, the
advertisement you submitted has not been accepted by Science. ' As the agency reported in
a memo to Dell: 'We insisted on a letter giving some reason for the rejection. So far,
just this "answer" from Science - which brilliantly avoids mentioning the books that are
involved. '
Perhaps inadvertently, Science listed the paperback edition of Worlds in Collision under
'Reprints' in its occasional department 'New Books' (May 7, 1965).
Throughout the story of Velikovsky's reception by science, one phenomenon occurs over and
over again. One prominent scientist after another undertakes to criticize and ridicule the
author and his theories; having done this, he states - not without a trace of pride - that
he has not read the books.
This trend was established early, when Harlow Shapley, in interviews, and Cecilia Payne-
Gaposchkin, in print, spoke out against Worlds in Collision before the book appeared.
Astronomer Dean McLaughlin of Michigan boasted that he never would read Velikovsky's book,
yet he felt no compunction against proclaiming it to be 'nothing but lies. ' Philip
Abelson rejected Velikovsky's article in 1963 without experiencing any compulsion to read
it, and Rabinowitch did likewise with another article, at the same time throwing the
weight of his journal's prestige behind a renewal of the campaign to brand Velikovsky as
incompetent.
Another phenomenon is the alacrity with which scientist-critics of Velikovsky proclaim
their own objectivity by citing their acceptance of Einstein's theories. Again and again
the name of Einstein or the theory of relativity has been brought forward in comparisons
of Velikovsky and Einstein which are intended to justify the different receptions accorded
their works. Einstein's theory, held in highest esteem in spite of the fact that even
after half a century there is no indisputable proof of its validity, is held up as a model
scientific theory; Velikovsky's theory, on the other hand, although many predictions based
upon it have already found vindication, is rejected as unscientific. The logic in this
stance - adopted most recently by Rabinowitch - is elusive.
Still another approach to the problem posed by Velikovsky's heresies is to depreciate the
evidence or ignore it altogether when it tends to support him. This technique averts
discussion and acknowledgment of his successful predictions. Sky & Telescope, a journal
for amateur astronomers published by Harvard Observatory, reported the findings of Mariner
II by reprinting the summary from a book, Mariner, Mission to Venus, written by the staff
of Jet Propulsion Laboratory - the group which conducted the experiments aboard the
spacecraft. Minor ellipses in the text are noted by dots in the reprinted version, but
four major deletions are unacknowledged by any sort of mark.
Restoration of the mutilated text requires reinsertion of the following:
(1) 'The rotation might be retrograde... '
(2) The clouds of Venus 'probably are comprised of condensed hydrocarbons held in oily
suspension... '
(3) 'No water could be present at the surface, but there is some possibility of small
lakes of molten metal of one type or another. '
(4) 'Some reddish sunlight... may find its way through the 15-mile-thick cloud cover, but
the surface is probably very bleak. '
Is it just coincidence that these points - which (1) suggest anomalous behaviour in the
past, (2) lend credence to a specific prediction made by Velikovsky, (3) challenge long-
held motions of water clouds on Venus, and (4) cast an insurmountable barrier across the
path of the theory that Venus is heated by a greenhouse-like trapping of sunlight - fell
by the wayside in an editorial office at Harvard? Does Harvard University have any
responsibility for inquiring into such matters (the question asked by de Grazia in 1963)?
Influential scientists continue to exert pressure against any sort of favourable mention
of Velikovsky in popular journals and magazines. The easiest ploy is to impress upon
editors that only scientists - and preferably selected members of the establishment - are
competent to judge scientific theories. And since science is an important source of news
of interest to the general public, editors are not inclined to reject such advice. An
article planned in 1963 by Newsweek to call attention to Velikovsky's predictions and
their fulfilment by Mariner II was abandoned following a telephone conversation between a
Newsweek editor and Harlow Shapley - the astronomer to whom Velikovsky wrote in 1946 that
a crucial test of his theory would be a search for hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of
Venus.
In the Soviet Union, a journal of popular science, Nauka i Zhizn (Science and Life), in a
series of articles continuing since 1962, has been casually presenting Velikovsky's
theories, even the parenthetical speculation that in the legend of the sinking of Atlantis
one too many zeroes crept in to the traditional dating of the event. Velikovsky's name,
however, has not been mentioned in the series.
The Italian multi-lingual journal Civiltà delle Macchine, in its issue for May-June 1964,
underlined the need for eternal vigilance to preserve the spirit of the scientific method,
which had been discussed at length in an earlier issue commemorating Galileo's fourth
centenary. Professor Bruno de Finetti of the Instituto Matematico of the University of
Rome contributed the lead article for the May-June issue.
To illustrate a theme presented by the journal's editors - science must continually guard
itself against scepticism that tends to limit its perception to a series of unrelated
hypotheses just as it must guard against dogmatism - Professor de Finetti expressed the
opinion that the refusal of the large majority in the academic community to even discuss
Velikovsky's ideas imparts 'one great teaching above all others; ' professionalization and
departmentalization in science has become a major obstacle to the continuous renewal so
necessary to science.
Thus, according to de Finetti, scholars refused to discuss the merits of Velikovsky's
studies because their attentions were diverted by a more personal issue - the fact that he
challenged 'the right of their fossilized brains to rest in peace' with the skills and
problems already established. The defence of such vested interest in the preservation of
comfortable interdisciplinary boundaries may transform 'each clan of specialists and the
great clan of scientists in general into a sort of despotic and irresponsible mafia. '
Although American scientists and science editors continue to ignore - or rail against -
Velikovsky's ideas, impersonal science itself continues to explode its own more
conventional theories by turning up new evidence. Much new evidence tends to support
Velikovsky; some of it is simply compatible with his views; up to now none of it has
refuted them.
In April 1964 an announcement by radio astronomers of evidence that the planet Jupiter
suddenly changed its period of rotation made front-page news. The correspondence between
the rotational period of radio sources and the rotational period of the body of the planet
is entirely inferential, but the time of sudden change noted for the radio sources
coincided with a similar change in the period of rotation of Jupiter's red spot. In this
connection, it should be noted that in a memorandum of proposed space researches sent by
Velikovsky to Professor H. H. Hess at Hess's request in September 1963 the following
suggestion is made: 'Precise calculations should be made as to the effect of the magnetic
field permeating the solar system on the motions of [Jupiter] which is surrounded by a
magnetosphere of an intensity presumably 10 14 times that of the terrestrial
magnetosphere. This is basic to the impending reevaluation of electromagnetic effects in
celestial mechanics. '
At a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Hamburg (1964) the planets Mercury
and Venus became topics of intense interest. Australian astronomers reported evidence of
temperatures near 600F on the dark side of Mercury, where temperatures far below zero were
expected. According to Scientific American (October 1964), 'The explanation advanced for
this surprisingly high temperature provides another surprise: that in spite of Mercury's
small mass and its exposure to solar radiation pressure... it has enough of an atmosphere
to transfer some of the sunlit side's abundant heat ration to the dark side. ' Perhaps a
more reasonable explanation will be found some day in the sequel to Worlds in Collision,
which deals with earlier catastrophes, at least one of which the human record ascribes to
Mercury.
New radar studies of Venus have confirmed its retrograde rotation, first detected at about
the time of the Mariner II flyby by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's
Goldstone Tracking Station. Radar Work at Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in Puerto Rico
by scientists from Cornell University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology pinpointed
the period of rotation at 247 +/-5 days. The planet orbits the sun in 225 days. British
and Soviet workers also have verified the retrograde rotation.
The U. S. Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) Satellite - Explorer 18 - has detected
a magnetosphere around the moon --a teardrop-shaped region reaching at least 68,000 miles
into space on the side away from the sun. The same probe has discovered a region of high-
energy electrons fanning out and trailing off like a wake on the night side of the earth.
K. A. Anderson, who first reported this discovery, believes it likely that the moon
encounters this tail on its monthly passages around the earth. Dr N. F. Ness of Goddard
Space Flight Center believes the earth's tail may extend well past the orbit of the moon.
The earth's tail is believed to be an elongation of the geomagnetic field in the anti-
solar direction. In 1953 Velikovsky suggested that the earth's magnetic field may reach as
far as the moon, causing certain unexplained libratory, or rocking, motions of the moon.
In Book Week for September 5, 1965, Velikovsky claimed: 'in July, Mariner IV confirmed my
picture of Mars as more moon-like than earth-like: "The contacts of Mars with other
planets larger than itself and more powerful make it highly improbable that any higher
forms of life, if they previously existed there, survive on Mars. It is, rather, a dead
planet"( Worlds in Collision, page 364)... That Mars has crater-like formations, as the
moon does, follows from the way these formations were built. Mars was heated and it
bubbled; it was pelted by interplanetary bolts; some large meteorites pelted it, too.
These events are described on many pages of Worlds in Collision as having taken place
mainly in the 8th century before the present era... the sharp outlines of the formations,
in the presence of an atmosphere, speak for their recentness. '
Velikovsky's efforts of more than a decade to induce radiocarbon laboratories around the
world to test objects from the New Kingdom of Egypt have yielded their first fruits. The
test results are compatible with Velikovsky's chronology and quite incompatible with the
conventional timetable.
In 1963 three small pieces of wood from the tomb of Tutankhamen were delivered to the
radiocarbon laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The Director of the
laboratory, Dr Elizabeth K. Ralph, performed the test, using all three samples (total 26
grams). In Radiocarbon (1965), a Yale University publication, she reports that the date of
the material, based on Libby's estimate of the half-life of radiocarbon, is 1030+/-50, B.
C.( based on the Washington estimate of the half-life, the date is 1120+/-52, B. C.).
These dates are clearly at odds with accepted chronology, which places Tutankhamen in the
fourteenth century. Velikovsky places him in the ninth century. The test results do not
confute Velikovsky's chronology because radiocarbon in wooden objects indicates the time
when the cells of the wood were actively growing. Only wood from the outer parts of a log
yields dates close to the time of cutting, whereas wood from the interior of a log may
yield dates hundreds of years earlier. Almost half the wood tested in this case was of
Lebanese cedar, a tree famed for its longevity and not usually cut as a sapling. Therefore
it is possible that heartwood grown about 1030 (or 1120) B. C. was cut in the ninth
century to make objects for Tutankhamen; it is not possible, however, that wood grown
centuries after his death furnished objects for a fourteenth-century pharaoh.
No hard and fast conclusions can be drawn on the basis of a single test of this kind. But
perhaps now the door has been opened for the further testing that is so urgently needed in
the 13 centuries whose chronology Velikovsky has challenged. Up to now this entire period
of history had been left out of radiocarbon programmes.
Because of the eminently successful campaign of defamation in the 1950's the name
Velikovsky became anathema among editors and science writers of newspapers and mass-
circulation magazines. In large degree this situation is still unchanged. But the article
by Larrabee in Harper's for August 1963 and the special issue of the American Behavioral
Scientist in September 1963 initiated a fermentation process in scholarly circles and on
college campuses which, up to now, has been unreflected in either the general or the
scientific press. Students and young professors are making known their desires to
understand the implications Velikovsky's theories and of their non-reception by science.
The October-November 1964 issue of Quadrant, published in Sydney by the Australian
Association for Cultural Freedom, carried a ten-page article, 'Velikovsky in Collision, '
by David Stove, senior lecturer in philosophy at Sydney University.
Stove offers objective criticism of the evidence advanced by Velikovsky in all his books:
'... the most striking evidence for Velikovsky's theory remains the historical. The Earth
spoke, at least to my ear, very equivocally for him... What, then, of the skies?... it is
the Evening Star herself who has responded to two of Velikovsky's antecedently improbable
predictions with an audible and astonishing "yes"... [The weight of this evidence] should
not be overestimated... but I do not see how it could be denied that these two
confirmations substantially raise the probability of...[ the entire thesis] above the
value it had in the light of all the previous evidence; and this was by no means
negligible. '
Stove attributes the violent reaction to Worlds in Collision among astronomers to
Velikovsky's forceful reminder 'that astronomy is not a theoretical science, but a branch
of natural history... The uneventfulness of the history of the solar system is an
assumption on which astronomers have placed a tacit reliance it by no means ever deserved.
In the house that they knew so well, they had never noticed this door. And Velikovsky did
the most infuriating thing in the world: he - a stranger - walked through this open
door... We should not withhold the highest possible admiration for the first man to
suggest that the earth is not only not the centre, not only not still, but not even safe.
'
Notes (References Cited in "Aftermath to Exposure")
1. In a letter to Science (Vol. 140, p. 1, 362), Australian radio astronomer Grote Reber
charged that Velikovsky's prediction Had trouble resolving dest near word action type is
Launch of the earth's far-reaching magnetic field was 'more in the nature of ad hoc guess.
' His authority for this is science-fiction writer Poul Anderson (Science Vol. 139, p.
671), whose childish and facetious comments on the Bargmann-Motz letter (Science Vol. 138,
p. 1, 350) caught the fancy of Editor Philip Abelson. On the basis of his own 1955
speculation that the earth's atmosphere has a disc-like equatorial bulge (not yet
discovered), Reber claims prior prediction of the magnetosphere. How this follows is not
clear.
2. Normal D. Newell, curator of fossils at the American Museum of Natural History and
professor of paleontology at Columbia, offered a theory of 'gradual' catastrophism in
Scientific American for February 1963. Here Velikovsky's name appears - almost as if it
were a late editorial insertion - with that of Charles Hapgood (Earth's Shifting Crust),
and together the two men are exemplified as writers who 'continue to propose imaginary
catastrophes on the basis of little or no historical evidence. ' The timing of this
reference to Velikovsky suggests that the Bargmann-Motz letter in Science may have
prompted it.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
PART THREE
by Livio C. Stecchini
THE INCONSTANT HEAVENS
The modern system of astronomy is now so much received by all inquirers, and has become
so essential a part even of our earliest education, that we are not commonly very
scrupulous in examining the reasons upon which it is founded. It is now become a matter of
mere curiosity to study the first writers on that subject.
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part II.
Only a few years ago astronomers were unanimous in dismissing as preposterous Velikovsky's
contention that the movement of the heavenly bodies is affected by electromagnetic fields.
Today creative astronomers are immersed in the study of electromagnetism. The historian
finds difficulty in explaining how radical is this change that has challenged three
hundred years of cosmological thought and has brought us back to the arguments of William
Gilbert (1544-1603) and Johann Kepler (1571-1630) [1] . The newness of the revolution is
evinced by the Einstein-Velikovsky correspondence wherein the former soon accepted as
tenable the hypothesis of global catastrophes and, though originally quite opposed, at
last became sympathetic even to the hypothesis of a recent origin of Venus as a planet.
However, he persistently rebutted to the end of his life all argument that electricity and
magnetism affect the motions of heavenly bodies.
Whereas astronomers are perplexed at the implication of the new picture of the universe as
derived from the space probes, Velikovsky has been clear from the very beginning. In one
of the first conversations I had with him ten years ago, he summed up this thinking by
stating that one of the implications of his work is to reinstate Descartes as a rightful
contestant of Newton in the understanding of the texture of the universe. Velikovsky
quoted the following summation by Herbert Butterfield of the results of the famous contest
between the two views of celestial mechanics: 'The clean and comparatively empty Newtonian
skies ultimately carried the day against a Cartesian universe packed with matter and
agitated with whirlpools, for the existence of which scientific observations provided no
evidence. ' [2] . Velikovsky was confident that this evidence would be found, and it has
been found. There is reasonable ground to hope that the new investigation which takes
electric charges and magnetic fields into account will, first of all, succeed in
explaining the behaviour of comets especially in the proximity of the Sun. The current
explanation, according to which the pressure of solar light drives a cometary tail as a
rigid rod at enormous velocities when the head is close to the perihelium, is not much
more satisfactory than the one proposed by Newton when he said that the tails of comets
turn away from the Sun for the same reason that the smoke from a fire ascends
perpendicularly, or in the case of a moving body obliquely, in the atmosphere [3] .
Thereafter, the case of planets like Earth or Jupiter, which are surrounded by a
magnetosphere and move through the magnetic field permeating the solar system and the
plasma winds that sweep through it, will come to quantitative analysis, too.
With new claimants to participation in the mechanism of the solar system, the problem of
its stability is brought into new light.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PREMISES
Because of his psychoanalytic training and experience Velikovsky was able to realize that
men tend to shunt off as fables the accumulated memories and records of cosmic cataclysms.
Even biblical fundamentalists do not accept at face value what is told in plain language
in a book that they purportedly interpret to the letter.
A few hundred years after the last upheaval, as dated by Velikovsky's thesis, Aristotle
struggled to refute the cosmology of Heraclitus; and Cicero, when other writers of his
century such as Lucretius or Ovid were describing in detail what had happened, proclaimed
ita stabilis mundus est atque ita cohaeret ad permanendum, ut nihil ne excogitari quidem
aptius possit - ' the world is so stable and it holds together so well for the sake of
permanence that it is impossible even to imagine anything more fitted to the purpose' [4]
. Planets are gods, and because of their divine nature they keep a perfect and immutable
order. In another passage Cicero expounds the same view in terms that became a creed both
for medieval scholastic natural philosophers and, as I shall indicate, for the followers
of Newton:
In the firmament, therefore, there is no accident, no chance, no aimless wandering,
nothing untrustworthy; on the contrary, all things display perfect order, reliability,
purpose, constancy... Wherefore, that man who holds that the astounding orderliness and
the incredible precision of movement of these celestial bodies, upon which the support and
safety of all things are wholly dependent, are not directed by reason must himself be
considered to be utterly devoid of the rational faculty [5] .
But this was a reversal of the older beliefs in the Theomachy, or the struggle among the
planetary gods. Critias, the cousin of Plato's mother, in his drama 'Sisyphus, ' stressed
the opposite view, defended by Democritus and his followers, that the belief in the
planetary gods was linked with the worst of all human terrors. The following quotation
illuminates also the question, with which I shall deal below, that the organization of the
heavenly bodies came to be considered the foundation of ethics:
He [Sisyphus] said the gods resided in that place Which men would dread the most, that
place from which, As he well knew, mortals have been beset With fears or blest with that
which brings relief To their tormented lives - there, high above, In that great circuit
where the lightnings flash, Where thunder's baleful tumult may be heard, And heaven's
starry countenance is seen (That lovely work of Time's skilled joinery), Where molten
stones of stars descend ablaze, And wet rain starts it journey to the earth. Such were the
consternating fears he sent To men, and such the means by which the gods Were settled in
their proper dwelling-place (A pretty trick, accomplished with a word); And thus he
quenched out lawlessness with laws [6] .
Modern writers have suspected as much. John Dewey opens The Quest for Certainty (1929)
with a chapter titled 'Escape from Peril. ' He points out that fear is the spring of the
search for immutable perfect entities, for the glorification of regularity and invariance
at the expense of diversity and change. By rationalizing the beliefs in the heavenly
bodies as gods and making them the expression of a higher realm (higher physically and
morally) which is rational, regular, and unalterable, Aristotle set up the foundations of
classical science.
In a similar vein, Freud [7] asks on what foundation does 'man build the feeling of
security with which he armours himself against the dangers both of the external world and
of human environment. ' In answering he declares: 'Think of the famous dictum of Kant that
mentions in one breath the starry heavens and the moral law in our heart. This combination
sounds odd - for, what could the heavenly bodies have to do with the question whether a
human being loves or murders another - but it touches a profound psychological truth. '
The passage of Kant (1724-1804) to which Freud refers is the conclusion of the Critique of
Practical Reason:
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the
more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the
moral law within me.
But does the starry heaven inspire us rightfully with the feeling of stability, while it
inspired the ancients with an all-pervading fear?
RENAISSANCE COSMOLOGY
Nicolas of Cusa (1401-64), in his De docta ignorantia, denied the qualitative difference
between heaven and earth. He also rejected the rest of the related propositions of
Aristotelian metaphysics and revived the heliocentric theory, and he stated that the earth
is not perfectly spherical and that the orbits of the planets are not perfectly circular
[8] . He claimed that heavenly motions do not have stability as an inherent quality, and
formulated the hypothesis that some statements of ancient writers may be explained by
their having seen a sky different from what was seen in his time. He defined science as
'learned ignorance, ' because it is impossible to formulate an exact, eternal, and
absolute description of the physical universe.
The position of Copernicus (1475-1543) was relatively conservative in that he combined
heliocentrism with the traditional conception of circular movements (around the sun) and
of a limited universe bounded by the sphere of the fixed stars. The opposition to
Copernicus was determined by the realization that by giving mathematical structure to the
heliocentric theory he lent support to the subversion of metaphysics that had been
associated with it by Nicholas of Cusa.
Questioning of the text of Genesis began as a result of the Copernican theory: if the
Earth is nothing but a planet revolving around the Sun, one may doubt that its creation
was the result of a providential dispensation. A son-in-law of Osiander, the editor of
Copernicus, uttered the first frank challenge to the divine authority of the biblical
narrative: neque mihi quisquam Judaeorum fabulas objiciat [9] . Scholars began to doubt
the notion that the universe had been created once and forever. They started to
investigate ancient chronology, and laid down the foundations of geology and paleontology.
In the age of Reformation some religious apologists argued that a distinction must be made
between the creation of the universe as a whole and the creation of the Earth: the
biblical text referred to the latter creation.
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), in his last and greatest work, De immenso et innumerabilibus,
published just after his imprisonment, made clear the meaning of the assertion of the
principle of indifferenza della natura. He denied the existence of a providential order in
nature and hence of the stability of the solar system which is linked with the doctrine of
circular movements; declared that only their imperfect astronomical observations permitted
earlier scholars to believe that the heavenly bodies move in circles and in the long run
return to their original position (de vanitate circulorum et anni illius mundani phantasia
platonica et aliorum) [10] ; and pointed out that astronomical movements are bound to be
infinitely complex (differentias et singularum differentiarum irregularitatem) [11] . The
belief in the simple and regular motion of the planets, he continued, is a delusory
product of astrological thinking sub fide vel spe geometricantis naturae; it is necessary
to free mathematical astronomy from Platonic and Pythagorean metaphysical accretions. From
the relativity of motion follows the relativity of time; since no completely regular
motion can be discovered, and since we possess no records which can prove that all the
heavenly bodies have taken up exactly the same positions with regard to the Earth as those
previously occupied by them and that their motions are rigidly regular, no absolute
measure of time can be found [12] .
The new conception of nature is epitomized in John Donne's poem, An Anatomy of the World
(1611):
And new Philosophy calls all in doubt... And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is
crumbled out again to his Atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone... So, of the
Stars, which boast that they do run In Circle still, none ends where he begun. All their
proportions lame, it sinks, it swells.
Velikovsky has been scorned for blending the study of astronomy with that of geology,
ancient traditions, ancient chronology, and ancient science. But in so doing he has
followed the path of Renaissance scholars, since such a course is inevitable once the
dogmatic belief in the incorruptibility of the solar system has been questioned. The new
astronomy brought forth a series of studies on ancient traditions and chronology, and
effected the birth of interest in Egyptian and Mesopotamian science. For instance, Father
Athanasius Kircher (1601-80) founded the study of geology with his Mundus Subterraneus,
while he initiated the study of Egyptian science with his Oedypus Aegyptiacus. In
Vicissitudo Rerum (1600) John Norden refers to these speculations that have been revived
by Velikovsky:
The antique Poets in their Poems telled Under their fondest Fables, Mysteries: By
Phaeton, how heaven's Powers rebelled In Fire's force, and by the histories Of Phyrrha and
Deucalian there lies, The like of water's impetuity, In part concurring with divinity -
The Priests of Egypt gazing on the stars, Are said to see the World's sad ruins past, That
had betide by Fire and Water's jars: And how the World inconstant and unchaste, Assailed
by these, cannot alike stand fast. Earthquakes and Wars, Famine, Hate, and Pest, Bring
perils to the Earth, and Man's unrest.
Sir Walter Raleigh in his History of the World (1616) wondered how it could happen that
the phases of Venus just discovered by Galileo seem to have been known to ancient authors.
He listed the authorities who state that at the time of the flood of Ogyges 'so great a
miracle happened in the star of Venus, as never was seen before nor in after-times: for
the colour, the size, the figure, and the course of it were changed. ' The catastrophe
associated with the name of Ogyges, a time mark for ancient Greeks, took place
simultaneously with Venus' complete metamorphosis. This statement made by Varro, 'the most
learned of all the Romans, ' on the authority of earlier scientists should have provoked
interest in the time of Newton, when the working of the solar system was elevated to the
state of a most exact science. But, whereas the gleaning of information from ancient
authors contributed to more than one discovery of the new age of astronomy (the very
heliocentric theory had been advanced on the authority of Greek and Roman writers), Newton
pulled down the curtain on the use of ancient sources as an inspiration for astronomical
research. The notion that the solar system may have a history, became (in the name of the
new religion of science) as sacrilegious as it had been for the scholastics (Saint
Augustine, A. D. 354-430, had taken a different position on the authority of classical
authors).
On the eve of the establishment of Newtonian cosmology, the speculation on cosmic
cataclysms had become so commonplace that in 1672 Molière, in his satire on the ladies
who, captured by the new passion for science, studied astronomy, could make a joke of it
(Les femmes savantes, Act IV, Scene III):
Je viens vous annoncer une grande nouvelle: Nous l'avons en dormant, madame, échappé
belle, Un monde près de nous a passé tout du long; Est chu tout au travers de notre
tourbillon, Et s'il eût en chemin rencontré notre terre, Elle eût été brisée en morceaux
comme verre.
(' I have come to tell you a great piece of news. We have, Madam, while sleeping, had a
narrow escape. A world has passed by us, has fallen across our vortex, and if it had on
its way met our Earth, it would have broken it into pieces like glass. ')
NEWTON
The Renaissance view of life and of the world, which can be summed up by the word
mutability, was created by personalities of heroic stamina and required the leadership of
such personalities for its preservation, for indeed, it is not easy to live in a world
where the only divinity is Fortuna and nothing is certain beyond measurement and
probability. As Freud contends, neuroses originate from the failure, due to inferior
biological endowment combined with stunted psychic growth, to face the burden of the human
condition in a world that owes us nothing.
Some contemporary thinkers were frightened, for the relativism and decentralization of the
Renaissance found expression not only in astronomy but in political theory; furthermore,
the impact of thinkers such as Machiavelli was compounded by the geographical discoveries
that gave birth to the doctrine of ethical relativism. In England the herald of reaction
against Renaissance thought was the theologian Richard Hooker who imagined that a new
conservative position could be justified by appealing to nature's laws linked with an
absolute reason and an obedience of man to absolute ethics. In the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity (1593-97), he examined the views current at his time:
Now if nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether, thought it were but for
a while the observation of her own laws; if those principal and mother elements of the
world, whereof all things in this lower world are made, should lose the qualities which
now they have; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and
dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular
volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of
heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should as it were through a
languishing faintness begin to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from
her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and
confused mixture, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the
earth be defeated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine away as children at
the withered breasts of their mother no longer able to yield them relief: what would
become of man himself, whom these things now do all serve? See we not plainly that
obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world?
He proposed the comforting solution that was accepted by Newton and the scientists who
followed him:
But howsoever these swervings are now and then incident into the course of nature,
nevertheless so constantly the laws of nature are by natural agents observed, that no man
denieth but those things which nature worketh are wrought, either always or for the most
part, after one and the same manner.
Helène Metzger has shown that Newton developed his theory under the influence of this
spirit of reaction. She is certainly right when she judges the overall effect of Newton's
work which devait vite devenir une aliée de cette piétJ bienséante et bien pensante [13]
; but she has not analyzed in detail what caused Newton to arrive at his conservative
conclusions nor what is their technical significance for science. Her pacemaking
investigations were cut short by the gas chamber at Auschwitz.
One of the precursors of Velikovsky as to the general thesis of the catastrophic past of
the earth, to whom he refers in his work, was William Whiston (1667-1752). In 1964, seven
years after the first edition of Principia, Whiston, then a fellow of Cambridge
University, became a devoted pupil of Newton, and two years later submitted to his master
the manuscript of a book entitled New Theory of the Earth. The book was intended to
replace the then popular Theory of the Earth (1681) by Thomas Burnet, and dealt with a
theme with which Newton had been concerned for more than a score of years. This book
contended that the cataclysm described in the Old Testament as universal Deluge was caused
by the impact of a comet at the end of the third millennium B. C., and that up to the
Deluge the solar year had the duration of 360 days only, yet the new calendar of 365 days
had to wait to be introduced by Nabonassar (in 747 B. C.). These contentions were based
mainly on historical evidence, whereas astronomical considerations were the main ground
for suggesting that comets may become planets:
Yet comets by passing through the planetary regions in all planets and directions...
seem fit to cause vast mutations in the planets, particularly in bringing on them deluges
and conflagrations, according as the planets pass through the atmosphere... Tho'indeed
they do withal seem at present chaos or worlds in confusion, but capable of change to
orbits nearer circular, and then settling into a state of order and of becoming fit for
habitation like the planets; but these conjectures are left to further enquiry, when it
pleases the divine providence to afford us more light about them [14] .
Newton was so impressed by Whiston's work that from that moment he established a close
scientific relation with him. The book was highly praised also by other contemporaries,
John Locke among them. Two years later the Savillian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford,
John Keill (1671-1721), dedicated a book to the evaluation of Whiston's hypotheses in
comparison to those of Burnet, in which he expressed the following judgments:
... Yet I cannot but acknowledge that Mr Whiston, the ingenious author of the new Theory
of the Earth, has made great discoveries and proceeded on more philosophical principles
than all the theorists before him have done. In his theory there are some coincidents
which make it indeed probable, that a comet at the time of the Deluge passed by the Earth
[15] .
Keill approved also of the contention that before this upheaval the solar year consisted
of 360 days, divided into 12 lunar months of 30 days.
In 1701 Whiston was appointed as a temporary substitute for Newton at Cambridge, and in
1703, when Newton resigned permanently from the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, he
recommended Whiston as uniquely worthy to be his successor. By 1713, when the second
edition of the Principia was published, Newton's feelings towards Whiston had changed
radically. When in 1720 the astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742) and others proposed
Whiston as a member of the Royal Society, Newton threatened that, should the members vote
for Whiston's admission, he would resign from the presidency of the Society. Whiston, who
was deeply devoted to Newton, suggested that his candidacy not be pressed; he felt that
the aging Newton was so violently disturbed by the issue that he might die [16] . Halley
who one year and a half before the publication of Whiston's New Theory of the Earth had
read a paper before the Royal Society in which he had explained the Deluge by the impact
of a comet, but had not printed it 'lest by some unguarded expression he might incur the
censure of the sacred order, ' reacted to Newton's gesture by publishing with thirty years
of delay a memoir in the acts of the society [17] . Historians of science gloss over this
incident, which is vital for the understanding of the evolution of Newton's thought. After
1710, when Whiston was dismissed from his teaching position because of heresy and then
formally brought to trial before the body of bishops of the Church of England, he assumed
more radical positions and came to disagree with Newton who was becoming more and more
conservative.
Whiston's contention was that the creation story told in Genesis should not be interpreted
literally, but as referring to a process of progressive creation through several cosmic
stages. Newton, who was at first sympathetic to Whiston's religious and scientific views,
came to be shocked by his radicalism, and turned towards a fundamentalist position. The
concluding words of Opticks indicate that Newton, like others of his contemporaries felt
that, if the traditional views of cosmic order were abandoned, the foundations of morality
would be undermined [18] . Furthermore, Newton felt that Whiston's hypotheses would end
by eliminating what he considered the chief argument for the existence of God, the
argument from design, namely, the wise adaptation of the present frame of nature to the
needs of living creatures, especially man. In Opticks he rebutted Whiston in these terms:
For it became who created them [the celestial bodies] to set them in order. And if he
did so, it's unphilosophical to seem for any other origin of the world, or to pretend that
it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of nature; though being once formed, it may
continue by those laws for many ages. For while comets move in very excentrick orbs in all
manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way
in orbs, concentrick, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted, which may have arisen
from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to
increase, till this system wants a reformation. Such a wonderful uniformity in the
planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice [19] .
Whereas the first edition of the Principia (1687) is essentially rationalistic in spirit
and follows a positivistic method, theological preoccupations dominate the second edition
(1713). Newton is bent on proving that the machinery of the world is such a perfectly
contrived system that it cannot be the result of 'mechanical cause, ' but must be the
result of an intelligent and consistent plan. In order to support further the story of
Genesis that the world was created by a single act, he argued also that the world is
stable and has remained unchanged since creation. But he could not prove this point, since
he admitted that, according to his own theory, the gravitational pull among the several
members of the solar system would tend to modify their orbits; hence, he begged the
question and claimed that God in his providence must intervene from time to time to reset
the clockwork of the heavens to its original state. This point of Newton's doctrine is
well known, for it was the object of sarcastic comments by Newton's great rival in the
mathematical field, Leibniz (1646-1716). As the letter observed, Newton cast God not only
as a clockmaker, and a poor one at that, but also as a clock-repairman [20] .
Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862), the chosen pupil of Laplace, agreed with his teacher in
considering the second edition of the Principia as highly objectionable. He argued that
Newton had ceased to be a creative thinker in 1695 and suggested that this was the result
of his mental illness of eighteen months duration [21] . But in truth Newton was hampered
by religious preoccupations and not by mental deterioration. The only external evidence
that Biot submits for a psychic collapse is Newton's 'infantile' antics in his dealings
with Whiston in 1714. In my opinion, the proof that Newton had become fixated on the
religious problem, but had not lost any of his intellectual flexibility, is that the few
additions that appear in the third edition of the Principia (1726), disclose that he came
to believe that God reveals himself not in the appearance of things but in the ways of
mankind [22] .
Scholars have failed to notice that the refutation of Whiston's doctrine was of major
concern to Newton. In the Principia, he maintained that comets, far from being a
disruptive element, contribute to the providential preservation of the original order:
since a certain amount of the water of the Earth is steadily consumed by chemical
combinations, the seas would not be preserved in their original state unless new water was
provided by the exhalations of comets. The notion of the providential purpose of comets
was further expanded in Newton's time: the comets exist also for the purpose of supplying
new fuel to the Sun which otherwise would gradually consume itself. One of the important
popularizers of Newton's ideas stresses that comets can perform these providential
functions, but at the same time are providentially prevented from striking the Earth:
In the next place, the reason why the planes of their [comets'] motions are not in the
plane of the ecliptic, or any of the planetary orbits, is extremely evident; for had this
been the case, it would have been impossible for the Earth to be out of the way of the
comets' tails. Nay, the possibility of an immediate encounter or shock of the body, of a
comet would have been too frequent; and considering how great is the velocity of a comet
at such a time, the collision of two such bodies must necessarily be destructive of each
other; nor perhaps could the inhabitants of planets long survive frequent immersions in
the tails of comets, as they would be liable to in such a situation. Not to mention
anything of the irregularities and confusion that must happen in the motion of planets and
comets, if their orbits were all disposed in the same plane [23] .
The writer follows here the reasoning of Newton, who argued that the providential order of
the universe required that the comets have beneficial characteristics. In reality, the
planes of the orbits of some comets are at a small angle with the plane of the ecliptic,
and the chance of collision exists.
Biographies of Newton usually dismiss in a few lines his book The Chronology of the
Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), to which he dedicated the last years of his life. They
consider it the product of an irrelevant side activity; yet its purpose is clearly that of
refuting Whiston's hypotheses. Newton argues that evidence for the years of 365 days is as
old as the year 887 B. C., and that even though this year was 'scarcely brought into
common use' before this date, it was as old as the first astronomical observation of the
Egyptians. However, these would have started only quite late, in 1034 B. C. The main
purpose of the book is to contend that there was hardly any reliable history before the
First Olympic Games in 776 B. C. In the first page the point is made that the ancient
legends and traditions (the basis of Whiston's argument for a cataclysm caused by a comet)
are not a reliable source of information.
Newton believed that his cosmology, which he had summed up in the famous General Scholium
of the second edition of the Principia, could not be accepted unless Whiston was refuted.
For this reason, about three months after the appearance of the second edition, he wrote
an essay (that lies unpublished at the British Museum) in which he answered the criticism
advanced by William Lloyd (1627-1717), an intimate friend of Whiston, on the ground that
the oldest calendars of the ancients are based on a solar year of 360 days. From what is
known about this document it can be said that Newton gave a lame answer [24] . He argued
that if a calendar of 360 days had been in use without a system of intercalation for the
five extra days, the official beginning of the seasons would have moved around the full
year in a period of 70 years; since there is no trace of this 70 year cycle, this calendar
cannot have existed. But the argument of Whiston and Lloyd was exactly that the solar year
was about 360 days long and that therefore no intercalation was needed. Newton was begging
the question by assuming that the solar year must have always consisted of 365 days.
In the works of Newton the doctrine of the eternal stability of the solar system is
clearly presented as an assumption based not on scientific data but on faith in a
providential order. But the flood of popularizations that made Newtonianism the basic
doctrine of the eighteenth century claimed that Newton had provided scientific
mathematical proof of the marvellous order that he accepted on faith. Carl L. Backer, who
has examined this development in The Heavenly City of Eighteenth Century Philosophers
(1932), concludes that the thinkers of the Enlightenment, while they believed themselves
to be anti-Christian or even irreligious, were, in the name of Newton's mechanics (though
not his religion), returning to the tenets of medieval theology along with Newton. Not
since the thirteenth century had there been such as alliance between faith and reason. It
was again possible to lift up one's eyes to the changeless movements of the sky - signs of
divine perfection and eternal laws. As Becker remarks, Newtonianism was an immediate
success with the educated public, because 'the desire to correspond with the general
harmony springs perennial in the human breast' [25] .
Every good textbook of history points out that Newton's astronomy precipitated a religious
revolution. Newton was perfectly aware that he had expounded the religious view that was
called 'natural religion agreeing with revealed. ' The new religion was called theism and
its Nicene Creed was the General Scholium of the Principia:
The six primary planets are revolved about the Sun in circles concentric with the Sun,
and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same place. Ten moons
are revolved about the Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, in circles concentric with them, with
the same direction of motion, and nearly in the planes of the orbits of those planets; but
it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular
motions, since the comets range over all parts of the heavens in very eccentric orbits;
for by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbs of the planets, and with
great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detained the
longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and hence suffer the least
disturbance from their mutual attractions. This most beautiful system of the Sun, planets,
and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and
powerful Being.
In the popularizations of Newton theism became deism, and the letter evolved into the
mechanistic atheism of La Mettrie (1709-51) and D'Holbach (1723-89). All these views of
religion had in common the belief in the perfect regularity of the universe, expressed by
the analogy of the mechanical clock. 'The ideal of a clockwork universe was the great
contribution of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth-century age of reason. ' [26]
There is no doubt that several of our contemporary natural scientists would object that
these are metaphysical preoccupations that do not concern an observational science like
modern astronomy. But there are no more hardened metaphysicians than those who believe
that they do not have any metaphysics, and this can be proved by a timely example.
Venus is the planet closest to the Earth and has a size very similar to that of the Earth,
so that it is a sort of twin sister of the Earth. Hence, those who agreed with Newton in
believing in the regularity of nature presumed that Venus must rotate in about 24 hours
and must be encircled by a moon similar to our Moon. In the eighteenth century a number of
astronomers claimed to have seen and tracked this moon; after the solar transit of 1769
Lambert (one of those who advanced the nebular hypotheses) computed the orbit of this moon
and its size (28/ 27 that of our Moon). The subsequent progress in the construction of
telescopes made it impossible for astronomers of following generations to see what was not
there. According to Newton, Venus has a period of rotation similar to that of Earth, 23
hours [27] . Jacques Cassini revised the figure to 23 hours 20, ' and by the end of the
eighteenth century the accepted figure was 23 hrs. 21' 20". One more century of
observations made the figure of 23 hrs. 21' acceptable, but in 1877 G. V. Schiaparelli
concluded that Venus rotates very slowly, probably once in a Cytherean year. Still, many
astronomers published reports of decades of observation that proved the correctness of the
Newtonian view that Venus rotates in about 24 hours. In spite of the further support
provided by the absence of Doppler effect and of polar flattening, Schiaparelli's view
that if Venus rotates, it rotates very slowly, was not accepted by many astronomers until
1963.
Whereas it took two and a half centuries for astronomers to realize that they had been
looking into the telescope with the eyes of their mind, the philosopher David Hume (1711-
76) recognized the epistemological problem involved in the study of Venus. He presents a
Newtonian who declares 'Is not Venus another Earth, where we observe the same phenomena? '
And to this Hume in his imaginary dialogue counterposes, by appealing to the authority of
Galileo, 'When nature has so extremely diversified her manner of operation in this small
globe, can we imagine that she incessantly copies herself throughout so immense a
universe? ' [28]
The case of the rotation of Venus is a minor example of the intellectual confusion that
results when scientists accept all the astronomical doctrines of Newton without
discriminating between what is mystical and what is scientific in the modern sense of the
term.
In a brilliant and penetrating essay on 'Newton the Man, ' written for the Royal Society
Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (Cambridge, 1947), Lord Keynes declared:
In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and the
greatest of modern-age scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines
of cold and untutored reason. I do not see him in this light.
The main contention of the essay is that Newton had 'a foot in the Middle Ages and a foot
treading a path for modern science. ' This contention had been advanced earlier by other
scholars, but this time it met with the approval of outstanding historians of science,
because Keynes had gained access to the unpublished manuscripts of Newton.
In the case of Newton we meet with the unique occurrence that for three centuries his
admirers have fought battle after battle in order to prevent the publication of about
nine-tenths of his scholarly work. Whiston was one of the first to clamour for the
publication of Newton's manuscripts, since he wanted to have an opportunity to refute his
historical theories. Only recently have the efforts to lift the curtain begun to be
successful.
If all the manuscripts were published, what had been claimed by some scholars and was
granted by Newton himself in some of his letters, would become evident: that science was
not his main interest and that he conceived of it as an auxiliary to theology, as ancilla
theologiae. That he was unusually successful in his scientific endeavours does not
disprove that his main aim was to reconcile astronomy with religion. Newton believed that
the astronomical revolution linked with the names of Copernicus and Galileo had destroyed
the foundations of religious belief and that it was necessary to return to the medieval
world view. He was a biblical fundamentalist who tried to prove, among other points, that
the Bible contains prophecies of future history. His interest in science was a by-product
of his effort to prove that even science does not conflict with biblical religion,
conceived by him as the medieval synthesis of biblical religion with Platonic-Aristotelian
cosmology.
The voluminous unpublished works of Newton deal with many topics from alchemy to politics,
but theology has the lion's share, followed next by ancient history. These unpublished
works cannot be dismissed as occasional efforts. To them he dedicated more time than to
his scientific writings. They are just as accurately argued and well finished. All his
writings constitute a unified stream of thought of which the scientific production was
only one aspect.
Recently, Frank E. Manuel in Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, 1963), has informed us of
the contents of Newton's unpublished historical manuscripts. Manuel has made clear that at
the time they were written they dealt with topics that were intensely debated among
scholars. But he has not grasped that their purpose was to refute the historical
researches of the Renaissance and those of Whiston in particular. Their main object was to
discredit all the historical evidence presented for changes in the solar system. For
instance, he tried to prove that in Mesopotamia astronomical science did not begin before
the era of Nabonassar (747 N. C.).
In substance, Newton was trying to refute the kind of historical evidence that has been
brought again to public attention by Velikovsky. It is rather amusing that in the effort
to prove that the observation of the heavenly bodies began only at a very late date, he
argued that accepted chronology must be lowered and anticipated the conclusions reached by
Velikovsky in Ages in Chaos. Like Velikovsky, he claimed that Greek chronology must be
shortened by four hundred years, eliminating what today we call the Dark Ages of Greece.
Like Velikovsky, he claimed that some dynasties of Egypt have been duplicated in
chronological schemes. A main contention of Velikovsky is that the Pharaoh Shishak of the
Book of Kings, a contemporary of the successor of King Solomon of Israel, is the same
person as Thutmosis III of the XVIII Dynasty. Newton, using a similar line of argument,
identifies Shishak with the Pharaoh called Sesostris by the Greek. In giving an account of
Sesostris, Greek historian confused the deeds of Thutmosis III with those of Sesostris III
of the XII Dynasty. It may be noted that Velikovsky, after a ten year struggle with the
committees that administer the carbon 14 tests of archaeological material, has finally
succeeded in obtaining at least some tests to prove or disprove his theory and Newton's.
These few tests support the contention that the currently accepted dates of Egyptian
history must be substantially lowered.
All the pursuits of Newton in theology, history, and science had one purpose. I. Bernard
Cohen, the foremost authority on Newton in the United States, concludes (Franklin and
Newton, Philadelphia, 1956, p. 66): 'Of course, Newton had one real secret, and concerning
it he did his best to keep the world in ignorance. ' The secret is that he intended to
uphold the theology and the cosmology of Maimonides. Cohen agrees with Keynes that this
medieval synthesis of biblical religion with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,
constituted the ideal of Newton. He kept it a secret because he wanted to influence
scientific thought without putting the admirers of the new scientific method on the alert.
Velikovsky, too, has recognized in Worlds in Collision that through Newton he is fighting
Maimonides. Maimonides expressly declares that in accepting the story of creation he
disagrees with Aristotle, but that he agrees with Aristotle that the cosmos, once created,
is permanent and indestructible.
In order to reconcile the cosmology of Aristotle with the text of the Old Testament,
Maimonides asserted that all the passages that have been understood as referring to cosmic
upheavals and to changes in planetary motions, must be understood as metaphors, not as
factual accounts. Velikovsky reports that Maimonides re-examined a long series of biblical
texts, establishing thereby a new trend in exegesis. Newton pursued the same line of
argument as Maimonides in his exegesis of Greek texts and of what was then known of
Oriental documents. In his scientific writings Newton tried to prove that natural science
does not contradict this exegesis and corresponding theology.
LAPLACE
Among those few who had more keenly critical minds than Voltaire and the other so-called
philosophes, the metaphysics of Newton created an opposite reaction. By questioning it,
his contemporaries, Berkeley (1685-1753) and Hume, established scientific empiricism and
laid the foundations for our contemporary scientific method. Just as the leading
philosophers of England (soon followed by Hegel, 1770-1831) pierced Newton's metaphysical
fog, so the leading scientists of France refused to climb the bandwagon of popular
Newtonianism and kept in mind the distinction between what Newton had proved and what he
had not proved. Historians usually ascribe the reserve of the Academie des Sciences
towards Newton to an obscurantist clinging to Cartesian tradition; but these strictures of
the French scientists gave the impetus to the studies of Laplace, the greatest genius in
mathematical astronomy since Newton. With the emergence of Laplace, gravitational
celestial mechanics was more firmly established and the role of providence in sustaining
the immutable order was abrogated.
Laplace (1749-1827) was cited throughout the nineteenth century and also has been quoted
by opponents of Velikovsky as having provided the mathematical proof that the solar
system, and hence nature, is built like a mechanical clock. But this is only one side of
his total view. In the Exposition du système du monde he uses two pages to argue that
mankind should learn to accept without obsessive fear the likelihood that a comet may
strike the Earth [29] . In his other major work, Theorie analytique des probabilités, he
insists that the motions of the Earth are not unalterable, being subject to several
unpredictable forces, among which is the impact of meteorites [30] . He realized that the
resistance to accepting the alterability of the sky springs also from the fear that
thereby moral law may be destroyed. For this reason he continues the discussion of this
topic by delving into psychology and arguing along lines similar to those of Hume's
ethics, that a feeling of sympathy among men can exist without traditional metaphysics
[31] . It is worth noting that his treatment of psychology touches upon the importance of
childhood memories and upon the role of unconscious thinking [32] .
Laplace observed that from his mathematical formulas it was possible to draw the
conclusion that 'nature has arranged everything in the sky to insure the permanence of the
planetary system, with the same purpose that it seems to have adopted on Earth for the
preservation of individuals and the perpetuation of species' [33] , but added that such a
conclusion was wrong, even though 'we are naturally inclined to believe that the order by
which things seem to renew themselves on Earth has existed at all times and will exist
forever' [34] . In reality, the stability of the present order 'is disturbed by various
causes that can be ascertained by careful analysis, but which are impossible to frame
within a calculation' [35] . He summed up his views in the words: Le ciel même, malgré
l'ordre de ses mouvements, n'est pas inaltérable [36] . He warned specifically that in
his mathematical formulas about the solar system he had not taken comets into account,
stating just as specifically, that the motion of the Earth might be affected by
meteorites, and one should therefore study the historical evidence, even though this
evidence covers only a few millennia.
Laplace stressed that the human race is beset by a great fear that a comet may upset the
Earth, a fear that manifested itself dramatically after Lexell's comet in 1770 had passed
at only 2,400,000 km from the Earth. Shortly thereafter Lalande published a list of the
comets that had passed closest to the Earth [37] . Men should be free from this fear,
Laplace argued, for the probability of one striking the Earth within the span of a human
life is slim, even though the probability of such an impact occurring in the course of
centuries is very great (très grande) [38] . He proceeded to describe the possible
effects of a collision with a comet, painting a picture that is in close agreement with
that outlined by Velikovsky. Much in the geology of the Earth and in human history could
be explained by assuming that such an impact had taken place. However, if this is true, it
must also be assumed that the colliding comet had a mass similar to that of the Earth
[39] . Velikovsky conjectures that this comet was Venus, which had the required mass.
Laplace summed up his hypothesis in these words:
The axis and the movement of rotation would be changed. The seas would abandon their
ancient positions, in order to precipitate themselves toward the new equator; a great
portion of the human race and the animals would be drowned in the universal deluge, or
destroyed by the violent shock imparted to the terrestrial globe; entire species would be
annihilated; all monuments of human industry overthrown; such are the disasters which the
shock of a comet would produce, if its mass were comparable to that of the earth.
We see then, in effect, why the ocean has receded from the high mountains, upon which it
has left incontestable marks of its sojourn. We see how the animals and plants of the
south have been able to exist in the climate of the north, where their remains and
imprints have been discovered; finally, it explains the newness of the human civilization,
certain monuments of which do not go further back than five thousand years. The human race
reduced to a small number of individuals, and to the most deplorable state, solely
occupied for a length of time with the care of its own preservation, must have lost
entirely the remembrance of the sciences and the arts; and when progress of civilization
made these wants felt anew, it was necessary to begin again, as if man had been newly
placed upon the earth.
Laplace also wondered whether heavenly bodies might not be affected by forces other than
gravitation, such as electric and magnetic forces [40] . He did not exclude such a
possibility, even though according to available calculations their effect was not
noticeable. Yet, when Velikovsky stated that the members of the solar system have strong
electric charges and that these affect their motions, some astronomers objected that this
had been proved impossible by Laplace. The first empirical evidence of the present effect
of electromagnetic forces on the motion of the Earth is now available.
Scientific literature never mentions the Laplace statements listed above. He won immediate
fame for having provided the mathematical proof of the stability of the solar system that
was missing in Newton, despite the fact that he had emphatically warned against such an
interpretation of his conclusions.
The interpretation of Laplace's theories was influenced by a minor point he made. He felt
the need to refute Newton's argument that the fact that all the planets and their
satellites rotate counterclockwise is proof of divine providence [41] . After calculating
the statistical near-impossibility that such rotation may be a chance arrangement, he
concluded that it must be the result of a common mechanical phenomenon [42] . Hence, he
proposed the nebular hypothesis which had already occurred independently to the theologian
Emanuel Swedenborg( 1688-1772), to the philosopher Kant, and to the astronomer Johann
Heinrich Lambert (1728-77). But Laplace did not yet know of the satellites that revolve
clockwise. He would have been pleased by the evidence submitted in 1963 which suggests
that Venus rotates clockwise. The uniform direction of the rotation and revolution of the
planets and their satellites, far from being a key point of his view, was considered by
him to be a stumbling block to his probabilistic view of the universe.
The following quotation indicates to what distortions Laplace's theories were subjected by
the interpreters:
We are naturally led to ponder on the great truth of the stability and permanence of the
solar system as demonstrated by the discoveries of Lagrange and Laplace... The
arrangement, therefore, upon which the stability of the solar system depends, must have
been the result of design, the contrivance of that infinite skill which knew how to
provide for the permanence of His work. How the comets, whose motions are not regulated by
such laws, and which move in so many different directions, may in the future interfere
with the order of the system, can only be conjectured. They have not interfered with it in
the past, owing no doubt to the smallness of their density; and we cannot doubt that the
same wisdom which has established so great a harmony in the movement of the planetary
system, that the inequalities which necessarily arise from their mutual action arrive at a
maximum, and then disappear, will also have made provision for the future stability of the
system [43] .
Since Laplace was concerned with eliminating providential order, he proved (within the
limits of the formal rigour that was considered sufficient by mathematicians of his age)
that the mutual gravitational influence of the planets cannot disrupt the system [44] .
But this is an empirical, not a metaphysical, conclusion which is valid only if other
factors are excluded, that is, if it is assumed that the solar system is isolated in the
universe, that the Sun does not suffer alteration, and that no other matter and no other
forces beside gravitation and inertia are present in the space where the Sun and the
planets move.
Interpreting Laplace as supporting the theological assumptions of Newton has destroyed the
scientific achievements of the Renaissance. We are back at scholasticism, and Aristotle is
again il maestro di color che sanno on an issue that Galileo considered central to the new
thought. In the First Day in the Dialogue on the Great World Systems, which is concerned
with the refutation of the concept of the immutability of the heavens, the great
astronomer formulated his creed in these unequivocal terms:
I cannot without great wonder, nay more, disbelief, hear it being attributed to natural
bodies as a great honour and perfection that they are impassible, immutable, inalterable,
etc.: as, conversely, I hear it esteemed a great imperfection to be alterable, generable,
mutable, etc. It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable by reason of the
many and different alterations, mutations, generations, etc., which incessantly occur in
it... I say the same concerning the Moon, Jupiter, and all the other globes of the
Universe... These men who so extol incorruptibility, inalterability, etc., speak thus, I
believe, out of the great desire they have to live long and for fear of death... [45] .
Galileo is in precise agreement with Dewey's argument and with Velikovsky's psychological
assumption.
Laplace was interpreted to meet the psychological need to believe in the eternal stability
of the solar system. The following quotations from An Analytical View of Sir Isaac
Newton's Principia by H. P. Brougham and E. J. Routh are a good example of a general
tendency.
The other changes which take place in the orbits and motions of the heavenly bodies,
were found by these great geometricians [Laplace and Legendre] to follow a law of
periodicity which assures the eternal stability of the system.
These changes in the heavenly paths and motions oscillate, as it were, round a middle
point, from which they never depart on either hand, beyond a certain distance; so that at
the end of thousands of years the whole system in each separate case (each body having its
own secular period) returns to the exact position in which it was when these vast
successions of ages began to roll [46] .
The religious tone of the presentation is obvious. Laplace is construed to be saying that
heavenly bodies can have only two types of movements: cyclical movements and uniform
rectilinear movements; that is, movements that are equivalent with a state of rest. It is
a full return, with some added sophistication, to the Aristotelian doctrine that the
heavenly bodies can have only circular motions, motions reconcilable with immobility.
FEAR AND TREMBLING
When one examines the reviews of Worlds in Collision written by some one hundred
luminaries of our age, he observes that the civil liberty aspects of the affair (the
effort to prevent the printing, the academic pressure exercised to keep reviewers in line,
and the refusals to publish corrections of misstatements) recede in the face of the
frightening realization that the experts to whom is entrusted the human inheritance of
scientific thought, our most precious possession, can be the victims of collective
hysteria. Scientist after scientist declared that the edifice of science was threatened
with destruction by a book which, to hear a number of them, is full of transparent
contradictions, written by a 'complete ignoramus' who ranks with the proponents of the
flat-earth hypothesis. The atmosphere of panic was somewhat better justified by the
opposite contention advanced by a minority of reviewers, that Velikovsky is a hoaxer so
unusually well-informed in all technical details and so deft in the subtleties of
scientific thinking, that the normal professional expert cannot detect the flaws of his
arguments, although these must exist.
The emotional upheaval was such that the New York Times Book Review ten years later, in
reviewing the literary events of a decade, dwelt upon the fate of 'a book which most
contemporary scientists regarded as a publishing catastrophe. It stirred up all sorts of
vituperation, especially among astronomers who, it may be recalled, behaved as though they
had been stung by a hornet from outer space. ' [47] . One should peruse the literature of
the hundred years that followed Copernicus's work, to assemble an equivalent collection of
bizarre and ridiculous arguments used in the refutation of a theory. To cite one of the
best publicized instances: a popular argument against Copernicus was that if the Earth
moved, human beings would be thrown into space; similarly, the mimeographed memorandum
distributed by the Harvard Observatory, and later several other astronomers, contended
that if the Earth's rotation had been arrested, as Velikovsky suggested, human beings
would have been projected into space along with all objects not anchored to the Earth
[48] . This argument completely ignores the possibility of gentle deceleration and
attributes gravitational effect, apparently, to the constancy of the Earth's rotation. The
natural scientists who gave Velikovsky's evidence the benefit of objective examination
were few. Some reviewers, after boasting that they had not read the book, delivered
themselves of Catilinarian orations against the crime of Velikovsky.
In spite of the variety of emotional expressions, the greatest number of reviews written
by natural scientists, when reduced to the scientifically significant points, repeat
monotonously the same general arguments. They appeal to the 'laws of nature' without any
further specifications, and keep iterating the names of Newton and Laplace, as if they
were an incantation, without referring to any specific passage or section of their works.
The stereotype is varied only by the late President of the American Astronomical Society,
Otto Struve, who in a review entitled 'Copernicus, Who Was He ?' (New York Herald Tribune
Book Review, April 2, 1950), declared that the trouble was that Velikovsky had never heard
of Copernicus and was refuted by the Copernican doctrine.
The psychological assumption that gave Velikovsky his original subjective stimulus to
investigate ancient traditions, namely that mankind lives in subconscious fear of cosmic
cataclysms, could explain the panic and the emotional irrationality of many reviewers. A
valuable clue to the cause of such a reaction is given by the professor of philosophy at
St Louis University [49] who, while associating himself with the efforts of the
scientists to suppress the book, complained that they did not fully realize the enormity
of the crime committed by the publishing industry, for the book destroyed the foundation
of Judeo-Christian beliefs. The article concluded that the Catholic Church should come to
the rescue by placing the book on the Index. But, after the painful experience with
Galileo, the Catholic Church has accumulated more wisdom in scientific epistemology than
that revealed by our scientific community.
The Cardinal Bellarmine of this case was Professor Harlow Shapley who was indefatigable in
his campaign, started before the publication of the book, to alarm the scientific world of
the impending catastrophe. How similar are the two personalities! Cardinal Bellarmine was
the epitome of the bureaucratic personality and Shapley has devoted his life to the new
Leviathan of scientific bureaucracy. The spirit of the new bureaucracy was revealed by the
A. A. A. S. meeting (Dec. 30, 1950) held in response to Velikovsky's book. At that meeting
it was proposed that henceforth any publication that presents new scientific hypotheses
should not be allowed to be printed without the Imprimatur of a proper professional body
[50] .
Every bureaucratic organization that wants to be accountable only to itself attempts to
base its power on a transcendental absolute, and Velikovsky was threatening the
transcendental absolute of the church of scientism. The reaction against Velikovsky's book
confirms once more the common observation that the great mass of natural scientists has
not yet assimilated the implications of the great scientific transformation that started
at the end of the last century (on the foundations laid by Berkeley, Hume, and Hegel), and
clings to scientism, the crude mechanical determinism of the eighteenth century, with
insufficient awareness of all the knowledge that has been accumulated in two hundred years
on the problem of human perception [51] . What has happened is that when science was
still operating on scholastic premises, there were developed mechanical clocks. Since
early clocks were connected with astronomy and often took the form of orreries, they
influenced the interpretation of the cosmological revolution brought about by Copernicus,
Bruno, and Galileo. The recent book, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven, 1962), by the
philosopher Colin Murray Turbayne, who explicitly appeals to the arguments of Berkeley and
Hume, examines the pervading influence of the metaphor of the mechanical clock and
observes, in the Introduction, that as a result of it there has been 'founded a church,
more powerful than that founded by Peter and Paul, whose dogmas are now so entrenched that
anyone who tries to re-allocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy; he is opposing
scientific truth. '
In the Velikovsky-Shapley correpondence of 1946, when Velikovsky offered to submit to
crucial tests before publishing his book, Shapley took a position similar to that of
Bellarmine: one should not test Velikovsky's hypotheses about the physical characteristics
of Venus, such as high temperature and atmosphere of hydrocarbon gases, unless he first
agreed to frame them within the proper scheme of metaphysical presuppositions. What
Shapley had in mind was the dogma of the absolute stability of the solar system [52] .
Velikovsky forced the scientists to become well aware that proof of this postulate does
not exist.
Scores of reviews were remarkable for the violence of expression and the jejune poverty of
the contents. Often columns of denunciation were not followed by a single argument. The
case of Harrison Brown is a good example of those who proclaimed that they had peremptory
arguments galore, but did not submit a single one. Only a few scientists of note showed a
spirit of scholarly cooperation by providing friendly criticism and additional
information. Among them were W. S. Adams, G. Atwater, V. A. Bailey, V. Bargmann, A.
Einstein, A. Goldsmith, H. H. Hess, H. S. Jones, J. S. Miller, P. L. Mercanton, C. W. van
der Merwe, L. Motz, and S. K. Vsekhsviatsky. In contrast with the rational attitude of
these men, several other great names affixed their signatures to statements that competent
scholars know to be incorrect.
In order to prove the eternal stability of the solar system, scholar after scholar
insisted that records document that planetary motions and eclipses have conformed to the
present pattern from the origin of writing at the beginning of the third millennium B. C.
But this is known not to be so: records proving such assertions do not exist for the
period preceding the year 747 B. C. The aforementioned claim is so manifestly incorrect
that, when it appeared for the first time in the New York Times Book Review (April 2,
1950), Velikovsky for once obtained the satisfaction of a retraction, but the assertion
continued to appear in scholarly publications. The most serious effort to prove the basic
postulate of Velikovsky's opponents was that of the astronomer John Q. Stewart of
Princeton University, who debating with Velikovsky in the pages of Harper's Magazine
(June, 1951), argued that Venus could not have entered into orbit after the creation of
the solar system because this would contradict Bode's Law. What this so-called law amounts
to is a mnemonic formula which gives with rough approximation the planets' distances from
the Sun, and which has no basis in gravitational theory.
The almost childish misrepresentations of the available scientific evidence can be
explained by the circumstance that many scholars associated Velikovsky's book with their
worst personal fears. Astronomers saw the book as a defence of astrology; professors
linked it with the McCarthy investigations; a professor at Southern Methodist University
declared that it would subvert our traditional way of life more radically than would
communism and prostitution combined; and J. B. S. Haldane saw it as fitting into the plans
of the American warmongers to start an atomic war [53] .
Leaders in science accused Velikovsky of encouraging belief in sorcery, witchcraft, and
demonic possession. Since, however, a good number of his postulates, especially those
listed as crucial in the final pages of Worlds in Collision, have been confirmed by
subsequent discoveries, the new strategy of retreat is the assertion, heard with
increasing frequency, that these predictions were lucky guesses: it follows that
Velikovsky has gambled and won the longest shot in history. It could therefore be argued
that the accusation of witchcraft stands.
On the issue of what constitutes or does not constitute superstitious thinking, natural
scientists have had their signals crossed for a long time. 'A true son of the
Enlightenment, ' the great naturalist Buffon (1707-88), in 1749 opened his monumental
Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, the most comprehensive effort since
Aristotle to gather in one body all scientific knowledge, with a condemnation of Whiston
[54] . This ferocious onslaught put the tombstone on Whiston's reputation, whereas up to
that point it had been Newton's view of the history of the solar system that had been on
the defensive among scholars [55] . Since he believed that the mechanism of planetary
motions is so well contrived that its origin could not be ascribed to a series of
accidental events, Buffon suggested that it came into existence as the result of the
impact of a comet on the Sun; for this reason he could not object to Whiston on mechanical
grounds, but resorted to theological arguments. After having presented a mocking summary
of his hypotheses, Buffon declared:
I shall make only one remark upon this system, of which I have given a faithful
abridgement. Whenever men are so presumptuous as to attempt a physical explanation of
theological truths, whenever they allow themselves to interpret the sacred text by views
that are purely human;... they must necessarily involve themselves in obscurity, and
tumble into a chaos of confusion like the author of this whimsical system, which
notwithstanding all its absurdities has been received with great applause [56] .
Whiston was ridiculed for quoting the Old Testament in matters of astronomy and at the
same time, condemned for not having taken literally the story of creation in Genesis: 'He
says that the common notion of the work of six days is absolutely false, and that Moses'
description is not an exact and philosophical account of the origin of the universe. ' On
the first point Buffon declared that the true naturalist must leave the interpretation of
the Scriptures to the theologians, and on the second point he agreed with Newton that the
solar system is so exquisitely designed to operate 'in the most perfect manner' that it
cannot have changed since its creation. Modern interpreters of the thought of Buffon are
perplexed because he appears to be a rank mechanical materialist, whereas he put at the
head of the fourth volume a letter to the Faculty of Theology of Paris that begins with
this profession: 'I declare that I do not have any intention of contradicting the text of
the Scriptures, that I firmly believe all that they report about creation, both in
relation to time sequence and to factual circumstances' [57] . In his writings he delved
at great length into problems of scientific method in order to maintain that hypotheses
must be built solely on the painstaking gathering of facts, monuments, experiences: but
apparently, the narratives of mankind's history do not fit into any of these categories,
whereas Newton's adaptation of the creation story of Genesis does.
Buffon's intellectual confusion persists among our contemporary scientists: Kirtley F.
Mather [58] , Edward U. Condon [59] , and J. B. S. Haldane [60] alleged Velikovsky was
a rationalist and an enemy of religious faith; many, among them Otto Struve, accused him
of trying to subvert science for the sake of religious superstition and biblical
fundamentalism. Obviously, odium theologale is not a monopoly of the so-called dark ages.
Frank Manuel came close to the truth in his book, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the
Gods (Cambridge, 1959), where he acknowledged that Newton was deeply involved in
controversies about the significance of ancient mythology (pp. 85-128). Newton championed
euhemerism, the theory that myths were based upon the lives of historical personages, for
by this doctrine he hoped to discredit the references to astronomical and other natural
events in myths - aspects of mythology so frequently cited by his opponents. Manuel has
elegantly summarized (pp. 210-27) the ideas of a prominent antagonist of Newton whose
views Velikovsky has revived: Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722-59). Author of the entry
'Deluge' for the Encyclopédie, Boulanger also wrote L'Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages,
ou examen critique des principales opinions, cérémonies et institutions religieuses et
politiques des différents peuples de la terre (Amsterdam, 1766). In this work he analyzed
the cosmogonies and mythologies of several farspread peoples of the Earth, such as
Germans, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvians, Mexicans, and Caribs,
concluding that rites, ceremonials, and myths reflect the fact that the human race was
subjected to a series of cosmic convulsions for which he also considered the geological
and paleontological evidence. He argued that these catastrophes shaped the human mind,
causing among other things a deepseated psychological trauma:
We still tremble today as a consequence of the deluge and our institutions still pass on
to us the fears and the apocalyptic ideas of our first fathers. Terror survives from race
to race... The child will dread in perpetuity what frightens his ancestors. (III, 316)
Boulanger explained by these fears the human tendency to ideological intolerance, and his
hypothesis seems to be confirmed by the reactions of the academy to Velikovsky's work:
We shall there see the origin of the terrors which throughout the ages have alarmed the
minds of men always possessed by ideas of the devastation of the world. There we shall see
generated the destructive fanaticism, the enthusiasm which leads men to commit the
greatest excesses against themselves and against their fellows, the spirit of persecution
and intolerance which under the name of zeal makes man believe that he has the right to
torment those who do not adore with him the same celestial monarch, or who do not have the
same opinion as he does about His essence or His cult. (III, 348-49)
When the 'Velikovsky affair' is considered in the light of the history of science it loses
its puzzling qualities. Velikovsky saw what other scholars were not able to see because he
relied on pieces of evidence that they had chosen to neglect, namely the accumulated
records of human experience. Natural scientists who scorn these records put themselves in
the position of the early astronomers who held that no truly respectable scholar should
resort to the telescope. In only thirteen years a number of fundamental discoveries,
predicted by Velikovsky, have demonstrated the value of his method. And one could have
predicted that the academic world would react to his thesis with a most unscholarly fury,
even with personal vindictiveness: the record shows that astronomers hold to a peculiar
dogma akin to the biblical story of Creation, that the solar system has remained unchanged
since it was created eons ago, and their assumption has of necessity determined the views
of geologists and historical biologists. This dogma, being basically of theological and
not scientific nature, is grounded itself on fear, as Galileo and Laplace have pointed
out. The evidence is that the dogma is groundless but the fear real. This was the
principal reason for the prolonged emotional outburst in which almost the entire
scientific community of the 1950's took part, an outburst of what Soren Kierkegaard termed
'fear and trembling. '
It is now time for a sober and factual reconsideration; William James properly called
'tough minded' those who can face reality and who do not believe a priori in uniformity
and regularity. The scholars, the learned societies, the professional journals which
violated, in some cases quite outrageously, the canons of proper scholarly procedure in
evaluating Velikovsky's hypotheses, should undo the foolishness of the past by promoting a
systematic study of what the records of antiquity can contribute to the natural sciences.
Newton himself, by his extensive investigations of ancient accounts and records,
recognized that his contention that the solar system has no history stands or falls on the
historical record. The crux of the matter is not the validity of Velikovsky's particular
historical interpretations, but whether an entire body of scientific evidence can be
rejected on dogmatic premises.
Notes (References cited in "The Inconstant Heavens")
1. The position of Galileo on the question of magnetism is summarized in the following way
by Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (New York, 1960), 142: 'Galileo at
one time was prepared to adopt the more general theories of Gilbert in a vague kind of
way, though he did not pretend that he had understood magnetism or the mode of its
operation in the universe. He regretted that Gilbert had been so much a mere experimenter
and had failed to mathematize magnetic phenomena in which we have seen to be the Galileian
manner. '
2. Op. cit., 158.
3. Principia, Ed. by Florian Cajori (Berkeley, 1946), 525. This peculiar explanation is
already presented in the first edition of the Principia, 505: Ascendit fumus in camino
impulsu aeris cui innatat.
4. De natura deorum II, 45, 115. The source of this passage is Posidonius. Whereas the
cosmology of Cicero has received great attention and its sources have been traced, the
cosmology of Ovid, which is an even richer source of information on ancient scientific
theories, has been neglected; but the gap has now been partly filled by Walter Spöerri,
Späthellenistische Berichte uber die Welt (Basel, 1959).
5. Op. cit., II, 21, 56 (Transl. Hubert M. Poteat).
6. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin, 1952), II, 387-88
(Transl, Edward S. Robinson in Werner Jaeger, The Theology of Early Greek Philosophers
(Oxford, 1947), 187.)
7. Freud's essay has the untranslatable title 'Uber die Weltanschaung, ' Gesammelte Werke
(London, 1946), 176. It is Lecture XXXV in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
8. Of Learned Ignorance, Transl. by Germain Heron (New Haven, 1954), Bk. II ch. XI-XII,
107-118.
9. Johannes Funck, Chronologia cum commentariis chronologicis ab initio mundi (Nuernberg,
1545).
10. Opera latine conscripta, Ed. by F. Fiorentino (Napoli, 1879), I, 1, 367.
11. Op cit., I, 1, 372.
12. Cf. A. Corsano, Il pensiero di Giordano Bruno nel suo svolgimento storico (Firenze,
1940), 249-64.
13. Attraction universelle et religion naturelle chez quelques commentateurs anglais de
Newton (Paris, 1938), 4.
14. Quoted from William Whiston, Astronomical Principles of Religion Natural and Reveal'd
(London, 1717), 23. John C. Greene, when he was writing The Death of Adam (Ames, 1959) and
was my colleague at the University of Chicago, called to my attention, before the
publication of Worlds in Collision, the crucial significance of Whiston's writings in the
development of scientific thought.
15. An Examination of Dr Burnet's Theory of the Earth with Remarks on Mr Whiston's New
Theory of the Earth (Oxford, 1698), 177-224.
16. William Whiston, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr William Whiston (London,
1760), I, 293.
17. Philosophical Transactions XXXIII (1724-25), 118-25.
18. 2nd ed. (London, 1718), 381.
19. Op. cit., 4th ed. (London, 1730), 378.
20. Letter to the Princess of Wales, November 1715, in Correspondence Leibnitz-Clarke
présentée d'après les manuscrits originaux, Ed. by Andre Robinet (Paris, 1957), 22.
21. 'Newton, Isaac, ' Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, Published by L. G.
Michaud (Paris, 1821), 127-94; cf. Journal des savants, April 1836, 216.
22. Cf. 'An Historical and Explanatory Appendix' by Cajori to his edition of the
Principia.
23. Bernard Le Boyier Fontenelle, Conversation on the Plurality of the Worlds, Transl.
from French, 2nd ed. (London, 1767), 466.
24. Quoted in Gentleman's Magazine, XXX (1755), January, p. 3.
25. (New Haven, 1932), 63.
26. Butterfield, Op. cit., 118.
27. Principia, 534.
28. Loc. cit.
29. Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1884), VI, 234.
30. VII, p. cxx.
31. VII, p. cxxiv.
32. VII, p. cxxx.
33. VI, 478.
34. VII, p. cxx.
35. VII, p. 121.
36. Ibid.
37. VI, 235.
38. VI, 234.
39. Ibid. (The following translation by Kenneth Heuer, The End of the World, New York,
1953).
40. VI, 347.
41. VI, 479.
42. A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Transl. by F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory (New
York, 1951), Part II Ch. IX, 97.
43. David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton
(Edinburgh, 1855), Vol. 1, 359-60.
44. Several reviewers stated or intimated that the Newtonian theory is absolutely
confirmed by the ephemerides. But, as every student of astronomy is taught, the Newtonian
theory, in spite of the contributions of Laplace, is only nearly confirmed. The
discrepancy between the predictions and the events may be explained by the inadequacy of
our mathematical equipment in matters of three-body or n-body problems, or by the
inadequacy of the theory, or by the possibility (which is extremely rarely mentioned in
the texts of celestial mechanics) that a third factor may be at work besides gravitation
and inertia.
45. Dialogue on the Great World Systems, Ed. by Giorgio de Santillana (Chicago, 1953), 68-
9.
46. (London, 1855), 122, 124.
47. Russell Lyne, 'What are Bestsellers Made of?, ' November 27, 1959.
48. C. Payne-Gaposchkin, The Reporter, March 14, 1950; F. K. Edmondson, Indianapolis Star,
April 9, 1950.
49. Thomas P. McTighe, Best Sellers, August 15, 1950.
50. Science, April 30, 1951.
51. Most leaders of science, except for the very top layer, reveal themselves as being
naive realists without any knowledge of scientific epistemology. An expression of this is
that some of them declared that Velikovsky's earlier activity in neurology and psychiatry
disqualifies him from discussing questions of cosmology. However, it was just from an
interest in neurology and psychiatry that Kant moved to his investigation of the
phenomenology of space and time, which is the foundation of non-Euclidian geometry and
Einsteinian physics; Cf. F. S. C. Northrop, 'Natural Science and the Critical Philosophy
of Kant, ' The Heritage of Kant, Ed. by G. P. Whitney and David F. Bowers (New York,
1962), 37-62. The fruitfulness of Kant's background is indicated by the circumstance that,
in his very first essay published in 1753, he declared: 'A science of all the possible
kinds of space would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding
could undertake in the world of geometry, ' and continued by considering the possibility
of conceiving a space of more than three dimensions.
52. Shapley, Flights from Chaos (New York, 1930), 56-7, declares that the Earth has 'a
quiet predictable behavior' and that 'not many catastrophes happen to the Earth, except
those of its own making, like floods, earthquakes, and sudden continental shifts. '
According to him the destruction caused by the impact of a small comet in the Tunguska
uninhabited area of Siberia on June 30, 1908, was a unique event in history. On this
occurrence, Cf. V. G. Fesenkov, Meteorika, XX( 1961), 27-31.
In the introduction to Of Stars and Men (Boston, 1958), 2, Shapley sums up his philosophy
in these terms:
"It is a good world for many of us. Nature is reasonably benign, and good will is a common
human trait. There is widespread beauty, pleasing symmetry, collaboration, lawfulness,
progress - all qualities that appeal to man-the-thinker if not always to man-the-animal.
When not oppressed by hunger or cold or manmade indignities, we are inclined to
contentment, sometimes to lightheartedness."
Like other militants, he seems to have identified dialectical materialism with the
optimistic mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century, which rehashed the position
of the most dogmatic among the scholastics. Such a position would have been too extreme
even for the more critical of the scholastics, such as the nominalists. It would have been
too extreme even for Plato and Aristotle. It occurs only in the more literary passages of
Plato, as Gorgias 508 A:
Friendship, orderliness, harmony, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and Gods and
men, and because of this the whole is called an order (kosmos) and not disconnected chaos.
Cf. G. P. Maguire, 'Plato's Theory of Natural Law, ' Yale
Classical Studies, X (1947), 178, John Wild, Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of
Natural Law (Chicago, 1957), 117, observes how these passages of Plato inspired The Laws
of Ecclesiastical Policy by the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, a work which, as I
have indicated, framed the foundations of the Newtonian ideology of the eighteenth
century. But Plato deals at length with the astronomical changes and related physical
disasters that have befallen the human race.
53. William A. Irwin, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, April 1952; Haldane, New Statesman
and Nation, November 11, 1950.
54. Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1858), I, 96-100.
55. The last time that Whiston's view was given serious consideration was in 1754 when the
Berlin Academy of Science offered a prize for an essay on the question: 'Whether the Earth
since its origin has undergone a change in its period of rotation, and whence this fact
could be established. ' Kant submitted an essay for this competition (Werke, Ed. by Ernst
Cassirer, Berlin, 1912, I, 189-96); but, since he was an ardent Newtonian, he refused to
answer the question as it was stated: 'One could investigate the question historically by
considering the documents of the most ancient period of the ancient world that concern the
length of the year and the intercalations.... But in my proposal I shall not try to gain
light with the help of history. I find these documents so obscure and so little
trustworthy in the information that they could provide on the question before us that the
theory that would have to be built on them in order to make them agree with the
foundations of nature, would sound too much like an artificial construction. ' He then
proceeded to outline the nebular hypothesis which implies the stability of the solar
system.
56. Transl. by William Smellie (London, 1791,) I, 108.
57. Oeuvres philosophiques de Buffon, Ed. by Jean Piveteau (Paris, 1954), p. XVI.
58. American Scientist, Summer, 1950.
59. 'Velikovsky's Catastrophes, ' New Republic, April 24, 1950.
60. Loc. cit.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
PART FOUR
by Livio C. Stecchini
CUNEIFORM ASTRONOMICAL RECORDS AND CELESTIAL INSTABILITY
To prove that there are ancient records which document that in recent times the earth
underwent a cataclysm of extraterrestrial origin which is precisely described and should
be taken into account as an empirical datum by those whose task is to construct
astronomical and cosmological theories, I shall quote the opinion of a recognized major
authority on Babylonian and biblical astronomy, chronology, and mythology, Father Franz
Xavier Kugler (1862-1929).
Kugler had a strictly scientific bent of mind. He started his academic career as a
university lecturer of chemistry, but, after the death of Joseph Epping (1835-94), a
fellow member of the Jesuit order and the founder of the study of cuneiform astronomical
texts, Kugler decided to take over and continue his work and to this end became an
outstanding expert on ancient astronomy and cuneiform philology. Most of his life was
dedicated to the interpretation of cuneiform texts dealing with astronomy and with the
related topics of chronology and mythology; the main characteristic of his method was a
mathematical rigour for which he is considered still unsurpassed today.
In the latter part of his life he applied the knowledge developed in the field of
cuneiform documents to the solution of related problems of biblical interpretation. His
greatest contribution to the study of ancient astronomy was his approach, by which he
built only from the most painstaking interpretation of specific texts and thereby cleared
the field of a priori presuppositions and hasty generalizations.
The decipherment of cuneiform materials had produced from the very beginning an
overwhelming mass of novel data which compelled thoughtful scholars to question most of
the accepted notions about the development of civilization in ancient times. However, this
wealth of revolutionary evidence drove a number of highly competent specialists of
cuneiform philology to raise too many general questions at the same time and, in their
enthusiasm for the new data before their eyes, to commit themselves to general theories
without adequate empirical backing. It is true that many of these general theories were
presented as merely tentative, with the purpose of stressing that most of our assumptions
need to be totally revised; but the concrete result was that the debate shifted to
controversies about generalities, obscuring thereby the more meaningful aspect that
cuneiform texts provide a new exact historical documentation, more reliable than most of
those that had been hitherto available.
Kugler insisted that one should suspend judgment and concentrate on the careful study of
specific groups of documents. For this reason, only at the end of his life did he feel
ready to come forth with a general theory, and less than two years before his death, he
published a rather slim book entitled Sybillinischer Sternkampf und Phaëthon in
naturgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung, 'The Sybilline Battle of the Stars and Phaethon Seen as
Natural History, '( Munster, 1927).
He who rested his fame on tomes which, in spite of their intrinsic clarity, are
comprehensible only to the few who can understand both mathematical astronomy and
cuneiform philology, issued this book as part of a series called Zeitgemässige Beiträge,
(' Essays of Current Interest'), because, as he explains, he felt that he had a message
that should affect contemporary society, since it had a great meaning for the history of
culture. Kugler well understood that great innovating ideas can be made to prevail by
presenting them to a public wider than the narrow specialists, who have a tendency to
become prisoners of the general conceptions they have learned together with the technical
routines that they have spent their lives to master. But even though Kugler intended to
address himself to the general public, he could not help following his usual method, which
consisted in proving a general point by concentrating on the exact technical
interpretations of a few texts.
Werner Jaeger was fond of repeating to us students that the most important rule he had
learned from the great Wilamowitz, was that in philology a few univocal texts have more
compelling force than one hundred ambiguous ones. The trouble with this method is that it
leads to the formulation of conclusions meaningful only for the wise who can understand
that the revision of the interpretation of a single text may automatically imply the
revision of a host of similar ones. What Kugler submitted was intended to be dynamite that
should have shaken the entire field of ancient chronology and historical astronomy, but
the fuse was not lit because the general public did not understand what was implied, and
those who were competent to understand the implications were not psychologically ready to
draw the inevitable conclusions.
The 'pressing warning' that Kugler wanted to communicate to the public was summed up by
him as:
the momentous doctrine that ancient traditions, even when they are dressed as myth and
saga, cannot be dismissed lightly as fantastic, or worse, meaningless fabrications. It is
particularly proper to avoid this pitfall when dealing with serious reports, especially
those of religious nature such as those that occur in large number in the Old Testament.
He applied this general theory to the interpretations of the ancient texts that deal with
the Battle of the Stars. He observed that these texts have been dismissed by scholars as:
completely nonsensical and that nobody has succeeded in explaining them as a meaningful
allegory, if it is not possible to interpret them as references to true cosmic
occurrences... I have to confess that in my first occasional attempts I did not succeed
any better. But many years of experience with the decipherment of cuneiform documents that
concern the astronomical and astromythological conceptions of the Babylonians have taught
me that, in the system of ideas of the Easterners and of the ancient Orientals in
particular, there is much that seems nonsensical to us Occidentals, but is in reality
within the realm of factual foundations and sound logic.
When in 1966 I published a first version of the present essay, I stressed that
pronunciamentos such as the two just quoted, were intended to sum up an entire life of
research on ancient astronomical documents. It was the intention of Kugler that they
should be taken as statements of fundamental importance for the understanding and the
gathering of actual empirical data of astronomy (which is relevant to natural science).
After this brief, but final and comprehensive publication of Kugler was rescued from
oblivion, it was quoted by several supporters of Velikovsky. Yet it has been ignored by
his opponents, which is regrettable since I heartily desire to hear their interpretation
of the astronomical records submitted by Kugler.
My essay of 1966 stimulated a writer friendly to Velikovsky's theories, Malcolm Lowery, to
dedicate a learned article to the contents of Kugler's book. This article is a valuable
contribution. First published in England, it was then published again in the United States
in a revised form [1] . It is remarkable that the latter version of Lowery's article
(which is the one I shall quote), in spite of its effort to summarize what Kugler intended
to convey, had to dedicate 25 compact pages to Kugler's 52 pages. In spite of this, Lowery
missed several points made by Kugler. This is not to be taken as a reflection upon
Lowery's learning, which is of the highest level: for instance, he has translated well
some Greek texts of astromythology which have challenged even the professional
classicists. The root of the problem is that, although Kugler meant to address himself to
the general public, he knew that he was uttering momentous statements and therefore tried
to document every single step: for this reason, in many cases, instead of presenting an
argument in his own words, he limited himself to citing the text of ancient documents. The
result is a booklet that is comprehensible only to those who are familiar with his
previous publications of an extremely specialized nature.
Kugler published his booklet when he was sixty-five years old, because what he intended to
issue was actually a manifesto announcing a new line of solutions for problems which had
been debated since scholars first began to read the astronomical clay tablets found in
Mesopotamia. Kugler had wrestled with these problems all through his scholarly life. A
manifesto is a declaration of opinions and of related objectives to be pursued. In his
manifesto Kugler was considering what had developed in the study of ancient astronomy in
the preceding half century, and was setting aims for future research to be pursued by the
next generation.
Unfortunately Kugler's manifesto was ignored by the generation that immediately followed
it. This is not a unique case. Thomas S. Kuhn (The Copernican Revolution, Cambridge,
Mass., 1957, pp. 185-6) relates that Copernicus had been 'widely recognized as one of
Europe's leading astronomers' for twenty years, before he published his revolutionary book
on point of death (A. D. 1543):
Many advanced astronomical tests written during the fifty years after Copernicus' death
referred to him as a 'second Ptolemy' or 'the outstanding artificer of our age; '
increasingly these books borrowed data, computations, and diagrams. Authors who applauded
his erudition, borrowed his diagrams, or quoted his determination of the distance from the
earth to the moon, usually either ignored the earth's motion or dismissed it as absurd.
Today, if what Kugler stated in his booklet was put into the hands of a writer with some
journalistic talent, it would be the source of a runaway bestseller. It would be expedient
that this writer reserve to himself the copyright to the film version, because Hollywood
would be most likely to make a bid for it. But Kugler belonged to a different generation
and a different world: he spent most of his life within the walls of Jesuit training
institutions, carrying on, as a practical sideline to his reading of Sumerian and Assyrian
tablets, the teaching of mathematics to his brothers of the Order.
The pivotal idea in Kugler's book is that the myth of Phaeton, one of the best known but
also oddest Greek myths, was based on an actual physical occurrence which can be dated
historically around 1500 B. C. According to Kugler it was at this time that there appeared
in the sky a body which was more brilliant than the light of the sun and finally made an
impact on the earth: 'There really were at one time simultaneous catastrophes of fire and
flood. '
The myth narrates that Phaeton (The Shining One) borrowed and drove the chariot of the
Sun, but was forced by the steeds that were pulling it to drive it off course through the
sky and finally to drive it disastrously close to the surface of the earth. The gods had
to put an end to the calamity. Phaeton was struck by a bolt of lightning and fell to earth
dead. Kugler concentrates upon this myth in order to establish the principle that, if such
a 'highly fantastic' story must be taken as scientific truth wrapped 'in the veil of
poetry, ' there are other ancient myths which must be understood as having a similar
basis.
Before Kugler many scholars had recognized that the myth of Phaeton refers to an event of
physical nature, but they had tried to explain it as an ordinary recurring phenomenon.
Some had maintained that it describes the fiery glow of particularly brilliant sunsets,
and some, as the coming out of Venus as the morning star. Lowery has translated in full
from the original German the pages in which Kugler lists these interpretations, in order
to show how forceful Kugler was in scorning them as preposterous. This is a quotation from
Lowery's translation:
So simple, ordinary and peaceful a phenomenon as the evening sky could not provide the
basis for a legend which patently describes complicated extraordinary and violent natural
events. And yet neither, on the hand, could the appearance of Venus as the morning star
awaken the idea of a universal catastrophe - even in the wildest imagination.
According to Kugler, the reality behind the myth, is that the earth was enveloped by a
stream of meteorites, a stream of 'enormous width' and containing meteorites of such
'giant' size that they could cause 'great fires and violent flood waves. ' He also
indicated that the impact must have been preceded by the appearance in the sky of a body
larger and more brilliant than the sun. He left the definition of this body open for
reasons that I shall explain later.
According to Kugler, the fire of Phaeton which according to the Greeks had its main impact
on Africa (some poets claimed that it caused the Africans to turn black), refers to the
same event which in Greek mythology is called the Flood of Deucalion (the name by which
the Greeks called the man who supposedly survived it and repopulated the land). Having
identified the Fire of Phaeton and the Flood of Deucalion, Kugler proceeded to document
that ancient chronologists had assigned specific dates to these two events, such as 610
years before the founding of Rome or the 67th year of Moses. Actually, Greek chronologists
state that the period for which we have certain dates begins with this event. They date as
contemporary the Flood of Deucalion or Ogyges in Greece, the Fire of Phaeton in Africa,
and the Plagues of Egypt. Kugler left out of his account of the ancient information the
detail that the foundation of Athens, that is, the city of Athena (who was the planet
Venus), was made contemporary with these events. In the chronology set up by the Greek
historian Ephorus (fourth century B. C.) the cataclysm took place in the year 1528/ 7 B.
C. [2] . This chronology was accepted in the chronological studies of Eratosthenes (third
century B. C.) which in turn were incorporated into those of Castor of Rhodes (first
century B. C.). Varro quotes Castor as his source for the information that at the time of
the Flood of Ogyges 'so great a miracle happened in the star of Venus, as never was seen
before nor in aftertimes: for the colour, the size, the figure and the course of it were
changed. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this
occurred in the reign of Ogyges' [3] .
Kugler concluded his quotations of the chronological texts with these words: 'Even though
we do not get the notion of ascribing certain chronological value to these dates and of
accepting the old chronological tables based on them (e. g. Petavius, de doctrina
temporum), we do not have any right to deny that these traditions have a core of
historical truth. ' Like Velikovsky, Kugler studies both the ancient writers of chronology
and the chronological investigations of Renaissance scholars. Velikovsky quotes a number
of Renaissance writers who stress that ancient sources make the cataclysm contemporary
with the appearance of the comet Typhon, and observe that, although this was called a
comet, it had a circular shape. These Renaissance writers quote, among others, a passage
of Pliny (II, XXIII, 91-92) from which one can gather that it had been disputed whether
Typhon was a comet or a planet. The passage reads:
Some comets move like planets, but others remain stationary ... A terrible comet was seen
by the people of Ethiopia and Egypt, to which Typhon the king of that period gave his
name. It had the nature of a fire, twisted like a spiral, but it was dismal in appearance.
Rather than a comet it was some sort of conglomeration of fire. Occasionally both planets
and comets spread out a coma.
Wilhelm Gundel, a specialist in Hellenistic astromythology, in his review of Kugler's book
sharply rebuked Kugler for not mentioning that all the texts similar to those examined by
Kugler ascribed the catastrophe to a comet, and specifically to the comet Typhon [4] .
Gundel denied to Kugler the merit of originality by remarking:
Kugler arrives at the conclusion that the saga of Phaethon has as its historical core
the appearance of a comet that was followed by a partial world fire and a flood. In
support of this Kugler provides a complete detailed analysis of the saga. I can observe
that this interpretation has been already offered several times in antiquity. Probably it
is based on an old Pythagorean theory of comets. The first references to it are in Plato
and Aristotle, but it is presented in detail by later commentators.
It would seem that Kugler refrained from using the term comet because he was puzzled by
the role of Venus and because the texts mention a globular body similar in apparent size
and brightness to the sun. He used the term 'sun-like meteor' which sounds strange except
to those who are familiar with ancient terminology. Aristotle, in order to defend the
immutability of the heavens, distinguishes astronomy from meteorology and defines the
latter as the study of 'the appearance in the sky of burning flames and of shooting stars
and of what some call torches and horns' (Meteor. I 341 B). It is significant that, after
having described the general topic of meteorology, Aristotle begins the treatment of it by
refuting those who say that 'the comet is one of the planets' (342 B).
Gundel's criticism is not justified, because even though it is clear from Kugler's
explanation of the ancient accounts that he was suggesting answers in terms of the
appearance of a comet and of the impact of the comet's tail, he refrained from committing
himself because he was puzzled by the role assigned to Venus in the entire event.
Having dealt with the myth of Phaeton, Kugler, in order to prove further that ancient
texts that touch upon heavenly occurrences and are dismissed as fantasy or gibberish
contain precise scientific information, picks as a test case the last lines of the Fifth
Book of the Sybilline Oracles. He chose these lines (512-31) because F. W. Blass, the
editor of the text of the Sibylline Oracles, had referred to them as 'the insane finale'
of the Fifth Book, and the historian of ancient science, Edmund Hoppe, had declared that,
no matter from which angle they are examined, they prove 'entirely nonsensical. '
Kugler concluded that to him, as an expert on ancient astronomy, these lines have a clear
meaning, since they contain 'an elegant dressing of real natural events according to a
fully unified plan' [5] .
The lines purport to describe the circumstances of the coming end of the world; they were
written in the century before the birth of Christ by Greek-speaking inhabitants of Egypt,
when the ancient world was agitated by the Messianic expectation of a cosmic upheaval. But
the lines give an account that is so exact and technical that it must be something more
than a mere mystical vision of coming destruction. Such precise astronomical details are
given that, calculating by the position of the constellations around 100 B. C., the crisis
began in September and reached a climax in seven months and 2.7 days, after the 7th or the
8th of April. Velikovsky has concluded on the basis of the agreement of Egyptian, Hebrew,
Athenian, and Aztec traditions that the earth was hit by the tail of a comet on April 13.
According to Kugler, the crisis described as the Battle of the Stars began with the
appearance in the eastern sky of a body as bright as the sun and similar in apparent
diameter to the sun and the moon. The light of the sun was replaced by long streams of
flame crossing each other.
After the mention of these streams of flame that replaced the sun as a source of light,
there follows the line, 'the Morning Star fought the battle riding on the back of Leo. '
Kugler observed that this association of Venus with Leo must have had a momentous meaning
for the ancients, since the several goddesses that represent Venus, such as the Phrygian
Cybele, the Greek Great Mother, the Carthaginian Coelestis was portrayed as riding a lion
while holding a spear in her hands. In Babylonian mythology Venus as Evening Star was a
goddess of love and motherhood; but as Morning Star she was a divinity of war, leader of
the army of the stars, associated with the lion 'as a symbol of a power that overthrows
everything. '
The Battle of the Stars ends when the attacker is defeated, falling into the ocean and
setting the entire earth on fire. Kugler explained these events by bringing to bear
another prophecy of the same book of the Sibylline Oracles (line 206-13) where, after
mentioning the same positions of the stars, warning is given to the Indians and the
Ethiopians to beware of a coming 'great heavenly fire on earth and a new nature from the
fighting stars, when the entire land of the Ethiopians will be destroyed in fire and
wailing. ' The emphasis on Ethiopia is comprehensible when one considers that these texts
were written in Lower Egypt.
Kugler concluded that the details of the world disaster prophesied in the Sibylline
Oracles are materials taken over from the reports of past events, which among the Greeks
were presented as the story of Phaeton.
Lowery has stated that in dealing with the Sybilline oracle Kugler retreated from his
former position that some major catastrophe of extraterrestrial origin took place at the
middle of the second millennium B. C., because Kugler analyzes the oracle according to the
normal movement of the heavenly bodies in the year 100 B. C. In spite of his diligence and
familiarity with the Greek originals, Lowery has missed the drift of Kugler's argument.
First of all, it is a good guess to assume that this oracle was written in the first
century B. C., the age in which the Mediterranean countries were most agitated by
expectations of a messianic end of this world [6] . In the second place, Kugler wanted to
indicate that the writers of the oracle were so preoccupied with solid astronomical facts
that they described the successive phases of the episode of Phaeton according to what they
knew about the position of the heavenly bodies in the several months of the year. It is
his contention that the writers of this oracle, far from being maniacs breathing
gibberish, were trying to make their prediction (based on a past historical occurrence)
credible by framing it in an accurate astronomical timetable. Kugler left no doubt that he
was not thinking of an ordinary movement of the heavens according to the yearly unfolding
of the seasons, when he put emphasis on the line of the oracle that reads, 'the Morning
Star fought the battle, riding on the back of Leo, ' and linked this line with the fact
that, in several ancient cults of the planet Venus, the goddess was portrayed as riding on
a lion.
Followers of Velikovsky may find fault with Kugler for having left the role of Venus hang
loosely as an unexplained item. They do not understand that Kugler did not intend to
compile a treatise of cosmology : he was broadcasting a manifesto on how texts of
astromythology should be interpreted. Perhaps one can explain his approach by referring to
his first academic position as a teacher of chemistry : by testing two pieces chipped out
of a mountain, he proved that there was an entire gold mine to be dug out.
Lowery criticizes Kugler for not having raised the issue of catastrophism versus
uniformitarianism; but Kugler was not trying to construct an astronomical theory : he was
stating less and stating more, in that he was arguing that there was an entire world of
astronomical knowledge to be explored. In any case, Kugler was more clearminded on the
theoretical aspects of the problem than Lowery has proved to be. The latter regrets that
at the end of his presentation Kugler took a stand against 'catastrophism; ' that is, he
dismissed as without historical significance all those passages of Greek philosophers,
from Plato in his late writings to the Roman Stoics, in which mention is made of universal
destructions by fire and flood, despite the fact that these passages take some elements
from the myth of Phaeton.
Kugler was scientifically correct, but in a peculiar sense : these ancient writers failed
to see the episode of Phaeton as a unique event. This group of philosophers was fathering
modern uniformitarianism, because they were fitting the historical tradition of
'catastrophes' into a cyclical pattern of phenomena recurring at fixed intervals of time,
past and future, according to an absolutely unchangeable and predictable order of the
heavenly cosmos. It was their way of moving from a disorderly universe, now often
admitted, to an orderly progression of disorders, which was a first step towards dropping
disorders entirely and leaving the history of science with simple orderly progression of
the ages.
PANBABYLONIANISM
Since Kugler's booklet on the myth of Phaeton has been ignored, his reputation rests on
his monumental work Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel, 'Astronomical Science and
Astronomical Observations at Babylon. ' The first volume was published in 1907 and the
second volume in 1909 ; supplements were issued up to 1914. The contents consist
essentially in the edition, interpretation, and numerical analysis of cuneiform
astronomical records. Even today it is quoted as an invaluable source of data; but those
who draw from it do not mention that it was written in order to solve problems of
astromythology. The two published volumes were intended to be followed by a third volume
dealing with mythology; but this volume was not issued for reasons that I shall explain.
In the period that goes from the beginning of our century to the First World War, the
field of ancient studies was agitated by debates about the value of a theory to which
there was given the misleading name of Panbabylonianism. In order to explain how their
theory came to be formulated, one would have to review the entire history of the
decipherment of cuneiform languages, but here I shall limit myself to a few points. The
reading of the clay tablets that were excavated in Mesopotamia after 1842 provoked a
revolution in biblical studies, since it was found that many of the accounts of the Old
Testament had close parallels in cuneiform narratives. A typical example is the story of
the Deluge and of the Ark. To explain these parallels was a complex task which was
rendered even more arduous by the circumstance that the Old Testament is sacred literature
to Jews and Christians (divine revelation to the more conservative ones). The problem
became extremely difficult and at the same time of utmost importance when it was realized
that episodes which are common to the Old Testament and to cuneiform literature occur in
the mythologies of the most diverse areas of the globe. The case of the Deluge story is
the best known one. To this day Scholars have not yet agreed on an explanation for these
astounding parallels. Velikovsky's hypotheses constitute an effort to arrive at the
solution of the problem, which obviously is central to the understanding of the
development of any civilization and of civilization in general.
The decipherment of the cuneiform signs (particularly of the original Sumerian ones) had
relied in part on the study of mathematics; documents dealing with measurements had been
particularly useful. In the process it was found that, at the time the Sumerians were
developing the art of writing, they had already established a scientific system of
measures linking length, volume, and weight; the very fact that these units were
sexagesimal indicates their connection with time units. Even before one began to read
cuneiform tablets, it had been surmised that the measures of the ancient world derived
from Mesopotamia. A highlight in the growth of cuneiform studies was a paper submitted by
C. F. Lehmann-Haupt to the International Congress of Orientalist held at Stockholm in
1889; 'The Old Babylonian System of Volume and Weight as the Foundation of the Ancient
System of Weight, Coinage, and Volume. ' Since the notion that a single system of measures
spread through the world by diffusion from Mesopotamia was then generally accepted, it was
reasonable to infer that scientific thinking spread from the same area by diffusion.
Friedrich Delitzsch (1850-1922) thought of applying these notions of diffusion in the
mathematical field to the solution of the problems of the similarities between the
mythologies of the world. This scholar who was one of the most powerful minds in the field
of cuneiform studies, developed a comprehensive theory which centres on two main
contentions. The first is the common elements of mythologies. The second is that very
early in Mesopotamia there was developed an advanced astronomical science which was
carried by diffusion to the rest of the world in the form of mythological stories. In
substance mythology would have been used as a medium for coding astronomical information.
According to this interpretation the mythological dress would have helped in remembering.
(According to Velikovsky's interpretation the memory of some astronomical occurrences
would have been clothed in a mythical dress because a direct recollection was too
traumatic.)
The reason why the Panbabylonists were hurrying to formulate a comprehensive theory, even
before all the available evidence was gathered, was that cuneiform scholars were under
pressure to answer to statements made by students of the Old Testament; this category
included a broad range of writers, from biblical scholars to religious zealots. The
discovery of the similarities between Old Testament narratives and cuneiform accounts had
caused a commotion among interpreters of the Bible, whether scholarly or not; much of what
was published was irrational or irresponsible, and there was some outright exploitation of
the interest of the general public. The excavation of the Tower of Babel which was then
being planned by German archaeologists, seemed to be symbolic of the situation; in Germany
one spoke jokingly of Babel und Bibel, a phrase which in English was expanded into 'Babel,
Bible, and babble. ' The German scholars, who were the world leaders in developing the new
field of cuneiform studies, felt they had the responsibility to come out with some clear-
cut formulation that could put an end to this confusion of tongues.
Delitzsch and his many supporters among the experts on cuneiform philology would have been
on solid ground if they had stuck to their own area and investigated the assumed high
level of early Mesopotamian astronomy. Instead they over-extended themselves in a sort of
imperialist enthusiasm for their own discipline. For instance, they engaged in an
unnecessary, and in my opinion misguided, campaign to belittle the achievements of
Egyptian mathematics and astronomy. They rushed to explain the great riddle of the
similarities among the mythologies of the world.
Panbabylonianism became so well established among German scholars that in 1902 Delitzsch
was asked by them to present his ideas in two solemn public lectures in the presence of
the Emperor. The latter was so impressed that he asked Delitzsch to repeat them for the
Emperor and his court. The text of these lectures was immediately translated into English:
Babel and Bible, Two lectures Delivered before the Members of the Deutsche Orient-
Gesellschaft in the Presence of the Emperor, (New York and London, 1903). In England too
the Panbabylonist theory received so much public attention that the London Times of
February 25,1903, printed a letter in which Wilhelm II answered those who wondered whether
he had performed his imperial duty of upholding the Christian faith.
THE ERA OF NABONASSAR
Kugler at first was sympathetic to Panbabyloniaism, but later rejected it, because he
became convinced that any serious astronomy could not have existed in Mesopotamia before
the era of Nabonassar.
Late Mesopotamian and Hellenistic astronomers reckon the years by a chronological system
called 'era of Nabonassar, ' which begins on February 26, 747 B. C. This era gets it name
by the circumstance that, in the initial centuries, the years are counted according to a
list of the years of reign of the Kings of Babylon; the first of the kings included in the
list, is Nabonassar. At the time of Nabonassar, Babylon was under foreign rule and the
power of its king was only nominal; in any case, as Kugler observed, no significant
political event occurred during the reign of Nabonassar. Nevertheless, starting with the
reign of Nabonassar there began to be kept a yearly record of outstanding political
events, known as the Babylonian Chronicle. Since Ptolemy calculated the years by the era
of Nabonassar, it continued to be used by astronomers until the Julian era was adopted as
the scientific era during the Renaissance.
The common explanation for the adoption of the era of Nabonassar, which is still repeated
today in standard textbooks, is that at that time in Mesopotamia there was introduced a
new luni-solar calendar, which gradually was adopted in the neighbouring countries,
including Greece. But Kugler realized that the introduction of this calendar was not the
cause, but the result of whatever caused the adoption of the new era.
In the very first pages of the introduction to his Sternkunde, Kugler states that only
with the beginning of the era of Nabonassar did Babylonian and Assyrian astronomers feel
the urge 'to ascertain and record the heavenly motions according to space and time by
measurement and number. ' Before this era the astronomers of Mesopotamia would have been
only 'stargazers' (the German word Sterngucker has a humorous connotation which may be
rendered by 'starpeeper') who were 'exceptionally inclined to fantasy' (ausserördentlich
phantasiereich). This is indeed a strange claim, but Kugler dedicated the entire body of
his Sternkunde to justifying it by facts and figures. In the supplements to it there is a
chapter entitled triumphantly, 'Positive Proofs for the Absence of a Scientific Astronomy
before the Eighth Century B. C. '
The proofs are basically of two types. First, after the beginning of the era of
Nabonassar, the astronomers of Mesopotamia, for a period that lasted about two centuries,
worked laboriously to ascertain some basic pieces of numerical information without which
any rational study of the heavens is impossible, as, for instance, the exact day of the
spring equinox. Second, the earlier astronomers of this group developed elaborate
calculations which begin with basic figures set through a rough approximation. For
instance, computations of the appositions and conjunctions of the sun and the moon, made
for the purpose of calculating the beginning of the new moon, would have been based on a
value of the longest day which is in excess by more than ten minutes. Since some of these
data could have been obtained by a minimum of diligent observation, he concluded that
these astronomers liked to play with numbers and enjoyed calculations that had little to
do with reality. Still he had to admit that at times one comes across figures of
breathtaking accuracy.
According to Kugler there are two specific pieces of proof that astronomy began to be
based on exact calculations in the era of Nabonassar. The first is that, because the list
of eclipses available to Hellenistic scholars begins with the year 721 B. C., one can
infer that Mesopotamian astronomers had not kept a record of eclipses before this date;
any serious study of the heavens would start with such a record. Kugler was not aware of
the fact, called to our attention by Velikovsky, that the Chinese list of eclipses begins
at the same point of time. The second is that before the age of Nabonassar the
Mesopotamian calendar appears to have been based on irregular lengths of the year and
month; obviously the establishment of a reliable calendar is a prerequisite even of
elementary astronomy.
Kugler fails to provide a consistent evaluation of the method of pre-Nabonassar
astronomers: at times he describes them as totally oblivious of numerical data and at
other times as occasionally careless. At the beginning (p. 25) of the second volume of the
Sternkunde he hedged the statement he had made at the beginning of the first volume, by
declaring that the collecting of observational data 'at least was not administered
systematically. '
Kugler tried to establish why at the time of Nabonassar there would have been a striking
change in the attitude towards astronomical records. At first he suggested that 'perhaps
Nabonassar promoted it; ' but later he recognized that Nabonassar contributed only a name
to the dating system. He concluded that observers must have been influenced by some
momentous astronomical occurrence. Kugler could not trace anything more significant than
that, at the time, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars were in conjunction. On December 12, 747 B. C.
Venus and Jupiter were at a distance of 1'30" and on February 26, 746 B. C. Mars and
Jupiter were at a distance of 23". In reality these conjunctions do not provide an
explanation for a total reform in the art of astronomy. If they prove anything, they give
some support to Velikovsky's hypothesis that Venus, having been originally ejected from
Jupiter, came to interfere with the orbit of Mars on February 26, 747 B. C. According to
astrophysics, if there was a near collision, the present orbits, retrojected to the
assumed time of the near collision, should indicate proximity.
Kugler had his doubts about the meaning of the era of Nabonassar, but these were assuaged
by the statement of the Byzantine chronologist Syncellus that, 'Beginning with Nabonassar
the Chaldeans made precise the times of the movements of the heavenly bodies. ' What
Kugler did not consider is that Syncellus drew on the Greek chronologists that I mentioned
in the first chapter of this essay. These chronologists indicate that whatever change took
place in the methods of measurement was not limited to Mesopotamia.
In my doctoral dissertation I studied the role of Pheidon, King of Argos, in Greek
chronology [7] . Greek chronologists divide their system of dates, which begins with the
Flood of Deucalion, into a first period called mythikon (period of the myths) and a second
period called historikon. The dividing line is the date of Pheidon of Argos which was
originally set in 748/ 7 B. C. [8] . Other dates of early Greek history, such as the
supposed date of the First Olympiad (776 B. C.), were calculated from this assumed date of
Pheidon, who would have interfered with the Olympic Games (Cf. Herodotus VI, 127).
According to Greek tradition Pheidon of Argos would have invented measures of lengths,
volume, and weight; but this tradition puzzled the same Greeks who reported it, since, as
they say, 'measures existed even earlier. '
However, I proved to the satisfaction of my academic readers that Pheidon was an imaginary
character whose name is derived from the verb pheidomai 'to reduce. ' The earliest texts
do not speak of Pheidon, which in Greek is a nickname for one who gives scanty measures,
but of pheidonia metra, 'reduced measures. ' Since in successive investigations I
established that the basic units of length, volume, and weight were not changed from the
Mycenean age, the only units that could have been changed would be time units.
Greek historians report that the first basis for a yearly record of events was the list of
the priestesses of the Temple of Hera outside Argos. Excavations show that this temple may
well have been founded in the eighth century B. C. One point can be accepted as proven,
namely, that Greek chronologists set a break in the calculation of time at the middle of
the eighth century B. C., independently of anything that may have happened in Mesopotamia,
and that this break was connected with the units of measurement.
Possibly similar developments had occurred independently in Rome. The foundation of Rome
is dated by the earliest annalist, Fabius Pictor, in 748 B. C. The foundation of Rome was
ascribed to an imaginary character called Romulus after the name of the city, Rome.
Romulus was followed by another imaginary character called Numa; this name is derived from
an Italian modification of the Greek word nomos, 'norm, standard. ' We are told that Numa
was the second founder of Rome; his birthday was April 21, which was the supposed date of
the foundation of Rome by Romulus. Numa was the first to establish a calendar 'according
to exactness' [9] : he would have calculated a luni-solar calendar according to the
correct length of the solar year and the lunar month. Before him the Romans would have
used erroneous figures for the length of the year and month. Finally, it must be observed
that, up to the second century B. C., the Roman year began on March 1, and hence we say
September, October, November, December. The beginning of the era of Nabonassar has been
calculated as beginning on February 26, 747 B. C., at a point which, as Kugler related,
had no particular significance in the Babylonian calendar and which does not mark any
turning point in the unfolding of the seasons.
Kugler probably did not know that Newton too had argued, on the basis of the Greek and
Latin authors available to him, that the science of astronomy began with the era of
Nabonassar. The purpose of Newton was to silence those who disputed the stability of the
solar system since creation. Newton's contention that astronomical science was a late
historical development, was challenged by a scholar who anticipated some of the views of
the Panbabylonists, Nicolas Fréret (1688-1749), the first permanent secretary of the
Academie des Inscriptions. Fréret, who is properly described as l'un des savants les plus
illustres que la France ait produit [10] , in a series of monumental studies published in
the acts of this academy, foresaw the immense advances that could be made in the study of
ancient history by combining linguistics, mythology, chronology, geography, astronomy, and
history of science in general, taking into account the information that was beginning to
be available concerning the civilization of Mesopotamia, Persia, India and China. He
realized that with this material there could be obtained conclusions that not only are
revolutionary, but also particularly reliable. This point is summed up in his essay,
Réflexions sur l'etude des anciennes histoires et sur le degré de certitude de leurs
preuves. He saw that the data of ancient history were in conflict with the theory of
Newton. He challenged Newton's views about mythology and ancient science by which the
latter tried to dismiss the evidence for changes in the solar system before the era of
Nabonassar. A number of scholars of the time wrote heatedly for and against his Défense de
la chronologie fondée sur les monuments, contre le système chronologique de Newton (Paris,
1758). The strongest argument, however, against Newton's contention that the ancient
evidence on astronomical events is unreliable, is contained in Fréret's essay on ancient
geodesy, in which he maintained not only that the length of circumference of the earth was
well known in early times but also that the Egyptians knew the length of their country
almost to the cubit [11] . In 1816, Jean-Antoine Letronne (1787-1848), after reviewing
the entire Academie des Inscriptions concluded that, given the precision of the Egyptian
methods of geodetic surveying the declaration of Fréret 'is verified or at least ceases to
be too exaggerated' [12] .
In 1972, I published the figures used by the Egyptians in calculating the length of their
country at the beginning of the dynastic period and showed that they calculated the size
of the earth according to a polar flattening of 1/ 297.75 [13] . At present, I have ready
for publication the Mesopotamian figures for the size of the earth, which are based on a
polar flattening of 1/ 298.666. There are accounts that concern the discrepancy between
the two sets of figures. In our own age, before the launching of satellites, it was
believed that the flattening is 1/ 297.1. With the help of satellites it has been
established that the earth flattening is 1/ 298.25. Using this figure and an equatorial
radius of 6,378,140 metres, it has been calculated how each area of the globe is above or
below the level indicated by a geometrically perfect spheroid. It happens that Egypt and
Mesopotamia are among the few areas in which the actual sea level agrees with the spheroid
of reference. Even before the figures of our space age were published, on purely empirical
grounds I had reached the conclusion that the ancient calculations of distances within
Egypt agree best of all with a flattening of 1/ 298.3.
In conclusion, Kugler was right in documenting that a new age in the reporting of
astronomical data began with the era of Nabonassar, but the aberrant astronomical data
reported for the earlier period cannot be explained by a lack of interest in precise
measurements.
VENUS IN CUNEIFORM ASTRONOMY
Kugler's criticism, which concentrated on the specific issue of the era of Nabonassar, had
a sobering effect on some leading members of the Panbabylonist school. Hugo Winckler
(1863-1913) and Alfred Jeremias (1864-1935) withdrew from the emotion laden debates about
the value of the biblical testimony. In 1907 they began to publish a series of monographs
aimed at refuting Kugler. This Series was entitled Im Kampfe um den Alten Orient; Wehr-
und Streitschriften, 'On the Field of Battle about the Ancient Orient; Writings of Defence
and Attack; ' but in spite of their flamboyant heading, these monographs concentrated on
what their authors knew well, cuneiform philology. General questions of comparative
mythology were introduced only as far as it was necessary to interpret cuneiform texts.
In their counteroffensive Winckler and Jeremias tried to prove their case by focusing the
attention on one specific item : 'the entire manner in which Venus is handled by
mythology. ' They observed that all the astromythologies they considered reveal
consistently three features: there is a paramount concern with Venus which is described as
the Queen of Heaven; the planets are listed as four, whereas Venus is grouped together
with the sun and the moon; mention is made of the phases of Venus. In their opinion the
last feature must have been the determining one: Venus was grouped with the sun and the
moon because it has phases like the moon and was the object of particular attention
because of these phases. Only advanced astronomers would have been able to observe the
phases of Venus. Hence, it should be inferred that an advanced level of astronomy was
reached so early in Mesopotamia as to have an echo in the mythology of distant countries.
The phases of Venus became the kingpin of Panbabylonist theory. Winckler stated that one
should not be surprised at discovering that the astronomers of Mesopotamia were acquainted
with them since unquestionably these astronomers had seen four satellites of Jupiter,
'which are much more difficult to observe than the phases of Venus. '
At this point Kugler felt that he could score a crushing victory over his opponents. In
March of 1909 he published in Anthropos, an international magazine of anthropological and
ethnographic studies, an article entitled 'Auf den Trümmern des Panbabylonysmus, ' (' On
the Wreckage of Panbabylonism'). The following year he expanded it into a book [14] . His
main contention was that to assume a knowledge of the phases of Venus was a patent
absurdity. He remarked sarcastically (p. 58 of the book) :'The phases of Venus! If this
discovery is authentic, then, oh Galileo Galilei, your fame is turning pale. ' According
to Kugler the Panbabylonist should have refrained from any further publication until they
were ready to submit a special excursus on the physiology of the eyes of the Babylonians.
In reality Kugler was treading on slippery ground, because when in 1611 Galileo announced
the discovery of the phases of Venus, some of his contemporaries immediately remarked that
they seem to have been known to the ancient Greeks (I have mentioned what Sir Walter
Raleigh wrote in 1616). The contemporaries of Galileo who were familiar with classical
literature wondered whether Greek mythology hinted at the four satellites of Jupiter,
which Galileo saw in 1610 with a telescope that enlarged thirty times. For this reason the
four satellites were given the name of four mythological figures closely associated with
Zeus: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
For that matter, the contemporaries of Galileo did not know that in Babylonian mythology
the god Marduk is accompanied by four dogs. They did not know that the planet Jupiter is
portrayed with satellites in the art of the Near East. Kugler did not deny that the
Babylonians were acquainted with the satellites of Jupiter, but he dismissed this point as
unimportant (p. 61): 'Only this is true: in most rare cases and under most favourable
conditions one could have observed the satellites of Jupiter - in any case they could have
been seen only for a few minutes. ' They would not have been seen well enough to permit
listing their appearances in astronomical tables, and only such a listing could be a proof
of scientific astronomy.
On the central issue of the special treatment of Venus, Kugler granted readily that this
planet forms a 'triad' with the sun and the moon. He even submitted pictures from
Babylonian monuments in which Venus is grouped with the sun and the moon. But, according
to Kugler, all of this can be explained by the elementary fact that occasionally Venus is
bright enough to cause a pointer to cast a shadow, as the sun and the moon do, and often
is bright enough to be seen during daylight. In reality, neither the Panbabylonists nor
Kugler could account for the cuneiform texts in which Venus is referred to by phrases such
as the 'diamond that shines like the sun' or 'lordly miraculous apparition in the middle
of the sky. '
The very title of the book that Kugler published in 1910 indicates how confident he was
that he had succeeded in laughing his opponents out of the scene of cuneiform studies. But
their ranks received reinforcement in the person of a young recruit, Ernst Friedrich
Weidner (born 1891), who was not only like them a master of cuneiform languages (he was
respected as an authority throughout the following half century of his life), but was also
well versed in astronomy and mathematics. Winckler and Jeremias, like other distinguished
Panbabylonists such as F. E. Peiser, had declared that they were philologists whose task
was merely the deciphering of the texts and that they intended to leave the task of
solving the problems of astronomy to experts of that discipline.
The arguments lined up by Weidner hit Kugler so hard that in reacting he lost his balance.
He stated that the texts that mention that a star was seen as being near the 'right' or
'left' crescent of Venus, really referred to the crescent of the moon (waxing or waning
moon) behind which Venus was concealed at the moment; then, a short time later, he printed
a special sheet in order to withdraw this interpretation. The debate between Kugler and
Weidner had become so heated that their publications were dated not only by the year, but
also by the month and the day.
In March 1914 Weidner published a monograph entitled Alter und Bedeutung der babylonischen
Astronomie und Astrallehre (' Antiquity and Import of Babylonian Astronomy and
Astrological Conceptions'), which was intended to be a refutation of Kugler's main
contention, as stated in the Preface. Weidner felt so sure of himself that, in spite of
his young age, soon after, in 1915, he issued the first instalment of a comprehensive
manual of Babylonian astronomy [15] .
In the mentioned monograph Weidner saved his best argument for the last pages where he
refuted Kugler on the interpretation of texts which mentioned the 'crescent' of Venus. The
very last sentence of the book reads: 'Henceforth nobody will try to shake the solid fact
that the Babylonians were acquainted with the phases of Venus. ' But this forceful and
positive statement is followed, at the bottom of the page, by the following elusive
footnote: 'One may also mention that well-known staffers of astronomical observatories
have assured me that, in the clear sky of the Orient, it is definitely possible to follow
the phases of Venus with the naked eye. '
The quarrel between Kugler and the Panbabylonists had reached a dead end. Kugler could not
deny that the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter had been observed; but his
opponents could not explain how this feat had been accomplished. It was pointless for them
to cite alleged expert opinions, unless they could produce living individuals who had
actually seen such features of the heavens with the unaided eye. Both sides had declared
that they were interested in establishing the textual record and that they did not intend
any personal rancor, but in fact their exchanges had deteriorated into unconstructive
vituperation. Kugler, years later, expressed regret for the asperity of his attacks on the
Panbabylonists. Both Kugler and his opponents took advantage of the pause forced upon them
by World War I to drop the matter entirely. However, although silence about what had been
aired in the controversy may have been advantageous in terms of academic respectability,
it did not contribute to the advancement of knowledge.
ON THE WRECKAGE OF PANBABYLONIANISM
Since the 'Panbabylonists' were the innovators and Kugler proved that some of their
contentions were incorrect, their silence was interpreted by the academic community as a
confession of defeat. But Kugler too had been forced into a corner, and kept silent after
1914. Scholars who chose to avoid thorny problems on their way to achieving academic
prestige acted as if the 'Panbabylonists' had been totally refuted. Yet, even assuming
that Kugler had made a 'wreck' of Panbabylonism, one should ask whether in this wreck
there were pieces of valuable salvage.
A distorted view of the status of the controversy was created by the circumstance that
Delitzsch, in 1920, at the age of seventy, two years before his death, aimed a Parthian
shaft at his religious opponents, in which he reiterated and broadened some of the
original positions of Panbabylonism. The claim that many of the most striking accounts of
the Old Testament must be interpreted as astronomical information and that this
information was derived from Mesopotamian scientific astronomy was presented in the
context of a book entitled Die grosse Taüschung; The title 'The Great Fraud' refers to Old
Testament religion. This book stirred a furor in Jewish and Christian religious groups and
aroused all sorts of suspicion in less committed circles. Delitzsch even felt compelled to
write an article in the popular press, in which he reviewed his life in order to prove
that he had not been motivated by antisemitism [16] .
A standard German encyclopedia, Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, in the edition of 1972, in the
entry 'Panbabylonismus' states the following: 'Today Panbabylonism survives only as a
subject of historical interest, because in a one-sided manner it reduces the history of
religion to diffusionism. ' This evaluation may be justifiable in relation to Delitzsch,
but not in relation to the other 'Panbabylonists' who tried to avoid theological topics
and concentrated on the interpretation of cuneiform records.
In 1914 they withdrew from the battle because they did not know how to respond to Kugler's
documentation of the 'gross errors' in early Babylonian records. Weidner tried to answer
by pointing out that there are errors of a few degrees in Ptolemy's list of the positions
of fixed stars [17] ; but this is a poor way of defending the high scientific level of
early Mesopotamian astronomy. He might have made his point, if he had had the courage to
infer from the records that Mesopotamian astronomers made use of some means of optical
enlargement. But the Panbabylonists were intimidated by Kugler's statement of 1910 that,
'At the start one must relegate to the realm of illusions the assumption that the
Babylonians were already acquainted with the telescope. '
They appeared ridiculous when they ascribed unusually good eyesight to the Babylonians.
There is a consensus among those who deal with measurements, that the human eye cannot
perceive intervals of less than a minute. It has been argued that this practical reason
explains why the degree was divided into 60 minutes. An object which, because of its size
and distance, subtends an arc of less than a minute of degree is perceived as a point
without any recognizable shape. The apparent diameter of Venus varies from less than 10"
to 63" when she is closest to the earth (inferior conjunction); but at the latter point
she shows us her dark side (being between the Sun and earth like a new moon), so that she
is hard to observe even with a telescope. For an amateur astronomer the best time to
observe Venus is about a month before and after inferior conjunction, when she appears as
a thin crescent. The four satellites of Jupiter per se would be in the range of visible
objects, since they have a brightness of stars of the fourth or fifth magnitude, but what
is decisive is their angular distance from the body of Jupiter. We perceive as one light
two stars that are less than 3 minutes apart.
Supporters of Velikovsky could argue that the phases of Venus were seen because there was
a time when Venus came closer to the earth. In this spirit Lynn E. Rose, with the help of
mathematicians and astrophysicists, has been conducting investigations aimed at
establishing what may have been the orbits of the earth, Mars, and Venus before the age of
Nabonassar [18] . He has gone so far as to consider the possibility that there had been a
period of time in which Venus was an outer planet and Mars an inner planet. But, even if
these investigations were to arrive at a wellgrounded conclusion, they could not solve all
the problems raised by the Panbabylonists.
There has been a general neglect of one problem which in my opinion should be the first
one to be asked in dealing with ancient astromythologies : how could Jupiter have been
conceived as ruler of the gods, when the planet Jupiter, although by far the largest of
the planets, appears to the naked eye as a not particularly brilliant point. However, with
an enlarging tool of modest power one can see that Jupiter surpasses all other planets in
apparent diameter; this diameter varies between 30" and 50". I do not claim that the
apparent diameter of Jupiter is the only explanation for the role assigned to Jupiter by
mythology, but I suggest that it may be a part of the explanation.
Since the great debates of the period that preceded World War I scholars of ancient
astronomy have avoided difficult problems. Father Johann Schaumberger in 1935 published an
addition to Kugler's Sternkunde based upon the notes that Kugler had left unpublished at
his death. Upon noticing that Kugler did not reply to Weidner's statement of 1914 about
the phases of Venus, he supposed that Weidner had been refuted by implication [19] . The
argument of Weidner was that cuneiform documents refer to the left and right 'horn' of
Venus, using a Sumerian symbol which is used to refer to the shape of the waxing or waning
moon. Schaumberger observed that there have been found texts in which the same symbol is
used in relation to Mars; since the phases of Mars undoubtedly cannot be observed with the
unaided eye, the symbol should not be understood as referring to a moonlike shape. He left
out of consideration that Mars when in quadrature (that is, just before and after its
closest approach to the earth) shows a contour similar to that of the moon in second and
third quarter, and that this face was first noticed in 1636 by Francesco Fontana with the
help of a poor telescope.
The total evidence suggests to me that the astronomers of Mesopotamia made use of some
sort of enlarging device [20] . But, even if one chooses to let the investigation of this
possibility hang suspended in limbo, it remains that the astronomers of Mesopotamia were
acquainted with the phases of Venus and Mars and with four satellites of Jupiter, and must
have had some notion about the huge size of Jupiter. The question whether Mesopotamian
astronomy had an influence on the astromythology of other countries may also be ignored
for the time being. The essential point is that the early astronomers of Mesopotamia
cannot be dismissed as fantasts who had no concern with empirical reality and lacked
scientific spirit; here the Panbabylonists were right.
But, on his side, Kugler was right in pointing out that in the early cuneiform records
there occur figures which seem to be gross errors, and that after the beginning of the era
of Nabonassar Babylonian astronomers were conducting investigations aimed at ascertaining
basic data without which any scientific study of the heavens is impossible. It must have
occurred to Kugler that the explanation of these discrepancies may have been some shift in
the heavenly motion in the period preceding the era of Nabonassar.
It is a fact that after 1914 Kugler suspended the publication of his major work which had
given him a world wide reputation. From the beginning he had announced that the first two
volumes, which dealt with observational data, would be followed by a third volume dealing
with mythology and cosmological concepts. This third volume was never published, and one
must understand that the booklet of 1927 on the myth of Phaeton, in a real, if limited,
sense, replaced it. The message of this booklet is not so much that the myth of Phaeton
refers to a cosmic catastrophe which took place at the middle of the second millennium B.
C., but that in general astromythologies are based on astronomical occurrences. Kugler
would have granted to Velikovsky that it is perfectly legitimate to use mythological
materials as a source of information about astronomical events.
In substance Kugler accepted one of the major contentions of the Panbabylonists. It may
not be true that Mesopotamia was the center of diffusion of astromythologies, but the
Panbabylonists were right in pointing out that in Mesopotamia one comes across data which
are superior as sources of astronomical information. The information is not only couched
in the form of mythological stories, but also in the form of numerical records.
The cuneiform astronomical tablets dating before the era of Nabonassar must be taken at
face value. It is no longer possible to speak of careless measurements. Since the
publication of Kugler's writings these tablets have been almost completely neglected, with
the result that only a fraction of what is available has been published. The collections
of cuneiform astronomical tablets that are stored in some museums have been gathered from
the excavation of entire astronomical libraries of Mesopotamia. The wealth of material
that is available is such that it should occupy scores of scholars for several
generations. But the effort would be well justified, because these tablets contain more
than general accounts of the events, such as those studied by Velikovsky; they contain
exact quantitative data on the basis of which it will be possible to establish on
empirical, not metaphysical, foundations the history of the solar system.
Notes (References cited in "Cuneiform Astronomical Records and Celestial Instability")
1. The article first appeared under the title 'F. X. Kugler - Almost a Catastrophist, ' in
the second Newsletter of the Inter-disciplinary Study Group, now I. S. G. Review. It
appeared in revised form under the title 'Father Kugler's Falling Star, ' in Kronos, II
(1977), No 4.
2. Felix Jacoby, Das Marmor Parium (Berlin, 1904), 136-37.
3. Augustine, City of God, XXI, 8.
4. Gnomon, 1927,449-51.
5. The Greek text of this particular oracle with an English translation and commentary,
has been now provided by Lowery in Appendix I to his mentioned article. It must be noticed
that, although the academic world has generally ignored Kugler's book, when Alfred
Kurfess, Sybillinische Weissagungen (Berlin, 1951), published an authoritative translation
with commentary upon the entire body of Sybilline Oracles, in relation to this particular
oracle he followed Kugler's interpretation.
6. Lowery objects that Kugler was arbitrary in choosing the date of 100 B. C. for the
composition of this oracle. Kugler would have just chosen a point of time in which the sky
fitted the text of the oracle, although the book called the Sybilline Oracles most likely
was put together in the second century A. D. but the date of the gathering of the oracles
in a collection has no relation with the date of composition of this particular oracle.
7. The Origin of Money in Greece (Harvard, 1946).
8. Jacoby, Op. cit. 93, 158.
9. Plutarch, Life of Numa.
10. Grand Dictionnaire Universel, ed. by Pierre Larousse (Paris, 1866-90), VIII 818, s. v.
'Nicolas Fréret. '
11. Mémoires, Académie des Inscriptions, XXIV (1756), 507-522.
12. Recherches critiques, historiques et géographiques sur les fragments d'Héron
d'Alexandrie (Paris, 1851), 133.
13. Noted on the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great Pyramid, published as Appendix
to Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid (New York, 1971).
14. In Bannkreis Babels: Panbabylonistische Konstructionen und religionsgeschichtliche
Tatsachen (Munster, 1910).
15. Handbuch der babylonischen Astronomie, Vol. I (Leipzig, 1915).
16. 'Mein Lebenslauf, ' Reclams Universum, 36 (1920), Heft 47, 241-46.
17. Alter und Bedetung, 13.
18. A good sample of these investigations is provided by Lynn E. Rose and Raymond C.
Vaughan, 'Velikovsky and the Sequence of Planetary Orbits, ' Pensée IV (1974), No. 3, 27-
34. Cf. also Velikovsky Reconsidered, by the Editors of Pensée (Garden City, 1976), 100-
133.
19. Ergänzungsheft 3, 302.
20. One of the few Orientalists who pays attention to this problem is H. W. F. Saggs, The
Greatness that was Babylon (New York, 1962), 432. But Saggs assumes that the solution must
of necessity be the discovery of lenses in excavations. Saggs indicates that some lenses
were found. Sir Flinders Petrie too was always on the lookout for lenses in his
excavations in Egypt, and reported that once he found an object that might have been a
lens. I must observe that a simple glass container of the right shape, filled with water,
can perform the function of a lens. Furthermore, the written and archeological evidence
suggests that in the ancient world enlargement was obtained by the use of mirrors. Mirrors
provide simple and powerful enlarging devices.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
PART FIVE
by Livio C. Stecchini
ASTRONOMICAL THEORY AND HISTORICAL DATA
Jupiter: 'Ah Venus, Venus! Is it possible that you will ever consider our condition even
once, and yours in particular? Do you think that what humans imagine about us is true, that
he among us who is old is always old, that he who is young is always young, that he who is
a boy is always a boy, and thus we eternally continue as we were when first taken into
heaven; and that just as paintings and portraits of ourselves on earth are always seen
unchanged, so likewise here our vital complexion does not change again and again? '
GIORDANO BRUNO,
Spaccio della bestia trionfante,
First Dialogue, first Part. Translation by Arthur D. Imerti. (New Brunswick, 1964), 98.
In the September 1963 issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, my essay, 'The Inconstant
Heavens, ' dealt with the Velikovsky controversy only tangentially and intended to limit
itself to a mere gathering of its historical antecedents. The substance of what I said was
that the doctrine of the eternal stability of the solar system since its creation eons ago
is a theological dogma for which there has never been presented scientific evidence and
that, hence, it must be concluded that the 'contention that the solar system has no history
stands or falls on the historical evidence. ' Yet my essay, in spite of its antiquarian
intent and tone, happened to touch a most sensitive point, since it dealt with a
controversy about the nature of science that has been fought for more than two thousand
years.
In his last treatise, the Laws, Plato declares that the most dangerous and subversive
doctrinaires are those who deny the eternal regularity of the heavenly bodies. According to
him, no intellectual, political, or moral order can exist unless it is believed that the
stars (in Greek the terms refer to the heavenly bodies in general) 'behave always in the
same way according to rules of action established long ago, at some distant time beyond
human understanding, and that these rules are not altered up and down, so that the stars at
times change nature and now and then act in a different way with wandering and change of
orbits. ' (Epinomis 982 C.) Although Plato here states his general principle, his choice of
words intimates that he had concretely in mind the contention which Aristotle too (Meteor,
1343A) tries to refute, that a planet may become a comet or a comet may become a planet.
On the basis of this view of astronomy Plato states that there are two conceptions of
science, one that we may call noumenic and the other that we may call phenomenic. According
to the first, the physical order is the manifestation of an ordering mind, a nous; he sums
it up in these words (X 903 C): 'the ruler of the universe has ordered all things with a
view to the excellence and preservation of the whole. ' The essential proof of this is the
system of heavenly motions.
The opposite view, which was represented by Democritus's theory of atoms and celestial
bodies in collision, is summed up by Plato in these terms (X 889 B):
They say that fire and water and earth and air, all exist by nature and chance, and none
of them by art, and that as to the bodies that come next in order - Earth, and Sun, and
Moon, and Stars - they have been created by means of these absolutely inanimate entities...
After this fashion and this manner the whole heaven has been created, and all that is in
heaven, as well as all animals and plants, and all the changes of seasons, having had their
origin not by mind, not from any god or art, but, as I was saying, by nature and chance.
For those who uphold this second view of science, Plato recommends (X 909 A) that they be
imprisoned for five years in a House of Better Judgment to be brainwashed and that, if they
do not change their minds within that period, they be put to death.
This recommendation was not lost to history, for, in fact, Giordano Bruno was subjected to
such treatment for seven years and, when it was seen that in spite of the repeated tortures
he would not agree even to a partial recantation, he was finally put to death. It must be
kept in mind that in the famous passage (De immenso, VI, 19; Op. lat. I, 2,229) in which
Bruno sums up his cosmology with the motto veritas temporis filia (a motto that was later
adopted by Galileo), he refers to the mentioned passage of Aristotle about comets and takes
his stand with the opponents of Aristotle. In the work entitled Spaccio della bestia
trionfante (which means 'The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, ' that is, Platonic and
Aristotelian cosmology) Bruno propounds an interpretation of ancient astromythology that is
similar to that followed by Velikovsky.
The reactions to the publication of Velikovsky's books prove that those who agree with
Plato are still with us. The case of the curator Gordon Atwater, who was summarily
dismissed without trial from his position as Chairman of the Astronomy Department of the
American Museum of Natural History and prevented from ever practising his art, indicates
that the supporters of the perfection of the solar system went as far as they could in the
use of repressive measures and missed only the help of the secular arm of the state.
Animistic thinking will always be with the human race and, therefore, the battle for the
defence of phenomenic science will never be ended. This is well documented by a letter that
the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Eugene Rabinowitch, wrote (September 9,
1964) to professor H. H. Hess, in which he tried to justify the attack of his magazine
against the contributors to the American Behavioral Scientist. In this letter he condemns
Velikovsky, while boasting, as other scientists of his faction have done, of having never
studied any of his writings, and dismisses those who advocate a free discussion on the
value of Velikovsky's hypotheses as being 'behavioural scientists' who do not understand
the nature of science. The fact that Rabinovitch claims a monopoly on the definition of
what is an abomination, indicates which kind of science he is upholding.
Behaviouralism is a movement which aims at introducing the scientific method propounded by
Galileo, the phenomenic method, in the area of the so-called social sciences, an area
infested with dogmatic, theological, metaphysical, and rhetorical thinking. Against the
behaviouralists, Rabinowitch resorts to arguments ad hominem, imputing to them malice and
obscure ulterior motives; it is a variant on the old Platonic accusation, repeated today
even by many social scientists, that the use of the behavioural approach destroys necessary
human certainties and subverts moral values. One could have expected from Rabinovitch, at
least for the sake of rhetoric, a statement to the effect that, having examined the
arguments of his opponents, he found reasons for not accepting them. But he felt the need
to state that his condemnation is based on major premises and not on the study of the
evidence. The alternative to such medieval scholasticism would have been to accept the
method of phenomenic science.
The editors of ABS well know that, by dealing with the attitude of some scientists toward
Velikovsky's hypotheses, they were risking the wrath of well-entrenched academic power
organizations. What they wondered was whether raising this issue was worth the trouble in
relation to their general aims of scientific enlightenment. The results prove that, in
publishing the special issue, they made a wise decision, in that they struck at the roots
of the opposing position.
NEW METHODS AND DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES
Since this year marks the fifth centenary of the death of Nicolas of Cusa and the fourth
centenary of the birth of Galileo, it is timely to remind the reader that the preservation
of the scientific method established by them requires eternal vigilance. The same need for
eternal vigilance has been underlined by an international magazine written in several
languages and published in Italy, Civiltá delle Macchine, which is concerned with the
problem of the role of science in contemporary society. In celebration of the fourth
centenary of Galileo, this magazine came out with a special issue (May-June 1964) dedicated
to the problem of scientific method. In presenting the special issue the editors stated on
the first page:
Precisely today, because the progress of science seems to shine with particular
brilliance, there is a tendency to neglect some obscure forces that affect scientific
progress from the inside and the outside. If it is easy to identify, at least historically,
the external obstacles to scientific research (the case of Galileo is just an obstreperous
example of it), one often forgets that some resistances come from the inside of science
itself... To the obstacles that are often set by the closedmind attitude of the humanists
there is added, with more harmful consequences, the immobilism resulting from a priori and
absolutist tenets held by some of the very people whose task is to cultivate science. This
problem is treated with breadth and profundity of analysis in the article by Bruno de
Finetti, who reminds us that scientific thought is 'unitary and in perpetual renewal, not
fragmentary and final. '
The main article is by Professor Bruno de Finetti of the Instituto Matematico of University
of Rome, a specialist in probability theory whose main contribution to scholarship has been
the analysis of the interplay of mathematical method with psychological attitudes in the
structure of quantitative science.
The editorial of the magazine [1] , under the title 'Truth in Expansion, ' remarks that
modern science was born by proclaiming the independence of science from theology and
metaphysics, but that this claim of science to be a complete and autonomous source of
knowledge 'has two enemies that are never tired and never defeated: on one side, there is
dogmatism, which may come from inside science itself, that pretends to give absolute value
to what has been already acquired to such a point as to make difficult or even impossible
the introduction of new concepts, and on the other side there is scepticism which pretends
to limit the cognitive aspect of science to a series of unrelated hypotheses. '
In order to illustrate this point, Professor de Finetti, in his article 'Brakes on the Path
of Science' [2] , gives a good deal of attention to the Velikovsky case. In his opinion,
the refusal of the large majority of the academic community to discuss objectively how much
is acceptable about Velikovsky's hypotheses, in the light of the present state of the
empirical evidence, imparts 'one great teaching above all others, ' namely, that the
professionalization and departmentalization of the several branches of science have become
an obstacle to the necessary continuous renewal of science itself.
Scientists forget that the division of science into disciplines exists for the sake of
science and come to think that science exists for the preservation of the boundaries of the
several disciplines and the related academic organizational structures. In de Finetti's
opinion, the uproar against Velikovsky resulted from his trying to relate the art of
interpreting historical memories and documents to astronomical and physical research. What
was felt as a threat was the possibility, for instance, that the space probes might help to
solve problems in the field of the history of ancient civilizations. Scholars refused to
discuss the merits and demerits of Velikovsky's studies, because they were concerned with a
larger issue, the fact that he challenged 'the right of their fossilized brains to rest in
peace' with the skills and problems already established. The defence of this vested
interest in the preservation of disciplinary boundaries may transform 'each clan of
specialists and the great clan of scientists in general into a sort of despotic and
irresponsible mafia. '
Here we are reminded of one of the distinctive contribution to behavioural science made by
Harold D. Lasswell, who has demonstrated that the conflict for money, power, and prestige
among different skills, and in particular for the preservation of old skills against new
skills, can be as explosive in society as the class struggle is according to Karl Marx.
AGAINST HISTORICAL SCIENCE
Professor de Finetti makes us realize that the ideologists who planned the opposition to
Velikovsky, even before his first book was published, were successful in their efforts to
mobilize the academic community because they were raising what politicians call a bread-
and-butter issue, the fear of natural scientists that they might be compelled to learn
something about historical evidence. The ideological issue of denying that the solar system
has a history becomes intertwined with the issue of denying the significance of historical
evidence.
As I demonstrated, the scientific evidence for the non-historicity of the solar system does
not exist: if this evidence existed, the opponents of Velikovsky could simply point to it
and the debate would be closed. But, since this evidence does not exist, the supporters of
the stability of the solar system have been forced to carry the battle into the field of
history itself. They are engaged in the strange manoeuvre of denying the historicity of the
solar system by denying the value of historical science. This is clearly indicated by the
fact that, in the campaign against Velikovsky of fourteen years ago, at the meeting of the
American Philosophical Society which was intended to dispose of the issue forever, the
performer was the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who did not discuss astronomy, but
made a mockery of historical science.
Rule number one of this discipline is that one must quote the texts correctly and she
demonstrated ad abundantiam how this rule can be violated. Similarly, the renewed onslaught
by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was concentrated on the field of historical
science. In the field of physical science the supporters of the Newtonian theology of the
solar system not only cannot find proofs, but find themselves confronted with a steadily
increasing number of discoveries (many of them predicted by Velikovsky) which flatly
contradict it. The space probes have an effect on this theology that is as devastating as
that exercised by the telescope on the similar theology defended by the opponents of
Galileo.
Therefore these dogmatists are forced into the position of defending scepticism. As de
Finetti observes, they are forced to deny the unitary character of science. In the area of
natural science they have to claim that astrophysical data, such as magnetic fields, radio
noises, hot temperature and geological data, such as Worzel layer, tektites, the recent
origin of at least some oil deposits, the results of paleomagnetic analysis, are isolated
phenomena. In the field of historical science they have to prove that this discipline is
not science and cannot provide reliable data of any sort. This is the reason why Margolis
in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists followed in the footsteps of Madame Payne-
Gaposchkin in presenting an outrageous caricature of historical documentation. He showed
his contempt by stating that in a few hours of study of Egyptology he could contradict an
interpretation laboriously arrived at by Velikovsky and supported by the authority of
William F. Albright. Margolis trampled on the most precious tenets of historical research:
he misquoted passage after passage, referred to statements that did not exist, submitted
erroneous translations, and subverted the most elementary rules of linguistics.
But his quarrel is not with Velikovsky, not with me, not with the American Behavioral
Scientists; it is a quarrel with an entire scientific tradition that dates from the revival
of scientific learning in the Renaissance. In my essay, having assumed that any person who
enters into discussions of scientific method is familiar with at least the main work of
Galileo, I limited myself to quoting the complementary opinions expressed in less known
works of other major figures of science. But, since there has been an effort to muddy the
waters, I am willing to rest my case on this passage in which Galileo expressed, with
superb lucidity of thought and expression, the epistemological conflict between his
spokesman and his Aristotelian opponent:
Salviatus: But to give Simplicius yet fuller satisfaction, and to reclaim him, if
possible, from his errors, I affirm that we have in our age new occurrences and
observations and such that I doubt not in the least that, if Aristotle were here today,
they would make him change his opinion. This may be easily gathered from the very way he
argues, for when he writes that he esteems the heavens unalterable because no new thing was
seen to be born there, or any old one to be dissolved, he seems to imply that, if he were
to see any such accident, he would then hold the contrary and put observation before
natural reason (as indeed is right); for, had he not made any reckoning of the senses, he
would not have then argued immutability from not seeing any change.
Simplicius: Aristotle deduced his principal argument a priori, showing the necessity of
the unalterability of heaven by natural, manifest, and clear principles, and then
established it a posteriori by sense and the traditions of the ancients [3] .
The astronomical question, whether the solar system is unalterable, cannot be settled a
priori, but must be settled a posteriori, by examining 'the traditions of the ancients. '
Galileo stated that astronomical theories about the structure of the solar system must
stand or fall on the historical record. I have shown that even Newton, although he did not
like what he found in the historical records, granted as much. One cannot defend Newton's
cosmology without defending also the conclusions of his historical studies. Hence, the
astronomer who wants to pronounce himself today on the mechanics of the solar system cannot
ignore the historical documentation and must depend on the result of historical
scholarship.
The writer of the Bulletin tries to reduce a controversy on the nature of scientific method
to arguments ad hominem. He asserts that Velikovsky is a person of dubious morality, a
peddler of hokum, and hence those who advocate investigations in the same direction are
equally tarnished. Similarly, Eugene Rabinowitch, on the one side, in his letter to
Professor Hess explaining the editorial policy of the Bulletin, accuses the 'behavioural
scientists' of unconfessed invidious intents, and, on the other side, in his letter (June
23, 1964) to the editor of ABS, asserts that historical evidence is 'inevitably tentative
and often controversial matter. '
Indeed, any phenomenic science, any science which is not based on noumenic premises
dogmatically accepted, is bound to be 'inevitably tentative and often controversial matter.
' If one reads the record of the trial of Galileo, one sees that this was the main argument
against him. This appears to be the reason why he chose to sign a recantation; he granted
that to those who were asking for absolute certainty his science was of no avail.
History (unless one believes in a dogmatic and scholastic Marxism which today is outmoded
even in the Soviet Union [4] ) is an empirical science, a behavioural science, indeed, cum
pace Rabinowitchi. As such it cannot produce the apodictic certainty to which the Bulletin,
with Plato, would like to restrict the name of science; but it can be shown that history
can produce a body of information that is specific and positively significant, even in the
area of celestial phenomena. Historical science, properly used, achieves the same results
as any other science. The only limit that is specific to this discipline is that it depends
on the records of the past that happen to be preserved and it cannot manufacture them if by
chance they have been destroyed. Hence, the problem is the factual one of assessing how
many and which kind of documents are available. In the following pages I shall address
myself to this problem, relying on the opinion of scholars other than Velikovsky and
stressing the significance of documents that do not constitute the major element of his
argumentation.
Notes (References cited in "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data")
1. Page 17. The editorial is signed by the Director, Francesco d'Arcais.
2. Pages 19-24.
3. Dialogue on the Great World System, ed. by Giorgio de Santillana (Chicago: U. of Chicago
Press, 1953), p. 59.
4. The likelihood of recent shifts in the structure of the solar system, with resulting
catastrophes upon earth, has been discussed over the past three years in the general
science magazine, Nauka i Zhizn' (Science and Life). The articles quote both physical and
historical evidence, similar in kind to, and at times identical with, material adduced by
Velikovsky.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
PART SIX
by Alfred de Grazia
THE SCIENTIFIC RECEPTION SYSTEM
When a scientist writes a book of his controlled experiences, a publisher ponders its
audience, and a colleague weighs its value, the special order of human relations called
science is in being. Their patterns of motive and behaviour emerge from and return to the
larger sphere of social behaviour. They are different from, yet the same as the general
social order.
Perhaps then never can it be said that 'this could only happen in science': in a
scientific sense science cannot follow laws uniquely its own. Also it would be exceedingly
risky to reason that, though possessed of a basis of generally understood behaviour,
science receives from somewhere a unique moral code that cannot be evaluated by general
moral codes.
THE CONCEPT OF RECEPTION SYSTEM
There is, in every social order, a reception system. In the sub-order of scientific
behaviour, the reception system consists of the criteria whereby scientists, their
beliefs, and their practices are adjudged by scientists as a community to be worthy, true
and effective.
The importance of a reception system in every social order is manifest. The reception
system shapes the character of new recruits to the order and therefore forms the product
of the order. If the term itself is new, the reception processes in themselves are well
known. Whenever a scientist concerns himself with the training methods and the curriculum
of his field, or with its system of publications and the criteria for evaluating work, he
contributes to the building or enforcement of the order. Political parties and mass
movements, religious groups, business enterprises, bureaucracies, and a host of voluntary
associations have similar reception systems, and of course there is little difference
between the natural and social sciences in this regard.
The principal elements of the reception system are doctrines and an operational formula
with typical tactics of acceptance and rejection. Thus, 'truth according to empirical
principles' constitutes a doctrine of the science reception system. It is generally
believed that some criteria satisfying this goal must be extracted from those who contend
for acceptance. The operational formula sets forth a number of methods by which behaviours
are to be tested to determine the degree to which they fulfil the obligation of 'empirical
truth. ' And a set of tactics is employed to admit or reject offerings determined to have
succeeded or failed according to the formula. For instance, a journal will return a
manuscript with a polite note of refusal or fit an article meeting its criteria into its
publishing schedule. Ultimately the social and scientific consequences of this reception
system must be discovered and analyzed in order to pass judgment upon the system and to
enable an applied science of science to revise and reform doctrines, formulae, and
tactics.
Such a reception system may be postulated to operate when a person, belief, or practice is
projected upon the perceptive and cognitive screen of scientists with an implicit or
explicit demand for acceptance. We therefore view Dr Velikovsky, his theories, and his
practices as a case relevant to the study of the reception system of science.
The interpretation of the science reception system may be facilitated by fitting its
activity to assumed models. Models of social behaviour in a given setting can be numerous,
since the construction of any single model depends only on the perception of a patterned
dynamic of actions, and since the validity (and utility) of such models is theoretical and
statistical, not absolute. The number of principal models may be reduced to one in the
case of purely-motivated and purely-acted behaviour, or to several in the case of the
usual complicated performance of social institutions. In the case of the scientific
reception system the problem is to determine what postulated pattern or complex of motives
and behaviour best accounts for what happens in most cases coming before the reception
system for consideration. What accounts for the favourable or unfavourable reception of
men, beliefs and practices?
The historical sociology of science is obliged, in the long run, to provide materials and
analysis in a large enough number of cases to verify empirically that one or several given
models explain in great part and usefully the vast majority of relevant actions. A single
case, as the one of Velikovsky, can contribute to an ultimate historical sociology of
science, but cannot in itself prove the validity of the models used.
However, if there is support from materials already known to us, and from such writings as
the preceding article by Livio Stecchini, we would be inclined to credit the hypothetical
model with somewhat more validity than the single case would warrant per se. Moreover, in
order for a rule of law to characterize the behaviour of social groups, justice has
ultimately to be defined in relation to singular parties. Therefore a finding of injustice
in a single case is sufficient to provide grounds for remedial action then and there,
without resort to laws of averages, or the 'long run. ' If a postulated model of the
scientific reception system fits a case well, and is believed to be either personally
unjust [1] or socially (scientifically) harmful, then the question will naturally arise
whether the case should be reheard, as well as whether this condition is typical, this
model is normal, and the public or social policies (rules) of scientific behaviour should
be revised.
Four models appear to explain a good deal of scientific reception-system behaviour. They
may be called the Rationalistic Model, the Indeterminacy Model, the Power Model, and the
Dogmatic Model.
THE RATIONALISTIC RECEPTION SYSTEM
The rationalistic reception system is openly displayed by scientists in general as the
'scientific method. ' It is considered in proto-thought [2] to be the exclusive
determinant of admission policies to the corpus of science. Its goal is truth,
enlightenment, knowledge, or just simply 'science. ' It postulates a purity of science,
namely that the propositions and methods of scientists are arrived at only by efficient,
logico-empirical operations. Personal animosities, psychopathology, politics and other
social conditions are ignored, reduced in importance, or denied a place in the scheme of
science.
The rationalistic model, defender of the purity of science, requires that the 'scientific
method' be pursued in validating fact and proposition. It demands control, prefers
quantification, and honours prediction as marks of scientific work. It asserts that new
material offered for scientific examination and appraisal will be fairly and openly dealt
with, will be communicated freely to whoever may be in a position to judge its merits, and
will, upon approval, convey credit to its author. It resembles the rule of law in court
systems in that a set of procedures for arriving at truth are to be required of all men
regardless of their degree of authority, their previous record, and the resources they
command.
These are some of the doctrinal, procedural, and tactical elements in the rationalistic
model. The socio-scientific consequences that are deemed valuable are 'truths, ' by the
operation of this process more and greater 'truths' will be discovered. The truth will be
communicated. As its value becomes apparent, the truth will be used in all applied fields
that are related.
Those who operate in the name of this model tend to deny a sociology of science. The
concept of sociology implies that men are conditioned in their behaviour by social factors
lying outside of the intellect. The scope of the psychology of science is similarly
reduced, creating a constant tendency to believe in absolute realities. Furthermore, since
those under the rationalistic spell claim that after all 'there is an objective method of
testing reality and any reasonable person can see the truth when it is presented to him, '
they tend to dismiss political problems as irrelevant, and to dismiss power as a factor in
the building of the corpus of science.
In detailing the rationalistic model, some of the behaviour of scientists in the
Velikovsky case that exemplify the use or non-use of the rules of the model can be
described. To be noted first of all is that the model is itself used as a mode of attack
upon Velikovsky. This is immediately apparent when articles and correspondence dealing
with his work are examined. Perhaps the most indignant published attacks against
Velikovsky occur at the hand of Professor Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. She precedes them,
however, with a statement of the rationalistic doctrine of science, for she says:
In these days of loyalty oaths, scientists may congratulate themselves that they are
not, as such, required to swear to anything. Nonetheless, every scientific man, every man
who devotes his life sincerely to the advancement of knowledge, commits himself to certain
loyalties. His loyalties are to principles, not to dogmas; to respect for evidence - all
the evidence, not merely such as fulfills his expectations, respect for those formulations
that embody the evidence. We who are engaged in research are not concerned in preserving
the existing framework of theories. We spend our lives searching for the wherewithal to
modify and supplant them. The discovery of discordant facts is cause for rejoicing, not
consternation. If Velikovsky had adduced any real evidence that compelled a revision of
the laws of celestial mechanics, astronomers would have accepted the facts, and the
challenge, with delight. His supporters imagine that we are shaking in our shoes. This is
partly true: we are shaking, but with laughter... Our critical faculties have not been
developed only by dealing with cranks, for there is plenty of loose thinking and
misinterpretation of evidence within the fold. The outsider might be surprised to learn
how little mercy we have on, or ask from, our fellow scientists [3] .
The Scientific Monthly, which was later incorporated into the magazine Science, also
printed an article by a professor of philosophy that endeavoured to explain to the public
the criteria that distinguish scientists from cranks. We quote the rationalistic doctrine
as carried there:
We have already said that there is hardly a scientific theory that is not questioned by
some scientist of repute. This is so because science is unfinished business, an inquiry
into the habits of nature where all the evidence is not in and where much of the evidence
that is in has not been digested. Under these conditions there is room for minority
opinions, some of which will, no doubt, turn out to be correct. There is a parallel here,
though, with horse racing: long shots run in the races, and some will no doubt win. But a
sports commentator who expected a long shot to win in almost every race would be open to
suspicion. In the same way, the man who accepts one or two scientific 'long shots' is
perfectly reasonable, but when a man accepts too many of them, his scientific standing
becomes suspect. The crank is one who tries to force nature into his own selected pattern;
the evidence of strain resulting from this practice is divergence from currently accepted
views [4] .
Harrison Brown, reviewing Velikovsky's work in the Scientific American, similarly asserts
several rules of the science reception system:
... In the world of science the individual research worker usually subjects his results
and theories to his fellow scientists for searching criticism and checking before making
his results known to the public. If he is at a university he first solicits the criticisms
of his local colleagues, following which he shows his results to scientists in other
institutions. When he has thus satisfied himself that his results or ideas make sense, he
submits a paper to a scientific journal. The paper is sent to anonymous referees for
criticism, and if they judge it worth publishing it is published in that journal [5] .
Earlier, writing in The Saturday Review, Brown had this to say about the Velikovsky
hypotheses:
... Modern science can... marshal far more convincing evidence - evidence which
possesses mathematical rigor as distinct from interpretations of what human beings may or
may not have done, observed, or said thousands of years ago [6] .
In each case, following upon or included in the doctrinal statements are assertions that
Velikovsky has failed to fulfil the conditions. The doctrinal statements reveal how aware
the scientific community is of the need to precede strong criticism by a credo.
In the rationalistic doctrine the rule of publication holds primary importance. It says
that any would-be scientist should make known the result of his investigations, and, by
inference, should have the right to publish his work. It also is expected that a
scientist's work will be discussed before publication by those capable of evaluating it.
These obligations were, of course, fulfilled by Dr Velikovsky. He consulted many
specialists, among them the historian Pfeiffer and astronomers Adams and Motz. The book
was examined carefully before publication. Macmillan held it for three years, and then was
subjected to pressure from leading scientists not to publish or stop selling it after it
was brought out. His work was subjected to double the regular scrutiny by experts prior to
publication because of these pressures. It was read by at least six experts and emerged
with a favourable verdict. His book was removed from one firm and transferred to another
because of the threat to the publisher of loss of reputation and sales. Whereas the first
article by Larrabee in Harper's was a responsible piece of journalism, and those of
Atwater and Oursler were respectable presentations, a portion of the popular press
distorted some of the features of his work, creating an image of it that many scientists
could use to discourage other scientists from writing about the work seriously. The
scientific journals would not subsequently publish articles by Velikovsky which adduced
further proof of his thesis or responded to criticism.
A second canon of the rationalistic model is that works will be read before a judgment is
passed. This promise is not always fulfilled. Yet the principle of reading offered
material must be upheld lest the whole rationalistic model collapse. If the new work
cannot be guaranteed some degree of expert reading it must naturally fail to make its
mark. Science is a communication system as well as a method of advancing truth. Several of
the most severe attacks against Velikovsky can now be shown to have been made by
scientists who had not read the book. Perhaps as many as half a million American have read
Worlds in Collision. Among them are relatively few of the scientists - astronomers,
geologists, paleontologists, historians - who are directly affected by the ideas treated
in the book.
Reviewing is one step beyond reading. The review is necessary to pinpoint the audience of
a book, to enlighten others as to its contents, and to suggest considerations of its truth
or falsity. Hundreds of reviews were written of Velikovsky's book, Worlds in Collision.
The popular reviewers tended to be favourable. The scientists were hostile. If there is
such a thing as an ideal book review, whether favourable or unfavourable, it is not to be
found in the story of Worlds in Collision. The question may be raised whether not only
Velikovsky but also other scientists are subjected to the same inadequate treatment of
their work and whether thereby this principle of the rationalistic model is continually
being violated.
Another rule is that theories offered should be tested, not only by the author but his
critics. This rule again turns out to be unobserved in many instances [7] . Velikovsky,
whose behavior throughout the controversy was that of person committed to the
rationalistic model, began to ask for tests of his theories four years prior to
publication of his work. He reasonably claimed to have performed all tests within his
power (the historical tests) but sought other tests requiring the use of equipment that he
did not have access to. For instance, over a ten-year period he corresponded with several
institutions - universities, museums, laboratories - trying to persuade someone to perform
radiocarbon tests on Egyptian artifacts of the New Kingdom, without success. He also
sought unsuccessfully to have the spectrogram of Venus analysed for heavy molecules of
hydrocarbon. One wonders here, as in the case of other 'folk heroes, ' whether a condition
of accepting with grave seriousness the rationalistic doctrine is to be innocent of
experience of the world wherein the doctrine operates. Velikovsky, having had no
university appointment or foundation grant, was more tenacious in his adherence to the
rationalistic myth than his detractors.
Honesty and fairness are cardinal tenets of the rationalistic credo. Unless scientists are
willing to admit the source of their knowledge and theories, and willing to grant a fair
hearing and test to ideas brought forth, they contribute to the collapse of the
rationalistic reception system. The honesty of Velikovsky was frequently called into
question by natural scientists, in a manner so strong and unbalanced as to constitute
libel. Yet no single case of mis-stated fact was proven in any of the four books of
Velikovsky, and it would be untrue to assert that his works are too vague to assail; they
are, in fact, exceedingly detailed and specific.
The 'ruthless honesty' that both Gaposchkin and Brown asserted as the hallmark of science
in relation to self-criticism and appraisal of new works was quite ruthless, it is true,
but directed entirely at Velikovsky. The degree of honesty in the appraisal of
Velikovsky's studies can be judged in some of the evidence presented in these papers.
The appraisal of works by specialists, we have said, is a necessary ingredient of the
rationalistic model. And specialists were brought to bear upon the work of Velikovsky.
However, it would appear that the specialists' functions in the Velikovsky case were
primarily to proclaim their competence and to disperse the vulgar masses who claimed to
see revelations of value in Velikovsky's writings. Instead of specialism being used as a
positive weapon of analysis, it tended to be used as a negative weapon of destruction:
'Anything un-narrow must be bad. ' Professor Boring wrote in an article on unorthodoxies
of science that agreement by trained scientists is the critical determinant of truth [8]
. His theory, itself unorthodox, and not part of the rationalistic model, was used to show
why Velikovsky was wrong even by those scientists who were operating in the name of the
rationalistic credo: since the specialists said Velikovsky was incorrect, he must be
incorrect.
Open discussion is supposed to characterize the rationalistic model. The social setting
provided for the discussion of Velikovsky's work were mostly arranged for and administered
by hostile critics or intimidated moderators. He was excluded from discussions of his own
work and, when he succeeded in participating under a special dispensation, his words were
not subsequently published. Several scientists and intellectuals who attempted his defence
were silenced or sanctioned severely. I. Bernard Cohen, Professor of history of science
(Harvard University), wrote sympathetically, almost enthusiastically, of Velikovsky's work
in the advance summary of his address before the American Philosophical Society in April
1952, but changed his approach markedly in the published version of his address in the
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (October 1952).
Radical innovation, declared Dr. Gaposchkin, is no bar to the reception of new science.
This is part of her testimonial to the rationalistic reception system. More in keeping
with the facts of the reception of Velikovsky by herself and the scientific order is the
statement by Bernard Cohen that 'Any suggestion that scientists so dearly love truth, that
they have not the slightest hesitation in jettisoning their beliefs, is a mean perversion
of the facts' [9] .
Nor should radicalism in method be a deterrent to the recruitment of ideas. Yet one of the
glaring features of the Velikovsky case is the humanistic ignorance of natural scientists.
A reading of the Velikovsky record should be part of the proceedings of any group
considering the revision of curriculum for students of the natural sciences. Soon a
century will have passed since the beginnings of the scientific investigation of myth,
folklore, and primitive psychology. It has been many years since a theory of the
unconscious has found a place in the instrumentation of social science. The science of
linguistics, of symbols, of the sociology of communication, has progressed. It would
appear that a more broadly educated or at least philosophically trained scientific class
would have been able to perceive the relevance, validity, and unique capabilities of
Velikovsky's method to key problems of natural science.
But the passage of time has relegated the natural sciences principally to hardware
instrumentation. The natural scientists are still dwelling mentally in the hollow
rationalistic universe of the 19th century. Indeed such a statement is unfair to the 19th
century, which was far richer in mental constructions than its impoverished and dependent
epigoni. They were victims of the fallacies that the present writer came to list in a
previous article as common among natural scientist [10] .
The rationalistic model naturally assumes that sincerity is a hallmark of scientific work.
Harlow Shapley called Velikovsky a fraud [11] , without having read the book. Thereupon
Shapley engaged in collective action to prevent the publication and use of Velikovsky's
book, actions which he then denied upon being accused of them. He declared in the Harvard
Crimson (Sept. 25, 1950):
The claim that Dr. Velikovsky's book is being suppressed is nothing but a publicity
promotion stunt. Like having a book banned in Boston; it improves the sales. Several
attempts have been made to link such a move to stop the book's publication to some
organization or to the Harvard Observatory. This idea is absolutely false.
The model of rationality demands that the populace be barred from scientific proceedings.
Sales of a work to laymen does not disprove the validity of a work yet this seems to have
been indicated by critics of Velikovsky. We even note that Velikovsky was criticized
negatively for having found people to buy his book, the implication being that unless a
work has the previous blessings of the scientific establishment, it has no right to exist
[12] .
The rational model holds that imprecision is a defeat of scientific work. An ideal is
quantification, though many of the sciences fall short of this ideal in most of their
propositions. Without foundation in fact, Gaposchkin says of Worlds in Collision: 'It
contains no scientific arguments; not a formula, not a number (save for arbitrarily
assigned dates) presents itself for analysis. ' Dr Donald H. Menzel's appendix to her
critique, sturdily entitled 'The celestial mechanics of electrically-charged planets, '
goes on to show quantitatively that a planet or sun charged to the potential demanded by
equations based on Velikovsky's theory, amounting to 10 to the 19 th power volts, 'would
be violently unstable... trying to put such an electric field on the sun resembles trying
to hold back the entire mass of water in Lake Mead by a Boulder Dam made of tissue paper
sheets' [13] . Recent space probes led Professor V. A. Bailey to the conclusion that the
sun must hold a net negative charge with a potential of the order of 10 to the 19th power
volts [14] . The coincidence is only that, for even Menzel's arithmetic was faulty. The
main point is that in astronomy and other sciences, natural and social, to make
quantification a rigid condition for the admission of new theory, even in areas where
qualification today rules, can promote dysfunctional rigidities.
'Reject appeals to authority, ' affirm the rationalistic rules of procedure. Presumably,
nothing is made true or false by the character of its supporters. However, science has not
yet discovered a set of techniques for superseding authority, and the corpus of science
would be a skeleton if this rule were seriously followed. We have more to say about that
shortly, but meanwhile it is well to note that in no respect was the scientific movement
against Velikovsky so much at variance with the rationalistic model as in its reliance
upon authority.
The rationalistic model, when it is sociological at all, remembers history, warns against
the blind opposition to new science, and as insurance that it can no longer happen in our
secular and non-magical age, offers the assertion that when at first, ideas are rejected,
they may return with additional proof for admission and will be cordially re-examined. On
December 21, 1962, Prof. V. Bargmann of the Department of Physics of Princeton University
and Prof. Lloyd Motz of the Department of Astronomy of Columbia University published a
letter in Science magazine claiming Velikovsky's priority of prediction of the hot surface
temperature of Venus, of the existence of the magnetosphere around the Earth, and of the
radio noises emanating from Jupiter. We quote from their letter:
'On 14 October 1953, Immanuel Velikovsky, addressing the Forum of the Graduate College
of Princeton University... concluded the lecture as follows: "The planet Jupiter is cold,
yet its gases are in motion. It appears probable to me that it sends out radio noises as
do the sun and the stars. I suggest that this be investigated."... In April 1955 B. F.
Burke and K. L. Franklin of the Carnegie Institution announced the chance detection of
strong radio signals emanating from Jupiter. They recorded the signals for several weeks
before they correctly identified the source. '
'This discovery came as something of a surprise because radio astronomers had never
expected a body as cold as Jupiter to emit radio waves (1. see also the New York Times for
28 October 1962.) '
'In 1960 V. Radhakrishmah of India and J. A. Roberts of Australia, working at California
Institute of Technology, established the existence of a radiation belt encompassing
Jupiter, "giving 10 14 times as much radio energy as the Van Allen belts around the
earth". '
'On 5 December 1956, through the kind services of H. H. Hess, chairman of the department
of geology of Princeton University, Velikovsky submitted a memorandum to the U. S.
National Committee for the (planned) IGY in which he suggested the existence of a
terrestrial magnetosphere reaching the moon. Receipt of the memorandum was acknowledged by
E. O. Hulbert for the Committee. The magnetosphere was discovered in 1958 by Van Allen. '
'In the last chapter of his Worlds in Collision (1950), Velikovsky stated that the
surface of Venus must be very hot, although in 1950 the temperature of the cloud surface
of Venus was known to be -25 deg C on the day and night sides alike... By 1961 it became
known that the surface temperature of Venus is "almost 600 degrees [K]" (4. Phys. Today
14, No. 4, 30, 1961). F. D. Drake described this discovery as "a surprise... in a field in
which the fewest surprises were expected". "We would have expected a temperature only
slightly greater than that of the earth... Sources of internal heating [radioactivity]
will not produce an enhanced surface temperature. Cornell H. Mayer writes (5. C. H. Mayer,
Sci. Am., 204, May 1961), "All the observations are consistent with a temperature of
almost 600 degrees," and admits that "the temperature is much higher than anyone would
have predicted". '
They urged 'that his other conclusions be objectively re-examined. ' Following the
publication of this note, Velikovsky on January 29, 1963 submitted to Science magazine a
more complete presentation of recent empirical evidence of the correctness of some of his
statements. On January 31, the article was back in his hands with a formal letter of
rejection.
In connection with reports of the Venus probes, Newsweek magazine was independently
developing a story about Velikovsky at the time. The Editor of Science, Philip Abelson,
stated to the Newsweek reporter in the course of a telephone inquiry that he had not read
the Velikovsky manuscript before returning it.
Both as a document in the present case and for its intrinsic significance, the Velikovsky
note, as submitted to Science and rejected, is printed below (see page 215). In the months
since its submission to Science, additional corroborative finds have occurred. The paper
was written and submitted before the results of the Mariner II probe of Venus were
announced on February 26, 1963. The probe further confirmed Velikovsky's claims concerning
the great heat of Venus (800 deg F) and the hydrocarbons (or organic compounds) of its
envelope.
It was upon an occasion shortly after reviewing the memorandum of Velikovsky that
Professor H. H. Hess, Chairman of the Department of Geology of Princeton University, wrote
to Dr Velikovsky:
I am not about to be converted to your form of reasoning though it certainly has had
successes. You have after all predicted that Jupiter would be a source of radio noise,
that Venus would have a high surface temperature, that the sun and bodies of the solar
system would have large electrical charges and several other such predictions. Some of
these predictions were said to be impossible when you made them. All of them were
predicted long before proof that they were correct came to hand. Conversely I do not know
of any specific prediction you made that has since been proven to be false. I suspect the
merit lies in that you have a good basic background in the natural sciences and you are
quite uninhibited by the prejudices and probability taboos which confine the thinking of
most of us.
For nearly a decade, Professor Hess has encouraged a hearing for Velikovsky and a testing
of his ideas.
On February 15, Science carried a letter by Poul Anderson that lampooned Velikovsky and
criticized the Bargmann-Motz letter on grounds that jokers and science-fiction writers had
also made fantastic assumptions that were later verified. When Eric Larrabee, managing
editor of Horizon magazine, protested to Dr Abelson against the exclusion of Velikovsky's
article and the publication of Anderson's letter, Abelson thanked him and replied that:
Velikovsky is a controversial figure. Many of the ideas that he expressed are not accepted
by serious students of earth science. Since my prejudices happen to agree with this
majority, I strained my sense of fair play to accept the letter by Bargmann and Motz, and
thought that the books were nicely balanced with the rejoinder of Anderson.
When the Reverend Warner Sizemore, a Philadelphia minister, wrote to Science to show that
the very cases that Anderson cited might be construed in favour of Velikovsky he received
in reply a letter from Dr Abelson that declared:
Science can exist and is useful because much of the knowledge in it is more than 99.9
percent certain and reproducible. If science were based on suggestions that were true 50
percent of the time, and all were free to make predictions which were only that reliable,
chaos would result. I have repeatedly seen men of brilliance with fertile imaginations
make all kinds of suggestions. Ideas are easy. They are cheap. It is the proving of a
suggestion beyond a reasonable doubt that makes it valuable. At least half of Velikovsky's
ideas have been proved wrong and he has done little to substantiate the remainder. In view
of this, he is not to be taken seriously.
Yet, a few months earlier, Abelson was proclaiming the role of ideas in a Science
editorial:
The synthesis of xenon tetraflouride and related compounds... makes necessary the
revision of many chemistry textbooks... For perhaps 15 years, at least a million
scientists all over the world have been blind to a potential opportunity to make this
important discovery. All that was required to overthrow a respectable and entrenched dogma
was a few hours of effort and a germ of scepticism. Our intuition tells us that this is
just one of countless opportunities in all areas of inquiry. The imaginative and original
mind need not be overawed by the imposing body of present knowledge or by the complex and
costly paraphernalia which today surround much of scientific activity. The great shortage
in science now is not opportunity, manpower, money, or laboratory space. What is really
needed is more of that healthy scepticism which generates the key idea - the liberating
concept [15] .
We must question whether the P. H. A. who wrote these lines stands for Philip H. Abelson.
This was not the first time Dr Velikovsky had difficulties entering the pages of
professional journals. The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, which in
1952 carried extensive attacks upon him, would not suffer his reply. In 1956, the
Scientific American carried a strong attack on both Worlds in Collision and Earth in
Upheaval by Harrison Brown. (The magazine had refused to carry advertising of Velikovsky's
book.) When Velikovsky asked for permission to rebut, the Editor Dennis Flanagan, wrote:
I think you should know my position once and for all. I think your books have done
incalculable harm to the public understanding of what science is and what scientists do.
There is no danger whatever that your arguments will not be heard; on the contrary they
have received huge circulation by scientific standards.
Thus I feel that we have no further obligation in the matter.
This quotation reveals that the Editor has picked up a common sociological misapprehension
among scientists. It is that the media of the general public can substitute for the media
of science. They cannot. Furthermore, most scientists, when they reflect, realize that
they themselves insist upon a distinct separation of the two types of media.
Science magazine has a subscription list of 90,000. Its sponsoring body, the A. A. A. S.,
includes 71,000 individual members and 298 affiliated scientific societies, academies, and
other professional organizations. The Scientific American sells a quarter of a million
copies. They can reach fully the diversified audience of scientists who are concerned with
Velikovsky's work. Or they can serve as a block to the admission of new material. If the
American Behavioral Scientist prints accounts of Velikovsky's theories, it does so in the
pursuance of its commitment to treat with the sociology of science and scientific freedom.
If Science magazine carries or does not carry the developments of the substance of
Velikovsky's work, it acts out of its obligation to present new scientific propositions
and theories to the scientific world.
At this point the discussion of the rationalistic system of science may be concluded. Its
doctrine, formulas, and tactics have been only feebly exercised in the Velikovsky case. It
has furnished a poor fit. A few scientists - in conversation, by letters, and rarely by
public statement - asked for the rules of rationalistic science to be observed. The
behaviours of almost all scientists involved, with the expected exception of Dr Velikovsky
who acted in accord with the rules of seeking admission, must be fitted to some other
model. Perhaps it will be that which is called here the indeterminacy model.
THE INDETERMINACY MODEL
The Indeterminacy Model postulates a scientific order that is not replenished according to
any scheme that is instrumentally rational. Rather it almost randomly absorbs or refuses.
The lightning of discovery can strike anywhere. The pattern of science forms and becomes
recognizable out of a vast collection of accidents. The truth value of the scientist and
his product are alleged to have very little to do with their chances of success in being
incorporated into science. Nor are they kept out by skillful managers of power and
arbiters of claims.
The indeterminacy model differs from the rationalistic in that it postulates deliberate
activities that are distributed so as to nullify and cancel out each other, thus giving
the total system an unplanned effect. Its rules therefore are not rules of conduct but
rules of effects.
The very first rule of the indeterminacy model is that 'truth' about reality has as much
chance of rejection as of acceptance. Truth is an irrelevant trait of candidates and
material.
Let us pause for a moment to contemplate this radical expression. It does not say that
truth is non-existent. It can still hold to the theory that statements can be
distinguished as to their relative correlation with facts, patterns of fact, predictions
of events, and control of events. However, for truth to exist does not imply truth will be
admitted - even to its own domain of science. Like the proverbial prophet, it can be
without honour in its own land.
To conceive of this situation, let us assume that all men are scientists, even if some are
more so than others. They have problems that might be solved by logico-empirical
procedures. Taking into account all that men allow into their body of convictions, all the
statements about the world and about the future to which they grant their assents, can it
be said now, or ever, that the bulk of these statements are true? Perhaps not, at least
not by logico-empirical standards.
Now, moving from the common man to the scientist, can it be said that scientists take in
more correct statements than incorrect ones? To affirm such, one would have to believe
that they have attained omniscience. He would say, as men usually have said through
history, that those who went before had mental closets packed with the shabby clothes of
superstition, wrong theories, and unempirical ideas, whereas today, most of what men know
is true.
If pressed, one would be forced to justify his pride by the known effects of
specialization. A worn witticism says that the scientist as specialist is one who knows
more and more about less and less. This may be granted, in which event one would have to
resort to a collectivist theory of knowledge: knowledge is a corporate possession; apart
from the question of whether most of what is known is true, more is true today than
before, despite specialization, because science is a set of wonderful pools connected by
communicating pipes.
If this is so, then everything depends upon communications. If the pipes are not working,
truth is forever partial and in a worse condition than when the lesser sum of it was more
generally distributed. Is this the case today ? It may be. It may be becoming so. The
indeterminacy model postulates that it is so. Error is not only as common as truth; but
truth is fragmented for being uncommunicated. When a truth is admitted only to a small
part of the realm of science, it does not exist except for that portion of the realm.
Probably the extent of the admission of error into science is underestimated by those
scientists who have high morale or rigid unconscious self-doubts. Probably also truth
today does not enter a reservoir of science but only a separate pool. Therefore the
indeterminacy model can affirm that truth does not enter as a matter of course not because
it is deliberately excluded, but from logical, social, and psychological conditions beyond
current means of control.
The model suggests that the spirit of the times and customs dictate what will and will not
be science. Few or many people will acquire the habits of inquiry. They will produce
results, theoretical and practical, and they will be accepted or rejected partly by
chance, partly by favour or patronage, partly by publicity, partly by the use to which
their work may be put.
Scientists operate under the indeterminacy system by various myths - primarily of
rationality, of causation, and of power of choice - but in fact do not know what they are
seeking, what is available, or what are solutions. That their compensation, whether in
esteem, position, or money, is related to performance is only an illusion. What is
accepted and what is rejected are therefore only a product of chance encounters of purpose
and provision.
Under these circumstances, scientists follow the laws of nonrational collective behaviour.
They think in stereotypes (e. g. the eternal harmony of the spheres, uniformitarianism,
catastrophism). They circulate ideas via popularization and texts [16] . Thus have
Newton, Galileo, Darwin, Freud and Einstein been conveyed. Scientists are at the mercy of
popularizers. Their own minds are formed by simplistic ideas, try as they will to evade
their grip.
A new theory spreads as a rumour, simplified, overly precise, and success comes as a
surprise. No two persons understand its extended meanings quite alike. It is resistant to
rational counter-argument. And it persists until it is stale and a more vibrant report
originates. It seems to be specific and operational until it is shown to be blind and
vague; such is the fate of most past statements about the universe.
We would expect more scientists to dislike the indeterminacy model than the rationalistic
or power models. It negates the rationalistic model. And the power model, though disliked,
entrusts judgments to 'qualified authorities, ' as we shall see. The indeterminacy
threatens the whole order. It can be fully expected that among various kinds of
scientists, statisticians and sociologists will be least offended by it, astronomers most
offended, because of their own methodology. Physics and individualistic psychology, it may
be noted, have in recent years been prone to demand complicated systems of priorities in
giving scientific credits. Quarrelling over datelines of reports and property in
'findings' has sometimes occurred. This, it may be assumed, is in part a reaction against
surrendering to indeterminacy. Much greater nervousness, verging on trauma, is approaching
as scientists will consign their work to the anonymous maw of the electronic information
storage apparatus of the future.
Under the indeterminacy model, in the jargon of avant-garde statistics, the man/ material
'takes a random walk. ' The random walk signifies that for control purposes (including
predictive and tactical behaviour) there is no pattern except randomness. Only behaviours
of a low level of typicality can be discovered, and these are too weak to determine
directions. In the light of this theory, the Galileo case reads understandably. One cannot
escape the feeling that the treatment afforded Galileo was produced by a host of non-
rational, inconsistent incidents and intrigues leading up to his condemnation. A
hierarchical or power system was at work, but its instrumental rationality was inept. The
Church did not behave as a fully-aware, clearly organized, accurately aimed body.
Galileo's punishment seems in retrospect almost to have been an accident, though an
understandable one.
The following rules prevail:
(1) There are no prescribed scientific procedures. The rule of creative hypothesis is
great and scientists 'monkey around. ' Science fiction, magic, astrology, and half-
rationalized ideas are joined to logico-empirical procedures and facts, creating an
environment from which practical accomplishment emerges. There is a chaos of
communication. A person working in science applies himself to whatever comes to him
through his peculiar interests and situs, and casts forth a product whose destination and
fate are unknown.
The indeterminacy model stresses the chance reception of discoveries. Poincare recites how
he solved a theorem of Fuchsian functions while walking across a street [17] . Karl Gauss
after working for years on proof of a theorem succeeds and writes: 'At last, two days ago,
I succeeded, not by dint of painful effort, but so to speak by the grace of God. As a
sudden flash of light, the enigma was solved. For my part, I am not in a position to point
to the thread which joins what I knew previously to what I have succeeded in doing. '
Where is Velikovsky's method, more than one of his reviewers asks in anguish. There is a
method, not highly selfconscious, not always exposed. It is much more clearly recognizable
to social scientists than to natural scientists. Sometimes the method is concealed by an
easy style that separates empirically-tied ideas while allocating them to short sentences.
Of course, a number of the rational propositions, which lend the work its distinction, are
only as explainable as the leaps of Poincare and Gauss. The social psychology, much less
the neurology, of such events is little known.
The indeterminancy model, in this regard, offers in place of the rationalistic model a
description of 'normal' science as a quasi-administrative routine [18] . It affirms the
idea over the process, as in the letter from Professor H. H. Hess to Velikovsky (2, Jan.
1957) that refers to the memorandum he was sending to IGY:
... I will pass your ideas on to Dr Kaplan in the IGY organization.. Scientific
discoveries and ideas are produced by the intuition, creativeness and genius of a man.
Dollars of themselves don't produce this any more than they could be expected to produce
another Mona Lisa. This is something which I believe you can readily understand...
(2) There are no rules for the form in which material is submitted, nor rules for
publication. Whatever is offered is admitted or rejected for reasons largely mythical. The
works of Velikovsky are actually high in the scale of adduced proof and formality, by the
standards of all past useful scientific production. Much of science is passed down as
lore. The procedures are habitual and not rationally and consciously prescribed or
learned. Much that is communicated passes via devices and hardware inventions that elude
the literature of science.
The true inventor has to be dissociated from the accredited inventor. Every famous
scientist rests on the back of hundreds of unknown inventors. Even if credit were to be
assigned by a laborious objective research process, it would not be well enough informed
to do justice to the process of discovery.
The indeterminacy model fits the inefficiencies in maintenance and replenishment of the
corpus scientiae. Much more is discovered and forgotten than is known. Much that is known
is unused or known in a partial form. In Velikovsky's works are found numerous discoveries
of the past that became essential parts of his theory. The theory that a comet created
destruction of Earth was itself once propounded in various forms by distinguished
scientists, as Dr. Velikovsky and Professor Stecchini have shown. Whenever a new
scientific discovery or invention is made, its predecessors can be unearthed. Sometimes
the ideas may be shown to be in a causal sequence. At other times they are apparently
aborted and unrelated. And occasionally they are independently invented in the same
ideological epoch.
(3) A work penetrates into the body of science by the machinery of publicity, through
acquaintanceship circles, by accident, by unconscious exposure and the creation of frames
of mind (subliminal stimulation). It enters also by parallel practical operations
independently derived from the same sources or from the same, different and related
sources. It joins science by 'creative misunderstanding' or by 'anticreative
misunderstanding. '
(4) The rationalistic modes of presentation, as treated above, become unreliable and the
scientific establishment turns out to be wicked, foolish, or ineffectual. There really are
heroes, whom the people adore as the Heroes of Science, but the scientist does not learn
from the heroes and cannot know the origins of their knowledge. The heroes are really
hallucinations arising from the troubled mass mind that cannot rest with an anonymous and
uncontrolled world. Subscribing to the ideal system of rational science, the public
performs rituals and makes obsequies to an order which they believe to exist (but which is
only fantastic and invisible) and which they believe guides the destinies of science. The
representatives of the public act like the member of Parliament in J. H. Poincare's story
who, when asked about the value of geodesy, would answer, 'I am led to think that geodesy
is one of the most useful of sciences, for it is one of those that cost us most money. '
To conclude, a reasonably satisfying history of science and of the Velikovsky case might
be written from what might be called a purely phenotypical perspective. This would
decommission all the personalities of science. It would consider only the massive output
of symbols. It would reveal the patterns by which certain applied operations, of
considerable practical value, emerged from the nodules or clusters within this
communicative system. It would conclude that there is little control over the reception of
new science. It would conclude that other models for organizing and incorporating new
knowledge are either practical myths sustaining the morale of scientists, and/ or weak
determining systems having at best a mild effect on scientific advance and almost no
effect on the use to which science is put.
This set of problems is familiar to history, if not to the history of science. Did
Napoleon win his battles or did the French Revolution pre-conquer Europe for him? Would
science be largely the same if Newton or Galileo or Einstein had not lived? Does not the
readiness of people - few in the case of science and many in the case of politics - to
perceive, to believe and to use new materials, ideas and instruments constitute the
deterministic, inevitable, and overpowering structural force? Are not all the actions of
the powerful in the personalized drama of science, like the personalized drama of
political history, a glossing upon reality, a personalizing of events not less natural for
being human?
The documents of the Velikovsky case explain in this light some of the behaviours that
take place. They point to the immense practical impact of science while revealing the
chaotic conditions of the reception system. Scarcely any scientist appears to have read
Velikovsky properly. Practically all of the mechanisms for appraisal of his work failed.
Yet his findings appear to be increasingly validated, if not recognized. The science of
the future may be heavily conditioned by the existence of Velikovskian natural and
historical science, even though many of the sources of that science might have been
incubating independently of Velikovsky.
Probably some thousands of natural and social scientists might have been among the readers
of Velikovsky's works - which are written clearly, deal with important problems, and are
controversial - were it not for the curse of superstition and fakery called down upon it.
Nevertheless, through the indeterminacy system, Velikovsky's works were kept alive and
read. His ideas could become part of a frame of thought among a mass of people, and to
some unknown degree, help them develop a new vision of history, science, and nature.
THE POWER MODEL
Still a third reception system presents itself for consideration. It is the power model.
Its pure dynamics posit as an exclusive goal the admission of scientists and their works
to the establishment and corpus of science only as means to the preservation or
enhancement of the power and prestige of the ruling group.
In this model science is organized as a hierarchy operating by power principles in the
name of the rationalistic myth. The rationalistic doctrine is embraced, formulated, and
controlled as dogma by the hierarchy, which employs it as circumstances dictate. As
keepers of the sacred corpus of science, the hierarchs define ethical practices. They
accept or reject men and material, and inflict sanctions, all according to their own power
interests.
The power model presupposes one or more power elites. It foresees a possibility of factual
conflict among elites and also of dissension through ineffective control systems. It also
admits the possibility of economic and political alliances that may be employed to affect
the internal power structure of a science.
In the beginning are the hierarchs of the scientific establishment. As in all political
situations their existence can be proven by observation of their activity, by effects of
their interventions and by correct prediction, either in the present case or by transfer
of evidence in other similar situations. Thus, if Professor X, head of a famed University
department and incumbent of numerous professional and public specialized offices, agitates
against Dr V. and sways others to do so; if typical sanctions of non-appointment, non-
promotion, non-discussion, non-publication, and negative prestige result from this for Dr
V. and friends; if certain correct predictions are made about the negative response of the
establishment to projected actions of Dr V.; and if the impressive positions, connections
and behaviour of Professor X in other situations are of a nature similar to his behaviours
towards V.: then Professor X is a hierarch and the setting in which he operates can be
said to be hierarchical and those with whom he cooperates are co-leaders and those to whom
he delegates the same power tasks are subordinate hierarchs, and the whole establishment
is a power structure to the extent to which all of these behaviours are typical and
exclusive.
An authority-sanctioned doctrine is called dogma. It is the set of beliefs about how
events occur and their rightness or wrong-ness. In science, the major dogma of method is
the rationalistic model. And a minor dogma about authority is contained here in the power
model, so that it is permissible to claim 'authority' even if authority must bow down
before the 'proof' of the rationalistic model.
If a doctrine prevails in a social order, such as is science, it cannot be ignored by the
holders of power. They must rule in its terms. They must control it. Naked power is
difficult to achieve and hold. Man can no more live by power alone than by bread alone.
This is especially true of ruling groups such as scientific ones, that lack the sanctions
of physical coercion.
The control of dogma or doctrine rests on an original legitimacy of rule and then upon
control of means. In science, appointment to leading universities, designation to honours
and esteem by prior designees (co-option) confer legitimacy inside and outside the
establishment.
The control of dogma enables the hierarchs to dominate a controversy in that correct dogma
may be attributed to oneself and violations of dogma, hence illegitimacy, to the
opposition. As indicated above, the establishment leaders were not remiss in their tasks;
Gaposchkin, H. Brown, Lafleur, Stewart, et al. enunciated the code before passing judgment
upon Velikovsky and his works.
At the same time, they were equally careful to state, even if without confirmation, that
Velikovsky violated the code of science in salient respects. He was accused of writing for
money [19] . He was accused of a hoax. In numerous varying terms, he was labelled as
incompetent to discuss his topics.
Velikovsky's detractors were vulnerable, actually, on dogmatic grounds. But only in the
public press could they be attacked thereupon. Newsweek and Harper's carried the chief
pro-Velikovsky statements, alleging the failure of the hierarchs to conform to their
asserted belief-system.
Naked power is a shameful thing in science. Members of the establishment, realizing the
vulnerability of naked power, were quick to defend themselves against accusations of
arbitrariness, suppression, and censorship. One reason why their reviews and letters
seemed short on literary and scientific quality was that in them they were conducting a
three-fold operation - they had often to assert their control over dogma, effectuate their
power, and act out the model of a rationalistic reception system, all at the same time and
in the same place.
There can be no ruling group without an institutional base. The preferred situs is a
university of high prestige, funds, fellowships, staffs, and expensive, collectively
controlled apparatus. Holding the chief position in astronomy at Harvard is in these
regards like controlling the New York State delegation at a Presidential nominating
convention. From such a position come honours and other positions as well. In the 1952
Who's Who in America, Harlow Shapley, Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Lowell
Observatory at Cambridge, listed himself as an officer or member of 41 professional
associations. In this case, as happens in most power situations, the network of influence
extends outward through former students, new appointments, and professional rewards, and
also overlaps and is reinforced by affiliations of other kinds - sometimes of a political
and ideological nature, at other times of family, of money, etc.
The tactics of power normally operate to suppress undesired opinion and manipulate
favourable opinion. In the scientific reception system, this involves action in two
spheres, professional opinion and public opinion. The points where control can be
exercised are in the specialized and public publishing media, and in regards to
individuals.
The suppression or influencing of professional opinion in the Velikovsky case occurred in
the following ways:
(A) By word-of-mouth communication before and after the publication of Velikovsky's book.
This is an evanescent kind of material, now consisting largely of recollections of
scientists and publishers' representatives. (It would consist of items such as: Dr.
Conant, then President of Harvard, meets the Editor of Harper's magazine at the Century
Club; he says 'I have only one thing to say about your current issue: "Really!" ')
(B) By letter and 'committee of correspondence. ' Item: Before Velikovsky's book is
published, Madame Gaposchkin on the basis of Harper's article writes a violent review at
the request of The Reporter magazine and Dr. Shapley. This is accompanied by a hortatory
message prior to publication [20] .
(C) By seeking recantations. Shapley asked his colleague at Harvard, Dr. Robert H.
Pfeiffer, to confirm the genuineness of his statements supporting Velikovsky's Ages in
Chaos: Pfeiffer, Lecturer in Semitic Languages, did so. Atwater was asked by professor
Otto Struve in a menacing letter to reconsider and perhaps clarify his favourable
disposition towards Velikovsky. At an A. A. A. S. meeting called especially to deal with
problems of publishing ethics growing out of the failure to suppress completely the
Velikovsky book, the Macmillan company was permitted to recant and state a safe position.
(Boards of review for scientific publishing were suggested and considered by the panel.)
(D) By depriving opposing persons of positions. Their support of Velikovsky's right to be
heard and/ or of his theories appears to have played a significant part in the forced
resignation of Gordon Atwater, Chairman of the Astronomy Department of the American Museum
of Nature History and Curator of the Hayden Planetarium, and of James Putnam, a Macmillan
editor for 26 years. The converse, promoting the useful allies, is found in Lafleur, of
whom Scientific Monthly, in heralding a second article a few months later, reported that
he had been appointed to a new university and promoted to a departmental chairmanship
following his article on Velikovsky.
(E) The techniques of denying and avoiding public discussion, of refusing access to
scientific fora and a denial of access to scientific publications - via articles or
letters of reply, or even advertising - are amply illustrated elsewhere in these pages.
In additions, the power model of the reception system operates to restrict credentials.
Velikovsky did not possess orthodox credentials. This was made clear in the review of his
work. He was of course, well trained in many fields as, one by one, his readers came
around to admitting.
At that time, he had few friends, although among them was Albert Einstein. Shortly after
Einstein's death, Professor Bernard Cohen reported that Einstein had spoken in humorous
disparagement of Velikovsky. Einstein could not respond, but a number of personal meetings
and a good deal of reading by Einstein of Velikovsky's material would refute the surmise.
(Cohen himself retracted. Cf. the Cohen letter above, p. 15.) We note a handwritten letter
in German from Einstein to Velikovsky, 30 days before the former's death, in
acknowledgement of a gift of Ages in Chaos.
I look forward with pleasure to reading the historical book that does not bring into
danger the toes of my guild. How it stands with the toes of the other faculty, I do not
know as yet. I think of the touching prayer: 'Holy St Florian, spare my house, put fire to
others! ' I have already carefully read the first volume of the memoirs to 'Worlds in
Collision, ' and have supplied it with a few marginal notes in pencil that can be easily
erased. I admire your dramatic talent and also the art and the straightforwardness of
Thackeray [Thackrey] who has compelled the roaring astronomical lion to pull in a little
his royal tail yet still not showing enough respect for the truth.
Velikovsky made attempts to conciliate the powers, partly in conjunction with his attempts
to satisfy the demands of the rationalistic model of the reception system. He appreciated
that Shapley and Einstein, along with others, to be sure, were two heavily influential
figures on the scientific scene. Einstein was a source of comfort, if not of theoretical
support. Shapley was approached in the typical honest manner of 'cranks, ' that is, in the
course of a public forum, without introduction, and then by letter assuming naively the
rationalistic operational code that 'to test a theory, you go to a testing specialist who
has the required apparatus. '
It may be inquired why Velikovsky chose Shapley and Einstein, and why he engaged in other
actions directed at impressing the gatekeepers of science. This behaviour is in the first
place 'normal. ' It indicates only that he himself was no enemy of authority, but remained
throughout a naive and quixotic believer in the symbiosis of the rationalistic and power
models. One might pursue farther the psychology of this set of incidents. The strongly
controlled but nevertheless necessarily and typically great self-confidence of Velikovsky,
which enabled him to be a 'normal' man who could still pursue tremendous hypotheses
through many thousands of hours against many adversities, had a side of unconscious
intellectual presumption: 'The Lodges speak only to the Cabots. '
The establishment has a final weapon against hostile innovators. It is the concealed
incorporation of their ideas.
The best-known manifestation of the techniques of secret information is sometimes called
the 'silent footnote techniques. ' Credit is given in sources, footnotes, and forewords
only to those who are members of the establishment in good standing. Also there is a rule
of the highly specialized to not cite anyone less highly specialized for fear of being
thought too general, too popular. As a clique device, selective footnoting costs an
aspirant nothing (except possibly self-respect) and shows that he belongs to the group,
and he is 'advanced. ' It also lets him grace the patronage chiefs and the powerful. It is
a vote. A less expensive, less discernible, and more vitriolic tactic is hard to imagine.
To this day, despite a great deal of corroborative evidence and the passage of thirteen
years, no scientist has admitted in a work of his own that any glance that he may have
given towards the skies, nor any peek into ancient documents, has been provoked by an
objective and calm desire to examine Velikovsky's evidence. When relevant findings have
occurred, they have not been associated with the name of Velikovsky.
Then, too, using the partially respectable and partly true doctrines of the indeterminacy
model, the leaders claim that the innovator plucks his ideas and facts from the air of the
times. Examples are the 'ideas are cheap' statement of Philip Abelson. Or Harrison Brown's
assertions that 'Velikovsky apparently looks upon himself as an original thinker... ' and
'He quotes some data which we know to be true, some which we know to be dubious and some
which we know to be false. ' Brown gives not a shred of evidence for this statement. It is
baseless, yet a widely circulated canard among scientists is that Velikovsky made so many
predictions that some are bound to be true.
Or, using the rationalistic dogma, the establishment propagandists claim that 'there are
predictions and predictions, ' meaning that correctness is not the hallmark of good
predictions. Science works only on proper, methodical, laboratory work, it is declared.
This mysterious science is, of course, only the power and indeterminacy procedures at
work. So Velikovsky's catastrophes 'do not upset' scientists: Madame Gaposchkin goes out
of her way to express the attitude, 'See how we have accepted the much greater
catastrophes recently demonstrated empirically and mathematically by members of the
establishment! '
ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL NETWORKS
The tactics used to enhance power within the scientific establishment include bringing in
power from the outside. The most obvious external networks activated in the Velikovsky
case were the economic and the political.
Here is Dr Velikovsky's description of the fatal interview in May 1950 with the President
of Macmillan Company, when the latter requested him to free Macmillan from its obligation
to continue publishing Worlds in Collision. Mr Brett said:
Seventy per cent of the business of this company is in textbooks; it is the real
backbone of our firm. Therefore we are vulnerable. Professors in certain universities have
refused to see our salesmen. We have received a series of letters declaring a boycott
against all our textbooks. Please realize how it works. (Here Mr Brett picked up a pencil
and drew some circles.) Academic circles are not isolated groups; they are united in local
organizations, or in professorial associations that are incorporated or represented in
larger national organizations. (And he drew larger circles.) The American Association for
the Advancement of Science in Washington. The American Philosophical Society, and the
National Academy of Sciences are groups of national importance where scientists in many
field are represented. In this way the academic pressure may become widespread.
The conversation is pursued and becomes difficult. Velikovsky notes again:
Mr Brett, though very polite and trying to be pleasant, was definitely committed to his
decision to free his house of a book that was arousing wrath among the powerful of the
textbook world, and he began again to draw a pattern of circles to show me how the
scientific groups are interlocked; how they are centred, and how they can damage a
publishing house.
The most readily available economic instrument of the scientific establishment is the
'boycott. ' It is well-known but not sufficiently appreciated that the leaders of the
scientific field wield a triple influence over publishers. They are authors or sponsors of
the leading works in the field. They influence opinion about books; this in turn affects
purchasing. And they and their subordinates and followers in other colleges purchase an
important part of the books and materials sold in the field and used as texts and required
reading. When a publisher's contact men find the doors to the mighty suddenly closed to
them, this is more than pressure - it can be a mortal blow.
The establishment moved with speed and vigour to block professional support for
Velikovsky's book and to boycott it and its publishers. The following occurs in a letter
from Shapley to Macmillan Company prior to the publication of the book.
And frankly, unless you can assure me that you have done things like this frequently in
the past without damage, the publication must cut me off from the Macmillan Company.
And on February 20, one month later, and still before the book was printed, in a letter to
Ted Thackrey, Editor of Compass, Shapley writes:
In my rather long experience in the field of science, this is the most successful fraud
that has been perpetrated on leading American publications... I am not quite sure that
Macmillan is going through with the publication, because that firm has perhaps the highest
reputation in the world for the handling of scientific books.
The book was published after clearing the hurdle of a board of censors instituted by Mr
Brett but pressure continued. Macmillan prevailed upon Velikovsky to release it from its
contract with him, presenting him with a contract with Doubleday (the book was already on
the top of the best-seller list and over 50,000 copies of it had been sold) and making
clear that he had no other course to take if his book were to be promoted and marketed.
Indeed, the company had already stopped publicizing the book. As every bookman knows, this
could be construed as a breach of faith with the author.
Subsequent correspondence indicated the nature of Operation Boycott. D. B. McLaughlin,
University of Michigan astronomer, in a letter of June 16, 1950 to Fulton Oursler,
Reader's Digest, said in part:
Worlds in Collision has just changed hand, from Macmillan to Doubleday. I am frank to
state that this change was the result of pressure that scientists and scholars brought to
bear on the Macmillan Company. It is our duty to the public to prevent such fraud insofar
as we can.
Paul Herget, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cincinnati and Director of its
observatory, wrote to the columnist Sokolsky, early July 1950:
I do not believe he [Shapley] was in any sense the leader in this campaign. I was a very
vigorous participant myself... For your information I enclose copies of some of my
correspondence.
After the transfer was made, pressure was brought upon the Doubleday Company.
On June 30,1950, David C. Grahame, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Amherst, wrote:
Macmillan company abandoned it [Worlds in Collision] because of the storm of protest it
aroused among informed persons, and you, too, may find yourself kept busy answering
letters of indignation from scientists the country over. Scientists are now engaged in an
active boycott of the Macmillan books, their opinion should be heeded by any publisher who
intends to publish a book which purports to be science. I trust that you can be dissuaded.
The Harvard University group was relentless. Professor Fred L. Whipple, who had been
Shapley's chief assistant and had relieved him as Director of the Harvard College
Observatory, took up the cudgels with Doubleday. On June 30, 1950 he wrote to the
Blakiston Company, which was the publisher of his book, Earth, Moon, and Planets.
Commenting on an article that Newsweek magazine had just published on Velikovsky's case
(called 'Professors as Suppressors') he says:
Newsweek has unwittingly done the Doubleday Company a considerable amount of harm. They
have made public the high success of the spontaneous boycott of the Macmillan Company by
scientifically minded people. This in turn amounts to organizing a boycott of the
Doubleday Company by the thinking people who buy books. My guess is that Doubleday Company
will never publish Volumes 3 and 4 [21] ... In any case, since I believe that the
Blakiston Company is owned by the Doubleday Company, which controls its policies as well
as the distribution of its books, I am now then a fellow author of the Doubleday Company
along with Velikovsky. My natural inclination, were it possible, is to take Earth, Moon
and Planets off the market and find a publisher who is not associated with one who has
such a lacuna in its publication ethics.
He would instead, he declared, give the royalties to charity and bring out no new edition.
Indeed the entire popularly-written Harvard series on astronomy was soon withdrawn from
Blakiston.
Whether a political network became engaged along with the scientific and economic ones is
quite unclear. It may even be questioned whether so controversial a subject should be
raised. (Perhaps if mere Democrats and Republicans were the participants, one might not
hesitate.) And yet, the evidence suggests that an informal left-wing network might well
have been in operation. This would help explain the intensity of emotion and activity
exhibited by Professor Shapley and various supporters. The political affiliations of Dr
Shapley during this period were under scrutiny by official agencies. The 'normal' threats
posed by the Velikovsky work might have been intensified by the political attacks Shapley
was undergoing. Velikovsky could have been a convenient, fairly helpless target of
displaced aggressions.
Yet Shapley was not alone. He was supported by others who were under the same kind of
political attack, for example, Kirtley Mather and Edward U. Condon. Were they all
displacing aggressions? Was the British evolutionist, J. B. S. Haldane, several thousand
miles away, subject to the same collective disorder? In Britain and on the Continent of
Europe, Worlds in Collision was received differently. Not accepted in many quarters,
neither was it vilified. On the other hand, Haldane, an old friend and political ally of
Shapley, wrote an exceptional diatribe against Velikovsky, even associating the book with
those in America who wished to use Britain as a base for atomic warfare.
If a political network theory were to be assumed, the reasons might be several. The work
of Velikovsky could be assumed to defend Jewish nationalism. It could be assumed to defend
fundamentalism. It could be considered anti-materialist, anti-determinist, and
obscurantist. An attack on it might also give a political apparatus, with its associated
branches, some needed exercise, and, what is more, a needed victory at its lowest moment
in history. The conflict could moreover serve to bind to the group unsuspecting
sympathizers in a common cause of science.
This is conjectural, yet it would be improper to eliminate it entirely from consideration,
even at the cost of arousing hostility in readers who, until this page, might have been in
full sympathy with our presentation. To illustrate further, there occurred a strange
incident that can perhaps be best understood as a network problem.
Shapley was among a group of progressives and more extreme left-wingers who, when the New
York newspaper PM failed, backed its successor, Compass. On February 19, 1950, it
reprinted the original Harper's article on Velikovsky's book, the very article which,
appearing before book publication, caused an immediate hostile outburst from the Harvard
group. On February 20, Harlow Shapley, on the stationery of the Harvard College
Observatory, wrote to Ted Thackrey, Editor of the Compass. 'Dear Ted, ' he began,
'Somebody has done you dirt. ' The rest of the letter was smoothly persuasive to Thackrey
and derogatory to Velikovsky. He referred to Worlds in Collision as 'a successful fraud, '
'rubbish, ' and 'astrological hocus-pocus. ' Einstein was later to read his letter and
call it 'miserable' in a marginal notation.
However, Thackrey, far from cringing, sent back a stinging retort. He stated well the
rationalistic ideal, and accused Shapley of trying to suppress Velikovsky's work. Another
exchange followed. The Compass was not long for this world, however. Thackrey's views on
issues such as the Korean War threw the communists and fellow travellers into deadly
opposition to him. Eventually, key backers withdrew their financial support, and Compass
folded.
But the main struggle over Worlds in Collision was not waged in the associated arenas of
business and politics. It occurred within the ramparts of science. Furthermore, it was a
fairly clear engagement of the one with the many. The hierarchs were not riven by dissent.
There has been no revolt. The natural resort of the denied and dispossessed in a power
system, factionalism, was not exercised. No faction within science attempted in the name
of rationalism to substitute its interest, theories and facts for the prevailing ones.
A different kind of power behaviour within the dynamics of the model is visible. Dr
Velikovsky has been more of the hermit scientist than of the hierarch, cabalist, or rebel.
The model of this behaviour has the gates of scientific recognition being forced by the
single-minded dedicated scholar and a small group of disciples. They create a disturbance
that cannot be ignored. The whole picture is one of a power struggle where the odds
against innovation are great but the addiction of the innovator to truth is supreme.
In the end, it is the outcome of the power struggle that determines whether the truth is
admitted, not the rationalistic tests. Just as a soldier or a bureaucrat will exclaim in
amazement over the gargantuan capacity of the collective organism to ingest irrationality
and inefficiency, the scientist with any degree of historical perspective must often be
shocked at the frequency with which power determines what the laws of human and natural
behaviour 'are' and how a corpus of science survives.
THE DOGMATIC MODEL
A final model, the dogmatic, requires exposition. Professor Stecchini has given ample
reason to believe that the resistance to the astronomical theories of Velikovsky was
motivated by sheer ideology, a dislike of challenge to an orderly universe. Much evidence
can be brought forward from other fields of knowledge - archaeology, biblical studies,
paleontology, geology, physics and biology - to the same effect: the theories of
Velikovsky operating against the prevailing dogma are repulsed vigorously. Every weapon is
brought into play against the new ideas - authoritative denunciation, arguments ad
hominem, tricks of logic and evidence, suppression, denial of rewards, and stony silence.
By the rules of the dogmatic model, what happens is explained solely and adequately by the
fact that all believers in the state of present knowledge unite to resist the innovator.
New material and men are accepted in the proportion to which they conform with prevailing
theories and norms.
Several tests of the dogmatic model may be proposed. (1) Is there a universal agreement
against a work on grounds other than rationalistic? If so, a dogmatic model may fit the
case. The spontaneity and generality of denunciation of Velikovsky's work is compelling.
The power apparatus is simply not strong enough to explain it. The rationalistic model
certainly does not. Nor does the indeterminacy model. Yet the concept of a collective
obsession spread among a great many persons on all scientific levels and in all scientific
fields would fit the dogmatic mould.
(2) Does the power elite reject new and correct ideas even though the effects of the ideas
may be expected to enhance their power? If the answer is an unambiguous 'yes, ' then the
dogmatic model fits. The Velikovsky case is here ambiguous, however. Partly this is owing
to the lack of agreement over the correctness of his theories. But other factors could
cloud the issue too. In 1950 the throne of astronomy, the queen of sciences, was shaky. It
could have been bolstered by consideration of the Velikovskian theories. The weakness of
classical studies was evident. They could have been rejuvenated. Biology was not in such a
poor condition, but it too could have been aided by vigorous re-examination of
evolutionary theory. Geology was vigorous, physics too. They needed no great prestige. All
rejected the ideas. Thus power (prestige) was not a determinant, it would seem.
However, power outside is not the same as power inside the disciplines. Time after time in
history, power elites succumb because they are more intent of gaining or holding internal
power than in maintaining or extending the scope and intensity of their power vis-a-vis
the outer spheres. Cavalry generals have been known to risk their country's safety in
order to protect the power of their outmoded arm within the military establishments. An
authority in the classics might readily sacrifice the chances of his discipline to retain
his personal position within it.
We do note a perceptiveness of the larger power issues among fundamentalists and other
belief-groups that held a fringe position with respect to modern science. They could see a
movement back into science from which they had long been displaced by evolutionary and
anti-scriptural doctrines in science.
(3) Do conflicting power factions within the power elite take the same attitude towards
plausible innovation? If so, then the dogmatic model is indicated. In the Velikovsky case,
whatever general scientific leadership could be said to exist was either antagonistic or
silent towards him. If factions existed, then dogmatism can be assumed. The answer is in
doubt. The factions may not have existed or perhaps they did not perceive their 'objective
interests' (indeterminacy) or perhaps they were in fact dogmatically opposed.
Going into the autonomous fields of science, the situation is somewhat clearer. In no
scientific field, of the half dozen involved, did a faction seize upon the issues. In
astronomy, for instance, Struve, who might have opposed Shapley, took a dogmatic position
in opposition to Velikovsky. The West Coast empires of astronomy were less unanimous in
opposing him. Again, the query: indeterminacy? A cancelling effect between dogmatism and
factionalism ?
(4) Is there in fact a high correlation between opposition and novelty, where truth is a
constant ? If so, then the dogmatic model fits. The Velikovsky case alone cannot serve for
this test. The measure of truth of the numerous theories is not yet agreed to. The
opposition has treated the books wholesale; hence, opinions of one proposition are
intertwined with opinions of another.
(5) Where there is awareness and interest in a work among several disciplines that are
autonomous power groups, and where the rationalistic code is not applied, is agreement in
the appraisal of the work conditioned by the degree to which its theories and approach are
novel to the individual fields? If so, then dogmatism, rather than other behaviours, is
manifest.
Here again, a sure answer is impossible in the Velikovsky case. Several fields were
interested, but each suffered radical assaults. The only group that might have received
the findings of Velikovsky without shock would be psychoanalytically-oriented
anthropologists of folklore. But there are few of these, and they seem scarcely to have
been alerted (again the indeterminacy model).
(6) Are statements purporting to be empirically proven propositions of science bluntly
made and repeatedly hammered home? If so, the dogmatic model would apply. Time after time,
the same simple assertions were made against Velikovsky. This is a well-known rhetorical
and propagandistic device, and would fit the power model as such, but it is likely that
the assertions were sincerely meant as facts. Examples:
The earth cannot stop suddenly without disintegrating. (Literally true but the affirmative
was never asserted by Velikovsky.) The sea levels did not change in historical times.
(Incorrect) Temples and dwellings from before 1500 B. C. are still standing. (Incorrect)
Excavations in Ur show no signs of flooding. (Incorrect) Eclipses are checked to 3000 B.
C. (Incorrect) Clear records of Venus as a planet with orderly movements exist from before
1500 B. C. [22] ( Incorrect) Velikovsky is not scientific.
(7) Is the language of the reviewers and commentators heavily dogmatic and authoritative
rather than rationalistic? If so, then the dogmatic model is operative. In fact, this is
the most obvious aspect of the Velikovsky case. In the New Haven Connecticut Register of
June 25, 1950, there appeared a collective review of Worlds in Collision by four Yale
professors who were shortly to republish the same review in the American Journal of
Science. I attempted a crude analysis of the contents of the four successive reviews.
Putting aside the question of the validity of empirical statements made by the authors, I
attempted to discover the proportions of various kinds of formal statements that appeared
in the reviews. Using the sentences as the unit of measure, I fitted each statement into
one of five categories by its form: a descriptive statement purporting to carry
information about the contents of the work; an empirical statement presenting a factual
proposition about the scientific material; a logico-empirical statement containing a
prosition of factual or conceptual relations; a dogmatic-authorative statement affirming a
belief or a consensus of experts; and miscellaneous statements dealing with the personal
motives of the author and publisher.
I emerged from this little exercise with 27 statements purportedly descriptive of the
work, 4 purportedly empirical statements, 12 purportedly logico-empirical statements, 27
dogmatic-authoritative statements and 8 statements dealing with the character of the
author and publisher. A separate summing-up of the evaluative loading of each statement
resulted in a total of 2 favourable sentences, 31 neutral sentences and 46 negative
statements about the work. In the Velikovsky case, then, rationalistic criticism was
heavily subordinated to dogmatic-authoritative criticism of a negative character. This
kind of material, if pursued through the Velikovsky case and also through many other
scientific case studies, might lead to a complete overhaul of the machinery of scientific
evaluation. At the very least, it would position the review function on a low level in the
order of merit for the rationalistic appraisal of science.
The language of the academic reviewers is unequivocally harsh, strident and hostile. The
question arises, however, whether this might not also be an indication of the power system
at work. The language of power and the language of dogmatism are often similar:
established power is conservative.
Furthermore, we note that the popular reviewers, numbering into the hundreds, are more
disposed to rationalistic argument with the Velikovsky ideas than the scientists. This
might indicate power, not dogma, to be the issue. The conclusion may be that motives of
dogmatism and power are both in evidence. An unnecessary excess of abuse reveals that
Worlds in Collision struck at dogmatic and moralistic defences as well as at existing
power structures.
REFORM OF THE SYSTEM
The documentation of the Velikovsky case cannot be completed here. Much remains to be
said. It is enough, however, to the immediate tasks, if it is shown that the Power Model,
the Dogmatic Model, and the Indeterminacy Model describe and explain far more of the
behaviours observed in the Velikovsky case than the Rationalistic Model.
In the early stages of the Velikovsky case, numerous 'wrong' cues were given. Lacking a
conscious, regular system for the reception of new materials, the scientific establishment
was governed by intrusive psychological forces organized irrelevantly by ideological and
power networks. The frequent, remarkable misreadings of plain textual material are merely
one of various indications of a perceptual system operating psychopathologically.
An original spate of publicity was the red flag to the bull. It warned the authorities
that an outsider was seeking entrance with strange credentials. In some scholars and
scientists, a high level of political anxiety (this was the period of McCarthyism) could
join with intellectual anxieties produced by 'strange' and 'discredited' forms of data and
proof to form a highly combustible mixture.
The rationalistic system was suppressed and the power system and dogmatic systems were
activated. Once events had taken this course, little could be done to evade the
conclusion. All involved were fully committed. There was no higher court of scientific
appeal, or other checking or remedial agencies. The adjustment thereafter had to occur
through unmobilized elements - young, sceptical students (from time to time Velikovsky
mentions the young as his justifiers) or dissident scientists or outside intellectuals.
Interestingly, the engineering profession is one of the best represented among
Velikovsky's adherents.
The problem that many thought had been solved ages ago - that of recognition of new
contributions - turns out to be ominously present. Actually little was solved by the great
historical cases of Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo and Pasteur, for the problem has always
been conceived as one of improving rationality rather than as one of the applied sociology
of science and institutions. It is in every respect like the central problems of political
and governmental organization; there, however, a long history of scientific attention
focuses on the need for more than personal goodwill and sweet reason to preserve and
promote desired behaviours.
Also like the political order, the scientific order consists of a set of sub-universes
each with its own goals, routines, organization, and, hence, particular problems.
Generalizations about science as a whole and subsequent policies must be based on averages
and parameters, and a priori could provide less than the total need for policies governing
the individual disciplines. That is, a few policies may work for all fields, but each
field needs its own; and all such policies should be based upon extensive behavioural
research.
Few scientists can be immediately useful in the policy process of science. Most are
uneducated to the tasks. They do not understand the nature of ideology. They seem not to
know their own psychology or their patterns of social behaviour. They do not know how
their organization works or what its policies are. In the end, how can scientists be
trusted to fashion solutions to a wide range of social problems to which their special
'hardware' competence must contribute? The answer is that they cannot. Unless and until
there is the equivalent of a Copernican revolution (or a Velikovskian revolution) in the
form of a sociological revolution in science, natural scientists as a group will
constitute a dead weight in public and professional policy, or worse, a potential force of
evil.
The beginning of such a revolution must be in scientific self-knowledge. At present,
scientists appear to study everything but themselves. An institute for research in
scientific procedure is needed to initiate and conduct a wide variety of research projects
on the behaviour of scientists. This institute should be amply supported by numerous
individuals and groups and should be beholden to none. In its own structure it should
predicate the goals that brought it into being. Its activities might be based on the
recommendations for reform that are put forward in the passages that follow.
ON THE EDUCATION OF SCIENTISTS
The education of scientists must be broadened to include a knowledge of the aims and
methods of the humanistic and behavioural disciplines.
The average scientist needs to know more of the history of science, but especially of an
analytic sociological history of science. Unfortunately, the history of science is largely
old-fashioned chronological recitation and rationalistic technical analysis.
The sociology of knowledge, epistemology, and pragmatic logic should be regular
instruments of all of the sciences and philosophy.
The education of scientists should include ethical training. The cynicism normally
provoked by analysis of the type undertaken in the present article can have a destructive
effect upon creative and sustained work unless there appear to be social and professional
forces working towards rationalistic ideals. The rationalistic model of science itself
needs reformulation and reinforcement. Despite its failures in the Velikovsky case, it
remains the most acceptable of the model reception systems of science presently
conceivable.
The more frequent employment of psychiatric techniques to give specialists insight into
their motives and behaviour would help to prevent destructiveness, exclusiveness, and
other unconsciously provoked behaviours.
Efforts at unified interpretations of science should be promoted. Presently, the rewards
for scholars who work on bridges across the sciences are unattended chairs in philosophy.
The largest expenditures, and professional prestige go to the masters of disciplinary
secrets.
ON REPORTING ABOUT SCIENTIFIC BEHAVIOUR
Periodic surveys, assessments and agendas of scientific work in every discipline are
needed. A clear and frank set of observations about what is and is not going on in science
can help prevent a slump into the chaos of indeterminacy and into the evasive and
irrelevant actions of the power-hungry. For science and all of its parts, regular reports
should be prepared on the costs of maintenance, and on any imbalances between scientific
and other social costs and among the various sub-sciences.
The sociology of science should focus upon the new communication systems that are rapidly
developing, including linguistics, information storage and retrieval, mechanical
translation, and rapid large-scale publication. The invention and control of these systems
will soon force decisions that will critically affect power relations within science and
society. The existing organizational structures of the sciences are inadequate to deal
with such issues.
Most scientific journals are organized along lines of power; scientific controversies are
often conducted like political campaigns. The journals lack serious intellectual goals;
and they command few resources and skills for the massive tasks of providing free and easy
communication. Their reviewing procedures need reform. Professional reviewers'
associations might be set up within each scientific association; their members would
engage to improve the science of scientific reviews and to use explicit agreed-upon
procedures in reporting on new works. Their reviews would carry their associational
'trademark. '
ON THE CONTROLS OF SCIENCE
The associations of science are still among the primitive and puerile mechanisms of modern
life. The annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has
perhaps as much to do with the advancement of science as a state fair with the advancement
of agriculture, but not more. Yet it is not atypical of the associative activities of
science.
At present, and perhaps indefinitely, awareness of the non-rationality of scientific
behaviour should favour old-fashioned means of promoting scientific freedom. For instance,
the semi-independent scientific establishments that have resulted from nationalistic
separateness may be preferable to an international establishment with semi-coercive
powers.
On the same grounds, a pluralism of support of scientific endeavour is desirable. A
multiplicity of foundations, associations, well-equipped universities and other supportive
agencies may appear costly, but brings about a larger efficiency through increased
initiative and varied development. In this connection, the role of non-governmental
companies engaged in research and development, and of independent publishing firms, should
not be understated.
It would be well to inquire whether existing institutions have any inherent capacity for
trying and sanctioning unprofessional practices among professionals. Two types of problems
occur: those of ethics and those of non-rationality. Most contemporary scientists, and the
public, perhaps believe that scientific freedom is achieved when outside lay authorities
are forbidden to rule on questions of functional ethics and scientific truth. Inquisitions
are scorned. Legislative investigations are hateful. The considerable powers of lawyers
and medical practitioners for self-government are regarded as inappropriate to scientific
affairs.
Is there then no recourse for the scientist who has been damaged by the means detailed in
these papers? Perhaps Harvard University has within its authority the right to inquire
into the scientific behaviour of its faculty. Its officers might make a determination 'on
the merits' that one or more members of the faculty were so irrelevant and destructive in
their scientific work as to violate plain standards of scientific competence. They might
as a result take remedial action, as, for example, to require apologies, re-tests, re-
examinations, discussion in open forums, suspension, reprimand, resignation, or dismissal.
Lacking any of these forms of action, can a University be said to be responsible to its
own and to the greater community for the quality of the particular activities it performs
in the name of the community and of knowledge?
Scientific associations might conduct the same kind of inquiries. Their sanctions might be
lighter; their responsibilities, however, are no less heavy. They could extend their
authority to questions of apology, hearings, open forums, open journal pages, and
suspension or withdrawal of membership.
The machinery and practices so envisioned might be self-defeating. The unorthodox voice is
likely to end as the defendant, not the plaintiff, in most proceedings. The rank and file
are likely to follow their leaders more than the dissident. Research is needed, therefore,
into the conditions under which a hearing procedure and its consequences can be structured
independently of the organization as a whole, very much as an independent court system
operates in civil law.
The question arises also whether the larger society should ever take a hand in
professional affairs. The investment of the public in the Velikovsky case is not
inconsiderable. The scope and importance of the knowledge involved are great. Beyond them
lies the public concern in how scientific scientists are. And the education being conveyed
to the young is of public interest. Nor is it immaterial that a part of the nation's
resources is being spent each year to solve technological problems, some of which are
connected with national survival. If the public concern is present, what public machinery
is to be brought into play - congressional investigations, a national science board to
hear and investigate complaints, a congress of scientific associations with a judicial
branch?
Such questions warrant intensive study followed by new policies. It is this writer's
belief that independent hearing and reporting mechanisms should be invented for use by
associations and by joint scientific-public-governmental organs. Legislative and executive
machinery should be avoided as far as possible, but quasi-judicial machinery encouraged.
Scientists have on the whole tender sensitivities. A mild exposure and embarrassment
usually have great corrective value for them.
These then are the conclusions reached. They are as far from the original incidents
engendering the case of Dr Velikovsky as were his astronomical, geological, and historical
conclusions from his early thought that Freud misjudged Akhnaton.
Immanuel Velikovsky propounded a synthetic theory of the highest order. He reordered
classical chronology. He derived important truths from ancient sources that science had
abandoned. Profound experiences of man's ancestors are revealed anew. He therefore has
given us new understanding of man's nature.
He has shown that the present order of the solar system is quite new and that unaccounted
forces help govern it. He has struck at a great part of the Darwinian explanation of
evolution. He has upset several major theories of geology and offered substitutes
therefore. He found space a vacuum and has made of it a plenum.
A great many of his truths are to be found scattered in the historical and contemporary
byways of science. As bits of information and fragmented theories, they meant little or
nothing to the many scholars and scientists who may have glanced at them and turned away.
With rare imagination and consummate skill, he fashioned them into theories of great
scope, compactness, and integration. While his ideas are not at all beyond criticism, as a
cosmogonist he appears in the company of Plato, Aquinas, Bruno, Descartes, Newton and
Kant. What would therefore be only the duty of the critics of science - to defend ordinary
or even mistaken scholars - becomes, by accident, an occasion to defend a great savant of
the age.
Notes (References cited in "The Scientific Reception System")
1. A person may be favored 'unjustly' by the reception system Thus, many irrelevant
elements may enter into rewarding undeservedly a scientist for his behaviors. Whatever
principles may be established to correct 'unjust unacceptance' should also be observedly
operative in cases of 'unjust acceptance. ' It also may occur that 'unjust acceptance' is
correlated with 'unjust unacceptance. '
2. Proto-thought is a level of assumptive prejudiced thought midway between unconscious
'thought' and self-controlled thinking. It is prominent in ideological and stereotyped
thinking.
3. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, 'Worlds in Collision, ' Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, Vol. 96 (October 15, 1952), pp. 519, 523.
4. Laurence J. Lafleur, 'Cranks and Scientists, ' The Scientific Monthly, Vol. LXXIII
(November, 1951), p. 285.
5. In a review of Earth in Upheaval, Scientific American, Vol. 194 (March, 1956), p. 127.
6. Harrison Brown, 'Venus and the Scriptures, ' The Saturday Review, Vol. XXXIII (April
22, 1950), pp. 18, 19.
7. In a recent article in Science, M. King Hubbert has shown how an erroneous formula
existed in various books over a half century without detection. ... the equation cited was
for twenty-five years the most widely used equation in the petroleum industry ... it was
ruefully discovered that the equation in question was neither physically correct nor a
valid statement of a result established a century earlier by a Frenchman named Henry
Darcy. (Science, March 8, 1963, p. 8856.)
8. Edwin G. Boring, 'The Validation of Scientific Belief, ' Proceedings, Op. cit., pp.
535-39.
9. 'Orthodoxy and Scientific Progress, ' Proceedings, Op. cit., p. 505.
10. American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. VI, December, 1962.
11. Harvard Crimson (September 25, 1950), p. M2, and infra, p. 59.
12. Cf. James V. Conant, in Science and Common Sense (1951), Preface and p. 278, and in
New York Herald Tribune, February 16, 1951.
13. Proceedings, Op. cit., p. 525.
14. Nature, May 14, 1960; January 7, 1961; March 25, 1961.
15. Science, Vol. 138, October 12, 1962.
16. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), p. 164.
17. Science and Method (London, Nelson, n. d.), p. 54.
18. Cf. A. de Grazia, Science and Values of Administration (Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill,
reprint series, 1962), on science as administration; T. S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, p. 10 seq.
19. A fair estimate of Dr Velikovsky's wage rate considering his total royalties from
writing and his total research time on his books, including Worlds in Collision, would be
$1.35 an hour. He held no university or foundation appointment at any time. The typical
Harvard professor could be said to be paid the equivalent of royalties on sales of 30,000
books every year.
20. It was in the transition from the mimeographed to the printed version that a clear
ethical test was presented and failed by Dr Gaposchkin. We quote here the passage from the
mimeographed text and that of the printed text: The mimeographed version: 'If the biblical
story which Mr Velikovsky seeks to establish is to be accepted at its face value, the
rotation of the earth must have been stopped within six hours. All bodies not attached to
the surface of the earth (including the atmosphere and the ocean) would then have
continued their motion, and consequently have flown off with a speed of 900 miles an hour
at the latitude of Egypt. '
The printed version (later): 'Let us assume, however, that Dr Velikovsky is right - that
the earth did stop rotating. In that case all bodies not attached to the surface of the
earth (including the atmosphere and the ocean) would have continued the motion, and would
have flown off with a speed of nine hundred miles an hour at the latitude of Egypt. '
Nota Bene. If the earth, as she says first, decelerated within six hours, the inertial
push in objects on the earth's surface would be 500 times smaller than their weight. A man
of 160 lbs would experience a forward push of 5 ounces. Dr Gaposchkin now had a clear
choice: Someone had called the quantitative error to her attention. She might choose to
recalculate the inertia of the slower stop. She chose the latter. She took out the
reference to the six hours and all other qualifications Velikovsky had introduced and kept
the 900 m. p. h. reference.
21. An incorrect prediction. Doubleday Company has published, in addition to Worlds in
Collision, Ages in Chaos, Earth in Upheaval, and Oedipus and Akhnaton. A fifth volume,
forming a sequel to Ages in Chaos, is in page proofs.
22. We note such phenomena as the following triple play among reviewers: Dr Edmondson of
Link Observatory obviously copies in a review from Kaempffert of the New York Times who
had copied in his review from Gaposchkin's preview that (1) the Venus tablets from before
1500 B. C. describe regular motions of this planet 'exactly as we see it, ' and that (2)
Velikovsky suppressed both this fact and the very existence of the tablets. Both
statements are untrue. The tablets describe very erratic motions of Venus, and Velikovsky
presented the Venus Tablets in his book to support his concept.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
PART SEVEN
by Immanuel Velikovsky
ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES OF CORRECT PROGNOSIS
In 1950 - as it is still largely today - it was generally accepted that the theory of
uniformity must be true and that no process which is unobservable in our time could have
occurred in the past. It was also believed that celestial bodies, the Earth included,
travel serenely on their orbits in the void of space for countless eons. In Worlds in
Collision (1950), however, I offered these theses: '( 1) there were physical upheavals of a
global character in historical time; (2) these catastrophes were caused by extraterrestrial
agents; and (3) these agents can be identified' (from the Preface). These claims were
termed a 'most amazing example of a shattering of accepted concepts on record' (Payne-
Gaposchkin).
The consequences of the theory affected almost all natural sciences and many social
disciplines. Especially objectionable was the assertion that events of such magnitude took
place in historical times.
Worlds in Collision describes two (last) series of cataclysmic events that occurred 34 and
27 centuries ago. Not only the Earth, but also Venus, Mars, and the Moon were involved in
near encounters, when the Morning Star, then on a stretched elliptical orbit following its
eruption from the giant planet Jupiter, caused turmoil among the members of the solar
system before settling on its present orbit.
The description was derived from literary references in the writings of ancient peoples of
the world. The archaeological, geological, and paleontological evidence for the theory was
collected and presented separately in Earth in Upheaval (1955). In order to explain how
certain phenomena could have taken place - how, for instance, Venus, a newcomer, could
obtain a circular orbit, or the Earth turn over on its axis - the theory envisaged a
charged state of the sun, planets, and comets, and extended magnetic fields permeating the
solar system. This appeared even more objectionable since celestial mechanics had been
solidly erected on the notion of gravitation, inertia and pressure of light as the only
forces acting in the void, the celestial bodies being electrically and magnetically sterile
in their inter-relations. Worlds in Collision, in its Preface, was acknowledged as heresy
in fields where the names Newton and Darwin are supreme.
The only quantitative attempt to disprove one of my main theses was made by D. Menzel of
Harvard College Observatory (1952) [1] . He showed (' if Velikovsky wants quantitative
discussion, let us give him one'), on certain assumptions, that were I right the sun would
need to hold a potential of 10 to the 19th power volts; but, he calculated that the sun, if
positive, could hold only 1800 volts, and, if negative, it follows from the equation, no
more than a single volt.
In 1960-61, V. A. Bailey calculated that to account for the data obtained in space probes
(Pioneer V) the sun must possess a net negative charge with the potential of the order of
1019 volts [2] .
In 1953 Menzel wrote: 'Indeed, the total number of electrons that could escape the sun
would be able to run a one cell flashlight for less than one minute. ' [3] My affirmation
of electromagnetic interactions in the solar system became less objectionable with the
discovery of the solar wind and of magnetic fields permeating the solar system.
My thesis that changes in the duration of the day had been caused in the past by
electromagnetic interactions was rejected in 1950-51 [4] . In February 1960, A. Danjon,
Director, Paris Observatory, reported to l'Académie des Sciences that following a strong
solar flare the length of the day suddenly increased by 0.85 millisecond. Thereafter the
day began to decrease by 3.7 microseconds every 24 hours [5] . He ascribed the fluctuation
in the length of the day to an electromagnetic cause connected with the flare. His
announcement 'created a sensation among the delegates to the General Assembly of the
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics' that year in Helsinki [5] .
V. Bargmann of Princeton University and L. Motz of Columbia University claimed for me the
priority of predicting radio-noises from Jupiter, the existence of a magnetosphere around
the earth, and the high ground temperature of Venus [6] . They stressed also that these
discoveries later came as great surprises, though I have insisted in my published works, in
my lectures, and in my letters that these physical conditions are directly deducible from
my theory.
These claims were not made casually or in a veiled form. Some of my arguments for Jupiter
sending out radio-noises can be learned from my correspondence with A. Einstein. I could
add that if the solar system as a whole is close to neutrality, and the planets possess
charges of opposite sign to that of the sun, Jupiter must have the largest charge among the
planets. Rotating quickly the charged planet creates an intense magnetosphere.
In the last chapter of W. in C. (' The Thermal Balance of Venus') I insisted that ' Venus
is hot' and 'gives off heat' as a consequence of its recent origin and stormy history
before settling on its orbit. In 1954, R. Barker suggested that a layer of ice on the night
side of Venus is responsible for the ashen light [7] . It is more probably a visible sign
of incandescence. When in 1961 the temperature of Venus was found to be ca. 600 deg K, it
was admitted that neither radioactivity nor greenhouse effect suffices to explain why Venus
is so hot.
Several of the sensors of Mariner II were beyond their capacity to report temperatures
before the nearest point to Venus was reached, 'because temperatures beyond their designed
scale were encountered, ' as reported by C. W. Snyder to the meeting of the American
Geophysical Union, December 28, 1962 [8] . On December 15, 1962, a day after Mariner II
passed the point of closest approach, the 'temperature had inexplicably started to drop'
[9] .
It is interesting also to know why the temperature of the upper cloud layer of Venus
measured in the 1920's by Pettit and Nicholson (-33 deg C for the dark side, -38 deg C for
the bright side) [10] was found in the 1950's by Stinton and Strong to be a few degrees
lower (ca. -40 deg C for both sides) [11] . Could it be that Venus cools off at this rate ?
It would point, too, to its youth as a celestial body.
In 1950 the critics of W. in C. emphatically objected to the notion that Venus is a young
Planet or that it erupted from Jupiter.
R. A. Lyttleton (1959-60) showed why the terrestrial planets, Venus included, must have
originated from the giant planets, notably Jupiter, by disruption [12] . W. H. McCrea
(1960) calculated that no planet could have originated by aggregation inside the Jovian
orbit [13] .
R. M. Goldstein and R. L. Carpenter reported to the meeting of the American Geophysical
Union at Palo Alto, the last week of December 1962, that radar probes from Goldstone
Tracking Station between October 1 and December 17, 1962, confirmed earlier indications
that Venus rotates very slowly and retrogradely. According to the press, this led to the
following surmises: 'Maybe Venus was created apart from other planets, perhaps as a second
solar explosion, or perhaps in a collision of planets. ' [14] To this, compare W. in C.,
p. 373: 'The collision between major planets... brought about the birth of comets. These
comets moved across the orbits of other planets and collided with them. At least one of the
comets in historical times became a planet - Venus, and this at the cost of great
destruction on Mars and on the earth. '
In the section 'The Gases of Venus' in W. in C. (1950), I concluded that Venus must be rich
in hydrocarbons. This theory was termed 'surprising' (H. Shapley, 1946) when, a few years
in advance of the publication of my book, I requested that Harvard College Observatory make
a spectral search for hydrocarbons in Venus's atmosphere [15] . In 1955, Fred Hoyle
proposes, on theoretical grounds, that Venus is covered by oceans of oil and that its
atmosphere is clouded by hydrocarbon droplets [16] . I, however, wrote: '... as long as
Venus is too hot for the liquefaction of petroleum, the hydrocarbons will circulate in
gaseous form. ' (W. in C., p. 169).
The extraterrestrial origin claimed in my book for at least part of the petroleum deposits,
notably those of the Mexican Gulf area, was scorned (C. R. Longwell, 1950) [17] , and it
was asserted that petroleum is never found in recent sediments (J. B. Patton, 1950). [18]
However, soon thereafter, P. V. Smith (1952) [19] reported the 'surprising' fact that the
oil of the Gulf of Mexico is found in recent sediment and must have been deposited during
the last 9,200 plus or minus 1,000 years.
Hydrocarbons were subsequently found on meteorites, a fact termed by H. H. Nininger (1959)
[20] also 'surprising': 'These resemble in many ways some of the waxes and petroleum
products that are found on the earth. ' Several months ago, A. T. Wilson (1962) [21]
postulated an extraterrestrial origin of the entire terrestrial deposit of oil. In W. in C.
(p. 55), presence of hydrocarbons on meteorites was anticipated. The experiment in which
high molecular weight hydrocarbons were compounded from ammonia and methane with electrical
discharges (Wilson, 1960) [22] supports the view that the planet Jupiter (rich in ammonia
and methane) was the source of the hydrocarbons on Venus, on meteorites, and in some of the
earth's deposits (W. in C., 'The Gases of Venus').
My contention that Mars's atmosphere must be rich in argon and neon and possibly nitrogen
was made early in my work (lecture titled 'Neon and Argon in the Atmosphere of Mars'). A
few years later, Harrison Brown, on theoretical grounds and independently, arrived at the
same conclusion concerning argon: 'In the case of Mars, it might well be that argon is the
major atmospheric constituent. ' [23] But he thought that rare gases 'are essentially non-
existent' on meteorites. In recent years neon and argon have been repeatedly discovered on
meteorites (H. Stauffer, 1961) [24] , as anticipated in W. in C. (pp. 281 ff, 367).
Concerning the Moon, I asserted that its surface had been subjected to stress, heating
(liquefaction) and bubbling activity in historical times. 'During these catastrophes the
moon's surface flowed with lava and bubbled into great circular formations, which rapidly
cooled off ... In these cosmic collisions or near contacts the surface of the moon was also
marked with clefts and rifts' (W. in C., 'The moon and Its Craters'). H. Percy Wilkins
(1955) described numerous domes that might be regarded as examples of bubbles which did not
burst. ' [25] .
Signs of tensional stresses have been detected on the Moon (Warren and Fielder, 1962) [26]
; volcanic activity has been unexpectedly discovered by Kozyrev (1958) [27] . Sharp
outlines of lunar formations could not have persisted for millions of years in view of the
thermal splintering due to great changes in temperature, over 300 degrees, in the day-night
sequel and during the eclipses. H. Jeffreys (1959) [28] drew attention to this evidence
for the youth of the surface features, but made it dependent on the presence of water in
the rocks. Since there seems to be volcanic activity on the Moon, water is most probably
present in the rocks.
Assertions that the Earth's axis could not have changed its geographical or astronomical
position constituted one of the main arguments against Worlds in Collision [29] . They
gave place to the theory of wandering poles. Th. Gold (1955ff) [30] shows the error in the
view of G. Darwin and Lord Kelvin on the subject, and stresses the comparative ease with
which the globe could - and did - change its axis, even with no external force applied.
Confirmed is also the conclusion that advanced human culture would be found in the today
uninhabited area 'on the Kolyma or Lena rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean' in
northeastern Siberia (W. in C., p. 329) in the region where herds of mammoths roamed.
Already in 1951, A. P. Okladnikov [31] making known the results of his research in
northern Siberia, wrote: 'about two to three millennia before our era, neolithic races...
spread to the very coast of the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Kolyma in the east. '
Twenty-five hundred years ago copper was worked in the taiga of Yakutsk.
Under the heading 'The Reversed Polarity of the Earth' (W. in C., pp. 114ff.) is written:
'In recent geological times the magnetic poles of the globe were reversed. ' The phenomenon
that could cause it was described, and the question was asked 'whether the position of the
magnetic poles has anything to do with the direction of rotation of the globe. ' Complete
and repeated sudden reversals of the magnetic poles were postulated by S. K. Runcorn (1955)
[32] and P. M. Blackett (1956) [33] . Runcorn wrote: 'There seems no doubt that the
earth's field is tied up in some way with the rotation of the planet. And this leads to a
remarkable finding about the earth's rotation itself... The planet has rolled about,
changing the location of its geographical poles. ' Complete reversals would change the
rising and setting points, west becoming east, as described in many ancient sources
collated in W. in C. The pioneers in paleomagnetic studies, G. Folgheraiter and P. L.
Mercanton [34] , found a reversal of the earth's magnetic field in the Central
Mediterranean area in the 8th century before the present era, recorded in the magnetic dip
of the Etruscan and Attic vases; their position in the kiln is learned from the flow of
glaze. This find is in harmony with the events described on pp. 207-359 of W. in C.
Radiocarbon analysis, besides disclosing that some petroleum is of recent origin and
deposit, verified also the claim (W. in C., 'The Ice Age and the Antiquity of Man') that
the last glacial period ended less than 10,000 years ago. One of the first and most
important results of the new method was the reduction of the time of the last glaciation.
'The advance of the ice occurred about 11,000 years ago... Previously this maximum advance
had been assumed to date from about 25,000 years ago, ' reported W. F. Libby and Frederick
Johnson in 1952 [35] . Later this figure was still more reduced; furthermore, it refers to
the advance, not the end of the retreat of the ice cover.
Possibly the most clear-cut case of vindication concerns the antiquity I assigned to the
Mesoamerican civilizations (Mayas, Toltecs, Olmecs). G. Kubler of Yale University wrote
(1950) [36] :
The Mesoamerican cosmology to which Velikovsky repeatedly appeals for proof did not
originate and could not originate until about the beginning of our era.
Kubler showed a discrepancy of over 1,000 years and asserted that events I ascribed to the
8th-4th centuries before the present era could not have taken place until rather late in
the Christian era. But on December 30, 1956, the National Geographical Society, on its own
behalf and that of the Smithsonian Institution, announced:
Atomic science has proved the ancient civilization of Mexico to be some 1,000 years older
than had been believed. The findings basic to Middle American archaeology, artifacts dug up
in La Venta, Mexico, have been proved to come from a period 800 to 400 or 500 A. D., more
than 1,000 years later. Cultural parallels between La Venta and other Mexican
archaeological excavations enable scientists to date one in the terms of the others. Thus
the new knowledge affects the dating of many finds. Dr Matthew W. Sterling, Chief of the
Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, declared the new dating the
most important archaeological discovery in recent history.
P. Drucker and his co-workers have elaborated on the subject in Science (1957) and in the
report of the excavation (1959) [37] .
H. E. Suess, because of an accumulation of certain discrepancies in the radiocarbon dates,
assumes that natural events caused a radical change in the intensity of the magnetosphere
and in the influx of cosmic rays sometime in the second millennium before the present era.
Several other researchers came to the same conclusion [38] . This is also in harmony with
the story related in my book.
Oceanographic research brought several confirming data. H. Pettersson of Goteborg found so
much nickel in clay of the oceanic bed that he inferred that at some time in the past there
had been a prodigious fall of meteorites [39] . In W. in C., the descent of enormous
trains of meteorites and meteoric dust and ash (pp. 51ff) of land and sea is narrated, with
reliance on ancient sources. In 1958, J. L. Worzel found a layer of white ash, 5 to 30 cm
thick, very close to the bottom, evenly spread over an enormous area of the ocean bed in
the Pacific, and he thought of a 'fiery end of bodies of cosmic origin' [40] . M. Ewing
cites evidence that the same ash layer of 'remarkable uniformity of thickness' found by
Worzel in the Pacific underlies all oceans and assumes 'a cometary collision' [41] . It
could hardly be without some recorded consequences of global extent, ' Ewing concluded. To
this a line from W. in C. (' the Darkness') can be quoted: 'The earth entered deeper into
the tail of the onrushing comet' with its 'sweeping gases, dust, and cinders' and 'the dust
sweeping in from interplanetary space. '
In 1950 a past collision of the earth with a comet was denied, and comets were also
regarded as very tenuous and light masses incapable of causing much damage [42] . R. Wildt
claimed that the largest comet would have a mass equal to one millionth of that of Venus
[42] . But N. T. Bobrovnikoff (1951) [43] Director of Perkins Observatory, took a
different view. Several comets seen in the 19th century moved in very similar orbits and
'in all probability, are the result of decomposition of one single body. ' He estimated
that: 'If put together' these comets 'would make something like the mass of the moon. '
Before Ewing, a cometary collision was postulated in 1957 by H. Urey to explain the
tektites and their distribution [44] . G. Baker insists that Australian tektites
(australites) have lain in place no longer than 5,000 years [45] .
3,500 years ago the oceans suddenly evaporated and the water level dropped about twenty
feet, a fact first noted by R. Daly and later confirmed by Kuenen [46] . Rubin and Suess
found that 3,000 years ago glaciers in the Rockies suddenly increased in size [47] .
Scandinavian and German authors date Klimastürze at 1500 and 700 B. C. - the very period of
great perturbations described in W. in C. [48] .
In the ocean floor B. Heezen discovered (1960) [49] a ridge split by a deep canyon, or
'crack in the crust that runs nearly twice around the earth. ' He wrote: 'the discovery at
this late date of the midocean ridge and rift has raised fundamental questions about basic
geological processes and the history of the earth and has even had reverberations in
cosmology. '
Prof. Ma (Formosa) claims that there was a sudden and total shift in the crust only 26 and
32 centuries ago, as evidenced by the shift of marine sediments (1955) [50] . It was
argued that in global catastrophes of such dimensions no stalactites would have remained
unbroken, but within one year after the atomic explosion, stalactites grew in the Gnome
cavern, New Mexico: 'All nature's processes have been speeded up a billionfold. ' [51]
Claude F. A. Schaeffer of College de France, in his Stratigraphie Comparée [52] on which
he worked not knowing of my simultaneous efforts, came to the conclusion that the Ancient
East, as documented by every excavated place from Troy to the Caucasus, Persia, and
Palestine-Syria, underwent immense natural paroxysms, unknown in modern annals of
seismology; cultures were terminated, empires collapsed, trade ceased, populations were
decimated, the earth upheaved, the sea erupted, ash buried cities, climate changed. Five
times between the third and the first millennia before the present era the cataclysms were
repeated, closing the Early and the Middle Bronze Ages in their wake. The number of
catastrophes and their dates relative to historical periods coincide in Schaeffer's
estimate and in my own. From source material of a different nature - archaeological - he
found that the greatest catastrophe terminated the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (Middle Bronze).
Thus we are in agreement to a day. The catastrophe that ended the Middle Kingdom in Egypt
is the starting point of Worlds in Collision (and of Ages of Chaos, my reconstruction of
ancient chronology).
The recent finds in astronomy, especially in radioastronomy (sun, Venus, Jupiter), have
given confirmation from above; oceanography, radiocarbon, paleomagnetism, and archaeology
have carried their shares from below.
Notes (References cited in "Additional Examples of Correct Prognosis")
1. D. Menzel, Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. (October, 1952).
2. V. A. Bailey, Nature, May 14, 1960; January 7, 1961; March 25, 1961.
3. Menzel, Flying Saucers (Harvard University Press), 1953, p. 236.
4. J. Q. Stuart, Princeton University Observatory, in Harper's, June, 1951.
5. A. Danjon, Comptes rendus des séances de L'Académie des Sciences, 250 #8 (February 22,
1960); 250 #15 (April 11, 1960).
5a. New York Times, July 30, 1960.
6. Science, December 21, 1962.
7. R. Barker, J. B. A. A., 64, 60 (1954).
8. New York Times, December 29, 1962 (West coast ed.).
9. U. P. I. dispatch from Washington, D. C., in Philadelphia Inquirer, December 16, 1962.
10. E. Pettit in Hynek (ed.) Astrophysics, McGraw-Hill, 1951, revised by Pettit and
Nicholson, Publ. Astr. Soc. of the Pacif. 67 (1955), p. 293.
11. Sinton and Strong, Science, 123, 676 (1956).
12. R. A. Lyttleton, Monthly Notices, Royal Astr. Soc. 121 #6 (1960); Man's View of the
Universe, 1961, p. 36.
13. H. H. McCrea, Proceedings, Royal Society, Series A, Vol. 256 (May 31, 1960).
14. The National Observer, December 31, 1962.
15. H. Shapley to H. M. Kallen, May 27, 1946.
16. F. Hoyle, Frontiers of Astronomy, 1955, pp. 68-72.
17. C. R. Longwell, Am. J. of Science, August, 1950.
18. J. B. Patton quoted by F. E. Edmondson, Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky., April 23,
1950.
19. P. V. Smith, Science, October 24, 1952.
20. H. H. Nininger, Out of the Sky (Dover Publ.), 1959, pp. 89-90.
21. A. T. Wilson, Nature, October 6, 1962.
22. Ibid., December 17, 1960.
23. H. Brown in The Atmospheres of the Earth and Planets, ed. Kuiper, 1949, p. 268.
24. H. Stauffer, J. Geoph. Res., 66 #5 (May, 1961).
25. H. P. Wilkins, The Moon, 1955, p. 42.
26. B. Warren and G. Fielder, Nature, February 24, 1962.
27. N. A. Kozyrev, November 3, 1958. Cf. Z. Kopal, The Moon (1960), p. 96.
28. H. Jeffreys, The Earth, 4th ed.( 1959), p. 377.
29. C. Payne-Gaposchkin, Popular Astronomy, June, 1950.
30. Th. Gold, Nature, 175, 526 (March 26, 1955); Sky and Telescope, April, 1958.
31. A. P. Okladnikov, in Po Sledam Drevnikh Kultur, Moscow, 1951; Russ. Transl. series of
the Peabody Museum, 1, #1( 1959).
32. S. K. Runcorn, Scientific American, September, 1955.
33. P. M. Blackett, Lectures on Rock Magnetism, Jerusalem, 1956.
34. G. Folgheraiter, Archives des sciences physiques et naturelles (Geneva), 1899; Journal
de Physique, 1899; P. L. Mercanton, Archives des science phys. et nat., 1907 (t. xxiii).
35. F. Johnson in W. F. Libby, Radiocarbon Dating (University of Chicago Press), 1952.
36. G. Kubler, Am. J. of Science, August, 1950.
37. P. Drucker, R. F. Heizer, R. J. Squier, Science, July 12, 1957; Excavations at La Venta
(Smithsonian Institute, 1959).
38. Cf. a series of articles by V. Milojcic, Germania, 1957 ff, E. Ralph, Am. J. of Sc.,
Radiac. Suppl., 19559 (note to samples p-214, p-215, p-216).
39. H. Pettersson, Scient. American, August, 1950; Tellus, I, 1949.
40. J. L. Worzel, Proc. Nat. Acad. of Sc., Vol. 45 #3 (March 15, 1959).
41. M. Ewing, Proc. Nat. Acad. of Sc., Vol. 45 #3.
42. R. Wildt, Amer. J. of Science, August, 1950.
43. N. T. Bobrovnikoff, in Astrophysics, ed. Hynek, McGraw-Hill, 1951, pp. 310-311.
44. H. Urey, Nature, March 16, 1957.
45. G. Baker, Nature, January 30, 1960.
46. P. H. Kuenen, Marine Geology, 1950, p. 538.
47. Rubin and Suess, Science, April 8, 1955.
48. H. Games and R. Nordhagen, Mitteil. der Geograph. Ges. in Munchen, XVI, H. 2 (1923),
pp. 13-348. R. Sernander, 'Klima-verschlechterung, Postglaciale' in Reallexikon der
Vorgeschichte, VII (1926); O. Paret, Das Neue Bild der Vorgeschuchte (1948), p. 44.
49. B. Heezen, Scient. American, October, 1960.
50. T. Y. H. Ma, Alterations of Sedimentary Facies on the Ocean Bottom, 1955.
51. Dispatch by W. Hines of the Washington Star from Carlsbad, N. M., in The Evening
Bulletin, December 18, 1962.
52. C. F. A. Schaeffer, Stratigraphie comparée, Oxford University Press, 1948; Im.
Velikovsky, Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (Scripta Academica
Hierosolymitana), 1945.
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
APPENDIX I
ON THE RECENT DISCOVERIES CONCERNING JUPITER AND VENUS
In the light of recent discoveries of radio waves from Jupiter and of the high surface
temperature of Venus, we think it proper and just to make the following statement.
On October 14, 1953, Immanuel Velikovsky, addressing the Forum of the Graduate College of
Princeton University in a lecture entitled 'Worlds in Collision in the Light of Recent
Finds in Archaeology, Geology and Astronomy: Refuted or Verified? ' concluded the lecture
as follows: 'The planet Jupiter is cold, yet its gases are in motion. It appears probable
to me that it sends out radio noises as do the sun and the stars. I suggest that this be
investigated. '
Soon after that date, the text of the lecture was deposited with each of us [it is printed
as supplement to Velikovsky's Earth in Upheaval (Doubleday, 1955)]. Eight months later, in
June 1954, Velikovsky, in a letter, requested Albert Einstein to use his influence to have
Jupiter surveyed for radio emission. The letter, with Einstein's marginal notes commenting
on this proposal, is before us. Ten more months passed, and on April 5, 1955, B. F. Burke
and K. L. Franklin of the Carnegie Institution announced the chance detection of strong
radio signals emanating from Jupiter. They recorded the signals for several weeks before
they correctly identified the source.
This discovery came as something of a surprise because radio astronomers had never expected
a body as cold as Jupiter to emit radio waves [1] .
In 1960 V. Radhakrishnah of India and J. A. Roberts of Australia, working at California
Institute of Technology, established the existence of a radiation belt encompassing
Jupiter, 'giving 10 to the 14th power times as much radio energy as the Van Allen belts
around the earth. '
On December 5, 1956, through the kind services of H. H. Hess, chairman of the department of
geology of Princeton University, Velikovsky submitted a memorandum to the U. S. National
Committee for the (planned) I. G. Y. in which he suggested the existence of a terrestrial
magnetosphere reaching the moon. Receipt of the memorandum was acknowledged by E. O.
Hulburt for the Committee. The magnetosphere was discovered in 1958 by Van Allen.
In the last chapter of his Worlds in Collision (1950), Velikovsky stated that the surface
of Venus must be very hot, even though in 1950 the temperature of the cloud surface of
Venus was known to be -25 deg C on the day and night sides alike.
In 1954 N. A. Kozyrev [2] observed an emission spectrum from the night side of Venus but
ascribed it to discharges in the upper layers of its atmosphere. He calculated that the
temperature of the surface of Venus must be + 30 deg C; somewhat higher values were found
earlier by Adel and Herzberg. As late as 1959, V. A. Firsoff arrived at a figure of + 17.5
deg C for the mean surface temperature of Venus, only a little above the mean annual
temperature of the earth (+ 14.2 deg C) [3] .
However, by 1961 it became known that the surface temperature of Venus is 'almost 600
degrees (K) ' [4] . F. D. Drake describe this discovery as 'a surprise... in a field in
which the fewest surprises were expected. ' 'We would have expected a temperature only
slightly greater than that of the earth... Sources of internal heating (radioactivity) will
not produce an enhanced surface temperature. ' Cornell H. Mayer writes [5] , 'All the
observations are consistent with a temperature of almost 600 degrees, ' and admits that
'the temperature is much higher than anyone would have predicted. '
Although we disagree with Velikovsky's theories, we feel impelled to make this statement to
establish Velikovsky's priority of prediction of these two points and to urge, in view of
these prognostications, that his other conclusions be objectively re-examined.
V. BARGMANN Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
LLOYD MOTZ Department of Astronomy, Columbia University, New York
Notes (References cited in "Appendix I - On recent Discoveries Concerning Jupiter and
Venus")
1. See also the New York Times for October 28,1962.
2. N. A. Kozyrev, Izv. Krymsk. Astrofiz. Observ. 12 (1954).
3. Science News 1959, 52 (Summer 1959).
4. Phys. Today 14, No. 4, 30 (1961).
5. C. H. Mayer, Sci. Am. 204 (May, 1961).
THE VELIKOVSKY AFFAIR
SCIENTISM VERSUS SCIENCE
APPENDIX II
VELIKOVSKY 'DISCREDITED': A TEXTUAL COMPARISON
The various writings of Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin against Worlds in
Collision (The Reporter, March 14, 1950; Popular Astronomy, June, 1950, Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, Vol. 96, October, 1952) provided a convenient reservoir of
damaging testimony from which her colleagues as well as lesser critics drew freely in
formulating their own opinions and in preparing further commentaries on the book.
Reproduced below are passages from Gaposchkin's paper that appeared in the Proceedings of
the American Philosophical Society and the material in Velikovsky's book that she
purportedly discredited. The reader may judge for himself who is guilty of faulty
scholarship and purposeful misrepresentation.
THE CRITICISM: I Gaposchkin:
The thesis of the book is scientific, but the evidence is drawn from an immense mass of
biblical evidence and Hebrew tradition, myth and folklore, classical literature and the
works of the Church fathers. A critic is faced ... with the herculean labour of laying a
finger on the flaws in an argument that ranges over the greater part of ancient literature.
[But] when one examines [Velikovsky's] sources, his argument falls to pieces... He has not
only chosen his sources; he has even chosen what they shall mean.
Let me give one example. [Gaposchkin quotes from Worlds in Collision:] 'One of the places
of the heavenly combat... was on the way from Egypt to Syria. According to Herodotus, the
final act of the fight between Zeus and Typhon took place at Lake Serbon on the coastal
route from Egypt to Palestine. ' But Herodotus says nothing about the battle, or even about
Zeus, in the passage quoted. [The dots denoting an omission and the italics are
Gaposchkin's. She next quotes Herodotus in Greek and translates:] 'Egypt begins at the
Serbonian shore, where, they say, Typhon is hidden. '
[Gaposchkin makes it appear that Velikovsky invented the battle and its participants,
because Herodotus speaks only of Typhon's place of burial, not of a battle.]
THE TEXTS: I
Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision, pp. 78-81): [The quoted sentence in Worlds in Collision
follows almost three pages of a description of the battle between Zeus and Typhon, quoted
from Apollodorus: 'Zeus pelted Typhon at a distance with thunderbolts... '] The Egyptian
shore of the Red Sea was called Typhonia (Fn: Strabo, vii, 3, 8). Strabo narrates also that
the Arimi (Syrians) were terrified witnesses of the battle of Zeus with Typhon... 'who...
when struck by the bolts of lightning, fled in search of a descent underground. '
[Restituted in full, the passage quoted by Gaposchkin reads as follows:] One of the places
of the heavenly combat between elementary forces of nature - as narrated by Apollodorus and
Strabo - was on the way from Egypt to Syria. (Fn: Mount Casius, mentioned by Apollodorus,
is the name of Mount Lebanon as well as of Mount Sinai. Cf. Pomponius Mela, De situ orbis.)
According to Herodotus, the final act of the fight between Zeus and Typhon took place at
Lake Serbon on the coastal route from Egypt to Palestine. (Fn: Herodotus ii, 5. Also
Apollonius Rhodius in the Argonautica, Bk. ii, says that Typhon 'smitten by the bolt of
Zeus... lies whelmed beneath the waters of the Serbonian lake. ') [Actually, the Harvard
University edition of Herodotus (Loeb Classical Library) connects the quoted sentence about
the place where Typhon is entombed with his defeat by Zeus.]
THE CRITICISM: II Gaposchkin continues:
A cosmic encounter, we read, was responsible for the destruction of the army of Sennacherib
by a 'blast of fire. ' But none of the three biblical accounts of the event mentions a
blast: each one ascribes the defeat of the enemy to an angel. (Fn: II Kings, xx, 35; II
Chronicles, xxxvii, 2; Isaiah, xxxvii, 36). We do find a blast in the prophecy made by
Isaiah before the event: 'Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour,
and shall return to his own land. ' (Fn: II Kings, xix, 7). But the Hebrew word used here
means 'wind or spirit' rather than 'fire. '
[Thus Velikovsky is accused of suppressing the 'angel' as the agent of destruction in the
story of Sennacherib's debacle; of incorrectly interpreting 'blast of fire, ' which words
do not appear in the biblical narrative]
[Next, Gaposchkin implies that Velikovsky suppressed Herodotus's version of Sennacherib's
defeat:] Herodotus gives a very different account of the defeat of Sennacherib's army,
which does not suggest any catastrophe on a cosmic scale. [The passage in Herodotus is
printed in Greek, and a translation follows it (Gaposchkin's dots):] Afterwards...
Sennacherib, king of the Arabians and Assyrians, marched his vast army into Egypt.... As
the two armies lay here opposite one another, there came in the night a multitude of field-
mice, which devoured all the quivers and bowstrings of the enemy, and ate the thongs by
which they managed their shields. Next morning they commenced their flight and great
multitudes fell, as they had no arms with which to defend themselves.( Fn: History, iii;
Rawlinson translation.)
[Gaposchkin concluded:] If all readers had complete classical libraries, and could read
them; if every man were his own Assyriologist and habitually studied the Bible in the
Hebrew and Septuagint versions, Dr Velikovsky would have had short shrift.
[When Velikovsky submitted to the editors of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society evidence that he had not misquoted the Biblical passages, had not ascribed 'blast
of fire' to a Biblical text, and had not suppressed Herodotus's version, he was refused
access to the pages of that journal for a rejoinder. As a result, more than one
irresponsible writer was misled into echoing Gaposchkin: 'Thus when Velikovsky quotes
Herodotus about a battle between Zeus and Typhon and Isaiah on the destruction of
Sennacherib's army by fire, you have only to turn to the books cited to learn that
Herodotus... and Isaiah said nothing of the sort' - this from an article by L. Sprague de
Camp (' Orthodoxy in Science, ' Astounding Science Fiction, May, 1954.)]
[As late as the fall of 1962, the reader information service of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, in answer to inquiries about the validity of Velikovsky's theories, mailed out
a five-page-long compilation of excerpts from critical reviews of Worlds in Collision. More
than three pages were filled with Gaposchkin passages in the same vein as, and including,
those set forth here for comparison with Velikovsky's text.]
THE TEXT: II
Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision, pp. 230-231): The destruction of the army of Sennacherib
is described laconically in the Book of Kings: 'And it came to pass that night, that the
angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred four score and
five thousand; and when the people arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead
corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt in
Nineveh. ' It is similarly described in the Book of Chronicles: .'.. And the Lord sent an
angel which cut off all the mighty men of valour.... '
What kind of destruction was this?... It is explained in the texts of the Book of Kings and
Isaiah that it was a 'blast' sent upon the army of Sennacherib. 'I will send a blast upon
him... and [he] shall return to his own land, ' was the prophecy immediately preceding the
catastrophe...
The Talmud and Midrash sources, which are numerous, all agree on the manner in which the
Assyrian host was destroyed: a blast fell from the sky on the camp of Sennacherib. It was
not a flame, but a consuming blast: 'Their souls were burnt, though their garments remained
intact. ' The phenomenon was accompanied by a terrific noise. (Fn: Tractate Shabbat 113b;
Snahedrin 94a; Jerome on Isaiah 1: 16; L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vi, 363.)
Another version of the destruction of the army of Sennacherib is given by Herodotus. During
his visit in Egypt, he heard from the Egyptian priests or guides to the antiquities that
the army of Sennacherib, while threatening the borders of Egypt, was destroyed in a single
night. According to this story, an image of a deity holding in his palm the figure of a
mouse was erected in an Egyptian temple to commemorate the miraculous event. In explanation
of the symbolic figure, Herodotus was told that myriads of mice descended upon the Assyrian
camp and gnawed away the cords of their bows and other weapons; deprived of their arms, the
troops fled in panic.
[Velikovsky also drew attention to the neglected fact that both versions - in the
Scriptures and in Herodotus - include a story of a disturbance (reversal) of the sun's
movement in immediate sequence with the above narratives.]
[In a chapter dealing with the folklore of the American Indians, Velikovsky relates a tale
preserved by the Mnemoni tribe of the Algonquin nation. The sun had been caught in a noose
and restrained from proceeding on its path:] .'.. The Mouse came up and gnawed at the
string... the Sun breathed again and the darkness disappeared. If the Mouse had not
succeeded, the Sun would have died. ' (S. Thompson, Tales of the North American Indians,
1929)... The image of the mouse must have had some relation to the cosmic drama...
Apparently the atmosphere of the celestial body that appeared in the darkness and was
illuminated took on the elongated form of a mouse... This explains why the blast that
destroyed the army of Sennacherib was commemorated by the emblem of a mouse... Thus we see
how a folk story of the primitives can solve an unsettled problem between Isaiah and
Herodotus.
End of The Velikovsky Affair